Blood and Daring (43 page)

With the Fenians and the new threats from America on his mind, Macdonald had spent the fall of 1866 focusing on at last bringing Confederation to fruition. Once he had the approval of the Canadian, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia legislatures in hand, the last necessary step was to shape the Quebec Resolutions into a bill and request that the British Parliament pass it. Delegates from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were so anxious to move the process along that they ignored the advice of Monck and Macdonald and had hurried off to London in July, without their Canadian counterparts. They were met graciously but there was little they could do without the Canadians.

Macdonald delayed his departure both to deal with the Fenian issue and to push through long-awaited legislation for the public funding of separate Catholic schools. He was also reluctant to leave because of the instability of the British government. Lord Palmerston, his earlier ally, had died on October 18, 1865, and Earl John Russell had again become prime minister. In the general election that soon followed, Russell was defeated and a Tory government brought to power. Lord Derby, the next
prime minister, had appointed Benjamin Disraeli chancellor of the exchequer. Fortunately for Macdonald, Lord Carnarvon had replaced Cardwell as colonial secretary, and he was as anxious as his predecessor to see Confederation come into being. Carnarvon had written to Derby in October: “[Confederation had] become a necessity to us and it was a question of confederation amongst themselves, or of absorption by the U. S.”
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Derby agreed.
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But still Macdonald demurred.

Monck became as frustrated as the Maritime delegates cooling their heels and wetting their whistles in London. He wrote a scathing letter to Macdonald, demanding that he move to exploit the momentum that Confederation had gathered. Macdonald replied with a coolness that must have brought the preternaturally calm governor general to a boil: “With respect to the best mode of guiding the measure through the House,” Macdonald replied, “I think I must ask your Excellency to leave somewhat to my Canadian parliamentary experience.”
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Macdonald ended with kind compliments, but his point was clear and the power play won.

Macdonald was also drinking again.
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In August, for ten days in a row, he failed to show his face in the House. The length and depth of this bender was remarkable even for him. Monck’s daughter Elizabeth was appalled when, at a formal Spencer Wood dinner party, Macdonald drank so heavily that he threw up on the family’s new drawing room chairs.
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Galt wrote to his wife of the problems the government was facing and complained, “Add to all this that Macdonald has been in a constant state of partial intoxication and you may judge whether we have had a pleasant week.… Macdonald is in such a weak maudlin state, that he is wholly unfit for the emergency.”
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At one point Monck dispatched an aide to Macdonald, ordering him back to his duties. A dishevelled Macdonald told the young man that if he was there at the behest of the governor general then his Excellency should go to hell, but if he was there of his own accord then he could take the trip himself.
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Macdonald eventually shook his demons. The timing of his delay was actually quite clever: for he understood the British Parliament’s schedule and wanted to arrive in London with little time for the Maritimers or the
British government to significantly alter the Quebec resolutions. The apparent procrastination that infuriated and exasperated so many was really just another illustration of a masterful political strategist at work, and a man perhaps quite adept at timing his binges.
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With the Fenian trials in progress, on November 7, 1866, Macdonald, Galt, Cartier, up-and-coming Conservative Hector-Louis Langevin and two Reform cabinet ministers finally set sail from New York for London. They showed courage in moving through the United States. Fenians had already put a bounty on McGee’s head. A week after the delegation’s departure, Monck prepared to leave for England to spend Christmas with his family and to be in London for the conference. The British consul in New York City warned him that a number of Fenian informants feared for the governor general’s life and urged extreme caution.
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The Canadian delegation checked into the Westminster Palace Hotel that they had come to know so well. On December 4, they joined the Maritimers in a grand and high-ceilinged meeting room to begin work on the seventy-two Quebec resolutions. Macdonald was again the indispensable man. He manoeuvred, charmed and cajoled. He personally redrafted the words that he had played such a large part in writing two years before. Carnarvon’s senior advisor, assigned to oversee the work, described Macdonald as the conference’s “ruling genius.”
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On December 11, after a day off enjoying Carnarvon’s hospitality in the English countryside, Macdonald awoke to flames engulfing his curtains, bed and bedclothes. He leapt up, tore off his burning nightshirt, frantically pulled the flaming sheets and curtains onto the floor and doused the lot with water. He ran for Cartier and Galt, who breathlessly rushed in with more water to put out the rest of the fire. An errant candle had been the culprit. Another minute or two and the Fathers of Confederation could have been fatalities.

The next day, Macdonald was back at work with scorched hands, a burned shoulder blade and singed hair, but still ready to lead the discussions. Some minor changes were made regarding the apportioning of powers between the federal government and the provinces. But the
essence of what had been decided in Charlottetown and Quebec remained unaltered: a highly centralized, federal state, loyal to the monarchy. The new nation and Constitution would be founded not on Thomas Jefferson’s ringing declaration of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” but rather on a more staid promise of “peace, order and good government.” The phrase was both process and goal. In its modesty, and with an eye to the blood just spilled south of the border and more recently at Ridgeway, the phrase was as brave as it was so very Canadian.

The final draft was rewritten as a bill and introduced by Carnarvon in the House of Lords on February 12, 1867. He tried to put it all in context: “This Confederation of the British North American Provinces … in population, in revenue, in trade, in shipping, it is superior to the Thirteen Colonies when, not a century ago, in the Declaration of Independence, they became the United States. We are laying the foundation of a great State—perhaps one that at a future day may even overshadow this country.”
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It passed without amendment and with little comment. On March 8, following not a single word of debate, the House of Commons passed the bill. Queen Victoria signed it a couple of weeks later. The Civil War had thus seen the destruction of one country and the renewal of another; and with that signature, the immeasurable role it had played in the creation of one more was nearly complete.

Macdonald had been in the galleries of the British Parliament for both historic moments which marked the birth of a nation and the crowning achievement of a career already long and distinguished. With the passage of the British North America Act, Macdonald had forged a nation and frustrated America’s dream of Manifest Destiny. But Seward and other dreamers were not yet ready to surrender. Despite the guns having fallen silent, the Civil War was not really over and Macdonald could not yet rest.

EPILOGUE
 
DANGER IN THE WAR’S SHADOW

T
HE CLOCK’S FIRST GONG
announced midnight. Few heard the second, as 101 guns roared in succession, announcing the start of the glorious day. An enormous bonfire was set ablaze. Every church bell in Ottawa chimed, and spontaneous cheers erupted from the crowd on Parliament Hill. It was July 1, 1867, and Canada had been born.

There were twenty-one gun salutes in Saint John, Kingston and Hamilton, and fireworks in Montreal and Toronto. In many towns, shops closed for the day as people enjoyed parades, dances and concerts. But the black bunting on a number of Nova Scotia shops and the black border on some of its newspapers spoke for those who still believed they had been hoodwinked into a bad deal. The
Halifax Morning Chronicle
’s headline read, “Died! Last night at twelve o’clock, the free and enlightened Province of Nova Scotia.”
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John A. Macdonald had been appointed the new country’s first prime minister. He and several of his colleagues had been rewarded with knighthoods. He was enormously popular even among those who opposed him
and his policies. To his countrymen, he was simply Sir John or John A. He was a rascal, but he was their rascal.

Macdonald had come back from the final London conference happy and married. After a decade as a widower, he wed Susan Agnes Bernard, who offered love and the stability that had been too long absent in his life. He kept his promise to reduce his drinking—not end it, mind you. The now lively Macdonald household hosted dinner parties as one would expect of a head of government and, according to current practice, all expenses came out of his pocket.

The Civil War had been over for two years, but neither the United States nor Canada had yet to emerge from its shadow. Lingering judicial questions and humanitarian concerns needed to be addressed. Of greater importance was the link drawn between Canada and America’s competing urge for territorial expansion and the settlement of claims against Britain for having allowed Confederate ships to be built in its harbours. As he listened to the church bells and gunfire echo down the Ottawa River late into the warm July night, Macdonald understood that Canada was still more an idea than a fact. He knew that there were men in Washington determined to erase that idea before it could take hold. Until crucial issues were settled and those men confronted, the Civil War was not really over and Confederation not yet complete.

The trials of Fenian raiders captured on Canadian soil had caused international consternation in the winter of 1866. When their sentences were announced in January, there had been outrage. Twenty-five Fenians had been found guilty and sixteen sentenced to death. Macdonald was as politically astute and generous in dealing with such matters as Lincoln had been. He quietly commuted the sentences to life imprisonment and the sixteen joined their comrades in Kingston’s penitentiary. Over the next four years, he arranged for all to be released and many received full pardons. In so doing, Macdonald respected Canadian law and American diplomatic appeals. He allowed punishment without creating martyrs.

Among the other judicial questions demonstrating the war’s continued effects on Canada’s civil society was the matter of Lt. Col. George Denison. The colonel had spent the war playing an interesting game; he had served as an officer in the Canadian militia while maintaining his very public support for the Confederacy. He was the only member of the Toronto City Council who voted against sending a letter of condolence following Lincoln’s assassination. He later wrote a history of the Fenian Raids that, while exaggerating his role, burst with nationalistic pride at the way Canada had defended itself against invasion.

Denison insisted on being compensated for losses suffered as a result of his association with Jacob Thompson’s Canadian-based Confederates. In late October, 1864, as part of what would become the
Philo Parsons
incident on Lake Erie, Thompson had arranged for Denison to purchase the steamer
Georgian
from Kentucky’s Dr. James Bates for eighteen thousand dollars. Through another arrangement with Thompson, Denison had then purchased a second ship called the
Georgiana
. It was also moored at Collingwood, on Lake Huron’s charming Georgian Bay. In February 1865, Denison hired William MacDonald to perform a number of upgrades on the
Georgiana
. MacDonald had been one of Thompson’s men and was a fugitive for having been involved in the burning of New York. In April, under the power of the Alien Act, John A. Macdonald, as attorney general, had the
Georgiana
seized. Denison was on board when Toronto’s Collector of Customs arrived to do the deed.