The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (18 page)

In the preliminary bout of the great scandal, the Opposition had finally won a round. Macdonald was confident he would win the next one. On May 7 he learned, by telegram, that the Queen’s legal advisers considered the Oaths Bill
ultra vires
. Could it be officially disallowed before the committee began cross-examining witnesses on July 2? Macdonald urged the Governor General to send a cable to London to hasten the British action and Lord Dufferin obligingly complied. Parliament adjourned until August 13.

Outwardly then, the Prime Minister was totally in command. Inwardly, he was sick at heart with grief, disappointment and foreboding. In May he suffered two terrible blows. Their force was not lessened by the fact he was braced to expect them.

By the middle of the month it was clear that Allan’s negotiations with the English banking houses had met with total failure, destroyed by the whispers of scandal from across the water; and so Macdonald’s railway policy lay in tatters. The settlement of the North West, the knitting together of the disunited provinces, the building of a workable, transcontinental nation, all these remained an elusive dream. Two years had already slipped by since the pact with British Columbia and there was now no chance in the foreseeable future of mounting the enterprise.

And the partnership of Macdonald and Cartier was no more. Macdonald’s friend, confidant, bulwark, political comrade-in-arms
and strong right hand, was dead in England of the kidney disease that had ravaged him for two years. At the nadir of his career, Macdonald had no one to turn to. Politically he stood alone, weary, overworked, tormented, dispirited. He wanted out; but his party could not let him resign; there was no one to replace him. When he suggested retiring to the back-benches, the Conservative hierarchy pointed out that his withdrawal could easily lead to a general exodus; and so, “very much harassed and out of health,” he stayed.

He was, in fact, a Canadian fixture and it was unthinkable that he should go. In those days, before the newspaper half-tone engraving was invented, politicians were not always instantly recognizable; but everyone knew Macdonald, whom his own sister Louisa referred to as “one of the ugliest men in Canada.” The long, rangy figure, the homely face, the absurd nose, the tight curls round the ears made him a caricaturist’s delight. J. W. Bengough portrayed him week after week in
Grip
as a kind of likable rogue with matchstick legs and giant proboscis.

Likable he was, though often enough a rogue in the political sense. In those days of partisan hatreds, when one’s political adversary really
was
the enemy, Macdonald’s opponents found it hard to hate him. One Grit, Joseph Lister, who attacked Macdonald viciously in Parliament, confessed he was so attracted to the man’s personality that he dare not trust himself in his company. Another, David Thompson of Haldimand, preferred him to his own leaders, Blake and Cartwright, who greeted him in the Commons corridors after a long illness with the chilliest of nods, while Macdonald slapped him on the back, called him Davy, said how glad he was to see him and declared: “I hope you’ll soon be yourself again and live many a day to vote against me-as you have always done!” Said Thompson: “Hang me if it doesn’t go against the grain to follow the men who haven’t a word of kind greeting for me, and oppose a man with a heart like Sir John’s.” The twinkling eyes, the sardonic smile, the easy tolerance, the quick wit, and the general lack of malice made Macdonald an attractive figure in and out of Parliament. He did not believe that a politician could afford for long to harbour resentments; throughout his career he worked quite cheerfully with men who had slighted, insulted or betrayed him.

This singular absence of bile is remarkable when set against the tragedies and travails of Macdonald’s private life. His personal vicissitudes would have broken a lesser man. His first wife had been
a hopeless invalid, bed-ridden for most of the fourteen years of their married life. His second baby boy had died of convulsions. His daughter Mary, the only issue of his second marriage, was mentally retarded and physically deformed. After Confederation, Macdonald’s life savings were wiped out, and he found himself plunged into heavy debt, partly because he had been forced by his political career to neglect his law practice, partly because of an unexpected bank failure. Never robust, always apparently on the cliff-edge of physical breakdown, he had been felled for six months in 1870 by a nightmarish attack of gallstones, which brought him to the brink of death (his obituary set in type and ready for release) and weakened him for life.

Now, in the late spring of 1873, piled on top of all these adversities, Macdonald was burdened by the loss of his closest associate, the collapse of his national dream and the possible political destruction of himself and his party.

He turned, as he so often did in moments of stress, to the bottle; and for the next several weeks all who encountered him, from Governor General to hack reporter, were treated to the spectacle of the Prime Minister of Canada reeling drunk. “Indisposed” was the euphemism usually employed by the newspapers but the public knew exactly what
that
meant. After all, the stories about his drinking were legion: how he had once mounted a train platform so drunk and shaken that he had been seen to vomit while his opponent was speaking but had saved the day by opening his speech with the words: “Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen, I don’t know how it is, but every time I hear Mr. Jones speak it turns my stomach.” How he had told a public gathering during his campaigns against the former Liberal leader and
Globe
editor: “I know enough of the feeling of this meeting to know that you would rather have John A. drunk than George Brown sober.” How, when his colleagues urged him to speak to that other great toper, D’Arcy McGee, about his alcohol problem, he had said: “Look here, McGee, this Government can’t afford two drunkards and you’ve got to stop.”

Macdonald’s affinity for alcohol – he was a non-smoker – went back to his childhood when the Macdonald home dispensed what was then the universal form of hospitality: raw whiskey, obtainable at twenty-five cents a gallon and usually as easily available as water, being kept on tap or in a pail with a cup beside it. Macdonald’s father “Little Hugh” was addicted to it and his life was shortened by it. Macdonald’s own drinking bouts – he would sometimes retire to bed and consume bottle after bottle of port – were to become an endearing Canadian legend; but at the time they were a source of concern to his friends and colleagues and a perplexing embarrassment to his statuesque and highly moral wife, for whom, in the first glow of courtship, he had given up the bottle. To the sympathetic Dufferin, who was more than once publicly discomfited by the presence of his tipsy Prime Minister, Macdonald suffered from an “infirmity.” The prim and granite-faced leader of the Opposition, Alexander Mackenzie, was not so tolerant. To him, Macdonald was, quite simply, a “drunken debauchee.”

Yet his powers of recuperation were marvellous. He had the ability to pull himself together, even after days of drinking, when there was necessary business to attend to. And at the end of June, Macdonald needed his faculties: the Oaths Bill was officially disallowed just five days before the investigating committee was due to meet. Macdonald was now prepared to renew his offer of a royal commission.

The Dominion Day holiday, the sixth since Confederation, intervened – a day of picnics and street-dancing, quoits and croquet, train excursions and lacrosse games. Year by year, such national celebrations were giving the country a slight sense of community. The following morning, in the Montreal Court of Appeals, the select committee convened before a crowd of onlookers including such notables as Huntington, Macpherson, Alexander Galt, a gaggle of provincial and federal
M.P.S
but, noticeably, no member of the Government. Macdonald was in town, the
Globe
reported, but “indisposed.” He was well enough, however, to send the committee a letter renewing his offer of a royal commission. A furious debate followed. The Government members wanted to pack up the committee until Parliament briefly reconvened on August 13. Parliament, they argued, had clearly meant the evidence to be taken under oath. Blake and his Liberal colleague, A. A. Dorion, wanted to dispense with the oath and examine unsworn witnesses. That was the way Parliamentary committees had always operated. The wrangle continued into the next day when the three Government supporters inevitably prevailed. Once again the Opposition had been frustrated in its attempts to get the evidence before the public. It was more than three months since Huntington had raised the issue and the country was in no sense aroused. There was only one course left open: the press.

2
Scandal!

On the morning of July 4, the faithful readers of the Toronto
Globe
and the Montreal
Herald
opened their slim papers to the scoop of the decade, “
PACIFIC RAILWAY INTRIGUES
,” the
Globe
headline read, and there, for column after column, was laid bare the correspondence of Sir Hugh Allan with his secret American backers. It was all in print for the country to ponder: Allan’s remarks regarding Brydges and Macpherson … Allan’s list of prominent Canadians who, he said, were to be given free stock … Allan’s detailed account of his victory over Cartier … Allan’s long report to General Cass (whose name was withheld from the press) reporting on his coercion of the Quebec press and public … Allan’s disbursements of $343,000 … Allan’s double game with his American associates.

There were seventeen letters in total and they all but ended Sir Hugh Allan’s public career. One associate, the engineer Walter Shanly, declared in Montreal that he would not be seen walking the streets with Sir Hugh. The board of the new railway company met hurriedly that afternoon while, not far away in Chaboillez Square, a public meeting expressed its dissatisfaction with the investigation. For the first time the public had something it could get its teeth into and the Pacific Scandal, as it was now universally called, became the major topic of the day.

The letters, the
Globe
insisted, showed that the Government was “hopelessly involved in an infamous and corrupt conspiracy.” They scarcely showed that. Macdonald’s name was mentioned only three times and always innocuously. There was only one suspicious paragraph in the letter of August 7 to General Cass, in which Allan wrote that “we yesterday signed an agreement by which, on certain monetary conditions, they agreed to form the company, of which I am to be President, to suit my views, to give me and my friends a majority of the stock.” The letter was ambiguous enough to be capable of innocent explanation.

Meanwhile, a much chastened Allan, at Macdonald’s urgent behest and with Abbott’s legal skill, was preparing a sworn affidavit to be published on July 6 in major Government newspapers. This lengthy document, which was seized on with glee by the Government’s supporters, was designed to get the administration off the hook. It largely succeeded. Allan’s sworn denials were explicit and positive.
Though he certainly subscribed money to aid in the election of his friends, he had done so without any understanding or condition being placed upon such funds. None of this money, he swore, had come from the Americans. It was true that he had left the door ajar for his American friends until told specifically by the Government that they must be excluded; he felt honour bound to do so. As for McMullen, he had made such financial demands on Allan that “I declined altogether to entertain them.” He was, of course, prepared to return all the money the Americans had expended but he was not prepared to pay McMullen an exorbitant fee for his time.

The statement, which bears the imprint of Abbott’s sensitive legal mind, was a masterpiece of tightrope walking. “He [Abbott] has made the old gentleman acknowledge on oath that his letters were untrue,” Macdonald wrote gleefully to Dufferin. “This was a bitter pill for him to swallow, but Abbott has gilded it over for him very nicely.” It was not easy for Allan to wriggle out of correspondence written in his own hand but he did his best in a painfully contorted way: the letters, he said, were “written in the confidence of private intercourse in the midst of many matters engrossing my attention, and probably with less care and circumspection than might have been bestowed upon them had they been intended for publication. At the same time, while in some respects these letters are not strictly accurate, I can see that the circumstances, to a great extent, justified or excused the language used in them.”

Allan, then, was the villain of the piece and the ministerial press cast him in that role. The Government’s position was also immeasurably helped by the fact, easily substantiated, that the
Globe
and
Herald
had deliberately suppressed two other letters which showed that Allan had finally broken off negotiations with the Americans. McMullen, too, was reviled as a scoundrel and a blackmailer. His own relatives on the Picton
Gazette
attacked him, carefully refraining from any reference to his local family connections.

Though the
Globe
regurgitated the correspondence daily, it was clear that Macdonald’s ministry, though bruised, was by no means broken. Indeed, Macdonald felt that the publication of the Allan correspondence was “very fortunate for the government” and Dufferin, in reply, agreed: “The unfolding of the drama is quite sensational and in spite of all the annoyance to which you have been put in this business, it must have afforded you a good deal of amusement.… Nothing can be more satisfactory than the way
in which your own position and that of your colleagues remains unassailed in the midst of all these disreputable proceedings.”

The weary Prime Minister now felt that he could afford a short holiday at Rivière du Loup. It was while he was there, in his small cottage by the riverside, that the world crashed in on him.

The blow fell on July 17, just as the public was growing weary of the newspapers’ incessant harping on the scandal. It was devastating. The
Globe
ran a great bank of type on the right-hand column of its front page: “
THE PACIFIC SCANDAL: ASTOUNDING REVELATIONS.”
The revelations appeared identically and simultaneously in the
Globe
, the
Herald
and
l’Evénement
of Quebec and they
were
astounding.