John A (8 page)

 

FIVE

A Conservative in a Conservative Country

In a young country like Canada, I am of the opinion that it is of more consequence to endeavour to develop its resources and improve its physical advantages than to waste the time of the legislature and the money of the people on abstract and theoretical questions of government. John A. Macdonald

M
acdonald took the advice and joined the Orange Lodge; to cover all bases, he later joined the Masonic Lodge and the Oddfellows. In February 1843 he announced that he would contest a vacant seat for alderman in Kingston's Fourth Ward. Helped by the
Chronicle
's praise for his “well-known talents and high character,” he won easily. As word of his new diligence in civic duties spread, he was elected president of Kingston's influential St. Andrew's Society. He was also an active supporter of the campaign to establish a university, Queen's, at Kingston.

He applied the same diligence to the task of sorting out his business affairs. For several years, Alexander Campbell had served him exceptionally well as a law clerk. Macdonald now promoted him to junior partner. Their agreement gave Campbell a third of the profits of the general business, excluding those generated by Macdonald from his own work as solicitor of the Commercial Bank. The deal was well structured: the practice
would continue to provide him with a salary, but Macdonald no longer needed to be there all the time.

He closed the contract with Campbell on September 1, 1843. That same day he entered into another contract, a lifelong one. Macdonald married the woman with whom he'd fallen in love.

It had happened during his holiday in Britain the year before. It's just possible that the “very pretty” Margaret Wanklyn who had toured Windsor Castle on his arm had set him to thinking about the pleasures of the permanent company of a woman with whom he “sympathized wonderfully.” On the Isle of Man, he had gone to call on his cousin, Margaret Greene, who was living in a farmhouse near the small capital of Douglas. Born a Clark in the same Highland site of Dalnavert where Macdonald's mother had been born, Margaret had crossed the Atlantic to live with an uncle in Georgia. There she had married a John Ward Greene, the descendant of a hero of the Revolutionary War, but had been widowed a few years later and retreated back across the Atlantic to the Isle of Man to stretch out her finances. She was living comfortably but carefully with her two unmarried sisters, Jane and Isabella.

Macdonald and Isabella clicked almost immediately. By the time he left, Macdonald had secured from Isabella a commitment to come to
Kingston the following year, ostensibly to visit yet another of her sisters, Maria, now the wife of John Alexander Macpherson, a son of Colonel Macpherson. Isabella made the journey. As was by now inevitable, a proposal was made and was accepted. And so on that September morning, they exchanged vows and matching gold wedding rings in St. Andrew's Church in Kingston. Right after the wedding, Macdonald hurried over to his law office to sign his agreement with Campbell. By marriage, and thereby the acquisition of respectability, Macdonald had cleared the last hurdle to his political candidacy.

Isabella Macdonald (née Clark), probably close to the time of her marriage. Her wan, girlish vulnerability helped get her in under Macdonald's radar screen.

No election date had yet been announced, but it was now only a year away.

Because Macdonald would go on to become so successful a politician, it has often been taken for granted that his motive for getting into the game was to get to the top as soon as possible and, once there, to remain at the top for as long as possible. In fact, it's wholly possible that Macdonald's principal motive for entering public life was to make money.

The professions of law and politics are joined at the hip. They always have been: in particular, lawyers are practised in the arts of debating and oratory, two political skills of immense esteem in the nineteenth century. Of the eleven prime ministers back to Louis St. Laurent just over a half-century ago, all but three (Lester Pearson, Joe Clark, and Stephen Harper) have been lawyers. Lawyers are good at spotting loopholes in legislation and regulations, and at attitudinizing—projecting shock and disbelief—at the arguments of their opponents. Lawyers who leave politics can return more easily to their practices than can members of almost any other profession; there are more, and
better, post-politics prospects for lawyers, from the bench to boards of public enterprises to commissions of inquiry.

Two pieces of evidence suggest that short-term practical considerations were indeed Macdonald's purpose. When asked why he had stood as a candidate, Macdonald answered, “To fill a gap. There seemed no one else available, so I was pitched on.” Many years later, his minister of justice of that time, Sir John Thompson, asked Macdonald if it was proper for a friend to run for Parliament for only a single term. Macdonald replied bluntly, “Those are the terms on which I came into public life.” In this strictly private conversation, he had no reason to dissemble.

As further evidence that Macdonald's motivation for entering public life was more to make money than to make a name for himself, not a single companion or friend, nor any member of the family, ever claimed to have heard him say during his early years that he planned to become a great man. By contrast, his closest contemporary British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, proclaimed uninhibitedly, “I love fame. I love reputation,” while Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who comes closest to Macdonald in his hold on the Canadian imagination, wrote in a journal he kept as a youth, “I must become a great man…a future head of state or a well-known diplomat or an eminent lawyer.”

It's thus entirely possible that Macdonald initially saw politics as an opportunity to gain a quick under-
standing of government and to accumulate contacts that he could then deploy on behalf of old and new clients. Only later, as he realized how good he was at it, would politics become his life, fame his spur, and power his addiction.

John A. Macdonald as a young man—alert, active and, as so often, very clearly amused.

As always with Macdonald, little is certain. He prepared himself with the focused rigour of someone girding for a marathon, not a sprint. Once elected, he set out systematically to turn Kingston into a political citadel from which he could sally out knowing he had a secure base to retreat to. And, of course, once in, Macdonald stayed on, and on and on.

The call came in the spring of 1844. A group of leading Kingston citizens asked him to run in the election that was coming due. They asked him to stand as a Conservative—he being conservative by nature, Kingston being Loyalist, and all those worthy types looking for someone sound and sensible to represent them. Macdonald agreed to their request and then told them exactly what they wanted to hear: that all politics is local—today it's a cliché, but at the time it came to Macdonald instinctually.
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He promised he would address “the settlement of the back township district, hitherto so utterly neglected, and to press for the construction of the long projected plank road to Perth and Ottawa.” He also said that he intended to get things done in the way they themselves would do it—by being practical: “In a young country like Canada,” he declared, “I am of the opinion that it is of more consequence to endeavour to develop its resources and improve its physical advantages than to waste the time of the legislature
and the money of the people on abstract and theoretical questions of government.”

Macdonald and his supporters (all men of property, they being the only ones with the right to vote) were as one. That curious but occasionally insightful book
The Canadian Commercial Revolution, 1845–1851
contains a good description of the typical Canadian voter of the time: “They were energetic, progressive and materialistic…they were strong and shrewd men, disdainful of theories, and interested chiefly in the material realities of life.”
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In one respect, these unsentimental types might have wondered just what they were getting into. Part of Macdonald's reply to his petitioners had a decidedly teasing, over-the-top quality to it: “With feelings of greater pride and gratitude than I can express…[t]he mode in which I can best evince my high sense of the honour you have done me is,
at once,
to lay aside all personal considerations and accede to your request.”