Clan MacDonald · 1867
Sir John A. Macdonald and the Confederation
On the morning of the first of July 1867 the British North America Act came into force and the Dominion of Canada was constituted from the four provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, on the basis of the Seventy-Two Resolutions agreed at the Quebec Conference of October 1864 and ratified by the colonial legislatures over the next two years. The architect of the deal, the man who had threaded its compromises between the Reformers under George Brown, the Bleus under Cartier, and the maritime delegations under Tupper and Tilley, was the Scottish-born Kingston lawyer John Alexander Macdonald, born at Glasgow on the eleventh of January 1815, brought to Upper Canada at the age of five, called to the bar in 1836, member of the legislature for Kingston since 1844. He was sworn in as the first Prime Minister of Canada on the same morning the Act came into force, by Lord Monck the Governor-General, in the Senate Chamber at Ottawa. He held office for nineteen of the next twenty-four years.
It is the late evening of the twenty-seventh of October 1864, in the upper room of the Hotel Saint-Louis in Quebec City, with the river fog rolling up the cliff and the candles in the chandeliers running low. He is forty-nine years old. He is John Alexander Macdonald, Attorney-General of the Province of Canada, formerly of Glasgow, of Kingston for forty-one of his forty-nine years, in his usual evening posture which is in shirt-sleeves with a glass of whisky-and-water on the table, with thirty-three colonial delegates around him in three knots, and the Seventy-Two Resolutions in folio on the long table at the head of the room.
George-Étienne Cartier, the leader of the Bleus, the man who carries the Catholic Quebecois into any deal he signs and out of any deal he refuses, is at his right elbow. Charles Tupper of Nova Scotia, who has come up because he believes the Maritime Union plan is a smokescreen and has been right, is at the second knot with Tilley of New Brunswick. George Brown, the Reform editor of the Globe, the man Macdonald has fought for fifteen years and is now the senior partner of in the great coalition government, is at the third knot at the window with d'Arcy McGee.
He thinks: Cartier needs language guarantees in the criminal law and education. Cartier will get them. The Bleus will sign.
He thinks: Tupper needs a railway down to Halifax. Tupper will get it. Nova Scotia is the harder problem because the maritime feeling is that they are bigger than they are and the central provinces are smaller than they are.
He thinks: Brown will sign because Brown is in the room. Brown could not be in the room without losing his Reform purity, and he came in anyway. The deal cost him to come into. He will sign anything that takes us out of the deadlock of the United Province.
He thinks: Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island will not sign tonight. Newfoundland will not sign for eighty-five years. We let them go and we keep moving.
He thinks: the Crown will accept this if it is one act of the Westminster Parliament with a new federal name above the four provinces. Lord Monck will press the Cabinet in London. Carnarvon at the Colonial Office will write the Bill.
He thinks: we are seventy-two resolutions, and not one of them is what any of us came to Charlottetown for. The country we are building is the compromise none of us would have proposed alone.
Cartier comes to him at the table at twenty past ten and asks him in French whether the Quebec delegation has the language clause they need. Macdonald reads the French of the resolution he has written that afternoon. Cartier reads it twice. Cartier nods. The Bleus will hold. Brown comes over from the window at half past ten and says the Reform caucus in Toronto will accept the Senate compromise (appointed, not elected; sectional equality, not provincial). Macdonald nods. Tupper comes over from his knot at midnight and says the Maritime delegations will accept the railway. Macdonald has the railway clause already drafted.
By two in the morning the Resolutions have been read through twice in plenary. The pipes have been brought out. The Conference closes at three with the resolutions agreed in principle by all the delegations. The deal is not yet a country. It is now a basis on which six colonial legislatures can be asked to ratify. Three years pass between the Quebec Conference and the British North America Act of 1867. The Act receives Royal Assent on the twenty-ninth of March 1867, comes into force on the first of July, and on the same morning, in the Senate chamber at Ottawa, Lord Monck the Governor-General confers the Knighthood of the Bath on Macdonald and swears him in as the first Prime Minister of the Dominion of Canada.
He held the office for six years, lost it on the Pacific Scandal in 1873, came back to power in 1878 with a National Policy of high tariffs and a transcontinental railway, finished the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885, won four further elections, and died, in office, on the sixth of June 1891, sixteen days short of his seventy-seventh birthday. He is buried in Cataraqui Cemetery at Kingston. The Glasgow-born Kingston lawyer was Prime Minister for nineteen of the country's first twenty-four years; the Macdonald-Cartier coalition is, by every Canadian historian's reckoning, the foundational political marriage of the country. His record on Indigenous policy, on the residential schools that began under his ministries, on the famine in the Saskatchewan country in 1883, has come, since the 1990s, into the moral inventory of Canada in a way it had not been in the nineteenth century, and rightly. The country he made carries his ancestor's name above the doors of two of its provinces; the village in north-east Scotland that the family had come from, in Glasgow's hinterland, has, since 1967, a bronze plaque on the wall of the parish church recording that the first Prime Minister of Canada had been baptised there. Sir John A. is on the ten-dollar note. The federal day every July first is, by the Act of his Cabinet of 1879, called Dominion Day, since 1982 Canada Day. The country was, by his own private letter to George Brown of 1872, a hundred-year project. The country is a hundred and fifty-eight years old in the year you are reading this. It is, in his terms, half-built.
The champion at the centre of this story
Sir John A. MacdonaldThe Glasgow-born lawyer who held the disparate British colonies of North America together as one Dominion in 1867, then carried the country from sea to sea by railway and federal architecture.More stories of Clan MacDonald
- The Massacre of GlencoeIn late 1691, the British crown demanded every Highland chief swear loyalty by the first of January, on pain of fire and sword. The MacDonalds of Glencoe missed the deadline by six days through no fault of their own. In response, the government quietly authorised the destruction of the family. For two weeks 120 government soldiers under a Campbell captain were billeted as guests in MacDonald longhouses, eating MacDonald food and playing cards with their hosts under the unbreakable Highland code of guest-right. Before dawn on the thirteenth of February 1692, the captain received written orders to fall on the village. What followed is remembered as the worst breach of guest-right in British history, and the reason the MacDonalds will not sit at table with a Campbell to this day.
- Flora MacDonald and the princeIn June 1746, two months after the disaster of Culloden, Charles Edward Stuart was a fugitive in the Hebrides with a price on his head of thirty thousand pounds, the largest reward of the eighteenth century. Government patrols closed in around him on the islands of South Uist and Benbecula. The plan that came to him through an Irish Jacobite officer was to disguise him as an Irish spinning-maid and put him on a boat to Skye in the household of a young woman with a militia pass. Her name was Flora MacDonald. She was twenty-four years old. She had no political stake in the rising. The crossing made her name a synonym for the lost cause for the next two centuries.
- InverlochyOn the night of the thirty-first of January 1645, after a winter march of thirty-six hours from the south end of Loch Ness through Glen Tarbet and the high pass of the Lairig Leacach, James Graham, Marquess of Montrose, with the Highland-Irish brigade of Alasdair MacColla MacDonald and a force of about fifteen hundred men of the western clans, came down at first light on the second of February, the morning of Candlemas, on the Campbell army of Archibald Campbell, eighth Earl of Argyll, encamped under the walls of Inverlochy Castle at the head of Loch Linnhe. Argyll had three thousand men. The day broke in heavy frost. The Highland charge took the Campbell line in flank and rolled it down the loch shore. Argyll was put aboard his galley and rowed for Inveraray. Fifteen hundred Campbells died, by the careful estimate of the modern historians of the action, in two hours. The MacDonalds of Clanranald, of Glengarry, of Keppoch, of Glencoe, fought beside MacColla in the centre. The single most consequential reckoning between MacDonald and Campbell of the seventeenth century was won that morning by Montrose's tactical genius and the Highland charge in winter, fifty years and ten days before Glencoe, and reads, in Highland MacDonald memory, as the inverse of Glencoe.