In class, the son of a struggling country storekeeper competed with the sons of the comfortable local elite, who likely looked down on him. Opening a gymnasium in Ottawa sixty years later, Macdonald joked “when I was a boy at school I was fighting all the time, but I always got licked.” He continued to be a star pupil, the boy the headmaster would summon to the blackboard to impress visitors with the school’s mathematical teaching. But the unending pressure to succeed took its toll. Once, facing stressful examinations, young Macdonald ran away from school, arriving home unexpectedly, and close to a breakdown. He paid a high price for his elite schooling. “I had no boyhood,” he once said in later years.
In the holidays, Macdonald imitated Colonel Macpherson by playing soldiers with his sisters, casting himself as their commander. Once, when Louisa ignored orders, he picked up a real gun and threatened to shoot her for disobedience. Fortunately, Margaret dissuaded him, for the weapon was loaded. She probably saved Macdonald’s political career: a slaughtered sister would have been an electoral liability. Campaigning in the area sixty years later, Macdonald spoke nostalgically of idyllic days when he had run wild and barefoot, but in fact he did not belong around Hay Bay and Glenora any more than he did in town. His parents’ well-meaning gesture of inviting local children to parties to welcome John home from school probably accentuated resentment against the “big-nosed Scotch kid.” The girls mocked him as “ugly John”; the boys bullied him. One winter, Macdonald tried skating on Lake Ontario. Sneering at his spindly legs, a local lad upended him on the ice. On another occasion, a bigger boy pinned him down and rubbed Hugh Macdonald’s flour into his untidy black hair. For their part, the country children considered the interloper to be vindictive and violent-tempered.
“From the age of fifteen I began to earn my own living,” John A. Macdonald once recalled, bemoaning his lost boyhood. But in pioneer days, most youngsters worked by their mid-teens, and his puzzling comment suggests that he had bigger expectations. As prime minister, he remarked that if he had received a university education, he would have made his career in literature. Perhaps this was just political image-making, but maybe his hothouse schooling was intended as a preparation for a college education. If so, the idea must have been to send him to Scotland, where universities accepted students in their mid-teens: planned colleges in Montreal and Toronto had yet to open their doors. A dream of higher education in Scotland might also explain why, in 1829, John was switched to a new Kingston academy, opened by a young Aberdeen University graduate. One other clue is revealing. In 1839, Macdonald was scheduled to speak at a fund-raising meeting in Kingston, part of the campaign to establish Queen’s University. He prepared an address on the importance of education but, when his turn came, he could not utter a word. It was John A. Macdonald’s only failure as a public speaker: the subject evidently triggered complex emotions. The dashing of his hopes for a university education perhaps helps explain John A. Macdonald’s drive to succeed in life.
In 1830, Macdonald entered the Kingston law office of George Mackenzie, and also lodged in his house. A kindly couple with no children of their own, the Mackenzies gave their charge some space to manage his life. Like many adolescents, Macdonald disliked getting up in the mornings. One day, unable to rouse him, Sarah Mackenzie closed off every chink of light in the lad’s bedroom and left him comatose in pitch darkness. When he eventually shook himself awake and opened the curtains, the sun was setting. The problem did not recur.
Young Macdonald’s sharp intelligence and a photographic memory impressed his boss and, late in 1832, Mackenzie sent him to manage a branch law office at Napanee, forty kilometres west of Kingston. Not quite eighteen and operating independently for the first time, Macdonald had to choose the personality he wished to project. Initially, he wrapped himself in professional dignity, perhaps emulating his father’s prickly concern for status. Mackenzie criticized his “dead & alive” pomposity. “I do not think you are so free & lively with the people as a young man eager for their good will should be.” John A. Macdonald kept that letter, which contained some of the best advice he ever received. He would become another George Mackenzie, not a second Hugh Macdonald.
At the end of 1833, another opportunity presented itself. His lawyer cousin Lowther Pennington Macpherson — the old colonel’s son — was dying of a lung disease, and under medical advice to escape the Canadian winter. Macpherson needed Macdonald to run his law office at Hallowell, in Prince Edward County. George Mackenzie graciously released him, and Macdonald found himself ten kilometres from the family home at Glenora. But was Hallowell an opportunity or a trap? Macpherson reported August 1834 that his cough was worse. “God only knows how it is to terminate.” Cousin Lowther would never return, but John A. Macdonald had no wish to be consigned to a country backwater.
Even in the 1830s, Hallowell was overshadowed by its neighbour, Picton. The young man appreciatively remembered as a “poor and friendless boy” supported a campaign to merge the two communities under a neutral name, Port William, in honour of King William IV. John A. Macdonald’s first attempt at a negotiated union under the symbolic headship of the British Crown was a failure: ambitious Picton simply swallowed up its neighbour. Thirty years later, Macdonald successfully led a second such project, Confederation, on a continental scale. At Hallowell, Macdonald took his first steps in community activity, helping to found a debating club, and serving as secretary of the local school board. Keen to keep him in town, local businessmen reportedly offered to finance him in his own law practice, but his ambitions lay elsewhere.
John A. Macdonald seemed on track to becoming George Mackenzie’s junior partner. Mackenzie was planning a political career and would need a trusted lieutenant to manage his law office and his election campaigns in Kingston. Rejecting the political polarization which later provoked the 1837 rebellions, Mackenzie sought the middle ground, advocating precisely the moderate Conservatism that Macdonald himself later championed. But the partnership never happened. In August 1834, cholera swept across Canada. The terrifying disease could kill within forty-eight hours and George Mackenzie was one of its victims. For John A. Macdonald, it was suddenly important to return to Kingston and inherit Mackenzie’s clients. His motivation was not entirely cynical. The back roads of rural Canada were notoriously bad, and travel through country districts was only possible on horseback. Macdonald tried it — and fell, breaking his arm. In Kingston, lawyers sat in comfortable offices and waited for clients to come to them. Macdonald redoubled his efforts to qualify, and we have a glimpse of him sitting under a willow tree in a Hallowell garden, “studying intently” while small boys played leap-frog around him. He passed his examinations and, in August 1835, set up in business as an attorney in a cross-street off Kingston’s central business district.
There is a mystery here. Born in January 1815, Macdonald was twenty when he opened his first law office — but the minimum age to practise was twenty-one. His birth had been formally recorded, in distant Edinburgh, but Canada had no registration system. Apparently, John A.’s father agreed to counter-sign a statement backdating his birth by twelve months: in later years, the year of his birth was often given as 1814. It seems the first formal act of John A. Macdonald’s legal career was to commit perjury — a harbinger of his ruthless readiness to cut corners in later life.
The young adult John A. Macdonald was “slender, with a marked disinclination to corpulency.” Even in his seventies, leading a sedentary life as prime minister, his weight just topped eighty kilograms (180 pounds or under thirteen stone) — light enough for someone who was five feet, eleven inches (180 centimetres) tall — well above the average of the time. But he did not use his height to overawe. Macdonald had a slight stoop, an inclusive gesture that put people at ease. James Porter, a Picton acquaintance, recalled spotting him on the streets of Kingston whenever he visited the town — and was flattered to be affably recognized: “he wouldn’t wait for me to come and speak, but he would duck