There are newspaper accounts of the events, banquets, and balls in Quebec City; speeches published months after the meetings; letters from George Brown (founder of the Globe, today’s Globe and Mail) to his wife; and limited minutes of the proceedings — all written by men. The story of the women who were present at the Confederation conference events has been absent from the record. Mercy Coles’s diary gives us that story.
I have transcribed the full diary, all of which is included in this book. Mercy’s two weeks of travel back home to PEI through the northern United States while the Civil War was in full swing, which has never been documented before now, is also included. This latter part of the diary was a revealing read; it captures a different side of Mercy, perhaps a more vulnerable side.
We are so lucky to have Mercy Coles’s diary. She thought to keep a record of the events, and just as importantly, she thought to preserve that record and pass it on to relatives. They, in turn, were wise enough to take care of it, and eventually share it with Library and Archives Canada.
It is the only full account of these events from a woman’s perspective. Further, it’s not tied to political ideals or machinations. It is a record caught at the moment history was being made, without the veneer or gloss that passing time creates.
When I first read the diary, I focused on the parts that were easy to read and transcribe, and used the events and timeline loosely in my novel To the Edge of the Sea, set during the Confederation conferences. It was a few years afterward that I began transcribing the full diary, reading it closely, paying attention to every nuance, and looking at the placement of words on the page.
Mercy was often travelling while she wrote — bumping along on the trains or in a carriage, and so, especially in the latter part of her diary, there are words and phrases that are illegible at points.
Because it is an original document, one can see Mercy’s style of writing and penmanship; they became an interest in and of themselves. I had to work closely with the text to understand what she was saying. For example, I wondered to whom she was referring when she wrote “Lala dined with us.… I was rather disappointed in the man.…” Whomever she was speaking of was obviously famous, but who was he? Not the yellow Teletubby, I was sure. A study of Mercy’s penmanship proved it was “Sala” I needed to look for, not “Lala.” Ah — it was George Augustus Sala, a British journalist, famous at the time, who was then travelling through Canada.
One can see how Mercy shapes her capital S, and R. The S is important to identifying Sala’s name. Her capital R is distinctive, closer to what is typically a small r, but made large enough to be a capital letter. The name Louis Riel comes out clearly, even though it is small in size, written to fit in the same line as “a Red River man,” but above it. It’s clear that the name was written some time afterward. How long afterward, though? It could very well have been later that same day. Still, the fact that it is an unknown time afterwards is important for assessing the accuracy of what Mercy knew at the time, and what she believed later. Even within this original document, then, it can be seen how the passing of time and the impulse of the author to edit her work have affected the history of the moment.
More than the study of the writing, though, it was the people, places, and events Mercy wrote of that interested me. At every turn, she piqued my curiosity. What were her relationships with John A. Macdonald or with Leonard Tilley? Why was the Victoria Bridge an important part of their sightseeing itinerary — and was that the same bridge we’d crossed over every week when I was a child to go visit my cousins in Montreal? Was diphtheria, which Mercy caught in Quebec City, really that bad? What was this “Bonnie Blue Flag” she wrote of while visiting with her relatives in Ohio?
I was intrigued by all she wrote. As I researched further, I felt like I was recreating a picture of Canada as it was at Confederation, a picture framed and circumscribed by what Mercy Coles presented to me, as it was presented to her. It is by no means a complete picture — it is, as I say, a circumscribed view of the time, the events, places, and people at an important time in Canada’s history. Importantly, Mercy has given immediacy, colour, and depth to all to which she turned her gaze, her female gaze.
That this is the first time the diary will have been published is extra-ordinary to me. Pieces of it have been quoted, but it has never been published in its entirety. That it hasn’t appeared until now speaks volumes about who and what we consider worthy of hearing. It is heartening that now, 150 years later, Mercy Coles’s writing will be available to all.
One
Miss Confederation: Mercy Anne Coles
It is rather a joke, he is the only beau of the party and with 5 single ladies he has something to do to keep them all in good humour.1
The “he” mentioned in the above quotation is Leonard Tilley, who was then the premier of New Brunswick, and Mercy Anne Coles, the irreverent writer of this note, was one of those single women. Ten unmarried women altogether, three from Prince Edward Island, two from Nova Scotia, four from New Brunswick, and one from Canada West, accompanied their fathers or brothers to the conference in Quebec City, where the men negotiated Confederation and the creation of Canada.
The start of Canada’s journey to Confederation is a fascinating one, involving a circus; Farini, the tightrope walker from Port Hope, Ontario; the American Civil War; a whole lot of champagne, sunshine, and sea; and lovemaking — in the old-fashioned sense.
The process began in earnest when, in September 1864, the Fathers of Confederation, travelling by rail, steamship, and horse-drawn carriage, met in Charlottetown, the provincial capital of Prince Edward Island, to discuss the possibility of a union of Britain’s North American colonies.* Like New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, PEI was an independent colony of the British Crown at the time. The final of this group of colonies, Canada, was made up of Ontario and Quebec, then known respectively as Canada West and Canada East. Each of the Maritime colonies was very small, and with a large and growing American neighbour, many of the colonies’ residents, including those of Canada East and West, felt that if they were to survive separate from the United States, then the time had come to join forces and form a larger political entity.**
Following their time in Charlottetown, the Canadian and Maritime delegates crossed the Northumberland Strait on the Canadians’ steamship, the Queen Victoria, and toured briefly through Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, meeting in Halifax on September 12 for the delegates to discuss the idea of Confederation further. Mercy Coles, the unmarried twenty-six-year-old daughter of Prince Edward Island delegate George Coles, went with her father on this tour. From Mercy’s descriptions she was the only young woman to go on this trip with the delegates. Perhaps her father viewed this as an opportunity for her education, or to meet a potential husband.
The big meetings and events, though, were saved for Quebec City, where, in October 1864, the Maritime Fathers of Confederation, with their unmarried daughters and sisters in tow, travelled again on the Queen Victoria, which the Canadians had sent to bring the Maritimers up to Quebec City. They promenaded