Mercy Coles was not part of this large group, however. She writes that her “father thought the trip [by ship the whole way] would be too rough for mother and me.”2 Instead, Mercy, her father and mother; William Pope (Colonial Secretary and a member of the Conservative Party, which was in power in PEI) and his wife; and Mrs. Alexander, the widowed sister of Thomas Heath Haviland (also a member of the Conservative Party), left on October 5, a day earlier than the others. They crossed from PEI to Shediac, New Brunswick, then took a train specially booked for them to Saint John. There they picked up Leonard Tilley, the aforementioned “only beau of the party,” as well as two members of Tilley’s government — Charles Fisher, with his daughter Jane, and William Steeves, with his two daughters.
From Saint John, they travelled by steamship down the Bay of Fundy, the trip taking twenty-four hours, to Portland, Maine (compare this to the sixty-plus hours it would take to get to Quebec City by ship). There was as yet no rail line from the Maritimes to Quebec through Canada, and so the group had to take this roundabout route through the United States. Of course, what the single women missed in the promenading on the Queen Victoria’s deck, they gained in the attention paid to them by the recent widower and then-premier of New Brunswick, Leonard Tilley.
In Quebec City, the Fathers debated and finally crafted the seventy-two resolutions of the British North America Act, the act that formed the Canadian constitution at the time, and which still forms the basis of the Canadian constitution today.
Politics was not the only thing on the minds of those discussing the creation of Confederation, however. The men viewed the conference and following tour of the Canadas as a wonderful opportunity for other matters; they brought along their unmarried daughters and sisters to … well, to promote unions of a different sort. Luckily for us, Mercy Coles kept a diary of her trip. She wrote of her travels and of the events, balls, banquets, people, and whirlwind of social happenings and political manoeuvrings as they affected her and her desires.
The diary has never been published, and yet without it, Confederation history is — no question — incomplete. It is not the only such document, however: George Brown was one of the Canadian delegates, and the discovery, in the 1950s, of his letters to his wife, Anne, written during the Confederation conferences provided greater understanding of what made the union possible. The letters document the important relationships that were forged, and how those connections affected the views and attitudes of the delegates. The Mercy Coles diary also offers important insight into the people present at the Quebec conference, and provides the only report by a Canadian female of Canada’s social and political landscape in 1864.
Mercy Anne Coles was the third child of George Coles and his wife, Mercy Haine Coles. The couple had twelve children, two of whom, a boy and a girl, died in infancy. Their first nine children were girls. George Coles was a prosperous merchant, brewer, and distiller. In 1851, he led the Reform party to victory, and was PEI’s first premier. He led the government from 1851 to1854, and then, after six months out of office, from 1854 to 1859. Best known as the man who achieved responsible government for PEI in 1851, Coles was the leader of the Reform or Liberal Party, which was mostly supported by Roman Catholics, though Coles himself was Anglican. That he was able to muster such support, even in the face of the divisive issues that often fell along the religious lines of his time, is a tribute to the esteem in which Prince Edward Islanders held him, and is indicative of their support for his policies.
Coles was a self-made man, not one of the wealthy landowners whose politics tended to support absentee landlords and kept the many tenant farmers of PEI in a state of poverty. His government launched many remarkably progressive measures, such as the Free Education Act, which was passed in 1852. This act — the first in British North America, and possibly the first of this type of act in all of Britain’s colonies — provided free education for all primary school–aged children. The government also created a provincial fund to pay teachers’ salaries.
In contrast, other conference attendees from PEI, such as Colonel John Hamilton Gray, who was the premier of PEI in 1864, and Thomas Heath Haviland, who was among the ruling landowners, would have had different expectations and different values from those of Coles, just as their daughters and sisters would have also had different expectations and values from those held by Mercy.
These sharp differences in outlook and expectations existed despite the fact that all hailed from the relatively small city of Charlottetown. In 1838, the year Mercy was born, Charlottetown was a city with a population of just over three thousand people; although its population had doubled since then, it was still just over 6,700 in 1861. The province itself had a population of 80,552 by 1861, having grown in size by over thirty thousand people in the previous twenty-six years.
Like other cities at the time, Charlottetown had dirt streets that in the fall and spring were mired in mud. The Islander reported on April 14, 1863, that women, “on their way to church, [were] floundering about in the mud like swine in a hog-sty.”3 They’d get so stuck they had to have men pull them out. Even in much larger places, like Quebec City, which had a population of fifty thousand, the situation was similar. “You cannot put a foot off the sidewalk without plunging into mud,” wrote the correspondent for the Montreal newspaper La Minerve about Quebec City on Sunday, October 10, 1864,4 the day the delegates arrived on the Queen Victoria.
Prince Edward Island was almost entirely rural in the 1860s, and agriculture was, by far, the most important part of the economy. Only about 9 percent of the population lived in the capital city. There were reportedly 800 cattle, 850 sheep, 350 horses, and 400 hogs living in Charlottetown in 1861. Animals roamed the streets, and boys were hired to keep stray animals off them.5
Things were bad enough on normal days, but on days when the market was held, the situation became significantly worse. The market house, which at the time was in a serious state of dilapidation, was located in Queen Square — the same place that the seat of government, Province House, was located. Their proximity to each other caused a great deal of chagrin in many of the local politicians. Held twice weekly, year-round, the market was renowned for its filth: animal excrement, fish guts, and more littered the ground. Most of the vendors chose to sell their wares and produce outside, rather than be stuck inside the building. Even more filth and noise was the result.
It is of little surprise, then, that epidemics of cholera, typhus, smallpox, and typhoid were far from uncommon in Charlottetown. And although these types of epidemics were commonplace in other cities in British North America at this time, their impact was especially severe in Charlottetown, as there was no permanent hospital there until 1879.
In winter, the mail came and left by iceboat. Such trips were, at times, dangerous, and it was often questionable whether the mail would arrive at all. Evelyn MacLeod, in her annotations of the 1863 diary of Margaret Gray (the eighteen-year-old daughter of PEI’s premier, Colonel John Hamilton Gray), describes the small boats: “[They were] approximately seventeen feet long and four feet wide, and covered with heavy tin. Leather straps harnessed men to the boat as they hauled it across solid ice, and oars and sometimes a sail were used in patches of open water.” In describing the difficulties of receiving or sending mail, MacLeod quotes the Charlottetown Guardian on March 13, 1863: “Several attempts have been made during the week to cross the Straits but owing to the bad state of the ice they have proved ineffectual.”6
The ice often didn’t melt until the middle or end of April, and so shortages of many goods were common by the end of winter. As Margaret Gray wrote, the shops were close to empty by March.7 With no (or very slow) mail in or out, and no goods till the ice broke up and allowed steamers back into the harbour, Islanders were forced to be very self-sufficient.
The consequent privation that many in the province experienced was less of an issue for the Coles family, however, because of its large size and relative affluence. Also, although George Coles owned a brewery and distillery in town, the Coleses’ home was Stone Park Farm, on the outskirts of the city. It was four kilometres from Province House, and Mercy and her sisters were spared some of the day-to-day difficulties of living in town.
Despite the fact that they lived outside of the city, Coles’s daughters still benefitted from the education and culture that would have been more easily available