Within a week, John A. Macdonald was facing death himself. He had travelled to Toronto, probably on legal business, but perhaps carrying a last-ditch plea to save Brass. News of insurrection in Lower Canada encouraged William Lyon Mackenzie to attempt to seize the Upper Canada capital. The first blood was shed on December 4, 1837. Three days later, a thousand-strong government force marched up Yonge Street to attack the rebel headquarters at Montgomery’s Tavern. The militia outnumbered the insurgents, and they had the advantage of two big guns. A few shells fired at the tavern proved enough to rout Mackenzie’s untrained followers.
Marching close to the front of the column, just behind the two cannon, was John A. Macdonald. “I carried my musket in ’37,” he would say in later years, laconically telling Parliament in 1884: “I suppose I fought as bravely as my confreres.” Yet he was reluctant to talk about that day when he had gone into battle. His close friend, J.R. Gowan, only discovered that they had been comrades in arms at Montgomery’s while reminiscing on the fiftieth anniversary of the armed clash. John A. Macdonald took part, not because he had volunteered, but because all adult males had a duty to serve in the militia. They were called out for a few days of basic training each summer, but they were definitely not disciplined soldiers programmed to stand and fight. Because there were few casualties in that brief skirmish, historians rather belittle the episode. Yet it was a frightening experience for men who had never been under fire: Gowan recalled his “strong inclination to run away.”
Because Macdonald hardly mentioned his experience, the 1837 episode has never been factored into his life story. It is noteworthy that he took part, and significant that he never boasted about it: a Conservative politician might have proclaimed that he had risked his life to preserve Canada for Queen Victoria. John A. Macdonald is often caricatured as an amoral and unprincipled operator, who struck deals and cut corners. But we should see him as somebody who knew that Canadian society was fragile, who had learned that the art of government involved avoiding conflict among its contrasting elements — Tories and radicals, Catholics and Protestants, English and French. As he put it in 1854, Canadians should “agree as much as possible” and that meant “respecting each other’s principles ... even each other’s prejudices. Unless they were governed by a spirit of compromise and kindly feelings towards each other, they could never get on harmoniously together.” In a rare allusion to those traumatic events, in 1887 he called the rebellion era “days of humiliation,” adding that “we can all look back and respect the men who fought on one side or the other, for we know there was a feeling of right and justice on both sides.” The clash at Montgomery’s had been part of “a war of fellow-subject against fellow-subject” which he preferred to forget — but, throughout his career, he remembered the lessons of 1837.
Macdonald was angry with the authorities for provoking the conflict. He curtly refused promotion in the militia, and boldly defended victims of the Tory crackdown on dissidents, showing a courageous commitment to fair play in the heated post-rebellion atmosphere. Eight Reformers from the Kingston area were charged with treason on dubious evidence; in 1885, as he pondered the case of Louis Riel, he recalled how he had “tripped up” the prosecution to secure their acquittal. A further fifteen prisoners decamped from military custody. In angry over-reaction, the garrison commander, Colonel Henry Dundas, concluded the storekeeper, Reformer John Ashley, must have connived in their escape. Embarrassed local magistrates quickly released Ashley from jail, but the irate victim hired John A. Macdonald to sue for wrongful arrest. This was courtroom drama, for Dundas, the heir to a peerage, would one day sit in the House of Lords — too elevated a personage to answer to an angry storekeeper and a raw young barrister. Army officers called to give evidence found themselves roughly cross-examined. The judge summed up in the colonel’s favour, but the jury shocked respectable Kingston opinion and awarded Ashley $800 — huge damages for the time. For years afterwards, the outraged officers of the garrison displayed the ultimate disapproval of English gentlemen by refusing to invite Macdonald to dinner, “but John A. cared nothing for that.”
Although internal rebellion had collapsed, Canada remained under external threat. In mid-November, a paramilitary force from the United States landed at Prescott, one hundred kilometres downriver from Kingston. They were counter-attacked by British regulars, disciplined soldiers who stood firm and shot straight. By the time the invaders surrendered, there were several dozen fatalities. The prisoners were taken to Kingston, where one local resident was appalled to discover that his own brother-in-law was among those captured. After two senior lawyers refused to help, he implored John A. Macdonald to provide a defence. There was little the young lawyer could do: the invaders were tried by court martial, and the resentful military refused to recognize the upstart lawyer who had humiliated their commanding officer. A grisly batch of hangings ensued, and Macdonald was called to death row, to draw up the bandit leader’s will as he awaited the gallows.
“Macdonald’s popularity was terribly strained by his defence of these men.” But John A. Macdonald was playing for higher stakes than popularity. He was putting down a marker: the elite must accept him, and on his own terms. For their part, the city’s power brokers decided to recruit him. Increasingly challenged by Toronto, Kingston needed to maximize its local talent. In June 1839, John A. Macdonald became a director of the Commercial Bank — the institution where his father worked as a clerk.
That autumn, the death of Kingston’s mayor, Henry Cassady, provided further opportunities. Cassady’s legal apprentice,
seventeen-year-old Alexander Campbell — like Oliver Mowat, offspring of the local elite — transferred to Macdonald’s tutelage in October 1839. At intervals through the next fifty years, Campbell would act as Macdonald’s business partner, campaign manager, and political lieutenant, usually dazzled but occasionally horrified by the activities of his magnetic mentor. Mowat soon moved to Toronto, but Campbell remained the workhorse who could handle groups who sometimes distrusted John A. — from genteel Tories to intolerant Orangemen. Macdonald also succeeded Cassady as the Commercial Bank’s official legal adviser, a position previously held by George Mackenzie. At the age of twenty-four, John A. Macdonald could now shift his focus away from fee-grubbing courtroom work towards the attractive world of business and corporate law. He was no longer “poor and friendless.” Hothouse schooling, grinding apprenticeship, plus ability, determination, and charm had won him a seat at Kingston’s top table. He was almost one third of his journey through life. Now he could map out how he planned to live the rest.
2
1839–1854
Idleness Is No Pleasure
John A. Macdonald was seriously ill for a time in 1840, and his health continued to cause concern during the next two years. His father’s death, in 1841, added to his family responsibilities, and he was probably working too hard. However, as he remarked during his first overseas holiday, “idleness is no pleasure,” and he planned to return to his career “with greater zest and zeal than ever.” In his mid-twenties, various options loomed: marriage, expansion of his law firm, and maybe a launch into politics, to advance Kingston’s business interests — and his own.
Canada was entering a new political chapter. The British government had decided to unite Upper and Lower Canada into a single province, confident that the predominantly loyal Upper Canadians would control the habitants, who had posed the major challenge to the Empire in 1837–38. Both sections of the new province would have forty-two seats in the joint Assembly, thus overcoming the inconvenient problem that Upper Canada’s 450,000 population — half that of modern Nova Scotia — was 200,000 fewer than that of Lower Canada. However, Montreal, Canada’s largest city at the time, was largely English-speaking, and Anglophones would control about a dozen Lower Canada ridings, ensuring a 5–3 majority of English over French in the united legislature. Responsible government — a Canadian ministry answerable to the local legislature — was ruled out. Rather, the British governor-general would work with the Assembly just as the president of the United States dealt with Congress, persuading it to vote the taxes needed to pay for government and choosing his own Cabinet, irrespective of party. This imperial thinking was deeply flawed.