John A. Macdonald. Ged Martin

it, Porter, are you alive yet?” Macdonald claimed that he forgot only one face in a thousand, and his impressive memory for people he had only met briefly would win him devotees across Canada. He had absorbed George Mackenzie’s advice to loosen up: “no client, however poor, ever came out of Mr. Macdonald’s office complaining of snobbery.”

      His giant nose and unruly black hair contributed to an unforgettable face, but not a pretty one. When Louisa was congratulated on resembling her famous brother, she indignantly commented that he was the ugliest man in Canada. It was a face full of character, manipulated by “a consummate actor,” with “a strong desire to please,” who could easily “assume the role of the intensely interested recipient.” In the early years of slow-exposure photography, sitters had to remain motionless for lengthy periods. Hence most nineteenth-century politicians glare at us, pop-eyed with tension. But even the earliest photographs of John A. Macdonald convey a lively, genial personality: one of his theatrical skills was his ability to hold a pose. Yet he was not merely playing a role. Macdonald’s “wit and his inexhaustible fund of anecdote” infused every gathering that he attended. One critic remembered prime-ministerial dinner parties, where Macdonald carried on a serious conversation at one end of the table, while “telling risqué anecdotes to the guests at the other end.”

      As James Porter recalled, “there wasn’t much fun that John A. wasn’t up to.” At Picton, he formed a mock order of chivalry, la Société de la Vache Rouge (Knights of the Red Cow). One Christmas, Macdonald brought the Knights to Glenora for the ceremonial enthronement of his mother as patroness, a paper knife serving as her sword of office. As master of ceremonies, John A. wisecracked his way through the proceedings until tears of laughter ran down Helen’s face. “God help us for a set of fools!” she exclaimed. Years later, Macdonald told an astonished British statesman about an American vacation he had taken with two friends, in which they pretended to be strolling players. Calling at taverns, Macdonald played tunes, one of his companions pretended to be a dancing bear while the third collected coins from onlookers.

      Macdonald enjoyed irresponsible pranks. On summer night in Kingston, he led a group of friends in bricking up old Jemmy Williamson’s doorway, a stunt requiring a couple of hours of silent labour. From a hiding place, they threw pebbles at the bedroom window until Williamson came downstairs to investigate. A solemn Scotsman who believed in Hellfire religion, he thought he had been walled in as a punishment for his sins. An earlier joke was even less amusing. A Picton hotelier was notorious for driving his buggy at daredevil speed through the town. One night Macdonald slowed him down by building a barrier across the darkened street. The victim escaped unhurt, but his buggy was damaged and the horse badly injured. Worse still, suspicion fell on an innocent man: Macdonald confessed, but managed to get the affair hushed up. He was less fortunate when an altercation with a local doctor came to court, although the assault charge against him failed: punches had been thrown when the medical gentleman had dismissed the young law clerk as a “lousy Scotchman.”

      Macdonald was also engaged in serious activity in the adult world. He was elected to a junior office in Kingston’s Celtic Society, with twice-yearly banquets including toasts damning Canada’s “external and internal enemies” (Americans and radicals) and praising “the immortal memory” of James Wolfe, conqueror of Quebec. This organization embodied an important Scots network, from which he recruited his first law pupil, Oliver Mowat, son of a prominent merchant, magistrate, and Presbyterian Church elder. The two were active members of the Kingston Young Men’s Society — Macdonald was president in 1837 — which debated political and religious questions. In 1836, he had voted in his first election, helping the Tory John S. Cartwright to defeat the Reformers in the nearby riding of Lennox and Addington.

      John A. Macdonald’s political opinions were formed in a highly confrontational period of Canadian history. “Tory” was the shorthand for Conservatives, while, after Confederation, Ontario Reformers adopted the name of their French-Canadian allies, le parti libéral, to become the Liberal Party of Canada. An election pitting Tory-Conservatives against Liberal-Reformers sounds familiar to modern Canadians, but the outward two-party system masked four political streams, two on each side, usually forming uneasy alliances. The extreme Tories believed in privilege, so long as it was privilege for themselves. However, they were a tiny minority (hence their nickname, the “Family Compact”) who needed the votes of more moderate Conservatives, people like John A. Macdonald who supported British institutions and the development of Canada’s economy. “I could never have been called a Tory,” he later recalled, mocking “old fogy Toryism.”

      Their opponents were split too. Moderate Reformers admired Britain’s system of parliamentary government, and wished to adapt it to enable Canadians to run their own affairs through a miniature copy of the Westminster Parliament — a system known as “responsible government.” They were uncomfortable allies of the radicals, who admired American-style elective institutions, and sometimes sought to defy the Empire and join the United States. Two-party politics in Canada operated more like a four-cornered boxing match, with some of the sharpest political struggles happening, not between, but within, the main groupings. However, as divisive issues were resolved, such as the achievement of responsible government, moderates on both sides found more in common with their erstwhile opponents than with their quarrelsome friends — a strategy that John A. Macdonald exploited to occupy the middle ground in politics for two decades after 1854.

      Unfortunately, this subtlety was lost on the governor of Upper Canada, Sir Francis Head, an eccentric British Army officer who naively believed that anyone who opposed his Tory supporters must be a Republican traitor. Governor Head enlivened the 1836 campaign by issuing colourful appeals to vote for the Union Jack. With the right to vote confined to property-owning British subjects, barely a fifth of adult males qualified (and no women). It was alleged that in 1836, veteran Reformers were thrown off the electoral rolls on shabby pretexts, while normally sleepy bureaucrats rushed out title deeds to government supporters — which was probably how young Macdonald acquired the hundred acres of wild land that entitled him to vote. Predictably, the Reformers were routed. Fifty-five years later, in his last desperate election campaign of 1891, Sir John A. Macdonald would resort to the same unsavoury combination of flag-waving and manipulation of voter rolls.

      Head’s election victory was overkill. The big losers in 1836 were the moderate Reformers, their strategy of patient argument shown to be powerless against Tory arrogance. The vacuum of opposition was filled by radicals with their big talk of fighting for liberty. As mayor of York, journalist William Lyon Mackenzie had proved a decisive administrator, even changing the name of Kingston’s burgeoning rival to Toronto. But in futile opposition, his newspaper became increasingly reckless. With the British authorities struggling to suppress a national uprising in French Canada, Mackenzie’s inflammatory language fanned rebellion among his supporters, in the hinterland of Toronto. December 1837 became one of the most traumatic months in John A. Macdonald’s life.

      The crisis of that month was not just political but professional and personal. Macdonald had quickly acquired a reputation as a clever courtroom performer, who could talk to juries of working men in language they understood. Once he described an assault by saying the defendant “took & went & hit him a brick.” Few cases were as daunting as that of William Brass, an alcoholic hobo charged in 1837 with raping an eight-year-old girl, a crime that carried the death penalty. Although Macdonald was praised for his “ingenious” defence, it was perhaps too clever. His first line of argument, that Brass had been too drunk to commit a sexual act, collapsed when the victim gave harrowing testimony. The young lawyer’s fallback position, that his client’s alcohol problem was a form of insanity, also failed. Despite Macdonald’s “very able” performance, Brass was found guilty and sentenced to die. His execution, on December 1, 1837, was horribly bungled. Brass was publicly hanged, from an upstairs window of Kingston’s courthouse. The executioner miscalculated the length of the rope, and Brass crashed into his own coffin. Despite pleading that his escape was proof of his innocence, he was dragged back upstairs and choked to death on a shortened noose. We can only guess the impact of this failure on the twenty-two year-old Macdonald, whose client was widely believed to be the victim of a frame-up. A decade later, Macdonald became a political ally of W.H. Draper, who had prosecuted Brass. Draper occasionally teased the younger man, reminding Macdonald that he was such a smart