John A. Macdonald. Ged Martin

highlighting his ability to reach out to uncommitted voters. He agreed “to lay aside all personal considerations” and run. Some Tories likely resented giving this upstart a free pass into Parliament for, in September, Macdonald staged a pre-emptive strike. He called a public meeting and asked whether his supporters might “now prefer to select another candidate.” The outcome was a unanimous endorsement, with the intimidating pro-Macdonald chairman, old Jemmy Williamson, practically defying anybody to break ranks. Happily, Williamson did not know that Macdonald had once bricked up his doorway.

      In his campaign, Macdonald waved the British flag: “the prosperity of Canada depends upon its permanent connection with the mother country,” implying that Reformers were disloyal. He dismissed “fruitless discussions on abstract and theoretical questions of government,” insisting that, as “a young country,” Canada should “develop its resources.” He backed schemes such as a plank road to the Ottawa Valley, to “make Kingston the market for a large and fertile, though hitherto valueless country.” There was no hidden bonanza waiting in Kingston’s rocky hinterland but, decades later, Macdonald would push Canada’s westward expansion with equal optimism.

      He emphasized his local credentials, promising “to advance the interests of the town in which I have lived so long and with whose fortunes my own prosperity is linked.” For John A. Macdonald, politics was an extension of business. On September 1, 1843 — by whimsical coincidence, his wedding day — he signed a three-year partnership agreement with Alexander Campbell. Campbell would run the law office while Macdonald worked for Kingston in Parliament. Over the next two decades, Macdonald secured charters for twenty-five local projects, one of which, the Trust and Loan Company, a farm mortgage bank founded in 1843, would become a mainstay of his income. When he proclaimed that it was “alike my duty and my interest to promote the prosperity of this city and the adjacent country,” John A. Macdonald meant what he said.

      There was another, unstressed, plank in his campaign. Macdonald ran as a Protestant candidate against the Catholic, Anthony Manahan, claiming that he would be “hard run by the Papishes,” a mildly offensive nickname for Manahan’s Irish supporters. In fact, Macdonald won handily, by 275 votes to forty-two. However, he had lost the straw vote taken at the “hustings,” the rowdy public nomination meeting, in which anybody could take part. In his early election campaigns, he invariably lost on the hustings but went on to triumph among the qualified voters: as the franchise widened, so his majorities fell. John A. Macdonald was elected by Kingston elite, not by the Kingston masses — but the bank clerk’s son had shouldered his way to prominence. The riding might not remain as rock-solid as it appeared.

      For Helen Macdonald, as she proudly watched the new member for Kingston board the steamer to Montreal, her son’s election to Parliament likely closed the quarter-century of humiliation caused by her husband’s bankruptcy in Glasgow. But Macdonald’s wife was absent from the dockside. Life was going badly for Isabella, and we must probe the mystery of her health. We hear her voice from just two surviving letters, both probably written under heavy medication: “my head is very confused, & I am not sure what I say,” she confessed in one of them. Some male historians have implied that she was a selfish airhead whose hysterical self-pity dragged down her husband’s career —even driving him to drink. However, Isabella Macdonald suffered real pain, likely caused by trigeminal neuralgia, pressure on the facial nerve from enlarged blood vessels that causes a stabbing pain in the face. Often called the “tic” (the name Macdonald used), the condition interferes with normal activities, such as eating, sleeping, and kissing. In Isabella’s case, it sometimes produced total physical collapse. Driven to desperate remedies, she became dependent upon pain-killing opium. Even if perhaps she manipulated her condition to gain control over her own life, her agonies were genuine. Macdonald’s sister Margaret reported Isabella’s “inability to take care of herself,” adding that “poor John however willing” was “nearly as useless as a child” in looking after her.

      In the summer of 1844 the Macdonalds had vacationed at New Haven, Connecticut. Isabella was not only determined to return the following year but also to spend the 1845–46 winter in Georgia, although a severe attack in July left her so exhausted that a Kingston doctor feared she would die. “It may be days — nay weeks — before she has rallied sufficiently to attempt any journey,” Macdonald wrote despairingly. But Isabella aimed to get as far away from Canada as possible, and for as long as she could. Within a week of the crisis, she was carried to the Oswego steamboat and the couple started across Lake Ontario for New England. Her exhaustion was so “dreadful” that Macdonald feared his wife “would die on the deck.” Yet, “strange to say her health and strength seemed to return” the further she travelled from Kingston. In October, Macdonald escorted her on the harrowing journey south. Even though Isabella was carried everywhere, exhaustion often forced her “to have recourse to opium.” However, she indomitably insisted on pressing on: Isabella was not the weak heroine of melodrama. Fond of wordplay, Macdonald called her a “Shero,” who “manfully” resisted her affliction. It took three weeks to reach Savannah, where he enjoyed his first taste of peach brandy, but early in December he had to return to Canada.

      Macdonald left his wife behind at a time when the United States threatened war against Britain. On December 2, 1845, President James K. Polk aggressively demanded that the British clear out of the Pacific Northwest, the fur-trading region hitherto shared between the two countries. He also insisted that there must be “no future European colony or dominion … planted or established on any part of the North American continent.” The Oregon crisis was resolved by dividing the territory along the forty-ninth parallel, but for several months there was a danger that Isabella would be stranded behind enemy lines. From Kingston in February 1846, Macdonald forlornly hoped his wife “may yet be restored to me, in health, strength and spirits.” In fact, Isabella would be absent from Canada for three years.

      If the new member for Kingston was risking his domestic happiness to sit in Parliament, he displayed a surprisingly low political profile, hardly speaking during his first two sessions. Macdonald entered Parliament at a toxic moment. Governor Metcalfe’s narrow election victory was almost entirely based upon an English-Canadian majority. The result was a divided country and a weak government. John A. Macdonald spent the next decade learning the lessons of 1844. Ironically, Metcalfe’s victory had proved Bagot’s point: arguing over responsible government was pointless, for Canada was now governed by the dominant grouping in the Assembly. W.H. Draper, the governor-general’s right-hand man, was effectively premier. Draper’s precarious ministry needed Macdonald’s vote, not his voice.

      Keen to promote the interests of Kingston, John A. Macdonald avoided making enemies. Indeed, his most serious clash was with an arch-Tory, W.H. Boulton, who threatened him with a duel for allegedly slandering his family dynasty. (Duelling was going out of fashion, so it was safe to issue the threat.) In 1846, Macdonald secured a charter making Kingston a city, but his main interest was his mortgage business. The Trust and Loan Company’s plan to lend money to farmers was hampered by Canada’s Usury Laws, which capped interest rates. Well-intentioned but short-sighted, the Usury Laws gave Canadians no incentive to save, and made the province unattractive to overseas investors. Macdonald’s strategy was to bypass the obstacle, by seeking an exemption permitting his own company to charge higher rates — which he eventually achieved in 1850.

      “I like to steer my own course,” Macdonald assured his family, but he was ambitious for office. As the danger of war with the United States receded, so a new threat to Canada came from Britain itself. Late in 1845, the imperial government announced the end of the Corn Laws, the preferential tariff that enabled Canadian farmers to export their wheat to Britain at lower import duties than their American rivals. Cheap bread was needed to stave off revolution in Britain’s booming industrial towns and among the starving people of Ireland. In effect, Britain turned to the United States for its food. The repeal of the Corn Laws was followed by the end of protection on timber. In Canada, farmers, millers, loggers, and ship-owners faced ruin. Some feared Britain might abandon Canada altogether. The province needed ambitious politicians who would develop its resources.

      In June 1846, Premier Draper decided he needed a minister with “activity of mind and familiar with business details” to clean up Canada’s inefficient land-granting agency: Macdonald was the obvious choice.