The John A. Macdonald Retrospective 2-Book Bundle. Ged Martin

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 lawyer that his client had been hanged. Bricking up Jemmy Williamson’s front door was a huge joke, but losing a court case could send a man to a hideous death.

      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,