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

Canada Reformers controlled the Assembly and they forced the governor to admit their nominees to his Cabinet. As Bagot wearily concluded, theoretical argument about responsible government was pointless, because “virtually it exists.” In a rearguard action, he retained some existing Cabinet members for their administrative skills, including Kingston’s defender, S.B. Harrison. In 1843, Bagot’s health collapsed, and he was succeeded by Sir Charles Metcalfe. A former governor in India and Jamaica, Metcalfe was used to giving orders, not taking advice. A clash with his Reform ministers was likely, and confrontation would mean elections for a new Assembly. At this point, John A. Macdonald fought his first campaign.

      In March 1843, Macdonald was elected as a Kingston alderman. Five months earlier, he had become president of the local St Andrew’s Society, which gave him opportunities to wear his ceremonial kilt, and firm up his support among the Scottish community. He also joined the Orange Order, a Protestant Irish fraternal organization, which in Canada transcended its national origins. Its powerful political machine underpinned his electoral organization in Kingston until the Orangemen quarrelled with him in 1860–61.

      Macdonald was elected easily, but it was a fierce campaign. Since property qualifications allowed few men to vote, the excluded majority disrupted political rallies in protest. John A. Macdonald proved a skilled performer, exchanging wisecracks with hecklers until he gained the crowd’s attention, and then launching into a serious speech. At his victory rally, a platform collapsed, plunging him into the snow and he joked about the ups and downs of politics. Forsyth, the Conservative candidate in 1841, had been a halting speaker and was too obviously the privileged product of the local elite. If the party wanted a standard-bearer who could reach out and win votes, this genial self-made lawyer might be the answer.

      He became a key player in municipal affairs at a moment of crisis for Kingston. The city had benefited from its selection as Canada’s capital. (The official term was “seat of government”: as part of the Empire, Canada’s true capital was London, England.) The influx of politicians and bureaucrats boosted the local economy, but the newcomers were critical of the city’s poor accommodations, both for people and institutions. The municipality planned a huge city hall for use as Canada’s parliament house — but the real objection to Kingston was not its lack of facilities, but its atmosphere. French-Canadians felt uneasy with its loyalism, Reformers disliked its Toryism. When the new ministers lost an important by-election, Kingston Conservatives (Macdonald included) celebrated so riotously that the legislators felt intimidated. In March 1843, a Cabinet committee recommended moving the capital to Montreal. Harrison tried to block the decision, but in September he admitted defeat and resigned from office. Early in November 1843, the Assembly ratified the move. Three weeks later, Metcalfe forced the Reformers out of office, but it was too late for Kingston. Civil servants had quickly packed their files and hurried downriver.

      Having ousted the Reformers, Metcalfe prorogued (i.e., suspended) Parliament to silence their supporters. Although the governor general delayed the call until September 1844, everybody knew that elections would soon follow. Kingston’s Conservatives needed to unite behind an acceptable candidate — but who? The front-runner was probably lawyer John S. Cartwright, son of a founder of Kingston, who already represented a nearby riding. But Cartwright sailed to Britain in March 1844 to plead with the imperial authorities to veto the move to Montreal, a fruitless mission which destroyed his health. Into the vacuum stepped John A. Macdonald.

      Years later, Macdonald modestly explained that he was selected to “fill a gap,” adding: “There seemed to be no one else available, so I was pitched upon.” He also recalled that he made it a condition that he might serve only a single term. Perhaps this was a tactical concession to the hereditary claims of Kingston’s first families: in 1873, he recalled that they had distrusted him as “an adventurer” when he broke into politics. In reality, he moved effectively to seize the nomination. In April 1844, 225 Kingston citizens signed a requisition asking him to run — a well-organized show of strength. Macdonald responded by stressing that the signatories included “men of all shades of political opinion,” 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