The First Northern Magus

It takes a talented, hardworking and brave person, if not a foolhardy one, to attempt to write a serious biography of Sir John A. Macdonald. First of all, what a public life it was, beginning in the 1830s and stretching into the 1890s, more than a half century during which he was involved in virtually every aspect of colonial and Canadian affairs. Then there is the enigma of the man himself: surely our most talented and successful politician, but not one of vision, great speaking ability or outstanding moral character. He may have been an amiable companion but he was a negligent father, lonely husband and frequent public drunkard. He was surely a master manager of men but he was not to be trusted, and while he was at the centre of everything, pulling strings and cajoling, just exactly what he wanted for himself usually remains unclear. And so it goes. Then this complex human being must be apprehended through the mountain range of documentation he has left behind (805 archival boxes), the equally voluminous records of his contemporaries and his government departments, and a virtual library of memoirs and scholarly analyses. And standing between a new biographer and the man himself is Donald Creighton’s magisterial two-volume life of Macdonald published in the 1950s, arguably the greatest achievement in Canadian historical scholarship. These are formidable obstacles for an author to overcome, and still beyond lies the alleged indifference of Canadian publishers and readers to anything sniffing of Canadian History.

Richard Gwyn is no fool. He is talented, hardworking and brave. And the first volume of his new life of John A. Macdonald is a noble achievement. His previous career as a newspaper columnist, political commentator, Smallwood and Trudeau biographer, and public intellectual need not be rehearsed before this audience. In this project his skills are aptly matched with his subject. He commands the judgement, research dedication, writing ability and boldness to do something two generations of scholars could not bring themselves to do—produce a life of our founding father for our times.

That Gwyn’s new Macdonald is not that much different in his broad interpretive outline than the old one should not surprise us, nor be a matter for criticism. Confronting the enormous challenge of Creighton’s Macdonald, Gwyn does a very sensible thing. He might have cavalierly rejected the Young Politician and the Old Chieftain, turning them on their heads, finding a yet unknown counter-Macdonald to unveil. In rejecting Creighton, for example, he might have taken a Strachey-esque tack, perfected of late by U.S. celebrity-muckraking biographers, exposing the abundant vanity and readily displayed hypocrisy of his subject. The siren song of a psychobiography of a man of inexplicable ailments, tragic marriages, lost children, mad relatives, monstrous binges and mysterious power over other men might have been tempting, especially with an eye to sales.

But instead of rejecting Creighton to transcend him, Gwyn instead embraces him fully and in admiration. He, more than anyone, can appreciate the wonder of Creighton’s intellectual achievement, his deft sorting out of affairs, staging of events and, especially, the soaring prose style. Gwyn’s pages ring with generous acknowledgement of his predecessor. This latter attribute—Creighton’s melodramatic prose—Gwyn also quite sensibly does not attempt to emulate. As if to assert his independence, Gwyn makes much of his one disagreement with Creighton over when Macdonald actually committed himself to Confederation. He believes it was not until 1864 rather than 1858 and that Macdonald was actually a latecomer to the party. The evidence is equivocal.

If there is a major difference between Gwyn’s and Creighton’s Macdonald it is to be found in what I can only call the intensity of the engagement. In McLuhanesque language, Creighton’s Macdonald is hot—full of emotion, dancing adjectives, zinging verbs, sentences that soar and others that drive directly and lethally to the quick. Gwyn’s Macdonald by contrast is cool. Gwyn stands back from his subject looking intently at him rather than out through his eyes. Creighton is operatic, Gwyn reportorial. A succinct summary replaces a set piece scene; Gwyn frequently interrupts the narrative to pull back for reflection. The Times of London faintly praised the 72 resolutions of the 1864 Quebec Conference, describing them as possessing “a practical and unpretending style.” Gwyn himself comments upon the “pedestrian language” of these momentous resolutions and their lack of “poetry.” The same might be said of this life of Macdonald. It is eminently sound and forthright, but utterly devoid of music. This is not said by way of criticism. Ours is surely an age that distrusts hot prose, squirms at emotional commitment and has no ear for music. Gwyn has crafted a Macdonald in a prose style suited to our time.

Macdonald. It is eminently sound and forthright, but utterly devoid of music. This is not said by way of criticism. Ours is surely an age that distrusts hot prose, squirms at emotional commitment and has no ear for music. Gwyn has crafted a Macdonald in a prose style suited to our time. To capture Macdonald’s enduring genius, Gwyn adopts the trope set out in the subtitle: John A. was the man who made us. By that Gwyn means that without elaborate theorizing or even post hoc explanation, Macdonald set in place institutions and approaches that have remained permanent and continue to anchor Canadian public life. Gwyn’s case rests upon Macdonald’s founding of his governments upon a firm mutual accommodation between French and English, his negotiation of a Confederation settlement that has with minor changes remained the basic framework of Canada and, lastly, his perfection of the pragmatic broker-manager, non-ideological style of political leadership. With a few exceptions there is a direct line of descent linking Macdonald to Laurier, Mackenzie King, Louis St. Laurent, Jean Chrétien and, as Harper dreams his Quebec ship will come in, perhaps one day Stephen himself. The trope is of course an exaggeration—it is not that simple and there are many other factors at work making us—but I believe it to be a pardonable one. It captures the essence of Macdonald’s political acumen, the enormity of his accomplishment, and it reinforces the relevance of his life for ours.

This is a biography intended for a popular audience. Nonetheless Gwyn has done his work and made good use of the work of others. Creighton justified his biography noting that 60 years had passed since the last one, during which time a great deal of new information had come available. Gwyn makes a similar argument. Since Creighton, a small cottage industry of scholars has toiled away at the details of Macdonald’s life, modifying this and qualifying that. But in truth there is not that much that is new in all of this scholarship or startlingly different to require major revision of the received Creightonian version. In his characteristically generous and collegial manner, when Gwyn makes use of this new material he readily acknowledges his debts in the text or the notes—unlike some previous journalist-historians who scorned academics while ripping them off. Nor does he make a pretense of presenting everything as his own discovery. There is a generosity of spirit here that warrants praise and emulation. Along the way Gwyn pays ample tribute to the work of inter alia Keith Johnson, Peter Waite, Judith Fingard, Ged Martin, Ian Radforth, Syd Wise and Craig Brown, Gordon Stewart, Brian Osborne, W.L. Morton, Don Smith, Janet Ajzenstat, Carl Berger, Michel Bliss, and Christopher Moore.

As well as mastering the secondary literature, Gwyn has served his time in the National Archives, in the grand reading room with its plate glass windows looking out over the Ottawa River in the foreground, the Eddy Plant in the middle distance and the Gatineau Hills rising purple in the distance. In this hallowed place Gwyn has plowed through the boxes, cursed as he tried to decipher the hand-writing and had his share of eureka moments of discovery amidst the tedium of page after page of patronage letters. He has submerged himself in Macdonald’s torrent of correspondence and struggled to the surface to emerge with insights into Macdonald’s character and his manner of manoeuvring in public and private life.

What is it then that Richard Gwyn brings to the biography that makes it worthy of our attention? I will not make the tendentious claim that Gwyn “brings his subject to life” in that hoary old cliché of dust jacket prose. As I have already said, there is far too much questioning, analysis and reflection in these pages for that illusion to be pulled off. This too is a “life” rather than “a times.” Gwyn keeps the focus on Macdonald while in the background a kaleidoscope seems to be spinning without becoming a distraction. Although the following matters are mentioned in passing, a reader will not learn much about the questions that roiled politics during Macdonald’s time: the clergy reserves, the university question, militia and defence, separate schools, reciprocity, tariffs—indeed economic affairs are quite slighted. As for the mysteries of debt allowance and provincial subsidies—Galt’s magic greasing of the Confederation skids—mercifully not a word is said. And perhaps just as well. Gywn is more concerned with how Macdonald surfed these issues than the details. That is perhaps another difference between Creighton and Gwyn.

Gwyn’s major claim to our attention lies elsewhere. Gwyn brings a lifetime of experience observing politicians close up to the writing of 1840s, Macdonald’s methods, his new liberal-conservatism, the quarrel with George Brown, John A’s record as attorney general, George-Étienne Cartier, Canadian expansionism in the 1850s, anti-Americanism, Macdonald’s drinking,

this biography. He has been in the cockpit of politics, watched people succeed and fail. He knows the passions—the sulphurous stench of unstated personality conflicts that defy reason, complicate negotiations and make full explanations impossible. Gwyn is able to carry this experience and the necessary judgement that comes with it back into the 19th century. Despite the thousands of pages of documentation, there are silences to be filled in and gaps to be leapt with intuition to arrive at satisfactory conclusions. Gwyn, unlike his subject, is a man to be trusted. Gwyn does not strain to be partisan, nor does he worship at the Macdonald shrine. Rather he presents a balanced and believable rendering of a complex figure, acknowledging his enormous achievement, his all too human flaws and, on occasion, his appalling lapses of judgement. But, like trying to capture the appeal of a great lover or of a style of con man, it may be that some of John A’s charms cannot be easily captured in words or pinned between the pages of a book.

For a modern general audience Gwyn’s second major contribution will probably be much appreciated. He is the master of the succinct essay that elaborates upon a point or draws a contrast with present practices. Gwyn knows that the past is a foreign country and a trusty guidebook is often necessary. Almost invariably I found him to be reliable and dead on in dealing with subjects as varied as Scottishness, the innate conservatism of the colonies, the nature of patronage, the sea change that occurred in Canadian politics in the 1840s, Macdonald’s methods, his new liberal-conservatism, the quarrel with George Brown, John A’s record as attorney general, George-Étienne Cartier, Canadian expansionism in the 1850s, anti-Americanism, Macdonald’s drinking, the appeal of Empire, Macdonald’s contribution to the Confederation agreement, representative democracy, loyalty, and the origins and meaning of the peace, order and good government clause. There may not be poetry or music here, but there is an abundance of tightly focused observation and careful explication as to what it all means.

At the outset Gwyn makes what seems to me an unnecessarily defensive argument for writing a new biography of Macdonald. Apart from new scholarship and new documentation, he says, it’s about time. Gwyn notes that Americans do not seem to need to defend writing new biographies of their presidents with remarkable regularity. There is something wrong with a country, he seems to be saying, where an author has to justify writing about a major historical figure either because someone has done that before or no one apparently cares. To me the project needs no justification; indeed, more brave, talented, dedicated—even foolhardy—authors should try their hand at it.

An explicit Canadian nationalist subtext courses through these pages. Gwyn goes so far as to make a claim for John A. as our first anti-American. This is perhaps something of a stretch for someone who spent much of his life trying without success to obtain commercial reciprocity with the United States. Nevertheless, in his determination to make a separate country based upon British institutions and continuing loyalty to Crown and Empire, Macdonald can surely be credited with being the first Canadian nationalist. Macdonald’s nationalism took the form of insisting upon his Britishness, most famously in his last campaign. But these days nationalism has gone out of fashion. With the United States in a post-9/11 surly mood, in the anxious marches north of the border it is “suck up” time with the Americans. Neo-conservative markets have become the measure of all things. “Canadian” sounds a little parochial to trendy global thinkers. Richard Gwyn has always been a proud and unapologetic Canadian nationalist. His Macdonald is an implicit justification for defining and defending national interests in our time as Macdonald did in his. In a year when the CPR is likely to be sold to the Americans, and no one can think of a good reason why Inco, Alcan and Dofasco should not be owned by foreigners, this may be Richard Gwyn’s toughest sell.

At the climax of this volume, with trembling hands Macdonald pulls Confederation out of his threadbare top hat. Neat trick. For all but four of the next 25 years Macdonald will serve as prime minister. The magic will grow stale and the great conjurer more cynical. But if this first volume is any indication, it will be a long last act worth waiting for.