Archival evidence and John A. Macdonald biography

In 2007, I was invited to contribute to the first issue of the Journal of Historical Biography, founded by Dr Barbara J. Messamore and based at what would soon become the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia. As I was then preparing to write about the career of John A. Macdonald, Canada's first prime minister, I took the opportunity to discuss issues relating to the surviving source materials about his career.

When biographers are confronted by a massive and juicy collection of a subject's personal papers, they are inclined to dive in to the material gratefully and greedily. The questions that I asked about Macdonald need to be asked by every biographer about every biography – but the available material can rarely povide the answers. Some basic points had certainly never been made about the material relating to Sir John A. Totally forgotten was the admission by his literary executor, Joseph Pope – Macdonald's longtime secretary and his first major biographer – that he (Pope) had destroyed some papers. His defence was that he wished to protect the memory of others – but his fervent loyalty to his employer makes one wonder: if there were indeed contemporaries who had suggested nefarious projects, they presumably assumed that their correspondent might be interested. It seemed, too, that nobody had asked why Macdonald had written some letters at all. One obvious explanation, which Macdonald himself often used an excuse for putting pen to paper, lay in Canada's internal distances: he wrote to journalists and politicians in distant cities when he could not talk to them. Hence many of his letters on political subjects were simply John A. chatting in the persuasive and inclusive way in which he used friendly conversation to bring people on board. One important example of this process is his December 1864 letter to Matthew Crooks Cameron, who was critical of the Confederation project, assuring him that the provinces would be absorbed into the central government within an implied time-frame of twenty-five years. My article discusses both Macdonald's motives in committing such a prediction to paper, and those of his most celebrated twentieth-century, Donald Creighton, in totally ignoring this explosive document. But to identify Macdonald's correspondence as a substitute for face-to-face conversation highlights a major lacuna in his extensive personal archive. Twice married, he was a husband for almost forty years – and one who was often absent from home. Yet not a single letter survives between the spouses in either marriage. The implications of this negative aspect of the extensive Macdonald archive can only be the subject of speculation.
"Archival Evidence and John A. Macdonald Biography" was published in Journal of Historical Biography, i (2007), 79-115. 

ARCHIVAL EVIDENCE AND MACDONALD BIOGRAPHY*

When Donald Creighton published the first volume of his biography of John A. Macdonald in 1952, he recognised only one worthwhile forerunner in the field, the authorised Memoirs published in 1894 by Macdonald's former secretary, Joseph Pope. Pope's book merited this status because it was "solidly based" upon Macdonald's private papers, which Pope controlled as literary executor until they were deposited in the Public Archives (now Library and Archives Canada) in 1917. Other biographies were "shorter and slighter works … without independent authority". Creighton, then, nailed his biographer's colours firmly to the archival mast, basing his own study on the "richness" of the Macdonald Papers, supplemented by material in other collections that had become available since Pope's time.^[1]

Creighton's achievement remains impressive: not only did he work in the era before the photocopier, but he lacked the research funding that the Rockefeller Foundation provided for the contemporary project to produce an authorised biography of Mackenzie King, the only prime minister to equal Macdonald's longevity in office, and a politician whom Creighton detested.^[2] Yet there is good reason to accept the balanced verdict of two of his most respected former doctoral students that the work is "unforgettable, splendid, but flawed".^[3] Although the distinguished generation of academics whom he had trained spoke of him with admiration, awe and affection, it is evident that Creighton was a difficult and sometimes harsh personality.^[4] The question arises: was it possible for a person so obviously not at ease with himself to comprehend the darker side of John A. Macdonald? Creighton certainly acknowledged the tragedy of his first wife's mysterious illness, and the sadness that the sole child of his second marriage was severely handicapped. In the staid Canada of the 1950s, he was undoubtedly courageous in accepting that Macdonald sometimes drank too much. But Macdonald the man undoubtedly took second place to Macdonald the nation-builder, and the problems of his private life were used rather to paint a cumulative picture of a troubled hero –  there are even echoes of Wagner's Ring Cycle in Creighton's presentation^[5] – rather than explored in their full implications. Thus Creighton did not speculate whether Macdonald's determination to pursue his political career worsened his first wife's condition, and he omitted to interrogate the abrupt circumstances of the second marriage altogether.^[6] Arguably, a more robust acknowledgement of the extent of Macdonald's alcohol problem would have enabled Creighton to confront the fact that on more than one occasion the career of the "Old Chieftain" was threatened by lapses into drunkenness.^[7]

In addition to the areas of Macdonald's life which Creighton was unwilling or ill-equipped to explore, there were several major contradictions in his approach to biography. Two of them stemmed from the fact that he came to biography from economic history, and envisaged his study of Macdonald as completing a trilogy that had begun with his ground-breaking 1937 study, The Commercial Empire of the St Lawrence. He realised that the river, the "protagonist" of the first volume, could be replaced by the man and that, through studying Macdonald, he had "stumbled upon the only satisfactory method of writing the second phase of the history of the Empire of the St. Lawrence."^[8]

The complication was that, in becoming a biographer, Creighton did not cease to be an economic historian, and two curious spin-offs were the result. The first stemmed from the fact that he conceived Macdonald as the embodiment of Kingston, the loyal town located at a key point in the Laurentian system. Kingston was certainly the starting point for understanding the career of John A. Macdonald, but the problem was that, as that career progressed, he moved both physically and politically away from his original base, even losing his seat there against the political tide of the Conservative landslide of 1878. Because Creighton chose to see Macdonald's career as the necessary working-out of a predetermined Kingstonian-Laurentian destiny, he was unable to analyse the apparent anomaly of a politician who became steadily more prominent on the larger stage but increasingly vulnerable in his one-time local stronghold. No wonder Creighton announced his 1878 defeat with an exclamation mark, adding by way of explanation only that "Kingston had deserted her son".^[9]

Creighton's decision to portray Macdonald as the St Lawrence incarnate had one further, and intensely paradoxical, side effect: despite the biographer's academic track record, his subject turned out to have almost no economic history of his own. The documentation of Macdonald's finances in his personal papers was certainly chaotic – in which the archival record faithfully reflected the finances themselves – but there was certainly a story to be told, as J.K. Johnson was to show. To simplify a complicated tale, Macdonald became a full-time politician dedicated to the building of a transcontinental Dominion not because he was chosen by destiny but because he over-invested in property at a time when the market peaked, had milked his law firm for money and so became dependent upon a bank which crashed.^[10]

In some instances, then, Creighton decided to tell less of a story than the archival record might have supported. But he also expanded the documentary record with imaginative touches of his own. Contemporary accounts report that Macdonald fell seriously ill in 1870 and collapsed in his office. Creighton provided dramatic elaboration. "He clutched the table, swayed, tried to recover his balance, and fell blindly across the carpet."^[11] Perhaps it happened like that, but there is no endnote reference to support the interpretation. The literary executors who godfathered the rival biographical project hoped that "so far as possible Mr. Mackenzie King might be allowed to tell his own story."^[12] Creighton did indeed take his own proofs off to the Public Archives to check the accuracy of his quotations but  in the words of Peter Waite – he was "a sorcerer … telling the story of a great adventure".^[13] We may endorse Creighton's allusions to the "richness" and "authority" of the Macdonald Papers, but accuracy of transcription does not equate with neutrality of interpretation. The complexity of Creighton's approach to sources is a reminder that, even when confronted with the most succulent and comprehensive archive, biographers should interrogate both the nature of the material and their own exploitation of it.

The John A. Macdonald papers constitute one of the largest holdings in Library and Archives Canada.^[14] The collection owes its present organisation to Pope who, in the words of his son, devoted his retirement to "the meticulous classification of this appalling mass of correspondence".^[15] Every collection of private papers reflects both the personality of the compiler and the values of the executors who filtered the transmission of the documents to posterity. There are two notable features about the Macdonald Papers, one positive and the other negative.

Unusually, the collection includes 32 volumes of letter books, containing copies of outgoing correspondence. The letter books make the Macdonald papers an unusual private archive: most collections are dominated by letters received, and consequently tell more about the opinions of others than of the individual who preserved them. The sequence begins early in 1856, when Macdonald acquired for the first time an official private secretary. The letter books do not provide a comprehensive record of his outgoing letters, as the independently available correspondence with contemporaries such as J.R. Gowan demonstrates. Nor was coverage not continuous until his death in 1891: the letter books stop abruptly when he left office in 1862 and again in 1873, and in neither of his two periods in opposition did he seem concerned to keep copies of outgoing letters. However, this does not mean that their contents relate only to public business. They contain copies of correspondence relating to constituency business, and even some letters about Macdonald's private finances and the affairs of the Trust and Loan Company, the farm mortgage business in which he had a major interest.^[16] The fact that the letter books remained in his possession confirms that he simply made use of secretarial support to keep a record of correspondence that he regarded as personal. 

The negative aspect of the Macdonald Papers is the near-total absence of correspondence that throws light on his personal life. Macdonald was a married man for half his 76-year lifespan. Politics frequently took him away from home, but not a single letter survives between husband and wife from either of his marriages. Some correspondence preserved by family members later found its way into the main collection although the more celebrated their most prominent relative became, the less time he had for epistolatory self-revelation.^[17] The Macdonald Papers, then, were either not designed or not permitted to illuminate his private world. How comprehensive a source do they prove to be for his public life? In 1920, Pope insisted that there was "very little in anything Sir John Macdonald left behind him which might not eventually be proclaimed from the housetops", but that irreducible minimum had troubled him. Three years earlier, after handing over the bulk of Macdonald's papers to the Public Archives, Pope burned what was left. He consoled himself with the thought that it was "surprising that such an enormous collection … should contain so little that could not stand the light of day." Most of the documents were destroyed "not because their publication would do Sir John's memory any harm, but solely out of consideration for other people."^[18]

Near the end of his life, Macdonald advised an associate: "never write a letter if you can help it, and never destroy one". But his sometimes garrulous and indiscreet correspondence demonstrates that Macdonald did not always observe the first principle. Once, probably in the 1870s, walking with Macdonald on a Toronto street, the journalist T.C. Patteson suddenly remembered with some alarm that he had forgotten to write an important letter. His companion told him not to worry: "I don't remember a case of continuing to regret the not-writing a letter but I know hundreds of cases where I have wished I had not written one."^[19] Nor had Macdonald always retained letters. "I hope you burn my letters," he wrote to Brown Chamberlin of the Montreal Gazette in 1856. "I do yours." Thirty years later, George Stephen evidently assumed that Macdonald still put incoming mail into the fire. "I have not kept a copy of a single letter", he wrote in 1885 of four years of intense exchanges, "and when you have destroyed my letters no one but ourselves can ever know" the inner history of the Pacific railway.^[20]

Why did he retain to his letters in later years? Richard Cartwright hinted that Macdonald operated a system of dirt files. "He had an immense correspondence, which he preserved with jealous care, and could generally lay his hand on any document he wanted, even after a long lapse of years." The implication was that Macdonald maintained a network of supporters throughout Ontario "of whom he knew something they would not care to have made public." For a biographer, there is a chicken-and-egg problem about Cartwright's views on Macdonald, of whom he was a venomous critic. Was the intensity of Cartwright's dislike the product of inside knowledge of his one-time leader's unsavoury methods, or was his hatred so intense that he believed that only through coercion would Conservative activists rally to the support of so wicked a leader?^[21] Slight though it is, the evidence does not bear out Cartwright's suspicions. If so shrewd a personality as George Stephen did not suspect that his letters were being filed away, it is unlikely that ordinary party workers guessed that they were opening themselves to possible blackmail. In 1890, Macdonald wished to refer to a letter he had written back in 1868 to the then-Ontario premier Sandfield Macdonald about the prerogative of mercy. His normally uncomplaining secretary Joseph Pope grudgingly undertook to search for the document if really necessary, but made clear that it would be a massive and unwelcome task. Sandfield's provincial ministry had been defeated in 1871, and he had died the following year. It would seem that filing was two decades in arrears, even in relation to a major political figure and the country's largest province.^[22] Pope's subsequent huge task in organising the "appalling mass" of documents does not suggest a readily accessible personal archive.

Nor is it proved that Macdonald would have made unscrupulous use of someone else's indiscretion. In 1879, a newspaper editor, J.E. Collins, blatantly appealed for government patronage, threatening that "if the Government cast us adrift, we shall have to cling elsewhere." Macdonald's comment on the letter was: "If published, it would kill Mr Collins." As it happens, four years later Collins produced a muddled but hagiographical biography of the prime minister, having it seems being neither killed nor suborned. The implication is that Macdonald was not in the business of dishing dirt.^[23]

It may be that Macdonald's retention of letters in later years was a compulsive reaction to a moment of public embarrassment when he gave evidence in 1873 to the Royal Commission on the Pacific Scandal. "I got a letter from Sir Hugh Allan stating that he would contribute $25,000 to help the friends of the Administration in their elections," he explained as he described the 1872 election campaign. "Have you got that letter?", he was asked. "No; I destroyed it." If so, it was a delayed-action lesson, since Macdonald's period in opposition from 1873 to 1878 is exceptionally thinly documented.^[24]

Thus, however mouth-watering the Macdonald Papers may appear, it is still necessary to bear in mind the element of accident – not merely the chance of survival but the accident that a letter should have been written at all. To the great benefit of historians, Brown Chamberlin kept Macdonald's revealing correspondence on political matters. He was an educated man, a graduate of McGill University, and a lawyer – lawyers were people who kept papers. More prosaically, as the proprietor of a newspaper, he probably wished to protect his own back, to be able to demonstrate why the Gazette had espoused a particular line. Yet if the survival of the letters was accidental, so too was the fact that they were written in the first place. As proprietor of one of the city's daily newspapers, Brown Chamberlin was anchored to Montreal, in the years when the seat of government was successively located at Toronto, Quebec and Ottawa. "I wish you were here for a short time, so that we might talk matters over", Macdonald wrote to him from Toronto in 1856, "but as that I suppose, cannot be, why we must do it in black & white."^[25]

Occasionally, the accident of both of the creation and survival of a document will intersect with the context of its creation at multiple levels. One such example is a gossipy letter from Macdonald to a Toronto Tory, James McGill Strachan – usually called Captain Strachan – in February 1854. Written shortly before the 1854 general election, a phase when little evidence survives for Macdonald's motives, it is biographical manna from heaven: Pope reproduced it in full while Creighton made use of key passages.  It is certainly a quotable source, containing a number of eye-catching elements. Fortuitously, it seems to be the sole instance on which Macdonald used a political label which, half a century after his death, would be adopted as the formal title of his party, declaring that he aimed "to embrace every person desirous of being counted as a 'progressive Conservative'". Even more delicious were the frank personalia about prominent allies, most notably Macdonald's rival from the traditional Tory wing of the party, John Hillyard Cameron.

Strachan was organising to draft the Toronto lawyer, P.M.S. Vankoughnet, as the party's candidate for the city. Hillyard Cameron was also seeking to the nomination, to resume the political career which he had suspended three years earlier. Macdonald credited Cameron with "a good memory & a vicious fluency of speech", but added that "he lacks general intelligence, … is altogether devoid of political reading" and had proved "altogether a failure as a statesman" when he had held office in 1846-48. It was "selfish" of Cameron to run in "so powerful a constituency as Toronto", but "he could be kept in his place" if he scraped in for some obscure country riding.^[26]

"Put this in the fire after you have read it," Macdonald urged, explaining that he might have to work with some of the men he had so roundly criticised. However, the letter was found among Captain Strachan's possessions after his death in 1870, and his executors decided to return it to its author, "to show him how time sometimes changed opinions". Perhaps they were scoring a point, embarrassing the man who was now Sir John and prime minister of the Dominion with a reminder of his scurrilous past. The executors echoed Macdonald's original request that the letter be burned, but again without success. Why did Macdonald retain a letter which showed him in such poor light? Hillyard Cameron's political career had been severely damaged by his near-bankruptcy in 1857, and after a final challenge to Macdonald's caucus leadership in 1862, he had subsided into morose loyalty. In 1867, he failed even to secure the honorific post of Speaker of the House of Commons and retreated to running a cross-party dining club of disaffected politicians who gathered in the Rideau Club until his death in 1876. By 1870, there was no reason to preserve a document which demonstrated only that Macdonald himself had once undermined a party colleague who was now no threat to him. When Pope had the "questionable taste" to publish the letter eighteen years later, Cameron's friends were "outraged", and there were demands that it be deleted from any subsequent edition.^[27]

"I have written with perfect candour," Macdonald assured Strachan. Pope interpreted this as the "impress of perfect sincerity" which proved that Macdonald "was evidently expressing his inmost sentiments". Creighton's quotations made no mention of context. But should a biographer so readily assume such neutrality of interpretation? Surely it was odd that Macdonald should have prophetically coined the future name of his party in a letter to the son of the Anglican bishop of Toronto, for the adjective "progressive" did not readily spring to mind in relation to the surname Strachan. To interpret Macdonald's letter, it is necessary to place it in two contexts. One was the impact of the clergy reserves issue upon contemporary politics, the other the personal relations between Captain Strachan and Hillyard Cameron.

By the beginning of 1854, it was obvious that, across Upper Canada, the upcoming general election would be largely fought around the future of the clergy reserves, public land allocated originally for the support of the Anglican Church, but reallocated among several Protestant groups in an attempted compromise of 1840. Now, Upper Canada radicals were demanding the secularisation of the reserves or, in plain English, their confiscation. French-Canadian politicians, however, were displaying a devout Catholic concern for the sanctity of Protestant endowments, fearing that the attack would shift to the wealth of their own Church. It was thus highly likely that the election would destroy the broad-based Reform alliance created by Baldwin and LaFontaine that had held office since 1848.

On the face of it, Captain Strachan was a minor figure. He had sat very briefly in the Assembly, and served ten years as a city alderman in Toronto. However, in 1850, the bishop's son had suggested that the reserves be divided among the Protestant Churches according to population. During the winter of 1853-54, there was considerable press interest in this compromise proposal, and Strachan suddenly found himself a person of some consequence. Even the celebrated John A. Macdonald wrote to him on insider terms  and it was probably to recall his moment of celebrity that Strachan kept the letter.

Strachan probably had reasons of his own to dislike Hillyard Cameron. He had left the army in 1836 to study law and, soon after, had entered into partnership with Cameron – a partnership that had been dissolved in 1847, when Hillyard Cameron's career was soaring and Strachan was in financial difficulties. The Captain, it seems, had been dumped, and Macdonald's comments on Hillyard Cameron should be read through the filter of Strachan's presumed resentment. Cameron was prepared to die in the last ditch for Anglican privilege. Macdonald's letter was designed to stiffen Strachan's opposition to Hillyard Cameron's candidature, but his denigration of the "presumptuous young gentleman" was also intended to signal that Cameron was simply not important enough to worry about. In coining the phrase "progressive Conservative", Macdonald was not looking prophetically ahead to the Diefenbaker era. Rather he was offering a formula that would enable Strachan to swallow his personal antipathy and remain aboard for the forthcoming election campaign, even if his former partner became a party standard-bearer.^[28]

An exchange with another Cameron, in December 1864, illustrates the value of the Macdonald letter books in tracing both sides of a correspondence, but it also raises major questions of biographical selection and interpretation. Seven years younger than Macdonald, and an adherent of the Tory wing of the Conservative party, Matthew Crooks Cameron served for two years in the Assembly in 1861, losing his seat at the 1863 general election to the Reformer, William McDougall. The following summer, McDougall joined the Great Coalition and, according to the constitutional convention of the time, was obliged to fight a by-election. Claiming that McDougall was personally objectionable (a widespread opinion), Cameron launched a successful counter-attack and regained his seat. Although a setback to the new ministry, the by-election had the ironic effect of successfully testing the internal cohesion of an unlikely collection of political opponents. Even George Brown acknowledged that his enemy Macdonald had worked hard in support of their embattled colleague, while Cameron criticised him for opposing a fellow Conservative.^[29] However, behind the personality clashes of the by-election campaign, it was clear that a section of Macdonald's own party was agnostic towards the proposed union of the provinces, and waiting for the detailed scheme that emerged later in the year from the Quebec conference. 

Thus when Cameron wrote to Macdonald on 3 December 1864 about Confederation, his letter represented something more than political chit-chat. Furthermore, its conciliatory, even puzzled, tone indicated a bridge-building attempt at consensus.  "In the present position of our public affairs I scarcely know where I am or what I am," he wrote. Cameron was sympathetic to the idea of uniting the provinces, but "the scheme itself based on the federal principle does not inspire me with a feeling of confidence, that it will succeed in making us live more in harmony … or work with an eye solely to the common good."  He was unimpressed with the politicians from the Maritimes, and unconvinced by arguments that Confederation would create "a more powerful combination to resist invasion". Nor was he attracted by the prospect of local autonomy for Upper Canada: "all we gain is the power of legislating in local matters without the interference of Lower Canada - an interference that seldom took place to our prejudice". His basic concern was the apparent lack of clarity in the division of responsibility between centre and periphery. "The giving of legislative power to the local and general legislatures over the same subjects but subordinating the local to the general law may prove a source of much future disquietude," he wrote prophetically. However, despite his doubts, Cameron was open to persuasion: "I shall most heartily cooperate with you in advancing the scheme if satisfied it will not prove harmful".^[30]

Macdonald did not get around to responding for over two weeks, and even then he evidently regarded written communication as second-best: "I must contrive to discuss the Federative scheme with you." In reply to Cameron's main concern, he pleaded "that we have hit upon the only practicable plan - I do not say the best plan - but the only practicable plan for carrying out the Confederation." The delegates had "avoided the weak points of the United States Constitution", combining a scheme that would conciliate local interests while ensuring "a strong General Government".^[31] He accepted there was a conundrum at the heart of any federal system: "when there are local Governments and a General Government, or local Parliaments and a General Parliament … in time either the General Government absorbs the local ones, or the General body from weakness loses all its power". The American Civil War, he argued, proved that the United States had fallen into the second category, and the Civil War had come about because the United States government had been "losing its authority". In fact, since 1846, sectional conflict had increasingly pivoted upon the control of Washington. Macdonald, it seems, was constructing an artificial antithesis, so that he could argue that under the Quebec scheme, "the opposite must take place". This led him to a remarkable prophecy:

If the Confederation goes on, you, if spared the ordinary age of man, will see both Local Parliaments & Governments absorbed in the General power. This is as plain to me as if I saw it accomplished but of course it does not do to adopt that point of view in discussing the subject in Lower Canada.^[32]

This startling sentiment has an equally remarkable, indeed predominantly negative, publication history. It first appeared in print in Peter Waite's study of Confederation as late as 1963. Neither Pope in 1894 nor Creighton in 1952 had quoted the prediction. Each had a second bite at their subject: Pope still omitted the letter in his extensive edition of Macdonald's correspondence in 1921, but Creighton mentioned it in his 1964 Road to Confederation – of course, after Waite had released the tiger from its bag. Why did Macdonald's two most authoritative biographers pass over this item? It seems unlikely that they had missed it. Pope's knowledge of the archive was exhaustive, while Waite had come across the exchange while working for his doctorate, which he completed in 1953, under Creighton's supervision.^[33] Macdonald's letter is in fact a copy, entered in his letter books, an obvious core source within the collection for the expression of his opinions. The craft of biography involves as much the omission as the inclusion of material, especially where – as in this case – there is no shortage of evidence. It is possible that both biographers conscientiously concluded that the letter to Cameron represented a blind alley, a speculation irrelevant to the main Macdonald story – although Creighton in 1964 believed he had been "certain" of the eventual outcome. Pope was publishing first time around in the midst of the Manitoba Schools controversy and secondly in the aftermath of the 1917 conscription crisis. These may not have seemed conducive times to reveal from the housetops that Sir John A. Macdonald had apparently believed that Canada's provinces would quickly wither into nothing. Similarly, in 1952 the anglophone Conservative party which Creighton supported was unable to gain the co-operation of the Union Nationale, whose leader, Maurice Duplessis, had recently demonstrated a long and suspicious collective memory by adopting "Je me souviens" as the Quebec provincial motto. By 1964, not only was the letter was in the scholarly domain, but the Diefenbaker Tories had repented of their fling with Quebec, and a century-old archival scrap could hardly make Macdonald's party any more unpopular in French Canada.

At first sight, there is much to be said for Creighton's belated conclusion that the prediction to Cameron did indeed represent Macdonald's private view of the evolution of Canada's emerging quasi-federal scheme of government. "I have never hesitated to state my own opinions," he told the Assembly two months later. I have again and again stated … that, if practicable, I thought a Legislative Union would be preferable."^[34] It remains a persistent, if implausible, element in Quebec demonology that Macdonald attempted to trick Cartier into accepting a legislative union in London as part of the drafting of the British North America Act in the winter of 1866-67.^[35] During the early years of the Dominion, he sought to operate a centralised, "Macdonaldian" constitution.^[36] The letter to Cameron apparently takes this line of thought one step further, extending Macdonald's thinking to an expectation that the provinces would disappear altogether.

However, it is possible to view Macdonald's letter in another light, not so much as a revelation of opinion as an example of "manipulative inclusivity", an attempt to win Cameron's support by treating him as a political insider and trusting him with a confidence. This is not to argue that Macdonald was intentionally misleading about his own interpretation of the future, if only because outright mendacity would have been counter-productive: people cannot be expected to feel flattered by a lie. Rather, a belief in the eventual absorption of the provinces probably represented one end of a spectrum of expectations about the evolution of British North America. Alexander Galt wrote in 1867 that Macdonald was the only Father of Confederation who took a long view, but that even he was concentrating on the immediate aim of uniting the provinces, "leaving the rest to be solved by time".^[37] For Cameron's benefit, time was speeded up. He was 42 at the time, while Macdonald was just short of his fiftieth birthday. In an era when life expectancy, "the ordinary age of man", rarely extended beyond the Biblical span of three-score-years-and-ten, Macdonald was hinting that centralisation would happen within a quarter of a century.

However, few weeks earlier, behind closed doors at the Quebec Conference, Macdonald had emphatically rejected a step in that direction, by blocking a proposal to use the constitution of New Zealand as a blueprint. Macdonald objected that the New Zealand model swung the balance of authority too far towards the centre. "That is just what we do not want."^[38] The British parliament had in fact amended the New Zealand constitution in 1862 to increase central control over the country's provinces. Early in 1868, the General Assembly's powers were further extended, opening the way for the outright abolition of the provinces, which came about in 1876.^[39] Perhaps Macdonald's sharp rejection of the New Zealand constitution at the Quebec conference simply reflects his realisation that he would not get away with an overt centralising strategy. None the less, it remains the case that he failed to endorse a model that would have helped translate his prediction into reality. Thus it is superficial and potentially misleading to regard Macdonald's letter to Cameron merely as the occasion on which he happened to reveal his innermost thoughts. The recipient, as well as the writer, must be taken into consideration: Macdonald's prediction was intended purely to persuade Cameron to drop his opposition to the federal aspects of the project. (Judge Gowan expressed similar reservations in his letters to Macdonald at this time, but received no such assurance: Gowan was a minor player and he was already on board.)^[40]

Viewed from the era of modern investigative journalism, Macdonald might appear reckless in committing such a controversial opinion to paper. He was often forthright both in correspondence and conversation. "Sir John had a trick of 'running down' in private nearly every colleague he ever had."^[41] In his powerful later years, he may well have intended that such criticisms would be repeated to the victims: it was a way of keeping his subordinates on their toes. However, with M.C. Cameron in 1864, he was on safer ground. He was writing to a fellow lawyer, a member of a profession that respected confidences. Moreover, Cameron was that rare (and disappearing) commodity in Canadian politics, an old-fashioned gentleman. Cameron himself spoke of a "kind of friendly feeling" between them even as he assailed Confederation in the Assembly.^[42] It was the Pacific scandal of 1873 that made private correspondence fair game for political warfare, as the Tories showed when they retaliated by publishing George Brown's innocuous "Big Push" letter soon afterwards.^[43]

Macdonald failed to capture the prey. Cameron reiterated his criticisms during the marathon Assembly debate of February-March 1865, arguing that only a fully integrated legislative union would answer for British North America.  Macdonald had used the prediction of unification in an attempt to detach Cameron from an emerging coalition against Confederation. In the Assembly debate, Cameron seems to have hinted at the issue in the hope of driving a wedge between Macdonald and his ministerial colleagues. In a highly oblique allusion to the letter, he denied that the provinces were "building up the frame-work of a Constitution that is to stand for ever". Rather, they were being asked to create "something that we will have to tinker up from time to time, till we at length succeed either in destroying it altogether or making it a passably fair erection". Throwing out a challenge that Macdonald was quick to accept, Cameron insisted that a better alternative could be achieved, and that "honorable gentlemen on the Treasury benches would have better shown their patriotism by waiting a little longer to accomplish it". "Accomplish what?", Macdonald interjected. "A legislative union of all the provinces," Cameron replied. Macdonald's demolition was devastating:

I thought my hon. friend knew that every man in Lower Canada was against it, every man in New Brunswick, every man in Nova Scotia, every man in Newfoundland, and every man in Prince Edward Island. How, then, is it to be accomplished?^[44]

Cameron was too much of a gentleman to flourish Macdonald's letter and retort that the Attorney-General West expected just such an eventuality to come about within a couple of decades. The only prominent Upper Canadian Conservative to oppose Confederation to the end, Cameron increasingly found himself lined up alongside intransigent francophones obsessed with fears of cultural assimilation, but he did not reveal Macdonald's private opinion to those uncomfortable allies. Rather he concluded that it was his duty to support the new system and, in 1867, he agreed to join Sandfield Macdonald in the first Ontario cabinet. From 1872 until 1878, he led the provincial Conservative party in opposition as Oliver Mowat's Reform ministry. By the time Cameron died in 1887, at the age of 64, Mowat had gone far towards establishing Ontario as a sovereign entity in its own right. One wonders if Cameron ever reminded Macdonald of his prediction of 1864. Perhaps it became one of the missives Macdonald had in mind when he told Patteson that he regretted many of the letters he had penned more than those he had left unwritten.

In the half century since Creighton's biography, two substantial collections of personal papers have become available which both supplement our understanding of Macdonald in action and confirm that he conducted correspondence that was not recorded in his letter books. The papers of Alexander Campbell fall beyond the scope of this article. Outside his family and, indeed, exceeding the duration of his marriages, the relationship with Campbell was the longest in Macdonald's life, and one of the most complex.^[45] The other collection, the papers of J.R. Gowan, shows Macdonald in a more straightforward light, at one level a generous friend, at another a supreme manipulator.^[46] Richard Cartwright claimed that Macdonald's network of contacts across Ontario gave him "a pretty good idea of the public situation in any quarter" and also enabled him to "mould public opinion very often as he desired."^[47] His correspondence with Judge Gowan suggests that the latter was more important than the former, with – in some cases – Macdonald resorting to techniques which modern politics would classify as "spin".

James Robert Gowan was born in Ireland in 1815. His family formed part of the exodus of the middling Protestant landed classes that headed for Canada in the early eighteen-thirties.^[48] Young Gowan's politics were originally High Tory, hardly surprising in a cousin of the ferocious Orangeman, Ogle R. Gowan,^[49]  but by 1842 he had switched to support the Reformers. Thanks to the patronage of "my early friend Mr Baldwin",^[50] whose memory he never ceased to cherish, in 1843 Gowan became the youngest judge in the British empire. As Macdonald sought to shrug off the incubus of Family Compact Toryism in the middle of the eighteen-fifties, the Baldwinite Gowan was an obvious target for his wide net. Gowan held on to his judicial appointment until 1883, but Macdonald found him useful as a confidant – or that, at least, was the impression he created. "I think that what first drew me to you so many years ago was you trusted me," Gowan wrote as he saluted Macdonald's last birthday in 1891, "and believed I was one who [was] not given to talk when it was right to forget or be silent."^[51] Macdonald wrote in 1887: "I don't think there has ever been a passing cloud over our friendship of many years".^[52] Macdonald often used Gowan as a source for advice on drafting legislation, at least until Confederation when the establishment of a regular Department of Justice made amateur support less important. "I have still a grateful recollection of the enormous assistance you gave me in days gone by both in Quebec and Toronto", Macdonald wrote in 1887.^[53]

On Gowan's side, it was a relationship of hero-worship bordering on devotion. Through Macdonald, Gowan could experience a vicarious brush with greatness that compensated for his own sense of inferiority: "the measure of my ability never came up to my desire".^[54] An analysis of their correspondence shows once again Macdonald's clever use of inclusivity, giving his admirer a sense of being on the political inside. Writing shortly after the Quebec conference in 1864, for instance, Macdonald grumbled at having to bear the burden of designing the new system of government. "Not one man of the Conference (except Galt on Finance) had the slightest idea of Constitution making. Whatever is good or ill in the Constitution is mine." Almost casually, he commented that he could have benefited from Gowan's help.^[55] The response was awe-struck and star-struck:

It sounds almost like a jest your speaking of me helping you in your work upon our constitution. The very reading your words makes me feel faint. I wish I had the knowledge and ability to aid. … My only merit if it be one is I never lost faith in your star…^[56]

Gowan did not always conduct his hero-worship from afar. "I have a longing feeling to see you again", he wrote early in 1865.^[57] In reply, Macdonald urged him to "take a run down to Quebec. There is a pleasant drive across the ice, and I have a room for you".^[58] For the strategy of inclusivity, it did not matter whether the busy judge actually took up the invitation. What was important was its timing, for Macdonald was writing during the Canadian Assembly's marathon debate on Confederation, and therefore flattering his friend that he was not forgotten even at a crucial moment.^[59] The correspondence certainly should be viewed within the wider context of personal contact. For instance, congratulating Macdonald on the achievement of Confederation in 1867, Gowan recalled "a conversation we had in 1858 or 1859" after Macdonald had visited Britain on railway business, "and the remarks you made as to the future of the Provinces, most of which have been since   been verified".^[60]

 Gowan took great care in drafting his letters to Macdonald, and was anxious to be assured that they were received and read. "I sometimes think you are more likely at once to read my little notes than my long letters."^[61] Above all, he craved a reply. "I had an uncomfortable kind of feeling as if I was gliding out of your mind," he gratefully confessed on hearing from his friend, "while I was always thinking of you".^[62] Macdonald, for his part, dribbled out missives. One letter was penned "in the midst of a hubbub in the House on the Supplies".^[63] On another occasion, a letter from Gowan was accidentally "thrown into a Basket … to be taken up after the Session".^[64] Perversely, the rationing of correspondence was another version of inclusivity, albeit of a leader-and-follower variety: even during the tense negotiations drafting for the British North America Act in London, Macdonald found time to write.^[65]

Inclusivity can be seen in other aspects of the letters. One of the few sentences from the correspondence quoted by Pope was Macdonald's praise for the quality of British public life. "I do not think there is anything in the World equal, in real intellectual pleasure, to meeting the public men of England."^[66] No doubt the sentiment reflected his true opinion, but the context is important. Gowan had taken leave from his judgeship to cross the Atlantic and base himself at "a good health resort" – from which he sent Macdonald letters "which I hope you read".^[67] From there he visited London, met British politicians and eagerly reported on their expressions of admiration for Canada's prime minister.^[68] Macdonald's response to Gowan was an exercise in flattery: you and I move easily in exalted circles. The same you and I message could be extended to imply that they were, both of them, men capable of rising above the temporary irritations of public life. Historians will probably most likely to quarry Macdonald's four-page letter of 13 January 1870 for the three pages in which the prime minister assessed the Red River "affair". From the point of view of evaluating the correspondence, the other twenty-five percent is equally important. In a sudden change of direction, Macdonald asked Gowan if he had ever read Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur. "That medieval romance is the basis of all Tennyson's poetry on the subject." The busy prime minister advised his friend that Malory was "well worth reading, and on the whole gives one, I think, a finer and more practical conception of the blameless king & his surroundings than even the Poet Laureate".^[69] In other words, Gowan and Macdonald, from their daily lives on the shores of Lake Simcoe and in the sub-arctic lumber village of Ottawa, were nonetheless men of discernment, who could turn their minds from the mundane politics of the red River to finer things, and pass artistic judgement even upon the writings of Alfred Tennyson, the greatest poet of the age.

But inclusivity operated on Macdonald's terms. In 1883 Gowan planned another visit to Britain, and requested a letter of introduction to the Colonial Secretary, the Earl of Derby who, as Lord Stanley, had been Foreign Secretary at the time of Confederation in 1867.^[70] Gowan was indeed a friend, but his request for a letter of introduction was gently snubbed. "Now I don't [sic] think I can take that liberty with him," Macdonald wrote to his longtime admirer. "I have never been on such terms with any cabinet Minister in England, as to warrant me in giving letters, & I think it would not be well taken if I did so."^[71] But, to soften the blow, Macdonald wrote to Sir Charles Tupper, the Dominion's representative in London, alerting him to Gowan's arrival and reminding him "that he is an old and valued friend of mine" – and Gowan was supplied with a copy.^[72]

Contrary to Cartwright's view that Macdonald used his extensive correspondence to keep his finger on the pulse of local opinion across Ontario, its real function was probably the reverse. His letters to Gowan were written to enlist his friend's active support for Macdonald's own political aims, and to disseminate his own "spin" on political events. By treating Gowan as a trusted friend, Macdonald was able to manipulate him as a trusting friend.

Of course, the scope for enrolling Gowan in the ranks of John A.'s political spear-carriers was greatly reduced by the fact that, as a judge, he was required to be politically neutral. In July 1864, feeling himself in gave need of both additional legal expertise and a "fidus Achates", Macdonald urged Gowan to step down from the bench and enter politics. (However, when Oliver Mowat did just that eight years later, Macdonald rebuked him for sullying his calling.^[73]) Presuming on the closeness of their friendship, Macdonald assured Gowan that he was "just the man who could devote himself to the duties of a legislator". Not only had he only a small family to support, but he was independently wealthy so that his judicial salary was "of little moment to you". If he tired of politics, the experience would quality him "at once for a seat on the Superior bench". Even the forthcoming change in the seat of government was thrown into the incentives. "You will find it an agreeable change to run down for three months in the winter to Ottawa - good for the body and good for the mind." Above all, the offer was intended to flatter: "no one knows as well as myself your aptness for the consideration of all questions affecting the implementation & development of our legal system and I am more than anxious to get your able assistance".^[74] A more cynical view might be that a month earlier, Macdonald had entered a coalition dominated by a Brown-Cartier axis in which he had very few close allies and personal supporters.

Gowan excused himself as "too much of a coward … to peril my peace or to encounter sharp shooters in the political field".^[75] None the less, Macdonald called upon him for other tasks, for instance persuading him to take part in the arbitration of the disputed contract for the new Parliament Buildings,^[76] and (as noted above) successfully recruited him as a safe pair of hands on the Royal Commission investigating the Pacific Scandal.^[77] Finally, in 1885, two years after Gowan's retirement from the bench, Macdonald brought him to Ottawa. "At last the opportunity has arrived for which I have wanted," he wrote, "of being able to offer you a Senatorship." The compliment was accompanied by flattery. "That august body is generally in want of legal ability, and Campbell [the government leader in the Senate] knows from me of what value you were to me in years gone by."^[78]

Predictably, Gowan called his accession to the Senate "indeed a surprise", adding "I do not at all events go there as one freshly dyed in the political cauldron".^[79] That, of course, was precisely the point: in the absence of any independent power base, he was going to Ottawa as Macdonald's man. Three years later, Gowan offered to resign his seat if it would help Macdonald to reconstruct his government. ("You have a lot to do in the way of getting your political house in order", he wrote, perhaps the closest he ever came to criticising his patron.^[80]) The offer was declined, but the fact of its being made illustrated the client-patron relationship.

Even if it proved hard to draw Gowan into the ranks of his active followers, the judge could still be the recipient of the interpretation of political events that Macdonald himself wished to put into circulation. (Although Gowan prided himself on his discretion, it would defy belief to assume that so devoted an admirer always resisted the temptation to let slip that he was John A.'s confidant.) A striking example came immediately after the defeat of the Cartier-Macdonald on the Militia Bill in 1862. By most objective standards, this was a serious setback to Macdonald's political career. Not only had he been deprived of office, but he behaved like a man who had lost his grip, reportedly drinking heavily and arguably committing a tactical error in taking the crucial vote without adequate preparation. This was not how the episode was presented to Gowan. Defeat, Macdonald assured him, was "most grateful tonic". Indeed, it seemed almost a matter for congratulation, something that he had succeeded in bringing about as a political master-stroke. "I think you will agree that I chose a soft bed to fall upon." Macdonald attributed his setback entirely to discontents among Cartier's French-Canadian supporters. "My U[pper] C[anada] friends stood to me as one man and I fell in a blaze of Loyalty."  In reality, the Tory wing of his party had been openly restive, and an attempt had been made to depose him in favour of Hillyard Cameron at a caucus meeting less than a week before his letter to Gowan. Under the guise of giving his friend an insider account of the recent political crisis, Macdonald was in fact projecting his own message about the weakness of his supplanters. "We are now in a position to put the present people out whenever we like - but I am opposed to our taking that course just now, but our impatient spirits may force a vote on."^[81]

Talking up his own position, both in political strength and moral loftiness, was a consistent device of Macdonald's correspondence. "The Government are in a great mess & cannot possibly go on," he wrote in March 1863, "- but I am doing what I can to keep them up. They will fall from their own weakness and not from the attacks of the opposition."^[82] This was a startling sentiment from an opposition leader who managed shortly afterwards to force his namesake, Sandfield Macdonald, to the polls through a closely contested no-confidence motion. He condemned the recently installed Liberal government of Ontario in 1872 as "a shuffling lot…. We must get rid of them at all hazards."^[83] In 1888, he was equally dismissive of the apparent strength of the Mercier government in Quebec. "Mercier is the beggar on horseback," he assured Gowan, "& is riding fast to where the proverb says he must go. No fear there."^[84] Mercier did crash in a corruption scandal three years later, but it is unlikely that this was foreseen by Macdonald (who had his own party problems over political ethics around that time). Rather, he was whistling in the wind to keep up his supporters' morale.

What light does Macdonald's correspondence with Gowan throw upon the twin themes of centralised government and francophone autonomy which formed the basis of the exchange with Matthew Crooks Cameron? At the time of the Quebec conference, Gowan shared many of Cameron's views. (Distrust of American-style federation was a common theme among Tories.) "The prospects for a Legislative Union I am afraid are not very bright and yet unless such a one be brought about the bond between the Provinces will not in my opinion be of long duration", he wrote in October 1864. On the other hand, "with a legislative union and the several provinces receiving Municipal powers (coin a grander term if you wish) from the General Legislature there would be a great future for British America".^[85] Matthew Cameron was assured that the provinces would not survive. No such hope was held out to Gowan, although Macdonald promised to send him a copy of the Quebec resolutions. "You will at once see that there was much compromise in the affair - but I think we avoided the [illegible] rocks pretty well."^[86] Evidently, it is dangerous to take expressions of Macdonald's opinion at face value simply because we have tracked them down in the pristine form of archival evidence.

Twenty years later, the two men were probably in closer accord as they discussed the fate of Louis Riel and the light that it threw upon the French fact in Canadian politics. At the end of May 1885, Gowan was confident that the government would "carry out the law in the trial of Riel and his punishment if convicted", although he was puzzled to report "a very general feeling that a latent desire exists in certain quarters to allow him to escape."^[87] Those "certain quarters" did not include Sir John A. Macdonald:

If Riel is convicted he will certainly be executed but in the present natural excitement people grumble at his not being hanged off hand.

Abruptly, his letter switched to the prospects of passing legislation to regulate the pawnbroking trade.^[88] The prime minister's mind, it seems, was made up before the jury returned their verdict on Louis Riel. Macdonald was seconded in his determination by his old friend. "You know I am a man of moderate views not troubled with strong prejudices of any kind and not given to a hasty conclusion," Gowan wrote as if excusing the harshness of his opinions. In an oddly inappropriate choice of words, he gave his view that "it will be a fatal blunder to interfere with the due course of law in his case".^[89] The law did indeed take its course. The day after the hanging, Gowan reported from Barrie in a letter to his chief, who was visiting England. "Nothing is talked here but Riel - Riel! I never knew public opinion so set and determined." Gowan had "never doubted that justice would be done in his case".^[90] From London, Macdonald was reassuring. "The Riel fever will I think die out. If not it will be the worse for those who keep the fever alive."^[91] Gowan remained in no doubt that the right course had been followed:

it would have been an act of political insanity to yield, simply because the man was of French blood. In the Dominion generally as well as in England it would have been a painful confession that French influence and French threats turned a Gov[ernme]nt aside.

Thus far, Gowan's sentiments were entirely predictable, and almost certainly in line with Macdonald's own views. When he turned from the fate of Riel to the future of French Canada, he offered the larger and more speculative opinion that the Quebec Act of 1774 was "a tremendous mistake", an obstacle which ensured that "the Lower Canadians" (Gowan still employed the phrase of two decades earlier) would ever assimilate. "They are more French & more consolidated as French than they were 30 years ago."^[92] Soon after his return from London, where he had watching the unfolding drama of the Irish Home Rule crisis at close quarters, Macdonald soothingly replied that there was "much in what you say about Quebec matters". However, he continued in a different and intriguing vein:

Looking at them [Quebec matters] from a patriotic rather than from a party point of view, it is not to be regretted that the French should be more equally divided between the two existing parties. At present or rather before the Riel affair, they went nearly all one way and altho[ugh] it was my way - it was not particularly wholesome. Like the Parnellites, their unanimity had to be paid for. I have no doubt of retaining a French majority during the present Parliament. After that deponent sayeth not.^[93]

In 1864, he had invoked the vision of a centralised Canadian future in the hope of winning over Matthew Cameron. Now, in 1886, he attempted to persuade Gowan to concentrate on the medium-term to head him off from an inconvenient lack of sympathy towards French Canada. The closing flourish of a legal phrase - ironically enough, it had been a steady refrain in the evidence to the Royal Commission on the Pacific Scandal - hinted at the element of inclusivity that still joined the two men.

"When the passions of the hour have passed and the historian comes to deal with the history of the country," Gowan wrote to his hero in 1887, "justice will be done to you by all", and Macdonald's "noble aspirations will be recognized". Gowan's admiration provides a worthwhile counterpoise to the more robust analysis proposed here. There remains much to be said for Gowan's basic argument that historians "will have only to point to the Provinces as they were and Canada as you will leave it to say this is the work of a great and sagacious statesman who loved his country and made the most of his opportunities and the material at hand".^[94] To interpret Macdonald's use of private correspondence through the ostensibly cynical prism of inclusivity does not necessarily conflict with Gowan's assessment of his achievement. Rather, in penning his letters, Macdonald sought to make "the most of his opportunities and the material at hand", by attempting to include potentially useful people within his political coalition. The Macdonald-Gowan correspondence represents a potentially rich seam of archival evidence for the politics of nineteenth-century Canada. The wealth of comment, especially from Macdonald himself, is seductively attractive – maybe too tempting to biographers who must cope with those long desert stretches from which few private insights survive. As with any historical episode, archival sources cannot be simply transcribed as if they offered value-free evidence. John A. Macdonald was an impressive political manipulator. Whenever we encounter apparent insights into his thinking, we need to determine whether he was truly revealing confidences or using a more basic device of inclusivity for his own ends.

2024 Note: In the years immediately following the publication of "Archival Evidence and John A. Macdonald Biography", I explored some of the aspects of the subject touched upon in the article. His alcohol problem was reviewed in "John A. Macdonald and the Bottle", Journal of Canadian Studies, xl (2006), pp. 162-185, and subsequently updated as "John A. Macdonald, Alcohol and Gallstones":
https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/310-john-a-macdonald-alcohol-and-gallstones.

Relations with his home city and original riding were explored in Favourite Son?: John A. Macdonald and t he Voters of Kingston 1841-1891
(Kingston, Ont., Kingston Historical Society, 2010; xviii + 196 pp.): https://www.gedmartin.net/published-work-mainmenu-11/264-favourite-son-john-a-macdonald-and-the-voters-of-kingston-1841-1891.  An overview biography, John A. Macdonald: Canada's First Prime Minister (Toronto, Dundurn, Quest Biography; 215 pp.) appeared in 2012. An exploration of the papers of Macdonald's first law partner and longtime (if sometimes dissident) political associate yielded a revealing study: "Alexander Campbell (1822-1892): The Travails of a Father of Confederation", Ontario History, cv (2013), 1-18:
https://www.gedmartin.net/published-work-mainmenu-11/249-alexander-campbell-1822-1892-the-travails-of-a-father-of-confederation". Rather remarkably, no historian seemed to have noticed that Campbell suffered from epilepsy and that he became estranged from his wife who was confined in mental hospitals. Students of Canadian history are fortunate in being able to draw upon a rich and broad range of political biographies. But this does not mean that we know everything about the personalities whom those books describe.  For a full list of Canadian Studies material on this website, see "Canadian history on www.gedmartin.net":
https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/319-canadian-history-on-www-gedmartin-net

ENDNOTES  

 * John A. Macdonald (1815-91) was a leading figure in the Conservative politics of Upper Canada (later Ontario) from 1854. His skills as a lawyer and consensus-builder gave him a key role in bringing about the union of the provinces (Confederation) from 1864, and in 1867 he became the first prime minister of the Dominion of Canada. He lost office in 1873 thanks to a scandal linking party funding to the granting of the contract for a railway to the Pacific, but returned to office in 1878 to oversee completion of the project. He is variously remembered by Canadians as the founding statesman of their nation, and as an amoral and hard-drinking rogue. Both traditions are valid, and a central task for biographers is to reconcile the two.

[1] I acknowledge with appreciation a Government of Canada Research Award in 2000-1 as the starting point for this research, and the generous guidance of Dr Peter B. Waite in relation Macdonald source materials, especially the Macdonald Papers held in Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa [cited as LAC Macdonald]. Donald Creighton's mighty biography remains the essential starting point. The two volumes, John A. Macdonald: The Young Politician (Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, 1952) and John A. Macdonald: The Old Chieftain (Toronto, The Macmillan Company of Canada,1955), are cited as YP and OC. Creighton's interpretation should be supplemented by the essay on Macdonald by J.K. Johnson and P.B. Waite in Dictionary of Canadian Biography [cited as DCB], xii, pp. 591-612. The earlier work was Joseph Pope, Memoirs of The Right Honourable Sir John A. Macdonald G.C.B., First Prime Minister of the Dominion of Canada (2 vols, Ottawa: J. Durie & Son, 1894). The subject is further discussed in Ged Martin, “Macdonald and His Biographers”, British Journal of Canadian Studies, xiv (1999), pp. 300-19. For quotations, YP, p. vii.

^[2] The King biography was originally planned to comprise two volumes. (Ultimately, it ran to three and even then was incomplete.) In an allusion to his own work, Creighton suggested that the two volumes should be called King: The Young Son-of-a-Bitch and King: The Old Son-of-a-Bitch. J. McLeod, ed., The Oxford Book of Canadian Political Anecdotes (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 123.

^[3] Johnson and Waite in DCB, xii, p. 612.

^[4] Peter Waite contributed a rounded and sympathetic portrait in his introduction to a single volume reissue of the biography by the University of Toronto Press in 1998, “Donald Creighton and his Macdonald”, pp. vii-xxvi. In addition to many reminiscences of his former students, I have benefited greatly from discussions with Dr Donald Wright of the University of New Brunswick, who is engaged in an intellectual biography, Donald Creighton: A Life in History [published to great acclaim by the University of Toronto Press in 2015]. 

^[5] Ged Martin, “Macdonald and His Biographers”, pp. 304-5.

^[6] Barbara Roberts, “'They Drove Him to Drink': Donald Creighton's Macdonald and his Wives”, Canada: An Historical Magazine, 3, 1975, 51-64. Macdonald's sudden courtship during the pressured London Conference of 1866 is examined in Ged Martin, Canadian History: A Play in Two Acts? (Edinburgh: Centre of Canadian Studies, 1999), pp. 11-12. Cf. YP, p. 455: “and now he was about to marry again.”

^[7] Ged Martin, “Macdonald and the Bottle”, Journal of Canadian Studies, forthcoming in vol. 40 (2006).

^[8] Donald Creighton, Towards the Discovery of Canada: Selected Essays (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1972), p. 160; Carl Berger, The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing Since 1900 (2^nd ed., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), pp. 218-25.

^[9] OC, p. 242. I draw here upon a forthcoming study, Favourite Son: John A. Macdonald and the Voters of Kingston 1841-1891.  

^[10] J.K. Johnson, 'John A. Macdonald: the Young Non-Politician', Canadian Historical Association Annual Papers (1971), pp. 138-53.

^[11] OC, p. 69.

^[12] R. MacGregor Dawson, William Lyon Mackenzie King: A Political Biography, i: 1874-1923 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), p. vii.

^[13] Waite, “Donald Creighton and his Macdonald”, p. viii.

^[14] The Macdonald Papers are arranged in 538 “volumes”. These range from relatively slim folders to the solid ledgers of letter books. Access to the Papers is now through microfilm. Just as urns containing the ashes of Gandhi are distributed through the Government Houses of every State in India, so each Provincial Archives holds a microfilm set of Macdonald Papers. Unfortunately the microfilming was undertaken in 1950, and the quality of much of the reproduction is poor.

^[15] Maurice Pope, ed., Public Servant: The Memoirs of Sir Joseph Pope (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 263. Pope was not a trained archivist. He organised some of the papers by issue, others by correspondent. Thus letters from George Stephen might be filed as personal correspondence in volumes 267-71, or under the heading “Railways”, volumes 127-30. Library and Archives Canada provides a computerised finding aid, which is exceptionally irritating.

^[16] e.g. LAC Macdonald, vol. 516, to William Shannon, private, 1 December 1869 (Kingston patronage), to Hugh Allan, private, 29 September 1869 (his debts), and to William Chapman, confidential, 21 October 1869 and private, 7 January 1870, vol. 518, private and confidential, 20 January 1871 (Trust and Loan Company); to Patton, private, 28 January 1871 (accounts of his law firm).

^[17] J.K. Johnson, ed., Affectionately Yours: The Letters of Sir John A. Macdonald and His Family (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1969). Marital correspondence was probably destroyed at the behest of Macdonald's formidable second wife, Agnes. Almost forty years after the death of his first son, at the age of thirteen months in 1848, Macdonald still retained the child's toys. Pope, Memoirs, i, p. 62n.

^[18] J. Pope, ed., Correspondence of Sir John Macdonald (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1921), p. xxiv; Pope, ed., Public Servant, p. 265. A possible clue to the destroyed material may lie in Agnes Macdonald's comment, when Pope was writing his biography in 1892, that the political methods of Galt and Tupper were “frequently peculiar”, and “Lord Dufferin's reign” would cause him “difficulties”. Louise Reynolds, Agnes: The Biography of Lady Macdonald (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1990), p. 149.

^[19] Pope, ed., Correspondence, p. xxiii; Ontario Archives, T.C. Patteson Papers, MS 49, Reminiscences.

^[20] Macdonald to Brown Chamberlin, confidential, 27 November 1856, in J.K. Johnson, The Letters of Sir John A. Macdonald: i, 1836-1857 (Ottawa: Public Archives of Canada, 1968), p. 399.LAC Macdonald, vol. 130, Stephen to Macdonald, private and confidential, 23 January 1885. See also LAC Macdonald, vol. 267, Stephen to Macdonald, private and confidential, 30 December 1881; vol. 269, Stephen to Macdonald, 19 August 1884 and 14 January 1885.

^[21] Richard J. Cartwright, Reminiscences (Toronto: William Briggs, 1912), p. 48. Any implied threat to expose the dubious activities of local supporters would of course be counter-productive, since Macdonald himself would be identified as the source of corruption.

^[22] LAC Macdonald, vol. 530A, note by Pope on draft letter to R. Sedgewick, 26 May 1890.

^[23] LAC Macdonald, vol. 276, Collins to Macdonald, 21 October 1879, and note. J.E. Collins, Life and Times of the Right Honourable Sir John A. Macdonald … Premier of the Dominion of Canada (Toronto: Rose Publishing Company, 1883) ,was dedicated to Goldwin Smith, by then a disgusted opponent. When Macdonald died in 1891, Collins was incapable of responding to the publishers' desire to cash in with a quick revised edition because he was drinking himself to death in New York (DCB, xii, pp. 204-5). G. Mercer Adam converted the work into Canada's Patriot Statesman: The Life and Career of the Right Honourable Sir John A. Macdonald (Toronto: Rose Publishing Company, 1891). Adam dryly observed that he could not “rise to the pitch of enthusiasm” displayed by Collins (p. v). Adam dumped an eccentric chapter (Life and Times, pp. 435-98) on the growth of Canadian literature. In fact, when Archibald Lampman asked the government to provide funding for Susanna Moodie, Macdonald indicated that the application was both unprecedented and undesirable. LAC Macdonald, vol. 516, Macdonald to Lampman, 28 January 1870.

^[24] British Parliamentary Papers, 1874, xlv, Correspondence Relative to the Canadian Pacific Railway, p. 178. Macdonald's later aside (“it might have been stolen”, p. 187) was probably a sarcastic allusion to the burglarious tactics of the opposition. The Pacific Scandal aroused much disapproving interest in Britain, and extensive documentation was presented to the Westminster parliament, even on the essentially internal issue of the Pacific Railway contract. Anthony Trollope's cynical novel of 1874, The Way We Live Now, featured a fraudulent North American railway project. For several years after his fall in 1873, Macdonald was generally regarded as a spent force, and perhaps recipients did not think it worth saving letters from him. However, even a cursory study of the built environment of any central Canadian city demonstrates that, by the 1870s, the professional classes were living in larger houses, and thus had more space to store documents.

^[25] Macdonald to Brown Chamberlin, confidential, 27 November 1856, in Johnson, ed., Letters of Macdonald, i, p. 399, with minor correction of scribal error. “I would gratify your wishes in writing you a long letter on our policy if I did not wish to have the pleasure of talking these things over with yourself,” he wrote to Henry Smith in 1857. Johnson, ed., Letters of Macdonald, i, p. 415.

^[26] Macdonald to J.M. Strachan, private, 9 February 1854 in Johnson, ed., Letters of Macdonald, i, pp. 200-3. The letter is given apparently in full by Pope, Memoirs, i, pp. 102-4, but with minor amendments. Macdonald was hoping that Alexander Campbell would run for the Assembly, adding that he had “plenty of money & wont [sic] spare it in the contest”. Campbell had been lieutenant-governor of Ontario when died in 1892, and Pope presumably decided to omit a sentence implying that he would have connived at electoral corruption.  He did not indicate any deletion. Creighton quoted individual sentences, thereby divorcing the sentiments entirely from the context, in YP, pp. 199, 212. For an example of the retrospective symbolic importance of the phrase “progressive Conservative”, Heath Macquarrie, The Conservative Party (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965), pp. 6, 122.

^[27] W.F. Maclean, “The Canadian Themistocles”, Canadian Magazine, iv (1894), pp. 253-60, esp. p. 257. For Cameron, DCB, x, pp. 118-24; OC, pp. 327-28; Cartwright, Reminiscences, pp. 30-1. No second edition of Pope's Memoirs appeared until 1930 (Toronto: Musson Book Company), four years after Pope's death. The Strachan letter was retained (pp. 107-10), not least because its omission would have left a large hole in contemporary evidence for Macdonald's opinions. In 1847, the Toronto Globe had mocked Hillyard Cameron's “demnition-foin” speech and his “dancing-master” manners. In 1862, the Montreal gazette described him as “immeasurably inferior” to Macdonald as a parliamentarian. YP, p. 212; Montreal Gazette, 30 May 1862, Quebec correspondent, 29 May.

^[28] For Strachan, see DCB, ix, p. 751; John S. Moir, Church and State in Canada West: Three Studies in the Relation of Denominationalism and Nationalism, 1841-1867 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1959), pp. 59, 73 and Pope, Memoirs, i, p. 102.

^[29] DCB, xi, pp. 143-6 (M.C. Cameron); J.M.S. Careless, Brown of the Globe: ii, The Statesman of Confederation, 1860-1880 (Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited, 1963), p. 148.

^[30] LAC Macdonald, vol. 337, M.C. Cameron to Macdonald, 3 December 1864.

^[31] P.B. Waite, The Life and Times of Confederation 1864-1867:Politics, Newspapers, and the Union of British North America (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), p. 122 reads “Federation Scheme” and “Central Government”. The letter books are a welcome source but they are not always easy to decipher.

^[32] LAC Macdonald, vol. 510 (Letter Book), Macdonald to Cameron [copy], 19 December 1864, pp. 64-67.

^[33] Macdonald's exchange with M.C. Cameron is quoted in Waite, Life and Times of Confederation 1864-1867, p. 122 and by Creighton in his later work, The Road to Confederation: The Emergence of Canada 1863-1867 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1964), p. 165. 

^[34] Confederation Debates in the Province of Canada (Quebec: Hunter, Rose & Co., 1865), p. 29.

^[35] Lionel Groulx, La Confédération Canadienne: Ses Origines (Montreal: Le Devoir, 1918), pp. 249-53. In advancing a different form of conspiracy theory, J.T. Saywell has reviewed the Quebec evidence in “Backstage at London 1864-1867: Constitutionalizing the Distinct Society”, National History, i (2000), pp. 331-46. For a recent example of unquestioning acceptance of the demonology, Stéphane Kelly, La Petite Loterie: Comment la Couronne a obtenu la collaboration du Canada francais après 1837 (Quebec: Les Editions du Boréal, 1997), p. 215.

^[36] The phrase was coined by W.L. Morton in Journal of Canadian Studies, i (1966), pp. 11-24.

^[37] O.D. Skelton, Life and Times of Alexander Tilloch Galt (ed. G. Maclean, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1966), p. 192, and cf. Ged Martin, Past Futures: The Impossible Necessity of History (Toronto; University of Toronto Press, 2004), p. 130.

^[38] G.P. Browne, ed., Documents on the Confederation of British North America (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1969), p. 124. Although Garth Stevenson is correct to state that New Zealand was an “influence on Macdonald's thinking”, he may be on less secure ground in basing his statement on the presence of a copy of the New Zealand constitution in the Macdonald Papers. The Law of Good Intentions may apply: some of us preserve documents because we intend to read them some day. G. Stevenson, Ex Uno Plura: Federal-Provincial Relations in Canada, 1867-1896 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), p. 15.

^[39] W.P. Morrell, The Provincial System in New Zealand (2^nd ed., Christchurch: Whitcomb and Tombs Limited, 1964), pp. 197, 254. The two largest provinces by population, Auckland and Otago, each counted just over 60,000 people in 1871, fewer than Prince Edward Island and less than one-quarter of the population of the smallest of the four founding provinces of the Dominion, New Brunswick. The New Zealand provinces were also mired in recklessly acquired debt.

^[40] NAC Macdonald Vol. 221, Gowan to Macdonald, 8 October 1864. The exchange is further discussed below. 

^[41] Maclean, “The Canadian Themistocles”, p. 257. Take, for example, Macdonald's letter  during the Nova Scotian repeal campaign of 1868 to A.G. Archibald, commenting that Tupper's energetic  anti-secessionist tactics displayed “zeal without discretion.” A cynical commentator might suspect that the mere fact that Macdonald conveyed his opinion “entre nous” confirms that he both expected and intended that Archibald would convey his warning shot to Tupper. OC, p. 17. “Entre nous” [“between ourselves”] was one of a small number of French phrases which Macdonald used in his correspondence. It can be traced back to 1849, and may be a by-product of attendance at parliamentary sessions in Montreal. Johnson, ed., Letters of Macdonald, i, p. 153, and cf. p. 351 for an example from 1856, in a letter to the Anglo-Montrealer, Brown Chamberlin.

^[42] Creighton, Road to Confederation, p. 165; DCB, xi, pp. 143-46; Confederation Debates in the Province of Canada, p. 717. Cameron was an early product of Upper Canada College.

^[43] Careless, Brown of the Globe, ii, pp. 340-42.

^[44] Confederation Debates in the Province of Canada, pp. 983-84.

^[45] The Alexander Campbell Fonds are held by the Ontario Archives (F 23). An extensive calendar is available on-line via www.archives.gov.on.ca.

^[46] The Gowan Papers are in LAC, MG27, I E17 [cited as LAC Gowan]. When the collection became available in the 1960s, historians discovered for the first time that Macdonald had marched up Yonge Street with the militia force that confronted Mackenzie's rebels in December 1837. Even more intriguing, after almost forty years of confidential friendship, Gowan (another veteran of the clash at Montgomery's Tavern) had not known of his participation either. J.K. Johnson, “Sir James Gowan, Sir John A. Macdonald, and the Rebellion of 1837”, Ontario History, lx (1968), pp. 61-64.

^[47] Cartwright, Reminiscences, p. 48.

^[48] DCB, xiii, pp. 392-95. The author of his official biography,  H.A. Ardagh, was aware of Gowan's correspondence with Macdonald but made little use of it. H.A. Ardagh, Life of Hon. Sir James Gowan (Toronto: private, 1911), e.g. pp. 61, 77.

^[49] In his lively biography of Ogle R. Gowan, Donald H. Akenson concludes on the basis of some coquettish letters that young James Gowan had a brief affair with his cousin's wife, Frances. He overcomes the difficulty that her mother lived in the house by stating that the lovers “had the sense not to knock the plaster from the wall in their dalliance”, although part of his case is that Frances was “very sexually responsive”. There may be a case for a little archival agnosticism here: if the couple were indeed lovers, it is likely that incriminating letters would have been destroyed. Their tone does suggest a louche element in J.R. Gowan's character, which would have chimed with Macdonald's man-of-the-world attitudes. D.H. Akenson, The Orangeman: The Life and Times of Ogle R. Gowan (Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 1986), pp. 175-78.

^[50] LAC Macdonald, vol. 221, Gowan to Macdonald, private, 17 September 1883.

^[51] LAC Gowan Papers, MG27, I E17 [cited as LAC Gowan], Gowan to Macdonald, draft [January 1891].

^[52] LAC Gowan, Macdonald to Gowan, 30 May 1888. But Macdonald's references to his friendships were sometimes generous rather than wholly accurate. His claim in 1872 that he had “never had a serious difference” with the dying Cartier, although accepted at face value by Creighton, as clearly at odds with their often strained relations since 1867. Pope, Memoirs, ii, p. 156; OC, p. 142. Desmond H. Brown suggests that Gowan almost fell out with Macdonald over judicial workloads in the late 1860s. DCB, xiii, p. 393.

^[53] LAC Gowan, Macdonald to Gowan, 21 September 1887. For examples of Gowan's pre-Confederation legal work, Johnson, ed., Lettersof Macdonald, i, p. 421; J.K. Johnson and C.B. Stelmack, eds, The Letters of Sir John A. Macdonald: ii, 1858-1861 (Ottawa: Public Archives of Canada, 1969), pp. 71, 93, 324, 399, 465, and cf. J. Swainger, The Canadian Department of Justice and the Completion of Confederation, 1867-78 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000).

^[54] LAC Gowan, Gowan to Macdonald, draft, 2 June 1888.

^[55] LAC Gowan, Macdonald to Gowan, private, 15 November 1864.

^[56] LAC Gowan, Gowan to Macdonald, draft, 12 December 1864. Gowan's best-known public role was as one of the three Royal Commissioners appointed to investigate the Pacific Scandal in 1873. It is no wonder that contemporary critics denounced the exercise as a whitewash.

^[57] LAC Macdonald vol. 221, Gowan to Macdonald, 12 January 1864 [recte 1865]

^[58] LAC Gowan, Macdonald to Gowan, private, 13 February 1865. It seems that Gowan did visit Macdonald at the seat of government from time to time. Thus their letters form only part of their communication. Johnson, ed., Letters of Macdonald, i, p. 407; Johnson and Stelmack, eds, Letters of Macdonald, ii, p. 312.

^[59] Macdonald seems to have been adept at flattering political associates by sending them brief notes at busy times. Excusing himself for silence, he remarked to Henry Smith in 1857 that “when our hands are full we are apt to postpone our friends to the last”. Johnson, ed., Letters of Macdonald, i, p. 457. Thus he placated the bombastic but insecure John Prince by writing in August 1864, at a time when the recently formed Great Coalition was busy hammering out its policies in detail. “Your note of the 8^th was very welcome, because you have not forgotten that there is such a person above ground,” Prince replied. “…You are not only one or two letters in my debt, but one or, perhaps, two dozen…. I think well of the Coalition and wish it [e]very success”. ” Prince to Macdonald, 20 August 1864, in R.A. Douglas, ed., John Prince: A Collection of Documents (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1980), pp. 188-89.

^[60] LAC Macdonald vol. 221, Gowan to Macdonald, 8 July 1867. Until 1864, Macdonald appeared “cool” (DCB, xii, p. 596) towards a federal union of the provinces, and even his public endorsements of legislative union had something of a pro forma air. Gowan's letter provides the sole evidence that he argued for union in private. Macdonald had visited Britain on “railway business” in the summer of 1857.

^[61] LAC Macdonald vol. 221, Gowan to Macdonald, 17 March 1860.

^[62] LAC Macdonald vol. 221, Gowan to Macdonald, 15 March 1861.

^[63] LAC Gowan, Macdonald to Gowan, private, 3 June 1862.

^[64] LAC Gowan, Macdonald to Gowan, 28 March 1865.

^[65] LAC Gowan, Macdonald to Gowan, 13 February 1867. This letter combined a knowing assessment of the British political crisis over parliamentary reform with the news that Macdonald was to marry Agnes Bernard, “your old friend”. The Bernard family had lived for some years close to Gowan's home town of Barrie. Macdonald also penned Gowan lengthy private letters at the height of the Red River crisis and during the negotiations for the Treaty of Washington. (LAC Gowan, 13 January 1870; 5 April 1871). Macdonald's comments on British politics reflected the opinions of C.B. Adderley, a junior minister in Lord Derby's government. Pope, ed., Correspondence, p. 41.

^[66] LAC Gowan, Macdonald to Gowan, private, 27 June 1871, and cf. Pope, Memoirs, ii, p. 203.

^[67] NAC Gowan, Gowan to Macdonald, draft, 27 February 1871. The health resort was Bournemouth.

^[68] LAC Macdonald vol. 221, Gowan to Macdonald, 15 May 1871.

^[69] NAC Gowan, Macdonald to Gowan, private, 13 January 1870. Tennyson had succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate (official poet to the sovereign) in 1850.

^[70] Macdonald had a low opinion of his decision to block the proposal to style Canada a “kingdom” for fear of antagonising the United States. He relished Disraeli's later put-down that Derby lived “in the region of perpetual funk”. Pope, ed., Correspondence, p. 451.

^[71] LAC Gowan, Macdonald to Gowan, private, 6 November 1883.

^[72] LAC Gowan, Macdonald to Tupper, copy, 6 November 1883.

^[73] Macdonald to Mowat, private, 25 October 1872, Pope, ed., Correspondence, pp. 186-87. “Fidus Achates” was a classical allusion to a loyal supporter who was also a close friend.

^[74] LAC Gowan, Macdonald to Gowan, confidential, 11 July 1864. Macdonald's upbeat view of Ottawa was not widely shared. S. Gwyn, The Private Capital: Ambition and Love in the Age of Macdonald and Laurier (Toronto: Harper Collins, 1989 ed.), esp. pp. 35-58.

^[75] LAC Macdonald vol. 221, Gowan to Macdonald, 24 December 1864.

^[76] LAC Gowan, Macdonald to Gowan, 17 December 1864. For the maladministration of the construction of the Ottawa parliament buildings, J.E. Hodgetts, Pioneer Public Service: An Administrative History of the United Canadas, 1841-1867 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1955), pp. 198-204.

^[77] Gowan's suitability to investigate the Pacific Scandal may be measured by his unpunctuated letter to Macdonald of 5 May 1873: “The poniard or the pistol  would have disposed of you in other days or in other Countries here evil speaking slandering vile plotting are the well used weapons against you. … there can be no one capable of taking your place.” LAC Macdonald vol. 221, Gowan to Macdonald, 5 May 1873.

^[78] LAC Gowan, Macdonald to Gowan, private, 24 January 1885. Agnes Macdonald quickly arranged lodgings for him at a boarding house on Metcalfe Street. LAC Gowan, Lady Macdonald to Gowan, 28 January 1885.

^[79] LAC Gowan, Gowan to Macdonald, draft, private, 26 January 1885. 21^st century Canadians will be impressed by the speed with which letters were delivered across Ontario in the Macdonald era. 

^[80] LAC Gowan, Gowan to Macdonald, draft, 9 June 1888.

^[81] LAC Gowan, Macdonald to Gowan, private, 3 June 1862. Macdonald sent a similar account to another supporter, Samuel Amsden, YP, p. 335. Tory unrest had been faced down in April 1863, Pope, Memoirs, i, pp. 234-35. For the caucus move against Macdonald on 28 May, Montreal Gazette, 30 May 1862 (Quebec correspondent, 29 May).

^[82] LAC Gowan, Macdonald to Gowan, 18 March 1863.

^[83] LAC Gowan, Macdonald to Gowan, 7 October 1872.

^[84] LAC Gowan, Macdonald to Gowan, private, 21 September 1888. Macdonald was appealing to a proverb whose force has not survived the automobile and the welfare state. In various forms, it predicted that the beggar, who had no experience of managing a horse, would ride the animal to death. In a variant form, the beggar would ride “to the Devil”  a version used by the radical journalist William Cobbett in an 1809 issue of his widely read Political Register – perhaps the indirect source of Macdonald's usage. The proverb thus became a variant on the theme “pride comes before a fall”.

^[85] NAC Macdonald vol. 221, Gowan to Macdonald, 8 October 1864.

^[86] NAC Gowan, Macdonald to Gowan, private, 15 November 1864.

^[87] NAC Macdonald 221, Gowan to Macdonald, private, 30 May 1885.

^[88] NAC Gowan, Macdonald to Gowan, 4 June 1885.

^[89] NAC Macdonald vol. 221, Gowan to Macdonald, 9 September 1885.

^[90] NAC Macdonald vol. 221, Gowan to Macdonald, 10 November 1885.

^[91] NAC Gowan, Macdonald to Gowan, private, 12 December 1885.

^[92] NAC Macdonald vol. 221, Gowan to Macdonald, 14 November 1885.

^[93] NAC Gowan, Macdonald to Gowan, 20 January 1886.

^[94] NAC Macdonald vol. 221, Gowan to Macdonal, private, 31 March 1887.