John A. Macdonald: graveside oration, Kingston 6 June 2009
On 6 June 2009, the anniversary of the death of Canada's first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, I had the honour of delivering the annual graveside oration in his memory at Kingston's Cataraqui Cemetery.
I owed the invitation (and much else) to Dr Brian Osborne of Queen's University, who also gave vital support to my research for Favourite Son: John A. Macdonald and the Voters of Kingston 1841-1891 (Kingston, 2010). Foremost among the notable civic and academic representatives at the ceremony was the Honourable Peter Milliken, who was not only Member of Parliament for Kingston and the Islands, but Speaker of the House of Commons.
Commemorating Macdonald as an outsider, I decided that his memory was best commemorated by confronting two problems: his alcohol problem and his rejection, at the 1878 general election, by the city that he had represented for thirty-three years, that same Kingston which, throughout the twentieth century, claimed him as its most distinguished citizen. Macdonald regained the riding nine years later, but his recovery of the seat led him to complicity in a murky scandal surrounding a pork project of a dry dock that he gifted to the city. (The contract, which entrusted the work to a person called Andrew C. Bancroft, was a blatant fraud. Although he somehow managed to sign the necessary document, Bancroft did not exist.)
In more recent times, Macdonald's memory has become execrated by many of the citizens of the nation that he helped to create. As an external observer, I understand why Canadians censure many aspects of their country's conduct towards its Aboriginal people. There is everything to be said for the updating and revision of our understanding of Canada's history in relation to First Nations. However, nothing is gained by strident denigration, and it is hard to see how the removal (and, in some cases, the destruction) of statues can contribute to the resolution of the challenges of today. Perhaps the advent in 2025 of a President of the United States who is openly contemptuous of the entire Canadian national project will lead to a more rounded view of John A. Macdonald's overall contribution to the country. Patrice Dutil, Sir John A. Macdonald and the Apocalyptic Year 1885 (Toronto, 2025) is a useful starting point for a discussion of the obstacles that he faced.
I list some of my writing about John A. Macdonald and Kingston following the text of the 2009 graveside oration. In 2019-20 I explored some of the charges against Macdonald's handling of the crises that threatened Aboriginal communities in western Canada during the early eighteen-eighties. These are also reviewed in the supplementary Note.
The graveside oration, 6 June 2009
On a summer evening, 118 years ago today, the telegraph flashed around the world the solemn but expected news that Canada's prime minister had lost his battle for life. In Toronto, retired civil servant E.A. Meredith heard the church bells tolling and knew at once that they signalled the death of Sir John A. Macdonald. 'Fortunate, I think, in his ending,' Meredith wrote, 'fortunate in passing away after holding all his faculties mental & physical to the very end.' Macdonald's funeral, here in Kingston six days later, was the largest outpouring of grief that Canada had ever known. And here we are, over a century afterwards, gathered to honour his memory.
I thank you for your very great compliment in inviting me to speak here today. I value the honour all the more since I am not myself a Canadian. As an Englishman, I think of another June 6th anniversary, and recall with honour and gratitude the courage of Canadian forces this day 65 years ago on Juno Beach. I have spent much of my career interpreting Canada. It has never been my job to tell Canadians how to run their own country, but I confess that it can be difficult to discuss the Canadian past without seeming to comment on the present, for Canada faces the same challenges in every generation. If I accidentally cross those boundaries, I hope you will forgive me.
But being an outsider perhaps gives me some advantages. I am under no obligation to venerate your first prime minister. I honour John Alexander Macdonald because he merits my scholarly respect, not because he commands my patriotic duty. And we cannot capture the extent of his remarkable achievement if we portray him in stained-glass platitudes as a saintly superman. There are three major issues which we must confront about Macdonald, if only to demonstrate how a man who was far from perfect, can still deserve our esteem.
The first question goes to the heart of the way that you think about your country. In contrast to your neighbours to the south, Canadians often ─ dare I say, too often? ─ take a perverse delight in talking down their country. It is an inverted form of patriotism, but it is one that prevents proper confrontation with one crucial issue of Macdonald's personal life. Canadians still snigger at John A. Macdonald because (so they often say) he liked a drink.
The second problem concerns this city of Kingston that so proudly identifies with Sir John A. Macdonald, for it was Kingston that launched his political career in 1844. It was here that he collapsed exhausted during that last terrible election campaign of 1891. Many textbooks record the coronation election of 1857 when he triumphed by 1189 votes to 9 in what one historian called 'his faithful constituency'. Yet we should also remember that the city threw him out in 1878 after 34 years of service. He regained the riding two elections later, in 1887, but 2,700 votes were cast and his majority ─ the textbooks don't tell you this ─ was just twelve. Kingston has been embarrassed by this apparent lapse in civic good manners which maybe you would like to forget. What, then, went wrong between this elegant city and its most famous son?
And the third issue that I put before you goes to the heart of the reason why we are gathered here today, for it relates to a curious ambiguity in the legacy of John A. Macdonald to the Canada that he did so much to create. Somewhere in the Macdonald Papers in the Ottawa archives, there is a curious printed leaflet, issued soon after his death. It called for a new political movement, to be called the Macdonald Guard, which would dedicate itself to defending Sir John A's principles and his work. The organisation did not materialise, and here surely there is a paradox. John A. Macdonald was indeed, in Richard Gwyn's affectionately Canadian title, 'the man who made us'. But in practical terms, he seems to have faded rapidly from the national memory. It almost seems that Canada erected its statues (Kingston's dates from 1895) in order to embalm Sir John A. Macdonald in bronze and then forget him.
And so we have three challenges which we must confront if we are to honour a flesh-and-blood human being rather than idolise a myth: the issues of alcohol, of Kingston and of legacy.
But first, a more basic question: what was John A. Macdonald like? He was tall, around five foot eleven inches (180 centimetres), and this in an era when people were generally shorter than today. His great antagonist, the six-footer George Brown, used his height to intimidate, but John A. Macdonald carried himself with a slight stoop that leaned welcomingly forward. One old friend recalled that inclusive posture as he spotted an acquaintance on the downtown sidewalks of Kingston: 'he would duck his head in that peculiar way of his, and come right across the street to shake hands.'
A journalist who observed John A. just before his 53rd birthday described 'a young looking oldish man, dark hair ... a prominent nose, dark eyes, and a pliable and sagacious mouth.' That nose of course was almost a national monument. Macdonald's sister was once congratulated on her resemblance to the great man. She indignantly repudiated the compliment, saying that Macdonald was the ugliest man in Canada. One contemporary commented that photographs of Macdonald were unsatisfactory 'because his expression was never the same twice.' John A. Macdonald's death in 1891 occurred just as the new fast camera film was coming into use, which made it possible to capture character and expression. The old plate method of taking photographs required the victim to sit bolt upright during the slow exposure. It is a little known historical fact that there is no photograph of a prime minister of Canada laughing before 1893, although some would feel that during the frantic first quarter-century of the Dominion, prime ministers of Canada did not have much to laugh about. The result is that we see far too many Victorian Canadians as forever stern-faced and pop-eyed. In fact, John A. Macdonald photographed well, because he had an actor's skill in holding a pose, but even so we do not see him as his contemporaries did.
While we have only the sketchiest notion of his voice, we can be definite on one point. He spoke in Canadian tones, not with the Scots accent that film and television producers like to give him. He had, after all, lived here from the age of five. There is even evidence that he ended his sentences with that famous Canadian interrogative, 'eh?' Quite by accident, Canada's cartoonists have got it right. He really was Sir John Eh? Macdonald.
Paradoxically, he combined an infectious love of fun with a truly awful sense of humour. He relished that most sadistic form of wit, the pun. In the mid-eighteen sixties, Macdonald engaged in an informal double act, with D'Arcy McGee as his straight man. One gag concerned the Minotaur, the people-eating monster of Greek legend. McGee would ask why the Minotaur 'fell into a deep sleep after having devoured his morning meal of a young maiden'. Macdonald would deliver the punchline that the creature was ‘overcome by a great lass he chewed.' (lass-he-chewed, lassitude, get it?) The same brain, at the same time, was designing the foundations of modern Canada. Fortunately the Constitution Act has survived better than the joke.
And yet this warm and companionable man had his dark side, one that sometimes drove him to resort to the bottle. We must confront this flaw, and eventually he did just that himself. For twenty years from 1856 John A. Macdonald had an intermittent alcohol problem. I believe it began when he had to face the truth that his beloved wife was going to die. Isabella Clark Macdonald not only suffered from a hideously painful mystery illness, possibly trigeminal neuralgia, but she had almost certainly contracted tuberculosis, in those days a death sentence. She died in December 1857, right in the middle of a general election campaign. Her funeral, in this cemetery, was the largest Kingston had ever witnessed, the procession of mourners extending two miles back into town.
I am a doctor of History not of Medicine, but I do not think it is useful to call John A. Macdonald an alcoholic. It is a contested term among health-care professionals, and it conveys entirely unhelpful overtones in popular usage. We should remember Meredith's point: Macdonald retained 'his faculties mental & physical to the very end', holding down the most demanding job in Canada even at the age of 76. He did not destroy himself with drink. But there were occasions when the pressures were too much for him and he took refuge in what contemporaries called 'sprees' and we should now call binge-drinking. And there were times when his drinking prevented him from doing his job, most notably during the Fenian Raid of 1866 ─ unfortunate, to say the least, since he was Minister of Militia at the time.
If his first wife's illness triggered his alcohol problem, his second wife, the formidable Agnes Bernard Macdonald, eventually helped him to overcome the challenge. But behind them was a third woman in John A. Macdonald's life, the charming, resourceful but driving figure of his mother, Helen Shaw Macdonald. John A. was the only one of her three boys to survive childhood and she made him the vehicle for her frustrated ambitions. In his Will, Macdonald directed that he was to be buried 'near the grave of my mother' because, he recalled, he had long ago made a promise to lie here beside her. Almost thirty years after Helen's death, that spell could not be broken. I leave you to reflect on the curious fact that two other dominant and intriguing Canadian prime ministers, William Lyon Mackenzie King and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, were also shaped by intense maternal relationships.
Helen Macdonald's death in 1862 cut John A's last major link with Kingston, and this helps explain his declining popularity in the city. The story is complex. In some respects, John A. Macdonald was always an interloper: born in Scotland, he spent much of his boyhood out in Prince Edward County. Although he won the Conservative nomination in 1844, he was never fully accepted by the local elite, and this may explain why some of the rockiest relationships in his political career were with fellow Kingstonians who did hail from the city's golden circle: Oliver Mowat and Richard Cartwright, who became bitter foes, and Alexander Campbell and the Kirkpatricks, father and son, uneasy allies.
When he first entered politics, Kingston was briefly the capital of the united Canadas and still one of its leading urban centres, but the city soon began to fall behind. In the eighteen-fifties, John A. Macdonald delivered the goods to his riding, and big-time: the Custom House, the Post Office and the Frontenac Court House date from that period. When he rose to the highest office and became Premier of Canada in November 1857, one local newspaper eagerly predicted that his 'power to do the city further good is almost illimitable.’ In reality, his growing eminence made it harder for him to channel pork projects towards his own constituents. His great achievement at national level of building cross-regional alliances and bicultural partnership meant that he had to divide the loaves and the fishes among many claimants. Hence, in 1858, not only was he incapable of returning the seat of government, Canada's capital, to his own riding, but he had to preside over the choice of regional rival, Ottawa. Some of you may think that Ottawa was a very Canadian compromise: it offended just about everybody and it cost a great deal of money. But if he was to maintain a broad coalition of support, Premier Macdonald had no choice in the matter. A decade later, one of his first actions, or should I say inactions, as prime minister of the new Dominion was to watch equally helplessly as Kingston's Commercial Bank crashed into bankruptcy, with devastating results for the city.
Today the Orangemen of Kingston honour the memory of the man who entered municipal politics back in 1843 to champion their cause. But John A. Macdonald's partnership with French-speaking Catholics made their forebears uneasy. We think of Kingston as pre-eminently Loyalist and Scots, but demographically it was in fact an Irish town, with Catholics making up thirty percent of its population, twice the Ontario average. As he lost core Protestant support, so John A. reached out to Catholic voters, but it was a difficult balancing act. Worse still, the Kingston economy was in a down-spin. John A. Macdonald quietly moved his own law firm to Toronto and, in 1875, went to live there himself. Three years later, Kingston punished him for desertion. I know of no other Westminster-style parliamentary election anywhere around the Commonwealth in which a politician has led his party to a national landslide victory while losing his own seat.
He came back in 1887, but the price of his narrow victory was high, not just in cash but in political ethics. Macdonald rewarded the city with a dry dock. It was a fine project, and it is still the centrepiece of the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes. But there is a murky sub-plot. The story of the dry-dock contract is wickedly complicated and this is not the occasion to unravel it. Basically, there was a scam to ensure that the work went to political supporters who bank-rolled Sir John A's re-election for the city in 1891. Did Macdonald know what was going on? Well, he was MP for Kingston and head of the government, so he ought to have known. Indeed, I believe that the breaking scandal ─ one of several ─ helped to end his life. The series of strokes that killed him coincide with the rumbling revelations of the dry-dock contract fraud.
That aroma of scandal explains why Sir John A.'s memory faded so fast. 'The evil that men do lives after them,' said Shakespeare. 'The good is oft interred with their bones.' But with John A. Macdonald it was the other way round. There was genuine grief at his passing, and his part in the unfolding corruption scandals was quietly buried with him: there were plenty of living targets to pursue. And yet, in a sense, Macdonald was forgotten because he had given so much to Canada: the Dominion and the man had become synonymous. That, I believe, is what was meant by the unknown admirer who shouted during one of his last election campaigns, 'You'll never die, John A.'
'Why is John A. Macdonald not a Canadian hero in the way that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are American heroes?' demanded the distinguished historian Blair Neatby, speaking at this ceremony in 1995. Dare I suggest that I think that is the wrong question? John A. Macdonald was indeed a remarkable political leader, and the politicians who worked with him to create Confederation formed an impressive team. But if we abandon ourselves to the nostalgic belief that giants walked in the land in those days, that the politicians of yesteryear were knights in shining armour, we risk downgrading the public life of our own times and demeaning by comparison Macdonald's modern-day successors, at a time when our liberal institutions are under particular threat from enemies and doubters. We shall honour John A. Macdonald's achievements most effectively by facing up to his personal flaws and his political shortcomings. And Kingston should be proud not only of having elected him but of having thrown him out too, for if we believe in democracy then no politician is too grand to escape the rejection of the voters. The more realistic our appraisal of the man himself, the more genuine and the more total must be our resultant verdict on his achievement, this country, this Canada. Everyone who shares that view is a member of an enduring movement, the true Macdonald Guard.
In Donald Creighton's mighty biography, there are many layers of meaning, and nowhere more so than in the concluding passage with which he describes Macdonald's funeral in this cemetery. In almost Hollywood fashion, Creighton soars above the graveside, and then pans across the rooftops of Kingston to zoom downriver. The final phrase of his two volumes describes not John A. Macdonald but the St Lawrence on its long journey to the ocean. It is a pagan invocation, with Creighton implicitly consigning the spirit of the man who made Canada back into the great river which is the heartbeat of Canadian history.
And so, on this day of commemoration, our spirits should soar in the company of John A. Macdonald high above this place, to fly downriver towards the Canada that lives through the French language, to range north and westward to the Canada of Aboriginal peoples, to the Canada that has been shaped by newcomers from many cultures, all of them united in sharing the precious civic values of this enduring nation. And in this city of Kingston where John A. Macdonald himself became a Canadian, and where he launched the political career that enlarged both the boundaries and the meaning of Canada, we may join that voice in the crowd and proclaim, 'You'll never die, John A.!'
John A. Macdonald: taking the story further
For an overview of Macdonald's life and career, Ged Martin, John A. Macdonald: Canada's First Prime Minister (Toronto: Dundurn, 2013).
His relationship with Kingston is explored in Favourite Son?: John A. Macdonald and the Voters of Kingston, 1841-1891, published by the Kingston Historical Society in 2010. The chapters are in the Published Work section of www.gedmartin.net.
The Preface and Chapter 1 set John A. Macdonald in the context of his home city.
"Preface: Names and Numbers, Sources, Abbreviations": http://www.gedmartin.net/2016-11-04-15-27-28/252-favourite-son-names-and-numbers-sources-abbreviation
1: 'Macdonald of Kingston': http://www.gedmartin.net/2016-11-04-15-27-28/253-i-macdonald-of-kingston
Chapters 2 to 5 explore the decline and partial revival of Macdonald's hold on the riding.
2: "'My Duty and My Interest', 1841-1857": http://www.gedmartin.net/2016-11-04-15-27-28/254-ii-my-duty-and-my-interest-1841-1857
3: "'Kingston Had Not Been A Sufferer', 1857-1864": http://www.gedmartin.net/2016-11-04-15-27-28/255-iii-kingston-had-not-been-a-sufferer-1857-1864
4: "'Never Among Us', 1867-1874": http://www.gedmartin.net/2016-11-04-15-27-28/256-iv-never-among-us-1867-1874
5: "'A Worn-Out Relic of Decayed Toryism', 1874-1891": http://www.gedmartin.net/2016-11-04-15-27-28/257-v-a-worn-out-relic-of-decayed-toryism-1874-1891
Chapter 6 examines Kingston elections, exploring issues that may have some relevance beyond the city.
6: "Voters and Voter Management": http://www.gedmartin.net/2016-11-04-15-27-28/258-vi-voters-and-voter-management
Chapter 7 reviews the reason why Kingston stagnated in the nineteenth century, and examines Macdonald's sometimes chaotic finances.
7: "The Kingston Economy and the Finances of John A. Macdonald": http://www.gedmartin.net/2016-11-04-15-27-28/259-vii-the-kingston-economy-and-the-finances-of-john-a-macdonald
There is a brief "Conclusion": http://www.gedmartin.net/2016-11-04-15-27-28/260-conclusion
My graveside oration confronted Macdonald's intermittent alcohol problem, drawing an article published in 2006 that examined some of the notorious episodes of inebriation and reviewed how Macdonald overcame the challenge in the late eighteen-seventies. In 2019, I extended the discussion, suggesting that his alcohol problem should be considered in the wider context of his health and drawing attention especially to evidence of bouts of illness apparently caused by gallstones.
"John A. Macdonald, Alcohol and Gallstones": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/310-john-a-macdonald-alcohol-and-gallstones
Before the invention of the phonograph, it is peculiarly difficult to establish how people spoke. My assertion that John A. Macdonald had a Canadian and not a Scots accent is defended in "Sir John Eh? Macdonald": https://www.gedmartin.net/published-work-mainmenu-11/15-sir-john-eh-macdonald
John A. Macdonald and the First Nations
In response to the public campaign of condemnation unleashed against Macdonald in the twenty-first century, I examined some of the allegations made against him. I quickly realised that historians, myself included, had very little understanding of the finances of the Canadian government in the later nineteenth century. In "The Department of Indian Affairs in the Dominion of Canada budget, 1882", I reviewed how Ottawa raised and spent its money. The Dominion government collected its cash mainly from customs duties and from excise, most of the latter imposed upon alcohol. There was no income tax until 1917. As a result, Ottawa operated on a remarkably small budget. In 1882, net expenditure totalled $21.6 million (rounded). That year, the Canadian government spent $1.2 million on the Department of Indian Affairs, of which $1.1 million was spent directly on Indigenous people. On the face of it, devoting 5.5 percent of the total budget to First Nations communities in the grip of a devastating crisis does not seem very generous. However, of that $21.6 million total outlay, $11.8 million was swallowed up by two major items: the first, interest payments on the Dominion's ballooning debt and subsidies to the provinces –the first an unavoidable burden if Canada was to retain its shaky credit-worthiness overseas – and the second a requirement built into the country's constitution, the British North America Act of 1867. Allowing for these basic commitments, Indian Affairs received 12.2 percent of the non-debt and non-subsidy expenditure – in other words, about one-eighth of the available cash. Many other areas of government expenditure, such as civil service, police and justice, lighthouses and immigration control, were also necessary costs: they might be pruned but could hardly be eliminated. Of course we can all wish that Ottawa had provided more support for Canada's Native peoples in 1882 – but Macdonald's critics complained that he did too much. Richard Cartwright, finance spokesman for the opposition Liberals, announced that he was "appalled at the extravagance and mismanagement" which he insisted lay behind for the government's decision to increase expenditure on Indian Affairs, blaming the Prime Minister himself for being "a very indifferent administrator". We may equally conclude that the outlay suggests that Macdonald's government responded as positively as its tight funds allowed: indeed, Cartwright's complaint was that the Conservatives were spending $600,000 more annually than the Liberals had handed out when they were in office during the eighteen-seventies.
"The Department of Indian Affairs in the Dominion of Canada budget, 1882": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/312-indian-affairs-1882-budget
Between 1885 and 1891, a Liberal MP from Ontario, Malcolm Colin Cameron, made accusations against Macdonald in terms that are echoed by critics today. According to Cameron, Native people were neglected, robbed, cheated and swindled by government agents, and that the Prime Minister himself pursued "a policy of reducing the Indians to submission by absolute starvation". Not surprisingly, these charges have been cited as contemporary evidence in the modern-day indictment against Macdonald. The problem is that, when closely examined, Cameron's specific allegations do not always stand up, and some seem to have been motivated by personal hostility to the Prime Minister. I discuss Cameron's campaign against Macdonald in "M.C. Cameron's indictment of Canada's Department of Indian Affairs, 1885-1891: the pitfalls of contemporary evidence": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/315-the-pitfalls-of-contemporary-evidence
Canada's governments and its predominantly European-descended people surely face the much broader indictment that they took control of the prairies, the traditional territory of Indigenous people, without giving anything like adequate recompense in return. In "How much did Canada 'pay' First Nations for the prairies?", I used a simple accounting procedure (all that my basic arithmetical skills could manage) to estimate a notional capital sum from the annual payments that were made to 'Indian' communities, mainly under a series of Treaties concluded between 1871 and 1877. Assuming that the continuing payments represented a four percent return on capital, the Dominion 'paid' Aboriginal people $7.4 million (rounded) – thereby extinguishing any Aboriginal claim to title to what would become three whole provinces. It is only necessary to compare this with the subsidy to the Canadian Pacific Railway planned in 1880 – $25 million plus 25 million acres (10.1 million hectares) of land – to demonstrate that First Nations received a very poor deal. (And the railway to the Pacific would cost taxpayers much more than was promised in 1880.) Most of the Treaties were concluded during the Liberal government of Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie. The entire Canadian political community was complicit in an exercise of massive unfairness. I suspect that my amateur calculations would be subject to considerable revision at the hands of financial experts, but I doubt that a more generous picture would emerge.
"How much did Canada 'pay' First Nations for the prairies?": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/313-how-much-did-canada-pay-first-nations-for-the-prairies
I certainly do not claim that John A. Macdonald was perfect. He delivered a dry dock to Kingston in 1891, the pork project intended to secure his re-election for the riding through a blatant fraud. It is almost impossible to imagine that the member for Kingston himself was not complicit in the scam, with Macdonald's election funds very likely benefiting from untraceable kick-backs. The affair of the Bancroft Contract would have been enough to destroy the reputation of any politician – and it is perhaps a tribute to Macdonald's memory that even his opponents tacitly agreed to bury the scandal. Certainly there were clearly major failures in the treatment of Aboriginal people, both by Macdonald and by his contemporaries, but this does not mean we should uncritically endorse every allegation made against him, then or since. There is surely a case for assessing Canada's first Prime Minister within the constraints of the values of his own time – note the criticisms of his opponent, Cartwright – and for tempering modern-day censure with an awareness of the shortcomings of our own era. Nor, I hope, will Canadians of the twenty-first century forget that their country owes both its independence and its existence on a transcontinental scale very largely to the vision and the tenacity of John A. Macdonald.
For a more detailed 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