Michael S. Cross - A Biography of Robert Baldwin: The Morning Star of Memory

Michael S. Cross

A Biography of Robert Baldwin: The Morning Star of Memory

Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 2012

Pp. xii + 430. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-19-544954-9

Lampooning Grit dominance of Canadian historiography in 1947, Donald Creighton claimed there were no biographies of Robert Baldwin, only studies of Robert Responsible-Government. In 1985, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography essay, of which Michael S. Cross was co-author, provided a startling new identifier. Baldwin's wife, Eliza, had died in 1836, having failed to recover from giving birth by primitive Caesarean section. Mired in grief (and, perhaps, guilt), Baldwin left instructions that an identical incision should be made in his corpse. By inserting zigzag flashbacks within his chronological narrative, Cross dramatises three overlapping elements in the Baldwin story: the grisly posthumous ceremony, his humiliating confrontation with Lord Sydenham in 1841 and the consistent thread of bereavement. Each chapter begins with a motto, crafted by the author, such as "Eliza was always there, at the dinner table, in his study in the evening .... She had been dead for five years and eight months. It was September 1841." (88) Readers will judge for themselves whether this device works. Equally noteworthy was the fact that Eliza was Baldwin's cousin: marriage within his close-knit extended family deprived him of one potential escape route from the dominance of William Warren Baldwin, the original theorist of responsible government. The manipulative, confident father was the antithesis of the tormented, self-doubting son. Cross argues persuasively that Robert Baldwin was driven by a parentally inculcated sense of duty. Yet this alone cannot explain the contrast between their vision, of Canada running its local affairs through a cabinet answerable to the Assembly, and Robert Baldwin's decisions in 1836 and 1841 to join Executive Councils dominated by opponents. Even the apparent party triumph of 1842 involved coalition with holdovers and officials. The explanation may lie in the family's late eighteenth-century Irish background, which merits further exploration. Although Grattan's parliament achieved autonomy after 1782, it did not evolve a local executive: government was driven by viceroys named from London. Robert Baldwin was talking Westminster but acting College Green. Parliamentary majorities depended upon party discipline, which was best enforced by control of patronage. Yet Baldwin could not dispense jobs until he obtained office and -- as Governor Metcalfe proved -- not always then. Responsible government also required cabinet solidarity, a principle that Baldwin himself sometimes ignored even during the climacteric years of the "Great Ministry". Indeed, the Reform Party's sense of shared purpose was short-lived. The LaFontaine-Baldwin team spent 1848 settling in, unleashed blizzards of legislation in 1849 and 1850, but in 1851 the socially conservative Baldwin was driven into retirement by the radical agenda of the emerging Clear Grits. Like the Whigs in Britain after 1832, he gave the people constitutional reform without realising that there would be demands to use the new structure to achieve fundamental change. Baldwin could be ruthless, once ousting a candidate by circulating a private letter of thanks for his wise withdrawal, but he recognised the limitations of party government. His 1854 endorsement of the alliance between Hincksite Reformers and MacNab's Tories was not a private expression of opinion but an important public statement, indeed the classic defence of coalition government.
As a long-time authority on social violence in nineteenth-century in Victorian Canada, Cross deftly handles such crises as Upper Canada's 1837 uprisings, and the threat to civil society in Montreal in 1849. Cross demonstrates Baldwin's belief in the British connection as Canada's safeguard, although he passes over his well-documented protest, voiced to Elgin, against the admission by British prime minister Russell that the link might one day be broken. However, Cross gives us a remarkable statement from 1849, Baldwin's proclamation: "I have lived and -- I hope to God would die a British subject" (285, 314) -- foreshadowing and perhaps inspiring Macdonald's celebrated slogan in the 1891 election. In fact, this quotation is one of five that are repeated without apparent explanation. One of them -- a statement by Francis Hincks on class conflict -- appears three times, with minor differences in transcription. Firmer editing might also have tackled the use of the term "Québécois" twice in three pages, once anachronistically describing French-Canadian identity, the other correctly describing residents of Quebec City. By contrast, metrification has been imposed with piously inappropriate precision: indicative estimates such a mile and 150 yards become 1.6 kilometres and 137 metres. Cross rightly stresses the role of religion in Baldwin's life, but the characterisation of him as "High Church" hardly fits a seculariser who overthrew Anglican dominance of the University of Toronto. Biographers must take strategic decisions about how to refer to their subjects. A good rule is to use surnames in the public sphere (Baldwin and LaFontaine) but forenames in private life (Robert and Eliza). There is no consistency here: for instance, in a paragraph on pages 294-5, the usage is RBBBRRBRBBR. Occasionally we have "Robert and LaFontaine", "Robert and Hincks", but a couple of times he is "Mister".
It is important for historians to appreciate that politicians had private lives and inner worlds, but we need to distinguish between people like Louis Riel, whose millenarianism affected his public role, and those like Mackenzie King, whose spiritualism was a personal quirk. Baldwin's grief for Eliza humanises his memory, but did it shape his political trajectory? This biography should be saluted, but Robert Responsible-Government must not become Robert Caesarean-Section.