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Self-Government and Federal Union: 1841-1867
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• Gaining Responsible Rule
• Social Changes and the Coming of Railways
• Growing Forces for Union, and Disunion
• The Path to Confederation

Gaining Responsible Rule

By 1841, good times had largely returned to the British North American colonies after the harsh depression of the late thirties. St. Lawrence commerce had begun flourishing again in 1840, while British immigration, which had all but stopped during the rebellions and their troubled aftermath, rose in another ascending curve to run on through the forties. And if economic conditions had much improved, so had relations with the United States. Border warfare ended, as American adventurers gave up beating themselves against stubborn Canadians who did not want to be liberated, and as federal authorities in the great republic properly enforced its official neutrality. Moreover, the question of New Brunswick's uncertain inland border with Maine (which had seen both American and British forces move into disputed lumber territories in 1839) was peacefully put to diplomatic settlement. The results came in the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842. This defined New Brunswick's boundary north above the headwaters of the St. Croix River, while disposing of some other outstanding Anglo-American issues. Consequently, even as the decade opened, and the Act of Union took effect in the new Province of Canada, the way was clearing for more colonial growth -- but especially, for the advance of responsible self-government.

To start with, the Act of 1840 that had combined the two Canadas in one province had given it a single government and parliament without much changing the existing constitutional patterns. Under a Governor-General for the Union, there again would be an Executive Council, an appointed Legislative Council and an elected Legislative Assembly; so that, apparently, the old separate Canadas had simply been merged in one. And yet they had not. English-speaking, largely Protestant Upper Canada with its English-based law, and mainly Francophone Lower Canada, French in civil law and strongly Roman Catholic in religion, would remain as notably different halves of a United Province of Canada. And while these two sections henceforth would officially be labelled Canada West and Canada East, even their former names, Upper and Lower Canada, would stay in wide public use. Furthermore, the very Act that set up the new province embedded sectional division right within it, in its structure of parliamentary representation.

At union, much older Lower Canada had a population of some 650,000 to Upper Canada's 450,000. Lord Durham himself, in proposing a union, would have left its representation to a common basis of population, confident that the younger Upper Canadian community would continue its rapid growth through British immigration, and so before long obtain a majority of seats in the intended joint legislature. But the imperial government, seeking both to appease Upper Canada's worries over being swamped in a new union, and to limit French Canadian influence in it from the start, had opted instead for equal representation. Each section, the much more populous Canada East and the far less numerous Canada West, was thus to be allotted forty-two members in the new united Assembly. The result was to divide the Province of Canada politically, as well as culturally and socially, into two equal parliamentary segments. That led on to sectional power-blocks, to sectional parties and policies, and even double-headed ministries. The Union Act of 1840 by no means abolished two distinct Canadas: anything but.

Nevertheless, the Union would do well in forwarding their joint economic development -- and also their march to responsible rule itself. That march really began while Canadian union was still in the planning stage, when some perceptive Reformers saw how it might be used to benefit their cause in both Canadas. Francis Hincks, acute Protestant-Irish editor of the new Toronto Examiner, which championed Robert Baldwin's principle of responsible government, began a close correspondence in 1839 with Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine of Montreal, who was a prominent former supporter of Papineau yet one who had opposed rebellion, and who now was rising to the fore as the most capable figure in French Canadian Liberalism. Hincks pressed the view on LaFontaine that a party alliance of Upper and Lower Canadian Liberals could use the Union to build a solid majority in its joint Assembly: a majority which would stand firm upon responsible government, and could win it constitutionally, in parliament, from British imperial authorities who anxiously wanted peaceful progress, not embarrassing new conflict in the colonies. LaFontaine seized upon the thought that responsible government would amount to Canadian home rule, the best means of defending the Canadiens' own rights. He told voters in his Canada East constituency of Terrebonne County, during the first Union parliamentary elections in the spring of 1841, "I am in favour of the English principle of responsible government." And though he was defeated in Terrebonne (largely by Anglo-Tory mob violence), through Robert Baldwin's willing aid this Canadien leader was elected in Canada West's York County, thus personally confirming the growing Anglo-French Reform alliance.

Nevertheless, in the first Union parliament of 1841, Governor-General Sydenham used his amply persuasive powers to satisfy Assembly members that his coalition government containing both Conservatives and Reformers would rule in "harmony" with the interests of the elected House, if not actually be responsible to it. He also guided through some useful measures on local government, banking, schools, canal loans and more. Yet Baldwin left the ministry, in order to protest Sydenham's refusal to bring it under clear Assembly control And the Governor-General would have faced other signs of mounting opposition, had he not met with a fatal accident while out riding that autumn near Kingston, the Union's first capital. The hard issues thus were left to his successor as Governor-General, Sir Charles Bagot, a distinguished British diplomat more insightful than the overly self-confident Sydenham.

Bagot tried especially to gain better acceptance from the French Canadians, many of whom still wanted to repeal the Union. And he did so through being fully at home in French, and by appointing Francophones to a fairer share of official posts. Yet he could not break down the increasingly powerful opposition alliance of Upper and Lower Canadian Reformers in the Assembly, based on the mutual understanding and trust established between the two leader-partners, Baldwin and LaFontaine. Thus in September, 1842, as Bagot strove to prevent a crucial Reform majority vote in the Assembly against his government, he had to bring both Baldwin and LaFontaine into office; for neither would come without the other. Bagot saved his ministry, but at the price of making it Reform-dominated, a significant step towards responsible party government. Still, Tories found the sky did not fall, while the Governor got on very successfully with his changed ministers; although his own health began rapidly to fail, leading to his death in May of 1843.

The next Governor-General, Sir Charles Metcalfe, a veteran imperial administrator, was able and well-intentioned, yet firmly resolved to yield no further to creeping responsible government. The quarrels that soon rose between him and the Reform ministers he had inherited from Bagot brought their resignations in the fall of 1843. Metcalfe accordingly dissolved the Reform-controlled Assembly, and tried new elections in 1844; acting as a forthright partisan himself in strenuously appealing to public loyalty. In Canada West his "loyal" appeal worked; here Tory Conservatives carried the elections. In Canada East, LaFontaine's French Liberals still kept control. Hence Metcalfe (at damaging cost) achieved just a bare overall majority for his own allies in the Assembly. But thanks to the skills of his chief Conservative minister, William Henry Draper, an urbane Toronto English lawyer known as "Sweet William," the Governor's side kept a narrow hold. Nevertheless, Metcalfe, too, was ill -- now dying of cancer -- and he increasingly relied on Draper: letting that talented advisor become almost a prime minister himself, directing policies and dispensing government patronage to Conservative party interests in order to keep afloat. In fact, Draper was virtually performing as a party premier, even before responsible government had been officially established.

Metcalfe went home to die late in 1845: Canada had been sadly hard on its recent governors. For a year or more, the Canadian union went through an uncertain interim, while the Draper ministry still managed to stay in office. During this same period, however, far more influential developments took place in Britain. There the Conservative regime of Sir Robert Peel, which had sent out both Bagot and Metcalfe, was replaced in mid-1846 by a new Liberal ministry under Lord John Russell. But Peel had already committed Britain decisively to free trade, by abolishing the protective British Corn Laws; and the Russell Liberals would go still further in freely opening British markets to international commerce. One major effect, soon evident, was a changed attitude towards colonial policy. If the economic life of colonies was no longer to be imperially controlled, why should their political life be? There was, besides, a decline in Britain's concern for overseas possessions; now that its industrial supremacy, free trade and unequalled Royal Navy meant that the whole world could be Britain's oyster, while colonies largely produced more costs than benefits. Few British free traders then thought of actually abandoning colonies, but rather of guiding them on to self-government, to run their own affairs at their own expense. But whatever the moral obligations, there was a whole new desire in London government to move away from colonial "burdens."

Consequently, in November, 1846, the Colonial Secretary, Lord Grey, declared a crucial change in imperial policy, first set forth to the Governor of Nova Scotia, though it was later transmitted to Canada and elsewhere. Grey announced that the British North American colonies were henceforth to be governed only according to the will of their own inhabitants. Governors from now on would take their ministers from whatever group or party held the majority in a colony's Assembly, give them full support, and change them only when the Assembly produced a new majority. In sum, truly responsible government was thus authorized for a colony's domestic affairs, under a party cabinet and premier, with the Governor simply responding to confidence votes in the elected House, though he would still have his own role to play in external relations. This, then, was the climactic move in the advance to self-government; soon to be acted upon in the big Province of Canada.

There early in 1847 a new Governor-General arrived, the Earl of Elgin, balanced, clear-headed and tough-minded, though with a ready grace of humour. A Liberal-Conservative statesman, he also firmly believed in responsible government, perhaps helped by the fact that Lord Durham was his wife's father. And in Canada, Elgin worked convincingly and capably to carry out the new colonial policy: at first giving cordial support to Draper and his Tory associates in the Canadian ministry since they still held a small Assembly majority. But at the end of 1847, general elections in the Province of Canada brought a decisive Reform victory in both East and West. Thus when the new parliament met in 1848, the existing Tory administration was crushingly defeated in the House, and resigned in early March. Elgin promptly called on the Reformers to take office in a ministry jointly headed by LaFontaine and Baldwin -- in that order, since LaFontaine had the larger parliamentary following. Thereby, responsible rule was plainly acknowledged and put in full effect, under a one-party cabinet led by the two Reform leaders as co-premiers.

Self-government was granted. But it already had been earned; earned by the will and common-sense of Canadians of two languages, and as a constitutional heritage of far more value than that of empty revolt.

This LaFontaine-Baldwin cabinet soon got to work on major reforms. A critical test of the responsible system, however, came a year later, when early in 1849 the Ministry brought in a Rebellion Losses Bill to compensate for damages done during the Lower Canada revolt of 1837. Damages in Upper Canada had already been dealt with. Still, many Tories, especially Lower Canadian British, denounced this Losses Bill as "payment for treason," and eagerly looked to the British Governor-General to veto it. But Elgin would not reject a measure advised by his responsible cabinet and resting on an Assembly majority. In April, outraged Tories reacted with sheer mob-violence, burning down the parliament building in Montreal, the capital of the Union since 1844. Still, Governor Elgin calmly held firm in face of mob attacks against him, refusing to call out military forces that could well provoke more violence. And so the Tory extremists played themselves out, and sullenly gave up -- while responsible rule in Canada came through its crucial test by fire.

In other British North American colonies, self-government arrived far more quietly than in an ethnically divided Province of Canada. Nova Scotia, as Joseph Howe himself declared, "achieved a Revolution without bloodshed." There Howe out-talked and out-manoeuvred both Tory opponents and governors alike, as he shaped the solidly popular Reform party; even bringing over John Boyle Uniacke, a formidable Tory leader who became a powerful friend and party colleague instead. Reformers swept the Nova Scotian elections of late 1847. Consequently, in January, 1848, a Liberal party cabinet was called into office: actually, the first responsible colonial government in the British Empire (or any other, for that matter). Uniacke officially became premier, Howe Provincial Secretary, though the key inspiration and achievement remained Howe's throughout. As for neighbouring New Brunswick, that timber province had stayed quite happy in its Assembly's control of forest revenues, under mixed Tory and Liberal ministries during the 1840s. In 1848, however, the Colonial Office here applied its new principle of responsible rule to endorse a government led by Reformer Lemuel Allan Wilmot as attorney-general -- though he proved more interested in power than principle. Not till Charles Fisher took over as premier in 1854, with a clearly Liberal party, did responsible self-government gain real meaning in New Brunswick.

Similarly, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland were given the new imperial policy already put in practice elsewhere. In the former colony, the Reformers who took the island election of 1850 received responsible cabinet government the next year, under George Coles as first premier; although the old absentee-land ownership question continued to plague this province's politics. In Newfoundland -- which of course was later in its political evolution -- responsible rule was only instituted in 1855; again by imperial authority, and after it had been granted to other British possessions from Australia to South Africa. Nevertheless, it may generally be said that by the early 1850s, internal self-government was an accomplished or nearly accomplished fact in all of settled British America; if still excluding the wilderness domains of a vast North West ruled by the fur-trading monopoly of the Hudson's Bay Company.

Social Changes and the Coming of Railways

In the West of British America, wild lands and native peoples still were but little altered. Yet across the East, the frontier age was plainly passing in the 1840s, as renewed British immigration and economic development brought ever-mounting social changes in their wake. To generalize, intensive growth was taking over from extensive spread. Frontier settlement was no longer continually advancing into fresh territories. The Atlantic provinces, of course, had largely occupied their own arable lands by now, including Newfoundland, leaving aside its empty and inhospitable interior. Canada East was certainly still pushing out bush farms into rugged country north of the fertile St. Lawrence valley, but this was only a limited sort of frontier extension, considerably inspired by efforts of the French Catholic clergy to spread true faith and simple life away from the corrupting influences of les Anglais. Moreover, in Canada West, long the most expansive frontier region, good new lands were fast running out, as farm clearings came up against the thin soil and rock masses of the enormous Precambrian Shield.

Accordingly, already-opened areas of the Upper Canadian inlands now became far more intensively settled -- there still was lots of room for that. Fully tilled and fenced acres replaced roughly cultivated fields; frame farmhouses and planked barns supplanted log buildings and squared timber homes. And as local roads improved, with more farmers living along them to do the required road labour, so earlier backwoods hamlets became well supplied and organized country villages. Here the rural elites erected handsome houses. Here churches, stores, mills and workshops clustered, along with the doctor's office, lawyer's office -- and often a little newspaper office, too. Much the same could be said of other maturing countrysides across the British American provinces; but the Upper Canadian farm world most markedly revealed by 1850 the social change away from raw frontier existence.

The passing of the frontier also appeared in another, very different way: in the declining role and status of native peoples within much of eastern British North America. This decline indeed was not new or even recent; but it was lamentably evident by the 1840s. Once the Indian tribes of the East had been vital to entering Europeans, as agents or suppliers in the all-important fur trade. And the Indians' abilities in forest warfare long had made them both feared as enemies and sought as allies. But since the War of 1812, their military role had largely vanished, as settled countrysides steadily cut into forest wilds. The fur trade had no less disappeared across much of the East; although it remained significant in more northerly reaches, where traditional Algonquian hunting bands particularly endured. Nevertheless, the main weight of the fur trade now lay westward in the huge realms of the Hudson's Bay Company. As for Indian peoples in changing eastern worlds of settlement, they lived largely neglected, nearly ignored, on reserves which often were inferior tracts in back townships. Lands which turned out to be good in quality sometimes had a way of being reassigned; though it could be noted that ancestral native claims and binding treaty provisions were duly recognized in many other instances. The trouble was, there were all too many cases where they were not. In fact, even the big Six Nations Reserve along Upper Canada's Grand River suffered from developers' greedy incursions, and the legal disputes which followed.

The Iroquois of the Grand had been settled farmers when their European neighbours arrived about them. They had established themselves on working farms; their tribal leaders from Joseph Brant's time lived in ample homes like "Chiefswood"; and they had adapted effectively to dwelling amid a European society. Other smaller Indian groups, once roaming hunters, did less well. Confined to unproductive acres with no more open horizons, they were afflicted by poverty, disease and drunkenness, or by white policies which varied from keeping them segregated to seeking their absorption -- always for their own good, of course. Nevertheless, native conversions to Christianity, earnestly pursued by white missionaries, did some social good as well as harm. While uprooting age-old cultural and religious supports, they still helped native communities to cope with the white world all around them; especially when native Christians themselves took up that cause of adjustment. This was strikingly exampled when Kahkewaquonaby, or Peter Jones, the son of a white surveyor and a Mississauga (Ojibwa) mother, became the first Methodist native missionary in Upper Canada: translating the Christian gospels into Ojibwa, arguing vigorously for Indian land rights, and winning enthusiastic support for native interests from lecture audiences in England during the 1840s. Yet the dominant white societies of eastern British North America mainly regarded Indian peoples as inevitably dwindling fragments. Whether they saw them as vanishing, romantic creatures of the wild, or as incapable and outmoded savages, the whites showed little concern for Indian heritage or future. Only the natives would prove such views were wrong; by surviving still in close-knit communities of their own.

But nothing altered the fact that colonial society itself became far more interconnected, as transport and communications improved over the 1840s, even before railways arrived in the next decade. In 1848, the massive upper St. Lawrence canal system was finally completed, providing through navigation from ocean to Great Lakes, and much lowering freight costs in the process. On land, earth and mud highways were being macadamized, surfaced with interlocking, water-draining crushed gravel, while plank roads for "fast" transit by coach or buggy linked up major towns. Cheaper postal service would also help improve communications, and the spread of newspaper readership in the countryside. But more than that, the electric telegraph appeared between Niagara, Hamilton and Toronto in 1846, to which lines east to Montreal next were added. Today we may easily underrate this primitive start of immediate, electric news -- but soon items were being flashed within minutes from New York via Buffalo to Toronto, or to Montreal from Boston and Portland. Modern immediacy did not just begin with television or fax. In consequence, the provincial societies off British America moved all the faster out of frontier isolation.

At least as important was the rise of publicly supported education. New Brunswick made bare beginnings with small annual school grants in 1802, Nova Scotia in 1811. Upper Canada provided for local "common" schools in 1816, while Lower Canada maintained various church-directed institutions. Yet it was only in the 1840s that a state-backed school system really developed; notably in the Union of Canada, where an Act of 1841 established non-denominational public schools for Canada West, and Protestant or Catholic-connected schools with public funding for the English or French residents of Canada East. This provincial system was enlarged on into the fifties, particularly to ensure state-aided but Catholic-taught "separate schools" for the Roman Catholic minority of Canada West. At all events, even by 1850 public education was a sizeable reality in the Canadian union; though less so in the Atlantic provinces.

On higher educational levels, however, the Maritimes had early led in developing colleges and universities. In Nova Scotia, Anglican King's College had been founded at Windsor as far back as 1789; and only 134 years later would it move to Halifax, to join in association with Dalhousie University, which itself had been founded at Nova Scotia's capital in 1818. In New Brunswick, another King's College began operating in Fredericton in 1828, to become the University of New Brunswick by 1859. And within the Province of Canada, its own Anglican King's College at last opened at Toronto in 1843; but then was secularized in 1849 as the non-denominational public University of Toronto, in an act put through by Robert Baldwin. Meanwhile, by 1841 Methodist Victoria University had taken shape at Cobourg under Egerton Ryerson as first president, and Presbyterian Queen's emerged the next year at Kingston. McGill in Montreal, had begun teaching in 1829, although its own first building only went up in 1843. As for Laval at Quebec, dating back to 1663, this Catholic seminary would not be chartered as a public university until 1853.

Not only teaching and learning, but original literature as well was growing in the British American provinces. To mention just a few classics among many works, there was François-Xavier Garneau's Histoire du Canada in three volumes (1845-48), a powerfully nationaliste interpretation of French Canada's heritage; Susanna Moodie's best-known book, Roughing It in the Bush (1852), a sternly graphic account of Upper Canadian frontier life; her sister, Catharine Parr Traill's more cheerful Backwoods of Canada (1835 and 1846); and Thomas Chandler Haliburton's humorous work of fiction, Clockmaker, (1836 and 1840) offering the "sayings and doings of Sam Slick," a sharp-eyed Yankee trader peddling his timepieces in the Nova Scotian society of that day. There were many other new cultural voices: including the Literary Garland of Montreal, a periodical which during the 1840s published the writings of Moody and other rising Anglophone authors; while in the same city in 1847, L'Avenir, a Francophone weekly, took up the zesty cause of radical Canadien nationalism, both in letters and politics. All in all, this era expressed a whole new stage in cultural activity -- as it equally did in economic development as well.

In fact, good times and healthy immigration rates through most of the 1840s assuredly fostered the social and cultural growth just surveyed. Lumber and wheat markets flourished, merchants prospered, while British immigrants on the whole came well prepared and found employment. That is, until late in the decade, when another world depression struck hard. And at the same time, famine rose in Ireland, where a disastrous potato blight ruined that country's most vital food crop. Refugees now poured out of Ireland, desperate, near-starving, and soon riddled with deadly infections such as typhus and cholera. They came to American ports, to Saint John in New Brunswick or up the St. Lawrence into Canada, crammed in "coffin ships," in which large numbers died. The surviving Irish migrants brought a flood of helpless misery and disease to hard-pressed colonial communities. The great mass of the 109,000 British who reached the North American provinces in 1847 indeed were Irish-born; and their influx continued, although diminishing, on into the early fifties. In the new land these tragic Irish died in thousands at quarantine camps on Partridge Island off Saint John, at Grosse Isle outside Quebec, or in the "emigrant sheds" of Montreal, Kingston, and Toronto. Still, the majority survived and struggled through, to work largely in towns or lumber camps; and to add another heritage of fortitude -- women even more than men -- which descendants of the Famine Irish rightfully remember to this day.

Meanwhile, as problems of disease and welfare soared, bleak depression idled ships and trade in Canada of the late forties, closing down businesses and jobs and leaving the new canals almost empty: blows which particularly hit the major port of Montreal, and so partly explained the fierce mob-violence there over the Rebellion Losses Bill in April, 1849. Moreover, Britain's switch to free trade in 1846 had removed the imperial Corn Laws that had protected colonial exports of wheat and flour; and in 1849 the imperial timber preference was also sliced away. Consequently, even after the anger over the Rebellion Bill had subsided, bitter feelings remained among powerful Montreal business elements. Their sense indeed of being abandoned by imperial interests led a number of their leaders to sign the gloomy Annexation Manifesto of October 1849, proclaiming that a failed and neglected Canada should give up and join the United States. This was colonial heritage too -- a tendency to sell Canadians' own abilities short, and look to a new dependence to help out. (If Mother would no longer help, try Uncle.) Significantly also, the Manifesto was not only backed by Montreal Anglo-Tories, but by nationaliste French radicals, who now included a returned but scarcely altered Louis-Joseph Papineau. Yet the decisive mass response across both Canada East and West, French and English, was to condemn outright any idea of joining the Americans. And the business Tories of Montreal felt their own Canadian loyalty come surging back, as world trade and colonial commerce revived in 1850.

All the same, Montreal politically had proved too feverish as a governing centre, so that from 1850 the Union's government would be shifted periodically between the two old provincial capitals, Toronto and Quebec -- for sectional divisions in Canada prevented either being permanently selected. In 1858, however, the young city of Ottawa, once a canal and lumber village, was chosen as permanent seat of government by Queen Victoria (advised, of course, by her ministers and instructed by Sir Edmund Head, then Canadian Governor-General). But grand new Parliament Buildings, in stately Victorian Gothic style, would not be finished for use in Ottawa till 1866. And well before, in the earlier fifties, a much better economic phase had opened for the Canadian Union.

At that time, returning prosperity had effectively advanced to boom, as the St. Lawrence canals filled with traffic, grain and lumber again poured out to British markets or into the United States, and a whole new era of railway building took form. Railways had first reached the colonies in the 1830s. The sixteen-mile Champlain and St. Lawrence had opened successfully in 1836, linking Laprairie opposite Montreal with the Richelieu water route down to New England; while the Albion Mines Railway in Nova Scotia had begun in 1839 to carry coal out to the port of Pictou. Yet little more track was built; although the 1840s saw new lines chartered in provincial parliaments. By 1850, there still were only sixty-six miles of operating track in all British North America. Then, however, the return of general prosperity -- plus the fact that railways now were well established in Europe and the United States, thus freeing capital for their construction in Canada -- brought on a railroad era that virtually transformed land transport in the British American provinces, and raised wide new prospects for their future.

By 1853, the new St. Lawrence and Atlantic reached south from Montreal to Portland, Maine, thus giving Montreal commerce a winter outlet to salt water when the St. Lawrence was frozen solid. And the Northern Railway, started in 1851, by 1855 connected Toronto with Collingwood on Georgian Bay, an iron road pointing to the Upper Lakes and the vast North West beyond. The Great Western was open in 1854 from Hamilton to Windsor on the Detroit River, via London, and from Hamilton to Niagara Falls, there linking with American tracks to New York. By 1856 the G.W.R. was also extended to Toronto. Other, smaller lines were constructed in both sections of Canada. But the biggest project of them all was the Grand Trunk Railway, chartered in 1853 to span the entire Canadian Union. By 1860 it was completed: from Rivière du Loup on the south shore of the Lower St. Lawrence to Sherbrooke in the heart of the Eastern Townships; from there to Montreal, crossing the St. Lawrence over the magnificent new Victoria Bridge; then on through Kingston, Toronto and Guelph, finally to Sarnia on Lake Huron -- one of the world's longest rail routes at that time. The Grand Trunk's construction by an influential British-based company had still deeply depended on grants and backing from the Canadian government. That brought unhappy private-public entanglements in railway politics, leading to extravagance and heavy public debt, political-insider deals and outright corruption. Nonetheless, the Grand Trunk forged a vital transport bond across the central province of Canada, one that would last on to the present.

Railroads were not begun in Newfoundland until the 1880s. Yet even by 1848 large designs were under way in the Atlantic mainland provinces for a Halifax-to-Quebec line through safely British territory, to join the Maritimes with Canada and the St. Lawrence. Difficulties over route and division of costs, however, halted this first Intercolonial Railway project; though it would come up repeatedly in years to follow. In the meantime, Nova Scotia built a line from Halifax up to Truro, ready to go on into New Brunswick. This latter colony took up the European and North American Railway, which connected Saint John with Portland by 1857, and by 1860 extended to Shediac on the province's eastern shore. But a forecast of what railways could do -- Intercolonials or even more -- came in a glowing speech by Joseph Howe at a railway banquet in Halifax in 1851, where Howe prophesied that many in his audience well might live to hear "the whistle of the steam locomotive in the passes of the Rocky Mountains."

They might, indeed -- for railways met the challenge of continental distance. Passengers and bulky freight now could move by rail in North America throughout the year, at regular speeds far beyond the fastest horse. This conquering of distance also brought the need for accurate railway scheduling, resulting, indeed, in Standard Time to replace local "sun time": an international achievement successfully pushed by its Scots-Canadian originator, Sandford Fleming, initially the chief engineer on Toronto's Northern Railway. As well, rail technology really introduced the machine age into British North America; in metal foundries and engineering shops, locomotive works and rail-rolling mills; thus developing skills in steam and iron to serve wide new factory industries. Such industrial plants would mainly emerge later. More immediately important here is the fact that the Railway Revolution gave practical meaning to dreams of wider colonial union: to visions of bringing all British North America into one much stronger unit, able to withstand the pulls and pressures of the United States and even reach to the Pacific -- as a united country joined by and flourishing through its rail lines. Furthermore, if rails alone could bind a great new interprovincial union, only such a union would have the credit and tax resources needed to get the costly lines constructed. Railways and ideas of British North American Union hence came together in the 1850s, to thrust on to Confederation in 1867 -- and to still greater rail routes afterward.

Growing Forces for Union, and Disunion

Developments in trade no less than transport opened new vistas for the provinces, as they moved away from former reliance on exports to Britain or the West Indies and into growing American markets. The loss of the imperial protective tariff system, when Britain turned to free trade between 1846 and 1849, had proved to be more a shock than a disaster. Colonial wheat and timber again found ready British sales during the booming fifties. But no longer was there the rooted colonial belief that things would always stay that way. Instead, grain, wood -- and a lot of Atlantic fish -- now were also going to the United States, where northeastern factory centres needed more foodstuffs, and midwestern towns and farms more building lumber. This mounting commerce brought on the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854 between the republic and British provinces: a major agreement which established reciprocal free trade in natural products to run for ten years from 1855, then be renewed or abrogated (cancelled). And while the colonists thus gained free entry to the United States for their raw produce, the Americans, too, got what they particularly wanted, free access to the rich fisheries in colonial waters up the Atlantic coast.

Over all, the Treaty of 1854 did very well; although the good times it gained credit for were also due to railway building and internal colonial growth. As time went on, however, the colonies became concerned about the future, when the Treaty necessarily faced renewal. If the Americans then should abrogate the agreement, the best economic choice well might be to unite all the provinces in order to combine and develop their own home markets. Consequently, by the early 1860s, the forces both of railways and commerce were pointing towards union. And so, eventually, would issues in the great North West between the Lakehead and Pacific, the wilderness British territory ruled since 1821 by the re-made Hudson's Bay Company that had absorbed its old Nor'Wester rivals.

This powerful London-based fur enterprise had set its North American headquarters at Fort Garry in the Red River Colony, the small but persevering farm community first established by Lord Selkirk on the prairie sweeps of Ruperts Land. Ruperts Land itself -- the vast forest, plains and tundra country that drained into Hudson Bay -- was still the Company's domain by chartered right. But beyond it, both the North to the Arctic Ocean and the Far West over the Rockies were also held by the Company, under British parliamentary acts which from 1821 had licensed it to maintain government and fur-trade monopoly in these huge regions also. Since 1821, moreover, the Bay Company had generally managed this whole wild empire profitably, peaceably, and in ordered style; though its quiet condition largely rested on good relations with the native inhabitants, Plains Cree, Assiniboines, Peigans (Blackfoot) and many others to the north or west. Good relations, too, depended especially on Indian women who had married fur traders according to "the custom of the country." They provided a bridge connecting two very different societies; and some of them besides served as respected diplomats or mediators between one side and the other. In later days, the increasing entry of white women into the fur-trade West largely ended these older "tender ties" across racial lines. But during generations which produced the Métis as a vigorous new people, sprung from mixed Indian and French or British origins, the recognized fact of white-native family bonds did a great deal both for tranquil Company control and the mutual adjustment of European and Indian elements throughout the North West.

Throughout this realm, as well, the Bay Company's York boats carried on transport by the Saskatchewan or other Plains waterways. And they were increasingly supplemented by Red River carts, sturdy two-wheeled vehicles drawn by oxen that plodded south down rutted prairie paths to American posts in the Minnesota Territory, or north and west along the Carlton Trail, which in time stretched out to Fort Edmonton. All this traffic linked the Great Plains region by the mid-century (if crudely thus far), while pack-trains crossed on over the mountains to the Pacific West. Yet still more routes by land and water led far northward, past the Arctic Circle into the icebound homelands of the Inuit.

Here British explorations, particularly by sea in Royal Navy ships, had steadily opened up the Arctic expanses; although only a few examples can be offered here. In 1823, Edward Parry of the Navy had pushed the search for the North West Passage through Fury and Hecla Strait west above Hudson Bay, while in 1827 John Franklin, R.N., had probed from the Mackenzie River delta out along the north Alaskan coasts. John Ross located the North Magnetic Pole west of the Bay in 1831 -- still a long way from the geographic Pole itself. And Sir John Franklin's expedition of 1845-47, at last to determine the North West Passage, starkly resulted in his own death and those of the crews of his two vessels; yet brought on a stream of searches to "find Franklin." These certainly were futile; nevertheless, they widely increased Arctic knowledge and contacts with the Inuit. Thus parties under John Rae or Richard Collinson mapped icy Arctic islands closest to the continental shores, and in 1851 Captain Robert McClure finally uncovered the elusive North West Passage Franklin had died in seeking; though it was not be navigated successfully for some sixty years to follow.

Arctic explorations would matter greatly to Canada in the long run. During the mid-nineteenth century, however, events within the heartland of the Hudson's Bay Territory, at the Red River Colony, mattered considerably more. Here the Company's rule in America remained for decades in the capable hands of Sir George Simpson, as Governor-in-Chief of Ruperts Land from 1826 to 1860: a brisk forceful Scot, the "Little Emperor," who strongly upheld Company interests and pushed exploration besides. He himself crossed the continent westward -- and on around the globe -- in a monumental journey of 1841-2. But by the 1850s, times were changing; and at Red River the old, sequestered world of fur-trade monopoly was beginning to pass away. In 1849 the Company had been compelled to let free traders operate out of the Red River (population by then about 5,000) to posts down across the United States border. In 1855 American railroads reached St. Paul in Minnesota. In 1859 the first American steamboat came up the Red to Fort Garry, where a little commercial hamlet to be called Winnipeg was already rising just outside the stone walls. And eager American venturers came up also; some looking forward to the annexation of the British territories to northward -- a project even endorsed by resolution in the Minnesota legislature.

Not only Americans, but Canadians too, began showing a decided interest in the Red River and the Hudson's Bay Territory. Late in the fifties, settlers started to reach there from Canada West -- and the first newspaper at Red River, the Nor'Wester, was founded by two young Toronto journalists in 1859. Meanwhile in 1857, the future of the Hudson's Bay Company empire had come before a Select Committee of the House of Commons in Britain, to consider whether the Company's licence to its leased western territories should be renewed. The Committee's report recommended, among other things, that fertile areas in the plains, such as the Red River and Saskatchewan Valleys, might be acquired by Canada for settlement. That recommendation proved inconclusive; yet it was handwriting on the wall. A thinly-held fur empire of the Hudson's Bay Company would surely be supplanted -- whether by takeover from the powerfully expansionist United States or by union with a hopefully enlarged Canada. That was really the question emerging for the North West: one that had already revealed itself upon the Pacific shores.

The question there took shape, in fact, in the Oregon Country, a great reach of territory which bordered the Pacific between Russian-ruled Alaska on the north and Mexican-held California on the south, a territory which had been jointly occupied by Britain and the United States since 1819. By the 1840s, however, American westward expansion was rapidly filling in the southern half of this Oregon Country; and, as ever, fur posts could not stand long against the tide of settlement. Furthermore, as disputes arose, an aggressive United States threatened war, during the presidential election of 1844 demanding "Fifty-Four Forty or Fight" -- all the country right up to Alaska. That would have cut off a future Canada completely from the Pacific; though it was largely election noise. Instead diplomacy brought the Oregon Treaty of 1846, which broadly divided the disputed territory in half, by extending the Canadian-American boundary along the 49th parallel onward from the plains over the mountains to the Pacific, then dipping southward around Vancouver Island. In many respects, this Treaty was a reasonable solution. Yet the British colonists had faced renewed American dangers along their borders, not to mention extravagant American claims and talk of war.

In any event, the valuable Columbia waterway to the ocean now decisively fell to the Americans, since the lower Columbia lay south of the newly extended boundary line, thus compelling British traders and colonists to rely on the more difficult Fraser route to the sea further northward. Nonetheless, there was ample space left for a great province of British Columbia to arise in time. And more immediately significant, the Hudson's Bay Company established a new west-coast headquarters, Fort Victoria, at the southern end of Vancouver Island. This, in fact, became the focus and capital of a colony of Vancouver Island, set up in 1849 under Company control in order to provide a firm basis of British settlement on this fertile and well favoured isle: to pin down the western end of the American border, and make sure another Oregon did not happen.

The Hudson's Bay Company sent shiploads of English settlers to Victoria, right around Cape Horn at the bottom of South America. Dorset farmers, Stafford miners and varied town workers arrived -- 140 migrants, for example, by the nicely-named Tory in 1851. Company servants and retired officials also settled in; and though the colony stayed small, farming thrived in the mild island climate, where spring flowers opened before March. Moreover, lumbering and fishing resources soon were tapped, as well as productive coal mines up the island near Nanaimo. Relations with the native peoples, besides, generally stayed amicable: with the local Salish, the formidable Cowichans up the coast, and the majestic Haida who travelled in sea-going dugout canoes down from the Queen Charlottes far northward. And thanks considerably to the decisive leadership of James Douglas as Company chief factor and governor, the young province advanced steadily; indeed was given its own representative assembly in 1856.

Douglas, a Nor'Wester in background (though born in British Guiana), had continued in the reorganized Hudson's Bay Company, and had moved the Company's Pacific headquarters to Victoria. Made Governor of Vancouver Island in 1851, he not only shaped that colony, but also a still newer colony, British Columbia, which emerged on the mainland when gold was discovered on gravel bars along the Fraser River in 1857-8. Miners flocked to the canyons of the lower Fraser: via Victoria from California, whose own gold fields were beginning to play out, across the continent from the eastern British provinces, and around the globe by sea from Britain and Europe. To deal with this frantic, disorderly rush, Douglas swiftly took it on himself to establish law and security on the mainland, where Britain in 1858 set up the province of British Columbia, placing it also under his governorship.

Thereafter, Victoria boomed as the supply base for the Fraser gold fields. And when the original fields were dwindling around 1860, big new finds made further up the Fraser, in the Cariboo district, brought a whole fresh surge of growth both to Vancouver Island's capital and to mainland British Columbia; now with its own capital of New Westminster near the Fraser's mouth. Yet though these young British colonies seemed fast flourishing, they faced serious future problems: of costly inland communications through rough mountain country, problems of finding a wider economic basis if the gold ran out, and worries about the constant, powerful presence of so many American miners from across the border. Would the Oregon case be repeated, after all, if the small Pacific settlements could not withstand American annexationism? Could fur-company rule endure -- or was union with distant Canada the one, ultimate, effective answer? These questions rose with the 1860s, and as new colonial leaders came forth. One was grandly called Amor de Cosmos, once plain Bill Smith from Nova Scotia, until he changed his name in California. He moved up to Victoria in 1858, founded a paper there, the British Colonist, and soon went into politics to seek responsible government for the colony. Another was John Robson, born at Perth in Upper Canada, who in 1861 began his own British Columbian at New Westminster, and also took up the quest for responsible rule. Both men would be crucial in the cause of union with Canada. Indeed, from the earlier 1860s, that issue took on mounting force: for the Pacific West no less than the Plains country.

On the prairies, the world of Selkirk settlers tilling their near-subsistence holdings beside the Red, or of Métis buffalo hunts out on open plains, would increasingly be challenged by commercial farming, brought by new arrivals who ploughed up ancient grasslands. And in the Far West, the world of Company posts and transient mining camps would increasingly be replaced by enduring villages and shaft-mines, by cattle-ranching and lumbering. Furthermore, back East, where earlier frontiers had so largely been occupied in the British provinces, eyes there were turning westward more and more. Nowhere was that more evident than in Canada West, former Upper Canada, the most populous and rapidly growing community in all British North America. Expansionism indeed was not just an American trait. By the 1860s Canada West, future Ontario, was strongly displaying it -- especially in the Upper Canada Reform or Liberal party as headed by George Brown.

Brown, a hard-driving Edinburgh Scot, whose Toronto Globe became the most widely circulated newspaper in British North America, had rebuilt failing Upper Canadian Liberal forces into a sweeping popular movement. To go back and explain, Robert Baldwin's Reform party, that had seen responsible government triumph in the United Province of Canada in 1848, had split wide open in 1850-1, under attacks from new or revived radical elements. These included both Reform veterans like William Lyon Mackenzie and John Rolph, safely returned from exile, and young democratic idealists like William McDougall, who looked for men who were "clear grit" to move on beyond fancy-dancy British parliamentary self-government to "cheap" American-style elective rule and "simple" written constitutions. Such radicals were inevitably dubbed Clear Grits, notably by George Brown's Globe (which added "bunkum-talking cormorants"). Brown himself was an ardent supporter of Baldwin and British responsible government, having founded his Globe in 1844 to back them. But Clear Grit onslaughts led Baldwin to resign in disgust in 1851. And his vital Lower Canadians partner, Louis LaFontaine, soon followed, worn down by similar attacks from the French-Canadian radicals termed Rouges.

The chief lieutenants of Baldwin and LaFontaine, Francis Hincks and Augustin-Norbert Morin, then replaced them in office. Soon, however, this Reform or Liberal Hincks-Morin ministry ran into even more party divisions; until in 1854 it fell apart in utter sectional confusion. In its stead a new Liberal-Conservative Coalition took power, headed by Sir Allan MacNab, an old-guard Tory politician from Hamilton, with Morin still as his Lower Canadian co-premier. In fact, their middle-ground coalition effectively combined Upper Canada Tory-Conservatives (plus some moderate Liberals formerly led by Hincks) with Lower Canada mainstream Liberals, who had grown pretty moderate themselves. Yet it won and lasted; and not just because of its broad political basis. It also embraced powerful railway-building interests: even crusty old Sir Allan said genially, "my politics now are railways." Besides, this MacNab-Morin Coalition moved successfully in 1854-55 to remove two outstanding grievances: by secularizing Upper Canadian clergy reserves, and turning their income over to municipalities; by abolishing Lower Canadian seigneurial tenure and paying the seigneurs compensation for their rights. But finally, this new political formation gained immeasurably when in 1856 John A. Macdonald, Kingston Scot -- and undoubtedly the ablest politician in Canada -- replaced MacNab as cabinet head; while in 1857, George Étienne Cartier of Montreal became Canada East co-premier, a powerful fighting colleague for the strategic-minded Macdonald. Their partnership, in truth, would shape a national Canadian Conservative party, which successfully joined Anglophones and Francophones within one lasting political formation.

But meanwhile, as the Liberal-Conservative Coalition of 1854 was first taking hold, the Liberal fragments left in opposition were coming together themselves, thanks largely to George Brown, who had entered parliament in 1852. By 1855 he had made peace with his former Clear Grit foes. They already shared some major causes; among them, resisting enlarged Catholic separate school rights in Canada West as ruinous inroads into its non-denominational common school system; or urging "representation by population," in order to give the western half of the Canadian Union the larger number of seats in parliament which its greater population warranted. But along with "rep by pop" and other sectional causes, both Brown and the Grits ardently wanted westward expansion -- to bring the British North West into union with Canada. To that end, Brown's influential Globe waged a vigorous public campaign from mid-1856 for the acquisition of the Hudson's Bay Company Territory. Here its owner was decidedly helped by William McDougall, now on the Globe staff, whose own paper, the North American, had earlier pushed for gaining the West; but had since been absorbed into the Globe. At any rate, in January, 1857, a Toronto Reform Convention celebrated the reunion of Canada West Liberalism and called for the annexation of the North West: joining Brown's Toronto business-leadership group, who eagerly looked for new western markets to develop, with the Clear Grits' rural following of land-hungry farmers, who sought fertile western tracts to settle.

Consequently, this Brownite-Grit-Liberal combination swept Canada West in provincial elections held late in 1857, while old Grit radical aims were submerged in a respectably British Victorian Liberal party hereafter moulded by George Brown. Furthermore, the ruling Conservative Coalition was tossed into trouble, since John A. Macdonald's forces were now a minority in the western half of the Union, although Cartier's support held in the eastern section. Hence 1858 proved a hectic political year; even marked that summer by a sudden, four-day Liberal government headed by an all-too unprepared Brown. But swiftly, deftly, his Conservative opponents who had left office as the Macdonald-Cartier ministry slipped back in as the Cartier-Macdonald cabinet, after a shady, so-called "Double Shuffle" of their ministerial posts. All the same, the shuffled Conservative administration did return with one significant fresh policy: to inquire into forming a federal union of all the British American colonies. It was only an initial promise to take up the question of union with the other provinces: but it signalled the opening of a path that led to Confederation. Adopted partly by the Conservatives to outplay the Brownite Liberal thrust for western expansion, this federation venture made no immediate headway with the Atlantic colonies, still bound up in their own internal concerns. Thus it was soon dropped by the Canadian Conservative government itself. Nonetheless, it heralded a rising era of plans and policies aimed at union, of strains and dangers of disunion, as the momentous Confederation years got under way.

The Path to Confederation

Politicians' talk of a British North American union had been going on for years -- with the American federal example so close at hand, how could it be otherwise? Back in 1849, Canadian Tories had vaguely proposed federation as some sort of answer to British free trade and colonial responsible government. Yet not till the hot political summer of 1858 were meaningful resolutions on the subject laid before the Canadian legislature, placed there by Alexander Galt, a top Montreal businessman and a leading representative of the English-speaking minority in Canada East as independent Liberal member for Sherbrooke. But Galt was also a powerful Grand Trunk promoter and contractor who had been moving much closer to the rail-minded Conservatives, although he still kept his own horizons. At all events, he put resolutions before the Canadian Assembly in 1858, calling both for the transfer of the great North West to Canada and for a general confederation of all British North America, in which the western territories (and rail links) would take their place. Galt's resolutions remained undecided. Yet when the Cartier-Macdonald cabinet took power that August after the notorious Double Shuffle, Galt was brought in as finance minister, along with his own Confederation proposal. And while that scheme got nowhere then, it was too hopefully appealing just to be forgotten. Henceforth in the Province of Canada the Conservative side kept touch with the idea of a broad federal union, an idea which re-emerged from time to time. Liberal ties with the federation concept soon followed as well.

In 1859, an Upper Canada Reform Convention of over 600 delegates meeting in Toronto adopted a plan to federate the two very distinct Canadas, powerfully urged and steered by George Brown. This scheme proposed provincial governments for Canada West and Canada East, to handle such sectionally different matters as education, culture and local affairs, and one general, "joint authority" for matters of their common concern, like finance, transport and economic development. Here, too, were the germs of future Canadian federalism. Moreover, Lower Canadian Liberals joined their Upper Canadian counterparts in endorsing the dual federation idea; among them, Antoine-Aimé Dorion, keen-minded French-Canadian leader of the Rouges, and Thomas D'Arcy McGee, an eloquent voice of the Catholic Irish community particularly strong in Montreal.

These Liberal forces, however, made little progress when in 1860 they put the dual federation scheme before the Canadian legislature. Their Conservative opponents, especially in Francophone Canada East, feared to change the existing Canadian union because of the new sectional difficulties which could arise. In fact, Conservatives, over all, preferred to keep the present union going, until some distant day when a general Confederation might actually be established. As for the Liberals, they divided: since numbers of them, especially in eastern Upper Canada, also felt uncertain about a change to federalism, and still hoped to make the existing union of the Canadas work better through the "double majority" principle, whereby critical votes in parliament would have to carry majority support from both halves of the province, east and west. Indeed, when in 1861 George Brown left parliament temporarily, both ill and defeated, an older Reformer, Sandfield Macdonald from Cornwall in eastern Upper Canada, moved the Grit Liberal forces towards the double-majority idea -- though this was really an improbable notion, since it would require joint majority votes from Protestant Brownite Grits and Catholic Cartier Conservatives alike: two fiercely determined opposites.

But also in 1861, new external threats began to grow. That spring, the Civil War erupted in the United States, between the Union forces of an industrial North and the rebel Confederacy proclaimed by a slave-owning South. Out of their bloody conflict incidents soon arose involving Great Britain and the Union North -- which would steadily develop into the world's strongest military power. These incidents inevitably affected the British provinces in America, set right beside the embattled Union. There was a good deal of sympathy within the provinces for the anti-slavery cause of the American North, and Canada West particularly had become a haven for Black slaves fleeing from the South. Nevertheless, high-handed Northern talk of using force against Southern sympathizers in adjoining British territories increasingly put the colonies on the defensive once more, to guard their borders against renewed American dangers. Then came the "Trent Affair" late in 1861, when an American Union warship stopped the British mail steamer Trent on the open Atlantic and took off Confederate diplomatic envoys bound for Europe. It was an outright violation of British neutrality -- though not unlike what British naval vessels had done to American ships before the War of 1812. As a result, war fever rose between Britain and the United States, until cooler counsels on both sides prevailed.

British regulars still were rushed overseas, and militia companies were raised in Canada in 1862 to meet possible American attacks. From then on, the question of colonial defence loomed large, reinforcing the idea of an interprovincial union to bring greater military efficiency and strength. Other dangerous episodes followed from Lake Erie to the Atlantic coasts. In Nova Scotian waters, Northern warships hung off Halifax to catch Southern "blockade-runners," and there late in 1863 they seized the coastal vessel Chesapeake back from its Confederate captors, setting off a furore in the Maritime provinces. But most serious of all was the Confederate raid on St. Albans, Vermont, in October, 1864, when a band of Southern conspirators crossed from Lower Canada to rob banks in this small town, then escaped back into Canada with their loot. The St. Albans Raid outraged Americans. Union troops were ordered to pursue any further raiders right into Canada -- a sharply menacing threat. In fact, the real peril of border war gave fresh urgency to the question of defence, while D'Arcy McGee warned Canadians that they might sleep no more, except under arms.

And meanwhile, internal troubles within the existing Canadian union had continued, as its two widely different halves -- with equal blocks of seats within one parliament -- clashed stubbornly in politics. Canada West still demanded representation by population to recognize its decided lead in numbers, now over ten years old, and by the census of 1861 standing approximately at 1.4 million for the western section to 1.1 for the eastern. Beyond that, the western section sought an end to "French-Catholic domination," which had imposed Catholic separate school measures on Upper Canada, thanks to Lower Canadian French votes added to those of the Upper Canadian Catholic minority; and had also placed larger tax burdens on Canada West in support of Montreal's business interests. That, of course, was the one-sided but heartfelt opinion of the Anglo-Liberal West; while in the French Conservative East no less emotional views upheld Catholic faith and cherished Canadien heritage against wild English Protestants of the western section, who would surely destroy true faith and culture, if they ever gained the larger share of seats in the United Province. Yet these opposed, uncompromising sectional stands threatened sheer deadlock for the Canadian Union.

For a time, that threat seemed to have been put off, when in May, 1862, a middle-ground Liberal ministry headed by Sandfield Macdonald replaced the Cartier-John A. Macdonald cabinet, which had fallen over a too costly Militia Bill. The new government, bringing together wishful moderates of both sections, tried to keep the Canadian union going on the basis of the double-majority principle. But that principle failed flatly when a new separate school bill for Upper Canada still went through by virtue of Lower Canadian votes. Thus in mid-1863, Sandfield Macdonald's ministry was reorganized in order to save it -- in which effort George Brown, now back in parliament, played a major role. New elections did not help the remade Liberal regime, however; for while Brownite Grits carried Canada West in a revived campaign for rep by pop, Cartier Conservatives swept Canada East as strongly against it. Nothing had worked. Though the Reform government struggled on amid the sectional impasse, it finally collapsed in March, 1864. In its place a no-less shaky Conservative administration took over, led by John A. Macdonald, as cheerfully genial as ever, and by Sir Etienne Taché, a French Canadian elder statesman dating from LaFontaine's time (though under Taché's nominal control, Cartier still managed the French-Canadian contingent). In any case, this Macdonald-Taché government itself gave up after three months of futility: equally unable to cope with the sectional deadlock, wherein Liberals controlled the western votes of the Union and Conservatives the eastern. Essentially, the constitution itself would have to change. And here George Brown took a deliberate, dramatic step -- which went on to Confederation.

When the Macdonald-Taché government resigned on June 14, Brown made known that he stood ready to support a new ministry solidly committed to settling the sectional problems of Canada. Keenly aware of the deadlock themselves, John A. Macdonald, Cartier and Galt met privately with Brown in the then-capital city of Quebec. Out of their discussions came a transforming agreement: to seek first a general federation of all British North America, or if that failed, the dual federation of the Canadas. Brown and two Liberal colleagues would join a new coalition government under the official premiership of Taché, as a figure respected by both sides. Thus arose the Great Coalition -- the strongest government of all the Union era -- with substantial eastern and western, Conservative and Liberal, majorities behind it in the common cause of federation. And once it was formally announced to a loudly cheering Assembly on June 24, 1864, the Coalition launched a telling approach to the other British American colonies.

It came at ideally the right time. By mid-1864, the forces for union were reaching critical heights across the wide expanses of British North America. In the Hudson's Bay Company empire of the North West, a group of top London financiers (who also had connections with Grand Trunk Railway interests) had bought control of the Company in 1863; and were ready to see its old fur-trade monopoly replaced, at a price, by farm settlement and telegraph or railroad lines all the way to the Pacific. No less influential in the East, the Intercolonial Railway project had powerfully re-emerged, stimulated by American border dangers, which made a wholly British rail route between the Maritimes and inland Canada seem even more vital. An Intercolonial Railway conference in London between Canadian, New Brunswick and Nova Scotian representatives had broken down in the fall of 1862, over final financial terms. But though a sense of Canadian bad faith was left with the Maritimes, the prospect of a binding railway was not at all forgotten -- something which an intercolonial union might far better accomplish. By mid-1864, that prospect appeared even more attractive to the two main Atlantic provinces, not only worrying about their future on the edge of a great American military power, but also seeking new means for their own development. Confined as they were to the northeast corner of the continent, the flourishing seaboard colonies of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia looked for new expansion inward, along their own rail links into the vastness of British America, whose exports could then flow down to their Atlantic harbours. And growing evidence that the United States now aimed to end reciprocal free trade and raise its own high tariff walls, further turned the Maritimes towards economic and political union with Canada and the North West beyond.

Indeed, the three Maritime Provinces were already seeking to strengthen their own position by discussing "maritime union" among themselves at a conference to be held at Charlottetown in early September, 1864. But to this meeting representatives from Canada also asked admission, in order to present far wider proposals for union. The Charlottetown Conference planners agreed. On September 1 a group of Canadian visitors from the new Canadian Coalition ministry arrived by government steamer at the little island capital, glowing amid late summer sunshine and the excitement of a visiting circus. Chief among the Canadian party were John A. Macdonald, Brown, Cartier, Galt, McDougall, and McGee. They enthusiastically outlined a grand scheme for general federation which had been drafted at long, gruelling cabinet sessions in Quebec. The Maritime delegates responded as enthusiastically. Within days the project of Confederation was endorsed in principle; and it was agreed to hold a further, larger interprovincial conference at Quebec to work out and decide the plan in detail. Seldom could a new nation have had a more amiable and enjoyable start than in that warmly golden Charlottetown September.

In October, 1864, during cooler, working autumn weather, the monumental Quebec Conference met in the Legislative Buildings high above the sweep of the St. Lawrence. Taché presided as its august Chairman. Along with the main Canadian delegates -- Macdonald, Brown, Cartier and Galt, Langevin, McGee and McDougall -- there were outstanding Maritimers like Samuel Leonard Tilley, the astute Liberal premier of New Brunswick, Dr. Charles Tupper, tough Conservative master of Nova Scotia, or capable George Coles and J.H. Gray of Prince Edward Island. And there were also representatives from Newfoundland this time, such as F.B. Carter and Ambrose Shea. This list still leaves out other noteworthy members including Charles Fisher and E.B. Chandler from New Brunswick, Adams Archibald and Jonathan McCully of Nova Scotia; but out of 33 delegates in total it should serve.

The Quebec Conference did work hard from October 10 to 27; although with splendid evening social occasions in a hospitable Quebec City. Out of the Conference came the future constitutional structure of Canada, in seventy-two resolutions all debated and accepted. For instance, they provided an appointed federal upper chamber, the Senate, based on equal representation for the main settled regions of British America (then the Atlantic, Quebec and Ontario sectors), and set up an elected federal lower chamber, the House of Commons, based on the democratic majority principle of representation by population. Furthermore, federal governments would stand or fall by the votes of this popularly elected House of Commons. Thus federalism and responsible parliamentary government were to be combined in the central sphere of a new constitution.

That was also true for the provincial sphere, where provinces would operate similarly, although within their own prescribed list of powers. The division of powers, so basic to a federal system, led on to plentiful later discussions. But let it briefly be said here, that matters assigned to provincial control were broadly to cover property, civil rights and civil law (so different for French Canada), education and municipal affairs, land resources and welfare institutions. And the "general parliament" would look after criminal law and justice, defence and external relations, native rights and aliens, plus trade, transport, shipping and fisheries. Further, any unspecified, residuary powers would also fall to the central regime, along with a considerable wider taxing authority. Over all, this was an effective division, which certainly did not mean that it would not face future challenges. Yet beyond all such concerns, the Quebec Conference resolutions no less called for the completion of the Intercolonial Railway "without delay," between Canada East and Truro in Nova Scotia -- and for provisions to admit "Newfoundland, the North West Territory, British Columbia and Vancouver Island" into the new Confederation. The intended scope was clearly continental.

The Quebec Conference plan won wide public acclaim when it was made known: but gradually reactions set in. No doubt inevitable, considering the breathtaking scope of change proposed, these reactions variously arose from old regional or local feelings and resentments, doubts about the complexities (or generalities) of the Quebec plan, its inability to satisfy every special concern -- and fears about its costs, certainly in new taxes. But more specifically, some particular elements and areas turned against the scheme. In Lower Canada, for example, the Rouges rejected it as "a Grand Trunk job" to bail out railway interests; but also because these heirs of Papineau's radical nationaliste tradition deemed it an Anglo-power drive that would swamp the French-Canadian people.

Yet more still in the Maritimes, little Prince Edward Island itself felt swamped by the rep-by-pop principle, which would allow it only a scant five seats in the federal House of Commons. The island colony withdrew, not to enter Confederation until 1873. Moreover, Newfoundland, which was still remote from the mainland ("Her face turns to Britain, her back to the Gulf," sang anti-Confederate Newfoundlanders) also rejected union with Canada, and was not to join it till 1949. Nevertheless, these rejections were not disastrous. A viable federal union could still be formed between the big Province of Canada and the two main Maritime provinces, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Then in New Brunswick, Tilley's pro-Confederation government was defeated in the provincial election of March, 1865, though to a large extent over local issues. Furthermore, in Nova Scotia Tupper did not even dare to put Confederation to a test in the Assembly: for his formidable Liberal opponent, Joseph Howe -- who had not been at either Charlottetown or Quebec -- was heading a powerful movement to save his beloved home province from what he called "the Botheration Scheme."

All the same, there was reason to hope that Maritime opinion could be won back. And in the Province of Canada itself, the Quebec Resolutions gained commanding legislative approval in March, 1865, following historic parliamentary discussions duly published as the Confederation Debates. The opposing Rouge group was simply flooded under. The main body of Cartier's Conservatives held firm, usefully aided by public pronouncements from the Catholic bishops of French Canada in favour of Confederation. Moreover, Brown's Upper Canadian Liberal majority stayed heartily with the Quebec plan. But more also, John A. Macdonald now rose to the fore as virtual leader of the Coalition ministry, thanks to his patient generalship and amiable wit -- not to forget his sharp skill as an in-fighter or his always dexterous and tolerant diplomacy.

Later in 1865, besides, new influences strengthened the cause of the Quebec federal plan. Much stemmed from Britain, still a powerful factor in colonial decisions across the Atlantic. The imperial government was anxious to reduce its commitments and burdens in North America, and was aware, too, of closer problems rising in Europe with the emergence there of a strong German nation-state and other new potent nationalisms. Thus in the early summer of 1865, an official Canadian mission to England by Macdonald, Brown Cartier and Galt, won the British government's agreement to use its legitimate influence to help create a new Confederation; to guarantee defence aid to it, and arrange for the transfer of the whole North West to such a federal state. And when the Canadian mission returned home, assured of British backing for the Quebec plan, American influences were also working in its favour -- if quite unwittingly.

The American Civil War had ended in April, 1865. With a sigh of relief, British Americans watched the mighty Union armies being rapidly demobilized. But there was still a huge pool of trained United States military man-power available, and American expansionists again were looking northward, particularly across the western plains. Furthermore, American high-tariff interests exploited anti-British sentiments that rose after the St. Albans Raid of 1864 to ensure the abrogation of the Reciprocity Treaty. It indeed would disappear in 1866. These looming problems hence led anti-Confederation elements in the Maritimes to have new thoughts -- over the economic future, and the need as well to shape a united front against American threats, to show that the colonies could not be absorbed piecemeal. The reality was that Maritime anti-Confederates had little positive to offer, only criticisms. In both New Brunswick and Nova Scotia they now began to come around; not saying they liked the Quebec plan they had so thoroughly condemned, but suggesting (vaguely) that some other union scheme might suit. Then came the Fenian Raids, to complete the popular defeat of Maritime anti-Confederation forces.

The Fenians were Irish-Americans, many of them Union ex-soldiers, who sought confusedly to free Ireland from British rule by invading Canada instead. Yet more important, an unfriendly United States let them do so, and thus let loose another round of border warfare. That unofficial conflict spread violence into British American territory from April, 1866, thereby spurring a colonial resistance that looked still more towards the strength of union. The Fenians raided into Lower Canada, and ultimately struck at Red River. Most serious, however, were their push across the Niagara River at Fort Erie (leading to bloody combat in the little Battle of Ridgeway) and their invasion over the New Brunswick frontier from Maine, which proved even more significant in the response it roused. The Upper Canadian raid struck a community already fully in support of Confederation. But the rapidly collapsing New Brunswick assault rallied much less convinced Maritimers to the cause of union -- especially when grand Fenian pronouncements condemned Confederation as a design for British anti-republican tyranny. If so, angry Maritime citizens might only think Confederation a good idea! New elections were held in New Brunswick. Its weak anti-Confederate government (with no fresh answers) was swept away in June, 1866, replaced by Tilley and his Quebec-plan supporters. Moreover, in Nova Scotia, Premier Tupper now felt it safe to reopen the federal union question; and soon delegates were being readied for a final constitutional conference to be held in Britain, the centre of empire.

This London Conference met at the Westminster Palace Hotel in December, 1866, with many of the former Quebec Conference delegates present, but not George Brown. While his determined drive had essentially launched the successful Confederation movement, he had left the cabinet in 1865, less suited for the long haul which his great rival, Macdonald, had effectively taken over. Brown, however, remained a strong supporter of Confederation; and he shared in shaping a new provincial constitution for Ontario in 1866, when at the first legislative session held in the newly completed Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, constitutions for both the future provinces of Quebec and Ontario were debated and accepted. As for the London Conference that ran on into 1867, it made some revisions in the original Quebec scheme; but basically it approved a federal system built upon the Quebec Resolutions which then was put through the imperial Houses of Parliament in the spring of 1867 as the British North America Act. That founding Act went into effect on July 1, 1867. John A. Macdonald stood out on that great day, rightly, as the first prime minister of a confederated Dominion of Canada. But Brown, Cartier and Galt, Tilley, Tupper, and McGee, nonetheless shared signal honours for its creation.

The new federal Dominion thus born in 1867 began with only the provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario, once Upper and Lower Canada. Yet steps to bring in the whole western half of British America were already well under way. Within three more years, the great North West of plains, sub-Arctic and Arctic expanses would be added to the union. Within four years, British Columbia and Vancouver Island (combined as a single, larger British Columbia in 1866) would join Confederation as well. Still, these western changes, from centuries of fur-trade dominance, must be left for now; since while in process, they only were to be realized after the original achievement of Confederation.

Nevertheless, it can and should be said that on July 1, 1867, the established British-American communities heralded the birth of a "new nationality" -- the favoured term of that day. It had varied elements: Native peoples, French Canadians, English, Irish, Scots, and Welsh, along with Germans, Blacks and still more; all in a growing blend of ethnic heritages, regional outlooks and economic interests. Together these elements formed one broad Canadian state, soon to reach transcontinental size. The members of the new nationality thus joined on July 1, 1867, to celebrate the birthday of their federal union; with pomp and proclamation at Ottawa, the capital of Confederation, with parades, military reviews and public ceremonies in other major centres. But above all, the day was a summer holiday for ordinary citizens: marked by regattas on lakes or rivers, games and picnics in parks or fair grounds; fireworks and bonfires gleaming from the heights, as the warm July night came on. The people happily enjoyed federal Canada's birthday -- as they have ever since.

Copyright © 1999 Canadian Heritage Gallery