of abolitionism. Its owner, after all, was a prominent member of the city’s vigorous Anti-Slavery Society. Nevertheless, his paper recognized that the Harper’s Ferry raid had been hopelessly misguided; and George Brown had himself obtained a legal opinion from Oliver Mowat, his close colleague in the Reform party and associate in the Anti-Slavery Society, affirming that the charge of treason against the raiders would have been upheld in Canadian courts.2 Whatever the rights of the case, the future looked grim enough for the United States. “We take our leave of 1859,” the Globe sombrely closed its survey of the American scene, “with threats of disunion ringing in our ears.”3
Compared with the sectional strife in the American union, the problems facing Canada looked by no means so explosive. Yet here, too – as Brown and the Globe would emphasize – the Canadian union that had been formed in 1841 from the two old provinces of Upper and Lower Canada was racked with sectional discord. Canada West and East were not just halves of the United Province. They were still Upper and Lower Canada to their inhabitants; two widely divergent communities, the one dominated by English-speaking Protestants, the other by French-speaking Roman Catholics, and effectively divided within a common frame of government by the scheme of equal representation that gave the same number of parliamentary seats to each section. The discord between them had reached new heights of vehemence during 1859. It showed no sign of lessening, as Upper Canadians hotly denounced what they regarded as eastern domination of the union, and Lower Canadians grimly resisted any change that might place them in the power of a hostile West.
As the western Reform organ sharply presented it, the chief British province in America lay divided, distracted, and cast down.4 A good harvest had helped the slow and partial recovery from the severe depression of 1857-8; yet it seemed that the heady, boundless optimism of the railway boom of the earlier fifties would never return. Railways had been built; population and economic complexity had grown; but a disappointed, disunited Canada was still little more than a thin margin of settlement in the enormous wilderness of British America. And yet, in spite of every problem, Brown’s Globe looked forward manfully to the 1860s. “Our belief,” it said conclusively, “that Canada contains within herself elements of progress which will yet place her among the foremost nations of the world, is not one jot abated.”5 Was this that wishful thinking called nationalism, which still might put its mark upon the next decade?
A time of the making of nations. Though this was barely foreshadowed, such would the sixties be. In Europe, a united Italy would arise from the bravura of Garibaldi and the calculations of Cavour, even as Bismarck worked towards that German national unity destined to upset the power balance of the world. In the United States, nationalism would triumph, in appalling cost of civil war, and establish the modern centralized republic. And in British North America itself, internal crisis and external threat, dreams and near-desperation, would at last move the provinces into a federal union, the broad continental basis for a Canadian nation-state. There were transforming years ahead, and they would work upon George Brown. The strongest exponent of Upper Canada sectionalism would become an all important builder of the new national design. The moulder and leader of the Clear Grit Reform party of Canada West would exercise a potent influence on Liberalism in the federal Dominion to be proclaimed in 1867. But in the more immediate future lay fresh political defeats and hard new personal trials. Like any other man, Brown was the more fortunate not to see ahead too clearly.
Not that he would have felt great need of foreknowledge: “Sufficient unto the day” had always been his motto. Now, as 1860 opened, he showed no real anxiety for great events impending, good or bad. He was attending closely to the Globe, preparing hopefully for the next political campaign, rejoicing at the re-election of Toronto’s Reform mayor, Adam Wilson. Quite probably he went a few days later to nearby Newmarket, to stand with party stalwarts in a swirling snow-storm as Wilson was also declared victor in the North York by-election, which was held to fill the parliamentary vacancy left by the death of old Joseph Hartman, one of the early Clear Grit Liberals.6
Perhaps, as well, he improved his otherwise hard-working bachelor existence with evenings at the winter lecture series in St. Lawrence Hall, where distinguished visitors such as Horace Greeley and Ralph Waldo Emerson were currently enlightening Toronto society. At any rate, he was there to introduce Greeley’s address on “Great Men”.7 And his massive six-foot figure loomed up as familiarly among the lecture-going élite at St. Lawrence Hall, at the Music Hall, or at the Lyceum, as it did in the busy crowd on King Street, when he strode along to the Globe office or the St. Charles restaurant, long arms swinging, a ready smile for an acquaintance on his eager, expressive face. He was forty-one. His red hair was fading somewhat into brown, and had sufficiently receded that a hostile observer could unkindly term him “a hungry-looking, bald-headed individual”.8 Still, Brown’s long, strong features, powerful jaw, and piercing blue eyes might well have appeared hungry-looking to the aforesaid observer (one Captain Rhys), seeing that the Captain’s calm proposal that the Globe print his theatrical posters on credit had been indignantly rejected.9
In fact, however, Brown was his old vigorous self: decided in his likes and dislikes, equally decided in revealing them. There was no guile in his make-up; and his normal good nature, transparent kindness, and cheerful laughter far outbalanced his sudden bursts of indignation or the aggressive urgency and fervour of his will. His was a forthright, frank simplicity, ruled by a powerful conscience and quick emotions. “Do as you feel right,” he said, “and you will be sure to be right.”10 Of course he could be fiercely uncompromising, imperious, dogmatic. But he was loved and admired by his personal friends and political followers; and there were few indeed of his enemies who did not feel a deep, reluctant respect for him.
His health now appeared fully recovered after the exhaustion and depression of the preceding summer. His optimism and cheerful self-assurance were wholly restored. In short, this much was certain: that as George Brown moved forward into a new era, his confidence in the future was – in the Globe’s own announcement – “not one jot abated”.
2
Brown had more to announce that January in his paper. He had been busy for weeks at the office on the latest large-scale project to improve the Globe, and the journal bowed in the new year in what it modestly called “the handsomest new dress yet”.11 This was the result of a new font of copper-faced type, of the most modern cut, specially cast for it by James Connor and Sons of New York.12 Henceforth Brown could crowd still more into the Globe’s four large pages of nine columns each, yet still keep them legible and attractive. More notable still, he had bought a second big double-cylinder Taylor press. Each of them could print 3,000 sheets an hour; and he had the only two in the British provinces. To complement the presses he had installed a remarkable new folding machine from Philadelphia, as used in some of the larger American printing offices, that could fold the sheets as fast as the Taylor presses could throw them off. The Globe could now print, fold, and mail 3,000 papers an hour with only six employees in the press room, most of them boys. The new machinery, Brown calculated, should save enough to pay its cost within a year.13 He was really ushering in the age of the big mechanized press in Canada – although the conservative-minded printers’ trade would prove none too appreciative of his policy.14
In part the pressure of circulation, and in part the hope for more, had dictated this large investment in improvement. The Globe’s daily, tri-weekly, and weekly editions now sold well over 20,000 copies.15 Before the following year was out, they would claim more than 30,000.16 This, in a city of some 40,000 people and an Upper Canada of approximately a million and a quarter, was a significant figure indeed, especially when the newspaper “clubs” across the West passed each copy of the Globe from hand to hand among a devout body of the faithful. Moreover, the influence of the country’s largest newspaper was vital to George Brown’s political career. Hence politics as well as business impelled his new programme of expansion, venturesome as it might be in such dull times. Yet it had always worked before. Better facilities and faster publication would stimulate greater circulation, while greater circulation would bring more advertising revenue to meet the costs – and still wider public influence for the Globe.
In