No true Scotsman would be so disrespectful.
The Macdonalds endured a squalid six-week voyage to Quebec. Packed with several hundred passengers, the Earl of Buckinghamshire was about the size of a modern Toronto Island ferry, or Vancouver’s SeaBus. Its washroom facilities were two privies, each less than fifty centimetres square, handily located over the stern. Crammed into a sleeping compartment, 1.5 metres square and stacked with bunks, were the parents, four children, cousin Maria, and Macdonald’s seventy-five-year-old grandmother, whom Helen refused to leave behind. (She barely survived the journey.) Even this cramped space was shared with another emigrant family. By the time they reached Kingston, in mid-July 1820, they had been travelling for three months.
With hindsight, emigration to Canada was John A. Macdonald’s first step towards a notable destiny. At the time, it seemed a humiliation. His parents became determined that their son must succeed to compensate for their failure. Helen in particular insisted that “John will make more than an ordinary man.” A family tragedy added to the pressures. In 1822, Macdonald’s younger brother, James, was killed in an accident — “if accident it can be called,” commented an early biographer, catching Macdonald’s anger at the tragedy even sixty years later. One evening, the parents entrusted their sons to an ex-soldier called Kennedy. Preferring boozing to babysitting, Kennedy took the children to a bar and attempted to make them drink gin. When the boys tried to run away, Kennedy lost his temper and hurled James into the iron grate of a fireplace, causing internal injuries that killed him. This appalling experience left John A. Macdonald as the sole surviving son, bearing the full weight of his parents’ hopes upon his young shoulders.
Kingston was then the largest urban centre in Upper Canada, but it contained only three thousand people, smaller than most modern country towns. New York State was just across the St. Lawrence, but the United States seemed remote — although the Macphersons vividly recalled Yankee bullets smashing into Kingston’s timber fortifications back in 1812. The British Empire, on the other hand, was a very real presence, thanks to the redcoats of the imperial garrison: the young John A. Macdonald even dreamed of a career under the British flag in India. The town had been founded in 1784 by Loyalist refugees from the newly independent American republic, families like the Hagermans and Cartwrights who had made sacrifices for Britain — and coolly expected rewards in return. Kingston’s elite accepted successful newcomers, especially Scots or Irish Protestants, men like merchant John Mowat, from Caithness, who settled in 1816; lawyer Thomas Kirkpatrick from Dublin, who arrived in 1823; and — a decade later — the medical doctor James Campbell, who came from Yorkshire via Montreal. The son of a failed immigrant, John A. Macdonald had to gatecrash this local elite. For all his fabled political charm, his sometimes fraught relations with Kingston’s leading families reflected his marginal status.
After failing to establish a store in Kingston, Hugh Macdonald shifted forty kilometres west to the village of Hay Bay in 1824. Later, he moved to the Stone Mills (now Glenora) in Prince Edward County, to run the flour mill that gave the place its name. Although Hugh had no farming experience, he considered moving still further west, to try growing wheat. A neighbour tactfully steered him away from the project: nothing would grow beyond Port Hope because “the summer frosts kill everything.” Decades later, Macdonald quoted that story against pessimists who doubted the potential of the prairies. In 1836, the Macphersons arranged a job for Hugh as a clerk in the Commercial Bank, Kingston’s own financial institution, and the Macdonalds moved back to town. By then, his son had replaced him as the family breadwinner. Hugh, it was discreetly recalled, was “unequal to the responsibilities of the head of a family.” John A. recalled that it had been his indomitable mother who carried them through the difficult early years in Canada.
John A. Macdonald was a bright child, “the star of Canada,” as one of Hugh’s drinking pals called him. Aged ten in 1825, he was sent to the Midland District Grammar School in Kingston, an academy that specialized in teaching Latin and mathematics, subjects which were the key to professional or commercial careers. (The school was less effective at teaching French, a language Macdonald never mastered.) For five years he shuttled between the town and his family home in the country, living in both, belonging to neither. This strange phase of his life would emphasize the dual aspect of his character — the competitive and secretive personality who manipulated charm to win friends. In Kingston, he lodged with a miserly landlady, spending his free time cadging food from the Macphersons. The genial old colonel became an alternative father figure. Donald Macpherson had risen from the ranks to defend Canada for the Empire in the War of 1812; John A. Macdonald would replicate his gallant career in politics.
In class, the son of a struggling country storekeeper competed with the sons of the comfortable local elite, who likely looked down on him. Opening a gymnasium in Ottawa sixty years later, Macdonald joked “when I was a boy at school I was fighting all the time, but I always got licked.” He continued to be a star pupil, the boy the headmaster would summon to the blackboard to impress visitors with the school’s mathematical teaching. But the unending pressure to succeed took its toll. Once, facing stressful examinations, young Macdonald ran away from school, arriving home unexpectedly, and close to a breakdown. He paid a high price for his elite schooling. “I had no boyhood,” he once said in later years.
In the holidays, Macdonald imitated Colonel Macpherson by playing soldiers with his sisters, casting himself as their commander. Once, when Louisa ignored orders, he picked up a real gun and threatened to shoot her for disobedience. Fortunately, Margaret dissuaded him, for the weapon was loaded. She probably saved Macdonald’s political career: a slaughtered sister would have been an electoral liability. Campaigning in the area sixty years later, Macdonald spoke nostalgically of idyllic days when he had run wild and barefoot, but in fact he did not belong around Hay Bay and Glenora any more than he did in town. His parents’ well-meaning gesture of inviting local children to parties to welcome John home from school probably accentuated resentment against the “big-nosed Scotch kid.” The girls mocked him as “ugly John”; the boys bullied him. One winter, Macdonald tried skating on Lake Ontario. Sneering at his spindly legs, a local lad upended him on the ice. On another occasion, a bigger boy pinned him down and rubbed Hugh Macdonald’s flour into his untidy black hair. For their part, the country children considered the interloper to be vindictive and violent-tempered.
“From the age of fifteen I began to earn my own living,” John A. Macdonald once recalled, bemoaning his lost boyhood. But in pioneer days, most youngsters worked by their mid-teens, and his puzzling comment suggests that he had bigger expectations. As prime minister, he remarked that if he had received a university education, he would have made his career in literature. Perhaps this was just political image-making, but maybe his hothouse schooling was intended as a preparation for a college education. If so, the idea must have been to send him to Scotland, where universities accepted students in their mid-teens: planned colleges in Montreal and Toronto had yet to open their doors. A dream of higher education in Scotland might also explain why, in 1829, John was switched to a new Kingston academy, opened by a young Aberdeen University graduate. One other clue is revealing. In 1839, Macdonald was scheduled to speak at a fund-raising meeting in Kingston, part of the campaign to establish Queen’s University. He prepared an address on the importance of education but, when his turn came, he could not utter a word. It was John A. Macdonald’s only failure as a public speaker: the subject evidently triggered complex emotions. The dashing of his hopes for a university education perhaps helps explain John A. Macdonald’s drive to succeed in life.
In 1830, Macdonald entered the Kingston law office of George Mackenzie, and also lodged in his house. A kindly couple with no children of their own, the Mackenzies gave their charge some space to manage his life. Like many adolescents, Macdonald disliked getting up in the mornings. One day, unable to rouse him, Sarah Mackenzie closed off every chink of light in the lad’s bedroom and left him comatose in pitch darkness. When he eventually shook himself awake and opened the curtains, the sun was setting. The problem did not recur.
Young Macdonald’s sharp intelligence and a photographic memory impressed his boss and, late in 1832, Mackenzie sent him to manage a branch law office at Napanee, forty kilometres west of Kingston. Not quite eighteen and operating independently for the first time, Macdonald had to choose the personality he wished to project. Initially, he wrapped himself in professional dignity, perhaps emulating