Image source: Eden B.
Image source: Eden B.
It can be no exaggeration to state that at this moment the eyes of all Canadians are looking south toward the American capitol. They watch to see what Mr. John A. MacDonald will achieve at the Washington Conference, his first great test as Prime Minister. Will he protect our fishing rights? Will he get compensation for the Fenian Raids launched upon us from American soil? Most significantly, will he allow the Americans to annex Rupert’s Land in compensation for the Alabama Claims? For those Canadians ignorant of the Alabama Claims I will explain. The Confederate warship Alabama sank sixty-eight Union ships during the Civil War. The losses are estimated in the billions of dollars. The Alabama was built for the Confederacy in a British shipyard hence the Americans expect the British to pay—pay in either gold, silver, or land. Given the disastrous state of the British economy, land will be the currency and Canada will be the bank that pays.
Rupert’s Land stretches from the Red River to the Rocky Mountains. It is vast and it is fertile; wheat and cattle and settlers will thrive. The Americans desire it; indeed, they insist that by rights it should be theirs—all the way north to the ice.
What will Mr. MacDonald do? How will he keep the American behemoth, fanged and armed and greedy for yet more land, south of the border? Will his signature cerise cravat, striped trousers and yellow shoes be enough? Will his renowned wit keep the Americans at bay? Or will they come pouring north across the border like a flood when the dike breaks, Canadians corralled to the eastern corner of the continent, Canada, in time, eroded to naught but a memory?
Letter to the Globe - March 1871
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The MacDonalds traveled south. At Prescott on the Saint Lawrence River they boarded the Freedom bound for Ogdensburg on the American side from which they would continue to Washington as part of the British delegation intending to settle, among other issues, the Alabama Claims and thereby keep the U.S. army from invading Canada.
“The Americans want the British to compensate them for the Union ships sunk by the Alabama,” said John A.
“I know,” said Agnes. “Everyone knows.”
“The British can’t afford to hand over the millions that are being demanded.”
“I know,” said Agnes. “Everyone knows.”
“So the Americans will ask for Rupert’s Land.”
“Yes,” said Agnes. “I read the papers.”
“It is my job to say no.”
“You and the rest of your team,” she corrected him.
“Are you also aware of the noises they are making?” he asked. “That Canada is a burden.”
Agnes sipped her sparkling water which had lost its effervescence.
“They say, my dearest dear, that we are too costly. That if the Americans want us the British will not stand in their way. Certainly they will not commit troops or money. So, my dear, on this last point you are wrong. It is up to me. Me and me alone. I made Canada and now I must defend Canada. Now that McGee is dead and Cartier sick, I am a man alone. I am David facing Goliath. Now this man alone is going out on deck. Are you going to keep him company?”
“No.”
“No?” He was bemused. “Then God willing he shall see you anon.”
She remained where she was in the forward lounge and watched him battle the door open against the wind and then, visible through the porthole, grip the rail, feet set wide, rain lashing his face. Oh, God, she thought, but she did love him and find him exhausting and childlike and incomprehensible and contradictory. Yet how exhilarating it was to be Lady MacDonald, how exalting, and now here they were off to Washington. As such, she supposed that she had a duty, and with a sigh she rose and followed him out on deck and stood beside him with the rain stinging her brow and cheeks and the wind tugging at her bonnet and molesting her hair and her rump. Her hand found his and squeezed, and there they remained stalwart against the elements.
When they docked in Ogdensburg the rain had ceased and the sky was clearing.
“You are soaked,” said Agnes. “You must change your coat.”
“Do you smell that?” he asked.
Agnes looked around. “I don’t know. I smell many things. Tar, rope, mud, smoke.” The Freedom was tied to the wharf, though continued to rise and fall with the swell, hull nudging the piles while frantic gulls screeled, dogs barked, and longshoremen cursed as they unloaded bales and crates.
“Inhale again,” he instructed her.
She inhaled again and detected the damp dull metallic scent of the river.
John A. sniffed as though a connoisseur of atmospheres. “America… The very air has a…” He rubbed his thumb and fingertips together as he sought the word. “A galvanic pepper to it.”
“Galvanic pepper? And just what does that mean, galvanic pepper?”
“They know what they are,” he stated. “Or rather they know what they think they are, what they wish to be. And they all partake of this conceit, this mass delusion. You can hear it.”
“Now America has a sound as well as a smell?”
“A fanfare. An orchestra. A marching band playing in the mind of each and every one of the buggers. They’re children at make-believe.”
“Children at make-believe with real guns,” observed Agnes. And yet as she continued to look around it seemed to her that Ogdensburg did not appear so very different from Prescott on the Canadian side of the river. A trio of wharfies stood smoking and they appeared just as lazy, leering, loutish, and sullen as any other young men regardless of nation.
“It’s there in England as well,” he said. “Did you not notice it?”
“No.”
“It was different of course. More subtle. Less frantic. An incontrovertible fact. Perhaps a touch smug, a little complacent. But this, make no mistake my love, this is American air.” He became troubled.
“What?”
“We do not have this,” he grudgingly conceded. “And I think that is a problem.”
“Perhaps this is the inbred deference of the colonial,” she suggested.
“Look.” He pointed. “They do not walk so much as strut, as if the bare fact of having been born here was somehow an achievement, a glory.”
Agnes saw no such glory in the longshoremen slouching about the riverside. Nor did the crewmen aboard the Freedom leaning upon the rail smoking and spitting appear to embody anything remotely glorious or galvanic. She did not, however, debate the point. She said, “Apparently this exercises you deeply.”
“Our Orangemen have some sullen version of it. Our Frenchmen have some haunted version of it. But separately. There is no unified spirit, no psychic engine to thrust us forward.”
“John, you are beginning to sound both mystical and mechanical.”
“Exactly!” he said. Then brooding, “Exactly…”
“A secular theocracy,” ventured Agnes.
John A. discovered her and, taking her hands in his, squeezed. “Bull’s eye my dear, bull’s eye.”
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November Street (2018) mh