In March 1871, Sir John A. Macdonald was visiting Washington, D.C., with his wife Agnes and four distinguished Englishmen. One of them, Lord de Grey and Ripon, a British cabinet minister, brought his cook on the trip to ensure they all ate properly.
They went sightseeing in horse-drawn carriages and met President Ulysses Grant. At Congress, they witnessed the re-election of the House Speaker and shook hands with almost every senator. The Americans joked that as “the British lion was waiting,” they “must come out and confront him.” It was belligerent language couched in dry humour.
But in 1871, the British lion was not looking for a fight. On the contrary, the top British aim was to secure peace with the United States. Because Canada was still a lion cub, needing Great Britain for its defence, Macdonald’s top priority was also peace.
The threat of war was real. The Americans had invaded Canada in 1775 and again in 1812. In 1871, the British could not afford an American war with modern weapons and methods.
Canada invested too little in its military to have an independent voice—sadly, a situation still true today.
In fact, Canada was so vulnerable to failure at the time that Macdonald needed the help of British troops to quell a tiny rebellion of Métis buffalo hunters led by Louis Riel, an occasion when the tiny Dominion could actually have collapsed and all North America fallen into American hands.
The Americans raged over a range of disputes that could lead to war. They felt contempt for “the Colonial authority known as the Dominion of Canada.” They claimed massive compensation from the British, known as the Alabama Claims, for war damages by British-built Confederate ships during the U.S. Civil War.
They also demanded free access to Canada’s inshore fishing waters where “unfriendly” Canadian authorities had been stopping American vessels. In the Washington meetings, Macdonald put up with “a good deal of gas talked about the fisheries.” His position was “exceedingly embarrassing” and he had to “scrimmage,” in private, to explain Canada’s position to his English allies.
So Lord de Grey kept his cook busy. He hosted several dinners for the British and American Commissioners which, Macdonald wrote, in the innocent language of the time, were “gay enough.”
However, one night, Macdonald was fascinated, perhaps alarmed, when the Americans invited an extra guest—one of the most ferocious military leaders of the American Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman.
Sherman was a legend. Everyone knew of his bloody exploits, leading 60,000 troops in the scorched-earth “March to the Sea” from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia, “smashing things” to make the South “feel the hard hand of war.” The victorious Union Army in 1865 numbered one million men.
Sherman was now General-in-Chief of the U.S. Army.
Had the Americans brought Sherman in to intimidate the British into abandoning Canada in exchange for a “permanent peace between the two nations”?
The Americans’ goal was to divide and conquer, “to get up a sort of quarrel between the two, and to strengthen that party in England which desires to get rid of the colonies as a burden,” Macdonald wrote. If the Yankees could separate Canada from its imperial protector, the Stars and Stripes could soon fly unrivalled over North America.
Contrary to some historians, Macdonald was not “helpless.” But nor did he win Canada’s place as an “independent” player. Both are exaggerations.
Independence was not at issue, but peace and security. Macdonald knew the Americans “were strung to a very high pitch” and without a deal, “the war cloud will hang over England and Canada.”
Macdonald hated yielding American access to Canadian fish. He thought the British were “craven,” too “squeezable.” He knew he would be a political scapegoat back home and indeed the Opposition called him a “traitor.”
Privately, Macdonald wrote that “England had been frightened” by American belligerency “into coercing Canada.”
However, he got the British to accept, in writing, that U.S. access to Canada’s inshore fisheries was subject to approval by the Dominion Parliament—a step towards sovereignty in external relations.
His great accomplishment was maintaining a united front.
Attacked in Parliament, Macdonald defended the Washington Treaty, which “removed almost all possibility of war.” By securing peace among the Anglo-Saxon peoples, it marked “an epoch in the history of civilization.”
“England and Canada are one,” he declared. In future, Canada would be “the right arm of England” and “a powerful auxiliary to the Empire”—a prophetic vision of Canadians’ epic role in the two world wars.
The English-speaking world has changed a lot since then. But the peace that Macdonald helped secure along the Canada-U.S. border—the “longest undefended border” in history—has lasted 152 years, to this day.
