Miss Confederation. Anne McDonald

      Dedication

      For my mother, Audrey McDonald, from whom I’ve inherited my curiosity and interest in the “real” story, and my aunt, Frances McDonald Griffith (1922–2011), who shared with me her essays and research on the history of Prince Edward Island, from out-migration to Francis Bolger’s seminal work.

      Contents

      Foreword by Christopher Moore

      Preface

      One — Miss Confederation: Mercy Anne Coles

      Two — Charlottetown: The Circus, Champagne, and Union

      Three — The Journey Begins: The Lure of Travel, the New — and Leonard Tilley

      Four — From the Sublime to the Ridiculous: The “Failed,” the Grand Success, or the Drunken Fiasco of the Government Ball

      Five — Diphtheria

      Six — The Temptation of John A. Macdonald

      Seven — What She Said — A Woman’s Point of View

      Eight — Montreal Sightseeing and the “Eighth Wonder of the World”

      Nine — Ottawa the Unseemly

      Ten — Sightseeing in Toronto, 1864 Style

      Eleven — Niagara Falls

      Twelve — Family and Travel

      Thirteen — Going Home

      Fourteen — Confederation Suitors

      Fifteen — Daughters and Fathers

      Conclusion

      Acknowledgements

      Appendix — “Reminiscences of Confederation Days: Extracts from a Diary Kept by Miss Mercy A. Coles When She Accompanied Her Father, the Late Hon. George Coles, to the Confederation Conferences at Quebec, Montreal and Ottawa in 1864.”

      Note on Sources

      Notes

      Bibliography

      Image Credits

      Foreword

      by Christopher Moore

      For years I had a little crush on Miss Mercy Coles, even when I only knew her diary from nasty print-outs and photocopies from the archives.

      When a well-brought-up Island girl would let me read her private thoughts, how could I not be smitten? The lively little scenes she conjures up, the bitter disappointments she confesses, the sharp opinions she offers — they all captivated me.

      How could my heart not melt when illness strikes her down just before the elegant ball she has set her heart on? A triumphal appearance might have changed her life. Alas, she missed it.

      How could I resist her vivid pen sketches of the great men of confederation? John A. Macdonald brings her dessert. Charles Tupper bustles in with his medical bag. D’Arcy McGee takes her to dinner and then drinks too much. Her own politician father dances himself into a lather. All this is livelier than, say, the debate over Number 8 of the Quebec Conference’s seventy-two constitutional resolutions. Such matters Mercy declines to mention, though her father is in the thick of them, and one senses she knows a good deal about them.

      But … I was being selfish, too. Mostly, I plundered what Mercy would tell me. I was greedy for the glimpses she gave of history in the making. Really, I was not paying attention to her hopes and dreams at all. I was just there to grab what I could use.

      Men!

      Anne McDonald taught me the error of my ways. It was from her sensitive reading in this book that I came truly to appreciate Mercy Anne Coles, Miss Confederation. It is Anne McDonald who listens for what a young woman of the 1860s will not say in words. She teaches us how to see all that is hiding between Mercy’s lines.

      Any reader can note that Leonard Tilley, the premier of New Brunswick, is a fellow passenger on the Coles family’s slow train to Quebec City. Anne McDonald sees and shows us the courting rituals that may be linking Mercy to this dynamic, and youngish, widower. And when the Coles family dines with John A. Macdonald, also a widower, she is the one who asks whether Mercy considers him as husband material. Those ambitious young political aides constantly about the hotel parlour — do they stand a chance at all?

      Anne McDonald lets us see that the gender politics around the Quebec Conference are at least as subtle as the constitutional partnership that is being negotiated simultaneously.

      Mercy Anne Coles’s diary is far and away the most personal account we have of the events surrounding the making of Canada’s confederation in 1864. Anne McDonald, herself an Island girl, almost, is our ideal guide to it. She unobtrusively gives us all the background we might want. More than that, she listens to Mercy. She suggests what we might look for, just below the surface of the text.

      Christopher Moore has twice won the Governor General’s Literary Award. He is the author of 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal and Three Weeks in Quebec City: The Meeting That Made Canada, among many other works. Mercy Coles plays cameo roles in both.

      Preface

      Prince Edward Island is always thought of as the birthplace of Confederation because the politicians of the day, including Canada’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, met in Charlottetown to discuss the possibility of a political union of the colonies of British North America. Thoughts of union had been bandied about for years, but it was in Charlottetown that it looked like the idea would finally take hold.

      That was in the late summer of 1864, and the weather, which would normally have turned cool by September first, was unseasonably warm. Not only was Prince Edward Island playing host to the politicians who had come to talk union, but, amazingly enough, the first circus in almost a generation had just arrived in Charlottetown. The Islanders, it turned out, including the PEI politicians, were more interested in the circus than in the negotiations to unite the colonies. You can’t blame them. The late summer was as lovely as summer can be in what’s come to be known as Canada’s Garden Province, and the circus was the highlight of the season.

      I learned all this one unreasonably hot summer in Toronto when I was teaching an adult English as Another Language literacy class, with students from all over the world. On a whim one sleepy afternoon, all of us sweltering together in an old school without air conditioning, the class watched a video celebrating Canada’s 125th birthday. The video told the story of the PEI Father of Confederation William Pope being rowed out in a tiny boat to the steamship Queen Victoria to meet the men who had come from Canada to PEI to talk Confederation.

      I was astonished. My father was from Prince Edward Island. As children, my sisters and I had gone almost every summer to visit my grandmother and aunts and uncles there. I love the Island, and I love history, and I’d never heard any of this before.

      I knew I had found a story I wanted to write.

      I began an enormous amount of research, and, in the course of doing so, I heard an interview on CBC Radio with Christopher Moore. He mentioned a young woman from PEI named Mercy Anne Coles. She had gone with her father, George Coles, to the Confederation conference in Quebec City in October 1864, which followed the summer meeting in Charlottetown. Mercy was one of nine unmarried daughters (only daughters went, no sons) of Maritime delegates who went to Quebec, where the now-famous Fathers of Confederation met to work out the terms for this union of all the British colonies.

      And she’d kept a diary of her trip.

      It was the Canadians, those from present-day Quebec and Ontario, who were most in need of a