Miss Confederation Read online

  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 political union. At that conference in Quebec City they wanted to do everything in their power to charm the Maritime delegates. They must have realized it was crucial to keep the relaxed, convivial tone and lovely party atmosphere of Charlottetown going. And for that to happen, they knew they needed to include the women. Not only were the belles of Quebec City invited to the banquets and balls that were held alongside the political discussions, so too were the wives, sisters, and daughters of the Maritime delegates. In this way, the Canadians could court the Maritimers, and the Maritimers would be able to enjoy a sightseeing- and banquet-filled trip of a lifetime, at which their daughters could “come out.”

  There are newspaper accounts of the events, banquets, and balls in Quebec City; speeches published months after the meetings; letters from George Brown (founder of the Globe, today’s Globe and Mail) to his wife; and limited minutes of the proceedings — all written by men. The story of the women who were present at the Confederation conference events has been absent from the record. Mercy Coles’s diary gives us that story.

  I have transcribed the full diary, all of which is included in this book. Mercy’s two weeks of travel back home to PEI through the northern United States while the Civil War was in full swing, which has never been documented before now, is also included. This latter part of the diary was a revealing read; it captures a different side of Mercy, perhaps a more vulnerable side.

  We are so lucky to have Mercy Coles’s diary. She thought to keep a record of the events, and just as importantly, she thought to preserve that record and pass it on to relatives. They, in turn, were wise enough to take care of it, and eventually share it with Library and Archives Canada.

  It is the only full account of these events from a woman’s perspective. Further, it’s not tied to political ideals or machinations. It is a record caught at the moment history was being made, without the veneer or gloss that passing time creates.

  When I first read the diary, I focused on the parts that were easy to read and transcribe, and used the events and timeline loosely in my novel To the Edge of the Sea, set during the Confederation conferences. It was a few years afterward that I began transcribing the full diary, reading it closely, paying attention to every nuance, and looking at the placement of words on the page.

  Mercy was often travelling while she wrote — bumping along on the trains or in a carriage, and so, especially in the latter part of her diary, there are words and phrases that are illegible at points.

  Because it is an original document, one can see Mercy’s style of writing and penmanship; they became an interest in and of themselves. I had to work closely with the text to understand what she was saying. For example, I wondered to whom she was referring when she wrote “Lala dined with us.… I was rather disappointed in the man.…” Whomever she was speaking of was obviously famous, but who was he? Not the yellow Teletubby, I was sure. A study of Mercy’s penmanship proved it was “Sala” I needed to look for, not “Lala.” Ah — it was George Augustus Sala, a British journalist, famous at the time, who was then travelling through Canada.

  One can see how Mercy shapes her capital S, and R. The S is important to identifying Sala’s name. Her capital R is distinctive, closer to what is typically a small r, but made large enough to be a capital letter. The name Louis Riel comes out clearly, even though it is small in size, written to fit in the same line as “a Red River man,” but above it. It’s clear that the name was written some time afterward. How long afterward, though? It could very well have been later that same day. Still, the fact that it is an unknown time afterwards is important for assessing the accuracy of what Mercy knew at the time, and what she believed later. Even within this original document, then, it can be seen how the passing of time and the impulse of the author to edit her work have affected the history of the moment.

  More than the study of the writing, though, it was the people, places, and events Mercy wrote of that interested me. At every turn, she piqued my curiosity. What were her relationships with John A. Macdonald or with Leonard Tilley? Why was the Victoria Bridge an important part of their sightseeing itinerary — and was that the same bridge we’d crossed over every week when I was a child to go visit my cousins in Montreal? Was diphtheria, which Mercy caught in Quebec City, really that bad? What was this “Bonnie Blue Flag” she wrote of while visiting with her relatives in Ohio?

  I was intrigued by all she wrote. As I researched further, I felt like I was recreating a picture of Canada as it was at Confederation, a picture framed and circumscribed by what Mercy Coles presented to me, as it was presented to her. It is by no means a complete picture — it is, as I say, a circumscribed view of the time, the events, places, and people at an important time in Canada’s history. Importantly, Mercy has given immediacy, colour, and depth to all to which she turned her gaze, her female gaze.

  That this is the first time the diary will have been published is extra-ordinary to me. Pieces of it have been quoted, but it has never been published in its entirety. That it hasn’t appeared until now speaks volumes about who and what we consider worthy of hearing. It is heartening that now, 150 years later, Mercy Coles’s writing will be available to all.

  One

  Miss Confederation: Mercy Anne Coles

  It is rather a joke, he is the only beau of the party and with 5 single ladies he has something to do to keep them all in good humour.1

  The “he” mentioned in the above quotation is Leonard Tilley, who was then the premier of New Brunswick, and Mercy Anne Coles, the irreverent writer of this note, was one of those single women. Ten unmarried women altogether, three from Prince Edward Island, two from Nova Scotia, four from New Brunswick, and one from Canada West, accompanied their fathers or brothers to the conference in Quebec City, where the men negotiated Confederation and the creation of Canada.

  The start of Canada’s journey to Confederation is a fascinating one, involving a circus; Farini, the tightrope walker from Port Hope, Ontario; the American Civil War; a whole lot of champagne, sunshine, and sea; and lovemaking — in the old-fashioned sense.

  The process began in earnest when, in September 1864, the Fathers of Confederation, travelling by rail, steamship, and horse-drawn carriage, met in Charlottetown, the provincial capital of Prince Edward Island, to discuss the possibility of a union of Britain’s North American colonies.* Like New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, PEI was an independent colony of the British Crown at the time. The final of this group of colonies, Canada, was made up of Ontario and Quebec, then known respectively as Canada West and Canada East. Each of the Maritime colonies was very small, and with a large and growing American neighbour, many of the colonies’ residents, including those of Canada East and West, felt that if they were to survive separate from the United States, then the time had come to join forces and form a larger political entity.**

  Following their time in Charlottetown, the Canadian and Maritime delegates crossed the Northumberland Strait on the Canadians’ steamship, the Queen Victoria, and toured briefly through Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, meeting in Halifax on September 12 for the delegates to discuss the idea of Confederation further. Mercy Coles, the unmarried twenty-six-year-old daughter of Prince Edward Island delegate George Coles, went with her father on this tour. From Merc
y’s descriptions she was the only young woman to go on this trip with the delegates. Perhaps her father viewed this as an opportunity for her education, or to meet a potential husband.

  The big meetings and events, though, were saved for Quebec City, where, in October 1864, the Maritime Fathers of Confederation, with their unmarried daughters and sisters in tow, travelled again on the Queen Victoria, which the Canadians had sent to bring the Maritimers up to Quebec City. They promenaded on the decks and looked out at the spectacular fall scenery along the shores of the St. Lawrence.

  Mercy Coles was not part of this large group, however. She writes that her “father thought the trip [by ship the whole way] would be too rough for mother and me.”2 Instead, Mercy, her father and mother; William Pope (Colonial Secretary and a member of the Conservative Party, which was in power in PEI) and his wife; and Mrs. Alexander, the widowed sister of Thomas Heath Haviland (also a member of the Conservative Party), left on October 5, a day earlier than the others. They crossed from PEI to Shediac, New Brunswick, then took a train specially booked for them to Saint John. There they picked up Leonard Tilley, the aforementioned “only beau of the party,” as well as two members of Tilley’s government — Charles Fisher, with his daughter Jane, and William Steeves, with his two daughters.

  From Saint John, they travelled by steamship down the Bay of Fundy, the trip taking twenty-four hours, to Portland, Maine (compare this to the sixty-plus hours it would take to get to Quebec City by ship). There was as yet no rail line from the Maritimes to Quebec through Canada, and so the group had to take this roundabout route through the United States. Of course, what the single women missed in the promenading on the Queen Victoria’s deck, they gained in the attention paid to them by the recent widower and then-premier of New Brunswick, Leonard Tilley.