Free John A by Richard J. Gwyn Page A

people on abstract and theoretical questions of government.”
    Macdonald and his supporters (all men of property, they being the only ones with the right to vote) were as one. That curious but occasionally insightful book The Canadian Commercial Revolution, 1845–1851 contains a good description of the typical Canadian voter of the time: “They were energetic, progressive and materialistic…they were strong and shrewd men, disdainful of theories, and interested chiefly in the material realities of life.” *22 In one respect, these unsentimental types might have wondered just what they were getting into. Part of Macdonald’s reply to his petitioners had a decidedly teasing, over-the-top quality to it: “With feelings of greater pride and gratitude than I can express…[t]he mode in which I can best evince my high sense of the honour you have done me is, at once, to lay aside all personal considerations and accede to your request.”
    For the actual election, in the fall of 1844, Macdonald issued his own proclamation in the Kingston Chronicle. It repeated his local ambitions and dealt with a topic that concerned most voters in the staunchly Loyalist town, no less so than Macdonald himself: “I, therefore, scarcely need state my firm belief that the prosperity of Canada depends upon its permanent connection with the Mother Country and that I shall resist to the utmost any attempt which may tend to weaken that union.”
    The balloting—each elector casting his vote not by marking an X on paper but in the “manly” manner of shouting his choice out loud—took place on Monday, October 14, and throughout the next day. Macdonald won easily, by 275 shouts against just 42 for his opponent, Anthony Manahan. As was far from always the case,the casting of the votes and their counting were conducted “in a most peaceful and orderly manner,” according to the Chronicle.
    But one thing had gone wrong for Macdonald. He had always assumed he would be serving as a member in a legislature that met in his home town of Kingston. Lord Sydenham, the first governor general of the new United Province of Canada, which had just replaced the separate provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, had announced in February 1841 that Kingston would be the capital of his domain. This town of some five thousand souls had gone into an instant and ecstatic boom—as had Macdonald’s law practice. Civil servants streamed in, along with the governor general and his mini-court. Construction was soon under way for at least four hundred new houses. Town officials took delighted note of the fact that a grand new town hall was being constructed which just happened to have, in its second storey, two high-ceilinged chambers ideal for the Legislative Assembly and theLegislative Council, or upper chamber. Until this building was completed, the Assembly met in a newly built but empty hospital, with eighty-four overstuffed armchairs equipped with an attached writing tablet hurried in for the eighty-four legislators.

    Kingston, c. 1863. Some fine three-storey buildings by now, and horses and carriages, but still a street of deep, foul-smelling mud.
    If Kingstonians were pleased, few others shared their enthusiasm. French-Canadian members complained loudly that, compared with Montreal or Quebec City, this new capital was dull and, worse, homogeneously English; one of the French members referred to “cet enfer de Kingston.” The demands of the French, headed by the emerging leader Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, could not be denied. In September 1843 a new governor general, Sir Charles Metcalfe, announced that Kingston’s brief hour of glory was over and, perhaps initiating the tradition of resolving national problems by displeasing everyone more or less equally, that the seat of government would henceforth rotate every three years from Montreal to Quebec City to Toronto. *23 Macdonald’s inaugural