Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times Volume 2, 1867–1891 (review)

‘My purpose in writing this biography,’ Richard Gwyn confides simply and honestly at the end of Nation Maker, ‘was to try to make Canadian history alive and relevant again.’ That’s an admirable goal and one that Gwyn, an excellent writer with a reverence for the country and its past, has mostly achieved in this epic two-volume tribute to Canada’s first and greatest prime minister. He has, without the slightest question, brought history to life. His portrayal of the Old Man himself, of the way he was, is marvellous. And Gwyn has made him relevant, too, by talking about his successes and failures more honestly – and with less sentimentality – than the great Donald Creighton did in the two-volume 1950s biography that still looms large over Canadian political historiography. But at times the degree of factual accuracy required to make this an authoritative work is suspect, and occasionally Gwyn has strained to make Macdonald into a figure of the twenty-first century, to convince us, despite the vast differences between his Canada and our own, that this was (as the first volume declared) ‘the man who made us.’ The strain shows in Nation Maker, and it undermines a good biography that might otherwise have been a great one.

Gwyn is at his best when describing what Macdonald was like, and that is no easy task, because Sir John A. was a far more complex person than most Canadians realize. He is remembered today largely as an old drunk, and Gwyn explores this subject with startling frankness. Macdonald’s binges were not just the source of colourful anecdotes, such as his gem: ‘The people prefer Sir John A. drunk to George Brown sober.’ They sometimes damaged his political fortunes and they were a source of emotional pain and frustration to Agnes, his steadfast wife, to whom Gwyn devotes a large amount of his attention in the book. It was Agnes, as much as Macdonald himself, who fought off his personal demons, and Gwyn provides great insight into their marital relationship, drawing especially on her diary to do so. Overall, he manages to thread together Macdonald’s tormented private life and better-known public career more effectively than any previous biographer, Creighton included.

Gwyn captures equally well the unique combination of good cheer, charisma, common sense, and appreciation of human nature that made Macdonald so beloved to his fellow Liberal-Conservatives (if not to his Liberal opponents, who found his ruthless usage of patronage and partisan personal attacks hard to stomach). His intellectual brilliance, so often obscured by all the drinking stories told about him by historians, shines through clearly here. So does his capacity for hard work, which is rarely pointed out today, but was absolutely essential to his day-today management of a fledgling and continuously struggling country. Gwyn accurately depicts Macdonald as a prime minister who was almost always in what politicians now call ‘damage control’ mode, either dealing with problems of his own making (such as the Pacific Scandal) or, more typically, with the inherent divisions within Canadian society or the economy’s stubborn lack of progress. The scale of his central achievement – establishing the country’s foundations and then building on them successfully in his nineteen years in office – can be appreciated here, and Nation Maker is indeed an apt title for this biography.

Unfortunately, Gwyn does not seem to know this era of Canadian history quite as well as he knows Macdonald himself. Small and medium-sized errors are too easily found, in the later chapters especially. For example, Macdonald refused a British request to dispatch Canadian troops to Sudan in 1885, and Gwyn subtly frames this as evidence of his desire to claim greater autonomy for Canada. But he distorts the history of the event by failing to mention that Sir John A. had already obliged an earlier British request by sending the 386-man Canadian Voyageur...