A Biography of Robert Baldwin: The Morning Star of Memory by Michael S. Cross (review)

Lampooning Grit dominance of Canadian historiography in 1947, Donald Creighton claimed there were no biographies of Robert Baldwin, only studies of Robert Responsible-Government. In 1985, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography essay, of which Michael S. Cross was co-author, provided a startling new identifier. Baldwin's wife, Eliza, had died in 1836, having failed to recover from giving birth by primitive Caesarean section. Mired in grief (and, perhaps, guilt), Baldwin left instructions that an identical incision should be made in his corpse. By inserting zigzag flashbacks within his chronological narrative, Cross dramatizes three overlapping elements in the Baldwin story: the grisly posthumous ceremony, his humiliating confrontation with Lord Sydenham in 1841, and the consistent thread of bereavement. Each chapter begins with an epigraph, crafted by the author, such as "Eliza was always there, at the dinner table, in his study in the evening. . . . She had been dead for five years and eight months. It was September 1841" (88). Readers will judge for themselves whether this device works. Equally noteworthy was the fact that Eliza was Baldwin's cousin: marriage within his close-knit extended family deprived him of one potential escape route from the dominance of William Warren Baldwin, the original theorist of responsible government. The manipulative, confident father was the antithesis of the tormented, self-doubting son. Cross argues persuasively that Robert Baldwin was driven by a parentally inculcated sense of duty. Yet this alone cannot explain the contrast between their vision of Canada running its local affairs through a Cabinet answerable to the Assembly, and Robert Baldwin's decisions in 1836 and 1841 to join Executive Councils dominated by opponents. Even the apparent party triumph of 1842 involved coalition with holdovers and officials. The explanation may lie in the family's late eighteenth-century Irish background, which merits further exploration. Although Grattan's parliament achieved autonomy after 1782, it did not evolve a local executive: government was driven by viceroys named from London. Robert Baldwin was talking Westminster but acting College Green. Parliamentary majorities depended upon party discipline, which was best enforced by control of patronage. Yet Baldwin could not dispense jobs until he obtained office and - as Governor Metcalfe proved - not always then. Responsible government also required Cabinet solidarity, a principle that Baldwin himself sometimes ignored, even during the climactic years of the "Great Ministry." Indeed, the Reform Party's sense of shared purpose was short-lived. The LaFontaine-Baldwin team spent 1848 settling in and unleashed blizzards of legislation in 1849 and 1850, but in 1851 the socially conservative Baldwin was driven into retirement by the radical agenda of the emerging Clear Grits. Like the Whigs in Britain after 1832, he gave the people constitutional reform without realizing that there would be demands to use the new structure to achieve fundamental change. Baldwin could be ruthless, once ousting a candidate by circulating a private letter of thanks for his wise withdrawal, but he recognized the limitations of party government. His 1854 endorsement of the alliance between Hincksite Reformers and MacNab's Tories was not a private expression of opinion but an important public statement, indeed the classic defence of coalition government.

As a long-time authority on social violence in nineteenth-century Victorian Canada, Cross deftly handles such crises as Upper Canada's 1837 uprisings and the threat to civil society in Montreal in 1849. Cross demonstrates Baldwin's belief in the British connection as Canada's safeguard, although he passes over his well-documented protest, voiced to Elgin, against the admission by British prime minister Russell that the link might one day be broken. However, Cross gives us a remarkable statement from 1849: Baldwin's proclamation, "I have lived and - I hope to God would die a British subject" (285, 314) - foreshadowing and perhaps inspiring Macdonald's celebrated slogan in the 1891 election. In fact, this quotation is one of five that are repeated without...