The Thousandth Man: A Biography of James McGregor Stewart by Barry Cahill (review)

512 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 an exploding shell during the battle of Mont Sorrel, the intensity of the shock such that he had to be evacuated for the next four months to British hospitals and convalescent homes. In July, he was authorized to return to Canada, but refused. >I can=t go back now with the boys fighting in France.= A month later, when he was offered a desk in the battalion=s headquarters, he again refused, >since I do not want to leave the fighting troops.= At war=s end he confided to his mother: >I am happy at the thought that I had the courage to return to my boys in 1916 and that God gave me the strength of body and of mind to do my duty under fire. It is a tremendous consolation that will comfort me until my dying day.= When, leading an assault on Chérisy on 28 August 1918, he was seriously wounded and in >intolerable pain,= his biggest sorrow was that his wounds forced him to be carried off the field, away from the firing line. His diary entry reads: >I took a last look at the old roads of France that I have come to know so well. My heart is heavy indeed.= At 11 o=clock on 11 November Georges Vanier was under anaesthetic for a second amputation on his right leg in the IODE Hospital in London. He awoke to the sounds of cannon celebrating the Armistice. >Still,= he wrote to his mother, >I should have preferred very much to have been with the battalion in France= ... the rest is history. Much much much later B at the end of a long, bloodstained century B a large consensus of Canadians agreed that Georges Vanier may well have been >the leading hero B the most important Canadian in history.= To understand why and how that could become so, read Deborah Cowley=s book. (JACQUES MONET, SJ) Barry Cahill. The Thousandth Man: A Biography of James McGregor Stewart University of Toronto Press 2000. xxii, 266. $45.00 James McGregor Stewart was an exceptional man who had an extraordinary legal career, one that is captured in glowing detail by Barry Cahill, an archivist from Nova Scotia. Published by the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, this biography flows from research with Gregory Marchildon on the history of Stewart=s Halifax law firm (now Stewart McKelvey Stirling Scales) from 1927 to 1949, when Stewart was its chair. But Cahill=s account of Stewart=s life does more than simply present a biographical account of one of the foremost corporate lawyers of his day. Stewart=s involvement in a variety of activities, from the courtroom to the boardroom and beyond, serves to illustrate broader aspects of Canadian history that will be appealing to a diverse audience. The author takes a thematic approach to Stewart=s life, an approach that does not often do justice to a biographical subject. The Thousandth Man is an exception. The biography is divided into several parts. The first deals with humanities 513 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Stewart the person: his Scotch heritage, childhood and education in Nova Scotia, Presbyterianism, and marriage to Elizabeth Wilson. We learn that Stewart was denied a Rhodes scholarship because of the disability he suffered from a childhood bout with polio. It is clear, however, that this challenge did not stop him from excelling, whether it was teaching classics at Dalhousie or joining a top Halifax law firm in 1914. Although Stewart made his reputation as a leading corporate lawyer, he was also active in the courtroom, which Cahill deals with in a section dedicated to Stewart=s early legal career. Stewart, who was a Conservative active in the backrooms of the provincial party, was retained by the Bennett government as standing outside counsel, and this section outlines some of his more noteworthy cases on behalf of both private clients and the government. While Stewart was an active participant in professional associations B he was, for example, the president of the Canadian Bar Association during the Second...