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

At long last, the enigmatic Robert Baldwin has found a worthy biographer. Generations of historians have struggled to understand this key player in the achievement of responsible government in the United Canadas – a reluctant politician who remained curiously out of the action during the rebellions of 1837–38 and who resigned from the “Great Ministry” less than three years after his apparent triumph. In their research on Baldwin for volume 8 of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, published in 1985, Michael Cross and Robert Fraser used their skills in what was then the new social history to offer a fresh perspective on this political icon of Canadian liberalism. Cross, whose soul seems as finely tuned as that of his subject, fleshes out the remarkable story in a biography that will not soon be superseded.

Cross locates Baldwin firmly in the context of his pre-industrial middle-class, Protestant Anglo-Irish culture and argues convincingly that his private family relationships are essential to understanding the public man. In particular, Baldwin’s obsession with his wife, Eliza, who died in 1836 following the birth of their fourth child, haunted him for the rest of his life, to the point that he left instructions that, upon his death, his body was to be mutilated with the same Caesarean section Eliza had suffered. By drawing on Byron for his subtitle, the Morning-Star of Memory (from The Giaour) and framing each chapter with Baldwin’s imagined reflections on Eliza, Cross suffuses his otherwise hard-nosed analysis with a sensibility worthy of the romantic writers whom Baldwin so admired and in his youth tried to emulate. It is likely that Baldwin, much like the equally spiritually minded William Lyon Mackenzie King, would have followed the same political path without his muse, but he found comfort in receiving approbation from an unassailable otherworldly source.

Deeply introverted and troubled by debilitating depressions, Baldwin was drawn to politics by his father’s expectations and a profound sense of Christian duty. He was never comfortable in the public arena, which severely tested his high principles and thin skin. Determined to create a ministry that was both loyal and liberal, he had his work cut out for him in a colony where Tories had pre-empted the badge of loyalism. Cross walks his readers through the torturous manoeuvring surrounding the governor-ships of Lord Sydenham, Sir Charles Bagot, and Sir Charles Metcalfe, during which Baldwin flirted with compromise but ultimately held out for the whole responsible-government package. Arguably, his most important achievement was forming an alliance with the mostly francophone reformers in Canada East under the leadership of Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, thus laying the foundations for a bicultural Canada. In a time of intense anti-French, anti-Catholic sentiment, this was a courageous move that was called violently into question during the Rebellion Losses Bill riots of 1849, the Canadian equivalent (but from a Tory mob) of the rebellions in Europe of 1848.

By the time Baldwin achieved office, his gentry values were being rapidly eclipsed in the brash new world of industrial capitalism. The LaFontaine-Baldwin ministry left an important legacy in the reform of higher education, the judiciary, and municipal government, but the radical flank of the Reform Party wanted more, including universal manhood suffrage, abolition of the Clergy Reserves, and less centralized government. In the end, ambitious promoters of railways and industrial development, such as the politician-for-all-seasons Francis Hincks, were much more in tune with the spirit of the age than either Baldwin or LaFontaine, both of whom retired from office in 1851.

Cross argues that Baldwin was essentially a conservative man who sought the virtues of the British constitution for Canadians but recoiled at the compromises self-government demanded and the economic and social policies it ultimately championed. Given how deeply the tragedy of his wife’s death after childbirth haunted him, it is fitting that Baldwin’s political demise...