Book Notes: Dann on Brown

When this blog seemed to be one of the very few places actually noting the George Brown bicentennial in 2018, we were a bit wistful about the need for new attention to the Reform leader in the confederation process.

So it's good to see Moira Dann has in progress a new "correspondence-based biography" of the man.  I understand the modifier immediately: Brown's correspondence is constantly lively and opinionated and personal, and deserves to be more widely quoted.

Her Canada Day piece for the Globe & Mail highlights Brown's progressive attitude in many fields.

When I started to look into this man for a documentary I did about the Mothers of Confederation, I initially didn’t like him much because of some things he said about Quebec (my birthplace) and Catholics (my birth faith), but now he’s one of my favourite fathers: Further study revealed Brown hated that the church told people in Quebec how to vote.

(And people in Ontario too, for that matter, The Catholic hierarchy worked to turn the Irish Ontario population against Brown too, and also felt the lash of his tongue).

Image Source:  Brown sketch by Dominic Bugatto, from the Globe & Mail.

George Brown 10: The Bicentennary

A quick google search this morning suggests this blog is the only site in the world that has noticed that today is the 200th birthday of one of the key founders of Canadian confederation, George Brown, 1818-1880.  Nothing at all in the newspaper he founded, even.

On the other hand, I now see the Archives of Ontario has an online exhibit up:  "A Growing Family: Meet the Browns."  If I have not yet worn out your interest, say hello to baby Maggie.

“Twenty times a day I fancy myself by your side with our baby on your knee … [and] then come thoughts of the country [and] public duty, the newspaper and so I give a great grumph [and] turn away from the subject.”
                                     -George to Anne, 29 February 1864

Update, December 2:  From the Globe & Mail, 29 November, page 2

GEORGE BROWN IS BORN

This newspaper’s founding proprietor was born 200 years ago this day in a Scottish village. George Brown’s reform-minded father moved the family to New York, where he established a newspaper. But young George preferred British to U.S. rule and, in 1844, he established The Globe in Toronto, which quickly became the most influential newspaper in British North America. Brown championed technological innovation, prison reform and responsible government, in opposition to the Tory elites. The Reform Party and movement he effectively led eventually became the Liberal Party. Like many journalists, Brown made an indifferent politician, and during his time in Parliament, he was consistently bested by his Conservative rival, John A. Macdonald. But after years of unstable, short-lived governments, it was Brown who proposed the Great Coalition, which made Confederation possible. Macdonald, not Brown, became prime minister, of course, but that was all right, because Brown was always at heart a newspaperman. In a way, the paper killed him. In March, 1880, he was accidentally shot in the thigh by an irate former employee. The wound became infected and he died in May. But Brown’s legacy is great: He founded what became The Globe and Mail, helped forge the Liberal Party and proposed the compromise that led to Confederation.

H/T Chris Raible, who sent the link.

George Brown Days 9: Two Brown Issues: First Nations and Taxes

As we approach George Brown's 200th birthday, we should address a couple of issues that are not as  celebratory as many of the previous ones.

1. Indigenous and Treaty matters.  With the reputation of John A. Macdonald being battered, and probably permanently tarnished, by increased exposure of his policies towards Indigenous peoples in the west, particularly in the 1880s, the question arises: what would similar attention to George Brown reveal? 

Brown was ahead of Macdonald in advocating for the westward expansion of Canada and the cancellation of the Hudson's Bay Company's rights there.  (It was another place where Cartier and Brown were closer than Macdonald and Brown.)  Brown and his constituents on the farmlands of Southern Ontario saw the prairie west as their children's future farmlands. Sympathy or concern for the rights of First Nations in the West did not feature in the western-expansion campaigns Brown supported.  During the mid-1870s, the Liberal government of Alexander Mackenzie followed a basically Brownian policy on westward expansion and a basically Macdonaldian policy on Aboriginal matters and treaty obligations -- without protest from Brown that I am aware of.  Has Brown and Indigenous policy been explored lately?

It is notable that in 1885, five years after Brown's death, "his" Toronto Globe placed the blame for the Red River Resistance of that year entirely upon the federal government and its mismanagement of western affairs.  It accepted that the resistance had to be put down, but saw the Métis and their allies mostly as victims. Would Brown had shared that view had he lived?

2. Taxes, Spending, Social Policy -- and Money for French-speaking Canadians.  Elspeth Heaman's Tax, Order, and Good Government from 2017 argues powerfully -- if I may try to massively summarize a lengthy and subtle presentation -- that George Brown's rep by pop and federalism campaigns of the 1860s were principally about ensuring that the taxes of (rich) Canada West never went to (poor and priest-ridden) Canada East.  Brown was a liberal of his day, holding Adam Smithian views about the invisible hand of the market and the importance of small government and personal responsibility. He favoured direct taxation which was also locally controlled taxation, so that those who paid the taxes closely controlled the spending of them.  His opposition to the constitutional structure of the United Canadas included his revulsion against its indirect taxes and their highly political allocations -- in his view, from the pockets of hardworking Upper Canadians to those of unproductive French-Canadians.

As she further argues, the tax structure of the new Canada after 1867 was one in which most revenues flowed to the federal government -- but most responsibility for social spending devolved to the provinces. It would be a long time before any of the provinces had revenues capable of supporting lavish spending on anything -- and George Brown liked it that way. 

George Brown Days 8: Anne Nelson Brown

Today marks the 156th anniversary of the marriage of George Brown and Anne Nelson, married 27 November 1862, when he was 43 and she was "some ten years his junior" (J.M.S Careless) -- born 1827 (Canadian Encyclopedia). On their way back to Toronto they spent Christmas at Niagara Falls (!) and were greeted by 5000 people on their arrival in Toronto the next day.

Anne Nelson is sometimes credited as the (or a) mother of confederation for her wholesome influence on  -- and good advice to -- her sometimes headstrong husband. Wealthy, well-educated, widely travelled, and well-informed, she was in many ways more sophisticated and cultured than he was, and it showed. "Since you became his wife," Oliver Mowat told her, " the softer side of his nature has been developed under your loving influence -- himself becoming an increasingly gentle, kind, and considerate person."

She was, however, never as committed as he was to Canadian political life, or to Canada. The visit to Britain when he met and married her was his first in twenty-three years, and he summed up his reaction to Britain as: "I say now as earnestly as ever -- Canada for me." She remained more devoted to her homeland, and returned there after his death -- as did John A Macdonald's widow. She travelled "home" to Scotland with their six-months-old first born in the summer of 1864, and they were separated for the six months in which Brown participated in the making of confederation -- though, happily for historians, the process was given a lively record in his constant letters to her. ("How I do wish you were here to advise me.," he wrote during the early stages.)

They wrote to each other even when only apart for a day or two, and his letters (biographer Careless discovered them in a trunk in a private house in Scotland in the 1950s) are far and away the best evidence of his personality, often of his politics, too, and particularly of his devotion to her and their children. His effusions upon receiving photos of darling baby Maggie can still soften the gaze of even the most focused historical researcher. 

Her letters to him do not survive. Careless: "He could not bear the thought of other eyes than his seeing Anne's letters, and hence destroyed them after a few days"  -- as soon as he had a new one to keep in his pocket.

Photo credit:  Photos of Anne Brown are not readily to hand on the internet.  I found this one on the website of a high school student in Vancouver whose group decided to research her.

George Brown Days 7: Dear Malcolm Cameron

I should work up one or two substantial pieces about George Brown before his 200th birthday November 29, but other things interfere.  More correspondence, instead, and another aspect of Victorian moral principles.

Apparently this letter exists in George Brown's handwriting, but there is no confirmation it was actually sent,  The intended recipient is thought to have been Malcolm Cameron of Sarnia, lawyer, temperance advocate, Clear Grit radical turned political independent, and a frequent rival of Brown's.  It is published in Careless, Brown of the Globe Vol 1.  Thanks again to Russ Chamberlayne.

27th February, 1857
Globe Office Toronto

My dear Sir:

It is said here that your mercantile affairs are irretrievably embarrassed, and that you are quite disheartened about it. I yet trust the case may be exaggerated, but fear there is some truth in it. You may doubt it, but I assure you nothing that has happened in a very long time has grieved me more and I have been thinking ever since I heard of it whether I could not be of service to you in your difficulty. I have had my own pecuniary trials here and in the States, but have I trust got over them; also I am vain enough to believe I have learnt that by experience which might now serve you. If you think so, I am at your services for a few weeks in any part of the country. Don't give way to despondency--from the little I know, you can retrieve matters. The only way in such cases is to look the worst right in the face and go at it with the determination to be at the bottom of it--not to cover up--and to do our duty in the sight of God. There are often circumstances which one has to regret, in lookingback, by which perhaps friends suffer. Well, that can't be helped for the past, but the thought of it should only invigorate us to fresh efforts to make amends in the future.

This letter, perhaps rude, perhaps impertinent, may displease you or may produce mere contempt for the writer. I can't help that--I have done my duty and I never did a duty with more sincerity or good feeling. Had I not looked on you as we met in King Street the other day as a rich and prosperous man I would certainly have tried to make friends again. I am not going, even at this moment, to say I do not think you did very wrong in past transactions, but I will say that a knowledge of your sanguine temperament and the effect of a similar temperament on my own actions, ought to have made me at least less harsh. Politics I believe hardens men's hearts worse than anything else.

You may answer this or not, as you like--but I trust whatever you do, you will at the worst give me the benefit of doubt, and throw this letter into the flames and forget it.

Were I in Sarnia, and oppressed, I would seek first to have my mind at rest in God's sight. And as Christian fellowship strengthens one much I would seek the sympathy of my friend, Reverend MacAlister. How easy do trials become when the mind and affections are fixed on things of eternity and we feel that all here is a passing show--may end tomorrow--will end soon. Do you wonder at my writing this? I wonder myself--but thanks to a long- suffering God, I feel it somewhat.

Yours very truly,
(Signed) Geo. Brown

George Brown Days 5: Was GB a bigot?

I deny not that in this protracted contest words were spoken and lines were penned that had been better clothed in more courteous guise.  But when men go to war they are apt to take their gloves off, and assuredly if one side struck hard blows the other was not slow in returning them....

It is the incumbent duty of the reform party, dictated as well by their most cherished principles as by justice, and good policy, that a full share of parliamentary representation according to their numbers, and generous consideration in all public matters, should be awarded to the catholic minority [in Ontario]... This the reform party has done voluntarily, gladly, without condition, although a vast proponderance of the catholic electors will in all probability cast their votes in the coming contest against our candidates and for our opponents.   (George Brown, letter to the Roman Catholic Committee, March 1871, arguing why Catholics should support the Reformers rather than the Conservatives)

In those recurring three cornered debates about the great man of confederation -- was it John A?  Was it Cartier?  Was it Brown?  -- one of the knocks on Brown is often his bigotry.  An important figure, surely, but disqualified by his intolerance for francophones and for Roman Catholics, goes the argument.

I'm not really a Brown scholar. From time to time, however, I have followed up sources that are cited a proof of the allegation: things he said or printed about Irish Catholics, or French Canadians, or the Catholic Church hierarchy

He was extremely hard on the Catholic Church for sure, assailing it for "priestcraft and state-churchism" and for coercing Catholics to follow the political dictates of their bishops. And he was hard on French-Canadians, and indeed famously on "French-Canadianism."  He also clearly feared in the 1840s and 1850s that the migration of large numbers of Irish Catholic refugees to British North America would undermine his Reform constituency by bringing into the body politic large numbers of illiterate, priest-dominated settlers hostile to most British political ideas and institutions. None of these views was welcomed by Catholics, Francophones, or Irish immigrants.

But his criticisms were usually expressed as charges that French-Canadians and Irish Catholics were too much driven and controlled in their politics by their priests and by leaders approved by the hierarchy -- a strong accusation but within the bounds of political discourse, surely. In his insistence that the Catholic Church should stay out of politics, Brown, it often strikes me, was about a hundred years ahead of his time. He was accused of being a francophobe for asserting views about the separation of Church and State that every Quebecker seemed to adopt about 1960.

I do not want to go too far here.  Brown undoubtedly grew up with 19th century British prejudices about the Pope and France and Ireland  -- developed from times of the Spanish Armada to James II to Napoleon -- as a great permanent threat to the "rights of Englishmen," and those attitudes found a receptive audience in British North America.

So... I'd welcome contributions:  citations to the Globe, or parliamentary debates, ore letters, or whatever that strike readers as evidence of bigotry.

A different criticism of Brown next...

George Brown Days 4: On Political Correctness

...if their sensibilities are so nice that what does not suit them must be held as insulting -- they must just be insulted accordingly....

 The Globe,Tuesday April 2, 1850

Not much into trigger warnings, the old Globe.

George Brown Days 3: Talking to Americans

George Brown's advice about what the United States needs from us:

...when you get hold of a Yankee, drive it home to him; tell him his country is disgraced; wound his pride; tell him his pure institutions are a grand sham; send him home thoroughly ashamed of the black blot on his country's escutcheon. In steamboat, or railroad, or wherever you are, hunt up a Yankee and speak to him faithfully; there is no other man so sensitive as to what others think of him.

This is actually from an anti-slavery speech Brown gave in 1852.  The disgrace was slavery, which would endure another dozen years. But in these times,  it has a contemporary ring, except maybe for the sensitive part..

H/t Russ Chamberlayne

George Brown Days, 2

I think we will make what remains of November into George Brown Days around here.  Not that other coverage will cease but we'll try to have a little something, praising or critical, pretty regularly in the run up to his 200th birthday November 29.

Let's start with Andrew Coyne's tribute to Brown from the spring of 2017:

It was Brown who first championed, in the pages of the Globe, the idea of a federation of the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, conjoined since 1841 as the single, though decidedly not united, province of Canada, as the solution to the impasse and instability that had enveloped its politics. He it was who committed the reborn Reform party, cobbled together out of various political factions — moderate Reformers, Clear Grit radicals and Lower Canadian Rouges — to the same proposal, and it was his motion, and the report of the all-party committee he chaired, that led to the idea being adopted by Parliament in 1864.