Canada’s journey to Confederation kicked off with a bang — or rather, a circus, a civil war (the American one), a small fortune’s worth of champagne, and a lot of making love — in the old-fashioned sense. Miss Confederation offers a rare look back, through a woman’s eyes, at the men and events at the centre of this pivotal time in Canada’s history.
Mercy Anne Coles, the daughter of PEI delegate George Coles, kept a diary of the social happenings and political manoeuvrings as they affected her and her desires. A unique historical document, her diary is now being published for the first time, offering a window into the events that led to Canada’s creation, from a point of view that has long been neglected.
Canada’s journey to Confederation kicked off with a bang — or rather, a circus, a civil war (the American one), a small fortune’s worth of champagne, and a lot of making love — in the old-fashioned sense. Miss Confederation offers a rare look back, through a woman’s eyes, at the men and events at the centre of this pivotal time in Canada’s history.
Mercy Anne Coles, the daughter of PEI delegate George Coles, kept a diary of the social happenings and political manoeuvrings as they affected her and her desires. A unique historical document, her diary is now being published for the first time, offering a window into the events that led to Canada’s creation, from a point of view that has long been neglected.
Miss Confederation: The Diary of Mercy Anne Coles
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Overview
Canada’s journey to Confederation kicked off with a bang — or rather, a circus, a civil war (the American one), a small fortune’s worth of champagne, and a lot of making love — in the old-fashioned sense. Miss Confederation offers a rare look back, through a woman’s eyes, at the men and events at the centre of this pivotal time in Canada’s history.
Mercy Anne Coles, the daughter of PEI delegate George Coles, kept a diary of the social happenings and political manoeuvrings as they affected her and her desires. A unique historical document, her diary is now being published for the first time, offering a window into the events that led to Canada’s creation, from a point of view that has long been neglected.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781459739697 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dundurn Press |
| Publication date: | 06/24/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Anne McDonald is an award-winning author. Her novel To the Edge of the Sea won the Saskatchewan First Book Award. Her play Lullabies and Cautions was recently showcased at the 2016 Spring Festival of New Plays. Her work has appeared in literary journals, Canada’s History, and on CBC Radio. Anne teaches theatre and creative writing. She lives in Regina, Saskatchewan.
Read an Excerpt
Miss Confederation
The Diary of Mercy Anne Coles
By Anne McDonald
Dundurn Press
Copyright © 2017 Anne McDonaldAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4597-3969-7
CHAPTER 1
Miss Confederation: Mercy Coles
"It is rather a joke, he is the only beau of the party and with 5 single ladies he has something to do to keep them all in good humour."
The "he" mentioned in the above quotation is Leonard Tilley, who was then the premier of New Brunswick, and Mercy Coles, the irreverent writer of this note, was one of those single women. Ten unmarried women altogether, three from Prince Edward Island, two from Nova Scotia, four from New Brunswick, and one from Canada West, accompanied their fathers or brothers to the conference in Quebec City, where the men negotiated Confederation and the creation of Canada.
The start of Canada's journey to Confederation is a fascinating one, involving a circus; Farini, the tightrope walker from Port Hope, Ontario; the U.S. Civil War; a whole lot of champagne, sunshine, and sea; and lovemaking — in the old-fashioned sense.
The process began in earnest when, in September 1864, the Fathers of Confederation, travelling by rail, steamship, and horse-drawn carriage, met in Charlottetown, the provincial capital of Prince Edward Island, to discuss the possibility of a union of Britain's North American colonies. Like New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, PEI was an independent colony of the British Crown at the time. The final of this group of colonies, Canada, was made up of Ontario and Quebec, then known respectively as Canada West and Canada East. Each of the Maritime colonies was very small, and with a large and growing American neighbour, many of the colonies' residents, including those of Canada East and West, felt that if they were to survive separate from the United States, then the time had come to join forces and form a larger political entity.
Following their time in Charlottetown, the Canadian and Maritime delegates crossed the Northumberland Strait on the Canadians' steamship, the Queen Victoria, and toured briefly through Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, meeting in Halifax on September 12 for the delegates to discuss the idea of Confederation further. Mercy Coles, the unmarried twenty-six-year-old daughter of Prince Edward Island delegate George Coles, went with her father on this tour. From Mercy's descriptions she was the only young woman to go on this trip with the delegates. Perhaps her father viewed this as an opportunity for her education, or to meet a potential husband.
The big meetings and events, though, were saved for Quebec City, where, in October 1864, the Maritime Fathers of Confederation, with their unmarried daughters and sisters in tow, travelled again on the Queen Victoria, which the Canadians had sent to bring the Maritimers up to Quebec City. They promenaded on the decks and looked out at the spectacular fall scenery along the shores of the St. Lawrence.
Mercy Coles was not part of this large group, however. She writes that her "father thought the trip [by ship the whole way] would be too rough for mother and me." Instead, Mercy, her father and mother, William Pope (colonial secretary of the Conservative Party, which was in power in PEI) and his wife, and Mrs. Alexander, the widowed sister of Thomas Heath Haviland (also a member of the Conservative Party), left on October 5, a day earlier than the others. They crossed from PEI to Shediac, New Brunswick, then took a train specially booked for them to Saint John. There they picked up Leonard Tilley, the aforementioned "only beau of the party," as well as two members of Tilley's government — Charles Fisher, with his daughter Jane, and William Steeves, with his two daughters.
From Saint John, they travelled by steamship down the Bay of Fundy, the trip taking twenty-four hours, to Portland, Maine (compare this to the sixty-plus hours it would take to get to Quebec City by ship). There was as yet no rail line from the Maritimes to Quebec through Canada, and so the group had to take this roundabout route through the United States. Of course, what the single women missed in the promenading on the Queen Victoria's deck, they gained in the attention paid to them by the recent widower and then-premier of New Brunswick, Leonard Tilley.
In Quebec City, the Fathers debated and finally crafted the seventy-two resolutions of the British North America Act, the bill that formed the Canadian constitution at the time, and which still forms the basis of the Canadian constitution today.
* * *
Politics was not the only thing on the minds of those discussing the creation of Confederation, however. The men viewed the conference and following tour of the Canadas as a wonderful opportunity for other matters; they brought along their unmarried daughters and sisters to ... well, to promote unions of a different sort. Luckily for us, Mercy Coles kept a diary of her trip. She wrote of her travels and of the events, balls, banquets, people, and whirlwind of social happenings and political manoeuvrings as they affected her and her desires.
The diary has never been published, and yet without it, Confederation history is — no question — incomplete. It is not the only such document, however: George Brown was one of the Canadian delegates, and the discovery, in the 1950s, of his letters to his wife, Anne, written during the Confederation conferences provided greater understanding of what made the union possible. The letters document the important relationships that were forged, and how those connections affected the views and attitudes of the delegates. The Mercy Coles diary also offers important insight into the people present at the Quebec conference, and provides the only report by a Canadian female of Canada's social and political landscape in 1864.
* * *
Mercy Coles was the third child of George Coles and his wife, Mercy Haine Coles. The couple had twelve children, two of whom, a boy and a girl, died in infancy. Their first nine children were girls. George Coles was a prosperous merchant, brewer, and distiller. In 1851, he was elected as PEI's first premier, and led the government from 1851 to 1854, and then, after six months out of office, from 1854 to 1859. Best-known as the man who achieved responsible government for PEI in 1851, Coles was the leader of the Reform or Liberal Party, which was mostly supported by Roman Catholics, though Coles himself was Anglican. That he was able to muster such support, even in the face of the divisive issues that often fell along the religious lines of his time, is a tribute to the esteem in which Prince Edward Islanders held him, and is indicative of their support for his policies.
Coles was a self-made man, not one of the wealthy landowners whose politics tended to support absentee landlords and kept the many tenant farmers of PEI in a state of poverty. His government launched many remarkably progressive measures, such as the Free Education Act, which was passed in 1852. This act — the first in British North America, and possibly the first of this type of act in all of Britain's colonies — provided free education for all primary school-aged children. The government also created a provincial fund to pay teachers' salaries.
In contrast, other conference attendees from PEI, such as Colonel John Hamilton Gray, who was the premier of PEI in 1864, and Thomas Heath Haviland, who was among the ruling landowners, would have had different expectations and different values from those of Coles, just as their daughters and sisters would have also had different expectations and values from those held by Mercy.
* * *
These sharp differences in outlook and expectations existed despite the fact that all hailed from the relatively small city of Charlottetown. In 1838, the year Mercy was born, Charlottetown was a city with a population of just over three thousand people; although its population had doubled since then, it was still just over 6,700 in 1861. The province itself had a population of 80,552 by 1861, having grown in size by over 30,000 people in the previous twenty-six years.
Like other cities at the time, Charlottetown had dirt streets that in the fall and spring were mired in mud. The Islander reported on April 14, 1863, that women, "on their way to church, [were] floundering about in the mud like swine in a hog-sty." They'd get so stuck they had to have men pull them out. Even in much larger places, like Quebec City, which had a population of fifty thousand, the situation was similar. "You cannot put a foot off the sidewalk without plunging into mud," wrote the correspondent for the Montreal newspaper La Minerve about Quebec City on Sunday, October 10, 1864, the day the delegates arrived on the Queen Victoria.
Prince Edward Island was almost entirely rural in the 1860s, and agriculture was, by far, the most important part of the economy. Only about nine percent of the population lived in the capital city. There were reportedly eight hundred cattle, 850 sheep, 350 horses, and four hundred hogs living in Charlottetown in 1861. Animals roamed the streets, and boys were hired to keep stray animals off them.
Things were bad enough on normal days, but on days when the market was held, the situation became significantly worse. The market house, which at the time was in a serious state of dilapidation, was located in Queen Square — the same place that the seat of government, Province House, was located. Their proximity to each other caused a great deal of chagrin in many of the local politicians. Held twice weekly, year-round, the market was renowned for its filth: animal excrement, fish guts, and more littered the ground. Most of the vendors chose to sell their wares and produce outside, rather than be stuck inside the building. Even more filth and noise was the result.
It is of little surprise, then, that epidemics of cholera, typhus, smallpox, and typhoid were far from uncommon in Charlottetown. And although these types of epidemics were commonplace in other cities in British North America at this time, their impact was especially severe in Charlottetown, as there was no permanent hospital there until 1879.
In winter, the mail came and left by ice boat. Such trips were, at times, dangerous, and it was often questionable whether the mail would arrive at all. Evelyn MacLeod, in her annotations of the 1863 diary of Margaret Gray (the eighteen-year-old daughter of PEI's premier, Colonel John Hamilton Gray), describes the small boats: "[They were] approximately seventeen feet long and four feet wide, and covered with heavy tin. Leather straps harnessed men to the boat as they hauled it across solid ice, and oars and sometimes a sail were used in patches of open water." In describing the difficulties of receiving or sending mail, MacLeod quotes the Charlottetown Guardian on March 13, 1863: "Several attempts have been made during the week to cross the Straits but owing to the bad state of the ice they have proved ineffectual."
The ice often didn't melt until the middle or end of April, and so shortages of many goods were common by the end of winter. As Margaret Gray wrote, the shops were close to empty by March. With no (or very slow) mail in or out, and no goods till the ice broke up and allowed steamers back into the harbour, Islanders were forced to be very self-sufficient.
* * *
The consequent privation that many in the province experienced was less of an issue for the Coles family, however because of its large size and relative affluence. Also, although George Coles owned a brewery and distillery in town, the Coleses' home was Stone Park Farm, on the outskirts of the city. It was four kilometres from Province House, and Mercy and her sisters were spared some of the day-to-day difficulties of living in town.
Despite the fact that they lived outside of the city, Coles's daughters still benefitted from the education and culture that would have been more easily available to their urban peers. It's likely that tutors came to the house, and the young women may have gone out to get specialized lessons in such things as singing. Margaret Gray, likewise, wrote that a tutor came to teach her and her sisters German, and that they went out for singing lessons. As well as such formal instruction, Coles's daughters would also have been exposed to the sort of informal tuition offered by the lively discussions held in their home. George Coles would have entertained his political allies, and perhaps the discussions included the women of the household, as the Coles sisters were noted to be "well educated, well informed and sharp as needles."
* * *
Such is the background of Mercy Coles. It is important to keep this in mind, because this Confederation story is one told from a young, unmarried woman's point of view. It is a story told by someone along for the events, and tied in that way to the goings-on. Yet, Mercy Coles was interested in something far different from the resolutions of the British North America Act. She was twenty-six, after all, when twenty-six was getting old to be single. Mercy had seven surviving sisters altogether. Her two older sisters were already married, and of the two just younger than she, Eliza was about to be married in December, and the other one already was. The next in line after that was already twenty years old. Thus, the pressure was on, and Mercy's interest in the men she met during this time is not surprising. Many of the men, including John A. Macdonald, were taken with her. And here she was with a bevy of single women, younger and thus perhaps more desirable than herself, vying for the attention of Canada's foremost bachelors.
In her Confederation photograph, taken by the celebrated Montreal photographer William Notman, Mercy's eyes gaze back at the viewer with intensity and interest. Her long, dark hair, thick with curl, is parted in the middle and pulled back from her brow, in the style of the day. She liked to have fun, to dance, to sing. She was easy to talk to. She liked teasing and being teased. Her wide mouth and full lips must have smiled easily. Men found her intelligent and attractive, especially in her "irresistible blue silk." They paid attention to her. And she definitely enjoyed receiving their attention — but then, who doesn't, when they're young and looking for love?
And that's what she was doing — amid the grand and heady spectacle of the balls, banquets, and events that went along with the Confederation Conference of October 1864, in Quebec City. It was the perfect place for such a quest, because that city was the headiest of places in Canada then, with its corps of officers, garrison of British soldiers in red uniforms, and regimental bands. It was the hub of cultural and diplomatic life, and the most debonair of any of Canada's cities. Quebec City was, and is, strikingly beautiful, sitting atop a cliff, overlooking the St. Charles and St. Lawrence rivers. The streets of the old city are cobblestoned, and wind crookedly past buildings and houses that look more European than North American.
Even amid the wonders of Quebec City and the conference events, however, it's clear that the country's politics affected Mercy Coles, too. This tale of the "Road to Confederation" is one shaped by a young female traveller interested in what all young people are interested in: falling in love, finding a mate, the excitement of travel, and the lure of "away." It is the herstory of Confederation.
Mercy is refreshingly honest, and writes so blithely of people and events that we are caught in the moment in time at which history was being made, without the veneer and gloss time can create. We are allowed an intimate view into the past at this seminal period in Canada's history, and at the men, now famous, or once famous and now forgotten, who shaped Canadas's future. Further, we're exposed to a female voice at the making of Confederation.
Women were not part of any official delegation, but the importance of connections to, and relationships with, women, was recognized by those who were, and so it was that women had an unofficial role in the negotiations. As PEI delegate Edward Whelan noted for his newspaper, the Examiner.
The Cabinet Ministers — the leading ones especially — are the most inveterate dancers I have ever seen, they do not seem to miss a dance the live-long night. They are cunning fellows; and there is no doubt it is all done for a political purpose; they know if they can dance themselves into the affections of the wives and daughters of the country, the men will certainly become an easy conquest.
Mercy's writings of the attention she received from men like John A. Macdonald and Leonard Tilley help us understand how the relationships at play worked to make Confederation a possibility.
In her diary, Mercy is willing to gossip; she's open; she's flirtatious. And yet she also shows a conventional side, happy to follow the strictures and guidelines expected of a young, single woman — but, interestingly, this is found mostly later in her diary, once the conference tour, and the possibility of her being wooed by any of the bachelors, have ended. Throughout, she maintains a sense of propriety — for example, she never mentions the first names of the other young women who attended the Confederation conference. Even when Emma Tupper and Margaret Gray visit her sick room, she refers to them as "Miss Tupper" and "Miss Gray."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Miss Confederation by Anne McDonald. Copyright © 2017 Anne McDonald. Excerpted by permission of Dundurn Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
- Foreword by Christopher Moore
- Preface
- One Miss Confederation, Mercy Anne Coles
- Two Charlottetown: The Circus, Champagne, and Union
- Three The Journey Begins: The Lure of Travel, the New — and Leonard Tilley
- Four From the Sublime to the Ridiculous: the “Failed,” the Grand Success, or the Drunken Fiasco of the Government Ball
- Five Diphtheria
- Six The Temptation of John A. Macdonald
- Seven What She Said –— A Woman’s Point of View
- Eight Montreal Sightseeing and the “Eighth Wonder of the World”
- Nine Ottawa the Unseemly
- Ten Sightseeing in Toronto, 1864 Style
- Eleven Niagara Falls
- Twelve Family and Travel
- Thirteen Going Home
- Fourteen Confederation Suitors
- Fifteen Daughters and Fathers
- Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Appendix “Reminiscences of Confederation Days: Extracts from a Diary Kept by Miss Mercy A. Coles When She Accompanied Her Father, the Late Hon. George Coles, to the Confederation Conferences at Quebec, Montreal and Ottawa in 1864.”
- Notes on Sources
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Image Credits
- Index