1867 (26 page)

More precisely, they were meeting those people who had a vote. Something close to universal male suffrage prevailed in New Brunswick in 1864, and it was little different in most of the other
British North American provinces, despite the widely held notion that there was no little or no democracy in the mid-nineteenth-century colonies. As early as 1810, Sir James Craig, a governor of Lower Canada whose usual inclination was to throw critics of his policies into jail, had complained bitterly that “scarcely one farmer in a thousand” was without a vote in that colony, while in 1832 the assembly he had fought with celebrated the fact that the right of voting remained “nearly universal.”
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When the first legislative assemblies were called in the British North American colonies, a radical choice had been required: either let almost all men vote or let almost none. The choice hinged on the amount of property that a voter would be required to own. Most colonial families owned property, but most were frontier farmers, whose properties had infinitesimal cash value. Setting any significant level of property ownership as a requirement for voting would disenfranchise almost everyone. Instead, a low requirement – “the forty-shilling freehold” – gave a vote to almost every household. Even the tenant farmers on the seigneuries of Quebec and the estates of Prince Edward Island got the vote. By the 1830s, with formal discrimination against Catholic, Jewish, and Quaker voters abolished, male property owners nearly all had the vote.

By the 1850s, the achievement of responsible government meant legislatures with genuine authority over the internal affairs of British North America were elected by an electorate as wide as any in the world. Britain still had a very limited franchise, and few European countries were democracies. The United States had adopted the principle of universal manhood suffrage in 1845, but many groups, most notably the slaves, remained disenfranchised, and significant limits to voter power remained. At confederation, United States senators were appointed by state governments, not elected. As late as 1877, Congress installed a president who had been soundly defeated in the popular vote.

Most British North American colonies still required voters to own a token amount of property, and thereby excluded transients, hired
men, and adult sons living at home (though policing of the polls to prevent them from voting was very haphazard). In practice, the right of voting for members of the assembly was not far short of universal for males in most of British North America. In Canada East, where poverty and dislocation of the kind Brother André experienced in his youth had disenfranchised a growing number of men, the proportion had fallen as low as 70 per cent by the 1860s, and opponents of Nova Scotia’s decision to restore a property requirement in that decade claimed that as many as a quarter of voters there might lose their vote. Even those colonies, however, still allowed more men to vote than most countries, and the other British North American colonies were even closer to universal male suffrage.

Oddly enough, it was reformers, the advocates of responsible government and a broad franchise, who were most reluctant to remove the last vestiges of a property requirement. The vote was nearly sacred to reformers; they resisted giving it to those who, they felt, neither earned it nor cared how they exercised it. In 1855, Tilley’s reform colleague Charles Fisher had argued, even as he widened the franchise, that allowing every man to vote would give too much power “to money and multitude.”
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It would enable the rich to cancel out middle-class votes, he said, by buying the votes of desperate poor people.

For the same reason, the great reform crusader Joseph Howe had brought back a property requirement in Nova Scotia after a conservative government had eliminated it. If a county with 5,000 voters had 2,400 men on each side of an issue, said Howe, the balance would be tipped by two hundred impoverished and apolitical voters, who only wished elections were more common so they could sell their vote more often. It was the reformers’ faith in the vote that impelled them to keep access to it from being too easy. George Brown defended token limits to exclude the unconcerned and uncommitted, but he was not far wrong when he declared that everyone in Canada West who seriously wanted a vote could have one, and it was much the same in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.

Everyone male, that is. Women could not vote. The property requirement eliminated most of them, and when it was noticed in the 1830s that some women who had property were voting, the colonies enacted laws to disenfranchise all women. Men and women were considered different by nature and destined for different realms: women for the domestic sphere, men for public life. In the reign of Queen Victoria, middle-class men increasingly expected to support their wives and dependents at home, while they monopolized “public” life. The doctrine of “separate spheres,” which disenfranchised women, was getting stronger in the 1860s.

In some ways, the conviction that men and women occupied separate spheres could empower women. Nurturing the young was women’s role, and so women could claim substantial influence over education and charitable work. As public schools expanded, women came to dominate the teaching profession throughout British North America. (Leonard Tilley had met his wife when they were Sunday-school teachers together.) Defending and raising society’s moral standards was also women’s domain. Since the boundary between moral suasion and public campaigning was hard to define, women’s moral role sometimes enabled them to enter directly into political activity.

Temperance, a moral issue that became a political crusade, had drawn thousands of New Brunswick women into politics in the 1850s. As a temperance campaigner, Leonard Tilley had long worked closely with women who organized meetings, spoke, marched, and gathered petition signatures in tens of thousands. George Hatheway, the politician who quit Tilley’s cabinet in opposition to confederation, said it was crucial for a politician to have “the good opinion of the fair portion of the community.” He claimed he “would rather have one lady canvasser than a dozen men.”
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Women were also beginning to crack open some of the formal prohibitions on their participation in public life. A few were already going to university and pushing for access to medical schools and professional careers. Emily Stowe, a Canadian trained in the United States, opened a medical practice in Toronto in the year of confederation.
A decade later Dr. Stowe would help organize the first Canadian campaigns for woman suffrage. Though women would be denied the vote until the end of the First World War, women’s-rights campaigners would force the generation of politicians empowered by confederation to debate (and vote down) woman suffrage regularly.

Suffragists demanded the vote as a right rooted in the equality of men and women. Men frequently justified male suffrage as providing a “household franchise,” exercised by the (male) head of the household. They argued that wives and daughters deserved the vote no more than hired men or sons who deferred to the authority of the master of the house. There was no justice in giving women the vote, they argued, if that simply gave their husbands or fathers control of extra votes. Women might argue about confederation – and what roles they may have played in influencing the choices their husbands and fathers made remains largely unstudied. But they could not vote.

One reason to deny women the vote was what George Brown celebrated as “the manly British system of open voting.” Until the 1870s, nearly all British North Americans had to vote in public. Brown’s adjective “manly” was carefully chosen, for the tumult and violence that often accompanied “open” voting helped justify the exclusion of women. Even more important was the belief that it was manliness which required a public statement of one’s political convictions. Voting and manliness went together, and advocates of open voting argued that no man who demanded a share of civic responsibility should refuse to declare his allegiance publicly. Only cowardly men would hide in a ballot booth. Advocates of the secret ballot argued that open voting encouraged vote-buying, but their rivals retorted that the secret ballot sacrificed “moral control” of voting; it actually encouraged corrupt behaviour by those who would say one thing and do another.

Open voting prevailed in most of British North America until a decade after confederation, but not in New Brunswick. Leonard Tilley had been in the government that had introduced voting by ballot there in the 1850s. In New Brunswick’s confederation elections,
voters wrote the name of their chosen candidate on a slip of paper and delivered it to the electoral officer. The full secret-ballot system, with printed ballots, screened voting booths, and other controls, was introduced to the world by South Australia in 1856, but New Brunswick had already accepted the essence of the process.
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Campaigning in mid-nineteenth-century British North America was direct and personal. Given the independent authority of individual members, voters had reason to assess the man as closely as the party with which he was associated. With only a thousand voters in many constituencies, an experienced local member would know most of his supporters personally, and most of his opposition, too. Long, careful cultivation of personal and communal loyalties was vital. If that did not seem to be succeeding, then persuasion, coercion, and intimidation came into play. The task of a constituency team was to get supporters to the polls, and also to keep opponents away. Early Canadian electoral folklore is filled with doctored voters’ lists, reports of “treating” the voters, intimidation, and discussions of the price of a vote. It was a rough-and-ready process.

Honest elections depended on each individual’s will or ability to reject coercion and stand by his principles. (That is, George Brown might have said, elections depended on the “manliness” of each voter.) It was because individual votes were crucially important that corruption lurked around every polling station. In the late twentieth century, skewing the vote had become almost entirely a wholesale process, where media buys, spin campaigns, and the well-timed release of tailored surveys were the best ways to influence national campaigns. In the 1860s, voting was personal, and the economics of political corruption were still retail. If the parties were equally
corrupt and equally funded, corruption might cancel itself out, but it was never eliminated.

In New Brunswick’s 1865 election, “confederation or no confederation” was the overwhelming issue. Tilley, Gray, and other confederation supporters held several big meetings in Saint John in November. Soon Tilley was out on a “stumping expedition through the central counties,” and arranging meetings across the province. Unfortunately for Tilley, the “strong current running against federation” that he had observed in November grew stronger as the campaign progressed. Tilley was popular and persuasive enough that anti-confederate leaders refused to debate him, and he had all the machinery and funds of government with which to tempt the voters. In mid-campaign, he believed he was “making good headway against the suspicions and fears of our opponents.” In fact, confederation was making very little headway at all.
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Confederation was not an urgent necessity in New Brunswick. None of the Maritime provinces faced the political crisis that drove the Canadians to seek a new arrangement, and the Quebec resolutions were a very “Canadian” proposal – from the “oily brains of Canadian politicians,” said Albert Smith.
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Maritimers had experienced years of frustrated bickering with the Canadians on many issues, and felt no incentive to solve Canadian problems. Confederation, with its promise to reorganize all the familiar political identities and commercial ties of each of the colonies, had come up suddenly in the Maritimes, offering little but the sheer ambition of the thing as an incentive.

Confederation’s weakness was compounded by a host of local irritants. Tilley’s government, in office a long time, had lost supporters on a series of controversies even before confederation emerged. Tilley, an evangelical Protestant who had never cultivated Catholic votes effectively, had recruited no Catholics to the Charlottetown and Quebec delegations, and the Acadian and Irish-Catholic minorities of the province regarded both him and confederation warily. Saint
John merchants and shippers, normally allies of Tilley, feared new tariffs and fiercer competition (with good reason), and argued that maintaining both federal and provincial governments would require increased taxation. Smith and his allies campaigned against both the details and the consequences of the Quebec resolutions. “Do you wish Canada oats, beef, pork, butter, etc., to come into this country at one half the price you are now receiving? Do you wish the whole revenue of this country to be handed over to … the dishonest statesmen of Canada?” Every issue seemed to go against Tilley and confederation.
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When the results of the New Brunswick election were complete, early in March 1865, only eleven declared supporters of the Quebec resolutions survived in a house of forty-one members, and Albert Smith took over as premier. “We have been pounded, really pounded,” wrote John Gray as the results came in. “I could not believe that the constituency which I have represented for fifteen years could have embraced so many fools or could have been so thoroughly blind to its own interest.”
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Gray had grounds to be bitter, perhaps; he had lost his seat. So had Tilley, but Tilley was remarkably unperturbed. In late-twentieth-century terms, the election should have given Albert Smith an unshakeable “mandate” for four or five years, but in the 1860s parliamentary democracy never put a legislature in such a straitjacket. Tilley had already calculated that Smith’s collection of reformers and conservatives would be hard-pressed to find an alternative to confederation – or to agree on anything else. Already, he was guessing that putting Smith into office might turn out to be the best way to expose his weaknesses and wean away his backbench supporters. “All our friends are plucky, sanguine of early success, and intend fighting earnestly for a reversal,” said Tilley within weeks of his electoral defeat. He calmly foresaw that “the day is not far distant when a majority of the electors of this province will declare in favour of a federal union.”
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