Sir John A. Macdonald

John A. Macdonald assembled Canada out of four colonies and governed it for nineteen years. Born in Glasgow in 1815, he came to Upper Canada as a boy, was articled to a lawyer at fifteen, and had his own practice at nineteen. He entered politics in 1844 and spent two decades in the deadlocked legislature of the united Province of Canada, where an equal split of seats between the French-speaking east and the English-speaking west meant that no government could hold a stable majority. The way out was to make the union larger. He formed a coalition with his opponent George Brown and with George-Étienne Cartier of Canada East, and the conferences at Charlottetown and Quebec in 1864 produced a federal design — a strong central government with the residual powers, which was his own preference and the lesson he drew from the American civil war then being fought. Confederation took effect on 1 July 1867 and he became the first prime minister. He then bought Rupert's Land, brought in Manitoba, British Columbia and Prince Edward Island, and built the Canadian Pacific Railway, which was the price of British Columbia and which produced the Pacific Scandal that drove him from office for five years. His government suppressed the Red River and North-West resistances and hanged Louis Riel in 1885. It also expanded the residential school system and used famine conditions to clear Plains nations from the railway route, and his statues have been removed on that account. He died in office in 1891.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history