Macdonald's Expectation of Southern Victory in the Civil War

As a conservative and a believer in hierarchy, and one who was always silent on the slavery issue, Macdonald appears to have favoured the South. At the war's start, he expected the South to succeed in its attempt to break away: "If they [Americans] are to be severed in two, as severed in two I believe they will be," he said in the legislature in his first post-Fort Sumter speech on April 19, 1861, "they will be two great, two noble, two free nations [that] will exist in the place of one."

--Richard Gwyn, John A: The Man Who Made Us; The Life and Times of John A. Macdonald (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2008), 245.