Joseph Howe, the Tragic Figure of Confederation

Of all the men who fought against Confederation, and so against Macdonald, Howe was the one Macdonald respected the most. Years later, he told his secretary Joseph Pope that Howe possessed "the most seminal mind" he had ever met. Yet Howe was the tragic figure of Confederation. He opposed it, and lost. The true source of his pain, though, was that he lost his faith in Britain.

--Richard Gwyn, John A: The Man Who Made Us; The Life and Times of John A. Macdonald (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2008), 360.

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.

Canada's Alexander Hamilton

Macdonald secured all the four centralizing measures Alexander Hamilton had attempted to insert into the U.S. Constitution at Philadelphia in 1787--appointment of senators for life; federal appointment of state governors; the federal right to disallow state laws; and the granting of residual powers to the federal government. He also secured one centralizing authority, over "banking, incorporation of banks, and the issue of paper money," that Hamilton never even thought of.

--Richard Gwyn, John A: The Man Who Made Us; The Life and Times of John A. Macdonald (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2008), 331.