Macdonald came to Kingston, Upper Canada [Ont.], with his parents when he was five years old. He went to school in Kingston and then articled with a Kingston lawyer. In 1835, when he was 20, he opened his own law practice. He soon earned a reputation for flair and ingenuity in his legal work, and by 1840 he moved into corporation law, becoming solicitor for companies such as Commercial Bank of the Midland District and the Trust and Loan Co. of Upper Canada. This kind of work provided some of his basic income from that time on.

Macdonald was attorney general of Canada West from 1854 until 1867, except briefly in 1858 and 1862-64, when he was in opposition. Being attorney general was heavy work; it involved supervising the whole legal and law enforcement system of Canada West including the judges, the courts, and the jails.

In the 1850s, Macdonald established a long-standing alliance with the French Canadians, symbolized by his personal friendship with George-Étienne Cartier. This alliance had great advantages, especially in rallying French-Canadian support for the coalition government of the mid-1860s. The Great Coalition, which was formed in 1864, was supported by three of the four major political groups in the Province of Canada: the Conservatives and Reformers of Canada West, and the Bleus of Canada East. Their aim was to unite the Province of Canada with the other British North American colonies, and to reorganize them as a confederation.

Macdonald had been slow to accept this idea; he usually resisted changes until forced to accept them. But once he put his hand to Confederation, he made it his own. He took the lead at the Charlottetown and Quebec conferences of 1864 and at the London Conference of 1866. He said privately that there was no one else who had any idea of constitution making, that he had to do it all himself. His overall aim was to give Canada a federal system with a strong central government and executive. The constitution that Canada has today owes much to Macdonald's painstaking work at the Confederation conferences.

Mcdonald fell from power in 1873 as a result of the Pacific Scandal. The scandal revolved around the large sums of money that leading Conservatives had accepted in campaign funds, from railway promoters, during the 1872 elections. "These hands are clean," Macdonald declared, meaning that none of the money acquired for election expenses had gone into his own pocket. But he lost so much support in Parliament that his government had to resign in November of 1873. He also tried to resign as leader of the Conservative Party, but his followers would have none of it.

His major achievements during this second term as prime minister were the National Policy and the Canadian Pacific Railway. The National Policy, introduced in 1879, was a program to promote Canadian industry by taxing imported goods. The railway, an immense undertaking, required government involvement and support, even though it was built by a private company. It was completed in November 1885, linking Canada from east to west.

As time went on, Macdonald became more indispensable to his party. His colleagues were getting older, but they could retire, whereas he, it seemed, could not. By the spring of 1885, with the Canadian Pacific Railway causing enormous drains on the Cabinet's time and energy, they were all looking thin and wrung out. Macdonald then made great efforts to recruit new men for the Cabinet. But he was not in time to prevent the North-West Rebellion (March-May 1885). The rebellion was largely the result of an old and tired government's neglect of the problems in the West.

By September 1885, Macdonald had added new blood to his cabinet: John Thompson from Nova Scotia, George Foster from New Brunswick, and Thomas White from Ontario. All three were important additions, especially Thompson, who soon became Macdonald's most trusted adviser.

Macdonald's last election, in the spring of 1891, gave him a 27-seat working majority. But he was 76 years old, and the hard and bitter election had worn him out. He died on June 6, 1891, in harness almost to the last.

Macdonald had a lively mind and an enormous range of knowledge, and to these he added a huge and irreverent sense of humour. When depressed, when his affairs were in a tangle, he might get drunk; but he was not a chronic drunkard. Sometimes he drank just in a spirit of companionship with friends and colleagues. During the Quebec Conference in 1864, a friend discovered him standing in a nightshirt in his room, in front of the mirror, a railway rug thrown over his shoulder, pretending to be Hamlet!

Macdonald read widely. He salted his speeches with apt, often funny, references from his lore of history and literature. He rather enjoyed politics, though in the later years those piles of paper that face every administrator could be hard and exacting work. Best of all, he remembered his friends and acquaintances, and kept up his wide-ranging friendships by writing vast numbers of letters.

"He was the father and founder of his country," said Sir John Thompson in a rare interview. "There is not one of us who had not lost his heart to him." Even Liberals, across the floor of the House of Commons, were not without grudging admiration. Conservatives, in Parliament and in the country, loved the "Old Man," and they mourned his death as if he had been taken from their very households.

See also PRIME MINISTERS OF CANADA: TABLE.

Related Articles: CONFEDERATION; NATIONAL POLICY; PACIFIC SCANDAL; POLITICAL HISTORY; RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT.