Canada's first prime minister started earning a living at fifteen
John A. Macdonald left school at 15 because his father's shops kept failing, and later lamented that he had no boyhood. When he won his first election, as a Kingston alderman in 1843, cheering supporters carried him aloft and dropped him in the slush. He called it his first downfall. It was hardly his last.
Macdonald was born in Glasgow in January 1815; the official record says the 10th, his father's journal the 11th. Hugh Macdonald was an unlucky merchant, and debts pushed the family across the Atlantic to Kingston, Upper Canada, in 1820. Soon after arriving, John's younger brother James died after a blow from a servant minding the boys. His mother remained the steadying influence in his life until her death in 1862. He would later tell his secretary that with a university education he might have become a writer.
Instead he took the well-worn road of law. With no law schools in the colony, he articled under a Kingston lawyer, ran the office at 18 when his employer travelled, and opened his own practice in 1835 before he was even qualified. He sought out dramatic criminal cases, winning praise for his defences even when clients were convicted, and learned the persuasion he would use in politics. In the 1837 rebellion he marched to Toronto as a militia private, remembering blistered feet and a musket that galled his shoulder.
Kingston sent him to the provincial legislature in 1844, and by 1857 he was premier of a colony whose governments kept collapsing. In 1864 he accepted his rival George Brown's offer of a Great Coalition to pursue federation, which produced Canada on 1 July 1867. As first prime minister he created the North-West Mounted Police and added Rupert's Land, British Columbia and Prince Edward Island. A bribery scandal tied to the Canadian Pacific Railway forced him out in 1873, but voters returned him in 1878, and he finished the railway.
His record is sharply contested. He approved the 1885 execution of the Métis leader Louis Riel, alienating many francophones, and is criticised for the Chinese head tax and for residential schools designed to assimilate Indigenous children. He also consistently ranks among Canada's highest-rated leaders. He served 19 years in all and died in office in 1891, still the oldest Canadian prime minister.
Source: John A. Macdonald
