MACDONALD, JACQUES ÉTIENNE JOSEPH ALEXANDRE (1765-1840), duke of Taranto and marshal of France, was born at Sedan on the 17th of November 1765. His father came of an old Jacobite family, which had followed James II. to France, and was a near relative of the celebrated Flora Macdonald. In 1785 Macdonald joined the legion raised to support the revolutionary party in Holland against the Prussians, and after it was disbanded he received a commission in the regiment of Dillon. On the breaking out of the Revolution, the regiment of Dillon remained eminently loyal, with the exception of Macdonald, who was in love with Mlle Jacob, whose father was enthusiastic for the doctrines of the Revolution. Directly after his marriage he was appointed aide-de-camp to General Dumouriez. He distinguished himself at Jemmapes, and was promoted colonel in 1793. He refused to desert to the Austrians with Dumouriez, and as a reward was made general of brigade, and appointed to command the leading brigade in Pichegru’s invasion of Holland. His knowledge of the country proved most useful, and he was instrumental in the capture of the Dutch fleet by French hussars. In 1797, having been made general of division, he served first in the army of the Rhine and then in that of Italy. When he reached Italy, the peace of Campo Formio had been signed, and Bonaparte had returned to France; but, under the direction of Berthier, Macdonald first occupied Rome, of which he was made governor, and then in conjunction with Championnet he defeated General Mack, and revolutionized the kingdom of Naples under the title of the Parthenopaean Republic. When Suvarov invaded northern Italy, and was winning back the conquests of Bonaparte, Macdonald collected all the troops in the peninsula and moved northwards. With but 30,000 men he attacked, at the Trebbia, Suvarov with 50,000, and after three days’ fighting, during which he held the Russians at bay, and gave time for Moreau to come up, he retired in good order to Genoa. After this gallant behaviour he was made governor of Versailles, and acquiesced, if he did not co-operate, in the events of the 18th Brumaire. In 1800 he received the command of the army in Switzerland which was to maintain the communications between the armies of Germany and of Italy. He carried out his orders to the letter, and at last, in the winter of 1800-1, he was ordered to march over the Splügen Pass. This achievement is fully described by Mathieu Dumas, who was chief of his staff, and is at least as noteworthy as Bonaparte’s famous passage of the St Bernard before Marengo, though followed by no such successful battle. On his return to Paris Macdonald married the widow of General Joubert, and was appointed French plenipotentiary in Denmark. Returning in 1805 he associated himself with Moreau and incurred the dislike of Napoleon, who did not include him in his first creation of marshals. Till 1809 he remained without employment, but in that year Napoleon gave him the command of a corps and the duties of military adviser to the young prince Eugène Beauharnais, viceroy of Italy. He led the army from Italy till its junction with Napoleon, and at Wagram commanded the celebrated column of attack which broke the Austrian centre and won the victory. Napoleon made him marshal of France on the field of battle, and presently created him duke of Taranto. In 1810 he served in Spain, and in 1812 he commanded the left wing of the grand army for the invasion of Russia. In 1813, after sharing in the battles of Lützen and Bautzen, he was ordered to invade Silesia, where Blücher defeated him with great loss at the Katzbach (see [Napoleonic Campaigns]). After the terrible battle of Leipzig he was ordered with Prince Poniatowski to cover the evacuation of Leipzig; after the blowing up of the bridge, he managed to swim the Elster, while Poniatowski was drowned. During the defensive campaign of 1814 Macdonald again distinguished himself; he was one of the marshals sent by Napoleon to take his abdication in favour of his son to Paris. When all were deserting their old master, Macdonald remained faithful to him. He was directed by Napoleon to give in his adherence to the new régime, and was presented by him with the sabre of Murad Bey for his fidelity. At the Restoration he was made a peer of France and knight grand cross of the order of St Louis; he remained faithful to the new order of things during the Hundred Days. In 1815 he became chancellor of the Legion of Honour (a post he held till 1831), in 1816 major-general of the royal bodyguard, and he took a great part in the discussions in the House of Peers, voting consistently as a moderate Liberal. In 1823 he married Mlle de Bourgony, by whom he had a son, Alexander, who succeeded on his death in 1840 as duke of Taranto. From 1830 his life was spent in retirement at his country place Courcelles-le-Roi (Seine et Oise), where he died on the 7th of September 1840.
Macdonald had none of that military genius which distinguished Davout, Masséna and Lannes, nor of that military science conspicuous in Marmont and St Cyr, but nevertheless his campaign in Switzerland gives him a rank far superior to such mere generals of division as Oudinot and Dupont. This capacity for independent command made Napoleon, in spite of his defeats at the Trebbia and the Katzbach, trust him with large commands till the end of his career. As a man, his character cannot be spoken of too highly; no stain of cruelty or faithlessness rests on him.
Macdonald was especially fortunate in the accounts of his military exploits, Mathieu Dumas and Ségur having been on his staff in Switzerland. See Dumas, Événements militaires; and Ségur’s rare tract, Lettre sur la campagne du Général Macdonald dans les Grisons en 1800 et 1801 (1802), and Éloge (1842). His memoirs were published in 1892 (Eng. trans., Recollections of Marshal Macdonald), but are brief and wanting in balance.
MACDONALD, SIR JOHN ALEXANDER (1815-1891), first premier of the dominion of Canada, was born in Glasgow on the 11th of January 1815, the third child of Hugh Macdonald (d. 1841), a native of Sutherlandshire. The family emigrated to Canada in 1820, settling first at Kingston, Ontario. At the age of fifteen Macdonald entered a law office; he was called to the bar in 1836, and began practice in Kingston, with immediate success. Macdonald entered upon his active career at a critical period in the history of Canada, and the circumstances of the time were calculated to stimulate political thought. It was the year before the rebellion of 1837; the condition of the whole country was very unsettled; and it seemed well-nigh impossible to reconcile differences arising from racial and political antagonisms. During the rebellion young Macdonald volunteered for active service, but his military career never went farther than drilling and marching. The mission of Lord Durham; the publication of his famous report; the union of the two Canadas; the administrations of Lord Sydenham, Sir Charles Bagot, and Sir Charles Metcalfe, filled the years immediately succeeding 1837 with intense political interest, and in their results have profoundly influenced the constitution of the British Empire.
Macdonald made his first acquaintance with public business as an alderman of Kingston. In 1844 Sir Charles Metcalfe, in his contest with the Reform party led by Baldwin and Lafontaine, appealed to the electors, and Macdonald was elected to the provincial assembly as Conservative member for Kingston. A sentence in his first address to the electors strikes the dominant note of his public career: “I therefore need scarcely state my firm belief that the prosperity of Canada depends upon its permanent connexion with the mother country, and that I shall resist to the utmost any attempt (from whatever quarter it may come) which may tend to weaken that union.” He took his seat on the 28th of November as a supporter of the Draper government. During the first three or four years he spoke little, but devoted himself with assiduity to mastering parliamentary forms and the business of the house. His capacity soon attracted attention, and in 1847 he was made receiver-general with a seat in the executive council, an office soon exchanged for the more important one of commissioner of Crown-lands. Although the government of which he thus became a member held office for only ten months, being placed in a hopeless minority on making an appeal to the country, Macdonald from this time forward took a position of constantly increasing weight in his party.
One of the first acts of the Reform government which succeeded that of which Macdonald was a member was to pass the Rebellion Losses Bill, made famous in colonial history by the fact that it brought to a crucial test the principle of responsible government. The assent of Lord Elgin to the bill provoked in Montreal a riot which ended in the burning of the houses of parliament, and so great was the indignation of the hitherto ultra-loyal Conservative party that many of its most prominent members signed a document favouring annexation to the United States; Macdonald on the other hand took steps, in conjunction with others, to form a British-American league, having for its object the confederation of all the provinces, the strengthening of the connexion with the mother country, and the adoption of a national commercial policy. He remained in opposition from 1848 till 1854, holding together under difficult circumstances an unpopular party with which he was not entirely in sympathy. The two great political issues of the time were the secularization of the clergy reserves in Ontario, and the abolition of seigniorial tenure in Quebec. Both of these reforms Macdonald long opposed, but when successive elections had proved that they were supported by public opinion, he brought about a coalition of Conservatives and moderate reformers for the purpose of carrying them.
Out of this coalition was gradually developed the Liberal-conservative party, of which until his death Macdonald continued to be the most considerable figure, and which for more than forty years largely moulded the history of Canada. From 1854 to 1857 he was attorney-general of Upper Canada, and then, on the retirement of Colonel Taché, he became prime minister. This first coalition had now accomplished its temporary purpose, but so closely were parties divided at this period, that the defeat and reinstatement of governments followed each other in rapid succession.
The experiment of applying responsible government on party lines to the two Canadian provinces at last seemed to have come to a deadlock. Two general elections and the defeat of four ministries within three years had done nothing to solve the difficulties of the situation. At this critical period a proposal was made for a coalition of parties in order to carry out a broad scheme of British-American confederation. The immediate proposal is said to have come from George Brown; the large political idea had long been advocated by Macdonald and Alexander Galt in Upper Canada—by Joseph Howe and others in the maritime provinces. The close of the American Civil War, the Fenian raids across the American border, and the dangers incident to the international situation, gave a decisive impulse to the movement. Macdonald, at the head of a representative delegation from Ontario and Quebec, met the public men of the maritime provinces in conference at Charlottetown in 1864, and the outline of confederation then agreed upon was filled out in detail at a conference held at Quebec soon afterwards. The actual framing of the British North America Act, into which the resolutions of these two conferences were consolidated, was carried out at the Westminster Palace Hotel in London, during December 1866 and January 1867, by delegates from all the provinces working in co-operation with the law officers of the Crown, under the presidency of Lord Carnarvon, then secretary of state for the colonies. Macdonald took the leading part in all these discussions, and he thus naturally became the first premier of the Dominion. He was made a K.C.B. in recognition of his services to the empire.
The difficulties of organizing the new Dominion, the questions arising from diverse claims and the various conditions of the country, called for infinite tact and resource on the part of the premier. Federal rights were to be safeguarded against the provincial governments, always jealous of their privileges. The people of Nova Scotia in particular, dissatisfied with the way in which their province had been drawn into the Union, maintained a fierce opposition to the Ottawa government, until their leader, Joseph Howe, fearing an armed rising, came to an agreement with Macdonald and accepted a seat in his cabinet. The establishment of a supreme court also occupied the attention of Sir John, who had a strong sense of the necessity of maintaining the purity and dignity of the judicial office. The act creating this court was finally passed during the administration of Alexander Mackenzie. The pledge made at confederation with regard to the building of the Intercolonial railway to connect the maritime provinces with those of the St Lawrence was fulfilled. The North-West Territories were secured as a part of confederated Canada by the purchase of the rights of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the establishment of Manitoba as a province in 1870. Canada’s interests were protected during the negotiations which ended in the treaty of Washington in 1871, and in which Sir John took a leading part as one of the British delegates. In this year British Columbia entered the confederation, one of the provisions of union being that a transcontinental railroad should be built within ten years. This was declared by the opposition to be impossible. It was possible only to a leader of indomitable will. Charges of bribery against the government in connexion with the contract for the building of this line led to the resignation of the cabinet in 1874, and for four years Sir John was in opposition. But he was by no means inactive. During the summer of 1876 he travelled through Ontario addressing the people on the subject of a commercial system looking to the protection of native industries. This was the celebrated “National Policy,” which had been in his thoughts as long ago as the formation of the British-American League in 1850. The government of Alexander Mackenzie refused to consider a protection policy, and determined to adhere to Free Trade, with a tariff for revenue only. On these strongly defined issues the two parties appealed to the people in 1878. The Liberal party was almost swept away, and Sir John, on his return to power, put his policy into effect with a thoroughness that commanded the admiration even of his opponents, who, after long resistance, adopted it on their accession to office in 1896. He also undertook the immediate construction of the Canadian Pacific railway, which had been postponed by the former government. The line was begun late in 1880, and finished in November 1885—an achievement which Sir John ranked among his greatest triumphs. “The faith of Sir John,” says one of his biographers, “did more to build the road than the money of Mount-Stephen.”