1867 (14 page)

Whelan, a cabinet minister in the government that had passed the laws, saw Britain’s actions as an attack on responsible government itself. “It is degrading and humiliating to the colony,” fumed
Whelan, “that the proprietors – most of them, or many of them absentees, and quite irresponsible, should exercise so arbitrary an influence at the Colonial Office, as to render nugatory the deliberate action of our legislature. This is a species of despotism.” London’s intransigence meant Coles’s government was unable to deliver on its promises to the tenant farmers who had elected it. It was defeated in 1859. In opposition, Whelan’s bitterness grew, and his commitment to constitutional reform wavered. “Talk about the glorious privileges of the British Constitution! We live under a constitution of dispatches dictated according to the caprice of absentee land proprietors,” he snarled in 1860.
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Whelan then began to speculate about a social contract between the governed and the governing that would have horrified Edmund Burke. “Loyalty with me is not a blind sentiment. The sentiment which springs from a mutual return of advantages is the loyalty which … we owe to that sovereign who rules over us.… Prince Edward Island has generally exhibited much more loyalty than, under the circumstances of the case, she was perhaps justified in showing.” Spoken in a legislature of the British Empire, particularly by a Catholic Irishman, such talk of “a mutual return of advantages” – and the implied right of subjects to abolish the contract when they chose – carried a whiff of revolution.
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In 1864, still in opposition, with the landocracy as entrenched as ever, Whelan got an opportunity to endorse the bold measures his words of 1860 suggested. In May 1864, Island farmers founded the Tenant League. They declared they would not pay rent and would resist any sanctions that might ensue, forcibly if necessary. Support for the League spread across the Island. Rents went unpaid. Horn-blowing lookouts surrounded bailiffs who went to enforce payment or to carry out evictions, and, at the sound of the horns, angry crowds gathered to drive the bailiffs back to Charlottetown. The delegates to the Charlottetown conference who went driving through the Island countryside were visiting a landscape in which defiance
of lawful authority was almost universal. Within a year, companies of the British army would be needed to aid the civil power in Prince Edward Island.

The Tenant League members were the people for whom Whelan had been fighting the landocracy since the 1840s. They included many of his own voters in the Second Kings riding. And their cause was his: defeat of the landocracy. If Whelan believed the Crown had forfeited its claim to the allegiance of the Islanders, the rise of the Tenant League should have been his moment to declare himself.

Instead, Edward Whelan condemned the Tenant League, and he did so unequivocally. He went back to the other fundamental principle he had declared in 1846: defence of the British constitution. The landlords must be confronted, he wrote in a long newspaper article on the league, but the law had to be respected. “No man has a right to resist the laws for the attainment of any public object … until all the resources under the constitution have been exhausted,” Whelan wrote.
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Whelan’s attack on the Tenant League, which bitterly antagonized its members, seems to have had several motives besides his conviction that it was wrong in principle. As a practical matter, Whelan believed defiance of the law would fail, and in failing would set back the legitimate cause. “It may be no difficult matter to bag a bailiff or an agent now and then, but to attempt to bag a company or a regiment of troops would be another affair,” he predicted long before troops had been called for. As an Irish Catholic, Whelan probably also guessed that defiance of the law would be more dangerous for the Catholic minority than for Protestant Islanders. League membership cut across Catholic–Protestant divisions, but if religious differences were exploited to divide the tenants, as had often been done before, many League leaders would be protected by their membership in the Protestant ascendancy. Whelan’s fellow Catholics would not.
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At bottom, however, Whelan was returning to the faith in parliamentary measures that had been wavering in 1860. By the fall of
1864, Whelan thought his faith was about to be vindicated. A new event had given fresh strength to his arguments. Forcible resistance seemed not only wrong and dangerous, but unnecessary. The new event was confederation.

Before the Charlottetown conference, Whelan had dismissed a union of the colonies as meaningless – unless it freed the Island from the interference of the Colonial Office and the landlords. That view was widely shared. When Arthur Gordon of New Brunswick floated the idea of uniting the three Maritime provinces, Leonard Tilley and Charles Tupper made sure the proposal included a plan for buying out the Island’s landlords. During the conference itself, George Coles pushed for that commitment. The Canadian visitors, particularly George-Étienne Cartier, who had assisted the buying out of the seigneurial landlords of Canada East, were encouraging. The conference passed no resolutions on the Island lands, but Coles said that they had accepted the principle of breaking up the estates. John Gray of New Brunswick, well known to Islanders for his role in a commission that had attempted to settle the land question in 1861, said as much at one of the Charlottetown banquets. Denouncing tenancy as the greatest drawback to the Island, he publicly confirmed that “the removal of this grievance would certainly follow as the result of colonial union.”
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Between the Charlottetown and Quebec meetings, Edward Whelan exulted. Confederation would drive landlordism “to the wall,” he wrote in the
Examiner
. Once confederation was achieved, he saw at once, the new federal government would stand between the Island and the Colonial Office. Island legislation to assist the tenants would no longer be vetoed by the landlords’ powerful friends in London. And, most wonderful, confederation would end the problem that had always vexed Island reformers: how to finance the end of tenancy. The much larger treasury of the federated colonies could readily provide money for a fund that would assist poor farmers to buy their land.
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Whelan became a sudden and permanent convert to confederation about the time of the Charlottetown conference, and with good reason. He had found the promise of an end to the Island’s most intractable social and political problem – and also a solution to the issue that was estranging him from his restless Tenant League constituents. Even a rival newspaper, hostile to confederation, admitted that, if the new confederation could buy out the landlords, “the islanders almost to a man will hold up both hands for the union.” If confederation could end landlordism peacefully and profitably, Whelan would have a victory for parliamentary principles – and fine prospects for re-election and a return to power. No wonder the confederation proposal had restored his faith in constitutional measures.
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Whelan came from a generation that had done well by the British constitution. In the aftermath of the disastrous and counter-productive 1837 rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada, reformers like him had re-dedicated themselves to change through constitutional means, and they had won. Proclaiming their absolute loyalty to the constitution, they had successfully turned the system of government inside out. The rule of appointed governors and their appointive councils had given way to the rule of legislatures elected on a broad public franchise and sympathetic to vigorous state initiatives.

In defeat and opposition in the early 1860s, Whelan’s constitutional faith had wavered. The Tenant League’s adoption of extralegal means, however, drew Whelan back to his fundamental faith that constitutional means were, both tactically and as matters of principle, the right ones. In September 1864, confederation looked to Whelan a fresh step in constitutional reform. It promised not only a glorious transcontinental destiny but also an end to landlordism, the last vestige of the bad old days that still lingered in Prince Edward Island. As the
Queen Victoria
ploughed through the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the next great reform triumph must have seemed to lie just over the horizon.

Quebec delivered a shattering disappointment to those hopes. In the Island delegation, Coles and Whelan, espousing liberal principles, sat with landowners like Edward Palmer and Heath Haviland, who were deeply suspicious of any change that might threaten their standing. Even though they fought bitterly amongst themselves, both groups asserted the rights of Islanders against central authority. The Island delegates quickly became the most obstreperous critics of the plan the Canadian delegates were putting forward. Demanding provincial equality in the Senate and more seats in the House, the Islanders challenged the rep-by-pop deal by which the Canadians had agreed on a federal union.

The Canadians began to denounce Island arguments as the complaints of greedy malcontents. And suddenly the proposal to buy out the Island’s landlords vanished from the confederation agenda. Possibly the Islanders’ demands had irritated the Canadians into closing the purse strings. Perhaps a dawning recognition that the Canadians were not going to live up to the land commitment made at Charlottetown helped ignite the hostility of the Islanders. Whatever the case, the Canadians would not budge on the land question. Support for confederation evaporated in the Island delegation. A land purchase, said Andrew Macdonald, was the only advantage he could see in confederation, but the motion that he and Coles put was not even included in the minutes of the meeting. The Islanders voted, often alone, against one resolution after another, and Whelan seems to have voted with the Island majority.

By the time the delegations returned to Prince Edward Island, George Coles, the leader of Whelan’s party, had changed course dramatically. Since Charlottetown, he had favoured confederation as the way to end landlordism. When confederation failed to deliver, he made common cause against it with Edward Palmer, who had always resisted both it and any challenge to landlords’ rights. In rejecting confederation, Coles had made an astute political calculation. With the tempting prospect of an end to landlordism snatched away, the tough take-it-or-leave-it offer of confederation seemed
mostly an affront to Island pride and self-sufficiency. Mass meetings across the Island condemned the idea of confederation. By an overwhelming majority, the legislature in Charlottetown instructed the government to have nothing to do with colonial union of any kind. In a couple of years, Coles would ride the anti-confederate crusade back to the premier’s office.

Edward Whelan would come back into office with Coles, but Whelan had not repudiated confederation. Although he had voted against many of the resolutions at Quebec, he told the Island legislature, “we got what I think should be accepted as a compromise.” At Quebec he had been fascinated by glimpses of the complex, diverse political world that confederation would create. He had caught the national vision, and he began to make disparaging jokes about “this patch of sandbank in the St. Lawrence.” He also seems to have calculated that federal union and the removal of Colonial Office interference would quickly make landlordism extinct, whether the money was provided or not. All through 1865, 1866, and 1867, he stood among the tiny, unpopular minority of Island confederates.
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Whelan, of course, held no sinecure post. He had to win his seat in every election, and, in 1867, the unpopularity of his views caught up with him. Anti-confederates resented his support for union. Tenant League supporters resented his refusal to support them. The bishop of Charlottetown and the local priest resented his blunt declarations that clerics ought to stay out of politics. The Irish community, Whelan’s core constituency, shared all three resentments. Whelan lost a by-election in the spring of 1867 and was out of politics when confederation went ahead on July 1 without Prince Edward Island. He was dead before the end of the year, not yet forty-four.

Even serious historians have been tempted into suggesting that Whelan died of a broken heart, a kind of martyr for the confederation cause. Surely this is nonsense. Whelan was a seasoned political pro. He would hardly have pined away over a by-election, and his confidence that Prince Edward Island would soon embrace confederation had not wavered. “He was a fast liver,” said one of his reporters
in an obituary, and photographs of Whelan suggest the beefy, thick-necked look of a man who worked too hard, ate too much, and drank too often. Almost certainly he died of these enthusiasms, and not from heartbreak.
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Whelan’s legacy seemed small. Edward Palmer once accused him of saying little during the Quebec conference because he was too busy making notes of the proceedings. Whelan admitted as much, but if he intended to make his fortune with a book about confederation, he never got the chance. All he produced was a small compilation of speeches from the conference banquets, “a very humble and unpretending affair,” in his own words. It cost him £150 to print, “and I haven’t received a shilling for it yet,” he told a friend. The larger book, if there was one, never appeared. Whatever notes he kept at Quebec were probably lost with all his papers in a house fire a few years after his death. His only surviving child drowned in 1875.
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Even his political predictions mostly went awry. He thought confederation would end landlordism, while Tenant League actions threatened only disaster and defeat. Instead, the tenants broke the landlords themselves. Whelan expected the landlords would invoke the law to smash the illegal resistance with armed force. But in face of the rent strike, it was the landlords who wavered. Leading landlords soon declared themselves ready to sell out to the tenants, and a wave of purchases eroded the great estates. Once they themselves became landowners, Island farmers shed their radicalism – but it had been the threat of forcible resistance, not Whelan’s parliamentary tactics, that had won their fight.