Commentary
John Sandfield Macdonald was Canadian born and bred—something that was unusual among his political contemporaries at the time. Born in 1812 in Glengarry, Upper Canada, he died in 1872 in Cornwall, only 30 kilometres from his birthplace. About 500 Scottish Highlanders had settled in eastern Ontario in 1786, in the aftermath of the American Revolutionary War, under the leadership of the Catholic priest Alexander Macdonell, trained at the Jesuit Scots College in Rome. Macdonell rallied his people to the Crown and the Upper Canadian elite. Glengarry was thus an old fashioned “Tory” milieu, dedicated to the monarchy and the British Constitution.
Sandfield (he was referred to by his middle name) lost his mother when he was eight. An adventurous boy, he tried a few times to run away, thwarted on one occasion when an indigenous man demanded 50 cents to paddle him across to the U.S. side of the St. Lawrence River, but he had only 25 cents. He attended Cornwall’s famous Grammar School established by Anglican churchman John Strachan, and upon graduation in 1835 articled in the law firm of the top local Tory, Archibald McLean. McLean was a War of 1812 hero severely wounded at Queenston Heights while serving in the 3rd Regiment of York Militia, an all-Canadian unit brought into being by the Upper Canada Assembly in the Militia Act of 1793, and perpetuated today by the Queen’s York Rangers (1st American Regiment), part of Canada’s Army Reserve. Sandfield himself served as a lieutenant in the Queen’s Light Infantry in Toronto in 1838-39 in the aftershocks of W. L. Mackenzie’s pro-American rebellion….