Leonard Tilley: Unlikely Saviour of Confederation

When British North American colonial leaders gathered at Quebec City in 1864 to shape the details of the Confederation project, one man stood out, in historian P.B. Waite’s words, as “the rare example of a politician who knew when not to talk.” This was Samuel Leonard Tilley, a Saint John druggist and leader of the New Brunswick Liberal Party. Waite notes that he was “not a frequent speaker at the Quebec Conference, but one always clear and to the point.” Yet it was the self-effacing Tilley who, with the timely help of some external forces, became the unlikely saviour of Confederation in 1866.

This tale begins with the fact that New Brunswick was the only British North American colony to put the Confederation project to its voters in a general election. And it did so twice. The Province of Canada and Nova Scotia adopted Confederation through resolutions passed by their legislatures. The New Brunswick election of February and March, 1865, sharply rejected both Tilley and Confederation. The anti-Confederates under A.J.M. Smith won 30 of the 41 seats in the legislature with Tilley losing his own seat.

This was a crushing blow to the Confederation cause. The Nova Scotia legislature would never have endorsed union with Canada without the land connection through New Brunswick. Had Tilley been a less persistent and tenacious supporter of Confederation, the project would have ended up as a mere federal union of Ontario and Quebec.

The British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, once famously remarked that “a week is a long time in politics.” In the slower- moving environment of mid-nineteenth century New Brunswick it took Tilley longer to turn the tide of public opinion. But, in the elections of May and June 1866, Tilley won an even larger majority for Confederation (33-8) than Smith’s majority against it (30-11) only fifteen months earlier.

Tilley’s personal qualities contributed a great deal to this remarkable turnaround. Waite describes him as “clever; he was like a fox, quick, resourceful, persistent, and at times courageous.” A contemporary newspaper prophetically observed in 1864 that “Mr. Tilley is never so dangerous, so fertile in expedients…as when his adversaries think they have him cornered.”
But even the redoubtable Tilley needed the assistance of three key external factors to pull off this reversal of the verdict of 1865.
First, the British government, through the provincial Lieutenant-Governor, Arthur Gordon, persistently pressed Smith’s government to reconsider joining Confederation. Finally in April 1866 Gordon forced Smith to resign and call a new election.
Second, the Smith government had hoped that the Americans could be persuaded to reverse their decision to abrogate the Reciprocity Treaty with British North America in March 1866. Supporters of Confederation promoted the benefits of an Intercolonial Railway linking New Brunswick to the Province of Canada. But Smith had argued that with the continuation of the Reciprocity Treaty a much more valuable project would be a Western Extension of New Brunswick’s railways from Saint John to the much larger American market through Maine. American determination to end the Reciprocity Treaty on schedule and the Smith government’s inability to obtain financial backing for Western Extension either by British or local capitalists left no alternative economic policy to Confederation.
Third, several hundred members of an American Irish nationalist group, the Fenians, gathered in Eastport, Maine in April 1866. Some of them launched an abortive invasion of Indian Island in Southwest New Brunswick later that month. The Fenian goal was to annex the province to the USA, thwart Confederation and pressure the British government to grant independence to Ireland. The Catholic hierarchy of New Brunswick responded to this event by issuing a pastoral letter endorsing Confederation. Also, coming just prior to the May-June 1866 election, the Fenian threat moved several constituencies bordering on Maine in southern and western New Brunswick from the Anti- to the Pro-Confederate camp. The only constituencies Smith carried were the ones farthest from the American border in southeast New Brunswick.
The Anti-Confederate cause had flourished in 1865 on the expectation that New Brunswick could remain a distinct self-governing colony and maintain and even extend its access to the lucrative United States market. The realities of American economic and military hostility and the determination of the British government to unite New Brunswick and Nova Scotia with the Province of Canada into a new Dominion dashed this vision. Britain believed union would make British North America more responsible for its own defence and less likely to entangle it into a war with the United States.
Tilley’s tenacity saved Confederation, but only with the powerful assistance of Confederation’s opponents in the United States. These external enemies of Confederation turned out to be Tilley’s most effective allies in reversing its stinging defeat of 1865.