George Brown: From Newspaper Entrepreneur to Father of Confederation (Part 1)

Hon. George Brown (1818–1880) newspaperman, politician, and one of the fathers of Confederation. Public Domain

Commentary

In May 1844, George Brown was on a special trip to New York City to acquire the best technology he could afford—Toronto’s very first cylinder rotary printing press, a model developed by R. Hoe & Co.—for his latest venture. The 26-year-old Edinburgh-born political journalist had worked in Manhattan for five formative years writing and editing newspapers with his father, Peter, before moving to the comparative wilds of Upper Canada in 1843. Now George was launching a new newspaper, The Toronto Globe.

He then threw his growing clout behind the movement for conservative reform, to obtain for Canada a constitution more closely modelled on that of Great Britain. As Brown’s influence increased, he became a main driver behind the Reform cause and, in turn, Canada’s Confederation and Western expansion. He was also co-premier of the Province of Canada very briefly before Confederation.

The younger Brown was “endowed with high enthusiasm,” his Edinburgh teacher said, and the gift of “creating enthusiasm in others.” His drive, ingenuity, and technological innovation were typical of the magnificent Scots diaspora across England’s domains. “We may assume that Mr. Brown derived much of his energy, power and religious zeal from his half Celtic origin” on his mother’s side, wrote his friend and admirer Alexander Mackenzie, the Scots stonemason who became Canada’s second prime minister in 1874. Such men everywhere put themselves at the leading edge of science, learning, discovery, enterprise, journalism and, not least, politics. They were the busy beavers of the Empire.

The Browns were crusaders, fighters, and entrepreneurs. From their offices on Broadway, they denounced slavery in the pages of The Albion newspaper and their first start-up, The British Chronicle, which carried news of imperial politics, British obituaries, and, in time, Canadian affairs, too. And the Browns backed the independent Scots evangelical Christians who broke away from the established Church of Scotland (in what was called the “Great Disruption”) and then in 1843 started a new weekly newspaper, The Banner, at 142 King Street in Toronto, to promote the Free Kirk (Free Church of Scotland), Presbyterianism, and religious liberty, and to offer family-friendly content.

With a population of about 16,000, compared to New York’s 312,000, Toronto then resembled a lakeshore town between the Don River and the 1816 fort with its recently restored stone walls. Toronto’s citizens, many of them recent immigrants from the British Isles with a marked Ulster (Northern Ireland) presence, had great aspirations for the place as an imperial capital. All the more welcome were new arrivals like Brown, the “war-like young Scotchman” (as Sir Joseph Pope described him), with his passion and his modern cylinder press which could roll out 1,250 pages per hour compared to 200 pages on the hand-cranked flatbed press operated by his younger brother, Gordon, to print The Banner.

The Browns had seen up close that America was a land of riotous factionalisms curiously animated by the spirit of conformity embodied in the motto “e pluribus unum,” from many into one. The radicalism they witnessed had alarmed them. Disillusioned with the republican model, Jacksonian democracy, and constantly roiling eccentric movements such as the egalitarian Locofoco Party, they hadn’t much liked the “log cabin and hard cider” election of 1840, which deceptively portrayed the upper class William H. Harrison as a man of the people (though in a twist of fate the president died in office of pneumonia 31 days later).

Statue of the Hon. George Brown in Queen’s Park, Toronto, circa 1900. Public Domain

All of this had turned the Browns back towards a greater appreciation of the British Constitution in their tract, “The Fame and Glory of England Vindicated.” Moving to Upper Canada in 1843, they naturally aligned themselves with the struggle for a proper British constitution, keenly supporting the pro-British Reformers of the old Province of Canada, men like Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine in the established eastern half of the Province (Lower Canada), and William Baldwin and his son Robert in the western frontier that was Upper Canada.

The thing to know about the Reformers of the time is that when they attacked the government, it was not because Upper Canada’s Anglican elites were too British but because they were not British enough. Toronto’s leadership was typified by War of 1812 veterans like Sir John Beverley Robinson, the formidable attorney general. Several were American-born, like Robinson himself, or Canadian-born descendants of American loyalists. On the other hand, leading Reformers included the Scots-born radicals Robert Gourlay and William Lyon Mackenzie, who mocked the “jumped up” elite of “Little York,” and the most talented and sensible of all the Reformers, William W. Baldwin and his wife Phoebe Willcocks, both born in Ireland.

The Browns threw themselves into the maelstrom. Having helped to bring British cabinet government to the Province of Canada in 1848, George Brown took on several new political crusades. One was the fight in the 1850s to free Upper Canada from the grip of what he and his allies denounced as “French Domination,” which referred to the powerful influence wielded by the skilled and determined political talents of the senior half of the Province, Lower Canada, led by men like Augustin-Norbert Morin, LaFontaine’s successor, and George Cartier.

Brown’s solution was “Representation by Population,” which I will write about in Part 2 of this article. Next came his major contribution to the cause of building a wider union with the Maritimes and the North-Western Territories that in 1867 became the Dominion of Canada. And then there is the best thing that ever happened to George Brown: meeting and marrying his wife, Anne Nelson, on a romantic trip to Scotland. Those topics, too, are for my next article.

Brown intended The Globe to be “a thoroughly conservative journal,” meaning it would promote measured and sensible reform, not radical change. Its opening manifesto stated that “the limited Monarchy of Great Britain is the best system of government yet devised by the wisdom of man.” He ensured that The Globe had the latest news (arriving regularly by steamship) and the most bracing opinion pages covering politics and settlement in Upper Canada, making it a daily must-read. He reproduced detailed accounts of politics and letters in England and the United States and printed the first Canadian serializations, for example, of Dickens’s new novels, beginning with “Dombey and Son” in 1846.

Originally a single large sheet folded to make four pages of close print as was typical of provincial newspapers of the time, Brown built The Globe into several editions per day. (They were fivepence a copy, or one pound for a year’s subscription.) Later, Brown scored another first, introducing Upper Canada’s first steam-powered rotary press in 1853, again from R. Hoe & Co. in Manhattan, powered by a steam engine he bought in Kingston. By then The Globe occupied three floors at 22 King Street West (today replaced by the Scotiabank tower), and with a circulation of 2,000 it was the city’s most widely read newspaper.

Perhaps the best tribute to Brown came from his admirer Alexander Mackenzie in his book “The Life and Speeches of Hon. George Brown”: “No man in his day had a better knowledge of history, civil and religious, or a more correct opinion respecting popular government. An intense hater of slavery, and a keen defender of the British constitutional system, no man was better adapted to shine as a newspaper editor or contributor.”

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.