George Brown (1818–1880): Alloa-Born Founder of the Globe and Father of Confederation

established claims rest on primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared claims have a sound core but disputed details, dates or readings. traditional claims are widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

Brown is very well documented. The standard life is J. M. S. Careless's two-volume Brown of the Globe (1959 and 1963), and Careless also wrote Brown's entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (volume 10, 1972). Dates, figures and constituencies here follow that entry unless stated. Careless admired Brown, and his judgements are attributed to him. Parks Canada, the Archives of Ontario and The Canadian Encyclopedia add the later life, the house and the family. Brown's letters to his wife, almost daily, are a main source for the conferences of 1864, for which no full official record exists. For the telephone episode the source is Robert V. Bruce's biography Bell (1973), which draws on the Bell family papers; Bruce wrongly gives Brown's birthplace as Edinburgh.

There are a few conflicts of detail. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography dates the shooting to 25 March 1880; some other accounts give 24 March. Parks Canada and the Archives of Ontario date his Senate appointment to 1873, while the Dictionary describes him taking up his seat in 1875. The judgement of Brown's attitude to Catholics and French Canadians varies with the writer. His defenders stress that he opposed state support for any church, not Catholicism as a faith; his critics quote the Globe's language. Both sides are given below.

An Alloa birth and an Edinburgh boyhood

established Born in Clackmannanshire. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography records that Brown was born at Alloa on 29 November 1818, the elder son of Peter Brown and Marianne Mackenzie. His father was an Edinburgh wholesale merchant. His mother was the daughter of George Mackenzie of Stornoway on Lewis, so the family had both Lowland and Highland roots. The Browns moved back to Edinburgh before George was eight.

established Educated in Edinburgh. George attended the High School of Edinburgh and then the Southern Academy, and joined his father's business. Peter Brown was a Whig-Liberal and an evangelical Presbyterian, and those two loyalties shaped his son's politics for life. Brown's later school friend Thomas Nelson, of the Edinburgh publishing family, was to become his brother-in-law.

established A family in trouble. In 1836 Peter Brown, who handled money for the city of Edinburgh, was found to have lost nearly £2,800 of municipal funds that had become mixed with his private accounts. His guarantors repaid it. The following spring, on 30 April 1837, he and George sailed from Liverpool for New York. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography records the loss as money mixed with his own accounts, not as theft.

established What was Scottish about him. Brown was Scottish by birth, parentage and schooling. He spent the rest of his life in North America from the age of 18, but Scotland stayed close. He married in Edinburgh, holidayed there with his family in 1867, sent his son to Merchiston Castle School, and his widow and children returned to Edinburgh after his death. His politics carried the marks of Scottish Presbyterian Liberalism: free trade, suspicion of established churches, moral seriousness, and a strong sense of the rights of a Protestant majority.

New York and the British Chronicle

established Shopkeepers and editors. In New York the Browns opened a small dry goods shop in June 1837, and the rest of the family joined them in 1838. Peter wrote for the Albion, a paper for British residents, and in 1842 published a defence of Britain against American critics. On 30 June 1842 the Browns launched their own paper, the British Chronicle. By March 1843 George was its publisher, and that spring he toured Toronto, Kingston and Montreal looking for readers.

established The Free Church connection. In May 1843 the Disruption split the Church of Scotland, when hundreds of ministers walked out to form the Free Church in a dispute over patronage and the church's independence from the state. The Browns backed the Free Church. Its supporters in Upper Canada invited them to bring their paper to Toronto. The last British Chronicle appeared on 22 July 1843, and the Banner, a Presbyterian weekly, first came out in Toronto on 18 August 1843.

The Globe

established A Reform paper. The political crisis of late 1843, when the governor general Sir Charles Metcalfe clashed with his Reform ministers, drew George Brown into politics. On 5 March 1844 he launched the Globe to support the Reformers and the principle of responsible government, under which ministers answer to the elected assembly. He made his first major political speech that same month.

established The biggest paper in British North America. Brown was a hard-driving newspaperman. He bought a rotary press, started a western edition at London in 1845, went tri-weekly in 1849 and daily in October 1853. The Canadian Encyclopedia records that by the 1850s the Globe had the largest circulation in British North America. Careless called it "the most powerful newspaper in British America". It merged with the Mail and Empire in 1936 to become the Globe and Mail, still published in Toronto.

Rep by pop and the sectional deadlock

established Two Canadas in one parliament. From 1841 the Province of Canada joined Canada West (now Ontario), mainly English-speaking and Protestant, with Canada East (now Quebec), mainly French-speaking and Catholic. Each section had the same number of seats. By the 1850s Canada West had the larger population, and its Reformers felt outvoted on schools, church and land.

established Representation by population. From 1853 Brown campaigned for "rep by pop": seats in proportion to population, which would have given Canada West a majority. He also called for the secularisation of the clergy reserves, lands set aside to support Protestant clergy, for non-sectarian schools, for free trade, and for annexing the vast North-West held by the Hudson's Bay Company. A Reform convention adopted his platform on 8 January 1857. He sat for Kent from 1851, Lambton from 1854, and in 1857 won both Toronto and North Oxford.

established Two days in office. In July 1858 the Macdonald–Cartier government was defeated over the choice of a capital. The governor general, Sir Edmund Head, asked Brown to form a government, and he did so with the Lower Canadian Liberal Antoine-Aimé Dorion. It was defeated in the Assembly at once. Head refused a dissolution, and Brown resigned on 4 August. Careless called it "a standard item of political comic relief".

established From union to federation. A great Reform convention in Toronto on 9 November 1859, with 570 delegates, accepted the idea of dissolving the union in favour of a federal arrangement with "some joint authority". Brown's finances were hit by the depression of 1857, his health broke down in 1861, and he lost his Toronto seat that year.

Catholics, French Canadians and the Globe's language

shared A Protestant voluntaryist. Brown believed that churches should be supported by their members, not the state. That put him against state funding of Catholic separate schools in Canada West and against the political power of the Catholic Church in Canada East. The Canadian Encyclopedia notes that his opposition to links between church and state won support in Canada West but made him hated by the French-speaking Catholic majority of Canada East.

shared Strident language. Richard Gwyn, the biographer of John A. Macdonald, notes that Brown's campaign for rep by pop was often accompanied by strident attacks on French Canadians. In one letter Brown wrote that French-Canadianism "bars all it dislikes – it extorts all its demands". The Globe in the 1850s was openly hostile to the political claims of the Catholic Church. Careless and other admirers argue that Brown's target was clerical power rather than Catholics as people, and that he learned to work with French-Canadian leaders. Critics argue that his paper fed sectarian hostility in Toronto. Both readings have support.

established He came to accept French Canada's place. By 1865 Brown spoke differently. In his Confederation speech of 8 February 1865 he argued that "the views of French Canadians must be consulted as well as ours". His partnership with Dorion in 1858, and then with Cartier in 1864, required him to accept a federal system in which Quebec would control its own schools and civil law.

Against slavery

established An abolitionist editor. Brown regarded slavery in the American South as the worst fault of the United States. Parks Canada records that under his leadership the Globe promoted abolition, and that he was a founding member of the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada in 1851, which supported the Underground Railroad and helped formerly enslaved people settle in Canada. He was also involved with the Elgin Association, a largely Free Church body that bought land in Kent County for the Buxton settlement of escaped slaves, and the Globe defended Buxton against hostile white neighbours.

established Remembered by Black Torontonians. Two days after Brown's death, on 11 May 1880, an Assembly of Coloured Citizens of Toronto, meeting at the Baptist church at Victoria and Queen Streets, passed a resolution of mourning. The Archives of Ontario include it in their online exhibit on the Brown family.

The Great Coalition

established Ending the deadlock. Back in the Assembly for South Oxford from March 1863, Brown chaired a select committee on the constitutional deadlock. Its report on 14 June 1864 favoured a federal system. The government of Étienne-Paschal Taché and John A. Macdonald had just fallen. Brown offered to support any government that would pursue federation. After meetings with Macdonald and Galt at the St Louis Hotel in Quebec, the Great Coalition was announced on 22 June 1864, with Brown as president of the executive council under Taché as premier.

established The decisive step. Brown and Macdonald had been bitter personal and political enemies for years. Brown's willingness to sit with him is generally seen as the step that made Confederation possible. The governor general, Lord Monck, called Brown "the man whose conduct in 1864 had rendered the project of union feasible".

established Charlottetown and Quebec. The Maritime colonies had called a conference at Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, to discuss a union of their own. The Canadians asked to attend. On 5 September 1864 Brown laid out the structure of a federal government. At the Quebec Conference in October he moved resolutions on the central and provincial governments and on representation by population in the lower house. The 72 Quebec Resolutions became the basis of the British North America Act. Brown went to London on the scheme in late 1864 and again in 1865.

established Anne's letters. Brown wrote to his wife almost every day. The Canadian Encyclopedia notes that these letters are a rare running account of the Charlottetown and Quebec conferences, for which no full official records exist. They are among the most quoted sources on how Confederation was made.

established A short coalition. Brown resigned from the cabinet on 19 December 1865 after a dispute with his colleagues over how to handle reciprocity with the United States. He telegraphed his wife: "I am a free man once more." Confederation took effect on 1 July 1867. Brown stood for South Ontario in the first federal election and lost. He never sat in the House of Commons.

Marriage to Anne Nelson

established An Edinburgh marriage. In 1862, recovering from illness, Brown travelled to Britain and visited the family of his old school friend Thomas Nelson in Edinburgh. There he met Thomas's sister Anne. They married on 27 November 1862 at Abden House, the Nelson family home on Edinburgh's South Side, and sailed for Toronto in December. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes Anne as born in Edinburgh in 1827 into a wealthy publishing family, educated in Germany, and fluent in French and German.

traditional "The real father of Confederation". Anne is often called a "Mother of Confederation" because she is credited with softening her husband's temper and making the compromise of 1864 possible. The Canadian Encyclopedia records the historian Frank Underhill quoting Brown as saying that perhaps the real father of Confederation was Mrs Brown. The remark is well known but its original context is unclear.

established Children. They had three children: Margaret, Catherine (Oda) and George Mackenzie Brown. In 1885 Margaret and Oda were among the first five women to graduate from the University of Toronto.

Bow Park, the Senate and Washington

established A cattle breeder. In 1866 Brown bought Bow Park, a peninsula of nearly a thousand acres on the Grand River near Brantford, and built up a herd of pedigree Shorthorn cattle. In 1876 he raised about $400,000 in London to turn it into a joint-stock company.

shared A senator. Parks Canada and the Archives of Ontario record that Brown became a senator in 1873, under the Liberal government of his ally Alexander Mackenzie, and served until his death. Careless's entry describes him taking his seat in 1875, after the Washington mission.

established Washington, 1874. Mackenzie sent Brown to Washington in February 1874 to negotiate a new reciprocity treaty with the United States. A draft treaty was sent to the US Senate on 18 June 1874, which set it aside. Careless summed it up: "the operation was successful but the patient died."

established Honours declined. Brown declined the lieutenant governorship of Ontario in 1875 and a knighthood in 1879. Parks Canada says he did so to keep an independent voice in public affairs.

The telephone he passed over

established A neighbour's invention. Alexander Graham Bell's family lived at Tutelo Heights above Brantford, close to Bow Park. In 1875 Bell sought backing for patents abroad. Robert V. Bruce, in his biography Bell (1973), describes how George Brown and his brother Gordon offered to pay for foreign patents in return for a half share, on condition that Bell delayed his American application so as not to prejudice them.

established The patent that never went in. Around the turn of 1876 Bell agreed a formal arrangement with Brown in Toronto: a half interest in his foreign patents, with the Browns paying the costs and $50 a month to Bell for up to six months. Brown met Bell in New York on 25 January 1876 and sailed for England the next day with the specifications, meaning to consult Sir William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin. He never filed them. Bruce records that Brown, on his return, said he had never thought the telephone idea worth mentioning. Bell's backer Gardiner Hubbard lost patience and filed the American application on 14 February 1876, hours before Elisha Gray's rival caveat.

Brown the employer

established Battles with the printers. Brown was a demanding employer and a strong believer in free contract. He clashed with the Toronto typographical union repeatedly between the 1840s and 1872, and was eventually forced to pay union rates. In the printers' strike of March to June 1872 eighteen printers were arrested and then released on bail. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography records that the strike ended in mutual concessions. The arrest of strikers sits badly with Brown's Liberal reputation, and his critics have not forgotten it.

The shooting

established Shot in his office. On 25 March 1880 George Bennett, an engine-room worker at the Globe who had been dismissed for drinking and poor work, came to Brown's office on King Street East. After a brief altercation Bennett's pistol went off and the bullet struck Brown in the thigh. The wound seemed slight but became infected. About seven weeks later Brown fell into a coma, and he died at Lambton Lodge, his house on Beverley Street, on 9 May 1880, aged 61.

established Bennett's fate. Bennett was tried for murder and hanged in Toronto on 23 July 1880. He maintained that he had not meant to kill Brown. He was buried in the jail yard; his remains were found during archaeological work in 2007–09 and reburied at St James Cemetery.

established Burial and memorials. Brown is buried in the Toronto Necropolis. A statue by Charles Bell Birch was unveiled at Queen's Park in 1884, and another by George William Hill stands on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Lambton Lodge, built in 1874–76, was designated the George Brown House National Historic Site in 1976 and is run by the Ontario Heritage Trust. George Brown College in Toronto, founded in 1967, is named after him.

The family back in Scotland

established Anne went home. After Brown's death Anne and the children returned to Scotland. She died in Edinburgh on 6 May 1906 and is buried in the Dean Cemetery.

established A son in the Commons. Their son George Mackenzie Brown, born in Toronto in 1869, was educated at Upper Canada College, Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh and King's College, Cambridge, and became managing trustee of Thomas Nelson and Sons. In 1900 he was elected Liberal MP for Edinburgh Central, defeating Arthur Conan Doyle, who stood as a Liberal Unionist, by 569 votes. He sat until 1906 and died in 1946.

Brown among the Scots of Canada

shared One of many. Brown was one of several Scots-born leaders of nineteenth-century Canada. The historian T. M. Devine, in To the Ends of the Earth (2011), points to the Glasgow-born John A. Macdonald, who dominated Canadian politics for two decades after 1867. Alexander Mackenzie, the Liberal prime minister of 1873–78, was born in Perthshire. Marjory Harper, in Adventurers and Exiles (2003), notes that Confederation also gave Scots in Canada a new focus of loyalty, and that many assimilated quietly into Canadian life. Brown fits that pattern. He kept his Scottish ties all his life, but his cause was Canada.

• George Brown was born in Alloa, not Edinburgh, though he grew up and went to school in Edinburgh.
• His mother's father was George Mackenzie of Stornoway, on Lewis.
• The Globe, which he founded in 1844, survives as the Globe and Mail.
• His first government, with Antoine-Aimé Dorion in 1858, lasted from 2 to 4 August.
• He married Anne Nelson at Abden House in Edinburgh in 1862.
• He carried Alexander Graham Bell's patent specifications to England in 1876 and never filed them.
• His son defeated Arthur Conan Doyle to become MP for Edinburgh Central in 1900.
• He was shot in the thigh, and died of the infected wound six weeks later.

• Myth: George Brown was born in Edinburgh. He was born at Alloa in 1818. He grew up and was schooled in Edinburgh, which is why some books, including Robert V. Bruce's biography of Bell, give Edinburgh.
• Myth: Brown was Canada's first prime minister or a premier of note. His only ministry lasted from 2 to 4 August 1858. He never sat in the Canadian House of Commons.
• Disputed: his attitude to Catholics and French Canadians. His paper's language was often hostile, and critics see sectarianism. Admirers, Careless among them, see a principled opposition to state-supported churches that softened as he worked with French-Canadian partners.
• Disputed: the date of the shooting. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography gives 25 March 1880; some accounts give 24 March.
• Disputed: when he became a senator. Parks Canada and the Archives of Ontario give 1873; the Dictionary of Canadian Biography describes him taking his seat in 1875.
• Myth: Bennett assassinated Brown for political reasons. Bennett was a dismissed employee with a personal grievance, and said he had not meant to kill him.
• Traditional: "the real father of Confederation was Mrs Brown". The remark is attributed to Brown through the historian Frank Underhill; its original source is not given.