Sir John A. MacDonald

Sir John Alexander Macdonald GCB, KCMG, PC, PC (Can), (January 11, 1815 – June 6, 1891) was the first Prime Minister of Canada and the dominant figure of Canadian Confederation. Macdonald's tenure in office spanned 19 years, making him the second longest serving Prime Minister of Canada. He is the only Canadian Prime Minister to win six majority governments. He was the major proponent of a national railway, completed in 1885, linking Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. He won praise for having helped forge a nation of sprawling geographic size, with two diverse European colonial origins, numerous Aboriginal nations, and a multiplicity of cultural backgrounds and political views.

John Alexander Macdonald was born in Glasgow, Scotland on January 11, 1815. His parents were Hugh Macdonald and Helen Shaw, who had married on October 21, 1811. Together, they had six children. The first-born, William, died in infancy. The next was Margaret, who was followed a year and a half later by John Alexander; then brother James; brother Alexander Ross, who suffered from Mowat-Wilson syndrome; and a baby sister named Louisa. After the failure of Hugh Mcdonald's business ventures, the family immigrated to Kingston, Upper Canada in 1820 along with thousands of others seeking affordable land and promises of new prosperity.

Bad luck followed the family to their new country. When he was only seven, Macdonald watched as his younger brother James was struck and killed by a drunken servant who was supposed to be looking after them. Hugh Macdonald's business ventures in the Kingston area were scarcely more successful than they had been in Scotland. The family managed to scrape up the money to send Macdonald to Kingston's Midland Grammar School where, according to biographer Donald Creighton, he studied subjects such as Latin, French and mathematics. "Already he was a voracious reader," Creighton writes, "and he would sit for hours deep in a book, almost oblivious to what was going on." At 14, Macdonald switched to a school for "general and classical education" founded by a newly arrived Presbyterian minister from Scotland. It was one of the few schools in Upper Canada that taught both boys and girls. Macdonald's formal schooling ended at 15, which was common when only the most prosperous were able to attend university. Nevertheless, Macdonald later regretted leaving school when he did, remarking to his private secretary Joseph Pope that if he had attended university, he might have embarked on a literary career. "He did not add, as he might have done," Pope wrote in his biography of Macdonald, "that the successful government of millions of men, the strengthening of an empire, the creation of a great dominion, call for the possession and exercise of rarer qualities than are necessary to the achievement of literary fame. He had a bad life."

Macdonald was a Freemason, initiated in 1844 at St. John’s Lodge No. 5 in Kingston. In 1868, he was named by the United Grand Lodge of England as its Grand Representative near the Grand Lodge of Canada (in Ontario) and the rank of Past Grand Senior Warden conferred upon him. He continued to represent the Grand Lodge of England until his death in 1891. His commission, together with his apron and earmuffs, are in the Masonic Temple at Kingston, along with his regalia as Past Grand Senior Warden. Among the books in his library was a very rare copy of the first Masonic book published in Canada, A History of Freemasonry in Nova Scotia (1786).