Confederation portrait, stamp snubbed public servant
Top public servant was snubbed in iconic photo, writes Randy Boswell
Even in a room filled with the titans of public life in 19th century Canada, which is exactly where William Henry Lee was — in the Privy Council chambers of the East Block building at 11 a.m. on July 1, 1867 — he would have been hard to miss.
Lee was a man “of venerable appearance and presence,” according to one contemporary account. He was especially noteworthy for his long, white wizard’s beard — think Dumbledore or Santa Claus, Merlin or Methuselah.
And so the top federal bureaucrat and behind-the-scenes maestro of the formal, official part of the first Dominion Day would surely have stood out even among such luminaries as John A. Macdonald, George-Etienne Cartier, Gov.-Gen. Viscount Monck and the others assembled for Confederation’s official birth.
But nearly three years earlier, poor W.H. Lee was the man at the margins of The Moment, a ghostly figure straddling the frame of one of Canadian history’s most famous photographs.
Every public servant who has ever suffered some politician’s slight, whose role has been excised from the history of some landmark policy, who’s been shoved just beyond the limelight at some public moment so dutifully orchestrated, will recognize the rich symbolism of this photographic snub.
Dominion Day was about to right the scales of justice a little for Lee, but the oversight of September, 1864, has left its indelible insult: Confederation’s half-man.
Only a tiny patch of Lee’s snowy beard and his right arm and leg — plus a bit of the brim and crown of his top hat — made it into the picture that encapsulated the nation-to-be: New Brunswick photographer George P. Roberts’ iconic shot of the Fathers of Confederation, gathered on the steps in front of P.E.I.’s Government House, during the breakthrough Charlottetown Conference in ‘64.
It was the nation’s Genesis event, the gabfest that kick-started the country and led directly to all of the celebrations and ceremonies happening in Ottawa on July 1, 1867. Our political patriarchs were all there for the P.E.I. group portrait — Macdonald smack in the centre, casually seated with an elbow resting on his propped-up left knee, stovepipe hat doffed and resting on his right.
The ever-dapper Cartier, Macdonald’s chief political partner and Quebec’s most powerful legislator, stood facing John A., chapeau at his side; between them and a step back was the fiery Irishman Thomas D’Arcy McGee, impassioned orator and the most persuasive nation-builder of the bunch, curly hair heaped to one side and face square to the camera.
Nova Scotia power broker Charles Tupper, a future prime minister, surveyed the scene from the back row; New Brunswicker Samuel Tilley, said to have coined “Dominion of Canada,” stood in front of the backdrop building’s third pillar.
There was an abundance of wild
whiskers, dark overcoats and narrow black bow ties — the fashion signs of the time. Several men wore bored expressions, a few posed proudly and one — George Brown, the Globe publisher and longtime Macdonald foe who buried the hatchet just long enough to make Confederation possible — must have moved while the picture was being taken: his face is a blur.
But at least it’s in the snapshot that immortalized 25 of the 26 men who stood there on that historic day. Only one of them, the sorry fellow too far off to the right for his face to be seen, missed his chance to live on in an embryonic nation’s earliest visual memory.
Faceless but not nameless, we know that the man was Lee, then the 65-year-old clerk of the Province of Canada’s executive council. That made him the colony’s top public servant, a deeply trusted government employee who worked behind the scenes in Charlottetown on behalf of Macdonald and his nine fellow delegates from the soon-to-be-separate provinces of Ontario and Quebec.
Lee, too, would have been immortalized in modern Canada’s seminal scene if only he’d shuffled a foot or two to his right; if only Roberts, the Saint John portraitist who set up the shot, had moved his camera back a step to capture a wider view, or had directed Lee to squeeze in a little closer to Brown — Lee’s boss at the time, as president of Canada’s executive council.
It’s tempting to say that because he was a conference functionary and not a genuine Father of Confederation, Lee’s virtual absence from the landmark photograph is a trifling matter.
But look to the far left, where a lesser public servant — the youthful Charles Drinkwater, Macdonald’s private secretary — cuts a truly dashing figure. Drinkwater’s gallant pose is what helped make the picture so memorable, his sunkissed hat held in one hand, his left leg turned in toward the illustrious Fathers as if he knew exactly how to position himself for optimal framing.
For whatever reason, on the opposite side of the scene, the bisected Lee stood oddly, awkwardly apart from the crowd.
Sadly, Lee has been left entirely out of many reproductions of the ultimate Confederation picture; in 1935, for example, when a special 13-cent stamp was issued to commemorate the foundational role of the Charlottetown Conference in the creation of the country, the artist who adapted Roberts’ renowned photograph for the square-inch canvas simply erased Lee from the scene.
Perhaps more cruelly, though, many reproductions have left Lee part way in — an unidentifiable sliver of a man forever on the edge of history.
To be sure, whole swaths of Confederation-era society — women, most glaringly — were left out of the picture when it came to the recording of history, let alone the exercising of power.
Still, the unfairness of Lee’s shunting rankles. So consider this his long-overdue and wellearned turn in the 21st century spotlight, thanks in part to a few lines of news from July 1, 1867, that acknowledged — sparingly, alas — his history-making, linchpin role in the new Dominion government.
“The announcement will be read with pleasure,” the Ottawa Times reported, “that W.H. LEE, Esq., late Clerk of the Executive Council of the Province of Canada has been appointed and sworn into office as Clerk of the Privy Council of Canada.”
Lee had formally become the new nation’s No. 1 bureaucrat, the man at the top of the federal government’s original org chart. As the archetype Ottawa administrator, Lee’s appointment symbolized the birth of Canada’s federal public service, which would become the country’s single largest employer and an immeasurable force in the development of the nation and its capital.
For Lee, the Dominion Day promotion was the culmination of a nearly half-century-long career of service with Canada’s colonial precursors.
Born in Trois-Rivières in 1799, he had gained a clerkship in the government of Upper Canada in 1821 before rising steadily through the ranks to become the united Province of Canada’s highestranking civil servant in the years before Confederation. That’s what put him at the centre of the action — well, just off to the side — at Charlottetown.
Lee went on — upon Confederation, at the advanced age of 68 — to the inaugural post for which he’s best remembered today, and his appointment as head of the East Block nerve centre of the Dominion’s first government earned him a handsome starting salary of $2,400 a year.
It also made him a close confidante of Sir John A. Macdonald throughout the first term of the country’s first prime minister — chief keeper of secrets during Canada’s fledgling phase of development — until Lee’s retirement in 1872.
A few years after he’d stepped down from his post as Canada’s top public servant and a few years before his death in 1878, the Canadian Illustrated News printed a brief but flattering summary of Lee’s career, kindly referencing “the delicate and important duties which he had discharged with great ability and unimpeachable fidelity.”
The 1875 item was illustrated, under the series label “Our Canadian Portrait Gallery,” by a sprawling, three-column-wide sketch of William Henry Lee — beard in full, glorious frizz — based on a photograph by the famed Ottawa portraitist William J. Topley. The hand-drawn “likeness,” which appeared above small items about such lesser figures as Kaiser Wilhelm and William Shakespeare, took up nearly the entire page.
The man at the margins, at least momentarily, had taken centre stage.