Railway riches ended in rags
Railways were expensive beasts to create in the 19th century and that cost was measured in more than dollars.
Political careers were made and lost over the rails, health failed and morals were cheapened — all in addition to the wealth that was created and lost.
Asa Belknap Foster was an American who came to Canada to seek his fortune. He found it — and lost it — because of the railways.
Foster first came to Frost, Que. (Lower Canada), with his parents in 1822, when he was age five, and received an education. By the time he was 20, he was back in the United States and working on railways in New England. At 35, he was back in Canada.
Initially he focused on rail lines in Quebec, but soon he looked west and before long he was vice-president and managing director of Canada Central Railway, managing director of the Brockville and Ottawa Railway and director of the Bedford District Bank.
Oh, the circles he travelled in. He became a politician in Quebec’s legislative assembly. By 1867 he was a Conservative senator.
But he left the world of business and entered history with his role in the Pacific Scandal, our country’s first.
Foster was friends with George McMullen, a Canadian who had travelled to the U.S. to make his fortune. This connection gave Foster insight into the communication between McMullen’s American pals and Sir Hugh Allan, who had funnel led money from the Americans to Sir John A. Macdonald’s Conservative party.
The Americans were not happy — they’d paid large amounts to the government of Canada, but had been excluded from the new railway where they were expecting to get work. Allan had been in busy correspondence trying to fend them off. This all took place in 1872, an election year.
Foster was the member of the inner circle to reveal the scandal and he did so through a letter to McMullen that was later published in the papers.
The information Foster revealed eventually destroyed Macdonald’s Conservative government.
Foster’s rail lines later received contracts from the new Liberal government, including one to link North Bay with Montreal.
“It was a notorious fact that the information used to turn out the late government was furnished by the Hon. A.B. Foster, and everybody in the country expected that [he] would receive his reward … And he did,” said John Graham Haggart. (Haggart was a Conservative and at one point considered for national leadership. His background as a womanizer — he was married — and his support of a canal that was clearly to his own benefit damaged his reputation and his remarks were soon put aside.)
But Foster’s contracts for building new lines didn’t save him.
In the 1870s his railways were in trouble. He had gone on a spending spree to meet the potential needs, thanks to those contracts. He was $2 million in debt — in 1870s money. He had bought miles of rail and large chunks of the Canada Central and the Brockville and Ottawa Railroad. Fully financially extended, he was vulnerable. In 1875 he resigned his Senate seat. By 1877 he was bankrupt and spent time in jail for debt. By November 1877 he was dead of heart disease.
Foster was remembered in the Montreal Gazette: “He devoted himself to the construction of railways with an ardour which did not spring from any mere desire of pecuniary profit, but from enthusiasm in his profession.” — Tom Villemaire is a writer based in Toronto and the Bruce Peninsula. Tom@historylab.ca