(12 Dec. 1812-1 June 1872), political figure. (his baptismal name was John Brock Macdonald, but he adopted the subsurname of Sandfield; J. S. Macdonald, Sandfield Macdonald) Born at St. Raphael’s, Glengarry. Parents: Alexander Macdonald, who was one of the emigrants of 1786, and his wife Nancy Macdonald. He was the oldest of the “Sandfield” brothers, brother of Alexander F., Donald A. and Ranald S. Macdonald.

     His mother died when he was eight years old. He was reputedly a turbulent child. While it was certainly a source of prestige among self-made men in the 19th-century to demonstrate that they had been “bad” not “good” boys, he certainly seems not to have valued the opportunities for education the local school provided. He worked as a store clerk at Lancaster and in Cornwall, then convinced of the need to provide for himself more effectively in life, he resumed his education, aged almost 20, as one the students of the Rev. Hugh Urquhart at the Cornwall Grammar School. He then turned to the study of the law, and was articled to Archibald McLean (son of Neil McLean).

     He was called to the bar in 1840, and practised law in Cornwall from that year. Harkness, who had an eagle eye for details of SDG legal history, says that “A Scotsman in a Scottish settlement, he at once acquired a large practice,” and that “He was one of the best jury lawyers these Counties have produced. With a Scottish jury especially, he was well nigh invincible.” Macdonald was the Cornwall law partner of two fellow Glengarrians, the brothers John B. and Donald B. Maclennan (Harkness was articled to the latter, and must have known him intimately).

     In 1841, when he was not quite thirty years old, he was elected as the GC representative to the Legislative Assembly of the newly-formed Province of Canada. He continued to represent GC in the assembly until 1857, when he became instead the member for Cornwall. At this time (1857) his brother Donald A. succeeded him as GC’s representative. Thereafter, Sandfield represented Cornwall in the assembly till Confederation. After Confederation, under the system of dual representation permitted at the time, Sandfield represented Cornwall in both the Ontario Legislature and the federal Parliament till his death. He was premier of the Province of Canada from May 1862 to March 1864. He was premier of Ontario from 15 July 1867 to 19 Dec. 1871, being the first premier after Confederation.

     He held during his distinguished career many public offices and honours. Among these, he was solicitor general for Canada West 1849-1851, speaker of the Legislative Assembly 1852-1854, and minister of militia affairs 1862-1864. He had the rank of lt.-col. in the militia.

     He originally entered politics as a right-of-centre candidate, under the auspices of two eminent Glengarrians, Alexander Fraser of Fraserfield and John McGillivray, formerly of the North West Co. Afterwards, Sandfield was one of the Reformers. He completed his political career before the political system of Liberals vs Conservatives was wholly consolidated, and remained almost instinctively a man of the more fragmented and individualistic system of political loyalties characteristic of the 1840s and 1850s, but retrospectively, he may be called a Liberal. If he had lived longer (he was only 59 when he died) he would no doubt have become, like his brother Donald A., one of the Liberals in a straightforward and unqualified sense. As Ontario premier, he headed a coalition government.

     He opposed Confederation, and so missed the distinction of being remembered as one of the Fathers of Confederation. Once Confederation was a political certainty, however, he reconciled himself to working with it. It has been assumed that one of his objections to Confederation was that with its new–or at least reaffirmed– provincial boundaries it would separate, effectively, Montreal from the Sandfield brothers’ home territory of Eastern Ontario. It must be said, however, that it took almost a hundred years to turn this prediction into a hard social and economic fact.

     When the new system of local government was being formed at the end of the 1840s under the Province of Canada, he intervened to keep the old Eastern District from being broken up, with the result that SDG continued the old Eastern District under another name.

     In the 1840s he set up the Freeholder newspaper in Cornwall, first on a temporary basis, and then permanently, to be his political representative. It is continued today by the Cornwall Standard-Freeholder.

     A major figure in Canadian history, he is commemorated by a statue at Queen’s Park in Toronto, unveiled in 1909, and he was the greatest political figure Glengarry has produced. Unsurprisingly, however, not everybody loved him. In bitter, angry words an opposition newspaper, The Cornwall Gazette, complained at the time of his death that he was domineering and vindictive, requiring absolute submission from his friends and being inflexible in his persecution of his enemies. Such was his personality, the writer thought, that Macdonald kept Cornwall, where he had “many local enemies,” in a perpetual turmoil through his feuds, which he managed both in his own person and through the Freeholder newspaper. With his passing, “we may now hope for a new era of peace and good will” in Cornwall.

     He died at his home Ivy Hall in Cornwall, aged 59. (seven children) Roman Catholic. He is buried in the old cemetery at St. Andrew’s, near Cornwall. In 1936, Ontario Premier Mitch Hepburn ordered the restoration of the monuments of Sandfield Macdonald and Simon Fraser at St. Andrew’s. (Standard Freeholder 31 July & 5 & 7 Aug. 1936)

     Sandfield Macdonald became, by the modest standards of SDG, a wealthy man (by Montreal standards, his wealth was unimpressive). In the mid-1850s, he obtained for himself and his brothers a contract–reputed to have been very profitable–for building the Grand Trunk Railway between Montreal and a point near Cornwall. To this he added his profitable practice as a lawyer. He also dealt extensively in the buying and selling land, and in mortgages, and he even found about a dozen scattered pieces of Crown Land to patent in GC in the 1850s. In the land registry documents for GC, there is probably no name more frequently found than his. His Freeholder newspaper of 4 Aug. 1865 praised his progressive agricultural techniques while reminding the readers that he was “a farmer on an extensive scale.” He is said to have been involved in lumbering activities with his brother D. A. He appears also to have owned the sawmill at Sandfield Mills in Stormont County near the GC border. It is a good guess also that some of his land transactions were intended to secure timber lands. But all that said, the impression remains that this very active businessman was not as deeply attracted to the lumber business as were so many of his contemporaries in the local business community.

     He undoubtedly had some knowledge of the ancestral Gaelic, though there doesn’t seem to be enough evidence to indicate how well he knew it. He learned to speak French–assisted, presumably, by his wife, who was a French speaker. In this connection, it is perhaps worth remembering the old GC belief, whether it was right or wrong, that people who spoke Gaelic as their first language fairly easily learned French–that French became inaccessible only after Glengarrians had to approach it from English only.

     He was married in 1840, the year he began his Cornwall law practice, to Marie Christine Waggaman, an American of distinguished family. Her father had been a Whig senator for Louisiana in the U. S. Senate. He is said (Rose) to have “owned a large plantation of negroes.” He was killed in a duel in 1843. Marie Christine’s mother belonged to the old French planter families of Louisiana. Marie Christine’s brother Eugene Waggaman was a colonel in the American Civil War and was one of the officers who surrendered with Lee at Appomattox. Sandfield Macdonald and his wife lived in Cornwall, at their home Ivy Hall, where they were known for their generous and indeed lavish hospitality. In the 1890s, Ivy Hall became the Hotel Dieu Hospital. Marie Christine long survived her husband, to die at Cornwall 3 Sept. 1909.

     For a note on other Glengarrians who became speakers of legislative bodies, see Archibald J. McDonell.

Life by Bruce W. Hodgins in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, X, 462-469 * Bruce W. Hodgins, John Sandfield Macdonald (1971) * biog. essay by Bruce W. Hodgins on Macdonald in J. M. S. Careless, ed., The Pre-Confederation Premiers (1980) * Macdonald, Sandfields , with portrait * Dale, 105-113 (with colour portrait) * Bibliography of Glengarry: index for further refs. to works on Macdonald, including notice of some early satires * obituaries ASC ii, 6-13, including one which, although undated, can be identified conclusively as being from the The Cornwall Gazette * his will, Archives of Ontario-SC * Harkness: index (has portrait) * Senior (has portrait, also of wife) * MacGillivray & Ross: index * Rose, i, 54-55 * Johnson (1968) & MDict & Hurtig * Roderick Lewis, 52 * Boss 31, 32, 39 * Chevrier * HHCT 133-134 (for Sandfield Mills) * his wife dies, Cornwall Standard 3 & 10 Sept. 1909, Glengarry News 10 Sept. 1909 * property of his sold in Alexandria, by estate, GN 6 Feb. 1903 * daughter Mrs Uppleby dies, CS 17 Sept. 1914 * daughter Mrs Pemberton dies, GN 20 July 1928 * daughter Mrs Langlois dies, CS 12 Dec. 1929, and see her biog. this dictionary * radio play on him, mentioned GN 19 Jan. 1934 * obituary of Miss Isabella Macdonald (“Bella Angus Jim”), whose mother was Sandfield Macdonald’s parliamentary housekeeper at Toronto, CS 29 April 1920, GN 30 April 1920 * portrait has been painted by G. T. Berthon, CF 27 March 1868 * proposals to restore oil portrait, grave, GN 19 June 2002, 19 April 2006