# Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Tupper, Charles

​TUPPER, Sir CHARLES, first baronet (1821–1915), Canadian statesman, was born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, 2 July 1821, the third son of the Rev. Charles Tupper, a Baptist minister, by his first wife, Miriam Lowe (née Lockhart). His ancestors came from England to Massachusetts in 1637, but his branch of the family removed in 1763 to Nova Scotia, and settled upon land left vacant by the expulsion of the Acadians. Tupper was educated at Horton Academy (afterwards Acadia University); and after some time spent as a medical student with a local practitioner, he studied at Edinburgh University, graduating in 1843. He then returned to Nova Scotia and began a very successful practice of medicine at Amherst. In 1855 he entered the Nova Scotia legislative assembly as conservative member for Cumberland county, defeating the liberal leader, Joseph Howe [q.v.].
On his entry into the assembly Tupper found his party a mere dispirited tory rump. He at once and fully accepted both responsible government and the state construction of railways, the chief planks in the programme of the liberal administration, and set out vigorously to shape for his own party a constructive policy of its own. In 1857 the conservatives gained power by an alliance with the Roman Catholics, and Tupper became provincial secretary. In 1860 his party was defeated, ​but in 1864 returned to power with Tupper as premier. In 1864–1865 he forced through, against the opposition of ill-educated farmers and of Roman Catholic supporters of separate schools, the effective system of education which is still in force, with free primary schools supported by compulsory assessment. In 1864 he organized a conference at Charlottetown to consider a maritime union of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. This was soon merged in the larger project of Canadian confederation, and Tupper was the chief Nova Scotian delegate at the Quebec conference in October 1864. While here, he formed a political and personal alliance with Sir John Alexander Macdonald [q.v.], which grew ever closer till Macdonald's death. Fierce opposition to federation soon developed in Nova Scotia, led by Howe and financed by the Halifax merchants, who feared for their monopoly of the provincial trade. Howe had long been an advocate of a larger union, and his inconsistency was apparently due to his egotism. ‘I will not play second fiddle to that d—d Tupper’, he said. Tupper faced his opponents aggressively. The Roman Catholic archbishop offered him the votes of his flock in return for separate schools, but Tupper was obdurate. The opposition clamoured with much justice for an appeal to the electorate, but this Tupper refused, and he held together his majority in the house by Walpolean methods. In 1866–1867 he was a prominent figure at the conference in London with the imperial authorities, in which the details were worked out of the British North America Act.
When Sir John Macdonald formed the first government of federated Canada (1867), sectional and religious claims had to be placated, and Tupper unselfishly stood aside, in company with the Irish-Canadian, Thomas D'Arcy McGee [q.v.]. Meanwhile Nova Scotia had become all but unanimous in favour of the repeal of the British North America Act. Of nineteen members in the federal house Tupper was the only federationist, and of thirty-eight in the local house he had but two supporters. His private savings had been exhausted in the struggle for federation, but he refused to withdraw from public life though offered the chairmanship of the board of commissioners for constructing the Intercolonial Railway. In 1868 he went to London to counter the repeal agitation of Howe, and was so completely successful that he actually induced Howe, by the promise of financial ‘better terms’ for Nova Scotia, to enter the federal Cabinet. On 21 June 1870 he himself entered the Cabinet as president of the council; he was transferred on 2 July 1872 to the department of inland revenue, and on 22 February 1873 to that of customs, which post he held till the defeat of the government in the autumn of that year on the ‘Pacific scandal’ [see Macdonald, Sir John Alexander].
In opposition Tupper was the chief financial critic of government measures, and did more than any other man to commit his own party to the ‘national policy’ of protection. On the return of the conservatives to power in October 1878 after a general election, Tupper accepted the ministry of public works in the Cabinet of Sir John Macdonald; in 1879 this post was divided into two, and Tupper became the first minister of railways and canals. In this office he reorganized and enlarged the inter-colonial railway between the maritime provinces and Quebec, and was largely concerned in changing the former policy of government construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway to that of construction by a private company with government aid. In May 1884 he suddenly and unexpectedly retired from the Cabinet in order to succeed Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt [q.v.] as Canadian high commissioner in London. This office he held till January 1896, when he resigned to enter the conservative Cabinet of Sir Mackenzie Bowell as secretary of state. As high commissioner he was vigour personified, and gave new importance to the office. Through him Canada obtained a larger influence in the making of all treaties which concerned her interests. He was an early advocate of imperial preference, and of fast inter-imperial steamship services both on the Atlantic and the Pacific; but he disliked the political activities of the Imperial Federation League, and was largely responsible for its disbanding in 1893. During his tenure of the high commissionership he returned to Canada in 1887 and 1891 to take part in the general elections, and was on each occasion Sir John Macdonald's chief assistant. For a few months of 1887–1888 he was also finance minister, and from November 1887 to February 1888 he was the Canadian representative at Washington in the negotiations for settling the fisheries imbroglio with the United States, the British representatives being Mr. Joseph Chamberlain [q.v.] and Sir Lionel Sackville-West (afterwards Baron Sackville, q.v.).
On 27 April 1896 Sir Mackenzie Bowell ​resigned; and Tupper succeeded him as prime minister of Canada. Since the death of Sir John Macdonald (1891) the conservative party had disintegrated, political and personal differences being rife. On Tupper's accession to power he found the federal government committed to a bill restoring to the Roman Catholic minority in Manitoba certain privileges which had been taken away by the provincial government. He was therefore opposed both by the advocates of provincial rights, and by the extreme Protestants, while he failed to win the French Roman Catholics of Quebec, who pinned their faith on Sir Wilfrid Laurier [q.v.], the liberal leader, in spite of the exhortations of their bishops. Parliament dissolved by efflux of time before the remedial bill could be forced through, and on 23 June 1896 the conservatives were defeated in a general election. The defeat was not due to Tupper, who ‘fought with amazing freshness and with indomitable courage … We could almost see the restoration of party unity proceed under his hand’ [J. S. Willison, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, ii, 255].
After his defeat, but before his resignation, Tupper filled a large number of important offices with his political supporters. These appointments the governor-general, the Earl of Aberdeen, refused to ratify. Tupper had on his side constitutional precedent, but the general sympathy of the country was with the governor-general. In opposition Tupper led his party with vigour until the general election of 1900, after his defeat in which he retired into private life, though still from time to time intervening in Canadian and imperial affairs with public letters and articles. In 1909 he settled at Bexley Heath, in Kent, where he died 30 October 1915.
Tupper was perhaps the most fearless and constructive statesman whom Canada has produced. He gave free education to Nova Scotia. Without him the Canadian Dominion could not have been formed. Without him Sir John Macdonald would almost certainly not have pulled through the lean years of opposition from 1873 to 1878. Without him Canada would almost certainly have had neither a ‘national policy’ nor the Canadian Pacific Railway. He had great executive ability, and untiring energy and fluency. The chief defects of which he was accused were a tendency to nepotism, and a willingness to use public money and public contracts as bribes to constituencies in need of railways and other public works.
Tupper was of middle height, broad-shouldered, with an alert and vigorous frame, capable of great exertion and endurance. His face was ruddy and leonine, with heavy masses of hair, which remained black till very late in his life. Many portraits and photographs of him are easily accessible. In religion he was at first a Baptist, but later became a member of the Anglican Church. In 1879 he was created K.C.M.G.; in 1886 G.C.M.G.; in 1888 a baronet of the United Kingdom; and in 1908 a privy councillor. Though from about 1863 he gave up the active practice of medicine he always retained his interest in it, and on the foundation of the Canadian Medical Association in 1867 was elected its first president.
Tupper married in 1846 Frances Amelia, daughter of Silas H. Morse, of Amherst, Nova Scotia; she died in 1912. They had three sons and one daughter; the second son, Sir Charles Hibbert Tupper, was from 1882 to 1904 a member of the Dominion parliament, and from 1888 to 1896 a member of the Canadian Cabinet.
[Sir C. Tupper, Recollections of Sixty Years in Canada, 1914; E. M. Saunders, Life and Letters of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles Tupper, 2 vols., 1916; J. W. Longley, Sir Charles Tupper, 1916; Canadian Hansard, 1875–1900; biographies of the chief Canadian and English contemporaries.]
W. L. G.