1867 by Christopher Moore Page A

Parliamentary Library, to the St. John’s library, to the hot little sheds on Pinnacle Street, Belleville, Ont., not by the exigencies of a Ph.D. but by adrenalin.” He was caught, he said, “as the newspapermen of the time were, by the sheer magnitude of confederation, of colonials meeting and greeting for the first time, a bit star-struck some of them, the way the writer was, who’d caught it too.” 14
    Waite’s quarryings from those newspapers yielded the details of the Charlottetown conference that historians have relied on ever since. Charlottetown in 1864 was a town of just seven thousand people, with red dirt streets running in parallel lines down to the spacious, sheltered harbour. Its landmark was Province House, the Georgian legislative building built with Island stone and Island craftsmanship in 1847, and still central in the modern city of Charlottetown.
    In late August 1864, Waite tells us, the great excitement in the town was caused not by the hastily scheduled political conference, but by Slaymaker’s and Nichol’s Olympic Circus, the first circus seen on the Island in twenty years. Charlottetown’s twenty small hotels were crowded with excursion visitors drawn by this sensation. As one of the newspapers noted, even Island politicians could not be deprived of their chance to see the elephants, and in his book Waite has fun with the casual reception given to the arriving delegations.When the spit-and-polish steamship
Queen Victoria
, carrying the Canadian delegation, the last to arrive, anchored in the harbour on September 1, the Island’s provincial secretary William Pope had to have himself rowed out to her in an oyster boat “with a barrel of flour in the bow and two jars of molasses in the stern.” Once Pope had welcomed the visitors, the
Queen Victoria
’s boats were lowered, “man-of-war” fashion. In Brown’s amused phrase, “we landed like Mr Christopher Columbus, who had the precedence of us in taking possession of portions of the American continent.” 15
    That same day, the conference opened in Province House. For all its giddy improvisation and champagne-fuelled sociability, the delegates to the Charlottetown conference also spent quite a few hours grinding out constitutional details around a conference table – more hours, in fact, than late-twentieth-century first ministers usually devoted to constitutional accords. Today, half-legislature and halfmuseum, Province House still preserves that serious side. Visitors to “the Confederation Room,” which in 1864 was the chamber where the Island’s upper house met, still lean over the barrier to see the long table and leather chairs where the business of the conference was conducted.
    The Charlottetown conference began with its original mandate of Maritime union, and no Canadians. The Maritimers, veterans of parliamentary business, set about electing Colonel Gray, their host, as chairman, and the visiting premiers, Tupper and Tilley, as joint secretaries, and hearing the enabling resolutions from their three legislatures. Despite some dissent, they soon decided they would have no observers and no transcripts. “Buncombe speeches will be out of place, and politicians will for once deal with naked facts,” wrote a surprisingly sympathetic journalist. While no transcript was made, the shape of the discussions was soon widely known and widely reported. 16
    Having organized the formalities, the Maritimers decided almost at once to bring in the Canadians and hear their proposal.Charlottetown thereupon became two conferences proceeding in tandem – the Maritimers’ sessions on Maritime union, interspersed with much longer meetings to discuss confederation with the Canadian guests. The Charlottetown conference would continue all week, and the delegates would hold further sessions in Halifax and Saint John before adjourning the Charlottetown conference indefinitely (in fact, permanently) in Montreal in October. The vital sessions, however,