I had never worked seriously on nineteenth-century political history, and much of Creighton’s story was, frankly, news to me. One detail about the way the deal was made became stuck in my mind. Creighton mentioned in passing that Nova Scotia’s premier, Charles Tupper, was invited to the constitutional conference at Charlottetown in 1864 – and Tupper refused to go unless the leader of the opposition would go with him. This astonished me. I could not imagine any of today’s imperial first ministers ever considering such a proposal. I could not help wondering what might have happened if they had. But Creighton offered no explanation for Tupper’s odd gesture, and when I asked some of Canada’s leading historians about it, none had any coherent explanation. As I read further, it began to seem that the nineteenth-century makers of confederation worked with constitutional machinery rather similar to what exists today. Yet actions like Tupper’s suggested they operated the machine differently.
