| Chapter 1: | New Brunswick and Canadian Confederation, 1861–1866 |
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his son-in-law and private secretary to the important post of provincial secretary in the teeth of Conservative objections purely as an act of patronage, while the following year the legislature made the appointment according to the wishes of the Conservatives.
In addition to revenue disbursements, therefore, the second contentious area in patronage politics lay in the selection of senior officials, including the judiciary, by advice to the lieutenant-governor in a system where there were no clearly defined departmental headships to be allocated by a premier in office. Moreover, so-called “parties”—Conservatives or Liberal reformers—were weakly disciplined in voting, fissile in loyalties, and prone to change camps to meet individual ambitions. In addition, there were other issues between assembly and governor, including the appropriation of surplus funds on the orders of the colonial office for survey work on the boundaries of crown lands according to an international treaty and over contributions for raising a local militia. These issues of defence and provincial relations with near neighbours, Canadian and American, would arise again in the 1860s during the Civil War and projects for confederation and railways.
Nevertheless, a rough working agreement had been hammered out between governors and politicians by that decade. The assembly had formally accepted the principles of responsible government. By 1854, the province had a cabinet government drawn from an elected majority by a party leader. The pattern was not completely formalized, leaving it open for a lieutenant-governor to appoint to executive council vacancies politicians or notables of his own selection. It may be thought convenient to see responsible government in New Brunswick introduced in three stages, with power of the purse by 1837, full “ministerial responsibility” by 1848, and a clear Reform Party ministry by 1854. 12But in practice, the weakness of party discipline and the propensity of lieutenant-governors to influence the composition of the executive make it doubtful whether the terminology of a mature, responsible, and ministerial system can be applied so early in the province. Gordon, therefore, inherited a political system still in formation, not one where the rules were well-established, and at a time when much larger political