If history is the self-story of political communities, then most portraits of Confederation have been regrettably partial. The joint voyage to Quebec City aboard the Canadian steamer at the close of the 1864 Charlottetown Conference seizes upon the kind of portrait that has been deeply symbolic of the spirit and struggles with Confederation. After all, according to George Brown, it was in the chief stateroom of the SS Queen Victoria “amid the wineglasses and cigar smoke, twenty-three men had warmly agreed to found a new nation.”Footnote ¹ Evidence of this can be found in Lieutenant-Governor Gordon's despatch to the Colonial Secretary of State dated September 22, 1864, outlining an early agreed upon federal division of powers which preserved independent spheres of governments through “respective” federal-local jurisdictions. This list of powers did not include any provision for or consultation with Indigenous peoples.Footnote ² Similarly, this is not a portrait that speaks to the struggles of women in Canadian politics; many women were present as wives and daughters, notably on the voyage to Quebec City,Footnote ³ but certainly not as equals or as participants.

The challenge is not to just seek a reconciliation with historical truths of exclusion in Canadian politics but also to present a historical narrative that is not entirely separate from the questions that have animated various aspects of our history and obscured these truths over time. The goal is to explore how these truths have been part of, and challenge, the classic questions in Confederation studies.

Contributing to the latter task is among the key contributions of Roads to Confederation. The first volume offers excerpts of the classics (Russell, Creighton, and others) preceded by texts from traditionally excluded voices (Indigenous peoples, women, minorities) in examining the inherited histories and myths of Confederation. The second volume continues with a selection of interweaving and competing national and local histories (Careless, Waite, Dumont, and others) for a nuanced and more complex reading of Confederation. The wide range of perspectives will be valuable to students and scholars, particularly in examining the centrality of the Confederation moment and tensions informing Canadian nationalism, or even geopolitical interests that shaped Canada in North America. Advanced readers will find the bibliography quite helpful, though tilted toward the classics. Missing in the overall selection of texts, however, are the African Nova Scotian voices in the legacies of race.

But there is also in all this a deeper question: what do we really think today about Confederation? Was it an achievement or a failure? Admittedly, I'm not sure what the answer really is. The volumes offer compelling voices on either side, but each often invokes deeper entangled tensions (ideational, institutional, colonial) that are not always connected or fully explored. As it may be possible to “speak on either side,” or both, these deeper tensions pull us into other, persistent, and far more obscure dynamics in Canadian history.

For instance, Russell, Ajzenstat, and Vipond, in Section III, reflect more than just competing sides but a complex, though largely European-American, heritage of theorizing about Canadian sovereignty, each capturing complex elements of an interwoven heritage of Toryism, philosophical liberalism and modern constitutionalism. We can't but find subtle tones of liberalism amidst the Toryism of the period, and vice versa in the modern constitutionalism and rights discourses of the time. If we also consider Section I and II—texts from the perspective of Indigenous authors—further dimensions emerge. Here, we can't but inquire how Indigenous traditional understandings of land and its spiritual meaning (Dickason and Newbigging) come into tension with the secular North American conceptions of order (each with fault lines with the sacred, secularism, and the latter's ongoing struggles with masculinity). We can't but also wonder about the inner struggle between traditional Indigenous treaty interpretations, recent liberalization of rights discourses and other aspects of Indigenous culture that have undergone an irrevocable change through colonial and post-Confederation administration (Dickason and Newbigging). There is a deeply complex interplay and dynamic here that pulls us in, and that challenges for instance Mackay's “liberal order,” in Section VIII, as a way for understanding the “other” in Confederation; or our different human existential struggles over land or environment in Canada. Something deeper gets lost in the polemics. As Russell, Vipond and Dickason have shown, there's for many of us a much messier intellectual heritage to draw from.

There is one other aspect here that I'm not entirely sure is always appreciated. All works, settler and indigenous alike, rely on what I call reliable instruments that have the force of proof. They aren't just cultural differences in telling history, but what constitutes culturally and institutionally a reliable record of it, be that oral or written. If reconciliation means more than healing injustices but a deeper appreciation of tensions mentioned above, then the rules and procedures of creation and the memorialization of truth is also certainly part of it. The discussion of this topic in the introduction to volume I is, regrettably, too brief and doesn't fully acknowledge these challenges. A turn to diplomatics—the study of the “genesis, inner constitution and transmission” of documents—brings out the volumes’ assumptions about the immutability and reliability of written records, and makes the case for repatriating many of them, and their assessments, to Indigenous systems of knowledge and creation.Footnote ⁴

There's also room here to apply this approach to traditional sources, in some cases, revealing notable historical inaccuracies. For instance, a closer look at the manuscripts of the Quebec Resolutions reveal that there were, in English and French, at least three distinct versions in circulation preceding and during the Confederation debates. That there were mistakes in the initial resolutions might not surprise anyone familiar with Pope's footnotes in his 1895 compendium, republished in Browne's 1969, or Waite's brief mention of them in his Confederation Debates—all cited in the volumes. But it might be surprising to know how and when the delegates discovered them, amended and put the resolutions into circulation, despite the political rhetoric stating otherwise.Footnote ⁵ Despatches from Macdonald, Tupper, Galt and Tilley on the topic in 1864–1865, and diplomatics analyses of the resolutions paint a more detailed sketch, from their review in Montreal at the close of the Quebec Conference to their engrossing and ceremonial reveal in Ottawa where remaining delegates affixed signatures in early-November 1864, expanding upon the narrative and the October 27th date proposed by Russell in Section III. Similarly, in Creighton's chapter, in Section IV, a closer examination of archival records from 1858-1862 reveal despatches and lengthy memoranda on the topic of free-trade authored by Finance Minister, A.T. Galt, that outline a far more ambitious and barrier-free British North American free-trade policy than Creighton elaborates.Footnote ⁶

Much more information can be further explored, strengthening Russell's Toryism in Section III, with a diplomatics and institutional approach of the 1867 draft bills, underlining the instructions to draftsmen, the rules of drafting sessions, and the importance of the Brougham Act in guiding the bill's initial language and structure.Footnote ⁷

There are certainly many roads to Confederation, many of which are outlined and explored in this collection. We may indeed question just how much and for whom this arrangement could be seen as progressive. However, what is clear is that the collection usefully offers a range of material to begin an outline and an assessment of what this inheritance means today.