Macaulay, Sir James Buchanan

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Gordon Dodds, “MACAULAY, Sir JAMES BUCHANAN,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 8, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/macaulay_james_buchanan_8E.html
  • DCB profile:
    • Army and militia officer, lawyer, politician, and judge; b. 3 Dec. 1793 in Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake), Upper Canada, second son of James Macaulay and Elizabeth Tuck Hayter; m. 1 Dec. 1821 Rachel Crookshank Gamble in York (Toronto), and they had one son and four daughters; d. 26 Nov. 1859 in Toronto.
    • James Buchanan Macaulay was born in the fledgling loyalist settlement of Newark to parents recently arrived from England. His father, a British army surgeon, and his mother enjoyed the personal friendship of the province’s first lieutenant governor, John Graves Simcoe, to which the given names of James’s older brother, John Simcoe Macaulay, bear eloquent witness. In 1795 or 1796 the Macaulays followed the seat of government to York near which the doctor had been granted a park lot. This land, stretching north into the edges of uncleared forest, rapidly attained the tag of Macaulay Town and as York grew it became a considerable financial asset for the Macaulay family.
    • On 14 Dec. 1809, a few days after his 16th birthday, Macaulay was commissioned an ensign with the 98th Foot, then stationed at Quebec. Appointed lieutenant in the Canadian Fencibles during the winter of 1812, that June, as rumours of war with the United States grew stronger, he became a lieutenant and acted as adjutant in the provincially raised Glengarry Light Infantry Fencibles. Almost immediately he was thrown into battle, first on 19 July at Sackets Harbor, N.Y., where he was wounded in the left hip, and then in February 1813 at the battle of Ogdensburg, N.Y., where he led a gallant, if not entirely sensible, charge across the frozen St Lawrence into American artillery fire. 
    • Macaulay entered his name on the books of the Law Society of Upper Canada in 1816, when he was 22. Macaulay’s industrious advocacy at the bar, revealed in the official law reports, and his impeccable social standing brought him to Sir Peregrine Maitland’s attention as an obviously desirable addition to the province’s ruling élite. On 5 May 1825 he was appointed to the Executive Council, an undoubted bastion of the “family compact.”. His executive role was to be short-lived for his last appearance in council was on 2 July 1829. The intervening years were not exactly smooth for Macaulay but he weathered them with expected ease. As an executive councillor he had inevitably to suffer William Lyon Mackenzie’s attacks in the Colonial Advocate, culminating in one on 18 May 1826 which described him as “a stink-trap of government.” 
    • James Buchanan Macaulay ended his days in what the young attorney general, John A. Macdonald, paying tribute to him at a retirement dinner in 1856, had called “an untiring assiduity.” The Upper Canada Law Journal that year noted the “ample monuments” represented by Macaulay’s judgements in the law reports and observed quite accurately that he was the sort of figure whom “men of all parties looked up to as a pattern of judicial purity.” He had, in short, as that journal recorded at his death, quite simply “grown with the country.” A shy, retiring man, hesitant in speech but fluent and eminently rational in his reports, charges, and judgements, Macaulay had developed vast experience in watching over and guiding the new society. His opinions and recommendations were sought on a wide range of issues affecting the machinery of government, his citizenship and private life were exemplary, and his military youth suitably dashing. To his equally reticent wife, who survived him until 1883 when she died in England at the home of a married daughter, Macaulay left the family home in Toronto, Wykeham Lodge, and an estate worth $40,000. To the province he left a legacy of quiet public service and principled professionalism.
  • Son of Proven United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=4909
  • Find a Grave: Cannot locate.