Sir Samuel Hughes (8 January 1853 – 23 August 1921) was a Canadian soldier and politician who served as Minister of Militia and Defence from 1911 to 1916. Responsible for Canada's armament during the first part of World War I, he was dismissed by Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden for insubordination in 1916.
Early life Hughes was born on 8 January 1853, at Solina near Bowmanville in what was then Canada West. He was a son of John Hughes from County Tyrone, Ireland, and Caroline (Laughlin) Hughes, a Canadian descended from Huguenots and Ulster Scots. He was educated in Durham County, Ontario and later attended the Toronto Normal School and the University of Toronto. In 1866 he joined the 45th West Durham Battalion of Infantry and served during the Fenian raids in the 1860s and 1870s. Throughout his life, Hughes was very involved in the militia, attending all of the drill practice sessions, and taking up shooting with a rifle in his spare time to improve his aim. A superb shot with a rifle, Hughes was active in gun clubs and ultimately became president of the Dominion Rifle Association. Hughes liked to see himself as embodying the Victorian values of hard work, self discipline, strength and manliness. Tall, muscular, and broad-shouldered, Hughes excelled at sports, being especially talented at lacrosse. He later claimed, in the British Who's Who, to have "personally offered to raise" Canadian contingents for service in "the Egyptian and Sudanese campaigns, the Afghan Frontier War, and the Transvaal War". Note the order in which they are quoted is not chronological.
At the age of 20, he married his first wife, Caroline Preston, who died a year later. Subsequently, he married Mary Burk, and the new couple soon moved to Toronto. He was a teacher from 1875 to 1885 at the Toronto Collegiate Institute (now Jarvis Collegiate), where he was noted for his eccentricities such as his habit of chewing on his chalk when delivering his lectures. Hughes abandoned teaching as he had trouble supporting a wife and three children on his salary while teaching offered little prospect of promotion. In 1885, he moved his family to Lindsay, where he had bought The Victoria Warder, the local newspaper. He was the paper's publisher from 1885 to 1897.
Newspaperman In his first editorial, Hughes accused the Roman Catholic Church of being behind the smallpox epidemic that was ravaging Montreal at the time and called French-Canadians "little better than brutes". Shortly after he began his proprietorship of the Victoria Warder in July 1885, Hughes joined the local Liberal-Conservative Association. The Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, often commented that Hughes's letters to him were "voluminous" and sometimes "impertinent" as he demanded patronage jobs for local Tories. Macdonald also noted in 1888 that "Sam Hughes is one of our best friends", as the Victoria Warder very strongly supported the Conservatives, making him a useful man for the Tories in the rural Victoria County, where most people got their news from his newspaper.
At the time when Hughes arrived in Victoria County, it was a mostly forested area where lumbering was the chief industry, though agriculture was increasing as the trees were cut down. Most of the towns and villages in Victoria County were isolated settlements on lakeshores and connected only by water and by primitive roads. The population of the county was overwhelmingly of British descent and Protestant. On the masthead of the Victoria Warder, Hughes put the following poem: "A Union of hearts, a Union of hands, A Union no man can sever, A Union of tongues, A Union of lands, And the flag—British Union forever". Hughes had much affection for the rugged landscape of the Victoria County, talking about its forests and lakes in the same manner he praised the Highlands of Scotland and the rolling fields of Ulster. His grandson wrote that for Hughes Victoria County was his "spiritual home". Victoria County in the 19th century was considered to be a "rough" frontier area, and during his tempestuous time as editor, Hughes was sued for libel, there was an arson attempt against the Victoria Warder and at least one assassination was attempted against him when he was shot at while leaving his newspaper office.
In 1885, Hughes tried to volunteer for the expeditionary force sent to put down the North-West Rebellion led by the Métis Louis Riel, but he was refused despite being a very active member of the militia. Hughes's younger brother, James, was part of the force sent to the North-West Territories (modern Saskatchewan) and to compensate for being not able to fight, he gave the war extensive coverage in The Victoria Warder. Reflecting his life-long belief in the superiority of citizen soldiers over professional soldiers, Hughes presented the North-West Rebellion as a triumph of the Canadian militia, proudly trumpeting the fact that almost all of the men sent to the North-West had been civilians only weeks before donning their uniforms to head west. About the Canadian victory in the Battle of Batoche, Hughes wrote in an editorial that "regular troops were all right for police purposes in times of peace and for training schools, but beyond that they are an injury to the nation".
A recurring theme of Hughes's writing in the Victoria Warder was the fear that industrialization and urbanization might lead to a loss of masculinity, and that the best way to save traditional masculinity was compulsory militia service for all Canadian men. Hughes equated masculinity with toughness, and argued that militia service would toughen up Canadian men who might otherwise go soft living in an urban environment full of labor-saving devices. As one of his arguments for the militia, Hughes played a key role in creating what the Canadian historian Desmond Morton called the "militia myth" around the War of 1812; namely, he misrepresented Upper Canada as being saved from successive American invasions in 1812, 1813 and 1814 by the Upper Canada militia, instead of the British Army regulars, who in fact did most of the fighting.
Another theme of Hughes's coverage of the North-West Rebellion was the way in which he essentially agreed with Riel that the stream of English-speaking, Protestant settlers from Ontario into the Prairies were indeed threatening the existence of the Catholic religion and French language of the Métis, with the only difference that what Riel saw as a tragedy, Hughes saw as a blessing. Victoria County had as a percentage of the population the largest number of Orangemen in Canada in the late 19th century, and Hughes who sat on the executive board of the local Lodge of the Loyal Orange Order in the county was able to use the Orangemen to provide a reliable group of voters when seeking election to the House of Commons throughout his career. The combative Hughes enjoyed brawling with Irish Catholic immigrants on trips to Toronto. As the editor of the Victoria Warder, Hughes often attacked "Romanists" as he called Catholics. For an example in an editorial on 4 October 1889 he accused the "Romanists" of Lindsay of being "a disloyal murder-planning society". After Wilfrid Laurier, the new Liberal Leader of the Official Opposition, spoke in favour of free trade with the United States, Hughes accused him in an 1888 editorial of being in favour of having Canada annexed by the United States. To counter Laurier's argument that free trade with the United States meant prosperity, Hughes proposed an Imperial Federation with Great Britain as the best way to bring about prosperity, though he also held out the possibility that the United States might one day join to create a union of the English-speaking peoples.
Member of Parliament In the 1891 election, Hughes ran as a Conservative to represent Victoria North, but was narrowly defeated by only 202 votes by the Liberal incumbent, Jack Barron. Charging electoral fraud, Hughes went to court to challenge the result. Two justices at the Queen's Bench in Toronto ruled that the evidence of electoral fraud presented by Hughes was overwhelming, and ordered a by-election, held on 11 February 1892. During the by-election, Barron twice tried to bribe Hughes to drop out. Hughes was elected to Parliament in the by-election. In January 1894, Hughes was involved in a brawl on Lindsay's main street with a Roman Catholic blacksmith named Richard Kylie, which led him to being convicted of assault and fined $500. Despite expectations that the assault conviction would cause him to lose his seat, in the 1896 election, Hughes kept his seat.
In 1870, when the province of Manitoba was created out of the North-West Territories as part of the political deal to end the Red River Rebellion, Manitoba had a French-speaking Métis majority, and it was declared in the Manitoba Act creating the province that French was one of Manitoba's official languages, and the province was to provide Catholic education in French. By 1890, immigration from Ontario had changed the demographics of Manitoba drastically and in that year the Manitoba government passed a law making all education in English under the grounds that French-language education was costing too much money. This in turn led to demands for the Dominion government to intervene as this law violated the Manitoba Act. The Manitoba Schools Question proved to be one of the most bitterly divisive issues of the 1890s, and Hughes emerged as a spokesman for those who urged the Dominion government not to intervene, arguing that if Manitoba did not wish to provide education in French, that was its right. Hughes justified his views under the grounds of secularism, writing in 1892 "all churches are a simple damned nuisance". Despite his anti-Catholic stance, Hughes supported the claims of the Catholic John Thompson to be prime minister. Hughes's support for Thompson was based upon political expediency, namely that Thompson was the best man to beat the popular Wilfrid Laurier.
Hughes used his influence with the Orange Order to try to keep them from inflaming the Manitoba Schools Question, and to convince them to accept Thompson as the next Conservative leader to replace the ailing Sir John Abbott. As Thompson represented a more upper-class, urban wing of the Conservative Party, the support of Hughes who represented a more lower-class, rural wing of the Conservatives was instrumental in assuring Thompson became prime minister in November 1892 when Abbott finally resigned. He also tried to persuade the Orangemen to accept a Catholic prime minister. During Thompson's time as prime minister, Hughes supported his efforts to find a compromise to the Manitoba Schools Question, though he notably stopped writing as often to the prime minister after Thompson decided in 1894 to pass a remedial bill to force Manitoba to abide by the Manitoba Act. When Thompson died in December 1894, Hughes supported the candidacy of Sir Charles Tupper against Senator Mackenzie Bowell, but Bowell prevailed and became the next prime minister. As the debate intensified into a crisis in 1895–96 following a ruling by the Privy Council against Manitoba, Hughes took a generally moderate position on the Manitoba Schools Question, asking rhetorically in a letter to the editor of the Ottawa Journal "why should we plunge Canada into a religious war?" In a letter to Nathaniel Clarke Wallace, the Grand Master of the Orange Order, he advised against extremism on the Manitoba Schools Question, saying the issue was tearing the Conservative Party apart. Faced with certain defeat in the 1896 election, Hughes was one of the Conservative MPs who voted in March to depose Bowell in favour of Tupper.