MCGEE, THOMAS D’ARCY
Publication
28 February 2023Born Carlingford, County Louth, Ireland, 13 April 1825. Died Ottawa Ontario, Canada, April 7 1868.
Author: David Wilson
Of all the Irish men and women who emigrated to Canada, none had a more remarkable career or made a more significant impact on the country than Thomas D’Arcy McGee. A poet, journalist, historian and politician, he was the author of more than a dozen books, the outstanding orator of his generation, and the youngest and most intellectually gifted of the Fathers of Confederation. His life was riven by contradictions: at various points he was a temperance advocate, a serial alcoholic, a moral force nationalist, a republican revolutionary, an ultra-conservative Catholic, a Canadian Reformer and a Liberal-Conservative cabinet minister. In his youth, he had been a republican revolutionary who proudly described himself as a “traitor to the British Crown”; after his death, he was praised as “one of the most eloquent advocates of British rule and British institutions … on the face of the globe.” Yet there were also deeper consistencies; his program for a “new nationality” in Canada – a program that inspired a new generation of Canadian nationalists – reproduced the central ideas that had informed the moral force nationalism that he had initially developed in Ireland.
Born in Carlingford in 1825, McGee moved to Wexford eight years later; his mother was killed in a coach accident en route to their new home. When his father remarried, there were major tensions between the children and their stepmother. To escape the situation, the seventeen-year old McGee moved to the United States, where he secured a job writing for the Boston Pilot, the leading Irish American newspaper in the country. His writings and speeches in support of temperance and Irish independence were so impressive that two years later he was made editor of the paper – at the age of nineteen.
His achievements in the United States attracted the attention of nationalist supporters of Daniel O’Connell in Ireland, and they invited him back home to work for the O’Connellite Freeman’s Journal. Before long, though, McGee joined the Young Ireland movement that embraced cultural nationalism as means to revive the “spirit of Ireland,” and that injected new energy into the nationalist movement. Against the background of the Irish Famine and the wave of revolutions sweeping through Europe in 1848, Young Ireland broke with O’Connell and began to prepare for an Irish revolution – and McGee moved with them. By the summer of 1848, McGee adopted views that were virtually indistinguishable from those of the Fenians a decade later: he advocated separatist republicanism, an alliance with agrarian secret societies, the abolition of landlordism, and a revolution not only in Ireland but also in Canada.
After the failure of the Young Ireland rising, McGee escaped to the United States with a price on his head, started up his own newspaper, and continued to make the case for revolution. Gradually, though, he began to change his mind. There were two different lessons that could be drawn from the failure of the rising. One – eventually adopted by the Fenians – was to establish a more effective underground organization and get it right the next time. The other – eventually adopted by McGee – was that given the power imbalance between Britain and Ireland, revolution was bound to fail. Once he had taken this position, he turned against revolution in favour of reform – losing many of his former colleagues in the process.
At the same time, McGee was becoming increasingly alienated from the American way of life. The United States, in his view, was characterized by a constant nervous excitement, the breakdown of the family, celebrity culture, guns on the street, and intense prejudice against Irish Catholic immigrants, many of whom were trapped in urban squalor. Becoming increasingly disillusioned with Protestant America, he reacted by embracing an extreme form of ultramontane Catholicism. In the process, he became one of the most conservative Catholics on the continent – and it was this disillusionment and this Catholic conservatism that drew his eyes northwards to Canada. Even though it was in the British Empire, he reasoned, Canada was a place where most Irish Catholics were not mired in urban poverty and not subject to the same kind of nativist hostility that existed in the United States. And – of particular importance to someone with two young daughters – it was a place where Catholics could be educated in their own schools. “The British flag does indeed fly here,” he wrote, “but it casts no shadow.”
Moving to Canada in 1857, he shifted towards a more liberal position, although he was uncompromising in his efforts to improve separate school legislation in the country. As a journalist and then as a politician, he set out his vision for British North America – a confederated country, balancing British order with American liberty and minority rights with majority rule. Just as he had argued in his Young Ireland days, literature, art and music would create a new national identity, protective tariffs would foster domestic manufacturers, and railways would bring people closer together.
In Canada, McGee stood for a tolerant, generous-spirited, open-minded and compassionate society in which minority rights were respected and protected, and he delivered inspirational speeches about the country’s potential. He also took a strong stand against the militants in his midst, whether they were extreme Orange Protestants or Irish Canadian Fenians who supported an American-based invasion of his adopted country.
McGee played a leading role in promoting the cause of Confederation, both in his speeches and in the goodwill tour of the Maritime provinces that he organized in 1864 (described by one of his enemies as “the big Intercolonial Drink”). During the negotiations in Quebec over the constitutional structure of the new state, he ensured that minority religious rights would be safeguarded. “So far as I know,” he later wrote, “this is the first Constitution ever given to a mixed people, in which the conscientious rights of the minority, are made a subject of formal guarantee. I shall never cease to remember with pleasure that I was the first proposer of that guarantee in the Quebec conference; a guarantee by which we have carried the principle of equal and reciprocal toleration a step farther than it has yet been carried, in any other free government – American or European.”
McGee’s uncompromising opposition to the Fenians won him many admirers in the country, but also made him many enemies in the Irish Catholic community. As the anger of his enemies intensified, the number of death threats increased. On April 7 1868, McGee was shot in the back of the head, almost certainly by a freelance Fenian who regarded him as a traitor to Ireland. The day after his assassination, John A Macdonald, struggling to repress extreme emotion, described McGee as “a martyr to the cause of his country” – his adopted country, Canada. A week later, on what would have been his 43rd birthday, his funeral was held in Montreal. Eighty thousand people lined the streets.