Thomas D'Arcy McGee (13 April 18257 April 1868) was an Irish-Canadian politician, Catholic spokesman, journalist, poet, and a Father of Canadian Confederation. The young McGee was an Irish Catholic who opposed British rule in Ireland, and was part of the Young Ireland attempts to overthrow British rule and create an independent Irish Republic. He escaped arrest and fled to the United States in 1848, where he reversed his political beliefs. He became disgusted with American republicanism, Anti-Catholicism, and Classical Liberalism. McGee became intensely monarchistic in his political beliefs and in his religious support for the embattled Pope Pius IX.
He moved to the Province of Canada in 1857 and worked hard to convince fellow Irish Canadians to cooperate with Canadian Protestants in forming a self-governing Canada within the British Empire. His passion for Confederation garnered him the title: 'Canada's first nationalist'. McGee also vocally denounced the activities of the Fenian Brotherhood, a paramilitary secret society of exiled Irish Republicans who resembled his younger self politically, in Ireland, Canada, and the United States. McGee succeeded in helping achieve Confederation in 1867, but was assassinated by the Fenian Brotherhood, which considered McGee guilty of Shoneenism, in 1868. Montreal Fenian Brotherhood member Patrick J. Whelan was convicted of McGee's murder and executed.
Early life
Widely known as D'Arcy McGee, he was born on 13 April 1825 in Carlingford, Ireland, and raised as a Roman Catholic. From his mother, the daughter of a Dublin bookseller he learned the history of Ireland, which later influenced his writing and political activity. When he was eight years old, his family moved to Wexford, where his father, James McGee, was employed by the Irish coast guard (then under His Majesty's Coastguard and likely at the Wexford Town Station near Customs House Quay.
In Wexford he attended a local hedge school, where the teacher, Michael Donnelly, fed his hunger for knowledge and where he learned of the long history of British rule and Irish opposition, including the more recent uprising of 1798. In 1842 at age 17, McGee left Ireland with his sister due to a poor relationship with their stepmother, Margaret Dea, who had married his father in 1840 after the death of his mother 22 August 1833. In 1842 he sailed from Wexford harbour aboard the brig Leo, bound for the United States. On the Leo he wrote many of his early poems, mostly about Ireland.
He soon found work as assistant editor of Patrick Donahoe's Boston Pilot, a Catholic newspaper in Boston, Massachusetts. He specialized in articles expounding the movement for Irish self-determination led by Daniel O’Connell. He became the lead editor in 1844, While writing widely as well on Irish literature and politics. He advocated the union of Canada into the United States, saying, "Either by purchase, conquest, or stipulation, Canada must be yielded by Great Britain to this Republic."
In 1845, he returned to Ireland where he became politically active and edited The Nation, the voice of the Young Ireland movement. In 1847, he married Mary Theresa Caffrey; they had six children but only two daughters survived their father. His involvement in the Irish Confederation and Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848 resulted in a warrant for his arrest. McGee escaped disguised as a priest and returned to the United States.
United States
In the United States, he achieved prominence in Irish-American circles and founded and edited the New York-based Nation and the Boston-based American Celt. He also wrote a number of history books. In common with several other Young Ireland émigrés, McGee espoused proslavery thought and defended the continuation of slavery in the United States. In the August 4th, 1849 edition of the Nation, McGee attacked supporters of the abolitionist Daniel O'Connell in the United States, writing that "Their task is to liberate their slaves, not to travel across the Atlantic for foreign objects of sympathy."
McGee eventually grew disillusioned with democracy, republicanism and the United States. Historian David Gerber traces a dramatic transformation from the Young Ireland revolutionary who sought a peasant insurrection to expel the British from Ireland. Gerber writes: After 1851, however, he veered increasingly toward the opposite pole, espousing an ultramontane conservatism.... Catholic dogma and triumphalism, anti-Protestantism, cultural nationalism, and social conservatism were the framework of McGee's thought during the 1850s.