Thomas D’Arcy McGee: The forgotten Wexford man who founded Canada

The play, The trial of Thomas Darcy McGee: Irish Rebel – Canadian Patriot, will be performed in the Wexford Arts Centre, on Friday 2^nd May…

In 1848 Thomas D’Arcy McGee (1825 – 1868) was a physical force, Irish republican who fled, first to the United States and then Quebec, where he embraced British loyalism and became a founding father of the Canadian Confederation.

Remembering his days as an idealistic Young Irelander he declared; ‘Politically, we were a pack of fools but we were honest in our folly; and no man need blush at forty for the follies of one-and-twenty, unless he still perseveres in them, having no longer the fair excuse of youth and inexperience.’

The Fenians did not agree, and, in 1868, Thomas D’Arcy McGee was assassinated on Sparks Street, Ottawa. His death shocked and united Canada. 80,000 attended his funeral and the statue of Thomas D’Arcy McGee stands, overlooking the Ottawa River; outside the Parliament he helped create. Given that he opposed annexation, and argued against Canada becoming the 37^th state, his life story is complex, contradictory, fascinating and relevant.

Irish Rebel

Thomas D’Arcy McGee was born in Carlingford, Co. Louth on the 13^th of April 1825; the son of a Catholic Excise man who was soon posted to Co. Antrim. In 1833 the family moved to Wexford but his mother was thrown from the coach on the journey and died. She is buried in Selskar Abbey, Wexford.

Aged 16, he was an enthusiastic member of Father Mathew’s Temperance Movement and he opposed British rule in Ireland. In later life, he was an alcoholic who declared that although the Union Flag flew over Canada it cast no shadow.

In April 1842, in conflict with his stepmother, he sailed to Quebec. Aged 17, after making an impressive 4^th of July speech in Boston, he was offered a post with the Boston Pilot. Passionate informed oratory, from changing perspectives, was to be a feature of McGee’s political life. At 19 he was the editor of the Boston Pilot.

The writing of the young genius attracted attention and he was invited to become the London correspondent for Daniel O’Connell’s Freeman’s Journal. From 1845, as the Famine took hold, he grew disillusioned with O’Connell’s Repeal Association and joined the more militant Young Irelanders. Writing for their newspaper, the Nation, it was McGee who coined the phrase ‘sailing coffins’ – coffin ships.

In 1847, he married Mary Theresa Caffrey. Despite his alcoholism, and the loss of three children, theirs was a life of love and fidelity.

Under the influence of Gavin Duffy, ‘the father of my mind’, McGee was on the less militant wing of Young Ireland but enthused by the 1848 revolutions across Europe he supported a rebellion. He was not with Smith O’Brien at the Battle of the Widow McCormack’s Patch, as he was on a failed mission to Scotland, seeking men and arms.

A wanted man, he shared a house with the magistrate who was hunting him. Surprising because Thomas D’Arcy McGee was short in stature and dark of appearance. He escaped from Tremone Bay, Donegal, dressed as a clerical student.

As Ireland descended below the horizon he wrote that if he ever betrayed her he should, ‘Die a dog’s death, outcast, hurried! Into the earth as dogs are buried.’

Canadian Patriot

Thomas D’Arcy McGee arrived in Philadelphia on the 10th of October 1848. He set up a newspaper, the New York Nation, in which he continued to support physical force Irish republicanism, called for the annexation of Canada and incurred the wrath of Archbishop ‘Dagger’ Hughes for blaming the priests for the failure of the 1848 Ballingary Rebellion.

However, with his concern for the morals, health and education of the emigrant Irish he was appalled at how they were treated in the slums of New York and Boston. Influenced by Bishop Fitzpatrick of Boston. his criticism of the church mellowed and he became an intermontane catholic. Visits to Canada in 1852 and 1856 refashioned his views and he thought the Catholic Irish emigrants were better treated, and had more opportunities, in Montreal than in American cities. As his political character changed he was attacked as a traitor by the Irish Republican leadership.

In 1857, the Irish community in Montreal invited Thomas D’Arcy McGee to move there. He did and set up the New Era newspaper.

Canada at that time consisted of self-governing, self-interested, competing provinces – Lower Canada (Quebec), Upper Canada (Ontario), New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. Thomas D’Arcy McGee realised that, provinces jealous of each other, were vulnerable to annexation by the United States – something he had once strongly supported. He called for a new British, north American nationality, like the ‘Shield of Achilles’, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

In Montreal, he defended the rights of the Irish emigrants. He clashed bitterly with the Orange Order in Toronto by demanding separate schools for Catholics. He also encouraged economic development, immigration, tariffs and an intercolonial railway, uniting the St. Lawrence Valley and the Maritime Provinces.

In 1857, Thomas D’Arcy McGee was elected to the legislative assembly of Upper and Lower Canada. He supported the Reform Party Governments but, in 1861, as he became more comfortable within British Parliamentary Democracy he defected to the Orangeman John A. Macdonald’s conservatives. He was appointed minister of agriculture, immigration and statistics. McGee and Macdonanld became friends and drinking partners.

Preaching ‘unity in diversity’ Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s powerful oratory further developed the concept of a confederation of the provinces, a new Canada. In 1864, to help build trust, he organised a tour of the Maritime provinces by politicians from Upper and lower Canada. The Charlottetown and Quebec conferences followed and confederation took shape.

In 1865, as a conservative government minister he visited Ireland and made a speech in what is now the Wexford Arts Centre; in the town that reared him. He attacked Irish republican demagogues, praised the superiority of the British constitution and stated that the Irish should emigrate to British north America, where they were better treated than in the USA. Even close friends, like Charles Gavan Duffy, thought his Wexford speech unwise. In Montreal McGee’s electoral support ebbed. For the Fenians, Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Wexford speech confirmed him as a traitor. He was ‘the little vulgar arch-hypocrite of Griffintown.’

Perhaps because of the erosion of his political base, or his republican past, McGee was excluded from the final conference in London; but as a father of confederation he was there to witness the Bill that created the Confederation of Canada.

In 1866, the Fenians, with a small army of Civil War veterans, crossed the Niagra River and won the Battle of Ridgeway, before retreating. McGee called for the execution of captured officers. Although a failure, the invasion strengthened Fenian support among the Irish and, even in Montreal, this further eroded Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s electoral base. Despite failing popuarity, in 1867, he was elected to the new Canadian Parliament for Montreal West. In January 1868, he was expelled from the St. Patrick’s Society in that city.

Thomas D’Arcy McGee, free from alcohol for six months and, contemplating retirement from politics, to have more time to write, was assassinated; shot in the back of the head on Sparks Street Ottawa, on the 7^th of April 1868. Whilst the new nation mourned the loss of a founding father, the Fenian Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa declared that McGee prayed for a dog’s death should he ever desert the cause of Ireland; he did desert it, and a dog’s death he got.

Modern Relevance

In Ottawa the statue of Thomas Darcy McGee stands tall with a young girl, perhaps the emergent nation, sitting listening to his words. Education was important to him and he has claim to be regarded as the father of both Canada and Canadian literature. He declared, ‘no literature, no national life.’ For McGee a national literature was part of the national character. That character should have high moral values. The conservative Catholic mistrusted sensual fiction.

McGee’s portrait is the centre piece of the Canadian Museum of History’s 19^TH Century floor and the main character in story of Confederation.

In Carlingford, his birthplace, there is a large shrine to Thomas D’Arcy McGee and a financially insecure, annual summer school in his name. However, an exhibition about him was removed and when the Canadian Ambassador, Kevin Vickers, mentioned McGee, across the island, he was met with one of two responses; who? or that traitor.

Other than a small festival in Ottawa, which included the Trial of Thomas D’Arcy McGee: Irish Rebel – Canadian Patriot, the 200^th anniversary of his birth is not being widely celebrated. Yet, Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s voice has a modern resonance.

He highlighted distinctions between the USA and Canada, opposed the democratic tyranny of the former and highlighted the inclusive nature of the parliamentary system of the latter. He fought against Canada becoming the 37^th state. (1867 Nebraska).

Today, the Canadian Museum of History identifies the genesis of the nation well before European colonisation. In the Ottawa Parliament, in 1867, Thomas D’Arcy McGee asked that their new confederation, ‘learn from our forest born Federalists – our Six Nations brothers … who showed us that, only by rising above the old grievances and tribal prejudices of the past, in a spirit of tolerance, can a great nation emerge.’

In Ireland today D’Arcy McGee’s ideas have increasing currency. Describing the negotiations in 1864 among Canadian politicians that led to Confederation Professor David Wilson, author of two volumes on McGee, wrote of ‘…a strange scene – seventeen men with disparate views, some of whom could not stand one another, locked in a room, trying to find a way out of Canada’s constitutional problems.’ He could have been describing the 1998 ‘Good Friday Agreement’ talks!

Although largely forgotten in Ireland for 150 years, and often dismissed as a man of no principle, even as a traitor, it was D’Arcy McGee’s advocacy of hard bargaining, compromise, and seeking ‘Unity in Diversity’ that laid the foundations of the Canadian Confederation. Hard bargaining with enemies, seeking compromise between different ethnic groups and attempting to achieve “Unity in Diversity’ have all helped move the Irish peace process forward.

Thomas D’Arcy McGee was an Irish rebel and a Canadian patriot.

Retired from Anglia Ruskin University Anthony Russell is the author of Between Two Flags: John Mitchel Jenny Verner (Merion Press). His ‘Trial’ plays have been performed from Winnipeg to Wexford. The Trial of Thomas D’Arcy McGee; Irish Rebel – Canadian Patriot will be performed in Montreal, Ottawa and McGee’s birthplace, Wexford, to mark the 200^th anniversary of his birth.