[Frontispiece: THOMAS D'ARCY McGEE]
THOMAS D'ARCY McGEE
BY
ALEXANDER BRADY
Lecturer in Political Science,
University of Toronto
TORONTO
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED
1925
Copyright, Canada, 1925
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED
Printed in Canada
PREFATORY NOTE
In seeking information for this modest story of the life of Thomas
D'Arcy McGee, I received the kind assistance of the staff in the
Reference Library, Toronto, and also that of Dr. Doughty and his
staff in the Dominion Archives, Ottawa. I must particularly
acknowledge a debt to Mr. J. J. McGee of Ottawa, brother of T. D'Arcy
McGee. He kindly allowed me to examine the material which he had
collected concerning his distinguished brother. Finally, I am
indebted to the editor of this series, Mr. W. S. Wallace, for helpful
suggestions and criticisms.
A. B.
CONTENTS
I YOUTH
II THE LESSONS OF EXPERIENCE
III THE PROPHET OF CANADIAN NATIONALITY
IV IN OFFICE AND OUT OF IT
V CONFEDERATION AND FENIANISM
VI CLOSING YEARS
VII CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
THOMAS D'ARCY McGEE
CHAPTER I
YOUTH
Thomas D'Arcy McGee had a unique place among the Canadian statesmen
of his time. His life was replete with dramatic interest. Most of
those who stood by the cradle of Confederation, wherever they had
been born, were fashioned in their development by commonplace
Canadian conditions and environment. Such was not the case with
McGee. When he came to Canada, a young man of thirty-two, he had
already gone through the crucible of varied experiences. In another
land and under different conditions he had battled for a lost cause.
He had risen quickly from impoverished boyhood to distinction. He
had been a leader in an attempted revolution, a conspirator, a
fugitive rebel, an exile. He had felt the thrill that comes to a
poet, and the less intense satisfaction that comes to the public
leader. In the work that brought him fame, journalism, he had a
career equalled by few in its meteoric character. He had been the
editor or assistant editor of five newspapers, and on both sides of
the Atlantic had borne a large share in intense controversies. He
came to Montreal, in 1857, almost in the guise of an adventurer; and
the portion of his life woven into the story of Canada was no less
dramatic than that which preceded it. Within a few months of his
arrival, he was elected to the colonial legislature; within a few
years, he was honoured as one of the outstanding statesmen of the
British colonies. In that venture of political faith which resulted
in the establishment of the Dominion, he took a dominant share, and
was generally acclaimed its most eloquent champion. His public life
in Canada was crushed into ten years, but within that period his
achievements had won him a permanent place in Canadian history. Yet
in his career tragedy kept pace with brilliant success. He had no
more than seen his cherished cause triumph when his life was cut
short by the bullet of a Fenian assassin, who mistook him for an
enemy of Ireland.
Like Abraham Lincoln, also the victim of an assassin, McGee was born
in a cottage. But the country and circumstances surrounding the
birth of the two men were strikingly different. The hero of the
American Civil War was reared amid the uncouth surroundings of the
frontier. He never became freed from the social rawness of a
community arising from a wilderness. McGee was born in the year
1825, at Carlingford, in the beautiful coast country of County Louth,
Ireland. Carlingford is a shrine of natural beauty. It is washed by
the blue waters of Carlingford Lough, and in the background are the
Mourne Mountains with their ever alternating shadows and sunshine.
In such congenial surroundings, rich in their associations with
Ireland's heroic past, McGee's childhood was spent.
His father was a coast-guard, whose remote ancestors had been the
famous Magees of Ulster. But it was chiefly from his mother, not his
father, that McGee received his mental inheritance. She was the
daughter of a Dublin bookseller, by name Morgan, who had been
implicated in the rebellion of 1798, and whose business as a
consequence had been ruined. She was a woman of imagination, who
cherished the memory of her father's espousal of the national cause
and preserved all his national enthusiasms, which she sedulously fed
to her son, Thomas D'Arcy. Her nationalism was not limited to the
mere aspiration that Ireland possess political independence. She was
interested in all the old Irish myths, traditions, and poetry, and
these she related to her little "Tommie". Thus, from infancy, he
grew up saturated in Irish literary lore, and an ardent idealist for
the nationality of his country.
The simple facts respecting McGee's childhood scarcely need
narrating. They are facts that might be recounted with respect to
thousands of Irish boys of the same period. His father brought his
family to Wexford when Thomas D'Arcy was eight years old, and McGee
later in life always associated Wexford with his youth. In this city
he obtained the slender advantages of a day school education, and
came under the influence of a stimulating personality, the famous
Father Mathew. This marvellously effective apostle of temperance,
who swayed the conduct of Irishmen as with a magic wand, was at the
time carrying on his triumphant campaign in southern Ireland. His
appeal touched McGee. Under Father Mathew's influence a juvenile
temperance society was established in Wexford. One evening a slight
boy with flat face, dark skin and hair, and wonderfully expressive
eyes, delivered before the society a spell-binding oration, on which
he received the hearty congratulations of the great priest. The boy
was young McGee, and this was his first public speech. During the
next two years, 1840-1842, "little Tommy McGee's" speeches drew large
numbers to the society's meetings. But Wexford was not long to claim
the boy orator. His mother had died, his father had remarried, and
the family were not in affluent circumstances. Ireland in the
forties held out few prospects to the children of the indigent. The
economic structure of Irish society was diseased. Approximately
seven million were vainly endeavouring to wring a lean subsistence
from the land, and hundreds of thousands were on the verge of famine.
Gloom and misery were written broad over the southern counties, lit
up but not relieved by the sputterings of political agitation. The
one hope of the impoverished was the continent in the west, and a
mighty stream of emigration to that land of promise set in. McGee
joined the emigrant throng.
Accompanied by a sister, he arrived in the United States with few
material possessions beyond the clothes on his back and a prize book
won at school. The latter he disposed of during his first day in
Boston in order that he might be able to sleep under a roof. His
destination had been the home of an aunt in Rhode Island, but Boston,
with its commercial activities and its hum of life, attracted him.
In June, 1842, he repaired there to seek his fortune. Boston, like
every large American city, had many immigrant boys seeking fortunes,
and the hopes of the Irish lad must have shrunk away as the days of
unemployment passed and the empty future opened out. Then, suddenly,
one of the many incidents which give a dramatic interest to McGee's
life occurred. It was the practice of Bostonians, a patriotic people
mindful of their history, to commemorate the Fourth of July with a
civic celebration. At the close of a much applauded public address,
a strange and very uncouth youth feverishly jumped on an old cart,
and for half an hour delivered in a voice of thrilling melody an
oration on the virtues of liberty. Unknown by a soul in the large
throng, McGee was cheered for his audacity and success. Next
morning, with still little hope of getting employment, he prepared to
return to his aunt in Rhode Island. The story is related that he
called at the office of the _Boston Pilot_ with the purpose of
procuring something to read on his journey. He was there recognized
by the observant proprietor as the silver-tongued youth of the
previous day. A conversation was opened which resulted in the offer
of a position with the paper. This offer he accepted, and thus he
became launched on the career of journalism which dragged him, as it
has dragged many obscure but talented youths, into the glaring light
of publicity.
He had the powers certain to extract success: a quick and
assimilative mind, an imagination that could clothe the dullest facts
in the most appealing colours, and a marvellous facility in
expressing himself. Within a few months he revealed that he was
worth more than a mere clerkship, and became a travelling agent and
special correspondent. To retain the support of those subscribers
who were immigrant Irish, the prominent questions of Irish politics
were threshed out in the columns of the _Pilot_. McGee proved
invaluable in the presentation of Irish issues and in the vigorous
championship of the chief plank in O'Connell's platform, repeal of
the union of Great Britain and Ireland. The powers of his
journalistic pen extended his fame throughout New England, and within
two years he became, with Walter J. Walsh, joint editor of the
_Pilot_. An editor of the age of twenty is not a common phenomenon.
Still more uncommon is it when the youth in question is at the same
time winning a widely-extended reputation as a public speaker. In
the forties, on both sides of the Atlantic, there was a passion for
public lectures. Such great names as those of Carlyle, Emerson, and
Dickens were associated with the movement. McGee's zeal to find
expression led him to deliver public lectures throughout New England,
and the magnetic charm of the born orator insured his success. Few
public speakers could equal him in holding an audience enthralled.
The true instinct of the journalist--the desire to move public
opinion--acting on a mind naturally brilliant, won for the young
immigrant a local reputation in New England, but it also brought him
into all those dusty controversies and conflicts inseparable from
journalism. He found himself in vital battle with the settled
prejudices of New England. The large immigration from Ireland had in
this period begun to disturb old Bostonians, proud of their descent,
fictitious or real, from the Pilgrim fathers. The leaven of
Puritanism made them detest the faith of the immigrants; their belief
in the wholesome virtues of their racial stock made them resent the
intrusion of the Celtic Irish; and their material well-being gave
them a snobbish dislike of ragged and impoverished peasants from the
bogs of Leinster and the rocky hillsides of Connaught. A boycott of
Irish immigrants was launched, and against it McGee contended with
all his youthful fire. Thus the first public cause for which he
expended his energies was the recognition of his race and faith in
the community life of New England. In essence his plea was for
tolerance between class and class and sect and sect. The arguments
that he advanced as youthful editor find a surprising echo in those
which he used twenty years later in the Canadian provinces. It was
only through the tolerant recognition of different sects and races
that a new American community could be constituted. Prejudices and
jealousies must be erased from social life, and the spirit of
goodwill developed. It was a simple and ancient message, but one
that McGee both in the United States and in Canada never failed to
plead.
The defence of his countrymen led him in 1845 to publish his first
book, _Historical Sketches of O'Connell and His Friends_. It is
written with the nervous eloquence and facility of all his later
works. The most significant fact about it was the hero-worship which
he lavished upon the great Irish liberator. "In him," he
enthusiastically wrote, "liberty will boast a model for all her
future reformers." In his later Canadian career McGee showed himself
a consistent disciple of his hero of 1845. He was a follower of
O'Connell in his implicit faith in attaining political visions by
moving first the popular mind through oratory and the press.
O'Connell is generally remembered as an agitator, but he was
something more than the word ordinarily connotes. He was a political
educator, and a political educator of O'Connell's type McGee always
aspired to be.
In the year which witnessed the publication of his eulogy of
O'Connell, McGee's fame spread beyond Boston and its New England
environs. Indeed, his articles on Repeal were read with keen and
satisfied interest in the club rooms of Dublin. O'Connell himself
paid him a compliment by publicly referring to his editorials as "the
inspired writings of a young exiled Irish boy in America." John
Gray, proprietor of the _Freeman's Journal_, which was O'Connell's
pillar of support, considered McGee's journalistic talent worthy of
enlistment in the service of his paper. He offered him a liberally
paid position. The result was that McGee returned to Dublin. Only
three years had elapsed since his departure, but they were years
which had witnessed his rise from the position of a poor immigrant
boy, not unlike thousands who yearly crossed in the steerage to be
lost in the human eddies of American cities, to that of a newspaper
editor with a reputation in America and a certain distinction in
Ireland. The rapid pace of his rise measures in some degree his
quantity of inborn talent and his determination to hew success from
the most untoward circumstances.
His position with the _Freeman_ brought him to London as a political
correspondent. He had thus the advantage of viewing from the close
range of the press gallery the working of parliamentary institutions,
and we may assume that it enabled him to store away political and
constitutional precedents for future use. But his political articles
did not please the proprietor of the _Freeman_. The cause is to be
found in the fact that they showed the influence of a group of young
men with whom McGee on his return came to be associated, and who
profoundly influenced his whole development. This group was the
party of Young Ireland. At this period, Thomas Davis, a blending of
poet and man of affairs, was the guiding mind of the group, and the
Dublin _Nation_ was its organ of opinion. The leaders were all men
of talent; a few were men of genius. Next to Davis as an active and
persuasive writer was Charles Gavan Duffy, destined later to win
political laurels in Australia, and to leave no mean name in the
records of imperial statesmanship. John Blake Dillon, father of a
subsequent Irish nationalist leader, was another forceful member of
the group. Thomas Francis Meagher, in whose character were entwined
the chivalry of the soldier, the clear judgment of the statesman, and
the emotional intensity of the poet, was a third. Other names might
be mentioned. There was John Mitchel, a man of uncompromising mind
and a writer of powerful prose; Devin Reilly, a brilliant but
rancorous youth, who in the next year was to consider McGee as his
rival; and James Mangan, a poet of wasted genius.
All of these men were young. Few of them were over thirty. With
that hopefulness which is the gift of youth, they were driven by the
ideal of recreating Ireland by awakening her national consciousness.
Their task was similar to that of their great contemporary, Mazzini,
in Italy. They sought to arouse the Irish people to act for the
national good, to sink all sectarian animosities and class prejudices
which tended to dissipate the nation's energy on trifling ends.
Their outlook was not limited to material welfare or bare political
liberty. They endeavoured to revivify the cultural life of Ireland,
to give a more vital direction to its art, and to develop a more
intense literature. Their cherished motto was "Educate that you may
be free."
Soon after his return from America, McGee met the members of this
group, and readily subscribed to their doctrines and shared their
enthusiasms. Their ideas were new food for his mind, and he never
wholly shed the influence of their fervid idealism. When he later
pleaded the cause of Canadian nationality, he did so in the spirit
and through the inspiration of the Young Ireland creed. We have from
the pen of Gavan Duffy an interesting impression of McGee, when he
became a disciple of Young Ireland: "The young man was not
prepossessing. He had a face of almost African type, his dress was
slovenly even for the careless class to which he belonged, he looked
unformed and had a manner which struck me at first sight as too
deferential for self-respect. But he had not spoken three sentences
in a singularly sweet and flexible voice till it was plain that he
was a man in whom one might dimly discover rudiments of the orator,
poet and statesman hidden under the ungainly disguise." Needless to
say, Duffy gladly welcomed such a promising recruit in his loosely
formed association.
McGee's new alliance damaged his connection with the _Freeman_. His
articles tended to be too speculative and not sufficiently of the
sober-suited type desired by the commercial classes who supported
O'Connell and the _Freeman_. Moreover, he came to spend more time in
the British Museum digging up the materials for Irish history than in
the press gallery following the ingenuities of Peel's politics. His
best literary efforts, which absorbed most of his time, were his
articles for the _Nation_, and the tone of these was not acceptable
to O'Connell. Finally, Gray, becoming dissatisfied, brought his
engagement to a close. Duffy, who valued McGee's talent highly,
immediately employed him as London correspondent for the _Nation_,
and until his flight from Ireland in 1848 he remained an expounder,
through the press, of Young Ireland's varying hopes and policies.
Sectarian prejudices and colourless enthusiasm for the national cause
all encountered his virulent denunciation, and he sought in
accordance with the _Nation's_ prospectus "to direct the popular mind
and the sympathies of educated men of all parties to the great end of
nationality."
Meanwhile events in Ireland were hurrying to a dismal crisis. At the
end of 1845 the famine had begun to creep gloomily over the land, and
within the next nine months it had the country in its relentless
grip. Despair prevailed everywhere, except in Dublin, where the
calamity merely drove the political parties to more feverish
controversies. The Young Irelanders were breaking with O'Connell and
his repeal agitation. On the founding of the _Nation_ in 1842, Davis
and his associates had strongly supported the O'Connellite movement,
but as time passed the difficulties of co-operation between the
younger men and the old agitator became manifest. For a generation
O'Connell had been the uncrowned king of Ireland. He had swayed her
masses with his fertile brain and facile tongue. His triumph in the
movement of Catholic emancipation, when he had conquered Wellington
and convinced Peel, had given him a confidence which was now proving
fatal. In the forties of the century he was reaching the sere and
yellow leaf of his career, but his ambition to maintain an
unquestioned control of Irish affairs remained as keen as ever, and
prompted him to look with critical suspicion upon the Young Ireland
group. It is the lot of old men seldom to understand the generation
that hurriedly presses behind them with its new hopes and fresh
methods. They view its visions with frank uneasiness, and in the
rheumy conservatism of age condemn its vibrant actions as erratic and
destructive. It was so with O'Connell. He mocked the Young Ireland
talk of recreating the nation, he scorned its literary aspirations,
he suspected its condemnation of sectarianism, and he distrusted its
methods. In 1846, the Young Irelanders under the stress of the
famine had begun to talk of following the precedent of Pym and
Hampden and winning political liberty for Ireland by the sword; they
who had been content merely to champion the Irish cultural
renaissance, now proclaimed that Ireland could not be saved alone by
poetry. She must have action. But O'Connell, who had been taught
prudence by long and exacting experiences, condemned this rash talk.
The younger generation in Ireland took his prudence as timidity, and
spurned his words of caution.
The elements of disruption long existing between O'Connell and the
Young Irelanders ripened in July, 1846, when the younger men seceded
from the Repeal Association. But the critical nature of affairs
consequent upon the famine once more herded together the national
leaders, and in February, 1847, a Repeal Confederation was formed
with objects somewhat similar to those of the former association.
The formation of this Confederation marked McGee's first
participation in active politics. He had hurried back from the calm
atmosphere of London to the hectic politics of Dublin, and was made a
councillor of the Confederation. It is unnecessary to follow his
manœuvres amongst the Dublin politicians. We catch a glimpse of
him in the comments of a country gentleman who had dropped in to hear
the debates in the Confederation. He was at the outset very much
displeased at seeing a mere boy, ill-dressed and singularly ugly,
rise to address an assembly which had as its object the saving of
Ireland. But his displeasure vanished, and he was seized with
amazement when he found the boy with smiling confidence deliver a
statesmanlike oration that captivated his audience. McGee had,
moreover, other acquirements in addition to oratory, for the council
sufficiently prized his executive ability to make him its secretary.
The fates quickly precipitated events in Ireland. In the spring of
1847 O'Connell died, and his death plunged the nationalist movement
into a morass. "The king of the forest is dead," wrote a
contemporary, "and there is neither lion nor lion's cub to fill his
vacant place." John O'Connell, the Liberator's son, aspired to the
leadership formerly held by his father, but he was not a lion. He
was wholly unable to act with McGee and the Young Irelanders, and all
possibility of united action on Irish affairs vanished. Following
the French Revolution of February, 1848, which transferred
revolutionary enthusiasm to Ireland as to every other country in
Europe, John Mitchel, with the recklessness and Ishmaelite
characteristics of a born revolutionist, preached an armed uprising.
Others, including McGee, suddenly echoed his sentiments, and
revolutionary clubs sprang into being. These constituted in June a
special executive to which they were to yield obedience.
McGee became a member of the executive committee of five and went to
his task of creating a revolution with flushed enthusiasm. A venture
promising a quick fame and success to the public cause presented
itself. A delegate arrived from the Irish Confederates at Glasgow
stating that they had a considerable supply of arms and ammunition,
and if a known and daring leader were sent them, four or five hundred
men would volunteer for an expedition to Ireland. They might seize a
steamer on the Clyde, and sail for Sligo or Killala. Thus, by a
diversion in the west, they could strike British power a blow from
the rear. There was too much of a dramatic appeal in this adventure
for McGee to refuse when it was suggested that he be the leader.
Visions of emulating Paul Jones danced before his mind, and away he
sped the same evening for Scotland, while his associates matured
their plans in Ireland.
With rapid dispatch McGee consulted the Irish revolutionists in
Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Greenock, and enrolled four hundred
volunteers. The crew of a steamer sailing from Greenock was won
over, and it was arranged that the arms should be placed on board as
merchandise. While he was developing his plans, McGee was recognized
by the police; and, his arrest being under consideration, the
revolutionary committee insisted that he leave immediately and
proceed to Sligo, where he could extemporize arrangements for the
landing of the expedition. He reached Sligo early in August, and
there awaited developments, scanning the rocky and picturesque shores
of Lough Gill in the character of a Dublin student on holiday.
The news that finally reached him shattered his hopes. He learned
how Smith O'Brien had led his insurgents to the so-called battle of
Ballingarry, which ended, pantomime-like, in Widow McCormack's
cabbage patch. O'Brien, Meagher, McManus, and other leaders, he
heard, were in the hands of the government, and the revolutionary
organization had collapsed like a punctured balloon. The peasantry,
on whom the success of the movement finally depended, were more eager
to escape in emigrant ships from an impoverished country than to
fight for a revolutionary government.
To America McGee's eyes were immediately turned. He made his way to
Derry, where the bishop and his clergy sheltered him. Thence in the
dress of a priest, with his breviary in his hand and with a sad
heart, he boarded a brig at the mouth of the Foyle, and sailed for
the United States. He became one of the many disillusioned who in
this year of unfulfilled revolutions streamed across the Atlantic.
His departure from Ireland was not, however, as he might have
thought, the close, but the more vital opening, of his career. In
America he began at the age of twenty-three a new life in which he
was destined to plead for causes that were to prove more successful
than that of Irish independence in 1848.