THE LESSONS OF EXPERIENCE
In early October, 1848, McGee arrived in Philadelphia, and before the
close of the month he was in the exciting swirl of American
journalism. He established the _New York Nation_, patterned much
after the Dublin _Nation_. It was frankly an Irish-American organ
which gave special attention to the politics of Ireland, and to the
means whereby Irishmen in the new world might advance the interests
of their native country. It was written with that intense bitterness
towards Britain characteristic of the journals of most exiled
Irishmen. It is interesting to find the man who in 1868 was
described by Lord Mayo as "the most eloquent advocate of British rule
on the face of the world" vowing in 1848 to dedicate all his days to
the ruin of British power. But McGee's opinions were to travel a
changeful journey between these two dates.
His prospects in New York were promising. Although young, he had
already a wide reputation as an Irish leader, and a large population
in New York and the neighbouring states was prepared to support his
paper. But youthful rashness damaged his prospective success. Soon
after his arrival in America, he wrote some public letters
attributing the failure of the Irish revolutionary movement to the
influence of the clergy. He argued that they were primarily
responsible for the fact that the peasantry had not risen at the
critical moment. Such a reflection upon the patriotism of the Irish
clergy brought into the field against McGee an experienced and
formidable controversialist in Bishop Hughes of New York. The bishop
had proved his steel in many a public duel, and his ardent Irish
patriotism had given him a vast prestige over his flock. Having
closely followed affairs in Ireland, he was well prepared to meet
McGee's challenge. He argued that blame for the failure of the
insurrection must not be placed upon the clergy, but upon the leaders
of Young Ireland, prominent among whom was McGee himself. They had
precipitated a rebellion for which they had made no serviceable
preparation, and thus exposed the peasantry to destruction by British
soldiery. The priests, by restraining their flocks from rebellion,
had alone saved them from disaster. Bishop Hughes was not content
with such argument. He denounced McGee as being faithless to his
church and creed, which elicited from the latter the reply that "My
crime is not that I do not believe in the creed of my fathers and my
affections, but that I have failed to pay my court to some great
unknown who sits chafing on his chair, impatient of his daily dose of
honied praises."
The futile controversy that ensued proved fatal to the fortunes of
McGee's paper. His joust with the most powerful Catholic
ecclesiastic in America alienated the sympathies of those who might
otherwise have given him support. He had jockeyed himself into the
false position of being anti-clerical, a position which in the
nineteenth century seldom won the support of Irish Catholics. The
situation was all the more unfortunate in that he held many views in
common with Bishop Hughes, and was later to become his warm friend.
In the midst of the controversy, he received from Gavan Duffy an
invitation to assist once more in the editing of the Dublin _Nation_.
Duffy wrote with the enticing remark that "as a writer and a speaker
there is not any Irishman living whose help I would as soon have as
yours." All the weight of pleasant associations tugged at him to
return. In his youthful verse a dominant note was a longing for his
native land:
Where'er I turned, some emblem still
Roused consciousness upon my track;
Some hill was like an Irish hill,
Some wild-bird's whistle call'd me back.
But the vision of leading the Irish in America had captivated his
imagination, and he refused Duffy's offer. None the less he
determined to shift the scene of his work. He sold out the _Nation_,
went to Boston, and in August, 1850, established his second paper,
the _American Celt_.
During the next seven years, his career was that of an itinerant and
rather restless journalist. In 1851 he was publishing the _Celt_,
and championing the interests of the Irish in Buffalo. The following
year, he was in New York, feverishly dashing off editorials to guide
his Catholic countrymen through the stormy passages of mid-century
American politics. There are few recess periods in the career of
political journalism. It is an incessant battle demanding continuous
vigilance and tireless effort. McGee, in New York, fully experienced
its exacting claims, and satisfied them sufficiently to make his
paper the most powerful Irish-American organ of the period.
The fifties were a stirring decade in the history of the American
republic. They were marked by an intense feverishness in politics as
the question of slavery loomed higher on the horizon. The giant
strides of material development, the pushing back of the frontier by
the advancing lines of railway, the expansion of commerce, the
marvellous growth of population, all added a buoyancy to American
life which tended to draw newcomers into its tide. Carl Schurz, the
young German revolutionist of 1848, was only a few years in the
country when he became a party leader, swinging the votes of the
western Germans in support of the Republican platform. Similarly
many of McGee's fellow Young Irelanders became champions of American
parties. John Mitchel's brilliant, but bitter pen was enlisted in
the service of the Democrats. McGee, however, kept free from the
meshes of party affiliations. Throughout his career of journalism in
New York, he continued to consider himself as a new immigrant
fighting the battles of the new immigrants. He set himself to be the
sentinel and champion of his people, to safeguard their interests,
and to direct their development amid the plastic conditions of
American society. It was no easy task. In the twelve odd years
following the famine, emigration from Ireland to the United States
continued in a steady stream. Between 1846 and 1851, a quarter of a
million left Ireland each year; between 1851 and 1861, over 100,000
left annually. Most of these found their destination in the American
cities of the Atlantic seaboard. McGee saw their need of leadership.
They were chiefly peasants and small farmers, pushed from their land
in Ireland by famine and eviction. Concerning the relentless
struggle of city life they knew nothing. Of the political issues of
American cities they had no knowledge, and their ignorance exposed
them to the ready wiles of ward bosses in search of votes. Promises
were readily made to them and as readily unfulfilled. But, above
all, their political position and interests were endangered in the
fifties by the rise of the famous Know-Nothing party, with which
McGee was in warfare during the greater portion of his residence in
New York.
Know-Nothingism was a development of the native American movement of
the forties. The support tendered by the Irish immigrants to the
Democrats had assisted in the disorganization and severe defeat of
the Republican party. Hence many disappointed Republican leaders
determined to form an organization which should withhold political
rights from European newcomers. At first they organized a secret
fraternity called the "Know-Nothings" from "I don't know," the
ever-repeated reply of its members to inquiry about its nature. The
original name bestowed upon the fraternity by its founders was "The
Sons of '76", or the "Order of the Star-Spangled Banner"; and its
slogan was "America for the Americans." Its favourite counter-sign
was the traditional order of Washington, "Put none but Americans on
guard to-night." The national sentiment behind the society was
reinforced by Protestant sectarian zeal, since its organizers were
concerned not merely with depriving immigrants of power, but with
excluding all Catholics from office.
Thanks to the allure of its novelty, this party developed with
phenomenal rapidity. In 1854 its candidates swept the elections in
Massachusetts, and Gardiner, its nominee, became governor of the
state. Its members sought to control nomination for office by secret
conventions of delegates. They bound themselves to cast no votes for
any except Protestant-born citizens, and endeavoured to alter the
naturalization laws so that foreigners might not be allowed to vote
until they had resided twenty-one years in the country. The
Know-Nothing party could never have had more than temporary success.
As Horace Greeley, the noted editor of the New York _Tribune_,
remarked, it "would seem as devoid of the elements of persistence as
an anti-cholera or an anti-potato-rot party would be." But McGee,
like other leaders of the swelling Irish population, was alarmed at
its growing strength. It threatened to proscribe the men of his
faith, and to exclude from the exercise of political rights
immigrants like himself who sought a new home in the republic. In
the columns of the _Celt_, he attacked its aims, assailed its
champions, and marshalled Irish-American opinion against it. There
is little doubt that this conflict, in which McGee was engaged during
the last five years of his residence in New York, did much to
disillusion him in respect to American life and institutions.
A few years before he had written the lines:
Hail to the land whose broad domain
Rejoices under Freedom's reign
Where neither right nor race is banned.
But he no longer viewed the republic as a Utopia. He now discovered
that the so-called land of freedom was a land of intolerance, and his
migration to Canada was largely due to the action of the Know-Nothing
faction. As he later remarked, "I did not want to be a citizen on
sufferance, as it were, courted one day and proscribed the next."
But McGee served the immigrants in other ways than by fighting the
Know-Nothing platform. He encouraged them to seek their own
self-development. He preached the homely precepts of industry, and
urged them to study the laws and customs of their new country in
order to be able to view intelligently its problems. The most
helpful assistance that could be rendered to the indigent newcomers
was to provide them with the facilities for education. During his
early residence in Boston, McGee had realized this, and it was due
largely to his labours that night schools for adults were engrafted
on the educational system. The same work he now earnestly promoted
in New York, with benefit to immigrants of every race. But his most
emphatic plea was that his countrymen should move from the crowded
tenements and congested industries of the eastern cities to the
homestead lands of the West. "We must," he wrote in the _Celt_,
"urge them on and on. We must shame them out of cellars and sewers,
and endeavour by every art to awaken in their hearts the passion for
competency, so natural and laudable in a new and unsettled country."
For a time he had the dream of establishing an Irish state in the
western territories--an inland Erin--which should draw thither the
Irish immigrants. For this purpose, in 1856, he took a leading part
in calling a conference of leading Irish Americans at Buffalo.
Although the dream of an Irish state in the west was not realized,
McGee's advocacy of western settlement was not futile. Many
flourishing homesteads in Illinois and Wisconsin bore witness to the
zeal with which he advocated western colonization.
By 1852 a considerable change had taken place in McGee's thought.
When he had reached Philadelphia in the autumn of 1848, he was a
revolutionist with all that lack of compromise which accompanies
youth. He shared the idealism of the ardent patriots who had been
prepared to take any and every means for the quick attainment of
Irish freedom. As one Young Irelander had said: "If the altar stood
in the way of national liberty, then down with the altar." The path
to Ireland's freedom should, if necessary, cut through every
institution and be impeded by no consideration. But four years of
controversial journalism in America shook McGee's former
revolutionary faith. In a letter to a friend, published in the
_Celt_, he confessed that in the past he had been on the wrong track.
He found that he had neglected some of the primary principles which
govern the world. In the future he was determined to put all
political action to the test of a simple creed, the chief tenet of
which was a belief in Christendom and the Catholic church. The
revolutionary liberalism which sought in the name of liberty to tear
down the church and other institutions was reprehensible, and to be
resisted. It is not to be assumed that by this profession of faith
McGee suddenly, in 1852, saw, like Paul on the Damascus road, a new
light. The fact is that in Ireland he had been a revolutionist
largely by the accident of events. By temperament he had none of
those Ishmaelite characteristics which go to make the revolutionary.
"My native disposition," he declared in the Canadian parliament some
years later, "is towards reverence for things old, and veneration for
the landmarks of the past." Away from Ireland's hectic politics his
temperament reasserted itself. His reverence for things old fed his
loyalty to his church, and led him henceforth to discountenance all
movements for the freeing of Ireland which did not receive its
conservative sanction. As subsequent events show, he remained the
champion of reform for his native land, as for the country of his
adoption, but he was ever emphatic in his denunciation of the violent
methods of conspiracy and revolution. His change of front brought
him into friction with many Irish Americans like John Mitchel and the
founders of Fenianism, and this fact, linked with the existence of
Know-Nothingism, largely explained his departure to Canada in 1857.
McGee at various times had made visits to the British colonies. He
had delivered public lectures in Montreal. He had summered on Lake
Huron, had written letters to his paper from the upper Ottawa, and
had passed through the rich meadows and orchards of the Annapolis
valley in Nova Scotia. At all times he was struck with the orderly
and secure society of the British provinces, while his imagination
had been kindled by the magnificent future which stretched before
them. He early visualized them as the germ cells of a new nation.
He was, therefore, prepared in 1857 to accept readily the invitation
of some Canadian Irishmen to become their leader in Lower Canada. A
delegation consisting of such prominent Irish Canadians of the period
as Frank Smith, Patrick Brennan, and James Donnelly went to New York,
interviewed McGee, and obtained his acceptance of their invitation.
In the spring of 1857 he moved to Montreal, and there began his
Canadian career.
To McGee British North America seemed on the threshold of a new and
promising era. The steam-boat was drawing the provinces closer to
Britain. The telegraph and Atlantic cable were making possible more
intimate co-operation between the various provinces themselves, and
between them and the mother country. The building of railways
promised in the near future to bridge the dreary distances of forest
and rock which severed the various colonies from one another and kept
them as far apart as Europe is from America. In addition to these
facts was another laden with rich hope, the prospective annexation to
the Canadas of the vast hinterland then under the dominion of the
Hudson's Bay Company. What are now the rolling wheat fields of
Manitoba and Saskatchewan were in 1857 merely the hunting grounds of
trappers, employed by one of the mightiest of British mercantile
corporations. Yet there were some men who had caught a glimpse of
the potential value of those extensive lands beyond Lake Superior.
They described them as the natural field of expansion for the eastern
colonies and advocated their annexation. Under the inspiration of
these pregnant facts, McGee in May, 1857, established in Montreal a
tri-weekly paper, called the _New Era_ as indicative of the time of
its birth.
The paper had too brief a career to exercise much influence on public
life. Moreover, in 1857, McGee, as a newcomer, was of necessity
feeling his way amid the shoals and narrows of Canadian politics, and
was unable to discuss local issues with intimacy. None the less, the
_New Era_ has an outstanding significance in Canadian history. It
was the first newspaper in the British colonies dedicated to the
cause of colonial union and the establishment of a British American
nationality under the rule of a royal prince. It advanced the chief
arguments for union employed eight years later at the conferences of
Charlottetown and Quebec. It pleaded an aspiration not finally
realized for another ten years. To McGee nothing seemed more
apparent than that the Canadas and the colonies by the sea should
form the nucleus of a nation. The essential means was the
development of a common will strong enough to overcome the obstacles
in the way of closer co-operation.
The vision of a united British America was not new. It was as old as
the existence of the colonies. It grew naturally out of the presence
of a number of scattered communities whose common interests could
best be served by a common government. Previous to the American
Revolution the great Franklin had advocated such a union for the
thirteen colonies. After the Revolution it found many champions in
the territories which remained under the British crown. In 1790,
while the Constitutional Act for the Canadian provinces was being
fashioned, Chief Justice Smith suggested a plan for the comprehensive
government of all the colonies. In the succeeding years, many others
made similar suggestions--Uniacke in Nova Scotia, Sewell in Quebec,
William Lyon Mackenzie, the fiery Canadian agitator, and John
Beverley Robinson, an Upper Canadian who had pondered long and
carefully on colonial issues. Even the distinguished name of Lord
Durham was associated with the idea. He recommended it as the one
means of developing for the colonies a British American nationality,
which should rival the robust and aggressive nationality across the
southern frontier.
After 1850, the conception was dragged into the daylight of practical
politics. A number of prominent Canadians saw in it the one solvent
of the constitutional difficulties arising from the Union Act of
1841. In April, 1856, A. A. Dorion, leader of the Lower Canadian
Liberals, pleaded in parliament for the federal union of the two
Canadas. Thus, the idea had already entered the stage of practical
discussion when McGee established his _New Era_. But with the
politicians it was entertained largely as a gateway of escape from
the political embarrassments of the existing system, and was made
subsidiary to party considerations. McGee in his paper fired it with
a wider emotional appeal. With him it was not the product of close
grappling with the political difficulties of the Union Act, but a
poet's vision. It was a dream in the fulfilment of which lay a
mighty future for all the peoples of British North America. With a
newcomer's freshness of observation, he saw in the colonies
possibilities of development which had lain largely unnoticed by the
public men of the colonies. He thought as much of the social and
spiritual consequences of union as of the political. It would not
merely provide the British provinces with the strength of a common
government, but would knit the scattered colonists into a united,
self-reliant people, with a common will and common hopes, the true
evidence of nationality. Union would carve the way for the emergence
of a great new northern nation. It would provide the people with
vision, and destroy the cramping parochialism of their existing
political life.
In British American union, McGee at last discovered a cause that
vividly appealed to his imagination. He found it on taking up
residence in Montreal, and it shaped his career in the succeeding ten
years. It replaced in his sentiments his former fervour for Irish
liberty. In its advocacy he never grew weary, and the decade
previous to Confederation found no more fervid apostle of British
American union and nationality than McGee. He pleaded it, not merely
through the press, but on the public platform. Being in demand as a
lecturer, he used every occasion to unfold his favourite subject. In
one of his most famous addresses, delivered at Ottawa on October 9,
1857, he arrayed the various arguments for union. "If we extend our
vision so as to embrace all British North America, we survey a region
larger than all Europe. If we have no coal, Nova Scotia has
abundance. If Newfoundland has an indifferent soil, this Ottawa
valley can grow wheat enough to supply all that is required.
Throughout this wider view we find at least four millions already in
the field--one quarter more than laid the neighbouring republic.
Nature pronounces for the union of the provinces. Canada needs a
sea-coast."
In addition to the arguments drawn from geography and economic needs
were others no less cogent. Union was imperative for defence.
Political weakness was always a tempting bait to a neighbouring
power. The great resources of the British colonies combined with
their lack of unity might well induce the American republic to
attempt conquest. Especially was the St. Lawrence waterway tempting
to the United States, since in the course of time it must become the
shipping route for the wheat harvests of the West. The power in
possession of it would control the chief roadway to the grain fields.
In addition the colonies had other resources for which union alone
could give adequate protection, rich fisheries, extensive forests,
fertile lands. "Facts are logical, and unless we dream that the laws
of cause and effect will be suspended in our favour, we must look
either to the internal union or the political extinction of these
provinces at no distant day." Not merely would the wealthy natural
resources of British North America be preserved, but they would best
be developed by the consolidation of the colonies into one state.
With such a system McGee looked forward to Canada possessing, by the
close of the century, 25,000,000 people. Moreover, he anticipated
the appearance of all the other more brilliant, if less tangible,
accomplishments of national life, which had difficulty in arising
under the existing political disunion, a native literature, with
developments in art, science, and philosophy.
McGee went further than marshalling arguments for union. He
described in general terms the nature of the constitution suitable
for the colonies. He considered it neither desirable nor possible
that the various provinces with their diverse geographical characters
and economic interests should be fused into one political unit. "Our
river system indicates our union, railroads and canals will
strengthen these natural bonds, but complete oneness of political
life must still be wanting to sea-beaten Newfoundland and the
wheat-bearing West." The same geographical facts which pressed the
need of union made the recognition of local autonomy imperative. The
new constitution must be federal, allowing a large measure of local
autonomy, while constituting a central government to deal with common
interests. Many of the leading Fathers of Confederation, most
prominent among whom was Sir John A. Macdonald, began with the
suggestion of a legislative union, and only with reluctance in the
heat of constitution-building recognized the need of federal
institutions. But with keen insight McGee saw from the outset that
only federation could be the goal of British Americans. Provincial
governments with the recognition of certain provincial rights would
be a guarantee of liberty in the new state.
In December, 1857, an additional field was opened in which McGee
might extend the advocacy of his new found cause. A body of citizens
in Montreal nominated him for parliament, and in the ensuing contest
he was elected as one of the three representatives of the city. Thus
began the most constructive venture of his career.