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.