Chapter II: 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.