D'Arcy McGee

A Canadian nationality - not French-Canadian, nor British-Canadian, nor Irish-Canadian: patriotism rejects the prefix - is, in my opinion, what we should look forward to, that is what we ought to labour for, that is what we ought to be prepared to defend to the death.

Thomas D'Arcy McGee, 1862


Thomas D'Arcy McGee, PC, (April 13, 1825 – April 7, 1868) was a Canadian journalist, Father of Confederation, and the only Canadian victim of political assassination at the federal level.

D'Arcy McGee was born on April 13, 1825 in Carlingford, Ireland and raised as a Roman Catholic. In 1843 at age 17 he emigrated to the United States where he found work as assistant editor of Patrick Donahoe's Boston Pilot, a Catholic newspaper in Boston, Massachusetts. A few years later he returned to Ireland where he became politically active and edited the nationalist newspaper The Nation. His support for the Fenians and his involvement in the Irish Confederation and Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848 resulted in a warrant for his arrest. McGee escaped the country via steamship dressed as a priest and returned to the United States.

In the US, he founded Irish-American publications in New York City and Boston, and generally supported the cause of Irish immigrants.

In 1857 he went to Canada where he set up the publication of the New Era in Montreal, Quebec. Politically active, he advocated a new nationality in Canada, to escape the sectarianism of Ireland. In 1858, he was elected to the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada and worked for the creation of an independent Canada.

Moderating his radical Irish nationalist views, McGee denounced the Fenian Brotherhood in America that advocated a forcible takeover of Canada from Britain by the United States. A faction of American Fenians sent an invasion force into Canada in 1866 that was repelled by Canadian forces and arrested by the American authorities.

Canadians, with Irish sympathizers in their midst, and spurred by numerous rumours of another, more massive invasion, lived in fear of the Fenians for several years.

McGee was elected to the 1st Canadian Parliament in 1867 representing the riding of Montreal West. On April 7, 1868, D'Arcy McGee was assassinated in Ottawa, Ontario likely by Fenians.