a short, chunky man with shaggy black hair, was nothing remarkable to look at. But he was an inspired public speaker with a magnetic personality. On the day he died, The Globe described him as “marvellously eloquent.… His wit — his power of sarcasm — his readiness in reply — his aptness in quotation — his pathos which melted to tears, and his broad humour which convulsed with laughter — were all undoubtedly of a very high order.”
In the period leading up to Confederation, McGee had fired up audiences with his enthusiasm and his vision of a free, tolerant, and united Canada. As noted by Fennings Taylor in a 1868 sketch of McGee’s life and death, McGee presented this ideal to fellow provincial parliamentarians in 1860. “I see in the not remote distance,” he said, “one great nationality, bound, like the shield of Achilles, by the blue rim of ocean. I see it quartered into many communities, each disposing of its internal affairs, but all bound together by free institutions.… I see within the round of that shield the peaks of the western mountains and the crests of the eastern waves.”
Thomas D’Arcy McGee, statesman, journalist, public speaker, and poet. This portrait is dated 1868, the year that McGee was felled by an assassin’s bullet, becoming the only Canadian federal politician ever to be assassinated.
McGee was a man of action as well as a visionary. Between 1864 and 1866, his key role in the negotiations with Britain that led to the founding of the Dominion of Canada prompted many to describe him as the (rather than a ) Father of Confederation.
But McGee wasn’t always a Canadian nationalist, loyal to the British Crown. Ironically, he started off as a fiery revolutionary. In Ireland, where he was born in Carlingford in 1825 and raised as a Roman Catholic, and in the United States, where he landed as a seventeen-year-old in 1842 to work as a newspaperman, he was strongly in favour of armed rebellion against British rule in Ireland. On his return to his native country in 1845, he became so politically active that the British issued a warrant for his arrest, and he had to flee back to the States, disguised as a priest.
McGee became increasingly disenchanted with what he regarded as the discrimination and exploitation experienced by Irish immigrants in the United States. And once he moved to Canada in 1857 on the invitation of a group of Irish Catholics to start up the New Era newspaper in Montreal, he expressed his opinions even more forcefully, declaring that minorities, including Catholics, were much better off in Canada than in the United States.
McGee was dirt poor in spite of his multiple professional activities as a charismatic politician, public speaker, journalist, and poet. Fortunately, he had powerful friends who were happy to help out. He owned a home on St. Catherine Street in Montreal, where he lived with his wife, Mary, and their two young daughters, Frasa and Peggy. The house, decorated with shamrocks, the symbol of Ireland, had been a gift from supporters.
But violence and danger stalked McGee throughout his life, and he made many enemies.
His sharp tongue and acid wit wounded his political opponents. Much more seriously, he became a harsh critic of an Irish separatist movement and secret society called the Fenian Brotherhood.
The Fenian Brotherhood was founded in the United States in 1858 with the aim of violently overthrowing British rule in Ireland. The Fenians had a large number of followers in the States, with fewer in Canada. In 1866, the U.S. branch, for the most part Irish-American veterans of the American Civil War, launched two raids — or invasions, depending on who you spoke to — into Canada. The first one into New Brunswick was a complete failure. The other incursion from Buffalo, New York, over the Niagara River and into Ontario was a great success; but the inexperience of the commanding officer led to the withdrawal of the Fenian forces.
McGee went on the offensive, fearing that Fenian activities would lead to a violent backlash against the Irish in Canada.
“Secret Societies are like what the farmers in Ireland used to say of scotch grass,” he wrote in the Montreal Gazette . “The only way to destroy it is to cut it out by the roots and burn it into powder.” He threatened to publish “documents which would put in their proper position the Fenians of Montreal.”
And that, according to historian David A. Wilson in his biography of Thomas D’Arcy McGee, was when the death threats began. One anonymous letter writer warned that McGee would be assassinated if he revealed any information about the Fenians in Montreal. Another letter, wrapped up in a Fenian newspaper, contained a drawing of a gallows and a coffin.
So when McGee was assassinated, suspicion immediately fell on the Fenians. Within twenty-four hours, police arrested Patrick James Whelan, a twenty-eight-year -old Irish immigrant with strong Fenian associations. They found a fully loaded .32 calibre Smith & Wesson revolver in his coat pocket. He was charged with the murder of Thomas D’Arcy McGee.
Easter Monday, 1868: on what would have been his forty-third birthday, McGee was given a state funeral — Canada’s first — in Montreal. The turnout was enormous, partly because the new Grand Trunk Railway, which had been strongly championed by McGee, offered cheap fares to attendees from all around the country. Some 80,000 people (the population of Montreal at that time was 105,000) silently lined the streets, many hanging out of windows or standing on the rooftops, as the procession passed by. The coffin was carried in a sixteen-foot-long , sixteen-foot-high funeral carriage drawn by six grey horses with black ostrich plumes on their heads. Guns were fired every minute, and military bands along the way played George Frideric Handel’s “Dead March.” McGee was buried in his family mausoleum at the Notre-Dame-des -Neiges Cemetery in Montreal.
Patrick James Whelan was an Irish immigrant associated with the Fenian Brotherhood, a secret society that aimed to violently overthrow British rule in Ireland. Whelan’s execution for the assassination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee still stirs up controversy today.
And what of Patrick Whelan?
His trial began in Ottawa in September 1868. Newspapers of the day called him “the tailor with the sandy whiskers.” The Ottawa Times reported that “as point after point of evidence was brought out during his trial, his uncontrollable restlessness of body, his constant turning of the head, his knitted brows, his staring eyes and twitching mouth, gave evident marks of his anxiety.” On the eighth (and last) day of his trial, he wore plain black. He probably knew what was coming. He was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging.
Whelan swore that he was innocent. “I am here standing on the brink of my grave,” he told the court, “and I wish to declare to you and to my God … that I never committed this deed, and that, I know in my heart and soul.”
His lawyers launched two appeals against his sentence: both failed. In the interim, he languished on death row at the Carleton County Gaol in Ottawa.
Letter dated February 9, 1869, from the Department of the Secretary of State in Ottawa to sheriff W.F. Powell of the County of Carleton, advising him that the execution of Patrick James Whelan should proceed as planned.
The year 1869 was known as the Year of the Big Snow in the Ottawa Valley. It began with a bone-chilling blizzard on February 11, and it continued to snow without let-up until St. Patrick’s Day on March 17. Impenetrable six-and-a -half-foot-high drifts covered fields and villages, roads disappeared, farms and communities were totally isolated, and cattle perished in their stalls.
Patrick Whelan was hanged at the Carleton County Gaol in Ottawa on the first morning of the snowstorm. In
