Unusual Heroes: Canada’s Prime Ministers
Penguin Books Canada, 2002

Excerpt …

The Prophet
Thomas D’Arcy McGee

Imagine this. When Thomas D’Arcy McGee was buried, on his 43rd birthday, Easter Monday in April 1868, the Montreal streets were thronged with 100,000 people. They lined the sidewalks, hung from the windows, stood on the rooftops, and held signs showing their sadness. “We shall never look upon his like again,” read one.

There has never been a Canadian like D’Arcy McGee and may never be another one again. He lived a scary life. There was violence in it, revolution, poetry, and finally, explosive pain in the blast of a Derringer pistol on a dark Ottawa street. At its core was the man himself: five feet, three inches of thunder. He was the best speaker in our history, our biggest dreamer, and our most daring leader.

Irish Dramas
Born in Ireland in 1825, the son of a sailor and an educated mother, he didn’t get to go to school but had his dad’s spirit and his mom’s sharp mind. Years later the Archbishop of New York said, “McGee has the biggest mind and is unquestionably the cleverest man and the greatest orator that Ireland has sent forth in our time.”

Even as a teenager he was gifted with the ability to excite audiences. He spoke dramatically and with the full power of his amazing brain. And by the time he left the poverty and political problems of Ireland at the age of 17 in 1842 and passed through British North America on his way to the United States, he was ready to unleash his opinions on a bigger audience. He believed that Ireland should be a separate country from England, and that religious and racial minorities had to be treated fairly. The blood of rebellion pulsed inside him.

By the age of 19 he was an editor with the Boston Pilot newspaper and had published the first of many books. But he missed Ireland and soon returned to become a leader of the radical “Young Ireland” movement, writing and speaking, his passion for Irish independence growing. Famine (partly brought on by massive potato crop failures) was breaking the Irish people, and McGee, frustrated by England’s lack of concern, was pushed to the breaking point himself. By 1848 he no longer believed in peaceful change, and turned to violence. He began organizing a wing of a rebel army. But the police put a price on his head, and he had to flee. He snuck north to Derry, secretly said goodbye to his young wife Mary, disguised himself as a priest, and slipped onto an ocean-going ship. Ireland would never be his home again.

To a New World

First he lived in the United States, starting two newspapers and publishing more books and passionate poetry. (McGee would eventually be elected to the Royal Irish Academy for authors.) He spoke up for the Irish and tried to help the poor when they came to America. As always, he made as many enemies as friends. But he never really became an American, and in 1857, after being invited to visit Montreal, he found his true home. It seemed his ideas might be listened to in this new place.

Before his first year in the Canadas was over he had started a newspaper (The New Era) and been elected to Parliament. He gave stunning speeches and began to write about a dream of his, one rarely considered by many people who had lived in the land for much longer than he. He imagined a new nation where fairness was important, where there was no slavery of any kind–a brand-new northern country stretching from sea to sea.

It became common for the galleries of Parliament in Toronto to fill when D’Arcy McGee spoke. He argued for greater democracy and powers for minority religions. To the people of the Canadas, and the eastern Maritimes where he toured to promote his idea for a new nation, he was British North America’s most popular politician.

Younger than most leaders (just in his 30s), dressed in dark clothes, his black curly hair looking uncombed next to his pale Irish skin, he could hush an audience with beautiful, gentle words and then bring them to tears and thunderous applause with his explosive passion. A reporter said, “When McGee speaks I am tempted to throw down my pencil and just listen.”

In 1860, seven years before Confederation, he said: “I see in the not remote distance, one great nationality, bound, like the shield of Achilles, by the blue rim of ocean....I see within the round of that shield, the peaks of the Western mountains and the crests of the Eastern waves.” But he warned that there must be a special spirit behind it all: a tolerance of each other’s views and a real desire to be together.

In the early 1860s he joined the Liberals and became a cabinet minister. But that government was afraid of McGee’s bold views, and before long he left. Then he joined John A. Macdonald and George-Étienne Cartier’s Conservatives, and together they moved slowly but surely towards McGees’s dream of a new nation.

He would be a prominent Father at both the Charlottetown and Quebec conferences that year, pushing his policies of cooperation and tolerance–important ideas in the big idea that would become Canada.

McGee travelled thoughout the reluctant Maritimes, and was received “like a prince,” lighting up people with his speeches and even taking time to throw off his jacket and play a game of leapfrog at a picnic with the proper politicians of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. “As long as French Canadians keep their language,” he told English Canadians, “they are unconquered.” He vowed to help the French stay that way in his new country.

When the Confederation plan was presented to the House of Commons in 1865, it was D’Arcy McGee who brilliantly finished the proposal speech. And though he wasn't present when the London Conference opened in 1866, he was there when it ended, as the British North America Act created the Dominion of Canada.

Danger Approaches

But there was always something scary about Thomas D’Arcy McGee. Darkness and drama followed him. Because of the need for equal representation from all the regions and two main religions of Canada, he was kept out of the nation’s first cabinet. With so many Quebecker and Catholic candidates (like McGee) available, he didn’t fit into the mix. Instead of causing problems and seeking glory for himself, he quietly accepted this. On July 1, 1867, when celebrations across the land heralded the country’s birth, the “prophet of Confederation” spent the day feeling sad and out of sight in Toronto.

Giving all his time to his country, McGee lived in near-poverty. Three of his precious children died young, and he suffered the intense pain of poor circulation in his legs, causing him to walk with a cane by the age of 40. At times he drank too much and debated in the taverns, his sharp brain and tongue becoming razorlike, cutting his opponents without mercy and making enemies.

And there was trouble on other fronts. Various Irish groups in Montreal (and in Ireland and the United States too) were angry with him because he had grown critical of Irish terrorists and now believed in a new nation that tolerated everyone’s views. He had turned against violence. Angry mobs began coming to his public appearances, and brawls often erupted. To hear brave D’Arcy McGee address a crowd was an entertainment unlike any other in Canadian history.

His most frightening enemies were the Fenians, who would inflict terror on anyone, even Canadians, to gain independence for Ireland. He fearlessly called them names, dared them to disturb his Canadian dream,and told the world that secret societies like theirs, that hated others, were evil. They offered $1,000 in gold for his “head” and sent him letters marked with coffins; dark visitors crept near his Montreal home. But he wouldn’t give in to terror. He once told an angry Irish Montreal crowd that some Fenians “deserve death” and then stepped to the front of the stage to confront the goons who taunted him.

And then it happened.

Murder in the Street

At two o’clock in the cold morning of April 7, 1868, after McGee delivered a patriotic, midnight speech so moving that others stood and cheered, he hobbled down the big stone steps at the entrance to the magnificent new House of Commons and walked into downtown Ottawa. He turned at Sparks Street, said goodbye to a friend, and with his white silk top hat shining in the moonlight, made his way home. As he turned the key in his lock, a Derringer pistol was pointed at the back of his head and fired.

One of his poems had read:

In the time of my boyhood, I had a strange feeling
That I was to die in the noon of my day,
Not quietly into the silent grave stealing,
But torn, like a blasted oak, sudden away.

Seconds later he lay on the cold plank sidewalk, an arm pinned under his body, a pool of blood a metre wide forming nearby, remnants of his teeth embedded in the door. Prime Minister Macdonald was called from his home. He rushed over and helped lift the lifeless “prophet” onto a bed in the building. A huge crowd began gathering outside.

Hundreds would soon be arrested on suspicion of his murder throughout Canada, including the doorkeeper of the House of Commons. A Montreal tailor named Patrick James Whelan was found in Ottawa with a Derringer, accused of being a Fenian, and hanged for murder. But questions remain. Whelan insisted he was innocent. Across the street from the scene of the murder, an old man blew out his brains with a gun, taking what he knew with him to his grave. A secret society may have conducted a secret assassination, a dramatic end to a dramatic life.

That day the House of Commons plunged into sadness. Macdonald’s speech, full of pain, was barely heard. “If ever a soldier fell in the front of the fight it was D’Arcy McGee,” he whispered. “He deserves well of Canada. He left us a sacred legacy.” George-Étienne Cartier almost cried as he spoke, the Premier of Quebec compared McGee to Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln, and enemies of the Canadian dream wondered out loud if they had been wrong.

At home in Montreal, little Peggy McGee, 11 years old, was awakened by her weeping mother and told that in the night someone had killed her father.

The population of Montreal doubled on the day he was buried. Guns rang out every minute in salute, and 15,000 leaders, dignitaries, police, and common folk walked in the funeral procession that led his five-metre-long, five-metre-high carriage along the street in front of silent throngs. The people were of every sort: French, English, Irish; Catholic and Protestant; poor and wealthy; minorities and majorities. They were all Canadians to the core on that day, citizens of the now-achieved dream of Thomas D’Arcy McGee.

We will never see his like again.