D'Arcy McGee

I mentioned previously that the Irish family from which I’m descended is named McGee. And so Thomas D’Arcy McGee has always been special to me. He was a member of the Young Irelanders in the 1840s, a journalist in Ireland, the US, and Canada, and ended his days as one of Canada’s Fathers of Confederation. Indeed, he is arguably the man who first conceived of Canada in its modern form and extent.

He was born in Carlingford in Ireland in 1825, and he participated in the Famine Rebellion – one of the many revolutions raging across Europe in 1848 – for which a warrant was issued for his arrest, resulting in his escape to the US. He worked there as a journalist in Boston and New York before eventually moving to Montreal in 1857, where he became politically active, and within a year, was elected to the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada. At that time, the Province of Canada was a simple colony; a legislative union between what had been Upper Canada and Lower Canada, and would later become the provinces of Ontario and Quebec respectively in modern Canada. Canada as we know it today did not yet exist.

But it was McGee who conceived of it and urged the people of British North America on to a new nationality. As early as 1860, he stood up in the legislature, and said to the members:

I see in the not remote distance one great nationality, bound, like the shield of Achilles, by the blue of the ocean.

I see it quartered into many communities, each disposing of its own internal affairs, but all bound together by free institutions, free intercourse, free commerce.

I see, within the round of that shield, the peaks of the western mountains and the crests of the eastern waves. The winding Assinaboine, the five-fold lakes, the St. Lawrence, the Ottawa, the Sauguenay, the St. John, the Basin of Minas, by all these flowing waters in all the valleys they fertilize. In all the cities they visit in their courses, I see a generation of industrious, contented moral men, free in name and in fact – men capable of maintaining, in peace and in war, a constitution worthy of such a country.

With these words, he first gave Canadians a vision of the future, and one that ultimately came true in every respect, although he himself lived to see a Canada that stretched only from the Atlantic to Lake Superior. But he was one of those who worked to achieve it. After the US Civil War ended, the leaders of British North America, fearing annexation, came together to work out the details of Confederation. These were the Fathers of Confederation, and prominent among them was D’Arcy McGee.

The irony here is great. As a younger man, McGee fought for the independence of Ireland from Britain. Yet he ended his days as one of those most instrumental in conceiving and realizing the creation of the first dominion in the British Empire, Canada. In fact, as one of the members elected to its first parliament, he lived long enough to see his dream realized – but only just. Canada became a nation in July, 1867; McGee died not even a year later in April, 1868: assassinated by Patrick J. Whelan, a Fenian sympathizer who considered McGee a traitor to the cause.

Today, on the street on which he lived, Sparks Street in Ottawa, the prominent Thomas D’Arcy McGee Building stands near the site where he died; an office building owned by the federal government that houses the Ottawa headquarters of the Royal Bank of Canada (a private institution not to be confused with the Bank of Canada, which controls the Canadian dollar). Not far away on the same street is the pub, “D’Arcy McGee’s”, which serves as a favoured watering hole of federal politicians. Schools, towns, and electoral ridings are named after Thomas D’Arcy McGee; Patrick J. Whelan, hanged for his crime, is a footnote in Canadian history.

In the town of McGee's birth there is monument to him, dedicated there in circa 1990 by the (then) Canadian Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, and the Irish Taioseach, Charles Haughey. As it turns out, Carlingford is in County Louth, which I didn’t realize until today. There’s another irony here, but this one’s sweet. The photograph accompanying the beginning of this post is actually composited from two photos, both taken by me. One is of the statue of McGee himself, taken by me in July, 2007 on a trip to Parliament Hill in Ottawa. In order to get the detail in the dark statue, the camera altered the white balance and completely blanked out the sky behind him. I thought it would improve it to put in a sky like the one there that day, so I decided on one from my recent trip to Ireland last May. And the one I chose I took in a backyard in... County Louth. Only after doing so did I realize how justly I had put his own native sky behind him, strangely uniting the places where his life began and ended; the nebulous possibilities of his birth and the solidity of the achievements of his life; an unintentional, but appropriate, act that pleases me. I think it would have pleased McGee, an accomplished poet:

Long, long ago, beyond the misty space
Of twice a thousand years
In Erin old there dwelt a mighty race,
Taller than Roman spears;
Like oaks and towers they had a giant grace,
Were fleet as deers,
With wind and waves they made their 'biding place,
These western shepherd seers.

From The Celts, by D’Arcy McGee