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The following is excerpted from Canada's History review of Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Volume 2: The Extreme Moderate, 1857–1868 by David A. Wilson.
Most Canadians know Thomas D’Arcy McGee not for what the Irish-Canadian politician and firebrand accomplished in his short lifetime but for the way he died. He was infamously gunned down on an Ottawa street in April 1868, the victim of the first political assassination in Canada.
As David A. Wilson ably demonstrates in The Extreme Moderate, the concluding volume of his definitive biography, there is much more worth remembering about the forceful, fearless McGee than his tragic death just one week shy of his forty-third birthday.
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Wilson traces McGee’s evolution from Irish radical — he was briefly detained as a young man on a charge of sedition — to a politician convinced that his countrymen were better off under British rule than American-style republicanism. That put him on a collision course with the Fenian movement and its violent campaign against all things British. Branded a traitor to the Irish cause, McGee became a marked man.
Patrick James Whelan, a Fenian sympathizer, was convicted and hanged for McGee’s murder, and Wilson’s painstaking research leaves no doubt that justice was done. If Whelan “did not shoot McGee himself,” he concludes, “he was part of a hit squad that did.”
McGee’s untimely death did not cut short his political career; by 1868 he had become a liability, forced to relinquish his claim on a portfolio in John A. Macdonald’s first federal Cabinet and barely winning a seat in the first Parliament as his Irish support crumbled. He was angling for a soft landing in a civil service job when he was killed.
This, Wilson acknowledges, is “a political rather than a personal biography.” McGee left few papers to offer insights into a private life marred by heavy drinking and the deaths of three of his five children before the age of four. But Wilson spent a decade combing archives here and in Britain, Ireland, and the U.S., and reviewing McGee’s voluminous speeches and writings, and it shows in his mastery of his subject.
This is history well-told: insightful, detailed, and faithful to the historical record, yet displaying the clear writing and narrative drive needed to bring McGee’s story — the achievements as well as the tragedy — to a general audience.
To learn more about Thomas D'Arcy McGee, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
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