Thomas D'Arcy McGee

by Alexander Brady

The true instinct of the journalist—the desire to move public opinion—acting on a mind naturally brilliant, won for the young immigrant a local reputation in New England, but it also brought him into all those dusty controversies and conflicts inseparable from journalism. He found himself in vital battle with the settled prejudices of New England. The large immigration from Ireland had in this period begun to disturb old Bostonians, proud of their descent, fictitious or real, from the Pilgrim fathers. The leaven of Puritanism made them detest the faith of the immigrants; their belief in the wholesome virtues of their racial stock made them resent the intrusion of the Celtic Irish; and their material well-being gave them a snobbish dislike of ragged and impoverished peasants from the bogs of Leinster and the rocky hillsides of Connaught. A boycott of Irish immigrants was launched, and against it McGee contended with all his youthful fire. Thus the first public cause for which he expended his energies was the recognition of his race and faith in the community life of New England. In essence his plea was for tolerance between class and class and sect and sect. The arguments that he advanced as youthful editor find a surprising echo in those which he used twenty years later in the Canadian provinces. It was only through the tolerant recognition of different sects and races that a new American community could be constituted. Prejudices and jealousies must be erased from social life, and the spirit of goodwill developed. It was a simple and ancient message, but one that McGee both in the United States and in Canada never failed to plead.

The defence of his countrymen led him in 1845 to publish his first book, Historical Sketches of O'Connell and His Friends. It is written with the nervous eloquence and facility of all his later works. The most significant fact about it was the hero-worship which he lavished upon the great Irish liberator. "In him," he enthusiastically wrote, "liberty will boast a model for all her future reformers." In his later Canadian career McGee showed himself a consistent disciple of his hero of 1845. He was a follower of O'Connell in his implicit faith in attaining political visions by moving first the popular mind through oratory and the press. O'Connell is generally remembered as an agitator, but he was something more than the word ordinarily connotes. He was a political educator, and a political educator of O'Connell's type McGee always aspired to be.

In the year which witnessed the publication of his eulogy of O'Connell, McGee's fame spread beyond Boston and its New England environs. Indeed, his articles on Repeal were read with keen and satisfied interest in the club rooms of Dublin. O'Connell himself paid him a compliment by publicly referring to his editorials as "the inspired writings of a young exiled Irish boy in America." John Gray, proprietor of the Freeman's Journal, which was O'Connell's pillar of support, considered McGee's journalistic talent worthy of enlistment in the service of his paper. He offered him a liberally paid position. The result was that McGee returned to Dublin. Only three years had elapsed since his departure, but they were years which had witnessed his rise from the position of a poor immigrant boy, not unlike thousands who yearly crossed in the steerage to be lost in the human eddies of American cities, to that of a newspaper editor with a reputation in America and a certain distinction in Ireland. The rapid pace of his rise measures in some degree his quantity of inborn talent and his determination to hew success from the most untoward circumstances.

His position with the Freeman brought him to London as a political correspondent. He had thus the advantage of viewing from the close range of the press gallery the working of parliamentary institutions, and we may assume that it enabled him to store away political and constitutional precedents for future use. But his political articles did not please the proprietor of the Freeman. The cause is to be found in the fact that they showed the influence of a group of young men with whom McGee on his return came to be associated, and who profoundly influenced his whole development. This group was the party of Young Ireland. At this period, Thomas Davis, a blending of poet and man of affairs, was the guiding mind of the group, and the Dublin Nation was its organ of opinion. The leaders were all men of talent; a few were men of genius. Next to Davis as an active and persuasive writer was Charles Gavan Duffy, destined later to win political laurels in Australia, and to leave no mean name in the records of imperial statesmanship. John Blake Dillon, father of a subsequent Irish nationalist leader, was another forceful member of the group. Thomas Francis Meagher, in whose character were entwined the chivalry of the soldier, the clear judgment of the statesman, and the emotional intensity of the poet, was a third. Other names might be mentioned. There was John Mitchel, a man of uncompromising mind and a writer of powerful prose; Devin Reilly, a brilliant but rancorous youth, who in the next year was to consider McGee as his rival; and James Mangan, a poet of wasted genius.

All of these men were young. Few of them were over thirty. With that hopefulness which is the gift of youth, they were driven by the ideal of recreating Ireland by awakening her national consciousness. Their task was similar to that of their great contemporary, Mazzini, in Italy. They sought to arouse the Irish people to act for the national good, to sink all sectarian animosities and class prejudices which tended to dissipate the nation's energy on trifling ends. Their outlook was not limited to material welfare or bare political liberty. They endeavoured to revivify the cultural life of Ireland, to give a more vital direction to its art, and to develop a more intense literature. Their cherished motto was "Educate that you may be free."

Soon after his return from America, McGee met the members of this group, and readily subscribed to their doctrines and shared their enthusiasms. Their ideas were new food for his mind, and he never wholly shed the influence of their fervid idealism. When he later pleaded the cause of Canadian nationality, he did so in the spirit and through the inspiration of the Young Ireland creed. We have from the pen of Gavan Duffy an interesting impression of McGee, when he became a disciple of Young Ireland: "The young man was not prepossessing. He had a face of almost African type, his dress was slovenly even for the careless class to which he belonged, he looked unformed and had a manner which struck me at first sight as too deferential for self-respect. But he had not spoken three sentences in a singularly sweet and flexible voice till it was plain that he was a man in whom one might dimly discover rudiments of the orator, poet and statesman hidden under the ungainly disguise." Needless to say, Duffy gladly welcomed such a promising recruit in his loosely formed association.

McGee's new alliance damaged his connection with the Freeman. His articles tended to be too speculative and not sufficiently of the sober-suited type desired by the commercial classes who supported O'Connell and the Freeman. Moreover, he came to spend more time in the British Museum digging up the materials for Irish history than in the press gallery following the ingenuities of Peel's politics. His best literary efforts, which absorbed most of his time, were his articles for the Nation, and the tone of these was not acceptable to O'Connell. Finally, Gray, becoming dissatisfied, brought his engagement to a close. Duffy, who valued McGee's talent highly, immediately employed him as London correspondent for the Nation, and until his flight from Ireland in 1848 he remained an expounder, through the press, of Young Ireland's varying hopes and policies. Sectarian prejudices and colourless enthusiasm for the national cause all encountered his virulent denunciation, and he sought in accordance with the Nation's prospectus "to direct the popular mind and the sympathies of educated men of all parties to the great end of nationality."

Meanwhile events in Ireland were hurrying to a dismal crisis. At the end of 1845 the famine had begun to creep gloomily over the land, and within the next nine months it had the country in its relentless grip. Despair prevailed everywhere, except in Dublin, where the calamity merely drove the political parties to more feverish controversies. The Young Irelanders were breaking with O'Connell and his repeal agitation. On the founding of the Nation in 1842, Davis and his associates had strongly supported the O'Connellite movement, but as time passed the difficulties of co-operation between the younger men and the old agitator became manifest. For a generation O'Connell had been the uncrowned king of Ireland. He had swayed her masses with his fertile brain and facile tongue. His triumph in the movement of Catholic emancipation, when he had conquered Wellington and convinced Peel, had given him a confidence which was now proving fatal. In the forties of the century he was reaching the sere and yellow leaf of his career, but his ambition to maintain an unquestioned control of Irish affairs remained as keen as ever, and prompted him to look with critical suspicion upon the Young Ireland group. It is the lot of old men seldom to understand the generation that hurriedly presses behind them with its new hopes and fresh methods. They view its visions with frank uneasiness, and in the rheumy conservatism of age condemn its vibrant actions as erratic and destructive. It was so with O'Connell. He mocked the Young Ireland talk of recreating the nation, he scorned its literary aspirations, he suspected its condemnation of sectarianism, and he distrusted its methods. In 1846, the Young Irelanders under the stress of the famine had begun to talk of following the precedent of Pym and Hampden and winning political liberty for Ireland by the sword; they who had been content merely to champion the Irish cultural renaissance, now proclaimed that Ireland could not be saved alone by poetry. She must have action. But O'Connell, who had been taught prudence by long and exacting experiences, condemned this rash talk. The younger generation in Ireland took his prudence as timidity, and spurned his words of caution.

The elements of disruption long existing between O'Connell and the Young Irelanders ripened in July, 1846, when the younger men seceded from the Repeal Association. But the critical nature of affairs consequent upon the famine once more herded together the national leaders, and in February, 1847, a Repeal Confederation was formed with objects somewhat similar to those of the former association. The formation of this Confederation marked McGee's first participation in active politics. He had hurried back from the calm atmosphere of London to the hectic politics of Dublin, and was made a councillor of the Confederation. It is unnecessary to follow his manœuvres amongst the Dublin politicians. We catch a glimpse of him in the comments of a country gentleman who had dropped in to hear the debates in the Confederation. He was at the outset very much displeased at seeing a mere boy, ill-dressed and singularly ugly, rise to address an assembly which had as its object the saving of Ireland. But his displeasure vanished, and he was seized with amazement when he found the boy with smiling confidence deliver a statesmanlike oration that captivated his audience. McGee had, moreover, other acquirements in addition to oratory, for the council sufficiently prized his executive ability to make him its secretary.

The fates quickly precipitated events in Ireland. In the spring of 1847 O'Connell died, and his death plunged the nationalist movement into a morass. "The king of the forest is dead," wrote a contemporary, "and there is neither lion nor lion's cub to fill his vacant place." John O'Connell, the Liberator's son, aspired to the leadership formerly held by his father, but he was not a lion. He was wholly unable to act with McGee and the Young Irelanders, and all possibility of united action on Irish affairs vanished. Following the French Revolution of February, 1848, which transferred revolutionary enthusiasm to Ireland as to every other country in Europe, John Mitchel, with the recklessness and Ishmaelite characteristics of a born revolutionist, preached an armed uprising. Others, including McGee, suddenly echoed his sentiments, and revolutionary clubs sprang into being. These constituted in June a special executive to which they were to yield obedience.