But the vision of leading the Irish in America had captivated his imagination, and he refused Duffy's offer. None the less he determined to shift the scene of his work. He sold out the Nation, went to Boston, and in August, 1850, established his second paper, the American Celt.
During the next seven years, his career was that of an itinerant and rather restless journalist. In 1851 he was publishing the Celt, and championing the interests of the Irish in Buffalo. The following year, he was in New York, feverishly dashing off editorials to guide his Catholic countrymen through the stormy passages of mid-century American politics. There are few recess periods in the career of political journalism. It is an incessant battle demanding continuous vigilance and tireless effort. McGee, in New York, fully experienced its exacting claims, and satisfied them sufficiently to make his paper the most powerful Irish-American organ of the period.
The fifties were a stirring decade in the history of the American republic. They were marked by an intense feverishness in politics as the question of slavery loomed higher on the horizon. The giant strides of material development, the pushing back of the frontier by the advancing lines of railway, the expansion of commerce, the marvellous growth of population, all added a buoyancy to American life which tended to draw newcomers into its tide. Carl Schurz, the young German revolutionist of 1848, was only a few years in the country when he became a party leader, swinging the votes of the western Germans in support of the Republican platform. Similarly many of McGee's fellow Young Irelanders became champions of American parties. John Mitchel's brilliant, but bitter pen was enlisted in the service of the Democrats. McGee, however, kept free from the meshes of party affiliations. Throughout his career of journalism in New York, he continued to consider himself as a new immigrant fighting the battles of the new immigrants. He set himself to be the sentinel and champion of his people, to safeguard their interests, and to direct their development amid the plastic conditions of American society. It was no easy task. In the twelve odd years following the famine, emigration from Ireland to the United States continued in a steady stream. Between 1846 and 1851, a quarter of a million left Ireland each year; between 1851 and 1861, over 100,000 left annually. Most of these found their destination in the American cities of the Atlantic seaboard. McGee saw their need of leadership. They were chiefly peasants and small farmers, pushed from their land in Ireland by famine and eviction. Concerning the relentless struggle of city life they knew nothing. Of the political issues of American cities they had no knowledge, and their ignorance exposed them to the ready wiles of ward bosses in search of votes. Promises were readily made to them and as readily unfulfilled. But, above all, their political position and interests were endangered in the fifties by the rise of the famous Know-Nothing party, with which McGee was in warfare during the greater portion of his residence in New York.
Know-Nothingism was a development of the native American movement of the forties. The support tendered by the Irish immigrants to the Democrats had assisted in the disorganization and severe defeat of the Republican party. Hence many disappointed Republican leaders determined to form an organization which should withhold political rights from European newcomers. At first they organized a secret fraternity called the "Know-Nothings" from "I don't know," the ever-repeated reply of its members to inquiry about its nature. The original name bestowed upon the fraternity by its founders was "The Sons of '76", or the "Order of the Star-Spangled Banner"; and its slogan was "America for the Americans." Its favourite counter-sign was the traditional order of Washington, "Put none but Americans on guard to-night." The national sentiment behind the society was reinforced by Protestant sectarian zeal, since its organizers were concerned not merely with depriving immigrants of power, but with excluding all Catholics from office.
Thanks to the allure of its novelty, this party developed with phenomenal rapidity. In 1854 its candidates swept the elections in Massachusetts, and Gardiner, its nominee, became governor of the state. Its members sought to control nomination for office by secret conventions of delegates. They bound themselves to cast no votes for any except Protestant-born citizens, and endeavoured to alter the naturalization laws so that foreigners might not be allowed to vote until they had resided twenty-one years in the country. The Know-Nothing party could never have had more than temporary success. As Horace Greeley, the noted editor of the New York Tribune, remarked, it "would seem as devoid of the elements of persistence as an anti-cholera or an anti-potato-rot party would be." But McGee, like other leaders of the swelling Irish population, was alarmed at its growing strength. It threatened to proscribe the men of his faith, and to exclude from the exercise of political rights immigrants like himself who sought a new home in the republic. In the columns of the Celt, he attacked its aims, assailed its champions, and marshalled Irish-American opinion against it. There is little doubt that this conflict, in which McGee was engaged during the last five years of his residence in New York, did much to disillusion him in respect to American life and institutions.
A few years before he had written the lines:
Hail to the land whose broad domain
Rejoices under Freedom's reign
Where neither right nor race is banned.
But he no longer viewed the republic as a Utopia. He now discovered that the so-called land of freedom was a land of intolerance, and his migration to Canada was largely due to the action of the Know-Nothing faction. As he later remarked, "I did not want to be a citizen on sufferance, as it were, courted one day and proscribed the next."
But McGee served the immigrants in other ways than by fighting the Know-Nothing platform. He encouraged them to seek their own self-development. He preached the homely precepts of industry, and urged them to study the laws and customs of their new country in order to be able to view intelligently its problems. The most helpful assistance that could be rendered to the indigent newcomers was to provide them with the facilities for education. During his early residence in Boston, McGee had realized this, and it was due largely to his labours that night schools for adults were engrafted on the educational system. The same work he now earnestly promoted in New York, with benefit to immigrants of every race. But his most emphatic plea was that his countrymen should move from the crowded tenements and congested industries of the eastern cities to the homestead lands of the West. "We must," he wrote in the Celt, "urge them on and on. We must shame them out of cellars and sewers, and endeavour by every art to awaken in their hearts the passion for competency, so natural and laudable in a new and unsettled country." For a time he had the dream of establishing an Irish state in the western territories—an inland Erin—which should draw thither the Irish immigrants. For this purpose, in 1856, he took a leading part in calling a conference of leading Irish Americans at Buffalo. Although the dream of an Irish state in the west was not realized, McGee's advocacy of western settlement was not futile. Many flourishing homesteads in Illinois and Wisconsin bore witness to the zeal with which he advocated western colonization.
By 1852 a considerable change had taken place in McGee's thought. When he had reached Philadelphia in the autumn of 1848, he was a revolutionist with all that lack of compromise which accompanies youth. He shared the idealism of the ardent patriots who had been prepared to take any and every means for the quick attainment of Irish freedom. As one Young Irelander had said: "If the altar stood in the way of national liberty, then down with the altar." The path to Ireland's freedom should, if necessary, cut through every institution and be impeded by no consideration. But four years of controversial journalism in America shook McGee's former revolutionary faith. In a letter to a friend, published in the Celt, he confessed that in the past he had been on the wrong track. He found that he had neglected some of the primary principles which govern the world. In the future he was determined to put all political action to the test of a simple creed, the chief tenet of which was a belief in Christendom and the Catholic church. The revolutionary liberalism which sought in the name of liberty to tear down the church and other institutions was reprehensible, and to be resisted. It is not to be assumed that by this profession of faith McGee suddenly, in 1852, saw, like Paul on the Damascus road, a new light. The fact is that in Ireland he had been a revolutionist largely by the accident of events. By temperament he had none of those Ishmaelite characteristics which go to make the revolutionary. "My native disposition," he declared in the Canadian parliament some years later, "is towards reverence for things old, and veneration for the landmarks of the past." Away from Ireland's hectic politics his temperament reasserted itself. His reverence for things old fed his loyalty to his church, and led him henceforth to discountenance all movements for the freeing of Ireland which did not receive its conservative sanction. As subsequent events show, he remained the champion of reform for his native land, as for the country of his adoption, but he was ever emphatic in his denunciation of the violent methods of conspiracy and revolution. His change of front brought him into friction with many Irish Americans like John Mitchel and the founders of Fenianism, and this fact, linked with the existence of Know-Nothingism, largely explained his departure to Canada in 1857.