Thomas D'Arcy Magee

D'Arcy Magee statue on Parliament Hill CT

Irish-born Thomas D'Arcy Magee (1825-1868), was  a journalist, poet, orator and statesman and one of the Fathers of Confederation.

Educated in in Wexford, he left for America to write for and edited the Boston Pilot, an Irish-American journal. After three years he returned to Dublin to continue his journalistic career. A young radical, he left the more moderate Freeman's Journal to write for The Nation, the press organ of the "Young Ireland" party.

Implicated in the Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848, he escaped his native country to return to America. He lived in New York, Boston and Buffalo, writing for and publishing newspapers. On arriving in Montreal in 1857, he founded a newspaper called the New Era, and in 1858 he was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Canada as the Irish Catholic representative for Montreal West. In 1864, he was a delegate at the Charlottetown and Quebec Conferences that paved the way for Confederation in 1867 -- the birth of the new nation.

According to W. Stewart Wallace, D'Arcy Magee's eloquent orations in favour of the new civic nationality were a great help in creating the psychological grounding for the coming union of the first four provinces.

D'Arcy Magee changed parties from the Reformers to the Conservatives, but kept his Montreal seat until Confederation in 1867, and was re-elected to the same constituency in the first House of Commons in the new Dominion of Canada. He was not in the cabinet, however; he stood aside to allow Edward Kenny to take the post, and represent Nova Scotians as well as Irish Catholics. Wallace also calls him "the chief apostle of Canadian national unity" (ibid).

In the interests of that unity, this brilliant orator spoke strongly against the Fenians in 1866, These were Irish nationalists in America who invaded Canada in a series of raids between 1866 and 1871, with the purpose of securing Irish independence from Britain. Speaking against their attacks earned D'Arcy Magee the enmity of the American organization of Fenians. When he was shot in Ottawa 1868, it was a Fenian who was tried and found guilty of his murder.

At the last public hanging in Canada, Fenian sympathizer Patrick J. Whelan died for the crime in front of 5000 people. Yet doubt was later raised about his guilt. This question has been dealt with in a play by Pierre Brault, called Blood on the Moon.

D'Arcy Magee also makes a cameo appearance in the novel Away, by Jane Urquhart, when she gives a fictional account of what led up to his assassination near the Parliament Buildings in 1868.