Understanding the Thomas D'Arcy McGee Assassination: a legal and historical analysis

Book excerpt: The Thomas D’Arcy McGee assassination shocked the world more than a hundred and forty-five years ago, in the first year of Canada’s Confederation. McGee was shot through the back of the neck with a Smith & Wesson revolver, at his boarding house door on Sparks Street in Ottawa, having just returned from a late night sitting of the House of Commons around two thirty in the morning, on April 7, 1868. The man who was hanged for the murder claimed he was not the triggerman, although therewas a strong case against himand he admitted to being present. Now it seems he may have been telling the truth. The author of the most recent book on the killing has discovered persuasive evidence of a conspiracy involving American and Canadian Fenians, and he believes there was a hit man and an enforcer, typical of most Fenian assassinations. That book, Understanding the Thomas D’Arcy McGee Assassination, A Legal and Historical Analysis, by Charles MacNab, Q. C., presents a series of interesting, related, well documented lectures that build on each other to pass understanding of theMcGee assassination. Readers can follow McGee in his early Young Ireland days as a young poet, writer, journalist, moderate political leader and fearless patriot; learn of his secret mission to Scotland and northern Ireland at the time of the Irish Rebellion of 1848, and of his providential escape to America; appreciate his mistrust of the militant extremists who had assumed the NewYork Irish leadership during the summer of 1848, and McGee’s own remarkable leadership mission after reaching America, through his Catholic weekly newspaper, the New York Nation; learn the truth aboutMcGee’s divided loyalties to Ireland and Canada, as a Member of the Canadian Parliament and a Cabinet Minister, and his decision to do what he described as his painful duty to oppose the Fenians after 1861 when they began targeting Canada as part of their strategy to obtain Irish independence fromBritain, asMcGee still believed Ireland was being cruellymisgoverned; explore an expanded record and enjoy an analysis that supports the conclusion that theMcGee assassination resulted from a Fenian ordered hit fromNewYork. It is rather odd history. Irish American militants were conducting terrorism from American soil to obtain Irish independence from England in the name of radical republicanism, targeting Britain and Canada with hostage takings, dynamite explosions, and assassinations, including the ugly killing of Thomas D’Arcy McGee. The Canadian Government received a report of the conspiracy behind the McGee assassination fourteen years after the murder. It included signed affidavits fromtwoAmericanswho had participated, and bothmen were prepared to testify in any legal process provided they were granted immunity from prosecution themselves. John A.Macdonald, who was Justice Minister and Prime Minister at the time of the murder, believed that there had been a conspiracy, but he had been unable to persuade the Ontario Premier, Sandfield Macdonald, to authorize a Commission of Inquiry. There were a number of individuals who were charged at the time as accessories, but those prosecutions failed for lack of evidence. Previouswriters have been unable to conclude the assassination was the result of a conspiracy involving the American Fenians, but that is where the freshly discovered evidence leads. There is nothing to indicate John A. Macdonald (who was again Prime Minister in 1882) did anything with that later report, and so it is conceivable that Macdonald decided not to pursue the matter further. Much time had elapsed, and that hanging had already brought closure to a national tragedy. John A. Macdonald’s former law partner, Sir Alexander Campbell, who had been in the Canadian Cabinet at the time of the McGee assassination, is the one who provided that report directly to Macdonald about their “poor friend” McGee. It is a little ironic that it would be Campbell, for Campbell and McGee were never best friends, although they had been Cabinet colleagues, and had sat on the Committee of the Privy Council together before Confederation. Campbell liked to ridicule McGee privately,which probably explains why McGee had let it be known, in the summer of 1867, that Macdonald had offered him Campbell’s position in the Cabinet. Earlier in the year McGee and Charles Tupper had agreed to step aside for an Irish Catholic Senator from Nova Scotia, Edward Kenny, to enable Macdonald to form Canada’s first Government.