The assassination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee after an impassioned plea for Confederation
MP delivered what may have been the speech of his life and then he was shot
In the spring of 1868, an eminent Father of Confederation was assassinated outside his boarding house. The man convicted of killing him was hung the following year in what would be Canada’s last public execution. This is one of 15 Canadian stories we present as part the Citizen’s Canada 150 coverage.
It was shortly after 2 a.m. on April 7, 1868 by the time debate in the House of Commons closed and the day’s session adjourned.
Montreal West MP — and Father of Confederation — Thomas D’Arcy McGee had earlier in the evening delivered an impassioned plea urging Nova Scotians not to reject Confederation, an address that, according to Hansard, commanded “great” applause and which many in the House said was among the finest ever given by the man regarded at the time as the young nation’s most gifted orator.
In a celebratory mood afterwards, McGee reportedly bought three cigars at the House’s bar, lighting one with his LiberalConservative party’s leader, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald. He then spoke with Nova Scotia Anti-Confederation MP Dr. James Fraser Forbes while waiting for Liberal MP and friend Robert MacFarlane to finish his whisky. (McGee himself was no stranger to strong drink, but had recently sworn himself to abstinence.)
MacFarlane helped McGee on with his overcoat and the two spilled out into the cold, clear Ottawa night.
Despite the hearty applause that had followed his speech, McGee knew his words would not be welcomed in all quarters, and particularly not by members and sympathizers of the Fenian Brotherhood — militant Irish nationalists who viewed McGee, a one-time Irish revolutionary who in his 20s described himself as a “traitor to the British government,” as a turncoat to the Irish cause. More recently, however, McGee had advocated for a strong British North America and was a vociferous proponent of a uniquely Canadian spirit, independent of residents’ current geography or past provenance.
This very evening, in fact, he had closed his speech by noting “I … speak here not as the representative of any race, or of any Province, but as thoroughly and emphatically a Canadian, ready and bound to recognize the claims, if any, of my Canadian fellow subjects, from the farthest east to the farthest west, equally as those of my nearest neighbour, or of the friend who proposed me on the hustings.”
This was not the sort of talk that the Fenians, whose plans included taking over parts of Canada to hold ransom for Irish independence from Britain, liked to hear.
McGee put on his gloves and white top hat and, passing doorkeeper Patrick Buckley, left the Centre Block with MacFarlane, the pair slowly ambling down the Hill’s central path toward Wellington Street. With one bad leg, McGee walked with the aid of a silverhandled bamboo cane, also leaning occasionally on MacFarlane’s arm. A full moon lit their way.
They passed through the Hill’s front gate, then turned left on Wellington, walking the short distance to Metcalfe Street. From there, they crossed Wellington and continued a block south on Metcalfe to Dwyer’s Fruit Store at the corner of Sparks Street, where they parted ways — MacFarlane heading east on Sparks towards his home in Lowertown; McGee turning west towards his lodgings in the Toronto House, better known as Mrs. Trotter’s Boarding House, barely 100 metres away.
As he turned, MacFarlane noticed the parliamentary doorkeeper’s brother, John Buckley, and three other men following behind. McGee crossed to the south side of Sparks and heard Buckley call out, “Good night, Mr. McGee.”
“Good morning,” McGee replied, “It is morning now.” These are his last known words. The first of the three doors to Mrs. Trotter’s led to the public bar. McGee passed that entrance and took out his key for the second, the guests’ entrance. As he opened the door, he was approached from behind. His attacker pressed a cold Smith & Wesson revolver to the back of his neck and pulled the trigger.
Mary Ann Trotter, the widow who owned the boarding house, was still up, waiting for her 13-yearold son, Willie, who worked as a House of Commons page, to return home. She later remarked that she had heard “quick steps passing the dining room window” and “a noise as of someone rattling at the hall door.” As she opened the door, she heard what sounded like a firecracker going off. A figure lay slumped in the doorway, his face unrecognizable. The white top hat, cane and cigar, however, gave him away. It was McGee.
Later that day in the House of Commons, John A. Macdonald paid tribute to his friend and colleague: “He has lived a short life, respected and beloved, and died a heroic death; a martyr to the cause of his country. How easy it would have been for him, had he chosen, to have sailed along the full tide of popularity with thousands and hundreds of thousands following him, without the loss of a single plaudit, but he has been slain, and I fear slain because he preferred the path of duty.”
McGee was given a state funeral. On a freezing cold April 13 — on what would have been his 43rd birthday — upwards of 80,000 people lined Montreal’s Rue Saint-Jacques to watch his funeral cortège, a procession that consisted of 15,000 mourners in a city of just 105,000, as a halfdozen horses drew his hearse to St. Patrick’s Basilica. It was, at the time, the largest funeral yet held in British North America. McGee was interred at Notre-Dame-desNeiges cemetery.
Meanwhile, the Ottawa constabulary had found its man, they believed, in one Patrick James “Jim” Whelan, 28, a recent immigrant, tailor and alleged Fenian sympathizer. The evidence eventually gathered against Whelan was profuse but circumstantial: He was in attendance in the spectators’ gallery at the House of Commons that evening; he had earlier been seen there with a gun; his gun had recently been fired (for which an innocent explanation existed); he had previously threatened McGee’s life; boot prints discovered in the snow opposite Mrs. Trotter’s matched his; a lumberjack who claimed to have witnessed the murder identified Whelan as the culprit; and detectives hiding near Whelan’s cell in the Carleton County Gaol on Nicholas Street testified that they heard Whelan admit to the killing. “I shot that fellow,” he purportedly bragged to his friend John Doyle, who had also been arrested. “I shot him like a dog.”
As editor James Moylan wrote in Kingston’s Canadian Freeman newspaper during the Police Magistrate’s Inquiry immediately following the murder, “The evidence, thus far, though barely circumstantial, is so well knit, so convincing, and so minute in all its details, that it is exceedingly difficult to divest the mind of the impression that Whelan has been connected with the perpetration of the dreadful crime.”
By today’s standards, the eightday trial, held in September, and subsequent appeals were hardly impartial. The jurors were all Protestants, while Whelan was Catholic. McGee’s good friend, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, took in the proceedings from a chair beside Chief Justice William Buell Richards, who not only presided over the trial but also cast the deciding vote in two appeals, each time upholding the original verdict and his ruling sentencing Whelan to death.
Throughout, Whelan maintained his innocence. “I am here standing on the brink of my grave,” he said following the announcement of the verdict, “and I wish to declare to you and to my God that I am innocent, that I never committed this deed, and that, I know in my heart and soul.” He did, however, eventually concede that he was present when McGee was shot and knew who pulled the trigger, but that he would prefer a hanging death than to be remembered as an informant.
On Feb. 11, 1869, Patrick James Whelan was hanged in front of a crowd of more than 5,000 spectators. His death was not quick: the drop from the gallows did not break his neck. Instead, it took about five minutes for him to strangle to death. “The prisoner,” reported the Citizen, “died very hard.” His was Canada’s last public execution. He was buried in the courtyard of the Nicholas Street jail where the hanging took place.
In life, McGee was a champion of Canada and Confederation, of minority rights, and one of the first to publicly favour jettisoning such qualifying descriptions as IrishCanadian, French-Canadian and English-Canadian in favour of simply Canadian. “By Herculean labor, he succeeded to a large extent in tearing up, root and branch, senseless and inveterate prejudices,” wrote Halifax Archbishop Thomas-Louis Connolly, “and blending all hearts in one common effort for one commonweal.”
For many, his assassination helped coalesce that effort, as even his enemies distanced themselves from and condemned the act. In his two-volume biography of McGee, David A. Wilson notes that the nationalist Canada First movement of 1868 sprang from its founders’ admiration of McGee and his principles. “It was in some respects,” Wilson wrote, “a Canadian version of Young Ireland in its pre-revolutionary incarnation — a group of poets, intellectuals, writers who set out to replace a colonial mentality with a sense of pride and self-worth, who employed history and literature for the cultivation of national sentiment, and who stood for self-government within the empire.”
Its manifesto’s description of McGee might best sum up his contribution to Canada. He was, it claimed, “one who breathed into our new Dominion the spirit of a proud self-reliance, and first taught Canadians to respect themselves.”