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.

A brilliant writer, outstanding orator, and charismatic politician, Thomas D'Arcy McGee is best known for his prominent role in Irish-Canadian politics, his inspirational speeches in support of Canadian Confederation, and his assassination by an Irish revolutionary who accused him of betraying his earlier Irish nationalist principles. Thomas D'Arcy McGee, the first volume in a two-part biography, explores the development of those principles in Ireland and the United States. David Wilson follows McGee from Wexford, Ireland across the Atlantic to Boston, where at nineteen he became the editor of America's leading Irish newspaper, and traces his subsequent involvement with the Young Ireland movement, his reactions to the Famine, and his role in the Rising of 1848. Wilson goes on to examine McGee's experiences as a political refugee in the United States, where his increasing disillusionment with revolutionary Irish nationalism and his opposition to American nativism propelled him towards conservative Catholicism and sent him on a trajectory that ultimately led to Canada - his experiences are the subject of volume 2, Thomas D'Arcy McGee: The Extreme Moderate, 1857-1868.

1868 Ottawa D’Arcy McGee is assassinated. As John A. Macdonald cradles his friend’s bloody head, he blames transplanted Irish terrorists: the Fenian Brotherhood. Within a day, Patrick James Whelan is arrested. After a show trial, Whelan is publicly hanged. That much is history. Did Whelan do the deed? What if Clara Swift, a mere slip of a girl, sees the trace-line of a buggy turn off Sparks Street, moments after the murder? What if housemaid Clara understands her dead mentor’s shorthand, and forges an unlikely alliance with the Prime Minister’s investigator? And ends up being trusted by the condemned man’s wife — and by Lady Agnes Macdonald . . . Celtic Knot. It’s reimagining a crisis that tested a nation. It’s history with a mystery. It’s A Clara Swift Tale. And it all begins with a shot in the dark.

From Confederation in 1867 until the abolition of the death penalty in 1976, 704 people were hanged in Canada. The book examines how trial, conviction, and punishment operated then, and the relevance of capital punishment today. It profiles notable individuals: victims, murderers, judges, jurors, the wrongfully convicted ... and the hangman.

This is an extensive, fresh account of the early life of Thomas D'Arcy McGee. Astonishing new details are provided of his escape across Ireland in 1848, including his stay on Lough Derg in the course of being rescued by Clogher and Derry priests in a carefully managed operation. Indications are that his secret mission to the north at the start of the Irish Rebellion had astonishing possibilities, but it was so sensitive he could never discuss it later. The delightful discovery of his christening gown leads to further examination of his birth and early childhood at Carlingford. There is an extensive account of his career as a journalist in America, and his early involvement with Young Ireland's cultural and political mission which becomes his own. Thomas Davis was an early acquaintance; Gavan Duffy was a close friend; John Mitchel was an early mentor. While McGee led the moderates in the Confederation, he was also preparing for war as he organized the Clubs to satisfy the militants just before the revolt. There was no truer Irishman. The official Government side of the story, including Peel's extensive relief efforts made during the Great Irish Famine and Lord Clarendon's continuing vigilance is thoroughly researched and written so as to provide a balanced perspective to the general dissent and the determined and sustained efforts towards Irish independence, including McGee's own glorious initiatives.

In Delusion: The True Story of Victorian Superspy Henri Le Caron, journalist Peter Edwards reveals the early history of Canadian, British, and American espionage. With the 1868 assassination of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, one of the Fathers of Confederation, newly elected prime minister John A. Macdonald created Canada's first secret police. As head of this covert force, Gilbert McMicken hired Le Caron, who also reported to Robert Anderson of Scotland Yard. Delusion details the little-told historic role Canada played in the violent fight for Irish Independence. Individuals and motivations clash in this epic story of nationhood at the crossroads that still resonates today.

'...from time to time a study comes along that truly can be called ‘path breaking,’ ‘seminal,’ ‘essential,’ a ‘must read.’ How the Irish Became White is such a study.' John Bracey, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachussetts, Amherst The Irish came to America in the eighteenth century, fleeing a homeland under foreign occupation and a caste system that regarded them as the lowest form of humanity. In the new country – a land of opportunity – they found a very different form of social hierarchy, one that was based on the color of a person’s skin. Noel Ignatiev’s 1995 book – the first published work of one of America’s leading and most controversial historians – tells the story of how the oppressed became the oppressors; how the new Irish immigrants achieved acceptance among an initially hostile population only by proving that they could be more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists. This is the story of How the Irish Became White.