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The Assassination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee: A Murder Mystery

T homas D’Arcy McGee may have had a premonition that his brains would be blown out by an assassin’s bullet. A few days before his death, he had a terrifying dream of tumbling into a powerful river and being swept helplessly toward a waterfall.

It was April 1868 and things had not been going well for McGee. Once a rising star among Irish Canadians, he had won a seat in parliament in the United Province of Canada (now Ontario and Quebec) in the general election of 1857 and had been instrumental in persuading Irish Canadians to support Confederation. But now his political career was in tatters. After playing a prominent role in the first two conferences in Charlottetown and Quebec that had led to Confederation, he was omitted from the third in London. He had been expelled from the St. Patrick’s Society in Montreal and denounced as a traitor to Ireland. In spite of his waning political fortunes, however, he was elected by a slim majority to the first House of Commons in the Dominion of Canada in 1867. But the Cabinet position he had expected as a prominent member of the ruling Conservative Party did not materialize. His clashes with the Irish community made him a liability rather than an asset, and the proposal was withdrawn. Instead, he was offered a job in the civil service as a consolation prize.

But at 2:00 a.m. on April 7, 1868, all of this faded into the background. In the House of Commons in Ottawa, parliamentarians were on their feet, giving McGee a standing ovation for his last passionate speech on the spirit of Confederation.

Then McGee put on his overcoat, gloves, and new white top hat and left the newly built centre block of parliament. As he started his slow walk back to his boarding house a short distance away, a full moon beamed down on him.

“Good night, Mr. McGee,” called John Buckley, a House of Commons employee, as McGee turned onto Sparks Street.

“Good morning,” joked McGee. “It’s morning now.”

Those were his last words.

His landlady, Mrs. Trotter, heard the drumming of feet and what sounded like a firecracker outside her front door. When she went to investigate, she found a figure slumped against the blood-speckled doorway. It was her lodger, shot to death. The bullet had entered the back of his head, passed through his skull, and exited through his mouth. The gun had been fired at such close range that some of McGee’s teeth were found embedded in the doorpost.

McGee was a close friend and drinking buddy of John A. Macdonald, also a Father of Confederation and now prime minister of Canada. Sir John A., as he was called, was devastated when wakened with the news that his companion had just been shot. He rushed at once to the scene of the murder and helped carry his dead friend into the house. He returned home, covered in blood and, as Macdonald’s wife Agnes described him, “much agitated,” with a face “ghostly white.”

A massive manhunt was launched, with more than two hundred people arrested in the police sweep. That afternoon, Sir John A. delivered a sombre tribute in the House of Commons to the “foully murdered” McGee. Flags flew at half-mast in Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto. The mayor of Ottawa posted a reward of $2,000 for information leading to the capture of the killer, and the federal government and provinces of Ontario and Quebec between them offered another $10,000.

The nation was in shock.

McGee, a short, chunky man with shaggy black hair, was nothing remarkable to look at. But he was an inspired public speaker with a magnetic personality. On the day he died, The Globe described him as “marvellously eloquent.… His wit — his power of sarcasm — his readiness in reply — his aptness in quotation — his pathos which melted to tears, and his broad humour which convulsed with laughter — were all undoubtedly of a very high order.”

In the period leading up to Confederation, McGee had fired up audiences with his enthusiasm and his vision of a free, tolerant, and united Canada. As noted by Fennings Taylor in a 1868 sketch of McGee’s life and death, McGee presented this ideal to fellow provincial parliamentarians in 1860. “I see in the not remote distance,” he said, “one great nationality, bound, like the shield of Achilles, by the blue rim of ocean. I see it quartered into many communities, each disposing of its internal affairs, but all bound together by free institutions.… I see within the round of that shield the peaks of the western mountains and the crests of the eastern waves.”

Thomas D’Arcy McGee, statesman, journalist, public speaker, and poet. This portrait is dated 1868, the year that McGee was felled by an assassin’s bullet, becoming the only Canadian federal politician ever to be assassinated.

McGee was a man of action as well as a visionary. Between 1864 and 1866, his key role in the negotiations with Britain that led to the founding of the Dominion of Canada prompted many to describe him as the (rather than a ) Father of Confederation.

But McGee wasn’t always a Canadian nationalist, loyal to the British Crown. Ironically, he started off as a fiery revolutionary. In Ireland, where he was born in Carlingford in 1825 and raised as a Roman Catholic, and in the United States, where he landed as a seventeen-year-old in 1842 to work as a newspaperman, he was strongly in favour of armed rebellion against British rule in Ireland. On his return to his native country in 1845, he became so politically active that the British issued a warrant for his arrest, and he had to flee back to the States, disguised as a priest.

McGee became increasingly disenchanted with what he regarded as the discrimination and exploitation experienced by Irish immigrants in the United States. And once he moved to Canada in 1857 on the invitation of a group of Irish Catholics to start up the New Era newspaper in Montreal, he expressed his opinions even more forcefully, declaring that minorities, including Catholics, were much better off in Canada than in the United States.

McGee was dirt poor in spite of his multiple professional activities as a charismatic politician, public speaker, journalist, and poet. Fortunately, he had powerful friends who were happy to help out. He owned a home on St. Catherine Street in Montreal, where he lived with his wife, Mary, and their two young daughters, Frasa and Peggy. The house, decorated with shamrocks, the symbol of Ireland, had been a gift from supporters.

But violence and danger stalked McGee throughout his life, and he made many enemies.

His sharp tongue and acid wit wounded his political opponents. Much more seriously, he became a harsh critic of an Irish separatist movement and secret society called the Fenian Brotherhood.

The Fenian Brotherhood was founded in the United States in 1858 with the aim of violently overthrowing British rule in Ireland. The Fenians had a large number of followers in the States, with fewer in Canada. In 1866, the U.S. branch, for the most part Irish-American veterans of the American Civil War, launched two raids — or invasions, depending on who you spoke to — into Canada. The first one into New Brunswick was a complete failure. The other incursion from Buffalo, New York, over the Niagara River and into Ontario was a great success; but the inexperience of the commanding officer led to the withdrawal of the Fenian forces.

McGee went on the offensive, fearing that Fenian activities would lead to a violent backlash against the Irish in Canada.

“Secret Societies are like what the farmers in Ireland used to say of scotch grass,” he wrote in the Montreal Gazette . “The only way to destroy it is to cut it out by the roots and burn it into powder.” He threatened to publish “documents which would put in their proper position the Fenians of Montreal.”

And that, according to historian David A. Wilson in his bio­graphy of Thomas D’Arcy McGee, was when the death threats began. One anonymous letter writer warned that McGee would be assassinated if he revealed any information about the Fenians in Montreal. Another letter, wrapped up in a Fenian newspaper, contained a drawing of a gallows and a coffin.

So when McGee was assassinated, suspicion immediately fell on the Fenians. Within twenty-four hours, police arrested Patrick James Whelan, a twenty-eight-year -old Irish immigrant with strong Fenian associations. They found a fully loaded .32 calibre Smith & Wesson revolver in his coat pocket. He was charged with the murder of Thomas D’Arcy McGee.

Easter Monday, 1868: on what would have been his forty-third birthday, McGee was given a state funeral — Canada’s first — in Montreal. The turnout was enormous, partly because the new Grand Trunk Railway, which had been strongly championed by McGee, offered cheap fares to attendees from all around the country. Some 80,000 people (the population of Montreal at that time was 105,000) silently lined the streets, many hanging out of windows or standing on the rooftops, as the procession passed by. The coffin was carried in a sixteen-foot-long , sixteen-foot-high funeral carriage drawn by six grey horses with black ostrich plumes on their heads. Guns were fired every minute, and military bands along the way played George Frideric Handel’s “Dead March.” McGee was buried in his family mausoleum at the Notre-Dame-des -Neiges Cemetery in Montreal.

Patrick James Whelan was an Irish immigrant associated with the Fenian Brotherhood, a secret society that aimed to violently overthrow British rule in Ireland. Whelan’s execution for the assassination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee still stirs up controversy today.

And what of Patrick Whelan?

His trial began in Ottawa in September 1868. Newspapers of the day called him “the tailor with the sandy whiskers.” The Ottawa Times reported that “as point after point of evidence was brought out during his trial, his uncontrollable restlessness of body, his constant turning of the head, his knitted brows, his staring eyes and twitching mouth, gave evident marks of his anxiety.” On the eighth (and last) day of his trial, he wore plain black. He probably knew what was coming. He was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging.

Whelan swore that he was innocent. “I am here standing on the brink of my grave,” he told the court, “and I wish to declare to you and to my God … that I never committed this deed, and that, I know in my heart and soul.”

His lawyers launched two appeals against his sentence: both failed. In the interim, he languished on death row at the Carleton County Gaol in Ottawa.

Letter dated February 9, 1869, from the Department of the Secretary of State in Ottawa to sheriff W.F. Powell of the County of Carleton, advising him that the execution of Patrick James Whelan should proceed as planned.

The year 1869 was known as the Year of the Big Snow in the Ottawa Valley. It began with a bone-chilling blizzard on February 11, and it continued to snow without let-up until St. Patrick’s Day on March 17. Impenetrable six-and-a -half-foot-high drifts covered fields and villages, roads disappeared, farms and communities were totally isolated, and cattle perished in their stalls.

Patrick Whelan was hanged at the Carleton County Gaol in Ottawa on the first morning of the snowstorm. In spite of the evil weather, more than five thousand people showed up for his execution. He went to his death with the words “God save Ireland! And God save my soul!” on his lips. It took seven long minutes for Whelan to die.

Executed individuals were usually buried in the cemetery of the prison where their hanging took place. Whelan was no exception: he was interred in an unmarked grave in the courtyard of the jail. But in 2002, following petitions from his family, a box of earth was dug up from the jail yard and taken to Montreal to be symbolically reburied beside Whelan’s widow’s remains in the Notre-Dame-Des -Neiges Cemetery.

How ironic that memorials to the two men — one murdered, the other hanged for his murder — now stand in such close proximity.

But was Whelan actually guilty of the crime?

Many say yes. Whelan, like McGee, lived in Montreal. As noted by Wilson, Whelan was either a Fenian or a Fenian sympathizer, and he hated McGee. He had been stalking McGee for months, following him to Ottawa when McGee went there on parliamentary business. He was in the visitors’ gallery at the House of Commons on the morning of the murder. He left the House at the same time as McGee and had no alibi for the time between 2:10 and 2:30 a.m. When the police arrested him, they found his Smith & Wesson revolver, which looked as though it had recently been fired. During Whelan’s trial, Joseph Faulkner, a tailor who worked with him in Montreal, testified that Whelan had said that McGee “was a traitor and deserved to be shot.” Another witness from Montreal, Alexander J. Turner, told the court that after McGee was elected to parliament, Whelan had threatened to “blow his bloody brains out before the session is over.”

On the other hand, there were signs that justice had not been done. Sir John A., McGee’s great friend, sat next to Judge William Buell Richards during the trial, which could have seriously influenced the jury’s decisions. Turner, whose evidence was particularly damaging to Whelan, was accused by the defence of lying in the hope of claiming a chunk of the reward money. In the two failed appeals against Whelan’s death sentence, Judge Richards, by now promoted to his new role as chief justice of Ontario, cast a deciding vote instead of stepping aside to make sure the process would be unbiased.

Other troubling questions remain. Witnesses had described a mysterious man sitting next to Whelan in the House of Commons on the night of the murder, making threatening gestures as McGee gave his final speech. Who was this suspect, and why was nothing done to investigate him further? What about reports of a horse and buggy seen speeding away from the crime scene? Was Whelan telling the truth when he said, just before he was hanged, “I know the man who shot Mr. McGee,” but that he was not prepared to rat on him? Could it be, as Wilson suggests, that Whelan was not a lone assassin but part of a hit squad?

And what about the murder weapon? Some commentators say that the evidence linking Whelan’s revolver to the crime was weak and circumstantial. This argument was tested when the gun turned up in 1973 in the possession of a private owner, Scott Renwick, an auto mechanic from Dundalk, Ontario. It seems that the original investigating officer had kept the firearm, which was a perfectly acceptable practice in the 1800s, and it was passed down through his family from generation to generation.

With new forensic tools available, Ontario’s Centre of Forensic Sciences found that a bullet fired from the gun looked a lot like the McGee bullet. This did not prove conclusively that Whelan shot McGee, but it did show that McGee was shot with the same kind of gun and ammunition Whelan was carrying when he was arrested.

Whether Whelan was guilty or not, this case has gone down in the record books. Thomas D’Arcy McGee is the only Canadian federal politician, and a very high-profile one at that, ever to be assassinated.

Patrick Whelan was the second-last individual in Canada to be officially executed in a public space. Later in 1869, the year Whelan was hanged, Sir John A. Macdonald signed a bill in an attempt to ensure that, beginning the following year, hangings would take place either out of the public’s view or with restrictions on the number of onlookers allowed to attend.