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Thomas D'Arcy McGee

 
Irish Literature Companion:

Thomas D'ArcyMcGee

McGee, Thomas D'Arcy (1825-1868), journalist and author; born in Carlingford, Co. Louth, and raised in Wexford, he emigrated to America aged 17. Returning to Ireland, he wrote for The Nation, to which he contributed many poems. Escaping in disguise after the Young Ireland Rising in 1848, he founded the New York Nation (1848). In 1862 he became Canadian Minister of Agriculture. He spoke against militant Republicanism on a visit to Wexford in 1865, and was assassinated in Ottawa after the Fenian raid on Canada. Besides Eva MacDonald (1844), a novel about the United Irishmen, he wrote A Gallery of Irish Writers of the Seventeenth Century (1846), A Popular History of Ireland (1862), and political memoirs.

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Columbia Encyclopedia:

Thomas D'Arcy McGee

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McGee, Thomas D'Arcy (məgē'), 1825-68, Canadian journalist and statesman, a leader in the movement for confederation, b. Ireland. He emigrated (1842) to Boston, where he became editor of the Boston Pilot, but in 1845 he returned to Ireland to join the staff of the Dublin Freeman's Journal. Later McGee transferred to the Nation, journal of the Young Ireland party. Implicated in the uprising of 1848, he fled to America. He edited Irish papers in New York City and Boston before settling (1857) in Montreal, where he started the New Era. Entering (1858) the Canadian legislature, McGee became president of the council (1862) and minister of agriculture (1864). His anti-British position had changed, and he lent his brilliant oratory to the cause of Canadian confederation within the empire. He lived to see it take place (1867), but the following year he was assassinated by a member of the Fenian movement, whose tactics McGee had denounced.
 
 

 

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Irish Literature Companion. The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature. Copyright © 1996, 2000, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/ Read more