Author Description

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