Address to the Boston Friends of the Irish: ‘The sufferings which the people of that unhappy country have endured at the hands of a heartless, bigoted, despotic government, are well known to you. Her people are born slaves, and bred in slavery from the cradle; they know not what freedom is.’

He later wrote in the Pilot that ‘Repeal of the Union’ is the Irish for ‘Responsible Government.’ On the position of Canada, he wrote: ‘The United States of North America must necessarily in course of time absorb the Northern British Provinces ... One vast Federal Union will stretch from Labrador to Panama. A river like the St. Lawrence cannot safely be left in European hands ... Either by purchase, conquest, or stipulation, Canada must be yielded by Great Britain to this Republic.’

• The Poems of Thomas D’Arcy McGee (NY: D&J Sadlier 1869 [1870]), 614pp.
• Poems Chiefly Written in America (Nation Office, 1854).

• Eva MacDonald: A Tale of the United Irishmen (Boston [Pilot] 1844).

• Sebastian, or The Roman Martyr: A Drama Founded on Cardinal Wiseman’s Celebrated Tale of “Fabiola” (NY/Boston/Montreal: D. & J. Sadlier & Co 1861).

• Historical Sketches of O’Connell and his friends ([Boston] q.pub. 1845).
• A Popular History of Ireland From the Earliest Period to the Emancipation of the Catholics [2 vols. in 1] (Glasgow: Cameron & Ferguson [1862]).
• Gallery of Irish Writers: The Irish Writers of the Seventeenth Century (Dublin: James Duffy 1846), and Do. (NY: Lemma Pub. Corp. 1974), 252pp.
• A Memoir of the Life and Conquests of Art MacMurrogh, King of Leinster from A.D. 1377 to A.D. 1417; With some Notices of the Leinster Wars of the 14th Century (Dublin: James Duffy; London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co. 1847).
• Memoir of Charles Gavan Duffy, Esq. as a Student, Journalist, and Organiser: With Selections from His Poems and Essays (Dublin: W. Hogan 1849), 32pp.
• The Catholic History of North America (Boston: P. Donahoe 1855), 239pp.
• A History of the Irish Settlers in North America: From the Earliest Period to the Census of 1850 (Boston: P. Donahoe [1851] 1855).
• ed., A Life of the Rt. Rev. Edward Maginn: With Selections from his Correspondence (NY: P. O’Shea 1857).
• The Present American Revolution: The Internal Condition of the American Democracy Considered, in a Letter from the Hon. Thomas D’Arcy M’Gee, M.P., President of the Executive Council of the Province of Canada, to the Hon. Charles Gavan Duffy, M.P., Minister of Public Lands of the Colony of Victoria (London: Hardwicke 1863).
• Speeches and Addresses Chiefly on the Subject of British-American Union (London: Chapman & Hall 1865), 308pp.
• Notes on Federal Governments, Past and Present (Montreal: Dawson 1865), 75pp.
• The Irish Position in British and in Republican North America: A Letter to the Editors of the Irish Press Irrespective of Party [2nd edn.] (Montreal: M. Longmoore 1866), 45pp.
• Charles Murphy, ed., 1825--D’Arcy McGee--1925: A Collection of Speeches and Addresses, Together with a Complete Report of the Centennial Celebration of the Birth of the Honourable Thomas D’Arcy McGee, at Ottawa, April 13th, 1925 (Toronto: Macmillan Company of Canada 1937), 366pp.

See also Seán Virgo, ed., Selected Verse of Thomas D'Arcy McGee (Exile Editions 2000), 104pp.

• D. C. Harvey, Thomas D’Arcy McGee: The Prophet of Canadian Nationality (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba 1923), 30pp.
• Isabel M. Skelton, The Life of Thomas D’Arcy McGee (Gardenvale, Canada: Garden City 1925).
• Alexander Brady, Thomas D’Arcy McGee (Toronto: Macmillan Company of Canada 1925), 182pp.
• J. Phelan, The Ardent Exile, The Life and Times of Thomas D’Arcy McGee (Toronto: Macmillan 1951) x, 317pp.
• A. Brady, Thomas D’Arcy McGee (Toronto: Macmillan 1925).
• James Coleman, Bibliography of Thomas D’Arcy McGee (Dublin: [Bibliographical Society of Ireland] 1925).
• J. S. Crone [on McGee], in Irish Book Lover, 15 (1925) [q.p.].
• Robin B. Burns, ‘D’Arcy McGee and the Fenians’, in Fenians and Fenianism, ed. Maurice Harmon (Univ. Review 1968), pp.68-81 [see extract].
• Norman Vance, ‘Victorian Ireland, Carleton and D’Arcy McGee’, in Irish Literature, A Social History (London: Basil Blackwell 1990), pp.120-64 [Chap. 4].
• Michael E. Vance, ‘The Assassination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Father of the Confederation, April 1868’, in An Nasc, 8 (Summer 1995), pp.11-13 [see extract].
• Brian Lambkin, ‘Thomas D’Arcy McGee and Charles Gavan Duffy’s “The Irish Chiefs”: Diasporic Trajectories of a Young Ireland’, in The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 31, 1 [Irish-Canadian Connections / Les liens irlando-canadiens] (Spring 2005), pp.98-107.
• David Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy Magee: Passion, Reason, and Politics, 1825-1857 (Canada: McGill UP 2008), 448pp. [being Vol. 1; Vol. II: The Extreme Moderate].

[...]

The Irish Confederation was frustrated in the general elections of 1847, and a radical faction developed which called for armed action. When the radicals were purged from the Confederation at the beginning of 1848 McGee supported the conservative leadership. But the French revolution of February persuaded the conservatives to adopt a revolutionary course of action, and McGee now participated in the plans for an Irish rebellion. He was actually arrested for sedition on the eve of his first wedding anniversary, but the charges were dismissed the next day. The government suspended habeas corpus in Ireland towards the end of July, and the Irish Confederation appealed to the country for armed support. McGee was dispatched to Scotland where he was to collect an expedition of armed sympathizers, but the main resistance did not last two weeks and McGee’s expedition did not embark. He returned to Ireland; when he could not obtain a following in the northeast he left again for the United States.
McGee arrived in Philadelphia in October 1848, and issued a public letter describing recent events in Ireland. He blamed the Irish clergy for the rebellion’s failure and signed the letter defiantly, “Thomas D’Arcy McGee, A Traitor to the British Government.” He then moved to New York City and started his own newspaper, the Nation, [...]

[...] When the pope appointed an English episcopacy in 1851, anti-Catholic opinion was aroused in Britain and America, and McGee, unable to endure the charge made by Catholics that he was contributing to the nativist campaign by attacking the clergy, made his peace with the Catholic Church.

[...] Gradually McGee became more critical of the United States, arguing that American society required the tempering influence of Catholicism to balance the disorderly tendencies of the New World. By 1855 he was urging the American Irish Catholics to leave the eastern cities and to found a colony in the newly opening west where they could recover their Celtic and Catholic character. He was the principal organizer of the Buffalo Emigrant Aid Convention of 1856, but the project failed when it aroused the opposition of the Catholic hierarchy in the east who insisted that the Irish had neither the skills nor the capital necessary for colonization.

[...] McGee’s concept of the “new nationality” was based on the desirability of developing an alternate experience in North America to that of the United States. An essential characteristic of Canada’s experience was its relationship with Great Britain, and McGee’s solution to the problem of retaining the connection between them yet providing for Canadian sovereignty was a proposal that one of Queen Victoria’s younger sons establish a Canadian dynasty in a “kingdom of the St. Lawrence.” Equally important in McGee’s mind was the development of a distinctive Canadian literature. After asking, “Who reads a Canadian book?” he went on to suggest ways in which Canadian literature might be encouraged, including tariff protection for Canadian publishers. Much of McGee’s Canadian programme was derived from the nationalist theories of Young Ireland, and he applied them to the particular circumstances of Montreal and British North America during the economic depression of 1857. Later he described his programme as his “national policy,” and its tenets influenced the course of his public life in Canada.

[...] Americans had developed their freedom into a republican system of government, and, although it was a magnificent experiment, it had many shortcomings. British Americans, on the other hand, had not separated from Britain and had developed their institutions along different lines. By retaining a system of constitutional monarchy, they had achieved a better balance between their natural freedom and the need for authority. Their society was more orderly and more free. “To the American citizen who boasts of greater liberty in the States, I say that a man can state his private, social, political and religious opinions with more freedom here than in New York or New England. There is, besides, far more liberty and toleration enjoyed by minorities in Canada than in the United States.” McGee was fond of citing the example of minority rights and he brought this to the attention of the Irish press, contrasting the position of the Irish in “British and Republican North America.”

[...] The years which inaugurated confederation [of Canada] coincided with a crisis in Ireland, and the crisis touched McGee. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, popularly known as the Fenians, had obtained wide support among the Irish in Great Britain and the United States, and appealed to the Irish in Canada. McGee openly opposed the movement, and based his opposition on two grounds: first, he objected to the republican programme for Ireland and urged the Irish to adopt the Canadian model of self-government within the British Empire; second, McGee attacked the Fenian plan to invade British America and called on the Irish in Canada to “give the highest practical proof possible that an Irishman well governed becomes one of the best subjects of the law and the Sovereign.” When he visited Ireland in 1865 as the Canadian delegate to the Dublin International Exposition McGee addressed an audience in Wexford, the town where he had spent his boyhood, and spoke on the Irish immigrant in Canada and the United States. He also described his career as an Irish rebel as “the follies of one and twenty.” This “Wexford Speech” attracted great attention in Ireland, Britain, the United States, and Canada, and McGee was accused of being a turncoat and a traitor to Ireland.

By 1866, McGee was in political trouble with his Irish constituents in Montreal. [...] He now expressed a desire to leave politics. John A. Macdonald promised him a civil service post for the summer of 1868, and McGee intended to turn his full attention to literature and Canadian history. He was dead before the appointment was made.
McGee was assassinated in Ottawa during the early morning hours of 7 April 1868. He was buried a week later on his 43rd birthday. It was generally believed at the time that his murder was part of a Fenian conspiracy. Patrick James Whelan, an Irish immigrant, was charged with the crime, found guilty, and hanged publicly in Ottawa on 11 Feb. 1869. The crown, however, never accused Whelan of being a Fenian, and the charges against other alleged members of the conspiracy were dismissed. [...]

Bibl.: T. D’A. McGee, The Catholic history of North America; five discourses, to which are added two discourses on the relations of Ireland and America (Boston, 1855); Eva MacDonald, a tale of the United Irishmen (Boston, 1844); Gallery of Irish writers; the Irish writers of the seventeenth century (Dublin, 1846); Historical sketches of O’Connell and his friends ... (2nd ed., Boston, 1845; 4th ed., 1854); A history of the attempts to establish the Protestant reformation in Ireland, and the successful resistance of that people [1540-1830] (Boston, 1853); A history of the Irish settlers in North America, from the earliest period to the census of 1850 (Boston, 1851; 5th ed., 1852); A life of the Rt. Rev. Edward Maginn, coadjutor bishop of Derry, with selections from his correspondence (NY, 1857; 2nd ed., 1860); A memoir of the life and conquests of Art MacMurrogh, king of Leinster, from A.D. 1377 to A.D. 1417, with some notices of the Leinster wars of the 14th century (Dublin, 1847; 2nd ed., [1886]); “A plea for British American nationality” and “A further plea for British American nationality,” British American Magazine; Devoted to Literature, Science, and Art (Toronto), I (1863), 337-45, and 561-67; The poems of Thomas D’Arcy McGee; with copious notes; also an introduction and biographical sketch, ed. Mrs. James Sadlier [M. A. Madden] (NY, 1869); ed. Brady (2nd ed., Boston, 1869), A popular history of Ireland ... (2 vols., NY, 1863).