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