Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Volume 2: The Extreme Moderate, 1857–1868 by David A. Wilson (review)

In keeping with his earlier writings, [McGee] envisaged a country that embodied the liberal conservatism of Burke, built on the principle of balance – between minority rights and a common Canadianism, between French- and English-speaking Canadians, between British and American forms of government, between central and local power, and between authority and liberty. Moderation and the middle way would be the chief characteristics of the new nation, along with an equally Burkean ruthlessness towards any religious or political extremists who sought to impose their own agendas on the country.

David A. Wilson, professor of Celtic studies at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, has already produced several important volumes. Volume 1 of Wilson’s biography, Thomas D’Arcy McGee (2008), presented a compelling account of the political, intellectual, and social background of this influential Victorian Irish Canadian political and cultural icon. Wilson’s first volume not only contributed the most important study to appear in Canadian Irish studies in the past ten years, but also provided Canadianists in general with a convincing and balanced account of the complex streams of nineteenth-century Irish, Irish Canadian, and American Irish cultural and political life.

When Wilson’s first volume appeared it was probably the most important book of Canadian biography and history to appear in this century. With the appearance of Wilson’s second volume, this is no longer so. Volume 2 has more than lived up to the standard of its predecessor, and in the work one of Canada’s premier living historians presents a learned and deeply hermeneutic account of a profoundly complex man during the most complicated period of his life. Drawing on an impressive array of sources and written in an engaging and lucid style, volume 2 does not simply present a standard biography of the great Canadian statesman. Instead, it provides a psychological and philosophical interpretation of the statesman’s character, thought, and actions that not only throws light on McGee as a great statesman, but also illuminates Victorian Irish, American, and imperial politics, early Canadian sociology, and Irish and Canadian cultural history.

Wilson’s great success in his account of McGee’s middle years stems from the historian’s great tact and honesty in dealing with McGee’s painful transition from Irish nationalist revolutionary and political refugee in the United States to a surprisingly loyal member of Her Majesty’s Government in Canada and founding statesman of the new Canadian nation. The transition could have been nothing short of agonizing for a thinker as sincere and essentially altruistic as McGee. But the most important element of his new book involves Wilson’s philosophical analysis of the constitutional and political background to the shift in McGee’s sociopolitical thought.

In the introductory section Wilson contrasts the sociological outcome of Hobbsean pessimism in republics like France and America with the more altruistic and optimistic view of human nature that dominates the cultural and political discourse of a Burkean British Empire. In McGee’s Canada, Canadian schoolchildren were given Edmund Burke’s essay on the French Revolution as an explanation of the Canadian constitutional position, and as grounds for the essentially counter-revolutionary and progressive Tory or ‘liberal-conservative’ ontology of the Victorian Canadian nation, one that McGee associated with ‘all the illustrious Irish statesmen of the past, O’Connell, Plunket, Curran, Grattan and above all, Burke.’ In his mature years McGee came to realize that Burkean, or ‘radical,’ moderation, with a hopeful belief in the general decency of mankind, allowed a divided citizenry to meet in a spirit of political and religious tolerance.

Both volumes of Wilson’s biography draw heavily on a sensitive analysis of the print culture of the Victorian Irish, and a vibrant and incisive sense of nineteenth-century conditions emerges from Wilson’s survey of the newspapers contributing to Wilson’s reconstruction of Irish, American, Irish American, and Canadian opinion.

Wilson...