"Thomas D'Arcy McGee...came to America in 1825...no name was better known among Catholic people of this country...wrote...'History of Irish Settlers in North America.'" -The Irish Standard (Minneapolis), June 22, 1901
"Thousands of Irish immigrants in this country have echoed...the words of Thomas D'Arcy McGee written over a century ago in his history of the Irish Settlers in North America." -Times-Tribune (Scranton), March 18, 1954
"Thomas D'Arcy McGee...was assassinated Apr. 7, 1868...by an Irish Fenian. He wrote 'History of the Irish Settlers in North America in 1851.'" -Decatur Daily Review, March 15, 1963
"McGee's book has surprised us. If the author is correct, we who have the misfortune to be of English origin cut but a sorry figure in our own country." - Brownson's Quarterly Review, 1852
"McGee shows how his countrymen in America 'have made many a clearing, found many a field, marked out many a noble plan, fighting stoutly for their new country, on land and sea, when so required.'" -Hunt's Magazine, 1856
About the year 1850, when fully a million Irish-born people were settled in the United States, the Irish-American community became sufficiently self-conscious to wish a survey of its status and its prospects. In that year Thomas D'Arcy McGee, then editor of the Boston Pilot, and a man of fine literary accomplishments and patriotic sympathies, published a book in 1851 entitled "A History of the Irish Settlers in North America." Its chapters called attention to the large Irish emigration here during the eighteenth century and the part the Irish race bore in the American Revolution.
McGee also discussed the position and requirements in 1850 of the Irish in America. Out of a population of twenty-four millions, he estimated the Irish-American element at four millions. The census of 1850, however, shows an Irish-born population of a little over 900,000. McGee was plainly of opinion that the future of the Irish lay in newer States. "The torrent of emigration from Ireland," he said, "must in a few years abate its force. Whatever we can do for ourselves as a people must be done before the close of this century; or the epitaph of our race will be written in the West with the single sentence Too Late."
About the author:
Thomas D'Arcy Etienne Grace Hughes McGee, (1825 –1868) was well known to the Irish American public. He was editor of The Boston Pilot, afterwards one of the editors of The Dublin Nation, subsequently to that editor of the New York Nation, and is finally the editor and proprietor of The American Celt.
He became disgusted with American politics and moved to Canada in 1857 and became an Irish-Canadian politician, Catholic spokesman, journalist, poet, and a Father of Canadian Confederation. McGee was assassinated with a shot from a handgun by Fenian sympathist Patrick J. Whelan on April 7, 1868.
Other books by the author include:
• The Catholic History of North America
• The Irish Position in British and in Republican North America
• Historical Sketches of O'Connell and His Friends
• Notes on Federal Governments, Past and Present
• A Popular History of Ireland
• The Poems of Thomas D'Arcy McGee
