On the night of April 7, 1868, Thomas D’Arcy McGee left the Parliament building in Ottawa after a debate that had stretched past midnight. He walked slowly toward the boarding house where he stayed on Sparks Street, smoking a cigar as he approached the door. The landlady, Marianne Trotter, was still awake, waiting for her son to come home from his own work at the Parliament buildings. When she heard McGee arrive, she opened the door.

Then she heard a loud noise, and McGee fell to the ground, shot dead. The assassin vanished into the dark Ottawa streets. McGee was one of the most prominent politicians in the new Dominion of Canada, a personal friend of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, and a man who had made powerful enemies.

Born in 1825 in Carlingford, in the northeast of Ireland, he had grown up in Wexford, where his father worked as a coast guard. His mother died when he was eight. He was a gifted student, educated in the illegal hedge schools that had emerged to teach Catholic children when Catholic schools were banned. He became deeply interested in Ireland’s relationship with Britain, and he opposed British rule.

At seventeen, he sailed to the United States with his sister and found work at the Boston Pilot, a Catholic newspaper where he wrote about Irish self-determination. He even argued that Canada should become part of the United States, once declaring that Canada must be yielded by Great Britain to the republic. He returned to Ireland in 1845 and worked for the weekly paper The Nation, but in 1848 he was implicated in a failed Irish rebellion and fled back to the United States disguised as a priest. There he established two newspapers of his own.

Over time, McGee changed his views. He came to believe that peaceful reform was the better path for Ireland, and in 1857 he moved to Canada. Within a year he was elected to the legislative assembly, and by 1863 he had become minister of agriculture. He worked for the creation of an independent Canada and, after Confederation, was elected to the first Canadian Parliament in 1867.

But his moderation had cost him. Many Irish Catholics saw him as a traitor, and the Fenians, a movement of Irish nationalists based mainly in the United States, were furious with him. They wanted to seize Canadian territory by force and ransom it back to Britain in exchange for Irish independence, and they hated McGee for condemning their methods and for saying that Canada under the British crown was a better home for Irish immigrants than the United States. Patrick Whelan, the man accused of his murder, had followed a very different path.

Born around 1840 in County Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, he was the son of William Whelan and Mary Sullivan. Although the family was not well off, they encouraged their children to study. When Patrick was five, the potato crop failed, and the Great Famine descended on Ireland, lasting until 1852. The island’s population fell from nearly 8.

4 million in 1844 to 6. 6 million by 1851, through both starvation and mass emigration. Between 1841 and 1850, Irish immigrants made up almost half of all immigrants arriving in the United States. When Patrick was fourteen, he became an apprentice to a tailor and learned his trade well.

He was considered a good and hardworking young man. But his elder brother Jack was arrested, accused of setting fire to a police station in Tulla as part of the broader Irish opposition to British rule. After that, Patrick resigned his position and left the country. He went first to England, then traveled to Canada in 1865, arriving in Quebec City, where he found work as a tailor.

He soon joined the volunteer cavalry and fought against the Fenians during their armed raids into the British province of Canada. In June 1866, around 1,300 Fenian soldiers captured Fort Erie in southern Ontario before being forced back across the border to the United States. But Whelan’s conduct during that campaign raised suspicions. Some of his actions led military leaders to believe his sympathies actually lay with the Fenians.

He was arrested and questioned, but with no evidence against him he was released. He was, however, discharged from the cavalry. He traveled to the United States, then returned to Canada, settling in Montreal, where on February 13, 1867, he married Bridget Boyle, a woman from County Kenny in Ireland, older than him and relatively wealthy. The match seemed strange to some, but the couple moved to Ottawa, where Whelan’s tailoring skills were in high demand.

On New Year’s Eve, 1867, two men came to McGee’s home to warn him that there was a plot to burn his house down at four in the morning. McGee asked them to tell the police and gave one of them a note to show the officer on duty. One of those men was believed to be Whelan. The note requested that two policemen be sent to protect McGee’s house and family, but it was not delivered to the police station until 4:45 a.

m. , after the attack was supposed to have taken place. The threat was never carried out. Three months later, McGee was dead.

Police immediately targeted known Fenian sympathizers and quickly arrested Patrick Buckley, a stable hand employed by Prime Minister Macdonald. Buckley gave the police the name of Patrick Whelan. Officers found Whelan at his lodgings at Stark’s Tavern. In his pockets they discovered a fully loaded Smith & Wesson revolver, with powder residue suggesting it had been fired within the previous forty-eight hours.

They also found a box of cartridges, an Irish American newspaper, and a green silk badge of the Toronto Hibernian Benevolent Society. The investigation continued. Police were told that Whelan had watched McGee from the visitors’ gallery in the House of Commons on the night of the shooting. McGee’s half-brother identified Whelan as the man who had come to the house on New Year’s Eve under an assumed name to warn of the arson plot.

On April 9, Whelan was charged with murder. Four days later, an estimated crowd of 80,000 people lined the streets for McGee’s state funeral. The trial drew intense political interest. McGee was a highly regarded public figure, and the prime minister was given the unusual permission to sit beside the judge, William Buell Richards, throughout the proceedings.

The defense was led by John Hillyard Cameron, a Protestant, while the prosecutor was James O’Reilly, an Irish Catholic. On the first day, the defendant sat with folded arms, eating apples as he listened. The defense called a fourteen-year-old girl named Eliza Tierney, who worked at Stark’s Tavern. She testified that Whelan had taken a room there about six weeks before his arrest and that he owned a pistol.

She said the pistol had been fired the day before the murder, when one of the other servant girls had accidentally shot herself in the arm while cleaning the room. A bookkeeper named William Gordon told the court that Whelan had offered to sell him the pistol a few weeks before the murder. Joseph Faulkner, a tailor from Montreal, said Whelan had been upset with McGee during the election season but that he had never known him to have any connections with the Fenians. There were claims that the government had offered money to prosecution witnesses, so the judge required them all to swear whether they had received any payment before testifying.

Whelan proclaimed his innocence throughout the trial. In closing, the defense argued that no man had ever been tried under circumstances so unfairly loaded with prejudice, and reminded the jury of cases where the accused had been executed only to be exonerated later. The prosecution reminded the jury that a public servant had been murdered and that society looked for justice. The jury returned a guilty verdict, and the judge sentenced Whelan to death.

Asked if he had anything to say, Whelan replied: “I am held to be a murderer. I am here standing on the brink of my grave, and I wish to declare to you, to my God, that I am innocent, that I never committed this deed. ”

The defense appealed to the Court of Queen’s Bench of Ontario, but Judge Richards, who had presided over the original trial, had recently been named chief justice and cast the deciding votes in the court’s two-to-one decision against the appeal. A second appeal to the Ontario Court of Appeal, which included the same three judges, was rejected six votes to four.

On February 11, 1869, Patrick Whelan was hanged before a crowd of 5,000 spectators. Standing on the scaffold, he again declared his innocence, saying he knew who had shot Thomas D’Arcy McGee but would not name him. His last words were “God save Ireland and God save my soul. ” He was the last person to be publicly hanged in Canada.

His widow, Bridget, moved back to Montreal and lived a solitary life. To this day, many people believe Patrick Whelan was innocent of the crime for which he was found guilty and hanged.