A brilliant writer, outstanding orator, and charismatic politician, Thomas D'Arcy McGee is best known for his prominent role in Irish-Canadian politics, his inspirational speeches in support of Canadian Confederation, and his assassination by an Irish revolutionary who accused him of betraying his earlier Irish nationalist principles.

Thomas D'Arcy McGee: Passion, Reason, and Politics, 1825-1857, the first volume in a two-part biography, explores the development of those principles in Ireland and the United States. From his early temperance speeches in Wexford, Ireland, David Wilson follows McGee across the Atlantic, where at nineteen he became the editor of America's leading Irish newspaper, and traces his subsequent involvement with the Young Ireland movement, his reactions to the Famine, and his role in the Rising of 1848.

Wilson goes on to explore McGee's experiences as a political refugee in the United States, where his increasing disillusionment with revolutionary Irish nationalism and his opposition to American nativism propelled him towards conservative Catholicism, and sent him on a trajectory that ultimately led to Canada - the subject of Volume II, Thomas D’Arcy McGee: The Extreme Moderate, 1857-1868.