David Wilson, in the first volume of his biography of Thomas D’Arcy McGee, leaves us with the phrase: “In Ireland, McGee had been an extreme republican; in the United States he had been an extreme Catholic; in Canada he would become an extreme moderate.”1 In volume two, we see McGee make the transition to the man that he was at Confederation. The book describes McGee’s person, in all its complexity, during his eleven years in British North America, as his political views became defined in his adopted nation. It also offers an extensive and detailed examination of the trial of Patrick James Whelan, the man convicted of McGee’s murder, as well as a description of the permutations of the McGee icon in a chapter titled “Mutations.”