The futile controversy that ensued proved fatal to the fortunes of McGee's paper. His joust with the most powerful Catholic ecclesiastic in America alienated the sympathies of those who might otherwise have given him support. He had jockeyed himself into the false position of being anti-clerical, a position which in the nineteenth century seldom won the support of Irish Catholics. The situation was all the more unfortunate in that he held many views in common with Bishop Hughes, and was later to become his warm friend. In the midst of the controversy, he received from Gavan Duffy an invitation to assist once more in the editing of the Dublin _Nation_. Duffy wrote with the enticing remark that "as a writer and a speaker there is not any Irishman living whose help I would as soon have as yours." All the weight of pleasant associations tugged at him to return. In his youthful verse a dominant note was a longing for his native land: Where'er I turned, some emblem still Roused consciousness upon my track; Some hill was like an Irish hill, Some wild-bird's whistle call'd me back. But the vision of leading the Irish in America had captivated his imagination, and he refused Duffy's offer. None the less he determined to shift the scene of his work. He sold out the _Nation_, went to Boston, and in August, 1850, established his second paper, the _American Celt_. During the next seven years, his career was that of an itinerant and rather restless journalist. In 1851 he was publishing the _Celt_, and championing the interests of the Irish in Buffalo. The following year, he was in New York, feverishly dashing off editorials to guide his Catholic countrymen through the stormy passages of mid-century American politics. There are few recess periods in the career of political journalism. It is an incessant battle demanding continuous vigilance and tireless effort. McGee, in New York, fully experienced its exacting claims, and satisfied them sufficiently to make his paper the most powerful Irish-American organ of the period.