Brendan Ó Cathaoir, “An Irishman’s Diary on John Mitchel, a contentious patriot -Bicentenary of birth of an unrepentant rebel’, in The Irish Times (3 Nov. 2015)

The contentious patriot John Mitchel was born 200 years ago today. Having preached social revolution in Ireland during the Famine, his subsequent support for the institution of slavery in America was unambiguous. None the less, FSL Lyons considered he was “among the two or three most forceful and effective journalists to write for Irish newspapers during the 19th century”. His uncompromising rhetoric was, moreover, an influential strand of Irish nationalism. A youthful John Dillon “found two congenial spirits, Mitchel and Davis, enough to turn a race of slaves into the wildest lovers of their country”.
 He can be described as a precursor of Fenianism. Although largely indifferent to religion, he detested the emotional excesses of evangelical revivalism and displayed a sympathy for Catholicism, which he regarded as a vital element of Irish nationality.
 Mitchel was born on November 3rd, 1815, near Dungiven, Co Derry. His father, a Unitarian minister, had been a United Irishman. The family moved to Dromalane, outside Newry, Co Down, where he attended a classical school. He graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1836, and later that year eloped with 16-year-old Jenny Verner. Overcoming obstacles, they were married in Drumcree parish church, Co Armagh. Throughout the vicissitudes of his career he was sustained by the love and loyalty of Jenny, a woman of intelligence and indomitable courage.
 Already known for his nationalist sympathies, in 1841 he met Charles Gavan Duffy, who introduced him to the other Nation co-founders, Thomas Davis and John Blake Dillon. Mitchel grew close to both men and contributed his first article in 1843. He also wrote a Life of Aodh O’Neill for the journal’s “Library of Ireland” series.
 He forsook the law for journalism when Davis died prematurely in September 1845. Mitchel, who succeeded Davis as the dominant personality among the Young Irelanders, quickly surpassed him in the vigour of his style, and for two years wrote nearly all the political articles in the most famous newspaper in Irish history.
 He moved dramatically to the left during the terrible Famine years (to the embarrassment of the moderate Young Ireland majority).
 He embraced the doctrine outlined by James Fintan Lalor - of harnessing the struggle for political independence to the engine of agrarian revolution - “as completely as a man adopts a new religion”. After Duffy censored some of his Nation articles, Mitchel resigned and founded the United Irishman “specifically as an organ of revolution”.
 Having despaired of the landlords and with contempt for the middle classes, he now relied - like Theobald Wolfe Tone - on the men of no property. He attempted to persuade “the Protestant democracy of the North” that government and aristocracy were exploiting sectarian tensions to blind them to their true interests.
 He believed “society itself stood dissolved” by the Famine. The theme of social dissolution occupies an important place in Mitchel’s thinking, bridging his conservatism and revolutionary idealism. It help to explains, but does not justify, why he championed the oppressed at home and became an apologist for slavery in America.

Conversion to republicanism
Through Mitchel, and influenced by another French revolution - that of February 1848, republican separatism re-entered Irish politics. It was unrealistic to call on a famished population “to strike for a republic ... to raise the Irish tricolour, orange, white and green, over a forest of pikes” - but Mitchel’s conversion to republicanism brought a potent factor into modern Irish nationalism.
 Crossing “the path of the British car of conquest” involved, however, being torn from his wife and children, convict ships, banishment to Van Diemen’s Land, escape and a restless life as journalist, backwoods farmer and advocate of the slave-owning South during the American Civil War (in which two of his sons were killed).
 He fell into ill health and poverty, which was alleviated in 1873 by a £2,000 testimonial raised by John and William Dillon, sons of his old friend. This enabled him to visit Ireland and, on returning to New York, learned of a forthcoming byelection in Tipperary. Despite worsening health he came back to fight the contest, arriving at Cobh to learn he had been elected the previous day. Disqualified as an undischarged felon, the unrepentant rebel was re-elected but died (aged 60) nine days later in his old home outside Newry.
  During the Famine Mitchel witnessed scenes which “might have driven a wise man mad”. His Anglophobia was rooted in that great calamity. Henceforth his mind was constricted by a hatred of the British imperial system. His formulation that the Almighty sent the potato blight but the English created the Famine was burned into the folk memory of the diaspora. His classic prison memoir, the Jail Journal, became the bible of militant republicanism. Arthur Griffith’s edition was reprinted four times in 1913-21. For Pearse it was “the last of the four gospels of the new testament of Irish nationality ...”

It may not be the time to pose such a question, as Mayo head for their 11th All-Ireland senior football final since 1989 (including two replays), but should Castlebar Mitchels GAA club consider changing its name?
 Similarly where Tralee and Newry Mitchel’s GAA clubs are concerned, as well as John Mitchel’s in Claudy and John Mitchel’s at Glenullin, both in Co Derry, and all those other GAA clubs named after the 19th-century Irish patriot on this island, in the UK and elsewhere?
 Is it time too that the people of Newry, Co Down, reconsidered the statue erected there to him in 1966, and where it stands, at John Mitchel Place?
 And should the Government rename Fort Mitchel on Spike Island in Cork harbour?
 Why? Because John Mitchel actively supported slavery and the confederate side in the US civil war, in which two of his sons died fighting against the union side, while a third son was maimed.

Plantations
Prior to that civil war, on lecture tours in the US, Mitchel argued that “negroes” were innately inferior people who had lived in a state of barbarism in Africa but had a better quality of life on plantations in America.
 He claimed that a society based on free competition resulted in the exploitation of the weak, whereas the slave system provided for the social well-being of all, and that slaves on southern plantations had more comfortable lives than factory hands in Manchester or starving peasants in Mayo.
 He wanted the people of the US to be “proud and fond of [slavery] as a national institution, and advocate its extension by reopening the trade in negroes”. He claimed slavery was inherently moral and a “good in itself”.
 In October 1857 he was involved with setting up the Southern Citizen newspaper, which promoted “the value and virtue of slavery, both for negroes and white men” and advocated the reopening of the African slave trade while also encouraging its spread into the American west.
 In his view the “peculiar gentleness of demeanour and quiet courtesy” of the south in the US could be attributed to slavery, while he felt the southern custom of speaking gently to servants and slaves created “a softness of manner and tone which, in educated people, being united with dignity, and self-possession, gives me the ideal of a well-bred person”.
 Throughout the American Civil War, as Confederate forces became depleted, John Mitchel remained resolutely opposed to freeing slaves even as some Confederate leaders suggested they should be offered freedom in return for fighting for the South.
 He denounced Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 emancipation proclamation as an incitement to insurrection for slaves that could only result in their slaughter.
 Elsewhere he said of Lincoln that he was “an ignoramus and a boor; not an apostle at all; no grand reformer, not so much as an abolitionist, except by accident - a man of very small account in every way”.

Irish brigade
At the second battle of Fredericksburg, in May 1863, Mitchel’s sons James and Willie, serving in Gen George Pickett’s Virginian division, fought against the union army’s Irish brigade led by Thomas Francis Meagher, who had been one of their father’s closest friends in Ireland.
 Willie Mitchel would be killed at Gettysburg in July 1863, while another son, John, was killed fighting union forces at Richmond, Virginia, in 1864. Mitchel’s remaining son, James, lost an arm in battle.
 John Mitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher had been in the Young Ireland movement in Dublin in the 1840s. Meagher had also been deported to Van Diemen’s Land, and had also escaped to the US.
 But their paths diverged, with Meagher opposing slavery.
 At Fredericksburg, Meagher led his men repeatedly against strong confederate forces, but each time they were repelled. Their courage won the admiration of Gen Pickett.
 He wrote to his wife that as he saw their green flags approach his lines again and again his “heart almost stood still as he watched those sons of Erin . . . My darling, we forgot they were fighting us, and cheer after cheer at their fearlessness went up along our lines.”
 The battle was a major defeat for the union. The Irish brigade suffered heavy casualties, with more than 900 of its 1,200 men killed or wounded.
 John Mitchel wrote to Irish newspapers discouraging Irishmen from enlisting in the union army. In a letter to the Nation newspaper he applauded the bravery of those Irishmen fighting for the union but claimed that they had been fooled by false promises of land in the south and fought for a government that despised them and cared nothing for their lives.
 “They are to be made use of precisely as the poor negroes are - thrust to the front in every fight, and thrown aside afterwards as broken tools. They will never hold land in the confederate country, save that regular fee-simple of six feet by two which many thousands of them now peacefully hold,” he wrote.
 Is it right that such a man is remembered so generously? In club or square or place?