John Mitchel
John Mitchel was an Irish nationalist writer and journalist chiefly renowned for his indictment of British policy in Ireland during the years of the Great Famine. Concluding that, in Ireland, legal and constitutional agitation was a "delusion", Mitchel broke first with Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association and then with his Young Ireland colleagues at the paper The Nation. In 1848, as editor of his own journal, United Irishman, he was convicted of a treason felony and sentenced to 14-years penal transportation after advocating James Fintan Lalor's programme of co-ordinated resistance to landlords and to the continued shipment of harvests to England.
Controversially for a republican tradition that has viewed Mitchel, in the words of Pádraic Pearse, as a "fierce" and "sublime" apostle of Irish republicanism, in American exile into which he escaped in 1853 Mitchel was an uncompromising pro-slavery partisan of the Southern secessionist cause. Embracing the illiberal and racial views of Thomas Carlyle, he was also opposed in Europe to Jewish emancipation.
In his last year, 1875, and while still resident in the United States, Mitchel was elected twice to the British Parliament from Tipperary on an abstentionist platform of Irish self-government, tenant rights and free education. Exposing, as he saw it, the "fraudulent" nature of Irish representation at Westminster, on both occasions the results were set aside on the grounds of his previous felony.
Early life
John Mitchel was born at Camnish near Dungiven in County Londonderry, in the province of Ulster. His father, Rev. John Mitchel, was a Non-subscribing Presbyterian minister of Unitarian sympathies, and his mother was Mary from Maghera. From 1823 until his death in 1840, John Sr. was minister in Newry, County Down. In Newry, Mitchel attended a school kept by a Dr Henderson whose encouragement and support laid the foundation for classical scholarship that at age 15 gained him entry to Trinity College, Dublin. After taking his degree at age 19 he worked briefly as a bank clerk in Derry, before entering legal practice in the office of a Newry solicitor, a friend of his father.In early 1836 Mitchel met Jane "Jenny" Verner, the only daughter of Captain James Verner. Despite family opposition, they became engaged later in the year and were married in February 1837.
The couple's first child, John, was born in January the following year. Their second, James, was born in February 1840. Two further children were born, Henrietta in October 1842, and William in May 1844, in Banbridge, County Down, where as a qualified attorney Mitchel opened a new office for the Newry legal practice.
Early politics
One of Mitchel's first steps into Irish politics was to face down threats of Orange Order retaliation by helping arrange, in September 1839, a public dinner in Newry for Daniel O'Connell. O'Connell was the leader of the campaign to repeal the 1800 Acts of Union and restore an Irish Parliament.Until his marriage, John Mitchel had by and large taken his politics from his father who, according to Mitchel's early biographer William Dillon, had "begun to comprehend the degradation of his countrymen". Soon after the granting of Catholic emancipation in 1829, the O'Connellites challenged the Protestant Ascendancy in Newry by running a Catholic parliamentary candidate. Many members of the Rev. Mitchel's congregation took an active part in the elections on the side of the Ascendancy, and pressed the Rev. Mitchel to do the same. His refusal to do earned him the nickname "Papist Mitchel."
In Banbridge, Mitchel was often employed by the Catholics in the legal proceedings arising from provocative, sometimes violent, Orange incursions into their districts. Seeing how cases were handled by magistrates, who were themselves often Orangemen, enraged Mitchel's sense of justice and spurred his interest in national politics and reform.
In October 1842, his friend John Martin sent Mitchel the first copy of The Nation produced in Dublin by Charles Gavan Duffy, who had previously been editor of the O'Connellite journal, The Vindicator, in Belfast, and by Thomas Osborne Davis, and John Blake Dillon. Martin and Davis were both, like Mitchell himself, Protestants and graduates of Trinity College. "I think The Nation will do very well", he wrote Martin, while adding that he knew how the country "ought to take" news that an additional 20,000 troops were to be deployed to Ireland but would not put it on paper for fear of being arrested.
''The Nation''
Succeeds Thomas Davis
Mitchel began to write for the Nation in February 1843. He co-authored an editorial with Thomas Davis, "the Anti-Irish Catholics", in which he embraced Davis's promotion of the Irish language and of Gaelic tradition as a non-sectarian basis for a common Irish nationality. Mitchel, however, did not share Davis's anti-clericalism, declining to support Davis as he sought to reverse O'Connell's opposition to the government's secular, or as O'Connell proposed "Godless", Colleges Bill.Mitchel insisted that the government, aware that it would cause dissension, had introduced their bill for non-religious higher education to divide the national movement. But he also argued that religion is integral to education; that "all subjects of human knowledge and speculation --and history most of all--are necessarily regarded from either a Catholic or a Protestant point of view, and cannot be understood or conceived at all if looked at from either, or from both". For Mitchel a cultural nationalism based on Ireland's Gaelic heritage was intended not to displace the two religious traditions but rather serve as common ground between them.
When in September 1845, Davis unexpectedly died of scarlet fever, Duffy asked Mitchel to join the Nation as chief editorial writer. He left his legal practice in Newry, and brought his wife and children to live in Dublin, eventually settling in Rathmines. For the next two years Mitchel wrote both political and historical articles and reviews for The Nation. He reviewed the Speeches of John Philpot Curran, a pamphlet by Isaac Butt on The Protection of Home Industry, The Age of Pitt and Fox, and later on The Poets and Dramatists of Ireland, edited by Denis Florence MacCarthy ; The Industrial History of Free Nations, by Torrens McCullagh, and Father Meehan's The Confederation of Kilkenny.
Responds to the Famine
Mitchel blamed the British government for the famine. He wrote: "The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine...and a million and a half men, women and children were carefully, prudently and peacefully slain by the English government".On 25 October 1845, in article "The People's Food", Mitchel pointed to the failure of the potato crop, and warned landlords that pursuing their tenants for rents would force them to sell their other crops and starve. On 8 November, in "The Detectives", he wrote, "The people are beginning to fear that the Irish Government is merely a machinery for their destruction;... that it is unable, or unwilling, to take a single step for the prevention of famine, for the encouragement of manufactures, or providing fields of industry, and is only active in promoting, by high premiums and bounties, the horrible manufacture of crimes!".
On 14 February 1846 Mitchel wrote again of the consequences of the previous autumn's potato crop losses, condemning the Government's inadequate response, and questioning whether it recognised that millions of people in Ireland who would soon have nothing to eat. On 28 February, he observed that the Coercion Bill, then going through the House of Lords, was "the only kind of legislation for Ireland that is sure to meet with no obstruction in that House". However they may differ about feeding the Irish people, the one thing all English parties were agreed upon was "the policy of taxing, prosecuting and ruining them."
In an article on "English Rule" on 7 March 1846, Mitchel wrote:
The Irish People are expecting famine day by day... and they ascribe it unanimously, not so much to the rule of heaven as to the greedy and cruel policy of England.... They behold their own wretched food melting in rottenness off the face of the earth, and they see heavy-laden ships, freighted with the yellow corn their own hands have sown and reaped, spreading all sail for England; they see it and with every grain of that corn goes a heavy curse.
Lalor and the break with O'Connell
In June 1846 the Whigs, with whom O'Connell had worked against the Conservative ministry of Robert Peel, returned to office under Lord John Russell. Invoking new laissez-faire doctrines "political economy", they immediately set about dismantling Peel's limited, but practical, efforts to provide Ireland with food relief. O'Connell was left to plead for his country from the floor of the House of Commons: "She is in your hands—in your power. If you do not save her, she cannot save herself. One-fourth of her population will perish unless Parliament comes to their relief". A broken man, on the advice of his doctors O'Connell took himself to the continent where, on route to Rome, he died in May 1847.In the months before O'Connell's death, Duffy circulated letters received from James Fintan Lalor in which he argued that independence could be pursued only in a popular struggle for the land. While Lalor proposed that this should begin with a campaign to withhold rent, he suggested more might be required. Parts of the country were already in a state of semi-insurrection. Tenants conspirators, in the tradition of the Whiteboys and Ribbonmen, were attacking process servers, intimidating land agents, and resisting evictions. Lalor advised only against a general uprising, as he believed the Irish people could not overthrow British rule in Ireland with military force.
Having abandoned the hopes he had entertained with Duffy that landlords might rally to Repeal, and notwithstanding that his own ideas of agrarian reform extended little further than Tenant Right, Mitchel embraced Lalor's vision of agrarian agitation as the cutting edge of a national struggle. When the London journal the Standard observed that the new Irish railways could be used to transport government troops to quickly curb agrarian unrest, Mitchel responded that the tracks could be turned into pikes and trains ambushed. O’Connell publicly distanced himself from The Nation, appearing to some to set Duffy, as the editor, up for prosecution. In the case that followed, Mitchel successfully defended Duffy in court. O'Connell and his son John were determined to press the issue. On the threat of their own resignations, they carried a resolution in the Repeal Association declaring that under no circumstances was a nation justified in asserting its liberties by force of arms.
The grouping around the Nation that O'Connell had taken to calling "Young Ireland", a reference to Giuseppe Mazzini's anti-clerical and insurrectionist Young Italy, withdrew from the Repeal Association. In January 1847, they formed themselves anew as the Irish Confederation with, in Michael Doheny words, the "independence of the Irish nation" the objective and "no means to attain that end abjured, save such as were inconsistent with honour, morality and reason". But unable to secure a pronouncement in favour of Lalor's policy of building a campaign of resistance around tenant grievances, Mitchel soon broke with his confederates.