53 Facts About 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.

Controversially for a republican tradition that has viewed John Mitchel, in the words of Padraic Pearse, as a "fierce" and "sublime" apostle of Irish republicanism, in American exile into which he escaped in 1853 John Mitchel was an uncompromising pro-slavery partisan of the Southern secessionist cause.

John Mitchel was born at Camnish near Dungiven in County Londonderry, in the province of Ulster.

John Mitchel's father, Rev John Mitchel, was a Non-subscribing Presbyterian minister of Unitarian sympathies, and his mother was Mary from Maghera.

In Newry, John 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.

In early 1836 John Mitchel met Jane "Jenny" Verner, the only daughter of Captain James Verner.

Two further children were born, Henrietta in October 1842, and William in May 1844, in Banbridge, County Down, where as a qualified attorney John Mitchel opened a new office for the Newry legal practice.

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".

Many members of the Rev John Mitchel's congregation took an active part in the elections on the side of the Ascendancy, and pressed the Rev John Mitchel to do the same.

In Banbridge, John Mitchel was often employed by the Catholics in the legal proceedings arising from provocative, sometimes violent, Orange incursions into their districts.

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.

John Mitchel began to write for the Nation in February 1843.

John Mitchel 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.

John Mitchel 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.

John 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.

When in September 1845, Davis unexpectedly died of scarlet fever, Duffy asked John Mitchel to join the Nation as chief editorial writer.

John Mitchel left his legal practice in Newry, and brought his wife and children to live in Dublin, eventually settling in Rathmines.

John Mitchel 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.

On 25 October 1845, in article "The People's Food", John 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 14 February 1846 John 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.

O'Connell and his son John Mitchel were determined to press the issue.

Duffy suggests that John Mitchel had already been on a path that would see him break not only with O'Connell but with Duffy himself and other Young Irelanders.

John Mitchel had fallen under the influence of Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle, a High Tory notorious for his antipathy toward liberal notions of enlightenment and progress.

John Mitchel had just published his own hagiography of the Ulster rebel chieftain Hugh O'Neill, which both Duffy and Davis had found excessively "Carlylean".

When in May 1846 Mitchel first met Carlyle in a delegation with Duffy in London, he wrote to John Martin describing the historian's presence as "royal, almost Godlike", and did so even while acknowledging Carlyle's unbending unionism.

Duffy found that he had lent a journal, "recognised throughout the world as the mouthpiece of Irish rights", to "the monstrous task of applauding negro slavery and of denouncing the emancipation of the Jews," another of O'Connell's liberal causes against which John Mitchel stood with Carlyle.

Nor was it that John Mitchel decried as inopportune O'Connell's harping upon "the vile union" in the United States "of republicanism and slavery".

John Mitchel later explained that he had come to regard as "absolutely necessary a more vigorous policy against the English Government than that which William Smith O'Brien, Charles Gavan Duffy and other Young Ireland leaders were willing to pursue".

John Mitchel was convinced too, that rendered acute by the famine, the agrarian question had the potential to surmount the north-south sectarian division, and to realise the unity that had been sought in '98.

John Mitchel was "no bigot as to forms of government".

Only 16 editions of The United Irishman had been produced when John Mitchel was arrested, and the paper suppressed.

John Mitchel concluded his last article in The United Irishman, from Newgate prison, entitled "A Letter to Farmers",.

Once in the United States, John Mitchel did not hesitate to repeat the claim that negroes were "an innately inferior people".

In Dublin, the Irish Confederation convened an emergency meeting to protest reports in American and British press outlets which "erroneously attributed" John Mitchel's proslavery thought "to the Young Ireland party".

The value and virtue of slavery, "both for negroes and white men", John Mitchel maintained from 1857 in the pages of the Southern Citizen, a paper he moved in 1859 from Knoxville, Tennessee to Washington DC The paper circulated widely through Hibernian societies of the south.

John Mitchel had credited slavery with the contrast between southern gentility and Yankee brusqueness.

John Mitchel travelled to Paris as an American correspondent, but found the talk of war had been much exaggerated.

John Mitchel drew a parallel between the American South and Ireland: both were agricultural economies tied to an unjust union.

At war's end in 1865 John Mitchel moved to New York and edited the New York Daily News.

John Mitchel returned to Paris where he acted as Fenians' financial agent.

John Mitchel resigned from the Brotherhood, and returned to New York where, after writing for the Daily News, he resumed publication of the Irish Citizen.

John Mitchel dedicated his paper to "aspirants to the privileges of American citizenship", arguing that the more integrated among American citizens the Irish in America were "the better".

Already In 1854, for comments critical of the Pope's temporal powers, John Mitchel had earned "wrath" of the Archbishop.

But, like John Mitchel, Hughes had suggested that the conditions of "starving laborers" in the North were often worse than that of slaves in the South, and in 1842 he had urged his flock not to sign O'Connell's abolitionist petition which he regarded as unnecessarily provocative.

In July 1874 John Mitchel received an enthusiastic reception in Ireland.

Back in New York City on 8 December 1874, John Mitchel lectured on "Ireland Revisited" at the Cooper Institute, an event organised by the Clan-na-Gael and attended by among other prominent nationalists Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa.

John Mitchel died at Drumalane, his parents' house in Newry, on 20 March 1875.

At Mitchel's funeral in Newry, his friend John Martin collapsed, and died a week later.

Obituaries for John Mitchel looked elsewhere to qualify their acknowledgement of his patriotic devotion.

The Standard, with which John Mitchel had contended in 1847, concluded: "His powers through life were marred by want of judgment, obstinate opinionativeness [sic], and a factiousness which disabled him from ever acting long enough with any set of men".

John Mitchel "played upon international suspicion and exalted hatred of England above the love of Ireland that Davis would have taught us".

Newry, Mourne and Down District Council agreed only to "proceed to clarify responsibility for the John Mitchel statue, develop options for an education programme, identify the origins of John Mitchel Place and give consideration as to other potential issues in relation to slavery within the council area".

John Mitchel was described by Charles Gavan Duffy as "a trumpet to awake the slothful to the call of duty; and the Irish people".