John Mitchel

This article is about the Irish activist. For the Mayor of New York City, see John Purroy Mitchel.

John Mitchel
Born(1815-11-03)3 November 1815
Camnish, County Londonderry, Ireland.
Died20 March 1875(1875-03-20) (aged 59)
Newry, Ireland
Occupations
  • Journalist
  • author
Employer(s)The Nation (Dublin), The United Irishman (Dublin), Irish Citizen (New York City), Southern Citizen (Knoxville TN), Daily Enquirer (Richmond VA); Richmond Examiner (Richmond VA), New York Daily News.
Known formilitant Irish republicanism and, in the United States, support for slavery and southern secession.[1]
MovementYoung Ireland, Repeal Association, the Irish Confederation, Fenian Brotherhood

John Mitchel (Irish: Seán Mistéal; 3 November 1815 – 20 March 1875) 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 seditious libel and sentenced to 14-years penal transportation for 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,[2][3] 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 a platform of Irish Home Rule, 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.

  1. ^ Fanning, Bryan (1 November 2017). "Slaves to a Myth". Irish Review of Books (article). 102. Retrieved 11 November 2018.
  2. ^ Pearse, P. H. (1916). The Sovereign People (PDF). Dublin: Whelan. p. 10. Archived (PDF) from the original on 9 June 2021. Retrieved 23 December 2020.
  3. ^ Russell, Anthony (2020). "John Mitchel: The forgotten man in a decade of commemorations". Belfast Media Group. Retrieved 30 July 2023.