A life story of stubborn pride and extreme prejudice...
JOHN MITCHEL was born on November 3, 1815 near Dungiven in Co Derry, the third son of Presbyterian Minister John Mitchel and Mary Haslett. He was raised in Newry, where he went to Henderson’s School before studying law at Trinity College.
He married Jane
Verner in 1837 and the couple had two daughters and three sons. Mitchel qualified as a solicitor in 1840 but gave up his practice in 1845 to further the nationalist cause. He joined the Repeal Association, got involved in the Young Ireland movement and in February 1848 launched the United Irishman newspaper.
His writings in that publication saw him arrested and charged under the Treason Felony Act.
He was found guilty of treason and sentenced to 14 years transportation and hard labour. He left for Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) but escaped with his family to New York in 1853.
While in the US, Mitchel edited a number of newspapers and regularly championed the rights of slave-owners while also slamming papal power.
Mitchel was openly racist in his views, describing ‘negroes’ as ‘an innately inferior people’ in his justification for slavery, adding ‘we deny that it is a crime, or a wrong, or even a peccadillo to hold slaves, to buy slaves, to keep slaves to their work by flogging or other needful correction. We wish we had a good plantation well-stocked with healthy negroes in Alabama.’
He also stated it was his intention to make American people ‘proud and fond of [slavery] as a national institution, and advocate its extension by re-opening the trade in negroes’, claiming that there was an inherent morality to slavery that was ‘good in itself’.
Mitchel was also publicly anti-Semitic, opposing movements
advocating the legal emancipation of the Jews, something he believed was against the will of God.
When the American Civil War began in 1861, he supported the Confederate cause, losing two of his three sons to the conflict.
Mitchel based himself in the Confederate capital in Richmond, Virginia, and became editor of the Richmond Enquirer.
During this time, he dismissed US president Abraham Lincoln as ‘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’.
After the Confederates lost the Civil War, Mitchel moved to New York in 1865 and with the fight for slavery over, switched his attention back to Irish nationalism – spending a short time in prison before being released with help from the Fenians.
He returned to Ireland in 1875 after 27 years in exile and won a UK Parliamentary seat in Tipperary, although the result was contested on the grounds that Mitchel was a convicted felon.
However, days after that victory, he died at home in Newry at the age of 59 and is buried at the Old Meeting House Cemetery on High Street.
A statue to his memory was erected in Newry (right) in John Mitchel Place and a number of GAA clubs were named after him.