Editing John Mitchel (section)

==United States==
Assisted by [[Patrick James Smyth|Patrick James ("Nicaragua") Smyth]], an agent of the New York Irish Directory, in June 1853 Mitchel escaped from Van Diemen's Land and made his way (via [[Tahiti]], [[San Francisco]], [[Nicaragua]] and [[Cuba]]) to [[New York City]].<ref>Russell (2015), pp. 87-99.</ref> He soon outlived the hero's welcome he received. Among his contributions to the ''Irish Citizen'' (a joint venture with Meagher) was a defence of slavery in the southern states that occasioned "much surprise and general rebuke".<ref name="O Cathaoir">{{cite news |last1=O Cathaoir |first1=Brendan |date=31 December 1999 |title=An Irishman's Diary |newspaper=The Irish Times |url=https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/an-irishman-s-diary-1.265846 |access-date=27 December 2020}}</ref>

===Pro-slavery Confederate===
Once in the United States, Mitchel did not hesitate to repeat the claim that negroes were "an innately inferior people".<ref name="Quinn">{{cite web |last1=Quinn |first1=James |title=Southern Citizen: John Mitchel, the Confederacy and slavery |url=https://www.historyireland.com/18th-19th-century-history/southern-citizen-john-mitchel-the-confederacy-and-slavery/ |website=History Ireland |date=28 February 2013 |access-date=21 December 2020 |archive-date=12 November 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201112024944/http://www.historyireland.com/18th-19th-century-history/southern-citizen-john-mitchel-the-confederacy-and-slavery/ |url-status=live }}</ref> In what was only the second edition the ''Irish Citizen'', he declared that it was not a crime "or even a peccadillo to hold slaves, to buy slaves, to keep slaves to their work by flogging or other needful correction", and that he himself, might wish for "a good plantation well-stocked with healthy negroes in [[Alabama]]".<ref>''The Great Dan'', Charles Chevenix Trench, Jonathan Cape Ltd, (London 1984), p. 274.</ref><ref>{{cite book |last1=Kennedy |first1=Liam |title=Unhappy the Land: The Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish? |date=2016 |publisher=Irish Academic Press |location=Dublin |isbn=978-1-78537-047-2 |language=en |page=215}}</ref>{{sfn|Kennedy|2016|p=215}} Subject to widely-circulated broadsides from the abolitionist [[Henry Ward Beecher]]<ref>{{cite web|title=Image 2 of Frederick Douglass' paper (Rochester, N.Y.), January 27, 1854|url=https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn84026366/1854-01-27/ed-1/?sp=1&st=text|access-date=2021-08-26|website=Library of Congress|archive-date=26 August 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210826160122/https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn84026366/1854-01-27/ed-1/?sp=1&st=text|url-status=live}}</ref> and the French republican exile Alexandre Holinski,<ref>{{cite web|last=Hogan|first=Liam|date=2020-06-03|title=Alexandre Holinski. A Letter to John Mitchel, The Liberator, 3 February 1854|url=https://limerick1914.medium.com/a-letter-to-john-mitchel-d6a4644d6c1b|url-status=live|access-date=2021-08-26|website=Medium|language=en|archive-date=26 August 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210826160124/https://limerick1914.medium.com/a-letter-to-john-mitchel-d6a4644d6c1b}}</ref> the remarks triggered a public furore. In Dublin, the [[Irish Confederation]] convened an emergency meeting to protest reports in American and British press outlets which "erroneously attributed" Mitchel's [[proslavery thought]] "to the Young Ireland party".<ref>{{citation|date=25 February 1854|title=Freeman's Journal}}</ref><ref name=":0">{{cite web|last=Hogan|first=Liam|date=4 January 2016|title=John Mitchel. White Supremacist|url=https://limerick1914.medium.com/john-mitchel-white-supremacist-1fcaf85e4e4e|url-status=live|access-date=2021-04-11|website=Medium|language=en|archive-date=11 April 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210411120519/https://limerick1914.medium.com/john-mitchel-white-supremacist-1fcaf85e4e4e}}</ref>

Provoked by the [[Nativism (politics)|nativist]] hostility they encountered in the United States, Mitchel was to further distance his countrymen from the [[African Americans|African American]] by elevating them within the white race. In 1858 he told an audience in New York that "nearly all the great men which Europe has produced have been [[Celts]]".<ref name=":0" />

In correspondence with his friend, the Roman Catholic priest [[John Kenyon (priest)|John Kenyon]], Mitchel revealed his wish to make the people of the US "proud and fond of [slavery] as a national institution, and [to] advocate its extension by re-opening the trade in [[Negro|Negroes]]". Slavery he promoted for "its own sake". It was "good in itself" for "to enslave [Africans] is impossible or to set them free either. They are born and bred slaves". The Catholic Church might condemn the "enslavement of men", but this censure could not apply to "negro slaves".<ref name="Fogarty 1921 163">{{cite book|last=Fogarty|first=Lillian|title=Fr. John Kenyon – A Patriot Priest of '48|year=1921|publisher=Whelan & Son|location=Dublin|page=163}}</ref>

The value and virtue of slavery, "both for negroes and white men", Mitchel maintained from 1857 in the pages of the ''Southern Citizen'', a paper he moved in 1859 from [[Knoxville, Tennessee]] to [[Washington D.C.|Washington D.C]].<ref name="Quinn" /> The paper circulated widely through Hibernian societies of the south. Among these it was commonplace to propose that the American slave had nothing to envy in the freedom of the Irish tenant-at-will, the [[Cotter (farmer)|cottier]] family in Ireland that the landlord might set out in the roadside ditch.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Gleeson|first=D.|date=1999|title=Parallel Struggles: Irish Republicanism in the American South, 1798–1876|journal=Eire-Ireland|volume=34|issue=2|pages=97–116|doi=10.1353/EIR.1999.0005|s2cid=164365735}}</ref> In 1854, in a widely reported address to the graduating class of [[University of Virginia]], he had linked Britain's abolitionism to her [[laissez-faire]] indifference to the Irish famine. He had also credited slavery with the contrast between southern gentility and [[Yankee]] brusqueness.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Gleeson |first=David T. |date=2010 |editor-last=McGovern |editor-first=Bryan P. |title=The Forgotten Nationalist: John Mitchel, Race, and Irish American Identity |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/40985428 |journal=Reviews in American History |volume=38 |issue=4 |pages=(658–663) 660 |doi=10.1353/rah.2010.a407693 |jstor=40985428 |issn=0048-7511}}</ref>

Mitchel's wife, Jenny, had her reservations. Nothing, she said, would induce her "to become the mistress of a slave household". Her objection to slavery was "the injury it does to the white masters".<ref name="O Cathaoir" /> There is no record or suggestion of Mitchel, himself, holding any person in bondage. When he briefly farmed in eastern [[Tennessee]] it was from a log cabin and, reportedly, with a "colored man" employed only "if he could not get a white man to work".<ref>{{Cite web|last=The New York Times|date=21 March 1875|title=Obituary, John Mitchel|url=http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1875/03/21/79962261.html?pageNumber=2|access-date=2021-04-20|website=timesmachine.nytimes.com|language=en}}</ref>

While championing the South, in the summer of 1859 Mitchel detected the possibility of a breach between France and England, from which Ireland might benefit. He travelled to Paris as an American correspondent, but found the talk of war had been much exaggerated. After the secession from the American Union of several Southern states in February 1861 and the [[Battle of Fort Sumter|bombardment of Fort Sumter]] (during which his son John commanded a [[South Carolina]] battery), Mitchel was anxious to return. He reached New York in September and made his way to the [[Confederate States of America|Confederate]] capital, [[Richmond, Virginia]]. There he edited the ''Daily Enquirer'', the semi-official organ of secessionists' president, [[Jefferson Davis]].<ref name="Quinn" />

Mitchel drew a parallel between the American South and Ireland: both were agricultural economies tied to an unjust union. The Union States and England were "''..the commercial, manufacturing and money-broking power&nbsp;... greedy, grabbing, griping and grovelling''".<ref>{{cite book|author1=James Patrick Byrne|author2=Philip Coleman|author3=Jason Francis King|title=Ireland and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History : a Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=agfvVQnBu9MC&pg=PA597|year=2008|publisher=ABC-CLIO|page=597|isbn=978-1-85109-614-5|access-date=16 October 2015|archive-date=10 May 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160510142844/https://books.google.com/books?id=agfvVQnBu9MC&pg=PA597|url-status=live}}</ref> [[Abraham Lincoln]] he described 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."<ref name="Quinn" />

The Mitchels lost both their youngest son Willie in the [[Battle of Gettysburg]] in July 1863, and their son John, who returned to Fort Sumter, in July the following year.<ref>{{Cite book |last=McGovern |first=Bryan P. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Qtg9jS2M9vYC&q=THE+FORGOTTEN+NATIONALIST:+JOHN+MITCHEL,+RACE,+AND+IRISH+AMERICAN+IDENTITY |title=John Mitchel: Irish Nationalist, Southern Secessionist |date=2009 |publisher=Univ. of Tennessee Press |isbn=978-1-57233-654-4 |pages=179–189, 184 |language=en}}</ref>

After the reverse at [[Battle of Gettysburg|Gettysburg]], Mitchel became increasingly disillusioned with Davis's leadership. In December 1863 he resigned from the ''Enquirer'' and became the leader writer for the ''Richmond Examiner'', regularly attacking Davis for what he saw as misplaced chivalry, especially his failure to retaliate in kind for Federal attacks on civilians.<ref name="Russell">{{cite book |last1=Russell |first1=Anthony |title=Between Two Flags: John Mitchel & Jenny Verner |date=2015 |publisher=Merion Press |location=Dublin |isbn=9781785370007}}</ref>

On slavery, Mitchel remained uncompromising. As the South's manpower reserves depleted, Generals [[Robert E. Lee]] and [[Patrick Cleburne]] (a native of County Cork) proposed that slaves should be offered their freedom in return for military service. Although he had been among the first to claim that slavery had not been the cause of the conflict but simply the pretext for northern aggression, Mitchel objected: to allow blacks their freedom was to concede that the South had been in the wrong from the start.<ref name="Quinn" /> His biographer Anthony Russell<ref name="Russell" /> notes that it was "with no trace of irony at all", that Mitchel wrote:<ref name="Roy">{{cite news |last1=Roy |first1=David |title=John Mitchel: a rebel with two causes remembered |url=https://www.irishnews.com/lifestyle/2015/07/11/news/john-mitchel-a-rebel-with-two-causes-remembered-160950/ |access-date=23 December 2020 |work=Irish News |date=11 July 2015 |archive-date=14 February 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210214130430/https://www.irishnews.com/lifestyle/2015/07/11/news/john-mitchel-a-rebel-with-two-causes-remembered-160950/ |url-status=live }}</ref>

<blockquote>...if freedom be a reward for negroes – that is, if freedom be a good thing for negroes – why, then it is, and always was, a grievous wrong and crime to hold them in slavery at all. If it be true that the state of slavery keeps these people depressed below the condition to which they could develop their nature, their intelligence, and their capacity for enjoyment, and what we call "progress" then every hour of their bondage for generations is a black stain upon the white race.<ref name="Dillon 109">{{cite book |last1=Dillon |first1=William |title=The Life of John Mitchel (vol. 2) |date=1888 |publisher=Kegan Paul, Trench &Co |location=London |page=109 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=r8YJAAAAIAAJ&q=page+109 |access-date=31 December 2020 |archive-date=9 June 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210609164145/https://books.google.com/books?id=r8YJAAAAIAAJ&q=page+109 |url-status=live }}</ref></blockquote>

This might have suggested that Mitchel was open to revising his view of slavery. But he remained defiant to the end, going so far as to "raise the blasphemous doubt" as to whether General [[Robert E. Lee]] was "a 'good Southerner'; that is whether he is thoroughly satisfied of the justice and beneficence of negro slavery".<ref name="Quinlan">{{cite book |last1=Quinlan |first1=Kieran |title=Strange Kin: Ireland and the American South |date=2005 |publisher=Louisiana State University Press |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=18Ep1zJm8ssC&pg=PA93 |location=Baton Rouge |isbn=0807129836 |page=93 |access-date=31 December 2020 |archive-date=9 June 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210609164059/https://books.google.com/books?id=18Ep1zJm8ssC&pg=PA93 |url-status=live }}</ref>

Mitchel would make no allowances. After the war a Union officer who claimed to have "loved John Mitchel, the Irish patriot, with a purer devotion" than any in Ireland, reported to a Boston paper that, as prisoners in Richmond, he and a fellow Irishman contacted his former idol. Not only did Mitchel refuse to have anything to do with "Lincoln's hirelings," but in the next issue of the ''Examiner'' he "directed the citizens to treat this human fungi not as prisoners of war, but as 'robbers, murderers and assassins!'"<ref>{{Cite news|date=1865-06-18|title=John Mitchel.|language=en-US|work=The New York Times|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1865/06/18/archives/john-mitchel.html|access-date=2021-04-20|issn=0362-4331|archive-date=20 April 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210420100444/https://www.nytimes.com/1865/06/18/archives/john-mitchel.html|url-status=live}}</ref>

[[Frederick Douglass]], who in visiting Ireland believed her dispossessed were bound in sorrow at their circumstances with the enslaved in America, accounted Mitchel a “vulgar traitor to liberty.”<ref>{{Cite book|last=Douglas|first=Frederick|url=https://www.scribd.com/doc/15574293/The-Frederick-Douglass-Papers-Vol-2|title=The Frederick Douglass Papers-Vol 2|publisher=Yale University Press|year=1982|pages=486n}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|last=Hogan|first=Liam|date=2020-06-19|title=John Mitchel. White Supremacist.|url=https://limerick1914.medium.com/john-mitchel-white-supremacist-1fcaf85e4e4e|access-date=2022-02-03|website=Medium|language=en}}</ref>

===At odds with Irish America===
[[File:John Mitchel Paris, 1861.JPG|thumb|upright|right|John Mitchel, Paris, 1861]]
At war's end in 1865 Mitchel moved to New York and edited the ''[[New York Daily News]]''. That same year, his continued defence of southern secession caused him to be arrested in the offices of the paper and interned at [[Fort Monroe]], Virginia, where Jefferson Davis and [[Clement Claiborne Clay|Senator Clement Claiborne Clay]] (accused of conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln) were the only other prisoners. A new Irish republican organisation, the [[Fenian Brotherhood]], lobbied for his release which was secured on condition that he left America. Mitchel returned to Paris where he acted as Fenians' financial agent.<ref>Russell (2015), pp. 160-161.</ref>

Following their [[Fenian raids|raids into Ontario and New Brunswick]] in June 1866, opposing Fenian factions proposed to unite under Mitchel's leadership. But Mitchel objected to asking people for large contributions under the delusion that, with England at peace, further military operations could be mounted whether in [[Canada]] or in Ireland. He resigned from the Brotherhood,<ref>Russell (2015), pp. 168-169.</ref> and returned to New York where, after writing for the ''Daily News,'' he resumed publication of the ''Irish Citizen''.<ref>{{Cite web|last=Quinn|first=James|date=2013|title=Southern Citizen: John Mitchel, the Confederacy and slavery|url=https://www.historyireland.com/18th-19th-century-history/southern-citizen-john-mitchel-the-confederacy-and-slavery/|url-status=live|access-date=2021-09-05|website=History Ireland|archive-date=7 April 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180407053938/https://www.historyireland.com/18th-19th-century-history/southern-citizen-john-mitchel-the-confederacy-and-slavery/}}</ref>

Mitchel's anti-[[Reconstruction era|Reconstruction]], pro-Democratic editorial line was opposed in New York by another [[Ulster]] Protestant, the [[Irish Republican Brotherhood|IRB]] exile [[David Bell (Irish Republican)|David Bell]].<ref name="Knight">{{cite journal |last1=Knight |first1=Matthew |title=The Irish Republic: Reconstructing Liberty, Right Principles, and the Fenian Brotherhood |journal=Éire-Ireland (Irish-American Cultural Institute) |date=2017 |volume=52 |issue=3 & 4 |pages=252–271 |doi=10.1353/eir.2017.0029 |s2cid=159525524 |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/680371/summary |access-date=9 October 2020 |archive-date=1 December 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201201141335/https://muse.jhu.edu/article/680371/summary |url-status=live }}</ref> Bell's "Journal of Liberty, Literature, and Social Progress", ''Irish Republic,'' cautioned readers "interested in the labor question" from associating themselves with John Mitchel. Mitchel, a "miserable man", was the proponent of a "diabolical" Democratic Party plan to impose upon blacks in the South, "as a substitute for chattel slavery, a system of serfdom scarcely less hateful than the institution it is intended to practically prolong". The policy was nothing less than "an attempt to attach to the laborer in America those medieval conditions which even Russia [<nowiki/>[[Emancipation reform of 1861|Emancipation of the Serfs, 1861]] ] has rejected".<ref>{{cite journal |title=Spirit of the Press |journal=The Irish Republic |date=4 January 1868 |volume=2 |issue=1 |page=6 |url=https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=d&d=TIR18680104.1.3&e=-------en-20--1--img-txIN--------- |access-date=11 October 2020 |archive-date=9 June 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210609164312/https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=d&d=TIR18680104.1.3&e=-------en-20--1--img-txIN--------- |url-status=live }}</ref>

The revived ''Citizen'' failed to attract readers and folded in July 1872; Bell's ''Irish Republic'' followed a year later. Neither paper was in sympathy with the ethnic-minority Catholicism powerfully represented by the city's [[Tammany Hall]] Democratic-Party political machine and, until his death in 1864, by the authority of a third Ulsterman, [[John Hughes (archbishop)|Archbishop John Hughes]]. Mitchel dedicated his paper to "aspirants to the privileges of American citizenship", arguing that the more integrated (or "more lost") among American citizens the Irish in America were "the better".<ref name="Collopy">{{cite news |last1=Collopy |first1=David |title=Unholy row – An Irishman's Diary on John Mitchel and Archbishop John Hughes |url=https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/unholy-row-an-irishman-s-diary-on-john-mitchel-and-archbishop-john-hughes-1.4183530 |access-date=21 December 2020 |newspaper=The Irish Times |date=24 February 2020}}</ref>

Already In 1854, for comments critical of the Pope's temporal powers, Mitchel had earned "wrath" of the Archbishop.<ref>Russel (2015), p. 102.</ref> But, like Mitchel, Hughes had suggested that the conditions of "starving laborers" in the North were often worse than that of slaves in the South,<ref name=abolition>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=IQ_WPseBGPcC&pg=PA114|title=Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race|last=Nelson|first=Bruce|date=2012|publisher=Princeton University Press|isbn=978-0691153124|page=114|access-date=23 December 2020|archive-date=9 June 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210609164707/https://books.google.com/books?id=IQ_WPseBGPcC&pg=PA114|url-status=live}}</ref> and in 1842 he had urged his flock not to sign O'Connell's abolitionist petition ("An Address of the People of Ireland to their Countrymen and Countrywomen in America") which he regarded as unnecessarily provocative.<ref name="Irish America"/> Nonetheless, Hughes used Mitchel's stance on slavery to discredit him: as Mitchel saw it, "copying the abolition press to cast an Alabama plantation" in his "teeth".<ref name="Collopy"/>