John Mitchel - The United States

The United States

Mitchel, with aid from Patrick James Smyth, escaped from the colony in 1853 and settled in America where he edited the collections of the poetry of Mangan and Davis, He established the radical Irish nationalist newspaper The Citizen in New York, as an expression of radical Irish-American anti-British opinion. The paper was controversial for its defence of slavery by highlighting the (supposed) hypocrisy of the abolitionists in the debate. Mitchel claimed that slaves in the Southern USA were better cared for and fed than Irish cottiers, or industrial workers in English cities like Manchester. His views were explicitly racist, negroes were "an innately inferior people" opining "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."

Mitchel was a critic of international capitalism, which he blamed for both the pending Civil War and the Great Hunger. In 1861 Mitchel wrote The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), a jeremiad accusing England of "deliberate murder" for their actions during the 1845 Irish famine. This tract did much to establish the widespread view, as Mitchel famously put it, that "The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine."

Mitchel resigned from the paper and toured as a spokesman for the South. In 1857 in Knoxville, Tennessee, he founded a new paper, the Southern Citizen to promote "the value and virtue of slavery, both for negroes and white men", advocate the reopening of the African slave trade and encourage the spread of slavery into the American West. He moved the paper to Washington in 1859. When the Civil War broke out in 1861 he moved to Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, to edit the powerful Richmond Enquirer. As a spokesman for the cause of the South, he was the first to claim that slavery and abolition were not the cause of the conflict but simply used as a pretence. Two of his sons died in the war, and a third lost an arm. He equated the Confederacy with Ireland, as both were agricultural economies tied into an unjust union. The Union States and England were:"..the commercial, manufacturing and money-broking power ... greedy, grabbing, griping and groveling".

Mitchel fell out with Jefferson Davis, whom he regarded as too moderate. Abraham Lincoln was described as follows: "...he was 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."

Mitchel moved to New York City in 1865 to edit the Daily News. The Tweed Machine put him in prison for a short time but he was released with the assistance of the Fenians. Slavery was dead and Mitchel returned his focus to the issue of Ireland. He founded his third American newspaper, the Irish Citizen in New York City, but the paper failed to attract readers and folded in 1872. In part this was because he used it to criticize the Irish-born Catholic archbishop of New York, John Hughes. Mitchel worked for a time in Paris as financial agent for the Fenians before again returning to the States.