John Mitchel (3 November 1815 – 20 March 1875) was a Young Irelander revolutionary, pro-slavery jorunalist, Confederate sympathizer, and Independent MP for Tipperary in 1875 (succeeding Charles William White and preceding Stephen Moore). He was the grandfather of New York City mayor John Purroy Mitchel.
Biography[]
John Mitchel was born in Camnish, County Londonderry, Ireland on 3 November 1815 to a Presbyterian Ulster Scots family. He became a supporter of the Young Irelander faction of the Repeal Association during the 1840s, and he joined the staff of The Nation newspaper in 1845 and The United Irishman in February 1848. He was arrested in Rathmines in 1848 for his involvement in the Young Irelander Rebellion, and he was initially sentenced to death before his sentence was commuted to deportation to Bermuda.
Journalism and political careers[]
Mitchel in 1875
In 1853, he escaped to the United States and founded The Citizen newspaper in New York City, defending slavery by highlighting the hypocrisy of the mostly anti-Catholic abolitionists in the debate. Mitchel blamed international capitalism for the Great Famine and the slavery debate and claimed that African-American slaves were treated better than Irish industrial workers in Britain; his views on the benevolence of slavery and his opposition to the emancipation of the Jews were unpopular within the broader Young Irelander movement. In 1857, he moved to Knoxville, Tennessee and founded the Southern Citizen to promote "the value and virtue of slavery, both for negroes and white men", advocating the expansion of slavery and the reopening of the Atlantic slave trade. He was so staunchly pro-slavery that he criticized Jefferson Davis for being too moderate. During the American Civil War, two of his sons were killed while serving in the Confederate States Army, and, after the war, his attempts to restart his journalism career in New York failed, with his Irish Citizen failing to attract readers and folding in 1872. He went on to work in Paris as a financial agent for the Fenian Brotherhood before returning to America, where he began an Anglophobic campaign; Mitchel was said to hate everything he came across, including the Jews and Britain. In 1875, he was elected to Parliament as the Independent Nationalist MP for Tipperary, but his election was invalidated on the grounds that he was a convicted felon. He died in Newry in 1875 at the age of 59.