John Mitchel

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John Mitchel (Irish: Seán Mistéal; 3 November 1815 – 20 March 1875) was an Irish republican 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 a treason felony and sentenced to 14-years penal transportation after 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, in American exile into which he escaped in 1853 Mitchel was an uncompromising pro-slavery partisan of the Southern secessionist cause. Embracing the illiberal...

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