As a follow up to our article create by volunteer Elwyn Soutter, on Emigrant's letters held at PRONI, one of the letters in the collection is one sent by John Mitchel from the US. John Mitchel was a member of the Young Irelanders and wrote in The Nation expanding on political opinions and movement that culminated in the Young Irelanders uprising in 1848 and his deportation and exile. To put the letter in context, the following extract is taken from the Dictionary of Irish Biography.

In April 1836 John Mitchel (1815-1875) was apprenticed attorney to John Henry Quinn of Newry, and fell in love with Jenny Verner, barely sixteen years old. In November 1836 they eloped but were discovered in Chester, and Mitchel spent eighteen days in Kilmainham jail on a charge of abduction. They eloped again and on 2 February 1837 were secretly married at Drumcree, Co. Armagh. Jenny was disowned by the Verners, but accepted by the Mitchels, and the young couple settled in Newry.

On 3 June 1839, after completing his legal training, Mitchel formed a partnership with Samuel Fraser of Newry, and was entrusted with founding a branch office in nearby Banbridge, where he moved. He built up a successful practice, but often clashed with Orange magistrates and grew increasingly indignant at the injustices suffered by local catholics. Known for his nationalist sympathies, he subscribed to the Nation and in 1841 met Charles Gavan Duffy, one of the paper's founders. Duffy was impressed by Mitchel's spirited opinions. 

Duffy introduced him to his Nation co-founders, Thomas Davis and John Blake Dillon, and Mitchel became close to both men, contributing his first article to the Nation in February 1843. In May 1843 he joined the Repeal Association and Davis appointed him to the council of the ‘82 Club in April 1845 and after Davis's death readily accepted Duffy's offer to become assistant editor of the Nation.

With the Nation, 1845–7

Mitchel moved to Dublin on 9 October 1845 and became a central figure in the Young Ireland movement. As famine loomed in early 1846, Mitchel condemned British policy in Ireland and intimated that insurrection was preferable to death from starvation, much to the embarrassment of moderate Young Irelanders. 

Partly to damp down Mitchel's militancy, on 13 July 1846 Daniel O'Connell moved a resolution in the Repeal Association that all its members repudiate the use of violence to attain political objectives. Mitchel and other Young Irelanders refused and quit the Repeal Association. He afterwards opposed all attempts at reconciliation, and denounced O'Connell for betraying and emasculating the Irish people. In January 1847 the Young Irelanders founded the Irish Confederation, and Mitchel was appointed to its policy council. In spring 1847 he was greatly influenced by the proposals of James Fintan Lalor, published in the Nation, that the Confederation should link their campaign for political independence to agrarian grievances: specifically Lalor proposed a rent strike to spark a social revolution that would eventually transfer land ownership to the peasantry. Mitchel at first hoped that Irish landlords could be persuaded to accept tenant right and self-government, and worked with them on the Irish Council, but by autumn 1847 he had become disillusioned with their conservatism and adopted Lalor's ideas even more strongly. The worsening famine sharpened Mitchel's resentment towards the British government, and in the Nation he complained that while the Irish starved, shiploads of food were leaving Irish ports. He claimed that the famine was not a natural disaster but a deliberate attempt to exterminate the Irish peasantry. Obsessed by the pursuit of profit and the callous doctrines of political economy, British politicians were using famine to clear Ireland's ‘surplus population’ from the land, and create a huge commercialised cattle and grain farm to feed Britain's growing industrial population.

Revolutionary

His views had now diverged sharply from Duffy's, and after Duffy censored some of his Nation articles Mitchel resigned from the paper in December 1847; he and Duffy soon became bitter enemies. Smith O'Brien, too, sought to distance the Confederation from Mitchel's militancy, and proposed resolutions reiterating the Confederation's commitment to constitutional methods. Mitchel argued strongly that constitutional agitation had proved useless, and called for a rent and rates strike and forcible resistance to evictions to provoke a national insurrection. O'Brien's resolutions were, however, overwhelmingly adopted on 4 February 1848 and Mitchel withdrew from the Confederation's council. He then founded a weekly newspaper, the United Irishman, enlisting his friends Martin, Thomas Devin Reilly, Fr John Kenyon, and James Clarence Mangan as contributors. First published on 12 February 1848, its violent revolutionary tone caused a sensation. Attempting to goad the government into draconian action, it denounced the lord lieutenant, Clarendon, as a ‘butcher’, called openly for national insurrection, and carried articles on pike drills and street fighting. Welcoming the French revolution of February 1848, the paper proclaimed its republicanism, called for social revolution, and attempted to persuade working-class Ulster protestants that government and aristocracy were using sectarian distinctions to blind them to their true interests. 

Mitchel's increasingly seditious speeches and articles eventually led to his prosecution under the treason felony act (passed on 22 April 1848 primarily to deal with Mitchel's writings). On 13 May 1848 he was arrested in his home at 8 Ontario Terrace, Rathmines, and imprisoned in Newgate. Tried at Green St. courthouse (25–7 May), he was found guilty by a packed jury and sentenced to fourteen years transportation. The severity of the sentence and Mitchel's dignified bearing won him considerable sympathy from nationalists, and contributed to the Young Irelanders’ decision to rise in July 1848. Taken to Spike Island, he was transported to Bermuda, arriving 20 June.

Transported, 1848–53

Imprisoned in the convict hulk Dromedary, Mitchel was relatively well treated, but his health suffered in Bermuda's intense humidity. An asthmatic, he had several near-fatal attacks, and the authorities decided to move him to a drier climate. On 22 April 1849 he sailed on the Neptune with hundreds of other convicts for the Cape of Good Hope. Beset by contrary winds, the ship only arrived at the Cape on 19 September 1849, but locals refused to accept any more convicts. Despite his personal discomfort, Mitchel greatly enjoyed the embarrassment of the British authorities. On 19 February 1850 the Neptune sailed for Van Diemen's Land, docking at Hobart on 7 April. Mitchel was given a ‘ticket of leave’, allowing him freedom to travel within his resident police district, once he gave his parole not to escape. After two years of confinement and long voyages, he was at death's door, and was allowed to live with John Martin (transported the previous summer) at Bothwell, a village forty-six miles inland from Hobart. With Martin's care, the pleasant climate, and regular exercise, Mitchel's health improved rapidly, and he travelled across the island meeting other transported Young Irelanders including Thomas Francis Meagher and Smith O'Brien; despite their political differences Mitchel and O'Brien much admired each other. Mitchel's wife and five children arrived in Hobart on 18 June 1851, and in August 1851 the family moved to Nant Cottage, near Bothwell. Mitchel took up sheep farming but soon became bored and when in January 1853 P. J. Smyth arrived to assist an escape attempt, he decided to take his chances. On 9 June he withdrew his parole and, after several failed attempts to get off the island, sailed from Hobart to Sydney on 19 July, arriving in New York (via Tahiti and San Francisco) on 29 November 1853.

New York, 1854

After an enthusiastic welcome from a large crowd, he went to Union St., Brooklyn, to join his mother, sister, and brother William (1830–91), who had emigrated during his exile. (William had been sent to America by the Irish Confederation to solicit money and arms after Mitchel's conviction in May 1848) From 7 January 1854 Mitchel published the weekly Citizen, aimed at the Irish-American community. In the Citizen he serially published his famous ‘Jail journal’ (January–August 1854), his classic prison memoir and denunciation of British imperialism. With war about to break out between Russia and Britain, he unsuccessfully sought aid from the Russian ambassador for Irish independence. He also helped found the Irishmen's Civil and Military Republican Union in New York in April 1854 to take advantage of British difficulties. Mitchel hoped that the Crimean war, or an even greater war in the future, would revitalise Europe and allow Ireland to seize its independence. He believed that decades of peace had made Europe decadent and facilitated British global economic hegemony. 

Soon after his arrival in New York, Mitchel became involved in bitter controversy with the city's abolitionists after he published an article approving of slavery and wishing that he could afford an Alabama plantation, well stocked with slaves.. Mitchel was roundly condemned for his inhumanity and racism, but continued to bait evangelical abolitionists.  Mitchel believed that catholicism was a vital element of Irish nationality, and a strong barrier to the evils of modernity. Such sympathies did not, however, prevent him in autumn 1854 from severely attacking John Hughes, catholic archbishop of New York, for criticising the Young Irelanders. Many New York catholics were appalled at Mitchel's abuse of Hughes, and the Citizen lost thousands of readers.

Champion of the South, 1855–65

Deciding to leave New York, he sold the Citizen and moved to eastern Tennessee in March 1855. He bought a farm at Tucaleechee Cove, a remote valley in the Alleghenies (May 1855–September 1856), supplementing his income with lecture tours, but his wife never took to life in the woods, and they moved to Knoxville. In October 1857 he began publishing the Southern Citizen to defend the doctrine of states’ rights and promote slavery. He regarded the agrarian and slave-holding South, with its self-reliant and martial citizens, as a haven from industrial capitalism and a latter-day version of the classical republics he so much admired. In contrast he equated the industrial North with Britain, claiming that it oppressed the South as Britain oppressed Ireland, and that in both cases he sought the repeal of unjust unions. In the Southern Citizen he published a series of letters condemning the British government's policy in Ireland during the famine, which later appeared in book form as The last conquest of Ireland (perhaps) (1860). Deciding to transfer the Southern Citizen to Washington, Mitchel moved there in December 1858. 

Last years, 1865–75

Mitchel became financial agent for the Fenians in Paris, sailing on 10 November. He had always had reservations about Fenianism, but believed that since war between Britain and America was possible, a formidable army of battle-hardened Fenian soldiers might be landed in Ireland. He dispensed Fenian money but remained unimpressed by their leadership, especially James Stephens, and by the factionalism of American Fenians. Believing that the movement had settled back into its usual cloak-and-dagger ineffectiveness, he resigned on 22 June 1866 and returned to Richmond in October 1866. He spent the next year writing his History of Ireland from the treaty of Limerick (1867), which became a standard nationalist account. In October 1867 he moved to New York and published the weekly Irish Citizen, which strongly criticised the delusions of the Fenians, the moderation of the Home Rule party, and the reconstruction policies of the American government. 

Poor health stopped him writing or lecturing (the Irish Citizen ceased publication in July 1872), and he fell into poverty, but was assisted in November 1873 by a £2,000 testimonial raised by William and John Dillon, sons of his old friend. With John Dillon he discussed standing for parliament; he was still contemptuous of parliamentary politics and had no intention of taking his seat, but hoped that his candidature would embarrass the British government and remind nationalists of an alternative to the peaceful pursuit of home rule. He stood as an independent nationalist for Cork city in the general election of February 1874, but was beaten. In July 1874 he returned to Ireland for the first time since 1848 to visit family and friends, and with his daughter Isabel attended a dinner in his honour at the house of Lady Wilde in Merrion Square.

Mitchel returned to New York in October 1874. In February 1875 he learned of a forthcoming by-election in Co. Tipperary and, despite his worsening health, sailed to Ireland to contest the seat, arriving at Queenstown on 17 February to find he had already been elected the previous day. Parliament declared him ineligible as an undischarged felon, but Mitchel announced he would stand as often as he was unseated. After resting in Cork, he travelled to Dromalane, near Newry, and on 11 March another poll took place in which Mitchel soundly beat the tory candidate. Over the next few days his health declined rapidly, and he died 20 March 1875 at Dromalane. He was buried in his parents’ grave in the unitarian cemetery, High St., Newry, where a monument was later erected by his widow; he was also commemorated by a statue in Newry. His wife and three of his children survived him: James (1840–1908), a New York City fire marshal whose son John Purroy Mitchel (1879–1918) became mayor of New York (1913–17), Mary (1846–1910), and Isabel (1853–79); Henrietta (1842–63) had died in a Paris convent.

The following is a transcription of a letter he wrote to a family friend in Ireland:

Source: PRONI ref: D249/1

Letter from John Mitchel, Tucaleechee Cove, Tennessee, USA, to Miss Thomson. Dated 1st November 1855.

The gentle reproach conveyed to me in your letter to Jenny of September 7th (received only a week ago) in form of a question whether I was so very much occupied that I could not write, has goaded and stung me into taking the decided step being your correspondent this turn instead of my wife. I need not begin to excuse myself, which would only make matters worse, but in fact so long as your pleasant letters came periodically to Jenny without my earning them by my own exertions - and I got the reading of them - I was willing to evade my own share of the writing. This you may say if you like was not honest. But you are not to imagine that I was indifferent to the correspondence. You and Mr[?] Pigot are the only two persons in all Ireland who even write to me (save a very rare note from one of my sisters) and I could by no means dispense with the letters of either.

You have already some idea of our remote and solitary wigwam at the back of the Alleghanies, a 1100 miles from New York and in the present state of communications, eight or ten days from that city reckoning by the post office, though only five of exactual travelling. And you wonder at my having taken my family to such a place. To some such place I was obliged to bring them or else submit to a species of life in New York which (without some mere hope of a grand success) is to me the most wasting drudgery. It happens indeed that the particular spot I have lighted upon, though certainly one of the most beautiful is about the most barbarious in the United States. I never, in any part of the world, met so ignorant people except in Tahiti. Their long isolation from the rest of the country for want of railroads or any good roads has kept them at about the stage of 'progress' in which the country parts of the North of Ireland were forty years ago or indeed worse for there are no people of education or refinement anywhere near.

And an emigrant to the new territory of Kansas, away between the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains would from the very first have a far better chance of meeting men and women of some cultivation. Yet I rather like all this. I have contracted (owing to an exaggerative habit) a diseased and monomaniacal hatred of 'progress' and would like rather to go back and see people going back. Besides I suppose the five years of my exile, most of that time passed in living among remote forests, have given me, if not a taste, at least a habit, and I feel at home in the woods.

You see I do not altogether triumph in, or so much as entirely defend this way of life. It is not natural. Society is natural to us, though this sort of thing was natural to the Cherokees. In fact those red savages, as well as the tribe of white, or sallow savages who have succeeded them at society. Like sought and found like.Cherokee smoked the pipe with Cherokee and Hoosier with Hoosier [ ] enjoys life at Cornshuckings and swaps horses and ideas at camp meetings.

 Now I don't pretend that we have exactly found our place and when I resolve to leave New York if I had possessed independent means I should certainly have crossed the sea to la belle France, with all my household. But avails repining? Who does find his place? and being here among the hossiers (Tennessians are called Hossiers as the people of Ohio rejoice in the title of Buckeyes and Kentuckians I believe are Red Horses) it remains to make the best of it. For the family, or at least for Jenny and the little girls this is a dernier ressort. It is bad enough but then it is better than dependence. It is better than living as you first found them and on the whole it is necessary to admit that it is a misfortune to a family to have its head transported, even though it be in the most patriotic and glorious manner - though it makes a 'sensation' and be alleviated by plenty of honourable mention. 

Reading over what I have written I found it looks dreary and will give you too dismal an impression of our lot, and of our endurance thereof. But there is also a bright side. Imagine a most lovely valley five miles long, varying in breadth from a quarter of a mile to a mile and a half, lying among the parallel folds of the great Alleghanies. Through it gushes and flashes one of the brightest and most crystalline of rivers, a river about thrice the size of the Bray river, whose banks are sometimes corn fields fringed with trees, sometimes shelving beaches of sand, sometimes precipices twice the height of St George's steeple crowned and plumed with oaks and pines and whose waters here dash and race over broken rocks, there rippled gently over a pebbly bed, and there again lie in a still black pool almost hidden from the scene[?] by overarching boughs of great trees. Into or out of this valley you must go through a glen seven miles in length where the river has cut is way through the Chilhowee Mountains, travelling sometimes on one bank, sometimes on the other and fording the river five times (for bridge there is none) and in short if you multiply and magnify the Dargle by about six in all its proportions, you will have some faint notion of the form of the glen.

But then who is to give you a notion of its colours of course all those mountains and all the hills round about and far and near are covered with unbroken forest of vast timber trees - oak, beach, maple,cycamore, chestnut, pine, cedar, poplar, hickory and forty other sorts and at this 'Fall' season these trees robe the hills with a mantle of many colours. You have heard of the splendour of American woods in the Fall. Then bethink you that we are here in the most luxuriantly timbered region of all America and under a Southern sun, golden yellow, deep orange, burning scarlet, blood red, turkey red, crimson up to Imperial Tyrian purple, the weft and the woof of this grand forest mantle shows them all and relieves them so cunningly with dark masses of pine and green boscages of cedar and hemlock that there is nothing glaring or dazzling.

But even the autumn foliage is eclipsed by the spring and summer flowers azaleas, kalmias, rhododendrons and multitudes of others which I am not botanist enough to be able as yet to identify or name. Now young lady at the very head of the above mentioned valley up in the nook where the river first bursts out from its mountain solitudes and its pine-shaded ravine expands into the vale of Tuckaleechee - up so high that my only neighbours (going up the river) are the bears and deer I have pitched my tent a wigwam.

I am the highest man in the valley - so that your[?] little French teacher truly said I was tres ambitieux - and the Hoosiers can no more muddy the water flowing past my door than the lamb could disturb the wolfs drinking. Here we have 132 acres of land, 80 of those acres cleared [?] and very fertile- a log house which I am just about to enlarge by a good addition and a good large barn just now full of the fruits of the earth. Two horses, three cows and that indispensable part of a Tennessians stock a multitude of pigs. Now if we had our house once enlarged and made comfortable and if we could but persuade even one family of our acquaintance to come and settle near us, don't you think life might be endured?

Moreover this East Tennessee is in a state of transition. Railroads are pushing into it in all directions. The original Hoosiers of these parts (as always happens in such cases) will infallibly retire farther west and people from the more eastern states will press in bringing with them all the improvements and elegancies of life, wherein you know this Yankee nation whips the airth. Indeed it is an amusing people or as it frequently says itself a peculiar people. I will give you an anecdote quite characteristic. About 16 miles from this place stands one of the great watering places of the south, Montodle[?] Springs a vast wooden house with accommodation for 3 or 400 boarders where many families from Georgia, Alabana, Louisiana etc spend sometime in summer and drink the sulphurous water.

About six weeks after I had come to Tuca[leechee], a well-dressed stranger on horseback made his appearance. I was standing at my own gate. He looked curiously at me and then at the wigwam and said he guessed I must be the gentleman he was in search of. There upon he pulled out of his pocket a packet of papers whereby I learned that the inmates of Montoolay[?] Southern [ ], members of the legislature and no end of colonels, on learning that I was near at hand had convened a public meeting of the guests male and female, appointed a chairman named four secretaries and having read the requisition proceeded to business. Five resolutions previously prepared were then moved and seconded with appropriate speeches to the effect that having heard I was settled in Tennessee they welcomed me to the South: that they sympathized with me as a patriot and martyr and admired me as a scholar and a gentleman; that they warmly approved my 'conservative' principles [in the matter of slavery]; finally that actuated by all these feelings, and having a strong desire to see me and make my acquaintance they thereby invited me to go 'together with my esteemed lady' and partake of the hospitalities of Montvale[?] Springs at such time and so long as might suit my convenience - that is to say go and stop at that hotel at their expense. Then the chairman having been moved from the chair and thanked for his dignified conduct, the four secretaries dispatched the courier to find me out at Tuckaleechee.I think you will laugh. We laughed but not in a ambassador's face and I wrote a very curt answer saying I was compiled by engagements at home to decline their more than polite invitation and besides that I was not a martyr but a farmer. In fact so curious are these people - such an appetite have they for new faces and making what they call acquaintance with all persons whose names are familiar to them, and hearing them talk and testing their capacity for public speaking - a thing for which there is a devouring passion here that I knew very well what they wanted was to set me up upon a platform and by pretending monstrous enthusiasm and sympathy and all that to set me a vociferating there for their amusement. 

We have an excellent neighbour on one side of us, I mean the mountains. The principal change of the Alleghanies which are here very high, rise just behind us and there is a tract of 25 miles across all covered with mountains highly timbered and swarming with bears, wolves, panthers and deer. When you descend into low country on the other side you are in North Carolina. Some of the peaks near this are very lofty 6,000ft high but the average heights of the Alleghanies in Tennessee is not above 4,000. A pack of six wolves was traced lately to within a hundred yards of our house and one night being up in the mountains pretty late James and I,within a mile and a half of our own door came upon three well grown bear cubs as large as big black mastiffs. Deer have been killed at least to the number of two dozen within a mile of us since we came and they very often trot past the house or through my fields. We have seen but one rattlesnake and killed it but other snakes are numerous and some venomous ones.

 So much for America and Tuckaleechee. Now for Ireland. You think nationality is dead. What does Mr Mitchel think? why there is no trusting to appearances in judging a popular feeling especially in Ireland. I believe, or rather I know that the disaffection of a great mass of the people  against English law and government is just as profound and intense as ever. The meaner and more abject is their pretence of loyality for tacit allowance ofthat law and government. What is more, disaffection among the upper, the land Protestant classes is by no means rare and this will show itself the more boldly and decidedly (so chivalrous are the upper classes) as England's power and prestige wane more and more.Wane as they will, young lady, and very soon.

And the Revolution which was ready and of to have broken out in England forty years ago but was forcibly and unnaturally stiffled and smothered then[?] will come. Probably this will happen to England before there is any great sign of Irish nationality dividing and then I will tell you what I think may very possibly happen. While a sweeping Revolution rages over England and a violent end is put to Church and Crown, to noblesse rent primogeniture and the funds then the aristocracy, many of them being connected already with Ireland by property, may make their final stand for law and order and monarchy and Christianity in Ireland. The Catholic clergy are already on the side of all that - the aristocracy of England already hankering greatly after the Ancient Church and in such a case it would be the obvious policy of that aristocracy to become enthusiastic Catholics and determined Nationalists, with Erin go Bragh and first gem of the sea and all that. And they would do it and then you know the attachment of our poor people to high descent and gentle blood and the 'old stock' and you can fancy their zeal and function of the priests.

Then would Ireland be the Véndee of the British revolution and would not be conquered so easily as La Vendée. So should we achieve our nationhood and get our parliament in College Green the wrong way. Not that even this form and method of reestablishing the nation would not be a great blessing. Any other arrangements than that which makes Irish laws be made in London would bea blessing.There is another programme of Ireland's electing which sometimes I think may be the right one. It would suit in case of a war happily breaking out between England and America. But after all you know this is mere guessing.There will probably be plenty of war in the world and how that may tumble nations against one another it would be hard to predict but of the main fact Iam well assured: there is as deep disaffection now in Ireland as there was in [18]48. This letter must close sometime.

So adieu and whether we have our parliament in College Green or not be assured that I am and shall continue  with great regard and respect your friend [signed] John Mitchel

Sources

The Dictionary of Irish Biography content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license.

Image of John Mitchel in public domain

Read More

guide to searching for your northern irish ancestors

Armagh