Mitchel, John (1815–75),
Young Irelander. The son of a Unitarian minister, Mitchel was educated in Newry and at
Trinity College, Dublin. He practised as a solicitor at Banbridge, was attracted by the writings of the Young Irelanders, and joined the
Repeal Association in 1843. In 1845 he succeeded Thomas
Davis as political leader writer for the
Nation. Deeply influenced by Thomas Carlyle and James Fintan
Lalor, and traumatized by his experience of the
Great Famine, Mitchel became an outspoken advocate of a peasant‐led revolution to establish an independent Irish republic. Increasingly at odds with more socially conservative Young Irelanders, he resigned from the
Nation in December 1847 and later, when his call for a rent and rates strike was rejected, from the
Irish Confederation. He began publishing the
United Irishman specifically as an organ of revolution in February 1848. In May he was convicted of treasonfelony by a packed jury and
transported. Escaping from Tasmania to America in 1853, Mitchel was involved in Irish‐American politics and was a leading supporter of slavery and the southern cause during the
American Civil War. In 1865–6 he was the financial agent of the
Fenian Brotherhood in Paris, but he disapproved of that movement's leadership and subsequently criticized it. In 1875 he returned to Ireland and, although disqualified as an undischarged felon, was elected MP for Co. Tipperary shortly before his death. His
Jail Journal (1854) and other writings had an immense impact on subsequent nationalist thinking.
Peter Gray