John Mitchel: Irish Nationalist, Southern Secessionist (review)

“The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine.” These are the best-known words of John Mitchel and are still held as an article of faith among those who believe that the Potato Famine was the product of British genocide. Mitchel penned them in The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) (Dublin, 1860)—a book that was dedicated to Alexander Stephens, the future vice president of the Confederacy, in an attempt to foster anti-British sentiment in the American South, where Mitchel had settled. This brings us to Mitchel’s second most quoted statement: “We deny that it is a crime, or a wrong, or even a peccadillo, to hold slaves, to buy slaves, to sell slaves, to keep slaves to their work, by flogging or other needful coercion. . . . We, for our part, wish we had a good plantation well-stocked with healthy negroes in Alabama” (p. 131).

Taken together, these quotations not only demonstrate Mitchel’s striking style and penchant for the provocative but also the paradox at the heart of his polemics—the fact that this revolutionary apostle of Irish liberty was also a wholehearted supporter of the slavery of Africans in America. As Bryan P. McGovern points out in the first full-scale biography of Mitchel to appear in more than half a century, this was one of many real or apparent contradictions that ran through his career. Mitchel was a Presbyterian who brilliantly articulated the Anglophobia of many Irish Catholics; he was a gentle and mild-mannered man (at least according to his admirers) who eviscerated his opponents in print; he loved the People in principle but despised them in practice; he idealized agrarian life but was a complete failure as a farmer. The one constant in his life was an overriding and abiding hatred of British rule in Ireland.

McGovern locates Mitchel’s thought within the traditions of classical republicanism (where liberty is compatible with slavery) and romantic nationalism (which found its focus in the American South). There is, it should be said, something of the romantic nationalist in McGovern himself; how many other historians today refer to Ireland as “Erin” or the “Emerald Isle”? While McGovern distances himself from Mitchel’s “sometimes distasteful assertions” (p. 240), he generally bends over backwards to be sympathetic to his subject. McGovern writes that Mitchel’s genocidal interpretation of the famine “may not have been completely accurate” (p. 44). In fact, it is demonstrably wrong—although this in no way detracts from its power as a myth. Similarly, McGovern attempts to soften Mitchel’s extreme pro-slavery rhetoric by contending that it was driven as much by anger toward abolitionists as by antipathy toward African Americans. The two, however, are not mutually exclusive. Or again, McGovern notes that Mitchel was a great hater, but argues that this hatred was grounded in a deep love for Ireland. Hatred that stems from idealized love is still hatred.

Along with the influence of ideas, McGovern also emphasizes the importance of experience in shaping Mitchel’s views, arguing that the Famine turned him into a revolutionary and that his disillusionment with the American North turned him into a Southern secessionist. There is some truth in this, but the reality is more complicated; Mitchel was moving in a revolutionary direction before the famine and had already denounced the “worship of the Great God Dollar” before he set foot in the United States. As so often with Mitchel, ideology trumped facts.

In discussing Mitchel’s long-range influence, McGovern shows that his writings had an enormous influence within the physical-force tradition of Irish nationalism, although he tends to exaggerate the degree of support for that tradition in both Ireland and the United States. Ultimately, however, McGovern finds Mitchel’s ecumenicalism more appealing than his extremism, and concludes the book with a passage from the preface of Mitchel’s Life of Aodh O’Neil (Dublin, 1845), with its call...