John Mitchel: Ecumenical Nationalist in the Old South

Historians have often portrayed John Mitchel as a radical and a dissident. They have contended that the virulent Anglophobia of this Irish nationalist and Ulster Protestant was the ideological foundation of his ardent republicanism. Cecil Woodham-Smith asserted that "John Mitchel possessed an extraordinary capacity for hatred directed at the British Government, and an equal talent for burning invective." ¹ Malcolm Brown argued that Mitchel hated almost everything he came into contact with, from British society to the Jew. ² These historians, as well as many others, condemn Mitchel in particular for his justification of slavery. Richard Davis, for instance, has maintained that racism and anti-Semitism accompanied John Mitchel's and the other Young Irelanders' brand of Romantic natioanlism in the mid-nineteenth century. ³ Others have pointed out the influences of Thomas Carlyle on Mitchel, including not only his style of writing, but also his contention of the black man's inferiority, as well as his disdain of progress. While these historians have astutely defined Mitchel in such a manner, they have yet to fully explain why Mitchel adopted a position favoring the South when he emigrated to New York in 1853, and why he eventually moved to the South and supported the Confederacy. While there is little doubt that Mitchel embraced the racism of Romantic nationalism, his proslavery stance cannot fully explain why he became such a staunch defender of the South. There were additional, and perhaps more profoundly significant reasons for Mitchel's embrace of the South. It was in the South that Mitchel's ideal of ecumenical nationalism could best be expressed because, by the middle of the nineteenth century, only in the South could an Irish Protestant also be a revolutionary Irish nationalist.

Mitchel initially received a warm welcome throughout the United States, yet he soon disccovered that his ideals did not conform to Northern mores. After escaping in 1853 from his sentence of transportation to Tasmania for treason and felony, Mitchel sailed to San Francisco, but decided to settle in New York, where his mother and brother were then living. More important, Mitchel found New York attractive because he believed the resident Irish expatriate population might support a further attempt to liberate Ireland. Mitchel published his Irish-American nationalist newspaper the Citizen there, but found himself embroiled in controvery. In 1855, he moved to Tucaleecheed Cove in eastern Tennessee, where by 1857 he established another newspaper, this one he titled Southern Citizen. In the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, Mitchel found a society that embraced the ideals that he held dear. Mitchel saw in the South a society that resisted progress, where the Roman Catholic church remained a weak institution, where Irish nationalists remained beholden to the ideals of the United Irishmen, and where Irish nationalists could be radical, as well as Protestant. The South was also a place where Protestant evangelicals were not ideologically linked to Yankee abolitionists, who hypocritically dismissed Irish men and women as a grossly inferior race. The Protestant evangelicalism that was prevalent in the North and in Ulster, as well as the Catholic church's strident response to evangelicalism there, had also meant the rise of sectarian strife. This sectarian conflict that Mitchel so despised was not as prevalent in most areas of the South. Furthermore, Mitchel also drew parallels between the struggle of Ireland and that of the South.

Mitchel's brief tenure as a Tennessee journalist and farmer was tranquil compared to his tempestuous tenure in New York. Working as a journalist in New York, Mitchel had a number of conflicts with the Irish-American Roman Catholic community in the North. Part of this conflict stemmed from Mitchel's militancy and his espousal of republicanism. In his first issue of the Citizen, Mitchel endorsed Irish independence in connection with republicanism. The clerically dominated Irish-American press then unfairly portrayed Mitchel and other Young Irelanders as red republicans or socialists, associating them with the Italian nationalists...