About John Mitchel
John Mitchel (Irish: Seán Mistéal; 3 November 1815 – 20 March 1875) was an Irish nationalist 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 of Irish republicanism, in American exile into which he escaped in 1853 Mitchel was an uncompromising pro-slavery partisan of the Southern secessionist cause. Embracing the illiberal and racial views of Thomas Carlyle, he was also opposed in Europe to Jewish emancipation. In his last year, 1875, and while still resident in the United States, Mitchel was elected twice to the British Parliament from Tipperary on an abstentionist platform of Irish self-government, tenant rights and free education. Exposing, as he saw it, the "fraudulent" nature of Irish representation at Westminster, on both occasions the results were set aside on the grounds of his previous felony. == Early life == John Mitchel was born at Camnish near Dungiven in County Londonderry, in the province of Ulster. His father, Rev. John Mitchel, was a Non-subscribing Presbyterian minister of Unitarian sympathies, and his mother was Mary (née Haslett) from Maghera.
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