John Mitchel

[close] John Mitchel (Irish: Seán Mistéal; 1815 - 1875) was an Irish nationalist activist, author, and political journalist. In the Famine years of the 1840s he was a leading writer for The Nation newspaper produced by the Young Ireland group and their splinter from Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association, the Irish Confederation. As editor of his own paper, the United Irishman, in 1848 Mitchel was sentenced to 14-years penal transportation, the penalty for his advocacy of James Fintan Lalor's programme of co-ordinated resistance to exactions of 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 nationalism, in the American exile into which he escaped in 1853, Mitchel was an uncompromising pro-slavery partisan of the Southern secessionist cause. In the year he died, 1875, Mitchel was twice elected to the British Parliament from Tipperary on a platform of Irish Home Rule, tenant rights and free education, and twice denied his seat as a convicted felon.