John Mitchel: Ecumenical Nationalist in the Old South

Abstract

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.