Are we right to honour John Mitchel?

It may not be the time to pose such a question, as Mayo head for their 11th All-Ireland senior football final since 1989 (including two replays), but should Castlebar Mitchels GAA club consider changing its name?

Similarly where Tralee and Newry Mitchel's GAA clubs are concerned, as well as John Mitchel's in Claudy and John Mitchel's at Glenullin, both in Co Derry, and all those other GAA clubs named after the 19th-century Irish patriot on this island, in the UK and elsewhere?

Is it time too that the people of Newry, Co Down, reconsidered the statue erected there to him in 1966, and where it stands, at John Mitchel Place?

And should the Government rename Fort Mitchel on Spike Island in Cork harbour?

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‘Deaf children fighting to be heard’

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Why? Because John Mitchel actively supported slavery and the confederate side in the US civil war, in which two of his sons died fighting against the union side, while a third son was maimed.

Plantations

Prior to that civil war, on lecture tours in the US, Mitchel argued that "negroes" were innately inferior people who had lived in a state of barbarism in Africa but had a better quality of life on plantations in America.

He claimed that a society based on free competition resulted in the exploitation of the weak, whereas the slave system provided for the social well-being of all, and that slaves on southern plantations had more comfortable lives than factory hands in Manchester or starving peasants in Mayo.

He wanted the people of the US to be “proud and fond of [slavery] as a national institution, and advocate its extension by reopening the trade in negroes”. He claimed slavery was inherently moral and a “good in itself”.

It has been estimated that about 20,000 Irish fought on the confederate side in the US civil war

In October 1857 he was involved with setting up the Southern Citizen newspaper, which promoted "the value and virtue of slavery, both for negroes and white men" and advocated the reopening of the African slave trade while also encouraging its spread into the American west.

In his view the “peculiar gentleness of demeanour and quiet courtesy” of the south in the US could be attributed to slavery, while he felt the southern custom of speaking gently to servants and slaves created “a softness of manner and tone which, in educated people, being united with dignity, and self-possession, gives me the ideal of a well-bred person”.

He denounced Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 emancipation proclamation as an incitement to insurrection for slaves that could only result in their slaughter.

Elsewhere he said of Lincoln that he was “an ignoramus and a boor; not an apostle at all; no grand reformer, not so much as an abolitionist, except by accident – a man of very small account in every way”.

Throughout the civil war, as confederate forces became depleted, Mitchel remained resolutely opposed to freeing slaves even as some confederate leaders, including Gen Robert E Lee, suggested they should be offered freedom in return for fighting for the south.

It has been estimated that about 20,000 Irish fought on the confederate side in the US civil war, while upwards of 120,000 Irish fought on the union side.

Irish brigade

At the second battle of Fredericksburg, in May 1863, Mitchel's sons James and Willie, serving in Gen George Pickett's Virginian division, fought against the union army's Irish brigade led by Thomas Francis Meagher, who had been one of their father's closest friends in Ireland.

Willie Mitchel would be killed at Gettysburg in July 1863, while another son, John, was killed fighting union forces at Richmond, Virginia, in 1864. Mitchel's remaining son, James, lost an arm in battle.

My darling, we forgot they were fighting us, and cheer after cheer at their fearlessness went up along our lines

John Mitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher had been in the Young Ireland movement in Dublin in the 1840s. Meagher had also been deported to Van Diemen’s Land, and had also escaped to the US.

But their paths diverged, with Meagher opposing slavery.

At Fredericksburg, Meagher led his men repeatedly against strong confederate forces, but each time they were repelled. Their courage won the admiration of Gen Pickett.

He wrote to his wife that as he saw their green flags approach his lines again and again his “heart almost stood still as he watched those sons of Erin . . . My darling, we forgot they were fighting us, and cheer after cheer at their fearlessness went up along our lines.”

The battle was a major defeat for the union. The Irish brigade suffered heavy casualties, with more than 900 of its 1,200 men killed or wounded.

John Mitchel wrote to Irish newspapers discouraging Irishmen from enlisting in the union army. In a letter to the Nation newspaper he applauded the bravery of those Irishmen fighting for the union but claimed that they had been fooled by false promises of land in the south and fought for a government that despised them and cared nothing for their lives.

“They are to be made use of precisely as the poor negroes are – thrust to the front in every fight, and thrown aside afterwards as broken tools. They will never hold land in the confederate country, save that regular fee-simple of six feet by two which many thousands of them now peacefully hold,” he wrote.

Is it right that such a man is remembered so generously? In club or square or place?