John Mitchel was an Ulster
Presbyterian barrister whose first cases involved defending Catholics in sundry
land-related law suits; evictions, disputes over improvements, the general
skewered relationship between landlord and tenant which typified the heart of
the malaise of Ireland under the Union. It seems this is where his nationalist
sympathies were first aroused, in addition to which, his family were one of
those few among Ulster Protestants to still retain a proud memory of "the men of
1798".
Daniel O' Connell's preference to distance the Repeal movement from all association with the United Irishmen and its "ungodly French republicanism" was yet another reason why he baulked under the "Liberator's" authority. William Dillon's biography of Mitchel, still the most extensive treatment, quotes extensively from his Nation articles and the tone for the most part is nothing like what you'll find in Last Conquest or Jail Journal, or especially History of Ireland since the Treaty of Limerick (which is far less polemical than either) - as he is under supervision by editor Charles Gavan Duffy and reined in by the need to keep the Repeal movement from fracturing.
He cannot diverge in other words too much from the O' Connellite line which, after the election of the Whigs in the summer of 1846, was to be broadly supportive of government policy. By the winter of 1846 these tensions were coming to the fore. Next you had the Confederate Association which was formed in January 1847, the death of O' Connell in March 1847 and the first appearance of Fintan Lalor's letters to the Nation around the same time - each of these events acted as an accelerant in the tone of his writing. When the Poor Law Act in Autumn 1847 (complete with Gregory Clause) switched the burden of relief entirely onto the Irish landed proprietors he takes another switch in gear, this time spearheading the radical section within the Confederates who sought to foment a North-South Land League as protection against the escalating cases of eviction.
In early 1848 Mitchel resigned from the Confederation to set up his own newspaper (the United Irishman) with help from Lalor, Martin, Mangan, "Eva" of the Nation and Speranza, so that by the time the French Revolution breaks out in February and all the promises it may entail for a similar combustion in Ireland his rhetoric reaches a firebrand crescendo. Finally, after referring to Clarendon as His Majesty's "chief butcher and executioner" its offices are closed and in the words of John O' Leary "the thunder and the thunderer were gone".
Now, as anyone who is even fleetingly aware of the nature of government in the 1840's realises, what you are talking about is a small unrepresentative coterie of aristocrats who are determining policy. The British working class, as represented by the Chartists, were actually in favour of Repeal
unlike either the Tories or the Whigs, and even when O' Connell repudiated the Charter, many individual Chartists still supported his Repeal campaign nevertheless.
Potential synergies were already in place for a cross-channel working class alliance due to the high outward flow of Irish immigration to England even before the famine struck. The relatively high wages to be had taking in the English harvest is what initially drove so many Irish cottiers and labourers across the channel in the first place. For many, it was just necessary seasonal work, where they could top up the 'hanging gale' in September after the spuds had been picked - 8d per diem was the going wage in Ireland - while others would no doubt stay in England, drift into the towns and try their luck.
Thomas Carlyle in his essay "On Chartism" is quite savage about this Irish demographic, blaming them in fact for all sorts of evils; under-cutting wages, crime, prostitution, lax morality - feeding the very discontent Chartism (of which he disapproved) thrived upon. The Tithe War in Ireland (contemporaneous to the Swing Riots) was perhaps triggered by a rejuvenated sense of optimism over the recent granting of Catholic Emancipation and a perception perhaps that all reform would now come at once, including the hated agrarian tax to uphold the Anglican Church of Ireland - the O' Connelite and Whig alliance at this time was a key juncture for both countries as it attempted to absorb the radical energies being expressed in both country-sides. The 1834 English Poor Law was bitterly opposed by the progressives, the trade unions, the movement for the free press etc.. out of which grew Chartism, but all along they cursed O' Connell for enabling Melbourne to dilute the reformist plank of the Whig's programme.
There was also a radical ideological undercurrent borne of the French Revolution which, given the right circumstances, could have provided the basis for a more lasting cross-channel working class partnership. These linkages were exemplified in the figure of Thomas Paine in exile becoming an honorary United Irishman not to mention Pitt's exasperation with the founding of the United Britons and the continual suspicions of Fox dabbling with the "English Jacobins" - all of whom dedicated to promoting Jacobinical French republicanism in both islands. Conservative fears were well grounded as cross-channel plotting and republican networks were being rapidly consolidated between Paris, Dublin, London and the free port of Hamburg; the O' Connor brothers in particular (uncles to Feargus O' Connor, the Chartist leader) were associates of Brinsley Sheridan & Francis Burdett, a central reform figure in the post-Napoleonic period of discontent in England that would lead to 'Peterloo'.
However, the Catholic leadership in Ireland quickly repudiated French-style republicanism and O' Connell (a witness of the violence of 1798) became a committed pacifist - though many working class Irish (Bronterre O' Brien et al.) who emigrated to England became quickly embroiled in trade union politics and reform agitation underpinned by republican principles that were more easily accommodated in the English towns. Dorothy Thomson, in fact, has a few good chapters on this in one of her Chartist studies where she notes the strong disproportionate presence of Irish among their ranks.
Feargus O' Connor's argument was that the "Six Points" if granted, would naturally lead in any case to a dismantling of the Act of Union as a fully democratised parliament would return an overwhelming majority of Repeal MP's in Ireland. It's interesting to trace the disillusionment of the Repeal Association with Russell's Whig government over the course of the famine - first manifesting over the Viceroy's rejection of its proposals in October 1845 - inaugurating the Repeal split into the Young Ireland Confederates in early 1847 and then, later that Autumn when the entire burden of relief was thrown onto the Irish Poor Law system another split again between moderate and "physical force" Confederates.
This latter fissure hinged on the attitude of Irish landlords with the moderates (Duffy, D'Arcy McGee, Smith O' Brien) still insisting they had a positive role to play vis-a vis Repeal but the physical force group (the 'Mitchelites' - Lalor, Devin Reilly, John Martin) denouncing the widespread evictions which threw them as a class 'beyond the pale' in their estimation; more part of the problem than the solution.
So, to whom does English Chartism reach out to among these three disparate groups (O' Connellite Repealers, Moderate Confederates & Mitchelites) - when its gathering a head of steam to present the Third Charter at Kennington Commons? The latter in fact and the most radical of the lot, the Mitchelites. By the time the French Revolution breaks out in February 1848 you have radical Confederates and 'physical force' Chartists sharing platforms in Manchester, London, Glasgow and Bristol - there are five Confederate clubs set up in London alone, with their presses re-producing Chartist speeches & literature (and vice versa).
When Mitchel was arrested, Chartist candle light vigils and solidarity marches are organised, while the British government, increasingly wary of a triangular relationship of solidarity developing between Lamartine's republican government, Irish Confederates and English Chartists, sets spies into all their camps and hardballs the French into repudiating both of them. As mentioned, the whole alliance between the Irish Repeal movement and the English working classes was the very synergy that the Whigs hoped to destroy in 1834 when the Lichfield House Compact was made - something many English radicals never forgave O' Connell for as it set back the programme of democratic reform in England for another decade at least.
The Irish leaders were much more conservative politically and socially and took a long time to warm to radical British working class ideas mainly because like O' Connell they were drawn from the ranks of the Catholic gentry and middle class but when the famine crisis emerged and intensified it tended to crystallize things for many of them, eventually seeing in Chartism via the stimulus of the French revolution a republican mandate that was conducive and made sense to them both.
As a postscript, in modern times, Mitchel has been maligned unfairly on two scores; his opposition to abolition and his supposed "rabid Anglophobia" (bizarrely for a self-confessed 'proud Saxon'). The context of his support for slavery is at first baffling; his father belonged to the "New Light" Presbyterians (who were the most radical and republican Ulster grouping) and a sworn United Irishman who subscribed to the tenets of the universal "Rights of Man" and the levelling principles which underpinned the French Revolution and the US Constitution.
It is thought Mitchel came under the influence of Thomas Carlyle (who himself grew to support slavery) and possibly a perverse strain of German Romanticism and was only emboldened in his defence of it when O' Connell refused to accept donations from Southern Planters. Nevertheless, the conditions which awaited immigrant Irish in America played a part too as there was a widespread perception that abolition would drastically undercut wages for working class Irish labourers - Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White is the lengthiest treatment you'll find of the inherent racism of many among the Irish community in Philadelphia, Boston and New York during this time. Smith O' Brien visited him in the South a decade after the famine and gave him a right tongue-lashing for supporting this "hideous institution", this crime "against all things human" - but still the pair remained life-long friends.
To renew the link with Carlyle. His "Reminiscenses of My Irish Journey in 1849"
is a disgraceful book full of bile and condescending hatred devoid of empathy. His description of the workhouses as piggeries, their inhabitants as sub-human, his repulsion with beggary etc. almost defy belief coming from the pen of such an honoured scribe. Its a wonder in fact such a disagreeable character as he clearly was by then was taken in so much by the Young Irelanders.
Carlyle's "French Revolution" had sealed his reputation as one of England's greatest writers and Mitchel and Gavan Duffy clearly held him in the highest esteem. The only qualifying remark you can make is that the "Journey" was published posthumously from unedited manuscripts. Charles Gavan Duffy himself produced a memoir of their tour together and in it remarked that Carlyle would never have allowed some of his "less diplomatic" remarks see the light of day.
Tellingly however, Mitchel wrote a favourable review of Carlyle's collection of Oliver Cromwell's speeches and writings in the Nation prior to Carlyle's earlier visit in 1847 - a review which Carlyle was pleasantly surprised to find was devoid of the usual nationalist invective as Mitchel was quite even-handed in assessing Cromwell's brief period in Ireland as well as demonstrating a firm grasp of all those qualities in Cromwell which Carlyle came to admire so much. So much for Mitchel "the rabid Anglophobe".
To counter the charge of emotiveness in Mitchel's writing is more straightforward and explicable. Mitchel is not a 'passive academic' but an active participant in all these events who is simply putting on paper (i.e. transcribing in blood) the thoughts and more importantly "feelings" of possibly the bulk of those forced to flee to the States. The welcome receptions in New York for Smith O' Brien, Meagher and himself were truly staggering - each of whom could have landed plum jobs on the back of their popularity with Irish-Americans.
Last Conquest is a polemic written only a few years after the 1867 Fenian uprising and is intended to rouse the spirit of Irishmen both at home and abroad in America not provide a definitive "factual" account of the famine. It also has to be balanced with the highly sanitised versions of the famine coming from many British writers, chief of whom, Trevelyan's widely read The Irish Crisis - declared the whole thing to be over in Autumn 1847!
So, context is everything when reading what he has left us from the famine years - even, and especially, the later published works which were written while he was editor for the Southern Citizen and defending slavery up to, during and after the American Civil War.
Daniel O' Connell's preference to distance the Repeal movement from all association with the United Irishmen and its "ungodly French republicanism" was yet another reason why he baulked under the "Liberator's" authority. William Dillon's biography of Mitchel, still the most extensive treatment, quotes extensively from his Nation articles and the tone for the most part is nothing like what you'll find in Last Conquest or Jail Journal, or especially History of Ireland since the Treaty of Limerick (which is far less polemical than either) - as he is under supervision by editor Charles Gavan Duffy and reined in by the need to keep the Repeal movement from fracturing.
He cannot diverge in other words too much from the O' Connellite line which, after the election of the Whigs in the summer of 1846, was to be broadly supportive of government policy. By the winter of 1846 these tensions were coming to the fore. Next you had the Confederate Association which was formed in January 1847, the death of O' Connell in March 1847 and the first appearance of Fintan Lalor's letters to the Nation around the same time - each of these events acted as an accelerant in the tone of his writing. When the Poor Law Act in Autumn 1847 (complete with Gregory Clause) switched the burden of relief entirely onto the Irish landed proprietors he takes another switch in gear, this time spearheading the radical section within the Confederates who sought to foment a North-South Land League as protection against the escalating cases of eviction.
In early 1848 Mitchel resigned from the Confederation to set up his own newspaper (the United Irishman) with help from Lalor, Martin, Mangan, "Eva" of the Nation and Speranza, so that by the time the French Revolution breaks out in February and all the promises it may entail for a similar combustion in Ireland his rhetoric reaches a firebrand crescendo. Finally, after referring to Clarendon as His Majesty's "chief butcher and executioner" its offices are closed and in the words of John O' Leary "the thunder and the thunderer were gone".
Now, as anyone who is even fleetingly aware of the nature of government in the 1840's realises, what you are talking about is a small unrepresentative coterie of aristocrats who are determining policy. The British working class, as represented by the Chartists, were actually in favour of Repeal
unlike either the Tories or the Whigs, and even when O' Connell repudiated the Charter, many individual Chartists still supported his Repeal campaign nevertheless.
Potential synergies were already in place for a cross-channel working class alliance due to the high outward flow of Irish immigration to England even before the famine struck. The relatively high wages to be had taking in the English harvest is what initially drove so many Irish cottiers and labourers across the channel in the first place. For many, it was just necessary seasonal work, where they could top up the 'hanging gale' in September after the spuds had been picked - 8d per diem was the going wage in Ireland - while others would no doubt stay in England, drift into the towns and try their luck.
Thomas Carlyle in his essay "On Chartism" is quite savage about this Irish demographic, blaming them in fact for all sorts of evils; under-cutting wages, crime, prostitution, lax morality - feeding the very discontent Chartism (of which he disapproved) thrived upon. The Tithe War in Ireland (contemporaneous to the Swing Riots) was perhaps triggered by a rejuvenated sense of optimism over the recent granting of Catholic Emancipation and a perception perhaps that all reform would now come at once, including the hated agrarian tax to uphold the Anglican Church of Ireland - the O' Connelite and Whig alliance at this time was a key juncture for both countries as it attempted to absorb the radical energies being expressed in both country-sides. The 1834 English Poor Law was bitterly opposed by the progressives, the trade unions, the movement for the free press etc.. out of which grew Chartism, but all along they cursed O' Connell for enabling Melbourne to dilute the reformist plank of the Whig's programme.
There was also a radical ideological undercurrent borne of the French Revolution which, given the right circumstances, could have provided the basis for a more lasting cross-channel working class partnership. These linkages were exemplified in the figure of Thomas Paine in exile becoming an honorary United Irishman not to mention Pitt's exasperation with the founding of the United Britons and the continual suspicions of Fox dabbling with the "English Jacobins" - all of whom dedicated to promoting Jacobinical French republicanism in both islands. Conservative fears were well grounded as cross-channel plotting and republican networks were being rapidly consolidated between Paris, Dublin, London and the free port of Hamburg; the O' Connor brothers in particular (uncles to Feargus O' Connor, the Chartist leader) were associates of Brinsley Sheridan & Francis Burdett, a central reform figure in the post-Napoleonic period of discontent in England that would lead to 'Peterloo'.
However, the Catholic leadership in Ireland quickly repudiated French-style republicanism and O' Connell (a witness of the violence of 1798) became a committed pacifist - though many working class Irish (Bronterre O' Brien et al.) who emigrated to England became quickly embroiled in trade union politics and reform agitation underpinned by republican principles that were more easily accommodated in the English towns. Dorothy Thomson, in fact, has a few good chapters on this in one of her Chartist studies where she notes the strong disproportionate presence of Irish among their ranks.
Feargus O' Connor's argument was that the "Six Points" if granted, would naturally lead in any case to a dismantling of the Act of Union as a fully democratised parliament would return an overwhelming majority of Repeal MP's in Ireland. It's interesting to trace the disillusionment of the Repeal Association with Russell's Whig government over the course of the famine - first manifesting over the Viceroy's rejection of its proposals in October 1845 - inaugurating the Repeal split into the Young Ireland Confederates in early 1847 and then, later that Autumn when the entire burden of relief was thrown onto the Irish Poor Law system another split again between moderate and "physical force" Confederates.
This latter fissure hinged on the attitude of Irish landlords with the moderates (Duffy, D'Arcy McGee, Smith O' Brien) still insisting they had a positive role to play vis-a vis Repeal but the physical force group (the 'Mitchelites' - Lalor, Devin Reilly, John Martin) denouncing the widespread evictions which threw them as a class 'beyond the pale' in their estimation; more part of the problem than the solution.
So, to whom does English Chartism reach out to among these three disparate groups (O' Connellite Repealers, Moderate Confederates & Mitchelites) - when its gathering a head of steam to present the Third Charter at Kennington Commons? The latter in fact and the most radical of the lot, the Mitchelites. By the time the French Revolution breaks out in February 1848 you have radical Confederates and 'physical force' Chartists sharing platforms in Manchester, London, Glasgow and Bristol - there are five Confederate clubs set up in London alone, with their presses re-producing Chartist speeches & literature (and vice versa).
When Mitchel was arrested, Chartist candle light vigils and solidarity marches are organised, while the British government, increasingly wary of a triangular relationship of solidarity developing between Lamartine's republican government, Irish Confederates and English Chartists, sets spies into all their camps and hardballs the French into repudiating both of them. As mentioned, the whole alliance between the Irish Repeal movement and the English working classes was the very synergy that the Whigs hoped to destroy in 1834 when the Lichfield House Compact was made - something many English radicals never forgave O' Connell for as it set back the programme of democratic reform in England for another decade at least.
The Irish leaders were much more conservative politically and socially and took a long time to warm to radical British working class ideas mainly because like O' Connell they were drawn from the ranks of the Catholic gentry and middle class but when the famine crisis emerged and intensified it tended to crystallize things for many of them, eventually seeing in Chartism via the stimulus of the French revolution a republican mandate that was conducive and made sense to them both.
As a postscript, in modern times, Mitchel has been maligned unfairly on two scores; his opposition to abolition and his supposed "rabid Anglophobia" (bizarrely for a self-confessed 'proud Saxon'). The context of his support for slavery is at first baffling; his father belonged to the "New Light" Presbyterians (who were the most radical and republican Ulster grouping) and a sworn United Irishman who subscribed to the tenets of the universal "Rights of Man" and the levelling principles which underpinned the French Revolution and the US Constitution.
It is thought Mitchel came under the influence of Thomas Carlyle (who himself grew to support slavery) and possibly a perverse strain of German Romanticism and was only emboldened in his defence of it when O' Connell refused to accept donations from Southern Planters. Nevertheless, the conditions which awaited immigrant Irish in America played a part too as there was a widespread perception that abolition would drastically undercut wages for working class Irish labourers - Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White is the lengthiest treatment you'll find of the inherent racism of many among the Irish community in Philadelphia, Boston and New York during this time. Smith O' Brien visited him in the South a decade after the famine and gave him a right tongue-lashing for supporting this "hideous institution", this crime "against all things human" - but still the pair remained life-long friends.
To renew the link with Carlyle. His "Reminiscenses of My Irish Journey in 1849"
is a disgraceful book full of bile and condescending hatred devoid of empathy. His description of the workhouses as piggeries, their inhabitants as sub-human, his repulsion with beggary etc. almost defy belief coming from the pen of such an honoured scribe. Its a wonder in fact such a disagreeable character as he clearly was by then was taken in so much by the Young Irelanders.
Carlyle's "French Revolution" had sealed his reputation as one of England's greatest writers and Mitchel and Gavan Duffy clearly held him in the highest esteem. The only qualifying remark you can make is that the "Journey" was published posthumously from unedited manuscripts. Charles Gavan Duffy himself produced a memoir of their tour together and in it remarked that Carlyle would never have allowed some of his "less diplomatic" remarks see the light of day.
Tellingly however, Mitchel wrote a favourable review of Carlyle's collection of Oliver Cromwell's speeches and writings in the Nation prior to Carlyle's earlier visit in 1847 - a review which Carlyle was pleasantly surprised to find was devoid of the usual nationalist invective as Mitchel was quite even-handed in assessing Cromwell's brief period in Ireland as well as demonstrating a firm grasp of all those qualities in Cromwell which Carlyle came to admire so much. So much for Mitchel "the rabid Anglophobe".
To counter the charge of emotiveness in Mitchel's writing is more straightforward and explicable. Mitchel is not a 'passive academic' but an active participant in all these events who is simply putting on paper (i.e. transcribing in blood) the thoughts and more importantly "feelings" of possibly the bulk of those forced to flee to the States. The welcome receptions in New York for Smith O' Brien, Meagher and himself were truly staggering - each of whom could have landed plum jobs on the back of their popularity with Irish-Americans.
Last Conquest is a polemic written only a few years after the 1867 Fenian uprising and is intended to rouse the spirit of Irishmen both at home and abroad in America not provide a definitive "factual" account of the famine. It also has to be balanced with the highly sanitised versions of the famine coming from many British writers, chief of whom, Trevelyan's widely read The Irish Crisis - declared the whole thing to be over in Autumn 1847!
So, context is everything when reading what he has left us from the famine years - even, and especially, the later published works which were written while he was editor for the Southern Citizen and defending slavery up to, during and after the American Civil War.
No comments:
Post a Comment