John Mitchel. White Supremacist.

Hailed by Irish nationalists in the early 20th century as being singularly emblematic of the Irish struggle for independence, Mitchel was nonetheless a virulent pro-slavery racist and propagandist for the Confederacy. What does the last century of quiet reverence of this figure say about our identity and our values?

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. — Terence (163 BC)

If you are asked ‘Would you like an Irish Republic with an accompaniment of slave plantations?’ answer quite simply, ‘Yes.’ — John Mitchel (1854)¹

“[John Mitchel] is more Southern than the extremist Southern soldier of Slavery; and like most converts of the kind, he makes an ass of himself avowing his conversion.” — New York Tribune, 1 December 1858

When John Mitchel died on the 20 March 1875 many people in Ireland mourned his passing as one of the most revered Irish patriots. He had just sailed to victory in a by-election in Co.Tipperary and his popularity was arguably greater than ever. Funeral processions and demonstrations were held in cities all across the United States and Ireland. In Limerick thousands marched through the city in his honour, including Michael Hogan ‘The Bard of Thomond’ who rode in an open carriage “with the harp of Erin draped in mourning by his side.”²

The obituaries in the Irish press were overwhelmingly positive and they paid tribute to his life’s work in the cause of Irish Freedom. His memory was to be constantly evoked by Irish nationalists for inspiration, leadership and sacrifice. As the nineteenth century progressed branches of the Irish National Land League were named in his honour and Michael Davitt implored his audiences to listen to the “words of the illustrious Mitchel.” Into the twentieth century we find the Sinn Fein dominated Nenagh Town Council during the Irish War of Independence changing the names of many streets to fête the “great figures of Irish history.” Among the various streets that were renamed was Queen Street, which was now relabelled Mitchel Street. The Nenagh Guardian’s editorial revealed how many nationalists viewed Mitchel’s legacy at this time.

This street should be happy in its new name. No man has left a greater mark in Irish history than John Mitchel. No man was more upright and uncompromising. No man served Ireland better. He was gifted with the most brilliant intellectual powers, and one of the proudest traditions of Tipperary is that in the face of every chicanery he was returned as its Parliamentary representative in dark and oppressive times.³

From Irish independence to the present day, numerous GAA clubs, a military fort on Spike Island, a Park in Derry, a Place in Newry and many streets all across the country were all named in his honour. A statue of Mitchel was also erected in his hometown of Newry. But is there something amiss here?

On the same day that Mitchel died, the Nenagh Guardian ran an syndicated article entitled ‘An American View of John Mitchel.’ This was coincidental and it would probably have been withdrawn if they had learnt of his passing in time. This article was a reprint of a Chicago Tribune piece which sought to remind their Irish American readers that Mitchel was a “recreant to liberty” and that “the Union masses of the American people have so little sympathy with [him]” because of his racism and support for the Confederacy.⁴ This was an isolated piece of accidental criticism in a sea of glowing tributes across the entire Irish press, but what, exactly, was the Chicago Tribune referring to? Let’s take a look.

Mitchel was a pro-slavery white supremacist who wanted to reopen the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

The Dublin printer and activist Richard Davis Webb co-founded the Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society in Dublin in 1837. He was arguably the most active, influential and well connected anti-slavery campaigner in Ireland in the 19th century. In 1847 he viewed John Mitchel as a hero, one who “loved Ireland and sacrificed everything for Ireland.”⁵ It was around this time that Webb hung a portrait of John Mitchel on the wall of his son’s bedroom as a mark of how esteemed he was in that household.

But when Richard’s son Alfred returned from Australia in 1855 he was surprised to find that the portrait had been removed from the wall and discarded. Why did Richard D. Webb change his mind so completely about John Mitchel?

Mitchel’s statue in Newry, via Wikimedia

As early as 1847, and six years before he ever set foot on American soil, John Mitchel was making it clear that he believed racialised chattel slavery was a legitimate and moral institution. The basis for his belief was apparently quite simple. Mitchel was a proud racist, one who believed in the innate supremacy of the “white race”. He believed negroes were inherently inferior, subscribing fully to what Daniel O’Connell called “the filthy aristocracy of the skin.”⁶ Some of his contemporaries were appalled by his racism. Charles Gavan Duffy in particular found Mitchel’s pro-slavery beliefs to be repellent. In his memoirs Duffy recounted how he refused to publish some of Mitchel’s writings in the Nation newspaper as he had

attempted to employ the journal which was recognised throughout the world as the mouthpiece of Irish rights in the monstrous task of applauding negro slavery and denouncing the emancipation of the Jews. I would not permit him to make me responsible for these opinions at that time, nor would I permit any man in the world to do so to-day.⁷

Duffy suggests that Mitchel “learned these opinions” from that other famous racist and pro-slavery advocate, Thomas Carlyle. It’s hard to argue with Duffy’s observation that Mitchel’s racist beliefs were “strangely unsuitable equipment for a spokesman of Irish liberty.”⁸

Mitchel was a vociferous critic of liberalism, believing that the 19th century was “sadly retrogressive.” Talk of reforming criminal offenders was “not the reasonable object of criminal punishment.” His extreme stance on social issues included a belief in capital punishment for crimes such as burglary, forgery and robbery.

Why hang them, hang them….you have no right to make the honest people support the rogues….and for “ventilation”…I would ventilate the rascals in front of the county jails at the end of a rope.⁹

In 1853 Mitchel escaped from the penal colony of Tasmania and settled in New York. He was warmly greeted and highly regarded by his hosts, both North and South. But he soon became unwelcome there for many reasons, not least his outspoken pro-slavery views which shocked and confused many of his supporters on both sides of the Atlantic.

Mitchel and his former Young Irelander colleague, Thomas Francis Meagher (who arrived stateside in 1852), set up the Citizen newspaper in New York in 1854. Around this time, James Haughton, an abolitionist, repealer and social reformer, wrote to Mitchel and Meagher asking them to “be consistent” and to condemn slavery while they were resident in the “land of slave drivers”. Meagher was cautious in his response, deciding to defer making any comment either for or against slavery while he was not yet a citizen of the U.S. But Mitchel in true fire-eater form published an infamous and sardonic open letter in the Citizen which concluded as follows

We deny it is crime, or a wrong, or even a peccadillo, to hold slaves, to buy slaves, to sell slaves, to keep slaves to their work by flogging or other needful coercion we, for our part, wish we had a good plantation well stocked with healthy negroes in Alabama.¹⁰

That Fallen Leader

This statement caused shockwaves and was quoted for many years.¹¹ Mitchel was vilified by much of the press in the U.S. which was a sea change from when he first arrived. He was described by one newspaper as “one of the noblest apostles of the creed of human equality” but now he was labelled “rabid”, “insane”, “hypocritical” and a “meddler” by the shocked editor.¹² A representative of French republican exiles in New York publicly scolded him for betraying his supposed principles.

If Ireland alone interests you, you serve her cause badly, believe me, in separating it from that of the other victims of tyranny. You maintain her rights with a bad grace, when you deny the rights of a vast portion of humanity.

It was not a surprise that support for his opinion emanated solely from pro-slavery publishers and apologists.

Meanwhile in Ireland the Irish Confederation held an emergency meeting to discuss Mitchel’s revelation. They immediately distanced themselves from the reports in parts of the American and English press which “erroneously attributed such [pro-slavery] sentiments to the Young Ireland party.”¹³ Historian Paul Huddie has recounted how James Ward, President of the Painter’s Association, simply asked, ‘is he mad?’ and declared that Mitchel’s own New York newspaper, the Citizen, ‘had done more damage to the national cause’ of Ireland than any other person or publication. More vociferous still was a Mr. Foresman who stood up and stated that

I as one of the Confederates, indignantly repudiate the teaching of that fallen leader…if Ireland is to be separated from England only by such materials, and a slave-holding republic established for her rule, Mr Moses Mitchel shall not have me as a follower to that promised land.¹⁴

In the aforementioned letter Mitchel also managed to slander James Haughton, by insinuating that as a corn merchant he had stockpiled food during the Famine to raise prices. This was a knowingly deceitful slur that ignored the fact that Haughton was one of the Trustees of the Metropolitan Relief Committee in Dublin which fed thousands of people in Dublin during the Famine, until it went broke. This Committee, in the absence of sufficient Governmental relief, called on the affluent in Dublin to contribute money to alleviate the suffering of the poor. But subscriptions were not enough to sustain the necessary relief and so in response they passed a resolution in December 1846 which called for immediate state assistance. This resolution included the following prediction.

If immediate, active and persevering attention be not paid to the awful symptoms by which we are surrounded, those who are guilty of any neglect in these particulars will be responsible before man, and we venture to add before an all-just Providence, for the destruction by famine and disease of millions of lives in Ireland.¹⁵

Haughton could certainly be criticised for his faith in economic liberalism, but there was a limit to such beliefs. He supported the intervention of central government when any threat of famine existed. He wrote a lengthy letter to The Freeman’s Journal in October 1846 entitled “Distress of the Poor” and observed that

While political economists are disputing as to the best means of effecting so desirable, so necessary an end — and while landlords are selfishly, or unselfishly, devising plans having the same object in view, the poor of the land — the men who are the producers of all the comforts and luxuries enjoyed by the rich — are crying out for bread.¹⁶

The furore which followed Mitchel’s pro-slavery announcement led to a drastic drop in the circulation of the Citizen newspaper and by 1855 Mitchel had resigned from his post.¹⁷ His pro-slavery views spread far and wide, making an impression on fugitive slaves in Canada. In 1854 he had suggested that plans were being made by Fenians to invade Canada and that this would a justifiable act. This raised the ire of a leading abolitionist based in Canada, Rev. Samuel Ringgold Ward, who warned the “recreant Irishman” that if he “were to go there it would be the finishing up of all his follies in the world.”¹⁸

He eventually retreated to where slavery thrived and in 1857 he set up the Southern Citizen newspaper in Tennessee with his friend William Graham Swan. Its prospectus held that

The Institution of Negro Slavery is a sound, just, wholesome Institution; and therefore, that the question of re-opening the African Slave Trade is a question of expediency alone.¹⁹

John Mitchel thus supported the re-opening of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The voyage across the Atlantic during the heyday of this “trade in human flesh” had led to the deaths of more than 1 million Africans alone. This aspect of the slave trade (treated in isolation) fulfils Article II of the Convention on Genocide. But this was a non-issue for Mitchel. For him this was “a good, a positive good”. He felt that price of slaves in the South was too high and to have a more egalitarian society the price must come down so that even the poorest white could own a slave. Thus re-opening of the slave trade was for Mitchel key to increasing the supply of labour in the South. This was now apparently Mitchel’s version of republicanism, and one can only wonder what plans he would have concocted had he gained actual political power in Ireland. The Anti-Slavery Bugle even claimed (wrongly) that he was the first journalist in the U.S. to openly advocate for a renewal of the slave trade.²⁰

Ironically other influential racists in the South were, for various racist reasons, against this idea. Some did not want the price of their “stock” reducing, while others did want any more Africans in their country.²¹
The depth of Mitchel’s belief in slavery and white supremacy is sharply illustrated in a letter he sent in 1857 to his good friend Fr. John Kenyon.

Kenyon was known in abolitionist circles as “the slave tolerating priest of Templederry” and had defended Mitchel in public on many occasions.²² He once wrote that “Mr. Mitchel’s published opinions about Negro slavery” were of the kind that “the truest lover of liberty and of the Catholic religion may lawfully adopt.”²³ Because after all, he spuriously opined, “we are all slaves.” Yet even Kenyon eventually took issue privately with Mitchel’s enthusiastic support for slavery. Kenyon wrote to Mitchel that it was “monstrous” to promote the system of slavery for its own sake and Mitchel’s reply lays bare his moral collapse.

He told Kenyon that he wanted to make the people of the U.S. “proud and fond of [slavery] as a national institution, and advocate its extension by re-opening the trade in Negroes.” He claimed that slavery was inherently moral, it was “good in itself” and that yes he “promotes it for its own sake.”²⁴ Then comes the coup de grace. After a brief discussion of how slavery was viewed by the Catholic Church he writes that this was in any case a mute point. He believed that the religious debate with regards to the immorality of the “enslavement of men” did not apply to “negro slaves”. Why is this? According to Mitchel,

To enslave [Africans] is impossible or to set them free either. They are born and bred slaves.²⁵

Ironically Mitchel’s grotesque sentiment was paralleled by the London Times during the Famine when it described Irish as

A people born and bred, from time immemorial, in inveterate indolence, improvidence, disorder, and consequent destitution.²⁶

In the self-serving worlds of racial and colonial supremacism, Africans were born to be slaves and the Irish were born to be destitute.

The Confederate Propagandist

When the American Civil War started, Mitchel moved to Richmond, Virginia. He never sympathised with the enslaved black population of the South but yet felt sorry for the “poor negroes” of the North who he claimed were tricked into fighting against their best interests, i.e. perpetual enslavement. It must have angered him these were the same “poor negroes” of the Union army who helped win the war and free over three million slaves, their kin.

As the war progressed two of Mitchel’s sons died fighting to defend the Confederacy and a third lost an arm. As the Confederate side became desperate, it was suggested by some of their Generals to use slaves as soldiers to bolster their ranks. It was proposed that the slaves who fought would be freed afterwards. An incredulous Mitchel condemned this idea as gravely mistaken.

If freedom be a reward for negroes — that is, if freedom be a good thing for negroes — why, then it is, and always was, a grievous wrong and crime to hold them in slavery at all. If it be true that the state of slavery keeps these people depressed below the condition to which they could develop their nature, their intelligence, and their capacity for enjoyment, and what we call “progress” then every hour of their bondage for generations is a black stain upon the white race.²⁷

Since Mitchel consistently believed that Africans were born and bred slaves he opposed this measure, but it is fascinating to see him elucidate the moral consequences if he was proved to be wrong. It also shows how much Mitchel was opposed to the enslavement of members of the “white race”; as despite his claim that the “fat and merry” slaves on the plantations had a better life than Irish peasants, he never once suggested chattel slavery as a solution to the injustice and scandalous poverty in Ireland. One piece of sophistry deserves another. When the civil war ended, Mitchel lamented the abolition of slavery commenting that the sorrow of the former slaveowners was due to the “fate which threatens that unhappy race they have protected [for] so long” rather than any monetary loss they may have incurred. He also lashed out at newspapers that labelled him inconsistent, arguing that he only ever wished

That Ireland should have the power to regulate her institutions in her own way, and I wished the Southern States to have the same power…where is the inconsistency?²⁸

He also went on to deny a rumour that he flogged “negro wenches” to death in Alabama.

Celtic Supremacy?

Mitchel’s racism was not confined to just white supremacy, he also believed in a racial hierarchy within the white population. He delivered a lecture in New York on the the subject of the “Footsteps of the Celt” whereupon he claimed “there was no such thing as an Anglo-Saxon” and that “nearly all the great men which Europe has produced have been Celts”. He proceeded to endorse royal blood as something natural and told of a “tradition in European countries that beasts of prey have such a respect for royal blood that they will not attack the descendants of a king.” The New York correspondent for the Ottawa Free Trader in attendance wryly observed that Mitchel “appears to reverence “blood” more than education or intelligence.”²⁹

This extreme racial nationalism could not be further from the belief in universal emancipation and human rights as espoused by Irish political figures such as John Philpott Curran, Thomas Russell, Daniel O’Connell, Thomas Addis Emmett and Mary Ann McCracken. It is thus useful at this point to shed a light on how the Young Ireland generation viewed chattel slavery. After reflection, the leader of the Young Ireland Rebellion in 1848, William Smith O’Brien, believed the institution of slavery violated “every noble instinct of human nature, every principle of natural and revealed religion.”³⁰

The Irish Confederation was with the notable exception of Fr. John Kenyon appalled at Mitchel’s behaviour in the U.S. But what of the other Young Irelanders exiled in the U.S? Were they vocal opponents of the continued enslavement of millions of people?

Richard O’Gorman supported slavery and was a vociferous “copperhead” during the American Civil War.³¹ He frequently launched attacks on abolitionists, misrepresenting their position as nativist and extreme. Since he was well placed politically in New York, these views influenced his Democratic supporters to believe that the abolitionists cared more about the welfare of slaves than Irish immigrants. He spuriously remarked at one rally (to much laughter) that “by freedom, the abolitionists mean, no freedom for the white but for the black man.”³² O’Gorman described Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation as “a barbarous, disgraceful, hideous violation of the morality of Christendom.”³³

The devout Charles Hart on the other hand was “surprised” to find an intelligent slave in Washington, commenting on the “quiet submissive manner” of the general body of “well behaved” slaves he encountered. He thought that slaves were “less intellectual looking than the free blacks of NY.” Hart was resident in the U.S. for almost a year, but his diaries contain no suggestion that he believed chattel slavery was wrong.³⁴

Thomas Francis Meagher held more complex views, he was certainly not an abolitionist, but he was also not an admirer of the “peculiar institution.” His was an attempt in moral gymnastics, admitting that there were some abuses of slaves, but that this meant that slavery should be regulated rather than abolished. Like Mitchel, he had great sympathy and respect for the South, and published articles in his newspaper which reassured his Irish-American readers that Catholicism was consistent with slavery.³⁵ In fact his stance on slavery was very similar to that of the Catholic hierarchy in the U.S. at this time, the majority of which were Irish. It’s also notable that Meagher expressed admiration for William Walker, the filibuster, who invaded Nicaragua in 1855 with a private army, declared himself president and legalised slavery.³⁶ But by 1863, Meagher was in favour of abolition, exclaiming “Thank God! that disgrace has been averted from our race..”³⁷ Meagher revealed how William Smith O’Brien had previously chided him on more than one occasion for being an apologist for slavery and he explained that he only supported slavery because it was a part of the Union, and never, like Mitchel, for its own sake.

It is evident that many influential members of this generation of Irish Nationalists, while not as extreme as Mitchel, were also not of a Liberal persuasion and had little to no sympathy with abolitionism. Some were overtly racist. Perhaps this may explain why an Irish patriot, who also happened be a white race supremacist, was so easily rehabilitated into an living emblem for Irish independence and liberty. The Fenian movement in the U.S. took little notice of his pro-slavery opinions and actively sought his support and approval. One group of Fenians in New Orleans in the 1860s named their circle in his honour.³⁸ Back in Ireland, the Irish Confederation (and the majority of its Liberals) had now dissolved, succeeded by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, whom in this now post-slavery Atlantic world, evidently did not see his controversial views as relevant, or indeed controversial at all.

Even Michael Davitt, who famously denounced the Limerick Boycott of the Jewish community in 1904, saw nothing amiss with the vicious racism of the Boers who he perversely lauded for shedding “far less blood in subduing the natives to their rule than did any British settlement which was ever planted among savage races.”³⁹ The Boers, of course, were former slave owners and in the 18th century had a higher percentage of slave ownership than the colonies in British America.⁴⁰

How Mitchel’s legacy was treated in print by both Arthur Griffith and Padraig Pearse in the early 20th century effectively sealed his place in Irish nationalist orthodoxy. In a preface to a 1913 edition of Mitchel’s influential Jail Journal, Griffith compares Mitchel to Swift, calls him a “fearless speaker of the truth” who demolished the “moral basis” of abolitionism. Griffith, by quoting Scripture, agrees with Mitchel that slavery was a non-issue, an invention of a crime. He recalls how Mitchel asked the abolitionists “Are you better Christians than Him who founded Christianity, better lovers of liberty than the Greeks who invented it, better republicans than Washington and Jefferson?.” Griffith was satisfied that this comprehensively won the argument. He then revealed his own racist reasoning and nationalistic myopia when he stated that

Even his views on negro-slavery have been deprecatingly excused, as if excuse were needed for an Irish Nationalist declining to hold the negro his peer in right. When the Irish Nation needs explanation or apology for John Mitchel the Irish Nation will need its shroud.⁴¹

Padraig Pearse was impressed when he read Griffith’s “finely-written” preface.⁴² Tom Kettle once asserted that Thomas Davis was “inspired by love of Ireland” but that John Mitchel was “inspired by hatred of England.”⁴³ Pearse disagreed with this apparently conclusion while admitting that Mitchel was certainly a “wrathful spirit”. He claimed that Mitchel “can speak more adequately of freedom than a Voltaire” and thus it appears that his racism and pro-slavery views were not a factor for Pearse. And therein lies the base contradiction. One of Pearse’s most frequently used literary devices was to compare Ireland’s union with Britain to that of a slave being exploited by its master. He believed that “there are many things more horrible than bloodshed; and slavery is one of them” and yet this maxim appeared to only apply when an Irish person or Irish political entity was involved.

“A vulgar traitor to liberty”

But I would prefer to leave the final word to Frederick Douglass, a former slave and former admirer of John Mitchel. Douglass visited Ireland in 1845 and observed first hand the plight of the country. He imagined that the enslaved in the U.S. and the oppressed and impoverished in Ireland were bound together in sorrow at their circumstance. When he recalled the melancholic singing of enslaved Americans he relates that he

did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude, and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle, so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They were tones, loud, long and deep, breathing the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirits, and filled my heart with sadness.⁴⁴

He compared these expressions of pain with the songs he heard while traveling through Ireland on the eve of the Great Famine.

I have never heard songs like those anywhere since I left slavery, except when in Ireland. There I heard the same wailing notes, and was much affected by them.

Douglass held deep solidarity for Ireland “ever chafing under oppressive rule”, praised Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa and was a supporter of Irish Independence for nearly all of his adult life.⁴⁵ But he could not stomach nor excuse Mitchel’s racism and with sorrow branded him a “traitor to humanity” and a “vulgar traitor to liberty.”⁴⁶

References

1. John Mitchel, New York, U.S.A., to Miss Thomson, 24 April 1854, http://www.dippam.ac.uk/ied/records/43699.transcript.
2. The Freeman’s Journal, 29 March 1875.
3. Nenagh Guardian, 8 May 1920.
4. Nenagh Guardian, 20 March 1875.
5. Richard S. Harrison, Richard Davis Webb: Dublin Quaker Printer (1805–72)(Skibbereen, 1993), 64.
6. Daniel O’Connell, Address to the Cincinnati Repeal Association, 11 October 1843.
7. Charles Gavan Duffy, My Life in Two Hemispheres, Vol. 2 (London, 1898), 70.
8. ibid. Vol. 1, 244.
9. John Mitchel, Jail Journal, or, Five years in a British Prison (New York 1854), 142.
10. The Perrysburg Journal, 20 February 1854.
11. The Irish Press referred to this “embarrassing” letter as late as 1978.
12. Daily Evening Star, 11 November 1853.
13. The Freeman’s Journal, 25 February 1854.
14. Paul Huddie, The Crimean War and Irish Society, (Oxford, 2016), 40.
15. Christine Kinealy, Charity and Great Hunger in Ireland: The Kindness of Strangers (London, 2013), 55.
16. The Freeman’s Journal, 24 October 1846.
17. The Perrysburg Journal, 6 January 1855. This paper estimated that Mitchel’s Citizen lost circa ten thousand subscribers due to his pro-slavery proclamation.
18. Provincial Freeman, 15 July 1854.
19. Southern Citizen, 1 January 1859.
20. Anti-Slavery Bugle, 3 September 1859.
21. Bryan P. McGovern, John Mitchel: Irish Nationalist, Southern Secessionist (Knoxville, 2009), 158.
22. Tim Boland, Father John Kenyon, The Rebel Priest (Nenagh, 2010), 195.
23. Malcolm Brown, The Politics of Irish Literature: From Thomas Davis to W. B. Yeats (Seattle, 1973), 142.
24. Lillian Fogarty, Fr. John Kenyon — A Patriot Priest of ’48 (Dublin, 1921), 163.
25. ibid.
26. McGovern, 39-40.
27. William Dillon, Life of John Mitchel (London, 1888), 109.
28. The Irish People, 1 July 1865.
29. Ottawa Free Trader, 26 January 1856.
30. William Smith O’Brien, Principles of Government, Vol. 2 (Dublin, 1856), 164.
31. Copperheads were a group of Democrats in the North who were against the war. In some cases they colluded with the Confederates, in all cases they blamed the abolitionists for the conflict and were invariably white supremacists.
32. The Dollar Weekly Bulletin (Maysville, Ky.), 23 October 1862.
33. Albon P. Man Jr, ‘The Irish in New York in the early eighteen-sixties’, Irish Historical Studies 7, no. 26 (1950), 98.
34. Brendan Ó Cathaoir (ed.), Charles Hart, Young Irelander Abroad: The Diary of Charles Hart (Cork, 2003), 49–58.
35. Paul R. Wylie, The Irish General: Thomas Francis Meagher (Oklahoma, 2012), 101.
36. ibid, 103.
37. ibid, 205.
38. David T. Gleeson, The Irish in the South 1815–1877 (Chapel Hill, 2001), 72.
39. Michael Davitt, The Boer Fight for Freedom (New York, 1902), 2.
40. Kevin Reilly, Stephen Kaufman and Angela Bodino (eds), Racism: A Global Reader (New York, 2003), 218.
41. John Mitchel, Jail Journal (Dublin, 1913), preface by Arthur Griffith, n.p.
42. Padraig Pearse, Collected Works of Pádraic H. Pearse: Political Writings and Speeches (Dublin, 1946), 164.
43. Louis François Alphonse Paul-Dubois, Contemporary Ireland (New York, 1908) introduction by Tom Kettle, n.p.
44. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York, 1857), 99.
45. David Roediger, ‘Race, Labor, and Gender in Languages of Antebellum Social Protest’ in The Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor, ed. Stanley L. Engerman (Stanford, 1999), 174.
46. Blassingame (ed.), The Frederick Douglass Papers, Vol. 2, 486n.