THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY From the collection of James Collins, Drumoondra , I r e 1 and •' Purchased, 1918. cop. 2. IREMOTF^ STORAGE Return this book on or before the Latest Date stamped below. A charge is made on all overdue books. U. of L Library M«R 27 1933 ::^^*^ Wr\r: i^f^nsm OECfS 3EC 2 ^ 1 •iv mn 2fi mn HAR26 993 t4685-S t 1 JAIL JOURNAL — ^': JAIL JOURNAL COMMENCED ON BOARD THE " SHEARWATER" STEAMER, IN DUBLIN BAY, CONTINUED AT SPIKE ISLAND—ON BOARD THE "SCOURGE" WAR STEAMER—ON BOARD THE "DROMEDARY" HULK, BERMUDA—ON BOARD THE "NEPTUNE" CONVICT SHIP—AT PERNAMBUCO—AT THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE (DURING THE ANTI-CONVICT REBELLION)—AT VAN DIEMEN'S LAND—AT SYDNEY^AT TAHITI—AT SAN FRANCISCO AT GREYTOWN—AND CONCLUDING AT NO. 3 PIER, • NORTH KIVEK, NEW YORK. WITH AN INTRODUCTORY NARRATIVE OF TRANSACTIONS IN IRELAND BY JOHN' MITCHEL PRISONER IN THE HANDS OF THE ENGLISH \ Ol'T €V TOl? (f>9lfl€VOt<i . " • OiV iv ^oxriv dpi,dfwvfievo<i. ORIGINAL EDITION WITH A CONTINUATION OF THE JOURNAL IN NEW YORK AND PARIS, A PREFACE, APPENDICES, AND ILLUSTRATIONS Dublin M. H. GILL & SON, LTD. 1913 Printed and Bound in Ireland ^w*.we "»«*• BY M. H. GILL & SON, LTD. — orage REMOTE ST TAe present edition is reprifited from " The " Citizen Mitchets first New York newspaper—in which the Jail Journal" was originally published, '' from January i^th, 1854, to August i()th, 1854. Save for some half-dozen verbal changes subsequently made by MiteheI, this Edition is an exact reproduction of the '' Jail Journal'' as it first appeared. 435020 AH John Mitchel (A sketch in May, 1848) 0^ PREFACE John Mitchel met the crisis of 1848 with a pohcy. Practical Posterity, from its easy chair, has pronoimced the policy ex- ' travagant and impossible : even, in unctuous moments, repre- hensible. Let the Censor stand in the Censured's place and declare what its wisdom would have counselled a people whose life was assailed. For two years Mitchel had trod the round of Resolution and Protest, Protest and Resolution against the drafting out from Ireland of the food of twenty millions of people to the famishing of eight milUons. A third year * dawned on the same programme of calculated destructioi) and futile remonstrance. Mitchel withdrew his name from the second part of the programme and bade his countrjTnen defend their lives from attack by the ultimate methods of self-preservation. Mitchel made one miscalculation when he amazed all and scandalised many by introducing the element of reality into the Irish politics of his time. He beUeved there was hidden in his cotmtrymen a sympathy with his own haughty manhood which he could kindle to devouring flame. He allowed too little for the weight of two centuries of direct oppression, for the senile teaching of a great leader in his dotage, and for the chilling effect of extreme misery on the people whom his masculinity addressed. He told them that the settled policy of England was to reduce the population of this country to easy governable Umits, and he bade each man defend his house, his food, his life against that policy. He preached to Ireland a passive resistance reinforced at strate^c points by aggressive action, and the Ireland he preached to shrank from the preacher, preferring to sow its fields for foreigners to reap their harvests, and die of hunger on its hearthstone—but in Peace. In a land so lost to reason, the voice of sanity was deemed mad. Ireland failed Mitchel %'ecause it failed in manhood. Our shamed consciousness of b ix X PREFACE this is the impulse of our anxiety to explain Mitchel as a good man crazed by oppression. Thirty years later, Mitchel's policy, interpreted and applied in a stronger generation hy the man whose career Mitchel's writings mouldedr—Charles Stewart Pamell^—^brought the stoutest bulwark of English power in Ireland to the ground. When Pamell bade the farmers of Ireland " Keep a firm grip on their holdings," he crystallised into a phrase the policy Mitchel urged unsuccessfully in 1848. Mitchel's generation failed hira, his sacrifice seemed vain—but, sixty years after, we can look back to the Ireland of slavish resignation—the land of carcases and ruins—the Finis Hibemiae of the cheering auditors to a British Minister and the leaderwriters of the English press, and, seeing out of that degradation and misery and ruin new forces grow to encounter and defeat English policy in Ireland, realise that the haughty spirit of a great Irishman though baffled in its own generation may set the feet of our country in the way of triumph in the next. Fifty years passed ere the voice of Swift in the " Drapier's Letters " spoke winningly to England through the cannon of the Volunteers. Thirty years after Mitchel was borne a shackled prisoner from a cowed country, two strong fortresses of England's power in Ireland perished in the fires of resistance to oppression he had rekindled in an abject land. Nature gifted Mitchel with the genius, and more than the strength of Swift. No party prejudices or personal animosities distracted or marred his treatment of his country's enemies. Few men have possessed his intellectual courage in following out unshrinkingly a thought, an opinion, a conviction to its logical conclusion, however terrible the conclusion might be. Other men weighing the trend of English Legislation in Ireland from 1829, recalling the incautious public statement of an English Minister that the growth of Irish population was a menace, and observing the attitude of the Government in 1846 and 1847—its refusal to close our ports to the export of food, its alleged relief measures which steadily forced the comparatively well-off farmer to the choice of emigration or starvation—had come to the same conclusion as Mitchel—that the English Government was deliberately using the pretext of the failure of •PWT^ PREFACE xi the potato crop to reduce the Celtic population by famine aipfl exile. The logic of events compelled the conclusion. All out Mitchel shrank from proclaiming the fact, not through a cowardly fear of personal consequences, but through a common intellectual timidity. To the end of his days Mitchel remained the fearless speaker of truth as he conceived it, regardless of personal consequences, and the foe of humbug no matter what its garb. Necessarily he raised up hosts of enemies and spent a stormy life. The.: United States received him with fulsome welcome on his escape from the hands of the English. He passed its honours when, alarmed by his manner of receiving them, it hinted that they should be taken as a personal compliment to John Mitchel, not as an expression of sympathy with Ireland in her efforts against English Government. Vanity was absent from his composition. Later, when Mitchel avowed his approval of slave-holding and the Northern States whidh had but a few months before banquetted, bouquetted aid brass-banded him to weariness, shrieked threat and insult, he was genuinely astonished to find that in a " Land of Liberty" a man was supposed to conceal unpopular opinions. His demolition of the " moral basis" of the Abolitionist case in his trenchant letters to the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, who unluckily for himself crossed swords with Mitchel, was avenged later on by the subjection of Mitchel to harsh treatment and attempted personal indignities when he fell a prisoner into Yankee hands at the close of the Civil War. In the midst of the blizzard of abuse that raged around him when in the heart of Abolitionism, he opposed the Coercion of the Southern States, Mitchel remained as cool as when week by week in Dubhn he fought the English Government into the dilemma of either " openly and notoriously " packing the jury before which it would arraign him or letting him go free. Had humanity not enough crimes already to its charge, he inquired, that the Benevolists and Human-progress people should invent another ? Were they to write "criminal" across the civihsations and the wise and noble men of all ages because some Benevolists at the end of the eighteenth century had decided for the first time that slaveholding was immoral. " Would you sell a being with " an immortal soul ? the Abohtionists asked Mitchel furiously. — xii PREFACE * " Certainly, Moses and the Prophets did the same." " Would you send back a fugitive slave to his master ? " " Assuredly Paul, the Apostle, very hdnestly sent back the absconding *' Onesimus." Slave-holding," he declared, " is not a crime and nobody ever thought it a crime until near the close of the eighteenth century." " Are you who would have us beligve it is," he asked the dumbfounded Benevolists, " better Christians than Him who founded Christianity, better lovers of liberty than the Greeks who invented it, better republicans than WasHington and Jefferson and all the republicans of old ? " When his hysterical opponerits inquired did he not stand on the prin- ciple of the inalienable right of every human being to life, liberty, and happiness, Mitchel pointed out to the dupes of this cant that no human being ever had or could have such inalienable right. When they attempted to confuse the issue of National Liberty with the social institution of slave- holding, Mitchel silenced them by inquiring whether George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were inconsistent in assert- ing American liberties while buying and using slaves. The liberty he fought for for Ireland, he wrote, was just the sort of liberty the slave-holding Corcyraeans asserted against Corinth, the liberty the slave-holding Corinthians fought for against Rome, and the slave-holding Americans wrung from England.