wretched Roman Catholics? As explained by his son William in the foreword to the first edition of the Autobiography:
When he first wrote his pamphlet in favour of Catholics he was not acquainted with a single individual of that religion, so complete at that period was the distinction in society between the several sects. In a few months he was a prime mover of their councils and accomplished the union between them and the dissenters of the North.
His diaries for late-1791 record a drink-fuelled debate (one of many) with a fellow Protestant who argued that for all protestations of good wishes towards Roman Catholics, thirty-nine out of forty Protestants would be found, whenever the question came forward, to be hostile to the liberation of the Roman Catholics.
The first volume of the Autobiography covered the period prior to his departure to the United States. The second volume of the diaries, written from France, depicts his involvement in three French efforts to invade Ireland between 1796 and 1798 and the articulation of his political aspirations for Ireland. An 18 July 1796 entry recorded a conversation with his French government liaison General Henri Clarke (whose father was an Irishman) about what kind of government might be installed in Ireland. Clarke favoured some kind of monarchy. ‘Where on God’s earth’, Tone replied, ‘would we go look for a King?’ There was no obvious candidate amongst the Irish nobility and he could not see, in any case, the Irish people spilling their blood for any monarch. ‘Maybe, after all,’ Clarke suggested, ‘you will choose one of your own leaders; who knows but it may be yourself?’ Tone replied that he had neither the desire nor the talents to aspire so high. He then outlined his own hopes and fears for an Irish revolution:
I summed up all by telling him that, as to religion, my belief was we should content ourselves with pulling down the Establishment without setting up any other; that we would have no State religion, but let every sect pay their own clergy voluntarily; and that, as to royalty and aristocracy, they were both odious in Ireland to that degree, that I apprehended much more a general massacre of the gentry, and a distribution of the entire of their property, than the establishment of any form of government that would perpetuate their influence; that I hoped this massacre would not happen, and that I, for one, would do all that lay in my power to prevent it, because I did not like to spill the blood, even of the guilty; at the same time, that the pride, cruelty, and oppression of the Irish aristocracy were so great, that I apprehended every excess from the just resentment of the people.
Tone went to sea with a French fleet three times between December 1796 and August 1798. Each attempt to land in Ireland ended in failure due to bad weather, poor leadership or poor seamanship. On Christmas Day 1796, contemplating failure, he recorded in his diary that if captured, the best he could expect was to be shot or killed in action. Perhaps there would be trial for the sake of striking terror into others, and then perhaps a hanging or disembowelling, which he wouldn’t mind as long as he was dead first. During a sea battle in August 1798 during which Tone turned down an opportunity to be safely evacuated, he was captured, court-marshalled and sentenced to death. He cheated the hangman by cutting his own throat. Whether he meant to take his life or defer his execution is unclear.
In March 1797 Tone recorded a conversation with Thomas Paine in Paris where he described the shattered state of Edmund Burke’s mind following the death of his son Richard. Paine retorted that it was the Rights of Man that had broken Burke’s heart and that the death of his son gave him an excuse to develop the chagrin which had preyed upon him since. Tone recorded that he was sure that The Rights of Man had tormented Burke exceedingly, but that he had seen himself the workings of a father’s grief on his own spirit and that Paine had no children. Two of Tone’s three children were to die of illness in France. Tone’s Autobiography is very much the story of his family by his family. All three memoirs, his own and equally well-crafted ones by his son William and his wife Martha, capture a life that cannot be reduced to any single political end.
BF
Notes
1William Theobald Wolfe Tone (ed.), The Autobiography of Wolfe Tone (Washington: Gales & Seaton, 1826).
2Thomas Bartlett (ed.), The Autobiography of Wolfe Tone (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1998).
7
John Mitchel, The Jail Journal (1861)
John Mitchel (1815–1875) wrote two hugely influential books. The focus here is upon the better-known Jail Journal, described by Patrick Pearse as the final gospel of the new testament of Irish nationalism.1 It opens dramatically on 27 May 1848 with his imprisonment and sentencing to fourteen-years’ transportation. His readers learn why he is being transported, through a series of flashbacks and asides, meditations on books Mitchel reads as he is shipped first to Barbados, then to Cape Town and on to Van Diemen’s Land and also through the observations he records of his journey. The Jail Diaries document a dramatic escape to New York in 1853. There he set up The Citizen, an anti-British and pro-slavery periodical in which he first serialised his Jail Journal between January and August 1854. Irishmen in America, he wrote in the first issue of The Citizen, could not endure the thought of accepting the defeat which had driven them from the land of their fathers and which had made Ireland an object of pity and contempt to the world. The Jail Journal first emerged alongside polemics against the British Empire, the economic and social ideas that Mitchel believed were integral to its success and caused the devastation of Ireland and alongside strident defence of the Southern slave-owning social order that he believed was the only hold-out against the triumph of such ideas in America.
Mitchel’s other influential book The Last Conquest of Ireland (perhaps) also began life in serial form, this time in The Southern Citizen which was established in 1857 after he left New York in disgust for Knoxville, Tennessee. The Last Conquest depicted the Famine as the culmination of a process of colonisation whereby Ireland would in future be dominated by the liberal political economy and liberal ideologies that had built the British Empire.2 It offered a powerful polemic that in many respects resembled Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class. Both were very influenced by the anti-laissez-faire writings of Thomas Carlyle. Whereas Engels described the lives of the Irish poor in urban slums, Mitchel depicted their deaths as due to malign neglect, justified by laissez-faire doctrines at home. Mitchel influentially undermined the reputation of Daniel O’Connell as Liberator, blaming him for this liberal tyranny insofar as O’Connell was the only Irish leader able to do anything about it. Pro-slavery Mitchel attacked O’Connell’s preoccupation with Abolitionism, seeing it as a manifestation of the sham philanthropy of a British model of liberalism that had killed hundreds of thousands through famine in Ireland. Mitchel had little political influence during his life but his analysis of the Famine and his anti-liberal anti-colonialism became standard interpretations among the early twentieth-century nationalists who rejected Home Rule. Pearse was drawn instinctively to his revolutionary spirit. Griffith admired Mitchel’s contrariness, insisting in his 1913 foreword to a reprint of the Jail Journal that no excuses were needed for an Irish nationalist declining to hold the Negro his peer in right. James Connolly admired his critique of British colonialism but quietly sidestepped Mitchel’s intense antipathy towards any form of socialism.
The Jail Journal was Mitchel’s best and best-known book. It is much more than a polemic. He emphasises the decency and kindness of the prison wardens and governors, navy officers and marines he encounters. He never appears to exaggerate any hardships he experienced. Ideas and arguments that are stridently emphasised in his journalism and in his later book The Last Conquest, crop up as shifts in register. Mitchel the journalist and Mitchel the author of The Last Conquest wrote like a man possessed by great passions and greater hatreds. The Mitchel revealed in the Jail Journal
