THOMAS KENEALLY
Faber & Faber
€17.50
ISBN 9780571387960
REVIEWED BY Frank MacGabhann
Frank MacGabhann is a retired lawyer currently researching the Catalpa rescue of Fenian prisoners in 1876.
The late Gore Vidal maintained that one can learn more, sometimes far more, about a historical period or personage from a historical novel than from many historians. Thomas Keneally is clearly the Irish and Australian counterpart to Vidal. Best known for his book upon which the film Schindler’s List was based, Keneally has written some 60 books, including The Great Shame, which covers the subject-matter (the Great Hunger) of this book, Fanatic heart, but in more detail. Here Keneally tells the story of the life of Young Irelander John Mitchel up until 1855, his settling in Tennessee with his family after first disappointing and then outraging the American abolitionists with his defence of slavery. No other writer then or since could approach Mitchel’s ability to condemn the British government for its callousness towards the Irish, or come close to Mitchel in describing the pitiful state of the cottier class in Ireland during the Famine, especially in his Jail journal and The last conquest of Ireland (perhaps).
In law the great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes shocked purists when he posited that the life of the law was more than logic and the syllogism. Mitchel is a classic example of how the syllogism can fail. Keneally shows Mitchel challenging abolitionist preachers who railed against slavery in the southern states but ignored the plight of the urban Irish poor in the north—because they were free. This is the hurdle that Mitchel ultimately cannot cross. His great flaw was that he lacked the broad democratic vision of Daniel O’Connell, Thomas Davis and James Fintan Lalor. Mitchel, using the syllogism of chattel slavery versus wage slavery, in adding two plus two wrongly, even shamelessly, comes up with five. Many have speculated that Mitchel’s problem was his rejection of the Enlightenment and/or the idea of progress. Or was he blinded by hatred of England? He admitted late in life that he hated England more than he loved Ireland, which is a shocking admission. In any case, 500 years from now, Irish nationalists will still be wondering how Mitchel got one issue so very right and another so wrong, even despicably wrong.
Mitchel is by far the most complicated Irish figure since at least 1800, and perhaps since the chieftain Hugh O’Neill. Mitchel, like most white people of his generation, including Abraham Lincoln, believed black people to be inferior. Mitchel went further and actually defended slavery and, later, the Confederacy in the American Civil War, writing the most appalling things, including that slavery was actually good for the African! He also advocated for the reopening of the slave trade, which had been abolished in 1808.
Keneally has written a wonderfully engaging page-turner. Jenny, Mitchel’s long-suffering wife—whom he married at the infamous (for other reasons) Drumcree church near Portadown and who followed him to Van Diemen’s Land with their children in 1851 and escaped with him, eventually arriving in New York in 1853 via the tropics, San Francisco, Nicaragua and Cuba—jumps out from the pages. The imagined discussions between Mitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher, his fellow Young Irelander, exile and escaper from Down Under, are the treat of the book. This reviewer was left with Meagher’s more advanced political thinking but also his relative indifference to the death of his wife, living in Waterford with his father. Mitchel chides Meagher for leaving his young son in Waterford with no apparent desire to bring him to America. In fact, Meagher never knew or ever met his own son, and this apparently did not particularly bother him. Keneally shows that Mitchel, for all his many faults, loved his children, even as he recognised that he was ultimately responsible for the deaths of two of them in the war, fighting for ‘a country (sic) that was, after all, not their own’.
Following the removal of statues of slaveholders in the United States who were traitors, the question has arisen in Ireland of whether the statue of John Mitchel in Newry should be taken down, and whether the dozen or more GAA clubs named after him should be renamed. It is not true, as has been claimed, that GAA club founders or the promoters of the statue were unaware of Mitchel’s support for the Confederacy and slavery. Mitchel’s life was very well known. The statue and clubs were a tribute to his writings and his exile, and in no way reflected his support for slavery. Similarly, statues to Presidents Washington and Lincoln in the US were erected as tributes to their nation-building and nation-preserving respectively and had nothing to do with their attitudes on race. The question to be answered is whether Mitchel’s writings and life in another country cancel out his writings and his prior life and work in Ireland. And to answer that question the two books mentioned above must be re-read. Perhaps the best solution is to have an accompanying panel near the statue or in the GAA club detailing the complexities of Mitchel’s life to show him, in Cromwell’s words, ‘warts and all’. Keneally does this admirably.