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The Quarrel Between Gavan Duffy and John Mitchel: Implications for Ireland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Steven R. Knowlton
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Extract

In the annals of nineteenth-century Ireland, few disputes between public figures have been more rancorous or more significant than the fight that began in 1848 between two seemingly like-minded journalists, Charles Gavan Duffy and John Mitchel. In the mid-1840s, Duffy and Mitchel were colleagues on the most influential nationalist newspaper in Irish history, the Nation. But in 1847, relations between the two men became strained, and Mitchel resigned to start his own, more radical, paper. The former friends and colleagues soon became the bitterest of enemies. Their public quarrels over the next few years severely damaged each man's personal reputation — and also damaged the Irish nationalist cause in which each so fervently believed.

Unlike many running Irish feuds, which merely exacerbate old stereotypes about the Gaels being a fractious race, the Mitchel-Duffy controversy haddirect political fallout at a critical point in the development of political separatism in Ireland. The quarrel erupted just when Irish nationalists had an unusual opportunity to bring enormous pressure to bear on the British House of Commons. The Tory party of the 1840s had been shattered, first by Sir Robert Peel's turnabout on free trade in 1846, and then by Peel's death four years later. The modern idea of nearly automatic, lifelong adhesion to strong central parties was still some years off, and the two major British parties were scrambling for friends.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , Winter 1989 , pp. 581 - 590
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1989

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References

1 An excellent recent analysis of the formation of the modern political parties is Cox, Gary, The Efficient Secret: The Cabinet and the Development of Political Parties in Victorian England (Cambridge, 1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 For the relative strengths of the major parties, see Hawkins, Angus, Parliament, Party and the Art of Politics in Britain, 1855-59 (Stanford, 1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 See Knowlton, Steven R., “Irish Politics and the Irish Catholic Church, 1850 -1859” (Ph.D. diss., Washington University, 1987).Google Scholar

4 For a generation, the standard account of Young Ireland was Gwynn, Denis, Young Ireland and 1848 (Cork, 1949)Google Scholar. Davis, Richard P., The Young Ireland Movement (Dublin, 1987)Google Scholar addresses the subject in the context more appropriate to modern scholarship.

5 The crime of treason-felony was enacted on April 22, 1848 (2 Vict. c. 12) specifically to deal with political dissidents. It called for transportation rather than execution, as ordinary treason required, and had two advantages. Convictions were thought easier to obtain with the less draconian punishment, and political troublemakers could be removed from the scene without creating new martyrs. On May 27th, less than five weeks after the bill received royal assent, Mitchel was on a prison ship headed away from Ireland.

6 Irishman, Jan. 6, 1849.

7 Ibid., Jan. 13, 1849.

8 Ibid., June 16, 1849.

9 Ibid., Aug. 18, 1849.

10 Ibid., Sept. 1, 1849.

11 Ibid., Sept. 15, 1849.

12 Ibid., Sept. 29, 1849.

13 Daniel O'Connell had a legitimate enough quarrel with Duffy and the Young Irelanders at the time of the Liberator's death in 1847. O'Connell was pledged to constitutional protest only, while most of the Young Ireland group were willing to resort to armed resistance, at least in theory. But in its new incarnation, the Nation and its editor were philosophically almost identical to the next generation of O'Connellites. Most of the bitterness between O'Connell's sons and Duffy was due to personal animosity from the prior age, not philosophical differences in the current one.

14 Mitchel, John, Jail Journal, Griffith, Arthur, ed. (Dublin, 1913), pp. 420-21.Google Scholar

15 Touhill, Blanche M., William Smith O'Brien and His Irish Revolutionary Companions in Penal Exile (Columbia, Mo., 1981), pp. 194-96.Google Scholar

16 Davis, , The Young Ireland Movement, p. 154.Google Scholar

17 Corish, Patrick, ed., Radicals, Rebels and Establishments (Belfast, 1985), p. ix.Google Scholar

18 Much of this capsule summary comes from Fogarty, L., James Fintan Lalor: Patriot & Political Essayist, 1807-1849 (Dublin, 1918).Google Scholar

19 Royal Irish Academy, 12, p. 15 1(4), Lalor to Mitchel, June 21, 1847.

20 Mitchel to Lalor, Jan. 4, 1848, quoted in Fogarty, , James Finlan Lalor, p. 120.Google Scholar

21 Mitchel, , Jail Journal, pp. 123-24.Google Scholar

22 Ibid., p. 275. A young Mitchel protégé, Thomas Devin Reilly, coined the term.

23 Duffy, Charles Gavan, My Life in Two Hemispheres, 2 vols. (London, 1898), 2: 69.Google Scholar

24 Ibid.