John Mitchel, the Ulster-born Presbyterian and leading Young Irelander, was a man of contradictions. Personally warm and passionate and sincerely dedicated in his love for Ireland, he was also ill at ease around the common people, though he sympathized with their plight, and harbored a vehement hatred of the British state. While advocating freedom for Ireland he later became an ultraconservative advocate of slavery in the American South. His romantic view of pastoralism contrasted sharply with his abject failure as a farmer. In the early 1840s the nascent political thinker fell in with men of similar views on Ireland—Thomas Davis, John Dillon, and Charles Gavan Duffy—and together the band formed Young Ireland. Mitchel was a key link to the north of Ireland; he was a Protestant whose presence might sweep more of his kind into a mass movement to repeal the Act of Union. Young Ireland was so named in conscious genuflection to Mazzini's Romantic, nationalist Young Italy movement. As a nationalist, Mitchel, and indeed the Young Irelanders more generally, are best seen in this European light. The early chapters of McGovern's book describe this dimension very well, focusing with sharp effect on Mitchel's mutual admiration for another Romantic, Thomas Carlyle, a man who shared Mitchel's views on slavery.

The importance to Young Ireland of a volkisch sense of the organic nation cannot be gainsaid. This is just as well: in pursuit of big, cultural ideas, the group was impressive; as men of action, these men could not hold a candle to the Fenians, another Irish nationalist organization, formed in 1858, with which Mitchel had a brief dalliance. Young Ireland's greatest contributions came with the pen, not the sword. They founded several newspapers in Ireland, and Mitchel produced further titles in the United States. However, Mitchel influenced most strongely through his books, particularly the Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) (1873) and his Jail Journal (1914), both of which had a remarkable effect on later nationalisms in Ireland. In particular, Mitchel was responsible for articulating and popularizing the view that the Great Famine was an act of calculated genocide by the British state. In such a context, mass emigration became a flight of reluctant exiles driven out by the operations of a colonial state bent on social engineering. Though many twentieth-century nationalists might not realize it, some of their core assumptions took shape in the pages of polemic penned in Tasmania and America by John Mitchel.

When Mitchel escaped his enforced exile in Van Diemen's Land in 1853, he traveled to the United States, where, for a while, he was feted by Irish America. Yet, he disliked northern, urban Americans almost as much as he despised the British. Indeed, he rightly saw the anti-Irish connections between British attitudes to Ireland and American nativism, a forceful, exclusionary political creed that was rife at the time of his arrival. Mitchel eventually moved south and settled there, producing his Southern Citizen newspaper from Knoxville, Tennessee. He came to admire the South, though he thought the people there were only marginally less ignorant than the Tahitians he encountered on his voyages in the Pacific. The would-be emancipator of Ireland eventually became a southern secessionist and, crucially, not only an advocate of slavery but a proponent of the reopening of the Atlantic slave trade.

McGovern splices the two Mitchels—radical Irish nationalist and southern ultraconservative—together very well. It is important that Irish readers should know that one of the heroes of the freedom struggle against Britain was a fire-eating proslaver who would happily have unfree Africans working his lands. The connections to Carlyle also represent an important piece of context, for which McGovern is to be applauded. While Carlyle professed answers to the evils of the modern world with which Mitchel was fully in accord, he was also disdainful of the masses, believed in heroes, and desired an organic, homogenous society in which the classes would come together, albeit under the leadership of people like him and Mitchel, of course.

Yet, revolutions invariably require the destruction of one class and interest group by another. On this basis, Mitchel became increasingly alienated from the landed elites of Ireland. However, the brutal realities of affecting the type of change that would deliver Ireland from British thralldom extended far beyond Mitchel's compass. Such freedoms only came to pass when, following an exhausting global conflagration, and with much of the British public alienated from a Unionist perspective, the men and women of the Irish Revolution were prepared to spill blood to obtain their designs. Yet, there is a link to Mitchel, for, arguably, the intellectual foreground provided by Young Irelanders was important, not least because they provided a model of how not to do things for the more active Fenians whose physical force influence on the freedom struggle remains alive even today.

There is as much to admire in McGovern's study as there is not to admire about its subject. Mitchel had many qualities as a writer of power, style, and commitment. Yet, his flaws were more than just those inherent in weaknesses of the Mazzinian tradition. His hierarchical, elitist worldview, which was put to work at the expense of Southern slaves, surely establishes his ultimate marginalism as an international figure. McGovern is sympathetic to Mitchel. He rightly sees Mitchel as influential and important. Mitchel certainly had an enormous influence over Irish American thought because of his books. I may ascribe a different weighting to the value of Mitchel, the apostle of a free Ireland, but I will certainly point my students toward this considered, well-researched, and empathetic account of an interesting and charismatic figure.