"Poor Jenny," John Mitchel once wrote, "she might as well have married a homeless Bedouin or wandering Tartar." Mitchel was referring to his wife, Jane Verner, and to his own restless, controversial career. He was in turn Nation journalist, social revolutionary, transported felon, defender of slavery in America, and prophet of militant Irish nationalism.
Jenny died in New York 100 years ago today, having circumnavigated the globe with her husband and outlived him by a quarter of a century.
Ironically, in the light of the present-day stand-off, they were married in Drumcree Parish Church, Co Armagh, in 1837. Mitchel had earlier suggested an elopement because Capt Verner intended taking his beautiful 16-year-old daughter to France. The lovers went to Chester to seek a marriage licence, and waited chastely in their hotel for it. Mitchel was reading Jenny a novel by Disraeli when the Verner parents and a policeman burst into the room. Returned in custody to Newry, where a judge dismissed charges of abduction, Mitchel fell back on his limitless eloquence and pursued a more conventional courtship.
Quarrel with Duffy
On the death of Thomas Davis in 1845, Mitchel abandoned his solicitor's practice and moved to Dublin, where he became a leading writer of the Nation. By February 1848 he had quarrelled with its proprietor, Charles Gavan Duffy, and started his own journal, the United Irishman. In May, in a futile attempt to silence him, the British authorities secured a conviction under the new Treason Felony Act. He was sentenced to 14 years' transportation and removed hastily from Dublin. His wife was left to rear their three sons and two daughters, the eldest being barely 10.
After three years Jenny and the children were allowed to join him in Van Diemen's Land, where the Young Ireland prisoners had been paroled. Mitchel's Jail Journal records the meeting: "Today I met my wife and family once more. These things cannot be described. Tomorrow morning we set off through the woods for Bothwell." His faithful friend and fellow convict, John Martin, completed the household.
Jenny wrote from Nant Cottage, their farm near Bothwell, to a childhood friend: "I am now perhaps happier than I would have been had I never known trouble." Thomas Keneally comments in his epic about the diaspora, The Great Shame: "Two months of seasickness on her way to Mitchel, her recuperation lying on a mattress on the poop deck, were all but forgotten."
Their idyllic existence in the Australian outback did not last long, however. When an Irish-American emissary arrived with rescue plans, Jenny declared her willingness to follow Mitchel to San Francisco. He surrendered his ticket-of-leave and went on the run in Tasmania. Jenny expected daily to hear of his embarkation for America, his capture, or death. She had just given birth to a daughter and was seriously ill for a month.
New York welcome
After several escapades, described vividly in the Jail Journal, Mitchel joined his wife and children on a ship bound for the United States. Following three weeks' celebration in San Francisco, they set out for New York by the trans-Nicaragua route. From Havana they sailed in the appositely-named Prometheus into New York harbour in November 1853.
Mitchel refused to believe that, "prostrate and broken as the Irish nation is now, the cause of Irish independence is utterly lost". He began publishing the Irish Citizen in January 1854, but soon outlived the hero's welcome received in New York. His slavery doctrine was "the subject of much surprise and general rebuke", while his advocacy of European revolution alienated Bishop John Joseph Hughes. A period of farming in East Tennessee followed, before he launched the Southern Citizen.
Having championed the oppressed at home, Mitchel - indefensibly - supported the slave-owning states in America. This radical-conservative despised the humanitarian agenda of the Victorian age, was repelled by the hypocrisy of many Northern abolitionists, and retained illusions about the pastoral South.
Jenny's view was more consistent: "Nothing would induce me to become the mistress of a slave household . . . My objection to slavery is the injury it does to the white masters."
Mitchel's various projects led to periods of domicile in Washington, Paris, and Richmond, Virginia. During the American Civil War, Jenny and two surviving daughters had to run a blockade to return from Ireland. Two of the Mitchels' three sons died fighting for the Confederacy, including Capt John C. Mitchel, whose last words (according to his memorial in Charleston) were: "I willingly give my life for South Carolina; oh, that I could have died for Ireland."
Jenny did not accompany her husband on his last visit to Ireland. He was concerned about her health and asked her to stay in New York. Reelected MP for Tipperary, Mitchel died on March 20th, 1875, and was buried in the Unitarian cemetery, Newry. His companion in adventure lived until the last day of 1899; her grave in Woodlawn cemetery in the Bronx is surmounted by a Celtic cross.