Mitchel, JOHN, an Irish patriot, was born the son of a Presbyterian minister at Dungiven in County Derry, 3d November 1815. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and practised several years as an attorney at Banbridge. Soon after the formation of the Young Ireland party, and the starting of the Nation in 1842, Mitchel began to contribute, and after the death of Thomas Davis in 1845 he became assistant-editor. But his language was too violent for the paper, and three years later he started the United Irishman, for his articles in which he was tried on a charge of 'treason-felony' and sentenced to fourteen years' transportation. He was sent to Bermuda, and next to Van Diemen's Land, whence he made his escape to the United States in the summer of 1853. In New York he published his Jail Journal, or Five Years in British Prisons (1854). Next followed a series of short-lived newspapers, the Citizen, the Southern Citizen, the Richmond Inquirer, and the Irish Citizen, which cost him the confidence of many of his American friends by its enthusiastic defence of slavery and the South. In 1874 he returned unmolested to Ireland, and was elected to parliament for Tipperary, but declared ineligible. Again elected, he died at Cork, 20th March 1875.
Of his books may be mentioned a Life of Hugh O'Neill, Prince of Ulster (1845); and History of Ireland from the Treaty of Limerick (1868); besides editions of the poems of Thomas Davis (1856) and James C. Mangan (1859). See the Life of him by William Dillon (2 vols. 1888).