John Mitchel was an Irish nationalist writer and journalist chiefly renowned for his indictment of British policy in Ireland during the years of the Great Famine. Concluding that, in Ireland, legal and constitutional agitation was a "delusion", Mitchel broke first with Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association and then with his Young Ireland colleagues at the paper The Nation. In 1848, as editor of his own journal, United Irishman, he was convicted of seditious libel and sentenced to 14-years penal transportation for advocating James Fintan Lalor's programme of co-ordinated resistance to landlords and to the continued shipment of harvests to England.

The Great Famine, also known as the Great Hunger, the Famine and the Irish Potato Famine, was a period of starvation and disease in Ireland lasting from 1845 to 1852 that constituted a historical social crisis and subsequently had a major impact on Irish society and history as a whole. The most severely affected areas were in the western and southern parts of Ireland—where the Irish language was dominant—and hence the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as an Drochshaol, which literally translates to "the bad life" and loosely translates to "the hard times". The worst year of the famine was 1847, which became known as "Black '47". During the Great Hunger, roughly 1 million people died and more than 1 million more fled the country, causing the country's population to fall by 20–25% between 1841 and 1871. Between 1845 and 1855, at least 2.1 million people left Ireland, primarily on packet ships but also on steamboats and barques—one of the greatest exoduses from a single island in history.