Irish exiles, becoming fond of William Smith O'Brien in particular. When John Mitchel escaped in July 1853, Mitchel travelled with her children to join him in Sydney, from where they sailed to America. They lived for a time in Brooklyn, New York from 1853 to 1855, rekindling friendships with old friends who were fellow Young Ireland exiles. In May 1855, the family moved to a remote farm at Tucaleechee Cove in the Allegheny Mountains, Tennessee. Mitchel feared that the isolation and life in a primitive log cabin would be detrimental to their children's education, and at her behest the family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee in September 1856. From here John Mitchel ran a pro-slavery newspaper, the Southern Citizen. The family moved again in December 1858 to Washington, D.C. Mitchel supported her husband in the Southern cause, albeit with some reservation. Nothing, she said, would induce her "to become the mistress of a slave household". Her objection to slavery was "the injury it does to the white masters". Mitchel accompanied her husband to Paris in September 1860, and in opposition to some of the family, she supported her daughter Henrietta's conversion to Catholicism and entrance into a convent. She remained in Paris and Ireland with her daughters, while her husband and sons assisted the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Without letting her husband know, Mitchel resolved to return to America when she heard of her youngest son, William's, death at Gettysburg in July 1863. She sailed with her daughters, Mary and Isabel, as Henrietta had died earlier the same year. Whilst their ship ran a blockade by the Union, the ship was shelled, ran aground, and caught fire near the coast of North Carolina. Mitchel and her daughters were unhurt, but lost all of their possessions. By December 1863, Mitchel had joined her husband in Richmond, Virginia, remaining their for the rest of the Civil War. Their eldest son, John, was killed in action in July 1864. Later life The family returned to New York after the war, and John Mitchel set up another paper, the Irish Citizen (1867–72). Due to lack of funding for the Irish-American press and her husband's ill health resulted in the family falling into poverty. This was alleviated by a testimonial raised by William and John Dillon in 1873. Mitchel was widowed in March 1875, going on to receive $30,000 from nationalist sympathisers. She invested