James Mitchell

Who was James Mitchell?

The Reverend James Mitchell was the United States Commissioner on negro colonization in the Abraham Lincoln administration, and a prominent religious leader in the Georgia Episcopal Methodist Conference after the American Civil War.

Mitchell was born to Protestant parents in Derry in 1818, and migrated to America in the 1830s. He became a Methodist preacher in Indiana near where his family had settled and became an advocate of abolitionism and colonization. In 1848 Mitchell took the job as Secretary of the American Colonization Society of Indiana and first met Abraham Lincoln in that capacity.

Lincoln appointed Mitchell as Commissioner of Emigration on August 4, 1862. In this capacity he oversaw the establishment of colonies abroad for freed slaves. Mitchell organized Lincoln's infamous 1862 address to a "Deputation of Negroes" at the White House, where Lincoln proclaimed "You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races.