Mitchel's anti-Reconstruction, pro-Democratic Party editorial line was opposed in New York by another Ulster Protestant, the IRB exile David Bell. Bell's "Journal of Liberty, Literature, and Social Progress", "Irish Republic," cautioned readers "interested in the labor question" from associating themselves with John Mitchel (a "miserable man") and with a "diabolical" Democratic plan to impose upon blacks in the South, "as a substitute for chattel slavery, a system of serfdom scarcely less hateful than the institution it is intended to practically prolong". It claimed Mitchel defended a Democratic Party policy in the South that was nothing less than "an attempt to attach to the laborer in America those medieval conditions which even Russia [ Emancipation of the Serfs, 1861 ] has rejected".