Reverend James Mitchell (September 14, 1818 – March 2, 1903) was the United States Commissioner of Emigration [of negroes] in the Abraham Lincoln administration, and a prominent religious leader in the Georgia Episcopal Methodist Conference after the Civil War.

[1] Mitchell was born to Protestant parents in Derry, Ireland 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 of Secretary of the American Colonization Society of Indiana, and first met Abraham Lincoln in that capacity.

After the Civil War, Mitchell returned to the ministry in the Methodist church.