I knew I wanted to study in Ireland when I learned of Frederick Douglass’s visit here in 1845–46. A student of Civil War–era U.S. history, I had read about events like the New York City draft riots of 1863, a series of violent anti-Black attacks led by working-class Irish Americans bridling at the possibility of conscription into the Union army. So it surprised me to discover that one of the foremost Black American abolitionists would have made a point to visit Ireland, which I naively assumed to be a hotbed of proslavery sentiment (as were certain parts of England that thrived on slave-grown cotton). Douglass’s Irish tour—as well as Daniel O’Connell’s refusal to accept donations from slaveholders in support of his Repeal campaign—were my first clues that there existed a deep tension within the Irish diaspora over the issue of slavery. Since coming to Belfast, I’ve had the chance to learn a great deal more about Douglass’s time in this city (and even to write a paper about it!), so I thought I would share a few interesting findings.
Douglass was in Ireland to sell copies of his recently published Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. When the young abolitionist began lecturing in New York and Massachusetts shortly after escaping his bondage in Maryland in 1838, audiences found his oratory so eloquent that they refused to believe he had been enslaved. In his Narrative, Douglass attempted to prove his credibility by providing details of his enslavement, including the names of his enslavers, the Aulds. As Douglass was still a fugitive, this amount of identifying information exposed him to huge risk, and so he fled to the British Isles for a nearly two-year tour to raise money and avoid recapture. In Belfast, he publicly referred to himself as a “mere fugitive slave, liable to be hunted down” by the “bloodhounds of the white man.”
The experience of touring abroad was personally transformative. According to historian David Blight, Douglass was steeped in the “political liberalism” and “laissez-faire individualism” of progressive nineteenth-century elite circles. Douglass argued to audiences in Belfast that slavery was wrong not only because it was cruel and exploitative, but also because it stripped enslaved people of the ability to work for themselves, which he thought a necessary component of the self-fashioning of all liberal subjects. In Ireland, the orator was able to free himself both of the looming threat of re-enslavement and of the at-times peremptory presence of William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society, who guided his affairs in the United States. Enjoying newfound autonomy and celebrity, feted by leading Belfast men, and earning money hand over fist from the sale of his Narrative—his very own intellectual property—Douglass grew in confidence as a speaker and strategist. Soon after returning to the States, he would begin to distance himself from Garrison.
Douglass provoked controversy in Belfast over his stance toward the Free Church of Scotland. In 1843, a group of Evangelicals led by Thomas Chalmers broke from the Church of Scotland to form their own entity independent of the state, the Free Church, or Free Kirk. To fund their new congregation, the Free Churchers solicited donations from American slaveholding Presbyterians. This incensed but also intrigued Douglass, who, upon arriving in Belfast in December 1845, wrote that the city was “the very hot bed of presbyterianism and free churchism, a blow can be struck here, more effuctually [sic] than in any other part of Ireland.” Borrowing a tactic from O’Connell (whom he had met earlier during his sojourn on the island), he demanded in his lectures that the “unanimous cry of the people of Belfast, to the Free Church of Scotland . . . would be, ‘Have no communion with the American slaveholders;’ and that the next thing the Free Church should do would be to send back the blood-stained money which they had received.” Interestingly, Douglass was careful not to espouse Repeal, promising not to “speak of O’Connell in connexion with any other subject than” anti-slavery. Yet his attack on the Free Church and his implicit association with “The Liberator” was enough to alienate a segment of the city’s Presbyterian elite, many of whom favored continued union with Britain. The result was a string of invective newspaper editorials that echoed many of the critiques Douglass faced in the States, accusing him of being an “impostor” who lacked “integrity” and perhaps had never really been enslaved.
Ever the political strategist, as he prepared to cross the Irish Sea for a tour of Scotland and England in early 1846, Douglass would nonetheless include a written testimonial from a sympathetic Belfast Protestant minister in an updated edition of the Narrative. This addition angered Douglass’s Dublin-based printer, Richard Webb, a friend of Garrison who privately described Douglass as an ill-mannered “savage” and “wild animal,” apparently offended by the orator’s growing self-confidence. (One cannot help but note Webb’s use of the long-standing racist trope of the uncivilized African brute.)
Douglass was deeply impacted by witnessing Irish poverty and the beginning of the Famine. At the outset of his lecture tour, Douglass consistently chided Irish listeners for likening their relationship to Britain to that between enslaved people and their masters, arguing that such a comparison “did not sufficiently distinguish between certain forms of oppression and slavery.” Yet by the end of his tour, he would recall in a letter to Garrison the “human misery, ignorance, degradation, filth and wretchedness” he had observed among the Irish poor. Particularly horrifying to Douglass was Dublin, where ““the streets were almost literally alive with beggars.” Reflecting on this penury, he softened his stance on the question of “Irish slaves” somewhat, concluding that the Irish were
in much the same degradation as the American slaves. I see much here to remind me of my former condition, and I confess I should be ashamed to lift up my voice against American slavery, but that I know the cause of humanity is one the world over. He who really and truly feels for the American slave, cannot steel his heart to the woes of others; and he who thinks himself an abolitionist, yet cannot enter into the wrongs of others, has yet to find a true foundation for his anti-slavery faith.
This is just a small sample of everything I’ve learned so far! As I begin my dissertation research, I’m looking forward to uncovering much more about the transatlantic connections between Ireland and the United States in the nineteenth century and beyond.
Some books and articles I’d recommend if you want to learn more about Douglass’s Irish tour:
- Blight, David W. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. Simon & Schuster, 2018.
- Chaffin, Tom. Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary. University of Virginia Press, 2014.
- Fenton, Laurence. Frederick Douglass in Ireland: ‘The Black O’Connell.’ Collins Press, 2014.
- Ferreira, Patricia. “All But ‘A Black Skin and Wooly Hair’: Frederick Douglass’s Witness of the Irish Famine.” American Studies International 37, no. 2 (1999): 69–83.
- Jenkins, Lee. “Beyond the Pale: Frederick Douglass in Cork.” Irish Review, no. 24 (1999): 80–95.
- Kinealy, Christine. Black Abolitionists in Ireland. Routledge, 2020.
- Maclear, J. F. “Thomas Smyth, Frederick Douglass, and the Belfast Antislavery Campaign.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 80, no. 4 (1979): 286–97.
- Murray, Hannah-Rose, and John R. McKivigan, eds. Frederick Douglass in Britain and Ireland, 1845–1895. Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
- Quinn, John F. “‘Safe in Old Ireland’: Frederick Douglass’s Tour, 1845–1846.” The Historian 64, no. 3/4 (2002): 535–50.
- Ritchie, Daniel. “‘The Stone in the Sling’: Frederick Douglass and Belfast Abolitionism.” American Nineteenth Century History 18, no. 3 (2017): 245–72.
- Rodgers, Nini. Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612–1865. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
And of course: Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845.