Frederick Douglass’s Irish Liberty
By TOM CHAFFIN
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Indeed, the ghost of the Irish nationalist, before and after the Civil War years, often inhabited Douglass’s thinking. And it was the influence of O’Connell that, in critical ways, led to the breach between Douglass and his early mentor, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison — and thus paved the way for Douglass’s support for and his guidance in shaping, via President Lincoln, the Union’s war policies against the slave-holding South.
Library of Congress Frederick DouglassIn 1845, Garrison’s protégé published his “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.” The book was a bestseller, but the publicity it won increased the steady stream of threats of bodily harm and kidnapping that by then bedeviled Douglass. Ultimately both men decided it a good idea for Douglass to leave the country for a while, until public attention stirred by the “Narrative” waned. A two-year lecture tour of the British Isles was arranged. And so in August 1845, Douglass, then in his late 20s, left for what would be his first trip abroad.
Douglass’s visit to Ireland was fraught with potential difficulties. For starters, he was an unabashed Anglophile in a country where many disdained their English colonial overseers. From his manner of dress (crisp three-piece suits) to his tastes in books (Dickens and Shakespeare were favorites), Douglass genuinely admired British culture and what he regarded as its devotion to human rights. Before crossing the Atlantic, he had wryly noted that he would be sailing from “American republican slavery, to monarchical liberty.” And he was more than aware of Britain’s position on slavery: since 1833, when the United Kingdom had abolished slavery in most of its overseas colonies, its abolitionists had turned their energies toward raising funds for their American counterparts.
Further complicating matters for Douglass, many observers on both sides of the Atlantic at the time believed that war was about to erupt between the United States and Britain over rival claims to the vast Oregon Country in North America’s Pacific Northwest.
For Douglass, his warm reception in Ireland also served as an ironic contrast to difficulties he would soon face in his native land. Even as he toured Ireland, a blight was destroying the potato crop on which the island depended. In the coming years, the disaster transmogrified into a full-fledged famine, sending millions of Irish to North America. During that period and through the Civil War years, many — but not all — Irish-Americans and their leaders opposed Douglass’s fight to gain rights for African-Americans. They opposed his efforts to win rights for enslaved blacks in the South and for blacks in the North, free but denied U.S. citizenship and subject to widespread discrimination — including, in many cases, both de facto and de jure segregation.
Even so, Douglass, during his four months in Ireland, found in many Irish nationalists he met a kindred spirit of resistance against an oppressor — in his case, the slave-owning South; in theirs, the United Kingdom. Indeed, at least one influential and younger Irish nationalist even talked of allying with America in any war that erupted in the Pacific Northwest. “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity,” proclaimed the Irish firebrand John Mitchel that season. “‘If there is going to be a war between England and the United States, ’tis impossible for us to pretend sympathy for the former. We shall have allies, not enemies, on the banks of the Columbia.”
Awkward moments notwithstanding, Douglass in Ireland found new avenues for self-expression that he’d never been afforded in the United States. “I can truly say,” he wrote to Garrison, “I have spent some of the happiest moments of my life since landing in this country, I seem to have undergone a transformation, I live a new life.” Speaking before Irish audiences — and feeling un-shadowed by “slave-catchers” and others who would do him harm — Douglass basked in a new confidence. And he came to view his fight against slavery as belonging to a larger, global struggle against all social injustices.
Library of Congress Daniel O’ConnellO’Connell also passionately opposed slavery. Upon meeting an American, before shaking hands, he routinely asked whether the visitor was a slaveholder. If the answer was yes — no handshake.
In September 1845, Douglass appeared alongside O’Connell at a Dublin rally attended by more than a thousand followers. Douglass had read of O’Connell’s reputed oratorical abilities, but he assumed those skills to have been “greatly exaggerated.” The rally, however, persuaded Douglass that the reports were accurate. Though O’Connell was already a septuagenarian, “eloquence came down upon the vast assembly like a summer thunder-shower upon a dusty road,” Douglass later wrote. Moreover, it seemed to Douglass that O’Connell “held Ireland within the grasp of his strong hand, and [that he] could lead it whithersoever he would.” The regard was mutual. O’Connell — still revered in Ireland today as “the Liberator” — soon took to calling Douglass “the Black O’Connell of the United States.”
O’Connell died in 1847, soon after Douglass left Ireland, and the American never followed O’Connell in rejecting violence. But O’Connell’s courage, his intellectual breadth, his grasp of mass politics, his belief in the moral authority of laws, self-government and political reform continued to shape Douglass’s world view.
More particularly, Douglass’s eventual conviction that America’s federal union offered the best means of banishing slavery from the land descended, in part, from O’Connell’s view that Ireland’s best future resided in the rule of law — not in revolution but in continued membership in the British empire.
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Douglass, after his trip across the Atlantic, increasingly rejected such intellectual legerdemain. He knew that, regardless of what flag waved over the South, Garrison’s envisioned “Come-outism” future would leave the region’s slaves in shackles. In a February 1861 article in his journal, Douglass’ Monthly, Douglass thus rejected Garrison’s and all other dodges intended to avoid confrontation: “Slavery is the disease,” he inveighed, “and its abolition in every part of the land is essential to the future quiet and security of the country.”
In that same article, Douglass also advised American opponents of slavery to broaden their horizons — to end their preoccupation with domestic compromises and to look abroad:
Instead of looking around for means of reconciling freedom and slavery, how immeasurably better would it be if, in our national councils, some Wilberforce or a Buxton could arise, and, looking at the subject from the highest point of a wise statesmanship, which is ever in harmony with immutable laws of progress and development, scorning all the petty tricks of the mere politician, propose a plan for the complete abolition of slavery. Is America more selfish and less humane than Russia? — Is she less honest and benevolent than England? Is she more stolid and insensible to the claims of humanity than the Dutch? — What should hinder her from following the human example, and adopting the enlightened policy of those nations?The article’s omission of any reference to O’Connell or Ireland likely attested to Douglass’s continued trepidation about roiling Anglo-Irish or Anglo-American tensions. Pro-Union forces, after all, aware of the cotton South’s importance to Britain’s textile industry, worried about dangers that that industry might, if war erupted between North and South, lead Britain’s government to tilt toward the South. Given those realpolitik concerns, why look for trouble?
In 1847, after returning to the United States, Douglass set up shop in Rochester, N.Y. — a safe 300-mile distance from Garrison’s Boston — and began publishing the North Star, an antislavery paper that Garrison considered a rival to his own paper, the Liberator. By 1851 — confiding to an associate that he was “sick and tired of arguing on the slaveholder’s side” — Douglass had publicly repudiated Garrison’s view of the U.S. Constitution’s alleged immorality; as well as his former mentor’s rejection of political activism.
True to form, in December 1860, Garrison welcomed South Carolina’s secession and agreed with arguments by secessionists that the American Constitution legally enshrined chattel slavery. By then, such arguments belonged to Douglass’s past. Animated, in part, by Daniel O’Connell’s political vision, the former slave was, by February 1861, girding himself for his public career’s most defining work — his eventual equation of the Union’s war efforts against the Confederacy, policies that he would help to shape, with his own long battle against slavery.
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Sources: Frederick Douglass, “Frederick Douglass Autobiographies,” with notes by Henry Louis Gates, Jr; and “The Union and How to Save It,” in Douglass’ Monthly (Feb. 1861); Noel Ignatiev, “How the Irish Became White”; Lee Jenkins, “Beyond the Pale: Frederick Douglass in Cork,” Irish Review, vol. 24 (1999): Oliver MacDonagh, “The Hereditary Bondsman, Daniel O’Connell, 1775-1829″ and “The Emancipationist: Daniel O’Connell, 1830-1847″; William S. McFeely, “Frederick Douglass”; Bryan McGovern, “John Mitchel, Irish Nationalist, Southern Secessionist”; Henry Mayer, “All On Fire, William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery”; James Oakes, “The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics”; John F. Quinn, “Father Mathew’s Crusade: Temperance in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and Irish America” and “’Safe in Old Ireland’: Frederick Douglass’s Tour, 1845-1846,” The Historian, vol. 64. (Dec. 2002); Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford, editors, “Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass & Transatlantic Reform”; Louis Ruchames, “Jim Crow Railroads in Massachusetts,” American Quarterly, vol. 1 (Spring 1956).
Tom Chaffin is author of, among others books, “Sea of Gray: The Around-The-World Odyssey of the Confederate Raider ‘Shenandoah.’” As Research Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, he serves as Editor and Director of the Correspondence of James K. Polk. He is now writing a book about Frederick Douglass’s encounters with Ireland and Irish America.
