“Our success here is even greater than I had anticipated,” pronounced Frederick Douglass a little while after arriving in Ireland in the autumn of 1845. Born into slavery in the US in 1818, Douglass became a powerful anti-slavery advocate through his speeches and writings.
He escaped from slavery in 1838 by disguising himself as a sailor and jumping on a train in Baltimore, Maryland. He made his way to New York, but the presence of slave catchers in the city made him move on to New Bedford in Massachusetts.
The feeling of newfound freedom in the relative safety of the north was akin to having escaped from a “den of hungry lions”, according to Douglass. He learned to read and write while he was a slave and once freed, he honed his public speaking skills by addressing abolitionist meetings and “pleading the cause of my brethren”.
In 1845, he wrote his first autobiography – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. It sold 4,500 copies in the first four months but it also brought unwanted attention. Publication of the book emboldened his former master, who wanted the fugitive slave to be recaptured.
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A lecture tour of Britain and Ireland was organised to avoid the possibility of capture and earn some money at the same time. After first making his way across the Atlantic from Boston to Liverpool on a Cunard steamship, he arrived in Dublin a couple of days later.
Such was the level of discrimination at the time, he was forced to travel in steerage on the vessel that brought him to Europe (despite having bought a first-class ticket). He landed in Dublin on the morning of August 31st, 1845.
That evening, he gave a speech in Celbridge, Co Kildare, and would go on to give about 50 speeches in towns and cities around Ireland over the course of the next four months. He spoke on the themes of anti-slavery and temperance.
In Dublin, he witnessed the temperance leader, Fr Theobald Mathew, administer the pledge to 1,000 people in Booterstown. On September 29th, he addressed a crowd in Conciliation Hall on Burgh Quay, which was built as a meeting place for Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Association.
O’Connell spoke for over an hour. His speech was described by Douglass as “powerful in its logic, majestic in its rhetoric, biting in its sarcasm, melting in its pathos, and burning in its rebukes”. O’Connell introduced him as the “black O’Connell of the United States”.
After one of his speeches in the Music Hall on Abbey Street (where the Abbey Theatre now stands) before a crowd of some 3,000, the lord mayor invited Douglass to dine with him in the Mansion House. He was received there a couple of days later by the lord mayor and several officials.
While in the capital, Douglass saw shops selling luxury goods but he also saw poverty. He was surrounded by it. He recalled having to deal with groups of people begging when he went out on to the streets.
Douglass praised one of his hosts in Dublin, labelling the Quaker Richard Davis Webb, “the very impersonation of old-fashioned, thorough-going anti-slavery”. Webb was a printer and was the Irish publisher of Douglass’s autobiography.
After Dublin, Douglass made his way to Wexford, Waterford, Youghal, Cork city, Limerick and Belfast. He also addressed crowds in Lisburn, Bangor and Hollywood, Co Down.
During October and November he made a dozen speeches in Cork, including at the Courthouse on Washington Street and the Imperial Hotel on the South Mall. He described his meetings in the city as being well attended by “highly intelligent and influential people”. He praised the abolitionists he met there, who were “of the true stamp”, as he put it.
According to Laurence Fenton, who has written on Douglass’s time in Ireland, a song was penned to welcome him to the city. Entitled Céad Míle Fáilte to the Stranger, it included the lines: “We welcome thee with acclamation, And, as a brother, warmly greet thee.” A handwritten copy of the lyrics was found among Douglass’s papers in the Library of Congress.
[ Here it was again, the phantom Yeats quote in an Irish pub in PerpignanOpens in new window ]
Douglass was amazed at the positive reception he received in Ireland. In a letter back to a friend in America, he recorded that he found himself “treated not as a color, but as a man – not as a thing, but as a child of the common Father of us all”.
When he returned home in April 1847, Douglass travelled on the same ship that brought him to Liverpool in 1845. Again, he was forced to travel in steerage, despite having purchased a first-class ticket. On this occasion, the Cunard Line was forced to apologise publicly for the discrimination that he suffered. He continued to advocate for an end to slavery and also supported the cause of women’s suffrage.
