THE COLLINS PRESS: Release
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
IN IRELAND
‘THE BLACK O’CONNELL’
Laurence Fenton
‘I am a graduate of that peculiar institution
[…] with my diploma written on my back.’
The film 12 Years A Slave, Colum McCann’s novel
TransAtlantic and President Obama’s speech in Dublin in
2011 have brought slavery and Frederick Douglass back to
the fore. Now, in the first book devoted to Douglass’ visit to
Ireland in 1845, we learn how Douglass was inspired by his
four-month stay in a country on the brink of famine.
A slave from birth, Douglass escaped his Maryland
home/prison in September 1838 and went north to New York
and then Massachusetts where he was welcomed on stage at anti-slavery meetings. A powerful
speaker, he made his first major public speech in August 1841. Following the publication of his
incendiary attack on slavery, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave,
Douglass was advised to leave America and arrived in Ireland on board the Cambria in late summer
1845, the start of a two-year lecture tour of Britain and Ireland to champion freedom from slavery.
His Quaker hosts, including Richard D. Webb, a Dublin printer, brought him to meetings in Dublin,
Wexford, Waterford, Cork, Limerick and Belfast. He shared stages with the ‘Liberator’ Daniel
O’Connell and the ‘apostle of temperance’ Fr Theobald Mathew. He shocked many with his graphic
accounts of life as a slave. He angered more than a few with his attacks on those religious bodies
whose American counterparts supported slavery.
His stay in Ireland was transformative but this was not the first time the Irish had influenced
Douglass. Unusually, Douglass had been taught to read by his owner Sophia Auld and the first book
he bought was The Columbian Orator, which contained an extract from a speech by United Irishman
Arthur O’Connor from which he ‘got a bold and powerful denunciation of oppression […] and a
most brilliant vindication of the rights of man’. He learned important lessons in the art of public
speaking from that book and refused to allow ‘some of the plantation’ into his speech, leading some
to question had he ever been a slave because he spoke so eloquently. Then, when he was twelve
years old, he met Irish dockworkers in Baltimore who were affected by his slave status and
encouraged him to run away.
Douglass delighted in the openness with which he was received in Ireland, writing that the chattel
became a man in the soft grey fog of the Emerald Isle. But he was shocked at the poverty he
encountered and was conflicted at asking an impoverished people, especially those suffering the
effects of the potato blight, to help strangers in a far-off land.
This compelling account of the celebrated escaped slave’s tour of Ireland combines a unique insight
into the formative years of one of the great figures of nineteenth-century America with a vivid
portrait of a country on the cusp of famine.
For further information, photographs, images or interviews with the author please contact:
Gillian Hennessy: Tel: 021-4347717 / e-mail: [email protected]
Con Collins: Mob: 087-2513922 / e-mail: [email protected]
THE COLLINS PRESS: Release
Notes for the Editor
• Frederick Douglass was born in February 1818 although he never knew his real date of birth as
owners often withheld that sort of personal information from their slaves as a mark of their
power. His mother was Harriet Bailey who died when he was six or seven years old and the
identity of his white father was unknown although it was likely to be his owner Aaron Anthony.
When he was eight, Frederick was ready to be put to work in the fields but was ‘rescued’ by
Lucretia Auld, his owner’s daughter, who arranged for him to be sent to Baltimore as a
companion to her nephew. Lucretia’s sister-in-law Sophia Auld taught Frederick to read.
•
Douglass’s birth name was Bailey but after his escape he changed it to Douglass (with an extra
‘s’) after the protagonist in The Lady of the Lake by Walter Scott.
•
Despite holding a first-class ticket for the Cambria, Douglass was relegated to steerage for the
journey from America to Ireland. He was invited to speak on board the ship but this incited a mob
who threatened to throw ‘the damned nigger overboard’.
•
Daniel O’Connell was the first to introduce Douglass as ‘the black O’Connell of the United
States’. Echoing the famous call from his Catholic emancipation campaign, he repeatedly urged
‘some black O’Connell’ to rise among the slaves and cry ‘Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!’
•
Douglass’s second wife was Helen Pitts Douglass, a white woman twenty years his junior who
was his secretary when he was Recorder of deeds for the district of Columbia, one of a number of
government positions he held in the years following the American Civil War.
•
Alcohol as the root of all evil: Douglass advocated temperance, believing that alcohol was one
of the ways his people were controlled by their white owners. He regretted how the drunken
behaviour of free blacks in the northern American states held back the anti-slavery movement and
blamed alcohol almost entirely for Ireland’s poverty, a superficial judgement that suggests no
matter how fond the escaped slave became of the country, he did not really attain any deep
understanding of its social and economic problems.
•
Equality for women: At the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840, Richard Webb, William
Garrison and others protested against the exclusion of women from the main body of the
conference hall. The conference had been organised by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery
Society, who were not quite as advanced when it came to women’s rights as slavery. Douglass
attended the world's first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. He
would remain a dedicated supporter of women's rights all his life.
•
From President Obama’s speech in Dublin in 2011: ‘When we strove to blot out the stain of
slavery and advance the rights of man, we found common cause with your struggle against
oppression. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave and our great abolitionist, forged an unlikely
friendship right here in Dublin with your great liberator, Daniel O’Connell.’
•
There are several plaques in Ireland dedicated to Frederick Douglass: the Imperial Hotel in
Cork unveiled their plaque in September 2012 and Waterford City Hall in October 2013.
Laurence Fenton is a writer and editor living in Cork. He is the author of The Young Ireland
Rebellion and Limerick (2010) and Palmerston and The Times: Foreign Policy, the Press and
Public Opinion in Mid-Victorian Britain (2012).
Frederick Douglass in Ireland – ‘The Black O’Connell’ by Laurence Fenton is published by
The Collins Press, price €12.99. It is available in all good bookshops and online from
www.collinspress.ie
978-1-84889-1968 • €12.99/£10.99 • Pb • 198 x 128 mm • 240 pp • Also in eBook
For further information, photographs, images or interviews with the author please contact:
Gillian Hennessy: Tel: 021-4347717 / e-mail: [email protected]
Con Collins: Mob: 087-2513922 / e-mail: [email protected]