Deliver Your Future...*

or Fredrick Douglass: Travels in Ireland

By TOM CHAFFIN
Frederick Douglass drew on many influences during his life as an orator, journalist and anti-slavery activist. Few, however, are more unlikely than the man he met in 1845, during a two-year lecture tour of Ireland, Scotland and England: Daniel O’Connell.

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.
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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.
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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.

Douglass’s mentor Garrison studiously avoided conventional politics. O’Connell, by contrast, lived and breathed political conflict. ... At the same time, O’Connell, a successful trial lawyer, was no revolutionary: he believed in the rule of law, rejected violence and had a deep-seated wariness of the Pandora’s box of societal forces unleashed by revolutions.

O’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.
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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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*... It's in the Hands of Your Friends.