Frederick Douglass on Tour

A striking figure and powerful stage presence, the 27-year-old Frederick Douglass embarked on a tour of Britain and Ireland in the summer of 1845, soon after the publication of his incendiary autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Music and poetry followed him wherever he went. His speeches – high energy affairs which lasted for hours – often ended, as was the manner of the time, with audience members taking to the floor to perform themselves. Douglass took part in the revelry, too, as newspapers carried reports of him singing ‘a song in favour of abolition’, ‘an original Yankee Temperance song’ or ‘a beautiful sentimental air’. 

Erin’s Isle

Douglass began his tour in Ireland and almost from the start works were composed in his honour. ‘Céad Míle Fáilte to the Stranger’, written by the poet Daniel Casey and sung by John Donovan, was performed after a speech given by Douglass at St Patrick’s Temperance Hall in Cork on the evening of 28 October 1845. Performed to the tune of ‘Old Dan Tucker’ and playing upon the old Irish greeting meaning ‘a hundred thousand welcomes’, this piece, which has alternately been called a poem or a song – the line between the two forms much more fluid in the 19th century than today – went in part: 

Stranger from a distant nation,
We welcome thee with acclamation,
And, as a brother, warmly greet thee –
Rejoiced in Erin’s Isle to meet thee.
Then Céad Míle Fáilte to the stranger,
Free from bondage, chains and danger.
Who could have heard thy hapless story, 
Of tyrants – canting, base and gory;
Whose heart throbbed not with deep pulsation
For the trampled slaves emancipation.

Oh! why should different hue or feature
Prevent the sacred laws of Nature,
And every tie of feeling sever? – 
The voice of Nature thunders ‘Never!’

In what is perhaps a sign of the affection Douglass felt for the poem, a handwritten copy can be found in his papers in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

The song also appears in Daniel Casey’s collection Cork Lyrics: or, Scraps from the Beautiful City, published in 1857 under the title ‘To Frederick Douglass’. A note by Casey states: ‘The following song which the celebrated Frederick Douglass stated was sufficient to compensate for years of slavery, may be deemed appropriate as the recent struggles for Negro emancipation have attracted such deep attention.’ While it is highly unlikely that Douglass felt the poem a sufficient counterweight to slavery, the comments indicate that he may have spent some time talking with Casey the night it was performed and that American affairs were being closely followed in Ireland in 1857, the year of the notorious Dred Scott judgment, in which the US Supreme Court ruled that enslaved people were not American citizens and so were not entitled to federal protection.

From Cork, Douglass travelled up through Limerick and Dublin to Belfast, where he spent most of December 1845, delivering speeches at venues like the Independent Chapel on Donegall Street and selling so many copies of his Narrative that he had to implore his Irish publisher, the Dublin Quaker printer Richard Davis Webb, to send more. One copy seems to have made its way to the home of the 29-year-old writer Frances Browne in Stranorlar in Donegal, where it is likely to have been read to the so-called ‘Blind Poetess of Ulster’ by her sister and amanuensis Rebekah. Blind since childhood because of smallpox, Browne was inspired by the Narrative to compose the poem ‘The Land of the Slave’, subtitled ‘Suggested by a Passage in the Life of Fred. Douglass’, which was soon published in the Unionist daily the Northern Whig. Browne’s poem focused on the early years of Douglass’ enslavement in Maryland. She was particularly affected by his tender descriptions of his mother, Harriet Bailey, who had died in 1825 when Frederick was still a child, and who had spent much of her life being forced to work on a different farm:

He saw the far sky, like an ocean of blue,
And thought of the mother his infancy knew – 
Of the love that through toil and through bondage she bore,
And the night-coming step that might seek him no more.
Oh! faint was the faith of his future, and dim
The hope that soul-masters had granted to him;
But they said that the grass had grown green on her grave,
And he wished her not back to the Land of the Slave.

In the final verse Browne brings past and present together, leaping forward from Douglass’ enslavement to his arrival in Ireland and celebrating the country’s open-armed embrace of the anti-slavery activist: 

Our isle hath her sorrows; the page of her years
Is dark with the memory of discord and tears;
But she still owns the heart and the hand that would save,
And we welcome thy steps from the Land of the Slave.

Browne would return to the theme of the struggles of oppressed peoples and nations in other poems addressed to the Poles and the Circassians. Moving to Edinburgh and then London, she carved out a moderately successful career as poet, novelist and essayist, best known for her collection of children’s stories Granny’s Wonderful Chair. 

Scottish pilgrimage

From Belfast, Douglass sailed to Scotland, spending most of the first six months of 1846 travelling throughout the country, visiting towns and cities including Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth, Falkirk, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Douglass’ time in Scotland was suffused in poetry; he was an ardent admirer of both Robert Burns and Walter Scott. Indeed, Douglass had been born Frederick Bailey and his adopted name was taken from a character, ‘the Black Douglas’, in Scott’s long poem The Lady of the Lake. He would weave passages from the works of Burns and Scott into his speeches and while in Scotland made a point of travelling to Burns’ birthplace in Ayr. There he also visited the Burns Monument, a striking 70-foot high Grecian-style temple surrounded by manicured gardens built on the banks of the River Doon in early 1820s. 

On his way to the monument, Douglass was thrilled to meet Burns’ last surviving sibling, Isabella Begg, a ‘spirited looking woman’ in her 70s who lived in a nearby cottage. He also met two of her daughters, the poet’s nieces, whose ‘jet black eyes’, he wrote in the New York Tribune, sparkled ‘with the poetic fire which illuminated the breast of their brilliant uncle’. Kind words were exchanged and some letters in Burns’ own handwriting passed around for the American visitor to examine, the family having grown accustomed by this time to entertaining admiring guests from all over the world. Caught up in the emotion of the moment, Douglass tried to link their lives, describing how the poor, self-educated Burns had lived in the midst of a ‘bigoted’ clergy who ‘looked upon the ploughman … as being little better than a brute’ before breaking loose ‘from the moorings which society had thrown around him’, much as Douglass had himself escaped the bonds of slavery in America.

Polluted gold

Away from this personal pilgrimage, the Scottish leg of Douglass’ tour is best known for his attacks on the Free Church of Scotland, founded in 1843, which had raised a lot of money in the slaveholding states, accepting as much as £3,000 in donations from slave-owners. Douglass repeatedly urged the Free Church’s founder Thomas Chalmers to ‘send back the blood-stained money’. The rallying cry ‘Send back the Money’ was soon daubed on walls across Scotland. It also found its way into a number of poems and songs that were collected and published in Edinburgh in 1846. ‘Send back the Money! Send it back! ’Tis dark polluted gold’, began one of the poems:

’Twas wrung from human flesh and bones,
By agonies untold:
There’s not a mite in all the sum
But what is stained with blood;
There’s not a mite in all the sum
But what is cursed of God.

A song titled ‘O For Good Luck To Our Coffers’, meanwhile, had a verse that went:

The worthy Free Priest was pleas’d to allow,
That all the Slaveholders were Christians now;
The Doctor he bless’d them for what they had paid,
And wish’d them success in their Slaveholding trade.

Another, based on the old Scottish tune ‘My Boy Tammy’, imagined a scene between ‘Tammy’ – Thomas Chalmers – and ‘Mother Kirk’ – the Presbyterian Church. Written in the colloquial style, one verse alluded directly to Douglass: 

I’ve heard a voice on thunder borne,
My Boy Tammy;
I’ve seen the fingers rais’d in scorn,
My Boy Tammy;
Heaven rings wi’ DOUGLASS’ appeal,
An’ thrills my heart like burnin’ stell,
An’ conscience racks me on the wheel,
You’ve wranged – ye’ve grie’d your Mammy!

Although a source of discomfort for Chalmers and his allies, Douglass’ campaign did not change the Free Church’s stance.

Last of a noble line

Hailed as ‘a Negro Hercules’, Douglass spent much of the late summer and autumn of 1846 lecturing to and being fêted by large crowds in England. A highlight was the journey he made in August to the home of the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, whom he anointed ‘the last of the noble line of Englishmen who inaugurated the anti-slavery movement for England and the civilised world’. Clarkson was in poor health and Douglass’ visit was brief. Nevertheless, the sense of awe was still palpable when Douglass later described how the practically deaf Clarkson had clasped his two frail hands around one of his own and in a ‘tremulous’ voice said: ‘God bless you, Frederick Douglass! I have given sixty years of my life to the emancipation of your people, and if I had sixty years more they should all be given to the same cause.’

Douglass left Playford Hall, the Elizabethan mansion Clarkson shared with his wife Catherine just outside Ipswich, ‘with something of the feeling with which a man takes final leave of a beloved friend at the edge of a grave’. This proved accurate. Clarkson died just over a month later on 26 September 1846. 

Around the same time, an anonymous ‘Ipswich Lady’ was writing a Douglass-inspired poem – simply titled ‘Frederick Douglass’ – that would find its way into The Liberator, the leading abolitionist newspaper in America. A panegyric for the North, its tone is epitomised in the following verses:

Let me go, let me go, to the land of the brave,
Where the shackles must fall from the limbs of the slave;
Where Freedom’s proud eagle screams wild through the sky,
And the sweet mountain birds in glad notes reply.

I’ll fly to New-England, where the fugitive finds
A home mid her mountains and deep forest winds;
And her hill-tops shall ring with the wrongs done to me,
Till responsive they sing, ‘Let the bondman go free!’

In October 1846 Douglass made a brief foray into Wales, travelling the short distance from Liverpool to Wrexham, where he received ‘a sisterly welcome’ at the 25 King Street home of Sarah and Blanche Hilditch, abolitionists who had sent contributions to the American Anti Slavery Society’s annual Christmas fundraiser, the Boston Bazaar, for a number of years. Almost immediately, they held a meeting in the town hall, the stairs, hallways and aisles of which were crowded to capacity. Already ‘fired’ up with ‘zeal’ by Douglass’ Narrative, Sarah Hilditch would be just as impressed by his performance in person, describing him as ‘a living example of the capabilities of the slave’, proof they were more than ‘mere chattels – with bodies formed for Herculean labour, but without minds, without souls’.

Douglass’ speech made an impression on another Welsh supporter, ‘L. Sabine’, whose ‘To Frederick Douglass’ was also published in The Liberator. A lengthy work, taking in Amerigo Vespucci, Hernán Cortés and the plight of the Native American population, the poem turns its attention to Douglass in its final verses: 

Thrice welcome to this land of liberty –
Look back on bondage as a bygone dream!
Thy tongue is loosened – loosened be the ties
Which held thy brethren in the Western shores;
Proclaim their wrongs, denounce the nation’s lies,
Where man his brother hates, his God adores.

The slave departs, the man returns

Douglass spent most of the winter of 1846-47 in the north of England, especially Newcastle, where his Quaker hosts Henry and Anna Richardson, together with Henry’s sister Ellen, with Douglass’ consent took the lead in raising the money needed to secure his manumission (legal emancipation) from his so-called owner Hugh Auld. The transaction was completed just before Christmas with the £150 raised converted into the $711.66 cost of freedom. Soon after, the newly emancipated Douglass attended a celebratory dinner at the Music Hall on Nelson Street in Newcastle, where a ‘spirited ode’ by the local writer and reformer E.P. Hood (almost certainly Edwin Paxton Hood, later a Congregationalist minister) was performed. Titled ‘We’ll Free the Slave’ and sung to the air of Robert Burns’ ‘Ye Banks and Braes o’ Bonny Doon’, it began:

How bright the sun of freedom burns,
From mount to mount, from shore to shore!
‘The slave departs, the man returns,’
The reign of force and fraud is o’er:
’Tis Truth’s own beam, from sea to sea,
From vale to vale, from wave to wave;
Her ministers this night are we,
To free, to free, to free the slave!

Although free to return to America, Douglass remained in England through the early months of 1847, promoting the abolitionist cause and raising the funds that would help him buy a printing press once back in America. It was this printing press with which he would launch his newspaper, the North Star. 

Douglass finally left Liverpool for Boston at the start of April, but not before one last celebration in his honour, a grand farewell soiree held at the London Tavern on 30 March attended by about 600 ‘persons of great respectability’, including prominent politicians, clergymen and writers. While unable to be there, Charles Dickens, who was known to give copies of Douglass’ Narrative to friends, stated in his letter to the event’s organisers: ‘I trust I need hardly say that I feel a warm interest in any occasion designed as a denunciation of slavery, and a mark of sympathy with anyone who has escaped from its tremendous wrongs and horrors.’ 

To mark the occasion, one of Douglass’ supporters, Julia Griffiths, together with her brother Thomas Powis Griffiths, composed the ‘Farewell Song of Frederick Douglass’.

Introduced to each other towards the end of the tour, Julia Griffiths and Douglass quickly struck up a close friendship. Douglass seems to have charmed the whole Griffiths family, Julia reminiscing fondly how her younger sister Eliza had pinned a ‘white camellia’ to his coat at his farewell soiree in London, only to see a restless Douglass knock off all the ‘beautiful’ petals with his nervous fidgeting. In 1849 Julia Griffiths travelled across the Atlantic herself and ended up living in Rochester where – in the face of much innuendo about their relationship – she acted as Douglass’ de facto business manager, editor and publicist, making use of skills she had picked up from her printer father and helping rescue the then flailing North Star. 

It is possible that Griffiths brought the sheet music for the ‘Farewell Song of Frederick Douglass’ – complete with its striking and somewhat surprising cover depicting Douglass in a toga, now held in the University of Rochester – with her from England.

Afterlife

The men and women who wrote these poems and songs while Douglass toured Britain and Ireland were the not the first to celebrate him in verse. That accolade probably belongs to his good friends the Hutchinson Family Singers, who wrote ‘The Fugitive’s Song’ about Douglass in early 1845. Nevertheless, whether they were anonymous, obscure or well-known, these British and Irish writers were at the vanguard of Douglass myth-making, their words helping fix his story in the popular consciousness. 

They also laid the foundations for more famous Douglass-themed works by 20th-century poets such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes and Robert Hayden. Douglass’ leonine visage and powerful words continue to inspire generation after generation of political activists and leaders. As Hughes concluded in his poem ‘Frederick Douglass 1817-1895’, written at the height of the American Civil Rights movement: ‘He died in 1895 / He is not dead.’

Laurence Fenton is the author of ‘I Was Transformed’ Frederick Douglass: An American Slave in Victorian Britain (Amberley, 2018) and Frederick Douglass in Ireland: ‘The Black O’Connell’ (The Collins Press, 2014).