Today, February 14, Valentine’s Day, is the day that abolitionist, orator, and writer Frederick Douglass chose to celebrate as his birthday because he remembered that his mother, Harriet Bailey, called Douglass her “little Valentine.” Nearly every year, around Valentine’s Day, I find myself reading in whole or in part, his first of three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. No “celebration” of the 4th of July is complete without reading one of the most famous speeches of American history, “What To the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (which Meteor Blades excerpts most years on the Fourth)
In the past few years, I’ve often thought about the fact that, in many ways, Frederick Douglass is becoming as honored in Ireland as he is in the United States. In Belfast, for example, there’s a wall mural dedicated to Douglass. Just last year, a statue of Douglass was completed and stands in Belfast city center. The public library in Cork, Ireland has an online exhibit dedicated to Douglass and there are plaques at the sites that Frederick Douglass gave speeches on abolitionist and other subjects during his four-month speaking tour of Ireland in 1845. There are walking tours of sites where Douglass spoke and lodged in Cork and Dublin. Scholarship about Douglass’s visits to Ireland in 1845 and 1887 have become extensive over the past 30 years. But the beginnings of Douglass’ thoughts about Ireland can be easily traced back to his days as an enslaved boy in Baltimore.
Prior to Frederick Douglass setting off to sail for the British Isles on the Cambria in 1845, he already had the Emerald Isle in his imagination. Thoughts about Ireland had been with Douglass ever since he read and studied that classic American textbook of reading and rhetoric, The Columbian Orator. The Columbian Orator was the one book that young Frederick Bailey purchased and, in many ways, that book molded the man who was to become Frederick Douglass into perhaps the finest abolitionist, writer, and orator that the 19th century produced.
The full title of the book, The Columbian orator: containing a variety of original and selected pieces, together with rules, calculated to improve youth and others in the ornamental and useful art of eloquence, first published in 1791 by educator Caleb Bingham, gives a thorough description of its’ content: 84 set pieces of varied writings (some original to an assistant of Bingham) and a 23-page introduction of specific instructions on how to speak. David Blight wrote, in his biography of Douglass that:
Bingham’s long introduction, “General Directions for Speaking”...may have been the most important thing Douglass ever read. The primary aim of oratory, said Bingham, was to create “action” between speaker and audience. “The perfection of art consists in its’ nearest resemblance to nature,” the educator argued. True eloquence emerged when the orator could train his voice to “follow nature.” Bingham provided specific examples of such elements of speech as cadence, pace, variety of tone, and especially gestures of the arms, hands, shoulders, and head.
Blight also identifies The Columbian Orator as an implicitly antislavery text.
The Columbian Orator was much more than than a stiff collection of American moralisms for American youth. It was the creation of a man of decidedly antislavery sympathies, one determined to democratize education and instill in young people the heritage of the American Revolution, as well as the values of republicanism.
In the Narrative, Douglass describes his purchase of The Columbian Orator.
When I was about thirteen years old, and had succeeded in learning to read, every increase of knowledge, especially respecting the free states, added something to the almost intolerable burden of the thought-" I AM A SLAVE FOR LIFE." To my bondage I saw no end. It was a terrible reality, and I shall never be able to tell how sadly that thought chafed my young spirit. Fortunately, or unfortunately, about this time in my life, I had made enough money to buy what was then a very popular school book, viz: the "Columbian Orator." I bought this addition to my library, of Mr. Knight, on Thames street, Fell's Point, Baltimore, and paid him fifty cents for it. I was first led to buy this book, by hearing some little boys say that they were going to learn some little pieces out of it for the Exhibition. This volume was, indeed, a rich treasure, and every opportunity afforded me, for a time, was spent in diligently perusing it.
[It’s important to note two things. First, while there was no Maryland law prohibiting Douglass from learning to read, there wasa law that prohibited Nathaniel Knight, the owner of the Thames Street book store, from selling the book to Douglass. Secondly, while Douglass did not reveal the identities of the “little boys” in his first or second autobiography, he did reveal their names in this third autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, long after slavery ended and he could be sure that the “little boys” were safe from those who might otherwise have harassed or harmed them if he published their names in his 1845 and/or his 1855 books. Blight identifies Douglass’s playmates as Irish.]
The influence of the piece titled “Dialogue Between a Master and a Slave” is already well attested by Douglass himself and his biographers. The piece directly after that, “Speech in the Irish Parliament,” was an excerpt of a 1795 speech by Arthur O’Connor arguing for Catholic Emancipation, that is, removing the various legal restrictions placed on Catholics in Ireland and England. Blight notes that like the other pieces in The Columbian Orator, Douglass would have “encountered irresistible words like ‘freedom,’ ‘liberty,’ ‘tyranny,’ and the ‘rights of man’“ in the text of the O’Connor speech excerpt. Another advocate for Catholic emancipation, Daniel O’Connell, was to play a significant role in Douglass’s life because of a diplomatic incident that occurred a month prior to Douglass’s escape to freedom.
In August 1838, one month before Douglass escaped to freedom, Douglass overheard his master talking about Daniel O’Connell’s snub of the American ambassador to Britain, Andrew Stevenson.
O’Connell’s attacks on the United States almost resulted in a duel with the American ambassador to Britain. A major anti-slavery meeting was held at Birmingham on 1 August 1838 to celebrate the abolition of black apprenticeship (slavery in all but name) in the West Indies. In advance of the meeting, O’Connell called for the launch of a new crusade against slavery, attacking ‘the vile union of republicanism and slavery’, and expressing his hope that the day would come ‘when not a single American will be received in civilised society unless he belongs to an anti-slavery union or body’. At Birmingham, O’Connell was the final speaker, and his appearance was greeted with cheers and applause. Once again O’Connell attacked Washington for owning slaves and for waiting until his death before freeing them. Perhaps unwisely, he then launched into an attack on the United States ambassador to Britain, accusing him of being a ‘slave-breeder’, and wondering aloud whether it was ‘possible that America would send a man here who traffics in blood?’ Slave-breeding was a serious allegation at the time, far worse than simply owning slaves, for it suggested that owners treated their slaves like animals, encouraging (and sometimes forcing) them to breed, and then selling the offspring for profit.
The ambassador in question was a wealthy Virginian landowner, Andrew Stevenson. He had been Speaker of the House of Representatives before his appointment in 1834 to the court of St James (an appointment that was only confirmed by the Senate in 1836), and he was enraged that he had been attacked so publicly. O’Connell was ordered to withdraw the comments or fight a duel, but he refused to do either. Instead, he declared that until slavery was abolished in the United States ‘no American slaveholder ought to be received on a footing of equality by any of the civilised inhabitants of Europe’. And he spoke movingly about the madness that mothers must feel when their children were taken away from them and sold into slavery.
Word of the dispute travelled across the world. The former president of the United States, John Quincy Adams, even brought the matter before the floor of the House of Representatives. On 6 December 1838 he explained that he wished to expose ‘a conspiracy against the life of Daniel O’Connell’. He returned to this subject again in January 1839, denouncing the proposed challenge to O’Connell as ‘a threat of assassination by one ruffian. That was a conspiracy’. The resolution that Adams proposed, attacking Stevenson, was defeated but the debate caused a considerable impression in the United States.
In an October 14, 1845 speech in Cork, Douglass alluded specifically to the 1838 diplomatic incident and Daniel O’Connell.
I cannot proceed without alluding to a man who did much to abolish slavery, I mean Daniel O’Connell. (Tremendous cheers.) I feel grateful to him, for his voice has made American slavery shake to its centre. I am determined wherever I go, and whatever position I may fill, to speak with grateful emotions of Mr. O’Connell‘s labours.(Cheering.) I heard his denunciation of slavery, I heard my master curse him, and therefore I loved him. (Great cheering.) In London, Mr. O’Connell tore off the mask of hypocrisy from the slave-holders, and branded them as the vilest of the vile, and the most execrable of the execrable, for no man can put words together stronger than Mr. O’Connell.
Douglass escaped slavery on Sept. 3, 1838, days after he overheard his master’s curse Daniel O’Connell. Seven years later, in his preface to The Narrative, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison wrote that:
To illustrate the effect of slavery on the white man,— to show that he has no powers of endurance, in such a condition, superior to those of his black brother,—DANIEL O’CONNELL, the distinguished advocate of universal emancipation, and the mightiest champion of prostrate but not conquered Ireland, relates the following anecdote in a speech delivered by him in the Conciliation Hall, Dublin, before the Loyal National Repeal Association, March 31, 1845. “No matter,” said Mr. O’CONNELL, “under what specious term it may disguise itself, slavery is still hideous. It has a natural, an inevitable tendency to brutalize every noble faculty of man. An American sailor, who was cast away on the shore of Africa, where he was kept in slavery for three years, was, at the expiration of that period, found to be imbruted and stultified— he had lost all reasoning power; and having forgotten his native language, could only utter some savage gibberish between Arabic and English, which nobody could understand, and which even he himself found difficulty in pronouncing. So much for the humanizing influence of THE DOMESTIC INSTITUTION!” Admitting this to have been an extraordinary case of mental deterioration, it proves at least that the white slave can sink as low in the scale of humanity as the black one.
Because of fears for his recapture following the American publication of the Narrative, Douglass followed Garrison’s advice and toured Britain and Ireland, boarding the Cambria on August 16, 1845. By then, Douglass had already encountered and cherished friendships with his Irish playmates on the docks of Baltimore and had heard multiple stories of an Irishman who gave speeches not only about Catholic emancipation but speeches condemning American slavery as well. Within a few months, Douglass was to meet for the first and last time, a man in Ireland that he already regarded as a hero.