What Frederick Douglass Learned in Ireland

And what Ireland learned from him

I first came across Frederick Douglass’s Irish connection in the summer of 2012. I was then Ireland’s Ambassador to Germany, and I travelled to Derrynane, in County Kerry, former home of Daniel O’Connell, to talk about the Liberator’s European reputation. My talk highlighted how renowned O’Connell was in Germany during his heyday. That day I shared a platform with Douglass’s great-great granddaughter, Nettie Washington Douglass, who spoke about how her famous ancestor had been deeply influenced by O’Connell’s commitment to peaceful agitation. As someone who had studied O’Connell’s life and work, it surprised me that I had not previously come across his influence on Douglass. But then again, O’Connell’s opposition to slavery was not mentioned in Seán O’Faolain’s King of the Beggars (1938), and only touched on briefly in Oliver MacDonagh’s scholarly 2-volume biography of O’Connell (1988/9), with neither even mentioning Douglass.¹ Reflecting the altered interests of historians, Patrick Geoghegan’s The Liberator: the Life and Death of Daniel O’Connell, 1830-1847 (2002) devoted a full chapter to his subject’s extended campaign against slavery, beginning with an account of his meeting with Douglass. Christine Kinealy, best known for her research on the Famine, subsequently subjected O’Connell’s battle against slavery to a book-length analysis.²

Today’s Ireland is experiencing significant ethnic and racial diversity for the first time in its history, and the country’s new look has undoubtedly made some Irish feel uncomfortable. As these anxieties unfold, it is worth looking at the history of Irish attitudes toward race and emancipation, with Douglass’s 1845 visit to Ireland as a window. History is not an infallible guide, but neither should it be ignored. The tale of Daniel and Frederick, and of 19^th-century Irish attitudes to slavery, offers us mixed lessons.

Nine years after my initial encounter with the Douglass story, I met with a group of Frederick Douglass Fellows in Washington DC. They were on the eve of their departure for Ireland as part of a programme co-funded by the Irish Government to honour the legacy of Douglass’s connection with Ireland.

Frederick Douglass was 27 years old when he arrived in Dublin on the last day of August 1845, having crossed the Atlantic from Boston to Liverpool a few days before. Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818, and as a 20-year-old fled to Massachusetts, where he could live, albeit precariously, as a freeman. In 1845, he published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. The risk that his high profile would make him a target for slave hunters caused him to take refuge across the Atlantic.

Ireland in the 1840s was fertile ground for Douglass’s abolitionist message. I saw evidence of that when I visited Frederick Douglass’s home in Anacostia near Washington, and was shown an elaborate address of welcome presented to him by Cork City’s anti-slavery societies. This means that a city of about 80,000 inhabitants had two abolitionist groups in the 1840s.

Douglass’s principal hosts in Ireland were members of the Quaker community, including his Dublin publisher, Richard Webb. Ironically, Webb developed a decidedly negative opinion of Douglass, seeing him as ‘absurdly haughty, self-possessed and prone to take offence’.³ This did not prevent him from publishing a British and Irish edition of Douglass’s Autobiography. Webb’s son, Alfred, went on to become a Home Rule MP and, in an illustration of the international sympathies to Ireland’s struggle, was invited to preside over the tenth Indian National Congress in Madras in 1894.⁴

Frederick Douglass lived in Ireland for four months, at the end of 1845. During his visit, Douglass delivered lectures on slavery and temperance in Dublin, Cork, Waterford, Wexford, Youghal, Limerick, Celbridge, Bangor, Lisburn and Belfast.⁵ His staunch advocacy of temperance caused him to strike up a friendship with Ireland’s chief temperance crusader, Father Theobald Mathew (1790-1856). They parted ways when Fr Mathew, on a subsequent visit to America, refused to condemn slavery. The American visitor cut quite a dash in Ireland, although residual undercurrents of racism can be detected in some of the newspaper coverage he attracted, which overall was very positive. He was described as “a fine-looking man, possessed of a full flow of natural eloquence” and as someone with “a manly dignity of manner”.

Douglass’s encounter with Daniel O’Connell was one of the highlights of his visit. By that time, O’Connell had gained international recognition as a fiery critic of slavery, which he saw as ‘a foul stain’ on America’s character. Even when it came to America’s Founding Fathers, O’Connell did not mince his words, accusing them of lacking the ‘moral courage’ to abolish slavery. His uncompromising stance put him at odds with many Irish Americans, including two powerful, Irish-born prelates, Archbishop Hughes of New York and Bishop England of Charleston, both apologists for slavery. Hughes dismissed O’Connell’s criticisms as unwarranted outside interference in American affairs and, in common with other prominent churchmen, he suspected America’s leading abolitionists of being anti-Catholic. O’Connell’s position also undermined the burgeoning support among the Irish in America for his bid to repeal the Act of Union. A number of Repeal Associations established in American cities dissolved themselves in response to O’Connell’s condemnation of slavery. In 1843, he decided to refuse financial support from those in America who supported slavery. His abolitionist fervour was one of the issues that came between him and the members of the Young Ireland movement, who thought it unwise to alienate America and Irish Americans on the issue of slavery. (The Young Irelanders were a more radical offshoot of O’Connell’s Repeal movement.)

When the two met at a Repeal meeting in Dublin, Douglass revealed that he had known of O’Connell ever since he heard him cursed by his slave-owning masters. Douglass recorded O’Connell’s stirring condemnation of slavery: ‘My sympathy with distress is not confined within the narrow bounds of my own green island. No – it extends to every corner of the earth. My heart walks abroad, and wherever the miserable are to be succoured, or the slave to be set free, there my spirit is at home, and I delight to dwell.’ Understandably, Douglass was mightily impressed with O’Connell, whose ‘eloquence came down upon the vast assembly like a summer thunder-shower upon a dusty road.’

When it came to Douglass’s turn to speak, he said that: ‘The poor trampled slave of Carolina had heard the name of the Liberator with joy and hope, and he himself had heard the wish that some black O’Connell would rise up amongst his countrymen, and cry agitate, agitate, agitate’. Although their encounter was brief, the ageing, ailing O’Connell left a profound mark on the younger man, who often referred to him down the decades that followed. When O’Connell died, Douglass lamented that ‘a great champion of freedom had fallen’, to be succeeded by ‘the Duffys, Mitchells, Meaghers and others – who loved liberty for themselves and their country, but were utterly destitute of sympathy with the cause of liberty in countries other than their own’.⁶

Douglass was gratified by the manner in which he was received in Ireland and was struck by the ‘total absence of all manifestations of prejudice against me, on account of my color. I find myself not treated as a color, but as a man.’ Some of Douglass’s descriptions of the level of tolerance in Ireland sound rather far-fetched, but he contrasted this with his lot in America: ‘The land of my birth welcomes me to her shores only as a slave, and spurns with contempt the idea of treating me differently’. Douglass came to Ireland right at the beginning of the Famine, when O’Connell was still a commanding political figure, who enjoyed a degree of fame and popularity unmatched in modern Irish history. O’Connell’s uncompromising condemnation of slavery may well have swayed many Irish people to share his views on a subject to which they might not otherwise have paid such attention.

There were certainly plenty of Irish people who participated in, strongly supported, and benefited from slavery. John Mitchell, author of the influential nationalist tract Jail Journal, was an undying supporter of slavery and became a fervent advocate of the Confederate cause during the US Civil War. On arrival in America, Mitchell said that all he wanted was ‘a slave plantation well-stocked with slaves’.⁷ Many among the Irish in America felt threatened by the influx of freed slaves into Northern cities, where they competed for opportunity on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. And of course, Irish-Americans in New York led the anti-draft protests that turned into a race riot against black residents in 1863. The violence unleashed against African Americans at that time prompted Douglass to describe the Irish as “among our bitterest persecutors”. Yet Douglass retained an affection for Ireland, and he paid a brief return visit in 1887, and met with the families of those who had welcomed him four decades earlier. On his return to the USA, he expressed his strong support for Charles Stewart Parnell’s Home Rule movement, describing himself as ‘an out-and-out Home Ruler for Ireland and … for this Republic. The right I am claiming for Ireland I claim for every man here – North and South.’⁸

Many decades later, as an independent state, Ireland sought to build on its anti-colonial heritage and became an active supporter of decolonisation during the 1950s and 1960s. This seems to me to be built on the legacy of 19th-century Irish attitudes. A positive reputation was established that has endured. I remember hosting three African Ambassadors in Berlin in 2011 at a commemoration of the 90^th anniversary of the first Irish delegation to come to Germany to build support for Ireland’s freedom struggle. My guests explained that they saw Ireland’s fight for independence as part of their history too.⁹ I had similar experiences as a diplomat to India in the early 1980s, when many Indians I met told me that they lauded the role Ireland had played as a pathfinder for other subject peoples.

Such positive feelings towards Ireland will not last forever. In 2020, they were probably a factor in Ireland’s election to the United Nations Security Council in the face of stiff opposition from Canada and Norway. It will be increasingly difficult for us to combine our interests as an advanced Western country with the values distilled from our history and the ageing yeast of our freedom struggle.

Is there a link between O’Connell’s rejection of slavery and Ireland’s 20th-century foreign policy traditions? Personally, I see a broad continuum in Irish political life from O’Connell’s time to the present day, which helps shape attitudes to contemporary international issues and encourages the Irish Government to take advanced positions on, for example, the plight of the Palestinians, exposing itself to the risk of retaliatory action from the USA. From the early 19th century, the Irish nationalist cause found most favour within the Whig/Liberal tradition – O’Connell sided with the Whig Lord Melbourne, Parnell with Gladstone, Redmond with Asquith. That positioned Irish nationalism at the liberal end of the spectrum in the politics of 19th and early-20th-century Britain. The anti-Imperial sentiment that prompted Irish support for the Boer cause during Britain’s South African war continued into the 1930s with de Valera’s support for sanctions against Italy over its invasion of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). It reached full steam during the era of decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s.

We can draw satisfaction from the fact that Douglass was so well received in Ireland. Burdened by a strong sense of grievance at the social and economic conditions that were the lot of the majority of the Irish people in 1845, there was a feeling of affinity with those who suffered under the yoke of slavery. Nonetheless, as Douglass made clear, the situation of the Irish, despite the deprivation and discrimination besetting them, was a far cry from what he had endured during his life as a slave in Maryland. Among other things, the Irish had the right to leave and seek new lives for themselves in the USA and elsewhere.

Douglass’s most recent biographer, David Blight, argues that he was ‘deeply affected, even changed, by Ireland and her people’ and brought away both a real and mythic sense of ‘the Irish people and their beautiful and terrible land’. Writing to the leading American abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, as he left Ireland, Douglass said that he had 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.’¹⁰ Ireland has also been described as ‘a space of empowerment’ and ‘increasing ideological independence’¹¹ for Douglass at the beginning of what turned out to be a long and outstanding innings in public life which saw him become one of the most famous Americans of the 19^th century.

Douglass’s positive experiences in Ireland lands well with African Americans today, many of whom are happy to see themselves as part of a multifarious Irish diaspora whose heterogeneity is there to be recognised and celebrated. An African American Irish Diaspora Network was established during my time as Ambassador to the USA. I was present in October 2021 for the official opening of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge across Washington’s Anacostia River, when Mayor Muriel Bowser paid warm tribute to Ireland’s efforts to honour the legacy of Frederick Douglass’s fruitful encounter with our country.

The memory of Frederick Douglass’s visit will not soothe those who feel discommoded by the novel experience of demographic diversity, but it is a long-overlooked part of our backstory that has been rediscovered. It reminds us of the outstanding role that Ireland’s Liberator played, to the satisfaction of his Irish supporters, in the struggle against slavery, which in the mid-19^th century prompted the kind of passionate activism and heated exchanges that climate change or the plight of Palestinians in Gaza do today. Unexpected characters show up from time to time in Irish history. Frederick Douglass’s visit to Ireland is among the most surprising and revealing.

Daniel Mulhall is a retired Irish diplomat, who was formerly Ambassador to Malaysia, Germany, the UK, and the US. He is the author of Ulysses: A Reader’s Odyssey, and Pilgrim Soul: W.B. Yeats and the Ireland of His Time. You can follow him on X here.

1. There is a chapter on ‘O’Connell and Slavery’ in Donal McCartney (ed.), The World of Daniel O’Connell (1980), written by a Finnish-based academic, Douglas Riach. It makes no reference to Douglass’s visit.

2. Christine Kinealy, Daniel O’Connell and the Anti-Slavery Movement (2016).

3. Tom Chaffin, Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary, p. 45.

4. Mare-Louise Legg (ed.), Alfred Webb: The Autobiography of a Quaker Nationalist, pp. 67-71.

5. Editor’s note: Some of these lectures are now commemorated by a plaque and statue.

6. Quoted in Patrick Geoghegan, The Liberator (2010), p. 198.

7. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, pp. 181-2.

8. Tom Chaffin, Giant’s Causeway, p. 219

9. Editor’s note: There is a story that Marcus Garvey, the founder of the pan-Africanist movement, chose to include the colour green in the pan-African flag – from which many African national flags are derived – to represent solidarity with the Irish. Garvey did once say that, although his interpretation was not shared by other members of the UNIA-ACL.

10. David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, p. 153.

11. Fionnghuala Sweeney, Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World (2007).