Chapter Eight
On two sides of the Atlantic
Many people would have shared Jack’s reluctance to believe Amelia’s story. As time passed the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society found itself caught in a dilemma. The committee knew all the facts of Frederick’s case; but for his protection the members took every precaution, withholding the name of the state and county from which he had come, his master’s name and any other detail which might lead to his capture. Even so they realized that they must be constantly on guard. But the audiences began to murmur that this Frederick Douglass could not be a “fugitive from slavery.”
During the first three or four months Frederick’s speeches had been almost exclusively made up of narrations of his own personal experiences as a slave.
“Give us the facts,” said Secretary Collins. “We’ll take care of the philosophy.”
“Tell your story, Frederick,” Garrison would whisper as his protégé stepped upon the platform. And Frederick, smiling his devotion to the older man, always followed the injunction.
But Frederick was growing in stature. Scholars’ libraries were thrown open to him. Theodore Parker had sixteen thousand volumes; his library covered the entire third floor of his house.
“Come up any time, Frederick. Books, my boy, were written to be read.”
And Frederick reveled in Thomas Jefferson, Carlyle, Edmund Burke, Tom Paine, John Quincy Adams, Jonathan Swift, William Godwin. He became drunk on books; staggering home late at night, his eyes red, he would fall heavily across his bed. He pored over the newspapers from all parts of the country which Garrison gathered intheLiberatoroffice; he sat at the feet of the greatest orators of the day—Wendell Phillips, Charles Redmond, Theodore Parker among them. He munched sandwiches and listened, while John Whittier read his verses; and always the young fugitive from slavery followed in the wake of William Lloyd Garrison, devouring his words, tapping his sources of wisdom, attuning his ears to every pitch of the loved voice.
Frederick’s speeches began to expand in content, logic and delivery.
“People won’t believe you ever were a slave, Frederick, if you keep on this way,” cautioned Collins. But Garrison shook his head.
“Let him alone!” he said.
The year 1843 was one of remarkable antislavery activity. The New England Anti-Slavery Society mapped out a series of one hundred conventions. The territory covered in the schedule included all of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. Under Garrison’s leadership it was a real campaign, taking more than six months to complete. Frederick Douglass was chosen as one of the agents to tour the country.
The first convention was held in Middlebury, Vermont, home of William Slade, for years co-worked with John Quincy Adams in Congress. Yet in this town the opposition to the antislavery convention was intensely bitter and violent. Vermont boasted that within her borders no slave had ever been delivered up to a master, but the towns did not wish to be involved in “agitation.”
What was in this respect true of the Green Mountain State was most discouragingly true of New York, the next state they visited. All along the Erie canal, from Albany to Buffalo, they met with apathy, indifference, and sometimes the mob spirit. Syracuse refused to furnish church, market, house, or hall in which to hold the meetings. Mr. Stephen Smith, who had received the little group of speakers in his home, was sick with distress. Frederick, standing beside a wide window, looked out upon a park covered with young trees. He turned to his unhappy host.
“Don’t worry, my friend,” he said. “We’ll have our meeting.”
The next morning he took his stand under a tree in the southeast corner of this park and began to speak to an audience of five persons. Before the close of the afternoon he had before him not less than five hundred. In the evening he was waited upon by the officers of the Congregational church and tendered the use of an old woodenbuilding which they had deserted for a better. Here the convention continued for three days.
In the growing city of Rochester their reception was more cordial. Gerrit Smith, Myron Holly, William Goodell and Samuel Porter were influential Abolitionists in the section. Frederick was to know the eccentric, learned and wealthy Gerrit Smith much better. Now he argued with him, upholding Garrison’s moral persuasion against Gerrit Smith’s ballot-box, as the weapon for abolishing slavery. From Rochester, Frederick and William Bradburn made their way to Buffalo, a rising city of steamboats, business and bustle. The Friends there had been able to secure for the convention only an old dilapidated and deserted room on a side-street, formerly used as a post-office. They went at the time appointed and found seated a few cabmen in their coarse, wrinkled clothes, whips in hand, while their teams were standing on the street waiting for a job.
Bradburn was disgusted. After an hour of what he considered futile talk and haranguing, he left. That evening he took the steamer to Cleveland. But Frederick stayed on. For nearly a week he spoke every day in the old post-office to constantly increasing audiences. Then a Baptist church was thrown open to him. The following Sunday he spoke in an open park to an assembly of several thousand persons.
In Richmond, Indiana, their meeting was broken up, and their clothes ruined with evil-smelling eggs. In Pendleton, Indiana, Frederick’s speaking schedule suffered a delay.
It had been found impossible to obtain a building in Pendleton in which to hold the convention. So a platform was erected in the woods at the edge of town. Here a large audience assembled and Frederick and his companion speaker, William A. White, were in high spirits. But hardly had they climbed to the stand when they were attacked by a mob of about sixty persons who, armed with clubs, picks and bricks, had come out to “kill the nigger!”
It was a furious but uneven fight. The Friends tried to protect Frederick, but they had no defense. White, standing his ground, pleaded with the ruffians and got a ferocious blow on the head, which cut his scalp and knocked him to the ground. Frederick had caught up a stick, and he fought with all his strength; but the mob beat him down, leaving him, they supposed, dead on the ground. Then they mounted their horses and rode to Anderson where, it was said, most of them lived.
Frederick lay on the ground at the edge of the woods, bleedingand unconscious. Neal Hardy, a Quaker, carried him to his cart and took him home. There he was bandaged and nursed. His right hand had been broken and never recovered its natural strength and dexterity. But within a few days he was up and on his way. His arm was in a sling but, as he remarked, the rest of him “little the worse for the tussle.”
“A complete history of these hundred conventions would fill a volume far larger than the one in which this simple reference is to find place,” Frederick Douglass wrote many years later. “It would be a grateful duty to speak of the noble young men who forsook ease and pleasure, as did White, Gay and Monroe, and endured all manner of privations in the cause of the enslaved and down-trodden of my race.... Mr. Monroe was for many years consul to Brazil, and has since been a faithful member of Congress from Oberlin District, Ohio, and has filled other important positions in his state. Mr. Gay was managing editor of theNational Anti-Slavery Standard, and afterward of theNew York Tribune, and still later of theNew York Evening Post.”[4]
The following winter, against the advice of his friends, Douglass decided on an independent course of action.
“Your wordis being doubted,” he said to Garrison and Phillips. “That I cannot endure. They are saying that I am an impostor. I shall write out the facts connected with my experience in slavery, giving names, places and dates.”
“It will be a powerful story!” said Garrison, his eyes watching the glow of light from the fireplace.
Theodore Parker spoke impatiently. “So powerful that it will bring the pack on his heels. And neither the people nor the laws of Massachusetts will be able to protect him.”
“He’s mad!” Wendell Phillips’ golden voice was hard. “When he has finished I shall advise him to throw the manuscript in the fire!”
But Garrison smiled.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “we’ll find a way. God will not lose such a man as Frederick Douglass!”
They looked at him sitting there in the dusk, with the firelight playing over his calm face. There were times when Garrison’s quiet faith confounded the two divines.
A way did reveal itself. In May, 1845, theNarrative of the Lifeof Frederick Douglass, prefaced by letters by Garrison and Phillips, made its appearance. Priced at fifty cents, it ran through a large edition. In August, Douglass, with a purse of two hundred and fifty dollars raised by his friends in Boston, boarded the British shipCambriafor England, in company with the Hutchinsons, a family of Abolitionist singers, and James Buffum, vice-president of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.
Anna stood on the dock and waved goodbye. She smiled, though the ship was blurred and she could not distinguish his dear face at the rail. A blast of the whistle made little Freddie clutch her skirts and bury his face in alarm. He wanted to go home. Close by her side, straight and unmoved, stood six-year-old Lewis, holding the hand of his weeping sister, Rosetta.
“Look after Mother and the children, Son. I’m depending on you!” Lewis was turning over his father’s parting words. Now he would be the man of the house. Girls, of course, could cry. He watched his mother’s face.
A few final shouts, a last flutter of handkerchiefs, some stifled sobs, and the relatives and friends of the voyagers began to disperse. Anna felt a light touch on her arm.
“Come, Mrs. Douglass”—it was Mrs. Wendell Phillips—“we’re going to drive you home.”
Friends surrounded her—comforting, solicitous.
“You can depend upon us, Mrs. Douglass. You know that.”
Anna smiled. She had wanted him to go, to get out of harm’s reach. She could not continue to live in the terror that had gripped her ever since Frederick had returned from the western trip. He had made light of the “Indiana incident,” but his broken hand could not be hidden. Each time he left her after that, she knew whatmighthappen. So she had urged him to go; she had smiled and said, “Don’t worry about us, Frederick. You must go!”
“My salary will be paid direct to you.”
“I’ll manage. Now that we’re in our home, it will be easy.” Nothing but confidence and assurances for him.
The summer before they had bought a lot in Lynn, Massachusetts. They had planned the house together; and in the fall—between trips and with the help of several friends—Douglass had built a cottage.
Anna hated to leave New Bedford—“a city of friends,” she called it.
“But you see,” she explained to them ruefully, “the Douglassfamily has simply rent the seams of this little house. We have to have more room.”
They had chosen Lynn because it was more on the path for Frederick’s work and because the town had a thriving Anti-Slavery Society. Came the day when they moved into their cottage. Anna washed windows and woodwork, and Lewis followed his father around, “chunking up all the holes” so that when the cold weather came they would be snug and warm.
The highway was good and the May day pleasant as the Reverend Wendell Phillips drove Douglass’ family back to their home.
“How long do you think he’ll have to stay away, Mr. Phillips?”
They were nearly there, before Anna dared ask the question she had been avoiding.
Wendell Phillips flicked his whip. It was a moment before he answered.
“It’s impossible to say, Mrs. Douglass. We’re certain he’ll render valuable service to the cause of freedom among peoples who do not know the real horrors of American slavery. Meanwhile, we’ll do what we can to see that his own return may be safe.”
“Pray God the time will not be long!” Mrs. Phillips laid her hand over that of the woman by her side.
Then they were at the gate and goodbyes were said. The children climbed down nimbly and rushed up the path. Anna moved more slowly.
She smiled at the sight of moist, chubby Charlie in the neighbor woman’s arms. This was their youngest son—hers and Frederick’s. Poor little fellow! Anna felt her heart contract.Hedidn’t know his father was going so far away.
“Hasn’t whimpered a mite,” the neighbor had kept him during the family’s absence. “So I mixed up a pot of soup for you. It’s on the stove all ready. I knew you’d all be starved.”
Anna’s voice choked when she tried to thank the good soul. The woman patted her arm and hurried homeward across the vacant lot.
Small Charlie was quite happy, so Anna left him with the other children and went to the room she shared with her husband. It was very small. The wardrobe door, left swinging open, bumped against the washstand crowding the bed. Anna took off her hat, placed it on the shelf and closed the door. Moving mechanically, she emptied the half-filled bowl of water on the stand and hung up an old alpaca coat.Frederick had discarded it at the last moment. Then she stood motionless, just thinking.
She had not told him she was going to have another baby: he might not have gone. But she knew she needed more money than that tiny salary. She could not leave the children. There must be something she could do. She must manage. Suddenly her face lighted. Lynn, Massachusetts, had one industry which in the early 1840’s spilled over into every section. Lynn had developed like a guild town in England; and that evening Anna made up her mind that she could do what was being done in many households in the town—she would make shoes.
In time she learned to turn a sole with the best of them.
Meanwhile a ship was going out to sea. And all was not smooth sailing.
“We should have taken one of the French boats—even if they are slower!” Mrs. Hutchinson regarded the apologetic purser scornfully.
“I’ll see the Captain at once.” And James Buffum stalked away in search of him.
No cabin had been assigned to Frederick Douglass. Though the tickets had been purchased together, the party was being separated—the Hutchinsons and Mr. Buffum sent to cabins, Frederick Douglass to the steerage.
Douglass took no part in the angry discussion that ensued. It was an old story to him. Negroes who had the temerity to travel about the United States were subject to insults and indignities. On the Sound between New York and Stonington no colored man was allowed abaft the wheel. In all seasons of the year, hot or cold, wet or dry, the deck was his only place. Douglass had been in many fights—had been beaten by conductors and brakemen. He smiled now remembering the time six men ejected him from a car on the Eastern Line between Boston and Portland. He had managed to tear away several seats and break a couple of windows.
But this morning, as theCambrianosed her way out of the bay and started back to the Old Country which so many had left in their search for freedom, Douglass shrugged his shoulders.
“Let it go!” he said. “We’ll all reach England together. If I cannot go to the cabins, you can come to me in the steerage.”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Douglass,” Captain Judkins quickly intervened.“There is only the formality of an invitation. You can visit your friends at any time.”
“Thank you, sir!” Douglass bowed gravely.
But Mrs. Hutchinson would not be quieted. “It’s ridiculous!”
Her husband sighed and slipped his arm through Frederick’s.
“Let’s go now and see that our friend is properly settled,” he said.
So they all went first to the steerage. And here, to the edification of the steerage passengers, they spent most of their time. But, as always happens within a small world, word got around, and during the long afternoons and evenings other first-class passengers began visiting the steerage.
The Hutchinsons, celebrated vocalists, sang their sweetest songs, and groups gathered on the rude forecastle-deck in spirited conversation with Frederick Douglass.
“Always thought Abolitionists were crackpots!” The man from Indiana frowned.
“Wouldn’t think any—er—a black could talk like that!” The speaker, who came from Delaware, certainly had never heard such talk before.
“This man—he is not black.” The tinge of foreign accent in the words caused the Americans to glance up sharply. Perhaps the immaculate swarthy passenger was from Quebec. A Washingtonian eyed him coolly and rose to his feet.
“He’s a nigger just the same!” he said, and walked away from the group.
They fell silent after that. But some time afterward several of the passengers approached the Captain with the request that he invite this unusual character to deliver a lecture in the salon. Captain Judkins, who had been unhappy about the matter, gladly complied. He himself went to the steerage and sat chatting with the ex-slave. The dark man’s manners captivated him.
Announcement was made of the scheduled lecture. News of the Captain’s visit to the steerage got around. In one of the most expensive suites on the ship three young men faced each other. They were trembling with rage.
“By God, suh,” said one, thumping the table with his fist, “we won’t stand for it!”
“Invited to the salon!” said another.
“By the Captain!”
The pampered son of a Louisiana planter tore his silk cravat as he loosened it.
“Dog of a runaway slave—flaunted in our faces!” His voice choked in his throat. His cousin quickly assented.
“Fool Captain ought to be horsewhipped!”
The fair-haired boy from Georgia emptied his glass of brandy and waved his hand drunkenly.
“Just a minute, gentlemen. No rash talk! Gotta plan—that’s it—gotta plan!”
“Plan—hell!” The dark face of the Louisianian flushed dangerously. “We’ll just throw the nigger overboard if he dares show his impertinent face!”
“Yes,” agreed his cousin. “That’ll show the damned Yankees!”
They did not really believe he would come. But, of course, they did not know Frederick Douglass.
On the appointed evening the salon filled up early. Few of the ladies had dared to go to the steerage, and now flowered ruffles and curls fluttered with excitement as they settled into the cushioned seats. Promptly on the hour the imposing figure appeared in the doorway. At a sign from the Captain, who had risen, Douglass walked toward the front of the room.
Then it happened.
The three young men were now five. At Douglass’ appearance the two who were inside the salon sprang quickly to their feet, the three who had been watching from the deck came running in.
“We’ll stop him!”
“Get the nigger!”
“Throw him overboard!”
Ladies screamed, men jumped up, but Frederick only stood still while they closed in on him. Perhaps he had expected something like this. At any rate, his face did not change. The clamor increased as, cursing, the young men knocked aside any opposition.
But they had reckoned without the Captain. The stern old Britisher’s voice thundered out. His shipmen came running, and before the rioters could realize what had happened, they were struggling in the firm grasp of British seamen, who looked toward the Captain for further orders.
Captain Judkins was outraged. He glared at the offenders who, utterly bewildered by the turn of events, were stuttering their objections. The Captain chose to ignore everything except one obvious fact.
“Put these young drunks in irons until they sober up!” He turned away, leaving his competent crewmen to execute the order.
The Louisianian’s face paled. He stared about stupidly, expecting the whole roomful of people to rise in protest. But they did not. The faces swam before his eyes crazily as, stumbling a little, he was led away. Later he heard them applauding on the upper deck.
The next day they sighted land. A mist between the ocean and the sky turned green, took shape. The man beside Frederick gripped the rail with his broken nails.
“’Tis Ireland,” he repeated softly. And there was pain and heartache in his voice.
Frederick did not sleep that night. He was one of the huddled group that stayed on deck. They talked together in low voices, watching the distant flicker of an occasional light, straining their ears to catch some sound. Some of them had failed in the bewildering New World, and they were going back. Others had succeeded and now were returning for parents or wives and children.
But Frederick was breaking through the horizon. He was getting on the other side. He had sailed through the sky. America and all that it had meant to him lay far behind. How would Europe receive this dark-skinned fugitive from slavery?
The ship docked at Liverpool, but certain preliminaries prevented the passengers from going ashore immediately. Baltimore, New Bedford, not even New York, had prepared Frederick for the port of Liverpool. It was rapidly becoming Britain’s monstrous spider of commerce, flinging its sticky filaments to the far corners of the world and drawing into its net all that the earth yields up to men.
Just inside the bottleneck entrance to the Mersey River, kept relatively free from silt by tidal scour, Liverpool was once a shelter for fishing vessels which built up a comfortable coastal trade with Ireland. Medieval sailors gave little thought to the sandstone hill that lay beyond the marshy fringe. The Dee River silted up and trade with America grew; and it was found that Liverpool was well situated to meet the change. The mouth of the old pool was converted into wet docks, the marshes were hollowed out, and railroads tunneled through the sandstone hill with ease. The British Empire was expanding.
Now all along the wharves rode merchant ships of every variety, ships laden with iron and salt, timber and coal, grains, silks and woollens, tobacco and, most of all, raw cotton from America.
Frederick saw them unloading the cotton and piling it high on the docks. He knew it was going to the weavers of Lancashire. He wondered if those weavers knew how cotton was planted and chopped and picked.
The Hutchinsons had been in Liverpool before, so they all went to a small hotel not far from the wide Quadrant. Frederick stood in the square gazing up at the great columned building fashioned after the Greek Parthenon and for a moment he forgot about the cotton. He liked the quiet, solid strength of that building. He resolved to visit it to feel the stone and measure the columns.
Quite unexpectedly Liverpool became aware of Frederick Douglass.
The young men who had been so rudely halted in their premeditated violence, went immediately to the police demanding the arrest of the “runaway slave” and of the ship’s Captain! They were not prepared for the calm detachment of British justice. Never doubting the outcome, the young men repaired to the newspapers, where they told of their “outrageous treatment,” denounced the Captain and all his crew and heaped abuse upon the insolent instigator of this “crime against society.”
British curiosity is not easily aroused. But the young men’s language pricked both the authorities and the newspapermen. They did not like it. They dropped in on Captain Judkins. His words were few, brusque and pointed. The police asked politely if he wished them to lock the young men up. The Captain considered their proposal coolly and decided he had no interest in the young men. Hewasgoing to take his Missus to hear the black American speak. She would enjoy it. And now, if the inspector was finished, his Missus was waiting. The Captain hurried away, rolling a little on his sea legs; and the newspapermen decided they would visit the “black American.”
The Honorable William Gladstone, down from London for a few days, re-read a certain column in his paper over a late and solitary breakfast. The new Colonial Secretary spent most of his time in London; but Liverpool remained his home. It was a lovely house, well out of town, away from the dirt and noise of warehouses and docks. Well back from the graveled road, behind high fences and undulating greens, sat the residences of England’s merchant princes. Gladstone had represented his neighbors in the government since he was twenty-three years old, first as vice-president and then president of the Boardof Trade. Now, at thirty-six, he had been made Colonial Secretary. It took a man who knew trade and the proper restrictions for its protection to handle the affairs of Egypt, Australia and fabulously rich India.
The young man frowned and crumpled his paper.
“Nevins!” he called.
“Yes, sir!”
“Nevins, have you been in town this week?”
Nevins considered before answering. There must be no mistake about this matter.
“Not this week, sir.”
“Well, have you heard any talk of a British India Society meeting?”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“India Society,” the Colonial Secretary explained, “or anything at all about India. I understand there have been meetings in the provinces—talk about starving India—Indian independence—some sort of agitation.”
“We’ve had nothing of that kind in these parts.” Nevins spoke with a touch of disapproval.
The Colonial Secretary picked up his paper. He frowned at it a moment.
“I was wondering if there were any connection. Any connection at all. Might well be, you know.”
“I don’t understand, sir.”
“There’s something here about a runaway slave from America speaking in town tonight—at one of those workers’ halls. They’re springing up all over England.” He added the last thoughtfully.
“Did you say a slave, sir, perhaps an African cannibal?”
“Exactly. This gives a most extraordinary account of the fellow on shipboard. Ship’s Captain says he’s educated.”
“I can’t believe it, sir.”
“Um—would be very strange, if true. But who would be bringing him over here?” The American Revolution had not yet become a mellowed memory. Americans—white or black—would bear watching.
“Nevins!”
“Yes, sir.”
“I should like you to attend this meeting.”
“I, sir?”
“Find out what this slave has to say and what’s behind him.”
It had really been planned by the Hutchinsons as a concert. The Anti-Slavery Society had asked Mr. Buffum to say a few words. Douglass was merely to be presented and to say that he was glad to be in England. But the newspapers had played up Frederick Douglass’ story so much that at the last moment they decided to seize the opportunity and feature him. When, long before dark the hall began to fill, it was obvious that they had come to hear “the black man.”
While the crowd listened respectfully to the Hutchinsons, Frederick studied his first British audience. Somehow it was different. He realized it bore out what he had witnessed in two days of wandering about Liverpool. For the first time in his life he had seen white people whose lot might well be compared with that of the black slave in America. Here in Liverpool they could indeed leave their jobs, he thought grimly; but their children would starve. He saw them living in unbelievable squalor, several families herded together in two or three rooms, or in a single dirty cellar, sleeping on straw and shavings.
He sat on the platform and studied their faces. There was something in their eyes, something in the stolid set of their chins, something hard and unyielding, some strength which could not be destroyed—something to join with his strength. And so when he rose he did not fumble for words. He told them that he was glad that here on British soil he was truly free, that no slave-hunter could drag him from the platform, no arm, however long, turn him over to a master. Here he stood a free man, among other free men!
They cheered him lustily. And when they had quieted down he began to talk to them about cotton. He talked to them of the cotton piled high on the docks of Liverpool and how it got there. He talked to them of black hands picking cotton and blood soaking into soil around the cotton stalks.
“Because British manufacturers need cotton, American slavery can defy the opinions of the civilized world and block Abolitionists in America and England. If England bought free cotton from some other part of the world, if she stopped buying slave-grown cotton, American slavery would die out.”
Graphically, he added up the horrors of slavery. He told how the labor of the slave in chains cheapened and degraded labor everywhere. They listened, leaning forward in their seats, their eyes fixed.
“Cotton can be grown by free labor, at a fair cost and in far greater abundance, in India. England, as a matter of self-interest as well as on the score of humanity, should without delay redress the wrongs of India, give protection and encouragement to its oppressed and suffering population, and thus obtain a permanent and abundant supply of free cotton produced by free men.”
“A powerful speech, sir!” Nevins reported the next morning.
The Colonial Secretary looked at his man with some impatience.
“Well, really, Nevins! Let’s be a bit more specific. A black make a powerful speech—something of an exaggeration, surely!”
“He’s not really a black, sir,” Nevins answered surprisingly.
“Good Lord! What is he then?”
“I couldn’t rightly say, sir.” There was a dogged stubbornness about Nevins this morning. The Colonial Secretary shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, well. What did he talk about?”
A lucid thought flashed across Nevins’ mind.
“He talked about cotton, sir.”
“About cotton?” The Colonial Secretary stared. “What on earth did he say about cotton?”
“He said that better cotton could be raised in India than in America.”
The lucid moment passed, and Nevins could tell no more. But the young Colonial Secretary saw the newspaper accounts of Douglass’s talk before he returned to London. He took out his notebook and on a clean, fresh page he wrote a name, “Frederick Douglass.” Then he thoughtfully drew a circle around it. William Gladstone’s mind had projected itself into the future, when there might be no more cheap cotton coming from America. The Colonial Secretary was a solid young man with no nonsense about him.
Across the narrow strip of water, in Dublin, Daniel O’Connell sat in a ruby-brick house off Rutland Square, while the dusk of a September evening closed about him. He held a letter in his hand—a letter he had been re-reading while he waited. From far-off America his friend, William Lloyd Garrison, had written:
I send him to you, O’Connell, because you of all men have most to teach him. He is a young lion, not yet fully come into his strength, but all the latent power is there. I tremble forhim! I am not a learned man. When confronted with clever phrasing of long words I am like to be confused. Scholars well versed in theology say I am a perfectionist.... As Christians, I believe we must convert the human race. Yet, God forgive me, doubts assail my heart. Here is a man, a few short years ago a slave. I stand condemned each time I look into his face. I am ashamed of being identified with a race of men who have done him so much injustice, who yet retain his people in horrible bondage. I try to make amends. But who am I to shape this young man’s course? I have no marks of a lash across my back; I’ve had the comforts of a mother’s tender care; I speak my father’s name with pride. I am a free white man in a land shaped and designed for free white men. But you, O’Connell, know of slavery! Your people are not free. Poor and naked, they are governed by laws which combine all the vices of civilization with those of primitive life. The masses of Ireland enjoy neither the freedom of the savage, left to roam his own forests and draw fish from his rivers, nor the bread of servitude.... From you, Frederick Douglass can learn. I commend him to you, with my love. He will strengthen your great heart. He will renew your faith and hope for all mankind.
I send him to you, O’Connell, because you of all men have most to teach him. He is a young lion, not yet fully come into his strength, but all the latent power is there. I tremble forhim! I am not a learned man. When confronted with clever phrasing of long words I am like to be confused. Scholars well versed in theology say I am a perfectionist.... As Christians, I believe we must convert the human race. Yet, God forgive me, doubts assail my heart. Here is a man, a few short years ago a slave. I stand condemned each time I look into his face. I am ashamed of being identified with a race of men who have done him so much injustice, who yet retain his people in horrible bondage. I try to make amends. But who am I to shape this young man’s course? I have no marks of a lash across my back; I’ve had the comforts of a mother’s tender care; I speak my father’s name with pride. I am a free white man in a land shaped and designed for free white men. But you, O’Connell, know of slavery! Your people are not free. Poor and naked, they are governed by laws which combine all the vices of civilization with those of primitive life. The masses of Ireland enjoy neither the freedom of the savage, left to roam his own forests and draw fish from his rivers, nor the bread of servitude.... From you, Frederick Douglass can learn. I commend him to you, with my love. He will strengthen your great heart. He will renew your faith and hope for all mankind.
The old man sat, turning the letter in his hand. The years lay heavy along his massive frame. His own voice came back to him:Sons of Ireland! Agitate, agitate, agitate!
Yet the evictions of starving tenants went on. The great castle in its circle of wretched cabins, stripped the surrounding country of food and fuel. People were ignorant because they could not go to school, slothful because there was nothing they could do. Drunkards because they were cold. Ireland had long been in subjection harsh enough to embitter, yet not complete enough to subdue. But the failure of the potato crop this year had brought a deadening apathy. The Irish cottier was saying he could never be worse off or better off by any act of his own. And everywhere there were the gendarmes, sodden with drink and armed with carbines, bayonets and handcuffs.
Daniel O’Connell had been thirty-six years old when, in 1812, Robert Peel came to Dublin. To O’Connell the twenty-four-year-old Secretary for Ireland was the embodiment of everything English. The Irishman had been destined and educated for the priesthood, had taken up law instead, and risen as rapidly as a Catholic could in a Protestant government. An Irish Catholic could vote, but could notsit in Parliament; he could enter the army, navy or professions, but could not rise to the higher ranks. The universities and all the important posts in the Civil Service were closed to him.
As an advocate, Daniel O’Connell had been greatly in demand. In those days he stood six feet tall, with a head of fox-red curls and a face that had irregular, almost ugly features. They said his voice could be heard a mile off and was like music strained through honey. Reckless, cunning, generous and vindictive, O’Connell had fought for Ireland. They threw him in jail when he challenged Robert Peel to a duel. It never came off. He finally apologized, thinking to propitiate the Englishman in the matter of his Catholic Relief Bill that was up before Parliament.
Now Robert Peel was Prime Minister of England, and misery still lay like a shroud over all Ireland. O’Connell shook his head. Garrison was mistaken. There was nothing he could teach his young man. At seventy, one’s work is finished, and he, Daniel O’Connell, had failed.
After a while the girl brought in a lighted lamp and set it on the table. O’Connell said nothing. He was waiting.
Then he heard voices in the hall and he stood up, his keen eyes fixed on the door. It opened to admit Frederick Douglass. The dark man stood a moment where the lamplight fell on him; then he smiled. And something in the Irishman’s tired heart ran out to meet that smile. O’Connell strode across the room. He placed his two hands on the younger man’s shoulders and looked deep into his eyes.
“My son, I’m glad you’ve come,” he said.
So Frederick Douglass saw Ireland and came to know its people. He learned why women’s faces beneath their shawls aged so quickly. He watched children claw the débris on the coal-quays of Cork. He saw the rich grasslands of the Golden Vale where fine, fat cattle fed while babies died for milk. Looking out over the Lakes of Killarney, he saw on the one side uncultivated tracts, marshy wastes studded with patches of heather, with here and there a stunted fir tree; and on the other, along the foot of the mountains beside the lovely lakes, green, smiling fields and woods of almost tropical vegetation. He learned that in Ireland there were only rich and poor, only palaces and hovels.
“Misrule is due to ignorance and ignorance is due to misrule.” O’Connell tapped the short stem of his pipe on the table. “Few Englishmen ever visit Ireland. When they do they drive in a carriage fromcountry house to country house. The swarms of beggars in Dublin only fill them with disgust.”
“But—But why don’t these beggars work?”
“There are no industries in Ireland. Our wool and wheat go into English mills. In Ireland, in order to work, one must have a plot of land.”
Frowning, Douglass grappled with the problem. Oppression then was not confined to black folks! There was some common reason for it all.
O’Connell nodded his head.
“Possession of the land! This is the struggle, whether we’re talking about the Gaels of Scotland and Ireland, the brown peoples of India, or the blacks of South Africa. Indeed, where are your red men in America?”
The young man’s face showed something of horror. Was the earth so small then that men must destroy each other to have their little bit?
“Not at all. But there have always been those who would share nothing. Conquest has come to be a glorious thing. Our heroes are the men who take, not those who give!”
The old man was in fine form that fall. The young man with his vibrant personality and searching questions inspired him. Earlier in the year he had vetoed plans for a huge rally at the great Conciliation Hall. The place held twenty thousand people and O’Connell had not felt equal to it. But now he announced a change of mind: he and Douglass would speak there together.
It was an event talked of many a long winter evening afterward. “Dan—Our Dan,” they said, outdid himself. The massive stooped shoulders were squared, the white head high. Once more the magnificent voice pealed forth.
“Until I heard this man that day,” Douglass himself wrote, “I had thought that the story of his oratory and power was exaggerated. I did not see how a man could speak to twenty or thirty thousand people at one time and be heard by any considerable portion of them, but the mystery was solved when I saw his ample person and heard his musical voice. His eloquence came down upon the vast assembly like a summer thunder-shower upon a dusty road. At will he stirred the multitude to a tempest of wrath or reduced it to the silence with which a mother leaves the cradle-side of her sleeping babe. Such tenderness, such pathos, such world-embracing love! And, on theother hand, such indignation, such fiery and thunderous denunciation, such wit and humor, I never heard surpassed, if equaled, at home or abroad.”[5]
A piece on O’Connell came out inBrownson’s Review. Mr. O. A. Brownson, recently become a Catholic, took issue with the “Liberator” of Ireland for having attacked American institutions. O’Connell gave another speech.
“I am charged with attacking American institutions, as slavery is called,” he began. “I am not ashamed.... My sympathy is not confined to the narrow limits of my own green Ireland; my spirit walks abroad upon sea and land, and wherever there is sorrow and suffering, there is my spirit to succor and relieve.”
The striking pair toured Ireland together. O’Connell talked about the antislavery movement and why the people of Ireland should take part in it; Douglass preached O’Connell’s doctrines of full participation of all peoples in government and legislative independence.
“There must be government,” said O’Connell. They were talking together quietly in the old man’s rooms. “And the people must take part, must learn to vote and take responsibility. You have a fine Constitution in the United States of America. I have studied it carefully.”
“I have never read it,” confessed the dark man, very much ashamed.
“No?” O’Connell studied the somber face. “But you have read the Declaration of Independence. A glorious thing!”
“Yes.” And now there was deep bitterness. “And I find it only words!”
The Irishman leaned over and placed his hand upon the young man’s knee. He spoke softly.
“Aye, lad—words! But words that can come alive! And that’s worth working and even fighting for!”