Giant's Causeway

Frederick Douglass's Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary

Tom Chaffin

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780813936116
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In 1845, seven years after fleeing bondage in Maryland, Frederick Douglass was in his late twenties and already a celebrated lecturer across the northern United States. The recent publication of his groundbreaking Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave had incited threats to his life, however, and to place himself out of harm's way he embarked on a lecture tour of the British Isles, a journey that would span seventeen months and change him as a man and a leader in the struggle for equality.

In the first major narrative account of a transformational episode in the life of this extraordinary American, Tom Chaffin chronicles Douglass's 1845-47 lecture tour of Ireland, Scotland, and England. It was, however, the Emerald Isle, above all, that affected Douglass--from its wild landscape ("I have travelled almost from the hill of 'Howth' to the Giant's Causeway") to the plight of its people, with which he found parallels to that of African Americans. Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, critic David Kipen has called Chaffin a "thorough and uncommonly graceful historian." Possessed of an epic, transatlantic scope, Chaffin's new book makes Douglass's historic journey vivid for the modern reader and reveals how the former slave's growing awareness of intersections between Irish, American, and African history shaped the rest of his life.

The experience accelerated Douglass's transformation from a teller of his own life story into a commentator on contemporary issues--a transition discouraged during his early lecturing days by white colleagues at the American Anti-Slavery Society. ("Give us the facts," he had been instructed, "we will take care of the philosophy.") As the tour progressed, newspaper coverage of his passage through Ireland and Great Britain enhanced his stature dramatically. When he finally returned to America he had the platform of an international celebrity.

Drawn from hundreds of letters, diaries, and other primary-source documents--many heretofore unpublished--this far-reaching tale includes vivid portraits of personages who shaped Douglass and his world, including the Irish nationalists Daniel O'Connell and John Mitchel, British prime minister Robert Peel, abolitionist John Brown, and Abraham Lincoln.

Giant's Causeway--which includes an account of Douglass's final, bittersweet, visit to Ireland in 1887--shows how experiences under foreign skies helped him hone habits of independence, discretion, compromise, self-reliance, and political dexterity. Along the way, it chronicles Douglass's transformation from activist foot soldier to moral visionary.

PART I

Republican Slavery to
Monarchical Freedom,
Atlantic World,
August 1845

The sails were fill’d, and fair the light winds blew, As glad to waft him from his native home.

—Lord Byron, Canto I, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”

Monarchical freedom is better than republican slavery—things are better than names. I prefer the substance to the shadow.

—Frederick Douglass to William Lloyd Garrison, May 23, 1846

CHAPTER 1

“They Need No Credentials”

He will go out as a representative of the prisonhouse of bondage and not as the representative of any sect or party.

—James Buffum to Gerrit Smith, June 21, 1845

ON AUGUST 11, days after James Buffum purchased the steamship tickets, he and Frederick Douglass were attending an abolitionist meeting in Lynn, Massachusetts, at which Douglass was to lecture. There, they encountered the Hutchinson Family Singers, neighbors in Lynn and old friends, who were at the gathering to perform.

The brothers John, Jesse, Judson, and Asa and sister Abby—the family lineup in the act varied over time—were favorites on the abolitionist circuit. Jesse Hutchinson had long been affiliated with abolitionism, but it was only after meeting Douglass that other family members embraced the cause. The Hutchinsons had helped to popularize four-part harmony singing in the United States. But, as Douglass and Buffum reminded them, the singers had never performed overseas: “They urged us to go with them,” recalled John Hutchinson, the handsome, bright-eyed, bearded sibling who by then had abandoned singing to manage the group, “and as we had been contemplating a tour of England for some time, it did not take much persuasion to induce us to go.” Like Douglass, the singers would finalize individual bookings after reaching foreign shores.¹

Two days later, writing to the abolitionist Wendell Phillips, Douglass lamented: “I wish I had time to write a long letter. But I have just returned from a lecturing tour, which has left me three days in which to get ready for my long journey.”² After years of road trips, Douglass by 1845 was nothing if not a meticulous packer. Into his steamer trunk, he pressed clothes and copies of the Narrative that he hoped to sell. So that he might quote extracts of actual slave codes to audiences, he inserted a copy of Theodore Dwight Weld’s American Slavery As It Is. To further make his case to those audiences, he also packed an iron neck-collar, leather whip, handcuffs, and chains used by slaveholders to confine and torture bondsmen.³

On Friday, August 15, Buffum and Douglass joined supporters in Lynn’s Lyceum Hall for an evening of farewells, passage of resolutions endorsing the journey, and two speeches by Douglass. “The spacious hall was crowded to its utmost capacity,” a newspaper reported, “hundreds of men and women being obliged to stand all the evening. This was a most gratifying fact, and spoke volumes for the onward progress of the antislavery movement.”⁴

The following day, Saturday, August 16, antislavery well-wishers joined Buffum, Douglass, and the Hutchinsons on the Boston waterfront. The Cambria with its deep draft could not reach that part of the harbor, so ticketed passengers and those assembled to see them off boarded a tugboat that cruised across the inner harbor to deeper waters off an island where the steamship lay berthed. According to the Liberator, the abolitionist newspaper, all of the travelers, though sad to be leaving friends behind, looked forward to the voyage. After all, asserted the paper, they were established diplomats, dispatched upon a transoceanic mission: “They need no credentials, no letters of introduction, on the other side of the Atlantic. Their names, services and talents are known by all in England, Scotland, and Ireland, who take any interest in the cause of emancipation here, or who are familiar with what is going on in the musical world.”

The tugboat, with its clanking steam engine, soon edged alongside the larger Cambria. For passengers gazing landward from the tug, Boston Harbor, at once picturesque and fetid, spread before them like some vivid but evanescent dream. Large and small boats blurred into a tangle of rigging, sails, yardarms, waterwheels, and smokestacks; behind them, stone and masonry buildings lined the waterfront; and beyond all of those, northward, across the Charles River, rose the Bunker Hill Monument. Abolitionists remaining behind joined hands with those departing. Amid the farewells, the Hutchinsons slipped into “Home Sweet Home,” rendering it “with deep pathos and thrilling effect.”

Leaving the tug, Douglass, Buffum, and the Hutchinsons stepped aboard the Cambria’s main deck. Amid the bustle of passengers, luggage, and stewards, they found their way to the rail section below which their friends lingered aboard the tug. As hands aboard the smaller craft prepared for its return to the wharf, the abolitionists resumed their singing. Those below, according to the Liberator, reached upward for final handshakes with the departing sojourners: “as the last strain died upon the air, the bell sounded, and, giving a final clasp of the hand, we bade each other adieu. The last thing we saw of Douglass was his waving his hat to us in the distance.”⁵

CHAPTER 2

RMS Cambria

THE RMS CAMBRIA’S bell clanged across Boston Harbor through the summer’s haze of Saturday, August 16. Moments later, the whooshing revolutions of the ship’s paddle wheels, one on each bow side, rained cooling splatters of salt spray over the passengers crowded along the main deck’s rail. With that, the steamer commenced chugging northeasterly on her 2,800-mile course. Stem to stern, her wooden hull stretched 219 feet, with a 35-foot beam.

Over six feet in height, Douglass towered over most passengers. He was handsome. He dressed well, appearing on the deck attired in a crisp white shirt and elegantly cut suit. Douglass’s lanky frame moved with an easy grace. But during the Atlantic passage, observant passengers also noticed an awkwardness in the movement of his right hand. Two years earlier, Douglass had been beaten during a riot in Indiana. The hand had been broken, and he never recovered its full use. Douglass was in his late twenties as he departed aboard the Cambria—just how late he did not know. Slavery had robbed him of certainty concerning the precise year and date of his birth, or even who had fathered him. Never during his entire life did he know with assurance his exact age or his father’s identity.

By 1845, Douglass was growing jaded about his bondage-to-freedom tale, finding it increasingly difficult “to repeat the same old story month after month and keep up my interest in it.” Although “true” and “new to the people,” its recitation increasingly felt “too mechanical for my nature.” Even so, during the Atlantic crossing, he obliged those who asked for the story, dutifully recounting his escape from bondage in 1838 and his subsequent life. Their curiosity unsated, some passengers then purchased from him copies of his recently published Narrative. The book had been published in late May, only three months earlier, and its brisk sales—already reaching 4,500 copies—and the publicity it stirred had increased his renown.¹

At thirty-eight, James Buffum was a decade older than his friend and fellow Cambria passenger Douglass. But the two men shared a closeness that transcended their age difference. Partly that friendship issued from Buffum’s past loyalty to Douglass, bonds steeled on the domestic lecture circuit.

Two days after departing Boston, the Cambria anchored for a brief mail stopover in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Otherwise, over the coming days, the ship’s crew and passengers remained encircled by the North Atlantic’s broad dome of sky. Day after day, night after night, the clanking of the ship’s two coal-fired engines and the rotations of her paddle wheels sounded, for all aboard, a comforting, if noisy, ode to technological progress.

By the next decade, ships propelled by newly invented screw-propellers would eclipse and end the brief life of oceangoing paddle-wheel steamers. Even so, the Cambria and other paddle ships already had shrunk that era’s world. An Atlantic crossing that, a generation earlier, had taken up to two months, now took less than two weeks. Indeed, two years later, the Hibernia—a steamer similar to the Cambria and owned by the same company—took the burgeoning steamship’s industry’s Blue Riband prize for the fastest Halifax-to-Liverpool-to-Halifax crossing—nine days, one hour, and thirty minutes.²

As did all passenger steamers, the Cambria welcomed business from every class. But, truth be known, most of the approximately 110 passengers—95 in first class and “about a dozen” in steerage—on that August 1845 crossing, were arrivistes, newcomers to the prosperity created by that era’s industrialism.³ The Cambria numbered among six paddle steamers launched in that decade by the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, later reorganized into the Cunard Line. Officially, the fleet had been created to carry mail across the Atlantic—the Cambria’s RMS prefix stood for Royal Mail Ship—but the line also had plunged into the growing market for comfortable, regularly scheduled, and speedy passenger service between England and the United States—in the case of the Cambria, from Liverpool to Boston, with the stopover in Halifax, still under British dominion.

Passengers griped about the puniness of the Cambria’s spartan first-class cabins, touted as “staterooms” in company advertising. The novelist Charles Dickens, upon entering his cabin on another steamer in the same fleet, assumed it initially a “pleasant fiction and a cheerful jest” of the ship’s captain, whom Dickens expected any minute to appear and show him to his actual quarters.

But, cramped cabins notwithstanding, the Cambria, one of Cunard’s six original “Britannia”-class steamships, did manage to spoil passengers with amenities, including wine-and brandy-sodden meals fit for a king. “Such dinners as we have here can’t be found at hotels generally on land,” recalled a passenger that August.⁴

On Monday, August 25—ten days out of Boston—the Cambria and its paddle wheels continued to plow the North Atlantic’s chilled waters. She was due to reach Liverpool in three days. By all measures, it had been a pleasant crossing, and passengers had not lacked for diversions. Yes, during the first few days, seasickness had kept some confined to quarters. But the travelers also had been able to run, walk, and read on the ship’s deck in the bracing ocean air. They had experienced Atlantic storms; performances by the famous Hutchinson Family Singers; a Sunday sermon; splendid cuisine; card games; lively alcohol-lubricated deck conversations; idyllic sunny days; and sublime icebergs that evoked monumental architecture: “One was a great fellow,” a shipboard diarist recalled, “with two great domes, each as large as that of St. Paul’s: the lower part was like frosted silver.”⁵

So, on that late summer day, August 25, as the Cambria’s crossing neared its end, several passengers caught up with the ship’s commander to tell him that there was one experience that would consummate their voyage—a lecture by the famous Frederick Douglass.

The Cambria’s Captain Charles Judkins exemplified the sort of no-nonsense competency that Mark Twain had in mind when he wrote: “Those practical, hard-headed, unromantic Cunard people would not take Noah himself as first mate till they had worked him up through all the lower grades & tried him ten years or such a matter.”

Judkins, dapper in his blue British Merchant Navy officer uniform, was a middle-aged, by-the-book commander, rarely known for his charm. He seldom indulged anyone. His easy smile masked a perpetual gruffness. On another crossing, to a passenger who asked whether the fog through which they were then passing was expected, he had replied, “How the devil do I know, madam? I don’t live here.”⁶

But this time, the passengers won a fuller hearing. For ten days, they told him, Douglass had politely mingled with all who approached him. They had conversed—some had argued—with him on the ship’s decks, in its dining saloon, its first-class cabins, and even in the second-class forecastle quarters to which he was nominally consigned. So, they now asked, would the captain would be willing to ask the famous orator to deliver a formal lecture aboard the Cambria?

The request to Captain Judkins came, as it turned out, after several passengers had already approached Douglass. Flattered, he had answered that he would gladly oblige—provided the lecture invitation came from the ship’s captain. Judkins extended the invitation, and Douglass accepted. The lecture was to take place two days later, on Wednesday, August 27, the final full day of the crossing. Its topic was to be “American slavery,” and it would be delivered on the ship’s saloon deck, a long awning-covered sternward enclosure just outside the dining saloon. The lecture was to commence after the captain’s dinner, traditionally held on the day before the end of each crossing.

Cap...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: Great Brunswick Street
• Acknowledgments
• Chronology
• Prologue: Commercial Wharf
• Part I: Republican Slavery to Monarchical Freedom, Atlantic World, August 1845
• Part II: Ireland, August 1845–January 1846
• Part III: Britain, January 1846–April 1847
• Part IV: America, 1847–1865
• Part V: Reckonings, Atlantic World and Beyond, 1865–1895
• A Note on Sources
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index