Even so, Douglass, during his four months in Ireland, found in many Irish nationalists he met a kindred spirit of resistance against an oppressor — in his case, the slave-owning South; in theirs, the United Kingdom. Indeed, at least one influential and younger Irish nationalist even talked of allying with America in any war that erupted in the Pacific Northwest. “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity,” proclaimed the Irish firebrand John Mitchel that season. “‘If there is going to be a war between England and the United States, ’tis impossible for us to pretend sympathy for the former. We shall have allies, not enemies, on the banks of the Columbia.”
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In September 1845, Douglass appeared alongside O’Connell at a Dublin rally attended by more than a thousand followers. Douglass had read of O’Connell’s reputed oratorical abilities, but he assumed those skills to have been “greatly exaggerated.” The rally, however, persuaded Douglass that the reports were accurate. Though O’Connell was already a septuagenarian, “eloquence came down upon the vast assembly like a summer thunder-shower upon a dusty road,” Douglass later wrote. Moreover, it seemed to Douglass that O’Connell “held Ireland within the grasp of his strong hand, and [that he] could lead it whithersoever he would.” The regard was mutual. O’Connell — still revered in Ireland today as “the Liberator” — soon took to calling Douglass “the Black O’Connell of the United States.”
O’Connell died in 1847, soon after Douglass left Ireland, and the American never followed O’Connell in rejecting violence. But O’Connell’s courage, his intellectual breadth, his grasp of mass politics, his belief in the moral authority of laws, self-government and political reform continued to shape Douglass’s world view.
More particularly, Douglass’s eventual conviction that America’s federal union offered the best means of banishing slavery from the land descended, in part, from O’Connell’s view that Ireland’s best future resided in the rule of law — not in revolution but in continued membership in the British empire.
From the late-1840s onward, Douglass’s evolving views on how best to rid America of slavery attested to that latter insight. And that insight, in turn, eroded Douglass’s relationship with William Lloyd Garrison. Like Garrison, Douglass would have welcomed the immediate abolition of slavery across the entire United States. But both men knew that wasn’t going to happen. Garrison, however, was willing to settle for another means of eliminating slavery in the United States — to allow the slave states to leave the Union. Or, if that didn’t happen, Garrison argued, the Northern free-soil states should simply “come out from” the Union; in other words, the states of the North should do their own seceding from what Garrison considered a morally tainted federation.
Tom Chaffin, here
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/frederick-douglasss-irish-liberty/
3 comments:
“It struck him: the sheer surprise of being here. A carpenter, a caulker of ships, a man of the fields. To have come such a distance. To have left behind his wife, his beloved children. To hear the sound of his shoes striking the floor. The only moving shoes in a roomful of Men.His voice had now become his hands: he understood what it meant to be made flesh. An energy moved through him. He cleared his throat, but held back a moment. These were, he remembered, the members of the Royal Dublin Society. Creatures of high collars and groomed moustaches. They had an air of antiquity about them. He gazed out at them. The sort of men who had hung their swords above the fireplaces of their minds. He would wait to unleash his fury."
Excerpt From: McCann, Colum. “TransAtlantic.”
Beautiful. Is this about Douglass himself?
It is. But fiction of course.
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