Today, February 14th, Valentine’s Day, is the day that abolitionist, orator, and author Frederick Douglass chose to celebrate as his birthday. Because he remembered his mother, Harriet Bailey, calling Douglas “Little Valentine.” Almost every year around Valentine’s Day, I read all or part of his first of his three autobiographies. Story of the life of American slave Frederick Douglass. No Independence Day “celebration” would be complete without reading one of his most famous speeches in American history, “What is Independence Day to a Slave?” (Meteor Blades excerpts the 4th installment most years)
Over the past few years, I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that Frederick Douglass is, in many ways, being honored in Ireland as much as he is in the United States. In Belfast, for example, there is a mural dedicated to Douglas. Just last year, a statue of Douglas was completed and stands in Belfast city centre. A public library in Cork, Ireland, has an online exhibit dedicated to Douglass, which depicts Frederick Douglass discussing abolitionism and other subjects during his four-month speaking tour in Ireland in 1845. A plaque has been placed at the location where the speech was given. Douglas stayed and spoke in Cork and Dublin. Research on Douglas’s visits to Ireland in 1845 and his 1887 has been extensive over the past three decades. But the beginnings of Douglass’ ideas about Ireland can be easily traced back to his childhood as a slave in Baltimore.
Before Frederick Douglass set sail for the British Isles, cambria By 1845, he was already imagining the Emerald Isle. Douglass’ feelings about Ireland had been with him ever since he read and studied classic American reading and rhetoric textbooks. colombian orator. colombian orator This is one of the books that a young Frederick Bailey bought, and in many ways it was the book that would make Frederick Douglass into perhaps the greatest abolitionist, writer, and orator the 19th century produced. It was shaped like this.
The full title of the book is The Columbian Orator: Contains a variety of original and selected works and rules calculated for the improvement of decorative and useful oratory in youth and others. First published in 1791 by educator Caleb Bingham, this book thoroughly explains its contents. His 23-page introduction to 84 different works (some original by Bingham’s assistants) and specific instructions on how to speak. David Bright writes in his biography of Douglass:
Bingham’s long preface, “General Instructions for Speaking,” may have been the most important thing Douglass ever read. According to Bingham, the main purpose of his oratory is to create “action” between the speaker and the audience. “The perfection of art lies in its closest resemblance to nature,” the educator argued. True eloquence emerged when an orator was able to train his voice to “follow nature.” Bingham gave specific examples of elements of speech such as rhythm, pace, variety of tone, and especially gestures of the arms, hands, shoulders, and head.
Also identifies Blight colombian orator as an implicit anti-slavery text.
The Columbian Orator was not a staid collection of American moralism for young Americans. It was the creation of a man with clear anti-slavery sympathies and a determination to democratize education and inculcate in young people the legacy of the American Revolution and republican values.
inside storyDouglas describes his purchase colombian orator.
When I was about 13 years old and succeeded in learning to read, something added to the almost unbearable burden of the thought, “I will be a slave for the rest of my life,” especially as my knowledge of free nations increased. . There was no end in sight to my bondage. That was a frightening reality. I can never express how sad and hurt that thought made my young heart. Fortunately or unfortunately, at this time in my life I had earned enough money to buy a school book that was very popular at the time: The Columbian Orator. I purchased this additional book by Mr. Knight, Thames Street, Fells Point, Baltimore, and paid him fifty cents for it. What inspired me to buy this book was hearing some boys say they were going to learn some small parts from this book for an exhibition. Indeed, this book is a rich treasure, and I read it avidly for some time every chance I got.
[It’s important to note two things. First, while there was no Maryland law prohibiting Douglass from learning to read, there was a 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 work entitled “Dialogue between Master and Slave” has already been amply attested by Douglas himself and his biographers. His immediate work, Speech to the Irish Parliament, was an excerpt from a 1795 speech by Arthur O’Connor advocating Catholic emancipation, or the removal of various legal restrictions placed on Catholics in Ireland and England. Bright, as well as other articles in The Columbian Orator, notes that in excerpts from O’Connor’s speech, Douglass also used the words “‘liberty,’ ‘liberty,’ ‘tyranny,’ and ‘the rights of man’ to resist.” “I encountered a word that I wanted to use,” he said. . Another Catholic emancipation supporter, Daniel O’Connell, would play an important role in Douglass’ life thanks to a diplomatic incident that occurred a month before Douglass fled to freedom.
In August 1838, a month before Douglass was set free, he overheard his master talking about Daniel O’Connell’s disdain for the American ambassador to Britain, Andrew Stevenson.
O’Connell’s attack on the United States almost led to a duel with the American ambassador to Britain. A major anti-slavery convention was held in Birmingham on 1 August 1838 to celebrate the abolition of black apprenticeship (slavery in name only) in the West Indies. Ahead of the meeting, O’Connell called for a new movement against slavery, attacking the “vile combination of republicanism and slavery” and offering “hope for the day when no American will be able to accept it.” expressed,” he said. civilized society, unless he belongs to an anti-slavery union or an anti-slavery group. Mr O’Connell was the last speaker in Birmingham and his appearance was greeted with cheers and applause. O’Connell again attacked Washington for owning slaves and waiting until his death before freeing them. Perhaps unwisely, he then launched an attack on the US ambassador to the UK, accusing him of being a “slave-breeder” and claiming that “America has shed blood on human beings”. Is there any possibility of sending a man here to buy and sell?” he wondered aloud. Slave breeding was seriously suspected at the time and was far more egregious than simply owning slaves. Because it suggested that owners treated slaves like animals, encouraged (and sometimes forced) them to reproduce, and sold their offspring for profit.
The ambassador in question was Andrew Stevenson, a wealthy landowner from Virginia. He was Speaker of the House of Commons until his appointment to the Court of St. James in 1834 (an appointment confirmed by the House of Lords in 1836), and he was furious that he had been attacked so publicly. O’Connell was ordered to retract his comments or face a duel, both of which he refused. Instead, it declared that until slavery was abolished in the United States, “no American slaveholder should be accepted on an equal footing by any of the civilized inhabitants of Europe.” And he spoke movingly of the madness a mother must feel when her children are taken away and sold into slavery.
Word of this controversy spread around the world. Former U.S. President John Quincy Adams also brought the issue to the floor of the House of Representatives. On December 6, 1838, he explained that he wanted to expose “a conspiracy against the life of Daniel O’Connell.” He returned to the subject again in January 1839, denouncing the proposed challenge to O’Connell as “an assassination threat by a single scoundrel”. That was a conspiracy. Although the resolution proposed by Adams to attack Stevenson was defeated, the debate had a huge impact on the United States.
In a speech in Cork on 14 October 1845, Douglas specifically mentioned the diplomatic events of 1838 and Daniel O’Connell.
I can’t go on without mentioning a man who made a huge contribution to the abolition of slavery: Daniel O’Connell. (tremendous cheers.) I am grateful to him. Because his voice shook American slavery to its core. I am determined to speak gratefully of Mr. O’Connell’s labors wherever I go and in whatever capacity I occupy.support) I heard his condemnation of slavery. I loved him because I heard my master curse him. (Big cheers.) In London, Mr. O’Connell tore off the mask of hypocrisy from the slaveholders and branded them the vilest of the vilest, and the vilest of the vilest. O’Connell.
Douglass escaped from slavery on September 3, 1838, a few days after hearing his master Daniel O’Connell’s curse. Seven years later, in his preface, storyabolitionist William Lloyd Garrison wrote:
To illustrate the effects of slavery on white people,—to show that in such circumstances they have no greater patience than their black brethren—DAniel O’COnnelA prominent advocate of universal emancipation and the strongest defender of a prostrate but unconquered Ireland, he performed before the Loyal National Abolition Society in the Hall of Conciliation in Dublin on 31 March 1845. In one of his speeches, he narrated the following anecdote.That’s a problem,” said O’C.Onnel“Slavery remains a terrible thing, no matter how plausibly it may be veiled. There is a natural and inevitable tendency to brutalize all the noble human faculties. An American sailor was abandoned on the shores of Africa, where he remained in slavery for three years, by the end of which he was found to be scarred and stunted. He had lost all logical thinking. And having forgotten his native language, he could only speak a gibberish between Arabic and English that no one could understand and that even he himself had difficulty pronouncing. So much for his humanizing influence. Domestic organization! ” Admitting that this was an unusual case of mental breakdown proves that white slaves were at least as capable of falling to the level of humanity as black slaves.
This was because there were concerns that he would be recaptured after it was published in the United States. storyDouglas followed Garrison’s advice and traveled to England and Ireland. cambria By then, Douglass had met some Irish playmates on the docks in Baltimore, and he valued their friendship, often telling stories of the Irishman who gave speeches denouncing not only Catholic emancipation but also American slavery. was hearing. Within a few months, Douglas would meet for the first and last time the Irishman he already considered a hero.