Douglass  speeches condemned American slavery and suggested how people in Scotland could help the movement calling for its abolition. A striking man and a powerful speaker, Douglass won many to the cause. He was even the subject of several songs.

On Tour

Frederick Douglass arrived in Liverpool on the Cambria on 28 August 1845 and departed from Liverpool on the same ship in April 1847.

In over 18 months he travelled extensively in Britain and Ireland, giving lectures in dozens of cities and towns. He was in Scotland for most of the first half of 1846, returning again in July, September and October the same year.

Home to some of the more radical anti-slavery sentiment in Britain, Scotland gave Douglass a warm welcome. The Edinburgh and Glasgow Emancipation Societies had been formed in 1833 and – in the wake of the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies – they called for the abolition of slavery in other parts of the world, especially the United States. When the American abolitionist movement began to split in the late 1830s, the Scottish Societies tended to take the side of William Lloyd Garrison, whose uncompromising followers stood aloof from party politics and held radical views on women’s rights.

Douglass spoke at public meetings across the country.  For further details see the list of speaking engagements.

Many of these meetings drew large crowds. On the 1 May at the Music Hall, Edinburgh, an audience of 2000 had bought tickets at sixpence each. Douglass was not always the only speaker on these occasions, but undoubtedly the main attraction. Other anti-slavery campaigners with whom he shared the platform included:

• James Buffum, his travelling companion from Massachusetts
• Henry Clarke Wright, the American activist who had been in Britain since early 1843
• William Lloyd Garrison, the leader of the American Anti-Slavery Society and editor of its influential magazine, The Liberator – who toured Britain in 1846
• George Thompson, an English militant who had long been associated with the Glasgow Emancipation Society

Speeches

Douglass was a powerful, charismatic speaker, and a talented mimic who could rouse the indignation of the crowd as well as make them laugh.

Above all Douglass spoke about American slavery. He could speak about it from first-hand experience – and of course could rely on an appreciative audience when telling of his own escape from it.

But he also approached the subject more generally. For as well as raising his listeners to a deep sense of injustice of slavery, he wanted to get them to think what could be done about it. Again and again he stressed the value of the moral pressure that Britain could put on the United States. The example of its own act of abolition of slavery in the West Indies was itself a powerful way of isolating the Americans on the international scene. The anti-slavery propaganda of travel books – such as Charles Dickens’ American Notes(1842) was important too, as were the protests that resulted in reduced sentences or improved conditions for anti-slavery campaigners who fell foul of the law.

But he was also keen to identify those who seemed to undermine this strategy, those British writers and church leaders who – wittingly or not – reassured the slaveholders of the American South that their sins were not so bad as some made out. One of Douglass’ targets was the geologist Charles Lyell, whose recent travel account was one of the ‘misrepresentations of slavery as would have the effect of cooling that British indignation against slavery which had existed for many years’.

However the main target of his withering sarcasm during his visit was the Free Church of Scotland. The Free Church had formed when a large minority of ministers – and with them their congregations – seceded from the established Church of Scotland in 1843, tired of the way the government was interfering in their internal affairs. Deprived of public money, the breakaway church sought to raise funds among friendly Presbyterians in England, Wales, Ireland and the United States. But the fact that some of the funds raised in the United States came from churches in the slaveholding South drew strong criticism from the abolitionists. Convinced that this gesture amounted to an uncritical endorsement of the churches there, who refused to condemn slavery or expel slaveholding members, a campaign calling for the Free Church to return the money was well under way when Douglass arrived in 1846.

‘Send back the money’ was to be a recurring slogan at many of the meetings he addressed in Scotland. In Dundee in March 1846 he ends his speech with these words:

When the Free Church says – Did not Abraham hold slaves? the reply should be, Send back that money! (Cheers). When they ask did not Paul send back Onesimus? I answer, Send you back that money! (Great cheering). That is the only answer which should be given to their sophistical arguments, adn it is one which they cannot get over. (Great cheering). In order to justify their conduct, they endeavour to forget that they are a Church, and speak as if they were a manufacturing corporation. They forget that a Church is not for making money, but for spreading the Gospel. We are guilty, say they, but these merchants are guilty, and some other parties are guilty also. I say, send back that money! (Cheering). There is music in that sound. (Continued cheering). There is poetry in it.

Impact

Douglass was clearly a sensation. ‘Send Back the Money’ set the country alight. The slogan was apparently carved out of the turf of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, and there were a number of songs that were inspired by the campaign.

Not surprisingly he made some enemies among the supporters of the Free Church of Scotland. Hissing was reported in some newspaper accounts – to which the orator cleverly responded:

it was said by a very learned man that when the cool voice of truth falls into the burning vortex of falsehood there would always be hissing.

And it is probably true that in some quarters it was his stand against the Free Church rather than his stand against slavery that impressed. The radical speeches of Garrison and Wright probably alienated some of those they might otherwise have reached. A small minority in the church did voice concern about the propriety of the American donations: James Macbeth and John Willis founded the Free Church Anti-Slavery Society in May 1847, but it had little impact. The money was not returned and eventually Macbeth, Willis and others emigrated to Canada.

Nevertheless Douglass did help to keep the anti-slavery issue alive in Scotland – and other former slaves from the United States followed in his footsteps in the 1850s. He remembered his time in Scotland with some fondness and before he returned to the United States, friends and supporters raised funds which enabled him to buy his freedom, sparing him of the fear of recapture, and also made it possible for him to set up his own newspaper, The North Star in 1847.

Here you can learn about the 1846 visit to Scotland by the anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass, drawing on research for this book, published in November 2018.

Resources here include pages on

• who he was,
• why he came to Scotland
• how he engaged with Scottish literature and history, and
• other African Americans who toured the country in the mid-nineteenth century.

There is also

• a detailed itinerary, listing all Douglass’ known speaking engagements, and
• a log of recent efforts to enhance public awareness of Scotland’s historical connections to the Atlantic slavery system and the struggle for black emancipation.

In the course of 2019, transcriptions of all the newspaper reports of Douglass’ speeches were added, supported by contextual introductions and editorial annotations.

Born a slave in Maryland, Douglass escapes to the North and writes a best-selling account of his life. In 1845, fearing recapture, he seeks refuge in Great Britain. On his return to the United States, he sets up his own newspaper and becomes a leading spokesman for black America and campaigner for civil rights.

From Slave to Free Man

Frederick Douglass was born a slave in Maryland in 1818 on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. As a boy he was taken away from the Great House Farm to Baltimore, as the family servant of Thomas and Sophia Auld. Later he was hired out to work on plantations across the Bay, but in 1836 returned to Baltimore, where he was employed in the shipyards. With the help of Anna Murray, a free black woman from the city, he escaped to the north by train to New York, disguised as a sailor. He was just twenty years old.

He was soon reunited with Anna, whom he married. They moved to New Bedford, a whaling port in Massachusetts, and within three years, he was lecturing on behalf of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, speaking at public halls across New England. At first he simply told of his own experiences in Maryland, but before long, he found ‘it did not entirely satisfy me to narrate wrongs; I felt like denouncing them.’

Across the Ocean

He recounts this story in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself published in 1845. The book was written partly to answer those who heard his accomplished speeches and doubted he ever was a slave. It was an instant critical and commercial success. Within five years, it had sold 30,000 copies in Britain and the United States and had been translated into Dutch and French.

But by providing the details of his experience in slavery, ‘giving names of persons, places, and dates’, he put himself in grave danger.

This statement soon became known in Maryland, and I had reason to believe that an effort would be made to recapture me…

And while there was little probability of successful recapture, if attempted openly, I was constantly in danger of being spirited away, at a moment when my friends could render me no assistance. In traveling about from place to place – often alone – I was much exposed to this sort of attack. Any one cherishing the design to betray me, could easily do so, by simply tracing my whereabouts through the anti-slavery journals, for my meetings and movements were promptly made known in advance.

So in August 1845 he set sail for England.

Leader and Statesman

On his return in 1847, Douglass settled in Rochester, New York, and consolidated his position as one of the leading anti-slavery campaigners, founding his own newspaper, the North Star (later renamed Frederick Douglass’ Paper). During the Civil War, he recruited young men for the Union Army, and in later years held a number of government posts, including that of Minister to Haiti (1889-91).

He revisited Scotland in 1859-60, but his speeches lacked the radical edge of 1846. No doubt he was shaken by the recent hanging of his friend John Brown, who had attempted to spark off a major slave insurrection by seizing the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. But he also found that British support for abolitionism was on the decline.

He died in February 1895 at Cedar Hill, the beautiful house he acquired 17 years earlier, in woodland across the Anacostia River from Washington, DC. The house is now a national monument and site of a museum devoted to this major politician and writer of the 19th Century.

Frederick Douglass wasn’t the first African American abolitionist to visit Scotland in the three decades before the Civil War.  Nor was he the last.  Here are some of his fellow travellers.

Forerunners

His path was prepared by several public figures who had crossed the Atlantic during the previous decade or so, some of them for extended stays.  They travelled for a variety of reasons. Nathaniel Paul came to raise money for the Wilberforce Colony in Ontario. James McCune Smith studied medicine at Glasgow University. Robert Purvis visited his father’s family in Fife. Moses Roper trained as a misionary. Charles Lenox Remond toured Scotland after attending the first World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, while James W. C. Pennington was a delegate to the second.  Moses Grandy sought to raise funds to purchase the freedom of relatives.

But all of them attended or addressed antislavery meetings in Scotland, and those who had grown up enslaved (Roper and Grandy) recounted their experiences both on the lecture platform and in autobiographies published in Britain and Ireland, which (like Douglass) they sold on speaking tours.  McCune Smith played an active role in the Glasgow Emancipation Society.

Some of them subsequently returned to Britain, including Pennington (three times before the Civil War), while Roper, after two years in Canada, came back in 1846 to arrange a new edition of his Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper from American Slavery, and lectured, mostly in Scotland and Ireland, at the same time as Douglass, although there is no evidence they met.

Douglass’ Response to Fellow Travellers

Douglass enjoyed close relationships with some of these other travellers.  He had campaigned alongside Remond in Massachusetts and named his third child after him. Pennington was the church minister who had married him and Anna in New York shortly after the daring escape from Baltimore.  And McCune Smith later became the New York correspondent for Frederick Douglass’ Paper as well as writing the preface to Douglass’ second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, published in 1855.

But we shouldn’t assume there was a natural solidarity between them.  Indeed, differences of approach were sometimes remarked on in the press.

While a Free Church paper like the Northern Warder condemned the ‘grossly abusive style of declamation’ of Douglass and his colleagues, it found the more strictly autobiographical lectures of Moses Roper more congenial, praising him for the way in which he ‘exercises more discretion in his vocation’ by focusing on ‘his own sufferings under slavery’.  That Roper was not touring on behalf of (or supported by) a formal abolitionist network increased his distance from the Garrisonians. In a speech in Edinburgh on 25 May 1846 Douglass’ friend George Thompson refers in passing to ‘another slave [who] has come from America to plead the cause’ without naming Roper, whom he casually dismisses with faint praise. While not promising ‘that he will  be quite so eloquent and effective as Mr Douglass, still his plain and simple story will no doubt produce its effects.’ Meanwhile Douglass himself makes no public reference at all to Roper during his tour, exercising his own discretion perhaps.

But Douglass did speak out against another African American touring Britain at the time. This was Mollison Madison Clark, a delegate of the African Methodist Episcopal Church to the Evangelical Alliance conference in London, an international gathering of evangelical church leaders Douglass denounced for refusing to ban slaveholding ministers from taking part.

In a speech in Glasgow on 30 September 1846 Douglass told his audience

There is a recreant black man in this country going by the name of Clark. He went into that Alliance and there denounced the only true friends of emancipation – the abolitionists. if he goes through this country, as I expect he will, for I expect the Free Church of Scotland will employ him to go about and defend her, as he has the Judas Iscariot impudence to stand up in defence of her connection with the man-stealers of America; and I trust he will be informed that I arraigned him here as a traitor to his race, and as representing no portion of the black, or coloured population in the United States.

Clark subsequently reviewed his support for the Alliance and published a retraction. Yet this is almost the only evidence we have of Douglass engaging with other notable Black people in Britain, whether they were visitors or long-term residents.

The celebrated actor Ira Aldridge – based in Britain since 1824 – played to theatres in the west of Scotland in early 1846. He and Douglass both attracted extensive press coverage for their public appearances and while their itineraries did not converge, they must have known of each other. However any traces of mutual recognition they may have expressed remain private.

When visiting the north east Douglass may have been told of Selim Aga, a Sudanese survivor of slavery who published his life story in Aberdeen that year. In Paisley surely someone made him aware of Peter Burnett, an African American who had lived in the town since the 1780s, a local celebrity honoured in a biographical sketch that went through several editions.  And there was the militant Chartist William Cuffay, well known enough to be lampooned in Punch.  But Douglass left no indication that he was aware of them either.

Of less prominent individuals whose paths crossed with Douglass’, there are scattered hints.  At a meeting in Edinburgh Douglass told the audience how the day before in Liverpool he encountered an old acquaintance from the Baltimore shipyards, a man probably called J R Bailey. He hadn’t seen him for eight years and discovered that he too had escaped slavery. His friend told him how he jumped ship in the Bahamas and secured freedom under the British flag vowing never to return to the Southern States.

And when he was in Arbroath, Douglass was almost certainly introduced to the wife of Rev Alexander Sorley, who had previously welcomed abolitionist speakers to his church. As his associate Henry Clarke Wright reported, she ‘was a COLORED WOMAN, the daughter of a slave’ and ‘the cherished object of respect and affection among all the people of this town.’ The archives can confirm that her name was Elizabeth Greenfield whose father is described in her marriage certificate as ‘late a merchant of Jamaica’. She was probably educated in Edinburgh and she outlived her spouse to leave a substantial legacy to her step-daughter in 1885.

And while that is about all we know of their lives and their encounters with Douglass, it is worth thinking of people like J R Bailey and Elizabeth Greenfield who also reached Britain’s shores but fashioned very different kinds of antislavery lives, away from the public gaze.

Some Later Visitors

Recent research has charted the Scottish speaking engagements of several African American abolitionists who toured in the wake of Douglass, including Ellen and William Craft, Josiah Henson, Sarah Parker Remond and J Sella Martin.  For more details see the excellent maps devised by Hannah Murray and the Our Bondage & Our Freedom project.

Two formerly enslaved authors in particular wrote evocatively of their experiences in the country in their autobiographies: William Wells Brown and Samuel Ringgold Ward.  William Wells Brown, touring Scotland in 1851, he records his impressions of Stirling Castle and Aberdeen, and is heartened by the racial mixing he finds in Edinburgh. Samuel Ringgold Ward is another visitor who finds much to admire in the Scottish character, but cannot bring himself to enjoy oatcakes or haggis.

William Wells Brown

William Wells Brown (1814-1884) was a slave in Kentucky and the Missouri Territory. In 1834 he fled north and reached Cleveland, later moving to Buffalo, and took advantage of his work on the Lake Erie steamboats to help other fugitives reach Canada. In the early 1840s he became an anti-slavery lecturer, and moved to Boston in 1847. In 1849 he travelled to Britain on behalf of the American Peace Society to counter the propaganda of the American Colonization Society, which for thirty years had been promoting the resettlement of emancipated slaves to Liberia in West Africa. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law (1850) delayed his return to the United States until 1854, when his freedom was purchased by supporters.

He toured Scotland in 1851 in the company of two other fugitive slaves, William and Ellen Craft. In Edinburgh he attended a meeting of the Edinburgh Ladies’ Emancipation Society, breakfasted in a room in which Robert Burns had often sat, visited the Royal Institute, the Scott Monument, Edinburgh Castle, the Palace of Holyrood, and John Knox’s House.

They travelled by train to Glasgow and on to Dundee, passing Stirling Castle which was, Brown noted,

situated or built on an isolated rock, which seems as if Nature had thrown it there for that purpose. It was once the retreat of the Scottish Kings, and famous for its historical associations, Here the “Lady of the Lake,” with the magic ring, sought the monarch to intercede for her father; here James II. murdered the Earl of Douglas; here the beautiful but unfortunate Mary was made Queen; and here John Knox, the Reformer, preached the coronation sermon of James VI. The Castle Hill rises from the valley of the Forth, and makes an imposing and picturesque appearance. The windings of the noble river till lost in the distance, present pleasing contrasts, scarcely to be surpassed.

Further North, they visited

the Granite City of Scotland. Aberdeen reminds one of Boston, especially in a walk down Union Street, which is said to be one of the finest promenades in Europe.

And returned to Edinburgh by sea. On the ship, Brown notices a copy of Frederick Douglass’ newspaper, the North Star. On the way he admired the view as they rounded the coast of Fife:

On our left, lay the Island of May, while to the right was to be seen the small fishing town of Anstruther, twenty miles distant from Edinburgh. Beyond these, on either side, was a range of undulating blue mountains, swelling as they retired, into a bolder outline and a loftier altitude, until they terminated some twenty-five or thirty miles in the dim distance. A friend at my side pointed out a place on the right, where the remains of an old castle or look-out house, used in the time of the border wars, once stood, and which reminded us of the barbarism of the past.

But these signs are fast disappearing. The plough and roller have passed over many of these foundations, and the time will soon come, when the antiquarian will look in vain for those places that history has pointed out to him, as connected with the political and religious struggles of the past.

In Edinburgh he visited the Infimary,

and was pleased to see among the two or three hundred students, three coloured young men, seated upon the same benches with those of a fairer complexion, and yet there appeared no feeling on the part of the whites towards their coloured associates, except of companionship and respect. One of the cardinal truths, both of religion and freedom, is the equality and brotherhood of man. In the sight of God and all just institutions, the whites can claim no precedence or privilege, on account of their being white; and if coloured men are not treated as they should be in the educational institutions in America, it is a pleasure to know that all distinction ceases by crossing the broad Atlantic. I had scarcely left the lecture room of the Institute and reached the street, when I met a large number of the students on their way to the college, and here again were seen coloured men arm in arm with whites. The proud American who finds himself in the splendid streets of Edinburgh, and witnesses such scenes as these, can but behold in them the degradation of his own country, whose laws would make slaves of these same young men, should they appear in the streets of Charleston or New Orleans.

Samuel Ringgold Ward

Samuel Ringgold Ward (1817-1864) was born in Maryland of slave parents who escaped to New York shortly after his birth. He was active as a journalist in the abolitionist movement and visited Britain in 1853 as the representative of the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada.

In his Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro (1855) he records how he was invited to Scotland by the Committee of the Glasgow New Abolition Society. There he was presented with

a copy of Burns’ poems, from his own library. That was almost equal to proffering me the freedom of Glasgow, or making me a Scotchman! Well did I use that volume, while sojourning in the country which gave birth to it and its immortal author! O that I liked oaten cakes, haggis, cockie-leekie, or BAGPIPES, as much as Burns! May my Scotch brethren forgive me for being so incorrigible a creature as to cling to old-fashioned likes and dislikes, acquired before I went to Scotland!

He visited Edinburgh and joined the wife of abolitionist J B Tod and her daughter on a tour of Holyrood House, and was also in Dundee and Greenock.

Reflecting on the character of the people, he wrote:

Society in Scotland differs from that in England, as does the society of Boston and Massachusetts generally from that of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. I was struck with this while travelling northwards. The northern people are more familiar, more democratic. A Scotchman does not feel under the particular necessity of sitting next you all day in a railway carriage without saying a word, as an Englishman does. Betwixt different classes there is more familiarity, less distance, in Scotland, than in England. The different orders of society seem to approach more nearly to each other, without either losing or forgetting its place. There is less of the feeling, so prevalent in small towns in the South, that merchants and professional men must by all means avoid contact with shopkeepers. The chief order of nobility is the clergy, and all join to pay deference to them; but the general spread of religion, and the very upright and pious habits of the population–the familiarity of the ministers with people, join to produce a brotherly feeling of oneness, which is abundantly apparent in the national character and in the state of society.

Besides, I do not think that mere ceremony is half so much studied by the Scotch. They are great believers in realities; they are a substantial people; and what is merely formal, unless it be formal after the Scottish mode, is not commendable to them, and it costs them but little to say, “I canna be fashed wi sic clishmaclaver.” Hence, you get at a Scotchman’s heart at once. He will not profess to be what he is not. When you go to his house, and he extends his hand and says, “Come away,” you may know you are welcome. I like this straightforward way of doing things: it is far more expressive of true generosity than the set courtly phrases of mere conventionalism.

A sort of independence of character is far more prevalent and observable in the Scotch peasantry than in either the English, the Irish, or the Welsh. Everybody expects to find it so; if not he will find himself much mistaken. Several anecdotes have been given me illustrative of this; but as I am not at home in telling Scotch tales, I dare not insert any of them. The fact, however, is most palpable. Doubtless the universal diffusion of education has much to do with it.

How readily, and how generously, did the Scottish people respond to the claims of the anti-slavery cause!

Douglass made several tours of Scotland in 1846, the first and longest lasting four months. He spent a total of nearly six months in Scotland between January and October, addressing at least seventy meetings, probably many more.

Full texts of newspaper reports of meetings addressed by him will be added to this site during 2019, starting, on 15 January, with his first speech in Scotland, the one he gave in Glasgow on 15 January 1846.

Douglass and his fellow campaigners spoke mostly at two kinds of venue.

They held public meetings at civic halls and meeting rooms, such as the City Hall and the Assembly Rooms in Glasgow, the Exchange Rooms in Paisley, the Music Hall (now the Assembly Rooms) and Waterloo Rooms in Edinburgh, the City Hall in Perth and the Assembly Rooms (now the Music Hall) in Aberdeen – and many of them still exist today.

They also addressed audiences in numerous churches, usually belonging to the United Secession Church or the Relief Church (the two denominations merged in 1847 to form the United Presbyterian Church). Most of these church buildings have since been demolished or rebuilt beyond recognition.

In drawing up a list of his speaking engagements, my starting point was the list published in The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series One: Speeches, Debates and Interviews. Volume 1: 1841-46, under the general editorship of John W. Blassingame (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

But some meetings are listed there which certainly did not take place: Douglass did not accompany fellow anti-slavery campaigner Henry Clarke Wright on his tour of the Borders in March and April, for instance. I have not included them here, nor a few others for which I have been unable to find independent confirmation. On the other hand, I have found evidence of meetings which are not listed in the Frederick Douglass Papers.  For more details of evidence used to identify meetings and locations  (still the subject of ongoing research) see Douglass: Speaking Engagements working document (pdf).

Some important local history research has revealed interesting details about the places Douglass spoke at in Greenock and Fenwick.

For a broader picture of Douglass’ tour of Britain and Ireland, see Hannah-Rose Murray’s excellent Frederick Douglass Map.  In October 2018 the National Library of Scotland produced interactive maps showing the locations where Douglass and other black abolitionists spoke in Scotland.

An asterisk indicates that the exact date is not certain. One may assume the meetings took place in the evening unless specified otherwise.

Where the venue is known, I have tried to link it to a matching record in the Canmore database of historic sites and buildings in Scotland, which gives its precise location and often provides some history of the site or building in question (although the record does not always recognise its use in 1846). Another useful resource is the Dictionary of Scottish Architects 1660-1980 where you can search for buildings as well as architects.

Accompanied by his white abolitionist friend, James Buffum, Douglass arrived in Ardrossan from Belfast on Saturday 10 January and proceeded by train to Glasgow.

• Thu 15 Jan: Glasgow, City Hall.
• Fri 23 Jan: Perth, City Hall.
• Mon 26 Jan: Perth, City Hall.
• Tue 27 Jan: Dundee, School Wynd Chapel.
• Wed 28 Jan: Dundee, School Wynd Chapel.
• Thu 29 Jan: Dundee, School Wynd Chapel.
• Fri 30 Jan: Dundee, Bell Street Chapel.
• Mon 9 Feb: Dundee, McGavin’s Chapel, Tay Square.
• Tue 10 Feb: Arbroath, Trades’ Hall.
• Wed 11 Feb: Arbroath, Abbey Church.
• Thu 12 Feb: Arbroath, Abbey Church.
• Wed 18 Feb: Glasgow, Assembly Rooms (afternoon). ‘Ladies Meeting.’
• Wed 18 Feb: Glasgow, City Hall.  Scottish Temperance League.
• Thu 26 Feb: Montrose. Mr Hyslop’s Chapel, Market Street.
• Fri 27 Feb: Montrose. Mr Hyslop’s Chapel, Market Street.
• Sat 28 Feb: Montrose. Thistle Hall, Bridge Street.
• Mon 2 Mar: Aberdeen, Bon Accord Music Hall, George Street.
• Fri 6 Mar: Aberdeen. Assembly Rooms, Union Street.
• Mon 9 Mar: Montrose, Mr Hyslop’s Chapel, Market Street.
• Tue 10 Mar: Dundee, School Wynd Chapel. ‘Anti-Slavery Soiree.’
• Tue 12 Mar: Perth (afternoon). ‘A meeting of ladies.’
• Tue 12 Mar Perth, City Hall. ‘Anti-Slavery Soiree.’
• Tue 17 Mar: Paisley, William Nisbet’s Church, 16 Abbey Close.
• Thu 19 Mar: Paisley, William Nisbet’s Church, 16 Abbey Close.
• Fri 20 Mar: Paisley, William Nisbet’s Church, 16 Abbey Close.
• Mon 23 Mar: Ayr, Relief Church, Cathcart Street.
• Tue 24 Mar: Ayr, Relief Church, Cathcart Street.
• Wed 25 Mar: Kilmarnock, George Inn Hall.
• Thu 26 Mar: Kilmarnock, Clerk’s Lane Chapel.
• Fri 27 Mar: Kilmarnock, Low Church.
• Mon 30 Mar: Paisley, William Nisbet’s Church, 16 Abbey Close. Temperance Meeting.
• Tue 31 Mar: Bonhill, [Relief Church?]. Probably the first of several meetings in the Vale of Leven.
• Fri 3 Apr: Kilmarnock, Clerk’s Lane Chapel.
• Sat 4 Apr: Fenwick, Secession Church.
• Mon 6 Apr: Paisley, William Nisbet’s Church, 16 Abbey Close.
• Fri 10 Apr: Greenock, West Blackhall Street Chapel.
• Fri 17 Apr: Paisley, Exchange Rooms.
• Tue 21 Apr: Glasgow, City Hall.
• Thu 23 Apr: Glasgow, Assembly Rooms (afternoon).
• Thu 23 Apr: Glasgow, City Hall.
• Sat 25 Apr: Paisley, West Relief Church, Canal Street and William Nisbet’s Church, 16 Abbey Close.
• Tue 28 Apr: Edinburgh, McGilchrist’s Church,19 Rose Street.
• Wed 29 Apr: Edinburgh, McGilchrist’s Church,19 Rose Street.(afternoon). ‘Ladies’ Meeting.’
• Fri 1 May: Edinburgh, Waterloo Rooms. ‘Public breakfast’ followed by meeting of the Edinburgh Ladies’ Emancipation Society (afternoon).
• Fri 1 May: Edinburgh, Music Hall.
• Thu 7 May: Edinburgh, McGilchrist’s Church,19 Rose Street.
• Fri 8 May: Edinburgh, Broughton Place Church. Attends fifth day of the United Associate Synod.

Douglass left for London on 17 or 18 May to attend the anniversary meeting of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, although he had scheduled meetings in Kirkcaldy (19 May) and Edinburgh (20 and 22 May), which went ahead without him. He returns on 23 or 24 May.

• Mon 25 May: Edinburgh, Music Hall.
• Wed 27 May: Edinburgh, Music Hall.
• Thu 28 May: Leith.
• Mon 1 Jun: Kirkcaldy, Bethelfield Chapel.
• Tue 2 Jun: Edinburgh, Music Hall.
• Thu 4 Jun: Edinburgh, Music Hall.
• Tue 9 Jun: Edinburgh, Music Hall.

His next known engagement was in Belfast on 16 June. He was back in Liverpool on 4 July seeing off his friend Buffum, heading back to Massachusetts, after which he returned to Belfast for the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. Douglass then sailed to Ardrossan and thence to Edinburgh via Glasgow.

• Fri 31 Jul: Edinburgh, Brighton Street Chapel. Scottish Anti-Slavery Society meeting ‘to commemorate the anniversary of the emancipation of the slaves in the West Indies.’

Douglass left Edinburgh for Newcastle on 1 August, and thence to London where he met William Lloyd Garrison, newly-arrived from Boston. The following month they both travelled to Scotland, but while Garrison travelled direct from London to Glasgow, arriving on the evening of 19 September, Douglass spoke in Sunderland on 18 September and did not rejoin him until 21 September. They had hoped to speak at City Hall, Glasgow on 21 September, but the meeting had to be postponed because the building ‘was to be occupied during the week with an exhibition of statuary.’

• Tue 22 Sep: Greenock.
• Wed 23 Sep: Paisley, Secession Church, 21 George St.
• Thu 24 Sep: Edinburgh, Brighton Street Chapel.
• Fri 25 Sep: Edinburgh. Edinburgh Female Anti-Slavery Meeting.
• Fri 25 Sep: Edinburgh, Brighton Street Chapel.
• Mon 28 Sep: Dundee, Bell Street Hall.
• Tue 29 Sep: Edinburgh.
• Wed 30 Sep: Glasgow, City Hall.
• Thu 1 Oct: Glasgow, City Hall (afternoon).
• Thu 1 Oct: Glasgow, City Hall.
• Fri 2 Oct: Glasgow, Eagle Temperance Hotel (morning)
• Fri 2 Oct: Kilmarnock (afternoon).

Douglass and Garrison then took the overnight steamer from Ardrossan to Belfast, where they spoke on 3 October. After speaking in Liverpool on 19 October, Douglass, Garrison and George Thompson took the train to Fleetwood on 20 October, then the overnight boat to Ardrossan, and headed for Edinburgh via Glasgow arriving just in time for the evening meeting.

• Wed 21 Oct: Edinburgh, Brighton Street Chapel.
• Thu 22 Oct: Kirkcaldy, Bethelfield Chapel.
• Fri 23 Oct: Dundee, James’ Chapel, Bell Street.
• Sat 24 Oct: Perth, City Hall
• Mon 26 Oct: Perth, City Hall.
• Wed 28 Oct: Glasgow, City Hall.
• Thu 29 Oct: Edinburgh, Music Hall.
• Mon 2 Nov: Hawick, West-End Chapel.

The next morning Douglass took the morning coach south. He was one of many supporters who saw Garrison off when he departed from Liverpool for Boston on 4 November.

Douglass finds in Scottish history an expression of the freedom that he is denied in the United States. Douglass takes his name from the hero of The Lady of the Lake – not the only namesake to feature in Scott’s work. Douglass visits the birthplace of Scotland’s most famous poet and meets a surviving relative.

The Free Hills of Old Scotland

Like many anti-slavery activists, Douglass often made much of the contrast between Britain and the United States. Britain, a monarchy, had abolished slavery in its colonies in 1833, while in the United States, a republic, the ‘peculiar institution’ continued to thrive in the South. But even in the North, where slavery had all but fizzled out by the third decade of the century, Douglass found himself

doomed by an inveterate prejudice against color to insult and outrage on every hand … – denied the privileges and courtesies common to others in the use of the most humble means of conveyance – shut out from the cabins on steamboats – refused admission to respectable hotels – caricatured, scorned, scoffed, mocked, and maltreated, with impunity by any one, (no matter how black his heart,) so he has a white skin.

But once on the other side of the Atlantic, ‘behold the change!’ In a speech given on the eve of his return to the United States, he recalled

I have travelled in all parts of the country: in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. I have journeyed upon highways, byways, railways and steamboats. I have myself gone, I might say, with almost electric speed; but at all events my trunk has been overttaken by electric speed. In none of these various conveyances, or in any class of society, have I found any curled lip of scorn, or an expression that I could torture into a word of disresepct of me on account of my complexion; not once…

However, he does seem to have had a special place in his heart for Scotland. In Dundee on 29 January 1846 he wrote:

I am now as you will perceive by the date of this letter in Scotland, almost every hill, river, mountain and lake of which has been made classic by the heroic deeds of her noble sons. Scarcely a stream but has been poured into song, or a hill that is not associated with some fierce and bloody conflict between liberty and slavery.

And, addressing himself to an American who had dared question the authenticity of his Narrative, he invoked a Scottish hero:

You must not judge me by what I then was – a change of circumstances has made a surprising change in me. Frederick Douglass, the freeman, is a very different person from Frederick Bailey, (my former name), the slave. I feel myself almost a new man – freedom has given me a new life. I fancy you would scarcely know me. i think I have altered very much in my general appearance, and know I have in my manners. you remember when I used to meet you on the road to St Michaels, or near Mr Covey’s lane gate, I hardly dared to lift my head, and lok up at you. If I should meet you now, aimd the free hills of old Scotland, where the ancient ‘black Douglass’ once met his foes, I presume I might summon sufficient fortitude to look you full in the face; and were you to attempt to make a slave of me, it is possible you might find me almost as disagreeable a subject, as was the Douglass to whom I have just referred. Of one thing, I am certain – you would see a great change in me!

Sir Walter Scott

It wasn’t quite a coincidence that Douglass shares the same name as ‘the ancient “black Douglass”‘. Born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, he dispensed with his two middle names early in life. When he escaped from Baltimore, he adopted several other names, including Stanley, designed to thrown any pursuers off the track, and arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, as Johnson. But, as he explains in his autobiographies, the name Johnson was very common in that town, and was even the name of the family who took him in. His host,

unwilling to have another of his own name added to the community in this unauthorised way, after I spent a night and a day at his house, gave me my present name. He had been reading Lady of the Lake, and was pleased to regard me as a suitable person to wear this, one of Scotland’s many famous names.

No doubt the choice was an appropriate one. Even if the fugitive slave was not yet acquainted with Walter Scott‘s famous poem, he certainly became so, and his library at Cedar Hill in Washington, DC – still preserved – boasts several editions of the collected works. The hero is – like Douglass – an outlaw and member of an ‘exiled race’. And at one point Scott compares him to a ‘hunted stag’, recalling the famous hunting scene at the beginning and in which, significantly, the ‘antler’d monarch’ gets away. Perhaps this caught the notice of the man who a few years’ later would recount his escape from ‘the hunters of men.’

Scott was hugely popular in the United States.  Readers there became acquainted with Scottish history not only through his poems and novels but his non-fiction works such as Tales of a Grandfather.  Many of those who travelled to Britain were inspired to visit some of the places he had so romantically described, such as the Trossachs, which served as the setting for The Lady of the Lake. Among them were some of Douglass’ fellow abolitionists who toured Scotland after attending the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840. And Henry Clarke Wright – with whom Douglass would join forces in Perth in January 1846 – had already, for over a year, been writing lyrically about the scenery Scott made famous, in letters to the Liberator.

So even if he had little time to read Scott as an overstretched antislavery campaigner in New England and beyond – he was almost permanently on tour from early 1842 until late 1844 – he would surely have absorbed some of these stories before he crossed the Atlantic. Once he was in Scotland, his name would have given his hosts an excuse to offer more re-tellings had they needed one.

The original ‘Black Douglas’ referred to in the letter above was the Good Sir James Douglas, the king’s leading military commander, and knighted by Robert Bruce on the eve of Bannockburn (1314), given the nickname by his English enemies, for his dark hair and complexion, and his diabolical reputation on the battlefield. He features in Scott’s last novel, Castle Dangerous (1832). But the whole line of Sir James’ successors were known as the Black Douglases, including Archibald the Grim (or ‘Blak’ Archibald), the third Earl of Douglas, who appears in The Fair Maid of Perth (1828).

The Black Douglases must be distinguished from the Earls of Angus, who became known as the Red Douglases, of whom it was Archibald Douglas, Sixth Earl who threatened James V and indeed imprisoned him in 1525. James escaped and managed to win back his authority, and subsequently passed sentence of forfeiture against Douglas and his kinsmen.  Scott identified the protagonist of The Lady of the Lake as Archibald’s nephew James Douglas, also known as the fourth Earl of Morton who, during the period of his family’s banishment, lived in the north of Scotland under an assumed name.

Even a superficial understanding of these aristocratic families would have been enough for Douglass to eagerly exploit the resonance of his adopted Scottish name that could signify both his status as an outlaw and a hunted fugitive on the one hand, and his dream of leading his oppressed compatriots to victory of their enemies on the other.

Robert Burns

There is no record of Douglass having visited Abbotsford when he was in Scotland – although the home of Walter Scott (who died a just over a decade earlier) was a favourite destination of literary pilgrims from the Europe and the United States at the time.

However we know he did visit Ayr, the birthplace of Robert Burns. Douglass knew Burns well. The first book he bought after escaping from slavery was an edition of Burns, which he later gifted to his son Lewis, and he was presented with another edition in Scotland in 1846. He often quoted lines from Burns in his speeches.

In a letter, later printed in the New York Tribune, Douglass wrote animatedly of the romantic setting of his monument. He took delight in being able to see with his own eyes the places named in ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ and ‘Ye Banks and Braes’. And he was honoured to meet Burns’ 80-year old sister, Isabella Burns Begg, ‘a spirited looking woman who bids fair to live yet many days.’

The letter went on to pay a generous tribute to the man – whose past trials and tribulations somewhat resembled his own:

I have ever esteemed Robert Burns a true soul but never could I have had the high opinion of the man or his genius, which I now entertain, without my present knowledge of the country, to which he belonged – the times in which he lived, and the broad Scotch tongue in which he wrote. Burns lived in the midst of a bigoted and besotted clergy – a pious, but corrupt generation – a proud, ambitious, and contemptuous aristocracy, who, esteemed a little more than a man, and looked upon the plowman, such as was the noble Burns, as being little better than a brute. He became disgusted with the pious frauds, indignant at the bigotry, filled with contempt for the hollow pretensions set up by the shallow-brained aristocracy. He broke loose from the moorings which society had thrown around him. Spurning all restraint, he sought a path for his feet, and, like all bold pioneers, he made crooked paths. We may lament it, we may weep over it, but in the lagnauge of another, we shall lament and weep with him. The elements of character which urge him on are in us all, and influencing our conduct every day of our lives. We may pity him, but we can’t despise him. We may condemn his faults, but only as we condemn our own. His very weakness was an index of his strength. Full of faults of a grievous nature, yet far more faultless than many who have come down to us in the pages of history as saints.

In Rochester, New York, nearly two years after his return from Britain in April 1847, Douglass was invited to address a Burns Supper. He reflected on his travels in Scotland, his meeting with the poet’s sister, and clearly could have gone on at length.

But, ladies and gentlemen, this is not a time for long speeches. I do not wish to detain you from the social pleasures that await you. I repeat again, that though I am not a Scotchman, and have a colored skin, I am proud to be among you this evening. And if any think me out of my place on this occasion (pointing at the picture of Burns), I beg that the blame may be laid at the door of him who taught me that ‘a man’s a man for a’ that.’