Speaking Engagements

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.

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.

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.’

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.

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.

Resources

Some websites of related interest, including electronic texts. Books and articles on Douglass and his visit of 1845-47. Other sources of primary materials.

Websites

General sites on Frederick Douglass:

Electronic Texts:

On Walter Scott:

Books and Articles

Writings and Speeches by Douglass

  • John W Blassingame (ed), The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series One: Speeches, Debates and Interviews. Volume 1: 1841-1846 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979). Includes the text of 19 speeches made in Scotland 1846-47.
  • Philip Foner (ed), The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. Volume 1: Early Years, 1817-1849 (New York: International Publishers, 1950). Includes letters written in Scotland 1846.

On Douglass

  • Benjamin Quarles, Frederick Douglass (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1948).
  • Philip S Foner, Frederick Douglass: A Biography (New York: 1964).
  • Nathan Huggins, Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980).
  • William McFeeley, Frederick Douglass (New York: Touchstone, 1991).
  • L Diane Barnes, Frederick Douglass: Reformer and Statesman (London and New York: Routledge, 2013).
  • John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd and Celeste-Marie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American (New York: W W Norton, 2015).
  • Robert S Levine, The Lives of Frederick Douglass (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016).
  • Leigh Fought, Women in the World of Frederick Douglass (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
  • Celeste-Marie Bernier and Bill E Lawson (eds), Pictures and Power: Imaging and Imagining Frederick Douglass 1818-2018 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017).
  • Celeste-Marie Bernier and Andrew Taylor, If I Survive: Frederick Douglass and Family in the Walter O Evans Collection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018).
  • David W Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018).

Accounts of his Visit

  • George Shepperson, ‘The Free Church and American Slavery’, Scottish Historical Review 30 (October 1951).
  • George Shepperson, ‘Thomas Chalmers, the Free Church of Scotland, and the South’, Journal of Southern History 17 (November 1951).
  • George Shepperson, ‘Frederick Douglass and Scotland’, Journal of Negro History 38 (July 1953).
  • C Duncan Rice, The Scots Abolitionists, 1833-1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981).
  • R J M Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983).
  • Alasdair Pettinger, ‘“Send Back the Money”: Frederick Douglass and the Free Church of Scotland’ in A Rice & M Crawford (eds), A Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), pp31-55.
  • Alasdair Pettinger, ‘”At Sea – Coloured Passenger”‘ in Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun (eds), Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp149-66.
  • Alasdair Pettinger, ‘Frederick Douglass, Scotland and the South’, STAR (Scotland’s Transatlantic Relations) Project Archive, April 2004.
  • Alasdair Pettinger, ‘George Lewis and the American Churches’ in Tim Youngs (ed), Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century: Filling in the Blank Spaces (London: Anthem Press, 2006), pp145-62.
  • Fionnghuala Sweeney, Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007).
  • W Caleb McDaniel, ‘Saltwater anti-slavery: American abolitionists on the Atlantic Ocean in the Age of Steam’, Atlantic Studies, Vol 8 No 2 (June 2011), 141-63
  • Iain Whyte, ‘Send Back the Money’: The Free Church of Scotland and American Slavery (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2012).
  • Tom Chaffin, Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014).
  • Laurence Fenton, Frederick Douglass in Ireland: ‘The Black O’Connell’ (Cork: The Collins Press, 2014).
  • Laurence Fenton, ‘I Was Transformed’: Frederick Douglass, An American Slave in Victorian Britain (Stroud: Amberley, 2018)
  • Christine Kinealy (ed), Frederick Douglass and Ireland: In His Own Words. 2 vols. (London: Routledge 2018)
  • Christine Kinealy, Black Abolitionists in Ireland (London: Routledge, 2020).
  • Hannah-Rose Murray, Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitioism in the British Isles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2020).

Fiction and Drama

Radio Programmes

Research Projects

  • Our Bondage and Our Freedom (2018-19). An international project celebrating the 200 year anniversary of the birth of African American activist and author, Frederick Douglass.

Installation

  • Merchant City Voices (2013). ‘A series of sound installations formed in collaboration between Collective Architecture and renowned Scottish author, Louise Welsh, commissioned by Glasgow City Council. The project explores Glasgow’s involvement in the tobacco and sugar industries, and contemporary responses to the system of forced labour that it depended on – the transatlantic slave trade.’

Libraries

  • The Mitchell Library in Glasgow has the minutes of the Glasgow Emancipation Society and related documents in the William Smeal Collection.

Douglass, Burns and Scott

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.

handwritten letter
Frederick Douglass to Francis Jackson, Dundee, 29 January 1846. Boston Public Library.

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.

Isabella Burns Begg
Isabella (Burns) Begg, 1771-1858. Youngest sister of Robert Burns[a] [detail]. Robert Adamson & David Octavius Hill. National Galleries of Scotland.
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.’