Page 44 - Bulletin, Vol.79 No.1, February 2020

FROM SLAVERY TO FREEDOM: FREDERICK

DOUGLASS IN IRELAND

By Ita MARGUET
He was born into slavery as Frederick Augustus
Washington Bailey (1818-1895) in Cordova, Maryland, USA.
After escaping from slavery in Maryland he became a
national leader of the abolitionist movement in
Massachusetts and New York, gaining note for his oratory
and his incisive antislavery writings. Described as tall and
handsome in his late twenties, just how late he didn’t know.
Slavery had robbed him of knowledge about the exact
circumstances of his birth, its precise date as well as
uncertainty of his father’s identity. He was separated early
from his mother who had been a slave in the ownership of a
wealthy white Master whose paternity he suspected. He
grew up in the cruel and inhuman conditions of bondage.
With his escape in 1838 his dangerous and daring journey to
the northern states of the USA is well documented and
widely chronicled.

He wrote later of his arrival in New York City: I have often been asked, how I felt
when first I found myself on free soil. And my readers may share the same curiosity. There
is scarcely anything in my experience about which I could not give a more satisfactory
answer. A new world had opened upon me. If life is more than breath, and the ‘quick round
of blood’, I lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life. It was a time of joyous
excitement which words can but tamely describe. In a letter soon after reaching New York, I
said: ‘I felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry lions’. Anguish and grief,
like darkness and rain, may be depicted; but gladness and joy, like the rainbow, defy the
skill of pen or pencil.

To avoid being recaptured after his incendiary attack on slavery he was advised to
leave America. Along with a Quaker friend he sailed to Liverpool, England on The Cambria,
a trans-Atlantic paddle-steamer, which brought the nineteenth century civil rights activist
and escaped slave to Ireland. He travelled in Ireland as the Great Famine was beginning to
take a grip on the country. The feeling of freedom from American racial discrimination
amazed Douglass; “Eleven days and a half gone and I have crossed three thousand
miles of the perilous deep. Instead of a democratic government I am under a
monarchical government. Instead of the bright, blue sky of America, I am covered
with the soft, grey fog of the Emerald Isle. I breath, and lo! The chattel becomes a
man. I gaze around in vain for one who will question my equal humanity, claim me as
his slave, or offer me an insult.” His first autobiography had just become a best seller in
America. Abraham Lincoln would call him the “the most impressive man I ever met.”

40 AAFI-AFICS BULLETIN, Vol. 79 No. 1, 2020-02