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by Alan Rice, Lecturer in American Studies and Cultural Theory, University of Central Lancashire.
"You cannot write the bloody laws of slavery on those restless billows. The Ocean, if not the land is free." Frederick Douglass, born a slave in Maryland in 1818 waxed so lyrically about the ocean because its traditions had provided him with a free sailor's papers, he escaped northward by train and ferry. His attainment of freedom in 1838 was, however, only the first step in a journey to maturity in which the trip across the ocean would play a foundational part. In August 1845, by now a leading Black Abolitionist and veteran of North American speaking tours, he boarded the Cambria on a visit to Britain which was to serve the dual purpose of getting him out of the country, as his newly-published autobiography exposed him to the danger of re-enslavement, and allowing the British Public their first exposure to his exceptional presence and fiery rhetoric.
His fine qualities were not, however, universally admired and American prejudice dogged his journey. On the Cambria itself he was forced to to accept a berth in steerage and was to be the centre of a controversial incident when passengers from the South attempted to break up a meeting organised in his honour. His idictment of slavery led some of these Southern passengers to menace him with threats that he would be thrown overbaord. The ship's captain, Judkins, settled the incident by the use of a judicious fist to quieten the most rowdy men and threatened the other malcontents with the application of the irons.
Douglass's dramatisation of the naked prejudice of these Southerners and their comeuppance effectively refigured the Atlantic crossing, which had historically been an enslaving sojourn, into a liberating one. His eighteen month visit provided him with the means controversially to purchase his freedom (expedited by a collection organised by Miss Ellen Richardson of Newcastle) and to collect funds for the setting up of an independent African American newspaper edited by himself, the North Star. Having come to America bound to a fundamentally white-run abolitionist movement, he returned, buoyed by personal contacts with British abolitionists, with a more independent and racially charged agenda. As Paul Gilroy has said, "his consciousness of 'race', self and society were profoundly changed by the experience of being outside America."
Douglass in fact saw a dichotomy in this finding of a "refuge from republican slavery in monarchical Britain" which had banned slavery in its colonies completely in 1838 and this irony was reinforced by the wonderful reception he got wherever he went in Britain. In a letter to his mentor, William Garrison, Douglass wrote, "the entire absence of anything that looked like prejudice against me, on the account of the colour of my skin - contrasted so strongly with my long and bitter experience in the United States, that I look with wonder and amazement at the transition." This supposed absence of prejudice is a theme echoed by black travellers to Europe from William Wells Brown later in the nineteenth-century to Paul Robeson in the 1930's and 1940's. Robeson's frequent journeys to Europe were often pleasant escapes from the realities of racism at home and Professor George Shepperson, in introducing Robeson to an Edinburgh meeting of 1949 made the specific comparison of his visit to that of Douglass the century before. In effect, they had both helped to internationalise the African American struggle for full human rights by their Atlantic soujourns.
Like Robeson, Douglass had had very successful meetings in Edinburgh. He
took a leading role in the vociferous campaign to force the Free Chruch of
Scotland to refuse monies collected by the slaveholding clergy in the South
for their mother church. The campaign was so successful that the slogan
"Send the Money Back" became a rallying call shouted out at street corners
and grafiteed on walls throughout the capital. Douglass relates how street
urchins shouted the phrase to him as he passed them by and it wasn't long
before it was immortalised in a street ballad:
Shall I, as free as ocean's waves Shake hands wi' women shipping slaves, An, build Kirks wi' the bluid o' slaves Send back - SEND BACK THE MONEY!
Douglass's role in the campaign was seen as central and he was lionised by many ordinary Scots folk. One anonymous witness reported, "On Monday nicht our Jock gat me to gang doun an' hear that chiel Douglass. I had come away wanting ma specks: but frae the luik I gat o' him, he seemed a buirly fellow, ane I shouldna like to hae a tussle wi' him either feeseecally or intellecktually."
The manifold resonances from Douglass's visit were a prime consideration of the International Colloquium at Keele. The event marked the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary both of Douglass's first visit to Britain and of the publication of his first autobiography. 1995 was also the centenary year of his death. With papers as wide-ranging as Douglass and the Unitarians and his relationship to women, the Scots and Irish, it aims to show how his interventions in British life had as profound an effect on it has it had on him. A session at the recently opened Slavery Gallery in the Meryside Maritime Museum honoured Douglass's leading role in ending the "peculiar institution", both through his campaigning rhetoric and his influential autobiography, which is used by the Gallery as primary evidence of the evils of slavery.
His presence in Britain exposed other evils, darker waters swimming beneath the seemingly benign faces of white abolitionists, whose forced encounter with an actual black man showed up as many deficiencies as positive qualities. John Estlin illustrated the former when he wrote of Douglass, "You can hardly imagine how he is noticed - petted I may say by the ladies. Some of them really exceed the bounds of propriety or delicacy, as far as apearances are concerned; yet Frederick Douglass's conduct is most guardedly correct, judicious and decourous ... My fear is that after associating so much with white women of education and refined taste and manners, he will feel a craving void when he returns to his own family."
Estlin's depiction of an African American culture devoid of the nourishments of white civilisation and a general uneasiness with mixed-race relationships, particularly across the sexual divide, exemplifies a racist ideology which unfortunately transcended and continues to transcend differences between America and Europe, undermining Douglass's fond hope of a Britain "where no delicate nose grows deformed in my presence." The delicate noses were just more discreet. His visit to Britain, thus, should be seen as a liberating sojourn for him, and for those working class and women abolitionists with whome he communicated especially well (perhaps because of their similarly degraded status to his own); however, the more ambiguous response from Estlin is emblematic of a troubled racialised discourse lurking just beneath the surface in even the most philosophically liberal and politically radical circles of nineteenth-century Britain. On his return to America, Douglass was again forced to travel steerage. He had expanded his horizons greatly through his visit to Britain, only to encounter at its end the limitations of a world-view which could not see beyond the colour of his skin.
Portrait of Douglass and texts
Frederick Douglass Colloquim at Keele
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