In 1845, seven years after fleeing bondage in Maryland, Frederick
Douglass was in his late twenties and already a celebrated lecturer
across the northern United States. The recent publication of his
groundbreaking Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an
American Slave had incited threats to his life, however, and to
place himself out of harm's way he embarked on a lecture tour of
the British Isles, a journey that would span seventeen months and
change him as a man and a leader in the struggle for equality. In
the first major narrative account of a transformational episode in
the life of this extraordinary American, Tom Chaffin chronicles
Douglass's 1845-47 lecture tour of Ireland, Scotland, and England.
It was, however, the Emerald Isle, above all, that affected
Douglass - from its wild landscape (""I have travelled almost from
the hill of 'Howth' to the Giant's Causeway"") to the plight of its
people, with which he found parallels to that of African Americans.
Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, critic David Kipen has
called Chaffin a ""thorough and uncommonly graceful historian.""
Possessed of an epic, transatlantic scope, Chaffin's new book makes
Douglass's historic journey vivid for the modern reader and reveals
how the former slave's growing awareness of intersections between
Irish, American, and African history shaped the rest of his life.
The experience accelerated Douglass's transformation from a teller
of his own life story into a commentator on contemporary issues - a
transition discouraged during his early lecturing days by white
colleagues at the American Anti-Slavery Society. (""Give us the
facts,"" he had been instructed, ""we will take care of the
philosophy."") As the tour progressed, newspaper coverage of his
passage through Ireland and Great Britain enhanced his stature
dramatically. When he finally returned to America he had the
platform of an international celebrity. Drawn from hundreds of
letters, diaries, and other primary-source documents - many
heretofore unpublished - this far-reaching tale includes vivid
portraits of personages who shaped Douglass and his world,
including the Irish nationalists Daniel O'Connell and John Mitchel,
British prime minister Robert Peel, abolitionist John Brown, and
Abraham Lincoln. Giant's Causeway - which includes an account of
Douglass's final, bittersweet, visit to Ireland in 1887 - shows how
experiences under foreign skies helped him hone habits of
independence, discretion, compromise, self-reliance, and political
dexterity. Along the way, it chronicles Douglass's transformation
from activist foot soldier to moral visionary.
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