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primary-source documents--many heretofore unpublished--this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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