From Bondage to Freedom: The Making of an Abolitionist
“The Fugitive’s Song” (sheet music illustration).
On August 27, 1845, the passengers of the Cambria, a Cunard line paddle-steamer traveling from Boston to Liverpool, celebrated the end of their voyage. Many were milling around the upper decks, walking off the effects of numerous toasts made at the traditional captain’s dinner the night before arrival. The green shaded outline of Ireland was on the horizon, and the stillness of the sea must have been calming. Yet there was a commotion on the Cambria that night. A number of passengers had collected around a large black man, over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and an intense, intelligent face. As the man began to speak, his rich baritone rolling out to sea, the crowd grew larger. The man was talking about slavery, but before he could finish his first sentence, he was met with the challenge, “That’s a lie!” As he continued, the hecklers became more violent, more insulting. “Down with the nigger,” one shouted; “He shan’t speak,” yelled another. (SOURCE) But the man did speak, his voice steady with a defiant poise and power that would capture Britain’s attention for the next two years.
This was Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist and escaped slave. He was beginning a journey that would last twenty months and would take him crisscrossing throughout Ireland, Scotland, and England. He would give more than 300 antislavery lectures there, remorselessly revealing American hypocrisy and the complicity of British religious institutions in the support of American slavery. He would become a celebrity, welcomed into the homes of some of Britain’s most distinguished citizens. And he would return to America, to his own home, a changed man.
As Douglass declared before 1,400 men and women “of great respectability,” all gathered to hear his final speech before returning home:
I go back to the United States not as I landed here—I came a slave; I go back a free man. I came here a thing—I go back a human being. I came here despised and maligned—I go back with reputation and celebrity; for I am sure that if the Americans were to believe one tithe of all that has been said in this country respecting me, they would certainly admit me to be a little better than they had hitherto supposed I was.[1] (SOURCE)
These dramatic changes, like all major transitions in Douglass’s life—his conflict with Covey, his escape North, and later, his rejection of Garrisonian abolitionism—came only with intense struggle. In Britain, these struggles were sometimes hidden by the glare of Douglass’s newly established celebrity, but beyond the well-attended soirees and the rush of ardent admirers lay Douglass’s efforts to define his place in the abolition movement and to resolve the tensions of his complex identity. The story of Douglass in Britain is the story of these struggles.
In recent scholarship, these struggles have also been obscured by the glare of Douglass’s dramatic break-up with Garrison upon the celebrated black orator’s return to America. Much has been written of that confrontation, its roots traced back in the two men’s divergent histories and personalities. Douglass’s trip to Britain is normally viewed through the eventuality of that conflict, warped to fit as an anticipation of the breakup. But though Douglass’s experience in Great Britain undeniably changed him in ways that led to a reconsideration of his place in American abolition, it is important to avoid such a teleological bias. Only by examining Douglass’s experiences in Britain without an inevitable outcome in mind—by appreciating the steady deference paid to the Garrisonians by Douglass, as well as the problematic emergence of his independent spirit—can we understand the tensions and paradoxes inherent to Douglass’s journey, and the journey’s fundamental place in his development and maturation.
At the time of his voyage, Douglass was already a prominent figure in the American abolition movement. Born into slavery in 1818, Frederick Augustus Washington Baily (as he was originally named) grew up in relative contentment on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.[2] When he was eight years old Frederick was “transferred” to the home of his master’s brother, Hugh Auld, in Baltimore.[3] Indeed, the move to Baltimore was one of the fundamental events of Douglass’s life, for it introduced him to a world in which freedom was not a vague dream but a real possibility. Douglass had always chafed under the restraints of slavery, but life in Baltimore, a city where a “slave [was] almost a free citizen,” provided him with a powerful motivation and an undeniable opportunity.[4] In 1838, disguised as a sailor, Douglass managed to take a train to New York City, where he met up with his Baltimore sweetheart, a free black named Anna Murray. They were soon married and together moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where Frederick adopted the last name Douglass from a character in Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake.[5]
It was in New Bedford that Douglass encountered the abolitionist movement. He became a faithful reader of William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator and began attending abolitionist meetings held by the city’s blacks. Gaining confidence in his abilities, he rose to a position of prominence within the black abolitionist community. White abolitionists soon began to appreciate his talents as well. While attending an annual meeting of the Bristol Anti-Slavery Society on August 9, 1841, Douglass participated in several discussions; and his intelligence caught the eye of Garrison, the preeminent and controversial spearhead of the immediatist abolition movement. Garrison invited Douglass to join him and a group of his followers at another convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in Nantucket.[6] A week later, on August 16, Douglass gave his first official antislavery lecture.
Though he spoke with some embarrassment, struggling with the new idea of speaking before a white audience, all in attendance immediately recognized Douglass’s “wisdom as well as wit.”[7] Garrison and others encouraged him to continue as an antislavery lecturer; Douglass’s imposing physical presence, his articulate and impassioned delivery, and his first-hand knowledge of slavery quickly made him one of the most popular. Douglass was elected an agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in the fall of 1841, and then a lecturer for the “100 Conventions” western campaign of 1843-1844. On these tours Douglass met with both encouraging successes, suggesting the redemptive promise of American ideals, and disheartening defeats, revealing the ugly intransigence of American prejudice. Most disturbing among these defeats, haunting Douglass for years to come, was his experience in Pendleton, Indiana, where he barely escaped with his life after a savage attack by a pro-slavery mob.[8]
That Douglass would attract the attention of both antislavery sympathizers and pro-slavery detractors was inevitable. Compared to many escaped slaves, who would stammer and stutter their stories before a sympathetically tolerant audience, Douglass’s performances were virtuosic. One observer commented in 1842 that Douglass’s “intellectual greatness,” developed four years after his escape from slavery, was the “cause of absolute astonishment.”[9] In fact, Douglass’s polished delivery and his seemingly inborn sophistication led some to claim that he was actually an impostor, an educated free black who had never experienced the brutality of the whip or the turnscrew. As he recorded in his 1855 autobiography, “People doubted if I had ever been a slave. They said I did not talk like a slave, look like a slave, nor act like a slave, and that they believed I had never been south of Mason and Dixon’s line.” John Collins, Douglass’s traveling partner for much of 1843 and the general agent of the Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society, had apparently anticipated this response, warning Douglass, “Better have a little of the plantation manner of speech than not; it is not best that you seem too learned.”[10]
Douglass had too much self-respect, as well as too much respect for classical oratory, to adopt the demeaning accents of the illiterate Sambo. He had previously resisted the temptation to disclose much of his slave identity, including his master’s name or his place of birth, for fear of recapture. But he now decided to defend himself against these charges and to compose a narrative of his experiences that would conclusively prove the authenticity of his identity and validate his status as a representative slave. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845) became an instant success, selling 4,500 copies between the months of May and September, and 30,000 copies in both Britain and America by 1850. Praised by reviewers all over the country — one in the Lynn Pioneer declared, “It is the most thrilling work which the American press ever issued—and the most important”—the story of Douglass’s early life became our country’s most important slave narrative, and a seminal work of 19th century American literature.[11]
Its popularity, however, was something of a mixed blessing for Douglass; with his identity fully revealed, the risk of recapture increased dramatically. His old master, smarting over his treatment in the Narrative, would have liked nothing better than to bring that ungrateful slave back home. Concerned for his safety, Douglass’s friends urged him to pursue a course he had been considering, and that had become even more attractive after the strain of composing the Narrative: to travel overseas, and commence an antislavery tour of England.[12] Douglass was reluctant to leave his family—he was now the proud father of four children—but the threat of recapture was overpowering. On August 16, 1845, Douglass left from Boston with an antislavery traveling companion, James Buffum, a wealthy, if slightly insipid, Garrisonian from Lynn. They boarded the Cambria and sailed for Liverpool.[13]
Never one to shy away from the good fight, Douglass did not go quietly across the waters. Indeed, controversy followed his transatlantic voyage from its very beginning. Accompanied by Buffum, Douglass attempted to purchase a cabin passage, but was told that since “it would give offense to the majority of the American passengers,” he would have to accept a berth in the steerage compartment.[14] (SOURCE) Douglass complied; perhaps he suspected that there would be ample opportunity for agitation in the immediate future. Indeed, once on board, Douglass quickly ruffled some pro-slavery feathers by distributing copies of his Narrative, the sale of which was his principal means of financing his trip, as well as by venturing into the first-class sections to dine with sympathetic fellow passengers.[15]
If the ship simmered, it did not come to a boil till the night of the 27th. As Douglass began to speak on deck, the several hecklers around him became more violent, forming what Douglass called “a real American, republican, democratic, Christian mob.” And when Douglass countered their accusations of abolitionist fabrications by reading some of the more severe state slave laws, the pro-slavery members of the crowd became even more incensed. As one rather partisan witness explained, the passengers refused to let Douglass “vomit his foul stuff any longer on the quarter deck.”[16] Several suggested throwing Douglass overboard, others rushed to his defense, and the two sides fought it out on deck. The brawl was temporarily broken up when the captain threatened to put the pro-slavery men in chains if they continued to disrupt Douglass (a gesture that Douglass, all too familiar with chains and possessing a keen sense of irony, readily appreciated). However, the fighting continued, and the captain eventually suggested that for safety’s sake, Douglass retire to his cabin.[17]
The incident, heavily publicized in the British and Irish press, served Douglass as instant publicity material, and made him into a sort of celebrity before he even set foot on British soil. As he later wrote in My Bondage and My Freedom, the incident “brought me at once before the British public, awakening something like a national interest in me, and securing me an audience.”[18] Douglass was, in fact, his own brilliant PR man. Scholars have ably demonstrated how he deliberately constructed his 1845 Narrative to present his readers with a “rhetoricized” version of his life, ballooning certain incidents and themes and effacing others (like his sexuality and his relationship with his wife) to serve his abolitionist objectives.[19] It was no different with the Cambria incident. Douglass kept the event before the public’s attention long after it had run its course in the British periodicals. Always sensitive to his transforming sense of self, Douglass presented his journey from America to Britain as a geographic counterpart to his famous declaration in the Narrative: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.”[20] To an individual who had successfully completed the liberating journey North, there would always be a direct relationship between movement and personal development; and to one who in slavery had gazed wistfully at the great ships of the Chesapeake, the oceanic voyage would have a special symbolic resonance. Thus, the incident became another chapter in the story of Douglass’s escape from bondage to freedom.[21]
Moreover, the journey itself, and the events which occurred on it, expressed for Douglass the depravity of the land he was leaving and the critical and incendiary potential inherent in that departure. Douglass tailored each version of the story to suit the regional chauvinisms of his audience,[22] but in each case, he was quick to demonstrate the implicit irony in a movement from “American republican slavery, to monarchical liberty.” (SOURCE) As he wrote to Garrison, “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… I breathe, and lo! the chattel becomes a man.”[23] (SOURCE) By revealing the glaring hypocrisy of American ideals, and by reversing the transatlantic direction of the historical progression toward democratic freedom enshrined in American memory, the trip itself became a heroic gesture. Indeed, in several of his speeches Douglass implicitly compared his own controversial journey to that of Madison Washington, the slave who in 1841 led the mutiny on board the ship Creole, redirecting it from Virginia to Nassau, where the slaves on board would enjoy British emancipation.[24] Like Douglass, Washington preferred monarchical liberty to American republican slavery; and, through the comparison, Douglass suggested that his journey was actually a form of active rebellion, the defiant act of a still “heroic slave.”[25]
In telling and retelling the story of the Cambria (and especially in comparing it to the Creole incident),[26] Douglass was also playing upon the transatlantic tensions and affinities existing between the United States and Great Britain. Since she had emancipated her slaves in 1834, Great Britain served as a model for American reformers, and was considered by many to be the “moral arbiter of the Western World.”[27] American blacks and abolitionists often celebrated their version of Independence Day on August 1, the anniversary of British West Indian emancipation, demonstrating both the hypocrisy of the American July 4th celebration and their respect for British reform.[28] However, recent political and diplomatic events (as well as the inherent historical tension between a mother country and her liberated colony) tempered much of this American respect for Britain. The controversy over the Creole mutiny, the border disputes over the Northwest “Oregon” territories, and the prospect of British military intervention to prevent American annexation of Texas, all served to solidify the suspicions of one country toward the other.[29]
There was indeed a widespread fear among Americans that radical abolitionists traveling in Britain would ultimately incite Britain toward some form of military aggression, and that generally, American abolitionists were agents of a British conspiracy against the United States. One American paper denounced Douglass as a “glib-tongued scoundrel… running a muck in greedy-eared Britain against America, its people, its institutions, and even against its peace.”[30] (SOURCE) Aware of these charges, Douglass never explicitly advocated violence, and often rehearsed his Garrisonian pacifism before his British audiences, undoubtedly realizing that his words would echo back across the Atlantic. During one speech he exclaimed, “Were I to be asked the question as to whether I would have my emancipation by the shedding of one single drop of blood, my answer would be in the negative.”[31] (SOURCE) However, he seemed at times to enjoy flirting with the possibility of British intervention, as if to satisfy his audience’s sense of their own military might, and his own rhetorical power. In several speeches, Douglass imagined American slaves rallying to support a foreign invasion, implicitly British. In one he stated, “If a foreign enemy were to land in America and plant the standard of freedom, the slaves would rise to a man,” only to qualify that fantasy with the declaration, “But you are not to infer from this that I am an advocate for war, no, I hate war. I have no weapon but that which is consistent with morality.”[32] (SOURCE)
Douglass could exploit this inherent ambivalence in the relationship between America and Great Britain to provide himself with valuable rhetorical room. He could at one moment play upon British chauvinism and contempt for America—a tactic with a long history in the obloquies of American abolitionists.[33] Then, in the next breath, he could appeal to Britain’s responsibilities toward America, citing her original introduction of slavery to the American colonies. Additionally, after George Thompson’s trip to America in 1834-1835, and after the abolition of the “apprenticeship” system in 1838, the British antislavery forces focused their attention primarily on the United States. Through the writings of Thompson and Harriet Martineau, the British began to perceive the antislavery battle in the glorified terms of a Manichean struggle between the forces of good and evil.[34] Douglass could selectively focus on these different attitudes toward America, and thus manipulate his audience to serve his rhetorical purposes.
In perfecting these tactics, Douglass also benefited from the established tradition of American abolitionist visitors to the British Isles in the 1830’s and early 1840’s. During these years, almost all major American antislavery figures spent considerable time in Britain, forming important relationships with their British counterparts. Garrison himself crossed the Atlantic in 1833, and returned for the First World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 (he would return once again in 1846 to join Douglass). Though Garrison’s 1840 visit was complicated by his protest over the refusal of the Convention to allow the participation of female delegates, he did establish several contacts whose support Douglass would enjoy during his trip.[35] Numerous black abolitionists also made successful visits to Britain, most notably Nathaniel Paul and Charles Remond, and later William Wells Brown.[36] Visiting black abolitionists became so popular, in fact, that some dark-skinned men posed as ex-slaves and toured the country.[37] Ultimately, this transatlantic channel, facilitating the exchange of information and opinions from lecturers, pamphlets and books, ensured that most of Douglass’s audiences were adequately prepared for his visit and for their own participation in the cause of American abolition.
Footnotes
Benjamin Soskis graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in History in 1998. He wishes to thank Professor David Brion Davis and Professor John Stauffer for their encouragement, guidance and friendship, and Professor John McKivigan and Sean Adams at West Virginia University for all their assistance.
[1] Philip Foner (ed.), The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (6 vols; New York: International Publishers, 1950-1978), I:231 (March 30, 1847) (SOURCE); Foner, Frederick Douglass : A Biography (New York: Citadel Press, 1964), 73.
[2] Douglass was uncertain about many of the facts of his early life, and spent considerable effort trying to recover what he could of his unrecorded slave past. As he wrote in his Narrative (1845), “A want of information concerning my own [birth-date] was a source of unhappiness to me even in childhood (21).” See also Peter Walker, Moral Choices: Memory, Desire, and Imagination in Nineteenth-Century American Abolition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 209-228. Modern historians are more fortunate in the information available to them; Dickson Preston has painstakingly researched much of Douglass’s early life in Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
[3] William McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), 24.
[4] Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), reprint (Ebony Classics, Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 1970), 115; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 58-59.
[5] Though the name was actually suggested to Douglass by his host, Nathan Johnson, scholars have pointed to the name change as a symbolic embrace of his new identity as a freeman. See Walker, Moral Choices, 255-256; George Shepperson, “Frederick Douglass and Scotland,” Journal of Negro History 38 (July 1953), 307.
[6] On the boat traveling from New Bedford to Nantucket, Douglass joined in a protest over segregation onboard. It is possible that the symbolic potency of the Cambria incident for Douglass was due in some part to its resonance with this original protest experience. See Walker, Moral Choices, 241; Benjamin Quarles, Frederick Douglass (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 13; Waldo Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 21.
[7] Cited in McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 88.
[8] McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 109-112. See also Douglass’s letter from Scotland to William White, a fellow antislavery lecturer who came to his aid in Pendleton, in Philip Foner, Life and Writings , I:181. (SOURCE)
[9] John Blassingame, introduction to The Frederick Douglass Papers; Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), xlvii.
[10] Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), 282; Blassingame, I:38 (October 14, 1845). As late as 1846, nearly a year after the publication of Douglass’s Narrative and six months into his trip overseas, a Scottish minister had to convince an audience that Douglass was “not an impostor.” Blassingame et al eds., The Frederick Douglass Papers, I:195 (March 24, 1846) (SOURCE) .
[11] Quarles, Frederick Douglass, 55; Douglas Lorimer, Colour Class and the Victorians (New York: Leicester University Press, 1978), 46; R.J.M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press: 1983), 26.
[12] Quarles, Frederick Douglass, 35; Foner, Frederick Douglass, 430n.
[13] Quarles, Frederick Douglass, 38; Blassingame, The Frederick Douglass Papers, I:38n. Buffum, a carpenter, contractor, real-estate speculator and financier, had become vice-president of the MASS mostly through his financial contributions. He would eventually become mayor of Lynn and serve in the Massachusetts legislature. Though Buffum was initially selected to keep an eye on Douglass, it was soon apparent that Douglass’s independent spirit and obvious intellectual superiority would complicate that relationship. See McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 121.
[14] Blassingame, The Frederick Douglass Papers, I:63 (October 23, 1845) (SOURCE).
[15] Frederick Douglass to “My Dear Friend [Richard Webb],” January 20, 1846 (photostat), Frederick Douglass Papers, West Virginia University; Frederick Douglass to Maria Weston Chapman, March 29, 1846, Weston Sisters Papers, Boston Public Library; Blassingame, The Frederick Douglass Papers, I:63n.
[16] Letter to the Boston Times, quoted in the Liberator, October 3, 1845.
[17] Blassingame, The Frederick Douglass Papers, I:142 (January 15,1846) (SOURCE), I:63-67 (October 23, 1845) (SOURCE), I:82-85 (November 10, 1845) (SOURCE).
[18] My Bondage and My Freedom, 286; Foner, Life and Writings, I:124 (SOURCE); Blassingame, “Introduction to The Frederick Douglass Papers, liii.
[19] Eric Sundquist, “Introduction,” in Sundquist (ed.), Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 6-8 and Wilson Moses, “Writing Freely? Frederick Douglass and the Constraints of Racialized Writing,” in the same book, 70. See also Walker, Moral Choices, 212-214.
[20] Douglass, Narrative of Frederick Douglass (1845), reprint (New York,: Signet, 1968), 77.
[21] ibid, 76.
[22] So for instance, while in Ireland Douglass concentrated much of his narrative on an Irish passenger “of gigantic size” named Mr. Gough, (SOURCE) who defended Douglass against the “pro-slavery, cadaverous, lantern-jawed Americans (Blassingame, The Frederick Douglass Papers, I:139) (SOURCE).” For more regional adaptations, see Blassingame I:84 and I:91.
[23] Foner, Life and Writings, I:127 (January 1, 1846) (SOURCE).
[24] Blassingame, The Frederick Douglass Papers, I:68n (October 23, 1845) (SOURCE); II:46 (March 30, 1847); Sundquist, “Introduction,” 12. See also (SOURCE)
[25] “The Heroic Slave,” Douglass’s only novella, was published in 1853, and was inspired by the mutiny aboard the Creole. Robert Stepto has pointed out other parallels between the two men’s lives that might have attracted Douglass to Washington’s story. Both men began their escape attempts in 1835, and achieved a public recognition of their liberation in the fall of 1841. Additionally, Douglass originally escaped from Baltimore in the disguise of a sailor; Washington would become “a truer and more heroic sailor” through his mutiny. See Robert Stepto, “Storytelling in Early Afro-American Fiction: Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave,’ Georgia Review 36:2, 359.
[26] After the slaves reached Nassau, the British jailed the mutineers and freed the other slaves. The American government demanded either the return of the mutineers or reparations, and the ensuing negotiations between America and Britain exacerbated the tensions between the two nations over border disputes and nearly drove them to war. The mutineers were freed in 1842, and in 1855, a Anglo-American claims commission awarded the American owners of the freed slaves $110,330.
[27] Cited in Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, 4. See also Lawrence Friedman, Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),172-173.
[28] For an extended discussion of the American antislavery celebration of August 1, see Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 116-129.
[29] See Bernard DeVoto, The Year of Decision 1846 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942); Howard Temperly, British Antislavery 1833-1870 (London: Longman, 1972) 197-206.
[30] Foner, Life and Writings, I:146 (April 15, 1846)(SOURCE); Temperly, British Antislavery, 206.
[31] Blassingame, The Frederick Douglass Papers, I:262 (May 19, 1846) (SOURCE). See also Blassingame I:125 (January 2, 1846) (SOURCE), I:221 (April 17, 1846) (SOURCE), for other examples of Douglass’s repudiation of violence.
[32]Blassingame, The Frederick Douglass Papers, I:187 (March 19, 1846) (SOURCE). For a striking expression of Douglass’s ambivalence toward violence, see his letter to Francis Jackson (January 29, 1846, Anti-Slavery Collection, Boston Public Library) (SOURCE). By 1847, after he encountered the fiery and persuasive John Brown, Douglass began to question the infallibility of Garrisonian nonresistance. By 1849, he fully embraced the right of slaves to use violence in overthrowing slavery.
[33] Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, 7-8; Temperly, British Antislavery, 194.
[34] Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, 12-13; Temperly, British Antislavery, 25-29; Douglas Riach, “Richard Davis Webb and Antislavery in Ireland,” in Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman (eds.), Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspective on the Abolitionists (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 150.
[35] Temperly, British Antislavery, 195, 209.
[36] Douglass directly attributed much of the antislavery interest in Cork to Remond’s visit there in 1841. He wrote to Garrison, “He [Remond] is spoken of here in terms of high approbation; and his name is held in affectionate remembrance by many whose hearts were warmed into life on this question by his soul-stirring eloquence.” Frederick Douglass to W.L. Garrison, October 28, 1845 [photostat], Frederick Douglass Papers, West Virginia University. See also Shepperson, “Frederick Douglass and Scotland,” Journal of Negro History 38 (July 1953), 308 for a brief but thorough discussion of black visitors to Scotland.
[37] Lorimer, Colour, 46; Jane Pease and William Pease, They who would be free: Blacks’ search for Freedom, 1830-1861 (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 50.