Observations of African-American and Irish Abolitionists
During his career, O’Connell was elected Mayor of Dublin and a member of the British Parliament. However, he was refused his seat in the House of Commons because the law prohibited Catholics from serving in government. The British finally passed the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829, thereby seating him in Parliament in 1830 – a resounding victory for Irish Catholics.
O’connell possessed a Catholic vision of freedom, and empathized with the struggle of those seeking freedom in other parts of the world. He was well-known and revered in black American circles as a champion of their cause.
A virtual explosion of accord on the issue of freedom occurred when Frederick Douglass, publisher of the Rochester, New York, North Star, a former slave who escaped to freedom, met O’Connell on his trip to Ireland in 1845. Each in their own way testified that the concept of justice was universal, a common aspiration of a weeping humanity.
Douglass praised O’Connell’s effective oratory and his solidarity with abolitionism:
Such tenderness, such pathos, such world-embracing love! And on the other hand, such indignation, such heavy and thunderous denunciation, such wit and humor. … He held Ireland within the grasp of his strong hand and could lead it whithersoever he would, for Ireland believed in him and loved him. … He was called the Liberator. … and was clearly the friend of liberty the world over.”
Douglass further described O’Connell’s moral position on slavery in the most laudatory terms:
“No transatlantic Statesman bore a testimony more marked and telling against the crime and curse of slavery than did Daniel O’Connell. He would shake the hand of no slaveholder nor allow himself to be introduced to one if he knew him to be such. When the friends of repeal in the Southern States sent him money, with which to carry on his work, he, with ineffable scorn, sent back what he considered the bloodstained offering, saying he would never purchase the freedom of Ireland with the price of slaves.”
In response to a critic of his stand on abolitionism, an inspired O’Connell once said;
“I am charged with attacking American institutions, as slavery is called. I am not ashamed of this attack. My sympathy is not confined to the narrow limits of my own green Ireland. My spirit walks abroad upon sea and land, and wherever there is oppression, I hate the oppressor, and wherever the tyrant rears his head, I will deal my bolts upon it, and wherever there is sorrow and suffering, there is my spirit to succor and relieve.”
In his travels throughout Ireland, Douglass made a pilgrimage to the Dublin jail where O’Connell had been held in 1843, there paying homage to the Irish patriot’s opposition to slavery. At an 1845 speech in Cork, Douglass said, “I cannot proceed without alluding to a man who did much to abolish slavery. I mean Daniel O’Connell [tremendous cheers]. I feel grateful to him, for his voice has made American slavery shake to its centre. I am determined wherever I go and whatever position I may fill, to speak with grateful emotion of Mr. O’Connell’s labours.”
Douglass went on to describe the similarities between the Irish and Abolitionist Causes, and the generally destitute condition of both people. “Daniel O’Connell once said that the history of Ireland might be traced like a wounded man through a crowd, by the blood. The Irishman has been persecuted for his religion bout as rigorously as the Black man has been for his colour.” When confronting poverty during his travels in Ireland, Douglass wrote abolitionist William Garrison, “I see much here to remind me of my former condition [in slavery] and I confess I should be ashamed to lift my voice against American slavery but that I know the cause of humanity is one the world over.”
I am charged with attacking American institutions, as slavery is called. I am not ashamed of this attack. My sympathy is not confined to the narrow limits of my own green Ireland. My spirit walks abroad upon sea and land, and wherever there is oppression, I hate teh oppressor, and wherever the tyrant rears his head, I will deal my bolts upon it, and wherever there is sorrow and suffering, there is my spirit to succor and relieve.”
– Daniel O’Connell
O’Connell met many black American abolitionists, whose response to his empathetic understanding of the anti-slavery cause was uniformly respectful, even reverential. Charles Lenox Remond, an American representative to the first World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, met O’Connell at a later meeting of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. In his travels through Ireland, Remond, one of abolitionism’s most effective and brilliant speakers, bestowed upon O’Connell the highest praise. And when he returned to the U.S., he brought with him and 60,000 other Irishmen, urging Irish Americans to “treat the Negroes as friends and to make common cause among the abolitionists.” During his speeches in the U.S., many examined the document (which in most halls extended from the rostrum to the front door) with curiosity.
The request contained in the “Great Irish Address” fell on deaf ears. While the abolitionist cause was popular in Ireland, those sentiments changed dramatically when the Irish immigrated to America. One writer attributed the metamorphosis thusly in a December 3, 1847 commentary in Douglass’ North Star newspaper: “the opposition of Irishmen in America to the colored man in not so much a Hibernianism as an Americanism.”
Needless to say, the reception accorded Irish Catholics in America was not a hospital one. The large percentage that settled in northern cities suffered bitter discrimination (the sort exercised against them by the British in their home country). In the U.S., the vagaries of the economic system pitted them against those at the bottom of the social and economic ladder – free blacks. The Irish began to fill the position traditionally open to backs, such as laborers, house servants, waiters, even sailors. Their exercise of racial prejudice became a means to achieve social and economic status. Employers considered the Irish better qualified because they were white. This fact did not escape Douglass, who lamented in his autobiography:
“Perhaps no class of our fellow citizens has carried this prejudice against color to a point more extreme and dangerous than have our Catholic Irish fellow citizens, and no people on the face of the earth have been more relentlessly persecuted and oppressed on account of race and religion than have this same Irish people … The Irish, who, at home, readily sympathize with the oppressed everywhere, are instantly taught when they step upon our soil to hate and despise the Negro. They are taught that he eats the bread that belongs to them. … ”
Douglass continued, “The Irish-American will one day find out his mistake … but for the present we are the sufferers. Every hour sees us elbowed out of some employment to make room for some newly-arrived immigrant from the Emerald Isle, whose hunger and color entitle him to special favor … a ceaseless enmity in the Irish is excited against us. … “
O’Connell knew that many Irish-Americans had developed antipathies towards black Americans. He referred to the “depraved hearts” of those who felt such sentiments.
A contemporary of Dauglass, Rev. Samuel Ringgold Ward, an African-American Congregationalist minister, orator and publisher of the Syracuse, New York, Impartial Citizen, also commented upon the unfortunate abyss between Irish and Irish-American opinion on slavery.
Ward conducted an immensely successful speaking tour in Ireland and Great Britain in 1855. His hosts and audiences received him with typical “Irish warmth and cordiality.” The “witty and vivacious” Ward conducted three very well attended meetings in Sligo, Limerick, and Cork, the last of which he described as “the most enthusiastic [meeting] I ever held.”
Ward, too, expressed disappointment in the 180-degree change in sentiment between the Irish and the Irish immigrant regarding their view of black Americans. “It turns out, that the man who on his native bog is unwashed and unshaved … is, when arriving in America, the Negro’s birthplace, one of the first to ridicule and abuse the free Negro. The bitterest, most heartless, most malignant enemy of the Negro is the Irish immigrant. …”
“How I wish that the immigrant from the Emerald Isle understood the doctrine of brotherhood of man, and practiced of towards his coloured fellow citizens! If he did, one of the most serious obstacles to the cause of the Negro would disappear in America. I do hope that Irish abolitionists will be true to emigrants, exhorting them to save themselves from the abomination of pro-slaveryism and rebuking those who ruthlessly trample upon the Negro,” bemoaned Ward.
It would not be difficult to surmise that, with the abolition fervor at a high pitch in 1850’s Ireland, after having been built for decades through numerous visits of both black and white American abolitionists, and the example of those like O’Connell, the sympathies of the Irish were with the North in the U.S. Civil War. And while the Irish and African-Americans today still battle for human dignity, they need only look back in the pages of history 150 years ago to find how their struggles were indeed similar, and championed by standard bearers for freedom who embraced each cause as their own.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the January/February 1996 issue of Irish America. ⬥
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