by Simon Schama
In the early afternoon of the 20th of August 1846 two of them, one black, one white, along with a British radical Member of Parliament, George Thompson, sat in the drawing room at Playford Hall. The white man was William Lloyd Garrison, the Massachusetts editor of the Liberator, who had witnessed first-hand the moment of emancipation in 1833. Thompson, too, had earned his spurs by riding the crest of that transatlantic enthusiasm to lecture for abolition in the United States during the following year. In Boston a gang of teamsters had threatened to horsewhip Thompson and send him to South Carolina, where, they said, people would know what to do with him—a cry continually raised against the abolitionists. Although Clarkson had only learned at nine o’clock that morning that these two and their black companion intended to visit him, he was, as always, simply hospitable.
Why not? America was his cause now. In 1840, at the first World Anti-Slavery Convention, he had been made president, and in his eightieth year had received a silent, standing tribute from the five thousand delegates. Thomas’s peroration, in the form of a blessing on them and the Cause, triggered an outbreak of tears from the assembly. His greatest distress was to learn how Christianity was being perverted to defend the racial iniquity; that 70 percent (he was informed) of all American clergymen apparently believed that the Holy Scriptures justified slavery. In 1844 fifty thousand copies of his On the Ill Treatment of the People of Colour in the United States, on Account of the Colour of Their Skin were published in America in a fierce counter-attack on this blasphemy.21
So Thomas Clarkson was known to Frederick Douglass, the third visitor who sat in his drawing room that late summer afternoon. And by now Thomas Clarkson would certainly have heard of Frederick Douglass, the orator who had held the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Convention spellbound in May and had lit a fire at the World Temperance Convention in Covent Garden just two weeks earlier. Douglass was a twenty-eight-year-old escaped slave from Maryland, whom Garrison had met in New Bedford in 1841. Under Garrison’s encouragement, Douglass—articulate, handsome, witty and charismatic—quickly became the star turn of the abolitionist lecture circuit, unsurpassable for his dramatic account of cruelty in the plantations and deadly in his satirical skewering of pro-slavery clergymen. He was constantly threatened with recapture and physical assault, but the effect of having his hand broken by a gang in Pendleton, Indiana, had been only to add fuel to his fire. In May 1845 Garrison had published an edition of five thousand copies of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an immediate runaway bestseller. Clarkson was bound to have a copy, to have seen in Douglass a vision of a redeemed American future. That afternoon the old man reached out, took one of Douglass’s hands, enfolded it in both of his and exclaimed like the prophet: “God bless you, Frederick Douglass! I have given sixty years of my life to the emancipation of your people, and if I had sixty years more, they should all be given to the same cause.”22
The admiration was fervently mutual. For Douglass, Thomas Clarkson was the embodiment of everything that was best about British freedom, which for him was not mere declaratory piety of the kind that he had come to despise in the United States, but reality. Britain, he said, was the place that changed him from a thing to a human.
To Douglass’s amazement, this transformation had occurred even before he had set foot in Britain: on the saloon deck of the Cunard steamship Cambria, taking him in August 1845 from Boston to Liverpool. His last few days on American soil had reminded Douglass forcefully of why he was leaving. Massachusetts might have abolished slavery but it had certainly not abolished race prejudice. “Just before leaving…I was…refused permission to ride in an omnibus…on account of the colour of my skin I was kicked from a public conveyance just a few days before leaving that ‘cradle of liberty’. Only three months before leaving that ‘home of freedom’ I was driven from the lower floor of a church because I tried to enter as other men, forgetting my complexion.”23
Nor did the humiliations end when he boarded the Cambria together with James Buffum, a white abolitionist who was to accompany Douglass on his lecture tour, and the Hutchinson Family Quartet of singers—Jesse, Abby, Judson and Asa—whom they had persuaded to come along, partly as an inspirational warm-up act for the talks.24 Garrison had arranged that Douglass should have stateroom accommodation (eight by twelve, two oil lamps); but needless to say he had been obliged to travel steerage—where Buffum, too, bunked down in companionable solidarity. By way of compensation—and unexpectedly—Douglass found himself to be a shipboard celebrity, famous to some of the passengers as the author of the Narrative; notorious to many more for the same reason. He wrote to Garrison from Dublin:
I know it will gladden your heart to hear that from the moment we first lost sight of the American shore till we landed at Liverpool, our gallant steamship was the theatre of an almost constant discussion of the subject of slavery—commencing cool but growing hotter every moment as it advanced…The discussion was general. If suppressed in the saloon, it broke out in the steerage; and if it ceased in the steerage it was renewed in the saloon; and if suppressed in both it broke out with redoubled energy upon the saloon deck, in the open refreshing, free ocean air. I was happy.25
So were the Hutchinsons—so impressed by their own reading of Douglass’s Narrative that they exploited the two-week captivity of the crossing to distribute copies to the passengers. Those who hailed from Georgia, New Orleans and Cuba and who owned slaves were not at all pleased with this presumption. Others, however, wanted Frederick Douglass to give a lecture on his experiences and on the institution of slavery in the United States, an initiative that angered the slaveowners even more. Douglass himself was uncharacteristically (but understandably) shy about this overture. Almost certainly he had already heard the threats to throw the impertinent black overboard. It was for the captain to decide whether or not such a lecture would be right and proper, and in the normal way of things shipboard prudence would have counselled against hearing the orator.
But Captain Charles Judkins was not the standard Cunard master. He was, rather, a reformed ex-slaver with a strong moral spine and he issued a formal invitation himself. An awning was slung over the saloon deck to give Douglass some distance from a possibly threatening crowd, but the Hutchinsons had the fire of the Cause in their bellies and persuaded Douglass to come out into the open and deliver his speech by the mainmast. In the late afternoon Judkins had the ship’s bell rung to “cry” the meeting. A large audience assembled, not all of them friendly. Douglass appeared wearing his best: tall, imposing, morally and culturally aristocratic. But even before he could read from the odious slave statutes of South Carolina, the barracking began, and it rose into a human seastorm of abuse. The Hutchinsons then countered with renderings of inspirational and abolitionist hymns and anthems, “which like the angels of old, closed the lions’ mouths so that for a time, silence prevailed.”26 Seizing the moment, Judkins stepped forward and delivered an introduction, half fulsome, half stern, but as soon as Douglass had begun, so did the interruptions. Again Judkins intervened, his voice calm, saying that he tried to please all his passengers: some of them had plainly expressed their great desire to hear Mr Douglass speak, and those of a different view might take themselves somewhere else aboard the ship. Douglass made another effort and was met by shouts of, “Ah, I wish I had him in Savannah. We would use him up!” and another “I will be one of a number to throw him overboard.”
‘The clamor went on waxing hotter and hotter till it was quite impossible for me to proceed,” wrote Douglass. “I was stopped but the cause went on. Anti-slavery was uppermost and the mob was never more of service to the cause against which it was directed.” One of the “mobocrats,” as Douglass contemptuously called them, then made the serious mistake of berating the captain for allowing the “nigger” to speak. Judkins responded by ordering the bosun to fetch the irons and warned that anyone continuing in this conduct, threatening Douglass or interfering with his remarks would be clapped in the brig until the ship
docked in Liverpool. The riot abruptly stopped, and the black-baiters slunk away to the saloon, growling. Judkins then turned to the sympathetic remainder of the crowd and declared, “I once was the owner of two hundred slaves but the government of Great Britain liberated them and I am glad of it.” Moved, the Hutchinsons, who hailed from New Hampshire, spontaneously burst into a chorus of “God Save the Queen,” which they followed (to emphasize that this was a transatlantic show of goodwill) with “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “America” and “A Life on the Ocean Wave.” Just a day out from Liverpool there was a farewell dinner; toasts to Queen Victoria and the United States were drunk and Jesse Hutchinson proposed: “Our country is the world, our countrymen all mankind.” The slaveowners dared not interrupt the applause.27
Douglass never forgot the dramatic denouement of this crossing; not least because the episode got coverage in the British press and was, as he wrote, in effect the “visiting card” of his impending lecture tour. But Judkins’s behaviour was the first revelation of the difference between “monarchical British justice” and “democratic slaveowning mobocracy.”
That difference became only more glaring during the tour itself. It was not just the enormous, wildly enthusiastic audiences that greeted him almost everywhere from Manchester to Glasgow to Finsbury Chapel in London. It was also what Douglass was able to do; where he was able to go. He remembered being greeted at the Boston menagerie, at a revival meeting in New Bedford, at the philosophical Lyceum, always with the same refrain: “We don’t allow niggers in here.”28 In Britain, though, things were done differently. In London he was let into the Zoological Gardens, the Cremorne Pleasure Gardens, the British Museum and the panoramas in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, all without any demur or hesitation. At the country house of the Marquess of Westminster, Eaton Hall, Douglass ran into some of his white fellow passengers from the Cambria—and they were not the sympathizers; queuing for admission as tourists, they were appalled to find the black man granted admittance together with themselves. But, as he told an audience at his farewell speech at the London Tavern in 1847,
I have travelled in all parts of the country—in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. I have journeyed upon highways, byways, railways and steamboats. I have myself gone, you might say with electric speed. In none of these conveyances or in any class of society have I found any curled lip of scorn…being in London I of course felt desirous of seizing upon testing the custom at all places here by going and presenting myself for admission as a man. From none of them was I ever ejected. I passed through them all; your colosseums, museums, galleries of painting, even into your House of Commons, and still more a nobleman…permitted me to go into the House of Lords…In none of these places did I receive one word of opposition against my entrance…
However much Americans “affect to despise and scorn the Negroes,” Douglass went on, “Englishmen—the most intelligent, the noblest and best of Englishmen—do not hesitate to give the right hand of manly fellowship to a Negro such as I am…Why sir, the Americans do not know that I am a man. They talk of me as a box of goods; they speak of me in connexion with sheep, horses and cattle.” In Britain, he said, it was different. And when he insisted that even the dogs of “old England” took him for a man, Douglass got a guaranteed cheer. At Beckenham in Kent, he said, a “dog actually came up to the platform, put his paws on the front of it and gave me a smile of recognition as a man. [Laughter] The Americans would do well to learn wisdom upon this subject from the very dogs of old England.”29
Making these invidious transatlantic distinctions in 1846 was even more provocative than it seemed, for Britain and the United States were in one of their periodic cycles of mutual suspicion and recrimination. At issue were the north and west frontiers of the United States, in particular the boundaries of Oregon; and, for the British, the territorial integrity of Canada. Discussions between Peel’s government and Polk’s became frosty, then testy, then bellicose. So when Douglass charged headlong at the hypocrisies of American patriotism he was, in effect, hoisting the Union Jack. “The fact is,” he thundered at the London Tavern,
…the whole system, the entire network of American society is one great falsehood from beginning to end…. In their celebrated Declaration of Independence they [the founding fathers] made the loudest, the clearest assertions of the rights of man and yet at that very time the identical men who drew up the Declaration of Independence and framed the American democratic constitution, were trafficking in the blood and souls of their fellow men…From the period of their first adoption of the constitution of the United States downward everything good and great in the heart of the American people—everything patriotic within their breasts—has been summoned to defend this great lie before the world…The people of the United States are the boldest in their pretensions to freedom and the loudest in their profession of their love of liberty yet no nation upon the face of the globe can exhibit a statute book so full of all that is cruel, malicious and infernal as the American code of laws. Every page is red with the blood of the American slave.
Then Douglass turned to the saving grace of British America—Canada—” a land uncursed by slavery, a territory ruled by the British power.”30
It was a warm-up for an even more frontal assault when Douglass got home in the spring of 1847 and had to defend his right to criticize the United States. “I have no love for America as such; I have no patriotism, I have no country. What country have I? The institutions of this country do not know me.”31 Contrasting his free entrance to Parliament with the imprisonment and sale into slavery awaiting him should he presume to go to Washington, Douglass said that “under these circumstances my republican friends must not think me strange when I say I would rather be in London than Washington. Liberty in Hyde Park is better than democracy in a slave prison.”32
Of course, Douglass was being hopelessly starry-eyed, but he would not hear of the usual American retort: that the British had better look to ameliorate the condition of their wretched manufacturing poor before presuming to criticize the United States for slavery—the same tack that had been used by Benjamin Franklin three-quarters of a century earlier. For, as he told his audience back in America,
Say what you will of England—of the degradation—of the poverty—and there is much of it there—say what you will of the oppression and suffering…there is also Liberty there, not only for the white man but for the black man also. The instant I stepped ashore and looked into the faces of the crowd around me, I saw in every man a recognition of my manhood and an absence, a perfect absence of everything like that disgusting hate with which we are pursued in this country.33
Douglass continued to cling to this romantic passion for British freedom, notwithstanding the stinging slight of being forced on the return journey west in the Cambria (without Captain Judkins) to occupy steerage again, despite being assured he would have a stateroom. But after he had related this to The Times, he was gratified to have “The Thunderer” thunder in an editorial on his behalf at the iniquity of deferring to American race prejudice, so blotting the copybook of British fair play. Such was the scandal caused by Douglass’s accommodation that Samuel Cunard was obliged to go public with an abject apology and a pledge that such a thing would never happen again.
But there was a particular, personal reason why Douglass clung to his passionate belief in British aversion to slavery. For when, at that farewell meeting at the London Tavern, he said that “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 as a thing, I go back as a human being,” he was not speaking loosely or figuratively. It really had been England that had redeemed him. For it was a Newcastle woman, Ellen Richardson, who had started a fund to pay off Douglass’s owner, Hugh Auld. Once the appeal was known about, it took no time at all to raise the £700 that was paid over to Auld in return for the signed manumission. Henceforth Douglass was free, not only in legal title but also from the constant, gnawing fear that some day he migh
t be recaptured and that terrible retribution promised by the slaveholders on the Cambria might be taken for his insolent crusade.
So for him, at least, the promise of British freedom had been fulfilled. “I prefer things to names,” he wrote to Garrison. And since he was much at Westminster, we can assume that in the Abbey one of the solid things he went to see were the monuments in Poets’ Corner to those Britons who had, in good faith and against absurd odds, begun, seventy-five years before, the good fight. Perhaps he communed for a moment with the first and foremost of them, a memorial to Granville Sharp erected by the African Institution in 1816. Such were the encomia, hyperbolic even by the standards of memorials,
HIS LIFE PRESENTED ONE BEAUTIFUL COMMENT OF GLOWING PIETY
AND UNWEARIED BENEFICENCE… HE AIMED TO RESCUE HIS
NATIVE COUNTRY FROM THE GUILT AND INCONSISTENCY
OF EMPLOYING THE ARM OF FREEDOM TO RIVET THE
FETTERS OF BONDAGE…
that it was thought prudent to add, lest posterity raise a sceptical eyebrow, an unusual afterthought:
READER, IF ON PERUSING THIS TRIBUTE TO A PRIVATE INDIVIDUAL
THOU SHOULDST BE DISPOSED TO SUSPECT IT AS PARTIAL OR
CENSURE IT AS DIFFUSE KNOW THAT IT IS NOT PANEGYRIC
BUT HISTORY.
Notes and References
ABBREVIATED SOURCES
AO: Audit Office, London