Speaking from London

Frederick Douglass and Black abolitionists, 1846–47

Accounts of Douglass’s British tour tend to dwell on Scotland, Ireland and the provinces. This site argues that London mattered as the place where American abolitionists found a press, a pulpit and a lobby, and looks at who else used it.

Portrait of Frederick Douglass in the 1840s, in a high collar and dark coat
Frederick Douglass in the 1840s. Credit below.

Douglass sailed to Britain in 1845 after publishing his Narrative. He spent two years lecturing and left in 1847. Our task is to test how much of that happened in London, and what the capital offered that other places did not.

1.Why London

The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society was based in London, and its journal, the Anti-Slavery Reporter, carried news of the movement. The Society’s archive is at the Bodleian Library. Hannah-Rose Murray’s online map records nearly 5,000 lectures by Douglass and 25 other African Americans across Britain and Ireland, and it lets us check the London share of the tour.

Bodleian Library, Oxford

Archive of the Anti-Slavery Society, MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 16–25

Minute books and papers. The first minute book has been digitised.

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HathiTrust Digital Library

The Anti-Slavery Reporter

Digitised volumes of the Society’s journal.

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Frederick Douglass in Britain and Ireland (H.-R. Murray)

Map of abolitionist lectures

Searchable map and database of lecture venues.

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2.The London speeches

The Frederick Douglass Papers Project has transcribed four London addresses we can use. On 22 May 1846 he spoke at Finsbury Chapel about American slavery, American religion and the Free Church of Scotland. In September he spoke at the Evangelical Alliance. His farewell was in London on 30 March 1847. Each came with an audience and a newspaper report to read against it.

Frederick Douglass Papers Project

American Slavery, American Religion, and the Free Church of Scotland (22 May 1846)

Address delivered in London at Finsbury Chapel.

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Frederick Douglass Papers Project

Slavery in the Pulpit of the Evangelical Alliance (14 September 1846)

Address delivered in London.

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Frederick Douglass Papers Project

Farewell to the British People (30 March 1847)

His last London address of the tour.

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3.The £150 question

In late 1846 Anna and Ellen Richardson of Newcastle raised £150 to buy Douglass’s legal freedom from Hugh Auld. It raises a question we should test in the sources: was paying a slaveholder for his freedom a victory or a concession?

Newcastle University

Frederick Douglass at Newcastle

University page on his time in the city and the purchase of his freedom.

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4.Beyond Douglass

William and Ellen Craft arrived in 1850, and their account of escaping slavery was published in London by William Tweedie in 1860. Sarah Parker Remond arrived in 1859. Douglass’s own lodging at Whitehead’s Grove in Chelsea now has a plaque, which tells us who gets remembered.

Documenting the American South, UNC

William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom

Full text of the 1860 narrative.

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English Heritage

Ellen and William Craft, blue plaque

Plaque and short biography.

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Open Plaques

Frederick Douglass blue plaque

The London plaque for his 1846 stay.

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Why it matters now

Plaques, archives and public history are being argued over now, including who counts as part of Britain’s story of abolition. Douglass shows American activists using Britain strategically, which cuts against a comfortable version in which Britain simply led the way.

Bibliography

  1. Murray, Hannah-Rose, Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
  2. Blackett, R. J. M., Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983).
  3. Fisch, Audrey A., American Slaves in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
  4. Blight, David W., Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018).
  5. Sweeney, Fionnghuala, Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007).
  6. Fladeland, Betty, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972).
  7. Pettinger, Alasdair (ed.), Frederick Douglass and Scotland, 1846 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018).
  8. Murray, Hannah-Rose, ‘“With almost electric speed”: mapping African American abolitionists in Britain and Ireland, 1838–1847’, Slavery and Abolition 40:3 (2019), 522–42.

Image credits

Frederick Douglass (1840s).jpg, Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frederick_Douglass_(1840s).jpg). Retouched portrait taken in the 1840s, author unknown. Licence on the Commons page: public domain.