Tea at Trianon: What Frederick Douglass Learned From The Irish

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

What Frederick Douglass Learned From The Irish

From The Conversation:

Though Frederick Douglass remains the most well-known abolitionist to visit Ireland in the decades prior to the American Civil War, he was not the only one. As many as 30 Black abolitionists and activists also traveled to Ireland between 1790 and 1860. Olaudah Equiano was one of them. Born in Africa, Equiano was kidnapped when he was about 10 years old. But he later purchased his own freedom, wrote a bestselling autobiography and arrived in Ireland in 1791 as a guest of the United Irishmen, a group of radical nationalists.

Another was Sarah Parker Remond, who came to Ireland in 1859 and stayed with the same family who had hosted Douglass 14 years earlier. Having for the first time experienced equality, she could not bear to return to America. Instead, she completed a degree at a college in London and moved to Italy, where she trained as a medical doctor. Both Equiano and Parker Remond worked closely with Irish abolitionists.
Even before Douglass arrived in Ireland in 1845, he was aware of the rich tradition of Irish men and women involved in the transatlantic movement to bring an end to the U.S. system of enslavement. In particular, he was an admirer of the Irish nationalist leader Daniel O’Connell. A vocal critic of enslavement, O'Connell had played an important role in bringing it to an end in the British Empire in 1833.
Born into enslavement in Maryland in 1818, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey met his enslaved mother only a handful of times before she died. It was generally assumed that his father was the white owner of the plantation. At the age of 20, Frederick escaped to New York, where he changed his surname to Douglass. (Read more.)