Tea at Trianon: Ireland’s Abolitionist Titan

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

Thursday, March 13, 2025

Ireland’s Abolitionist Titan

In Ireland we stayed at the hotel in Cork where Frederick Douglass and Daniel O'Connell lectured. From First Things:

The whole saga drew considerable attention. Trinity College is one of Dublin’s grandest institutions and Ireland’s premier university. Its centuries-old campus sits in the very heart of the capital city. Trinity can doubtless congratulate itself on a difficult issue, sensitively and successfully handled. Yet this was also an opportunity scorned. Ireland has its own “anti-Berkeley,” a towering figure in the cause of abolition, and simply one of the four or five most important figures in modern Irish history: Daniel O’Connell.

O’Connell came from an old Irish family on a wild, far-flung peninsula of the Atlantic coastline, though he received some of his education in the eminent Catholic colleges of northern Europe. His place in history rests largely on successfully leading the campaign for Catholic emancipation in the early nineteenth century, earning him the sobriquet “The Liberator.”

But his actions as an abolitionist were also remarkable. Slavery, he wrote, was “a crime of enormous magnitude to be at once, unconditionally, and for ever abolished.” He foretold that slavery would never disappear from America until “some horrible calamity befalls the country.” Of Irishmen in the United States who supported slavery, he said: “They are not Irishmen! They are bastard Irishmen!”

O’Connell gave moving and fiery speeches against slavery in Cork and Dublin, London and Glasgow. He shared platforms with Frederick Douglass and Charles Lenox Remond. Douglass later called O’Connell’s death a great blow to the cause of the American slave. Remond said that it was only on hearing O’Connell speak that he realized what being an abolitionist really meant.

O’Connell refused all money and favors from supporters of slavery, often at great risk to the causes he pursued for the sake of the Irish. His outspokenness took him to the brink of a duel with Andrew Stevenson, former speaker of the House of Representatives and ambassador to the Court of St. James. John Quincy Adams spoke out in O’Connell’s defense.

All of this is the subject of a full chapter in a biography by Patrick Geoghegan, who happens to be a professor of history at Trinity. Why, then, did the university forego the chance to rename their library after Ireland’s abolitionist titan? What better and more apt way could there have been to move on from Berkeley’s tainted legacy? (Read more.)