Frederick Douglass drew on many influences during his life as an orator, journalist and anti-slavery activist. Few, however, are more unlikely than the man he met in 1845, during a two-year lecture tour of Ireland, Scotland and England: Daniel O’Connell.
Indeed, the ghost of the Irish nationalist, before and after the Civil War years, often inhabited Douglass’s thinking. And it was the influence of O’Connell that, in critical ways, led to the breach between Douglass and his early mentor, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison — and thus paved the way for Douglass’s support for and his guidance in shaping, via President Lincoln, the Union’s war policies against the slave-holding South.
Comments