IRISH CHRISTIANS AND NON-FELLOWSHIP WITH MAN-STEALERS: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN DUBLIN, IRELAND, ON 1 OCTOBER 1845, at Music Hall, Abbey StreetMusic Hall, Dublin, Ireland

Music Hall, 26 Abbey Street Lower, North City, Dublin 1, D01 K0F1 Ireland

Dublin , 4 October 1845. Other texts in Dublin , 4 October 1845; Waterford (Ire.) , 8 October 1845; , 7 November 1845; , 27 November 1845.

Douglass and his travelling companion James BuffumBuffum, James Needham

James Needham Buffum (1802—82), born of Quaker parents in North Berwick, Maine, spent most of his life in Lynn, Massachusetts, where he amassed considerable wealth as a carpenter, house contractor, real estate speculator, and financier. Dissatisfied with Quaker passivity on reform issues, Buffum was an early convert to Garrisonianism and participated in the campaign to desegregate New England’s public transportation during the early 1840s. From 1845 through 1847 Buffum accompanied Douglass on a lecture tour of Great Britain. He served as treasurer of the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society and vice-president of a Fourierist organization called the Friends of Social Reform. During Reconstruction he was director of Charles Steams’s Laborers’ Homestead and Southern Emigration Society, which bought land in Virginia for resale to freedmen. Chosen a presidential elector in 1868, Buffum served as mayor of Lynn from 1869 to 1825 and was elected to the Massachusetts legislature in 1.873. Garrison and Garrison, Garrison Life, 3 : 324 45. 4: 358; Mabee, Black Freedom, 114, 119—21, 125, 210—11, 221, 225, 250, 342; Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3 : 138n.; Douglass, Life and Times, 251, 259; James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction Princeton, N.J., 1964), 415; Clarence W. Hobbs, Lynn and Surroundings (Lynn, 1886), 141—42; James R. Newhall, Lynn: Her First 250 Years (Lynn, 1880), 133—34; James R. Newhall, History of Lynn, 1864-1893 (Lynn, 1897), 337; Renfrewshire (Scot.) Advertiser, 11 April 1846; Concord (N.H.) Herald of Freedom, 28 November 1845.James Needham Buffum (1807- 87), born of Quaker parents in North Berwick, Maine, spent most of his life in Lynn, Massachusetts, where he amassed considerable wealth as a carpenter, house contractor, real estate speculator, and financier. Dissatisfied with Quaker passivity on reform issues, Buffum was an early convert to Garrisonianism and participated in the campaign to desegregate New England's public transportation during the early 1840s. From 1845 through 1847 Buffum accompanied Douglass on a lecture tour of Great Britain. He served as treasurer of the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society and vice president of a Fourierist organization called Friends of Social Reform. During Reconstruction he was director of Charles Stearns's Laborers' Homestead and Southern Emigration Society, which bought land in Virginia for resale to freedmen. Chosen a presidential elector in 1868, Buffum served as mayor of Lynn from 1869 to 1875 and was elected to the Massachusetts legislature in 1873. Clarence W. Hobbs, Lynn and Surroundings (Lynn, Mass., 1886), 141-42; Garrison and Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 3:324- 25, 4:358; Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Letters, 3:138n; Mabee, Black Freedom, 114, 119- 21, 125, 210-11, 221, 225, 250, 342. found Dublin a good place to begin their antislavery lecture tour of the British Isles. The city’s Hibernian Anti-Slavery SocietyHibernian Anti-Slavery Society, Dublin, Ireland

maintained close ties with American Garrisonians. The Dublin Music Hall, which seated 3000 people, was the site for Douglass’s fifth in a series of lectures on American slavery. Presiding officer James HaughtonHaughton, James

James Haughton (1795-1873) was one of Ireland's leading social reformers and temperance activists. After several business ventures elsewhere, Haughton settled in Dublin in 1817, where he became a corn and flour factor in partnership with his brother William. Despite a Quaker education, Haughton joined the Unitarians in 1834 and supported the antislavery movement from an early period. He attended the World's Anti-Slavery Conventions in London in 1840 and 1843 as a delegate of the Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society. A lifelong proponent of reform, Haughton was one of the earliest disciples of the Irish temperance reformer Father Theobald Mathew. Following in Father Mathew's footsteps, Haughton devoted much energy to promoting total abstinence and advocating legislative restrictions on alcohol. He served as vice president of the United Kingdom Alliance, and penned a series of public letters on temperance, slavery, peace, capital punishment, British India, sanitary reform, and education. Initially he signed his letters "The Son of a Water Drinker," but eventually used his own name and continued to write until 1872. Haughton was also a friend and admirer of the Irish nationalist leader Daniel O'Connell. Together they advocated various plans for improving the condition of Ireland and repealing union with Britain. John F. Quinn, Father Mathew's Crusade: Temperance in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and Irish America (Amherst, Mass., 2002), 52, 118-19; Osofsky, "Abolitionists, Irish Immigrants," 889-912; DNB, 9:168. , a corn merchant and reform activist, introduced Douglass and objected to current misconceptions of Douglass‘s views on American churches and slavery. Douglass took up this theme in his ninety-minute speech. After a song by the Hutchinsons, Richard AllenAllen, Richard (Ireland)

Richard Allen (1803-86), Irish abolitionist and Quaker reformer, was a prominent member of the Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society. In 1828 he married Anne Webb and became a close companion to his new brother-in-law, Irish reformer Richard Davis Webb. Along with Webb and James Haughton, Allen became one of the most recognized Irish reformers. Dubbed the "Antieverythingarians" by the conservative Dublin Evening Mail, Allen and his associates supported Middle Eastern missionary work, peace, temperance, and British Indian reform, but would become best known as abolitionists. In 1840 Allen met William Lloyd Garrison when both were delegates to the World's Anti-Slavery Convention. Allen became a strong proponent of Garrisonian abolitionism soon afterward. Douglass met and interacted with Allen and his fellow Irish activists in 1845 during his first trip to Ireland and Great Britain. Allen visited the United States in 1883, and was reportedly appalled by the unfair treatment of African Americans following the end of slavery and Reconstruction. Nini Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, 1612-1865 (New York, 2007), 270, 273, 278-80, 286-89; Douglas C. Riach, "Richard Davis Webb and Antislavery in Ireland,'' in Antislavery Reconsidered, ed. Perry and Fellman, 149-59. , secretary of the Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society, proposed a resolution that praised those slaves who “amid unheard of difficulty made their way to freedom” and honored Douglass as an example of such courage. Richard D. WebbWebb, Richard Davis

Richard D. Webb was a Garrisonian abolitionist from Dublin, Ireland, whom Douglass met on his first trip to the British Isles in 1845. Originally a Quaker, he turned toward Unitarianism as his antislavery passions became more radical. A successful printer, Webb guided the small, but intensely active, Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society in Dublin, of which James Haughton and his family were also members. Webb printed the organ of the British Garrisonian abolitionist movement, the Anti-Slavery Advocate, out of his Dublin-based office. The British Garrisonians were active pamphleteers, and Webb's own The National AntiSlavery Societies of England and the United States (1852) was one of the most confident and able statements of the Garrisonian cause to appear on either side of the Atlantic. Temperley, British Antislavery, 210, 212-13, 227, 237, 239, 244, 252-54, 256, 259; Taylor, British and American Abolitionists, 241-44, 248, 258-59, 293-94. , a Dublin printer and the abolitionists’ host during their stay in the city, then offered a resolution which chastised scholars who “devote all their time to Greek and Latin, and . . - neglect the claim of humanity.” He censured those Dublin religious bodies that had “closed their doors against Frederick Douglass, because of their unwillingness to hear the truth respecting their delinquent brethren in America.” Before the crowd dispersed, Haughton apprised the audience of Douglass’s plans to speak in Wexford, Waterford, Cork, and other cities in southern Ireland and urged the residents of those cities to “prepare a hearty reception“ for him. Douglass to Garrison, 16 September 1845, Douglass to Garrison, 29 September 1845, in Lib., 10, 24 October 1845; Clare Taylor, ed., British and American Abolitionists: An Episode in Transatlantic Understanding (Edinburgh, 1974), 94n.; Quarles, , 38—40.

Mr. Douglass then came forward, and for an hour and a half he rivetted the attention of his hearers by his eloquent appeals on behalf of his out-

raged coloured brethren. Recently a slave himself, and still liable, by the laws of his country, to be seized and carried back into bondage, he appealed to an Irish audience for help to break the chains which bound the black man in America. What the chairman had stated respecting the churches of America was true. They were all implicated more or less in the sin of maintaining the infernal slave system—of placing their brethren in chains like these, and flogging them with whips like this— (holding up to the audience some of the horrible instruments of torture used by the slaveholders.) It is with such a church as this that I ask you to hold no Christian intercourse. Be faithful friends in your Christian testimony against such profanation of Christianity as this.

I love religion—I love the religion of Jesus, which is pure and peaceable, and easy to be entreated. I ask you all to love this religion; but I hate a religion which, in the name of the Saviour, and which prostitutes his blessed precepts to the vile purposes of slavery, ruthlessly sunders all the ties of nature, which tears the wife from the husband—which separates the child from the parent—which covers the backs of men and women with bloody scars—which promotes all manner of licentiousness. I hate such a religion as this, for it is not Christianity—it is of the devil.—I ask you to hate it too, and to assist me in putting in its place the religion of Jesus.

Let the Methodist minister, the Presbyterian minister, the Baptist minister, the Unitarian minister, the Catholic clergyman, and the Protestant clergyman—“let the Society of FriendsQuakers

The Religious Society of Friends was founded by George Fox in Great Britain during the mid-seventeenth century. Fox emphasized the immediacy of Christ's teachings and therefore found ordained ministers, a set liturgy, or consecrated buildings to be irrelevant. Central to the sect's teachings is the "Inner Light,'' an innate sense of the divine and direct working of Christ in the human soul that results in the moral attributes of simplicity, purity, and truthfulness, as its central doctrine. During their early history Quakers faced persecution, mostly due to their refusal to take oaths, pay tithes, or enlist in military service. As a result, the colony of Pennsylvania in North America was founded in 1682 as a refuge for Quakers. In 1743 the Society of Friends became the first religious denomination to condemn slavery as morally evil and to require its members to free their slaves. The Quakers were strong adherents of gradual emancipation, and they dominated the ranks of Revolutionary-era abolition societies that persuaded the northern states to end slavery. Three basic Quaker tenets led to support for abolition. First, the belief that all people are equal in the sight of God led to concerns that through forced slavery, masters were denying their slaves the chance to reach God. Second, Quakers held to a tradition of nonviolence and pacifism that did not agree with the constant threat of violence and force that kept people in bondage. Finally, Quaker abhorrence of ostentation or sloth in their daily lives led to dismissal of slavery on grounds that slaves were used as symbols of conspicuous consumption. Although the public controversy stirred up by abolitionism caused many Quakers to turn away from participation in the post-1831 antislavery movement, such prominent abolitionists as Benjamin Lundy and Angelina and Sarah Grimke were members of the Quaker sect. Jean R. Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit (Princeton, N.J., 1985), 17-18; F. L. Cross, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (London, 1974), 538-39; McKivigan, War against Proslavery Religion, 22, 28, 37; Miller and Smith, Dictionary of Afro- American Slavery, 303, 607-13. —let all, of every denomination in Ireland, be faithful to their Saviour, and slavery in America will soon fall to the ground. For they are all in connection with churches in America, to whom they can send out faithful remonstrances. Public Opinion in America boasts that it is almost omnipotent, and to a great extent this is true; it makes and unmakes laws—it establishes and overturns the customs of society; and while our people claim to be the most enlightened and the most civilised, and the freest upon the earth; and while they are vain of their institutions, they are sensitive in the extreme to the opinions entertained of them in European countries, particularly in England and Scotland and Ireland.

Friends of the poor slave, be therefore firm and faithful in your remonstrances with Americans; let your press teem with denunciations; let your pulpits proclaim to the world that Christianity disowns all fellowship with man-stealers; let your social circles all talk on the subject as one of deep importance to the interests of humanity; let your entire

community be filled with anti-slavery sentiment; so that when slaveholders, or apologists of the system, visit your country, they may feel that they breathe in an atmosphere too pure to be contaminated by them. Do this, my friends, and you will render good service to the oppressed. I ask you in the name of humanity; I ask you in the name of Christianity; I ask you in the name of God; I ask you in the name of all you hold dear on earth or in Heaven, to be in earnest in this holy cause.

I am the representative of three millions of bleeding slaves. I have felt the lash myself; my back is scarred with it; I know what they suffer, and I implore you to bring the weight of that powerful public Opinion which you can make so effective, to bear on the hearts and consciences of the slaveholders of my country. Tell them they must give up their vile practices, or continue to be held in contempt by the whole civilised world. (We have but given a faint outline of Mr. Douglass’s eloquent and manly speech. He is a speaker of great ability, well calculated to interest the feelings and convince the judgment of his hearers. He read copious extracts from the laws of the slave states, proving that a grinding despotism exists in them, and that great pains are taken to keep the colored man in a condition of the most brutal degradation. He was loudly cheered throughout his long and most interesting discourse.)