Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary by Tom Chaffin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary by Tom Chaffin Patricia J. Ferreira (bio) Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary. By Tom Chaffin. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. Pp. 292. Cloth, $29.95.) Ireland, especially in the last ten years, has embraced the fact that Frederick Douglass toured the country for four months beginning in late 1845, on an antislavery lecture circuit that would also take him to Scotland and England. Although Olaudah Equiano, on behalf of the British campaign to end slavery, and Charles Lenox Remond, another American abolitionist, also traveled to Ireland, respectively in 1791 and 1840, only Douglass’s journey has garnered significant contemporary attention. Plaques in Cork and Waterford commemorate his visit to both cities, a dramatic nine-foot statue by the sculptor Andrew Edwards awaits permanent installation in Dublin, a full-length documentary titled Frederick Douglass and the White Negro explores the visit as well as African American–Irish relations and is regularly aired on national television, and state universities as well as Trinity College have hosted forums on the former slave turned international statesman. Tom Chaffin’s contribution in Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary is the extensive, documented backdrop he provides to every step of Douglass’s Irish sojourn. Through Chaffin’s deft storytelling the reader learns not only that his subject sailed aboard the paddle steamer Cambria to Ireland, but also what transpired when fellow passengers, especially those from slaveholding states, learned that the former slave was among them. Once Douglass reaches Ireland, the reader is treated to such scenes as his meeting with Daniel O’Connell, the revered freedom fighter who advanced the repeal movement, advocating an end to the Act of Union between Ireland and England. Chaffin re-creates the circumstances so vividly that we feel as if we are witnessing close up the pair exchanging handshakes and pleasantries before discussing the conflicts that individually brought them to the fore of nineteenth-century social reform and made for their mutual admiration. Given the acrimonious relations between African Americans and the newly emigrated Irish, Chaffin also conscientiously treats Douglass’s initial [End Page 273] reticence to travel to Ireland as well as the tension between his mission and the reality of what he saw there. For instance, Douglass became conflicted by the singularity of his mission—to garner Irish support and involvement in ending the slave trade—when all around him he saw the ravages of the impending Great Famine. He also battled the bigoted responses of clergy, from a range of denominations, after he implicated them for their toleration of slavery. Given the sectarian divisions of Ireland, such incriminations were potent well beyond their perceived religious heresy. As Chaffin skillfully renders the details of Douglass’s Irish sojourn, he does not stray from the delicate circumstances that his subject was forced to negotiate. As a result, Chaffin’s text moves well beyond a simple chronological accounting. With all of the particulars, however, there are instances where the text digresses needlessly. Since the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass remains one of the preeminent accounts of an individual’s move from slavery to freedom, there is no need for Chaffin to give a synopsis of the autobiography. Douglass’s writing of his own story is far more powerful and politically important than secondary summarizing. It also intrudes too much on the original ground Chaffin is staking with his focus on Douglass in Ireland. Additionally, the way Chaffin contends with the Dublin editions of the Narrative—continuously stressing that they were “‘British Isles’” versions—ignores the recognized scholarship on the political implications of their Irish context. Surely it is crucial that the first place the Narrative was published outside of the United States was Ireland? Rather than giving air to such significance, however, Chaffin focuses on the well-worn causes and impact of the famine as well as British Prime Minister Robert Peel’s anxiety over the spread of potato blight. Again, not only is such attention unnecessary, it seems excessive and...