Come Here To Me!

Sarah Parker Remond, who spoke in Dublin in 1859 and 1861.

This year is the bicentenary of the birth of Frederick Douglass, the influential abolitionist who visited Ireland in 1845. His time in Ireland coincided with Daniel O’Connell’s campaign for Repeal of the Act of Union, a remarkable grassroots movement that greatly impacted Douglass. Of his time in Ireland, Douglass wrote that “I have spent some of the happiest moments of my life since landing in this country, I seem to have undergone a transformation, I live a new life.”

Douglass was not the first or last anti-slavery voice to be heard in Irish meeting halls. In the 1790s, Olaudah Equiano spoke in both Dublin and Belfast, and his cause was championed by prominent members of the United Irishmen, who were vocal opponents of slavery.

In the later decades of the nineteenth century, a number of anti-slavery campaigners spoke in Dublin, following in the footsteps of Equiano and Douglass. These included Sarah Parker Remond (1815-1894) from Salem, Massachusetts. In 1859 and 1861, she spoke in Dublin before sympathetic audiences, her second speech coming at  a time when America was gripped by Civil War. An activist with the American Anti Slavery Society, she spoke in Britain and Ireland, writing before departure from Boston to Liverpool that she feared not “the wind nor the waves, but I know that no matter how I go, the spirit of prejudice will meet me.” Like the pioneering figures who had come to Dublin before her, she found a receptive audience, with one report of her first speech noting:

They [the audience] were accustomed in this country to hear lectures on public subjects delivered by men only, but this was a great moral question. Miss Remond had identified herself with it, and had made it her own.

Freeman;s Journal, 19 March 1859

One of those who attended Remond’s speeches in Dublin was Richard D. Webb, the leading voice in Ireland for the abolition of slavery, and a founding member of the Hibernian Anti-Slavery Association and a political ally of Daniel O’Connell. Webb, with O’Connell, had attended the important Anti-Slavery Society Convention in London in 1840, and was instrumental to arranging Frederick Douglass’s speaking arrangements during his visit to Ireland. Of Remond, he was moved to write that “she is really very clever – the most so of all the coloured people I ever met, except Douglass, and is a very much more sensible and thoroughgoing person than he.”

The 1859 meeting was described in the press as being organised by the Dublin Ladies Anti-Slavery Society, a respected body which had emerged from the Hibernian Negro’s Friend Society in 1837. The meeting was addressed also by James Haughton, who stated that “although the Irish people, as a nation, always kept their hands clean from participation in the guilt of the African slave trade, that did not weaken their responsibility. It might be that our countrymen in America were sometimes misled, and their ideas perverted, by the outcry of mob opinion in favour of slaveholding.” Remond was presented with an Address of the Irish People to their Countrymen and Countrywomen in America urging Irish Americans to oppose the barbarism of slavery.

In speaking in the Round Room of the Rotunda, to an audience that included notable Dublin citizens, Remond received a welcome not unlike that afforded to those who came before her. The welcome of many Irish nationalists was not unlike the friendly hand extended in the past too, but as I noted in a recent piece on Equiano:

It would be a gross over-simplification to insist that Irish radical separatism and the cause of abolitionism have always gone hand in hand; in the 1840s, The Nation newspaper proclaimed that slavery in America was no concern to Irish republicans, as, “we have really so very urgent affairs at home … that all our exertions will be needed in Ireland. Carolina planters never devoured our substance, nor drove away our sheep and oxen for a spoil … Our enemies are nearer home than Carolina.”

By the late 1860s, Remond had settled in Italy. As the website BlackPast notes, “although subsequent records of her life remain scarce, one of the last sightings comes from none other than Frederick Douglass. While visiting Italy in 1886 Douglass encountered Remond and two of her sisters.  All three Remond women had chosen exile over life in the United States.” She died in December 1894.