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

Tom Chaffin’s Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary provides an engaging, readable, and informative account of Frederick Douglass’s 1845–1847 lecture tour of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Chaffin makes the case that the tour—particularly the Irish leg of the tour—was critical to Douglass’s development as an independent and, as the title suggests, “visionary” thinker in the cultural and political landscape of the second half of the nineteenth century. Much of the book is straight narrative, giving lively details, for instance, about the tense circumstances of Douglass’s transatlantic crossing on the RMS Cambria, and describing in almost novelistic fashion Douglass’s interactions with his various hosts and companions. All of the information for this narrative is scrupulously drawn from Douglass’s correspondence and other archival and published sources, giving a clear, human portrait of Douglass as he developed from a young single-issue activist whose fame was limited to North America into a speaker of world renown. The trip also established Douglass as his own man—not only because it enabled him to purchase his legal freedom, but also because it gave him experience with printers and publishers that he was able to use later when setting up the North Star and subsequent newspapers.

Chaffin highlights various ironies of Douglass’s visit, showing how Douglass, as a black man, felt greater freedom in monarchical Britain than he did in the republican United States. The author also asks telling questions about the intersection of abstract idealism and practical politics in confronting multiple overlapping reform movements—including Irish nationalism, women’s rights, and temperance. Daniel O’Connell, Ireland’s great “Liberator,” had long established himself as an “‘advocate of civil and religious liberty’” in every form, so he willingly and enthusiastically endorsed Douglass’s cause (p. 62). The particular religious, social, and political context in British-ruled Ireland, however, made it difficult for Douglass to repay the compliment; supporting O’Connell’s movement to repeal the Act of Union would have created controversy and perhaps opened up other fault lines of race and religion that would have damaged Douglass’s mission. Back in the United States, advocates for Irish liberation could not be counted on as abolitionists; in fact, as Chaffin points out, John Mitchel, one of the leaders of the 1848 Young Irelanders, went on to become a proslavery apologist and was interned at Fort Monroe for his support of the Confederacy.

Chaffin makes much of the fact that Douglass’s arrival in Ireland coincided with the onset of the Great Famine and just preceded the wave of revolutionary activity in 1848. One of the great strengths of the book is that it draws attention to how the urgency of one cause may have to give way to that of another. However, in the later stages of the book, where Chaffin attempts to show how Douglass’s Irish odyssey continued to influence his thinking for the remainder of his life, the transnational connections become somewhat tangential. Douglass, after all, maintained limited connections with O’Connell, Mitchel, and temperance campaigner Father Theobald Mathew. Therefore, the short biographies of these men and the summaries of the Young Ireland rebellion and Mathew’s tour of the United States do not convincingly advance Chaffin’s argument. However, these details do contribute to a richly informative biographical account of Frederick Douglass’s life and times from an unusual and thought-provoking angle.