American anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass contrasts two kinds of ‘nationalist’.
American anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass visited Ireland in 1845, and loved it. But in time he came to realise that there are two kinds of nationalist: those who want freedom everywhere, and those who want it only for themselves, and will enslave any other land or people in order to get it.
Frederick Douglass, the American runaway slave turned Abolitionist, spent some of his happiest days in Britain.
Frederick Douglass escaped slavery in Maryland, and became one of America’s leading Abolitionists. Gently forgiving but firm of purpose, Douglass was a champion not only of Abolition but of freedom everywhere, suspicious of communism, committed to national sovereignty and free markets. And in 1845, he instantly fell in love with the British.
British statesmen were among those who inspired the career of one of America’s greatest men, Frederick Douglass.
At thirteen, escaped slave Frederick Douglass bought a schoolbook, ‘The Columbian Orator’, for fifty cents. It nurtured gifts of understanding and eloquence that brought Douglass to prominence as America’s leading anti-slavery campaigner, and among his favourite passages were speeches by great British statesmen of his day.