‘He became a sensation’: Manchester pays tribute to abolitionist Frederick Douglass

Annual lectures will discuss work of writer and campaigner who ‘revitalised the anti-slavery cause’ in Britain

He was one of the most important figures of his time, an author, orator and American statesman who was born enslaved. But some of the most important years in the civil rights leader Frederick Douglass’s life were spent in Britain.

This month marks the 180th anniversary of a series of lectures Douglass gave in Manchester, speaking at venues across the region.

Despite the connection between Manchester – a city at the apex of the global cotton trade that depended on enslaved African workers in the 19th century – and Douglass, there is no commemorative blue plaque marking his presence in the city.

The building where he stayed in St Ann’s Square in Manchester city centre is now occupied by a branch of Holland & Barrett. But Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society (Lit and Phil), with whose members Douglass had connections in the 1840s, has begun annual lectures celebrating his legacy.

The inaugural Fredrick Douglass lecture was in June, staged by Lit and Phil in collaboration with the Manchester peacebuilding organisation Carisma and the University of Manchester research platform Creative Manchester.

Titled Frederick Douglass: A Global Life, the lecture told the story of how Douglass arrived in the UK as a 27-year-old “fugitive, the enslaved property of a man called Thomas Auld” and left a free man.

Douglass was as dedicated to women’s suffrage and Irish liberty as he was to the anti-slavery cause that brought him across the Atlantic. “It was his time here in Britain, free from the fear of re-enslavement, able to live a quite expansive existence in an unsegregated society, that gave him the emotional space to evolve intellectually,” the historian David Olusoga said, giving the inaugural lecture.

Dr Dhun Daji, a trustee of Lit and Phil, said the lecture was brought about “by our society feeling the life and times of Frederick Douglass needed to be better known – he left a template for a kind of activism that is still needed today”.

Douglass was born into enslavement in Maryland, in the US, in 1818. He was working at a shipyard and still a teenager when he fell in love with Anna Murray, a free Black woman, who financed and inspired his escape of his enslavement by boarding a northbound train disguised as a sailor.

In 1845, having married Murray, Douglass published his first autobiography: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. By that time, the trade in enslaved African people had been abolished in British territories by the Slave Trade Act of 1807. Enslaved people in the British empire were fully emancipated in 1838, after the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

However, enslavement continued in the US. And much of the cotton that flowed through Manchester’s mills had been grown, picked and packed by enslaved people in the US and Brazil.

Douglass’s 19-month tour of Britain and Ireland began in Liverpool in 1845 and, for much of the time, Manchester was his base. Between 2 July 1846 and 9 March 1847, he spoke repeatedly at Manchester venues including the town hall and the Free Trade Hall, the Corn Exchange and the Mechanics Institute; at the public hall in Rochdale and in Ashton-under-Lyne, Oldham, Stockport, Bacup in Lancashire and Warrington, Cheshire.

While in Britain, with his fundraising efforts aided by the Quaker social reformer Jonathan Dodgson Carr, the founder of Carr’s biscuits, Douglass not only gathered funds to set up his first abolitionist newspaper, the North Star, but officially became a free man.

In August 1846, Douglass went to Newcastle, visiting Anna and Ellen Richardson, Quaker sisters-in-law and abolitionists. The Richardsons would establish contact with American abolitionist lawyers and raise £150 to buy Douglass’s freedom.

John Bright, the Rochdale-born reformer and Liberal statesman, was among Manchester Lit and Phil members whom Douglass counted as friends and allies at that time, with Bright contributing to the funds to buy his freedom.

Within the movement, the Richardsons were criticised and Douglass, who is believed to have been staying at St Ann’s Square in Manchester when he became a free man, was condemned for having agreed to the transaction. The uncompromising white American abolitionist Henry C Wright wrote to Douglass: “I cannot think of the transaction without vexation … you always were free.”

Douglass wrote back from Manchester, on 22 December 1846: “I am legally the property of Thomas Auld, and if I go to the United States, Thomas Auld, aided by the American government can seize, bind and fetter, and drag me from my family, feed his cruel revenge upon me, and doom me to unending slavery … it was not to compensate the slave-holder, but to release me from his power; not to establish my natural right to freedom, but to release me from all legal liabilities to slavery.”

When Douglass returned to Britain in 1859, his liberty was again at stake. After the anti-slavery attack at a US arsenal at Harpers Ferry in West Virginia, staged by John Brown, a fervent white American abolitionist, authorities in Virginia sought to arrest and extradite Douglass amid a pro-slavery backlash. But the Britain Douglass found on his return was different from the one he had left as a hero in the 1840s.

Racial attitudes had hardened and Douglass now had to counter the ideas propagated by pro-slavery advocates, minstrel bands, scientific racism and a “growing faith in non-intervention in the affairs of the United States”, Olusoga said.

Nonetheless, by 1865 enslavement had officially been abolished in the US as the result of the pro-slavery confederacy of southern states losing the American civil war.

And the abolitionist spirit that Douglass found in the 1840s had not died out – as evidenced by those Lancashire cotton workers who boycotted cotton produced by enslaved people, against their own interests, in solidarity with African Americans, and Abraham Lincoln’s Union, during the American civil war.

“The impact of Frederick Douglass on Britain and Britain’s impact on him, was profound,” Olusoga said in his lecture. “He became a sensation. He revitalised the anti-slavery cause here in Britain in a way that no other speaker could. No American, including presidents, was photographed more than Douglass.”

In his “Farewell to the British people” speech delivered in London in March 1847, Douglass paid tribute to his audience, comparing his treatment in Britain with the life he had known in the US.

He said: “I go back to the United States not as I landed here – I came a slave; I go back a free man. I came here a thing – I go back a human being.

“I came here despised and maligned – I go back with reputation and celebrity; for I am sure that if the Americans were to believe one tithe of all that has been said in this country respecting me, they would certainly admit me to be a little better than they had hitherto supposed I was.”