Frederick Douglass speaks in Wexford

On Tuesday 7 and Wed­nes­day 8 Oc­to­ber 1845, Dou­glass ap­peared in the As­sem­bly Rooms in Wex­ford (now the Corn­mar­ket cen­tre), before a mostly Quaker audience.  The talk started at 8 o’clock and the admission charge was 4d or fourpence. The lecture was advertised in the Wex­ford In­de­pen­dent (a pro-Re­peal news­pa­per pub­lished by John Green, who was Mayor of Wexford 7 times).

Joseph Poole wrote:

‘Mr. Edi­tor - you are with­out doubt an anti-slav­ery man, and will have plea­sure of the fact that the ex­e­crable sys­tem of Amer­i­can Slav­ery has had a most com­plete ex­po­sure in our good town of Wex­ford, at the hands of one of its fugi­tive vic­tims and most elo­quent and de­ter­mined op­po­nents, Fred­er­ick Dou­glass, of Lynne, Mas­sachusetts, re­cently a slave in Mary­land, and now threat­ened in his life and lib­erty for his coura­geous de­nun­ci­a­tion of of its in­iq­uity, and who has been driven thereby from the land of stars and stripes - the land of free­dom and equal­ity - the land of re­li­gion and civil­i­sa­tion - the United States of Amer­ica, to seek pro­tec­tion from the piti­less grip of his mas­ter in the bo­som of the Green is­land, in the hearts and be­neath the shel­ter­ing arm of the lib­erty-lov­ing sons of Old Ire­land.’

In the Assembly Room Dou­glass pro­claimed aloud his man­hood and the man­hood of his race and its iden­tity with the whole broth­er­hood of man, Joseph Poole reported;

‘I am your brother" said Dou­glass, and the as­sent of his hear­ers was pro­claimed in such a univer­sal shout of ap­pro­ba­tion that the old walls shook to hear three mil­lion of our broth­ers and sis­ters still lan­guish in bondage of the most hideous de­scrip­tion in the South­ern State of Amer­ica.’

SEE ALSO ‘Fred­er­ick Dou­glass and Ire­land: In His Own Words’, by Chris­tine Kinealy