When Frederick Douglass toured Britain and Ireland in 1845-47, one issue that dominated his speeches was the decision of the Free Church of Scotland to accept donations from pro-slavery churches in the United States. The ‘Send Back the Money’ campaign was already under way when he arrived in Liverpool and embarked on a four-month tour of Ireland, but his rousing public appearances in Belfast, Glasgow, Paisley, Dundee, Edinburgh and many smaller towns clearly captured the popular imagination.¹

Dr Thomas Chalmers and other leading figures in the Free Church cleverly defused the concerns expressed by some of its members, but the very fact that the matter was debated by them at all angered at least one of the key fund-raisers, Dr Thomas Smyth, an Ulster-born Presbyterian minister in Charleston, South Carolina, who pressed Chalmers to publish a robust defence of the church’s position.

Chalmers may have disappointed Smyth by refusing to justify slavery, but he infuriated others more by refusing to break fellowship with slaveholding Christians in North America. Douglass mocked the distinction he made between ‘between the character of a system, and the character of the persons whom circumstances have implicated therewith.’² In his turn, Smyth – who crossed the Atlantic to join in the debates – incautiously repeated a malicious rumour about Douglass’ sexual conduct, which he was forced to retract.³ Amid such polarisation it is perhaps not surprising that the money was not returned.

Some historians have concluded from this that the campaign was misjudged, even a failure. But Douglass was interested in more than the folly of a few clergymen. He sailed from Boston as an emissary of the American Anti-Slavery Society at a time when most abolitionists in Britain were more sympathetic to its rival, the breakaway American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass’ decision to target the Free Church was a shrewd one. The complacent attitude of the US churches towards slavery was one which inflamed both wings of the abolitionist movement, and while some of his colleagues lost their way in sectarian squabbling, Douglass was happy to share a platform with anyone dedicated to the greater cause.⁴

We know that on many occasions, Douglass drew large crowds: for example, on the 1st May 1846 he addressed an audience of 2000 people paying sixpence a head at Edinburgh’s Music Hall.⁵ Newspaper reports tell us how his words elicited cheers, applause and laughter (and sometimes hissing). But it is harder to tell how his campaign speeches in Scotland transformed his listeners – emotionally, intellectually. The speeches denouncing the Free Church are distinctive in their repeated use of the same slogan – the rhythmic ‘send back the money’ that was often chanted by his audience, providing – as such formulae often do – a sense of shared emotion that temporarily binds disparate people together. Douglass and his fellow speakers rarely analyse what these feelings might be – beyond congratulating themselves on the ferment of anti-slavery sentiment they have induced.⁶

We may glimpse perhaps something of a personal response to Douglass’ speeches in the letters of two women, who had attended his lectures condemning the Free Church, addressed to two men at the heart of the controversy.

One was written to Thomas Chalmers by a woman who had recently seen Douglass in Dundee; she was not known to Chalmers and chose not to identify herself.⁷ The other was sent to Thomas Smyth in Charleston by Mary Cunningham in Belfast: she and Smyth had been close friends as teenagers (before he emigrated with his family as a young man fifteen years earlier) and whom he had met more recently in 1844 on his first return to his home town.⁸

Both writers are keenly aware of the argument that the American churches have been soft on slavery, accepting slaveholders into their congregations without question, and that because of their actions their addressees have a case to answer. The women regard them as men of great influence and call on them to take notice of those critics who invoked scriptural authority to denounce the property in human beings.

The woman from Dundee imagines that the ‘strangers’ (Douglass and his white abolitionist colleague James Buffum) were sent by God not only to show the error of the ways of Chalmers and the Free Church but to persuade her to examine her own conduct.

To me also were there [sic] words reproofs. I was shewing a little of the slaveholder my own conscience tell me so. I was also beginning to murmur for more liberty I thought that I could not well get alone. But it was the Grand Intruder that was ever following me with his suggestions. God in Mercy sent these men to shew me my transgressions, by telling me what my sisters are suffering pent up in chains, bloodhounds their guardians Iron Collars their necklaces, Whips instead of the strong arm of Man to lean on or ward off ill. And are we content to leave it so…

Her own circumstances – represented here by ‘necklaces’ and the supportive ‘strong arm of man’ – hardly resemble those of slaves whose freedom is constrained by iron collars and bloodhounds. And yet in her confined domesticity she too has begun ‘to murmur for more liberty I thought that I could not well get alone.’ If Douglass’ speeches made her feel a little ashamed of the limited horizons of her feminism (in which she now glimpses ‘a little of the slaveholder’ in herself), they also provide an opportunity to overcome them, if only in the act of writing and posting a letter to Chalmers.

But this soul-searching co-exists with humour. She tells Chalmers how the abolitionists quoted his words before dramatically inviting the audience to imagine a rather improper scene:

When the Collar and whip were produced it was remarked would the application of these to you or your daughters make you change your views on slavery. This caused laughter… Oh it is too serious a matter to make sport of – Fre. Douglass did make me laugh when he preached the boys in Dundee send back the money –

We know that, on occasion, Douglass (like other anti-slavery orators) displayed instruments of slave restraint and torture, to vividly bring home to his audiences the horrors of slavery, sometimes claiming that they were the very ones used in the events he is recalling.⁹ Here, we are told, he invited his audience (in a perhaps more unusual performative flourish) to imagine them being applied to Chalmers and his daughters – a rather risqué move (especially if it was Douglass who was holding them) that partly accounts for the (presumably) somewhat embarrassed laughter at the meeting. But if the letter-writer dutifully steps back a moment to condemn the frivolity, she can’t help mischievously admitting to Chalmers that she herself was amused, undermining somewhat the avowedly pious intent of her epistle.¹⁰

Mary Cunningham tells Smyth of ‘the eloquent, and affecting lectures’ she has attended, lectures which she says opened her eyes to ‘the heart sickening horrors of this dreadful system’. She is most vexed by the revelation that so-called Christians participate in this system, in flagrant disregard of the Great Commandment and Golden Rule. She riffs on the ironies of ‘the land of liberty’ holding millions in bondage, which was one of Douglass’ favourite rhetorical tactics.

You reside in the land, called falsely, (it is now represented,) ‘The Land of Liberty,’ the place of freedom, the picture now before us, is dark indeed, all the false coloring, has been wiped away, and nothing left for the eye, to gaze upon, but the gloomy, ghastly, features of this hideous monster…

‘Hideous monster’ is a term Douglass used to describe slavery in his famous ‘What to the Negro is the Fourth of July?’ speech in 1852 and he may have used it earlier, though I have found no evidence for it. But she certainly did not take from Douglass the image which she chooses to close the letter:

Oh! the thought of ‘liberty,’ the birds, that wing their joyous flight, above the clouds of Heaven, afford, ample proof, of the wise, beneficent, and glorious intention of our Heavenly Father, contrasted with the drooping, and imprisoned tenant, of a gilded cage, though that cage, be living in the palace of an Emperor.

The caged bird is an ancient symbol of imprisonment. The ‘gilded cage’ more specifically (as a space of confinement so comfortable or luxurious that it may appear otherwise) is at least as old as Chaucer (it appears in the ‘The Manciple’s Tale’) and was a pervasive Victorian metaphor for the subjugation of women.¹¹ There is nothing ‘gilded’ about the slave plantation whose brutal violence is repeatedly described by Douglass, who identified not with a caged bird but other, more roughly-handled creatures such as the ‘bridled horse and muzzled ox,’ as he did in one of his Belfast speeches.¹² The cage Mary Cunningham had in mind was more likely to have been her own.

Both letters draw on the arguments and capture the gestures that Douglass evidently made in his speeches in Belfast and Dundee (we have newspaper reports of them) repeating them to the people he accused but were not there to hear them. But they also reinterpret them, transposing their largely secular message into a more Christian key (that was more agreeable to themselves as well as their addressees), and hint that the ‘Send Back the Money’ campaign aroused more private feelings of shame and guilt as well as emboldening them to assert themselves, taking up their pens to call influential men to account.

It is not, perhaps, surprising that the repeated injunction to ‘return the bloody gold’¹³ in the context of a fight against slavery should prompt these women to think of necklaces and other blandishments as the trappings of a gilded cage. If we multiply these letters by the thousands of individuals who were moved by Douglass’ speeches, who knows how many lives they touched, realigned and transformed?

Notes

1. For a detailed account of the campaign see Iain Whyte, ‘Send Back the Money!’: The Free Church of Scotland and American Slavery (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2012).
2. Frederick Douglass, Arbroath, 12 February 1846, reprinted in John W Blassingame (ed), The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series 1: Speeches, Debates and Interviews, Vol 1: 1841-46 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) (hereafter FDP 1:1), 162-4. See also speeches in Paisley, 20 March 1846: FDP 1:1, 192-93; and Glasgow, 21 April 1846: FDP 1:1, 236-37.
3. See Thomas Smyth, Autobiographical Notes, Letters and Reflections, edited by his granddaughter Louisa Cheves Stoney (Charleston: Walker, Evans and Cogswell, 1914), 362-78.
4. This was the one of the main topics of discussion at the Annual Meeting of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1840, at which Thomas Clarkson made his last public appearance. His address, later published as A Letter to the Clergy of Various Denominations, and to the Slave-Holding Planters, in the Southern Parts of the United States of America (London: 1841), and James Gillespie Birney’s pamphlet, American Churches the Bulwarks of American Slavery (London: 1840), were to be influential texts in the movement during the following decade.
5. Editorial note: FDP 1:1, 244.
6. In letters from Dundee, Douglass wrote: ‘The agitation goes nobly on – all this region is in a ferment’ (to R D Webb, 16 February 1846) and ‘Old Scotland boils like a pot’ (to Francis Jackson, 29 January 1846), Clare Taylor, British and American Abolitionists: An Episode in Transatlantic Understanding(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974), 251, 248.
7. . Anon to Chalmers, 2 April 1846 in the Thomas Chalmers papers CHA.4.321, New College Library, Edinburgh.
8. Mary Cunningham to Thomas Smyth, Glenwood, 14 January 1846, transcribed in Smyth, Autobiographical Notes, 365.
9. A report of an abolitionist meeting in Dundee addressed by Douglass on 30 January 1846 refers to the exhibition of ‘instruments of torture’ including collar, handcuffs, anklets and lash, Dundee Courier, 3 February 1846. See also Douglass’ speech in Limerick, 10 November 1845, FDP 1:1, 85-6.
10. I can find no reference to such an episode in Blassingame’s compendium of newspaper reports of Douglass’ speeches, in Dundee or anywhere else. In one speech in Dundee Douglass was reported as saying, ‘Do you think Dr Chalmers would ever have said this, if, like me, he had four sisters and one brother in bondage?’ (Dundee 30 January 1846: FDP 1:1, 155). Perhaps these hypothetical sisters were misremembered as a daughter, with the theatrical application of the whip a fanciful addition. In a letter to the Scottish Guardian (cited by the Dundee Courier, 21 April 1846), a correspondent advises ‘the semi-savage, Douglass to be somewhat more tender-hearted in the application of his three-toed thong to the back of Dr Chalmers and others’ which might suggest that the image of Douglass applying a whip to his Scottish opponents was a regular motif in the counter-attacks by supporters of the Free Church.
11. The image appears frequently in the work of many Victorian poets and novelists, including Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Christina Rossetti, and Thomas Hardy. ‘I find that the caged bird makes a metaphor that truly deserves the adjective female’ -Ellen Moers, Literary Women (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1977), 250. My first thought was that Cunningham was drawing on Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Nightingale’, which also features an emperor, but this did not appear in English (in The Nightingale and other Tales, translated by Charles Boner, London: Joseph Cundall, 1846) until a few months after Cunningham’s letter – and the cage in the story is not ‘gilded’ (though often mis-remembered as such in plot summaries).
12. Frederick Douglass, Belfast, 5 December 1845, FDP 1:1, 93.
13. Frederick Douglass, Paisley, 20 March, 1846, FDP 1:1, 189.