Douglass on Music

On 25 January 1849 Frederick Douglass delivered a speech by special invitation to an audience of nearly 300 people – mostly Scots emigrants or descendants of Scots emigrants – at the Robert Burns Anniversary Festival in Rochester, New York. Douglass had recently returned to America from an extended lecture tour of Ireland and Great Britain from 1845 to 1847. He had undertaken this tour in order both to avoid recapture following the publication of his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), and to advance the abolitionist cause. Douglass was familiar with Burns's poems and songs before his tour of the United Kingdom: he would later claim that he had made the poet's works – in James Currie's edition (first published in 1800) – his first purchase after his escape from slavery. But he found that he gained new insight into the poet and his world while travelling through Scotland in 1846 (his itinerary included a visit to the cottage where Burns had been born, at Alloway, near Ayr, on 23 March 1846). Writing to Abigail Mott from Ayr on 23 April 1846, Douglass characterised Burns as ‘a true soul’, who had seen through the empty rhetoric of the ‘bigoted and besotted clergy’ and the ‘shallow-brained aristocracy’. Currie, in his biographical sketch of the poet, had depicted Burns as a victim of his own heightened passions and of a fatal weakness of the will. Douglass, inevitably influenced by this powerful portrait, nevertheless saw Burns as a ‘bold pioneer’ and a ‘brilliant genius’. ‘[L]et us adopt his virtues but avoid his vices,’ he declared, ‘let us pursue his wisdom but shun his folly; and as death has separated his noble spirit from the corrupt and corruptible dust with which it was encumbered, so let us separate his good from his evil deeds – thus may we make him a blessing rather than a curse to the world’. At the Burns Anniversary Festival in Rochester, Douglass proclaimed his ‘warm love of Scotch character’ and ‘high appreciation of Scotch genius’.