Daniel O’Connell and American anti-slavery

In August 1875, at the O’Connell centenary celebrations in Boston, three famous American abolitionists recalled the importance of O’Connell’s role in the American anti-slavery movement. John Greenleaf Whittier saw no reason to change the high opinion of O’Connell’s anti-slavery services that he had formed many years earlier; William Lloyd Garrison commented on the aid and inspiration he had always received from O’Connell; and Wendell Phillips noted how the Irishman’s actions as an agitator had influenced the abolitionists’ own concept of moral reform. Parallel celebrations in Dublin also mentioned this aspect of O’Connell’s career, but perhaps it is fitting that his anti-slavery commitment should receive greatest stress in Boston, which was not only an important Irish-American centre, but also the city with the closest links with British anti-slavery.