Robert Burns and Frederick Douglass

Abstract This chapter examines the influence and impact of Robert Burns’s poetry and songs on leaders of the American abolitionist movement in the nineteenth century, with the primary focus being on America’s most famous abolitionist, former slave Frederick Douglass, whose strong affinity for Burns and his writings was manifested in his outlook, speeches, and letters. Like most Americans in the nineteenth century, Douglass considered Burns to be an egalitarian representative of democratic values, and he identified with Burns’s challenges to the hypocrisy of the kirk and to the aristocracy. They mirrored Douglass’s own deep objections to white America’s response to slavery: the hypocrisy of people who considered themselves Christians but still justified their ownership of other humans. Douglass visited Scotland in 1846, and while there he toured Burns Country, meeting Burns’s sister and nieces, all of which he recounted in a letter to Quaker abolitionist Abigail Mott that was reprinted at least ten times in newspapers around the country that year. In the letter Douglass identifies with Burns’s struggles against the kirk and his social station, and by doing so connects the cause of abolition and the plight of slaves to the struggles of working-class people.