From White’s General Directory of the Town and County of Newcastle-upon-Tyne…, 1847, Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne Library

First, I consulted an 1847 Newcastle directory yesterday at the Antiquities Society for listings of locations on Albion St. There is no music hall or other public building listed there. It does, however, show that three George Richardsons lived at 9 Albion street, one ‘sen.’ (senior), one ‘jun.’ (junior), and one ‘gentleman.’ This likely describes a grandfather, father, and a grandson not yet employed, or perhaps a nephew or cousin. Then this morning, I found two more sources of information about the Richardsons of Newcastle: a website by a Benjamin S. Beck which has a series of pages detailing the genealogy and history of his family, especially the page ‘Children of George and Eleanor Richardson,’ and Mood’s journal article  ‘Women in the Quaker Community: The Richardson Family of Newcastle, C. 1815-60‘. The first of these list Ellen Richardson as living first at 9 and then at 21 Albion St. When Douglass was at Newcastle in 1846, Ellen was still living at no. 9. Though there are two address for Albion St over time, all of the sources I’ve consulted indicate that the family lived in the same home for a very long time. I suspect, then, that the two different addressed reflect only a change in the numbering over the years rather than a move to another nearby location.

Ellen and her sister-in-law Anna’s leadership in the anti-slavery movement in Newcastle may very well have meant that antislavery society meetings may have been held at Ellen’s family home on Albion St, and if so, Douglass would surely have attended if he was in town. However, an entry in the Newcastle Courant of Friday, Jan. 1st, 1847 specifies that the speech Douglass delivered for a soiree of the ‘the Newcastle branch of the Anti-Slavery League’ for 700 ‘members and friends’ was held at the ‘Music-hall’ on ‘Monday evening.’ December 28th, 1846 was a Monday, so it appears that both the December 28th and 29th speeches listed in the Frederick Douglass Papers were held at the Music Hall. This does not preclude Douglass giving a talk at an event held at the Richardsons’ home on Albion St, however, if such an event took place.

Albion St, Newcastle upon Tyne, from Thomas Oliver’s 1830 plan of the city at the National Library of Scotland

Even given the address at 9 Albion St, however, I still would not have enough information to find this location. That’s because, first, there is currently no Albion St in Newcastle. The man who helps me find sources at the Newcastle City Library, however, is able to help me with that one. He just so happens to have recently read something which informed him that the street once named Albion is now called Leazes Park Road. The maps room of the National Library of Scotland is able to provide the final piece of the puzzle. When I visit Albion St, I can only guess at the exact location given the maps, plans, and directories of Newcastle I find during my visit. In the following days, Louise and Rosemary help me locate a city plan and its guide for 1830-1831, also published by Thomas Oliver, which show that George Richardson lived at plot 352. The street has undergone very little change, if any, in its layout, and the nearest cross-street retains its old name. By comparing the location of the old map to Google Maps, I find that the Richardson family home used to stand on or near the place where 23 Leazes Park Road now stands, just south of the parking lot at the southwest corner of Leazes Park Road and Strawberry Place.

At the other side of the street at Leazes Park Rd and Strawberry Pl, there’s a nice roomy bar called Soho. The tablet I’m using for maps and photography is nearly out of power and I’ve forgotten to bring my portable charger, so I take a break with a pint of Guinness while it’s plugged in. As I wait, I read more about the Richardson family.

From William Whellan & Co.’s History, Topography, and Directory of Northumberland… and a History of the Town and County of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, National Library of Scotland

As mentioned earlier, Ellen, her sister in law Anna, her brother Henry, her brother George, and her father George were all very active in various societies. In addition to Ellen and Anna’s anti-slavery and charity work, the Richardsons were active in promoting their Quaker religion. White’s 1847 directory lists George Richardson, senior (or rather, his house), as the ‘depository for the bible society’ and Whellan’s 1855 History of Northumberland and Newcastle lists George (presumably junior) as treasurer of the Bible Society, with George Sr. serving as accountant and ‘depositary.’ Ellen, who never married, cared for her father after the death of her mother in 1846 (the same year she and Anna organized Douglass’ ‘ransom’) and dedicated herself to education and other worthy causes. She worked for the school for impoverished children called, quaintly to modern sensibilities, the Girls Ragged School, and made other efforts on behalf of impoverished members of the community as well. On November 5th, 1859, for example, she wrote a letter to the editor of the Newcastle Guardian and Tyne Mercury about the plight of a large Jewish family, explaining why they were appropriate and worthy recipients of ‘parochial charity.’ She signed her letter ‘Ellen Richardson, Secretary to the Jubilee School.’ It just so happens that there’s a link between Ellen and two of the places I visited yesterday: in 1864, at a meeting held in the Castle, she donated a book of Arabic prayers and a document containing the seal of Elizabeth I to the Newcastle Society of Antiquaries. She lived a long life, dying at the age of 87 after a long-time chest ailment worsened as she developed other ailments. Mary Spence Watson wrote of her recently departed cousin ‘I believe she is the last proper Quakeress in Newcastle, & the last who wore the Quaker’s dress, & she was so splendid.’

Building at the corner of Grainger and Nelson Streets with a Giuseppe Garibaldi, Louis Kossuth, and William Lloyd Garrison historical plaque, Newcastle

Once my tablet has charged sufficiently, I continue my tour by heading east and south toward Grey’s Monument, erected honor of the second Earl Grey, who was instrumental in the passage of the Reform Act of 1832 and namesake of that delicious bergamot-flavored black tea. Besides vastly expanding the electoral franchise in Britain, the Reform Act also led directly to the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire in 1832. At the monument square, I turn south down Grainger St then stop at the corner of Grainger and Nelson Streets. This is the place I spotted yesterday with the historical plaque above the shop window. The plaque reads: ‘To commemorate visits to this city and to a book shop in this house by Giuseppe Garibaldi in 1854, Louis Kossuth in 1856, W. Lloyd Garrison in 1876.‘ William Lloyd Garrison was, famously, the abolitionist colleague and eventual ideological rival of Douglass who had given him his start in the movement only to later oppose Douglass’ moving on from Garrison’s abolitionist society to found his own paper The North Star, and Douglass’ newfound commitment to political activism and armed resistance to slavery. Since this city had a vibrant antislavery movement, Garrison visited Newcastle more than once in his multiple tours of the British Isles, including at least twice in 1846, so it’s a delight but no surprised to stumble across this plaque. I less expected to find, and am very interested to have done so, this link to Louis Kossuth, the revolutionary 19th-century Hungarian president lauded by Douglass and his colleague James McCune Smith as a great freedom fighter.

Facade of the old Music Hall at 10-12 Nelson Street, Newcastle, England

Behind me on the other side of the road and a few buildings west, I find my next destination: the facade of the Music Hall I mentioned more than once earlier in my story, at 10-12 Nelson St. According to Thomas Oliver’s reference book for his 1844 plan of Newcastle, it stood to the ‘east of the Primitive Methodist Chapel,’ which can still be seen in the 1896 Ordnance Survey I find later at the National Library of Scotland. According to Oliver, the Lecture Room was located underneath the Music Hall. It was in that room that Douglass delivered his 1860 speeches. Today, the only remnants of the Nelson St Music Hall and its rooms is its arch-windowed facade with the name and date carved in the front door’s pediment. There’s a City of Newcastle upon Tyne historical plaque on the building to the left of the doorway, like the one at 5 Summerhill Grove, but unfortunately The Alchemist, the bar and restaurant now occupying the spot, has placed a big umbrella right in front of it. I could crane my neck from under the umbrella just enough to read the plaque: ‘Music Hall, Nelson Street, Charles Dickens 1812-1870. Charles Dickens gave public readings of his works in this theatre during 6 visits to Newcastle between 1852 and 1867. “A finer audience is there not in England.” City of Newcastle upon Tyne.‘

Frederick Douglass ca. 1847-52, Samuel Miller, American 1822-1882, Art Institute of Chicago, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

This is where Douglass almost certainly spoke at that 700-person antislavery event in December 1846, and where he did speak on February 19th and the 23rd, 1860. Douglass had returned once again to the British Isles that year, fleeing possible arrest and prosecution in connection with his militant abolitionist friend John Brown‘s unsuccessful raid on Harper’s Ferry. While he was back in Britain, he embarked on another abolitionist speaking tour. In 1860, Douglass was dismayed to find that anti-black prejudice, which he was so grateful to find nearly absent during his last visit to the Isles fourteen years before, had become more commonplace in British sensibilities. Nevertheless, the talk was so highly anticipated that the event space was packed as full as could be and many who sought tickets had to be turned away. Douglass told the crowd that he feared that the ‘malign influence’ of the American slave system and its apologists were infecting the mother country even though she had already abolished it. Yet Douglass was here once again to seek British support for the cause. American slavery was proving so difficult to eradicate that American abolitionists needed the moral and religious example and support of their freedom-loving British counterparts more than ever.

Even with that support, however, it seemed that armed resistance may have been necessary to end slavery, and in that, Britain could lend its support by withdrawing its trade with and support to slaveholding states. Douglass ended his speech with a defense of Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in hopes of inciting a slave insurrection. Though Douglass had, in person, turned down his friend’s plea to assist the raid on the grounds he thought it unlikely to succeed, Douglass defended the raid’s practicability and propriety to his Newcastle audience. For one thing, he said, the location of Harper’s Ferry was in proximity to a series of mountain ranges perfect for insurrectionists to hide, plan their course of action, and attack from. For another, the raid and planned guerrilla war to follow was not the cruel and criminal attack on peaceable citizens as it was generally portrayed. Slavery was essentially a cruel and bloody system of oppression that placed all involved in it in a state of war already. Slave resistance was merely the counterattack by those who had been savaged in the first place.

Ordnance Survey of Newcastle upon Tyne, Gateshead and Environs 1896, showing the location of the Music Hall on Nelson St, here designated Central Hall, and the apparent site of the Salem Methodist Chapel, here designated Church of England Institute, at the National Library of Scotland

My last destination leads me just a little ways south and east to Hood Street. According to Oliver’s reference to his 1844 city plan, the Salem Methodist Chapel ‘forms the centre building to the north side of Hood Street; the front is of polished stone, with a recessed Grecian Doric portico of four columns, approached by stone steps.’ It opened its doors in 1836. There is a building at number 11, at about the right location but a bit further west than I’d expect from the 1896 ordnance survey, which has a small portico supported by two full Doric columns and two pilasters, with three steps leading to the modest-sized front entry. However, the building doesn’t seem otherwise to have the appearance of a church. Photos I find of old Hood St online from 1912 and onward, few as they are, don’t appear to show a church or other building with a Doric-column-decorated entryway. It appears to me that there’s nothing left of the old Salem Chapel.

Buildings on the center north side of Hood Street around the approximate site of the old Salem Chapel, Newcastle, England

Douglass spoke at the Salem Chapel on August 3rd and 13th of 1846 at meetings of the Newcastle Antislavery Society. On the first occasion, the 1200-capacity church was packed nearly to overflowing, evidence of the strong popular support in Britain, particularly Newcastle, for the abolitionist cause. Douglass, the only lecturer at the August 3rd event, opened his speech by pointing out the danger of characterizing too many things as forms of slavery that were not, in fact, comparable to American chattel slavery, with all its depredations and horrors, its thorough denial of the rights and humanity of a certain class of human beings. Since chattel slavery was far away and out of sight in the free British Isles, he could see how some Britons might tend to conflate slavery with such practices as the exploitation of workers, unjust taxation, or political disenfranchisement. However, Douglass stressed, to do so undermined the message and urgency of the antislavery cause.

Douglass’ impassioned plea against equating actual slavery with other forms of exploitation, coercion, or cruelty reminds me of the trend I see so often in our hyperbolic age with its outrage culture run amok. So many things are characterized as assaults, as rape, as silencing, or as other trespasses on human rights and dignity that in some ways serve to equate minor with egregious forms with minor or less egregious forms, or at least serve to confuse them in the public consciousness. For example, speaking disrespectfully to or groping women, however deplorable, is not akin to physically raping them. Aggressive speech, leering looks, and insults are not akin to physical assault. Promoting one set of views, however loudly, meanly, or distastefully is not akin to silencing competing views. There are plenty of grounds for demanding we treat each other in ways that respect human rights and dignity without conflating these important issues. In fact, conflating the less egregious wrongs we do one another with more egregious ones undermine human rights causes. When it’s not clear what precise harms we are arguing about, the degree to which they damage ourselves and others, and the rights we are violating when we inflict them, then the arguments against them are hard to craft and defend, and our efforts to counteract them are rendered scattershot and ineffective.

Constitution of the United States, first page of the original, provided by the National Archives and Records Administration, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Douglass went on to criticize the various ways the legal system of the United States systematically supported and protected the institution of slavery, from the federal Constitution to the laws of states and municipalities. To remove any doubts in the minds of his audience that he might be embellishing his rhetoric with hyperbole, he read out example after examples of such laws so that they could judge for themselves. Over time, Douglass changed his mind about the Constitution as a proslavery document. To Douglass, interpreting the Constitution correctly as an antislavery document meant it could no longer be used as a tool by proponents of the slave system. It also made local laws supporting slavery that much more egregious, since they not only infringed on the natural rights of black people, they infringed on Constitutionally guaranteed rights as well. Armed with this Constitutional interpretation, Douglass went on after his early years as an abolitionist moral suasionist in the United States and the British Isles to focus on political and social activism.

My search for Douglass in Newcastle has proved to be an invigorating and fascinating one, and he has led me to learn about and appreciate not only more about his own work and his circle of friends and colleagues, but about the history of one more great city as well. I look forward to my next adventure following Douglass in the British Isles, stay tuned!