An American visitor, the former slave Frederick Douglass, toured Ireland in the fall on a speaking tour, just as people were beginning to starve. Elegant in his tailored suits, quoting Dickens and Shakespeare, Douglass drew enormous crowds. “I find myself not treated as a color, but as a man—not as a thing, but as a child of the common Father of us all,” he wrote. But he was not prepared for the misery of hungry Irish peasants, living “in much the same degradation as the American slave.” He saw families in windowless mud hovels, ragged-dressed, listless on straw beds, gaunt from malnutrition.
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