The great abolitionist Douglass and Cork’s Apostle of Temperance

Escaped slave Frederick Douglass was made welcome in Cork, but he later fell out with our own Apostle of Temperance, writes Laurence Fenton

WITH the South Main Street Quadrille Band playing music in the gallery and a crowd of 250 people still milling about, Fr Theobald Mathew, Ireland’s ‘Apostle of Temperance’, stepped onto the stage of the Temperance Institute on Academy Street in Cork. It was getting late in the evening of Monday, October 20, 1845, when he finally introduced the night’s guest of honour — the 27-year-old escaped slave Frederick Douglass.

Born a slave in Maryland in 1818 before escaping north aged 20, Douglass was best-known as an anti-slavery campaigner. Keenly aware, however, of the manner in which slave-owners dulled the spirits of slaves by plying them with alcohol on Sundays or holidays like Christmas, he was also an ardent advocate of temperance.