We have so far discussed two occasions on which Douglass directly commented on Burns and passed judgement on him, attuned to different audiences in each case: the enthusiastic devotees in the meeting he addressed at the Cathcart Street church in Ayr, and the more sceptical family friend who received his letter in Albany.

Two and a half years later, back in the United States, Douglass spoke of Burns in front of a different audience yet again. In Rochester, New York he was invited to the second annual gathering of the ‘sons and daughters of Old Scotia in this city and land of their adoption’, wrote Edinburgh-born John Dick, printer of The North Star. Dick was closely involved in the running of the paper, which Douglass edited with Martin Delany, and contributed numerous articles. From his account, it is clear Dick attended the gathering as a proud Scot and not just as a dispassionate reporter of his employer's speaking engagements. Two thirds of the three hundred present to celebrate the ninetieth anniversary of the poet's birth, he estimated, had been born in Scotland. ‘I could almost have believed,’ he continued, ‘when I heard the Scotch voices, and saw the Scotch faces, and listened to the wild notes of the pibroch, which was played at intervals during the evening, that I was in the “auld toon of Ayr” itself.’

But which Burns was being celebrated here? It seems clear from the speech of a Mr Sidey, which takes up nearly half of Dick's report, that it is a boldly egalitarian Burns. Sidey describes him as ‘freedom's poet […] whose greatest joy was in the triumph of right’, who despised British tyranny and sung the glory of the American and French revolutions; a defender of the oppressed and ‘friend to universal brotherhood’. The evening featured recitations and songs including some from the Scottish singer William Dempster, who happened to be in town and whose