Travel, Ritual, and National Identity: Planters on the European Tour, 1820-1860 By DANIEL KILBRIDE L A T E LN THE WINTER OF 1845 FREDERICK DOUGLASS AND A NUMBER OF friends went sightseeing at Eaton Hall, the Liverpool residence of the Marquis of Westminster. In the queue Douglass noticed several of his fellow passengers from the Cunard liner Cambria, among them south- emers, who had threatened to toss him overboard during the passage. As he wrote to William Lloyd Garrison, "[0]f all the faces, expressive of chagrin, those of the Americans were preeminent. They looked as sour as vinegar, and as bitter as gall, when they found I was to be admitted on equal terms with themselves." The relative racial equality that Douglass encountered in the Old World alienated him from the United States. At the same time, the shared characteristics of white Americans, regardless of regional origins, became clear. Douglass did not distinguish the southem planters from the other Americans in the group outside Eaton Hall; he noted that they all regarded him with disdain. Indeed, in the eyes of white southemers as well, a European tour had the effect of bridging the political and cultural gaps that increasingly separated them from northemers at home. They did not, unlike Douglass, use the occasion to single out racism as a national characteristic, but touring Europe did inspire planters to reflect upon other qualities they shared with privileged folk hke themselves. While European travel did not dissolve planters' loyalty to their section, it did intensify their sense of and pride in belonging to a national community.^ ^ Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York, 1855), 365-73 (quotation on p. 373). On Douglass's trip see Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford, 'Triumphant Exile: Fi^erick Douglass in Britain, 1845-1847," in Rice and Crawford, eds.. Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (Atiiens, Ga., and London, 1999), 1-12. Previous versions of this essay were delivered at the 2001 meeting of the Southem Historical Association and at the "Global Currents in Southern History, from European Colonization to the Late 20th Centur>'" conference at Georgia Southem University in October 2000.1 thank Mark M, Smith, MR. KILBRIDE is an associate professor of history at John Carroll University THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY Volume LXIX, No. 3, August 2003