Democracy’s Documents: Frederick Douglass: “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

“This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn,” Frederick Douglass proclaimed to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society on July 5, 1852.  “Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them.”  “My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view.”

Douglass, who had escaped from Southern slavery in 1838, was a world-acclaimed abolitionist. Forbidden by his Maryland owner to learn to read and write, he was self-educated and one of the most articulate anti-slavery leaders.  As he made his argument he was especially enraged by the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law which nationalized slavery by requiring law enforcement and judges to assist in the capture and return of escaped slaves in all states of the Union.

Douglass was not unappreciative of what the nation’s founders had accomplished: “Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic.” “They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage.” “With them, nothing was "settled" that was not right.”  He would use their principles for his time.

The past, for Douglass, was the opening of the sermon he delivered.  He then shifted: “My business, if I have any here to-day, is with the present.” “Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work.”  That work, he insisted, was to right the wrongs of the nation’s founding - the evils of slavery.

“I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me.”

“I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America!”

Moving from the general to the specific, Douglass reminds his audience that “the slave is a moral, intellectual and responsible being,” evidenced by abundant laws that treat him as a man, administer punishments and forbid teaching literacy. “Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body?,” Douglass says, reminding the audience of the Declaration of Independence they are celebrating. “There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.”

While the importation of slaves had been banned by federal law in 1808, Douglass next condemns the internal slave trade noting that “the men engaged in the slave-trade between the states pass without condemnation, and their business is deemed honorable.”

“Follow the drove to New Orleans. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers.” Should any slave escape, he reminds his listeners, the Fugitive Slave Law makes “[y]our broad republican domain is hunting ground for men.”

Nor does he excuse religion. “But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of slavery, it actually takes sides with the oppressors . . .  Many of its most eloquent Divines . . . have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system.”

As he moves toward the close of his nearly two-hour speech, Douglass offers a hopeful note.  Following the structure of the jeremiad sermons of his day, from past to present to future, he counters the argument that slavery is “guaranteed and sanctioned by the Constitution of the United States,” declaring instead that “the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” His proof: “neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it.” Indeed, “take the constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.”

“I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope,” he says. That hope comes because:

“Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness,” yet now “Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe.”

What would it take to end slavery?  In the end, sadly, Douglass was skeptical that reason would be enough.  “[I]t is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused.”  In less than a decade, the Civil War began.

Photo Credit: National Portrait Gallery, circa 1850 photograph.

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