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What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? by Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass was one of the most influential Americans of the 19th century. He was a prominent abolitionist who used his personal experiences as a former slave to support the fight against slavery. The following excerpt is from one of his most famous speeches.


Before you move on to the excerpt, you should learn a few things about Frederick Douglass and his life. Who was he, and what is he famous for?


Who was Frederick Douglass?

Frederick Douglass was born into slavery around 1818 in Talbot, Maryland. His date of birth was never recorded, but Douglass estimated that he had been born in February of that year.

Like many other enslaved children, he was separated from his mother as an infant. He stayed a while with his maternal grandmother but was removed from her at the age of six to live and work on a plantation in Maryland.

Two years later, he was moved to Hugh and Sophia Auld in Baltimore, where he was to care for their youngest son, Thomas. Along with her son, Sophia began teaching Frederick how to read and write. However, the lessons ended abruptly when her husband, Hugh, discovered what was going on. In Maryland, as in many other slaveholding states, it was forbidden to teach slaves how to read and write. However, a seed had been sown, and from there, Douglass taught himself the art of reading and writing.

In 1833, he was transferred to local farmer Edward Covey. Covey was known as a ‘slave breaker’, someone who abused slaves physically and psychologically in order to make them more compliant. Douglass, who was in his mid-teens at that time, was regularly whipped by Covey.

In 1838, he finally managed to escape from Covey’s farm, and after a journey fraught with danger, he arrived in New York as a free man. He later moved on to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he began attending meetings of the abolitionist movement. He soon became a prominent speaker and an abolitionist leader, and he tirelessly addressed anti-slavery meetings throughout the North. He also travelled to the British Isles, giving lectures about the situation for Blacks in America.

Frederick Douglass was a gifted orator who spoke with great eloquence and passion. He would spellbind his audience with his voice and his presence and he inspired many people through his numerous speeches. An observer recalled Douglass’s presence as a speaker:

"He was more than six feet in height, and his majestic form, as he rose to speak, straight as an arrow, muscular, yet lithe and graceful, his flashing eye, and more than all, his voice, that rivaled Webster’s in its richness, and in the depth and sonorousness of its cadences, made up such an ideal of an orator as the listeners never forgot."

Using his own experiences in life, Douglass put a human face on the horrors of American slavery. He became one of the most important activists of the time, fighting for emancipation and the equality of all people. He courageously spoke out against the subversion of civil rights and helped convince millions that the practice of slavery had to be abolished.


A black and white photo of Fredrick Douglass. He is a Black man dressed in a suit and a bow. He has thick hair and a beard. His expression is sad, or even angry.
Fredrick Douglass. Image: Unknown / Public domain

On 5 July, 1852, Frederick Douglass gave a keynote address at an Independence Day celebration. He asked the questionWhat to the Slave is the Fourth of July?

In this scathing speech, he acknowledges the Founding Fathers of America for their commitment to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, and he states that they were great men for their ideals of freedom. But he also brings awareness to the hypocrisy of their ideals by the existence of slavery on American soil. He states that “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine, You may rejoice, I must mourn.”



What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? by Frederick Douglass

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Audio: Radio Metro AS / CC BY-SA 4.0

What to the Slave is the Fourth of July (5 July, 1852)

(...) Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. 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. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine.

You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?

Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, 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! "I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;" I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.

What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employments for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.

What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is past.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour. Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the every day practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival . . .

Behold the practical operation of this internal slave-trade, the American slave-trade, sustained by American politics and American religion ... Fellow-citizens, this murderous traffic is, to-day, in active operation in this boasted republic. In the solitude of my spirit, I see clouds of dust raised on the highways of the South; I see the bleeding footsteps; I hear the doleful wail of fettered humanity, on the way to the slave-markets, where the victims are to be sold like horses, sheep, and swine, knocked off to the highest bidder. There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, caprice and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men. My soul sickens at the sight.

But a still more inhuman, disgraceful, and scandalous state of things remains to be presented. By an act of the American Congress, slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form ... The Fugitive Slave Law makes mercy to them, a crime; and bribes the judge who tries them. An American judge gets ten dollars for every victim he consigns to slavery, and five, when he fails to do so ... Let this damning fact be perpetually told ... that, in tyrant-killing, king-hating, people-loving, democratic, Christian America, the seats of justice are filled with judges, who hold their offices under an open and palpable bribe ... I take this law to be one of the grossest infringements of Christian Liberty, and, if the churches and ministers of our country were not stupidly blind, or most wickedly indifferent, they, too, would so regard it ... they are utterly silent in respect to a law which robs religion of its chief significance, and makes it utterly worthless to a world lying in wickedness ... Allow me to say, in conclusion ... I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably, work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I therefore, leave off where I began, with hope.


Sources

History.com (2021). 'Frederick Douglass'. From: https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/frederick-douglass

Smithsonian. 'A Nation's Story: “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”' From: https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/nations-story-%E2%80%9Cwhat-slave-fourth-july%E2%80%9D

Trent, N (2021). 'Frederick Douglass'. From: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Frederick-Douglass


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