Frederick Douglass on the Fourth of July
July 5, 1852. In Rochester, New York, an audience gathers at Corinthian Hall to commemorate the United States’ signing of the Declaration of Independence. To the podium, Frederick Douglass—abolitionist, writer, orator—is invited to speak. The speech he gives that day will go on to reverberate more than a century later.
“This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn,” he said. As a Black man in the United States, someone who was born into chattel slavery and risked his life to escape it, Douglass knew intimately the hypocrisy of the American devotion to liberty.
Today, we present the below excerpts from his speech as a reflection on where this country has been, and where it has yet to go.
[Read Douglass’s full speech here.]
On the Evils of Slavery
The core message of Douglass’s speech was clear: there could be no liberty in America as long as chattel slavery remained one of its institutions. The starkness of this truth was no more apparent than on the Fourth of July:
“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. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July!
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.”
Douglass was vivid in his description of the horrors of chattel slavery, relaying its cruelty and brutality all the more sharply because of having been forced into it at birth:
“Behold the practical operation of this internal slave-trade, the American slave-trade, sustained by American politics and America religion. Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market. You know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit all our Southern States. They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation, with droves of human stock. You will see one of these human flesh-jobbers, armed with pistol, whip and bowieknife, driving a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac to the slave market at New Orleans. These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers. They are food for the cotton-field, and the deadly sugar-mill.
Douglass knew that his white audience members, should they so wish, could pretend not to understand the suffering of the Black men, women, and children forced into chattel slavery. With his excruciating accounts of the cruelty of this system, he sought to lay bare that willful ignorance:
“Mark the sad procession, as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them. Hear his savage yells and his bloodchilling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives! There, see the old man, with locks thinned and gray. Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms. See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes! weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn! The drove moves tardily. Heat and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength; suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream, that seems to have torn its way to the center of your soul! The crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard, was from the woman you saw with the babe. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. 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. See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude.
Tell me citizens, WHERE, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States.”
On the Hypocrisy of the American Devotion to Liberty
Douglass’s 1852 speech is known by its most quotable statement, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” With it, he interrogated not just the celebration of the holiday, but also the story of America itself:
“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth 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.”
Yet, though the above words are some of the strongest in the speech, they are not the point from which it starts. On that day, Douglass knew that the mood of his audience would be celebratory, and so it is with a meditation on the reason for such celebration that he began his speech:
“Oppression makes a wise man mad. Your fathers were wise men, and if they did not go mad, they became restive under this treatment. They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity. With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression. Just here, the idea of a total separation of the colonies from the crown was born! It was a startling idea, much more so, than we, at this distance of time, regard it.”
For Douglass, this “startling idea” of independence held much in common with another idea that seemed so startling to white America at the time: the abolition of chattel slavery. As Douglass reflected, the courage with which the so-called “founding fathers” brought about the “startling idea” of independence made the hypocrisy of the American struggle for liberty that much starker:
“To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers.”
Douglass’s message was clear. The American public could not claim devotion to liberty so long as it denied the very same liberty to those of African descent:
“Fellow-citizens! I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a bye-word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes. Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation’s bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever!”
On Hope
More than a-century-and-a-half after Douglass delivered these words in Rochester, his speech is reflected on and quoted by many, including those who seek to honor its meaning and those who (consciously or subconsciously) seek to use it as a shield against rebuke of their own dealings in white supremacy.
There are those who would seek to neatly contain Douglass’s words within the bubble of his time period—to reflect upon them only as a representation of the past, rather than as a guide for the present and the future.
Yet, to reflect on his words from the position of the former would go against one of the core messages of Douglass’s speech, which turned on the clear understanding that each period in history is defined by injustices that are either maintained by those who take refuge in the status quo or are challenged by those with the courage and wherewithal to do so.
Douglass’s speech was a rebuke of American hypocrisy, but it was not a call for the erasure of the American story of Independence. It was instead a call for its re-narration as a complex event that nevertheless holds the power to help the American public to strive to attain those ideals upon which their country was supposedly founded:
“Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold [the Fourth of July] in perpetual remembrance. I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.
From the round top of your ship of state, dark and threatening clouds may be seen. Heavy billows, like mountains in the distance, disclose to the leeward huge forms of flinty rocks! That bolt drawn, that chain broken, and all is lost. Cling to this day — cling to it, and to its principles, with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight.”
More than 150 years after chattel slavery was ended, there are some who think that the brutality that Douglass denounced in his speech has been similarly concluded. Yet, today’s United States lives with its legacies. The very white supremacy that birthed chattel slavery transformed it into Jim Crow and racial terror lynching before refashioning it into mass incarceration and police brutality.
When confronted with Douglass’s words on how the American legal system stripped Black individuals of their rights and freedoms during his time, it is hard not to see parallels with the legal system of our own time:
“For black men there are neither law, justice, humanity, not religion. 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. The oath of any two villains is sufficient, under this hell-black enactment, to send the most pious and exemplary black man into the remorseless jaws of slavery! His own testimony is nothing. He can bring no witnesses for himself. The minister of American justice is bound by the law to hear but one side; and that side, is the side of the oppressor. Let this damning fact be perpetually told. Let it be thundered around the world, 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, and are bound, in deciding in the case of a man’s liberty, hear only his accusers!”
At the beginning of his speech, Douglass expressed the hope that the “young” America—76-years-old in 1852—still had sufficient flexibility to right its wrongs:
“There is consolation in the thought that America is young. Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely as ever. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. As with rivers so with nations.”
However, the river of America is older today, more embedded, than it was in Douglass’s time. So much of today’s America would be unrecognizable to him—and yet, it is easy to imagine that the continued denial of the humanity of Black individuals in this country would be all too distressingly familiar.
On a Narrative Approach to Justice
What hope is there, then, for a country that seems constantly on the verge of changing its course, only to recede back to the familiar banks of white supremacy?
There is hope enough to start in the model that Douglass set.
He knew that his audience on July 5, 1852, would not be ready to welcome his words. He said them anyway, and interrogated the anticipated calls to temper his tone:
“I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man?”
Douglass reminds us that where the very humanity of Black individuals is concerned, there is nothing to argue. His words make clear that the recognition of Black humanity is not the end goal—it is rather the bare minimum starting point if justice is to be attained:
“Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and cyphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!”
Douglass dug to the very core of what his white American audience knew and yet did not wish to admit:
“There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.”
The strength and vividness of Douglass’s words remind us that calls for argument and perspective-taking, for a more “respectable” tone and a more “logical” way of looking at things, are themselves part and parcel of the status quo. To dismantle systems of oppression thus requires the interrogation of discourses of oppression:
“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it 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; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.”
This has been one reading of Douglass’s speech, “What, to the American Slave, is Your Fourth of July?”
The above is not the only possible reading. Thus, we invite you to reflect on the full speech, which you can read here.
