He wrote a glowing letter of encouragement to Harriet Tubman, which served as the preface to Sarah Bradfords 1869 biography about Tubmans life. ROY: The better we get to know the people that we live with, that we work around, that we see at the coffee shop, and the more we talk about these important racial issues with one another, the easier it will be to heal our divided communities. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future, Douglass said. If any man in this assembly thinks differently from me in this matter, and feels able to disprove my statements, I will gladly confront him at any suitable time and place he may select.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.At the very moment that they are thanking God for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, and for the right to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences, 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. [9][10] He had previously lived in Boston, but did not want his newspaper to interfere with sales of The Liberator, published by William Lloyd Garrison. They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation, with droves of human stock. Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? How can we sing the Lords song in a strange land? Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? In a Fourth of July holiday special, we hear the words of Frederick Douglass. How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? The Lords of Buffalo, the Springs of New York, the Lathrops of Auburn, the Coxes and Spencers of Brooklyn, the Gannets and Sharps of Boston, the Deweys of Washington, and other great religious lights of the land have, in utter denial of the authority of Him by whom the professed to he called to the ministry, deliberately taught us, against the example or the Hebrews and against the remonstrance of the Apostles, they teach that we ought to obey mans law before the law of God.My spirit wearies of such blasphemy; and how such men can be supported, as the standing types and representatives of Jesus Christ, is a mystery which I leave others to penetrate. The 4th of July is the first great fact in your nation's historythe very ring-bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny. Douglass vividly describes the conditions under which those enslaved are bought and sold; he says that they are treated as no more than animals. With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression. Albert Barnes but uttered what the common sense of every man at all observant of the actual state of the case will receive as truth, when he declared that There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it.Let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday school, the conference meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations of the land array their immense powers against slavery and slave-holding; and the whole system of crime and blood would be scattered to the winds; and that they do not do this involves them in the most awful responsibility of which the mind can conceive.In prosecuting the anti-slavery enterprise, we have been asked to spare the church, to spare the ministry; but how, we ask, could such a thing be done? we wept when we remembered Zion. weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn! What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? ROY: The event that were doing in Somerville puts pressure on whitewashed conceptions of the Fourth of July, as many people to this day still view it as a celebration of American food, fireworks, and freedom. Youll never experience a black hole, but Avi Loeb can help you imagine one, We need individual events like reading Douglass, but we also need to be thinking about ways to extend this conversation over the long term., Level of cannabis use could determine post-op outcomes, Historian says Fla. dispute shows why AP class in African American studies is needed, Why Church Committee alums urged new House panel to avoid partisanship, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, Rewriting history to include all of it this time. Senator Berrien tell us that the Constitution is the fundamental law, that which controls all others. welcome anything! [8] Frederick Douglass had moved to Rochester in 1847 in order to publish his newspaper The North Star. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. From the round top of your ship of state, dark and threatening clouds may be seen. 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. The speech 'What to the Slaves is the Fourth of July' projected the American Day of Independence from a slave's point of view and brought to light the horrific experiences of slavery. The accepted time with God and his cause is the ever-living now. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the lame man leap as an hart.But, such is not the state of the case. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. In 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act had passed Congress as part of the broader Compromise of 1850. Genius is the ultimate source of music knowledge, created by scholars like you who share facts and insight about the songs and artists they love. Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. . Without this fight, the liberty of an American citizen would be as insecure as that of a Frenchman. 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? A John Knox would be seen at every church door, and heard from every pulpit, and Fillmore would have no more quarter than was shown by Knox, to the beautiful, but treacherous queen Mary of Scotland. there is no matter in respect to which, the people of the North have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon, as that of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution. My business, if I have any here to-day, is with the present. The Fugitive Slave Law makes mercy to them a crime; and bribes the judge who tries them. Summary: "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" In "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?", otherwise known as "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro," Frederick Douglassoutlines a careful argument against the institution of slavery and more specifically the Fugitive Slave Act. See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes! The charter of our liberties, which every citizen has a personal interest in understanding thoroughly. What would be thought of an instrument, drawn up, legally drawn up, for the purpose of entitling the city of Rochester to a track of land, in which no mention of land was made? Your President, your Secretary of State, your lords, nobles, and ecclesiastics, enforce, as a duty you owe to your free and glorious country, and to your God, that you do this accursed thing. From the slave prison to the ship, they are usually driven in the darkness of night; for since the antislavery agitation, a certain caution is observed.In the deep still darkness of midnight, I have been often aroused by the dead heavy footsteps, and the piteous cries of the chained gangs that passed our door. I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. This truth is not a doubtful one. You know what is a swine-drover? your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery." Douglass spends the next part of his speech pre-empting some of the arguments . The fate of many a slave has depended upon the turn of a single card; and many a child has been snatched from the arms of its mother by bargains arranged in a state of brutal drunkenness.The flesh-mongers gather up their victims by dozens, and drive them, chained, to the general depot at Baltimore. The speech "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" was delivered in the decade preceding the American Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865 and achieved the abolition of slavery. He became a leader in the abolitionist movement, which sought to end the practice of slavery, before and during the Civil War. Frederick Douglass, ca 1855, Metropolitan Museum of Art. 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. You glory in your refinement and your universal education yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of a nationa system begun in avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines! Not everyone. Douglass believed that slavery could be eliminated with the support of the church, and also with the reexamination of what the Bible was actually saying. To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria, and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and body-guards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. We need individual events like reading Douglass, but we also need to be thinking about ways to extend this conversation over the long term. Ever ready to drink, to treat, and to gamble. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! This trade is one of the peculiarities of American institutions. The inaugural meeting between six women took place in Corinthian Hall on August 20. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot and kill. We are met on the threshold of our efforts for the redemption of the slave, by the church and ministry of the country, in battle arrayed against us; and we are compelled to fight or flee. 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. Sign up for daily emails to get the latest Harvardnews. He argues that though the international slave trade is correctly decried as abhorrent, the people of the United States are far less vocal in their opposition to domestic slave trade. What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I take it, therefore, that it is not presumption in a private citizen to form an opinion of that instrument.Now, take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. The4th of July is the first great fact in your nation's history the very ringbolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destinyPride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetualremembrance. Of this sort of change they are always strongly in favor. He says that, if anything, many churches actually stand behind slavery and support the continued existence of the institution. Did this law concern the mint, anise, and cuminabridge the fight to sing psalms, to partake of the sacrament, or to engage in any of the ceremonies of religion, it would be smitten by the thunder of a thousand pulpits. Further, if this demand were not complied with, another Scotland would be added to the history of religious liberty, and the stern old Covenanters would be thrown into the shade. These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers. He faults America for utter hypocrisy and betrayal of those values in maintaining the institution of slavery. 15 November's Documents in Detail webinar was about Frederick Douglass's What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, his oration delivered on 5 July 1862. Where these are, man is not sacred. There is blasphemy in the thought. Space is comparatively annihilated. In several states, this trade is a chief source of wealth. [10] Douglass had spoken at Corinthian Hall in the past. I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more. Not fewer than forty Americans have, within the past two years, been hunted down and, without a moments warning, hurried away in chains, and consigned to slavery and excruciating torture. Douglass argues that religion is the center of the problem but also the main solution to it. It is carried on in all the large towns and cities in one-half of this confederacy; and millions are pocketed every year, by dealers in this horrid traffic. Oppression makes a wise man mad. In the end, Douglass wants to keep his hope and faith in humanity high. Your broad republican domain is hunting ground for men. That is a question Frederick Douglass posed 169 Julys ago in a speech to a group of abolitionists, one that's become perhaps his most famous. When a child, my soul was often pierced with a sense of its horrors. This act forced citizens to report people who had escaped their enslavement and escaped to a free state, under punishment of a fine or imprisonment. Tell me citizens, WHERE, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Sydney Smith tells us that men seldom eulogize the wisdom and virtues of their fathers, but to excuse some folly or wickedness of their own. Is it at the gateway? You shed tears over fallen Hungary, and make the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen and orators, till your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her cause against her oppressors; but, in regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce the strictest silence, and would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares to make those wrongs the subject of public discourse! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. The founding fathers left black people and women out of these rights for "everyone." By that act, Mason and Dixons line has been obliterated; New York has become as Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women, and children as slaves remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of the whole United States. Who can reason on such a proposition? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? 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. that he is the rightful owner of his own body? Kate Harris Date Published September 28, 2016 Last Modified November 14, 2021 Description. that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. It has been denounced with burning words, from the high places of the nation, as an execrable traffic. 2. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. What would be thought of an instrument, drawn up, legally drawn up, for the purpose of entitling the city of Rochester to a track of land, in which no mention of land was made? No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. Keidrick Roy, the host of the virtual reading event. Not for thieves and robbers, enemies of society, merely, but for men guilty of no crime. had I the ability, and could I reach the nations ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. The Oratory of Fr. ROY:One of the things that Douglass writings shows us is that he believed in amplifying a variety of voices. 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 mans liberty, hear only his accusers!In glaring violation of justice, in shameless disregard of the forms of administering law, in cunning arrangement to entrap the defenseless, and in diabolical intent, this Fugitive Slave Law stands alone in the annals of tyrannical legislation. Repetition Parallel structure ethos pathos Analogy Simile/Metaphor Rhetorical Question logos Part 2 - Slavery in America Fellow citizens, pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called uponto speak here today? [6] Due to this and the variant titles given to it in various places, and the fact that it is called a July Fourth Oration but was actually delivered on July 5, some confusion has arisen about the date and contents of the speech. The time was when such could be done. There should be no shoulder that does not bear the burden of the government. He had a prophetic vision for the future that he was always trying to work toward. He thinks they were extremely intelligent, and the thinks it is admirable that when they realized they were oppressed by Britain, they rebelled. 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. 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.What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? [4], The speech "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" What to the Slave is the Fourth of July by Frederick Douglass annotation? Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands. O! No! ROY: Douglass wrote the speech in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which effectively extended the reach of slave power in the South throughout the rest of the country. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, lowering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. They strip the love of God of its beauty, and leave the throng of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. was delivered in the decade preceding the American Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865 and achieved the abolition of slavery. ARI . The evil that men do, lives after them, The good is oft-interred with their bones. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. When a sufficient number have been collected here, a ship is chartered, for the purpose of conveying the forlorn crew to Mobile, or to New Orleans. Douglass referred not only to the captivity of enslaved people, but to the merciless exploitation and the cruelty and torture that slaves were subjected to in the United States. Douglass denounces the churches for betraying their own biblical and Christian values. GAZETTE: What is the historical setting for this speech, and why did Douglass focus on the Fourth of July? 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 hypocrisya thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. sanction. Need I tell you that the Jews are not the only people who built the tombs of the prophets, and garnished the sepulchres of the righteous? the feeling of despair in the face of obstacles. That trade has long since been denounced by this government, as piracy. But, with that blindness which seems to be the unvarying characteristic of tyrants, since Pharaoh and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea. You may rejoice, I must mourn. 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