Pasadena City College What To The American Slave Is Your 4th Of July Analysis READ THE EXCERPT TITLED “WHAT TO THE SLAVE IS THE FOURTH OF JULY?” BY FREDERI

Pasadena City College What To The American Slave Is Your 4th Of July Analysis READ THE EXCERPT TITLED “WHAT TO THE SLAVE IS THE FOURTH OF JULY?” BY FREDERICK DOUGLASS. WRITE ABOUT ANY 10 OBSERVATIONS OR INSIGHTS THAT STOOD OUT TO YOU FROM THE SPEECH AND EXPLAIN WHY NEXT TO EACH.ADD A SUMMARY WHERE YOU REFLECT ON WHAT NEW HISTORY YOU LEARNED BY READING THIS DOCUMENT.CONTEXT: IN 1852, DOUGLASS WAS INVITED BY THE FEMALE LEADERS AND MEMBERS OF THE ROCHESTER, NEW YORK ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY TO SPEAK ABOUT THE MEANING OF FREEDOM. THE AUDIENCE WAS A GENERAL AUDIENCE OF NORTHERN MEN AND WOMEN EXPECTING TO CELEBRATE THE 4TH OF JULY. KEEP IN MIND THESE ARE JUST A FEW EXCERPTS FROM A LONGER SPEECH – YOU CAN ACCESS THE ENTIRE SPEECH ONLINE. WHAT FOLLOWS ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT PASSAGES. “What To The American Slave Is Your
4th Of July?”
FREDERICK DOUGLASS SPEECH
July 4, 1852
Independence Day Speech
at Rochester, NY
Frederick Douglass (A former slave himself, Frederick Douglass
became a leader in the 19th Century Abolitionist Movement)
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Fellow citizens, pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here
today? 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?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be
truthfully returned to these questions. Then would my task be light, and my burden easy
and delightful. For who is there so cold that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who
so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge
such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the
hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs?
I am not that man. 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. I say it with a sad sense of 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
F. Douglass 4th of July Speech 7/4/1852 p.1
F. Douglass 4th of July Speech 7/4/1852 p.2
brought life 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 today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you, that it
is dangerous to copy the example of a nation (Babylon) whose crimes, towering up to
heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in
irrecoverable ruin.
Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of
millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable
by the jubilant shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not 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 here, 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
Fourth 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 slave-holder,
shall not confess to be right and just.
But I fancy I hear some 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? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The
slave-holders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government.
F. Douglass 4th of July Speech 7/4/1852 p.3
They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are
seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man (no matter
how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of these same
crimes will subject a white man to like punishment.
What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and
responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that
Southern statute books are covered with enactments, forbidding, under severe fines and
penalties, the teaching of the slave to read and write. When you can point to any such laws
in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the
slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your
hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the
slave from a brute, then I will argue with you that the slave is a man!
For the present it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not
astonishing that, while we are plowing, 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 ciphering, acting as
clerks, merchants, and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets,
authors, editors, orators, and teachers; that we are engaged in all the enterprises common
to other men — digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep
and cattle on the hillside, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as
husbands, wives, and children, and above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian
God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave — we are called upon
to prove that we are men?
Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? That he is the rightful owner
of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery?
Is that a question for republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and
argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the
principle of justice, hard to understand? How should I look today in the presence of
Americans, dividing and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to
freedom, speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively? To do so
would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. There is
not a man beneath the canopy of heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him.
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 employment for my time and strength than such arguments would
imply.
F. Douglass 4th of July Speech 7/4/1852 p.4
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.
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. Oh! had I the
ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would today 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 denounced.
What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him
more than all other days of 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 shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock; 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 of the earth guilty of practices more
shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.
Go 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 everyday practices of this nation, and you will say
with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a
rival.
Frederick Douglass – July 4, 1852
Source: http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/douglass.htm
See also http://www.juneteenth.us/douglass/index.html

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