It is, however, a notable fact that, while so much execration is poured out by Americans upon those engaged in the foreign slave-trade, the men engaged in the slave-trade between the states pass without condemnation, and their business is deemed honorable.Behold the practical operation of this internal slave-trade, the American slave-trade, sustained by American politics and America religion. [16] Additionally, it awarded $10 to a judge who sentenced an individual to return to enslavement, while awarding only $5 if the claim was dismissed. Not for thieves and robbers, enemies of society, merely, but for men guilty of no crime. Without this fight, the liberty of an American citizen would be as insecure as that of a Frenchman. Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? [5] Many copies of one section of it, beginning in paragraph 32, have been circulated online. 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 be understood? Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? It is fashionable to do so; but there was a time when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried mens souls. How digital misinformation may keep you from a good nights sleep, Study finds surgical patients with addiction issues may be at greater risk for complications, including sudden cardiac death after anesthesia, Khalil Gibran Muhammad says College Board needs to stand firm behind curriculum, Chief counsel of respected mid-70s Senate inquiry into improper federal investigations says credibility of oversight function at stake, 2023 The President and Fellows of Harvard College, Photo courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, By Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite Harvard Staff Writer, Frederick Douglass delivered his famous speech What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? in 1852, drawing parallels between the Revolutionary War and the fight to abolish slavery. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! There is not time now to argue the constitutional question at length nor have I the ability to discuss it as it ought to be discussed. [10] Douglass had spoken at Corinthian Hall in the past. Is slavery among them? [Under the Act] it became illegal not to arrest and return runaway slaves. He celebrates the efforts of the founding fathers of America for fighting back against the tyranny of England.[18]. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. Where these are, man is not sacred. 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 right of the hunter to his prey stands superior to the right of marriage, and to all rights in this republic, the rights of God included! Random House. At the same time, we need to be studying the history of slavery and racism in this country so we can build policies, practices, and procedures that address the present problems with those historical inequities in mind. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. The fiat of the Almighty, Let there be Light, has not yet spent its force. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? 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! GAZETTE: This is your second year as host of Reading Frederick Douglass Together in Somerville. In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. I am not that man. 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. Now, there are certain rules of interpretation, for the proper understanding of all legal instruments. 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. Great Britain, and many other countries of that time, had already abolished slavery from its territories. More than 150 years later, Keidrick Roy, a doctoral student in American Studies at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and a U.S. Air Force veteran, will host a virtual community reading and discussion of the storied speech at the Somerville Museum on Thursday as part of the annual state-wide MassHumanities program Reading Frederick Douglass Together.. Must we allow symbols of racism on public land? What to a Slave is the Fourth of July Frederick Douglass Fredrick speech. one of the most important speeches of the 19th century? Because the church stood behind the decision to abolish the selling and buying of people, so did the rest of the country. I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it. The testimony of Senator Breese, Lewis Cass, and many others that might be named, who are everywhere esteemed as sound lawyers, so regard the constitution. Rhetoricians R. L. Heath and D. Waymer refer to this as the "paradox of the positive" because it highlights how something positive and meant to be positive can also exclude individuals. 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. They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny, and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke, put together, have done! There is blasphemy in the thought. In an 1868 speech, he said, No man should be excluded from the government on the basis of his color, no woman on account of her sex. In speaking of the American church, however, let it be distinctly understood that I mean the great mass of the religious organizations of our land. ROY:One of the things that Douglass writings shows us is that he believed in amplifying a variety of voices. In the second part of the speech, Douglass turns to the present and his own feelings about the 4th of July . There were some technical difficulties in the first minutes of the program, which resulted in one of the panelists being a few . Let this damning fact be perpetually told. They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done. They that can, may; I cannot. In 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act had passed Congress as part of the broader Compromise of 1850. 2. In "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" Frederick Douglass sought not only to convince people of the wrongfulness of slavery but also to make abolition more acceptable to Northern whites. Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. Douglass also stresses the view that slaves and free Americans are equal in nature. True Christians, according to Douglass, should not stand idly by while the rights and liberty of others are stripped away. By that most foul and fiendish of all human decrees, the liberty and person of every man are put in peril. My business, if I have any here to-day, is with the present. He had delivered a series of seven lectures about slavery there in the winter of 185051. Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to. I hold that every American citizen has a fight to form an opinion of the constitution, and to propagate that opinion, and to use all honorable means to make his opinion the prevailing one. On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. The time for such argument is passed.At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. I am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. But its quite another to change the way you see yourself and to grow into a person deeply committed to long-term interracial coalition building. You discourse eloquently on the dignity of labor; yet, you sustain a system which, in its very essence, casts a stigma upon labor. He further says, the Constitution, in its words, is plain and intelligible, and is meant for the home-bred, unsophisticated understandings of our fellow-citizens. Douglass argues that religion is the center of the problem but also the main solution to it. It was fashionable, hundreds of years ago, for the children of Jacob to boast, we have Abraham to our father, when they had long lost Abrahams faith and spirit. Heavy billows, like mountains in the distance, disclose to the leeward huge forms of flinty rocks! On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.I have detained my audience entirely too long already. After this, he turns his attention to the church. welcome anything! GAZETTE: What is the historical setting for this speech, and why did Douglass focus on the Fourth of July? [4], Noted for its biting irony and bitter rhetoric, and acute textual analysis of the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Christian Bible, the speech is among the most widely known of all of Douglass's writings. What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? Feeling themselves harshly and unjustly treated by the home government, your fathers, like men of honesty, and men of spirit, earnestly sought redress. The accepted time with God and his cause is the ever-living now. It is called (in contradistinction to the foreign slave-trade) the internal slave trade. It is, probably, called so, too, in order to divert from it the horror with which the foreign slave-trade is contemplated. 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. By an act of the American Congress, not yet two years old, slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form. 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. He faults America for utter hypocrisy and betrayal of those values in maintaining the institution of slavery. In his speech, "The Hypocrisy of American Slavery . The charter of our liberties, which every citizen has a personal interest in understanding thoroughly. 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. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. 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. Initially mentored by William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass be warned! 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. Your lawmakers have commanded all good citizens to engage in this hellish sport. 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. 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. 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 everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.Take the American slave-trade, which, we are told by the papers, is especially prosperous just now. 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. Douglass says that if the residents of America believe that slaves are "men",[20]:342 they should be treated as such. 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. [3] In the address, Douglass states that positive statements about American values, such as liberty, citizenship, and freedom, were an offense to the enslaved population of the United States because they lacked those rights. The British accomplished this through religion or more specifically, the church. Where these go, may also go the merciless slave-hunter. 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! GAZETTE: What is something you have discovered about Douglass while researching this speech and his work more broadly that people might be surprised to learn? In July of 1852, Frederick Douglass prepares a speech known as The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro. I lived on Philpot Street, Fells Point, Baltimore, and have watched from the wharves, the slave ships in the Basin, anchored from the shore, with their cargoes of human flesh, waiting for favorable winds to waft them down the Chesapeake. So its important that our city and our society are outraged by the recent murders of unarmed black people. in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines! He implored the Rochester, N.Y., audience to think about the ongoing oppression of Black Americans during a holiday celebrating freedom. 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. The manhood of the slave is conceded. Senator Berrien tell us that the Constitution is the fundamental law, that which controls all others. 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. On the 2d of July, 1776, the old Continental Congress, to the dismay of the lovers of ease, and the worshipers of property, clothed that dreadful idea with all the authority of national sanction. GAZETTE: Why is it important to do this kind of community-building work at a local level? Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. In this collection, students will review the life of Frederick Douglass and learn about one of his most famous speeches, "The Meaning of Fourth of July for the Negro" (it is also commonly referred to as "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July). I have better employments for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.What, then, remains to be argued? They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity.For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! Your fathers esteemed the English Government as the home government; and England as the fatherland. There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, caprice and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men. His own testimony is nothing. Frederick Douglass delivered his famous speech at the Corinthian Hall in Rochester, NY, on July. "Meaning of the Fourth of July to a Negro" by Bridget Durham The Fourth of July is a day of celebration for many Americans because on July 4th, 1776, America declared independence from Britain and said that everyone was free under the US government, right? 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. 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! It is a slander upon their memory, at least, so I believe. 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