Frederick Douglass on slavery and the Fourth of July
In 1852 Frederick Douglass gave a Fourth of July oration to the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester, New York. Douglass, born the son of a slave in 1818, escaped slavery in 1838 and lived in fear of capture and re-enslavement until he was legally emancipated in 1846. The speech is one of the great acts of bearing witness to the horror of American slavery.
It is one of the great speeches of all time—eloquent, powerful, burning with rage. So rather than try to replicate it, I really just want to encourage those who don’t know it to read it (or listen to an excerpt) for themselves, for what it tells us about America’s relationship to its ‘founding fathers’ and the questions it inevitably throws up about our own relationship to American history—and the history of American slavery in particular. But I can’t help saying a few things.
Douglass begins, remarkably, with fulsome and extensive praise of the founding fathers, their achievement in throwing off the oppressive English crown, and their work to forge a land of their own founded on principles of freedom. ‘Oppression,’ he says, ‘makes a wise man mad’, and the founding fathers’ defiant resistance to it should not be belittled. Douglass is, he underscores, ‘not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too’.
But having built up the significance of the Fourth of July as an anniversary of these laudable achievements, Douglass then brings his audience crashing down from all this celebratory encomium as he turns to the real message of his speech. He declares that he is ‘not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary’; ‘this Fourth of July is yours, not mine.’ Black Americans who are, or (like Douglass) were, enslaved have no part in the Fourth of July; to them it is instead a hideous and cruel affront.
The true heart of the speech is Douglass’s moral case against slavery. I say ‘case’, not ‘argument’, since, as Douglass forcefully emphasizes, there is no such thing as arguing for or against slavery: there is no such thing as a debate to be had here. The moral nerve of Douglass’s case is that ‘where all is plain there is nothing to be argued.’ ‘Must I undertake,’ he asks rhetorically, ‘to prove that the slave is a man?’
In fact everyone has already arrived at the conclusion, rendering all ratiocination on the matter redundant: ‘There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.’ What is more the contention that there could be any debate about the rightness or wrongness of slavery in the minds of those involved in the slave business (and Douglass’s speech contains an excoriating and harrowing account of the ‘internal slave trade’ of the United States in this period) is shown up to be totally bogus. That terrible punishments are inflicted on slaves when they transgress the norms of horrific submission and crushing labour imposed on them is enough to prove that their moral status is implicitly accepted. It’s just false that anyone ever managed to think of slaves as not truly human: consequently, there is no such thing as failing to recognize the evil of slavery when you see it.
The following statement perhaps epitomizes Douglass’s chief lesson.
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. […] We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling 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.
These words continue, ever since first reading Douglass’s speech, to ring violently and resoundingly in my ears. It seems apt to invoke them on this Fourth of July, as the Black Lives Matter movement possesses a newfound momentum. Douglass’s insistence on the rift between those who are included ‘within the pale of this glorious anniversary’ of stirring declarations of supposed universality and inclusion, resonates. So does the insistence that, when it comes to rising up against oppression, it is not ‘debate’ that is wanted but a rage expressive of the humanity in us all.
