What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?

This morning some friends and I quietly launched an unusual experiment in nonviolent transformation - one solitary, solemn, silent soul, dressed in black, veiled, anonymous, the beginning of a 40 day procession for reparations, walking through four Native American sites and five African American killing sites on the streets of Oakland and Berkeley. Parts of Frederick Douglass' "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" speech were read.  I had not heard of this speech before.  Perhaps you have not either.  Apparently many consider it "the best Fourth of July speech in American history."  See what you think. 

Pace e bene con affetto

Lorin

The Best Fourth of July Speech in American History

James West Davidson

…  Elizabeth Cady Stanton vividly recalled the first time she heard Douglass address a crowd. He stood over 6 feet tall, “like an African prince, majestic in his wrath. Around him sat the great antislavery orators of the day, earnestly watching the effect of his eloquence on that immense audience, that laughed and wept by turns, completely carried away by the wondrous gifts of his pathos and humor. On this occasion, all the other speakers seemed tame after Frederick Douglass.”

(Four years later, on July 5, 1852 ) in Rochester, Douglass stalked his largely white audience with exquisite care, taking them by stealth. He began by providing what many listeners might not have expected from a notorious abolitionist: a fulsome paean to the Fourth and the founding generation. The day brought forth “demonstrations of joyous enthusiasm,” he told them, for the signers of the Declaration were “brave men. They were great men too—great enough to give fame to a great age.” Jefferson’s very words echoed in Douglass’s salute: “Your fathers staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, on the cause of their country … ”

Your fathers. That pronoun signaled the slightest shift in the breeze. But Douglass continued cordially. “Friends and citizens, I need not enter further into the causes which led to this anniversary. Many of you understand them better than I do.” Then another step back: “That is a branch of knowledge in which you feel, perhaps, a much deeper interest than your speaker.”

Now (his) dry humor was edging into view: accompanied, no doubt, by that peculiar twist of (his) mouth. As a people, Americans were never shy about proclaiming “the facts which make in their favor,” Douglass noted; indeed, bragging about their reputation was often deemed a national virtue. It might equally be accounted a national vice, he continued slyly; but in deference to that habit, he pledged to leave any further praise of the Revolution to “other gentlemen whose claim to have been regularly descended [from the Founding Fathers] will be less likely to be disputed than mine!”

Then he got to the point. It was all well and good to sing the praises of past heroes; but his business, Douglass insisted, “if I have any here to-day, is with the present.” Those who praised the hard-won deeds of the founders had no right to do so unless they too were ready to work for the cause of liberty. “You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence.”

Then he threw down one question after another, each white-hot as a brand from the burning: “Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? 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? … 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 to-day?”

Even the stoutest anti-slavery advocate must have quailed. Many in the audience, Douglass noted, would no doubt have preferred him to act less as an agitator and more as rational persuader. But what reasoned argument remained to be made? “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? … To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding.

“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? …

“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, 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.”

Yet for all these justly heaped coals of fire, Douglass’s peroration also offered hope. “I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery.” He embraced once more “the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions”—no doubt because, like Whitman, he wished “to lead America”—to make the people rage, weep, and hate the injustices that to him seemed so clear; and to desire the extension of freedom to all Americans.

His task must have seemed nearly hopeless at a time when the new Fugitive Slave Act, put in place by the Compromise of 1850, allowed Southern planters to pursue runaway slaves in the free states—slaves like him—and even forced Northerners to aid in that pursuit. As a devout Christian, it particularly galled Douglass that so many Northern ministers refused to join the abolitionist cause. So in reading his words, we must understand that it was not merely a facile rhetorical device when he asked listeners whether they meant to mock him, in asking him to deliver an Independence Day oration. In a sense, deep in his bones, he was truly offended.

Yet he did deliver the address, in a manner fiery and uncompromising yet patriotic and uplifting. Has there ever been another Independence Day speech to match it?

In the end, the promise of the Declaration could not be delivered without force of arms. The contradictions between freedom and slavery were etched so deeply into the nation that no orator’s tongue could resolve them. Still, Douglass called down the storm, whirlwind, and earthquake in the attempt, and his oration deserves a place of honor in the American canon. It would please the wrathful prince to receive the recognition that is his due; though he would surely be careful to accept it only through faintly pursed lips. And then, with (his) tight smile, he might wonder if we too would be rash enough to ask him to speak on our Fourth.

What would he say? Insist, no doubt, that we not merely enshrine the deeds of the Revolution under glass: “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.” Celebrating the deeds of our forefathers is a hollow sham if we fail to ask how we can work to extend the Declaration’s ideals in our own time. The protests in Ferguson, Missouri, the riots in Baltimore, and the shooting in a Charleston sanctuary all demonstrate that true freedom and equality remain works in progress.

But along with censure Douglass might offer hope: that the deeds and principles of the past, when set beside the tragedies of the present, might inspire a way forward. The shock and revulsion brought on by the Charleston shootings, combined with the magnanimity and forbearance of the victims’ families, have pushed a wide swath of the American public to reconsider the meaning of potent political symbols that have loomed so long over the national debate on liberty, equality, and race. Douglass never gave up hope that the spoken word could turn minds and hearts—on the Fourth of July as well as on the fifth. Neither should we.