What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?

From your fathers to your Fourth of July

Douglass spends the first quarter of the speech on the founders, and he means the praise. He calls the signers statesmen, patriots and heroes. He says that for the good they did, he will join the audience in honoring their memory. The pamphlet's first section, headed The Present, then begins with a warning. He quotes the writer Sydney Smith, who said that men praise their fathers mainly to excuse their own faults.

Listen to the pronouns. Through the opening, Douglass keeps saying your fathers, your nation and your national independence. Then he asks outright why he has been called on to speak. Are the principles of the Declaration of Independence extended to us? The answer is no. A few lines later he says it plainly. The pamphlet reads: This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? 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 famous question comes about halfway through. Douglass answers it with a list. To the slave, he says, the celebration is a sham, the boasted liberty an unholy license, and the prayers and hymns mere bombast, fraud and hypocrisy. He adds that no nation on earth is guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than the United States at this very hour.

Why he refuses to argue

Douglass expects an objection. Abolitionists, someone will say, would win more people over if they argued more and denounced less. He answers that there is nothing left to argue. Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? he asks. The slaveholders' own laws already admit it.

His evidence is the law of Virginia. He says the state lists seventy-two crimes that carry the death penalty for a Black man, and only two of them carry it for a white man. Southern states also make it a crime to teach an enslaved person to read. Nobody passes laws like that about animals, he says. When the dogs in the street cannot tell a slave from a brute, he will argue the point.

So he announces a change of method. At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. What the country needs, he says, is not light but fire, not the gentle shower but thunder. The famous question follows directly after this passage.

What he saw from the Baltimore wharves

The section headed The Internal Slave Trade is where Douglass stops speaking about principles and describes what he saw. He asks the audience to picture a trader on the road south with a hundred people in chains. He points out an old man, a young mother with a baby, and a girl of thirteen crying for the mother she has been taken from. Then comes the crack of a whip.

Then he tells them he was born amid such scenes. As a boy he lived on Philpot Street in Fell's Point, Baltimore, and watched slave ships in the harbor waiting for a wind to carry them down Chesapeake Bay. A slave dealer named Austin Woldfolk kept a market at the head of Pratt Street. At midnight, Douglass remembers, he was woken by the footsteps and cries of chained gangs passing the door.

From there he moves to the Fugitive Slave Act, which Congress had passed, he says, less than two years before. The law let slave catchers seize Black people anywhere in the country. Under the law, Douglass says, an American judge got ten dollars for every person he sent into slavery and five when he set one free. He says no fewer than forty Americans had been hunted down and sent into slavery in those two years.

The churches get the longest attack. Douglass names ministers in Buffalo, New York, Auburn, Brooklyn, Boston and Washington who had taught that obeying the Fugitive Slave Act was a Christian duty. He also names exceptions: Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn, Samuel J. May of Syracuse, and the Reverend R. R. Raymond, who was on the platform beside him.

The Constitution as a Glorious Liberty Document

The last section is headed The Constitution, and it restates a break with his old allies. William Lloyd Garrison and his followers taught that the Constitution was a proslavery document. Robert S. Levine notes that Douglass rejected that view when he left Garrison's camp in 1850.

In Rochester he says so from the platform. Read the Constitution as it ought to be read, he argues, and it is a Glorious Liberty Document. He asks why, if the framers meant to protect slavery, the words slavery, slaveholding and slave appear nowhere in it. He names the writers he thinks have proved the case: Lysander Spooner, William Goodell, Samuel E. Sewall and Gerrit Smith.

He admits he has run out of time to make the full argument. Then he closes where he began. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope, he says. Steamships, the telegraph and trade are tying the world together, he says, and no nation can hide its abuses any longer. The pamphlet ends with a poem by Garrison, The Triumph of Freedom.

The man he quoted, and the passport to France

The speech has nothing to do with Paris, but one name in it leads there. Arguing that ordinary citizens have the right to read the Constitution for themselves, Douglass cites Ex-Vice-President Dallas. The man he meant was George M. Dallas, vice president of the United States from 1845 to 1849. Dallas, Douglass says, had called the Constitution plain and intelligible, meant for the home-bred understandings of ordinary citizens.

Seven years later the same man was the American minister in London, a post he held from 1856 to 1861. In 1859 Douglass was in England and wanted to visit France. He wrote to Dallas for a passport. Dallas refused it, on the ground that Douglass was not a citizen of the United States. The French minister in London sent him a permit to enter France without delay.

Douglass did not reach Paris until the winter of 1886–87. Writing about that journey in 1892, he came back to Dallas. The man was now dead and generally forgotten, Douglass wrote, but he himself had lived to see himself everywhere recognized as an American citizen. The full story of that visit is on Frederick Douglass's own page.