In 1852, Frederick Douglass Fourth of July Speech In his hometown of Rochester, New York, Douglass praised the Framers of the Constitution and the nation they built, then spoke of the cruel hypocrisy of celebrating American independence while millions of people were still in slavery that they had only recently escaped. He then delivered a scathing complaint to white Americans in the second person:
“What is the Fourth of July to the American slave? … To him your celebration is a sham, your boasted freedom an immoral license, your national greatness an inflated vanity… No nation on earth is at this moment committing more shocking and bloody acts than the people of this United States of America.”
If anyone had reason to decry that America was irretrievably lost, it would be a man like Douglass, who had been legally treated as property for the first two decades of his life. And yet at the end of his speech he movingly expressed his faith in “the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the excellence of our American institutions.”
He had the wisdom to distinguish between the enduring ideals of the Founding Fathers and the human wickedness that perverted them. To Douglass, these ideals were worth defending. Indeed, they were what gave him hope that the abolitionist movement would soon triumph.
Ten years later, with the American Civil War raging, Douglas delivered another speech on Independence Day, July 4. This time, he used the third person plural, echoing both his countrymen and the Founding Fathers, describing the federal effort as “a continuation of the tremendous struggle begun by your fathers and mine eighty-six years ago.”
From the start of the war, Douglas had urged President Lincoln to allow black soldiers to fight in the Union Army, and when this was recognized with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, two of Douglas’s sons were among the 200,000 black Americans who enlisted.
In less than two years, America will celebrate its 250th anniversary. As we reflect on this milestone during this particularly turbulent time in our history, let us reflect on what divides us and, like Douglass, try to discern the units that they might hide.
