The Debate Over Slavery

“What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Frederick Douglass July 5, 1852

Mr. President, Friends and Fellow Citizens:

. . . the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National

Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to

the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of

your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act,

and that day. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national

life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old . . .

. . .

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? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And

let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes,

lowering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that

nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and

woe-smitten people!

. . .

Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of

millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more

intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. 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. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day,

and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. 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! 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. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to

be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this

occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which

is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and

trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can

command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery — the great sin and shame of

America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;” I will use the severest language I can

command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not

blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right

and just.

. . .

For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not

astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting and reaping, using all kinds of

mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in

metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and

cyphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers,

doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are

engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California,

capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living,

moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children,

and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully

for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!

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? Is

that a question for Republicans? 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? How should I look to-day, in the

presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a

natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively, and positively, negatively, and

affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to

your understanding. — There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not

know that slavery is wrong for him.

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? No! I will not. I have better employments for my time and strength

than such arguments would imply.

What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not

establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the

thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a

proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is passed . . .

The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience 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.

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. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy

license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and

heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty

and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and

thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast,

fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would

disgrace a nation of savages. 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.

. . .

Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are

flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and

your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the

two great political parties), is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the

enslavement of three millions of your countrymen. . . .

Fellow-citizens! I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. 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. It destroys your moral power abroad; it

corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name

a hissing, and a bye-word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your

government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. It fetters

your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education; it fosters

pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth

that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes.

Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation’s bosom; the

venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love

of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty

millions crush and destroy it forever!

Source: Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner

(Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999), 188-206.