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July
4, 2003
Freedom, Race and
Democracy in America
What is the
4th of July to a Slave?
By FREDERICK DOUGLASS
[A Speech to the Rochester Ladies'
Anti-Slavery Society on July 5, 1852]
Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why
am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I
represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great
principles of political freedom and natural justice, embodies
in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I,
therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national
altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude
for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Would to God, both for your sakes and
ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned
to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden
easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation's
sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the
claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such
priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not
give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee,
when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I
am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently
speak, and the "lame man leap as an hart."
But such is not the state of the case.
I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not
included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence
only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings
in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The
rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence,
bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The
sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes
and death to me.
This Fourth 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
today?
FELLOW CITIZENS, above your national,
tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions!--whose
chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, 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 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 judgement
is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder,
shall not confess to be right and just.
But I fancy I hear some of my audience
say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother
abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public
mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade
more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to
succeed.
But, I submit, where all is plain there
is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed
would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the
people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove
that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody
doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the
enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when
they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are
72 crimes in the state of Virginia, which, if committed by a
black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the
punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject
a white man to the like punishment.
What is this but the acknowledgment that
the slave is a moral, intellectual and responsible being? The
manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact
that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding,
under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to
read or to write.
When you can point to any such laws,
in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to
argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets,
when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when
the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable
to distinguish the slave from a brute, then will I argue with
you that the slave is a man!
For the present, it is enough to affirm
the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that,
while we are plowing, 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 ciphering, 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 hillside, 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?...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 who 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.
At a time like this, scorching irony,
not convincing argument, is needed. Oh! Had I the ability, and
could 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. 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 the United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will,
roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World,
travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when
you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday
practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for
revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without
a rival.
Fellow citizens, the murderous traffic
[the slave trade] is today in active operation in this boasted
republic. In the solitude of my spirit, I see clouds of dust
raised on the highways of the South; I see the bleeding footsteps;
I hear the doleful wail of fettered humanity, on the way to the
slave markets, where the victims are to be sold like horses,
sheep, and swine, knocked off to the highest bidder. There I
see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust,
caprice and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men. My soul
sickens at the sight.
Fellow citizens! 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 byword 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!
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