Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 gave Republicans the White House and was followed by the secession of 11 Southern states. In the following decade, the fragile consensus between American slave states and free states collapsed, making the country’s breakup inevitable and accelerating the rise of the new, anti-slavery Republican party. “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 denunciation 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 that would disgrace a nation of savages.”īut his speech ended with a prediction that slavery would not last, that its banishment in England and elsewhere would inevitably spread. “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim,” Douglass said.
His July 4 address (actually given on July 5) was notable in part for how he separated the slave from the holiday itself. Blight, a Yale University professor and leading slavery scholar whose biography “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” is coming out in October.ĭouglass was in his 30s when he spoke in Rochester’s Corinthian Hall, and seven years earlier had published the best-selling “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,” an extraordinary account of his time in bondage and escape from Maryland to New York that is still widely taught. “When you look at the trajectory of those speeches you see one of the most transformative eras in American history,” says David W.
Subsequent and lesser known speeches in 18 track the profound changes in his thinking and in the country’s history, from days when slavery seemed unending to the midst of the Civil War to a moment when Reconstruction in the South was being dismantled and a violent and legalized system of racial oppression was set to rule for nearly a century. But it wasn’t the only time he was asked to speak at an Independence Day event.
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