In a Fourth of July holiday special, we begin with the words of Frederick Douglass. weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn! [4], The speech "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" welcome atheism! These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers. I doubt if there be another nation on the globe, having the brass and the baseness to put such a law on the statute-book. Easel Activity. 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. According to this fact, you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. He implored the Rochester, N.Y., audience to think about the ongoing oppression of Black Americans during a holiday celebrating freedom. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? Frederick Douglass, ca 1855, Metropolitan Museum of Art. 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. be warned! What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. This is the inevitable conclusion, and from it there is no escape. These men were generally well dressed men, and very captivating in their manners. That trade has long since been denounced by this government, as piracy. Heat and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength; suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream, that seems to have torn its way to the center of your soul! It is neither. Keidrick Roy, the host of the virtual reading event. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it. Essentially, Douglass criticizes his audience's pride for a nation that claims to value freedom though it is composed of people who continuously commit atrocities against Blacks. What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? No! They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. [5] Many copies of one section of it, beginning in paragraph 32, have been circulated online. Ever ready to drink, to treat, and to gamble. The crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard, was from the woman you saw with the babe. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. It is not that pure and undefiled religion which is from above, and which is first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They inhabit all our Southern States. [28][29] The head of the organization responsible for the memorial speculated that it was vandalized in response to the removal of Confederate monuments in the wake of the George Floyd protests.[30]. 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. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. ts future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorr. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. In an 1868 speech, he said, No man should be excluded from the government on the basis of his color, no woman on account of her sex. was delivered in the decade preceding the American Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865 and achieved the abolition of slavery. The Bible addresses all such persons as scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, who pay tithe of mint, anise, and cumin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith.But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. I lived on Philpot Street, Fells Point, Baltimore, and have watched from the wharves, the slave ships in the Basin, anchored from the shore, with their cargoes of human flesh, waiting for favorable winds to waft them down the Chesapeake. In the second part of the speech, Douglass turns to the present and his own feelings about the 4th of July . America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Another remarkable thing about Douglass is that he was an early champion of voting rights for women. From what quarter, I beg to know, has proceeded a fire so deadly upon our ranks, during the last two years, as from the Northern pulpit? Tell me citizens, WHERE, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. 5.0. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers. They petitioned and remonstrated; they did so in a decorous, respectful, and loyal manner. In the language of Isaiah, the American church might be well addressed, Bring no more vain ablations; incense is an abomination unto me: the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity even the solemn meeting. What is this but the acknowledgement that the slave is a moral, intellectual and responsible being? The little experience I have had in addressing public meetings, in country schoolhouses, avails me nothing on the present occasion. Senator Berrien tell us that the Constitution is the fundamental law, that which controls all others. There are exceptions, and I thank God that there are. I will show you a man-drover. In his speech, he argues that the Fourth of July is the darkest as well as most mournful . I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. Yea! [20]:345He also attempts to demonstrate the irony of their inability to sympathize with the Black people they oppressed in cruel ways that the forefathers they valorized never experienced. The4th of July is the first great fact in your nation's history the very ringbolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destinyPride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetualremembrance. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. There, see the old man, with locks thinned and gray. Products. The far off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet. Rhetorical Analysis Of Harvey Fourth Of July. 2003. See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes! There is not time now to argue the constitutional question at length nor have I the ability to discuss it as it ought to be discussed. They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. 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 bum their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commission. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. He is a bird for the sportsmans gun. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. In July of 1852, Frederick Douglass prepares a speech known as The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro. He implored the Rochester, N.Y., audience to think about the ongoing oppression of Black Americans during a holiday celebrating . 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. Before you read the speech you can follow these links to learn more about Douglass's life and the evolution of his thought in this period. It is called (in contradistinction to the foreign slave-trade) the internal slave trade. It is, probably, called so, too, in order to divert from it the horror with which the foreign slave-trade is contemplated. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity.For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! It has been denounced with burning words, from the high places of the nation, as an execrable traffic. In a Fourth of July holiday special, we hear the words of Frederick Douglass. The inaugural meeting between six women took place in Corinthian Hall on August 20. GAZETTE: What is something you have discovered about Douglass while researching this speech and his work more broadly that people might be surprised to learn? There should be no shoulder that does not bear the burden of the government. He had a prophetic vision for the future that he was always trying to work toward. 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