Frederick Douglass' Fourth of July speech, 1852

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://loveman.sdsu.edu/docs/1852FrederickDouglass.pdf

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? 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, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can today take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!

(snip)

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 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 today, 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 employment for my time and strength, than such arguments would imply.

(snip)

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.

[Igel]

1. The full text is included.

In 2021/22 I was checking up on some allegations and found that a number of sites that had the full text in 2019 had edited Douglass' text but not their claim that it was complete.

I find the speech harder for most to understand than people give it credit for. Yes, it's a diatribe, but the real crunch is the 7th to last paragraph, finishing his rhetorical trap and deflating much of the audience's self-righteousness. This was the part very often unacknowledgedly edited out and seldom actually read because it's such a clash with the rest of the document--but that's the clincher. He accuses the white "gentlemen" present, often discretely and sometimes explicitly, as making various claims and presentations about the document--and couches his criticism in those terms, never taking on the document per say in a truly serious, far-reaching way. Then he turns around and says that the Constitution is what many said he never said it was (because the falsely-edited websites and sloth said so), saying that the Constitution is one thing and they have claimed to enforce it while absolutely falsifying what it says.

It's a great speech. (I think it has a bookend that's a couple of decades later.)

After that, it's just conclusion and settling down to leave the stage, not part of his argument (except in that his argument ends with hope and abolitionist validation, supported by the "tendency" of the age).

[Kid Berwyn]

2. Frederick Douglass warned us about the white supremacist assholes.

And he warned us about the Slave Ownership Class from before the Civil War...and the Spanish-American War...and World Wars 1 and 2...and still, they're back haunting the United States of America, as if they owned the place.

[malaise]

3. THIS

Rec