Words Worth Remembering: Frederick Douglass’s Rebuke
“The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable,” Frederick Douglass told a Rochester, New York, crowd gathered to hear his Fourth of July oration on Monday, July 5, 1852. “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.
“Pride and patriotism, no less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetual remembrance,” he added. The Declaration of Independence “is the ringbolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny,” whose words “are saving principles” ever to be defended “on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.”
Nevertheless, there was a stark contrast between those principles and reality. “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine,” he said. “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,” Douglass declared. When stripped of its pretensions, there remained “the great sin and shame of America” stemming from its commitment to slavery.
He was an imposing, stately figure whom William Lloyd Garrison proudly described in 1845 as having an “intellect richly endowed,” “in natural eloquence a prodigy,” and possessing a “soul manifestly ‘created but a little lower than the angels.’” But to the slaveholding states, Douglass was still “only a piece of property, a beast of burden, a chattel.”
Born into slavery in Maryland, Douglass, as with most slaves, was never quite sure of his own birthdate. “By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs,” he wrote in his 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.
More still, Douglass was raised in the world of the slave without a father or mother. “I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life,” he recalled, and “received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.”
Douglass’s first master was “a cruel man, hardened by a long life of slave-holding.” Once, Douglass hid and witnessed his aunt whipped mercilessly. “The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped,” he recalled; “and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest.”
Just a child then, Douglass saw with his own eyes the world in which fate and law had committed him. “It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which you were about to pass,” he wrote.
As he grew, life as a slave was to be confronted with two realities, each haunting in their challenges. “On the one hand, there stood slavery, a stern reality, glaring frightfully upon us,” Douglass wrote. “On the other hand, away back in the dim distance, under the flickering light of the north star, behind some craggy hill or snow-covered mountain, stood a doubtful freedom.”
The choice, though perilous, was clear. “In coming to a fixed determination to run away, we did more than Patrick Henry, when he resolved upon liberty or death,” Douglass wrote. “With us it was a doubtful liberty at most, and almost certain death if we failed.” Still, he preferred “death to hopeless bondage.”
Douglass left his chains and escaped slavery on Monday, September 3, 1838. Under the fugitive slave laws, he “was yet liable to be taken back, and subjected to all the tortures of slavery.” This, he recalled, “was enough to damp the ardor of my enthusiasm.”
Speaking in Rochester, Douglass stood his ground on the inherent wrongness of slavery. “There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him,” he preached.
However true his words, by 1852 slavery had ardent defenders and the Declaration vehement opponents. Representatives from the Deep South had in 1790 defended slavery as a divinely ordained institution. The Baptist leader and New York-born Richard Furman defended slavery in a popular 1822 pamphlet. In 1837, South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun spoke for the South when he defended slavery as “instead of an evil, a good—a positive good,” and, in 1848, called natural equality “the most false and dangerous of all political errors.”
At nearly every point, such arguments met worthy resistance.
But to Douglass, debates were no longer relevant. “The time for such argument has passed,” he told the crowd in Rochester. “At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed…
“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,” he shouted. “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?” Douglass asked. “To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license… your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery.”
But the tides would inevitably turn—that much Douglass was certain. “The fiat of the Almighty, ‘Let there be light,’ has not yet spent its force,” he declared. “God speed the year of jubilee,” he concluded, quoting Garrison’s poem. “Until that year, day, hour, arrive, / With head, and heart, and hand I’ll strive, / To break the rod, and rend the gyve, / The spoiler of his prey deprive— / So witness Heaven! / And never from my chosen post, / Whate’er the peril or the cost, / Be driven.”