For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.. The founding fathers left black people and women out of these rights for "everyone." This page was last edited on 5 February 2023, at 19:31. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slaves point of view. The British accomplished this through religion or more specifically, the church. Oh! What is now known as the "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" speech was delivered on July 5, 1852 as an address to the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, New York. 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. 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. 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. To find out what elements make the speech 'What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?' It was fashionable, hundreds of years ago, for the children of Jacob to boast, we have Abraham to our father, when they had long lost Abrahams faith and spirit. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. This truth is not a doubtful one. One small step toward understanding gravity, Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. What to the Slave is the Fourth of July | Historical Context The Colonial regime paved way for the transportation of slaves from different parts of the world, mostly from the African continent to work in southern states of America on cash crop plantations that generated a great source of income. In this collection, students will review the life of Frederick Douglass and learn about one of his most famous speeches, "The Meaning of Fourth of July for the Negro" (it is also commonly referred to as "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July). that it should be so; yet so it is. 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. Must we allow symbols of racism on public land? The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. Not fewer than forty Americans have, within the past two years, been hunted down and, without a moments warning, hurried away in chains, and consigned to slavery and excruciating torture. Great Britain, and many other countries of that time, had already abolished slavery from its territories. Douglass denounces the churches for betraying their own biblical and Christian values. He celebrates the efforts of the founding fathers of America for fighting back against the tyranny of England.[18]. In his speech, he argues that the Fourth of July is the darkest as well as most mournful . With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression. 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. Yea! The crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard, was from the woman you saw with the babe. [20]:346 To prove evidence of these inconsistencies, as one historian noted, during the speech Douglass claims that the United States Constitution is an abolitionist document and not a pro-slavery document.[22][23][24]. You live and must die, and you must do your work. welcome atheism! [4], Noted for its biting irony and bitter rhetoric, and acute textual analysis of the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Christian Bible, the speech is among the most widely known of all of Douglass's writings. Youll never experience a black hole, but Avi Loeb can help you imagine one, We need individual events like reading Douglass, but we also need to be thinking about ways to extend this conversation over the long term., Level of cannabis use could determine post-op outcomes, Historian says Fla. dispute shows why AP class in African American studies is needed, Why Church Committee alums urged new House panel to avoid partisanship, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, Rewriting history to include all of it this time. If any man in this assembly thinks differently from me in this matter, and feels able to disprove my statements, I will gladly confront him at any suitable time and place he may select.I take this law to be one of the grossest infringements of Christian Liberty, and, if the churches and ministers of our country were not stupidly blind, or most wickedly indifferent, they, too, would so regard it.At the very moment that they are thanking God for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, and for the right to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences, they are utterly silent in respect to a law which robs religion of its chief significance, and makes it utterly worthless to a world lying in wickedness. 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. 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. What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? Douglass argues that religion is the center of the problem but also the main solution to it. [9][10] He had previously lived in Boston, but did not want his newspaper to interfere with sales of The Liberator, published by William Lloyd Garrison. What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? Many of its most eloquent Divines. It is, however, a notable fact that, while so much execration is poured out by Americans upon those engaged in the foreign slave-trade, the men engaged in the slave-trade between the states pass without condemnation, and their business is deemed honorable.Behold the practical operation of this internal slave-trade, the American slave-trade, sustained by American politics and America religion. [20]:344. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands. there is no matter in respect to which, the people of the North have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon, as that of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution. 2003. Kate Harris Date Published September 28, 2016 Last Modified November 14, 2021 Description. Albert Barnes but uttered what the common sense of every man at all observant of the actual state of the case will receive as truth, when he declared that There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it.Let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday school, the conference meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations of the land array their immense powers against slavery and slave-holding; and the whole system of crime and blood would be scattered to the winds; and that they do not do this involves them in the most awful responsibility of which the mind can conceive.In prosecuting the anti-slavery enterprise, we have been asked to spare the church, to spare the ministry; but how, we ask, could such a thing be done? I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Your broad republican domain is hunting ground for men. He is outraged by the lack of responsibility and indifference towards slavery that many sects have taken around the nation. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The 4th of July Address, delivered in Corinthian Hall, by Frederick Douglass, is published on good paper, and makes a neat pamphlet of forty pages. On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass gave a keynote address at an Independence Day celebration and asked, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" Douglass was a powerful orator, often traveling six months out of the year to give lectures on abolition. The time for such argument is passed.At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. In the end, Douglass wants to keep his hope and faith in humanity high. Wells, which was incorporated into the preface of her 1892 pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.. Mark the sad procession, as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them. 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. The 'Address' may be had at this office, price ten cents, a single copy, or six dollars per hundred. Need I tell you that the Jews are not the only people who built the tombs of the prophets, and garnished the sepulchres of the righteous? An American judge gets ten dollars for every victim he con signs to slavery, and five, when he fails to do so. 15 November's Documents in Detail webinar was about Frederick Douglass's What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, his oration delivered on 5 July 1862. He further says, the Constitution, in its words, is plain and intelligible, and is meant for the home-bred, unsophisticated understandings of our fellow-citizens. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! There are exceptions, and I thank God that there are. This year is pretty challenging in the wake of COVID-19, and the event is going to be held online instead of before a live audience like we did last year. we wept when we remembered Zion. 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. [Throughout the speech] Douglass looks at the contradictions between the reality of slavery and the lofty claims of a just society outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. 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 doubt if there be another nation on the globe, having the brass and the baseness to put such a law on the statute-book. Where these are, man is not sacred. [16] Additionally, it awarded $10 to a judge who sentenced an individual to return to enslavement, while awarding only $5 if the claim was dismissed. 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? Interview was lightly edited for clarity and length. Frederick Douglass delivered his famous speech at the Corinthian Hall in Rochester, NY, on July. 4th period Mrs. Landrew Fredrick Douglass Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave who became a prominent activist, author and public speaker. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. The Act also denied suspected slaves trial by jury or even the ability to testify on their own behalf in court. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen, in contrast with nature. Yet his monument is built up by the price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of men shoutWe have Washington to our father.Alas! 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 the 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 slaverythe great sin and shame of America! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done. He validates the feelings of injustice the Founders felt then juxtaposes their experiences with vivid descriptions of the harshness of slavery.[21]. How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetual remembrance. Advertisement for the pamphlet of Douglass' speech from the July 12, 1852 edition of Frederick Douglass' Paper (formerly The North Star), Douglass begins by saying that the fathers of the nation were great statesmen, and that the values expressed in the Declaration of Independence were "saving principles", and the "ringbolt of your nation's destiny", stating, "stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost." But now is the time, the important time. Is it at the gateway? Tell me citizens, WHERE, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. You shed tears over fallen Hungary, and make the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen and orators, till your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her cause against her oppressors; but, in regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce the strictest silence, and would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares to make those wrongs the subject of public discourse! The far off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. They are food for the cotton-field, and the deadly sugar-mill. It esteems sacrifice above mercy; psalm-singing above right doing; solemn meetings above practical righteousness. . 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? The power is co-extensive with the Star-Spangled Banner and American Christianity. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. The Lords of Buffalo, the Springs of New York, the Lathrops of Auburn, the Coxes and Spencers of Brooklyn, the Gannets and Sharps of Boston, the Deweys of Washington, and other great religious lights of the land have, in utter denial of the authority of Him by whom the professed to he called to the ministry, deliberately taught us, against the example or the Hebrews and against the remonstrance of the Apostles, they teach that we ought to obey mans law before the law of God.My spirit wearies of such blasphemy; and how such men can be supported, as the standing types and representatives of Jesus Christ, is a mystery which I leave others to penetrate. 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. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. The timid and the prudent (as has been intimated) of that day, were, of course, shocked and alarmed by it. His own testimony is nothing. 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. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.I have detained my audience entirely too long already. The anti-slavery movement there was not an anti-church movement, for the reason that the church took its full share in prosecuting that movement: and the anti-slavery movement in this country will cease to be an anti-church movement, when the church of this country shall assume a favorable, instead or a hostile position towards that movement. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. Noble men may be found, scattered all over these Northern States, of whom Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn, Samuel J. In order to put an end to it, some of these last have consented that their colored brethren (nominally free) should leave this country, and establish themselves on the western coast of Africa! Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nations jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? Stauffer, John. I will show you a man-drover. speaking of it relatively, and positively, negatively, and affirmatively. Born into slavery around 1818, Douglass became a key leader of the abolitionist. He implored the Rochester, N.Y., audience to think about the ongoing oppression of Black Americans during a holiday celebrating freedom. They inhabit all our Southern States. There is consolation in the thought that America is young. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States. A feeling has crept over me, quite unfavorable to the exercise of my limited powers of speech. The speech has since been published under the above title in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One, Vol. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. The occasion was the Society's Fourth of July celebration, but Douglass refused to give the speech on July 4; he would not celebrate the holiday so long as African Americans remained enslaved. The accepted time with God and his cause is the ever-living now. one of the most important speeches of the 19th century? You may rejoice, I must mourn. Let this damning fact be perpetually told. Douglass vividly describes the conditions under which those enslaved are bought and sold; he says that they are treated as no more than animals. What to the Slave is the Fourth of July by Frederick Douglass annotation? Frederick Douglass, ca 1855, Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is neither. "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? Rhetorical Analysis Of Harvey Fourth Of July. How digital misinformation may keep you from a good nights sleep, Study finds surgical patients with addiction issues may be at greater risk for complications, including sudden cardiac death after anesthesia, Khalil Gibran Muhammad says College Board needs to stand firm behind curriculum, Chief counsel of respected mid-70s Senate inquiry into improper federal investigations says credibility of oversight function at stake, 2023 The President and Fellows of Harvard College, Photo courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, By Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite Harvard Staff Writer, Frederick Douglass delivered his famous speech What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? in 1852, drawing parallels between the Revolutionary War and the fight to abolish slavery. What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? These people were called Tories in the days of your fathers. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time. 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! 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. I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. had I the ability, and could I reach the nations ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. 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what to the slave is the fourth of july annotation