Another remarkable thing about Douglass is that he was an early champion of voting rights for women. [7], The Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society was founded in 1851. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. 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 hypocrisya thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands. 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. What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. Hear his savage yells and his blood-chilling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives! You live and must die, and you must do your work. To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. The right of the hunter to his prey stands superior to the right of marriage, and to all rights in this republic, the rights of God included! The timid and the prudent (as has been intimated) of that day, were, of course, shocked and alarmed by it. The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commission. 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? 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. A major theme of the speech is how America is not living up to its proclaimed beliefs. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and cyphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christians God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? You may rejoice, I must mourn. 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. We need individual events like reading Douglass, but we also need to be thinking about ways to extend this conversation over the long term. 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. 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 a slander upon their memory, at least, so I believe. The fact that the church of our country, (with fractional exceptions), does not esteem the Fugitive Slave Law as a declaration of war against religious liberty, implies that that church regards religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards man. Tell me citizens, WHERE, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. The drove moves tardily. The 'Address' may be had at this office, price ten cents, a single copy, or six dollars per hundred. Douglass equates this to being worse than many other things that are banned, in particular, books and plays that are banned for infidelity. The arm of the Lord is not shortened, and the doom of slavery is certain. Were the nation older, the patriots heart might be sadder, and the reformers brow heavier. I will show you a man-drover. 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. What to the Slave is the Fourth of July by Frederick Douglass annotation? You have already declared it. What to a Slave is the Fourth of July Frederick Douglass Fredrick speech. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. [19]. 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! The crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard, was from the woman you saw with the babe. As the champions of oppressors, the chosen men of American theology have appearedmen, honored for their so-called piety, and their real learning. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. Douglass argues that religion is the center of the problem but also the main solution to it. I am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. 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. A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy, is a curse, not a blessing to mankind. According to Douglass, these inconsistencies have made the United States the object of mockery and often contempt among the various nations of the world. Genius is the ultimate source of music knowledge, created by scholars like you who share facts and insight about the songs and artists they love. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? by Frederick Douglass 1852 11th Grade Lexile: 1140 Font Size Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) was an African American social reformer, orator, and writer. Senator Berrien tell us that the Constitution is the fundamental law, that which controls all others. He implored the Rochester, N.Y., audience to think about the ongoing oppression of Black Americans during a holiday celebrating freedom. [20]:344. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a by word to a mocking earth. 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. He thinks they were extremely intelligent, and the thinks it is admirable that when they realized they were oppressed by Britain, they rebelled. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. I repeat, I am glad this is so. 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! Did this law concern the mint, anise, and cuminabridge the fight to sing psalms, to partake of the sacrament, or to engage in any of the ceremonies of religion, it would be smitten by the thunder of a thousand pulpits. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and cyphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christians God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men! 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. Oppression makes a wise man mad. The fate of many a slave has depended upon the turn of a single card; and many a child has been snatched from the arms of its mother by bargains arranged in a state of brutal drunkenness.The flesh-mongers gather up their victims by dozens, and drive them, chained, to the general depot at Baltimore. The speech "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" was delivered in the decade preceding the American Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865 and achieved the abolition of slavery. These people were called Tories in the days of your fathers. That bolt drawn, that chain broken, and all is lost. In his speech, he argues that the Fourth of July is the darkest as well as most mournful . See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. The accepted time with God and his cause is the ever-living now. 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! Douglass says that if the residents of America believe that slaves are "men",[20]:342 they should be treated as such. ts future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorr. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence. You are all on fire at the mention of liberty for France or for Ireland; but are as cold as an iceberg at the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America. Frederick Douglass, born a slave and later the most influential African American leader of the 1800s, addresses the hypocrisy of the US of maintaining slavery with its upheld ideals being freedom and independence on July 4th, 1852. What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? GAZETTE: What is the historical setting for this speech, and why did Douglass focus on the Fourth of July? [6] Due to this and the variant titles given to it in various places, and the fact that it is called a July Fourth Oration but was actually delivered on July 5, some confusion has arisen about the date and contents of the speech. To the slave, Douglass tells the audience, "your 4th of July is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license [for enslaving blacks] . Anti-Slavery Society was founded in 1851 and thugs solution to it their years by.! 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