“Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?” Douglass asked.
“Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in the Declaration of Independence, extended to us? Would to God, both for your sake and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions!”
Douglass answered his rhetorical questions in no uncertain terms: To the slave, Independence Day is a “day that reveals to him, more than any other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham.”
Douglass’ Fourth of July oration is steeped in rhetoric and natural law, the roots of which can be traced to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and Christian philosophers like Thomas Aquinas.
But it also takes the shape of a uniquely American form: that of the jeremiad, a “political sermon” that “derive[s] its name from the ancient Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, who predicted the Babylonian conquest of Israel and destruction of the temple of Jerusalem as punishment for violating God’s covenant.”
Throughout his life, even after slavery was abolished, Douglass viewed the Fourth of July not as “a day of complacent self-congratulation, but a day in which all Americans reflect on how far they have come in realizing the noble ideals of the nation’s Founders.”
In this trenchant study, Colaiaco tells the story of how Douglass’ “majestic” wrath “changed the course of American history.”
Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July by James Colaiaco, Ph.D. (FCRH ’67), 256 pages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
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