Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages. The inaugural meeting between six women took place in Corinthian Hall on August 20. I am also hosting a summer reading and discussion series called Race, Fragility, and Anti-Racism through the Somerville Museum and the City on a Hill network of local churches. You may rejoice, I must mourn. What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? They that can, may; I cannot. Tell me citizens, WHERE, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Frederick Douglass, a well-known Black writer, orator, and abolitionist was asked to address an anti-slavery group on the July 4 holiday in 1852. Your fathers esteemed the English Government as the home government; and England as the fatherland. Ever ready to drink, to treat, and to gamble. Rhetoricians R. L. Heath and D. Waymer refer to this as the "paradox of the positive" because it highlights how something positive and meant to be positive can also exclude individuals. "[1][2] was a speech delivered by Frederick Douglass on July 5, 1852, at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, at a meeting organized by the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society. Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. [5] Many copies of one section of it, beginning in paragraph 32, have been circulated online. 2003. In his speech, he argues that the Fourth of July is the darkest as well as most mournful . Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. For black men there are neither law, justice, humanity, not religion. [19]. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.. 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. Creative people have bypassed gatekeepers for centuries to distribute what they wanted to share so badly. They find common ground in Houghton Library exhibition. [28][29] The head of the organization responsible for the memorial speculated that it was vandalized in response to the removal of Confederate monuments in the wake of the George Floyd protests.[30]. 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. You can bare your bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a threepenny tax on tea; and yet wring the last hard-earned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your country. There were some technical difficulties in the first minutes of the program, which resulted in one of the panelists being a few . 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! 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. Nobody doubts it. The 'Address' may be had at this office, price ten cents, a single copy, or six dollars per hundred. What characteristics does he praise about them? The speech notes the contradiction of the national ethos of United States and the way enslaved persons are treated. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. Hear his savage yells and his blood-chilling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives! 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. There are illustrations of it near and remote, ancient and modern. Is slavery among them? No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. 2. 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. 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. 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. 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. [20]:345He also attempts to demonstrate the irony of their inability to sympathize with the Black people they oppressed in cruel ways that the forefathers they valorized never experienced. Douglass addressed a part of the population for which the day had huge significance the true independence, he argues, is not for the American people, but for the American slave. Wells, which was incorporated into the preface of her 1892 pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.. Douglass details the hardships past Americans once endured when they were members of British colonies and validates their feelings of ill treatment. By that act, Mason and Dixons line has been obliterated; New York has become as Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women, and children as slaves remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of the whole United States. Americans! Yea! It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters. In this respect, Douglass's views converged with that of Abraham Lincoln's[25] in that those politicians who were saying that the Constitution was a justification for their beliefs in regard to slavery were doing so dishonestly. 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. Mr. President, Friends and Fellow Citizens: He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation, has stronger nerves than I have. And it also imposed severe penalties on anyone who helped enslaved people to escape. 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. GAZETTE: This is your second year as host of Reading Frederick Douglass Together in Somerville. 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. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? 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. With this product, you can choose to either have your students read the entire speech and annotate and analyze Douglass' rhetorical devices or you can choose to have your students read shorter excerpts from the speech and do an abbreviated annotation and analysis of rhetorical devices. 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. In several states, this trade is a chief source of wealth. From the slave prison to the ship, they are usually driven in the darkness of night; for since the antislavery agitation, a certain caution is observed.In the deep still darkness of midnight, I have been often aroused by the dead heavy footsteps, and the piteous cries of the chained gangs that passed our door. He talks about how Americans are proud of their country and their religion and how they rejoice in the name of freedom and liberty and yet they do not offer those things to millions of their country's residents. In short, it gave the federal government an active role in maintaining the Souths system of slavery. To arrest it, to put an end to it, this nation keeps a squadron, at immense cost, on the coast of Africa. I take it, therefore, that it is not presumption in a private citizen to form an opinion of that instrument.Now, take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. He wrote and presented a speech that challenged . [26] After the Civil War, Douglass said that "we" had achieved a great thing by gaining American independence during the American Revolutionary War, though he said it was not as great as what was achieved by the Civil War. Douglass then returns to the topic of the founding of the United States. What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? My business, if I have any here to-day, is with the present. Noble men may be found, scattered all over these Northern States, of whom Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn, Samuel J. Students also viewed My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. Douglass then pivots to the present, stating that "We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future". Nevertheless, Douglass claims that this can change. One small step toward understanding gravity, Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. 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. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. A feeling has crept over me, quite unfavorable to the exercise of my limited powers of speech. Born into slavery around 1818, Douglass became a key leader of the abolitionist movement. A John Knox would be seen at every church door, and heard from every pulpit, and Fillmore would have no more quarter than was shown by Knox, to the beautiful, but treacherous queen Mary of Scotland. It is a slander upon their memory, at least, so I believe. 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. They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity. Ex-Senator Benton tells us that the price of men was never higher than now. 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. To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. According to this fact, you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. 4th period Mrs. Landrew Fredrick Douglass Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave who became a prominent activist, author and public speaker. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. 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. On July 5, 1852, in . Interview was lightly edited for clarity and length. 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. when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Your broad republican domain is hunting ground for men. Heavy billows, like mountains in the distance, disclose to the leeward huge forms of flinty rocks! The duty to extirpate and destroy it, is admitted even by our DOCTORS OF DIVINITY. Washington could not die till he had broken the chains of his slaves. But, with that blindness which seems to be the unvarying characteristic of tyrants, since Pharaoh and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea. He praises them because they were great men. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work The downfall of slavery. Frederick Douglass delivered his famous speech at the Corinthian Hall in Rochester, NY, on July. . The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. This act forced citizens to report people who had escaped their enslavement and escaped to a free state, under punishment of a fine or imprisonment. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. Table of Contents. Is it at the gateway? On July 4, 1852, Frederick Douglass-- a former American slave, abolitionist leader and adroit speaker-- spoke in Rochester, New York about the affectation of celebrating independence. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, lowering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! As the project scholar, my role is to advise the process as it rolls out, to give a talk that provides contemporary and historical context and to facilitate the community discussion around the speech against the backdrop of other relevant issues. 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