Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July

By James A. Colaiaco

On July 5th, 1852, Frederick Douglass, one of the greatest orators of all time, delivered what was arguably the century's most powerful abolition speech. At a time of year where American freedom is celebrated across the nation, Douglass eloquently summoned the country to resolve the contradiction between slavery and the founding principles of our country. In this book, James A. Colaiaco vividly recreates the turbulent historical context of Douglass' speech and delivers a colorful portrait of the country in the turbulent years leading to the civil war. This book provides a fascinating new perspective on a critical time in American history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Mar 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781466892781

James A. Colaiaco

James A. Colaiaco received his Ph.D. in intellectual history from Columbia, and has for the past twenty-five years taught Great Books at New York University in the General Studies Program at NYU. Colaiaco is author of Socrates against Athens: Philosophy on Trail, Martin Luther King, Jr.: Apostle of Militant Nonviolence, and James Fitzjames Stephen and the Crisis of Victorian Thought.

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PROLOGUE

Time and events have summoned me to stand forth both as a witness and an advocate for a people long dumb, not allowed to speak for themselves, yet much misunderstood and deeply wronged.

—Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

On Monday, July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass, the former slave, made his way to majestic Corinthian Hall, located in downtown Rochester, New York, near the Genesee River.¹ He had been invited to deliver a speech to celebrate the Fourth of July.² For the past few weeks, he had labored into the night, gathering his thoughts about the urgent message he wanted to give the nation. Arriving at Corinthian Hall, Douglass, the keynote speaker of the day, walked to his seat and faced his audience. With great dignity and a stern countenance, he surveyed the assemblage of mostly white people.

Since the early years of the American republic, the Fourth of July has been the day Americans reaffirm their common identity and purpose in a collective ritual. For Douglass, the day had multiple meanings. It was the anniversary of the birth of the United States of America, which, he agreed, should be celebrated; the Fourth of July was the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the historic document that committed the nation to the ideals of liberty and equal rights for all. But for Douglass, the Fourth of July was also a day to remember that America’s ideals remained unfulfilled for blacks enslaved in the South. Throughout his life, Douglass struggled to resolve the American dilemma, the contradiction between the ideals professed by the nation’s Founders and the practice of denying human rights to black Americans and other minorities.³

A self-educated fugitive slave, abolitionist, advocate for women’s rights, orator, journalist, and diplomat, Frederick Douglass was the most famous black person of the nineteenth century. He is best known for his three inspiring autobiographies. But his greatest legacy to America is his oratory, forged in the crucible of the battle against slavery in the years prior to the Civil War. With extraordinary courage, he had escaped from his slave master. Having taught himself to read and write while a slave, Douglass is one of the most inspiring examples of the power of literacy. Shortly after attaining his freedom, he came under the influence of the great abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, who stirred the nation’s conscience by calling for the immediate and complete abolition of slavery. As a member of Garrison’s Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass honed his oratorical skills. After publishing his first autobiography in 1845, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which emphasized the moral evil of slavery, Douglass made the first of two excursions to Great Britain, where he spoke from a variety of platforms, electrifying his audiences. While he initially subscribed to Garrison’s rigid views, including denouncing the United States Constitution as pro-slavery, Douglass’s careful study led him to embrace the document as the abolitionists’ greatest legal weapon.

Having taken his anti-slavery message to Britain in 1847, Douglass had achieved international recognition as a great orator. He emerged as an independent thinker, ready to create his own path. In 1847, as an offensive against slavery, he founded an abolitionist newspaper, the North Star, in Rochester, New York. To the dismay of the Garrisonians, by 1851 he had converted not only to the United States Constitution, but also to pragmatic party politics. During the next decade, as tensions over slavery between the North and the South pushed the nation to the brink of civil war, Douglass delivered hundreds of speeches throughout the North calling upon the federal government to abolish slavery in the South. Douglass warned that failing to eradicate the moral evil of slavery would arouse divine retribution.

Despite the valiant efforts of Douglass and others, slavery continued to spread. The antebellum period was dominated by a struggle between the North and the South over whether newly acquired lands would become slave or free states. The outcome would have important political consequences, including control of Congress, the office of the presidency, the composition of the Supreme Court, and ultimately the fate of the nation. In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, which in effect nationalized slavery by requiring citizens in the North to assist in the return of runaway slaves. Douglass began advocating the abolition of slavery through political means, including support for anti-slavery political parties. When many black reformers, along with anti-slavery whites, believed that the best solution was to free the slaves and ship them out of the United States, Douglass remained a committed integrationist, insisting that blacks should not abandon America and its ideals. He also practiced civil disobedience as a leader in the Underground Railroad movement that assisted hundreds of fugitive slaves in their escape from the South to safe haven in Canada.

In the 1850s, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln—two giants on the stage of American history—embarked on paths that would converge on the issue of slavery. On June 16, 1858, Lincoln’s House Divided speech proclaimed that the nation could not survive half slave and half free. While both Douglass and Lincoln, inspired by the ideals of liberty and equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, agreed that slavery was immoral, they disagreed on the best method to abolish the institution. Douglass had become convinced that the Constitution was anti-slavery, but Lincoln insisted that the document did not authorize Congress to abolish the institution in the South. The most that the federal government could do, in Lincoln’s judgment, was to prevent slavery’s extension into new territories. Lincoln hoped that, confined to the South, slavery would die a natural death. While Lincoln was convinced that preserving the Union was more important than abolishing slavery, Douglass believed that a Union with slavery was an unacceptable betrayal of the nation’s democratic ideals.

In the years prior to the Civil War, Douglass emerged as a formidable interpreter of the nation’s founding documents. Read from an ethical perspective, he argued, the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution were essentially abolition documents. The Preamble to the Constitution alone provided sufficient legal basis to eradicate slavery. The Constitution was designed to secure for all persons the inalienable natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness proclaimed in the Declaration. The Supreme Court of the United States disagreed. Five years after Douglass’s July Fourth oration, in the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, speaking for a pro-slavery Court, ruled that no black American, slave or free, was a citizen of the United States. Taney argued that according to the Constitution blacks were property, not human beings. They were not endowed with inalienable rights. The Chief Justice defended the Court’s decision on the grounds that it expressed the original intentions of the nation’s Founders. Dred Scott essentially denied the American dilemma and was a devastating blow to the anti-slavery movement. In the minds of many Americans, the Supreme Court had definitively settled the slavery question that had plagued the nation since its inception. Black Americans were unequivocally excluded from the rights of the Declaration of Independence. Nor were they among We the people who established the Constitution. Blacks were not citizens of the United States, but aliens. If they were not included within the body politic in the first place, the nation could not logically be accused of violating its founding principles.

Dred Scott aroused a storm of protest throughout the North, edging the nation closer to civil war. The decision radicalized Douglass. He challenged the Supreme Court, arguing that the decision was based upon a misreading of the United States Constitution. But the prospect of repealing Dred Scott was bleak. As the battle against slavery by means of moral persuasion and politics proved to be ineffective, Douglass reluctantly concluded that war against the South was inevitable. He had always rejected violence in the past, but Dred Scott made him seriously consider the idea of a slave rebellion in the South. When in 1859 the white abolitionist John Brown sought Douglass’s support for his raid on Harpers Ferry, he rejected the venture only because it was strategically unsound and not because it would be violent. Soon after Brown’s raid was crushed, making Brown a martyr for the abolitionist cause, Douglass left for Britain, once again bringing the debate over human rights to an international forum.

Late in life, in his third and final autobiography, composed at his home in the Anacostia estate of Cedar Hill, Washington, D.C., Douglass reflected upon the issue that consumed him: I write freely of myself, not from choice, but because I have, by my cause, been morally forced into thus writing. Time and events have summoned me to stand forth both as a witness and an advocate for a people long dumb, not allowed to speak for themselves, yet much misunderstood and deeply wronged.⁴ The same motive drove his oratory. He spoke at antislavery meetings, state black conventions, and ceremonial gatherings. He spoke in halls, churches, auditoriums, courthouses, tents, and open fields. He spoke to give voice to black Americans so that they might be freed from the inhumanity of slavery and from the injustice of racial segregation. He spoke so that blacks might be inspired to stand up for their human rights to liberty and equality.

America took notice. The New York Tribune and the Chicago Tribune printed full-length accounts of Douglass’s many speeches, and they were summarized in the New York Times.⁵ As early as 1841, one paper observed: As a speaker [Douglass] has few equals. It is not declamation—but oratory, power of debate. He has wit, arguments, sarcasm, pathos—all that first rate men show in their master efforts.⁶ In 1859, the New York Tribune included Douglass among the two hundred people of the nation’s Lecturing Fraternity, recognized for their exceptional rhetorical ability. In 1872, the New York Times called him the representative orator of the colored race.⁷ The abolition movement had no more inspiring advocate than Douglass. White men and black men, proclaimed black abolitionist William Wells Brown, had talked against slavery, but none had ever spoken like Frederick Douglass.⁸ In an age when the standards of oratory were much higher than today, many of Douglass’s speeches, delivered over a period of more than fifty years, were considered among the best in the American rhetorical tradition.

Two weeks prior to Douglass’s July Fourth 1852 address, black orator William G. Allen singled out his fellow abolitionist’s unique gifts: In versatility of oratorical power, I know of no one who can begin to approach the celebrity of Frederick Douglass.⁹ Douglass’s reputation as a speaker continued unabated throughout the nineteenth century. In 1893, two years before Douglass’s death, James Monroe Gregory, professor of classics at Howard University, offered these words of praise: By whatever standard judged, Mr. Douglass will take high rank as orator and writer. A great orator like Douglass is one who not only delivers great speeches, but also touches the hearts of his hearers.¹⁰ When Douglass died on February 20, 1895, the reformer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who knew him since the 1840s and with whom he made common cause supporting women’s rights, paid him eloquent tribute in her diary. Stanton never forgot the first time she saw Douglass speak: He stood there like an African prince, majestic in his wrath. Around him sat the great antislavery orators of the day, earnestly watching the effect of his eloquence on that immense audience, that laughed and wept by turns, completely carried away by the wondrous gifts of his pathos and humor. On this occasion, all the other speakers seemed tame after Frederick Douglass.¹¹

Frederick Douglass awakened the conscience of the nation, compelling Americans to confront the gravest moral dilemma in its history. His attack on slavery and defense of human dignity brought him into conflict with the slave states of the South and with the states of the North, where free blacks were segregated and deprived of the full benefits of citizenship. He confronted a nation reluctant to take the necessary steps to abolish slavery. Despite formidable obstacles, he refused to be silenced. Delivering hundreds of speeches on behalf of those condemned to live in slavery, Douglass inspired, converted, and provoked. He mesmerized his audiences. No speaker was more impassioned, more devoted to the advancement of human rights. No person understood better the meaning of the American creed as embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the United States Constitution, and no one was more eloquent in summoning the nation to fulfill this creed for all, regardless of race.

CHAPTER 1

FREDERICK DOUGLASS AND THE FOURTH OF JULY

I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more shrinkingly, or with a greater distrust of my ability, than I do this day.

—Frederick Douglass, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?

I

Some five to six hundred people filed into Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852. They had come to hear the oration by Frederick Douglass celebrating the Fourth of July. By this time, he had become an esteemed abolitionist and the most famous black American of his era. Douglass had been invited to speak by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society.¹ The event had been advertised in the papers and on placards. The Fourth of July is the most important day in what has been called the American civil religion, meaning the unifying beliefs, myths, and rituals shared by citizens of the United States from the nation’s inception. This civil religion has its sacred scripture—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights; its holidays—the Fourth of July and Memorial Day; its symbols—the Liberty Bell, the American flag, and the Statue of Liberty; and its revered personages—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Susan B. Anthony. All of these elements have been incorporated in the narrative that Americans use to explain their origins and identity.

In the first part of the nineteenth century, Fourth of July ceremonials were solemn, almost religious occasions, often held in churches and modeled after a Protestant service. Prayers were intoned, hymns were sung, and the Declaration of Independence was recited with piety and fervor. On July Fourth, orators traditionally underscored the belief that America—hailed by New England Puritan John Winthrop as a city on a hill—had been chosen by God to fulfill a special mission in the world, to create a moral society. But America, despite its democratic and moral goals, harbored a hideous injustice, the institution of slavery. Most blacks regarded the Fourth of July as a white holiday, a day of mourning rather than celebration.² With the expansion of the abolitionist movement in the 1830s and 1840s, Independence Day became an occasion for abolitionists not so much to celebrate the past and preserve tradition, but to remind the nation of its betrayal. The contradiction of a nation tolerating slavery while professing the moral principles of the Declaration of Independence would eventually threaten the survival of the Union.

In the early years of the republic, celebrations of Independence Day were sporadic. But after the victory of the United States over Britain in the War of 1812, renewed patriotism inspired nationwide regular observance of the holiday.³ The mockery of a nation celebrating freedom while upholding slavery became increasingly obvious. In the North, free blacks and abolitionists often used the Fourth of July to lift their voices in protest, emphasizing the contradiction between the nation’s promise and slavery. Because July Fourth fell on a Sunday in 1852, the celebrations in Rochester had been postponed until the next day, July 5. Douglass welcomed the postponement. For years, abolitionists and black Americans often deliberately waited until July 5 as an expression of protest. As Peter Osborne declared at the New Haven African Church in Connecticut on July 5, 1832: On account of the misfortune of our color, our fourth of July comes on the fifth; but I hope and trust that when the Declaration of Independence is fully executed, which declared that all men, without respect to person, were born free and equal, we may then have our fourth of July on the fourth.⁴ While the nation was celebrating freedom, the southern plantations were filled with slaves. Many blacks in the North refused to partake in the festivities. Even black children from the New York African Free School, including the future black minister Alexander Crummell, vowed not to celebrate the Fourth of July until the abolition of slavery.⁵ For the black abolitionist Sojourner Truth, Independence Day symbolized both the promise of freedom and its denial. Her master had pledged to free her on July 4, 1826, but the day came and went without word from him. The following year, on the Fourth of July, she was freed by the State Legislature of New York.⁶ Slave rebel Nat Turner had initially intended his ill-fated slave rebellion in Southampton, Virginia to occur on July 4, 1831. The Weekly Anglo-African explained on July 23, 1859: The people generally do not understand why one should celebrate a day that … brought freedom to whites and slavery to colored people.⁷ Mindful that the liberty and equality principles of the Declaration of Independence had not been applied to slaves, many abolitionists and black protesters chose to recognize the national holiday the day after, on July 5.

II

Frederick Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in Talbot County on the Eastern Shore of Maryland sometime in February 1818. He was the son of Harriet Bailey, a field slave, and a white man believed to be his master, Aaron Anthony, who managed the large plantations of Colonel Edward Lloyd. Douglass was separated from his mother when he was an infant. I never saw my mother, he related, more than four or five times in my life, and each of those times was very short in duration, and at night. Douglass’s mother, who died when he was about seven years old, had been sent to work twelve miles away. To see her son, Harriet Bailey had to walk twelve miles through the night and make sure she returned to work by dawn, if she wanted to avoid a severe beating. She would lie down with me, he recalled, and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone.⁸ On the plantation, the child Frederick endured great hardships. He had no clothes other than a linen shirt that reached his knees, and no bed other than a coarse blanket.

Frederick lived with his grandmother, Betsy Bailey, until the age of eight, when his master Aaron Anthony died. Ownership of the young boy passed to Anthony’s son-in-law, Thomas Auld. Subsequently, Frederick was sent, by divine providence, he later wrote, from the plantation in rural Maryland to live in Baltimore with his owner’s brother, Hugh Auld, and his wife Sophia. Urban slavery was not as oppressive as that on the plantation, and in the Auld household young Douglass was relatively well treated. Hearing Sophia Auld frequently read the Bible aroused in him a desire to penetrate the mystery of reading. Upon his request, Sophia began teaching the nine-year-old Frederick the alphabet. Literacy would open the way for Douglass to attain his personhood. When Hugh Auld realized the precocious child’s considerable progress, he forbade his wife to further instruct the slave to read. It was not only unlawful, he warned his wife, but also unsafe, for it would make Douglass uncontrollable. He should know nothing but the will of his master, and learn to obey it. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. If you teach that nigger … how to read the bible, there will be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him for the duties of a slave. If you learn him how to read, he’ll want to know how to write; and, this accomplished, he’ll be running away with himself. His master’s words had a profound effect upon young Douglass, who was attentively listening: "His iron sentences, cold and harsh, sunk deep into my heart, and stirred up not only my feelings into a sort of rebellion, but awakened within me a slumbering train of vital thought. It was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery, against which my youthful understanding had struggled, and struggled in vain, to wit: the white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man. ‘Very well, thought I;’ ‘knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.’ I instinctively assented to the proposition; and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom."⁹

The master’s words were the spark that ignited the flame. The painful incident was an epiphany for Douglass. He was determined to learn how to read. He secretly taught himself. He perceived the radical difference between himself, a slave, and his master as never before: The argument which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn.¹⁰ As long as he remained illiterate, his mind subservient to his master, his body could never be free. He would be relegated to a life of silence and invisibility. Douglass defied his master. Seeking to learn the meaning of words, he would ask for the help of any willing white playmate in the streets of Baltimore. Webster’s Spelling Book became his constant companion. Acquiring literacy was for Douglass a Promethean act of rebellion necessary for the achievement of freedom. Reading gave him access to books, in which he discovered liberating ideas that would sustain him throughout his life as an abolitionist and reformer. Reading newspapers that he picked up in the streets of Baltimore informed him of southern resistance to the abolition movement and the increasing sectional conflict between the North and the South over the issue of slavery. He soon realized that learning to write would enable him to wield the power of the pen on behalf of millions of oppressed people. With playmates for my teachers, fences and pavements for my copy books, and chalk for my pen and ink, he remembered, I learned the art of writing.¹¹ As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. observes: Nowhere else among the hundred odd slave narratives published by blacks between 1760 and 1865 was the proverbial leap to freedom so inextricably intertwined with literacy.¹²

Douglass also discovered the power of the spoken word. At age thirteen, he purchased with his meager savings a used copy of Caleb Bingham’s book, The Columbian Orator, a collection of speeches that opened his mind, inspiring him to become a public speaker. Within its pages, Douglass found brief impassioned speeches on human rights by William Pitt the Elder, Charles James Fox, and Richard Sheridan, speeches that Douglass read over and over, absorbing not only their message of freedom but also their rhetorical style. He also studied the oratory of Socrates, Cicero, Cato, George Washington, and Napoleon. As Douglass relates in his autobiographies, these speeches enabled me to give tongue to many interesting thoughts, which had frequently flashed through my soul, and died away for want of utterance.¹³ The speeches articulated what the young Douglass had been feeling since he learned to read—the burning desire to be free. Frederick Douglass the orator was born.

While Douglass avidly studied The Columbian Orator, he underwent another life-defining moment. At the age of thirteen or fourteen, as he read the Bible with a devout free black lay preacher named Charles Lawson, Douglass experienced a spiritual awakening. ‘The Lord had a great work for me to do,’ Douglass recalled Uncle Lawson telling him. He must preach the gospel. Lawson’s "words made a deep impression on my mind, and I verily felt that some such work was before me, though I could not see how I should ever engage in its performance. But Lawson assured the young boy, ‘the good Lord would bring it to pass in his own good time.’ All Douglass had to do was to continue studying the Scriptures. The advice and the suggestions of Uncle Lawson, were not without their influence upon my character and destiny.… He fanned my already intense love of knowledge into a flame, by assuring me that I was to be a useful man in the world.… When I told him that ‘I was a slave FOR LIFE,’ he said, ‘the Lord can make you free, my dear. All things are possible with him, only have faith in God. Ask, and it shall be given. If you want liberty,’ said the good old man, ‘ask the Lord for it, in faith, AND HE WILL GIVE IT TO YOU.’"¹⁴ Such faith would sustain Douglass not only in the dark days of slavery, but throughout his life. As Lawson prophesied, he would preach the gospel, but his would be the gospel of freedom.

In 1833, at the age of fifteen, Douglass was returned to Thomas Auld and lived in the village of St. Michael’s in Maryland’s Talbot County. Douglass then secretly organized a Sunday school for slaves and began teaching them to read. After the school was discovered and disbanded, Auld leased the recalcitrant Douglass to Edward Covey, a well-known nigger-breaker in 1834. Covey frequently beat Douglass. One day, savagely attacked by Covey, Douglass successfully resisted. The beatings on his back left permanent scars that would serve as reminders of his years in bondage. Empowered by his success against Covey, the sixteen-year-old Douglass resolved to escape slavery as soon as possible. Sent back to Thomas Auld in Baltimore in 1836, Douglass was hired out to a local shipyard and learned to be a caulker. In 1838, disguised as a free black sailor whose identification papers he had acquired, Douglass escaped from slavery and made his way by train and steamship to the North. Arriving in the streets of New York City, he was assisted by the black abolitionist David Ruggles, who hid Douglass in his boarding house. That same year, Douglass married Anna Murray, a free black woman who had been a domestic worker in Baltimore, who assisted him in his escape and later became the mother of their five children, three boys and two girls. Attaining his freedom, Frederick Bailey became Frederick Douglass, inspired by the name of a heroic Scottish lord in Sir Walter Scott’s poem, Lady of the Lake. Douglass and his wife first settled in the whaling port of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he frequently denounced slavery as a lay preacher from the pulpit of the Zion Methodist Church. In 1839, he met the white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who became instrumental in launching his career as the foremost black spokesperson for the abolition of slavery. In My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass relates how as a young fugitive from slavery living in New