1825–1860
What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?
Douglass condemned slavery on July 5, highlighting America’s unfulfilled ideals, moral outrage, and the ongoing struggle for African American equality.
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Douglass condemned slavery on July 5, highlighting America’s unfulfilled ideals, moral outrage, and the ongoing struggle for African American equality.
. . .I have had but one idea for the last three years to present to the American people, and the phraseology in which I clothe it is the old
Source: Frederick Douglass, Address by Hon. Frederick Douglass, Delivered in the Congregational Church, Washington, D.C., on the Twenty-first Anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia, 1883, Library of Congress,
Source: Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999), 188–206. http://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/2945 My subject, then fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day, and
Explains Douglass’s Fourth of July critique, exposing slavery’s contradiction with American ideals and fueling abolitionist moral urgency.
Source: Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (Boston: the Anti-Slavery Office, 1845). https://www.google.com/books/edition/Narrative_of_the_Life_of_Frederick_Dougl/ds08RYrDBPIC?hl=en&gbpv=0. …Colonel Lloyd kept from three to four hundred
Source: Frederick Douglass, Address by Hon. Frederick Douglass, Delivered in the Congregational Church, Washington, D.C., on the Twenty-first Anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia, 1883, Library of Congress,
Source: University of Rochester Frederick Douglass Project, a collaboration of the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation at the University of Rochester and The Frederick Douglass Institute at
Atlantic Monthly 18 (1866): 761-765. Douglass (1818–1895) was a former slave who became a leading abolitionist. The assembling of the Second Session of the Thirty-ninth Congress may very properly be
Douglass’ defense of John Brown highlights the antebellum arguments as to the legitimacy of violence.