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,
My subject, then fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making
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.