
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.

Douglass condemned slavery on July 5, highlighting America’s unfulfilled ideals, moral outrage, and the ongoing struggle for African American equality.
Source: George L. Stearns, Frederick Douglass, Wendall Phillips, and William D Kelley, The Equality of All Men before the Law, 1865; Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/mfd.22014/. Annotations in brackets are in

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’s Monthly, November 1859. Available online https://goo.gl/h7rv7A One of the most painful incidents connected with the name of this old hero is the attempt to prove him insane. Many journals