In 1852, the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester, New York, invited Frederick Douglass to give a July Fourth speech. Douglass opted to speak on July 5 instead, and, addressing an audience of about 600, he delivered one of his most iconic speeches that would become known by the name “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” This episode explores Douglass’ oration on racial injustice and the broken promises of equality and liberty laid out in the Declaration of Independence. David Blight, Pulitzer Prize-winning Douglass biographer, and Lucas Morel, an expert on Douglass and African American history and politics, join host Jeffrey Rosen. They discuss the context and content of the speech, which Blight calls “the rhetorical masterpiece of abolition.” They also explore Douglass’ views of the Declaration of Independence—including that the principles expressed in the Declaration are eternal, but America does not live up to them in practice—as well as the Constitution. Finally, they reflect on what Douglass can teach us about the challenges America faces today, including the ongoing fight for racial justice and efforts to remove monuments around the country.
FULL PODCAST
PARTICIPANTS
David Blight is Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale. He is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. The book has been optioned by Higher Ground Productions and Netflix for a forthcoming feature film.
Lucas Morel is Professor of Politics and Head of the Politics Department at Washington and Lee University. He is the author of the new book Lincoln and the American Founding and of numerous scholarly articles on Frederick Douglass.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
- Full text of "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"
- Ossie Davis reading the speech, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
- Video of a reading of the speech by Phil Darius Wallace, US National Archives
- Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David Blight
- Lincoln and the American Founding by Lucas Morel
This episode was engineered by the National Constitution Center's AV team and Jackie McDermott, and produced by Jackie McDermott. Research was provided by Nicholas Mosvick and Lana Ulrich.
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TRANSCRIPT
This transcript may not be in its final form, accuracy may vary, and it may be updated or revised in the future.
Jackie McDermott: [00:00:00] Hi, We The People listeners I'm Jackie McDermott the show's producer. This week's episode is about Frederick Douglass' speech "What to the Slave is the 4th of July". Before we get to the episode, here's a recording of actor, Ozzie Davis, reading an excerpt from the speech courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
Ossie Davis: [00:00:21] Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are great principles of political freedom and of national justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national alter, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us? Would to God, both for your sake and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledged such priceless benefits? Who's so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak and the "lame man leap as an hart". But, such as not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice are not enjoyed and common. - The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeath by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you ,has brought stripes and death to me. This 4th of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:03:14] I'm Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, and welcome to We The People, a weekly show of constitutional debate. The National Constitution Center is a nonpartisan nonprofit chartered by Congress to increase awareness and understanding of the constitution among the American people. In 1852, the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester, New York, invited Frederick Douglass to give a July 4th speech. Douglass chose to speak on July 5th instead, addressing an audience of about 600. He delivered one of his most iconic speeches that would become known by the name "What to the Slave is the 4th of July". On today's episode, we discuss Douglass' oration and his thoughts on the broken promises of equality and liberty. We'll also reflect on what the speech can teach us about the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and the challenges America faces today. I'm joined by two of America's leading experts on Frederick Douglass. It is such an honor to have both of them on this independence day podcast. David Blight is Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale. He is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. David, thank you so much for joining.
David Blight: [00:04:39] Thank you Jeffrey. It's an honor to be with you.
Rosen: [00:04:41] And Lucas Morel is Professor of Politics and head of the Politics Department at Washington and Lee University. He is the author of the new book Lincoln and the American Founding and of many scholarly articles on Frederick Douglass. Lucas, it is wonderful to have you back on the show.
Lucas Morel: [00:04:58] Nice to be here with the National Constitution Center. Thank you so much.
Rosen: [00:05:02] In his iconic speech, Frederick Douglass said "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? 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". David Blight, what was the context for this speech and why is Douglass giving it when he did?
Blight: [00:05:27] Well, it's the summer of 1852. He gives this speech in the wake of the publication that spring of Uncle Tom's Cabin the book by Harriet Beecher Stowe that is taking the country and the world by storm. It will become the bestselling book of the 19th century. Even more so, it's only two years after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 and there are any number of fugitive slave rescues occurring all over the Northern States at this time and Frederick Douglass, himself, had participated in some of them. Up through Rochester, New York, where he lived, there was an air and a spirit of uses of violence in the air about the retrieval of fugitive slaves. It's also an election year. It's a big presidential election year, 1852, and the major political parties, the Democratic Party and the Whig Party, are beginning to fray, and particularly the Whigs are tearing themselves apart. The nativist, Know Nothing Party, has made great inroads, as the Free Soil Party, ever since 1848. So the slavery crisis, especially the expansion of slavery, and now this issue of fugitive slaves has the whole country kind of on edge, and when Douglass is invited to deliver a 4th of July speech in Rochester, which is his home, he accepts. But of course, he did not miss the opportunity to take his audience kind of almost by the throat. And for that matter, a larger audience of the nation by the throat and drag them, about a bit about American hypocrisy when it came to slavery.
Rosen: [00:07:12] Taking his audience by the throat is a powerful and accurate way to convey the searing intensity of this speech. Lucas, what would you like to add about the context that led up to the speech? Tell us why he chose to give it on July 5th, rather than July 4th, and then introduce us to the central theme of the speech.
Morel: [00:07:33] Sure as David Blights, great book on Frederick Douglass points out, it had been a practice by many Black Americans to give speeches or celebrate July 4th the day after, as a way of indicating that the time was out of sync or out of whack in a country that professed that all men were created equal, and yet we're not treating all men equal in the law. And so it had been something of a tradition, not uniformally practice, but a way for Black people to say what the 4th isn't quite ours yet, at least in practice, even though the trues of the declaration certainly were true of them by nature and by birthright. You also learned from David's book that this is something of a shock for people to hear from Frederick Douglass, not just the incendiary nature of his rhetoric, which he could do as well as any abolitionist of the day, but because it was his first speech where he announced that he had a change of heart and mind in particular about the constitution, which I'm sure we're going to talk about a little more. He had, ever since he was on the stump with other abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, been one to argue that the constitution was pro-slavery, but in this speech he publicly for the first time, as opposed to just in correspondence, viewed and defended the constitution as anti-slavery. And that really began to tear apart his relationship with his mentor, William Lloyd Garrison, and really put them at odds with a number of folks that he used to be quite good friends, and certainly fellow travelers, with on the speaking circuit for abolitionism. He defends the constitution and astonishingly for the first third/first half of this speech says almost nothing bad about the American founding. He knows full well, he knows better than anybody walking the face of the earth, that they were slaveholders and he studiously avoids mentioning that, and I'm sure we'll talk about why in a bit.
Rosen: [00:09:46] Well, let's talk about it right now cause you're so right to raise it. As you suggest, Douglass says "it is a slander upon their memories", that is the framers, to suggest that they embraced a pro-slavery document. He says "the subjects has been handled with masterful power by Lysander Spooner, by William Goodell, by Samuel East Sewell and, last thoug, not least, by Garrett Smith. These gentlemen have, I think, fully and clearly vindicated the constitution from any designed to support slavery for an hour". David Blight, tell us about these men: Lysander Spooner, Goodell, Sewell, and Smith. How did they persuade Douglass to change his mind about the constitution being a pro-slavery document?
Blight: [00:10:27] Well, Goodell and Spooner, in particular, had for a decade and more become the philosophers, if you like, of an anti-slavery interpretation of the constitution. Garrett Smith was the wealthy abolitionists who lived in upstate New York, in Peterboro, who became very close friends with Douglass. Indeed, he was an underwriter of Douglass' newspaper in fact. Douglass had been reading Spooner and Goodell for some time. He'd also come under the influence of the Liberty Party, under the influence of political abolitionist. And really the arguments that they were using boiled down to the guarantee in the constitution of a "republican" form of government to every state, and they even picked up on the language of the preamble "in order to form a more perfect union". Douglass and others said you can't be aiming at a perfect union and authorize slavery, and even more, they pointed to the Bill of Rights. They said the Bill of Rights has liberation in it and the Bill of Rights has elements of equality in it, so you can't have a pro-slavery constitution that includes these provisions. But as Lucas said in the beginning of this speech, really the first third of it, it's the Declaration of Independence that Douglass folds into this that's what the day is about of course, the 4th of July. And Douglass calls, the 4th of July, the American Passover.
He knows his audience here. This is a very biblical Christian audience and he calls the declaration itself he calls it the "ring-bolt of American liberty". The ring-bolt that rivets you down. And he says the principles, Jefferson's four first principles - natural rights, equality, popular sovereignty, right of revolution - Douglass says they are "saving principles". He says the principles are fantastic; the principles are eternal; the principles belong to everybody; it's the practices of this "republic" that are so contradictory, so paradoxical, so terrible. And he's setting his audience up here, he's setting them at ease, he's honoring the glorious founders. He says we should all rejoice in the genius of these founders, but he is really setting the audience up for the moment when the hammer is going to come down for the whole second-middle part of the speech, which will become this litany of the horrors of the slave trade, the holds of slave ships, auction blocks, domestic slave trade, every element of slavery you can imagine. In this speech, this man was such a genius with language, he even helps his audience use their senses. He makes them hear slavery. He makes them smell slavery. He makes them feel slavery. He captures their emotions around this idea of what it meant to be enslaved in the middle of this speech, after he has honored the genius of the founders for the 4th of July.
Rosen: [00:13:45] You so well capture the power of his language, "the existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense and your Christianity as a lie". Lucas Morell, tell us about the change of mind of Douglass the way that he came to see the constitution as having been betrayed and also his new conception of the relation between the declaration and the constitution.
Morel: [00:14:18] Yeah, he made a big point of reminding his audience that the preamble to the constitution is something of a mission statement for the new federal union. I mean, it's new in the sense that it's like a Hercules in the crib, right? We're an early infancy as he puts it, and he actually stresses that in the early part of this speech that the good that has been done, thankfully, not all the good that could be done has been, and things can still be shaped and imprinted so not everything is set in stone. There are certain things, as David pointed out, that we do want to hold onto we cling to this day, as he says, but also cling to those principles - they're saving principles, they're eternal principles - so the things that are true, these are the things that are fixed, these are the things that are natural. The un-natural things, Lincoln will call the great behemoth of danger, that's slavery. So he put a lot of stress on the preamble, the blessings of liberty - how do you square that with slavery - you can't, that's his point. He paid close attention to the fact that we've been using this document to uphold slavery. I don't see the word in it, in fact that word is not used until we decide to get rid of it as a country in the 13th Amendment. So he drove a truck through, if you will - it's not really a loophole - the whole document you cannot find the word slave or slavery in it. There are some clear passages, at least they're clear to me and most of the country when Douglass gave this speech, that are compromises with slavery. Douglass doesn't agree. He is persuaded by Goodell and Smith and Spooner that we have to read the constitution according to its letter. And according to the letter, if we stay within the four corners, if you will, I don't see slavery in it. As David mentioned, there is a republican guarantee clause, small "r" republican, so that every state is guaranteed a republican form of government, we're going to ensure that, you can't set up a monarchy or aristocracy. Well, what is the slave holding States? An oligarchy, if you will. But at any rate, Douglass says, look we've got to use the letter here to our advantage. It's not mentioned and if this document has been misinterpreted all this time and applied to uphold something that is contrary to its fundamental aim, the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity, there is absolutely nothing wrong with us trying to shape public opinion and get majority opinion to use this constitution correctly. And that is consistent with a republican government, which is the people's things, all the peoples, and that means their rights. And so, he thought it was entirely legitimate for them to take their bearings, not from some so-called intentions of the framers, but actually according to what they wrote and what he called it the plain sense, the plain reading of the document, which of course it should be something that everybody believes is true that constitution doesn't belong to our rulers it belongs to we, the people.
Rosen: [00:17:35] David, Douglass also says, "are the great principles of political freedom and natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence extended to us". To what degree is his argument resting on the idea that slavery violates the natural rights of liberty that the declaration promises and also of equal liberty?
Blight: [00:17:55] It absolutely stands on that. In the morning and the afternoon and in the evening, Douglass was an advocate of the natural rights tradition. It was his fundamental set of beliefs. Douglass always drew on two great traditions, the secular enlightenment and the natural rights tradition, and then also on biblical traditions, particularly old Testament, Hebrew prophet traditions. That becomes such a source of his storytelling of his source of metaphor and so on, and there's a lot of Bible, a lot of use of the songs and Isaiah in this 4th of July speech. I think there's seven biblical references, if you look carefully. But what's really important here, and I'm so glad you asked this about natural rights, is that radical abolitionist had been struggling for some time now to find a way to use law, instead of always being on the outside of law. That's of course, what William Lloyd Garrison's movement had done under William Lloyd Garrison's Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.
And Garrison was indeed Douglass' mentor, to say the least, through the 1840s. They had been very close, although they're going to have a terrible breakup over this ideological split. But abolitionists had been looking for a politics, a way to use law, a way to get inside of law, because otherwise by the 1850s, there's an awareness, and Douglass is a part of this as he's coming of age, we've got to remember he's still only in his thirties at this point, in fact he's barely in his thirties at this point, they're looking for a way to use American law because if they don't the only alternative that exists is eventually some kind of revolution. Some kind of insurrectionary violence, and there's a lot of talk about that. There's a lot of rhetoric about that, especially in resistance to the fugitive slave law. But they're looking for a politics by which they can begin to put the country on notice, to put the country on a warning that if they don't face this problem there is greater trouble to come. And that's exactly what Douglass does in the middle or toward the end of the 4th of July speech. He ends that litany in the middle of the speech. I like to call it a speech that's like a symphony in three movements, and that second movement is the longest - this is the litany of all the horrors of slavery - it's like a hailstorm he's raining down on his audience. That part ends with him using the imagery of a horrible, his words, a horrible reptile coil up at the nation's heart, "your heart is about to be eaten out by a horrible reptile, unless you tear it away", he says "tear it away" and then right after that move, which is right out of Jonathan Edwards, in fact, it's one better than Jonathan Edwards, he pauses. The last part of the speech - not that long - but the last part of the speech he kind of lets his audience up. He says it's not quite too late your nation is still young and malleable, it's still possible for you to save yourselves, but there's a reptile coil at the nation's heart and it's going to eat it out if you don't do something about it. So, it's this combination of looking for a new politics that anti-slavery can use as well as this deep biblical Jeremiah-attic tradition of warning the flock that if they don't act history will act upon them and destroy them.
Rosen: [00:21:47] Wow. Thank you so much for reminding us that this is a Jeremiah-attic, as you say, like the prophet Jeremiah, Douglass is denouncing the congregation for having fallen short of America's ideals and encouraging them to resurrect those ideals and be pointed toward the new Jerusalem. Lucas, tell us about the influence of the natural rights and natural law tradition on Douglass. Is he threatening violent revolution the way Jefferson did in the declaration for those who break those social contract and how in that sense, does his oration relate to that of other abolitionists like David Walker, who decades earlier had threatened violent revolution if the nation did not come back to its founding ideals?
Morel: [00:22:37] Yeah, it's a great question. It's something of a precursor of what became famous or infamous with Malcolm X in one of his greatest speeches called "The Ballot or the Bullet". Malcolm X probably got it from Abraham Lincoln, but he may have gotten it from Frederick Douglass who also used that formulation, which is to say it's always been the American way that we resolve our differences politically, which is to say peacefully with words - yes - we might even raise our voices at times, but we debate, we argue and then we pull the lever. We hope it works, no hanging chads, count them as fairly as we can and then let the chips fall where we may. And as I teach my students, republics require two things: good winners and good losers. And the ballot has to be almost the only way we resolve these things, but Douglass always remembers the past as well, and when American revolutionaries like Patrick Henry, who said what, "give me liberty or give me death". In other words, there's always that threat of the exercise, the legitimate, and just exercise of the natural right of revolution. It's not a constitutional right. It's not a political right. It's a natural right. It's one every human being is born with. You don't even have to be in a majority to exercise it. But that's always the last measure, you don't respond to a bad law with the exercise of the right of revolution. You try to work through the law because after all, at the end of the day, you want the benefit. You want the protection, the equal protection of the law. It's only when the regime is so corrupt that you think as the declaration puts it "after a long train of abuses and usurpations", right. Lifted right out of John Locke. I think one thing we should hasten to add about Douglass is new political abolitionism. I'm glad that that was said that way, because I think today we think, well, of course abolitionism is political. That wasn't an of course, that wasn't obvious. William Lloyd Garrison, before Douglass, was the most famous, in my opinion, abolitionists in the country, editor of the Liberator ever since, I think, January of 1831, and he was a member of a school shall we say of moral suasion. They thought that the only way that you could achieve true righteousness and true right action had to come from the heart. And this was something that could not be coerced by violence or even through law, which of course is a command that comes with a sanction - do this or get dinged. We would not do evil that good may result, right? You don't get good fruit from a bad tree, borrowing from the new Testament. And so the, the moral suasion school, which Frederick Douglass was a part of as an early stumped speaker for abolitionism, said that the most you could do was maybe raise your voice. And certainly Garrison love to speak in all caps in his newspaper, "I will be heard". There's this great scene in Uncle Tom's Cabin, when an escaped slave comes into of all Christian groups, Quakers, and why I'm exasperated here is because Quakers don't believe in the use of violence, while there's a slave hound, there's a bounty hunter on the heels and he comes up at this precipice and there's this new convert to the faith. I forget his name, but it's a priceless scene that still presents to us they don't want the bounty hunter to apprehend the escaped slave, but they can't use violence to prevent it. So, what does this guy do? Let's just say he savors of the old Adam, he rears back and with the sweep of his hand, he says, "brother, this is to the slave hunter, thou are not welcome here", and he knocks the slave hunter down the precipice, accidentally of course, hitting him with this magnificent gesture of the arm. And then of course, since it's stow and a novel, they go hustling down the Hill and take care of him, patch him up and he becomes a Quaker. Alright, we can talk about that later. Point being, Garrison was a pacifist, and pacifist said that we are not in this by ourselves, God and we are a majority, and all our responsibility is once we rest ourself of the taint of aiding and abetting slavery. So, he was for dissolution, dissolving the union, because free States are cooperating with slave States to uphold slavery. He says, once we dissolve the union, we also can trust that the conviction of the Lord, that the Holy spirit will come upon the slaveholder once we point out to him that what he is doing is a sin and wrong. Okay, so only moral suasion words, right. We would not strike the devil to kill him was their point. And so, that was the school from which, or out of which, Frederick Douglass' abolitionism, besides the school of slavery, if you will, was born. And so, the shift to political abolitionism, "oh really, we can run people for office. We could actually have a party. We could actually use the levers of the constitution and the legislature and courts to do the right thing to emancipate slaves" that was a breath of fresh air for Douglass. And when he imbibed that air he was in with both feet and this speech is arguably the most magnificent display of that.
Rosen: [00:27:57] Wow, amazing stories. David, I want to ask you more about Douglass' intellectual influences. In your pathbreaking biography, you say that the book that changed Douglass' life was called The Columbian Orator, and it was a compilation of enlightenment and classical and other sources from Cato and Cicero to Socrates and Milton and James Fox. Tell us about that book, how it shaped Douglass' intellectual and philosophical attitudes, and you talked about the enlightenment in the Bible to what degree did those classical sources influence his conceptions of liberty and equality? And then if I haven't given you too many questions, if you could just remind our listeners what the three parts of the speech are cause I want to make sure that we all have it down.
Blight: [00:28:50] Sure. Oh, gladly because The Columbian Orator was a tremendous influence on the young Douglass' life. This is a book compiled in 1797 by a man named Caleb Bingham, who was from Connecticut, although he went to Dartmouth, he ended up in Boston. He founded schools, actually the first schools for girls in New England. But he compiled this reader. It's a school reader in the 1790s. He called it The Columbian Orator. It is a huge collection of both classical oratory from the Greeks and Romans, Cicero, Desmosthenes and others, but also especially rhetoric speeches from the enlightenment years. Ben Franklin is in it, William Pitt is in it, and many, many others, even Jefferson. Also though, Bingham included in this book some dialogues, which were invented, I think there's six of them. The invented dialogues were aimed at children, at young readers. And one of those dialogues is between a master and a slave, and the slave just talks his master into freeing him, just like that. He makes a moral case and by God the master frees him. If it's a 10 or a 12 year-old reading that - why not persuasion? Douglass encounters this book on the streets of Baltimore when he's about 11 years-old, 11 or 12. He encounters the book among his white friends. These are white boys who are all of Irish and German immigrant workers in the docks of Baltimore, and these kids aren't old enough to have learned their racism yet. They like little Fred. They thought he was cool. They wondered why he couldn't go to school with him and he found he's already become literate of course having been taught his letters by one of his mistresses. And this kid for reasons that are not entirely knowable, Douglass, had really taken to language. He wants to get a copy of this book, his buddies all have it that's their school reader. And by the way, it had become by then the second largest selling school reader in the country next to only the McGuffey reader. Anyway, and by the way, a lot of these dialogues and some of the speeches in this collection were anti-slavery, there's just no question about it. And there was even a Maryland edition of this published in a slave state. Well, Douglass goes to a bookstore on 10th Street, Fells Point in Baltimore and he bargained, basically for a copy of The Columbian Orator and by age 12 he had his own copy, and it became one of the most precious things he had ever owned. And to make a long story short, when he was 18 years old or 17 and 18 living as a rented slave on the eastern shore on a farm owned by a man named Freeland, Douglass tells us that on the Sabbath on Sundays, when they weren't required to work, he would take what he called a band of brothers, other male slaves, he said at one point he had as many as 30, who knows, but he took his band of brothers out into a brush harbor under some shade trees, and he would preach to them out of The Columbian Orator. He would practice rhetoric with them and maybe the most important thing in that book was the 20 page introduction, because that introduction is a manual of oratory. It's a "how to" it's about how to use your arms and your shoulders in your neck and it's about how to modulate your voice, it's how to begin slowly and reach crescendos, and right out of Aristotle, Caleb Bingham tells how a great oratory must reach the heart of his audience, must reach a moral center in his audience. That was precious knowledge to this kid who had taken hold of language and now of preaching, and by the way, when he gets back to Baltimore, he attended no less than four different churches. Two of them with black preachers, two of them with white preachers, he'd heard a lot of sermonizing, a lot of homiletics, if you like, by the time he ever escaped from slavery. But that Columbian Orator was so precious to him that when he escaped disguised as a sailor in the pocket of his pantaloons he had a few dollars and he had his copy of The Columbian Orator. That is all he carried out of slavery with him. And that very copy is today at the Douglass home in Anacostia in Washington D.C. And one of the great thrills of my life is a story is when the curators there, let me have free reign one day and I got to set it Douglass his desk with gloves on and hold Douglass' copy of The Columbian Orator. It's one of those weird things that historians are into, but it was a thrill for me. And by the way, back to one last thing about what Lucas so beautifully said about what Douglass was doing in the 4th of July speech, even Thomas Paine gets in there, he uses the phrase about the times that try men's souls, he was pulling on so many different American references in that speech. As an American listening to that and an American reading that today who's knowledgeable at all, it is amazing the references that will come out of that speech. That's one of the reasons I've always called it the rhetorical masterpiece of American abolition.
Rosen: [00:34:39] Amazing. I have to ask because you said that he was so influenced by Aristotle. Were the three parts of the speech influenced by the classical models and what were the three parts of the speech?
Blight: [00:34:50] Well, the speech does, I think, have three essential parts to it. They're like movements of music in a way, if you see rhetoric and oratory as a kind of music. And I think Douglass did, he could hear the musical words in his head. That first part is where he sets the audience, where he honors the founding fathers. This is the American Passover. The Declaration is the ring bolt of your liberty. It's beautiful. It's a celebration 4th of July, but then already he's beginning to rain down the "you" and the "your", and the "you" and the "your", to the you pronoun, dozens of them. He just stares raining down on his audience. And finally, the hammer comes down. "Pardon me? Why have you invited me here to speak on the 4th of July? What have I to do with your 4th of July? 4th of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice. I must mourn" and so on, and then he says, what we really need here today is sacrilegious irony, not just irony, sacrilegious irony, and right after that begins the second movement of the speech the second part. And he begins with his very biblical audience by simply drawing them to the 137th song, by the rivers of Babylon there we sat down and you asked us to hang our harps upon the willows, and you asked of us a song, which is Douglass' way of saying to them you invited me here to sing for you. I'm not gonna sing. I'm gonna rip your heart out. And for the next 10 pages that's what he does. This hailstorm of the history, really of the slave trade, of slavery and it's poison the way it has poisoned the American polity and American law and everything. And then as I think I earlier said, that section ends with that metaphor of reptile coil at the nation's heart. That's the end of part two. And you can just sense a pause in the speech, and those last three or four pages of the text are when he lets them back up. He says, it's not quite too late. There's still hope for this Republic. It has its creeds in order, the principles are fine. It's the practice that matters. And then with tremendous irony, he ends that for those of us who know the story anyway, he ends that speech by quoting from passages of a poem by William Lloyd Garrison, with whom he's just had this terrible personal breakup and he's vacating himself from moral suasion, and he ends with verses from the poem by Garrison called Go Sound the Jubilee, which is the biblical word for, well many things, but especially for liberation. It's a speech of rhetorical genius, but it is also a very powerful political message, and I think the last thing I'd say about it is our man was a marketer. He had that baby printed up and ready to go already before he even delivered the speech and when you went on the roads he always did the speech now. He was selling copies of the 4th of July speech everywhere he went and in his newspaper the North Star you could buy them, I think, for 50 cents a copy or, I don't know, $10 or $15 per hundred. They were advertising for it for months on end afterward, but he was ready to take that way beyond Corinthian Hall in Rochester. And I've always been convinced this was one of those moments when the now quite famous Douglass was speaking well beyond that hall. He was speaking to the nation. He was speaking beyond the nation. He was speaking to us.
Rosen: [00:38:48] Wow. As you say, he ends with Garrison, "God speed the year of Jubilee the wide world o'er when from their galling chains set free, th' oppress'd shall vilely, bend the knee, and wear the yoke of tyranny". Amazing stuff. Lucas, so much to respond to what David said, I'm eager for your thoughts and then tell us about the response to this speech. Did it change the debate in any way? And then take us to Lincoln. Did this speech influence Lincoln? And in your new book you describe Lincoln's own evolution as he grappled with the legacy of the declaration and the constitution. Tell us about how those documents influenced Lincoln's constitutional thinking.
Morel: [00:39:35] Well, those are wonderful questions. The first one I think it's difficult to disentangle the impact of or at least distinguish the impact of Douglass' one speech in a year where the Harry Potter, Danielle Steel, John Grisham, all mashed together of the Uncle Tom's Cabin - I mean just blew up - the legal copyrighted copies, 300,000 I think the first year after it was serialized in an abolition newspaper. So, I have to say that probably the biggest impact of the year was the was the novel by Stowe. I mean that just really lit a fire under abolitionists, especially in New England. But I think more importantly for Douglass, this one really launched his career as a speaker in his own right. He made his living by giving speeches for the rest of his life, right, until 1896, so I think that the biggest impact is the separation from the Garrisonians school, and now making it legitimate for abolitionists to genuinely embrace political action not just social or moral activism, but political action. The actual hard work, in fact, as good an orator as he is, the hard work of changing people's minds and in fact lighting a fire under those whose minds don't need to be changed, but they need to get off their butts and do something about it. As David intimated, right, there's this great line where he says ,it is not like that is needed but fire, not a gentle shower but thunder, so he still held onto some of that Garrisonians verve no doubt, had his own resources for that as well. His own awful experience as a slave. But here's a guy in the middle of that speech where he says you're asking me for an argument - who needs to be told, who needs to be argued into the idea that being a slave is wrong. He says there's no one under the canopy of heaven that doesn't know that slavery is wrong for him. He says, I would look ridiculous if your complaints about my fiery rhetoric is, oh, you need to come down and persuade people. It's like persuade people of what they all know it. He's preaching out of their own choir, you guys made this stuff up I didn't, I didn't come up with all men are created equal, you said that. I'm just trying to hold you to it, right. I'm trying to close that gap between profession and practice. So in terms of its impact, I think the biggest impact I would say is probably within his own circles and within his own brand. David said he's an excellent marketer, for sure, here's a guy who's now embarking on a career on American soil. You've got to remember when his narrative came out in 45, he had to flee the country because he may have physically escaped his legal master, but in the eyes of the law he was an outlaw. He was outside of the laws protection until he was legally manumitted. This is the big debate. I don't even know how it's still a debate among historians, whether the slaves in the Civil War freed themselves or whether Lincoln did it. The obvious answer is yes. Yes, they had to make their own efforts as his preliminary emancipation proclamation said, efforts they may make for their own liberation. But guess what? Now the federal government with the authority of the executive department now invites them into the folds of liberty rather than returning them to their legal masters. It was an engraved invitation from the president that the efforts you make, we will second. Without the law they had to hightail it, not to the North, but to Canada. And again, 1852, only two years after the revision of the Fugitive Slave Act the notorious Fugitive Slave Act. So, we needed law and now Douglass has given abolitionists and like-minded antislavery folks like Lincoln, who was already there, but folks who haven't really taken up the cause to get their consciouses riled and to do something about it. Where is Lincoln in this? I've been teaching for not as long as David, but I'm trying to catch up. I've been teaching over a quarter century, good grief. Don't do the math. I think a student should try a paper, and there've been great dual biographies of Douglass and Lincoln, the best one in my opinion is by James Oaks, which won the Lincoln prize, but students should do a paper on the many affinities rhetorically between Douglass and Lincoln. David Blight pointed out the ring bolt. What phrase does Lincoln use - sheet anchor? In a speech in 1854, two years after this one, Lincoln says that consent is the sheet anchor of American republicanism in his great Peoria address of 1854, which brought Lincoln back into politics with two feet. I think you've got this ping pong match between these two guys that nobody really wins. They keep the ball in play because one in a way imitates or emulates the other. David would be a better hand at this than mine in terms of how well versed was Lincoln with Douglass. I think he was exceedingly well versed, because these abolitionists, even though they had subscribers, they sent their papers to people for free. They wanted the word to get out so I don't doubt Lincoln was reading Douglass and was both being shaped but also I think, as we see in Douglass' own writings later, being the shaper as well. So, to get to your last question about the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln of course is probably the most famous and articulate connector of the declaration to the constitution. The declaration being the aims or purposes of the regime and the constitution being the means, the mechanisms, the structures of liberty, even though it's compromised at least in his mind, not Douglass', in his mind with the compromises with slavery. And so Lincoln makes the battle for the founders the front burner issue in the 1850s with Stephen Douglas. Stephen Douglas also wants to wear the mantle of the founders. He claims he understands "our revolutionary fathers" better than Lincoln does, and so what we really have there is a battle over who has the correct interpretation of what the founders intended, what did they set into motion with the declaration and the constitution. And the one who is successful in that rhetorical battle is going to set the course of the country, and in Lincoln's mind will set the course on a future of a slave free Republic or a slave holding Republic. This is one of the most bizarre things. Lincoln said that for Douglas, Douglas was insidious. Not John Calhoun, not Jeff Davis, not Alexander Stephens, but Stephen Douglas, a Northern white the leading Democrat in the 1850s odds on favorite for the presidency in 1860 if the democratic party doesn't split. He says, Douglas is the enemy because all that needs to happen for slavery to become truly national and to enter into every territory, into every state, whether they want it or not, is for white northerners not to care what happens to people who do not look like them in other places like the federal territories. That's the insidious nature of Douglas and that's why people needed to reclaim the declaration, reclaim its connection to the constitution. And here is where he's on board with Frederick Douglass, use that preamble - the blessings of liberty. Liberty is the natural birthright. The equal possession of the individual rights of law, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for every human being.
Rosen: [00:47:29] Thank you so much for that and for introducing us to the relationship between Lincoln and Douglass. David on that score there is a monument in Washington, D.C. called the Emancipation Memorial and it was paid for by formerly enslaved people. It's on Capitol Hill. It depicts a clothed Abraham Lincoln standing with a hand over a kneeling freed enslaved person. The other hand is holding an emancipation proclamation. There's now a controversy about whether or not to take the statue down. As it happens, Douglass gave a speech on the unveiling of the statue and he talked about Lincoln's mixed legacy. Tell us what Douglass said about Lincoln in that speech and in light of that whether you think the statute should come down or not.
Blight: [00:48:19] Well, thank you first for that question, Jeffrey. I personally hope it does not come down. I hope it's still standing by the time this airs. There's obviously a rolling controversy over it now, like so many other memorials and monuments across the country. That monument the standing Lincoln and the kneeling slave was unveiled April 14, 1876, 11th anniversary of Lincoln's assassination. Again, the context is crucial here. It had taken years to conceive and build this monument. There had been many other models for it. It was in the end paid for, as you said, by almost entirely by African Americans. It cost $20,000 in 1870s money. The first $5 was given by an African American woman, former slave named Charlotte Scott from Missouri. The model for the kneeling slave was a very real person named Archer Alexander, who had been the last Missouri slave arrested under the Fugitive Slave Act in the middle of the civil war, 1863. He later went on to some local fame because of that and his photograph was taken and sent to the sculptor Thomas Ball, who actually lived in Italy. At any rate, at the unveiling of this monument, controversial as it was then and clearly still is, Douglass was orator of the day. The whole event at the unveiling was an African American event, by and large. There was a huge parade that day. It was a very typical Black Washington, D.C. parade with bands and drum and bugle corps and fraternal orders and everybody was out in costume. The master of ceremonies was John Mercer Langston, the African American freeborn Dean of the Howard University Law School, a young black poet named Charlotte Rae, read an original poem, an AME Bishop gave the invocation, and so on. It was a black affair, but the audience was a remarkable audience. First of all, there was thousands of people, but upfront with President Grant members of his cabinet, Justices of the Supreme Court, and members of the House and the Senate, the entire government. The day was declared a federal holiday. Douglass wrote a very special speech for this occasion too. He didn't blow this one off. Again, he could have done a ceremonial talk and said Lincoln was a great man. Isn't it a beautiful April spring day, hurrah, for the United States we survived and yada yada. No, he gave a dead, honest, straightforward speech. Again, in two parts. The first part is where Douglass famously says Abraham Lincoln was the white man's President. He was in every way, a white man in his assumptions and his prejudices. He was not our man. He says our being African-Americans and he says in the most famous line of the speech, my fellow white citizens you are Abraham Lincoln's children. I and my people are his stepchildren, stepchildren by adoption circumstances and necessity. That's a blunt metaphor. That's a brutal metaphor in a way. However, there's a pause after that again and the last part of the speech Douglass says, but, and then he uses a refrain three times, under his rule and in due time, meaning Lincoln, is how we became free. And he embraces, even admires, the caution, the kind of pragmatic political caution by which Lincoln came to emancipation in the midst of all out civil war. And he says the timing and method of doing this was Abraham Lincoln's alone. And it becomes his way of both declaring the Lincoln of the first year of the war of 1861, when Douglass was a ferocious critic of Lincoln, and the Lincoln of 1863, '64 up to '65, the Lincoln who grew to the point of emancipation. The Lincoln who crafted the Emancipation Proclamation and the policy by which the armies would free the slaves. It is both of those things that Douglass is doing. And last but not least, at the end of the speech with that audience, Grant Cabinet, Congress, Supreme Court, he basically is warning them you are losing reconstruction. Reconstruction is falling apart. There are only three States left in the South unredeemed by the democratic party. It may be too late, but you may still have a chance to save reconstruction. And what he's in effect done there is enlisted Lincoln's memory. The great symbolic power of Lincoln's memory here for the cause of Black civil and political rights. He's putting Lincoln on their side in that sense and it's a masterpiece. It's only 13 pages long, and to me, one of the reasons I want that Memorial preserved, although I'd love to see it enhanced, I think what we really need to see now is a big, if not national commission, some kind of commission, created to now begin to think imaginatively about emancipation memorials to replace all these Confederate monuments. But Douglass himself actually advocated for that in his own time. I'd like to see an additional Memorial put up there because I think in some ways it's the rarest of cases, but Douglass' speech, at least to me, of course I'm a Douglass historian, but his speech rendered that ground all but sacred and the way that he converted Lincoln to the cause of Black liberty, civil and political rights forever, and I just fear that if you take that monument out of Lincoln park and you stick it in the corner of some museum or it's nothing but a curiosity, no one will ever really learn this. And why not have a great new, modern emancipation Memorial without kneeling slaves, of course, next to that monument, which can be reconfigured at least with narrative around it. And think of what we could learn from the juxtaposition of the two of them about past and present. We can't just purify the past and we surely can't purify our memory. But this is a case where I want a monument preserved because we really can learn from it, especially while we're taking the Confederacy off our landscape. What are we going to replace it with?
Rosen: [00:55:18] Wow. Lucas, you have written and spoken about this emancipation Memorial as well. You sent me a letter to the editor that Douglass wrote five days after his oration and memory of Abraham Lincoln. Tell us what he said in that letter, what you think of the speech, whether you think the monument should stay up or come down or be contextualized and if it should be contextualized, how so?
Morel: [00:55:43] Yeah, I I'll just start by saying, I agree wholeheartedly with David Blight that it would be enhanced by the addition of at least one more, if not several monuments. It's a letter that he writes to the National Republican, which is a D.C. newspaper, five days after he delivers the eulogy to Lincoln, oration and memory of Abraham Lincoln. On April 19th, he says that what that statue represents isn't the whole truth. The mere act of breaking, as he puts it, "the Negroes chains was the act of Abraham Lincoln and is beautifully expressed in this monument". But that's not the end of his letter. In the letter, he says there is room in Lincoln park for another monument, and he's saying this, and David is right to point out, the number one person he needs to say this to is Grant. He loves Grant because if Lincoln freed the slaves, Grant has done what he could to make them citizens. That's the thing. It's not just liberation, it's citizenship long overdue, and of course with citizenship, in his mind, it's the vote - have to give Black people the vote. Without the vote, they are slaves of the community rather than an individual, as he said so many times. And you're thinking Lucas, I thought the 15th amendment was ratified back in 1870 what are you talking about the vote? As David pointed out, the "South" is on its way to being redeemed as they put it, getting out of bayonet rule with the federal government and the military occupation. Douglass knows without the help of the federal government putting teeth into the constitutional bite of 15th amendment, the Black population are going to be at the mercy of their former legal enslavers and that can't do. So in a speech where he goes overboard in my opinion tying Lincoln to the white color bigotry of the day. He has to do it because if Lincoln remains the Black man's president, if you will, they'll say well he freed the slaves, nothing more to do, nothing to see here. Douglass is like we blacks may have erected one monument. This country should be littered with monuments, put up by white people for their president Abraham Lincoln in honor of what he did. Yes, for us and for the country, and so he is enlisting that legacy of Lincoln He still speaks today. He still has relevance. He still is germane. Today, for what all American citizens, in particular Black American citizens at this time in 1876, need and so he says with Grant we need something that can't be said just with this particular monument. As he puts it, the act by which the Negro was made a citizen of the United States invested with the elective franchise the vote was preeminently the act of President U.S. Grant, not of Lincoln. This is nowhere seen in the Lincoln monument. So Douglass, he has told us what to do about the monument right now that in fact in Boston it's copy they have voted unanimously to remove their emancipation group, their freedman's memorial. It's going to be gone. And as David said, it's going to gather dust somewhere in the same way that wonderful barley for the 54th is behind a bus stop on Boston commons. You don't even notice it. It's on the other side of the parking. It's behind a bus stop. Is that going to happen to the emancipation group in D.C.? I hope not, and so I think Douglass told us a long time ago what should be done with the monument that was not one he conceived of even though he was on the commission that brought about the fundraising, et cetera. It didn't tell the whole story, but it did tell the story it was intended to tell, the moment of liberation not a kneeling slave, but a crouching one. One as it were, if you look at it carefully, the muscles, the sinews are tense. This is a sprinter at the blocks. He's not looking at Lincoln he's looking past Lincoln. He's looking to the future. What will the full flowering of liberty look like? That's what the statue should show. That's why Douglass wanted him erect, standing up fully clothed, in other words, this is what a human being looks like. This is what a citizen looks like, and that's the kind of story that Lincoln park should tell. It can be done with these explanatory plaques and it can be done in particular by the addition of one or two statues, one that should be of Charlotte Scott and the other one of Frederick Douglass in my opinion. But of course, I'll never be appointed to that commission, but I'll let David work on that.
Rosen: [01:00:20] You both should chair the commission and thank you for the amazing suggestions. Well, as Lincoln said in the first inaugural, I am loathed to close. This is an amazing conversation, but close we must, and David, the first of our closing arguments is to you and the question for our We The People listeners is what can Douglass' 4th of July oration tell us about our current fixations. What would he say today?
Blight: [01:00:51] Well, we don't know but he would no doubt remind us of what is now obvious this republic, this thing, this idea, this America, those principles embedded in the declaration and then reinvented in the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, and then reinvented in that second reckoning of the Civil Rights Movement, the '64 Civil Rights Act, the '65 Voting Rights Act, it's always unfinished. That would I think be his argument. He'd be surprised. I'm sure he'd be shocked. He'd probably look at the protest today and say, man I died 130/125 years ago, y'all are still at this my God? But given the fact that he had such a long view of history, he'd say, well this thing is always unfinished, but my God you're having this amazing reckoning and you ought to get it right this time. By the way, one little sliver of, I love doing this, one little sliver of context on Douglass is he embraces Grant in that incredible letter, which I only learned about in the past week from the intrepid research of Scott Sandidge and John White. Douglass was also campaigning at that point to try to get Grant to run for a third term, and the convention hadn't been held yet. He really wanted a Grant to run again cause he really wasn't sure whether you could trust the rest of the Republicans. So I've always read that as a little bit of nudging of Grant, maybe, I don't know. Not that he had that much influence over Grant, but Douglass would remind us that this experiment is almost by definition, always unfinished, always under revision, under attack and under defense and then under remaking. And we're at a time when we got to do some remaking.
Rosen: [01:02:51] Lucas, the last word is to you. What can Douglass' oration tell us about our current fixations and what would Douglass say to us today?
Morel: [01:03:00] Yeah, Douglass is the right man to think about as we look towards the celebration of our national independence on July 4th. Right now I'm sure there is a portion of the country that wonders whether there's anything to be proud of in our past. The past is being attacked in so many ways, not just through physical objects but through with words. We're now even confused apparently about what our true founding is and so I think we need to do some serious soul searching. Douglass says in that speech, my business if I have any here today is with the present. He is constantly trying to figure out what's next to do, what's next to do, what's next to do, and right now what's next to do is think about seriously what Douglass thought we were not supposed to lose sight of, not let go of, in fact cling he said cling to this day and that day was July 4th, July 4th of 1776. And here's a guy who's fully aware that 20 Africans landed at Point Comfort near Jamestown in Virginia, the Virginia colony, the first English colony there. He's fully aware of how tied our history has been to the legacy of slavery and racial bigotry. He got to that way before any of the recent kerfuffles over that issue. He knows that whole story, but here's a man who thought something truly new was born July 4th, 1776, in my opinion. He said those were saving principles, eternal principles hold on to that. That's a ring bolt, right? As Lincoln put it, the sheet anchor of the American Republic. We've got to decide whether that model still holds or what the alternative is going to be. And believe me, there are alternatives being presented and working their way out right now. And Douglass would not be content with just eating hot dogs or as Lincoln put it just burning firecrackers on July 4th; even though, I love that and they're all already doing it in my neighborhood. He would say take this moment not just to say we have Washington to our father, right? We have Abraham to our father as he so brilliantly alluded. It's not just about saying I'm an American. It's about asking what is the meaning of America and to figure out a way in which, in my opinion, we could have our practice line up more consistently with our profession. I'll leave the last word to a former President, William Jefferson Clinton, the best thing he ever said was from his first inaugural address "reset" borrowing from Ike, Dwight Eisenhower, he said, there's nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured with what is right with America. So we've got to figure out what is right with this country and then take our bearings from there.
Rosen: [01:05:51] Thank you so much David Blight and Lucas Morel for a truly inspiring and illuminating discussion of Frederick Douglass' legacy. I hope that everyone has a meaningful 4th of July weekend and David Blight, Lucas More thank you so much for joining.
Blight: [01:06:09] Thank you Jeffrey, and thank you Lucas.
Morel: [01:06:11] Thank you guys both, wonderful time.
