and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! With this product, you can choose to either have your students read the entire speech and annotate and analyze Douglass' rhetorical devices or you can choose to have your students read shorter excerpts from the speech and do an abbreviated annotation and analysis of rhetorical devices. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. To the slave, Douglass tells the audience, "your 4th of July is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license [for enslaving blacks] . In his speech, "The Hypocrisy of American Slavery . Let it be thundered around the world, that, in tyrant-killing, king-hating, people-loving, democratic, Christian America, the seats of justice are filled with judges, who hold their offices under an open and palpable bribe, and are bound, in deciding in the case of a mans liberty, hear only his accusers!In glaring violation of justice, in shameless disregard of the forms of administering law, in cunning arrangement to entrap the defenseless, and in diabolical intent, this Fugitive Slave Law stands alone in the annals of tyrannical legislation. speaking of it relatively, and positively, negatively, and affirmatively. It is called (in contradistinction to the foreign slave-trade) the internal slave trade. It is, probably, called so, too, in order to divert from it the horror with which the foreign slave-trade is contemplated. The accepted time with God and his cause is the ever-living now. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. welcome anything! weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn! The right of the hunter to his prey stands superior to the right of marriage, and to all rights in this republic, the rights of God included! Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. How can we sing the Lords song in a strange land? The charter of our liberties, which every citizen has a personal interest in understanding thoroughly. Space is comparatively annihilated. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it. The drove moves tardily. I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. Tell me citizens, WHERE, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Without this fight, the liberty of an American citizen would be as insecure as that of a Frenchman. when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence. O! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines! The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? Summary: "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" In "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?", otherwise known as "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro," Frederick Douglassoutlines a careful argument against the institution of slavery and more specifically the Fugitive Slave Act. They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done. To find out what elements make the speech 'What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?' Tell me citizens, WHERE, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. He mentions the fact to show that slavery is in no danger. Douglass equates this to being worse than many other things that are banned, in particular, books and plays that are banned for infidelity. we wept when we remembered Zion. He wrote and presented a speech that challenged . 4th period Mrs. Landrew Fredrick Douglass Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave who became a prominent activist, author and public speaker. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot and kill. In July of 1852, Frederick Douglass prepares a speech known as The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro. 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. In the second part of the speech, Douglass turns to the present and his own feelings about the 4th of July . All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God. They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity. Cling to this daycling to it, and to its principles, with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight, Neither steam nor lightning had then been reduced to order and discipline, With them, justice, liberty and humanity were final; not slavery and oppression. There is not time now to argue the constitutional question at length nor have I the ability to discuss it as it ought to be discussed. After this, he turns his attention to the church. If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the lame man leap as an hart.But, such is not the state of the case. True Christians, according to Douglass, should not stand idly by while the rights and liberty of others are stripped away. If any man in this assembly thinks differently from me in this matter, and feels able to disprove my statements, I will gladly confront him at any suitable time and place he may select.I take this law to be one of the grossest infringements of Christian Liberty, and, if the churches and ministers of our country were not stupidly blind, or most wickedly indifferent, they, too, would so regard it.At the very moment that they are thanking God for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, and for the right to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences, they are utterly silent in respect to a law which robs religion of its chief significance, and makes it utterly worthless to a world lying in wickedness. [20]:345He also attempts to demonstrate the irony of their inability to sympathize with the Black people they oppressed in cruel ways that the forefathers they valorized never experienced. Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? By an act of the American Congress, not yet two years old, slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form. Douglass builds his argument by using surprising contrasts, plain facts, and provocative antithesis. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. [6] Due to this and the variant titles given to it in various places, and the fact that it is called a July Fourth Oration but was actually delivered on July 5, some confusion has arisen about the date and contents of the speech. By that most foul and fiendish of all human decrees, the liberty and person of every man are put in peril. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen, in contrast with nature. These rules are well established. official permission or approval. (3) $3.99. You glory in your refinement and your universal education yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of a nationa system begun in avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. Douglass addressed a part of the population for which the day had huge significance the true independence, he argues, is not for the American people, but for the American slave. The 4th of July is the first great fact in your nation's historythe very ring-bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny. Great for your high school American Literature class. In an 1868 speech, he said, No man should be excluded from the government on the basis of his color, no woman on account of her sex. [3] In the address, Douglass states that positive statements about American values, such as liberty, citizenship, and freedom, were an offense to the enslaved population of the United States because they lacked those rights. Alison Drasner, the project coordinator for the Somerville Museum, teamed up with Dave Ortega at the Somerville Media Center to prerecord voices of 50 Somerville residents, including my 7-year-old daughter, Charlotte, to read sections of the speech. He praises them because they were great men. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! Douglass referred not only to the captivity of enslaved people, but to the merciless exploitation and the cruelty and torture that slaves were subjected to in the United States. nor the perfect gage I think I have of Corinthian Hall, the slave plantation, from which I escaped, and trusting to your patient and generous indulgence, I will proceed to lay them before you, This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? I take it, therefore, that it is not presumption in a private citizen to form an opinion of that instrument.Now, take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties), is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen. In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. In order to put an end to it, some of these last have consented that their colored brethren (nominally free) should leave this country, and establish themselves on the western coast of Africa! R, R. 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