…Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them… My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.-The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us.
He became one of the most influential abolitionist speakers and before a crowd of white abolitionists in 1852, he delivered this, one of the greatest abolitionist speeches.įellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? 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? After several attempts, he finally successfully escape slavery in 1838. He was separated from his mother in infancy and lived with his grandmother until he was separated from her as well at age seven.
Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” 1852įrederick Douglass was born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland in 1818.
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