Featuring: Larry Kenneth Alexander
Transcript:
Frederick Douglass was a great orator and African-American abolitionist who, in his historic 1852 speech, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July, addressed a white New York audience, condemning America’s Fourth of July celebrations as mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy. While whites celebrated the day annually, Douglass mourned each Fourth of July. Born into slavery but now a free man, Douglass posed and answered the question: “What to the American slave is your Fourth of July?” He declared, “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. To him, your celebration is a sham.”
In this speech, Douglass challenged both Black and white Americans, asserting, “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome.” This meant confronting and debunking the narrative that Black colonials were excluded from the Declaration of Independence because they were chattel property owned by white patriots based on colonial slave codes and Negro laws.
In this regard, Douglass referenced the Declaration drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1776. Within its grievance section, the Founders labeled England’s King George III a tyrant for “abolishing our most valuable laws” and altering their form of government. The Declaration contradicts the narrative that Black colonials were owned by white patriots based on colonial slave codes and Negro laws. Jefferson knew that colonial slave codes were irredeemably abolished and tried to persuade America’s Congress to abandon English law and adopt Roman law, which would have distanced the new nation from Anglo-Saxon and English traditions rejecting slavery at birth for those born in the country. However, he was unsuccessful.
In his 1785 work, Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson opined that American slavery was corrosive to slaves, slave masters, and the fabric of society, warning it would ultimately corrupt the nascent American experiment. Jefferson’s concerns were framed in 1783 when British commander General Guy Carleton confronted General George Washington, challenging America’s position and attempting to differentiate between Black and white colonial loyalists. Carleton declared that Black and white subjects held by Americans were Englishmen of the same rank and status when America declared independence in 1776, and all were entitled to freedom under the Treaty of Paris of 1783.
Washington, reputed for his integrity, falsely claimed colonial slave codes were valid laws that designated Black colonials as property before the war. This falsehood caused the post-Revolutionary enslavement and exploitation of Black individuals. The American Colonies Act of 1766, the Somerset Decision in 1772, and the Declaration’s 1776 grievance admitting their “valuable laws” were abolished by the British government validated Black British subjecthood. These truths align with Douglass’ assertion that America’s celebration of the Fourth of July was a sham.
Though partially yielding, Carleton managed to secure the freedom of roughly 3,000 Black individuals, whom he viewed as reclaiming their rightful status as British subjects. Douglass’ pre-Civil War speech in 1852 directs us to reconsider the narrative that Black colonials were excluded from the Declaration of Independence. The Revolution was not merely a story of patriot rights and monarchs but a far-reaching conflict for the universal application of human rights and legal integrity in the very creation of the United States.
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