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Frederick Douglass and the power of the rebuke
Independence Day is supposed to be a time for grand patriotic rituals, star-spangled spectacles, and flowery professions of love of one’s country. It’s a time for Americans to feel good about America. Frederick Douglass had a different idea. One hundred and sixty-eight years ago, the former slave turned abolitionist delivered a stinging jeremiad before an audience in Rochester, New York, with the title “What to the slave is the fourth of July?”
Douglass began his speech by meditating on the significance of the Fourth of July, which he called the “first great fact in your nation’s history — the very ring-bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny.” His use of the second-person — “your nation” as opposed to “our nation”— foreshadowed the kind of ironic rhetorical twist that the great orator was famous for.
After surveying the history of the American Revolution and the deeds of the Founding Fathers, Douglass poses a series of questions to the audience:
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 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…
