In 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered what many consider the best abolitionist speech of all time. He asked, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” What makes it such a masterpiece — and what can we take from it today?

Guests

David Blight, Sterling professor of history and Black studies at Yale University. Author of the biography “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in History. Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, also at Yale.

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Across this month, we’ve been looking at the idea of America, the ways this country has conceived of itself, the things we want to believe about ourselves, the creeds that we must reckon with and that distinguish us. We began on June 1st with Harvard University’s Danielle Allen, historian of democracy and scholar of the Declaration of Independence.

And by the way, it was a fantastic conversation. She revealed hidden aspects of the declaration, including the 250 yearlong impact of an extra piece of punctuation in reprints of the declaration that may have changed our fundamental understanding of that document and therefore of this nation.

I say never has so much relied on a period that should not even be there. If you want to know what I’m talking about, by the way, go to our podcast feed, the On Point podcast feed. Hit subscribe and you can absolutely find this conversation that we had with Danielle Allen. But anyway, I actually want to bring back today something that Professor Allen said about the fundamental contradiction within the Declaration of Independence.

DANIELLE ALLEN: So the declaration is already a moment where the slave interest in the South and then the anti-slavery interests are fighting with each other.

CHAKRABARTI: But Professor Allen told us that we’re wrong to think that just because the Declaration of Independence does not explicitly condemn slavery, that it therefore implicitly condones it.

In fact, she told us that the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” hints at the declaration’s abolitionist spirit.

Because the founders could have used the Enlightenment concept of life, liberty, and the protection of property instead, but did not.

ALLEN: So the point is the document is actually an abolitionist document. Okay, and there’s a lot more to be said about that. But right from the very beginning, this country had two voices. It had an abolitionist voice. It also had a voice defending the slave interest. They were both there. So it’s not really just that people had looked back later and saw these ideals and used them.

Those words in 1776 began the end of slavery right then and there.

CHAKRABARTI: The declaration was of course, signed on July 4, 2776. Almost exactly three quarters of a century later, Frederick Douglass challenged everything that document stood for. On July 5, 1852, Douglass spoke at an anti-slavery event in Rochester, New York.

He called out the founding fathers’ unwillingness to abolish slavery at this nation’s creation in a speech that powerfully asked, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Joining us to take a deep look at this historic address is David Blight. He’s the Sterling Professor of History and Black Studies at Yale University, and also author of many books on Frederick Douglass, including the masterful biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in History.

Professor Blight, welcome back to On Point.

DAVID BLIGHT: Oh, hello, Meghna. Great to be back.

CHAKRABARTI: And I should say that you’re joining us from Shepherdstown, West Virginia today.

BLIGHT: I am.

CHAKRABARTI: I wanted to ask you first, before we actually got to the specific text of the speech, for people who don’t know Douglass as well as they should, can you just give us a very brief bio of him?

Because it’s not for nothing that the import of this speech given by him should be recognized.

BLIGHT: Indeed. Born a slave, Eastern Shore of Maryland, spent the first 20 years of his life enslaved in Maryland. 11 of those years out on the Eastern Shore and nine of those years in Baltimore.

He was sent back and forth, and Baltimore had a great deal to do with the expansion of his imagination as he reached his teenage years, and then of course, with his ultimate ability to escape. He lands in the North and first in New York and then moves into Massachusetts where he was essentially unknown and did labor in the docks of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he took up his first residence until he started to preach in a local Black church and was discovered there by the Garrisonian abolitionists from Boston and invited out to Nantucket Island in August of 1841, where he gave his first in any way prominent speech to white people and to abolitionists.

He went on from there in the 1840s to be hired by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society run by Mr. Garrison. And he became, in many ways, the most popular orator, speaker on the abolitionist circuit within three to four years. By the mid-1840s he was sought after all across the North, especially all over New England as a speaker.

He was often telling his own story. The stories of his youth, the stories of those 20 years as a slave, which he sat down in the winter of 1844 and ’45 and wrote up in his famous slave narrative, the book called Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. He goes to England, an extraordinary tour of Ireland, Scotland, and England in 1845 to the spring of 1847, which was a complete flowering and even to some extent transformation of his consciousness and his life.

His freedom indeed was bought for him, purchased for him by a group of British abolitionists. And then he comes back to the U.S. He’s going to move out almost immediately, move out to Rochester, New York, found his own newspaper called The North Star. And he begins to change his attitudes about anti-slavery strategies, and such that at the time we have him speaking in Rochester in 1852, he’s transformed into a very political abolitionist.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So he gives the 1852 speech to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York. But he doesn’t begin with this full-throated criticism of the concept of the Declaration of Independence. In fact, he begins quite differently, doesn’t he?

BLIGHT: Oh, he does. It’s typical of Douglass’s oratory.

He begins by simply saying, “Oh, I am not prepared to be here. I’m not educated. Why am I here? I am so nervous,” and so on. He actually probably was, in some sense. But he immediately, and then for the first, oh, three pages of his script. And it was a script, by the way. He honors the founders. He honors the 4th of July.

He calls it the day of your deliverance. He calls it the great day of your national life. He calls it the American Passover, appealing to that great religious tradition. He calls the Declaration of Independence the sheet anchor of American liberty. And then and he goes on and on with that.

Although you begin to sense that he’s setting up his audience, and of course he was. He kept calling the fathers your fathers.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, can I just jump in here?

BLIGHT: Your Declaration.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, Professor, can I just jump in here? Because I’m literally on that paragraph right now. I’m looking at the speech, and that is one of the first things that jumps out at you. Because he does say, he talks about, as you said, he says he’s nervous. He’s quailing, in fact.

BLIGHT: Quailing sensation. Yeah, sure. … The audience will be quailing before long, let’s put it that way.

CHAKRABARTI: And then exactly as you said, he says “This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God.”

He calls, he says, “It is the birthday of your national independence.” “This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life.” So immediately, this is in the one, two, three, fourth paragraph of his speech. He’s setting himself apart from the people he’s addressing.

BLIGHT: He is. And he’s using the pronouns to do it. You, your, you, your. I have, I did count the use of you and your once. I think I got to 58, maybe 60. I don’t know. Doesn’t really matter, but the point is obvious. He is saying, “This is a glorious day. Those principles in the Declaration of Independence,” which he does specifically honor, “is your day,” and he’s setting up here in what I love to call the first movement of his symphony.

I’ve often called this in print and in speaking situations, it’s a speech that’s like a symphony in three movements. And this first movement is honoring the Founding, honoring the Framers, honoring even Jefferson himself quite explicitly. This is a great day. This is the sheet anchor of your story, and then he starts using the ship metaphor. The ship is the nation. But he’s setting up his audience here. This is what composers do with music. We’re being set up for a long second movement of this symphony, that is going to be taken over by the trombones and the kettle drums, if you will, of the orchestra.

And he begins to set it up by saying, “The ship of state, the ship of your nation is still mostly steady in the storms, but there are billows ahead of you. And there are dark clouds ahead of you.” This was, Douglass was so famous for his metaphors. He could try to, no one could count the metaphors in this speech, but the meaning of the speech comes through in metaphor after metaphor, where he is placing this story in the laps of his audience. Which by the way, was about 600 people in that hall. And he, as you said, he was indeed invited here by his friends.

The Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester were people he, by and large, he knew them all, and knew them all quite well. And I don’t really know what they expected him to do that day, but I suspect they did not get what they might have thought they were about to hear.

CHAKRABARTI: It’s so interesting to me because you’re right it does read very quite musically.

BLIGHT: It does.

CHAKRABARTI: Because his writing is just stunning. And he continues to loop back, I think. The use of the you and yours metaphor is so powerful. Because then in a sense, he connects the position or the grievances of the Founding Fathers to the grievances that enslaved people of America still held, right? He says, “Oppression makes a wise man mad. Your fathers were wise men, and if they did not go mad, they became restive under this treatment. They felt themselves the victim of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity.”

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: So Professor Blight, tell us, how does Douglass transition, as you said, between this first movement where he exalts the declaration, he exalts the efforts of the founders. He says, Of course, no duh, you should be celebrating the Fourth of July. And then how does he transition from that to: But wait a minute.

BLIGHT: Yeah, nicely put. There’s a break in the text in most printed versions of this, and then comes the line, “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?” And then he goes on to cite the great principles.

He’s all for the four first principles, or what he calls natural justice and natural rights. But then begins the long middle movement of the oration, which becomes Douglass’ litany of the horrors of beginning with the slave ships, slave trade, landing in America, auction blocks, domestic slave trade, people being transferred to the West, humans as property.

The pain, the litany of blood and pain becomes the story of this entire middle section. It’s the longest section of the speech. It’s almost like a hailstorm now. After that lovely setting them at ease beginning, respect for the Founding Fathers, honoring the day, he now marches his people.

And in the beginning of the second movement comes my single favorite moment in the speech, where he says, “There is a parallel to this.” It’s right after he has said, “The Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn,” famous passage. And by the way, if people will sit and read this out loud, they will get a sense of the cadences of the way Douglass used language.

It’s very King James Biblical language. It’s repetition, which in good oratory you always must do. But then he says, there is a parallel to this situation, and without naming his text, he knows he’s got a Biblical audience, he just floats into the 137th Psalm. “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down … we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof, for there they that carried us away captive required of us a song.”

And he goes on with that. But what’s he saying? He’s saying, “You’ve invited me here to sing for you. And I am not going to sing. I am going to draw the ache and the pain out of your hearts, and make you look at this national sin, this national crime, and challenge you to act to change it.”

CHAKRABARTI: “Fellow citizens, above your national tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions.” It’s incredible.

So Professor, as you probably know, back in 2020 NPR actually gathered some of the descendants of Frederick Douglass to read parts of this famous speech. And so we want to just play a little excerpt of that.

So here it is:

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?

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 in common.

The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me.

The sunlight that brought life 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.

CHAKRABARTI: So those were descendants of Frederick Douglass, Alexa Anne Watson, Douglas Washington Morris II, Haley Rose Watson, Isidore Dharma Douglass Skinner, and Zoë Douglass Skinner.

Professor Blight, let me, can I ask you a question? There’s this line that you just heard that comes before one of the psalms that Douglass quotes, and it’s where he says, “The sunlight that brought you light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me.” And I imagine it’s the word stripes that really strikes out to me. I imagine he’s talking about the torture.

BLIGHT: Scars, yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: But it also really it invokes the flag. Was that deliberate, then, or is that just a modern set of eyes looking back at that line?

BLIGHT: No, I think that’s quite deliberate. Douglass was fond at times of employing, appropriating, using the flag. This speech can be read as a kind of embittered but deeply honest form of patriotism, as demand for what the country has not yet done, demanding the principles of the founding, demanding the promise be fulfilled.

This is what some people would call honest patriotism. Sometimes embittered. But also a key thing here, and those wonderful young voices capture it, Douglass was writing a literary work here. We should not forget that for a moment. This is a work of literature. He’s taking his audience, think, if you read the middle section, he makes people feel his words in their senses.

He talks about the smells of the hold of a slave ship. He talks about the hearing, you can hear the chains on enslaved people brought to an auction block. You can see a baby in the arms of a slave woman that might be sold away. So these are the human senses, and it’s only the brilliant orator that can transform words into our own senses and make us feel what’s going on here.

And then, of course, he’s drawing upon, there are no less than six references to the Bible, almost all Old Testament, here in this speech. And to a biblical audience in the middle of the 19th century, they wouldn’t have missed it when he stops when he’s talking about the hypocrisies and so on.

Even in here he does almost announce his text. He says, “In the language of Isaiah, they are a trouble to me, I weary to bear them. And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood.” That’s a classic use of the prophet Isaiah, the Jeremiah, the warning the penetration of the human conscience to make people almost sick with their own sin.

That’s the point of the Hebrew prophets. That’s their mission in the world. Douglass is always, it isn’t just this speech, it’s many others. He’s always using a selected three or four of the Hebrew prophets in almost every major speech he ever gave. This is how he learned language, by the way, back even when he was a slave, from a reading out loud, preaching out loud from the Bible, especially that King James language of the Old Testament.

CHAKRABARTI: I want to stick with the visceral nature of this middle section for another moment. Because he’s confronting, I presume an entirely white audience of people who are fervently anti-slavery but who personally themselves had never experienced the true horrors of what was happening in the country. And even just looking at these words, it shocks the soul, right? He says, “Behold the practical operation of this internal slave trade within the United States,” right?

“The American slave trade sustained by American politics and American religion. Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market. You know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover.” And then he goes on and as you said, he says, “See the old man with locks thinned and gray. Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms. See, too, that girl of 13, weeping. Yes, weeping as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn.” Even just reading these, the words out loud now, I shudder with the reality of what the practice of slavery was.

BLIGHT: You chose that perfect quote to show the senses again. He says, Hear. Feel. Listen. And he didn’t need props. He didn’t need performers next to him. He did it all with language. And you’re quite right here. As you know from reading it, Meghna, there’s a large middle section here in the second movement that’s really all about religious hypocrisy and the hypocrisy of the clergy. That was one of Douglass’ favorite subjects all through his early abolitionist speaking career. One of his favorite subjects was religious hypocrisy. It was an easy target, but he makes the most of it here, that’s for sure.

CHAKRABARTI: And then he, and he reminds the crowd, they obviously knew this, but I think the force of this reminder really matters, where he says I was born amid such sights and scenes. And he says, in the deep, still darkness of midnight, I have often been aroused by the dead heavy footsteps and the piteous cries of the chained gangs that passed our door. What do you think he was aiming to provoke in the audience by being so eloquently confrontational to them at this point?

BLIGHT: Awakening of conscience, of understanding. And this may be a moment to mention just what the context were for this speech, the political context. He’s got an audience here now that is, especially this abolitionist audience, they’re all reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Which has just been published that spring, and they can’t keep it in print. They got, I don’t know, the story is something like 15 printing presses going up in Boston to just keep the book in print.

It’s possible many in his audience already had visions of some of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s characters in their head. It’s also the moment of only less than two years after The Fugitive Slave Act, the hated Fugitive Slave Act, at least in Northern communities. And there have been many rescues of fugitive slaves, some of them quite violent, across the North.

And Douglass himself had participated in a few of those. It’s also an election year. It’s a presidential election year. It’s going to elect Franklin Pierce, who don’t know that yet here in July. But this is the year, or it’s one of the years in a sequence of three to four years, when the whole American political party system is tearing itself apart over the issue of the expansion of slavery.

And everybody in this audience, and then the people who would read this speech are more than aware. In fact, they are fearful for the Union. They’re fearful that the whole political system is falling apart, coming apart. And part of what Douglass wants to do here is warn them of that. Make them see it, make them realize it, make them not think as we have a habit to do today, things will just be all right.

Just kind of wait this out. No, he’s saying, “You must act, and you must act now.” It’s a fascinating set of context here, of what a lot of scholars over the years have called a kind of politics of fear, that’s beginning to set in. And it’s only, less than two years now from the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the total breakup of the party system, and the birth of that group called the Republican Party, which will be the political party in American history that reached the fastest success at electing people to Congress and then of course to the presidency in all of our American history.

So this speech comes at a very delicate, sensitive moment for anyone paying attention to the larger political culture.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, I’m really glad you said that, Professor, because for most of us who only have a casual knowledge of the Civil War that we get in middle school or high school, our awareness of the rending of the nation begins in 1861. But of course, there’s so much more that preceded that. And as you said, the delicacy of this moment that Douglass decides to be as forceful as he is really important to understand. I also want to go back again.

This middle section is just gripping.

BLIGHT: It’s powerful. Yeah, it’s the most memorable part.

CHAKRABARTI: You used the phrase a litany, and it is that. It’s a bold, fearless litany of confronting people with the truths of slavery. In that sense, is Douglass deliberately trying to echo the construction of the Declaration of Independence, whose middle section also contains a litany of, in this case, political grievances?

BLIGHT: Possibly. Yeah, the 27 or so grievances against King George and the British Crown are possibly a model for this. But even more this has been both the tone and the substance of a lot of his previous anti-slavery speeches, and other abolitionists as well.

Their uses of this idea of religious and political hypocrisy goes all the way back to the beginnings of serious abolitionism. And appealing to the conscience. Now, this is crucial, and I’m glad you asked it that way, because Douglass by this time, as I may have said earlier, has become a political abolitionist.

Now, that’s important, because he started out as a Garrisonian, and what that meant simply is that if you followed William Lloyd Garrison, and he was the real thing, he was a true radical abolition. But if you followed him, you had to practice abolition by moral persuasion. You were not to engage in politics.

Politics was ugly and indecent and dirty. Garrison advocated non-voting. Don’t, no complicity with the slaveholders, no union with the slaveholders. And although Garrison also was a believer in women’s rights, and indeed in Black civil rights, he was a complicated character.

But Douglass by this point, by the time he writes the 4th of July speech in the spring, early summer of ’52, he has broken with Garrison. He’s joined the political anti-slavery movement, which says, “No, we can use the Constitution,” and hence the whole section in this speech about the anti-slavery interpretation of the Constitution, “and we must engage law and politics, or we will never end slavery.”

Part III

CHAKRABARTI:  Professor Blight, if I may, I just want to play a little bit more of these descendants of Frederick Douglass reading from the middle section of Frederick Douglass’s speech.

What to the American slave is your Fourth 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.

To him, your celebration is a sham.

Your boasted liberty an unholy license.

Your national greatness, swelling vanity.

Your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless.

Your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence.

Your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery.

Your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings.

With all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him —

Mere bombast.

Fraud.

Deception.

Impiety.

And hypocrisy. There is not a nation on the Earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.

CHAKRABARTI: NPR produced that with descendants of Frederick Douglass back in 2020. Professor Blight, actually I love that we had that excerpt because the emotion, the righteous emotion … it’s still felt to this day by his descendants. And before we get to the anti-slavery interpretation of the Constitution, I want to go back to one thing you said about his excoriation of the American Church.

Because I think it’s very, very important, like you said, given who he was talking to and the role of religion in the country at that time. Because he says, “The Church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors.” And then he says, this part is the one that blows my mind.

And he says, “Because of that,” he says, “For my part, I would say, ‘Welcome infidelity. Welcome atheism.'” “Welcome anything in preference to the gospel as preached by those divines. They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty.”

Yeah. The youth of today, if they were TikToking this, the fire emojis would be coming out of Frederick Douglass’s mouth.

BLIGHT: I hadn’t thought of that, I confess. You’re right. No kidding. Indeed, the language here is just so powerful. Unholy alliance, swelling vanity, a hollow mockery. He’s aiming this at preachers in the pulpit, politicians in the Congress, and individual citizens and their conscience. He’s naming, aiming this at everybody.

Now, the preachers made a good target. Because no hypocrisy like a religious hypocrisy, and note, and those kids got into reading that, didn’t they? Whoa. And note one of the last words he uses is hypocrisy. The whole speech is about hypocrisy, but he didn’t even bother to use it until the end of that litany.

He’s got plenty of bombast, fraud. Imagine you’re sitting in that audience. You’re a member of the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester. You love this guy Douglass. You heard him before. You admire him, and actually, you raised the money to put this whole thing on. But you might not have come there to be told you’re part of a country engaging in bombast, fraud, and hollow mockery.

But he’s not letting anybody off. Anybody. Everybody’s complicitous. Everybody’s involved. Everybody’s in the blame category if you’re part of the pro-slavery political, legal, religious apparatus of the country. And then of course, he has that just stunning ending of the whole middle movement.

The middle, the movement of the symphony in the middle ends with this, and you can just, if it is music, imagine what the orchestra is playing. When he gets to that section, he says, “Oh, be warned. A horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation’s bosom. The venomous creature’s nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic. For the love of God, tear away and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of 20 millions crush and destroy it forever.”

This is right out of Jonathan Edwards, the whole Puritan, Jeremiadic tradition. What could be more horrifying than a beast eating out your, the bosom of your body and your country?

And then there’s a pause in the speech, you can see it on the page, and you can feel it in reading the whole thing. It’s as though he pauses. Perhaps he backed away from the lectern for a moment. Timing is everything in oratory. And then he slowly but surely begins to let them back up.

And he does it by laying out for about two pages of text the anti-slavery interpretation of the Constitution. He says, “We can still use the Constitution.”

CHAKRABARTI: Can I just jump in here for a second, professor? Because I just want to read this, because you’re right. … He pauses, and then all of the sudden he says, “Now take the Constitution according to its plain reading,” right?

“And I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand, it will be found to contain principles and purposes entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.”

And then a line or two later, this is the part that really grabs me. He says, “Allow me to say in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country.”

So what did he see in the Constitution that allowed him to reach this conclusion for the audience?

BLIGHT: In a brief version, he’s been converted. It took about four years for him to convert away from the Garrisonian vision that the Constitution was hopelessly pro-slavery. Now, Douglass was a brilliant propagandist too.

Let’s not forget that. Of course, the Constitution, original Constitution, had many clauses that were pro-slavery, not least of which was the Three-Fifths Clause, et cetera, et cetera. But many abolitionists, and he’d come under the influence, he even names them. He names them in this section, William Goodell, Samuel Sewall, Gerrit Smith, and others.

He’s come under the influence here of a whole new group of abolitionist thinkers and leaders who have spent their careers and their lives reading the Constitution in a different way. They go right to the preamble, “We, the people, in order to form a more perfect union,” they talk, the common defense, common justice.

He goes to the clause about the guarantee clause, that says the Congress must guarantee a Republican form of government to all its states. And then he goes to the due process clause in the Fifth Amendment and says human beings all have a right to due process, and Black people are part of the human race, and on it goes.

Now, part of this is just old-fashioned, hard-nosed persuasion. But a lot of abolitionists here by the ’50s, 1850s, and even more so beyond this, are going to develop this anti-slavery vision of the Constitution. Because they are frankly sick and tired of always being on the wrong side of this.

And he even uses that language where he calls the Constitution a glorious liberty document.

Now that was bold. And a whole lot of people didn’t agree with him then, and they still wouldn’t agree with him now. But he’s gone from the horrible reptile, curled up to the nation’s heart, to now making the case.

You may not understand it fully yet, folks, but we can use this Constitution. It’s really about rights. It’s really, and of course, the ultimate thing the anti-slavery constitutionalists pointed to was the Bill of Rights. The basic Bill of Rights, which are the natural rights tradition of the Declaration of Independence put into amendments which were law.

And then of course, toward the end of this section, he has another whole argument, which is so interesting. He points to modernity. He calls it the tendencies of the age. He talks about how not just Americans, but humans are conquering time and space, the railroad, the telegraph, the cable they’re going to put across the Atlantic.

They don’t know about the phonograph yet, but there’s all this modernity happening, and it’s making a new world technologically, and maybe, just maybe, he says, we can find hope in that too. It’s going to make a new moral world. But that remained to be seen.

Does technology make a new moral world order? We’re living that right now. But when he talks about conquering the oceans and conquering the continent, imagine if you’re there and your imagination is in 1852. This is part of the human imagination now. Can human beings actually conquer space and time?

CHAKRABARTI: If I may ask you, Professor, what you just said, it really actually brings together many of the threads in the conversations we’ve been having over the past several weeks about the idea of America. Because first of all, as you say, he’s offering a anti-slavery vision of the Constitution both philosophically and for sheer marketing purposes, as you said.

But also earlier in the speech, he talks about, I think in referring to the Declaration, that the Founding Fathers, quote, “Seized upon eternal principles,” right?

BLIGHT: Yeah. Natural rights.

CHAKRABARTI: And I’m thinking about my conversation with Professor Danielle Allen, where she says, “The idea of abolition is seeded in the Declaration, if not explicitly worded.” And just yesterday, we had a conversation about what is patriotism, and you used this phrase, honest patriotism. So I’m wondering if in Frederick Douglass you see this notion that perhaps and hopefully is still well and alive in the country today, that in the traditions of our founding, there continues to be the let’s call it an energetic core of justice that has been used by Americans who’ve had to fight for that justice, in the past 250 years.

BLIGHT: No question, and Danielle may have indeed pointed to this over and over, no one has quite appropriated the Declaration of Independence and its principles to their ends and aims from the margins of our story quite like African Americans.

Now, other groups have, too. All kinds of immigrant groups from Asia, Europe, and elsewhere have done the same, but the reason that’s possible, and the reason the Declaration of Independence is still so alive is because it is ultimately a moral document. It’s not the creation of a government. It’s not a constitution.

It’s a statement of human rights. It’s a statement of natural rights. Douglass once called natural rights like precious ore in the earth. It just is. It exists. Now Thomas Jefferson said it’s either from nature or nature’s God. That was his language in the Declaration. Fine. John Adams says it was also from divine providence.

Fine. Douglass everywhere throughout his life was always speaking from, preaching from, arguing from that deep 18th century, even to some extent 17th century tradition of natural rights, the idea that we are born with these three, four, or five, depending on how you count them, basic rights as human beings.

And they are there in the Declaration of Independence. And one useful thing for people to be thinking about this week, next week and these weeks is that. If you go read the declaration, as Douglass had very carefully, they spent far more sentences defending and justifying the right of revolution, the fourth first principle, than they did justifying and defending life, liberty, and the doctrine of consent.

Those were terribly important, but that right of revolution, think about it. You have the right to rise up and overthrow your government if it engages in sufficient usurpations to destroy your liberties. 22 lines of the Declaration of Independence are justifications for this right of revolution.

What is this Fourth of July speech but an appeal to that, that unless the country changes, unless you can change its laws, unless you can change its political culture, there will likely be a revolution. If we can’t do it through law, interesting that he puts the constitutional argument in that third final short movement, because he still wants it done that way.

He still has hope for that. But if we can’t do it through law, through the rule of law, what’s left?

CHAKRABARTI: We only have about a minute and a half left, Professor.

BLIGHT: Sure.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, I mourn how short this show can be sometimes. But I want to ask you about the end, the very end of the speech.

BLIGHT: Yeah. It’s a very interesting move.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, so he ends with verse. Is this from Garrison, or?

BLIGHT: Okay. Yeah, it’s a poem made into a song called Go Speed the Year of Jubilee, and it’s by William Lloyd Garrison which again, in biographical terms, is fascinating, because he’s just had this terrible breakup with Garrison, a very personal breakup, by the way, and they never essentially spoke again for 10 years after this year, 1852.

But how does he end the speech? “Go speed the year of jubilee, the wide world over. When…” I won’t read it all. “… When from their galling chain set free, the oppressed shall vilely bend the knee.” It’s a poem that became a hymn, and that’s how he ends. It’s a hopeful poem. The year of jubilee may yet come, and year of jubilee, of course is very Old Testament, very biblical in the use of that term in the Bible.

It’s usually the liberation of workers, liberation of slaves. Liberation is what it means. So first of all, it’s quite a nod to his former mentor with whom he’s had a horrible breakup, but on the other hand, he ends on hope.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I’m actually going to read the last two verses here.

BLIGHT: Go ahead. Go right ahead.

CHAKRABARTI: “God speed the day when human blood shall cease to flow. In every clime be understood the claims of human brotherhood, and each return for evil good, not blow for blow. That day will come, all feuds to end, and change into a faithful friend each foe.”

David Blight is the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer of Frederick Douglass.

His book is Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, amongst many others, and he’s been walking us through today to Frederick Douglass’s greatest speech. Professor Blight, thank you so much for coming back to the show.

BLIGHT: Thank you, Meghna. Keep the faith out there.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.