Frederick Douglass and His Views on the Fourth of July
What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

The Fourth of July ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shows, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other, from this Time forward forever more.

– John Adams, July 3, 1776

The epigraph above helps to explain why, to this day, many Americans continue to observe the Fourth of July in celebration of the nation’s founding and freedom from the yoke of British tyranny. When these words were penned, however, there were already hundreds of thousands of black slaves in the United States, and it is reasonable to posit that they held a vastly different view of the celebration of the founding of the newly founded “Land of the Free” from the white mainstream Americans of the day. To gain some new insights into this issue, the purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the relevant primary and secondary literature to formulate and informed answer to the question, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" Following this review and analysis, a summary of the research and an answer to this guiding question are presented in the paper’s conclusion.

Review and Analysis

From any perspective, the irony could not be greater than when the Founding Fathers affixed their signatures to the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 written by Thomas Jefferson and others which proclaimed that, “We hold . . . that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness [and] that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” There is no equivocation in Jefferson’s words but there was in the spirit of the Declaration because there were hundreds of thousands of enslaved blacks in the fledging republic at the time, and their legal status would remain essentially unchanged until the promulgation of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in January 1865. Even thereafter, though, Jim Crow laws throughout the Old South would ensure that African Americans were constantly reminded of their inferior status, and it was not until the late 1960s that most of the “colored only” signs had been removed from the former Confederate states.

Taken together, it is clear that the United States was a “Land of the Free” in name only, but there were some other mainstream social practices that were commonplace throughout the late 18th and the first half of the 19th century that helped perpetuate the notion that “blacks deserve to be slaves” mentality among white Americans that seeped into the consciousness of many African Americans at the time and which continues to influence the national consciousness to the present day. Moreover, much of what has been learned by modern Americans about the condition of slaves has been gleaned from “Roots” et al. productions which sensationalize the brutality of slavery but cannot capture how the condition affected the views of slaves about the day of independence that was celebrated by their masters each year.

As the medical profession today pleads with Americans to “trust the science,” the same arguments were being made concerning the correctness of slavery. Indeed, even the medical community provided “scientific” evidence in support of blacks’ physiology in support of the proposition that they were constitutionally best suited for the service in the white man’s “Peculiar Institution.” For instance, in his “ writes, “With negroes, the sanguineous never gains the mastery over the lymphatic and nervous systems Their digestive systems, like children, are strong, and their secretions and excretions copious, excepting the brine, which is rather scant.”[footnoteRef:2] [2: S. A. Cartwright, In the Light of Ethnology, p. 695]

Given the authoritative nature of these “scientifically” verified findings, it is little wonder that many if not most white Americans came to...…much a revelation to the white people of the day as Nigger Jim’s confession about his loving feelings for his family to Huckleberry Finn which meant, gasp, that blacks were people too, and they were just like whites! In this regard, Douglass advises one leading white friend that:

The fact is, there are few here who would not return to the South in the event of emancipation. We want to live in the land of our birth, and to lay our bones by the side of our fathers'; and nothing short of an intense love of personal freedom keeps us from the South. For the sake of this, most of us would live on a crust of bread and a cup of cold water.[footnoteRef:8] [8: Frederick Douglass, “Letter to Thomas Auld” (September 3, 1848) p. 3]

Even though it required a bloody Civil War, an Emancipation Proclamation, and a constitutional amendment, Douglass and his like-minded peers succeeded in changing the legal status of black slaves into African Americans, but longstanding problems are not solved overnight and the racial strife that has roiled the nation in recent months indicates that far more remains to be done.

Conclusion

Although many Americans are “slaves to fashion” or “slaves to their jobs” except for incarcerated prisoners that have been sentenced by a court of competent jurisdiction, slavery is outlawed in the United States today. The research showed, though, that this was not always the case and the moral stain of slavery will forever mar the nation’s past. In fact, the lingering aftereffects of the Civil War and the powerful negative stereotypes about African Americans continue to influence modern thinking about race relations in the United States. The burgeoning Black Lives Movement, perhaps the largest social movement in U.S. history, reflects just some of the damage that this mindset has caused since the nation’s founding, and Lincoln was right when he said that it would take as much bondsmen blood to pay for slavery as the Peculiar Institution exacted to…