Frederick Douglass's "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?"

Introduction: The Fourth of July and American Slavery

Frederick Douglass's address to the American people, entitled "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?", was delivered as a commemoration of the Independence Day of the American nation. However, Douglass emphasizes in his address that this special day was not one to be celebrated by enslaved Black Americans like himself — "this Fourth of July is yours, not mine." For the enslaved, Independence Day was a stark reminder of the injustices and inequality that separated Black Americans from the white nation around them.

In his address, Douglass provides his audience a detailed explanation of his central argument: why the day of American Independence cannot be a celebration for Black Americans. His chief thesis holds that the Fourth of July is, for the Black American slave, not a day of independence — because the Declaration of Independence itself and the Constitution, the very symbols of liberty in America, were the very instruments that kept Black Americans in bondage.

His address has two main parts, each examining a sector of American society responsible for promulgating slavery. The first concerns the Fugitive Slave Law, a law that provided for the return of runaway slaves. The second examines the involvement of the religious sector in tolerating and actively perpetuating the practice of American slavery.

Douglass's Central Argument Against Independence Day

When Douglass proclaimed that the Fourth of July was not a commemoration of independence for the enslaved but rather a commemoration of slavery's injustices, he supported this argument by asserting that the American nation's "high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us." He also questions his audience directly: do "the great principles of political freedom... embodied in that Declaration of Independence" extend to enslaved people?

Douglass poses these challenges to his audience because it was the American nation itself that tolerated slavery — a stark contradiction of the principles enshrined in its own Constitution. He invokes the Declaration of Independence because that event marks the colonies' freedom from British rule; it therefore embodies liberty from all forms of tyranny. Yet Black Americans were excluded from that promise. For the enslaved person, the Fourth of July is "a day that reveals to him... the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is constant victim." American slavery, Douglass argues, was perpetuated by two forces: the Fugitive Slave laws and the complicity of organized religion.

The Fugitive Slave Law and the Internal Slave Trade

The Fugitive Slave Law was passed in favor of slaveholders, as it provided for the return of runaway slaves who had escaped from one state to another. Slaveholders were free to recover their enslaved people by presenting only a proof of ownership. The captured runaway would be arrested and returned to their owner without any legal trial or due process. This law explicitly supported the slave trade in America and encouraged white Americans to further exploit Black Americans through forced labor without pay or subsistence.

Douglass provides a vivid example of this cruelty, which he termed the "internal slave trade," describing the nation's treatment of enslaved people in harrowing detail: "...the practical operation of this internal slave trade... sustained by American politics and religion... you will see men and women reared like swine for the market... men examined like horses... women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slaveholders... there I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, caprice, and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men." The Fugitive Slave Law had brought slavery "in its most horrible and revolting form," making it an entrenched institution within the American nation.

Conclusion: The Constitution as an Instrument of Bondage

These two elements — the Fugitive Slave Law and the involvement of the religious establishment in slavery — are the two important pieces of evidence that Douglass uses to illustrate how slavery was perpetuated in the American nation. The Constitution itself became the primary vehicle for encouraging the practice of American slavery through the Fugitive Slave Law. The religious sector, meanwhile, further reinforced this cruel practice by encouraging its followers to return runaway slaves and by framing that action as a sacred duty.