Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July for Enslaved Americans

Introduction

"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 explain why, to this day, many Americans continue to observe the Fourth of July in celebration of the nation's founding and its freedom from 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 newly founded "Land of the Free" than did white mainstream Americans. To gain new insight into this issue, this paper reviews relevant primary and secondary literature to formulate an informed answer to the question: "What to the slave is the Fourth of July?" A summary of the research and an answer to this guiding question are presented in the conclusion.

The Irony of Independence and the Persistence of Slavery

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, proclaiming 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 hundreds of thousands of enslaved Black people lived in the fledgling republic at the time. Their legal status would remain essentially unchanged until the promulgation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in January 1865. Even thereafter, Jim Crow laws throughout the South ensured 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. Yet there were other mainstream social practices throughout the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century that helped perpetuate the notion that "blacks deserve to be slaves" — a mentality that seeped into the consciousness of many African Americans at the time and that continues to influence the national consciousness to the present day. Moreover, much of what modern Americans have learned about the condition of enslaved people has been gleaned from productions such as Roots, which sensationalize the brutality of slavery but cannot fully capture how that condition shaped slaves' views of the independence day celebrated each year by their masters.

Scientific Racism and the Suppression of Black Consciousness

Just as the medical profession today urges Americans to "trust the science," comparable arguments were once made concerning the supposed correctness of slavery. The medical community itself provided purportedly "scientific" evidence in support of the proposition that Black physiology made enslaved people constitutionally suited for service in the white man's "Peculiar Institution." For instance, S. A. Cartwright wrote: "With negroes, the sanguineous never gains the mastery over the lymphatic and nervous systems. Their digestive systems, like children's, are strong, and their secretions and excretions copious, excepting the brine, which is rather scant."¹

¹ S. A. Cartwright, In the Light of Ethnology, p. 695.

Given the authoritative veneer of these "scientifically" verified findings, it is little wonder that many — if not most — white Americans came to believe it was natural and right for them to occupy the top of the social order while Black people occupied the bottom. This insidious mindset profoundly affected the way enslaved people could conceptualize abstractions such as "freedom," and in turn, what the Fourth of July actually meant to them. An anecdote related by Solomon Northup illustrated just how total this suppression could be: one young Black girl named Mary "like many of the class, scarcely knew there was such a word as freedom. Brought up in the ignorance of a brute, she possessed but little more than a brute's intelligence. She was one of those, and there are very many, who fear nothing but their master's lash, and know no further duty than to obey his voice."² As James Loewen has argued, this kind of systematic distortion — embedded in law, medicine, and education alike — shaped how entire generations understood race in America.³

² Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, Harvard College Library.
³ J. W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me (New York: The New Press, 1995).

Conclusion

Although many Americans describe themselves as "slaves to fashion" or "slaves to their jobs," slavery itself is outlawed in the United States today. The research presented here demonstrates, however, that this was not always the case, and the moral stain of slavery will forever mar the nation's past. The lingering aftereffects of the Civil War and the powerful negative stereotypes about African Americans continue to shape modern thinking about race relations in the United States. The burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement — perhaps the largest social movement in U.S. history — reflects just some of the damage this historical mindset has caused since the nation's founding. Lincoln was right when he suggested it might take as much suffering to pay for slavery as the Peculiar Institution itself had inflicted. Frederick Douglass understood this truth more than a century before the nation began to fully reckon with it.

References

Booke, Bobbi. (2019, July 1). Frederick Douglass' "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro" still resonates. The Philadelphia Tribune, p. B1.

Cartwright, S. A. In the Light of Ethnology.

Douglass, Frederick. Letter to Thomas Auld (September 3, 1848).

Douglass, Frederick. "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro" (July 5, 1852).

Loewen, J. W. (1995). Lies My Teacher Told Me. New York: The New Press.

Northup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave. Harvard College Library.