 Navigating the journey, and today's journey is really long. We are going to Rochester, New York in 1852, the 5th of July, 1852. And we are going to listen to Brea Fox, who is, as everybody knows, a great vocalist, and she is going to read the speech that Frederick Douglass gave on that day. And you will understand as you listen to the speech why it was delivered on the 5th of July. But let me tell you a little bit about Frederick Douglass. He was a gorgeous man, he can bring up a picture. This remarkable man was born a slave, self-taught, became a powerful orator and advocate for his people. Always he spoke out with vigor and oppression of the nation. Again and again he wrote of his painful escape from slavery and his lifelong struggle to prevail against all forms of injustice. So, Brea, my dear friend Brea Fox, and everybody in Hawaii knows Brea because of her voice. And so, and then I imposed on her with all 15 pages of this speech. So, Lord have mercy. So it took some time, so if there are any scholars out there, it took some time to edit it down to where we could get into this time frame that we have. So, Brea, thank you so much. Yes, yes. It was an honor and a pleasure to repeat these words from Mr. Frederick Douglass on that day, July 5, 1852. He enters the hall and he says, Mr. President, friends and fellow citizens, the papers and placards say that I am to deliver a fourth of July oration. And so he sounds large and out of the common way, for it is true that I have often had the privilege to speak in this beautiful hall and to address many who now honor me with their presence. But neither their familiar faces nor the perfect gauge I think I have a Corinthian hall seems to free me from embarrassment. Ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation from which I escaped is considerable. And the difficulties to be overcome and getting from the latter to the former are by no means slight. What to an American slave is your fourth of July. And the answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham, your boasted liberty and unholy license, your national greatness, swelling vanity, your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless. Your celebration of tyrants, brass fronted impudence, your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mark mockery, your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings with all your religious parade and solemnity are to him mere bombast fraud, deception, riot and hypocrisy, a thin wall to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. 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. That I am here to say today is to me a matter of astonishment, as well as a gratitude. I will not therefore be surprised if in what I have to say I events no elaborate preparation, nor grace my speech with any high sounding Exordium. With little experience and with less learning I have been able to throw my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together and trusting to your patient and generous indulgence, I will proceed to lay them before you. This, for the purpose of this celebration is the fourth of July. It is the birth of your national independence and of your political freedom. This to you is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day and to the act of your great deliverance and to the signs and to the wonders associated with that act and that day. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. I am glad fellow citizens that your nation is so young 76 years, though a good old age for a man is but a mere spec in the life of a nation. Three score years and 10 is the allotted time for individual men, but nations number their years by thousands. According to this fact, you are even now only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the thought and hope is much needed under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. The sky of the reformer is met with angry flashes, pretending disastrous times, but his heart may well be lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressionable stage of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom of justice and of truth will yet give direction to her destiny. As she grows older, the Patriots heart might be sadder, and the reformers grow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its profits go out in sorrow. There is consolation in the thought that America is young. Great streams are not easily turned into channels, more and deep in the course of ages. Sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury and bear away on their angry waves the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel and flow on as serenely as ever. But while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up and leave nothing behind but the withered branch and the unsightly rock to howl in the abyss. The abyss swept land, the sad tale of departed glory, as with rivers, so with nations. Fellow citizens, I shall not presume to dwell at length on the associations that cluster about this day. The simple story of it is that 76 years ago, the people of this country were British subjects. The style and title of your sovereign people, in which you now glory, was not then born. You were under the British crown. Your fathers esteemed the English government as the home government, and England as the fatherland. This home government, you know, although a considerable distance from your home did, in the exercise of its parental prerogative, impose upon its colonial children such restraints, burdens and limitations as in the mature judgment, it deemed wise, right and proper. But your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government and the absolute character of its acts, presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need say fellow citizens that my opinion of these messages fully accords with those of your fathers. Such a declaration of agreement on my part would not be worth much to anybody. It would certainly prove nothing as to what part I might have taken, had I lived during the great controversy of 1776. Now that America was right and England wrong is exceedingly easy. Everybody can say it, the dastard, not less than the noble brave can flippantly discount on the tyranny of England towards the American colonies. It is fashionable to do so. But there was a time when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies tried men soul. And who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebel dangerous men. To side with the right against the wrong with the weak against the strong with the oppressed against the oppressor here lies the merit and the one which of all others seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers, but to proceed. They saw themselves harshly and unjustly treated by the home government your fathers, like men of honesty and men of spirit earnestly sought redress. They petition, they remonstrated, they did so in a decorous respectful and loyal manner. Their conduct was wholly unexceptionable. This however did not answer the purpose. They saw themselves treated with sovereign indifference, coldness and scorn. But they persevered. They were not the men to look back. As the sheet anchor takes a firmer hold when the ship is tossed by the storm so did the cause of your fathers grow stronger. And it breathed the chilling blast of kingly displeasure. The greatest and best of British statesmen admitted its justice and the loftiest eloquence of the British sentiment came to its support. That blindness, which seems to be the unburying characteristic of tyrant, since Pharaoh and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea, the British government persisted in the extractions complained of. The madness of this course we believe is admitted now, even by England, but we fear the lesson is wholly lost on our present ruler. 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 victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity. With brave men, there's always a remedy for oppression. Just here, the idea of a total separation of the colonies from the crown was born. It was a startling idea much more so than we at this distance of time regarded. The timid and the prudent, as has been intimated of that day, were of course shocked and alarmed by it. Such people lived then had lived before and will probably ever have a place on this planet. Their course, in respect to any great change, no matter how great the good to be attained or the wrong to be redressed by it, may be calculated with as much precision as can be the course of the stars. They hate all changes, but silver, gold, and copper change. Of this sort of change, they are always strongly in favor. These people were called Tories in the days of your fathers, and this appellation probably conveyed the same idea that is meant by the more modern, though somewhat less euphonious term, which we often find in our papers applied to some of our old politicians. Their opposition to the then dangerous thought was earnest and powerful, but amid all their terrible terror and affrighted separations against it, the alarming and revolutionary idea moved on and the country with it. On the second day of July 1776, the old Continental Congress to the dismay of the lovers of ease and the worshipers of property clothe that dreadful idea with all the authority of national sanction. They did so in the form of a resolution. And as we seldom hit upon resolutions drawn up in our day, whose transparency is at all equal to this. I wish your minds and help my story if I read it quote resolved that these United colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connection between them, and the state of Great Britain is and ought to be dissolved unquote. Citizens, your father's made good that resolution. They succeeded, and today you reap the fruits of their success. The freedom gained is yours, and you therefore may properly celebrate this anniversary. The fourth of July is the first great fact in your nation's history, the very ring bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny. Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetual remembrance. I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring bolt to the chain of your nation's destiny. So indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles stand by these principles be true to them on all occasions in all places against all foes and at whatever cost. From the round top of your ship of state, dark and threatening clouds may be seen. Heavy billows like mountains in the distance, disclosed to the leeward huge forms of flinty rocks, that bolts drawn that chain broken and all is lost. Cling to this day, cling to it, and its principles with the grasp of a storm tossed mariner to a spar at midnight. The coming into being of a nation in any circumstance is an interesting event. But besides general considerations, there were peculiar circumstances which make the advent of this Republic an event of special attractiveness. The whole scene, as I look back to it, was simple, dignified and sublime. The population of the country at the time stood at the insignificant number of three millions. This country was poor in the munitions of war. The population was weak and scattered and the country of wilderness unsubdued. There was then no means of concert and combination such as exist now. Neither stream nor lightning had then been reduced to order and discipline. From the Potomac to the Delaware was a journey of many days. Under these and innumerable other disadvantages, your fathers declared liberty and independence and they triumphed. Fellow citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this Republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too, great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to rise at one time such as the number of truly great, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not certainly the most favorable. And yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than aberration. They were statements, statesmen, patriots and heroes. And for the good they did and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory. They loved their country better than their own private interests. And though this was not the highest form of human excellence, all will concede it is a rare virtue. And that when it is exhibited, it ought to command respect. He who will intelligently lay down his life for his country is a man for whom it is not in human nature to despise. Your father staked their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor on the cause of their country. In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests. They were peacemen, but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men, but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance, but that, but that they knew its limits. They believed in order, but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was settled that was not right. For them, justice, liberty and humanity were final, not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrasted with these degenerate times. How circumspect, exact and proportionate were all their movements. How unlike the politicians of any of an hour, their statesmanship looked beyond the passing moment and stretched away in strength into the distant future. They seized upon eternal principles and set a glorious example in their defense. Mark them. Fully appreciating this hardship to be encountered, firmly believing in the right of their cause, honorably inviting the scrutiny of an onlooking world, reverently appealing to heaven to attest their sincerity, soundly comprehending the sound responsibility they were about to assume, wisely measuring the terrible odds against them. The fathers of this republic did most deliberately under the inspiration of a glorious patriotism and with a sublime faith in the great principles of justice and freedom laid deep the cornerstone of the national structure, which has risen and still rises in grandeur around you. This fundamental work this day is the anniversary. I eyes are met with demonstrations of joyous enthusiasm, banners and tenants wave exultingly on the breeze. They the din of business to is hushed, even mammon seems to have quitted this grass on this day. The ear piercing fight and the stirring drum, unite their accents with the ascending peel of 1000 church bells. The hymns are made, hymns are sung, sermons are preached in the honor of this day. While the quick marshals, tramps of a great and multi multitudinous nation, echoed back by all the hills, valleys and mountains of a vast continent, we speak the occasion one of one of thrilling and universal interest, a nation jubilee friends and citizens. You need not enter further into the causes which led to this anniversary. Many of you understand them better than I do. You would instruct me to regard to you would instruct me in regard to them. That is the branch of knowledge in which you feel perhaps a much deeper interest than your speaker. The causes which led to the separation of the colonies from British crown have never lacked a ton. They are all been taught in your common schools, narrated at your fireside, unfolded from your pulpits and thundered from your legislative halls, and as much and as familiar to you as household words. They form the staple of your national poetry and eloquence. I remember to that as a people Americans are remarkably familiar with all the facts which make in their own favor. It is esteemed by some as a national gift, a national trait, perhaps as a national weakness. It is in fact that whatever makes for the wealth or for the reputation of Americans and can be had cheap will be found by Americans. I shall not be charged with slandering Americans. If I say I think American side of any question can be safely left in American hands. I leave therefore the great deeds of your fathers to other gentlemen and claim to have been regularly descended will be less likely to be disputed than find mine. My business, if I have any here today is with the present. The accepted time with God and his cause is the ever living now. Trust no future, however pleasant, let the dead pass very extended and act in the living present. Cart within and God overhead. We have to do with the past, only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. To all inspiring motives to noble deeds, which can be gained from the past we are welcome. But now is the time the important time. Your fathers have lived died and have done their work and have done much of it as well. You live and must die and you must do your work. You have no right to enjoy a child share in the labor of your fathers, unless your children are to be blessed by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard earned famed of your fathers to cover your indolence. Sidney Smith tells us that men seldom eulogize the wisdom and virtues of their fathers, but to excuse some folly or wicked wickedness of their own. The truth is not a doubtful one. There are illustrations of it, near and remote, ancient and modern. It is fashionable hundreds of years ago for the children of Jacob to boast, we have Abraham to our father. And when they long lost Abraham's faith and spirit, that people contented themselves under the shadow of Abraham's great name, while they repudiated the deeds which made his name great. May I remind you that a similar thing is being done all over this country today? Need I tell you that the Jews were not the only people who built the tombs of the prophets and garnished the sepulchres of the righteous? Washington could not die until he had broken the chains of his slaves, yet his monument is built up by the price of human blood and the traders and the bodies and souls of men about. We have Washington as our father, alas, that it should be so, yet it is so. 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 national altar and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us? Would to God, both for your sake and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions? Then would my task be light and my burden easy and delightful? For who is there so cold that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so solid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee when the chains of servitude that have been thrown from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that the dumb might eloquently speak and the lame man leap as a heart. But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within this pale of glorious anniversary. Your great independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessing in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed, enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, blessing 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 Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man and fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems were inhumane mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean citizens to mock me by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, lowering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation is irrevocable ruin. I can say today, take up the plaintive lament of appealed and woe smitten, woe smitten people by the rivers of Babylon. There we sat down and we wept when we remember Zion. We hanged our hearts upon the willows of the midst thereof for there they that carried us away captive required us a song. And they who wasted us required us Murph saying, sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the large song in a strange land? I ask you, how can we sing the Lord song in a strange land? If you know citizens above your national tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember these bleeding children of sorrow this day, may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth. To pass lightly over their wrongs and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject then fellow citizens is American slavery, and I shall see this day and popular characteristics from the slaves point of view, standing there identified with the American bondsman, making his wrongs mine. I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this fourth of July. Whether we turn to the declaration of the past, or the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. To be with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will in the name of humanity which is outraged in the name of liberty which is fettered in the name of the Constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and denounce all the emphasis I can command. Everything that serves to perpetuate slavery, the great sin and shame of America, I will not equivocate, I will not excuse. This is the severest language I can command, and yet not one word shall escape me that any man whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder shall not confess to be right and just. Wow. That's fabulous. Thank you so much, my dear. It's my pleasure is 100 pages more and it's all riveting but I know we have a time. It is, it is, it is just let me say this. I'm going to read from his one of his many writings. It is something to give the Negro religion. It is more to give him justice. It is sometimes to give him the Bible. It is always time to give him the ballot. And we have an election coming up real soon. I want people to remember all that Frederick Douglas said, all he went through all we've all gone through one way. Now, today, the thing we can do today is vote. So, again. Thank you, rare. That was beautiful. My pleasure. I just feel so, so full so full and to listen to all of that and to think he was a slave and brilliant, just brilliant. So, again, we are fighting for unity, unity of idea, unity of sentiment, unity of object, unity of instruments in which we shall be. No north, no south, no east, no west, no black, no white, but a solidarity of nation, making every slave free and every man of voter. So, again, thank you. Thank you all for spending this time with us. And with Frederick Douglas. Eric, you want to.