 to read aloud Frederick Douglass 1852 speech, the meaning of 4th of July to the Negro. It incorporated in Massachusetts. It expanded across Massachusetts with a collaboration of mass humanities and was brought to Vermont in 2012 by Paul Marcus with the help and coordination of the Vermont Humanities Council. So this program expanded across Massachusetts with a collaboration of mass humanities and was brought to Vermont in 2012 by Paul Marcus with the help and coordination of the Vermont Humanities Council. This year in Vermont alone it will be read at 30 events. Among his numerous accomplishments, Frederick Douglass was a celebrated and controversial abolitionist, author, newspaper publisher, orator, and supporter of women's rights. He was criticized by some of his supporters for being too open to having a dialogue with people whose viewpoints opposed his. He notably said, I would unite with anybody to do right and nobody to do wrong. Frederick Douglass was 34 when he delivered his speech to the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society. He delivered it on July 5th because he would not celebrate the 4th until emancipation became a reality. We read this speech aloud not only because it's the way it was originally delivered but because it marks an important distinction between reading something silently to yourself and stating something publicly, identifiably to a crowd. We read it because we acknowledge our disappointment that 167 years later the themes and denunciations of this speech still resonate. Friends and fellow citizens, the task before me is one which requires much previous thought and study for its proper performance. I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more shrinkingly nor with greater distrust of my ability than I do this day. The papers and placards say that I am to deliver a 4th of July oration. The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation from which I escaped is considerable and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former are by no means slight. That I am here today is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude. This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the first day 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. 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. 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 as much needed under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. Fellow citizens, 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. England as the fatherland, although a considerable distance from your home, imposed in the exercise of its parental prerogatives upon its colonial children, such restraints, burdens, and limitations as, in its mature judgment, it deemed wise, right, and proper. Your fathers who had not adopted the idea 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 the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need to say, fellow citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers. Feeling themselves harshly and unjustly treated by the home government, your fathers, like men of honesty and men of spirit, earnestly sought redress. They petitioned and remonstrated. They did so in a decorous, respectful, and loyal manner. This, however, did not answer the purpose. They saw themselves treated with sovereign indifference, coldness, and scorn. Yet they persevered. Oppression makes a wise man mad. Your fathers became restive under this treatment. They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity. With brave men, there is 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 prudent of that day were, of course, shocked and alarmed by it. Their opposition to the then dangerous thought was earnest and powerful. But amid all their terror and affrightened vociferations against it, the alarming and revolutionary idea moved on and the country with it. The second of July 1776, the old Continental Congress, to the dismay of the lovers of ease and the worshipers of property, clothed that dreadful idea with all the authority of national sanction. They did so in the form of a resolution. We seldom hit upon resolutions drawn up in our day whose transparency is at all equal. It 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. Citizens, your fathers made good that resolution. They succeeded. And today you reap the fruit 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 a 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 those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost. Fellow citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes. And for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memories. They love their country better than their own private interests. We concede that it is a rare virtue that ought to command respect. He who will intelligently lay down his life for his country is a man whom it is not in human nature to despise. Your fathers stake 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 then, but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance, but they knew its limits. They believed in order, but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was settled that was not right. With 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 contrast it with these degenerate times. How circumspect, exact and proportionate were all their movements. How unlike the politicians of an hour, their statesmanship looked beyond the passing moment and stretched away into the strength or passed away in strength into the distant future. Mark them, fully appreciating the hardship to be encountered, firmly believing in the right of their cause, wisely measuring the terrible odds against them. Your fathers, the fathers of this Republic, laid the cornerstone of the national superstructure, which has risen and still rises in grandeur around you. Of this fundamental work, this day is the anniversary. Our eyes are met with demonstrations of joyous enthusiasm. The causes which led to the separation of the colonies from the British crown have never lacked for a ton. They have all been taught in your common schools, narrated at your firesides unfolded from your pulpits and thundered from your legislative halls and are as familiar to you as household words. They form the staple of your national poetry and eloquence. I leave, therefore, the great deeds of your fathers to others. 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. We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. Now is the time, the important time. Your fathers have lived, died and have done their work and have done much of it. 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 fame of your fathers to cover your indolence. 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 sakes 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, 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 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 fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice. I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean citizens to mock me by asking me to speak today? Fellow 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 reached them to forget them to pass lightly over their wrongs. And to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking. It would make me a reproach before God in the world. My subject then fellow citizens is American slavery. I shall see this day from the slaves point of view. Standing here identified with the American bondman, 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 declarations of the past or to 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 vines herself to be false to the future. Standing 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 into question and to denounce with 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. I will use the severe as 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. I fancy I hear one of my some of my audience say it is just in the circumstance that you and your brother abolitionist fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. I fancy I hear someone of my audience say it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionist failed to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more and denounce less? Would you persuade more and rebuke less? Your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But I submit we're always playing. There is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti slavery creed would you have me argue and what branch of the subject to the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are 72 crimes in the state of Virginia, which if committed by a black man subject him to the punishment of death. Well only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgement that the slave is a moral intellectual and responsible being? Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding under severe fines and penalties to teaching of the slave to read and write. When you can point to any such laws in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets when the fouls of the air when the cattle on your hills when the fish of the sea and the reptiles that crawl shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute. Then I'll argue with you that the slave is a man. Is it not astonishing that while we are plowing, planting and reaping using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold, that while we are reading, writing and ciphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers, that while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hillside, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children. And above all, confessing and worshiping the Christian's God and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men. Would you have me, would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? That he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery isn't to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation as a matter beset with great difficulty involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look today in the presence of Americans to show that men have a natural right to freedom? To do so would be to make myself ridiculous and to offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him. Am I to argue that is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks to play their flesh with the lash to load their limbs with irons to hunt them with dogs to sell them at auction to sender their families to knock out their teeth to burn their flesh to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood and stained with pollution is wrong? I will not. Employments for my time and strength, not any such arguments would apply. To be argued, is it that slavery is not divine that God did not establish it, that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There's blasphemy in the thought that which is in human cannot be divine. Who can reason on such a proposition? I cannot. The time for such argument is passed. The time like this scorching irony, not convincing argument is needed. Oh, had I the ability and could reach the nation's ear, I would today pour out a fiery stream of fighting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm and stern review. What is not the light that is needed, but the fire, it is not the gentle shower, but the thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened. The conscience of the nation must be roused. The propriety of the nation must be startled. The hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed. And it is crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced. What to the American slave is your fourth of July? I answer a day that reveals to him more than all the days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham. You're boasted liberty and 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 salinity are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy, a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour. Go where you may search where you will keys and despotisms of the old world. Search out every abuse. And when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation. And you will say with me that for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without arrival in slave trade, which we are told by the papers is especially prosperous just now as the price of men was never higher, and which is carried on in all the large towns and cities in one half of this confederacy. This trade is one of the peculiarities of American institutions. In several states, this trade is a chief source of wealth. It is called the internal slave trade. In order to divert from it, the horror with which the slave trade, the foreign slave trade is contemplated. The foreign slave trade has long since been denounced by this government as piracy, as an exeperable traffic. To arrest it, this nation keeps a squadron at immense cost on the coast of Africa. Everywhere in this country, it is safe to speak of this foreign slave trade as a most inhuman traffic opposed to like to the laws of God and of man. It is however a notable fact that while so much execution is poured out by Americans upon those engaged in the foreign slave trade, the men engaged in the slave trade between the states passed without condemnation and their business is deemed honorable. Behold the practical operation of this internal slave trade, 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. They inhibited all our southern states. They permeate the country and crowd the highways of the nation with droves of human stock. You will see one of these flesh human flesh jobbers armed with pistols, whips and bowie knives drive driving a company of hundreds of men, women and children from the Potomac to the South market and New Orleans. These wretched people are to be sold singularly or in lots to purchase to suited purchasers. They are the food for cotton fields and the deadly sugar mill. Mark the sad procession as it moves weirdly along and the inhuman wretch who drives them. Here his savage yells and his blood chilling oats as he hurries on his affrighted captives. There see the old man with locks tinned 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 to that girl of 13 weeping. Yes weeping as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn. The drove moves thoroughly. Pete and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength. Suddenly, you hear a quick snack like the discharge of a rifle. The fetters clank and the chain rattles simultaneously. Your ears are saluted with a scream that seems to have torn its way to the center of your soul. The crack you heard was the sound of the slave with the scream you heard was from the woman you saw with the bay. Her speed faltered under the weight of her child. That gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. Pull the strobe to New Orleans. Attend the auction. See men examined like horses. See the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave buyers. See the strobes sold and separated forever and never forget the deep sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. Tell me citizens where under the sun can you witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking? Yet this is but a glance at the American slave trade as it exists at this moment in the ruling part of the United States. I was born amid such sights and scenes. To me, the American slave trade is a terrible reality. The flesh mongers gather up their victims by dozens and drive them chained to the general depot at Baltimore. When a sufficient number has been collected here, the ship is chartered for the purpose of conveying the for long crew to Mobile or to New Orleans. From the slave prison to the ship, they are usually driven in the darkness of night. 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. Fellow citizens, this murderous traffic is today an active operation in this post in the Republic. In the solitude of my spirit, I see clouds of dust raised on the highways of the south. I see the bleeding footsteps. I hear the doleful whale of fettered humanity on the way to the slave markets where the victims are to be sold like horses, sheep and swine, knocked off to the highest bidder. There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken to gratify the lust, caprice and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men. My soul sickens at the sight. But still, but a still more inhuman, disgraceful and scandalous state of things remains to be presented. By an act of the American Congress, not yet two years old, slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form. Mason and Dixon's line has been obliterated. New York has become as Virginia and the power to hold, hunt and sell men, women and children as slaves remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of the whole United States. The power is co-extensive with the star-spangled banner and American Christianity where these go may also go the merciless slave hunter. Where these are, man is not sacred. He's a bird for the sportsman's gun. By that most foul and fiendish of all human decrees, the liberty and person of every man are put in peril. Your broad Republican domain is hunting ground for men. Your lawmakers have commanded all good citizens to engage in this hellish sport. Your president, your secretary of state and force as a duty to you that you owe to your free and glorious country and to your God that you do this accursed thing. Not fewer than 40 Americans have within the past two years been hunted down and without a moment's warning hurried away and chains consigned to slavery and excruciating torture. Some of these have had wives and children dependent on them for bread, but of this no account was made. The right of the hunter to his prey stands superior to the right of marriage and to the rights, all the rights in this Republic, the rights of God included. Then there is neither law nor justice, humanity nor religion. The fugitive slave law makes mercy to them a crime and bribes the judge who tries them. An American judge gets ten dollars for every victim he consigns to slavery and five when he fails to do so. The oath of any two villains is sufficient under this hell black enactment to send the most pious and exemplary black man into the remorseless jaws of slavery. His own testimony is nothing. He can bring no witness for himself. The minister of American justice is bound by the law to hear but one side and that side is the side of the oppressor. Let this damning fact be perpetually told. Let it be thundered around the world that in tyrant killing, king hating, people loving, democratic, Christian America, the seats of justice are filled with just judges who hold their offices under an open and palpable bribe and are bound and deciding in the case of a man's liberty to hear only his accusers. Violation of justice in shameless disregard of the forms of administering law in cunning arrangement to entrap the defenseless and in diabolical intent this fugitive slave law stands alone in the annals of tyrannical legislation. Americans your republican politics not less than your republican religion are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization and your pure Christianity. While the whole political power of the nation is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three million of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria impride yourselves on your democratic institutions while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and bodyguards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad honor them with banquets greet them with ovations cheer them toast them salute them protect them and pour out your money to them like water but the fugitives from your own land you advertise hunt arrest shoot and kill in your refinement and your universal education yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as it ever stained the character of a nation a system begun in avarice supported in pride and perpetuated in cruelty. You shed tears over fallen Hungary and make the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets statesmen and orators till your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her cause against the oppressor but in regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave you would enforce the strictest silence and would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares to make those wrongs the subject of public discourse you are all on the fire at the mention of liberty for France or for Ireland or as cold as an iceberg at the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America. You discourse eloquently on the dignity of labor let you sustain you sustain a system which in its very incessance casts a stigma upon labor you can bear your bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a three penny tax on tea and yet ring the last hard-earned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your country. You profess to believe that of one blood God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth and hath commanded all men everywhere to love one another yet you notoriously hate and glory in your hatred all men whose skins are not colored like your own. You declare before the world and are understood by the world to declare that you hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights and that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and yet you hold securely in a bondage which according to your own Thomas Jefferson is worse than ages of that which your father's rose in rebellion to oppose a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country. Fellow citizens I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies the existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham your humanity as a base pretense and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad it corrupts your politicians at home it saps the foundation of religion it makes your name a hissing and a byword to a mocking earth. It is an antagonistic force in your government the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your union it feathers your progress it is the enemy of improvement the deadly foe of education it fosters pride it breeds insulin it provokes promotes vice and it shelters crime it is the curse to the earth that supports it and yet you cling to it as if it were the sheet armor of all your hopes be warned a terrible reptile is coiled up in your nation's bosom the venerous creature is nurturing at a tender breast of your youthful republic for the love of god tear away flinging from you the hideous monster and let the weight of 20 million crush and destroy it forever but it is answered but it is answered in reply to all this that precisely what i have now denounced is in fact guaranteed and sanctioned by the constitution of the united states that the right to hold and to hunt slaves is a part of that constitution framed by the illustrious fathers of this republic then i dare to affirm notwithstanding all i have said before your fathers instead of being the honest men i have before to clear them to be were the various imposters that ever practiced on mankind this is the inevitable conclusion and from it there is no escape but i differ from those who charge this baseness on the framers of the constitution of the united states it is a slander upon their memory at least so i believe and others have as i think fully and clearly vindicated the constitution from any design to support slainly slavery for an hour allow me to say in conclusion notwithstanding this dark picture i have this day presented of the state of the nation i do not despair for this country there are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery i therefore leave off where i began with hope while drawing encouragement from the declaration of independence the great principles it contains and the genius of american institutions my spirit is cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago no nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world and trot round in the same old fat path of its fathers without interference the time was when such could be done but a change has now come over the affairs of mankind wall cities and empires have become unfashionable the arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe wind steam and lightning are its chartered agents oceans no longer divide but link nations together from boston to london is now a holiday excursion space is comparatively annihilated thoughts expressed on one side of the atlantic are distinctly heard on the other in the fervent aspirations of william Lloyd garrison i say let every heart join in saying it all godspeed the year of jubilee the wide world over when from their galling chains were set the obsessed shall wildly bend the knee yoke of tyranny like brutes no more that year will come and freedoms reign to man his plundered rights again restore godspeed the day when human blood shall cease to flow in every climb be understood the claims of human brotherhood and each return for evil good not low for blow that day will come all feuds to end and change into a faithful friend each foe so be it