Industry-leading accurate legal transcription to ensure you dont miss a statement. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, 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 cyphering, 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 hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christians God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men! If any man in this assembly thinks differently from me in this matter, and feels able to disprove my statements, I will gladly confront him at any suitable time and place he may select. The manhood of the slave is conceded. The coming into being of a nation, in any circumstances, is an interesting event. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. I scout the idea that the question of the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of slavery is not a question for the people. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. Would you have me argue that man is entitled to Liberty, that he is the rightful owner of his body? It was fashionable, hundreds of years ago, for the children of Jacob to boast, we have Abraham to our father, when they had long lost Abrahams faith and spirit. 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. Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? May of Syracuse, and my esteemed friend (Rev. For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? 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. To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! Who so stolid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nations Jubilee when the chains of servitude have been torn from his limbs? That point is conceded already. I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nations destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. There is not a nation of the earth, guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour. Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria, and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the meretoolsand body-guardsof the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. With head, and heart, and hand Ill strive, 8 Times Obama Showed Trump How Presidents Are Supposed To Celebrate The Fourth Of July, Welcome To The Cookout: 10 Lit Movies To Watch During July Fourth Holiday Weekend, 'Dilbert' Comic Creator Calls Black People A 'Hate Group,' Urges Segregation So Whites Can 'Escape', Bernie Mac Show Star Camille Winbush Is Not Ashamed Of Joining OnlyFans, Kyle Rittenhouse Faces 2nd Civil Lawsuit, Continues To Beg For Money From His Supporters, Ben Stein's 'Aunt Jemima' Rant Is A Master Class On White Privilege, Why Did tWitch Kill Himself? I will not. Section 107, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those 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 forget them, 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. 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 metal 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 we are engaged in all the 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, planting, living in families as husbands, wives, and children, and above all confessing and worshiping the Christian God and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave. What is this but the acknowledgement that the slave is a moral, intellectual and responsible being? I think that, in whatever else I may be deficient, I have WebOn December 3, 1860, Frederick Douglass and a group of fellow abolitionists met at the Tremont Temple Baptist Church in Boston for a discussion centered around the following The subject has been handled with masterly power by Lysander Spooner, Esq., by William Goodell, by Samuel E. Sewall, Esq., and last, though not least, by Gerritt Smith, Esq. The greatest and best of British statesmen admitted its justice, and the loftiest eloquence of the British Senate came to its support. Frederick Douglass: (10:31) Their conduct was wholly unexceptionable. in preference to the gospel,as preached by those Divines! A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy, is a curse, not a blessing to mankind. will be found by Americans. This, however, did not answer the purpose. welcome anything! They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an 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 solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. These rules are well established. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. President John F. Kennedy On July 4, 1962 President John F. Kennedy delivered this speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Transcribe your audio files to find high-impact insights in minutes. An American judge gets ten dollars for every victim he consigns to slavery, and five, when he fails to do so. What to the Slave is the 4th of July? Speech Transcript by Frederick Douglass, Congressional Testimony & Hearing Transcripts. Feeling themselves harshly and unjustly treated by the home government, your fathers, like men of honesty, and men of spirit, earnestly sought redress. Under Title 17 U.S.C. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. 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 and question and to denounce with all the emphasis I can command everything that serves to perpetuate slavery, the great sin and shame of America. With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression. You can bare your bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a threepenny tax on tea; and yet wring the last hard-earned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your country. There is blasphemy in the thought. In several states, this trade is a chief source of wealth. Descendants of Frederick Douglass read excerpts from one of his most famous speeches: What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass gave a speech at an Independence Day celebration organized by the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society. Your cause would be much more likely to succeed. In glaring 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. Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to those questions. The fiat of the Almighty, Let there be Light, has not yet spent its force. Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? When Douglass delivered his famous The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro address before an audience at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, on July 5, We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. WebOn July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass gave a keynote address at an Independence Day celebration and asked, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? Douglass was a powerful Am I to argue that it 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 flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with ions, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? The most accurate AI-powered transcription on the market. There are 72 crimes in the state of Virginia, which if committed by a black man, no matter how ignorant he be, subject him to the punishment of death, while only two of these same crimes will subject a white man to like punishment. Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. This is esteemed by some as a national trait perhaps a national weakness. Where these go, may also go the merciless slave-hunter. Fair use is permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. That, which is inhuman cannot be divine. These gentlemen have, as I think, fully and clearly vindicated the Constitution from any design to support slavery for an hour. They were great men too great enough to give fame to a great age. On the 2d 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. 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. Frederick Douglass: (00:26) The crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard, was from the woman you saw with the babe. From police shootings to the wage gap to crippling stereotypes (and everything in between), there are too many parallels today with what Douglass described in his speech to white America, including this relevant line. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.. The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commission. Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetual remembrance. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. 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, as it breasted the chilling blasts of kingly displeasure. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a bye-word to a mocking earth. The task before me is one which requires much previous thought and study for its proper performance. Convert your audio or video into 99% accurate text by a professional. 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 a rival. The arm of the Lord is not shortened, and the doom of slavery is certain. 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? My soul sickens at the sight. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Our eyes are met with demonstrations of joyous enthusiasm. Take the American slave-trade, which, we are told by the papers, is especially prosperous just now. R. R. Raymond) on the platform, are shining examples; and let me say further, that upon these men lies the duty to inspire our ranks with high religious faith and zeal, and to cheer us on in the great mission of the slaves redemption from his chains. The simple story of it is that, 76 years ago, the people of this country were British subjects. Copyright 2023 Interactive One, LLC. Its quite a remarkable speech as Douglass in a way reenacts his own journey in appreciation for the work that Lincoln did, not just for blacks, but for whites in this country.