In 1852, Frederick Douglass was invited to give a 4th of July speech in his hometown of Rochester, New York. After praising the framers of the Constitution and the nation they established, Douglass turned to the cruel hypocrisy of commemorating American independence while millions remained in the bondage he had only recently escaped, pointedly addressing white Americans in the second person:
“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? … To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; … 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.”
If anyone had reason to condemn America as irredeemably lost, it would be a man like Douglass, legally reduced to chattel for the first 20 years of his life. And yet Douglass ended his speech with a stirring affirmation of faith in “the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions.”
He had the wisdom to distinguish the lasting ideals of the founders from the human wickedness that had perverted them. For Douglass, these ideals remained worth protecting; indeed, they are what allowed him to hope that his abolitionist cause would soon triumph.
Ten years later, as the American Civil War raged, Douglass gave another 4th of July speech. This time, he used the third person plural, aligning himself with both his countrymen and the Founding Fathers and describing the Union effort as “continuing the tremendous struggle, which your fathers and my fathers began eighty six years ago.”
Douglass had urged President Lincoln to let black soldiers fight for the Union since the war began. When the 1863 signing of the Emancipation Proclamation permitted this, two of Douglass’ sons were among the 200,000 black Americans who enlisted.
In a little less than two years, America will celebrate the 250th anniversary of its founding. As we contemplate that milestone from this particularly volatile moment in our history, may we ponder what divides us and, like Douglass, strive to discern the unity it conceals.