What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July and Why Douglass Kept the Constitution

He gave the speech on the fifth. The Fourth fell on a Sunday that year, and the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society held its meeting the next day. The speaker stood before an audience gathered around the nation's birthday, and he declined to say what a holiday crowd expected. He said what was true.

What followed is among the greatest speeches ever delivered on American soil. Frederick Douglass did not need a stage larger than a hall in upstate New York to say it. And the thing that sets it apart from every other denunciation of slavery in its time is where it ends. A man who has just spent an hour calling the nation's celebration a mockery turns around and says that the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. Let us see how a man gets from one to the other.

The man and the room

Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland around 1818. He escaped in 1838, taught himself to read and write at hazard to himself, and became the most powerful speaker the antislavery movement had. By 1852 he was famous, a published author, and the editor of his own newspaper in Rochester, New York. On July 5, 1852, he spoke in Corinthian Hall in Rochester at the invitation of the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society. Accounts of the meeting put the audience at about six hundred.

He opens with modesty and then slowly turns. The early section is not what the headlines remember. He praises the Founders. He says that the signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men, great men, "great enough to give fame to a great age." He says he is "not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic," and that pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt his hearers to hold the day in remembrance. If you have only seen the famous paragraphs of the speech in a classroom excerpt, you may be surprised to learn that a long section builds a case for the Founding before it turns.

This matters because the turn is the point. A speaker who had no regard for the Founders would not have needed to turn. The pivot is that of a man who loves what the nation said and cannot bear what it did.

The turn

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?

Then the answer, which is the part everyone remembers. He says that this Fourth of July is a day that reveals to the slave "more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim." Before that comes the sentence that is the hinge of the whole address:

This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

Read what comes before it, too. Douglass says that "the rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence" bequeathed by the fathers is "shared by you, not by me." And that "the sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me." He says that he is not included "within the pale of this glorious anniversary," and that the high independence of his hearers "only reveals the immeasurable distance between us."

Let me put the argument in its structure, because Douglass built it like a lawyer. One, the Declaration states a universal principle. Two, the nation celebrates the Declaration annually, with feeling. Three, the nation holds millions of people in bondage in contradiction to the principle. Four, therefore the celebration is, to the slave, a mockery, and the celebrants stand condemned out of their own mouths. It is a reductio in the form of an oration.

And he knows how it will sound. He says that the time for argument is past: "At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed." He declines to prove that slavery is wrong. He treats it as something his hearers already know, and he holds up the nation's pretensions to the light. He asks whether he is supposed to argue that a man is entitled to liberty, and answers by describing the idea as an insult to the intelligence of his listeners. A man who knows that his audience agrees with him in principle, and still lets the evil stand, needs a different instrument than reason. He needs shame, and he uses it.

What he says about the nation's practices

The speech goes on to detail what slavery is: the domestic slave trade, which tore families apart and sent people south in coffles, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which, he says, "makes mercy to them a crime." He says that there is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than the people of the United States at that hour. It is a heavy charge, and he supports it with a description of the domestic slave trade.

He turns on the churches. He charges that much of the American church, instead of opposing slavery, either defended it or stayed silent, and he does so in the language of a believer who expects better of the church. He quotes Isaiah against a worship that God, in the prophet's words, hates. This is not the voice of an unbeliever. It is the voice of a man who reads the Bible as binding and finds that his country's pastors do not. That tradition, in which faith holds the nation to account, is one we explore in pulpits, boycotts and the church roots of the civil rights movement.

The break with Garrison

Now the question that the speech's ending raises, and for which the title promises an answer: why did Douglass keep the Constitution?

You have to know the dispute inside the abolitionist movement. William Lloyd Garrison, the great editor of The Liberator, held that the Constitution was a pro-slavery compact. He took the phrase from the prophet Isaiah and called it "a covenant with death" and "an agreement with hell." He demanded "no union with slaveholders," and on July 4, 1854, at a gathering in Framingham, Massachusetts, he burned a copy of the Constitution in front of the crowd. It was, one might say, the one constitutional theory that came with its own matches. Garrison's position had a certain moral purity. If the national charter protects slavery, then it should be repudiated.

Douglass began as a Garrisonian. He was Garrison's protégé. But in the years leading to 1852 he studied the Constitution for himself and concluded that his mentors were wrong about the document. In 1851 he announced his change of view, started to criticize the Garrisonian reading, and parted ways with the leaders who had been his sponsors. The break was painful and personal. Douglass was moving from a movement that loved him toward a position that its leaders called a betrayal.

What did he conclude? In the Rochester speech he states it, near the end:

Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document.

He tells his audience to "read its preamble, consider its purposes," and asks whether slavery is among them: "Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple?" It is neither, he says. He then makes a textual argument that is the heart of his constitutional position. If the Constitution were meant to be a slaveholding instrument, he asks, why can "neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave" be found anywhere in it? He does not pretend to argue the question at length that evening. He points his hearers to Lysander Spooner, William Goodell, Samuel E. Sewall and Gerrit Smith, and says that "according to its plain reading," he defies anyone to show a single pro-slavery clause. On his reading, a document whose plain language is about liberty and justice cannot lawfully be read as a charter for bondage.

The steelman: the clauses the Garrisonians pointed to

I owe you the other side at full strength, as Douglass himself did. The Garrisonian reading did not come from nowhere. Here is what the critics cited.

The Constitution counts "three fifths of all other Persons" for purposes of representation and direct taxes (Article I, Section 2), which gave slaveholding states extra weight in the House and the Electoral College. It forbids Congress to prohibit "the Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit" before 1808 (Article I, Section 9). It requires that a "Person held to Service or Labour" who escapes to another state "shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due" (Article IV, Section 2). And it commits the United States to protect the states against "domestic Violence" on application of the legislature or the executive (Article IV, Section 4), a clause which, in the context of the time, was understood to include slave insurrection.

That is a formidable list. The framers wrote slavery into the structure without using the word, and the national government carried out the Fugitive Slave Acts under it. The Supreme Court, in Dred Scott in 1857, ruled that Black Americans could not be citizens and that Congress could not bar slavery from the territories. Garrison's reading was supported by the experience of the institutions. And no honest scholar denies that some of the framers were willing to compromise with slavery to get the Union.

Douglass's answer, point by point

Douglass's argument is about what the document, as a legal text, says and permits. In the Rochester speech it is brief, and the numbered form below draws out its logic, using his words where he gives them and the text of the Constitution where I fill in the argument.

One. The clauses do not name slavery. Douglass says that "neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave" appears in the document. The three-fifths clause speaks of "other Persons." The fugitive clause speaks of persons "held to Service or Labour." The slave-trade clause speaks of "such Persons." Madison, according to the record of the Convention, objected to admitting the idea that there could be property in men, and our post on Madison Kept the Idea of Property in Men Out of the Constitution's Words explains the record. A text that takes such care not to name the thing is a text that did not wish to give it constitutional standing.

Two. Legal texts are read by well-established rules. Douglass says that there are "certain rules of interpretation, for the proper understanding of all legal instruments," plain, common-sense rules that any citizen can apply. Taking the Constitution "according to its plain reading," he finds no pro-slavery clause. It is the standard a court applies to a statute: if the text is plain, what is said controls.

Three. The Constitution belongs to the people to interpret. Douglass scouts the idea that the constitutionality of slavery is not a question for the people, and holds that every American citizen has a right to form an opinion of the Constitution and to use all honorable means to make that opinion prevail. On that view the citizen claims the founding charter and does not leave it to the slaveholders.

Four. The Declaration is the lens. For Douglass the Declaration is, in his words, "the ringbolt to the chain of your nation's destiny," and its principles are "saving principles" to which his hearers should hold at whatever cost. In his closing pages he says he draws encouragement from the Declaration, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American institutions. We take up what the Declaration's second paragraph established in The Declaration's Second Paragraph Is a Complete Theory of Government.

Is his argument airtight as history? It is not. He was reading the Constitution as it ought to be read, as he says, and that is a normative claim. The framers' compromises were real. And the courts in his lifetime did not agree with him. But as a statement of what the text can bear, and of what a free people should demand it mean, his reading was stronger than its reputation, and it was vindicated in the end, since the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments finished what the text, on his reading, had been built to permit.

The ending: "I do not despair of this country"

Now to the last pages, where the speech turns again. After detailing the evil, Douglass says that in spite of the dark picture he has drawn, "I do not despair of this country." He gives reasons. The mind of the nation is moving. The progress of knowledge, the spread of newspapers, the work of the abolitionists, the example of other nations that had ended the slave trade, and the Declaration itself are, he argues, grounds for hope. He ends: "I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope."

A word on what a conservative should draw from that. There are two failures of patriotism. One is the uncritical kind, which cannot see the nation's faults and so cannot correct them. The other is the cynical kind, which sees nothing else and concludes that the nation is a fraud. Douglass avoids both. He gives the most severe critique of America in the history of American oratory and he does so in the name of America's own principles. His is the patriotism of a man who loves the country enough to hold it to what it promised.

What the speech means for a reader now

First, it is an answer to anyone who says the Founding is simply a story of oppression. Douglass, who suffered the oppression, did not say that. He said that the Founding's principles were true and the nation's practice was false, and he asked that the practice be changed to match.

Second, it is an answer to anyone who says that to criticize the country's history is to hate it. The most brilliant critic of American slavery was among its greatest defenders of American principles. The two acts were one act.

Third, it is a model of how to argue from within a tradition. Douglass did not appeal to a foreign standard, and he did not invent a new one. He took the nation's own text and quoted it back. A reformer who can do that, who can say "you promised, here are your words," holds a powerful weapon, and the right is as entitled to wield it as the left. We see the same instinct in Frederick Douglass's Plea for Free Speech in Boston, Read Passage by Passage, where Douglass defends the liberty of those he disagrees with, and in the broader question of how to weigh the Founders fairly, treated in How to Judge the Founders Fairly Without Excusing Slavery or Erasing Them.

The case in brief

1. Douglass delivered his speech on July 5, 1852, in Rochester, and its central argument is that a nation celebrating liberty while holding millions in bondage condemns itself.
2. The famous lines, "This Fourth July is yours, not mine" and "scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed," are the hinge of a speech that begins by honoring the Founders.
3. Garrison called the Constitution a covenant with death; Douglass broke with him in 1851 and argued that the text, fairly read, does not sanction slavery.
4. The Garrisonian case rests on real clauses, the three-fifths rule, the 1808 slave-trade clause and the fugitive clause, and Douglass answers that these never name slavery and that the document's purposes are liberty and justice.
5. He ends in hope, a patriotism that holds the nation to its principles and not a contempt for them.

What you can do: read the full text of the Rochester speech at the National Archives or the Library of Congress, then read the Preamble and the Fifth Amendment beside it, and decide for yourself whether Douglass read the Constitution rightly.