Frederick Douglass’s Speech
It was 172 years ago when Frederick Douglass was invited to speak by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, New York. He delivered his historic speech in 1852 titled “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” However, Douglass’ speech was not delivered on July 4, 1852, as he felt it to be insincere for him to be the entertainment on Independence Day for a primarily white audience while millions of black individuals were wrongly enslaved, as it was reported in the Frederick Douglass’ Paper, July 1, 1852. He chose to deliver the speech the following day, July 5.
Douglass told his audience, “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” He sardonically asked, “Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today?” Then he explained…
“What to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; Your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless, your denunciation of tyrants brass-fronted impudence; your shout 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. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.”
Douglass labeling the celebration of the Fourth of July as “mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy” has always resonated with me. As a descendant of American slaves who became sharecroppers in Mississippi and Tennessee and someone who benefitted greatly from the Civil Rights movement and the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 and affirmative action in the 1960s, I am compelled to consider, “What to a Descendant of a Slave Is the Fourth of July in 2024?”
Douglass’ indictments of American slavery were not subtle. As he knew that the scourge of slavery infected the whole of America and that the battle to establish the humanity of blacks would take years to vindicate, he memorialized his perspectives as he spoke to his black brethren and their descendants, saying:
“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 well. You live and must die, and you must do your work. You have no right to enjoy a child’s share in the labor of your fathers unless your children are to be blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence.”
Douglass’ challenged us to find something “useful to the past and to the future,” which meant confronting and debunking the crippling lie that slavery was lawfully imported into the United States. In this regard, we can look to England’s Magna Carta of 1215, or “Great Charter,” and the famous assertion by British jurist Sir Edward Coke that the “Magna Carta is such a fellow, that he will have no sovereign.” This underscores the principle that the English Magna Carta is supreme over everyone, including the King of England.
The Magna Carta of 1215 was the legal foundation that prohibited slavery within England’s North American colonies and why colonial slavery within the colonies was a violation of England’s common law. The Magna Carta addressed various issues, including protection from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice, and the protection of church rights. By the late medieval period, following the Wars of the Roses in 1485—slavery in the form seen in ancient and early medieval times had primarily disappeared in England.
“Slaves cannot breathe in England; If their lungs receive our air, that moment they are free. They touch our country, and their shackles fall,”
were the poetic words of an 18th-century British poet, William Cowper. Further, the Cartwright case of 1569 is a landmark precedent in the history of English jurisprudence regarding slavery. This case established slavery within the Kingdom was repugnant to English common law, and the holding in Cartwright remained the controlling legal precedent for later legal challenges to the institution of slavery throughout the Kingdom of Great Britain. This historical context supports the conclusion that the practice of slavery in the American colonies could never be legally sanctioned.
Doubtlessly, slavery within England’s North American colonies was criminal and was the product of colonial government corruption since, by colonial charter, all colonial lawgivers within British North America were duty-bound to uphold the English rule of law. Further, in 1619, when the first 19 Africans arrived in colonial Virginia, the lawgivers applied the law of the land, and this explains why these Africans became indentured servants—not slaves. Additionally, these original Africans joined about 1,000 indentured servants in the colony and became Englishmen after their terms as indentured servants lapsed under English law.
Indentured servitude was brutal and deadly work, and many people died well before their terms were over. However, indentured servitude was temporary, with a beginning and an end. Afterward, captive Africans, no different from other immigrants, became British subjects when they completed their term of indenture. They were then eligible for headrights for land in this nascent colony in the Chesapeake Bay region, where discharged indentured servants were more common.
The children of these original kidnapped Africans were all born free English citizens under the colonial charter and English law that deemed them to be “children of the King,” protected by a 1350 Parliament enacted “statute for those who are born in Parts beyond Sea.” No English person could be born a slave, and being born in colonial America made the person a freeborn Englishman with an unalienable right to liberty, protected by English law at birth. These colonial-born Englishmen had legal rights under the common law doctrine of jus soli, each colonial charter, and later, Parliament’s English Bill of Rights of 1689.