Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July by James Colaiaco, Ph.D. (FCRH ’67), 256 pages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. $24.95.
The subject of James Colaiaco’s fourth book is one of the most electrifying speeches, and one of the most powerful orators, in American history. On July 5, 1852, self-educated black former slave Frederick Douglass delivered a “political sermon” at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, N.Y., vehemently taking white America to task for falling short of the ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence (that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights”). For Douglass, Independence Day was not a time of national self-congratulation; it was a painful reminder of national hypocrisy, of the evil of slavery and of promise unfulfilled.
Colaiaco, a professor who has taught Great Books at New York University for the last 25 years, sets the political and cultural context while offering sharp analysis of Douglass’ speech, noting in particular how Douglass used a series of rhetorical questions to underline the contradictions between the nation’s “ideals and practice with regard to human rights.”
“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?” Douglass asked. “Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in the Declaration of Independence, extended to us? Would to God, both for your sake and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions!”
Douglass answered his rhetorical questions in no uncertain terms: To the slave, Independence Day is a “day that reveals to him, more than any other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham.”
Colaiaco offers a close reading of Douglass’ speech, emphasizing how the former slave skillfully invoked the Bible and the Declaration of Independence to strengthen the abolitionist cause. Douglass called America’s founding document the “very Ring-Bolt to the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny,” transmuting, Colaiaco points out, “a symbol of oppression—a bolt with a ring attached for fitting a rope to it—into a symbol of liberation. The Declaration, the nation’s ‘ring-bolt,’ will smash the chains of the slaves.”
Douglass’ Fourth of July oration is steeped in rhetoric and natural law, the roots of which can be traced to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and Christian philosophers like Thomas Aquinas. But it also takes the shape of a uniquely American form: that of the jeremiad, a “political sermon” that “derive[s] its name from the ancient Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, who predicted the Babylonian conquest of Israel and destruction of the temple of Jerusalem as punishment for violating God’s covenant.” The American jeremiad begins with a reference to the nation’s promise (the Puritans’ “city on a hill”), before denouncing the people for falling short of that promise and concluding with a tough-minded but hopeful call for reform. “Douglass shocked his audience,” Colaiaco writes. “Instead of congratulating them for having invited a black man to sing the praises of the republic, he had them, along with millions of white Americans, bowing their heads in shame for tolerating slavery.”
The scope of Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July, however, extends beyond Douglass’ 1852 speech. Colaiaco also takes into account the infamous 1857 U.S. Supreme Court Dred Scott decision, which affirmed the constitutionality of slavery (a serious blow to Douglass’ determination to read the Constitution as an anti-slavery document), and the nation’s drift toward civil war. In an epilogue, he assesses a speech Douglass delivered on July 4, 1862, in Himrods Corners, N.Y., during which Douglass struck a more conciliatory tone than he did in 1852. Still, he emphasized what Colaiaco calls the “American dilemma, the contradiction between promise and fulfillment,” and he appealed to President Abraham Lincoln to issue a proclamation ending slavery once and for all. Approximately six months later, on January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation “sounded the death knell of slavery in the South.”
Throughout his life, even after slavery was abolished, Douglass viewed the Fourth of July not as “a day of complacent self-congratulation, but a day in which all Americans reflect on how far they have come in realizing the noble ideals of the nation’s Founders.”
In this trenchant study, Colaiaco tells the story of how Douglass’ “majestic” wrath “changed the course of American history.”
