As all the world knows, Frederick Douglass was born into slavery. That beginning point affected his relationship both to the land of his birth and its political order. It is perhaps unsurprising that, after he made his daring escape to freedom and began his career as an abolitionist orator, Douglass declared himself to be a man without a country, branded the signers of the Declaration of Independence “liars” and “man-stealers,” and denounced the United States Constitution as a “most foul and bloody conspiracy” against the rights of mankind. Douglass, however, was not content to remain in that position of radical alienation and disaffection. As a result of a searching confrontation with the founding documents, Douglass, over the course of the decade from 1841 to 1851, became an avowed patriot, eventually claiming both the Declaration and the Constitution for himself and his oppressed brethren.
The culmination of this arduous journey towards belonging is visible in his most famous speech, “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?” In the best-known passages of this 1852 address, Douglass savages the government, church, and society of his day with all his usual force and biting satire. He blames America for its “revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy” in enslaving 4 million people. What is new, however, is that this scathing denunciation is flanked by passages celebrating the nation’s twin charters. Douglass begins the speech with praise for the “saving principles” of the Declaration. He ends it with praise for the Constitution as a “GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” Moreover, for the first time, he addresses an American audience as “Fellow Citizens.” The tripartite structure of the speech is emblematic of his rhetorical strategy. Douglass summons the twin testaments of the American order to condemn the current generation of Americans who are betraying the spirit of 1776 and committing a forgery upon the letter of 1787. To my mind, Frederick Douglass stands as the model for how to apportion and combine praise and blame, when assessing the American record on slavery and race.
Since we are celebrating the semiquincentennial of the Declaration this year, let me say a bit more about the place that the Declaration of Independence assumed in Douglass’s political thought and self-conception. One of his most interesting applications of the Declaration appears in his second autobiography, published in 1855, entitled My Bondage and My Freedom. Many people are familiar with his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, published a decade earlier in 1845. The second version does much more than simply extend his narrative to include his experience of life in freedom. It also extensively revises the presentation of his life in slavery, adding layers of descriptive depth and psychological and philosophic analysis to the straightforward story-telling of the first edition.
Take the famous account of his battle with the slave-breaker, Edward Covey. The basics of the incident in the two autobiographies are identical. The second account, however, is both fuller and framed by language drawn from the Declaration of Independence. In effect, Douglass presents his rebellion against the tyrant Covey as an analogue to the colonial rebellion.
Aware of the injustice of his enslavement, the adolescent Douglass became increasingly unmanageable. His master had recourse to a common practice: hiring him out to someone with a reputation for breaking the spirits of recalcitrant slaves. After an especially brutal beating, Douglass fled back to his master, pleading with him for protection. When that petition was refused and Douglass was ordered back to Covey’s, he took temporary refuge in the woods. In describing his solitude there, Douglass says he was “shut in with nature and nature’s God”—a clear allusion to the Declaration’s appeal to “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” Having resolved to resist if Covey again tried to whip him, the 16-year-old Douglass returned to Covey’s farm. When Covey attempted to hog-tie him, Douglass made good on his “pledge to stand up in my own defense,” during a two-hour, hand-to-hand battle, which Covey was unable to win. In reflecting on this episode, Douglass delves into the effect of resistance to tyranny on the human spirit: “I had reached the point, at which I was not afraid to die. This spirit made me a freeman in fact, while I remained a slave in form. When a slave cannot be flogged he is more than half free. He has a domain as broad as his own manly heart to defend, and he is really ‘a power on earth’”—another linguistic borrowing from the first paragraph of the Declaration. Douglass presents the battle with Covey as his own personal declaration of independence, the moment that he assumed the sovereignty belonging to him as “the rightful owner of his own body.” Douglass testifies to a remarkable transformation:
I was a changed being after that fight. I was nothing before; I WAS A MAN NOW. It recalled to life my crushed self-respect and my self-confidence, and inspired me with a renewed determination to be A FREEMAN. A man, without force, is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him; and even this it cannot do long, if the signs of power do not arise.
Although all human beings are entitled to liberty, as their natural, God-given endowment, actually gaining that liberty requires the courage to hazard one’s life for the sake of one’s liberty. This is a truth that Douglass learned in staging his own revolution, making possible his transit from what he called “My Bondage” to “My Freedom.” Crucial to the ability to take this bold step is the notion of “honor” to which both Douglass and the signers of the Declaration appeal. Douglass highlights that he resisted both in word and deed. When “the cowardly tyrant asked if I ‘meant to persist in my resistance.’ I told him “I did mean to resist, come what might;” that I had been by him treated like a brute, during the last six months; and that I should stand it no longer.” His determination inspired those around him, as the two other slaves at Covey’s refused to comply with demands to assist their master in subduing Douglass: “We were all in open rebellion, that morning.”
Douglass closes his Declaration-infused account of the battle with Covey with lines of poetry from Lord Byron’s call for Greek independence. These were lines that Douglass never tired of quoting:
Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not,
Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow?
Certainly, Douglass welcomed the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment when they came, seeing them as a fulfillment of the nation’s revolutionary commitment to liberty for all. While he valued what could be accomplished by good laws, Douglass understood that political freedom ultimately depended upon something internal—a quality of the human spirit manifesting itself in speech and action. Thus, even after the abolition of slavery, Douglass remained attentive to the needfulness of a kind of self-emancipation, not just for the freedmen, but for every citizen. For, in truth, liberty cannot be inherited, it must be achieved by each individual and each generation.
Diana Schaub is professor emerita of Political Science at Loyola University Maryland and a non-resident Senior Scholar in the Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies department at the American Enterprise Institute. She was the Garwood Teaching Fellow at Princeton University in 2011-12 and Visiting Professor of Political Theory in the Government Department at Harvard University in 2018, 2020, and 2022. From 2004 to 2009 she was a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics. She was the recipient of the Richard M. Weaver Prize for Scholarly Letters in 2001 and is the author of Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s “Persian Letters” along with numerous book chapters and scholarly articles in the fields of political philosophy and American political thought. She is a coeditor (with Amy and Leon Kass) of What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song. A member of the Board of Directors of the Abraham Lincoln Institute, she also sits on the publication committee of National Affairs. Her book on Lincoln’s rhetoric and statesmanship, His Greatest Speeches: How Lincoln Moved the Nation, appeared in 2021 from St. Martin’s Press.