"Lovers of Ease and Worshipers of Property"

Reading Frederick Douglass' "What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?”

Note (July 4, 2025): Sadly, Frederick Douglass’ incendiary “What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?” only gets more powerful and relevant with each year. For me, the power comes from the tension Douglass places between the worthy high ideals of America— the ones the leaders of the revolution against English rule used to galvanize normal people to fight an die— with the actions of the country. This Independence Day, we are living that tension still.

Many Americans today celebrate the ideal of “freedom”. But at the same time, ICE pursues a massive purge of people proponents call “illegal immigrants” (which has at times included legal immigrants, legal permanent residents, and even United States citizens). At the same time, the executive branch pushes past more and more limits explicitly required by the Constitution. At the same time, the public is told we should comply with any request by any group of aggressive, non-uniformed men (and, meanwhile, ICE just got a major boost to its funding equivalent to many national militaries while the poorest Americans face the loss of their health coverage and food stamps). And at the same time, the Trump Department of Education withholds billions in Congressionally-mandated funds from public schools.

Making Sense of Trump's K-12 Budget Slashing

We have never lived up to our ideals fully (and in many circumstances, we have done well to even live up to them partly). And those ideals have often been used more to persuade people with little stake in the status quo to support it anyway. But those ideals are nonetheless worth struggling for.

So in that spirit, at least, happy Fourth of July.

Note (July 4, 2024): This piece was originally published July 4, 2023. During the ensuing year, SC Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver has declared war on school librarians, quoting Frederick Douglass in a speech remarks justifying book banning— in a state where most book challengers have targeted books about race and LGBTQ+ issues. Her department has intentionally made it much harder for students to take AP African American Studies, and passed perhaps the most sweeping book ban policy in the country— even over the objections of many conservative legislators who support some form of censorship policy. Across the country, similar battles are playing out.

In his 1852 address, Frederick Douglass reminded his audience,

On the 2nd of July, 1776, the old Continental Congress, to the dismay of the lovers of ease, and the worshipers of property, clothed that dreadful idea with all the authority of national sanction…

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 sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts 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.

-Frederick Douglass, “What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?” (1852)

That speech, entitled “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” or “What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?” was made to an audience of mostly white abolitionists. It was a friendly audience, but it wouldn’t be fair to call it a friendly speech, because Douglass’ subject was the ongoing evil and hypocrisy of a country celebrating its national independence while it held human beings in arguably the cruelest form of chattel slavery in recorded human history:

The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony…

Reading the speech this time of year is valuable, because not only does Douglass highlight how short America has fallen, but also how ennobling and powerful the ideals we fail to meet really are. While many of the “founding fathers” owned slaves and protected the institution of slavery, their ideas and words might also create the foundation of a better country that finally outlawed slavery and might one day achieve the task of addressing the lasting systemic wrongs created by slavery.

A daguerreotype of Douglass made sometime between 1847 and the time of the speech.

To do that, of course, we would have to learn from history. Douglass writes,

America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! "

Reading the speech this year, I’m struck by a passage that seems to address the extreme backlash our country is seeing against the gains of the Civil Rights movement and attempts to address those systemic wrongs. Moms for Liberty is perhaps only the most media-friendly and public face of a large far-right movement to be “false to the past,” to prohibit teaching and educational materials which create “discomfort” in White students (or, more likely, in their parents). Oklahoma Superintendent of Education Ryan Walters, at the Moms for Liberty “Joyful Warriors” conference in Philadelphia on Friday, said to the assembled crowd, “You are the most patriotic group in the country… This is the most important conference to happen in Philadelphia since 1776.”

Patriots should be offended by the near sacrilege of such a remark, but I don’t believe the powerful forces behind Moms for Liberty are patriots. If the best of our founding ideals are freedom and liberty— or, as Douglass put it, “To side with the right against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor!”— then people who value personal power and dark money over openness, freedom of speech, and democratic processes, cannot be considered patriots.

Similarly, the historical revisionist wing of the anti-CRT/ “parent’s rights”/ anti-woke crusade tellingly tried to repurpose Douglass’ words for its own cause. In the 1776 Commission Report, a hastily-assembled propaganda packet condemned by historians after being commissioned by the last presidential administration as a kind of clapback against the 1619 Project, there are two variations on the same Douglass quote, which comes from the “Fourth of July” speech:

He initially condemned the Constitution, but after studying its history came to insist that it was a “glorious liberty document” and that the Declaration of Independence was “the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny.”

and

The Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.

But context— to the frustration of book banners and revisionist historians— is key, and what Douglass said, once he was finished praising the founders and the Declaration (which, given the occasion of the speech, he all but had to do), was this:

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 [founding] 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.

In other words, Douglass’ thesis is exactly the opposite of 1776 Commission Report, which seems to be that despite what they call occasional “missteps” throughout history, the focus of history education should be on the “ideals” of the founders; but as Douglass explicitly said only a few paragraphs after their out-of-context quote, the past is only useful if it helps us understand the future, and living in the glory of your ancestors to “cover your indolence” gets a strong rebuke in a speech full of them.

And ironically, while many “parent’s rights” folks likely support the use of the 1776 Report (a number of anti-“CRT” bills even require it), they would also be the first to censor the rest of Douglass’ speech because it might have the effect of making students uncomfortable.

To Douglass, the rebukes were the point, because pure celebration would do nothing to address ongoing and deep wrongs:

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation's ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced

Near the end of the speech, before smoothing the emotions of the audience somewhat with some kinder words about the hopeful future of the country and the inevitable end of slavery, Douglass says these words, which might be helpful to reflect on today:

Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties) is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and body-guards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina.

You can read Douglass’ speech in full here.