Welcome back to Great Americans, a countdown to our country’s 250th birthday. We’re bringing you a writer we love on an American they love, every weekday between now and July 4. Previously, David Mamet wrote about Paul Dresser, the songwriter from Indiana who gave America its first great pop hit. Today, David A. Price pays tribute to Frederick Douglass, who famously asked, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” —The Editors
To be a speaker on the same bill with Frederick Douglass could be frustrating. His fellow abolitionists on the lecture circuit, black and white, “would sometimes get angry,” recalled the black abolitionist William Wells Brown. They “would speak first at the meetings; then they would take the last turn; but it was all the same—the fugitive’s impression was the one left upon the mind.”
Douglass, who escaped from slavery in Baltimore in 1838, was a sought-after orator in an age that prized stirring oration. In the North and in Britain, his rich voice and his direct and engaging words made him a star. Early in his speaking days, a well-meaning white abolitionist leader urged him, without success, to “have a little of the plantation” in his speaking style—or else who would credit that he had once been a slave?
He was in peak form on the morning of July 5, 1852, in his adopted hometown of Rochester, New York. The Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society had set that date for its Independence Day celebration because the fourth that year fell on a Sunday. An audience of more than 500 crowded into the city’s Corinthian Hall and witnessed Douglass, 34, deliver what is the most famous Independence Day address in American history—and also the most misunderstood.
