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Abigail Adams

Christopher Swift and Hagar Attia

COMM401-104

29 November 2017

Frederick Douglass: An Ethical Speaker

Frederick Douglass was one of the most acclaimed orators of his time and arguably the

most distinguished abolitionist of his period. His upbringing as a slave and the natural

intelligence that he possessed from a young age facilitated him to overcome all odds and become

a successful speaker and an influential voice of the seventeenth century. On July 5, 1852,

Douglass presented his speech, “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?” in Rochester, New York.

Knowing Douglass’s contextual background, experience as a rhetor, and the background of the

audience that he is presenting before adds to the meaning of the speech. According to the

periodical Nation, the rhetorical problem that Douglass sought to address was the celebration of

“a country whose actual practices all too frequently contradict its professed ideals” (Foner 2004).

Throughout his speech, Douglass used contextual and textual evidence to convey “ethics” as his

strategic discourse and to prove a Fourth of July celebration to be hypocritical.

To begin, Frederick Douglass focused on using a past example of moral standards as

evidence for the hypocrisy of a Fourth of July celebration. Douglass compared the colonist’s

struggle for sovereignty from Great Britain to a slave’s struggle for liberation from slaveholders.

Douglass told the story of how America became its own nation beginning with, “The simple

story is that 76 years ago, the people of this country were British subjects. The style and title of

your “sovereign people” (in which you now glory) was not then born,” (Douglass, 1852, p. 528).

This evidence shows that people who fought for what they thought to be morally right ended up
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creating a better future for the rest of America. In years prior, Douglass had made his view on

equal rights for all very clear. He even spoke at the Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls

(Darrah 2012). While Douglass’s speech was not fully successful in the sphere of published

works, it was successful among the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society, as according to the

National Humanities Center, they invited him to speak and he supported their rights just as much

as they supported his. Douglass knew that equality meant for all, not just for the group that he

was a part of and the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery society understood the same. One element

of strategic discourse as ethics is that the speaker practices what he preaches. Douglass’s support

of equality for other groups shows his morality and lack of hypocrisy. Thus, the speech Douglass

gave not only drew upon past examples of moral standards, but also on the current morals of the

audience before him.

Douglass used ethics as strategic discourse by praising the Founding Fathers for their

bravery and dedication to freedom. He stated, “With them, nothing was ‘settled’ that was not

right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were ‘final;’ not slavery and oppression,”

(Douglass, 1852, p. 531). However, despite Douglass’ admiration of the founders of the United

States, he used their desire for the eventual end to slavery to show the Americans that were

celebrating freedom because of the Founding Father’s hard work that there was still work to be

done. According to the analysis Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July, “Douglass shocked

his audience. 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” (Stellabotte 2006). Douglass drew the audience in with the familiar

comfort and the good that was done by the founding fathers only to make the audience

understand that they had not done enough to end slavery and promote freedom.
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Douglass makes his opinion about the hypocrisy of Americans that celebrate

Independence Day evident. He asks the audience, “Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask,

why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your

national independence?” (Douglass, 1852, p.534). Douglass knew that the answer to this

question was that he had nothing to do with their independence. This furthers his argument

pointing toward hypocrisy and strengthens the rationality of his argument, which is an aspect of

ethics. “I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of

this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance

between us,” (Douglass, 1852, p.534). Douglass presents himself to the audience as a humble

speaker at first, but here he is an accusatory speaker. Douglass is humble because he has had the

experiences that current slaves are going through and knows the pain that those experiences

cause. In his own narrative he states, “I often found myself regretting my own existence, and

wishing myself dead; and but for the hope of being free, I have no doubt but that I should have

killed myself, or done something for which I should have been killed” (Douglass). Standing

before the audience as someone that contemplated death when he was a slave strengthens

Douglass’s ethos, but it also makes the audience more likely to believe his argument that the

hypocrisy of the celebration was unethical.

A few years before his Fourth of July Oration, when Douglass spoke before the

Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society for the first time, he stated, “I cannot have patriotism.

The only thing that links me to this land is my family, and the painful consciousness that here

and there are three millions of my fellow-creatures, groaning beneath the iron rod of the worst

despotism that could be devised” (Douglass). Douglass uses his own understanding of a slave’s

depression to make the following hypocrisy even stronger. According to the feature Fifth of July,
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at the time, the Declaration of Independence had “claimed in no uncertain terms that ‘all men are

created equal.’ And yet, according to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, escaped slaves were not

persons but commodities” (Farrell 2001). Douglass’s understanding of the pain inflicted upon

slaves, when the Declaration of Independence has declared that those enslaved people should be

equal is an immoral quality of the United States.

Throughout his speech, Douglass toyed with the idea that Americans like to harp on the

good things about their history. He stated, “Americans are remarkably familiar with all facts

which make in their own favor,” (Douglass, 1852, p. 533). Many of the Founding Fathers owned

slaves in their time of leadership, which despite Douglass’ admiration of them, he was still aware

of. He states, “Washington could not die till he had broken the chains of slaves. Yet his

monument is built up by the price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of

men,” (Douglass, 1852, p.534). The example of Washington’s monument, one of a man that

wanted to abolish slavery yet was built by slaves, shows a history of immoral hypocrisy as a

nation. The hypocrisy present is harmful to the slaves that are involved. In stating that Americans

only see the good that they do and not the bad, Douglass pointed out that they may see the good

in their independence and the good in their celebration, but what they do not see is the fact that

while they celebrate others are still kept captive as slaves.

Just as Douglass used the founding fathers as ethics in his speech, he was also a man that

believed in God, which strengthened his ethos at the time. In his letter to Henry Clay in The

North Star, stated, “Finding ourself now in a favorable position for aiming an important blow at

slavery and prejudice, we feel urged on in our enterprise by a sense of duty to God and man,

firmly believing that our effort will be crowned with entire success” (Douglass). Douglass’s trust

in God and his use of God to encourage him to keep going in the fight for freedom was of high
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importance to people of that time. In his Fourth of July Oration, he uses God to denounce the

sins of slave holders stating, “Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this

occasion, I will... 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!” (Douglass,

1852, p.535). One author for the Americana: E-journal of American Studies in Hungary even

suggested that Douglass conjured up his mention of God “as documents of [his] leadership

within the respective sociopolitical movements of Abolitionism” (Bosnicova 20019). Douglass

used his belief in God to build his credibility and to give his audience an increased moral

responsibility. When listening to Douglass’s arguments for e freedom of slaves under God, the

ethical response of the audience was to agree.

Throughout his speech, Frederick Douglass used ethics as his strategic discourse to

convey that he believed that Americans that celebrated Independence Day while slavery still

existed were hypocritical. To communicate ethics as a speaker Douglass mentioned the founding

fathers, God, and his own struggle as a slave. Douglass focused heavily on the morals of his

audience that he spoke before on July 5, 1852 during his Fourth of July Oration.
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Works Cited

Bosnicova, Nina. "God Is an Activist: Religion in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

and the Autobiography of Malcolm X." Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary,

vol. 5, no. 1, Apr. 2009, pp. 22-28. EBSCOhost,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=52250555&site=ehost-live.

Darrah, Denise. “Frederick Douglass, Supporter of Equal Rights for All People.” Counterpoints,

vol. 406, 2012, pp. 151–162. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42981626.

Douglass, Frederick. "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave."

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, 8/1/2017, p. 1. EBSCOhost,

Douglass, Frederick. “Our Paper and its Prospects.” The North Star, 3 December 1950.

http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/support15.html. Accessed on 27 October 2017.

Douglass, Frederick. “The Right to Criticize American Institutions.” Speech before the American

Anti-Slavery Society, 11 May 1847.

Douglass, Frederick. “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?.” Speech before the Rochester Ladies

AntiSlavery Society, 5 July 1852.

Engell, James. “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” America in Class from the National

Humanities Center, http://americainclass.org/what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july/. Accessed

October 27, 2017.

Farrell, James J. "Fifth of July." Clergy Journal, vol. 77, no. 8, July 2001, p. 16. EBSCOhost,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=6482697&site=ehost-live.

Foner, Eric. "True Patriotism." Nation, vol. 279, no. 3, 19 July 2004, p. 10. EBSCOhost,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=13674481&site=ehost-live.
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Stellabotte, Ryan. “Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July.” Fordham News.

https://news.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/frederick-douglass-and-the-fourth-of-july/.

Accessed October 28, 2017.