“ Uncle Tom’s Cabin had just been published that spring and was taking the country by storm. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletterĪt the time Douglass spoke, Blight says, the opportunity was ripe for a lecture on the moral crisis. “We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” “For it is not light that is needed, but fire it is not the gentle shower, but thunder,” he said. 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.ĭouglass’ speech also foreshadowed the bloody reckoning to come: Civil War. 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. 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. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?…

This hat is not mine