Reading Frederick Douglass in 2025

His 1852 speech hasn't gone out of date

Yesterday, July 4, I took part for the 12th or 13th time (can't remember) in a community reading of Frederick Douglass's famous July 5, 1852, speech "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" Abigail McGrath, who initiated this tradition and sponsored it for 20 years, passed last December 20, so this was also a celebration of her life.

When Douglass gave the speech in Rochester, N.Y., the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had been in effect for almost two years. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 was less than two years away. By allowing the populations of the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide whether slavery would be allowed or not, it kicked off “Bleeding Kansas,” a series of violent confrontations between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces that led up to and helped bring about the Civil War.

This year my portion of Douglass's speech, which comes fairly near the beginning, included these two sentences: "To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers."

In her July 3 column “Check Out the Declaration’s List of Grievances” Jennifer Rubin does a masterful job of pointing out how many of the grievances named in the Declaration of Independence are happening today, implemented by those who presumably “glory in the deeds of your fathers,” or at least fake it in public. This time, however, they're not the work of a distant king and Parliament: they're coming from inside the White House, the Congress, and the Supreme Court.

The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers.

Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852

The cause of liberty is indeed being “stabbed by the men [and women] who glory in the deeds of your fathers.”

Glorying in the deeds of the founders is pretty much what today’s “originalists” claim to be about. They say they want to stick to the founders’ intentions. Trouble is, they don’t know what those intentions were. I don’t either, but I can’t help noticing that the founders built flexibility into the 1787 Constitution. They knew that the original relationship of the colonies with the Crown no longer worked. Would they have assumed that the document they created would work forever?

Of course not. That’s why they devised a process to amend the founding document. The Constitution was ratified — became official — on June 21, 1788. Plans for the Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments to the Constitution that wasn’t official yet) were begun a little more than a year later, on September 25, 1789.¹ It was adopted on December 15, 1791.

Frederick Douglass in 1852 had a few things to say about originalism, though he didn’t use the word because it hadn’t been coined yet. Instead he noted that though in his day everyone was rah-rah-rah² for the Revolution, “there was a time when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men.”

Once the radical and risky becomes settled and safe, in other words, everyone’s all for it. Even those who would have been taking ship to Canada after 1776.

What we’re seeing now is a backlash especially against the post-Civil War amendments (the 13th, 14th, and 15th) but also against the flexibility of the original Constitution as amended by the Bill of Rights. It's more relevant than ever, not least as a reminder that virtually every advance in U.S. history is met by a backlash, and the backlash can go on for generations. The backlash to the post–Civil War amendments spawned Jim Crow in the former Confederacy and Jim’s first cousin almost everywhere else.

Consider in that light the current administration's attack on birthright citizenship. They claim it was only meant to apply to the formerly enslaved and their children. It should not, they say, apply to the children born in the U.S. to immigrants if those immigrants were not themselves citizens at the time.

This is not surprising. Why do so many USians not realize that this started long before Trump showed up? that he is not personally responsible for it? In fact, a solid argument could be made that Trump is the endgame.

Why do so many people — white people in particular — think this started with Trump?? The Republicans have been headed in this direction at least since Reagan, and more likely since Nixon’s “southern strategy,” which brought hordes of white Southern Democrats into the GOP. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) turned up the heat. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) kept packing the courts (and the Court) with right-wingers.

Obama's election in 2008 drove the right bonkers. In 2010 we got hit with both the Citizens United decision and the Tea Party election: unlimited corporate money in campaigns + a Congress infested with hyperventilating anti-government crazies. What could possibly go wrong? The slope was not only slippery; it was steep.

If we weren’t around at the time, why haven’t we figured it out from recent history? We’ve had one wakeup call after another. January 6, 2021, was a monumental wakeup call, but so many of us seem to have dozed off again. If we choose to believe that it's all about Trump, and that Trump came out of nowhere, how can we possibly prevent it from happening again?

So now here we are, in the ER for failing democracies. I don't believe the professionals, political, medical, or otherwise, are going to save us. It's going to be our own strength and determination — and our ability to heed the words of Frederick Douglass.

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NOTES

1. A common start date for the French Revolution is May 1789. In June, the Third Estate of the Estates General (the non-clergy and non-nobles) became the National Assembly. The Bastille was stormed on July 14. Do we think for a moment that the founders weren’t paying close attention to events in France when they adopted the Bill of Rights?

2. Douglass didn’t use that word either. His prose is far more elegant than mine.