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Appendix
What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?
Extract from an Oration, at Rochester, July 5, 1852
Douglass's best-known speech: a direct address to a Fourth of July audience arguing that the day's liberty and joy belong to them, not to the enslaved, and that what the moment demands is not argument but ‘scorching irony’ and ‘stern rebuke.’
“This Fourth of July is yours, not mine”Refusal to argue that the slave is a manCall for satire and rebuke over gentle persuasionAmerica measured against the nations of the world