Monday Memo: The Long-Suffering Patriotism of Black America
A complex intellectual heritage
In 1852 Frederick Douglass delivered his questioning address, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July.” The United States was celebrating 76 years since the Declaration of Independence was signed, and yet here Douglass was, a born slave, considering what he had to do with that document while millions of Africans were slaves in the USA.
After introducing the problem, he explained what Independence Day was to the whites in America:
This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. ‘This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day.
His phrases are in second-person and exclusive, there is no “we” or “our.” And yet Douglass says something in 1852, as an ex-slave and that many people today in 2026 often find hard to acknowledge: the Founding Fathers were great men even with their contradictions and hypocrisies. Douglass noted:
Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too—great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.
He continued in Biblical allusions by comparing White Americans to the New Testament Pharisees and Sadducees who John the Baptist challenged for claiming they were special and favored because they had Abraham as their ancestor:
Washington could not die till he had broken the chains of his slaves. Yet his monument is built up by the price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of men, shout—“We have Washington to ‘our father.’”—Alas! that it should be so; yet so it is.
How could those who sold slaves claim the inheritance of liberty half-a-century after General George Washington of Virginia, freed his slaves? Was not Washington pointing the way? Douglass’s reasoning contained a clear logic leading to the Bible’s epic lament of exile and its warning against a proud and cruel nation:
…And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe smitten people! “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them…My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! (emphasis mine)
He goes on to list the injustice of slavery, the slave trade, the lack of judicial fairness to Blacks, and the how the nature of slavery imposed itself on the concepts of Christian liberty. Douglass identified slavery as the ultimate division between the churches in America, because if they could unite against slavery then they could never be fully united on what is good and what is right. In its moral confusion America was a nation that welcomed refugee immigrants from Europe but hunted refugee slaves born in America. He continued, exposing, exhorting, and challenging until he neared the conclusion of his address and declared his admiration for the United States Constitution:
Fellow-citizens! there is no matter in respect to which, the people of the North have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon, as that of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution. In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but interpreted, as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? it is neither. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it.
Douglass’s rhetorical argument is a complex one, but, it is one which reverses the embarrassment regarding slavery in America. If slaves are only inferred in the Constitution as “three fifths of all other Persons” and as a “Person held to Service or Labor,” which could also be indentured servants, then how can the Constitution be pro-slavery? He was arguing that it is strange to say a governing document is endorsing something that it is ashamed to name. That is rather odd.
Following his logic, I can note that the Constitution does not hesitate to mention war or piracy, and even rebellion, or that the government may “punish” and authorize “reprisals” to deal violently with enemies and even suspend Habeas Corpus to defeat rebellion and invasion. On the use of violence to guard national security, it is explicit. And yet on the issue of slavery, which the Constitution supposedly endorses, it cannot state plainly what the thing is? In which case Douglass challenges the listener to explain why he must accept a pro-slavery interpretation, when he could make the opposite case? He can adopt the position that:
Now, take the constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery. I have detained my audience entirely too long already. At some future period I will gladly avail myself of an opportunity to give this subject a full and fair discussion. Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably, work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope.
This is the rhetoric of hope and aspiration. And on this, the thinking of the Methodist believer, Frederick Douglass, was setting the tone for much of the Black American intellectual tradition that holds that American is Egypt, the land of bondage. And it is also Babylon the land of exile. But it could become the Promised Land for the freed slave. And that is what Frederick Douglass set out to make it, what he called on his fellow African Americans to work for, and urged White Americans to join him to make into the reality. He was laying the path for a Black American civic-nationalism that could regard the good works of slaveholding Founding Father’s like Washington as also belonging to the Black people of this land.
It would invert the relationship of who belonged to America, whereby the slave who resisted oppression and sought liberty was more like the Founders who fought against Britain than was the slaveholding potential rebel, who would rather have the Union destroyed than see slavery constrained.
The intellectual journey toward Black American patriotism is as complex a story as it is a hopeful one.
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