What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?

The greatest American speech, and it is an indictment. Invited to celebrate independence, Douglass asked his audience what the Fourth of July meant to the enslaved, and answered: a day that revealed the gross injustice and cruelty to which they were the constant victims. He turned the conscience of the founding against the founders, and did it by taking their own promise more seriously than they did. The phrase power concedes nothing without a demand belongs to this man and this fire.

Born into slavery, self-taught in secret, escaped at twenty, and within a decade the most commanding orator and writer the abolition movement had. His Narrative made the case against slavery undeniable by the simple force of a first-person witness who could not be dismissed. His Fourth of July address is the greatest American speech. He read the Constitution not as a slaveholders' document but as a charter of liberty to be claimed, and he spent his life claiming it. The conscience of the founding, turned on the founders.