A Speech Given By Frederick Do

FREDERICK DOUGLASS’S POWERS OF APPEAL
After his escape from slavery, Frederick Douglass chose to promote the abolition of slavery by speaking about the actions and effects that result from that institution. In an excerpt from a July 5, 1852 speech at Rochester, New York, Douglass asks the question: What to the slave is the Fourth of July? This question is a bold one, and it demands attention. The effectiveness of his oration is derived from the personal appeals in which he engages the listener.
At once in this speech, Douglass appeals to his listeners’ religious tendencies. He asks his audience, “am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar…'; (441). Religious appeal is so important because the majority of his audience is Christian, and he implies that Christianity, in its ostensible purity, allows the mishandling of human life to the degree of slavery. By relating Christianity directly to slavery, his listeners must question the validity of their Christian doctrines in relation to the institution of slavery. In doing so, they must eliminate their acceptance of one of these traditions; the odds are that Christianity holds a much more loyal following than slavery, in which case slavery will be given up as a practice. Douglass also quotes from Psalms 137:1-6, and the ludicrous concept that slaveholders expect their slaves to be joyous in their state of bondage is the essential meaning of the passage he chooses as it relates to the comparable situation of the Babylonians’ captives (442). His persuasive appeal in this case is the notion that any pious Christian would have sympathy for the lamenting captives and contempt for the captors in the Psalms passage. If this assumption is correct, then the same pious Christians surely should realize the situation of the slaves on this day and every other.
Additionally, in asking this question, he asserts immediately that the meaning of the Fourth of July is entirely different from that of the free, white American. Douglass concedes that the whites of America had reason to rejoice: “the rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence'; (441). However, he also illustrates that there are just as many reasons for slaves to scorn the traditional meaning of the Fourth of July. Furthermore, these reasons are as ...

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...w, with all of the activity and thinking life requires, the slave’s manhood can be questioned (443). For the white man listening to this argument, it is required that he empathizes with the situation of the slave, because in actuality there is much in common between the free and the enslaved. This is precisely Douglass’s point; bondage is the only hindrance of slaves’ abilities to lead a fulfilling life.
Douglass’s appeals to his audience are specifically directed toward white, Christian males. He is fully aware at all times he must show that he can relate with them. As Christians, how should they have felt had they been denied their right to practice religion and believe in their god? What would they do if the country they so loved chained them to a life of servitude? Finally, what would all the work to support a family and desire for self-improvement have accomplished if it only benefited a master, but not a wife and children? Douglass deliberately addresses those aspects of life that mean the most to his audience because in doing so he is sure to gain the listeners’ full attention and consideration of the immorality of slavery.