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Frederick douglass rhetorical stance
What to the Slave is the Fourth of July
Summary of what a slave is the fourth of july
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Because slaves were excluded from any recognized involvement in Fourth of July celebrations, Fredrick Douglass had to have been an extremely recognized and respected individual. He defied the stigma around being African American and others acknowledged him as intelligent and well spoken. However, in his oration, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?, we see him cleverly begin his address by expressing his insecurity and embarrassment towards his address. He continues to spike his audience’s attention through playing on their feelings of patriotism, commending the young nation and its founding fathers. After lingering on with appraisal for the past and capturing the intrigue of the entire audience, Douglass suddenly transitions into the solemn …show more content…
present. He questions why Anglo-Americans would condone slavery when their history consists of oppression from British colonies. He slowly but surely breaks down the façade covering the holiday, and expresses his holiday as one of mourning. With little to no background of the holiday essence, one might question the sudden transition from commemoration to severity in Douglass’s address. However, after researching antebellum Fourth of July celebrations, we can see that Douglass had to break through a barrier of arrogance and superiority to project his message to his audience. To offer some contextual background, both of my sources discuss Fourth of July celebrations and the spirit of the holiday during the Early Republic and Pre-Civil War eras.
Independence Day was seen as a sacred occasion to Anglo-American citizens, and we see this doctrine manifested through the extravagant events orchestrated around our nation’s birthday. Public parades, orations or sermons, luncheons, firework shows, and formal dinners were some of the major commemorations that citizens celebrated. One particular tradition that clearly shows the loyalty and respect that citizens felt towards the nation were toasts. A mainstay of Fourth of July dinners, toasts emphasized the chivalry and honor that citizens felt for their country. Ten to twelve men stood at the dinner table, each one declaring validations of nobility and praise to the other. They captured white men’s elevated status as protectors and governors of their households, as well as white women as fair and intelligent patrons of refinement. Through this example, I started to understand the presumptuous, autocratic attitude of Americans during this time. This is the mentality that Douglass is facing and arguing against in his …show more content…
address. Dr. Kellison also notes the emphasis put on veteran eulogies. “By the mid and late 1840s, concern that younger men and women had "forgotten" the sacrifices of Revolutionary War veterans multiplied. Eulogies for veterans abounded during Fourth of July celebrations. In July 1846, James Jackson, Esq., of the Athens-area Walton Cavalry delivered an oration emphasizing the greatness of officers. The men and women who gathered for the speech heard Jackson speak about various framers of the Declaration of Independence, including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and John Hancock, the latter whose "bold" signature "speaks with more power in behalf of high moral courage and undaunted patriotism, than all that the eloquence of mere language can convey."(Kellison) This emphasizes the importance that was placed on commemorating the founding fathers as well as the past Revolutionary war veterans. One can start to see the trend of Anglo-Americans celebrating the Fourth by showing honor, paying tribute, and obliging respect to this backward-looking holiday through these excerpts. While my previous source offers more examples of how physical celebrations revealed the mentalities of Americans, I pulled quotes from Dr. Travers’s novel to further discuss why these ideologies came into place. “The ritualized celebrations of the Fourth of July helped to mask disturbing ambiguities and contradictions in the new republic, overlaying real social and political conflict with a conceptual veneer of shared ideology and elemental harmony.” (Travers 7) Douglass correspondingly questions this national disguise of joy and congruence in his oration, while also addressing real conflicts like enslavement itself and why society chooses to be blind to it. This shows how Euro-American’s thinking had become habitual towards the holiday. While celebrating and commemorating the past, they could veil the problems being created by slavery as well as any other issues ensuing in the present. In relation to expanding my understanding of this text, I used this research towards finding the relevance of these celebrations to the tone of American citizens and Douglass’s audience.
These events asserted the unrealistic unity of American people. “The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me.” (Douglass 2241) Anglo-Americans only acknowledged their traditional, ritualistic values towards the holiday, while completely ignoring the real underlying issues of slavery and oppression. This is why Douglass’s oration takes such a sudden shift when he discusses the present-day issues. He wants his audience to realize this holiday is one of mourning and sorrow for African Americans. By exploring the many festivities held on an antebellum Fourth of July, whether it was public sermons or odes to founding fathers through toasts, I exposed that the tone of Douglass’s audience was one of extreme patriotism and blinding passion. This discovery ultimately lead to a fuller understanding of the oration and the strides Douglass had to make to convey a message of freedom and
equality.
The author Kevin Bales ,and co-writer Ron Soodalter, discuss the issues pertaining to forced labor in “Slavery in The Land of The Free”. Free The Slaves is a non-profit organization in Washington that Bales founded to help end slavery not only in the United States, but around the world. The Abraham Lincoln Institute has the honor to have the established historian, Soodalter, serve on it’s board.The two authors also wrote a book by the name of “The Slave Next Door: Human trafficking and Slavery in America Today” (2009). One of the issues that Bales and Soodalter effectively touch on is how widespread the issue of human trafficking and slavery is in
equality, hollow mockery … a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages” (Douglass). Essentially, everything that the slave observes is a lie. Everything the slave observes represents hypocritical double standards created by their oppressors to further otherize and dehumanize the slave. Here, Douglass’s critique of the citizenry reflects the concerns and critique that Socrates gave in regards to rhetoric and its uses in the Gorgias: “rhetoric seems not to be an artistic pursuit at all, but that of a shrewd, courageous spirit, which is naturally clever at dealing with men; I shall call the chief part of it flattery” (Plato 23). Flattery is necessarily a deceitful as it seeks to hide certain flaws or faults. The rhetoric and celebration of the Fourth of July, at least to Douglass, disguises the moral failures of the country in false patriotism pushing the nation even farther from the
Frederick Douglass’s speech was given to so many of his own people. The fact that Douglass speaks so harshly to them proves that he has passion for what he talks about through-out. “What to the slave is the Fourth of July”, compares and contrasts the different meanings the Fourth of July shared between Whites and African Americans. Douglass says “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim”. Frederick Douglass was not striving for the attention, he just wanted to get across that the Fourth of July is not a day of celebration to African Americans and the respect he shared with them, having once being a slave himself.
In the short story, “Fourth of July”, Audre Lord transmits the main message of how one should resist and retaliate when afflicted to prejudice. Lorde displays the message of prejudice early in the story when she describes the complications Phyllis had trying to get to Washington D.C. with her high school senior class, just because she is a different skin color as the others. Lorde writes “Phyllis’s high school senior class trip had been to Washington, but the nuns had given her back her deposit in private, explaining to her that the class, all of whom were white, except Phyllis, would be staying in a hotel where Phyllis ‘Would not be happy,’ meaning, Daddy explained to her, also in private, that they did not rent rooms to Negroes. ‘We will
The reality of the matter, only known to the mother and father, is that the status quo of racist policies prohibited the Lordes from dining in the car. Lorde appeals to the reader’s pathos by subconsciously creating empathy for Lorde as she struggles with her parents not being truthful about foundational aspect of mid 1900’s American society – racism. Moreover, the use of situational irony is shrewdly expressed in Lorde’s interpretation of her family’s D.C. trip: “…the waitress was white, and the counter was white, and the ice cream I never ate in Washington DC was white and the white heat and the white pavement and the white stone monuments of my first Washington summer made me sick to my stomach…” (para. 24). Employing vivid imagery of how Lorde perceives her recently awoken sense of actual reality, she is able to express her understanding of the displeasing disparity between superior Whites and inferior Blacks. Unlike her jaded parents, Lorde expected the United States’ capital to uphold the same virtues it was founded upon – freedom, equality, liberty. Ironically, she finds Washington D.C. to be filled with inherent discrimination. Consequently the reasoning for Lorde’s blatant irony in her essay’s title: “The Fourth of July”. July 4th is supposed to represent the day the American founders broke away from an oppressive British rule to mark the birth of a free land. Paradoxically, they created a regime that was was more oppressive than the British. The racist foundation of the new nation is not exposed until the understanding of Thomas Jefferson’s implication of the phrase “all men are created equal” in the Constitution. These “men” strictly refer to the elite men that have conquered this new land of America – property-owning white men. Thus, women and those of color were not recognized as entities that possessed inalienable rights. Founding a
Cultural diversity is the hallmark of our society because of the our inherited genetic predisposition or what we learn as we grow up that predominantly shapes us and our differences as individuals. In that same way, we must be more aware of the things others say and do because we’re all different and we all should be able to accept the fact. When it comes to the Fourth of July, every person has his or her own memory during this special occasion. Audre Lorde took a trip during the summer to Washington, D.C., she obtained her own memory and meaning of independence. Lorde’s essay was written in response to her family’s trip to Washington D.C. the summer after her graduation from eighth grade. In it, she writes, “The waitress was white, and the counter was white, and the ice cream I never ate in Washington D.C. … was white and the white heat and the white pavement and the white stone monuments of my first Washington summer made me sick to my stomach for the whole rest of that trip…”(Lorde 257). Here,
The concept of the Other is dominant in Frederick Douglass’s text “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro”, for it determines the main conflict and illuminates the issue of intolerance and even blasphemy regarding the attitude of white Americans towards Negroes. The text was written as a speech to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence and delivered at Rochester’s Corinthian Hall on July 5, 1852. It was a remarkable articulation of the Black people voice living in the United States of America at that point of time because Black people were going through too much humiliation on physical and moral levels (Andrews, 1991, p.46).
The drive to end slavery in the United States was a long one, from being debated in the writing of the Declaration of Independence, to exposure of its ills in literature, from rebellions of slaves, to the efforts of people like Harriet Tubman to transport escaping slaves along the Underground Railroad. Abolitionists had urged President Abraham Lincoln to free the slaves in the Confederate states from the very outset of the Civil War. By mid-1862, Lincoln had become increasingly convinced of the moral imperative to end slavery, but he hesitated (History.com). As commander-in-chief of the Union Army, he had military objectives to consider (History.com). On one hand, emancipation might
Rhetorically, Douglass was a master of irony, as illustrated by his famous Fourth of July speech in 1852: "This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn," he declared. Then he accused his unsuspecting audience in Roch...
n Frederick Douglass’ What to the Slave is the 4th of July, he presents a simple yet morally complex argument. In his letter, Douglass states that it is hypocritical for a country to celebrate its freedom and separation from another country, yet still have slavery alive and well in the United States. Morally, this issue is a pretty straightforward argument and the very definition of hypocritical. Douglass also touches upon his belief that all men and women are equal, as stated in the constitution, yet slaves are subhuman. Another topic touched on is the contributing factors that perpetuate the constant and unjust nature of how slaves are treated, such as religion, agricultural, and over all demeanor towards slaves.
He points out that the Fourth of July came to be seen by abolitionists as a day suited to point out the nation's failure to live up to its promise of liberty for all. Douglass raises the issue of slaves' humanity by addressing the line between humans and animals. Frederick Douglass' point in "The Meaning of Fourth of July for the Negro" is that America was being incredibly hypocritical in their celebration of the Fourth of July. The whole point of that holiday is to celebrate that all people in the country are free from Great Britain. while they are sitting there celebrating their own freedom, slaves are being held captive in that same country that seems to value freedom so greatly.
The effectiveness and excellent structure of Frederick Douglass’ Fourth of July speech is apparent. His rhetorical arguments served as powerful rebuts to opposing contentions and forced his audience to consider the undeniable error in their nation’s policy and approach regarding slavery. Douglass also compelled his audience to take his words seriously by establishing his credibility, recognizing his audience, and skillfully constructing and executing his speech. The end product of his efforts became a provocative speech at the time and a historical delivery in the future. Douglass succeeded in giving a speech that clearly and effectively argued the absurdity of the institution of slavery in America, leaving it up to his audience to consider his position and decide for themselves how to act in the future.
In the speech, “what to the slave is the Fourth of July?” which Fredrick Douglass gave he emphasized how the fourth of July is not a celebration to the slaves but an insult and ridicule. Douglass uses logos and pathos to make the audience understand his point of view and how this so called “independence day’’ is for whites only because the black people in America are still slaves , which in turn means they can’t celebrate this day. Using these rhetoric’s he conveys his point on how this day is adds insult to injury.
Americans, the notoriously claimed ignorant people of society. The process of becoming a default American of today’s culture involves simple steps. Firstly being, one must purely neglect the notion of an independence day and replace it with a widely known date, the Fourth of July. This is the date people are required to set out and spend half of their monthly check on explosives compounded with fire of various colors to impress everyone for a mere thirty seconds. Along with this must come the obligatory invitation of family’s families sided with lawn chairs sprawled out across the bug infested lawn. However, if the person following these steps is anything but white, they must disregard the entirety of these points. For this day of independence was not fought all beings in America, but just the selfish whites living in the colonies who mindlessly used slaves to do their dirty work. Is this what being an American was and is nowadays? The concept of being an American is so extensively butchered into the idea of freedom, equality, and diversity however the countless ideas
The speech I read was 'The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro', by Frederick Douglas. In the 4th July, being Independence Day, people celebrate it for their liberty, independence and separation from Great Britain. But all these joy applied only to those who were not under the burden of slavery, not to the slaves and Frederick Douglass, who was once a slave: “The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me” (Douglas, 1852). In this speech, Douglas reproved those that endorsed slavery and stated that it was not his plan to argue slavery since people were well aware that man is entitled to freedom, that slaves are men, that they are moral, intellectual and responsible