'A glorious liberty document': Frederick Douglass' case for an anti-slavery Constitution.

• Author: Root, Damon W.
• Position: Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July - Book review

Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July, by James A. Colaiaco, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 256 pages, $24.95

ON JANUARY 27, 1843, in a resolution adopted by the American Anti-Slavery Society, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison famously denounced the U.S. Constitution for sanctioning the crime of slavery. "The compact which exists between the North and the South" Garrison wrote, "is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell."

Was he right? Did the Constitution protect the right to own human property? Frederick Douglass, the escaped former slave, self-taught author and editor, and leading abolitionist orator, thought not. "Take the Constitution according to its plain reading," he challenged the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society on July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York. "I defy the presentation of a single proslavery clause in it." In fact, Douglass told the crowd gathered to hear his Independence Day address, "Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document."

In Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July, the New York University historian James A. Colaiaco offers a compelling, if repetitive, account of this remarkable oration and the extraordinary individual behind it. "An abolitionist manifesto" Colaiaco writes, "Douglass's oration would be the greatest abolition speech of the nineteenth century." Not only did it furiously denounce slavery ("a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of a nation"), the speech, entitled "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July," firmly grounded the fight against slavery in the text of the Constitution, boldly challenging the standard interpretation of the document, particularly its notorious "three-fifths" clause, and demanding that white America fully honor the Constitution's guarantee of natural rights.

Born sometime in 1818 to a slave mother and a white, most likely slaveholding, father, Frederick Douglass was 34 years old, and 14 years out of bondage, when he stood before 500 to 600 mostly white people in Rochester's grand Corinthian Hall. Invited to commemorate the anniversary of American independence, Douglass, the nation's foremost black leader, came out swinging. "Instead of congratulating them for having invited a black man to sing praises for the republic," Colaiaco writes, "he had them, along with millions of white Americans, bowing their heads in shame for tolerating slavery." Bitterly contrasting "your political freedom" and "your Fourth of July" with the misery of the American slave, Douglass informed his audience "this Fourth of July is yours, not mine.... You may rejoice, I must mourn."

Describing the horrors he both witnessed and endured during his 20 years in bondage, Douglass painted a bleak, infuriating portrait of the slave system. "There is not a nation on the earth," he charged, "guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of the United States, at this very hour" still, he refused to forsake America's founding principles, no matter how far the country had strayed in practice. He drew explicit parallels between the courageous signers of the Declaration of...