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1. The Present
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Liberty vs. Slavery
Christianity and the American Church
Ideals vs. Practice
America’s Past, Present, and Future
Summary
Analysis
Douglass discusses the domestic slave trade, which is currently booming. The domestic slave trade is called the “internal slave-trade” in order to distinguish it from the foreign slave trade, which has a stigma of being barbaric—something Douglass considers to be a double standard, given that domestic slave-traders are treated as respectable businessmen. To this end, Douglass implies that the term “internal slave-trade” is used to give domestic slave trading undue legitimacy.
Douglass’s comparison of the domestic and foreign slave trades is laced with irony. Although many Americans at the time view the domestic slave trade as more dignified and humane, the reality is that it is similarly cruel. Thus, Douglass suggests that Americans are lying to themselves about the domestic slave trade in order to assuage their guilt over its brutality.
Themes
In order to dismantle the image of the internal slave trade as legitimate and respectable, Douglass paints a vivid and distressing image of slaves being driven by a slave-driver, whom he calls a “man-drover” (in contrast to a “swine-drover”). He describes the way they drive slaves on highways that go from the Potomac to New Orleans, threatening them with weapons in order to push them forward. He depicts specific slaves, such as a weak old man and a young mother crying onto the baby in her arms. He describes the crack of the slave-driver’s whip, which is revealed to have hit the young mother and left a gash in her shoulder. From there, he tells the audience to imagine the slave auction itself, where human beings are exposed to the violating gaze of potential buyers, and he asks them where they could find a more horrific sight.
This section has the most graphic imagery of the entire speech, with Douglass giving a long list of upsetting details illustrating both the cruelty of the slave-driver and the suffering of his victims. These difficult descriptions provide a vivid rebuttal to the idea that the domestic slave trade is somehow more humane or acceptable than the foreign slave trade. In this way, Douglass lives up to his promise to use shocking language to perturb the audience into paying attention to the horrors of slavery.
Themes
Douglass says that he is familiar with such terrible sights of slavery due to his upbringing, which he goes into detail about. He grew up in Baltimore and regularly saw slaves being brought off of slave ships to be taken to a major slave market owned by Austin Woolfolk. According to Douglass, Woolfolk’s agents would travel across Maryland to offer to buy Black people. They were well-dressed and charming, but they had a propensity for gambling on the lives of slaves. Once the agents had enough slaves, they would charter a ship and drive the slaves to a market in the middle of the night.
By recounting his own childhood experiences of bearing witness to slave-driving, Douglass introduces an intensely personal angle to his speech. This allows him to remind his audience that slavery is not an abstract, remote issue but an urgent one that has profoundly affected the person they are listening to. Douglass also highlights the reality of slavery by naming a specific slaver, Austin Woolfolk, and describing the intense callousness with which his employees treated Black life.
Themes
Douglass provides the context of Woolfolk’s trade in order to illustrate his own experience as a young boy, in which he would be woken by the cries of slaves being driven in the middle of the night. He would take comfort in the fact that his mistress also found the sound of the brutality terrible. Douglass emphasizes that he still sees such terrible sights today, evoking sensory details such as dust on the highway, bloody footprints, and anguished cries. He expresses disgust that such suffering is inflicted in order to indulge the greed of slave-traders.
Once again, Douglass deliberately uses graphic and upsetting imagery in order to emphasize the horrors of slavery. In this particular instance, he juxtaposes these horrors with his own innocence as a child. Being young and innocent, Douglass struggled to understand the apathy many people around him had towards such intense suffering, hence his relief that Sophia Auld—the mistress he mentions—felt similarly horrified. The implication that their reactions were unusual serves as an indictment of the surrounding society’s general lack of regard for slaves’ lives.
Themes
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Even more than the slave trade itself, Douglass lambasts the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which has elevated slave-hunting from a state to a federal affair. Because of this, Douglass argues, freed slaves are threatened no matter where they go, and American citizens are expected to cooperate with the hunting of slaves. He highlights the profound shame of a nation that claims to be born from freedom, but whose judges would send even “the most pious and exemplary black man” back into slavery without even allowing him a proper defense in court. Douglass theorizes that no other nation has passed such a tyrannical law and offers to personally debate anybody who disagrees with him.
Douglass’s discussion of the Fugitive Slave Law illustrates how acceptance of the slave trade is not just a part of American culture but an aspect of American law. Highlighting this serves as a severe indictment of America’s hypocrisy; as Douglass points out, even though Americans believe themselves to live in a free country, the nation’s highest legal institutions contradict this.
Themes
