"What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"

In March 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in Boston. By June, 14 steam presses ran day and night to produce enough copies to meet the unprecedented demand for the antislavery novel that changed the imaginative landscape of America's struggle over slavery. It is in this context of the astonishing popularity of Stowe's great novel that Frederick Douglass, the 34-year-old black reformer and the country's most conspicuous former slave, delivered his speech, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" If Uncle Tom's Cabin is the fictional masterpiece of American abolitionism, a book Abraham Lincoln would later acknowledge as powerful enough to "cause this big war," then Douglass's Fourth of July address is abolition's rhetorical masterpiece. In style and substance, no 19th century American ever offered a more poignant critique of America's racial condition than Douglass did on July 5, 1852, at Corinthian Hall in his adopted hometown, Rochester, N.Y.

The summer of 1852 was a time of great tension in the nation and in Douglass's own life. For nearly two years, free blacks had defied the hated Fugitive Slave Act, passed as part of the Compromise of 1850. Massive protest meetings condemned a law that denied the right of habeas corpus and trial by jury to alleged fugitive slaves, as well as threatened the kidnapping of free people of color into slavery. Now, under the American flag, said Douglass, blacks could feel "no protection," only "danger, trials, bitter mockery." So deep was the fear in northern black communities that hundreds fled to Canada, causing what Douglass described as "a dark train going out of the land, as if fleeing from death."

By 1852, Douglass had converted from the moral suasionist strategies of abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, to political abolitionism and the possible uses of violence to overthrow slavery. Douglass was struggling financially; his newspaper, Frederick Douglass' Paper, survived only on philanthropy, and he could hardly support his growing family on meager lecturers' fees. At the time, the place of a radical black abolitionist in America's future was altogether uncertain.

In these circumstances Douglass crafted a speech in response to the invitation of the Rochester Ladies Antislavery Society. As was the tradition in black communities of New York state, Douglass insisted on speaking on the 5th and not the 4th of July. Before nearly 600 people who paid the 121/2c admission, Douglass rose as orator of the day after a reading of the Declaration of Independence by a local minister.

The speech has three major rhetorical moves. First, Douglass sets his audience at ease by offering accolades to the genius of the founding fathers. He calls the Fourth of July an American "Passover" and places hope in the youthful nation, "still impressible" and open to change. He calls the Declaration of Independence the "ringbolt" of the nation's destiny and urges his listeners to "cling to this day... and to its principles, with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight."

But his use of pronouns is a warning of what is soon to follow. The nation is "your nation", the fathers "your fathers." The nation's story is taught in "your common schools, narrated at your firesides, unfolded from your pulpits." As Douglass reminds his white audience of their national and personal deterioration, the speech finds its theme—the hypocrisy of slavery and racism in a growing republic. He harkens to the biblical story of the children of Jacob boasting of Abraham's paternity but losing Abraham's faith.

Then, as though slamming a hammer down on the lectern, Douglass says, "Pardon me... what have I... to do with your national independence?" What then flows is his famous attack on America's deepest contradiction, and Douglass does not pull any punches. He was speaking in the house of his friends, but he must have made the good abolitionists squirm with discomfort. As the painful analysis unfolds, he issues a litany of accusative pronouns: "This fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn." To invite him as Independence Day speaker, says Douglass is mere "mockery and sacrilegious irony." So for his Bible-reading audience, Douglass employs one of the deftest uses of irony in American rhetoric. "Let me warn you," he says as he floats unannounced into the 137th Psalm: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" Douglass's answer to the summons? He would not sing a praise song on the nation's birthday, because "above your national, tumultuous joy," he said, "I hear the mournful wail of millions!" He sang no anthems, no spirituals, only a requiem for his people and for the nation.

After this classic use of the rhetorical device of reversal, Douglass launched the second section of the speech, dragging his audience into the "sights and scenes" of slavery itself—the slave trade, brutal punishments, sales at auction, denials of African American humanity. He implicates the church and the state, and his subject is the evil done by Americans to other Americans. After pages of unsparing condemnations of all manner of blasphemy against every American creed, Douglass ends this unforgettable tirade with an apocalyptic warning that his well-churched audience would have understood: "Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation's bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away...."

For 20 minutes, the crowd must have felt strapped in their seats, bearing up to a hailstorm of humiliation. Then, in the third stage of the speech, Douglass lets them up, wipes their brows, and ends on cautious hope. The principles of the Declaration of Independence still exist; the founders' best wisdom can still be tapped. It is not yet too late. In an ending that evokes America's geographical boundlessness, draws on Psalm 68 to declare that blacks will rise on the world's historical stage, and then recites the abolitionist poem, "God Speed the Year of Jubilee," Douglass transcended his audience, Corinthian Hall, and almost history itself, into the realm of universal political art. He had used language to move people and mountains; he had explained a nation's condition, and through the pain of his indictment, illuminated a path to a better day. In thought and feeling, Douglass the ironist had never been in better form. No abolitionist had ever brought the two great intellectual traditions of antislavery—the Enlightenment and the Bible—together with such power. The meaning of slavery and freedom in America had never found such a voice at once so terrible and so truthful. As Douglass took his seat, 600 white Northerners roared, wrote a journalist, with "a universal burst of applause."

David W. Blight is Class of '54 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University. He is the author of the Bancroft Prize-winning Race and "Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory" (2001) and the forthcoming "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass's Greatest Speech."