True Patriotism Celebrates the Founding Ideals, and Recommits Us to the Work of Reform
In the second of two contrasting reflections on the meaning and lessons of Independence Day, Zachary explores how abolitionist Frederick Douglass viewed America’s founding principles as not stagnant, but as aspirations which each generation must recommit themselves to fulfilling.
By Zachary Suri
Every 4th of July, it is worth returning to Frederick Douglass’ famous Independence Day oration, ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’ delivered more than a decade before emancipation. In one of the greatest speeches in American history, Douglass laid out a vision for a radical citizenship and a critical patriotism. The 4th of July, he insisted, is not a simple celebration, but the moment when our nation’s failings and injustices are most obvious. The true patriot celebrates America’s founding ideals by recognizing our failure to meet them and recommitting to the difficult work of reform.
Douglass described slavery as the original sin of American life, a definitive contradiction inescapable without moral reckoning. He addressed his largely White audience in the second-person, speaking constantly of “your national independence”. He drew a clear distinction between “you” — White Americans — and “we” — Black Americans. “Fellow-citizens, pardon me,” he asked, “why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?” Douglass was denied the principle freedoms of the American founding and the blessings of American independence. Though he acknowledged their shared political tradition — “fellow-citizens” — he refused to claim July 4th as a celebration. He refused “to bring our humble offering to the national altar” (Ibid). “Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?” Douglass demanded (Ibid). The answer was clearly no.
Douglass articulated the fundamental failure of American institutions to guarantee equality to Black Americans. The celebration of American national principles only reveals “the immeasurable distance” between the ideals of the founding and the injustices of American political institutions. Rather than a day of “rejoicing,” the 4th of July is a day of “mourning” for Douglass. He “[takes] up the plaintive lament” of his people, quoting Psalm 137’s exhortation: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.” Douglass and his brethren are in exile from the Promised Land of American democracy. He cannot celebrate the 4th of July when the institutions created on that day entrench an arduous exile and brutal enslavement. A moral rot remained at the heart of American political life. “America,” he insisted, “is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future”. Slavery remained “the great sin and shame of America”.
Thirteen years later, in his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln predicted that “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” Lincoln proclaimed the war a necessary moral cleansing of the nation for “all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil)”. Similarly, in his speech at the dedication of “The Freedmen's Monument to Abraham Lincoln,” in 1876, Douglass framed Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Union victory as a moral redemption of the American republic on a Biblical scale. For Douglass, emancipation and reconstruction represent a second founding of the United States, a rededication of American political institutions to the ideals of the founding. America’s pre-war social and political institutions, though created to serve ideals antithetical to slavery, were inextricable from the present sin of slavery. A refounding of the American government was necessary to redeem the United States and return to the aspirations of the founding fathers.
On the Laurels of Our Ancestors
Douglass believed the founders to be aspirationally anti-slavery, even if practically pro-slavery in the short-term. After extolling the virtues of America’s founding in the first section of his 4th of July oration, Douglass set aside “the great deeds of your fathers” to deal “with the present”. His contemporaries, Douglass asserted, can no longer rest on the laurels of their ancestors. America’s founding principles are not stagnant, immediately effective proclamations of justice, but aspirations which each generation must recommit themselves to fulfilling. American political institutions are rotten because Douglass’ contemporaries “waste the hard-earned fame of [their] fathers to cover [their] indolence.” The principles of America’s founding generation were corrupted by the haunting specter of slavery.
In our moment of democratic strife, though far from the perils posed by slavery, we too must be willing to see our accomplishments and our failures with clear eyes. We are closer than ever before to realizing the democratic ideals of the founding, but Douglass reminds us that true patriotism isn’t easy. It isn’t popular. True patriotism is radical. It is a commitment to engage actively in rebuilding and reshaping our institutions in accordance with our aspirations and those of the founding. There is no time to rest on our laurels.
Douglass viewed emancipation as a new national founding, an institutional renewal in line with the principles of the first founding and a redefinition of American national identity in favor of equal citizenship. In his dedication of a monument to Lincoln paid for by freedmen in 1876, Douglass framed the moment, and emancipation more broadly, as the “new birth of freedom” Lincoln promised in his Gettysburg Address. “We stand to-day at the national centre,” Douglass proclaimed, “to perform something like a national act, an act which is to go into history, and we are here where every pulsation of the national heart can be heard, felt and reciprocated”. This “national act” is a refounding of America’s political institutions. For Douglass, the monument to Lincoln was not simply a claim to dignity or an attempt to “honor…our friend and liberator,” but a new national vision, a redefinition of what it means to be an American and a patriot. To be an American, in Douglass’ vision, is not to partake in the empty patriotism that so shocked him in his 4th of July oration, but to participate, like the freedmen funding the monument, in a “greater national enlightenment and progress.”
Also see in:
German, Turkish, Chinese, Spanish
Zachary Suri is a rising sophomore at Yale University studying History. He is a reporter for the Yale Daily News covering Connecticut and New Haven politics, a published poet, and podcaster. Zachary also serves as Gabbai for the traditional egalitarian minyan at Yale Hillel and associate editor of Shibboleth, Yale’s Jewish studies journal.