At every opportunity, black abolitionists rejected the nation’s pretensions as a land of liberty. Many free blacks dramatically reversed the common association of the United States with the progress of freedom. Black communities in the North devised an alternative calendar of “freedom celebrations” centered on January 1, the date in 1808 on which the slave trade became illegal, and August 1, the anniversary of West Indian emancipation, rather than July 4. (Many localities forcibly barred them from Independence Day festivities.) In doing so, they offered a stinging rebuke to white Americans’ claims to live in a land of freedom. Thanks to its embrace of emancipation in the 1830s, declared a group of black abolitionists in Philadelphia, Britain had become a model of liberty and justice, while the United States remained a land of tyranny.
Even more persistently than their white counterparts, black abolitionists articulated the ideal of color-blind citizenship. “The real battleground between liberty and slavery,” wrote Samuel Cornish, “is prejudice against color.” (Cornish, a Presbyterian minister, had helped to establish the nation’s first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, in New York City in 1827. The first editor, John B. Russwurm, closed the paper after two years and moved to Liberia, explaining, “we consider it a waste of mere words to talk of ever enjoying citizenship in this country.”) Black abolitionists also identified the widespread poverty of the free black population as a consequence of slavery and insisted that freedom possessed an economic dimension. It must be part of the “great work” of the antislavery crusade, insisted Charles L. Reason, “to abolish not only chattel slavery, but that other kind of slavery, which, for generation after generation, dooms an oppressed people to a condition of dependence and pauperism.”
The greatest oration on American slavery and American freedom was delivered in Rochester in 1852 by Frederick Douglass. Speaking just after the annual Independence Day celebration, Douglass posed the question, “What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?” (see p. 481 and the Appendix for excerpts from the speech). He answered that Fourth of July festivities revealed the hypocrisy of a nation that proclaimed its belief in liberty yet daily committed “practices more shocking and bloody” than any other country on earth. Like other abolitionists, however, Douglass also laid claim to the founders’ legacy. The Revolution had left a “rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence,” from which subsequent generations had tragically strayed. Only by abolishing slavery and freeing the “great doctrines” of the Declaration of Independence from the “narrow bounds” of race could the United States recapture its original mission.