NEW YORK — More than a century after his death, Frederick Douglass and July 4 remain profoundly intertwined.
Douglass was one of the greatest public speakers of the Civil War era, a conscience of the abolitionist movement and beyond and a popular choice for summing up American ideals, failings and challenges. His withering 1852 oration in Rochester, N.Y. ranks high in the canon of American oratory and is still widely cited as a corrective to the day’s celebratory spirit.
But it wasn’t the only time he was asked to speak at an Independence Day event. Subsequent and lesser known speeches in 1862 and 1875 track the profound changes in his thinking and in the country’s history, from days when slavery seemed unending to the midst of the Civil War to a moment when Reconstruction in the South was being dismantled and a violent and legalized system of racial oppression was set to rule for nearly a century.
“When you look at the trajectory of those speeches you see one of the most transformative eras in American history,” says David W. Blight, a Yale University professor and leading slavery scholar whose biography “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” is coming out in October.