Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July

D.W. Buffa's newest novel to be released (July 2024) is Evangeline, a courtroom drama about the murder trial of captain who is one of the few to survive the sinking of his ship.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is on Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July. It begins:

On July 5, l852, Frederick Douglass, who had been a slave until he escaped bondage when he was eighteen, gave a speech entitled, ‘What To The Slave Is The Fourth of July.’ He was brutally honest. “This fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand, illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthem, were inhuman mockery, and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today?”

This, as it would seem, is completely consistent, added proof, if more proof were needed, that from the very beginning the American experiment was a hoax and a fraud. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, whatever else they may have done, had been slave owners and, when it came to that issue, as guilty as everyone else who believed that only white people were entitled to the blessings of liberty. Jefferson’s great work, the Declaration of Independence, was a white man’s call to a white man’s revolution; the Constitution, drawn under Washington’s watchful eye, was a white man’s declaration that a black man was only a fraction of a white man’s worth. America was not just racist, but the most racist nation on earth. More than any other day of the year, Douglass insisted, the Fourth of July reveals to the black slave, “the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” There is no “nation on earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”

This is what Frederick Douglass said in his speech about the Fourth of July as reported in the Library of America’s edition of the works of Frederick Douglass, or what we would believe he said if we did not know that the last third of what Douglass said had been cut. And we would know that only if we read the speech in some other, more honest, edition. The Library of America did not just cut a third of the speech, the editor did not so much as bother to mention that the speech had been abridged. By leaving out, i.e. by concealing, what Douglass went on to say, the reader is not allowed to know that this speech, one of the most remarkable speeches ever given by an American, recognized not just America’s failures, but America’s greatness. The reader would never know that Douglass insisted that the men who wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence were great men, “great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable, and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen and patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.”

What too many of us have forgotten, but what Douglass understood, is...[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

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Third Reading: Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July.

--Marshal Zeringue