In the summer of 1852, the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society invited the country's most famous former slave to deliver what has come to be called the most important Fourth of July speech in American history.
Douglass told the 600-strong audience of white abolitionists that the nation had begun walking an anti-slavery path that they failed to finish. He began by praising the founders. He called the signers of the Declaration "brave men" and "great men too, great enough to give fame to a great age."
Then he turned to a peculiar moment in the country's evolving conscience. By 1852, according to the Smithsonian, no one in America defended the international slave trade publicly. It was universally agreed to be monstrous.
But the domestic slave trade was thriving. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, roughly one million enslaved people were forcibly moved from the Upper South to the Lower South between 1810 and 1860. The men who ran this trade were respected. They sat in legislatures.
Douglass pointed to the contradiction directly. Americans had already conceded the principle when they outlawed the slave trade from Africa in 1808. They were now drawing a geographic line around the part of the trade they wanted to keep.
Then came the argument that genuinely surprised his audience. Many abolitionists at the time, led by William Lloyd Garrison, called the Constitution a pro-slavery document and burned copies in protest. Douglass disagreed. He pointed out that the words "slave" and "slavery" appear nowhere in the Constitution.
To accuse the framers of writing a slavery document, he said, "is a slander upon their memory." Douglass argued that the Constitution should be read as a "glorious liberty document" and that argument eventually became the legal foundation for the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.
Douglass was asking his country to take the next step, not to repudiate its founding, but to live up to it.
