Frederick Douglass was born into slavery, so he never knew the exact date of his birth, only that it occurred sometime in February 1818. This means that Douglass was only thirty-four years old when he delivered one of the greatest political speeches in American history.
It was July 5, 1852. The setting was Rochester, New York's grand Corinthian Hall, and the occasion was a celebration of American Independence. Speaking that day before the mostly white audience gathered under the auspices of the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass delivered a Fourth of July oration that still has much to teach us today.
Douglass began his speech by singing the praises of the American Revolution, which he described as a bold and righteous cause embraced by those who "had not adopted the fashionable idea of [their] day, of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts." Those founding patriots "were accounted in their day plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men," he observed. "They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage." The audience surely realized that Douglass could have been describing a radical abolitionist such as himself.
