Slavery Is The Fourth Of July Analysis

In studying about the history of our Nation, the great divide between the North and South in the midst of the American Civil War is one of the greatest controversies our country has endured. The division between North and South, the Union and the confederate, took a lot out of our country. By the 1850’s the Nation had endured many things, the Missouri Compromise, Dredd Scott decision, and the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law, it was during the 1850’s that the Northern States expressed their opposition towards slavery. Many Northerners opposed slavery because of the lack of morality it entailed. Slavery was a cruel way of labor in the South and many Americans living in the north saw this to be true. Many abolitionists in the North were former slaves, Frederick Douglass, one of the most well – known abolitionists expresses his opinions about slavery and how unjust slavery was in his “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Douglass addresses the fact that although the Fourth

It is a constant reminder of how different whites and Negroes are seen as on a daily basis, he continues with “Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us….The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn” (Douglass, p. 4). Douglass goes on to express his opinion about other key points about American Slavery and how cruel it is, as well as how the Fourth of July exemplifies these cruelties. As an abolitionist and a former slave, it is clear that Douglass has strong opinions about slavery in the south; it is wrong. Although this