Evaluation of Frederick Douglass’s 1852 Speech

On the 5th of July in 1852, Frederick Douglass gave a speech in which he charged America and Americans with hypocrisy, in that they failed to practice the ideals that they professed to hold dear:

“…Your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality hollow mockery—a thin veil to cover up crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”

Douglass had a point, in that liberty and equality were by no means universal in the United States, and in fact, those concepts only applied to white males who were citizens. However, he lapsed into hyperbole when he claimed that the conditions in the US were worse and its crimes more egregious than anywhere else in the world.

Douglass’s most damning point would certainly have been that slavery still existed as an entrenched institution in the US. Only the abolitionists like Douglass and Soujourner Truth—a vocal but small minority—agitated for its elimination. The government was in a compromise mode, with court decisions validating the rights of slave owners and deals such as the Missouri Compromise seeming to cement the country’s identity as half slave, half free. This, then and now, smacked of hypocrisy in that it contradicted Thomas Jefferson’s “self-evident truth” that all men were created equal. Of course, Southerners dodged that argument by saying that Negroes weren’t human, but Douglass wouldn’t have allowed that, nor would he have expected his audiences to. His speaking engagements were calculated to rouse his audiences out of their complacency. The deliberately insulting and provocative tone of this speech exemplified his approach.

In addition, the disenfranchisement of women in the US contradicted the ideals of liberty and equality, though it is unclear whether Douglass thought that women should enjoy equal standing to men. Perhaps more damning was the ongoing extirpation of the Indian nations, which had begun almost as soon as the nation was formed and had now extended to the western plains, where the Treaty of 1851 had just taken away most of the Plains tribes’ lands. The US acknowledged the Indians neither as people—with equal rights—or as members of sovereign nations (they called them that in the treaties, but never conformed to those treaties). So it would seem that Douglass had a point.

It should also be noted that the abolitionists were not all white folks. Quarles (1969) noted that there was a need for Negroes to form their own abolitionist societies because “The existing [political] parties…could never strike a strong blow at slavery because their memberships counted hundreds of thousands of slave owners” (183). Douglass’s main complaint was that slavery (along with other injustices) was too institutionalized, too tightly woven into the fabric of American society. He was proved right less than a decade later when it took a lengthy and horrifically bloody war to remove it.

It is dangerous, however, to compare the mores and morals of the nation—or any nation—of 160 years ago with those of today. Any criticism of the US then—or now—must necessarily be responded to with, “compared to what?” The US, did, in fact, compare quite favorably to other nations in its treatment of aboriginal nations (bad, but not nearly as bad as most colonial powers), the conditions under which its slaves were held (again, bad, but in other places, it was much worse), the rights of the common man and woman (free speech, freedom of the press, of religion, etc.), and other measuring sticks as per the ideals expressed in its founding documents. Was it perfect? Far from it. Was it often hypocritical? No doubt. Was there “not a nation guilty of practices more shocking and bloody”? Yes, in fact, there were many such nations.

What Douglass deliberately chose to ignore was that ideals and actual practices are not either-or, black and white. A person or a nation can state ideals and strive for them without fulfilling them, and this reflects reality rather than showing hypocrisy. Douglass recognized that reform would be a progression rather than happening all at once, though he liked to speak as if it would be sudden and violent: “We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake” (225). This amounted to rhetorical flourishing more than any thought, or wish, that slavery should end as the result of some kind of cataclysm. Though in point of fact, that did come to pass, the eradication of slavery did occur but the establishment of racial and social equality did not—not for more than a hundred years after the end of the Civil War.

Whether Douglass was sincere in his scathing criticisms of the hypocrisy of American ideals is debatable; after all, if someone had come to hear one of his speeches in the first place, that person was probably predisposed to agree with Douglass regarding the injustices that persisted in America. So given that he was preaching to the choir most of the time, he might have viewed his mission as evangelical. After all, it wasn’t enough in the antebellum period just to tsk-tsk about slavery and injustice; something had to be actually done. It was certainly evident that power and money were intimately wedded to the institution of slavery and that therefore, appealing to the government wasn’t going to be effective.

Douglass was basically correct in that slavery should not have existed in a nation with the professed ideals of the United States. However, by tendering a blanket criticism of all America and Americans, he was tarring with the same brush both those who really did feel disappointment and frustration with the entrenched nature of slavery and those who exploited and profited from it. This was an error of hyperbole, and patently unfair—especially considering his audiences.

Works Cited

Douglass, Frederick. (1855). My bondage and my freedom. Random House LLC, 2007.

Quarles, Benjamin. Black abolitionists. Da Capo Press, 1969.