Frederick Douglass’ great lecture “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” delivered on July 5th, 1852, to a predominantly white audience at Rochester’s Corinthian Hall, captured the contradictions built into the nation’s July Fourth celebrations, then and to this day. The nation’s founding document may have declared that “All men are created equal,” but at the time of Douglass’ speech over three million Black people were enslaved. Douglass’ decision to deliver the speech on July 5th conveyed his view that the Fourth was not yet worth celebrating, for the holiday revealed to the American slave, “more than all other days in the year,” as Douglass put it, “the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery in 1865, but “What to the Slave” continues to speak to many readers about the gross injustice and cruelty of a nation that fails to offer equal opportunities and justice for all.
That speech, however, may not be the most compelling or even relevant of Douglass’ speeches for this year’s Fourth of July. A better candidate would be his 1867 “Sources of Danger to the Republic,” delivered after the Civil War on several occasions, including as part of a Black-sponsored lecture series in Philadelphia. Douglass took stock of the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and the democratic promise of the Declaration of Independence, and his concerns prophetically anticipate our present moment.
“Sources of Danger” was prompted by Douglass’ anger at President Andrew Johnson, whom he believed had betrayed the promise of Reconstruction by attempting to block all legislation intended to bring about racial equality. Though not delivered on or near July Fourth, the speech shares much of the holiday’s sentiment. Douglass begins with an appeal to “patriotic citizens of the United States,” and, stopping short of “Fourth-of-July extravagances,” he offers his “humble gratitude to the fathers who framed the nation’s founding documents.” (I quote from the version Douglass gave to the Black audience in Philadelphia on January 3, 1867.)
As in his more famous Fifth of July speech, Douglass laments the nation’s failure to live up to “the great principles of the Declaration of Independence.” In addition, he argues in “Sources of Danger” that the Constitution makes the presidency into something like a monarchy and thus a threat to democracy. Douglass concedes that there are electoral limits on the presidency, making it different from a monarchy. Nevertheless, the president, invested as he is with nearly unlimited power, “can reign long enough to commit any number of mischievous acts, and so defeat the most beneficent measures of our Government.”
How did it happen that some of the signers and supporters of the Declaration of Independence could create a government in which a president like Johnson is “invested with kingly powers”? Douglass speculates that the “fathers of this republic,” who were born under “monarchical institutions,” retained an unconscious nostalgia for monarchy. That nostalgia led to a key mistake in the Constitution—the elevation of the presidency to a kingship—which “must now be corrected.” As he instructs his audience, “You must have either a purely republican Government or you must have a monarchical Government, one or the other.” The burden of what could be called Douglass’ No-Kings speech is to identify the problem and suggest how to fix it.
Initially, the problem seems to be Andrew Johnson. Douglass states that the framers of the Constitution failed to anticipate a president like Johnson—a man willing to take full advantage of the lack of restraints on the presidency to become a “one-man power.” But even though Douglass refers to Johnson now and again, over the course of the speech he steps back in order to make a larger case about Constitutional failure and more disinterestedly offers his concerns about the nation’s future presidents and prospects.
“King Andy,” illustration by Thomas Nast. From Harper’s Weekly, November 1, 1866.
Douglass first calls attention to how the Constitution puts “immense patronage in the hands of the President.” The president, he observes, has access to “hundred millions of dollars per annum in times of peace, and uncounted thousands of millions in times of war.” There are only limited constraints on how he might use the money. He can use it to advance his own policies or even to enrich himself and assume power over others. Douglass is particularly concerned about how easily the president can distribute the nation’s money “among his political friends.” At the thought, Douglass can only throw up his hands and declare: “What a power! What a corrupting power!”
And there’s more: Douglass calls attention to the corruption enabled by the president’s veto power. He is outraged that a single person—the president—can overrule a simple majority of congressional legislators. The idea that the president always out-votes an under two-thirds congressional majority is “an absurdity,” Douglass says, as well as an affront to democracy. Douglass leaves no doubt about what he thinks should be done to address the anti-democratic presidential veto: “I want that old, despotic, and aristocratic power of our Government utterly banished from our Constitution. It has no business in a republican form of government.” Even in England, Douglass points out, no such power is invested in the monarchy.
Even though Douglass refers to Johnson now and again, over the course of the speech he steps back in order to make a larger case about Constitutional failure and more disinterestedly offers his concerns about the nation’s future presidents and prospects.
Douglass next turns to the president’s pardoning power as yet another source of danger. He does not want to eliminate the possibility of pardons, but he sees corruption as the inevitable result of the president’s absolute right to grant them. In Douglass’ time, he was particularly angry about Johnson’s decision to pardon nearly all of the leaders of the former Confederacy. As a political theorist, however, he looked into the future and was especially concerned about how unrestricted pardons added to presidential power. With the help of the Constitution, a president’s ability to pardon felons could be deployed “to win personal friends and co-operation and alliance, instead of loyal obedience to the laws of the land.”
Among Douglass’ suggestions for limiting presidential power, perhaps the most pertinent for our present historical moment is his call to abolish the president’s ability to undertake “secret diplomacy.” which puts the nation at risk. As Douglass warns, a bad president will choose a bad cabinet, and with “a bad President and a bad Cabinet” doing the secretive diplomatic work, “this nation might be conducted into the jaws of a terrible war, and be perfectly helpless.”
Andrew Johnson, the immediate focus of Douglass’ critique, was impeached that next year. Douglass thought he should have been convicted for crimes against Black people, but he was impeached for something very different: his violation of the Tenure of Office Act by firing Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. But was impeachment the best response to the problem? In “Sources of Danger” Douglass insists that broad constitutional change, rather than rituals of impeachment, would help to insure the future of the country.
Even in an angry and at times despairing speech like “Sources of Danger to the Republic,” Douglass retained hope for the future, calling on Americans to secure the democratic promise of the nation. “Strike down the one-man power everywhere,” he says at the speech’s conclusion; “make your Government lean to the people, and away from the individual or the one-man power.” If Americans are willing to do that, through constitutional reform or other means, “you make sure the permanence, prosperity, and glory of this great republic.” This is Douglass’ wish and request to us from 1867. As in “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” he reminds Americans of the still unfulfilled egalitarian promise of the Declaration of Independence, and there is no better time for such a reminder than July Fourth.
