“Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous
yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts
that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those
bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her
cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!”5 To
forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with
the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking,
and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My
subject, then, fellow citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this
day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of view.
Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his
wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the
character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than
on this Fourth of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the
past or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation
seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past,
false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the
future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on
this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in
the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution
and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call
into question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command,
everything that serves to perpetuate slavery—the great sin and
shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;” I will
use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall
escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice,
or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and
just.”
What’s is Douglass tone?