Annette Gordon-Reed

Engaging Jefferson: blacks and the founding father.

W Tr HAT to the American slave is your Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass asked famously in 1852. In a stinging oration, the great abolitionist threw down the founding document of the American experiment like a gauntlet, challenging those who would celebrate the Declaration of Independence when millions of individuals born on American soil were denied the blessings of liberty extolled in that charter. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by 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.1 Douglass was using what he referred to as the sacrilegious irony of the occasion to make clear his fervent desire that black Americans would one day share the benefits of freedom and equality bequeathed to white Americans by their spiritual and literal fathers. This strong rebuke of the fathers hypocrisy was meant to shame the original objects of paternal affection into sharing their patrimony with the children who had been excluded. In insisting upon the equal manhood of the Negro race, Douglass deflected the anticipated rejoinder that blacks, not possessing humanity equal to that of the founders, could never be considered their children. The more cynical members of the audience may have noted that the fathers, by leaving slavery in place while they pursued their flight to freedom, had effectively denied any connection to these putative children. Under the circumstances, in what sense could these men ever be considered fathers to the black children of America? It is a question that black Americans have been asking themselves and others in one form or another at least since the time of the American Revolution. The existence of racially based slavery during that era and beyond virtually mandates that every generation of blacks consider what,