What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. What is the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850? How is it different from other so-called “slave codes”? How is it similar?

Teaching Suggestion: Because Douglass’s address argues against this law specifically and against slavery in general, students can quickly and easily grasp the historical, social, and political context of 1852 by exploring this law and the forces that reacted in favor of and against it.

• “Fugitive Slave Acts” at History.com explains the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the laws that preceded it.
• “Compromise of 1850 Explained (Fugitive Slave Act)” via the Mr. Droste History YouTube channel is a 9-minute video that provides political and philosophical context for the act and thus Douglass’s speech.
• “Laws That Bound,” part of the National Park Service’s African American Heritage and Ethnography self-study program, provides a detailed history of the laws that restricted the lives of Black people from the nation’s founding.

Differentiation Suggestion: For students who need support organizing ideas for comprehension, writing, and reflection, it might be helpful to use a graphic organizer, such as a 3-column chart or a Venn diagram, to frame a discussion based on comparison. For advanced students, it might be useful to have students incorporate research to create a visual timeline of the laws and codes enacted from the colonial era to 1850.

2. Define abolition in your own words. Then use a dictionary to find the definition of the word and its etymology. How does the word apply in contexts outside of slavery? How has its use evolved today?

Teaching Suggestion: Depending on students’ familiarity with news cycles in the early 2020s and late 2010s, they may or may not have heard the word abolition in a modern context. The purpose of this activity is to give students a broader understanding of the use and the evolution of the word as it applies to human rights in public discourse. This question primes students to examine the theme of The Appropriate Response to Oppression.

• Merriam-Webster’s definition of abolition includes examples of the word’s usage in recent writing.
• Wordnik’s entry for abolition offers current examples as well, with direct links to the quoted articles.

Personal Connection Prompt

This prompt can be used for in-class discussion, exploratory free-writing, or reflection homework before reading the speech.

In his speech, Douglass asks his audience: “Is this the land your Fathers loved, / The freedom which they toiled to win? / Is this the earth whereon they moved? / Are these the graves they slumber in?” (11). In this passage, he implies that the United States in 1852 has failed to live up to its founding principles and morals. Reflect on the present and recent past in the United States. Do you think that Douglass’s incredulity would still be warranted today? Why or why not? How would you answer this question, if it weren’t rhetorical?

Teaching Suggestion: By engaging with this prompt, students will grapple with another major theme in the text: Celebrating and Acknowledging History’s Legacy. Each prereading activity has the potential to put students in the mindset of Douglass’s audience and the American public discourse in the 1850s. If tensions run high, you might take the opportunity to point out that students’ passion about the issue mirrors the passions that drove the nation’s political machinations during the 19th century. The power of this theme is that it helps students understand that policies and actions from the past that are critiqued or acknowledged as wrong do not negate the good, revolutionary, and brave deeds of that same time period—often done by the same people.