| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July. By James A. Colaiaco. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 247 pp. $24.95, ISBN 1-4039-7033-5.)

In the manner of Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992), James A. Colaiaco's study of Frederick Douglass's famous 1852 Independence Day speech is far more than an examination of a single three-hour speech. Colaiaco instead seeks to probe the political and social thinking of the most famous African American abolitionist, social reformer, and political leader of the nineteenth century. David W. Blight argues in Frederick Douglass' Civil War (1989) that as a black leader Douglass is the symbol of his age, but as a thinker he largely has been ignored. Colaiaco's effort is a welcome addition to the scholarly work on Douglass as a perceptive social critic. The book's thesis is that this speech—delivered on July 5, 1852 at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, where Douglass lived—more than any other given in the antebellum period, expresses the dilemma facing African Americans: should they praise the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Founding Fathers for establishing a democratic republic that calls for the equality of all men, or vilify them for leaving millions of human beings in bondage?

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