
In the United States, we have holidays to come together as a nation to celebrate something that is important to a majority if not all the citizens. The Fourth of July is the holiday that everyone across the country comes together to celebrate the creation of our great country by gaining our freedom from Great Britain. However, during the 1850s and throughout the entirety of slavery in the United States, celebrating the Fourth of July was arguably ironic and hypocritical for those celebrating. The irony is in that the United States celebrates freedom on the fourth of July while at the same time enslaving an entire race. Frederick Douglass’ speech about slavery in relation to the fourth of July and Eduardo Cadava’s article about slavery both help the reader better understand slavery itself as well as the irony of celebrating the fourth of July during a time where slavery was present. 

Frederick Douglass’ speech on what the fourth of July means to a slave was supposed to serve as some sort of wakeup call or just someone pointing out the hypocrisy that flooded America during the time that slavery was alive and running. Eduardo Cadava uses Frederick Douglass’ speech from the Fourth of July those hundred years ago to reiterate the atrocity that was slavery in America. The key point that Cadava also mentions in his article is the sheer irony that a group of people who thought they were treated with such disrespect that they had to go to war to defend themselves would then turn around and completely persecute an entire group of people just because of their skin color. Cadava also talks about one of the big things that he noted from Frederick Douglass’ speech is the idea of a monster. Now they do not directly say who the monster is, they give hints at who it could be. They say it could be the entire institution of slavery or the people, slave-owners, politicians that could be the monsters because they are allowing this to happen in their country. 

Cadava’s article on human rights is an effective piece because in his article “Monstrosity of Human Rights” the ideas that he had portrayed in the article pertaining to the horror and hypocrisies that surrounded slavery in America match up with the way that I see that particular time period in America. Through the points that Cadava makes, the reader can get a better understanding of where Frederick Douglass is coming from in his speech and the points he makes as well as a better understanding of slavery as a whole. Cadava in the article he writes talks about the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and compares that to slavery. In the article he writes “The monster asks Victor to listen to his tale in hopes of Victor’s recognition, like the slave pleads for a hearing with his master”(1560).  The relation of the monster and slavery also helps the reader further comprehend he is trying to get across the perception that slave-owners view their slaves as something with the sole purpose of working for them. Cadava is reiterating the idea here that Douglass had in his speech that slave-owners, including his own do not view their slaves as human beings rather more like animals that can talk with opposable thumbs. Cadava also in his article relates the monster in Frankenstein directly to Frederick Douglass himself a lot. Cadava does this because how Frederick Douglass felt while he was enslaved could be related to how the monster felt when he was just being introduced to the world and immediately being persecuted and treated awfully, to him, for no reason. Cadava does this in the article when he writes, “…his uncertainty about his descent, his sense of alienation and isolation, his ambiguous legacy of inheritance and dispossession the depression that comes with greater knowledge of his condition, and his desire to die”. The monster not only relates to Frederick Douglass the slave but slaves everywhere in that they are taken from one volatile situation and thrust into another without any knowledge of what is going on. It also relates to ho they are feeling during this situation. But the situation they are in is magnified ten times due to the fact that the monster has Frankenstein, his father, to help guide him through the new world he enters while the slaves have their slaveowners who wish to make their lives as close to a living hell as possible. Cadava also portrays the hypocrisy that was plaguing America when he writes, “…that it can declare itself a strong and privileged representative of ‘humanity’ even as it decides who belongs to humanity and who does not” (1559). Americans during this time represent possibly the biggest hypocrisy in our history. He helped bring to my attention that even after Americans who were being bullied around by Britain, who just took some of their rights away, then in America after they had already escaped the persecution in Britain, they commit one of the greatest crimes against humanity of all time, slavery. 

When Americans think of the Fourth of July they usually get a smile on their face because it is a time where people all come together as Americans and proud citizens of this great nation and celebrate its creation and separation from Great Britain. However, that is what the Fourth of July usually consists of today. Back in the pre-Civil War era the Fourth of July was not as welcoming to all the people living here. Leonard I. Sweet in his book “Journal of Negro History” he writes about the Fourth of July as it pertains to African-Americans during the 19th century. In this particular part of the journal he discussed how blacks were not allowed to celebrate the creation of the nation that they are living in because the whites did not consider them fit enough to celebrate the holiday with them, that they did not deserve to celebrate the freedom of their nation. In one part of the journal Sweet writes, “Black attempts at celebrating the Fourth of July frequently suffered similar violence…as a result…blacks approached the Fourth of July with ambivalence and alarm”. These occurrences of violence towards blacks on the Fourth of July during the slavery era of America just reiterates Frederick Douglass’ point in his speech, America at this time is filled with irony and hypocrisy. That point is reiterated in this piece when Sweet writes, “For the blacks, this was a day of ‘scorching irony’, the ‘bleakest day of the year’ when blacks became more conscious of the contradictions of American creed and deed”. This is the foundation of the arguments that Frederick Douglass and Eduardo Cadava are trying to make because these African-Americans during slavery would sit and watch the Americans celebrate their freedom. They watch them celebrate the so called ideal of freedom that founded America while they are chained up every separated from their families and tortured doing the work of these people celebrating their freedom.
