Thomas Jefferson & Frederick Douglass: On Freedom

What did freedom look like in early America? On July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence to lay out why the thirteen British American colonies decided to declare independence from Great Britain. These reasons asserted the founding principles of the new nation: freedom and equality. On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass, a well-known abolitionist, gave a speech at an Independence Day commemoration entitled “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July.” In this famous speech, Douglass discussed the Declaration of Independence and revealed the complexity and evolution of Americans’ understandings of freedom seventy-six years after the Declaration gave voice to Americans’ initial ideas on the subject. This video pairs excerpts from the Declaration of Independence and Frederick Douglass’s speech, encouraging viewers to reflect on what freedom means to them.