le of liberty, and call upon him to join you
in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you
mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there
is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous
to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven,
were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation
in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a
peeled and woe-smitten people.

"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we
remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst
thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a
song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one
of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If
I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth."

Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultous joy, I hear the mournful
wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are to-day
rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them. If I
do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children
of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my
tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!" To forget them, to pass lightly
over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be
treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach
before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN
SLAVERY. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the
slave's point of view. Standing there, identified with the American
bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with
all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked
blacker to me than on this Fourth of July. Whether we turn to the
declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the
conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is
false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to
be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding
slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is
outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the
constitution and the bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon,
dare t