The 250th Birthday of the United States was July 4th, 2026. What are you celebrating?

My wife’s wisdom should guide you.

As I wrote in my acknowledgements for the General Counsel Series (The Promised Land, at 14):

A comment by my wife Suzanne after seeing the show at the American Pavilion in Epcot Center in Walt Disney World gave me the essential vision of Visions of America; she felt that we should be proud about something besides all of the wars we’ve won.

And so, for the celebration of the 250th birthday of the United States, do not celebrate with gold statues or triumphal arches dedicated to the Power of Money, the Power of Religion, or the Power of the United States.

Celebrate by remembering the countless ways that the United States struggles (despite going astray (Isaiah 53:6)) to establish the ideal America first discovered by the hearts of Abraham, Moses and Jesus:

—blessing ALL people (Abraham; Genesis 12:2-3);

—challenging ALL pharaohs to set ALL people free (Moses; Exodus 8:1); and

—healing ALL hurting people (Jesus; Luke 10:25-37).

Honor those who blessed people, challenged pharaohs to set people free, and healed hurting people. Celebrate Frederick Douglass!

Here is an example of such blessing, challenging and healing taken from Visions of America, at pages 61-81-82:

 

Frederick Douglass

In Ancient Israel, God called Isaiah to warn the nation that they were “ever hearing,  but never understanding” and “ever seeing, but never perceiving.”

If the Ancient Israelites were ever to be healed from their iniquities, Isaiah told them, they must learn to see with their eyes, hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts (Isaiah 6:9-10). . . . .

When it came to slavery, it was as if Americans had eyes but did not see, and ears but did not feel.  Frederick Douglass and Harriett Beecher Stowe changed all that. By enabling people to feel the horrors of slavery, they enabled people to see that slavery must be abolished.

Frederick Douglass spent more than twenty years of his life as a slave. He escaped bondage, and within a few years became one of the most spellbinding orators for the Abolitionist Movement.

In 1845, he published a short book titled Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. With touching simplicity, Frederick Douglass described what it was like to be a slave. Through his eyes, Americans could see the beatings, hear the weeping, and understand the cruelty of slavery.

Americans could also see that people whose ancestors came from Africa loved freedom as much as people whose ancestors came from England.

Frederick Douglass said that, even as a child, he yearned to be free: “From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace.” He related that, by the time he was about 12 years old, “the thought of being a slave for life began to bear heavily on my heart.”

His thirst for freedom turned into a thirst for education.

Frederick Douglass learned the first steps of reading from a kind mistress who was not used to the ways of slavery.

When her husband found out what she was doing, he rebuked her. He warned her that, if you teach a slave to read “there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.”

As Frederick Douglass remembered years later: “These words sank deep into my heart . . . and called into existence an entirely new train of thought.”

He now understood “the white man’s power to enslave the black man.” The whites kept the blacks uneducated!

Therefore, as a child, Frederick Douglass “set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read.”

His struggles to learn to read and write far exceeded the oft-described struggles of Abraham Lincoln.

Growing up at roughly the same time, Abraham Lincoln’s problem was that there weren’t many books to read on the frontier. So we inspire school children with tales about how young Abe walked miles to borrow books to read beneath the flickering flames of the fireplace.

In contrast, it was illegal for Frederick Douglass to learn to read or write. The slave-owners, including Frederick Douglass’s master, well knew that they could only keep the blacks down if they kept the blacks uneducated!

Nevertheless, Frederick Douglass persevered.

He learned by using the discarded homework of his master’s son. He tricked the neighborhood children into revealing how to write. He snuck around reading everything he could lay his hands on.

Despite his many disadvantages, Frederick Douglass became a great writer, as well as a dynamic orator.

I’m especially proud to report that he settled in Rochester, New York, only a few miles from where I lived until recently.

Indeed, to cross the Genesee River that runs through Rochester, we drive over a bridge named after two great Rochesterians: Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony.

In 1847, he started publishing his newspaper, the North Star. I have often seen the historical marker on the site where he published this leading voice of the Abolitionist Movement.

Overcoming all obstacles, Frederick Douglass rose to “the forefront of the abolitionist ranks.”

He lived until 1895. And, for the rest of his life, he continued to stand “on the watchtower of American freedom, championing the cause of all oppressed men and women”. . . . .

Despite the efforts of Frederick Douglass, Harriett Beecher Stowe, and many others, only a small, despised minority of Americans were abolitionists before the Civil War.

Most northerners viewed slavery as a necessary evil. They denounced abolitionists for “stirring up trouble”.

Southerners praised the “peculiar institution” of American slavery as the best way of life for the supposedly lazy, stupid, inferior black race. Furthermore, Southerners claimed that the Bible supported the system of slavery. (Genesis 16:1-9; Ephesians 6:5-9).

Frederick Douglass denounced such spiritual blindness and deafness in a speech in Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852, that he titled “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”.

He spoke with “a sad sense of the disparity between us” because “[t]he blessings in which you this day rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.”

Douglass explained to his white listeners: “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.”

Louder than the tumultuous joy of whites at their Fourth of July celebrations, he heard “the mournful wail of millions” with “heavy and grievous chains.” He mourned for “those bleeding children of sorrow.”

The “hideous and revolting” conduct of the nation meant that “America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.”

Therefore, “[s]tanding with God and the crushed and bleeding slave” and “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,” Douglass said that he would “dare to call into question and denounce . . . everything that serves to perpetuate slavery—the great sin and shame of America!”

Douglass refused to waste his time disputing whether slavery was wrong. He asked how it cannot be wrong:

“to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant . . ., to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters?”

Douglass told his audience:

“[t]he feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be aroused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and it’s crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced. Otherwise, the celebration of the Fourth of July is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are [to a slave] mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy.”

To Douglass, all such celebrations of liberty in America were “a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”

The sad Truth was that “[t]here is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”

Douglass concluded his speech with the horrifying thought that for “revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”  . . . .

[In another speech, Douglass stressed the need to struggle for freedom.]

“The whole history of the progress of human liberty,” he said, “shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. . . . If there is no struggle there is no progress.”

He heaped scorn on those who naively hoped that liberty for the slaves could be won without struggle.

He said, “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

This struggle would take many forms. It “may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.”

Such struggles are necessary because “[p]ower concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

[After the election of Abraham Lincoln as President, the Union created by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the other Founding Fathers began falling apart.

Fearing the destruction of their economy by [Lincoln’s] economic policies that favored the North and fearing the destruction of their lives by rebellious slaves, Southern states began leaving the Union. . . . .]

Deeply alarmed, Lincoln and others began looking for a way to defuse the crisis. There was even some support for a constitutional amendment that would forever guarantee the existence of slavery in the South.

No wonder [the abolitionist leader and former slave] Frederick Douglass despaired.

Again and again in American history, whites in the North and the South had compromised their differences by sacrificing the liberty of blacks.

In 1787, at the Constitutional Convention, whites compromised by permitting the slave trade to continue for at least another 20 years.

In 1820, whites compromised by permitting the South to add new slave states and by promising the North that slavery (and cheap black labor) wouldn’t spread to the North.

In 1850, whites compromised by agreeing that the North would increase its efforts to return runaway slaves to their masters in the South.

Now, in 1861, it looked as if whites in the North might compromise to preserve the Union by adopting a constitutional amendment that would guarantee that slavery could exist forever in the South.

How would the new president respond?

As a practical politician, Lincoln was willing to compromise any issues except “the extension of slavery into the national territories”—not because Lincoln was worried about the effect of extending slavery on black people—but because Lincoln feared that a compromise on extending slavery into the national territories “would disrupt the party that had elected him.”

All of this talk of compromise at the expense of blacks was a far cry from Abraham Lincoln’s motto for the Republican Party: “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”

Therefore, Frederick Douglass attacked Lincoln’s timidity.

In an editorial, [Frederick Douglass] complained that, “With the single exception of slavery extension, Mr. Lincoln proposes no measure which can bring him into antagonistic collision with the traffickers in human flesh.”

Weary with such betrayals of his people, Frederick Douglass lost hope.

“Disappointed by Lincoln’s Inaugural Address, alarmed by public persecution, he fear[ed] for his people. For the first time in twenty years, he [lost] hope in the American dream.”

Wondering whether blacks would be better off fleeing America, [Frederick] Douglass chartered a boat to investigate Haiti as a possible haven.

Then the South made a fatal mistake.

Hotheads in South Carolina didn’t merely want Fort Sumter to be abandoned because it ran out of food. They wanted to take credit for forcing Fort Sumter to surrender.

These shortsighted fools did not see the bloodshed of war. They were too blinded by delusions of glory.

These deaf prophets did not hear the weeping that comes from needless death and suffering. They were too deafened by talk of glory.

These wicked men did not understand that starting a war would enable Lincoln to do something that he could never have done in peacetime: freeing the slaves.

And so, “[a]t four thirty in the morning of April 12 a signal mortar sounded and a red ball ascended in a lazy curve to burst above the fort.” “All day and into the rainy night the encircling batteries pounded at the fort” and its Star-Spangled Banner.

After a bombardment that lasted thirty-four hours, Fort Sumter surrendered.

In the South, people cheered.

But in the North—in the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave”—people rose in fury at the traitors who dared to fire at the Star-Spangled Banner.

Frederick Douglass didn’t go to Haiti. Instead, he shouted, “God be praised!”

Frederick Douglass did not rejoice because he liked war.

Frederick Douglass rejoiced because he saw that war would bring liberty.

Frederick Douglass rejoiced because he heard God’s truth marching on.

Frederick Douglass rejoiced because he understood that the Union could only be saved by granting liberty to those Americans [whose ancestors] had come from Africa.

Frederick Douglass rejoiced because he understood that Liberty AND Union truly were one and inseparable, then and forever.

THINGS TO THINK ABOUT

Was it wise to make compromises to preserve the Union? Why? Why not? Should these compromises have included enslaving black people and conquering indigenous people. Why? Why not?

Was it wise to preserve the freedom of Americans whose ancestors came from Europe by agreeing to enslave Americans whose ancestors came from Africa? Why? Why not?

Is it wise to give advantages and privileges to Americans whose ancestors came from Europe but deny those advantages and privileges to Americans whose ancestors did not come from Europe? Why? Why not?

Is it wise for schools, businesses, and churches to teach and encourage Diversity, Equity and Inclusion? Why? Why not?

READ MORE

For related ideas, please read “Racism Is America Gone Astray”; “The 500-Year Marathon To Overcome Racism”; and “The 250th Birthday of the United States: Harriett Beecher Stowe”.