"Distance between This Platform and the Slave Plantation": Dissociation in Frederick Douglass's "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?"

This paper examines the ways in which Frederick Douglass in his speech "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" obtains the audience's adherence to his thundering call for abolition to the nation that boasts of its liberation from bondage but leaves blacks in fetters through his masterful use of the rhetorical device Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca call "dissociation." Concerned with modifying some system of thought by "disuniting elements which are regarded as forming a whole" within that system, dissociation reveals the incompatibilities of such elements that demand the modification of our conventional conception of reality. Douglass argues that the celebration of liberty, justice, and Christianity as the American national ideals on the Independence Day is incompatible with the existence of slavery. By showing that blacks are not part of the "We the people of the United States" that is proclaimed to have human rights, that liberty is white liberty, that the injustices of slavery are reinforced by the very system of justice, and that the church is an alliance with slavery, he reverses the appearance/reality pairs of those ideals upholding the racist American society. Douglass pushes the audience to recognize that the reality that they believe America is a free and just republic true to God's word is a mere appearance. In so doing, he subverts the normative position of the three ideals and their universal values. Douglass's dissociative speech deconstructs the oppressive established order which distorts and exploits liberty, justice and Christianity and reconstructs the audience's conception of reality.