In his inaugural 1831 issue of The Liberator, his antislavery newspaper, William Lloyd Garrison quoted the Declaration extensively in his appeal on behalf of the enslaved. “While our Declaration of Independence boldly proclaims as self-evident truths, ‘that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’— at the very seat of government human beings are born, almost daily, whom the laws pronounce to be from their birth, not equal to other men, and who are, for life, deprived of liberty and the free pursuit of happiness.”
Garrison, it should be said, hated the Constitution and condemned it as a “covenant with death” and “an agreement with hell” because of the ways it empowered and strengthened the grip of the slave-owning South on the national government. But the Declaration was a torch that lit the path to salvation.
The South Carolina abolitionist Angelina Grimké declared slavery “contrary to the declaration of our independence” in her 1836 “Appeal to the Christian Women of the South,” and in a stark condemnation of American hypocrisy, the Colored Anti-Slavery Society of Newark proclaimed in 1834 that “it is our opinion, that if all the blood of our colored brethren shed by the people of the United States since the Declaration of Independence was kept in a reservoir, the framers of that instrument and their successors might swim in it.”
Frederick Douglass made what was the most famous condemnation of the United States in his 1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July.” Throughout, he wields both the language and ideals of the Declaration like a scalpel. “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,” Douglass said to the hundreds of people packed in the Corinthian Hall in Rochester, N.Y., to hear him speak. “What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”
It was in the hands of abolitionists, Black and white, carried over from Black Americans both free, freed and enslaved, that the Declaration worked as both an indictment and a promise — the spiritual foundation of the nation and the standard which its institutions must meet. And it is this vision of the Declaration that Abraham Lincoln hailed as he ascended to political leadership in the 1850s, fending off Southern slaveholders and their apologists.
