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Shame on you, but keep the ideals
Born partly of sin
The United States was born partly of sin. Land was always acquired at the expense of other human beings, including the expulsion of Native Americans from various places, and slavery scarred generations of people.
Douglass's shame and appeal
Douglass believed in the power of the mythic ideals of the founding and refused to give up on them. He pointed out the hypocrisy and the times Americans seemed to contradict in their actions the very principles the nation was supposed to rest on. His message amounted to shame on you. He did not reject those principles, and he appealed to them as mattering more than ever, so that more people could enjoy them.
Lincoln and the war
Lincoln used the same idea to justify the sacrifice the Civil War demanded. Hundreds of thousands of men died on battlefields for a notion that this place and its ideals matter. The case for redemption holds that a perfect past does not exist, and an idea can still be extraordinarily powerful.
Where did Douglass deliver his famous Fourth speech?
The Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society invited him to speak at Corinthian Hall in July 1852, and he delivered the address on July 5. He asked what the Fourth of July meant to an enslaved person and answered that it revealed the nation's gross injustice and cruelty. Yet he called the Declaration's principles saving principles and closed the speech on a note of hope. He had lived in Rochester since 1847, publishing his newspaper the North Star there.
How did Lincoln tie the war to the Declaration?
In the Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863, Lincoln dated the nation's birth to four score and seven years earlier, which points to 1776 rather than the Constitution. He said the country was dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Historians long estimated that 620,000 soldiers died in the Civil War, and demographic work by J. David Hacker suggests a figure closer to 750,000. The address runs about 270 words.
How did Douglass's view of the Constitution change?
Early in his career Douglass followed William Lloyd Garrison, who held that the Constitution protected slavery and should be rejected. By 1851 Douglass broke with Garrison and argued that the document, read on its own terms, did not sanction slavery. He used that reading to justify political action instead of withdrawal from politics. The break with Garrison came in 1851.
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