- Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 2 (New York: International Publishers, 1950), 181. The speech was delivered on July 5 rather than July 4 at the request of the organizing committee, who held their celebration one day after the national holiday. The date itself carried meaning that Douglass exploited deliberately. https://www.loc.gov/collections/frederick-douglass-papers/
- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), 1. Public domain. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23
- Douglass, Narrative, 29–35. The account of acquiring literacy is among the most documented passages in American autobiography.
- Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855), 318–322. Public domain. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/202
- John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American (New York: Liveright, 2015). Douglass sat for 160 known portraits, more than Lincoln, Grant, or any other nineteenth-century American.
- Declaration of Independence (1776). Public domain. National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration
- Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 369. Population estimates from colonial census records.
- U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 (Three-Fifths Clause). National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution
- U.S. Constitution, Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 (Fugitive Slave Clause). https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution
- U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 (Slave Trade Clause). https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution
- Missouri Compromise (1820). 16th Congress, 1st Session. Available through the Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/Missouri.html
- Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. 31st Congress. Available through the Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/llsl-v9/
- U.S. Census Bureau, Seventh Census of the United States (1850). Slave population schedules. Available through the National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1850
- Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (Rochester, NY: Lee, Mann & Co., 1852). Full text available through the Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/mfd.22007/
- Douglass, “What to the Slave,” 4–7. Douglass’s praise of the founders is sustained and specific. He called them statesmen, patriots and heroes, and patriots, who dared to risk their own safety in the service of their country.
- Douglass, “What to the Slave,” 14. Public domain — fully quotable. https://www.loc.gov/item/mfd.22007/
- Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 112–118.
- Frederick Douglass, “Prospectus for The North Star” (1847), in Foner, Life and Writings, vol. 1, 274–275. The North Star first published November 1, 1847. The motto: “Right is of no Sex — Truth is of no Color — God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren.” https://www.loc.gov/collections/frederick-douglass-papers/
- Douglass, “What to the Slave,” 28–30. This section of the speech is among its least quoted and most theologically significant. https://www.loc.gov/item/mfd.22007/
- Douglass’s home at 4 Alexander Street in Rochester was a documented station on the Underground Railroad. See Judith Wellman, Discovering the Underground Railroad, Abolitionism, and African American Life in Nineteenth-Century Wayne County, New York (Forthcoming, 2020); also Rochester Public Library Local History Division records.
- Thirteenth Amendment (1865), Fourteenth Amendment (1868), Fifteenth Amendment (1870). National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/amendments-11-27
- Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 564–587. The definitive scholarly treatment of the end of Reconstruction and the mechanisms of retrenchment.
- Frederick Douglass, “What the Black Man Wants” (Boston, 1865), in Foner, Life and Writings, vol. 4, 157–165. Douglass’s post-war address arguing that the ballot was the indispensable foundation of real freedom. https://www.loc.gov/collections/frederick-douglass-papers/
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