Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

by Alan Jacobs

we should return to a figure from earlier in our story, Frederick Douglass. His reflection on the American Founders—in a speech called “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” delivered in Rochester, New York, on July 4, 1852—is as excellent an example of reckoning healthily with the past as anything I have ever read. He begins by acknowledging that “they were great men,” though he immediately goes on to say, “The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration.” Yes: Douglass is compelled to view them in a critical light, because their failure to eradicate slavery at the nation’s founding led to his own enslavement, led to his being beaten and abused and denied every human right, forced him to live in bondage and in fear until he could at long last make his escape. Nevertheless, “for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.”