This is for you to make brainlist and get 60 points, Read the article and answer the questions. It was the summer of 1852 and Frederick Douglass was giving a speech about slavery in Rochester, New York.

Douglass had once been a slave and was now a famous anti-slavery speaker. The Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society asked him to give a speech at its Fourth of July observance.

For years, free African-Americans and many whites had refused to celebrate the Fourth of July. They wanted to protest slavery in America.

Douglass spoke to a crowd of at least 600 people that day. He delivered one of the most striking speeches many Americans had ever heard. What's more, he was doing so at an important time.

Blacks were the property of slaveholders

Just two years earlier, the federal government had issued a runaway slave law. It said runaway slaves must be captured and returned to their owners. The law was a reminder that slaveholders had rights, and African-Americans did not.

As Douglass stood before the crowd, he said the Fourth of July has a different meaning for slaves than for white people. Douglass said it was a reminder more than any other day that slaves are not equal.

On July 4, 1776, America’s Declaration of Independence was established and America was free from Britain.

America began as a country because its people did not want to be controlled by Britain any longer. But, then as a new country, America was allowing its people to make slaves out of other people.

Northern, Southern states differed on slavery

The Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia in 1787. It was the same place where the Declaration of Independence had been signed 11 years earlier.

For four months, 55 men from 12 states met to write a Constitution. One of the biggest issues of debate was the future of slavery in America. Some Northern states had ended slavery after the American Revolution. States in the South had not.

Some men from Southern states said their states needed slavery to make money. Rawlins Lowndes of South Carolina said that slavery was the source of the state’s “wealth, [and] our only natural resource.”

Constitution protected slave states

The Constitution protected slavery in many ways. For example, there was a "three-fifths clause." This allowed states to count three-fifths of their slaves when adding up the number of people in their states. The number was used to decide how many representatives each state would have in Washington, D. C. This gave slave states more representatives. These representatives made laws. That gave the slave states more power in Congress.

The Constitution also allowed the Atlantic slave trade to continue. The slave trade was when Africans were captured and brought on ships across the Atlantic Ocean to America to become slaves.

George Washington was a slaveholder

George Washington had mostly stayed silent about slavery. He was a slaveholder, but he had mixed feelings about it. His experience with black soldiers during wartime made him doubt the slave system. But, he did not argue against it. Still, Washington believed it would be best to slowly end slavery in America.

For the next 50 years, the Constitution protected slavery in America. This allowed it to continue. Meanwhile, it did not protect free blacks from unfair treatment by states. In many states, African-Americans could not vote. They were not allowed to even move to some states.

For many African-Americans, a Constitution that allowed them to be enslaved could not be respected.

Abraham Lincoln helped end slavery

By the 1800s, there was more talk to end slavery in America. Meanwhile, the Southern states wanted to separate from the North. This allowed President Abraham Lincoln to act. He removed the protections for slavery from the Constitution. Then he prohibited slavery with the 13th Amendment.

Later, parts of the Constitution were changed that didn't allow certain races to be Americans. The 14th Amendment in 1868 said that people could not be stopped from becoming Americans because of their race. Then, the 15th Amendment in 1870 protected African-Americans' voting rights.

In time, more laws for fair and equal treatment of all Americans have been made. But, the struggle continued and still does today.

Many Americans still want the country to live up to the values which it was founded on.

question: Choose two groups of people that were described in the article. How was their experience of the event similar? How was it different? Write a response that compares the perspectives of two groups of people using details from the article.