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18521776 Club

Douglass tells a packed Rochester hall: the Fourth of July is "yours, not mine"

Speaking the day after Independence Day at Corinthian Hall, he calls slavery "the great sin and shame of America" before a mostly white crowd invited by the Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society.

Rochester's Corinthian Hall was packed the day after Independence Day, 1852, when the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society invited Frederick Douglass to speak. He gave the crowd, mostly white, no comfortable holiday oratory. Douglass told them the Fourth of July was "yours, not mine," and called slavery "the great sin and shame of America." The speech became one of the most devastating critiques of American hypocrisy ever delivered on American soil…

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More from July 5
1814

Scott's regulars break Riall's line at Chippawa; the British general had taken them for militia

After 25 minutes of volley fire on open ground near the Niagara, the Right Division's lines collapse and American regulars prove they can stand against British veterans.
1775

Congress sends King George a loyalty oath and a list of grievances; the delegates call it their olive branch

Hancock and the full Congress sign the petition in Philadelphia, and envoys Richard Penn and Arthur Lee are bound for London with the appeal.
1859

Captain Brooks claims a mid-Pacific atoll for the United States; he calls it the Middlebrook Islands

The sealing ship Gambia raised the flag under the Guano Islands Act, planting a U.S. claim a third of the way between Honolulu and Tokyo.
18651776 Club
Three months after Appomattox, Treasury stands up its first detective force to fight a flood of fake U.S. currency that has spread across the country since the war.
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More from Expansion & Antebellum
1849

Harriet Tubman slips away from a Maryland plantation, bound for Pennsylvania

Her brothers Ben and Henry start north with her, then turn back; she keeps walking alone.
1850

Congress orders every escaped slave returned; the North must help catch them

Habeas corpus does not apply, and commissioners are paid double to rule against the accused.
1846

Taylor's army beats a Mexican force north of the Rio Grande; a war is now underway

American troops hold their ground in the first major engagement of the border dispute, with the armies still in the field and the outcome of the wider conflict far from settled.
1858

Minnesota enters the Union as the 32nd state; the Dakota name, the French motto, the New England soul

Nine years after Ramsey stepped off a riverboat to govern 5,000 settlers, the eastern half of the old territory takes its place on the map.
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