"What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" by Frederick Douglass: List 3

In this powerful speech delivered on July 5, 1852, abolitionist Frederick Douglass argued that the practice of slavery was antithetical to the American values of liberty and freedom.
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. execrable
    unequivocally detestable
    It has been denounced with burning words, from the high places of the nation, as an execrable traffic.
  2. extirpate
    destroy completely, as if down to the roots
    The duty to extirpate and destroy it, is admitted even by our DOCTORS OF DIVINITY.
  3. nominally
    in name only
    In order to put an end to it, some of these last have consented that their colored brethren (nominally free) should leave this country, and establish themselves on the western coast of Africa!
  4. perambulate
    walk with no particular goal
    They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation, with droves of human stock.
  5. caprice
    a sudden desire
    There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, caprice and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men.
  6. rapacity
    reprehensible acquisitiveness; insatiable desire for wealth
    There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, caprice and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men.
  7. scandalous
    giving offense to moral sensibilities
    But a still more inhuman, disgraceful, and scandalous state of things remains to be presented.
  8. obliterate
    do away with completely, without leaving a trace
    By that act, Mason & Dixon's line has been obliterated; New York has become as Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women, and children as slaves remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of the whole United States.
  9. ecclesiastic
    a clergyman or other person in religious orders
    Your President, your Secretary of State, our lords, nobles, and ecclesiastics, enforce, as a duty you owe to your free and glorious country, and to your God, that you do this accursed thing.
  10. consign
    commit forever
    Not fewer than forty Americans have, within the past two years, been hunted down and, without a moment’s warning, hurried away in chains, and consigned to slavery and excruciating torture.
  11. remorseless
    without mercy or pity
    The oath of any two villains is sufficient, under this hell-black enactment, to send the most pious and exemplary black man into the remorseless jaws of slavery!
  12. diabolical
    extremely evil or cruel
    In glaring violation of justice, in shameless disregard of the forms of administering law, in cunning arrangement to entrap the defenceless, and in diabolical intent, this Fugitive Slave Law stands alone in the annals of tyrannical legislation.
Created on Mon Jun 02 19:08:14 EDT 2025 (updated Fri Jul 11 11:19:11 EDT 2025)

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