In his famous speech titled “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (5 July 1852), Frederick Douglass praises the virtues of heat. He portrays as cold the failure of the United States to “extend” to its black population “the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence.” It would be easy for him to celebrate U.S. independence, says Douglass, if the United States had acted warmly by distributing political rights more widely: “For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him?” Although Douglass’s speech offers an illuminating account of American Revolutionary history, he insists that the times call for fire rather than light:

Douglass would like to be, like Kant’s Hume, the spark that ignites an awakening, a rouser of the sleeping. It is a cold nation, suggests Douglass, that oppresses part of its population. Such coldness is to be dispelled not by a gentle warming, but by the shock of fiery heat.