“What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Frederick Douglass.

         In “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Douglass takes a bold step and pride to use this platform to condemn the profits made from the slave trade, and, once again, he compares the treatment of slaves to that of animals. He mentions that in Baltimore, slave traders transported slaves in chains to ships in the dead of night because anti-slavery activism had made the public aware of the cruelty of that trade. Douglass recalls that when he was a child, the cries of chained slaves passing his house on route to the docks in the middle of the night had a chilling, unsettling effect on him.

           Douglass continually condemns the American churches and ministers excluding the abolitionist religious movements such as Garrison's for not speaking out against slavery. The contemporary American churches by remaining silent and acquiescing to the existence of slavery, he argues, is more of an infidel than Paine, Voltaire, or Bolingbroke (three eighteenth-century philosophers who spoke out against the churches of their time). Douglass argues that the church is "superlatively guilty" superlative, meaning even more guilty because it is an institution which has the power to eradicate slavery by condemning it. The Fugitive Slave Law, Douglass reasons, is "tyrannical legislation" because it removes all due process and civil rights for the black person: "For black men, there is neither law nor justice, humanity nor religion." (Under this Act, even freed blacks could easily be accused of being fugitive slaves and taken to the South.The Christian church which allows this law to remain in effect, Douglass says, is not really a Christian church at all.