Interpret

Christianity becomes a very dark symbol in this portrait of America. Douglass points, rightly, that the many ministers and church leaders actually found a way to use to defend their grotesquely bizarre claim that God confers approval upon the institution of slavery. This, among other failings, is what leads the Christian church in America to situated symbolically as a protective wall providing a bulwark against abolition, emancipation and the dismantling of the entire system of slavery in the south.

There are also allusions to the American Revolution. Douglass reminds his listeners that the American Revolution was, symbolically at the very least, act of self-declared emancipation from the bondage of British rules. If the Fourth of July is a celebration of the abolition of colonial slavery at the hands of British owners, then how can anyone rightly celebrate it while denying emancipation to American slaves?