Analysis Of What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July

People celebrated Independence day all the while buying and selling slaves. In Frederick Douglass 's “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, he argues that white men celebrating liberty and freedom while owning slaves is ironic and demonstrates the hypocrisy of his audience and the general white population when they define freedom. He compares the nation’s forefathers hunger for freedom to that of the slaves using irony and diction. He draws attention to the disparity between what the white men inherited and what the black men inherited from the same fathers using analogies to emphasize the irony of the Fourth of July. He further includes the hypocrisy of institutions that are made to be safe havens that not only fail as such but in fact …show more content…
The constitution is identified as “the fundamental law” by many lawmakers.(16) He defines what the constitution is supposed to represent in order to draw attention to the cynicism as it “guarantees the right to hold and to hunt slaves is a part.”(15) When Douglass says “...the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.”(16), he capitalizes “glorious liberty document” to emphasize the irony in which this document that represents freedom for white men, is seen as “sanction of the hateful thing”(16) for the slaves he represents . The constitution represented the forefathers liberation while further enslaving black people.
In his essay “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, Frederick Douglass demonstrates the hypocrisy of a country that celebrates freedom and liberty all the while enslaving an entire race by comparing the nation’s forefathers demand for freedom from England to that of the slaves from their masters, explaining the disparity between what the white men and what the black men inherited, analyzing the hypocrisy of institutions that were developed to protect the people of the United State. He uses syntax such as repeating the pronouns or capitalizing entire sentences to convey these