Standing there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July.
From his famous speech on the Fourth of July, Douglass condemns the nation's hypocrisy regarding slavery.
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It was in the air, and men breathed it and were permeated by it, often when they were quite unconscious of its presence.
The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.
Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.