your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. -- Douglass returns to providing contrasting conditions to highlight the irony of the celebration. While white citizens experience the emotional high of liberty, black slaves see the pomp and circumstance as the crushing reaffirmation of their bondage.