Douglass's central goal in What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? is to unveil American hypocrisy in its ongoing participation in an internal slave trade. In the speech, he praises both the founding fathers of the United States and Christian ideology to which many Americans subscribed. He argues that both these powers—the constitution and the Bible—are fundamentally at odds with the existence of slavery in America.
He opens by comparing the goals of the colonists who fought in the Revolutionary War against England with the slaves who are fighting for their own independence. The men who fought seventy years earlier felt enslaved to their British masters, and felt strongly enough about gaining their own independence and rights that they were willing to give their lives for the cause. These actions, Douglass says, are admirable, but shine light on the hypocritical existence of slaves in a country that rebelled against another type of "master" less than a century prior.
He observes that true Christians should be able to recognize that making one man another's slave is wrong, and he is angered by the way all religious institutions have enabled slavery in America when it is clearly condemned in the Bible. As an example, Douglass notes that the Church bans books and plays because they are deemed un-Christian, but they will not work toward banning slavery, which, Douglass asserts, is far more anti-Christian than a novel about infidelity.
However, Douglass contends that change is possible: America is a country of transformation, and a country that changes according to need so that it can become stronger. Once the colony of a distant monarch, America now stands proudly in its own right. Americans are also proud of the strength of their faith, and the strong institutions of religion. Douglass believes that although the Church's failure to address the issue of slavery is at the root of the problem, support from the Church for abolition could also be the answer.
Douglass concludes on a message of hope, saying he believes progress is not only possible, but imminent. He ends his speech with a poem by William Lloyd Garrison, which details the speaker's vision of a world without tyranny. The final stanza of the poem declares that, until that world arrives, the speaker will continue to fight for what is right.
