Next, Douglass condemns the American churches and ministers (excluding, of course, abolitionist religious movements such as Garrison's) for not speaking out against slavery. The contemporary American church, by remaining silent and acquiescing to the existence of slavery, he argues, is more of an infidel than Paine, Voltaire, or Bolingbroke (three eighteenth-century philosophers who spoke out against the churches of their time). Douglass argues that the church is "superlatively guilty"—superlative, meaning even more guilty—because it is an institution which has the power to eradicate slavery by condemning it. The Fugitive Slave Law, Douglass reasons, is "tyrannical legislation" because it removes all due process and civil rights for the black person: "For black men, there is neither law nor justice, humanity nor religion." (Under this Act, even freed blacks could easily be accused of being fugitive slaves and taken to the South.) The Christian church which allows this law to remain in effect, Douglass says, is not really a Christian church at all.
Douglass returns to his theme of American democracy and freedom. He criticizes American ideology as inconsistent. For him, while it professes freedom, it does not give all people that right. And while it advocates democracy in Europe and elsewhere, it does not grant it to all of its own people. Similarly, he argues that while the American Declaration of Independence states that "all men are created equal," American society creates an under-class of men and women.
To his opponents who believe that the Constitution permits slavery, Douglass offers the writings of Spooner, Goodell, Sewall, and Smith—four abolitionists whose essays "clearly vindicate the Constitution from any design to support slavery." Douglass sides with those activists who believe that the founding fathers meant to eliminate slavery and that the Constitution reflects this.
Douglass concludes on an optimistic note. He believes that anti-slavery sentiments will eventually triumph over pro-slavery forces. Nations, particularly Western countries, in the mid-nineteenth century were generally against slavery. In fact, slavery was banned in the British colonies in 1834 and in the French colonies in 1848; politicians in those countries could no longer claim to support the rights of man while allowing slavery. He argues that no longer can the cruelties of American slavery be hidden from the rest of the world. Trade and commerce have opened up borders, and political ideas know no boundaries. Douglass closes his essay with a poem by Garrison entitled "The Triumph of Freedom," stressing the inevitable arrival of freedom and the abolitionist's promise to fight slavery "whate'er the peril or the cost."
