Read the excerpt from "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? What is the purpose of this rhetorical question as it used by Douglass?

Douglass is not asking for information; he immediately answers the question by explaining that Independence Day means something very different to enslaved people. The question sets up his judgment that celebrating freedom while slavery continues is hypocritical, so it is designed to express an opinion.

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