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 denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; 
your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; 
your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, 
with all your religious parade and solemnity, are mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages.

the feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed...

-frederick douglass