I would say that the phrase that best describes the connotation of the word <em>reigns</em> in this excerpt from Frederick Douglass's speech <em>What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? </em>is the last one: <em>a sense of oppression and domination.</em>
Explanation:
In this excerpt, the speaker is trying to show his audience that, after all the experiences around the world they could get, they will end up choosing America's freedom and way of living. The message is: “<em>go travel the world and compare this way of living with others, and you will come back and appreciate this one</em>”; because, after all, America has no rival. The word reigns, in this excerpt means domination, prevalence, and it involves a sense of oppression because the region is under a certain domain and people there live by those rules.
