Frederick Douglass · Politics
Douglass broke painfully with his own movement over a single question: was the United States Constitution a pro-slavery pact to be burned, or an anti-slavery charter to be wielded? His answer reshaped abolition - and his own life.
For the first years of his public life, Frederick Douglass was the great star of William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist movement - and he had absorbed Garrison’s view of the Constitution completely. Garrison held that the document was hopelessly corrupted by slavery: it counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for representation, protected the slave trade for twenty years, and required the return of fugitive slaves. To Garrison, the Constitution was ‘a covenant with death and an agreement with hell,’ and he famously burned a copy in public. His followers, Douglass among them, refused to vote or hold office under it, regarding the Union itself as a sinful compact that the free states should dissolve.
Then Douglass changed his mind - and the change cost him dearly. By the early 1850s, after deeper study and the influence of anti-slavery constitutional thinkers, he had come to the opposite conclusion: that the Constitution, properly read, was not pro-slavery at all but a ‘glorious liberty document.’ The break with Garrison was bitter and personal; Douglass was accused of apostasy and ingratitude, and a friendship was shattered. But Douglass had concluded that the Garrisonian position was not only mistaken but strategically disastrous - that by ceding the nation’s founding charter to the slaveholders, the abolitionists had thrown away their most powerful weapon.
The core of Douglass’s new position was a method of reading. The Garrisonians condemned the Constitution as pro-slavery, but Douglass pointed out something striking: the word ‘slave’ or ‘slavery’ appears nowhere in the original document. The framers, even those who defended slavery, were ashamed enough of it that they refused to write it plainly into the nation’s charter, using only oblique euphemisms - ‘other persons,’ ‘such persons,’ ‘person held to service.’ Douglass argued that this silence was decisive. A government instrument must be read by what it actually says, not by the secret intentions imputed to its authors, and on its face the Constitution established a government for ‘We the People’ to ‘secure the blessings of liberty’ - purposes in which slavery had no part.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Douglass changed his mind about the Constitution. In your own words, what was the difference between reading it by the framers’ intentions and reading it by its plain words?
Leads to John Locke.
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