In an action almost as momentous as his original escape from enslavement, Frederick Douglass adopted an anti-slavery interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. That 1851 decision took Douglass from a platform avowedly “outside that piece of parchment” to a platform insistently faithful to the words on the page.1
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Once Douglass embraced an anti-slavery reading of the U.S. Constitution, he became a militant constitutionalist. For Douglass, the Constitution was more than a frame of government. The fixity he valued was of a different sort—not a set structure of branches, offices, and procedures, but rather a polestar, guiding progressive improvement. In fact, Douglass named his first newspaper, The North Star, after the “star of hope” that directed runaway slaves in their nighttime travels. When he abandoned Garrisonianism in 1851, Douglass simultaneously began a new publishing venture, the eponymously named Frederick Douglass’ Paper. It was as if the natural celestial pole had been supplemented or maybe replaced by the man-made light of the Constitution. With its Polaris-like Preamble, the Constitution is a permanent source of national self-correction. Because of its orienting power, textual fundamentalism became one of Douglass’s main weapons in the antislavery struggle. For Douglass, behind the Constitution is an ultimate source of illumination: the natural rights theory of the Declaration of Independence. That higher law, in accordance with the truth of human nature, always informs the rule of law. Perhaps most controversially, Douglass argued that the higher law required militant opposition to the unconstitutional 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. In doing so, Douglass believed that he was keeping faith with the letter of the Constitution, as well as the spirit or intentions of the Founders. His vindication of the Founders is more than verbal; it is a summons to imitate them, pledging life, fortune, and sacred honor in the cause of liberty.
Saturday, August 10, 2024
Douglass, Slavery, and the U.S. Constitution
