{"id":2145,"date":"2024-06-29T17:15:32","date_gmt":"2024-06-29T21:15:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/in-print-2\/volume-22-1-winter-2024\/frederick-douglass-the-constitution-militant\/"},"modified":"2025-05-12T11:11:31","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T15:11:31","slug":"frederick-douglass-the-constitution-militant","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/in-print-2\/volume-22-1-winter-2024\/frederick-douglass-the-constitution-militant\/","title":{"rendered":"Frederick Douglass: The Constitution Militant"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"p1\">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 \u201coutside that piece of parchment\u201d to a platform insistently faithful to the words on the page.<sup><span class=\"s1\">1 <\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Influenced by the literalism of Lysander Spooner, Gerrit Smith, and William Goodell\u2014if it doesn\u2019t say \u201cslave,\u201d it doesn\u2019t mean \u201cslave\u201d\u2014Douglass acknowledged as early as 1849 that the Constitution, if strictly construed, was not pro-slavery.<sup><span class=\"s1\">2 <\/span><\/sup>Nonetheless, he continued for the next two years to assert that the intention of the Founders had been to protect slavery and that this aim had been achieved by nefarious draftsmanship, employing hypocritical euphemisms for slaves like \u201call other persons\u201d and \u201cpersons held to service or labor.\u201d In line with the Garrisonian interpretation of the Constitution as a pro-slavery document, Douglass insisted that the public meaning of those phrases was clear, despite the surface ambiguity of the language. As he explained in an editorial dated April 1850, the fact that \u201cLiberty and Slavery\u2014opposite as Heaven and Hell\u2014are both in the Constitution\u201d constituted a \u201cradical defect\u201d that made an oath to support the Constitution \u201cmorally impossible.\u201d<sup><span class=\"s1\">3<\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10127,"featured_media":0,"parent":1770,"menu_order":5,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"abstract.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"footnotes":"","_tec_slr_enabled":"","_tec_slr_layout":""},"class_list":["post-2145","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"ticketed":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10127"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2145"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2149,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2145\/revisions\/2149"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}