In the mid-1800s, there was a plethora of opinions about the meaning of the Constitution. Into this dialog stepped a former slave, Frederick Douglass. In October 2023, Sterling Professor of History and African Studies at Yale, David W. Blight, gave the Second Circuit’s Thurgood Marshall Lecture entitled, “Frederick Douglass and the Antislavery Constitution: Why It Matters Today.”

In Judge Barrington Parker’s introduction of Professor Blight, he stated in part:

As I’m sure you know, Douglass was born in America, escaped slavery as a young man. A powerful orator, Douglass became a leading abolitionist touring the world in support of the cause of freedom. During the Civil War, he consulted and worked with President Lincoln, encouraged Black Northerners to join the Union Army to fight to destroy slavery. After Emancipation, Douglass remained a prominent Republican and supporter of equal rights for both Black Americans and women.

Natural Rights

Professor Blight commenced the lecture by asking how Douglass came by his deep “unabiding faith” in natural rights. Blight observed that the it was not true that Douglass was a “self-made man” but that he had to learn his oratory and he had a lot to learn about writing when he escaped from slavery. Blight said:

Well, how did he get any kind of education? He was a slave. He never spent one single hour of his life in a formal schoolroom. . . . [H]e became a writer of almost unparalleled power, prophetic power. His writing had to be practiced and practiced. . . . He had friends who would edit him . . . but he had that uncanny ability to find language that could explain what people were experiencing – whether it was slavery, Emancipation, war, constitutional crisis, political crisis, violence. He had the ability to find a metaphor that would just stick in your mind. …He started reading when was about seven or eight years old because his mistress, the wife of his owner or of his owner’s brother, taught him his alphabet. He took to language. 

Douglass met William Lloyd Garrison and under his tutelage he became an itinerant abolitionist. Garrison believed the U.S. Constitution was a “covenant with death.” In Douglass’ first three to four to five years on the circuit as a Garrisonian, he preached the tenets of Garrisonian. 

Douglass subsequently went to England and was treated as a human being “more fully and openly than he ever had been in the United States.” Douglass did not like being under Garrison’s wing any longer and, when he got back to the United States, he decided that he wanted to make the Constitution work for him. 

Toward that end, Douglass began to rethink his idea that the Constitution was hopeless, ultimately declaring that, “I am sick and tired of having the Constitution against us, let’s make it for us!”

Douglass decided there were two Constitutions, one proslavery and one antislavery. In a July 4, 1852, speech, he said, “In that instrument, the Constitution, I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing, slavery, but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document.” Blight explains that Douglass meant that the Constitution has possibilities, and his speech was “the rhetorical masterpiece of American abolitionism, the rhetorical masterpiece of American reform.” 

Following the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, Douglass gave “an eloquent, beautiful statement of the natural rights tradition – that all people are born, whether it’s before nature or before God, with certain liberties that can never be killed. He likened natural rights to precious ore. Once you find it, you have it.” In Douglass’ opinion, you cannot kill natural rights.

Blight’s Conclusion

In his speech, Professor Blight concluded that one part of America “loves to appropriate a certain Douglass, that Republican Douglass to them, who believe in self-help. They forget that he believed even more powerfully in energetic interventionist, activist government.”