Douglass Called the Constitution a Glorious Liberty Document and Meant It

On July 5, 1852, in Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, a former slave stood up before an audience that had come to hear a Fourth of July oration and told them, in effect, that their celebration was a mockery.

The speaker was Frederick Douglass. He had been born into slavery in Maryland, escaped in 1838, and become the most famous Black man in America. The speech has a title that has echoed ever since: "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" It is one of the great pieces of American oratory, and it is quoted constantly by people who want to prove that the nation's founding ideals were a fraud. They usually stop quoting about three-quarters of the way through.

Because here is the part that rarely makes the clip. Near the end of that same speech, after he has finished burning the hypocrisy off the platform, Douglass turns around and says, in effect, that the document is not the villain. Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, he says, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. Read its preamble, he tells the audience, and ask whether slavery is among its purposes.

I want to take that seriously. The man with the most right in the world to call the founding a lie looked at the text and said no. If you want to know whether the Founders' ideals are worthless, you could do worse than ask him.

The charge, stated fairly

Let me state the argument against us in the strongest terms, because it deserves a hearing.

The men who wrote "all men are created equal" owned human beings. Thomas Jefferson, who drafted the line, held hundreds of people in bondage over his lifetime and, as historians have documented, fathered children with Sally Hemings, a woman he owned. Of the delegates in Philadelphia in 1787, a good many were slaveholders. The Constitution itself protected slavery: it counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation, it barred Congress from ending the slave trade before 1808, and it required that escaped slaves be returned. If the principles were sincere, they would have been applied. They were not. Therefore the principles were a cover for self-interest, and a country built on them is built on a lie.

It is not a stupid argument. Samuel Johnson put the sharpest version of it before the Revolution even began, in 1775, when he asked how it was that the loudest yelps for liberty came from the drivers of slaves. The founders themselves felt the sting. Many of them said so in private, and some in public. The charge is not an invention of modern activists; it is as old as the Republic.

Now let me answer it. I will do it the way a debater would, in numbered points, and I will concede what has to be conceded.

First, concede what is true

Conservatives who defend the founding do their cause no favours by minimising the evil. So let me say it plainly.

• The Constitution did make compromises with slavery. Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 counted "three fifths of all other Persons" in apportioning seats and direct taxes. Article I, Section 9 barred Congress from prohibiting the "Migration or Importation" of such persons before 1808. Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 required the return of persons "held to Service or Labour" who escaped to another state. Those are in the text, and anyone who says they are not is wrong.
• The compromises had real consequences. The three-fifths clause gave slaveholding states more power in the House, and so more electoral votes in the presidential contest, than their free population alone would have given them. It is hard to read the early decades of the Republic without seeing the weight of that power.
• Many of the men who wrote the words fell far short of them. That is a moral fact, and it is not made smaller by the fact that the world they lived in was one in which slavery was legal nearly everywhere.

The concession matters because it is true, and because it strengthens everything that follows. A defence that cannot admit the wrong cannot be trusted on the right.

Point one: the text never uses the word, and the drafters knew why

Here is a fact that gets less attention than it deserves. Read the Constitution of 1787 from start to finish and you will not find the word "slave" or "slavery." The delegates used circumlocutions: "other Persons," "such Persons," "Person held to Service or Labour." James Madison's notes of the Convention record that the delegates did not want to put such a word in the document, because in his own account it was wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man.

Why does that matter? It means the framers who made the compromises felt shame about them. They wrote a document in which slavery was present but unnamed, and Douglass noticed. If the Constitution had declared that slavery was a national institution, the abolitionist argument would have been over. It did not. It left the door open, and later generations used it.

Point two: Douglass changed his mind, and his reasons are the argument

Here is the part of the story I find most compelling. Douglass did not start out believing this. In his early years as an abolitionist he stood with William Lloyd Garrison, who denounced the Constitution as "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell" and who burned a copy of it at a public meeting in Framingham, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1854. Douglass accepted that view at first.

Then he studied. In the early 1850s he broke with Garrison and came to hold that the Constitution, read for what it actually said, did not sanction slavery and could be turned against it. He was influenced by Lysander Spooner's 1845 book, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, which argued exactly that from the text. In March 1860, in Glasgow, Scotland, Douglass gave a long address titled "The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery?" and made the case in detail. His method was the same one a good lawyer uses: look at what the document says, not what its worst interpreters want it to say. He argued that the way to judge a founding charter is by its words and its purposes, and that the preamble's language, "establish Justice," "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity," pointed toward freedom.

You do not have to agree with every step of his legal argument to see what he was doing. Here was a man who had been owned, who had every personal reason to reject the whole thing, and he picked up the document and said: this is a weapon, and I know how to use it.

Point three: the Declaration was the standard Lincoln used to measure the sin

Abraham Lincoln went at it from a different direction and arrived at the same place. In his 1854 speech at Peoria, Illinois, in his 1857 answer to the Dred Scott decision, and in the debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858, Lincoln argued that the Declaration of Independence's claim that all men are created equal was the founders' real intention, even if they did not live up to it. He did not say they were perfect. He said they had set a standard meant for all men and all times, a promise to be kept and not a description of what they had already achieved. He used the same logic at Cooper Union in New York in February 1860, where he argued that the founders had understood the federal government to have power to restrict slavery in the territories, and he cited the votes to prove it. In 1863, at Gettysburg, he dated the nation's birth to 1776 and the proposition that all men are created equal, not to 1787.

That is the whole structure of the American argument, and it is why the charge of hypocrisy is not a refutation. If you announce a principle and fail to live up to it, you have not disproved the principle. You have given your critics a measuring stick. Every abolitionist, every suffragist and every civil rights marcher after them stood on those words, and said: you wrote this, now do it.

Point four: the founders acted against slavery where they could

The charge treats the founding as one indivisible act of hypocrisy. The record is more mixed.

• The Northwest Ordinance, July 13, 1787, passed by the Confederation Congress while the Convention met in Philadelphia, barred slavery in the territory north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi. It became the template for free states such as Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. The new Congress under the Constitution reaffirmed it in 1789.
• Several northern states had already begun ending slavery, some by immediate abolition and others by gradual emancipation laws, in the years after independence. Massachusetts did so through its courts; Pennsylvania passed a gradual emancipation law in 1780.
• The slave trade could be ended in 1808, and Congress did so: a law signed by Thomas Jefferson in 1807 took effect on January 1, 1808. The Constitution did not require the trade to continue; it allowed Congress to stop it, and Congress did.

None of this makes the founders saints. It means they were a divided group who left a mixed result, with an antislavery side that grew. The reason it grew is that the principles gave it something to stand on.

Point five: the amendments finished the work in the text

When the country finally paid the price, the means of repair came from inside the document. Here is the order.

1. The 13th Amendment, ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime.
2. The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, defined citizenship, guaranteed due process and equal protection of the laws to all persons, and overturned Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), in which the Supreme Court had said Black Americans could not be citizens.
3. The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, forbade denying the vote on grounds of race.

These amendments were driven through by the Republican Party of Lincoln, and it is a point of pride, not triviality, that Citizenship, Equal Protection and the Ballot in the 14th and 15th Amendments and From the Emancipation Proclamation to the 13th Amendment in Dated Steps tell the story in detail. Nobody had to tear up the Constitution to do it. They had to write new words in it, using the process the Founders had provided in Article V. The Constitution proved to be a document that could be corrected.

The strongest remaining objection

A thoughtful critic says: "Fine. But all you have shown is that the principles later served a good cause. It does not follow that the original framers meant them. The first draft was a deal with slaveholders, and the repair took a war that killed hundreds of thousands. A system that needs that to correct itself is a system with a deep flaw."

I will give three answers.

First, this is exactly the position Douglass reached, and it is not a reason to say the ideals are worthless. He argued in Glasgow that the document's language and purposes stood against slavery even while many of its framers and interpreters failed them. A mistake in application is not a defect in the principle.

Second, I accept the cost. The Civil War was the price of the sin, as Lincoln himself said in his Second Inaugural Address in 1865. I would not dress it up. But a nation that could say that about itself, in its own highest office, in the middle of its own agony, is one with a conscience built into its founding documents.

Third, ask the alternative question. If the Declaration and Constitution are worthless, what do the critics propose as the standard against which we measure injustice? Whatever is proposed will itself have been written by flawed people. The honest course is the one Douglass took: keep the standard and hold everyone to it, beginning with ourselves.

Why this matters for 250

As the country approaches its 250th anniversary, there will be two stories on offer. One says America was founded on a lie and nothing has changed. The other says America was founded on a promise and has been arguing, sometimes bloodily, about how to keep it ever since. The second story is truer, and it has the better witnesses. Douglass is the best of them.

If you want a fuller look at what the founders believed and what they did, Six Myths About the Founders and the Constitution You Can Correct Today tests six popular claims against the record, and Frederick Douglass stayed a Republican all his life and told people why tells the rest of his story. Where Rights Come From, and Why the Declaration Says So First explains why the idea of equal rights mattered so much, and A Conservative Can Love His Country Without Worshiping the Government is the case for loving this country with open eyes.

The bottom line

• Concede the wrong: the Constitution contained compromises with slavery, in the three-fifths clause, the 1808 clause and the fugitive slave clause. Pretending otherwise loses the argument and deserves to.
• Then point to the rest of the record: the word "slave" never appears in the 1787 text, the Northwest Ordinance barred slavery in the territory it covered, and Congress ended the slave trade in 1808.
• Douglass, who had every reason to reject the founding, read the text and called the Constitution a glorious liberty document. Read his 1852 Rochester speech and his 1860 Glasgow address in full, not in clips.
• A principle that is not fully lived is not a refuted principle. It is a standard, and every reform from abolition to civil rights stood on it.
• At the family table, ask what standard the critic would put in its place, and offer Douglass's answer: keep the promise and hold everyone to it.