Diana Schaub offers a valuable history lesson for those who consider the U.S. Constitution a pro-slavery document.
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.
Influenced by the literalism of Lysander Spooner, Gerrit Smith, and William Goodell—if it doesn’t say “slave,” it doesn’t mean “slave”—Douglass acknowledged as early as 1849 that the Constitution, if strictly construed, was not pro-slavery. 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 “all other persons” and “persons held to service or labor.” 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 “Liberty and Slavery—opposite as Heaven and Hell—are both in the Constitution” constituted a “radical defect” that made an oath to support the Constitution “morally impossible.”
During this same period, however, Douglass was increasingly dissatisfied with where the Garrisonian hermeneutic landed the abolition cause. As he complained to Gerrit Smith in January 1851, “I am sick and tired of arguing on the slaveholders’ side of this question, although they are doubtless right so far as the intentions of the framers of the Constitution are concerned.” The strong attraction of the alternative textualist approach was its focus on the letter of the law to the exclusion of those unjust intentions. As Douglass remarked to Smith, “these intentions you fling to the winds.”
