"The Constitution of the United States: is it pro-slavery or anti-slavery?" is a speech that Frederick Douglass gave on March 26, 1860, in Glasgow, in which he rejected arguments made by slaveholders as well as by fellow abolitionists as to the nature and meaning of the United States Constitution. The popularity of the speech led to its being published as a pamphlet. [1]
Frederick Douglass, born into slavery, escaped and upon meeting Garrisonian abolitionists joined their ranks. Highly intelligent and capable, Douglass became an active leader and founded The North Star newspaper.
As editor of The North Star, Douglass examined many issues of the day including the text and history of the United States Constitution. Over time, Douglass had a well-publicized break with Garrisonian principles and announced [2] his change of opinion in the North Star with respect to the Constitution as "a pro-slavery document." A decade later, Douglass was accused of having supported John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, which prompted him to flee the country. While on a lecture tour in Canada and later Great Britain, Douglass and British Garrisonian abolitionist George Thompson debated about the contents and nature of the United States Constitution in front of an interested public. [3] Prior to Douglass's arrival Thompson organized several lectures to denounce Douglass. [4] [5] "But Douglass loved these public squabbles, and his well of resentments and supply of sarcasm against the Garrisonians seemed bottomless". [6]
English professor Brian Yothers wrote that, in noting the importance of "The Constitution of the United States: Is it Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery?", English professor Vernon Loggins "provided a picture of the range of Douglass's oratory that can easily be lost in the canonization of a couple of representative pieces...." [7]
Douglass used the allegory of the "man from another country" during the speech, [8] arguing that abolitionists should take a moment to examine the plainly written text of the Constitution instead of secret meanings, saying, "It is not whether slavery existed ... at the time of the adoption of the Constitution" nor that "those slaveholders, in their hearts, intended to secure certain advantages in that instrument for slavery." [9] This was a reference to Roger Taney's view that the Constitution was pro-slavery, [10] which was the view of most lawyers at the time.
Douglass articulated his belief that the "great national enactment done by the people" "can only be altered, amended, or added to by the people," and that the ambiguity of many of its clauses leaned against the flimsy evidence offered by slaveholders. [11]
He argued in the speech for a reform and not a breakup of government, saying, "Do you break up your government? By no means. You say:— Reform the government; and that is just what the abolitionists who wish for liberty in the United States propose." [12] Douglass saw no need to break up the government, because he denied "that the constitution guarantees the right to hold property in man." [13]
During the speech, Douglass examined one by one the four provisions Thompson cited as evidence: the Three-Fifths Clause (Article 1, section 2); the Migration or Importation Clause (Article 1, section 9); the Fugitive Slave Clause (Article 4, section 2); and the clause giving Congress the power to "suppress Insurrections" (Article 1, section 8). In each instance, Douglass took a provision [14] and elaborated a worst-case argument and his own argument. [15] Douglass argued that the Three-Fifths Clause "deprives [slave] States of two-fifths of their natural basis of representation"; that the Migration or Importation Clause allowed Congress to end the importation of slaves from Africa in 1808; that the Fugitive Slave Clause does not apply to slaves but rather to "Person[s] held to Service or Labour", which do not include slaves, because a slave "is a simple article of property. He does not owe and cannot owe service. He cannot even make a contract"; and that the clause giving Congress the power to suppress insurrections gives Congress the power to end slavery, "[i]f it should turn out that slavery is a source of insurrection, [and] that there is no security from insurrection while slavery lasts...." [16] [17] Douglass also examined point by point the meaning of the objects contained in the Preamble, which he listed as "union, defence, welfare, tranquility, justice, and liberty". Douglass concluded that of the six objects slavery "is a foe of them all". [18]
The speech has received glowing reviews from historians, who note Douglass's "power of mature reasoning" in this "majestic" speech [19] and his "ingenious textual interpretation of the Constitution". [20]
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. He became the most important leader of the movement for African-American civil rights in the 19th century.
Abolitionism, or the abolitionist movement, is the movement to end slavery and liberate enslaved people around the world.
Lysander Spooner was an American abolitionist, entrepreneur, lawyer, essayist, natural rights legal theorist, pamphletist, political philosopher, Unitarian and writer often associated with the Boston anarchist tradition.
The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during the early colonial period, it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition in 1865, and issues concerning slavery seeped into every aspect of national politics, economics, and social custom. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing.
The Constitution of the Confederate States was the supreme law of the Confederate States of America. It superseded the Provisional Constitution of the Confederate States, the Confederate State's first constitution, in 1862. It remained in effect until the end of the American Civil War in 1865.
The American Anti-Slavery Society was an abolitionist society founded by William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur Tappan. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, had become a prominent abolitionist and was a key leader of this society, who often spoke at its meetings. William Wells Brown, also a freedman, also often spoke at meetings. By 1838, the society had 1,350 local chapters with around 250,000 members.
Historians who address the origins of the American Civil War agree that the preservation of the institution of slavery was the principal aim of the 11 Southern states that declared their secession from the United States and united to form the Confederate States of America. However, while historians in the 21st century agree on the centrality of the conflict over slavery—it was not just "a cause" of the war but "the cause" according to Civil War historian Chris Mackowski—they disagree sharply on which aspects of this conflict were most important, and on the North’s reasons for refusing to allow the Southern states to secede. Proponents of the pseudo-historical Lost Cause ideology have denied that slavery was the principal cause of the secession, a view that has been disproven by the overwhelming historical evidence against it, notably the seceding states' own secession documents.
The Three-fifths Compromise was an agreement reached during the 1787 United States Constitutional Convention over the inclusion of slaves in a state's total population. This count would determine: the number of seats in the House of Representatives; the number of electoral votes each state would be allocated; and how much money the states would pay in taxes. Slave holding states wanted their entire population to be counted to determine the number of Representatives those states could elect and send to Congress. Free states wanted to exclude the counting of slave populations in slave states, since those slaves had no voting rights. A compromise was struck to resolve this impasse. The compromise counted three-fifths of each state's slave population toward that state's total population for the purpose of apportioning the House of Representatives, effectively giving the Southern states more power in the House relative to the Northern states. It also gave slaveholders similarly enlarged powers in Southern legislatures; this was an issue in the secession of West Virginia from Virginia in 1863. Free blacks and indentured servants were not subject to the compromise, and each was counted as one full person for representation.
In the United States before 1865, a slave state was a state in which slavery and the internal or domestic slave trade were legal, while a free state was one in which they were prohibited. Between 1812 and 1850, it was considered by the slave states to be politically imperative that the number of free states not exceed the number of slave states, so new states were admitted in slave–free pairs. There were, nonetheless, some slaves in most free states up to the 1840 census, and the Fugitive Slave Clause of the U.S. Constitution, as implemented by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, provided that a slave did not become free by entering a free state and must be returned to his or her owner.
In the United States, fugitive slaves or runaway slaves were terms used in the 18th and 19th centuries to describe people who fled slavery. The term also refers to the federal Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850. Such people are also called freedom seekers to avoid implying that the enslaved person had committed a crime and that the slaveholder was the injured party.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is an 1845 memoir and treatise on abolition written by African-American orator and former slave Frederick Douglass during his time in Lynn, Massachusetts. It is generally held to be the most famous of a number of narratives written by former slaves during the same period. In factual detail, the text describes the events of his life and is considered to be one of the most influential pieces of literature to fuel the abolitionist movement of the early 19th century in the United States.
Abraham Lincoln's position on slavery in the United States is one of the most discussed aspects of his life. Lincoln frequently expressed his moral opposition to slavery in public and private. "I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," he stated. "I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel." However, the question of what to do about it and how to end it, given that it was so firmly embedded in the nation's constitutional framework and in the economy of much of the country, was complex and politically challenging. In addition, there was the unanswered question, which Lincoln had to deal with, of what would become of the four million slaves if liberated: how they would earn a living in a society that had almost always rejected them or looked down on their very presence.
The North Star was a nineteenth-century anti-slavery newspaper published from the Talman Building in Rochester, New York, by abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The paper commenced publication on December 3, 1847, and ceased as The North Star in June 1851, when it merged with Gerrit Smith's Liberty Party Paper to form Frederick Douglass' Paper. At the time of the Civil War, it was Douglass' Monthly.
The Slave Power, or Slavocracy, referred to the perceived political power held by American slaveowners in the federal government of the United States during the Antebellum period. Antislavery campaigners charged that this small group of wealthy slaveholders had seized political control of their states and were trying to take over the federal government illegitimately to expand and protect slavery. The claim was later used by the Republican Party that formed in 1854–55 to oppose the expansion of slavery.
The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1845) was a book by American abolitionist Lysander Spooner arguing that the United States Constitution prohibited slavery. This view was contrary to that of William Lloyd Garrison who opposed the Constitution on the grounds that it was pro-slavery. In the book, Spooner shows that none of the state governments of the slave states specifically authorized slavery, that the U.S. Constitution contains several clauses that are inconsistent with slavery, that slavery was a violation of natural law, and that the intentions of the Constitutional Convention have no legal bearing on the document they created. Thus, Spooner's position is one that employs original meaning-styled textualism and rejects original intent-styled originalism.
The Liberty Party was an abolitionist political party in the United States prior to the American Civil War. The party experienced its greatest activity during the 1840s, while remnants persisted as late as 1860. It supported James G. Birney in the presidential elections of 1840 and 1844. Others who attained prominence as leaders of the Liberty Party included Gerrit Smith, Salmon P. Chase, Henry Highland Garnet, Henry Bibb, and William Goodell. They attempted to work within the federal system created by the United States Constitution to diminish the political influence of the Slave Power and advance the cause of universal emancipation and an integrated, egalitarian society.
In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the late colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American slavery, except as punishment for a crime, through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
"What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" was a speech delivered by Frederick Douglass on July 5, 1852, at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, at a meeting organized by the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society. In the address, Douglass states that positive statements about perceived American values, such as liberty, citizenship, and freedom, were an offense to the enslaved population of the United States because they lacked those rights. Douglass referred not only to the captivity of enslaved people, but to the merciless exploitation and the cruelty and torture that slaves were subjected to in the United States.
Slavery as a positive good in the United States was the prevailing view of Southern politicians and intellectuals just before the American Civil War, as opposed to seeing it as a crime against humanity or a necessary evil. They defended the legal enslavement of people for their labor as a benevolent, paternalistic institution with social and economic benefits, an important bulwark of civilization, and a divine institution similar or superior to the free labor in the North.
Although the United States Constitution has never contained the words "slave" or "slavery" within its text, it dealt directly with American slavery in at least five of its provisions and indirectly protected the institution elsewhere in the document.
The American Constitution and the Slave public domain audiobook at LibriVox