"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.
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 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.
A consensus of 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 eleven 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 slavery in the conflict, 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.
The Liberator (1831–1865) was a weekly abolitionist newspaper, printed and published in Boston by William Lloyd Garrison and, through 1839, by Isaac Knapp. Religious rather than political, it appealed to the moral conscience of its readers, urging them to demand immediate freeing of the slaves ("immediatism"). It also promoted women's rights, an issue that split the American abolitionist movement. Despite its modest circulation of 3,000, it had prominent and influential readers, including all the abolitionist leaders, among them Frederick Douglass, Beriah Green, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, and Alfred Niger. It frequently printed or reprinted letters, reports, sermons, and news stories relating to American slavery, becoming a sort of community bulletin board for the new abolitionist movement that Garrison helped foster.
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.
Joshua Reed Giddings was an American attorney, politician and a prominent opponent of slavery. He represented Northeast Ohio in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1838 to 1859. He was at first a member of the Whig Party and was later a Republican, helping found the party.
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.
Betsy Mix Cowles was an early leader in the United States abolitionist movement. She was an active and influential Ohio-based reformer, and was a noted feminist and an educator. She counted among her friends and acquaintances people such as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Henry C. Wright, and Abby Kelley Foster.
The Missouri Compromise was a federal legislation of the United States that balanced desires of northern states to prevent the expansion of slavery in the country with those of southern states to expand it. It admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state and declared a policy of prohibiting slavery in the remaining Louisiana Purchase lands north of the 36°30′ parallel. The 16th United States Congress passed the legislation on March 3, 1820, and President James Monroe signed it on March 6, 1820.
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 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.
National conventions of the Free Soil and Liberty parties met in 1847 and 1848 to nominate candidates for president and vice president in advance of the 1848 United States presidential election. The conventions resulted in the creation of the national Free Soil Party, a union of political abolitionists with antislavery Conscience Whigs and Barnburner Democrats to oppose the westward extension of slavery into the U.S. territories. Former President Martin Van Buren was nominated for president by the Free Soil National Convention that met at Buffalo, New York on August 9, 1848; Charles Francis Adams Sr. was nominated for vice president. Van Buren and Adams received 291,409 popular votes in the national election, almost all from the free states; his popularity among northern Democrats was great enough to deny his Democratic rival, Lewis Cass, the crucial state of New York, throwing the state and the election to Whig Zachary Taylor.
"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.
James Cropper (1773–1840) was an English businessman and philanthropist, known as an abolitionist who made a major contribution to the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833.
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 Radical Abolitionist Party was a political party formed by abolitionists in the United States in the decade preceding the American Civil War as part of a reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The party was formed following their first convention in 1855 and lasted until the end of the decade. The Radical Abolition Party was distinct from other contemporary political groups of the time for their aims to immediately eliminate the institution of slavery and advocate for full citizenship rights for African Americans. They also advocated for other marginalized groups' rights, such as women and Native Americans. Many prominent black and white abolitionists were founders and members including Frederick Douglass, James McCune Smith, William Goodell, Gerrit Smith, and John Brown. The party was unsuccessful in electing a candidate to office, however, made significant contributions to political discourse and helped shape the Republican Party's future platform on slavery.
The American Constitution and the Slave public domain audiobook at LibriVox