You shouldn’t need a special month to talk about Frederick Douglass. An esteemed abolitionist, orator, and thinker who escaped from slavery to become one of the most widely respected Americans to ever live, Douglass requires no excuse to be celebrated. But, considering that February is Black History Month, the month of both Douglass’s birth and death, and punctuated midway by Valentine’s Day, now seems as good a time as any to write a love letter to Frederick Douglass and his contributions to the advancement of American liberty.
Remembered now mostly for his inspiring life story—memorably told by Douglass himself across three autobiographies—sometimes the man’s own words and actions tend to be obscured by what he represents. As biographer Damon Root put it, “He deserves to be remembered for much more than that. His penetrating ideas about freedom, equality, and individualism still stand out for their clarity and originality…Through his words, his actions, and the personal example that he set, Douglass helped to move his country a little bit closer towards liberty. If only more Americans—then and now—could say the same thing.”
Slavery to Self-Ownership
Douglass’s first-hand experience suffering the injustice of slavery instilled in him a radical belief in self-ownership that became his life’s chief motivation. From the time he was born and for twenty years after he toiled at another man’s pleasure and profit. That brutal experience qualified him as an expert in the value of the freedom and independence that come with the right to pursue an honest living. Explaining the jubilation he felt upon earning his first ever paycheck as a dockworker after escaping from slavery, Douglass wrote, “I was now my own master—a tremendous fact.”
He managed to distill the wrongness of slavery better than perhaps anyone else, before or since, when he wrote an open letter to his former master in 1848, published in a newspaper the ever-entrepreneurial Douglass founded. He said in that letter, “You are a man, and so am I…In leaving you, I took nothing but what belonged to me, and in no way lessened your means for obtaining an honest living. Your faculties remained yours, and mine became useful to their rightful owner.”
Douglass’s dedication to the Lockean idea of self-ownership—the virtue of using one’s natural gifts to earn an honest living and the corresponding evil of commandeering the natural gifts of others for one’s own benefit—animated Douglass’s speeches, writing, and activism through the abolition struggle, his later years striving for women’s suffrage, and against the rise of Jim Crow.
The Glorious Liberty Document
Such classical liberal ideas also informed Douglass’s constitutional thought, even as that thought shifted over the course of his long public career. As a radical, young, escaped former slave with a voracious appetite for reading, Douglass became a fan and eventually protégé of William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of The Liberator, the most influential abolitionist newspaper in the country. Garrison took a hard line against the Constitution, “dripping as it is with human blood,” calling it the most “heaven-daring arrangement ever made by men for the continuance and protection of a system of the most atrocious villainy ever exhibited on earth.”
Douglass initially bought into this view, but grew to reject it over time as nihilistic and counterproductive. Douglass began to see value in the Constitution’s words, particularly read in the context of the Declaration of Independence’s promise that “all men are created equal.” To hate the Constitution as a pro-slavery charter would be to abandon the field of law to the John C. Calhouns of the world, to acknowledge some legitimacy in slavery, and to sacrifice the Enlightenment ideals undergirding the very foundation of the Republic.
As Douglass frustratedly wrote, “I am sick and tired of arguing on the slaveholders’ side of this question…I am prepared to treat slavery as a system of ‘lawless violence’ incapable of being legalized. I am prepared for those rules of interpretation which when applied to the Constitution make its details harmonize with its declared objects in its preamble.” He later proclaimed the Constitution “a glorious liberty document,” and dedicated the rest of his life to advocating for its honest and fair interpretation.
The Truest of Champions
Douglass’s belief in self-ownership, independence, and the dignity-providing value of free labor caused him to reject both the ideals of the Garrisonians and their paternalistic hold over him. He left The Liberator in 1847 to start his own paper where he could create new ideas and not merely describe the horrors inflicted upon him in support of someone else’s mission. His beliefs impelled him to reject the “arrant nonsense” of the burgeoning socialist movement that had ensnared and distracted so many of his fellow abolitionists. As someone who had spent the first twenty years of his life toiling away without pay under threat of violence, he understood better than most the lies of collectivism.
Frederick Douglass passed away on February 20, 1895, having spoken earlier that day in favor of women’s suffrage at a National Council of Women meeting. He never stopped fighting, motivated until his very last day on this Earth to struggle for the personal autonomy of his fellow human beings. To slightly misquote journalist Ida B. Wells’s eulogy, he was simply the greatest man the human race has produced in this land of the free and home of the brave.