On The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery?

The Hundred closes where it began, with the founding documents, but seen now through the eyes of a man who had been enslaved under them and who refused to let them mean what his country said they meant. In this 1860 speech, Frederick Douglass took up the hardest question an American abolitionist could face: was the Constitution of the United States a pro-slavery document or an anti-slavery one? His answer, and the argument he built to reach it, is a masterclass in how a citizen reads a founding text, and a fitting end to a library devoted to reading the sources for oneself.

The question was not academic. Many of Douglass's fellow abolitionists, including those he had once followed, held that the Constitution was hopelessly corrupt, a covenant with slavery, a pact with the devil that protected human bondage and should be denounced and even burned. On their reading, the document's compromises, the clauses that counted the enslaved as fractions for representation, that protected the slave trade for a period, that required the return of those who escaped, proved that the founders had written slavery into the nation's charter, and that no honest person could swear to uphold it. Douglass had once shared this view.

By 1860 he had changed his mind, and this speech is his case for the change. Read the Constitution itself, he argued, read its actual words, and you will find that it nowhere mentions slavery or the slave by name, that it speaks throughout of persons, of people, of citizens, and that its preamble announces purposes, to establish justice, to secure the blessings of liberty, that are the very opposite of slavery. The pro-slavery reading, he contended, depended not on the text but on assumptions and intentions read into it, on interpreting the document by the supposed designs of some of its framers rather than by what it actually said. Take the Constitution at its word, as a legal instrument to be read by its plain language, and it could be wielded as a charter of freedom, a glorious liberty document, rather than surrendered to the defenders of bondage.

The argument is electric, and it is more than a lawyer's parsing. Douglass was performing the central act this entire library exists to encourage: refusing to accept secondhand what a document means, going to the source, reading it closely and for himself, and discovering that the text could sustain a reading its self-appointed authorities denied. He would not concede the founding charter to slavery's defenders. He claimed it instead, turned its own words against the institution, and insisted that the Constitution belonged to the cause of freedom. This is the same move that runs through the whole collection, Douglass with the Fourth of July, Stanton with the Declaration, King in the Birmingham cell, holding the country's sacred texts to their own language and demanding they mean what they say.

It is the right note on which to close The Hundred. The speech sends the reader straight back to the hosted Constitution in this library, to read it again with Douglass's question in mind and to reach a judgment of their own. That is the whole point. The engaged citizen does not take the meaning of the founding documents on anyone's authority, not the framers', not the abolitionists', not even Douglass's. They read the source and decide. This speech is public domain and freely available. Read it last, then read the Constitution once more, and let the argument be yours to settle.