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

The closing note of the shelf, and the brand's own thesis in Douglass's words. Having every reason to read the Constitution as a slaveholders' charter, Douglass instead read it as a document of liberty to be claimed, arguing that its principles, rightly understood, condemned the very system it tolerated. The argument is that the founding can be claimed, not only critiqued, that the promise belongs to those it betrayed as much as to those who wrote it. That conviction is where this whole library begins and ends.

Born into slavery, self-taught in secret, escaped at twenty, and within a decade the most commanding orator and writer the abolition movement had. His Narrative made the case against slavery undeniable by the simple force of a first-person witness who could not be dismissed. His Fourth of July address is the greatest American speech. He read the Constitution not as a slaveholders' document but as a charter of liberty to be claimed, and he spent his life claiming it. The conscience of the founding, turned on the founders.