Book notes of “A Glorious Liberty: Frederick Douglass and the fight for an antislavery constitution” by Damon Root

Many slaves did not know their birthday. Douglass, first known as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, was born into slavery in Tuckahoe Maryland of Talbot County in February 1818. He took the name Douglas upon obtaining freedom in tribute to James Douglas in sir Walter Scott’s poem “the Lady of the lake“.

Douglass had been authoring for a paper owned by William Lloyd Garrison. Douglass chose to go public over his stance that the constitution laid out the case for abolition on 5/9/1851 in Syracuse, NY at the 18th annual meeting of the American anti-slavery Society. Garrison did not share this view.

The gag rule was implemented in Congress to suppress speech pertaining to slavery. It was a very contentious topic that they didn’t want to discuss and disturb the “tranquility of the public mind”. John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams and former 6th president of the United States presented a petition by slaves to the House of Representatives as a Massachusetts man. It was likened to “aiding and abetting insurrection” because it broke the principle that a slave can only be known through the authority of their master’s word. It struck a nerve because no one wanted to acknowledge the implications of allowing slaves the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. This implied that slaves were men of which the constitution said all were created equal and have the rights attached to that of pursuing happiness, property, etc. The House passed a resolution that said “Slaves do not have the right to petition”. Some wanted to censure Adams but this was avoided because no one wanted to mess with free speech. This fueled the abolitionist movement and more petitions were sent in on anti-slavery.

When Douglass had the responsibility as an 8 year old slave to babysit and be a playmate to his master Hugh Auld’s son, his master’s wife, sophia Auld, read the bible aloud frequently. This sparked his interest in reading and Sophia taught him the alphabet and he learned to spell and read. The reaction of his master when Sophia told him he could read moved Douglass to fight for freedom. His master had shown a weakness to Douglass when saying that knowledge would prevent him from being a slave and obeying his master. This motivated Douglass to exploit the vulnerability inherent in his master’s dependence on slavery.

Non-resistance was informed by a Christian view that pacifism should be adopted in the abolitionist movement. Because Christ suffered at the cross, more violence wasn’t the answer to achieving abolition. It also meant that they had a non-voting strategy and they refused to join a political party.

Absolving oneself from political participation was the philosophy of those who felt the constitution should be understood as a document that was made to maintain slavery. It was seen this way because it said the slave trade would go on for another 20 years at which it could decide to continue it and also that it allowed the government to respond with force to insurrections that may include slave revolts. It also said those with “labor terms” would be returned to their duties if they were found in a different state from their service.

Eventually, Douglass departed with the views of Garrisonians (who maintained the constitution advocated for slavery) while writing under and speaking with William Lloyd Garrison in “The Liberator” paper. He moved to Rochester, NY as to not compete with The Liberator and started his own paper “The North Star”. The Abolitionist movement in Rochester shared Douglass’ view that they should participate in the American political system and that the constitution had great anti-slavery principles in it.

Alvan Stewart argued for an abolitionist interpretation of the constitution in Utica, NY on 9/20/1837 to the New York Anti-slavery Society on the basis of the fifth amendment because it requires due process for someone to be held in bondage. He argues that every use of the word “person” in it refers to a full human with inalienable rights. It doesn’t explicitly say it is referring to African Americans or slaves currently calculated as 3/5ths of a person for the benefit of slave holding states.

Gerrit Smith, a founder of the Liberty Party, declared at the Liberty Party Convention in Cazenovia, NY that the constitution was an abolitionist document.

An antislavery convention held in Utica in 1835 was shouted down and broken up like liberals on a conservative speaker at a contemporary university campus.

Lysander Spooner was a self-proclaimed lawyer from Massachusetts. He pushed state legislature to remove the law that required lawyers to have a college degree and a five year apprenticeship. He argued that it kept prices high. The law was changed in 1836. Spooner joined the Abolitionists via the constitution movement. His argument was largely based on an 1805 supreme court ruling by chief justice John Marshal in United States v. Fisher. In that case chief justice John Marshal said “Where rights are infringed, where fundamental principles are overthrown, or the general system of the law is departed from, the legislative intention must be expressed with irresistible clearness, to induce a court of justice to suppose a design to affect such objects.“ Because the framers of the constitution purposely avoided using the word slavery in the constitution, Spooner argued that there was no strong clear case for the constitution supporting slavery.

William Lloyd Garrison and his right hand man Wendell Phillips were opposed to the constitutionality view of abolition from the start and thought it would undermine the movement.

When Douglas went on speaking tours with Garrison he was told multiple times to dumb it down or talk more like a slave to make it convincing. And then when he moved to agree more with Gerrit Smith, Garrisonians labeled him a puppet of Smith’s influenced by his money.

Author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin“, Harriet Beecher Stowe, asked Garrison after meeting Douglas if there was only “one true anti-slavery church and all others infidels?” She had been moved by the differences in how Garrison talked about Douglas in the “Refuge of Oppression“ column of his paper along with other pro-slavery views to how he was in person. Garrisons column served to lump Douglass or anyone imploring abolitionist to use the constitution’s logic to achieve that goal as a detriment to that goal.

Salmon P. Chase, a lawyer from Ohio, was moved to side with the abolitionist movement when he witnessed the violent destruction of a local newspaper printing press for Cincinnati the “philanthropist“ and the pursuit of its editor by a proslavery mob. He felt that an enemy of free speech was on the wrong side. In US Supreme Court case of Jones V. Van Zandt, he argued that runaway slaves should not be seen as criminal in the eyes of the constitution. His interpretation was that the government did not have the power to enforce anti-slavery throughout the country and to respect state institutions, but that it had to stay on the side of anti-slavery outside of the states. Chief justice Roger Taney rejected chases arguments and said the constitution “flung its shield, for security, over such property as is in controversy in the present case, and the right to pursue and reclaim it within the limits of another state.“ Chase worked for the liberty party, then for the free-soilers, and finally for the Republicans. He lost the Republican nomination for president to Abraham Lincoln but served as the secretary of treasury for the Lincoln administration. Lincoln appointed Chase to the US Supreme Court in 1864 replacing Roger Taney who had ruled against him in the Van Zandt case.

Many state officials, especially southern ones, argued to leave the issue alone as to whether the government had power to legislate against slavery in a state. George mason of Virginia, a slave owner, made a argument that, referring to the slave trade, “This infernal [sic] traffic originated in the avarice of British merchants,”so the new constitution should have nothing to do with it.

John C. Calhoun was distinguished in his advocacy for slavery in that he argued it was the ideal arrangement between black and white races. Most others defending slavery acknowledged its inhumanity but considered it a necessary evil. Calhoun wanted to make an amendment to prioritize and protect slave owners so they would be safe from abolitionist fervor. Douglass stated that his desire to amend the constitution shows how desperate slavery advocates were because they had no moral or constitutional basis for their institution. Calhoun denounced the idea in the constitution that all men are created equal. He even denounced Thomas Locke’s statement that government’s role was to protect individual liberty. He said that Locke’s false theory of individual liberty “was inserted in our declaration of independence without any necessity. It made no necessary part of our justification in separating from the parent country.“ He said that “For a long time it laid dormant, but in the process of time it began to germinate, and produce its poisonous fruits” and that Thomas Jefferson had brought Locke’s ideas of liberty into the constitution. He said that “individual liberty, or freedom, must be subordinate to whatever power may be necessary to protect society against anarchy within or destruction without.“ “The safety and well-being of society, paramount to individual liberty.” So societal safety was achieved by subordinating the liberty of the individual.

George Fitzhugh said the same in his book defending slavery “Sociology for the south, or the failure of free society”. He said that “The ancients took it for granted that slavery was right and never attempted to justify it.”

Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney was anti-slavery in private but pro-slavery in his public service. He inherited slaves but manumitted all of them except for a couple that were too old to provide for themselves. But when it came to some free British sailors that were arrested in South Carolina he said, as the attorney general of the United States, that the agreement between the US and Great Britain did not Trump by making powers of a state. “The African race in the United States, even went free, are everywhere a degraded class,” and that “The privileges they are allowed to enjoy, are accorded to them as a matter of kindness and benevolence rather than of right.” “… they were never regarded as a constituent portion of any state“ and “were not looked upon as citizens by the contracting parties who formed the constitution.“ In the Scott V. Sandford case, Sanford mispelled with an extra “d”, Taney ruled in favor of the institution of slavery in 1857. He said blacks “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the constitution.“ He said blacks “had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order,” and comprised no part of “We the People”, that the federal government had no power to outlaw slavery or grant freedom to a slave entering north of the 36 degrees 30’ latitude line, over territories just as it had no power over slave states.

In 1856 Democrat congressman Preston Brooks from South Carolina beat senator charles sumner senseless with a cane. The attack was in retaliation for a speech given by Sumner two days earlier in which he fiercely criticized slaveholders, including a relative of Brooks, Andrew Butler. Brooks claimed since they had been made against a relative, he was bound by Southern codes of duty and honor at the time to avenge the elder Butler for the younger Sumner’s actions. Sumner almost died and took years to recover from his head injuries.

A little less than four years later on April 12, 1861, the Civil War was started when general Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard fired on a US military facility strategically located on a man-made island in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. He was acting on orders from Jefferson Davis, the man he considered president.

Tragically, corporations benefited from the 14th amendment which prioritized individuals rights over state laws. Chief justice salmon and P. Chase had been worried about this. In the slaughterhouse cases of 1873, the Louisiana legislature established a central slaughterhouse for the city of New Orleans and granted a private corporation exclusive authority to operate that facility for a period of 25 years. It appeared as a ordinary public health or safety measure because it required inspection of animals before slaughter and all slaughtering to be done downstream from the city to avoid polluting the city’s water supply. This screwed over small family owned slaughter houses. Historian Charles Lofgren wrote “legislative bribery had greased passage of the law, with its most immediate beneficiaries — the 17 participants in the corporation it established — adroitly distributing shares of stock in cash.“ They organized into the Butchers’ Benevolent Association and filed a lawsuit that went to supreme court arguing that individual rights of butchers were infringed on. The Supreme Court sided with the state and the slaughterhouse monopoly trumpeted the 14th amendment and won against small slaughter houses in Louisiana.

The 15th amendment granted the right to vote to African-American men. Frederick Douglass had conflict with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony because along with others he felt that the rights of African-Americans should be prioritized. They wanted women to be included in the amendment. In 1868, Stanton asked, Why educated white women be denied the vote while uneducated former slaves, not to mention uneducated immigrants, are granted access to the ballot box simply because they happen to be male? She used slurs for both blacks and several and immigrant groups “…who never read the Declaration of Independence or Webster spelling book.“