The Enigmatic Mr Douglass: Dennis Rasmussen on America's Fiercest Critic & its Greatest Fan.

“You should fight against tyranny in any form it takes. You’re not betraying the founding by standing up to tyranny — you’re following in their footsteps.” — Dennis Rasmussen

 

After Lincoln, he was the best known man in nineteenth century America. And the most photographed too, some 160 portraits of the ex-slave’s unmistakable face still surviving. So there was nothing hidden about Frederick Douglass. And yet the more we know about this most remarkable American, the more enigmatic he becomes.

 

At first, he was America’s fiercest critic. In the early 1840s he accused the founders of being “little better than a band of pirates” and described the Constitution as a “wicked compact.” By 1851, however, he radically revised his view of that same Constitution, eulogizing it as “a glorious liberty document” that outlawed slavery outright. So why did Douglass change his mind so radically? Is it really possible that he was simultaneously America’s fiercest critic and its greatest fan? That’s the riddle at the heart of Dennis Rasmussen’s new book Frederick Douglass’s American Founding.

 

Rasmussen reminds us that Douglass got his political education from William Lloyd Garrison, the unbending New Englander who burned a copy of the Constitution and ground its ashes under his intolerant heel. Then Douglass — having moved to Rochester, started his own newspaper, and fallen in with Gerrit Smith’s political abolitionists — spent two years changing his mind about the Constitution. His logic was startlingly modern. Scalia before Antonin Scalia. Studying the historic document like a biblical scholar, Douglass argued that it never mentions slavery nor race. So the rights it confers, he argued, belong to all Americans. This exegesis made him more militant than Lincoln, because he argued that such a careful reading of the Constitution demanded immediate emancipation.

 

Was Douglass bought or paid off by Gerrit Smith? Naturally the bitter Garrisonians said he was. But Dennis Rasmussen disputes this, arguing that the timing doesn’t work. What Douglass earned instead, Rasmussen argues, was the right to call himself and his fellow abolitionists the founders’ true heirs, more American than even Lincoln and the Republicans. So no mystery, then. The most familiar face in America confessing, in public, that he had been wrong for a decade. If only we had such political enigmas today.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Band of Pirates. Where Douglass started. Escaping slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore at twenty, he entered the abolitionist movement under William Lloyd Garrison — editor of The Liberator, organizer of the largest antislavery society, and the man who called the Constitution “an agreement with death and a covenant with hell,” once burning a copy at a rally and grinding its ashes under his heel. Through the 1840s Douglass held the Garrisonian line: the founders were hypocrites who complained about a three-penny tax while kidnapping and enslaving a huge share of the population; the Constitution was not merely flawed but evil, with its three-fifths clause, fugitive slave clause and slave trade clause. And these were not respectable opinions. Rasmussen’s reminder: even in the North, abolitionists were the tiniest and most despised minority in American politics — Garrison was tarred, feathered and dragged around Boston by a rope.

•       The Two Years That Changed Him. The conversion ran from roughly 1849 to 1851, and it had a geography. Douglass left the East Coast for Rochester and started a newspaper against Garrison’s wishes, landing in the heartland of the political abolitionists — the Liberty Party, the Radical Abolition Party — who believed slavery should be fought through