Frederick Douglass is remembered as an abolitionist, writer, and perhaps the greatest American orator of the 19th century. But there was another Douglass as well: a serious constitutional thinker who spent years wrestling with one of the central questions of his time. Was the United States Constitution fundamentally a protector of slavery, or could it become a weapon against it?
That question is at the heart of author Damon Root’s A Glorious Liberty: Frederick Douglass and the Fight for an Antislavery Constitution. Root, a senior editor at Reason and author of three books on American law and constitutional history, will discuss the book at the Talbot County Free Library in Easton on Saturday, September 26, from 1 to 2 p.m. The program is part of this year’s Frederick Douglass Day celebration, held annually in Douglass’s native Talbot County. A question-and-answer session and book signing will follow.
In this long-form chat with the Spy before his Easton appearance, Root traces the remarkable evolution of Douglass’s thinking. For roughly the first decade of his public career, Douglass followed his mentor William Lloyd Garrison in viewing the Constitution as fundamentally pro-slavery. By the late 1840s, however, Douglass had broken with Garrison and embraced a far more radical proposition: properly read, the Constitution could provide the means for attacking slavery itself. The disagreement became both intellectual and deeply personal before the two men eventually moved toward reconciliation during the Civil War.