Frederick Douglass on Slavery & the US Constitution

Frederick Douglass on Slavery & the US Constitution

The constitution is interposed. It always is.

“Let me tell you something. Do you know that you have been deceived and cheated? You have been told that this government was intended from the beginning for white men, and for white men exclusively; that the men who formed the Union and framed the Constitution designed the permanent exclusion of the colored people from the benefits of those institutions. Davis, Taney and Yancey, traitors at the south, have propagated this statement, while their copperhead echoes at the north have repeated the same. There never was a bolder or more wicked perversion of the truth of history. So far from this purpose was the mind and heart of your fathers, that they desired and expected the abolition of slavery. They framed the Constitution plainly with a view to the speedy downfall of slavery. They carefully excluded from the Constitution any and every word which could lead to the belief that they meant it for persons of only one complexion.

The Constitution, in its language and in its spirit, welcomes the black man to all the rights which it was intended to guarantee to any class of the American people. Its preamble tells us for whom and for what it was made.”

Frederick Douglass (June 1863)

http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documen...

Modern liberals and neocons use slavery to bash the Constitution and the Founding Fathers.

Let Frederick Douglass retort them in his own words. Douglass has great authority on the subject. He was a brilliant man, born a slave in 1818, but taught himself to read when he was 6 years old (without the benefit of the public schools). He was a man who valued liberty, and escaped from slavery when he was 20, in 1838.

Then he worked for the liberty of others, and at the same time, educated himself. He read the Founding documents of our nation, and commentaries on them, like the Federalist Papers. After 1840, he was able to get his hands on Madison's Notes on the Federal Constitution. Hence his great statement of liberty, above, from 1863.

Douglass was there.