Frederick Douglas Wants To Have A Talk
by Paul Grimsley
“Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.” ~ Frederick Douglass
The Constitution isn’t broken — it doesn’t need fixing. Reading the above book by Frederick Douglas was enlightening because it is actually a great advertisement for digging in and understanding that document that helped to shape this county: The Constitution.
There were points where the Abolitionists called for the destruction of The Constitution, claiming that it was an inherently racist document, whereupon Frederick Douglass, breaking with those who had mentored him, such as William Lloyd Garrison, put forward an altogether different argument.
Douglass suggested that the language of the document itself was not racist, merely the interpretation of it, and that the notion that all men were created equal did not exclude African Americans. That if they were to be recognized as more than slaves, and given their due as thinking and reasoning human beings, that the rights enshrined in the founding documents of this country had to be applied to them to.
He extended this to the right of women as well, being very active in the fight for women’s suffrage as well, using very logical arguments that never stray beyond well reasoned out logic that lays bear the flaw in any argument that seeks to make a person in this country less than a person.
Likewise the idea of no union with slaveholders is replaced with the notion of no union with slaveholding, with the idea of bringing the rebel states in under the control of The Union, and making sure that they adhered to the rules laid out in The Constitution. He believed that the only solution was to control those states who still allowed slavery and to stamp it out, and the only way they could do that was to take responsibility for them.
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
~ Frederick Douglass
His faith in the enterprise seemed to draw from both the faith and knowledge he had of his own people, and the faith that he had in the good people such as Abraham Lincoln who he had adjudged to be a good man. But also he drew from his own experience and his own self knowledge, and his desire to really make his country work.
At points when others might have fled for fear of being recaptured and sold back into the slave trade, Frederick Douglass returned to live in his home country, because he believed it was the place that he was most needed.
He advocated joining the army, and worked tirelessly to create favorable conditions for black soldiers, because he believed that fighting for their country not only gave his people better living conditions, it gave them agency, and it secured for them a history of having fought to shape the country that they wanted to fully be part of.
To read Frederick Douglass is to be made cognizant of what the United States was, what it might have become, and what can be done by men of integrity to shape what it is. Some of the answers to the problems that exist still today may be found in these lessons that have been preserved from the past, and in The Constitution itself — a unique document, of which too little is known by the people who it was written for.
Frederick Douglass and his ilk are where we should be seeking answers to how to make America again.
Please hunt out this book — it is inexpensive, and it is invaluable.
