Abolitionists and the Constitution
by Damon Huss
Two great abolitionists, William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, once allies, split over the Constitution. Garrison believed it was a pro-slavery document from its inception. Douglass strongly disagreed.
Today, many Americans disagree about how to interpret the Constitution. This is especially true with our most controversial social issues. For example, Americans disagree over what a “well-regulated militia” means in the Second Amendment, or whether the government must always have “probable cause” under the Fourth Amendment to investigate terrorism suspects. These kinds of disagreements about interpretation are not new. In fact, they have flared up since the Constitutional Convention in 1787. One major debate over the Constitution’s meaning caused a rift in the abolitionist movement to end slavery in the 19th century.
Before the 13th Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1865, formally ending slavery in the United States, many abolitionists had argued that slavery was already inherently unconstitutional. The escaped slave and renowned author Frederick Douglass was one of them. Others, like the newspaper publisher and activist William Lloyd Garrison, disagreed and argued that the Constitution had always been a pro-slavery document.
This split between abolitionists’ views of the Constitution was more than a legalistic debate. Neither Douglass nor Garrison were lawyers, though each had key allies who were. The debate had primarily political origins, grounded in Garrison’s deep-seated moral sentiments that attracted many followers (“Garrisonians”), but also alienated many others, including Douglass.
Garrison and Northern Secession
Motivated by strong, personal Christian convictions, Garrison was an uncompromising speaker and writer on the abolition of slavery. In 1831, Garrison launched his own newspaper, The Liberator, in Boston, to preach the immediate end of slavery to a national audience. In his opening editorial, he informed his readers of his then radical intent: “I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard!”
Garrison also co-founded the American Anti-Slavery Society (AAS) in Boston, which soon had over 200,000 members in several Northern cities. Garrison was a popular speaker at meetings of the AAS and was known for giving fiery speeches about the evils of slavery.
Garrison’s editorials and speeches angered Southern slaveowners, especially those who used enslaved people on large plantations, or cash-crop farms for cotton, rice, and indigo. They feared that if the Northern states united to abolish slavery, then the balance of power between the South and North in Congress would shift decidedly to the North, and slavery would be undone. For his views, Garrison was repeatedly threatened and once narrowly escaped being hanged in Boston by an angry pro-slavery mob.
Garrison’s activism also polarized his fellow abolitionists. Garrison urged his readers not to vote, not to hold public office, and not to accept the authority of the U.S. Constitution as long as slavery still existed. Garrison once wrote that he wished that the Union would “crumble into dust” rather than let slavery continue.
Garrison even supported Northern secession from the United States. He believed that disunion between North and South would result in massive slave revolts in Southern states, like Nat Turner’s revolt in Virginia in 1831. Without protection from the Union Army, Southerners would have no choice but to give up owning slaves. “No Union with Slaveholders!” became The Liberator’s motto.
Garrison’s brand of abolitionism attracted many radicals. More moderate abolitionists, however, feared that Garrison’s published criticisms of the government and even of organized religion would push abolitionism to the margins of American politics.
In 1840, two wealthy cofounders of the AAS founded a new rival organization, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, as well as a political party, the Liberty Party. Both of these new organizations supported political reform and the U.S. Constitution as the means to end slavery. Eventually, in 1854, the newly formed Republican Party would absorb the Liberty Party’s abolitionists.
Douglass and Spooner: Free Citizens Under the Constitution
In 1838, Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery in Maryland. He made his way to New York, got married, and settled with his wife in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He began to attend meetings of the local abolitionist society and started to speak publicly about the cruelties of slavery and his daring escape. Garrison saw him speak and recognized Douglass’s skills as a speaker.
Soon, Garrison had Douglass speaking regularly at meetings of the AAS. Over the years, both of them ventured on speaking tours throughout the North, and Garrison became a mentor to Douglass.
Douglass’s fame grew. In 1845, The Liberator published Douglass’s first autobiography, which went on to be a bestselling book. Despite his growing notoriety, Douglass had to flee to Ireland and England to be safe from his former slave master, who could legally send agents into the North to abduct him. Fortunately, with Garrison’s help, British abolitionists bought Douglass’s freedom.
Douglass returned to the United States in 1847 and started publishing his own abolitionist newspaper The North Star. He thought it was important to have a Black-owned and operated abolitionist newspaper “under the complete control and direction of the immediate victims of slavery and oppression.”
The North Star’s editorials generally supported the Garrisonian idea of disunionism and Northern secession. But Douglass had begun feeling sympathy with the Liberty Party and the pro-Constitution ideas of others, including a prominent white Massachusetts attorney and abolitionist named Lysander Spooner.
In 1845, Spooner had published a book, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, in which he argued that the Constitution’s words supported liberty for all slaves. Spooner saw the absence of the words “slave” or “slavery” in the Constitution as proof of the document’s anti-slavery nature.
The Preamble, Spooner argued, “does not declare that ‘we, the white people,’ or ‘we, the free people,’ or ‘we, a part of the people’ — but that ‘we, the people’ — that is, we the whole people — of the United States, ‘do ordain and establish this Constitution.’ ”
Spooner argued that all enslaved Black people should be as free as white women and children. “Because the whole people of the country were not allowed to vote on the ratification of the Constitution,” Spooner wrote, “it does not follow that they were not made citizens under it; for women and children did not vote on its adoption; yet they are made citizens by it . . . and the state governments cannot enslave them.” These were novel arguments and persuasive to Douglass. To Garrison’s dismay, Douglass finally announced at an AAS meeting in 1851 that The North Star would no longer promote the idea of Northern secession. Douglass believed that disunion would mean the abandonment of millions of suffering enslaved Black people in the Southern states.
He also announced that he supported the U.S. Constitution, believing that it would be the means to end slavery once and for all. His unexpected announcement caused uproar at the meeting, and The Liberator and The North Star then published feuding editorials over the direction of abolitionism.
Garrison and Phillips: Was the Constitution Pro-Slavery?
One prominent Garrisonian was the Harvard-educated lawyer Wendell Phillips. Both Garrison and Phillips knew that the Constitution did not include the words “slave” or “slavery.” But they argued that the free states made compromises with the slave states in order to get the Constitution passed in 1787, and these compromises corrupted the Constitution.
Phillips wrote a treatise, “The Constitution: A Pro-Slavery Document,” in 1845, to refute the arguments of Spooner. He argued that the three-fifths clause, Congress’ power to put down “insurrections” (rebellions), and the extension of the slave trade until 1808 in Article I of the Constitution were evidence of the Founding Fathers’ intent to maintain the institution of slavery. (See page 8 for excerpts from the Constitution.)
Furthermore, Phillips argued that the so-called fugitive slave clause in Article IV proved the proslavery nature of the document. By 1846, 13 states had banned slavery but were obligated to return fugitive slaves to their slave masters under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Congress passed another Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. These acts were authorized by the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause.
The 1793 Fugitive Slave Act and other laws convinced Phillips that the three branches of the U.S. government had been “unanimous, concurrent, [and] unbroken” in preserving slavery ever since 1789. “Anyone who swears to support [the Constitution],” he wrote, “swears to do pro-slavery acts. . . .”
In 1854, Garrison publicly demonstrated his anger against the U.S. government and the Constitution by burning a copy of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act at an anti-slavery picnic in Massachusetts. Calling the Constitution “a covenant with death, an agreement with hell,” he burned a copy of that, too.
Douglass: ‘The Constitution Encourages Freedom’
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford held that enslaved Black people were not citizens in any sense and could not sue for their freedom under the Constitution. For Garrison, this merely confirmed the corruption of the constitutional system. But Douglass believed the decision misinterpreted the Constitution, and he held firm in his constitutional support.
In 1860, Douglass outlined his pro-constitutional message in a speech to abolitionists in Scotland. In “The Constitution: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery?,” Douglass argued, like Lysander Spooner, that the language of the Constitution itself was anti-slavery. “The Garrisonians . . . hold the Constitution to be a slaveholding instrument,” he said. “I, on the other hand, deny that the Constitution guarantees the right to hold property in man, and believe that the way to abolish slavery in America is to vote such men into power as will use their powers for the abolition of slavery.”
He argued that “other persons” in the three-fifths clause could equally refer to non-citizen aliens, or immigrants, as much as to enslaved Black people. Moreover, he argued that “instead of encouraging slavery, the Constitution encourages freedom by giving an increase of ‘two-fifths’ of political power to free over slave States.”
Douglass also argued that the clause in Article I ending the slave trade in 1808 “showed that the intentions of the framers of the Constitution were good, not bad.” The clause itself “looked to the abolition of slavery rather than to its perpetuity.”
Douglass argued that the so-called fugitive slave clause did not pertain to slaves. Pierce Butler and Charles Pinckney, both delegates from South Carolina, originally had introduced the clause to refer to slaves. James Madison, a delegate from Virginia, however, “declared that the word [‘slave’] was struck out because the convention would not consent that the idea of property in men should be admitted into the Constitution.”
Instead, Douglass argued, the Constitutional Convention intended the clause to refer to redemptioners, or foreign-born workers, and others who had contracts for “service and labor.” White indentured servants, for example, could be redemptioners, who were forced to work but only for a limited period by contract. Enslaved people, by definition, did not work under contracts.
Douglass offered other arguments based on the text of the Constitution. For example, the Constitution prohibits bills of attainder, which are laws that declare a person or group of people guilty of a crime without any trial. Arguing that a “slave is made a slave because his mother is a slave,” Frederick Douglass argued that the prohibition on bills of attainder alone should have ended slavery immediately.
As for slave revolts, Douglass argued that the plain language of the Constitution did not include anything about slave insurrections. He also noted that the president has the authority to put down insurrections of any kind. If the U.S. had an anti-slavery president, that president could put down a “slave insurrection” by simply issuing an order ending slavery.
Later in 1860, an anti-slavery president was indeed elected. Abraham Lincoln believed that slavery should not extend beyond the states where it already existed. This view was anti-slavery but not necessarily abolitionist. Still, it proved too much for Southern states. A month after the election, South Carolina seceded from the Union. The Civil War soon followed.
Reconstruction and Reconciliation
After the Civil War ended in 1865, slavery was finally abolished. The 13th Amendment was added to the Constitution, making clear that “involuntary servitude” would no longer be legal in any state, except for prison inmates. Reconstruction of the nation began.
Garrison resigned as president of the AAS and called for the organization to dissolve. Wendell Phillips rejected this idea, arguing that ending slavery was only the beginning of what freed Black people needed. He and Garrison fell out of friendship over the issue. The 14th Amendment in 1868, protecting due process and equal protection under the law, and the 15th Amendment in 1870, establishing voting rights, later fulfilled Phillips’ hopes.
In 1873, Garrison and Douglass ended their estrangement. Throughout their careers, they actively supported women’s suffrage (voting rights). At a rally organized by a women’s rights group in Boston, Garrison, Douglass, and Phillips, too, publicly reunited in the women’s suffrage cause.
The debate over how the Constitution’s language can be interpreted to address present social needs is ongoing. To this day, the U.S. Supreme Court continues to hear cases in which it must interpret the scope and meaning of the U.S. Constitution, as well as the history of the Constitution’s drafting. Those in this country who argue over gun laws, LGBT rights, women’s rights, or issues of national security continually seek to clarify whether the language and principles of the Constitution and its existing amendments remain broad enough to guide our present day experiences, challenges, and ideals.
Questions for Discussion
- What was disunionism? Why did Garrison support it? Why did Douglass oppose it? What made it such a polarizing idea?
- Explain Lysander Spooner’s argument about the Preamble. Do you find it convincing? Why or why not?
- When Frederick Douglass was a child, he was sent to be a house slave in urban Maryland. There, he secretly learned to read, a forbidden act for a slave. Why do you think slave masters wanted to prevent enslaved people from reading? What examples in the article support your answer?
This article was originally published in BRIA, the quarterly curricular magazine of Teach Democracy (formerly Constitutional Rights Foundation). Click here for a high-school classroom activity on this article, as well as a source list for the article. You can also subscribe to BRIA for free here.
