Constitutional Abolitionism

• In Event: Frederick Douglass and the American Political Tradition

Abstract

Frederick Douglass, using a unique method of constitutional interpretation—blending a plain reading with history and natural rights reasoning—argued that the Constitution properly executed would bring an end to slavery. This put him at odds with the Garrisonians, who interpreted the Constitution as a pro-slavery document. Thus Douglass fell out of favor with the Garrisonians, but he was far from alone in his constitutional efforts. After changing his views of the Constitution, Douglass found himself sharing a space with abolitionists who believed the Constitution to be a legitimate mechanism for attacking the institution of slavery. Indeed, Douglass mentioned several of these abolitionists—including Lysander Spooner, William Goodell, and Gerrit Smith—as influential in the development of his constitutional thought. Together with this group, Douglass rejected the Garrisonian position of “No Union with Slaveholders,” insisting that a proper interpretation of the Constitution be used to achieve abolition. Abolitionists who used the Constitution in anti-slavery efforts, however, were not simply ideologically aligned. This paper will examine the fragmentation among abolitionists and explain Douglass’s particular place within the movement—highlighting his role in advancing a purer vision of natural rights constitutionalism. Constitutional abolitionists experienced a bifurcation that resulted in two strains of constitutional thought. Whereas Douglass believed the Constitution could effectively eradicate slavery everywhere in the Union, other constitutional abolitionists were more reserved in their approach—they believed that the Constitution could eradicate slavery in the territories and in the District of Columbia, but that it could not abolish slavery in the original states. Both positions shared the basic fusion of text, history, and natural rights—understanding the Constitution based on original meaning and natural rights principles. But while Douglass, along with some abolitionists, employed a broad natural rights construction that rendered the Constitution a viable vehicle for abolishing slavery everywhere in the Union, other constitutional abolitionists tempered that method with an additional strict constructionism based on a commitment to federalism, what we may call federalism strict construction. William Wiecek notes that these constitutional abolitionists constrained their commitment to natural rights interpretation due to a desire to abide by what Wiecek terms the “federal consensus.” The federal consensus has two parts: “(1) [O]nly the states could abolish or in any way regulate slavery within their jurisdictions; (2) the federal government had no power over slavery in the states.” In Wiecek’s telling, what he calls moderate abolitionists, though hopeful for abolition, bound themselves to the federal consensus, while radical abolitionists openly rejected the federal consensus but could still be considered “constitutionalists” because they sought to carry out abolition through constitutional means. Drawing on Wiecek’s work, I will bring these conceptual categories to bear on how Douglass fit within the constitutional abolitionists. But I will forego Wiecek’s nomenclature of “moderate” and “radical” abolitionists and instead term Douglass’s camp “nationalist” abolitionists and the other camp as “federalist” abolitionists. These disparate camps employed constructions that led to two constitutions: one that may be deemed a truly abolitionist Constitution, and the other an anti-slavery Constitution.

Author

• Bradley Rebeiro, University of Notre Dame