Frederick Douglass's American Founding: How the Nation’s Fiercest Critic Embraced the Constitution

The remarkable story of how Frederick Douglass went from condemning the Constitution as a proslavery pact to celebrating it as a “glorious liberty document” that promises freedom to everyoneThe speeches and writings of Frederick Douglass contain some of the most probing examinations ever of the role that slavery played in America’s founding.In Frederick Douglass’s American Founding, Dennis Rasmussen traces the great abolitionist’s intellectual journey from denouncing the founders as hypocrites and the Constitution as evil to embracing them both. Throughout the 1840s, Douglass described the founders as “little better than a band of pirates” and the Constitution as “a most cunningly-devised and wicked compact.” Beginning in 1849, however, he undertook a long period of study and reflection that produced a dramatic change of mind.From 1851 on, Douglass contended that the founders were resolutely opposed to slavery and that the Constitution was a “glorious liberty document” that mandated im