Frederick Douglass with Peter Myers | BRI Scholar Talks: Black Intellectuals Series #2

0:00 douglas was first one way and then he was a completely different way um and uh that means that when he was a garrisonian he thought that this is again through the 1840s he thought the constitution was a pro-slavery document but then he tells you in his autobiography i became an editor and uh i started reading more widely

0:21 and i came to understand the different kinds of abolitionism and there is this school of abolitionists who believe the constitution is actually anti-slavery and it can be an instrument for us to achieve our our objective and he came to think that was persuasive and so from 1851 onward douglas is defending the proposition the constitution actually is

0:43 and properly read it is an anti-slavery document [Music] [Applause] hi everyone this is tony williams a senior fellow at bri we’re really honored to have a scholar peter myers who is going to discuss his thoughts on

1:04 frederick douglass and the guiding question for all of these videos in the series will be what contribution did this person make to understanding the black experience in america peter myers is a professor of political science at the university of wisconsin at eau claire and an honored visiting graduate faculty at ashland university

1:26 where he has recently edited a civil rights court documents volume he is also the author of frederick douglass race and rebirth of american liberalism and he’s worked on race in america for several bri curricula and appeared on a previous scholar talk which you should check out on martin luther king

1:46 pete i want to thank you for joining us my pleasure thank you for the invitation great well you know i i’ve told you personally many times i love this book i think it’s really a remarkable book on frederick douglass but but really understanding the broader issues of the american founding and race in america and douglas himself really

2:07 i’m going to embarrass you a little bit one of the most important books i’ve read in the last few years and so we’re really really honored and glad you could join us so um the first question i have uh relates to a quote from the introduction to your book which i think really dials in deep very well on really just understanding douglas broadly

2:27 you you write that frederick douglass made it his great life’s work to instruct his fellow americans on the first principles of government to bring the nation into consistency with itself and so to conceive a nobler liberalism than america had yet known so my question is what were those principles and how does douglas push

2:47 america for a greater consistency in achieving his founding ideals and really realizing its aspirations what what were the principles can be answered in a in a pretty simple way to start with the principles are the principles that are summarized in the declaration of independence

3:07 that all human beings are created equal endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights among these life liberty pursuit of happiness people are equal in rights and have uh and these are natural unalienable rights okay uh so those are the principles the country is dedicated to douglas called them saving

3:28 principles uh and uh and not perfectly realized in his day of course and that’s what he was trying to call his fellow citizens to achieve uh one one quick thing about that douglas’s most famous speech that we might uh you know direct our audience to if if they’re not

3:48 already familiar with it is called what to the slave is the fourth of july that he delivered actually on july the 5th 1852 um and you know every fourth of july for us you’re going to find some commentary and commentary is going to be some mixed you know sort of mix taking different opinions uh about that speech douglas’s attitude toward july the 4th was maybe

4:10 complicated but toward the declaration itself his attitude was not at all complicated as i said these are saving principles um really quickly you know you asked another question how did he go about pushing america toward that and the answer is free speech um

4:30 one of his one of the things i like to quote later in the book great is the power of human speech says douglas he made his career after he escapes larry essentially being an abolitionist and then a civil rights lecturer and he made his case one final point not just by arguments not just by explaining to people in some

4:50 kind of dry philosophic way why slavery is wrong and freedom is right but by telling stories by by making his life into this great inspiring story in his in his autobiographies which people also ought to ought to read so that’s that’s for starters right uh well dialing a little bit more

5:12 on on the next question why did douglas believe that slavery was fundamentally at odds with this moral order and the american founding principles as you mentioned in the declaration of independence or or really my question is you know why did he believe slavery was wrong yeah i that that too can be a really long

5:32 answer or a really short answer and uh douglas gave a series of lectures around 1850 on slavery uh and he and he took up that exact question why is slavery wrong and he said my answer is simple uh maybe maybe i should be forgiven or he for his uh his what we would now say gendered

5:53 language but he he said the answer is because a man is himself meaning uh a human being a person is self-owning his own self and how you get to that conclusion there’s an argument in political philosophy that we can summarize really quickly and i

6:14 think also in douglas’s rhetoric and in his in his real thinking there’s an argument from biblical faith um and so the the political philosophy argument boiled down to its essentials is is really this there’s a natural ordering of things and the the the world of nature

6:35 is articulated into kinds of things species of things it’s almost an aristotelian argument um and so there’s such a thing as a human nature you know a human being is a kind of a thing and a human being is distinguished from other parts of the animal creation

6:56 by essentially two things by a rational capability for freedom and a moral desire for freedom and those two things added together get you to the conclusion that people have a right to liberty that people are in that sense

7:16 uh self self owning the the biblical argument is that slavery is against god’s law uh and that carries an interesting implication which he which he draws out that that means that the essence of slavery really is a

7:37 rebellion against god’s order uh i mean in because god established you know this natural articulation of beings so you’re treating to treat a human being as though a human being were livestock you know a lower a part of the lower animal creation is a violation of uh of the divine ordering um

7:58 so long before the civil war douglas is saying that the the slaveholders are are rebels yes of the essence of slavery is moral rebellion right and speaking of rebellion how does douglas uh justify resistance to the tyranny to the injustices of slavery uh that you just mentioned

8:20 all right resistance is a significant word so let’s say let’s say i mean significant in his day as well as ours let’s say two kinds of resistance um resistance by force of law resistance by force of arms

8:41 and uh he first has to overcome the influence of the the man the abolitionist who was his mentor william lloyd garrison who was in the language of the day uh part of a a a a body of a body of thought called non-resistance which was

9:01 derived from the a couple of biblical texts turn the other cheek and resist not evil and and so forth don’t return evil for evil so the garrisonians think we have to undo slavery by speech by moral suasion as it was called and douglas i think never completely bought into that but but some of it when he was with the

9:23 garrisonians through the 1840s he meets john brown in 1847 and john brown is trying to convince him that the the slave holders are not going to give up slavery either voluntarily or peacefully so it’s going to have to be by one or another kind of force you’ll we’ll get to this i know douglas changed his mind about the constitution and he

9:45 came to think that the federal government actually does have legal power legal authority to to undo slavery but if you couldn’t get the federal government to do that then other alternatives are morally open where where the law fails where politics

10:06 fails the the violation of natural rights justifies forceful resistance and so douglas did come to support that pretty loudly and openly in the in the 1850s and so uh you mentioned douglas’s views on the constitution so what were these complex views on whether the

10:26 uh the constitution is pro-slavery or anti-slavery and maybe how do they change over time yeah that’s a that’s also you know a really big and important subject i’m uh i’m tempted this is going to be off-putting to some listeners and maybe uh gratifying to others i speaking the language of the chosen if you’ve been watching that series uh yeah

10:48 douglas was first one way and then he was a completely different way um and uh that means that when he was a garrisonian he thought that this is again through the 1840s he thought the constitution was a pro-slavery document but then he tells you in his autobiography i became an editor and uh i started reading more widely

11:10 and i came to understand the different kinds of abolitionism and there is this school of abolitionist who believe the constitution is actually anti-slavery and it can be an instrument for us to achieve our objective and he came to think that was persuasive and so from 1851 onward douglas is defending the proposition the constitution actually is

11:32 and properly read it is an anti-slavery document how he came to that conclusion he was influenced by certain writers foremost among whom is lysander spooner but his reading of the constitution is interesting and and and law professors at least a certain slice of them are

11:52 still find it his and spooner’s arguments um persuasive some some do anyway it’s partly based on a strict textualism uh you know meaning that the word slave or slavery never appears in the in the original the founders constitution and it’s also informed by a principle

12:13 that where there is ambiguity in the in the us constitution and you need to interpret it you resolve the ambiguities by reference to the overall goals the objects of the constitution as they as they said and that means you have to resolve the ambiguities in favor of

12:33 liberty in favor of the natural rights idea one one last point about uh douglas and the constitution there are different way i mean once you get to the conclusion the constitution’s anti-slavery that tells you something important but not everything because there are lots of different ways of judging the constitution anti-slavery

12:54 and different degrees of it the short way to put it is that for douglas douglas was douglas took the most radically anti-slavery reading possible of the constitution that the constitution is not just anti-slavery in the sense that it’s looking down the road to emancipation

13:16 the constitution is actually abolitionist meaning that it not only provides the federal government the power to abolish slavery instantly and everywhere but it provides the duty to do so slavery was unconstitutional we could talk about you know the passages in the

13:36 constitution why he why he says that but uh but i’ll i’ll let you follow up if you want to talk more about that right well and and a very different view from lincoln right uh who believed in the anti-slavery constitution but took a different reading of the the powers of the government to immediately uh abolish it you know that’s very interesting yes that that was lincoln’s view

13:57 um you might say all the way up until it wasn’t i mean you know lincoln was a gradualist and douglas douglas was a proponent of immediate abolition but once the war broke out lincoln lincoln effected immediate abolition uh and so uh lincoln became uh lincoln was uh lincoln became a hero to

14:18 frederick douglass which is not what he was to douglas uh in the earlier parts of his presidency all right um my last question is is it is a big one and and really at the heart of this series um you know douglas really profoundly and deeply reflected on on the black experience in america and really came up with complex answers and

14:40 and we may not be able to dig around in all of that complexity um just in in the time we have remaining but what were some of the most important challenges uh and impediments for african americans in the american regime in american society and and what paths does does douglas envision as as the best paths forward for for achieving

15:01 those ideals of liberty and justice and equality okay about the challenge first uh i think um again the the well a good way to to to address that in summary is to say douglas says something really interesting in 1862

15:22 says it a couple of times also again in 1863 he’s anticipating the end of the civil war he’s anticipating victory and he says the day that we win you know the day the union forces prevail the slave holder surrender is going to be the most trying day for american virtue in the nation’s history and what he meant by that is that

15:42 the the problem of abolishing slavery which was hugely difficult you know in the first decades of the republic is not the biggest problem the the bigger problem beyond that will be the problem of integrating the class of people formerly enslaved with the rest of the

16:03 with the rest of the country that is securing full equal citizenship civil rights for everybody that’s going to be a harder problem because slavery by that time was concentrated in a region and hostility to slavery was prevalent in the in the northern states um but

16:25 uh there was considerable anti-black sentiment in the northern states as well as the south so race prejudice was pretty much universal uh and deeper than the support for slavery and so that’s what he meant in saying that the problem was gonna be harder even uh the remaining work after the civil war so about the

16:47 the paths he envisioned let me say a general thing and then a couple of particular things and and that’ll and that’ll have to do um the general thing is this i think douglas thought um it’s a basic principle political philosophy really that if you boil down

17:07 the problems of political life of all political life everywhere they are essentially two problems i mean one is to secure justice against the natural human propensity to do injustice to each other um so liberation if we want to put it that way and the second part of the problem is elevation meaning

17:29 um the cultivation of uh of of human excellence of virtue so securing rights cultivating virtue those are those are the problems and and in a way you know those are those are douglas’s foremost concerns throughout his whole life and so there’s there are two tracks that uh

17:51 that black americans are going to have to travel along at once and one of them is this is one of his words again agitation for rights and so in the immediate aftermath of the civil war that means especially voting rights and property rights and

18:11 educational opportunities let’s say and just the guarantee of the full range of civil rights access fair treatment in the in the criminal justice system uh but beyond that you know beyond the agitation for the for the equal civil rights douglas speaking to black americans was essentially saying it’s it’s on us the

18:33 elevation part the self-improvement part the preparation to exercise the rights fruitfully that we’re trying to win the the cultivation of the full range of human virtues that’s not something anybody else can do for us we we’ve got to do that for our for ourselves um so i’ll i i’m gonna let me put a couple of plugs in uh

18:55 that uh one of them is following up on some of you and i were talking about before the before the broadcast um it’s it’s often thought that douglas’s heirs in in american political thought are w.b du bois and martin luther king jr

19:16 and that’s not wrong they they are but i i really would stress adding booker t washington to that i mean when washington says in his most famous speech it is important and right that we get all of the rights that are proper to american citizenship and to human beings but it’s no less important that we be

19:37 prepared to exercise those rights and that we have to do for for ourselves it’s uh martin luther king called it a two-front war and that’s that was exactly douglas’s position also so this the other plug is this argument for racial development uh is uh as it’s now called is an argument

19:58 made by shelby steele and lately by by robert woodson in the 1776 project i think that’s that’s entirely in the spirit of frederick douglass too excellent uh pete myers thank you for joining us uh the book is frederick douglass race and the rebirth of american liberalism a really important book everyone should go out and read

20:20 and i want to thank all of you for joining us on this uh episode of scholar talks and please check out our next installments uh in the series black intellectuals and after the african-american experience and also check out our previous series on the cold war and the presidency and our upcoming series on pivotal battles in american history thank you very much

20:48 you