As part of his new mode of argument, Douglass adopted a very literal mode of interpreting the Constitution. He held that the Constitution meant what it said and said what it meant: Claims about slavery's constitutionality ought not to be accepted unless backed by plain language in the Constitution. Here Douglass took advantage of the founders' most notable silence, that the Constitution they wrote never mentioned the word "slavery." Douglass saw this silence as evidence that the founders did not want the central document of the new republic to legitimize slavery by explicitly recognizing it. James Madison's notes from the convention confirm that this refusal to name slavery derived from an anti-slavery sensibility, that some delegates "thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men." (12)
For Douglass, the preamble occupied a central place in his anti-slavery reading of the Constitution. Douglass, in his 1860 speech on "The Constitution and Slavery," invited readers to inspect the Constitution's preamble to "look at the objects for which the Constitution was framed and adopted and see if slavery is one of them." Douglass recited the preamble:
We the people of these United
States, in order to form a more
perfect union, establish justice,
insure domestic tranquility,
provide for the common defense,
promote the general welfare, and
secure the blessings of liberty
to ourselves and our posterity,
do ordain and establish this
Constitution for the United States
of America.
Douglass expressed support for all six goals of the preamble--"union, defence, welfare, tranquility, justice, and liberty."--and he noted that "slavery so far from being among them, is a foe of them all." (13) To slaveholders who claimed that the founders did not mean for the Constitution's phrases about liberty to apply to African Americans, Douglass responded that they needed to read the preamble:
Its language is "we the people";
not we the white people, not even
we the citizens, not we the privileged
class, not we the high, not
we the low, but we the people; not
we the horses, sheep, and swine,
and wheel-barrows, but we the
people; and if Negroes are people,
they are included in the benefits
for which the Constitution of the
United States of America was
ordained and established. (14)
Critics might dismiss this multi-racial reading of the preamble because the all-white Constitutional Convention included and compromised with slave-owners. However, Justice Benjamin Robbins Curtis's dissenting opinion in the Dred Scott decision supports Douglass's interpretation. Justice Curtis argued that the liberties ordained for "We the people," included free blacks, most notably residents of New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts who, "though descended from African slaves" were not merely citizens but voters in the Constitution's ratification process. (15)
Douglass also reversed his earlier interpretation of the Constitution's articles empowering the federal government to "suppress insurrections" and "domestic violence." Since neither of these articles mentioned slavery, Douglass now argued that the only reason they became a license to suppress slave rebellions was because pro-slavery presidents distorted their meaning. He envisaged a Lincolnesque leader using the power of the presidency, his constitutional authority, to suppress insurrection, as a license for abolitionism:
If it should turn out that slavery
is a source of insurrection, that
there is no security from insurrection
while slavery lasts, why
the Constitution would best be
obeyed by putting an end to slavery,
and an anti-slavery Congress
would do that very thing. (16)
Some people's entire lives revolve around politics. How sad is that?
