Great Antidote Extras: Timothy Sandefur on Frederick Douglass

• Where did the philosophy that underpinned slavery (the idea that it was okay to own another person) come from?
• How did Douglass’ early experience trying to learn to read influence him? 
• In what ways is slavery also the cause of perversions of white people?
• Is the U.S. Constitution anti-slavery, pro-slavery, or a mix of both?
• Is Douglass a patriot? 
  
  

[T]he modern chattel slavery attitudes that we are familiar with from American history, that really only developed starting between about 1800 and the 1830 or so. Beginning in the 1830s you had what was called the Positive Good School of slavery, which was the idea that slavery was a good thing for society and civilization… what made this attitude distinct was that it was the first anti-capitalist ideology in world history, really, certainly in American history. And this was developed in reaction against the rising tide of the industrial revolution in capitalism in Europe and a little bit in America. And southerners started looking at capitalism and saying, This is terrible because it's all just a bunch of people who agree based on contract, and it's all based on rationality and self-interest, and those are bad things. What we ought to have instead is a communitarian society where everybody knows where they belong. Everybody fills a social role. Everybody has this sense of community and belonging and, and isn't that great? Everybody is in harmony and all this sort of thing, which of course was crap because it was based on subjugation and brutality and discrimination and so forth. 

We sometimes we have this idea that law consists of a command from the government to us, and that's absolutely not what law is. Law is a system of rules that allows us to accomplish our own goals vis-a-vi, other people. And so taking that away from slaves and subjecting them to a lawless rule of arbitrariness was really essential to breaking down their sense of self. 

Douglas was born in Maryland, and at the age of seven, he was separated from his family and sent to live with the Old family… Sophia Old who was the wife of his master was very inexperienced as a slave owner. She hadn't had that situation before, so she didn't know the unwritten rules of how to be a slave mistress. And one of those being that you don't teach slaves to read because if they start to read, then they'll start to get ideas and they'll start to wanna run away. And you don't wanna have that, so you don't let them read. So she, out of the goodness of her heart, tried to teach young Frederick how to read the Bible. 

And when her husband Hugh discovered this, he was horrified. If you teach him to read, you know he's going to start having ideas and you give him an inch, he’ll take a mile. And so as soon as Douglass heard that, he tells us that it was the first abolitionist speech he ever heard. He realized immediately that what Hugh was saying was that he needs to learn to read if he wants to be free. So he tricked the neighborhood boys into teaching him how to read and write by saying, I bet you don't know your alphabet. And they would say, Yes, we do. And they would show him by, and then he would practice, the alphabet, and then he would pick up newspapers from the streets where they'd been thrown away and, and this sort of thing in order to practice reading. And reading. Of course, as is always the case, it opened these immense horizons to him. He could read and discover the ideas of generations of past thinkers as well as the abolitionists who were starting their movement at just that time. This is in the 1830s or so. Reading was a, was a huge open door for Douglas as it has been for so many other people since. 

But there's another sense in which you can take the Constitution is an anti-slavery document, and that's the way Lincoln took it. Lincoln said, of course, slavery is in the Constitution and referred to in the Constitution. And he said it even prohibits the federal government from interfering with slavery in the states where it already exists. 

And so he was not, in that sense, an abolitionist, but, he said that the Constitution does allow Congress to take steps to prevent its spread and gradually to lead to its eradication. As he put it, it puts slavery in the course of ultimate extinction, which is a beautiful phrase. That's what it means for the Constitution to be an anti-slavery document in Lincoln's version… 

Even if you don't buy that, you have to admit that both of those arguments are better than the proslavery argument that says that the Constitution is a pro-slavery document, which it very clearly is not. If it were a pro-slavery document, it would include the word slavery somewhere in it. The fact that it does not do that and that its authors acknowledged at the time that slavery was incompatible with what they were doing, including James Madison, who said at the Constitutional Convention that it would be wrong for the document to include any reference to the principle that a person could own another person means that the pro-slavery interpretation of the Constitution is absolutely wrong. 

It was wrong when Roger Tawney said it, it was wrong when William Lloyd Garrison said it, and it's wrong when the 1619 project says it today. 

Douglas had a great love for what he considered to be the heart and soul of America, which was the Declaration of Independence and the principle that all men are created equal and that all people are entitled to liberty. But he also acknowledged how hypocritical the country had been for such a long time and still was toward the end of his life. And in fact, he was rather pessimistic toward the end of his life.

• Randy Barnett on Constitutional Law (mentioned in this episode)
• Darren Staloff on the American Founding
• William B. Allen on The State of Black America
• Shikha Dalmia on Nationalism
• Todd Zywicki on the 17th Amendment
• Jason Riley on Black America