Celebrate this Fourth (or Fifth) of July by Putting Frederick Douglass in Your Syllabus

Guest Blogger

Alec Ewald

The best way to celebrate this Fourth of July is to open your draft syllabus and put Frederick Douglass in it. Particularly if it’s a draft con law syllabus, but Douglass goes with anything.  (I’m a political scientist, and wouldn’t presume to tell actual law professors what to do – but actually, I kind of would.  I think this will be valuable in your classrooms too, and at least one purpose-built casebook features Douglass.)

Plan to read, with your students, two things: his 1852 speech “What to the Slave is The Fourth of July,” and his 1860 speech “The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery?”  I did these first as optional, dropped in alongside required readings.  But over a couple years, the discussions were too good, and too many students said later in course evals that these were among the most memorable and valuable things they’d read. So now it’s a day.

You should try it.  Let me make the case, and since it’s summer, I’ll do it in the most reader-friendly setup – a simple list – and start with the practical bottom line.

1. Every academic has tried to change the syllabus after reading some terrific new book, but found that ripping out weeks of cherished old material to make time was too hard. You can do this – read Douglass, read him meaningfully, enrich your curriculum – in a single class day.  And you can do it at no cost, since students can read them on-line.  Or, if you want, toss them into Word, and make them however long suits your purpose.  

There’s a clean, nicely abridged fifteen-page version of the 1852 speech here.  Full 1852 text is available here and  here; you can see it in a pamphlet Douglass published a week later, here.  The 1860 speech is briefly excerpted here, and you can find it unabridged here.

I do strongly recommend reading both.  The 1860 speech is more extensively about constitutional interpretation, but the 1852 speech is a must. 

2. For pedagogical purposes, this is the most important thing: Douglass makes startling, provocative reading.  Partly because of how vividly he writes (one can only imagine the delivery), partly because of who he was, and partly because of what he writes: a lot of Douglass’ arguments don’t readily make sense together in many modern minds.

And so these two essays invite and demand interpretation.  They generate the best kind of confusion, the cognitive dissonance kind, the kind that’s treatable by reflection, disagreement, and discussion. 

3. Hearing Douglass make this argument, in the ways he makes it, runs a uniquely valuable constitutional-interpretation workout.

Spoiler alert, for those who might not be familiar. Leading up to the 1852 speech, Douglass changed his mind about the Constitution.  In these speeches, he argues that the “American Government” and the “American Constitution” are not the same thing, and that the Constitution properly understood opposes slavery. And he does so with a forceful, unapologetic blend of what we call textualist, historicist, and aspirational claims. 

This yields a few big benefits.  Because Douglass is so clear, even beginning students can readily see each approach at work. “[T]ake the constitution according to its plain reading;” “the law must be construed strictly in favor of justice and liberty;” “backed up by a right moral sentiment;” “if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters;” “the intentions of the framers of the Constitution were good, not bad.” (Dismissive glances at doctrine, in 1860: the Constitution’s meaning does not rest on “whether a pro-slavery interpretation has been put upon the Constitution by the American Courts.”)

Second (and paradoxically), it’s productively confusing to hear Douglass mix methods.  Many textbooks start with explanations of major interpretive approaches, then turn to substance.  Students assume, reasonably enough, that these approaches are separate, very different, even incompatible – and that they have existed that way since ratification. (Even in the most historical-institutionalist constitutional-politics textbook, the opening explanation of interpretive methods is a-historical.)  And of course, students know the Constitution contains clear references to slavery, and that it built a political system that protected slavery.

But here comes Douglass!  Praising the founders and wrenching passages out of their clear historical context and quoting Jefferson against slavery and denouncing the courts and the entire political system and quoting the Bible and doing it all in the service of the argument that the Constitution, “interpreted as it ought to be interpreted,” is “a “Glorious Liberty Document.” 

4. These are deeply religious texts.  Douglass spoke “in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon,” as he said in 1852.  These speeches praise the Constitution, read the Constitution, claim the Constitution in the fight against slavery – and they are also unambiguously spiritual, in language, energy and principle.  This is particularly true of “What to the Slave,” with its dozen references to scripture, a long recitation from Psalm 137, and its conclusion starting with “God speed the year of jubilee.”  This is constitutional interpretation, within a sermon.  “[T]he Constitution is for ages,” he said in 1860, and we “owe it to ourselves, and to mankind, and to God, to maintain the truth of our own language, and to allow no villainy, not even the villainy of holding men as slaves.” 

Blasting “the Churches and the ministers” and praising the Bible, Douglass was a “protestant” and a textualist, with regard to both of his sacred documents.  That is certainly one excellent way to read him.  But don’t spare the discomfort, particularly for your more secular students. Douglass didn’t care for the church or the state, but he also doesn’t separate his religion from his constitutionalism. 

5. Who he is, of course. Douglass was a major political figure.  For decades he influenced politicians, they influenced him, the newspapers were full of him. People bought his memoirs (plural!).  Lincoln asked for his help.  People cared what he thought about the Constitution.  Reading him puts a black voice in your curriculum, and there is nothing remotely token about it.

Your students might not know the term “standpoint epistemology,” but to a greater or lesser degree, these days most of them believe in it: people with certain identities have greater standing to speak on issues related to those identities.  “Lived experience” must have its due. 

So, here is a Black man, escaped from slavery, arguing that the Constitution did not endorse or protect slavery.  Many readers, then and now, find themselves not only tossed into cognitive dissonance but compelled to disagree. (Maybe particularly with some textual claims: with the zeal of a convert, Douglass reaches for several… creative readings.) That disagreement can yield its own discomfort, its own ethical, epistemological question: who am I! 

6. Speaking of discomfort, Douglass is ideally suited to our polarized time.  In an age when it’s not paranoid for college instructors to worry about getting in serious trouble for assigning strong arguments about race and racism, Douglass is an author cited by Justice Clarence Thomas and by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor. 

Douglass combines religious fervor with sincere, repeated praise for the Founders (blaming those “honest men” for slavery is “a slander upon their memory”), all set in what is still, line for line, among the most withering denunciations ever written of American racism.  It’s like Hamilton, only with both halves of the paradox spelled right out. 

7. Douglass changed his mind, and he changed his mind on the thing that mattered most to him personally and politically, in a time of vicious polarization.

Douglass is a hero for a lot of reasons, and this is one of them.  He’s explicitly reflective about it, in these and other speeches (“I am not infallible… I never pretended to be,” in 1860).  And he did it with grace: despite the fact that he was now totally rejecting William Lloyd Garrison’s politics, Douglass tried to give his old mentor pride of place, closing the 1852 speech with a long Garrison quotation, and “let every heart join in saying it.”   

Your students might wonder if Douglass made his move strategically, figuring that praising the Constitution would be more politically palatable to white folks than condemning it.  Maybe, for some, eventually.  But when Douglass decided Gerrit Smith was right about the Constitution and Garrison was wrong, he spoke at great risk and real cost. 

8. Self-serving bonus: Douglass changed his mind partly because he read things written by academics.  True, technically the abolitionists Lysander Spooner and William Goodell had other day jobs (lawyer, journalist). But the publications in which they developed their novel theories of the Constitution and slavery were side projects.  Call them “independent scholars,” then. 

9. Speaking of Smith, Spooner and Goodell, you don’t need to be an expert to bring Douglass in.  A good judicious couple hours reading on-line – including maybe perusing this article – or just reading relevant slices from David Blight’s 1991 book or 2018 book on Douglass (I’ve got excerpts scanned in and I’m happy to share) – will equip you to facilitate a discussion.  Because, see above: your students will have things to say. 

And you’ll enjoy the work.  For example, the reason I said “or Fifth,” way up top, is that Douglass gave the 1852 speech on July 5^th, not July 4^th, very likely because he chose to. Apparently it was common among free black communities at the time to celebrate on the fifth, as a clear but subtle dig at the slave nation’s problems and the hypocrisy of the Declaration.

Anyway, don’t take it from me.  Go do some reading.  And of course the last word, a semiquincentennial exhortation, is from the man: “Act, act in the living present, Heart within, and God overhead.” 

Alec Ewald is professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont.  You can reach him at Alec.Ewald@uvm.edu.