Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Upstate New York is rich with history from the abolitionist movement. My guest today has written a new book about one of its leaders, Frederick Douglass. Dennis Rasmussen is a professor of political science at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship, and his new book is titled, "Frederick Douglass's American Founding: How the Nation's Fiercest Critic Embraced the Constitution." Professor Rasmussen, welcome to the program.
Dennis Rasmussen: Thanks for having me, Grant.
GR: We really appreciate you making the time. So let me just start with the beginning of your book. You've got a prologue, and you do, I think, a nice job of summarizing the current debate that's going on in the country about how we should regard the founding period and the founders in terms of slavery. And it also illustrates, I think, why what you're writing about is relevant to us today. So, if you could just start, just give us a thumbnail rendering of that debate that's going on today.
DR: Absolutely. So of course, there are lots of books on Douglass, biographies of Douglass. My book mostly looks at his views of the founding and the founders and the Constitution. And so, particularly apt this year, we're all talking about the founding because of the, right, the 250th anniversary we've heard about a thousand times by now. And so, you know, we debate about how we should view the founding and the founders, given their complicity regarding slavery. And I say, well, let's go back to Douglass, he had very thoughtful views on this. But in terms of setting it up for today's camp, right, there's one camp that I loosely associate with what was called the 1776 report that was commissioned by President Trump during his first term, that was a kind of patriotic response to the 1619 project, which I'll mention in a second. But the 1776 view of the founding is that the founders were, you know, maybe not demigods, but good people. Wise, well-intentioned individuals, they managed against very long odds, to establish a successful constitutional republic. And yes, slavery was bad, slavery was a large and of course, lamentable. But it was a temporary aberration that the founding generation did its best to combat. And, you know, when we did combat it through the Civil War and reconstruction and the civil rights movement, we did so using the very principles that the founders articulated. So that's one view, what I call the 1776 view. Then there's a second camp, which you can associate with The New York Times, this 1619 project that says, well, slavery actually made a mockery of these principles. Sure, the Declaration of Independence says all men are created equal, we possess inalienable rights. But guess what? At the time, there was something like 600,000 enslaved people spread across every one of the newly independent states. The Constitution, according to this view, has various protections and benefits for slaveholding interests. This allows slavery to expand both demographically and geographically. Slaveholders control much of the American government, national government for the first, you know, seven decades or so. America is the preeminent slave power in the world. Many of the leading founders, Jefferson, Madison, Washington, are slaveholders. So, these founding ideals are just a sort of flimsy cover for the perpetuation of slavery and white supremacy. So those are the two kind of polls, maybe overly drawn, but kind of polls in today's culture wars, I think, about the views of the founding today.
GR: Yeah, it's clear that those are woven into, you mentioned the culture wars, they’re woven into that. So, and then you also write about how Douglass is this towering figure in American history and as you note, he's almost universally celebrated today. It's one of the few things that there's bipartisan agreement on. But you also, I think, give us some good and interesting specific reasons why he is or should be still of interest to us, and tell us some of those.
DR: Sure. So he's, you know, first of all, who he was, right? He escaped from slavery at age 20, he endured slavery himself. He spends then a half century as an author and an orator. He becomes, I think it's fair to say, the leading abolitionist in the country, probably the world at the time, maybe the greatest champion of freedom in American history. And during that time, he's often cast as the spokesman or even the representative embodiment, if you will, of the slaves' position. Views on this question are all the more interesting because he changed his mind radically, right? He spent the first, you know, ten years or so of his career as an abolitionist, holding one view and then the next ten years holding the complete opposite view. So, it's a really interesting thing to see this guy who's, you know, a very thoughtful individual, he's a, I think, a thinker of the first rank. You see him wrestling with this really important question and, you know, coming to terms with the fact that, wow, I've been wrong for a decade on this thing that's very important to me. So, in some ways, just an admirable little episode where you see someone who has this laudable willingness to change his mind.
GR: Yeah and something we don't see too much today on either side, that's for sure. So, tell us a little bit more about Douglass's original view of the Constitution and the fundamental setup of the government. You kind of intimated I think maybe what those views might have been when you were talking about the 1619 project. But tell us why he was the fiercest critic of the Constitution.
DR: Sure. So, throughout the 1740s, he is basically a disciple of a guy named William Lloyd Garrison, who's probably the most famous abolitionist before Douglass's meteoric rise onto this stage. Garrison is editor of The Liberator, the leading anti-slavery newspaper. He's the chief organizer of the American Anti-Slavery Society, which is the nation's biggest abolitionist organization. And Garrison views the founders as utter hypocrites, right? They fight for their own liberty, but not for those whom they've enslaved. He sees the Constitution, he calls it time and again a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. At one public meeting, he burns a copy of the Constitution and grinds the ashes under his heels. So, there's no ambiguity involved.
GR: (laughter)
DR: He is definitely anti-founders. And as I say, Douglass kind of comes up under Garrison, and he's very much a Garrisonian for the first decade or so of his career as an abolitionist. He agrees with everything Douglass says, he reads the Constitution as containing a number of protections and even rewards for slaveholding interests, right, among other things. There's a guarantee that fugitives have to be returned to those who hold them in bondage. You get an augmentation of the slaveholders' voting power in the House of Representatives and also the Electoral College, amounting to 3/5 of the population they’ve enslaved. And you have an insurance that the international slave trade can continue at least for 20 years. And Garrison and Douglass both thought this made The Constitution, again, in their view, is not just flawed, is downright evil. Douglass says early in his career, the founders little better than a band of pirates. Really colorful phrases for the Constitution, I can't remember them all. Something like, a most cunningly devised and wicked project or something like this, right? You know, he's second to none in his criticisms of the founding and the Constitution.
GR: And so that, there were a number of different views about slavery during this period, you know, all different shades. And, you know, Lincoln occupies one space, for example, but that view that you just articulated, how unusual was that for the time?
DR: It's funny, so it's common on both of the poles, right? So some of the leading abolitionists because of Garrison, Garrison just has this massive influence over the abolitionist movement and he does not brook people differing from him kindly. If anyone disagrees with him on anything, you know, he’ll rebuke them immediately, to leave a single difference of opinion to go on unrebuked as a dereliction of duty in his view. So he gets many of the leading abolitionists to take this view that the founding, the founders, were pro-slavery, whatever. But then you get the same view in John C. Calhoun and Taney and the, right, the kind of southern defenders of slavery have the same view. They say, yes, the founders were on our side. Jefferson, Washington, they're slaveholders are on our side, they're pro-slavery, and says we are the two extreme poles have this view, whereas they're more in the middle who are like Lincoln, as you say, who say, well, the founders they didn't like slavery, they couldn't get rid of it immediately, but they wanted to do what they could to, you know, hem it in and hopefully set on a course to eventual extinction. So strangely, it was the two extremes have this view that I'm attributing to Douglass, whereas the middle tended to have a more positive view of the founders.
GR: I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Syracuse University political scientist Dennis Rasmussen. He's just published a new book titled, "Frederick Douglass's American Founding: How the Nation's Fiercest Critic Embraced the Constitution." So, you talk about, and you already mentioned this, but you talk about William Lloyd Garrison. And now, as I recall, he lived a good chunk of his life in this area. Is that correct, or do I have that wrong, am I confusing him with somebody else?
DR: Garrison lives in Boston.
GR: Okay. I may be thinking of Samuel May and some of the other folks that are up here, around here. Okay. And how does Garrison get these ideas? What is his sort of foundational story?
DR: So, he has a number of controversial views, right? Of course, the hatred of the Constitution is one of them. He's also a strictly anti-political or apolitical abolitionist. That is to say, he says, it is the duty of abolitionists to abstain entirely from politics, to vote in an election to support a political party, no matter how anti-slavery they may be, is supporting a fundamentally corrupt institution. And so, you know, he and his followers say, no, we're, you know, we can't even, you know, sully our hands by casting a ballot. So, there are lots of things that and frankly, because of his controversial views, you get a split around 1840, you get a split in the abolitionist movement. It was more common in our area, in Central / Western New York for people to be political abolitionists. That is to say, to want to use the government to use the Constitution to fight against slavery, to support, say, the Liberty Party or eventually the Radical Abolition Party, Free Soil Party, you know, the various anti-slavery parties. So, there's a split where you have the American Anti-Slavery Society that's headed by the Garrisonians, but then a couple of other societies and a couple other newspapers that are headed by the political abolitionists. And so it's, you know, Douglass starts out in Massachusetts, it's when he moves to Rochester, he moves to New York to start his own newspaper, that he kind of comes into the orbit of these political abolitionists and gets, you know, frankly, a different view than it had for the first, you know, many years during his time on the lecture circuit.
GR: And is that a part of the change, then, in his views about the Constitution? How does that come about for him?
DR: It is. So, he moves to Rochester, he starts the North Star, his first newspaper, against the wishes of Garrison. Garrison worries that it's going to compete with The Liberator and kind of take away from the time of his, the time that Douglass should be devoted to lecturing, because, I mean, he's an extremely powerful orator. And, you know, people flocked to see him. This is an age when attending lectures was on a par with sports or pop music today, right? It's like popular entertainment of the first rank, and he exceeds everyone else. And so, Garrison kind of says, well, we, you know, we have Douglass the star, we'd rather have him out on the circuit, now he's going to be stuck in Rochester editing this newspaper. You know, I hate to impute this to him, He may have wondered, could this unlettered, right, uneducated, former slave be successful as a newspaper editor that could have been at least in part of his mind. Anyway, Douglass moves to Rochester, he starts this newspaper, and he's now in the home, as I just said a second ago, of political abolitionism. So, he's forced to defend, you know, at first he still holds these Garrisonian views, and he's forced to defend them against his own friends and neighbors, his new neighbors, in a way that he didn't really have to before, everyone was a Garrisonian back in Boston. And so, is this that kind of first opens his eyes to other possibilities, and then he starts doing some reading and we can talk about his change of mind, if you like. But I think it's both the duty to edit this newspaper and doing so in this new location that kind of provide the, together provide the impetus for his change.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Dennis Rasmussen. He's a professor of political science at Syracuse University, and we've been discussing his new book. It's titled, "Frederick Douglass's American Founding: How the Nation's Fiercest Critic Embraced the Constitution." So, Dennis, you were talking about this change in Douglass's thinking and I want to just to dig a little deeper into that. Is there a kind of ah-ha moment, a conversion moment for him, or is this more kind of a gradual thing as he continues to read, he kind of persuades himself, wait a minute, I've kind of been seeing this wrong? And I also wonder whether it's connected somehow to becoming more in the camp of those who want to use the political system to change it. In other words, if part of his thinking is not sort of strategic, you know, I can't be bashing the Constitution and make any political traction, I've got to change my views. I wonder if that's part of it too.
DR: So, it's definitely a gradual process. It begins in something like 1849. It's really a two-year process of him changing his mind. There are a bunch of different steps I won't go through all of the steps. But he starts, so he attributes his change of mind to new reading. He reads some figures who are all but forgotten today. The really radicals known as constitutional abolitionists. I can talk later about what constitutional abolitionism entails, but folks including William Goodell, Lysander Spooner, Gerrit Smith, who's actually from the area from Peterboro.
GR: That's who I was confusing with Lloyd Garrison, there we go, yes.
DR: Okay, so Gerrit Smith is actually the closest of these figures to Douglass personally, probably does the most to help him change his mind. So Gerrit Smith, in addition to being a radical abolitionist, is fabulously wealthy. He's one of the richest men in the entire United States, maybe the greatest philanthropist that the nation had seen to that point. He gave away enormous sums of money. And so, the Garrisonians accused Douglass of changing his mind, basically, that he was bribed by Gerrit Smith's gold, that Smith helped to fund his newspaper and so, well he had to change his mind to kind of butter up his provider. I think that's entirely unfair. It also just doesn't fit the timing very well. So again, it's a long process, two-year process. Gerrit Smith doesn't start supporting him until he's basically already finished changing his mind, you know, in part, because he has changed his mind. So, it’s not, you know, he definitely wasn't motivated by financial considerations. There is as you suggest, it could be just political expediency, right? It could be, well, I'm not going to win too many people to my side by bashing the Constitution and burning it like Garrison does, you know, catch more flies with honey than vinegar, right? Aren’t I going to win more converts to the abolitionist cause if I wrap myself in the flag and the Constitution and things that most Americans admire. And there are a number of contemporary scholars who say as much. Douglass anticipates this kind of, I don't know if we want to call it a criticism, but this of this line of thinking and tries to rebut it, he says, no, you can change your mind, right, you can just have new ideas, be exposed to new arguments and change your mind. And he says, that's all it was that, of course, I was a Garrisonian when I first came up, I didn't know any better, right? I just, you know, escaped slavery, you know, this is, The Liberator is the only thing I know. But then once he is exposed to new ideas, he thinks for himself and he comes to new conclusions. So, you know, it's impossible to read into his mind how much, you know, the political considerations counted and how much it was just pure, you know, convinced by new arguments. But the latter was his claim, at least.
GR: Okay, I want to join this book that we've been talking about with one of your earlier books. You've got a really neat earlier book, "Fears of a Setting Sun," where you argue that many of the founders actually, by the time they got to their death, they were relatively pessimistic about the young republic's future. I really thought that was an interesting piece. So, let's do that with Douglass. What was Douglass's sense of the future of America when he got to the end of his life?
DR: So, if we skip to the very end, right, so he is seen by this, he lived so long, he lives to I wish I had on the tip of my tongue, I think it's 1895, right, so he lives so long, he sees everything that he's been fighting for come to fruition with the Reconstruction Amendments and then reconstruction, and then he sees it all go away with the failure of reconstruction. So, in his last year, you know, he kind of goes back and forth. He has moments of hope, but mostly he's aghast at how easily he thinks, you know, we have these guarantees written into the Constitution for equal rights, and then they're still not being respected. So, I guess by the very end, I think he too is, you know, like you said, like most of the founders were, wasn't as happy as he had been earlier in his life.
GR: So, I want to come back to talking about this part of upstate New York and get your thoughts about this. I know that this is not what you wrote your book about, but, you know, you've obviously spent a lot of time knee deep in it and thinking about it. This region of the state was such a hotbed for all sorts of political movements and other movements of great passion, whether it's abolitionism or utopian communities, religious awakenings, millennial movements. And I've had other authors on the program who have written about some of those things, and I asked them this question, what is going on with this area? What do you think is the reason why this part of upstate New York has this, it has, you know, the birth of Mormonism, it's got, you know, Millerites. It's just, you know, is there something weird in the water up here? What's going on?
DR: It's a good question. I mean, I'd add to your list the temperance movement, the feminist movement, like, Seneca Falls, of course, is right here.
GR: Women's movement, yes, sir. Yeah.
DR: In fact, one of the names for Central and Western New York then was it was called the burned-over district.
GR: Right.
DR: And that was because of the kind of religious fervor that had swept through the area like a wildfire, you know, earlier in the 19th century. Yeah, it's a fascinating question. I'm open if you have suggestions, but I don't have any myself. It's, you know, it makes 19th century New York, Western New York, a fascinating place to look at, though.
GR: Yeah. One supposition I've heard is a lot of it had to do with the canal, and that being a crossroads. But I don't know, there are other crossroads in the United States or other places like that and, you don't, you know, St. Louis, you don't associate that, so very, very interesting. If you've just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is Dennis Rasmussen. He's the author of "Frederick Douglass's American Founding: How the Nation's Fiercest Critic Embraced the Constitution," as I just mentioned. You know, you've obviously been knee deep and Douglass's writings and speeches in order to write this book. I was wondering if there's any particular passage or passages of his work that really have stayed with you, you know, and to ask if you could share it with us. And so, obviously, I gave you a heads up about this and you did find some things, but I'm really curious to hear what you chose.
DR: Okay. So, I'm going to read a pair of passages that come from the same speech, the speech is his most famous speech and I think one of the great speeches in American history, it's called "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" It was delivered on the 5th of July in 1852. So, this is just after, like a year after his change of mind about the founding and founders.
GR: And this is the core question we've been talking about. He's distilled it in the title of that speech, right?
DR: Correct. Now, his view is still subtle, right, so we haven't really gotten to his view. He becomes, has a much more positive view of the founding and of the Constitution from 1851 onward. But it's still not just rah rah, the founders were great. It's also he's still a radical critic, right? That's the part of my subtitle, right? “How the Nation's Fiercest Critic Embraced the Constitution.” So, he does these two things that don't often go together today, which is, he embraces the founders, he embraces the Constitution, but he uses them almost as cudgels to beat his contemporaries with. So, I’m going to read two quotes from this speech, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?," that point in these, you know, these two parts of his mature view. The first one is prominently quoted in the 1776 report, this report commissioned by President Trump that's a very kind of patriotic view of American history. So, this is a quote from, from Douglass that they also quote in the 1776 report, Douglass says, quote, "The Declaration of Independence is the ringbolt to the chain of your nation's destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost." That's the end of the quote. All right, so very positive, you know, you can see Trump and people like him, you know, embracing this, yes, Douglass embraces the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, rather. Here's another quote from this very same speech. This one is prominently quoted in the 1619 project, from The New York Times. Here's the second quote: "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States, at this very hour." That's the end of the quote. So again, very powerful writer and orator. And it's so fascinating, right? You know, he pulls these two things in his mind together at once, right? It's not just America's great, America is terrible, you know, both are true in certain respects.
GR: So, let's fast forward to the civil rights movement and the 20th century, and a lot of Douglass's, I guess I'll say his second view, the later view reminds me a lot of Martin Luther King, to say, you know, we're taking these principles and we're taking them seriously, and if you take them seriously, then you've got to make some big changes.
DR: Yes.
GR: And then I can really hear echoes when you're reading that and talking about it. And then I'm also thinking, though, say about Malcolm X, and Malcolm X sort of taking more of the Garrison sort of position. I mean, is there any kind of mapping to, you know, later periods that you see here?
DR: Sure. I mean, you could do the same thing with Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois later in the 19th century, right? Malcolm and Martin, in the 20th century, right, where you see, you know, you see these threads both throughout African American political thought, but also, you know, white American political thought, the kind of different uses to which the founding is put. But, you know, I'm sorry I almost interrupted you there, I started to agree emphatically, right, the Martin Luther King, the famous “I Have a Dream” speech, right? The founding documents are a promissory note that we're cashing in now. I mean, this is very much the later Douglass, that we want to cash that, right?
GR: Yeah, yeah. And it was, I couldn't help but think about that. So, you're not going to like this next question, I'm just going to give you that, but we've got we've got about, oh, two minutes left or so, but I want to squeeze in two more questions. The first one is the tougher one, maybe, I don't know, we'll see. But you've obviously got your own views of these issues, I'm sure you came in with them, or hunches, you do all this work. Has it changed your view of the of this big debate that we've been talking about?
DR: I've certainly become more open to the idea that the Constitution can legitimately be read in an anti-slavery, maybe even abolitionist light. With two minutes we definitely don't have time to go through all those elements, I spent two whole chapters on this, but, I kind of had accepted and I think this is a predominant view among historians today is that, you know, the founders wanted to enshrine slavery, and they did so. Douglass has perfectly good reasons to read the Constitution as not just anti-slavery, but abolitionist. If you read it properly, you have to instantly free every slave in the land. And, you know, I would have thought that was utterly preposterous going in. I don't know that he's got a slam dunk argument, but it's, you know, it's there. The possibility to argue in that direction is definitely there.
GR: So maybe not to push you too far, but you've invoked the 1619 and 1776, it sounds like maybe you're somewhere in between at this point.
DR: Yeah. So, well, I guess I'm probably somewhere in between. I think more interesting is where Douglass is, which I argue isn't just somewhere in between. It's not just, well, the founding is admirable in some respects, and it's, you know, less admirable in others. Rather, he, the mature Douglass anyway, he admires the founding and founders every bit as enthusiastically as the firmest adherence of the 1776 view. I think almost no one today would dare to go as far as he does in characterizing the founders and the founding documents is just resolutely anti-slavery. And so, you know, he's unlike the 1619 project, say, he doesn’t, or at least some of its supporters, he doesn't resort to sort of fatalistically writing off America is intrinsically or irredeemably racist. But then, on the other hand, his embrace of the founding, as I just suggested a second ago, doesn't engender the slightest bit of the complacency or unreflective patriotism or sort of, just blindness to oppression that you sometimes see among the 1776 crowd today. He is second to none in denouncing America for its evils, you know, before and after the Civil War. And so, you know, this is the most interesting thing about him is he combines these two things that so rarely go together today, deep admiration for the nation's birth and radical criticism of the nation, partly, as I've said, he just shows how far the nation's deviating from its first principles, but also, and maybe more interestingly, he sees the founders themselves as radicals, right? If we want to oversimplify only slightly, the founders fought tyranny in their time, taking the word fight in the most literal possible sense and he says we should imitate them by fighting it in ours. And that's what, you know, maybe a bit counter-intuitively, after he begins to embrace the founding, he grows more open to the use of violence against slaveholders and slave catchers. And so, he says, you know, if we want to be true to the founder’s vision in the Constitution, we need militant resistance to any form of tyranny that we see. That's the Douglass that I find most admirable.
GR: I'm so glad I asked that question first, because we don't have time for the second one, but that was a much better question, and that's a great way to end. Thanks so much. That was Dennis Rasmussen and again, his new book is titled, "Frederick Douglass's American Founding: How the Nation's Fiercest Critic Embraced the Constitution." Now, as you can probably gather from the conversation we just had, his book is not only deep, but it is extremely readable and the passion in the book comes through. Dennis, thanks so much for talking to me. I really learned a lot.
DR: Thanks for having me, Grant.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
