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Talking about slavery and the Constitution with Alan Guelzo, Sean Wilentz, and others

I participated in an online event hosted by the Heritage Foundation in September about the Constitution, slavery, the 1619 Project, and so forth. On the panel were Sean Wilentz, Alan Guelzo, Lucas Morel, and Paul Larkin. A revised transcript of our conversation is now available here, and if you want to watch the whole thing, it's here:

My review of Damon Root's new book on Frederick Douglass

...is now available at The Objective Standard. Excerpt:

As Root explains, Douglass mostly hewed to [William Lloyd] Garrison’s opinions at first, but he was never entirely comfortable with them. For instance, Garrison thought that violence was never justified, even as a tactic against slavery, but Douglass—who had more than once been forced to defend himself with his fists, against both southern slave masters and northern racists—was “never destined to be much of a pacifist.” On the contrary, he celebrated slave uprisings, encouraged forcible resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, and viewed the insurrectionist John Brown—who tried unsuccessfully to recruit him to participate in his disastrous 1859 attack on Harpers Ferry—as one of America’s greatest heroes. But the more significant conflict came when Douglass dramatically repudiated Garrison’s anti-Constitution views and embraced instead the pro-Constitution abolitionism of Gerrit Smith and his allies.

Root is at his best when emphasizing the diligence with which Douglass studied this question before changing his mind. This is worthwhile because Garrison and his allies later accused the former slave of compromising his principles for purposes of personal gain—and historians still make this accusation today. This Root rightly regards as “a cheap smear.” The reality is that Douglass seriously examined the subject for years, devouring complex books of constitutional law and history, particularly those by Lysander Spooner, William Goodell, and Smith himself. It was only after four years of careful examination that Douglass announced that he had been persuaded. The Constitution was not a “pact with hell” as Garrison had taught him; instead, it was an antislavery document, at least in principle, and a potential tool for abolition.

Read the rest...