The American Constitution

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that Frederick Douglass' argument, which characterized the American Constitution as an anti-slavery document, divided between free and slave states and territories, does not stand up to sustained legal and historical analysis of the original text of the American Constitution, as signed after the Constitutional Convention, and before the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation. The author points out that the first Constitution clearly was not an anti-slavery document, rather it functioned as the founding of a republic not a democracy, with a dim view of factional interests, including the rights of both slaveholders and slaves. The paper relates that the defenders of the American Union such as Abraham Lincoln used the Constitution to create an anti-slavery position leading to the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation.

From the Paper:

"Slavery, Douglass stated, deprives an individual of his or her dignity, deprives an individual American of the right to dispose of his or her person as he or she sees fit, and lastly deprives a potentially educated American citizen of the right to read and to obtain an education, even if he or she possesses the intellectual capacity to do so, and thus is a violation of the principles of American democracy. Douglass demonstrates that even marriage becomes corrupt in the enslaved states, a mere institution of breeding rather than of Christian love as it ought to be for, "slavery provides no means for the honorable continuance of the race.""

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