The Constitution: a covenant with death, or an anti-slavery charter?

Frederick Douglass, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Read the document. The words slave and slavery do not appear in it. Its preamble is written in the name of the people, to establish justice and secure the blessings of liberty; and if its language will bear a construction consistent with liberty, that construction is the one an honest man is bound to give it. I once held with Garrison that it was a covenant with death.

I changed my mind in public and gave my reasons, and I have defended the new ground for forty years: I stopped taking the slaveholder's construction of the text on trust and read the text.¹²³⁴

Sources

1. To those with whom I had been in agreement and in sympathy, I was now in opposition. What they held to be a great and important truth, I now looked upon as a dangerous error. A very painful, and yet a very natural, thing now happened.

   My Bondage and My Freedom, pp. 396–397

2. With Mr. Garrison, I held it to be the first duty of the non-slaveholding states to dissolve the union with the slaveholding states; and hence my cry, like his, was, " No union with slaveholders." With these views, I came into "Western "New York; and during the first four years of my labor here, I advocated them with pen and tongue, according to the best of my ability.

   My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 396

3. It was new to the people, it is true, but it was an old story to me; and to go through with it night after night, was a task altogether too mechanical for my nature. " Tell your story, Frederick," would whisper my then revered friend, William Lloyd Garrison, as I stepped upon the platform. L could not always >bey, for I was now reading and thinking. New v, vvvs of the subject were presented to my mind.

   My Bondage and My Freedom, pp. 362–363

4. To those with whom I had been in agreement and in sympathy, I came to be in opposition. What they held to be a great and important truth I now looked upon as a dangerous error. A very natural, but to me a very painful thing, now happened.

   Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Where the argument is made

• My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), on the break with the Garrisonians
• the Corinthian Hall oration (1852), where the constitutional argument occupies the closing third
• Life and Times (1881)

How the argument was received

Contested from the moment he announced it. Garrison and Phillips treated the change as apostasy bought with a subscription list, and modern critics still ask whether the reading survives contact with the framers' intentions.