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Introduction. “A Man from Another Country”: Citizenship and the Bonds of Labor
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Introduction. “A Man from Another Country” Citizenship and the Bonds of Labor What will the people of America a hundred years hence care about the intentions of the scriveners who wrote the Constitution? —Frederick Douglass, “The Constitution of the United States: Is it Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery?” In 1849, as the Union crisis escalated over yet another likely compromise with American slavery, Frederick Douglass startled the antislavery movement with an unusually equivocal statement of his view of the Constitution as a slavery-sanctioning text: “On a close examination of the Constitution, I am satisfied that if ‘strictly construed according to its reading’ it is not a pro-slavery instrument. . . . I now hold that the original intent and meaning of the Constitution (the one given to it by the men who framed it, those who adopted it, and the one given to it by the Supreme Court of the United States) makes it a proslavery instrument.”1 Douglass’s concluding claim that “the original intent and meaning of the Constitution” made it “a pro-slavery instrument” was uncontroversial, the reiteration of an interpretation widely accepted by abolitionists and slaveholders alike in antebellum America. Indeed, this view of the original Constitution as a slavery-sanctioning document remains accepted by most modern historians. What startled so many in 1849 was Douglass ’s first claim, one that seemed to contradict this interpretation of the Constitution. How could one hold the view that the “original intent and meaning” of the Constitution was to sanction and safeguard slavery, while simultaneously arguing that “if strictly construed,” the Constitution was not a proslavery document? How could the meaning of this founding legal 2 Introduction document be construed against that “intended” meaning “given to it by the men who framed it”? These were the central hermeneutic questions of the debate over what would come to be called the 1850 Compromise and its federal Fugitive Slave Act. In his editorial entitled “The Address of Southern Delegates in Congress to their Constituents; or, the Address of John C. Calhoun and Forty Other Thieves,” appearing in the same 9 February issue of the North Star, Douglass elaborated upon this distinction between the conception of a law’s “original intent and meaning” based on the historical context of its framing and its legislative intent, based on the “strict construction” of its language. Douglass observed: “It will be seen that [Calhoun’s] “Address” assumes a clear recognition of slavery in the United States Constitution, by the clause relating to taxation and representation—that relating to the return of fugitive slaves, and that respecting the importation of slaves.”2 The problem for these political representatives of the slaveholders, Douglass argued—and here we have the first articulation of the emerging shift in Douglass’s interpretation of the Constitution—is that the so-called “slave clauses” contained no such clear recognition of slavery: “We deem it unfortunate for these honourable menstealers, that in no instances have they been able to find a word in either of these clauses which bears the definition of slaves or slavery. The word slave in all these references is the word of this conclave, and not the Constitution.”3 According to Douglass, slaveholders were confounded in their attempts to read the Constitution as a slavery-sanctioning document because, just as the word is absent from their own “Address,” it is absent from that founding law whose legitimating authority they invoke. If slavery’s political representatives avoided using the “gross form of the word slavery” to name that system they defended, the Constitution’s framers also avoided this word, likewise referring to slavery and its subjects only through euphemism and indirection . As Douglass argued further: “The fact is, the framers of that cunning instrument were ashamed of the name, while they had not the honesty to renounce the thing, slavery; and it is the same sense of shame today which leads the friends and defenders of this inhuman system to use the term ‘peculiar institution,’ ‘the relation existing between the European and African races’ and the like.”4 In Douglass’s reading, this shared “way of sliding over of the hateful word slavery” links the rhetorical practice of the slavery-defending southern delegates to the writing practice of the slavery-sanctioning constitutional framers.5 [3.236.147.122] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:48 GMT) Introduction 3 Douglass’s reading practice thus extends beyond the “ambiguous terms” of Calhoun’s “Address” to the “ambiguously worded” Constitution itself: “The language in...