The Enigmatic Mr Douglass: Dennis Rasmussen on America's Fiercest Critic & its Greatest Fan.

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's Tuesday, September 15. Last month, we did a show about Abraham Lincoln. Certainly not the first or the last show we've done. One of America's most iconic figures, politicians. Jonathan Earle had a new book out about him published by Oxford University Press called He Has the People, which in Earle's world— Earle's words brought Lincoln down from Mount Rushmore, made him an ordinary man. Today, we're talking about another Oxford University Press book about another major figure in American political history, who lived during Lincoln's time, Frederick Douglass. My guest is Dennis C. Rasmussen, who teaches political theory at Syracuse University. He has a new book out, Frederick Douglass's American Founding: How the Nation's Fiercest Critic Embraced the Constitution [as spoken: conversation]. Dennis is joining us from a rainy Syracuse. It always rains in Syracuse. Dennis and I joked before we went live. Dennis, are you bringing the great Frederick Douglass down from his perch on Rushmore? Of course, he's not up on Rushmore, but in at least a symbolic sense. Are you making him into an ordinary man?

00:02:01 Dennis Rasmussen: No. That's not the main goal. So first, just a quick correction. I'm sure my publisher would want me to note it's Princeton University Press, not Oxford University Press.

00:02:09 Andrew Keen: Wow.

00:02:10 Dennis Rasmussen: But, no, my goal is not to— I mean, this is something that historians and political theorists often do. They wanna humanize, you know, George Washington or Lincoln or whoever it is. You know, I do hope I treat Douglass as a flesh-and-blood figure, but that's not my goal is to bring him down from any pedestal. In fact, I'd say, you know, it's pretty remarkable. He's a hero to most Americans, on both the left and the right in a way that few others are. Even Lincoln, who you just mentioned, now has his detractors above all because of his alleged racism. But, Douglass is admired on the left and the right alike, and that's merited.

00:02:47 Andrew Keen: Frederick Douglass, of course, has been written about extensively. David Blight's book won the Pulitzer Prize. Why another book on Douglass? What's the point?

00:02:59 Dennis Rasmussen: Sure. So this book isn't a biography as Blight's is. Very good in full biography of Douglass. My book is more on Douglass's view of the founders and the founding, the Declaration of Independence, and above all, the Constitution. The idea being, you know, this is, as everybody knows by now, the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of 1776. We're all talking about the founding, and I think it's worth our while to look at Frederick Douglass's view of the founding and founders. All the more interesting and remarkable because he changed his mind radically midway through his career. For the first half of his career as an abolitionist, he saw the founding and founders as, you know, the founders as wicked oppressors and the founding as evil. And later, he saw them as, you know, is anti slave more anti slavery than almost anyone today would dare to view them, and he called the Constitution a glorious liberty document. So he changed his mind radically midway through his career.

00:03:55 Andrew Keen: That's quite a remarkable shift, as you say, a radical shift. He's very well known for his essay. "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?", a speech that he delivered in 1852. So how did he begin his career in terms of thinking about the Constitution?

00:04:14 Dennis Rasmussen: So he came up— so he was, of course, born enslaved. He was enslaved on Maryland's Eastern Shore, escaped to the North at age 20. He worked for a few years as a manual laborer, but he entered the abolitionist movement kind of under the wing of William Lloyd Garrison, who was at that time the nation's foremost abolitionist. He was the organizer of the biggest antislavery society in the country. He was the editor of The Liberator, the biggest antislavery newspaper. And he kind of found Douglass and took Douglass under his wing. And so Douglass was throughout the 1840s very much a Garrisonian. And one of the things that meant was, he was hostile to the Constitution, hostile to the founders. Garrison frequently called the Constitution an agreement with death and a covenant with hell. He in one rally, he burned a copy of the Constitution and ground its ashes under his heel. So he was no fan [as spoken: a fan] of the Constitution, and Douglass followed him for a good decade or so during his first decade as a abolitionist.

00:05:16 Andrew Keen: It's astonishing, really, particularly in the context, I guess, of the America of the 2020s, the idea of an American burning the Constitution symbolically or otherwise. Why did William Lloyd Garrison come to that conclusion?

00:05:32 Dennis Rasmussen: Well, the idea was pretty simple, and it's not a foreign idea today by any means, which is that the founders were hypocrites. Right? They fought for their own liberty. They complained about you know, a three-penny tax on tea, and yet they turned around and enslaved a huge proportion of their population, right, which they kidnapped from Africa. And so they were utter hypocrites. The Constitution was not just flawed, but evil. It provided all kinds of sanctions in the Garrisonian view for slavery. We have the three-fifths clause, right, giving extra power to the slave states, the fugitive slave clause demanding return of runaways, the slave trade clause protecting the overseas slave trade for a time. And so we thought, again, the founders were not just hypocrites, but downright evil. And the you know, the Constitution was a you know, the vehicle for their evil.

00:06:23 Andrew Keen: We're doing a show or we did a show earlier, on evil with the philosopher Susan Neiman. It's a word that Neiman reminds us is a very powerful word because it's the most extreme one we can we use, we've invented to describe badness. You also wrote a book, a very well received book, Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America's Founders, which talks about how many of the founders, including Washington, Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson fell out of love with the idea of the republic. Does that mean that Garrison's position on the evil nature of the Constitution wasn't quite as outlandish and radical as it might seem today?

00:07:10 Dennis Rasmussen: No. It was outlandish. So this— I mean, we have to remember. Right? We look back at the abolitionists as heroic. Right? They stood up to slavery, which we all now recognize for the evil that it was. It's hard to remember even in the North. Right? I mean, obviously, by the 1840s and especially 1850s, slavery has very, you know, staunch defenders in the South. Most people in the North aren't defenders of slavery. They don't like it. They hope it goes away one day, but they see abolitionists as these radicals who are hell bent on pressing the issue that, you know, for them, slavery has been around for millennia. It's not going away anytime soon. And, you know, you're upending the peace and safety of American society. And so Garrison is, you know, tarred and feathered and dragged around Boston by a rope. You know, they are the tiniest and most despised of minorities in American politics.

00:07:59 Andrew Keen: What was Garrison's relationship like with Douglass? We've done some shows on that, and I know there were some breaches and tensions, not just with Garrison, but some of the other figures within the abolitionist movement and Douglass. Did they treat Douglass in any way in a patronizing way?

00:08:18 Dennis Rasmussen: I mean, it's tough. Right? So early on when Garrison— I mean, first of all, Douglass or Garrison is Douglass' hero. His hero as he comes up in the abolitionist movement. He looks up to him like no other. And Garrison and the Garrisonians kinda take Douglass under their wing. They teach him— I mean, he become— Douglass becomes just a fantastically powerful orator. He was one of the most sought after orators in the nation at a time when, you know, attending lectures is a massively popular event. It's on a par with pop music or sports is today. So they taught him and brought him up. And for the most part, they were— you know, they thought highly of him. They— whenever he was Jim Crow, right, denied entry to you know, some cable car [as spoken] or theater or whatever. They would stay with him in the quote, unquote, colored only sections. But at the same time, they sometimes treated him something like a prop. Right? They wanted him to first of all, toe the Garrisonian line, to agree with everything Garrison said, but also, you know, just to tell the story of his enslavement and let the other figures, frankly, whiter figures, do the real speaking, do the real philosophical heavy lifting, which, you know, rankled Douglass naturally.

00:09:31 Andrew Keen: So in terms of this shift in Douglass' intellectual life from following Garrison to rejecting his arguments about the evil of the Constitution, how much of it was personal?

00:09:47 Dennis Rasmussen: There's definitely some of that. So the change of mind comes after Douglass has moved from the East Coast to Rochester, New York, where he starts up a newspaper against the wishes of Garrison. And there, he comes into contact with more of what were known as political abolitionists as opposed to the Garrisonians were anti political. They said that being involved in politics in any way is evil, that to vote for a candidate for any office or to join a political party, you're upholding an evil system. And so it's, you know, by definition wrong. Whereas in Western New York was kind of the home of those who said, well, we wanna fight slavery, and we should do it through the political system. The there were founders of the first Liberty Party and then the Radical Abolition Party. So he came into this orbit of folks who wanted to use, the political system and the Constitution to fight against slavery. He publishes this newspaper. He has to kinda defend his Garrisonian position, in a more sustained way than he had up to that point. And so it was really that the combination of that move and the starting the newspaper that exposes him to new views and leads to his change of mind. So it was partly reacting against Garrison, but partly also just being exposed to new things.

00:10:57 Andrew Keen: I mean, I'm guessing, I'm guessing, Dennis, that there are at least two ways of thinking about this conversion. On the one hand, there may be those who saw him as perhaps an opportunist shifting to the right, becoming more centrist, more concessionary towards the American Constitution, which might have furthered his political career. On the other hand, of course, one should admire him, particularly in our age of rigid orthodoxes and ideologies, for his ability to actually change his mind on something so significant.

00:11:34 Dennis Rasmussen: That's what he said. Right? So the— well, first of all, the Garrisonians said that he did it for purely monetary reasons. There's a very, very rich man named Gerrit Smith, one of the richest men in America, who helped him to fund his newspaper. And he was a political abolitionist. He saw the Constitution as an antislavery document. This guy Gerrit Smith did. And so they said he was basically bribed by Gerrit Smith. He took Gerrit Smith's money, and so he had to— take Smith's position. I think that's patently unfair. Unfair or untrue.

00:12:04 Andrew Keen: Sorry. Unfair or untrue?

00:12:06 Dennis Rasmussen: On both. I mean, so just the timing doesn't fit. So if you go back and look at— it's— it was a long drawn out process. Douglass changed his mind over a couple of years, and Smith didn't offer him the money for the newspaper until Douglass had mostly already changed his mind. So I think the time— timing just doesn't fit for that one, and it seems, you know, again, a little bit patronizing the way that Garrisonians sometimes did. I think more serious is this question of well, did he just change his mind for reasons of political expediency? Right? That you're more likely to get more people on your side if you wrap yourself in the American flag in the Constitution rather than fighting against it the way the Garrisonians did. And there might have been something to that. Douglass said no. Douglass himself said, you know, he just read new things, including the works of Gerrit Smith, others who were less known today, and they changed his mind. And that, as you said, you know, it's laudable to be willing to change your mind and to— you know, it's really a remarkable thing to see this guy. He's a— I would say Douglass was an intellect of the first rank, and you see him wrestling with this serious question over a period of a couple years, and he comes to the conclusion that, wow, for the past decade, I've been wrong. I, you know, I find that to be admirable.

00:13:17 Andrew Keen: Is it really, though, an either-or choice? [unclear; as spoken: 'an evil or choice'] I mean, on the one hand, you see the Constitution as evil. On the other hand, you see it perhaps as a mistake when it comes to slavery. There's a great deal of gray between those two positions.

00:13:32 Dennis Rasmussen: Of course. And I think, you know, most historians today would say just what you said. Right? That there's some of both. Right? The founding is admirable, noble in some respects, and less than admirable in other respects. It's strange. I mean, Douglass occupies that position for like, a month, a couple months during his change of opinion. Really, he goes from one extreme to the other. Right? He goes from the extreme of saying at one point, he says the founders were little better than a band of pirates. Right? And the Constitution is this wicked proslavery document. And then he goes to the complete other end where, you know, there were lots of people who said the Constitution kind of leaned antislavery or could be made to lean in an antislavery direction. He said it was an outright abolitionist document, that if you read it carefully, it demands the immediate emancipation of every enslaved person on American soil. So he really, you know, is black and white for him. He goes from one extreme of the spectrum of American opinion to the complete opposite end.

00:14:32 Andrew Keen: But how do you square that with the fact that the Constitution, and correct me if I'm wrong, was written by Jefferson [ed.: Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution; he was in Paris during the 1787 convention], who himself was, of course, a slave owner and wrestled quite publicly in some ways with the contradiction and the hypocrisy in his position.

00:14:48 Dennis Rasmussen: Sure. And, of course, Douglass is well aware of this. Right? So one of the things he points out is, yes, Jefferson was a slaveholder, so was Madison, so was Washington. We all know this now. The fact that they were slaveholders doesn't mean that they supported slavery or they wanted to see slavery continue indefinitely. On the contrary, basically, all of the major founders denounced slavery as evil and said that they hoped it would die out eventually. Now you can, you know, we could have a whole conversation about how or whether Jefferson was able to square his personal practice with what he professed in public. But he denounced slavery again and again. He tried to in the draft of the Declaration of Independence. And so one of Douglass' points was if they said in the 1850s what they had said in the 1780s and '90s, they would have been radical— seen as radical antislavery, you know, Radical Republicans. The Southerners would have denounced them. They like to think of Jefferson and Washington as their heroes. Right? They're Virginians. They were slaveholders. But the positions they adopted with regard to slavery would have put them in a Radical Republican position by the 1850s.

00:15:51 Andrew Keen: You're a political theorist, a political philosopher. Do you think this is a good argument?

00:15:57 Dennis Rasmussen: The argument about the founding?

00:15:59 Andrew Keen: Yeah. About the idea that somehow the founders had to if not embrace slavery, acknowledge it whilst writing the Constitution for political expediency?

00:16:14 Dennis Rasmussen: Look. I mean, I think Douglass goes further than almost anyone would wanna go today, and that includes myself in saying that, you know, all the founders were resolutely antislavery. The Constitution was an abolitionist document. I mean, that's— we should talk about why he read the Constitution that way. You know, when you look at the founding and, you know, I wrote an entire book about a guy named Gouverneur Morris and the debates at the Philadelphia Convention. Of course, you know, there was people— there were framers at the Philadelphia Convention who supported slavery. So, you know, is it a historically good argument? No. Is it a good argument about you know, how one could read the Constitution? It's far more interesting than you might think. He has a far stronger case than you might expect given the presence of things like three-fifths clause and the fugitive slave clause and the slave trade clause.

00:17:00 Andrew Keen: As I said, you're a political theorist, so you obviously come to this in theoretical, philosophical terms. But can it also be seen in an emotional sense as Douglass coming to terms with the republic, with his history, and with all the ambiguity, the warts of human nature, what it— can't say about humans being twisted creatures [unclear] of one kind or another.

00:17:27 Dennis Rasmussen: Right. The crooked timber of humanity. Right? Yes. Absolutely. So early in his career, Douglass is very firm. He says, you know, I'm not a patriot. I have no patriotism. I have no love for America. How could I love America when it's treated me this way and my brothers and sisters this way? He goes on a couple year tour of England and Ireland and Scotland and denounces America. He says, you know, I'm a reviler of American republicanism. It's British monarchy that's done more to fight against slavery than American republicanism has. But then, you know, as he comes to embrace the founding, he comes to feel more at home in America, and he feels like he's upholding the best of America. This is, you know, one of the main themes of the book is he sees himself and his fellow abolitionists as following in the founders' footsteps in the sense that the founders fought slavery in their time, in the most literal sense possible— fight. Right? They fought tyranny, rather, in their time, and he's fighting tyranny in his time. Right? That he's their true heirs. That Lincoln and the Republicans like to think that the you know, don the mantle of the founders, but Douglass wanted to say, no. We're really the heirs of the founders.

00:18:39 Andrew Keen: So he compared literally the experience of Americans in the British Empire and the experience of blacks in the South in the slave system that in his mind, they were morally equivalent?

00:18:54 Dennis Rasmussen: I don't know about moral equivalence, but they're both fighting, you know, a tyrannical rule— ruling over people without their consent. Right? The British were ruling over the colonists without their consent. Slaveholders were ruling over the enslaved without their consent. That there was a certain parallel there. Now he repeatedly says the tyranny that the enslaved suffered was a million times worse than what the colonists endured. Right? Yeah. Okay. You don't have votes in parliament. You have your tax on tea, whatever. But these are very minor things compared to you know, being whipped and raped and all, you know, all the terrible things that enslaved people had to endure. But what he was trying to draw a parallel for his contemporaries, right, to say, you all, you my contemporaries, you admire the founders. You admire the way they stood up to tyranny. You should admire me and the other abolitionists the way we're standing up to tyranny, a tyranny that's so much worse. So that's the parallel that he wanted to draw.

00:19:45 Andrew Keen: And, of course, it's easy for me to sit here and try and pick holes in his argument, but he was a guy who actually experienced slavery. So this wasn't theory to him.

00:19:57 Dennis Rasmussen: No. Not at all. Right? This is as firsthand as it gets. And yes. Right. So he spends twenty years enslaved. He— because he's had this experience, he's often cast as kind of the spokesman or the representative of the slave's position. He sort of dons this mantle for himself, right, in the speech you mentioned before, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?". He says, I'm gonna look at this holiday from the perspective of the enslaved. And he was able to do this in a way that certainly not Garrison. You know, very few other figure— public figures were able to do.

00:20:33 Andrew Keen: Remind us then of the chronology of all this in terms of the Civil War, and we began by talking about Lincoln. And just to remind everyone, I made the error of suggesting that your book is an Oxford book. Jonathan Earle's book's Oxford. Yours is Princeton. But, how did this coordinate with the Civil War itself and his conversion from a critic, a profound critic of the Constitution to one who embraced it?

00:21:06 Dennis Rasmussen: Okay. Good. So, yeah, just to set the timeline. So he escapes from slavery. He escapes to the North in 1838. It's about three years later, 1841, he starts to join the abolition movement. It's throughout the 1840s that he adopts this Garrisonian position, that the founders were wicked and the Constitution was a proslavery document. It's over the course of around two years, 1849 to 1851 or so, that he undergoes this change of mind. He goes through a series of steps where he changes his mind. Then it's really in the 1850s that he adopts the position I've been attributing to him where he says, no. In fact, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. The founders were, in fact, antislavery. In some ways, this question goes away after the Civil War. Right? The Civil War, we get the end of slavery. We get the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth Amendments. We get— start to get Reconstruction. And after that point, in this 1860s, '70s, and '80s, he lives so long. Right? He starts to use the Civil War and Lincoln and Reconstruction. The Reconstruction Amendments kind of replaced the founding and the founders in his mind. So the story I'm telling is really a kind of 1840s, 1850s story that— the two decades leading up to the Civil War.

00:22:20 Andrew Keen: So would it be fair to say that he intellectually shuffled over into the Lincoln camp?

00:22:28 Dennis Rasmussen: I think he went beyond the Lincoln camp. So the Lincoln camp is— so there's a kind of well known position in the 1850s that was sometimes called "freedom national". The idea being, well, freedom is almost the default position of the national government. Slavery is just a local institution protected in the Southern states, but the federal government should do everything it can to for instance, keep slavery out of the western territories or any states that might be emerged from them, but it has to leave slavery alone in the South. Douglass is one of the you know, really just handful of people who think that the Constitution actually outlaws slavery, forbids slavery. If we're gonna follow through on the words of the Constitution, we have to eliminate slavery in the South immediately. And so he is, you know, I think well beyond Lincoln in this position. It's really just a tiny handful of folks who take this what's sometimes known as a constitutional abolitionist position.

00:23:22 Andrew Keen: Several years ago, and I apologize for not remembering the name of the author. I'm sure you're familiar with him. Someone came on the show to talk about a book which suggested that right from the founding of the Constitution or the founding of the republic, it was always black Americans, slaves, who embrace the Constitution and in many ways were much more learned, erudite about it than white Americans. Was that a theme? In other words, was Douglass not quite as unusual as perhaps he might seem?

00:23:58 Dennis Rasmussen: Well, no. I mean, so there are lots of you know, whether they're free black Americans or escaped enslaved people who escaped slavery, you know, many of them were very learned and participate in these debates. Frankly, a lot of them were Garrisonians. That is to say a lot of them, you know, took the position that the Constitution was evil.

00:24:18 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Not surprising. I mean, if you're living as a slave, it's hard to be as sympathetic as Douglass was to the Constitution.

00:24:28 Dennis Rasmussen: Sure. I mean, it's only natural. And he later— once he had changed his mind, he said, of course, I took that position when I first, you know, learned about these things. Right? He's learning under Garrison's wing, and, you know, he had just endured slavery. Of course, it seems terrible to him, which, again, makes his change of mind all the more remarkable. But there were many black Garrisonians who read the Constitution and viewed the founding in the way that Garrison did.

00:24:53 Andrew Keen: As you know, in his famous essay, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?", he was writing as I mean, not maybe literally, but he was perceived or the essay was perceived as the voice of black America. How was his transition, this conversion viewed from within the black American community?

00:25:16 Dennis Rasmussen: It's a good question. So the this speech, the "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" comes just a year or so after he has kind of completed his change of mind about the Constitution. And this is, I think, his greatest speech. It deserves to be ranked up there with the greatest speeches in American history. And it only gesture— toward the end, it gestures at this new view of the Constitution. But it's a very rhetorically complicated speech. I devote a whole chapter of the book to the speech. It's given mostly to a white audience. Honestly, even his newspapers, first called The North Star and then becomes Frederick Douglass' Paper, the majority of his subscribers are white. So somehow he— you know, both during his Garrisonian phase and his constitutional abolitionist phase, he seems to be very good to— at speaking to white America. He's very popular with white audiences. There's less I mean, for you know, kind of obvious reasons, there's— we have less information about how black audiences responded. Partly, they couldn't afford to come listen to you know, it costs money to come listen to a lecture like this. It costs money to get a newspaper. But we just have less information about the black response to his speeches and writings.

00:26:26 Andrew Keen: And was he used by the reactionary community, racist, people from the South, people who still believed in the institution of slavery to say, well, even the most famous black American believes in the Constitution?

00:26:41 Dennis Rasmussen: Well, so— funnily, he and the other Garrisonians were sometimes used— when he, during the 1840s, when he's in the Garrisonian phase. Right? Because they said exactly what the Southerners said. They said the Constitution supports slavery, and they said it was evil because of that. But they said the Constitution supports slavery, the founders supported slavery, and the Southerners said, yeah. You're right on. They did. And so there's a weird kind of meeting of the minds between, you know, Southerners, John C. Calhoun and his ilk and the Garrisonians. It's this new position, the constitutional abolitionist position that kind of puts them on their heels. So, you know, one of the main themes of the book is that, yes, he embraces the Constitution and the family [unclear; possibly "founding"] with both arms, but that doesn't one bit lessen his radicalism. That is the radicalism of his critique of the country. Right? He's second to none in denouncing America for its evils and the evils of slavery. He, in fact, interestingly, he becomes more militant, more open to violence to combat slaveholders and especially slave catchers, after this change of mind about the Constitution. So it's— you know, in some ways, he does— you said this a few minutes ago. In some ways, it seems like he becomes more moderate. He wants to work within the system to embrace the Constitution rather than overthrowing it. But there are other ways in which he becomes at least as radical, at least as militant about denouncing. Because, again, he says, we're violating all these things. The Constitution forbade slavery, and yet we're allowing it. He becomes even more kind of emphatic about the way we're betraying the founding ideals of the country.

00:28:15 Andrew Keen: But does all this reify the Constitution, or does it suggest, almost sort of a biblical quality to it? That it's all very well writing these idealistic documents, but when it comes to the business of humans, we behave in quite different ways. In other words, does it make the Constitution more or less important?

00:28:41 Dennis Rasmussen: Yeah. Well so, I mean, it makes it as important as it can be, right, if this is how we're gonna decide on—

00:28:48 Andrew Keen: But let me— sorry. Maybe I didn't articulate the question as clearly as I should. Does it make the Constitution so idealistic, given the nature of American democracy after the Civil War and the failure of Reconstruction that it actually makes it less important, in the sense that whatever the Constitution said, America behaves differently.

00:29:21 Dennis Rasmussen: I think I see where you're coming from. Right? So let's finally get down to this. Yeah. I've hinted a number of times. He starts to read the Constitution as a glorious liberty document. Let me say a few words about why he reads it that way because it doesn't seem entirely obvious that it should be read that way given the number of clauses that seem to protect slavery. So he points to the of course, the preamble. Right? We wanna establish justice and secure the blessings of liberty and all these things that would seem to run afoul of slavery. He points to the fact that there is no mention of slaves or slavery anywhere in the Constitution. There's no mention of white people or black people. Any— not even a euphemism for racial differences. So he says, look. The provisions of the Constitution apply equally to all Americans. Black people, whether enslaved or not, fall under this category. They're born in America. They're Americans. And so all the provisions that would seem to give people rights apply— should apply to black Americans. He— you know, the— we can talk more about his kind of method of constitutional interpretation. But he more generally, he takes the allegedly proslavery clauses, and he sort of almost wills them away. He finds ways of construing them in such a way that they have nothing to do with slavery. Because, again, the word slavery isn't even invoked. So it's not just, you know, generally pointing to the Constitution and saying, oh, I think it's antislavery. He's very careful, you know, chapter and verse, looking at the specific wording of the clauses and making a real case for why if we read the words on the page— forget the intentions of the founders. If we read the words on the page, there's nothing there that, in fact, supports slavery. So he's taking— trying to take the Constitution at its word in a way that he thought people in his time weren't doing seriously enough. They were just saying, well, we know the founders. Many of them were slaveholders, so surely this is what they meant to do. He says, well, what did the words on the page say? That's really his goal.

00:31:15 Andrew Keen: And did he, in that sense, lump in the experience of African Americans with women and other people who, for one reason or other, are excluded from having political rights, perhaps Native Americans too?

00:31:29 Dennis Rasmussen: Yes. So he was active in the women's rights movement. He attended the Seneca Falls Convention, and he was the only black person to sign its famous Declaration of Sentiments. Now there was— he— there was an enormous split and a consequential split. So when it comes time for the Fifteenth Amendment, that bars the you know, denying the right to vote on the basis of race, many feminists said, we won't support this unless it also denies— forbids any state from denying, the vote on the basis of sex. And Douglass supported that. Right? He definitely wanted women to have the right to vote, but he said, basically, this is our time. Like, we've just won this war. This is the time I think we can get this. I think we can get the Fifteenth Amendment as applied to black men. I don't— I think we're gonna lose if we try to include women too. So, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, other feminist kind of you know, who had been friends with him and who had worked alongside him, kinda split with him over this moment so that, you know, he won't go entirely to the mat for them, in that instance. But in general, yeah, he's a pretty steadfast supporter of women's rights and women's suffrage.

00:32:42 Andrew Keen: As you say, lived a long time. He was born in 1818. He died in 1895. So he saw upfront firsthand the fundamental failure of Reconstruction. How did that change his view of the Constitution in this whole debate?

00:33:00 Dennis Rasmussen: Yes. So the Reconstruction Amendments were interesting for him. Right? In one sense, he thought they were unnecessary in the sense that, right, he thought the Constitution already forbade slavery. So all they were doing was kind of reinforcing something that was already there or kind of making more explicit something that had been there all along. Now he's, of course, thrilled that there were enough people on his side after the war, after the North won the war that it could be made explicit in this way. He, you know, so he was thrilled with the Reconstruction Amendments. He was devastated that they weren't really lived up to. Right? That in the South, they found ways to kinda get around respecting the civil rights of black people to you know, confer [as spoken; presumably 'not confer'] voting rights on black people after a very short time, right, after the kind of failure of Reconstruction. So, yeah, he has this ambivalent attitude where the Reconstruction Amendments aren't necessary, but they're great, and now they're being violated. Yeah.

00:33:55 Andrew Keen: I mentioned the Bible earlier. The more you talk, it sounds to me as if Douglass was treating the Constitution in religious terms. What was his religious background? And do you think in some ways, maybe, that religiosity might have seeped over into his view of the Constitution, emerged the Bible and the Constitution?

00:34:22 Dennis Rasmussen: Yes. I mean, he's definitely a believing Christian. He started at the— is it the African Methodist Episcopal Church, in— as a young man just, you know, coming out of slavery. There is a sense in which he— I mean, and frankly, he's not alone. Right? But many Americans treat the Constitution as almost sacrosanct, including many who haven't even read it. Think of it that way. And there is a kind of certain almost [unclear] character to the you know, the looking at this clause and the words in this clause and taking it seriously as he does. Whether there's a you know, real connection there, whether one led to the other, I don't know. That's maybe beyond my— I can't get into his mind. But there is, yeah, there's something to that comparison, I think.

00:35:09 Andrew Keen: So what's the inter— I mean, this is all— this is remarkably interesting in personal terms and in the history of Frederick Douglass. But what does it tell us about the broader intellectual history of the African American community? Of course, there was the later debate, so to speak, between book— Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. Did they use some of Douglass's work to make their argument?

00:35:41 Dennis Rasmussen: Yes. So because Douglass becomes the nation's leading abolitionist and, you know, one of the greatest defenders of freedom, I think more generally in American history, he's enormously famous. He is in fact the most photographed American of any race in the nineteenth century. I think there are 160 photographs of him that still exist [unclear; as spoken: 'that is still excellent'].

00:36:01 Andrew Keen: So— Oh, yeah. Quite a face [as spoken: phase].

00:36:03 Dennis Rasmussen: Yeah. Well, he— yes. He's very photogenic. Right? That you can see why he wanted to use— I

00:36:07 Andrew Keen: mean, there's a biblical— again, coming back to the Bible, there's certainly a biblical and Old Testament quality to how he looked.

00:36:15 Dennis Rasmussen: Sure. So, as you say, Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and even later, a lot of the kind of debates within the African American community are wrestling over his legacy and kind of claiming Douglass for their cause. I've read recently a book they claimed that Ida B. Wells was his kind of most faithful heir, and that, you know, that could be. I'm not— I'm not an expert on the later nineteenth century, but, certainly, they all wanted him on their side. They all wanted to use his legacy for their purposes.

00:36:46 Andrew Keen: Well, I assume as well. I mean, maybe not explicitly, but there was an implicit element of Douglass in the dispute in the sixties between MLK and Martin— Malcolm X in terms of how to think of themselves as Americans or not American.

00:37:02 Dennis Rasmussen: Sure. Right. In his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Right? King talks about the Constitution and the Declaration as a promissory note, right, that the founding wrote. He's very much you know, he doesn't cite Douglass, but he's very much drawing on this strain of Douglass' thinking that, you know, we can use the founding and the founders rightly understood for our purposes that, you know, rightly understood they're on our side.

00:37:24 Andrew Keen: And, of course, there was that great debate maybe in some ways still going on within the African American community about whether or not they should go back to Africa, whether they should choose to be an American or not. I mean, the way in which, Douglass was presenting his embrace of the Constitution, it makes black Americans as American, if not more Americans than anyone else.

00:37:49 Dennis Rasmussen: That's right. And he always said, right, if you just look at— once again, look at the words on the page. The words of the Constitution recognizes only two classes of Americans. There are citizens, and there are aliens, though— immigrants who haven't been naturalized. And he says, look. I was born here. I'm not an alien. I'm not an immigrant. So I'm a citizen. I'm wrapped in the American flag just as much as anyone else [as spoken: did]. Absolutely.

00:38:11 Andrew Keen: So finally, Dennis, in America of September 2026, of course, where there are more and more racial tensions where Donald Trump seems to get great pleasure in upsetting people on race. Where's the relevance of Douglass today?

00:38:38 Dennis Rasmussen: I think I'd go back to what I said toward the middle of our conversation, the part about how, you know, if, you know, this is the lesson at least Douglass would want us to take from him and from his speeches and writings, which is that you should fight against tyranny in any form that it takes, whether it comes from the government or private citizens or whatever, that doing this is living up to the model of the founders. Right? That you're not betraying the founding by standing up to tyranny. You're following in their footsteps. I think that's what he would want us to do in our time just as he did in his.

00:39:08 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And the more you talk about him, the more actually he seems like the Lincoln that Jonathan Earle presents, the guy he brought down from Mount Rushmore. Because, clearly, he wrestled with these issues. His argument probably wasn't in— was certainly wasn't perfect, and it's quite possible to critique him. So in a way, what Douglass does or did was expose himself as just another human and being vulnerable to all the passions and contradictions that go along with being human.

00:39:46 Dennis Rasmussen: I think that's especially true in his later life. So my book doesn't spend too much time on the kind of post-Civil War period of Douglass's life, but he's definitely brought— he becomes a stalwart defender of the Republican Party even when the Republican Party isn't as admirable as you would have liked to think it was. He gets kind of used in certain ways. It's known as the Freedman's Bank. We don't need to go into the historical details. But, definitely, the more time you spend on his later life, the more you realize he was, you know, all too human as we all are. But, really, I have to say that, you know, this early period, the pre-Civil War period, he's a pretty admirable guy. It's a pretty impressive, you know, couple decades to read about and to think about.

00:40:29 Andrew Keen: Finally, Dennis, you're also the author of a another very well received book, The Infidel and the Professor, about David Hume and Adam Smith, two of the major figures of the Enlightenment. In your presentation of Douglass in this American founding, are you, in a way, not you, but are you presenting him or should we think of Douglass as a figure who comes directly out of the Enlightenment? He clearly embraces the Enlightenment.

00:40:59 Dennis Rasmussen: Interesting. I mean, he's not— he's not a philosopher. He doesn't spend a whole lot of time. You know? He's, you know, a political thinker, of course. We've talked about his views of the Constitution, and he talks about the founders and so forth. But he doesn't spend a lot of time arguing about you know, John Locke versus Rousseau or anything like that. Yeah. I mean, in some ways, his view, especially, I think his later views, the kind of constitutional abolitionist views are a certain version of Enlightenment thought, kind of a mix— one of the more radical versions you might think of as Enlightenment thought, kind of the Thomas Paine version of the Enlightenment more than the David Hume version. You might say that, you know, we need to be radical in our embrace of rights and the like. So, yeah, I don't think that was a conscious thing on his part, but sure. I mean, he follows in at least certain— the footsteps of at least certain strands of the Enlightenment.

00:41:53 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. Dennis Rasmussen's Frederick Douglass's American Founding: How the Nation's Fiercest Critic Embraced the Constitution is out today. It's published by Princeton University Press, not Oxford. And I think what it does is it makes Douglass so contemporary because the issues that he wrestled over, maybe not entirely successfully, but in a very honest way, in a very painful way, I guess, Dennis, are as relevant today as they've ever been.

00:42:23 Dennis Rasmussen: Absolutely.