“You should fight against tyranny in any form it takes. You’re not betraying the founding by standing up to tyranny — you’re following in their footsteps.” — Dennis Rasmussen
After Lincoln, he was the best known man in nineteenth century America. And the most photographed too, some 160 portraits of the ex-slave’s unmistakable face still surviving. So there was nothing hidden about Frederick Douglass. And yet the more we know about this most remarkable American, the more enigmatic he becomes.
At first, he was America’s fiercest critic. In the early 1840s he accused the founders of being “little better than a band of pirates” and described the Constitution as a “wicked compact.” By 1851, however, he radically revised his view of that same Constitution, eulogizing it as “a glorious liberty document” that outlawed slavery outright. So why did Douglass change his mind so radically? Is it really possible that he was simultaneously America’s fiercest critic and its greatest fan? That’s the riddle at the heart of Dennis Rasmussen’s new book Frederick Douglass’s American Founding.
Rasmussen reminds us that Douglass got his political education from William Lloyd Garrison, the unbending New Englander who burned a copy of the Constitution and ground its ashes under his intolerant heel. Then Douglass — having moved to Rochester, started his own newspaper, and fallen in with Gerrit Smith’s political abolitionists — spent two years changing his mind about the Constitution. His logic was startlingly modern. Scalia before Antonin Scalia. Studying the historic document like a biblical scholar, Douglass argued that it never mentions slavery nor race. So the rights it confers, he argued, belong to all Americans. This exegesis made him more militant than Lincoln, because he argued that such a careful reading of the Constitution demanded immediate emancipation.
Was Douglass bought or paid off by Gerrit Smith? Naturally the bitter Garrisonians said he was. But Dennis Rasmussen disputes this, arguing that the timing doesn’t work. What Douglass earned instead, Rasmussen argues, was the right to call himself and his fellow abolitionists the founders’ true heirs, more American than even Lincoln and the Republicans. So no mystery, then. The most familiar face in America confessing, in public, that he had been wrong for a decade. If only we had such political enigmas today.
Five Takeaways
• Band of Pirates. Douglass came up under Garrison, who burned the Constitution and ground the ashes under his heel — and who was tarred, feathered and dragged around Boston for his trouble.
• The Two Years That Changed Him. Rochester, a newspaper of his own, and the political abolitionists. The Garrisonians cried bribery; the timing says otherwise.
• Read the Words on the Page. The Constitution never mentions slavery or race — so its rights belong to everyone born here. Bad history, says Rasmussen; a far better argument than you’d expect.
• More Radical, Not Less. He went beyond Lincoln, demanded immediate emancipation everywhere, and grew more militant after his conversion — claiming the founders’ mantle for the abolitionists.
• Wrapped in the American Flag. Only citizens and aliens exist in the Constitution — an argument running straight to King’s promissory note. And the lesson for 2026: fight tyranny in any form.
About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.
Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow
Buy Frederick Douglass’s American Founding: press.princeton.edu
Chapters:
00:00:31 Introduction
00:02:01 Not a man off a pedestal
00:02:47 Why another Douglass book?
00:04:14 Under Garrison’s wing
00:05:32 Why Garrison burned the Constitution
00:06:23 Were the Garrisonians outlandish?
00:07:59 Douglass as prop
00:09:31 Rochester and the political abolitionists
00:10:57 Opportunist or admirable?
00:11:34 The bribery charge
00:13:17 From one extreme to the other
00:14:32 Slaveholders who denounced slavery
00:15:51 Is it a good argument?
00:17:00 From no patriotism to feeling at home
00:18:39 Colonists and the enslaved
00:19:45 Twenty years enslaved
00:20:33 The timeline
00:22:20 Past the Lincoln camp
00:23:22 Black Americans and the Constitution
00:24:53 How the conversion played
00:26:26 Garrison and Calhoun agree
00:28:15 More important, or less?
00:29:21 A glorious liberty document
00:31:15 Seneca Falls and the split with Stanton
00:32:42 Reconstruction betrayed
00:33:55 The Bible and the Constitution
00:35:09 Du Bois, Washington, Wells
00:36:46 King’s promissory note
00:38:11 Douglass in 2026
00:39:08 All too human
00:40:29 Paine, not Hume