The United States Constitution has a powerful and enduring place in the career of Frederick Douglass. Once he committed to his belief in the Constitution as a valid document, he used it as a tool in his arsenal to advocate for the freedom, and later the civil rights of African Americans and women. Initially, Douglass found himself at odds with his fellow Garrisonian abolitionists; later his support of the Fifteenth Amendment and Black male suffrage was opposed by some of his White female allies. Despite the conflict with friends and allies, he would continue to view the Constitution as the ideal to which the country had yet to fulfill. Like all great thinkers, Douglass was a complicated man whose position evolved throughout his lifetime.
Douglass publicly changed his stance on the Constitution in the spring of 1851. The American Anti-Slavery Society established a new policy denouncing any paper that opposed the organization’s belief in the Constitution as a pro-slavery document at its 1851 annual meeting. Douglass, a longtime member, announced that under this new policy his paper The North Star was ineligible for their endorsement. He published his new stance in the May 15, 1851 edition of The North Star, stating that his interpretation of the Constitution as an anti-slavery document established a precedent which allowed it to be “wielded on behalf of emancipation.”
