SUSAN DUNN
539
"George Washington can never be claimed as a fanatic," wrote Frederick
Douglass in 1857, a few years before the Civil War. Had Washington
lived in the mid-nineteenth century, he continued, he would have been
"a terror of the slaveholders." Douglass portrayed the nation's founders
as good, beneficent fathers who wished for the freedom of all their
"children"-white and black. America's most extraordinary abolitionist
anchored his appeal for the emancipation of slaves in his praise for the
American revolutionary tradi tion.
Douglass recognized the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution as the radical documents of a new, revolutionary order, and
he challenged Americans to live up to their spirit and principles. "Stand by
those principles, be true to them on all occasions," he declared, " in all
places, against all foes, and at whatever cost." Southerners, he bristled, tried
to distort the nation's revolutionary past by reading the Constitution as a
proslavery document. They claimed that slaveholding was a part of the
Constitution, sanctioned by the founders, and that they even had the right
to
hunt down fugitive slaves.
Douglass angrily rejected such misrepresentations. The Constitution,
he announced, was "a glorious liberty document." Not once, he insisted,
did the words "slave," "slavery," or "slaveholder" appear in the
Constitution. There was not a single principle in the Constitution that was
not entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.
The founding fathers represented the epitome of rationality and
morality; they were the "brains, heart and soul" of the Republic, and they
despised slavery. Washington, Douglass asserted, "desired to see Slavery
abolished, and would gladly give his vote for such abolition"; Jefferson
"trembled for his country when he reflected that God was just"; Franklin
served as President of the first Abolition Society in America; and Madison
utterly rejected the idea that human beings could constitute the property
of others.
But Americans had betrayed their great revolutionary heritage. The
Fourth ofJuly, Douglass bitterly confessed, reminds the black man only of
"the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim." "I am
not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary," he bristled.
"The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence,
bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me....This Fourth of
July is
yours,
not
mine. You
may rejoice,
I
must mourn."
The future lay in a return to the nation's heritage, in a renewed com–
mitment to America's founding principles. America, he warned, must not
be "false to the past."
Violence, it could not be denied, belonged to that noble American tra–
dition. Turning away from William Lloyd Garrison's philosophy of
