American Spectator: Frederick Douglass, Champion of freedom and opportunity for all
This month marks the 207th anniversary of the birth of Frederick Douglass, one of the greatest Americans ever to live. After he escaped from slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, Douglass eventually settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, an anti-slavery stronghold, and got his first job as a dockworker. His enthusiasm for being able to work as a free man is infectious:
I was now my own master—a tremendous fact—and the rapturous excitement with which I seized the job, may not easily be understood, except by some one with an experience something like mine. The thoughts — “I can work! I can work for a living; I am not afraid of work; I have no [master] to rob me of my earnings”—placed me in a state of independence […].
He described his first day of paid work as “the real starting point of something like a new existence.” Two centuries later, his attitude is a powerful reminder of how precious the freedoms Douglass fought for remain today.
Not long after Douglass got his first taste of the American Dream, he began speaking at abolitionist meetings. He would soon devote the remainder of his life to the abolition of slavery and the ability of all Americans, regardless of race or sex, to pursue the same rapture that he had enjoyed on that Massachusetts dockyard.
During a period when the ideals espoused in the Declaration of Independence were under assault by pro-slavery figures like John C. Calhoun and George Fitzhugh, Douglass proudly embraced individual liberty and equality under the law. In perhaps his most famous oration, the 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Douglass emphasized that the institution of slavery was a betrayal of American values. To achieve the American Dream, Douglass proclaimed, “justice, liberty and humanity were ‘final;’ not slavery and oppression.”
Douglass was not content with eliminating racial discrimination—the same Enlightenment ideals that saw him reject discrimination on the basis of race also saw him embrace equality for women. In an 1886 speech calling for women’s suffrage, Douglass recognized that “[t]he great fact underlying the claim for universal suffrage is that every man is himself and belongs to himself, and represents his own individuality” and that “the same is true of woman.” “Nothing is clearer in my mind than this,” he proclaimed, “that no person, man or woman, living in this country, can be excluded from participation in its governing power.”
Nor was Douglass content with all Americans being treated equally under the law—he wanted them to be equally free. Douglass believed in the right to earn a living in the occupation of one’s choice and felt that equality under the law would be of little worth without the freedom to work an honest calling. If freedom means anything, Douglass stated in 1865, it means “the right to choose one’s own employment.”
He was quick to dismiss socialism, which was gaining popularity in Douglass’ day, as “arrant nonsense” for “attempt[ing] to place holding property in the soil—on the same footing as holding property in man.” This contempt for socialism is perhaps unsurprising, given that many antebellum socialist intellectuals were at best indifferent to the evils of slavery, while some (like the aforementioned George Fitzhugh) actively promoted slavery as an ideal system when compared to the supposed evils of market capitalism. Douglass recognized that the socialist alternative to free labor “would necessarily resemble slavery in its cruelties, as well as in its privations.”
Douglass’ contempt for those who aspired to limit the right to earn a living was not limited to socialists. His response to the Slaughter-House Cases, an 1873 Supreme Court decision in which the Court effectively gutted the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause, was scathing.
In an 1873 letter to the abolitionist Gerrit Smith, Douglass described the Court’s decision in Slaughter-House as “Folly” for laying out an “impractical doctrine of two citizenships.” He lamented that “[t]he nation affirms, the state denies, and there is no progress” and that “[t]wo citizenships mean no citizenship. The one destroys the other.”
Like that of the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment, Douglass’ view was that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed individuals the constitutional rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights and common law rights like the right to work an honest calling, against the states. “The true doctrine,” he wrote, “is one nation, one country, one citizenship—and one law for all people.”
Douglass is best known today for his inspiring personal story (he taught himself to read, in addition to escaping from bondage) and for his key role in driving a stake through the heart of slavery. He has earned his place as a titan of American history for those achievements alone. But his fight to enable all Americans, regardless of race or sex, to build a life for themselves free of arbitrary restraint should not be forgotten. His intellectual and moral agitation for a better America helped make it closer to the ideal espoused in the Declaration of Independence—one in which we can pursue opportunity equally.
This op-ed originally appeared in American Spectator on February 14, 2025.
