“A Man from Another Country”
“A Man from Another Country”
Citizenship and the Bonds of Labor
This chapter examines Frederick Douglass' equivocal statement of his view of the U.S. Constitution as a slavery-sanctioning text: “On a close examination of the Constitution, I am satisfied that if strictly construed according to its reading' it is not a pro-slavery instrument. … I now hold that the original intent and meaning of the Constitution makes it a proslavery instrument.” In this antislavery speech, Douglass elaborates the significant disjunction between the letter of the law and the “original intent” of the law. His counterintuitive construction shows that the dominant historical conceptualizations of slavery and slave personhood are contingent, partial truths, whose very intelligibility is circumscribed by the forms of law.
Keywords: Frederick Douglass, proslavery instrument, Constitution, law, slave personhood, slavery
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