Our ‘GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT’
When asked about my hope for our great nation, I often reflect on the life and words of a true American hero to describe my optimism – Frederick Douglass, who escaped from the brutal bonds of slavery in 1838. Douglass was an amazing 19th-century American orator, abolitionist, and woman’s suffragist. He was one of the greatest minds and speakers in American history, and his friendship molded the mind and shaped the perspective of President Abraham Lincoln. Based on his first-hand experience with the horrors of slavery, he offers a particularly unique view of the American experiment.
Douglass stated the following hard truth in 1852 when asked to give remarks on Independence Day, in a speech entitled “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July”:
This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today?
After these strongly condemning words, Douglass went on to say:
The American people, likewise, have made void their law by their traditions; they have trampled upon their own constitution, stepped beyond the limits set for themselves, and, in their ever-abounding iniquity, established a constitution of action outside of the fundamental law of the land. While the one is good, the other is evil; while the one is for liberty, the other is in favour of slavery; the practice of the American government is one thing, and the character of the constitution of the government is quite another and different thing.
There is an important nuance here that follows the thoughts of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution: We are forming “a more perfect union.” We have not yet arrived. And while we are progressing in a non-steady fashion, we are committed to ultimately aligning ourselves with our founding principles. As Douglass reminds us, our shortcomings don’t derive from a principle problem but an application problem.
With the scars and the pains of whip marks on his back, Douglass went on in his remarks to describe the Constitution as “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT” (emphasis provided by Douglass in a pamphlet he published to correspond with his speech). He went on to explain that our Founders were “great men” and “brave men.” He stated that those founding fathers were “entitled to the profound gratitude of mankind.”
Our Founders weren’t perfect. Our history isn’t perfect. We are not perfect!
But our tragic errors and serious shortcomings are not because our principles are flawed. It’s not because our origin is rotten. Instead, it is because we have not yet perfectly aligned our practices with our principles. A constant pursuit of those principles should motivate our every action and inform our daily perspective. On our semiquincentennial and beyond, we must endlessly and tirelessly struggle for a more perfect union to see our practices converge with our GLORIOUS LIBERTY principles.