Douglass compared government and the Constitution to "a ship and a compass": the latter could point correctly while the former steered wrongly. Decades of pro-slavery legislation might represent not the fulfillment of the Constitution but its betrayal.
Wheatley Constitutional Government Fellow Dr. Bradley Rebeiro's recently published work Until the Last Yoke Is Broken: The Constitutional Vision of Frederick Douglass is receiving national attention, including a recent review from David S. Reynolds with the Wall Street Journal.
Throughout the book, Dr. Rebeiro explores the legal and cultural foundations set forward in the Consititution and their implications for both pro- and anti-slavery movements through American history. Rebeiro especially focuses on the the arguments and experience of Frederick Douglass, who originally condemned the Constitution for its protections on slavery, but eventually came to embrace its sweeping precedents for liberty as laying a foundation for slavery's end.