Women’s Rights 283At first Douglass was, in his own words, “a faith-
ful disciple” of Garrison, prepared to tear up the
Constitution and destroy the Union to gain his ends.
In the late 1840s, however, he changed his mind,
deciding that the Constitution, created to “establish
Justice, insure domestic Tranquility... and secure
the Blessings of Liberty,” as its preamble states,
“could not well have been designed at the same time
to maintain and perpetuate a system of rapine and
murder like slavery.” Thereafter he fought slavery and
race prejudice from within the system, something
Garrison was never willing to do.
Garrison’s importance cannot be measured by the
number of his followers, which was never large. Unlike
more moderately inclined enemies of slavery, he recog-
nized that abolitionism was a revolutionary movement,
not merely one more middle-class reform. He also
understood that achieving racial equality, not merely
“freeing” the slaves, was the only way to reach the abo-
litionists’ professed objective: full justice for blacks.
And he saw clearly that few whites, even among aboli-
tionists, believed that blacks were their equals.
At the same time, Garrison
seemed utterly indifferent to what
effect the “immediate” freeing of the
slaves would have on the South.
Garrison said he would rather be
governed by “the inmates of our
penitentiaries” than by southern con-
gressmen, whom he characterized as
“desperadoes.” The life of the slave-
owner, he wrote, is “one of unbri-
dled lust, of filthy amalgamation, of
swaggering braggadocio, of haughty
domination, of cowardly ruffianism,
of boundless dissipation, of matchless
insolence, of infinite self-conceit, of
unequaled oppression, of more than
savage cruelty.” His followers were
no less insistent. “Slavery and cruelty
cannot be disjoined,” one wrote.
“Consequently every slaveholder
must be inhuman.”
Both Garrison’s insights into the
limits of northern racial egalitarian-
ism and his blind contempt for
southern whites led him to the con-
clusion that American society was
rotten to the core. Thus he refused
to make any concession to the exist-
ing establishment, religious or secu-
lar. He was hated in the North as
much for his explicit denial of the
idea that a constitution that sup-
ported slavery merited respect as for
his implicit denial of the idea that a
professed Christian who tolerated slavery for even an
instant could hope for salvation. He was, in short, a
perfectionist, a trafficker in moral absolutes who
wanted his Kingdom of Heaven in the here and now.
By contrast, most other American reformers were
willing to settle for perfection on the installment plan.Garrison, First Issue of The Liberatorat
myhistorylab.com
Passages from The Autobiography of
Frederick Douglassatmyhistorylab.comWomen’s Rights
The question of slavery was related to another major
reform movement of the era, the crusade for women’s
rights. The relationship was personal and ideological,
direct and indirect, simple and profound. Superficially,
the connection can be explained in this way: Women
were as likely as men to find slavery offensive and to
protest against it. When they did so, they ran into even
more adamant resistance: the prejudices of those whoReadtheDocumentReadtheDocumentSingle women worth at least 50 pounds were allowed to vote in New Jersey from 1775 to 1807.