Statue Rises for Frederick Douglass: "He saw that the protection of specific groups or classes would lead government away from protecting individual rights and towards assigning benefits and burdens. 'I know of no rights of race,' he said, 'superior to the rights of humanity.'".

• Author: Morel, Lucas E.
• Position: NATIONAL AFFAIRS

Frederick Douglass, a former slave and a leading abolitionist writer and orator, was the most-photographed American of the 19th century--and, as you at Hillsdale College know, one of the most famous photographs of Douglass was taken in this town, just a few weeks after Pres. Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. At the invitation of a ladies literary society, Douglass came to Hillsdale and spoke in the College Chapel on Jan. 21, 1863. The title of his lecture was "Popular Error and Unpopular Truth." As reported in the newspaper, Douglass said: "There is no such thing as new truth. Error might be old or new, but truth is as old as the universe."

A "popular error" of our own day is the idea that, because Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, nothing good could come from him. Douglass surely knew that Jefferson owned slaves, but he knew as well that Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence, which supplied for Douglass and all Americans the key to political progress: the principles that "all men are created equal," that they are "endowed by their Creator [not by government] with certain unalienable Rights," among which are "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness," and that "to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men."

Douglass called these "saving principles," and he devoted himself to convincing white Americans "to trust [these principles'] operation." In this, he foreshadowed Justice John Marshall Harlan's lone dissent against the Supreme Court's infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which produced the nefarious doctrine of "separate but equal." Harlan wrote: "Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law."

Thirty years before Plessy, Douglass observed that the Constitution "knows no distinction between citizens on account of color." The "burden of our demand upon the American people shall simply be justice and fair play," he said. 'We utterly repudiate all invidious distinctions, whether in our favor or against us, and only ask for a fair...