 Last year, The New York Times published the 1619 project, an immensely ambitious, influential, and controversial reframing of American history. The project's creator, Nicole Hannah-Jones, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her work, argued that the U.S. Constitution was a decidedly undemocratic document and that anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country. Our country says that we were founded to be a democracy, but we were actually founded as a slaveocracy. This interpretation of the American founding has been the subject of a heated debate. The 1619 project has also been adapted into a high school curriculum that attempts to reframe U.S. history by marking the year when the first enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil as our nation's foundational date. After the 1619 project was attacked by five eminent historians, the project's editor responded by reiterating Hannah-Jones's view that advances from minority groups have almost always come as a result of political and social struggles in which African-Americans have generally taken the lead, not as a working out of the eminent logic of the Constitution. But this view of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence is at odds with that of Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave, abolitionist, author, and towering figure in American history. In his new book, A Glorious Liberty, Frederick Douglass and the Fight for an Anti-Slavery Constitution, reasoned senior editor Damon Root looks at the arguments that took place in the middle of the 19th century over racism and America's founding, which are being replayed today. If you look at what Frederick Douglass and Lamela Garrison were fighting over in the 1840s and 1850s, you see what people are fighting about right now, which is the founding, just a pro-slavery compact, and Douglass completely rejects that. As a former slave, Douglass had no illusions about racism, but his view of the Constitution, which he called a glorious liberty document, would put him at odds with many of its contemporary critics. Douglass' challenge really is that the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence lay out these powerful principles, but why don't we live up to them? Clearly, the nation is not living up to those principles. Habeas Corpus, due process of law, the right to keep and bear arms, any of those things, if sort of fully enforced, that's, you know, slavery can't stand, and he would point that out again and again and again. Root argues that Douglass was a classical liberal who believed in the primacy of individual rights and economic freedom. One of his intellectual adversaries was the slavery apologist George Fitzhugh, whose 1854 book, Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society, defended slavery by repudiating the principles of liberalism. He has this attack on John Locke, attack on Adam Smith, attack on all these liberal principles, and you see Frederick Douglass picking up the banner of those principles and making it a bedrock of his all-out war on slavery. He talked about the powerful experience of earning his first free dollar on the docks in New Bedford, Massachusetts, when he escapes, and what that meant to him, that he was now his own master, a tremendous faculty rights in one of his autobiographies. It all comes back to this idea of self-ownership. Locke's theory of self-ownership, property rights, begins with the ownership in yourself, and everything flows out from that. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Douglass extended his beliefs in unalienable individual rights to women as well. In 1848, he attended the Seneca Falls Convention that launched the women's suffrage movement. There are 100 people at the Seneca Falls Convention. He's one of 32 men. He's the only black person there. He takes the radical position alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton, that women should have not just a whole host of other legal privileges that they're denied at the time, but women should have the right to vote. Douglass said that was almost too radical for the convention. There were people who were against it that thought, oh, we can't go that far, and Douglass was right there shoulder to shoulder with her on that issue. Douglass would have a bitter falling out with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other suffragettes after the Civil War, when only former male slaves got the right to vote. But he would reconcile with them later in his life. The last thing that Douglass does, the day he dies, is he attends a women's rights meeting. That's his last public act, and he goes home and dies of either a heart attack or a stroke. He falls dead in his home. So he goes out doing what he always did, fighting for the liberty and equality. In a country that seems more divided along racial and ethnic lines than it has been in decades, Root says that Frederick Douglass's belief in principles undergirding the American founding have a lot to teach us about how to build a society based on mutual respect, empathy, and individualism. Douglass, he says, stressed that. Rights for one or rights for all, ending slavery was also something that benefited the country as a whole because slavery is a pernicious institution, it's economically crippling, all these sorts of things. Free labor system benefits whites and blacks, to the extent that a civil rights cause looks like it just benefits one group. In fact, its benefits are far and wide to all involved. That's certainly a lesson we can continue to take today. The nation's founding doesn't need to be dialed back to 1619 to acknowledge the horrific legacy of slavery and honor the major role played by African Americans in the nation's history. We would do well not only to remember the examples set by Frederick Douglass in his life, but also to embrace his understanding of the Constitution as a glorious liberty document whose ideals of freedom and equality we must never stop fighting to realize.