This essay was originally published on Sept. 24, 2026, on Jacob Mchangama’s Substack.

This is the fourth installment of my series on Frederick Douglass’ free speech philosophy, drawn from the Frederick Douglass Free Speech Corpus. The first examined his defense of wartime dissent; the second, press freedom and defamation; the third, the mobs that enforced slavery’s code of silence.

The first three installments followed Douglass’ fight for freedom and equality through words, even as that struggle culminated in war. This installment examines a more difficult issue. Douglass spent two decades insisting that free speech would defeat slavery and secure freedom. Then emancipation came, constitutional amendments passed and, for a short while, it looked as if Douglass’ vision of “a reform absolutely complete” had triumphed. But soon Reconstruction was being dismantled. Free speech had helped win the argument, but the “sacred right” was once again overawed. What does a man do with his first principles when the victory they helped secure proved fleeting rather than permanent?

The question is relevant even today. A growing share of Americans has become skeptical of the value of free speech. In our 2025 Future of Free Speech Index, the United States recorded the third-largest decline in support for free expression of the 33 countries surveyed. Among Americans aged 18 to 34, only 47% said speech offensive to minority groups should be permitted, compared with 70% of those over 55. Douglass belonged to the most despised minority in the country, was slandered, mobbed and nearly killed for speaking, and watched the constitutional settlement he had fought for be dismantled in his lifetime. His answer is worth knowing.

‘A reform absolutely complete’

On February 6, 1863, Frederick Douglass celebrated the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation as perhaps “the greatest event of our nation’s history, if not the greatest event of the century.” With Lincoln’s momentous proclamation, Douglass declared: “At last the out-spread wings of the American Eagle afford shelter and protection to men of all colors.”

The Emancipation Proclamation, the defeat of the Confederacy and the adoption of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments prohibiting slavery and promising equal protection and the right to vote for the recently emancipated Black population seemed to fulfill Douglass’ life’s mission as an abolitionist and human rights defender. Yet over the following decades, Douglass’ joy at emancipation was mixed with bitter disappointment at the stark contrast between the fine principles enshrined in these documents and their practical nullification through oppressive laws, racist terror and mob action in the South.

Douglass had often insisted that the practical protection of freedom of speech throughout the Union would defeat slavery. Free speech was the foundation of individual freedom and democratic self-government, the great moral renovator of society, the precondition for the triumph of truth and reason over error and falsehood and the antidote to fanaticism and orthodoxy.

But would Douglass’ faith in freedom of speech survive the bloody and bitter disappointment of a failed Reconstruction in the South, where former rebels “who deliberate with daggers and vote with revolvers” were emboldened by a prejudiced public opinion and given a pass by the federal government?

In “Reconstruction,” published by The Atlantic Monthly in 1866, Douglass offered his blueprint for a new America repudiating President Andrew Johnson’s conciliatory attitude toward white Southerners and indifference to the Black freedmen. Douglass’ prescription for a “government consistent with itself” was to “render the rights of the States compatible with the sacred rights of human nature.”

This would not be achieved by vesting “despotic power” in the federal government, but by enfranchising “every loyal citizen.” The right to vote, Douglass expected, would “form a wall of fire” for the protection of all citizens, Black or white. The resounding Republican victory in the midterm elections of 1866 gave him hope that this bold vision for a republic that no longer would “den[y] to any of its citizens equal rights and equal means to maintain them” could be realized:

In every considerable public meeting … the subject has been discussed, and the people have emphatically pronounced in favor of a radical policy. … they have everywhere broken into demonstrations of the wildest enthusiasm when a brave word has been spoken in favor of equal rights and impartial suffrage. Radicalism, so far from being odious, is now the popular passport to power.

In other words, open discussion and free elections would open the South “to the light of law and liberty.” For a while, this policy won support in the Republican-controlled Congress and charted a hopeful course for Black Americans in the South who were being reshackled by Black Codes and terror.

In 1870, Douglass gave a short speech at the final meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York, where it triumphantly disbanded, its mission accomplished. Douglass hailed the occasion as marking “a reform absolutely complete.” He noted how different everyday life had become for the combative abolitionist long accustomed to being greeted by mobs, epithets and rotten eggs. But now: “The old elements of malice and hate and contempt that I once saw written in the faces of men, seem mostly to have disappeared.”

Douglass, normally an unstoppable fountain of speech, declared himself at a loss for words to “express my sense of the great triumph of justice and liberty” achieved by the rapid succession of emancipation, equal protection and the right to vote ensured by the 13th–15th Amendments.

‘Reconstruction a failure’

Alas, the spirit of radical zeal gradually lost its grip on Congress, and what had seemed like a reform absolutely complete by 1870 looked more and more like a dilapidated halfway house as Reconstruction unraveled.

As early as 1871, Douglass sounded the alarm about “Liberty of Speech South,” or what I called the “Segregationist’s Veto” in “Douglass versus the Mobocrats.” He painted a hagiographic image of Northern commitment to free expression. Nothing had so aroused the North’s “hatred” against slavery in the South as “the absolute denial of freedom of speech.” Yet ex-slaveholders and rebels were once again denying this freedom to Northerners and others who — he claimed — were murdered in their thousands for daring to express their commitment to equality or declare themselves Republicans. Douglass’ conclusion struck a very different tone than the triumphalist speech in New York the previous year:

Until a man can express his opinion upon all possible subjects as freely and as safely at the South as he does at the North, freedom is the merest farce, and reconstruction a failure.

In May 1878, Douglass delivered a Memorial Day address in New York’s Union Square. His assessment of Reconstruction had grown even darker than his early warning seven years earlier. Freedom of speech and the ballot had “fallen before the shot-guns of the South.” Yet he insisted that “we need bate no jot of heart or hope.” Even as he acknowledged the destruction of the protections on which his earlier optimism rested, he continued to profess his belief in their resurrection.

But restoring life to the protections that had been dangled before Black Southerners, only to be cruelly snatched away, required confronting something constitutional amendments had failed to eradicate. In “The Color Line” in 1881, Douglass described the prevalent anti-Black racial prejudice as a moral disorder that “fortifies itself by refusing all contradiction.” Slavery had given its beneficiaries “a thousand reasons for painting the black man as fit only for slavery.” The former Slavocracy’s wealth and influence had enlisted the press, pulpit and politicians in spreading that picture. Emancipation had abolished human ownership while leaving much of its ideological justification intact. Yet Douglass rejected the claim that racial prejudice was an immutable feature of human nature. His essay itself was an attempt to expose its origins and reason his readers out of it.

That diagnosis gave him ample reason to distrust public opinion. His longstanding warning about suppressing discussion nevertheless held. Back in 1852, he had explained how censorship directed against one group could endanger the liberties of others:

If they can prohibit the discussion of the rights of black men, they may also, bye and bye, prohibit the discussion of the rights of white men. Liberty for all, or chains for all.

‘The gates of reason are still open’

Strikingly, his later defense of free expression rested on extolling the immense benefits of this freedom, even as he decried the way it was exercised by the power and wealth of Southern segregationists and their Northern apologists. In an April 1883 address, Douglass condemned a press that “usually tries him in advance of the courts,” preparing the way for juries to convict Black defendants. Yet the persistence of public discussion remained a ground for hope:

There is no modern Joshua who can command this resplendent orb of popular discussion to stand still.

The country was “governed by ideas as well as by laws.” Despite the violence and exclusion, he insisted: “The gates of reason are still open to us; and, while we may speak and vote, we need not despair.”

Addressing the National Colored Convention in Louisville that September, Douglass developed the argument further. Conventions airing grievances, “whether real or fancied,” were “the safety-valves of the Republic, a wise and safe substitute for violence, dynamite, and all sorts of revolutionary action.”

Even unfounded grievances could be exposed through public scrutiny. Employed as such, free speech was the antithesis of violence: a means of transforming anger and dissatisfaction into public argument, collective action and the pursuit of peaceful change through the ballot rather than the gun.

By 1888, the distance between constitutional promises and practical freedom had become intolerable. At an emancipation anniversary in Washington, Douglass described Black Americans in the South as “in law free, in fact a slave.” Citizenship brought obligations without adequate protection; voting rights coexisted with disfranchisement. An occasion normally devoted to celebration demanded an alarm: “There are times when neither hope nor fear should be allowed to control our speech.”

His appeal joined public exposure to concrete reform. He denounced exploitative Southern payment practices as a “villainous swindle” and urged the Black press to expose it, legislators to prohibit it and Black voters to withhold support from politicians who refused. Speech was part of the remedy needed to expose and reform a system built on the pillars of injustice and fraud.

The following year, in “The Nation’s Problem,” Douglass confronted the wave of opinion, laws and violence that made a mockery of the freedoms and protections that Black Americans had been promised after the war. His response supplies perhaps the clearest answer to whether the shattered promises had also shattered his faith in first principles:

I do not regard discussion as an evil in itself. I regard it not as an enemy, but as a friend. It has served us well at other times in our history, and I hope it may serve us well at this time.

However, he took no pleasure in the intense discussion of “The Negro problem.” That the question dominated public discourse at all was “a bitter disappointment” to him. He had believed Reconstruction would settle Black Americans’ membership in the political community for good and consign demands for legally enforced color lines to the dustbin of history. Now that settlement was being reopened. Yet his answer was not to shy away from the controversy or let his detractors speak unopposed: “Our business is to answer back wisely, modestly, and yet grandly.”

That commitment also extended to criticism within the Black community, where he defended the importance of identifying mistakes and harmful errors as essential for the progress and improvement needed to make equality a practical reality.

‘The light of truth’

Nor did this commitment blind Douglass to the relationship between racist speech and physical violence. In “Lynch Law in the South” (1892), discussed in a previous installment, he assigned responsibility beyond the men who carried out the killings. The mobs acted on a public sentiment cultivated “by wealth and respectability, by the press and the pulpit.” Northern prejudice helped sustain the same violence. His proposed response was to enlist these influential institutions in condemning lynching and changing the public sentiment that licensed it.

By “Lessons of the Hour” in 1894, his assessment of the national retreat was devastating: “The cause lost in the war, is the cause regained in peace, and the cause gained in war, is the cause lost in peace.” His faith in the nation’s conduct had been shaken, and he highlighted the culpability of “newspapers and magazines” for “increasing hate and dark suspicion” that fed the mob violence against Black Americans and the spread of lynch law to the North. But his remedies continued to combine public argument with the enforcement of constitutional rights. He demanded honest elections, protection from exploitation and an end to the evasion of equal citizenship. And he again summoned the institutions capable of shaping public opinion:

Let the great Northern press and pulpit proclaim the gospel of truth and justice against war now being made upon the negro.

Two years earlier, Douglass — already in his seventies — had found hope in a younger generation taking up the struggle that this “Prophet of Freedom” had inspired but would not live to see completed. The fearless civil rights and women’s rights advocate Ida B. Wells demonstrated what independent reporting could accomplish. Wells believed that “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” In the pursuit of truth, she traveled the South exposing fabricated rape allegations, including cases involving consensual interracial relationships, and killings for supposed offenses as trivial as being “sassy” toward whites. Her investigative reporting and commentary were considered a scandalous affront to the “honor” of white women and put her in extreme danger. In May 1892, a white mob — incited by local newspapers to torture and burn “the black wretch” — destroyed her Tennessee newspaper, The Memphis Free Speech, and Wells went into exile. Yet her investigation of lynching reached readers through her pamphlet Southern Horrors, which recounted dozens of stories of lynchings throughout the South and documented the racist logic behind this practice.

In an October 1892 letter to Wells endorsing Southern Horrors, Douglass wrote enthusiastically about the pamphlet’s content and impact:

There has been no word equal to it in convincing power. I have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison. You give us what you know and testify from actual knowledge. You have dealt with the facts with cool, painstaking fidelity and left those naked and uncontradicted facts to speak for themselves.

Douglass acknowledged that repeated atrocities had hardened American moral sensibility. The evidence might encounter indifference as well as hostility. Yet even at a time of despair and hopelessness, silence was not an option: “we must still think, speak and work.”

‘Liberty for all, or chains for all’

Future generations of Americans did indeed continue to think, speak and work.

From the late 1950s, the civil rights movement won a series of landmark First Amendment cases that expanded protection for speech, press, assembly and association. Those victories gave protesters, organizers and journalists greater freedom to challenge segregation. In 1965, the legal scholar Harry Kalven Jr. captured the contrast with the repression of the Cold War years: “We may come to see the Negro as winning back for us the freedoms the Communists seemed to have lost for us.”

Yet these freedoms still had to be defended. On April 3, 1968, less than twenty-four hours before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “Mountaintop” speech in Memphis. A federal judge had issued an injunction preventing another march in support of the city’s striking sanitation workers. In language that echoed Douglass, King called upon America to honor its own professed ideals:

If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand … the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges. … But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly … the freedom of speech … the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.

The following year, the Supreme Court demonstrated how far those protections extended. In Brandenburg v. Ohio, it overturned the conviction of Clarence Brandenburg, a local Ku Klux Klan leader. The Court held that advocacy of violence was protected unless directed to inciting imminent lawless action and likely to produce it. Brandenburg’s legal team included Eleanor Holmes Norton, a young Black lawyer. Among the justices who voted unanimously to overturn his conviction was Thurgood Marshall, a civil rights icon and the first Black member of the Supreme Court.

While the immediate beneficiary of that outcome was a hardened racist, the decision enshrined a principle Douglass had advocated more than a century earlier: “Liberty for all, or chains for all.” The freedoms that enabled Black Americans to challenge white supremacy also protected a Klansman’s right to express his repugnant beliefs. Douglass understood free speech and equality as mutually reinforcing. His response to the betrayal of emancipation’s promises was to insist on the freedom to expose injustice, organize and answer back. Those who now treat free speech and racial equality as mutually exclusive should reckon with that history.

This essay was originally published on Sept. 11, 2026, on Jacob Mchangama’s Substack.

This is the third installment of my series on Frederick Douglass’ free speech philosophy, drawn from the Frederick Douglass Free Speech Corpus, which is now live, freely searchable and even includes an audio player. The first installment examined Douglass’ defense of wartime dissent; the second, press freedom, defamation and journalistic ethics. Here I turn to the mobs that enforced slavery’s code of silence in the North and South — and to Douglass’ lifelong struggle against a form of censorship that survived emancipation. His insistence that using force to silence honest sentiments results in a “double wrong” remains a powerful message a year after the killing of Charlie Kirk and the wave of institutional and cultural censorship this political assassination unleashed.

The Sunday school mob

When Frederick Douglass learned how to read on the streets of Baltimore, the speeches in The Columbian Orator gave “tongue to many interesting thoughts” that previously were mere flashes which “died away for want of utterance.” Douglass was eager to help pass on this newfound power to enslaved children at an improvised Sunday school in rural Maryland. But Douglass’ stint as a teacher was swiftly shut down by his own master and two Methodist lay leaders:

we had scarcely got at work — good work, simply teaching a few colored children how to read the gospel of the Son of God — when in rushed a mob … who, armed with sticks and other missiles, drove us off, and commanded us never to meet for such a purpose again.

Douglass was told he was trying to be a Nat Turner — the leader of a bloody slave revolt in 1831 — and was warned that if he persisted, “I should get as many balls into me, as Nat did into him.” A fifteen-year-old boy teaching illiterate children to read and understand the word of God was treated as an instigator of violent insurrection and threatened with death.

Douglass later acknowledged the twisted logic behind this strict proscription:

The plea for this outrage was then, as it is now and at all times — the danger to good order. If the slaves learnt to read, they would learn something else, and something worse. The peace of slavery would be disturbed; slave rule would be endangered…. I do not dispute the soundness of the reasoning. It is perfectly sound; and, if slavery be right, Sabbath schools for teaching slaves to read the bible are wrong, and ought to be put down.

This experience did not deter Douglass from successfully starting another, more clandestine Sunday school later on. But the brutal crackdown on the unshackling of the minds of Black children likely helped shape his lifelong opposition to what we might call “The Slave Power’s Veto.” This Veto would keep haunting Douglass even after he escaped slavery and supporters purchased his freedom. What Douglass called “Mobocracy” would even survive slavery and obstruct the efforts to ensure freedom, equality and voting rights for the emancipated.

The veto reaches Yankeedom

Though slavery rested on racial hierarchy and was concentrated in the South, the Slave Power’s Veto crossed the color line, and its tentacles reached far beyond the Mason-Dixon Line and into Yankeedom.

In 1837, the white abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy was shot and killed while defending his printing press against a mob in Alton, Illinois. Two years earlier, the white theological student Amos Dresser had received twenty lashes on his bare back in Nashville, Tennessee, for possessing abolitionist literature and allegedly circulating it. A self-appointed vigilance committee ordered the whipping even though Dresser had violated no law. According to the local newspaper the Nashville Republican, Dresser should be grateful for this extrajudicial whipping, since only “the prudence and firmness of the Committee” had saved Dresser’s life from a lynch mob. That same year, Douglass’ future friend and mentor, William Lloyd Garrison, was dragged through the streets of Boston with a rope around his waist. In May 1838, the white abolitionist Angelina Grimké addressed an audience in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Hall as a mob hurled stones through its windows. The very next day, a mob burned the hall down.

In August 1845, a mob seized the printing press of the antislavery editor Cassius M. Clay in Lexington, Kentucky. Douglass repeatedly invoked these attacks to expose the Slave Power’s reach. He could think of “no occurrence of mobocratic violence against the anti-slavery cause which sent such a chill over my hopes” as the seizure of Clay’s press, which, operating in a slaveholding state, had been “a star shining in darkness, beaming hope to the almost despairing bondman.” But, he despaired, “the mob has triumphed, and the star apparently gone out.”

The mobs that Douglass faced down in person used methods of intimidation that ranged from heckling to violence. In 1842, The Liberator reported Douglass condemning racial prejudice for “exciting mobs against the colored people” and “preventing them from taking their places in society as equal members.” The Nantucket convention at which he spoke had itself faced people throwing brickbats and other missiles. In 1843, an abolitionist meeting in Pendleton, Indiana, nearly cost Douglass his life. A frenzied mob ordered the speakers to “be silent,” tore down their platform and attacked them. Douglass fought back with a stick before being beaten unconscious, only to be saved by an intervening friend. Douglass’ broken right hand never fully recovered.

Salt-water mobocrats

Mobs attempted to prevent Douglass from speaking not only in churches, assembly halls and outdoor meetings but even on the Atlantic, where he was confronted with the Slave Power’s Veto. In 1845, Douglass traveled to Britain on the steamship Cambria. American passengers threatened to throw Douglass overboard when he attempted to deliver an invited lecture on slavery. The captain’s threat to put the “salt-water mobocrats” in irons brought them to order.

The attack also demonstrated how suppression could backfire. The controversy was widely reported in the British press, which was much more hostile to slavery than its American counterpart. The Cambria affair introduced Douglass to a sympathetic British public eager to hear the man whom Americans had tried to silence. As we saw in the previous installment, his enemies sometimes became unwitting publicists for his cause. In a subsequent letter to the newspaper editor Thurlow Weed, Douglass exposed the double standard:

But then, it will be said, the subject of slavery is not open to discussion. Who say so? The very men who are continually speaking and writing in its favor.

The passengers had a right to ask about slavery, Douglass insisted, and he had a corresponding right to answer “so as to be understood by those who wished to hear.” Offended slaveholders could not extinguish either right.

In Britain, Douglass used his growing fame to expose how slavery corroded American liberty. Speaking in Paisley, Scotland, in 1846, he described the Northern states as “the tools of slaveholders.” A visitor from a free state could be “hung at the first lamp post” for proclaiming human equality in the South.

Yet abolitionists, quick to adopt modern communications technology, were making headway. More than a hundred newspapers now spread their doctrines, and speakers previously denied a meeting hall could take their arguments into the statehouse. Douglass and fellow abolitionists were once shunned by civil society, but “now we can hold meetings with men standing round to protect us.”

In Troy in 1855, Douglass placed “the suppression of all anti-slavery discussion” first among the Slave Power’s objectives. Its determination to silence opponents amounted to an admission of guilt: “Innocence has nothing to fear from discussion.”

The following year, in Rochester, he explained why free expression posed such a threat. Slaveholders understood that “the slave cannot be safely chained while the lips of freemen are unlocked.” Laws against abolitionist speech were reinforced by a public intolerance ready to erupt into violence:

Look at the whole South. You have only to drop a word against slavery, to set a whole community in a blaze, and bring down upon you the violence of the mob.

Free speech for an enemy

As in the previous installments, the harder test is whether Douglass extended his principles to his enemies. Did an antislavery crowd get a pass when it silenced a defender of human bondage?

Douglass’ defense of free speech extended to one of slavery’s most powerful political allies. In an October 1854 speech in Chicago, he addressed the recent shouting down of Senator Stephen A. Douglas (no relation and no ally), the architect of the Kansas–Nebraska Act. But before considering the senator’s grievances, Douglass described the people excluded from his promises of “Popular Sovereignty”:

Every right of human nature, as such, is denied them — they are dumb in their chains! To utter one groan, or scream, for freedom in the presence of the Southern advocate of Popular Sovereignty, is to bring down the frightful lash upon their quivering flesh. I know this suffering people; I am acquainted with their sorrows; I am one with them in experience; I have felt the lash of the slave driver, and stand up here with all the bitter recollections of its horrors vividly upon me.

This experience gave Douglass a particular obligation to exercise the freedom denied to those still enslaved:

There are special reasons, therefore, why I should speak and speak freely. The right of speech is a very precious one, especially to the oppressed.

He then turned to the senator’s wounded feelings:

I understand that Mr. Douglas regards himself as the most abused man in the United States, and that the greatest outrage ever committed upon him, was in the case in which your indignation raised your voices so high that his could not be heard. No personal violence, as I understand, was offered him. It seems to have been a trial of vocal powers between the individual and the multitude; as might have been expected, the voice of one man was not equal in volume to the voice of five hundred.

The mockery came with an explicit reaffirmation of principle:

I do not approve it; I am for free speech as well as for freemen and free soil.

Douglass recognized the senator’s right to speak while putting the interference he had suffered in perspective. Being drowned out by nonviolent political opponents scarcely compared with the enforced silence of millions living under the lash. Yet the senator had no problem with systematic suppression when slavery was decided in elections where those wielding the whip cast ballots but those being whipped did not. Douglass could condemn the crowd’s conduct and ridicule the senator’s self-pity in the same breath. Indeed, he hoped the experience might teach the senator to respect the rights of those whose oppression he defended.

Douglass’ opposition to the heckler’s veto did not demand reverential silence from the audience. In 1862, Douglass gave a speech that viciously attacked both President Lincoln’s and General McClellan’s war efforts. A member of the audience got so vocally upset at Douglass’ remarks that he was about to be expelled and “handled roughly,” yet Douglass intervened and insisted that his critic be “heard patiently by the audience.” In “Self-Made Men,” Douglass observed that speakers could be as indebted “to the men who hiss, as to those who applaud.” Hostility could sharpen arguments and amplify a speaker’s message. Read alongside his denunciations of suppression, this suggests a distinction between opposition that leaves room for an answer and disruption that prevents a hearing altogether. Once again, Douglass resisted Milton’s Curse — free speech for me, but not for thee — while retaining the moral high ground and conceding nothing of his powerful argument.

A mob of gentlemen

On December 3, 1860, abolitionists gathered at Boston’s Tremont Temple to commemorate John Brown and discuss how slavery could be abolished. A hostile crowd of Bostonians took over the meeting, which devolved into a fight in which Douglass gave as good as he received. Instead of protecting the meeting against the mob, the mayor ordered its dispersal.

Six days later, Douglass delivered his famous speech, “A Plea for Free Speech in Boston,” at the city’s Music Hall and aimed an accusatory finger at the Athens of America. Here was a city proud of its revolutionary heritage and supposed devotion to liberty. Yet the meeting had been captured by a “mob of gentlemen” — men who proclaimed their respect for law and order while trampling the rights of their opponents:

Theirs was the law of slavery. The law of free speech and the law for the protection of public meetings they trampled under foot, while they greatly magnified the law of slavery.

Douglass also confronted the more sympathetic observers who condemned the mob but regretted the meeting’s timing and choice of participants. Their advice would make the exercise of a right depend on the tolerance of those threatening it. Douglass insisted that “the time to assert a right is the time when the right itself is called in question.”

The protection of a handful of eminent speakers could not vindicate Boston’s freedom. The test was whether the same protection extended to the poor, the unpopular and the despised:

There can be no right of speech where any man, however lifted up or however humble, however young or however old, is overawed by force, and compelled to suppress his honest sentiments.

And the injury extended beyond the person on the platform:

To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.

This was the principle Douglass had defended aboard the Cambria, now expressed with exceptional clarity. A willing audience had rights of its own. The mob could not claim to speak for everyone present simply because it possessed the determination or physical force to overpower them.

As in his account of press freedom, Douglass’ understanding of free speech demanded more than the absence of censorship and suppression. It required institutions and a civic commitment capable of protecting the actual exchange of ideas in the public sphere. Officials who surrendered a meeting to its attackers helped make intimidation an effective instrument of censorship.

The segregationist’s veto

Emancipation would abolish the slaveholder’s legal ownership of other human beings. It would not abolish the power to silence them. In 1871, Douglass wrote an editorial titled “Liberty of Speech South,” asserting that nothing had aroused the North’s “hatred” against slavery more than the South’s “absolute denial of the freedom of speech” on this topic. Yet even after defeat, Douglass claimed, Southern recalcitrants had “murdered not less than ten thousand loyal men” for exercising this freedom. His verdict on what was supposed to be a triumphant status quo was damning:

until a man can express his opinion upon all possible subjects as freely and as safely at the South as he does at the North […] freedom is the merest farce, and reconstruction a failure.

By 1878, Douglass lamented that “freedom of speech and of the ballot have for the present fallen before the shot-guns of the South.” The Slave Power’s Veto was becoming the Segregationist’s Veto: political violence could defeat the equal protection of rights and franchise that constitutional amendments had formally secured.

In “Lynch Law in the South” (1892), Douglass again looked beyond the men carrying out the violence. The “men who break open jails and with bloody hands destroy human life” acted on the public sentiment of the South created by “wealth and respectability, by the press and the pulpit.” The resemblance to Boston’s “mob of gentlemen” was unmistakable. Men did not have to wield a weapon themselves to help determine whose voice could safely be heard, when they could depend on the “ignorant mob” to do it for them with the promise of impunity from the state and approval from the public.

Two years later, in “Lessons of the Hour,” Douglass described the finality of the mob’s censorship:

When the will of the mob has been accomplished, when its thirst for blood has been quenched, when its victim is speechless, silent and dead, his mobocratic accusers and murderers of course have the ear of the world all to themselves, and the world generally approves their verdict.

More than sixty years separated this indictment from the dispersal of Douglass’ Sunday school. Progress had been made, but the dreams of true freedom and equality had yet to be realized. Despite Douglass’ herculean efforts, the mob’s infliction of the Double Wrong continued to sustain racial domination.

The veto’s afterlife

Fortunately, the Slave Power’s Veto has been soundly defeated; shotguns no longer silence dissent in the South, nor do Southern sensibilities padlock lips in the North. Nonetheless, modern America has yet to fully internalize Douglass’ vision of a public sphere that cherishes free speech and cultivates tolerance of dissent as civic virtues.

A year ago, the conservative influencer Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while answering student questions at Utah Valley University. The reaction to Kirk’s assassination was not to double down on free speech. Instead, it unleashed a “wave of censorship” at many American colleges, with faculty sanctioned for Kirk-related comments and students disciplined for what they posted. This points to a deeper problem of intolerance. According to FIRE’s most recent College Free Speech Rankings, 30% of college students say using violence is acceptable to prevent controversial campus speakers in some instances, 69% think shouting down a speaker can be justified, and 50% think blocking other students from attending a speech on campus can be justified. For the second year running, a majority of students opposed allowing each of six hypothetical controversial speakers on campus — three liberal and three conservative. Both sides have red lines they believe should be off limits, and both draw them from their own ideological and moral commitments.

College campuses are not the only arena where Mobocracy still lingers. Three months before Kirk’s murder, in June 2025, Minnesota’s former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were shot dead in their home by a gunman specifically targeting Democratic lawmakers. In 2022, Salman Rushdie was stabbed on stage at Chautauqua by a religious fanatic offended by Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.

Clearly, even today many are tempted to use force to compel fellow citizens to hide their honest sentiments. That was exactly what Douglass learned at fifteen, when his Sunday school was violently dispersed. Douglass saw clearly that the answer to violent intolerance was not to silence opponents in turn, but to preach and practice the principle of free speech. We would do well to follow his example today.

This is the second in a series on Frederick Douglass’ free speech philosophy, drawn from the Frederick Douglass Free Speech Corpus, a growing collection of close to two hundred speeches, editorials, letters and interviews I’m currently curating. In Part 1, I found that during the Civil War, Douglass defended the right to attack Lincoln and cheer for Jefferson Davis, an astonishing position for a man who had given his life to a cause that only Union victory could secure and that the Confederacy waged all-out war to prevent.

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This installment takes up another test: What did Douglass do when what was at stake was not sedition or criticism of the government but lies and attacks aimed at himself? It is a test that has undone many a great champion of free expression, in what I’ve called Milton’s Curse: free speech for me, but not for thee. Douglass spent half a century embroiled in often bitter and deeply personal wars of words. Yet as far as I can tell, he initiated legal action for defamation only once.

Frederick Douglass was a frequent target of vilification and smears — not to mention hostile mobs, stones and rotten eggs. His enemies — and sometimes even erstwhile allies — used press and pulpit to counter the growing influence of his oratorical genius and editorial prowess. Douglass’ primary weapon consisted of words, but what to do when opponents turned this weapon against him? Was counterspeech a sufficient remedy, or should legal redress also be an option? What rules, legal or moral, should guide newspaper editors with power to shape public opinion? And as Douglass became an influential speaker, editor and publisher himself, did he practice what he preached?

Douglass the defamed

“Nigger” and other racial epithets were routinely hurled at Douglass. But far more damaging than crude racist attacks were various allegations of sexual depravity, of lying about his life story, of being a paid anti-American agitator and of being a cowardly co-conspirator in the attack on Harper’s Ferry.

In August 1841, Douglass gave a speech at Nantucket’s Atheneum that made him an immediate sensation in abolitionist circles and launched his career as a peripatetic orator and relentless freedom fighter. William Lloyd Garrison vividly described Douglass’ impact:

I shall never forget his first speech at the convention — the extraordinary emotion it excited in my own mind — the powerful impression it created upon a crowded auditory . . . I think I never hated slavery so intensely as at that moment.

The enthusiastic response to Douglass’ speeches prompted the idea for his first autobiography, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave” (1845), which in turn transformed Douglass into an international celebrity. But as his fame increased, so did the scrutiny, criticism and hostility he faced.

In late 1845, the Delaware Republican published a letter — “Falsehood Refuted” — from an A.C.C. Thompson who had lived in Maryland and knew the “runaway slave” (Douglass). Thompson insisted that the Narrative was a “catalogue of lies” composed by “some evil designed person or persons” to “excite the indignation of public opinion against the slaveholders of the South.” Thompson also defended Douglass’ previous owners and a brutal overseer named in the Narrative, claiming that he was “intimately acquainted with most of the gentlemen whose characters are so shamefully traduced.”

But Douglass turned Thompson’s damning accusations into a victory. He wrote a sarcastic reply in Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. Douglass begged Thompson “to accept my thanks for his full, free and unsolicited testimony, in regard to my identity,” since the article had “forever” settled the question of whether Douglass had truly been a slave or was a fictitious character of abolitionist propaganda. He continued:

I am greatly indebted to you, sir, for silencing those truly prejudicial insinuations . . . You have done a piece of anti-slavery work, which no anti-slaveryman could do.

His reply also contained the initial contours of a Douglassian ethical framework necessary for press freedom to serve its proper function. Douglass submitted his response to The Liberator expecting the Delaware Republican to refuse him a rejoinder:

In any country but the United States, I might hope to get a hearing through the columns of the paper in which I was attacked. But this would be inconsistent with American usage and magnanimity. It would be folly to expect such a hearing. They might possibly advertise me as a runaway slave, and share the reward of my apprehension; but on no other condition would they allow my reply a place in their columns.

To Douglass, the proper response to attacks on reputation and ideas was reciprocal counterspeech. Ideally, the venue of attack would provide the target equal access to respond. When reciprocity was denied, press freedom provided a corrective mechanism. Media pluralism increased the chances that a fair-minded newspaper would give voice to those denied a right of reply elsewhere.

The poison and its antidote

Douglass would get plenty of chances to wrestle with the functioning of this framework during his extensive stay in Great Britain and Ireland from 1845–47, where he thundered against slavery and its apologists.

Douglass repeatedly attacked the recently established Free Church of Scotland for its fundraising efforts among Presbyterian slaveholders in the American South. Douglass popularized the slogan “Send Back the Money” among Scots outraged that their church was soliciting funds from the “man-stealing, cradle-robbing, and woman-whipping monster[s]” whom Douglass vividly portrayed in his speeches.

The Northern Warder, a Free Church–friendly newspaper, fought back against Douglass’ moral crusade. It accused Douglass and fellow critics of being “foul-mouthed clamourers” and “hired bravoes from the ranks of the American abolitionists” who spread “impieties” and “falsehood and slander” against the Free Church and its ministers.

In his speech “Charges and Defense of the Free Church,” delivered in Dundee on March 10, 1846, Douglass told the audience that he had fully expected a “desperate” attempt to counter his message through “the grossest misrepresentations and the darkest insinuations.” He would not have “uttered a single word of complaint” if the Northern Warder had resorted to such measures in a free and open contest. But instead, he asserted, the editor “assailed our character, impeached our motives, perverted our arguments, and peremptorily refused to permit us a single word of reply.”

Douglass then expanded on his previous press ethics sketch:

In America, and I believe in this country, it is understood as being but common fairness, when either a single individual or a body of individuals are attacked in their opinions or conduct in the columns of a newspaper, that he or they have an opportunity of reply through the same columns, so that the cup containing the poison, or supposed poison, may also contain its antidote. This in America is established etiquette; it is also common fairness and common justice. It is only where this etiquette is established in a community that it can be said to have any of the advantages of a public press, that it becomes the palladium of liberty as well as of purity. But let the opposite principle prevail, and it is a curse rather than a blessing. No man is safe. He may be pierced through with a thousand poisoned weapons, and be totally without the means of defence or redress. An adroit editor may keep within the letter of the law and break its spirit in every line. Such is the present case. We have not been allowed a single word of reply.

Note that just months earlier, Douglass had written that in America it would be “folly” to expect a right to reply in the same newspaper where he was attacked. Now he described the right of reply as an “established etiquette” in the U.S. He may simply have meant that reciprocity in a pro-slavery Southern newspaper was futile for a runaway slave (after all, most Southern states strictly prohibited abolitionist writings), and that the established etiquette operated with a dividing line based on color.

Whatever the reason for this seeming discrepancy, the quoted passage showed Douglass’ keen awareness that the twin freedoms of the press and speech functioned differently in practice. Press freedom was exercised by the few who had the means to acquire and operate a printing press, providing editors and publishers outsized power to shape public opinion. Restraining this concentration of power demanded responsibility and a commitment to ethical standards preventing the press from perverting the principles which it was meant to serve. As such, Douglass clearly acknowledged that words — however indispensable for realizing universal human freedom — could also be weaponized to frustrate these ideals and harm those without access to the reach that print provided.

But crucially, Douglass’ primary remedy for the violation of press ethics was not a resort to the law but rather a reliance on a pluralistic and decentralized press and active civil society. When the Northern Warder refused Douglass a right of reply, the Dundee Courier wrote a detailed article rebutting the claims of the Northern Warder and supporting Douglass, who in turn praised the Courier’s editor for “expos[ing] the sophistries and denounc[ing] the base insinuations.” The combination of the Courier’s coverage and his speech at the raucous meeting in Dundee “was sufficient answer to all the Warder’s indirect slander.”

The New-York Tribune also republished a Douglass article from The Liberator to counter coverage in hostile New York newspapers accusing him of being a “glib-tongued scoundrel” who was “running a muck in greedy-eared Britain against America, its people, its institutions, and even against its peace.” In a private letter thanking the Tribune’s editor, Douglass wrote: “Of the low and vulgar epithets applied to me by the Express, very little need be said. I am used to them. Their force is lost upon me, in the frequency of their application.” What really mattered to him was the opportunity to explain to readers that “the best friend of a nation is he who most faithfully rebukes her for her sins — and he her worst enemy who, under the specious and popular garb of patriotism, seeks to excuse, palliate or defend them.”

After Douglass spoke at a temperance convention in London, the Reverend Samuel Hanson Cox wrote an article in the New-York Evangelist accusing Douglass of being a paid “agitator” who “denounce[d] America” as part of an abolitionist plot to “re-kindle, on both sides of the Atlantic, the flames of national exasperation and war.” Douglass once again relied on the Liberator to respond.

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Douglass conceded that answering every hostile accusation displayed “a ridiculous sensibility to the good or evil opinions of men” and wasted precious “thought, time and strength,” particularly when the attacks came from “those who hate me.” But a rebuttal was required when it involved defending “great and vital principles, the vindication of which is essential to the triumph of righteousness throughout the world.”

The limits of counterspeech

Soon the limits of Douglass’ commitment to counterspeech would be severely tested. His criticism of the Free Church had caused many Presbyterians to rebel and join the growing chorus of “Send Back the Money.” When Douglass traveled to Belfast to persuade local Presbyterians to demand the return of slavers’ money, Free Church supporters decided to fight back and fight ugly. They cleverly appropriated the viral abolitionist campaign with leaflets shouting “Send Back the Nigger.” But that was not all: The Irish-born American Free Church supporter Thomas Smyth circulated a rumor that Douglass had visited a brothel in Manchester. This was a highly damaging attack on Douglass’ character, calculated to invoke racist stereotypes and blacken his reputation as a person worthy of addressing white Christians as their equal. Douglass confessed that his “spirit was marred” by this “malignant slander,” and he instructed solicitors to initiate legal action against Smyth for defamation. Unable to substantiate his statements, Smyth felt compelled to write a letter expressing his “sincere regret” for the “unfounded” allegations. Douglass accepted the retraction and apology and insisted that the letter should first be published in Belfast, where Smyth had spread the falsehood.

Douglass had finally found the limits of free speech. Racial epithets and character assassination directed at his public life and opinions should be confronted in the court of public opinion. False and highly damaging allegations of fact directed at his private life might justify escalation to courts of law unless retracted. This was hardly a case of egregious hypocrisy. In fact, Douglass might have won a defamation lawsuit against Smyth even under the exacting standards of modern First Amendment doctrine.

From the sources I have identified, it appears that Smyth was the first and last person Douglass ever took legal steps against for defamation, despite a career that continued for almost five decades after Smyth’s retraction. This conclusion is consistent with Douglass biographer John Muller, who in 2022 wrote that he had “not yet come across a case where Frederick Douglass, Sr. filed suit against any journalist or newspaper.”

A press of his own

Despite the many attacks on his person, Douglass concluded that his British tour and the attention the controversies generated for him and his cause had been a net benefit. In My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass wrote that he was often “more indebted to my enemies than to my own skill” since a “man is sometimes made great, by the greatness of the abuse.” But the path to greatness depended almost wholly on having a forum and a receptive audience for counterspeech. This experience convinced Douglass that he needed a printing press of his own:

a tolerably well conducted press, in the hands of persons of the despised race . . . would prove a most powerful means of removing prejudice, and of awakening an interest in them.

Douglass’ entrepreneurial spirit was not appreciated by his backers among white American abolitionists, whose usual admiration turned to condescending dismissal:

My American friends looked at me with astonishment! ‘A wood-sawyer’ offering himself to the public as an editor! A slave, brought up in the very depths of ignorance, assuming to instruct the highly civilized people of the north in the principles of liberty, justice, and humanity!

With money from British supporters, Douglass overcame his self-doubt and defied the naysayers by launching The North Star in 1847. As editor and publisher, he was no longer reliant on the goodwill of other gatekeepers when spreading his abolitionist gospel in print. Douglass was now a gatekeeper and responsible for ensuring that The North Star complied with the demanding ethical framework he so frequently lambasted other publishers for violating.

The editor on trial

In 1849, The North Star became the venue for a heated and factional discussion among abolitionists divided on the issue of whether the Constitution was an instrument of slavery or a roadmap for emancipation.

Douglass promised to keep the North Star open to all sides of the argument and to be guided solely by the pursuit of truth: “The only truly consistent man is he who will, for the sake of being right today, contradict what he said wrong yesterday.”

These debates — especially with his friend and later financial supporter Gerrit Smith — helped persuade Douglass to abandon the Garrisonian view of the Constitution as inherently proslavery. The reversal caused a bitter rupture with his former allies and sparked an acrimonious war of words. In the following years, Garrison spread rumors that Douglass was having an affair with his white collaborator Julia Griffiths, who lived with Douglass and his wife. Much like the Smyth rumors in Belfast, these charges were aimed squarely at Douglass’ private life rather than his ideas. This raised a delicate strategic question: When would publicly answering internecine attacks do more harm to their common cause than the attacks themselves? Despite the rumors’ malicious nature, Douglass met them with furious denials from his pen and press, or strategic silence, rather than legal threats.

Douglass also faced another difficult test of his own editorial principles. Following a dispute over the proposal to distribute Bibles among enslaved people, he published a sharply personal attack on Henry Highland Garnet, who was preparing to tour Britain. Douglass questioned Garnet’s commitment to moral abolitionism, portrayed him as an advocate of violence and warned British supporters that Garnet represented only himself. Garnet replied that Douglass had “slandered and traduced” him and attempted to discredit his character before an audience important to them both. He further alleged that Douglass had previously withheld one of his letters because its opinions were unwelcome — the very charge Douglass had leveled at the Northern Warder in Dundee. He also portrayed Douglass as hostile to and jealous of other abolitionists whose prominence might threaten his own standing and fame. Yet Garnet acknowledged that Douglass had now given him “an opportunity to speak for myself, through the same medium.” Douglass honored that promise, printing the hostile reply in full under the headline “Calling Him Out, and He Comes.” Douglass allowed Garnet to pour his antidote into the same cup that had contained Douglass’ poison.

The North Star also served as the first line of defense when Douglass was on the receiving end of attacks from other newspapers that didn’t share the same ethical commitment to reciprocity as Douglass. In 1850, Douglass was physically attacked while walking through New York with white friends, including women. One press account falsely portrayed him as deliberately provoking the public by walking down Broadway with two white women on his arms and claimed that the women subsequently placed themselves under the protection of his assailants. According to Douglass’ account, a group of men surrounded the party, shouted “coarse and filthy language,” struck the women and attacked him multiple times.

In “At Home Again,” Douglass connected the assault to a press campaign that had made him a target:

Having been, during the past few weeks, the special object of attack, marked out by a corrupt and fiendish Press, for assassination, the victim of a continuous train of almost unprecedented abuse — harassed and dogged from day to day by the furious blood-hounds of American Slavery — I should be something more than a Stoic, if I did not feel and acknowledge a sense of profound gratitude . . . that I am again permitted safely to occupy my editorial chair.

Douglass corrected the false particulars but refused to retreat from the principle underlying his conduct. His real “crime,” he wrote, was treating white companions as equals and reducing his belief in human brotherhood to practice: “Not an inch will I retreat — not one jot of zeal will I abate — not one word will I retract.”

Truth and falsehood at Harper’s Ferry

In 1859, a group of armed abolitionists led by John Brown attacked the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, hoping to capture weapons and ammunition for a slave rebellion. Brown’s plan failed; many of his men were killed, and Brown was wounded and captured. The fallout of Harper’s Ferry also ensnared Douglass. Newspaper and telegraphic reports implicated him in the raid and attributed to the captured raider John Cook the allegation that Douglass had promised to participate, only to flee when the decisive moment arrived. Federal marshals were dispatched to arrest Douglass as an accomplice. With lawmen closing in, Douglass narrowly avoided arrest and a likely death sentence in slaveholding Virginia by escaping to Canada and from there to Britain.

Douglass mocked the telegraph as “the swiftest of liars” when placed in the hands of the slave power. But his public response carefully distinguished between an insult and a damaging allegation of fact. Cook might call him a coward: “I have not one word to say in defense or vindication of my character for courage.” What Douglass categorically denied was that he had ever promised to take part in the raid.

Nor did he accept that defending his reputation obliged him to disclose potentially incriminating details about Brown or expose other abolitionists to prosecution. Moreover, Douglass would continue to “write, speak, publish, organize, combine, and even . . . conspire against Slavery” when success appeared possible.

Douglass confronted a subtler version of the same allegation when the pacifist Elihu Burritt accused him of advocating bloodshed, deserting Brown by leaving him to the gallows and fleeing to England. Burritt’s account contained individual facts that were technically correct: Douglass had met and admired Brown; he had fled America for fear of his life; and Brown had been captured and executed. But to Douglass, press ethics demanded more than avoiding literally false sentences. A writer could arrange “a simple truth” to accomplish “all the malign purposes of a positive untruth.” Biased omission and insinuation could “state a fact, as to convey a complete misrepresentation of its natural import.” Yet once again, his preferred remedy was a reciprocal right of reply in the pages where the untruths had been printed.

The legal aftermath of Harper’s Ferry also provides another rare indication of where Douglass placed the limits of counterspeech, although it may do more to blur than to clarify any Douglassian doctrine. His friend Gerrit Smith suffered a severe mental collapse after the raid. The Chicago Tribune subsequently implied that Smith had feigned insanity to avoid prosecution for supporting Brown. Smith demanded an apology and, when the newspaper refused, brought a $50,000 libel action. In a private letter to Smith, Douglass supported taking legal action against “an accusation of the most damaging kind” for which its editors should “retract or suffer.” The case ended with the Tribune publicly acknowledging that Smith’s illness had been genuine.

The Smith affair complicates any sharp distinction between attacks on public and private life. Smyth’s brothel rumor concerned Douglass’ private sexual conduct, whereas the Tribune’s allegation concerned Smith’s actions following an event of enormous public importance. Yet Douglass pursued legal redress against Smyth and endorsed Smith’s libel lawsuit. Still, the Smyth vs. Smith cases are not necessarily comparable. Douglass’ support for Smith was expressed in a private letter to a distressed friend and benefactor and may not have reflected the redress Douglass thought appropriate if he were on the receiving end. After all, he was the target of significantly more damaging accusations related to the same incident and responded in print rather than in the courts.

The weight of the evidence

The willingness to be corrected did not fade with age. In 1882, Douglass wrote a letter to Robert C. Winthrop Jr. apologizing for an unflattering and misleading portrayal of Winthrop’s father in Douglass’ third autobiography, Life and Times. Douglass promised to “redress this wrong” in future editions, a promise he kept.

Nine years later, an older Frederick Douglass reflected on his combative spirit:

When I was a younger man than now . . . I thought it my duty to contradict all the falsehoods told in respect to my conduct; but I soon found that if I did so I would have little time to do anything else. I therefore concluded to leave many of them to time and events.

This was more a rule of economy than a retreat from counterspeech. Douglass had learned to distinguish falsehoods that threatened important principles if left unanswered from those whose rebuttal would merely distract him from advancing those principles.

When it comes to what remedies Douglass thought proper for redress, the scale of the evidence is overwhelmingly one-sided. Against the Smyth and Smith cases stand countless speeches, letters and editorials answering his critics with facts and arguments. As an editor, he repeatedly opened his own columns to opposing views, including attacks directed against himself. Even when he failed to live up to his professed editorial ideals, as both Garnet and Winthrop Jr. alleged, Douglass ultimately allowed his accuser to answer in his own columns or acknowledged his error and corrected the record. Add to this several examples of Douglass defending other Black journalists and editors when they faced legal jeopardy for their writings. In one instance, Douglass offered the then-considerable sum of $300 in security for John W. Cromwell — editor of the People’s Advocate — who was charged with criminal libel.

As David Blight shows, Douglass was proud, often hypersensitive to criticism and not above vicious personal counterattack, so the temptation to settle scores in court must have been considerable. That he seems to have instructed lawyers only once in response to defamatory statements suggests he meant what he said about answering attacks in print: Rebuttal was owed to “great and vital principles,” not merely to his own wounded pride.

Two things underwrote Douglass’ conviction that the law should protect the pen rather than restrain it: an extraordinary confidence in counterspeech and a demanding conception of what press freedom required. A newspaper worthy of being called the “palladium of liberty” did not protect readers from controversy. It enabled accusations to be answered, exposed its own claims to adversarial testing and gave truth a chance to prevail over falsehood. Douglass did not merely preach that ideal. Across more than half a century of vilification, he practiced it with a record that — if not unblemished — was impressively consistent.

More than 130 years after his death, Douglass still has something to teach the thin-skinned who want free speech for themselves but not for their critics. It has become all too common for politicians and public figures to sue or threaten legal action over attacks that Douglass would have ignored or answered with facts and arguments. Recent examples include Donald Trump’s defamation suits against the media, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s many criminal complaints against online critics over “insults,” free-speech advocate Matt Taibbi’s dismissed lawsuit against the author of a critical book, Gavin Newsom’s $787 million defamation lawsuit against Fox News, and J.K. Rowling’s offer to bankroll libel actions against Amnesty International over its characterization of gender-critical campaigners. It’s a testament to Douglass’ enduring legacy that even in 2026, a culture of free speech infused with his principles would strengthen our ability to speak freely as well as our commitment to truth, integrity, and dialogue.

This is the first in a series on Frederick Douglass’ free speech philosophy, originally published on Mchangama’s Substack and drawn from the Frederick Douglass Free Speech Corpus. We’re republishing it this month to mark the anniversary of Douglass’ escape from slavery on Sept. 3, 1838.

“A man’s right to speak does not depend upon where he was born or upon his color. The simple quality of manhood is the solid basis of the right — and there let it rest forever.”

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So ends Frederick Douglass’ famous speech “A Plea for Free Speech in Boston” from Dec. 9, 1860. A Plea is Douglass’ defiant and rousing response to the disruption of an abolitionist meeting in Boston six days earlier. In a mere 1,099 words, Douglass writes a gripping and compelling defense of free speech constructed on the mutually reinforcing pillars of universal freedom and equality, natural rights and civic commitment. To embed the foundational value of free speech in the minds of his audience, he uses vivid imagery and formulations that have become timeless despite the very specific context in which they were written. Free speech is “the dread of Tyrants” and the “great moral renovator of society.” So consequential is free speech that “five years of its exercise would banish the auction block and break every chain in the South.” Therefore, to “suppress free speech is a double wrong” that “violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.” No wonder that A Plea is treated as the canonical Douglass text on free speech from which everyone quotes (myself included).

But how important was free speech really to Frederick Douglass? A Plea is deeply inspiring, but it’s not a systematic work of philosophy or political theory. Douglass never wrote a longer work specifically dedicated to free speech, such as Chapter 20 in Spinoza’s Theological Political Treatise, Cato’s Letters No. 15, 32, and 100, Chapter 2 in Mill’s “On Liberty,” or Madison’s “Report of 1800.”

I had read a number of other Douglass speeches, his second autobiography “My Bondage and My Freedom,” and David Blight’s sublime “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.” They all seemed to confirm Douglass’ sincere and deep commitment to free speech, but none of these texts are specifically focused on this topic and might give a skewed or incomplete picture. Given my reverence for Douglass and the prevalence of “Milton’s Curse,” I felt that I had to know exactly what his position was on free speech. And specifically whether he, like Milton, Spinoza, Cato’s Letters, Voltaire, J.S. Mill, and so many other great champions of free expression, had glaring blind spots or a record of advocating “free speech for me, but not for thee.”

So, over the weekend, I started a small side-project that quickly got out of hand. With ChatGPT’s help, I created the “Frederick Douglass Free Speech Corpus.” The project is my attempt to identify and log every publicly available speech, article and letter in which Douglass discusses free speech and related freedoms, including press, religion, assembly, petition, and literacy. ChatGPT assists with discovery and organization, while I check the entries against original sources. I expected perhaps 15–30 relevant texts. I currently have an index of 203 entries and a 169-page Master Corpus of quotations, summaries, and themes, not counting the many repetitive texts logged only as cross-references. To work through all that material, I also vibe-coded an audio app that lets me listen, bookmark, and annotate uploaded texts from the corpus while driving, working, etc. Both projects remain works in progress, but I eventually intend to publish the corpus and its methodology.

Given the huge number of relevant texts, it’s safe to say that free speech was not merely a passing reference for Douglass. It was an obsession both as a practice and a principle. Yet, at this stage, I will resist the temptation to make any categorical claims about Douglass’ free speech philosophy or consistency across all themes. I still have more than a thousand pages of underlying text to trawl through. But in the following, I’ll give a (very) preliminary verdict on whether Douglass remained committed to free speech maximalism during wartime.

Take nothing away from A Plea, but it’s not surprising that a man in Douglass’ position would appeal to free speech given the draconian censorship of abolitionist ideas in the South, the hostile mobs he often had to confront and more generally his membership of an unpopular minority that suffered pervasive stigma and discrimination. In such a vulnerable situation, it’s not hard to see how the right of free speech can be invoked as a shield against majoritarian intolerance and a precondition for speaking truth to power. But as everyone who cares deeply about free speech knows all too well, the real test for free speech defenders is not whether you advocate free speech for yourself and the ideas you want to advance. The real test is whether you also defend the rights of those you most vehemently disagree with and are willing to take a stand for the right to express deeply unpopular ideas, no matter how massive and vocal the public backlash.

A great topic to test Douglass’ free speech philosophy and consistency is wartime restrictions. National security is and remains one of the essential drivers of censorship. As witnessed by World War I and the subsequent First Red Scare, such wartime restrictions can often extend beyond and outlive any genuine and pressing requirements, and end up targeting dissent and opposition alleged to threaten national unity.

Douglass lived through the American Civil War, a war fundamentally fought over the very question of slavery, which also animated Douglass’ personal struggle. He therefore had a deeply personal stake in the outcome of the war and in supporting one side against the other, both when they faced off on the battlefield and when they clashed in the public square. So what does the record say?

On Jan. 14, 1862, nine months after the attack on Fort Sumter, Douglass gave an address, “Fighting the Rebels With One Hand,” in which he lamented the ruinous costs of the war as measured in blood, property, treasure, and rights:

Liberty of speech and of the press have ceased to exist . . . one stroke of the pen from Davis or Lincoln sends any citizen to prison, as in England, three centuries ago, British subjects were sent to the Tower of London.

Douglass found this state of affairs “terrible beyond all description,” but ultimately also warranted by the exceptional circumstances:

We speak and write now by the forbearance of our rulers, not by the sacredness of our rights. I speak this not in complaint; I admit the necessity, while I lament it.

Whatever necessity Douglass conceded in January, six months later he was sharply limiting its reach. On July 4, 1862, speaking in Yates County, New York, Douglass delivered his “The Slaveholders’ Rebellion,” an incendiary speech highly critical of the way that Lincoln and his generals were conducting the war. More importantly for our purposes, Douglass explains why he feels compelled to so vocally attack the very leaders he wants to succeed on the battlefield:

I am quite aware that some who hear me will question the wisdom of any criticisms upon the conduct of this war at this time and will censure me for making them. I do not dread those censures. I have on many occasions, since the war began, held my breath when even the stones of the street would seem to cry out. I can do so no longer. I believe in the absence of martial law, a citizen may properly express an opinion as to the manner in which our Government has conducted, and is still conducting this war. I hold that it becomes this country, the men who have to shed their blood and pour out their wealth to sustain the Government at this crisis, to look very sharply into the movements of the men who have our destiny in their hands.

To Douglass, no less than the “safety of the nation” depends on the public’s ability to hold “every officer of the nation strictly responsible to the people for the faithful performance of duty.” But instead of open discussion, Douglass argues that the war has bred a “slavish and abject” tendency to shut the eyes of the nation to the blunders of those in power whose decisions must be accepted blindly. To Douglass, this will not do since:

Our rulers are the agents of the people. They are fallible men. They need instruction from the people, and it is no evidence of a factious disposition that any man presumes to condemn a public measure if in his judgment that measure is opposed to the public good.

He then highlights three men whose decisions and conduct warrant special scrutiny: Lincoln and Generals McClellan and Halleck, in other words the president and two of the most senior commanders of the Union Army.

Douglass goes on a detailed and scathing attack against McClellan, concluding that the general is either a “cold-blooded Traitor” or “an unmitigated military Impostor.” He also turns his fire on Lincoln’s policy — or lack thereof — on slavery. Douglass stops short of saying that the administration has no policy, but observes that “an Administration without a policy” is an administration “without brains,” while anyone who professes the ability to act but cannot explain how “confesses his own imbecility.” If Lincoln does have a policy, Douglass argues, “the people have a right to know what it is” and “to approve or disapprove of it as they shall deem it wise or unwise.”

So Douglass seems to accept the legitimacy of martial law in exceptional circumstances. But outside such genuine and declared emergency, there is neither a legal nor moral duty to refrain from uttering even harsh criticism of government policies and actions, which many might view as bordering on disloyalty and sedition.

In February 1863, Douglass professes an even more radical tolerance of wartime speech. In “The Proclamation and a Negro Army,” Douglass celebrates the momentous issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation a month earlier as the triumphant victory of “the glorious liberty of truth” over the “thraldom and darkness of error.” The Proclamation is proof that:

The hope of the world — the progress of nations — the triumph of the truth and the reign of reason and righteousness among men are conditioned on free discussion.

Douglass is not praising free speech as an empty and abstract ornament in which this freedom equals pleasant ideas. He is a man deeply committed to principles and who abhors hypocrisy. So much so that Douglass refuses to let the hypocrisy of his most hated opponents defeat his most cherished principles:

One of the peculiarities of our times compels notice here. Parties have to some extent changed sides on the subject of free speech. The men who would a few years ago mob and hang Abolitionists for exercising the sacred right of free thought and speech, have all at once become the most urgent for the largest liberty of speech. And I must say, detestable as are the motives that have brought them to the defense of free speech, I think they have the right in the controversy.

Frustratingly, Douglass does not provide us with a clear doctrinal test on where to draw the line: “I do not know where I would limit the right of simple utterance of opinion.” Yet the bar he sets — and this is during wartime, mind you — seems very high indeed:

If any one is base enough to . . . shout for Jefferson Davis, let him, and do not lock him up for it.

Treasonous opinions should be protected, while treasonous acts should be met with force. That’s an almost unbelievably principled position. Douglass is very clear that he regards supporters of the Confederacy as traitorous rebels intent on waging war to keep alive the very institution which he has dedicated his life to abolishing. Yet, even as bloody battles are fought across the nation, Douglass is prepared to defend the right to utter support for the supreme leader of the Lords of the Lash.

But to Douglass, it would seem that this presents no Paradox of Tolerance. Free speech is literally the remedy against the erroneous and unjust ideas that support slavery. To underline that position, Douglass invokes Thomas Jefferson: “Error may be safely tolerated where truth is left free to combat it.” He also points to several historical examples of bigoted intolerance — from the burning of heretics and witches to Christian persecution of Jews — that rested on ideas now widely regarded as erroneous, superstitious and false.

Contemporary proponents of Militant Democracy might argue that a republic fighting a slaveholding rebellion would be suicidal to allow Confederate sympathizers to exploit free speech by voicing support of its destruction. Douglass reaches the opposite conclusion. He views censorship and suppression as vectors of the disease and free speech and open debate as the remedy:

Such is my confidence in the potency of truth, in the power of reason, I hold that had the right of free discussion been preserved during the last thirty years, had the Northern parties and politicians been half so diligent in protecting this high constitutional right, from the first ruthlessly struck down all over the South, as they have been in framing laws for the recapture of poor, toil-worn and foot-sore slaves, we should now have no Slavery to breed Rebellion, nor war, black with dismal terror, to drench our land with blood, and fill our dwellings with sorrow and mourning. Slavery would have fallen as it fell in the West Indies, as it has fallen in the Free States, as it has fallen in Russia, and elsewhere, and as it will fall everywhere, when men can assail it with the weapons of reason and the facts of experience.

Douglass’ confidence in free discussion ran so deep that, although fiercely committed to winning the war and abolishing slavery, he could contemplate peace on one indispensable condition:

Much as I hate Slavery, and glad as I should be to see it instantly abolished, I would consent gladly to any peace if but the right of speech, and the liberty of peaceably assembling could be secured in every part of the Union.

Make no mistake: Douglass (at this point in time) was no pacifist. His position rested on a sharp distinction between speech and violence: “When error consents to reason truth may also consent to reason. But when error takes the sword, truth must also take the sword.”

As long as the Confederacy used arms, Douglass’ response was guns and bullets. But Douglass believed that if the freedoms of speech and assembly were universally protected, truth and reason would ultimately be more powerful than armies.

Douglass’ willingness to accept “any peace” securing free speech and peaceful assembly throughout the Union was obviously hypothetical. No such settlement was on offer, and the suppression on which slavery depended made those freedoms impossible throughout the South. Confronting the concrete question of what peace would actually mean, Douglass called for an “Abolition peace” in his speech “The Mission of the War” at Cooper Institute in New York on Jan. 13, 1864. His refusal to accept any peace preserving slavery did not signal a retreat from his commitment to free speech. Even as Douglass recognized that the Confederate cause was aided by the “national prejudice and hatred” directed against his own people, and that even Northern newspapers were “firing the nation’s heart with hatred to Negroes and Abolitionists,” free expression remained central to the country he envisioned emerging from the war:

We want a country, and are fighting for a country, through the length and breadth of which the literature and learning of any section of it may float to its extremities unimpaired, and thus become the common property of all the people — a country in which no man shall be fined for reading a book, or imprisoned for selling a book — a country where no man may be imprisoned or flogged or sold for learning to read, or teaching a fellow mortal how to read.

I started this article by asking the question, was Frederick Douglass a free speech absolutist? That framing set an extremely high bar — even modern First Amendment doctrine allows for narrow restrictions on speech. As far as I can tell, Douglass never supplied anything like a comprehensive doctrinal test. But based on my (initial and non-exhaustive) reading of Douglass’ wartime speeches, I think he came close to absolutism in his defense of the universal human right to voice any opinion, however repulsive, offensive, hateful or unpopular with magistrates, majorities or mobs.

In future articles, I hope to explore other aspects of Douglass’ free speech philosophy, including how it developed over time, his reactions to lies and slander, mob action, counterspeech, and the ethical framework of moral rights and duties sustaining a vibrant culture and civic commitment to free speech. This is very much a work in progress, and I will undoubtedly revise and refine my writings and conclusions as I delve deeper into the material. No doubt readers with a deeper knowledge of American history than I have will be able to connect some of Douglass’ writings and ideas with relevant contexts of which I am insufficiently aware — or entirely ignorant. I therefore welcome comments and corrections.

Jacob Mchangama is the founder and CEO of The Future of Free Speech and a research professor at Vanderbilt University. He is also the author of Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media and The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom (with Jeff Kosseff).