A three-part series by Jacob Mchangama examines how Frederick Douglass developed and applied his free speech philosophy, and the series forces a harder question than most treatments attempt: did Douglass extend those principles consistently to his enemies, or only to himself and his allies?
Mchangama, a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and author of Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media, has been publishing the series on his Substack. The three installments move from Douglass’s defence of wartime dissent, through his thinking on press freedom and defamation, to the third instalment, ‘Douglass versus the Mobocrats,’ which examines how pro-slavery mobs silenced opponents and why Douglass defended the right to speak even when the crowd’s target was someone he despised.
Counterspeech, Press Freedom, and a Grudging Line to Legal Remedy
Douglass (1818–1895) was a frequent target of vilification: racial epithets, allegations of sexual depravity, accusations that he had fabricated his life story, and claims that he was a paid anti-American agitator. His response, as Mchangama details, was grounded in an expansive faith in counterspeech. A newspaper worthy of the name, Douglass held, did not shelter readers from controversy. It allowed accusations to be answered, subjected its own claims to adversarial testing, and gave truth a fighting chance against falsehood.
Media pluralism was the corrective mechanism when a hostile outlet refused to offer a right of reply. Douglass believed press freedom itself would supply the corrective: a fair-minded editor elsewhere would publish what the partisan editor suppressed.
His commitment to counterspeech over legal redress was not absolute, however. Mchangama’s Part 2 essay reports that Douglass ‘confessed that his spirit was marred by this malignant slander, and he instructed solicitors to initiate legal action against Smyth,’ indicating that on at least one occasion Douglass did pursue litigation rather than relying solely on the public word. The principle had a boundary. Its location was contested even in Douglass’s own conduct.
The Chicago Speech and the Frederick Douglass Free Speech Standard
The hardest test Mchangama identifies came on 30 October 1854, when Douglass addressed a Chicago audience in a speech formally recorded by the Frederick Douglass Papers Project as ‘Slavery, Freedom, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act: An Address Delivered in Chicago, Illinois, on October 30, 1854.’ The occasion was the recent shouting-down of Senator Stephen A. Douglas (no relation, no ally), architect of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
The partisan press had already divided over who bore responsibility for the disruption. The Chicago Times, a Douglas paper, blamed ‘a gang of abolition rowdies.’ The Chicago Tribune countered that the senator had brought the outburst on himself by losing his temper and denouncing the crowd as a mob. Contemporary accounts cited in the Frederick Douglass Papers Project record that the senator ‘defiantly hurled one final insult and left the platform, shaking his fist at the audience.’
Frederick Douglass did not pretend the incident was uncomplicated. Before engaging the senator’s grievances, he named those the senator’s own doctrine excluded from its protections: ‘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.’
He then turned to the senator’s wounded feelings with carefully calibrated mockery: ‘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 carried an explicit reaffirmation: ‘I do not approve it; I am for free speech as well as for freemen and free soil.’ Douglass condemned the crowd’s conduct and ridiculed the senator’s self-pity in the same breath. He recognised the senator’s right to speak. He also placed the interference in proportion: being drowned out by non-violent opponents was not the enforced silence of millions held under the lash, and the senator had raised no objection to systematic suppression when the suppressed had no vote.
Across more than half a century of vilification, Douglass applied his principles with what Mchangama calls an impressively consistent record, if not an unblemished one. The Chicago speech is the record at its most demanding: principle upheld for an enemy, mockery deployed, perspective maintained, without contradiction.
Whether Douglass ultimately qualifies as a free speech absolutist, in the contemporary sense of that phrase, is the question the remaining parts of Mchangama’s series work towards answering.
