It was an assertion of hard-won personal sovereignty: Frederick Douglass, born on a Maryland plantation 200 years ago this month, never knew on what February day because history-deprivation was inflicted to confirm slaves as nonpersons. So, later in life, Douglass picked the 14th, the middle of the month, as his birthday. This February, remember him, the first African-American to attain historic stature.
In an inspired choice to write a short biography of this fierce defender of individualism, the libertarian Cato Institute commissioned the Goldwater Institute's Timothy Sandefur, who says that Douglass was, in a sense, born when he was 16. After six months of being whipped once a week with sticks and rawhide thongs — arbitrary punishment was used to stunt a slave's dangerous sense of personhood — Douglass fought his tormentor. Sent to Baltimore, where he was put to work building ships — some of them slave transports — he soon fled north to freedom, and to fame as an anti-slavery orator and author. His 1845 "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass" is, as Sandefur says, a classic of American autobiography.
Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison said there should be "no union with slaveholders," preferring disunion to association with slave states. They said what the Supreme Court would say in its execrable 1857 Dred Scott decision — that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document. Douglass, however, knew that Abraham Lincoln knew better.