‘A Pound of Flesh, but Not One Drop of Blood’: Frederick Douglass’s Antislavery Constitution

Peter C. Myers is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, specializing in political philosophy and U.S. constitutional law, at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and is Honored Visiting Graduate Faculty at Ashland University. He earned his B.A. in Political Science from Northwestern University and his Ph.D. in Political Science from Loyola University Chicago. His Ph.D. dissertation, “John Locke on the Naturalness of Rights,” received the American Political Science Association’s Leo Strauss Award for the Best Doctoral Dissertation in the Field of Political Philosophy in 1992. Professor Myers has published three books. He is author of Our Only Star and Compass: Locke on the Struggle for Political Rationality (1998) and Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism (2008), and is editor of Race and Civil Rights: Core Documents (Ashbrook Press, 2021). He has received fellowship grants from the Earhart Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Heritage Foundation. He has published articles, chapters, and book reviews in the fields of liberal political philosophy, American literature, and American political thought, and is currently researching a book on the idea of color-blindness in American political thought.