“A man’s rights rest in three boxes. The ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box.”

John Locke Foundation ^ | February 8, 2018 | Jon Guze

[wildcard_redneck]

The title comes from a memoir by Frederick Douglass, a self-taught escaped slave who was born two hundred years ago this month. During his life, Douglass was celebrated as one of the 19th century’s most learned, eloquent, and passionate defenders of freedom and individual rights in the classical liberal tradition.

By the time of his death in 1895, however, that tradition was being rapidly displaced by progressivism, an antithetical philosophy promoting government power over the individual that would dominate American political thought throughout the coming century. The triumph of progressivism over classical liberalism may, in part, explain why Douglass is so woefully neglected as a thinker and as a writer, and it may also explain why—despite the official creation of a federal Frederick Douglass Bicentennial Commission—so little has been done to commemorate the anniversary of his birth.

At a time when the principles of the Declaration of Independence were under assault, Douglass waved the banner of classical liberalism, championing inalienable rights for all, regardless of race or sex. At a time when socialism was on the rise, Douglass preached the virtues of free labor and self-ownership in a market-based economy. At a time when state governments were violating the rights of the recently emancipated, Douglass professed the central importance of “the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box” in the fight against Jim Crow

[LS]

Yeah. It’s a pretty good book.