On Plantation Politics: Citizenship and Antislavery Resistance in Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom

I provide an account of Frederick Douglass's conception of citizenship. For Douglass, persons constitute themselves as citizens of a polity by enacting commitments to the fundamental principles of that polity. Douglass holds that the fundamental principle of the American polity is a commitment to resist tyranny and oppression. So American citizenship consists in enacting a commitment to resist tyranny and oppression, through acts of resistance that cultivate bonds of solidarity. Douglass’s account bears emancipatory potential because it grounds citizenship not in facts about one’s place of birth or in a state’s power of conferral, but rather in the political agency of persons— especially those subject to and resisting oppression. Citizenship, for Douglass, is not something given to us by a polity, but something that we seize for ourselves through action in concert with others.