On 20 April 1847, Frederick Douglass returned from his long sojourn in Britain planning to found and edit a newspaper aimed at both white abolitionists and the free black community in the North. Not entirely to his surprise, his colleagues in William Garrison's Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society were unenthusiastic: “My American friends looked at me with astonishment!” Douglass reports in his 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom (390). “‘A wood-sawyer’ offering himself up to the public as an editor! A slave, brought up in the very depths of ignorance, assuming to instruct the highly civilized people of the north in the principles of liberty, justice, and humanity! The thing looked absurd” (390). Indeed it did, but only to his “American friends.” As we shall see (and as his palpable irony here suggests), by 1855 Douglass had come to think of himself as a political philosopher who had valuable instruction to offer his nation about the practice and principles of its democracy precisely because he had been a slave. In the following pages, I focus on two aspects of the intellectual disposition Douglass believed he had acquired within slavery. …