Seizing Citizenship: Frederick Douglass's Abolitionist Republicanism

In the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War, former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass maintained that enslaved Black Americans were already American citizens. Through a systematic analysis of his political writings from the 1840s through the 1890s, Philip Yaure shows that Douglass' declaration of Black Americans' citizenship is the locus of a profound innovation in republican political philosophy. Seizing Citizenship argues that Frederick Douglass reimagined the republican concep...