From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true, and the beautiful are taught, nurtured, and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.

I would say the two constitutions that are increasingly at war in our politics are the original constitution, which I call the Founders Constitution, and the Liberals Constitution, which they like to call the living Constitution.

This is your host, Scott Bertram, and that's Charles Kessler.

We'll talk with him later on in today's program about his brand new book,

Crisis of the Two Constitutions, The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of American Greatness.

First up, we talk with John J. Miller,

director of the Dow Journalism Program

at Hillsdale College,

about Frederick Douglas, the journalist.

We do so because Frederick Douglass

celebrated his birthday on February 14th.

He also died February 20th of 1895

at the age of 77.

John, thanks for joining us. Hi, Scott. Talking today about

Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass, the journalists. Frederick Douglass, people know as an

abolitionist, but he was also a journalist, and that's where we come in today. Douglas, though,

Douglas was born into slavery, John. How did he become prominent? Well, he's best known,

of course, as you say, as an abolitionist. He was a great orator. He's a terrific speaker.

We don't have any recordings of him, obviously. You can't go look up a Douglas speech on YouTube.

We have contemporary accounts of this. We know he was just a spellbinding orator.

How did he come to his education? As you say, he's born into slavery. He had an owner at one point

whose wife actually began to teach him to read and write, and then she stopped. But she gave him

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