
Gowler applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Thoughts That Burned: William Goodell, Human Rights, and the Abolition of American Slavery, and reported the following:
Readers dropping into Thoughts that Burned on page 99 find themselves amid revolutionary ferment in Rhode Island in 1841-42. The Dorr Rebellion pitted Charterists, who supported only modest changes to the state’s Royal Charter of 1663, which allowed only propertied white men to vote, against Dorrites (named for their leader, Thomas Wilson Dorr) who pushed for a new constitution that would expand the franchise to landless merchants and mechanics. A former resident of Providence, RI, and a proponent of radical democracy, the abolitionist William Goodell, the subject of Thoughts that Burned, followed the events in Rhode Island avidly. He instinctively supported the Dorrites, though he lamented their refusal to extend the vote to Black men. When he visited Providence in the late spring of 1842 the air was charged with the threat of violence.Visit Steve Gowler's website.
From page 99:As usual, Goodell’s pen was at the ready. He wrote an article for Joshua Leavitt’s Emancipator and Free American, titled “Lessons of a Single Day, or Sketches and Musings of Twenty-Four Hours in Rhode Island,” which focused on the Charterists’ bad faith in denying the natural rights of most of Rhode Island’s population. Over the next several months, Goodell continued to reflect on the implications of Dorr’s push toward a more democratic polity for his state. In the fall, Goodell published The Rights and the Wrongs of Rhode Island, arguing that the Rhode Island Charter contradicted the United States Constitution and proclaiming that the Declaration of Independence was the “grand expositor and father of Constitutional law.” This claim that the Declaration is the hermeneutical key to the Constitution would be crucial to the legal arguments he developed in the coming years.This passage mentions Goodell’s signal contribution to the abolitionist movement: his radical antislavery reading of the U.S. Constitution. Along with Gerrit Smith, Lysander Spooner, Alvan Stewart, and, most famously, Frederick Douglass, he argued that the Declaration of Independence was the Rosetta Stone of constitutional interpretation, the lens through which the Constitution was revealed to be, in Douglass’s words, “a glorious liberty document.” Douglass credited Goodell with being one of the most important influences on his understanding of the Constitution and his conversion to political abolitionism.
Page 99 offers a glimpse of an essential aspect of Goodell’s thinking and provides an example of his gravitational attraction to democratic reform; however, it is silent about the book’s other leading theme: the formation of an abolitionist household. Goodell’s wife, Clarissa, and his remarkable daughters, Maria and Lavinia, are frequently on stage in this biography, but on page 99 they remain in the wings.
--Marshal Zeringue