There were a number of martyrs in Roman times named Saint Valentine. Of the one whose feast is celebrated on February 14, nothing at all is known except that he was buried on that day. How he became the patron saint of love nobody really knows.

However, there was a man who is worth commemorating on February 14, the date he chose arbitrarily as his ‘birthday’.

His name was Frederick Douglass.

Nick Rizzuto writes about him at Townhall:

He was a giant of a man both physically and intellectually. He was raised in adverse circumstances that he would eventually rise above. When called upon, he served his country admirably in grave times, and broke racial barriers in this nation like no other man before him had. No, I’m not speaking of Abraham Lincoln, although that description would be equally fitting for him; I speak of the great anti-slavery orator Frederick Douglass.

As it was with most people born into slavery, Douglass did not know the exact date of his birth. He did however adopt Valentine’s Day as his birthday due to the fact that his mother, Harriet Bailey, lovingly referred to him as “her little valentine.” This year will mark the 192nd anniversary of Douglass’ birth.

Like many historical figures, Frederick Douglass’s true character and beliefs have been somewhat obscured, whether due to the fog of time, or to fit modern agendas. While we take for granted today that Douglass’ views on the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage were just, his view of the US Constitution would be considered by many to be out of the mainstream.

On July 5th of 1852, Douglass, who referred to himself as a “black, dyed in the wool Republican”, addressed the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, New York. During his passionate speech, Douglass said, “Take the Constitution according to its plain reading. I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it.” Douglass continued his Independence Day address by proclaiming that, “Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document.”

Imagine the leap of faith that that statement must have taken for a black man who lived in a time in which members of his family were treated as property to view the Constitution as a beacon of liberty. If the self educated scholar Douglass had stood in front of the crowd and torn the document to shreds, one could scarcely have blamed him. While evident to Douglass over 150 years ago, this trust in the idea of limited government in general, and the protections afforded by the United States Constitution specifically, seems to be difficult for many on the American left to accept even today.

What makes Douglass’s praise for the constitution even more unlikely was that he did so according to its “plain reading”; or in other words, as it had been written. He spoke these words before America fought a Civil War to decide once and for all the issue of slavery and even before a single piece of Civil Rights legislation had passed through congress. Douglass did not complain about the lack of specifics in the constitution that indicated what the government “must do on your behalf”, as then Illinois State Senator Barack Obama famously did in a 2001 interview. Nor did he decry that it was a “charter of negative liberties” which, as President Obama has stated he believes, “represented the bias of the founders.”

Douglass’ words came even before The Constitution came to be viewed by many as a series of court cases and precedents rather than a stand-alone document. For example, his praise did not rest on the decision made in Brown vs. Board of Education which would come over 100 years later. Douglass apparently understood that civil rights would not be the products of court decisions, but that they were intrinsic to the nature of our republican form of government.