Alexander Crummell: What Gives a Person Rights?

Imagine you’re a kid in class, and the teacher announces that only some students get to vote on where the class goes on the field trip. The rest of you just have to go along with whatever the voting students decide. When you ask why, the teacher says: “Because the rules say so. And the rules were written a long time ago, and they didn’t include you.”

You’d probably feel that something was deeply wrong. Not just unfair in the way that all rules are sometimes unfair, but wrong in a way that the rules themselves don’t fix. You might feel that you have a right to be included—not because the rules say so, but just because you’re a person like anyone else.

This is exactly the kind of problem Alexander Crummell spent his life thinking about. And the problem was much bigger than a school field trip. It was about whether millions of Black people in America—both enslaved and free—had any rights at all.

Crummell was born free in New York City in 1819. His father had been enslaved but later became free. His mother had always been free. So Crummell grew up knowing that the line between being a person with rights and being a person without them was thin, arbitrary, and backed by the full power of the law. He became a priest, studied at Yale and Cambridge, and spent his life trying to answer a question that still matters today: Where do rights really come from?

The Problem: You Have No Rights Here

Here’s how bad the situation was when Crummell was thinking about this. In 1857, the Supreme Court of the United States decided the Dred Scott case. Dred Scott was an enslaved man who had lived in free territories with his owner. He sued for his freedom, arguing that living on free soil should have made him free.

The Chief Justice, Roger Taney, wrote that Black people—whether enslaved or free—“had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” He said that Black people were not citizens and could never become citizens, even if a state wanted to make them citizens. The Constitution, he said, was written only for white people.

Taney wasn’t just being cruel. He was reading the Constitution in a way that many people at the time thought was correct. The Constitution talked about enslaved people as property. It counted them as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation. It didn’t treat them as members of the country at all.

So here was the puzzle: if the laws say you have no rights, and the Constitution says you have no rights, and the Supreme Court says you have no rights—how can you possibly claim that you have rights?

Most people would have tried to argue that the laws were unfair and should be changed. Crummell thought that wasn’t enough. He thought that if rights depend on what the law says, then they can be taken away just as easily as they’re given. What’s needed is something stronger—a reason why rights exist before the law, independent of what any government says.

The Natural Rights Argument

Crummell’s big idea was simple to state but hard to defend: Rights come from being human, not from being a citizen.

This idea is called “natural rights.” The thought is that there are some rights you have just because you’re a person. The law doesn’t give them to you, and the law can’t take them away. The law’s job is to recognize these rights, not to create them.

Crummell thought that rights are built into the structure of the world, like mathematical truths. Before anyone ever wrote a law, there was already the truth that you shouldn’t enslave people. The law that says “slavery is legal” isn’t just unfair—it’s false, the same way “2+2=5” is false.

This is a radical claim. Think about what it means. If rights are built into reality itself, then the whole legal system of slavery in America was not just bad policy—it was built on a lie about what is real.

But how do you prove that rights exist before the law? Crummell had a three-step argument.

First step: Rights aren’t just what people feel sympathy for. You can’t base rights on public opinion, because public opinion changes. During slavery, many white Americans felt sympathy for enslaved people—but that sympathy didn’t give them any legal rights. And sympathy can vanish overnight. So rights can’t depend on how people feel.

Second step: Rights come from our nature as humans. Humans have certain “settled and primary sentiments”—deep feelings about what’s right and wrong. When you see someone being treated cruelly, you feel that it’s wrong. That feeling, Crummell thought, isn’t just a personal preference. It’s a clue to how the world actually is. Your feeling of “this is wrong” is your mind perceiving a real truth, the same way your eyes perceive a real tree.

Third step: Humans have reason—the ability to think about general principles and apply them to specific situations. Reason lets us see that there are truths about rights that don’t depend on what any particular government says. If you can reason, you can see that some things are always wrong, no matter what the law says.

A Test Case: The Amistad

Crummell used the famous Amistad case to show how this works. In 1839, a group of Africans who had been kidnapped and put on a slave ship rose up, killed most of the crew, and tried to sail back to Africa. They ended up in American waters, and the question became: what should happen to them?

On one way of thinking, they were property. They’d been bought and sold, and the law said that people who buy property get to keep it. On another way of thinking, they had a right to defend themselves—after all, they’d been kidnapped. But that second way of thinking depends on what rights you think people have.

Crummell said: the Africans on the Amistad had a right to self-defense not because American law gave it to them, but because they were human beings. The law should have recognized that right. And the reason Americans felt sympathy for the Africans—the reason people were outraged by their kidnapping—wasn’t the source of their rights. It was a sign of their rights. People felt outraged because the situation was genuinely wrong, and their feelings were picking up on that truth.

The Problem of Moral Change

But here’s where things get complicated. If rights are built into reality, and reality doesn’t change, then how does moral progress happen? How did slavery go from being legal to being illegal? If the truth about rights was always there, why didn’t people see it before?

Crummell thought that moral change happens slowly, through generations. Each generation has a duty to make the world more civilized—to bring human society closer to the timeless truths about right and wrong. This duty isn’t just to people alive now. It’s to future people who will inherit the world we leave behind.

He thought of civilization like farming. A farmer works the soil so that it produces a harvest. If you don’t work the soil, it becomes dead and useless. The same is true for human society. Each generation has to cultivate goodness, justice, and reason, so that the next generation has better soil to work with.

For Black Americans, this meant something specific. Crummell believed that slavery had damaged people’s ability to reason and think clearly about moral questions. Not because Black people were naturally less capable, but because slavery had crushed the conditions that let people develop their minds. He thought the remedy was education—learning to use language precisely, to reason carefully, to think about abstract principles.

This part of his thinking is uncomfortable to read today. Crummell said harsh things about African languages like Grebo, claiming they couldn’t support complex moral reasoning. (He was wrong about this, and modern linguistics has shown that every human language is capable of expressing any thought its speakers need to express.) But his underlying point is worth taking seriously: the tools we use to think—language, education, practice—matter for our ability to reason about moral questions.

The Problem of Motivation

There’s another puzzle Crummell wrestled with. Even if you know what’s right, why would you do it? Why would you work for moral progress when it’s hard and takes generations?

Crummell thought the answer had something to do with God. He believed that God is an active force in history, working through human beings to bring about goodness. When people do good things, they’re cooperating with God’s plan. When people do evil things, God can still use those evil actions for good purposes—though that doesn’t make the evil actions themselves okay.

This led to a problem that philosophers call “the problem of evil.” If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, then why does evil exist? Why did slavery happen? Why did millions of people suffer for centuries?

Crummell had a few ways of answering this. One was the classic religious answer: God allows evil because it builds character and teaches lessons. Another was more philosophical. He thought that the “good” is a timeless, abstract reality—like a perfect circle that exists even though no actual circle is perfectly round. Evil is what happens when we fail to grasp the good, not something God creates. Suffering is real and terrible, but it doesn’t change the fact that goodness itself is permanent and unchanging.

This might not satisfy you. It didn’t satisfy a lot of people then, and it doesn’t satisfy a lot of people now. Even Crummell seemed to struggle with it. But it was his attempt to make sense of how progress is possible in a world that contains so much horror.

The Argument with Douglass

Near the end of his life, Crummell had a famous public disagreement with Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist and former slave. The question was: how should Black Americans think about slavery?

Douglass thought they should remember it actively—talk about it, write about it, use it as fuel for the fight for justice. Crummell thought this was a mistake. He drew a distinction between memory and recollection. Memory is passive: things come into your mind whether you want them to or not. Recollection is active: you deliberately bring the past into the present.

Crummell thought that actively recalling the horrors of slavery—dwelling on them, making them the center of your thoughts—would trap Black people in the past. He said it had an “irresistible tendency in the Negro mind in this land to dwell morbidly and absorbingly upon the servile past.” Instead, he wanted Black Americans to focus on building the future—creating new ideas, new projects, new ambitions.

Douglass thought this was dangerously wrong. He believed that forgetting the past was how injustice gets repeated. If you don’t remember what was done to you, you can’t demand that it never happens again.

This disagreement is still alive today. Should a group that has been wronged focus on the past or the future? Is it more important to remember or to move forward? There’s no easy answer, and Crummell and Douglass represent two powerful ways of thinking about it.

What Crummell Leaves Us

Crummell’s arguments don’t all work. His claims about language have been disproven. His confidence that reason alone can prove the existence of natural rights is something many philosophers today doubt. His providential view of history—the idea that God is guiding everything toward goodness—is hard to square with the amount of suffering in the world.

But the question he asked is still alive. If the law says you have no rights, do you still have rights? If so, where do they come from? And if not, then what protects you when the law changes?

These aren’t just academic questions. They’re practical ones. People are still denied rights all over the world. Governments still write laws that treat some people as less than fully human. The claim that rights come from being human—not from being a citizen of this country or that country, not from being this race or that race, not from anything except your existence as a person—is still a radical claim.

Crummell thought it was the only claim strong enough to stand up to the power of governments and laws. He might have been right. He might have been wrong. But the question is still ours to answer.

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Natural rights	Rights that exist before any government creates them, based on being human
Reason	The human ability to think about general principles and apply them to specific situations
Moral change	How human societies move closer to what is truly right and just over time
Posterity	Future generations that current generations have a duty to help
Memory vs. Recollection	Passive remembering vs. actively bringing the past into the present to dwell on it

Key People

Alexander Crummell (1819–1898): A Black American priest and philosopher who argued that rights come from being human, not from the law. Born free in New York, he studied at Yale and Cambridge and spent his life thinking about how to achieve justice for Black people.
Roger Taney (1777–1864): The Supreme Court Chief Justice who wrote the Dred Scott decision, declaring that Black people had no rights white people had to respect.
Frederick Douglass (1818–1895): A former slave who became the most famous abolitionist of the 19th century. He argued with Crummell about whether Black people should actively recall the horrors of slavery or focus on the future.

Things to Think About

Crummell thought rights exist before the law, like mathematical truths. But if someone disagrees with you about rights, how do you prove you’re right? Can you reason someone into agreeing that slavery is wrong, or do they just have to feel it?
Crummell and Douglass disagreed about whether to remember or move on. Is there a way to do both? Can you honor the past without being trapped by it?
Crummell thought moral progress happens through education—learning to reason clearly and precisely. But education takes time and resources. What do you do about people who are suffering now, before they’ve been educated? Is it fair to tell them to wait?
If rights are “natural” and built into reality, then why do different societies have such different ideas about what rights people have? Is it possible that some societies are just wrong, the way some people are wrong about math? Or does that seem like a way of saying “my culture is right and yours is wrong”?

Where This Shows Up

Debates about human rights today. When people say “human rights” are universal, they’re making the same kind of argument Crummell made. The question is whether these rights really exist or are just agreements we’ve made with each other.
Arguments about reparations. The question of whether descendants of enslaved people should receive compensation is partly about whether past wrongs create present obligations. Crummell’s arguments about posterity are directly relevant here.
School debates about curriculum. Should schools teach about historical injustices in detail, or focus on building skills for the future? That’s Crummell versus Douglass playing out in classrooms today.
The idea of “law versus justice.” Every time someone says “the law says X, but justice requires Y,” they’re making a Crummell-style claim that there’s a standard of right and wrong above what any government says.