By the middle of the 19th century, slavery had created a fevered pitch in the politics of the United States, as abolitionists and slavery proponents fought a war of words and actual wars in Kansas and Nebraska. While the South postured for secession, abolitionists, both white and black, created a stronger movement in the Northeast in places like Boston. Ultimately the issue would have to be settled via civil war.
Spooner published his most famous work in 1845, and it immediately ignited controversy among the various factions of the abolition movement. He disputed the common perception that the Constitution supported the institution of slavery by using a complicated system of semantic, legal, and “natural law” arguments to demonstrate that several clauses in the document actually prohibited the establishment of slavery by the states. Spooner even went so far as to claim that those clauses cited by the Southern politicians justifying slavery actually did not.
This edition of Lysander Spooner’s The Unconstitutionality of Slavery is specially formatted with a Table of Contents and pictures of famous abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and more.
