The Unconstitutionality of Slavery

In The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, Lysander Spooner advances a bold juridical argument: properly interpreted, the United States Constitution gives no legitimate sanction to human bondage. Reading contested clauses through principles of natural right and common-law liberty, he contends that ambiguity must favor freedom, not property in persons. The work is forensic, exacting, and polemical, situated within antebellum debates between proslavery constitutionalists and abolitionists who denounced the Constitution as a proslavery compact. Spooner, a Massachusetts legal thinker and radical individualist, brought to the question of slavery a deep suspicion of arbitrary power and coerced submission. His commitments to natural rights, contractual consent, and legal precision shaped his insistence that no government could justly create ownership in human beings. The treatise reflects both his abolitionist urgency and his broader resistance to institutions that violated individual sovereignty. This book is essential for readers interested in abolitionism, constitutional interpretation, and the moral limits of law. It rewards careful reading as both a historical intervention and a provocative theory of liberty, challenging modern readers to consider how legal texts may be used either to entrench injustice or to expose it.