Securing the Blessings of Liberty for All: Lysander Spooner’s Originalism
On January 1, 1808, legislation made it illegal to import slaves into the United States. Eighteen days later, in Athol, Massachusetts, Lysander Spooner was born. In terms of their influence on the abolition of slavery, only the first of these events has gained widespread recognition. The importance of Spooner’s reading of the U.S. Constitution as a document that did not sanction slavery has been overlooked, and his abolitionist work continues to be disparaged as the incoherent ramblings of an unserious polemicist. As this essay demonstrates, this conclusion about Spooner’s mid-nineteenth century work, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, is unfortunate because his observations about the relationship between law and individual liberty are timeless.
Drawing on his writings (including a previously unpublished manuscript) and voluminous correspondence, with supporting material from abolitionist newspapers and periodicals, I focus on Spooner’s contribution to a mid-1840s debate about constitutional interpretation. Spooner’s natural rights–based reading of the Constitution’s original meaning never matched the popularity of fellow abolitionist Wendell Phillips’s emphasis on the Framers’ original pro-slavery intentions. Phillips won the day with conclusions that seemed to vindicate the Garrisonian condemnation of the Constitution as a “covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.” However, Phillips’s conclusions about the law were underpinned by a misleading emphasis on political history. They could not match the fiercely logical and legal emphasis of Spooner’s conclusions. In this respect, only Spooner offered an approach that was faithful to the guarantee, that appears in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, to protect the “Blessings of Liberty.”
