{"id":2128,"date":"2024-06-29T17:01:53","date_gmt":"2024-06-29T21:01:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/in-print-2\/volume-22-1-winter-2024\/how-lysander-spooners-legal-education-influenced-his-and-frederick-douglasss-belief-that-slavery-was-unconstitutional\/"},"modified":"2025-05-12T11:11:32","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T15:11:32","slug":"how-lysander-spooners-legal-education-influenced-his-and-frederick-douglasss-belief-that-slavery-was-unconstitutional","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/in-print-2\/volume-22-1-winter-2024\/how-lysander-spooners-legal-education-influenced-his-and-frederick-douglasss-belief-that-slavery-was-unconstitutional\/","title":{"rendered":"Arriving at an Answer to \u201cThe QUESTION OF QUESTIONS\u201d: How Lysander Spooner\u2019s Legal Education Influenced His (and Frederick Douglass\u2019s) Belief that Slavery Was Unconstitutional"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"p1\">In May 1851, downtown Syracuse bore witness to many dramatic events that would help to shape the course of slavery from thereon out, not just in that one city in central upstate New York, but also across the nation. Famously, when Secretary of State Daniel Webster took to the balcony of the Frazee Building on Montgomery Street on the 26th of that month, he vowed, among other things, to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act everywhere, even in Syracuse <span class=\"s1\">\u201c<\/span>in the midst of the next anti-slavery convention, if the occasion should arise.<span class=\"s1\">\u201d<\/span><sup><span class=\"s2\">1 <\/span><\/sup>He did not have to wait long for this smoldering fuse to ignite a powder keg of abolitionist anger; four months later, on October 1, fugitive slave Jerry (born William Henry) was arrested by U.S. Marshals while the Liberty Party convention was in town. Thus followed the famous rescue of Jerry, an event in which numerous prominent members of the Liberty Party participated in myriad ways. Although the events that unfolded in Syracuse at the <i>beginning <\/i>of May 1851 have received less attention, they should nevertheless be regarded as no less important in the history of American abolitionism. This is certainly true of the dramatic events that unfolded when the American Anti-Slavery Society (AA-SS) came to the Salt City for its eighteenth annual meeting on May 7<span class=\"s1\">\u2013<\/span>9, a meeting at which Frederick Douglass made an announcement that shocked the world of abolitionism.<sup><span class=\"s2\">2<\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Was the U.S. Constitution pro-slavery? This, as Douglass once stated, was the QUESTION OF QUESTIONS so far as the Anti-Slavery cause was concerned.<span class=\"s1\">\u201d<\/span><sup><span class=\"s2\">3 <\/span><\/sup>It was not the <span class=\"s1\">\u201c<\/span>only barrier between the different Radical Anti-Slavery Organizations of the country,<span class=\"s1\">\u201d<\/span><sup><span class=\"s2\">4 <\/span><\/sup>but it certainly helped to explain why the barriers existed. In January 1850, Douglass continued to publicly align himself with an affirmative answer to the question. <span class=\"s1\">\u201c<\/span>To say that the constitution is Anti-Slavery,<span class=\"s1\">\u201d <\/span>he observed during a debate that month, <span class=\"s1\">\u201c<\/span>is an assumption against an overwhelming array of testimony, and against the Constitution itself.<span class=\"s1\">\u201d<\/span><sup><span class=\"s2\">5<\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In May 1851, downtown Syracuse bore witness to many dramatic events that would help to shape the course of slavery from thereon out, not just in that one city in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10127,"featured_media":0,"parent":1770,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"abstract.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"footnotes":"","_tec_slr_enabled":"","_tec_slr_layout":""},"class_list":["post-2128","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"ticketed":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10127"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2128"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2138,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2128\/revisions\/2138"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}