This First Edition copy of the “Review of the Lysander Spooner's Essay on the Unconstitutionality of Slavery”, Reprinted from the "Anti-Slavery Standard" with additions by Wendell Phillips was printed in 1847 by Andres & Prentiss in Boston. The booklet contains 95 pages, is bound in light brown paper covers, and measures approximately 5 1/2 x 9 inches. The covers are slightly stained, presumably from dirt. There is very slight tanning of the pages, and the text is clear and easily read. The overall condition of the item is very good. 

In this pamphlet Phillips reviews Spooner's essay and details his disagreements with him. The Review starts with “Two years ago, Lysander Spooner, Esq. published an essay on the Unconstitutionality of Slavery. We shall but fulfill an old promise in reviewing the argument it contains. Events beyond our control have delayed us till now, which we regret only as it seems to have led some of Mr. Spooner's admirers to imagine that the delay proceeded from an unwillingness, on our part, to measure lances with so skillful an adversary...”.

 Lysander Spooner (January 19, 1808 – May 14, 1887) was an American individualist anarchist, political philosopher, Deist, Unitarian abolitionist, supporter of the labor movement, legal theorist, and entrepreneur of the nineteenth century...Spooner attained his greatest fame as a figure in the abolitionist movement. His most famous work, a book titled The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, was published in 1845 to great acclaim among many abolitionists but criticism from others. Spooner's book contributed to a controversy within the abolitionist movement over whether the United States Constitution supported the institution of slavery. The "disunionist" faction, led by William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, argued the Constitution legally recognized and enforced the oppression of slaves. They also cited the frequent appeals to Constitutional compromise by Southern politicians, who insisted that protection of the "peculiar institution" was part of the sectional compromise on which the Constitution was based. The disunionists thus argued that keeping the free states in a political union with the slave states made the citizens of the free states complicit in the slave system and denounced the Constitution as "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell." More generally, Wendell Phillips disputed Spooner's notion that any unjust law should be held legally void by judges. [Wikipedia]

Wendell Phillips (November 29, 1811 – February 2, 1884) was an American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator and lawyer. It was Phillips's contention that racial injustice was the source of all of society's ills. Like Garrison, Phillips denounced the Constitution for tolerating slavery. He disagreed with the argument of abolitionist Lysander Spooner that slavery was unconstitutional, and more generally disputed Spooner's notion that any unjust law should be held legally void by judges. [Wikipedia]

The illustrations accompanying this description are the front cover, the Title page, the first page of the Review, and a typical 2-page spread of text.