 In the pamphlet, Spooner shows that none of the state governments of the slave states specifically authorized slavery, that the U.S. Constitution contains several clauses that are contradictory with slavery, that slavery was a violation of natural law, and that the "intentions" of the Constitutional Convention have no legal bearing on the document they created.Thus, Spooner's position is one that employs "original meaning"-styled textualism and rejects "original intent"-styled originalism.This work is considered to be a work of sophistry or political strategy which aimed to win support from inconsistently-anti-slavery or "fence-sitting" Northerners whose sympathies were squarely on the side of the Constitution, but who opposed slavery on a mixed and inconsistent basis (Spooner believed that the Constitution was "of no Authority," as his later essay "No Treason Volume VI