The constitution itself contains no designation, description, or necessary admission of the existence of such a thing as slavery, servitude, or the right of property in man. We are obliged to go out of the instrument and grope among the records of oppression, lawlessness and crime – records unmentioned, and of course unsanctioned by the constitution – to find the thing, to which it is said that the words of the constitution apply. And when we have found this thing, which the constitution dare not name, we find that the constitution has sanctioned it (if at all) only by enigmatical words, by unnecessary implication and inference, by innuendo and double entendre, and under a name that entirely fails of describing the thing.

From “No Treason, The Constitution of No Authority” by Lyndard Spooner, discussing the fundamental failures of the document when confronting the horror of the antebellum South.