The Constitution a Pro-Slavery Compact

The pamphlet was written by William Lloyd Garrison, a leading American abolitionist and publisher of The Liberator. It argues that the United States Constitution protected slavery rather than merely tolerating it.

Garrison argued that constitutional protections for slavery made the federal system complicit in human bondage. He therefore rejected the Constitution as morally unacceptable until slavery was abolished.

Garrison described it as a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. The phrase expressed his view that constitutional compromises with slaveholding states were fundamentally immoral.

Garrison promoted immediate abolition and moral opposition to slavery, including resistance to participation in a government he viewed as pro-slavery. Other abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass at different points, debated whether the Constitution could instead be interpreted as anti-slavery.