Let us begin our view of symbolic expression in Framing-era law by looking at speech restrictions. We’ll get to speech protections in coming posts, but the law of speech restrictions is relevant because speech restrictions and speech protections were seen as closely related during the era: The restrictions were recognized exceptions from the constitutional freedoms, and the freedoms were recognized as being constrained by the traditional restrictions.
Speech restriction law of the late 1700s and early 1800s took a functional view of symbolic expression, and generally treated it the same as verbal expression. As William Hawkins