Encyclopedia
Lysander Spooner was an American individualist anarchist political philosopher,
abolitionist, and legal theorist of the
19th century. He is best known for his role in the
abolitionist movement, competing with the
U.S. Post Office, and for his contributions to
American individualist anarchism.
Life overview
Spooner was born on a farm in
Athol,
Massachusetts, on January 19, 1808, and died "at one o'clock in the afternoon of Saturday, May 14, 1887, in his little room at 109 Myrtle Street, surrounded by trunks and chests bursting with the books, manuscripts, and pamphlets which he had gathered about him in his active pamphleteer's warfare over half a century long."
Later known as an early
individualist anarchist, Spooner advocated what he called Natural Law — or the "Science of Justice" — wherein acts of actual coercion against individuals and their property were considered "illegal" but the so-called criminal acts that violated only man-made legislation were not. Spooner was a lifelong
deist.
Early years and the postal monopoly
His activism began with his career as a
lawyer, which itself violated Massachusetts law. Spooner had studied law under the prominent lawyers and politicians, John Davis and Charles Allen, but he had never attended
college. According to the laws of the state, college graduates were required to study with an attorney for three years, while non-graduates were required to do so for five years.
With the encouragement of his legal mentors, Spooner set up his practice in Worcester after only three years, openly defying the courts. He saw the two-year privilege for college graduates as a state-sponsored discrimination against the poor. He argued that such discrimination was "so monstrous a principle as that the rich ought to be protected by law from the competition of the poor." In 1836, the legislature abolished the restriction.
After a disappointing legal career — for which his radical writing seemed to have kept away potential clients — and a failed career in real estate speculation in
Ohio, Spooner returned to his father's farm in 1840.
Postal rates were notoriously high in the 1840s, and in 1844, Spooner founded the
American Letter Mail Company to contest the United States Post Office's
monopoly. As he had done when challenging the rules of the Massachusetts bar, he published a pamphlet titled "The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress Prohibiting Private Mails." Although Spooner had finally found commercial success with his mail company, legal challenges by the government eventually exhausted his financial resources. He closed up shop without ever having had the opportunity to fully litigate his constitutional claims. The lasting legacy of Spooner's challenge to the postal service was the 3 cent stamp, adopted in response to the competition his company provided.
Abolitionism
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 1846 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." Spooner challenged the claim that the
text of the Constitution supported slavery. Although he recognized that the Founders had probably not
intended to outlaw slavery when writing the Constitution, he argued that only the
meaning of the text, not the private intentions of its writers, was enforceable. Spooner used a complex system of legal and natural law arguments in order to show that the clauses usually interpreted as supporting slavery did not, in fact, support it, and that several clauses of the Constitution prohibited the states from establishing slavery under the law. Spooner's arguments were cited by other pro-Constitution abolitionists, such as Gerrit Smith and the Liberty Party, which adopted it as an official text in its 1848 platform.
Frederick Douglass, originally a Garrisonian disunionist, later came to accept the pro-Constitution position, and cited Spooner's arguments to explain his change of mind.
From the publication of this book until 1861, Spooner actively campaigned against slavery. He published subsequent pamphlets on Jury Nullification and other legal defenses for escaped slaves and offered his legal services, often free of charge, to fugitives. In the late 1850s, copies of his book were distributed to members of Congress sparking some debate over their contents. Even Senator Albert Gallatin Brown of
Mississippi, a slavery proponent, praised the argument's intellectual rigor and conceded it was the most formidable legal challenge he had seen from the abolitionists to date. In 1858, Spooner circulated a , calling for the use of
guerrilla warfare against slaveholders by black slaves and non-slaveholding free Southerners, with aid from Northern abolitionists. Spooner also participated in an aborted plot to free John Brown after his capture following the failed raid on
Harper's Ferry,
Virginia.
In 1860 Spooner was actively courted by William Seward to support the fledgling Republican Party. An admitted sympathizer with the Jeffersonian political philosophy, Spooner adamantly refused the request and soon became an outspoken abolitionist critic of the party. To Spooner, the Republicans were hypocrites for purporting to oppose slavery's expansion but refusing to take a strong, consistent moral stance against slavery itself. Although Spooner had advocated the use of violence to
abolish slavery, he denounced the Republicans' use of violence to prevent the Southern states from seceding during the
American Civil War. He published several letters and pamphlets about the war, arguing that the Republican war aim was not the overthrow of slavery, but rather to maintain the Union by force. He blamed the bloodshed on the Republican political leaders such as Secretary of State William Seward and Senator
Charles Sumner, who often spoke out against slavery but would not attack it on a constitutional basis, and who pursued military policies seen as vengeful and abusive.
Though denouncing its embrace of slavery, Spooner sided with the
Confederate States of America's right to secede on the basis that they were choosing to exercise government by consent – a fundamental constitutional and legal principle to Spooner's philosophy. The North, by contrast, was trying to deny the
Southerners their inherent right to be governed by their consent. He believed they were attempting to coerce the obedience of the southern states to a union they did not wish to enter. He believed that Compensated Emancipation was a preferable way to end slavery, something many nations had done. He argued that the right for states to secede derives from the same right of the slaves to be free. This argument was not popular in the North or South once the war started, as it was contrary to the government positions held on both sides.
Reconstruction
Spooner harshly condemned the
Civil War and the
Reconstruction period that followed. Though he approved of the fact that black slavery was abolished, he criticized the North for failing to make this the purpose of their cause. Instead of fighting to abolish slavery, they fought to "preserve the union" and, according to Spooner, to bolster business interests behind that union. Spooner believed a war of this type was hypocritical and dishonest, especially on the part of Radical Republicans like Sumner who were by then claiming to be abolitionist heroes for ending slavery. Spooner also argued that the war came at a great cost to liberty and proved that the rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence no longer held true – the people could not "dissolve the political bands" that tie them to a government that "becomes destructive" of the consent of the governed because if they did so, as Spooner believed the south had attempted to do, they would be met by the bayonet to enforce their obedience to the former government.
Reacting to the war, Spooner published one of his most famous political tracts,
. In this lengthy essay, Spooner argued that the Constitution was a contract of government which had been irreparably violated during the war and was thus void. Furthermore, since the government now existing under the Constitution pursued coercive policies that were contrary to the Natural Law and to the consent of the governed, it had been demonstrated that document was unable to adequately stop many abuses against liberty or to prevent tyranny from taking hold. Spooner bolstered his argument by noting that the Federal government, as established by a legal contract, could not legally bind all persons living in the nation since none had ever signed their names or given their consent to it - that consent had always been assumed, which fails the most basic burdens of proof for a valid contract in the courtroom.
Spooner widely circulated the
No Treason pamphlets, which also contained a legal defense against the crime of treason itself intended for former Confederate soldiers . These excerpts were published in DeBow's Review and some other well known southern periodicals of the time.
Later life
Spooner continued to write and publish extensively in the decades following Reconstruction, producing works such as "Natural Law or The Science of Justice" and "Trial By Jury." In "Trial By Jury" he defended the doctrine of "Jury Nullification," which holds that in a free society a trial jury not only has the authority to rule on the facts of the case, but also on
the legitimacy of the law under which the case is tried, and which would allow juries to refuse to convict if they regard the law they are asked to convict under as illegitimate. He became closely associated with
Benjamin Tucker's
anarchist journal
Liberty, which published all of his later works in serial format, and for which he wrote several editorial columns on current events .
Spooner died on May 14, 1887, at the age of 79.
Benjamin Tucker arranged his funeral service and wrote an obituary, entitled "Our Nestor Taken From Us," which appeared in
Liberty on May 28.
Influence
Spooner's influence extends to the wide range of topics he addressed during his lifetime. He is remembered today primarily for his abolitionist activities and for his challenge to the post office monopoly, which had a lasting influence of significantly reducing postal rates. Spooner's writings contributed to the development of
libertarian political theory in the United States, and were often reprinted in early libertarian journals such as the
Rampart Journal. His writings were also a major influence on Austrian School economist
Murray Rothbard and libertarian law professor and legal theorist Randy Barnett.
References and external links
- at Liberty-Tree.ca
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- via The Wayback Machine
- via The Wayback Machine
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- by Murray Rothbard
Notes
Works online
