Lysander Spooner

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Lysander Spooner (January 19, 1808 — May 14, 1887) was an American

Spooner's activism began with his career as a lawyer, which itself violated Massachusetts law.[19] Spooner had studied law under the prominent lawyers, politicians and abolitionists John Davis, later Governor of Massachusetts and Senator; and Charles Allen, state senator and Representative from the Free Soil Party.^[18]: viii However, he never attended college.^[20] According to the laws of the state, college graduates were required to study with an attorney for three years while non-graduates like Lysander would be required to do so for five years.^[20]

With the encouragement from his legal mentors, Spooner set up his practice in Worcester, Massachusetts, after only three years, defying the courts.^[20] He regarded three-year privilege for college graduates as a state-sponsored discrimination against the poor and also providing a monopoly income to those who met the requirements. He argued that "no one has yet ever dared advocate, in direct terms, so monstrous a principle as that the rich ought to be protected by law from the competition of the poor".^[20] In 1836, the legislature abolished the restriction.^[20] He opposed all licensing requirements for lawyers, doctors, or anyone else that was prevented from being employed by such requirements.^[21] For Spooner, to prevent a person from doing business with a person without a professional license was a violation of the natural right to contract.^[22] Spooner advocated natural law, or what he called the science of justice, wherein acts of initiatory coercion against individuals and their property, including taxation, were considered criminal because they were immoral, while the so-called criminal acts that violated only man-made arbitrary legislation were not necessarily criminal.^[23]

After a disappointing legal career and a failed career in real estate speculation in Ohio, Spooner returned to his father's farm in 1840.^[20]

American Letter Mail Company

Being an advocate of

As he had done when challenging the rules of the Massachusetts Bar Association, Spooner 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. A law enacted in 1851 that strengthened the federal government's monopoly finally put him out of business. The legacy of Spooner's challenge to the postal service was the reduction in letter postage from 5¢ to 3¢, in response to the competition his company provided which lasted until the late 1950s or early 1960s.^[27]

Abolitionism

Spooner attained his highest profile as a figure in the

Spooner challenged the claim that the text of the Constitution permitted slavery.[30] Although he recognized that the Founding Fathers had likely not intended to outlaw slavery when writing the Constitution, Spooner argued that only the properly interpreted meaning of the text, not the private intentions of its drafters, was enforceable, representing an early enunciation of textualist argument. He used a complex system of legal and natural law arguments to show that the Constitutional clauses usually interpreted as adopting or at least accepting implicitly the practice of slavery did not in fact support it, despite the open tolerance of human servitude under the original Constitution of 1789; even though those interpretations would only be superseded by the amendments to the Constitution passed after the American Civil War, viz. Amendments XIII-XV, prohibiting the states from enabling or enforcing slavery.^[30] Contemporaneously, Spooner's arguments were cited by other pro-Constitution abolitionists such as Gerrit Smith and the Liberty Party, the twenty-second plank of whose 1849 platform praised Spooner's book The Unconstitutionality of Slavery. Frederick Douglass, originally a Garrisonian disunionist, later came to accept the pro-Constitution position and cited Spooner's arguments as an influence upon his change of mind.^[31]

From the publication of this book until 1861, when the Civil War overtook society, Spooner actively campaigned against slavery.^[32] He published subsequent pamphlets on jury nullification and other legal defenses for escaped slaves, and offered his legal services to fugitives, often free of charge.^[33] In the late 1850s, copies of his book were distributed to members of Congress. Even Senator Albert G. 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 "Plan for the Abolition of Slavery", calling for the use of guerrilla warfare against slaveholders by Black persons who had been enslaved and non-slaveholding free Southerners, with aid from Northern abolitionists.^[34] Spooner also "conspir[ed] with John Brown to promote a servile insurrection in the South" and participated in an aborted plot to free Brown after his capture following the failed raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia (now part of the state of West Virginia).^[15]

Although he had advocated the use of violence to abolish slavery, Spooner denounced the newly founded political party of the Republicans' use of violence to prevent the Southern states from successfully seceding during the American Civil War. He published several letters and pamphlets about the war, arguing that Lincoln's objective was not to eradicate slavery, but rather to preserve the Union by supposedly necessary force. He blamed the bloodshed on Republican political leaders such as Secretary of State William H. Seward and Senator Charles Sumner, who often criticized slavery yet would not attack it on a constitutional basis, and who pursued military policies Spooner described as vengeful and abusive.^[35][36] He viewed that the Northern states were trying to deny the Southerners through military force.^[37]

He argued that the northern concession (after the divided

Spooner continued to write and publish extensively during the decades following

Spooner argued that "almost all fortunes are made out of the capital and labour of other men than those who realize them. Indeed, except by his sponging capital and labour from others".[39] Spooner defended the Millerites, who stopped working because they believed the world would soon end and were arrested for vagrancy.^[18]: viii

Spooner spent much time in the Boston Athenæum.^[18]: xv He died on May 14, 1887, at the age of 79 in his nearby residence at 109 Myrtle Street, Boston.^[40] He never married and had no children.^[41] Benjamin Tucker arranged his funeral service and wrote a "loving obituary" entitled "Our Nestor Taken From Us" which appeared in Liberty on May 28 and predicted "that the name Lysander Spooner would be 'henceforth memorable among men'".^[42]

Political views

Anarchist

Spooner was an advocate for absolute property rights based on Lockean principles of initial acquisition. He wrote:^[44]

The right of property, therefore, is a right of absolute dominion over a commodity, whether the owner wish to retain it in his own actual possession and use, or not. It is a right to forbid others to use it, without his consent. If it were not so, men could never sell, rent, or give away those commodities, which they do not themselves wish to keep or use; but would lose their right of property in them – that is, their right of dominion over them – the moment they suspended their personal possession and use of them.

As an

Spooner believed that it was beneficial for people to be self-employed so that they could enjoy the full benefits of their labor rather than having to share them with an employer. He argued that various forms of government intervention in the free market made it difficult for people to start their own businesses. For one, he believed that laws against high interest rates, or usury, prevented those with capital from extending credit because they could not be compensated for high risks of not being repaid, writing:

If a man have not capital of his own, upon which to bestow his labor, it is necessary that he be allowed to obtain it on credit. And in order that he may be able to obtain it on credit, it is necessary that he be allowed to contract for such a rate of interest as will induce a man, having surplus capital, to loan it to him; for the capitalist cannot, consistently with natural law, be compelled to loan his capital against his will. All legislative restraints upon the rate of interest, are, therefore, nothing less than arbitrary and tyrannical restraints upon a man's natural capacity amid natural right to hire capital, upon which to bestow his labor. [...] The effect of usury laws, then, is to give a monopoly of the right of borrowing money, to those few, who can offer the most approved security.^[46]

Spooner believed that government restrictions on issuance of private money made it inordinately difficult for individuals to obtain the capital on credit to start their own businesses, thereby putting them in a situation where "a very large portion of them, to save themselves from starvation, have no alternative but to sell their labor to others" and those who do employ others are only able to afford to pay "far below what the laborers could produce, [than] if they themselves had the necessary capital to work with".^[47] Spooner said that there was "a prohibitory tax – a tax of ten per cent – on all notes issued for circulation as money, other than the notes of the United States and the national banks" which he argued caused an artificial shortage of credit and that eliminating this tax would result in making plenty of money available for lending.^[47]

Spooner believed that altruism should not be enforced, but that one still has a moral obligation to help others, writing:

Man, no doubt, owes many other moral duties to his fellow men; such as to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick, protect the defenceless, assist the weak, and enlighten the ignorant. But these are simply moral duties, of which each man must be his own judge, in each particular case, as to whether, and how, and how far, he can, or will, perform them.^[8]

Spooner was opposed to

All the great establishments, of every kind, now in the hands of a few proprietors, but employing a great number of wage labourers, would be broken up; for few or no persons, who could hire capital and do business for themselves would consent to labour for wages for another.[48]

In response to

• Robert Heinlein's science fiction
  makes several references to Spooner, and some of his fictional worlds are based on Spooner's ideas.
• The science fiction novel ""Scam Artists of the Galaxy"" for its fourth planet visits Nirvana, which is explicitly based on Spooner principles, making it impossible for the scammers to succeed there.

In January 2004, Laissez Faire Books established the Lysander Spooner Award for advancing the literature of liberty. The honor is awarded monthly to the most important contributions to right-libertarian literature, followed by an annual award to the winner.^[55] In 2010, the Libertarian, Agorist, Voluntaryist and Anarch Association of Authors and Publishers (LAVA) created the Lysander Spooner Award for Book of the Year which has been awarded annually since 2011.^[56] The LAVA Awards are held annually to honor excellence in books relating to the principles of liberty, with the Lysander Spooner Award being the grand prize award.

Spooner's The Unconstitutionality of Slavery was cited in the 2008

Virtually everything written by Spooner is contained in the six-volume compilation The Collected Works of Lysander Spooner (1971). The most notable exception is Vices Are Not Crimes, not widely known until its republication in 1977.[18]^: xv

• "The Deist's Immortality, and An Essay on Man's Accountability for His Belief" (1834)
• "The Deist's Reply to the Alleged Supernatural Evidences of Christianity" (1836)
• "Constitutional Law, Relative to Credit, Currency, and Banking" (1843)
• "The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress, Prohibiting Private Mails" (1844)
• The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1845)
• "Poverty: Its Illegal Causes, and Legal Cure" (1846)
• "Illegality of the Trial of John W. Webster" (1850)
• "An Essay on Trial by Jury" (1852)
• "The Law of Intellectual Property" (1855)
• "A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery, and To the Non-Slaveholders of the South" (1858)
• "Address of the Free Constitutionalists to the People of the United States" (1860)
• "A New System of Paper Currency" (1861)
• "A Letter to Charles Sumner" (1864)
• "Considerations for Bankers, and Holders of United States Bonds" (1864)
• No Treason No. I (1870)
• No Treason No. II: The Constitution (1870)
• No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority (1870)
• "Forced Consent" (1873)
• "Vices Are Not Crimes: A Vindication of Moral Liberty" (1875)
• "Our Financiers: Their Ignorance, Usurpations and Frauds" (1877)
• "Gold and Silver as Standards of Value: The Flagrant Cheat in Regard to Them" (1878)
• "Natural Law, or the Science of Justice" (1882)
• "A Letter to Thomas F. Bayard" (1882)
• "A Letter to Scientists and Inventors, on the Science of Justice" (1884)
• "A Letter to Grover Cleveland, on His False Inaugural Address, the Usurpations and Crimes of Lawmakers and Judges, and the Consequent Poverty, Ignorance, and Servitude of the People" (1886)
• "Two Treatises on Competitive Currency and Banking" Archived February 22, 2019, at the Wayback Machine (2018)

Archival material

There are collections of letters written by Spooner in the

References

Further reading

• OCLC 750831024
  .
• Shone, Steve J. (2010). Lysander Spooner, American Anarchist.
  ISBN 978-0739144503
  . This is the first full-length work devoted to the ideas of Lysander Spooner. [...] The purpose of the present book is to argue that Lysander Spooner should be taken much more seriously as a political theorist.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Lysander Spooner.

Wikisource has original works by or about:
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• LysanderSpooner.org, dedicated website
• Works by Lysander Spooner at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Lysander Spooner at Internet Archive
• Works by Lysander Spooner at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Lysander Spooner's Bibliography at the Wayback Machine (archived April 12, 2003)
• Reason Magazine