Lysander Spooner

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Spooner was born on a farm in Athol, Massachusetts on January 19, 1808.[15] Spooner's parents were Asa and Dolly Spooner. One of his ancestors, William Spooner, arrived in Plymouth in 1637. He was the second of nine children. His father was a deist and it has been speculated that he purposely named his two older sons Leander and Lysander after pagan and Spartan heroes, respectively.[16]^:viii

Spooner's activism began with his career as a lawyer which itself violated Massachusetts law.[17] 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.[16]^:viii However, he never attended college.[18] 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.[18]

With the encouragement of his legal mentors, Spooner set up his practice in Worcester, Massachusetts after only three years, defying the courts.[18] He regarded the 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".[18] In 1836, the legislature abolished the restriction.[18] He opposed all licensing requirements for lawyers, doctors or anyone else that was prevented from being employed by such requirements.[19] 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.[20] 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.[21] After a disappointing legal career and a failed career in real estate speculation in Ohio, Spooner returned to his father's farm in 1840.[18]

Being an advocate of self-employment and opponent of government regulation of business, Spooner started his own business called American Letter Mail Company which competed with the Post Office, whose rates were notoriously high in the 1840s.[22] In 1844, Spooner founded the American Letter Mail Company, which had offices in various cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York City.[23] Stamps could be purchased and then attached to letters, which could be sent to any of its offices. From here, agents were dispatched who traveled on railroads and steamboats and carried the letters in hand bags. Letters were transferred to messengers in the cities along the routes which then delivered the letters to the addressees. This was a challenge to the Post Office's legal monopoly.[22][24]

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 lasting 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.[25]

Spooner attained his highest profile as a figure in the abolitionist movement. His book The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, published in 1845, contributed to a controversy among abolitionists over whether the Constitution supported the institution of slavery. The disunionist faction led by William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips argued that the Constitution legally recognized and enforced the oppression of slaves as in the provisions for the capture of fugitive slaves in Article IV, Section 2.[12][26] More generally, Phillips disputed Spooner's notion that any unjust law should be held legally void by judges.[27]

Spooner challenged the claim that the text of the Constitution permitted slavery.[28] Although he recognized that the Founding Fathers had probably not intended to outlaw slavery when writing the Constitution, Spooner argued that only the meaning of the text, not the private intentions of its writers, was enforceable. He used a complex system of legal and natural law arguments 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.[28] Spooner's arguments were cited by other pro-Constitution abolitionists such as Gerrit Smith and the Liberty Party, whose twenty-second plank of the 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 to explain his change of mind.[29]

From the publication of this book until 1861, Spooner actively campaigned against slavery.[30] 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.[31] In the late 1850s, copies of his book were distributed to members of Congress causing some debate over their contents. 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 slaves and non-slaveholding free Southerners, with aid from Northern abolitionists.[32] 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).[13]

Although he had advocated the use of violence to abolish slavery, Spooner 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 objective was not to eradicate slavery, but rather to preserve the Union by 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 seen as vengeful and abusive.[33][34]

While denouncing the institution of slavery, Spooner recognized the right of the Confederate States of America to secede as the manifestation of government by consent, a constitutional and legal principle fundamental to Spooner's philosophy. In contrast, the Northern states were trying to deny the Southerners that right through military force.[35] He vociferously opposed the Civil War, arguing that it violated the right of the Southern states to secede from a Union that no longer represented them.[13] He believed they were attempting to restore the Southern states to the Union against the wishes of Southerners. He argued that the right of the states to secede derives from the natural right of slaves to be free.[33] This argument was unpopular in the North and in the South after the Civil War began as it conflicted with the official position of both governments.[11]

Spooner is interred in the historic Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts

Spooner continued to write and publish extensively during the decades following Reconstruction, producing works such as his essay "Natural Law or the Science of Justice" and the short book 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. This doctrine would further allow juries to refuse to convict if they regard the law by which they are asked to convict as illegitimate. Spooner became associated with Benjamin Tucker's American individualist anarchist journal Liberty which published all of his later works in serial format and for which he wrote several editorial columns on current events.[36]

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".[37] Spooner defended the Millerites, who stopped working because they believed the world would soon end and were arrested for vagrancy.[16]^:viii

Spooner spent much time in the Boston Athenæum.[16]^:xv He died on May 14, 1887, at the age of 79 in his nearby residence at 109 Myrtle Street, Boston.[38] He never married and had no children.[39] 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'".[40]

There are collections of letters written by Spooner in the Boston Public Library and the New York Historical Society.[16]^:viii–ix