Lysander Spooner | |||||||
Theorist, pamphleteer, activist, and businessman, Lysander Spooner joined ideas with action making him one of the most interesting figures of the classical liberal tradition. Spooner, a constitutional lawyer, activist in the abolitionist movement, and founder of his own private postal service, is best known for his No Treason pamphlets which pursued liberal theories of consent and natural rights to what Spooner thought were their natural conclusions: that no one was bound by any agreement he had not personally agreed to. Born in 1808 the son of a New England farmer, he left home at the age of 25 to enter law. The rule of Massachusetts courts required a student to study in a lawyer's office before admission to the bar - three years was required of a college graduate; but for a non-graduate, five years were required. Believing this rule discriminated against the "well-educated poor," Spooner set out to test the constitutionality of the provision, offering his services as a lawyer without the required training. Spooner's petition, "To the Members of the Legislature of Massachusetts," certainly was not the only force to bring about the change, but it did crystalize the prevailing sentiment. In 1836 the Massachusetts legislature abolished the rule. In 1844 Spooner formed the American Letter Mail Company to test the constitutionality of laws prohibiting private mail service and invited the Postmaster General to sue him. The Postmaster General resorted to extralegal attempts to shut down Spooner and his fellow private mail operators. But when those efforts failled and as private mail carriers won greater numbers of customers on lucrative mail routes between Boston and Philadelphia, Congress responded by reducing the U.S. Postal Service's postage rates. By 1848, Congress had halved U.S. Postal Service rates driving Spooner out of business. A product of an ardently abolitionist family, Spooner authored a series pamphlets in the 1840s and 1850s arguing that slavery was unconstitutional and that slaves had a natural right to bear arms and "if from the inefficiencies of the laws, it should become necessary," to use these arms "in defense of their own lives and liberties." (Unconstitutionality of Slavery, p.98) But his most famous writings, published in the 1860s, were three anarchist pamphlets that pursued liberal social contract theory to its natural conclusion in arguing that those who had not explicitly agreed to the Constitution were not bound by its provisions. Spooner's writings were part of a nascent anarchist movement centered around Benjamin Tucker and Josiah Warren in Boston. This early anarchist movement differed in two important respects with successor revolutionary anarchists including Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Johann Most. Spooner and Tucker were ambivalent about the question of violence and they both rejected socialism. Spooner declared: "the right of property is the right of supreme, absolute, and irresponsible dominion over anything that is naturally a subject of property, - that is, of ownership. It is a right against all the world." Spooner died in 1887 having lived his life has a Deist, lawyer, bank clerk, western land speculator, businessman, abolitionist, inventor, legal writer, economist, and anarchist. Related Links The Writings of Lysander Spooner Resources by Lysander Spooner |
