Lysander Spooner

Lysander Spooner (January 19, 1808 – May 14, 1887) was an American classical liberal political philosopher, abolitionist, and legal theorist of the 19th century. He is best known for his role in the abolitionist movement to end slavery, competing with the U.S. Post Office, and for his contributions to American individualist anarchism.

Abolitionism

Spooner attained his greatest fame as a figure in the Abolitionist movement to abolish slavery. His most famous work, a book entitled The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, used a complex system of legal and natural law arguments to challenge the institution of slavery in the United States. The book was published in 1846 to great acclaim among many abolitionists but criticism from others. It helped to precipitate a split in the abolitionist movement over the issue of the Constitution surrounding whether the document was pro-freedom or pro-slavery. Spooner's pro-freedom argument was embraced by Gerrit Smith, Frederick Douglass, and the Liberty Party, which adopted it as an official text in its 1848 platform. Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison took the opposing view, which held that the Constitution was an immoral pact with slavery.

Related Topics:
Slavery - Gerrit Smith - Frederick Douglass - Liberty Party - Wendell Phillips - William Lloyd Garrison

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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 1850's 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. Spooner also participated in an aborted plot to free John Brown after his capture after the failed raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia.

Related Topics:
Jury Nullification - Albert Gallatin Brown - Mississippi - John Brown - Harper's Ferry - Virginia

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In 1860 Spooner was actively courted by William Seward to support the fledgling Republican Party. An admitted sympathizer with the Jeffersonian ideology, 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. He also opposed the coercive means by which the Republicans sought to prevent the south from seceding during the American Civil War. Spooner published several letters and pamphlets about the war, which he called evil and violent. He blamed the bloodshed on the Radical Republicans and particularly 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.http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo87.html

Related Topics:
William Seward - Republican Party - Jeffersonian - American Civil War - Radical Republicans - Charles Sumner

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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 that they did not wish to enter.

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