Lysander Spooner was an American individualist anarchist, abolitionist, entrepreneur, essayist, legal theorist, pamphletist, political philosopher, Unitarian and writer.
42 Facts About Lysander Spooner
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Lysander Spooner's writings contributed to the development of both left-libertarian and right-libertarian political theory.
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Lysander Spooner's writings include the abolitionist book The Unconstitutionality of Slavery and No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority, which opposed treason charges against secessionists.
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Lysander Spooner is known for competing with the Post Office with his American Letter Mail Company.
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Lysander Spooner was born on a farm in Athol, Massachusetts on January 19,1808.
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One of his ancestors, William Lysander Spooner, arrived in Plymouth in 1637.
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Lysander Spooner's 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.
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Lysander Spooner's activism began with his career as a lawyer, which itself violated Massachusetts law.
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Lysander 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.
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Lysander Spooner regarded three-year privilege for college graduates as a state-sponsored discrimination against the poor and providing a monopoly income to those who met the requirements.
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Lysander Spooner 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".
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Lysander Spooner opposed all licensing requirements for lawyers, doctors, or anyone else that was prevented from being employed by such requirements.
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For Lysander Spooner, to prevent a person from doing business with a person without a professional license was a violation of the natural right to contract.
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Lysander 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.
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Lysander Spooner attained his highest profile as a figure in the abolitionist movement.
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Lysander Spooner challenged the claim that the text of the Constitution permitted slavery.
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Lysander Spooner 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.
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Lysander 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 Lysander Spooner's book The Unconstitutionality of Slavery.
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Lysander Spooner published subsequent pamphlets on jury nullification and other legal defenses for escaped slaves, and offered his legal services to fugitives, often free of charge.
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In 1858, Lysander 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.
21.
Lysander Spooner "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.
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Lysander Spooner 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 force.
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Lysander Spooner viewed that the Northern states were trying to deny the Southerners through military force.
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Lysander Spooner argued that the northern concession on the constitutionality of slavery, that it was permitted, gave southern states a constitutionally defendable justification for seceding, to continue slavery.
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Lysander 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.
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Lysander 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.
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Lysander Spooner defended the Millerites, who stopped working because they believed the world would soon end and were arrested for vagrancy.
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Lysander Spooner died on May 14,1887, at the age of 79 in his nearby residence at 109 Myrtle Street, Boston.
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Lysander Spooner was an advocate for absolute property rights based on Lockean principles of initial acquisition.
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Lysander Spooner felt that an expansive government created virtual slaves and its demands of obedience expropriated the role of the individual.
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Lysander Spooner argued that the national Congress should dissolve and let citizens rule themselves as he held that individuals should make their own fates.
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Lysander 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.
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Lysander Spooner argued that various forms of government intervention in the free market made it difficult for people to start their own businesses.
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Lysander Spooner believed that altruism should not be enforced, but that one still has a moral obligation to help others, writing:.
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Lysander Spooner was opposed to wage labor, believing that no worker would work for a capitalist if they had alternatives, tools to bestow their own labour upon, arguing:.
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Lysander Spooner's influence extends to the wide range of topics he addressed during his lifetime.
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Lysander Spooner is remembered primarily for his abolitionist activities and for his challenge to the Post Office monopoly which had a lasting influence of significantly reducing postal rates, according to the Journal of Libertarian Studies.
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Lysander Spooner's writings were a major influence on Austrian School economist Murray Rothbard and right-libertarian law professor and legal theorist Randy Barnett.
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Lysander Spooner's writings were often reprinted in early libertarian journals such as the Rampart Journal and Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought.
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MacSaorsa further argues that Lysander Spooner was opposed to wage labor, "wanting that social relationship destroyed by turning capital over to those who work in it, as associated producers and not as wage slaves".
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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.
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Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the court, quotes Lysander Spooner as saying the right to bear arms was necessary for those who wanted to take a stand against slavery.