Lysander Spooner: American Anarchist

139 Pages·2010·0.49 MB·English

by  Steve J. Shone

Lysander Spooner:
American Anarchist

Lysander Spooner:
American Anarchist
Steve J. Shone
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shone, Steve J.
Lysander Spooner : American anarchist / Steve J. Shone.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-7391-4450-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-4452-7
(electronic)
1. Spooner, Lysander, 1808-1887. 2. Anarchists—United States—Biography.
3. Abolitionists—United States—Biography. I. Title.
HX843.7.S68S56 2010
335'.83092—dc22
[B] 2010006401
(cid:2) ™
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
(cid:2)
Contents
Introduction vii
Chapter 1 Natural Law, Private Mail, and Property 1
Chapter 2 Poverty and Economics 25
Chapter 3 Political Obligation 39
Chapter 4 Jury Nullification 59
Chapter 5 Slavery 77
Chapter 6 Religion, Morality, and the Legal Profession 95
Bibliography 105
Index 117
About the Author 121
v

(cid:2)
Introduction
Today, the limited number of people who recognize the name Lysander
Spooner chiefly recall him as a nineteenth-century abolitionist. We no longer
remember him as an attorney who challenged Massachusetts law so that he
himself could join the profession; or as a legal theorist, analyzing the Magna
Carta, who argued in favor of jury nullification; or as a land speculator who
demanded an alternative, more solvent system of banking; or as an enthusiast
of entrepreneurial capitalism with a keenly developed theory of intellectual
property; or as a leading American Anarchist who completely rejected the
United States Constitution as a bulwark of democratic government. Although
some people may know that he was an opponent of involuntary servitude,
they will probably not have read any of his original arguments that challenged
the abolitionist leadership of Wendell Phillips and others, insisting they take
a less constitutionalist, and more radical, violent approach toward ending the
abomination of slavery. Moreover, what is known about Spooner’s personality
and life derives invariably, as Alexander (1950, 200) notes, from the same few
sources, which are themselves chiefly based on published obituary notices, as
well as collections of letters that Spooner wrote and received.
Spooner’s work has received some renewed attention in recent years due
to his interest in the concept of jury nullification. Following the acquittal of
O. J. Simpson in a murder case, hundreds of scholarly articles on the topic1
have appeared in law journals, and a few authors (Conrad 1998, Ostrowski
2001, Parmenter 2007, Shone 2004b) have traced the practice and its valida-
tion back to Spooner.
vii
viii (cid:2) Introduction
Lysander Spooner was born in Athol, Massachusetts, where he grew up
on the family farm of his parents, Asa and Dolly Spooner. One of Spooner’s
ancestors was William Spooner, who arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts in
1637. Lysander Spooner was the second of nine children (Martin 1970, 167;
Reichert 1976, 117; Shively 1971a, 15; Smith 1992, viii). Shively (1971a,
15) speculates that their father, who as a Deist disliked Christian names,
purposely named his two oldest sons, Leander and Lysander, after pagan and
Spartan heroes respectively.
While a trainee lawyer in Worcester, Massachusetts, Spooner was em-
ployed by two of the best-known attorneys in the state, first by John Davis
and then by Charles Allen (Reichert 1976, 117; Martin 1970, 167; Tucker
1887, 2). Both were abolitionists, and Davis would become the governor of
Massachusetts and later a U.S. senator, while Allen would serve as a state
senator, and then in the U.S. House of Representatives as a member of the
Free Soil Party (Shively 1971a, 17).
Amazed by the inefficiency of the post office, Spooner set up a mail deliv-
ery service, the American Letter Mail Company, which competed in several
large Northeastern cities, while charging the customer substantially less. After
the post office forced the closure of Spooner’s company and other similar op-
erations, he produced his 1844 monograph, The Unconstitutionality of the Laws
of Congress Prohibiting Private Mails (Martin 1970, 170; Spooner 1850c, 24).
Spooner next briefly became a land speculator in Ohio, where he bought
property hoping it would turn out to be the spot where a town developed,
a location where people would transfer from canal travel to horseback.
However, the canal route was diverted, and he lost his investment. In this
process, he campaigned to prevent the state legislature from draining the
Maumee River (Dictionary of American Biography 1935, 466) and then sued
in the hope of getting back his money after the completion of the drainage
project made certain that his land investment would fail (Alexander 1950,
201). Unsuccessful in this speculative venture, he failed also to secure any
compensation from the state. Later in life, Spooner provided legal assistance
to “Millerite” workers who, having stopped working because they believed
the world would soon end, quit their jobs and were arrested for violating a
law against vagrancy (Dictionary of American Biography 1935, 467).
At the time of his death, Spooner lived in a room at 109 Myrtle Street
in Boston. He spent a lot of time reading at the nearby Boston Athenaeum,
and would arrange to meet colleagues in bookstores (Reichert 1976, 137;
Shively 1971a, 56, 60; Tucker 1887, 1). Spooner was relatively well-known
in his time, a fact readily attested to by the collections of letters written to
him that can be browsed today in the Boston Public Library and at the New
Introduction (cid:2) ix
York Historical Society. He knew the abolitionists John Brown, Gerritt
Smith, and Wendell Phillips, and he wrote articles for the Radical Review and
Liberty, publications of another of the leading American Anarchists, Benja-
min N. Tucker, although some of Spooner’s contributions appeared under
the pseudonym “O” (Brooks 1994). However, based in Boston, where he
would sometimes get together with visiting intellectuals, Spooner’s input was
not always heard, and could sometimes be overlooked. For example, Martin
(1970, 127) notes that the monetary theories of William B. Greene, which
were disseminated in a series of newspaper articles published in Worcester,
Massachusetts, became rather better known, even though “Spooner had pre-
viously stated the position of the free money decentralist in Greene’s home
area.” Others who came across his works simply considered his proposals too
radical. Furthermore, although he earned some income from his work as a
trial attorney, he was not a wealthy man. In his eulogy of Spooner, which is
still read today, Tucker ([1887] 1971, 6) points out that some of Spooner’s
writings were never completed, and notes that, unable to afford to publish an
entire work at once, he often printed a chapter at a time.
At first glance, Spooner looks to be inconsistent, to agree with thinkers
of both the left and right, or even to defy categorization. Indeed, in Partisans
of Freedom: A Study in American Anarchism, Reichert (1976, 138) criticizes
Alexander (1950, 216) for calling Spooner “a bundle of contradictions.”
Reichert himself (1976, 119) describes Spooner as “[c]hampioning the poor
and propertyless worker,” and explains the thinker well when he writes:
Although Spooner’s sympathies were predominantly with the working classes
as against the rich, he did not allow himself to be led into a doctrinaire defense
of labor in support of a general program of leveling property rights. No eco-
nomic communist, Spooner did not condemn the private ownership of prop-
erty itself; what he opposed was the injustice meted out by the government
when it interfered with the natural laws of economics. (Reichert 1976, 120)
Was Lysander Spooner an anarchist or a libertarian? Today, adherents of
both ideologies proudly claim him as a collaborator. That is not surprising
because, as an American Anarchist, Spooner is partly a leftist, and partly a
libertarian, and it is surely much to Spooner’s credit that both camps can find
much in his ideas that they admire.
Anarchism proper might be satisfactorily defined as an ideology that seeks
as little government as possible, one of the grounds for this being the inabil-
ity, from an anarchist perspective, to justify the power of the state in terms
of consent. As will be seen in chapter 3, this key element of anarchism is en-
tirely in keeping with the ideas of Spooner. Even so, Martin (1970, iii) notes