Lysander Spooner
From Dixiepedia: The PC-Free Encyclopedia
Lysander Spooner (19 January 1808 – 14 May 1887) was an obscure and ill-trained lawyer from Boston, Massachusetts. In his attempted legal brief, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (Boston: Bela Marsh, Publisher, 1846), Spooner attempted to prove that the Declaration of Independence abolished slavery in the original thirteen States, that the "persons held to labor" under the Constitution were not slaves, but indentured servants or apprentices, and that the framers by their refusal to use the word "slave" in the document evidenced that they did not intend the federal Government to protect that species of property. It was Spooner's hope to have slavery abolished by judicial action, and in this goal, he was strongly opposed by other prominent Abolitionists, such as Wendell Phillips, who saw it rather as a subject requiring political agitation for new legislation, or, should such agitation fail to produce the desired result, the dissolution of the Union.
Spooner's work on slavery was just another in a string of failed literary endeavors, and might never have been completed at all had he not solicited and obtained the financial aid of Gerrit Smith, a wealthy upstate New York Abolitionist. Once published, the pamphlet attracted the praise of only the most fanatical within the anti-slavery movement, of which William Lloyd Garrison was the most notable, but was largely ignored when it was not being soundly refuted. In his response to The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, Wendell Phillips criticized Spooner for advocating "practical no-governmentism" and for encouraging "every one to do what is right in his own eyes" (Review of Lysander Spooner's Essay on the Unconstitutionality of Slavery [Boston: Andrews and Prentiss, 1847], page 10). Indeed, Spooner insisted in his pamphlet that "the whole object of legislation is to overturn natural law, and substitute for it the arbitrary will of power; to destroy men's rights" (page 142), and he criticized the notions that "first, that government must be sustained whether it administers justice or injustice; and, second, that its commands must be called law, whether they really are law or not" (page 144). Spooner's entire career as a writer consisted of one denunciation of governmental authority after another. The unsoundness of his thinking was aptly demonstrated by his appeal to the Constitution in order to attack slavery in his 1846 pamphlet and his later attack on the Constitution itself as having "no authority or obligation at all" in his pamphlet entitled, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority (Boston: Self-Published, 1870).
It should be noted that Spooner was also openly anti-religion, and specifically anti-Christian, in his sentiments, basing his attacks upon slavery entirely upon humanistic rationalism and egalitarianism. On this point, he was much more consistent than most other Abolitionists, who chose to retain a veneer of religious rhetoric in their agitation against the institution. Spooner's claim that the phrase "We the People" in the preamble to the Constitution identified the ordaining power behind the "nation" as all those who were born and living within the United States, regardless of race, color, or gender, was later used as the foundation of the so-called Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 and eventually the women's suffrage movement. His arguments in favor of the sovereignty of the individual and the supremacy of his "natural rights" over all forms of legislative restraint were also very similar, if not identical, to the anarchistic ideals advanced by many today in the so-called "Patriot" movement.
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