Lysander Spooner

Lysander Spooner (January 19, 1808 – May 14, 1887) was an American abolitionist, entrepreneur, lawyer, essayist, natural rights legal theorist, pamphleteer, political philosopher, and writer often associated with the Boston anarchist tradition.

Spooner was a strong advocate of the labor movement and is politically identified with individualist anarchism. His writings contributed to the development of both left-libertarian and right-libertarian political theory.

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.

He is known for establishing the American Letter Mail Company, which competed with the United States Postal Service.

Spooner was born on a farm in Athol, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1808. Spooner's parents were Asa and Dolly Spooner. One of his ancestors, William Spooner, arrived in Plymouth in 1637. Lysander was the second of nine children. His father was a deist and it has been speculated that he purposely named his two older sons Leander and Lysander after Greek mythological and Spartan heroes, respectively.

Being an advocate of self-employment and opponent of government regulation of business, in 1844 Spooner started the American Letter Mail Company, which competed with the United States Post Office, whose rates were very high. It had offices in various cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York City. Stamps could be purchased and then attached to letters, which could be brought to any of its offices. From here, agents were dispatched who traveled on railroads and steamboats and carried the letters in handbags. Letters were transferred to messengers in the cities along the routes, who then delivered the letters to the addressees. This was a challenge to the Post Office's legal monopoly.

As he had done when challenging the rules of the Massachusetts Bar Association, Spooner published a pamphlet titled "The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress Prohibiting Private Mails". Although Spooner had finally found commercial success with his mail company, legal challenges by the government eventually exhausted his financial resources. A law enacted in 1851 that strengthened the federal government's monopoly finally put him out of business. The legacy of Spooner's challenge to the postal service was the reduction in letter postage from 5¢ to 3¢, in response to the competition his company provided.

Spooner attained his highest profile as a figure in the abolitionist movement. His book The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, published in 1845, contributed to a controversy among abolitionists over whether the Constitution supported the institution of slavery. The disunionist faction led by William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips argued that the Constitution legally recognized and enforced the oppression of slaves as in the provisions for the capture of fugitive slaves in Article IV, Section 2.

Spooner challenged the claim that the text of the Constitution permitted slavery. He used a complex system of legal and natural law arguments to show that the Constitutional clauses usually interpreted as adopting or at least accepting implicitly the practice of slavery did not in fact support it, despite the open tolerance of human servitude under the original Constitution of 1789; even though those interpretations would only be superseded by the amendments to the Constitution passed after the American Civil War, viz. Amendments XIII–XV, prohibiting the states from enabling or enforcing slavery.

As an individualist anarchist, Spooner advocated for pre-industrial living in communities of small property holders so that they could pursue life, liberty, happiness, and property in mutual honesty without ceding responsibility to a central government.

Spooner rejected institution of legislature and compulsive government, proposing its replacement by voluntary mutual insurance companies owned by all of their members, which he called political corporation, members of which may take their disputes to be judged in a jury trial in which jurors would use their intuition to seek the most just verdict. The rights of members of the "political corporation" would be determined "only by the unanimous verdict of a tribunal fairly representing the whole people,—that is, a tribunal of twelve men, taken, at random from the whole body, and ascertained to be as impartial as the nature of the case will admit, and sworn to the observance of justice".

Spooner also believed in the inalienability of liberty, which makes every contract giving dominion over anyone criminal, including giving dominion over oneself.

Spooner believed that every person has absolute dominion over the products of their labor, regardless of if in their possession. He also rejected limits on the amount of property acquirable by taking unowned natural resources, the only exception being if violence were committed against others or their property.

Spooner believed that just as those who labor own the material product, so do scientists and inventors own their discoveries and inventions, and have right over them in all countries and without any expiration date, and when the owner dies the natural right to their property falls to their descendants. He advocated giving intellectual rights to all past inventions and discoveries to their inventors and discoverers, or their descendants.

Spooner's The Unconstitutionality of Slavery was cited in the 2008 Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller which struck down the federal district's ban on handguns. Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the court, quotes Spooner as saying the right to bear arms was necessary for those who wanted to take a stand against slavery. It was also cited by Justice Clarence Thomas in his concurring opinion in McDonald v. Chicago, another firearms case, the following year.

Virtually everything written by Spooner is contained in the six-volume compilation The Collected Works of Lysander Spooner (1971). The most notable exception is Vices Are Not Crimes, not widely known until its republication in 1977.

"The Deist's Immortality, and An Essay on Man's Accountability for His Belief" (1834)

"The Deist's Reply to the Alleged Supernatural Evidences of Christianity" (1836)

"Constitutional Law, Relative to Credit, Currency, and Banking" (1843)

"The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress, Prohibiting Private Mails" (1844)