Lysander Spooner
Lysander Spooner was a 19th-century lawyer, abolitionist, and anarchist known for his radical views on government authority and individual liberty. Born in 1808 in Athol, Massachusetts, he worked on a farm before pursuing a law career, ultimately practicing without completing the state's required legal education. Spooner was a vigorous opponent of slavery, asserting that it violated fundamental human rights, and he criticized the U.S. Constitution as an instrument of tyranny that unjustly constrained individual freedoms. He established an independent postal service that was deemed illegal, arguing that the government should not monopolize such services. His writings, including "The Unconstitutionality of Slavery" and "No Treason," advocate for the idea that individuals have a moral obligation to resist unjust laws. Spooner's legacy continues to resonate particularly within libertarian circles, as he championed the right to disobey oppressive laws and emphasized the importance of natural justice. He lived a solitary life dedicated to intellectual pursuits until his death at the age of 79 in Boston, where he is remembered for his commitment to justice and individual rights.
Subject Terms
Lysander Spooner
- Lysander Spooner
- Born: January 19, 1808
- Died: May 14, 1887
Lawyer, abolitionist, anarchist, was born in Athol, Massachusetts, the second of nine children of Asa Spooner and Dolly (Brown) Spooner. The Spooners traced their ancestry to William Spooner, who settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts, probably in 1637. Lysander Spooner worked on his father’s farm until the age of twenty-five, when he took a position as clerk in the Registry of Deeds in Worcester, Massachusetts.
The following year (1834) he read law in the office of John Davis and then in the office of Charles Allen, both prominent lawyers. Massachusetts law required those who were not college graduates to read law for three years before opening an office. Spooner, whose education was limited to country schools, started to practice in Worcester before fulfilling the three-year requirement. As a result of his defiance and agitation, the state legislature repealed the law in 1836.
In 1836 Spooner wrote The Deist’s Reply to the Alleged Supernatural Evidence of Christianity, in which he denounced Christian beliefs as being contrary to reason. With the same disdain for constituted authority, he would examine American political institutions.
Spooner left Massachusetts for Ohio, where he purchased land. In 1838 he engaged in an unsuccessful lawsuit against the Ohio State Board of Public Works to restrain it from draining the Maumee River, claiming that the project damaged his land. Returning East in 1844, he established a private postal service that delivered mail between Boston and New York City and later between Philadelphia and Baltimore at a lower rate than the federal government charged. The venture was ruled illegal and Spooner was forced to disband it. In The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress Prohibiting Private Mails (1844), Spooner argued that the Founding Fathers did not intend to give the government a monopoly over the postal service and that such a monopoly stifled individual freedom and promoted tyranny.
In The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1845), Spooner, with unrestrained anger, attacked slavery as a violation of the inalienable human right to liberty. Nothing inconsistent with justice can be law, he insisted.
Spooner contended that the Constitution was framed and sustained by men who profited from the arbitrary dominion it gave them over others. He charged that Congress used its legislative power to deprive people of their freedom and property. Holding that each person should fulfill his obligations to others in accordance with “the sacred requirements of natural justice,” Spooner denied that government has a right to legislate for the individual. The aim of legislation, he wrote in Trial By Jury (1852), has not been to help discover the principles of natural justice but to “overturn natural law and substitute for it the arbitrary will of power.”
To hold that the Constitution had a binding character on future generations, Spooner declared, was to assume that people are slaves of their tyrannical and dead grandfathers. In No Treason (1870) Spooner argued that “on general principles of law and reason” the Constitution is not binding. Consequently, those who act by its authority are “mere usurpers and … everybody not only has the right but is morally bound to treat them as such.”
Spooner urged the creation of juries chosen without government interference that would hold unjust and oppressive laws invalid. Had the United States had such an independent jury system, he declared, ninety percent of congressional legislation would never have been enacted. Spooner upheld the right of the individual to disobey unjust laws and to take up arms against a government that violates human liberties.
Spooner was a bachelor and a loner, spending many hours reading jurisprudence, history, and political science in the Boston Athenaeum. He lived in a small room in Boston, surrounded by books and manuscripts that he had gathered in his many years as an active campaigner against the state and injustice.
Spooner died in Boston at seventy-nine. Above his grave these words are inscribed: “To live honestly is to hurt no one and to give to everyone his due.” Because of his attack on the authority of the state, contemporary libertarians regard Spooner as a spiritual ancestor.
All of Lysander Spooner’s known writings, with the exception of Vices Are Not Crimes, have been reprinted in The Collected Works of Lysander Spooner, with an introduction by C. Shively (1971). In 1977 C. Watner uncovered Vices Are Not Crimes. Discussions of Spooner are found in J. J. Martin, Men Against the State (1970) and W. O. Reichert, Partisans of Freedom (1976). A brief biography of Spooner is found in T. Spooner, Records of William Spooner of Plymouth, Massachusetts and His Descendants, vol. 1 (1883). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1935).