Ye Olde Rebel of the Week: Lysander Spooner

It’s been an unorthodox week here at Silver Underground because it just so happened that the SOPA Protest Blackout yesterday fell on the same day we normally announce the Rebel of the Week. Since we participated in the blackout we made the announcement a day early. But today also happens to be the birthday of one of my all time favorite rebels. So, I thought I’d take us back in time and declare Lysander Spooner the rebel of this week in 1808.

Lysander Spooner was a nineteenth century American political philosopher, pamphleteer, entrepreneur, abolitionist and individualist anarchist. Spooner advocated what he called the “Science of Justice” which held that the initiation of coercion against an individual or their property was a natural crime, but so-called crimes that violated man-made statutes but had no victim were no crime at all.

Spooner studied law under many prominent legal mentors and launched a modest legal career, offering his services to fugitive slaves free of charge. During his life he published a multitude of pamphlets expressing his legal views on slavery, jury nullification and numerous other subjects. Spooner’s legal arguments were cited by abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass. But he never actually attended college, which meant his legal practice was an open act of civil disobedience. He regarded granting preferential treatment to college graduates as state-sponsored discrimination against the poor and opposed all licensing requirements in all professions. He argued “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.”

Competition is perhaps what Spooner is best known for, specifically illegally competing with the US Post Office. Being an outspoken opponent of government intervention in the market, and observing that postal rates were excessively high in the 1840s, Spooner published a pamphlet titled “The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress Prohibiting Private Mails.” But rather than waiting and hoping for legislators to reform the law, Spooner founded the American Letter Mail Company to directly challenge the US Post Office’s monopoly. Although he met with commercial success, and was able to provide a superior mail service at lower prices, he was ultimately forced out of business by the state.

During the Civil War the actions of the Union government radicalized Spooner into adopting his anarchist views. He refused to support the fledgling Republican Party despite its then-held Jeffersonian political views because he saw them as hypocrites, opposing the institution of slavery in rhetoric only. According to Spooner the Republicans’ use of violence to prevent the Southern states from seceding was not to end slavery, but to bolster Northern business interests and preserve the Union by military force. Spooner defended the right of the Confederate states to secede arguing that the right of states to secede and the right of slaves to be free derived from the same natural right to emancipation.

In Spooner’s view the war violated the fundamental right expressed in the Declaration of Independence; the right of the people to dissolve their political ties to a government which did not enjoy the consent of the governed.

This is when he published his most famous work, “No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority.” In it he argued that the Constitution fails the most basic test of a valid contract. It could only legitimately apply to those who signed it, and was thus void. He further argued that since the government no longer operated with the consent of the governed, they had demonstrated that a contract of government was an inadequate instrument for preventing tyranny.

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