Lysander Spooner

Today is the birthday of the great 19th century libertarian philosopher Lysander Spooner (1808-1887).

Born onto a Massachusetts farm, Spooner studied to become a lawyer and then proceeded to practice law in Massachusetts illegally (he had neither a college degree nor had he served the required five years under a licensed lawyer). Spooner broke the law on purpose as a protest against its unfairness to the poor.

In 1844, he made history by opening the first private competition to the U.S. Postal Service, called the American Letter Mail Company (this was almost 60 years before UPS, over a century before FedEx). The business actually flourished, but the costs of his legal challenge to the government’s monopoly eventually broke it.

Spooner was also an influential abolitionist. His 1845 tract The Unsconstitutionality of Slavery was instrumental in bolstering the legal argument against the institution. In 1858, he circulated a pamphlet called Plan for the Abolition of Slavery, which called for a slave revolt. He also participated in a plan to free John Brown, which was aborted at the last minute.

Ironically, Spooner then went on recognize the right of the southern states to secede, and he opposed the Civil War and Reconstruction on both legal and moral grounds. While courted by the Republican Party at its founding, he considered himself a Jeffersonian Democrat.

Spooner was a sort of anti-Hobbes. He challenged many laws on the basis that no one but government officials had signed off on them, not recognizing the objective existence of the state. He wrote, “Government is in reality established by the few, and these few assume the consent of all the rest, without any such consent actually given.”

Spooner was also a proponent of self-employment (making him seem almost prescient in his anticipation of today’s economy), was against the government’s monopoly on currency, and was an early convert to Unitarianism, publishing tracts on Deism as early as the 1830s.

He is by no means to be confused with the Reverend William Archibald Spooner, inadvertent inventor of the “Spoonerism”.