Lysander Spooner

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Lysander Spooner bigraphy, stories - Anarchist, Entrepreneur, Abolitionist

Lysander Spooner : biography

January 19, 1808 – May 14, 1887

Lysander Spooner (January 19, 1808 May 14, 1887) was an American individualist anarchist, political philosopher, Deist, Unitarian abolitionist, supporter of the labor movement, legal theorist, and entrepreneur of the nineteenth century. He is also known for competing with the U.S. Post Office with his American Letter Mail Company, which was forced out of business by the United States government.

Life overview

Spooner was born on a farm in Athol, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1808, and died "at one o’clock in the afternoon of Saturday, May 14, 1887, in his little room at 109 Myrtle Street, Boston, surrounded by trunks and chests bursting with the books, manuscripts, and pamphlets which he had gathered in his active pamphleteer’s warfare over half a century long."Benjamin Tucker, "Our Nestor Taken From Us."

Spooner advocated what he called Natural Law or the "Science of Justice" wherein acts of initiatory coercion against individuals and their property were considered "illegal" but the so-called criminal acts that violated only man-made legislation were not.Spooner, Lysander,

Publications

  • 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)
  • The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1845)
  • Poverty: Its Illegal Causes, and Legal Cure (1846)
  • Illegality of the Trial of John W. Webster (1850)
  • An Essay on Trial by Jury (1852)
  • The Law of Intellectual Property (1855)
  • A Plan For The Abolition Of Slavery (and) To The Non-Slaveholders of the South (1858)
  • Address of the Free Constitutionalists to the People of the United States (1860)
  • A New System of Paper Currency (1861)
  • A Letter to Charles Sumner (1864)
  • Considerations for Bankers, and Holders of United States Bonds (1864)
  • No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority (1870)
  • Forced Consent (1873)
  • Vices Are Not Crimes: A Vindication of Moral Liberty (1875)
  • Our Financiers: Their Ignorance, Usurpations and Frauds (1877)
  • Gold and Silver as Standards of Value: The Flagrant Cheat in Regard to Them (1878)
  • A Letter to Thomas F. Bayard (1882)
  • A Letter to Scientists and Inventors, on the Science of Justice (1884)
  • A Letter to Grover Cleveland, on His False Inaugural Address, The Usurpations and Crimes of Lawmakers and Judges, and the Consequent Poverty, Ignorance, and Servitude of the People (1886)

Later life

Spooner became a member of the socialist First International.George Woodcock. Anarchism: a history of anarchist ideas and movements (1962). pg. 459. Spooner continued to write and publish extensively in the decades following Reconstruction, producing works such as "Natural Law or The Science of Justice" and "Trial By Jury." In "Trial By Jury" he defended the doctrine of Jury Nullification, which holds that in a free society a trial jury not only has the authority to rule on the facts of the case, but also on the legitimacy of the law under which the case is tried, and which would allow juries to refuse to convict if they regard the law they are asked to convict under as illegitimate. He became closely associated with Benjamin Tucker’s anarchist journal Liberty, which published all of his later works in serial format, and for which he wrote several editorial columns on current events. He argued that ". . . almost all fortunes are made out of the capital and labour of other men than those who realise them. Indeed, except by his sponging capital and labour from others."quoted in Martin, James J. Men Against the State, p. 173f

Spooner died on May 14, 1887 at the age of 79 in his residence, 109 Myrtle Street, Boston. Benjamin Tucker arranged his funeral service and wrote a "loving obituary," entitled "Our Nestor Taken From Us," which appeared in Liberty on May 28, and predicted "that the name Lysander Spooner would be ‘henceforth memorable among men.’"McElroy, Wendy,