Lysander Spooner — Natural Law, the Constitution of No Authority, and the Abolitionist Roots of American Anarchism (1808–1887)

Lysander Spooner was an American individualist anarchist, abolitionist, legal theorist, entrepreneur, and pamphleteer — born on 19 January 1808 on his father's farm near Athol, Massachusetts, the second of nine children, who worked the land until twenty-five, read law in the offices of John Davis and Charles Allen, and opened his practice in Worcester after only three years in deliberate defiance of a Massachusetts law requiring five years for non-college graduates — a law he regarded as state-sponsored discrimination against the poor. His agitation helped get the law repealed in 1836. He spent the rest of his life producing pamphlets, legal arguments, and political tracts from a Boston apartment crammed with books and manuscripts, dying on 14 May 1887 at the age of seventy-nine, "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."

He competed directly with the United States Post Office through his American Letter Mail Company (1844), offering faster delivery at lower prices, until the government used its legal monopoly to force him out of business. He was a member of the First International. He argued the unconstitutionality of slavery before the Civil War and then argued the unconstitutionality of the Union's war against the Confederacy two years after it — applying the same principles with perfect consistency regardless of whose ox was gored. His writing was cited by Justice Antonin Scalia in the 2008 Heller decision. He is claimed simultaneously by libertarians of the left and the right — a fact that reflects not inconsistency but the radicalism of a natural-law framework that refused every settled political alignment.

His central concern, pursued without deviation across fifty years: that natural law — the science of justice, the science of all human rights — was prior to and independent of all government, and that any government whose authority rested not on natural law but on mere power and presumed consent was indistinguishable from organized robbery.

Natural Law — The Science of Justice

Spooner's philosophy rested on a single foundational commitment: natural law was not a philosophical abstraction or a theological postulate but a discoverable body of principles about human rights — "the science of all human rights; of all man's rights of person and property; of all his rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" — as objectively real as the laws of physics and as binding on governments as on individuals. Rights were not granted by constitutions, governments, or social contracts. They were given at birth, inherent in the human person, and their recognition or violation was a matter of justice independent of what any legal system said.

This framework had immediate radical consequences. If rights were natural and prior to government, then no government — however democratically organized — could legitimately violate them. Majority votes did not make wrong right. Constitutions did not make slavery permissible. Congressional legislation did not make monopoly postal service lawful. The test of every law and every governmental act was not its procedural legitimacy but its conformity with natural justice — and laws that failed this test were not law at all, however many representatives had voted for them.

"If there be such a principle as justice, or natural law, it is the principle, or law, that tells us what rights were given to every human being at his birth; what rights are, therefore, inherent in him as a human being, necessarily remain with him during life; and, however capable of being trampled upon, are incapable of being blotted out, extinguished, annihilated, or separated from his nature."

— Spooner, No Treason (1870)

The Unconstitutionality of Slavery — Law Against Itself

Spooner's 1845 "The Unconstitutionality of Slavery" entered a sharp controversy within the abolitionist movement about whether the Constitution supported or prohibited slavery. William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips argued that it supported slavery — that the Constitution was a covenant with death and an agreement with hell — and drew from this the conclusion that the Constitution should be abolished and the Union dissolved. Spooner took the opposite textual position: the Constitution nowhere mentioned slavery, servitude, or a right of property in man. To find constitutional sanction for slavery, you had to go outside the document entirely — "grope among the records of oppression, lawlessness and crime — records unmentioned, and of course unsanctioned by the constitution."

The argument was legally sophisticated — Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett called it "more sophisticated and persuasive than the theorizing of most contemporary legal academics" — and it was deployed in the service of a moral conclusion: slavery was not merely wrong but unconstitutional, and the law itself, properly understood, was on the side of freedom. The argument that natural law governed constitutional interpretation — that ambiguities should be resolved in rights-protecting directions — anticipated significant strands of later constitutional theory.

"The constitution itself contains no designation, description, or necessary admission of the existence of such a thing as slavery, servitude, or the right of property in man. We are obliged to go out of the instrument and grope among the records of oppression, lawlessness and crime — records unmentioned, and of course unsanctioned by the constitution — to find any sanction for it."

— Spooner, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1845)

No Treason — The Constitution of No Authority

The masterpiece, published in 1870 five years after the war that ended slavery, was an assault not on slavery but on the authority of the Constitution itself — and on the principle that any government could legitimately claim authority over persons who had not individually consented to it. The argument was drawn from contract law: a contract was binding only on those who had signed it. No living American had signed the Constitution. No one had been offered the chance to sign or refuse it. Consent had been merely presumed — and presumed consent, as any contract lawyer knew, was no consent at all.

The government was therefore not a legitimate authority but a protection racket — one made more insidious than an ordinary highwayman precisely because it dressed its coercion in the language of law and consent. Spooner's comparison was sharp: the highwayman took sole responsibility for his act, made no pretense of right, and did not continue to demand money after the robbery. The government appointed its own agents to do the collecting, claimed a right to the money, insisted it would use it for your benefit, and kept coming back every year. The honest robber was more straightforward.

"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain — that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist."

— Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority (1870)

Vices Are Not Crimes — The Limits of State Power

One of Spooner's most important distinctions — elaborated in "Vices Are Not Crimes" (written in the 1870s, little known until 1977) — was the line between vice and crime. A crime was an act that violated another person's rights — theft, assault, fraud, murder. A vice was a self-damaging act that harmed no one but the person who committed it. The state had legitimate authority to prohibit crimes — indeed, this was its only legitimate function. It had no legitimate authority whatsoever over vices. To criminalize vice was to treat adults as incapable of self-governance — to appoint the government as the moral guardian of persons who had never consented to that guardianship.

This distinction anticipates the harm principle in Mill's "On Liberty" and has had a long subsequent life in liberal political philosophy. Spooner applied it with more consistency than most: the principle that only harm to others justified legal prohibition led him to oppose not only vice laws in the ordinary sense but the entire apparatus of state regulation of voluntary exchange.

"Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property."

— Spooner, Vices Are Not Crimes

The American Letter Mail Company — Theory Into Practice

In 1844 Spooner put his theory of government monopoly directly to the test by founding the American Letter Mail Company — a private postal service operating between Boston and Baltimore that offered faster delivery at lower prices than the federal Post Office. He openly advertised in major newspapers, notified the Postmaster General in advance of his intention, and included a copy of his pamphlet arguing that congressional legislation prohibiting private mails was unconstitutional. The company operated profitably for several months. The government responded not by winning the legal argument — which Spooner was prepared to contest — but by enforcing its statutory monopoly through seizure and prosecution. The company was forced out of business.

The episode illustrated precisely the argument of "No Treason": the government did not claim to offer a better service or a fairer price. It claimed a monopoly right — enforceable by force — regardless of whether that monopoly served the public interest. The consumers who had chosen Spooner's service had made their judgment. The government overrode it.

"Under the principle of individual consent, the little government that mankind need, is not only practicable, but natural and easy; and the only difficulty is to restrain the government from growing beyond the limits of individual consent."

— Spooner

Legacy — The Consistent Radical

Spooner's ideological consistency is simultaneously his most admirable and most uncomfortable characteristic. He argued against slavery in 1845 and against the Union's war to preserve itself in 1867 using the same principle — that no government could legitimately coerce persons who had not consented to its authority. The principle applied to slaveowners and to the federal government alike. He opposed monopoly whether held by corporations or by the state. He opposed censorship, vice laws, and banking monopolies with the same logic he applied to postal monopolies. He was a member of the First International while simultaneously defending private property and free markets. Both libertarians and anarcho-socialists have claimed him — and both claims are partially legitimate, because his framework was genuinely prior to the left-right division that subsequent political thought has taken for granted.

"To live honestly is to hurt no one and to give to everyone his due."

— Inscription above Spooner's grave