Lysander Spooner

Lysander Spooner wore many hats: abolitionist, entrepreneur, lawyer, essayist, legal theorist, pamphleteer, political philosopher, and writer. He is tied to the Boston anarchist tradition. Politically, he falls under individualist anarchism, and his work helped shape both left-libertarian and right-libertarian ideas. He backed the labor movement strongly.

Spooner came into the world on January 19, 1808, on a farm in Athol, Massachusetts. His parents were Asa and Dolly Spooner. An ancestor, William Spooner, had reached Plymouth in 1637. Lysander was the second of nine kids. His father, a deist, may have named his two older sons Leander and Lysander after Greek mythological and Spartan heroes.

His activism started with law, a career he entered in defiance of Massachusetts rules. He studied under John Davis (later governor and senator) and Charles Allen (state senator and Free Soil congressman), both prominent abolitionists. Spooner never went to college. State law required college graduates to study with an attorney for three years; non-graduates had to do five. With his mentors’ backing, Spooner set up a practice in Worcester after just three years, ignoring the courts. He saw the three-year privilege for graduates as discrimination against the poor, who couldn’t afford college, and as a way to guarantee monopoly incomes for those who met the requirements. He said no one had ever dared openly back “so monstrous a principle as that the rich ought to be protected by law from the competition of the poor.” In 1836, the legislature scrapped the restriction. He opposed all lawyer licensing. After a disappointing legal career and a failed real estate venture in Ohio, he returned to his father’s farm in 1840.

In 1844, Spooner launched the American Letter Mail Company to compete with the U.S. Post Office, whose rates were steep. He believed in self-employment and opposed government regulation of business. The company had offices in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. Customers bought stamps, attached them to letters, and dropped them off at any office. Agents then carried the letters in handbags on trains and steamboats, passing them to messengers in cities along the routes for delivery. This directly challenged the Post Office’s legal monopoly. As he had done with the bar association rules, Spooner published a pamphlet: “The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress Prohibiting Private Mails.” Though the company found commercial success, government legal battles drained his money. A law passed in 1851 that strengthened the federal monopoly finally shut him down. His challenge did leave a mark: letter postage dropped from five cents to three cents due to the competition.

Spooner gained his highest profile as an abolitionist. His 1845 book *The Unconstitutionality of Slavery* sparked a debate among abolitionists about whether the Constitution backed slavery. The disunionist faction, led by William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, argued that the Constitution legally recognized and enforced slavery, pointing to provisions like the fugitive slave clause in Article IV, Section 2. Spooner countered that the Constitution’s text did not permit slavery. He used a complex mix of legal and natural law arguments to show that clauses usually read as accepting slavery actually didn’t support it—even though the original 1789 Constitution openly tolerated human servitude. Those interpretations would only be overturned by the post–Civil War amendments (XIII–XV), which barred states from enabling or enforcing slavery. From 1845 until the Civil War overtook society in 1861, Spooner campaigned actively against slavery. He saw the Northern states as trying to deny Southerners through military force.

Spooner argued that “almost all fortunes are made out of the capital and labour of other men than those who realize them. Indeed, large fortunes could rarely be made at all by one individual, except by his sponging capital and labor from others. And the usury laws are the means by which he does it.” He defended the Millerites, who stopped working because they believed the world would end soon and were arrested for vagrancy. He spent much time at the Boston Athenæum. He died on May 14, 1887, at age 79, at his home on 109 Myrtle Street in Boston. He never married and had no children.

As an individualist anarchist, Spooner advocated for pre-industrial living in communities of small property holders.