"With Irresistible Clearness"

Lysander Spooner's 205th birthday

Lysander Spooner was born on this date - January 19 - in 1808, 205 years ago. On this anniversary, I post this transcription of a short but nevertheless significant advertisement-cum-article that appeared in the Boston Commonwealth on January 22, 1851. It refers to copies of another Boston newspaper, the Chronotype...

"CHRONOTYPES of Dec. 12 [1850], containing one chapter of Mr. Spooner’s “Defence for Fugitive Slaves,” the same chapter that has been sent to the Lawyers and Editors generally throughout the country, and of which an Alabama paper, just received, says, “This Defence is the boldest and most incendiary publication the Northern Press has ever issued,” and “This Defence is, in our opinion, the ablest effort ever put forth by the Abolitionists.” For sale at the office of the Commonwealth, and also at the book store of BELA MARSH, 25 Cornhill. Price, $1 per hundred."

I discuss Spooner's Defence for Fugitive Slaves (1850), and the important role that it plays in understanding his antislavery constitutionalism, in the article linked to in my previous post.

Lysander Spooner and popular constitutionalism

I am pleased to announce that my article about Lysander Spooner and popular constitutionalism is forthcoming in Law and History Review. The article can be downloaded here: Download Knowles - LS and popular constitutionalism - Law and History Review final draft

Here is the abstract:

In recent years, the rise in academic interest in “popular constitutionalism” has been accompanied by scholarly efforts to identify examples from American history that support that movement’s normative claims about the ills of judicial supremacy. Should antislavery constitutionalists receive substantive discussion in this historical narrative? This article uses the writings of Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) (who authored the most extensive argument that slavery was unconstitutional) to demonstrate the complexities of answering this question. Nineteenth century abolitionists who wrote about the Constitution were constantly confronted with judges unwilling to act for liberty and justice. However, this did not result in an automatic acceptance of the need to issue a popular constitutionalist call to ‘take the Constitution away from the courts.’ Many, such as William Lloyd Garrison, adhered to an anti-constitutionalist position – advocating destruction of the nation’s supreme law. Lysander Spooner was no Garrisonian, but he also did not become a popular constitutionalist until the late 1850s. Not until the decision in Dred Scott did he finally decide to abandon his earlier belief in greater judicial involvement in the interpretive conversation about the meaning of the Constitution.

My review of Shone on Spooner

My review of Steve J. Shone, Lysander Spooner: American Anarchist (Lexington, 2010) has been published in the Fall 2011 issue of the Independent Review and can be found here.

Exciting Lysander Spooner news!

I am very excited to announce the publication of

 

Reasonable Religion: Lysander Spooner on Christianity

This is the first volume in The Lysander Spooner Collection. Published by Cobden Press, the intention is that this series will provide historical reprintings of Spooner's works. While many of these works are available elsewhere, the hope is that this collection will avoid the transcription errors and incompleteness that plagues many other versions.

In addition, each volume will include an introductory essay contextualizing the work. I have authored the essay for the first volume, a volume which has the added significance of being "the first, complete, collection of Spooner’s writings on religion since they were originally written almost two centuries ago." It contains The Deist’s Immortality (1835); On Man’s Accountability for His Belief’s (1834); and The Deist’s Reply to Alleged Supernatural Evidences to Christianity (1836).

It is available to purchase, for a price that I think Lysander would consider very reasonable indeed, from here or from Amazon.com (Amazon's price is a bit higher; and they are simply fulfilling the orders for the first link I have given - and the Amazon link is a bit misleading; it simply means that the orders are only available from one source, not that there is only one copy available).

For those seeking to understand any of Spooner's work, his earliest published writings - his essays on religion - are a must...

Happy Birthday Lysander Spooner!

Today, January 19, we once again celebrate the birthday of Lysander Spooner, who was born, in the central Massachusetts town of Athol, on this day in 1808. 

Three days after his birthday in 1860, Spooner wrote to William H. Seward, the latest letter in his correspondence with the Senator. As this country reaches the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, readers might find the following extract of Spooner’s letter to be interesting reading. It reflects the way in which by 1860 Spooner’s faith in the ability of the federal government sincerely to tackle the problem of slavery had all but vanished:

            Sir,
                        Your note of the 11th inst, was not recd until the 21st. It was read with some surprise, and with more regret, to say nothing of other sentiments.
            The note is marked “private" - I decline the confidence. Both your notes came into my hands fairly, without my having authorized any implication of privacy. And although I may not think it proper, or any longer feel disposed, to use the one to Mrs. South in the particular manner I had desired to do, I shall nevertheless, since you are a public man, feel at perfect liberty to use both of them in any other manner, however public, as evidence of your unfaithfulness to freedom, and to your own convictions of the true character of the constitution, which you have sworn to support. 
    And if, in so doing, I shall chance to “embarrass” the plans of the Chases, and Summers, and Wilsons, and Hales, and the other jesuitical leaders of the Republican party, who profess that they can aid liberty, without injuring slavery; who imagine that they can even be champions of freedom at the north, and at the same time avowedly protect slavery at the south, “where it is”; and that they can thus ride into power on the two horses, Liberty and Slavery – if I should happen to “embarrass” these plans, I shall not feel that that consequence is one which I need care to “avoid.” I had had some hope that you would put your foot on these double-faced demagogues, and either extinguish them, or compel them to conduct, for the time being, as if they were honest men. But it seems that you have decided rather to throw yourself into their arms, commit your fortunes to their keeping, and do nothing, in behalf of liberty, that may “embarrass” their operations...
    I shall very likely make the whole of this correspondence public; and if it shall serve any purpose towards defeating yourself and the Republicans, I shall be gratified; for I would much rather the government be in the hands of declared enemies of liberty, than in those of treacherous friends.
 
 
                                                                                                Lysander Spooner
 

Another exciting Spooner development

Beginning with a volume containing Spooner's three essays about deism (which he published in 1834 and 1836), which will be released in early 2011, Cobden Publishing  will be producing  a set of books containing thematically-organized reprints of Spooner's work.

As I explain in the introductory essay that I have written for the deism volume, now available on SSRN, these deism essays were certainly not Spooner's best work, and lacked the rigorous logical reasoning that defines almost all of his later writings. Nevertheless, it is exciting that they will be included in the first volume produced by Cobden. Unlike many of Spooner's other works, these essays have not been reprinted (other than in the Collected Works of Lysander Spooner), and scholars have paid them, the first published writings by Spooner, very little attention.

For anyone interested in Spooner, this, and the subsequent volumes that Cobden plans to produce, will be required, and instructive reading.

An exciting Spooner development!

For those who are interested in learning more about Lysander Spooner from the man himself, an invaluable source of information is undoubtedly the voluminous correspondence between Spooner and many interesting individuals that resides in two manuscript collections at the New-York Historical Society and the Boston Public Library. While incomplete transcripts can be found at http://www.lysanderspooner.org, news now comes from the New-York Historical Society that the Lysander Spooner papers held there have been completely digitized - digital images, of stunning quality, of the hundreds of Spooner letters at the N-YHS can now be viewed, free of charge, with full-text transcriptions, at https://www.nyhistory.org/slaverycollections/

This is a fantastic development for scholars of Spooner's work. Spooner would, of course, be very proud of this.

The book review that isn't

For those interested in the work of Lysander Spooner, the October 2010 issue of Reason Magazine is worth consulting. There one will find a 'review' article by Damon Root, an article intriguingly and provocatively titled "Clarence Thomas' Favorite Anarchist: The radical anti-statism of Lysander Spooner"

At first glance, one might think that this is a book review of Steve Shone's Lysander Spooner: American Anarchist. After all, that is what the article says it is. Unfortunately, Root hardly mentions this book, and fails to tackle the work's major shortcomings (something which I am currently in the process of doing).

To be sure, in recent years Spooner's visibility has definitely increased, and Root, to his credit, summarizes some of Lysander's major works and arguments. However, anyone seriously interested in Spooner's work is cautioned to expect a degree of intellectual dissatisfaction at both Shone's book and Root's review, and to find in these works the major problem that is associated with many of the aforementioned attempts to make more people aware of Spooner. This is the problem of selective quotations. Spooner's works fill 6 volumes. Even though he longed for his work to be taken seriously, there can be no doubt that he would now cringe at the propensity of commentators to cherrypick his arguments for their own sake.

This is not to say that Root's review, and Shone's book, are entirely guilty of this (or that Spooner did not sometimes make the best use of the material that best supported his views), but readers of these works should be forewarned not to expect arguments laid out with the "irresistible clearness" of which Spooner was so fond.

New Book About Spooner!!

I have the great pleasure of bringing an exciting new publication to the attention of this blog's readers.

Steve Shone, Assistant professor of political science at Winona State University, has published the first book-length treatment of Spooner's works.

Lysander Spooner: American Anarchist is published by Lexington Books.

I have some initial misgivings about the book's title, because I'm of the opinion that scholars frequently place too much emphasis on Spooner's anarchist views, which, as I've mentioned here, are not really representative of his life's work, especially his legal views.

However, I note that I have not yet read Shone's work, so maybe the title is deceiving.

Nevertheless, I look forward to reading this book, and know that whatever argument it makes would make Spooner very proud.

Supreme Court cites Spooner again!!

I am pleased to announce that Lysander Spooner's Unconstitutionality of Slavery has been prominently cited and discussed - as it pertains to Spooner's views about the application of the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to actions of local and state governments - in today's decision in McDonald v. Chicago!!

Spooner's work was briefly cited by Justice Scalia in 2008 in Heller v. District of Columbia (although Scalia incorrectly stated the page numbers from which he was quoting), but the opinion of the Court in today's opinion in McDonald v. Chicago (written by Justice Alito), and the separate opinion of Justice Thomas make much more substantive references.

Spooner would be thrilled!

Watch this space for my future comments about the Spooner cites - and how they relate to Spooner's broader views (which I discuss here)