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“They Ought to Deceive No One”: Lysander Spooner and the Civil War
David A. Beirne
The primary document that best encapsulates my study of the role of economics in the American Civil War is the pamphlet “No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority,” written by lawyer, abolitionist, and anarchist Lysander Spooner and published in 1870, five years after the war. Though Spooner was fervently anti-slavery and hailed from Massachusetts, he brutally criticized the wartime president, the Republican Party for furthering in an unprecedented manner what he considered to be a dangerous consolidation of governmental, military and, apropos this paper, economic power.
Spooner hailed from a family of abolitionists, by 1845 already having written The Unconstitutionality of Slavery that argued that not only was slavery contrary to natural law, but never expressly sanctioned by the U.S. Constitution. Spooner wrote that the founding document “not only does not recognize or sanction slavery, as a legal institution, but that, on the contrary, it presumes all men to be free; that it positively denies the right of property in man; and that it, of itself, makes it impossible for slavery to have a legal existence in any of the United States.” Spooner was even involved in efforts to try and free John Brown. (Barnett 980)
By 1870, he seemed to believe that the slaves had gained their freedom at the expense of the freedom of the American states and, accordingly, the populace at large. “[P]residents, senators, and representatives . . . are really only the agents of a secret band of robbers and murderers, whom they themselves do not know, and have no means of knowing, individually.” (Spooner 52) He continued, “And they expect to repay the loans, if at all, only from the proceeds of the future robberies, which they anticipate it will be easy for them and their successors to perpetrate through a long series of years, upon their pretended principals—if they can but shoot down now some hundreds of thousands of them, and thus strike terror into the rest.” (Spooner 53)
Lysander, though fighting his entire life for the abolition of slaves, posited that his government’s rhetoric and selective actions were not aligned with its wider ambitions and abuses. Slavery, in Spooner’s mind, was merely a pretense by which the aims of power were wrought. “All these cries of having “abolished slavery,” of having “saved the country,” of having “preserved the union,” of establishing a “government of consent,” and of “maintaining the national honor” are all gross, shameless, transparent cheats—so transparent that they ought to deceive no one.” “In short, the industrial and commercial slavery of the great body of the people, North and South, black and white, is the price which these lenders of blood money demand . . . in return for the money lent for the war.”
“In short, the North said to the slaveholders: If you will not pay us our price (give us control of your markets) for our assistance against your slaves, we will secure the same price (keep control of your markets) by helping your slaves against you, and using them as our tools for maintaining dominion over you. (Spooner 54-55) “On this principle, and from this motive, and not from any love of liberty or justice, the money was lent in enormous amounts, and at enormous rates of interest. And it was only by means of these loans that the objects of the war were accomplished.” (Spooner 55)
Spooner concludes that “The lesson taught by all these facts is this: As long as mankind continue to pay “National Debts,” so-called,—that is, so long as they are such dupes and cowards as to pay for being cheated plundered, enslaved, and murdered—so long as there will be enough to lend the money for those purposes; and with that money a plenty of tools, called soldiers, can be hired to keep them in subjection.” This viewpoint regarding the Civil War is often overlooked, even though Spooner’s case shows that it was not unique and crossed ideological boundaries that made more sense in the mid-nineteenth century than now.
Bibliography
Barnett, Randy E. “Was Slavery Unconstitutional Before the Thirteenth Amendment? Lysander Spooner’s Theory of Interpretation.” 28 Pacific L.J. 977-1014 (1997).
Johnson, Reinhard O. The Liberty Party, 1840-1848: Antislavery Third-Party Politics in the United States. Louisiana State University Press, 2009.
Spooner, Lysander, “No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority,” in The University of Michigan’s Labadie Collection, 1870) 52-53.