\u201cThey Ought to Deceive No One\u201d: Lysander Spooner and the Civil War
\nDavid A. Beirne
\nThe primary document that best encapsulates my study of the role of economics in the American Civil War is the pamphlet \u201cNo Treason: The Constitution of No Authority,\u201d written by lawyer, abolitionist, and anarchist Lysander Spooner and published in 1870, five years after the war.\u00a0Though 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.<\/p>\n

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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.\u00a0Spooner wrote that the founding document \u201cnot 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.\u201d\u00a0Spooner was even involved in efforts to try and free John Brown. (Barnett 980)<\/p>\n

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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.\u00a0\u201c[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.\u201d (Spooner 52)\u00a0He continued, \u201cAnd 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\u2014if they can but shoot down now some hundreds of thousands of them, and thus strike terror into the rest.\u201d (Spooner 53)<\/p>\n

Lysander, though fighting his entire life for the abolition of slaves, posited that his government\u2019s rhetoric and selective actions were not aligned with its wider ambitions and abuses.\u00a0Slavery, in Spooner\u2019s mind, was merely a pretense by which the aims of power were wrought.\u00a0\u201cAll these cries of having \u201cabolished slavery,\u201d of having \u201csaved the country,\u201d of having \u201cpreserved the union,\u201d of establishing a \u201cgovernment of consent,\u201d and of \u201cmaintaining the national honor\u201d are all gross, shameless, transparent cheats\u2014so transparent that they ought to deceive no one.\u201d\u00a0\u201cIn 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 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)\u00a0\u201cOn 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.\u201d (Spooner 55)<\/p>\n

Spooner concludes that \u201cThe lesson taught by all these facts is this: As long as mankind continue to pay \u201cNational Debts,\u201d so-called,\u2014that is, so long as they are such dupes and cowards as to pay for being cheated plundered, enslaved, and murdered\u2014so 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.\u201d\u00a0This viewpoint regarding the Civil War is often overlooked, even though Spooner\u2019s case shows that it was not unique and crossed ideological boundaries that made more sense in the mid-nineteenth century than now.<\/p>\n

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\nBibliography
\nBarnett, Randy E. \u201cWas Slavery Unconstitutional Before the Thirteenth Amendment? Lysander Spooner\u2019s Theory of Interpretation.\u201d 28 Pacific L.J. 977-1014 (1997).<\/p>\n

Johnson, Reinhard O. The Liberty Party, 1840-1848: Antislavery Third-Party Politics in the United States. Louisiana State University Press, 2009.<\/p>\n

Spooner, Lysander, \u201cNo Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority,\u201d in The University of Michigan\u2019s Labadie Collection, 1870) 52-53.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThey Ought to Deceive No One\u201d: 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 \u201cNo Treason: The Constitution of No Authority,\u201d written by lawyer, abolitionist, and anarchist Lysander Spooner and published in 1870, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=886"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":891,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886\/revisions\/891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}