Lysander Spooner on Lincoln's War (1870)

No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority, Chapter XIX | 1870 | Lysander Spooner

[Servant of the Nine]

"Do What Though Will is the whole of the law"

Malarkey, boy. You try to quote a once famous Satanist and can't do it because you can't spell 'thou'. If you aren't even familiar with Spooner's book you shouldn't try to horn in on a discussion of an essay from it. Servant of nine winos under a bridge? Is that what your nick means?

Do you always start with gratuitous insults you pompous sack of bullshit?

I admit that I don't bother to spell check, but I was not quoting Crowley, but Rabelais. I think you will find that Crowley is still a famous Satanist, though dead. No one is horning in here, excepting your fluttering around your betters

I know who Lysander Spooner was, and what his positions were. Taking his theories on the invalidation of compacts seriously is pure Tin Foil territory. He and Ignatious Donelly are the two most notorious American crackpots of the period

Was the War between the States about slavery, NO.
Was Lincoln acting Constitutionally when he attacked the Confederacy, NO.
Does either of those facts make Spooner rational, NO.

So9

[lentulusgracchus]

You try to quote a once famous Satanist

Satanist? Who's the Satanist? Spooner?

[lentulusgracchus]

Today's battle is not South or North, it is between Americans and the remnants of the Communists and the rabid idiots who want to murder us in the name of some non-existant so-called god.

Good post, and good point.

What you are seeing in the constant revisitation of American Civil War subjects is the broad joining of a debate over the character of the American governmental experiment, and the attempt by academic Marxists to hijack the subject to their own purposes, in much the same way that Dalton Trumbo and the other Hollywood communists tried to hijack H'wood's message machinery to put out Marxist-Leninist themes. Good examples are most of the films Burt Lancaster appeared in, in which, if he were playing the Marxist vanguardist Good Guy, the townspeople (the Bourgeoisie) were always vilified as low-ethics, low-courage, low-virtue, and generally contemptible.

In the current conversation series, the so-called Neo-Confederates (and the other side mostly calls them that) are arguing a series of constitutionalist and sectionalist positions, against Marxist themes of "people's revolution/liberation" propagated from the top by Lincoln and the Republicans (vanguardism, again).

Where the Marxists want to go is, to validate Government as the Sovereign, and the elite Vanguard as the proprietors of the Government. They have something to work with there, because something very similar is what Lincoln had to do, in order to justify getting rid of slavery by armed force and constitutional novelties. To trump the secessionists' constitutionalist arguments, or at least to meet and dispute them for political purposes, Lincoln had to posit a competing theory of Union that redefined the Union, the People, and Sovereignty. That is the Marxists' beginning material. As someone noted in another thread, it may be very significant that Marx himself approved of Lincoln's political theory and his war, a congruence that the Marxist apologists, of course, are a little shy about advertising; but instead, they pick up Lincoln's arguments and run with them.

To complete the hat trick, they identify their own politics as neo-Lincolnian, or standing in a tradition going back to Lincoln, and use his public cult as the figurehead of their own intellectual and political assault on the sovereignty and freedom of the American People.

That's what the food-fight is all about.

[dcwusmc]

Bump to a most interesting argument. Well spoken and lucid. Thanks.

[lentulusgracchus]

Do you think he's not one? Cause practically every analysis of that movement's intellectual side identifies Spooner and Garrison as the leaders. They're about the only two who consistently make the history books as well, plus Stowe I suppose as the literary side and Brown as the violent domestic terrorist branch of the movement.

I didn't find Spooner in a Civil War almanac or in my biographical section of my 1967 dictionary. There were some other very important abolitionists linked to Stowe and Garrison:

Theodore Weld was the eminence grise of the movement. Less well known because he wrote under pseudonyms and usually spoke in smaller venues, it was he who introduced the Beechers to abolitionism. Originally a seminarian interested in temperance, he came to the abolition issue in 1830, and introduced the Beechers, who were the children of a seminary president in Cincinnati whom Weld was hired to assist in 1831/2. He was a half-generation older than they (they were in their early 20's, she was still single), and he succeeded in getting himself dismissed over his "excessive" interest in the subject of abolition -- and took half the seminary's student body with him, including a young Edwin Stanton, who went on to read law instead -- an early warning of Stanton's character in office. Weld worked for the New York Emancipator for a while, and later on at another periodical serialized Uncle Tom's Cabin for Stowe in 1851. She also owed him a literary debt, which she acknowledged publicly, having drawn on his 1839 book, American Slavery As It Is. Except for publishing Stowe and publicly backing Lincoln, Weld largely withdrew from abolitionist activities after 1844. He lived until 1895, dying at age 92.

Wendell Phillips was the original "limousine liberal", a wealthy attorney who came to the abolitionist movement in 1837 and thereafter became a professional firebrand, joining with Garrison in attacking slavery and actually publicly cursing the Constitution in 1842 in a Boston rally. He remained a red-hot who criticized Lincoln until the Emancipation Proclamation. After the war, he went on to other "progressive" causes: woman suffrage, prison reform, attacking profit capitalism. He died in 1883.

The Beechers, Thad Stevens, and Garrison, everyone knows about.

[lentulusgracchus]

Why, thank you.

[lentulusgracchus]

I'm perfectly content with ceding that he was no friend of the south and that makes his testimony here all the more amazing.

My own immediate impression is of a tinfoil tablecloth stained with the juice of the grape.

Nevertheless, in between the extreme rhetoric of a bitter, disillusioned man who has also been severely disappointed in business, his POV has a certain internal coherence, and you can trace its direct descent from Jacksonian populism, and see his fury in realizing that the value system of his youth, and the public ideal that he grew up with, was being overreached by the "age of combinations" Rockefeller talked about, and the rise of the "malefactors of great wealth". This writing is shot through with pure rage. He's screwed, his countrymen are screwed, the country and its ideals are screwed, screwed, screwed, Orville Babcock is running wild, Victoria Woodhull is talking trash about Free Love, and P.T. Barnum is getting rich showing everyone the Egress. Remember, Spooner's generation grew up with the Great Revival, the beginnings of Temperance, and the abolition movement, and here the country seems to be turning into the Neo-Babylonian Empire before his eyes. I have to sympathize with him.....but still, I don't think his white heat serves him well, outside the confines of the political revival tent. Wendell Phillips, Thad Stevens, and William Lloyd Garrison all had the same problem. Stevens had to be surrounded by volunteer "bodyguards" when he spoke in the well of the House in the 1850's.

[lentulusgracchus]

Quoth R.E. Lee; "Texans always move them."

Yes, I think he said it standing in his saddle, too, in a loud, clear voice so that they could hear it. I think that that was at Spottsylvania, in 1864.

[GOPcapitalist]

I didn't find Spooner in a Civil War almanac or in my biographical section of my 1967 dictionary.

I'm surprised he wouldn't be in a Civil War Almanac. Several of the prominent politicians of the north were citing his works in their political speeches during the late 1850's.

Here's what a brief web search pulled up on him http://www.lysanderspooner.org/

As for this particular writing, my own take is that it has some interesting parallels with what Alexis de Tocqueville had to say about secession. Tocqueville wrote years before and essentially said that when the union acts to coerce obedience of one of its own, it will have violated the principles of its founding and therefore no longer exist as the union it was created to be.

Spooner's essentially saying 5 years after the war that this happened and the nation that was there before the war is now nothing more than another European style might-makes-right state posing as a principled libertarian democracy. It's inescapably frustration-driven and downright scathing in the harshest use of language imaginable, but that's also a type of flamboyance evident in Spooner and most of his books. In the time since he's become a quasi-icon of the libertarian and anarcho-libertarian types.

[GOPcapitalist]

My own immediate impression is of a tinfoil tablecloth stained with the juice of the grape.

Angry flamboyancy can often leave that impression. But Spooner was constantly flamboyent and often angry, so it must not be taken as anything out of the ordinary for him. He had his own share of crackpot ideas running all around him, but in his movement he was both influential and widespread.

Now, abolitionism itself was never anywhere near the size most make it out to be and was thoroughly a fringe movement, though one that lots of people paid attention to closely.

I think the center of Spooner's complaint is with what happened to the movement's name after the war. He saw a bunch of disingenuous yankee politicians who had advocated segregation and bigotry all their lives suddenly rallying around their victory in the war and pretending themselves to be abolitionists that they were not then and never had been.

The politicians seized his movement as their own after the fact and started using it to justify their own continued political gains. Spooner being a "true believer" was naturally repulsed (as was Garrison from time to time in his dealings with Lincoln). So in flamboyant Lysander Spooner style, he lashed out with this essay.

Many of its points are little different from what southerners argued, Spooner enjoys a position that is unique to only a few - he was a northerner lashing out at the northern radical "mainstream" from a side opposite of the south yet for many of the same reasons as the south.

[Dajjal]

Spooner bump

[one2many]

Great post. Thanks.

[one2many]

I don't believe he ever called Jefferson Davis the "chief murderer of the war." No, he saved that title for Ulysses S. Grant.

And I believe some research into that statement would show that he meant not only Grunt's actions against Southerners but his use of his own men as cannon fodder!

P*ss on him.

[one2many]

Hey here is something for those people over at the LIARS CLUB to chew on!

Who Cares about the Civil War?

by Harry Browne

July 31, 2002

I believe an understanding of the Civil War has great relevance to the future of liberty in America.

It may be the most misunderstood of all American wars. And so much of what we lament today — government intrusions on civil liberties, unlimited taxation, corporate welfare, disregarding of the Constitution, funny money — date back to programs started during the Civil War.

Although slavery was an ever-present political issue in the early 1800s, it wasn't the immediate cause of the war. In fact, Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address vowed that he wouldn't interfere with slavery. 

He also said the North wouldn't invade the South unless necessary to collect taxes.

Before the war, the main concern about slavery was whether new states and territories would come into the Union as free states or slave states. This affected the balance of power in Congress, and both Northerners and Southerners worried that the other region might dominate Congress.

Taxes

Why then was the Civil War fought?

As with most wars, there's no single answer. But the predominant cause was taxation.

Before his election, Lincoln had promoted very high tariffs (federal taxes on foreign imports), using the receipts to build railroads, canals, roads, and other federal pork-barrel projects.

The tariffs protected Northern manufacturers from foreign competition, and were paid mostly by the non-manufacturing South, while most of the proposed boondoggles were to be built in the North. Thus the South was being forced to subsidize Northern corporate welfare.

Certainly the Southerners were concerned about the future of slavery. But there was no threat in 1861 that the federal government would be able to outlaw it. 

Secession

When Lincoln was elected, South Carolina saw a grim future ahead and seceded. Other Southern states quickly followed suit. 

Lincoln asserted that no state had a right to secede from the Union — even though several geographical regions had considered secession before. Few people thought the Union couldn't survive if some states decided to leave.

Upon seceding, the Confederates took over all federal forts and other facilities in the South, with no opposition from Lincoln. The last remaining federal facilities were Fort Pickens in Florida and Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Lincoln at first promised to let the South have Fort Sumter, but then tried to reinforce it. The South moved to confiscate it — shelling the Fort for many hours. (No one was killed or even seriously injured.)

Why was Fort Sumter important? Because it was a major tariff-collecting facility in the harbor at Charleston. So long as the Union controlled it, the South would still have to pay Lincoln's oppressive tariffs.

Although there had been only scattered Northern opposition to the secessions, the shelling of Fort Sumter (like the bombing of Pearl Harbor almost a century later) incited many Northerners to call for war against the South. The South's seizure of Fort Sumter caused many Northerners to notice that the South would no longer be subsidizing Northern manufacturing.

As the war began, the sole issue was restoration of the Union — not ending slavery. Only in 1863 did the Emancipation Proclamation go into effect, and it didn't actually free a single slave — just like so many laws today that don't perform the purpose for which they were promoted. .

The Damage

The Lincoln Presidency imposed a police state upon America — North and South. He shut down newspapers that disagreed with him, suspended habeas corpus, imprisoned civilians without trials, and went to war — all without Congressional authority.

Just as future Presidents would do, he used the war as an excuse to increase government dramatically. He rewarded his political friends with pork-barrel projects, flooded the country with paper money, established a national banking system to finance a large federal debt, and imposed the first income tax. He also destroyed the balance between the executive and Congressional branches, and between the federal government and the states.

He set in motion many precedents we suffer from today. That's why it's important to understand the Civil War for what it was, not what the mythmakers want it to be.

Alternatives

Was slavery an evil? Of course.

Is it a blessing that it ended? Of course.

Was it necessary for 140,414 people to die in order to end slavery? Definitely not. The U.S. was the only western country that ended slavery through violence — outside of Haiti (where it ended through a slave revolt). During the 19th century dozens of nations ended slavery peaceably.

What Was Lincoln?

Was Lincoln opposed to slavery? Yes, he became an abolitionist in the mid-1850s, although he said he didn't know how slavery could be ended.

Lincoln's fans have portrayed him as the Great Emancipator, Honest Abe, who with great courage and single-minded determination fought a Civil War to free the slaves. Many of his detractors have tried to show that he was actually a racist.

I think it's important to understand that, more than anything else, he was a politician. Throughout his career he shaded the truth for political advantage, he played both sides against the middle, he lied about his opponents, and he used government force to get what he wanted. Like so many politicians, he continually uttered platitudes about liberty while doing everything in his power to curtail it.

His idolaters applaud him for being a dictatorial politician, saying this was precisely what America needed in 1861. No historian believes he acted within the Constitution.

Importance of Studying the Civil War

I believe the study of the origins and conduct of the Civil War is an important part of a libertarian education.

Although the Progressive era, the New Deal, and the Great Society each caused government growth to accelerate, only the Civil War caused a complete break with the past. It transformed a federation of states into a national government. It introduced the elements of big government that later movements would build on. And it set in motion the disregard for the Constitution that's taken for granted today.

You'll also find parallels between the Civil War and today's War on Terrorism.

Lincoln and the Civil War are fascinating subjects. I've read numerous books about them, and I can highly recommend two recent books that provide an excellent introduction.

Jeffrey Hummel's book "Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men" (published in 1996) and Thomas DiLorenzo's "The Real Lincoln" (2002) are both well-documented and very well-written. You'll find reading either of them (or both) to be an adventure, rather than a task.

Hummel's book is longer, more complete, and perhaps more balanced. DiLorenzo's is faster reading. Both are well worth their inexpensive prices.

We're fortunate that Laissez Faire Books carries an enormous assortment of pro-liberty titles, and makes it easy to order books online. (You may want to bookmark the site for easy reference.)

Hummel's book is only $14.95, and DiLorenzo's book is only $17.50. 

Happy reading!

 

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[stand watie]

TRUE!

free dixie NOW,sw

[stand watie]

YEP!

[Colt .45]

You want to know truth, here's a mouthful for you to choke on ... 'Lincoln through his secretary of state, called out the militia of twenty-four states using as authority a 1795 act of Congress that gave the president the authority to do so, providing that authority would cease thirty days after the beginning of the next session of Congress.

Under the Constitution it is the duty of the president to call the Congress into session during "extrordinary occasions." Ft. Sumter, like Pearl Harbor, was such an occasion. Why didn't Lincoln follow the commands of the Constitution and call the Congress forthwith? Why did he, on 15 April 1861, call Congress to meet almost three months later in July? And then only after he had driven the nation headlong into war? Obviously, he did not want Congress to get involved-did not want the Constitution to get involved. Lincoln was assuming all the powers of a dictator.

After calling forth the militia, within less than a week after Sumter, Lincoln ordered the blockade of Southern ports. A blockade is an act of war, requiring Congressional resolution. On April 21, he ordered the navy to buy five warships, an appropriations act requiring Congressional approval. On April 27th, he started suspending the priviledge of habeas corpus, in effect just about nullifying every civil liberty of every citizen. Soon thereafter he started shutting down newspapers that were not supportive of the war on the South. On May 3, he called for more troops, this time for three years, again a prerogative of the Congress.' - 'When In The Course of Human Events' - Charles Adams 1999

Yet you say that the South had no right to lawfully seceed. Please read what the Founding Fathers thought about rebellion!

It is a traditional American motto that: "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." That is, resistance against tyranny is a moral duty. This motto was suggested by Benjamin Franklin in mid-1776 in the Congress as being an appropriate one for the seal of the United States; and it was so truly expressive of traditional American thinking that Jefferson adopted it for use on his personal seal.

A major part of the American philosophy underlying the resistance to the tyranny of the king and parliament prior to the Declaration of Independence, and in support of that Declaration in 1776, was as follows. Public officials who exceed the limits of the powers delegated to them by the people under their fundamental law and thus violate, or endanger, the people's God-given, unalienable rights thereby and to this extent make of themselves defaulting trustees, usurpers, oppressors and tyrants. They thereby act outside of this supreme law, which defines these limits and the scope of their authority and office, and therefore act without authority from the people. By thus exceeding and violating the restrictions of law, they act outside the Law: lawlessly, as "out-laws." As Samuel Adams stated: "Let us remember, that 'if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others [Posterity] in our doom.'" (Emphasis added.) They thereby, in practice, replace Rule-by-Law with Rule-by-Man. These defaulting trustees-thus acting lawlessly-thereby free the people from any duty of obedience; because legally and morally, under Rule-by-Law, obedience by the self-governing people is required only to Law and not to law-defying public servants.

The reasoning supporting the above-quoted motto's concept of moral duty is this: Man, being given by his Creator unalienable rights which are accompanied by corresponding duties, has the moral duty - duty to God - to safeguard these rights for the benefit of self and others, including Posterity. Man is therefore obligated to oppose all violaters of these rights and to fail to do so is to defy duty to God as the giver of these rights; and such failure betrays Man's duty as the temporary trustee of Posterity's just heritage.- 'The Spirit of 1776 - Twelve Basic American Principles' by Hamilton Albert Long published 1976 (Emphasis is mine)

So as we see, the South had every right to secede and not obey the tyranny of Lincoln who had usurped his Constitutionally delegated powers.

[stainlessbanner]

Great post. I have never heard of Spooner before now - I'll have to read up on him!

[Non-Sequitur]

The problem is that actions are not illegal because you say so, nor are they unconstitutional.

Under the Constitution it is the duty of the president to call the Congress into session during "extrordinary occasions."

No, what Article II, Section 3 says is that the president may on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them. It does not say he is required to. But that doesn't mean anything because, as you pointed out, Lincoln did call Congress into session in the same proclamation that called out the militia to supress the rebellion. Regardless of whether it was three weeks or three months later, Lincoln was constitutionally limited to what he could do until Congress convened and he didn't cross the line.

A blockade is an act of war, requiring Congressional resolution.

Again, your definition. It was not an act of war, because one wages war against other countries, but an action for supressing the rebellion. Lincoln believed that the same legislation that allowed him to call out the militia to supress rebellion also gave him the authority to use the military for the same purpose. That is why his April proclamation limited the length of the blockade until such time as Congress had assembled and deliberated on the unlawful actions of the southern states.

On April 21, he ordered the navy to buy five warships, an appropriations act requiring Congressional approval...On May 3, he called for more troops, this time for three years, again a prerogative of the Congress.

You're both wrong on that, not surprising when dealing with Charles Adams. As Commander in Chief there is nothing in the Constitution that prevented Lincoln from ordering those ships. As Commander in Chief there was nothing preventing Lincoln from calling for 75,000 troops. There is nothing in the Constitution that says only congress can do either of those things, because the act of ordering ships and calling up men do not constitute an appropriations. Had congess declined to pay for those ships or fund those soldiers then there was nothing Lincoln could have done. And if you look at the history of the period you would find that all those soldiers were supported by states and cities and counties in the expectation that the federal government would reimburse them.

On April 27th, he started suspending the priviledge of habeas corpus, in effect just about nullifying every civil liberty of every citizen.

In the first place, Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus was limited to areas on Maryland around Baltimore so he wasn't "nullifying every civil liberty of every citizen". In the second place, the constitutionality of Lincoln's actions has never been decided, as no less authority as Chief Justice William Rehnquist pointed out in a recent book. Again, it is not illegal just because you said so.

So as we see, the South had every right to secede and not obey the tyranny of Lincoln who had usurped his Constitutionally delegated powers.

Again, the opinions of yourself and the gentlemen in question. Their opinions do not make secession legal any more than my opinion makes it illegal. The Supreme Court ruled the southern actions illegal and in violation of the Constitution and their opinions are the ones that count. But I realize that a Supreme Court decision on this subject carries no weight with you. Supreme Court decisions meand nothing to the southern leadership, either. But the court did speak, and until the Constitution is amended or the decision is overturned by a future court then unilateral secession as practiced by the southern states will remain illegal.

[Twodees]

but I was not quoting Crowley, but Rabelais.

Who is quoting Crowley if indeed he wrote that line.

I know who Lysander Spooner was, and what his positions were. Taking his theories on the invalidation of compacts seriously is pure Tin Foil territory. He and Ignatious Donelly are the two most notorious American crackpots of the period

The Constitution was indeed violated and the seceded states had the rightful power to withdraw whether or not it had been. There's nothing tinfoilish about that. As to your observation about crackpots, all the radical abolitionists were crackpots. Spooner was the least cracked of them all. One of the worst, a man who was clearly insane ,was Thaddeus Stevens. He and his fellow bedbug, Charles Sumner did massive damage by participating in exactly what Spooner describes here. A massive fraud was perpetrated on the American people. It continues to this day.

What is really irrational is denying that what Spooner describes is accurate. He was not alone in his observations. Lunt says the same things without any passionate ranting on the subject.

In the future, when you quote someone, remember to put your quote in quotation marks or italicize it and attribute the lines to the author.