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.
This is the same man who wrote "A Treatise on the Unconstitutionality of American Slavery"
Very good! You know your history!
where he had little to say about the kind of men who would become the leaders of your confederacy.
That is nice and all, but completely misses his post-war book quoted from here. His critique of the northern participants in the war and after the war (as in the people you constantly defend, embrace, and promote) is one of the most scathing pieces he ever wrote.
I'm perfectly content with ceding that he was no friend of the south and that makes his testimony here all the more amazing. But even then as a staunch opponent of slavery, I don't believe he ever called Jefferson Davis the "chief murderer of the war." No, he saved that title for Ulysses S. Grant.
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.
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.
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.