And once again, I care not what interest you have in posting, but rather in what you post to the record of this thread. Respond only if you desire.
For those who might be taken in by your spiel, though, I point out once again that Spooner was a very minor figure among abolitionists.
That is simply not the case. His book, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, was one of the key philosophical texts of the abolitionist movement. It was embraced by the Liberty Party in 1849 and recieved widespread circulation by the abolitionists between then and the war. Spooner's philosophical concepts were a major influence on Geritt Smith, one of the only true abolitionists to win a major political office. It also angered many of the Garrisonians and Wendell Phillips, who attempted an intellectually weaker rebuttal of Spooner's book in an effort to counter its growing popularity in the movement. The book also gained Spooner national attention in the political arena for about a decade preceding the war. It came up as a subject on the floor of Congress and even prompted efforts by leaders of the Republican Party, including William Seward, to solicit Spooner's political support in 1860. All of these facts have been brought to your attention previously, x. Yet here you are spouting the same historically false line and belittling Spooner's contribution to a movement he helped revolutionize. That indicates one of two things - willful ignorance or dishonesty.
This can be confirmed by impartial readers who consult the standard historical works on the period.
Which would be??? If those works you are thinking of happen to be what I think they are, I can only say that they are suspect in their historical credibility. Go look at the records of the 1850's if you want a real view of Spooner's relevance. You will see his book in publication. You will see it mentioned in the newspapers and on the floor of Congress. You will see letters from prominent Republicans seeking to court a political endorsement from him that was evidently valued to them. You will see prominent abolitionist organizations such as the Liberty Party endorsing the distribution of his book. You will see abolitionist leaders such as Smith praising it as the central philosophical work of their movement. All of these facts and others directly contradict your claim, x.
The abolition of slavery was only one of Spooners many interests, including deism, banking and currency, jury nullification, and a crusade against the postal service.
And so it was. Spooner was a thoroughly political philosopher on many issues, but having an interest in other things does not preclude one from being an abolitionist any more than your interest in the civil war precludes you from speaking out on welfare reform. Some of those political causes, such as jury nullification, were linked to his abolitionist activity, which included providing legal defense to fugitive slaves. Others were financial and economic issues pertaining to other political disputes of the time. Regardless of the number of causes he took up, Spooner is best known for his book on "The Unconstitutionality of Slavery" and the abolitionist activities related to that book. That his book achieved the attention it did during the late 1840's and the 1850's alone is enough to qualify him as one of the most prominent abolitionists. Add to that his political involvement in abolitionism with Smith, with John Brown, and in the defense of fugitive slaves and you have a man who participated in the movement both philosophically and actively.
Wendell Phillips's 1847 response to Spooner's pamphlet on the constitutionality of slavery correctly identifies Spooner as essentially an anarchist
That it may, though Spooner's libertarian-oriented leanings toward anarchism did not develop fully until after the war. Regardless, those leanings say nothing of your claim that Spooner was but a "minor figure" among abolitionist. In fact, that he attracted enough attention from Phillips to provoke a heated exchange and pamphlet response to his book directly contradicts your initial premise. After all, why would a "major abolitionist" like you have alleged Phillips to have been waste his time and effort responding to someone you term "a very minor figure among abolitionists" unless that person was not as "minor" as you claim?
Spooner's 1867 publication of "No Treason" in De Bow's Magazine, which had been the premiere pro-secession, pro-slavery magazine, suggests that "Confederate apologist" is a pretty good characterization of one aspect of Spooner's activities.
After a brief search, the only reference I can find to Spooner directly submitting something to DeBow's is an 1866 essay in which he proposed a series of economic and banking reforms to help the south in the post-war scene. As best I can tell, he did so, if for no other reason, for the fact that at the time DeBow's was among the most widely read magazines in the south and permitted him to attain the widest audience in the region he was hoping to help recover economically.
I suppose it is possible he submitted other things to them, but it is my understanding that he put out "No Treason" on his own as a pamphlet series. From what I can tell, DeBow's did reprint a portion of No Treason #2 in November 1867. The note at the bottom of its first page indicates that it is a reprint of the pamphlet that was taken from the District Court's office in Massachusetts where Spooner filed it. Thus, your premise that he was some sort of "confederate apologist" writing for DeBow's is, in addition to being outright absurd, historically dishonest.
If you were familiar with the "No Treason" series, you would know that it condemns southern slavery in the harshest of language and denounces the confederate relation to that same form of slavery. It was probably excerpted in DeBow's though not out of love for Lysander Spooner, but rather because the part they excerpted was a strong legal defense against the charge of treason crafted and filed as such by a well known attorney.
Certainly De Bow's published his work precisely as a defence of their own pro-Confederate activities. Their crowing about finding an abolitionist who supported their cause shows how welcome Spooner was to diehard Confederatists in the immediate aftermath of the war as well as today.
Did you even bother to read the segment that was excerpted in DeBows before shooting your mouth off and making that statement, x? It certainly does not appear to be so. There is nothing in it about an "abolitionist who supports the south," nothing about an anti-slavery yankee siding with the confederacy. The part that is excerpted is a heavily-legalistic argument about the crime of treason, what that crime means as a principle of law, and how it does not pertain to the war. The segment also includes a mention of the slaveholder, who he harshly denounces for the "whips and the robbery which he practises upon" slaves. In other words, the passage appears to be exactly what I noted earlier - DeBows reprinted a well-reasoned legal argument pertaining to the crime of treason that had been printed and then filed by Spooner at a Massachusetts court office. They reprinted it because it pertained to an allegation that was politically pertinent to the south at the time. That you argue that it is indicative of some sort of evidence of "confederate apologism" by Spooner can, once again, be explained by only two things: either ignorance resulting from your failure to investigate the segment of "No Treason" as it was excerpted, or willful intellectual dishonesty.
It's hard to find so scathing a review as Gamble's critique of DiLorenzo written by someone who actually agrees with the thesis of the work under consideration.
How so? Every book has its critic, including some who align politically with the author. As I noted previously, Gamble's criticisms are almost entirely complaints about a short list of TYPOS IN THE FOOTNOTES! Now don't get me wrong - typos in the footnotes need to be corrected when found, but if that is the best he's got against the book, I'd say DiLorenzo's in pretty good shape.
Those who disagree with DiLorenzo will find even more to attack in DiLorenzo's myth book.
First, you have yet to substantiate the grounds on which you call it a "myth book." Second, your argument is itself inherently weak as it says nothing of what has actually occured but rather only speculates the unspecified occurrence of something that you desire.
As has been noted, "Gamble's findings" = "typos in a few footnotes." If we hold the following from your argument:
"critic's findings" > "Gamble's findings," or C > A where A = B, your argument may be stated that C > B, or "critics findings" > "typos in a few footnotes." So in other words, the "bar" you have set for DiLorenzo's critics is sufficiently low enough for them to simply find something more than typos in a few footnotes, thus surpassing Gamble. If you wish to call that an accomplishment, be my guest. But all indicators are that you're still only a few steps beyond typos in the footnotes, or in other words exactly what Claremont did - find a typo plus a few disputed interpretations of negligable pertinence to the thesis in the book itself, and harp on them incessantly over the course of three dozen book reviews from the same four writers, each stating the exact same thing only in a different order and with different choices of names by which to call DiLorenzo.
Sloppy research is a sign of sloppy thinking.
May I conclude, then, that you are a sloppy thinker in light of the sign provided by your sloppy treatment of DeBow's relation to Spooner?
Harry Jaffa has certainly been a major Lincoln scholar, but so far as I've seen, DiLorenzo's book has so far received little consideration from scholarly reviews or academic historians, as opposed to ideologues of one stripe or another.
That may be the case with Krannawitter, but what about the others? Are not Jaffa, Masugi, and Ferrier all scholars with academic credentials?
When actual historical experts get through with DiLorenzo, given all of the errors that have already been found in the book by laymen, I imagine there won't be very much left.
So Jaffa & company are simply "laymen" of Lincoln studies? If that is so, then why is Harry regularly referred to as the "greatest living Lincoln scholar" among other things? The obvious answer is that Jaffa is indeed among the most well regarded living academic scholars in the area of Lincoln studies, and those who are among his followers tend to achieve credit of their own from his reflected glory. When it comes to pro-Lincoln scholarship, Jaffa and his school are considered to be among the best of the best. He is a leader in that field and has the academic following of those others around him in the Claremont group. Like it or not, Claremont jumped into the critics circle for DiLorenzo - nay, they practically organized and led the critic's charge against him! The supposed best of the best from the pro-Lincoln side already went after his book, x. Their findings? A couple typos, a single accidental misquote, and a disputed interpretation of another quote or two. In short, the best of the best came up with nothing.
I don't think Tim Robbins wants to bomb New York or Susan Sarandon wants to make Islam our official religion, but people have charged that they give support and comfort to our enemies and make common cause with them. You yourself have made extensive use of "guilt by association" tactics in your posts, so you understand the idea. I don't argue that Spooner is "guilty by association," though, just that associations between Spooner and neo-confederatism do exist and shouldn't be ignored. Spooner should not be represented as a typical or important abolitionist without serious consideration of the anarchist views that differentiated him from other, and more important abolitionists.
Spooner defended the "right to secession" and attacked unionist doctrines and efforts to fight back. He may not have agreed with everything the Confederates wanted to do, and may not have been willing to defend them from rebels in their own camp, but he certainly did write an apologia for secession, and hence, to all practical purposes, for the Confederacy. To be sure, he was anti-slavery, but the neo-confederate argument is that the war was not about slavery and that one could be pro-Confederate and anti-slavery, so this hardly counts as an objection.
The publication of Spooner's writings in De Bow's was an early milestone in the development of neo-confederate ideology and argument, and the move away from slavery to other justifications for the rebellion. There certainly are real contradictions between Spooner's anarchist denial of state sovereignty and the secessionists advocacy of that doctrine, but neo-confederate theory is rife with such contradictions. Intellectual ammunition is valued more than consistent thought, and Spooner provided Confederate apologists with such ammunition, if they chose to use it.
Spooner had no problem sending his writing to a pro-secession journal and giving them permission to publish "No Treason" and they had no problem publishing what he sent in and asking him for permission to reprint the pamphlet (see the headnote to Part One. The reference to the court in Boston in the footnote to Part Two may be some sort of copyright notice. Someone sent the pamphlet to De Bow's and that someone may have been Spooner himself. De Bow's didn't dig it out of court documents).
Spooner and De Bow's may not have agreed with each other on all particulars but neither had any trouble about using the other. That an abolitionist was willing to send an article to what had been the most prominent pro-slavery journal and was still unrepentant about secession and White supremacy suggests that he was not a typical abolitionist. Hair splitting and invective may obscure this, but those who may be interested or concerned may judge for themselves.
Spooner's article is far more -- or less -- than a scholarly study of the meaning of treason. Unbiased observers may see that by reading the attack on "the North" at the beginning of the excerpt in De Bow's. Spooner's support for the "right to secession" was precisely what unregenerate Confederates wanted, as is the reference to United States citizenship as "political slavery" and the United States government as a "tyranny." The anarchist sentiments and doctrines that Spooner passionately expresses in "No Treason" differentiate it from a sober, scholarly study of what treason is. Heavy on rhetoric and abstract theory, "No Treason #1" is light on serious constitutional analysis. I also doubt legal scholars are usually so free with exclamation points. "No Treason #2" makes more mention of the Constitution, but it too is heavy on anarchist theories and light on documentation.
Spooner's ideas were present at the creation of the neo-Confederate apologia. As a precursor and foundation of the Rockwellite argument, Spooner can't be taken as an unbiased outside arbiter of the controversy.
What you think is clear, and I hope that's also true of what I think. It's up to those who are interested in this question to make up their own minds. Links to the relevant articles are here. It's important, though, to read other articles from DeBow's to get a clear view of just who and what Spooner was flirting with.
If you had read my post carefully, you would see that I readily admitted that Jaffa was a distinguished Lincoln scholar, but other historians who aren't closely identified with ideological camps haven't yet weighed in on Di Lorenzo's book. When they do it will be the end of DiLorenzo's book among thinking people, but because a craving to believe is at the root of his appeal, it probably won't affect his sales.