Not really. But when someone I disagree with continually espouses falsehoods that can be attributed to only ignorance or dishonesty, I will make note of it. Your case against Spooner is replete with one or both of these attributes.
I know my comments won't make any impression on you. I make them simply for the benefit of anyone else who might be following the argument.
Make them for whoever you desire, but simply note then when you espouse falsehoods, such as dismissing Spooner's prominent role as an abolitionist in the face of all reasonable facts, I will call you on it.
They are free to consult standard works on the period to determine Spooner's standing and reputation among abolitionists and other contemporaries.
I happily encourage them to do the same. Upon doing so, they will find the Liberty Party adopting Spooner's book as their standard philosophical work. They will find Gerrit Smith, one of the only true abolitionists ever elected to Congress, basing his cause on the philosophical notions of Spooner's book. And they will find Spooner's writings being discussed on the floor of congress, and his endorsement being solicited by high level officials of the government.
When I say that "No Treason" is not a scholarly argument, I mean that it is not an argument that a legal scholar or scholarly lawyer would make to convince either a scholarly or a judicial audience. It is particularly devoid of legal precedents.
If that is the basis upon which you judge it, I may only note that once again its purpose has flown completely over your head. Legal philosophy is a different game entirely than case law. It's tools are logic, as opposed to historical citation.
A judge would laugh it out of court and a scholar would regard it as an impassioned sermon or a satire, rather than a serious treatise. Try reading an opinion of Marshall's or Story's after reading "No Treason" and you'll see the difference.
My suspicions are again affirmed, x. You have not a clue as to what you compare or write. Marshall's case law and Spooner's legal philosophy are two different animals entirely, and thus not comparable or analogous. If you do not understand the difference, look up William Blackstone's legal philosophy essays. They don't dwell on case citations either, nor do they even remotely resemble your average supreme court ruling, but as legal scholarship they provide the basis for much of the American legal system.
That doesn't necessarily mean Spooner's argument is wrong on its face. He is capable of thinking or sounding like a lawyer, but he's doesn't engage legal precedents and realities.
...and you wonder why I noted your ignorance in this matter, x? Not all law is case citation law, and that includes the legal writings that are the basis for our entire legal system.
You may be able to separate out some highly logical argument from Spooner's wild rhetoric and vilification. Many laymen may not be able to do so
Do you count yourself among those laymen, x? I ask because you have yet to demonstrate any significant grasp whatsoever of Spooner's writings. If you take the time examine them closely, you will find that, far from being wild and random assertions, they are very carefully crafted and meticulous parts of a logical procession. They do posess a quality (or vice depending on how you look upon it) of skilled and powerful rhetoric, but underlying it all is a rigidly logical procession of arguments. Agree or disagree with those arguments if you like, but do note that they are constantly there.
and I suspect some experts may find Spooner's leaps in logic even wilder than his more emotional invective and abuse.
Actually, Spooner's skill as a logician was quite reputable in his day. It confounded Wendell Phillips to no end. I am accordingly curious as to what you consider his "leaps in logic," as I suspect that you simply missed the underlying order to arguments that you mistook for something else.
Spooner's discussion of treason narrowly understood is only the tip of the iceberg. The bulk of Spooner's treatise is an attack on the very idea of government authority. It may be fine rhetoric or philosophy or anarchist theory, but it isn't much of a legal treatise.
It qualifies as what most would call legal philosophy, a vitally important part of legal scholarship. You seem to be operating under the mistaken notion that legal scholarship ammounts to little beyond case law. That is a fallacy that you must consciously seek to avoid. Before there is case law and in fact before there can even be case law, there must be legal philosophy, which is what Spooner's legal argument on treason took the form of.
"No Treason #2" is less emotional and more substantive than "No Treason #1" but I doubt it would convince or impress many lawyers or legal scholars.
I highly suspect that such doubt comes from a mistaken impression that all law is, or somehow resembles, case law. It does not. Go read some of the parts of Blackstone's commentaries if you doubt me. They don't look a thing like most supreme court rulings, yet their importance and stature in our legal system surpasses practically every case ruling put out by the court.
The last time I checked, reviews of DiLorenzo's book hadn't appeared in such serious academic journals
I cannot speak for book reviews, but I do know of at least one recent publication in a peer reviewed scholarly journal that lends its support to DiLorenzo's thesis (BTW, I wouldn't remind Claremont that their little newsletter isn't a scholarly journal. Such things may incite a fatwah from the Abratollah).
Phillips, Garrison, Douglass, Parker, Weld, Smith, Birney, Mott, Beecher, Lovejoy, Stowe, Howe and others all have at least two biographies or monographs devoted to them. You may argue that some of these people are known for other reasons. That hardly matters, since Spooner was also active in banking, the law and religion and acquired no great prominence in his own day from any of his activities. Whatever their renown for other reasons, these people were known as abolitionists and were more prominent abolitionists than Spooner. Lysander Spooner may have been more theoretical than some of those I named, but sheer quantity of verbiage and degree of abstraction do not directly translate into fame or influence, if the quality, human appeal, practicality and relevance aren't there. You may contest some of these names, but not enough to make Spooner one of the top three abolitionists in the country.
It would take a long article or thesis to determine just how important or unimportant Spooner was in his day, and in the works of subsequent scholars. And it's hard to prove a negative. There's always another book to look at to see if Spooner, against expectations, plays a major role. And there's the question of just what "importance" is and what it takes for a person, a reputation, a book, or an article to be truly significant. Any list of books that anyone gives you will be suspect as unrepresentative. That's why I urged anyone interested in the question to go to sources themselves and make their own determination. Counting page numbers in the index is a pretty crude way of analyzing significance or prominence, but it does give a rough estimate of the comparative importance of various figures.
Spooner isn't mentioned in most histories of the United States. In most works devoted to the abolitionists or antebellum social reform and biographies of other abolitionists references to him could usually be counted on one hand in each book. Older works make little reference to Spooner. Louis Filler's standard work, "The Crusade Against Slavery" (1960) has one page number in the index for Spooner, while such forgotten fighures as Joshua Leavitt and Benjamin Lundy have more. Dwight Dumond's "Antislavery" (1961) and William and Jane Pease's "The Antislavery Argument" (1965) have no index entries for Spooner. Louis Ruchames's "The Abolitionists: a Collection of their Writings" (1963) has one mention in the index and no anthologized text by Spooner. Henry Meyer's 1998 biography of Garrison, "All on Fire" (1998) has one page number in the index. Communist Herbert Aptheker's "Abolitionism: a Revolutionary Movement" (1989) has three entries and makes a very favorable mention of Spooner and his allies. Mason Lowance's "Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader" has two excerpts of one text by Spooner, mixed in with excerpts from three dozen other writers. Spooner doesn't bulk large in the anthology. The heavyweights for Lowance are apparently Garrison and Lowell.
Spooner plays a slightly larger role in John Thomas's "Slavery Attacked: The Abolitionist Crusade" (1963) and Aileen Kraditor's "Means and Ends in American Abolitionism" (1970) but he's not one of the major heroes in the story there either. That's my random sample of books taken from a local library shelf. It's not exhaustive and may not be precisely representative but it does suggest that historians and contemporaries did not consider Lysander Spooner a major abolitionist. Try another sample if you don't believe me, so long as it is a more random sample and not weighted in favor of DiLorenzo, Hummell, Adams, the Kennedy's and other recent writers from your clique.
Two facts stand out though. First, Spooner's moment of fame was in 1845-7 and connected with his book, "The Unconstitutionality of Slavery." He didn't have the kind of sustained influence of other abolitionist thinkers, agitators or activists. He fades away and turns up again as angling for a role in the John Brown affair, but doesn't remain in the limelight. Second, Spooner's ideas did have some influence, but the degree to which they are "Spooner's ideas" and the predominant direction of the influence are unclear. Did Spooner really influence the more prominent Smith? From what scholars say, it could well have been the other way around, with Spooner fleshing out Smith's or James Birney's ideas. The year before Spooner's pamphlet William Goodell made the same argument in his "Views of the American Constitution" (1844). Historians were as apt to speak of the ideas of "Goodell, Spooner and Smith" taken together rather than treat them separately. Spooner is better known today than Smith or Birney because he wrote a long, repetitive book, rather than speeches or letters, but he's better known than his ally and precursor Goodell or his opponents Wendell Phillips or William Bowditch because of his later anarchist ideas, not because of the quality of his thought or extent of his influence as an abolitionist.
Things changed a bit in the last thirty years. Libertarians and anarchists rediscovered Spooner and put his works on line, so he shows up more in recent books. But it would be a mistake to project this prominence backwards into history, the reasons for Spooner's current vogue lie in us, not in the past. Those approaching Spooner from an anarchist or libertarian perspective will doubtless overestimate his importance in his times. But those who approach him through the abolitionists and try to assess his significance in that movement will reach a very different estimation of Spooner's significance.
In his own day, Spooner wasn't considered a major abolitionist leader, activist or thinker. At least a half-dozen names and almost certainly more would come to mind before Spooner's own when his contemporaries thought about abolitionists. In their own day and afterwards, now obscure figures, like Theodore Parker, Theodore Weld or Orestes Brownson were far better known than Lysander Spooner. But today, Spooner has a lobby pushing his name into public view, and most of his contemporaries don't.
Does it matter that Lysander Spooner really doesn't matter -- that he wasn't one of the most prominent, respected or influential abolitionists? Probably not in the greater scheme of things, but a false estimation of Spooner's importance shouldn't be used to advance dubious arguments.
Murray Rothbard cheered the fall of Saigon in 1975 and advocated voting for socialist and Trotskyite candidates for tactical reasons. That was his prerogative, but if someone said, "Even archcapitalists like Rothbard support Communism and Socialism, therefore they must be right" I would object. Rothbard wasn't a typical capitalist or free marketeer. His libertarianism or anarchism were more important in these cases than his support for what most would take to be market capitalism.
If someone were to say "Noam Chomsky, an American, a Jew, and a Zionist of sorts from his youth, opposes the War with Iraq, therefore it must be wrong," I'd also object. Chomsky isn't a typical American or Jew and wasn't a typical Zionist (when he was one). Chomsky's radicalism or leftist anarchism are more important in determining his opinion of the war than his religion or nationality.
And so it is with Spooner. He's not a representative abolitionist. The anarchist tendencies that distinguished Spooner from his peers, identified by Phillips as early as 1846, play a greater role in determining his attitude towards secession than the abolitionist views he shared with them.
Someone who is so ill-informed as to claim that Spooner was one of the three greatest or best known or most prominent or most influential abolitionists, either in his lifetime, or subsequently by historians or today by experts and laymen has a serious credibility problem. After Garrison, there is Frederick Douglass. Alongside Stowe, there is Julia Ward Howe. Lowell and Whittier were more than just poets, and still have some name recognition. So even if one grants that Spooner is, thanks to libertarian and anarchist activism, better known today than other abolitionists who were more famous in their day, he's by no means one of the top three even now.
Those who rely on Rockwell's or DiLorenzo's history lite, rather than more serious fare, have been misled and mislead others. I'm not inclined to make too much of this. Interests, prejudices and passions govern people's opinions more than reason, facts or experiential knowledge. It's not a grave moral failing but part of the human condition. But if one does persist in such errors, and does so in a particularly self-righteous fashion it does cut into one's credibility.
Spooner is well known and popular today for the same reason that he was obscure and discounted in his own times: he found easy answers to the hard questions of the day. He cut through the knotty problems of political thought and practice because he didn't seriously confront them. People who struggled with slavery and secession in mid-19th century America found Spooner's ideas (to the degree that they were aware of them) simplistic wishful thinking. Spooner's belief that one could wave one's hand in front of problems, utter a few formulae and make them go away fooled no one. Those who faced civil war knew that things weren't so simple and that one couldn't "have it all," or have much without sacrifices and difficult choices. But Spooner's very shallowness is precisely what appeals to his fans today. Spooner's "feel good" ideology is the parent of today's Rockwellism, which yokes together opposing and incompatible ideas and tries to pretend that they form a cohesive ideology. Spooner's ability to convince himself that what he wanted to be true was true and that real and painful contradictions can be easily overcome makes him fit in very well at LewRockwell.com.