Spooner is generally considered to be one of the greatest minds ever produced by America. Even the slaveowners who despised the abolitionist movement were honest enough to give credit to and respect his intelligence. His beliefs, like them or not, were almost always rigidly thoughtful and philosophically brilliant - far more so than any other abolitionist and in fact more than most historians ever since. Seeing as their originator Spooner was no fool, none of those beliefs could be properly called foolish simply from being adhered to and espoused by others. That holds true for today since much of what he wrote after the war pertained to the directions American government was going, including where it is still going today.