Description
No Treason is a composition of three essays, all written in 1867: No. 1, No. 2: “The Constitution”, and No. 6: “The Constitution of no Authority”. No essays between No. 2 and No. 6 were ever published under the authorship of Lysander Spooner.
A lawyer by training, a strong abolitionist, radical thinker, and anarchist, Spooner wrote these specific pamphlets in order to express his discontent with the state and its legitimizing documents in the United States, the U.S. Constitution. He strongly believed in the idea of natural law, which he also described as “the science of justice,” which he defined as “the science of all human rights; of all man’s rights of person and property; of all his rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.[1]
Natural law, as Spooner saw it, was to be part of everyone’s life, which includes the rights given at birth: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The framers of the United States government also saw natural law to be a good basis for the creation of the Constitution. Its preamble implies that the powers of the U.S government come from “the People”. Spooner believed that “if there be such a principle as justice, or natural law, it is the principle, or law, that tells us what rights were given to every human being at his birth”.[2] This means that Spooner believed that everyone has the same rights from birth, regardless of color or sex or state decree.
Being against the Civil War as a conflict for union, when it should have been about slavery, and witnessing the hardships brought along by the Reconstruction Era, Spooner felt the Constitution completely violated natural law; thus, it was voided. By allowing for the institution of slavery to take place, the United States was taking away the basic rights of the many slaves who were born in American soil. According to Spooner, the slave’s rights were to be the same as everyone else’s due to their birth qualifications. As an outspoken abolitionist, Spooner did not believe that any American should be treated differently under the natural law.
In the years prior to writing No Treason, Lysander Spooner had already expressed his disapproval of slavery in his essay The “Unconstitutionality of Slavery” (1845, 1860), considered a “comprehensive, liberitarian theory of constitutional interpretation”[3] by many abolitionists of his time. His main argument fell under the idea that slavery was not mentioned in the Constitution:
The constitution itself contains no designation, description, or necessary admission of the existence of such a thing as slavery, servitude, or the right of property in man. We are obliged to go out of the instrument and grope among the records of oppression, lawlessness and crime – records unmentioned, and of course unsanctioned by the constitution – to find the thing, to which it is said that the words of the constitution apply. And when we have found this thing, which the constitution dare not name, we find that the constitution has sanctioned it (if at all) only by enigmatical words, by unnecessary implication and inference, by innuendo and double entendre, and under a name that entirely fails of describing the thing.
While each of Spooner’s three essays claims voidance of the Constitution, each emphasizes on specific aspects.
About the Author:
Lysander Spooner (1808–1887) is the American individualist anarchist and legal theorist known mainly for setting up a commercial post office in competition with the government and thereby being shut down. But he was also the author of some of the most radical political and economic writings of the 19th century, and continues to have a huge influence on libertarian thinkers today. He was a dedicated opponent of slavery in all its forms — even advocating guerrilla war to stop it — but also a dedicated opponent of the federal invasion of the South and its postwar reconstruction.
