 It's genuinely hard to find a libertarian who does not love Lysander Spooner. I've met every kind of libertarian there is, the people who put their licenses in bags and hang them out the window for police officers when they get pulled over, the kind of libertarian who has a dream of fighting insurrectionary militia campaigns against the Federals, and the kinds of libertarians who even disavow their social security numbers and live off the grid with odd jobs as much as possible. But everyone, no matter what kind of libertarian you are, everyone loves Lysander Spooner. Historian Phil Magnus joins us again to talk about this most radical of libertarians. Welcome to Liberty Chronicles, a project of libertarianism.org. I'm Anthony Comegna. Lysander Spooner more or less seems to have led the archetypical libertarian life. It's hard to imagine a real actual person who led much more of an archetypically libertarian life. Can you tell us a bit about his personal history? Yeah. So there's the kind of the running joke if there's ever a libertarian that wants to film a biopic about somebody in libertarian history in the movement, Lysander Spooner is probably the ideal candidate of that. You could give a really kind of a swashbuckling tale of someone who more or less waged war on the government for a 50, 60-year stretch of his life, basically from the very origins of his entry into adulthood to almost the day he died. He's taking up anti-status causes and he's doing so in very creative and subversive ways. So Spooner is, he's born on a farmhouse in a farmhouse in Central Massachusetts out of an old Puritan family. We don't know too much about his childhood other than he's left a little bit of glimpses of autobiographical material from time to time. What happens with Spooner is he comes under the tutelage of a pair of attorneys that try to raise him up through the law, give him instruction basically through the old apprenticeship system, the way that legal training used to be. And this is really the font of his first encounter with the state. The state of Massachusetts at the time had started passing a variety of regulations and licensee schemes of if you wanted to practice law, you basically needed to go through a bunch of regulatory fulfillment as distinct from this older common law tradition of you go in apprentice effectively with a barred attorney. So Spooner is encouraged by his two tutors that he's working in their law office to basically make a test case against the state of Massachusetts very early in his life. And this is when the 1830s when he's active in this campaign to essentially force his way into the legal profession without going through the regulatory hurdles that the state of Massachusetts had put up. So one of his first pamphlets is on this subject and he effectively gets the state to stand down and admit him into the bar, into the courtroom. So that's kind of the very first font of Spooner's activism. And what we see from there is him taking up cause after cause after cause of basically railing against what he sees is injustices in law that are imposed by the government. And these can be some very small things. He thinks that government is the font of the monopoly in society. And his next big crusade, for example, he goes into trying to free the postage system and introduce competition to it. The big one that he's most famous for, which we can get into is working in the abolitionist movement is a radical anti-slavery man and he champions this cause for a good 20 years of his life. And then what we find is after the Civil War after slavery is abolished, he turns to various other economic causes. As a similar theme, he sees a state monopoly of property or state monopoly of money or state monopoly of the legal system as the mechanisms that introduce injustice and appropriation of wealth into society. So he continues for the rest of his life as basically a crusader against these different causes in a very archetypical libertarian way. Now, I want to go back to those two threads you mentioned about the post office and abolitionism. And I want to see if we can tie them together in his biography at all. Because as you know, the post office was an early focal point of abolitionist campaigns of all different sorts and backlash against abolitionism. So there is this, especially the incident in South Carolina in 1835 when the Charleston mob burned all the abolitionist males and that touched off William Leggett's conversion to abolitionism among others after him. There were figures like Barnabas Bates, who was a loco-foco contemporary of Spooner, who was trying to do the same thing by reforming the males. His big cause was to get postage rates down as far as possible and he wanted to do that with competition of many different kinds, reform of the postal system. And his purpose, Barnabas Bates' purpose behind that was to make it easier for abolitionists to use the male and flood the males with their material for a very cheap rate. I wonder, is there any connection that you can find between Spooner's post office or postal activism against that monopoly and tie it to his abolitionism in any way? Yeah, absolutely. So Spooner is famous for leading a crusade against the post office. This is his next major cause he takes up after he's broken into the legal system. And what he does is, in the early 1840s, he founds a company called the American Letter Mail Company. And it's best to think of this as kind of like a 19th century FedEx. And what they did is they set up station offices in all the major cities along the East Coast. So you could go to the American Letter Mail Company in Boston, you purchase a stamp, put it on your package, and there would be a carrier that every week would travel up and down the coast dropping off that package from office to office. So the Boston office would carry to New York, pick up new packages, drop off packages down from New York, move further down to Philadelphia, down to Washington DC, all the way down to Charleston, at least was the idea behind the scheme. And the historical literature on this has focused on the market mechanism behind it. So postage rates are very high through the federal government. And Spooner views this as his entry mechanism. He says, I can do this for cheaper than the federal government does. So I'm going to sell my booklet of stamps cheaper than what the federal government does to deliver mail along the same route. And we'll just do it through this distribution system of stationing offices and have a carrier move between them. And we can out-compete them. And that will force through the competitive mechanisms the federal government to lower its postage rate. So he gets a lot of credit for that story. Sometimes cited as the father of cheap postage in the United States. But the other context to it is the one that you mentioned. So in the 1830s, Andrew Jackson in particular really comes to champion this cause of viewing regulatory mechanisms over the post office as a means of keeping down what they'd call insurrectionary devices. And insurrection really means abolitionist literature, literature that could incite either the slaves to revolt or incite other people in the South to push back against this institution. There are a number of famous incidents. You mentioned one in Charleston where, you know, mobs basically seize and burn and destroy abolitionist pamphleteering that sent through the U.S. postage system to the South. This causes a national emergency of sorts in Congress. There's legislation proposed to suppress the sending of seditious literature through the federal postage system on account that it could foment a slave revolt. So abolitionists had seized onto this tactic as a way to get their message out as you mail newspapers and pamphlets and letters at random basically to any name and identity that would exist in the postage books across the South. And it's kind of like a mass mailing campaign, a political campaign today where throwing as much literature as you can into the mail. That's how you get your message out. Well, this is seen as a threat to the slavery system. So both state and federal officials start to clamp down on this through this ostensible public service of the post office. They start using it as a censorship mechanism. And Spooner absolutely sees this. He mentions it in his pamphlets that there's a threat to free speech at play with the way that the post office operates and censors its material. So not only is he structuring the American Letter Mail Company as an economic competitor to the post office to push rates down, he also sees it as something that's willing to carry literature that's legally suppressed through this government run alternative. So that subversion is automatically at play in his entire scheme. And it gets into a almost a direct foray into his next big cause, which is abolitionism. And, you know, I think historians probably know Spooner best as somebody who said that slavery is necessarily unconstitutional. It's against the spirit and nature of the Constitution because it denies individual sovereignty, which is against the natural law and so it cannot be proper constitutional law. Now, I don't want to dwell too much on that because, like I said, I think that's what people best know Spooner for. But I'm way more interested in his radical, radical politics and social activism. And that, to me, is sort of a forgotten element of the left libertarian past that people barely recognize or remember anymore today. And, you know, the main subject for today is the secret six of John Brown. So let's march up to that point. Talking about his early abolitionism, do we know exactly when he became an abolitionist or was it sort of always part of his Massachusetts upbringing? Yeah, it seems to be there in the Massachusetts upbringing. It comes out of a Massachusetts legal tradition. So this is something if you dig deep into the legal history. So not only is he an anti-slavery man who's famous for claiming that slavery is unconstitutional and sometimes libertarians struggle with his reasoning here. So I guess just to briefly set it out, his entire argument is that slavery is on its face incompatible with something that serves as a foundational document for society, even if that document itself has, he would call them indirect nods to slavery. So the U.S. Constitution refers to slavery at several places, but it never uses the word slave and always refers to three-fifths of other persons or guarded language of that type. And Spooners, he said, is intentional and kind of frames his argument on it, but he also sees slavery as something that's inherently self-voiding of the legal system. So anti-slavery activism in a way is the font of his anarchism. The entire notion that a society could exist and sanction an institution that's in the violation of natural law, such as slavery, would void the legitimacy of that society and void the legitimacy of that government. So hence anarchism becomes a default so long as slavery is permitted to persist. Although he goes draw on an English legal tradition and he cites this thoroughly, so there's the famous Somerset case in Great Britain of 1772, which kind of kickstarts the abolitionist movement around the world, and especially in the British order. And it's a common law decision that rules, so there's a slave from Virginia that's carried into England and by his owner on a trip overseas and some local anti-slavery men basically file a rent of Habeas Corpus to free the slave that's been brought into England and they did so very creatively. They looked on the books and they noticed there's nothing in the English constitutional order or system that establishes slavery as positive law. And the absence of that establishment means that by legal definition, Somerset, the slave is free to go. Well, this tradition filters over into Massachusetts. So there's an Articles of Confederation era, legal decision that comes out of Massachusetts prior to the Constitution taking place that voids slavery in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on almost identical grounds to Somerset. They say, well, we never established those by law. The common law kicks in and the common law upholds a certain type of natural law that voids slavery's existence. That's where slavery enters into Spooner's legal tradition. He draws out of that type of thinking where it goes in the radical direction is he sees it as such a fundamental violation of a natural law order that it's almost a duty of an individual to resist it. It's almost a duty of anyone who values a free society to oppose any and all type of slavery everywhere. So it's a very universal mystic form of anti-slavery activism which gets him into quite a bit of tension with some of the other abolitionists who are arguing a more localized case-by-case approach or arguing a containment policy, which is what we see in the Republican Party when it emerges in the 1850s and 1860s. What is his relationship to the political parties and the many different factions of the period? Say from the, let's go 1840s and 1850s. What are his affiliations? He's an anti-party man through and through. He actually kind of detests voting, although he does have a fairly complex relationship with that. The interesting connection that he has to political parties formally though is his great book on the unconstitutionality of slavery is adopted by his friend Garrett Smith as a political platform. And Garrett Smith runs for several political offices. He's a Liberty Party, a third party candidate for president in 1848, I believe, and then eventually gets himself elected to Congress in the 1850s. And Smith is a similar old school radical New England abolitionist. He's based in New York. Smith is personally wealthy and he uses his family's wealth as basically to be a patron of anti-slavery causes and a patron of anti-slavery thinkers and Spooner's one of those that comes into connection with him. So Smith is influenced by this doctrine by this book. And even though Spooner himself is not saying, well, let's run a national political campaign on the unconstitutionality of slavery, you have someone like Garrett Smith who is taking up that cause and saying, well, let's adapt it into our own political message and make this the platform on which we run. Smith is a better known figure than Spooner in the sense that he's a more visible prominent abolitionist on the political scene of the United States for about 20 years. He's also one of the core members of the secret six and in a way becomes a patron of Frederick Douglass at many points this time. So there's another political dissemination of Spooner himself. Douglass undergoes a conversion in the late 1840s or early 1850s from being a garrisonian, someone who'd used the Constitution as a pact with slavery to being a Spoonerite. And there are several speeches where Douglass says, I've been convinced by the eminent legal thinker, Lysander Spooner, that slavery is indeed incompatible with the Constitution. And that's what we build our political platform on. And by the end of the 1850s, Spooner publishes at least two broadsides advocating that white Northerners gang up together, armed themselves, invade the South, break the slaves' chains free as many as possible, put the chains on the planters and chastise them until they give up slavery. So it's kind of like an ordered slaver bolt that he's advocating. Very much a radical direction that he's moved in, but it's a philosophy of liberty that's underlining both of them. He's actually somewhat similar to another black abolitionist of this era, Henry Highland Garnett, in his prescriptive approach. And Garnett is famous as a free black Northerner who campaigns and crusades against slavery. He gives a speech in the 1840s where he declares, let your motto be resistance, resistance, resistance, resistance. And this is directed to the slaves of the South. And Garnett's message to them is, take your case to your master, plead that by natural right, you are to be free. And if he frees you, he will be fulfilling his moral duty as a human being, his moral recognition. If he doesn't free you, he may strike you down, but if he does, resist that. And let your spilled blood effectively be the tool of resistance. So it's a very pessimistic outlook in the sense that it's welcoming a slave revolt in play, but it's also a realistic outlook in saying that these people are not willing to negotiate to lead their institution voluntarily. And Spooner's very much of that mindset. So in the 1850s, 1858 is the big scheme. He authors a series of pamphlets and broad sides and his intent is to mail them around the country to paper them across the South. One of them actually has an appeal to the non-slave owners, the free whites of the South to join in the scheme. And he tries to use moral swasion to convince everyone that receives this into believing that slavery is wrong. And it's not only a wrong, but it's also their own individual moral duty to stand against that wrong. And in so doing through that intellectual moral instruction that he's provided by his pamphlet to order and instigate a revolt that forcibly unchanged the slaves, that forcibly freeze the slaves off the plantation system and turns the institution around against their masters. But also notice there's always that appeal to human decency to the masters to change their ways. So, you know, we'll shackle you in return as a means of freeing our slaves, but you can come over to the right side and, you know, no harm felt. See the error of your ways and admit it and end this institution. And wife will be good. So it is a little bit utopian in that sense. This is very much a spooner right approach to how to handle the slavery problem. As you can tell, this is a very, very radical solution. And there are other not only Southerners that are horrified by the fact that he's publishing these things. There are other abolitionists that are saying, wait a minute, we wanna achieve our anti-slavery goals through a very incremental, gradualist political approach rather than just upheaval of the entire system. So they view this as kind of undermining their cause because it's too radical. The one person that doesn't though is John Brown. And that's where we get into spooner's complex relationships with that element of actual slave or bolt style abolitionism. Right. And now, when, you know, when I've been doing my reading in the period, I've seen some historians very few, but some have mentioned spooner directly as somebody involved in the secret six to some degree, although it's fairly hazy as to what exactly his role was. But most people leave him out entirely. And I believe if you go to the Wikipedia page on this, he's not mentioned whatsoever. So, you know, it sort of speaks to the general sense of a lack of knowledge about what exactly spooner did, what role he played in this John Brown raid on Harper's Ferry. Could you tell us exactly what were his connections to the secret six? Yeah, so the secret six refers to a group of six financiers and abolitionists from the North who basically provided the financial backing and a little bit of the logistic infrastructure behind John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. And it's an interesting eclectic group. There are two members in particular that are friends with and very closely connected to spooner. So there's the physical connection. And that's Garrett Speth who we mentioned, the wealthy abolitionist. He's one of the financiers of the Brown scheme. And the second is more of a Massachusetts friend of spooner. And this is a minister by the name of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. He's another great classical liberal type. Unitarian minister from New England ran in spooner circle. Spooner served as his attorney on a couple of different cases connected to abolitionism in the early 1850s and kind of runs in that circle. So Smith and Higginson and four others are the main financiers behind the Brown conspiracy, which as we know famously launches a raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry. And is actually quickly suppressed by the U.S. military before it really takes root. Brown has a fairly similar vision to spooner of trying to incite a slave revolt across the South, being a distributor. That's why they target the arsenal is to acquire the arms and then spread them across the countryside. Brown is more radical, if you can imagine this, than spooner in the sense that he's ready to pull the trigger now. Whereas spooner's argument was always we need instruction in the philosophy of a free society to convince people that this revolt is the right thing first. That's why spooner is the intellectual pamphleteer. Brown is seize the arsenal and pass out the guns. And what happens is just through sheer coincidence of history. Spooner's writing these pamphlets in the late 1850s and 1858, he's about to publish one and he shows it to his friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson. He says, I'm about to mail this across the South. It's my new abolitionist campaign. Well, you take a look at it and tell me what you think. And Higginson reads it, knowing what Brown is about to do. And he's kind of like, oh crap, you're about to announce what we're intending to launch here. So Higginson arranges for a meeting with spooner in a coffee house in Boston, I believe it was, where they have a conversation. And we only know of this through a couple of letters that reference the conversation. So he writes a letter to spooner and says, I've read your pamphlet. You need to come with me, effectively. Be at the coffee house at 10 a.m. this morning. I have someone you need to meet. And there's actually an encounter where spooner does meet with John Brown and learns of the conspiracy. He doesn't jump in full-fledged as someone that can really do anything to launch the conspiracy while it takes off. But he's aware of it and has a little bit of reservation because again, he's the intellectual, he thinks we need to lay out the intellectual case for revolt first and foremost before we actually pulled the trigger and engage in the revolt. But John Brown, as we know, proceeds anyway with the secret six support. Spooner learns of this through the secret six. And he helps them out in two ways. The first is being an attorney. He says, if any of you get into trouble with the law, I'll serve as your counsel. File the motions in court and we'll defend you. So he goes back to his legal trade, his main profession as a mechanism to protect the secret six. The second thing he attempts to do is after Brown is captured, after Brown's imprisoned and put on trial and is awaiting his execution. Spooner actually tries to devise a mercenary scheme that's willing to go into the South, sail up the James River into Richmond and basically spring Brown from jail. And if not that, take a Southern official hostage effectively and use that as the trade-off to spring Brown from prison. So he sees an injustice in the arrest of Brown even though he sees Brown's scheme as kind of half-baked and premature. And there are several letters where he actually writes Higginson devising this plan. And one of them says that if we can raise enough money, if we get $1,000 a piece, possibly even up the payment to 2000, we can hire 25 mercenaries that can sneak in in the middle of night in spring Brown from prison. Or if not do that, we can actually force their hand by taking someone hostage effectively. And actually he's on this very elaborate scheme sends it to Higginson, Higginson responds and it's like, wait a minute, no, I don't think this will work because mercenaries are of notorious low ethics. So he doesn't think that the mercenaries will stick to the resolve. Basically the first resistance, they'll just take the money and run or flip sides and reveal it. So Spooner is kind of the hardliner, Higginson by this point, even though the Brown raid has become a pragmatist and urge a Spooner to back down from this plan so they never really launch a mercenary raid to free John Brown from prison. Again, this is by the way, one of the things why if there's any libertarian filmmakers out there, there should be a bystander Spooner biopic is to tell the story of the aborted mercenary raid to free John Brown. So there's one of the elements of the connection that emerges to the secret six, but it's a rearguard action after the conspiracy has also been launched. One final thing on the note is that in 1860, Spooner's pamphlet has been printed. It's been disseminated across the South and other areas of the country, arguing that we still need to proceed in the slave revolt and actually continues to work in printing this thing after the Brown conspiracy. One of the copies of it makes its way into the hands of the governor of Virginia, Henry Wise. When Spooner printed it, it's of course anonymous. He doesn't put his name on the copies. He just wants the plan to be out there. And Governor Wise issues kind of this public decree thinking that he's found the core document that proves the Northern abolitionists are behind the Brown conspiracy and we can bring them to justice for insurrection and treason and sedition. And, but he doesn't know who the author is. So he does this public announcement. And right after the word that gets into the newspaper, Spooner pulls out his pen and writes a letter to Governor Wise and says, Dear Governor, I am the person you're looking for. There is not a court in Massachusetts that would indict me for it. So try your best to come at me. It's basically the message of the letter and nothing ever really comes at it. And then Wise backs down. And then of course the Civil War breaks out so it's all pushed by the wayside. But that's the last hurrah of Spooner's contribution that has a connection to the secret critics. Now you make me think maybe instead of a biographical film we need a fantasy where his escape attempt with John Brown works out and they go to lead that slave revolt after all. That's like a Inglorious Bastards of the Civil War. Exactly, yeah, that would be very cool. All for the history. Now I wonder though, did it ever, or when was it public knowledge that he had something to do with the Brown raid? Because people, I mean, people one of them all hanged for treason. Around 1860 there's enough conversation that you can connect them to it. And again, so the one thing that really keeps attention away from him personally is that there are attempts to bring some of the other secret six, quote unquote, to justice. So there are attempts to prosecute them. Garrett Smith, his friend, basically ends up pleading insanity to develop a legal strategy to resist any attempts to prosecute him. Smith is probably the most prominent of the secret six. He's a former US congressman, had been a national political figure and there is an actual attempt to indict him in serious substantial ways as a collaborator of Brown. A few of the others actually flee the country or flee into other areas of the United States where they cannot be brought under the court system. Higginson kind of bunkers down in Massachusetts where he views the local court system which is very aligned with abolitionism as sufficient to protect him, but Spooner himself is at least one step removed that he doesn't attract enough attention that he is personally imperiled by it other than kind of sticking the middle finger up at Governor Wise, but by then, the country is heading headfirst into the Civil War. It kind of is a mooted point by the time that anyone could do anything about it. Now at this point in the show, we have covered a bit too extensively perhaps. We've covered contemporaries of Spooners like George Fitzhugh and Hinton Helper who are both other extreme examples of radical thinkers from the time and radical doers too in their own way. I wonder if you could take a couple minutes to compare someone like Spooner with folks like Fitzhugh and Hinton Helper. Yeah, yeah. So probably the closest comparison is their style of disseminating their messages. All three of them are pamphleteers. They're incredibly productive writers. They draw various sources of income from selling their pamphlets or putting small journalism pieces out in magazines that they get paid for. And they're relative contemporaries so they live in about the same period. Fitzhugh, of course, being the radical pro-slavery advocate that tries to extend the slave system to the entire society. He sees this as an ordering system for society but his approach is very similar. He writes two book-length pamphlets, Sociology for the South and Cannibals All, that are arguing his case. He disseminates them not only across the South but into the North. So one of the things Fitzhugh does, he's actually famous of the pro-slavery theorists of being the one guy that's willing to actually go to the North and debate the abolitionists. And he does, I believe it's in 1855. He travels up to the North and engages in an exchange with both Gerrit Smith and Wendell Phillips, who's another Boston-based abolitionist, very public exchange. Spooner, in the sense, is kind of like the foil to that. He's the Northern abolitionist. He's very willing to send his material south or foment the slave revolt from the South as we just talked about. So stylistically, there's a bit of similarity. This taps into an older lost art of social action. That we no longer see today, the pamphlet here, or it's more into other things. I guess they do it on blogs and Twitter today or something would be the closest parallel. But you have intellectual figures that aren't necessarily connected to a specific institution like a university or a research outfit, but nonetheless engage in legal theorizing or political theorizing or social theorizing and they take their message to other intellectuals in the form of pamphlets and very elaborate, sophisticated arguments and pamphlets. So both Spooner and Fitz, you do that. Hinton Rowan Helper, very similar to him. He's a Southerner by birth that views slavery as an evil of society. He views it as a wrong that exists around him and he blames it for some of the economic malaise that afflicts the South, the lack of industrialization. But he's also much more wedded to a racial vision of up with for the white man. So Hinton Rowan Helper is effectively what we would call a radical colonizationist. He wants the blacks freed, but then he wants them moved off the continent. And his whole motive for doing this is much more rooted in, he thinks slavery is inflicting a wrong economically on free white Southerners, the poor whites of the South. Then the blacks themselves that are affected by slavery, even though he does believe it's a wrong, it's an injustice to them, but the racial motive is more aligned with his own class, his own group, than with the actual victims of slavery itself. But again, he's a pamphleteer and he's also someone that's willing to take his case across the country. He moves to the North, he publishes his material in the North and then sends itself and causes all sorts of rage and backlash from the slave owners that he's attacking. So the style is very similar between these three figures. What does differ is that Spooner has a more enduring intellectual legacy because he's not just an anti-slavery theorist. He's not just wedded to the issue of slavery. He's actually articulating a full philosophy of human liberty. And slavery just happens to be the big issue of the 20 or so odd year period that he's at the height of his political writing and the height of his political philosophizing. But you can take a Spooner pamphlet on monetary policy from the 1870s or Spooner pamphlet on theories of government from the 1880s. You can find the same themes of human liberty in an appeal to natural rights that you'd find in an 1840 or 1850 pamphlet that you wrote against slavery. So there's a universal dimension that's not present in these other guys unless you want to call pitch you kind of like a forerunner to the alt-right, which I actually think there is some case for through the Carl Ilie and connections he has. But someone like Spooner is a much broader thinker than just slavery alone, even though he's as radical as one can get short of John Brown on the slavery issue. You know, a couple of other things strike me. They all three make explicit class appeals, right? But Spooners is clearly the classical liberal version of class, that the government is the great exploiter and the mass of humanity is its victim. And the other two are not so concerned about it like that. And it's interesting too that both Fitzhugh and Spooner have politics that are terribly unpopular and ineffective. But Hinton Helper and his sort of xenophobic populism is very, very popular politically. But yet both him and Fitzhugh die in obscurity and Spooner, like you said, is the only one who leaves a genuine intellectual remnant. You know, he leaves a circle of followers and admirers around somebody like Benjamin Tucker who just absolutely adore his legacy. And you know, that seems intensely important to me as a way of linking Spooner very directly to the modern libertarian movement that we know. And I wonder if then you could close this off by telling us about your current project working with Lysander Spooner. Right, so as I mentioned, you know, Spooner does not go away after the Civil War. And in fact, other than his anti-slavery treatise unconstitutionality slavery, he's probably best known today for this little pamphlet goes by the name of No Treason or the Constitution of No with Orbridgey. And this is his reflection on what the Civil War has done to the constitutional order. He's perfectly happy that slavery has ended, but he's asking the question at what expense socially did the route we take to ending it, accomplish that end. So he's very concerned that basically the state, the government, which had been the enabler of slavery since time immemorial is now suddenly taking credit for freeing the slaves because just through chance of the way that this war turned out, it became a political convenience for them to do it. So that's his big message. So again, anti-statism is present. He sees the state as a mechanism of social ill. What he does after the war though, in addition to continuing to extend this political philosophy in an individualistic and artistic direction, he also turns to economic matters. And my current project, which is a book we're just releasing this month through American Institute for Economic Research, it's gonna be on our classic reprint series. I located and found a series of pamphlets that Spooner wrote in 1876 through roughly 1877. So about a two year period in the late 19th century where he lays out a very complex monetary theory of basically introducing monetary competition against that great monopolist that's the source of all social bills the United States government. So he sees the federal government as a continuation of this monopolistic tradition. He's been fighting all his life. So 1840 government monopolized the postal system. Since time immemorial, the government had monopolized the labor system by instituting slavery, giving it legal sanction. After the civil war, he says, government monopolizes the production and issuance of currency. And what happens in this pamphlet is he lays out an elaborate theory for what we might consider like 19th century Bitcoin. He wants private actors to be able to issue competitive currencies of their own and basically tie these to better products than what the federal government is able to offer. He sees the federal government as prone to political manipulation of its currency to finance what it wants to do. And the victims are always the holder of the currency. So society at large is deprived of an economic say in its main monetary instrument because the federal government has monopolized it and turned it toward these corrupt and economically susceptible political ends. So it's almost public choice theory or we thought choice theory meets radical monetary competition. And what Spooner did is in 1876 is he began publishing his series of monetary tracks in a magazine that was edited by one of his friends in the Boston area. It's called The New Age. The editor was a fellow intellectual by the name of J. M. L. Babcock ran in the same circles as Spooner and Tucker and ended up putting together a very sophisticated economic doctrine that uses the historical example of Scottish free banking. So anyone that studied the monetary project at Kato you probably know and never heard about Scottish free banking Spooner does a historical analysis of Scottish free banking. It says this is our model for introducing monetary competition into the United States and basically lays out a theory of how it would work and how it would solve some of the credit crises that had caused economic depressions and recessions in his own day, the big one being the panic of 1873. So he wrote this pamphlet. It was known in his day, it's cited in several newspapers but after Spooner died it kind of fell by the wayside and it was believed for many, many years that the only existing copy of this pamphlet belonged to his mentee and protege, Benjamin Tucker. Tucker inherited Spooner's papers from his estate and kept them for many years to try and keep that torch alive but Tucker had a very unfortunate incident right after the term of the 20th century. He owned a bookstore where he kept all of his massive collection of pamphlets in the 19th century legal individualistic anarchism including Spooner's papers in the bookstore went up in flames. There was a fire that destroyed his collection. So it's always been thought that this pamphlet, this great monetary track that we knew and other references have been lost to history. And what it turns out to be is that a few surviving copies of this newspaper he serialized it in for, did manage to make it through the ages although they're in incomplete form. So there's no single library in the United States that has a full run of this newspaper called The New Age. And what I did is I went through and I found all the different library collections that have bits and pieces of The New Age and pieced back together the serialized form. So now we have a 200 page Lysander Spooner treatise on free banking and competitive currency that basically lays out his theory of how that type of a system would work. And we're putting it back into print for the first time since 1876. Phil Magnus is senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research and definitely keep your eyes out for his latest book on Lysander Spooner, Two Treatises on Competitive Currency and Banking. Liberty Chronicles is a project of Libertarianism.org. It is produced by Test Terrible. If you've enjoyed this episode of Liberty Chronicles, please rate, review, and subscribe to us on iTunes. For more information on Liberty Chronicles, visit libertarianism.org.