 This is Classics of Liberty from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute, narrated by Caleb Brown. Today's classic is To the Non-Slaveholders of the South by Lysander Spooner. Lysander Spooner lived during a period of world history in which daily life for hundreds of millions around the globe profoundly changed. In the United States, perhaps the most significant and transformative single change during the whole of the century was the abolition of private slaveholding. A penetrating and challenging legal thinker, Spooner left important marks on the anti-slavery debate and the long history of abolitionist activism before the Civil War. Most significantly, he argued in the unconstitutionality of slavery that the Constitution should and must be interpreted as an anti-slavery document, most especially because slavery contradicted natural law and even the Constitution was bounded by the natural law. The supreme law of the land, therefore, is not permitted to contradict the natural rights of individuals, including those condemned to slavery by unjust, unnatural legislation. In response to the Dred Scott decision of 1857, Spooner released this self-published broadside we present today. Addressed to the non-slaveholders of the South, Spooner's abolition plan called for what can only be properly described as abolitionist filibustering throughout the South to free the slave and inspire rebellion. Spooner argues that it is the moral duty of Americans everywhere, but particularly non-slaveholders in the South, to assist the slave in seizing his person and property from the slaveholders great and small, perhaps most significantly for the history of liberal thought. Spooner accepts the time-honored Lockean premise that slavery indeed represented a state of war between slave and slave master. In Spooner's eyes, anyone who would be combatants in such a war between individuals or institutional groups of individuals are entirely justified in killing their enemies if necessary. Rather than endorse the wholesale slaughter of slaveholders, Spooner instead advises anti-slavery filibusters to assist the slave in turning master's whips against themselves until sufficient chastisement shall have taken place to ensure compliance with respect for former slaves' rights. To the non-slaveholders of the South by Lysander Spooner, 1858. We present to you herewith a plan for the abolition of slavery and solicit your aid to carry it into execution. Your numbers combined with those of the slaves will give you all power. You have but to use it, and the work is done. The following self-evident principles of justice and humanity will serve as guides to the measures proper to be adopted. These principles are 1. That the slaves have a natural right to their liberty. 2. That they have a natural right to compensation so far as the property of the slaveholders and their abetters can compensate them for the wrongs they have suffered. 3. That so long as the governments under which they live refuse to give them liberty or compensation, they have the right to take it by stratagem or force. 4. That it is the duty of all who can to assist them in such an enterprise. In rendering this assistance, you will naturally adopt these measures. 1. To ignore and spurn the authority of all the corrupt and tyrannical political institutions which the slaveholders have established for the security of their crimes. 2. Soon as may be to take the political power of your states into your own hands and establish governments that shall punish slaveholding as a crime, and also give to the slaves civil actions for damages for the wrongs that have already been committed against them. 3. Until such new governments shall be instituted to recognize the slaves as free men and as being the rightful owners of the property which is now held by their masters but which would pass to them if justice were done. 4. To justify and assist them in every effort to acquire their liberty and obtain possession of such property by stratagem or force. 5. To hire them as laborers, pay them their wages and defend them meanwhile against their tyrants. 6. To sell them firearms and teach them the use of them. 7. To trade with them, buying the property they may have taken from their oppressors and paying them for it. 8. To encourage and assist them to take possession of the land they cultivate and the crops they produce and appropriate them to their own use. 9. And in every way possible to recognize them as being now the rightful owners of the property which justice, if administered, would give them in compensation for the injuries they have received. 4. To form vigilance committees or leagues of freedom in every neighborhood or township whose duty it shall be to stand in the stead of the government and do that justice for the slaves which government refuses to do and especially to arrest, try and chastise with their own whips all slaveholders who shall beat their slaves or restrain them of their liberty and compel them to give deeds of emancipation and conveyances of their property to their slaves. 5. To treat and teach the Negroes to treat all active abetters of the slaveholders as you and they treat the slaveholders themselves both in person and property. Perhaps some say that this taking of property by the slaves would be stealing and should not be encouraged. The answer is that it would not be stealing, it would be simply taking justice into their own hands and redressing their own wrongs. The state of slavery is a state of war. In this case it is a just war on the part of the Negroes, a war for liberty and the recompense of injuries. And necessity justifies them in carrying it on by the only means their oppressors have left to them. In war the plunder of enemies is as legitimate as the killing of them and stratagem is as legitimate as open force. The right of the slaves therefore in this war to take property is as clear as their right to take life and their right to do it secretly is as clear as their right to do it openly. And as this will probably be their most effective mode of operation for the present, they ought to be taught, encouraged and assisted to do it to the utmost so long as they are unable to meet their enemies in the open field. And to call this taking of property stealing is as false and unjust as it would be to call the taking of life in just war murder. It is only those who have a false and superstitious reverence for the authority of governments and have contracted the habit of thinking that the most tyrannical and iniquitous laws have the power to make that right which is naturally wrong or that wrong which is naturally right, who will have any doubt as to the right of the slaves and those who would assist them to make war to all possible extent upon the property of the slaveholders and their abetters. We are unwilling to take the responsibility of advising any general insurrection or any taking of life until we of the north go down to take part in it in such numbers as to ensure a certain and easy victory. We therefore advise that for the present, operations be confined to the seizure of property and the chastisement of individual slaveholders and their accomplices. And that these things be done only so far as they can be done without too great danger to the actors. We specially advise the flogging of individual slaveholders. This is a case where the medical principle that like cures like will certainly succeed. Give the slaveholders then a taste of their own whips, spare their lives, but not their backs. The arrogance they have acquired by the use of the lash upon others will soon be taken out on them when the same scourge shall be applied to themselves. A band of ten or twenty determined negroes, well armed, having their rendezvous in the forests, coming out upon the plantations by day or night, seizing individual slaveholders, stripping them and flogging them soundly in the presence of their own slaves would soon abolish slavery over a large district. These bands could also do a good work by kidnapping individual slaveholders, taking them into the forest and holding them as hostages for the good behavior of the whites remaining on the plantations, compelling them also to execute deeds of emancipation and conveyances of their property to their slaves. These contracts could probably never afterward be successfully disallowed on the ground of duress, especially after new governments favorable to liberty should be established, in as much as contracts would be nothing more than justice, and men may rightfully be coerced to do justice. Such contracts would be intrinsically as valid as the treaties by which conquered nations make satisfaction for the injustice which caused the war. The more bold and resolute slaves should be encouraged to form themselves into bands, build forts in the forests, and there collect arms, stores, horses, everything that will enable them to sustain themselves and carry on their warfare upon the slaveholders. Another important measure on the part of the slaves will be to disarm their masters so far as that is practicable by seizing and concealing their weapons whenever opportunity offers. They should also kill all slave hunting dogs and the owners too if that should prove necessary. Whenever the slaves on a plantation are not powerful or courageous enough to resist, they should be encouraged to desert in a body temporarily, especially at harvest time so as to cause the crops to perish for want of hands to gather them. Many other ways will suggest themselves to you and to the slaves by which the slaveholders can be annoyed and injured without causing any general outbreak or shedding of blood. Our plan then is one, to make war openly or secretly as circumstances may dictate upon the property of the slaveholders and their rebetters, not for its destruction, if that can easily be avoided, but to convert it to the use of the slaves. If it cannot be thus converted, then we advise its destruction. Teach the slaves to burn their masters buildings, to kill their cattle and horses, to conceal or destroy farming utensils, to abandon labor in seed time and harvest and let crops perish. Make slavery unprofitable in this way if it can be done in no other. Two, to make slaveholders objects of derision and contempt by flogging them whenever they shall be guilty of flogging their slaves. Three, to risk no general insurrection until we of the north go to your assistance or you are sure of success without our aid. Four, to cultivate the friendship and confidence of the slaves, to consult with them as to their rights and interests and the means of promoting them, to show your interest in their welfare and your readiness to assist them. Let them know that they have your sympathy and it will give them courage, self-respect and ambition and make men of them. Infinitely better men to live by as neighbors and friends than the indolent, arrogant, selfish, heartless, domineering robbers and tyrants who now keep both yourselves and the slaves in subjection and look with contempt upon all who live by honest labor. Five, to change your political institutions soon as possible and in the meantime give never a vote to a slaveholder. Pay no taxes to their government if you can either resist or evade them. As witnesses and jurors give no testimony and no verdicts in support of any slaveholding claims. Perform no military, patrol or police service, mob slaveholding courts, jails and sheriffs. Do nothing in short for sustaining slavery but everything you safely and rightfully can publicly and privately for its overthrow. While rascals of the south, willing tools of the slaveholders, you who drive slaves to their labor, hunt them with dogs and flog them for pay without asking any questions, we have a word specially for you. You are one of the main pillars of the slave system. You stand ready to do all that vile and inhuman work which must be done by somebody but which the more decent slaveholders themselves will not do. Yet we have heard one good report even of you. It is that you have no such prejudices against color nor against liberty as that you would not as willingly earn money by helping a slave to Canada as by catching a fugitive and returning him to his master. If you are thus indifferent as to whom you serve, we advise you henceforth to serve the slaves instead of their masters. Turn about and help the robbed to rob their robbers. The former can afford to pay you better than the latter. Help them to get possession of the property which is rightfully their due and they can afford to give you liberal commissions. Help them flog individual slaveholders and they can afford to pay you ten times as much as you ever received for flogging slaves. Help them to kidnap the slaveholders and they can afford to pay you more than you now get for catching fugitive slaves. Be true to the slaves and we hope they will pay you well for your services. Be false to them and we hope they will kill you. Lawyers of the South, you can, if you will, exert a potent influence for good in this matter. If in the true spirit of law as a science you shall see a man in the most crushed of human beings and recognize his right to obtain justice by such means as may be in his power, you shall take the side of the oppressed in this controversy and teach them to trample on their tyrants and vindicate their manhood. If you do this and then aid in establishing new institutions based upon liberty, equality and right, you will have the satisfaction of doing your part towards bringing into life a great, free and happy people where now all is crime, tyranny, degradation and death. If on the contrary you shall take the side of the slaveholders and continue to be as professionally under slave institutions, you must forever be the degraded, pedophogging pimps, hirelings and tools of a few soulless robbers of their species, denying continually the authority of justice and the rights of humanity. If you shall do this, we need not attempt to tell you what your true rank will be in the scale of lawyers, statesmen, patriots or men. Merchants of the South, we hope you will deliberately consider this matter and make up your minds whether the slaves have the right to take the property of their masters in compensation for the injuries they have suffered. If you decide that they have that right, we hope you will act accordingly and will not hesitate to buy of them cotton or any other property which they may have taken from their masters and give them in exchange weapons or any other articles they may need. If you will but do this, you will soon put an end to slavery. Non-slaveholders generally of the South. If it is right for the slaves to take the property of their masters to compensate their wrongs, it is right for you to help them. Your numbers, compared with those of the slaveholders, are as five or six to one. It will be perfectly easy for you by combining with the slaves to put them in possession of the plantations on which they labor and of all the property upon them. They could afford to pay you well for doing them such a service. They could afford to let you share with them in the division of the property taken. We hope you will adopt this measure. It will not only be right in itself, it will be the noblest act of your lives, provided you do not take too large a share to yourselves and provided also that you afterwards faithfully protect the slaves in their liberty and the property assigned to them. Finally, we say to all, correspond with us of the North. Let each person who receives or sees one of these sheets send his letters to the one who sent it, with liberty to publish them in northern papers. Finally, we say to all, correspond with us of the North. Let each person who receives or sees one of these sheets send his letters to the one who sent it, with liberty to publish them in the northern papers. This correspondence, we are confident, will be a more interesting literature than the South has ever furnished and will enlist the feelings of Northern people to such a degree that we shall be induced to go, in large numbers, to your assistance whenever you shall need us. That was To the Non-Slaveholders of the South by Lysenver Spooner. Find more Classics of Liberty at libertarianism.org.