Early life Spooner was born on a farm in
Athol, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1808. Spooner's parents were Asa and Dolly Spooner. One of his ancestors, William Spooner, arrived in
Plymouth in 1637. Lysander was the second of nine children. His father was a
deist and it has been speculated that he purposely named his two older sons
Leander and
Lysander after Greek mythological and
Spartan heroes, respectively.
Legal career Spooner's activism began with his career as a lawyer, which itself violated
Massachusetts law. Spooner had studied law under the prominent lawyers, politicians and abolitionists
John Davis, later
Governor of Massachusetts and Senator; and
Charles Allen, state senator and Representative from the
Free Soil Party. However, he never attended college. According to the laws of the state, college graduates were required to study with an attorney for three years, while non-graduates like Lysander would be required to do so for five years. With the encouragement from his legal mentors, Spooner set up his practice in
Worcester, Massachusetts after only three years, defying the courts. He regarded the three-year privilege for college graduates as a state-sponsored discrimination against the poor (who could not afford to go to college), and viewed it as providing a monopoly income to those who met the requirements. He argued that "no one has yet ever dared advocate, in direct terms, so monstrous a principle as that the rich ought to be protected by law from the competition of the poor". In 1836, the legislature abolished the restriction. He opposed all
licensing requirements for lawyers. After a disappointing legal career and a failed career in real estate
speculation in
Ohio, Spooner returned to his father's farm in 1840.
American Letter Mail Company Being an advocate of
self-employment and opponent of government regulation of business, in 1844 Spooner started the
American Letter Mail Company, which competed with the
United States Post Office, whose rates were very high. It had offices in various cities, including
Baltimore,
Philadelphia and New York City. Stamps could be purchased and then attached to letters, which could be brought to any of its offices. From here, agents were dispatched who traveled on railroads and steamboats and carried the letters in handbags. Letters were transferred to messengers in the cities along the routes, who then delivered the letters to the addressees. This was a challenge to the Post Office's
legal monopoly. As he had done when challenging the rules of the
Massachusetts Bar Association, Spooner published a
pamphlet titled "The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress Prohibiting Private Mails". Although Spooner had finally found commercial success with his mail company, legal challenges by the government eventually exhausted his financial resources. A law enacted in 1851 that strengthened the federal government's monopoly finally put him out of business. The legacy of Spooner's challenge to the postal service was the reduction in letter postage from 5¢ to 3¢, in response to the competition his company provided.
Abolitionism Spooner attained his highest profile as a figure in the
abolitionist movement. His book
The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, published in 1845, contributed to a controversy among abolitionists over whether the
Constitution supported the institution of
slavery. The disunionist faction led by
William Lloyd Garrison and
Wendell Phillips argued that the Constitution legally recognized and enforced the oppression of slaves as in the provisions for the capture of fugitive slaves in
Article IV, Section 2. Spooner challenged the claim that the text of the Constitution permitted slavery. He used a complex system of legal and natural law arguments to show that the Constitutional clauses usually interpreted as adopting or at least accepting implicitly the practice of slavery did not in fact support it, despite the open tolerance of human servitude under the original Constitution of 1789; even though those interpretations would only be superseded by the amendments to the Constitution passed after the
American Civil War, viz. Amendments XIII–XV, prohibiting the states from enabling or enforcing slavery. From the publication of this book until 1861, when the Civil War overtook society, Spooner actively campaigned against slavery. Spooner viewed the
Northern states as trying to deny the
Southerners through military force.
Later life and death in Boston, Massachusetts. Spooner argued that "almost all fortunes are made out of the capital and labour of other men than those who realize them. Indeed, large fortunes could rarely be made at all by one individual, except by his sponging capital and labor from others. And the usury laws are the means by which he does it." Spooner defended the
Millerites, who stopped working because they believed the world would soon end and were arrested for
vagrancy. Spooner spent much time in the
Boston Athenæum. He died on May 14, 1887, at the age of 79 in his nearby residence at 109 Myrtle Street, Boston. He never married and had no children. ==Political views==