Abolitionist Hypocrisies
Lysander Spooner is well known as an abolitionist who argued that slavery was a violation of natural law. In his 1858 pamphlet, “A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery, and To the Non-Slaveholders of the South,” Spooner set out what he considered to be the relevant “principles of justice and humanity,” arguing that “so long as the governments, under which they live, refuse to give them liberty or compensation, [slaves] have the right to take it by stratagem or force.” Spooner argued that property owned by slave masters belonged, in justice, to the slaves. He called on his readers to help the slaves in the South to revolt and to seize their masters’ property by force:
…the rightful owners of the property, which is now held by their masters, but which would pass to them, if justice were done; to justify and assist them in every effort to acquire their liberty, and obtain possession of such property, by stratagem or force.
Spooner did not see slavery as a legal institution. His own interpretation of the United States Constitution was that the Constitution did not permit slavery. He therefore saw the institution of slavery as not only immoral and unjust, in the ethical sense, but also as illegal and unconstitutional. This is an important distinction. As readers of Murray Rothbard’s Ethics of Liberty will be aware, Rothbard did not purport to set out the principles that are contained in the United States Constitution or in any positive (formal) legal instruments, but rather to set out moral principles of justice. By contrast, Spooner was a lawyer who had published a book called The Unconstitutionality of Slavery. Spooner’s reading of the Constitution goes a long way in explaining why he encouraged slaves in the South to rise up and seize their masters’ property. He explained that he did not see this as theft, but rather he saw it as merely vindication of what he called “a natural right to compensation (so far as the property of the Slaveholders and their abettors can compensate them) for the wrongs they have suffered” (emphasis added). He was very much in favor of slaves in the South “taking justice into their own hands” as compensation for their suffering:
Perhaps some may 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.
Spooner’s argument was not simply that anyone who works on a resource becomes its owner, nor was he simply arguing that slaves should seize their masters’ property as compensation for their labor. Spooner did not show any interest in whether slaves were ever compensated for their labor, as might perhaps be expected if his concern was merely that slave labor was not directly paid. Historians have noted cases where slaves kept part of their crop and even cases where slaves worked for wages or were paid stipends. But this is not the issue Spooner had in mind when he talked of seizing the property of slave owners. The compensation Spooner had in mind was not for “unpaid labor” but for the unjust and (as he saw it) unconstitutional holding of men in bondage. Spooner regarded slavery as a war crime, and to him a slave revolt amounted to a just war. As he explained:
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.
Murray Rothbard also thought that seizing the plantations of slave owners and giving them to the slaves would have been an appropriate punishment for the crime of slavery. Thus, the abolitionist call for seizure of the plantations was not simply an application of Lockean homesteading principles of first acquisition or just acquisition of title, as many libertarians tend to assume. It was based on the notion of compensation and punishment for the injustice or crime of slavery. Spooner went even further, arguing for violence and killing of slave owners because, after all, as far as he could tell from the safety of his home in Massachusetts, noth
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