No Treason
Title page of No. 1.
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| Author | Lysander Spooner |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Anarchism |
| Publisher | Self-published |
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Publication date
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1867-1870 |
| Text | at |
No Treason is a composition of three essays, all written in 1867: No.I, No.II: "The Constitution", and No. VI: "The Constitution of no Authority". Any essays between No. 2 and No.6 were never published under the authorship of Lysander Spooner. Lawyer by training, strong abolitionist, radical thinker, and anarchist, Spooner wrote these specific pamphlets in order to express his discontent with the state and its driving power, 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". 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 United States government also saw natural law to be a good basis for the creation of the Constitution. The preamble itself states the liberties that all American citizens have under the protection of the United States government. 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". This meant that the rights listed under the Constitution were granted to "the people" who Spooner thought to be everyone that was born in the United States regardless of color or gender.
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" by many abolitionists of his time. His main argument fell under the idea that slavery was not mentioned in the Constitution:
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