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No Treason
''No Treason'' is a composition of three essays: No.1 (1867), No.2: The Constitution (1867), and No. 6: The Constitution of no Authority (1867) (no more versions were made between No. 2 and No.6) 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”.〔Spooner, Lysander. The Lysander Spooner Reader. San Francisco, CA: Fox & Wilkes, 1992. pp9〕 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”.〔Spooner, Lysander. The Lysander Spooner Reader. San Francisco, CA: Fox & Wilkes, 1992. pp14〕 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”〔Knowles, Helen. "The Constitution and Slavery: A Special Relationship." Slavery & Abolition 28.3 (2007): 309-28. pp313〕 by many abolitionists of his time. His main argument fell under the idea that slavery was not mentioned in the Constitution:
“The constitution itself contains no designation, description, or necessary admission of the existence of such a thing as slavery, servitude, or the right of property in man. We are obliged to go out of the instrument and grope among the records of oppression, lawlessness and crime--records unmentioned, and of course unsanctioned by the constitution—to find the thing, to which it is said that the words of the constitution apply. And when we have found this thing, which the constitution dare not name, we find that the constitution has sanctioned it (if at all) only by enigmatical words, by unnecessary implication and inference, by innuendo and double entendre, and under a name that entirely fails of describing the thing”
"Although Spooner’s argument on the unconstitutionality of slavery had no legal basis, his concept of natural law contained the germs of anarchistic theory of government",〔Alexander, John. "The Ideas of Lysander Spooner." The New England Quarterly 23.2 (1950): 200-17. pp208〕 which would eventually lead to the creation of No Treason, probably his most anarchistic work as well as influential to anarchists of his time and of present day, and while each essay claims voidance of the Constitution, each emphasizes on specific aspects.
== ''No Treason No. 1'' ==
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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