Lysander Spooner was the foremost legal theorist of the 19th-century American individualist anarchist movement. His 1882 open letter to Senator Bayard is fairly well-known among Spooner fans; but an 1886 sequel, A Second Letter to Thomas F. Bayard, which originally appeared in Benjamin Tucker’s anarchist journal Liberty, is much more obscure; it was omitted (like most of Spooner’s periodical work) from the Collected Works, and indeed has never (so far as I can determine) been reprinted anywhere else. Now at last I am happy to announce that it is available in the Molinari Institute online library.
I can’t claim that this is one of Spooner’s more important works. Apart from a more than usually irascible tone, it contains little that isn’t already covered in the first letter, or still more fully in other works such as No Treason or Natural Law or the Letter to Grover Cleveland. But hey, it’s Spooner.
And speaking of material from Tucker’s Liberty, hurray for Shawn Wilbur! He’s been scanning issues of Liberty (including the one containing this Spooner piece) and placing the PDFs online. Check out what he’s got so far.
