The great nineteenth-century Massachusetts libertarian abolitionist Lysander Spooner despised Lincoln and his administration with a red hot passion. Here’s one example of what he thought of the Dishonest Abe regime, from The Lysander Spooner Reader (p. 49):
“The principle, on which the war was waged by the North, was simply this: That men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a government that they do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and criminals.”
“No principle, that is possible to be named, can be more self-evidently false than this; or more self-evidently fatal to all political freedom. Yet it triumphed in the field, and is now assumed to be established. If it really be established, the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the war, has been greatly increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave.”
2:38 pm on February 23, 2012
