Brown, Spooner, and Garrison on liberty and the right to resist

As a follow up on yesterday’s post here are a couple of relevant articles from the Journal of Libertarian Studies:

• “Ambivalence, Ambiguity, and Contradiction: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Nonviolence” by Richard O. Curry and Lawrence B. Goodheart
• “The Radical Libertarian Tradition in Antislavery Thought” by Carl Watner

John Brown seems to have had some ideas in common with Lysander Spooner, the radical libertarian lawyer and theorist. The argument for violent action against slaveholders was premised on the slaves’ inalienable right of liberty and self-defense. According to Spooner and Brown, sympathizers with the anti-slavery cause were entirely justified in coming to the aid of slaves in forcibly resisting their enslavement.

Pacifists like Garrison, on the other hand, saw slavery as part of the broader problem of the use of coercion over one’s fellow man. They were opposed to all use of force, and so would not consent to the use of force even to free slaves. However, Garrison himself seems to have waffled, basically saying that it was ok for those who were not convinced of the truth of nonviolence to use force in the service of a just cause. Ultimately he came to support the war effort and even conscription (though, he favored exemptions for conscientious objectors). It was only a small minority, such as Garrison’s sons Francis and Wendell Phillips, and Adin Ballou who clung to the pacifist position to the bitter end.

What’s interesting is that proponents of violence like Spooner and Brown and pacifists like Garrison and Ballou started from the same natural rights individualist premise that no man had the right to rule over another without his consent and yet reached startlingly different practical conclusions.