Lysander Spooner, One of the Old Guard of Abolition Heroes, Dies in His Eightieth Year After a Fortnight's Illness, Obituary, Boston Daily Globe, May 18, 1887.

Biography from The Collected Works of Lysander Spooner, by Charles Shively, © 1971 by M&S Press.

Click on the Chapter headings for the full text of each chapter.

Chapter I
Lysander Spooner came form the flinty farmland of rural New England. He was born January 19, 1808, on his father's farm near Athol, Massachusetts, the second child and second son in a family of six sons and three daughters...

Chapter II
America boomed during the 1830's as canals opened vast new areas for settlement. Utica, Rochester, and Buffalo led the expansion along the Erie Canal which, when finished in 1825, connected Lake Erie with the Atlantic Ocean...

Chapter III
How did it happen, Lysander Spooner wondered, that the country hd been so financially exuberant in 1836, and alost bankrupt by 1840?...

Chapter IV
Sorely dissapointed by his Ohio Prospects, Lysander Spooner sought out another avenue to wealth and freedom in the heart of America's expansive business world...

Chapter V
After his post office venture failed, Lysander Spooner returned to the family farm in Athol, where he took up the question of slavery...

Chapter VI
Before all else, Lysander Spooner remained a lawyer...

Chapter VII
Having presented ideas on banking, slavery, and the law, Spooner still remiained poor, continuously threatened with poverty...

Chapter VIII
With the end of the Civil War, America passed over a great watershed...

Chapter IX
In 1881, Daniel McFarland, Spooner's friend, wrote how "painfully sorrowful and maddening, Lysander, to reflect that you, who have worked sohard and given so much valuable thought to the world, have bee kept in poverty..."

Chapter X
Through his youth and old age Lysander Spooner followed the voice of freedom...