The missing signature

Lysander Spooner is the clerk of this page. No Treason, the sixth and last of the series, is the pamphlet. I am not going to drown him in my mood. The argument is his, and it is a contract argument. If the dead neither could nor tried to bind the living, the question he leaves is whether the living have bound themselves. He allows two supposed proofs and takes them apart: voting, and paying taxes.

Voting, on his 1870 count, cannot carry a people. In the first decades, property qualifications likely admitted a tenth, a fifteenth, perhaps a twentieth of the whole population. By the year of the pamphlet, not more than a sixth were permitted to vote, and of that sixth probably not more than two-thirds usually did. Many never vote. Many vote once in a long while. A vote, even if it were consent, pledges a man only for the term of the officer he chose. And for a large share of those who do vote, he says the act is necessity, not choice. Taxes, on his account, are taken under threat. A payment made because a man with a gun will otherwise take the house is not the signature on a social contract. It is the thing the contract was supposed to forbid.

Treason, in his title, is the breach of a prior faith. If there was no faith, there is no treason. The oaths are where he makes that concrete. An oath to support the Constitution, on general principles of law and reason, is of no obligation, because it is given to nobody. There is no privity, his word for mutual recognition, consent, and agreement, between the man who swears and any other persons. An oath taken before a crowd you have no contract with pledges your faith to the winds. It would not change the case if some number of them had secretly, by ballot, designated you their agent. You cannot pledge faith to a secret you were not allowed to see. I think that is a serious sentence. It does not require me to sneer at people who love the country. It requires me to notice the difference between a love and a signature.

The last movement is the debt, and I read it as a theory of credit and force. Debts contracted in the name of "the United States," he argues, bind nobody, because there is not the kind of evidence that would prove a private debt. No open contract ever united them as a firm authorized to borrow. The wild lands the band pretends to own are, on his principles, no more ownable for the payment of those debts than the oceans. The principals, a band that never signed an open membership, borrowed in the dark from lenders who could not identify them either. The money is then collected from people who never sat in the room. That is a power play. And power plays of that size do not survive as a one-night conspiracy of strangers. They survive as houses. Credit, law, land, and office run in families. Spooner is talking about a creditor class and a political band. I am willing to say those bands have blood in them. I am not willing to pretend a pamphlet from 1870 is a modern census, or that every person who shares a letterhead sat in the room. Particular houses. Particular gifts. Particular debts. That is the sharper reading, and it is the one the accidental theory cannot use.

What is true in Europe, he writes, is substantially true here, with one difference he calls immaterial: there is no permanent crowned head who claims to rule by the grace of God. There are men who call themselves presidents, senators, and representatives, and who can show no credentials that they are agents of all the people. When their exactions meet resistance, they borrow in order to shoot the people they call their constituents, and they expect to repay the loans from later collection after terror has done its work. His reading of the Civil War money is a market reading. Lenders of blood-money, on his account, had been the accomplices of the slave-holders for a pecuniary consideration. I keep that as his market reading. Inheritance and interest are both in it. A racial cartoon is a blurrier tool than the ledger he is actually pointing at, and I am not going to flinch off the ledger because the cartoon exists.

That is the missing-signature brief. The Red Dead enigma is what the brief looks like when it is still walking around in a county. Anti-federalism named the machine early and lost the printing press. Spooner asked whether the paper was a contract at all. A father and a son in Springfield are not the argument. They are two of the people who still feel the weather the argument describes, and they are a line, which is its own kind of evidence that temperament outlives a pamphlet. I do not have the last word on Spooner. I have the pamphlet, and I think the signature is still missing.