“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
You can’t comply your way out of tyranny. This principle – central to the American Revolution – has been almost totally forgotten and ignored. And it was also forcefully repeated and reiterated a century later by Lysander Spooner. The following are the top...
Refuse to comply. That’s exactly what the people did to nullify the Stamp Act, which took effect on November 1, 1765. We’ve all heard about the fiery protests, the bold resistance, hanging in effigy of stamp distributors and the like, but there was so much more to...
On his 29th birthday – May 29, 1765 – Patrick Henry helped spark the American Revolution. His Virginia Resolves against the Stamp Act not only dared to defy British rule, but also established a number of bedrock principles that would become cornerstones of...
On May 21, 1766, the Sons of Liberty erected a liberty pole in the commons of New York City, celebrating the repeal of the Stamp Act. Although little is ever spoken of the liberty pole today, at the time of the American War for Independence and decades prior, they...
“The right of the people, to resist an unconstitutional law, is absolute and unqualified, from the moment the law is enacted.” Lysander Spooner penned this line in 1850, but he was tapping into a fundamental principle that evolved during the Revolution –...