Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists Against Slavery

Peter Wirzbicki

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press 2021

Fighting for the Higher Law

Black and White Transcendentalists Against Slavery

Peter Wirzbicki

In the series America in the Nineteenth Century

https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812297898

Overview
Contents

About this book

In Fighting for the Higher Law, Peter Wirzbicki explores how important black abolitionists joined famous Transcendentalists to create a political philosophy that fired the radical struggle against American slavery.

In Fighting for the Higher Law, Peter Wirzbicki explores how important black abolitionists joined famous Transcendentalists to create a political philosophy that fired the radical struggle against American slavery.

In the cauldron of the antislavery movement, antislavery activists, such as William C. Nell, Thomas Sidney, and Charlotte Forten, and Transcendentalist intellectuals, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, developed a "Higher Law" ethos, a unique set of romantic political sensibilities—marked by moral enthusiasms, democratic idealism, and a vision of the self that could judge political questions from "higher" standards of morality and reason. The Transcendentalism that emerges here is not simply the dreamy philosophy of privileged white New Englanders, but a more populist movement, one that encouraged an uncompromising form of politics among a wide range of Northerners, black as well as white, working-class as well as wealthy. Invented to fight slavery, it would influence later labor, feminist, civil rights, and environmentalist activism.

African American thinkers and activists have long engaged with American Transcendentalist ideas about "double consciousness," nonconformity, and civil disobedience. When thinkers like Martin Luther King, Jr., or W. E. B. Du Bois invoked Transcendentalist ideas, they were putting to use an intellectual movement that black radicals had participated in since the 1830s.

Author / Editor information

Peter Wirzbicki is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University.

Reviews

"Peter Wirzbicki brilliantly rescues Transcendental abolitionists from the caricatures and myths that surround their history. Perhaps the most original contribution he makes is to foreground the forgotten intellectual and political contributions of African American Transcendentalists. This astute book will forever change the way we think about Transcendentalism and foreground its antislavery contributions to the American radical democratic imagination."

"In these pages, with an eloquence worthy of William Cooper Nell and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Peter Wirzbicki urges us to hear the hidden harmonies between abolitionist and Transcendentalist thought, while never failing to notice the dissonances, too. This is an inspiring book that ranges as widely as the thinkers it follows. It demonstrates anew why intellectuals and the life of the mind mattered in the struggle to end slavery."

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Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 1 Transcendentalism in Black and White Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	23
Chapter 2 The Latest Forms of Infidelity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	62
Chapter 3 The Cotton Economy and the Rise of Universal Reformers Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	102
Chapter 4 Fugitive Slaves and the Many Origins of Civil Disobedience Theory Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	142
Chapter 5 Heroism, Violence, and Race Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	178
Chapter 6 A War of Ideas Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	219
Epilogue Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	258
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	265
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	317
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	323

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 384
Keywords: 19th century New England; abolition; African American history studies; Charles Lenox Remond; civil disobedience; fugitive slaves; Henry David Thoreau; Margaret Fuller; Maria Stewart; Ralph Waldo Emerson; self-reliance; slavery; social cultural political history; transcendentalism; W. E. B. Du Bois; Willam C. Nell

eBook

Published: March 26, 2021
ISBN: 9780812297898