Fighting for the Higher Law

Black and White Transcendentalists Against Slavery

Peter Wirzbicki

• Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780812297898
• Thema: Histoire
• Thema: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

How important black abolitionists joined famous Transcendentalists to create a political philosophy to fight 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.

CHAPTER 1

Transcendentalism in Black and White

Every year, on the Fourth of July, the young black men of the Hamilton Lyceum in New York City met for their most important lecture of the year. The tradition had begun several years earlier when a group of teenagers, including the future abolitionist leaders Alexander Crummell and Henry Highland Garnet, “resolved, that while slavery existed we would not celebrate the Fourth of July.” Instead of patriotic speeches or parades, the day “was devoted to planning schemes for the freeing and upbuilding of our race,” Crummell remembered.¹ Since the mid-1830s, Crummell and Garnet had helped to create a series of black intellectual organizations in New York that organized lectures, created libraries, and discussed everything from British poetry to the Amistad captives. And so, on Independence Day 1844, as the fireworks and drunken revelry of the white celebration echoed outside, Crummell rose to deliver the yearly address to the somber crowd, titled “Necessities and Advantages of Education Considered in Relation to Colored Men.”

Though only twenty-five at the time, Crummell was already a leader among the burgeoning community of young black intellectuals in Manhattan. He had been raised among abolitionist activists and had received the best education available in the segregated North. After brief stints at schools in New Hampshire and Upstate New York, he had returned to New York City and attempted to enter the clergy. After a struggle with the white-dominated hierarchy, he had finally been ordained an Episcopalian priest. Later, he would become well known as a controversial advocate of Liberian emigration, of the “talented tenth” ideal of black leadership, and, half a century later, as a mentor to a young W. E. B. Du Bois. By the time Du Bois met him, Crummell was a white-haired patriarch—a man of “simple dignity and an unmistakable air of good breeding” leading the African Episcopal Church. Describing Crummell in the 1840s, Du Bois imagined a tall and thin man with a distant self-confidence, holding to a spiritual striving that could withstand even the bigotry of the antebellum church and a sincere if sometimes overly serious demeanor: “he wrote his sermons carefully; he intoned his prayers with a soft, earnest voice.”²

On this particular July afternoon, Crummell’s lecture was on a topic near and dear to his heart: the way in which education and intellectual development would aid the elevation of free African Americans and contribute to abolitionism. It was an opportunity to both discuss his theory of pedagogy and, even more, his vision of black intellectual life under the conditions of racism and oppression. From a cosmopolitan set of sources—New England Transcendentalism, British Romanticism, German idealistic philosophy, and traditions rooted in the black Atlantic—Crummell outlined a political sensibility that would not just change the way black thinkers conceived of their political life but would help to shape all forms of Northern abolitionism. It was an important statement of the philosophical and metaphysical basis of the Higher Law Ethos that came to dominate American abolitionism.

If slavery denied black people their freedom, Crummell told the crowd, Northern racism attempted to destroy their dignity and their sense of inner worth. The consequences for many black men were dire. The white vision of black men was one in which they were reduced to “mere instruments,” tools in the hands of slaveowners or racist politicians. If this racist order had its way, black men might internalize these ideas, accepting a degradation of their consciousness and loss of their self-worth. Denying them education and discouraging them from considering themselves as worthy of self-creation, white people sought to force them back onto the only thing left to develop a subjectivity: their physical senses and the arbitrary outward circumstances of a segregated and impoverished life. “He who relies upon his senses for his well being, degrades himself; takes the first step downward toward the brute,” Crummell wrote.³

Underlying Crummell’s concern for the state of black education was a philosophical, even metaphysical, critique of American racism. Black men would have to reject not just the racism of white America but also the system of thought that underlay its treatment of African Americans, a philosophy that encouraged people to define their inner lives by the external experiences they had lived through. Crummell feared that theories and practices of the self that privileged the importance of sensory inputs to the creation of ideas, opinions, and habits (such as those associated with British empiricism) risked eliminating the characteristically human ability to freely determine one’s own moral and political fate. Stuck in conditions determined by racist white Americans, Afri can Americans needed some transcendent source of selfhood beyond the world as it existed around them. Crummell thus believed that actual freedom began when people were able to reject the determinism of physical effects. “Sense is the proper element of the mere animal, in its search after pleasure. Spirit, reason, and a moral nature, are the fountains of excellence to man.”⁴

It was in the cultivation and use of these parts of the human mind that black men would “elevate” themselves and reject white racism. In doing so, Crummell argued, black men would be able to reject “condition, place, power, and all the mere outward circumstances of life.”⁵ A black person would need to be radically, transcendently free in his internal self before he was capable of becoming politically and socially free in the wider world. In this light, it is easy to dismiss Crummell as a naive individualist. But if we listen closer, we realize that, for this young idealist, individual development and freedom were means to an end. The Transcendent faculties of thought, moral sensibility, and reason were required not only to grant individuals free will but also to allow them to act politically, to conceive of and fight for a world not purely determined by the circumstances of history as given. Crummell was articulating a crucial part of the Higher Law Ethos: it did not just matter what an individual thought; it mattered how they thought and what mental paths they took to discover a political truth. Radical politics, he believed, required modes of thinking—especially intuitive “Reason” and an idealist theory of knowledge—that allowed and encouraged people to criticize the values of a racist and unjust society.

Crummell’s idealism explicitly shared many assumptions and influences with the burgeoning Transcendentalist movement in New England. Ending his lecture, he included a lengthy quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s first major antislavery piece, the famous “Address on Emancipation in the British West Indies.” Since Emerson’s address was first given on August 1, 1844 (and Crummell’s a month earlier), we have to assume that Crummell went back and added this section to his lecture notes. Perhaps most interesting was the hand underlining with which Crummell underscored Emerson’s description of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture. “The intellect,” Crummell underlined in Emerson’s essay, “that is miraculous! Who has it, has the talisman: his skin and bones, though they were of the color of night, are transparent, and the everlasting stars shine through, with attractive beams.” Here Emerson’s belief in the universality of humanity based on shared ability to receive the influx of intellectual inspiration linked up with Crummell’s vision of an ascendant transnational African race whose education would prepare it for both moral and political freedom and, as the example of Toussaint suggested, maybe revolution.

In this lecture, as well as countless other speeches and writings, men and women such as Crummell, Thomas Sidney, William C. Nell, and Charlotte Forten were creating black Transcendentalist thought. Black Transcendentalists used many of the same assumptions and intellectual influences as white Transcendentalists but centered much earlier and with more consistency than their white colleagues on racism and slavery. They were doing this in intellectual clubs—such as New York’s Phoenixonian Literary Society and Boston’s Adelphic Union—and in journals and newspapers, side by side with unknown fugitive slaves and next to world-famous white intellectuals. Abolitionists had to learn how to think about politics in new ways in order to overcome the years of political and ideological inertia that sustained slavery; Transcendentalism in the hands of black thinkers helped them do this. These black thinkers sought inspiration from German and British Romantics, people such as Friedrich Schiller, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and, through them, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Black intellectuals were on the forefront of thinking through how these new styles of idealist philosophy could contribute to the abolitionist struggle. To understand their thought, we must consider Transcendentalism not as something cloistered among a select group of white intellectuals in Concord but as a living philosophy, one constantly being renewed and produced by those who spoke its language and seized on its ideas.

The black embrace of Transcendentalism is a reminder that antebellum black intellectuals played a central role in the history of American thought. Black thinkers were engaging with many of the broad philosophical assumptions that marked early nineteenth-century idealist philosophy: the belief that human life involved the conscious use of reason to order and fix society; that real knowledge was critical; that truth was gained through movement, struggle, and becoming; and that true freedom was about self-development, not being left alone. Influenced by British, French, and German philosophers, these were the moral and political assumptions that have historically inspired radical social movements. To see black thinkers in antebellum America in dialogue with this same tradition is to appreciate that black abolitionists were intellectually sophisticated radicals in touch with revolutionary philosophical and political thought.

Weapons of the Mind

The best place to begin a study of antebellum black intellectual life is in the intellectual clubs—such as Crummell’s Hamilton Lyceum—that sprouted up in the early part of the nineteenth century. Rivaled only by the black church, these clubs were crucial institutions of community and intellectual development, an essential component of what one historian has called “the early black public sphere.”⁶ In Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and throughout the North, free blacks were creating intellectual clubs that served as valuable places for education and self-improvement, sociability, and the development of political consciousness. Most combined lectures, reading rooms, debates, and theatrical performances. Among the forty-five that we can recover in the written record, a small sampling includes the Female Literary Society in Philadelphia, the New York Garrison Literary Association, the Pittsburgh Theban Society, the New Bedford Debating Society, and the Young Men’s Mental Improvement Society in Baltimore.⁷ As one observer in New York City boasted, the various literary organizations were “institutions of which we may well be proud … we can refer to them as evidences of the literary taste existing among us.”⁸ Some of them, no doubt, were short-lived, while others, such as the New York Phoenixonian Society, which was well into its sixth year in 1839 and boasted a substantial library, were enduring.⁹ By the time of the Civil War, they had spread all the way to the Pacific coast, with California boasting the San Francisco Literary Institute.¹⁰

Black intellectual clubs assumed many forms. Some were libraries, funded through donations from members or endowed by a white philanthropist. In 1821, according to the New York Journal, a library was “about to be established at Boston, for the exclusive use of people of Color.”¹¹ Others, such as the Female Literary Society, in Philadelphia, were places of intellectual and moral uplift, where members exchanged poems and letters with each other, helping to form bonds of community and solidarity.¹² Boston’s Adelphic Union sponsored a lecture series that competed with the most prestigious in the city, attracting famous scholars and activists (both white and black) to speak before integrated audience. Sometimes organizations focused on more quotidian educational matters, helping to spread literacy and basic math skills to the black population in the antebellum city. Thus, the Boston Mutual Lyceum, which was organized in 1833, gave classes on reading, writing, and math, as well as debating topics such as “what are the best means to adopt, to remove the prejudice which exists against the people of color?”¹³

For black Northerners, these private clubs were necessary because they were largely excluded from public intellectual life, “denied usual facilities for mental cultivation,” in the words of William C. Nell.¹⁴ Boston’s school system was segregated until 1855, and Harvard would not graduate an African American student until the 1860s. White-run lyceums and libraries regularly excluded blacks. Nell reported that in Boston, “large audiences in Lyceum lectures have been thrown almost into spasms by the presence of one colored man in their midst.”¹⁵ In 1845, white allies Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Sumner created a controversy by boycotting the New Bedford Lyceum on account of its segregationist policies, evidence of the continued prejudice of lyceums even in a Quaker and abolitionist stronghold.¹⁶ The one intellectual institution to which African Americans did have sporadic access was the press, as William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator and other antislavery newspapers sometimes published their writings. But even this venue had limits: in 1854, Samuel R. Ward, who had run a short-lived black newspaper in Boston in the 1850s, complained of a type of paternalist abolitionist who “a thousand times would … rather see us tied to some newspaper that represents us as being about mid way betwixt slaves and men, than to see us holding up a bold front, with a press worthy of entire freemen.”¹⁷ Starting in New York City, with Freedom’s Journal, black abol...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Transcendentalism in Black and White
• Chapter 2. The Latest Forms of Infidelity
• Chapter 3. The Cotton Economy and the Rise of Universal Reformers
• Chapter 4. Fugitive Slaves and the Many Origins of Civil Disobedience Theory
• Chapter 5. Heroism, Violence, and Race
• Chapter 6. A War of Ideas
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments