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

In his inaugural monograph, Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists Against Slavery, Peter Wirzbicki considers how African American intellectuals in their battle against human chattel bondage “drew tremendous energy from the philosophic and ethical commitments that Transcendentalism encouraged” (4). Wirzbicki is among a growing number of historians who have refocused the study of antislavery away from the bourgeois liberalism of white reformers to the activism of African Americans themselves. Black thinkers who figure prominently in his book include Alexander Crummell, Thomas Sidney, William C. Nell, and Charlotte Forten—intellectuals motivated by the likes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Friedrich Schiller, and Immanuel Kant, as well as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. These activist-philosophers mined “New England Transcendentalism for inspiration,” Wirzbicki says, from the beginning, “thinking through how these new styles of idealist philosophy could contribute to the abolitionist struggle” (4, 26). Moved by the Transcendentalist “ideals of freedom as self-development, rationality as more than instrumental logic, and political struggle as rooted in idealism and utopianism,” African Americans came to realize that the attainment of truth did not come by objective reflections on the “rarified world of pure ideas, texts, and abstractions,” writes Wirzbicki, but “through movement, struggle, and becoming” (6, 26).Transcendentalism likewise helped for a time to strengthen the bonds of interracial activism. What united black and white Transcendentalists was what Wirzbicki identifies as the Higher Law Ethos. Because it was “not the platform of any party or sect,” the author says, this “ethos,” underscored by the dissentient mood of American culture, resisted traditional formulations related to metaphysics, epistemology, and theology (16). Transcendentalism had a reputation of avoiding systematic thought. More directly, it “rejected instrumental logic,” what Transcendentalists, drawing on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, called “Understanding,” which contributed to a kind of moral torpor, for a “moral and dialectical style of thought” that led a person to “Reason” (11). Understanding was shallow, cold, disconnected, and static, and for that reason it obstructed the soul. Reason, in contrast, allowed a person to recognize a higher and spiritual connection with the universal order—the absorption of the self into the divine. Alexander Crummell exhibited an essential tenet of this Higher Law Ethos, when he wrote that “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” (25).Americans were “torn between the competing worlds of Reason and Understanding, the divine and the human, the ideal and the real, the numinous and the phenomenal” (49). Transcendentalists lamented the ways by which the majority of citizens rested (though not comfortably) in Understanding, preferring wealth, cultural status, and political power over that of the development of the soul. Radical thinkers confronted the obstacles in the way of Reason. One such hindrance came from organized religion. Creating the first “American intellectual movement that broke free of the confines of the Church,” Transcendentalists resisted efforts to box the infinite into the finite, since preserving the ineffability, mystery, and sublime in regard to faith was a matter of respecting the absolute freedom of both God and humanity (65). The divine would not be constrained by the limits of the human mind, which would include the dictates of dogma and the authoritarianism of a priestly class.Another obstacle in the elevation of the soul was market capitalism. Slavery and industrialization shared an economic root that created not only inequalities but also enmity between producers (laborers) and non-producers (management/owners) (115). The supposedly “free” economies of northern cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Boston depended on Southern cotton and were thus complicit in supporting the authority of the slaveholder along with the Northern capitalist exploiter. Yet the industrial economy did more than simply support Southern slavery. Industrial capitalism itself created unfree labor; workers became dependent subjects of capitalist owners. Emerson recognized that the fight against slavery “implied an attack on all forms of unearned wealth, on whether ‘dead’ capital would dominate over ‘alive’ labor, not just riches derived from enslavement” (120). For Thoreau, slavery did not exist solely in the South but “wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool” (170). Black abolitionists recognize the moral imperative to break the material conditions that kept human beings, black and white, from aspiring to the divine. Consequently, many Transcendentalists supported a variety of cooperative social (socialist) schemes, doing so not only as a way to critique market society but also to maintain the unity of the self in society.Politics was yet another impediment. Compromise had been a longstanding habit in antebellum politics. Such political deal-making, however, was done by conformists stymied by mere Understanding. Yet the tragedy of this “foolish consistency,” to borrow from Emerson, came to a head with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Rather than an act “to salve sectional tension,” the new slave law strengthened the nation's slaveocracy, threatened the lives of both fugitive slaves and free blacks, and yet rallied many whites to the cause of abolition. The act divided the nation in such a way that made compromise with slavery an impossibility. Transcendentalists came to grips with the fact that a higher law needed to be obeyed when human and finite laws were unquestionably immoral. Yet because they were captured by Understanding, “boxed into their professions” and acting in accordance with “goals that someone else had set for them,” few American citizens challenged the Slave Law, extinguishing their moral obligation to follow the higher law (161, 164). Compliance with the higher law meant non-compliance with the saliently immoral lower law of the 1850 Slave Act. Those who obeyed the Slave Act capitulated to “the suffocating pressure of social conformity” (145).In their resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, black intellectuals contributed to the history of civil disobedience, defined not strictly as lawbreaking but as the refusal to abide by what was perceived to be an unjust law and facing the consequences for such a violation. This, of course, raised the question as to the means of disobedience, particularly the effectiveness of violence or pacificism. Black abolitionists, impatient with non-violent commitments and the “promise of white abolitionist benevolence itself,” turned increasingly toward violence (179). “Our white brethren,” McCune Smith stated, “cannot understand us unless we speak to them in their own language; they recognize only the philosophy of force” (12). Such a strategy divided reformers, black and white. The Higher Law Ethos, already weakened in the 1850s because of the acceptance of prevailing racial theories among white reformers, was “splitting in two, producing, on the one hand, an arrogant moral elitism among some that could turn judgmental and racist” against those who, on the other hand, sought a more violent confrontation with the slaveholding power.Sentiments toward violence among whites altered somewhat by the end of the 1850s. Realizing that the institution would never be dismantled by rhetorical persuasion, moral/religious suasion, or government legislation, a growing number of white Transcendentalists embraced the logic of not just local violence but a conflagration that would consume the nation. The Civil War marked the triumph of the Higher Law Ethos, which had consistently sought to “deploy [ideas] to change and reform society” (222). The war demonstrated the inevitable triumph of Reason. For the Hegelian philosopher William Torrey Harris, the American nation, now in the grip of a worldwide Hegelian Geist working itself out toward greater self-realization and self-liberation, was in “a state of constant becoming, a never finished experiment in equality and democracy” (223, 239).This idea of America as a “never finished experiment” can be attributed to the legacy of the Transcendentalists. After the war and despite the serious setbacks in expanding freedom, justice, and electoral participation for former slaves, the Higher Law Ethos remained, “submerged under new intellectual and political movements” (259). Transcendentalists helped lay the groundwork for radically different engagements with the world, creating new theories and methods in science and philosophy, inspiring the environmentalist movement, fueling the opposition to the violence of capitalism and imperialism, encouraging the wider acceptance of social pluralism, and emboldening civil rights activists of the late twentieth century. Much of these developments took shape because of those who brooked no compromise with slavery.Some readers may inquire as to the continued presence of the Higher Law Ethos in American society. How should we distinguish it from popular reactionary uprisings that use similar higher law rhetoric? Systems of dependency and discrimination have continued in American history. Those who experience alienation, marginality, terror, violence, exploitation, and cultural otherness as daily occurrences seem to be in accord with a Higher Law Ethos when they courageously and directly confront conditions that block the ascendancy of Reason. Wirzbicki's book should encourage readers to consider ways in which citizens might revive a Higher Law Ethos.