Russell B. Goodman on Peter Wirzbicki’s *Fighting for the Higher Law*

This book is both a history of ideas — of their origins, transmission, and utilizations — and of the people who employed them — their meetings, organizations, and friendships. We learn, for example, about the ways that Emerson’s concept of self-reliance was taken up and adapted by black abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, but also about Douglass’s appearances in Concord, both as a speaker in his own right and alongside Emerson in 1844 when he delivered his address on the abolition of slavery in the West Indies. We learn about the importance of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s distinction (derived from Kant) between the Understanding and the “higher law” of Reason— not only for the Transcendentalists, but aslo for black abolitionists like Douglass. In My Bondage and My Freedom, for example, Douglass cites Coleridge’s distinction between a person and a thing, and quotes Coleridge’s conclusion “that the Idea of a Human Being necessarily excludes the Idea of property in that Being” (167).[1] At the center of the book’s conceptual structure is what Wirzbicki calls the “Higher Law Ethos” (10), with origins in the “hyper-Protestant belief that all people could experience inspiration without intervention or mediation” (145), the Quaker concept of a natural light, republican beliefs in the right of revolution, and the romantic philosophy of Coleridge and William Wordsworth. These ideas coalesce into “something new” in nineteenth century America, Wirzbicki argues: “a full-throated philosophical and existential defense of nonconformity in a democratic culture” (10).

In the early pages of the book we meet Alexander Crummell, a black Episcopal minister who founded New York’s Phoenixonian Society, one of the scores of literary, scientific, and increasingly political societies of the “early black public sphere” in northern American cities. He “was obsessed with Coleridge,” Wirzbicki writes, “quoting him throughout his long life” (35). Like Coleridge and Emerson, Crummell appreciated the power of intuition, which he held to be a “penetrative quality, which is as much moral as it is intellectual, which leads the mind, as by a flash, to the very centre of its subject” (39). Wirzbicki rightly points out the coherence of this definition with Emerson’s emphasis on whims and flashes as “more reliable epistemological moments, than strenuous systematic thought” (41).

Another key figure discussed in the book is the black abolitionist William C. Nell, who  founded Boston’s Adelphic Union Library Association in 1836, the year in which Concord ‘s “Transcendental Club”  was established. The leadership of the Association was black, but invited speakers included prominent black and white abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips and Angelina Grimké. Nell founded the New England Freedom Association in 1842 to “extend the helping hand to the ‘chattel’ who may have taken to itself ‘wings’” (148); and he joined with Lewis Hayden and others to establish the Boston Vigilance Committee after passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. Nell attended Bronson Alcott’s conversations, heard Emerson speak, and participated in Emerson’s Town and Country Club. He referred to Emerson as the “ever-to-be-honored friend of equal rights” (55).

The alignment of black and white opposition to slavery took some time to develop. Emerson praised “the bountiful cause of Abolition” in “Self-Reliance” (1841), but lamented that the cause had been taken over by “angry bigots”; and Margaret Fuller at first found the abolitionists “so tedious, often so narrow, always so rabid and exaggerated in their tone” (69). Things changed by the mid-1840s, when Fuller linked the servitude of women and of slaves in her Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and Emerson delivered his potent address celebrating the  abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. Douglass and other black abolitionists took up and adapted Emerson’s term “self-reliance” in their advice to their readers and hearers, and Douglass reproduced this sentence from Emerson’s “The American Scholar” in his abolitionist newspaper North Star:  “It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attribute that we bring to it” (53).

Wirzbickl calls attention to Emerson’s talk of an Anglo Saxon race in English Traits (1856) (and he might have added “Fate” in The Conduct of Life (1860)). He concludes that Emerson “racialized the antislavery project” (181) in the 1850s, and “never fully embraced black equality” (200). Nevertheless, he emphasizes Emerson’s consistent, public opposition to slavery from the eighteen forties through the Civil War. He highlights Emerson’s poem “Boston Hymn,” read to an audience of 3000 gathered in Boston on January 1, 1863 to celebrate Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. “Pay ransom to the owner,” Emerson wrote, “and fill the bag to the brim; who is the owner? The slave is owner; And ever was. Pay him.” This poem was read not just to Boston’s elite but to black soldiers serving in the Union army (220).  In this way and others, Wirzbicki maintains in one of his most original claims, Transcendentalism did not burn out in the fire of the American Civil War, but was part of the “war of ideas” that motivated it.

Emerson’s younger friend Henry Thoreau receives substantial attention in the book as well, not only for his radical abolitionism but because of his critique of capitalism and  its attendant dehumanization: a “mechanizing of mental and physical life” (118). In a chapter entitled “The Cotton Economy and the Rise of Universal Reformers,” Wirzbicki places Thoreau and Emerson in the context of such European writers as Karl Marx, Charles Fourier, and Thomas Carlyle, as well as American social reformers like Alcott, Nell, and Douglass. He offers a persuasive account of Emerson and Thoreau’s critique of the market economy, paying special attention to Walden, “The American Scholar,” and Emerson’s neglected essay “The Conservative,” where, Wirzibicki writes, Emerson “defined conservatism as a pessimism about human ability rooted in an unhealthy submission to the world as currently ordered” (119).

In the subsequent chapter, entitled “Fugitive Slaves and the Origins of Civil Disobedience Theory,” he describes Thoreau’s work with Hayden and Nell’s Boston Vigilance Committee. Thoreau hosted escaped slaves in his cabin in the forties and fifties, and wrote his bitter “Slavery in Massachusetts” after Anthony Burns was returned to slavery by the Massachusetts authorities in 1854, as the Fugitive Slave Law required. “My thoughts,” Thoreau wrote, “are murder to the State.” On the eve of the Civil War, Thoreau and Emerson supported John Brown, the violent abolitionist who was executed in 1859 by the U. S. government after his attack on the U. S. armory in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. Thoreau wrote that Brown was a man “of rare common sense and directness of speech, as of action; a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and principles.” This sentence shows not only Thoreau’s support for Brown as a man of principles, but the manner in which a major Transcendentalist extended the term “Transcendentalist” to include opposition to slavery. As for Emerson, he called Brown “a pure idealist” (217), raised money for his defense, and provided lodging in his home for Brown’s two daughters after their father’s execution in 1860.

One of several strengths of this book is its attention to a wide range of detail. Wirzbicki writes about French interest in Emerson in the mid nineteenth century, specifically by such scholars as Jules Michelet, Edgar Quinet, and Adam Mickiewicz. And he tells us that: “When Margaret Fuller found herself in Paris on the eve of the French Revolution in 1848, she found Mickiewicz, among others, lecturing on Emersonian Transcendentalism to the Collège de France” (127). Another memorable detail from a few years later concerns Harriet Beecher Stowe’s visit to the home of Lewis Hayden, where she “discovered thirteen different fugitives, ‘of all colors and sizes,’ hiding out in the Haydens’ basement” (157). On the national political scene, this is the period when New York Senator William Seward spoke of a “higher law” than the Constitution (152).

Wirzbicki writes that most Transcendentalist writing was “shaped by … the struggle to realize one’s ideals in the messy world” (240). This is true, but to say that John Brown was motivated by moral ideas or ideals does not imply that he thought the material world of stones, stars, and bodies is just a set of phenomena. Likewise, to adopt the idealist claim that the world is merely phenomenal, a succession of subjective “ideas,” implies nothing about moral issues like the abolition of slavery. Emerson and Thoreau were not always careful to distinguish the senses of idealism they considered or embraced, but Wirzbicki isn’t either. He mentions Stanley Cavell as a major philosophical writer about Emerson (14) but doesn’t take advantage of Cavell’s idea that Emerson is a kind of Kantian transcendental idealist, especially in “Experience.” Apart from this comparatively minor quibble I have nothing but praise for this book, which is engagingly written and replete with well-supported judgments about abolitionism, the Transcendentalists, and the black public sphere in nineteenth century America.

[1] Parenthetical references in the text refer to Fighting for the Higher Law..