Fighting for the Higher Law

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.

"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."

"In his lucid, well-researched intellectual history, Wirzbicki, underscores the nexus between the philosophy of New England transcendentalism and the politics of abolitionism…. By centering abolitionism within the history of transcendentalism, and transcendentalism within the abolitionist crusade, Wirzbicki advances understanding of these two pillars of reform ideology and action in New England, in antebellum and Civil War-era America generally, and in the work of 20th-century racial reformers W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr."

"[A]n important contribution to the history of both Transcendentalism and radical abolitionism, as well as to intellectual history as a discipline...[I]t expertly describes intellectual and political life as the converging point of different forces and currents produced by a diverse cast of characters and sites and that is not centered exclusively on white male canonical authors or institutions, without flattening the intricacies and sometimes deadlocks of movements built across gender, race, and class lines."

"The effort to correct a whitewashed understanding of American Transcendentalism takes a giant step forward with Fighting for the Higher Law. Peter Wirzbicki has gifted us a richly detailed and revelatory study that restores Black thinkers and antislavery networks to Transcendentalism…The book offers us a new vision of the American crowd and celebrates within it each and all who kept with perfect sweetness the commitment to equality."

"Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists Against Slavery, centers abolitionism in the story of American Transcendentalists. . . . The author is among a growing number of historians who have refocused the study of antislavery directly on the activism of African Americans themselves, as opposed to the “bourgeois liberalism” of white reformers. . . . Wirzbicki’s book reads as a kind of history of public philosophy in America."