Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists against Slavery by Peter Wirzbicki (review)

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• Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists against Slavery by Peter Wirzbicki
• Lawrence Buell

Peter Wirzbicki. Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists against Slavery. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2021. 325 pp. $39.95.

This thoughtfully argued book makes an unusual and rather counterintuitive contribution to nineteenth-century US intellectual history by [End Page 245] concentrating on the relationship between two arenas of thought and action usually discussed separately and often presumed to have relatively little to do with each other.

Since it is well known that the American Transcendentalist movement was fomented by a group of white Northern progressives, writing from within and largely for fellow members of the New England intelligentsia, the implication that a cadre of Black Transcendentalists also existed is certain to raise eyebrows. Readers are likely to approach this book supposing that any similarities between the priorities of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Theodore Parker and those of Black abolitionists would have been a fortuitous convergence arising from the [white] Transcendentalists’ somewhat belated but increasingly zealous commitment to abolitionism and Black activists’ pragmatic enlistment of Transcendentalist rhetoric for strategic purposes. Against this view, Wirzbicki argues resourcefully and for the most part persuasively that the interactions between the two groups and, more important, the cross-pollinations of thought, were far deeper and more extensive than that—indeed, more so than anyone has yet realized.

Although none of this book’s Black protagonists—Frederick Douglass, William C. Nell, Lewis Hayden, Charlotte Forten, and others—seem to have self-described as a Transcendentalist, Wirzbicki demonstrates a pattern of significant and increasing mutual awareness, cross-communication, and periodic collaboration from the late 1830s through the Civil War years. In his account, the initial epicenters for both personal and intellectual exchange were the Northampton Community, the antebellum socialist venture most receptive to African Americans, and the Boston Adelphi Society, which Wirzbicki characterizes as a forum for Black intellectuals equivalent to the Transcendental Club of the 1830s and early 1840s, before which several of the latter were invited to speak. The more consequential—and controversial— part of his argument, however, is that northeastern Black activists looked to the Transcendentalists not merely or even primarily for tactical and financial support for the abolition of slavery and the assistance of fugitive slaves, in which the African American community had already taken the lead. Beyond that, they were strongly attracted to and deeply influenced by the core convictions of Transcendentalist philosophical idealism itself: in particular, its distrust of dominant religious, governmental, and economic interests; its apotheosis of individual self-reliance; its valuation of higher or intuitive “reason” over prudential calculation; and its utopian “politics of idealism” in judging society by the standard of what should be rather than what is (15).

As Wirzbicki sees it, the two groups were engaged in the “same broad conversation about the relationship between individual fulfilment and social regeneration” (58). To that end, Transcendentalism’s preeminent value for Black contemporaries and interlocutors was instrumental in helping create “an inner life to abolitionist politics” (4), the single most important result of which was to be the solidification of resistance to institutionalized slavery in the name of the higher law. This occurred both at the level of theory—the formulation of the conception of authority of conscience is higher than statute—and at the level of practice, by propagating the discipline of acting from conscience despite societal opprobrium and personal risk. Not that [End Page 246] Wirzbicki goes so far as to claim that Transcendentalism and Black abolitionism were on the same page in every respect. He takes pain to point out, for example, that by no means was every Transcendentalist equally and consistently invested in the antislavery cause, and that racial prejudice and New England tribalism were serious and sometimes insuperable impediments that kept most Transcendentalists from accepting African Americans on anything like equal intellectual or social partners. Here and elsewhere, prudent calibration enhances the credibility of the broader argument that the consanguinities between Transcendentalist and Black radical thinking in matters of ethical and political philosophy were much greater than the divergences, especially but not exclusively à propos the...