The List of Works Cited

It's boring, I know, but it's necessary. Thanks again for sticking with this.

Works Cited

Albrecht, Robert C. Theodore Parker. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1971. Print.

Andrews, John. Anthony Burns. Wood engraving. 1855. Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Web. 21 Oct. 2014.

Baym, Nina, ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 2. 8th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2012. Print.

Blanchard, Paula. Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution. New York: Delacorte-Seymore Lawrence, 1978. Print.

Channing, William Ellery. Slavery. Ed. James M. McPherson, William Loren Katz. 1969 ed. New York: Arno Press, Inc., 1969. Print.

Clay, Edward Williams. The Disappointed Abolitionists. 1838. Lithograph. Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Web. 21 Oct. 2014.

Commager, Henry Steele. Theodore Parker, Yankee Crusader. 1960 ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1960. Print.

Currier, Nathaniel. The Modern Colossus. Eighth Wonder of the World. 1848. Lithograph. Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Web. 21 Oct. 2014.

Dillon, Merton L. The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting Minority. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1974. Print.

Duberman, Martin, ed. The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists. Princeton: Princeton UP: 1965. Print.

Elkins, Stanley M. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. 3^rd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P: 1976. Print.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “John Brown.” Baym 326-28.

---. “Self-Reliance.” Baym 269-86.

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Harper's Ferry Insurrection - Interior of the Engine-House, just before the Gate Is Broken Down by the Storming Party - Col. Washington and His Associates as Captives, Held by Brown as Hostages. 1859. Wood engraving. Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Web. 21 Oct. 2014.

Fredrickson, George M. The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Print.

Fuller, Margaret. The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women. Baym 743-77.

---. Review of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Rev. of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, by Frederick Douglass. Baym 778-79.

Gara, Larry. “Who Was an Abolitionist?” Duberman 32-51.

Gougeon, Len. Introduction. Emerson’s Antislavery Writings. By Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. xi-lvi. Print.

McPherson, James M. “A Brief for Equality: The Abolitionist Reply to the Racist Myth.” Duberman 156-177.

Parker, Theodore. “To Francis Jackson.” 24 Nov. 1859. Letter from Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker, Minister of the Twenty-eighth Congregational Society, Boston.  Ed. John Weiss. Vol. 2. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1864. 170-178. Google Books. Web. 18 Oct. 2014.

Ronda, Bruce A. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on Her Own Terms. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. Print.

Schreiner, Samuel Agnew. The Concord Quartet: Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and the Friendship That Freed the American Mind. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006. Print. 

Slavery: Fugitive Slave Law. Dir. History Channel. Youtube, 2011. Web. 22 Oct. 2014.

Thoreau, Henry David. Resistance to Civil Government.  Baym 964-979.

---. “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” Baym 1166-70.

---. Slavery in Massachusetts. Baym 1155-1166.

Wedgewood, Josiah. Am I Not a Man and a Brother? 1787. Woodcut. Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Web. 21 Oct. 2014. 

Here's a timeline of all the events and literature I've talked about in these posts. Thanks for checking this out; I've tried to make this understandable for anyone who's around high school age, and I've tried to link any unfamiliar terms or names to pictures and credible information sites. I hope you've enjoyed yourself and learned something! The last post will me my list of works cited. 

Timeline 

3 March 1820 – Missouri Compromise 

1835 – Channing’s Slavery published

1841 - Emerson’s Self-Reliance published

1 August 1844 – Emerson’s Address on Emancipation in the West Indies

1845 –Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass published

29 December 1845 – Texas annexed

13 May 1846 – 2 February 1848 – Mexican-American War

1849 – Thoreau’s Resistance to Civil Government published

September 1850 – Compromise of 1850, Fugitive Slave Law

24 May – 2 June 1854 – Anthony Burns Trial

May 30, 1854 – Kansas-Nebraska Act

1854-1859 – “Bleeding Kansas”

16 – 18 October 1859 – John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry

30 October 1859 – Thoreau’s “A Plea for Captain John Brown”

6 January 1860 – Emerson’s “John Brown”

6 November 1860 – Lincoln elected

12 April 1861 – Civil War begins

Transcendentalism and Racism

            However, being pro-abolition did not equate to being pro-African American. Not even the erudite, egalitarian, Man-as-God Transcendentalists could entirely escape the pervading racism of the time, and even their attacks on slavery occasionally reveal a racist mindset.  Channing’s Slavery, a moving and well-developed moral argument against slavery, falls into this trap despite Channing’s obvious good intentions. Slavery, Channing writes, takes man from his rightful place as a divine spiritual being and forces him into an unnatural, animalistic subservience (27). It debases the divine man and teaches him to disregard himself, law, and virtue (69-70). He is careful not to condemn the Southerners who have been raised to accept slavery, but he remains implacable: No economic benefits or potential drawbacks could ever justify such an evil; “if these institutions cannot stand without slavery as their foundation, then I say, Let them fall” (42, 56-7, 103).

            Nevertheless, Channing also portrays the slave as necessarily lacking morals. Because his higher nature has been crushed, wickedness is expected of the slave (70). If he manages happiness in his circumstances, it is “because he has not learned to think; because he is too fallen to feel his wrongs; because he wants just self-respect” (109). Channing also leaves the methods of removing slavery to the slave owners and suggests a gradual emancipation preceded by a highly regulated (by the former masters) training period to adjust slaves to freedom (128, 132-37). This solution treats the slave as a child who must be guided by the very people who once owned him.

            Perhaps this attitude that African Americans required such strict guidance stemmed from the Transcendental and Romantic idea that the people in tune with Nature (or, as the Romantics called it, the spirit of the age) and privy to higher truth had a duty to teach and guide others. This belief might have lead to a sense of condescending intellectual superiority. 

How Far Should We Go?

            Abolitionism in nineteenth century America had all the impatience and emotionalism of Romanticism, but many abolitionists, especially those who were devoutly religious, remained staunchly nonresistant – that is, they believed that emancipation should be brought about without using force (Dillon 9; Fredrickson 41). Slavery, William Ellery Channing’s 1836 discourse on the subject, promoted this pacifism, declaring, “To instigate the slave to insurrection is a crime for which no rebuke and no punishment can be too severe” (5). Slavery, however, was proving stubborn, and by the 1850s – years which encompassed the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law, “Bleeding Kansas,” and John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry – many abolitionists, Transcendentalists included, were beginning to wonder if slavery would have to be washed out with blood.

            For people who believed every man was divine, Transcendentalists had a surprisingly accepting attitude toward violence. Man set his own morals, after all, and if he had to resort to violence to stand by them, who then was in the wrong –he himself, or whoever tried to force him to go against his nature? Thoreau’s Resistance to Civil Government does not advocate violence in so many words, but revolution is not at all discouraged – quite the opposite, in fact, and in “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” Thoreau adds, “I do not wish to kill or be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable” (967; 1167). Interestingly, in the early days of the Civil War, this mindset prompted some Transcendentalists to support the South’s secession as the ultimate expression of individual will (Fredrickson 65).

            Then there was the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, who became a radical abolitionist in the 1840s, and he was a class unto himself (Albrecht 92). The grandson of a Revolutionary minuteman, Parker cared little for violence, but he recognized that is was unavoidable; he kept his grandfather’s musket in his office and believed “All the great charters of humanity have been writ in blood. I once hoped that of American democracy would be engrossed in less costly ink; but it is plain now that our pilgrimage must lead through a Red Sea, wherein many a Pharaoh will go under and perish” (Fredrickson 36-7; Albrecht 101; Weiss 172). After the Fugitive Slave Law went into effect in 1850, Parker organized a Vigilance Committee in Boston, whose purpose was to watch for slave hunters and stop them. When Ellen and William Craft, African American members of his congregation, were targeted by these hunters, Parker hid the couple. He put a gun and a knife in William’s hands and encouraged him to use them if he had to, then gathered a mob to intimidate the slave hunters into fleeing Boston without the Crafts (Commager 199, 215). This same Vigilance Committee would storm the courthouse in 1854 in attempt to rescue Anthony Burns; their attempt was unsuccessful, but Bronson Alcott was nearly shot and a police officer was stabbed to death (Albrecht 109; Commager 236).

The Transcendentalist consensus on yet another violent occurrence would further reveal the lengths to which they were willing to go by the 1850s. John Brown, the militant abolitionist, came to Concord in 1857. Thoreau introduced Emerson to him, and when Brown returned to Concord in 1859 to raise money for the freedom fight in Kansas, Emerson housed him and helped him gather funds (Gougeon xlvi-vii). Alcott, Thoreau, Emerson, and Parker all vocally supported Brown after his failed attack on Harpers Ferry; Brown’s daughters lived with the Emersons for a while after Brown’s execution (Gougeon xlvii-viii; Fredrickson 37-38). In “John Brown” Emerson even went so far as to describe Brown as a “founder of liberty” (326). In an ironic twist, Transcendentalists had in some ways become more extreme than the radical abolitionists they had once derided. 

Coming Around

            Transcendentalists may have disagreed with abolitionists’ methods, but they did agree that slavery was wrong.  In 1836, the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing, the proverbial grandfather of Transcendentalism who infamously disapproved of extreme Garrisonian abolitionism, expounded on the evils of slavery in his highly moral Slavery, and Thoreau would write, "Slavery and servility have produced no sweet-scented flower annually, to charm the senses of men, for they have no real life: they are merely a decaying and a death, offensive to all healthy nostrils" (Slavery 1165). That common moral stance would eventually overwhelm many of their objections and bring Transcendentalists into the fold of abolitionism. The 1840s dealt heavy blows to abolition: The annexation of Texas and the Mexican-American war added new slave states to the Union. 

Suddenly, Transcendentalists who, like Emerson, had disapproved of slavery from a lofty moral pulpit realized that a more active stance might be necessary to eradicate slavery from America (Gougeon xiii, xxvii, xxx). Emerson’s wife, aunt, and brother were already involved in abolition societies; he finally agreed to deliver a speech on the anniversary of emancipation in British West Indies in 1844 and stepped into the limelight of the anti-slavery movement (Gougeon xxv, xxvii).

            However long it took Transcendentalists to come around – some, like Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Margaret Fuller, were preoccupied with other causes (education and women’s rights, respectively) for years – their belief in higher laws than the government’s guaranteed they would be fearless supporters indeed, and as the slavery debate grew in intensity across America, they had plenty of opportunities to join the fight (Ronda 263). 

Peabody would eventually drive the Hawthornes to distraction by preaching abolition to them (Ronda 265). Fuller, while she did view championing women’s rights as her primary calling, was certainly no friend to slavery; in the Great Lawsuit, she writes bitterly of “what has been done to the red man, the black man. These deeds are the scoff of the world; and they have been accompanied by such pious words that the gentlest would not dare to intercede with, ‘Father forgive then, for they know not what they do’” (748). A close friend of Lydia Maria Child, author of An Appeal in Favor of Americans Called Africans, Fuller would also give Fredrick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself a glowing review in the New York Tribune (Blanchard 153; Fuller 778-79).

Bronson Alcott, founder of the Temple School in Boston, was arrested for refusing to pay taxes in protest of the annexation of Texas; his home was a stop on the Underground Railroad (Schreiner 110, 161). In 1854, when Anthony Burns was seized in Boston, Alcott, by then nearly sixty, joined an armed mob and was nearly shot in an attempt to free Burns (Commager 236). Henry David Thoreau, famous for his unabashed refusal to obey a government that condoned slavery, also helped hide runaway slaves, but he also went even farther than that (Schreiner 162). No hypocrisy for Thoreau; he bid people stand up for what they believed, no matter the cost, encouraged everyone to refuse to pay taxes, to go to jail, to revolt if necessary. He practiced what he preached by going to jail himself, and his Slavery in Massachusetts, which laments the corruption of government, justice, church, press, and the individual himself makes it clear that he wishes others would follow his example (Thoreau Resistance 974; Slavery 1155-1166). Moncure Conway, scion of a Southern slaveholding family, promoted Northern separation from the South to preserve the North from slavery’s taint (Fredrickson 16). Theodore Parker, one of the more active and famous Transcendental abolitionists, worked himself into an early grave trying to cleanse America of slavery’s wicked stain (Commager 267, 272).

            Once they devoted themselves to a cause, Transcendentalists held nothing back. They chose their paths, and they acted, but some were more extreme than others, and many grew more radical as time went on without seeing emancipation. The next post will dive into how Transcendentalist abolitionists participated in the growing belief that violence would play a part in ending slavery in America for good.

Transcendentalism and Abolitionism: The Institution vs. the Individual

As Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance makes abundantly clear, Transcendentalists deeply distrusted institutions, hated the way they suppressed the individual’s agency and natural inclinations. They were, therefore, unafraid to buck the system, even when the federal government tried to force them to comply with the Fugitive Slave Law. Emerson declared “I will not obey it, by God;” the Unitarian minister and reformer Theodore Parker was very nearly indicted for obstructing justice after attempting to rescue the fugitive slave Anthony Burns; both Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau spent time in jail for refusing to pay taxes to an unjust government and volunteered their homes for use in the Underground Railroad (qtd. in Gougeon xxxix; Commager 242; Schreiner 110, 161; Thoreau 974). However, their apathy toward institutions meant that they viewed evils like slavery as issues that had to be resolved not through institutional (such as the government and even abolitionist organizations) means but through individual moral reform (Elkins 168). Individuals had to change first, and society would follow, not the other way around (Gougeon xi). Transcendentalists had the duty to reveal the evils and spread the truth, but the individual had to change himself (Fredrickson 11). Before the 1840s, therefore, while Transcendentalists theoretically opposed slavery, many were reluctant to be publicly associated with abolition organizations like the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Aside from their dislike of institutions, Transcendentalists had another reason for not publicly and loudly taking up the abolition cause: Slavery was too narrow a cause. “Single-issue moral reform efforts like abolition missed the point that moral reform must always seek the renewal of the entire individual. Morality is not, after all, piecemeal” (Gougeon xi). Man was inherently good, but he had lost his way, been separated from Nature and her divine truth. To cure that, he had to be changed entirely; slavery was merely a single symptom of a much larger and more pervasive disease. From a Transcendentalist point of view, it made little sense to attempt a cure anywhere but the root of the problem, the soul. “They have fallen into the common error of enthusiasts,” wrote William Ellery Channing of abolitionists in Slavery, “that of exaggerating their object, of feeling as if no evil existed but that which they opposed, and as if no guilt could be compared with that of countenancing or upholding it” (153). Many Transcendentalists were abolitionists, and their stances would grow more and more extreme as the passing years revealed society’s stubbornness regarding slavery, but in the early years, the 1820s and 1830s, many Transcendentalists agreed with the sentiment Emerson voiced in Self-Reliance: “If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition […], why should I not say to him, ‘Go love thy infant; love thy woodchopper: be good-natured and modest: have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home’” (Elkins 167; Emerson 271-72).

Emerson’s comment on the “hard, uncharitable ambition” of abolitionists reveals yet another reason many Transcendentalists held abolitionists at arm’s length for many years (Emerson 272). In their attempts to end slavery, extreme abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, naturally the people who became the figureheads of the movement, used belligerent and aggressive methods to sway people to their side. “The tone of their newspapers, as far as I have seen them,” wrote Channing, “has often been fierce, bitter, and abusive” (153). Because Transcendentalists believed in man as the ultimate authority over himself, these bullying, pressuring, condemning methods drew their disapproval (Elkins 167; Gara 37). Telling the truth was one thing; forcing it down people’s throats, however, was encroaching on man’s inviolate individual judgment and morals.  

Ironically, however, Transcendentalism also placed a significant amount of pressure on the individual who knew the truth; knowing the truth but not acting on it was significantly worse than following in blind ignorance. In that vein, Thoreau’s Resistance to Civil Government frequently expresses the individual’s responsibility to at least not support evil but preferably to resist it outright (968-69). These opposing tenets – allowing no one to force you into anything without failing to act entirely – created an interesting and difficult dichotomy. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, for example, the Transcendentalist educational reformer and eventual abolitionist, deeply strained her relationship with her sister and her brother-in-law Nathaniel Hawthorne over the Hawthornes’ apparent apathy and inaction toward slavery (Ronda 264-65).  

Romanticism, Transcendentalism, and Abolitionism

What Is a Man Born for But to Be a Reformer: Abolitionism and Romantic and Transcendental Movement

            Starting in the eighteenth century, some European forward-thinkers were starting to chafe at the boundaries of Enlightenment ideals. These people, dubbed Romantics, were frustrated with the clinical, scientific, senses-only approach. Instead, they relied on their intuition, believing that humans and nature were united, trusting nature to teach humanity on a spiritual level, and adopting the optimistic view that man had the ability to better both himself and his world.  Across the pond in the nineteenth century, American radicals in Massachusetts combined Romantic ideals with Unitarianism and got Transcendentalism, the philosophy that would shape the American mindset for years to come. Transcendentalists preached Nature as god and man as Nature, all men perfectible and united across time and space, each man the ultimate authority over himself. The Transcendentalist movement dubbed organized religion unnecessary, scoffed at blindly upheld traditions, and challenged humanity’s need for any and all institutions: the church, the government, and society at large (Elkins 150). “No institution, practice, belief, or relationship was considered too venerable or too sacred to escape questioning,” writes Merton Dillon of the American mindset in the eighteen hundreds; Transcendentalists embodied that spirit (116). Instead of looking to institutions for guidance, they looked to Nature; Nature revealed the highest truth, and Transcendentalists believed it was their duty to share these higher truths with the rest of the world (Fredrickson 11).

            Believing that every man was essentially a law unto himself, Transcendentalism naturally sparked rampant questioning. Even those who were not a part of the movement proper caught the fever and started evaluating the status quo – and then they started trying to change it (Fredrickson 9).  The nineteenth century was rife with activism. Women’s rights, changed family hierarchies, educational reform, religious reform, Temperance and more were all being promoted, and in many cases, the Transcendentalists were in the vanguard.

            But while the above issues were certainly on America’s radar, the dominating social and moral question in nineteenth century America was undoubtedly that of slavery. The Transcendentalist connection between humans and the sovereignty of each human led to a growing spirit of egalitarianism which was emphasized by the belief in the innate goodness and perfectibility of all men (Fredrickson 9; McPherson 177). Abolition was the most controversial topic in political, economic, and moral spheres. There were rallies and riots – Emerson was actually booed off-stage at an anti-slavery rally in 1861 – and revolts and mobs; there were speeches and pamphlets galore (Gougeon 1; Dillon 76). As the Civil War loomed on the horizon, the Mexican War supplied more slave states, and the Fugitive Slave Law acerbated the problem, abolitionism became more and more the central dispute of a divided nation.

            Considering their closely-held tenets of united mankind, moral improvement, man’s divinity and perfectibility – not to mention their sense of duty to reveal the higher truths Nature had revealed to them – Romantics and Transcendentalists in theory should have been whole-hearted members of the abolition movement. Some of them were; as Henry Commager succinctly writes, “If Man was divine, then it was wicked that his body should be confined in slavery” (viii). However, where there are humans, there is diversity, and the Transcendentalists were no exception. Deep-seated questions about institutionalism and individualism kept many Transcendentalists at arm’s length for many years; so too did the very narrow moral focus of the abolitionist movement and the belligerent methods the movement employed. Other Transcendentalists had other causes that were nearer and dearer to their hearts, and some of them were simply slow on the uptake. Still more divisions occurred when Transcendentalists questioned the best way to bring about emancipation and debated to what degree they should resist slavery-friendly laws.

            This series of posts will explore how America’s Transcendentalists interacted with the abolition movement, when and why they disagreed, when they worked together, and what they sought to accomplish.