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).