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.