Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists against 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 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."—Caleb McDaniel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sweet Taste of Liberty
"Peter Wirzbicki brilliantly rescues Transcendental abolitionists from the caricatures and myths that surround their history. Perhaps the most original contribution he makes is to foreground the forgotten intellectual and political contributions of African American Transcendentalists. This astute book will forever change the way we think about Transcendentalism and foreground its antislavery contributions to the American radical democratic imagination."—Manisha Sinha, author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition