An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

by Matthew Stewart

Overview

How a band of antislavery leaders recovered the radical philosophical inspirations of the first American Revolution to defeat the slaveholders’ oligarchy in the Civil War.

This is a story about a dangerous idea—one which ignited revolutions in America, France, and Haiti; burst across Europe in the revolutions of 1848; and returned to inflame a new generation of intellectuals to lead the abolition movement—the idea that all men are created equal.

In their struggle against the slaveholding oligarchy of their time, America’s antislavery leaders found their way back to the rationalist, secularist, and essentially atheist inspiration for the first American Revolution. Frederick Douglass’s unusual interest in radical German philosophers and Abraham Lincoln’s buried allusions to the same thinkers are but a few of the clues that underlie this propulsive philosophical detective story. With fresh takes on forgotten thinkers like Theodore Parker, the excommunicated Unitarian minister who is the original source of some of Lincoln’s most famous lines, and a feisty band of German refugees, philosopher and historian Matthew Stewart tells a vivid and piercing story of the battle between America’s philosophical radicals and the conservative counterrevolution that swept the American republic in the first decades of its existence and persists in new forms up to the present day. In exposing the role of Christian nationalism and the collusion between northern economic elites and slaveholding oligarchs, An Emancipation of the Mind demands a significant revision in our understanding of the origins and meaning of the struggle over slavery in America—and offers a fresh perspective on struggles between democracy and elite power today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324003625
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/26/2024
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	55,697
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Matthew Stewart is an independent philosopher and historian who has written extensively about the philosophical origins of the American republic, the history of philosophy, management theory, and the culture of inequality. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review, among other publications. In recent years he has lived in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, and is currently based in London.

Editorial Reviews

★ 02/05/2024

In this enthralling and muscular study, historian and philosopher Stewart (The 9.9 Percent) examines the German radicals who inspired a generation of antislavery leaders in 19th-century America. Tracing how the secularist, rational, and atheistic philosophies of Ludwig Feuerbach, G.W.F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant, and David Friedrich Strauss traveled across the ocean and found a home with leading lights of the abolitionist movement (including Frederick Douglass and Theodore Parker), Stewart contends that this radical philosophical vision, which had somewhat influenced the American Revolution, had in the years since “dissipated under the growing pressure of a counterrevolutionary slaveholding oligarchy.” After the failure of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, however, a cadre of well-educated, German-speaking “hard-liners” (around 10,000 people in total) immigrated to the U.S., carrying with them ideas that revitalized American revolutionary principles—especially the notion that all men are created equal, which Stewart argues came into direct conflict with the slaveholders’ coopted branch of American Christianity that explicitly promoted racial hierarchy. Stewart brings this intellectual battle into the present, forcefully rebutting what he considers insidious recent historiography that paints Lincoln as a “Bible-believing Christian” and boldly stating that the slaveholders’ Christian nationalism “clearly anticipates the fascist and neo-fascist movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” It’s a vital reassessment of what underpins American democracy. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Enthralling, illuminating, and timely. A beautifully written, myth-busting, and eye-opening uncovering of the radical, humanistic roots of America’s best impulses toward justice and equality. A must-read for anyone who wants to fully understand not only the abolitionist movement and the nation’s struggle over slavery, but also America’s ongoing conflicts related to religion, nationalism, theology, and democracy. By delving into the lives and Enlightenment thinking of Frederick Douglass, Theodore Parker, Abraham Lincoln, and Ottilie Assing, Matthew Stewart shines a much-needed light on some of the most compelling—and yet underappreciated—emancipatory values that flow through our history and society."

Phil Zuckerman

"Engaging and often surprising."

New York Times - S.C. Gwynne

"Matthew Stewart renders the radical philosophy of Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and John Brown with analytical precision and intellectual rigor. Stewart's notion of "philosophy-in-action" as foundational to radical abolition is a fascinating account of ideas in action, anticipating contemporary arguments over the role of philosophy and ideas in the fight for racial equality."

Kerri Greenidge

"Matthew Stewart’s philosophical odyssey of the secular roots of America’s second founding is cerebral, eloquent, and highly readable. I couldn’t stop highlighting the historical connections, stories, and quotations. Stewart leaves readers sated, but somehow wanting to learn more about the fascinating heretical America of this era. A brilliant book exploring America’s secular refounding."

Andrew L. Seidel

"Stewart consistently presents a lively and compelling march through the history of American slavery—revealing both its barbarity and its own supposedly philosophical and scriptural justifications… [a] bracingly original book."

Wall Street Journal - Harold Holzer

"Stewart’s philosophical odyssey of the secular roots of America’s second founding is cerebral, eloquent, and highly readable. I couldn’t stop highlighting the historical connections, stories, and quotations. Stewart leaves readers sated, but somehow wanting to learn more about the fascinating heretical America of this era. A brilliant book exploring America’s secular refounding."

Andrew Seidel

★ 2024-01-17
Equality, humanity, and power were at the heart of America’s second founding.

In Nature’s God, Stewart examined the ideological and theological underpinnings of America’s founding fathers. Now turning to what he calls the nation’s second revolution, the Civil War, he offers a deeply researched history of the philosophical bonds that linked three monumental figures of the time: Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Theodore Parker. The author argues persuasively that the “radical philosophical vision that originated in early modern Europe” fueled both the American Revolution and the widespread European revolutions of 1848 and then tracked back across the Atlantic. Stewart closely examines the role of religion in antebellum America, when a “theology of the propertied classes” emerged as a justification for slavery and for the violent treatment of the enslaved. Douglass called religious slaveholders “the worst.” Piously citing scripture as justification, Confederate states proposed a Christian Republic with “benevolent Christian masters and grateful Christian slaves.” In the North, not immune to racism, none of the major religious denominations “endorsed abolition before the war broke out.” Abolitionists were branded as infidels. The Civil War, then, was more than a conflict over slavery; it pitted self-proclaimed God-fearing white Americans against religious skeptics like Lincoln and nonbelievers like Parker. The war also laid bare the pervasiveness of insidious economic inequality, not only between whites and Blacks, but between white oligarchs, owners of huge cotton plantations, and the middle class and poor whites who made up the rest of the country’s population. Slavery, Stewart asserts, “is best understood as a device through which the propertied exploit the entire nation by mobilizing one part of society to enforce the oppression of another at the expense of both.” After the war, proslavery theology led to a conservative counterrevolution that still permeates Christian nationalism and the religious right.

A sweeping, penetrating historical narrative.

Kirkus Reviews

"The author of Nature's God on the intellectual origins of the American republic has carried his story forward to give us an equally riveting history of the philosophical foundations of the abolitionist war against slavery. In this gem of a book, Mathew Stewart innovatively uses nineteenth century German philosophy to illustrate the fundamentally radical and emancipatory nature of American abolitionism."

Manisha Sinha

"A timely and inspiring intervention in the ongoing struggle over our history and collective identity. An Emancipation of the Mind illuminates the enduring and transformative legacy of the radical Enlightenment for the American experiment in republican self-government."

Peter S. Onuf