7

Slavery and Citizenship

The revolutions of 1848 revealed a recurrent pattern of oppression across Europe. People did not have to speak the same language, or live in the same place, under the same political structures, or belong to the same class to experience the miseries of pauperization and unemployment. The ragged, as we saw in Chapter 3, was an international category that transcended all these boundaries. Now that a new media was available to expose oppression in its multiple, but remarkably similar, iterations, a debate about the limits of human existence, its necessities, and the basic rights of human beings was inevitable. Christopher Hill has suggested that ‘the ultimate measure of the universality of an idea must be its incorporation into social practice in places far from its origin, including not only behavior in the world of ideas but also modes of governance and, potentially, resistance.’¹ This chapter shows that Douglass and Emerson took the ideas they had absorbed in revolutionary Europe far from their origins and applied them, particularly as modes of resistance, on the other side of the world, in America.

1848 was crucial in inaugurating the kind of universalism that led to the concept of ‘human rights’. According to historian Lynn Hunt, once universal entitlements are declared it becomes increasingly difficult to justify their non-delivery to all.² They become what intellectual historian Samuel Moyn has called ‘truncated universals’, and are abstract enough to move around and lodge themselves into different geographical areas and political systems, where they demand completion.³ But Moyn argues against Hunt, pointing out that ‘the model is a strikingly idealist one’.⁴ He maintains that ‘human rights’ do not come into conceptual existence until the late twentieth century, when they appear as a kind of ‘consolation prize’ in lieu of the people’s right of self-determination.⁵ Emma MacKinnon complains that ‘Moyn’s account…is so relentlessly realistic that it risks being reductive’.⁶ I agree that Moyn dismisses ‘idealism’ and ‘abstraction’ too quickly. Idealism and abstraction are concepts with their own histories too, and 1848 is a particularly important year for those histories. As we shall see, the potential for abstraction and idealism released by the revolutions of 1848 became a very important intellectual tool for both Emerson and Douglass in America. Serial Revolutions attempts to track the material mediation of ideas and the ‘real’ and embodied ways in which the abstract and ideal travelled around the mid-nineteenth-century world, to be put to new uses and new ends in new places.

Fugitive Forms

Both Emerson and Douglass had escaped to Europe and their physical travel had helped them grasp the potential of transit to reveal cultural relativity. Of course, Douglass’s fugitivity was brutally real: he was genuinely on the run, but he also understood that fugitivity might offer a different way of thinking through his black identity. In the case of another fugitive slave and visitor to Europe, William Wells Brown, Paul Jefferson has said that ‘the act of fleeing is an existential act of self-creation.’⁷ Douglass kept on fleeing and kept on self-creating. He wrote and rewrote his own autobiography repeatedly in a way that called the idea of a linear series into sharp question and proposed in its stead a model of reflection, revision, and reprise.⁸ For Douglass, revisionism became the means of producing a viable future. Whilst fugitivity was marked by association with oppression and violence, it was also potentially enabling. Returning to America, both Douglass and Emerson used fugitivity as a ‘figure of thought’.⁹ At the end of his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass explicitly made fugitivity into a ‘figure of thought’ when he imagined himself escaping slavery ‘in a flying cloud or balloon, (pardon the figure,) driven by the wind’.¹⁰ By then, he had also escaped the Garrisonian stage-managed repetition of plantation violence to develop a more forward-facing, mobile engagement with the possibility of black citizenship. In his evolving lecture style and his editorial work, Douglass reconceptualized his physical fugitivity from slavery into an intellectual and generalized dissent. Douglass’s constant reappraisal and remapping of the changing place of his own body in the world in which he found himself, a world which worked to change him and which he worked to change, was itself a radical anti-essentialist technique.

For Emerson, the ideal poet was always fugitive: ‘[h]is own body is a fleeing apparition, his personality as fugitive as any type, as fugitive as the trope he employs. In certain hours, we can almost pass our hand through our own bodies’.¹¹ This fugitivity is not measurable in linear time, however. It is a trope that can operate in many directions and in many different modes. Both Emerson and Douglass are ‘atemporal’ in their writing, meaning that both of them abandon, return, revise, and transform their ideas.¹² Bronson Alcott remarked of Emerson that ‘[i]t makes no difference, they say, whether you begin at the last paragraph and read backwards, or begin at what he meant for the beginning…but be assured there is a thread on which he strings all his pearls; it is not accidental’.¹³ He seems to suggest that seriality, rather than unilinearity, is the underlying logic that governs Emerson’s prose. In other words, a series can cohere through an identity between parts that is not necessarily teleological or progressive. It is Emerson’s dislike of standardization and its concomitant over-determination that in English Traits makes him describe the English as ‘cold’, ‘marching in phalanx, lockstep, foot after foot, file after file of heroes, ten-thousand deep’.¹⁴ Emerson’s own serial structures are distributive rather than accretive, allowing him to store ideas and to return to transform them later.

The coiled energy of the serial form was harnessed by Emerson and Douglass in different ways. Emerson used it on both a macro and a micro scale: he published his essays explicitly as ‘series’ (Essays [First Series], 1841; Essays, Second Series, 1844), and he kept the ball always in the air, his reader chasing after his sense from essay to essay.¹⁵ His metaphors created the loose looping tug of his prose, soliciting, as Adam Phillips puts it, ‘[a]ttention to what is coming next, to the next good thing, which may or may not be the next best thing; attention to what he calls, in “Nature”, “enhancement and sequel” ’.¹⁶ James Russell Lowell felt the strong pull forwards in Emerson’s prose to be its chief characteristic and content, too, noticing that ‘[t]here is keen excitement though there be no ponderable acquisition’.¹⁷ Emerson’s version of fugitivity is a prose flight from the blocked stasis of particularity to a constant state of mobility which makes it possible to apprehend the universal. And Emerson’s more macro interest in serial form is explicit in the opening question of his 1844 essay ‘Experience’ (Essays: Second Series): ‘Where do we find ourselves? In a series, of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair: there are stairs below us which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.’ For Emerson, the true scale of the universal series into which we are inserted is entirely beyond our comprehension: we cannot apprehend past or future, or judge even our present moment. Stanley Cavell recognized that in Emerson’s description, ‘[a] finding in every step is the description of a series, perhaps in the form of a proof, or a paragraph…Every finding incurs a new loss. A succession of steps. A lasting, as in an enduring. A going on.’¹⁸ Seriality for Emerson is not accretive in progressive or obviously teleological ways. In ‘Self-Reliance’ (1841), he had declared that ‘[p]ower ceases in the instant of repose…it resides in the moment of transition from the past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim’.¹⁹ And he retooled this idea in the first of his 1848 London lectures on ‘The Powers and Laws of Thought’, which later became the lecture ‘Natural History of Intellect’: ‘[t]he universe exists only in transit, or we behold it shooting the gulf from the past to the future. We are passing into new heavens in fact by the movement of our solar system, and in thought by our better knowledge.’²⁰ This makes a powerful image of serial amelioration, but it also avoids explicit reference to the violent ‘transition’ under way at the time in most countries in Europe. In 1848, Emerson looks determinedly at the solar system rather than at Paris, but he amplifies and strengthens his thinking about progress as a serial movement which pauses only to proceed: ‘[t]ransition is the attitude of power. A fact is only a fulcrum of the spirit. It is the terminus of a past thought, but only a means now to new sallies of the imagination and new progress of wisdom.’²¹ The forward movement feels Hegelian, but Emerson resists the agentless inexorability of Hegelian synthesis, preferring a more improvisatory method: ‘I can’t read Hegel, or Schelling, or find interest in what is told me from them, so I persist in my own idle & easy way…so I persist, until some sort of outline or system grows.’²²

Douglass articulates his temporal difficulties in My Bondage and My Freedom, his second autobiography: ‘[t]he thought of only being a creature of the present and the past troubled me, and I longed to have a future’.²³ Not least in his four autobiographies, he repeatedly reinvented himself through a complex series of returns and revisions of his own past. The publication of his Narrative of 1845 was what drove him, fugitive, to Europe, and when he returned, he refashioned himself in My Bondage and My Freedom, published in 1855.²⁴ Moving away from the ‘slave narrative’, Bondage signals its new-found self-possession immediately by the headings of the first three chapters: ‘The Author’s Childhood’, ‘The Author Removed from his First Home’, and ‘The Author’s Parentage.’²⁵ The echo of Dickens’s David Copperfield, whose first three chapters are titled ‘I am Born’, ‘I Observe’, and ‘I Have a Change’, is possibly deliberate: Douglass had referenced Dickens’s work in his speeches since 1846, and from April 1852 to December 1853, Frederick Douglass’s Paper (as The North Star had become in 1851) serialized Dickens’s Bleak House, lagging only one instalment behind the novel’s serialization in London and New York.²⁶ Douglass may have modelled his role as the ‘conductor’ of a journal on Dickens’s example. The words ‘Conducted by Charles Dickens’ appeared on every page of Dickens’s Household Words (launched in 1850).²⁷ Douglass claimed that ‘[b]ut for the responsibility of conducting a public journal… I should probably have remained as firm in my disunion views as any other disciple of William Lloyd Garrison’.²⁸ Perhaps also inspired by Dickens, Douglass would increasingly fashion the seriality of the North Star as a vehicle for political reform as well as the organ of his own celebrity. When he returned from Europe to take on the editorship of the North Star, he recalled that ‘[m]y new circumstances [as editor] compelled me to re-think the whole subject…and to study…the origin, design, nature, rights, powers, and duties of civil government, also the relations which human beings sustain to it’.²⁹ Through his editorship, he escaped his past and built a future which could make that past look different. From 1847, Douglass deliberately entangled his own life story with the narrative of the founding and future of America.

Serial Constitutionalism as Social Form

‘I find that his beautiful things are slippery, and will not stay in my mind’, wrote one of Emerson’s audience in his journal after hearing him lecture.³⁰ Both Douglass’s and Emerson’s improvisory and atemporal practices helped them to square circles and to create new shapes and forms for the transitional moment in which they found themselves. Emerson wrote that ‘[a] true method has no more need of firstly, secondly, &c. than a perfect sentence has of punctuation. It tells its own story, makes its own feet, creates its own form.’³¹ Apparently, autotelic form will inevitably escape into manifestation, but form for Emerson was also always fugitive, unpredictable and mobile. He therefore recoiled from a systematic socialism that, according to him, declared ‘let us make our state perfect; the world should be rendered as geometrical as a beehive’.³² Instead of the regular repeatable tessellations of the bees’ cells, he substituted the unstable household substance of naptha (mothballs) which work by sublimation, or evaporation from a solid state directly into a gas. Emerson remarked that ‘it is always becoming evident that the permanent good like naptha is for the soul only, cannot be retained in society or form’.³³ Imposed political forms would never be sufficient to sustain the social good, but would melt away into vapour, just like mothballs. Richard Poirier has remarked that ‘Emerson brings to the constitutional crisis of his day an improvisational approach to language skeptical of the fixity or finality of any expression…The outcomes in this creative process are mere resting places, temporary pauses while the energy for another revision gathers’.³⁴ To some extent this resistance to an ending explains Emerson’s ambivalent response to the 1848 revolutions: to him, they were passing ‘scrambles’ that represented a step on the endless stair, a pause, a gathering of energy, reculer pour mieux sauter.

With the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act in September 1850, fugitivity took on a new and inescapably political dimension. Congress, in the wake of the Mexican War, passed the Compromise of 1850, a series of five acts which included the Fugitive Slave Act.³⁵ The Act made it a crime in the Northern States not to turn in to custody any slave escaping from the South. While both Emerson and Douglass had started to shift their political thinking in Europe in the late 1840s, it was the Fugitive Slave Act that finally propelled Emerson into furious political engagement. Emerson felt that the Act shamed him out of his study: ‘[e]very liberal study is discredited: Literature and science appear effeminate, and the hiding of the head.’³⁶ Both men saw the Act as a direct contravention of the spirit of the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776. In 1850, Emerson asserted angrily that at least the current crisis had ‘ended a good deal of nonsense we had been wont to hear and repeat, on…the fourth of July’.³⁷ And Douglass responded to the Act with the most powerful and moving of all his speeches, ‘The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro’.³⁸ Their disgust at the Fugitive Slave Act drove them both back to the American myth of origin, and to the Constitution, with its perplexing first person plural of ‘We, the people’. Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo has said of Douglass that ‘[a]t various moments in his autobiographies, his references to “we” refer to “we” slaves, “we” Americans, and “we” Black Americans. The grounds of his notions vary from geographical to experiential to national to ideological. Tension between all of these “wes” as well as between the “wes” and the “I” permeates all the autobiographies.’³⁹ But it is a self-conscious and carefully modulated tension, on the assumption that all the ‘wes’ must finally collapse together in a democracy. As Jason Frank has recognized, the constitution of the people is always incomplete, ‘its persistent latency or virtuality, from the paradoxical political reality that the people are forever a people that is not …yet’.⁴⁰ Douglass’s ‘we’ is necessarily a proleptic ‘we’.

The logic of Douglass’s demographic-democratic argument also demanded the inclusion of another excluded fifty per cent of Americans: women. Soon after his return to America, Douglass was a delegate at the first Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in upstate New York in July 1848, where he argued that ‘if that government is only just which governs by the free consent of the governed, there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the exercise of the elective franchise, or a hand in making and administering the laws of the land. Our doctrine is, that “Right is of no sex”.’⁴¹ He was quoting from the masthead of his own paper: the declaration that ‘RIGHT IS OF NO SEX’ appeared on the front of the North Star every week. 1848 had created a productive and transnational moment for campaigners for women’s rights: ‘[i]n the United States, as well as France and many German states, women’s movements arose under “the sun of 1848” ’.⁴² Douglass’s feminism related closely to his position on race, for, in Denise Riley’s words, ‘both a concentration on and a refusal of the identity of “women” are essential to feminism’, just as a concentration on and a refusal of ‘blackness’ as a determining category were essential to Douglass’s campaign for inclusion.⁴³

Douglass had been very early in recognizing the disruptive power of the fugitive. He saw the instability of the slave as subject and the challenge of the unstable subject to the modern nation state. He had also seen clearly that the constitutional reforms of 1848 in Europe were not purely national affairs but were rather repeated iterations of an international phenomenon. As Douglass saw it, ‘[t]his spirit cannot be bound by geographical boundaries or national restrictions’.⁴⁴ The spirit of Liberty in 1848 had seemed fugitive and unbindable as constitutionalism had played out serially across Europe. From all he had seen in England and in Ireland, Douglass had chosen the idea of constitutional reform rather than that of revolution as his take-home message. Soon after he had arrived in Belfast in 1845, he had excoriated America and threatened ‘to tear down their star-spangled banner, and, with its folds, bind up the bleeding wounds of the lacerated slaves. (Great cheering).’⁴⁵ But when he got back to the States, he had decided that rather than ripping the flag into bandages, the only way to heal slavery was for the star-spangled banner to become ‘ours’ and not ‘theirs’. Douglass did not want to bandage and recuperate black people so that they could supplicate for entry into the Constitution. His plan was more radical than that. He proposed to use the figure of black fugitivity to disrupt America and to remake it.⁴⁶ As Douglass now saw it, white Americans could not possibly claim to be citizens under the Constitution until they had rebuilt the whole Constitution to include all Americans. It was not, in his view, a matter of adding to or extending the current dispensation, but of a total rethinking of the nation, which necessitated a return to its origins on that humid July day in 1776 in the Assembly Room of the State House of Philadelphia.⁴⁷ The past needed to be properly understood so that America could be reconstituted, or, rather, properly constituted. In Douglass’s view, myths of origin can and must be rewritten. The revisionism he applied to his own autobiography he would also apply to the Constitution. In 1851, Douglass ran in the opposite direction from the Garrisonian position of Disunionism which read the Constitution as a pro-slavery document.⁴⁸ Instead, he praised ‘the fathers of this republic’ for the forward-looking open-endedness of the Constitution: ‘[w]ith them, nothing was “settled” that was not right’.⁴⁹ Constituting connects to fugitivity because the practice of making a constitution is predicated on abandonment and remaking. In this radical view, the past is not settled.⁵⁰ Douglass’s atemporal form allowed him to return and reconstitute the past in order to recalibrate the possibilities available in the present.⁵¹

In 1848 across Europe there emerged a ‘virtual’ constitution of rights understood as serial, and therefore as universal, as a result of the transnationalism of that revolutionary moment. Both Emerson and Douglass were inspired by this universalism. These transnational universal rights could be, and were, captured and tethered in national written forms. But subsequently this meant that those very rights would be delivered through national constitutions that reinscribed racial and gender categories and undermined their universalism. Neither Douglass nor Emerson predicted the rise and triumph of racist and xenophobic nationalism over the universalist and seemingly emancipatory nationalism of 1848. In the classical republican tradition, the polis granted citizenship and had traditionally been cast in terms of the opposition between ‘liber and servus, citizen and slave’, and, on this classical model, the nineteenth-century citizen was ‘an always already free white European or white American male, posited as the subject of rights’.⁵² Slaves were the opposite of citizens. But in 1848, two versions of republicanism intersected and the mix offered opportunities for rethinking the republic in ways that Douglass immediately grasped. The American and French versions of citizenship in the nineteenth century had been distinct, the French version resting on the natural rights that every man is born with, the American on the necessity of civilized government to confer rights on its citizens.⁵³ Yet 1848 seemed to open the possibility of universal citizenship on the French model as well as offering the protection of the written national constitution and national government on the American model. For both Emerson and Douglass, back from their travels, global connectivity offered an important solution to the particularism of American politics. Douglass wrote that

it is somewhat remarkable that, at a time when knowledge is so generally diffused, when the geography of the world is so well understood—when time and space, in the intercourse of nations, are almost annihilated—when oceans have become bridges—the earth a magnificent ball—the hollow sky a dome—under which a common humanity can meet in friendly conclave—when nationalities are being swallowed up—and the ends of the earth are being brought together—I saw it is remarkable—nay, it is strange that there should arise a phalanx of learned men—speaking in the name of science—to forbid the magnificent reunion of mankind into one brotherhood.⁵⁴

Nationalities were not, however, being swallowed up quite as Douglass hoped, and he was only half right when he declared in 1854 that, because of transnational technological connectivity, ‘[n]o nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world’. Douglass wrote that ‘[i]ntelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth’, referencing the new submarine telegraphic technologies, just as Emerson did in a lecture he gave in Dundee, Scotland, during the 1848 Paris revolution, and as London was introducing gas-lighting in its streets: ‘[t]he social day has come to be divided and arranged by the time-tables of the Railway. See how the clocks of this country have been changed to astronomic-time, and all the sea submits to the invading thrills of the electric telegraph.…The day is indebted to the penny post, the night to the gas-company.’⁵⁵ In the same lecture, Emerson declared his universalism in both spatial and temporal terms, saying that we are all capable of becoming ‘citizens of the world, and at home in all ages’.⁵⁶ Douglass and Emerson began to share a faith in an unbound, non-national liberalism which seems to be automatically delivered by new technologies and by market liberalism. In his third autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), Douglass recalls the first wages he earned, ‘two silver half-dollars’ for shifting some coal, and how the money ‘swelled [his] heart’, and left him untroubled by ‘all [capitalism’s] illusions as to liberty’, as diagnosed by Marx.⁵⁷ Instead, Douglass celebrated ‘commerce’ which he connected with the ‘growth of intelligence’, believing that it worked against the practice of slavery.⁵⁸ But how had both Emerson and Douglass come to change their thinking so much by the end of the 1840s, and what exactly had been the effects of their European experiences?

‘The Heart at the Center of the Universe’: Universalism and Scale in Emerson’s ‘Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century’

Between 1844 and 1849, something momentous had shifted in Emerson’s world view.⁵⁹ The scale of his thinking changed. Back in 1844, on that rainy August day in Concord, Emerson had been speaking in the local character of the great white Boston sage, and Douglass was Garrison’s sideshow, in the local character of the escaped black slave. The New England abolitionists had been trying to recruit Emerson to their cause for some time. His marriage to Lydia (later Lidian) Jackson in 1835, herself a committed abolitionist, and the couple’s move to Concord, a centre of abolitionist activity and an important stop on the Underground Railway, had brought Emerson closer to the campaigning hub, but he continued to hold back. Privately, he shared Margaret Fuller’s repulsion for the earnest abolitionists, calling them ‘an altogether odious set of people…the worst of bores & canters’.⁶⁰ After the August meeting he wrote to Carlyle, ‘[t]hough I sometimes accept a popular call, & preach on Temperance or the Abolition of slavery, as lately on the First of August, I am sure to feel as soon as I have done with it, what an intrusion it is into another sphere & so much loss of virtue in my own’.⁶¹ He trusts Carlyle, in particular, to understand this need for scholarly distance and to sympathize with his horror of noisy populism. In Concord, Emerson sighed, ‘every third man lectures on Slavery’.⁶² But this was not, perhaps, quite the whole story of his reluctance.

In his courthouse address, Emerson had experimented with a language of violence and bodiliness that was unfamiliar to him. He had described slave ships ‘in whose filthy hold[s] [the slave] sat in irons, unable to lie down; bad food, and insufficiency of that; disenfranchisement; no property in the rags that covered him; no marriage, no right in the poor black woman that cherished him in her bosom,—no right to the children of his body’, adding, ‘the stomach rises with disgust, and curses slavery’.⁶³ His own nausea, the slave’s abused and tortured body: these were hardly Transcendentalist subjects, and Emerson felt that in trying to address them, ‘my genius deserts me, no muse befriends, no music of word or thought accompanies. Bah!’⁶⁴ The insistently material body with its obdurate lack of metaphoricity acted as a block on his literary creativity, but there is no disguising the racism of the disavowal here too. For it is the black body that he can neither see, nor see beyond. In his journal on 2 December 1836, Emerson had written ‘I think it cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise ever to occupy any very high place in the human family’.⁶⁵ In the 1830s and 1840s, Emerson’s failure to abstract the individual from the spectacle of the black body hampered his ability fully to engage with the catastrophe that slavery had caused, and was continuing to cause, for the American project of democracy.

His travels in 1847 changed this. The poverty and abjection of white people that Emerson witnessed in Manchester during his stay in the city shocked him deeply, as we saw in Chapter 3. Douglass had witnessed even worse poverty in Ireland: ‘[w]omen, barefooted and bareheaded, and only covered by rags which seemed to be held together by the very dirt and filth with which they were covered—many of these had infants in their arms, whose emaciated forms, sunken eyes and pallid cheeks, told too plainly that they had nursed till they had nursed in vain’.⁶⁶ In Ireland, he felt that he saw the ‘wrongs of the whole human family’.⁶⁷ ‘He who really and truly feels for the American slave’, he wrote, ‘cannot steel his heart to the woes of others; and he who thinks himself an abolitionist, yet cannot enter into the wrongs of others, has yet to find a true foundation for his anti-slavery faith’.⁶⁸ Europe helped the American visitors Douglass, Emerson, and Fuller to decouple the mechanisms of oppression from race. Douglass noticed that ‘[t]he Irishman ignorant and degraded, compares in form and feature, with the Negro!’⁶⁹ By 1851, Emerson would be thinking comparatively too: ‘Africa has its malformation; England has its Ireland; Germany, its hatred of classes; France, its love of gunpowder; Italy, its Pope; and America, the most prosperous country in the universe, has the greatest calamity in the universe, negro slavery’.⁷⁰ It took Emerson much longer than Douglass to grasp the structural identity of social degradation, but in 1848 he was already forced to confront political questions in a more immediate and urgent way than was entirely comfortable to him.

In March 1848, Emerson had arrived in London from the North of England to find that not only were ‘French politics…incessantly discussed in all companies’ but that the French revolution was adding to the anxiety about the Chartist Petition which was to be carried to the Commons on 10 April.⁷¹ Emerson knew that violence was simmering in London, with gangs ‘breaking windows & stealing’, and he knew that ‘[a]t Glasgow, the mob has been fired upon’.⁷² When he attended a Chartist meeting in Holborn, he noticed that ‘the great body of the meeting liked best the sentiment, “Every man a ballot & every man a musket” ’.⁷³ But he did not predict an English revolution: ‘though there is a vast population of hungry operatives all over the kingdom, the peace will not probably be disturbed by them; they will only, in the coming months, give body & terror to the demands made by the Cobdens & Brights, who agitate for the Middle Class; when these are satisfied, the universal suffrage & the Republic will come in’.⁷⁴ He saw—correctly—the continuing ascension of free-trade liberalism in Britain. The Chartists seemed to him ‘pathetic…a constituency that cannot read & are drunk with gin’, and he felt that they were lamentably unsupported by a materialistic English middle class.⁷⁵ He was unimpressed, too, by the Irish Chartist leader, Feargus O’Connor, who had capitulated to Parliament, making it easy for ‘noblemen’ to dismiss Chartism as a ‘humbug’.⁷⁶

But when he reached France, Emerson changed his mind about Chartism. He realized that the Chartists were of the ‘Movement party’ like himself: ‘the time will come when these poor enfans perdus of revolution will have instructed their party, if only by their fate, & wiser counsels will prevail & the music & the dance of liberty will take me in also. I shall not have forfeited my right to speak & act for the Movement party. Shame to the fop of philosophy who suffers a little vulgarity of speech & of character to hide from him the true current of Tendency.’⁷⁷ The slippage from ‘they’ to ‘I’ to ‘he’ reveals Emerson’s ambivalence about joining any kind of party, even while he claims to do so. And these see-sawing pronouns mean that while he seems to espouse a radical individualism, he leaves his words equally open to communitarian or collectivist readings. His figure of ‘the music & the dance of liberty’ that will ‘take me in’ also suggests an agentless surrender to an extra-human powerful force. The Chartists, he says, will have an effect, ‘if only by their fate’, and Emerson would come to believe in the positive longer-term results of the 1848 revolutions, too.

The British utopian socialist John Goodwyn Barmby was one of those who felt that Emerson ‘wanted social sympathy’.⁷⁸ He had invited Emerson to tea with him in Bayswater in March or April 1848 just before Emerson left for Paris, and he remembered that ‘I had just returned from the French revolution of ’48, and had witnessed the inspiration of a nation, and my harmony was jarred by his not appearing to sympathise with the social movement’.⁷⁹ Emerson’s own trip to Paris in May, ‘for the purpose of seeing, on the spot, the fruits of the revolution [of February 1848]’, did not entirely change his mind about the social movement, but it did open his eyes.⁸⁰ As we have seen, he had been both fascinated and repelled in the revolutionary clubs of Paris by ‘the president with his bell [and] the fierce eagerness of the speakers, rushing from all sides of the tribune’.⁸¹ Emerson himself ‘wholly decline[d] “roaring” ’, and while he imagined his lectures as metaphorically calling ‘forth the splendid voice of four or five thousand men in full cry’ he was horrified by the reality of thousands of men politically combined in Paris, and confessed himself ‘heartily glad of the Shopkeepers’ victory’.⁸² Nevertheless, he noted with respect ‘the deep sincerity of the speakers who are agitating social not political questions, and who are studying how to secure a fair share of bread to every man’.⁸³ He felt this was ‘very good to hear’.⁸⁴ While he was in Paris he had confided in his journal ‘I have been exaggerating the English merits all winter, & disparaging the French. Now, I am correcting my judgement of both, & the French have risen very fast.’⁸⁵ From France, where he felt he was witnessing a genuine idealism in the early summer of 1848, he looked back at the materialism of the English and what he now felt was their obsession with utility. He came back from France and told his London lecture audience with some defiance that ‘truly I honour the generous ideas of the Socialists, the magnificence of their theories, & the enthusiasm by which they have been urged. They are the inspired men of the time.’⁸⁶

‘What is the religion of 1848? What is the mythology of 1848?’ Emerson asked his audience in June 1848 in the first of the new lectures he gave in London upon his return from Paris.⁸⁷ He called the series of six lectures ‘Mind and Manners in the Nineteenth Century’, and they were delivered at the Literary and Scientific Institution in Portman Square.⁸⁸ One of these new lectures, ‘Natural Aristocracy’, had been written before he left Manchester, but he felt that he had ruined his trip to Paris writing the others and he was still having to write furiously as he delivered the lectures in London, complaining that ‘I spoil my work by giving it this too rapid casting’.⁸⁹ These lectures, therefore, can be read as his live response to the 1848 revolutions, a little like the dispatches of his friend Margaret Fuller from Rome. Even Emerson’s considerable talent for abstraction was sorely tested by the tumultuous events of that year. He was never a systematic Fourierist or an Owenite socialist, but this strange series of lectures does show him attempting to model some kind of global system. To do this, he distances himself from the explosive revolutionary present political moment from which he is writing. The fact that Emerson never published this lecture series or produced the ‘kind of Book of Metaphysics’ that he had originally projected from the first three lectures, suggests that he did not feel that they were an entire success. Nevertheless, the 1848 lectures remain important as a record of a transitional moment in his thinking.⁹⁰ By the end of his stay in England, Emerson’s view of the French 1848 revolution had changed. He was not alone in recoiling from the violence that erupted on the streets of Paris between 23 and 26 June as a reaction to the abandonment of the ateliers by the government, the so-called ‘June days’ of 1848, which he read about in the British and the American press just after he had concluded his ‘Men and Manners’ series in London. When he came to revise the lectures for subsequent use in America, he would remove all direct reference to the revolutions.⁹¹ But the trace of 1848 remains even in the later versions in the shift of scale that Emerson had felt himself compelled to make.

The upscaling that is under way in these 1848 lectures had important results for Emerson’s thinking. In his famous 1841 essay on ‘Self Reliance’, Emerson had scorned the ‘angry bigot’ who assumes ‘this bountiful cause of Abolition’ and professes ‘incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off’ while his own neighbours were suffering. But is clear that by 1850, Emerson had dramatically moved his position on anti-slavery. From insisting on the impossibility of addressing a distant wrong (‘[s]orely as we may feel the wrongs of the poor slave in Carolina or in Cuba, we have each of us our hands full of much nearer duties’), he now insisted on the absolute moral imperative of doing so: ‘it is not possible to extricate oneself from the questions in which your age is involved’.⁹² This volte-face was largely the consequence of his second trip to Europe.⁹³ Emerson’s personal experience of ‘the pattern of movement, transformation, and relocation’, in Paul Gilroy’s phrase, on his travels during the 1848 revolutions challenged the scale of his thinking about ‘nation’ (a scale which had made Carolina very far indeed from Concord) to a new transnational scale (which refigures the map and draws Carolina close to Concord, and to Cuba, London, and Paris).⁹⁴ Such a change in the scale of his thinking creates a correspondent change in kinds and categories.

The results of this change in his thinking were momentous. After 1848, Emerson saw a series where before he had only seen the anomalous singularity of American slavery. Just as it had helped his friend Margaret Fuller, witnessing the 1848 revolutions across Europe helped Emerson apprehend the full extent of a global system of oppression. Bruce Robbins has described ‘the thousand gross and subtle ways in which we are told every day that people outside our borders are too distant to matter’, and 1848 had forced Emerson to realise his own error of scale.⁹⁵ He wrote to Lidian after his last ‘Mind and Manners’ lecture that ‘no harm was done, no knives were concealed in the words, more the pity!…and the assembly at last escaped without a Revolution’.⁹⁶ His ambivalence about his own political agency is clear, just as a problem of agency lurks in the lectures themselves, and it shows up again in the resigned tone of another comment to his wife, that ‘[l]ecturing is of little consequence’.⁹⁷ The ‘littleness’ he admits he is feeling confirms that what he encountered in 1848 was a largeness he could not yet fully reckon with.

Throughout the 1848 series, Emerson disdained getting entangled in discussions of ‘ “provisional” or “republican” or any other sort of government’.⁹⁸ Instead of political particularities, the revolution seems to have propelled him towards a new language of the universal:

For truly, the Heart at the center of the Universe, with every throb, hurls the flood of happiness into every artery, and vein, and veinlet, so that the whole system is inundated with the tides of joy. The plenty of the poorest place is too great; the harvest cannot be gathered. Every sound ends in music: The edge of every surface is tinged with prismatic rays.⁹⁹

He sees the natural and human worlds as materially connected, forming a vast circulatory system that delivers plenty to all. The idea of connectivity was far from new in Emerson’s thinking: in 1836 in the introductory lecture of a series on history, he announced that ‘[e]very being in nature has its existence so connected with other beings that if set apart from them it would instantly perish’.¹⁰⁰ But by 1848, his model of connectivity has become a dynamic and circulatory one, and his metaphors bespeak his new enthusiasm for physiology ignited by the scientific lectures he had attended in London and in Paris.¹⁰¹ The central image of this series is what he describes in his third lecture as ‘the superpersonal Heart’, a figure that represents the world as a connected organic system of circulation and cooperation.¹⁰² The move from conventional religion to a universalist model of a connected universe was not Emerson’s idea alone.¹⁰³ In the 1840s, thinkers such as the positivist Comte and the socialist Fourier were reaching to science for their models of the universe. It is difficult to reimagine the radicalism of this position now, but in the 1840s it represented a significant break, throwing out a bridge from persistent religious forms to think about the world on a cosmic, rather than a theological, scale. While this represented an escape from stultifying religious forms and hierarchies (it addressed women as equal to men, for example), it was also a deliberate response to the scientific materialism that was threatening that same religious belief. Emerson, like Comte, is appropriating scientific metaphor to turn it back on the materialists, and to argue for an organically whole universe animated by a circulatory system that can deliver an even distribution of resources. This universalist thinking was made possible partly by the emerging possibilities of technological connectivity and improving communications in the 1840s, alongside international examples of mutual aid, all of which challenged the bounds of the local and seemed to hold the promise of a fairer distribution of social good.

All this, perhaps understandably, left most of Emerson’s audience in 1848 somewhat bewildered. Henry Crabb Robinson said that Emerson’s first London lecture was ‘one of those rhapsodical exercises of mind…not easy to analyse or render an account of’.¹⁰⁴ Carlyle faithfully attended all six and described them to his sister as ‘pleasant moonshiny discourses, delivered to a rather vapid miscellany of persons (friends of humanity, chiefly)’ and he added that he ‘was not very much grieved at the ending of them’.¹⁰⁵ But Carlyle had reacted to the revolutions with ‘musket-worship’, whereas, in his third London lecture on ‘The Tendencies and Duties of Men of Thought’, Emerson suggested that the true ‘revolutionist’ ‘must be armed not necessarily with muskets & pikes—Better, if seeing these; he can feel, that he has better muskets & pikes in his energy & constancy…The way to mend a bad world is to create the right world.’¹⁰⁶ His insistence on ‘world’ rather than ‘nation’ and his repeated return to totalizing physiological metaphors throughout the series show him reaching towards a new scale of global dispersal and circulation. The ‘superpersonal Heart’ is, crucially, at the centre of a ‘system’, in Emerson’s word, and it feeds a connected network so that ‘every artery, and vein, and veinlet’ is ‘inundated’. The metaphor of an efficiently networked system which distributes resources evenly is surely at least partly inspired by the universalist aspirations of the 1848 revolutionaries.

Scale is Emerson’s real subject in these lectures. In his journal, he wrote that he wished ‘to make the student independent of the century, to show him that his class offer one immutable front in all times & countries, cannot hear the drums of Paris, cannot read the London journals, they are the Wandering Jew or the Eternal Angel that survives all, & stands in the same fraternal relation to all’.¹⁰⁷ Emerson’s personal and philosophical diffidence here becomes a radical form of withdrawal which is problematic insofar as it allows him to dodge direct engagement in the revolutionary moment before him, but it is also radical in his insistent refusal of nationhood as a primary identity. The student ‘in all times & countries…stands in the same fraternal relation to all’, he insists. His idealized subject, whom he refers to as the ‘student’ (and Emerson’s student is always a ‘he’), must never be embedded in the particularities of the crowd, which would afford him only a partial view of events, as Emerson himself had had experienced in Paris. In the second lecture, he laments the current state of the universities, but adds ‘[w]e will hope that the mended humanity of Republics will save us’.¹⁰⁸ His decision to speak of ‘Republics’ in the plural, rather than to focus his attention on any one of the faltering new republics emerging across Europe as he spoke, is another distancing strategy. Refusing small-scale national politics in favour of large-scale philosophy, he insists on the impossibility of understanding the present from the present moment.¹⁰⁹ As a result, the lectures generally disappointed his more radical followers.¹¹⁰ Emerson was used to this and unmoved by it, reflecting calmly that ‘[p]eople came, it seems, to my lectures with the expectation that I was to realize the Republic I described & ceased to come when they found this reality no nearer. They mistook me.’¹¹¹

The ‘Heart at the center of the Universe’ of his first London lecture makes a solipsism of his earlier transformation of himself into an eyeball. Famously, he had declared in ‘Nature’ in 1836, ‘I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God’.¹¹² Instead of the image of his own embodied perception, Emerson now offers us the embodiment of the entire universe.¹¹³ The shift is important. Emerson’s epiphanic vision of himself as an eyeball occurs in a very specific place at a very specific time, ‘[c]rossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky’; but the later metaphor is given no such geo-coordinates. This body belongs to everywhere and to everybody. Carlyle dismissed his 1848 lectures as ‘moonshiny’, and it is true that Emerson had partly concealed the scalar move that he was making out of the individual body and into the world, and towards a more complex and joined-up transnational view of the social. He has moved from the revelation of connected vegetable species he had experienced in the Jardin des Plantes in 1833 to a more three-dimensional physiological dynamic model of a universe, a republican body with intellect at its head.¹¹⁴ The journalist who was later to become Emerson’s biographer, Alexander Ireland, was one of the few who did recognize the half-hidden radicalism of these lectures, saying that Emerson spoke ‘with a daring independence’ and a ‘solemnity of manner which might have put kings in fear’.¹¹⁵

Related to Emerson’s emerging politics of distributive connectivity are his changing ideas about slavery. Try as he might to resist the immediate topicality of the 1848 moment, a new connection between the politics of labour and the American debate over slavery becomes explicit in the 1848 lectures. In ‘Lecture 3: The Tendencies and Duties of Men of Thought’ he declares that ‘[t]he secret of power is delight in one’s work’.¹¹⁶ This lecture pivots on a conclusion about the relationship between work and vocation, which was a subject that Emerson had been thinking about since the 1830s.¹¹⁷ But now his Parisian experience of the ateliers had sharpened his ideas: ‘[t]he dream that now floats before the eyes of the French nation that every man shall do that which of all things he prefers, & shall have two francs a day for doing that, is the real law of the world & all good labor by which society is really served will be found to be of that kind’. In this, Emerson was agreeing with the French socialist Victor Considerant, who had written that ‘real emancipation and true progress’ for the people would be in ‘well-remunerated work, [rather] than in winning political rights and a meaningless sovereignty for them. The most important of the people’s rights is the right to work.’¹¹⁸ For Emerson, the opposite of slavery is not freedom but the freedom of labour. In ‘Lecture 6: Natural Aristocracy’, he made a connection between labour and duty, criticizing the attitude the careless rich man shows to the poor: ‘[h]e eats their bread; he does not scorn to live by their labour; and, after breakfast, he cannot remember that there are human beings! To live without duties, is obscene.’¹¹⁹ Labour emerges as an important term of equivalence for Emerson, as for Marx. Like Marx, he believes the labour of a man’s body to be his own property, but, unlike Marx, Emerson’s good society rests on the free trade of labour, and he has considerable faith in unhindered commerce to resolve social problems. Indeed, Emerson positively dislikes the socialists’ rejection of possessive individualism. Although he congratulates them in ‘Lecture 4: Politics and Socialism’, Emerson also distances himself from ‘Mr. Owen’ and Fourier, ‘with all his brilliant social schemes’.¹²⁰

Across his 1848 lecture series, Emerson repeatedly returns to what Henry Wadsworth Longfellow described as his ‘Analogies between Mind and Matter’.¹²¹ ‘The world vegetates, like a bulb or an acorn’, Emerson explained, and ‘[t]he same course continues itself in the mind which we have witnessed in nature, namely, the carrying on and completion of the metamorphosis from grub to worm, from worm to fly’.¹²² These curious lectures failed to produce a metaphysical system as such, but Emerson strained across the six towards a bigger scale, a more global sympathy, and a new sense of the necessity of serial collectivity to deliver true ‘revolution’. ‘Revolutions of violence are scrambles merely’, he says, meaning that what we call ‘revolutions’ are no such thing, but might be a sign of a general tendency towards some later change in the development ‘from grub to worm, from worm to fly’.¹²³ ‘’Tis an infinite series’, he said in his second lecture, explaining that ‘[w]hilst the dull man seems to himself always to live in a finished world, the thinker always finds himself in the early ages; the world lies to him in heaps and gathered materials, materials of a structure that is yet to be built’.¹²⁴

By 1849, both Emerson and Douglass were both arguing passionately against despotism and oppression, and for the universal rights of human beings. By then, Douglass’s speeches in Britain reported in the American press had made him famous, and infamous, in America. When he declared in his parting speech in London that he was ‘determined to be honest with America…to denounce her high claims to civilization, and proclaim in her ears the wrongs of those who cry day and night to Heaven, “How long! how long! O Lord God of Sabaoth!” (Loud cheers)’, he did so in the full knowledge that this speech would be reported in the American press, complete with the echoing ‘loud cheers’ of the British.¹²⁵ Shortly before leaving Europe in July 1848, Emerson asked, ‘[i]f the law of love and justice have once entered our hearts, why need we seek any other?’, echoing the rhetoric of the newspaper that Douglass had set up in 1847 upon his return to America, which celebrated ‘that electric chain of imperishable love which…passing through the heart of every human being, unites him forever to humanity and to God’.¹²⁶ They both felt compelled to refocus these universalist ideas on the American nation in 1850 with the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act. At this point Emerson, addressing the citizens of Concord, declared that ‘there seems to be no option. The last year has forced us all into politics.’¹²⁷

Emerson and Douglass reached for similar strategies in the face of the revolutionary events of 1848. Emerson’s ‘super-personal’ heart is not very far from Douglass’s ‘net-work of human brotherhood’, although Douglass’s ‘net-work’ is not based on a physiological model but is inspired by ‘the vast conglomeration of our material forces’ he sees in the increasing technological connectivity of the 1840s.¹²⁸ Like Emerson, Douglass also developed a politics around the idea of labour. He argued that slaves must be American citizens precisely because they had mixed their labour with the very soil of the continent and, quite literally, built ‘America’ with their own hands. They already possessed the nation: ‘[a]ll this native land talk is nonsense. The native land of the American negro is America. His bones, his muscles, his sinews, are all American. His ancestors for two hundred and seventy years have lived, and laboured, and died on American soil.’¹²⁹

Douglass’s 1848

‘The Revolution of 1848’ was the subject that Douglass chose for his annual address in Rochester on 1 August 1848 to mark the anniversary of the West India Emancipation, explaining that ‘I look…with the profoundest interest on all these movements, both in and out of France. Their influence upon our destiny here, is greater than may at first be perceived.’¹³⁰ Within months of his return to America he had broken with Garrison and set up his newspaper. From its inception the North Star ran a series of articles on European politics, many of them contributed by his Scottish partner, John Dick.¹³¹ Douglass had early learnt the power of the press: he remembered how his previous owner Hugh Auld’s wife would snatch the newspaper away from him if she caught him reading it: ‘[n]othing seemed to make her more angry than to see me with a newspaper. She seemed to think that here lay the danger.’¹³² In Europe, he had stayed with Mary and William Howitt in Clapton and watched them setting up and editing their weekly Howitt’s Journal, and they had helped raise money by public subscription for his purchase of a steam press.¹³³ Now, instead of trying to steal a glimpse of a newspaper, he was editing and writing one, and all this during an exciting period of ‘[r]evolutions, outbreaks, and provisional governments’ which his European trip had equipped him to analyse and discuss.¹³⁴

Paul Gilroy has argued that Frederick Douglass’s ‘consciousness of “race”, self and society were profoundly changed by the experience of being outside America’.¹³⁵ But it was not merely the experience of being outside America that changed Douglass: it was the experience of being, specifically, in Ireland as the potato crop failed, and his exposure to Irish nationalist and Chartist politics on the eve of the 1848 revolutions. He understood the mechanisms of racism at work between England and Ireland: the racialization of the Irish people that worked to allow their sufferings to go unaddressed. He learnt new campaign tactics from the Temperance Movement and from the Chartists. He saw that Chartism was about self-emancipation while abolitionism was not. Douglass got much closer to the Chartists than Emerson did. The ‘moral-force’ Chartist leader William Lovett recalled a convivial night of singing when Douglass performed ‘a number of negro melodies’ and fellow Chartist Henry Vincent sang ‘the Marseillaise’.¹³⁶ Lovett described slavery as ‘a link in the same great chain of oppression that binds all multitudes in all countries and climes’, encouraging Douglass to think serially and internationally about slavery and political exclusion.¹³⁷ Douglass’s anti-slavery strategy of ‘moral suasion’, social uplift, and education was very close to that of the ‘moral-force’ Chartists, and the title he had chosen for his newspaper, the North Star, echoed that of Feargus O’Connor’s Chartist paper the Northern Star.¹³⁸ The North Star would explicitly align itself with Chartism: ‘[w]e are, if we understand Chartism, a Chartism; and we are even in favour of more radical reforms than they have yet proposed’, announced Douglass in its pages.¹³⁹ Richard Bradbury claims that because Douglass left Ireland before the ‘great upsurge of 1848…[h]e was no longer near enough to hear the arguments in favor of physical force that gained ground in the face of the government’s contemptuous attitude’.¹⁴⁰ But as an internationally networked newspaper editor, Douglass was plenty near enough to hear, and in its first year the North Star covered both the Irish famine and the European revolutions in depth, making links between these foreign political struggles and the institution of slavery in America while taking care never to collapse the differences between them. In March 1848, the paper reported the reaction in Ireland to the 1848 revolution in Paris: ‘[t]he excitement produced throughout the entire country by the news of the French revolution, has been most intense, and particularly so in the south-east and west…illuminations, bonfires and rejoicings have taken place’.¹⁴¹ And in April it reported in full Lamartine’s speech to the Irish Deputation that visited him in Paris.¹⁴² In his 1 August address in 1848, Douglass spoke warmly of ‘Ireland…the land of O’Connell…Ireland, ever chafing under oppressive rule, famine-stricken, ragged and wretched, but warm-hearted, generous and unconquerable Ireland.’¹⁴³ Yet, despite the growing pressure of immiseration in Ireland and in England, the North Star continued to hold firm to a policy of non-violent struggle: ‘[i]n all circumstances, we are inflexibly opposed to a resort to violence, as a means of effecting reform’.¹⁴⁴

Instead, the North Star maintained the emphasis on comportment of the earlier black press, advising its readers to ‘[b]e reserved, but not sour; grave, but not formal; bold, but not rash; humble but not servile; patient, but not insensible; constant, but not obstinate; cheerful, but not light. Rather be sweet-tempered, rather than miliar [sic: familiar?]; and intimate with very few, and with those few upon good grounds’.¹⁴⁵ In the same issue, an article on ‘Self-Elevation’ argues that to achieve equality, ‘[w]e must obtain literary acquirements,—a knowledge of the mechanic arts; a knowledge of agriculture, mercantile business, the learned professions, as medicine, the law, and all other attainments possessed by others’.¹⁴⁶ Douglass emphasized the hard work involved in this: ‘[w]hat we, the colored people, want is character, and this nobody can give us. It is a thing we must get for ourselves. We must labor for it. It is gained by toil—hard toil.’¹⁴⁷ Underestimating the tenacious grip of skin racism, Douglass believed that comportment and accomplishment would win freedom and social acceptance for blacks in America.¹⁴⁸

Nevertheless, the revolutions of 1848 posed a significant challenge to the North Star’s policy of moral suasion. Privately, Douglass, and his co-editor Delany, were perhaps already beginning to doubt this position. In the lecture that Douglass gave most often in this period, ‘What are the Coloured People Doing for Themselves?’, he applauded European revolutionaries: ‘[w]hile the oppressed of the old world are making efforts…it is a shame that we, who are enduring wrongs far more grievous than any other portion of the family of man, are comparatively idle and indifferent about our welfare’.¹⁴⁹ He complained that attempts to ‘call for a National Convention’ to work for ‘the emancipation of our enslaved fellow countrymen’ would produce about fifty responses, ‘but if we call a grand celebration of odd-fellowship or free-masonry, we shall assemble, as was the case a few days ago in New York, from four to five thousand’, at an expense which would be ‘sufficient to maintain four or five efficient presses, devoted to our elevation and improvement’.¹⁵⁰ And his colleague Martin Delaney agreed: ‘[w]hat reflection for the colored people of this country, that while the oppressed of France, Denmark, Sweden, Wallachie, Tunis, and even Bohemia…have demanded a restitution of wrongs, demanded liberty and had it conceded, we are comparatively standing fast, not yet having made the first stride towards it’.¹⁵¹ Douglass and Delany began to worry that their doctrine of self-help was not proving effective, and might even be counterproductive and slowing down the incorporation of black people into the American community. But they also saw that the 1848 revolutions were being fought for national identities which did not map neatly onto the situation of black slaves of African origin in America. Their responses to this would be different and would eventually lead to their estrangement from each other.¹⁵²

African Americans were in a position that was ‘anomalous, unequal, and extraordinary’, and Douglass sought to correct this.¹⁵³ Douglass wanted black people in America to be exemplary of the whole nation, and to be full citizens. But he recognized the complicated paradox of being ‘[a]liens…in our native land’, of being a part of a whole that simultaneously does not belong to the whole.¹⁵⁴ In the late 1840s, he is coming to understand that this leaves him in the anomalous position of speaking both from within the whole and from the excluded part at the same time.¹⁵⁵ He begins fully to articulate this paradox in the early 1850s, as he moves away from aspiring to an ideal of ‘unmarked universalism’. In an 1853 lecture, itself paradoxically entitled, ‘A Nation in the Midst of a Nation’, he articulated this doubleness: ‘as a colored man I do speak—as a colored man I was invited here to speak—and as a colored man there are peculiar reasons for my speaking’.¹⁵⁶ Douglass marks himself as ‘colored’ but then unmarks himself when he claims the nation as his own: ‘we declare that we are, and of right we ought to be American citizens. We claim this right.’¹⁵⁷ ‘We are, and ought to be’ citizens: this marks a definite development in Douglass’s thinking. Back in 1845, speaking in Cork, Douglass had disavowed constitutional politics to argue for the liberation of the body: ‘I am not here to call in question the propriety or impropriety of a Democratic Government, or to say anything in favour of any kind of Government. I am here but to urge the right of every man to his own body, to his own hand, and to his own heart. (Applause).’¹⁵⁸ But by the revolutionary year of 1848, he is already sounding a different note:

The Spirit of Liberty is sweeping in majesty over the whole European continent, encountering and shattering dynasties, overcoming and subverting monarchies, causing thrones to crumble, courts to dissolve, and royalty and despotism to vanish like shadows before the morning sun. This spirit cannot be bound by geographical boundaries or national restrictions. It has neither flesh nor bones; there is no way to chain it; swords and guns, armies and ramparts, are as impotent to stay it as they would be if directed at the Asiatic cholera. We cannot but be affected. These stupendous overturnings throughout the world, proclaim in the ear of American slaveholders, with all the terrible energy of an earthquake, the downfall of slavery.¹⁵⁹

1848 shows Douglass that the American revolution is incomplete. He sees at work in America ‘the violence of discursive formations that produce classes of disposable people’, and consequently he now reaches for an imagery not of the individual body, but of a dematerialized transnational spirit of liberty which ‘has neither flesh nor bones’.¹⁶⁰ Unlike Emerson who, as privileged, white, and male, is ‘unmarked’ and feels the need to differentiate himself from everyman without cutting himself off from the harmonies of the universe, Douglass’s philosophical task in 1848 is more complicated: to be both black and everyman.¹⁶¹ His decorporealization of the ‘Spirit of Liberty’ is a means of deracializing his anti-slavery argument, and reveals a shift from the French revolutionary ideal of the natural rights of man towards a contract of limited freedoms under a constitution.

Without abandoning universalist human rights arguments based on natural rights, after 1848 Douglass began to take a new interest in the polity of America and in citizenship as the source of rights. In 1852, speaking in the Corinthian Hall, Rochester, he proclaimed the American Constitution to be ‘a glorious liberty document. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them?’¹⁶² He moved away from Garrison’s anti-slavery campaign for the Disunion of North and South, and instead developed a complex pro-Union position that held to both a universalist version of natural human rights and, simultaneously, to a constitutionalism by which limited rights are conferred by a state. Democracy depended on an abstraction of the citizenry, and this necessarily had to pertain for all, as any partial or incomplete abstraction would destroy the very possibility of democratic community. ‘Human rights stand upon a common basis’, Douglass argued,

and by all the reason that they are supported, maintained and defended, for one variety of the human family, they are supported, maintained and defended for all the human family; because all mankind have the same wants, arising out of a common nature. A diverse origin does not disprove a common nature, nor does it disprove a united destiny. The essential characteristics of humanity are everywhere the same.¹⁶³

In other words, any attempt to bracket or set aside sub-sections of the population would pollute the purity of its abstraction. In a way, Douglass wanted to disappear, taking all his black compatriots with him, into the standardized grid of the state. Instead of ‘anomalous, unequal, and extraordinary’, he wanted black people to be standard, equal, and ordinary; but as a lecturer, his blackness made him stand out as an exceptional individual. The incommensurability between the spectacle of his own body and his project to decorporealize black Americans created the contradiction which underpinned much of his thinking and speaking in the 1840s.¹⁶⁴ But by the end of the 1840s, he had discovered a way to keep blackness and universalism in a perpetual and creative tension. From 1848 onwards, Douglass would maintain that it was possible to be black and ordinary, both ordinary in its banal sense of unremarkable but also in its statistical sense of ordinal, as one figure belonging to a series.¹⁶⁵ Emerson’s case was different, even opposite. Unlike Douglass, he did not have to work to depersonalize himself, because his white ‘Boston Brahmin’ status automatically conferred upon him ‘the privilege of abstraction’, in Lauren Berlant’s phrase.¹⁶⁶ Emerson’s anxiety was that the democratic grid was too rigid and stifling in its uniformity, that it required too complete a submission to current conventionalities. He wanted to find a way to bracket individuality whilst retaining consensus. This was his particular conundrum, and he acted it out by lecturing in the most impersonal way possible about personality. Both Douglass and Emerson took positions so far from the identity politics of today that they have become almost illegible to us. Both needed to find a way to bring the universalism they had learnt from 1848 into meaningful engagement with American constitutionalism. They achieved this through imagining a new constitutionalism that was serial and therefore flexible and responsive, forward moving, and open to reinterpretation. This is how they hoped to remake American history.

The revolutions of 1848 did not deliver on all their promises, but they did leave the majority of European countries with a written constitution which limited the absolute power of the monarchy. As historian R. J. W. Evans, reminds us, 1848 left in its immediate wake ‘universal suffrage in France; constitutions in parts of Germany and Italy; national rights, at least on paper, even in Austria, peasant emancipation and law reform, fiscal and commercial innovation’.¹⁶⁷ The revolutions did genuinely spell the end of the old regime, and the transnational revolution left perhaps its most important legacy in the communications and transport infrastructures which these new governments rapidly and cooperatively established across Europe and beyond in the 1850s. Europe after 1848 was a mobile serialized space, and many of its people had benefited by its constitutionalism which identified them as human in ways in which they had not been considered human before. The social had become undeniably political. Both Douglass and Emerson took this message back to America and both presented the possibility of alternative and inclusive social forms as a political question. They used their lectures to model the future of the social in a way which mimicked prophecy in making ‘mediations—between parts and whole, between specific communities and aspirations toward universality, between conscientious incorporations and national fantasy’.¹⁶⁸ It was the universalism implicit in the constitutionalism of 1848 that would lead inexorably to the American Civil War. And it was the subsequent development of nationalism away from universalism that would ensure the failure of reconstruction after the Civil War.

¹ Christopher L. Hill, ‘Conceptual Universalization in the Transnational Nineteenth Century’, in Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori (eds), Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), pp. 134–58, p. 148.

² Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, p. 183.

³ Samuel Moyn, ‘On the Nonglobalization of Ideas’, in Moyn and Sartori (eds), Global Intellectual History, pp. 187–204, p. 192.

⁴ Ibid., p. 190.

⁵ Ibid., p. 200. See also Moyn, The Last Utopia.

⁶ Emma Mackinnon, ‘Promise-Making and the History of Human Rights’, Humanity 9:2 (Summer 2018): 193–217, p. 194.

⁷ Paul Jefferson, Introduction to The Travels of William Wells Brown, quoted in Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 72. William Wells Brown visited Europe in 1849 and stayed in England until 1854, largely due to the Fugitive Slave Act. Like Douglass before him, he made a successful lecture tour of the UK.

⁸ FD published four versions of his autobiography: Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, an American Slave (1845); My Bondage and My Freedom (1855); Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881); and a revised Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892). They are all collected in FD Autobiographies.

⁹ Jack Halberstam explains, ‘[t]he movement of things can be felt and touched and exists in language and in fantasy, it is flight, it is motion, it is fugitivity itself. Fugitivity is not only escape, “exit” as Paolo Virno might put it, or “exodus” in the terms offered by Hardt and Negri, fugitivity is being separate from settling. It is a being in motion that has learned that “organizations are obstacles to organising ourselves”.’ Jack Halberstam, ‘The Wild Beyond: With and For The Undercommons’, in Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013), pp. 4–7, p. 6. Paula von Gleich suggests that ‘fugitivity is a figure of thought [that] enables us to accept the structural antagonism Afro-pessimism poses as well as reflect on the strategies and expressions of Black survival, perseverance, and sociability in an anti-black world’: Paula von Gleich, ‘Afro-pessimism, Fugitivity, and the Border to Social Death’, https://www.e-ir.info/2017/06/27/afro-pessimism-fugitivity-and-the-border-to-social-death/ (2017): 1–8, p. 4.

¹⁰ FD, Bondage and Freedom, FD Autobiographies, p. 349.

¹¹ RWE, ‘The Relation of Intellect to Natural Science’, RWE Later Lectures 1, pp. 152–72, p. 163.

¹² The description is Richard Hardack’s: Hardack, ‘The Slavery of Romanism’, p. 137 n. 29. But the disruption of chronology in Douglass’s work has been noticed by many others, George Shulman and Robert Gooding-Williams among them. See George Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

¹³ Bronson Alcott, ‘Fuller, Thoreau, Emerson…The Substance of a “Conversation” ’ (1871), repr. in Bosco and Myerson (eds), Emerson in His Own Time, pp. 58–61, p. 59. The Italian word for serial is collana [necklace].

¹⁴ RWE, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: English Traits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994) vol. 5, p. 56.

¹⁵ In Manchester, where he gave his first course of lectures on his England tour, Emerson was billed as ‘the greatest living writer of America’: ‘Mr. Emerson’s Lecture, at Manchester’, Hull Packet and East Riding Times (5 November 1847). ‘My books sell here quite actively’, he remarked to his wife, although, unfortunately, they sold mostly in pirated editions from the notorious William Tegg, with no profit to the author. Nature (1836); Essays [First Series] (1841); Essays: Second Series (1844) were already well known, and Poems was published in Britain the year before he arrived, in December 1846. RWE to Lidian Emerson (9 February 1848), RWE Letters 4, p. 14.

¹⁶ Adam Phillips, ‘Emerson and the Impossibilities of Style’ in Michael D. Hurley and Marcus Waithe (eds), Thinking Through Style: Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 135–48, p. 142.

¹⁷ Lowell, My Study Windows, p. 276.

¹⁸ ‘Finding as Founding: Taking Steps in Emerson’s “Experience” ’, Chapter 6 in Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 110–40, p. 138. Hannah Arendt writes that ‘the light that illuminates processes of action, and therefore all historical processes, appears only at their end’: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [1958] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 192.

¹⁹ RWE, ‘Self Reliance’, in Essays & Lectures, pp. 259–82, p. 271.

²⁰ RWE, ‘Natural History of Intellect’, in RWE, Natural History of Intellect and Other Papers (Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1893), pp. 3–59, p. 54. For a discussion of the development of the 1848 lecture ‘The Powers and Laws of Thought’ into the 1850 lecture ‘Natural History of the Intellect’, see Ronald A, Bosco and Joel Myerson, Later Lectures of RWE, vol. 1, pp. 134–6.

²¹ RWE, Natural History of Intellect, p. 54.

²² RWE, RWE JMN 16, p. 189. Jared Hickman claims that ‘[t]his vague notion of a vitalizing transcendence-in-immanence, which one might associate with Hegel, was everywhere in Douglass’s post-slavery milieu, so there’s no doubting he was conversant with it’, but he does not read Douglass as Hegelian: Jared Hickman, Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 144. See also Paul Gilroy, ‘Masters, Mistresses, Slaves, and the Antinomies of Modernity’, in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 41–71.

²³ FD, My Bondage and my Freedom, FD Autobiographies, pp. 304–5 (emphasis original).

²⁴ Eduardo Cadava suggests that Douglass drew on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in this first self-representation: “Douglass’s well-known story in his 1845 Narrative of the ways in which he learned to read and write draws directly from a passage in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein where the monster tells Victor how he acquired language.” Eduardo Cadava, ‘The Monstrosity of Human Rights’, PMLA 121:5 (October 2006): 1558–65, p. 1560.

²⁵ Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, p. 113

²⁶ ‘If any one has any doubt upon this point, I would ask him to read that chapter on slavery in Dickens’s Notes on America.’ FD, ‘Reception Speech at Finsbury Chapel, Moorfields, England (22 May 1846), reprinted as Appendix to My Bondage and My Freedom, FD Autobiographies, pp. 399–411, p. 401. FD referenced David Copperfield in a speech of 1867: ‘especially when the individuals are all humble “Uriah Heeps”. (Laughter)’. FD, ‘Sources of Danger to the Republic’, An Address delivered in St. Louis, Missouri (7 February 1867). For a discussion of Douglass’s appropriation of Bleak House, which was being serialized in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine as it came out in London, see Daniel Hack, Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 23–44.

²⁷ Robert Patten suggests that when he took up the editorship of Master Humphrey’s Clock in April 1840, ‘Dickens imagines himself as a conductor of a complex organization of writers, artists, printers, publishers, distributors, and readers.’ ‘Conducting’ as a metaphor for editing was also used by Dickens’s friend and illustrator, George Cruikshank, who referred to himself as the ‘conductor’ of George Cruikshank’s Omnibus (1846). Robert L. Patten, Charles Dickens and ‘Boz’: The Birth of the Industrial Age Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 24, 43.

²⁸ FD, My Bondage and Freedom, FD Autobiographies, p. 392.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ Convers Francis, Journal Entry (16 February 1837), quoted in Joel Myerson, ‘Convers Francis and Emerson’, American Literature 50:1 (March 1978): 17–36, p. 24 (emphasis original).

³¹ RWE, RWE JMN 4, p. 290.

³² From ‘Politics and Socialism’ (4), a revised version of ‘Spirit of the Times’ which had changed a great deal between February and June 1848: Jerrold’s Weekly Paper (17 June 1848), p. 790.

³³ RWE from Houghton bMS Am120.200 (8), quoted by Daniel Koch, Ralph Waldo Emerson in Europe: Class, Race and Revolution in the Making of an American Thinker (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), p. 153.

³⁴ Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 104.

³⁵ Paul Gilroy notes that a universalist ‘cosmic’ thinking reappears with Franz Fanon’s ‘unfashionable commitment to a new humanism’: Paul Gilroy, ‘Race and the Value of the Human’, in Costas Douzinas and Conor Gearty (eds), The Meanings of Rights: The Philosophy and Social Theory of Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 137–58, p. 138.

³⁶ RWE, ‘Address to the Citizens of Concord on the Fugitive Slave Law’ (3 May 1851), RWE Later Lectures 1, pp. 259–76, p. 261.

³⁷ Ibid.

³⁸ FD, Speech at Rochester, New York (5 July 1852), given to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society.

³⁹ Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), p. 122.

⁴⁰ Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 5. Best and Hartman describe this escapist predicament as the ‘sign of the political interval in which all captives find themselves’. The interval lies between the ‘no longer and the not yet’; it contains the ‘mutual imbrication of pragmatic political advance with a long history of failure’. In this political interval, they ‘find a representation in miniature of fugitive justice’, which they describe as the ‘master trope of black political discourse’. See Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman, ‘Fugitive Justice’, Representations 2 (Autumn 2005): 1–15, p. 3.

⁴¹ [Anon.], ‘Report of the Woman’s Rights Convention held at Seneca Falls, N.Y. July 19 & 20, 1848’ (Rochester, NY: John Dick at the North Star office, 1848).

⁴² Bonnie S. Anderson, ‘The Lid Comes off: International Radical Feminism and the Revolutions of 1848’, NWSA Journal 10:2 (Summer, 1998): 1–12, p. 9. ‘The sun of 1848’ was the phrase that Jeanne Deroin and Pauline Roland used in a public letter to feminists in the United States and Great Britain, so the internal quotation is from that letter reprinted in The Proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention Held at Worcester, October 15 & 16, 1851 (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1852), pp. 32–5. Pauline Roland and Jeanne Deroin were radical French feminists. Jeanne Deroin produced La Voix des Femmes in Paris in 1848, along with Eugenie Niboyet and Désiree Véret Gay. After the revolution, Deroin went to England where she published a bilingual feminist journal.

⁴³ Denise Riley, ‘Am I That Name?’: Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), p. 1.

⁴⁴ FD: ‘What of the Night?’, North Star (5 May 1848); repr. in Foner (ed.), Life and Writings, vol. 1, pp. 307–9, p. 308.

⁴⁵ [Anon.], ‘Mr. Frederick Douglass’s Address’, Banner of Ulster (9 December 1845).

⁴⁶ For more on this idea, see Jimmy Casas Klausen, Fugitive Rousseau: Slavery, Primitivism, and Political Freedom (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).

⁴⁷ Robert S. Levine suggests that ‘while Douglass sees all sorts of value in mobility, his anti-emigrationism and quest for leadership compel him to make a case for its limits’: Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, p. 142.

⁴⁸ Greg Crane recounts that ‘[o]n 7 May 1851, at the Syracuse meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society convention, Douglass shocked the meeting and the ranks of anti-slavery by summarily announcing his adoption of a radical reading of the Constitution’: Gregg D. Crane, Race, Citizenship and Law in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 110. See also Robert Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), esp. Chapter 5, ‘Douglass’s Declarations of Independence and Practices of Politics’, pp.162–209; and Neil Roberts (ed.), A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2018).

⁴⁹ FD, ‘What to the Slave’, FDP2, p. 365.

⁵⁰ Emma Mackinnon writes similarly about Hannah Arendt on promising and forgiving: ‘[i]n making promises, political actors narrate the past in order to contest its meaning for their present, to project possibilities for the future, and so to render certain futures possible. Promises reference and narrate the past not because it is fixed but because it is not; in this way, promises manifest freedom’: Mackinnon, ‘Promise-Making’, p. 194.

⁵¹ As Cody Marrs has put it, ‘it is precisely this kind of temporal refractiveness—this woven, nonlinear complexity—that obliges us to view transnationalism not as the antithesis of nationalism, but instead as a spatiotemporal sensibility that mixes the nation’s inside and outside and, in so doing, generates an alternative universality’: Marrs, ‘Frederic Douglass in 1848’, p. 467. In an interesting note, Marrs writes: ‘Another way to read these layered, chronopolitical responses to 1848 is, accordingly, through the politico-aesthetic figure of the “cut” or “break” in African American studies. James Snead (1990, 67) describes the “cut” as an underlying element of black aesthetics and argues that whereas European culture tends to code repetition as progress, the cultural traditions coming from Africa tend to present repetition as a variegated process in which “the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is [always] ‘there for you to pick it up when you come back to get it.’ ” Fred Moten (2003, 2–7), in a related vein, uses this phenomenon of the “break” to read Douglass’s portrayal of plantation life, positing that Douglass’s autobiographies expose the raw acoustics of slavery.’ Marrs, ‘Frederic Douglass in 1848’, p. 468 n. 4.

⁵² Philip Pettit quoted by Barnor Hesse, ‘Escaping Liberty: Western Hegemony, Black Fugitivity’, Political Theory 42:3 (June 2014): 288–313, pp. 305, 299.

⁵³ See Hannah Arendt’s explanation of this distinction in her On Revolution, p. 147. This is discussed in the Introduction to this volume.

⁵⁴ FD, ‘The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered’ (1854); quoted in Rice and Crawford (eds), Liberating Sojourn, p. 67. FDP1, pp. 499–525 (see esp. pp. 503–4).

⁵⁵ FD, ‘No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world…The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe… Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are distinctly heard on the other.’ Douglass, ‘What to the Slave’, FDP2, p. 386. RWE, ‘The Spirit of the Times’ (21 February 1848). This lecture started its life in 1839, and then became ‘Genius of the Present Age’ on 15 February 1848 at Edinburgh and on 21 February 1848 ‘The Spirit of the Times’ in Dundee. Later Lectures 1, p. 112. For the ‘extended genealogy’ of this lecture, see RWE Later Lectures 1, p. 110.

⁵⁶ RWE, ‘The Spirit of the Times’ (15 February 1848), RWE Later Lectures 1, p. 125.

⁵⁷ FD, Life and Times, and Karl Marx/Frederick Engels Collected Works vol. 35, Capital, Volume One (London: Lawrence & Wishart), p. 540. On 31 August 1846 in Bridgwater, Somerset, FD explicitly denied the parallels between wage and chattel slavery: FDP1, pp. 344, 365. See Richard Bradbury, ‘Frederick Douglass and the Chartists’, in Rice and Crawford (eds), Liberating Sojourn, pp. 169–86, pp. 182–3.

⁵⁸ FD, ‘The Antislavery Movement: Extracts from a Lecture Before Various Anti-Slavery Bodies, in the Winter of 1855’, Appendix to My Bondage and My Freedom, FD Autobiographies, pp. 445–52, p. 450. Robert Levine points out that Douglass has escaped from Southern organic agrarianism and he sees Northern economic freedoms as emancipating: Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, p. 134. While I agree, I would also argue that Douglass’s vision of ‘commerce’ as emancipatory is more transnational than this suggests.

⁵⁹ Leslie Eckel argues that in English Traits (1856), ‘Emerson transformed his patriotic gestures of the 1840s into statements advocating universalism over nationalism in the 1850s’, and this book marks his turn away from patriotism or nationality to offer a cosmopolitan view of the ‘old largeness’: see Eckel, Atlantic Citizens, pp. 99–126, p. 112. I argue that this shift is already happening earlier in Emerson’s career. For a ‘transnational Emerson’, see also Lawrence Buell and Wai Chee Dimock.

⁶⁰ RWE, RWE JMN 9, p. 120, quoted in Janet Kemper Beck, Creating the John Brown Legend: Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Child and Higginson in Defense of the Raid on Harpers Ferry (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2009), p. 29.

⁶¹ The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Joseph Slater (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 373.

⁶² RWE, RWE JMN 5, p. 505.

⁶³ RWE, ‘Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies’, in Emerson’s Anti-slavery Writings, pp. 9–10.

⁶⁴ RWE, RWE JMN 5, p. 479.

⁶⁵ RWE, RWE JMN 12, p. 152. Emerson was equally dismissive of the abilities and potential of Native Americans, Chinese people, and the Irish.

⁶⁶ Frederick Douglass, ‘Thoughts and Recollections of a Tour in Ireland’, AME Church Review 3 (1886): 139–40.

⁶⁷ Ibid., p. 139.

⁶⁸ Ibid., p. 141. See Patricia Ferreira, ‘All But “A Black Skin and Wooly Hair”: Frederick Douglass’s Witness of the Irish Famine’, American Studies International 37:2 (June 1999): 69–83.

⁶⁹ FD, ‘Negro Claims Ethnographically Considered’, in FD Life and Writings, vol. 2, p. 305. See also Hardack, ‘The Slavery of Romanism’, pp. 115–40. It is important to remember, though, that FD never equated the Irish, however miserable, with slaves: ‘The Irishman is poor, but he is not a slave. He may be in rags, but he is not a slave.’ FD, ‘The Nature of Slavery’, Address given at Rochester, NY (1 December 1850) and subsequently printed in My Bondage and My Freedom, FD Autobiographies, pp. 419–24, pp. 422–3.

⁷⁰ RWE, ‘Address to the Citizens of Concord on the Fugitive Slave Law’ (3 May 1851), RWE Later Lectures 1, pp. 259–76, p. 263.

⁷¹ RWE Letters 4, p. 43. Emerson also noted the international networks in London and ‘the intimate acquaintance which all these people have with all the eminent persons in France’: RWE to Lidian Emerson (c.15 ? March 1848). When he arrived in England in October 1847, Emerson had already written ‘The Uses of Great Men’ series and he delivered 64 lectures between 2 November 1847 and 24 Feb 1848. ‘Napoleon’ was repeated on 14 occasions.

⁷² RWE to Lidian Emerson (8 and 10 March 1848), RWE Letters 4, pp. 34–5, 35.

⁷³ RWE, RWE JMN 10, p. 239. Reynolds, European Revolutions, p. 28.

⁷⁴ RWE to Lidian Emerson (8 and 10 March 1848). RWE Letters 4, p. 35.

⁷⁵ RWE, ‘Chartism’, Houghton Library bMS 1280.201 (7), quoted in Koch, Ralph Waldo Emerson in Europe, p. 188.

⁷⁶ Houghton Library MS, 201 (7), leaf 2, from the manuscript of a lecture that Emerson never completed; quoted in Reynolds, European Revolutions, p. 28. Typed version of 1848 MS. Houghton bMS Am1280.200(3); quoted in Koch, Ralph Waldo Emerson in Europe, p. 143. O’Connor was MP for Nottingham from 1847 to 1852.

⁷⁷ RWE, RWE JMN 10, p. 326. The ‘t’ of enfants is omitted. This is a common nineteenth-century French spelling of words ending in ‘-ant’.

⁷⁸ Moncure Daniel Conway, Autobiography: Memories and Experiences, vol. 2 (London: Cassell, 1904), p. 359.

⁷⁹ Ibid.

⁸⁰ WEF, p. 227. This is a description of Forster’s motive for going to Paris, but it stands for all these travellers in 1848.

⁸¹ WEF, p. 231.

⁸² Clough on Emerson, quoted in Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad, p. 270. RWE, ‘New England: Recent Literary and Spiritual Influences’ (30 January 1843), RWE Later Lectures 1, p. 44. RWE Letters 4, p. 73.

⁸³ RWE to Lidian Emerson (17 May 1848), RWE Letters 4, pp. 72–5, pp. 73–4.

⁸⁴ Ibid, p. 74.

⁸⁵ RWE (n.d. May 1848), RWE JMN 7, p. 468.

⁸⁶ Houghton Library lecture MS, 200 (8), leaves 77–8; quoted in Reynolds, European Revolutions, p. 35. Adapted from ‘The Spirit of the Times’ into ‘Politics and Socialism’ as it was given at Marylebone.

⁸⁷ First lecture: ‘The Powers and Laws of Thought’. The direct references to 1848 were excised from the published lecture. Quoted in James Elliott Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1887), vol. 2, p. 177. According to Bocso and Myerson, three manuscripts—two complete and one incomplete—of ‘The Powers and Laws of Thought’ are preserved in the Houghton Library of Harvard University. One of these is the script for the 1848 London performance. RWE Later Lectures 1, p. 134.

⁸⁸ The ‘Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century’ series ran from 6 to 17 June 1848 at the Literary and Scientific Institution, 17, Edwards Street, Portman Square, London. The lectures started at 4 o’clock and were given in the following order: (1)‘Powers and Laws of Thought’; (2)‘Relation of the Intellect to Natural Science’; (3)‘Tendencies and Duties of Men of Thought’; (4)‘Politics and Socialism’; (5)‘Poetry and Eloquence’; and (6)‘Natural Aristocracy’. Emerson also gave an extra lecture, ‘The Superlative’, on 26 June. Between 23 and 30 June, Emerson gave three lectures at Exeter Hall in the Strand, under the auspices of the Metropolitan Early Closing Association, with much lower ticket prices than the Marylebone ones. These were the old favourites ‘Napoleon’, ‘Domestic Life’, and ‘Shakespeare’.

⁸⁹ Emerson wrote to his wife that he had spent the last fortnight in Manchester, ‘where I have written a lecture on Natural Aristocracy, which I am to read in Edinburgh tomorrow’: RWE to Lidian Emerson (10 February 1848), RWE Letters 4, p. 15. He complained to Margaret Fuller from Paris that ‘I have spoiled my visit here very much by bringing my portfolio of papers to prepare lectures for London’: RWE to Margaret Fuller (31 May 1848), RWE Letters 4, p. 78.

⁹⁰ RWE to Margaret Fuller (25 April 1848), RWE Letters 4, p. 63. Emerson thought of the first three lectures as the beginning of a project on the ‘Natural History of the Intellect’.

⁹¹ In 1848, with revolutions still active around Europe, Emerson had evinced some revolutionary and Chartist sympathy. In the version of his lecture on ‘Natural Aristocracy’ that he gave in his 1848 series, for example, he asked ‘if the perfumed gentleman…who serves the people in no wise…goes about to set ill examples and corrupt them, who shall blame them if they shoot him in the back, or burn his barns, or insult his children…Not I.’ After hearing the lecture, Lord Morpeth quietly asked Emerson to ‘leave that passage out’ in future, and Emerson did so. Quoted in Koch, Ralph Waldo Emerson in Europe, p. 154. Koch adds, ‘[a] variation of the quote was included in the version of “Aristocracy” published in Lectures and Biographical Sketches…Reynolds noted that the manuscript shows that Emerson removed the “last half of the sentence and then the entire passage from the lecture” (European Revolutions, 41) though it is uncertain when’: Koch, Ralph Waldo Emerson in Europe, p. 269 n. 171.

⁹² RWE, speech in Concord (November 1837) reported in Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2, p. 426. RWE, ‘The Fugitive Slave Law’ (1854), in Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, ed. Gougeon and Myerson, pp. 84–5.

⁹³ Len Gougeon argues that Emerson continued to view slavery as a matter of private conscience rather than one of collective social responsibility: see Len Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990). Emerson had visited Europe once before, in 1833, when he met J. S. Mill, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle. He combined his experiences of both European trips in English Traits (1856). In 1833, he had found Paris a ‘loud modern New York of a place’ (Paris, 20 June 1833), RWE JMN 4, p. 197.

⁹⁴ Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. xi. There were other contributory factors to Emerson’s espousal of abolitionism. Emerson’s friend Judge Hoar and his daughter Elizabeth travelled to South Carolina in November 1844 to protest against the way in which free blacks were seized and imprisoned when entering Southern harbours on Northern ships. They were attacked and had to flee for their lives. Emerson was shocked and angry. He wrote a furious letter to the New-York Daily Tribune about the affair and signed a petition against the annexation of Texas. The Mexican War of 1846 and the acquisition of more slave-states was also what convinced Margaret Fuller to leave for Europe. The Fugitive Slave Law was a part of the Compromise of 1850, so that California was admitted to the Union as a free state (a non slave-state). RWE was horrified by Daniel Webster’s support of the law.

⁹⁵ Bruce Robbins, ‘Introduction, Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism’, in Robbins and Cheah (eds), Cosmopolitics, p. 12.

⁹⁶ RWE, Letters 4, pp. 85–6. Reconstructing these lectures as they were given in 1848 is difficult as none of them were published in Emerson’s lifetime, except ‘Poetry and Eloquence’ which appeared in 1870, heavily altered. I have relied upon Daniel Koch’s reconstructions and the conflated versions in RWE Later Lectures.

⁹⁷ RWE to Lidian Emerson (8 June 1848), Letters 4, p. 82 n.

⁹⁸ RWE, ‘Lecture 1: The Powers and Laws of Thought from Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century’, Later Lectures 1.

⁹⁹ Ibid., p. 151.

¹⁰⁰ RWE, ‘The Philosophy of History’ (8 December 1836), repr. in The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2, pp. 1–21, p. 17.

¹⁰¹ Even in his first lecture, in 1836, on ‘The Philosophy of History’, Emerson had thought about connectivity: ‘[e]very being in nature has its existence so connected with others that if set apart from them it would instantly perish’. And in 1840 he wrote in his journal, ‘[d]o not imagine that the Universe is somewhat so vague and aloof that a man cannot be willing to die for it. If that lives, I live; I am the universe.’ RWE JMN 7, p. 542.

¹⁰² RWE, ‘Lecture III: The Tendencies and Duties of Men of Thought’, RWE Later Lectures 1, p. 189.

¹⁰³ For a discussion of the similarities and differences between Emerson’s Transcendentalist thought and the theology of the Unitarian Universalists, see Ann Lee Bressler, The Universalist Movement in America, 1770–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 48–53.

¹⁰⁴ Robinson, Diary, vol. 3, p. 319.

¹⁰⁵ Thomas Carlyle to Jean Carlyle Aitken (19 July 1848), The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, vol. 23: April 1848–March 1849, ed. Clyde de L. Ryals and Kenneth J. Fielding (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 73–7, p. 76. Carlyle describes Emerson as ‘moonshiny’ twice in this letter, again at p. 75.

¹⁰⁶ RWE, Houghton Library MS 200 (9), leaf 45; quoted in Reynolds, European Revolutions, p. 40. ‘There will be no revolution, none that deserves to be called so…There will be no revolution until there are revolutionists.’ This from ‘The Spirit of the Times’, a lecture which he gave in Britain, and then self-plagiarized for ‘Politics and Socialism’. Houghton Library MS 200 (8), leaves 95, 101; quoted in Reynolds, European Revolutions, p. 42.

¹⁰⁷ RWE, RWE JMN 10, p. 328.

¹⁰⁸ RWE, ‘Lecture II: ‘The Relation of Intellect to Natural Science’, Later Lectures 1, p. 158.

¹⁰⁹ Largely because of his declared religious unorthodoxy, Emerson was widely considered to be a radical, and had often been prohibited from speaking in churches around England and Scotland. A pamphlet called Emerson’s Orations to the Modern Athenians described the four lectures at Edinburgh as French and revolutionary in their scepticism: RWE Letters 4, p. 18.

¹¹⁰ Larry Reynolds suggests that Emerson’s experience in Paris in 1848 ‘shifted his outlook back toward the left’; but ‘left’ and ‘right’ were political categories under construction in this period, and so the anachronism of this analysis does little to capture the complexity of Emerson’s shifting position post-1848. Reynolds, European Revolutions, p. 25. Daniel Koch also uses the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ in Ralph Waldo Emerson in Europe. See Norberto Bobbio, Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction, trans. Allan Cameron (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) for a usefully complicating discussion of these terms.

¹¹¹ RWE, RWE JMN 9, p. 49 (Journal U, 1843), quoted in Field, ‘ “The Transformation of Genius’ ”, p. 480.

¹¹² RWE, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971) vol. 1, p. 10.

¹¹³ Recalling RWE’s epiphanic moment on 13 July 1833 in the Cabinet of Curiosities in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, when he decided ‘I will be a naturalist’: RWE JMN 4, p. 200.

¹¹⁴ After 1848, Emerson decides that a ‘new religion’ will be founded on intellect. See Koch, Ralph Waldo Emerson in Europe, p. 146.

¹¹⁵ Alexander Ireland, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Recollections of his Visits to England in 1833, 1847–8, 1872–3 and Extracts from Unpublished Letters (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1882), pp. 51–2. Daniel S. Malachuk observes that “Emerson began to piece together a republican philosophy in his early lectures that would culminate in a progressive, liberal, and democratic ideal of self-reliance.” Daniel S. Malachuk, ‘The Republican Philosophy of Emerson’s Early Lectures’, New England Quarterly 71:3 (September 1998): 404–28, p. 425.

¹¹⁶ RWE, ‘Lecture III: The Tendencies and Duties of Men of Thought’, Later Lectures 1, p. 184.

¹¹⁷ Emerson spoke on vocation and work in his lecture ‘Trades and Professions’, delivered in Boston on 2 February 1837 and in Concord on 27 November 1839, and ended by saying ‘labor is the Potentate, the Civilizer, the Teacher of the World’: The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2, pp. 113–28, p. 128.

¹¹⁸ Cited in Jonathan Beecher, Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), p. 143; quoted in Moyn, The Last Utopia, p. 35.

¹¹⁹ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lectures and Biographical Sketches (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1883), p. 46.

¹²⁰ ‘The Spirit of the Times’, Later Lectures 1, p. 118. It seems that Emerson used a revised version of part of his 1839 lecture ‘The Spirit of the Times’ in ‘Politics and Socialism’: see Bosco and Myerson’s headnote to ‘The Spirit of the Times’ in Later Lectures 1, p. 102. Emerson says the world awaits a ‘moral engineer’ who will transform it as much as George Stephenson in the mechanical world. Quoted in Koch, Ralph Waldo Emerson in Europe, p. 149. See also RWE JMN 10, p. 300 and the account of this lecture in Jerrold’s Weekly Paper (17 June 1848): 790. RWE, ‘Lecture II: The Relation of Intellect to Natural Science’, Later Lectures 1, p. 165.

¹²¹ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow went to Emerson’s lecture on 22 January at Freeman Place Chapel: quoted in Later Lectures 1, p. 131.

¹²² RWE, ‘The Spirit of the Times’, Later Lectures 1, p. 116 and RWE, ‘Mind and Manners’, Later Lectures 1, p. 178.

¹²³ RWE, ‘The Spirit of the Times’, Later Lectures 1, p. 119.

¹²⁴ RWE, ‘Lecture II: The Relation of Intellect to Natural Science’, Later Lectures 1, p. 166.

¹²⁵ FD, ‘Farewell Speech to the British People’ (30 March 1847), London Tavern, FDP2, p. 23.

¹²⁶ Recorded in Mrs Bray’s notebook, after Emerson’s visit to Coventry, where he spent the day with the Brays and met Mary Ann Evans (later George Eliot). Mrs Bray remembers Emerson said these words ‘(as he sat in the drawing room window, July 12^th 1848)’: Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad, p. 275. H.M.P., ‘Thoughts on the League of Universal Brotherhood’, North Star (12 May 1848).

¹²⁷ RWE, ‘Address to the Citizens of Concord on the Fugitive Slave Law’ (3 May 1851), Later Lectures 1, pp. 259–76, pp. 259–60.

¹²⁸ FD, ‘The Antislavery Movement: Extracts from a Lecture Before Various Anti-Slavery Bodies, in the Winter of 1855’, Appendix to My Bondage and My Freedom, FD Autobiographies, pp. 445–52, p. 450.

¹²⁹ FD, ‘Why is the Negro Lynched?’ The Lesson of the Hour (1894), in FD Life and Writings 4, pp. 491–523, p. 513.

¹³⁰ FD, ‘Frederic Douglass’s Address (1 August)’, North Star (4 August 1848).

¹³¹ See Benjamin Fagan, ‘Revolutionary Closeness’, in The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2016), pp. 71–94.

¹³² FD, Narrative (1845), FD Autobiographies, p. 40.

¹³³ For an account of Douglass’s stay with the Howitts see Pettitt, Serial Forms, pp. 278–84.

¹³⁴ FD, ‘Frederic Douglass’s Address (1 August)’, North Star (4 August 1848).

¹³⁵ Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 132. Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford have also made the claim that ‘in many ways the 1845 visit can be seen as one of the key events of Douglass’s life’: Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford, ‘Triumphant Exile: Frederick Douglass in Britain, 1845–1847’, in Rice and Crawford (eds), Liberating Sojourn, pp. 1–12, p. 4.

¹³⁶ William Lovett, quoted in Bradbury, ‘Frederick Douglass and the Chartists’, p. 178. Lovett and Vincent were both organizers of the London Working Men’s Association, founded in 1836. Bradbury notes that Douglass was not connected to the black London Chartist William Cuffay, but this was probably because Cuffay was a ‘physical-force’ Chartist, and Douglass was not, at this stage, convinced by arguments for the use of violence.

¹³⁷ William Lovett to W. L. Garrison (1 March 1847), in Clare Taylor (ed.), British and American Abolitionists: An Episode in Transatlantic Understanding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974), p. 308, quoted in Bradbury, ‘Frederick Douglass and the Chartists’, p. 179.

¹³⁸ Although the ‘North Star’ also referred to Polaris, designated Alpha Ursae Minoris, commonly known as the North Star or Pole Star, which helped fugitive slaves find their way towards freedom in the Northern States.

¹³⁹ ‘Chartists of England’, North Star (5 May 1848).

¹⁴⁰ Bradbury, ‘Frederick Douglass and the Chartists’, p. 184.

¹⁴¹ ‘Foreign News’, North Star (31 March 1848).

¹⁴² ‘Reception of the Irish Deputation’, North Star (28 April 1848).

¹⁴³ ‘Frederic Douglass’s Address (1 August)’, North Star (4 August 1848).

¹⁴⁴ ‘Chartists of England’, North Star (5 May 1848). Levine calls this Douglass’s ‘temperate revolutionism’: Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, p. 16.

¹⁴⁵ North Star (11 August 1848), quoted in Hutton, The Early Black Press in America, p. 108.

¹⁴⁶ [Anon.], ‘Self-Elevation’, North Star (11 August 1848).

¹⁴⁷ FD, ‘What are the Colored People Doing for Themselves?’, North Star (14 July 1848).

¹⁴⁸ In a chapter of her narrative called ‘A Visit to England’, another fugitive slave, Harriet Jacobs, remarked that ‘for the first time in my life I was in a place where I was treated according to my deportment, without reference to my complexion’: Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, ed. Nell Irvin Painter (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), p. 204. See Goodwyn Jones, ‘Engendered in the South’, p. 98. Goodwyn Jones points out that in the South, slaves could feel themselves of different classes, depending on who they worked for and how trusted and intimate they were with a white family. She adds that the Northern ‘self-help’ doctrine ‘of gaining “social status through achievement rather than birth” in a culture based on family lineage’ was not really a possibility in the South. She concludes that in the antebellum South, ‘class identity may have appeared to be more stable than even race, gender, or condition of servitude as a marker of one’s “authentic” self’: pp. 96–7, 98.

¹⁴⁹ FD, ‘What are the Colored People Doing for Themselves?’, North Star (14 July 1848).

¹⁵⁰ Ibid. Paul Gilroy discusses Douglass’s position in this lecture in Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2000), pp. 222–3.

¹⁵¹ MRD, ‘Dear Douglass’, North Star (5 January 1849), pp. 3–4, p. 4.

¹⁵² Martin Delany developed an emigrationist argument and published Political Destiny of the Colored Race, on the American Continent, Proceedings of the National Emigration Convention of Colored People, held at Cleveland, Ohio, August 24, 1854 (Pittsburgh, PA: A. A. Anderson, Printer, 1854). In May 1859, Delany sailed from New York to Liberia in western Africa and negotiated settlement rights there for emigrant African Americans. His plans were disrupted by the American Civil War, but his split from Douglass was final.

¹⁵³ Frederick Douglass, ‘The Present Condition and Future Prospects of the Negro People’, speech at Annual Meeting of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, New York (11 May 1853), repr. in Frederick Douglass, Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner, abridged and adapted by Yival Taylor (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999), pp. 250–9, p. 251. Hereafter cited as FD Speeches and Writings.

¹⁵⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵⁵ Jason Frank has written about Douglass’s understanding of what ‘Jacques Rancière describes as “the part that has no part in the name of the whole” ’: Frank, Constituent Moments, p. 210. The quotation is from Rancière, Dis-agreement, pp. 1–19.

¹⁵⁶ FD, ‘A Nation in the Midst of a Nation: An Address Delivered in New York, New York, on May 11 1853’, FDP2, pp. 423–40, pp. 427–8.

¹⁵⁷ FD in an address on behalf of the ‘Colored Convention’(1853), in FD Speeches and Writings, p. 264 (emphasis original).

¹⁵⁸ ‘Frederick Douglass in Cork: Thursday 23 October 1845, Imperial Hotel Cork’, Cork Examiner (27 October 1845).

¹⁵⁹ FD, ‘What of the Night?’, North Star (5 May 1848); repr. in FD Life and Writings 1, pp. 307–9, p. 308.

¹⁶⁰ Best and Hartman, ‘Fugitive Justice’, p. 11.

¹⁶¹ RWE, ‘The Tendencies and Duties of Men of Thought’; all quotations from Koch, Ralph Waldo Emerson in Europe, p. 147.

¹⁶² FD, ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’ in FD Speeches and Writings, p. 204.

¹⁶³ FD, ‘The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered’ (12 July 1854), in FD Speeches and Writings, p. 296.

¹⁶⁴ Amanda Adams says ‘[h]is audiences saw him as representative and exceptional’: Adams, Performing Authorship, p. 23.

¹⁶⁵ Jason Frank has made a similar observation, remarking on ‘Douglass’s refusal of the opposition between racial particularism (a standpoint epistemology) and the supposed unmarked universalism of racial liberalism’: Frank, Constituent Moments, particularly Chapter 7, ‘Staging Dissensus: Frederick Douglass and “We the People” ’, pp. 209–36, p. 217. One hundred years after Douglass’s time, Frantz Fanon showed how ‘a normal Negro child, having grown up in a normal Negro family, will become abnormal on the slightest contact of the white world’: Frantz Fanon, ‘The Negro and Psychopathology’, in Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986), p. 142 ; originally published as Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (France: Éditions du Seuil, 1952).

¹⁶⁶ Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 13.

¹⁶⁷ R. J. W. Evans, ‘Liberalism, Nationalism, and the Coming of the Revolution’, in Evans and von Strandmann (eds), The Revolutions in Europe, pp. 9–26, pp. 23–4.

¹⁶⁸ Shulman, American Prophecy, p. 255.