Black Intellectuals, White Abolitionists, and Revolutionary Transcendentalists: Creating the Radical Intellectual Tradition in Antebellum Boston

This dissertation analyzes the activism and intellectual debates led by a community of radical abolitionists in antebellum Boston. This was a unique intellectual group: former slaves plotting resistance and revolution alongside Transcendentalist poets and utopian socialists. This work weaves a narrative history of the various debates and political crises from 1835 to 1865 with a rigorous analysis of abolitionist thought, illustrating the interplay between social, political, and intellectual history. This research reshapes scholarly conversations about New England intellectual life, emphasizing the radical political nature of Transcendentalism, the influence of black intellectuals, and the cosmopolitan nature of the ideas that developed from this alliance.;Black intellectuals were crucial to the development of New England thought. In organizations like the Adelphic Union and other intellectual clubs, they began articulating important ideas about the self, philosophy, politics, and the law that had profound influence upon the ways in which famous white intellectuals thought about these issues. Rooted in a Romantic worldview that drew from post-revolutionary Haiti as well as Germany and France, these thinkers are nearly forgotten contributors to the American intellectual tradition.;These intellectuals and activists came together during crises over fugitive slaves in Boston. One fascinating organization, the Boston Vigilance Committee, combined the efforts of black thinkers like William C. Nell, Robert Morris, and Lewis Hayden with white intellectuals like Theodore Parker, William H. Channing, A. Bronson Alcott, and even, at its peripheries, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.;This dissertation is ultimately about the motivations, ideas, and sources of commitment that inspired these black and white activists. I explore how they invented the concept of a "higher law" to justify violating the Fugitive Slave Act, how they celebrated a notion of selfhood that resisted being reduced to a performance of their social role, and how they consistently contrasted the injustices of American life with ideals of freedom and equality. Eventually these thinkers articulated a theory of democracy and equality that would pave the way for the programs of the Radical Republicans and other egalitarian movements during the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction.