Alexander Crummell—the black theologian, abolitionist, educator, and intellectual—was a close reader of European Romantic philosophy and literature. Romantics like Schiller, Wordsworth, and, especially, Samuel Taylor Coleridge shaped Crummell's political thought and personal philosophy. Crummell called Coleridge “a transcendent man,” and combined the British poet's Romanticism with political impulses from the black radical tradition. The intellectual trajectory of the black abolitionist demonstrates the deep political power of Romantic thought, which continued to be used and adapted by American and black intellectuals decades after it was first articulated. This black Romanticism was important because it demonstrates how an antislavery intellectual like Crummell—a consummate moralist—wanted to model a vision of selfhood which would encourage abolitionist commitments. Crummell was a theorist of the self, deeply engaged with normative discussions about what we might call the inner life of abolitionist politics. Crummell's vision of selfhood combined many sources—Coleridge's philosophy, the antislavery metaphysics of his former professor Beriah Green, and the specific needs of antebellum African American scholars. Seeing Crummell develop a theory of self that he thought would aid the abolitionist movement from such divergent sources illustrates the surprising mobility and dialogic nature of ideas about selfhood in the nineteenth century.
Few black Americans led a life of such a transnational travel and influence as Crummell. He spent the first twenty-nine years of his life in America, becoming an Episcopalian minister and leader in the black community of New York City. He left America in 1848 to get an education at Cambridge University, where he was the first black graduate of the modern era. From 1853 until 1872, except for brief trips back to the US, he spent most of his time in Liberia, helping to lead Liberia College and working as a missionary among the native peoples. During this period he published many of his major collections of essays and sermons—including The Future of Africa (1862). He came back to the United States in the waning years of Reconstruction and helped found a prominent black church in Washington, DC, quickly becoming a leader in the African Episcopal Church. Thus one of his greatest intellectual influences was the stamp he put on the theological and philosophical assumptions of the black church during the formative years after emancipation. Crummell, even in old age, never slowed down, and well into his 70s he was mentoring W. E. B. Du Bois, while helping to lead the American Negro Academy, and leading the resistance to Booker T. Washington's program of manual education.
Crummell's thought has always resisted easy ideological categorization. Even his mentee and admirer W. E. B. Du Bois noted the “weird pilgrimage” of his life and thought.Footnote 1 Born free in New York City, his life was shaped by racism, Jim Crow, and what he called the “grave-clothes” of slavery.Footnote 2 He was not the consistent radical that Frederick Douglass was, but even Douglass admired that Crummell was “a man who almost glories in his unmixed negro blood.”Footnote 3 His cold imperial personality (the colleague who called him a “born aristocrat” was not necessarily paying him a compliment) concealed an intellect formed in response to the fire of the Romantic Revolution.Footnote 4 Generally seen as more conservative than Douglass because of his embrace of Christian respectability and his emigrationist politics, he had, if anything, a more pessimistic view of the durability of white racism. An active adherent to the “elevation” ideology common to many antebellum black reformers, he ended up supporting Liberian emigration in order to develop and strengthen black institutional power. Simultaneously a black nationalist and cultural Anglophile, he created the strange spectacle of a black American seeking to convert what he called the “West African Pagans” to the language of Milton, the culture of Tennyson, and the religion of the King James Bible.Footnote 5
Yet, despite all of the twists and turns of Crummell's life, there is a core set of ideas about the politics of selfhood which remained largely consistent across Crummell's long life. In Crummell's ideas about politics and elevation we can begin to identify a particular type of Romantic philosophy specific to black abolitionist political philosophy.Footnote 6 Crummell's thought takes many of the philosophical assumptions of people like Coleridge, but adapts them to the antislavery struggle. Recent scholarship that has decried the influence of the Romantic spirit on antebellum reform has too often failed to ask why black reformers were also drawn to Romantic and Transcendentalist ideas.Footnote 7 Like other Romantics, Crummell celebrated intuitive and multidimensional forms of reasoning—criticizing the mechanically instrumental reasoning of liberal and utilitarian thought. He did so from the perspective that assumed that a proper style of reasoning would lead one to antislavery politics, and that therefore there were moral and political consequences to how we think. Crummell was drawn to visions of national destiny rooted in essentialist notions of racial identity; unlike others it was a vision that identified Africans as the ascending race of the world. Like many Romantics, he had a vision of self-culture, of individual becoming and development. But more so than Emerson or Channing, he tempered such perfectionist enthusiasm with the knowledge that injustice in the world shaped and limited the ability of individuals to achieve such self-making. Thus Crummell could never afford to dismiss the social aspects of existence, as some American Transcendentalists seemed to do. Individual human flourishing, he believed, could only occur within collective organizations that encouraged it: voluntary black-led social clubs, the church, and eventually a black nation. In the post-Kantian moment in American thought, he thought political and moral truths were rooted in an ideal nonmaterial realm, but, as an African American living in the Jim Crow North, he never abandoned a belief that the proper task of politics was remaking the very material world.
Crummell's appropriation of Romantic philosophy challenge how we understand the American reception of European cultural and intellectual thought in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Crummell's story disproves the common assumption that “when English Romanticism reaches American shores … it tends to be stripped of its political references.”Footnote 8 Whether or not this was true of white readers, Crummell's story demonstrates well that many black intellectuals eagerly embraced the political possibilities of Romantic literature. While there has been a renewed interest in African American intellectual history, the transnational roots of nineteenth-century black thought, the way that black thinkers were in an early dialogue with European Romantic intellectuals, are still underexplored.Footnote 9 We know that later African American thinkers read European and especially German thinkers carefully—whether it was Du Bois studying Kant or King citing Hegel. But a close study of Crummell's thought demonstrates an early black interest in European idealist philosophy and Romantic culture that well pre-dated Du Bois's famous trip to Germany. Meanwhile, literature on Coleridge's antislavery influence is not very large but focuses almost exclusively on his influence on white British thought.Footnote 10 The scholarship of American abolitionism increasingly emphasizes how American antislavery thinkers were engaged in transnational dialogue, but rarely include the thought of Romantics like Coleridge in that conversation.Footnote 11
Finally, Crummell's engagement with Romanticism helps us reconceptualize the new histories of Western selfhood. In recent years philosophers and historians have shown increased interest in the contexts of selfhood, the historically situated ways that that people conceive of things like our consciousness, reason, impulses, social expectations, bodies, and other characteristics that mark us as individuals.Footnote 12 In much of the late twentieth century, such language had fallen out of fashion in favor of narrow interpretations that seemed to reduce the inner self to little more than language games or the irresponsible antihumanism of people like Foucault for whom this humanist self-identification as a subject was exactly how power had governed individuals in the modern era. But towards the turn of the century, two prominent voices called us back to the history of selfhood: the philosopher Charles Taylor and, more recently, the historian Jerrold Seigel.Footnote 13 Although coming to very different conclusions, both helped to reintroduce the language of the “self” back into a historical profession that, I suspect, had earlier seen it as too close to the now discredited trope of studying the American “mind.”Footnote 14 The stakes, for both, are high. For the communitarian Taylor, the victory of a “punctual” disengaged self is evidence of his broader critique of modernity as involving an unhealthy rupture of self and society, a world in which religious belief seems untenable because we've inherited background cultural and intellectual norms that seem to preclude a default connection to God and world. Seigel, on the other hand, sees more to appreciate in modern life but is concerned, in part, with the ways in which certain theorists of the last part of the twentieth century had set forth what one historian has called an “anti-selfhood,” a notion of the human subject nearly wholly determined by social life and power.Footnote 15 The new history of the self is partly attractive because it offers a way out, by, especially in Seigel's version, celebrating the historical creation and debates around a “multidimensional self,” one that balances social influences with bodily and reflective components. While Seigel and Taylor differ on much, they agree that the self can both be a historically informed artifact, articulated as “an embodied and situated subjectivity,” and contain components of reflection and self-determination that cannot be reduced to power dynamics.Footnote 16 The history of the self, then, in some ways is the history of the background to our selfhood, these assumptions about morality, consciousness, instincts, and reason that frame but do not determine how we come to think of our individuality.
Looking at the life and ideas of Alexander Crummell both demonstrates the value in foregrounding the self as a historical question and challenges us to modify these narratives of the history of Western selfhood. First, both Taylor and Seigel's stories are nearly wholly Eurocentric. Seigel focuses entirely on what he considered the representative philosophical nations of France, Germany, and Great Britain, while Taylor only ventures from Europe occasionally. Both wholly discount black thought. But to the degree the history of selfhood wants to make comprehensive interventions in contemporary debates about selfhood, history, humanism, and politics it will have to demonstrate its relevance to a wider range of people, remembering that there were multiple competing visions of self, all inflected with differing experiences. Second, and more to the point, Crummell, as I hope to show, developed his ideas of an abolitionist selfhood in conversation with a series of interlocutors—the black members of his intellectual club, the white abolitionist Beriah Green, and, most importantly, the British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It's a reminder that notions of selfhood, even quite individualist ones, are, ironically enough, formed through discussion, dialogue, movement, and exchange. Finally, Crummell was the consummate traveler. An outsider in his home of New York City because of his race, he was educated at Cambridge and served as a professor in West Africa. He engaged with German, British, American, and African intellectuals and students. He thus was part of three different continents’ intellectual history. While Seigel tends to emphasize the national origins of ideas of the self, Crummell's story reminds us that ideas of selfhood are not always constructed out of national settings, but often in the flow between them, at their margins. If the history of the self is interested in background assumptions, it must be as attuned to the self's social life, to the dialogue between thinkers—the productive space between them—as it is to the self-contained thought of any one intellectual. Crummell's story demonstrates, I hope, that a history of selfhood that is attuned to broader categories of people, that pays attention to dialogues and conversations, and that concerns itself with transnational contexts, will provide a stronger claim for the importance of studying the self while revealing important things about the intellectual climate of nineteenth-century black thought.
Coleridge among the black abolitionists
From the very beginning, Crummell developed his ideas about politics and selfhood from a rich transnational intellectual dialogue. This began even with his famous attempts to get a basic education. Along with his friends and colleagues from New York—Thomas Sidney and Henry Highland Garnet—Crummell had attempted to receive an education at the Noyes Academy in New Hampshire. As Du Bois famously recounted in The Souls of Black Folk, a white mob soon destroyed the school, forcing them back to New York City. A couple of months later, Crummell and his friends decamped to the Oneida Institute in upstate New York, where they would receive their most meaningful formal education. The Oneida Institute was a unique place. There had been earlier attempts at interracial education in the Northeast but most, like the Noyes Institute, had ended in mob violence. Such had been the fate, for instance, of Prudence Crandall's attempt to educate black girls in Canterbury, Connecticut. But from 1833 to 1844, an idiosyncratic white reformer from Preston, Connecticut named Beriah Green—a “bluff, kind-hearted man,” as W. E. B. Du Bois described him—had helmed Oneida, perhaps the most fascinating attempt in democratic and inclusive education in the antebellum years.Footnote 17
Green's was one of many consciences set ablaze in the heady 1830s by abolitionist and perfectionist Christian ideas. An early convert to immediate abolitionism, Green had been pushed out of Western Reserve College in 1833 and returned east after preaching a series of radical sermons against slavery and the American Colonization Society. Accepting the presidency of Oneida in 1833, he immediately demanded that black students be admitted. Green detested the elitism of most schools and tried to encourage “originality of thought” and develop skills for “promoting the welfare and increasing the rightful influence of the common people.”Footnote 18 Crummell claimed that he experienced ” three years of perfect equality with upwards of one hundred white students” while at Oneida.Footnote 19 President Green himself took the lead in organizing antislavery societies on campus—a stark contrast with most antebellum colleges in which abolitionist societies were in constant conflict with college administrations and trustees. Arriving in 1836, Crummell, Garnett, and Sidney, like the other students, were expected to help earn their keep through manual labor: cutting wood, working in the pail factory, and running the printing press of the local abolitionist paper, the Friend of Man.Footnote 20
New ideas were in the air at Oneida: Romantic poetry, idealist philosophy, and radical abolitionism. Like the Transcendentalists in New England (Emerson actually came to admire Green), President Green had come under the spell of German idealism in the 1830s.Footnote 21 As was common in America, he did so indirectly, through British commentators such as Carlyle and, especially, Coleridge.Footnote 22 Green is thus historically interesting as one of the first Americans to apply the new German-inspired popular “mental philosophy” to the abolitionist struggle. Whether it was Green himself who taught Crummell to appreciate Coleridge and other Romantics, other students, or simply something in the intellectual atmosphere, Crummell came out of Oneida sharing much of Green's idealist approach to abolition and his concern over how materialist philosophy that denied human agency and free will could buttress slavery and northern inaction.
Green encouraged Crummell to see slavery as not just a political but also a philosophical problem. Green, as was common for college presidents, taught the course on moral philosophy, which he titled “Mental and Moral Philosophy,” highlighting the links between metaphysics and Green's ethics. At patrician colleges like Princeton or Harvard, this course would be based in the sturdy antimetaphysics of Scottish Common Sense philosophy; at plebian Oneida it was the gauzy Romanticism of Coleridge, Carlyle, and Goethe that structured the class. As his biographer has emphasized, Green's moral philosophy was rooted in a sort of antislavery Coleridgianism, that saw “Reason” as a divine light emanating from God into the conscience of the believer.Footnote 23 Green was particularly taken with Coleridge's antislavery writings, quoting at length from the Friend in an essay on the philosophy of reform.Footnote 24 Like other Romantics, Green was disgusted at skeptical or materialist philosophers who seemed to undermine human dignity and religious belief. In particular, Green was horrified by Hume's skepticism. Before becoming a college president he had written a series of critiques of Hume for the Vermont Chronicle in the 1820s and had been searching for some other philosophical system to ground Christian faith and moral action.Footnote 25 He would appeal to European Romantics such as Herder, Goethe, Carlyle, Schlegal, and, of course, Coleridge to base his religious and ethical views.Footnote 26 These thinkers inspired a dualism that pervaded Green's and later Crummell's philosophy. In his sermons the college president emphasized that the outer world of appearance—he used the Kantian term “Phenomena”—was valuable insofar as it provided “symbols” for the eternal world of “Principles, Ideas, Laws.”Footnote 27 Philosophically speaking, Green's system was a mess—an uneasy marriage of Kantian, evangelical Christian, and Swendenborgian themes—that missed, among other things, Kant's firm insistence that there were strict limits on reason's ability to probe the noumenal realm. But Green's belief that the same realm of appearance could and should reflect eternal truths—that the world was a dim reflection, a shadow on the cave wall, of a set of deeper truths—produced a congenial set of assumptions for would-be reformers.
Green became obsessed with the same questions of free will and autonomy that motivated Kant and the British Romantics who were responding to Humean skepticism. The majority of men, Green explained in his sermon “Ideas and Phenomena,” cared only for “lifeless forms,” external mechanical appearances.Footnote 28 This was particularly true of slaveholders who, in their quest for mastery over other human beings, had allowed their own inner life to be mastered by their ugliest uncontrollable impulses. Driven by their own animal sensuality, they ignored divine truth and were comfortable treating humans only as instruments to their pleasure. Slavery degraded both slave and slaveowner into “a merely animal existence,” he wrote in 1848.Footnote 29 It was a system in which, rather than listen to abstract principles, “the worst passions in mankind in their wildest excesses reign predominant.”Footnote 30 To be a free agent, he believed, was to follow the “self-evident,” “universal,” and “necessary” principles of Reason. But instead the slaveowner had become “possessed by his passions … become a voluntary slave … the things of sense occupy, engross, control his powers.”Footnote 31 Along with other Romantics, Green had a deep fear of the mechanization of the human soul, of a world where characteristically human capacities to reason and direct one's own life became instead dominated by physical necessity and psychological hedonism. Worse, slavery treated as mere object and commodity people who had Reason, will, and the image of God within—“one man treats his fellow, not as another self, but as a thing—a chattel—an article of merchandize.”Footnote 32
It was out of this series of philosophical ideas that came one of Green's most important concepts—the “Chattel Principle.” He had developed this in an important 1839 pamphlet—published by the American Anti-slavery Society— in which Green had taken aim at biblical support for slavery. In its literal words, of course, the Bible seemed to accept Jewish and Roman practices of slavery, a fact that slaveowners and their northern allies never tired of repeating. But Green attempted to shift the discussion, arguing that the basic spirit of Christianity (the “Christian Principle” which stood in contrast to the Chattel Principle) and the light of Reason indicated that humans were “capable of self-government,” endowed with “the mysterious and awful attribute of will.”Footnote 33 It was, in other words, because of the characteristically human qualities of free will, autonomy, “human consciousness,” and the ability to freely know God that slavery was wrong. Green thus defined slavery not primarily by its cruelty, its labor exploitation, or its threat to democracy; rather, slavery was defined by how it treated the divine soul as a “thing—a chattel—an article of merchandize.”Footnote 34 Green's Chattel Principle argument bore very close comparison to Coleridge's central objection to slavery—that the institution confused human beings with objects. Crummell, in later years, would adopt much of this philosophical critique as well as Green's language about the Chattel Principle (or the “principle of chattelism,” as Crummell called it).Footnote 35
Alexander Crummell spent three happy years at the Oneida Institute absorbing Green's political metaphysics and learning to love Coleridge's poetry. Du Bois later claimed that this time helped to “lift the Veil” from Crummell's eyes, giving him a momentary vision of life and truth unmediated by racism and Jim Crow. Du Bois was certainly correct that Crummell appreciated his time at Oneida; later he would refer to Green as a “master-thinker,” and incorporate many of Green's beliefs into his own thought.Footnote 36 Throughout his later life he would cite Wordsworth, Schiller, Carlyle, and others. In particular, though, he engaged with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom he seems to have read at Oneida. A slight diversion, then, from our narrative is in order to demonstrate some of the ways that Crummell would read and use Coleridge and other Romantics over his long career.
Throughout his life after Oneida, Crummell would come back to Coleridge—in his eulogy on Thomas Clarkson, in addresses at Harper's Ferry on black politics, in response to late nineteenth-century racial science, and in countless sermons and speeches throughout his life. Along with his one-time collaborator, William Wordsworth, Coleridge was Crummell's greatest literary inspiration. He was not alone; many black abolitionists cited Coleridge, as Frederick Douglass did when he used an epigram from the British poet on the title page of My Bondage and My Freedom and William Wells Brown did when he began a chapter of his novel Clotel with a poem by the British poet.Footnote 37 But Crummell stands out for the frequency with which he cited Coleridge and the philosophical rigor with which he engaged the poet's thought.
There would be four main ways that Crummell would be inspired by Coleridge: we can distinguish between the artistic, religious, ethical, and political sides of Crummell's adaptation of Coleridge. Adding these together, it becomes clear that the black abolitionist was doing more than simply reading a famous British poet; he was using the logic of Coleridge's thought to help develop a theory of the abolitionist self, a way to conceive of the inner life of antislavery and black radical politics.
Crummell cited Coleridge as a writer and artist for black students to aspire to. In 1844, for instance, in a speech to black members of his literary society, the Hamilton Society, he asked his listeners to “look for a moment at such a writer as Coleridge … bringing forth error from its subterfuges and unfolding the attraction of Faith and the majesty of Reason.”Footnote 38 Coleridge, then, was in part a symbol of literary excellence, of the type of author that aspiring black students would read in order to prove their intellectual and religious ambition. Crummell continued to see Coleridge in this way, arguing in Liberia that the fact that many Liberian citizens “have enriched themselves” with the works of Coleridge was a demonstration of their civilization and capacity for growth.Footnote 39 Crummell almost always included Coleridge in his pantheon of writers whom a civilized people ought to engage with, as he did when he celebrated the work of “such men as Dante, Milton, Southey, Coleridge, or Ruskin, or Burke.”Footnote 40
Further, Crummell viewed Coleridge as a religious figure, one of his favored figures in Protestant theology, who expressed something of the internal life of Christian truth. In sermons, Coleridge appeared (alongside figures like Newton and Faraday) as proof that religious belief and intellect went hand in hand.Footnote 41 In one remarkable sermon that he gave late in his life, Crummell identified Coleridge as one of two “transcendent men” who had reshaped Christianity—the other being Luther himself. “Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a scholar, poet, theologian, philosopher; but grand genius as he was, his highest aspiration was to be, and to be regarded as a Christian!” Crummell wrote, “And oh! How gloriously did he move, at all times, in the grandest circles; dropping everywhere … learning and erudition, light and illumination upon all the subjects which pertain to the elucidation of God's Holy Word, and the spiritual elevation of the soul of man!”Footnote 42
More frequently, Crummell used Coleridge as an example of the type of ethical life that he hoped to live. When exhorting the black community not to put too much faith in mere monetary gain, he told them, “How true are the words of Coleridge: ‘I may not hope from outward things to win the passion and the life, whose fountains are within.’”Footnote 43 In an 1844 speech to a black intellectual society, he told the black audience, “I recollect well a thought advanced by Coleridge,” before citing Coleridge's Friend on the possibility of an unprincipled person rising through evil means.Footnote 44 He often quoted Coleridge—as we'll see, this had links to his broader theory of the self and of abolitionist politics—as a figure opposed to the dry dictates of the mechanical intellect, seeing instead the value of emotional, moral, and spiritual truths. “Indeed, it is a remark of Coleridge,” he wrote in one sermon, “that it is from the moral nature the intellect gets its power and full nourishment.”Footnote 45
Finally, Crummell saw Coleridge as an antislavery figure. Coleridge had been supportive of the British campaign to abolish the slave trade and Crummell was able to quote his writings for explicit antislavery purposes. In a response to a racist southerner, Crummell quoted at length from Coleridge's 1798 poem “Fears in Solitude,” in which Coleridge interprets a possible French invasion as, in part, divine retribution for having “borne to injur'd tribes slavery and pangs; and deadlier far, our vices, whose deep taint with slow perdition murders the whole man, his body and soul.”Footnote 46 Crummell faithfully quoted Coleridge but stressed “deadlier far, our vices,” in order to emphasize a point that he had been trying to make: that slavery was responsible for whatever flaws in black character supposedly existed, and that black people were not inherently vicious as slaveowners were trying to portray them. Writing on the racism that he had experienced in the white American church, he began his sermon, “‘Expediency is the anarchy of morals,’ says Coleridge.”Footnote 47
It is not just in direct citations that we can see Coleridge's influence on Crummell; more important are the indirect ways that his philosophy—and that of the broader Romantic movement—shaped Crummell's thought. More than other Romantic poets, Coleridge left behind an extensive body of prose that articulated in clear detail how he understood his own philosophy. He thus stands as one of the major figures articulating a Romantic philosophy that also appeared in a number of other figures whom Crummell frequently cited—Wordsworth, Whittier, and Emerson. It is not so much that Crummell unthinkingly copied Coleridge—or any other thinker, for that matter. Rather, given that we know Crummell was a close reader of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Emerson, and others, putting the black abolitionist's thought in the context of this Romantic philosophy reveals new dimensions to his thought, as well as shedding light on the broader reception of European Romantic philosophy in African American circles.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge seems like a strange source of political influence for a young black reformer: an opium addict and disenchanted revolutionary, who had become a prominent advocate for a traditionalist marriage of the Anglican Church and British government. Like the American Transcendentalists, Coleridge had been a dissatisfied Unitarian obsessed with how traditional Lockean empiricism sapped religious faith. But where the Americans would go left to renew their faith, into an Aeolian pantheism that rejected the authority of both church and state, Coleridge eventually took a hard right, back onto the solid ground of established Trinitarian orthodoxy and political conservatism. He had once been an avid supporter of the French Revolution and the British campaign to abolish the slave trade.Footnote 48 If his own politics became conservative towards the end of his life, he bequeathed, especially to American audiences, a set of philosophical ideas that could be quite radical in implication.
The British poet had spent important years in Germany in the late 1790s, where he had imbibed Kantian transcendental philosophy, later supplementing it with the revisions of Schelling and Fichte. He took from the Germans a number of important arguments that he would pass on to American reformers. First, blending Kantian arguments about the noumenon—the “thing-in-itself” that our physical senses cannot fully grasp—with the writings of various Christian mystics such as the Quaker George Fox and the German theologian Jakob Böhme, he developed a strong defense of the existence of an ideal, nonmaterial aspect to our mental and spiritual life.Footnote 49 Coleridge intended this as a critique of the epistemological methods derived from sensationalists like Hobbes, Locke, and Helvetius and associationists like David Hartley that viewed knowledge as only deriving from the senses, and the mind operating on deterministic principles (to Coleridge this made the mind, and human agency more broadly, to be “so many differently coloured billiard balls in contact.”Footnote 50) This sense-based epistemology, he had argued, that dominated British philosophy and theology, tended to create a view of humans as simply complex machines—responding to pleasure and pain in almost instinctual ways with little ability to use reason or morality to determine one's own ends. If his work didn't have the same philosophical rigor as Kant's, it did demonstrate a similar concern with the metaphysical conditions of human autonomy.
If Coleridge gave some Americans a language with which to resist the narrow materialism of some Anglo-American Enlightenment thought, he also helped them to reject psychological materialism's close cousin: narrow, instrumental definitions of reason. For Coleridge, our thought processes can be split up into two distinct forms: Understanding and Reason. The distinction clearly followed the lead of a number of German philosophers, including Kant, who had distinguished between the faculties of Verstand and Vernunft, as well as Friedrich Jacobi, who had defined Reason as a faculty of the spiritual senses and Understanding as a faculty of the material senses.Footnote 51 Understanding, for Coleridge, was narrow, means-to-an-end instrumental logic. Reason, on the other hand, implied the characteristically human ability to weigh and determine moral ends. For Coleridge and many Americans (here they departed from Kant), Reason was also intuitive, the place where God spoke to the human soul, a site of instinctual religious and spiritual “influx” where the light of knowledge was received from God. As American thinkers interpreted it, Reason as a style of thought was more critical than Understanding (hence James Russell Lowell spoke of Coleridge's “critical sense”), because it provided a mechanism with which to criticize the world as currently ordered.Footnote 52
If there was a dualism at the foundation of his thought, Coleridge's embrace of “imagination,” as the preeminent human faculty, sought to provide a mechanism to overcome the division between physical nature and moral freedom. Imagination, for Coleridge, served as a reminder of the always present possibility of traversing from the material to the ideal, of breaking the seemingly ironbound chain of material causality through human agency—will, morality, and Reason. Imagination, for Coleridge, had a specific psychological meaning, related to but distinct from our common association with artistic creation. It was that part of the mind capable of balancing the active and the passive, the given with the willed. Imagination allowed an individual to give form and meaning to the wild anarchy of her received sensory consciousness. Coleridge had compared imagination to a “water-insect” swimming against the current, allowing itself to be passively taken by the flow of water one moment (as a thinker does with the knowledge attained from our sensory knowledge or unconscious impulses) but jumping and moving upstream on its own the next minute (as we do when we will our own ends). As Jerrold Seigel has pointed out, Coleridge was nearly obsessed with what man had “below his own consciousness.”Footnote 53 Coleridge's sense that there is “an obscure and biding sense of somewhat, that must be kept out of sight of the conscience,” presaged, in both concept and language, Freud's description of repression.Footnote 54 Our outer actions had origins deep in the half-known subterranean lairs of our psyche, a lesson Crummell would absorb and adopt. If traditional idealism threatened to swaddle the agent in narcissistic blankets of mystical self-absorption, and materialist philosophy descended into mechanistic determinism, buffered self-interest, and instrumental rationality, then a politics of imagination offered a way out, a way to anchor oneself in the empirical world but still will another, to envision a political order not yet evidenced by history. Coleridge's vision of the imagining mind as a cascading stream which our active consciousness both battles against and submits to mirrored the political imperatives of radical reformers, who were searching for an agency with which to redirect the world.
It was exactly Coleridge's metaphysical opposition to materialism and psychological hedonism that bequeathed to him an early hatred of chattel slavery. Coleridge's central objection to slavery was that the institution confused human beings with objects. As early as 1795, he gave a lecture against the slave trade that imagined Africans as sort of Rousseauan primitives—“innocent and happy”—beset by European avarice.Footnote 55 In an article for the Watchman on the slave trade, he contrasted the suffering of slaves with the unnecessary commodities—sugar, rum, cotton, etc.—that slaves produced.Footnote 56 In poems, occasional references to “soul-hardened barterers of human blood,” or “Afric's wrongs,” would appear as symbols of the moral degradation of British society.Footnote 57 Later he developed a more philosophical approach. In one fascinating fragment from 1811, he ruminated on the consequences of Thomas Hobbes's atomistic materialism. It was not so much that Coleridge worried about Hobbes's antidemocratic absolutism. Even worse was that too many Britons had accepted Hobbes's “confounding” of people with material objects, the way his psychological hedonism (based on Galilean physics) reduced human agency to the play of external forces. In a note that he attached, he examined the consequences of this for slavery. An object, obviously, can be used simply as a means; a person cannot. The result was that “slave is a Person perverted into a Thing; Slavery therefore is not so properly a deviation from Justice, as an absolute subversion of all Morality.”Footnote 58 Here we can see the outline of how a particular philosophical orientation, one that recoiled from the materialist naturalism of Enlightenment-era empiricism, could give rise to a particular type of antislavery sensibility, an opposition to the Chattel Principle. It would be American thinkers like Beriah Green and Alexander Crummell who would give more concrete political shape to this impulse.
Crummell was not alone in antebellum America or the broader Atlantic world of reformers in seeing Coleridge's metaphysics as having important political and social implications for slavery as well as other political causes. Emerson and Thoreau were careful readers of the British thinker. Abolitionists like Garrison and Charles Sumner quoted him. James Russell Lowell was one of many American antislavery thinkers who were obsessed with Coleridge, remembering the British poet as being responsible for showing “the English mind how it could emancipate itself from the vulgarizing tyranny of common sense.”Footnote 59 For John Stuart Mill—who famously turned to Coleridge to save himself from his father's inhuman utilitarianism—the “Germano-Coleridgians” were one of two poles of British thought in the first part of the nineteenth century.Footnote 60 According to Mill, the Benthamites were drawn to liberal and basically mainstream British politics—religious toleration, laissez-faire policy, sound currency, free trade, and the rest of the prejudices of the Victorian bourgeoisie. On the other hand, the Germano-Coleridgians’ alienation from this liberal consensus inspired both reactionaries and revolutionaries, appealing as it was to those both on the top and at the bottom of British society who were being displaced by capitalist modernity. Along with his obvious devotion to Coleridge, Crummell made it clear that he was also drawn to the “Germano” part of Mill's equation—the German people “are singularly and preeminently distinguished in philosophy,” he wrote late in life—helping to inaugurate a long tradition of African American engagement with German thought.Footnote 61
The phoenixonian society
In the following years, as he took on a leadership role in the New York black community, Alexander Crummell would go beyond Green by developing his own synthesis of “Germano-Colerdigian” thought and black abolitionism. Returning to New York City, the Oneida graduates—Garnet, Sidney, and Crummell—formed a tight clique that, despite their young ages, quickly came to dominate African American intellectual circles. One aspect of this was their involvement in black print culture—Crummell himself became the “traveling agent” of the Colored American.Footnote 62 The Colored American was an important black newspaper that, alongside its abolitionism and support for the urban black community, republished lengthy Coleridge poems.Footnote 63 But primarily Crummell's influence can be seen in black intellectual clubs—especially the Phoenixonian Society, a black-run community and literary group that sponsored lectures and reading groups and ran a small private library for its members. Through these lived experiences, Crummell began adapting the Germano-Colerdigian intellectual tradition to meet the particular circumstances of black abolitionist life.
The Phoenixonian Society was one of the New York incarnations of perhaps the most important developments in antebellum African American intellectual life: the flowering of voluntary black-run literary, debating, and intellectual societies in the 1830s.Footnote 64 Throughout the US there were at least forty-five of these clubs, which particularly flourished between about 1815 and 1850, on the northern seaboard. Although many benefited from white benevolence—in Boston, for instance, the Adelphic Union received significant donations from the white philanthropist Abner Forbes—the day-to-day operations of these societies were controlled by the black members themselves. These clubs were different to most early educational institutions for African Americans in part because they were not controlled by paternalistic white elites. As such, these black intellectual clubs rapidly became critical sites of political organization and radicalization.
It was no coincidence that this explosion occurred when it did. The 1830s were crucial and generative times for black abolitionism. Along with the black churches, these intellectual clubs were crucial places where a black civic society was being created that was able to develop an understanding of its own public and political interests. What the historian Manisha Sinha has called the “black counter-public” was developing: new voluntary associations were springing up and organizing a black community in the wake of gradual emancipation.Footnote 65 The rise of uncompromising Garrisonian abolitionism contributed, of course, to a spirit of assertiveness. But it was primarily the political fight against southern slavery, and the brute realities of the Jim Crow North, which had called forth this black communal life. By the 1840s, the Colored Convention movement had begun uniting black activists and thinkers from across the free North, helping to grow this counterpublic into a national force.
As a result, Crummell's Phoenixonian Society combined educational and political purposes. A predecessor, the Phoenix Society, had been founded in 1833 by a number of black leaders, including Samuel Cornish and Peter Williams, with the assistance of some white philanthropists.Footnote 66 As it developed, so many members of the Phoenixonian Literary Society were also members of the Political Improvement Association (founded to win the full franchise for black New Yorkers) that the groups were expected to coordinate their schedules.Footnote 67 Crummell recalled constant discussions about slavery.Footnote 68 In 1839, the society was holding public events to raise money for the Amistad captives.Footnote 69 Behind closed doors, they nurtured even more radical aspirations. Crummell remembered proudly that his club had refused to celebrate the Fourth of July. What William Lloyd Garrison, who also refrained from celebrating the Fourth, would not have approved of was how the black teenagers spent the day: fantasizing and planning how to “start an insurrection and free our brethren in bondage.”Footnote 70 In 1848, writing to John Jay (the grandson of the Patriot leader), Crummell summed up the intellectual climate among New York African Americans: few black northerners, it was true, had much formal education, but “there is a great deal of mental activity, a great deal of intellectual inquisitiveness & questioning.”Footnote 71
In the Phoenixonian Society, politics and Romantic poetry went hand in hand. In 1839, the Colored American reported that the club would be discussing “the sublime and beautiful” in the poetry of William Wordsworth.Footnote 72 Thomas Sidney, Crummell's New Hampshire classmate and a leader of the society, “committed to memory” the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth.Footnote 73 In 1840, in front of the society, Crummell recited Coleridge's translation of Schiller's epic poem Wallenstein. They quickly found ways to use this Romantic poetry to mobilize political power. Consider, for instance, the appeal that Crummell wrote in 1840 for a state convention of “colored citizens,” demanding suffrage rights. In New York State, African Americans needed $250 worth of property to vote, a measure that disenfranchised all but the richest members of the community. Mobilizing against this, Crummell quoted from Wordsworth's “The Excursion” on the power of conscience. He then declared, in language evocative of Green's politicized Coleridgianism, that success would come from “the light of reason, the principles of Christianity, and the dictates of living and eternal right.”Footnote 74 In 1843 a New York black minister—probably Crummell himself—writing under the name of “Ignatius Sancho” (a nod to the eighteenth-century Anglo-African writer) protested to the New York Observer against prejudice in northern colleges by quoting at length Beriah Green and citing, once again, Wordsworth.Footnote 75 Romantic poetry and philosophy, far from being a diversion, was central to Crummell's political vision.
Back at the society, the “public lectures,” given overwhelmingly by young black New Yorkers, featured a steady diet of philosophy, many drawing on new Romantic ideas about the mind. For instance, in 1836, Sidney gave an address on the “Influence of Intellectual Ability” while Henry Highland Garnett wrote a poem called “Alonzo.” It was a mix of “Parnassian” poetry and discussion of the “transcendant [sic] influence of intellectual ability.”Footnote 76 And in the 1841 series of lectures Nathaniel Southard lectured on “The responsibility of Man to the development of his Intellectual Faculties,” Samuel Cornish lectured on “a right understanding of the laws that govern mind and matter,” Oliver Pierce lectured on “the elements of Moral Science,” and Crummell himself lectured on “the Influence of Factitious Life.”Footnote 77 While it is hard to be certain from the titles alone, the keywords used—“intellectual,” “Parnassian,” and “Transcendent”—all strongly suggest idealist and Romantic themes.
Crummell participated eagerly in this interest in “mental philosophy.” He spent much of the early 1840s battling the white leaders of the Episcopal Church in an attempt to become ordained and start his own church, not an easy proposition for an African American at the time. “Virulent Negro hatred,” Crummell remembered, “was well nigh as strong in the Church as in the State.”Footnote 78 He petitioned to gain admission to the General Theological Seminary in New York but was rejected by Bishop Onderdonk out of fear, Crummell came to believe, that the admission of a black student would endanger southern donations.Footnote 79 It must have seemed like déjà vu. His antagonists were more genteel this time, but just as in New Hampshire, white Americans were trying to prevent him from getting an education because of his race. His attempt to get ordained became something of a cause célèbre among African American activists in the North who held protest meetings on his behalf.Footnote 80 With the help of some New York abolitionists—including members of the illustrious Jay family—Crummell was admitted as a candidate for orders in Boston, where he was eventually ordained. He spent much of the early 1840s traveling between congregations in New England, including New Bedford, New Haven, and Providence. In New Haven, he sat in on classes at Yale and befriended Alexander Du Bois, who was the treasurer at his parish and whose grandson, William Edward Burghardt, would one day study with an elderly Crummell.Footnote 81 Once again, in a tiresome repetition, Yale's white leaders refused to allow Crummell's name to be published in the school catalogue.Footnote 82
The 1840s were fertile times for northern black intellectual life. The repression of abolitionist activity was loosening up a bit. The split between Garrisonian abolitionists and political abolitionists had opened up space for black abolitionists as both sides fought over their loyalty. In this context the Colored Convention movement was developing, beginning to mobilize black political sensibility independent of white abolitionist control.Footnote 83 The conventions helped to link black activists from a variety of northern cities into organizations with more national focus. Crummell's participation in abolitionist politics in the 1840s is often forgotten, overshadowed by his later embrace of Liberian emigration and black nationalism. But Crummell would play an important role in this movement—especially in discussions on black attitudes towards education. In 1840, he chaired a committee on petition at the Albany Colored Convention, where he drafted a resolution quoting Wordsworth and demanding that “from our own human consciousness can we make our most earnest and effectual entreaties to our fellow men in power.”Footnote 84 And in 1847 he played a major role in the National Colored Convention held at Troy, where he wrote the report on education, providing one of the first and best articulations of a black approach to pedagogy, one that drew heavily on Romantic philosophy. As such, his ideas were extraordinarily influential helping to shape black political culture as it was emerging as an independent force in American thought.
Abolitionist selfhood
By the middle of the 1840s, Crummell had synthesized his various influences—black voluntary clubs, Coleridge's poetry and philosophy, and Beriah Green's idealistic abolitionism—into a political philosophy that he would maintain, with relatively few changes, throughout his life. His later influences seem to have confirmed and deepened the beliefs that he absorbed as a young man. Arriving in England, in 1848, for instance, he enrolled in Queens’ College in Cambridge University—becoming the first black student at Cambridge in the modern era. At Cambridge he had his general idealist approach to philosophy reaffirmed through the Neoplatonism still dominant in the philosophy department there. For the rest of his life he could be found declaring his preference for Plato, the “master idealist [over] his materialist junior Aristotle.”Footnote 85 He would have attended the lectures of the Neoplatonist William Whewell, professor of moral philosophy, which featured long attacks on the metaphysics of philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke, further confirming Crummell's belief that philosophical materialism led to atheism and injustice.Footnote 86
There were three major themes to his politics of selfhood, each of which demonstrated his encounter with European Romantic philosophers like Coleridge. First, he solidified a metaphysical dualism that would suffuse his thought. Even before he had been educated among the Neoplatonists at Cambridge, he was primed to distrust material explanations of life and see existential and political truths as derived from some encounter with a nonmaterial life. As he wrote in an Easter sermon in 1857, we may have a body and a pile of senses, “but they do not make the man.” Instead, “we are essentially spiritual creatures.”Footnote 87 Second, he absorbed Coleridge's idea of Reason as “truth as by intuition,” a style of thought that was non-syllogistic, striking people in moments of spontaneous genius. He thought of thinking, in other words, less as a labored process of inductive reasoning, and with more room for moral, religious, and emotional inspiration. Third, mirroring Coleridge's embrace of the faculty of imagination, out of all of this came a Romantic sense of mankind's creativity, particularly embracing the ability of black people to constantly evolve and develop beyond the limits of what was given to them by the existing world. These three themes helped to constitute the core of Crummell's politicized selfhood.
In other words, Crummell himself believed that the self was a question of urgent inquiry, that there were a strong politics to how people conceived of their inner lives. It was of crucial importance that black people have agency in their internal lives, that they resist mechanical or materialistic views of the self. To use Seigel's language, Crummell virulently opposed the models of selfhood that are entirely “bodily or material” and believed that such models of selfhood led directly to proslavery ideas or actions.Footnote 88 Good abolitionist thought and action developed out of a belief in the internal freedom and dignity of the self.
It was in the shadow of tragedy that Crummell best articulated the first aspect of his theory of selfhood: his idealist and dualist philosophy. In 1840, his good friend and comrade Thomas Sidney, with whom he had studied at Oneida, braved the New Hampshire mobs, and helped to lead the Phoenixonian Society, died at an early age. In a eulogy in front of the society, Crummell told the audience that Sidney had succeeded in achieving his Christian virtues because he had first embraced a certain philosophical style. Even more than his study of languages and “Shakespeare and Milton and Coleridge and Wordsworth,” Sidney was most drawn to philosophy. According to Crummell, Sidney had specifically read John Locke “before his 16th year,” but come to reject what he called the British empiricist's “sensual” system. Crummell claimed that Sidney had “studied the leading writers in the two great schools of Philosophy—the Sensual and Spiritual,” but had ended up preferring the “Spiritual Philosophy.”Footnote 89
Crummell was using Coleridgian terms—“spiritual” and “sensual”—to describe Sidney's personal philosophy. American and British Romantics used the terms “sensual” and “spiritual” to designate competing philosophical systems: sensual to refer to Lockean empiricism (because knowledge came from the senses) and spiritual to refer to Romantic metaphysics that made room for spiritual truth. The terms could be traced back to Coleridge. In Aids to Reflection, Coleridge had declared “spiritual” truths to be the highest form of wisdom, corresponding to Reason; prudence was the lowest, and it, of course, corresponded to the physical senses.Footnote 90 Elsewhere, he had used the term “sensuous” to describe “all that appertains to the perception considered as passive, and merely recipient.”Footnote 91 And by the 1840s, as John Stuart Mill observed, “sensualism is the common term of abuse” that what he called “Germano-Coleridigians” tended to hurl at traditional Lockean empiricists.Footnote 92 Not only, in other words, was Crummell using Coleridgian categories to describe his friend's philosophy, but also he was using them to indicate that he sided with those who rejected Lockean empiricism in favor of more “spiritual” ways of thought.
Crummell was obsessed with the encouragement of these traits of the mind that Lockean sensationalism supposedly denied and Romantic philosophy affirmed: the spirit over the senses, the mind and soul over the body. Crummell drew on this model of the self when he developed ways to think about education for black men in the 1840s. In 1844 in an important speech in front of the Phoenixonian Society (now renamed the Hamilton Lyceum) he sketched how the “spiritual” vision of philosophy shaped his abolitionist and uplift politics.Footnote 93 In many ways, Crummell's vision of black education was in line with those of other “Romantic Reformers.” He stressed “mental culture,” insisting, along with William Ellery Channing and other proponents of “self-culture,” that education was more than simply about gaining knowledge, but also a broader project of development, moral growth, and self-discipline. In fact he directly cited the Channing essay on self-culture, adding the New England Unitarian as well as Emerson's antislavery writing to his normal cast of influences: Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth.Footnote 94 But his experiences since 1839, in the various black organizations that he had led, had made him see these internal qualities of ambition and self-development as related to the health of the whole community.
The extreme foil of the black radical self was the tendency of slavery to reduce human beings to a more physical tools, instruments for another's pleasure. Like Green, Crummell referred to this as “the principle of chattelism.”Footnote 95 He was particularly concerned that some black people had internalized this mechanistic oppression. One cannot understand Crummell's philosophy without appreciating how concerned he was with the psychological trauma and long-lasting consequences of racism and slavery. In an 1844 speech he emphasized that one consequence of slavery and racism was that black men let their internal moral compass be dictated by physical demands, rather than spiritual or rational ones. Slaves and even free blacks, as Crummell wrote, were turned into things, as their position as “instruments and the tools of their superiors” was degrading to “so noble and exalted a thing as the human soul.”Footnote 96 A human dominated by physical things would not be able to create and abide by moral and political values, but would be controlled by their physical desires. “He who relies on his senses for well being, degrades himself,” Crummell told the Hamilton Lyceum; “sense is the proper element of the mere animal.” But, he argued, African Americans, because of the racism and degradation that they experienced, struggled to be able to overcome physical necessity; prone to apathy and the political quietism that came from resignation and fatalism. “The artificial state in which we live in society, the systems of Caste which we are kept,” he had written a year earlier to John Jay, “deprive us of the soul for bold and energetic actions.”Footnote 97
Nowhere did he differ more, in other words, from the colonizationists with whom he would later sometimes collaborate than in his attitude towards American slavery: he never accepted the argument that slavery had been part of God's plan because it prepared black men for freedom and civilization. Instead, thanks to slavery and racism, black Americans had inherited a past, Crummell believed, whose continuities offered them little hope. Generally a sober, even cautious, orator, he would explode when white Americans suggested that slavery had “prepared” Africans for freedom: “they are nought [sic] but vain babblers,” he later told a Liberian audience, “who speak as though … death should be the prime and proper originator of life—that filth and pollution should generate purity.”Footnote 98 Slavery had been an unmitigated evil. At times, though, his urgent sense of the psychological damage wrought by slavery pushed him to describe black men in a language of degradation, veering on elitist disgust.Footnote 99 “Our natures have been dwarfed and our souls shrivelled,” he wrote in one particularly harsh assessment.Footnote 100 When justifying his move to Liberia (and his abandonment of his New York flock), he went as far as to blame the American black community as “the worst enemies a black man, in my position, has.”Footnote 101
There was a certain metaphysics to Crummell's understanding of history: the black past represented the material realm (the sensual), the world of oppression and slavery that they had inherited, while the black future lived in the realms of ideals and spiritual growth. Thus his future-orientation was tied to his Romanticism. “Our dotage is in the past,” he declared in one speech; “our juvenescence is in the future.”Footnote 102 He often admonished black men who had a “morbid” obsession with the past, an obsession that he believed precluded the sort of “hope and imagination” that was required to build a better future.Footnote 103 These two words—hope and imagination—summed up well how Crummell's inheritance from Coleridge inspired an optimistic forward-looking vision.
Crummell needed a way out of this cycle of historical oppression, psychological materialism, and degradation, something in which to root an abolitionist politics and vision for the black future. Following Coleridge, Crummell partly saw the solution in terms of flashes of intuitive Reason that might illuminate a different future. Coleridge's critique of narrow, one-sided instrumental thought—what he called Understanding, reappeared in Crummell's disgust at those who would attempt to root religious or political truth in “severe ratiocination.” Instead good abolitionists and Christians were to use Reason—Coleridge's more Romantic and intuitive style of thinking. Consider how Crummell evoked Coleridge to praise the British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson: “He had one faculty which Coleridge regards as indicative of a great mind—‘the capability of extending its attention to the greatest multiplicity of affairs.’ The logical faculty is not strongly developed in his [Thomas Clarkson's] writings. Like most Reformers he perceives truth as by intuition; and without the labor of severe ratiocination.”Footnote 104
Abolitionism and black advancement, then, could be rooted in the particularly human capacity of intuitive moral reasoning. This intuitive Reason stood in contrast to formal ponderous logic and so Crummell frequently criticized those who would try to use “severe ratiocination” or rely on the “logical faculty” alone to answer questions about slavery. Writing of his old New Hampshire schoolmate Henry Highland Garnet (Crummell had the sad duty of giving eulogies for both Sidney and Garnet, his two comrades from New Hampshire), he defined intuition as “that special faculty of my friend, by which, without any labored process of reasoning … he invariably reached, as by a straight and sudden dash, the clearest conception of his argument.”Footnote 105 This moral and intuitive style of reasoning has obvious connections to Coleridge and the broader Romantic rejection of one-dimensional instrumental logic. Such a politics, of course, involves imagination, as when he celebrates the white abolitionist Clarkson's attempt to place himself in the shoes of an African slave, as well as willingness to look beyond the world as given. It was, in fact, remarkable how often Crummell described abolitionism as an emotional, almost irrational, endeavor, something that, as he told a Liberian audience in 1860, was “outrunning the calculations of cold prudence and prospective result.”Footnote 106 An abolitionist, then, could not slowly accumulate truth by the logical addition of knowledge they had gained with their senses—as this would forever trap them in the trajectory of an unjust world and its values.
Both his dualistic metaphysics and his appeals to intuitive Reason underlay a Romantic view of the black self as creative, capable of transcending the given past through imagination and creativity. In 1847, he worked closely with Douglass, his future rival, in the formation of the 1847 Colored Convention. Chairing the Committee on Education at the Colored Convention, he wrote the official report on education issued by the organization of black activists. True education, Crummell declared, would be a unification of “mind, soul, and body.” This formulation was not particularly new, and bares some comparison to the thought of George Ripley and other American Transcendentalists who were trying to unite manual labor and mental culture. But while Ripley and Emerson saw white Bostonians as living enervated lives, tied up in bookish scholarship and the life of the mind, Crummell was concerned that black students had the opposite problems: an “unnatural and inordinate demand for physical exertion.” Remedying this through collective self-development, this seizing of education, was tied to the development of a black nation—“our people can never be a people,” Crummell wrote, while “there is nothing but physical development.” It would be very similar language that he would use in the 1890s to attack Washington's model of black education. Crummell's theory of education, then, was also a theory of the self, as capable of change and evolution, what Emerson would refer to when he declared in Self-Reliance that the soul “becomes.”Footnote 107 Mankind, Crummell's educational report began, had a religious duty to develop their “mental culture.”Footnote 108 “Everything that lives,” Crummell explained, “was made and designed for growth; for development; for expansion; not for inactivity; not to ‘lie in dull abstraction and to rot’.”
Like William Ellery Channing or Ralph Waldo Emerson (both of whom he cited in his writings during this period) Crummell rejected notions of the human self as fixed or static. Black people were, he would later write, not like a mountain or pillar—“fixed and rigid”—but a stream, forever moving, progressing, with “vital energy, creative influence, and plastic energy.”Footnote 109 As Marshall Berman has written, the “symbolic antithesis of Machine and Tree” marked competing post-Enlightenment ideas of the self, with Romantics like Crummell firmly embracing the metaphor of the growing, expanding, self-directed tree.Footnote 110 But unlike Channing or Emerson, whose visions of human perfectibility focused on the individual subject, Crummell tended to see such a politics of growth and development in collective terms, in the self-development of the race. In Crummell's hands, education was a call for black collective self-development, growth, and becoming. If black people had been through the hell of white oppression, their future could be a hopeful one of both individual and collective development. Masterful nations, he declared, were marked by “vitality, plasticity, receptivity.”Footnote 111 One would be hard pressed to find a better expression of the Romantic confidence in human agency, in mankind's ability to transcend the world given to them, than in Crummell's assertion that “we are not creatures of necessity. In a certain sense we are all creators.”Footnote 112
It was true that, especially later in life, Crummell became so committed to this vision of black people reaching inward and pulling from out of the solitary core of their being a “grand civility” that he tended to discourage discussions of current oppressions.Footnote 113 “We are, under, to God, to look to a great extent to ourselves for relief,” he told his congregation.Footnote 114 He even went as far as to tell a group of British abolitionists that slavery “arose as much from the weakness of a race, as from the proslavery disposition.”Footnote 115 His obsession with self-development could become a hatred of the softness and weakness of character that, he claimed, too many black men exhibited. “Weak and miserable people of the earth have misused their prerogatives and so unfitted themselves to feel after God,” he declared in one sermon.Footnote 116 Black men needed a “hardiment of soul,” he often repeated.Footnote 117 Together they required a “hardihood of the race,” to withstand the assaults of racism and slavery.Footnote 118
Frederick Douglass, for one, would deeply disapprove of Crummell's insistence in the postwar years that black people should not “dwell morbidly” upon the slave past.Footnote 119 Douglass saw this as letting white people off the hook, as buying into the idea that, because slavery was over, white men owed nothing to the black race. Crummell, unlike Douglass, had never experienced slavery and was probably not the best spokesman for the position that African Americans should move on from the history of slavery. And Crummell could be insensitive, if not arrogant, towards poor African Americans. Meanwhile, Douglass saw American history as the accumulation of a debt to African Americans that, as his biographer notes, needed “to be paid over time with action.”Footnote 120
This difference in ideas about history was rooted in subtle but crucial differences in how the two men conceived of race and its relation to selfhood.Footnote 121 The black self that Crummell saw developing was made real in the context of group institutions: the church, black educational organizations, and even a black nation. Both believed in self-reliance, but in Crummell's version of it, the self was more of a collective entity than it was for Douglass. Crummell's vision of selfhood was rooted in a racial community. Moreover, Crummell's belief in the weakness of black people was not meant to be a crude victim blaming but a spur for black power; he believed, “destroy the weakness of a race, i.e. raise them to light and culture and manhood, and slavery cannot even exist.”Footnote 122 He saw this type of self-willed black activity in radical and even revolutionary behavior, as when he commented that Nat Turner proved that “the negro himself has been a vindicator of his own rights.”Footnote 123 Douglass, on the other hand, was a bit skeptical of these efforts at collective racial organizing. While Douglass's postwar political philosophy was nuanced and is beyond the scope of this essay, he disapproved of Crummell's race pride, and was skeptical of the race-first philanthropy of the “swarm of white beggars that sweep the country in the name of the colored race,” even while still demanding white attention to black oppression.Footnote 124 In essence, Douglass conceived of the liberation of black people, as individuals, through the institutions of national politics (the Republican Party, the federal government, integrated civil rights organizations), while Crummell was largely speaking to a black audience mobilized through collective institutions (the black church, black educational organizations, black nations like Liberia).
Still, despite their difference over the politics of history, the disagreement between Crummell and Douglass on broader questions of selfhood shouldn't be exaggerated. Like Crummell, Douglass was strongly shaped by British Romanticism and American Transcendentalism.Footnote 125 In his famous essay “Self-Made Men,” Douglass used Romantic philosophy (Emerson, in this case), to articulate a vision of a striving self, a belief in the ability of individuals to overcome history and circumstance. And like Crummell he preferred the “spiritual” forms of work and struggle to the material ones. He often spoke of the need for black agency, for African Americans to earn their freedom through struggle. Douglass, in fact, was so opposed to Crummell's arguments that seemed to forget slavery because he wanted to prove black self-reliance; by emphasizing the continued relevance of past injustice he thought he was answering white skeptics who wondered why African Americans weren't immediately as rich as whites.
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On 23 April 1865, a young black medical student in Liberia named Edwin Howard heard that Alexander Crummell would be preaching that night at the Episcopal Church. Despite having already attended church once that day, Howard rushed through the Monrovia streets with some friends to attend. The sermon was “excellent,” he wrote in his tattered diary, one of the few sources we have to understand the reception of Crummell's sermons among his audience in Africa.Footnote 126 We don't know for sure why Howard responded so positively to this particular sermon. But it's likely that Howard—who struggled with depression and loneliness so far away from his Massachusetts home—found something personally uplifting about Crummell's philosophy. Perhaps this isn't surprising as Crummell had never divorced the political from his theories of the self. Rather his work constituted a particularly interesting case of the politicization of selfhood and of the close relationship between models of the self and political activity. It was a vision of the internal self created through dialogue and interaction. He created it by drawing on British Romantics like Coleridge, on American intellectuals like Emerson and Channing, and on other black thinkers and abolitionists. For Crummell this politics of selfhood had both a didactic purpose, as he was articulating models of behavior rooted in an antimaterialistic metaphysics that he wished young black men would follow, and a foundation upon which his own political life occurred.
In the end, Crummell's Romanticism bequeathed him, and the nineteenth-century African American intellectual culture of which he was an important voice, a fascinating if contradictory set of impulses that cannot be fully captured by traditional political categories—part radical critic of white supremacy and slavery and part conservative advocate of self-help and Christian respectability. His opposition to materialism made him skeptical of both Washingtonian accommodation and manual-labor schools, as well as of socialist militancy. A radical abolitionist, Crummell's commitment to a rising black nationality led him to work with the American Colonization Society. His metaphysical dualism inspired both an ugly disdain for the black poor, who constantly disappointed him with their interest in physical or material pleasures, and at the same time an abolitionism that located ideals of political justice outside the given historical world. He was a cultural elitist who still saw truth and knowledge to be about intuitive forms of moral inspiration open to everyone.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the readers of the Intellectual History Workshop and the American Social History Workshop at the University of Chicago for reading earlier versions of this article. The anonymous readers made this essay significantly better and the editors at Modern Intellectual History—including Charlie Capper and Duncan Kelly, offered invaluable advice. As always, I thank Meg who read countless drafts.
