Natural Justice The Crux Of Transcendentalism And...

Laurel Day HIST 1301-066 3 November 2015 Natural Justice: The Crux of Transcendentalism and Abolitionism The year was 1850. President Millard Fillmore had signed the Fugitive Slave Act into law, giving southern slave-owners the right to claim slaves they alleged had run away from their property in exchange for the federal government claiming California as a free state. Fillmore would not have signed the act without the pressure created by numerous slave rebellions over the last fifty years, with Nat Turner’s 1831 insurrection in Virginia being one of the most notable. Nevertheless, the law didn’t stop dissidents like John Brown in 1859 or Harriet Tubman from committing civil disobedience: in fact, such actions only strengthened the abolitionist movement and increased the likelihood of a civil war. Some of their supporters identified as transcendentalists, or writers and philosophers who believed that by looking to nature, a divine creation, society could solve its problems. In effect, they believed that because African-Americans were also God’s creatures, they too had agency. Three iconic writers associated with the movement made up for their financial failures as writers to become influential volunteers and activists that educated the American public about the repugnant nature of slavery, effectively rallying them to support their cause and the preservation of the Union. One of these supporters was Walt Whitman, a writer from an impoverished Quaker background who