An Emancipation of the Mind

Starred review from February 5, 2024
In this enthralling and muscular study, historian and philosopher Stewart (The 9.9 Percent) examines the German radicals who inspired a generation of antislavery leaders in 19th-century America. Tracing how the secularist, rational, and atheistic philosophies of Ludwig Feuerbach, G.W.F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant, and David Friedrich Strauss traveled across the ocean and found a home with leading lights of the abolitionist movement (including Frederick Douglass and Theodore Parker), Stewart contends that this radical philosophical vision, which had somewhat influenced the American Revolution, had in the years since “dissipated under the growing pressure of a counterrevolutionary slaveholding oligarchy.” After the failure of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, however, a cadre of well-educated, German-speaking “hard-liners” (around 10,000 people in total) immigrated to the U.S., carrying with them ideas that revitalized American revolutionary principles—especially the notion that all men are created equal, which Stewart argues came into direct conflict with the slaveholders’ coopted branch of American Christianity that explicitly promoted racial hierarchy. Stewart brings this intellectual battle into the present, forcefully rebutting what he considers insidious recent historiography that paints Lincoln as a “Bible-believing Christian” and boldly stating that the slaveholders’ Christian nationalism “clearly anticipates the fascist and neo-fascist movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” It’s a vital reassessment of what underpins American democracy.