Book Review: An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America

An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America. By Matthew Stewart. New York: WW Norton & Company, 2024. Hardcover, 400 pp. $32.50.

Reviewed by Robin Friedman

The Civil War remains endlessly fascinating. It rewards study from many perspectives. Matthew Stewart’s book, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America is a study of the Civil War through ideas and of how ideas may lead to action. It combines history, philosophy, and theology in a way that is difficult, challenging, and provocative.

Stewart is an independent philosopher and historian whose books include Nature’s God[1], which explores the influence of the Enlightenment on the American Revolution. Stewart argues that Enlightenment thought was based on naturalism, science, and reason and that it rejected supernatural religion. For Stewart, the significance of the American Revolution does not lie in the overthrow of a king, but lies instead in its effort to take a transcendental deity and a claimed Revelation out of public life. The Enlightenment, for Stewart, lead to the precious values of American life, including freedom, intellectual curiosity, an openness to differing ideas, economic opportunity, and individual growth.

In The Emancipation of Mind, Stewart expands upon his earlier book to consider the Second American Revolution – the Civil War and the fight against slavery. The book explores at some length the economic basis of slavery, but its focus is on revealed religion, on transcendent standards for conduct that allegedly dictate the structure of human society, and in what Stewart finds as the complicity and support that organized Christianity provided to justify the “Peculiar Institution.” Stewart discusses the Bible and passages which he finds support slavery, and he shows how many theologians of the day, both North and South, used the Bible in their extensive purported justifications of slavery.

Stewart writes with a passion for ideas, but also with polemic and with a harsh, narrow view of religion. The book consists of an introduction, “About this Book” which offers a good overview of its content followed by ten chapters, with titles derived from Lincoln’s second inaugural address or from speeches by Frederick Douglass. The work concludes with an afterword, “Let us Strive On” in which Stewart offers his view of the importance of the Civil War era to contemporary American life and to the fight against racial and economic inequality, a bibliographical Appendix of sources, and extensive end notes.

The chapters move between discussions of history and philosophy and try to weave together a broad, international story. The book’s most unusual aspect is its focus on German philosophy and on its influence on the United States following the failed European revolutions of 1848. Many German thinkers, including Hegel and Marx, receive attention, but Stewart gives most consideration to Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 – 1872). Feuerbach’s book The Essence of Christianity (1841) maintained that God was created in man’s image. Feuerbach argued against revealed religion and in favor of a study of man to promote humanism and human solidarity. Stewart offers expositions of Feuerbach’s thought and works to trace its influence in the United States of the Civil War era. He was a particular influence on Frederick Douglass who read The Essence of Christianity in the summer of 1859 and had a bust of the German philosopher in his Washington, D.C. home.

In the United States, Stewart focuses upon four individuals. The central figure, and the least known, is the renegade Unitarian minister and theologian Theodore Parker (1810 – 1860). Martin Luther King Jr’s famous statement: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” (308) is derived from Parker. Parker was a conduit for German thought in the United States. Parker’s erudition, rejection of Christianity, and commitment to abolitionism and other social movements are discussed throughout the book together with his influence on Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown.

Stewart argues that Lincoln remained a religious skeptic throughout his life. He contends that Lincoln read Parker’s essays, which were in his law library, and alluded to them in several important speeches. Lincoln’s second inaugural address is the most important single text in this book, and Stewart gives it a naturalistic interpretation, contrary to the work of some other scholars[2]. Frederick Douglass spoke often about Parker’s works “for the cause of human freedom” (170, 295). Parker was a member of the “Secret Six” which provided funds and support to John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid. Douglass also was involved. Stewart is strongly sympathetic to Brown for, in essence, beginning the Civil War and showing that activism and violence would be necessary for the overthrow of slavery.[3]

Stewart “takes for granted that ideas matter, and that they trace a visible arc through the disorder of human history.” (xxi) He traces this arc through the Enlightenment and the American Revolution in his earlier book and through German philosophy and the Second American Revolution in An Emancipation of the Mind. Even if they may not be fully convinced, students of the Civil War will learn from this book.

[1] Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic, Matthew W. Stewart, (W.W. Norton & Company, 2014).

[2] Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural, Ronald C. White, (Simon & Schuster, 2006) offers a detailed, religiously oriented reading of the Second Inaugural Address.

[3] Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861, Robert W. Merry, (Simon & Schuster, 2024) reviewed on ECW, October 3, 2024, offers a different view of Brown and of the Secret Six. It is rewarding to compare Stewart’s book with Merry’s.

Robin Friedman retired from a career as an attorney with the United States Department of the Interior in 2010. He now spends most of his time pursing his passion for American studies, including history, literature, philosophy, and the Civil War.