Armies prepare to fight the last war, or so the adage goes. Napoleon, for instance, won great battles attacking with tight formations of troops, and mid-nineteenth-century military leaders emulated his tactics, even as advances in bullet and rifle technology rendered them increasingly ineffective. This became brutally apparent in the American Civil War as defenders capable of shooting more quickly and accurately at longer distances decimated charging formations. The problem of predicting the nature of future wars by looking to past conflicts can be more generally summed by another adage, this one traceable to Søren Kierkegaard in 1843: life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.1

When Frederick Douglass in 1851 changed the name of his newspaper from The North Star to Frederick Douglass' Paper, he joked, “I shall lose my reputation for being unstable if I don't change soon” (LW 2:223). Change is indeed a major feature of Douglass’s life and writings, as is his sensitivity to his reputation in an often-critical public eye. Douglass rose to fame with the extraordinary success of his 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written By Himself (1845). The book, which forever altered Douglass’s life, is itself a carefully crafted record of personal transformations - from Douglass’s loss of childhood innocence under the brutality of chattel bondage, to his battle with the slave-breaker Covey (which Douglass describes as a “turning-point in my career as a slave” [N 65]), to his escape in 1838 into what he later called the “nominal” freedom of the North (LW 1:279), to his rebirth as a speaker in the American Anti-Slavery Society under the leadership of the white evangelical William Lloyd Garrison. After traveling through Great Britain in 1845-47 and having his freedom purchased by abolitionist friends, Douglass distanced himself from Garrison’s influence and founded the newspaper that would eventually take his name, thus announcing himself as the most prominent black leader and writer in the English-speaking world.

Douglass’s transformations would continue. He became increasingly militant with the coming of the Civil War, defending John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry and recruiting African American soldiers for the Union Army. After the war, he made an uneasy transition from radical reformer to political appointee, holding noteworthy positions in Republican administrations during and after Reconstruction. By the time of his death in 1895, Douglass was an international figure recognized as an orator, writer, statesman, and representative of his race.

Dim memories, dead lovers, old sins, former selves – almost nothing passes utterly away in Poe. Nor does faith in rational systems finally expire in his writings, for although Poe is preternaturally sensitive to the limits of enlightenment philosophy, and although he appears to anticipate postmodernism as uncannily as anyone in the nineteenth century, he remains like so many of his desperate characters driven by the crises of his moment. Melville, Emerson, Douglass, and Stowe have for decades been associated with political questions. Now somewhat belatedly but with sudden intensity a historically grounded and culturally embedded Poe is being unearthed. Whereas deconstruction and psycholinguistics used Poe in a decidedly ahistorical manner, recent scholarship sets his work within social, economic, and mass cultural contexts of the antebellum period. The problem is that Poe is becoming something of a divided figure bound by his era's political discourse but divorced from the philosophy of his day. It may be possible, however, to synthesize this instance of double consciousness by finding a more stubbornly historical Poe who not only participates in his era's broader cultural milieus but who uses historically available ideas to theorize his American world. Like Emerson, Melville, Douglass, and Stowe, Poe tries to bring philosophical order to the slavery conflict. Unlike them, the order he comes to announce is pro-slavery and virulently racist, indicating one possible use of transcendentalism in the antebellum United States.

In their writings on the slavery crisis, Poe, Stowe, Douglass, and Melville treat topics that are recognizably philosophical – the constitution of reality, the foundations of moral authority, the operations of the mind, representation and language. Still, addressing philosophical topics and drawing on available philosophical concepts may not be the same thing as doing philosophy, at least insofar as the authors in question do not employ the rigorous logical methods of formal philosophical analysis and ultimately seem most interested in applying, not inventing or discovering, philosophical ideas. Emerson is similarly improvisational and opportunistic, but he has more cachet in philosophical circles. Though Emerson was seldom a systematic student, he read widely and intensely in philosophy, and though for most professional philosophers he remains on the margins of the field, he directly influenced Nietzsche and the pragmatists and has been the subject of powerful work by Stanley Cavell and Cornel West. As Lawrence Buell has recently suggested, whether we call Emerson a philosopher or not may have more to do with definitions of philosophy than with Emerson's lifelong, if somewhat idiosyncratic, dedication to epistemology and ethics. Such dedication, along with his growing participation in the abolitionist movement, might rightly make Emerson the star of a book about the conjunction of slavery and philosophy in antebellum American literature.

Yet the intersections of philosophy and the literature of slavery cannot be centripetally structured around a single writer, for even as canonical a thinker as Emerson is in many ways an anomalous figure in this book.

Thus far we have seen how Poe and Stowe enter into philosophical narratives: Poe helps to signal the rise of transcendentalism, while Stowe explores the theory of moral sentiments and its tense relation to Calvinism. Romantic, sentimental, and Puritan legacies are certainly important to antebellum literature. Yet the dominant philosophy in pre-Civil War America was Scottish commonsense, represented here by a literary figure not generally regarded in terms of philosophy. Looking back on leaders such as Alexander Crummell, Henry Highland Garnett, Sojourner Truth and “above all, Frederick Douglass,” W. E. B. Du Bois wondered, “Where were these black abolitionists trained?” Du Bois simply called Douglass “self-trained” and said little else on the matter, though subsequent scholarship more stubbornly traces Douglass's intellectual roots. For a time, Douglass's thinking appeared to be fairly representative of his era and not particularly profound, in part because of what David Blight sees as Douglass's strain of realism. Douglass was indeed a politically savvy and remarkably effective abolitionist who first knew slavery as a physical atrocity, not a philosophical problem. Douglass's race and experience as a slave distinguish him from other main figures in this book, and yet as he pursued practical ends he, too, found both disillusionment and hope in the possibilities of philosophy.

As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. first pointed out, the issue is not whether Douglass deals with metaphysics, but rather how he views and deploys its emancipatory power. What Gates calls Douglass's “burden” of knowledge entails important questions.