i've just published a new book to kindle:
Herald of Freedom: Essays of Nathaniel Rogers, American Transcendentalist and Radical Abolitionist
i'm telling you this is a discovery: someone's going to have to convince me that a more important straight-to-e book has been published.
A great and almost unknown American writer from New Hampshire, Nathaniel Peabody Rogers (1794-1846) was the most radical American political voice of the antebellum period. He is also an undiscovered American Transcendentalist, at his best comparable to Emerson and Thoreau. Both men acknowledged Rogers' influence on them, and Thoreau published one of his first essays - collected here - on Rogers' work, recognizing his excellence as both a political and a nature writer. Anti-slavery drove all his thought, and as an abolitionist writer, only Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips are his rivals. Rogers was an anarchist, a pacifist, a feminist, an environmentalist, a religious heretic, an individualist, an anti-capitalist and an advocate of animal rights.
His writings are collected here for the first time since 1849, along with Thoreau's essay "Herald of Freedom" and other materials about Rogers and American radicalism of the early 19th century.
nathaniel rogers was an amazing radical and an amazing writer, and if you want to see someone in 1840 who speaks up for animal rights, against capital punishment, against slavery, against the state, for environmentalism as that came much later to be understood, for indian rights, and so on, and did so with extreme clarity, creativity and vigor, you've got to check this out. he was a decade emerson's senior, and he is a fundamental american transcendentalist.
boy kindle does still mangle a word document. here is a clean, free pdf
Contents
Preface, 3
Introduction by John Pierpont, 7
Writings
I. Manifestos of Liberty and Infidelity, 20
Speech, 21
Authority, 22
Church and State, 26
Infidelity, 27
Politics, 28
The Great Question of the Age, 29
Rhode Island Meeting, 31
War, 38
Reply to a Correspondent, 41
II. Anti-Slavery, 46
Constitutionality of Slavery, 47
The Amistad Case, 52
III. Against Hierarchy, 56
Osceola, 57
Color-Phobia, 60
The Rights of Animals, 62
Thoughts on the Death Penalty, 63
Aristocracy, 65
Letter from the Old Man of the Mountain, 67
Address to the Female Anti-Slavery Society, 69
IV. Capitalism, 72
Labor, 73
Against Property, 76
Anti-Slavery and Capital, 79
V. Nature Writing and Personal Essays, 81
It Rains, 82
Bell-Ringing, 83
The Ground Bird, 85
Cobbett's American Gardener, 87
Tilling the Ground, 89
Trees, 91
"Herald of Freedom," by Henry David Thoreau, 99
Appendix A: William Lloyd Garrison, "Declaration of Sentiments of the Peace Society, 108
Appendix B: American Radical Anti-Authoritarians of the of the Early Nineteenth Century, 113
