Black Abdiel and the Higher Law: James Monroe Whitfield vs. the Fillmore Faction

Abstract:As English Romanticism rejects Neoclassicism, so Antebellum Black Romanticism rejects the slavery-friendly White Unionism embodied in the Compromise of 1850. In Millard Fillmore's Buffalo, the Black Romantic barber-poet James Monroe Whitfield damned Daniel Webster as a traitor to Abolition ("The Arch-Apostate") and Buffalo's Reverend John C. Lord as a hireling Unionist priest ("How Long"). For White Unionists, Scripture blesses the slaveholding Davidic kingdom of the present, founded in compromise and positive law. For Black Romantics like Whitfield, Scripture blesses the liberated republic of the future, founded in Milton's prophetic tradition and in an Abolitonist higher law.