In the 1850s, Frederick Douglass set out to nurture emergent antislavery commitments within the most advanced political milieu of the antebellum decade, the Free Soil movement. Douglass developed a protoenvironmentalist critique of capitalism's alienation of workers from the land, arguing that liberty achieved its truest expression when free people mixed their labor with nature in the pursuit of self-reliance. Democratic access to arable land was a precondition of real emancipation, which required reversing capitalism's expropriation of the commons. Douglass fictionalized these ideas in his only novella, “The Heroic Slave” (1853), in which Madison Washington, leader of the 1841 Creole mutiny, declares his independence in a forest glade that functions as a chapel of natural rights. This kind of radical republican pastoralism also shapes My Bondage, My Freedom (1855). The trope's polemical function is especially apparent when it is contrasted retrospectively with The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), in which nature is a paralyzing wilderness rather than a theater of self-emancipation. Ecocriticism has failed so far to engage substantially with black cultures of nature. Part of the problem may be that the lithified historical experience of slavery in rural settings has prevented black writers from developing ecocentric ways of thinking. Douglass's integration of radical pastoralism into abolitionist rhetoric is not only a spotlight example of an alternative black tradition and experience of nature, it also showcases the organic connection between the struggles for social and environmental justice.

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AbstractIn her travel narrativeSummer on the Lakes, in 1843, Margaret Fuller differentiates consistently between the materialistic or utilitarian motivations of settlers, on one hand, and the spiritual or aesthetic aims of tourists on the other. Her trip occurred during the depths of the severe economic crisis of 1837 to 1844, a period of widespread questioning of the historical progressiveness of capitalism. Many among Fuller’s circle of radical bourgeois Bostonians felt that the world had been badly deformed by what they called “the spirit of commerce”, and they worried that New England was developing what Thomas Carlyle diagnosed as the “Condition-of-England.” This romantic assessment of socio-economic pathologies focused on the idea that a materialist, instrumentalist, and rationalist civilization had lost touch with the organic “laws of nature.”Summer on the Lakes, then, is structured by the tension between a vision of a just society rooted in nature and the stark reality of America’s westward expansion, between an abiding faith in the human potential to live up to the beauty of picturesque landscapes and a clear understanding of the cold social calculus of immediate profit.

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