Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau 
When civil law doesn’t work, and enormously disastrous consequences are in the offing, it’s time to turn to higher law.
“When they go low, we go high” — or so Michelle Obama famously said.
It’s a great credo — or, as we say today, ‘sound bite’ — but so far we haven’t done it. Not really.
They go low, and we just shake a finger and say “naughty, naughty.”
What do we mean by going ‘high’?
How about “higher law”?
The phrase, and the concept behind it, has an age-old weight and credibility in the history of American political thought. In particular, it was responsible for organizing and motivating the radical Abolitionist movement in 19th century America that led ultimately to the end of slavery.
The abolition of slavery in America is generally regarded as a positive step unless, of course, you were raised white in Virginia, and quite likely in any of the other states of the Old Confederacy, as recent events suggest. I’m not quite sure why these states were permitted to rejoin the USA with full rights and status. I think their membership in the union should have been conditional on good behavior. Considering what’s gone on in many of these places since 1865, I believe they would probably still be on probation today.
But let’s “go high” — as the former First Lady suggests — and look at the historical circumstances surrounding the emergence of the theory of “higher law.”
African slavery was the great Constitutional crisis between the era War of Independence and the founding of the United States and the era of the industrial crises and wars of the 20th century. The USA survived it only by an enormous national cost in spilled blood and good luck. In the hands of any 19th century President other than Abraham Lincoln, the country would not have survived it intact.
In that time of crisis America’s leading thinkers made appeal to the concept of “higher law” to justify that opposition to slavery that included evading, ignoring and systematic disobedience to national law.
Faced with The Fugitive Slave Act (an essential piece of the sectional Great Compromise of 1850) America’s first original intellectual and cultural figures embraced the notion of a moral law that transcended civil laws.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, still the most influential thinker produced by American culture (Thomas Jefferson and other members of the ‘founding generation’ were products of the flowering of European thought know as the Enlightenment), contended that Americans, like members of the civilizations that came before, had a right to “an original relationship with the universe… There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.”
As slavery became the wedge issue of the mid-19th century sectional crisis, and Abolition the moral crusade of his own home state of Massachusetts, Emerson was forced to consider whether citizens were obliged to follow the dictates of civil law when the morally repulsive Fugitive Slave Act became the law of the land.
The law gave white people in any state of the union the right to imprison any black person they suspected of having once been a slave — and either return them to their owner or make their own claim of ownership. Courts were empowered to ratify the claim, with blacks given only minimal opportunities to prove that they were free ‘persons.’
The law gave white people in any state of the union the right to imprison any black person they suspected of having once been a slave — and either return them to their owner or make their own claim of ownership. Courts were empowered to ratify the claim, with blacks given only minimal opportunities to prove that they were free ‘persons.’
Slave catchers, or mere criminals, moved north in droves to hunt for African Americans.
In Massachusetts white Americans rallied against the law, mobbing slave catchers and freeing their captives by force. Abolitionists such as Henry David Thoreau hid fugitives in their own homes and helped them reach the next safe house in an underground passageway to Canada, now the only place where they could be safe.
Once the most famous politician of his day, Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster was driven from office for his support of the Great Compromise, and replaced by the abolitionist Charles Sumner.
The Fugitive Slave Law caused Emerson to formulate a justification for disobeying civil law by appealing to what he called “higher law” — a universal moral law in tune with ‘nature’ rather than temporal politics — with the right to nullify civil laws that contradicted it.
He wrote: “An immoral law makes it a man’s duty to break it at every hazard.”
Though never as famous in his own time, Emerson’s Concord, Mass. neighbor, friend, and one-time disciple Henry David Thoreau had written his own defense of higher law back in the 1840s titled “Resistance to Civil Government.”
Republished, after his death, under the title “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau’s essay inspired a movement that eventually earned Thoreau international fame. Gandhi drew on it. So did Martin Luther King.
Thoreau famously refused to pay his poll tax one year in protest of America’s immoral land-grab Mexican War and subsequent expansion of slavery into newly seized territory. He was, Thoreau argued, obeying a moral law that has a higher claim on human beings than federal or state civil laws.
This symbolic action — someone else quickly paid Thoreau’s tax and he was out of jail the next morning — attracted little notice. But when the slavery crisis peaked in 1850, his claim that obedience to moral law transcended the obligation to obey to an unjust civil law was widely repeated.
The phrase and concept of a “higher law” justifying opposition to slavery received national attention in the Senate’s debate on the Fugitive Slave Law when New York Senator William Seward (later Lincoln’s Secretary of State) declared his belief in “a higher law than the Constitution.”
The Abolitionists’ crusade to end slavery and the widespread Northern opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act helped bring on the crisis of 1860 and the Civil War. Lincoln was not an Abolitionist, but he and his newly formed Republican Party opposed the expansion of slavery to any new American territory.
The no longer ‘united ‘states paid a huge price for slavery’s end in the wartime deaths and maimings of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. But how to weigh that cost against the price paid by the millions of African lives sentenced to slavery, for which no real restitution has ever been made?
Now, we may ask, what does the philosophy of a higher moral law counsel for today’s Americans at a time when its civilly chosen chief executive profanes the office of President every time he opens his lying, bigoted mouth.
Here’s a suggestion: ignore him.
We do not currently, until the time of the current Pretender’s removal, have a true President of United States.
Obedience to higher law says that desk is empty.
Therefore, no one elected to federal office, employed by the federal government, or counted in the US census as a citizen of the United States should be obliged to obey any order or decision or command issued by the current Pretender to the office of President.
The Pretender claimed the office after a fraudulent election, marred by blatant interference by a foreign hostile government, whose hindquarters the Pretender patently sniffs before betraying his country’s interests; and by brazen attempts at voter suppression by partisan politicians working openly for the interests of the Pretender’s party.
Therefore, no citizen or resident of United States need obey the authority of a Pretender who, while incorrectly recognized by fawning civil authorities as the country’s President, fails the test of legitimacy according to the moral law.
Stop worrying about whether the Pretender will declare a phony ‘national emergency’ to build a wall nobody who live s anywhere near the Southern border desires.
Regardless of the Pretender’s self-serving, self-enriching bombastic bleatings, federal employees should continue to show up for work and do their jobs, the federal treasury should continue to pay them.
Congressional enactments must go into effect directly without executive approval, because we have no legitimate executive to approve them.
Stop listening to anything the Pretender says.
All you need to know of the Pretender’s recent public statement is that a careful analysis by the New York Times concluded that the Pretender made nine factual claims, of which five were demonstrably false, two wholly misleading, and only two of them accurate.
A national figure who speaks truth only two out of nine times fails the standard of the moral law, or any other standard of honesty (or competence) you can think of.
So let us make it clear: Generals, chiefs of staff, cabinet ministers, and other department heads — If the Pretender gives you an order, do not follow it.
This is especially the case if the order involves the use of military force.
No illegitimate Pretender who lies all the time and cannot face facts if he finds them disagreeable can be permitted to make war, especially in the nuclear age. And not even little wars in which tiny nations are humiliated for the sake of publicity photos.
Finally — and equally important to all of the above — if you are the owner of a new media outlet, do not report anything the Pretender says. It is more than likely a lie, or an ignorant prejudice, or a self-serving distraction from an important, though inconvenient truth. Since nothing the Pretender says can be taken at face value, it is against the moral law for news media to spread lies, bigotry and ignorance among the people of this once great land.
The moral law clearly requires expelling the Pretender by turning you back upon him.
All the Pretender craves is attention. Drive him from our midst by ignoring him.
The only attention the moral law recognizes for conduct such as the pretender’s is psychiatric or criminal.
Let only those authorities willing to behave in keeping with higher law deal with the Pretender.
Do this, Americans, and he will soon be gone.
We may take him down by consistently “going higher.” The only question is whether we as nation can find the moral fortitude to do it.
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