Part 28

came his sense of justice, and the power of seeing the planter’s side, born into such a social and political condition, by breeding and climatic conditions unable to toil, and with his whole inheritance vested in slaves. In a speech in New York in 1855, Mr. Emerson urged emancipation with compensation to the owners, by general sacrifices to this great end by old and young throughout the North, not as the planters’ due, but as recognizing their need and losses. Yet with all due consideration for the planters’ misfortune of condition, he said, on the main question, “It is impossible to be a gentleman and not be an abolitionist.”

[105] _Page 103, note 1._

Sole estate his sire bequeathed,— Hapless sire to hapless son,— Was the wailing song he breathed, And his chain when life was done.

These lines from “Voluntaries” in the _Poems_, and the stanza which there follows them, are recalled by this passage.

[106] _Page 106, note 1._ Granville Sharp (1734-1813) was a broad-minded scholar and determined philanthropist. He left the study of law to go into the ordnance office, which he left, when the American Revolution came on, disapproving of the course of the government. In the case of one of the slaves whom he defended, the Lord Mayor discharged the negro, but his master would not give him up. The case then went before the Court of Kings Bench, and the twelve judges decided in 1772 that a man could not be held in, or transported from, England. In June, 1787, Sharp with Clarkson and ten others, nine of whom were Quakers, formed a committee “for effecting the abolition of the slave trade;” Sharp was chairman. Defeated in Parliament in 1788 and 1789, they were joined by Pitt and Fox in 1790. In 1793 the Commons passed an act for gradual abolition of the trade, which was rejected by the Peers. This occurred again in 1795 and 1804. In 1806, the Fox and Grenville Ministry brought forward abolition of the trade as a government measure. It was carried in 1807. Then the enemies of slavery began to strive for its gradual abolition throughout the British dominions, Clarkson, Wilberforce and Buxton being the principal leaders. The course of events, however, showed that immediate emancipation would be a better measure. The government brought this forward in 1823, modified by an apprenticeship system. The bill with this feature and some compensation to owners was passed in 1833.

[107] _Page 108, note 1._ In the essay on Self-Reliance Mr. Emerson said: “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as Monachism, of the Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson.”

[108] _Page 112, note 1._ The “prædials” seem to have been the slaves born into captivity, as distinguished from imported slaves.

[109] _Page 115, note 1._ _Emancipation in the West Indies: A Six Months’ Tour in Antigua, Barbadoes and Jamaica, in the year 1837._ J. A. Thome and J. H. Kimball, New York, 1838.

[110] _Page 120, note 1._ This was very soon after the coronation of the young Queen Victoria, which occurred in the previous year.

[111] _Page 125, note 1._ “All things are moral, and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature glorious with form, color and motion; that every globe in the remotest heaven, every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life ... every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments.”—_Nature, Addresses and Lectures_, p. 40. See also the last sentence in “Prudence,” _Essays, First Series_.

[112] _Page 131, note 1._ “For he [a ruler] is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.” _Epistle to the Romans_, xiii. 4.

[113] _Page 132, note 1._ The cause for Mr. Emerson’s indignation was great and recent. His honored townsman, Samuel Hoar, Esq., sent by the State of Massachusetts as her commissioner to South Carolina to investigate the seizures, imprisonments, punishments, and even sale of colored citizens of Massachusetts who had committed no crime, had been expelled with threats of violence from the city of Charleston. (See “Samuel Hoar,” in _Lectures and Biographical Sketches_.)

[114] _Page 133, note 1._

A union then of honest men, Or union never more again.

“Boston,” _Poems_.

[115] _Page 134, note 1._ John Quincy Adams, who, though disapproving, as untimely, the legislation urged on Congress by the abolitionists, yet fought strongly and persistently against the rules framed to check their importunity, as inconsistent with the right of petition itself.

[116] _Page 144, note 1._ Here comes in the doctrine of the Survival of the Fittest that appears in the “Ode inscribed to W. H. Channing,” but, even more than there, tempered by faith in the strength of humanity. See the “Lecture on the Times,” given in 1841 (_Nature, Addresses and Lectures_, p. 220), for considerations on slavery more coolly philosophical than Mr. Emerson’s warm blood often admitted of, during the strife for liberty in the period between the Mexican and Civil Wars.

[117] _Page 145, note 1._

To-day unbind the captive, So only are ye unbound; Lift up a people from the dust, Trump of their rescue, sound!

“Boston Hymn,” _Poems_.

[118] _Page 146, note 1._ In the early version of the “Boston” poem were these lines:—

O pity that I pause! The song disdaining shuns To name the noble sires, because Of the unworthy sons. ... Your town is full of gentle names, By patriots once were watchwords made; Those war-cry names are muffled shames On recreant sons mislaid.

WAR

In the winter and early spring of 1838, the American Peace Society held a course of lectures in Boston. This lecture was the seventh in the course. Mr. Alcott wrote in his diary at that time:—

“I heard Emerson’s lecture on _Peace_, as the closing discourse of a series delivered at the Odeon before the American Peace Society.... After the lecture I saw Mr. Garrison, who is at this time deeply interested in the question of Peace, as are many of the meekest and noblest souls amongst us. He expressed his great pleasure in the stand taken by Mr. Emerson and his hopes in him as a man of the new age. This great topic has been brought before the general mind as a direct consequence of the agitation of the abolition of slavery.”

The lecture was printed in 1849 _Æsthetic Papers_, edited by Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody.

Although the chronicles of the campaigns and acts of prowess of the masterly soldiers were always attractive reading to Mr. Emerson,—much more acts of patriotic devotion in the field,—and he was by no means committed as a non-resistant, he saw that war had been a part of evolution, and that its evils might pave the way for good, as flowers spring up next year on a field of carnage. He knew that evolution required an almost divine patience, yet his good hope was strengthened by the signs of the times, and he desired to hasten the great upward step in civilization.

It is evident from his words and course of action during the outrages upon the peaceful settlers of Kansas, and when Sumter was fired upon and Washington threatened, that he recognized that the hour had not yet come. He subscribed lavishly from his limited means for the furnishing Sharp’s rifles to the “Free State men.” In the early days of the War of the Rebellion he visited Charlestown Navy-Yard to see the preparations, and said, “Ah! sometimes gunpowder smells good.” In the opening of his address at Tufts College, in July, 1861, he said, “The brute noise of cannon has a most poetic echo in these days, as instrument of the primal sentiments of humanity.” Several speeches included in this volume show that at that crisis his feeling was, as he had said of the forefathers’ “deed of blood” at Concord Bridge,—

Even the serene Reason says It was well done.

But all this was only a postponement of hope.

[119] _Page 152, note 1._ With regard to schooling a man’s courage for whatever may befall, Mr. Emerson said: “Our culture therefore must not omit the arming of the man. Let him hear in season that he is born into the state of war, and that the commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self-collected and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and life in his hand, and with perfect urbanity dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech and the rectitude of his behavior.”—“Heroism,” _Essays, First Series_.

“A state of war or anarchy, in which law has little force, is so far valuable that it puts every man on trial.”—“The Conservative,” _Nature, Addresses and Lectures_.

[120] _Page 156, note 1._ Mr. Emerson used to take pleasure in a story illustrating this common foible of mankind. A returned Arctic explorer, in a lecture, said, “In this wilderness among the ice-floes, I had the fortune to see a terrible conflict between two Polar bears—” “Which beat?” cried an excited voice from the audience.

[121] _Page 160, note 1._ In his description of the Tower of London in the journal of 1834, it appears that the suits of armor there set up affected Mr. Emerson unpleasantly, suggesting half-human destructive lobsters and crabs. It is, I believe, said that Benvenuto Cellini learned to make the cunning joints in armor for men from those of these marine warriors.

In the opening paragraphs of the essay on Inspiration Mr. Emerson congratulates himself that the doleful experiences of the aboriginal man were got through with long ago. “They combed his mane, they pared his nails, cut off his tail, set him on end, sent him to school and made him pay taxes, before he could begin to write his sad story for the compassion or the repudiation of his descendants, who are all but unanimous to disown him. We must take him as we find him,” etc.

[122] _Page 162, note 1._ In _English Traits_, at the end of the chapter on Stonehenge, Mr. Emerson gave a humorous account of his setting forth the faith or hope of the non-resistants and idealists in New England, to the amazed and shocked ears of Carlyle and Arthur Helps.

[123] _Page 164, note 1._ “As the solidest rocks are made up of invisible gases, as the world is made of thickened light and arrested electricity, so men know that ideas are the parents of men and things; there was never anything that did not proceed from a thought.”—“The Scholar,” _Lectures and Biographical Sketches_.

[124] _Page 164, note 2._ In “The Problem” he says of the Parthenon and England’s abbeys that

out of Thought’s interior sphere These wonders rose to upper air.

[125] _Page 167, note 1._ Mr. Emerson in his conversation frankly showed that he was not yet quite prepared to be a non-resistant. He would have surely followed his own counsel where he says, “Go face the burglar in your own house,” and he seemed to feel instinctive sympathy with what Mr. Dexter, the counsel, said in the speech which he used to read me from the Selfridge trial:—

“And may my arm drop powerless when it fails to defend my honor!”

He exactly stated his own position in a later passage, where he says that “in a given extreme event Nature and God will instruct him in that hour.”

[126] _Page 172, note 1._ Thoreau lived frankly and fearlessly up to this standard.

[127] _Page 173, note 1._ This same view is even more attractively set forth in “Aristocracy” (_Lectures and Biographical Sketches_, pp. 36-40).

Rev. Dr. Cyrus A. Bartol, in an interesting paper on “Emerson’s Religion,”[C] gives, among other reminiscences, the following: “I asked him if he approved of war. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘in one born to fight.’”

THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW, CONCORD, 1851

The opening passages of this speech to his friends and neighbors show how deeply Mr. Emerson was moved. He could no longer be philosophical, as in the “Ode” inscribed to his friend William Channing, and in earlier addresses. The time had come when he might at any moment be summoned to help the marshal’s men seize and return to bondage the poor fugitive who had almost reached the safety of England’s protection. Such men were frequently passing through Concord, concealed and helped by the good Bigelow, the blacksmith, and his wife, the Thoreaus, Mrs. Brooks, and even once at a critical moment by her husband, the law-abiding “’Squire” himself.

Mr. Emerson instantly took his stand, and did not hesitate to run atilt against the dark giant, once so honored. The question of secession for conscience’ sake had come up among the Abolitionists. Mr. Emerson had stood for Union, yet felt that there could be nothing but shame in Union until the humiliating statute was repealed. Meanwhile he fell back on the reserve-right of individual revolution as the duty of honest men. The Free-Soilers soon after renominated Dr. John Gorham Palfrey for a seat in Congress, and in his campaign Mr. Emerson delivered this speech in several Middlesex towns. In Cambridge he was interrupted by young men from the college, Southerners, it was said, but it appears that the disturbance was quite as much due to “Northern men who were eager to keep up a show of fidelity to the interest of the South,” as a Southern student said in a dignified disclaimer. Mr. Cabot in his Memoir gives an interesting account by Professor James B. Thayer of Mr. Emerson’s calm ignoring of the rude and hostile demonstration.

Writing to Carlyle, in the end of July, 1857, Mr. Emerson said: “In the spring, the abomination of our Fugitive Slave Bill drove me to some writing and speech-making, without hope of effect, but to clear my own skirts.”

This was the reaction which could not but be felt by him where he had been forced to descend into the dust and conflict of the arena from the serene heights. He wrote in his journal next year:—

“Philip Randolph [a valued friend] was surprised to find me speaking to the politics of anti-slavery in Philadelphia. I suppose because he thought me a believer in general laws and that it was a kind of distrust of my own general teachings to appear in active sympathy with these temporary heats. He is right so far as it is becoming in the scholar to insist on central soundness rather than on superficial applications. I am to give a wise and just ballot, though no man else in the republic doth. I am to demand the absolute right, affirm that, and do that; but not push Boston into a showy and theatrical attitude, endeavoring to persuade her she is more virtuous than she is. Thereby I am robbing myself more than I am enriching the public. After twenty, fifty, a hundred years, it will be quite easy to discriminate who stood for the right, and who for the expedient.”

Yet however hard the duty of the hour might be, Mr. Emerson never failed in his duty as a good citizen to come to the front in dark days.

“In spite of all his gracefulness and reserve and love of the unbroken tranquillity of serene thought, he was by the right of heredity a belligerent in the cause of Freedom.”

[128] _Page 181, note 1._ Shadrach was hurried to Concord after his rescue, and by curious coincidence Edwin Bigelow, the good village blacksmith who there harbored him and drove him to the New Hampshire line, was one of the jurors in the trial of another rescue case.

[129] _Page 183, note 1._ Mr. Emerson wrote in his journal, after Mr. Hoar’s return:—

“The position of Massachusetts seems to me to be better for Mr. Hoar’s visit to South Carolina in this point, that one illusion is dispelled. Massachusetts was dishonored before, but she was credulous in the protection of the Constitution, and either did not believe, or affected not to believe in that she was dishonored. Now all doubt on that subject is removed, and every Carolina boy will not fail to tell every Massachusetts boy whenever they meet how the fact stands. The Boston merchants would willingly salve the matter over, but they cannot hereafter receive Southern gentlemen at their tables without a consciousness of shame.”

[130] _Page 192, note 1._ Apparently from Vattel, book i., ch. i., p. 79.

[131] _Page 201, note 1._

But there was chaff within the flour, And one was false in ten, And reckless clerks in lust of power Forgot the rights of men; Cruel and blind did file their mind, And sell the blood of human kind.

Your town is full of gentle names By patriots once were watchwords made; Those war-cry names are muffled shames On recreant sons mislaid. What slave shall dare a name to wear Once Freedom’s passport everywhere?

See note to poem “Boston.”

Mr. Charles Francis Adams’s _Life of Richard H. Dana_ gives light on the phrase used in the first of these verses. The following passage is from Mr. Dana’s journal during the trial of Anthony Burns, the fugitive:—

“Choate, I had an amusing interview with. I asked him to make one effort in favor of freedom, and told him that the 1850 delusion was dispelled and all men were coming round, the Board of Brokers and Board of Aldermen were talking treason, and that he must come and act. He said he should be glad to make an effort on our side, but that he had given written opinions against us in the Sims case on every point, and that he could not go against them.

“‘You corrupted your mind in 1850.’

“‘Yes. Filed my mind.’

“‘I wish you would file it in court for our benefit.’”

Shakspeare said,—

“For Banquo’s issue have I filed my mind.”

[132] _Page 202, note 1._ Mr. F. B. Sanborn, in his _Life of Thoreau_, says that Webster gave, as a reason for not visiting Concord in his later years, that “Many of those whom I so highly esteemed in your beautiful and quiet village have become a good deal estranged, to my great grief, by abolitionism, free-soilism, transcendentalism and other notions which I cannot but regard as so many vagaries of the imagination.”

[133] _Page 204, note 1._

Or who, with accent bolder, Dare praise the freedom-loving mountaineer? I found by thee, O rushing Contoocook! And in thy valleys, Agiochook! The jackals of the negro-holder. ... Virtue palters; Right is hence; Freedom praised, but hid; Funeral eloquence Rattles the coffin-lid.

_Poems_, “Ode,” inscribed to W. H. Channing.

See also what is said of “the treachery of scholars” in the last pages of “The Man of Letters,” _Lectures and Biographical Sketches_.

[134] _Page 209, note 1._ This appeal for a general movement in the free states to free the slaves and to recompense the planters, unhappily brought up to the institution, for their loss, was so much better in an anti-slavery address in New York, in 1855, than in the Concord speech four years earlier, that I have substituted the later version here. In Mr. Cabot’s Memoir, pp. 558-593, a portion of the New York speech, including this paragraph, is given.

THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW, NEW YORK, 1854

Writing to his friend Carlyle on March 11, 1854, Mr. Emerson said:—

“One good word closed your letter in September ... namely, that you might come westward when Frederic was disposed of. Speed Frederic, then, for all reasons and for this! America is growing furiously, town and state; new Kansas, new Nebraska looming up in these days, vicious politicians seething a wretched destiny for them already at Washington. The politicians shall be sodden, the States escape, please God! The fight of slave and freeman drawing nearer, the question is sharply, whether slavery or whether freedom shall be abolished. Come and see.”

Four days before thus writing, he had given this address, to a fairly large audience, in the “Tabernacle” in New York City, for, however dark the horizon looked, the very success of the slave power was working its ruin. Encouraged by the submission of the North to the passage of the evil law to pacify them, they had resolved to repeal the Missouri Compromise, which confined slavery to a certain latitude. It was repealed within a few days of the time Mr. Emerson made this address. During the debate, Charles Sumner said to Douglas, “Sir, the bill you are about to pass is at once the worst and the best on which Congress has ever acted.... It is the worst bill because it is a present victory for slavery.... Sir, it is the best bill on which Congress has ever acted, _for it annuls all past compromises with slavery and makes any future compromises impossible_. Thus it puts Freedom and Slavery face to face and bids them grapple. Who can doubt the result?” The rendition to slavery of Anthony Burns from Boston in May wrought a great change in public feeling there. Even the commercial element in the North felt the shame.

Though not a worker in the anti-slavery organization, Mr. Emerson had always been the outspoken friend of freedom for the negroes. Witness his tribute in 1837 to Elijah Lovejoy, the martyr in their cause (see “Heroism,” _Essays, First Series_, p. 262, and note). But the narrow and uncharitable speech and demeanor of many “philanthropists” led him to such reproofs as the one quoted by Dr. Bartol, “Let them first be anthropic,” or that in “Self-Reliance” to the angry bigot: “Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper; be good-natured and modest; have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off.”

But now the foe was at the very gate. The duty to resist was instant and commanding. Mr. Emerson wrote in his journal, soon after:—

“Why do we not say, We are abolitionists of the most absolute abolition, as every man that is a man must be?... We do not try to alter your laws in Alabama, nor yours in Japan, or in the Feejee Islands; but we do not admit them, or permit a trace of them here. Nor shall we suffer you to carry your Thuggism, north, south, east or west into a single rod of territory which we control. We intend to set and keep a _cordon sanitaire_ all around the infected district, and by no means suffer the pestilence to spread.

“It is impossible to be a gentleman, and not be an abolitionist, for a gentleman is one who is fulfilled with all nobleness, and imparts it; is the natural defender and raiser of the weak and oppressed.”

With Mr. Emerson’s indignation at Webster’s fall was mingled great sorrow. From his youth he had admired and revered him. The verses about him printed in the Appendix to the _Poems_ show the change of feeling. He used to quote Browning’s “Lost Leader” as applying to him, and admired Whittier’s fine poem “Ichabod” (“The glory is departed,” I. Samuel, iv., 21, 22) on his apostasy.

Mr. Emerson’s faithfulness to his sense of duty, leading him, against his native instincts, into the turmoil of politics, striving to undo the mischief that a leader once revered had wrought in the minds of Americans, is shown in the extract from his journal with regard to this lecture:—

“At New York Tabernacle, on the 7th March, I saw the great audience with dismay, and told the bragging secretary that I was most thankful to those that staid at home; every auditor was a new affliction, and if all had staid away, by rain or preoccupation, I had been best pleased.”

[135] _Page 217, note 1._ In _Lectures and Biographical Sketches_, in the essay on Aristocracy, and also in that on The Man of Letters, the duty of loyalty to his thought and his order is urged as a trait of the gentleman and the scholar, and in the latter essay, the scholar’s duty to stand for what is generous and free.