9
THE INWARD TURN
Ezra Stiles Gannett, editor of The Christian Examiner between 1843 and 1849, had a good vantage point from which to survey the intellectual terrain contested by New England’s liberal Christians. Reviewing Unitarianism’s development at mid-decade, he admitted that Transcendentalism had affected the denomination “with a meteor-like rapidity.” The movement had captivated or deluded some and frightened or puzzled others, “who looked on and said nothing.” But since then it had declined “with a slower and more equal descent, to the point where we may expect its harmless explosion.” He concluded, “Our mention of it is but the making up of yesterday’s journal.”1
Gannett’s confident dismissal of Transcendentalism’s influence was not just wishful thinking, for by 1850 something had indeed changed. Not that public intellectuals like Emerson or Parker had lost influence, for their reputations only grew in the 1850s. But the coherence and focus of the movement was dissipated, so that to brand someone a Transcendentalist no longer meant what it had in 1840. For one thing, the group’s participation in transatlantic intellectual discourse had progressively contracted, Fuller’s untimely death its most emphatic and tragic marker. Her acolyte Caroline Dall put it simply. “I do not think that I am mistaken,” she said in the 1880s, “that what is meant by Transcendentalism perished with Margaret Fuller.”2 But the demise of Brook Farm, New England’s most ambitious Fourierist experiment, also contributed, as did disillusionment with the failure of Europe’s democratic revolutions of 1848. Fragmented into different camps depending on their orientation toward reform, New England Transcendentalists, who for two decades had eagerly embraced Continental ideas to help them understand and address their nation’s—and mankind’s—shortcomings, became preoccupied with issues they believed were unique to the United States, chief among them the curse of slavery. “The agitation against slavery,” O. B. Frothingham recalled, “had taken hold of the whole country; it was in politics, in journalism, in literature, in the public hall and parlor.”3
Predictably, after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that closed the Mexican War, there was renewed debate over the extension of slavery in the newly acquired territories. Matters came to a head in 1849, when California asked for admission to the Union as a Free State. As Northern abolitionists gained more public support and Whigs threatened to pass more stringent antislavery legislation, Southerners became increasingly worried and bitter, so much so that some began to think that, should the antislavery North have its way, the Southern states should withdraw from the Union. To avert this, in September 1850, after bitter debate, Congress, under the leadership of Senators Henry Clay and Stephen A. Douglas, passed a set of measures subsequently known as the Compromise of 1850.
Its provisions were complex and divisive enough to require their being taken up individually rather than in an omnibus bill. California entered the Union as a Free State. The new territories of New Mexico and Utah were established without mention of slavery, their citizens to decide the matter when they applied for full statehood. The slave trade was outlawed in the District of Columbia, but slaveholding was not. Disputed boundary claims of Texas into western areas of the United States subsequently incorporated into New Mexico were settled by the cession of these lands to the federal government, for a ten-million-dollar payment to Texas.
Most importantly, Fugitive Slave Laws were made much more draconian, giving Southern slave owners unprecedented powers to recover runaways from Free States. Any citizen who aided escaped slaves or inhibited federal authorities from recovering them was subject to a prison term of up to six months and a thousand-dollar fine. Slaves were not entitled to trial by jury and when apprehended were arraigned in federal court where a United States judge or commissioner heard the claimant’s case for recovering his “property.” A slave’s testimony was not admitted; and a written affidavit, rather than the personal testimony of the owner, was all that was required as proof of ownership, opening the way for bounty hunters to undertake the sordid task of returning runaways. Finally, there was no appeal of the judge’s or commissioner’s decision.4
Particularly dismaying to many Northerners, the great Whig senator from Massachusetts, Daniel Webster, had thrown his considerable influence behind the compromise measures and on March 7, 1850, he delivered an impassioned speech in which he urged passage of the bills to preserve the Union. Webster’s actions outraged Emerson, who had become increasingly concerned about slavery and drawn into abolitionist circles.5 For years he had admired the immensely gifted and charismatic senator, whom he once termed “a natural Emperor of men” who was “the triumph of the understanding,” but which in him was “undermined & supplanted by the Reason for which yet he is so good a witness.”6 But early in the 1840s, as the sectional crisis heated up, Emerson began to worry that Webster was currying too much favor with Southern interests.
By the end of the decade, his view of Webster had become darker, as the senator continued to truckle to Southerners, presumably to further his chances for the presidency. “Webster has never done any thing up to the promise of his faculties,” Emerson observed in 1849.7 Such criticism was mild, however, compared with Emerson’s disgust after Webster’s March 7 speech. “‘Liberty! liberty! ’ Pho! Let Mr[.] Webster for decency’s sake shut his lips for once & forever on this word,” Emerson exclaimed in his journals. “The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtezan [sic].”8 Emerson spewed his rancor not only at Webster but at Massachusetts citizens who had not resisted more forcefully the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Law. “No man can look his neighbor in the face,” Emerson wrote. “We sneak about with the infamy of crime in the streets, & cowardice in ourselves and frankly once and for all the Union is sunk[,] the flag is hateful[,] & will be hissed.”9
The Fugitive Slave Law marked a turning point in Emerson’s involvement with organized reform, particularly the abolition movement. As much as he enjoyed the lecture platform, he was uncomfortable with public debate. But by the early 1840s, with the question of Texas statehood—and thus of the expansion of the slave power—looming, he began to accept invitations to speak on the issue of slavery, an activity that increased after Webster’s defection.
One of Emerson’s most significant forays into this arena occurred in the summer of 1844, when the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society asked him to deliver an address on the tenth anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. The occasion was unusual, for although there were many strong advocates of antislavery in Concord—including Emerson’s own wife, Lidian, and Henry Thoreau’s mother, Cynthia—abolition itself was not universally popular.10 When a heavy rainstorm the day before the occasion washed out plans to have Emerson speak on the grounds of Hawthorne’s residence at the Old Manse, he cast about for another venue, only to discover that no local church would open its doors to the event. His young friend Thoreau thereupon procured the courthouse, and when the sexton of the First Church meetinghouse refused to ring its bell (the usual summons for important community gatherings), Thoreau himself pulled the belfry rope to raise a crowd. This was superfluous, however, for that same day Concord was the site of the Middlesex County antislavery fair, which drew participants from the whole region, assuring Emerson a large audience.
Emerson took the occasion seriously. He prepared by reading Thomas Clarkson’s definitive History of the … Abolition of the African Slave Trade as well as James Thome and J. H. Kimball’s Emancipation in the West Indies, works that contained graphic descriptions of slave owners’ abuses. He particularly admired England for voluntarily abolishing the peculiar institution on the grounds of reason, despite the considerable economic interests involved. Like the United States, England ended the slave trade in 1807. Realizing that this had done little to aid the plight of those already enslaved, however, they continued to debate the matter until the populace saw that abolition was the only enlightened alternative. Finally, in May 1833, Lord Sta
nley, minister for the British colonies, introduced into the House of Commons a bill for emancipation. To placate the planters for the loss of their labor force, it included a provision that the black population of the islands would be registered as apprentices for a set number of years, giving their masters three-fourths of their profits but now enjoying the rights and privileges of freemen. At the end of their terms of apprenticeship, they and their children were permanently manumitted. In short, after August 1, 1834, slavery was “utterly and forever abolished” in the British Empire.11
The greatest obstacle to this glorious accomplishment, Emerson told his audience, had been that the British were “shopkeepers, and have the timidities of that profession.” Americans, their children, were similar. “We peddle, we truck, we sail, we row, we ride in cars, we creep in teams, we go in canals—to market, for the sale of goods,” he observed. All that Americans cared about was keeping the customer contented, supplied with good sugar, coffee, tobacco; and if toward that end there resulted “a few unpleasant scenes on the coast of Africa? That was a great way off,” Emerson said sarcastically. If anyone mentioned the “homicide, madness, adultery, and intolerable torture” that accompanies slavery, Americans “let the church bells ring louder, the church organ swell its peal, and drown the hideous sound.” The sugar cultivated by slaves “was excellent; nobody tasted blood in it.” The coffee, too, “was fragrant; the tobacco was incense; the brandy made nations happy; the cotton clothed the world.”12 In England, however, honest men and women had not overlooked the abominable system on which these luxuries were based. In 1834 the British had made the right decision. Would Americans do the same?
Most appalling to Emerson were laws in South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana that allowed white citizens of these states arbitrarily to detain free black sailors, cooks, and other menial workers visiting their ports on merchant vessels and, if their jail costs (often exorbitant to discourage payment) were not met, to sell them into slavery. On this issue Emerson was a states’ rights man, demanding that citizens of Massachusetts, white or black, be given the protection to which they were entitled by the United States Constitution. It astonished him that the Massachusetts government took no action in such cases. “The Governor of Massachusetts is a trifler; the State-house in Boston is a playhouse; the General Court is a dishonored body: if they make laws which they cannot execute.” If Massachusetts did not have the power to defend its own people and its own shipping, because it had delegated it to the federal government, he asked, did it not have representation in that government? “I may as well say what all men feel,” Emerson concluded, “that whilst our very amiable and very innocent representatives and senators at Washington are accomplished lawyers and merchants, and very eloquent at dinners and caucuses, there is a disastrous want of men from New England.”13
He also praised the accomplishments of Caribbean blacks who in the aftermath of emancipation had risen to occupations and positions of authority throughout the islands. This was not the case in the United States, where descendants of Africans were precluded any opportunity to be a white person’s equal. This only reflected on the moral bankruptcy of American white society, however, for “the civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded.” It was a doctrine common to both the oldest and the newest philosophy: that one man cannot injure another “without a sympathetic injury” to all.14
Over the next several years Emerson gave other antislavery addresses, on the Fourth of July in the nearby town of Dedham in 1846, for example, and at an antislavery convention in Worcester in the summer of 1849 attended by more than five thousand delegates from all over New England. Then came the Compromise of 1850, and with it the harsh truth that by federal statute Massachusetts had to comply with the Fugitive Slave Law. That spring Emerson accepted an invitation from some of his townsmen to speak on this issue, an occasion precipitated by the capture and rendition in Boston of the runaway slave Thomas Sims. In this speech, fired by months of rumination on Webster’s treachery, Emerson spoke as one transformed. As he put it in the first paragraph of his speech, “The last year has forced us all into politics.”15
He who in 1836 had counseled “Build therefore your own world” now awakened every morning to a political reality that pained him throughout the day. The very landscape seemed robbed of its beauty, and he even had trouble breathing because of the “infamy” in the air. But the notorious law seemed not to have the same effect among his fellow citizens. Emerson was surprised to find that among “presidents of colleges and professors, saints and brokers, insurers, lawyers, importers, manufacturers,” there was not “an unpleasant sentiment, not a liberal recollection, not so much as a snatch of an old song for freedom” that intruded on their passive obedience to the new statutes. The only good thing to come from them was that they “had the illuminating power of a sheet of lightning at midnight.” They showed the truth about America to those willing to see.16
Most despicable, all seemed excused by allegiance to “party,” that is, to politics. “Nothing proves the want of all thought,” Emerson seethed, and “the absence of standard in men’s minds more than the dominion of party.” Here were “upright men, compotes mentis, husbands, fathers, trustees, friends, open, generous, brave, who can see nothing in this claim for bare humanity and the health and honor of their native state, but canting fanaticism, sedition, and ‘one idea.’” Because of such preoccupation, he continued, the wealth and power of Massachusetts were thrown into “the scale of the crime.” Boston, which Emerson’s friend Oliver Wendell Holmes had called the “hub of the universe,” was nothing less than the slave master’s “hound.”17
Emerson now came to the same conclusion Thoreau had over the Mexican War. “An immoral law,” Emerson declared, “makes it a man’s duty to break it, at every hazard.” He was disappointed that moral outrage had not moved his fellow citizens to civil disobedience. “I thought,” he said, “that all men of all conditions had been made sharers of a certain experience, that in certain rare and retired moments they had been made to see how man is man.” “I thought,” he continued, “that every time a man goes back to his own thoughts, these angels receive him, talk with him, and, that, in the best hours, he is uplifted in virtue of this essence, into a peace and power this world cannot give.”18 Emerson had believed, in other words, that men would be directed to oppose slavery by instruction from the transcendent Reason. Now he knew otherwise. They had to be shocked into disgust and action by an encounter with the horror of slavery, directly embodied in the likes of Thomas Sims and vicariously by words like Emerson’s.
After outlining other grounds on which Massachusetts citizens should resist the new law—how could a law be enforced that fines pity, he asked, or that could not be executed by good men?—Emerson made his larger point. “Every person who touches this business is contaminated,” he claimed. He also repeated his indictment of Webster, angrily noting that “the one eminent American of our time, whom we could produce as a finished work of nature,” had deserted the cause of righteousness. Webster’s fault, Emerson now realized, was that the great senator thought that government existed for the protection of property rather than to ensure the good of all its citizens. Indeed, nothing seemed more hypocritical than the bluster about the preservation of the Union by which supporters of the Compromise defended their vote. What was the Union “to a man self-condemned, with all sense of self-respect and chance of fair fame cut off, with the names of conscience and religion become bitter ironies, and liberty the ghastly mockery which Mr. Webster means by that word?” What must people do? “One thing is plain,” Emerson declared. “We cannot answer for the Union” but have to keep Massachusetts “true” by resisting the law’s provisions.19
Shortly after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and four years after Webster’s speech, Emerson revisited it in an address delivered at an antislavery meeting at the Tabernacle, on Broadway in New York City. Introduced by Stephen Douglas, this act left to popular sove
reignty—that is, the settlers’ votes—the question of whether slavery would be allowed in these two new territories. It was viewed by antislavery forces as another capitulation to the Southern cause, and Emerson linked it to the earlier and much-despised Compromise of 1850. He stated his continuing discomfort with speaking to public questions. “It seems like meddling,” he said, “or leaving your work.” Public events, however, caused him to feel the necessity to turn to the public arena. Even though Webster had been dead for two years, his perfidy had brought on the Fugitive Slave Law, so that no one in the Free States could escape complicity with slavery, a situation now exacerbated in the Kansas-Nebraska territories.20 This same month, another runaway, Anthony Burns, had been arrested in Boston, causing the largest uproar yet among antislavery supporters. Burns’s hearing and subsequent efforts to free him traumatized the community and intensified support of the abolitionists’ cause.
Through the decade, Emerson continued to work at literary projects, publishing Representative Men in 1850 and English Traits six years later, neither of which, oddly, contained any of his antislavery writings. Like any moral person, he obviously was deeply moved by the slaves’ plight and had weighed in against the immorality of the plantation system, but he could hardly have been termed a leader among abolitionists. At this point another Transcendentalist stepped into the fray. Antislavery advocates sought and received Emerson’s support in the decade’s subsequent ideological battles, but it was Theodore Parker, “our Savonarola,” as Emerson called him, who most galvanized Massachusetts citizens against the continuing erosion of their, and all Americans’, liberties.21 The Fugitive Slave Law had pushed Emerson into antislavery politics, but it made Theodore Parker one of the nation’s most prominent abolitionists.
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