III. SOME KEY CONCORD ABOLITIONISTS
III.B. The Emersons:
Lidian Emerson was, in the assessment of her daughter Ellen, as ardent about antislavery as her friend Mary Merrick Brooks. Like Mrs. Brooks, she was an active member of the Concord Ladies' Antislavery Society from its formation. In contrast, her husband's commitment to abolition came by degrees.
Although Emerson was surrounded by antislavery advocates in his family (step-grandfather Ezra Ripley, brother Charles, and aunt Mary Moody Emerson) and among his friends (Hoars and Thoreaus as well as Mary Brooks), he was reluctant for both temperamental and philosophical reasons to serve as a spokesman for the cause, and remained emotionally distant from it for some time. In an 1837 journal entry, he wrote dispassionately: "Lidian grieves aloud about the wretched negro in the horrors of the middle passage; and they are bad enough. But to such as she, these crucifixions do not come. They come to the obtuse & barbarous to whom they are not horrid but only a little worse than the old sufferings."
Gradually, however, Emerson was moved by the unfolding of events that, in their threat to the individual and to conscience, aroused his outrage and his willingness to play an active role in abolition.
Emerson delivered an antislavery address in Concord in November of 1837, in response to the murder of abolitionist publisher Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois. Focusing as much on the right of free speech as on the wrong of slavery, the speech disappointed those who wanted a stronger statement from him.
By 1844, the annexation of Texas was imminent. Emerson was disgusted with the failure of government and political leaders like Daniel Webster to stop the spread of slavery. When Mary Merrick Brooks asked him to speak at a Ladies' Antislavery Society celebration of the anniversary of emancipation in the British West Indies (one of many such events in New England towns), he agreed. On August 1, 1844, in the Court House on Monument Square, he delivered a powerful speech that placed him among effective public supporters of abolition.
With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and the playing out of its consequences (including the arrest in Boston and return to slavery of Thomas Sims in 1851), Emerson ultimately threw his energies into the antislavery cause, serving in Concord and beyond as a strong voice of social conscience. In the 1850s, he spoke at meetings around the country, opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and supported John Brown.
24. Carte de visite portrait photograph of Lidian Emerson. CFPL Photofile.
26. John Fowler Trow. Alton Trials: of Winthrop S. Gilman, Who Was Indicted with Enoch Long, Amos B. Roff[,] George H. Walworth, George H. Whitney, William Harned, John S. Noble, James Morss, Jr., Henry Tanner, Royal Weller, Reuben Gerry, and Thaddeus B. Hurlbut; for the Crime of Riot, Committed on the night of the 7th of November, 1837, while engaged in defending a Printing Press, from an Attack Made on It at That Time, by an Armed Mob Also, the Trial of John Solomon, Levi Palmer, Horace Beall, Josiah Nutter, Jacob Smith, David Butler, William Carr, and James M. Rock, Indicted with James Jennings, Solomon Morgan, and Frederick Bruchy; for a Riot Committed in Alton, On the night of the 7th of November, 1837, in unlawfully and forcibly entering the Warehouse of Godfrey, Gilman & Co., and breaking up and destroying a Printing Press (New York: John F. Trow, 1838). From Peabody Books, CFPL Vault Collection.
28. Ralph Waldo Emerson. An Address Delivered in the Court-House in Concord, Massachusetts, on 1st August, 1844, on the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1844). From Newton/Emerson Collection, CFPL Concord Authors Collection.
29. Ralph Waldo Emerson. "The Fugitive Slave Law: Address to Citizens of Concord, 3 May, 1851," in Miscellanies, Volume 11 of the Autograph Centenary Edition of The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge: Printed at the Riverside Press, 1904). From R. W. Emerson Collection, CFPL Concord Authors Collection.
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