Essay
During the period from about 1820 until the Civil War, a heightened awareness of a range of social issues was expressed through a number of active reform movements. Emerson, in his 1841 lecture “Man the Reformer,” assessed the climate of the times, “In the history of the world the doctrine of Reform had never had such scope as at the present hour.” There was not only an outpouring of concerned effort on behalf of the unrepresented and underrepresented—Blacks, Native Americans, the labor force, women, children, the mentally ill—but also a trend toward the idealistic reshaping of society through communal living and through education and moral reform. Emerson found that his liberal contemporaries—including some in Concord—hoped that he would speak out on the causes they embraced.
In Emerson in Concord, Edward Waldo Emerson wrote of his father’s involvement in reform: “To all meetings held in Concord for the causes of Freedom, spiritual or corporal, he felt bound to give the sanction of his presence whether the speakers were good or bad; he officially welcomed Kossuth and his Hungarian exiles; he entertained John Brown at his house and gave largely from his, at that time very limited, means, to the fund for the furtherance and arming of the Kansas “Free State” immigration.”
Emerson certainly spoke out for reform, in Concord and elsewhere. However, his commitment to reform activism did not come easily.
Both temperamentally and philosophically, he had difficulty aligning himself with organized reform. Naturally reserved, he was repelled by the emotionalism that characterized the rhetoric of reform meetings. Moreover, his Transcendental focus was on the intellectual and moral perfection of the individual as the best method of reforming society.
Even when he believed in the principles behind a reform effort, he could not support the elevation of society over the primacy of the individual. In his “New England Reformers” (1844), he declared: “ … union must be inward, and not one of covenants, and is to be reached by a reverse of the methods [men] use. The union is only perfect, when all the uniters are isolated … Each man, if he attempts to join himself to others, is on all sides cramped and diminished of his proportion; and the stricter the union, the smaller and the more pitiful he is. But leave him alone, to recognize in every hour and place the secret soul, he will go up and down doing the works of a true member, and, to the astonishment of all, the work will be done with concert, though no man spoke … The union must be ideal in actual individualism.”
For this reason, Emerson was skeptical about the benefits of joining utopian communities like Brook Farm and Fruitlands.
Nevertheless, Emerson surmounted his disinclination to become involved in reform. He did, in fact, become impassioned about certain issues, foremost among them the abolition of slavery, and repeatedly rose to the occasion when asked to make a public statement. Some of his most rousing addresses were delivered in Concord, which reinforced the town’s reputation as a reform stronghold.
Concordians were already sensitive to the issue of slavery by the 1830s. A number of the town’s residents belonged to the Middlesex County Antislavery Society, established in 1834. When the Concord Ladies’ Antislavery Society was formed in 1837, Lidian Emerson was one of its founding members. Others in Emerson’s family—his step-grandfather Ezra Ripley, his brother Charles, and his aunt Mary Moody Emerson—were outspoken in their condemnation of slavery. The Hoars and the Thoreaus were abolitionists, as were many others among his friends and associates. His outrage over slavery developed in an atmosphere that encouraged public expression.
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.
Between 1837 and 1844, Emerson was moved by the unfolding of events that, in their threat to the individual and to conscience, could not be ignored. 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 Concord abolitionist Mary Merrick Brooks asked him to speak at the Ladies’ Antislavery Society celebration of the anniversary of emancipation in the British West Indies, 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.
The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 further fueled
Emerson’s antislavery activism. In the 1850s, he spoke at meetings
around the country, opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and supported radical
abolitionist John Brown. Although he had hesitated in throwing his
energies into the cause, he ultimately served in Concord and beyond as
the voice of social conscience.
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