Emerson seems to have a reputation as a reluctant abolitionist. Even in American Bloomsbury Susan Cheever says several times that Alcott, Thoreau and eventually Emerson spoke out against slavery. But, I think, Emerson was against it all along and spoke out about it sooner than he is given credit for. My partial evidence being an address, Emancipation in the British West Indies, he delivered in Concord on August 1, 1844 on the ten-year anniversary of the English bill that gave all slaves in English colonies their freedom. Emerson’s measured and reasoned speech on the occasion, to me, exhibits a mind not recently made up, but one that has thought deeply about the question and concluded some time ago, that slavery is wrong. I am also aided in my conclusion by Robert Richardson in Emerson: The Mind on Fire who notes that much of Emerson’s writing on anti-slavery has yet to be published and remains in manuscript among his papers at Harvard’s Houghton Library.

At any rate, Emerson’s speech while celebratory–

We are met to exchange congratulations on the anniversary of an event singular in the history of civilization; a day of reason; of the clear light; of that which makes us better than a flock of birds and beasts; a day which gave the immense fortification of a fact, of gross history, to ethical abstractions.

–is mostly a solemn affair as he cannot help but compare what the English have already done with what the Americans were still years away from doing.

Concord was a town that would become fervently anti-slavery, though it must have been early yet in its becoming as Emerson says:

The institution of slavery seems to its opponent to have but one side, and he feels that none but a stupid or a malignant person can hesitate on a view of the facts. Under such an impulse, I was about to say, If any cannot speak, or cannot hear the words of freedom, let him go hence, – I had almost said, Creep into your grave, the universe has no need of you ! But I have thought better: let him not go. When we consider what remains to he done for this interest in this country, the dictates of humanity make us tender of such as are not vet persuaded.

This is early in his speech, and clearly Emerson wishes to say something to persuade those who have not yet been persuaded. And so he carefully outlines the history of slavery from black-skinned people painted in Egyptian tombs and Herodotus’ accounts to the present day. Believing that the history of humanity is one that evolves toward truth and right, he outlines in great detail how the slaves in the British West Indies came to be free through the awakening of the moral sentiment in the British people which prompted changes in the law.

This event was a moral revolution. The history of it is before you. Here was no prodigy, no fabulous hero, no Trojan horse, no bloody war, but all was achieved by plain means of plain men, working not under a leader, but under a sentiment.

Emerson’s is a rather, one could argue, innocent, view of what happened. We know there were plenty of slave uprisings and horrors attendant on the emancipation of the slaves, that the years of drawn out legislative battles in the British Parliament were not as simple and straightforward as Emerson describes them.

But, I think Emerson also understands some of what lies at the root of slavery when he remarks that the history of slavery is “not founded solely on the avarice of the planter…but shows the existence, beside the covetousness, of a bitterer element, the love of power, the voluptuousness of holding a human being in his absolute control.”

Towards the end of his speech Emerson turns from England to New England and brings the fight for an end to slavery into his listeners’ own backyards. He is outraged at the fact that the southern states can send slave catchers and kidnappers to the free state of Massachusetts, that these very same are allowed to capture not only runaway slaves, but black men who were born free and that their own state government and laws can do nothing about it. In his anger and frustration he declares, “The Governor of Massachusetts is a trifler; the State-House in Boston is a play-house; the General Court is a dishonored body, if they make laws which they cannot execute.”

However, while the legislators may be useless, Emerson says “what great masses of men wish done, will be done.” He believes the situation can be changed through “direct conversation and influence” without force or politics. It is unfortunate that the freeing of the slaves in America happened with lots of force and was steeped in politics, the consequences of which still reverberate today.

Something Emerson said in his speech had a John Donne, no man is an island echo to it: “the civility of no race can he perfect whilst another race is degraded.” The realization and understanding that all humanity is connected, that what happens on the other side of the world affects a person and is as important as what happens in one’s own town is something Emerson understood. He, of course, is not the first nor the last to express the idea. What baffles me is that there are so many who still don’t get it.

Next week’s Emerson: War