EMERSON: ARDENT ABOLITIONIST

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a passive abolitionist, who become an ardent one after the fugitive Thomas Sims' recapture and reenslavement in April 1851, pursuant to the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, in Boston, by 300 police. Sims' was manacled, hustled aboard a waiting ship, then sailed immediately back to Savannah, Georgia, where he was publicly whipped. Emerson inveighed against the Fugitive Slave Act and slavery itself from the lectern and by letters and articles. He wrote: "If our resistance to this law is not right, there is no right." He said. Emerson and his wife, Lidian, were agents on the Concord, Massachusetts, Underground Railroad , as was the entire family of Henry David Thoreau and friends. That Emerson's activist abolitionism is not so well known is, in part, due to "both Holmes and Cabot, the authors of the most influential of Emerson's biographies, before Rusk's." They "made careful and conscious efforts to underplay Emerson's antislavery work, much to the distress of Emerson's family." "Emerson entertained John Brown at his home, raised money for him, and spoke on his behalf. Whitman observed that when Emerson came out for John Brown, 'it was with the power, the overwhelmingness, of an avalanche.' Emerson recognized and approved of John Brown's apocalyptic finality and his intransigent moral absolutism and he quoted what John Brown said to him privately about the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence : 'Better that a whole generation of men, women, and children should pass away by violent death than that one word of either should be violated in this country.' Emerson did not believe in the Union above all. He was cool toward Lincoln until the Emancipation Proclamation , after which he said: '[Lincoln] had been permitted to do more than any other American man.'" P.495-499, EMERSON : THE MIND ON FIRE by Robert D. Richardson, Jr., (1995)