“Solitude before Society: Emerson on Self-Reliance, Abolitionism, and Moral Suasion.”

Solitude Before Society: Emersonon Self-Reliance, Abolitionism, andMoral Suasion

Robinson Woodward-Burns

University of Pennsylvania

Scholars have not reconciled Ralph Waldo Emerson’s anti-political individualism

with his newly rediscovered abolitionism. This article attempts to unite the apolitical

and political Emerson by showing that they are only temporally separated. Solitude

prefaces politics. I first explain Emerson’s solitary contemplation as imagination that

reveals interpersonal obligations. Second, I show how these obligations draw the

thinker back to politics, and in Emerson’s case, to abolitionism, where he advocated

small conversations to incite others to contemplation and then action. Conversation

did not convert hostile slaveholders. But, third, I note that Emerson admired the

abolitionists who attempted moral suasion in the South at great personal risk. Their

political activism exemplified self-reliance within society.

Keywords Emerson; self-reliance; abolitionism; moral suasion; democracy;

deliberation

Ralph Waldo Emerson advocated both solitary contemplation and political

activism. He rejected politics in favor of private introspection, and yet he backed

mass mobilization against slavery. He preached to packed abolitionist rallies,

yet scoffed that “the reformers summon conventions, and vote and resolve in

multitude…. It is only as a man puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I

see him to be strong and to prevail.” He even admitted the tension, concluding that

“nature delights to put us between extreme antagonisms…. Solitude is impractic-

able, and society fatal.”1 This dilemma drove a century of Emerson scholarship,

The author would like to thank Jeff Green, Nancy Hirschmann, Anne Norton, Rogers Smith, readers at the

University of Pennsylvania Political Theory Workshop, and Polity’s editors and anonymous reviewers for

comments on this article.

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson,

ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Random House, 1950), 145–69 at 169; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Society

and Solitude,” in The Selected Writings, 739–46 at 745.

Polity, January 2016, Vol. 48(1): 29–54. doi:10.1057/pol.2015.33

© 2016 Northeastern Political Science Association 0032-3497/16www.palgrave-journals.com/polity/

including two recent edited volumes.2 Thus the question for this essay: how to

reconcile self-reliance and politics? How might Emerson’s solitude be political?

Scholars have given three answers. Commenters from Oliver Wendell Holmes,

Sr. in 1884, to Harold Bloom in 1982, have claimed that Emerson shunned society

for the solitary, contemplative life he called self-reliance. Emerson saw political

parties as breeding intellectual conformity and promoting slavery and Indian

removal, and argued that entering politics risked complicity in these wrongs.3

Wilson Carey McWilliams and Judith Shklar later unearthed Emerson’s overtly

political writings and activism, and George Kateb, his abolitionism.4 In this second

reading, Emerson was torn between solitary contemplation and public action.

After publishing a letter to Martin Van Buren protesting Cherokee removal in 1838,

Emerson confided to his journal: “Yesterday went the letter to V[an] B[uren] …

I write in my journal, I read my lecture with joy – but this stirring in the philanthropic

mud, gives me no peace. I will let the republic alone.” Yet he recants: “I stir in it for the

sad reason that no other mortal men will move, and if I do not, why it is left undone.”5

Kateb’s Emerson worries that democracy forces citizens to rule and be ruled by others,

compromising their independence, and that reform societies coerce members into

uncontemplated dogmas. Best is solitude. But the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act seized

runaways from Emerson’s Massachusetts, horrifying him enough “to change his

attitude on the subject of associating for reform” and to abandon self-reliance.6 Stanley

Cavell agrees that “we will be disappointed in democracy,” which homogenizes

citizens. The independent “individual meant to be created and preserved in

democracy is apt to be undone by it.” So Cavell’s Emerson thinks and acts against

democratic convention.7 Unlike Kateb’s Emerson, who initially withdraws from

democracy, Cavell’s Emerson challenges democracy to improve it and himself.

2. See T. Gregory Garvey, ed., The Emerson Dilemma: Essays on Emerson and Social Reform (Athens:

University of Georgia Press, 2001); and Alan M. Levine and Daniel S. Malachuk, eds., A Political Companion

to Ralph Waldo Emerson (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011).

3. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press, 1884);

Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Alan M.

Levine and Daniel S. Malachuk, “Introduction: The New History of Emerson’s Politics and His Philosophy

of Self-Reliance,” in A Political Companion, ed. Levine and Malachuk, 1–39, at 12 (see the previous note).

4. Wilson Carey McWilliams, “Emerson and Thoreau: The All and the One,” in The Idea of Fraternity in

America, ed. McWilliams (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 280–89; Judith

Shklar, “Emerson and the Inhibitions of Democracy,” Political Theory 18 (1990): 601–14; George Kateb,

Emerson and Self-Reliance (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995).

5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 5,

ed. Merton Sealts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), 475–79.

6. For Kateb’s Emerson, democracy is “second best and should only be put into practice if nonrule is

impossible.” See Kateb, Emerson and Self-Reliance, 190 (see note 4 above); George Kateb, “Self-Reliance,

Politics, and Society,” in A Political Companion, ed. Levine and Malachuk, 69–90, at 72–73 (see note 2 above).

7. Cavell asserts that this distinguishes him from Kateb. See Stanley Cavell, “What Is the Emersonian

Event? A Comment on Kateb’s Emerson,” New Literary History 25 (1994): 951–58; see also Stanley Cavell,

Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism: The Carus Lectures,

1988 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 18, 56–59.

30 SOLITUDE BEFORE SOCIETY

Third, recent accounts seek to reconcile Emerson’s politics and self-reliance.

For Jack Turner, self-reliance requires contemplating one’s complicity in

slavery and then organizing mass boycotts and protests against

pro-slavery laws. To Len Gougeon, the Emersonian abolitionist merely had to

awaken the listener’s latent anti-slavery intuitions. Spreading his message, the

abolitionist could mobilize masses of individuals without bullying them or

infringing on their autonomy.8

But Emerson warned that abolitionists’ mass conventions, speeches, and

newspapers forced intellectual conformity, preventing self-reliant contempla-

tion. In his 1844 “New England Reformers,” Emerson condemns reform societies

and communes for “their reliance on Association.” He notes that “the revolt

against the spirit of commerce, the spirit of aristocracy, and the inveterate

abuses of cities, did not appear possible to individuals; and to do battle against

numbers, they armed themselves with numbers.”9 Gougeon acknowledges

Emerson’s qualms about abolitionist organizing, but does not fully explain

how mass abolitionism might enrich individuals’ self-reliance.10 Similarly,

Turner recognizes the tension between contemplation and action, but never

fully reconciles the two.11

Taking contemplation as prior to action, this essay seeks to unite the halves of

Emerson. Its starting point is Emerson’s assertion, in an 1844 address, that solitary

reflection comes before activism: “society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself

renovated, attempts to renovate things around him.”12 In private contemplation

one intuits self-determined reasons for action. Following these, one can reenter

politics self-reliantly, sharing one’s moral enlightenment with others in small

conversations that avoid the conformity of the mass abolitionist rally. As the Civil

War approached, Emerson realized that this discursive method of abolitionism,

called moral suasion, had failed in the South. Yet he continued to back suasionists

8. Jack Turner, Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2012); Len Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform (Athens:

University of Georgia Press, 2010).

9. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “New England Reformers,” in Selected Writings, ed. Atkinson, 449–68, at

456–57 (see note 1 above).

10. Len Gougeon, “Emerson, Self-Reliance, and the Politics of Democracy,” in A Political Companion,

ed. Levine and Malachuk, 185–220 at 192–94 (see note 2 above).

11. In Awakening to Race, Turner asserts: “In calling for massive resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law,

Emerson takes a step toward mobilization. He gives no indication he thinks this inconsistent with

self-reliance. He believes, in fact, that aggregate civil disobedience will enhance the character of citizens”;

41–42 (see note 8 above). To Turner, citizens practice self-reliance by deliberately and collectively

resisting unjust pro-slavery law. But individuals joining mass actions usually follow their companions or a

leader. Hence, these individuals do not act deliberately or self-reliantly. So the tension between self-

reliance and political action remains.

12. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “New England Reformers,” in Selected Writings, ed. Atkinson 455 (see note

1 above). Kateb and Gougeon mention this point, but never expand on it. See Kateb, Emerson and Self-

Reliance, 176 (see note 4 above); Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero, 55 (see note 8 above).

Robinson Woodward-Burns 31

who traveled south at great personal risk. These men, who were mentally and

materially self-sufficient while canvassing the South, embodied self-reliant action in

society.

Emerson’s path from contemplation to activism follows that of many moral

suasionists. He committed to moral sense theory as an undergraduate in the 1820s,

studied British suasionism in the 1830s and 1840s, and befriended and supported

American suasionists during the Fugitive Slave Act crisis of the 1850s. This essay is

likely the first to read Emerson’s politics through moral suasion, helping to

reconcile his initial solitude and later activism.

In the following, I show that solitude is a precondition for action, proceeding in

four chronological steps that will follow Emerson from his early isolation to his

active abolitionism.

First, in his essays and journals and on his private walks, Emerson contemplated

his economic complicity in slavery. Second, he mixed his recollection of slavery

with imagination, envisioning himself as both witness to and victim of slavery,

rousing himself to action. Third, starting with his 1844 “Emancipation” address,

Emerson publicly backed moral suasionists’ anti-slavery conversations. Small

conversations avoid the conformity of the mass abolitionist rally and awaken the

listener’s anti-slavery intuitions, pushing him to share his insight with others.

Finally, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act radicalized Emerson and divided the nation,

preventing anti-slavery conversation in the South. While suasionists did not convert

pro-slavery Southerners, Emerson admired these abolitionists for following their

anti-slavery principles at great personal risk. Suasionists epitomized self-reliance,

acting with conviction against a hostile society. In this era Emerson abandoned

quietude but maintained his ideal of self-reliance. In sum, this essay traces the

individual’s path from solitary contemplation to discursive political action along-

side Emerson’s own development. Paradoxically, to join others, one first must

isolate oneself.

Solitude

How does one self-interrogate? Not through popular politics, where individuals

lose themselves in Jacksonian conventions, parades, and caucuses. Between 1834

and 1840 Emerson chronicled his retreat from party politics in his journals.

He recounts the 1834 election: “Noisy Election; flags, boy processions, placards,

badges, medals, bannered coaches – everything to get the hurrah on our side.

That is the main end.” Parties clothe their ambition in noble principles, but

Emerson claims moral education requires distance from party politics. He writes in

1838: “A whig victory … raises your spirits & you think easy days are preparing for

you. Do not believe it. It can never be so. Nothing can ever bring you peace but

yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the attainment of principles.” On July 4,


1840 he attended a Whig convention in Concord and another in Bunker Hill in

early September. In an entry two weeks later, he reflects: “Conventions vote &

resolve in multitude … [A man] is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a

man better than a town?”13 In the following weeks he redrafted his anti-political

journal entries, including these last two quotes, into “Self-Reliance,” the culmina-

tion of his early individualism.14

Emerson had an additional reason to avoid mass politics: to participate

in an unjust political order is to grow complicit in its injustices. If one sup-

ported the Jacksonian Democrats, one supported the slavery on which the

party rested. As Jack Turner notes, “self-reliance and complicity are inversely

proportionate: the greater one’s complicity, the lesser one’s self-reliance.”15

Reform societies fought slavery and Indian removal, but copied political

parties’ mass rallies and conventions. Speakers before packed halls could

reveal the common anti-slavery cause, but not the listener’s personal complicity

in slavery. Conforming to the crowd, the listener’s abolitionism was imitative,

not self-reliant.

Disillusioned with political and reform parties, Emerson took solitary nature

walks. He asserts: “A man feels that his time is too precious[,] the objects within

reach of his spirit too beautiful than that his attention should stoop to such

disfigurements as Antimasonry or Convent Riots or General Jackson.” He asks

“if a man should go to walk in the woods & should there find suspended on the

oaks or bulrushes electioneering placards,” whether such placards would “exalt

his meditation,” answering “In the hush of these woods I find no Jackson placards

affixed to the trees.”16

While walking, Emerson’s thought shifted from the party and reform society to

the natural world. The method of his thought shifted too. Political deliberation is

sequential and purposeful, directed by speeches, conventions, and newspapers. In

nature, Emerson practiced not deliberation but contemplation. While walking, he

pondered objects as he met them, stooping over shrubs and pocketing pebbles,

each thought sudden and independent of the last. Emerson found great joy in

nature’s disruptive particularities and instability. He writes: “Nature abhors the

old … every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the

13. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. vol. 4,

ed. Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 333; Ralph Waldo Emerson,

The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. vol. 7, ed. A.W. Plumstead and

Harrison Hayford (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 145, 403.

14. Much of Emerson’s Essays: First Series, including “Self-Reliance,” began in his journals. For a

chronology of Emerson’s Whig convention visits, subsequent journal entries, and corresponding essays,

see his Journals, vol. 7, xv–xvi, xx (see the previous note).

15. Turner, Awakening to Race, 27 (see note 8 above).

16. Emerson, Journals, vol. 5, 29 (see note 5 above); Journals, vol. 7, 292 (see note 13 above); Journals,

vol. 4, 369 (see note 13 above).


coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition.”17 With no sense of

past or time, Emerson’s feet and mind wandered for hours. In “Country Life,”

he compares his walks to those of Rousseau. When exiled to a wooded island,

Rousseau approached the aimless simplicity of the pre-political savage, mean-

dering daily “without needing to recall the past or encroach upon the future …

without any trace of time’s passage.”18 In timeless contemplation Emerson broke

with his political past.

Emerson’s friend and neighbor, Henry David Thoreau, also retreated from

Jacksonian politics and commerce. He recalls dodging carts and vendors on

Concord’s main street: “every traveler had to run the gauntlet, and every man,

woman and child might get a lick at him.” Placards and peddlers ransomed

Thoreau’s attention until he “was let out through the rear avenues, and so escaped

to the woods again.” In “Walking,” he describes his solitary strolls: “I saw the setting

sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood … [the pines] are of no

politics. There was no noise of labor.”19 Withdrawal cleared Thoreau’s mind,

allowing critique of popular politics. And in nature’s particulars, in wild huckle-

berries and apples, he saw admirable roughness. For Jane Bennett’s Thoreau, “the

wild” resists reason, consistency, and domestication, cultivating a similarly

untamed self, “which disturbs and confounds settled projects, techniques, and

myths.”20 Similarly, Shannon Mariotti’s Thoreau praised huckleberries that could

not be domesticated and sold in street commerce. Walking taught Thoreau

critique and defiance, capacities needed for democratic citizenship. As Mariotti

concludes, “Thoreau expands the parameters of democratic politics to include

these spaces of withdrawal.”21

Emerson and Thoreau often walked together, eyeing nature’s particulars.

Emerson recalls a late fall stroll: “T[horeau] showed me the bush of mountain

laurel … [which] gleamed like steel upon the excited eye… . Here no history or

church or state is interpolated on the divine sky.”22 On this walk Emerson praised

the “lofty natures beautiful in growth … [which work] strangely on the imagina-

tion.” For Emerson, particulars instantiated higher natural laws. He imagined

patterns and interconnections between plants and people. But Thoreau saw

17. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles,” in Selected Writings, ed. Atkinson, 455, 289 (see note 1 above).

18. Rousseau calls this aimless pondering the least political method of thought. Jean-Jacques

Rousseau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Charles Butterworth (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing,

1992), 68.

19. Henry David Thoreau, “Walden” and “Walking,” in Walden and Other Writings of Henry David

Thoreau, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Random House, 1950), 151–53.

20. Jane Bennett, Thoreau’s Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995),

xxi.

21. Shannon Mariotti, Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

2010), 120–26, 143–47.

22. Emerson, Journals, vol. 7, 313 (see note 13 above). See similar records of their many excursions,

for example, on 143, 238, 454, and 538.


particular things and people as unique and disconnected, free of artificial

harmony.23 This is the root of their political differences – Emerson’s capacity for

abstraction and imagination allowed him to empathize with other people and

return to a more active, sustained interpersonal politics than Thoreau’s. But for

both, walks taught critique.

Emerson criticizes affluent Northerners who consumed Southern cotton and

Caribbean sugar.24 They forget the injustices they support by limiting them to

the South or the Caribbean, “a great way off.” For Emerson, this ignorance is

intentional: “If any mention was made of [slavery’s] homicide, madness, adultery,

and intolerable tortures, we would let the church-bells ring louder, the church-

organ swell its peal and drown the hideous sound.” The reference to the church is

telling. An unreflective donation to a religious or abolition society might purchase

peace of mind, but did not redress one’s complicity in slavery.

One should interrogate one’s economic complicity. In his 1841 essay

“Self-Reliance,” Emerson mocked the abolitionist’s “incredible tenderness for

black folks a thousand miles off,” reminding him his “love afar is spite at home.”

Empathy and charity begins with “my poor,” with local laborers. Therefore, he

rejects an “obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor?…

I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me

and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual

affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be.”25

Emerson gradually came to sympathize with New England laborers. Weeks

after publishing “Self-Reliance,” he publicly praised “the attention of many

philanthropic and intelligent persons to the claims of manual labor.” And in “New

England Reformers,” he asked “Why should professional labor and that of the

counting-house be paid so disproportionately to the labor of the porter and

wood-sawyer?” In his relative wealth, Emerson realized the gulf between “the lot

of me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, my poor sister.” Through daily village

walks and commerce, Emerson met and empathized with these laborers.

These walks unsettled Emerson. He wrote: “Trade gives me to pause and think,”

stirring a “disposition to scrutiny and dissent … [and] restless, prying,

23. On Thoreau and particularity, see Mariotti, Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal, 128–35 (see note 21

above), and Bennett, Thoreau’s Nature, xix–xxv, 26–29 (see note 20 above).

24. Jason Frank, “Standing for Others,” in Levine and Malachuk, Political Companion, 390 (see note 2

above); Neal Dolan, Emerson’s Liberalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 216; Turner,

Awakening to Race, 31–32 (see note 8 above).

25. Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 148–49 (see note 1 above). In the same passage, Emerson regrets some

of his charitable donations as a “wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.”

This is often read to reject charity. But the full, original passage, drafted across three July 1839 journal

entries, is more ambivalent. In his 1830s journals, Emerson was uncertain about which “class of persons”

he owed. By his 1844 “New England Reformers” and “Manners,” Emerson had fewer reservations with

charity. See Emerson, Journals, vol. 7, 128–29, 224–25, 405–6 (see note 13 above).


conscientious criticism.”26 Yet writing in early 1844, Emerson still shied from

political action, deriding the communism of St. Simon, Fourier, and Owen as a

conformist fad.27

In his August 1844 “Emancipation” address to the citizens of Concord, Emerson

reversed his position, advocating organizing against commercial evils both at

home and abroad. He claimed New England’s textile mills abused both local New

England laborers and slaves on distant cotton plantations.28 After 1844, Emerson

narrowed his aim to revealing complicity in distant slavery. In a later piece, he

criticized a Northern mill owner not for his labor practices, but for ignoring the

source of his cotton, and Emerson carefully recalled his own “dreadful debt to the

southern negro.”29

The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act enlisted Emerson’s neighbors to recapture run-

aways, bringing slavery home to Massachusetts. Bostonians jailed the fugitives

Thomas Sims in 1851 and Anthony Burns in 1854, riling Massachusetts and

radicalizing Emerson. No longer could he contemplate slavery in distant, dis-

embodied terms. He reflected that “Slavery in Virginia or Carolina was like Slavery

in Africa or the Feejies for me,” until the Act “required me to hunt slaves, and it

found citizens in Massachusetts willing to act as judges and captors.” Between 1822

and 1856, eight Southern states passed Seamen Acts to impress visiting free black

sailors into servitude.30 Visual memories of particular neighbors who had been

captured interrupted Emerson’s contemplative walks. Three years after Louisiana

passed its own law, he wrote:

As I have walked in the pastures and along the edge of the woods, I could not

keep my imagination on those agreeable figures, for other images that

intruded on me … poor black men of obscure employment as mariners,

cooks, or stewards, in ships, yet citizens of this our Commonwealth of

26. Thoreau, confronted by the crass particulars of Concord shops and peddlers, recalls that

“I escaped wonderfully from these dangers… by keeping my thoughts on high things.” Here it is Thoreau,

not Emerson, who practices what Mariotti calls high-minded “focal distancing.” Thoreau, “Walden,”

151–53 (see note 19 above).

27. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Man the Reformer,” in Emerson: Political Writings, ed. Kenneth Sacks

(Cambrdge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 104; Emerson, “New England Reformers,” 452–56,

emphasis added (see note 9 above).

28. “Emerson, Self-Reliance, and the Politics of Democracy,” 194 (see note 10 above); Len Gougeon,

“Historical Background,” in Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, ed. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson (New

Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), xxx; Dolan, Emerson’s Liberalism, 216–17 (see note 24 above).

29. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Lecture on Slavery” in Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 97 (see note 28

above); Shannon Mariotti, “Emerson’s Transcendental Gaze and the ‘Disagreeable Particulars’ of Slavery,”

in Political Companion, ed. Levine and Malachuk, 329–30 (see note 2 above); Emerson, “Man the

Reformer,” 103 (see note 27 above).

30. Quoted in Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero, 194 (see note 8 above). On the Seamen Acts, see Michael

Schoeppner, “Peculiar Quarantines: The Seamen Acts and Regulatory Authority in the Antebellum South,”

Law and History Review 31 (2013): 559–86.


Massachusetts – freeborn as we – whom the slave-laws of the States of South

Carolina, Georgia and Louisiana have arrested.31

These memories rose involuntarily, so Emerson credited them as his personal

intuition. Memory “has its own vagaries and interruptions … memory has a

personality of its own, and volunteers or refuses its informations at its will,

not mine.” Coming suddenly from his private intuition, this contemplation was

self-reliant but also political. It prompted his abolitionism.32

Moral Imagination

Yet Emerson did not witness the plantation slavery from which he benefitted.

His personal experience and memory were largely limited to Northern niceties, “coffee

and toast, with a daily newspaper,” and like his Northerner audience, he could

place plantation slavery “a great way off.” To overcome this distance, Emerson mixed

memory and imagination. Recollections of vivid conversations with abolitionists

sparked his imagination: “if we saw the whip applied to old men, to tender women;

and, undeniably, though I shrink to say so – pregnant women set in the treadmill for

refusing to work,… if we saw these things with eyes, we too should wince.”33 Note the

“if” – Emerson never saw these images, but imagined he had, blending them with his

own memories. Emerson used imagination to transcend his limited personal experi-

ence – and that of his Massachusetts audience – stirring empathy with distant Caribbean

slaves. As Mariotti notes, in this passage, Emerson is “focusing directly upon particular

experiences” to “motivate his abolitionism” and encourage others to the cause.34

While walking, Emerson abandoned rote, sequential thought for sudden moral

imaginings that revealed his complicity in slavery’s economy. He deemed

“imagination a spontaneous act … a perception and affirming of a real relation

between a thought and some material fact.” On his walks, he affirmed the relation

between his anti-slavery intuition and the “material fact” of his purchases. Through

imagination, “the new virtue [is] shown in some unprized old property,” and one’s

possessions become a grave evil.35

Imagination also invited empathy for slaves. Emerson understood imagination

as the faculty of making mental images, of seeing what was not physically present.

31. Emerson learned of these imprisonments secondhand, from neighbors. See Ralph Waldo

Emerson, “Emancipation in the West Indies,” in Selected Writings, 847–50 (see note 1 above).

32. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Memory,” in Emerson’s Complete Works, vol. 12, ed. James Elliot Cabot

(Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1893), 66–69.

33. Emerson, “Emancipation,” 843–47 (see note 31 above).

34. Mariotti, “Emerson’s Transcendental Gaze,” 315–16 (see note 29 above).

35. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Poetry and Imagination,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Letters and Social Aims, vol. 8, ed. Ronald A. Bosco, Glen M. Johnson, and Joel Myerson (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 6, 15.


He wrote, “This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a

very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being

where and what it sees.”36 Though not physically in the South or the Caribbean,

through imagination, his intellect could be “where … it sees,” as if he witnessed

slavery firsthand. Further, his intellect could be “what it sees,” as Emerson

imagined himself in the place of slaves, experiencing enslavement firsthand.

Emerson’s empathy is distinct from pity. He pities and scorns those who do not act

self-reliantly. The intellectual conformist “should be ashamed of our compassion, [but]

themoment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries and customs out

of thewindow, we pity him nomore but thank and revere him.”Northern whites’ pity for

Caribbean slaves was “degrading and futile,” but was rebutted by the brave collective

self-emancipation of “such men as Toussaint, and the Haytian heroes.” Rebellion

distinguished the slave from the docile workhorse, affirming the slave’s humanity.

“A man is added to the human family,” Emerson declared.37 Recognizing slaves as

fellow humans, Emerson empathized with their particular, embodied suffering.

Hannah Arendt agrees that this particularity distinguishes empathy, which she

dubs “compassion,” from unfeeling, abstracted pity. She asserts that “compassion,

to be stricken with the suffering of someone else,” and “pity, to be sorry without

being touched in the flesh, are not only not the same, they may not even be related.

Compassion … cannot reach out farther than what is suffered by one person and

remain what it is supposed to be, co-suffering.”38 Imagining slaves’ embodied pain,

Emerson saw that he suffered far less than slaves, and personally could not

represent not their suffering, but only his anti-slavery intuitions.39 So he frames his

descriptions of slavery as his own imagination, using the phrase “if we saw” slavery’s

abuses, emphasizing his role as hypothetical witness rather than actual victim.

Emerson’s passages on suffering, hypothetical observers, and visual imagina-

tion recall Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith opens that work by

recounting the torture of a man on the rack. Even the most stoic men “observe that

36. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” in Selected Writings, ed. Atkinson, 331–32 (see note 29 above).

37. Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 162 (see note 1 above); Emerson, “Emancipation,” 839–40, 853–55 (see

note 31 above). Notice, however, that earlier in the address, Emerson also lauds Antigua’s peaceful

abolition, and grants former slaves both “pity and respect.” On this inconsistency, see James Read, “The

Limits of Self-Reliance: Emerson, Slavery, and Abolition,” in A Political Companion, ed. Levine and

Malachuk, 152–84, at 166–71 (see note 2 above).

Like Emerson, Frederick Douglass feels that whites’ pity for slaves often rested on scorn for helpless,

abject slaves, refuted only with violent, self-reliant resistance. For a contrast between Emerson and

Douglass on pity and slave revolt, see Robert Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern

Political Thought in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 177. Similarly, in his 1829 Appeal,

David Walker argued that violent revolt would convince whites of slaves’ humanity. See David Walker,

Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular,

and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).

38. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), 80.

39. Frank in “Standing for Others” shows that abolitionists like John Brown represented humans’

universal, if latent, anti-slavery intuitions (see note 24 above).


in looking upon sore eyes they very often feel a very sensible soreness in their own.” In

both Emerson and Smith, a witness observes a sufferer, imagines himself as the

sufferer, and actually suffers, wincing against the images, feeling soreness in his own

eyes. Visions of slavery upset Emerson’s gut too: “the blood is moral: the blood is anti-

slavery: it runs cold in the veins: the stomach rises in disgust.”40 Mariotti insightfully

calls Emerson’s visual imagination theorizing, from the Greek theoria, meaning both to

see and to contemplate.41 For Emerson, contemplation was a means to sight: when his

thoughts wandered, he imagined and identified with slaves’ suffering.

The resemblance to Smith is no coincidence – Emerson adopted his approach

to moral imagination and empathy from Scottish moral sense thinkers. In the early

nineteenth century, Scottish moral sense theory dominated America’s colleges,

including Emerson’s Harvard.42 Journal entries reveal that as a junior and senior,

Emerson closely read Dugald Stewart’s Elements of the Philosophy of the Human

Mind. And in1821, Emerson penned a dissertation on Smith and David Hume’s

idea of empathy.43 He taught moral sense theory as a primary school teacher the

following year, and a July 1824 entry reveals he read Smith’s Theory of Moral

Sentiments and adopted Smith’s argument that luxury trained the moral imagina-

tion.44 This sheds new light on Emerson’s disappointment with genteel Northerners

who consumed sugar and cotton but lacked empathy for plantation slaves. Half a

dozen entries on moral imagination and empathy followed, including an 1832

entry listing the Earl of Shaftesbury and Hume as necessary reading.45

Emerson saw himself both as slavery’s perpetrator, through commerce, and as

its victim, through imagination and empathy. The latter drew him back to politics.

40. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004),

12–13; Emerson, “Emancipation,” 834 (see note 31 above).

41. Mariotti, “Emerson’s Transcendental Gaze,” 305 (see note 29 above).

42. Emerson’s mentors, Professors Levi Hedge and Levi Frisbie, led this national trend, adding Locke’s

Essay to the curriculum Emerson’s first year (1818), Dugald Stewart’s Elements and Thomas Reid his third

year, and Francis Hutcheson and the Earl of Shaftesbury around this time. See John Edward Schamberger,

Emerson’s Concept of the Moral Sense, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1969, 36–59; Edgeley

W. Todd, “Philosophical Ideas at Harvard College, 1817–1837,” New England Quarterly 15 (1943): 60–90.

43. Schamberger, Emerson’s Concept, 60–88 (see note 42 above); Merrell R. Davis, “Emerson’s

‘Reason’ and the Scottish Philosophers,” The New England Quarterly 17 (1944): 209–28. Emerson, following

Scottish moral sense theorists, used the word “sympathy,” although his meaning is closest to the modern

word “empathy,” which this essay uses.

44. Smith argues that luxuries like the theater train audiences to imagine themselves as and to empathize

with the play’s characters, while “savage” peoples competing and killing to survive have duller moral senses. See

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 63, 240 (see note 40 above). Citing Smith’s Theory, Emerson agrees

that “the savage & the child” cannot imagine the “experience of other men.” Emerson also quietly adopted

inegalitarian race theories from moral sense writers and antebellum Americans like his friend and colleague

Louis Agassiz. See The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2, ed. William H.

Gillman, Alfred R. Ferguson, and Merrell R. Davis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 262.

45. On Emerson’s primary school teaching and journal entries, see Schamberger, Emerson’s Concept

of the Moral Sense, 104–105 (see note 42 above); Emerson took his reading list from contemporary Scottish

moral philosopher James Mackintosh, whom he lauded throughout his journals.


Many abolitionists felt guilt or pity, but not empathy. Per David Bromwich, Lincoln

held that “an injustice you aim to correct had better be seen not from the point

of view of the victim, but from the perspective of the agent who commits the

injustice… . With Lincoln on slavery … the pressure for reform comes from a

redefinition of self-respect or sympathy with myself.” Rejecting commerce is “not a

question of what I owe the sufferer but of what I owe myself.” Jack Turner insightfully

notes that Emerson rejected tainted goods and laws as a means to his own self-

reliance, to “recovering innocence.”46 But Emerson’s other sort of imagination,

empathy, pushed him from this private self-improvement to improvement of others,

to politics. This dual imagination is the insight of Emerson’s abolitionism. Imagining

himself not only as the perpetrator, but also as the victim, Emerson transcended his

private quest for moral purity, turning to other-regarding public action.

In sum, Emerson mixed two kinds of introspection. One was retrospection –

remembering his kidnaped neighbors, his economic complicity, and his attendant

debts. The other was imagination – extending introspection beyond his personal

memory. Both memory and imagination of slavery rose involuntarily during private

contemplation, and were so vivid that they interrupted his reflection. The images’

vividness and their mediation of his present experience showed Emerson that

these ideas mattered. They revealed obligations to a particular class of persons,

giving personal, self-reliant reasons for political action.

Retrospection and moral imagination allowed Emerson to reenter politics

without violating his self-reliance. Self-reliance requires acting for self-derived

reasons rather than coerced or imitative ones. The self-reliant individual “acts from

himself,” not from others. Emerson’s private contemplation revealed the anti-

slavery moral law, inspiring his abolitionism, a self-reliant but political activity.

Constrained only by the moral law that he derived during introspection, Emerson

was self-reliant, recalling Kantian autonomy as self- (auto) legislation (nomos),

as opposed to heteronomy, or constraint by others.47 As Emerson says in

“Self-Reliance,” “No law can be sacred to me but that of my own nature.” And in

“The American Scholar,” he gives his “definition of freedom, ‘[to be] without any

hindrance that does not arise out of [one’s] own constitution.’”48 A man publicly

pressured into abolitionism acts in accord with the universal anti-slavery moral

law, but acts heteronomously, for the sake of approval. He is not self-reliant or free.

To be a self-reliant abolitionist, he must act for the sake of his personal anti-slavery

46. David Bromwich, “Moral Imagination.” Raritan 27 (2008), 15–16; Turner, Awakening to Race, 39

(see note 8 above). Turner rightly notes that rejecting commerce also spurs action.

47. Emerson was familiar with Kant, particularly through the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

which he read as early as 1834. See Gougeon, “Emerson, Self-Reliance, and the Politics of Democracy,” 187

(see note 10 above).

48. Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 148; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Selected

Writings, ed. Atkinson, 57 (see note 1 above for both sources).


intuitions. Cavell rightly compares Emerson’s self-reliance to “Kant’s idea that

moral worth is a function of acting not merely in conformity with the moral law but

for the sake of the law.”49

For Emerson, self-reliance and freedom require following one’s private intuition

to interpersonal action. This anticipates feminists’ “relational autonomy,” which to

Nancy Hirschmann “is based not on rights but on responsibility, not on separation

but on connection, not on autonomy as rejection of or reaction to others but on

relationship and interaction with others.”50 Hirschmann advocates small conversa-

tions, in which speakers encourage listeners to contemplate their autonomous

reasons for action, modeled on modern feminists’ consciousness raising, “a

practice in which women gather together in small groups to help themselves and

each other gain a deeper understanding of themselves in the patriarchal world

order.” Emerson, as we will see, sought abolition through similar small conversa-

tions. This interpretation rebuts canonical readings of Emersonian liberty as anti-

political, akin to Isaiah Berlin’s classical, negative autonomy from government and

society, or “the traditional self-emancipation of ascetics and quietists … who have

fled the world, and escaped the yoke of society or public opinion, by some

deliberate process of self-transformation.”51 Emersonian autonomy is not rejecting

bonds, but walking to see the “right bonds,” bonds rising from intuition of

particular people’s suffering, which obligate aiding the sufferer.

Mariotti argues that visual imagination of slavery’s visceral “disagreeable

particulars” revolted Emerson, turning his contemplation toward the pleasant,

disembodied, anti-slavery moral law. She claims that Emerson’s anti-slavery

addresses waver between contemplating the particular and the ideal, favoring the

latter; she reads Emerson’s 1850s anti-slavery idealism mainly through his early,

transcendental, less political essays like “Nature” (1836), “Compensation” (1841),

and “Experience” (1844).52 After the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, Emerson could not

49. Emerson claims that the antislavery moral law obligates and “pervades all intelligent beings,” so an

unreflective abolitionist could unwittingly act in conformity with the moral law but not for the sake of the

law. Also note that Kant, like Emerson, stresses the universality of moral law, acting for the sake of the law,

and the importance of autonomy. See Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans.

James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993); see also Cavell, “Aversive

Thinking,” 104 (see note 7 above); and Emerson, Journals, vol. 2, 49 (see note 44 above). Emerson’s

adoption of Kantian rationalism and Scottish moral sense theory may seem like an unabashed or unwitting

inconsistency. But both Kant and the Scots felt that autonomous contemplation revealed universal moral

law, guiding human action. Emerson’s idea of freedom fits in this overlap. For Kant on independent

contemplation, see Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” in Kant: Political

Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54–60 (see note

24 above).

50. Nancy Hirschmann, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom,” Political Theory 24 (1996): 46–67, at 59.

51. Isiah Belin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1970), 135.

52. Mariotti, Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal, 58–81 (see note 21 above), and “Emerson’s Transcen-

dental Gaze,” 309–13 (see note 29 above).


ignore the particular slaves recaptured in his native Concord, and Mariotti sees his

1851, 1854, and 1855 anti-slavery speeches as attempts to preserve the ideal and

transcendental amid the slavery crisis.

Emerson’s anti-slavery idealism was a practical suasionist tactic. The Fugi-

tive Slave Act split Massachusetts into abolitionist, secessionist, unionist, and

pro-slavery factions. Emerson publicly preached that the universal anti-slavery law

obligated all of his listeners, making abolitionism the only moral solution to the

slavery crisis. Further, Emerson needed a higher, universal anti-slavery law to

trump the many, corrupt, pro-slavery civil laws of Massachusetts, and the Union.

His higher law rhetoric was not apolitical transcendentalism, but a pragmatic

suasionist method to legitimize civil disobedience. From universal obligation, he

returned to vivid images of particular slaves, awakening his audience’s common

anti-slavery intuition. As Mariotti recognizes, sometimes Emerson “experiences

scattered moments of illumination and inspiration by attending to particularity.”53

Consider his “Emancipation of the British West Indies” address. It moved from gory

images of particular slaves to the spread of the lofty anti-slavery law, then back

down to an exceptionally detailed history of abolitionists’ organizing practices. In

the speech he admitted his rhetorical tactic, praising the suasionist Thomas

Clarkson for using particular images to persuade skeptics of the ideal anti-slavery

moral law.54 His move from particular to universal appeals was not an unsympa-

thetic revulsion at particular images of slavery, but a staple of moral suasion. In a

characteristically Emersonian paradox, he appealed to abstract, disembodied

universal moral law in order to obligate others to aid concrete, embodied slaves.

Similarly, he mixed solitude and society. Society pushed Emerson back to

solitary contemplation. The Fugitive Slave Act is “contravened by all the senti-

ments,” prompting private indignation and rumination. In his first speech on the

Act, he urged that “every time a man goes back to his own thoughts … these

moments counterbalance the years of drudgery.” Chance meetings on urban walks

provoked contemplation and resistance. Emerson recalls a fellow Bay Stater who,

by coincidence, “walking in New Orleans, found a freeborn citizen of Nantucket…

working chained in the streets of that city, kidnapped.” So Emerson alternated

between action and solitude. Contemplation pushed political action, provoking

further contemplation. “To go into solitude,” Emerson concludes, “a man needs to

retire as much from his chambers as from society.”55

53. Mariotti, “Emerson’s Transcedental Gaze,” 307 (see note 29 above). Although Emerson’s idealism

sometimes distances him from particular slaves, Mariotti grants that it also connects him to them. Even

were these connection rare, they are still important demonstrations of his suasionism.

54. Emerson, “Emancipation,” 853 (see note 33 above).

55. Previous accounts of Emerson’s epiphanies considered them apolitical insights into nature. See

Gene Bluestein, “Emerson’s Epiphanies,” The New England Quarterly 39 (1966): 449–54. Emerson’s

alternation complicates the traditional reading of Emerson as a classical apolitical liberal. Ralph Waldo

Emerson, “Address to the Citizens of Concord,” in Gougeon and Myerson, Emerson’s Antislavery Writings,


Abolition by Moral Suasion

How did Emerson practice politics? Antebellum Northerners ignored the source of

their West-Indian sugar and Southern cotton. Their “well-being consists in having a

sufficiency of coffee and toast,” and in the coffee, “the sugar [slaves] raised was

excellent: nobody tasted blood in it.”56 Emerson lauds the abolitionist who “has

shown us our dreadful debt to the southern negro.” Inspired by Thoreau, Emerson

asks that we boycott plantation goods. But “by coming out of trade, you have not

cleared yourself” from unjust laws. So we must pursue legal gradual reform, “laying

one stone aright every day,” through abrogation of the Fugitive Slave Act, through

compensated emancipation, or even through New England’s secession from the

Union. As Turner explains, these measures reduce our complicity, increasing our

self-reliance.57

Troublingly, each of these measures requires widespread political mobilization

– “a mass movement” in Turner’s words. Similarly, Gougeon posits “self-reliance as

the essential precursor to collective social action,” but never fully explains how to

organize others without violating their self-reliance, or one’s own.58 We reject

complicity, but risk conformity. Abolitionists converted others through mass

speeches, conventions, and rallies, and were just as conformist and constricting

as the mass political parties. An act is self-reliant if done for self-derived reasons, so

a conformist abolitionist could not be self-reliant. To Emerson, William Lloyd

Garrison and his colleague Wendell Phillips “had only a platform existence, & no

personality. Mere mouthpieces of a party … they are inestimable workers on

audiences; but for a private conversation, one to one, I much prefer to take my

chance with that boy in the corner.”59

How to go about “laying one stone aright every day,” and mobilize others

without coercing them? Abolitionist conventions were too crowded for self-

reliance. Conversely, Emerson chides the hermit Thoreau for refusing to vote and

for visiting town only for his mother’s cooking. Politics must occur in a middle

ground, smaller than a convention but bigger than one man. Kateb rightly

concludes that “when politics leaves the face-to-face situation, Emerson finds

abstractness, alienation, unreality; he also finds gross distortions of the political

person’s character.” Emerson claims that one “in his friendship, in his natural and

58 (see note 28 above). Emerson, “Emancipation,” 848 (see note 33 above). Note that Mariotti’s Thoreau

also briefly returned to society after solitude; see Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal, 120 (see note 21

above).

56. Emerson, “Man the Reformer,” 103 (see note 27 above); Dolan, Emerson’s Liberalism, 216 (see

note 24 above); Emerson, “Emancipation,” 843–44 (see note 33 above).

57. Turner, Awakening to Race, 43 (see note 8 above).

58. Gougeon, “Emerson, Self-Reliance, and the Politics of Democracy,” 201–202 (see note 10 above).

59. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson,

vol. 13, ed. Ralph H. Orth and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 281–82.


momentary associations, doubles or multiplies himself.”60 The best reform

association is the momentary association – the conversation.

In the 1844 essay “New England Reformers,” Emerson posits that the face-to-face

conversation is the model for reform, for conversation is not mediated by law or

power. “The disparities of power in men are superficial,” he states, “and all frank

and searching conversation, in which a man lays himself open to his brother,

apprises each of their radical unity.” A post-modern skeptic may object that power

taints language and prevents open discourse. The sunny Emerson answers that this

one-on-one conversation disrobes power and skill. In conversation, “a perfect

understanding, a like receiving, a like perceiving, abolished differences; and the

poet would confess that his creative imagination gave him no deep advantage.”61

Emerson admires vulgar conversation and speaking “the rude truth in all ways.”

Frank speech silences a listener’s counterarguments, despite his intentions, revealing

his anti-slavery intuitions. “We would persuade our fellow to this or that; another self

within our eyes dissuades him. That which we keep back, this reveals …. There lies

the unspoken thing, present, omnipresent.” Emerson lauds the British suasionists who

used direct, confrontational speech to rile listeners’ empathy. Inspired by moral sense

theory, the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson presented to Prime Minister William Pitt a

handful of African trinkets, cloths, and pipes. Struck with slaves’ humanity, Pitt turned

to abolition, and Parliament eventually banned the British slave trade.62 Other British

abolitionists recounted the public torture of particular slaves and the practice of

throwing slaves from their ships mid-ocean, lodging these images in the listener’s

imagination. Long after the conversation ended, the images gnawed at the listener’s

conscience, interrupting his daily contemplation, and stirring his empathy.63

Suasionist conversation is political in two senses. First, the conversation is

vulgar. It rejects politeness and rank in favor of common gut reactions, equalizing

participants. In this equality, it is democratic. Second, conversation through door-

to-door canvassing was a mainstay of American abolitionism. Abolitionists in

Emerson’s Massachusetts practiced their own solitary walks, visiting houses and

small gatherings across the state. According to historian Richard Newman, for

Massachusetts abolitionists, “local resistance, not mass conversion to abolitionism,

remained the rule of the road for traveling agents.” On their three-month tours,

60. Kateb, Emerson and Self-Reliance, 184–88 (see note 4 above); Emerson, “New England Reformers,”

457 (see note 9 above).

61. Emerson, ibid., 455–65.

62. Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 148 (see note 1 above); Emerson, “Emancipation,” 853 (see note 33 above); on

Clarkson and suasion, see Michael E. Woods, “A Theory of Moral Outrage: Indignation and Eighteenth-Century

British Abolitionism,” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Post - Slave Studies 62 (2014): 622–83, at 665–58.

63. Similarly, Arendt asserts that a truly compassionate listener is so struck with another’s suffering that

he is reduced to “gestures and expressions of countenance.” She adds that appeals to compassion can

circumvent and “shun the drawn-out wearisome process of persuasion” and argument. See Arendt,

On Revolution, 80–85 (see note 38 above).


these agents perfected arguments for revealing complicity to skeptical listeners,

appealing to the shame that slavery brought Americans. In their wake sprang local

abolition groups, often with several dozen members each.64

Small conversations can multiply, spreading enlightenment. For a contempla-

tive man like Clarkson, educating others comes naturally. Instinct “prompts him to

tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that going down into the secrets of

his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.” This was the crux of

British abolitionism. In the British West Indies, “a good man or woman, a country

boy or girl, it would so fall out, once in a while saw [slavery’s] injuries and had the

indiscretion to tell of them. The horrid story ran and flew; the winds blew it all over

the world.”65 Emerson was right. Stories from plantations radiated across the

Anglophone world, stirring widespread indignation. As the historian Michael

E. Woods argues, “popular indignation did not grow automatically,” but through

vigilant coordination by committed career activists. Emerson praised William

Wilberforce for bringing ten contentious anti-slavery petitions to Parliament, and

Granville Sharp for advising the runaway slave James Somerset on his landmark

lawsuit for freedom, which alerted the British public to the particular horrors of

Caribbean slavery.66 Even more influential than Wilberforce and Sharp was their

friend Clarkson, who traveled, leafleted, and preached, building a transatlantic

anti-slavery network with chapters from London to Philadelphia. By 1792, as many

as 400,000 people had signed 519 anti-slavery petitions.67 Woods credits this

activist network, and its appeals to “irascible emotions,” for widespread “success

in changing Britons’ gut reactions to the barbarous commerce.”

Emerson hoped to train his American audiences in the suasionism practiced

by Clarkson, Wilberforce, and Sharp. He drew his first major anti-slavery speech,

the 1844 “Emancipation” address, from Clarkson’s history of British abolition.

In the speech, Emerson recounted Clarkson’s vivid depictions of plantation

slavery. He explained how Clarkson, Wilberforce, and others convinced 300,000

Britons to boycott goods produced by Caribbean slavery, how Sharp helped to

persuade Lord Mansfield to grant British slaves a right of habeas corpus in the

1772 Somerset case, and how eventually, Britain abolished colonial slavery.68

64. Kateb, Emerson and Self-Reliance, 35 (see note 4 above); Richard S. Newman, The Transformation

of American Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 152–59.

65. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 21 (see note 48 above); Emerson, “Emancipation,” 834 (see

note 33 above).

66. Emerson, “Emancipation,” 834–37 (see note 33 above). Emerson so admired Wilberforce that he

attended the abolitionist’s funeral in Westminster Abbey in 1833. See Emerson, Journals, vol. 4, 414 (see

note 13 above).

67. J.R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the

Slave Trade 1787–1807 (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1–3.

68. Gougeon, “Historical Background,” xxviii (see note 28 above); Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero, 51–52, 74–

76 (see note 8 above); Emerson, “Emancipation,” 834–37, 856 (see note 33 above).


Emerson trusted that anti-slavery conversations would also push Americans to

protest. In a moment of overconfidence, Emerson hoped the Jacksonian era’s

progressive spirit, its “demon of reform,” might abolish American slavery. In “Man

the Reformer,” Emerson exclaimed: “We are to revise the whole of our social

structure… to see that the world is not only fitted to the former men, but fits us and

to clear ourselves of every usage which has not its roots in our own mind. What is

man born for but to be a reformer, a Remaker of what man has made.” The whole

political world is fraught with injustice, and intuition pushes us to right every part of

it. In Emerson’s view, we bend all institutions to our aims. This interpretation

breaks with Turner’s, which asserts that slavery taints “the entire society that

sponsors it,” but attributes to Emerson only “a modest mode of recovering

innocence” – boycotting only the goods and laws of slavery.69 Rather, I hold that

Emerson argued that our intuition condemns the whole American system. Hence,

to be true to our intuition – to be self-reliant – we must reform the whole system.

This Emerson is more radical than Turner’s, and closer to Garrison, who damned

the entire republic.

Emerson promises that there is harmony in reform. As intuitions are common

across people, so too will be the reforms: “The demon of reform has a secret door

into the heart of every lawmaker, of every inhabitant of every city. The fact, that a

new thought and hope have dawned in your breast, should apprize you that in the

same hour a new light broke in upon a thousand private hearts.” He echoes this in

his 1844 essay, “New England Reformers.” Conversation ripples across America,

pushing citizens to solitary contemplation of slavery. This ideal union is not “one of

covenants” and forced concert, but one of simultaneous solitude: “The union is

only perfect when all the uniters are isolated.” Awakened to slavery, citizens return

to politics as abolitionists. Solitary contemplation sparks harmonious action: “leave

[a man] 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.” 70

Maintaining Self-Reliance

Emerson was wrong. Slavery so divided antebellum America that war – not

conversation – united the halves. Emerson’s deliberative, peaceful, British model

of abolition seems unsuited to the American dilemma. As James H. Read

concludes, after the Fugitive Slave Act and crises of the 1850s, “Emerson’s

69. Emerson, “Man the Reformer,” 110 (see note 27 above); Turner, Awakening to Race, 34–39 (see

note 8 above).

70. Emerson, “Man the Reformer,” 102, (see note 27 above); Emerson, “New England Reformers,” 458

(see note 9 above).


philosophy was limited in its capacity to ground effective action with respect to so

politically complicated an evil as American slavery.”71

Emerson personally witnessed the backlash against discursive, suasionist

abolitionism. In 1835, Andrew Jackson asked the federal post to impound

abolitionist mail. Soon afterward, the House of Representatives passed a gag

rule tabling federal anti-slavery petitions. Hence, abolitionists preached and

printed locally, ranging southward and westward. The 1837 lynching of Elijah

Lovejoy by a pro-slavery Illinois mob riled abolitionists. Emerson mourned that

“the brave Lovejoy has given his breast to the bullet for his part and has died

when it was better not to live.” In 1844 Emerson’s friend Samuel Hoar fled

Charleston, South Carolina, fearing mob violence. Two years later, Emerson

attended the funeral of Charles Turner Torrey, a suasionist who died in a

Maryland prison. Finally, after Emerson’s periodical, The Dial, recounted the

flight of the abolitionist preacher George Simmons from Mobile, Emerson

fumed “Can any citizen of Massachusetts travel in honor through Kentucky

and Alabama and speak his mind?” Emerson saw that the suasionist canvass-

ing door-to-door in Alabama would be lynched. Concluding that Southern

slaveholders were blind to blacks’ suffering, Emerson wrote, “The habit of

oppression cuts out the moral eyes…. American slavery affords no exception to

this rule. No excess of good nature or of tenderness in individuals has been able

to give a new character to the system.”72

Scholars claim that after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, Emerson abandoned

suasionism and even self-reliance. The Act turned Emerson from private contempla-

tion to the sort of politics he once detested. He wrote that the Act “has forced us all

into politics and made it a duty to seek what it is often a duty to shun.”73 Emerson

canvassed for a Free Soil congressional candidate in 1851 and an anti-slavery

Republican in 1854. The 1850 Act and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act sparked mob

violence across the North, and crowds shouted down at least two of Emerson’s

Boston addresses. Frustrated with abolitionist deliberation, in 1856 Emerson

advocated shipping rifles to anti-slavery Kansas guerillas, harbored the outlaw John

Brown twice, and funded Brown on the eve of his bloody Harper’s Ferry attack.74

71. James H. Read. “The Limits of Self-Reliance,” in A Political Companion, ed. Levine and Malachuk,


72. Emerson, Journals, vol. 5, 437 (see note 5 above); Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Kansas Relief Meeting,”

“Attempted Speech,” and “The President’s Proclamation,” in Gougeon and Myerson, Emerson’s Antislavery

Writings, 114, 126, 131 (see note 28 above); Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Fugitive Slave Law,” in Selected

Writings, 872 (see note 1 above).

73. Emerson, “Address to the Citizens of Concord,” 53 (see note 55 above).

74. Accused of massacring five pro-slavery Kansans at Pottawatomie Creek, Brown fled Kansas for

New England. He stayed in Emerson’s house in the spring of 1857 and again in May 1859. Emerson

continued fundraising for Brown until his capture at Harper’s Ferry; see Gougeon, “Historical Back-

ground,” xlvi–xlvii (see note 28 above).


Emerson praised Brown’s raid, glad that Brown “did not believe in moral suasion,

he believed in putting the thing through.” This suggests to Len Gougeon and Jason

Frank that Emerson abandoned moral suasion in the 1850s.75 Kateb even claims

that Emerson gave up his ideal of self-reliance to support Brown and mass

abolitionist organizing: this “profound change is a deviation from his theory of

self-reliance, not its transformation.”76

Kateb is not quite right, for Emerson maintained his belief in self-reliance. Prior

to the slavery crisis he understood self-reliance as action from self-derived

principles, rather than from coerced or imitative ones.77 After the Fugitive Slave

Act, he believed that certain forms of abolitionism met this definition. The Act

was an opportunity, as Read writes, “to exhibit self-reliance in one’s opposition

to slavery.” All forms of abolitionist action were practical and thus imperfect,

so Emerson was ambivalent about each. The Act outraged many Northerners,

allowing mass partisan and Republican organizing, but this could also coerce

members into uncontemplated action on party dogmas, violating their self-

reliance. Emerson derided organizers like Garrison and Phillips as the “Mere

mouthpieces of a party” and Webster’s Fugitive Slave Act for capitulating to

Southern slavery and damning the whole Union. Garrison and Phillips suggested

that New Englanders abrogate the Act by seceding from the Union, but this would

not achieve Southern abolition.78 After Southern secession, Emerson sought

abolition through Union conquest of the Confederacy, but hesitated when he

pondered the human cost of the war.79

One might reject mass organizing or secession in favor of individual or small

group resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, hewing closer to self-reliance but

limiting political impact. The latter tactics included refusing to vote, personally

boycotting plantation goods, harboring runaways, and resisting Fugitive Slave Act

posses. Emerson learned of these tactics from Concord friends, including Thoreau,

who withdrew from politics to his cabin and woods at Walden Pond. Mariotti

convincingly argues that Thoreau’s withdrawals “are not prerequisites to get under

our belts before we rejoin the polity to engage in conventional politics”: rather,

75. On Emerson’s unsuccessful speeches, see Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero, 169, 264–56 (see note 8 above);

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Speech at a Meeting to Aid John Brown’s Family,” in Gougeon and Myerson,

Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 119 (see note 28 above); on Emerson’s material and moral support of

Brown’s violence, see Read, “The Limits of Self-Reliance,” 165 (see note 37 above); Gougeon, “Emerson,

Self-Reliance, and the Politics of Democracy,” 205 (see note 10 above); Frank, “Standing for Others,” 408

(see note 24 above).

76. George Kateb, “Self-Reliance, Politics, and Society,” 73 (see note 6 above).

77. This harmony between self-reliant thought and action undermines Kateb’s division between the

two.

78. Read, “The Limits of Self-Reliance,” 160–66, 178–79 (see note 37 above).

79. Kateb, Emerson and Self-Reliance, 34–35 (see note 4 above); Larry John Reynolds, Righteous

Violence: Revolution, Slavery, and the American Renaissance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011),

76–84.


these withdrawals “enact a democratic politics by their very practice.” In with-

drawing to nature, Thoreau repudiated the American government for its Fugitive

Slave Act. For Ruth Lane, Thoreau walks at Walden Pond to contemplate the

principles by which he could live. She calls this solitary discovery and self-

imposition of laws “self-government.”80 It is akin to Emerson’s autonomy, the first,

solitary stage of Emersonian self-reliance. “I went to the woods because I wished to

live deliberately,” Thoreau explains.

Emerson agreed that withdrawal to nature was political, allowing critical,

unconventional thought, and discovery of one’s own principles. But he insisted

that these principles lead to action in and against the realm of conventional

politics. Indefinitely pondering and inspecting nature amid crisis was irresponsible:

“It is a shame to him if his tranquility, amid dangerous times, arise from the

presumption, that, like children and women, his is a protected class; or if he seek a

temporary peace by the diversion of his thoughts from politics or vexed questions,

hiding his head like an ostrich in the flowering bushes, peeping into micro-

scopes.”81 Self-reliance requires activity among other people.

Emerson laments Thoreau’s inaction: “Had his genius been only contemplative,

he had been fitted to his life, but with his energy and practical ability he seemed

born for great enterprise and for command… . I so much regret the loss of his rare

powers of action… . [I]nstead of engineering for all America, he was captain of a

huckleberry party.” To Mariotti, this quote suggests that Emerson read Thoreau’s

withdrawal as apolitical. But Emerson appreciated the political nature of Thoreau’s

withdrawal.82 He practiced this exact political withdrawal by walking alone and

with Thoreau, and like Thoreau, Emerson explicitly celebrated how withdrawal

helped him to undermine mainstream politics.

Emerson criticizes Thoreau for, in contrast, not following his private anti-slavery

intuitions back to the world of conventional political action. Emerson hoped that

common moral sense would unite individuals to pursue abolition. But Thoreau

doubts that individuals following their private intuition will harmonize with others.

He rejects an authentic common moral sense, and often rejects mass action.83 As

Mariotti explains “common sense is problematic for Thoreau in that it is a way of

thinking that follows conventional patterns.” Emerson does not criticize Thoreau’s

withdrawal as apolitical; rather, his sees the withdrawal is incomplete, for Thoreau

never reentered and undermined the world of conventional politics.

80. Mariotti, Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal, xvii, 106–7 (see note 21 above); Ruth Lane,

“Standing Aloof from the State: Thoreau on Self-Government,” in Review of Politics 67 (2005)

285–86.

81. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 57 (see note 48 above).

82. Quoted in Mariotti, Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal, 14, 130–31 (see note 21 above).

83. Thoreau accepted conventional political action more than many, including Emerson, realize.

See Lane, “Thoreau on Self-Government,” 299 (see note 80 above).


Political action could not come through indefinite individual withdrawal,

which was autonomous but ineffective, and not through mass campaigning, which

was effective but coercive. Suasion was the middle ground, allowing both private

contemplation and public action, and nearing the ideal of self-reliance. Like many

suasionists, Emerson argued that the slavery crisis arose from Americans’ weak

moral sentiment and imagination. Northerners saw commerce, but “a great

imaginative soul, a broad cosmopolitan mind, has not accompanied [their]

immense industrial energy;” they “could not see beyond their eye-lids.” As Mariotti

recognizes, Emerson faults Northerners for seeing the particulars of their com-

merce, but not imagining the slaves that produced the goods. Southerners did not

need to imagine slavery – instead they daily saw it firsthand – but this habituation

“cuts out the moral eyes.” Statesmen across the Union lacked moral vision. Daniel

Webster could not imagine the physical suffering of slaves, having “no moral

perception, no moral sentiment.” Nor could Webster imagine an anti-slavery state,

lacking the creativity needed in “extemporizing a government.” Unimaginative

judges, “servile to precedent,” upheld his Act, missing the “intellect to ask not

whether it was constitutional, but whether it was right … the open secret of the

world was hid from their eyes.”84 Abolition would not come through the state, but

through activism.

Webster’s Fugitive Slave Act readied Northerners for moral enlightenment by

suasionists. Emerson cheered that “the Fugitive Law did much to unglue the eyes

of men, and now the Nebraska Bill leaves us staring. The Anti-Slavery Society

will add many members this year.” Northerners “unglued” their eyes from the

particulars of commerce, refocusing on the immediate, particular slaves captured

in their neighborhoods. Boston mobs guarded escapees, Vermont and Wisconsin

nullified the Fugitive Slave Act, and the anti-slavery Republican Party boomed.

Northerners were surprised both by the law and by their ability to publicly resist it:

“All sane persons are startled not only by the treachery of the officials, but of the

controlling public of the moment in Boston. It is one suasion more.”85

Conversation with pro-slavery Southerners was futile. Among Southerners, the

“habit of oppression cuts out the moral eyes … the habit of mind of traders in

power would not be esteemed favorable to delicate moral perception.” Here

Emerson echoes old suasionist rhetoric. In 1792, the Scottish suasionist poet

William Roscoe argued that the slaveholder’s “natural feelings are destroyed by

early and continual intercourse with the worst of Slavery.” Another British

abolitionist asked in 1791 “can any thing blunt the edge of sympathy and

84. Mariotti, “Emerson’s Transcendental Gaze,” 330 (see note 29 above); Ralph Waldo Emerson,

“Lecture on Slavery” and “Address to the Citizens of Concord,” in Gougeon and Myerson, Emerson’s

Antislavery Writings 67, 94–97, and 101 (see note 28 above).

85. Mariotti, Ibid., 326; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Fugitive Slave Law," 89 (see note 72 above);

quoted in Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero, 156 (see note 8 above).


compassion so much, as the continual sight of a man engaged in the employment

of a beast?”86 Constantly seeing the slave only as a particular, brute laborer, the

slave overseer might feel scorn or even pity at the slave’s suffering, but not

empathy. For Emerson, as for Adam Smith, empathy required removal from labor,

and leisure time to imagine oneself as the sufferer. Slaveholders lack “moral eyes,”

for failing to abstract past the particular and to empathetically envision their slaves’

humanity.87

Still, Emerson admired the suasionists who canvassed the South at great

personal risk. Given federal inaction, “there is no help but in the head and heart

and hamstrings of a man,” Emerson declared in 1854. The head and heart – the

imagination and intuition – stirred the hamstrings to motion, and the abolitionist

walked southward. Traveling the hostile South, he exemplified self-reliance both

mentally, ignoring pro-slavery custom, and physically, providing for himself, indepen-

dent while in society. Frustrated by the Fugitive Slave Act, Emerson called all citizens

to independent resistance, but his thoughts were equally applicable to the traveling

suasionist. He instructed: “To make good the cause of Freedom you must draw off

from all these foolish trusts on others. You must be citadels and warriors, yourselves

Declarations of Independence… . He only who is able to stand alone, is qualified for

society.”88 Paradoxically, the abolitionist’s self-reliance was possible only given the

injustice of slaveholders. The slaveholder pushed the abolitionist to contemplation

and action. Emerson asked: “Who makes the Abolitionist? The Slaveholder.”89

Gradually, Emerson harmonized self-reliance with the figure of the traveling

suasionist who acted independently against an unjust society.

Emerson personally knew the abolitionists who took these self-reliant journeys.

On November 2, 1837, the anti-slavery printer Elijah Lovejoy of Alton, Illinois,

affirmed “I respect and appreciate the feelings and opinions of my fellow-citizens,

and it is one of the most painful and unpleasant duties of my life, that I am called

upon to act in opposition to them… . [I]f I die, I have determined to make my grave

in Alton.” Five days later, he was shot to death. Emerson canonized him for seeking

86. Quoted in Woods, “A Theory of Moral Outrage,” 14, emphasis added (see note 62 above). For the

full second quote, see G.C.P., Reflections on the Slave Trade, with Remarks on the Policy of Its Abolition. In a

Letter to a Clergyman in the County of Suffolk (Sudbury, England: J.H. Riley, 1791), 31.

87. Mariotti, “Emerson’s Transcendental Gaze,” 321–26 (see note 29 above).

88. Emerson, “The Fugitive Slave Law,” 83 (see note 72 above); Emerson’s quote implies that initial

independence later makes one “qualified for society.” Gougeon interprets this and a related quote as an

exhortation for politicians and “individuals to look within themselves for truth and then act upon that

truth… These beliefs, once shared, would lead to a natural coalition. The leader of such a group simply

articulates – not dictates – the collective desires of the people. As noted earlier, this coalition would

emerge through a democratic process of public discourse”; see Gougeon, “Emerson, Self-Reliance, and the

Politics of Democracy,” 202–3 (see note 10 above). Emerson’s passage never refers to suasionists, but it is

tellingly compatible with their methods and tenets.

89. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “John Brown,” in Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, eds. Gougeon and

Myerson, 123 (see note 28 above).


“to die for humanity & the rights of free speech & opinion.”90 Lovejoy was noble not

for dying, but for struggling alone, in a hostile environment, without support. While

the demagogic Garrison and Phillips had “a platform existence, & no personality,”

Lovejoy preached in isolation, with personality and conviction.

To Emerson, Lovejoy was both hero and fool. Emerson’s friend William Ellery

Channing organized a memorial for Lovejoy at Faneuil Hall, which Emerson likely

attended.91 The December 8th meeting riled Lovejoy’s native Boston, especially

after the state Attorney General declared that the imprudent Lovejoy “died as the

fool dieth.” The following month, Emerson replied with the lecture “Heroism,”

which was inspired partly by Lovejoy.92 Contemporary Boston crowds understood

the political undertones of a lecture that today seems apolitical. Emerson

told listeners that heroism, like Lovejoy’s actions, “is the extreme of individual

nature… . Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind.” Emerson

affirms that heroism will “exercise the soul by assuming the penalties of

abstinence, of debt, of solitude … and the vision of violent death,” just as did

Lovejoy. Much later, Emerson described heroism as an admirable foolishness.

Socrates, condemned for impiety by fellow Athenians, requested as punishment a

lifetime of free meals, to Emerson’s delight. To the “preachers of freedom … that

have strengthened the moral sense,” Emerson instructed: “be the fool of virtue.”

In their foolhardy, unflinching contempt for Southern convention, suasionists

embodied self-reliance. Three times mobs destroyed Lovejoy’s press and three

times he rebuilt it. The fourth time, the mob killed him. Emerson cast subsequent

suasionists like Charles Torrey and John Underwood in Lovejoy’s mold. As war

neared, their recklessness made them all the more virtuous.93

Emerson lauded these men for following moral duty, not prudence. Faced with

“the material necessities, on the one hand, and Will, or Duty, or Freedom, on the

other,” the abolitionist chose the latter. Like Kant, Emerson felt that good will made

an action moral, particularly a will in accord with one’s duty to the transcendent,

universal anti-slavery law. Duty was a common tenet among suasionists. Lovejoy

ranked suasion “one of the most painful and unpleasant duties of my life.” In a

eulogy for him, Emerson avowed that Lovejoy awakened Northerners to slavery,

90. Joseph Cammet Lovejoy and Owen Lovejoy, Memoir of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy (New York:

J.S. Taylor, 1838), 278–78; Emerson, Journals, vol. 5, 437 (see note 5 above).

91. T. Gregory Garvey, “Anarchy and Public Discourse: Emerson, Lincoln, and the ‘Mobocratic Spirit’

of the 1830s,” American Nineteenth Century History 14 (June 2013): 178 n1.

92. In a November 24, 1837 journal entry, Emerson drafted parts of “Heroism” to laud Lovejoy, who

was killed seventeen days earlier. See Emerson, Journals, vol. 5, 437 (see note 5 above). For Lovejoy’s

significant influence on “Heroism,” see Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero, 37–38, 48, 52, 339, 356–57 n26 (see note 8

above); Reynolds, Righteous Violence, 58–59 (see note 79 above); Tiffany K. Wayne, “Heroism,” in

Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism (New York: Infobase, 2006): 144–45.

93. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Heroism,” in Selected, ed. Atkinson, 252–53, 256, 259 (see note 1 above);

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Remarks at Worcester,” in Gougeon and Myerson, Emerson’s Antislavery Writings,



placing the burden of resistance on Northerners. Now, he added, “our great duty in

this matter is to open our halls to the discussion of the [slavery] question.”94

Emerson held to suasion not only because it was effective, but also because it was

a moral obligation. The suasionist was a fool, but he was “the fool of virtue.”

Yet Emerson also admired John Brown’s violent rebellion. Emerson seems

inconsistent in admiring both Brown and Lovejoy, for Brown rejected suasion

and Lovejoy shunned aggression. But Brown and Lovejoy are more similar than

they seem. American citizens and statesmen were morally blind, requiring the

abolitionist’s insight. The “judges rely on the forms, and do not, like John Brown,

use their eyes to see the fact behind the forms.” Upholding the Dred Scott decision,

judges saw only formal pro-slavery law and precedent, but Brown perceived the

abstract anti-slavery law. This pushed Brown to political activism: “the rarest of

heroes, a pure idealist … he believed in his ideas, to the extent that he existed to

put them all into action.” Brown’s sudden, violent rebellion awakened Northerners

to the slavery crisis and abolitionism. Both Brown and Lovejoy shared their moral

imagination with Northerners: “Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing… through

forms, and making them translucid to others.” Through action, Brown and Lovejoy

made the anti-slavery moral law “translucid to others” in the North, creating a

“new public” that lived by this higher law.95 This might redeem Northerners who

capitulated to the Fugitive Slave Act.

Emerson elsewhere praises “the sympathy which all elevated minds must feel

with Brown.” Brown and Lovejoy died self-reliant martyrs, principled against a

hostile Southern society. As Larry John Reynolds recalls, Emerson repeatedly

omitted that Brown and Lovejoy shot at others in self-defense. Emerson was

ambivalent about their physical violence; rather, he said their “military attitude of

the soul we give the name of heroism.” Emerson’s focus was not their violence, nor

their effectiveness, but their self-reliance. According to Gougeon, Brown and

Lovejoy were “transcendental heroes, individuals who were prepared to sacrifice

all in the name of principle.”96 In sum, Emerson maintained his ideal of self-

reliance, realized through contemplation and action. Brown and Lovejoy exempli-

fied self-reliance, first intuiting the evil of slavery and then entering society as

abolitionists.

94. Emerson, “The Fugitive Slave Law,” 81; Lovejoy and Lovejoy, Memoir of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy,

278–79 (see note 90 above), emphasis added; Emerson on “our great duty” quoted in Robert D.

Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 269, emphasis

added.

95. Emerson, “Speech at a Meeting to Aid John Brown’s Family,” 119 (see note 75 above); Frank,

“Standing for Others,” 408 (see note 24 above); Read, “The Limits of Self-Reliance,” 164 (see note 37

above); Emerson, “The Poet,” 331–32 (see note 36 above).

96. Reynolds. Righteous Violence, 58–59 (see note 79 above); Emerson, “Heroism,” 252, emphasis

added (see note 92 above); Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero, 339 (see note 8 above).


Emerson’s essay “Society and Solitude” concludes that “nature delights to put

us between extreme antagonisms… . Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal.”97

Indefinite solitude shirks our political responsibilities, and society forces confor-

mity and complicity. Current Emerson literature notes this ambivalence, but not its

solution. Solitude and society are natural complements, each repairing the other.

Emerson continues:

We require such a solitude as shall hold us to its revelations when we are in the

streets and palaces; for most men are cowed in society, and say good things to

you in private, but will not stand to them in public. But let us not be the victims

of words. Society and solitude are deceptive names. It is not the circumstance of

seeing more or fewer people, but the readiness of sympathy, that imports; and a

sound mind will derive its principles from insight, with ever a purer ascent to

the sufficient and absolute right, and will accept society as the natural element

in which they are to be applied.98

Distinguishing solitude and society is foolish; to give them separate names is

deceptive. Solitude allows a sound mind to derive its principles, and society the

place to apply them. The paradox of Emerson’s political thought is that to live

authentically among others, one must retreat from others. When one retreats from

others to contemplate, he is drawn back to them. The Emersonian individual

follows his intuitions into and out of politics.

Robinson Woodward-Burns is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at the

University of Pennsylvania. He researches American anti-slavery and constitutional

thought, and is currently writing on the interdependent development of America’s

national and state constitutions. The author may be reached at rowood@sas.

upenn.edu.

97. Emerson, “Society and Solitude,” 745 (see note 1 above).

98. Ibid.


“Solitude before Society: Emerson on Self-Reliance, Abolitionism, and Moral Suasion.”

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