Part 31

But now wrong and outrage, not only on others but terribly suffered in his own family, had made Brown feel that not he but “Slavery was an outlaw” against which he “held a commission direct from God Almighty” to act. A friend quoted him as having said, “The loss of my family and the troubles in Kansas have shattered my constitution, and I am nothing to the world but to defend the right, and that, by God’s help, I have done and will do.”

The people were not ready to follow him in revolutionary measures, but when on his own responsibility he had precipitated the inevitable conflict by breaking with a government, then so unrighteous, and offered his life as a sacrifice for humanity, they could not but do homage to him as a hero, who was technically a traitor. He had cut the Gordian knot which they had suffered to be tied tighter.

Of course Mr. Emerson had known nothing of John Brown’s plan for a raid into the slave states. It was the motive and courage he honored, not the means. He wrote: “I wish we should have health enough to know virtue when we see it, and not cry with the fools and the newspapers, ‘Madman!’ when a hero passes.”

On the first day of November, John Brown had been sentenced to death. This meeting in Boston, to give aid to his family, was held on the eighteenth, just two weeks before his execution.

The verses which serve as motto are from Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman’s poem written at the time, which Mr. Emerson used to read aloud to his family and friends with much pleasure.

[151] _Page 269, note 1._ “This court acknowledges, I suppose, the validity of the Law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or, at least, the New Testament. That teaches me that all things ‘whatsoever I would that men should do unto me, I should do even so to them.’ It teaches me further to ‘remember them which are in bonds as bound with them.’ I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted that I have done, in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments—I submit: so let it be done.” From the Speech of John Brown to the Court.

[152] _Page 270, note 1._ Among the sheets of the lecture “Courage” is one which seems to have been used at that time:—

“Governor Wise and Mr. Mason no doubt have some right to their places. It is some superiority of working brain that put them there, and the aristocrats in every society. But when they come to deal with Brown, they find that he speaks their own speech,—has whatever courage and directness they have, and a great deal more of the same; so that they feel themselves timorous little fellows in his hand; he outsees, outthinks, outacts them, and they are forced to shuffle and stammer in their turn.

“They painfully feel this, that he is their governor and superior, and the only alternative is to kneel to him if they are truly noble, or else (if they wish to keep their places), to put this fact which they know, out of sight of other people, as fast as they can. Quick, drums and trumpets strike up! Quick, judges and juries, silence him, by sentence and execution of sentence, and hide in the ground this alarming fact. For, if everything comes to its right place, he goes up, and we down.”

[153] _Page 271, note 1._ Commodore Hiram Paulding, in 1857, had broken up Walker’s filibustering expedition at Nicaragua. The arrest of Walker on foreign soil the government did not think it wise wholly to approve.

[154] _Page 272, note 1._ The allusion is to the trials of the fugitives Shadrach, Sims and Burns in Boston. The story of these humiliations is told in full and in a most interesting manner in the diary of Richard H. Dana,[H] whose zeal in the cause of these poor men did him great honor.

During the trial of Sims, a chain was put up, as a barrier against the crowd, around the United States Court-House, and the stooping of the judges to creep under this chain in order to enter the court-house was considered symbolic of their abject attitude towards the aggressive slave power.

JOHN BROWN: SPEECH AT SALEM

The second of December, on which day John Brown was executed at Charlestown, Virginia, was bright in that State, but in New England was of a strange sultriness with a wind from the south and a lowering sky. At noon, the hour appointed for his death, in Concord (as in many New England towns) the men and women who honored his character and motives gathered and made solemn observance of a day and event which seemed laden with omens. There was a prayer, I think offered by the Rev. Edmund Sears of Wayland,[I] Mr. Emerson read William Allingham’s beautiful poem “The Touchstone” which is used as the motto to this speech, Thoreau read with sad bitterness Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Soule’s Errand.” Hon. John S. Keyes read some appropriate verses from Aytoun’s “Execution of Montrose” and Mr. Sanborn a poem which he had written for the occasion.

[155] _Page 279, note 1._ Here, as often in Mr. Emerson’s speech and writing, is shown his respect for the old religion of New England and its effect on the thought and character of her people. As Lowell said of them in his Concord Ode in 1875:—

“And yet the enduring half they chose, Whose choice decides a man life’s slave or king, The invisible things of God before the seen and known.”

[156] _Page 279, note 2._ I well remember the evening, in my school-boy days, when John Brown, in my father’s house, told of his experiences as a sheep-farmer, and his eye for animals and power over them. He said he knew at once a strange sheep in his flock of many hundred, and that he could always make a dog or cat so uncomfortable as to wish to leave the room, simply by fixing his eyes on it.

[157] _Page 281, note 1._ “Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right; and although a different breeding, different religion and greater intellectual activity would have modified or even reversed the particular action, yet, for the hero, that thing he does is the highest deed, and is not open to the censure of philosophers and divines.”—“Heroism,” _Essays, First Series_.

“I can leave to God the time and means of my death, for I believe now that the sealing of my testimony before God and man with my blood will do far more to further the cause to which I have earnestly devoted myself than anything else I have done in my life.”—Letter of John Brown to a friend.

THEODORE PARKER

Theodore Parker, worn by his great work in defence of liberal religion and in every cause of suffering humanity, had succumbed to disease and died in Florence in May, 1860, not quite fifty years of age. Born in the neighbor town of Lexington when Emerson was seven years old, they had been friends probably from the time when the latter, soon after settling in Concord, preached for the society at East Lexington, from 1836 for two years. Parker was, during this period, studying divinity, and was settled as pastor of the West Roxbury church in 1837. In that year he is mentioned by Mr. Alcott as a member of the Transcendental Club and attending its meetings in Boston. When, in June, 1838, Mr. Emerson fluttered the conservative and the timid by his Divinity School Address, the young Parker went home and wrote, “It was the most inspiring strain I ever listened to.... My soul is roused, and this week I shall write the long-meditated sermons on the state of the church and the duties of these times.”

Mr. Parker was one of those who attended the gathering in Boston which gave birth to the _Dial_, to which he was a strong contributor. Three years after its death, he, with the help of Mr. James Elliot Cabot and Mr. Emerson, founded the _Massachusetts Quarterly Review_, vigorous though short-lived, of which he was the editor. Parker frequently visited Emerson, and the two, unlike in their method, worked best apart in the same great causes. Rev. William Gannett says, “What Emerson uttered without plot or plan, Theodore Parker elaborated to a system. Parker was the Paul of transcendentalism.”

Mr. Edwin D. Mead, in his chapter on Emerson and Theodore Parker,[J] gives the following pleasant anecdote:—

“At one of Emerson’s lectures in Boston, when the storm against Parker was fiercest, a lecture at which a score of the religious and literary leaders of the city were present, Emerson, as he laid his manuscript upon the desk and looked over the audience, after his wont, observed Parker; and immediately he stepped from the platform to the seat near the front where Parker sat, grasping his hand and standing for a moment’s conversation with him. It was not ostentation, and it was not patronage: it was admiring friendship,—and that fortification and stimulus Parker in those times never failed to feel. It was Emerson who fed his lamp, he said; and Emerson said that, be the lamp fed as it might, it was Parker whom the time to come would have to thank for finding the light burning.”

Parker dedicated to Emerson his _Ten Sermons on Religion_. In acknowledging this tribute, Mr. Emerson thus paid tribute to Parker’s brave service:—

“We shall all thank the right soldier whom God gave strength to fight for him the battle of the day.”

When Mr. Parker’s failing forces made it necessary for him to drop his arduous work and go abroad for rest, Mr. Emerson was frequently called to take his place in the Music Hall on Sundays. I think that this was the only pulpit he went into to conduct Sunday services after 1838.

It is told that Parker, sitting, on Sunday morning, on the deck of the vessel that was bearing him away, never to return, smiled and said: “Emerson is preaching at Music Hall to-day.”

[158] _Page 286, note 1._ Mr. Emerson wrote in his journal:—

“The Duc de Brancas said, ‘Why need I read the Encyclopédie? Rivarol visits me.’ I may well say it of Theodore Parker.”

[159] _Page 290, note 1._ Richard H. Dana wrote in his diary, November 3, 1853:—

“It is now ten days since Webster’s death.... Strange that the best commendation that has appeared yet, the most touching, elevated, meaning eulogy, with all its censure, should have come from Theodore Parker! Were I Daniel Webster, I would not have that sermon destroyed for all that had been said in my favor as yet.”

[160] _Page 293, note 1._ I copy from Mr. Emerson’s journal at the time of Mr. Parker’s death these sentences which precede some of those included in this address:—

“Theodore Parker has filled up all his years and days and hours. A son of the energy of New England; restless, eager, manly, brave, early old, contumacious, clever. I can well praise him at a spectator’s distance, for our minds and methods were unlike,—few people more unlike. All the virtues are solitaires. Each man is related to persons who are not related to each other, and I saw with pleasure that men whom I could not approach, were drawn through him to the admiration of that which I admire.”

AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

On January 31, 1862, Mr. Emerson lectured at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington on American Civilization. Just after the outbreak of war in the April preceding, he had given a lecture, in a course in Boston on Life and Literature, which he called “Civilization at a Pinch,” the title suggesting how it had been modified by the crisis which had suddenly come to pass. In the course of the year the flocking of slaves to the Union camps, and the opening vista of a long and bitter struggle, with slavery now acknowledged as its root, had brought the question of Emancipation as a war-measure to the front. Of course Mr. Emerson saw hope in this situation of affairs, and when he went to Washington with the chance of being heard by men in power there, he prepared himself to urge the measure, as well on grounds of policy as of right. So the Boston lecture was much expanded to deal with the need of the hour. There is no evidence that President Lincoln heard it; it is probable that he did not; nor is it true that Mr. Emerson had a long and earnest conversation with him on the subject next day, both of which assertions have been made in print. Mr. Emerson made an unusual record in his journal of the incidents of his stay in Washington, and though he tells of his introduction to Mr. Lincoln and a short chat with him, evidently there was little opportunity for serious conversation. The President’s secretaries had, in 1886, no memory of his having attended the lecture, and the Washington papers do not mention his presence there. The following notice of the lecture, however, appeared in one of the local papers: “The audience received it, as they have the other anti-slavery lectures of the course, with unbounded enthusiasm. It was in many respects a wonderful lecture, and those who have often heard Mr. Emerson said that he seemed inspired through nearly the whole of it, especially the part referring to slavery and the war.”

A gentleman in Washington, who took the trouble to look up the question as to whether Mr. Lincoln and other high officials heard it, says that Mr. Lincoln could hardly have attended lectures then:—

“He was very busy at the time, Stanton the new war secretary having just come in, and storming like a fury at the business of his department. The great operations of the war for the time overshadowed all the other events.... It is worth remarking that Mr. Emerson in this lecture clearly foreshadowed the policy of Emancipation some six or eight months in advance of Mr. Lincoln. He saw the logic of events leading up to a crisis in our affairs, to ‘emancipation as a platform with compensation to the loyal owners’ (his words as reported in the _Star_). The notice states that the lecture was very fully attended.”

Very possibly it may be with regard to this address that we have the interesting account given of the effect of Mr. Emerson’s speaking on a well-known English author. Dr. Garnett, in his _Life of Emerson_, says:—

“A shrewd judge, Anthony Trollope, was particularly struck with the note of sincerity in Emerson when he heard him address a large meeting during the Civil War. Not only was the speaker terse, perspicuous, and practical to a degree amazing to Mr. Trollope’s preconceived notions, but he commanded his hearers’ respect by the frankness of his dealing with them. ‘You make much of the American eagle,’ he said, ‘you do well. But beware of the American peacock.’ When shortly afterwards Mr. Trollope heard the consummate rhetorician, ⸺ ⸺ he discerned at once that oratory was an end with him, instead of, as with Emerson, a means. He was neither bold nor honest, as Emerson had been, and the people knew that while pretending to lead them he was led by them.”

Mr. Emerson revised the lecture and printed it in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for April, 1862. It was afterwards separated into the essay “Civilization,” treating of the general and permanent aspects of the subject (printed in _Society and Solitude_), and this urgent appeal for the instant need.

The few lines inspired by the Flag are from one of the verse-books.

[161] _Page 298, note 1._ Mr. Emerson himself was by no means free from pecuniary anxieties and cares in those days.

Journal, 1862. “Poverty, sickness, a lawsuit, even bad, dark weather, spoil a great many days of the scholar’s year, hinder him of the frolic freedom necessary to spontaneous flow of thought.”

[162] _Page 300, note 1._ This was during the days of apparent inaction when, after the first reverses or minor successes of the raw Northern armies, the magnitude of the task before them and the energy of their opponents was realized, and recruiting, fortification, organization was going on in earnest in preparation for the spring campaign. General Scott had resigned; General McClellan was doing his admirable work of creating a fit army, and Secretary Cameron had been succeeded by the energetic and impatient Stanton. But the government was still very shy of meddling with slavery for fear of disaffecting the War Democrats and especially the Border States.

[163] _Page 307, note 1._ A short time before this address was delivered Mr. Moncure D. Conway (a young Virginian, who, for conscience’ sake, had left his charge as a Methodist preacher and had abandoned his inheritance in slaves, losing in so doing the good will of his parents, and become a Unitarian minister and an abolitionist) had read in Concord an admirable and eloquent lecture called “The Rejected Stone.” This stone, slighted by the founders, although they knew it to be a source of danger, had now “become the head of the corner,” and its continuance in the national structure threatened its stability. Mr. Emerson had been much struck with the excellence and cogency of Mr. Conway’s arguments, based on his knowledge of Southern economics and character, and in this lecture made free use of them.

[164] _Page 308, note 1._ Mason and Slidell, the emissaries sent by the Confederacy to excite sympathy in its cause in Europe, had been taken off an English vessel at the Bermudas by Commodore Wilkes, and were confined in Fort Warren in Boston Harbor. President Lincoln’s action in surrendering them at England’s demand had been a surprise to the country, but was well received.

[165] _Page 309, note 1._ From the Veeshnoo Sarma.

[166] _Page 309, note 2._ See in the address on Theodore Parker the passage commending him for insisting “that the essence of Christianity is its practical morals; it is there for use or nothing,” etc.

[167] _Page 311, note 1._ In the agitation concerning the abolition of slavery in the British colonies, gradual emancipation was at first planned, as more reasonable and politic, but, in the end, not only the reformers but the planters came in most cases to see that immediate emancipation was wiser.

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION

On the 22d of September, President Lincoln at last spoke the word so long earnestly desired by the friends of Freedom and the victims of slavery, abolishing slavery on the first day of the coming year in those states which should then be in rebellion against the United States.

At a meeting held in Boston in honor of this auspicious utterance, Mr. Emerson spoke, with others.

The address was printed in its present form in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for November, 1862.

[168] _Page 316, note 1._ It may be interesting in this connection to recall the quiet joy with which Mr. Emerson in his poem “The Adirondacs” celebrates man’s victory over matter, and its promise to human brotherhood, when the Atlantic Cable was supposed to be a success in 1858.

[169] _Page 320, note 1._ Milton, “Comus.”

[170] _Page 321, note 1._ It is pleasant to contrast this passage with the tone of sad humiliation which prevails in the address on the Fugitive Slave Law given in Concord in 1851.

[171] _Page 324, note 1._ See the insulting recognition of this disgraceful attitude of the North by John Randolph, quoted by Mr. Emerson in his speech on the Fugitive Slave Law in Concord in 1851.

[172] _Page 326, note 1._ Shakspeare, Sonnet cvii.

[173] _Page 326, note 2._ The tragedy of the negro is tenderly told in the poem “Voluntaries,” which was written just after they had gallantly stood the test of battle in the desperate attack on Fort Wagner.

On the first day of the year 1863, when Emancipation became a fact throughout the United States, a joyful meeting was held in Boston, and there Mr. Emerson read his “Boston Hymn.”

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

In the year 1865, the people of Concord gathered on the Nineteenth of April, as had been their wont for ninety years, but this time not to celebrate the grasping by the town of its great opportunity for freedom and fame. The people came together in the old meeting-house to mourn for their wise and good Chief Magistrate, murdered when he had triumphantly finished the great work which fell to his lot. Mr. Emerson, with others of his townsmen, spoke.

[174] _Page 331, note 1._ On the occasion of his visit to Washington in January, 1862, Mr. Emerson had been taken to the White House by Mr. Sumner and introduced to the President. Mr. Lincoln’s first remark was, “Mr. Emerson, I once heard you say in a lecture that a Kentuckian seems to say by his air and manners, ‘Here am I; if you don’t like me, the worse for you.’”

The interview with Mr. Lincoln was necessarily short, but he left an agreeable impression on Mr. Emerson’s mind. The full account of this visit is printed in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for July, 1904, and will be included among the selections from the journals which will be later published.

[175] _Page 332, note 1._ Mr. Emerson’s poem, “The Visit,” shows how terrible the devastation of the day of a public man would have seemed to him.

[176] _Page 336, note 1._ The brave retraction by Thomas Taylor of the hostile ridicule which _Punch_ had poured on Lincoln in earlier days contained these verses:—

“Beside this corpse, that bears for winding-sheet The Stars and Stripes he lived to rear anew, Between the mourners at his head and feet, Say, scurrile jester, is there room for _you_?

“Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer, To lame my pencil, and confute my pen;— To make me own this kind of princes peer, This rail-splitter a true-born king of men.”

The whole poem is included in Mr. Emerson’s collection _Parnassus_.

[177] _Page 337, note 1._ This thought is rendered more fully in the poem “Spiritual Laws,” and in the lines in “Worship,”—

This is he men miscall Fate, Threading dark ways, arriving late, But ever coming in time to crown The truth, and hurl wrong-doers down.

[178] _Page 338, note 1._ The following letter was written by Mr. Emerson in November, 1863, to his friend, Mr. George P. Bradford, who, as Mr. Cabot says, came nearer to being a “crony” than any of the others:—

CONCORD.

DEAR GEORGE,—I hope you do not need to be reminded that we rely on you at 2 o’clock on Thanksgiving Day. Bring all the climate and all the memories of Newport with you. Mr. Lincoln in fixing this day has in some sort bound himself to furnish good news and victories for it. If not, we must comfort each other with the good which already is, and with that which must be.

Yours affectionately,

R. W. EMERSON.

A year later, he wrote to the same friend:—

“I give you joy of the Election. Seldom in history was so much staked on a popular vote—I suppose never in history.