Emerson and Antislavery

Abstract “Emerson,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes in his 1884 biography, had never been identified with the abolitionists.”1 Many biographers and critics have argued that just the opposite is true, pointing to Emerson’s numerous private and public statements against slavery. Still, for a variety of reasons, Holmes’s erroneous view of Emerson has been remarkably persistent. Not the least of these reasons are Emerson’s own words. “Every reformer is partial and exaggerates some one grievance,” and every reformer’s obsessions are “somewhat ridiculous,” wrote Emerson in his 1839 lecture “The Protest” (EL, 91). Even as the Civil War approached and Emerson shared the platform with abolitionists on dozens of occasions, he still disdainfully kept many of them at arm’s length. “They are a bitter, sterile people, whom I flee from,” he wrote in his journal (JMN, 14:166). Similar disparaging remarks about abolitionists and other reformers punctuate Emerson’s lectures, journals, and letters. This attitude, together with his oft-expressed repugnance toward involvement in the political arena and his insistent self-portraiture of himself as a poet-philosopher, has inevitably supported the view promoted by Holmes of an aloof and remote “Sage of Concord.”