Emerson and Caribbean Emancipation

Abstract This essay reassesses Emerson’s “Address on the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies,” with an emphasis on the staggered hemispheric emancipation process as it stood in 1844. By emphasizing the address’s engagement with the complexities and reversals of the emancipation process, this essay works to shift critical attention from abolitionist radicalism as an abstract ideal that shone with occasional purity over the course of the emancipation era, to the abolitionist movement’s confrontation with a proliferation of semi-emancipated resistance formations that we can see repeated and revised across the long hemispheric nineteenth century. This reading of the address tracks Emerson’s specific engagement with Haiti’s second revolutionary era in the 1840s before turning to the ambiguities of US emancipation, which Emerson well understood as itself partial and reversible as demonstrated by the treatment of free Black mariners from Massachusetts when they entered Southern US ports.