We can’t understand Ralph Waldo Emerson the philosopher of self-realisation without understanding Emerson the radical abolitionist. In fact, his language and philosophy helped shape the contours of the antislavery movement in New England. As Bostonians’ dislike of slavery began to grow into active disobedience to the laws that supported it, many turned to Emerson’s ideas to understand their actions. This happened even as Emerson frankly disliked the insincerity and bad faith of many reformers – for whom moralism replaced an authentic character. Ultimately, through examples such as the militant abolitionist John Brown, Emerson came to celebrate a certain form of antislavery political activity, one that expressed heroic and authentic moral character traits and that could be experienced as resistance to the conformity to the marketplace.
In some of his earliest extant letters and journal entries, as a young man, Emerson expressed a hatred for slavery and wanted to see it abolished. It was in the 1830s, while he was coming to many of the philosophical and existential conclusions that would mark his Transcendentalist thought, that he first spent time with radical abolitionists. In 1831, he had surprised the buttoned-up parishioners in his Unitarian church by allowing abolitionists to address the congregation. In 1838, the leading abolitionist newspaper of the day, William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, republished Emerson’s letter protesting Cherokee removal, which he called ‘so vast an outrage’. As the conservative clergy in Massachusetts mobilised to condemn Emerson’s Transcendentalist movement, he often found himself allied with abolitionists, who also tangled with the religiously orthodox on questions such as church reform or antisabbatarianism. Importantly, as the 1840s progressed, Emerson began to spend more time with Black abolitionists. He was familiar with Frederick Douglass as early as 1844, he shared antislavery stages with fugitive slaves such as Lewis Hayden, and he encountered William C Nell, an activist and groundbreaking Black historian, in New England’s parlours, intellectual clubs.
Still, Emerson’s reputation in the public mind as an antipolitical thinker lingers. To be sure, in his contrarianism, Emerson often espoused an antimoralism, one that privileged individual authenticity rather than public displays of solidarity. Emerson was in some ways the mirror-opposite of some of today’s preening Left intellectuals; the Transcendentalist was almost embarrassed of his own political commitments, as if he hoped you didn’t notice the antislavery rallies he spoke at, the support he gave to abolitionist militants. He had an instinctive allergy to what he called the ‘rosepink sentimentality’ of reformers, preferring the smirk of an honest rogue to the scowl of a self-righteous prig. In essays such as ‘Self-Reliance’ (1841), he had accused some abolitionists of bad faith, of concealing their greed and ‘spite at home’ through a Mrs Jellyby-like ‘incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off’. He saw how a moral crusade, maybe especially if it is so clearly righteous, can serve as an existential crutch for people, allowing them to fill the void in their souls with the applause that comes from cheap moralism. He would have hated your Twitter feed.