Coming Around

            Transcendentalists may have disagreed with abolitionists’ methods, but they did agree that slavery was wrong.  In 1836, the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing, the proverbial grandfather of Transcendentalism who infamously disapproved of extreme Garrisonian abolitionism, expounded on the evils of slavery in his highly moral Slavery, and Thoreau would write, "Slavery and servility have produced no sweet-scented flower annually, to charm the senses of men, for they have no real life: they are merely a decaying and a death, offensive to all healthy nostrils" (Slavery 1165). That common moral stance would eventually overwhelm many of their objections and bring Transcendentalists into the fold of abolitionism. The 1840s dealt heavy blows to abolition: The annexation of Texas and the Mexican-American war added new slave states to the Union. 

Suddenly, Transcendentalists who, like Emerson, had disapproved of slavery from a lofty moral pulpit realized that a more active stance might be necessary to eradicate slavery from America (Gougeon xiii, xxvii, xxx). Emerson’s wife, aunt, and brother were already involved in abolition societies; he finally agreed to deliver a speech on the anniversary of emancipation in British West Indies in 1844 and stepped into the limelight of the anti-slavery movement (Gougeon xxv, xxvii).

            However long it took Transcendentalists to come around – some, like Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Margaret Fuller, were preoccupied with other causes (education and women’s rights, respectively) for years – their belief in higher laws than the government’s guaranteed they would be fearless supporters indeed, and as the slavery debate grew in intensity across America, they had plenty of opportunities to join the fight (Ronda 263). 

Peabody would eventually drive the Hawthornes to distraction by preaching abolition to them (Ronda 265). Fuller, while she did view championing women’s rights as her primary calling, was certainly no friend to slavery; in the Great Lawsuit, she writes bitterly of “what has been done to the red man, the black man. These deeds are the scoff of the world; and they have been accompanied by such pious words that the gentlest would not dare to intercede with, ‘Father forgive then, for they know not what they do’” (748). A close friend of Lydia Maria Child, author of An Appeal in Favor of Americans Called Africans, Fuller would also give Fredrick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself a glowing review in the New York Tribune (Blanchard 153; Fuller 778-79).

Bronson Alcott, founder of the Temple School in Boston, was arrested for refusing to pay taxes in protest of the annexation of Texas; his home was a stop on the Underground Railroad (Schreiner 110, 161). In 1854, when Anthony Burns was seized in Boston, Alcott, by then nearly sixty, joined an armed mob and was nearly shot in an attempt to free Burns (Commager 236). Henry David Thoreau, famous for his unabashed refusal to obey a government that condoned slavery, also helped hide runaway slaves, but he also went even farther than that (Schreiner 162). No hypocrisy for Thoreau; he bid people stand up for what they believed, no matter the cost, encouraged everyone to refuse to pay taxes, to go to jail, to revolt if necessary. He practiced what he preached by going to jail himself, and his Slavery in Massachusetts, which laments the corruption of government, justice, church, press, and the individual himself makes it clear that he wishes others would follow his example (Thoreau Resistance 974; Slavery 1155-1166). Moncure Conway, scion of a Southern slaveholding family, promoted Northern separation from the South to preserve the North from slavery’s taint (Fredrickson 16). Theodore Parker, one of the more active and famous Transcendental abolitionists, worked himself into an early grave trying to cleanse America of slavery’s wicked stain (Commager 267, 272).

            Once they devoted themselves to a cause, Transcendentalists held nothing back. They chose their paths, and they acted, but some were more extreme than others, and many grew more radical as time went on without seeing emancipation. The next post will dive into how Transcendentalist abolitionists participated in the growing belief that violence would play a part in ending slavery in America for good.