How Far Should We Go?

            Abolitionism in nineteenth century America had all the impatience and emotionalism of Romanticism, but many abolitionists, especially those who were devoutly religious, remained staunchly nonresistant – that is, they believed that emancipation should be brought about without using force (Dillon 9; Fredrickson 41). Slavery, William Ellery Channing’s 1836 discourse on the subject, promoted this pacifism, declaring, “To instigate the slave to insurrection is a crime for which no rebuke and no punishment can be too severe” (5). Slavery, however, was proving stubborn, and by the 1850s – years which encompassed the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law, “Bleeding Kansas,” and John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry – many abolitionists, Transcendentalists included, were beginning to wonder if slavery would have to be washed out with blood.

            For people who believed every man was divine, Transcendentalists had a surprisingly accepting attitude toward violence. Man set his own morals, after all, and if he had to resort to violence to stand by them, who then was in the wrong –he himself, or whoever tried to force him to go against his nature? Thoreau’s Resistance to Civil Government does not advocate violence in so many words, but revolution is not at all discouraged – quite the opposite, in fact, and in “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” Thoreau adds, “I do not wish to kill or be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable” (967; 1167). Interestingly, in the early days of the Civil War, this mindset prompted some Transcendentalists to support the South’s secession as the ultimate expression of individual will (Fredrickson 65).

            Then there was the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, who became a radical abolitionist in the 1840s, and he was a class unto himself (Albrecht 92). The grandson of a Revolutionary minuteman, Parker cared little for violence, but he recognized that is was unavoidable; he kept his grandfather’s musket in his office and believed “All the great charters of humanity have been writ in blood. I once hoped that of American democracy would be engrossed in less costly ink; but it is plain now that our pilgrimage must lead through a Red Sea, wherein many a Pharaoh will go under and perish” (Fredrickson 36-7; Albrecht 101; Weiss 172). After the Fugitive Slave Law went into effect in 1850, Parker organized a Vigilance Committee in Boston, whose purpose was to watch for slave hunters and stop them. When Ellen and William Craft, African American members of his congregation, were targeted by these hunters, Parker hid the couple. He put a gun and a knife in William’s hands and encouraged him to use them if he had to, then gathered a mob to intimidate the slave hunters into fleeing Boston without the Crafts (Commager 199, 215). This same Vigilance Committee would storm the courthouse in 1854 in attempt to rescue Anthony Burns; their attempt was unsuccessful, but Bronson Alcott was nearly shot and a police officer was stabbed to death (Albrecht 109; Commager 236).

The Transcendentalist consensus on yet another violent occurrence would further reveal the lengths to which they were willing to go by the 1850s. John Brown, the militant abolitionist, came to Concord in 1857. Thoreau introduced Emerson to him, and when Brown returned to Concord in 1859 to raise money for the freedom fight in Kansas, Emerson housed him and helped him gather funds (Gougeon xlvi-vii). Alcott, Thoreau, Emerson, and Parker all vocally supported Brown after his failed attack on Harpers Ferry; Brown’s daughters lived with the Emersons for a while after Brown’s execution (Gougeon xlvii-viii; Fredrickson 37-38). In “John Brown” Emerson even went so far as to describe Brown as a “founder of liberty” (326). In an ironic twist, Transcendentalists had in some ways become more extreme than the radical abolitionists they had once derided.