American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  Although Essays, Second Series was the work of a man chastened by experience (the title of the book’s greatest essay), it still demonstrated Emerson’s belief in the individual will to prevail, albeit in a universe that he could not fully mold to his wishes. Having lost his five-year-old son and Henry Thoreau’s brother within the span of a few weeks at the beginning of 1842 (and the death of his first wife, Ellen, a decade earlier, from which he never fully recovered), he had good reason to question whether “compensation” really kept things in cosmic balance.

  “Experience” comes early in the volume, and it marked Emerson’s mature understanding of the delicate relationship between individual “power” and universal “form.” In the epigram to the essay he names the “lords of life” that he will subsequently elucidate, those inescapable facts that bind us, as the Lilliputians did Gulliver, as we struggle to achieve happiness. What is man to do about them? Meet life head-on, he counsels, without expectation, and take the “potluck of the day.” “I am thankful for small mercies,” Emerson writes. “To fill the hour,—that is happiness; to fill the hour and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval.” This, from the man who eight years earlier had urged each individual to build his own world! Now, “to finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.” Moreover, consciousness, the center and glory of Nature and “Self-Reliance,” now was mankind’s bane, for “the discovery we have made that we exist” was nothing less than “the Fall of Man.”15

  When people asked, then, why he did not “realize” his world in the way he once had prophesied, he urged “patience and patience,” for “we shall win at last.” We till our gardens, he explains, eat our dinners, discuss household with our wives, and think nothing of such things, while they are in fact to be savored. “Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat,” he tells us; “up again old heart!” For there “is victory yet for all justice.”16 In Emerson’s world, the individual prevailed, even if the castle he built lacked final grandeur. Reviewing several volumes of Emerson’s works in 1850, Theodore Parker understood his friend’s accomplishment. “Mr. Emerson is the most American of our writers,” he proclaimed, for “the idea of America” appeared in him “with great prominence.” What idea? That of “personal freedom, of the dignity and value of human nature, the superiority of man to the accidents of a man.”17

  Emerson championed the empowered individual, the self-reliant genius for whom conscience was the highest law. But other Transcendentalists lamented how much such self-regard obscured the Transcendentalists’ response to social problems. Elizabeth Peabody had another word for it, “egotheism,” which she used in characterizing her disappointment in the tendency of much Transcendentalist thought. The problem with viewing the world as Emerson did was that people “deified their own conceptions; that is, they say that their conception of God is all that men can ever know of God.” She recognized this as early as 1838, when she was at Emerson’s home as he revised his Divinity School address for publication. She noticed a passage that he had not delivered—as he explained, “merely for want of time.” In it he had warned, she wrote, “against making a new truth a fanaticism,” which, perhaps, had it been published, “would have saved many a weak brother and sister Transcendentalist from going into the extreme of ego-theism.” “Too soon,” she remembered Emerson writing, “we shall have the puppyism of pretension looking down on the head of all human culture; setting up against Jesus Christ every little self magnified.”18 Emerson obviously recognized that his ideas might lend themselves to uses other than those that he wished.

  Peabody, much closer in her religious views to her mentor William Ellery Channing, concluded that when one held such self-centered views as Emerson did, “faith commits suicide” and the individual, not realizing that there is “beyond our conception, inconceivable Power, Wisdom, and Love,” becomes self-centered. “Man,” she urged, “proves but a melancholy God” in comparison to the divine being whom she still worshipped.19 A reviewer in Greeley’s Tribune was even more severe. After hearing Emerson speak on “The Transcendentalist” in his series on “The Times,” the correspondent lamented Emerson’s insistence that a Transcendentalist should not labor “for small objects, such as Abolition, Temperance, Political Reforms, &c.” “So we would ask Mr. Emerson,” he wrote indignantly, “whether the Poverty, Ignorance and Misery of the Human Race and the devastated and neglected conditions of the Globe are not objects great enough to arouse the Philosopher of the Transcendentalist School to action.”20 Emerson’s friend Henry James, Sr., baldly stated the criticism. “The curse of our present times, which eliminates all their poetry,” he observed of his contemporaries’ resistance to socialism, is the “selfhood imposed on us by the evil world,” a project in which some Transcendentalists were undeniably complicit.21

  Despite such criticism, through the 1840s Emerson commanded his side of the Transcendentalist barricade, enlisting Alcott; Fuller; the Salem, Massachusetts, poet and eccentric Jones Very; and a host of younger admirers like Thoreau, Ellery Channing the younger, Charles King Newcomb, and Caroline Healey in a program of self-culture that revolved more around literature than social reform. But if Emerson held this intellectual vantage, other of his colleagues in the Transcendentalist circle were not ready to relinquish their dreams of an American democracy based in social harmony. For these individuals, selfless work for humanitarian reform was at the heart of Transcendentalism’s promise.

  One of the most vocal of these individuals was Theodore Parker. In the wake of the controversy over his Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity and Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion he had been ostracized from fellowship with other Unitarian clery in the Boston Association of Ministers. In the midst of these difficulties, he and his wife, Lydia, spent a year abroad to recuperate from the heated attacks on his ministry. Before he returned to the United States in the fall of 1844, he had met Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle, the philosophers Cousin and Friedrich Schelling, and such giants of scriptural history and exegesis as Strauss, Johann Neander, E. W. Hengstenberg, and the great de Wette, a translation of whose commentary on the New Testament had been published by Parker. He also took time to learn about the ecclesiastical and civil governments of the various countries he visited, knowledge that, upon his return, influenced his notion of American democracy and its destiny.

  His sermons before Boston’s Twenty-eighth Congregational Society, over which he was formally installed on January 4, 1846, were little short of electrifying. Peabody, long an admirer, recalled that when she heard Parker deliver his “A Lesson for the Day,” the “deep music of his earnest voice” moved her as she had seldom been moved. “I want you to hear Parker preach now,” she told John Sullivan Dwight, for “he has got on fire with the velocity of his spirit’s speed—& the elements melt in the fervent heat of his word.” In short, she wrote, “He is a son of thunder.”22 Peabody’s young friend, Caroline Healey, agreed. Present one evening when Emerson and others were discussing Parker, she was disappointed that no one captured what she felt for her new friend. “I had it on my lips to say,” she explained, that “‘every word falling from Mr. Parker’s lip is a battle ax—it cleaves—a skull.’”23

  What message did Parker so powerfully proffer? From the time of his first difficulties with the Boston Association to his assumption of his new pulpit, he had been traveling a road from religious radicalism to much more committed social and political involvement. Rather than adhere to Emerson’s notion of self-reliance and the personal empowerment it promised, Parker was influenced by Schleiermacher’s sense of man’s cosmic dependence. God is not what we are, but what we need to make our lives whole, and one way to realize this is through selfless devotion to God’s creation. For Parker, this meant a commitment to social action. Now he found a new circle of supporters, having painfully lost so many friends and admirers in the controversy over his religious radicalism.
He consorted with the likes of prison reformer Samuel Gridley Howe; educational reformer Horace Mann; and abolitionist Joseph May, a disciple of Garrison’s. Through May, he also befriended the Whig politicians Charles Sumner and Josiah Quincy, and others in the party sympathetic to abolition. Concomitantly, Parker moved toward a more vocal antislavery position, a journey hastened by the country’s annexation of Texas early in 1845 in what many regarded as a ploy by Southern states to extend slave territory.

  Parker’s sermons at mid-decade reflected his new orientation. Gone were the detailed exegeses of thorny scriptural passages and the well-reasoned defenses of his ecclesiastical prerogatives. Instead he addressed the causes of crime and poverty in Boston, the selfishness of the merchant class, the immorality of the war with Mexico, and, ever more commonly, the agenda of the antislavery movement. By 1847, with his close friend Ripley now reviewing books for Horace Greeley’s Tribune, and Brownson marginalized by his increasingly fervent Catholicism, Parker had become the social conscience of the Transcendentalist movement.

  A look at a few of his chief sermons from this period indicates how far he had spun from Emerson’s orbit. Several of these, preached in the Melodeon in 1846 and 1847 on social conditions in Boston, bear comparison to Brownson’s fiery essays and sermons at the beginning of the decade. Most remarkable was Parker’s astute analysis of the complicity of the wealthy in tearing the city’s frayed social fabric. He understood that the problems of the poor—their seemingly inexorable descent into crime, drunkenness, and prostitution—were caused as much by the complacency of the comfortable as by any personal faults. In other addresses he took up such subjects as the “perishing” and the “dangerous” classes in Boston, linking the urban poor and the criminal to society’s general neglect of the conditions that spawned them. With a large body of statistics recently prepared by the city at his command, Parker painted a dark picture of the city’s steady decline into social chaos. What was needed to remove the cause of all this, Parker reminded his audience, was simply “the application of Christianity to social life.” “I look to you to do something in this matter,” he told his congregation. “I look to you to set an example of a noble life, human, clean, and Christian,” not debasing the poor, but uplifting them.24

  Parker’s rage at his contemporaries’ acquisitiveness was unbounded. “Love of money,” he trumpeted in 1849, “is out of proportion to love of better things—to love of justice, of truth”; and wealth was “often made the end to live for; not the means to live by.”25 Condemning in turn tavern keepers and the popular, sensationalist press for their contribution to the city’s moral quagmire, he implored his hearers to realize that “we are all brothers, rich and poor, American and foreign; put here by the same God, for the same end, and journeying towards the same heaven, and owing mutual help.”26 He urged his auditors to join in organized politics to stay the city’s decline.

  The battles against intemperance, and for prison reform and universal education, could be won only when Christians took control of corrupt political parties. Pointing to the election of 1848 in which Whig candidate Zachary Taylor had defeated Democratic nominee Lewis Cass and Free-Soil aspirant Martin Van Buren in a hard-pitched contest, Parker approvingly observed that “the last election has shown us what resolute men can do.” He cited the efforts of all the parties—“what meetings they held, what money they raised, what talent was employed, what speeches made, what ideas set forth,” toward the end that virtually everyone’s vote was solicited. When public-spirited men, Parker concluded, turned their attention “to reforming the evils of society, with such a determined soul, what evil can stand against mankind?”27 In Parker’s moral calculus, Emerson’s right-minded individual still mattered, as long as he worked through concerted political activity to realize the good society.

  In the mid-1840s Parker threw in his lot with the Whig Party, linked to it as he was through Sumner and Quincy. At this time the nation was preoccupied with the extension of slaveholding territory, specifically the annexation of Texas and the subsequent war with Mexico, to which Parker was bitterly opposed. His Sermon of War, preached at the Melodeon in June 1846, as well as his Sermon of the Mexican War, delivered two years later at the conflict’s conclusion, marked his growing indignation at the social evil of slavery as well as his continuing belief in the power of American democracy as an engine for the nation’s good.

  In his Sermon of War, Parker could hardly contain his outrage at politicians’ blatant instigation of armed conflict for their own self-serving ends. He lambasted his Massachusetts countrymen’s silence when President Polk declared war, and he was even more outraged when, after the governor called for volunteers, the church and the press still did nothing. Hitting his fellow citizens where he knew it hurt, he asked if they realized the toll the battles would take on their purses. He was speaking in a city, he bellowed, “whose most popular Idol is Mammon, the God of God; whose Trinity is a Trinity of Coin!” And even though the fighting was thousands of miles from Boston, the price of their stocks had fallen, the rates of their insurance were altered, and their commodities waited on the docks, unshipped.28 Add to this economic disruption the immense waste of goods and property, and the terrible loss of human life that accompanied the conflict, and one knew the true dogs of war.

  Parker was speaking not only to Americans but to Christians. “Aggressive war is a sin,” he reminded them, “a corruption of the public morals.” It was a “practical denial of Christianity; a violation of God’s eternal law of love.”29 What blinded his countrymen to this evident truth? “The eyes of the North are full of cotton,” he told his audience, “they see nothing else, for a web is before them; their ears are full of cotton, and they hear nothing but the buzz of their mills; their mouth is full of cotton, and they can speak audibly but two words—Tariff, Tariff, Dividends, Dividends.” Northern politicians closed their eyes as long as more money was to be made, and as a result, the “nation’s neck now invites a tyrant.”30 Finally, Parker reminded them that war, horrible as it was, was not the worst calamity that could befall a nation. “It is far worse to lose all reverence for right, for truth, all respect for man and God; to care more for the freedom of trade than the freedom of men; more for a tariff than millions of souls.” Look at your rulers, he told his audience, “and see your own likeness!”31

  Parker and other opponents of the Mexican War were shouting into the wind; and when the conflict ended two years later, he sarcastically assessed his congregation’s putative gains. When the war began, he recalled, “there was a good deal of talk about it here; talk against it.” But, Parker observed wryly, “as things often go in Boston,” it ended in talk, as many men “diligently set themselves to make money out of the war and the new turn it gave to national affairs.” 32 He again mentioned the war’s cost in monetary and human terms, more than he could have predicted two years earlier, when he had prayed that the conflict would be brief. Parker’s anger was palpable. “I wish,” he said,

  all of this killing of 2,000 Americans on the field of battle, and the 10,000 Mexicans; all this slashing of the bodies of 24,000 wounded men; all the agony of the other 18,000, that have died of disease, could have taken place in some spot where the President of the United States and his Cabinet, where all the Congress who voted for the war … the controlling men of both political parties, who care nothing for this bloodshed and misery they have idly caused, could have stood and seen it all; and then that the voice of the whole nation had come up to them and said, “This is your work, not ours … We have trusted you thus far, but please God we never will trust you again.”33

  Slavery was “the blight of this nation,” he told the assembled, “the curse of the North and the curse of the South” and, whether they acknowledged it or not, the reason for which the war was fought. Slavery hindered commerce, manufacture, and agriculture, he added, and it “confounds your politics” and silenced the “ablest men.” It had robbed three million people of “what is dearer than life�
�� and prevented the welfare of seventeen million more. “You ask, O Americans, where is the harmony of the Union?” Parker knew the answer. “It was broken by slavery.” A good man had to speak out and vote against the slave power.34

  The timbre of Parker’s voice was not Emerson’s. By the mid-1840s Parker wanted political and social change and did not depend on self-culture to initiate it. Conscience might make one realize what political party to support, but thereafter one effected change through organized pressure. By 1850, at the vanguard of the abolition movement, he set aside his projected history of religious thought and began to work tirelessly to realize his ideal of a democratic America. He was not much interested in the Associationists’ dream of international cooperation and union. The country’s unique moral problem of slavery now demanded all his attention.

  In 1849, when Elizabeth Peabody introduced her new project, a journal called Aesthetic Papers, she had explicitly in mind the division between self and society epitomized by Emerson on the one hand and Parker on the other. Gallantly she tried to broker a peace between them. In her quarterly she wished to assemble, she proclaimed, on the “high aesthetic ground,” writers of different schools. In particular, she hoped that her journal would bring together “the antagonistic views of Philosophy, of Individual and Social Culture, which prevail among the various divisions of the Church, and of the Literary and Scientific world.” Reacting to the increased divisiveness in the Transcendentalist as well as the Unitarian folds, she sought “a white radiance of love and wisdom” from “the union of many-colored rays,” to cultivate “an harmonious intellectual and moral life in our country.”35 Tellingly, Aesthetic Papers failed after one issue.

  One contributor to Peabody’s journal was Henry Thoreau, who like Parker was outraged at the Mexican War. But if Parker’s response was a call to organized political action, Thoreau’s came in a different key, modulated not only by his friend Emerson’s sense of individual sovereignty but also by Thoreau’s interest in the New England nonresistance movement, whose advocates included abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Still living in his cabin on Walden Pond when the Mexican War broke out, Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax, which he considered a levy that directly connected him to the nation’s hostilities. As a result of his infraction he was locked overnight in Concord’s jail, until someone paid the pittance for his release. His gesture, however, was destined to become much more significant, for as the war raged, he worked up a lecture on the subject of “Resistance to Civil Government,” which he first delivered at the Concord Lyceum early in 1848. In the spring of 1849 Elizabeth Peabody, casting about for submissions to her periodical, solicited it. The essay appeared that summer and became the journal’s most famous contribution. In 1866 it acquired the moniker “Civil Disobedience,” by which it has subsequently been known.