American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  In November, Brown returned to New York (where he had left his wife and younger children on his farm in North Elba) and New England to raise money for guns and supplies for the Kansas settlers. He introduced himself to Sanborn. Brown sought to raise and equip a small army—one hundred strong—to protect the Kansas settlers and make occasional forays into Missouri, where the proslavery militias were based. For this he needed thirty thousand dollars and two hundred rifles.

  Ignited by his enthusiasm and vivid accounts of actions already undertaken in the new territory—by all accounts, Brown was nothing if not spellbinding and convincing—Sanborn consented to help and thereupon introduced him to Samuel Gridley Howe as well as to Parker, who hosted a reception for him. Garrison and Wendell Phillips were both skeptical of Brown’s Old Testament demeanor and eagerness to resort to violence. Howe and Parker, however, were won over. Also present was the wealthy Medford, Massachusetts, merchant, George Luther Stearns (1809-1867), a strong backer of the Emigrant Aid Company and the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee, groups that bankrolled antislavery emigrants in Kansas. Brown so impressed Stearns that out of his own pocket he paid for two hundred handguns for Brown’s militia.

  When the New England contingent of the Kansas Aid Society, a national group based in Chicago, agreed to give Brown the rifles he wanted as well as five thousand dollars, Brown’s plan was well under way. Continuing his solicitations, in early March, Brown found himself at Sanborn’s home in Concord, where he was introduced to the town’s literary lions. He met both Emerson and Thoreau and soon enough was engaged to lecture at the Town House, where he drew an appreciative audience but again met with only small, courteous contributions. Taken all around, his New England trip had not been overly lucrative. He thereupon penned a bitter “Farewell” to some of his New England supporters, a missive that moved Stearns so much that he gave Brown a seven-thousand-dollar letter of credit against his own account, a sum that put the Captain back into operation. 41 By August, with political matters in Kansas stabilizing in favor of the antislavery party, Brown began to develop his quixotic plan to attack a federal arsenal in Virginia, liberate and arm the local slave population, and continue such forays throughout the South.

  He stopped in Rochester, New York, to apprise Douglass of his plan, but even given his host’s willingness to liberate the slaves by force, he met with considerable skepticism. Brown then apprised his strongest backers, swearing them to confidentiality, of a grand strategy for freeing the slaves, the details of which he did not yet share. New York abolitionist Gerrit Smith wanted Brown’s New England coterie to meet at his home in Peterboro, New York, outside Rochester—Brown was afraid of being seen in Boston—but Stearns, Howe, Parker, and Higginson chose not to go. Sanborn did, however, and on February 22, an auspicious holiday, he heard Brown’s plans for attacking a Virginia arsenal, freeing and arming the slaves on several nearby plantations, and establishing a government in the liberated area on the basis of a constitution he had already prepared. Brown asked Smith and Sanborn and, through them, their friends, for at least eight hundred dollars to carry out his plans.

  On Sanborn’s return to Boston, he shared details of this plot with Higginson, Parker, and Howe; Brown himself took it up with his large backer, Stearns. Parker was intrigued but wanted to hear from Brown in person. This time he took the risk, and on March 4 in a Boston hotel he met those who, with the addition of Smith, thereafter would comprise the “Secret Six,” individuals who had been apprised of, and morally and financially supported, Brown’s attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Parker the Transcendentalist, along with two second-generation members, Higginson and Sanborn, had come this far in his radicalism. Over the next few months, coconspirators in what proved one of the most infamous episodes leading to the Civil War, they assiduously raised money among their friends for what they euphemistically termed a new “experiment” to free the slaves.

  The rest is history. Delayed by the machinations of Hugh Forbes, an unstable confidant who knew of Brown’s larger plan and had worked Washington’s corridors warning against him, Brown finally attacked the arsenal. Forbes’s warnings in Washington, though, had less to do with the assault’s outcome than did the small number of recruits and the failure of Brown’s actions to foment a wider rebellion. With his force decimated and Brown himself wounded, in a few days he and the remainder of his militia were captured and tried, and the majority of them, Brown included, were executed. Documents found in his home in North Elba implicated the Secret Six, of different minds about whether Brown should have struck when he did. Writing to his brother William a few days after Brown’s capture, Emerson provides a sense of how worried he and his friends were about the conspirators’ fate. These “bushels of letters,” he noted, showed Brown’s “extensive relationships with many northern supporters” and “have naturally alarmed some of his friends in Boston.”42

  One of the most famous and strident voices for abolition, Parker was virtually silent during this traumatic period, but not because he was intimidated. By 1858 he realized that he had tuberculosis. On his doctor’s advice, early the next year he and his wife left for Cuba and Santa Cruz in the Caribbean, a warmer climate where he might better cope with the disease. From there they sailed to Europe and settled in Rome, where he eagerly followed news of Brown’s plight. Writing to the prominent abolitionist Francis Jackson late in November, Parker reiterated what he had come to believe—that men held against their will have a natural right to kill everyone who seeks to prevent their liberty, and that it was a natural duty for freemen to do for the enslaved all that they have a right to do for themselves. “Brown will die, I think,” Parker wrote, “like a martyr, and also like a saint.”43

  A continent away, Parker was beyond the reach of United States law, if in failing health, but the remainder of the Secret Six had much to worry about. Sanborn absconded to Canada, a retreat that upset supporters like Emerson who thought that he should repent and argue Brown’s case. After a prominent Boston attorney opined that none of the Six could be indicted for treason if they had not taken part in the act itself, Sanborn returned to Concord by the day of Brown’s execution, taking part in services organized by his sympathizers. Fearing prosecution, Stearns and Howe also had left the country and did not return from Canada until after Brown’s execution. Gerrit Smith was confined in a Utica, New York, lunatic asylum, committed for “mental collapse” shortly after the attack on Harpers Ferry. This left Higginson. After planning various unrealistic attempts to rescue Brown from federal authorities, he returned to Worcester. He felt betrayed by his fellow conspirators, none of whom confessed to having been involved in Brown’s grand “experiment,” and he thought that they had not done enough to ensure the raid’s success. With the threat of subpoena from a congressional committee looking into the raid, the conspirators squabbled about what to do and say. Higginson and Sanborn were the only ones actually summoned to testify, but none were ever prosecuted. Parker died in Florence on June 10, 1860. Recriminations about loyalty to Brown and his grandiose plans, which he had based on a belief that he had obeyed the voice of his conscience, preoccupied the survivors for their lifetimes.

  Although in Concord Brown had little success drumming up support for his plans, many townsmen were sympathetic to the anti-slavery cause, some eventually drifting into the camp of the radical abolitionists. Anticipating what Brown and others already knew, Emerson admitted that he was “glad to see that the terror at disunion and anarchy is disappearing,” for the price of the slaves’ freedom might demand just that.44 After Brown’s death, on December 2, he and other Concord citizens planned an appropriate memorial, work in which Henry Thoreau took the lead. To avoid inciting the crowd, the speakers—Emerson, Alcott, Sanborn, Thoreau, and a few others—agreed to keep the service solemn rather than make it a call to political action. Emerson read Brown’s last words; Alcott recited a church service for the death of a martyr; and Sanborn performed a dirge he had written for the o
ccasion. After a few brief remarks, Thoreau read some poems, including Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Soul’s Errand” and his own translation from Tacitus.45

  The Thoreau family long had been considered “advanced” in their abolitionist views, and through the 1850s Henry continued to reflect and speak out on slavery, particularly after the Anthony Burns case. On July 4, 1854, he spoke in Framingham, Massachusetts, at a mass meeting for abolitionists called by Garrison, on “Slavery in Massachusetts,” an address widely reported in the local press.46 Even more powerful was his “Plea for Captain John Brown,” delivered in Concord on October 30, 1859, as the insurgent languished in prison. Because Concord’s community remained split over the propriety of Brown’s actions, the town selectmen would not allow anyone to ring the meetinghouse bell to summon townspeople to the lecture. Once again, as he had done a decade earlier for Emerson’s address on the anniversary of the West Indian emancipation, Thoreau performed the task himself.

  He devoted much of his speech to Brown’s character rather than to a defense of his actions in Kansas and at Harpers Ferry; Thoreau believed that Brown’s ideals, rather than his violent actions, were most important. Like Emerson, he made much of Brown’s Revolutionary heritage and praised him as “by birth and descent a New England farmer,” one who had not gone to Harvard but to “the great university of the West, where he sedulously pursued the study of Liberty.” Thoreau also linked him to the Puritans of Cromwell’s day, “men of simple habits, straightforward, prayerful; not thinking much of rulers who did not fear God.” But above all, Thoreau noted, he was “a man of rare common sense and directness of speech, as of action; a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and principles.” 47

  Not an admirer of the popular press, Thoreau admitted that for days after the raid on Harpers Ferry he had read all the newspapers but never encountered a “single expression of sympathy” for Brown and his men. Everywhere he found the words “misguided,” “wild,” “insane, “crazed,” “deluded.” But Brown was a superior being. “No man in America,” he continued admiringly, “has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature,” and in that way Brown was “the most American of us all.”48 More remarkable was Thoreau’s admission that he understood how one could be driven to draw blood over the slavery issue. “A man may have other affairs to attend to,” he admitted, and he “did not wish to kill nor [sic] to be killed,” but he could foresee “circumstances in which both these things would by me be unavoidable.” The federal government was in thrall to the slavery interests, and for an American to keep his decency, he might have to act as Brown had done, striking a blow, like the men of 1776, for freedom. Thoreau did not doubt Brown’s significance. “Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified,” he continued, and “this morning, perchance, Captain John Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links.”49

  Thoreau’s address was enthusiastically received, and he soon had invitations to repeat it elsewhere, which he did at Boston’s Tremont Temple on November 1, after Frederick Douglass had canceled because of his own complicity in Brown’s plans. The lecture was sold out and reported in all the Boston papers, some favoring it, others condemning it as wildly fanatic. Two days later, at the request of his good friend H.G.O. Blake, Thoreau again reprised the lecture, with great success, at Washburn Hall in Worcester. He also prepared another address, “The Last Days of John Brown,” for a commemoration at Brown’s home in North Elba on July 4, 1860, which he could not attend. R. J. Hinton, the secretary of the meeting, introduced and read the paper, to much praise: “Mr. Thoreau’s voice,” one report of the event proclaimed, “was the first which broke the disgraceful silence or hushed the senseless babble with which the grandest deed of our time was met.”50

  At Thoreau’s funeral, in 1862, his friend and erstwhile mentor remembered his praise of Brown. “Before the first friendly word had been spoken for Captain John Brown,” Emerson said, Thoreau “sent notices to most homes in Concord that he would speak in a public hall on the condition and character of John Brown, on Sunday evening, and invited all people to come.” Representatives of both the Republican committee and the abolitionist committee advised him not to do so, thinking it premature and his words potentially inflammatory and detrimental to their causes. Thoreau replied, Emerson told the mourners, “‘I did not send to you for advice, but to announce that I am to speak.’” In many ways, not the least in his single-minded devotion to conscience, Thoreau was cut from the same rugged homespun as Brown. As he had said of Brown, so Emerson said eloquently of Thoreau: “No truer American existed.” 51 When James Redpath brought out his Echoes of Harper’s Ferry (1860), a collection of essays and addresses on Brown, he commemorated Brown’s relation to Concord, the cradle of liberty, by dedicating the volume to Thoreau, as well as to Emerson, Phillips, and other “Defenders of the Faithful.”52

  All that was left was the final conflagration, which neither Parker nor Thoreau lived through but which Emerson, Brownson, Ripley, Peabody, and others of the Transcendentalist cohort survived. The year 1860 brought accelerating crises, as Abraham Lincoln, the presidential candidate of the infant Republican Party, was elected over a split Democratic Party—the Southern wing nominating John C. Breckinridge and the Northern, Stephen Douglas. The South Carolina militia’s attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12 was the spark everyone had awaited, with anticipation or dread.

  To this point, Emerson continued his efforts for abolition, but his spirit took a severe blow when his good friend Parker, long an inspiration, died. Invited to speak at his memorial, Emerson declined, sensitive to the distance between his friend’s heroic and long-term engagement with antislavery and his own halting entrance onto that stage. “Our differences of method & working,” Emerson wrote to the memorial committee, “[were] such as really required and honored all his [Parker’s] catholicism and magnanimity to forgive in me.”53 In the privacy of his journal he was even more candid. “I can well praise him at a spectator’s distance, for our minds & methods were unlike—few people more unlike,” a tacit admission of the fractures within the Transcendentalist party.54

  To his credit, as the war drew closer, Emerson did not shy away. In January 1861 he accepted Wendell Phillips’s invitation to speak at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society at the Tremont Temple in Boston. Phillips and James Freeman Clarke, the latter now head of his own independent church in Boston and emerging in his own right as an important antislavery spokesperson, joined him on the platform. The meeting was large and rowdy, with pro-Union advocates, who feared that inflammatory rhetoric might encourage secession, vociferous in their disapproval of Emerson’s condemnation of the South’s moral corruption. When he declared that if the Union were broken, it would only be because of the recalcitrant slaveholders’ “barbarism,” he sent the assembly into chaos. The pro-Union crowd continually interrupted his speech with catcalls and offensive slogans, finally causing Emerson to stop while police cleared the building. This was not his usual reception, but it indicated how divided the Massachusetts citizenry had become over the escalating sectional crisis.55

  In the early months of the war, particularly after the Union defeat at the first Battle of Bull Run, Emerson joined the debate among Northerners over whether there should be immediate emancipation, even as President Lincoln held out for preservation of the Union. As the war continued its brutal course, Emerson was invited to lecture at the Smithsonian Institution, an opportunity he could not refuse, for it provided an opportunity to meet and speak before many of the nation’s most important politicians, including the president, whom he met twice and lobbied to emancipate the slaves. On January 31 Emerson gave his lecture, “American Civilization,” a revision of an address he had delivered in Boston several months earlier.

  He minced no words. Taking as his starting point the nobility of all voluntary labor, no matter how menial, he observed, “now here comes this conspiracy o
f slavery,—they call it an institution. I call it a destitution.” Because of the slave system, he continued, Americans had attempted to hold together two states of civilization, a higher one, in which “labor and the tenure of land and the right of suffrage” were defended; and a lower state, in which “the old military tenure of prisoners or slaves, and of power and land in a few hands, makes an oligarchy.” All the facts—economical and moral—were on the side of emancipation, but people in power did not have the courage to take the next, necessary step. Civilization, Emerson proclaimed, demanded emancipation. It is “a principle; everything else is an intrigue.”56

  Emerson played the pragmatist. Unless the North took the affirmative step of emancipation, war would only preserve the Union in its present corrupt state and not ensure the triumph of any larger ideal. Emerson called on Lincoln to act. The power of emancipation, Emerson continued, would alter “the atomic social constitution of the Southern people,” for they intended to keep out white labor, particularly German and Irish immigrants, because it would cost them wages. Emancipation, he proclaimed, at one stroke would elevate the poor whites of the South and identify their interest with those of the Northern laborers.57 In September 1862, when Lincoln finally acted, Emerson rejoiced to a Boston audience, “Our hurts are healed; the health of the nation is repaired.” And if Lincoln’s action did not “promise the redemption of the black race,” he continued, it at least “relieve[d] it of our opposition.” For that he, as well as other of his friends, thought the war worth fighting.58