This section contains 9,871 words (approx. 33 pages at 300 words per page) |
SOURCE: “Emerson's ‘Domestic and Social Experiments’: Service, Slavery, and the Unhired Man,” in American Literature, Vol. 66, No. 3, September, 1994, pp. 485-508.
In the following essay, Ryan outlines Emerson's ideas on abolition, examining the development of these views in the context of the writer's own domestic arrangements.
I hope New England will come to boast itself in being a nation of servants, & leave to the planters the misery of being a nation of served.
—R. W. Emerson, Journal C (1837)
Len Gougeon has shown that Ralph Waldo Emerson traveled a long way between 1837, when he made his first “abolitionist” speech, and 1844, when he affirmed his opposition to chattel slavery. The first effort, Gougeon notes, disappointed Emerson's friends because it was more a defense of free speech than a denunciation of American slavery; indeed, the great idealist had recommended tolerance for slaveholders' views. Yet by 1844 Emerson made a stirring antislavery speech which...
This section contains 9,871 words (approx. 33 pages at 300 words per page) |