Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis eBook

With Mrs. Barlow at Brook Farm and Concord was her son Francis Channing, born in 1834, who graduated at Harvard in 1855, was a lawyer in New York, rose to the rank of Major-General during the Rebellion, and was afterwards prominent in his profession.  He married as his second wife Miss Ellen Shaw, the sister of Colonel Robert G. Shaw and of Mrs. George William Curtis.

Curtis mentions hearing Emerson’s address on the anniversary of emancipation in the West Indies, which was delivered in Concord, August 1, 1844.  There had existed in Concord for a number of years a Woman’s Antislavery Society, of which Mrs. Emerson was a member.  Of this society, Mrs. Mary Merrick Brooks was the president, and its most active worker.  She invited Emerson to speak on this occasion.  He felt that he was excused from political action by virtue of his having been a clergyman, and because of his life as a man of letters.  Mrs. Brooks thought otherwise, and she gave him good and urgent reasons why he ought to speak, and to speak then.  At last she prevailed, partly because she gave him no rest until he had complied with her request, and partly because his conscience went with her arguments.  His attitude hitherto had been such as in part justified the statement made by Carlyle to Theodore Parker in 1843, that the negroes were fit only for slavery, and that Emerson agreed with him.

V

The second abiding place of Curtis and his brother in Concord was the farm of Edmund Hosmer, which was one-half mile east of Emerson’s house, about that distance from Walden Pond, and nearly the same from Hawthorne’s Wayside of later years, which faced it, and from which it could be seen.  Hosmer was a native of Concord, gave his earlier years to his trade as a tanner, and then spent the remainder of his life as a Concord farmer.  He was Emerson’s authority on agriculture and gardening more than any one; though in later years Samuel Staples (usually known and spoken of as “Sam”) superseded him because he was a nearer neighbor.  In 1843, when Emerson wrote to George Ripley declining to join the Brook Farm community, he referred to the opinions of Edmund Hosmer, “a very intelligent farmer and a very upright man in my neighborhood.”  He gave in full his neighbor’s reasons for want of faith in the community idea, that co-operation in farming was not successful, that the word of gentlemen-farmers could not be trusted, that the equal payment of ten cents an hour to every laborer was unjust, and that good work could not be secured if the worker was not directly benefited.