## 1. Origins and Character



What we now know as transcendentalism first arose among the liberal
New England Congregationalists, who departed from orthodox Calvinism
in two respects: they believed in the importance and efficacy of human
striving, as opposed to the bleaker Puritan picture of complete and
inescapable human depravity; and they emphasized the unity rather than
the "Trinity" of God (hence the term
"Unitarian," originally a term of abuse that they came to
adopt.) Most of the Unitarians held that Jesus was in some way
inferior to God the Father but still greater than human beings; a few
followed the English Unitarian Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) in
holding that Jesus was thoroughly human, although endowed with special
authority. The Unitarians' leading preacher, William Ellery
Channing (1780-1842), portrayed orthodox Congregationalism as a
religion of fear, and maintained that Jesus saved human beings from
sin, not just from punishment. His sermon "Unitarian
Christianity" (1819) denounced "the conspiracy of ages
against the liberty of Christians" (P, 336) and helped give the
Unitarian movement its name. In "Likeness to God" (1828)
he proposed that human beings "partake" of Divinity and
that they may achieve "a growing likeness to the Supreme
Being" (T, 4).



The Unitarians were "modern." They attempted to reconcile
Locke's empiricism with Christianity by maintaining that the
accounts of miracles in the Bible provide overwhelming evidence for
the truth of religion. It was precisely on this ground, however, that
the transcendentalists found fault with Unitarianism. For although
they admired Channing's idea that human beings can become more
like God, they were persuaded by Hume that no empirical proof of
religion could be satisfactory. In letters written in his freshman
year at Harvard (1817), Emerson tried out Hume's skeptical
arguments on his devout and respected Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and in
his journals of the early 1820s he discusses with approval
Hume's *Dialogues on Natural Religion* and his underlying
critique of necessary connection. "We have no experience of a
Creator," Emerson writes, and therefore we "know of
none" (JMN 2, 161).



Skepticism about religion was also engendered by the publication of an
English translation of F. D. E. Schleiermacher's *Critical
Essay Upon the Gospel of St. Luke* (1825), which introduced the
idea that the Bible was a product of human history and culture.
Equally important was the publication in 1833--some fifty years
after its initial appearance in Germany--of James Marsh's
translation of Johann Gottfried von Herder's *Spirit of
Hebrew Poetry* (1782). Herder blurred the lines between religious
texts and humanly-produced poetry, casting doubt on the authority of
the Bible, but also suggesting that texts with equal authority could
still be written. It was against this background that Emerson asked in
1836, in the first paragraph of *Nature*: "Why should we
not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and
a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs"
(O, 5). The individual's "revelation"--or
"intuition," as Emerson was later to speak of it--was
to be the counter both to Unitarian empiricism and Humean
skepticism.



An important source for the transcendentalists' knowledge of
German philosophy was Frederic Henry Hedge (1805-90).
Hedge's father Levi Hedge, a Harvard professor of logic, sent
him to preparatory school in Germany at the age of thirteen, after
which he attended the Harvard Divinity School. Ordained as a Unitarian
minister, Hedge wrote a long review of the work of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge for the *Christian Examiner* in 1833. Noting
Coleridge's fondness for "German metaphysics" and
his immense gifts of erudition and expression, he laments that
Coleridge had not made Kant and the post-Kantians more accessible to
an English-speaking audience. This is the task--to introduce the
"transcendental philosophy" of Kant, (T, 87)--that
Hedge takes up. In particular, he explains Kant's idea of a
Copernican Revolution in philosophy: "[S]ince the supposition
that our intuitions depend on the nature of the world without, will
not answer, assume that the world without depends on the nature of our
intuitions." This "key to the whole critical
philosophy," Hedge continues, explains the possibility of
"a priori knowledge" (T, 92). Hedge organized what
eventually became known as the Transcendental Club, by suggesting to
Emerson in 1836 that they form a discussion group for disaffected
young Unitarian clergy. The group included George Ripley and Bronson
Alcott, had some 30 meetings in four years, and was a sponsor of
*The Dial* and Brook Farm. Hedge was a vocal opponent of
slavery in the 1830s and a champion of women's rights in the
1850s, but he remained a Unitarian minister, and became a professor at
the Harvard Divinity School.



Another source for the transcendentalists' knowledge of German
philosophy was Germaine de Stael (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker)
(1766-1817), whose *De l'Allemagne* (*On
Germany*) was a favorite of the young Emerson. In a sweeping
survey of European metaphysics and political philosophy, de Stael
praises Locke's devotion to liberty, but sees him as the
originator of a sensationalist school of epistemology that leads to
the skepticism of Hume. She finds an attractive contrast in the German
tradition that begins with Leibniz and culminates in Kant, which
asserts the power and authority of the mind.



James Marsh (1794-1842), a graduate of Andover and the president
of the University of Vermont, was equally important for the emerging
philosophy of transcendentalism. Marsh was convinced that German
philosophy held the key to a reformed theology. His American edition
of Coleridge's *Aids to Reflection* (1829) introduced
Coleridge's version--much indebted to Schelling--of
Kantian terminology, terminology that runs throughout Emerson's
early work. In *Nature*, for example, Emerson writes:
"The Imagination may be defined to be, the use which the Reason
makes of the material world" (O, 25).



German philosophy and literature was also championed by Thomas
Carlyle, whom Emerson met on his first trip to Europe in 1831.
Carlyle's philosophy of action in such works as *Sartor
Resartus* resonates with Emerson's idea in "The
American Scholar" that action--along with nature and
"the mind of the Past" (O, 39) is essential to human
education. Along with his countrymen Coleridge and Wordsworth, Carlyle
embraced a "natural supernaturalism," the view that
nature, including human beings, has the power and authority
traditionally attributed to an independent deity.



Piety towards nature was also a main theme of William Wordsworth,
whose poetry was in vogue in America in the 1820s. Wordsworth's
depiction of an active and powerful mind cohered with the shaping
power of the mind that his collaborator in the *Lyrical
Ballads*, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, traced to Kant. The idea of
such power pervades Emerson's *Nature*, where he writes
of nature as "obedient" to spirit and counsels each of us
to "Build ... your own world." Wordsworth has his
more receptive mode as well, in which he calls for "a heart that
watches and receives" (in "The Tables Turned"), and
we find Emerson's receptive mode from *Nature* onward, as
when he recounts an ecstatic experience in the woods: "I become
a transparent eyeball. I am nothing; I see all; The currents of the
universal being circulate through me." (O, 6).



Emerson's sense that men and women are, as he put it in
*Nature*, gods "in ruins," led to one of
transcendentalism's defining events, his delivery of an address
at the Harvard Divinity School graduation in 1838. Emerson portrayed
the contemporary church that the graduates were about to lead as an
"eastern monarchy of a Christianity" that had become an
"injuror of man" (O, 58). Jesus, in contrast, was a
"friend of man." Yet he was just one of the "true
race of prophets," whose message is not so much their own
greatness, as the "greatness of man" (O, 57). Emerson
rejects the Unitarian argument that miracles prove the truth of
Christianity, not simply because the evidence is weak, but because
proof of the sort they envision embodies a mistaken view of the nature
of religion: "conversion by miracles is a profanation of the
soul." Emerson's religion is based not on testimony but on
a "perception" that produces a "religious
sentiment" (O, 55).



The "Divinity School Address" drew a quick and angry
response from Andrews Norton (1786-1853) of the Harvard Divinity
School, often known as the "Unitarian Pope." In "The
New School in Literature and Religion" (1838), Norton complains
of "a restless craving for notoriety and excitement,"
which he traces to German "speculatists" and
"barbarians" and "that hyper-Germanized Englishman,
Carlyle." Emerson's "Address," he concludes,
is at once "an insult to religion" (T, 248) and "an
incoherent rhapsody" (T, 249).



An earlier transcendentalist scandal surrounded the publication of
Amos Bronson Alcott's *Conversations with Children Upon the
Gospels* (1836). Alcott (1799-1888) was a self-taught
educator from Connecticut who established a series of schools that
aimed to "draw out" the intuitive knowledge of children.
He found anticipations of his views about a priori knowledge in the
writings of Plato and Kant, and support in Coleridge's *Aids
to Reflection* for the idea that idealism and materiality could be
reconciled. Alcott replaced the hard benches of the common schools
with more comfortable furniture that he built himself, and left a
central space in his classrooms for dancing. The *Conversations
with Children Upon the Gospels*, based on a school Alcott (and his
assistant Elizabeth Peabody) ran in Boston, argued that evidence for
the truth of Christianity could be found in the unimpeded flow of
children's thought. What people particularly noticed about
Alcott's book, however, were its frank discussions of
conception, circumcision, and childbirth. Rather than gaining support
for his school, the publication of the book caused many parents to
withdraw their children from it, and the school--like many of
Alcott's projects, failed.



Theodore Parker (1810-60) was the son of a farmer who attended
Harvard and became a Unitarian minister and accomplished linguist. He
published a long critical essay on David Friedrich Strauss's
*Das Leben Jesu*, and translated Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de
Wette's *Introduction to the Old Testament*, both of
which cast doubt on the divine inspiration and single authorship of
the Bible. After the publication of his "A Discourse Concerning
the Transient and Permanent in Christianity" (1841) he was
invited to resign from the Boston Association of Ministers (he did
not), and was no longer welcome in many pulpits. He argued, much as
Emerson had in the "Divinity School Address," that
Christianity had nothing essential to do with the person of Jesus:
"If Jesus taught at Athens, and not at Jerusalem; if he had
wrought no miracle, and none but the human nature had ever been
ascribed to him; if the Old Testament had forever perished at his
birth, Christianity would still have been the Word of God ...
just as true, just as lasting, just as beautiful, as now it
is..." (T, 352). Parker exploited the similarities between
science and religious doctrine to argue that although nature and
religious truth are permanent, any merely human version of such truth
is transient. In religious doctrines especially, there are stunning
reversals, so that "men are burned for professing what men are
burned for denying" (T, 347).



Surveying the scene in his 1842 lecture, "The
Transcendentalist," Emerson begins with a philosophical account,
according to which what are generally called "new views"
are not really new, but rather part of a broad tradition of idealism.
It is not a skeptical idealism, however, but an anti-skeptical
idealism deriving from Kant:



> 
> It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism of the
> present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use of that
> term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg [sic], who replied to the
> skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing
> in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the
> senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or
> imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which
> experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind
> itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms (O, 101-2).
> 



Emerson shows here a basic understanding of three Kantian claims,
which can be traced throughout his philosophy: that the human mind
"forms" experience; that the existence of such mental
operations is a counter to skepticism; and that
"transcendental" does not mean "transcendent"
or beyond human experience altogether, but something through which
experience is made possible. Emerson's idealism is not purely
Kantian, however, for (like Coleridge's) it contains a strong
admixture of Neoplatonism and post-Kantian idealism. Emerson thinks of
Reason, for example, as a faculty of "vision," as opposed
to the mundane understanding, which "toils all the time,
compares, contrives, adds, argues...." (*Letters*,
vol. 1, 413). For many of the transcendentalists the term
"transcendentalism" represented nothing so technical as an
inquiry into the presuppositions of human experience, but a new
confidence in and appreciation of the mind's powers, and a
modern, non-doctrinal spirituality. The transcendentalist, Emerson
states, believes in miracles, conceived as "the perpetual
openness of the human mind to new influx of light and
power..." (O, 100).



Emerson keeps his distance from the transcendentalists in his essay by
speaking always of what "they" say or do, despite the fact
that he was regarded then and is regarded now as the leading
transcendentalist. He notes with some disdain that the
transcendentalists are "'not good members of
society," that they do not work for "the abolition of the
slave-trade" (though both these charges have been leveled at
him). He closes the essay nevertheless with a defense of the
transcendentalist critique of a society pervaded by "a spirit of
cowardly compromise and seeming, which intimates a frightful
skepticism, a life without love, and an activity without an aim"
(O, 106). This critique is Emerson's own in such writings as
"Self-Reliance," and "The American Scholar";
and it finds a powerful and original restatement in the
"Economy" chapter of Thoreau's *Walden*.


## 2. High Tide: *The Dial*, Fuller, Thoreau



The transcendentalists had several publishing outlets: at first
*The Christian Examiner*, then, after the furor over the
"Divinity School Address," *The Western Messenger*
(1835-41) in St Louis, then the *Boston Quarterly Review*
(1838-44). *The Dial* (1840-4) was a special case,
for it was planned and instituted by the members of the Transcendental
Club, with Margaret Fuller (1810-50) as the first editor.
Emerson succeeded her for the magazine's last two years. The
writing in *The Dial* was uneven, but in its four years of
existence it published Fuller's "The Great Lawsuit"
(the core of her *Woman in the Nineteenth Century*) and her
long review of Goethe's work; prose and poetry by Emerson;
Alcott's "Orphic Sayings" (which gave the magazine a
reputation for silliness); and the first publications of a young
friend of Emerson's, Henry David Thoreau (1817-62). After
Emerson became editor in 1842 *The Dial* published a series of
"Ethnical Scriptures," translations from Chinese and
Indian philosophical works.



Margaret Fuller was the daughter of a Massachusetts congressman who
provided tutors for her in Latin, Greek, chemistry, philosophy and,
later, German. Exercising what Barbara Packer calls "her
peculiar powers of intrusion and caress" (P, 443), Fuller became
friends with many of the transcendentalists, including Emerson. In the
winters of 1839-44, Fuller organized a series of popular and
influential "conversations" for women in Elizabeth
Peabody's bookstore in Boston. She journeyed to the Midwest in
the summer of 1843, and published her observations as *Summer on
the Lakes* the following year. After this publishing success,
Horace Greeley, a friend of Emerson's and the editor of the
*New York Tribune*, invited her to New York to write for the
*Tribune*. Fuller abandoned her previously ornate and
pretentious style, issuing pithy reviews and forthright criticisms:
for example, of Longfellow's poetry and Carlyle's
attraction to brutality. Fuller was in Europe from 1846-9,
sending back hundreds of pages for the *Tribune*. On her return
to America with her husband and son, she drowned in a hurricane off
the coast of Fire Island, New York.



*Woman in the Nineteenth Century* (1845), a revision of her
"Great Lawsuit" manifesto in *The Dial*, is
Fuller's major philosophical work. She holds that masculinity
and femininity pass into one another, that there is "no wholly
masculine man, no purely feminine woman" (T, 418). In classical
mythology, for example, "Man partakes of the feminine in the
Apollo; woman of the Masculine as Minerva." But there are
differences. The feminine genius is "electrical" and
"intuitive," the male more inclined to classification (T,
419). Women are treated as dependents, however, and their self-reliant
impulses are often held against them. What they most want, Fuller
maintains, is the freedom to unfold their powers, a freedom necessary
not only for their self-development, but for the renovation of
society. Like Thoreau and Emerson, Fuller calls for periods of
withdrawal from a society whose members are in various states of
"distraction" and "imbecility," and a return
only after "the renovating fountains" of individuality
have risen up. Such individuality is necessary in particular for the
proper constitution of that form of society known as marriage.
"Union," she holds, "is only possible to those who
are units" (T, 419). In contrast, most marriages are forms of
degradation, in which "the woman does belong to the man, instead
of forming a whole with him" (T, 422).



Henry Thoreau studied Latin, Greek, Italian, French, German, and
Spanish at Harvard, where he heard Emerson's "The American
Scholar" as the commencement address in 1837. He first published
in *The Dial* when Emerson commissioned him to review a series
of reports on wildlife by the state of Massachusetts, but he cast
about for a literary outlet after *The Dial'*s failure in
1844. In 1845, his move to Walden Pond allowed him to complete his
first book, *A Week on the Concord and the Merrimac Rivers*. He
also wrote a first draft of *Walden*, which eventually appeared
in 1854.



Nature comes to even more prominence in *Walden* than in
Emerson's *Nature*, which it followed by eighteen years.
Nature now becomes particular: this tree, this bird, this state of the
pond on a summer evening or winter morning become Thoreau's
subjects. Thoreau is receptive. He finds himself "suddenly
neighbor to" rather than a hunter of birds (W, 85); and he
learns to dwell in a house that is no more and no less than a place
where he can properly sit. From the right perspective, Thoreau finds,
he can possess and use a farm with more satisfaction than the farmer,
who is preoccupied with feeding his family and expanding his
operations.



In *Walden*'s opening chapter, "Economy,"
Thoreau considers the trade-offs we make in life, and he asks, as
Plato did in *The Republic*, what are life's real
necessities. Like the Roman philosophers Marcus Porcius Cato and
Marcus Varro he seeks a "life of simplicity, independence,
magnanimity, and trust" (W, 15). Considering his contemporaries,
he finds that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet
desperation" (W, 8). Thoreau's "experiment" at
Walden shows that a life of simplicity and independence can be
achieved today (W, 17). If Thoreau counsels simple frugality--a
vegetarian diet for example, and a dirt floor--he also counsels a
kind of extravagance, a spending of what you have in the day that
shall never come again. True economy, he writes, is a matter of
"improving the nick of time" (W, 17).



Thoreau went to Walden Pond on the anniversary of America's
declared independence from Britain--July 4, 1845, declaring his
own independence from a society that is "commonly too
cheap." It is not that he is against all society, but that he
finds we meet too often, before we have had the chance to acquire any
"new value for each other" (W, 136). Thoreau welcomes
those visitors who "speak reservedly and thoughtfully" (W,
141), and who preserve an appropriate sense of distance; he values the
little leaves or acorns left by visitors he never meets. Thoreau lived
at Walden for just under three years, a time during which he sometimes
visited friends and conducted business in town. (It was on one such
visit, to pick up a mended shoe, that he was arrested for tax
avoidance, an episode that became the occasion for "Resistance
to Civil Government.")



At the opening of Walden's chapter on "Higher Laws"
Thoreau confesses to once having desired to slaughter a woodchuck and
eat it raw, just to get at its wild essence. He values fishing and
hunting for their taste of wildness, though he finds that in middle
age he has given up eating meat. He finds wildness not only in the
woods, but in such literary works as *Hamlet* and the
*Iliad;* and even in certain forms of society: "The
wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with
which good men and lovers meet" ("Walking" (1862),
p. 621). The wild is not always consoling or uplifting, however. In
*The Maine Woods*, Thoreau records a climb on Mount Ktaadn in
Maine when he confronted the alien materiality of the world; and in
*Cape Cod* (1865), he records the foreignness, not the
friendliness, of nature: the shore is "a wild, rank place, and
there is no flattery in it" (P, 577).



Although *Walden* initiates the American tradition of
environmental philosophy, it is equally concerned with reading and
writing. In the chapter on "Reading," Thoreau speaks of
books that demand and inspire "reading, in a high sense"
(W, 104). He calls such books "heroic," and finds them
equally in literature and philosophy, in Europe and Asia: "Vedas
and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and
Shakespeares..." (W, 104). Thoreau suggests that
*Walden* is or aspires to be such a book; and indeed the
enduring construction from his time at Walden is not the cabin he
built but the book he wrote.



Thoreau maintains in *Walden* that writing is "the work
of art closest to life itself" (W, 102). In his search for such
closeness, he began to reconceive the nature of his journal. Both he
and Emerson kept journals from which their published works were
derived. But in the early 1850s, Thoreau began to conceive of the
journal as a work in itself, "each page of which should be
written in its own season & out of doors or in its own locality
wherever it may be" (J, 67). A journal has a sequence set by the
days, but it may have no order; or what order it has emerges in the
writer's life as he meets the life of nature. With its chapters
on "Reading," "Solitude,"
"Economy," "Winter," and "Spring,"
*Walden* is more "worked up" than the journal; in
this sense, Thoreau came to feel, it is less close to nature than the
journal.


## 3. Social and Political Critiques



The transcendentalists operated from the start with the sense that the
society around them was seriously deficient: a "mass" of
"bugs or spawn" as Emerson put it in "The American
Scholar"; slavedrivers of themselves, as Thoreau says in
*Walden*. Thus the attraction of alternative life-styles:
Alcott's ill-fated Fruitlands; Brook Farm, planned and organized
by the Transcendental Club; Thoreau's cabin at Walden. As the
nineteenth century came to its mid-point, the
transcendentalists' dissatisfaction with their society became
focused on policies and actions of the United States government: the
treatment of the Native Americans, the war with Mexico, and, above
all, the continuing and expanding practice of slavery.



Emerson's 1838 letter to President Martin Van Buren is an early
expression of the depth of his despair at actions of his country, in
this case the ethnic cleansing of American land east of the
Mississippi. The 16,000 Cherokees lived in what is now Kentucky and
Tennessee, and in parts of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia. They
were one of the more assimilated tribes, whose members owned property,
drove carriages, used plows and spinning wheels, and even owned
slaves. Wealthy Cherokees sent their children to elite academies or
seminaries. The Cherokee chief refused to sign a "removal"
agreement with the government of Andrew Jackson, but the government
found a minority faction to agree to move to territories west of the
Mississippi. Despite the ruling by the Supreme Court under Chief
Justice John Marshall that the Cherokee Nation's sovereignty had
been violated, Jackson's policies continued to take effect. In
1838, President Van Buren, Jackson's former Vice-President and
approved successor, ordered the U. S. Army into the Cherokee Nation,
where they rounded up as many remaining members of the tribe as they
could and marched them west and across the Mississippi. Thousands died
along the way. In his letter to President Van Buren, Emerson calls
this "a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees
of a country; for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush
these poor Indians our Government, or the land that was cursed by
their parting and dying imprecations our country, any more?" (A,
3).



Slavery had existed in the United States from the beginnings of the
country, but the question of its morality and entrenchment within the
American political system came to the fore with the annexation of
Texas, where slavery was legal, and its admission to the Union as the
28th state in 1845. Emerson's breakout address "On the
Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies" (1844)
was delivered in this context. (The Slavery Abolition Act was passed
by the British Parliament in 1833 and celebrated annually in Concord.)
In his address Emerson wrote: "Language must be raked, the
secrets of slaughter-houses and infamous holes that cannot front the
day, must be ransacked, to tell what negro-slavery has been. These
men, our benefactors, ... the producers of comfort and luxury for
the civilized world. ... I am heartsick when I read how they came
there, and how they are kept there. Their case was left out of the
mind and out of the heart of their brothers" (A, 9).



Frederick Douglass spoke in Concord at Thoreau's invitation, and
was on the dais in Concord in August 1844, when Emerson delivered his
emancipation address, where he states: "The Black Man carries in
his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming
civilization" (Wirzbicki, 95; A, 31). Douglass took up
Emerson's term "self-reliance" in advice to his
readers and hearers, and he quotes "The American Scholar"
in his abolitionist newspaper *North Star*. "It is a
mischievous notion," Douglass quotes Emerson as saying,
"that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished
a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of
God so is it ever to so much of his attribute that we bring to
it" (Wirzbicki, 53; O, 47).



Another important black abolitionist with Transcendentalist leanings
and connections was William C. Nell, who founded Boston's
Adelphic Union Library Association in 1836. Nell attended Bronson
Alcott's conversations, heard Emerson speak, and participated in
Emerson's Town and Country Club. He referred to Emerson as the
"ever-to-be-honored friend of equal rights" (Wirzbicki,
55). The leadership of Nell's Association was black, but invited
speakers included prominent black and white abolitionists, including
Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and Angelina Grimke. Nell founded
the New England Freedom Association in 1842 to "extend the
helping hand to the 'chattel' who may have taken to itself
'wings'" (Wirzbicki, 148); and he joined with Lewis
Hayden (who had escaped slavery in Kentucky) to establish the Boston
Vigilance Committee after passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850.
Thoreau worked with both Nell and Hayden. He brought Hayden to Concord
to speak to the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, and he
contributed to the Underground Railroad by hosting fugitives in his
cabin at Walden Pond (Wirzbicki, 158).



Fuller addresses American slavery directly in *Woman in the
Nineteenth Century*, recalling her dread at the news that James K.
Polk, a Tennessee slaveholder who favored the extension of slavery to
Texas, had been elected the nation's 11th president (by an
all-male electorate). The "choice of the people," she
wrote, "threatens to rivet the chains of slavery and the leprosy
of sin permanently on this nation, with the annexation of
Texas!" (F, 97). Addressing "[t]he women of my
country," she asks: "have you nothing to do with this? You
see the men, how they are willing to sell shamelessly, the happiness
of countless generations of fellow-creatures, the honor of their
country, and their immortal souls for a money market and political
power. Do you not feel within you that which can reprove them, which
can check, which can convince them? You would not speak in vain;
whether each in her own home, or banded in union" (F, 98).



This call both to the individual and to individuals acting together
characterizes Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil
Government" (1849). Thoreau was arrested in 1846 for nonpayment
of his poll tax, and he took the opportunity presented by his night in
jail to meditate on the authority of the state. The government,
Thoreau argues, is but an expedient by which we succeed "in
letting one another alone" (R, 64). The citizen has no duty to
resign his conscience to the state, and may even have a duty to oppose
immoral legislation such as that which supports slavery and the
Mexican War. Thoreau concludes: "I cannot for an instant
recognize that political organization as my government which is the
slave's government also" (R, 67). Slavery could be
abolished by a "peaceable revolution," he continues, if
people refused to pay their taxes and clogged the system by going to
jail (R, 76).



The Fugitive Slave Law passed by the United States Congress in 1850
had dramatic and visible effects not only in Georgia or Mississippi
but in Massachusetts and New York. For the law required all citizens
of the country to assist in returning fugitive slaves to their owners.
This extension of the slave-system to the north, the subject of
Thoreau's "Slavery in Massachusetts" (1854), was on
public view when an escaped slave named Anthony Burns was captured in
Boston, tried by a Massachusetts court, and escorted by the
Massachusetts militia and U. S. marines to the harbor, where he was
taken back to slavery in Virginia. His owner placed him in a notorious
"slave pen" outside Richmond, where Burns was handcuffed,
chained at the ankles and left to lie in his own filth for four
months. Thoreau denounced the absurdity of a court in Boston
"trying a MAN, to find out if he is not really a SLAVE,"
when the question has already been "decided from eternity"
(R, 92). In his "Lecture on Slavery" of 1855, Emerson
calls the original 1787 Constitution's recognition of slavery a
"crime" (A, 100), and he contrasts the written law of the
constitution with the "Laws" and "Right"
ascertained by Jesus, Menu, Moses, and Confucius. An immoral law, he
holds, is void.



Although Thoreau advocated nonviolent action in "Resistance to
Civil Government," he later supported the violent actions of
John Brown, who killed unarmed pro-slavery settlers in Kansas, and in
1859 attacked the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia.
In "A Plea for Captain John Brown," Thoreau portrays Brown
as an "Angel of Light" (R, 137) and "a
transcendentalist above all" (115) who believed "that a
man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in
order to rescue the slave" (R,132). In early 1860, just months
before the outbreak of the Civil War, he and Emerson participated in
public commemorations of Brown's life and actions.