Emerson and Thoreau: A Batch from The New England Quarterly (MIT Press Batches) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780262758680
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2015-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

In the years following the publication of My Bondage and My Freedom, Emerson and Douglass continued their individual crusades against slavery. When civil war came, they both campaigned relentlessly and successfully for the admission of Negro soldiers into the Union Army, and both gave recruitment speeches for the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth, which would become the North’s first, regular, all-black regiment.77 For Emerson, the symbolism of thousands of former slaves fighting for freedom with both words and weapons signaled the long-awaited triumph of the anti-slave.78 In an address in Boston in 1864, he articulated the conviction that had informed his abolition campaign for twenty years, a conviction that had inspired a young Frederick Douglass, as it was in part inspired by him. “While European genius is symbolized by some majestic Corinne crowned in the capitol at Rome,” Emerson observed, “American genius finds its true type—if I dare tell you—in the poor negro soldier lying in the trenches by the Potomac, with his spelling book in one hand and his musket in the other.”79 It would take many more decades of violent struggle, but eventually this risen anti-slave would take his rightful place in American society, a place to which two of America’s greatest visionaries had called him so many years before.

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