XXVII.

THE PYTHON.

EMERSON was the first American scholar to cast a dart at Slavery. On Sunday, May 29, 1831, he admitted an abolitionist to lecture on the subject in his church, and in the following year another was invited to his pulpit. The dates are important. This was six years before even Channing had committed himself to that side. Garrison was at that time regarded as a vulgar street-preacher of notions too wild to excite more than a smile. The despised group of Boston Common was first sheltered by Emerson, and this action was the more significant because he was chaplain of the Massachusetts Legislature, which could hardly have contained one anti-slavery member. Emerson first drew the sympathy of scholars to that side. The voices of the two popular orators, Channing and Phillips, soon followed, and Longfellow began to write the anti-slavery poems collected in 1842.

When, in 1835, Harriet Martineau was nearly mobbed in Boston, and no prominent citizen ventured to her side, Emerson and his brother Charles hastened to her defence. "At the time of the hubbub against me in Boston," she wrote, "Charles Emerson stood alone in a large company in defence of the right of free thought and speech, and declared that he had rather see Boston in ashes than that I or anybody else should be debarred in any way from perfectly free speech. His brother Waldo invited me to be his guest in the midst of my unpopularity."

On November 7, 1837, the Rev. E. P. Lovejoy, an abolitionist, was shot by a mob at Alton, Illinois, while

attempting to defend his printing-press from destruction. Some citizens of Boston, headed by. Dr. Channing, petitioned the mayor of that city for permission to hold a meeting in Faneuil Hall, "the Cradle of Liberty," and it was refused. The Attorney-General of Massachusetts said that Lovejoy had "died as the fool dieth," and such was the general opinion of "respectability." In a lecture on Heroism Emerson said, "Whoso is heroic will always find crises to try his edge. Human virtue demands her champions and martyrs, and the trial of persecution always proceeds. It is but the other day that the brave Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of a mob for the right of free speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to live." George Bradford says that some of Emerson's friends "felt the sort of cold shudder which ran through the audience at this calm braving of the current opinion." The audience had been "carried on and lifted up" by the speaker's celebrations of heroism in other lands and ancient times, but when he recognised a hero in the lynched abolitionist, they "were wholly unprepared for this unexpected turn and shock;" and Emerson's friends were in terror.

Emerson could not throw himself into any organisation, nor did he encourage the scholars around him to do so; he believed that to elevate character, to raise the ethical standard, to inspire courage in the intellect of the nation, would speedily make its atmosphere too pure for a slave to breathe. He even resented the peremptory demand of the abolitionists that every kind of work should be postponed to their cause. Fearless in vindicating those whose convictions led them to enlist for this particular struggle, Emerson saw in slavery one among many symptoms of the moral disease of the time. "The timidity of our public opinion is our disease, or, shall I say, the absence of private opinion. Good nature is plentiful, but we want justice with heart of steel to fight down the proud. The private mind has the access to the totality of goodness

and truth, that it may be a balance to a corrupt society, and to stand for the private verdict against popular clamour is the office of the noble. If If a humane measure is propounded in behalf of the slave, or of the Irishman, or of the Catholic, or for the succour of the poor, that sentiment, that project, will have the homage of the hero. That is his nobility, his oath of knighthood, to succour the helpless and oppressed; always to throw himself on the side of weakness, of youth, of hope, on the liberal, on the expansive side, never on the conserving, the timorous, the lock-and-bolt system. More than our good-will we may not be able to give. We have our own affairs, our own genius, which chains us to our proper work. We cannot give our life to the cause of the debtor, of the slave, or the pauper, as another is doing; but to one thing we are bound, not to blaspheme the sentiment and the work of that man, nor to throw stumbling-blocks in the way of the abolitionist, the philanthropist, as the organs of influence and opinion are swift to do."

Emerson had as much practical sagacity as genius; when he spoke the words just quoted (in a lecture in Boston, February 7, 1844) he had reached a commanding position, carrying with it gravest responsibilities; the destinies of best young men and women were determined by his word. But in this early anti-slavery movement he did more than he exacted from others, and recognised it as a far more important reform than others. In 1844, when coloured citizens of Massachusetts had been taken to prison from ships in Southern ports, Emerson delivered an oration in Concord on the anniversary of West Indian emancipation, and spoke sternly on the matter. "If such a damnable outrage can be committed on the person of a citizen with impunity, let the Governor break the broad seal of the State; he bears the sword in vain. The Governor of Massachusetts is a trifler; the State-house in Boston is a playhouse; the General Court is a dishonoured body, if they make laws which they

cannot execute.

The great-hearted Puritans have left no posterity." He demanded that the representatives of the State should demand of Congress the instant release, by force if necessary, of the imprisoned negro seamen, and their indemnification. "As for dangers to the Union from such demands, the Union is already at an end when the first citizen of Massachusetts is thus outraged."

This address, in which the heroic story of West Indian emancipation was told in simplest words and with thrilling effect, and the lesson plainly applied to America, became of historic importance. Thoreau always remembered with pleasure that he rang the bell which summoned the people to the town-hall that day, where the representatives of thirteen towns assembled. In a contemporary paragraph in the "Herald of Freedom" its effect upon the abolitionists is indicated. "Imagine a face expressive alike of great intellectual power and sweetness of nature; eyes which at times seem to look into another world with far-seeing and prophetic ken; a mouth of chiselled beauty which never speaks but to utter the most melodious, the most exquisite intonations of which the English language is capable. Behold the speaker before you. He appears for the first time on the anti-slavery platform. You expect that he will look at his subject from an intellectual point of view merely; that he will give an impartial judgment on the merits and the faults. of abolitionism, and stand on a clear eminence above the dust and turmoil of the movement. But not so. Behold

he has descended among us. He grasps our hands with warm and earnest pressure, and says, 'Brothers, I have come to enter with you into this holy war. My arm and my heart are yours, and here do I pledge myself henceforth to do battle in your cause till you have gained the victory.' I wish I could picture to you the audience as it listened in rapt and breathless attention to the speaker as he detailed the progress of British emancipation from its commencement to its close, and then contrasted the

noble course of British statesmen with that of their descendants in our own country, and branded the latter with its deserved meed of reproach and contempt. As he pictured the infinite wrongs of the coloured man and his godlike patience, our hearts swayed to and fro at his bidding, and tears found their way down the cheeks of sturdy men as well as of tender-hearted maidens. When the last word was spoken its music still lingered in our ears, and silence alone seemed a fitting expression of our deep and absorbing delight. The faint clapping of hands, which a few attempted, died away immediately as inappropriate to the occasion."

Probably it was this brave note coming from the first battlefield of American independence which led the Governor of Massachusetts to select the Hon. Samuel Hoar, Emerson's friend and neighbour, to repair to South Carolina in order to institute proceedings for the release of the coloured seamen, on which the Legislature had resolved. Mr. Hoar and his daughter, who had been betrothed to Charles Emerson, proceeded to Charleston, South Carolina, from which place they were driven after repeated threats of violence. This incident produced much effect on Emerson's mind, but it could not swerve him from his method.

Let us withhold every reproachful, and, if we can, every indignant remark. In this cause we must renounce our temper and the risings of pride. If there be any man who thinks the ruin of a race of men a small matter compared with the last decorations and completions of his own comfort, who would not so much as part with his ice-cream to save them from rapine and manacles, I think I must not hesitate to satisfy that man that also his cream and vanilla are safer and cheaper by placing the negro nation on a fair footing than by robbing them. If the Virginian piques himself on the picturesque luxury of his vassalage, on the heavy Ethiopian manners of his houseservants, their silent obedience, their hue of bronze, their turbaned heads, and would not exchange them for the