It hardly seems necessary to underline Emerson’s importance in nineteenth-century American culture. One of his well-read contemporaries expressed this esteem: “I think Mr. Emerson is the greatest man—the most complete man that ever lived…. He is indeed a ‘supernal vision.’ I often think that God and his holy angels must regard him with delight.”1* Another described him as “the most American of our writers,” the embodiment of “the Idea of America, which lies at the bottom of our original institutions”—views that resonate still.2 While so many of his nineteenth-century peers calibrated their thought according to the Bible, Emerson read everything and translated it into recognizable American terms. His enrichment of American intellectual life turned the phrase “Ralph Waldo Emerson” into a summary of Victorian America’s intellectual history.
Emerson expressed the best of his age, albeit in the most restrained terms. Looking kindly upon progressive reform, he denounced the barbarism he saw in American slavery and befriended a woman, Margaret Fuller, one of the smartest people of her generation.* Truly, Emerson cemented the identification of liberal, antislavery New England with American intellect, while the luxury of his language—its very wealth of allusion and nuance—amazes readers to this day.3 Much of his popularity grew out of his ability to mirror and to orchestrate the thinking of his age: as a mirror, he reflected back familiar notions already accepted, if only tacitly, by educated Americans; as an orchestrator, he arranged simple thoughts into elaborate, memorable performances. His every note seemingly rang true. But did it?
It is important to notice that when Emerson said “American,” he meant male white people of a certain socioeconomic standing—his. Without his saying so directly, his definition of American excluded non-Christians and virtually all poor whites. Native American Indians and African Americans did not count. In English Traits, when he tallies up the American population, Emerson explicitly excludes the enslaved and skips over native peoples entirely.4
On the whole, Emerson’s engagement with Saxon racial identity simply shut out all else. Certainly, insofar as race connects to blackness and slavery, Emerson remains outside the ranks of racial thinkers. Many others of the time were obsessed by color, but Emerson had little to say about black people. What he did say, with the exception of “Voluntaries,” a poem commemorating the Civil War exploits of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Colored Troops, lacks sentiments of brotherhood.5
Musings in the journals—unpublished while he lived—are mostly what we have to judge. In the mid-1840s, before his views had hardened, Emerson preferred abstractions to empathy, on the theory that only ideas could “save races.” He remained unsure, he said, of the ultimate worth of the Negro race: “[I]f the black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new & coming civilization, for the sake of that element no wrong nor strength nor circumstance can hurt him, he will survive & play his part.” However, “if the black man is feeble & not important to the existing races, not on a par with the best race, the black man must serve & be sold & exterminated.”6 Thus the black man, a notion rather than an individual, remains a plaything of the forces of history.
Such confusion is not lessened by the fact that Emerson hated slavery, especially the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. His excoriation of the law and of New Englanders who supported it takes up more space in his journals than any other political issue: eighty-six manuscript pages in his journal for 1851.7 But, like that of Thomas Jefferson, for instance, Emerson’s disapproval of slavery in no way reflected racial egalitarianism. Rather, it connected to his sense of civilization: he considered slavery a relic of barbarism that was bad for civilization, that is, bad for his kind of white people. He harbored no doubt that American indulgence of slaveholders threatened the United States as a whole: “The absence of moral feeling in the country whiteman is the very calamity I deplore,” he notes in 1851, adding a chilling denouement: “The loss of captivity of a thousand negroes is nothing to me.”8
Neither, by the mid-1850s, did it perturb Emerson that black people and Indians might become extinct; on the contrary, their eventual disappearance would improve the human race by widening the gap between “man & beast!” The black man “is created on a lower plane than the white, & eats men & kidnaps & tortures, if he can. The Negro is reactionary imitative, secondary, in short, reactionary merely in his successes, & there is no origination with him in mental & moral sphere.”9
Occasional nameless black figures do appear fleetingly in the journals. One instance corroborates the multiracial nature of Emerson’s Concord: his mention in 1845 of a heterogeneous church meeting where “the whole various extremes of our little village society were for once brought together. Black & white, poet & grocer, contractor & lumberman, Methodist & preacher joined with the regular congregation in rare union.”10 If race means blackness, Emerson plays the tiniest part in American intellectual history, although quite a callous one. Proud of his ability to deliver unsentimental realism in the face of a racial hierarchy decreed by natural law, Emerson deviates only briefly from his concept of permanent racial hierarchy. But ever so briefly he did deviate.
In the mid-1840s, Know-Nothing xenophobia and mob violence troubled Emerson, setting off a flirtation with the idea of hybridity. In an often quoted journal entry he moves to praise multiculturalism, envisioning a new America forged from all the different constituents that make up this new country:
…in this Continent,—asylum of all nations, the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, & the Cossacks, & all the European tribes,—of the Africans, & of the Polynesians, will construct a new race, a new religion, a new State, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting pot of the Dark Ages, or that which earlier emerged from the Pelasgic [ancient Greek] & Etruscan barbarism. La Nature aime les croisements.11
Emerson’s reputation for ethnic-racial broadmindedness rests largely upon this generous and virtually unique statement of American identity.12 Nowhere else, however, did he welcome multicultural America so warmly, despite occasional doodlings about mixture and “crossings” (usually phrased in French). His journals for 1847 contain five statements on mixture: “La Nature aime les Croisments,” “Crosiements,” “Croisment,” twice, and “Nature loved crosses, and inoculations of barbarous races prove: and marriage is crossing.”13 But there was nothing sustained, no sentence even completed.
WHEN RACE means white blood, however, Emerson surges to the fore.14 Since his views were already circulating in the United States and Great Britain, Emerson cannot be seen as an originator. He was what we might nowadays call an enabler. Nonetheless, by phrasing bromides in his learned and graceful prose, he endowed them with his own substantial intellectual prestige. No matter how contradictory and obtuse, they circulated as American orthodoxy.
With the rare exception of the Fugitive Slave Act, Emerson paid scant attention to any of the historical processes that spawned hardship and political upheaval. To him history served as racial prologue—as the opening scenes in a drama rather than as events that affected people’s relation to one another. Economic classes existed as though decreed by Fate, not as outcomes of human interaction. Therefore, poor people, especially poor white people, native and immigrant, remain at the periphery of Emerson’s field of vision. By the late 1850s, Emerson deemed an array of the poor to be poor by inherent nature. The Irish and others in the antebellum working class (the Jews, Italians, and Greeks of the turn of the twentieth century had not yet arrived in massive numbers), whom he called “guano,” were fated by race to play dismal roles in a mechanistic world.
By 1860, political upheaval had further hardened Emerson’s racial views. Passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which he considered a wreck of American civilization, had prompted him to publish a book of essays intended to advise fellow Americans on how to live in the face of nasty politics. These essays, entitled Conduct of Life (1860), express much crueler views than any he had voiced in the 1840s. Here Emerson sounds practically as mean-spirited as Thomas Carlyle. “Fate,” for instance, contains an eloquent defense of the land-grabbing enthusiasms of “manifest destiny.” In it, entire races are consigned to extinction in the interest of Nature’s greater good.15
Emerson had mulled over these issues in his journal as early as 1851: “Too much guano. The German & Irish nations, like the Negro, have a deal of guano in their destiny. They are l ferried over the Atlantic, & carted over America to ditch & to drudge, to make the land fertile, & corn cheap, & then to lie down prematurely to make the grass a spot of greener grass on the prairie.”16 The appearance of the “German” nation among Emerson’s guano races recalls his distinction between wonderful “Saxons” in England and mere Germans. The sacrifice of the poor, hardworking races like the German, Irish, and African for the good of the more advanced, like the Saxon, was nothing other than the working out of inevitable—and salutary, because inevitable—laws of Nature. “Fate” transformed national opportunism into the destiny of races.
As harsh as Emerson sounds on races he thought inferior, his theories could have sunk a great deal lower. Counterparts living to the south of his beloved New England built their theoretical edifices on the foundation of African slavery. And slavery encouraged a good deal more meanness than Emerson could muster against those who were free.