The tenth anniversary of the emancipation by Act of Parliament of all slaves in the insular possessions of Great Britain in the West Indies was celebrated in Concord, in the year 1844, by citizens of thirteen Massachusetts towns, and they invited Mr. Emerson to make the Address. The Rev. Dr. Channing, on whose mind the wrongs of the slave had weighed ever since he had seen them in Santa Cruz, had spoken on Slavery in Faneuil Hall in 1837, had written on the subject, and his last public work had been a speech on the anniversary of the West Indian Emancipation in 1842, in the village of Lenox. The public conscience was slowly becoming aroused, especially among the country people, who had not the mercantile and social relations with the Southerner which hampered the action of many people in the cities. Yet even in Concord the religious societies appear to have closed their doors against the philanthropists who gathered to celebrate this anniversary in 1844, but the energy of the young Thoreau, always a champion of Freedom, secured the use of the Court-House, and he himself rang the bell to call the people together. It is said that Mr. Emerson, while minister of the Second Church in Boston, had held his pulpit open to speakers on behalf of liberty, and to his attitude in 1835 Harriet Martineau bears witness in her Autobiography. After speaking of the temperamental unfitness of these brother scholars, Charles and Waldo, to become active workers in an Abolitionist organization, she says: “Yet they did that which made me feel that I knew them through the very cause in which they did not implicate themselves. At the time of the hubbub against me in Boston, Charles Emerson stood alone in a large company and declared that he would rather see Boston in ashes than that I or anybody 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, and during my visit told me his course about this matter of slavery. He did not see that there was any particular thing for him to do in it then; but when, in coaches or steamboats or anywhere else, he saw people of color ill treated, or heard bad doctrine or sentiment propounded, he did what he could, and said what he thought. Since that date he has spoken more abundantly and boldly, the more critical the times became; and he is now, and has long been, identified with the Abolitionists in conviction and sentiment, though it is out of his way to join himself to their organization.” Mr. Cabot in his Memoir[B] gives several pages of extracts from Mr. Emerson’s journal showing his feelings at this time, before the slave power, aggressive and advancing, left him, as a lover of Freedom, no choice but to fight for her as he could, by tongue and pen, in seasons of peril.