This Address was printed in England, as well as in America, the autumn
after its delivery here. In a letter to Carlyle written September 1, Mr.
Emerson says he is sending proof to the London publisher.
“Chapman wrote to me by the last steamer, urging me to send him some
manuscript that had not yet been published in America [hoping for
copyright, and promising half profits].... The request was so timely,
since I was not only printing a book, but also a pamphlet, that I came to
town yesterday and hastened the printers, and have now sent him proofs
of all the Address, and of more than half of the book.” He requests
Carlyle to have an eye to its correct reproduction, to which his friend
faithfully attended.
[104] _Page 100, note 1._ It was characteristic of Mr. Emerson that, as a
corrective to the flush of righteous wrath that man should be capable of
laying hands on another
To coin his labor and sweat,
came his sense of justice, and the power of seeing the planter’s side,
born into such a social and political condition, by breeding and climatic
conditions unable to toil, and with his whole inheritance vested in
slaves. In a speech in New York in 1855, Mr. Emerson urged emancipation
with compensation to the owners, by general sacrifices to this great end
by old and young throughout the North, not as the planters’ due, but as
recognizing their need and losses. Yet with all due consideration for the
planters’ misfortune of condition, he said, on the main question, “It is
impossible to be a gentleman and not be an abolitionist.”
[105] _Page 103, note 1._
Sole estate his sire bequeathed,—
Hapless sire to hapless son,—
Was the wailing song he breathed,
And his chain when life was done.
These lines from “Voluntaries” in the _Poems_, and the stanza which there
follows them, are recalled by this passage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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