n
abolitionist to lecture on the subject in his church, 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 on Boston Common was
first sheltered by Emerson, and this action was more significant
because Emerson was chaplain of the Massachusetts Legislature. 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.
Emerson could not throw himself into any organization, 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 country, would speedily make its atmosphere
too pure for a slave to breathe. 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," he said, "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 clamor is the office of the noble.
If a humane measure is propounded in behalf of the slave, or of the
Irishman, or the Catholic, or for the succor of the poor, that
sentiment, that project, will have the homage of the hero. That is his
nobility, his oath of knighthood, to succor 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 chain 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, not 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 spok