As her neighbors hung flags to celebrate Independence Day, Lidian Emerson adorned her front gate and fence posts with a different patriotic bunting. Desiring to make a statement, she came up with an idea for an unconventional display expressing her fervent passion and devotion to the American Revolution’s principles. Discussing her intentions with her husband Ralph Waldo Emerson—the famed poet, essayist and lecturer, who was a leading voice in American literature and culture—he smiled his approval.
Transcendentalists, like Emerson, framed an individual’s moral imperative and the conscious choice to principled living as an American ideal. To many nineteenth century Americans, individual freedom was not merely a political or human right, but holy and sacred. Along with many contemporaries, the Transcendentalists believed in the nation’s exceptional destiny to become a new Eden for the world; a leading moral example.
They were living is a different society, with different perspectives, principles, needs and desires than their grandparents’ Revolutionary generation, but they were well aware of the historical legacy bequeath to them. They evoked revolutionary rhetoric, and believed they were following through on the Revolutions’ ideals—life, liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness. Their efforts to further liberty and merciful justice through social reform were seen by them an an unfinished or ongoing American Revolution; a continuation and a progression. They, too, were working toward a communal good. To actively work towards a perfectly free world, this is what it meant to the Transcendentalists to be American.
Emerson’s friend and neighbor in Concord, Bronson Alcott declared, “Our time is revolutionary” (Tablets). Speaking of his fellow Transcendentalists, he said, “These I deem the free men and the brave, by whom great principles are to be honoured amongst us” (Journal 1838). Together, these intellectuals led a revolution in thought that was all their own; not a continuum, but a new revolution inspired by the spirit and fought by the individual making a conscious choice to do what was morally right. Each individual chose who they were in the world by their deliberate choices and actions. Emerson’s “The American Scholar” (1837) address was described by a contemporary (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.) as the nation’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.”
When he was twenty-one-years-old, Emerson expressed concerned for the nation’s morality, confiding in his diary, “When the whole nation is roaring patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and the purity of its heart” (Journal, Dec 10, 1824). Rather than cant and affiliations, he wanted feeling and principled action. He continued, “I have sometimes thought that the election an individual makes between right and wrong [is] more important than his choice between rival statesmen.” He ruminated that men traded their original thoughts for material gain. “Your soul” he said, “will last longer ...” Decades later in Conduct of Life (comprised of essays he wrote in the 1850s), Emerson declared in the same vein, “nothing is as disgusting than crowing about liberty ... and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like the Declaration of Independence, or the statue right to vote by those who have never dared to think or to act.” Principled action was a central tenet in Transcendentalist thought and living.
Long grieved by slavery’s continuance in the United States, Lidian Emerson draped black cambric in funeral pall on the stately gates in front of the well-known and regarded Emerson home.
Antislavery sentiments had been inflamed in New England a few years earlier by the Fugitive Slave Act. The 1850 law made the federal government responsible for finding persons in free states and returning them to enslavement. White law enforcement and citizens in free states were punitively compelled to comply with any unproven affidavit attesting to ownership, and the accused was denied right to habeas corpus (a protection against unlawful detention), a jury trial, and the ability to testify on their own behalf. Officials were further incentivized by compensation and bonuses to rule in favor of enslavement, resulting in the conscription of free persons. Any individual who aided a “fugitive” with food or shelter risked six months imprisonment and a $1,000 fine (more than $41,000 in today’s currency). Earlier penalties exists under the 1793 Slave Act, but relied on local rather than federal enforcement, which could be non-compliant, especially in places like Massachusetts. Many northern individuals who had been complacent about slavery, were troubled by the new law’s overreach. Ralph Waldo Emerson declared the law “a filthy enactment;” “I will not obey it, by God” (Journal, July 1851). He expressed these sentiments publicly in his “Address on the Fugitive Slave Law.”
The Emersons’ local community, and friends who were involved in abolitionist activities, were directly embroiled in the fates of persons who became targets under the law. William and Ellen Craft, Thomas Simms, and Anthony Burns, were high-profile names among many unidentified others who made their way through Concord and Boston seeking freedom. Edward Emerson remembered his father advising him and his siblings that every house should be build with a place to hide fugitive slaves (Emerson in Concord). There is no definitive evidence that the Emerson home, which was frequented by many strangers coming and going, was a stop in the network dubbed the ‘Underground Railroad.’ But their wagon and horses are known to have been lent to abolitionist purposes. In 1837, (Lydia) Lidian Jackson Emerson was a founding member of the Concord Female Antislavery Society, and she invigorated her husband to use his influential voice to speak against injustice. The Grimke Sisters and English abolitionist George Thompson were guests at the Emerson House, and Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriett Tubman visited Concord.
Making direct ties between the national plight to the country’s Revolutionary heritage, the Emersons and other abolitionists, felt disgraced by the government’s concession to slaveholders, and emboldened by a fervent devotion to—what they felt to be—sacred principles, upholding “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all within their country. As Concord honored the town’s Revolutionary heritage, commemorating the April 19th battle at the North Bridge, Lidian decried the “national shame.” She only heard her neighbors’ concerned for the country’s disunion, and not for hypocrisy and injustice “standing on the neck of the enslaved black man, while we shout aloud in praise of Freedom and pretend to love it on principle.”1
Lidian Emerson was not alone in identifying July 4th with the unfinished call for freedom. In 1852, Frederick Douglass had delivered his “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” speech in Rochester, New York. While it is undocumented precisely in which year Lidian dressed her fence in mourning, her daughter Ellen thought it might have been July 1853 or 1854. 1854 would make sense in the wake of the Anthony Burns trial, the subsequent protest riot at the Boston court house, and Burns transport out of Boston, as the affects of the Fugitive Slave Law were being felt in the Boston area. On that Independence Day, the New England Antislavery society held a rally at the Harmony Grove community in Framingham, Massachusetts. The Emersons’ intimate friend Henry David Thoreau attended, and gave an impromptu address from the speakers’ platform bedecked with an inverted flag and, likewise, draped in black.2 A few days later, the Emersons attended a local protest on July 9, 1854.
Although in sympathy with Lidian’s sentiments, one close family friend, Emerson’s would-be sister-in-law Elizabeth thought her July 4th mourning display “silly.” But it did Lidian’s “heart good to express her feelings.”3 Nearly a decade later, on the onset of civil war, Lidian hoped the flag would “be a sign of Freedom for all.”4
As we commemorate the Declaration of Independence’s 250th anniversary, some patriotic hearts may hold similarly conflicted feelings regarding our own moments in history and the divisive issues that we face together. But may we celebrate and carry forward, too, a comparable devotion to our shared ideals and hope for their fruition. As I hung my flags and decorated with festive red-white-and-blue, I felt cheered. I remembered Lidian’s patriotic fence, and I felt hope and love in my heart for all our country has been, is, and will be; I think we have much to be proud of and to be thankful for. Happy Semiquincentennial, America!
Additional Sources and Notes:
1 Qtd in Sandra Harbert Petrulionis. To Set this World Right” The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau’s Concord, (Cornell University Press, 2006), 76.
2 Ibid, 102.
3 Ellen Tucker Emerson, The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson. Ed Delores Bird Carpenter (Michigan State University Press, 1992), 125.
4 Qtd in Petrolinus, 150.
Very interesting, Kristi! The Emerson House should occasionally drape its fence in black on July 4th as a reminder of the unfinished work of America’s promise.