Ralph Waldo Emerson

A year into the Civil War, The Atlantic’s co-founder entreated President Lincoln and the Republican-majority Congress to bring slavery to an immediate and permanent end.

One year after the start of the Civil War, Emerson, a co-founder of The Atlantic, issued a vehement call to free the slaves—predicting that the world would take notice of the statesman with the courage to “break through the cobwebs” of fear and do so. Within a year, President Lincoln would issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

A poem in praise of soldiers who gave up their lives for the Union

An Atlantic founder argues vehemently for the emancipation of the slaves.

Seven months after his call to free the slaves, Emerson hails the Emancipation Proclamation.

Emerson pays poetic tribute to the Union's military volunteers

“He is mighty Nature’s child, another Robert Burns, trusting entirely to her power, as he has never been deceived by it, and arriving unexpectedly every moment at new and happiest deliverances.”

"Country Life" was the opening lecture of a course given by Mr. Emerson at the Freeman Place Chapel in Boston, in March, 1858. It was followed by "Works and Days" (printed in Society and Solitude), "Powers of the Mind," "Natural Method of Mental Philosophy," "Memory" (the matter of these three mostly now found in Natural History of Intellect), and "Self Possession." "Concord Walks," which will be printed in connection with "Country Life" in the last volume of the Centenary Edition of Mr. Emerson's works, was originally a part of the lecture, as given by him to his neighbors in the village Lyceum.—Edward W. Emerson

“What a great heart of equity is he! How good and sound and inviolable his innocency, that is never to seek, and never wrong, but speaks the pure sense of humanity on each occasion.”

From the journal of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We are often praised for what is least ours. Boston too is sometimes pushed into a theatrical attitude of virtue, to which she is not entitled and which she cannot keep. But the genius of Boston is seen in her real independence, productive power, and Northern acuteness of mind, which is in nature hostile to oppression.”

“What a subject is her mind and life for the finest novel! When I read Dante, the other day, and his paraphrases to signify with more adequateness Christ or Jehovah, whom do you think I was reminded of? Whom but Mary Emerson and her eloquent theology?”

“He was a perfectly sincere man, punctual, severe, but just and charitable; and if he made his forms a strait-jacket to others, he wore the same himself all his years.”

“The warm swart Earth-spirit which made the strength of past ages, mightier than it knew, with instincts instead of science, like a mother yielding food from her own breast instead of preparing it through chemic and culinary skill, — warm negro ages of sentiment and vegetation, — all gone; another hour had struck and other forms arose.”

A poem

Address read before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University, July, 1867

A poem

A poem

“In a country where there are no libraries and no printing, people must carry wisdom in sentences.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson hails Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

"The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost."

As the Civil War ground on, Ralph Waldo Emerson argued vehemently for a federal emancipation of the slaves. Above all else, he asserted, “morality is the object of government.”

“Skill to do comes of doing; knowledge comes by eyes always open, and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power.”