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Examination Number: B093509 
 

Title of work: 

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle on Slavery: 

Transatlantic Dissentions and Philosophical Connections 

 
Programme Name: MSc United States Literature  

 
 

Graduate School of Literatures, Languages & Cultures 
 
 

University of Edinburgh 
 
 

Word count: 15 000 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

  

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1857) 

Source: ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/e/emerson/ralph_waldo/portrait.jpg 

 

Thomas Carlyle (1854) 

  Source: archive.org/stream/pastandpresent06carlgoog#page/n10/mode/2up 

 



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Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle on Slavery:  

Transatlantic Dissentions and Philosophical Connections 

 

Table of Contents 

 

Introduction          3 

Chapter One:    On Slavery and Labor: Racist Characterizations and   7 

      Economic Justifications 

Chapter Two    On Democracy and Government: Ruling Elites and   21 

      Moral Diptychs 

Chapter Three    On War and Abolition: Transoceanic Tensions and   35 

      Amicable Resolutions  

Conclusion           49 

 

Bibliography           51 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



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Introduction 

 

 In his 1841 essay on “Friendship”, Ralph Waldo Emerson defined a “friend” as “a 

sort of paradox in nature” (348). Perhaps emulating that paradoxical essence, Emerson’s 

essay was pervaded with constant contradictions: while reiterating his belief in the “absolute 

insulation of man” (353), Emerson simultaneously depicted “friends” as those who 

“recognize the deep identity which beneath these disparities unites them” (“Friendship” 350). 

Relating back to the Platonic myth of recognition, by which one’s soul recognizes what it had 

previously seen and forgotten, Emerson defined a friend as that “Other” in which one is able 

to perceive oneself. As Johannes Voelz argued in Transcendental Resistance, “for Emerson, 

friendship … is a relationship from which we want to extract identity. Friendship is a 

relationship from which we seek recognition” (137). Indeed, Emerson was mostly concerned 

with what he called “high friendship” (“Friendship” 350) - an abstract ideality, which 

inevitably creates “a tension between potentiality and actuality” (Voelz 136). Acting as a 

compromise between isolation and symbiosis, epistolary friendship occupied a great part of 

Emerson’s definition: in his letter-shaped essay, the author indeed described a “letter” as that 

“spiritual gift worthy of him to give, and of me to receive” (“Friendship” 351).  

 When Essays: First Series was published in 1841, Emerson had been corresponding 

with Thomas Carlyle for seven years already: the two had met in Edinburgh in 1833, on 

Emerson’s first European tour (1832-1833). Their epistolary friendship had begun 

immediately after their encounter and lasted until 1873. For Emerson, Carlyle had become 

that “beautiful enemy” (“Friendship” 351) with whom he would exchange letters for over 

five decades. For Carlyle, his American correspondent was the interlocutor he respected the 

most. After Emerson’s friend Charles Elliot Norton published their letters in a posthumous 

collection, Emerson and Carlyle’s exchange became available to read for admirers and 



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scholars. Raising quite a momentum among its contemporaries, the Correspondence was 

indeed positively welcomed as a breach into the philosophers’ lives: as indicated in a review 

of the same year, published in The Atlantic Monthly, “the special charm of the 

correspondence lies … in its being human rather than literary” (560). Commented upon by 

Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe, Emerson and Carlyle’s relationship raised, however, less 

and less critical interest throughout the twentieth century. Whereas Emerson came to be 

progressively considered as American literature’s canonical author, Carlyle’s conservatism as 

well as his racist remarks spoiled the writer’s reputation. Overshadowed by Emerson's 

modern approach to matters of race and class, Carlyle became known as bigot and was 

therefore less appreciated by modern critics, who hardly understood his friendship with 

Emerson.  

 Whereas Emerson’s fellowship with Henry David Thoreau - his Transcendentalist 

friend and disciple – was abundantly described by critics, his relationship with Thomas 

Carlyle was never exhaustively explained. The critical interrogation of how Carlyle, a British 

conservative, had become one of Emerson’s closest friends is still partly unsolved. In 1978, 

Marc Harris handled that contradiction by referring to their relationship as a “debate”: in 

Their Long Debate, he thus defined their friendship as a transatlantic, epistolary debate of 

ideas. A few years later, Harris’ approach was compounded by Len Gougeon’s. Adding a 

new dimension to previous criticism, Gougeon chose to examine Emerson and Carlyle’s 

relationship through the prism of race and politics. In “Emerson, Carlyle and the Civil War”, 

he concluded that, despite major dissentions, the two friends “were able to maintain a long 

and cordial relationship largely by ignoring or avoiding areas of disagreement and by 

refraining from publicly criticizing one another’s political views” (Gougeon 403). Drawing 

on past criticism, Thomas Constantinesco more recently contributed to the critical discussion 

on Emerson and Carlyle’s “discordant” friendship as he examined the financial dimension of 



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their correspondence. He indeed observed that, writing before the Copyright Act of 1891, 

most of the authors’ initial exchanges revolved around Emerson’s efforts to safeguard 

Carlyle’s financial interests among U.S. editors and bankers.  

 The common leitmotif pervading all these analyses - precisely the “paradoxical” 

nature of their friendship - will be the core element of my work. I will indeed base my 

understanding of their relationship on the axiom that a friend is a “sort of paradox in nature”, 

thus interpreting Emerson and Carlyle’s personal dissentions as the reflection of dissentions 

of their time. Focusing on the abolition of slavery in the United States, I will therefore 

consider the socio-historical changes that agitated America throughout the first half of the 

nineteenth century as a prism to examine the “convergences” and “divergences” of the 

authors’ philosophical thinking. I will indeed analyze Emerson and Carlyle’s exchange in 

correlation to their personal stances on the question of slavery - which challenged both 

authors in a problematic way. On the one hand, abolitionism revealed the inadequacy of 

Emerson’s transcendentalist ideals to political and social issues. On the other, Carlyle’s curt 

stance on the matter continues to reassert the inadaptability of his theories to modern 

audiences. The abolition of slavery also majorly put their relationship to test: it is indeed 

during the American Civil War that Emerson and Carlyle’s friendship faced its major crisis. 

However, the two authors quickly overcame tensions and, as Bret E. Kinser concluded, 

“[p]rivate cattiness and intellectual disputes aside, there was no other intellectual on either 

side of the Atlantic whom Carlyle respected more; the same can be said of Emerson about 

Carlyle” (Shaping 42).  

 While examining Emerson and Carlyle’s respective stances on questions of labor, 

democracy, and war, my purpose will be to debunk the general tendency to perceive the two 

authors as intellectual polar opposites. Examining how slavery became throughout the years 

the point of convergence of the authors’ philosophical dissentions, I will demonstrate the 



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sincerity of their friendship when faced with major transatlantic dissentions. Relying on 

literary secondary criticism, historical accounts, and a selection of primary sources, my 

understanding of Emerson and Carlyle’s Correspondence will be based on a series of close-

reading analyses of some of their foundational texts, all written between 1844 and 1865. In 

chapter one, I will focus on Emerson’s and Carlyle’s reaction to the abolition of slavery in the 

British West Indies: outlining the predominance of the economic factor in both approaches, I 

will insist on the importance of labor in their respective defense or attack of slavery. I will 

then scrutinize the authors’ approaches to government and democracy in chapter two: 

showcasing the influence of Romantic ideals on their thinking I will demonstrate that both 

authors believed in the necessity of a ruling elite. Eventually, in chapter three, I will analyze 

how the Civil War undermined their relationship and made it the mirror of the transatlantic 

tensions of their time.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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Chapter One - 

On Slavery and Labor: Racist Characterizations and Economic Justifications 

Initially reluctant to take a clear political stand on the question, Ralph Waldo Emerson 

openly joined the abolitionist cause for the first time in 1844 in an address on the 

“Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies”: as Len Gougeon remarked, 

“Emerson’s 1 August address was a milestone” (“Militant” 623). British abolition of slavery 

came with great surprise to its contemporaries as well as to latter-day historians, who still 

wonder why did the European country with the most successful slave trade become the center 

of the strongest abolitionist movement? To answer that question, it is important to realize that 

the 1807 abolition of slave-trade and the following emancipation of West Indian slaves in 

1834, were not mere acts of Parliament but were the outcomes of an increasingly strong 

social movement; British Parliament only took up the cause of slave trade because it was 

obliged to by public pressure. It is thus relevant to consider the public rhetoric that 

surrounded abolitionism, looking at its supporters as well as its opponents on both sides of 

the Atlantic. Praising Britain’s decision to abolish slavery, Emerson used his address to 

condemn the immorality of the so-called “Institution” and defined its abolition in the 

Southern States as a matter of moral necessity. Contrary to Emerson, Thomas Carlyle 

received the news of emancipation with great disappointment. Convinced of black people’s 

natural idleness, Carlyle defended slavery as a necessary system and advocated its expansion 

to the rest of the British Empire in his 1849 “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question”. 

A comparative study of Emerson and Carlyle’s reactions to British emancipation will help 

reveal the transatlantic consonances and dissentions surrounding the question of abolition, in 

the years preceding the American Civil War.   

 



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I/ Dialectic of Words and Action 

In “Emancipation in the British West Indies”, Emerson welcomed emancipation as the 

concretization of ethical rhetoric: he celebrated the fact that words had now been 

compounded by action on “a day which gave the immense fortification of a fact, of gross 

history, to ethical abstractions” (1). For him, the abolition of slavery finally complemented 

abolitionists’ abstract morality with the practical materiality of a ruling: he therefore rejoiced 

over the achievement of “practical ethics” (14), which he defined as the final communion of 

“the material and the moral nature” (Emerson, “West Indies” 2). Abolishing slavery is indeed 

presented as a way of obeying a higher moral law, or as Emerson wrote, “the dictates of 

humanity” - “When we consider what remains to be done for this interest in this country, the 

dictates of humanity make us tender of such as are not yet persuaded” (“West Indies” 1). For 

him, fighting against slavery was a way of conforming to one’s inherent, moral nature. In 

Kantian terms, Emerson saw it as part of a “categorical imperative” to act morally: the 

opposition to human bondage is therefore presented as inherent in one’s own body, for 

“blood is moral: the blood is anti-slavery: it runs cold in the veins: the stomach rises in 

disgust, and curses slavery” (Emerson, “West Indies” 3). Moreover, Emerson stated that 

individual moral imperatives should also be enacted on a collective scale: the body politic 

should be aiming at that “sentiment of Right, once very low and indistinct, but ever more 

articulate, because it is the voice of the universe” (“West Indies” 17). The civility of the 

United States depended upon the abolition of the country’s biggest sin, for “the civility of no 

race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded” (Emerson, “West Indies” 17). 

Furthermore, Emerson praised British figures such as Granville Sharpe who had accepted no 

compromise - “Granville Sharpe, as a matter of conscience … felt constrained to record his 

protest against the limitation, declaring that slavery was as much as a crime against the 

Divine law as the slave-trade” (“West Indies” 4). Expressions such as “matter of conscience” 



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and “Divine law” show that abolition was not a matter of political altercations: elevating the 

public scene with a moral sense seemed “indispensable” in Emerson’s eyes, “The civility of 

the world has reached that pitch that their more moral genius is becoming indispensable” 

(“West Indies” 17). In a letter written to his Carlyle in December 1862, Emerson had 

emphasized once again the prevalence of morality in national matters - “The war is our sole 

& doleful instructer. All the bright young men go into it, to be misused & sacrificed hitherto 

by incapable leaders. One lesson they all learn, -to hate slavery, teterrima causa. But the 

issue does not yet appear. We must get ourselves morally right. Nobody can help us” 

(Correspondence 536).  In line with Emerson’s idea of progress, abolishing slavery was part 

of that trajectory by which humanity was defined, and in which Emerson believed: “The 

history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right” (“West 

Indies” 2). Slavery had to be abolished precisely because it went against progress – “Slavery 

is no scholar, no improver” (Emerson, “West Indies” 10).  

Whereas Emerson celebrated abolitionism as the material application of abstract 

moral imperatives, Thomas Carlyle indicted the hypocrisy of anti-slavery rhetoric. In his 

“Occasional Discourse”, he strongly condemned the ontological emptiness of abolitionist 

speeches - “Sunk in deep froth-oceans of ‘Benevolence,’ ‘Fraternity,’ ‘Emancipation-

Principle,’ ‘Christian Philanthropy,’” “rosepink Sentimentalism” (671). If it weren’t for their 

epistolary friendship, one would think that it is Emerson that Carlyle had in mind while 

writing these words, “no longer as windy sentimentalists that merely have speeches to deliver 

and despatches to write” (“Occasional Discourse” 672). However bigot Carlyle may have 

seemed, Brent E. Kinser devoted his article “Fearful Symmetry” to defend the author by 

acknowledging that even if he “may have been simply an unconverted bigot or a masochistic 

satirist, … it is also true that in 1867 the dance of hypocrisy and bigotry in Anglo-American 

national discourse twirled merrily along. Democracy was expanded in yet another reform, but 



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not for women” (160). Carlyle’s questioning of the British Parliament was justified when he 

wondered why, if it were moral outrage that was leading Britain’s abolition of slavery, did 

they not invade Cuba or Brazil to stop the same injustice: “The political and economical 

impossibility of these ventures was an open secret. … If moral outrage was at stake on the 

question of universal emancipation, then Britain should and in fact would act to stop it” 

(Kinser, “Fearful Symmetry” 159).  

II/ “Blackness” According to Carlyle: Slaves’ Laziness and Laissez-faire Madness 

 In “Occasional Discourse”, Carlyle’s derogatory depiction of West Indian slaves is 

conveyed through a particularly violent language, which revolted most of the author’s 

contemporaries when the text was published: as Kinser remarks, the “public reception of ‘An 

Occasional Discourse,’ … was met with a veritable fire-storm of rejection” (“Fearful 

Symmetry” 141). Carlyle’s tone is indeed deeply patronizing, and his characterization of 

black people, referred to as “[o]ur beautiful Black darlings”, “sweet blighted lilies” 

(“Occasional Discourse” 671), is strongly racist. Throughout the text, the attention is 

constantly brought on black people’s idleness, which somehow served to attribute them the 

responsibility of their own enslavement - “while the sugar-crops rot round them uncut” (671), 

“[t]he idle black man in the West Indies” (“Occasional Discourse” 674). According to 

Carlyle, slaves had no merit nor did they deserve any recognition: “And now observe, my 

friends, it was not Black Quashee or those he represents that made those West India Islands 

what they are” (“Occasional Discourse” 674). West Indian slaves are thus portrayed as 

opportunistic, idle figures: the ignorant, unaware “fortunate Black man” is described as 

merrier than “the less fortunate White man” (“Occasional Discourse” 672). Yet the 

extremeness of Carlyle’s language forces us to wonder: “Is it satire, insanity, or something 

else?” (Kinser, “Fearful Symmetry” 156). As Kinser pinpointed, “[t]he one apparent point of 



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consensus in any review of the literature surrounding the essay/pamphlet leads to an 

overwhelming question: Why return to such a noxious declaration of Victorian racialism?” 

(“Fearful Symmetry” 140). It is true that, from the very beginning, Carlyle establishes a 

distance between his statements and himself through a frame narrative: the text indeed 

“begins with the creation of narrative distance between Carlyle and his text” (Kinser, “Fearful 

Symmetry” 143). “Occasional Discourse”, published anonymously, was indeed initially 

attributed to the fictional “Dr. Phelim M’Quirk” (Carlyle 670). If one were to side with 

Kinser’s reading of the “Discourse” as strongly satirical and ironic, Carlyle’s vocabulary 

would suddenly become easier to handle and less monstrous to accept - “If one imagines an 

unreliably mocking voice, on the other hand, then M’Quirk’s lecture becomes high satirical 

comedy, ridiculous and dark with an element of truth that shocks as it informs” (Kinser, 

“Fearful Symmetry 144). In his article “Carlyle’s Frederick the Great and the ‘sham-kings’ 

of the American South”, David Sorensen seemed to agree with Kinser that “the critical 

assault against him had frequently mistaken his rhetorical smoke for the actual fire of his 

convictions” (92). However, Carlyle’s belief in the inferiority of black people is present in 

other of his other texts, proving his racism to be more of a personal belief than a satirical tool. 

In his 1867 article “Shooting Niagara: And After?”, Carlyle described black people as 

follows:  

One always rather likes the Nigger; evidently a poor blackhead with good 

dispositions, with affections, attachments, …  -he is the only Savage of all the 

coloured races that doesn’t die out on sight of the White Man; but can actually live 

beside him, and work and increase and be merry. The Almighty Maker has appointed 

him to be a Servant. (321) 

Degrading and patronizing expressions such as “a poor blackhead with good dispositions”, 



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“only Savage” leave no possible doubt on Carlyle’s racism.  

 In a letter addressed to Emerson, in April 1849, Carlyle wrote: “For they will all have 

to learn that man does need government, and that an able-embodied starving beggar is and 

remains (whatever Exeter Hall may say to it) a Slave destitute of a Master” (Correspondence 

453). In Carlyle’s mind, slavery appeared as a necessity for society - as suggested by the use 

of stative verbs such as “need”, “is”, “remains”. Carlyle’s defense of slavery was based on 

the pretense “existence of an ideal hierarchy and on a divine relationship between master and 

servant” (Kinser, “Fearful Symmetry” 152). As he would repeat in 1850, Carlyle believed 

that a naturally-mandated chain of beings had established that the “Noble [should be] in the 

high place, the Ignoble in the low; that is, in all times and in all countries, the Almighty 

Maker's Law” (Carlyle, “Present Time” 22).  According to him, white people should be 

Masters and black people should be Slaves - “decidedly you will have to be servants to those 

that are born wiser than you, that are born lords of you- servants to the whites” (Carlyle, 

“Occasional Discourse” 676). For Carlyle, racial inferiority indeed manifested itself as 

idleness: “our Black West Indies and our White Ireland, … these two extremes of lazy refusal 

to work” (Carlyle, “Present Time” 27). First acknowledging that the “character of Carlyle’s 

language when he discusses race deserves no defense,” (Shaping 20)  Bret E. Kinser 

remarked that “knowing the divine importance of work within Carlyle’s vision of repairing 

the social ills of the world, it is important to acknowledge that the mordant side of his rhetoric 

is most visible in discussions of race or class where, according to his knowledge, the 

performance of work has been stopped, voluntarily or otherwise”  (Shaping 20). Although 

extremely racist, Carlyle’s vision of West Indian emancipation was not limited to an insulting 

account of its population: Carlyle’s racist theory is based on an economic argument. 

Convinced that “West Indian slaves are emancipated, and it appears refuse to work” (Carlyle, 

“Present time” 25), Carlyle proclaimed their racial inferiority in the name of work ethic. 



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Presenting slavery as the only solution to idleness, he considers emancipation as a failure: 

“Emancipation … had failed because the freed slaves had not become members of the social 

fabric – they had refused to work” (Kinser, Shaping 21).  In contrast with slaves’ idleness, the 

Anglo-Saxon race is, on the other hand, celebrated by Carlyle as being born to rule: “Who it 

may be that has a right to raise pumpkins and other produce on those Islands, perhaps none 

can, except temporarily, decide”, “Up to this time it is the Saxon British mainly; they hitherto 

have cultivated with some manfulness” (“Occasional Discourse” 674).  Based on the 

conviction that black people are “savages”, Carlyle saw slavery as one of his “favorite 

solutions to the problem of labor, a return to feudal relationships … whereby slaves would 

be, like the serfs, attached permanently to land, so when the land exchanged hands, the slaves 

would remain with it” (Kinser, “Fearful Symmetry” 151). His praise of the slave system 

derived from the belief that the permanence inherent in the slave/master relationship is far 

better than the instability of a working contract in a liberal context: as Kinser rightfully 

pinpoints in his article, “What Carlyle repeatedly claimed to be precious in slavery was the 

fact of its permanence, not its injustice (152). Carlyle’s defense of slavery was therefore 

mostly based on socio-economic factors : for him, “the only possible way to reconcile the 

problems or labor and of the general social malaise of humanity” (Kinser, “Fearful 

Symmetry” 152), Carlyle maintained and reiterated that viewpoint until 1867, when he 

asserted that “Servantship, like all solid contracts between men (like wedlock itself, which 

was once nomadic enough, temporary enough!), must become a contract of permanency, not 

easy to dissolve, but difficult extremely” (“Shooting Niagara” 322). Strongly opposed to 

laissez-faire economics, Carlyle thus thought that slavery could provide a better, long-term 

stability which liberalism failed to offer. Less stubbornly racist than one ought to think, 

Carlyle’s defense of slavery appears to have been in the name of social and economic 

balance, more than for purely pseudo-scientific, racist reasons.  



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III/ Emerson’s Plea(s): Civic Freedom and Economic Liberty 

Contrary to his friend’s insistence on idleness, Emerson repeatedly emphasized 

slaves’ “good order, decorum and gratitude” (8) in his address on West Indian emancipation - 

“The negroes were called together by the missionaries and by the planters, and the news [of 

emancipation] explained to them. … they met everywhere at their churches and chapels, and 

at midnight, when the clock struck twelve, on their knees, the silent, weeping assembly 

became men” (“West Indies” 6). Emerson’s depiction strongly contrasts with Carlyle’s 

portrayal of black people as “savages”; references to “churches and chapels”, as well as the 

assertion “became men”, puts black people on the side of civilization and on a parallel 

position to whites. Emerson recognized black people as citizens, whom he defined as “the 

most helpless citizen in her [Britain’s] world-wide realm” (11); he included them into the 

world of civilization, “[t]here are many styles of civilization, and not only one” (“West 

Indies” 9). Emerson’s acceptance of black people as part of civilization was revolutionary yet 

needs to be carefully analyzed: in fact, Emerson’s decision was not based on the non-racist 

conviction that black and white people are equal, but originated in his “theory of progress”. 

Ten years after West Indies’ emancipation, “Emerson decided that the freed blacks in the 

West Indies had indeed improved themselves, which convinced him that the ameliorative 

principle applied to all races” (Harris 155). It is their capacity to ameliorate which brought 

him to recognize blacks as civilized, not a deep conviction in racial equality.  Emerson’s 

attitude towards black people was generally that of an apologetic yet patronizing speaker, 

who praises the ones he knows have been victims of injustice - “These men, our benefactors, 

as they are producers of corn and wine, of coffee, of tobacco, of cotton, of sugar, of rum and 

brandy; gentle and joyous themselves and producers of comfort and luxury for the civilized 



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world, -there seated in the finest climates of the globe, children of the sun” (“West Indies” 2). 

Generalizations such as the anonymous-sounding plural “these men”, compounded with the 

periphrasis “children of the sun”, denies these men their singularities and presents them as a 

whole. The fact that slaves are only described through their workforce suggests that slavery 

dehumanized them – as shown by the words “producers” and by the enumeration of 

agricultural products from the colonies “corn and wine, of coffee, of tobacco, of cotton, of 

sugar, of rum and brandy”. However, abolition is defined by Emerson as the act of returning 

to black people the humanity and dignity that have been stolen from them: “The First of 

August marks the entrance of a new element into modern politics, namely, the civilization of 

the negro. A man is added to the human family” (“West Indies” 15). As Len Gougeon 

pinpoints, Emerson “is arguably the first white American intellectual to call for use of federal 

force in the defense of African Americans’ civil rights” (624).  

Nevertheless, Emerson believed that slaves should be active participants of their own 

emancipation. For Emerson, the improvement of their condition was indeed based on their 

capacity to become “the anti-slave”: “the arrival in the world of such men as Toussaint, and 

the Haytian heroes, or of the leaders of their race in Barbados and Jamaica … the might and 

the right are here: here is the anti-slave: here is man: and if you have man, black or white is 

an insignificance” (“West Indies” 16). By praising men such as “Toussaint”, Emerson also 

simultaneously referred to heroes such as Frederick Douglass - who was in the crowd as 

Emerson delivered his speech. Douglass “was both a model of and inspired by that avatar of 

resistance as Emerson conceived of and presented him”, notes Gougeon (“Militant” 623). 

Emerson certainly felt that his addresses could change some minds but the majority of the 

action resided, according to him, in the hands of African Americans: as Len Gougeon 

explains, “the responsibility slaves bear for achieving their freedom far outweighs anything 

that an abolitionist might do for them” (“Militant” 625). For Emerson, it is thanks to a few 



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exceptional individuals, the anti-slaves, that the revolution would occur. “Several years 

before Charles Darwin and Herbert Spenser, Emerson envisioned a world dominated by a 

principle somewhat akin to ‘survival of the fittest’”, as Gougeon observed “‘fitness’ was not 

merely biological but focused as well on character and personal integrity” (“Militant” 626).  

 Thus, whereas Carlyle based his justification of slavery on the pretense inferiority of 

black people, Emerson countered that argument – shared by many of Carlyle’s 

contemporaries – by welcoming black people in the world of the Civilized. Emerson 

overturned the foundational racist argument on which slavery resides, by which one is 

“allowed” to enslave for a slave is not a person: “If the black man is feeble and not important 

to the existing races, not on a parity with the best race, the black man must serve, and be 

exterminated” (“West Indies” 16). Yet Emerson proved that if black man were recognized as 

“man”, then slavery was an obvious barbarity: “But if the black man carries in his bosom an 

indispensable element of a new and coming civilization, for the sake of that element, no 

wrong, nor strength nor circumstance can hurt him” (“West Indies” 16). The rhetoric of 

master and slave, defined as natural hierarchy by Carlyle, was therefore ironized by Emerson. 

Instead of a divine hierarchy of beings, Emerson recounted a completely haphazard choice of 

“boxes”: 

the Great Spirit, in the beginning, offered the black man, whom he loved better than 

the buckra, or white, his choice of two boxes, a big and a little one. The black man 

was greedy, and chose the largest. ‘The buckra box was full up with pen, paper and 

whip, and the negro box with hoe and bill; and hoe and bill for negro to this day.” 

(“Emancipation” 2) 

Emerson powerfully overthrew pro-slavery arguments as he reversed the master/slave 

relationship - “It was shown to the planters that they, as well as negroes, were slaves” 



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(“Emancipation” 10). Masters become slaves in a world in which the “oppression of the slave 

recoiled on them” (10): Emerson’s rhetorical ability was extremely successful as his tone 

became (sarcastically) empathetic towards slave-owners, “Many planters have said, since the 

emancipation, that, before that day, they were the greatest slaves on the estates” (“West 

Indies” 10). Emerson went as far as describing emancipation as masters’ revolution, “It was 

the masters revolting from their mastery” (“Emancipation” 13).  

Throughout his address, Emerson strategically included slave-owners as part of his 

audience for he quickly understood the strategic power of offering them “the practical 

advantages likely to accrue to such commercial interests from the abolition of slavery” (Rowe 

28). Convinced that free labor would benefit the economy, Emerson resorted to the economic 

argument as a way of rallying everyone to his cause. As John Carlos Rowe remarked, “Far 

from meeting the lofty demands of Emerson’s transcendentalist ethics, his argument … 

embraces thoroughly practical solutions that are in the best interests of the expanding, 

commercial, capitalist, and Northern interests he had hitherto claimed to criticize so 

profoundly” (29).  While condemning trade for its immoral consequences, Emerson however 

"acknowledges that the British and Americans share a commercial character that must be 

considered by abolitionists” (Rowe 28) However, Emerson never seemed to resolve the 

ambiguity between the commercial nature of men and the immoral nature of trade. On the 

one hand, Emerson was highly critical towards white men in power: he emphasized their lack 

of morality, and pointed out “the existence, beside the covetousness, of a bitterer element, the 

love of power, the voluptuousness of holding a human being in his absolute control” (“West 

Indies” 7). This led to passages of self-criticism in which it is the whole Western civilization 

that Emerson accused: “Ours is full of barbarities. There are many faculties in man, each of 

which takes its turn of activity, … and each age thinks its own the perfection of reason” 

(“West Indies” 9). Emerson’s criticism towards American politics was moreover paralleled 



B093509  18    

by a praise of British liberals, for it is on a transatlantic comparison that Emerson based his 

argument: “America is not civil” (17), he wrote, while singing the praises of “All the great 

geniuses of the British senate, Fox, Pitt, Burke, Greenville, Sheridan, Grey, Canning, ranged 

themselves on its side” (“West Indies” 14). Emerson insisted on the British origins of the 

United States in numerous occurrences - “as we are the expansion of that people” (9), “Whilst 

I have read of England, I have thought of New England” (“Emancipation” 13). Emerson’s 

praise of Britain, and his desire for America to imitate England’s decisions is quite surprising 

considering America’s violent rejection of its European roots that motivated the War of 

Independence. Yet Emerson saw no borders when it came to the Saxon race, which he 

depicted as dominating the world and about which he concluded, “The genius of the Saxon 

race, friendly to liberty; the enterprise, the very muscular vigor of this nation, are inconsistent 

with slavery” (“Emancipation” 17). On the other hand, Emerson did not only rejoice over that 

civic freedom brought on by emancipation, yet he also welcomed it for bringing economic 

liberty, i.e. the freedom to work - Labor. As Sofia Forster observe, “Antebellum free labor 

abolitionists celebrated the capitalist economic system for conferring on the laborer intrinsic 

moral and extrinsic economic improvement. Emerson shares this fundamentally liberal 

embrace of the capitalist marketplace, but he values it for a somewhat different reason” (36). 

Indeed, Emerson’s positive understanding of labor consisted in the belief that labor could 

educate “the individual in creative self-development rather than stern self-discipline” (Forster 

40). Having inherited what William Ellery Channing defined as “self-culture”, Emerson was 

convinced that capitalism and labor enables “self-development”, i.e. the “expansion of the 

self’s innate faculties and capacities” (Forster 36). “Despite Emerson’s famous 

disparagements of Unitarianism, transcendentalism is deeply indebted to Unitarian doctrines, 

and perhaps most significantly to the idea of self-culture” (44), and, as Forster explained in 

“Peculiar Faculty and Peculiar Institution”, “[t]his construction of labor [as positive], as 



B093509  19    

motivated by desire rather than necessity and as producing power in the form of education 

rather than self-discipline, …was published the year after Channing’s Slavery and the year 

before the labor speeches” (Forster 48). What Emerson called “self-development” consisted 

in the communion of headwork and handwork achieved through labor: by accomplishing a 

task, the individual puts his physical skills at the service of his mental ones. Thus, posing 

“handwork and headwork as providing equal conditions of possibility for self-development” 

(Forster 53), Emerson elevated labor.  Yet, in “Emerson’s model, legal freedom is the 

condition of possibility for the individual’s [right] of choice in occupation” (Forster 61) and 

capitalism is presented as the condition of this kind of self-development. It is capitalism’s 

division of labor, and thus the possibility to choose one’s occupation, that allows the 

individual to put his best skills into action and thus realize a perfect headwork-handwork 

balance. According to these views, one understands why the “abolitionist platform, primarily 

during the 1850s and early 1860s, … derided the pseudo-feudal slave economy of the South 

for disabling the economic health of the nation, but also the economic well-being of 

individual slaves and slave-owners” (Forster 38). As Emerson said with regards to the 

Emancipation in the British West Indies, “I think I must not hesitate to satisfy that man that 

also his cream and vanilla are safer and cheaper by placing the negro nation on a fair footing 

than by robbing them” (“West Indies” 2): “Emphasizing the profits that will accrue not only 

to former slaves but also to their owners from the shift to capitalism’s system of wages, 

Emerson’s rhetoric seems fully in line with the so-called free labor doctrine” (Forster 38). 

Emerson’s pragmatic rejoicing over Emancipation’s economic benefits seems to support the 

argument suggested by some “that Emersonianism, despite Emerson’s vigorous criticism of 

industrialism and materialism in his own time, nevertheless provides a splendid intellectual 

rationale for Jacksonian democracy and thus emergent industrial capitalism” (Rowe 22). 

Countering a primarily aesthetic and ethic understanding of Emerson’s thinking, Rowe 



B093509  20    

indeed argued that, in some regards, Emerson’s stance would be “an explicit instance of an 

‘aesthetic ideology’ working to support the very social forces it overtly criticizes” (22-23). 

 Despite holding opposite views on the question of the abolition of slavery, Carlyle 

and Emerson both recognized the importance of the economic factor with regards to slavery. 

On the one hand, Carlyle’s critique of liberalism’s instability brought him to defend slavery 

for its more reassuring “work-relations". On the other hand, Emerson’s plea for civic freedom 

was doubled by a plea for economic liberty: convinced that labor was beneficial to the 

individual, Emerson advocated the economic advantages of free labor while simultaneously 

attacking slavery’s immorality. In the early stages of his abolitionist path, Emerson’s 

indictment against slavery was strongly intertwined with his patriotic sentiment: in his eyes, 

the stain of slavery polluted the moral nature of Puritan America. As he wrote, “the Union is 

already at an end when the first citizen of Massachusetts is thus outraged” (“West Indies” 

12). Although Emerson’s condemnation of slavery would always be in the name of a Higher 

law, the thinker did not always identify it in the idea of State: as Lawrence Buell remarked, 

“Emerson's activist turn in the 1850s thrust him at first down a decidedly antinationalist, 

anticapitalist path, toward a schismatic regionalism that divided Yankeedom itself into a 

hegemony of venial compromisers versus embattled true-believing latter-day Puritans 

standing for the higher law” (273).  

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 



B093509  21    

Chapter Two  

 On Democracy and Government: Ruling Elites and Moral Diptychs 

 Regarded as one of the dark days of American history, 1850’s “Fugitive Slave Law” 

brought noxious changes to the lives of African-Americans. Establishing that fugitive slaves 

should be returned to their masters, the “Fugitive Slave Law” reenacted what had already 

been formulated in 1793. Through a series of rulings, “the Compromise of 1850” aimed at 

maintaining a political balance between slave-states and the Northern part of the country. It is 

then that Ralph Waldo Emerson, deeply disappointed by the Compromise, came to the 

realization that the “popular assumption that all men loved freedom, and believed in the 

Christian religion, was found hollow American brag” (“Concord” 137). The 1850s were also 

a period of profound disillusionment for Thomas Carlyle. Faced with the consequences of 

emancipation in the British West Indies, Carlyle reiterated his distaste for democratic 

institutions by reasserting his skepticism about the abolition of slavery. Exasperated by 

British people’s fascination with American democracy, he also beseeched them to “Cease to 

brag me of America, and its model institutions and constitutions” (“The Present Time” 20). 

The political events that shook the United States in 1850 thus brought both philosophers to 

reflect upon the notion of “democracy”. For Carlyle, this led to a reinstatement of his earlier 

conviction that democracy was a system doomed to failure. For Emerson, the political events 

of 1850 engendered a strong distrust of political institutions and forced him into a more 

active role in politics. Even though their critiques rested on very different arguments, 

Emerson’s and Carlyle’s respective thinking were less different than one ought to imagine as 

both inferred the necessity of a ruling elite: as Marc Harris remarks, although Emerson and 

Carlyle “stood on opposite sides in these matters, the philosophical premises underlying their 

attitudes are not far apart” (150). Their views on democracy obviously pre-determined their 



B093509  22    

stance on the question of slavery: therefore, a comparative study of Carlyle’s Latter-Day 

Pamphlets (1850) and Emerson’s 1851 “Address to the Citizens of Concord” will help us 

determine their stance on questions of democracy and self-government. We will thus consider 

these two texts through the prism of Carlyle and Emerson’s transatlantic friendship, 

examining the similarities and divergences of their positions. 

 

I – Carlyle Against Democracy: Elite-Ruling and American Misruling 

 In the late 1840s, Europe was plunged into a climate of democratic revolutions, today 

remembered as the “Spring of Nations”. Indeed, in 1848, a wave of rebellions spread over 

Europe causing, among others, the French “February Revolution” and Mazzini’s rebellions in 

Italy. It is in this climate of democratic upheavals that Carlyle found himself as he was 

writing his Latter-Day Pamphlets. As Brent E. Kinser pointed out, “[t]hroughout the course 

of the eight monthly installments of Latter-Day Pamphlets, Carlyle incessantly attacked 

democracy” (Shaping 18). In a letter to Emerson written in June 1852, Carlyle himself 

referred to his work as “those furious Pamphlets” (Correspondence 484). Deeply shaken by 

the socio-political changes of his times, the Scottish thinker described himself in “The 

Present Time” as “I, the poor knowing person of this epoch” (13). What emerges in fact from 

Carlyle’s Pamphlets is the anxiety of a man who witnessed a change of which he 

disapproved. In his writings, the author’s tone is that of a man who is deeply preoccupied, 

because wary of society’s future. As his choice of vocabulary indicates, Carlyle was 

personally alarmed by what was going on around him - “we are advancing closer and closer 

to the very Problem itself” (9), “Alas, it is sad enough that Anarchy is here” (“Present Time” 

12). Expressions such as “closer and closer” as well as the interjection “Alas” reflect the 

author’s preoccupation with Europe’s future. Carlyle’s disenchantment was caused by his 



B093509  23    

awareness of the inevitability of such social changes: as he wrote in “The Present Time”, 

“universal Democracy, whatever we may think of it, has declared itself as an inevitable fact 

of the days in which we live” (8). While Carlyle knew that the Western world was evolving 

towards democracy, he felt a discrepancy between himself and “Reality”: “Democracy is the 

grand, alarming, imminent and indisputable Reality” (“Present Time” 9). As Emerson wrote 

in a letter to his friend in August 1850, “I inferred so much from the sturdy tone of these 

wonderful ‘Pamphlets,’ all which I have duly read as they arrived” (461); according to him, 

Carlyle had initiated a “crusade against the Times” (Correspondence 461). Carlyle’s anxiety 

about the rise of democratic systems of government essentially originated in his extreme 

mistrust of masses. The author perceived democracy as a persistent state of anarchic chaos - 

“If help or direction is not given; if the thing called Government merely drift and tumble to 

and fro, no-wither, on the popular vortexes, … popular indignation will infallibly accumulate 

upon it” (“The Present Time” 37). Indeed, Harris remarks that “as he aged, Carlyle became 

more and more convinced that society’s wish for order could be achieved and maintained 

only through the beneficent rule of a dictator” (118).  

 As David Sorensen demonstrated in “Carlyle’s Frederick the Great and the ‘Sham-

Kings’ of the American South”, Carlyle’s fascination for strong leaders was strongly tied to 

his understanding of latter-day politics: as Kinser also observed, “Frederick William, for 

Carlyle, cruel and despotic though he may have been, represented an important example of 

leadership in an era marked by chaos” (Shaping 30). In fact, “he hoped that by reviving the 

memory of leaders from the past … he could teach hero worshippers of the present how to 

look for the right contemporary leaders” (Harris 126). In line with his interest in autocratic 

figures, Carlyle wrote a brief historical account of the life of a former dictator of Paraguay, 

Dr. Francia. In the narration, Carlyle justified the necessity of dictators by asserting the 

incapability of certain societies to rule themselves - “The Gaucho population, it must be 



B093509  24    

owned, is yet not fit for constitutional liberty. They are rude people; led a drowsy life, of ease 

and sluttish abundance” (“Dr. Francia” 288). The use of stative verbs to describe the Gauchos 

implies an unchangeable state of natural inferiority, therefore highlighting a need for 

dictatorship: the adjective “rude” refers to a lack of “civility” on behalf of this people 

whereas “drowsy” insinuates their lack of intellect. Thus, Carlyle’s theory of political power 

relies on the fundamentally racist belief that the “naturally-inferior” should be governed by 

those who are superior to them: as he wrote in “The Present Time”, Carlyle was convinced 

that “the few Wise will have, by one method or another, to take command of the innumerable 

Foolish” (34). More precisely, Carlyle understood the unsuitability of some for self-

government as a consequence of their “laziness”, 

The people of that profuse climate live in a careless abundance, troubling themselves 

about few things…. Riding through the town of Santa Fe, with Parish Robertson, at 

three in the afternoon, you will find the entire population just risen from its siesta; 

slipshod, half-buttoned; sitting in front verandas open to the street, eating pumpkins 

with voracity,- sunk to the ears in pumpkins; imbibing the grateful saccharine juices, 

in a free-and-easy way.” (“Dr. Francia” 287) 

Carlyle’s insistence on the idea of laziness shows his crude aversion for Gauchos’ idleness - 

constantly reiterated through expressions such as “profuse climate”, “careless abundance”, 

“risen from its siesta”, “half-buttoned”, “free-and-easy-way”. Even though these terms all 

refer to the idea of abundance, these expressions are far from pointing to something positive: 

“abundance” is here to be understood as synonymous with “overload” and “negligence”. 

What’s more, Carlyle’s final insistence on “pumpkins” – “eating pumpkins”, “sunk to the 

ears in pumpkins” – cannot but recall his characterization of West Indian populations in “The 

Present Time”,  



B093509  25    

—And you Quashee, my pumpkin,— (not a bad fellow either, this poor Quashee, 

when tolerably guided!)— idle Quashee, I say you must get the Devil sent away from 

your elbow, my poor dark friend! In this world there will be no existence for you 

otherwise. No, not as the brother of your folly will I live beside you. Please to 

withdraw out of my way, if I am not to contradict your folly, and amend it, and put it 

in the stocks if it will not amend.” (67) 

The motif of “pumpkins” - which had also been used to described slave populations in his 

“Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” - seems to have become, throughout the 

years, a Carlylean symbol for laziness. It also shows that Carlyle’s vision of democracy has 

always been at the heart of his stance on slavery: according to him, “lazy” societies – such as 

slave societies -  should be controlled and governed by a strong leader.  

 While highlighting the benefits of dictatorship, Carlyle articulated his rejection of 

democracy in Latter-Day Pamphlets through a critique of American politics. It is, among 

others, the rise of the U.S. abolitionist movement that led Carlyle to strongly criticize 

American politics. In 1850, the Scottish author was well-aware that it was on the question of 

slavery that the country would face its major crisis as he foresightedly wrote, “America too 

will have to strain its energies, in quite other fashion than this; to crack its sinews, and all-but 

break its heart, as the rest of us have had to do, in thousand fold wrestle with the Pythons and 

mud-demons, before it can become a habitation for the gods” (“Present Time” 20-21). On the 

eve of the Compromise of 1850, Carlyle knew “as many British commentators that America 

would be unable to avoid civil war” (Kinser, Shaping 17). As Kinser remarks, “[i]t did not 

take much of a prophet to recognize trouble on the American horizon, and Carlyle was well 

informed about both domestic and international events” (Shaping 17). On the one hand, 

Carlyle was able to recognize the qualities of the American nation - “America is a great, and 



B093509  26    

in many respects a blessed and hopeful phenomenon. Sure enough, these hardy millions of 

Anglo-Saxon men prove themselves worthy of their genealogy; … doing, in their day and 

generation, a creditable and cheering feat under the sun” (“Present Time” 19). Yet he deemed 

it unacceptable that Britain would want to follow the American example, for “as to a Model 

Republic, or a model anything, the wise among themselves know too well that there is 

nothing to be said” (“Present Time” 19). In his Pamphlets, Carlyle thus oscillated between 

asserting that he “can find no model in history for a successful future democracy” (Kinser, 

Shaping 15) and praising the American Republic: “[o]f the various French Republics that 

have been tried, or that are still on trial,- of these also it is not needful to say any word. But 

there is one modern instance of Democracy nearly perfect, the Republic of the United States, 

which has actually subsisted for threescore years or more” (“Present Time” 19). As Kinser 

suggests, one should distance oneself from Carlyle’s tone in order to grasp the author’s 

sarcasm: “Carlyle was being sarcastic because he had simply had his fill of reading about 

how wonderful the Americans were and, more important, that their institutions were an apt 

model for the future of the British polity” (Kinser, Shaping 15). Carlyle did not criticize the 

U.S. out of gratuitous antipathy, yet he “refuse[d] to believe that democracy, the foundation 

of the Americans’ secular ideology, [could] be inculcated into the British psyche on similar 

terms” (Shaping 16). Kinser convincingly concludes that “Carlyle’s wish to hear no more 

about the superiorities of American governance did not mean he had grown to hate the 

Americans” (Shaping 15); hence, his correspondence with the major representative of 

American nineteenth century thinking - Ralph Waldo Emerson – was never a series of written 

indictments but epitomized a real, and honest transatlantic friendship.  

II -  Emerson’s Moral Elitism  



B093509  27    

 If Carlyle’s rejection of democracy was based on the belief that society should be 

governed by an elite, “for Emerson it was … ‘the will of the wise man,’ who of course was 

wise precisely in that he understood the higher sources of wisdom and power” (Harris 151). 

As numerous critics pointed out, there was indeed a certain elitism, “a certain authoritarian 

tendency” (Harris 151) in Emerson’s thinking. However, whereas Carlylean elitism derived 

from an arbitrary natural hierarchy, Emerson’s “chain of beings” was determined by virtue 

and morality. The Transcendentalist thinker believed in what one could call “moral 

authority”, or the right of the moral leader to seize power if things had become immoral. In 

his 1841 essay on “Self-Reliance”, Emerson had expressed an almost Carlylean distrust for 

the masses: for him, society was “a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the 

better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the 

eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not 

realities and creators, but names and customs” (55). According to Emerson, virtue was a rare 

quality among the masses and that is the reason why the “world has been instructed by its 

kings, who have so magnetized the eyes of nations” (“Self-Reliance” 61). Most virtuous 

among men, kings are depicted as those who “pay for benefits not with money but with 

honor, and represent the law in his person, was the hieroglyphic by which they obscurely 

signified their consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right of every man” 

(“Self-Reliance”, Emerson 62). The masses, conceived as a “mob”, were perceived as 

derogatory and noxious to the individual by Emerson, who suggested that man needs to be 

alone - “now we are a mob. … We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service 

begins, better than any preaching” (“Self-Reliance”, Emerson 65). In “Webster” (1831), a 

poem dedicated to Massachusetts’ senator Daniel Webster, Emerson therefore described a 

prototype of moral leadership, 

LET Webster’s lofty face 



B093509  28    

Ever on thousands shine, 

A beacon set that Freedom’s race 

Might gather omens from that radiant sign. 

Written in alternate rhymes abab, these four lines form Daniel Webster’s eulogy. The idea of 

light – more particularly, the words “shine”, “beacon” and “radiant” – highlight Webster’s 

morality and his subsequent closeness to the divine. Webster’s virtue is explicitly asserted 

through the adjective “lofty”, used to describe his “face”, and capitalized words such as 

“Freedom” insist on Webster’s conformity to a higher, moral law. However, when Daniel 

Webster declared his support for the Compromise of 1850, he irremediably let Emerson 

down, who was instantly repelled by the passing of the bill. As Daniel Robert Koch remarks, 

“Emerson was deeply disturbed by the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Law, 

which was included to placate Southerners in exchange for the entry of California into the 

Union as a Free State” (183).  In July 1851, Emerson wrote to Carlyle, saying that “the 

abomination of our Fugitive Slave-Bill drove me to some writing and speech-making, 

without hope of effect, but to clear my own skirts” (Correspondence 470). As indicated by 

the verb “drove”, Emerson’s repulsion at the pro-slavery turn of Massachusetts’ politics was 

now forcing him to enter once again the public scene of abolitionist politics. In his “Address 

to the Citizens of Concord”, held on May 3, 1851, Emerson therefore urged his audience to 

adopt a similar attitude to his, hence to publicly reject the recent ruling - “The last year has 

forced us all into politics” (Emerson, “Concord” 135). 

 Whereas he had been portrayed by Emerson as an example of moral leadership in 

1831, Daniel Webster permanently disappointed him in in the 1850s. Emerson thus went 

back on his eulogy and wrote the couplet “1854”, in which he highlighted Webster’s now 

corrupted soul, 



B093509  29    

WHY did all manly gifts in Webster fail? 

He wrote on Nature’s grandest brow, For Sale. 

In 1851, in his “Address to the Citizens of Concord”, Emerson had already “passionately 

denounce[d] Daniel Webster” (Rowe 29), about whom he had written that a “man of greedy 

and unscrupulous selfishness may maintain morals when they are in fashion: but he will not 

stick” (Emerson, “Concord” 137). Denouncing the immoral disposition of the Senator, 

Emerson stated that “[c]’est donc par une inclination naturelle à la servilité que Webster 

serait devenu l’esclave des sudistes, se ravalant de lui-même au rang de bête de somme”1 

(Constantinesco, “Amérique Fugitive” 7). Throughout his speech, Emerson indeed insisted 

on his revulsion at Webster’s political turnaround, opening his address with an emphasis on 

the physiological effects engendered by the Compromise: “I have a new experience. I wake 

in the morning with a painful sensation, which I carry about all day” (“Concord” 135). The 

word “experience”, compounded by the noun “sensation”, indeed emphasizes the physical 

dimension of Emerson’s reaction: the bill went against his own nature, hurting his body and 

soul. As Constantinesco importantly remarked, “la dénonciation de la bestialité de Webster et 

des sudistes permet d’abord à Emerson de leur opposer la profonde humanité de la loi de la 

nature, cet édit suprême … en vertu duquel toute loi immorale doit nécessairement être 

déclarée nulle et non avenue”2 (“Amérique Fugitive” 8-9). The reference to the natural cycle 

of life “I wake the morning” recalls the endless procession of days and nights, while the idea 

                                                
1	“It is because of a natural inclination to subservience that Webster became a slave to the 

Southern states, for he had lowered himself to the role of beast of burden”  

2 “Emerson’s indictment of both Webster and the Southern States’ brutality allows him, more 

importantly, to contrast their barbarity with the profound humanity of the law of nature - this 

divine edict according to which all immoral rulings must be opposed”  



B093509  30    

of regeneration - referred to through the adjective “new” – stands for the constant renewal of 

nature: the immorality of the bill goes against the natural morality of human nature, thus 

bringing “a painful sensation”. These sensations are caused by a certain “infamy in the air” - 

air which has been polluted by “the odious remembrance of that ignominy which has fallen 

on Massachusetts, which robs the landscape of beauty, and takes the sunshine out every hour” 

(Emerson, “Concord” 135). Webster’s decision to adopt the Fugitive Slave Law brought the 

evils of slavery to the northern part of the country: metaphorically comparing slavery to 

moral pollution, Emerson described how the Compromise had managed to darken northern 

landscapes, “The sun paints: presently we shall organize the echo, as now we do the shadow” 

(“Concord” 149). Using the classic association of “light” and “morality”, Emerson deplored 

the “shadow” in which the North of the United States has been plunged. As Thomas 

Constantinesco pinpoints, “[t]el un éclair déchirant le ciel, la loi sur les esclaves fugitifs, ou 

plutôt la crise politique et morale dont elle est le signe, fait éclater la vérité au grand jour”3 

(“Amérique Fugitive” 5). Indeed, what emerges most clearly from Emerson’s tone is his 

disappointment when faced with “the slightness and unreliableness of our social fabric”, his 

coming to terms with “what stuff reputations are made of; what straws we dignify by office 

and title …. It showed the shallowness of leaders; the divergence of parties from their alleged 

grounds; showed that men would not stick to what they have said” (“Concord” 137). 

Emerson was inhabited by a strong sense of disillusionment with regards to American 

politics : in fact, he now could clearly see “l’inanité d’une politique du compromis qui, dès 

l’origine et pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle, aura chercher à préserver l’Union au 

prix de l’asservissement des noirs et de l’avilissement des populations blanches, à la fois 

                                                
3 “As a flash of lightning that shine through the sky, the Fugitive Slave Law – and the 

political and moral crisis which it embodied – made the truth shine through”  



B093509  31    

complices et coupables”4 (Constantinesco, “Amérique Fugitive” 5). Emerson was shocked by 

the realization that his was an age of “metaphysical debility” (Emerson, “Concord” 137). 

Denouncing moral corruption, he attacked how the evils of slavery had spread throughout the 

country: “What is the use of admirable law-forms and political forms, if a hurricane of party 

feeling and a combination of monied interests can beat them to the ground?” (Emerson, 

“Concord” 137). As Daniel Robert Koch remarks, “Emerson believed that support for the law 

was the result of a materialist spirit, which united southern slaveholders and corrupted 

‘officials’ who attempted to persuade northern communities through ‘the mischievous 

whisper ‘’Tariff and southern market, if you will be quiet”’ (179).  As he had written in his 

address on the “Emancipation of the British West Indies”, Emerson again denounced the 

monetary benefits of slavery, which he recognized as the source of politicians’ corruption of 

soul”: “Relying on a transcendentalist convention regarding excess (luxus) and dependency 

as unnatural” (Rowe 26), Emerson attacked politicians’ thirst for profit. A series of rhetorical 

questions stand for Emerson’s disappointment: “What kind of legislation is this? What kind 

of Constitution which covers it?” (Emerson, “Concord” 142), “Great is the mischief of a legal 

crime” (Emerson, “Concord” 143). As previously demonstrated, Emerson never rejected 

capitalistic economy; yet he believed that laws should follow a higher law, not the one of 

Mammon. In fact, “[d]espite his condemnation of commercial interests in the debate over 

slavery, … and his fiery condemnation of political and legal processes in America, Emerson 

reverts to the same solutions to slavery he had proposed in 1844: economic and legal” (Rowe 

31).  

                                                
4	“the futility of political compromise which, from its very start and throughout the first half 

of the nineteenth century, safeguarded the Union while causing the enslavement of African-

Americans and the debasement of white Americans, both accomplices and guilty” 



B093509  32    

 According to Emerson, an immoral law should not be obeyed - “An immoral law 

makes it a man’s duty to break it, at every hazard” (Emerson, “Concord” 138) – for the only 

law that should is the Higher law. Showcasing the corruptness of Webster’s ruling, Emerson 

thus stated that it would be immoral to conform to it - “You have a law which no man can 

obey, or abet the obeying, without loss of self-respect and forfeiture of the name of a 

gentleman” ( “Concord” 144).  In his rejection an unlawful government, Emerson went back 

to the principles of “Self-Reliance”, deeming that in the absence of a moral government, one 

should follow one’s own inner morality. As he wrote in 1841, Emerson believed that “[t]he 

relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose 

helps” (“Self-Reliance” 62). In fact, at the heart of Transcendentalist philosophy stood the 

belief that each individual possesses an inner morality and a direct connection to the divine: 

“Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away, – means, 

teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour” 

(Emerson, “Self-Reliance” 63). The strength of Emerson’s appeal thus lies in its peremptory 

injunction to react against political corruption and immoral rulings by relying on individual 

morality: “Condemning leaders like Webster for their lack of character and the legal and 

political processes for their ‘metaphysical debility,’ Emerson appeals for the renewal of 

virtue in civil disobedience” (Rowe 30). As Rowe remarks, it is important to emphasize that 

Emerson’s invitation to rebel against government’s decisions never encompassed any armed 

reaction: - “Yet the civil disobedience that Emerson counsels does not lead relentlessly either 

to a call to arms or comparable revolutionary practice” (31). His appeal to civil disobedience 

was more symbolic than it was factual, “Emerson enjoint donc son auditoire de reconstituer 

une communauté alternative, une nation parallèle et véritablement naturelle cette fois” 5 

                                                
5 “Emerson invites his audience to become part of an alternative community, a parallel nation 

obeying, for real this time, natural law”  



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(Constantinesco, “Amérique Fugitive” 10). His invitation, however theoretical, was clear: 

“You know that the Act of Congress of September 18, 1850, is a law which every one of you 

will break on the earliest occasion” (Emerson, “Concord” 141). Thus, Emerson did not call to 

armed “action” yet he plead for intellectual “re-action”. In order to better understand 

Emerson’s sudden entrance into the world of engaged intellectualism, it would be useful to 

adopt a transatlantic perspective on the thinker’s European travels. In fact, when Emerson 

delivered his “Address to the Citizens of Concord” in 1851, he had just come back from his 

second European tour (1847-1848). As Koch remarks, Emerson had been affected by the 

European revolutions he witnessed while travelling and, even though he “initially found the 

European revolutions, especially the revolution in France, to have been tragicomic failures”, 

Emerson “drew parallels … between American supporters of slavery and European 

reactionaries and rulers of the post-1848 order in Europe” (182). Koch adds that “[i]nspired 

by his participation in what he understood to be a revolution against the moral abomination of 

slavery, he came to see the idealism of the French revolutionaries of 1848 as the spirit that 

connected 1848 and the American Civil War within an epic struggle for human dignity and 

freedom” (182-183). Affected by European revolution and American political changes, 

Emerson thus went from a promotion “of panreligious tolerance and coexistence [to] an 

apparent embrace of secular nationalism” (Ziser 336): as Koch concluded, “we can 

understand Emerson’s lionization of European revolutionary leaders during the first half of 

the 1850s as related to his vision of a sublime struggle for freedom against a materialist 

fatalism, which he saw affecting both Americans and Europeans” (186).  

 

 Deeply disappointed by the Compromise of 1850, Emerson thus denounced the 

government’s indulgence towards the Slave states and attacked Daniel Webster’s moral 

corruption. Nevertheless, however critique Emerson’s address was, the latter’s rejection of 



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the government never fell into a rejection of America: Emerson’s patriotism resisted his 

disappointment and was strengthened by it. It is indeed in an effort to build a nation of moral, 

uncorrupted men that Emerson urged his audience to resist – Emerson’s civil disobedience 

consisted in an effort to recreate that moral elite by which the United States of America 

should be ruled. In the same way as Carlyle argued for a return to past social organizations 

and feudal relations, Emerson argued for a return to the Founding Fathers and the great 

Puritan principles of his country. For Emerson, the unmatchable superiority of the Higher 

Law shadowed any human government and legitimated resistance against a potentially 

unlawful government – justifying actions such as John Brown’s armed rebellion against pro-

slavery government.  

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



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Chapter Three  

On War: Transatlantic Tensions and Amicable Resolutions 

During the American Civil War, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle’s 

relationship strongly deteriorated because of their dissentions concerning the conflict. 

Between 1861 and 1865, the two intellectuals in fact only exchanged six letters – a sparsity 

that accounts for a considerable crisis in their relationship. Paralyzed by their disagreements, 

Emerson and Carlyle’s communication progressively shifted from the private sphere to the 

public one, turning into an exchange of lectures and articles. It is Thomas Carlyle who 

opened fire first: his “Ilias (Americana) in Nuce”, published by Macmillan’s Magazine in 

1863, outraged both British and American abolitionists. Indeed “Carlyle’s response to the 

American Civil War was characteristic of a man who courted controversy and reveled in 

paradox” (Sorensen, “Frederick” 91). Reluctant to publicly criticize his friend, Emerson 

indirectly retorted to Carlyle’s satire through a series critical lectures. In his 1863 address 

“Fortune of the Republic”, Emerson indicted England’s non-supportive attitude towards the 

Union and deplored Carlyle’s disinterest in the North’s moral cause. It is therefore on the 

question of slavery that the two authors collided: the American Civil War, and the abolition 

of slavery, became the point of convergence of the authors’ philosophical differences.    

 

I – Praising Action: Where Does the Scholar Stand? 

Despite being a man of letters, Emerson legitimized war defining it as a necessary 

step into action in order to abolish the Institution of Slavery. As he stated his in “Address to 

the Citizens of Concord” in 1851, Emerson did not disapprove of forms of violent action 

when employed in extreme circumstances, echoing his friend Henry David Thoreau’s 1849 



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“Civil Disobedience”. In a eulogy delivered in 1859 in honor of John Brown, Emerson 

therefore praised the latter’s armed resistance because justified by an unlawful state of things. 

As Michael Ziser wrote in “Emersonian Terrorism”, Emerson did authorize a “suspension of 

normative ethics and law to allow for genuinely revolutionary change” (352).  More 

particularly, Emerson used the heroic figure of John Brown as counter-argument to the 

general accusation that abolitionists were mere idealists. Brown was the proof that being an 

idealist was not a sign of passivity, for “John Brown … believed in his ideas to that extent 

that he existed to put them all into action” (“John Brown” 189). Emerson admired how, in the 

person of John Brown, words were synonymous with action. He even elevated Brown to the 

role of representative of the Nation, describing him as a national hero - “There is a Unionist 

…. He believes in the Union of the States, and he conceives that the only obstruction to the 

Union is Slavery, and for that reason, as a patriot, he works for its abolition” (Emerson, “John 

Brown” 188). Surprisingly enough, even though Brown had led a terrorist rebellion against 

the government in Harpers Ferry, Emerson portrayed him as a model of morality - “he is so 

transparent that all men see him through. He is a man to make friends wherever on earth 

courage and integrity are esteemed, the rarest of heroes, a pure idealist, with no by-ends of 

his own” (“John Brown” 188). In Emerson’s eyes, the U.S. government had lost all moral 

authority with its 1850 “Fugitive Slave Act”: therefore, rebelling against it was now not only 

justified, it was to be praised. Emerson praised John Brown’s patriotism as well as his 

attempt to reassert the foundational Puritan values of American democracy: as Ziser pointed 

out, “[b]oth an anachronistic throwback to primitive and absolutist Calvinism and a racial 

progressive who helped precipitate the war that modernized and centralized the United States, 

Brown embraced violence and martyrdom as means of opposing first proslavery settlers” 

(345).  



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In the figure of John Brown, Emerson thus found the concretization of words into 

action, which had haunted him for so long. Initially reluctant to step out of the world of pure 

abstractions, Emerson had long hesitated before entering the political sphere for he deemed 

that the solitary life of an intellectual was incompatible with that of politics. Even after 

publicly joining the abolitionist cause in 1844, Emerson found it difficult to fully perceive 

himself as an “engaged intellectual”: his support for the abolitionist cause threw him into 

doubt, caught between moral abstractions and pragmatic concerns. Indeed, in juxtaposition to 

his praise of abolitionist action, Emerson also had to explain his role as an abolitionist 

scholar: where did he stand in the realm of political rebellion? Such a question agitated many 

of Emerson’s lectures, including his 1862 “Emancipation Proclamation” address, in which he 

defines the role of politicians in comparison to that of orators. Emphasizing Lincoln’s 

oratorical qualities, Emerson attempted to showcase that politicians and intellectuals were 

indeed both moved by idealism and morality. Emerson did not try to hoist himself to the role 

of “man of action” yet he justified his own place in politics by demonstrating how “men of 

action” were also “men of words”. Indeed, Emerson’s praise of Lincoln is interestingly 

pervaded with references to speech, “so fair a mind that none ever listened so patiently to 

such extreme varieties of opinion …,— the firm tone in which he announces it, without 

inflation or surplusage” (“Proclamation” 2). Comparing Lincoln to an orator, Emerson 

depicts the Emancipation Proclamation as a speech’s climax:  

It is as when an orator, having ended the compliments and pleasantries with which he 

conciliated attention, and having run over the superficial fitness and commodities of 

the measure he urges, suddenly, lending himself to some happy inspiration, announces 

with vibrating voice the grand human principles involved;—the bravos and wits who 

greeted him loudly thus far are surprised and overawed. (“Proclamation” 1)  



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In Emerson’s eyes, the emancipation of slaves represented the successful communion of the 

world of morality and that of politics: Emerson thus celebrated Lincoln’s Proclamation for it 

endowed the conflict with a moral end, transforming the war into a crusade towards “liberty” 

(Emerson, “Proclamation” 1). According to his belief in the general progress of humanity, 

Emerson viewed the war as one of history’s major “moments of expansion” (“Proclamation” 

1). 

 As Gougeon noted after analyzing Emerson’s reaction to the news of emancipation, 

“[f]or Emerson, the true victory here is for principle, no matter what the actual effects are” 

(Virtue’s Hero 288). Emerson “welcomed” the victory of emancipation “as an effort to fulfill 

America’s original promise of equality and justice and a necessary clarification of the 

purpose of the war” (Gougeon, “Emerson, Carlyle” 411). Yet the Proclamation did not only 

fulfill America’s moral destiny; it also crossed the North-American borders, uniting 

abolitionists from all over the world over morality’s dictates. For Emerson, the abolition of 

slavery was a universal ideal in which all intellectuals should believe: 

The truly cultivated. They exist in England, as in France, in Italy, in Germany, in 

America. The inspirations of God, like birds, never stop at frontiers or languages, but 

come to every nation. This class like Christians, or poets, or chemists, exist across all 

possible nationalities, strangers to their own people, - brothers to you.” (Emerson, 

The Later Lectures 333)  

When Emerson pronounced these words in 1863, he “was becoming increasingly concerned 

about relations with Great Britain” (Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero 302). Personally “aware that the 

British lacked sympathy or understanding for the Union cause almost from the war’s 

beginning” (Gougeon, “Emerson, Carlyle” 410), Emerson thus tried to display the war’s new 

abolitionist turn overseas. By emphasizing the universality of the abolitionist sentiment, he 



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justified the Northern cause in the eyes of rest of the word. As he had cleverly phrased it in 

his “Emancipation Proclamation” address, Emerson countered all opponents by asserting that 

siding with the abolitionist cause equaled siding with reason, for:  

“every spark of intellect, every virtuous feeling, every religious heart, every man of 

honor, every poet, every philosopher, the generosity of the cities, the health of the 

country, the strong arms of the mechanic, the endurance of farmers, the passionate 

conscience of women, the sympathy of distant nations,— all rally to its support.” (3) 

 

II- British Positions and Transatlantic Tensions 

 The universal morality of the abolitionist cause, the idealism and benevolence which 

Emerson found so noble, were not always unanimously received in Europe, and in Britain 

more particularly. Despite Emerson’s efforts to state that abolitionism was a universal 

principle, British reactions to the Civil War – both on behalf of British government and 

British people – were not all in favor of the North.  In fact, even though the government had 

asserted its neutrality in 1861, “[t]he upper and middle classes, the conservatives, most High 

Anglicans, and The Times mostly sympathized with the South and sometimes suggested 

British intervention for the South” (95), as noted by Peter T. Park. Carlyle was among those 

who opposed the Northern cause from the start, deeming that slavery was not worth the 

deaths of thousands of white soldiers: Carlyle in fact did not understand why the North would 

fight the “South to the death just to free the slaves” (Kinser, Shaping 36).  He thus wished 

that the United States would avoid any bloody conflict, and as he wrote to his friend Charles 

Butler: “Wise men seem to be of the opinion that you will not go to cutting of throats, but 

will settle pacifically (being a prudent People)” (Collected Letters 97-98). Through the years, 

however, Anglo-American relations kept deteriorating over diplomatic incidents; “Although 



B093509  40    

by 1863 there was little likelihood that either France or England would intervene in the war 

on behalf of the Confederacy, there was a possibility that the Union might drift into a war 

with England over the issue of British shipbuilding for the Confederate navy” (Gougeon 

Virtue’s Hero 302). In 1861, two Confederate diplomats who were on the British mail ship 

Trent were illegally captured by the Union, who accused them of violating international laws 

of neutrality in high seas. Although soldiers were eventually freed, this diplomatic incident 

increased tensions between Britain and the North and “Great Britain nearly declared war on 

the United States as a result of the Trent affair” (Park 96). It is true that British sympathy for 

Southern troops was also motivated by the already-existing commercial relations between the 

two countries: in fact, “apart from resenting U.S. commercial competition, the British needed 

Southern cotton and believed in a Southern victory until 1863” (Park 95). However, British 

antipathy towards the North was not only caused by their financial agreements with the 

South; throughout the years, British people had become “cynical about Northern 

abolitionism, which they regarded as a hypocritical cloak for sordid commercial and political 

ambitions” (Park 95). In fact, British antipathy towards the Union began in the early years of 

the American conflict, when  

anti-slavery feeling inclined English observers to expect, quite falsely, a federal war 

for emancipation. When this anti-slavery crusade failed to materialize, when the 

cotton famine created hardship in Lancashire, and when federal forces proved inept in 

the field, Englishmen of a broad range of political opinion and social background 

came to see no point or purpose in the northern campaign. (Lorimer 420) 

As Douglas A. Lorimer concluded, “[t]his critical attitude toward the north turned sympathies 

more favourably toward the south” (406): hence, British abolitionists chose not to side with 

the Union and believed that, once independent, the South would free its slaves.  



B093509  41    

 From the very beginning, Carlyle saw the Civil War as “a nightmarish conflict over 

phantoms and illusions” (105): it was, in his eyes, “a tragically pointless conflict” (Park 93). 

However, as Kinser rightfully remarks, “Carlyle’s insistence that the American Civil War 

was an absurd tragedy about nothing did not mean he was uninterested or uncaring” (Shaping 

37). As he wrote to his friend Charles Butler in 1863, “We are all much interested in your 

American excitements” (Collected Letters 97-98). Carlyle’s satirical piece “Ilias (Americana) 

in Nuce” - “the American Iliad in a Nutshell” – was Carlyle’s “only published comment on 

the war” (50), as Gerald M. Straka pinpointed in his article. With its publication in the 

Macmillan’s Magazine in 1863, the piece caused great scandal and even its editors were for a 

moment disconcerted by it. As George Worth recounts in his article, “[f]ollowing the 

publication … Alexander Macmillan, the self-described foe of slavery and friend of the 

Union, had some explaining to do” (195).  

PETER of the North (to PAUL of the South): “Paul, you unaccountable scoundrel, I 

find you hire your servants for life, not by the moth or the year, as I do! You go 

straight to hell, you - !” 

PAUL: “Good words, Peter. The risk is my own; I am willing to take the risk. Hire 

your servants by the month or day, and get straight to Heaven; leave me to my own 

method.”  

PETER: “No, I won’t, I will beat your brains out first.” (And is trying dreadfully ever 

since, but cannot yet manage it.)  

         (Carlyle, “Ilias”) 

Consisting of only three lines, “Ilias in Nuce” is a short dialogue between two fictional 

characters – “Peter of the North” and “Paul of the South”. The generalizing character of their 



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names, their biblical origins and the absence of last name, indicates to the reader that the 

scope of Carlyle’s satire is broad. The accumulation of exclamatory sentences – “You 

unaccountable soundrel, I find you hire servants for life, not by the month or year as I do!” 

“You are going straight to Hell, you –!”, “Good words, Peter!” – takes away all possible 

credibility from the dialogue and its characters. The tools of satire are all at use: short 

sentences, exaggerated violence – “I will beat your brains out first” – and syllogistic 

nonsense all partake to the satirical effect of the piece. Eventually, the ludicrousness of the 

dialogue comes from the final italics - “And is trying dreadfully ever since, but cannot yet 

manage it” - which satirize “Peter” through an ironic imitation of stage directions. 

Complaining that Paul hires “servants for life, not by the month or year”, Peter encapsulates 

the North’s hypocrisy, which Carlyle is criticizing: his grotesque violence is indeed used to 

debunk Northerners’ hypocritical morality.  As Len Gougeon pointed out, Carlyle “had been 

intensely critical of democratic thought as early as the 1840s” (“Emerson, Carlyle” 407) - 

hence his natural antipathy for Northern abolitionist discourses. Emerson’s ideals of morality 

and progress were hypocritical nonsense to the ears of Carlyle, who “attacked democracy as 

an impossible ideology because it failed to recognize that some men are born to govern and 

others are born to serve” (Gougeon “Emerson, Carlyle 408). According to the thinker, “strong 

leadership was the only practical answer to the organization of labor question” (Straka 47): in 

the same way as he had criticized the emancipation of West Indian slaves, Carlyle seemingly 

condemned the abolition of slavery in America. Because of “Ilias in Nuce”, Carlyle “was 

immediately branded a de facto supporter of the South” (Kinser, Shaping 36), which also 

grew to admire him. As Straka remarks, “Carlyle’s influence on the growth of Southern 

nationalism is obvious” (52): the thinker’s writings became very popular in the American 

South, inspiring through their blatant racism. Among those writers, George Fitzhugh, 

“Virginian lawyer, sociologist, and pro-slavery theorist George Fitzhugh (1806-1881) had 



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long regarded himself as a Carlylean disciple” (Sorensen, “Frederick” 104). Fitzhugh indeed 

borrowed the title of his second book - Cannibals All! or Slaves Without Masters (1857) – 

from the latter’s Past and Present (Sorensen, “Frederick” 104). In his “Introduction” to 

Cannibals All, Fitzhugh overtly declared his admiration for Carlyle’s ideas: “At the very time 

we were writing our pamphlet entitled Slavery Justified, in which we took ground that Free 

Society had failed, Mr. Carlyle began to write his Latter-Day Pamphlets, whose very title is 

the assertion of the failure of Free Society” (12). More precisely, Fitzhugh applauded 

Carlyle’s denunciation of “the physical impoverishment of the English working classes” 

(Sorensen, “Frederick” 104) - “Mr. Carlyle … vindicate[s] Slavery by showing that each of 

its apparent relaxations in England has injured the laboring class” (Fitzhugh 12). Like 

Carlyle, Fitzhugh was strongly opposed to laissez-faire economics, and perceived slavery as 

the only way of maintaining a balance between “labor” and “capital”, “It is impossible to 

place labor and capital in harmonious and friendly relations, except by the means of slavery, 

which identifies their interests” (Fitzhugh 31). However, one must be careful about 

comparing Fitzhugh and Carlyle for, as Sorensen rightfully pinpoints, Fitzhugh’s “ideal of 

society was aristocratic in a far more traditional way than Carlyle approved” (“Frederick” 

105). However influential Carlyle had been in the South, Straka thus rightfully asks: “One 

last question poses itself: were the Southerners right in interpreting Carlyle as they did? He 

never published a direct opinion on the South. He had condemned West Indian policy, but he 

did not support outright the South’s slavery system” (54). Although Southerners joyfully used 

Carlyle as a form of propaganda for pro-slavery arguments, Kinser convincingly observes 

that in “in the ‘Ilias’, Carlyle was in fact simply professing his long-held position against 

democracy and democratic reform in Britain” (Shaping 36). “But to which camp did Carlyle 

belong? Was he a progressive or a reactionary, a leftist or a rightist, a crypto-communist or a 

proto-fascist?” (111), asks Marc Harris. Carlyle’s ideas had been manipulated by his 



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contemporaries, and continued to be misinterpreted until the twentieth century when, in “the 

thirties and forties, for example, a few German professors sought to enshrine him as precursor 

of National Socialism” (Harris 111).  

III/ American Reactions and Amicable Resolution 

 Whereas “Ilias” was generally welcomed in the South as pro-slavery propaganda, the 

piece outraged most Northerners: as Gougeon remarks, “[w]hile to Carlyle the snippet may 

have appeared but a mild rebuke to both parties, for many Northern readers it was an 

unpardonable affront” (“Emerson, Carlyle” 412). Indeed, even though Emerson “had been 

aware of Carlyle’s views on the subject of slavery for some time, he was apparently stung by 

the Macmillan’s piece” (Gougeon “Emerson, Carlyle” 414).  Whereas until 1863 Carlyle and 

Emerson had always managed to accept their political differences, “Ilias in Nuce” put their 

relation at risk. Emerson was deeply disappointed by his friend, for he was convinced that 

“scholars such as Carlyle should be providing moral leadership and enlightenment for the 

masses” (Gougeon Virtue’s Hero 304). Thus, Emerson felt appalled by the satire and was 

encouraged, by many in his surroundings, to retort to Carlyle by way of a public letter.  One 

can only imagine the amount of public pressure to which Emerson was subjected; his 

friendship with Carlyle was well-known by the general public. When Emerson finally “chose 

the lecture platform to unleash a bitter attack on the British generally, and Carlyle in 

particular” (413), “Emerson’s audiences must have been pleased that America’s honor, and 

the North’s moral stand, had been vindicated by such a prestigious spokesperson, the man 

who had recommended Carlyle to America” (Gougeon “Emerson, Carlyle” 420). It is in 

“Fortune of the Republic”, an address delivered in 1863, that Emerson finally confronted his 

friend Thomas Carlyle. In his speech, Emerson mirrored the frustrations of his times: while 

Britain had developed an antipathy towards the North, the Union had been strongly 



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disappointed by the British government and British intellectuals. “Fortune of the Republic” is 

indeed pervaded with a certain anger towards Britain, of which Emerson repeatedly 

condemns the lack of maturity: “Now, English nationality is babyish”, “The English have a 

certain childishness”, “They are insular, and narrow”, “they retain their Scandinavian strength 

and skill; but their morals do not reach beyond their frontier” (Emerson “Fortune” 323).  In 

fact, while the “Queen’s Neutrality Proclamation of 13 May 1861 seemed reasonable enough 

to the British, it was considered an act of outright perfidy by many Northerners” (Gougeon 

“Emerson, Carlyle” 406). Emerson’s indictment against Britain was therefore direct and 

straightforward:  

it is time that you should hear the truth,- that you have failed in one of the great hours 

that put nations to test. When the occasion of magnamity arrived, you had none: you 

forgot your loud professions, you rubbed your hands with indecent joy, and saw only 

in our extreme danger the chance of humbling a rival and getting away his 

commerce.” (Emerson The Later Lectures 327) 

If Britain is depicted as childish, America is presented as a wiser entity which managed to 

expel those European vices - “America was opened after the feudal mischief was spent, and 

so the people made a good start. We began well. No inquisition here; no kings, no nobles, no 

dominant church” (Emerson The Later Lectures 326). Emerson’s disappointment and anger 

are blatantly expressed - “We who saw you in a halo of honor which our affection made, now 

we must measure your means; your true dimensions” (The Later Lectures 327). Yet the 

author also tempers his accusations with a final captatio benenvolentiae, which spares some 

from his hard critique: “In speaking of England, I lay out of question the truly cultivated 

class. They exist in England, as in France, in Italy, in Germany, and in America” (The Later 

Lectures 333). Emerson also extends his critique to his friend Carlyle, expressing his 



B093509  46    

disappointment about his friends’ political attitude - “Even Carlyle, her ablest living writer, a 

man who has earned his position by the sharpest insights, is politically a fatalist” (The Later 

Lectures 323). Accordingly with what he said in his “Emancipation Proclamation” address, 

the role of intellectuals in society should not be underestimated and it is “Britain’s artists and 

intellectuals who must bear the brunt of the criticism for this failing” (Gougeon, Virtue’s 

Hero 304). Reiterating the universalism of abolitionist ideals - “[t]he inspirations of God, like 

birds, never stop at frontiers or languages, but come to every nation” (The Later Lectures 

333) – Emerson was therefore disappointed by his friend’s lack of sympathy for the Union 

and her moral cause.  Deeming that trade was the main reason of Britain’s pro-southern 

convictions, Emerson condemned trade with the same verve with which Carlyle condemned 

democracy; “Never a lofty sentiment, never a duty of civilization, never a generosity, a moral 

self-restraint is suffered in the way of commercial advantage” (The Later Lectures 323). The 

ternary insistence on the adverb “never” emphasizes America’s morality while it denounces 

British vicious attachment to trade. “Fortune of the Republic” thus ends on a patriotic 

celebration of American democracy: while recollecting the memory of the American 

Revolution, Emerson now announces the Union’s moral destiny - “But the moment one 

enemy appeared, we woke out of sleep. No country! We had nothing else but a country. 

Business was thrust aside. Every house hung out the flag. Every street was full of patriotic 

songs. Almost every able-bodied man put on a uniform.” (The Later Lectures 330). Based 

once again on a ternary repetition - “every house” “every street” and “every man”- this 

sentence sounds like the patriotic prayer of American democracy.  While defending his 

country with vigor and passion from foreign attacks such as Carlyle’s “Ilias”, Emerson’s tone 

still leaves room for hope of a British redemption. As Len Gougeon explained, the “failure of 

intellectuals in England was particularly disturbing to Emerson because, unlike the South, … 

England seemed to possess all the advantages of a developed and advanced culture” (Virtue’s 



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Hero 310). In a private letter to Carlyle written in September 1864, Emerson thus tried “to 

correct erroneous impressions regarding the war which had unfortunately circulated some 

time among the British” (Gougeon “Emerson, Carlyle” 422). In a benevolent tone, Emerson 

tried to open his friend’s eyes - “A few days here would show you the disgusting composition 

of the party which within the Union resists the national action” (Correspondence 541). 

Moreover, Emerson excuses Carlyle for his mistakes by depicting him as the victim of 

slaveholders’ manipulation - “Slaveholders in London have filled English ears with their 

wishes & perhaps beliefs” (Correspondence 542). Emerson was not the only person who saw 

Carlyle as the “duped victim of Southern propaganda” (Kinser, Shaping 37). Moncure Daniel 

Conway, who had been recommended by Emerson, visited Carlyle in London during the 

Civil War: as Kinser remarks, “[h]is estimation of Carlyle is perhaps surprisingly positive” 

(Shaping 37). Originally from Virginia, Conway had renounced his pulpit like Emerson 

because of his opposition to slavery. In his reflections, Conway recounted: “There reached 

him the tidings that in the Southern States of America there was such a fair country. … In his 

longing that his dream should be no dream, but a reality, he had listened to the most 

insubstantial representations” (Thomas Carlyle 92-93). In the same way, forgiving his 

friend’s radical opinions, Emerson set aside political divergences as “he tactfully urges him 

‘to forgo petty differences and to support the cause’” (Gougeon “Emerson, Carlyle” 421-

422). As Sorensen hypothetically suggests, “Emerson may have been accurate in his 

supposition that Carlyle had failed to play a part in the ‘battle for humanity’ less from racial 

prejudice than from a furious need to be idiosyncratic” (“Frederick” 110).  

The American Civil War is considered by critics as the strongest crisis in Emerson 

and Carlyle’s relationship. During the war, Emerson’s abolitionism became more and more 

intertwined with a patriotic belief in American democracy: therefore, his friend Carlyle’s 

satire “Ilias (Americana) in Nuce” both offended his personal, and patriotic convictions. On 



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the other hand, Carlyle had become intolerant of abolitionists’ discourse and his intention was 

to debunk their pretense morality by exposing their real, violent natures. However concise, 

Carlyle’s satire is useful for it enables us to understand the political context in which it was 

written and the national influences after which it was carved. Thus, Emerson and Carlyle’s 

divergences during the Civil War are not only to be seen as personal misunderstandings, yet 

help reveal the transatlantic dissentions of their times. In fact, “[t]ensions between the writers 

of Old England and New became acute as a result of the Civil War, and in many respects, 

Carlyle and Emerson’s experience was representative. For some, the animosities generated at 

the time would endure or the rest of their lives” (Gougeon “Emerson, Carlyle” 423). 

However, “[a]mid the dissension and conflict of the period, … the friendship of Emerson and 

Carlyle was both tested and reaffirmed” (Gougeon, “Emerson, Carlyle” 423).  

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



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Conclusion 
 
 
 

 Despite holding very divergent views on a variety of topics, Ralph Waldo Emerson 

and Thomas Carlyle managed to remain friends until the latter’s death, in 1881. As shown 

throughout this dissertation, it is on the question of slavery that their views mostly diverged – 

putting their relationship to test during the American Civil War. However, their friendship 

resisted and the two thinkers were able to maintain amicable relations until their last days. 

Even though Emerson and Carlyle’s friendship might seem absurdly paradoxical at first sight, 

thorough close-readings of both authors have revealed that, in order to understand their 

relationship, one should drop any biases about the authors’ reputation. Known as a modern 

abolitionist thinker, Emerson has indeed obtained, throughout the years, an unparalleled 

popularity among critics; on the other hand, “Carlyle’s reputation” still has not “recovered 

from the dubious role he played in distorting the historical significance of the American 

‘Iliad’” (Sorensen 110). Thus, although their friendship was “a sort of paradox in nature”, it is 

important to analyze the similarities that united these thinkers and that enable us today to 

explain their correspondence. Emerson and Carlyle have often been described as intellectual 

polar opposites for, even though they were “paradoxically” similar in their approaches, they 

reached very different in their conclusions. As we have seen in Chapter One, the thinkers 

held opposite views on the emancipation of British West Indies: whereas Carlyle condemned 

it as failure in his “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question”, Emerson rejoiced over the 

civility of black populations. However, the two interestingly used the same socio-economical 

approach and defined slavery in relation to labor and economy. Whereas Carlyle plead in 

favor of a return to feudal modes of social organization, Emerson described the benefits of 

free labor and advocated in favor of legal freedom. As proven in Chapter Two, even as they 

criticized governments and democracy, the two authors still held similar Romantic ideals. 



B093509  50    

Carlyle attacked democracy – and the United States – for he believed that a few should 

govern the masses. He believed that dictators were the heroes that society needed and 

denounced laissez-faire’s liberalism. On the other hand, Emerson believed that a moral elite 

should rule the country - whereas Carlyle’s hero consisted in a dictatorial figure, Emerson 

suggested that it is the wise men who should be in power. Deeply disappointed by the 

Compromise of 1850, Emerson thus accused the government and denounced its moral 

corruption while advocating the necessity of a moral elite. As he became more and more 

invested in politics, Emerson had to modify his way of being a Transcendentalist: faced with 

war and the evils of slavery, Emerson praised action and rebellion against unlawful 

governments. As shown in Chapter Three, the clearly different stances adopted by Emerson 

and Carlyle on the Civil War put their relationship at risk: mirroring the transatlantic tensions 

of their times, the two wrote less and less letters to each other and debated over abolition 

through lectures and speeches. As Marc Harris concluded, “History may not forgive Carlyle 

for the comfort he gave to slave drivers and racists, in his own time and after, but his friend 

[eventually] did forgive him” (157).  

  

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



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