EMERSON ON SLAVERY

Some wingnuts still insist that the Civil War was about States's Rights but they are very wrong.  This is what the leading American intellectual of the time thought:

For his own part, he was convinced that there could never be peace and a real Union while this devilish slavery, seed of war, was in American soil. "Root it out," he wrote in his journal, "burn it up, pay for the damage, and let us have done with it."

This was his mood when, on May 3, 1851, he addressed the citizens of Concord on the Fugitive Slave Law. In both geography and patriotism, his address was narrowed down almost to Massachusetts. It put the South aside as essentially a separate nation. What it lacked in liberality, it made for in intensity. Infamy was in the air, Emerson warned his fellow townsmen. Who could have believed that a hundred guns would be fired Boston to celebrate the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law? There had been a political betrayal, and Webster was the arch betrayer. "All the drops his blood," Emerson declared, "have eyes that look downward." But again there was a note of wisdom. As for action, the principal thing to do to follow the example of the British in the West Indies and buy the slaves. There must have been by this time a good deal of loose talk about expense of such a move, and estimates were evidently going up by leaps and bounds. But the increasing cost did not daunt Emerson. If it going to be two thousand million dollars, as was now said, it would paid more enthusiastically than any other contribution had ever been, he was confident.

SOURCE:The life of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Rusk, Ralph L.;New York, C.Scribner's Sons, 1949.; pp. 366-67