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Augustine, Florida, he had mused about the best use of his last days, even then accepting death’s imminent reality as part of life’s natural evolution. At twenty-three, recuperating from tuberculosis in St. Hall, 1994), 426 Robert D.ĥ A sense of life’s swiftness and unpredictable end had long been a hallmark of Emerson’s daily consciousness, only heightened in his sixties and seventies.

von Frank, An Emerson Chronology (New York: G.

2 Edward Emerson, Emerson in Concord: A Memoir (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), 183.

Some might find this incessant debate a mark of his integrity. Until such time as that liberation occurred, however, his self-questioning on these issues could not stop. In fact, as both groups largely adopted his ideas about self-reliance, this eventually happened. And though he knew each party needed outside help, he was hoping they themselves would exhibit the evident truths he sought and thus persuade him en masse of both their capabilities and desires. Even as he spoke publicly and passionately for emancipating blacks and for new privileges for women, his private biases about both groups persisted. Pro and con private conversations could mire him in hesitant ambivalence. But as a privileged white male, he had long carried on an inner debate about the given mental capacity of all but exceptional blacks and about the natural social and political place of women.

From nature’s given moral law, he sincerely believed that both groups were due freedom and just treatment. His thought-in-action illustrates how fully he continued to make Transcendentalism a social tool of great practical worth in his seventeen remaining years after Appomattox.ģ In this period, too, he evidently reached an almost complete resolution of the lifetime tension between principle and prejudice he had felt concerning blacks and women. This he put to good work, vigorously bringing his pre-war thinking to bear upon his post-war purpose and activities. Until his very last years, he maintained his ability to reason. 1 Emerson’s capacities after the Civil War, often seen as diminishing, in fact gained a surprising new life.Ģ He carried on with multiple tasks at an amazing level, considering his gradual loss of memory, possible mini-strokes, and even Alzheimer-like symptoms.