Emerson’s Antislavery Writings ed. by Len Gougeon, Joel Myerson (review)

172 Canadzan Review of American Studies if vacations meant different things to men and women or if male and female tourists were perceived and received differently. Brown's focus on the middle class is also frustrating. Although she provides some evidence that working people did take vacations, no attempt is made to assess the extent of this practise or the different meanings and objectives that tourism had for members of the working class either as vacationers or as employees in the tourism industry. Despite these oversights, Inventing New England makes an important contribution to our understanding of the region and the larger history of tourism. Norman Knowles University of Calgary Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson (editors). Emerson's Antislavery Writings. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1995. lvi + 232 pp. Len Gougeon's Virtue's Hero (University of Georgia Press, 1990) was the first comprehensive study of Emerson's thinking, writing, and speaking on what he called, in 1851, "the great question of these days" (53). Now Gougeon and Joel Myerson, the premier bibliographer of American Transcendentalism , have collected primary materials by Emerson on the slavery crisis-fourteen speeches and four public letters ranging from 1838 to 1863. Of these, only "The Fugitive Slave Law" (1954) and "John Brown" (1860) have received much attention. Others, especially the extraordinary 1863 lecture "The Fortune of the Republic, 11 deserve the renewed importance that this volume encourages. The value of Gougeon's and Myerson's compilation goes beyond simply gathering it: Emerson's 1855 "Address on Slavery" has never been published, and four others have been available only in contemporary newspaper accounts. Nine speeches were published posthumously in revisions that Emerson did not supervise, so Myerson has returned them as closely as possible to their original spoken versions. In a useful historical introduction, Gougeon suggests that Emerson made a "transition from philosophical antislavery to active abolitionism" in 1844 in response to impending annexation of Texas as a slave state (xxx). This is by way of explaining an apparent change from "Self-Reliance" (1841), where Book Revieivs 173 the 11 angry bigot" abolitionist is castigated for 11 this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off.11 My own reading of these years is that there was no fundamental change, but rather a continuing interrogation of the issue by the man who called himself an "endless seeker." And, indeed, a great value of this edition is its record of this supple mind trying out, over a quarter century, an extraordinary array of moral, philosophical, legal, scriptural , and practical political arguments against slavery. And it is true, as Gougeon says, that after 1844 Emerson's rhetoric was steadfastly radical: "Liberty is aggressive, 11 he pronounced from the platform in 1854 (88). Beyond the specific context of slavery and race relations, Gougeon and Myerson have given scholars new evidence with which to explore old issues-for example, the conundrum of Emerson's definition of the scholar: "To think is to act." There is also much here to forward understanding of Emerson's belief in universal moral law, and of how he worked toward the doctrine of "the good of evil," a development from his early belief in "Compensation " that occupied much of his attention in later years. The belief that Emerson's antislavery involvement was reluctant or spotty is a curious survival: it has long outlasted its original context in the historical consensus against Radical abolitionism and reconstruction, which influenced Emersonians from his early editors to Ralph Rusk, author of the longstandard biography (1949). Because of this assumption, Emerson's frequent insistence on his reluctance to enter the fray-"I do not often speak to public questions. They are odious and hurtful and it seems like meddling or leaving your work 11 (73)-has been taken more literally than a conventional rhetorical trope should be. And, for teachers, the fame of Thoreau's night in jail to protest the Mexican War has made for a convenient contrast between his activism and Emerson's supposed ambivalence. Emerson's Antislavery Writings should set us straight. In fact, Emerson did once have a go at activism: he joined a demonstration preventing the arrest in Concord of one of John...