Virtue's Hero: Emerson, Antislavery and Reform (review)

book reviews163 family and personal concerns, although we are left wishing that more could be included here. This is especially true in relation to his ill-fated marriage to Alice Mason Hooper. There are letters to several of his siblings, especially to brother George, and here we see him lecture condescendingly on personal concerns as well as comment with great insight on national and international issues. During the Civil War we follow his attempts to advise Lincoln on emancipation policies and, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, feud with Secretary of State William Seward over the proper stance the nation should take toward Great Britain. The reader thus finds Sumner's letters to be a window on the critical questions of the day, even if they do not always answer the mystery of what drove their author to his many controversial actions. Again, this failure is due to Sumner rather than the editor, for like so many others of both his era and ours he had an exaggerated opinion of himself and rarely admitted to anything but the noblest of motives. Beverly Wilson Palmer became involved in editing Sumner's letters as an outgrowth of her direction of the mammoth project of microfilming all of the correspondence to and from Sumner, which fills some eightyfive reels. Her Selected Letters of Charles Sumner includes the most relevant of Sumner's correspondence and is thus a most useful tool for the researcher. It also provides great insight to those who simply seek to learn more about Charles Sumner in his own words. Frederick J. Blue Youngstown State University Virtue's Hero: Emerson, Antislavery and Reform. By Len Gougeon. (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1990. Pp. ix, 408. $45.00.) If there were an exact equation between the depth and intensity of an author's research efforts and the quality of the resulting monograph, this would be a truly outstanding study. Since, unfortunately, no such equation operates, Len Gougeon's Virtue's Hero: Emerson, Antislavery and Reform fails to convert a minute and massive investigation of Ralph Waldo Emerson's expressions of opposition to slavery into an analysis that will substantially instruct historians of Yankee culture and reform. Part of the problem is the author's extremely narrow objective which is largely to prove, contrary to received scholarly opinion, that Emerson spoke and wrote extensively about his opposition to slavery. The much larger remainder of the problem is the author's evident innocence of all the rich scholarship on antislavery reform that has arisen since the early 1960s, when Stanley Elkins first suggested a similarity of temperament between abolitionists and transcendentalists. While the notes bristle with references, and the text with commentaries on literary-historical 164civil war history treatments of Emerson himself, there is no sustained discussion of how the works of such analysts as Elkins, George Frederickson, Lewis Perry, John L. Thomas, Aileen Kraditor, David B. Davis, Anne Rose, or Ronald Walters bear on the subject at hand. The result is a repetitive, pedantic study that establishes no dialogue with the most pertinent historical scholarship. To be fair, Gougeon does succeed in achieving his primary goal by establishing beyond question the long-term reality of Emerson's antislavery activism. Contrary to scholarly judgments with origins in the nineteenth century, the author demonstrates that by the mid- 1840s Emerson found himself constantly being drawn into public protests against slavery and into public association with various New England abolitionists . By the mid-1850s, responding to the Fugitive Slave Law and the sustained crisis over free soil, Emerson's commitments became ever more frequent and freely given. According to Gougeon, Emerson "not only philosophised about reform, but actually immersed himself in it" by translating his transcendentalist's faith in personal virtue into strong espousals for action against slavery (flyleaf). After reading nearly four hundred pages of evidence supporting these contentions, it is hard to disagree. In the process of building this case, however, Gougeon also demonstrates , sometimes inadvertently, that Emerson's versions of antislavery were actually rather tame and rarefied (much as Anne Rose has argued), especially when compared to those such as Garrison, Phillips, or Higginson , who sought for lifetimes...