Like its population, Boston’s contacts abroad were growing exponentially. In the three decades that Emerson would call Boston home, the people in its streets always included black seamen, barbers, waiters, and even rising shop-owners. By 1830, they numbered 1,875, or three percent of the city’s total population, the majority living in the West End, just over the hill from Boston’s State House and Emerson’s boyhood home. 2Īmong its residents at the turn of the nineteenth century was a small community of blacks, free since Massachusetts outlawed slavery in 1790. Boston itself, though long a major East Coast port, was rapidly enlarging from the size of a town, growing from 25,000 in 1800 to more than 90,000 forty years later. Nearby in Cambridge, Harvard College continued to lead the region’s two hundred year old tradition of close intellectual ties to England and Europe. Yet Boston remained arguably the most cultured city in all of the seventeen states. That act extended the nation, and its constitutionally legal shadow of slavery, to the western reaches of the plains, the Rockies, and the Spanish Southwest. Less than a month before, President Thomas Jefferson had seized the unexpected opportunity of purchasing the Louisiana territory from France. The United States, fourteen years after the enactment of its Constitution, was newly enlarged and confident. When Emerson was born in Boston on May 25, 1803, American horizons were rapidly expanding at home and abroad. His immediate surroundings beckoned with incentives to create, out of his forefathers’ protesting past and participation in the Revolution, his own call to citizens of the nation and world.Īt a Leading Center of American Culture and Change Furthermore, he had started life in a time and place that made a wide, and ever wider, world available to his curious mind. Emerson’s boyhood had allowed him to find resources within himself, required him to muster strength against loss and difficulty, and embedded a strong habit of questioning the status quo. Of course, he had been prepared for such a boldly active philosophical beginning. Though the particulars would change, this journal and its allegiance to imagination would ground his career as a writer and reformer for the next five decades. 1Įmerson’s wealth of growing entries richly displayed this power in romantic fantasies, vivid and often critical self-portraits, poems, watercolors and drawings, ironic asides, and philosophical musings. Only that faculty, he felt, gave form to the “thousand pursuits & passions & objects of the world”. Imagination would be their ordering principal, the “generalissimo” of “all the luckless ragamuffin Ideas” gathered here, he announced. But now in January 1820, he wrote of uniting his “new thoughts” with the “old ideas” of other writers. Since the year before, he had been accumulating notebooks for college themes, lists of books read, course notes, and commonplace books with quotations from his reading. Many students kept journals, commonplace books, or diaries, but Emerson’s title for this one―“The Wide World”―measured his unusually ambitious compass. It would become the personal record of his trajectory toward vision and revolution. Avert it heaven! avert it virtue! I need excitement.Īt sixteen, while a junior at Harvard College, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote his first entry in a new journal. All around me are industrious & will be great, I am indolent & shall be insignificant. This is somewhat appalling & if I do not discipline myself with diligent care I shall suffer severely from remorse & the sense of inferiority hereafter. I find myself often idle, vagrant, stupid, & hollow.
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