The philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson took a long route to a passionate stand on abolition, brought there not by religious fervor or conviction but by the gradual expansion of his personal optimism and belief in individuality and universal morality. In 1859, he raised his voice in defense of John Brown. The radical abolitionist had taken up arms in a campaign against chattel slavery in the United States and helped precipitate the Civil War with his raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry. Among Southerners and even many of his Northern abolitionist comrades, Brown was painted as a zealot, a madman, an extremist. In a speech memorializing Brown after his execution by hanging, Emerson described Brown as a man who “conceives that the only obstruction to the Union is slavery, and for that reason, as a patriot, he works for its abolition.” 

As the Civil War raged—and perhaps motivated by Brown’s example—Emerson called for the unconditional eradication of slavery as the only just way forward for the United States. In April 1862, in the pages of The Atlantic, a magazine he had helped to found, he bemoaned the constant capitulation to slavery by so-called “free states.” Months before President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, he declared that “Emancipation is the demand of civilization.”