Ralph Waldo Emerson

A year into the Civil War, The Atlantic’s co-founder entreated President Lincoln and the Republican-majority Congress to bring slavery to an immediate and permanent end.

One year after the start of the Civil War, Emerson, a co-founder of The Atlantic, issued a vehement call to free the slaves—predicting that the world would take notice of the statesman with the courage to “break through the cobwebs” of fear and do so. Within a year, President Lincoln would issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

A poem in praise of soldiers who gave up their lives for the Union

An Atlantic founder argues vehemently for the emancipation of the slaves.

Seven months after his call to free the slaves, Emerson hails the Emancipation Proclamation.

Emerson pays poetic tribute to the Union's military volunteers

“He is mighty Nature’s child, another Robert Burns, trusting entirely to her power, as he has never been deceived by it, and arriving unexpectedly every moment at new and happiest deliverances.”

"Country Life" was the opening lecture of a course given by Mr. Emerson at the Freeman Place Chapel in Boston, in March, 1858. It was followed by "Works and Days" (printed in Society and Solitude), "Powers of the Mind," "Natural Method of Mental Philosophy," "Memory" (the matter of these three mostly now found in Natural History of Intellect), and "Self Possession." "Concord Walks," which will be printed in connection with "Country Life" in the last volume of the Centenary Edition of Mr. Emerson's works, was originally a part of the lecture, as given by him to his neighbors in the village Lyceum.—Edward W. Emerson

“What a great heart of equity is he! How good and sound and inviolable his innocency, that is never to seek, and never wrong, but speaks the pure sense of humanity on each occasion.”

From the journal of Ralph Waldo Emerson