Emerson’s English Traits and the Paradox of Empire

susan l. roberson

ALPH WALDO EMERSON begins English Traits (1856) R by recalling his earlier voyage to the island: “I have been twice to England. In 1833, on my return from a short tour of Sicily, Italy, and France, I crossed from Boulogne and landed 1 in London at the Tower stairs.” “I find nothing in my memo- randa of visits to places,” he reports of his first sojourn. “But I have copied the few notes I made of visits to persons” (p. 502), of Wordsworth’s “green goggles,” of Carlyle “full of lively anec- dote,” and of the talk of books he shares with them (pp. 509, 507). These appealing vignettes describe “the meeting between an intelligent young American . . . and the literary lights of the day,” including as well Horatio Greenough, Walter Savage Lan- 2 dor, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In the second chapter of English Traits, concerning his second visit to England in 1847, Emerson details in fairly conventional terms the hazards of a sea voyage, “one of the severest tests to try a man.” Noting that the English are a “seafaring people, who for hundreds of years claimed the strict sovereignty of the sea,” he remarks succinctly 3 that “the sea is bounded by his majesty’s empire” (p. 517). By

1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits, in Selected Writings of Emerson, ed. Donald McQuade (New York: Modern Library, 1981), p. 501. Hereafter cited in the text. 2 Susan Castillo, “‘The Best of Nations’? Race and Imperial Destinies in Emerson’s English Traits,” Yearbook of English Studies 34 (2004): 103. 3 As Curtis Fukuchi has observed, the strength and dangers of the sea in En- glish Traits are, metaphorically, “the sources of English power” (“ ‘The Only Firma- ment’: ‘Sea-Room’ in Emerson’s English Traits,” American Transcendental Quarterly 1.3 (September 1987): 197.

The New England Quarterly,vol.84,no.2 (June 2011). C 2011 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 266 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY referring not only to his own journey but to England’s mar- itime superiority, Emerson announces that, even though later essays take up a number of diverse subjects, English Traits should be viewed as a travel book, a book about travel and transportation. The structure of English Traits has, as a whole, puzzled read- ers, in part because a number of its essays contemplate matters such as race, character, and manners. In his review for Putnam’s Monthly, Parke Godwin called English Traits “a miscellany of 4 remarks on one topic.” Yet the book does meet certain con- temporary expectations of travel writing. Visiting Stonehenge with Thomas Carlyle, Emerson situates himself as a tourist who takes measure of the monument for readers back home: “Stonehenge is a circular colonnade with a diameter a hundred feet, and enclosing a second and a third colonnade within” (p. 648). Sophia Hawthorne was similarly precise when she gauged the width along the “west front” of an English cathedral at “174 feet” and described the “sacred place” as “great spoil for Henry 5 the Eighth.” Attention to details of landscape, architecture, and history was typical for the period, as was a factual, linear rendition of the journey (“On leaving Wilton House, we took the coach for Salisbury” [p. 653]). As their still relatively young nation struggled to find its place in the world, Americans took vicarious satisfaction from reports that their upper- and middle-class elites were proving ade- quate to European sophistications and expectations. And so in “Personal,” Emerson assures his countrymen that “My journeys were cheered by so much kindness from new friends, that my impression of the island is bright with agreeable memories” (p. 656), just as Harriet Beecher Stowe, who also toured England as an invited speaker, commented in Sunny Memories of For- eign Lands (1854), “A circle of family relatives could not have 6 received us with more warmth and kindness.” Although the

4 Parke Godwin, quoted in Castillo, “The Best of Nations,” p. 100. 5 Sophia Hawthorne, Notes in England and Italy (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1869), p. 37. 6 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, vol. 1 (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company, 1854), p. 22.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 EMERSON AND EMPIRE 267 passage of time has blunted the significance of such remarks for twenty-first-century readers, we need only consider our own society’s penchant for celebrity gossip to understand how they might have been understood in the antebellum United States. Emerson was a famous man, and his contemporaries wanted to know about his comings and goings as well as his opin- ions about what he saw and whom he met. Evidently Emer- son did not disappoint, for English Traits was, in fact, “the most eagerly anticipated and one of the most successful of his 7 publications.” In addition to presenting Emerson as a privileged and yet quintessential American tourist, English Traits exemplifies the ways in which overseas travel writing moves him to ponder his home country and national identity. When Alfred Bendixen re- flects on English Traits as travel writing, he notes that “it is also quite characteristic of the American travel writer who is torn between admiring foreign achievements and defending Amer- 8 ican values.” And as Terry Caesar argues, “Americans write of travel abroad, for better or worse, in order to be responsi- 9 ble to their national identities.” Just so, Emerson celebrates the “great sloven continent” of America, which has “long since driven away the trim hedge-rows and over-cultivated garden of England,” national differences to which he has become “quite too sensible” during his sojourn (p. 655). Thus, at the same time that Emerson is contemplating what makes “England, England” (p. 518), he is also thinking about what makes America, Amer- ica. Emerson’s use of such traditions of nineteenth-century travel writing, then, asks us to consider English Traits as a travel book, albeit an unconventional one. But what also rec- ommends English Traits as an example of travel writing—and recommends it especially to our present age—is its insistent

7 Robert E. Burkholder, “The Contemporary Reception of English Traits,”inEmer- son Centenary Essays, ed. Joel Myerson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), p. 156. 8 Alfred Bendixen, “American Travel Books about Europe before the Civil War,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing, ed. Bendixen and Judith Hamera (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2009), p. 122. 9 Terry Caesar, Forgiving the Boundaries: Home as Abroad in American Travel Writing (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), p. 5.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 268 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY concern with transportation and the flow of goods, institutions, and peoples around the globe. Most of the nineteen essays that form English Traits contain some reference to England as a seafaring nation or as the cen- ter of global commerce, if not as a colonial empire. England’s history as an island that was originally colonized by various continental forces and subsequently extended its own energy outward to the rest of the world is, for Emerson, what sets it apart as a nation. In his essay on “Race,” he claims that “The English derive their pedigree from such a range of nationalities that there needs sea-room and land-room to unfold the varieties of talent and character” (p. 527); in “Ability,” he comments on England’s “commercial relations to the world,” by means of which they “have made the island a thorough fare, and London a shop” (p. 549); in “Character,” he comments on the colonizing activities of the English, how “[t]hey subsidize other nations” and administer their codes around the world (p. 573); in “Cock- ayne,” he calls the founding saints of England and America, St. George and Amerigo Vespucci, traveling rogues and thieves; in “Wealth,” he examines London’s role in the global econ- omy; and in “Result,” he critiques England’s foreign policy and alludes to the paradox of empire: that the English have an “in- stinct for liberty and law” as well as an instinct for “conquest” (p. 663). As he repeatedly attempts to understand “why En- gland is England” (p. 518), Emerson returns again and again to England’s position as a seafaring, commercial nation that trans- ports its goods and institutions “into every nook and corner of the earth” (p. 571). Exerting an astounding influence, the em- pire, by Emerson’s estimate, accounts for “perhaps a fifth of the population of the globe” (p. 523). Stressing the point that migration involves more than people alone, twentieth-century critic Arjun Appadurai refers to these various emigrating influ- ences as ethnoscapes, finanscapes, and ideascapes, an approach to critiquing globalization and empire that Emerson anticipates 10 in his 1856 travel book.

10 Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture 2.2 (Spring 1990): 7.

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In his 2002 economic history, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, Niall Ferguson asks two questions that not only relate to our early-twenty-first-century understanding of global power but that resonate throughout Emerson’s book: “Why should Amer- icans care about the history of the British Empire?” and “Was 11 the British Empire a good or bad thing?” As for its negative aspects, Ferguson faults the British Empire for its “involve- ment in the Atlantic slave trade and slavery itself” (pp. xii–xiii), which brought “nearly three and a half million Africans to the NewWorld...inBritishships”(p.80), and, because it was “economically exploitative” of colonial workers and of workers at home (p. xx), for the empire’s deleterious effects on both colonized and colonizer. While abroad, the British “practiced forms of racial discrimination and segregation” (p. xxiii). More- over, as Ferguson notes in his introduction, “When imperial authority was challenged—in India in 1857, in Jamaica in 1831 or 1865, in South Africa in 1899—the British response was brutal. When famine struck—in Ireland in the 1840s, in India in the 1870s—the response was negligent, in some measure positively culpable.” Echoing Edward Said, Ferguson goes on to say that “even when the British took a scholarly interest in oriental cultures, perhaps they did subtly denigrate them in the process” (p. xxiv). For all of its deficits, however, the empire provided opportu- nities for emigrants, which they in turn carried to other parts of the world. “To the Scots [like the Ferguson family], the Empire stood for bright sunlight” (p. xix). “The British Empire acted as an agency for imposing free markets, the rule of law, investor protection and relatively incorrupt government on roughly a quarter of the world.” Moreover, Ferguson claims, “The Em- pire also did a good deal to encourage those things in countries which were outside its formal imperial domain but under its

11 Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. xii. Hereafter cited in the text.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 270 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY economic influence through the ‘imperialism of free trade’ ” (p. xxiii). Many of the benefits we take for granted today— the spread of technology, modern cities around the world, and international trade—can be traced, Ferguson argues, to the British Empire, where “flows of knowledge, culture and institu- tions” accompanied flows of “commodities, capital and labour” (pp. xxii–xxiii). More important, the British Empire spread the idea of liberty to its colonies. Even when “the British were behaving despotically,” Ferguson contends, “there was almost always a liberal critique of that behavior from within British society” (p. xxv). In sum, Ferguson concludes, “For better, for worse—fair and foul—the world we know today is in large measure the product of Britain’s age of Empire” (p. xxix). Emerson, too, seems to ask whether the British Empire has been a force for good or ill, and the oft-noted dialectic between his celebration and his criticism of the English is in large part informed by this basic question. In his review of the critical re- ception of English Traits, Philip Nicoloff observes that review- ers “found much to praise, much to censure” about Emerson’s treatment of the English, which suggests not only a mixed re- ception for the book but its underlying ambiguity, which made it difficult for readers to anticipate Emerson’s views on any 12 particular topic. Benjamin Goluboff puts a positive spin on the matter, calling Emerson’s “affirmation and criticism[,] pro and con,” a “complex vision of England” that demonstrates his 13 “creative dialogue on British civilization.” On the positive side, Emerson notes that “Britons have pre- cisely the best commercial position in the whole planet,” which affords them a “conveniency to trade” (p. 522) that has opened the Thames, London, and the rest of England to the world. Not only are goods from London shops sent around the globe, but “a law-court, a record-office, and scientific bureau” are as well. “The swarms[,] which pouring [forth] now for two hundred

12 Philip L. Nicoloff, Emerson on Race and History: An Examination of “English Traits” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 268. 13 Benjamin Goluboff, “Emerson’s English Traits: ‘The Mechanics of Conversation,”’ American Transcendental Quarterly 3.2 (June 1989): 155.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 EMERSON AND EMPIRE 271 years from the British Islands, have sailed and rode and traded and planted through all climates[,] . . . carrying the Saxon seed, with its instinct for liberty and law, for arts and for thought” (pp. 662–63). As a commercial, seafaring nation with interests in all corners of the earth, England has shaped the modern world while serving as its guarantor. Thus, “the stability of En- gland [is] the security of the modern world,” and because “the English stand for liberty, . . . freedom is safe” everywhere (p. 576). Emerson also heralds the empire’s effects on its colonial sub- jects: “They have abolished slavery in the West Indies and put an end to human sacrifices [sati] in the East” (p. 661). “The ex- odus of millions from Great Britain, amounting in 1852 to more than a thousand a day,” has anglicized much of the nineteenth- century world. This mixing of peoples—be it amalgamation or assimilation—“is the most potent advancer of nations” (pp. 524, 526), Emerson argues, for it prompts colonized populations to imitate the positive traits, practices, and institutions of their colonizers. On this side of the equation, Emerson’s comments correlate rather nicely with Ferguson’s analysis of the positive qualities of the British Empire and the “imperialism of free trade” (p. xxiii), and they suggest as well Emerson’s and Amer- 14 ica’s Anglophilia. But although, in spreading goods and institutions, Britain is bettering the global community, its emphasis on commerce, property, and materialism, Emerson observes, also dulls the imagination, drives England’s institutions, and contributes to the dehumanization of the worker. The “despotism of expense” (p. 592) and the “tyranny of trade” (p. 590) make their way not only into the factories at home and the colonies abroad but into the formation of the aristocracy, a university system that aims to train gentlemen of the upper classes, a religion that serves the interests of economics, a literature of “mental materialism” (p. 625), and a press that “shares the limitations of the gov- erning classes” (p. 646). As he did in “Self-Reliance,” Emerson

14 Philip F. Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), p. 269.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 272 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY argues that “the machine unmans the user,” and he admonishes “the mischief of the division of labor” perpetrated by a “brutal political economy” (p. 583) that looks to the accumulation of wealth instead of the “care and culture of men” (p. 590). England’s pursuit of wealth abroad had, moreover, actually impoverished its people at home. “In the culmination of na- tional prosperity, in the annexation of countries . . . it was found that bread rose to famine prices . . . and the dreadful barometer of the poor-rates was touching the point of ruin” (p. 591). Britain’s era of territorial expansion and technolog- ical development also “included years of ‘distress,’ of falling profits, of falling wages, of mass unemployment,” years that co- 15 incided with Emerson’s visit. On 6 November 1847, a story in the London Times exposed the commercial crisis that was gripping Great Britain: “The harvest failed—the potato rot also destroyed all the food of Ireland—the consequence was, that we were unexpectedly called upon to find 30,000,000 £.to supply this deficiency.” Such historic facts prompt Ferguson to conclude that “investment in domestic industry would have been better for Britain than investment in far-flung colonies” (p. xxi). Like Ferguson, Emerson recognizes the brutal character of colonialism. Some of the same native traits that equip the En- glishman to fare well abroad—the “vigorous energy” with which he will “hunt with fury by gun, by trap, by harpoon” (p. 537)— also render him “aggressive and propagandist” (524), which impels him to “force his island by-laws down the throat of great countries, like India, China, Canada, Australia,” trampling down “all nationalities with his taxed boots” (p. 579). Like his country’s founding fathers, Emerson full well knows that power corrupts. “Their vast colonial power has warped men out of or- bit” (p. 577), he opines; the English colonizers are “more just than kind” (p. 581), and they retain their hold by means of “armed colonies,” “a standing army of police” at home, and a navy “maintained by the impressments of seamen” (p. 552).

15 Walter L. Arnstein, Britain Yesterday and Today: 1830 to the Present (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1966), p. 30.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 EMERSON AND EMPIRE 273 In its foreign policy, the empire, “though ambitious and lavish of money, has not often been generous or just,” its principal re- gard being for trade. In fact, Emerson claims, “It sanctioned the partition of Poland, it betrayed Genoa, Sicily, Parma, Greece, Turkey, Rome and Hungary” (p. 661). When Europe was rev- olutionized in 1847–48, Britain did not come to the defense of emerging nations but stood by, as had America. Margaret Fuller, too, had criticized “the inertia of England” in her 1849 dispatches for the New York Tribune, as she urged her coun- trymen to send “a talisman to thy ambassadors” in Italy of the 16 “brotherhood of nations.” And in his Fugitive Slave Law speech of 1854, Emerson 17 had already complained that “England goes for trade.” By the time he composed English Traits, Emerson’s criticism had only deepened, deepened to the point that therein he angrily announces, “England must be held responsible for the despo- tism of expense” (p. 592). The critique of the British Empire that runs throughout En- glish Traits intensifies near the book’s end in “Wealth” and “Retrospect.” Sounding much like he did in “Self-Reliance,” where he claimed that “society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members,” and in “The American Scholar Address,” in which he insisted that so- ciety has metamorphosed man into “a thing,” Emerson draws a connection between materialism—the rule of society—and 18 colonialism that Ferguson does not. He had done so earlier, in his 1854 Fugitive Slave Law speech when he declared that Americans’ “bellies had run away with our consciences and our hearts,” their greed having turned Africans into “a species of 19 money.” In short, Emerson understands about the English

16 Margaret Fuller, “These Sad But Glorious Days”: Dispatches from Europe, 1846– 1850, ed. Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 313, 284. 17 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Seventh of March Speech on the Fugitive Slave Law,” in Transcendentalism: A Reader, ed. Joel Myerson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 598. 18 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1841) and “The American Scholar” (1837), in Transcendentalism: A Reader, pp. 332, 197. 19 Emerson, “Seventh of March Speech on the Fugitive Slave Law,” p. 592.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 274 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY what he understands about a slaveholding society—that a poli- tics of economy rather than of human culture and care corrupts the British and their empire just as surely as it corrupts the United States. Moreover, Emerson recognizes the complicity of institutions in that politics of economy. For example, the Times, whose mission should have been to safeguard human rights, actu- ally served the interests of the governing classes when it “de- nounced and discredited the French Republic of 1848,and checked every sympathy with it in England, until it had en- rolled 200,000 special constables to watch the Chartists and make them ridiculous on the 10th April” (p. 641). Having ex- perienced the skirmishes in Boston after the Massachusetts Supreme Court upheld the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850,Emer- son knew only too well the true allegiance of a nation’s insti- tutions. Whereas Ferguson writes from the retrospect of one hundred fifty years, Emerson’s experience was direct and per- sonal; therefore, his critique of imperialism and commerce has a tone of urgency that Ferguson’s lacks. “I happened to arrive in England at the moment of a commercial crisis” (p. 557), Emer- son reports, a crisis that spurred the Chartists to make one last stand in 1848. He was in England and France when the revolu- tions broke out across Europe. He attended a Chartist meeting on 9 March, heard Lamartine speak at the National Assembly in Paris, attended the radical French clubs—the Club de la Revolution´ and the Club des Droits de l’Homme—and saw the barren streets of Paris, whose trees had been cut down to form barricades. In the riots and revolutions provoked by hunger, fatigue, and unequal rights, Emerson had witnessed firsthand the negative effects of a commercial, imperializing society. He declared in a letter to his wife, “the deep sincerity of the speak- ers who are agitating for social not political questions, and who are studying how to secure a fair share of bread to every man, and to get the God’s justice done through the land, is very good 20 to hear.” The rights denied slaves in the United States had

20 Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Larry Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 34.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 EMERSON AND EMPIRE 275 fueled Emerson’s sympathy for the downtrodden in Europe, and following his sojourn in Europe, he “resumed his antislav- 21 ery crusade with renewed vigor and confidence.” Having weighed the advantages and disadvantages of em- pire, Emerson finally decides that “England is the best of ac- tual nations,” even though “it is no ideal framework” (p. 660). Thus he uncovers the paradox of empire—“that the best of actual races had grown into one of the greatest enemies of the highest principles,” even as its instincts for both liberty and 22 conquest have informed its policies abroad and at home. In “Result,” the penultimate chapter of English Traits, Emerson reminds readers of the abolition of slavery in the West Indies and the liberalization and modernization of Canada, Australia, and India, while at the same time he laments the poverty in England, Ireland, and Scotland and the betrayal of European nations whose revolutionary impulse runs counter to England’s overriding allegiance to property, the energizing force of em- pire. Philip Nicoloff notes that Emerson’s recognition of the “paradoxofthemodernEnglish...dramatizedtheirresistible hubris which [he] finally acknowledged as closing about all civ- ilized men, not only in their individual aspirations, but in their corporate hopes as well.” That view of the English, Nicoloff concludes, serves as “an indirect prophecy of [America’s] fu- 23 ture glory.”

Emerson’s apparent understanding of the paradox of empire takes us back to Ferguson’s first question: “Why should Amer- icans care about the history of the British Empire?” Ferguson offers two reasons: “The first is that the United States was a product of that empire....Second...theBritishEmpireis

21 Len Gougeon, “Emerson’s Abolition Conversion,” in The Emerson Dilemma: Essays on Emerson and Social Reform, ed. T. Gregory Garvey (Athens: Univer- sity of Georgia Press, 2001), p. 187; Len Gougeon, “Politics and Economics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, ed. Joel Myerson, Sandra Har- bert Petrulionis, and Laura Dassow Walls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 147–48. 22 Nicoloff, Emerson on Race and History, p. 240. 23 Nicoloff, Emerson on Race and History, pp. 240–41.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 276 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the most commonly cited precedent for the global power cur- rently wielded by the United States. America is the heir to the Empire in both senses: offspring in the colonial era, successor today” (p. xii). In their status as postcolonials, Emerson and his fellow citizens considered England their ancestral home. Terry Caesar claims that for the American travel book of the mid–nineteenth century, “its first idea of home was somewhere else, in England,” and Allison Lockwood defines with she calls the “mother country mystique,” whereby “strong ties of his- tory, religion, language, and literature bound the new nation 24 to the old.” To be sure, those commonalities are evident in the period’s travel narratives. Stowe exclaimed that England’s “history for two centuries was our history,” and Lydia Sigour- 25 ney referred to England as “the Mother Land.” But Caesar and other scholars have also noted “the importance of travel writing about abroad for America’s imagination of itself as a 26 nation.” In other words, Americans had two ways of looking at England: as the ancestral home, and as a foil to their own emerging sense of identity. And they could test out their ideas of themselves by reflecting on their relation to England and Europe. In “The Young American,” Emerson had contemplated the double consciousness of America’s postcolonial intellectual po- sition when he remarked that “our people have their intellec- 27 tual culture from one country, and their duties in another.” And he had called for an end to “our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands” in “the American Scholar,” his intellectual declaration of independence, as he sought out an 28 American scholar and, later, an American poet. Now, in En- glish Traits, the example of English imperialism prompts him

24 Caesar, Forgiving the Boundaries, p. 43; Allison Lockwood, Passionate Pilgrims: The American Traveler in Great Britain, 1800–1914 (New York: Cornwall Books, 1981), p. 11. 25 Stowe, Sunny Memories in Foreign Lands, p. 18;L.H.Sigourney,Pleasant Mem- ories of Pleasant Lands (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1842), p. 363. 26 Caesar, Forgiving the Boundaries, p. 8. 27 Emerson, quoted in Castillo, “The Best of Nations,” p. 106. 28 Emerson, “The American Scholar,” p. 196.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 EMERSON AND EMPIRE 277 to examine the United States from a different angle, as an in- dependent entity in transition from a postcolonial to an impe- rializing nation, a nation that belies some of the promises of its founding. Anne Baker reminds us that “during the first half of the nine- teenth century, the United States more than doubled in size,” 29 and it was eyeing lands “beyond continental limits.” In 1846, Britain ceded much of the Oregon Territory to the U.S. to 30 avert a looming threat of war. The 1847 war with Mexico had extended American territory in the southwest. From the 1840s, gold miners rushed into California, and then pioneers settled in the Plains states. Assorted projects to colonize parts of Cen- tral America and the Caribbean were also afloat at midcentury. This geographic and cultural expansion, Baker argues, “had a far more complicated, multifaceted impact on American cul- 31 ture than has been previously recognized.” Some, like John L. O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, argued that it is “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiply- ing millions.” That “narrative of progress,” wherein Americans would tame the wilderness with the engines of transportation and commerce, was dominated by dramatic actions such as 32 “expansion, change, and development.” Convinced that moral, political, and economic progress was linear, many of the period’s best minds thought that America’s unique civilization would arise from the conquest of the savage, the unknown, the undeveloped. “I must walk toward Oregon, and not Europe,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. “And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west.” Walt Whitman urged the nation westward in

29 Anne Baker, Heartless Immensity: Literature, Culture, and Geography in Ante- bellum America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), p. 1. 30 Paul Giles, “Transnationalism and Classic American Literature,” PMLA 118.1 (January 2003): 66–67 31 Baker, Heartless Immensity, p. 1 32 Quoted in Linda Hudson, Mistress of Manifest Destiny: A Biography of Jane Mc- Manus Storm Cazneau, 1807–1878 (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2001), p. 61; Baker, Heartless Immensity, p. 72; John O’Sullivan, quoted in Baker, Heartless Immensity, p. 105.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 278 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”: “Conquering, holding, daring, ven- turing, as we go the unknown ways.” And in “The Young American” (1844), Emerson had joined the chorus of Mani- fest Destiny with his declaration that “America is the coun- try of the Future. . . . [A]ll has an onward prospective look.” And, further, “there is a sublime and friendly Destiny by which the human race is guided,” and for Americans that destiny was to domesticate its vast landscape and advance the val- 33 ues of virtue, “justice and humanity.” Indeed, much of the rhetoric of self-reliance that Emerson shaped early in his ca- reer aligns personal growth with the rhetoric of geographical movement, a strategy that allowed him to value expansionism as progressive and inevitable at the same time as he suppressed its 34 costs. By the time he wrote English Traits, however, Emerson had a clearer understanding that in extending national boundaries, the United States’ ideal framework of democracy and equal- ity confronted the actualities of military incursion, force, and the displacement of indigenous populations, actualities that be- lied the promise of Manifest Destiny. He also recognized that geographic expansion was complicated by the debate over slav- ery. When, in 1837, Texas applied for entry into the United States as a slaveholding state, Emerson signed a petition of protest; and after Texas was admitted to the Union, he be- came more active in opposing slavery. For many Americans, Martin Duberman asserts, “the real watershed came in 1845, when Texas was annexed to the Union, and war with Mexico followed. The prospect now loomed of a whole series of new slave states.” Emerson sailed for England in October 1847,and

33 Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in The Portable Thoreau, ed. Carl Bode (New York: Viking, 1947), p. 604; Walt Whitman, “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), p. 374; The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson, Joseph Slater, and Douglas Emory Wilson, 8 vols. to date (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971–), 1:230, 234. 34 See my “Emerson, Columbus, and the Geography of Self-Reliance: The Ex- ample of the Sermons,” in Emerson Bicentennial Essays, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2006), pp. 273–88;JohnCar- los Rowe, “Nineteenth-Century United States Literary Culture and Transnationality,” PMLA 118.1 (January 2003): 78–89.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 EMERSON AND EMPIRE 279 Len Gougeon contends that he did so in part because he was distressed about the kidnapping of a runaway slave in Boston harbor in September 1846 and the eruption of the Mexican 35 War in May 1847. Alexander Ireland’s invitation that Emer- son give a series of lectures in England certainly came at a time when he was casting about for something that would “set [him] aglow,” but it also arrived when “the name of Washington City 36 in the newspapers is every day of blacker shade.” Signs of America’s paradox of empire were all about. Indeed, some of the same people who extolled westerly progress and the taming of the wilderness also spoke out against the harsher realities of expansion. Emerson’s friend and neighbor Henry David Thoreau had spent a night in jail rather than pay his poll tax, after which he wrote his manifesto “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849) wherein he advocated a “peaceable rev- olution” against a government that had become “the invading army.” From Italy, Margaret Fuller took a negative view of her homeland: “My country is at present spoiled by prosperity, stupid with the lust of gain, soiled by crime in its willing perpet- uation of Slavery, shamed by an unjust war.” In his 1858 sermon “The Revival of Religion Which We Need,” transcendentalist minister Theodore Parker made his case with reference to the country’s ills. “First, there is war,” a reminder that the United States had engaged in a questionable war with Mexico. “Next consider the character of the Federal government”—its dishon- esty, its imperializing forays into Cuba, Mexico, and Central America. “Next look at slavery,” which had been extended into 37 Kansas by virtue of the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854. From the 1840s on, Emerson participated in the fray over slavery

35 Gougeon, “Emerson’s Abolition Conversion,” pp. 177, 187; Duberman quoted p. 177. 36 The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman, 16 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960–82), 10:28–29. 37 Henry David Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government,” in Transcendentalism: A Reader, ed. Joel Myerson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 556, 550; Fuller, “These Sad But Glorious Days,” p. 230; Theodore Parker, Discourses of Theology, vol. 3 of The Collected Works of Theodore Parker, ed. Frances Power Cobbe (London: Trubner¨ and Co., 1863), pp. 237–38.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 280 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY and complained about the Mexican War, which he saw as a manifestation “of the failure of spirit in the face of the grow- 38 ing materialism of the age.” The lessons he learned from the Fugitive Slave Act, abolition, and the turmoil in Kansas prompted him to complain, “Language has lost its meaning in the universal cant. Representative government is really misrep- resentative. . . . Manifest Destiny, Democracy, Freedom, fine 39 names for an ugly thing.” Beyond U.S. borders, natural resources, harbors, and trade routes for American goods beckoned in the Caribbean and Central America. Even as she exposed some of the blunders and atrocities of the war with Mexico in her New York Sun articles, Jane Storm Cazneau urged America toward “informal empire.” “There is the great precious route across the isth- mus, south of Vera Cruz, to the Pacific, which ought to be attended to now,” she explained. “Here is an enterprise which ...maymaketheircitytheentrepotofAsiaandWestern America” (14 May 1847). Viewed as locations for the exten- sion of slavery or displacement of African Americans from the continental United States, the tropics might also serve as a 40 kind of “safety valve” for slavery. Plans to invade and then annex Cuba, developed in 1849 in concert with the indepen- dence movement of the Havana Club, were complicated by 41 issues revolving around slavery. Emerson alludes to the Cuba plot in his 1854 speech when he states that America’s lead- 42 ers “knew Cuba would be had,” just as Mexico would be. In 1853, the United States was contemplating bringing the newly independent Dominican Republic into the fold to gain harbors in the “commerce war that existed between the United States and Britain.” In 1855, William Walker invaded Nicaragua, had

38 Len Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform (Athens: Univer- sity of Georgia Press, 1990), p. 115 39 Emerson, quoted in Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson:TheMindonFire(Berke- ley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 498. 40 Robert E. May, “Lobbyists for Commercial Empire: Jane Cazneau, William Cazneau, and U.S. Caribbean Policy, 1846–1878,” Pacific Historical Review 48 (1979): 402, 389. 41 Hudson, Mistress of Manifest Destiny, pp. 102–11 42 Emerson, “Seventh of March Speech on the Fugitive Slave Law,” p. 593.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 EMERSON AND EMPIRE 281 himself elected president, and repealed Nicaragua’s anti-slavery law. Imperializing plans did not end with the Civil War or with the Americas. After the war, Secretary of State William H. Seward began “negotiating for the purchase of the Virgin Is- 43 lands, Alaska, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Midway and Guam.” In the next century, apparently not having absorbed the lessons of his famous grandfather, William Cameron Forbes served as 44 governor-general of the Philippines from 1909 until 1913. All of these enterprises, part of the national discussion, played into Emerson’s growing political sense and his discussion of empire in English Traits. It was, however, America’s empire within that most troubled Emerson. In a lecture on Human Rights in 1945,W.E.B. Du Bois argued that colonization is not only a problem of em- pires that stretch beyond national borders; in addition, “there are groups of people who occupy the quasi-colonial status” within the country. Not accorded full status as citizens, they are segregated and discriminated against “physically” and “spiritu- 45 ally.” With the publication of Len Gougeon’s groundbreaking Virtue’s Hero, we learned how deeply incensed Emerson was about slavery, especially after the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; as his anger mounted, so did his involvement in antislavery ac- tivities, which were occurring just as he was drafting English Traits and lecturing from it. Gougeon says of Emerson’s 1851 address on the Fugitive Slave Law, “Nothing less than pure rage is evident in the pyrotechnical ferocity of this attack on politicians, crass materialism, and especially the cultivated bar- barism of the polite classes who defend a moral outrage on the 46 basis of its constitutionality.” His ire is evident as well in his 1854 response to the Kansas–Nebraska Act, where he accuses a Christian America of hypocrisy. “If Slavery is good,” Emerson announces, “then are lying, theft, arson, incest, homicide, each

43 Hudson, Mistress of Manifest Destiny, pp. 146, 161, 183. 44 Len Gougeon, “The Legacy of Reform: Emersonian Idealism, Moorfield Storey, and the Civil Rights Movement,” in Emerson Bicentennial Essays, p. 191. 45 W. E. B. Du Bois, quoted in Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994; reprinted, London: Routledge, 2005), p. xviii. 46 Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero, p. 160.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 282 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY and all good and to be maintained by Union societies.” He calls on his audience to “stand alone” for society, to exercise the moral sentiment the nation has forgotten in its annexation of slaveholding territory and its illegal and immoral treatment 47 of some of its inhabitants. Among those ill-treated inhabitants were the country’s Native Americans, and Emerson lamented the fate of those who had been forced to leave their lands in Georgia. During the early decades of the nineteenth century, white Americans asserted that with the discovery of the new world, “the doom of the sav- age races . . . was sealed,” and as more and more Indians were relocated to reservations, they came to be referred to as “our 48 colonized tribes.” Margaret Fuller exemplifies white Amer- ica’s conflicted attitude about the Native American in her travel book Summer on the Lakes. Decrying the Indians’ poverty and progressive demise, she nonetheless portrays Native Ameri- cans as noble and picturesque, even though she insisted that “I have not wished to write sentimentally about the Indians, however moved by the thought of their wrongs and speedy 49 extinction.” Fuller wrote at a time when the Indians of Black Hawk’s band and the wandering Pottawatomie she encountered at the Great Lakes were being displaced from their traditional lands and resettled on reservations west of the Mississippi River, a “plan of colonization or removal” that had been inaugurated 50 by President James Monroe in 1825. In 1838, Emerson re- leased his open letter to President Martin Van Buren. “Such a dereliction of all faith and virtue, such a denial of justice, and such deafness to screams for mercy were never heard of in times of peace and in the dealings of a nation with its own

47 Emerson, “Seventh of March Speech on the Fugitive Slave Law,” pp. 595, 596. 48 Lucy Maddox, Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Poli- tics of Indian Affairs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 26, 10. 49 Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, in The Portable Margaret Fuller, ed. Mary Kelley (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), p. 213. 50 Quoted in “Indian Reservation History,” Access Genealogy, www.Accessgenealogy .com/native/tribes/reservations/rezhistory.htm (accessed 10 December 2009).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 EMERSON AND EMPIRE 283 51 allies and wards, since earth was made,” he insisted. Despite such opposition, “between 1828 and 1838, more than 80,000 Native Americans”—America’s “allies and wards”—were relo- 52 cated against their will. During the infamous Trail of Tears, approximately 4,000 of the 15,000 Native Americans removed died en route to Indian Territory. Emerson’s disdain for Amer- ica’s treatment of its minorities—Native American and African Americans—flows from the same observations that inform his critique of the British Empire: that its (and America’s) com- mercial, materialistic spirit impelled it to colonize other peoples and lands, and that its treatment of them could be brutal and heartless.

Phillip Gura finds it odd that Emerson did not include “any 53 of his antislavery writings” in English Traits. Butifweview English Traits as but another of the many documents in which Emerson was thinking about power and empire at midcentury, then it appears not an anomaly but another inscription on the larger palimpsest of texts about politics, power, and morality he had been producing and from which he had been preach- ing ever since he began speaking in public. Like other travel writers, Emerson was making use of his experiences abroad to define and think about America. In some ways, English Traits is uncannily similar to Fuller’s 1 January 1848 dispatch to the New York Tribune. Fuller writes about her visits to tourist sites and famous people in the generic form of a travelogue, as she had in earlier dispatches, but midway through the essay, she abruptly shifts direction and tone to criticize not only England but the United States. As Emerson would do in English Traits, she draws attention to “this hollow England, with its monstrous wealth and cruel poverty, its conventional life and low, practi- cal aims” and to England’s “public failure” to come to the aid

51 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Open Letter to President Van Buren,” in Transcenden- talism: A Reader, p. 228. 52 Gregory Campbell, “Indian Reservations,” Dictionary of American History, www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3401802046.html (accessed 10 December 2009). 53 Gura, American Transcendentalism, p. 248.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 284 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY of the struggling people of France, Poland, Italy, Russia, and Austria. “My country,” however, is “the darkest offender,” she avers,“because...foresworntothehighcalling with which she is called,” the United States has supported “this horrible 54 cancer of Slavery, and this wicked War [with Mexico].” In other words, Fuller conjoins her criticism of European tyranny, against which its people are rebelling but to which Britain is turning a blind eye, with the tyranny she sees at home. Although English Traits is about the English, its subtext con- cerns America’s position not just as a postcolonial nation but as a colonizing one. Marek Paryz calls the book “an ambigu- ous instance of the Emersonian project of giving testimony to thegrowingpowerandsignificanceofAmericaand...tothe 55 continuous maturation of American national consciousness.” As he troubles over the Compromise of 1850, the extension of slave territory, the war with Mexico, and the Fugitive Slave Law, Emerson still wants America to imagine itself not just as “the best of actual nations” but as “the hope of mankind” (pp. 660, 668). Written during a period of intense national and in- ternational turmoil for the rights of humankind, English Traits extends Emerson’s vision beyond the particulars of the Amer- ican landscape and onto the global arena, thus showing him to be an early thinker about the “force fields of transnational 56 conflict.” A travel book about his own journey to England and the transportation of English people, goods, and ideas around the globe, English Traits prompts us to consider Emerson’s work as part of an emerging discussion or meditation on glob- alization and transnationalism that complicates easy notions of American literature and Emersonian politics at midcentury. As Emersonsaidinhis1854 speech on the Fugitive Slave Law, “It is not possible to extricate oneself from the question in which 57 your age is involved.” For him, that question comes down to

54 Fuller, “These Sad But Glorious Days,” pp. 164–65. 55 Marek Paryz, “Beyond the Traveler’s Testimony: Emerson’s English Traits and the Construction of Postcolonial Counter-Discourse,” American Transcendental Quarterly 20.3 (September 2006): 565–66. 56 Giles, “Transnationalism and Classic American Literature,” p. 75. 57 Emerson, “Seventh of March Speech on the Fugitive Slave Law,” p. 600.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 EMERSON AND EMPIRE 285 this: how does a nation ensure the “care and culture of men” against the “tyranny of trade”? (p. 590).

Susan Roberson is Professor of English and Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Texas A&M University– Kingsville. She is author of Antebellum American Women Writers and the Road: American Mobilities (2011) and of Emerson in His Sermons: A Man-Made Self (1995); she is the editor of two collections, Defining Travel: Di- verse Visions (2001) and Women, America, and Move- ment: Narratives of Relocation (1998). She has written numerous essays on Emerson, travel, and the antebellum period.

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