Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1803. Thomas Jefferson was President of the United States and, only one month earlier, had signed the treaty for purchase of Louisiana Territory from France. One year later, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark departed from St. Louis on their arduous trek up the Missouri River to discover the "Northwest Passage." The potential size of the United States had virtually doubled; jumping across the Mississippi, US territory now extended to the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. France had essentially resigned all interest in North America, leaving only worrisome British interests along the north and along the Northwest Coast and well entrenched Spanish interests along the Gulf of Mexico (including Florida) and in an indefinite northwesterly wedge from Texas to the Pacific. While France had never settled Louisiana Territory, Spain's occupation of Mexico (New Spain) was long term; Spain had missionized and settled New Mexico from 1600 onward; and they had missionized the Pacific Coast from Baja California to the San Francisco Bay region, beginning in 1769. By the time of Emerson's death in 1882, the United States spread from coast-to-coast, and California was already a state. Spain also had relinquished interests in North America, though not peacefully. The United States had gained possession of the Oregon Territory.
Emerson's father was minister at First Church, Boston, and descended from an almost unbroken line of ministers whose first American ties began in 1635. Unfortunately, his father died in 1811 and the family (including five boys) removed to Beacon Street where they lived "poor and cold, with little meal, and little wood, and little meat," his mother taking in boarders and doing housework. From 1812 through 1817, Emerson went to Boston Latin School, and from 1817 through 1821, he went to Harvard College. After graduation, he taught school and began writing short articles; then, in 1825, he sought admission at and was accepted by Harvard Divinity School. In October 1826, he became a Unitarian minister and began to preach, though his ministry was cut short by incipient tuberculosis, which caused him to travel into the warmer climes of the South. Three years later, he was ordained junior pastor of the Second Church of Boston (Unitarian).
Emerson's marriage to Ellen Louisa Tucker, 1829, was cut short by her tragic death from tuberculosis in February 1831. A year later, Emerson resigned his pastorial position and embarked on European travels. He went to Italy, France, England, and Scotland; and he met many of the leading minds of Europe, including Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth. Carlyle, in particular, became a close friend. It was a crucial time in Emerson's development, leading to the formation of the basic principles on which American Transcendentalism would be launched. By 1836, he had settled down in Concord, Massachusetts, remarried (Lydia Jackson), and written Nature, the seminal monograph of the American Transcendental movement.
Emerson himself associated Transcendentalism with the classic tradition of Idealism. "What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us," he said, "is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842." In this respect, his thought was heavily influenced by Plato and the neo-Platonists. But the name of this movement came from Immanuel Kant's philosophy of the late 18th Century. Kant's "transcendental analytic" and "transcendental dialectic," in his Critique of Pure Reason, demonstrated the logical priority of specific mental functions to our experience of the world. The very possibility of experience, Kant thought, depends upon specific functions of human reason. Kant's work was the ultimate solution to the fundamental problems in empiricism as they had been laid out by John Locke and, later, criticized by David Hume. Thus, Emerson saw Transcendentalism as a contemporary phase in the long struggle between classical materialism and idealism. "The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man," Emerson said; "the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture."
Emerson's resignation from Second Church was the end of his Unitarian ministry; after his return to America in 1834, he found his way through lectures, essays, and (later) poetry. Each winter brought forward a new lecture series with a specific theme, and this provided many opportunities to meet other ambitious American thinkers. One of these (1835) was another dissatisfied Unitarian, Bronson Alcott, who, along with Emerson, founded the movement known as Transcendentalism. At the same time, George Ripley, yet another former Unitarian minister, founded the utopian community called Brook Farm and invited Alcott and Emerson to join, though both declined. Another was his most famous disciple, Henry David Thoreau (1837), who lived in Emerson's household from 1841 through 1843. In this early period, Emerson delivered a famous lecture, "The American Scholar," to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard and appealed to his audience to end their dependence upon European culture and, instead, to create a fully independent and strong American intellectual culture. In his Harvard Divinity address, of 1838, he seemed to have carried independence to an extreme and to have cut himself so far loose from God, in their minds, that he was not invited back for more than twenty years.
In the 1840s, the great migration of Americans had begun to trickle across the plains, mountains, and deserts of the West toward Oregon Territory and Alta (Mexican) California. Virtually all eastern Indians had been forcibly removed to "Indian Territory," a sorry excuse for land, on the western side of the Mississippi, promised as a "permanent" homeland but only to later become Oklahoma. By the end of the decade, war with Mexico had ended with Texas, New Mexico Territory, California, and the ill-defined and little understood Great Basin all brought into the Union. The United States streched from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Rio Grande to Vancouver Island.
Essays: First Series was published in 1841, and Essays: Second Series was published in 1844. His first series of Poems was published in 1846. Throughout the rest of his life, Emerson became an increasingly demanded lecturer and published poems, collections, and full books. For at least a half decade before the Civil War, he engaged in anti-slavery activism, and met Lincoln in 1862. His "Boston Hymn" celebrated the Emancipation Proclamation, in January 1863. Harvard awarded him an honorary LL.D. in 1866. After his death, in 1882, his forty-year correspondence with Carlyle was published (1886); and in 1910, his own Journals were published in ten volumes, having begun when he was at Harvard College and carried throughout his life.
Notes
(1) Unitarians were a small splinter group of Calvinists who could no longer support the Calvinist teachings of innate depravity, infinite atonement, predestination, and election. They lived primarily in eastern Massachusetts at the beginning of the 19th Century. The faithful Calvinists condemned them as infidels; but the Unitarians remained faithful to the idea that a thoroughly rational, reasoned approach to religious belief would ultimately capture a true spirit of Christianity.
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(2) In the early period of Unitarianism, young ministers had tried to bring together the scientific reason of the Enlightenment with Christian faith. They went so far as to assert that the Bible was an empirically sound history of God's influence on human affairs. By the 1830s, however, this path was beginning to crumble under the scholarly researches of German "Higher Criticism" which was uncovering the actual history of the Bible's evolution. Unitarian's began to move backward toward a more traditional Calvinism; but Emerson, Alcott, and others could not do this. Transcendentalism was strongly influenced by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Ellery Channing; but its roots lay in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant whose "transcendental" investigations into pure reason had laid the foundation for the crucial role of reason in all human experience. Emerson and others mapped a course, in Transcendentalism, by which reason itself could address God. It was, in fact, Idealism born in a new manifestation.
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Sources:
Edman, Irwin. "Biographical Note" in Emerson's Essays (Harper, 1951);
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "The Transcendentalist" a lecture in Boston, January 1842
(gopher://gopher.vt.edu:10010/02/79/14).
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