The Public Intellectualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and W.E.B. Du Bois: Emotional Dimensions of Race and Reform (Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance)

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10.1057/9780230105652 - The Public Intellectualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and W.E.B. Du Bois, Ryan Schneider

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THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUALISM OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON AND W.E.B. DU BOIS

Engaging Audiences Bruce McConachie Literature, Science, and a New Humanities Jonathan Gottschall The Public Intellectualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and W.E.B. Du Bois Ryan Schneider



Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance

Emotional Dimensions of Race and Reform

Ryan Schneider



The Public Intellectualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and W.E.B. Du Bois

THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUALISM OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON AND W.E.B. DU BOIS

Copyright © Ryan Schneider, 2010.

From “Fathers, Sons, Sentimentality, and the Color-Line: The Not-QuiteSeparate Spheres of W.E.B. Du Bois and Ralph Waldo Emerson,” in No More Separate Spheres!: A Next Wave American Studies Reader, Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher, eds., pp. 355–375. Copyright 2002, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. From “How to Be a (Sentimental) Race Man: Mourning and Passing in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk,” in Boys Don’t Cry? Rethinking Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion in America, Jennifer Travis and Milette Shamir, eds., pp. 106–123. Copyright 2002, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978– 0 –230– 61884 –8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schneider, Ryan. The public intellectualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and W.E.B. Du Bois : emotional dimensions of race and reform / Ryan Schneider. p. cm. — (Cognitive studies in literature and performance) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–61884–8 (alk. paper) 1. American literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803–1882—Political and social views. 4. Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868–1963—Political and social views. 5. Racism in literature. 6. Reformation in literature. 7. African Americans in literature. I. Title. PS169.R28S66 2010 810.9⬘355—dc22

2009030394

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: March 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



The author gratefully acknowledges permission to publish portions of the manuscript (in some cases now revised) that have appeared in essay form in the following edited collections:



For Dorrie, Mally, and Emmy



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Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: The Province of Public Intellectualism: Emerson, Du Bois, Emotion, and Reform Writing

1

1 Race: You’ll Know It When You Feel It

23

2 Double Consciousness: It’s More Than What You Think

49

3 Losing Your Head: Why Du Bois and Emerson (Mostly) Like John Brown

71

4 Intimate Attachments: Fathers, Sons, and Public Intellectuals

93

Conclusion: Theory of Mind and the Color Line

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Notes

143

Bibliography

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Index

179



Contents




Completing this book would not have been possible without the help of a multitude of mentors, friends, and family members. First and foremost, I must thank Cathy N. Davidson. If not for her knowledge, creative energy, and editorial acumen, I would never have been able to bring Emerson and Du Bois together. Equally deserving of thanks are: Lawrence Buell, who first led me to Emerson, who kindly and expertly continues to respond to my (still clumsy) scholarly efforts; and whose research I return to again and again for insights and guidance; Thomas J. Ferraro, whose seminars pushed me to explore the relationship between intellect and emotion and whose keen ear and unflagging passion helped me understand why scholarship has to be personal as well as public; Karla F.C. Holloway, whose hard questions about autobiography and willingness to share her work on African American mourning practices redirected and enriched my approach to writing about race and loss; Robert Paul Lamb, who was there at the beginning, whose abundance of personality is unmatched by anyone anywhere, and who continues to show me why art and craft matter; Michael Moon, who provided essential comments and insights throughout the early stages of this project; Dana D. Nelson, whose invaluable scholarship and generous mentorship I deeply cherish; and William Anthony Nericcio, fellow traveler (to destinations local and exotic), artful performer, and academic godfather who mixes work and play in mutually beneficial ways. Much gratitude is due to the many other friends and colleagues who graciously shared their thoughts and critiques and allowed me to share mine: Kristina Bross, Jeffory Clymer, June



Acknowledgments

ACK NOW LEDGMENT S

Cummins, Susan Curtis, John Duvall, Wendy Stallard Flory, Gayle Iwamasa, Christopher Lukasik (despite his misplaced basketball allegiances), Howard Mancing, Daniel Morris, Bill Mullen, Venetria Patton, Nancy J. Peterson, Charles Ross, Margaret Moan Rowe, Aparajita Sagar, María Carla Sánchez, G.R. Thompson, and Bonnie Wheeler. I also want to acknowledge the support of my former and current department heads, Thomas Adler and Irwin Weiser, respectively, as well as that of my colleagues in Purdue’s Cognitive Literary Studies Group, Early American Reading Group, and American Studies Program. Other timely assistance has come in the form of research grants and teaching releases from the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue; the Purdue Research Foundation; the San Diego State University Research Foundation; the SDSU Department of English and Comparative Literature; and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Much credit and gratitude also are due to Lee Norton, Brigitte Shull, and the rest of the wonderfully patient and highly professional editorial and production staff at Palgrave Macmillan. It has been a joy and honor to work with many graduate students, past and present, whose research interests and enthusiasm for exploring new fields, methods, and questions have helped shape this book’s arguments. Particularly deserving of acknowledgment and appreciation are Chris Abreu (Cheap Buffets & Operation Pedro Pan); Mary Barford (Emerson & More Emerson); Mark Bousquet (Water & Whalemen); Leslie Hammer (SDSU & UCSD); Jamie Hickner (Barolo & Lumumba); Nicole Livengood (Stoddard & Fuller); Brian McCammack (Dylan & Soulja Boy); Melissa Peck (Louboutin & Prada); Casey Pratt (Hawthorne & Poe); Karen Salt (Black Russians & Haiti); Stephany Spaulding (Hip Hop & Twain); and Erik Wade (Black Masculinity & The National Horse Thief Detective Association). I want to thank all my family members—Armstrongs, Davises, Hochstetlers, Schneiders, and Thomases—for their support, but most especially my parents, Paul and Jan Schneider: there is no adequate measure or expression for their love and confidence. Finally, I offer my thanks to those closest to home: Mally and Emmy, possibly the stealthiest twin daughters on the planet, for periodically invading my office and absconding



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with as many books as they can carry (diversions come in many forms, but none quite so entertaining as chasing after small, giggling book thieves); and Dorrie Armstrong, goddess of all things Arthurian, for understanding what it means to live and work together in the way we do.



ACK NOW LEDGMENT S




The Province of Public Intellectualism: Emerson, Du Bois, Emotion, and Reform Writing

Before I explain what this book is about, I am going to list some of the similarities—a few bordering on the uncanny—that mark the personal and professional lives of Ralph Waldo Emerson and W.E.B. Du Bois: similarities all the more striking given the differences in their racial subject positions and eras of intellectual emergence. Both were natives of Massachusetts and grew up in nearly all-white communities. Both were raised in financially strapped households, and, for the most part, lacked the presence of a father or father figures. Each attended Harvard College on scholarship (Du Bois also earned a PhD, the first African American to do so), and both presented reform-themed formal addresses to Harvard students and faculty. They survived debilitating illnesses as young adults; they trained for and then left the security of established professions; they suffered the losses of their first wives; and they endured the deaths of firstborn sons, each writing publicly about the experience. Both also edited periodicals that became lightning rods for controversy (Du Bois’ The Crisis more so than Emerson’s The Dial); formulated concepts of double consciousness that gained notice from their contemporaries as well as current scholars (again, Du Bois’s more so than Emerson’s); and composed historical-biographical narratives of individuals they regarded as representative or heroic figures (John Brown received attention from both). Finally, they



Introduction

P U B L I C I N T EL L E C T UA L I S M O F EM E R S O N & D U B O I S

achieved national and international reputations in their lifetimes and, it is no risk to claim, left immeasurable, lasting impressions on the terrains of intellectual, political, and cultural life in the United States and abroad. No evidence suggests they ever met or corresponded—Du Bois reached his fourteenth birthday just two months before Emerson died in April of 1882. Still, many readers, myself included, find no lack of Emersonian ideas and themes in Du Bois’s writing, and numerous scholars—literary critics, intellectual historians, philosophers—have explored the various strands of thought that connect their work.1 My list, however, does nothing to further arguments about intellectual influence (and neither does this book). It is meant instead to sketch out a set of interests and experiences that are similar but not precisely alike—shared but not the same. And while I admit to a fascination with the many ways Emerson and Du Bois mirror each other—the earlier paragraph is a small sample—this book’s goal is not to survey common points in their biographies, whether the loss of a child or a shift in vocation. Rather, it is to examine narratives that result from and respond to such coincidental interests and experiences— narratives that very often serve as calls for or commentaries on individual and social change and that are governed by Du Bois’s and Emerson’s concepts of public intellectualism (more on the relation between reform writing and public intellectualism later). The variations in these reform narratives, the markers and spaces of difference that feature prominently in the following chapters, necessarily reflect an array of broad cultural and political changes that occurred during the approximately fifty-year period that separates Emerson’s emergence as a public intellectual from that of Du Bois. Yet at the heart of these narratives stand particular questions about the possibilities for reform and abiding concerns about problems of black-white relations that temper the work of Emerson and Du Bois in remarkably similar ways. My readings focus on moments when Du Bois and Emerson probe and question various institutions, traditions, and habits of thought that determine the material and political circumstances of blacks and whites and shape the felt quality of interracial relations. Such interpellations differ in content and



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tone within individual texts and across the larger bodies of Emerson’s and Du Bois’s work, but they nonetheless are revealing of both intellectuals’ attempts to articulate the emotional dimensions of race and reform: the range of affective-cognitive processes that attend moments of black-white interaction and intercommunication and the ways such processes may expand, limit, or reconfigure possibilities for reform. Neither Emerson nor Du Bois provides a single, unambiguous notion of what race comprises, and each is immersed in contemporary currents of thought on the subject that are far from consistent. One of this book’s main arguments, however, is that while both offer multiple and sometimes conflicting definitions of race, each ultimately turns to discourses of emotion to delineate racial differences, examine problems of black-white relations, and explore possible models for reform. Relatively little attention has been given to the emotional dimensions of either Emerson’s or Du Bois’s reform writings, a fact both surprising and ironic given the passion both intellectuals show for their subjects. Drawing on Sarah Wider’s study of Emerson’s critical reception, Len Gougeon notes that, with a few important exceptions, scholars have devoted themselves to Emerson’s “intellect and intellectual contributions” and that many “seem to preclude the possibility that Emerson was even capable of psychological behavior, and by that is meant behavior stimulated by anything other than intellectual sources” (Emerson & Eros, 12).2 The same assertion holds true for Du Bois; critics have shown minimal interest in the conceptualization and thematization of emotion in his writings and are far more apt to focus (often exclusively) on his intellectual influences and achievements.3 This undervaluing of emotion is due partly to the sense of formality that characterizes the life and work of each man. Both could evince a distinct sense of detachment, in person and on paper, even when addressing emotionally charged subjects such as abolition and racial equality. Still, I think we too easily misperceive Emersonian dissociation or Du Boisian formality as indicating a lack of feeling, when in fact these qualities are constituent of complicated



INTRODUCTION


emotional configurations that play key roles in their work. Moreover, there are multiple instances in their writings on reform when feelings of detachment give way to intensely intimate sentiments that exemplify emotion’s capacity to maintain or alter thoughts, perceptions, and behaviors. In this regard, Du Bois and Emerson precede a host of current scholars—from philosophers and cultural anthropologists to evolutionary psychologists and neuroscientists—in conceptualizing emotion as a process comprising both affect and cognition. In general terms, the affective element of emotion refers to the moment when we perceive and respond physiologically to some evidence that our values and goals (material, social, spiritual, intellectual) may be influenced, positively or negatively, by some aspect of our environment (an event, an object, the speech or actions of another person). The cognitive component of emotion refers to both the judgments we make about whatever gives rise to the initial affective response as well as the ongoing monitoring and adjusting of our behavior that takes place in its aftermath, a phase that could last a fraction of a second or far longer if the external influence or problem continues to show the potential to either support or undermine our desires and beliefs.4 My use of the term emotion encompasses both its affective and cognitive elements, although, depending on the thematic and narrative qualities of a given text, I may emphasize one over the other. Some works—Du Bois’s 1903 The Souls of Black Folk, for example—shift frequently and seamlessly between affective description and cognitive-based commentary; others, such as Emerson’s 1844 “Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies,” dwell on the cognitive phase of emotion and make only intermittent and brief references to affect. Comparative analysis of texts such as these reveals the variegated and sometimes discordant ways Emerson and Du Bois conceptualize emotion’s capacity to manifest and alter habits of thought and behavior; it also underscores their shared belief that reform writing, in order to succeed in an ethical sense, must endorse, foster, and model strategies for prolonged cognitive monitoring and continuous adjustment of thought and action.



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The method and structure that support my arguments about emotion, race, and reform are distinctive in two ways. First, they bring Emerson and Du Bois together for sustained and balanced comparative readings. Despite several decades of canon expansion and revision, few scholars have linked their work in more than a cursory fashion, and those that do champion one writer over the other. Such paucity and imbalance are evidence that the color line remains more than a vestigial habit of thought and feeling among scholars. By that I do not mean racism, either outright or covert, but a tendency to enact interracial analyses either by including one or two nonwhite figures in a broad study otherwise populated by white writers or by drawing together figures of many different racial backgrounds and sampling small, representative portions of their work. Please do not mistake my point. There is no shortage of excellent scholarship that crosses the color line to positive effect: books or essay collections wherein subjects of different races commingle under the same or similar thematic, theoretical, or historical umbrellas— or anthologies that place the work of a writer of color under multiple subheadings to highlight its diversity and to avoid casting the author solely as a representative figure for a particular racial or ethnic group. I have no quarrel with any project driven, in whole or in part, by an impulse to move across racial boundaries in pursuit of such goals. But crossing the color line is not the same thing as drilling down into spaces of racial difference and opening up the interstices for prolonged comparative investigation and interpretation. The former sometimes may lead to the latter, but more often we trade depth for breadth when it comes to examining work by black and white writers. Such approaches outline (again, to positive effect) the multiplicity and diversity of ideas generated in response to issues of race and tensions of black-white relations. Yet rarely does the interpretive axis shift from the horizontal to the vertical long enough for us to become intimately familiar with substantive points of convergence and divergence. The interracial critique I offer makes visible thematic and narrative dimensions of Emerson’s and Du Bois’s writings that cannot be fully revealed by prevailing critical practices that treat their



INTRODUCTION


bodies of work separately, unequally, or as component parts of a broad-reaching survey. Operating along a vertical line of inquiry and within a closely circumscribed field, it juxtaposes a series of similar narratives and provides sustained close readings of both their affective-cognitive aspects and thematic concerns. In fact, the second distinctive feature of this book’s approach is that it puts the affective-cognitive elements that shape Emerson’s and Du Bois’s narratives of reform and race on equal footing with content—that is, it treats their writing as both a category of narrative and a form of cultural work. In so doing, it focuses exclusively on nonfictional narratives—essays, lectures, historical biography, and autobiography—since these are the richest and most nuanced reform texts Du Bois and Emerson produced. Many explore reform and race at theoretical or conceptual levels; others do so in relation to particular issues and problems. Several explicitly identify race and reform as chief concerns; others offer indirect or oblique references while delving into other questions. My readings address both the subject matter of these texts and how their narratives of affectivecognitive experience shape the ways content may be articulated and received.5 My choice of texts stems also from a desire to draw and build on extant work in narrative studies, a field that generally has been more enamored of fiction than nonfiction. The narrative turn that continues to take place across a wide range of disciplines—not just the humanities but also the social sciences and even legal and medical studies—presents an ideal chance to generate and refine theoretical premises that broaden the critical vocabulary available for analysis of nonfiction.6 The writings of Emerson and Du Bois are especially fertile ground for such efforts, and conjoining their work on reform and race clarifies in detail how the emotional discourse of nonfiction enables and shapes audiences’ engagement with its themes and content. Tracing the affective-cognitive arguments embedded in Emerson’s and Du Bois’s reform writings also provides a muchneeded complement to other disciplinary analyses of reform that focus on such issues as social movement theory, mass mobilization, rational choice theory, and class consciousness.



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To be clear: this book in no way discounts or disputes historical or social-scientific studies of reform; nor does it challenge the work of literary critics who may be more attuned to the cultural thematics of reform writing and less so to its affective-cognitive dimensions.7 Such research is invaluable if one is to understand how certain ideologies and concepts (e.g., sentimentality, benevolence, sympathy) are linked with various movements for change (e.g., abolition, women’s rights, temperance) that are themselves yoked to a range of sociocultural shifts, tensions, and problems (take your pick). Connections and relations such as these—by now commonplaces in the study of antebellum and postbellum reform—could not be reconstructed or explored in any depth absent a focus on social movements and cultural thematics.8 Several of my readings of Du Bois and Emerson follow a similar interpretive path by comparing the different kinds of cultural work their narratives accomplish and tracking the positions each writer takes on particular issues or in response to specific events and experiences. Yet such readings cannot fully address the matters of reform and race with which Emerson’s and Du Bois’s writings contend. It is crucial as well to compare the affective-cognitive aspects of narrative they rely on to express problems with the structure of black-white relations and possibilities for their reform. Doing so not only provides insights specific to the work of each individual but also enhances the study of reform in a broader sense by outlining and exemplifying some of the challenges and rewards of bringing narrative considerations into deeper conversation with the study of theme, content, and cultural work. Chief among those challenges is reckoning with the variable of referentiality: what James Phelan calls the degree to which a narrative is expected to refer to actual rather than imagined people and events. Whereas fiction may operate at the level of what Phelan calls “local referentiality”—meaning it has the option of connecting itself in some fashion to real people, places, and things from the present or past—nonfiction must operate at the level of “global referentiality” and meet the expectation that “the entire narrative refers to actual people and events.” Phelan goes on to contend: “referentiality means that nonfiction narratives can be



INTRODUCTION


contested in ways that fictional ones cannot, whenever the nonfictional narrative refers to public figures and events,” and that a nonfiction text that fails to meet audience expectations for referentiality runs a far greater risk than a fictional one of being judged negatively. Moreover, some nonfictional narratives run a greater risk of negative judgment than others because they appear in genres—autobiography, for example—that audiences are especially keen to believe are accurate or authentic (Experiencing Fiction, 217–220). Building on Phelan’s arguments, my readings show how Emerson’s and Du Bois’s nonfictional reform narratives value referentiality with regard not only to actual people and events but also to emotions and ethics. Both writers narrate affectivecognitive experiences to provide audiences with a sense of emotional familiarity, intensity, and substance, meaning they try to define and depict feelings that are recognizable, provocative, and relatively long-lived. And very often they do so to raise and explore ethical questions about the means and goals of individual and collective reform that otherwise might remain marginalized or go unasked and unanswered by their readers. In other words, I show how emotional referentiality in their nonfiction is tied not only to issues of genre but also to similarities and differences between author and audience (racial similarities and differences, for my purposes) that a narrative itself may call attention to as ethically meaningful or problematic. Much like the corresponding events and experiences from Emerson’s and Du Bois’s lives I listed at the outset of this Introduction, the risks of negative judgment for nonfiction writers of different races may be similar, but they are not precisely alike; they may be shared, but they are not perceived or experienced in quite the same way, even if the writers are working in matching genres. The fields of narrative studies and reader-response criticism have, over the past two decades, provoked and maintained pathbreaking discussions of cultural, racial, gender, or other differences between author and audience (whether authorial audiences, flesh-andblood readers, or both), but most attention goes to fictional rather than nonfictional genres, and the links between theme



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and affective-cognitive narrative strategies that could further elucidate such differences have not been explored.9 I track types and degrees of referentiality across a range of topics and genres in Du Bois’s and Emerson’s reform work— from their biographical-historical accounts of John Brown to their elegiac-autobiographical writings on the deaths of their sons—to explicate not only the differences in their authorial subject positions and constructions of audience but also how their narrative accounts of actual people, places, events, and (most important) feelings differently calibrate their articulations of the ethical issues and concerns of race reform. Finally, I show how both writers personalize and depersonalize accounts of their own life experiences to enhance their narratives’ capacity for emotional referentiality and, by extension, more vividly elucidate the ethical stakes attendant to any change in the status quo of black-white relations. My analyses of referentiality are not ends in themselves; they substantiate broader explications of Du Bois’s and Emerson’s attempts to construe relations between affect and cognition as a means of articulating fine yet crucial distinctions between and among different feelings—distinctions that, in turn, help them test the possibilities, limits, and ethics of change: Which reforms are presented as desirable or dangerous—and how do nonfictional narratives enable corresponding feelings of enthusiasm or reticence? What kinds of changes are presented as probable or improbable—and how can nonfictional accounts of affective experience and cognitive monitoring cause audiences to feel, perceive, and adjust their behavior in accordance with that likelihood? Put another way, I examine Emerson’s and Du Bois’s reform writings with an eye toward the cultural work they perform, but I do so through an affective-cognitive lens that brings into sharper relief the ways they anticipate, interpret, and attempt to shape audiences’ emotional engagements with the ethical content of their texts. Such examinations reveal the different expectations Du Bois and Emerson have for public approval or disapprobation as each seeks to make audiences feel, literally and figuratively, that they have something to gain or



INTRODUCTION


lose if reform is manifested in a given context or in relation to a specific racial problem or tension. The affective-cognitive aspects of narrative I have been referring to (in general terms thus far) are constituent of a concept that Theory of Mind (ToM) literary scholars refer to as “mindreading.” ToM-based criticism explores connections between our desire and ability to attribute states of mind to characters within a novel, for example, and the affective-cognitive processes we use to narrow the range of possible explanations for their behavior: to guess at what characters are feeling and why by determining which motivations and goals are likely or unlikely, relevant or irrelevant, ethical or unethical.10 For ToM critics, affective-cognitive constraints and adaptations make fictional narratives meaningful and enjoyable by enabling us to act as better mindreaders of characters—that is, to more accurately identify (or make more satisfying guesses about) their emotional states and also to make ethical judgments about the reasons for and results of their actions. The great majority of ToM literary criticism focuses on fiction, mainly because novels and short stories are rich in the kinds of affective-cognitive interplay—desires and counter-desires, attributions and misattributions of motivation—that make for meaningful interpretive experiences. Moreover, critics who follow ToM approaches suggest that fictional narratives appeal to us by offering mindreading challenges of varying duration and form. A Henry James novel, for example, might present a lengthy series of interpretive puzzles regarding a character’s motivation, while a Flannery O’Connor story might offer similar enigmas in an equally complex but less protracted narrative.11 Works by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Chesnutt may call upon our abilities to decipher characters’ emotional states and judge their actions given only partial access to their histories, while novels by William Faulkner and Toni Morrison can draw us into narrative mazes that test our capacity to mindread characters’ feelings and evaluate their behavior when confronted with variable focalization and multiple instances of metalepsis. The nonfictional reform narratives to which this book is devoted are not much of a type with The Ambassadors, The



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Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, or Beloved. Yet the emotional and ethical mindreading challenges they offer, particularly with regard to race, are equally intriguing and substantial. My first chapter, for example, shows how the ethical import of reformist essays such as Emerson’s 1844 “An Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies” and Du Bois’s 1897 “The Conservation of Races” are enabled by strikingly similar approaches to race that construe it not only as an innate biological characteristic or geopolitical construct but also as an affective-cognitive phenomenon: something that is best articulated as an emotional process and best apprehended in terms of the feelings that specters of miscegenation or racial extinction (to cite two examples) can provoke. Beginning with such basic comparative sketches, the chapter goes on to draw more complex and vivid maps of the affective and cognitive elements of emotion that shape the “Address” and “The Conservation of Races,” both of which are foundational texts, in terms of ethical content, for Emerson’s and Du Bois’s future writings on race and reform. In addition to delineating the mindreading efforts Emerson and Du Bois invite, or, in some cases, demand, from their audiences, these comparisons also tell us something, in turn, about these intellectuals’ respective efforts to mindread their audiences—meaning not simply the extent to which they, like all skilled rhetoricians, predict and preemptively shape the responses of their auditors and readers to particular issues, but, more importantly, how the various affective-cognitive models that are described, examined, critiqued, and endorsed in their narratives serve to delimit the problems and possibilities of race reform. The book’s second chapter continues to make visible the emotional discourse of Du Bois’s and Emerson’s reform narratives through comparative readings of one of the most famous of these affective-cognitive models: double consciousness. The literature, philosophy, and science of European Romanticism, broadly construed, help generate and shape these ideas, while more specific possible sources include Hegelian philosophy and Lamarckian scientific thought (for both Emerson and Du Bois) as well as



INTRODUCTION


Jamesian psychological theory and the utopianism of Edward Bellamy (for Du Bois alone).12 My interest is less with the intellectual origins of double consciousness than with the emotional discourse that gives it shape and substance.13 Du Boisian double consciousness, for example, is embedded in affective-cognitive expressions largely overlooked or bypassed by critics who focus mainly on the concept’s racial and geopolitical thematics— specifically the “two-ness” of being an American and a Negro (Du Bois, Du Bois: Writings, 364). Yet his narrative strategy is to present double consciousness and two-ness first and foremost as manifestations of feeling: “It is a peculiar sensation, this doubleconsciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness” (ibid.). The “peculiar sensation” is the product of other feelings—“amused contempt and pity”—that, taken in toto, create a condition in which one “feels” two-ness. Du Bois’s narrative strategy delineates the affective-cognitive aspects of double consciousness and serves as a crucial element of the passage’s critique of the collective ethical failure of the white world with regard to race relations. Chapter two also examines the affective and cognitive dimensions of Emersonian double consciousness, a concept he addresses in “The Transcendentalist,” an 1842 lecture later published in essay form, and, most famously, in “Fate,” an 1851 lecture revised and published in the 1860 collection The Conduct of Life. Comparing Emerson’s and Du Bois’s narratives of double consciousness reveals its special relevance to the notions of public intellectualism and leadership that govern each man’s vision of reform. In Emerson’s view, for example, while all humans may be subject to the emotional experience of double consciousness, only rarely do certain individuals perceive and articulate their experiences in ways that help reform themselves and others. Du Boisian double consciousness can be read as an essential element of African American subjectivity, but it also can be interpreted as a specific marker of the affective-cognitive experience of black intellectuals and artists whose obligation is to uplift the race.



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Public intellectualism may seem something of an anachronism in reference to Emerson since, unlike Du Bois, he was not alive in 1898 when the term “public intellectual” first emerged as part of the discourse surrounding French writer Emile Zola’s participation in the infamous Dreyfus Affair.14 Yet the reform narratives of both Emerson and Du Bois are guided in part by what Ross Posnock calls “the Dreyfusard ideal of protest founded on a rejection of culture and politics conceived as private domains ruled by vested interests”—an ideal he identifies as central to a sense of cosmopolitanism among turn-of-thecentury black intellectuals that emphasized “democratic culture and citizenship grounded in common humanity” and “a dialectic between (unraced) universal and (raced) particular” (2, 13). I examine the affective-cognitive experiences Emerson and Du Bois address when they assume the mantle of reform writer, and I show how the narratives that result from this process delineate and propagate their respective versions of both the Dreyfusard ideal of protest and the relationship between unraced universals and raced particulars. Chapter three further elaborates on and clarifies the links Du Bois and Emerson forge among reform, race, and public intellectualism by comparatively analyzing their writings on John Brown and his 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Emerson’s accounts—letters and lectures composed in the aftermath of the raid—challenge the mainstream view at the time that Brown was a traitor (and a lunatic one at that) and present him instead as a hero and martyr: a Christ-like figure to be admired for his force of will and clarity of moral vision. Du Bois, in a 1909 biography, praises Brown for not only galvanizing antislavery sentiments among Northern intellectuals and politicians but also inspiring slaves to escape in greater numbers, and he argues that Brown should be lionized as a white version of Nat Turner or Denmark Vesey. Bringing Du Bois and Emerson together spotlights their shared interest in commending Brown’s militant activism and elevating him to the status of savior of the Union. Yet while both admire him, neither recommends that anyone should actually do what Brown did. This may seem something



INTRODUCTION


of a moot point since their audiences would not have expected Emerson and Du Bois to incite militant insurrection or martyrdom, and neither man would have recognized an imperative to do so. But the form and fervency of their support begs additional scrutiny. Emerson risks the wrath of his audiences by not only likening Brown to a Founding Father but also going so far as to suggest a similarity between Brown on the gallows and Christ on the cross. Du Bois for his part is equally emphatic and provocative in casting Brown as a latter-day Toussaint L’Ouverture. Indeed both Emerson’s of-the-moment commentary and Du Bois’s biographical narrative, composed a half-century later, bring into sharp relief a vision of Harpers Ferry as a justifiably violent and epic sacrifice in service of restructuring race relations. Yet both ultimately push their audiences to interpret Brown’s model of reform figuratively rather than literally: to take up his passion rather than his guns and pikes. Their approach to Brown is motivated by something more than a distaste for militancy or an intellectual rejection of martyrdom per se: both are reluctant to endorse his violence even as they praise his heroism because, in the end, he fails their litmus test for reform under the aegis of public intellectualism. This is not simply a matter of moving too quickly from affect to action or of mistaking a threat to the individual as a threat to the collective. The problem is that Brown’s model of reform prevents any extensive or substantial cognitive monitoring of the situation to which he responded and sought to redress, and, thus, while it may be morally sound, it is not ethically viable. The distinction Emerson and Du Bois make between recommendation and commendation—quietly refusing Brown the former while vociferously granting him the latter—signals their shared belief in fostering change under the principles of public intellectualism: principles that do not foreclose possibilities that the reformer will be able to imagine, express, and enact original visions of change in the future by continuing to monitor the situation at hand. To be sure, Harpers Ferry was an emphatically defiant call for much-needed reform. But, at the conceptual level, it represented a chaotic and ineffective articulation of affect and cognition—and thus did not offer an ethics of change



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that either Emerson or Du Bois could truly endorse. In a letter written to his brother William shortly after news of the raid reached Concord, Emerson succinctly captured both the political success and the public intellectual failure that occurred at Harpers Ferry: “Brown is a true hero, but he lost his head there” (The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 178). Chapters two and three best exemplify the approach to public intellectualism I take throughout the book—one that does not align precisely with any of the various schools or trends that characterize current criticism and theory on the subject. It should be clear by now, for example, that I have nothing to add to the academic parlor games of ranking intellectuals or sparring about whether the species is in danger of becoming extinct.15 Both practices evince a crisis-and-declension theme that has persisted in discussions and studies on the status of public intellectualism in the United States since the early decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, one of the stunning (in a bad way) characteristics of much current commentary on the role of the public intellectual is a tendency to reference history without actually taking it seriously, a tendency that often manifests itself in formulaic, jeremiad-like narratives. To generalize only a bit: such commentaries begin with a pronouncement that, at some point in the past, public intellectuals and their work carried a great deal more weight, culturally speaking, than is the case nowadays; these narratives continue by shifting back and forth between anguished soul-searching as to why this is the case and scathing critique of any perceived faults (political, social, moral, ethical) from which the current intellectuals might suffer; they conclude with predictions of further degeneration, warnings of ultimate extinction, and sometimes—but this is rare—acknowledgment of possible redemption. The public intellectuals of previous generations (so most versions of this sermon-story go) were better than those of today in any number of ways: they thought better thoughts, felt nobler feelings, and articulated more substantial ideas; they were less self-involved, less encumbered by professional specialization, and less compromised by market forces. Moreover, whereas the giants of the past were broadly schooled, widely



INTRODUCTION


read, and spoke clearly and effectively to a large audience, current generations have been strangled by jargon, know little beyond their narrow areas of expertise, and speak only to a likeminded few. The type of declension storyline I am describing here may make good grist for book reviewers and opportunistic pundits, but it ultimately shuts down more possibilities for inquiry than it opens, especially when used as proxy evidence for alarmist claims (which I have no desire to perpetuate) that the nation as a whole is devolving toward a cultural or political nadir. For those proclaiming the decline of the intellectual, the issue at stake is a perception that the United States suffers from social fragmentation brought on by cultural pluralism and moral relativism; in such cases, then, “the past” takes a starring role in the prelapsarian story of a place and time when cultural identity and heritage were at once more unified and substantial.16 This book also makes no contribution to—although it certainly draws from—the ever-growing body of research that examines intellectuals in terms of social class and professional identity, the largest subset of which comprises sociological and historical studies that track the configuration of intellectual classes and their attendant vocational practices. These studies delineate the ideas and activities of intellectual groups or movements (e.g., the New York Intellectuals) and tell us something about where, when, and how they performed their work. Another subset, not so large as the first but equally influential, also devotes considerable attention to the class positions and practices of intellectuals. But its purpose is less to underpin arguments about specific groups or movements and more to substantiate conceptual models (e.g., Gramsci’s organic intellectual, Foucault’s specific intellectual) that attempt to theorize the intellectual’s position vis-à-vis culture writ large.17 I also wish to distinguish my approach from that of scholars who, working at the intersection of social and intellectual history, have developed over the past twenty-five years a stunning (in a good way) collection of work on public intellectual cultures in the United States. Indeed, the criticism of public intellectuals’ declining status is in many ways an unfortunate



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outgrowth of the study of “cultures of intellectual life,” to use Thomas Bender’s phrase. The latter is a far richer body of scholarship than the former: less preoccupied with the public intellectual as a category of identity, it focuses on the social institutions and economic forces that determine the form and content of intellectual discourse within a particular community. Its goal, generally speaking, has been to refashion the field of intellectual history to address the social factors within communities that influence intellectual life—factors that shape the local context within which ideas are produced and received. Such emphasis has allowed social-intellectua l historians not only to trace the ways and means by which specific intellectual cultures have been formed and sustained in the United States but also to evaluate the interaction—often competitive— among them as they seek to gain recognition and authority within broader society. The study of cultures of intellectual life assumes such cultures are “historically constructed and are held together by mutual attachment to a cluster of shared meanings and intellectual purposes. They socialize the life of the mind and give institutional force to the paradigms that guide the creative intellect.” 18 Perhaps the most significant achievement of this scholarship, at least for students of nineteenth-century culture, has been to make us more aware of how the rise of professionalism (itself the product of an increasingly industrialized and incorporated public sphere) shifted both the production and reception of intellectual work from community locales to the realms of specific disciplines. As work within professions, even long-standing ones such as law and medicine, became more specialized, those who performed it became somewhat more detached from civic culture; the audience for their ideas shifted from fellow citizens to peers within their disciplinary cultures. These shifts did not take place at the same pace and to the same extent in all sections of the country (certainly they were well-defined in the urban centers of the Northeast long before they even commenced in other regions). Yet they nonetheless can help construct a useful context for analysis of the intellectual work performed by someone such as Emerson (whose peers and audience were drawn mainly



INTRODUCTION


from New England’s urban white population and who did not envision himself as a member of a discipline) as well as a figure such as Du Bois (whose disciplinary training in history and sociology inflect many of his early essays and whose first major publication, The Philadelphia Negro, was a study of African American life conducted under the auspices of a fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania and addressed mainly to an academic audience). Each of my chapters gives some consideration to issues of social-professional class identity and the cultures of intellectual life in which Du Bois and Emerson were participants, but these are outweighed throughout the book by my attention to the heuristic qualities of public intellectualism. By heuristics I mean two things: an emphasis on the value of knowledge derived from experience (mainly affective-cognitive experience), and the formulating and posing of ethical questions and concerns (tacitly and explicitly) regarding a problem or tension that needs to be addressed but for which there is no immediate or straightforward means of calculating a solution. For Du Bois and Emerson, the heuristic qualities of public intellectualism allow both the affective and cognitive dimensions of emotional experience to be articulated via narratives that are just as likely to foster ambiguity and uncertainty as they are to solicit or affirm particular judgments and definitive answers. Recall the famous opening lines of The Souls of Black Folk: Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? They say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word. (363)

The narrator’s descriptions of various encounters with members of the “other world” (the narratees who pose the questions)



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identify a range of affective-cognitive experiences—sensitivity, uncertainty, curiosity, sympathy, anger, compassion—each of which underscores the difficulty of defining problems of race relations. Mindreading has a role here as well: the narratees who inhabit the “other world” are not very good at it while the narrator is an expert, one who not only anticipates their queries but offers responses that shape the encounters in ways that properly vary according to what “the occasion may require.” Du Bois’s white authorial audience—his ideal white readers— are meant, at the very least, to see the exchanges between narrator and narratee as ethical lessons in what not to do when it comes to interracial communication. All the better if they recognize that the narrative elements of the passage emphasize the emotional dimensions of black-white relations: that whether racial difference is a biological or a social construct, the end result is a mélange of affect that renders it difficult, if not impossible, to engage in the kind of extended cognitive monitoring necessary to identify and describe the true source and nature of racial problems. My readings throughout the book show how Du Bois, in contrast to Emerson, also writes for a second set of ideal readers, a black authorial audience, with whom narratives of reform and race are meant to establish more intimate author-audience connections. Such connections are based on precisely the kinds of experiences I described earlier: encountering a wide range of affective-cognitive expressions during moments of interracial communication; needing to mindread whites who are not capable of responding in kind; reckoning with the emotional fallout of racial tensions that cannot easily be articulated, much less resolved; and, above all, being interrogated and perceived as the problem itself rather than as one who is subject to its most devastating effects. Each chapter shows reform writing under the umbrella of public intellectualism to be a mode of educated guessing about the states of mind and feelings of others in order to articulate problems and ideas without falling back on polemics or onedimensional policy debates. Under such an umbrella, narratives that convey both the affective and cognitive elements of emotion



INTRODUCTION


become all the more important because they allow fuller expression of the complexity and ambiguity of problems that may spark a desire for reform. In particular, they have the flexibility and potency to explore the meanings and possibilities of change in an abstract, depersonalized sense even as they comment more specifically on matters of reform at a personal level. Both Emerson and Du Bois achieve such flexibility and potency, although to different degrees and for different ends, in writings on the deaths of their first-born sons: five-year-old Waldo, who died of scarlet fever in 1842, and two-year-old Burghardt, who in 1897 fell victim to diphtheria. The book’s final chapter brings these moments together— they appear in Emerson’s letters, journal entries, and his essay “Experience” (1844) and Du Bois’s essay “Of the Passing of the First-Born” from The Souls of Black Folk—to show how both fathers use the deaths of their sons (whom they characterize as future reform leaders) to substantiate public intellectualism as a governing principle for reform.19 My readings demonstrate in stark fashion how Dreyfusard ideals of protest and dialects of unraced universals and raced particulars manifest themselves differently as each writer recognizes in the death of his son a potential catalyst for reform. Both see their losses as opportunities to use personal emotional experience in support of calls for change at a universal, metaphysical level (i.e., their shared desire that people adjust their perceptions of the material and spiritual dimensions of life), but Du Bois also sees his son’s death as a chance to foster reforms of particular racial problems (e.g., the segregation of races in late-nineteenth-century Atlanta that prevented him from finding adequate medical treatment for Burghardt). Du Bois’s and Emerson’s elegiac-autobiographical narratives bring to light a shared tension in their reform writing between conceptualizing intimacy as a means of overcoming individual and group differences and as a signal of the ethical difficulty (even danger) of seeking the kinds of attachments beyond the self that are necessary for broad-scale social change.20 Their narratives shift between personalized visions of reform—wherein referentiality and heuristics reflect the extent to which emotional



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connections to one’s audience are possible—and moments when such possibilities are subsumed within attempts to theorize the nature of interpersonal attachments. These shifts echo the kinds of ethical questions I raised earlier and that both Emerson and Du Bois relentlessly explore: What are the problems that matter most and how can they be articulated in ways that enable change? Which changes are possible—and how can audiences be made to feel, perceive, and perhaps even act in ways that might achieve them? Which reforms are worthwhile and which are potentially regressive—and how can writers evoke corresponding feelings of sympathy or disaffection? For Du Bois and Emerson, these questions and their emotional dimensions constitute both the province of public intellectualism and the jurisdiction of nonfictional narrative. Let us now look more closely at how they navigate their ways through this shared affective-cognitive territory.



INTRODUCTION




Race: You’ll Know It When You Feel It

Go looking for references to race in Emerson’s work and you will find them embedded in a geography that is, by turns, regional, national, and global. New Englanders are representative of the American race; the greatest qualities of the American race are properly understood as products of English heritage; and to describe Englishness requires an atlas large enough to encompass the Saxons, the Normans, the Celts, the Goths, and the Romans. Even a relatively shallow pass through Emerson’s writings yields enough evidence to confirm Lawrence Buell’s observation that “he generally thought more in terms of place than race” (Emerson, 272). Something similar could be said of Du Bois who, in his 1897 essay “The Conservation of Races,” wrote: We find upon the world’s stage today eight distinctly differentiated races, in the sense in which History tells us the word must be used. They are, the Slavs of eastern Europe, the English of Great Britain and America, the Romance nations of Southern and Western Europe, the Negroes of Africa and America, the Semitic people of Western Asia and Northern Africa, the Hindoos of Central Asia and the Mongolians of Eastern Asia There are, of course, other minor race groups, as the American Indians, the Esquimaux and the South Sea Islanders; these larger races, too, are far from homogeneous; the Slav includes the Czech, the Magyar, the Pole and the Russian; the Teuton includes the German, the Scandinavian and the Dutch; the English include the scotch, the



Chapter 1


Irish and the conglomerate American. Under Romance nations the widely-differing Frenchman, Italian, Sicilian and Spaniard are comprehended. The term Negro is, perhaps, the most indefinite of al, combining the Mulattoes and Zamboes of America and the Egyptians, Bantus and Bushmen of Africa. Among the Hindoos are traces of widely differing nations, while the great Chinese, Tartar, Corean and Japanese families fall under the one designation—Mongolian. (817–818)1

A gloss of Du Bois’s writing at various stages of his long career shows that he consistently thinks of race and place together and moves easily among local, national, and global contexts, although without the Emersonian habit of nudging race to the margins. Still, whether the relation between race and place is balanced or biased matters less than the fact that both Du Bois and Emerson use it to resist definitive conclusions or judgments about what race might actually comprise. The question remains open-ended because neither accepts the premise that a single, static definition can account for the physiological and cultural diversity within racial groups. Moreover, both view interracial relations as far too complex to be governed by extant epistemologies of racial difference. For his part, Emerson repeatedly affirms and then rejects the notion of fixed racial characteristics, both across the body of his work as well as within particular texts (most notably his 1856 English Traits).2 The cumulative effect of this oscillation is to conceptualize race indirectly as a placeholder for correlations of the physical and the metaphysical that are linked to particular geopolitical contexts but not entirely bound by them— correlations stable enough to be recognized and tracked from one generation to the next but flexible enough to allow for a telos that, properly perceived, reveals the spirit or constitution (to use Emerson’s words) of a people. Such expansiveness enables Emerson to acknowledge that racial differences matter—and, to a lesser extent, demonstrate how they matter—without offering a final, conclusive taxonomy or explanation of the qualities that constitute race itself.



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Evasion-via-expansion is, of course, a hallmark of Emerson’s oeuvre, but its implications for his writings on race and reform are nonetheless worthy of closer scrutiny: partly because this narrative strategy codes race as supplemental to cosmopolitan geopolitical contexts, but, even more important, because it embeds problems of racial difference and possibilities for their reform in discourses of emotion. Another way of coming at this is to point out that Emerson’s expansive placeholder looks very much like the dialectic of (unraced) universal and (raced) particular Posnock argues is constituent of the cosmopolitanism displayed by turn-of-the-century black intellectuals such as Du Bois. What I am showing in this chapter is that for Emerson and Du Bois, such cosmopolitanism, while expressive of their different linkages of the geopolitical and the racial, hinges on a shared narrative approach that articulates problems of race and possibilities for reform in the emotional discourse of affective response and cognitive monitoring. In Emerson’s work, problems of racial difference do not necessarily stem from the existence of political and social inequalities since these are, for him, expressive of a natural racial hierarchy in which blacks develop politically and socially under the guidance and at the behest of whites, who, possessing greater knowledge of these issues, hold greater power to determine their particulars. Describing interracial relations after the 1834 emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies, he defines the status quo of this hierarchy: It now appears, that the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization. The emancipation is observed, in the islands, to have wrought for the negro a benefit as sudden as when a thermometer is brought out of the shade into the sun. It has given him eyes and ears. If, before, he was taxed with such stupidity, or such defective vision, that he could not set a table square to the walls of an apartment, he is now the principal, if not the only mechanic, I the West Indies; and is, besides an architect, a physician, a lawyer, a magistrate, an editor, and a valued and increasing political power. The recent testimonies of Sturge, of Thome and Kimball, of Gurney, of Phillippo, are



R A C E : YO U ’ L L K N O W I T W H E N YO U F E E L I T


very explicit on this point, the capacity and the success of the colored and the black best of all, is the testimony to their moderation. They receive hints and advances from the whites, that they will be gladly received as subscribers to the Exchange, as members of this or that committee of trust. They hold back, and say to each other, that “social position is not to be gained by pushing.” (30)3

Within the natural order of things, both races demonstrate proper decorum and restraint, each showing the other courtesy and respect, thus obviating the possibility that problems of racial difference might arise in the political and social arenas. Yet problems do arise, and according to Emerson they manifest themselves through the threats of miscegenation, economic dependency, and ethical shortsightedness. In the case of miscegenation, Emerson means not the intermixing of different light-skinned races but rather crossings of the color line between light and dark that threaten to undermine white superiority and intraracial solidarity. In the economic arena, he refers to excessive dependence on slavery, a condition that undermines self-reliance and ultimately hinders whites as much as blacks, Northerners as much as Southerners. And, finally, he critiques the ethical myopia of whites who cannot shed their beliefs in African Americans’ inherent inferiority and recognize that blacks have “won the pity and respect which they have received, by their powers and native endowments.” Emerson argues that accepting the premise of black inferiority is akin to believing: that the Creator of the Negro has given him up to stand as a victim of a caricature of the white man beside him; to stoop under his pack, and to bleed under his whip. If that be the doctrine, then, I say, if He has given up his cause, He has also given up mine, who feel his wrong, and who in our hearts must curse the Creator who has undone him. (36)

If such are the problems of race, the possibilities for reform, in Emerson’s vision, begin with preserving the hierarchies and boundaries that enable white privilege. While he may correctly



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be understood as progressive when it comes to abolition—two decades of scholarship have documented the development and maturation of his antislavery efforts in the 1840s and 1850s— such work does not necessarily encompass changes to the status quo of white-black relations. Emerson clearly desires a world free from slavery in all forms, and he never disavows the possibility that blacks might develop greater intellectual, physical, and cultural vitality. But neither does he fully relinquish his beliefs in Anglo-Saxon superiority and in the necessity of conserving political and social distinctions between and among different races in order to demonstrate and perpetuate that superiority. Du Bois, especially in the early years of his career, shares Emerson’s neo-Lamarckian view of race as a mutable admixture of physical characteristics and behavioral tendencies influenced by environment and passed down, in altered but recognizable form, from one generation to the next. And, like Emerson, Du Bois believes in the notions of social hierarchy associated with neo-Lamarckian science. But for him, problems of racial difference begin and end with the kinds of questions about political agency and social relations that, in Emerson’s work, are always and already foreclosed by assumptions that blackness is a natural barrier to the exercise of full democratic citizenship and a normative factor in determining social hierarchy. Remove race from the calculus of political and social equality, Du Bois argues, and uplift will follow. As early as 1896, in his landmark sociological study The Philadelphia Negro, he observes, “even a Negro bootblack could black boots better if he knew he was a menial not because he was a Negro but because he was best fitted for that work” (395).4 While his overriding concern in reformist writings on racial difference is to question and problematize the political and social status quo Emerson takes as given and necessary, Du Bois also expands and reconfigures discussions of the kinds of issues—sexual, economic, ethical—that Emerson does recognize as problems of racial difference. Whereas Emerson concerns himself with the threat miscegenation poses to white racial integrity, Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk decries the “red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had





stamped upon” his race, a tradition of sanctioned violence that “meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home.” (368) Du Bois does not limit his comments on interracial sexual dynamics to the trauma and violence suffered by black women. In his capacity as editor of The Crisis, he provides extensive coverage and documentation of the lynching of black men, many of whom were attacked, tortured, and murdered on the pretense of having had sexual relations with white women. Contrasting economic conditions in the British West Indies before and after emancipation, Emerson argues that under slavery the “islands proved bad customers” to England whereas afterward former slaves with wages to spend created a new and robust market for English clothes, tools, and crockery, thus increasing the wealth and improving the material circumstances of whites and blacks alike (21). For Du Bois, the economics of racial difference are not so easy to parse out. He certainly acknowledges that the abolition of slavery was a necessary step in enhancing, however gradually, the quality of life for African Americans, but he also notes that it did not erase the pecuniary benefit to whites of maintaining a belief in black inferiority. In his 1940 essay collection Dusk of Dawn, looking back on more than a half-century of his own research on black poverty, Du Bois writes: I think it was in Africa that I came more clearly to see the close connection between race and wealth. The fact that even in the minds of the most dogmatic supporters of race theories and believers in the inferiority of colored folk to white, there was a conscious or unconscious determination to increase their incomes by taking full advantage of this belief. And then gradually this thought was metamorphosed into a realization that the income-bearing value of race prejudice was the cause and not the result of theories of race inferiority. (649)

Given this insight, Du Bois might reply to Emerson that while benefits certainly accrue to both races upon the abolishment of slavery, the persistence of white-on-black prejudice provides



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an extra dividend to whites that compounds over time to create greater and greater disparities in wealth. He also might observe that when Emerson calls for abolition, his arguments are both economic and ethical, but when he calls for an end to stereotypes of black inferiority—chastising New Englanders for using the word “Nigger” and excoriating Southern planters for treating their slaves as animals—he does so on ethical grounds alone, appealing the “sentiment of right, which is the principle of civilization and the reason of reasons” (36–38). I emphasize this point not to criticize Emerson for failing to acknowledge the value of the prejudice dividend; no doubt he understood at some level the financial advantage to whites of fostering notions of black inferiority. Rather I mean to highlight his faith in ethical appeals as a means of enacting race reform and Du Bois’s skepticism of same—a difference I revisit and examine in greater depth in chapters two and three as part of my comparative readings of their concepts of double consciousness and writings on John Brown. Having sketched out in broad strokes some of the key similarities and differences in Emerson’s and Du Bois’s respective notions of what constitutes a problem of race and a possibility for reform, I want to add some detail to the picture by focusing more closely on Emerson’s 1844 “Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies” and Du Bois’s “The Conservation of Races.” Beyond linking race to geopolitical markers, these essays display an intriguingly similar preoccupation with the idea of preserving races from extinction while mapping out ideals to which they should aspire. As my comparison unfolds, evidence of the various thematic intersections and divergences I described earlier will become more apparent, and along the way I will refer back to issues of political and social equality, sexuality, economics, and ethics. The ultimate aim of my analysis, however, is to underscore how these essays articulate race as an emotional process in which affective response and cognitive monitoring not only reflect the tension that may arise from racial difference but also help address or resolve it. Du Bois published “The Conservation of Races” in 1897 as part of the Occasional Papers series sponsored by the American





Negro Academy. The Academy, established that same year under the leadership of Episcopal clergyman Alexander Crummell, was the first learned society exclusively dedicated to the work of African American thinkers, writers, and artists. Crummell wished the Academy to be a forum in which members could present work that affirmed the intellectual and cultural achievements of African Americans and offered both inspiration and practical means for uplifting the race.5 As the second installment of the Occasional Papers series, “The Conservation of Races” heralds Du Bois’s move from the confines of professional academia and university scholarship to the spheres of public intellectualism and race leadership. It also sets out many of the arguments about race and reform he would continue to expand and refine up through the early and middle decades of the next century. Early sections of the essay outline drawbacks and difficulties of scientific attempts to categorize racial groups and also trace the role of race in shaping human history (Du Bois offers some evidence of the “universal prevalence of the race idea” and its utility as a means of organizing social and political relations). Moving from the historical to the sociological, he provides brief descriptions of contemporary racial groups before turning to address more specific concerns with the status of the Negro in America. It is here, in the heart of the essay, that he first explores the double-bind of African American subjectivity and raises the questions—“Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both?—that later would be enfolded into his concept of double consciousness. The remainder of the essay examines some of the problems associated with that doublebind and sets out principles of conduct and leadership as well as some practical policies that members of the Negro Academy should follow to fulfill their intellectual and artistic potential and, by extension, uplift the race as whole. In the opening paragraph—prior to the essay’s early sections on the science and history of racial groups—Du Bois makes a claim about African Americans’ collective response to discussions of racial origins and ideals in late-nineteenth-century America: he argues that they approach debates and dialogues on race with deep suspicion because past experience has taught



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them that such talk, especially when it addresses questions of racial difference, very often is predicated on assumptions of black inferiority. While there may be no consensus about what race comprises, there is a general agreement, among African Americans at least, that it is most accurately perceived and understood in light of the feelings of distrust and disillusionment it engenders: The American Negro has always felt an intense personal interest in discussions as to the origins and destinies of races: primarily because back of most discussions of race with which he is familiar, have lurked certain assumptions as to his natural abilities, as to his political, intellectual and moral status, which he felt were wrong. He has, consequently, been led to deprecate and minimize race distinctions, to believe intensely that out of one blood God created all nations, and to speak of human brotherhood as though it were the possibility of an already dawning to-morrow. (815)

Du Bois explains and justifies this disenchantment by outlining at a thematic level the sentiments that characterize discussions of race from the perspective of African Americans, but he also relies on a narrative approach that enlivens and amplifies those thematics for his readers by treating race as an emotional process and leading us through its affective-cognitive phases: first an “intense personal interest” in the topic (which opens the possibility for discussion of race); then indignity at the presumption of black inferiority (which forecloses any chance for meaningful discussion of race); then disgust with the doctrine of racial distinctions (which becomes cause for its deprecation and rejection); and, finally, a passionate belief in the possibility and immediate necessity of transcending that doctrine (which then segues into an embrace of a monogenetic view of human origins). As an element of narrative, this affective-cognitive sequence allows Du Bois not simply to identify emotions associated with problems of racial difference but also to enhance their referential capacity—in this instance, specifically for an African American audience.6 The affective-cognitive sequence





enhances the likelihood of a positive judgment by his audience because it makes feelings recognizable in a thematic sense even as it renders them familiar in an experiential sense. Successful reception requires Du Bois to accurately mindread his black audience and offer them a narrative that interweaves raced particulars (e.g., the presupposition of black inferiority) and unraced universals (e.g., the desire to believe that “out of one blood God created all nations”) in a way that mirrors or at least approximates their own perceptions and experiences of racial difference and that can serve as a kind of affective-cognitive common ground for intraracial solidarity. Taken as a whole, the narrative suggests Du Bois’s main goal in the introductory section is to establish an emotional kinship with his readers that will, later in the essay, help establish and strengthen the intellectual links between black author and black audience. But Du Bois does not settle for a one-way courtship: he offers his African American audience a mindreading challenge of its own at the outset of the very next paragraph, in part by directing greater attention to white readers and even more so by arguing that the affective-cognitive sequence modeled in the first paragraph results in an understandable but unsound belief in monogenesis: Nevertheless, in our calmer moments, we must acknowledge that human beings are divided into races; that in this country the two most extreme types of the world’s races have met, and the resulting problem as to the future relations of these types is not only of intense and living interest to ush, but forms an epoch in the history of mankind. (815)

The pronoun switch—from the “he” of the first paragraph to the “we” of the second—abruptly unsettles the sense of connection Du Bois so artfully secured between himself and his black readers in the essay’s opening lines. Now they are compelled to guess at his motivations and positions whereas before these seemed clear: To what extent does his original affective-cognitive narrative actually endorse the feelings it articulates and to what extent



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does it simply reflect them? Does the imperative to acknowledge racial divisions “in our calmer moments” mean the rejection of the doctrine of racial distinctions and the embrace of mongenesis was too hasty? And were that not enough of a mindreading task, Du Bois’s black readers also must guess at and make decisions about their status within this new authorial audience—one that seems to bring whites and blacks together under the banner of inclusion so that they might profess to believe (paradoxically?) in the division of races. Whereas in the first paragraph, racial distinctions give rise to calls for human brotherhood, in the second that same brotherhood—that “we”—is called upon to acknowledge a world divided into races. Still, even as second passage complicates Du Bois’s relationship to his black audience and adds a new layer to his commentary on racial problems and reform possibilities, it maintains a narrative approach based on the concept of emotion-asprocess. Looking at both paragraphs together helps clarify that what the first offered was not a balanced, mutually beneficial relation between affect and cognition but instead one that lacked sufficient time and space to adequately monitor and evaluate the external factors that gave rise to the feelings in the first place. The “calmer moments” of the second paragraph signify what for Du Bois is not lack of affect or a better form of it but rather a situation in which affective responses are supplemented and complemented by unabbreviated cognitive monitoring and result in a more expansive view of interracial dynamics. According to Du Bois, such a view would allow one to perceive and understand the historical actuality of racial divisions and their significance to any future discussion of reform. It would allow one to acknowledge the physicality of race but, at the same time, recognize the existence and greater importance of certain ethical ideals that members of a race should strive to achieve: Although the wonderful developments of human history teach that the grosser physical differences of color, hair and bone go but a short way toward explaining the different roles which





groups of men have played in Human Progress, yet there are differences— subtle, delicate and elusive, though they may bewhich have silently but definitely separated men into groups. While these subtle forces have generally followed the natural cleavage of common blood, descent and physical peculiarities, they have at other times swept across and ignored these. At all times, however, they have divided human beings into races, which, while they perhaps transcend scientific definition, nevertheless, are clearly defined to the eye of the Historian and the Sociologist. If this be true, then the history of the world is the history, not of individuals, but of groups, not of nations, but of races, and he who ignores or seeks to override the race idea in human history ignores and overrides the central thought of all history. What, then, is a race? It is a vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life. (817)

Du Bois’s first concern is to show that race is critical to a linear understanding of history. In other words, he pushes beyond the model of the representative man to establish the importance of racial groups in the study of human development. And while he notes the existence of variations between people on a physical level, he is more concerned with establishing the presence of an abstract set of differences— characteristics more apparent to the humanist than the scientist and best apprehended in emotional rather than empirical terms. We can read Du Bois’s rejection of empirical observation as an attempt to formulate a narrative model that minimizes the emotionally limiting effects of static, physical racial boundaries (a task continued in later works such as his 1915 The Negro) but does not go so far as to minimize the distinctions between and among races (the sort of move he warns against in the essay’s second paragraph). Narratives of race and reform must be dynamic and flexible enough to permit not only the discussion of physical distinctions but also the exploration of shared cultural practices, desires, and ideals. Indeed it is the concept of racialized ethics to which Du Bois returns again and again in the remainder of the essay. His



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ultimate argument—one that resonates in intriguing ways with Emerson’s—is not just that races and racial differences must be preserved but that such preservation must concern itself with “the ideals of life” and “deeper differences” of psyche and spirit “undoubtedly based on the physical, but infinitely transcending them” (818). Finally, Du Bois urges his audiences (black and white) to think of race as a growth process based upon the existence of transcendent (but not immutable) differences. Significant racial separation occurs because groups grow in different ways according to the collective ideals they favor and, by the same token, the ideals of a particular racial group may shift as the race itself develops. As physical distinctions lessen, says Du Bois, differences in the ideals expressed and pursued by different races become more critical to the history of human development: The English nation stood for constitutional liberty and commercial freedom; the German nation for science and philosophy; the Romance nations stood for literature and art, and the other race groups are striving, each in its own way, to develop for civilization its particular message, its particular ideal, which shall help to guide the world nearer that perfection of human life for which we all long, that “one far off Divine event.” (819)

Ideals—and the passion to guide the world nearer to them— constitute a discourse of emotion that animates and structures the final sections of the essay as Du Bois urges his readers to develop the ethical habits of being “honest” and “earnest” in examining their lives and adjusting their behavior with the immediate goal of self-reform, and to then use their intellectual and artistic abilities to cultivate and propagate those habits in others with the long-term goal of conserving racial distinctions while fostering collective social uplift. A similar discourse of emotion animates Emerson’s vision of reform in his “Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies.” He too brings his work to a climax with the argument that individual races must preserve themselves for the greater good and that such preservation must





privilege the ideals and ideas each race best represents. Like Du Bois, he allows that such ideals may shift and that new ones can (indeed must) emerge as races develop. Grounding and illustrating his claims with examples from the natural environment, Emerson writes: Eaters and food are in the harmony of nature; and there too is the germ forever protected, unfolding gigantic leaf after leaf, a newer flower, a richer fruit, in every period, yet its next product is never to be guessed. It will only save what is worth saving; and it saves not by compassion, but by power. It appoints no police to guard the lion, but his teeth and claws; no fort or city for the bird, but his wings; no rescue for flies and mites, but their spawning numbers, which no ravages can overcome. It deals with men after the same manner. If they are rude and foolish, down they must go. When at last in a race, a new principle appears, an idea;—that conserves it; ideas only save races. If the black man is feeble, and not important to the existing races, not on a parity with the best race, the black man must serve, and be exterminated. But if the black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization, for the sake of that element, no wrong, nor strength, nor circumstance, can hurt him: he will survive and play his part. (30–31)

The assertions Emerson makes are emotionally powerful, in part because they are so uncomplicated: ideas—and “ideas only”— save races, so if a race survives, we know its members carry in their bosoms “an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization.” Conversely, if a race is exterminated, we need not trouble ourselves with asking by whom or under what circumstances because the idea necessary to conserve its existence was never there in the first place. While the logic is slippery (and a bit self-serving), his arguments pose an important ethics-based mindreading challenge. The intellectual paradox is a familiar one (for Emerson readers) of free will and agency set against fate and disenfranchisement. By privileging ideas over material circumstances, Emerson



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grants the possibility that each race may carry the keys to its own civilization. But if races are understood to be only carriers of these keys and not also users, then they have no say in determining whether their civilization will be actualized. While the intellectual paradox of this scenario gives readers something to chew on (if they are so inclined), its implications are more existential than ethical. In other words, the question they are likely to provoke first is “What am I to the universe?” Only later (perhaps), might they lead us to ask “How should I live?” Still, it would be a mistake to ignore the ethical side of an argument positioned so precisely at the intersection of race and reform in Emerson’s narrative. For as much as this passage pulls us toward seemingly unraced universal issues of fate and free will, it is grounded in very concrete racial particulars— problems that certainly beg the question of how we should live, even if they do more to complicate than answer it. Parsing out these complications is a mindreading challenge, one that invites readers to imagine the different ways Emerson’s argument might shape the dynamics of actual black-white relations. For example, are whites under any sort of obligation to help blacks realize whatever potential they may have to create a new civilization or articulate their ideas? If so, what form should the assistance take, how much should be offered, how often, and for how long? If there is no direct imperative to offer help, would it suffice simply to stay out of the way as African Americans work on their own behalf? What if whites perceive the black race to be headed toward extinction—do they have any ethical reason to act on that perception (e.g., lessen trauma, alleviate suffering)? To make matters even more interesting, shortly after the passage I quoted earlier (and at multiple points throughout the “Address”), Emerson insists on self-reliance as a determining factor in social relations: “I say to you, you must save yourself, black or white, man or woman; other help is none” (31). What if members of one race or gender are helping or hindering members of another? Should one contribute? Intervene? Stand aside? Spinning out these questions tests our mindreading capacity to guess at





possible scenarios and outcomes and to think in emotionally referential terms about the connections between Emerson’s argument and our own day-to-day lives. If such connections seem plausible and meaningful—if the questions feel relevant and if exploring them provides some sense of satisfaction—then, from a ToM standpoint, we are likely to make a positive judgment about the narrative. To take up the mindreading challenge of the “Address” is to recognize and take seriously the emotional and ethical concerns that motivated Emerson to involve himself more deeply in matters of social and political reform, especially abolition, in the 1840s and 1850s.7 A number of factors contributed to Emerson’s early antislavery activities. Among the first and most disturbing was the murder of abolitionist publisher Elijah P. Lovejoy by an angry mob in Alton, Illinois, in November of 1837, an event that followed on the heels of President Andrew Jackson’s recommendation that abolitionist tracts and other antislavery information be prevented from circulating via the federal postal system because of their inflammatory potential. Emerson was appalled by Lovejoy’s murder and described him in his journals as a public hero.8 He was equally appalled when Texas petitioned in August of 1837 for annexation to the United States as a slaveholding state—an event that would tip the balance between free and slave states in favor of the latter. He joined with other citizens of Concord in signing a petition of protest to the U.S. Congress declaring that, while they were not asking for the abolition of slavery, they would not countenance its “further extension” through the annexation of another slave state. And in January of 1838, he signed another petition demanding, in somewhat stronger terms, that Texas’s request for annexation be rejected.9 Emerson’s antislavery sentiments were further strengthened by an incident in 1844 that touched him at a more personal level—a terrifying event involving his friend Samuel Hoar and Hoar’s daughter Elizabeth (who had been his deceased brother Charles’s fiancé). Hoar had been sent by the Massachusetts General Court to Charleston, South Carolina, to look after the interests of freeborn black crew members of Massachusetts



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ships illegally detained under South Carolina’s slave laws. With the apparent approval of Charleston authorities, Hoar and his daughter were driven from the town by a mob of locals.10 Each of these events proved a factor in Emerson’s decision to become more vocal and active in support for abolition. But what finally prompted him to take his first significant step into the public debate over slavery was an invitation in 1844 from the women of Concord, including his own wife Lidian, to give a lecture at their annual celebration of the emancipation of the slaves in the British West Indies.11 The address, delivered on August 1, was, according to most critical and biographical accounts, a pivotal moment in Emerson’s career. Just as “Experience,” which was published less than three months later (and which I examine in chapter four), is seen by some scholars as a turning point in Emerson’s thought, so too can the West Indies Emancipation Address be understood as a watershed moment—one that, like Du Bois’s “The Conservation of Races,” marks a new level of public racialpolitical activism.12 In preparing the “Address,” Emerson immersed himself in a wealth of commentary on the history of slavery, including scholarly and legal treatises as well as first-hand accounts by planters and reformers. The materials gave him both a new appreciation for the complexity of the arguments for and against slavery and a sobering look at the physical and psychic horrors the institution was capable of inflicting on both slaves and slaveholders. Emerson’s exposure to several key works—Gougeon cites Thomas Clarkson’s The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808, 1839) and James A. Thome and J. Horace Kimball’s Emancipation in the West Indies: A Six Month’s Tour in Antigua, Barbadoes, and Jamaica, in the Year 1837 (1838)—prompted in him a greater level of respect for abolitionists and their cause, both of which he previously had viewed with some derision. Moreover, these accounts convinced him of the need to press harder for full emancipation and even to consider the validity of granting blacks full civic equality.13





Fully aware of his reputation for detachment from abolition and antislavery activism—a reputation cemented in part by his early reform lectures—Emerson begins the “Address” by assuring his audience that he understands the historical significance of the emancipation and recognizes the propriety of treating it in nonabstract terms: We are met to exchange congratulations on the anniversary of an event singular in the history of civilization; a day of reason; of the clear light; of that which makes us better than a flock of birds and beasts: a day, which gave the immense fortification of a fact,—of gross history,—to ethical abstractions. It was the settlement, as far as a great Empire was concerned, of a question on which almost every leading citizen in it had taken care to record his vote; one which for many years absorbed the attention of the best and most eminent of mankind. I might well hesitate, coming from other studies, and without the smallest claim to be a special laborer in this work of humanity, to undertake to set this matter before you; which ought rather to be done by a strict cooperation of many well-advised persons; but I shall not apologize for my weakness. In this cause, no man’s weakness is any prejudice; it has a thousand sons; if one man cannot speak, then others can; and whether by wisdom of its friends, or by the follow of the adversaries; by speech and by silence; by doing and my omitting to do, it goes forward. Therefore I will speak,—or not I, but the might of liberty in my weakness. The subject is said to have the property of making dull men eloquent. (7)

The epic and singular qualities of the emancipation, Emerson suggests, arose partly because it gave factual weight to otherwise abstract arguments and partly because it involved a critical mass of great thinkers who studied the matter for years in order to arrive at the proper conclusions. One might think of emancipation, in other words, as an affective-cognitive process that took place at the level of collective human emotional experience (or least the collective emotional experience of the British Empire). I would not hesitate to view this as an incidental construction



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on Emerson’s part save for the fact that he repeats it in various forms throughout the “Address.” The pattern begins when an individual is confronted with evidence of slavery’s barbarism or inhumanity. The evidence, because it threatens to influence some aspect of the individual’s goals, values, or ideals, causes an affective response (outrage, indignity, confusion, anxiety) and a subsequent cognitive phase in which the evidence is studied and evaluated. The cognitive phase then gives rise to a change in beliefs or behavior (usually both) that eventually manifests itself in some form of antislavery activism.14 In the case of emancipation, Emerson suggests, this process happens at the individual level, but it occurs among enough individuals at roughly the same time to result in reform on a grand scale. Emerson underscores the magnitude of emancipation by emphasizing throughout his narrative the epic, sweeping quality of the problem it redressed. He refers back to slavery’s ancient roots (as depicted in paintings on the temples and tombs of Egyptian kings and in the writings of Herodotus) and then proceeds to sketch its history up through the West African slave trade and the planter culture of the American South. He is especially cognizant of the global, economic implications of enslavement, noting in particular how Africans have been exploited for commercial gain and to provide material luxuries for whites: “the sugar they raised was excellent: nobody tasted blood in it. The coffee was fragrant; the tobacco was incense; the brand made nations happy; the cotton clothes the world.” (20). Emerson’s critique of the commercial excesses and love-ofluxury induced by slavery in the West Indies is acute throughout the address, no doubt because, as I noted in the opening section of this chapter, he believed and feared the United States would become economically and morally handicapped by its continued dependence on Southern slave labor. Emerson’s economic arguments often are accompanied by essentialist descriptions of enslaved Africans. The subtext of his characterization, never directly stated, is that their subordinate status as manual laborers has been somehow preordained— perhaps by themselves. Especially revealing in this regard is a




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For the negro, was the slave-ship to begin with, in whose filthy hold he sat in irons, unable to lie down; bad food, and insufficiency of that; disfranchisement; no property in the rags that covered him; no marriage, no right in the poor black woman that cherished him in her bosom,—no right to the children of his body; no security from the humors, none from the crimes, none from the appetites of his master: toil, famine, insult, and flogging; and, when he sunk in the furrow, no wind of good fame blew over him, no priest of salvation visited him with glad tidings: but he went down to death, with dusky dreams of African shadow-catchers and Obeahs hunting him. Very sad was the negro tradition, that the Great Spirit, in the beginning, offered the black man, whom he loved better than the buckra or white, his choice of two boxes, a big and a little one. The black man was greedy, and chose the largest. The buckra box was full up with pen, paper, and whip, and the negro box with hoe and bill; and hoe and bill for negro today. (9)

Although Emerson seems to employ the fable in the larger context of the address to invite sympathy for the plight of blacks and to highlight the depth and breadth of slavery’s deadening influence on human development, the effect is more essentialist than emancipatory. Still, it would be anachronistic and unfair to expect Emerson (or Du Bois) to somehow look beyond prevailing theories of racial difference, and the story warrants attention not for this matter but for the questions it raises about fate and free will—questions much like those that buttress his culminating assertion that only ideas springing from the essence or constitution of a race will be sufficient to conserve it. In this sense, the story can be read as employing essentialist notions about blacks’ capacity for certain types of labor in service of a progressive argument about how far they have advanced, as race, toward that “new and coming civilization” Emerson imagines as an inherent possibility: I say to you, you must save yourself, black or white, man or woman; other help is none. I esteem the occasion of this jubilee



fable he cites as an example of African folk culture’s attempts to explain the origins of black-white labor inequality:

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to be the proud discovery, that the black race can contend with the white; that, in the great anthem which we call history, a piece of many parts and vast compass, after playing a long time a very low and subdued accompaniment, they perceive the time arrived when they can strike in with effect, and take a master’s part in the music. The civility of the world has reached that pitch, that their moral genius is becoming indispensable, and the quality of this race is to be honored for itself. For this, they have been preserved in sandy deserts, in rice-swamps, in kitchens and shoe-shops, so long: now let them emerge, clothed and in their own form. (31–32)

Emphasizing the moral genius of blacks and the success of emancipation in the West Indies underscores by contrast the gravity of slavery in the United States and the urgency of the abolitionist cause. Through the narrative strategy I described earlier, Emerson offers his audience models for how emotional processes can galvanize antislavery reform; they show individuals encountering some form of evidence that provokes an affective response and prompts study and evaluation of slavery’s cruelties and injustice. Sometimes the degree of referentiality regarding actual people and events in these narratives is fairly low (the protagonists are generic; we are not given detailed descriptions of what they observe or encounter); on other occasions it is much higher (actual figures involved in the emancipation are identified and we are given a clear account of what they experienced and how they responded). In all cases, however, references to people or events—whether generic or specific—serve to enhance the overall emotional referentiality of the “Address.” In one of the more generic narrative moments, Emerson writes: Well, so it happened; a good man or woman, a country-boy or girl, it would so fall out, once in a while saw these injuries, and had the indiscretion to tell of them. The horrid story ran and flew; the winds blew it all over the world. They who heard it, asked their rich and great friends, if it was true, or only missionary lies. The richest and greatest, the prime minister of England, the king’s privy council were obliged to say, that it was too true. It became plain to all men, the more this business was looked into, that the crimes and cruelties of slave-traders and slave-owners could




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This story’s lack of specificity enables it to be read metaphorically as a general model of reform based on emotion (or, rather, emotional process). The country boys and girls who happened to see something of slavery’s evil and spoke to others about it represent the initial affective phase of the process: in a theoretical sense, we could say that they encounter some aspect of their environment with the potential to influence (in this instance negatively) their goals and values, and the encounter elicits an affective response. The second phase of the process is represented by those who heard the stories of the good men and women and sought to verify them by consulting learned authorities: they follow the affective response with cognitive evaluation—learning as much as they can about the situation while continuing to monitor it—and then take the ethical step of adjusting their behavior accordingly. Emerson’s affective-cognitive narrative structure supports the proposition that, in a world tainted by slavery, addressing the ethical question of how one should live is ultimately an emotional process. He reiterates this proposition in subsequent narratives, (legal and historical) each evincing different levels of referentiality to actual people and events while modeling the same affective-cognitive structure. Immediately following the story of the country boys and girls, he relates the history of Granville Sharp, a British abolitionist who gained fame in 1767 for his outspoken support of Jonathan Strong, an African slave who had been taken to Britain by his master, a West Indian planter. Subsequently, Strong was abandoned after a beating by the planter left him severely injured. With help from Sharp and other British abolitionists, Strong recovered and was able to work again, at which point the planter sought to reclaim him and his services. Sharp—a government employee and part-time classics scholar—was outraged when the courts ruled in favor of the planter and resolved to challenge slavery on legal grounds. He devoted himself to the



not be overstated. The more it was searched, the more shocking anecdotes came up,—things not to be spoken. (10)

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study of law for two years and was able to help litigate the landmark case of James Somersett, in which the nation’s highest court ruled that slavery could not be supported by English law (although it did not rule against the slave trade or the practice of slavery in the colonies). Emerson proceeds to give his audience a detailed summary, including names and dates, of the various events, legal cases, and legislative acts that led first to the abolishment of the slave trade and, finally, in 1834, to the complete outlaw of slavery throughout the British empire. As in the Sharp account, his narratives of these events and the persons involved follow a pattern of affective response (usually outrage or moral indignation) followed by a cognitive phase of study and evaluation. When he does deviate from this narrative structure, it is only to prove its importance by way of negative example. In the midst of an account of the reaction to emancipation of the planters on Antigua, he pauses to speculate on the reasons why a person might choose to become a slaveholder. I quote the passage at length to illustrate both the slippages surrounding the concept of race—biological, cultural, environmental—and the implicit argument Emerson makes that problems of racial difference manifest themselves (and are best apprehended) in terms of emotional process. Most important, he dramatizes the ethical problems that arise when the relation between affect and cognition is unstable or not fully developed: I may here express a general remark, which the history of slavery seems to justify, that it is not founded solely on the avarice of the planter. We sometimes say, the planter does not want slaves, he only wants the immunities and the luxuries which the slaves yield him; give him money, give him a machine that will yield him as much money as slaves, and he will thankfully let them go. He has no love of slavery, he wants luxury, and he will pay even this price of crime and danger for it. But I think the experience does not warrant this favorable distinction, but shows the existence, beside the covetousness, of a bitterer element, the love of power, the voluptuousness of holding a human being in his absolute control. We sometimes





observe, that spoiled children contract a habit of annoying quite wantonly those who have charge of them, and seem to measure their own sense of well-being, not by what they do, but by the degree of reaction they can cause. It is vain to get rid of them by not minding them; if purring and humming is not noticed, they squeal and screech; then if you chide and console them, they find the experiment succeeds, and they begin again. The child will sit in your arms contented, provided you do nothing. If you take a book and read, he commences hostile operations. The planter is the spoiled child of his unnatural habits, and had contracted in his indolent and luxurious climate the need of excitement by irritating and tormenting his slave. (17)

These observations constitute the address’s most explicit and insightful critique of the interracial dynamics that enable and result from slavery. Going beyond economic arguments, Emerson confronts his audience with the “love of power” and allure of holding another human being in “absolute control” in a master-slave relationship. The most striking and disturbing element of the picture he draws, however, is the chaotic (and, following Emerson’s spoiled-child metaphor, immature) relation between affect and cognition. This unstable relation creates an emotional feedback loop in which an affective response may give rise to cognitive monitoring, but any evaluation that occurs does so only for the sake of perpetuating that affective response. The existence of this sort of feedback loop is not particularly noteworthy at an individual level, but if it exists at a collective social or cultural level, the ethical implications are profound. A single spoiled child is a small danger, but a society organized and controlled by the affective-cognitive equivalents of spoiled children—ones who crave affective experience for the sake of affective experience—is a potential cataclysm because it allows no space for meaningful ethical discourse. The question of how one should live is rendered moot by a collective emotional process that gives no real weight to the cognitive evaluation of feeling. Yet Emerson cannot long maintain such a critique; even as he excoriates the planters for their lust for power and control,



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he shifts the responsibility for producing and controlling such feelings from the slaveholders themselves to the environment in which they live. On one hand, Emerson labels the planters’ habits “unnatural,” but, on the other, he asserts that nature itself—“the luxurious climate”—is responsible for creating them. In other words, he simultaneously indicts slaveholders for going against nature and lets them off the hook by suggesting that nature made them do it. Having it both ways, as Emerson does in this case, effectively allows the slaveholder, and, by extension, slaveholding culture, to avoid what would be the radical effects of true reform: not just abolition, but an ethical discussion of interracial power dynamics that seem to have an obfuscating effect on the virtue of slave and slaveholder alike. Emerson’s softening of the element of protest in his characterization of slaveholders’ desires for control and domination steers the “Address” away from potentially radical race reform and toward a more conservative stance that, while supportive of abolition, does not disturb the underlying hierarchy of white over black. In the decade following the “Address,” Emerson accelerated and expanded his work on behalf of the antislavery cause. In the Fugitive Slave Law Addresses of 1851 and 1854 and his popular 1856 book English Traits, he continued to argue for abolition and to explore the ethical implications and economic imperatives of reform, although never coming quite so close as he does in the 1844 “Address” to explicating the desires and sensations—including “the voluptuousness” of holding another human being in absolute control—that give interracial relations under the regime of slavery their affective charge. This is no failing on Emerson’s part but rather an indication of how acutely aware he is of the intense, felt quality of racialized experience and the need for a discourse of emotion to articulate it. Like Du Bois, Emerson continued to rely on affectivecognitive narrative structures in his writing and to conceive of racial problems and possibilities for reform as emotional processes. And just as “The Conservation of Races” served as a catalyst for Du Bois’s expanding efforts to bring about social change, “An Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in





the British West Indies” helped launch Emerson to new heights of public intellectual activism. In the wake of these inaugural efforts, both writers continued to develop and refine their notions of public intellectualism, a process I survey in my next chapter through comparisons of their famously enigmatic concepts of double consciousness.



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Double Consciousness: It’s More Than What You Think

Emerson’s “Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies” and Du Bois’s “The Conservation of Races” amplify and limn the emotional discourse and affectivecognitive narratives of experience that are such crucial yet undervalued dimensions of their authors’ writings on reform and race, and reading them together sets up a uniquely revealing context against which to gauge the potency and limits of the most widely known idea they have in common: double consciousness. Emerson’s version of double consciousness draws substantive attention from his critics but only occasionally makes its presence felt beyond that realm. Du Boisian double consciousness, by contrast, is a multidisciplinary phenomenon that finds reference in an amazingly large and diverse catalog of issues, texts, genres, and individuals: from biblical hermeneutics, Chicana feminist sociology, and rhetorical studies of community, to the music of Charles Mingus, the drama of Suzan-Lori Parks, and the cross-platform art of DJ Spooky.1 This catalog is so expansive, in fact, that it includes more references to Emersonian double consciousness than one finds in the extant body of Emerson criticism. Such far-reaching influence is a testament to the prescience of Du Bois’s insight as well as the evocative power of his narrative approach, and its resonance is all the more striking given the fact that the actual phrase “double consciousness” appears only once in the entire body of his work.



Chapter 2


Another intriguing aspect of the Du Boisian phenomenon is the extent to which double consciousness is conflated with “two-ness.” Such linkage is certainly plausible given their shared thematic emphasis on duality as well as the proximate positions they hold in the now-famous passage I am about to quote. But note that in Du Bois’s narrative, the nature of their relation remains ambiguous: It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—An American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (364–365)

While a great many readers use the terms interchangeably, Du Bois’s approach does not necessitate such conflation. There is room for difference (the relation could be interpreted as associative rather than synonymous), and room for causation (one concept could lead to or follow from the other). In other words, double consciousness and two-ness could be the same thing; or they could designate closely aligned yet still distinct notions; or they could exist in a dynamic relation of cause and effect. Moreover, Du Bois casts double consciousness as an abstract, potentially universal sensation while describing two-ness, on the other hand, as a feeling more closely linked to particulars of race and nationality. It is an experience specific to the figure of the American Negro (a figure that, I argue in more detail later, carries its own ambiguity insofar as it can stand for the race as a whole but is based mainly on the subset of African American intellectual elites that is Du Bois’s ideal audience). Beyond their general references to duality, the one thing that connects double consciousness and two-ness is the discourse of emotion that presents them as affective-cognitive processes: double consciousness is a “sensation” that results from other emotions (pity, amusement, contempt) while two-ness is a “feeling” that stems from the tension of conflicting affiliations.



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Yet the many critics who use these terms interchangeably largely miss or ignore the significance of this connective discourse. My point is not to challenge the conclusions of those who treat double consciousness and two-ness as synonymous, but to illustrate that, from a ToM standpoint, these elements of Du Bois’s narrative succeed because they have the capacity to satisfy a wide range of expectations for emotional referentiality. Other narratives in The Souls of Black Folk do, of course, address actual people, places, and events, and, taken as a whole, it would seem they do their job well enough to pass nonfiction’s test of global referentiality. But the phenomenal success of Souls stems also from the fact that it includes—indeed privileges—narratives that appear to satisfy audiences’ desires for recognizable and meaningful renderings of feeling. To extend and deepen my examination of the emotional dimensions of double consciousness, I will look back to “The Conservation of Races,” specifically to passages I examined in chapter one that raise the subjects of duality and ethics and that presage the appearance of similar concerns in The Souls of Black Folk.2 Adding another layer to this contextualization, I look at Emerson’s 1842 lecture-turned-essay “The Transcendentalist,” wherein he first conceptualizes double consciousness by relying on a thematics of dualism narrated in affective-cognitive terms, and also at his essay “Fate,” which renders double consciousness a vehicle for both ethical and emotional discourses of race and reform. Both “The Conservation of Races” and The Souls of Black Folk propose a conflation of race and nationality that expresses intellectual and emotional aspects of the duality Du Bois assigns to the condition of being black in America: Here, then, is the dilemma, and it is a puzzling one, I admit. No Negro who has given earnest thought to the situation of his people in America has failed, at some time in life, to find himself at these cross-roads; has failed to ask himself at some time: What, after all, am I? Am I an American or a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American? If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating the very



DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS

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Du Bois’s puzzling dilemma is both ontological and ethical: the first few sentences raise questions of being (“What, after all, am I?”) while the remainder of the passage addresses issues of “duty” and “obligation” that depend on how one responds to the initial existential queries. More important, Du Bois implies that this dilemma is not perceived (or perceived as such) by everyone—only those who give the matter sincere consideration will apprehend it—and that no Negro who does “give earnest thought to the situation” could fail to see things as Du Bois does (apparently if you disagree, either your thinking is not rigorous enough or you are not really thinking at all). The exclusive quality of the duality Du Bois describes in “The Conservation of Races” and the notion of double consciousness he offers in The Souls of Black Folk is a reminder that both texts ultimately claim as their authorial audience Du Bois’s fellow intellectual elites—a fact often undervalued, or even overlooked, in critical responses to these concepts. It is certainly true that neither work is addressed solely to this ideal group of readers; Souls, especially, reached out to and was received by a relatively wide swath of blacks and whites. Still, if the figure of the American Negro to which Du Bois refers were to assume f lesh-and-blood form, he (and it would be a he) would look very much like the members of the American Negro Academy; or, just a bit more broadly construed, like the “College-Bred Negroes” that were the subject of his commencement address at Fisk University the summer following his presentation and publication of “The Conservation of Races.” That Du Bois imagined his audience in such terms is evidenced by the passage immediately following the one I quoted earlier. Having established the ethical imperative to think earnestly about the questions that constitute the dilemma of the Negro in America, he warns against



cleft that threatens and separates Black and White America? Is not my only possible practical aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me to the American? Does my black blood place upon me any more obligation to assert my nationality than German, or Irish or Italian blood would? (821)


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It is such incessant self-questioning and the hesitation that arises from it, that is making the present period a time of vacillation and contradiction for the American Negro; combined race action is stifled, race responsibility is shirked, race enterprises languish, and the best blood, the best talent, the best energy of the Negro people cannot be marshaled to do the bidding of the race. They stand back to make room for every rascal and demagogue who chooses to cloak his selfish deviltry under the veil of race pride. (821)

The problems of duality may extend, in theory, to the race as a whole, but they matter most, in practice, for its best and most talented members. Not only does the potential of such elites go unrealized, but their hesitancy and vacillation leaves a void that is occupied by inferior, self-serving types who threaten to diminish the status of the race rather than uplift it. Du Bois’s notion of public intellectual leadership would crystallize to an even greater degree in his critique of Booker T. Washington (and others) in The Souls of Black Folk, and it is worthwhile to remind ourselves that, to whatever extent Du Bois is now famous for double consciousness, two-ness, and the problem of the colorline, during the period Souls was written and published, the formulation and expression of these ideas were complementary to his project of reshaping prevailing assumptions about race leadership and, more specifically, tamping down the influence of Washington’s materialist model of vocational education and economic progress. I note this aspect of Du Bois’s vision of racial uplift to shore up the claim I made in my Introduction that while he allows for double consciousness to be construed as a collective racial condition of African Americans, it holds particular relevance for intellectuals, artists, and skilled professionals. For these leaders of the race, double consciousness signifies the shared affective-cognitive experience of mediating between black and white communities in order to bring about interracial and intraracial reforms. Du Bois puts a finer point



the paralysis that can result from directing such questions inward rather than putting them in service of race reform:

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Here in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man’s turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness,—it is the contradiction of double aims. The doubleaimed struggle of the black artisan—on the one had to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde—could only result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by criticism of the other world, toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood. The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another people. (365–366, Italics in the original)

While both “The Conservation of Races” and Souls of Black Folk identify and describe the problems and consequences of duality, especially the lack of decisiveness and firm convictions that characterize African American leadership in the postbellum period, Souls provides a more substantive explanation of their source. The difficulties faced by artisans, doctors, and ministers stem from a double-bind of interracial navigation: they constantly are confronted with work that underutilizes their potential but is nonetheless necessary to uplift other members of the race. Yet performing such work limits their own



on the difficulty of such navigation in a passage from Souls that reiterates his foreboding critiques in “The Conservation of Races” of the hesitancy and unrealized potential of African American leaders:

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opportunities for further progress and development because it makes them unfit, in the eyes of whites, to stand on equal social and political ground. No matter which direction they turn, Du Bois’s race leaders find themselves unable to properly match their skills to the available tasks; the outcome is a pervasive sense of stagnation, debilitation, and disillusionment—a condition made all the more galling for Du Bois because, in his view, the interracial navigation modeled by contemporary African American leaders such as Washington enabled and affirmed whites’ predisposition to typecast blacks as hewers of wood and drawers of water. Still, Du Bois takes pains to assign final responsibility for this intractable situation to whites because of their unwillingness and inability to recognize the cultural contributions of nonelite African Americans: The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another people. This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousand people,—has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make them ashamed of themselves. (366)

The black artist’s ultimate obligation cannot be to a larger interracial audience so long as its white members would disdain or devalue the “soul-art” of African Americans, and it is this same spirit of intraracial solidarity that animates Du Bois’s vision of the figure of the “American Negro” who strives to be a “co-worker in the kingdom of culture” (365). The composition of the figure may be hierarchical rather than egalitarian— coded more specifically for the black public intellectual than for the “ruder souls” of his race—but, like double consciousness, it is flexible enough to be read as applicable to the affectivecognitive status of all African Americans.





Exploring the multiple ways inclusive-yet-hierarchical concepts such as the American Negro and double consciousness can be construed is a subject large and complex enough to warrant a book of its own, but it is possible and revealing to track the reception and interpretation of Du Bois’s ideas in general terms. At the outset of this chapter I glossed some of the diverse ways double consciousness has been appropriated and reconfigured in a range of contemporary contexts—academia, music, pop art—but this sample does not provide a sense of how interpretations have coalesced and shifted diachronically since the early decades of the twentieth century. Adolph L. Reed Jr., in a rigorous and highly critical assessment of the intellectual and political reception of double consciousness, offers a conceptual genealogy that identifies three distinct ideological groups or movements that put Du Bois’s notion to different uses, most of which Reed finds exasperatingly misguided insofar as they “presume an unchanging black essence and do not consider the possibility that Du Bois’s construction bears the marks of historically specific discursive patterns” (97). Citing the work of intellectuals including August Meir, Robert Ezra Park, and Gunnar Myrdal, Reed identifies the first movement (which runs from the 1920s to the mid-1960s) as “integrationist-therapeutic.” He argues that thinkers from this period tended to interpret double consciousness as a normative feature of black racial identity; for them it signified an array of existential problems, psychic traumas, and cognitive tensions that stood as obstacles to integration. The second movement—which Reed terms “nationalist-therapeutic”— lasted from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s and took its energy from the ideologies of Black Power and ethnic pluralism. Figures including Charles Valentine, Carol B. Stack, Harold M. Baron, George E. Kent, Nathan Huggins, and Larry Neal maintained the essential, normative quality of double consciousness but employed it in service of an increasingly nationalistic stance that valued the politics of racial difference over those of assimilation, and, in its more extreme forms, called for racial separatism. The third movement (“academic race-celebratory”) began in the early 1980s when



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African American studies became fully institutionalized as a discipline and moved from the more public arena of nationalist politics to the more insular realm of university politics. Spearheaded by high-profile scholars such as Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West (of whom Reed is less than approving), this approach treats double consciousness as a more or less essential aspect of African American identity, although discussions of its significance happen at the abstract levels of philosophy or critical theory and strive to portray its importance as a distinctly African American contribution to Western thought.3 Reed argues that all three movements are naïve in assuming that Du Boisian double consciousness is somehow a stable, essential property of African American racial identity; he contends, moreover, that each phase of appropriation is deficient because it fails to appreciate the extent to which Du Bois’s thought is the product of a turn-of-the-century Progressive-Era milieu comprising male and female reformist thinkers of both races who “shared a loosely defined outlook and intellectual and political problematique” inflected as much by issues of gender as of race (Reed 107). I do not share Reed’s misgivings about unhitching double consciousness from such possible influences as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry Adams, Jane Addams, and Anna Julia Cooper, but I think his tripartite conceptual history is a valuable means of highlighting the persistence across time of the belief that double consciousness can be claimed as a normative experience for African Americans. Whether such a claim could be verified or disproved is far less interesting than the fact that so many readers from different eras are inclined to believe in its validity and viability absent any empirical evidence one way or the other. Just as so many of Du Bois’s readers find it somehow accurate or useful to think of double consciousness and twoness as synonymous, many also, it seems, find satisfaction in assuming that double consciousness is an essential racial quality. Again, from a ToM perspective, Du Bois’s account of double consciousness proves remarkably flexible and adept in predicting and meeting readerly desires for recognizable, shared affectivecognitive experience. And this despite the fact that both “The





Conservation of Races” and The Souls of Black Folk take care to distinguish between the specific emotional burden shouldered by elites—who are not allowed to match their skills to proper tasks and must navigate between two unreconciled ideals and audiences—and the general “sad havoc” that devolves to the “ten thousand thousand” “ruder souls” constituting the majority of the race. To shed additional light on the inclusive-yet-hierarchical nature of double consciousness—the common condition of the whole yet the special problem of the few—I turn now to Emerson’s “The Transcendentalist” and examine his comments on similar issues. The essay opens with a heavy-handed distinction between idealism and materialism, associating the former with youthful (albeit flighty) faith in the significance of the spiritual and mystical and the latter with a crusty (albeit practical) insistence on the necessity of fact and empiricism. Elucidating the tensions that result from the coexistence of these opposing modes of thought, Emerson writes: These two states of thought diverge every moment, and stand in wild contrast. To him who looks at his life from these moments of illumination, it will seem that he skulks and plays a mean, shiftless, and subaltern part in the world. That is to be done which he has not skill to do, or to be said which others can say better, and he lies by, or occupies his hands with some plaything, until his hour comes again. Much of our reading, much of our labor, seems mere waiting: it was not that we were born for. Any other could do it as well, or better. So little skill enters into these works, so little do they mix with the divine life, that it really signifies little what we do, whether we turn a grindstone, or ride, or run, or make fortunes, or govern the state. The worst feature of this double consciousness is, that the two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, really show very little relation to each other, never meet and measure each other: one prevails now, all buzz and din; and the other prevails then, all infinitude and paradise; and, with the progress of life, the two discover no greater disposition to reconcile themselves. Yet, what is my faith? What am I? What but a thought of serenity and independence, and abode in the deep blue sky? (205–206)4



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Whether Emerson intends for double consciousness “to express a state of simultaneous withdrawal from and participation in the public realm,” as Anita Haya Patterson argues, or to underscore “the tension between monism and individuality” and “the gap between shabby everyday existence and the transfiguring power of one’s best but sadly transient moments,” as Lawrence Buell would have it, the ontological and ethical dimensions of the questions Emerson raises betoken those he explores two years later in the 1844 “Address.” The stakes may seem higher in the “Address,” but only if one dismisses (and I do not) the political significance of Emerson’s efforts in “The Transcendentalist” to carve out space for idealism in the midst of a materialist society that produced “So many promising youths, and never a finished Man!” (194, 201).5 The same thematic duality that pits a generalized idealism over and against an equally generalized materialism in “The Transcendentalist” reappears in more streamlined form in the “Address,” this time serving as warrant for Emerson’s climactic arguments that “ideas only save races” and that if the spirit exists in the bosom of a race, it perforce will overcome any limitations of material circumstance. The difference is that in 1842 Emerson is arguing not for the conservation of races but for the preservation of those “many intelligent and religious persons” who withdraw from conventional society because it will not foster or even accommodate their idealism. Less cohesive than Du Bois’s “Talented Tenth” authorial audience in “The Conservation of Races,” they are, nonetheless, a select class with the potential to elevate, or at least measure, the spirit and intellect of the rest of society: But all these of whom I speak are not proficients; they are novices; they only show the road in which man should travel, when the soul has greater health and prowess. Yet let them feel the dignity of their charge, and deserve a larger power. Their heart is the ark in which the fire is concealed, which shall burn in a broader and universal flame. Let them obey the Genius then most when his impulse is wildest; then most when he seems to lead to uninhabitable desarts of thought and life; for the path





which the hero travels alone is the high-way of health and benefit to mankind. What is the privilege and nobility of our nature, but its persistency, through its power to attach itself to what is permanent? Society also has its duties in reference to this class, and must behold them with what charity it can. Possibly some benefit may yet accrue from them to the state. In our Mechanics’ Fair, there must be not only bridges, ploughs, carpenter’s planes, and baking troughs, but also some few finer instruments,—raingauges, thermometers, and telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who betray the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the bystander. Perhaps too there might be room for the exciters and monitors; collectors of the heavenly spark with the power to convey the electricity to others. (207–208)

More beleaguered plea than clarion exhortation, “The Transcendentalist” still manages to lay a conceptual foundation for Emerson’s later calls to preserve racial distinctions and stabilize interracial relations. No doubt some portion of Emerson’s ideal audience (the students and scholars with whom he most closely identifies) would have appreciated the sardonic quality of his narrative approach: advocating on behalf of idealists living in a material world by comparing them to objects and advertising their use value. Yet, as in the “Address,” Emerson concludes by reaffirming the overarching power of ideas and ultimately defining their value not in an objective material sense but in abstract terms as a kind of saving grace for humanity when materialism has run its course: Soon these improvements and mechanical inventions will be lost out of memory; these cities rotted, ruined by war, by new inventions, by new seats of trade, or the geologic changes:—all gone, like the shells which sprinkle the seabeach with a white colony today, forever renewed to be forever destroyed. But the thoughts which these few hermits strove to proclaim by silence, as well as by speech, not only by what they did, but by what they



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Emerson’s concluding remarks add another dimension to the dualities that structure “The Transcendentalist.” Affirming the capacity of idealists to perpetuate and improve humanity by conserving its highest thoughts and principles, Emerson proposes an ethics of reform-as-stasis: one characterized as much by holding back as holding forth, as much by avoiding losses as striving for gains. Moreover, he argues that such stasis is actually progressive, at least in the long view, because it preserves the idealists’ potential to someday enact unifying reforms that cannot currently be achieved or even imagined: a potential to someday “invest themselves anew” in an even more comprehensive (and happier) effort to effect changes in the relation of human beings to their environment. A critical commonplace of Emerson scholarship from the 1950s and 1960s is that the hope and optimism he associates with detached idealism in early essays such as “The Transcendentalist” gradually diminishes over the course of his career, displaced in later work by a more pragmatic acceptance of the capacity of external events to check or even negate the potential influence of individuals and their ideas. By the time we get to Emerson’s last major work, the 1860 collection The Conduct of Life, we find little evidence (so the declension argument goes) of the unfettered freedoms that characterize his writing in the 1830s and 1840s. The Emerson critics I mentioned often cite “Fate”—a piece he first delivered in lecture form in 1851 and later published in Conduct—as exemplary proof of this supposed final stage in his thought. Like “The Transcendentalist,” it invokes double consciousness as part of a broader exploration of ethical questions—what should one do, how should one live—and, like Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, it is the centerpiece of a shifting set of appropriations and interpretations. Lawrence Buell explains how such works as Stephen Whicher’s Freedom and Fate (1953), Jonathan Bishop’s Emerson on the Soul (1964),



forebore to do, shall abide in beauty and strength, to reorganize themselves in nature, to invest themselves anew in other, perhaps higher endowed and happier mixed clay than ours, in fuller union with the surrounding system. (208–209)


and his own Literary Transcendentalism (1973), while offering different arguments about the thematic and stylistic elements of Emerson’s work, nevertheless followed the declension pattern in identifying “Fate” as emblematic of his diminishing belief in the power of idealism. Buell also points out another strand of criticism, inspired by the writings of Harold Bloom, Sacvan Bercovitch, and Stanley Cavell, that culminated in the “Emerson revival” of the late 1970s and early 1980s and was exemplified in such studies as Barbara Packer’s Emerson’s Fall (1982), Julie Ellison’s Emerson’s Romantic Style (1984), Joel Porte’s Representative Man (1979), and David Robinson’s Apostle of Culture (1984). These books, along with the works of scholars including Gertrude Hughes, John McAleer, David Porter, and R.A. Yoder, helped solidify Emerson’s place as a key figure in the American canon and subsequently combined with other trends (a New Historicist emphasis on the politics of canonization; a literary turn in Pragmatist/neo-Pragmatist studies) to generate increased scrutiny of Emerson’s positions on social issues, especially in his later writings. While the new attention often was more critical than celebratory, it did highlight once again the issue of how “Fate” might be situated within the larger body of Emerson’s work. Some critics (e.g., Gougeon and Myerson) chose to relegate it to the sidelines in favor of a sharper focus on Emerson’s antislavery writings, in particular his responses to the stringent Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 (the appearance of which, Buell notes, coincided with the first presentation of “Fate” as a lecture).6 Other scholars have, for the most part, continued to underscore the importance of “Fate,” although rather than map it as a low point in Emerson’s trajectory, they tend to group it with the antislavery writings as a triumphant assertion of freedom—one made all the more persuasive because it acknowledges the obstacles of material circumstance even as it asserts the capacity of idealism to overcome them.7 Building on the premise that Emerson’s antislavery writings— and the more general atmosphere of 1850s abolition—helped shape his composition of “Fate,” Buell argues for the essay’s importance as ethical discourse, claiming that despite a lack



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of explicit references to the problems of slavery, it nonetheless explores the ethical question of how one should live one’s life in the presence of tyranny. While the abolition writings offer a model for how to deal with the specific oppression of slavery, “Fate” explores the issue of tyranny at a more abstract level. Arguing that Emerson scholars have tended to miss this sort of dynamic in his work because they place more emphasis on his epistemology than his ethics, Buell suggests we would benefit from exploring more fully the implications of “what we have long ‘known’ about Emerson: that thought’s consequences in principle meant more to him than thought’s truth itself” (“Emerson’s Fate,” 23). Instead of asking questions about what constitutes perception in Emerson’s writings, we should be asking what constitutes “right perception”—which for Emerson was (according to Buell) “a matter of being reacted upon by a thought, above and beyond the notational comprehension of it” (ibid.). Following this ethics-based heading, Buell arrives at a capsule summary of the essay’s key points: “Fate” pursues a mature ethical vision that goes something like this: We begin by disowning our youthful hubris: “we are incompetent to solve the times.” This, however, does not justify mere spectatorship. Despite appearances, fate “is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought”; that consequently “every jet of chaos which threatens to exterminate us is convertible by intellect into wholesome force.” Each person must respond to this challenge individually: “the riddle of the age has for each a private solution”; but there is no excuse for fatalism. The difficult, indeed somewhat enigmatic doctrine of the “double consciousness” Emerson propounds near the end of “Fate,” I take to be an ethically robust activism: “a man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and public nature” (“Emerson’s Fate,” 23–24)

I would add that such “ethically robust activism” is contingent upon the kinds of emotional discourse I pointed out in Emerson’s 1844 “Address” and Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. “Fate” outlines a series of steps an individual must take to





transcend the bounds of “temperament and race” and achieve a full measure of freedom, steps that define how we should live with regard to feelings as well as ideas and actions. Emerson describes a “maturing” process, the “end and aim” of which is to shed the associations which no longer are relevant and have become obstacles to liberty; this process is as much emotional as it is intellectual: Fate involves the melioration. No statement of the Universe can have any soundness, which does not admit its ascending effort. The direction of the whole, and of the parts, is toward benefit, and in proportion to the health. Behind every individual, closes organization: before him, opens liberty,—the Better, the Best. The first and worst races are dead. The second and imperfect races are dying out, or remain for the maturing of the higher. In the latest race, in man, every generosity, every new perception, the love and praise he extorts from his fellows, are certificates of advance out of fate into freedom. Liberation of the will from the sheaths and clogs of organization which he has outgrown, is the end and aim of this world. Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint; and where his endeavors do not yet fully avail, they tell as tendency. The whole circle of animal life,—tooth against tooth,—devouring war, war for food, a yelp of pain and a grunt of triumph, until, at last, the whole menagerie, the whole chemical mass is mellowed and refined for higher use,—pleases at a sufficient perspective. (786)

Reiterated here are many of the familiar themes of his reform writings and abolition addresses: the diminishing effect of organizations and associations on individual integrity, the need for self-trust and self-reliance in order to better perceive one’s place in the world, and the general sense of assurance that, so long as individuals look to themselves—liberate their own wills from the institutions they have outgrown—reform and progress everywhere will follow. As we saw in the “Address,” race functions as a conflation of color and nationality (e.g., “the vices of a Saxon or Celtic Race”), and racial identity is understood to designate one’s membership in a larger group (whether it be black, white, Russian, or



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American) that stands for some idea or set of ideas. Race does not matter in and of itself; it matters as a way of marking the success or failure of groups to articulate their ideas. “Fate” also emphasizes that the process of racial conservation and development cannot occur at the expense of the individual because individual creativity is the basis for maintaining the process. Individual “temperament” and racial identity thus form one in a series of oppositions Emerson argues must be confronted in order to gain freedom. Other oppositions he sets forth in the course of the essay include: the right and the necessary, the private and the public, nature and thought, person and event. While some oppositions may offer an option that is ultimately more desirable (generally the first term of each of the pairs I named in the previous sentence), the point is not to enact a one-way trip from the unfavorable to the favorable but rather to navigate between them: One key, one solution to the mysteries of human condition, one solution to the old knots of fate, freedom, and foreknowledge, exists, the propounding, namely, of the double consciousness. A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature, as the equestrians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from horse to horse, or plant one foot on the back of one, and the other foot on the back of the other. So when a man is the victim of his fate, has sciatica in his loins, and cramp in his mind; a club-foot and a club in his wit; a sour face, and a selfish temper, a strut in his gait, and a conceit in his affection; or is ground to powder by the vice of his race; he is to rally on his relation to the Universe, which his ruin benefits. Leaving the daemon who suffers, he is to take sides with the Deity who secures universal benefit by his pain. To offset the drag of temperament and race, which pulls down, learn this lesson, namely, that by the cunning co-presence of two elements, which is throughout nature, whatever lames or paralyzes you, draws in with it the divinity, in some form, to repay. (792–793)

Emerson offers double consciousness as an ethical prescription in response to the problems of association and affiliation, and he presents it as an affective-cognitive process: we are to





monitor and evaluate our reactions to the external influences of association and then exchange racial ties for universal ones if and when the former threaten to lame or paralyze us. Emerson acknowledges the damages the external world can inflict, and his formulation of double consciousness is tremendously potent as an emotional-ethical remedy so long as individuals recognize the need to offset the drag of both temperament and race: to rearrange one’s feelings in ways that correspond to the rearrangement of one’s associations and affiliations. Within the frame of Emerson’s narrative, this does not seem an especially taxing requirement; indeed, one of the greatest strengths of Emersonian double consciousness is that it allows one to treat affectively charged issues from a position of emotional safety and stability. This is no backhanded compliment: Emerson’s achievement in “Fate” is to explain the emotional and ethical steps we must take but without shocking us into the very paralysis of feeling and thought that double consciousness is meant to ward against. Depersonalization, in this case, is an extremely effective narrative strategy; it reveals our emotional-ethical task but in abstract terms that lessen our risk of becoming overwhelmed by the affective-cognitive specifics of executing it. Depersonalization is a key quality of both Emersonian and Du Boisian double consciousness, and comparison brings into sharp relief its implications for the reception of their work. The figure Emerson invokes—the man who “must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature” and negotiate the oppositions of freedom and fate, individual and association, ideal and material circumstance—is more abstract than Du Bois’s “one dark body” that must encompass “two warring ideals,” and it is both possible and tempting to chart parallel courses through “Fate” and The Souls of Black Folk that show Du Bois moving back and forth between unraced universals and raced particulars and Emerson rarely departing from his abstract perch. But such a comparison (in addition to being unfair) likely would lead us no further than the not-verystunning conclusions that Emerson assumes a universal whiteness while Du Bois, from our perspective at least, shows greater insight into the particular dynamics of black-white relations.



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It is more revealing, I think, to look instead at the different degrees of intimacy that attend their constructions of double consciousness and, in doing so, to recognize that personalizing a narrative and creating potential for intimacy with one’s audience are not the same thing (a subject I revisit in chapter four as part of my comparative reading of their responses to the deaths of their sons). Inviting intimacy in a nonfiction narrative has, of course, both significant rewards and very high risks: If readers accept a nonfiction writer’s offer of intimacy, chances are greater that the text as a whole will meet expectations for the kind of global emotional referentiality I referred to earlier in this chapter (thus resulting in a positive judgment). If an invitation is refused—whether because the writer fails to accurately mindread an audience or vice versa—the chances for meeting global expectations for emotional referentiality decrease dramatically and the text is more likely to receive a negative judgment. By inviting intimacy, I mean the kind of suggestion Du Bois makes in describing double consciousness as “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” In defining double consciousness as an emotional process that involves—at least at the level of imagination—the potential inhabitation of oneself by another, Du Bois allows for the possibility of a shared experience that is at once more immediate and affectively intense than the phenomenon of Emersonian double consciousness. Like Emerson, Du Bois acknowledges the potential of external factors to influence the goals, values, and desires of the self. And, like Emerson, he includes other people among those possible factors. While neither he nor Emerson personalizes those others to the point that they could be identifiable in actual “real life” terms, Du Bois nevertheless holds open the possibility for a kind of close-quarters emotional contact and exchange between self and other that Emerson’s narrative does not permit. Du Bois’s double consciousness articulates the problem of the Negro self as one of intimacy not fully reciprocated: whites do not look at themselves through his eyes while he is compelled him to look at himself through theirs. Still, Du Bois does not




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The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,— this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. (365)

Du Boisian double consciousness thus articulates both the problem of maintaining an un-reconciled racial “two-ness” and the potential reward of narrating that condition in emotionally intimate terms. Moreover, it is predicated upon a kind of self-reflection that recognizes the role of the other in the formation of the self but refuses to subordinate the latter to the former. This refusal both insures the continued existence of the self—and, hence, the conservation of the race—and stands as evidence that the other does not look upon the self and remain emotionally unaltered, even if that effect goes unacknowledged. I conclude by emphasizing that Emerson and Du Bois, while evincing different degrees of intimacy, both conceive of double consciousness as an emotional process that ultimately remains open-ended. Neither intellectual attempts to reach some sort of closure in his narrative account of the experience: its affective and cognitive phases must be articulated, but the articulation itself has no fixed end point and cannot lead to a final, definitive answer because the problems and tensions of race relations are, for both Emerson and Du Bois, perpetual and always evolving. Public intellectualism, whether manifested in the figure who is “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” or riding “alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature,” cannot foreclose the potential to imagine new



foreclose the possibility for intimacy because, in his view, doing so would result in a loss of some part of the Negro self:

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possibilities for reform in response to the always-shifting drama of racial inequality. My next chapter shows how Du Bois’s and Emerson’s visions of the public intellectual-as-reformer shaped and were shaped by a highly controversial and extremely charismatic player in that drama: nineteenth-century America’s most infamous domestic terrorist, Captain John Brown.







Losing Your Head: Why Du Bois and Emerson (Mostly) Like John Brown

When U.S. Army and Gulf War veteran Timothy James McVeigh chose April 19 to carry out his deadly bombing attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Okalahoma City in 1995, he did so in deliberate protest of the FBI raid on the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993 and the beginning of the federal siege of a white supremacist enclave near Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, both of which occurred on that same date. While Waco and Ruby Ridge served as McVeigh’s immediate motivation, he took inspiration from a source much further removed in time: John Brown’s 1859 assault on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, which claimed the lives of 168 people and injured 450 more, McVeigh, who had trained at Fort Riley, Kansas, prior to Operation Desert Storm, drew a direct comparison between his actions and those of Brown, who gained much of his own combat experience in Kansas during the bloody guerrilla warfare between pro- and antislavery forces in the 1850s. Like McVeigh, Brown was seen by most of his contemporaries as a radical extremist and a domestic terrorist; and, like McVeigh, he was put on trial, convicted on multiple counts of first-degree murder, and eventually executed. While it seems improbable that McVeigh’s postmortem reputation will grow or develop in the way Brown’s has—that a majority of Americans will at some point believe that his ends



Chapter 3


were just even if his means were not—it makes sense nonetheless that McVeigh would feel kinship with Brown and find the attack on Harpers Ferry a forerunner for his destruction of the Murrah building.1 Like Brown, McVeigh viewed himself as an underdog warrior in an epic struggle against governmental tyranny, and certainly both men exhibited streaks of fanaticism and fatalism sufficient to obviate any compunctions about shedding innocent blood in the course of responding to perceived threats to their goals and values. From an external perspective, however, it is difficult to miss the irony of the fact that much of McVeigh’s support came from white supremacist groups whose cultural forebears were mortally opposed to precisely those issues—abolition and racial equality—for which Brown was willing to sacrifice himself. Debates about the validity of a McVeigh-Brown connection—whether the two should be understood as kindred more or less remote from one another—began immediately after the bombing and continued for months afterward in online forums and newspaper columns, and the subject was revived and revisited in the wake of the September 11 attacks when bloggers and pundits sought to define the scope and meaning of that tragedy by juxtaposing it with other terrorist acts committed on U.S. soil. It is easy to reject attempts to compare McVeigh or the September 11 hijackers to Brown by arguing that the former mainly desired vengeance and retribution while the latter acted in pursuit of a higher purpose. But the very fact that such comparisons seem plausible enough to debate indicates that something other than the moral high ground is at stake. Subtending the arguments about right and wrong is the question of how reform is pursued, especially when it involves the use of violence and self-sacrifice to enact change, and that is the focus of this chapter’s examination of Du Bois’s and Emerson’s writings on John Brown—specifically the biography Du Bois published in 1909 (which coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of Harpers Ferry) and the letters, journal entries, and speeches Emerson composed before and after the raid and Brown’s execution.2 In the previous chapter, I referred to Lawrence Buell’s argument that “Fate,” while never directly addressing the



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problems and tensions of antebellum slavery, is animated and energized nonetheless by Emerson’s abolitionist addresses and the general cultural currents of antislavery reform in 1850s New England. Buell also contends that one of the essay’s more puzzling references is inspired by the person and actions of John Brown: There can be no driving force except through the conversion of the man into his will, making him the will, and the will him. And one may say boldly that no man has a right perception of any truth who has not yet been reacted on by it so as to be ready to be its martyr. The one serious and formidable thing in nature is a will. Society is servile from want of will, and therefore the world wants saviours and religions. One way is right to go: the hero sees it, and moves on that aim, and has the world under him for root and support. He is to others as the world. His approbation is honor; his dissent, infamy. The glance of his eye has the force of sunbeams. A personal influence towers up in memory only worthy, and we gladly forget numbers, money, climate, gravitation, and the rest of Fate. (783)

Pointing out the passage’s source in an 1859 journal entry written in the midst of Emerson’s meditations on the events of Harpers Ferry, Buell identifies Brown as the warrant for Emerson’s assertion that “right perception” of a truth can only be ascribed to those who have been “reacted on” by it such that they are prepared to martyr themselves.3 If Buell is correct, then we have yet another reason to look more closely at the role Brown plays in Emerson’s thoughts on issues of race and reform and, in turn, how Emersonian Transcendentalism may have influenced many of Brown’s most ardent supporters and allies. David Reynolds’s recent biography of Brown notes that several of his key sponsors were Transcendentalists who had been galvanized by their exposure to Emersonian ideas such as self-trust and self-reliance and sought to translate those concepts into a militant form of abolitionism. Moreover, he claims that no group did more to define Brown’s image and cultural significance (at least in New England) than the



W H Y DU BOIS AND EMERSON LIK E JOHN BROW N


Transcendentalists, and that without their endorsement Brown “may very well have remained an obscure, tangential figure—a forgettable oddball” (Reynolds, 215).4 That may be overstating the case. But Reynolds’s basic premise, bolstered by studies of Emerson’s antislavery writings and social activism in the 1850s, counters the long-standing view of Transcendentalism as largely detached from the militant strands of abolitionism. Reynolds holds that Emerson had multiple connections to the more radical elements of the antislavery movement, specifically through his intellectual influence on and friendship with several of the members of the so-called Secret Six—a group founded to aid Brown in preparing for the Harpers Ferry raid. The Secret Six comprised Frank Sanborn, George Stearns, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Theodore Parker (all linked intellectually and socially to Emerson and the Concord milieu) as well as Samuel Gridley Howe and Gerrit Smith (Howe had a slight personal connection to the Transcendentalists; Smith almost none). Reynolds argues that the four members with the closest ties to Emerson were steadfast in their support of Brown’s militancy and continued to work on his behalf during the trial whereas Howe and especially Smith proved more “cowardly” in the aftermath of the raid by denying they had supported it.5 Reynolds may be dismissive of Smith, but Emerson actually thought very highly of him, both before and after Harpers Ferry. John Stauffer, in his innovative study of the interracial alliance among John Brown, Gerrit Smith, Frederick Douglass, and James McCune Smith, notes that Emerson admired Gerrit Smith for his unselfish and broad-minded approach to abolition and that he expressed a desire to meet him in person. Reynolds and Stauffer do agree that Emerson, in the 1850s, took an increasingly favorable view of violence as a means to end slavery and that he was especially enthralled by Brown’s militant antislavery activism in Kansas. After the raid, however, Emerson’s feelings shifted; while he still celebrated Brown’s heroism and the justness of his cause, he became disenchanted by the prospect of additional bloodshed and loss of life that threatened to follow if others emulated Brown’s example.6



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In addition to providing intellectual inspiration for some of Brown’s staunchest supporters, Emerson’s own relationship to Brown was characterized by a great deal of respect and admiration, not to mention various forms of material aid. Brown stayed with the Emersons on several occasions while in Concord to raise money for his cause, and Emerson himself was collecting funds to support Brown’s efforts as late as October of 1859, just weeks before the raid. Brown’s children stayed in his household, attended school with his children, and while Brown was in prison in November of 1859, Emerson spoke at a meeting in Boston to raise funds for the family. Later in this chapter, I examine the text of that address as well as other writings in which Emerson makes reference to Brown. For now I want to emphasize the complexity of Emerson’s feelings: fascination with Brown’s charisma (“I do not wonder that that gentlemen find traits of relation readily between him and themselves”); respect for his unwavering and complete dedication to abolition (“the rarest of heroes, a pure idealist, with no by-ends of his own”); admiration for his personal sacrifice (“Nothing can resist the sympathy which all elevated minds must feel with Brown”); and, most important, ambivalence about the ethics of his approach to reform (“He is a true hero, but lost his head there”).7 Du Bois’s feelings are similar: he too is intrigued by the force of Brown’s personality and depth of dedication to abolition— although he is careful to add that Brown deserves respect for both his antislavery work and his efforts to foster social equality among blacks and whites (which at one point included moving his family to a free black community in upstate New York sponsored by Gerrit Smith). And yet, like Emerson, he finds Brown’s model for reform as ethically problematic as it is politically powerful. Du Bois was first invited to write about John Brown in 1903 for the American Crisis Biographies Series, published by George W. Jacobs and Company. The series was edited by Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, a professional historian who had envisioned a collection of twenty-five biographies of famous figures from the Civil War. At the time Oberholtzer extended his invitation,





Du Bois was beginning to come into his own as a public intellectual and activist but still operated mainly from his faculty position at Atlanta University. His signature work, The Souls of Black Folk, had been published just six months earlier and was already into its second edition; the buzz it generated had pushed Du Bois to the forefront of discussions and debates regarding race relations, and he was well on the way to establishing himself as a representative figure—a race man—who could stand as an alternative to Booker T. Washington. Indeed, Washington was in competition with Du Bois even when it came to writing biographies. Oberholtzer had originally invited Du Bois to write on Frederick Douglass but then had to hastily withdraw that invitation when Washington contacted the publisher and made it clear that he wanted to write Douglass’s biography. Du Bois then proposed to write on Nat Turner but was rebuffed by Oberholtzer who feared that Turner might prove too divisive a subject. Finally, in 1904, editor and writer agreed on John Brown—a figure interesting enough for Du Bois and marketable enough for Oberholtzer—and Du Bois signed a contract. The project was immediately beset by delays, including a series of commitments Du Bois had previously made to different publishers for various other projects. Various family illnesses as well as the upheaval caused by the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906 also impeded his progress. So it was not until 1909, five years after the contract was signed, that the biography finally appeared (although it must be noted that the delay did allow for publication in coincidence with the half-century anniversary of Brown’s raid). While Du Bois was quite pleased with the final result—he later would call it “one of the best written” of his books— the overall response from reviewers was tepid.8 Some critics praised Du Bois’s careful blending of sources and his attempt to fix Brown’s life within the broader sweep of American and African American history. Others called his portrait of Brown too close to outright hero worship or else complained that he relied too much on previously published material.9 At any rate, whatever attention the book did receive was shortlived, and Du Bois’s effort was soon overshadowed by a more



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comprehensive study of Brown published in 1910 by Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of William Lloyd Garrison.10 Du Bois scholars writing in the late 1950s were similarly underwhelmed by the biography; they criticized its misattribution and misuse of sources, labeled it propaganda, or ignored it altogether.11 Most Brown biographers agree that Du Bois’s use of source material is often less than accurate, although recent critics tend to forgive the book’s scholarly weaknesses and credit Du Bois for an insightful reading of Brown’s significance as a cultural icon and touchstone for assessing the progress of race reform. Such kinder treatment is ref lective, I think, of both the stature of Du Bois’s reputation and a greater interest and enthusiasm among scholars for reframing nineteenth-century history in terms of abolition and race relations.12 Reynolds, for example, makes very little use of Du Bois’s biography as a source but does characterize his treatment of Brown as “passionate yet judicious” (495). Even more telling, however, is his decision to give Du Bois the last word, literally and figuratively, in his own massive study of Brown’s life: “W.E.B. Du Bois’s startling pronouncement thunders through American history. Indeed, ‘John Brown was right’ ” (506). Du Bois’s willingness in 1909 to make such a declaration says as much about his growing public intellectual presence as it does about his opinion of Brown. The biography appeared less than a year ahead of a watershed moment in his career: hired in 1910 as the director of publications and research for the newly organized NAACP (which grew out of the National Negro Committee), Du Bois left Atlanta University for New York where he founded The Crisis and began to initiate the kinds of radical, far-reaching reforms for which John Brown was a fitting symbol. Du Bois’s interest in Brown stretched back to his graduate studies at Harvard, and the biography he eventually produced would, like “The Conservation of Races” and The Souls of Black Folk, express and elaborate on issues and problems that remained a constant presence in his writing. Chief among these is the pressing need for reforms that can enable social and political equality between blacks and





whites—something he recognizes as an abiding concern of Brown’s as well. Approximately three years before the biography was published, Du Bois attended the second annual meeting of The Niagara Movement (which he helped found) at Harpers Ferry; there he paid tribute to Brown’s efforts and sacrifice by leading a barefoot march of delegates to the Brown monument. The tribute continued with an address titled “The Spirit of John Brown” given by the A.M.E. minister Reverdy C. Ransom. Ransom’s address reiterated a set of tropes common in postbellum and early-twentieth-century speeches, sermons, and writings on John Brown composed by African Americans for black audiences: Brown’s heroism and willingness to martyr himself in challenging slavery; his embodiment of the Declaration of Independence’s ideals of political equality for all men; and his belief in the necessity of constantly confronting and combating forces of racial oppression.13 Du Bois devotes much attention in the biography to the role of personal sacrifice in Brown’s abolitionist vision, and he shapes his narrative in part to explore the potential and limitations of an ethics of reform based on such sacrifice. Given the tendentious and violent atmosphere of race relations in the early 1900s when Du Bois was composing the biography— including the Atlanta race riot I referred to earlier—it is no surprise that he would examine Brown’s model to discern if and how it might be applied to turn-of-the-century problems of race relations and how it might appeal (or not) to both black and white audiences. For a black audience, Du Bois’s biography meets readerly expectations by offering precisely what Rev. Ransom’s speech does: a familiar celebration of Brown’s larger-than-life heroism (what many of his white reviewers dismissed as hero worship); an affirmation of the promise of the Declaration of Independence (what some later scholars labeled propaganda); and a powerful endorsement of militant activism in response to white tyranny (which explains why it was not until the Civil Rights and Black Power eras that the biography began to garner consistent praise).14 If black readers found fault with Du Bois—and there is little evidence to suggest they



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did—their objections could not have resulted from a failure on his part to meet conventional expectations for a familiar and satisfying narrative of John Brown’s life. The fact that white reviewers were much less inclined to offer positive evaluations is certainly due to the book’s scholarly deficiencies as well as the fact that Du Bois (a black author writing about a white subject) was competing directly with Villard (a white author—and grandson of Garrison no less—writing on the most prominent white reformer in U.S. history).15 No wonder then that significant praise from white readers was deferred for seventy years or more: only later in the twentieth century were white audiences prepared to meet the mindreading challenge Du Bois poses for them when he casts Brown as a self-sacrificing, militant enforcer of the doctrine of black-white social equality. A host of critics have commented on Du Bois’s presentation of Brown as a Christ figure, and this is, I believe, one of the most challenging aspects of the mindreading task he sets out for his white audience.16 On the one hand, this audience cannot deny the virtue of sacrifice for a just cause; on the other, it cannot find familiar or satisfying Du Bois’s implicit argument that white self-sacrifice is a necessary step in the reform of turnof-the-century race relations—even though the John Brown model illustrated the same necessity for mid-century abolition. Moreover, if Du Bois is defining Brown as a kind of “white Black Christ” (to use Sundquist’s phrase) who follows in the footsteps of figures such as Touissant, then he is presenting to his white audience a reform model far more ethically controversial and emotionally intimidating than any they may previously have encountered—especially since Du Bois makes clear that Brown’s Christ figure is willing to sacrifice not only his own life but also those of any whites who might attempt to impede his efforts.17 Du Bois amplifies the emotional and ethical challenges Brown presents for white readers by focusing less on the raid, trial, and execution—high watermarks for many other biographers—and more on Brown’s position, as he saw it, within a global context of militant response to white-on-black oppression. He includes Brown’s birth in 1800 in a symbolic timeline of antislavery





activism that begins with the violent uprising in Haiti in 1791, and he aligns Brown’s willingness to commit fatal acts of violence against whites (specifically during the struggle between pro and antislavery factions in Kansas in 1856) with other violent reprisals such as Denmark Vesey’s revolt in 1820 and Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831. From the very first chapter, Du Bois makes a deliberate attempt to present Brown as a white version of Toussaint, Vesey, and Turner: a self-sacrificing savior and violent avenger who will shed white blood without hesitation in service of race reform. Du Bois adds depth to this portrait of Brown by comparing and contrasting his career with that of Frederick Douglass, who, while certainly no pacifist, made it clear that he did not believe violence and armed insurrection constituted the best path, in either ethical or practical terms, to abolition and racial equality. The distinction between Brown and Douglass is all the more striking given how well the two men knew and admired each other. As Stauffer shows, Brown and Douglass established both a working relationship and a friendship and often acted in concert to further their antislavery aims.18 The Brown-Douglass connection intrigued Du Bois, and the biography devotes much space to highlighting the similarities and differences in both their characters and visions of reform. As much as Douglass admired Brown’s principles, he was critical of his methods and resisted attempts to be recruited for the Harpers Ferry mission. Douglass went so far as to tell Brown that if he proceeded with his plans, he would be heading into a “perfect steel trap” from which there would be no escape. Moreover, the results of a failed attempt to foster insurrection would, in Douglass’s view, only make matters worse for blacks in the South as well as the North by provoking slaveholders and slavecatchers to become more vigilant and vigorous in their efforts. Du Bois contends that Douglass is not alone in his rejection of the Harpers Ferry plan and that other race leaders who had experienced the cruelties of slaveholding culture shared his position: Tremendously impressed as was Douglass in mind and heart with John Brown and his plan, his reason was never convinced



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even up to the last; and naturally because here two radically opposite characters saw slavery from opposite sides of the shield. Both hated it with all their strength, but one knew its physical degradation, its tremendous power and the strong sympathies and interests that buttressed it the world over; the other felt its moral evil and knowing simply that it was wrong, concluded that John Brown and God could overthrow it. That was all—a plain straightforward path; but to the subtler darker man, more worldly-wise and less religious, the arm of the Lord was not revealed, while the evil of this world had seared his vitals. He uncovered himself if not reverently, certainly respectfully before the Seer; he gave him much help and information; he turned almost imperceptibly but surely toward Brown’s darker view of the blood-sacrifice of slavery, but he could never quite believe that John Brown’s tremendous plan was humanly possible. And this attitude of Douglass was in various degrees and strides the attitude of the leading Negroes of his day. They believed in John Brown but not in his plan. They knew he was right, but they knew that for any failure in his project they, the black men, would probably pay the cost. And the horror of that cost none knew as they. (60–61)

At key moments in the narrative, when the need arises to interpret the potential implications of Brown’s reform model for African Americans, Du Bois often does so from what he construes as Douglass’s perspective. In the biography’s penultimate chapter, Du Bois once again relies on Douglass to explain blacks’ misgivings about Brown’s vision of reform and their reluctance to assist him directly in manifesting it: Brown’s plan never in the slightest degree appealed to Douglass’s reason. That the Underground Railroad methods could be enlarged and systematized, Douglass believed, but any further plan he did not think possible. Only national force could dislodge national slavery. As it was with Douglass, so it was practically with the Negro race. They believed in John Brown but not in his plan. He touched their warm loving hearts but not their hard heads. The Canadian Negroes, for instance, were men who knew what slavery meant They had suffered its degradation, its repression and its still more fatal license They knew





the slave system. They had been slaves. They had risked life to help loved ones to escape its far-reaching tentacles. They had reached a land of freedom and had begun to taste the joy of being human. Their little homes were clustering about—they had their churches, lodges, social gatherings, and newspaper. Then came the call. They loved the old man and cherished him, helped and forwarded his work in a thousand little ways. But the call? Were they asked to sacrifice themselves to free their fellowslaves? Were they not quite ready? No—to do that they stood every ready. But here they were asked to sacrifice themselves for the sake of possibly freeing a few slaves and certainly arousing the nation. They saw what John Brown did not fully realize until the last; the tremendous meaning of sacrifice even though his enterprise failed and they were sure it would fail. (206)

Du Bois goes on to argue that blacks’ misgivings were due to their perceptions not only that the plan was logistically flawed and lacking in substance but also that the sacrifices Brown’s model of reform might require would be greater for them than for whites. As Du Bois notes, in 1859 it was illegal for a free black man to set foot on Virginia soil, whatever his intentions might be, and that any punishment handed down to a captured white insurrectionist would be rendered exponentially worse for an African American. Finally, Du Bois points out that most free blacks felt they had sacrificed enough already—indeed that their entire lives stood as sacrifices to white oppression. Thus, if Brown’s approach was to be undertaken, the burden should fall mainly if not exclusively to whites. And the burden should comprise not only abolishing slavery but also showing white America what black America already understood: that, as Du Bois remarks on several occasions in the biography, “the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression” (230). If Du Bois’s early-twentieth-century white readers were to follow Brown’s example they could (he suggests) begin to resolve the inequalities that manifest themselves in the tensions of the color line and double consciousness. While the John Brown model of white reform might not stand in perfectly reciprocal relation with African American double consciousness (i.e., it may not compel in whites “the sensation of always looking at



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one’s self through the eyes of others”), from an ethical standpoint it would do much to redress the inequality that results from, as Du Bois so elegantly puts it, “measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (364). For Du Bois, so long as blacks are looked upon with contempt and pity, John Brown remains a necessary, prophetic, and corrective model for whiteness, a point he drives home by quoting Brown’s remarks to Southerners just prior to his 1859 execution: You had better—all you people of the South—prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question. It must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it, and the sooner you commence the preparation, the better for you. You may dispose of me very easily—I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled—this Negro question, I mean. The end of that is not yet. (237)

Brown’s prophetic warning—especially his claim that the end of the problem has not yet arrived—was as relevant to Du Bois’s national and international audience of white readers in the first decade of the twentieth century as it was to Brown’s Southern audience fifty years earlier. The tensions of double consciousness and the color line in 1909 seemed as pressing and insurmountable as the problem of slavery had seemed in 1859, leading Du Bois to emphatically assert that “To-day at last we know: John Brown was right.” (202). It is crucial to recognize that Du Bois is not simply validating Brown’s prescience; he also is challenging early-twentieth-century notions of race that justified the denial of social equality and full political enfranchisement to African Americans. In the biography’s final chapter, Du Bois uses Brown to protest against the rising tide of Spencerian belief in a “Survival of the Fittest” theory of racial group development. He notes with irony that the events of Harpers Ferry and the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species were coincident, and he points out the parallel manner in which both Darwin’s and Brown’s ideals had been misappropriated and compromised by





later nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scholars and political leaders.19 Brown’s concept of willing self-sacrifice in service of liberty for all people was supplanted by a narrow, parochial view of race relations and the curtailment of black civil rights; moreover, Brown’s righteous militancy has been mistranslated into the immoral practice of lynching and other forms of whiteon-black violence. Likewise, Darwin’s concepts of evolution and natural selection were deliberately and irresponsibly reinterpreted by Spencer and others as the basis for a survival-ofthe-fittest racial ideology, which, in turn, was used to justify the denial of legal rights and philanthropic aid to those races deemed inferior and fated to suffer extinction. After all (so this line of reasoning goes) why waste money and energy helping those destined to die out anyway? Du Bois writes: Up to the time of John Brown’s death this doctrine was a growing, conquering, social thing. Since then there has come a change and many would rightly find reason for that change in the coincidence that the year in which John Brown suffered martyrdom was the year that first published the Origin of Species. Since that day tremendous scientific and economic advance has been accompanied by distinct signs of moral retrogression in social philosophy. Strong arguments have been made for the fostering of war, the utility of human degradation and disease, and the inevitable and known inferiority of certain classes and races of men. While such arguments have not stopped the efforts of the advocates of peace, the workers for social uplift and the believers in human brotherhood, they have, it must be confessed, made their voices falter and tinged their arguments with apology. Why is this? It is because the splendid scientific work of Darwin, Weisman, Galton, and others has been widely interpreted as meaning that there is no essential and inevitable inequality among men and races of men, which no philanthropy can or ought to eliminate; that civilization is a struggle for existence whereby the weaker nations and individuals will gradually succumb, and the strong inherit the earth. With this interpretation has gone the silent assumption that the white European stock represents the strong surviving peoples, and that the swarthy, yellow and black peoples are the ones rightly doomed to extinction. One can easily see what influence such doctrine



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In the life of John Brown, Du Bois found a counterargument, one literally and figuratively embodied by a white man, to check the rising tide of Spencerian ideology and offer in its place an alternative construction of race and racial relations: a construction based on white recognition of the need for social and political equality among blacks and whites and on white willingness to meet that need through militant sacrifice. I want to make clear that Du Bois never fully embraces the forms of violence Brown committed—or rather he does not explicitly promote them as models for African Americans to follow. As I have shown, he articulates this position within the biography itself through his focus on Frederick Douglass’s rejection of Brown’s invitation to join him at Harpers Ferry. But Du Bois had made his case (and would continue to do so) on other occasions and in other venues. The most striking of these moments occurred at the 1906 Niagara Movement conference at Harpers Ferry I referred to earlier. Standing on the same ground where Brown fought and where his sons and companions died, Du Bois offered these comments in a speech titled “Address to the Country”: We do not believe in violence, neither in the despised violence of the raid nor the lauded violence of the soldier, nor the barbarous violence of the mob, but we do believe in John Brown, in that incarnate spirit of justice, that hatred of a lie, that willingness to sacrifice money, reputation, and life itself on the altar of right. And here on the scene of John Brown’s martyrdom we reconsecrate ourselves, our honor, our property to the final emancipation of the race which John Brown died to make free. Our enemies, triumphant for the present, are fighting the stars in their courses. Justice and humanity must prevail. We live to tell these dark brothers of ours—scattered in counsel, wavering and weak—that no bribe of money or notoriety, no promise of wealth or fame, is worth the surrender of a people’s manhood



would have on the race problem in America. It meant moral revolution in the attitude of the nation. Those that stepped into the pathway marked by men like John Brown faltered and large numbers turned back. (225–226)

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To put this in the terms I have used in previous chapters, Du Bois’s carefully worded creed suggests that Brown properly sees reform as an emotional process—one that comprises both an affective response to external factors that might influence his goals, values, and desires (“hatred of a lie, love of justice”) and a phase of cognitive monitoring and adjustment of behavior to secure those goals, values, and desires (“willingness to sacrifice money, reputation, and life itself on the altar of right”). But in Brown’s case—or at least in Du Bois’s view of it—the process results in a model of reform that is morally just but not ethically viable. Du Bois might be tempted to suggest that his white audience emulate Brown in both a moral and ethical sense, but ultimately he argues that neither whites nor blacks should look to the narrative of Brown’s life for an answer to the question of how one should live. Violence may be attractive in the face of an intractable and intolerable situation, but it represents a chaotic relation between affect and cognition that threatens to foreclose the individual’s capacity to imagine and enact alternative possibilities for reform that are both morally just and ethically sustainable. Emerson arrives at a similar set of conclusions in his responses to Brown. In a eulogy at a public assembly in Salem, Massachusetts, in January of 1860, Emerson observes: I am not a little surprised at the easy effrontery with which political gentlemen, in and out of Congress, take it upon them to say that there are not a thousand men in the North who sympathize with John Brown. It would be far safer and nearer the truth to say that all people, in proportion to their sensibility and self-respect, sympathize with him. For it is impossible to see courage, and disinterestedness, and the love that casts out fear, without sympathy.



or the loss of a man’s self-respect. We refuse to surrender the leadership of this race to cowards and trucklers. We are men; we will be treated as men. On this rock we have planted our banners. We will never give up, though the trump of doom find us still fighting. (255–256)

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All women are drawn to him by their predominance of sentiment. All gentlemen, of course, are on his side. I do not mean by “gentlemen,” people of scented hair and perfumed handkerchiefs, but men of gentle blood and generosity, “fulfilled with all nobleness,” who, like the Cid, give the outcast leper a share of their bed; like the dying Sidney, pass the cup of cold water to the wounded soldier who needs it more. For what is the oath of gentle blood and knighthood? What but to protect the weak and lowly against the strong oppressor? Nothing is more absurd than to complain of this sympathy, or to complain of a party of men united in opposition to Slavery. As well complain of gravity, or the ebb of the tide. Who makes the Abolitionist? The Slaveholder. The sentiment of mercy is the natural recoil which the laws of the universe provide to protect mankind from destruction by savage passions. And our blind statesmen go up and down, with committees of vigilance and safety, hunting for the origin of this new heresy. They will need a very vigilant committee indeed to find its birthplace, and a very strong force to root it out. For the arch-Abolitionist, older than Brown, and older than the Shenandoah Mountains, is Love, whose other name is Justice, which was before Alfred, before Lycurgus, before Slavery, and will be after it.20

Emerson’s tribute hits many of the same notes that Brown’s legion of biographers would sound in the decades after Harpers Ferry: charisma, heroism, selflessness, compassion. He also attributes to Brown the ability to make others around him better, a quality possessed by the figurative young, idealistic outcasts he defended in “The Transcendentalist”: those saviors of humanity who held themselves apart from the rush and eventual decay of materialism and who would achieve the highest of reforms by preserving themselves and their ideas for some future moment when new possibilities for change could be imagined. In order to place Brown in that class of idealists, while, at the same time, explaining—or at least contextualizing—his decision not to hold back and wait for some future possibility of reform, Emerson (in the 1859 speech to raise funds for Brown’s family) argues that his personal history and his beliefs make




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Captain John Brown is a farmer, fifth in descent from Peter Brown, who came to Plymouth in the Mayflower, in 1620. All the six have been farmers. His grandfather, of Simsbury, in Connecticut, was a captain in the Revolution. His father, largely interested as a raiser of stock, became a contractor to supply the army with beef, in the war of 1812, and our Captain John Brown, then a boy with his father, was present and witnessed the surrender of General Hull. He cherishes a great respect for his father as a man of strong character, and his respect is probably just. For himself, he is so transparent that al men see him through. He is a man to make friends wherever on earth courage and integrity are esteemed [applause];—the rarest of heroes, a pure idealist, with no by-ends of his own. Many of you have seen him, and every one who has heard him speak has been impressed alike by his simple artless goodness, joined with his sublime courage. He joins that perfect puritan faith which brought his fifth ancestor to Plymouth Rock, with his grandfather’s ardor in the Revolution. He believes in two articles—two instruments, shall I say—The Golden Rule, and the Declaration of Independence; and he used this expression in conversation here. “Better that a whole generation of men, women, and children should pass away by a violent death, than that one word of either should be violated in this country. (118)

Culling references from a range of lectures and addresses Emerson gave in the aftermath of the raid and execution, Harold K. Bush shows him repeatedly attempting to portray Brown in precisely these terms: as an embodiment of Puritan principles and a lover of the Declaration.21 The overall effect of such moves is to define his treason as a justifiable act of rebellion entirely in line with the venerable American traditions of antinomianism and defense of democracy. Emerson’s efforts to contextualize the militant and violent actions Brown took at Harpers Ferry also include casting him as a chivalric idealist who, if allowed to be true to his nature, would play the part of the knight whose errand is



him a perfect symbol of American ideals, and he quotes Brown expressing the depth of his convictions that these ideals must be preserved no matter the cost:


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He grew up a religious and manly person in severe poverty; a fair specimen of the best stock of new England; having that force of thought and that sense of right which are the warp and woof of greatness. Our farmers were Orthodox Calvinists, mighty in the Scriptures; had learned that life was a preparation, a “probation,” to use their word, for a higher world, and was to be spent in loving and serving mankind. Thus was formed a romantic character absolutely without any vulgar trait; living to ideal ends, without any mixture of selfindulgence or compromise, such as lowers the value of benevolent and thoughtful men we know; abstemious, refusing luxuries, not sourly and reproachfully, but simply as unfit for his habit; quite and gentle as a child in the house. And, as happens usually to men of romantic character, his fortunes were romantic. Walter Scott would have delighted to draw his picture and trace his adventuresome career. A shepherd and herdsman, he learned the manner of animals, and knew the secret signals by which animals communicate. He made his hard bed on the mountains with them; he learned to drive his flock through thickets all but impassable; he had the skill of a shepherd by choice of breed, and by wise husbandry to obtain the best wool, and that for a course of years. And the anecdotes preserved show a farseeing skill and conduct which, in spite of adverse accidents, should secure, one year with another, an honest reward, first to the farmer, and afterwards to the dealer. If he kept sheep, it was with a royal mind; if he traded in wool, he was a merchant prince, not in the amount of wealth, but in the protection of the interests confided to him. (122)

Odd that a good Calvinist upbringing would result in a latter-day combination of St. Francis of Assisi and Ivanhoe, but Emerson must be given some leeway in this regard since he was tasked with not only eulogizing Brown for his sympathetic New England audience but also responding to a volley of attacks by outraged Southern Cavaliers (the scented and perfumed targets



mercy rather than vengeance. In the 1860 speech at Salem, Emerson primes his audience to think of Brown in such terms with a brief biographical sketch meant to explain his “romantic character”:


of his barb in the first passage from the 1860 speech I quoted earlier) who portrayed Brown as an uncivilized Puritan fanatic. Even more interesting than the chivalric air is the pastoral quality Emerson ascribes to Brown’s romantic character— mainly because Emerson’s initial attraction to Brown was based on his decidedly non-pastoral capacity for violence and bloodshed. In journal entries that reference Brown’s first visit to Concord in 1857, during which he gave a fundraising lecture at the Town Hall, Emerson expressed admiration for Brown’s use of deadly force against proslavery fighters in Kansas in the 1850s. Reynolds argues that Emerson and other Transcendentalists likely were aware at that time of Brown’s leading role in the controversial May 24, 1856, slayings of five proslavery men near Pottawatomie Creek in southeastern Kansas. While the Pottawatomie incident was part of an escalating series of attacks and reprisals that took place between pro- and antislavery fighters that year, the brutal nature of the killings and the fact that some of the victims were taken from their homes and hacked to death in front of family members left many Brown supporters shocked and dismayed. Whether or not Emerson had specific knowledge of Brown’s part in the killings, he endorsed the general position Brown took that violence was a necessary and justifiable method of abolishing slavery.22 But after the October 15 raid on Harpers Ferry, Emerson’s respect for Brown’s courage and his cause was undercut by a profound sense of disillusionment. He not only publicly condemned the attack as misguided but also privately criticized Brown’s decision to initiate it: a shift in attitude made abundantly clear in the now famous line from the letter to his brother William I quoted earlier: “He is a true hero, but lost his head there.”23 Yet, in many public meetings and in writings composed after Brown’s execution, Emerson again would praise the justness of his cause and celebrate—to the point of mythologizing— Brown’s individual courage. Emerson’s shifting rhetoric reflects the dynamics of his intellectual and emotional struggle to reconcile a Transcendental admiration for Brown’s self-reliance and dedication to abolition with a deeply felt ambivalence about the implications of his self-sacrifice and the efficacy of violence as



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a means to enact reform. Like Du Bois’s biography, Emerson’s accounts of Brown pay tribute to the moral justice of his cause even as they question, both directly and indirectly, the integrity of his ethics. As I show in my final chapter, the shared fascination and ambivalence Emerson and Du Bois have for John Brown as a model for reform find different expression in the elegiacautobiographical writings they produce in response to the deaths of their first-born sons—writings in which each child is imagined and memorialized as a potential intellectual leader and reformer with the capacity to bring idealism and action together in ways that are both morally sound and ethically uncompromised.







Intimate Attachments: Fathers, Sons, and Public Intellectuals

This chapter brings together narratives Du Bois and Emerson composed in response to the deaths of their sons: Du Bois in the essay “Of the Passing of the First-Born” from The Souls of Black Folk and Emerson in letters, journal entries, and his 1844 essay “Experience.” These elegiac-autobiographical writings serve as both personal memorials and explorations of reform under the aegis of public intellectualism. By that I mean they theorize reform as an emotional process and articulate it in affective-cognitive terms in order to more effectively convey the complexity and ambiguity of the problems and tensions each man seeks to address. Comparing these narratives offers a vivid look at how both writers approach reform in an abstract sense (as we have seen Emerson do in arguing for “a right perception” of truth in “Fate,” or as Du Bois does in describing the dilemmas and obligations of the American Negro). It also sheds additional light on their explorations of reform models in less abstract, more personalized terms (as we saw in their interpretations of the character and actions of John Brown). Finally, it reveals the different yet equally fraught constructions of intimacy in their work and how Du Bois, especially, adumbrates the risks and rewards of inviting his audience to share in the emotional pain of his loss. This last point is particularly important since I want to be clear from the outset of this chapter that my emphasis on the shared experience of losing a child is in no



Chapter 4


way meant to suggest that Du Bois and Emerson faced the same kinds of scrutiny or limitations in making their personal lives the subject of public consideration. What I want to understand is how each perceived the value and liability of writing in emotional terms about their losses—perceptions that most certainly were inflected by contingencies of race but that cannot be sufficiently accounted for by racial difference alone. My readings show how both men use narratives of affectivecognitive experience to memorialize their children in similar ways: in one sense as martyred innocents—versions of sentimental culture’s sacred or ideal child—and in another as future intellectual leaders with vast potential for articulating and enacting change. Both Du Bois and Emerson conceptualize these roles as complementary; indeed, each man’s public status compels him to construct his son as both sacred child and intellectual heir. Yet their narratives offer evidence that neither is fully satisfied with the emotional discourse of these constructions or their efficacy as vehicles for reform. Fathers and Sons On January 20 of 1842, Ralph Waldo Emerson traveled home to Concord, Massachusetts, after completing a two-month lecture series in Boston. Such trips were becoming more frequent in the early 1840s, taking him farther and farther afield in his efforts to develop a career as a professional speaker on the lyceum circuit. Taking full advantage of the circuit’s demand for accessible lectures on a wide variety of subjects, Emerson had gained a favorable regional reputation in the mid-1830s through presentations on topics ranging from “The Uses of Natural History” and “English Literature” to “The Age of the Fable” and “Philosophy of History.” The scope of his activity on the lecture circuit widened in the 1840s as he spoke all along the Northeastern seaboard, from Maine to New York City. Describing Emerson’s emerging sense of vocation during this period, Mary Kupiec Cayton writes, “In the new lyceums and in the profession of authorship, it seemed to Emerson, an individual might bring his moral mission to the attention of



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a general public not already bound up in partisan or sectarian causes and receive appropriate consideration.”1 Garnering appropriate consideration from the general public required Emerson not only to select intellectually accessible themes for his essays and lectures but also to present narratives of experiences in affective-cognitive terms that would establish an emotional connection with his audiences. Indeed it was his success at bringing intellectual and emotional discourse together on the lyceum circuit and in print during the 1840s and 1850s that helped him to become, in Len Gougeon’s terms, a “cultural hero” whose genius was an ability to recognize and redress his society’s blindness to “the affective side of humanity that connects us with divinity itself and binds us to one another.”2 Emerson’s lecture series in Boston during the winter of 1841–1842 was a key early step in establishing that heroic status, but the glow of his public triumph quickly dimmed when, just a few days after his return home, a scarlet fever epidemic struck the children of the Emerson household. Daughter Ellen was mildly affected. Baby Edith escaped altogether. But five-year-old Waldo, Emerson’s first-born child and his only son, was taken seriously ill. He deteriorated rapidly and he died at 8:15 in the evening on January 27. Later that same night, Emerson reported the death in a letter to his longtime friend and financial advisor Abel Adams and asked for his help in putting notice of the death in the newspaper: My dear friend, My little boy died this evening. He has been ill with scarlatina since Monday night. My darling my darling! Will you insert in the newspaper that Waldo, son of R Waldo Emerson died on Thursday of scarlatina. Mrs. A & Abby will grieve for their little favorite. —R.W.E.3

In the letter’s left-hand margin, Emerson penned the exact wording of Waldo’s death notice as he wished it to appear in print. Published in the Boston Daily Advertiser on Saturday,



FAT H E R S , S O N S , A N D P U B L I C I N T E L L E C T U A L S


January 29, it read simply: “In Concord, Ms. on Thursday, of scarlatina, Waldo, son of R. Waldo Emerson, 5 yrs 3 months.”4 Emerson wrote about Waldo at least forty times in letters and journal entries during the five-year period immediately following the boy’s death. Within this body of writing are narratives wherein Emerson’s roles as father and intellectual blend together and bleed into one another: intensely personal moments that articulate in affective-cognitive terms both his feelings of grief and his attempts to contextualize them within a broader frame of ideas about the nature of emotional experience and the possible insights to be gained from sharing that experience with others. Many of the letters are short notes meant to inform family and friends of the sad news; others are much longer, often serving to memorialize the boy in deeply emotional terms and speculate on what he might have achieved had his life not been cut short. Barely more than a week after his son’s passing, Emerson penned this relatively lengthy note to Caroline Sturgis, describing a disconnect between his actual affectivecognitive response to Waldo’s death and what he believed he ought to be feeling instead: Dear Caroline, The days of our mourning ought, no doubt, to be accomplished ere this, & the innocent & beautiful should not be sourly & gloomily lamented, but with music & fragrant thoughts & sportive recollections. Alas! I chiefly grieve that I cannot grieve; that this fact takes no more deep hold than other facts, is as dreamlike as they; a lambent flame that will not burn playing on the surface of my river. Must every experience—those that promised to be dearest & most penetrative,—only kiss my cheek like the wind & pass away? I think of Ixion & Tantalus & Kehama. Dear Boy too precious & unique a creation to be huddled aside into the waste and prodigality of things! Yet his Image, so gentle, yet so rich in hopes, blends easily with every happy moment, every fair remembrance, every cherished friendship of my life. I delight in the regularity & symmetry of his nature. Calm & wise, calmly & wisely happy, the beautiful Creative power looked out from him & spoke of anything but chaos & interruption; signified strength & unity—& gladdening, all-uniting life. What was the moral of sun & moon, of roses & acorns, that was



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Emerson’s journal entries likewise range from brief observations and succinct declarations—“Yesterday night at 15 minutes after eight my little Waldo ended his life.”—to page-length records of the boy’s adventures and detailed anecdotes that illustrate his many virtues and talents while reiterating that he no doubt would have become an intellectual and cultural hero in his own right.6 Many of these private letters and journals, in turn, became sources for Emerson’s two formal, public references to Waldo’s death: the 1844 essay “Experience” and the 1847 poem “Threnody,” texts that echo respectively the terse detachment of the official death notice and the sentimental anguish of the initial letter to Adams.7 The journal entries and letters composed in the weeks and months immediately following Waldo’s passing show Emerson struggling to come to terms with the meaning of the loss. The pain they document is severe: so disabling that Emerson often seems incapable of describing its effects, and, at times, so devastating that it causes him to wonder if he should ever be able to love anything again. In a letter to Margaret Fuller dated January 28, 1842, Emerson writes: Dear Margaret, My little boy must die also. All his wonderful beauty could not save him. He gave up his innocent breath last night and my world this morning is poor enough. He had Scarlatina on Monday night. Shall I ever date to love any thing again. Farewell and Farewell, O my Boy!8

These writings also show him attempting to articulate the emotional dimensions of the experience to a broader audience as he shared his feelings about Waldo’s loss with friends and associates such as Fuller and Sturgis and particular family members including his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, and his brother William, both of whom he considered mentors. In effect, Waldo ends up playing a dual role in this body of writing: he is a key figure in his father’s private introspections—an affective-cognitive touchstone



the moral of the sweet boy’s life, softened only & humanized by blue eyes & infant eloquence.5


to which Emerson returns again and again in his journals—and a focal point of intellectual and emotional exchange among Emerson and his closest companions. A lengthy journal entry describing the boy’s relationships with various friends and family members captures this phenomenon, suggesting that Waldo stood at a confluence of emotion and intellect not only in Emerson’s imagination but also in the lives and minds of others of his circle: The boy had his full swing in this world Never I think did a child enjoy more. he had been thoroughly respected by his parents & those around him & not interfered with; and he had been the most fortunate in respect to the influences near him for his Aunt Elizabeth had adopted him from his infancy & treated him ever with that plain & wise love which belongs to her and, as she boasted, had never given him sugar plums. So he was won to her & always signalized her arrival as a visit to him & left playmates playthings & all to go to her. Then Mary Russell had been his friend & teacher for two summers with true love & wisdom. Then Henry Thoreau had been one of the family for the last year, & charmed Waldo by the variety of toys whistles boats popguns & all kinds of instruments which he could make & mend; & possessed his love & respect by the gentle firmness with which he always treated him. Margaret Fuller & Caroline Sturgis had also marked the boy & caressed & conversed with him whenever they were here. Meantime every day his Grandmother gave him his reading lesson & had by patience taught him to read & spell; by patience & love for she loved him dearly.9

As this loving remembrance attests, Waldo enjoyed a privileged status: a student whose many caring teachers managed not to “interfere” with his own unique personality and talents while simultaneously investing him with their own virtue. Consistently describing Waldo’s instruction as a product of the love of his instructors—“plain & wise love,” “true love & wisdom,” “love & respect,” “patience & love”—Emerson portrays his son as a sentimental icon within this intellectual community, a child whose too-early death, combined with his perceived potential as a future



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Dear Lucy, Our darling is de[ad.] Waldo was attacked on Monday nig[gt wi]th scarlatina and died this evening. E[lle]n has symptoms of the disorder today. But my boy is gone. Lidian is very well and her babe. Your affectionate brother R.W.E.10

Emerson’s sentimental characterization of his son as a “darling” (or, in other writings, an “angel”) is a common feature of his journal entries and letters about Waldo; another is his repetition of the very fact of the death itself. The letter to Brown includes only five complete sentences, yet three are dedicated to stating and restating the same piece of news: “Our darling is dead. Waldo . . . died this evening . . . But my boy is gone.” The day after Emerson wrote to Lucy Jackson Brown, he sent a slightly longer letter to his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, emphasizing his inability to find proper terms to explain his feelings: My dear Aunt, My boy, my boy is gone. He was taken ill of Scarletina on Monday evening, and died last night. I can say nothing to you. My darling & the world’s wonderful child, for never in my own or another family have I seen any thing comparable, has fled out of my arms like a dream. He adorned the world for me like a morning star, and every particular of my daily life. I slept in his neighborhood & woke to remember him. Elizabeth was his foster mother filled his heart always with love & beauty which he well knew how to entertain and he distinguished her arrival always with the gravest joy. This thought pleases me now, that he has never been degraded by us or by any, no soil has stained him he has been treated with respect & religion almost, as really innocence is always great & inspires respect. But I can only tell you now that my angel is vanished. You too will grieve for the little traveler, though you scarce have seen his features. Farewell, dear Aunt.11



cultural leader, make him a tragic-heroic figure around which Emerson and his circle unite. On January 27 he wrote the following brief note to his friend Lucy Jackson Brown, notifying her of the tragedy:


Following a pattern typical of nearly all his private writing about Waldo, Emerson acknowledges the great difficulty he experienced in trying to describe the loss—“I can say nothing to you”—but then goes on to glorify the boy in sentimental terms, granting him singular status as a being whose purpose was to “adorn” the world as no other child could do and describing the nearly religious veneration he inspired in others. A journal entry composed a few days later echoes the letter: “The sun went up the morning sky with all his light, but the landscape was dishonored by this loss.”12 Writing to his brother William, Emerson again notes his inability to describe the effects of Waldo’s death and the fact that its overall effect has been to render him an impotent speaker. And he again relies on sentimentality as a narrative frame for his feelings—this time employing the simple refrain “Farewell & Farewell” in answer to his question: “What shall I say of my boy?”13 The impulse to memorialize Waldo in sentimental terms is especially evident in the journal passages, where his image as a perfect child is further enhanced, and all limits on his potential for future achievement are dissolved. Characterizing his son as a precocious scholar (“For every thing he had his own name & way of thinking . . . his own pronunciation and manner”) with preternatural poise and intellect (“a boy of early wisdom, of a grave & even majestic deportment, of a perfect gentleness”), Emerson finds himself compelled to insist on Waldo’s birthright as an intellectual.14 A particularly poignant passage outlines his frustrations: “It seems as if I ought to call upon the winds to describe my boy, my fast receding boy, a child of so large & generous a nature that I cannot paint him by specialties, as I might another.”15 There is a sense of urgency about these memorials, and Emerson seems intent on constructing Waldo as a powerful future prophet, sometimes quoting the boy at length to show his self-possession and eagerness to make himself heard by others: “My music,” he said, “makes the thunder dance”; for it thundered when he was blowing his willow whistle. “Mamma, may I have this bell which I have been making, to stand by the side of my bed.”



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Yes it may stand there. But Mamma I am afraid it will alarm you. It may sound in the middle of the night and it will be heard over the whole town, it will be louder than ten thousand hawks it will be heard across the water, and in all the countries. It will be heard all over the world. It will sound like some great glass thing which falls down & breaks all to pieces.16

Emerson’s journals and letters record the multitude of emotions— disbelief, anger, loneliness, melancholy—that convey both a general sense of sadness at losing his child as well as a specific bitterness at the loss of a promising intellectual legacy: someone who, in the words of Margaret Fuller, was a “child of my friend’s mind, born to fulfil his life.”17 Waldo’s loss cut deeply into Emerson’s psyche, disallowing both the immediate joys of fatherhood and the long-term satisfaction of watching his son grow to embody his father’s intellectual vision. The sense of shallowness Emerson experienced after the death was pervasive and persistent, manifesting itself directly and indirectly through links he makes between emotional expression and intellectual potency: “If I should write an honest diary what should I say? Alas that Life has halfness, shallowness. I have almost completed thirty nine years and I have not yet adjusted my relation to my fellows on the planet, or to my own work.”18 Emerson’s feelings were no doubt exacerbated by his grim experience with the deaths of other family members prior to Waldo: his older brother John Clarke in 1807; his father William in 1811 (Emerson was eight years old); his grandfather, John Haskins, and his only sister Mary Caroline, both in 1814; his first wife Ellen Tucker in 1831 (less than five months after the couple’s wedding); his brother Edward in 1834; and yet another brother Charles in 1836. Given this devastating history, it is hardly surprising that Emerson would wrestle with the emotional implications of insulating himself from the potential pain of future personal losses. Emerson’s struggle is evident in a fascinating exchange of letters with Margaret Fuller that takes place two years after Waldo’s passing, the main topic of which is the need to memorialize him in public fashion.19 Both he and Fuller acknowledge





the boy’s special status as Emerson’s intellectual heir, both describe the pain they continue to feel at his loss, and both rely on sentimental tropes to generate an ideal composite of his character and behavior. But, relative to the body of writing Emerson composed in the weeks and months following the death, these letters evince a greater sense of detachment and a greater degree of depersonalization. Fuller’s letter calls upon Emerson to circulate a poem she knew him to be composing in tribute to Waldo. Gently prodding him to make his verses available to her, she also reassures him that the act of acknowledging the anniversary of Waldo’s death would in no way undermine the “nobler purposes” of their intellectual work. Fuller’s letter is dated January 28, 1844, and is worth quoting in full: Dearest Waldo, I know you are not a “marker of days” nor do in any way encourage those useless pains which waste the strength needed for our nobler purposes, yet it seems to me this season can never pass without opening anew the deep wound. I do not find myself at all consoled for the loss of that beautiful form which seemed to me the realization of hope more than any other. I miss him when I go to your home, I miss him when I think of you there; you seem to me lonely as if he filled to you a place which no other ever could in any degree. And I cannot wish that any should. He seemed, as every human being ought, a thought fresh, original; no other can occupy the same place. Little Edith has been injured in my affections by being compared with him. She may have the same breath in her, and I should like to love her in the same way, but I do not like to have her put in his place or likened to him: that only makes me feel that she is not the same and do her injustice. I hope that you will have another son, for I perceive that men do not feel themselves represented to the next generation by daughters, but I hope, if you do, there will be no comparisons made, that Waldo will always be to us your eldest born, and have his own niche in our thoughts, and have no image intruded to near him. I think, too, that by such delicacy, and not substituting in any way what is inferior or at any rate different, we shall best be entitled to see the end of the poem, for I fully expect to know more of what he used to suggest in my mind. I think of him a great deal and feel at this



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distance of time that there was no fancy, no exaggeration in the feelings he excited. His beauty was real, was substantial I have all his looks before me now. I have just been reading a note of yours which he brought me in the red room, and I see him just as he looked that day, a messenger of good tidings, an angel. I wish, if you are willing, I may have a copy of your poem about him, even if it is not finished I will confine it as strictly to myself, as you may desire. Elizabeth would copy it, I know, for me, if you were willing I should have it, and do not like to do it yourself.20

Emerson wrote an equally detailed reply to Fuller two days later: Thou steadfast loving wise & dear friend, I am always astonished at thy faith & truth—I cannot tell whether they be more divine or human. How have you adopted the life of your poor friend and the lives that are dear to him, so easily, & with a love at once connate & prophetic, which delights & astonishes me at the same time. I am glad of guardian angels, but life is a treasure of soberer worth under the fanning of their wings. When last Saturday night Lidian said, “It is two years today-” I only heard the bellstroke again. I have had no experiences no progress to put me into better intelligence with my calamity than when it was new. I once had occasion to transfer before the Probate Judge the guardianship of an Irish child who had been the ward of my brother Charles to a new guardian, a gentleman in Boston. A poor Irishman who was her Uncle wished himself to have the charge of her little estate & opposed the new appointment but his counsel—seeing the persons interested, forsook him,—the judge slighted his objections, & appointed the gentleman, & poor Roger could only say to all of us strangers, as he did very distinctly, “I am not satisfied.” I am often in his condition; I feel all his impotence; and have only to say after my fashion, “I am not satisfied.” I read lately in Drummond of Hawthornden, of Ben Jonson’s narrative to him of the death of his son who died of the plague in London: Ben Jonson was at the time in the country, & saw the Boy in a vision, “of a manly shape, & of that growth he thinks he shall be at the resurrection.” That same preternatural maturity did my beautiful statue





assume the day after death, & so it often comes to me to tax the world with frivolity.—But the inarticulateness of the Supreme Power how can we insatiate hearers perceivers & thinkers ever reconcile ourselves unto? It deals all too highly with us lowlevelled & weaponed men. Does the Power labour, as men do, with the impossibility of perfect explication, that always the hurt is of one kind & the compensation of another. My divine temple which all angels seemed to love to build & which was shattered in a night, I can never rebuild,—and is the facility of entertainment from thought or friendship or affairs, an amends? Rather it seems like a cup of Somnus or of Momus. Yet flames forever the holy light for all eyes, & the nature of things against all appearances & specialities whatever assures us of eternal benefit. But these affirmations are tacit & secular. if spoken, they have a hollow & canting sound; And thus all our being, dear friend, is evermore adjourned. Patience & Patience & Patience! I will try, since you ask it, to copy my rude dirges to my Darling & send them to you.21

Still frustrated by the fact that he has experienced “no progress” in understanding the experience of his son’s death, Emerson continues to grieve for Waldo, but, unlike the earlier letters, the emotional discourse of his response to Fuller is accompanied by a heightened level of self-analysis. The loss remains a devastating tragedy from a personal standpoint, but now it also has become an intellectual problem—a riddle to be solved or a test to be passed—and, even more significant, a matter for public consideration. Like Jonson, Emerson wishes to publicize a vision of his son: to “tax the world with frivolity” by memorializing “my beautiful statue.” But he is hesitant to begin the process because he feels that no representation can be sufficiently complete or accurate: “My divine temple which all angels seemed to love to build & which was shattered in a night, I can never rebuild.” Moreover, writing publicly about Waldo ends not in new self-knowledge but the “hollow & canting sound” of a life suspended and “evermore adjourned.” Still, Emerson does not reject the more public stance Fuller proposes; six months after their April 1844 letter exchange, he addresses his son’s loss in “Experience,” and, as I show later



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in this chapter, reconceptualizes the boy’s death and his own emotional discourse to better support those “nobler purposes” of which Fuller sought to remind him. Like Emerson, W.E.B. Du Bois was just coming into his own as a public intellectual and cultural commentator when he suffered the acutely painful loss of a son. He and his wife, Nina Gomer Du Bois, were living in the slums of Philadelphia when Burghardt, their first child, was born in October of 1897.22 Du Bois was then in the midst of completing a massive sociological study of African American life commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania—a project that eventually led to the 1899 publication of The Philadelphia Negro and helped launch his career as a leading speaker and reformer on issues of race relations. Married in 1896, the same year the Supreme Court ruled on Plessy v. Ferguson, the couple had been together a scant three months when Du Bois received his research grant from the University of Pennsylvania. The task of surveying and assessing the poverty-stricken conditions of Philadelphia’s African American community kept him extremely busy—he interviewed over twenty-five hundred households in three months’ time— and he rarely had more than a few minutes a day to spend with his wife and son. As the appointment at Penn drew to a close, Du Bois began searching for a new position. An opportunity finally arose in January of 1898 in the form of a teaching position at Atlanta University, and so the Du Bois family moved south. They arrived in a city where the pervasive and debilitating separation of blacks and whites defined almost every sphere of existence. Stores, restaurants, libraries, transportation, housing— virtually every aspect of life in post-Reconstruction Atlanta—was coded by race. Historian and Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis notes that the capital of the New South had rebuilt itself into two very separate cities: “a place in which black and white people possessed angry and embarrassed memories of a fast-receding epoch of more informal and comparatively flexible racial separation.”23 Although Du Bois’s position as a professor at the university afforded some measure of economic security for the family, he and Nina were still subject to the full range of social





indignities and restrictions that white Atlantans imposed on all African American residents. Neither husband nor wife was equipped to battle the comprehensive segregation and unremitting racial hostility that determined life for blacks under Atlanta’s segregationist policies. Learning to negotiate the world of Jim Crow was especially difficult for Nina; having spent her early years in Iowa and Ohio, she had been exposed to racial prejudice but had little experience with pervasive segregation and racial violence. Having taken his undergraduate degree at Fisk University in Nashville, Du Bois was perhaps more familiar with overt racism than his wife; even so, he had relatively little experience with the forms of white-on-black aggression that characterized life in the part of the country he described with no little irony in his first autobiography as the “re-born south” (419). Thus, it would have been all the more difficult to bear the anguish when, in the spring of 1899, husband and wife could not find adequate medical attention after their son Burghardt became suddenly and seriously ill. Atlanta’s white doctors, as a matter of course, refused to treat black patients. And black physicians were all but nonexistent. So when Burghardt’s diphtheria worsened, and he grew more and more feverish, there was very little his parents could do but watch. The child struggled for ten days and then died at sundown on May 24. He was two years old.24 Less than four years later, Du Bois would write publicly of his son’s brief life and tragic death in the essay “Of the Passing of the First-Born” in The Souls of Black Folk. Strikingly dissimilar in tone and content from the other essays in Souls, this elegiac tribute stands as a singular and complex narrative (one given relatively little attention by critics) in a book that, more than any other, powered Du Bois’s transition from up-andcoming academic to established public intellectual and race leader. Following the sentimental convention of constructing dead or dying children as sacred and ideal, Du Bois characterizes Burghardt as a darling of virtue, a boy with the ability to elicit tenderness and sympathy from the most hardened of hearts and the capacity to draw admiration from all who



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observed him. Had he lived, the essay contends, his intellectual gifts would have allowed him to inherit his father’s newly earned mantle of race man and advance his program of racial uplift. Meanwhile, his physical appearance (light-skinned with fair hair and blue eyes) would have allowed him to reach out to a white audience and expand his father’s work of reshaping black-white relations. Burghardt’s loss, we are meant to understand, is as much a tragedy for humankind as for his immediate family, and, perforce, must serve to rally members of both races to change the conditions of social inequality that allowed it to happen. Fathers, Sons, and Public Intellectuals Emerson’s “Experience” depicts both his son and the personal experience of loss in emotionally enigmatic terms: In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me,—neither better nor worse. So it is with this calamity: it does not touch me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature. The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is a reality that will not dodge us. (473)

These brief but oft-quoted remarks on the death of Waldo and Emerson’s response give way almost immediately in the essay to a broader discussion of loss in general. The autobiographical, confessional mood is abandoned in favor of a more abstract,





universal tone, and the particular experience of Waldo’s death is, as numerous critics have remarked, soon subsumed within a series of metaphysical observations about the nature of experience as an abstract concept. Feelings regarding the boy’s passing are presented not as significant in and of themselves, but rather as signifiers of the problematic status of all experience: no matter what form it takes, we never perceive it fully or correctly (observations that presage the argument Emerson makes in “Fate” that no man can hold the correct perception of truth without having experienced it in such a way as to be ready to martyr himself for it). The fact of Waldo’s tragic death in 1842 has become something of a signpost within the field of Emerson studies, a biographical moment that corresponds to what seems an increasing tone of skepticism and gloominess in his philosophy. Most critics acknowledge in some fashion that a pessimism of vision beset Emerson in the 1840s and that he seems to see himself as existing in a state of crisis and disconnection that encompasses both life and work.25 It is not my goal to offer a psychoanalytic account of the way grief is conceptualized in “Experience,” nor is it my intent to explore possible links between a pessimistic sensibility in his intellectual work during the 1840s and 1850s and the losses he experienced in his personal life: these and related topics have been addressed at length in the expansive body of Emerson scholarship. My purpose is to highlight by contrast how the affective-cognitive narrative approach Emerson takes in “Experience” differs from that of the journal entries and letters: how the highly personalized sadness and intimate exchanges of feeling that characterize the latter give way to depersonalized and detached feelings of loss in the former. The objectification of Waldo’s loss in “Experience” can be taken as evidence of uncertainty about sentimentality’s capacity to serve as a public vehicle for emotional expression, but it also must be read, in a narrative sense, as a performance of Emerson’s ambivalence about intimacy: specifically his doubts as to whether the intimate exchange of feelings can lead to the right or true perception of an experience. And if intimacy’s capacity to generate right or true perception is suspect, then we cannot be sure,



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from an affective-cognitive standpoint, whether it is likely to facilitate or undermine the ethical governance of behaviors and actions. Put another way, “Experience” poses a mindreading challenge for Emerson’s readers, one that invites them to interpret his detached account of grief as evidence not of individual hardheartedness or a lack of personal sensitivity but of the difficulty, if not impossibility, of arriving at the meaning of loss through the sharing of feelings. It is a challenge to revisit and perhaps revise whatever estimation we may have of the efficacy of intimacy-as-epistemology. We must recognize here that Emerson does not reject emotional discourse itself; nor does he dismiss the notion that sentimentality and the sharing of feelings might have a collective, emotionally therapeutic benefit (his letters and journals indicate a belief that such benefits do accrue). And so rather than judge Emerson’s account of his son’s death in “Experience” as symptomatic of blocked grief or a stalled mourning process (or, as some critics argue, a stylized elegiac convention) we can treat it as a narrative enactment intimacy’s inability to contribute, ethically speaking, to any type of reform: metaphysical, physical, collective, or individual. Du Bois, like Emerson, expresses doubts about the efficacy of intimacy as an element of reform, although, in his writings about the loss of Burghardt, he does explore such capacity in ways Emerson does not. In “Of the Passing of the First-Born,” the father-son relationship is, by turns, intimate and distant, and the child’s identity is constructed in multiple forms that express the meaning of loss in personal, emotional terms as well as with regard to public, intellectual, and cultural concerns. That emotional discourse is a key narrative element of “FirstBorn” is evident from the essay’s opening lines, which I quote at length as much for the strikingly personal tone they set as for the range of feelings they document: “Unto you a child is born,” sang the bit of yellow paper that fluttered into my room one brown October morning. Then the fear of fatherhood mingled wildly with the joy of creation; I wondered how it looked and how it felt,—what were its eyes, and





how its hair curled and crumpled itself. And I thought in awe of her,—she who had slept with Death to tear a man-child from underneath her heart, while I was unconsciously wandering. I fled to my wife and child, repeating the while to myself half wonderingly, “Wife and child? Wife and child?” . . . Up the stairs I ran to the wan mother and whimpering babe, to the sanctuary on whose altar a life at my bidding had offered itself to win a life, and won. What is this tiny formless thing, this new-born wail from an unknown world—all head and voice? (507)

The scene in which Du Bois describes learning of his son’s birth is among the most dramatic and sentimental moments in “FirstBorn.” The child is understood to possess a sacred quality—his birthplace is a “sanctuary”—and Du Bois takes care to present him as both his own “creation” and as a being whose origin is somehow outside of or beyond the local family unit. We are meant to read him as something more than a son: he comes from an “unknown world” and has ties to something larger. Moreover, the mention of qualities stereotypically associated with an infant—“all head and voice”—is neither incidental, nor simply a way to establish some degree of physical referentiality. References to intellect and speech recur throughout “FirstBorn,” and these opening lines are part of that pattern: Du Bois employs tropes of head and voice to construct Burghardt as both typical infant and nascent public intellectual, a figure whose identity is defined by the ability to speak in meaningful ways and make his voice heard by those around him. The sense of wonder and awe that accompanies Du Bois’s account of the birth of his son underscores by way of counterpoint the subsequent tone of alienation and pessimism that will, as in Emerson’s “Experience,” characterize the description of the child’s death. While Burghardt’s arrival is cause for optimism and celebration, the joy of fatherhood is short-lived: in this narrative, paternal happiness quickly gives way to a sense of bitterness and anger as Du Bois recounts his son’s funeral procession and the racial epithet—“Niggers!”—uttered by whites who passed by.26 As Du Bois moves from the moment of the boy’s birth through his sickness, death, and burial, the space provided by the various facets of his identity—first-born son,



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A perfect life was his, all joy and love, with tears to make it brighter,—sweet as a summer’s day beside the Housatonic. He world loved him; the women kissed his curls, the men looked gravely into his wonderful eyes, and the children hovered and fluttered around him. I can see him now, changing like the sky from sparkling laughter to darkening frowns, and then to wondering thoughtfulness as he watched the world. (509)

On the other hand, the space afforded by these multiple identities offers Du Bois the chance, later in the essay, to separate himself somewhat from the charms of his offspring and discuss the loss in more depersonalized terms not unlike those Emerson employs in “Experience.” In these moments, Du Bois detaches himself from the sentimental portrait he paints early on and begins to address what the loss might mean for the possibilities of reforming black-white relations. Whereas Emerson constructs a more abstract discussion of the meaning of all experience, subsuming the personal within the philosophical, Du Bois detaches himself from his loss not to universalize about experience but to direct our attention to the material conditions associated with racial prejudice and social segregation that contributed to the boy’s death, even going so far as to argue that his son was better off dead than alive given the discrimination he no doubt would have faced as “a Negro and a Negro’s son.”27 Both men depersonalize their losses, but they do so to different degrees and in order to proceed in different directions: Emerson entirely dissolves the father-son bond, characterizing the death of Waldo as inconvenient, and, like the bankruptcy of one’s debtors, not permanently debilitating; he does so in order to show that a particular, personal experience, even the loss of a child, is ultimately no more or no less than a marker for the broader problems of perception humans necessarily encounter in trying to apprehend the meaning of any and all experience



sentimental icon, nascent public intellectual—takes on a certain personal utility. On the one hand, it allows him to claim a degree of intimacy with his child, to express fully and in the most sentimental of terms the extent to which he and others are captivated by Burghardt’s charms:


and, as I have argued, to offer through narrative an illustration of intimacy’s status as an insufficient form of epistemology that, because it offers no right perception of truth, cannot sustain true or significant reform. Du Bois maintains the bond but revises its terms, enlarging his discussion of personal loss to reference the broader intellectual-emotional problems of race: he and Burghardt are not just a father and a son, but a Negro and a Negro’s son. Unlike Emerson, however, Du Bois stops short of universalizing the experience of loss and draining it of particular meaning; to treat his son’s death as Emerson does would only serve to undermine his goals as a public intellectual by deemphasizing the significance of the particular racial prejudices that played a part in the tragedy. For Du Bois, Burghardt’s multidimensional identity becomes useful from both personal and intellectual standpoints as he begins to consider his child’s physical features and the social good that could result from his potential ability to appeal to a white audience (these physical features and the possibility of appealing to or even passing as white are also a source of ambivalence and anxiety, as I discuss in more detail later). The narrative reiterates the notion that Burghardt is both Du Bois’s flesh-and-blood creation and his intellectual heir: I too mused above his little white bed; saw the strength of my own arm stretched onward through the ages through the newer strength of his; saw the dream of my black fathers stagger a step onward in the wild phantasm of the world; heard in his baby voice the voice of the Prophet that was to rise within the Veil. And so we dreamed and loved and planned by fall and winter and the full flush of the long Southern spring, till the hot winds rolled from the fetid Gulf, till the roses shivered and the still stern sun quivered its awful light over the hills of Atlanta. (507–508)

Burghardt’s traits allow the infant boy to be envisioned as a future race man, one who will carry on the dream of his black fathers, and establish the positions of father and son within a distinguished lineage of black male cultural leaders. By linking



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the child with a history and an intellectual legacy that outstrips even his father’s influence, Du Bois shows Burghardt to be both typical and exceptional: typical in that he represents the logical next step in a progression of visionaries and activists, exceptional in that, had he been given the chance to realize his full potential, he not only would have carried on his ancestors’ dream of racial equality but perhaps also achieved it. The suggestion that Burghardt may have achieved this dream is predicated on the assumption that he can serve as a sentimental icon and an intellectual leader not only for African Americans but also for whites. In fact, Du Bois explicitly characterizes the boy’s ability to uplift and inspire members of both races: He knew no color-line, poor dear,—and the Veil, though it shadowed him, had not yet darkened half his sun. He loved the white matron, he loved his black nurse; and in his little world walked souls alone, uncolored and unclothed. I—yea, all men— are larger and purer by the infinite breadth of that one little life” (509).

Such broad-based appeal is, for Du Bois, a key step toward realizing a vision of society in which race is not problematic; within Burghardt’s sentimentalized world, where souls walk “uncolored and unclothed,” there exists the possibility that the colorline may yet be transcended. Du Bois’s transcendent vision of a world beyond the color line is inextricably bound up with Burghardt’s physical appearance and his ability to generate a transracial appeal. Du Bois’s discussion of his son’s appearance constitutes what is perhaps the most intensely personalized moment in the essay. Yet the ambivalent, emotionally charged descriptions of the boy’s physical features also invite an intimacy that, at least for some critics, seems out of place within the context of The Souls of Black Folk as a whole. Shamoon Zamir remarks, “Suddenly, a personal loss that has little to do with the history or politics of racism occupies center stage, and stoic reticence gives way to melodramatic public mourning.”28 In this view, Du Bois’s essay on the death of his son seems at once too emotionally fraught and too pubic—as





if he has violated a trust between himself and his audience that permits recollections of the personal, but only in the form of anecdotes describing incidents of racial prejudice or inequality Du Bois already has overcome. Zamir, along with Arnold Rampersad and Keith E. Byerman, suggest that Du Bois’s attempt to articulate the social significance of his son’s death is jarring because it differs not just in degree but in kind from the pieces that surround it. In their view, “First-Born” marks a shift in emphasis from rational argument to emotional drama; Du Bois’s presentation of Burghardt’s passing upsets the carefully constructed balance between personal experience and public argument that exists within and among the other essays to show that racial inequality is, and should rightly be perceived as, surmountable. Having established a narrative mode of self-presentation in which personal experience carefully and not-to-intimately elaborates the problems of racial inequality and his arguments for reform, it seems in “First-Born” as though Du Bois has suddenly gone too far, too fast when he exposes the recent and traumatic loss of his son. Following on the heels of his empowering history of full and partial victories over the evils of segregation, Du Bois’s decision to delve deeply into the fresh wounds opened by the boy’s passing allows the exposure of emotions and experiences too complex to be articulated or categorized under the rubric of triumph-over-racial adversity. The discussion of the material and moral particulars of Burghardt’s death imparts an acute sense of loss and a new mood of pessimism to the text. It is not a mistake to identify “First-Born” as different in tone and content from the other essays in Souls. Of the fourteen essays that constitute the book, only two others rely extensively on specific events from Du Bois’s life: “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” which tells us something of his childhood, and “Of the Meaning of Progress,” which describes his attempts to secure the school-teaching position in Tennessee while he was a student at Fisk. Despite their direct derivation from personal experience, however, these pieces express little of the sense of immediate and profound loss that characterizes “First-Born.”



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Moreover, they tell us nothing of Du Bois’s social or familial relationships, of his roles as son, husband, or father. They portray him as a detached and independent agent: an individual acting alone in the midst of a potentially hostile world without the support of friends or family. In contrast, when Du Bois writes about the death of Burghardt, he presents himself for the first and only time in Souls as a figure embedded within a familial framework, as someone with close, personal ties to others and who is willing to establish a more intimate connection with his audience: And then one night the little feet pattered wearily to the wee white bed, and the tiny hands trembled; and a warm flushed faced tossed on the pillow, and we knew baby was sick. Ten days he lay there,—a swift week and three endless days, wasting, wasting away. Cheerily the mother nursed him the first days, and laughed into the little eyes that smiled again. Tenderly then she hovered round him, till the smile fled away and Fear crouched beside the little bed. Then the day ended not, and night was a dreamless terror, and joy and sleep slipped away. I hear now that Voice at midnight calling me from dull and dreamless trance,— crying, “The Shadow of Death! The Shadow of Death!” Out into the starlight I crept to rouse the gray physician—the Shadow of Death, the Shadow of Death. The hours trembled on; the night listened; the ghastly dawn glided like a tired thing across the lamplight. Then we two alone looked upon the child as he turned toward us with great eyes, and stretched his stringlike hands,—the Shadow of Death! And we spoke no word and turned away. (508)

Zamir, Rampersad, and Byerman each call upon a particular set of binary oppositions to account for the singularity of “FirstBorn.” Zamir explains its difference from the other essays in terms of oppositions between the political and personal, the rational and irrational. He argues that Du Bois’s restrained use of his personal life elsewhere in the autobiography serves as support for political commentary but is itself never made the focal point of examination. And he contends that “First-Born” seems to do just the opposite by allowing an excess of emotion





to upset the delicately balanced relationship of autobiography and cultural critique: “First-Born” breaks with the text’s overall strategy of personal restraint, according to Zamir, by presenting an element of personal experience that cannot be easily categorized as support for political commentary. He suggests that Souls is geared, in general, to control and restrain the personal: to shape it into clear, rational, easily understood anecdotes for the purpose of countering or overcoming racial inequality. Likewise, Rampersad and Byerman invoke their own oppositions to explain the pattern of generating emotion and formalizing its expression in “First Born.” Both rely upon the language of dominance and resistance to describe Du Bois’s approach to writing about his son’s death. Rampersad sees Du Bois as disrupting the classic conventions of Christian elegy—even to the point of parody—in order to reveal its inadequacy as a method of expressing the mourning experiences of African Americans.29 Byerman argues that the complexity of the boy’s racial heritage as well as the complexity of the emotional experience of his loss render the elegiac tradition useless as a means of memorial, but he sees Du Bois’s revisions of that tradition as a highly effective means of subverting racist practices.30 Yet as much as Du Bois is invested in a maintaining a subversive pose—in using conventional tools and forms in unconventional ways for purposes of reform—he does not position himself in “First-Born” as overcoming the problems or difficulties raised by his son’s death, either from a personal or an intellectual standpoint. He may use Burghardt’s loss as evidence of the pressing need for race reform, but he gives no evidence that the essay should be read as a triumph over racial adversity. The multiple dimensions of Burghardt’s identity demand a reading that focuses less on contextualizing “First-Born” within oppositional frameworks and more on revealing its profound ambivalence concerning the relation of personal experience to public intellectual work. The point cannot be to identify the essay as an overly intimate anomaly in Du Bois’s larger project of conceptualizing race (Zamir). Nor is it entirely sufficient to view “First-Born” as evidence of how Du Bois performs the intellectual and literary work of revising received forms or



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showing them to be inadequate in addressing race-related issues (Rampersad and Byerman). Rather, the task must be to look more closely at how Burghardt’s status as public intellectual heir and reformer is complicated by the dynamics of race that he literally and figuratively embodies. The first detailed description of the child’s features praises the effects that a mixed racial heritage has had on his looks: How beautiful he was, with his olive-tinted flesh and dark gold ringlets, his eyes of mingled blue and brown, his perfect little limbs, and the soft voluptuous roll which the blood of Africa had moulded into his features! I held him in my arms, after we had sped far away to our Southern home—held him, and glanced at the hot red soil of Georgia and the breathless city of a hundred hills, and felt a vague unrest. (507)

This portrait of his son begins with same tone of wonder that defined the essay’s opening lines; like the scene of Burghardt’s birth, this moment also is intensely personal and highly sentimental. Surrounding passages suggest that the child’s striking physical beauty corresponds to his heightened capacity for virtue—we are meant to perceive him as angelic in all senses of the word. Yet the awe and admiration soon give way to uneasiness and then outright anger at the signifiers of whiteness that appear to have shaped Burghardt’s features at least as much, if not more, than the “blood of Africa”: Why was his hair tinted with gold? An evil omen was golden hair in my life. Why had not the brown of his eyes crushed out and killed the blue?—for brown were his father’s eyes, and his father’s father’s. And thus in the Land of the Color-line I saw, as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil. (507)

The angry response registers a sense that the boy was doomed from birth to suffer the effects of racial violence, and Du Bois signals his frustration that Burghardt’s appearance reflects and reiterates a pattern of racial dominance and oppression whereby whiteness obliterates or limits the possibilities for black





expression. Embodying whiteness through his golden hair and blue eyes, he both demonstrates and perpetuates the shadow of the Veil. Even beyond the problem of serving as a signifier of white oppression, Burghardt’s physical appearance provokes his father’s anguish because it may prove to disrupt the generational progression of black male leaders; the material realities of his whiteness may render him unable to carry out the intellectual work of achieving the dream of his black forefathers. As such, Burghardt may alter or interrupt not only the history of black male leadership but also the proper progress of race reform. As with Emerson’s “Experience” the work performed by emotional discourse in “First-Born” is simultaneously personal and public; it provides a means for Du Bois to idealize his son’s virtue and potential as a leader, and, in the process, invite a sympathetic response to Souls’ larger, twofold project of celebrating and uplifting African American culture and restructuring relations between blacks and whites. Yet the status of emotion as a link between the private and the political is never entirely stable or secure. In the course of memorializing Burghardt, scenes that invoke the most sentimental of tropes—the joy of the expectant father, the angelic beauty of the newborn son, the sorrow of the child’s untimely death—are consistently challenged by other moments when the feelings meant to be signified by these figures and images are presented as misguided or useless. Even more significant are moments when Burghardt’s angelic white appearance and capacity to generate sympathy across racial lines are characterized as disturbing, even dangerous to the future integrity of African American culture—scenes in which Du Bois seems to reject altogether the impulse to memorialize and preserve his son. “First-Born” thus evinces an advance-and-retreat pattern with regard to intimacy, a pattern that seems to argue for its potential to both realize and undermine Du Bois’s vision for reforming black-white relations.31 Like Du Bois, Emerson characterizes his son as a literal and figurative embodiment of his ideals for public intellectual leadership and reform: an Emersonian Man Thinking with a “right perception of truth” and an ability to use that perception for the good of the whole of society. Emerson’s letters and journals



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present a son who would have carried on his father’s project of making audiences more aware of the fundamental unity of individual, society, and nature and helping them overcome the problems of social fragmentation that Emerson saw as ever more pressing in the 1840s and 1850s. The act of writing publicly about the death of a child allowed Emerson and Du Bois to interpolate personal experiences into their public intellectual visions—interpolations that proved both vital and troubling as warrants for their increasingly active roles as reformers. Comparing their narrative approaches to personal loss and intimacy brings into sharper focus how contingencies of race differently inflect their shared articulation of affective-cognitive processes as motors for change; moreover, it shows how Emerson and Du Bois imagine and mediate these processes in order to substantiate the ethics of reform. Finally, bringing together these elegiac-autobiographical narratives helps explain not only how Emerson and Du Bois mediated the emotional dimensions of author-audience relations in service of reform but also why they did so: while both recognize the importance of attending to reform’s material and cultural aspects, they also understand that its tensions and problems are apprehended by their audiences as felt experiences—and that engaging with these feelings, however fraught the process may be, is the most expedient, potent, and ethical means of enacting change.







Theory of Mind and the Color Line

I noted in the Introduction that most ToM literary criticism concerns itself with fictional narratives, especially novels, since these texts tend to offer multiple and diverse opportunities to read characters’ states of mind: to predict their motivations and desires and to winnow from the many possible interpretations of their actions those that seem most persuasive and meaningful. I hope by now I have convinced you that nonfictional narratives, including and especially those devoted to the problems and possibilities of reform, can provide mindreading opportunities of their own that match in frequency and complexity any you might find in fiction. You will hear echoes of my plea on behalf of nonfiction later in this Conclusion. I will begin, however, with a brief overview of some of the neurobiological and evolutionary dimensions of ToM that determine how and to what extent we engage with narratives; as part of this overview, I will reiterate the important claim made by most ToM literary scholars: that attention to the evolved, biological elements of cognition must be accompanied by consideration of cultural and historical contexts.1 Finally, I will show how the particular arguments I have made about Emerson and Du Bois can suggest, in broader terms, how ToM-based approaches may temper and supplement literary and cultural criticism that addresses problems of racial difference in the work of other writers: how it can enrich the efforts of scholars whose interest in comparative racialization, like my own, demands modes and methods



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Cognition, Evolution, and Mindreading It is important to recognize that the attribution of a state of mind (whether to fictional character in a novel, an autobiographical representation in a piece of nonfiction, or an actual person sitting across the room) is dictated by cognitive constraints that are near-universal. There are certain neurobiological limits, in other words, that determine the degree and complexity of mindreading that human beings can successfully sustain in a given context, and these limits apply to almost everyone.2 Cognitive psychologists have shown, for example, that when it comes to interpreting social interactions, we are quite adept at identifying and keeping track of several degrees or levels intentionality that may be attributed to the players involved (i.e., Jack often wished that Jill knew that he loved her). Such research shows, in fact, that we are fully capable of making and tracking attributions that involve up to four levels or degrees of recursive intentionality—that is, intentions that seem to double back on themselves several times (i.e., Jack wanted Jill to know how often he wished that she knew that he loved her). Finally, studies of mindreading capacity show that it is possible—albeit very difficult—for us to parse out and monitor five or even six levels of intentionality. (You will be relieved to know, however, that my narrative of Jack’s hopes and wishes goes no further since we already have reached the point at which, according to cognitive psychology, the likelihood of achieving mindreading success decreases precipitously.3) I should note that the cognitive limits regarding intentionality apply to our desire and enthusiasm for mindreading as well as our capacity for it. Put another way, if I were to extend my narrative of Jack’s longing for Jill and if you were so generous as to follow along, it is unlikely that either of us would be satisfied with the end result. Still, mindreading must be understood in large part as the product of a long evolutionary process that has left us with both



of narrative study that not only cross the color line but also delve more deeply into the affective-cognitive infrastructures that subtend it.

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a capacity for and a deep-seated impulse to assess the intentions and motivations of others for purposes of survival. It is a commonplace among anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, and primatologists that the most pronounced and significant difference between humans and other mammals is the intensity and frequency of our social interactions with each other.4 Like us, higher primates may build or undermine alliances and seek to avoid or provoke conflict in ways that advance their chances for mating and survival. But the frequency and intensity of interaction that characterizes human social existence compels us to become both more active and more accurate in attributing complex motivations and goals to each other, and (most important) monitoring and adjusting our own emotions and behaviors in response to those attributions. Yet if attributing states of mind to others—reading their motivations and desires—is such a crucial skill, one might plausibly ask why we do not spend more time honing it by exploring intentionality that recurses beyond the fourth level. It cannot be for lack of opportunity: books, television shows, movies, social networking sites, board meetings, high school reunions—all are capable of presenting us with chances to engage in cognitive guessing games during which the complexity involved in attributing intention to others could grow rapidly and exponentially, assuming we remain willing to play along. Clearly there must be an evolutionary payoff for curbing the time and energy we spend attributing states of mind to others and limiting ourselves to four or fewer levels of intentionality. We are, after all, prone to look for cognitive shortcuts: heuristics or strategies that will allow us to interpret a situation in a way that is useful and meaningful but requires appreciably less work than we otherwise would have to perform. For example, if you have ever started to follow a particularly juicy and extensive online celebrity gossip thread (say, for the sake of this hypothetical example, it included 233 posts) but then decided to skip all posts longer than two lines (or read only the first two lines of every post) and yet were able to gain a satisfactory sense of that particular thread’s zeitgeist, then you have experienced the rewards of a



THEORY OF MIND AND THE COLOR LINE


mindreading shortcut that does not necessarily require you to venture beyond the fourth level of intentionality. Then again, sometimes we do choose to make and track attributions for as long and as far as we possibly can, even when we know there is a shortcut available. For example, if you chose to follow my hypothetical celebrity gossip thread all the way through to its end, reading each of the 233 posts in its entirety while keeping track of the especially catty references between and among the most frequent contributors, then you have experienced the rewards of a mindreading challenge that goes far beyond the fourth level of intentionality. Since my unscientific poll of close, personal friends suggests that some people would, on occasion, follow such a particularly juicy and extensive celebrity gossip thread to the very end while reading every line of every post, clearly there must be some evolutionary benefit to not always curbing the time and energy we spend attributing states of mind to others. To put all this more simply: The potential payoff for being able to keep track of more than four levels of intentionality is rarely worth the energy and time it would cost us to do so—yet sometimes we do it anyway. Thus, using an evolutionary balance sheet of costs and benefits to survival and reproduction is not always sufficient to account for the idiosyncrasies of our mindreading practices.5 Mindreading in Practice, Cognition in Context So, while the capacity for mindreading may be a near-universal human trait—cognitive science tells us it transcend differences in culture, race, and geography—there is no warrant to assume that everyone mindreads the same way or that judgments about another person’s (or fictional character’s) state of mind will remain static over time. As an interpretative mode, then, ToMbased literary criticism requires us to pay close attention not only to evolved neurobiological limits and cognitive constraints but also to the exigencies of particular historical moments and cultural contexts in which narratives emerge. ToM is not unique in requiring us to study the relation between text and context, of course, and as such it is best perceived as a fellow participant



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in a shared enterprise rather than as a cognitive super-theory meant to assimilate or override the goals and methods of other forms of literary criticism. After all, Lisa Zunshine notes, “it seems the majority of literary-critical paradigms—be that paradigm psychoanalytic, gender studies, or new historicism— profitably exploit, in their quest for new layers of meaning, our evolved cognitive eagerness to construct a state of mind behind a behavior” (25). Continuing to quote Zunshine: The current state of the field of cognitive approaches to literature already testifies to the spectacular diversity of venues offered by the parent fields of cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive evolutionary anthropology. Literary scholars have begun to investigate the ways in which recent research in these areas opens new avenues in gender studies (F. Elizabeth Hart); feminism (Elizabeth Grosz); cultural historicism (Mary Thomas Crane, Alan Richardson, Blakey Vermeule); narrative theory (Alan Palmer, David Herman, Uri Margolin, Monika Fludernik, Porter Abbott); ecocriticism (Nancy Easterlin); literary aesthetics (Elaine Scarry, Gabrielle Starr); deconstruction (Ellen Spolsky); and postcolonial studies (Patrick Colm Hogan, Frederick Luis Aldama). What their publications show is that far from displacing or rendering the traditional approaches redundant, a cognitive approach can build on, strengthen, and develop their insights. (36–37)

Zunshine’s catalog certainly attests to the breadth of areas of literary criticism that have benefited in some fashion from questions, concepts, and critical tools generated by studies of cognition. That the catalog makes no explicit mention of race is not an indication of cognitive studies’ incompatibility with critical race studies. Likewise, other than a general resistance to universalizing or near-universalizing critical sensibilities (resistance evinced to greater or lesser degrees by every other area of literary study on Zunshine’s list), there is no methodological or thematic aspect of race studies that would automatically put it at odds with ToM or other areas of cognitive research.





It is only a matter of time before current work in cognitive literary studies is enhanced by greater attention to issues of race and problems of racial difference, and this book is a small contribution to that project. These chapters, taken together, also stand as an argument that the insights of such a project will be significantly amplified and substantiated if, under its intellectual umbrella, there is room not only for studies that draw upon a wide range of texts and authors to support claims about how and why race matters in a cultural sense, but also for work that drills down into specific interracial interstices, such as those that characterize the writings of Emerson and Du Bois, to uncover narrative patterns and characteristics that otherwise would go unnoticed. Such work avoids the pitfall common to many but not all surveys of multiple writers of different racial backgrounds: that of setting up promising comparisons but not fully exploring them. Had I been operating within a multipleauthor format, I may have been able to establish the basis for a comparative analysis that would have identified and perhaps even begun to challenge the long-standing critical habits common to both Emerson and Du Bois scholars of interpreting each man’s personal detachment as evidence of a lack of feeling. But I would not have been able to develop that comparison to the extent I do in chapter four, for example, where my readings of their autobiographical-elegiac treatments of their sons show how detachment is in fact a complicated emotional configuration that plays a key role in their respective visions of what public intellectuals should be and do. I also would not have been able to explicate the degree to which Du Bois and Emerson (especially the former) attribute states of mind, feelings, and motivations to their lost children in order to explore the limits of reform and dramatize the stakes of social change for their respective audiences. Moreover, close-quarters comparative analysis reveals in striking detail how Du Bois and Emerson struggle to articulate emotional processes in which the interplay of affect and cognition can both reflect the tensions of racial difference and serve as the ethical basis for resolving them—in theory if not always in practice, as I show in my readings of each man’s writings on



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John Brown. Here again, a study that operated primarily along a horizontal axis rather than a vertical one would have necessitated a trade-off of depth for breadth and not fully captured the finely calibrated skepticism each writer brings to his critique of the ethics of Brown’s model of reform. Confining this study to Du Bois and Emerson also allowed circumvention of what I take to be well-intentioned but often limiting philosophical discussions of the origins of double consciousness as well as debates about whether (or how) the Emersonian and Du Boisian versions should be arranged in a common intellectual genealogy. Instead, I have been able to provide a fresh reading of double consciousness that makes visible the emotional discourse within which each intellectual embeds it—and how both Du Bois and Emerson define the affectivecognitive experience of public intellectualism in terms of this phenomenon. Also, the complex attributions of intent in Du Bois’s formulation, when contrasted with the lower-level attributions made by Emerson, offer telling evidence of the degree to which circumstances of racial difference and white privilege shape their respective efforts to enact social change. Finally, my dual-author approach and ToM methodology have created space for consideration of texts that generally get nudged to the margins of Emerson and Du Bois scholarship, yet are richly deserving of our attention. Chapter one sheds light on Emerson’s 1844 “An Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies” and Du Bois’s 1897 “The Conservation of Races” to illustrate how each serves as a foundation for its author’s later writings on race reform. Comparison reveals how both texts function as early sites of experimentation wherein Emerson and Du Bois invite an audience (or, in Du Bois’s case, audiences) to work through a series of mindreading challenges. One of the most intriguing aspects of these challenges is that they conceptualize race in terms of emotion as well as biology, culture, and geopolitical affiliation; moreover, they are meant to guide audiences to and through a series of ethical questions associated with the reform of intra- as well as interracial relations. And perhaps most striking: they signal both intellectuals’ recognition that the limits of mindreading—of





guessing at the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of others— effectively constitute the limits of reform writing. The diverse narratives Du Bois and Emerson produced in response to the pressures of representing their ideas and mindreading their audiences bespeak a need for deeper study of the reformist dimensions of their public intellectualism with regard to issues of racial difference—that is, a need for further comparative examination of the affective-cognitive dimensions of their responses to the ethical dilemmas, social tensions, and material inequalities that both give rise to and are perpetuated by the cultural phenomenon of the color line. I hope this book has begun to meet that need by taking as its premise the idea that racialization is a comparative process and that the act of comparison itself should not only assess similarities and differences but also bring into view relationalities that otherwise would remain obscured: whether that be a shared belief that race is best apprehended and articulated in terms of the emotions that attend it, or a shared fascination with reformist ideals and the passion necessary to guide the world closer to them. “Head-work” As I stated at the outset, my final goal for this Conclusion is to show how some of the ToM-based approaches and insights I have drawn from and developed in my study of Du Bois and Emerson might be extended or reconfigured to supplement criticism of other writers and texts. So, having just enumerated for you the various advantages of an exclusive, dual-author comparative focus, I want to close with a brief reading that examines (not too paradoxically, I hope) the work of another nineteenthcentury reformer who is deeply invested in articulating the problems of racial difference and exploring possibilities for change in the status quo of black-white relations. I will not stray far in thematic terms from the arguments I already have made about reform writing under the aegis of public intellectualism and the emotional dimensions of racial difference—and I will make a particular effort to draw connections to both Du Bois and Emerson (mainly the former for reasons that should become



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apparent as the analysis unfolds). But I also will bring into play some key literary and cultural variables that broaden the avenues of inquiry I have followed thus far. The writer is Maria W. Stewart, a reformer who was active in Boston’s free black community during the 1830s, and the particular text I want to begin with is a pamphlet she published and publicly presented in 1831 entitled “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, The Sure Foundation On Which We Must Build.”6 In it she describes a series of improvements and reforms, both individual and communal, she wishes to see enacted by herself and her peers—changes Stewart hopes eventually will attend broader and deeper reforms of antebellum race relations. To underscore the depth of civic inequality in early-nineteenth-century U.S. culture and galvanize her audience to demand full legal rights, she casts the division of blacks and whites in terms of nationality rather than color, referring to whites as “Americans” and urging her fellow blacks to act as “the Americans do”: Do you ask the disposition I would have you possess? Possess the spirit of independence. The Americans do, and why should not you? Possess the spirit of men, bold and enterprising, fearless and undaunted. Sue for your rights and privileges. Know the reason you cannot attain them. Weary them with your importunities. You can but die if you make the attempt; and we shall certainly die if you do not. The Americans have practised nothing but head-work these 200 years, and we have done their drudgery. And is it not high time for us to imitate their examples, and practise head-work too, and keep what we have got, and get what we can. (38)

Stewart is a pioneering figure in the tradition of black feminist thought, and her critique of African Americans’ exclusion from U.S. citizenship, even as she makes blacks themselves responsible in large part for the remedy, is one of many provocative arguments for reform both here and elsewhere in her writing that garner interest from scholars studying antebellum citizenship, race relations, and the gender dynamics of early black nationalism. She is, Marilyn Richardson notes, not only the first black woman to speak widely on issues of women’s rights,





but the first woman—black or white—who is recorded to have stood on a lecture platform and spoken on political topics to an audience comprising members of both sexes.7 Moreover, she was a frequent contributor to William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator (her articles appeared in the “Ladies Department”), and Garrison himself was a lifelong admirer of her passion and talent for inspiring social change.8 The relatively small but rapidly expanding body of scholarship on Stewart concerns itself mainly with the rhetorical traditions, political ideology, and cultural implications of her work. I want to look, however, at the affective-cognitive model for reform she recommends to her audience, specifically her contention that their efforts should comprise distinct yet interrelated habits and practices of feeling and behavior. Indeed, Stewart’s approach to reform is compelling not only for the particular political position she stakes out with regard to problems of intraand interracial relations, but also for the emotional protocol she endorses for addressing and resolving them. For her, the pursuit of citizenship, and, by extension, full-scale social and political equality, is best accomplished through affective manifestations and instances of cognitive monitoring (“Possess the spirit”) that allow for ongoing adjustment of behavior in service of activism (“Sue” and “Weary them”). One must be possessed by the spirit of reform and willing to act on those feelings, but such affective experience, if not accompanied by cognitive monitoring, can do little to remediate individual moral deficiencies. And if all this were not enough, Stewart insists that she and her peers must manifest emotion in ways that serve not only themselves but also the interdependent community to which they belong. The stakes are too high, she argues, to privilege the needs of the individual over those of the whole: “You can but die if you make the attempt; and we shall certainly die if you do not.” As we already have seen in the work of Du Bois and Emerson—particularly in their writings on the deaths of their sons—it is no easy task to initiate and govern emotion while maintaining a sense of one’s collective, relational subjectivity; indeed, their work suggests that detachment from others, even one’s own family members, can be a far more intellectually



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appealing and emotionally safer option for a reformer than the kind of collective interpersonal engagement Stewart demands. In fact, detachment is precisely what Stewart argues against in her vision of reform, and the necessity and complexity of maintaining intimate connections with one’s family and community would seem belied by the seemingly straightforward term— “head-work”— she uses to designate such labor (the practice of which she endorses as an alternative to the “drudgery” so long enforced upon her and her audience). This passage, as well as the larger body of her writing, demonstrates that head-work is far more than the opposite of manual labor. It is, rather, a multidimensional trope that expresses key elements of Stewart’s public intellectualism: the inspiration and expression of feelings; the imagining of alternatives to extant social institutions and traditions; the reconfiguration of political and economic sites of privilege; the revitalization of religious belief; the overcoming of physical and psychological trauma; and (especially) the process of self-abstraction whereby individuals assume status as speakers and representatives for particular groups or communities without cultivating a sense of formal distance or detachment from them. In a passage that appears shortly before the one I quoted earlier, Stewart iterates the necessity of a collective form of racial uplift initiated by African Americans themselves, and she underscores the importance of attachments within the black community as the basis for such reform by pointing out that whites cannot be counted on to offer support across the color line or (if history is any indication) foster a racially inclusive program of improvement, whether socioeconomic, political, moral, or cultural: I have been taking a survey of the American people in my own mind, and I see them thriving in the arts and sciences, and in polite literature. Their highest aim is to excel in political, moral, and religious improvement. They early consecrate their children to God, and their youth indeed are blushing in artless innocence. They wipe the tears from the orphan’s eyes, and they cause the widow’s heart to sing for joy [Job 29:13]! And their poorest ones, who have the least wish to excel, they promote!





And those that have but one talent they encourage. But how very few are there among them that bestow one thought upon the benighted sons and daughters of Africa, who have enriched the soils of America with their tears and blood: few to promote their cause, none to encourage their talents. Under those circumstances, do not let our hearts be any longer discouraged; it is no use to murmur or repine; but let us promote ourselves and improve our own talents. And I am rejoiced to reflect that there are many able and talented ones among us, whose names might be recorded on the bright annals of fame. But “I can’t,” is a great barrier in the way. I hope it will soon be removed, and “I will,” resume its place. (34–35)

In calling for “I can’t” to be replaced by “I will,” Stewart prefigures not so much the Du Bois of “Of the Passing of the First-Born” but rather he of “The Conservations of Races.”9 Recall chapter one’s references to the latter essay, specifically to Du Bois’s critique of the lack of leadership and effort in support of intraracial uplift demonstrated by the talented tenth of the Negro race at the turn of the century: It is such incessant self-questioning and the hesitation that arises from it, that is making the present period a time of vacillation and contradiction for the American Negro; combined race action is stifled, race responsibility is shirked, race enterprises languish, and the best blood, the best talent, the best energy of the Negro people cannot be marshaled to do the bidding of the race. They stand back to make room for every rascal and demagogue who chooses to cloak his selfish deviltry under the veil of race pride. (821)

Both Du Bois and Stewart identify racial-communal bonds as the foundation for reform, and both offer what is essentially a hierarchical vision of race leadership (Du Bois more pointedly so than Stewart). Their shared emphasis on intraracial responsibility to others serves as a counterbalance to what each perceives as the deferred or diluted promises of equality and citizenship; moreover, both extend their vision outward to identify African Americans as part of a global Negro race, the potential of which



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cannot ultimately be limited by the exigencies of the color line as they exist in either antebellum or turn-of-the-century America. Stewart and Du Bois also lament in similar ways the wasted potential—the under- or misused talents and skills—caused by the structural inequality of black-white relations. In an 1832 lecture delivered at The Franklin Hall in Boston (meeting place for the New England Anti-Slavery Society), Stewart is careful not to denigrate physical labor of the kind so long enforced on African American women and men; yet she also offers a strident critique of the race-based caste system that confines blacks to a narrow range of tasks and vocations (often physically and psychologically debilitating) and that prevents depressingly large segments of both the free and slave populations from discovering and developing abilities that would improve themselves and their race: I do not consider it derogatory, my friends, for persons to live out to service. There are many whose inclination leads them to aspire no higher; and I would commend the performance of almost anything for an honest livelihood; but where constitutional strength is wanting, labor of this kind, in its mildest form, is painful. And doubtless many are the prayers that have ascended to Heaven from Afric’s daughters for strength to perform their work. Oh, many are the tears that have been shed for want of that strength! Most of our color have dragged out a miserable existence of servitude from cradle to grave. And what literary acquirement can be made, or useful knowledge derived, from either maps, books, or charts, by those who continually drudge from Monday morning until Sunday noon . . . look at many of the most worthy and most interesting of us doomed to spend our lives in gentlemen’s kitchens. Look at our young men, smart, active, and energetic, with souls filled with ambitious fire; if they look forward, alas! What are their prospects? They can be nothing but the humblest laborers, on account of their dark complexions; hence many of them lose their ambition, and become worthless. (47–49)

Stewart follows this critical assessment of the vocational opportunities afforded to African Americans with an echo of her





1831 exhortation to “sue” for equal rights and privileges and “weary” the white power structure with calls for reform. Here she is even more pointed in her call for collective action— urging her audience to aggressively pressure the state legislature for full citizenship and equal access to economic opportunity. And once again, her words presage those of Du Bois who, as I argued in chapters one and two, both criticizes the leveling effects of the vocational limits placed on African Americans and, at the same time, contends that reform of such conditions must begin within the black community itself. He writes in “The Conservation of Races”: It is our duty to conserve our physical powers, our intellectual endowments, our spiritual ideals; as a race we must strive by race organization, by race solidarity, by race unity to the realization of that broader humanity which freely recognizes differences in men, but sternly deprecates inequality in their opportunities of development. For the accomplishments of these ends we need race organizations: Negro colleges, Negro newspapers, Negro business organizations, a Negro school of literature and art, and an intellectual clearing house, for all these products of the Negro mind, which we may call a Negro Academy. (822)

Du Bois’s idea for a Negro Academy bespeaks the early stages of a professionalism that would become increasingly important to his notion of public intellectualism. As a keystone for his program of racial uplift, the Academy is at once more formal and more elitist than anything Stewart imagines, although her connections to both The Liberator and the New England AntiSlavery Society suggest that she too envisioned race reform as a process in which all might participate but which would be sparked and guided by those elite individuals who evince the greatest talents and ambitions for leadership, artistic creation, and free enterprise. Still, for both Stewart and Du Bois, such talents and ambitions are insufficient to properly manifest reform unless governed by a distinct sense of morality and directed toward the achievement of a common good. In her 1832 essay “Cause for Encouragement” Stewart suggests that she herself would be



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Many bright and intelligent ones are in the midst of us; but because they are not calculated to display a classical education, they hide their talents behind a napkin. I should rejoice to behold my friends or foes far exceed my feeble efforts. I should be happy to discern among them patterns worthy of imitation, and become proud to acknowledge them as my superiors. O, how I long for the time to come when I shall behold our young men anxious to inform their minds on moral and political subjects—ambitions to become distinguished men of talents—view them as standing pillars in the church, qualifying themselves to preach the everlasting gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ—becoming useful and active members in society, and the future hopes of our declining years. (44)

The patterns “worthy of imitation” to which Stewart refers are based on moral and ethical principles meant to make individual ambition a virtue by embedding it within broader programs of communal reform. Those principles require, Stewart contends, a constant self-monitoring and adjustment of feelings and behaviors. To be informed “on moral and political subjects” is not simply to acquire knowledge of the external world that one previously had been denied, but to do so always with an eye toward forming and reforming one’s goals, values, and desires in accordance with collective uplift. In his blueprint for the Negro Academy, Du Bois reiterates Stewart’s insistence on a model of reform rooted not only in the acquisition of long-denied education but also undergirded by a moral and ethical imperative for self-monitoring and goaladjustment: Weighted with a heritage of moral iniquity from out past history, hard pressed in the economic world by foreign immigrants and native prejudice, hated here, despised there and pitied everywhere; our one haven of refuge is ourselves, and but one means of advance, our own belief in our great destiny, our own



glad to stand back, give up her platform, and follow the lead of anyone whose virtue and talent for inspiring reform surpasses her own:


implicit trust in our ability and worth. There is no power under God’s high heaven that can stop the advance of eight thousand thousand honest, earnest, inspired, and united people. But— and here is the rub—they must be honest, fearlessly criticizing their own faults, zealously correcting them; they must be earnest. No people that laughs at itself, and ridicules itself, and wishes to God it was anything but itself ever wrote its name in history; it must be inspired with the Divine faith of our black mothers, that out of the blood and dust of battle will march a victorious host, a mighty nation, a peculiar people, to speak to the nations of earth a Divine truth that shall make them free. And such a people must be united; not merely united for the organized theft of political spoils, not united to disgrace religion with whoremongers and ward-heelers; not united merely to protest and pass resolutions, but united to stop the ravages of consumption among the Negro people, united to keep black boys from loafing, gambling, and crime; united to guard the purity of black women and to reduce that vast army of black prostitutes that is today marching to hell; and united in serious organizations, to determine by careful conference and thoughtful interchange of opinion the broad lines of policy and action for the American Negro. This, is the reason for being which the American Negro Academy has. (822–823)

In chapter one I argued that Du Bois’s main goal in “The Conservation of Races” was to map out a series of ideals to which the race, as a whole, should aspire. I also described not only the emotional kinship he sought to establish with his primary audience, the talented tenth, as a means of achieving those ideals but also the mindreading challenges he offered his fellow elites—challenges that compelled them to explore, in ethical terms, how best to respond to racial inequality given their status as representative figures. It is important to note that, despite the intensity of the various feelings he seeks to inspire (pride, righteous indignation, anger, exhilaration), Du Bois’s attempt to define and justify the purpose of the Academy does not comprise any sort of direct call for violent action in service of race reform. A dozen years before his biographical portrait of John Brown would explicitly reject bloodshed as a component of reform under the aegis of public intellectualism,



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Du Bois implicitly rejects it here as part of his vision of the Negro Academy. Likewise, Stewart’s public intellectualism, for all it encompasses and embraces, stops short of recommending physical confrontation and resistance of the type endorsed by her mentor David Walker—a reformer who, figuratively speaking, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with John Brown in his desire to abolish slavery and race prejudice and who shared Brown’s belief that killing was a justifiable and necessary means of achieving those goals.10 Despite the epic-heroic, sacrificial connotations of their rhetoric, Du Bois and Stewart refuse the argument that violence is a morally just and ethically viable means of bringing about the kinds of radical changes in the social order necessary to ensure reciprocal relations across the color line. Moreover, much like Emerson and Du Bois contend in their writings on John Brown, Stewart argues that reform, as a properly emotional process, requires both an affective response to external factors that might influence one’s desires and goals and an opportunity for cognitive monitoring and behavior adjustment in order to achieve and secure them. She concludes, as Du Bois and Emerson would, that the allure of violence as a means of redressing racial inequalities masks an unstable relation between affect and cognition that threatens to diminish or eliminate would-be reformers’ capacities to imagine and enact new forms of change in response to shifts in the social-political landscape. In other words, the ethics of Stewart’s public intellectualism— the principles of head-work—require us to emulate the spirit of reform-minded self-sacrifice embodied by David Walker (or John Brown), but to reject the belief that violence and killing are viable strategies for reconfiguring black-white relations. Stewart’s rich and variegated notion of head-work helps us identify and begin to explore yet another space within the province of a public intellectualism that concerns itself with deep reform—that is, with the emotional dimensions that give shape to the experience of racial difference and determine possibilities for change at both individual and collective levels. In the 1831 pamphlet and speech, Stewart urges her audience to establish for




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We need never to think that anybody is going to feel interested for us, if we do not feel interested for ourselves. That day that we, as a people, hearken unto the voice of the Lord, our God, and walk in his ways and ordinances, and become distinguished for our ease, elegance, and grace, combined with other virtues, that day the Lord will raise us up, and enough to aid and befriend us, and we shall begin to flourish. Did every gentleman in America realize, as one, that they had got to become bondmen, and their wives, their sons, and their daughters, servants forever, to Great Britain, their very joints would become loosened, and tremblingly would smite one against another; their countenance would be filled with horror, every nerve and muscle would be forced into action, their souls would recoil at the very thought, their hearts would die within them, and death would be far more preferable. Then why have not Afric’s sons the right to feel the same? (38–39)

Stewart’s vision of reform, outlined here and in other pieces published in the early 1830s, encompasses much more than a move from manual to intellectual labor or from serving others to working for oneself. As I have argued, the “practise” of head-work is not solely an alternative to “drudgery.”11 From a ToM standpoint, it is a conceptual placeholder for the affective and cognitive dimensions of reform: the shifts in mood and self-perception that cause individuals to “feel interested” for themselves in new ways and which must be enacted with a convincing degree of emotional referentiality before other goals—moral, political, economic—can be achieved. Stewart’s question—if liberty is at risk, why would African Americans not have the right to “feel the same” as white Americans—certainly reminds us that race must be understood in geopolitical terms. But, like Du Bois and Emerson, her consistent invocation of the discourse of feeling is compelling evidence that both the



itself a collective mood of moral worthiness—to effect changes in feelings and habits of perception that will help consolidate the community while fostering its virtue and autonomy. She writes:

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problems of racial difference and the possibilities for reform must also be apprehended as emotional processes—and in fact that the affective-cognitive dimensions of black-white relations are the conceptual starting point for any attempt to conjoin race and place. The defining characteristic of citizenship, as Stewart defines it here, is the right to feel as others do: the right, in other words, to experience a particular affective response to some external factor that holds the potential to influence your values and desires and to adjust your behavior accordingly. Again, my claim from a ToM perspective is not so much that Stewart mindreads her audience but rather that she invites them to participate in a broader, more collective act of mindreading—a kind of head-work that brings together the affective and cognitive dimensions of emotion in service of intraracial uplift. Drawing on ToM research to formulate questions about the affective and cognitive foundations of her concept of reform as an inward-directed endeavor—first at the individual level and then at the level of racial community—helps enlarge and enhance extant scholarship that focuses on the cultural work her writing performs in challenging the status quo of interracial relations (specifically her calls for reciprocal political, social, and economic interactions across the color line). With regard to these challenges, ToM raises and investigates some difficult questions: To what extent are emotions universal or culturally and communally specific. What relation do they have to perception and behavior within a given social context. And how do emotions allow and inhibit the expression and pursuit of goals at both the individual and communal levels. It is the last of these questions—what is the status and function of feeling vis-à-vis the achievement of individual and communal goals—that matters most for my interest in Stewart’s reform writing. And it matters most because it posits (to borrow a phrase from cognitive psychology) the “deep goal relevance” of all forms of emotion and ascribes to them a shaping influence on subjectivity. The question assumes, in other words, a definite causal link between feelings and the forming and reforming of higher-level goals, like those so crucial to Stewart—as well as





Emerson and Du Bois—that determine moral and ethical relations between and among individuals and their communities. The approach I am sketching out here supplements the cultural and literary study of reform by drawing on recent empirical research that addresses the possible innate origins for moral principles and behavior. Such work builds on Chomsky’s “poverty of stimulus” argument, which posits that environmental stimuli alone are not sufficient to explain linguistic competence—an argument subsequently appropriated and extended by scholars interested in empirical studies of the mind to encompass moral competence as well. In other words, they show how external influences cannot fully account for an individual’s moral capacity and, thus, that morality must be at least in part an innate human quality. Other scholars redirect this line of inquiry by arguing that morality itself should not be understood as innate but rather viewed as the outcome of interactions between two innate processes: the affective and the cognitive.12 The larger issue at stake for this body of research—and for my nascent analysis of Stewart’s writing—is the instantiation of an integrated explanatory model for human behavior: one that posits the existence of innate qualities of the mind while maintaining space for consideration of environmental stimuli. Such a model is, I argue, adoptable and adaptable for cultural and literary studies insofar as it invites us to examine writers’ beliefs in universal morality as a motivational precursor to reform while simultaneously allowing for explications of the various kinds of cultural work reform writing accomplishes. To be clear: my goal is not to verify nineteenth-century universalisms with twenty-first-century empirical methods. It is instead to suggest that while our current critical practices have been extraordinarily effective in identifying the influence of cultural factors on the literature of reform, those same practices lead (and often push) us away from engaging universalist or essentialist sensibilities—save to critique them. Yet, as even a cursory examination of Stewart’s work makes clear, minimizing the importance of universalist notions such as innate morality inhibits the examination of nineteenth-century



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writers who, like her, relied on these beliefs as conceptual cornerstones for their theories of reform. Given head-work’s multiple forms, it would be a mistake to read Stewart’s claim that its practice will help her audience “keep what we have got, and get what we can” as evidence of insularity. In fact the opposite is true: the concept of head-work signifies Stewart’s deep-seated and abiding desire that she and the other members of Boston’s free black community be recognized as laboring for ends existing beyond the self and beyond the social and political status quo maintained by antebellum traditions of race-based disenfranchisement. Her wish is to be understood as working not to secure whatever gains might be had within the bounds of extant relations with whites but to begin reconstructing those relations as politically, economically, and socially reciprocal.13 With such reciprocity as its most crucial goal, Stewart’s trope serves as a powerful placeholder for an ethics that would generate and govern feelings, thoughts, and actions in order to effect change within and beyond the black community: within by calling for individual reform in service of communal consolidation, without by intervening in the maintenance of civic inequality and racial hierarchy. That Stewart, Du Bois, and Emerson all connect intellectual labor to an ethics of communal responsibility and reciprocity suggests we should apprehend their visions of reform in much the same way that contemporary multiculturalist theory invites us to view articulations of social difference produced by subjects speaking from marginal or interstitial cultural spaces: that is, as “signs of the emergence of community envisaged as a project—at once a vision and a construction—that takes you ‘beyond’ yourself in order to return, in a spirit of revision and reconstruction, to the political conditions of the present.”14 Moreover, Stewart and Du Bois can be understood as offering their audiences a means whereby those with relatively limited cultural and political capital nevertheless can use “the spirit of revision and reconstruction” as impetus to envision and then leverage large-scale reform. To “practise head-work,” as Stewart encourages explicitly and Du Bois advocates implicitly, is to





possess the inspiration necessary to imagine and carry out innovations of the self that elide tradition and surpass the limits of prior experience even as they foster active, pragmatic, and collective engagement with the politics of the here-and-now. And it is the full measure of what it means to feel and act as a public intellectual in pursuit of reform across the color line.



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Introduction: The Province of Public Intellectualism: Emerson, Du Bois, Emotion, and Reform Writing 1. For information on specific references to Emerson in Du Bois’s writing as well as a survey of intellectual connections critics have made between them, see Patterson, chapter 7, especially pp. 159–165. 2. Gougeon also notes that “despite the strong presence of the affective, emotional element in Emerson’s writings, as witnessed especially in such essays and poems as ‘Love,’ ‘Friendship,’ and ‘Give All to Love,’ as well as his numerous and often passionate antislavery addresses, this important element of Emerson’s work and life has been largely ignored, or even denied” (Virtue’s Hero, 12). For exceptions to this trend, see pp. 200–201, especially note 28. Gougeon’s study, Emerson & Eros: The Making of a Cultural Hero, draws on the work of Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Erich Neumann, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, and Norman O. Brown to facilitate a “psychomythic approach to Emerson that takes into account his emotional, affective, mystical, and intuitional side” (13). I share Gougeon’s view that critics have undervalued the emotional elements of Emerson’s work, although my affective-cognitive approach to these elements differs from Gougeon’s psychomythicism. 3. An important exception is Edward J. Blum’s W.E.B. Du Bois, American Prophet. Blum examines the creative and often highly emotional qualities of Du Bois’s writings on spirituality, countering and complicating the long-held views of Du Bois as atheist or agnostic in matters of religion. By and large, however, Du Bois’s scholars have ignored or resisted addressing the role of emotion as both a thematic and narrative dimension of his writing. 4. I do not mean to imply the existence of a consensus among theorists and researchers. Multifaceted and hotly contested debates



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about what constitutes an emotion and how its expressions or manifestations should be interpreted are ongoing both within and across disciplines, and the various strands of argument are too lengthy and complexly woven to explicate here. The language I use to describe the affective and cognitive elements I see and examine in Emerson’s and Du Bois’s writing is taken from Jenefer Robinson, whose book Deeper than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and Art offers the most thorough and accessible summary I have found of the study of emotion in the humanities, social sciences, and cognitive sciences. See especially pp. 69–70 as well as chapters 1, 2, and 3 in their entirety. 5. Throughout this book, when I refer to audience, I do not mean actual persons. I mean either authorial audience (the author’s ideal or implied reader) or narrative audience (the observer position within the narrative that actual readers may assume). In other words, my arguments about how audiences may engage a text take place solely in the realm of narrative, and I offer no conclusions from a cultural studies or sociological standpoint about how flesh-and-blood readers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may have responded to Emerson’s and Du Bois’s reform writings. In this regard, I follow the model of audience and reader response offered by Peter J. Rabinowitz and James Phelan in service of a rhetorical approach to narrative. See Phelan, Experiencing Fiction, p. 4. 6. See Phelan, “Narratives in Contest,” pp. 166–168. 7. Fiction and poetry fare somewhat differently (some might say better) than nonfiction in this regard, particularly in the hands of literature scholars who, by dint of disciplinary training or intellectual interest, may be more apt to investigate a text’s formal qualities and narrative characteristics—although even they generally shine their critical lights first and most brightly on its thematic components. One of my premises is that the affective and cognitive dimensions of reform in nineteenth-century American literature and culture remain largely unexplored in part because most critics rely on an explanatory model for behavior that more or less mirrors the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM)—a model that assumes most traits and behaviors are learned rather than innate and that external influences outpace genetic inheritance in determining how individuals perceive and interact with their world. Underwritten by these usually tacit assumptions, extant scholarship approaches reform as a broadly defined rhetorical or literary mode shaped by impulses, both conventional and subversive, that are the product



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9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

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of social, political, and economic actualities—a mode that requires and rewards interpretation based on a hermeneutics of cultural work. One could point, for example, to the long line of insightful studies of sentimentality’s relation to reform in antebellum U.S. literature and culture. Though here again, when the texts under scrutiny are nonfictional, thematic inquiry takes precedence over analysis of narrative form (indeed it is rare to find the latter considered at all). There is a substantial body of criticism on autobiographical narratives by writers whose race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or some intersection thereof, puts them on the margins of mainstream U.S. culture. For the most part, however, such criticism focuses either on individual autobiographers or multiple writers working from a broad range of subject positions. See especially Anderson; Freedman; Gilmore; Holden; Miller; Olney; and Smith and Watson. As Lisa Zunshine argues: “one of the crucial insights offered by cognitive psychologists is that by thus parsing the world and narrowing the scope of relevant interpretations of a given phenomenon, our cognitive adaptations enable us to contemplate an infinitely rich array of interpretations within that scope” (14). Some ToM critics hypothesize that we derive pleasure from our self-awareness of the mindreading process—this act of exploring emotions and states of mind that differ from our own—and that we use fiction as means to exercise, test, and affirm our own cognitive abilities. See Zunshine, pp. 17–18. For a more comprehensive account of possible sources for Du Bois, see Reed. pp. 100–108. Reed subsequently dismisses most of these sources and also undercuts the notion that Du Boisian double consciousness resulted primarily from the influences of Emerson and James. He argues that Du Bois’s concept is best understood as a product of neo-Lamarckian social science and (more significantly) the “discursive and ideological patterns” of a cohort of “universitytrained, reform-oriented, typically eastern intellectuals who mainly came to maturity during the last years of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth and who shared a loosely defined outlook and intellectual and political problematique.” See Reed, pp. 107–125. I do admit to a particular interest in how early the term itself may have been in circulation within the broader nineteenth-century American reading public. It appears in narrative accounts of certain



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medical conditions as early as the 1820s, roughly two decades before Emerson first mentioned it in “The Transcendentalist,” and almost eighty years prior to Du Bois’s initial use of the term in an 1897 article for The Atlantic Monthly titled “The Strivings of the Negro People” (which he subsequently reworked for publication as part of The Souls of Black Folk). In the antebellum medical studies of Emerson’s time and the postbellum psychological research of Du Bois’s, double consciousness was one of several designations for a condition in which a patient seemed to shift between two different lives or states of being, each accompanied by its own personality and set of memories but neither possessing direct knowledge or awareness of the other’s existence. Such cases were not only described in medical and psychology journals but also given extensive attention in the popular press—newspaper accounts sometimes referred to the condition as “split personality” or “alternating selves”—and it is no stretch to assume that Emerson and Du Bois were aware of the existence of these other narratives of double consciousness when they formulated their own. No doubt they also were aware that some segments of their audiences were familiar with the term as a reference to an actual physiological and psychological condition. 14. Emile Zola’s article “J’Accuse!”—essentially an open letter to the president of France—appeared in the Paris literary newspaper L’Aurore on January 13, 1898, challenging the 1894 arrest and conviction for treason of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French military officer. Dreyfus was a Jew, and his racial identity was seen by many as the primary motivation for the arrest and conviction (Ferdinand Esterhazy, an infantry officer, actually committed the crime). Zola’s article prompted widespread public outrage and condemnation of those involved in Dreyfus’s prosecution and the cover-up of Esterhazy’s guilt—outrage that in turn prompted a backlash by right-wing extremists who rioted and broke the windows of Jewish-owned stores in Paris. The day after Zola’s article appeared, L’Aurore published under the heading “Protestation des Intellectuals” a list of professors, writers, and members of L’Académie français who supported Zola and Dreyfus and called for a new trial. After an 1899 retrial—in which he was again found guilty but then pardoned and released from custody—Dreyfus finally was exonerated in 1906, reinstated in the army, and awarded the Legion of Honor. Zola, who had fled to England to avoid imprisonment on charges of libel, eventually returned to France but died under suspicious circumstances in 1902. Some historians argue he was killed by



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16. 17.

18.

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anti-Jewish extremists who blocked up the chimney of his house, causing death by asphyxiation. The claim could be made that, in focusing on Emerson and Du Bois to the exclusion of other possible candidates, I have participated, albeit indirectly, in the very practice of ranking and measuring—of deciding who’s in and who’s out—I claim to want to avoid. My point, though, is that it should be possible—it needs to be possible—to compare how individuals conceptualize public intellectualism without perforce making arguments or drawing conclusions about how well those individuals fit the category of “public intellectual”—or, better yet, without assuming in the first place that, as critics, the construction and maintenance of such a category should be our most important concern. One drawback of such categorization is that it very often serves as proxy lamentation for the loss of status perceived by those individuals doing the ranking and measuring. For these commentators, one might suppose with no great difficulty that the notion of the contemporarypublic-intellectual-as-impotent is a reflection of concern for their own role vis-à-vis the rapidly changing world in which they live, think, write, and speak. In corollary fashion, one does not have to look too closely at unfavorable judgments of public intellectuals to see how they serve as placeholders for broader anxiety about U.S. cultural declension. For examples of such commentary, see Jacoby and Posner. Among current critics, Posner offers the most substantial polemic in this vein. In taking this approach, I wish not to deny the significance of professional or social identity but to avoid the inflexibility of categorization that results, whether intended or not, from the groupand class-based approaches that inflect most current criticism of intellectuals and the work they do. Such approaches may differ in theoretical sophistication, tone, and intended audience, but all pursue similar goals: to rank or measure intellectuals against each other; to tell us something of the professional space they inhabit; to assess their function as an elite group or collection of discrete subgroups within a social matrix. See Bender, Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States, pp. 3–4. Those familiar with Pierre Bourdieu’s work on intellectual cultures will recognize its affinity with the scholarship I am describing here. Specifically, Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus (1988) offers an approach to the relation between intellectual cultures and broader



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society that is similar in many ways to the line of inquiry that Bender and other social-intellectual historians began to formulate and pursue in the late 1970s and early 1980s. 19. Emerson also memorialized Waldo in the 1847 poem “Threnody,” which I have examined elsewhere but do not include here because of this study’s exclusive focus on nonfictional prose narratives. 20. In studying public intellectualism and the affective-cognitive experience of racial difference, one of my objectives is to add a more personalized, emotional dimension to the story of what Habermas has famously termed “the structural transformation of the public sphere” (85). The origins of the public intellectual, as Habermas and others have argued, can be located in the eighteenth century as private citizens began to participate in a rapidly expanding print culture that had developed apart from the control of either the state or the church and had not yet become fully subject to market forces. Within this culture, educated private citizens (usually those owning property) wrote on matters of both politics and literature for a rapidly proliferating bourgeois reading public; in essence, these writers and their readers formed a sphere in which political engagement and, by extension, class identity were enhanced by their shared literary education and their common participation in literary praxis. The question of autonomy in eighteenth-century American print culture remains open for debate. For two different accounts, see Warner and Rice. Warner offers support for Habermas’s claims, arguing that print culture first allowed private citizens to participate in political discourse but that the freedom to be critical of the state soon caused the collapse of the culture itself. Rice is less sympathetic to Habermas, arguing that the rapid rise of print culture may have led to a measure of autonomy from church and state, but that it did so only by transforming texts from political commentary to economic commodity. What matters most for purposes of this study is not the extent of autonomy from church, state, and market forces that existed for writers in the eighteenthcentury public sphere, or even the extent to which private citizens participated in print culture, but rather the fact that autonomy and privacy existed as ideals against which later writers such as Emerson and Du Bois measured the development of their own positions within the public sphere. Much later in the nineteenth century, as capitalist-driven print media began to isolate politics as the particular domain of journalism and market forces sent the old bourgeois reading public



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into decline, something like our modern concept of the public intellectual emerged. The structural transformations of the public sphere in the nineteenth century eventually replaced the old model in which private, learned citizens spoke to each other about political and literary matters with a new one in which particular groups (professional writers, lecturers, journalists, editors, professors) were assigned the task of providing everyone else with political, literary, and cultural commentary. Such transformation, by linking intellectualism with public status, both solidified the credibility of public figures as commentators and distanced them from the very culture upon which they were supposed to comment. Showing why and how Emerson and Du Bois sought to overcome that distance—the fact that both chose to write publicly about their personal losses and that each found it compelling to interpolate such experiences into his emerging intellectual and political philosophy—is a crucial element of the book’s fourth chapter. This chapter shows how Emerson and Du Bois interpreted and shaped their respective roles as representative and representing figures and how both invoked the experience of loss to exemplify and explore—for themselves and their audiences—the emotional implications of speaking and writing in the public sphere. By articulating the motivations for and implications of each man’s efforts to write publicly about personal loss, intimacy, attachment, and detachment, this chapter offers the beginnings of a theory of the relation of public intellectualism and emotion that works across the fields of intellectual and social history, biography, mourning theory, and literary studies to provide a comparative map of how Emerson and Du Bois understood their emerging subject positions as public intellectuals, a map that serves as a prescription of sorts for how public intellectuals must think and write in order to communicate their visions of social change and maintain their status as representative and representing figures within the public sphere. 1

Race: You’ll Know It When You Feel It

1. Unless otherwise noted, all page numbers for Du Bois’s work refer to Du Bois: Writings, Library of America edition, 1986. 2. In chapter 4 of English Traits, Emerson describes both the allure and the enigma of racial categorization: “We anticipate in the doctrine of race something like that law of physiology, that, whatever bone, muscle, or essential organ is found in one healthy individual, the same part or organ may be found in or near the same place



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in its congener; and we look to find in the son every mental and moral property that existed in the ancestor. In race, it is not the broad shoulders, or litheness, or stature that give advantage, but a symmetry that reaches as far as to the wit. Then the miracle and renown begin. Then we first care to examine the pedigree, and copy heedfully the training,—what food they ate, what nursing, school, and exercises they had, which resulted in this mother-wit, delicacy of thought, and robust wisdom. How came such men as King Alfred, and Roger Bacon, William of Wykeham, Walter Raleigh, Philip Syndey, Issac Newton, William Shakespeare, George Chapman, Francis Bacon, George Herbert, Henry Vane, to exist here? What made these delicate natures? Was it the air? Was it the sea? Was it the parentage? For it is certain that these men are samples of their contemporaries. The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter any thing which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him” (25–26). Later in the same chapter, Emerson speculates on the impermanence and potential fluidity of racial categories across time and space: “These limitations of the formidable doctrine of race suggest others which threaten to undermine it, as not sufficiently based. The fixity or inconvertibleness of races as we see them, is a weak argument for the eternity of these frail boundaries, since all our historical period is a point to the duration in which nature has wrought. Any the least and solitariest fact in our natural history, such as the melioration of fruits and of animal stocks, has the worth of a power in the opportunity of geologic periods. Moreover, though we flatter the self-love of men and nations by the legend of pure races, all our experiences is of the gradation and resolution of races, and strange resemblances meet us every where. It need not puzzle us that Malay and Papuan, Celt and Roman, Saxon and Tartar, should mix, when we see the rudiments of tier and baboon in our human form, and know that the barriers of races are not so firm, but that some spray sprinkles us from the antediluvian seas” (27). For a summary of the diverse and often contradictory assertions Emerson makes about race throughout English Traits, see Newfield, pp. 190–195; and Patterson, pp. 132–147. For a survey of his views on race, rights, and nationalism, see Patterson, chapter 6. 3. Unless otherwise noted, all page numbers refer to the Address as it appears in Gougeon and Myerson’s Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson, eds. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995.



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4. See Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. 5. For a comprehensive history of the Academy, see Moss’s The American Negro Academy. 6. I am assuming an ideal African American audience comprising readers whose intellect and education would more or less match that of the members of the American Negro Academy—readers of the type Du Bois later would designate as the Talented Tenth. 7. For more on Emerson and reform, see Buell’s Emerson (especially chapter 6), Field’s Ralph Waldo Emerson (especially chapter 6), Garvey’s The Emerson Dilemma, Gougeon’s Virtue’s Hero, and Richardson’s Emerson: The Mind on Fire (especially chapters 66 and 85). For a thorough literary-historical account of how antebellum U.S. writers dealt with issues of slavery, see Sundquist’s Empire and Slavery in American Literature, 1820–1865. For general introductions to antislavery movements in the United States and abroad, see Bender’s The Antislavery Debate and Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. For discussions of Emerson’s concept of race and his ideological standing vis-à-vis debates over rights for African Americans, see Newfield’s The Emerson Effect and Patterson’s, From Emerson to King. 8. Gougeon and Myerson, xv–xvi. See Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (JMN), William H. Gilman et al., eds. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1960–1982, 5: 437. 9. Ibid., xxvi–xxvii. 10. Ibid., xxxi. 11. Ibid., xxvii. 12. Gougeon characterizes the importance of the 1844 West Indies Emancipation Address thusly: “There can be little doubt that on 1 August 1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson made the transition from philosophical antislavery to active abolitionism” (ibid., xxx). See also Gougeon, Emerson & Eros, chapter 5. 13. Gougeon and Myerson, xxviii–xxix. 14. In theoretical or abstract models of emotion as an affectivecognitive process, change may or may not occur as a result of cognitive monitoring and evaluation. In Emerson’s “Address,” narrative presentations of the cognitive phase nearly always give rise to some kind of change, usually involving both beliefs and behavior. 2

Double Consciousness: It’s More Than What You Think

1. See especially Theophus Smith’s Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America; Theresa Martinez’s “19th-Century



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3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

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Double Consciousness of Du Bois and 20th-Century Mestiza Consciousness of Gloria Anzaldúa”; Stephen H. Browne’s “Du Bois, Double-Consciousness, and the Modern City,” in Rhetoric and Community, ed. J. Michael Hogan, pp. 75–92; Gene Santoro’s biography of Charles Mingus, Myself When I am Real; Suzan-Lori Parks’s “The America Play”; and Carol Becker and Romi Crawford’s “An Interview with Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky—That Subliminal Kid.” For a comprehensive literary-historical account and textual analysis of The Souls of Black Folk, see chapter 5 of Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations. For an analysis of the elitist elements of Du Bois’s thought, see Reed, chapter 5. For a comparative reading of intellectual links between Du Boisian and Emersonian double consciousness, see Patterson, chapters 6 and 7. For a refutation of possible links between Du Bois and Emerson (as well as between Du Bois and William James), see Reed, chapter 7, especially pp. 99–105. For an account of Emerson’s and Du Bois’s respective contributions to American pragmatism, see West, chapters 1 and 4. See Reed, chapter 7, especially pp. 92–99. Reed emphasizes intellectual history and political science; he gives little attention to the reception of double consciousness beyond these fields. Unless otherwise noted, all page numbers for “The Transcendentalist” refer to Emerson: Essays and Poems, Library of America edition, 1996. Patterson reads Emersonian double consciousness in light of his critique of Lockean property rights and as a key element of what she argues is his theory of political obligation. Buell, taking a slightly different approach to similar issues, argues that the essay’s elaboration on Kant’s refutation of Locke is valuable less for its philosophical content than for its performance of some of the political and ethical dilemmas associated with the critique of materialism. See Patterson, pp. 152–153; and Buell, Emerson, pp. 202–207. For details of Buell’s summary, see his “Emerson’s Fate,” pp. 12–20. Buell singles out and quotes as follows the work of Richardson and Robinson, both of whom he sees as exemplifying aspects of this position: “Richardson places his discussion of the essay immediately after a chapter on Emerson’s antislavery addresses, characterizing ‘Fate’ as ‘a vigorous affirmation of freedom, more effective than earlier statements because it does not dismiss the power of circumstance, determinism, materialism, experience, Calvinism, and evil’ (Richardson, 500). Robinson refuses to discuss ‘Fate’ without reference to the neglected essay that immediately follows it in



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The Conduct of Life, ‘Power,’ stressing that ‘the most telling, and least understood, aspect of Emerson’s later work was his strategy of defining fate against power’ (Robinson, 135). But Emerson’s discourse of limits itself Robinson characterizes as an assertive political intervention, not a confession of cosmic humility: ‘To speak of fate in [boosteristic] America amounted to a form of political dissent’ (Robinson, 136). Here Robinson seeks, as it were, to save Emerson from the Emerosnians—not only those modern scholars who have read ‘Fate’ very differently but also the Anglo-American Victorians, both middlebrow and gentry, who hitched their rhetorical wagons to Emerson’s star by embracing him as an apolgist for cosmic and capitalist optimism.” For the full discussion, see Buell, “Emerson’s Fate,” p. 16. 3

Losing Your Head: Why Du Bois and Emerson (Mostly) Like John Brown

1. For an account of McVeigh’s self-identification with Brown, see Michel and Herbeck. For a concise summary and analysis of the development and different phases of the John Brown myth, see Trodd and Stauffer, pp. 1–33. 2. For readers who may not be entirely familiar with the events leading up to Brown’s raid or the details of the raid itself, I offer the following capsule summary. It is distilled from a range of sources, most notably Qaurles, Redpath, Reynolds, and Sanborn. John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry was part of a larger plan to establish a fortified, defensible base of operations somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains. In his vision, the arms and ammunition taken from the arsenal would be used to foster insurrections among the slave populations of Virginia—insurrections that would, he hoped, lead to wide-scale resistance and mass escapes by slaves throughout the South. Brown and his men would use their stronghold not only to aid escapees on their way North via the Underground Railroad to Canada but also to counter any efforts on the part of southern slave-catchers to recapture and return fugitives. Brown had been ready as early as 1858 to begin his attack, having raised what he believed to be sufficient funds and recruited a small but experienced band of men willing to sacrifice themselves to bring about the end of the slave system. He was compelled to wait nearly an entire year, however, when it became known that one of the men had leaked word of the raid and threatened to expose all the conspirators. Once he felt the threat of exposure had



NOTES

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passed, Brown began his preparations by renting a farm on the Maryland side of the Potomac, just across the river from Harpers Ferry. He spent the summer and early fall of 1859 drilling his men and slowly gathering arms and supplies. The one-year wait had a devastating effect on his recruiting efforts, however, and many of the men he had counted on to form his “army” of abolitionists had come to doubt the possibilities of success and never followed through on their original promises to join him. When the attack finally did commence—on October 16, 1859—it was carried out by only twenty-one men: sixteen whites, including two of Brown’s sons, and five blacks. (Another band of supporters was to join the original twenty-one after the initial assault.) The party reached Harpers Ferry before dawn, cutting the telegraph wires on their way, and were able to capture the federal arsenal and armory with minimal resistance. Having secured their position, Brown’s party waited for the word of the attack to spread and for slaves and sympathetic whites to join them. Unfortunately for Brown and his men, the large-scale uprising he imagined never materialized. Even the small band of supporters Brown had counted on to join the party after the initial attack arrived far too late to be of any help; its members were, in fact, cut down by local Harpers Ferry militia before ever reaching his position. Members of the militia then began firing on Brown’s party, which remained in control of the arsenal but with little hope of achieving their ultimate goal. Recognizing the dire nature of his situation, Brown sent one of his sons out under a white truce flag to meet with the townspeople and reach some kind of settlement. The crowd of citizens and militia members were too angry for negotiation, and they fired on and killed the son. Eight more of Brown’s party would be killed in the subsequent fighting, though they still managed to hold their position. By this point, news of the raid had been communicated to President Buchanan, who immediately sent a force of one hundred marines under the command of Col. Robert E. Lee to recapture the arsenal. The marines arrived on October 17 and were able to subdue the remaining members of Brown’s party by the following day; however, before the fighting was done, twn of his men were killed, including both his sons; seven were captured; and five escaped. Brown himself was wounded, and, shortly thereafter, he and the other prisoners were removed to Charlestown, Virginia, for trial. The trial was a national sensation, lasting from October 27 to November 4, and provoking extreme reactions—from sympathetic



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5. 6.

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support to condemnation. As nearly everyone expected, Brown and his coconspirators were found guilty of treason and executed on December 2. Buell, “Emerson’s Fate,” p. 21. Writing biographies of John Brown is a cottage industry among scholars, journalists, activists, and intellectuals that commenced almost immediately after the execution and, despite periodic lulls, shows no signs of stopping: from James Redpath’s 1860 Echoes of Harper’s Ferry, an edited collection of speeches, letters, and other responses to Brown and his actions, to Benjamin Quarles’s 1972 Blacks on John Brown, an edited collection of writings specifically authored by African Americans; from F.B. Sanborn’s 1885 The Life and Letters of John Brown, Liberator of Kansas, and Martyr of Virginia to, most recently, Reynolds’s 2005 biography John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights. An especially interesting feature of the Brown biographical tradition is that it serves as a kind of barometer of pressures points in U.S. racial history. Periods when the publishing (or republishing) of biographies peaks tend to coincide with moments when issues of race are most pressing and divisive: first in the immediate aftermath of the raid itself, when the fires of abolition went from warm to white-hot; then in the 1880s, when the failed promise of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow brought about a new round of soul-searching among those who had hoped the South would accept an integrated society; then again in the early years of the twentieth century, when race riots and lynching became more and more commonplace (even as historians looked back upon the Civil War years for heroes to celebrate); and yet again in the 1960s and early 1970s, following the emergence of the Civil Rights movement, the black arts movement, and the creation of black and ethnic studies programs at colleges and universities throughout the country. Indeed, one could make a convincing case that what we say about John Brown—and when we say it—reveals as much about the state of U.S. race relations as about the man himself. Reynolds, pp. 215–216. See Stauffer, pp. 35–37. Stauffer takes Emerson’s main contribution to radical abolition to be aesthetic rather than political, although he does argue that Emerson’s aesthetic innovations run parallel to the revolutionary racial politics of Brown, Smith, McCune Smith, and Douglass. Stauffer’s comprehensive and provocative account of the alliance among these four men—two white, two black—is



NOTES

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7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

a pathbreaking contribution to the study of abolition and a singularly insightful analysis of the interracial dynamics of radical antislavery reform. His recovery of the remarkable (and remarkably influential) James McCune Smith is especially important for the field of African American studies. Emerson, “Speech at a Meeting to Aid John Brown’s Family” (November 18, 1859). See Gougeon and Myerson, pp. 117–118. Unless otherwise noted, all references are to the text of the speech as it appears in this collection. Emerson, Letters, volume 5, 178. See Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois, p. 259. See Aptheker, pp. 99–107. Villard and Du Bois had a tense relationship prior to the publications of their respective biographies. In a 1905 article, Du Bois had indirectly implicated Villard (who wrote for and owned The Nation and The Evening Post) in a series of bribery charges he leveled at Booker T. Washington in which Du Bois accused Washington of paying for favorable coverage from various newspapers and magazines. See ibid., p. 91. Villard published an anonymous and extremely negative review (most certainly written by himself) of Du Bois’s biography that appeared in The Nation. See Lewis, pp. 360–361. See Broderick and Rudwick. See Oates, Marable, and Rampersad. See Aptheker, p. 90. Aptheker cites Quarles’s Blacks on John Brown as a source for his account of Ransom’s speech. Aptheker notes that the 1962 edition of John Brown, published to coincide with the one-hundredth anniversary of the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation, received overwhelmingly positive responses from reviewers in the black press while the commercial white press largely ignored it. See ibid., p. 106. Villard’s biography benefited from the marketing muscle of its publisher Houghton Mifflin. Du Bois’s publisher, Jacobs & Company, was much less energetic in its promotional efforts. For the most insightful readings of Brown-as-Christ, see Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, pp. 597–602, and Cain, pp. 319– 323. Both Sundquist and Cain note that Du Bois presents Brown as a militant Christlike figure; Sundquist offers a broader context for Du Bois’s use of this trope, arguing that Brown’s Christian militancy was important to Du Bois because of “the power of worldwide revolt that spoke through him” and that his meaning extends far beyond the sphere of African American abolition. See Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, p. 598.



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See Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, pp. 606–609. See Stauffer, pp. 45–60. See Cain, pp. 327–328. Emerson, “John Brown” (January 6, 1860). See Gougeon and Myerson, p. 123. Unless otherwise noted, all references are to the text of the speech as it appears in this collection. 21. See Bush, “Emerson, John Brown, and ‘Doing the Word,’ ” in The Emerson Dilemma, ed. Garvey, pp. 205–208. 22. See Reynolds, pp. 221–223. 23. See Emerson, Letters, volume 5, 178. 4 Intimate Attachments: Fathers, Sons, and Public Intellectuals 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Cayton, Emerson’s Emergence, p. 150. Gougeon, Emerson & Eros, p. 4. Letters, 3: 6. Ibid. Letters, 3: 9–10. JMN, 8: 163–165. The poem “Threnody,” which appeared in 1847, three years after the essay “Experience,” adds several dimensions to the characterization of Waldo, all of which humanize and otherwise complicate the essay’s decidedly unsentimental vision of him as a “beautiful estate,” as well as its description of his loss as a “great inconvenience” that leaves Emerson “neither better nor worse” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Poems, Joel Porte, ed., New York: Library of America, 1996, pp. 472–473; all subsequent references to “Experience” and “Threnody” are to this edition and will be cited as EP, followed by the page number). In “Threnody,” he constructs the father-son bond as more intimate than in “Experience,” and his use of sentimentality is comparable in revealing ways to that of Du Bois. The poem is a polished collection of a series of verses Emerson began working on almost immediately following Waldo’s death—they are referred to as “rude dirges” in an 1844 letter exchange with Margaret Fuller— and many of the lines included in the final published version are lifted verbatim from his letters and journals (JMN, 8:56; Letters, 3:7–10). Emerson biographer Robert Richardson may be overstating the case when he calls “Threnody” “one of the great elegies in English, and a poem in which Emerson rivals the Milton whose ‘Lycidas’ he had known by heart for so long” (359). But the poem



17. 18. 19. 20.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

NOTES

does possess an epic quality and most certainly affirms the capacity of the individual to overcome the anguish and pain of death. The opening stanza acknowledges, as in “Experience,” that a loss has occurred, but there is a distinct longing for the child’s return and a sense of melancholy that decidedly contradicts the essay’s assertion that the father was not touched by the son’s loss: The South-wind brings Life, sunshine, and desire, And on every mount and meadow Breathes aromatic fire; But over the dead he has no power, The lost, the lost, he cannot restore; And, looking over the hills, I mourn The darling who shall not return. (EP, 1167) Moreover, Waldo is given multiple, vibrant identities in the poem, in contrast to the one-dimensional status of property assigned to him in “Experience.” Letters, 3: 8. JMN, 8: 164–165. Letters, 3: 6. Letters, 3: 7. JMN, 8: 163. The full text of the letter reads: “My dear brother, My little Waldo died this evening. He was attacked by the scarletina on Monday night. Little Ellen has the eruption today but is not yet seriously sick. But what shall I say of my Boy? Farewell & Farewell! Lidian is very well, & Mother. Your affectionate brother—Waldo.” See Letters, 3: 6. A day later, in response to an earlier letter from Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Emerson wrote: “Thanks for your kind invitation, my friend, but the most severe of all afflictions has befallen me, in the death of my boy. He has been ill since Monday of what is called Scarlet Fever & died last night & with him has departed all that is glad & festal & almost all that is social even, for me, from this world. My second child is also sick, but I cannot in a lifetime incur another such loss. Farwell. R.W. Emerson.” See Letters, 3: 8. That same day, he wrote in a similar vein to Caroline Sturgis: “My little boy died last night, my little wonderful boy. You too have seen him & loved him. But you can never know how much daily & nightly blessedness was lodged in the child. I saw him always & felt him everywhere. On Sunday I carried him to see the new church & organ. & on Sunday we shall lay his sweet body in the ground. You will also grieve for him.



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R.W.E.” See Letters, 3: 8–9. In a letter to Fuller dated February 2, 1842, Emerson writes: “Dear Margaret, I am not going to write you a letter but only to say in reply to your request, that we are finding again our hands & feet after our dull & dreadful dream which does not leave us where it found us. Lidian, Elizabeth, & I recite chronicles words & tones of our fair boy & magnify our lost treasure to extort if we can the secretest wormwood of the grief, & see how bad is the worst. Meantime the sun rises & the winds blow Nature seems to have forgotten that she has crushed her sweetest creation and perhaps would admonish us that as this Child’s attention could never be fasted on any death, but proceeded still to enliven the new toy, so we children must have no retrospect, but illuminate the new hour if possible with an undiminished stream of rays. Waldo E.” See Letters, 3: 9. 14. In “Threnody,” Waldo Emerson is assigned the roles of sentimental icon and nascent public intellectual, and he is presented as a figure with the capacity to capture and hold the attention of an audience beyond his immediate family. Whereas “Experience” describes him as a “beautiful estate,” “Threnody” casts him as a child-prophet who, like Du Bois’s son, has a broad-based appeal: And whither now, my truant and wise sweet, O, whither tend they feet? I had the right, few days ago, Thy steps to watch, thy place to know; How have I forfeited the right? Hast thou forgot me in a new delight? I hearken for they household cheer, O eloquent child! Whose voice, an equal messenger, Conveyed thy meaning mild. What though the pains and joys Whereof it spoke were toys Fitting his age and ken, Yet fairest dames and bearded men, Who heard the sweet request, So gentle, wise, and grave, Bended with joy to his behest, And let the world’s affairs go by, Awhile to share his cordial game, Or mend his wicker wagon-frame, Still plotting how their hungry ear That winsome voice again might hear;



NOTES

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

NOTES

For his lips could well pronounce Words that were persuasions. (EP, 1168) As in Du Bois’s “First-Born,” the tropes of voice and intellect recur throughout “Threnody”; Emerson provides a sentimental portrait of an ideal child who is both typical infant and exceptional future leader: the content of his speech may be appropriate for his “age and ken,” but there is no mistaking the maturity of its timbre and its ability to persuade all auditors, women and men, young and old, to heed his message. Emerson ascribes to Waldo the same heightened sense of virtue, precocious charisma, and preternatural wisdom Du Bois associates with Burghardt. And, as “Threnody” unfolds, Waldo is given additional sentimental mantles—“gracious boy,” “chieftain” of his playmates, “captain” of the schoolyard, “child of paradise”—all of which serve to expand in striking fashion the one-dimensional view of the child in “Experience.” Most intriguing and telling is not so much the different approaches “Experience” and “Threnody” seem to take with regard to the personal experience of loss—the former dissociating father from son in the coldest of terms and the latter reinscribing that relation with highly sentimental language—but rather what those approaches allow in both a personal and a public sense. The combination of essay and poem permits Emerson to both satisfy the imperatives of his intellectual program—to speak of Waldo’s death as evidence of a larger philosophical dilemma regarding the difficulties of perception and self-knowledge—and to construct a more human and intimate memorial to his son. JMN, 8: 165–166. JMN, 7: 166. Letters, 3: 235–236. JMN, 7: 458. In the July 1842 issue of The Dial, of which Emerson served as editor, there appeared a story by Charles King Newcomb in which the author modeled a child character named Dolon on Emerson’s son Waldo. Newcomb, who had discussed Waldo’s death with both Ralph and Lidian and had asked Lidian for letters detailing the boy’s appearance, described his fictional character thusly: “a beautiful boy, with long auburn-brown hair, a fair and delicate complexion, light blue eyes, and eyelids which at the side-view lay gently-heavily folded over his eyes, as if the eyes were homes, like heaven air, for two little heavenly fairies, like a spring-fountain in the fresh meadows for little fishes, and the lids were curtains



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20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

161

which opened them to the world and covered them from mortal sight. like a cave opening into a forest, and the eyes seemed inlets into the boy’s being, and one could find him there as Dolon found fairies, and men find God, in the air, which was so like his eyes, only they were like a soul which had taken the eye for a form. We do not see the expression in eyes, when we look at them for it a second time; for when we first look, the spiritual in the eye suggests a form to us, and then we look as on a form for the type of the form that is created within us, and spirit is not to be bodily seen.” The Dial, III (July 1842), p. 116. Emerson’s publication of Newcomb’s story, less than six months after the boy’s death, shows he was interested in the possibilities of representing Waldo to a wider audience—even if he was not yet prepared to do so himself. Letters, 3: 235–236. Ibid., pp. 235–239. Emerson refers to Notes of Ben Jonson’s Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden, 1842: pp. 19–20. See Lewis, pp. 193–201. Ibid., p. 344. See ibid., p. 227. See Porte, Packer, Lopez, Richardson, and Robinson. Du Bois, Du Bois: Writings, p. 509. Ibid., pp. 507–508. Zamir, p. 190. Rampersad, “Slavery and the Literary Imagination,” pp. 120–121. Byerman, pp. 30–31. See “How To Be a (Sentimental) Race Man: Mourning and Passing in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk,” in Boys Don’t Cry?: Men and Emotions in America Milette Shamir and Jennifer Travis, eds. New York: Columbia UP, 2002: pp. 106–123. Conclusion

Theory of Mind and the Color Line

1. As Lisa Zunshine puts it, a cognitive ability such as ToM cannot be conceptualized or studied “in isolation from its human embodiment and historically and culturally concrete expression” (37). 2. Individuals on the autism spectrum constitute an important exception to this generalization insofar as the constraints on their mindreading capacity may be far greater (or of a different nature) than those of the non-autistic population. For a pathbreaking and highly accessible study of the relation between autism spectrum



NOTES

3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

NOTES

disorders (ASD) and Theory of Mind, see Simon Baron-Cohen’s Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. See especially Dunbar. See especially Cosmides and Tooby; Donald; and LeDoux. For a more comprehensive account of the relevant empirical research (as well as a much more extensive and imaginative discussion of mindreading-in-practice than I have provided), see Zunshine, pp. 27–35. See Maria W. Stewart: America’s First Black Woman Political Writer, Essays and Speeches, edited and introduced by Marilyn Richardson. All references to Stewart’s writings are to this edition and will be noted parenthetically in the text. The pamphlet was included in Stewart’s 1835 collection Productions Of Maria W. Stewart, Boston: Published By Friends of Freedom and Virtue. Stewart is not unique among nineteenth-century figures in casting white-black distinctions in terms of nationality. David Walker, Stewart’s mentor and associate, and Frederick Douglass, among others, follow a similar strategy. See Stewart, Preface, p. xiii. See especially Grasso, Peterson, and Romero for insightful readings of Stewart’s work. All three critics emphasize the evangelical quality of Stewart’s reform writings and her abiding interest in issues of both gender and racial inequality. Grasso offers an intriguing analysis of Stewart’s selective targeting of emotions, especially anger, in an attempt to provoke her audiences to act in service of reform. Peterson provides a thorough contextualization of Stewart’s life and work, associating her with both contemporary activists such as Sojourner Truth and fellow spiritual autobiographers such as Jarena Lee. Romero explicates the gender politics of literary history that have relegated Stewart and other black women writers to the margins of early black nationalism, despite considerable evidence of the central role they played in constructing this tradition of thought and activism. See also Richardson’s Introduction to her edited collection of Stewart’s essays and speeches for biographical information on Stewart and an overview of the content and rhetorical strategies of her work. The relative dearth of scholarship on Stewart is due also to the brevity of her career: most of her work was published in the threeyear period from 1831 to 1833, after which she retired from the public sphere until 1879 when she published Meditations From the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart, a collection of reprinted materials from the 1830s that included a brief autobiographical piece describing her experiences during the Civil War years.



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9. Stewart’s call for “I can’t” to be replaced by “I will” could also be seen as an antecedent of the strategy and slogan employed by the Obama campaign in the 2008 presidential election: “Yes We Can.” 10. There is general agreement among scholars that Stewart was deeply influenced by Walker’s vision of and commitment to race reform. Both were intensely religious and drew frequently on biblical references and theological arguments in their work. Walker’s Appeal, first published in 1829, is perhaps the most direct and scathing attack on slavery to appear during the antebellum period, and it served as a key source of inspiration for Stewart who referenced Walker and his ideas multiple times in her own writings. His critique of Jeffersonian notions of black inferiority and his methodic dismantling of pro-slavery arguments, both biblical and scientific, incurred the wrath of Southerners who passed laws banning the dissemination of his work and purportedly put a bounty on his head. Walker’s sudden and unexplained death in 1830 raised suspicions about a Southern assassination plot, but no evidence has ever been uncovered to offer support for such a theory. Stewart memorialized him as a heroic martyrfigure whom she would be happy to join in death if it would further the cause of abolition. Still, her militancy differs from his: not so much in fervency (she is equally passionate) as in designation. While Stewart certainly targets Southern slaveholding culture, her calls for change tend to be directed inwards—toward the free black community—to a greater extent than Walker’s. Stewart’s work also is somewhat less prophetic than Walker’s, and her references to possible future changes in the racial landscape have less of an insurrectionist, apocalyptic feel than his. Indeed, Walker’s predilection for an apocalyptic (and, at times, almost mystical) discourse of militant resistance and revolution is another telling point of similarity between his life and work and that of John Brown. 11. See Santamarina for a counterargument that addresses Stewart’s concept of head-work as part of a long-standing tradition in black women’s autobiographical writing of defending the importance of wage labor. Santamarina contends that extant scholarship on nineteenth-century African American women activists, in focusing on ideals and ideologies of racial uplift, has overlooked or ignored the extent to which such discourse is inextricably bound up with arguments that recognize and even celebrate physical labor as a source of virtue and independence.



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NOTES

12. See especially Reddy; Carruthers, Laurence, and Stich; BaronCohen; and Hirschfeld and Gelman. 13. See Fanon, p. 218. In conceptualizing head-work as she does, Stewart anticipates in more elaborate fashion what Fanon calls the desire to be considered not as “merely here-and-now, sealed into thingness” but as being “for somewhere else and for something else” and battling “for the creation of a human world— that is a world of reciprocal recognitions.” She also anticipates the task Homi Bhabha, following Fanon, describes as “breaking the time-barrier of a culturally collusive ‘present.’ ” See Bhabha, pp. 764–781. 14. See Bhabha, p. 4. Bhabha’s postcolonial-inspired approach to multiculturalism has much in common with the arguments advanced by scholars interested in education reform and critical pedagogy. I refer specifically to the concept of transformative multiculturalism described by Michael Vavrus: “Transformation is not bound to a human relations notion of cultural deficits and cultural understanding, where expected behaviors of marginalized populations are externally directed . . . By making conventional views of U.S. history and educational practices problematic, transformation resists White assimilationist conceptions of social change in favor of concern over social justice and equity” (6–7).



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abolition, 7, 27–9, 38–47, 62–4, 73, 80–3 Adams, Abel, 95 Adams, Henry, 57 Addams, Jane, 57 African American Studies, 57 Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, 71–2 American Crisis Biographies Series, 75 American Negro, 50 American Negro Academy, 29, 52, 134, 135–7 Antigua, 45 Atlanta, Georgia, racial dynamics of, 20, 105–6 Atlanta Race Riot of 1906, 76 Atlanta University, 76, 77, 105 authorial audience, 8–9, 19, 31–5, 43–4, 50–2, 59 Baron, Harold M., 56 Bellamy, Edward, 12 Bender, Thomas, 17 benevolence, 7 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 62 biblical hermeneutics, 49 Bishop, Jonathan, 61 black feminism, origins of, 129–30 black intellectual leadership, 12–13, 25, 30, 50, 52–6, 58, 80, 107, 112–13, 117–18, 129, 132–6 Black Power, 56

Boston’s free black community, 129, 141 Branch Davidian raid, 71 British West Indies, history of slavery and emancipation, 39–47 Brown, John, 1, 9, 13–14, 29, 69, 71–92, 127, 136–7 Brown, Lucy Jackson, 99 Buell, Lawrence, 23, 59, 61–3, 72–3 Bush, Harold K., 88 Byerman, Keith E., 114 Cavell, Stanley, 62 Cayton, Mary Kupiec, 94–5 Charleston, South Carolina, proslavery violence, 38–9 Chesnutt, Charles, 10 The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, 11 Chicana feminist sociology, 49 chivalry, 88–90 Chomsky, Noam, 140 Christ-figure, John Brown as, 13–14, 79 Christian elegy, 116 citizenship, 129, 130, 138–9 Clarkson, Thomas, 39 The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishments of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament, 39



Index

INDEX

class-based study of intellectuals, 16–18 cognitive approaches to literature, 2–5, 124–6, 140 comparative study of race and ethnicity, 5–6, 126–8 Cooper, Anna Julia, 57 cosmopolitanism, 13, 25 Crisis, The, 1, 28, 77 cultural pluralism, 16 cultural work of reform writing, 7–9, 139, 140 Darwin, Charles, 83–4 On the Origin of Species, 83, 84 Declaration of Independence, 78, 88 depersonalization, 20–1, 66–7, 96–7, 101–2, 111–12, 131 Dial, The, 1 diphtheria, 106 DJ Spooky, 49 double consciousness, 1, 11–12, 29, 30, 49–70, 82–3, 127 Douglass, Frederick, 74, 76, 80–2 Dreyfus Affair, 13 Dreyfusard Ideals, 13, 20 duality, 12, 30, 506, 3, 65, 97Du Bois, Burghardt, 20, 105–7, 109–13, 115, 117–18 Du Bois, Nina Gomer, 105 Du Bois, W.E.B., biographical similarities to Emerson, 1–2 “Address to the Country,” 85–6 “The Conservation of Races,” 11, 23–4, 29–35, 39, 47, 49, 51–2, 54–8, 77, 127, 132, 134–6 Dusk of Dawn, 28 John Brown, 72–3, 78–9, 80–3, 84–5 “Of the Meaning of Progress,” 114 The Negro, 34 “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” 114 “Of the Passing of the FirstBorn,” 20, 93, 106–7, 109–15, 132

The Philadelphia Negro, 18, 27, 105 The Souls of Black Folk, 4, 12, 18–19, 20, 27–8, 50, 51–8, 61, 63, 66, 76, 77, 106, 113–17, 118 elegiac-autobiographical narrative, 20, 93, 119 Ellison, Julie, 62 Emerson, Charles, 101 Emerson, Edward, 101 Emerson, Ellen Tucker, 101 Emersonian Man Thinking, 118 Emerson, John Clarke, 101 Emerson, Lidian, 39, 103 Emerson, Mary Caroline, 101 Emerson, Mary Moody, 97, 99 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, biographical similarities to Du Bois, 1–2 “An Address on the Emancipation of Negroes in the British West Indies,” 4, 11, 25–6, 28, 29, 35–48, 49, 59, 63, 64, 127 The Conduct of Life, 12, 61 English Traits, 24, 47 “Experience,” 20, 39, 93, 97, 104–5, 107–9, 111, 118 “Fate,” 12, 51, 61–6, 72–3, 93 “Fugitive Slave Law Address,” 47, 62 “John Brown,” 86–7, 89 Letters and journal entries on death of Waldo, 95–104 Lyceum lecture topics, 94 “Speech at a Meeting to Aid John Brown’s Family,” 88 “Threnody,” 97 “The Transcendentalist,” 12, 51, 58–61, 87 Emerson, Waldo, 20, 96–104, 108 Emerson, William (brother), 15, 97, 100 Emerson, William (father), 101



180

emotional referentiality, 8, 9, 20, 43–4, 51, 138 emotion, as affective-cognitive process, 3, 4, 9, 19–20, 31–3, 50–1, 65–6, 93, 130, 139 ethics of reform, 8–10, 14, 19–20, 33–7, 46–7, 52, 62–6, 79–80, 86, 126, 141–2 European Romanticism, 11 Faulkner, William, 10 Fisk University, 52, 106, 114 Fort Riley, Kansas, 71 Foucault, Michel, 16 Fuller, Margaret, 97, 98, 101–5 Garrison, William Lloyd, 77, 130 Gates, Henry Louis Jr., 57 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 57 Gougeon, Len, 2, 95 Gramsci, Antonio, 16 Haiti, 80 Harpers Ferry, Virginia, 13–15, 71–81 Harvard College and University, 1, 77 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 10 head-work, 128–31, 137–8, 141 Hegelian philosophy, 11 Herodotus, 41 heuristics, 18, 20, 123 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 74 Hoar, Elizabeth, 38 Hoar, Samuel, 38 Howe, Samuel Gridley, 74 Huggins, Nathan, 56 Hughes, Gertrude, 62 ideal child, 94, 106 idealism, 35–7, 54, 59–62, 66, 75, 87 intentionality, 122–4 intimacy, 20–1, 67–9, 108–10, 116–19, 131

181

Jackson, Andrew, 38 James, Henry, 10 The Ambassadors, 10 Jamesian psychological theory, 12 Jim Crow, 106 Jonson, Ben, 104 Kansas slavery-antislavery violence, 71, 74, 80 Kent, George E., 56 Kimball, J. Horace, 39 Lamarckian science, 11, 27 Lewis, David Levering, 105 Liberator, The, 130, 134 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 14, 80 Lovejoy, Elijah P., 38 lyceum circuit, 94 materialism, 20, 28, 41, 53, 59–60 McAleer, John, 62 McVeigh, Timothy James, 71 Meir, August, 56 mindreading, 10–11, 19, 32–3, 37–8, 109, 121–4, 127–8, 139 Mingus, Charles, 49 miscegenation, 11, 26, 27–8 Momus, 104 monogenesis, 32–3 morality, concepts and theories of, 43, 86, 91, 138–41 Morrison, Toni, 10 Beloved, 11 multiculturalist theory, 141 Myrdal, Gunnar, 56 NAACP, 77 narrative studies, 6, 8–11, 121–4 National Negro Committee, 77 Neal, Larry, 56 New England Anti-Slavery Society, 133, 134 New South, 105 New York Intellectuals, 16 Niagara Movement meeting at Harpers Ferry, 78, 85



INDEX

INDEX

nonfiction, critical approaches to, 6–8, 10–12, 121–2 Oberholtzer, Ellis Paxson, 75 Occasional Papers of the Negro Academy, 29–30 O’Connor, Flannery, 10 Oklahoma City bombing, 71 Operation Desert Storm, 71 organic intellectual, 16 Packer, Barbara, 62 Parker, Theodore, 74 Park, Robert Ezra, 56 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 49 Patterson, Anita Haya, 59 Phelan, James, 7 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 105 Plessy v. Ferguson, 105 Porte, Joel, 62 Porter, David, 62 Posnock, Ross, 13, 25 Pottawatomie Creek slayings, 90 professions and professionalism, 17–18, 30, 94 Progressive Era, 57 public intellectualism, 2, 12–19, 55–6, 68–9, 128, 131, 136–7 race, definitions of, 2, 11, 23–5, 33–4, 45–6, 64–5, 138 race man, 76 racial extinction, 11, 29, 36, 130 racial passing, 112, 117–18 racial uplift, 12, 35, 54–5, 113, 130–2, 135 racial violence, 14, 27–8, 78–80, 85–6, 88–90, 106, 110, 117–18, 136–7 Rampersad, Arnold, 114 Ransom, Reverdy C., 78 reader-response criticism, 8 Reed, Adolph L. Jr., 56–7 referentiality, local and global, 7–8, 43–4, 51 reform, scholarly approaches to, 3, 6–9

Reynolds, David, 73–4, 77, 90 rhetorical studies of community, 49 Richardson, Marilyn, 129 Robinson, David, 62 Ruby Ridge siege, 71 Russell, Mary, 98 sacred child, 94, 106 sacrifice, 13–15, 82–4, 90, 130, 137 Sanborn, Frank, 74 scarlet fever, 95, 99 Secret Six, 74 sentimentality, 7, 94, 98–100, 109–111 September 11 attacks, 72 Sharp, Granville, 44–5 slavery, economic dimensions of, 26–7, 28–9, 41, 45–6 Smith, Gerrit, 74, 75 Smith, James McCune, 74 Sommerset, James, 45 Somnus, 104 Southern Cavaliers, 89–90 specific intellectual, 16 Spencer, Herbert, 83–4 Stack, Carol B., 56 Stauffer, John, 74, 80 Sterns, George, 74 Stewart, Maria W., 129–41 “Cause for Encouragement,” 134–5 “Lecture Delivered at the Franklin Hall,” 133 “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality,” 129–32, 138 Strong, Jonathan, 44 Sturgis, Caroline, 96–8 Sundquist, Eric, 79 Survival of the Fittest, 83 sympathy, 7, 21 talented tenth, 58–9, 132, 136 temperance, 7 terrorism, domestic, 69, 71–2 Texas petition for annexation, 38 Theory of Mind (ToM), 10, 38, 51, 57, 121, 124, 128, 138–9



182

Thome, James A., 39 Thoreau, Henry David, 98 Transcendentalist response to slavery, 73–5, 90 Turner, Nat, 13, 76, 80 Two-ness, 12, 50–1, 57, 68

183

Walker, David, 137 Washington, Booker T., 53, 55, 76 West, Cornel, 57 Whicher, Stephen, 61 white privilege, 127 Wider, Sarah, 2 women’s rights, 7, 129–30

University of Pennsylvania, 18, 105

Yoder, R.A., 62

Valentine, Charles, 56 Vesey, Denmark, 13, 80 Villard, Oswald Garrison, 77

Zamir, Shamoon, 113 Zola, Emile, 13 Zunshine, Lisa, 125



INDEX

The Public Intellectualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and W.E.B. Du Bois: Emotional Dimensions of Race and Reform (Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance)

Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson

The essential writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

The essential writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

The essential writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

The essential writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Complete Essays and other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson, Ralph Waldo - The Conservative (1841)

Ralph Waldo Emerson - Man the Reformer

Ralph Waldo Emerson (Bloom's Classic Critical Views)

Critical Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson

Essays & Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance through Cognitive Science (Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance)

Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform

The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Em

Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare's Theatre (Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance)

Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance)

Literature, Science, and a New Humanities (Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance)

Successful Cognitive and Emotional Aging

Literature, Science, and a New Humanities (Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance)

Ralph Waldo Emerson (Bloom's Modern Critical Views), Updated Edition

Emerson's Essays-Ralph Waldo Emerson (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety in Late Medieval York (Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance)

Emerson, Ralph W. - The Conduct of Life

The Public Intellectualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and W.E.B. Du Bois: Emotional Dimensions of Race and Reform (Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance)

Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson

The essential writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

The essential writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

The essential writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

The essential writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Complete Essays and other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson, Ralph Waldo - The Conservative (1841)

Ralph Waldo Emerson - Man the Reformer

Ralph Waldo Emerson (Bloom's Classic Critical Views)

Critical Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson

Essays & Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance through Cognitive Science (Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance)

Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform

The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Em

Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare's Theatre (Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance)

Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance)

Literature, Science, and a New Humanities (Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance)

Successful Cognitive and Emotional Aging

Literature, Science, and a New Humanities (Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance)

Ralph Waldo Emerson (Bloom's Modern Critical Views), Updated Edition

Emerson's Essays-Ralph Waldo Emerson (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety in Late Medieval York (Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance)

Emerson, Ralph W. - The Conduct of Life

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