Political violence permeated the nineteenth century, and the Civil War, of course, generated the preponderance of bloodshed and death during the period. A series of other violent events also captured the attention of American authors, at times in more subtle and complex ways, due to the moral ambiguities associated with them. Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion, the 1837 murder of antislavery editor Elijah Lovejoy, the 1841 slave revolt on the Creole, the 1854 murder of James Batchelder in Boston (during the attempted rescue of fugitive slave Anthony Burns), the 1856 Pottawatomie massacre in “Bleeding Kansas,” John Brown’s 1859 raid on...

In her dispatches from Italy during 1848 and 1849, Margaret Fuller spoke as an American on behalf of what she called “my Italy” and celebrated the romantic heroism of the defenders of the Roman Republic. “The voice of this age,” she wrote after the republic fell, “shall yet proclaim the names of some of these Patriots whose inspiring soul was joseph mazzini—men as nobly true to their convictions as any that have ever yet redeemed poor, stained Humanity” (SG 315). After she, her husband, and their son fled Rome for Florence, she remained a defiant supporter of the Risorgimento....

In the preceding chapter, I argued that Margaret Fuller’s support of political violence in Europe in 1848–49 prefigured and influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson’s turn to righteous violence in the United States during the 1850s. What I wish to examine more closely in this chapter are the moral complexities this turn created for him and how he dealt with them. Emerson’s lifelong interest in the conversion of thought into practical power has recently dominated studies of transcendentalism, and a number of scholars have extended our knowledge of Emerson’s political activism, especially his abolitionism.¹ The ways in which this activism ran...

Frederick Douglass and Ralph Waldo Emerson knew and admired each other, yet their perspectives on political violence, while similar, arose from different experiences.¹ Unlike Emerson, Douglass understood slavery as a bloody and bodily reality; he had been whipped, beaten, and terrorized as a slave, and he had witnessed much worse inflicted upon others, as his Narrative (1845) reveals. Such experiential knowledge, rather than philosophical adherence to a “higher law,” led to Douglass’s alliance with John Brown. It also informed his decision not to join the armed insurrection at Harpers Ferry. In 1859 Douglass, age forty-one, despite his anger and courage,...

In an essay titled “Emerson’s Religion,” published in 1885, Cyrus A. Bartol recalled asking Emerson if he approved of war, and the reply he received was, “Yes, in one born to fight.”¹ This answer, with its unusual qualification, echoes a key point made in the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred Hindu poem that exerted a powerful influence on Emerson and his fellow transcendentalists. Emerson first learned about the Bhagavad Gita in 1831, when he read Victor Cousin’s summary of it in his Introduction to the History of Philosophy. In Cousin’s account, the god Krishna tells a young warrior, “You are, as...

Both Emerson and Thoreau were Louisa May Alcott’s neighbors and friends when she lived in Concord, and, as is well known, she came to idolize them both. She paid visits to Emerson’s study when she was a girl and imagined the two of them replicating the relation between Goethe and his young admirer Bettina von Arnim. She recalled Emerson as “my beloved ‘Master’” and counted it “the greatest honor and happiness of my life to have known [him].”¹ Her feelings for Thoreau seem to have been more romantic. As a child, she briefly attended the school he and his brother...

When Nathaniel Hawthorne returned to the United States after seven years abroad in the summer of 1860, the hero worship of John Brown was radiating throughout the land from its center in Concord. In the months that followed, the Alcotts found Hawthorne, who lived next door, aloof and shy. According to Louisa, “Mr. H. is as queer as ever and we catch glimpses of a dark mysterious looking man in a big hat and red slippers darting over the hills or skimming by as if he expected the house of Alcott were about to rush out and clutch him.”¹ Similarly,...

In many ways, Herman Melville’s attitude toward political violence coincided with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s. Like Hawthorne, he possessed a constitutional aversion to social and political upheaval. Yet it was the French Revolution of 1789, as opposed to the English Rebellion of 1642, that especially fascinated him and informed his belief that violence and warfare resulted from the primeval savageness of mankind.¹ In White-Jacket, he observed that “the whole matter of war is a thing that smites common sense and Christianity in the face; so every thing connected with it is utterly foolish, unchristian, barbarous, brutal, and savoring of the Feejee Islands,...

The struggle with righteous violence, as this book has tried to show, was central to the writers of the American Renaissance, for it persistently engaged their imaginations and deeply informed their writings. They lived in violent times. The United States experienced unprecedented bloodshed on its own soil during the years 1830–1890, caused not only by the state terror of slavery, conflict with Native Americans, and the waging of civil war, but also by the unlawful revolts, insurrections, riots, and strikes that surrounded those more spectacular tragedies. Oppression, exploitation, and denial of human rights were the primary causes of the...