"Liberty Is Never Cheap": Emerson, "The Fugitive Slave Law," and the Antislavery Lecture Series at the Broadway Tabernacle

Abstract

JN a journal entry from April 1850, Ralph Waldo Emerson grimly observed, The badness of the times is making death attractive. At the head of the passage he wrote D[aniel] Webster.' On 7 March 1850, Webster, the senior senator from Massachusetts, had betrayed not only radical abolitionists but antislavery moderates like Emerson as well when he rose to address his fellow legislators. Urging them to endorse the Compromise of 1850, which included a provision to strengthen existing penalties against fugitive slaves and those who harbored them, he heralded the cause of Union. Outraged by Webster's speech, stunned by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in September 1850, and appalled by its swift enforcement in Massachusetts, Emerson responded in two of his most important antislavery speeches: his Address to the Citizens of Concord, delivered in May 1851; and The Fugitive Slave Law, delivered on 7 March 1854, the fourth anniversary of Webster's Senate speech.