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11 “The Calamity of the Next Ages”: Emerson and Reconstruction
Get accessChristopher Hanlon, Professor of United States Literature, Arizona State University
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Published:18 July 2024
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Abstract
This chapter takes up the resonance of Emerson’s ideas for thinkers who were public advocates for racial justice after 1865. It examines a set of lectures Emerson gave during 1862 and 1863, during which he projected the possibilities for a multi-ethnic postwar American democracy: “Perpetual Forces” (1862), “American Civilization” (1862), and “Fortune of the Republic” (1863). During the last of these, Emerson imagined that “a new era of equal rights [might] dawn on the universe as a result of the war” wherein legislators might “write laws for the benefit of men” (LL 2:335). This chapter will treat such projections, to which Emerson gave voice only as his active, independent career was coming to an end, as a keynote that would find resonance among the coming generation of civil rights advocates in the Reconstruction-era United States.
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