mselves, threw their ballots for it, and made the law.... Nobody
doubts that Daniel Webster could make a good speech. Nobody doubts that
there were good and plausible things to be said on the part of the
South. But this is not a question of ingenuity, not a question of
syllogisms, but of sides. _How came he there_? ... But the question which
history will ask is broader. In the final hour when he was forced by the
peremptory necessity of the closing armies to take a side,--did he take
the part of great principles, the side of humanity and justice, or the
side of abuse, and oppression and chaos? ... He did as immoral men
usually do,--made very low bows to the Christian Church and went through
all the Sunday decorums, but when allusion was made to the question of
duty and the sanctions of morality, he very frankly said, at Albany,
'Some higher law, something existing somewhere between here and the
heaven--I do not know where.' And if the reporters say true, this
wretched atheism found some laughter in the company."

It was too late for Emerson to shine as a political debater. On May 14,
1857, Longfellow wrote in his diary, "It is rather painful to see
Emerson in the arena of politics, hissed and hooted at by young law
students." Emerson records a similar experience at a later date: "If I
were dumb, yet would I have gone and mowed and muttered or made signs.
The mob roared whenever I attempted to speak, and after several
beginnings I withdrew." There is nothing "painful" here: it is the
sublime exhibition of a great soul in bondage to circumstance.

The thing to be noted is that this is the same man, in the same state of
excitement about the same idea, who years before spoke out in The
American Scholar, in the Essays, and in the Lectures.

What was it that had aroused in Emerson such Promethean antagonism in
1837 but those same forces which in 1850 came to their culmination and
assumed visible shape in the person of Daniel Webster? The formal
victory of Webster drew Emerson into the arena, and made a dramatic
episode in his life. But his battle with those forces had begun thirteen
years earlier, when he threw down the gauntlet to them in his Phi Beta
Kappa oration. Emerson by his writings did more than any other man to
rescue the youth of the next generation and fit them for the fierce
times to follow. It will not be denied that he sent ten thousand sons to
the war.

In speaking of Emerson's attitude toward the anti-slav