Bridge were alarmed by the approach of our people, who had retreated, as mentioned before, and were now advancing with special orders not to fire upon the troops unless fired upon. These orders were so punctually observed that we received the fire of the enemy in three several and separate discharges of their pieces before it was returned by our commanding officer; the firing then soon become general for several minutes, in which skirmish two were killed on each side, and several of the enemy wounded. It may here be observed, by the way, that we were the more cautious to prevent beginning a rupture with the King's troops, as we were then uncertain what had happened at Lexington, and knew [not] that they had began the quarrel there by first firing upon our people, and killing eight men upon the spot. The three companies of troops soon quitted their post at the bridge, and retreated in the greatest disorder and confusion to the main body, who were soon upon the march to meet them. For half an hour, the enemy, bỳ their marches and counter-marches, discovered great fickleness and inconstancy of mind, sometimes advancing, sometimes returning to their former posts; till, at length they quitted the town, and retreated by the way they came. In the mean time, a party of our men (150) took the back way through the Great Fields into the east quarter, and had placed themselves to advantage, lying in ambush behind walls, fences and buildings, ready to fire upon the enemy on their retreat.

Page 78, note 1. Fifty years after his death the town erected a cenotaph to the memory of its brave young minister, whose body lies by the shore of Otter Creek, near Rutland, Vermont. On it they wrote:

Mr. Emerson believed the " not had been accidentally omitted, and it can hardly be questioned that he was right in his supposition.

"Enthusiastic, eloquent, affectionate and pious, he loved his family, his people, his God and his Country, and to this last he yielded the cheerful sacrifice of his life."

Page 78, note 2.

Town Records, Dec. 1775.

These facts are recorded by Shattuck in

Page 79, note 1.

his History,

Page 79, note 2. Bradford's History of Massachusetts,

Page 80, note 1.

Page 81, note 1.

History, vol. i., p.

Town Records, May 3, 1782.

Town Records, Sept. 9, and Bradford's 266.

Page 81, note 2. The Rev. Grindall Reynolds, late pastor of the First Church in Concord, wrote an interesting account of Shays's Rebellion, and various papers concerning his adopted town which are included in his Historical and Other Papers, published by his daughter in 1895.

Town Records, Oct. 21.

Page 81, note 3.

Page 82, note 1.

Town Records, May 7.

Page 82, note 2. 1903-4

Town Records, 1834 and 1835. In the town, with a population of about 5000, appropriated for public purposes $65,752, the amount for school purposes being $28,000.

Page 82, note 3. The Unitarian and the "Orthodox " (as the Trinitarian Congregationalist society has always been called in Concord) churches have for a century been good neighbors, and for many years have held union meetings on Thanksgiving Day. At the time of Mr. Emerson's discourse. it is doubtful if Concord contained a single Catholic or Episcopalian believer. The beginning of the twentieth century finds a larger body of Catholic worshippers than the four other societies contain. Yet all live in charity with one another.

Page 83, note 1. Mr. Emerson's honored kinsman, Rev. Ezra Ripley, who sat in the pulpit that day, was eighty-four years old, and when, six years later, he died, he had been pastor of the Concord church for sixty-three years.

Page 83, note 2. Lemuel Shattuck, author of the excellent History of Concord, which was published before the end

of the year.

Page 85, note 1. In Mr. Emerson's lecturing excursions during the following thirty-five years, he found with pleasure and pride the sons of his Concord neighbors important men in the building up the prairie and river towns, or the making and operating the great highways of emigration and trade.

LETTER TO PRESIDENT VAN BUREN

April 19, 1838, Mr. Emerson made this entry in his Journal:

This disaster of the Cherokees, brought to me by a sad friend to blacken my days and nights! I can do nothing; why shriek? why strike ineffectual blows? I stir in it for the sad reason that no other mortal will move, and if I do not, why, it is left undone. The amount of it, to be sure, is merely a scream; but sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.

"Yesterday wrote the letter to Van Buren, a letter hated of me, a deliverance that does not deliver the soul. I write my journal, I read my lecture with joy; but this stirring in the philanthropic mud gives me no peace. I will let the republic alone until the republic comes to me. I fully sympathize, be sure, with the sentiments I write; but I accept it rather from

my friends than dictate it. It is not my impulse to say it, and therefore my genius deserts ime; no muse befriends; no music of thought or word accompanies.??

Yet his conscience then, and many a time later, brought him to do the brave, distasteful duty... I

ADDRESS ON EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH DALG WEST INDIES O

"

The tenth anniversary of the emancipation by Act of Par liament of fall: slaves in the insular possessions of Great Britain in the West Indies was celebrated in Concord, in the year 1844, by citizens of thirteen Massachusetts towns, and they invited Mr. Emerson to make the Address. The Rev. Dr. Channing, on whose mind the wrongs of the slave had weighed ever since he had seen them in Santa Cruz, had spoken on Slavery in Faneuil Hall in 1837, had written on the subject, and his last public work had been a speech on the anniversary of the West Indian Emancipation in 1842, in the village of Lenox. The public conscience was slowly becoming aroused, especially among the country people, who had not the mercantile and social relations with the Southerner which hampered the action of many people in the cities. Yet even in Concord the religious societies appear to have closed their doors against the philanthropists who gathered to celebrate this anniversary in 1844, but the energy of the young Thoreau, always a champion of Freedom, secured the use of the Court-House, and he himself rang the bell to call the people together.in or

It is said that Mr. Emerson, while minister of the Second Church in Boston, had held his pulpit open to speakers on behalf of liberty, and to his attitude in 1835 Harriet Martineau

bears witness in her Autobiography. After speaking of the temperamental unfitness of these brother scholars, Charles and Waldo, to become active workers in an Abolitionist organiza tion, she says: "Yet they did that which made me feel that I knew them through the very cause in which they did not implicate themselves. At the time of the hubbub against me in Boston, Charles Emerson stood alone in a large company and declared that he would rather see Boston in ashes than that I or anybody should be debarred in any way from perfectly free speech. His brother Waldo invited me to be his guest in the midst of my unpopularity, and during my visit told me his course about this matter of slavery. He did not see that there was any particular thing for him to do in it then; but when, in coaches or steamboats or anywhere else, he saw people of color ill treated, or heard bad doctrine or sentiment propounded, he did what he could, and said what he thought. Since that date he has spoken more abundantly and boldly, the more critical the times became; and he is now, and has long been, identified with the Abolitionists in conviction and sentiment, though it is out of his way to join himself to their organization. Mr. Cabot in his Memoir I gives several pages of extracts from Mr. Emerson's journal showing his feelings at this time, Derore, before the slave power, aggressive and advancing, left him, as a lover of Freedom, no choice but to fight for her as he could, by tongue and pen, in seasons of peril.

21

1

This Address was printed in England, as well as in America, the autumn after its delivery here. In a letter to Carlyle written September 1, Mr. Emerson says he is sending proof to the London publisher.

66

Chapman wrote to me by the last steamer, urging me to end him some manuscript that had not yet been published in

Vol, ii,, PP. 424-433