The adventure to China meant sending ships around the world with the high-risk goal of safely reaching Canton, the single port of exchange. They led the United States in the Far East, a trade forced by Britain’s post-Revolutionary embargo of the West Indies and England. Since the mid-1780s, Boston and Salem’s venture capitalists, veteran leaders in colonial coastwise shipping, had been among the first Americans in China. Just a few minutes’ walk from the Emerson home on Chauncy Place, wharves and ships ringed the city, displaying New England’s role in the country’s newly independent trade with China. 4 Jean McClure Mudge, Chinese Export Porcelain for the American Trade, 1785-1835, 2nd ed., revised (E (.)ĥ Like its population, Boston’s contacts abroad were growing exponentially.Boston itself, though long a major East Coast port, was rapidly enlarging from the size of a town, growing from 25,000 in 1800 to more than 90,000 forty years later. Nearby in Cambridge, Harvard College continued to lead the region’s two hundred year old tradition of close intellectual ties to England and Europe. Yet Boston remained arguably the most cultured city in all of the seventeen states. That act extended the nation, and its constitutionally legal shadow of slavery, to the western reaches of the plains, the Rockies, and the Spanish Southwest. Less than a month before, President Thomas Jefferson had seized the unexpected opportunity of purchasing the Louisiana territory from France. The United States, fourteen years after the enactment of its Constitution, was newly enlarged and confident. (.)ģ When Emerson was born in Boston on May 25, 1803, American horizons were rapidly expanding at home and abroad. Kennedy, Planning the City Upon a Hill: Boston Since 1630 (Amherst, Mass. At a Leading Center of American Culture and Change His immediate surroundings beckoned with incentives to create, out of his forefathers’ protesting past and participation in the Revolution, his own call to citizens of the nation and world. Furthermore, he had started life in a time and place that made a wide, and ever wider, world available to his curious mind. Emerson’s boyhood had allowed him to find resources within himself, required him to muster strength against loss and difficulty, and embedded a strong habit of questioning the status quo. Of course, he had been prepared for such a boldly active philosophical beginning. Though the particulars would change, this journal and its allegiance to imagination would ground his career as a writer and reformer for the next five decades. Only that faculty, he felt, gave form to the “thousand pursuits & passions & objects of the world.” 1Ģ Emerson’s wealth of growing entries richly displayed this power in romantic fantasies, vivid and often critical self-portraits, poems, watercolors and drawings, ironic asides, and philosophical musings. Imagination would be their ordering principal, the “generalissimo” of “all the luckless ragamuffin Ideas” gathered here, he announced. But now in January 1820, he wrote of uniting his “new thoughts” with the “old ideas” of other writers. Since the year before, he had been accumulating notebooks for college themes, lists of books read, course notes, and commonplace books with quotations from his reading. Many students kept journals, commonplace books, or diaries, but Emerson’s title for this one ―“The Wide World”― measured his unusually ambitious compass. It would become the personal record of his trajectory toward vision and revolution. Gilman, (.)ġ At sixteen, while a junior at Harvard College, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote his first entry in a new journal. 1 The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 16 vols., eds.
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