Emerson was outraged when Daniel Webster, the eloquent and much admired senator from Massachusetts, gave a speech defending the compromise as essential to the maintenance of the Union. Emerson filled pages of his journal with paragraphs condemning Webster for his political expediency and lack of moral principle. When a group of Concord citizens petitioned him to speak publicly on the matter, Emerson had plenty of material to draw on. His “Address to the Citizens of Concord” on the Fugitive Slave Law restates his philosophy of self-reliance in an explicitly political context and deserves to be ranked alongside Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” as one of the most powerful justifications for civil disobedience written in the nineteenth century.

As the political crisis over slavery intensified as a result of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, Emerson continued to work on a series of lectures called “The Conduct of Life.” The series was meant to further the project Emerson had envisioned while lecturing in England: the cultivation of the middle class into the leading wave of reform in America. Now that project became shot through with the task of overcoming slavery. In the introductory lecture of that series, “Fate,” Emerson proposed a heroic overcoming of the limitations of human experience, and presented race as one of the predominant factors that must be overcome. Emerson published The Conduct of Life in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War. His essay “Power” unabashedly celebrates the entrepreneurial strength of the industrial north. “The alarmists in Congress, and in the newspapers... sectional interests urged with a fury which shuts its eyes to consequences,” these are “unimportant,” once we realize that “personal power, freedom, and the resources of nature strain every faculty of every citizen” (p. 394). The power of the human will comes into being precisely through its encounter with limitations, and what was true for the individual would also be true for the nation. From Emerson’s perspective, the Civil War itself was necessary to overcome the limitation of slavery and create a democratic society in which all individuals are free and equal.

With the publication of The Conduct of Life, the major phase of Emerson’s career was over. After Thoreau’s death in 1862, Emerson devoted time to editing Thoreau’s papers, and he continued to lecture throughout the country. In 1866, with the Civil War finally over, he compiled a second volume of poetry, May-Day and Other Pieces, which was published in 1867. That year is also notable because Harvard named him an Overseer of the Corporation—it seemed his address to the Divinity School was finally forgiven. However, Emerson was not generating significant new material. Most of his lectures, as well as the poems in May-Day, had been written earlier in his career, and the new lectures he did produce were often efforts to complete half-finished projects he dredged up from his journals and notebooks. A notable exception is the series of lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1870 and 1871, “The Natural History of the Intellect.” In this series, Emerson returned to the themes of Nature and made a concerted effort to offer a final, synthetic exposition of his theory that the physical laws of the universe correspond to ethical laws in the mind. But the effort left him exhausted. It soon was apparent that Emerson was experiencing short-term memory loss, and over the next decade he slowly declined into senility. With the help of his daughters, Ellen and Edith, and his literary executor, James Elliot Cabot, he continued to lecture and to advise on the publication of his miscellaneous lectures and addresses, but what he had foretold two decades earlier in his poem “Terminus” had now come to pass, “It is time to be old, / To take in sail,” he had written. “... Fancy departs: no more invent” (p. 463). He died on April 27,1882, at the age of seventy-nine.

Emerson’s philosophy of self-reliance is an indelible part of the American character. Some scholars condemn it for giving license to the worst sort of materialism—the “me first” mentality that sees wealth as equivalent to worth. They fail to see that this mentality is exactly the condition of conformity from which Emerson would liberate us. Their mistake is understandable because in our thoroughly secular society it is easy to overlook the fact that Emerson’s claims for the individual are based on a theory of natural right. Fortunately, the political crisis caused by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law makes that basis easier to comprehend.