born in 1834, who graduated at Harvard in 1855, was a lawyer in New York,
rose to the rank of Major-General during the Rebellion, and was afterwards
prominent in his profession. He married as his second wife Miss Ellen
Shaw, the sister of Colonel Robert G. Shaw and of Mrs. George William
Curtis.

Curtis mentions hearing Emerson's address on the anniversary of
emancipation in the West Indies, which was delivered in Concord, August 1,
1844. There had existed in Concord for a number of years a Woman's
Antislavery Society, of which Mrs. Emerson was a member. Of this society,
Mrs. Mary Merrick Brooks was the president, and its most active worker.
She invited Emerson to speak on this occasion. He felt that he was excused
from political action by virtue of his having been a clergyman, and
because of his life as a man of letters. Mrs. Brooks thought otherwise,
and she gave him good and urgent reasons why he ought to speak, and to
speak then. At last she prevailed, partly because she gave him no rest
until he had complied with her request, and partly because his conscience
went with her arguments. His attitude hitherto had been such as in part
justified the statement made by Carlyle to Theodore Parker in 1843, that
the negroes were fit only for slavery, and that Emerson agreed with him.


V

The second abiding place of Curtis and his brother in Concord was the farm
of Edmund Hosmer, which was one-half mile east of Emerson's house, about
that distance from Walden Pond, and nearly the same from Hawthorne's
Wayside of later years, which faced it, and from which it could be seen.
Hosmer was a native of Concord, gave his earlier years to his trade as a
tanner, and then spent the remainder of his life as a Concord farmer. He