Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Fate." The Conduct of Life, Ticknor and Fields, 1860, p. 22.
Johnson had a white mistress who accompanied him visibly at a time when Blacks were lynched for dating white women in many parts of the country. He was criticized heavily by whites for going with a white woman and many Blacks for the same.
American Founding Fathers were not the first to realize that freedom that depended on government was not very safe. It is highly likely that a number of them had read Ferguson. But they together with the public pressure for a Bill of Rights were the first to build a structure that would be based on the assumption that government alone could not be trusted as the guarantor and provider of freedom and rights.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
