This is the great turning point in Emerson’s life. The chapter starts with a comparison to William Ellery Channing’s heroic arc of antislavery activism. Despite dying before the annexation of territories from Mexico that galvanized abolitionism, Channing, starting as a moderate like Emerson, progressed dramatically in his commitment. Where was Emerson in all this? (See Chapter 2.) Suddenly, in 1856 Emerson pivots and from then on rises spectacularly in the abolitionist world. Not because of violence done to Black bodies, but because of violence done to his White friend Charles Sumner and to White settlers in Kansas. The chapter analyzes why Emerson had contempt for most abolitionists and how he became one himself without the characteristics of those whom he disdained. William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience is an important text here. He used him as an example of someone undergoing a “soft” conversion.

The abolition movement in Britain and America was primarily led and supported by people driven by Judeo-Christian religious beliefs. The major role of Quakers before 1800 is generally acknowledged. However, "[m]ost recent assessments neglect, avoid, or dismiss the Evangelicals," one scholar noted, and their much greater role after Quaker efforts faded after 1800. By contrast, the prior generation of historians typically concluded that the "evangelical roots of radical abolition are well documented"; "the abolition movement grew out of evangelical Protestantism"; and "[t]here is no question of the importance of Evangelicalism in American anti-slavery." Quakers and Evangelicals publicized the horrors of slavery, and condemned slavery theologically as sin, while building on the revolutionary generation’s widespread discomfort with slavery, and achieving steps toward gradual emancipation in the northern states. Evangelicals after 1800 broadened the movement, appealing to many of those claiming conversion in the Second Great Awakening, and supported immediate abolition. Though not every leader or supporter was primarily motivated by religious beliefs, a large number were, and Judeo-Christian faith was crucial in the abolition movement. Those activities of the abolition movement consisted largely of Judeo-Christian religious speech: sermons and oratory, tracts and circulars, antislavery newspapers and other publications, and petitions.

This chapter narrates African American historian William C. Nell’s efforts to highlight the actions of black Revolutionaries. His focus on figures such as Crispus Attucks, rather than static texts, such as the Constitution, laid claim to the first American Revolution in a way that signaled the need for a second revolution. While emphasizing instances of black assertiveness, Nell also narrated the instantiation of white prejudice. This indicated the promise of contingent change: if the human actions of the post-revolutionary period had betrayed the human actions of the revolutionary era, then new revolutionaries could reconstruct the current proslavery and prejudicial context and grant black contemporaries the rights for which their forebears fought. This interpretive frame inspired black reponses to Dred Scott, including the creation of Crispus Attucks Day. The Attucks commemorators crafted historical arguments to confront the racial prejudice they identified in both Roger B. Taney’s decision and in fellow abolitionist Theodore Parker’s speeches, and they looked to the first American Revolution to envision a second revolution in which blacks would play starring roles.

This chapter shifts the focus to the Constitution by tracking the emergence of historical readings of the Constitution and showing how debates over slavery drew attention to the historical realities of change since and distance from the founding era. The very act of producing a written constitution initiated this development. At first, the move to see the new Constitution as archival contributed to its status as a sacred document, but that move also had the potential to rapidly desacralize the Constitution by revealing that its roots rested in a distinct temporal setting. The death of James Madison in 1836 sparked efforts to publish and use his writings to interpret the Constitution. The slavery debates shaped that usage. Some abolitionists followed William Lloyd Garrison in using Madison’s Papers to damn the Constitution, but many antislavery constitutionalists advanced interpretations that emphasized the framers’ anticipation of eventual emancipation. Coupled with a stress on slavery’s unexpected spread and the sudden rise of the Slave Power, these antislavery accounts of original expectation cultivated a new sense of temporal dislocation from America’s most useful past.