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.

Chapter 4 focuses on democracy, specifically the creation of a violent American political process. By the 1840s, the right to vote expanded to include nearly all White men in the United States. The establishment of this racialized and gendered space put the nation at the global forefront of White male political participation. These voters elected militant candidates, used violence to set boundaries around the electorate, and physically intimidated political opponents. They demonstrated the import of Whiteness and violence to democratic development. The chapter covers Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the election of 1828, the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, and Bleeding Kansas.