Freedom.

            Before comparing and contrasting the differences between Emerson, Whitman, and Douglass, I will say, outright, that the ultimate freedom each seeks is freedom of consciousness.  Each author, I believe, recognized very well that there is no other kind of true freedom.  Of course, physical freedom was an issue for Douglass; that goes without saying.  But if you examine Douglass’s slave narrative closely, it is quite obvious that true freedom for him was something mental, and that his physical freedom was did not lead to his emancipation.  Whitman and Emerson, on the other hand, were white.  So they were, of course, physically free.  They were, perhaps, not always well off, but this fact alone, to me, indicates that the freedom they defined was through consciousness. 

            Staring with Douglass, the most important theme of his freedom, was, as he puts it, the idea of being a slave in form, rather than a slave in fact.  The “form” represents the physical shackles of slavery.  The “fact” represents something much deeper.  The fact of slavery was the enslavement of consciousness, and the complex system of inhumanity used by slaveholders to morally and mentally keep African Americans enslaved.  These tactics are well described in Douglass’s slave narrative.  For example, the way the masters would give slaves those few days of freedom after Christmas, and then challenge them to get horribly drunk, just so they could impress upon them an ironic sense of equating freedom with being sick. 

For Douglass, true freedom was something inside.  This inner freedom, however, did not come about by purely inner means.  This inner freedom came, ironically, through labor.  All his life, Douglass never knew the rewards of his own labor; he never had a direct sense of what his labor was worth.  While working as a caulker on the docks, he, for the first time discovered this worth.  And it was through this discovery that he learned that true freedom for him was to keep what he earned, therefore becoming his own master.  Although this sense of owning one’s own labor involves the physical exchange of money, it was through this that Douglass became free in his mind.  It was only when he could work and earn a living for himself, that Douglass could finally be free, a slave neither in form, nor in fact.

            Emerson, on the other hand, sought mental freedom, not from one’s own limitations, but from the limitations of society, and from the limitations of the past.  Emerson believed that a scholar could not be free unless he or she (he back then) could cast off the bondages of what other men have done in the past.  He saw that imitation was a form of slavery, slavery to the ideas of others.  Freedom for Emerson came through authenticity, from being able to, in a sense, ignore the past, and be truly creative now.  He saw reliance upon books, reliance upon other people, as a hindrance to real creativity.  So, like Douglass, the freedom Emerson defined was one of consciousness, but still, that freedom was within the boundaries of society, because it sought the approval of society.  Why else would he give his speech at Cambridge?  Emerson desired to free scholars from the past, but he still wanted them to conform to societal rule.

            Whitman however, sought an entirely different form of freedom.  While there are many ways in which Whitman was everything Emerson dreamed of, there are many ways in which Whitman represented nothing that Emerson ever could have imagined.  To me, Whitman sought freedom from everything, most importantly, freedom from oneself.  In other words, Whitman knew that even if you become free in the eyes of others, if you are still limited by your own ideas, by your own mind, then you are not free.  Through his poetry, Whitman sought to leave everything behind, to become, in a way, empty.  And through this emptiness, he was filled with the universe.  He was free to become anyone, and in many ways, Song of Myself, was Whitman speaking for others by becoming them.  By celebrating himself, he was celebrating everyone.  He could celebrate himself because he was free from himself.  This kind of freedom went way beyond Emerson.  This kind of freedom was, and still is, dangerous.  Whitman represented a wild kind of spiritual freedom from society, from which Whitman stood on the outside, naked and undisguised, looking in.  I am blown away by Whitman every time I read him.  The kind of freedom he writes about is rare, it didn’t really exist then, and it hardly exists now.