Climates of Imperialism: Emerson and William C. Nell in Florida

In 1827, Emerson travelled to St. Augustine to recover from a particularly acute attack of his lifelong tuberculosis. In his journals he recorded attending a church next door to a slave market: “One ear heard the glad... [ view full abstract ]

In 1827, Emerson travelled to St. Augustine to recover from a particularly acute attack of his lifelong tuberculosis. In his journals he recorded attending a church next door to a slave market: “One ear heard the glad tidings of great joy, whilst the other was regaled with ‘Going, Gentlemen, Going!” Encountering slavery, Emerson felt himself floundering beyond the space of the nation in the ambiguously old world Spanish Florida. Decades later, Boston abolitionist William C. Nell revised his assimilationist Colored Patriots of the American Revolution to include a chapter on the massacre of Black Seminoles under Andrew Jackson’s invading army. Like Emerson, Nell’s imagined nation wheezes through the Florida climate, unable to avoid the violence of imperialism and suggestions that freedom lies beyond the nation’s time and space. This paper examines the impact of this imperial border zone on two major abolitionist writers and reflects on how climate debates continue to contend with tropical imperial border zones.