“Born Believing”: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Birthday
Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Mathew B. Brady, ca. 1856. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
On May 25, 1803, Reverend William Emerson, the minister at Boston’s First Church, returned home from attending the city’s Election Day sermon and dining with the Massachusetts governor to find that his wife Ruth had given birth to their fourth child, a fair-haired, blue-eyed boy. The baby was christened four days later—named for his maternal uncle Ralph Haskins and his paternal ancestors the Waldo family.
When Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in the parsonage on the corner of Summer and Chauncy Streets in Boston that May, the Napoleonic Wars between Britain and France were beginning on the world stage, and the United States was a young and expanding nation. That spring, the Louisiana Purchase doubled the nation’s territory. Plans were well underway for the Lewis and Clark Expedition, charting the way for “manifest destiny” and westward migration decades later, such that Emerson would later spend his 68th birthday in Wyoming during the return leg of a transcontinental trip to California. Emerson was born into a culture that was optimistic with possibility, adventurously defining itself, and literally pushing its boundaries. He did the same in his own life. By the time Emerson was an eighteen-year-old senior at Harvard College, he had chosen to be familiarly known by his middle name.
In his youth, Waldo loved poetry, emblems, and literary symbolism, but as he came of age, in accordance with familial expectations, he followed in his late father’s—and generations of paternal footsteps—becoming a minister, and accepting a position at Boston’s Second Church. A few years later, however, he resigned his pulpit, and created a career as a leading voice in American literature and an intellectual celebrity speaker on the lyceum lecture circuit.
Apple blossoms at the Old Manse, the Emersons’ ancestral home in Concord, MA. Photo by Kristi Martin (May 2017).
In his essay “Worship,” Emerson wrote, “We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples." (Conduct of Life, 1860). He believed in the individual’s natural right to self-determination; to make choices led by one’s intuition and consciousness—rather than by tradition and expectation. Emerson felt this was an inborn principle. Through his lecturing and writing, Waldo’s idealism influenced generations of ideas about individuality, independence, and self-reliance, which went far beyond Emerson himself.
— K.L. Martin, PhD, Emerson House guide
WORKS CONSULTED:
Allen, Gay Wilson. Waldo Emerson. (New York: Viking Press, 1981), 3-7.
“Baptisms,” Records of the First Church Boston, 1630-1868, Vol 1, pg 351. (Colonial Society of Massachusetts webpage, https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/547#ch01)
Wilson, Brian C. The California Days of Ralph Waldo Emerson. (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022), 165.
