Ezra Ripley, who sat in the pulpit that day, was eighty-four years old, and when, six years later, he died, he had been pastor of the Concord church for sixty-three years. [102] _Page 83, note 2._ Lemuel Shattuck, author of the excellent _History of Concord_, which was published before the end of the year. [103] _Page 85, note 1._ In Mr. Emerson’s lecturing excursions during the following thirty-five years, he found with pleasure and pride the sons of his Concord neighbors important men in the building up the prairie and river towns, or the making and operating the great highways of emigration and trade. LETTER TO PRESIDENT VAN BUREN April 19, 1838, Mr. Emerson made this entry in his Journal:— “This disaster of the Cherokees, brought to me by a sad friend to blacken my days and nights! I can do nothing; why shriek? why strike ineffectual blows? I stir in it for the sad reason that no other mortal will move, and if I do not, why, it is left undone. The amount of it, to be sure, is merely a scream; but sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.... “Yesterday wrote the letter to Van Buren,—a letter hated of me, a deliverance that does not deliver the soul. I write my journal, I read my lecture with joy; but this stirring in the philanthropic mud gives me no peace. I will let the republic alone until the republic comes to me. I fully sympathize, be sure, with the sentiments I write; but I accept it rather from my friends than dictate it. It is not my impulse to say it, and therefore my genius deserts me; no muse befriends; no music of thought or word accompanies.” Yet his conscience then, and many a time later, brought him to do the brave, distasteful duty. ADDRESS ON EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES The tenth anniversary of the emancipation by Act of Parliament of all slaves in the insular possessions of Great Britain in the West Indies was celebrated in Concord, in the year 1844, by citizens of thirteen Massachusetts towns, and they invited Mr. Emerson to make the Address. The Rev. Dr. Channing, on whose mind the wrongs of the slave had weighed ever since he had seen them in Santa Cruz, had spoken on Slavery in Faneuil Hall in 1837, had written on the subject, and his last public work had been a speech on the anniversary of the West Indian Emancipation in 1842, in the village of Lenox.