Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journals, which he kept throughout his life and which served as the basis for many of his essays, lectures, and poems. The journals were a platform for Emerson to evaluate and make decisions; to react to news, good or bad; and to form a record of the people he met and the places he visited.

A profile of U.S. Senator Charles Sumner, a noted abolitionist whose friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson strengthened around their mutual antipathy for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Through Sumner, Emerson met President Lincoln in 1862, and when Sumner died in 1874, Emerson was one of his pallbearers. A portrait of Sumner hangs on the second floor of the Emerson House.

Ralph Waldo Emerson met Abraham Lincoln on two occasions. First in January 1853, when Emerson was lecturing in Springfield, Illinois and a then-unknown Lincoln was in the audience—and again in February 1862, when Emerson was invited to the White House to meet with President Lincoln. Initially unsure of his feelings about the President, Emerson was soon won over. He conveyed his admiration in a moving eulogy delivered after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865.