Year+1850


 * December 21st, 1850, Thursday**



What an incredibly busy year! I have traveled to England, Scotland, Ireland and even France these few weeks, lecturing about life. I have written several essays based on these lectures, and I am terribly proud of all my work. I might sound boastful, but I have really put prominent amount of time into them! Just last week, I have calculated how many lectures I give per year; I have been doing about 80 lectures in the past year. I have gotten $1,000 from these lectures, and I have bought eleven acres of land by Walden Pond and a few more acres in a neighboring grove. I am the landlord and the waterlord of 14 acres, more or less!

I would like to comment about my latest published literature. I titled it //Representative Men//, for it is a collection of biographies of the most prominent men of history. I have inserted biographies of Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe to mention a few. These are the men that I quite revere, and I am honored that I would make such literature public for the world to read.

Well, I must be going off now, I am so incredibly tired. Also, I must get freshened up for tomorrow, for I have two long lectures planned ahead of me. Alas! Until tomorrow,




 * December 25, 1850**

Joy should be here with me today, for it is the day Christ was born, but I am feeling nothing but helplessness and disgust! Perhaps I should elaborate more on this. Let me date back to the Compromise of 1850. I had talked about the Fugitive Slave Law in my previous journal entry, and that stature was part of this major compromise. There are four major statures, not all of them that I am happy with, but I understand that not all things can be good and positive.

I cannot say anything belittling about this compromise, for it has indeed helped to temporary ease the tensions between the abolitionists and the pro-slavery institution. But that does not mean that I have to be content about it.

Texas, one of the most vocal states for slavery, received debt relief in exchange for proprietary of New Mexico.The South had to give up on their claims for the Pacific territories and the expansion of slavery, but they received the option of "popular sovereignty" in New Mexico and Utah, and finally, a stronger Fugitive Slave Law, which I talked about in the previous journal entry. Popular sovereignty and the fugitive slave law is simply an outrage! I applaud Daniel Webster and Stephen Douglas, the two men who modified the previous model of the Compromise of 1850, for their hard work, but this only causes segregation of states in the later years! People should think about what would happen in the long run, not about immediate future.