 Slavery had existed in the United States from the beginnings of the country, but the question of its morality and entrenchment within the American political system came to the fore with the annexation of Texas, where slavery was legal, and its admission to the Union as the 28th state in 1845. Emerson’s breakout address “On the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies” (1844) was delivered in this context. (The Slavery Abolition Act was passed by the British Parliament in 1833 and celebrated annually in Concord.) In his address Emerson wrote: “Language must be raked, the secrets of slaughter-houses and infamous holes that cannot front the day, must be ransacked, to tell what negro-slavery has been. These men, our benefactors, … the producers of comfort and luxury for the civilized world. … I am heartsick when I read how they came there, and how they are kept there. Their case was left out of the mind and out of the heart of their brothers” (A, 9).