In Ralph Waldo Emerson's speech, "The Fugitive slave Law," what did Emerson want people to do? What did he want them to be?

On May 3, 1851, Emerson, a Transcendentalist writer, addressed the people of Concord, Massachusetts, about the Fugitive Slave Law. He was angered by the law, which was part of the Compromise of 1850 that ended the Mexican-American War. One of the stipulations of the compromise was a national fugitive slave law that compelled northerners, many of whom were abolitionists, to return runaway slaves to the south and therefore to slavery. 

In his speech, Emerson encouraged people to break the law and refuse to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. Part of his speech reads, "An immoral law makes it a man’s duty to break it, at every hazard." He believed that each person had the right to decide what was right. Emerson thought that slavery was morally unjust and that slaves should be free, and he also thought that the state of Massachusetts should be able to decide their own laws without the interference of the federal government. Emerson believed, similar to members of the Free Soil Party, that slavery should be restricted to the southern states and then ended everywhere through the process of the federal government's purchase of slaves. His message was similar to the message his friend Henry David Thoreau had presented in his 1849 essay "Civil Disobedience," which argued that people could disobey unjust laws. Thoreau wrote that essay to protest the Mexican-American War.