Henry’s immediate concern was earning a living. His commencement speech may have prophesied the one-day workweek, but the new graduate still had to work six days a week, like everyone else. But unlike his friends, forced by the Panic of 1837 to scramble for jobs, he walked into one of the best: teacher of Concord’s Center Grammar School, with ninety students and an annual salary of $500—making him one of the hardest-working and best-paid schoolteachers in town. On Wednesday, September 6, a week after skipping Emerson’s address to American educators, Henry Thoreau entered the classroom.5 He almost certainly planned to stay for some years, for he saw education as democracy’s highest civic calling, a calling reflected in the building itself: an ornate two-story brick schoolhouse in the town center.6 Through its elaborate portico Thoreau entered an amphitheater-shaped classroom, sat at his desk, and watched the children of storekeepers, bank directors, lawyers, farmers, millers, carriage-makers, and cobblers file through the back door and take their seats, boys on one side, girls on the other. He was to teach them how to read and speak well, write correctly, calculate sums, grasp a little geography, history, natural philosophy—even how to carve barnyard goose quills into writing instruments that served for a page or two before needing repair. His classroom was well equipped: blackboards, spelling cards, celestial and terrestrial globes, world maps, and wall posters outlining rules of grammar. Pupils worked at their desks, grouped by age and studies, while small groups came forward to review their lessons.
In the decade since Thoreau had attended this same school, educational reforms led in part by Edward Jarvis, his former teacher, called for teaching through example and appeals to moral elevation rather than corporal punishment. Thoreau made clear when he was hired that he would not flog his students for disobedience, but “talk morals as a punishment instead.” But unfortunately the reformers had moved on, and by 1837 the Concord school committee had shrunk to three of its most conservative members. One of them, Barzillai Frost, had tutored Thoreau at Harvard and likely approved of his teaching methods, but Deacon Nehemiah Ball did not. The committee’s senior member and a formidable presence in town governance, Ball stopped by late in Thoreau’s second week to judge the new schoolmaster’s conduct. As the story goes, Deacon Ball “sat through one session with increasing disapproval, waiting for corporal chastisement, the corner-stone of a sound education.”7 When Thoreau failed to comply, the Deacon took him to task: the teacher must flog, or the school would spoil.
What Thoreau did changed his life forever. He couldn’t actually flog anyone—he didn’t even own a cowhide—but he did possess a ferule, and that afternoon he used it. Accounts vary: some said he struck one or two students; some said as many as thirteen. Only two are recorded: Eliza Jane Durant, the Thoreau family’s maidservant, who left their employ soon after, and Daniel F. Potter, who vividly recalled the thrashing and declared as an old man, “It smarts still!” He was ten, and he’d just come from a district school where he’d been taught to put his book away, fold his arms, and sit quietly when finished with his lesson. To his astonishment, Thoreau called him up and feruled him for putting away his book and doing nothing. “I was so mad that I said to myself, ‘When I’m grown up, I’ll whip you for this, old feller.’ But,” chuckled Potter, “I never saw the day I wanted to do it.—Why, Henry Thoreau was the kindest hearted of men.” So perhaps it was only the two, Jane and Daniel, one girl and one boy, but that was enough. That evening, having completed his act of “uncivil obedience,” Thoreau went before Deacon Ball and resigned. Next day he returned to tell his students that punishing with force went against his conscience: “He wouldn’t keep school any longer, if that was the way he had to do it.”8
Thus ten days after it began, Thoreau’s career as a public schoolteacher was over. The annoyed school committee hired his friend William Allen in his place, and the term resumed almost immediately. Thoreau, out of a job, wrote Henry Vose, “fellow soldier of the campaign of —37,” to ask after any openings near Butternuts, New York, where Vose had found a teaching job. “Pens to mend, and hands to guide. / O, who would a schoolmaster be?” quipped Henry. Sorry, answered Vose, no openings near Butternuts. To his family, Henry talked largely about getting “an academy or private school where he can have his own way.”9 But an academy couldn’t be whistled up for the asking. For now, with the school year already under way, it was just talk. Town gossip burned through the scandal. Was young Thoreau a quitter, or too cavalier with a good job? Or was Deacon Ball too meddlesome, and in a bad cause, too? While the gossip moved on, Henry Thoreau did not. Rootless still, a sudden martyr to conscience, he needed help.
Now, at last, he was ready for Emerson.
Transcendental Self-Culture
It’s unclear exactly when Emerson and Thoreau met. Emerson thought it was around Thoreau’s graduation in 1837, perhaps in May when Lucy showed him “Sic Vita,” or as early as April, after she showed him the bit of Henry’s journal that sounded so much like himself. It could have been as late as that summer, when Wheeler and Thoreau were living on Sandy Pond. “The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner & would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature,” Emerson jotted approvingly.10 For his part, Thoreau carefully commemorated Sunday, October 22, 1837, as nothing less than his second Lebenstag, the day that gave him birth as a writer. Across the top of the first page of a new blank book, he wrote: “‘What are you doing now?’ he asked, ‘Do you keep a journal?’—So I make my first entry today.”11 Few doubt that “he” was Emerson. His query sounds casual, a kindly expression of interest in the youthful and newly unemployed Harvard graduate. This quiet conversation announces a momentous change in Thoreau’s life: from this day on, he had an interlocutor. His lifelong dialogue with Emerson, by turns loving, inspired, hostile, angry, and reconciled, would turn Thoreau into a great and wholly original writer. Thoreau’s creativity was realized not alone but in partnership, as Emerson fanned his creativity into genius.
Thoreau’s next wish was for solitude: “I seek a garret. The spiders must not be disturbed, nor the floor swept, nor the lumber arranged.” This also was Emerson’s advice, straight from the lectures he was writing then on “Human Culture”: first, “sit alone. In your arrangements for your residence see that you have a chamber to yourself, though you sell your coat and wear a blanket.” Second, “keep a journal. Pay so much honor to the visits of Truth to your mind as to record those thoughts.” Emerson’s point was that solitude and journal-keeping work together: solitude is not for empty reverie but for the productive habit of exploring, pen in hand, “what facts of moment lie in the memory,” facts that would illumine the gross and heedless world into meaning and life. Likely Thoreau had already been keeping some sort of journal. Spiritual self-examination was an honored New England tradition; journals were often shared with friends and family, and Professor Channing had encouraged his Harvard students to record their daily progress. But the professor’s moral accounting did not catch and hold Thoreau’s imagination—not like Emerson’s call to see how the inexhaustible waters of life roll through the catch of every moment.12 Thoreau’s response to that call inaugurated a monumental life’s work, an epic journey of over two million words, sustained as long as he could hold a pen.
With garret secured and pen in hand, Thoreau transformed himself from Harvard graduate to Transcendental apprentice. The key was “Self-Culture.” To culture, or cultivate, is to make something grow, whether plant, animal, or mind; while they all grow, only humans can turn that principle of culture upon themselves. To be human is to search for one’s unique inner powers and then consciously unfold, guide, and nourish them. In most people those powers lie dormant; to awaken, to become fully human, is to see that of all creation, humans alone carry God’s nature within. As William Ellery Channing wrote, “We see God around us, because he dwells within us. It is by a kindred wisdom, that we discern his wisdom in his works.”13 Over the years, the Transcendentalist
s would argue with one another and follow many paths, but all held firm to the belief that a divine principle dwells within every person. This insight proved absolutely transformative: it meant that slavery was an abomination to be stopped at any cost; that the political and social inequality of women must end; that children must never be punished as sinners nor trained as workers, but educated to unfold and foster that divine spirit within; and that spiritual seekers could read divine wisdom directly in nature and so enjoy, as Emerson proclaimed in Nature, “an original relation to the universe.” The new view reshaping everything—philosophy, theology, science, law, the trades and professions—had, in Emerson’s words, “as yet attained no clearer name than Culture.”14
The gracious village of Concord, with its leafy streets, neoclassical pillars, and welcoming pathways to ponds and hilltops, seemed to Emerson the perfect place to pursue this new project of Culture. In 1835 he bought a large white house on the busy Cambridge Turnpike, to which he brought his bride Lidian. Emerson’s home quickly became the center of American intellectual culture: the very evening of his triumphant “American Scholar” address, the Emersons returned to Concord with a virtual university in their train, who all stayed the night for a huge party the next day—the gala day when the small Transcendentalist circle opened at last to friends and sympathizers, including women. Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody were there, as were Thoreau’s neighbors Elizabeth Hoar and Sarah Alden Ripley. Lidian made sure it was a true festival, for, as she wryly noted, even Transcendentalists liked to eat well: “beef . . . a noble great piece for the Spiritualists,” mutton with caper sauce, ham and tongue, corn, “beans tomatoes macaroni cucumbers lettuce and applesauce,” plus puddings, with custards and pears, raisins and nuts for desert.15 But Henry Thoreau was not there. In a coincidence that must have felt like destiny, he found himself neighbored by a virtual force of nature. But he would gain entrance not as a local boy, son of a pencil-maker whose mother kept a boardinghouse, but only as Emerson’s intellectual equal—and that must be by Emerson’s invitation.
That invitation was not long in coming. Emerson opened his “Human Culture” lecture series in Boston on December 6, 1837, and gave his young neighbor tickets. Thoreau walked the nineteen miles to Boston’s impressive Masonic Temple, where he heard Emerson sorrow, in words that echoed Thoreau’s own commencement speech, “to see men blind to a beauty that is beaming on every side of them.” The student who loved mathematics and read through stacks of old English poetry heard Emerson ask, “Cannot a man know the mathematics, and love Shakespear also?” And the boy who dreamed of Walden Pond heard Emerson declare that “Culture in the high sense” turned to nature to awaken humankind—not to “the trimming and turfing of gardens,” but wild nature, “the true harmony of the unshorn landscape, with horrid thickets, wide morasses, bald mountains, and the balance of the land and sea.” Thoreau was hooked. And now, at last, so was Emerson. Someone told him that his young neighbor had walked all the way to Boston to hear him speak. Emerson’s response was to invite Thoreau to his home, where he was giving private readings of these same lectures to family and close friends.16
By February 1838, Thoreau and Emerson were companions. “I delight much in my young friend, who seems to have as free & erect a mind as any I have ever met,” wrote Emerson. Thoreau made the solitary afternoon “sunny with his simplicity & clear perception. . . . Every thing that boy says makes merry with society though nothing can be graver than his meaning,” for he is “spiced throughout with rebellion.”17 By April they were taking walks together, and by July Thoreau’s transformation was complete—at least according to James Russell Lowell, whom Harvard had suspended and sent to Concord to “rusticate” for a spell. “I saw Thoreau last night,” he giggled to a friend, “and it is exquisitely amusing to see how he imitates Emerson’s tone and manner. With my eyes shut I shouldn’t know them apart.” Thoreau’s resemblance to Emerson dogged him for the rest of his life, however unfairly: one visitor declared he was “even getting up a caricature nose like Emerson’s”!18 A decade later, Lowell publicly mocked Thoreau as a pickpocket pilfering Emerson’s best fruit: “Fie, for shame, brother bard; with good fruit of your own, / Can’t you let Neighbor Emerson’s orchards alone?” Yet William Ellery Channing insisted that imitation was necessary to self-culture: “We need connexions with great thinkers to make us thinkers too.”19 Once his apprenticeship was over, Thoreau would fight hard to grow beyond Emerson’s influence, but the paradox was built into the heart of Emerson’s philosophy. How could the disciples of the great Apostle of Originality declare their own originality without parroting their teacher?
Concord Social Culture
While Thoreau was sharpening the cross-grained banter that won him a place with the Emerson family, he was also working out a new role in his own family, who had sacrificed so largely to send him to Harvard and who expected more than a smart tongue in return. The Thoreau family compound in the Parkman house now included his parents, his three siblings (when they weren’t away teaching), Aunt Louisa and Uncle Charles Dunbar, Aunts Maria and Jane Thoreau (when they were visiting, which was often), and now Aunt Maria’s elderly friend Prudence Bird Ward and her daughter Prudence as well—plus such long-term residents as Lucy Jackson Brown, various temporary boarders, and one or two live-in maidservants. In addition, the pencil factory out back occupied a growing series of sheds. It was a large and active household composed almost entirely of women, bustling with meetings and missions, meals to be cooked, tables to be set and cleared, gardens to be tended (this job fell to Henry) and the factory to be managed (he helped out here as well). No wonder the budding writer hungered for solitude. Henry took a room in the attic—what he called his “upper empire,” from whose “perspective window” he could look out on the sunrise and see “all things . . . in their true relations.”20
There in that upper empire he wrote up his first lecture for the Concord Lyceum, on April 11, 1838, on “Society.” It was a grumpy lecture: men “have not associated, they have only assembled,” he would tell the assembly; as for himself, he was only acting a part in “the great farce” of life.”21 His Journal records glimpses of that “farce,” as in a sketch titled “A Sunday Scene” delineating family representatives of “the gender feminine”: Mrs. Ward, “born in days that tried men’s souls,” never let him forget her husband was a colonel in the Revolutionary War (“For time was when I conversed with greater men than you,” she’d say); and Aunt Maria, perfectly willing to rest her elbow on the Bible, spurned Henry’s scandalous foreign book “‘Germany by De Stael’, as though a viper had stung her.” But in his letters he clowns around: one day a big, mysterious box arrived in the mail from John. The honor of opening it fell to Henry: “What could it be? Some declare it must be Taunton herrings.” He crawled around the carpet, sniffing the box from corner to corner—no herring. Milking the family guessing game, s-l-o-w-l-y he pulled out one nail, then another, until someone howled “rip it off”!—and at last the contents, Indian relics, were revealed, examined, and distributed to their delighted recipients.22
Even when he was away, John was the “bright spot everywhere; the life of every gathering.” He graced the family parlor with a fancy album to record bird sightings, listed carefully by month starting at on one end, and by scientific families at the other, leaving plenty of blank space for new entries. Henry added a few, and Sophia, busy learning botany from Prudence Ward, added some pressed plants. As was the custom, John did his bird-watching with a gun; ironically, when a neighbor winged a male scarlet tanager, the family tried to keep the poor thing alive by feeding him worms, which he ate “voraciously” until he died three days later.23
Playing Indian with John fostered a deep bond between them. In December 1836, the brothers carved and erected a memorial to Tahatawan on Fairhaven Hill—“Tahatawan’s cliff”: here, “A Son of Nature, TAHATTAWAN, Sachimaupan, The Last of the Indians, has hunted, in this stream he has fished,” Henry inscribed, in his
best college Latin. “This crag shall be his cenotaph,” declared the brothers; “Oh Indian! Where have your people gone?” In answer Henry added the words of Psalm 2.8, in Wampanoag: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.”24 In November 1837, when John was teaching in Hopewell, Henry wrote him an elaborate letter dated “Musketaquid two hundred and two Summers—two moons—eleven suns since the coming of the Pale Faces. Tahatawan—Sachimaupan—to his brother sachem—Hopeful—of Hopewell—hoping that he is well.” Henry’s counterfeit Indian mimicked the speeches of Red Jacket: “Brother, it is many suns that I have not seen the print of thy moccasins by our council fire. . . . Brother. I have been thinking how the Pale-Faces have taken away our lands.” His elaborate satire of Concord politics mounted a protest in the name of the alienated and excluded, who found no representative in the town meeting: “There is no seat for Tahatawan in the council-house.”25 The mask of the Indian allowed Henry to play a visible dissenter, returning from the past to hold the present to account.
In the midst of writing this letter, Henry learned that one of the last survivors of the American Revolution, Anna Jones, was on her deathbed, and he walked to the poorhouse to interview the elderly and destitute woman. Faithfully he recorded her disconnected memories: the president of Harvard living at her farm house; Reverend Emerson’s wartime sermons; the song her sweetheart used to sing; how the miller, Mr. Buttrick, was captured by the British, who told him they would send him to hell, and who replied, Do as you please, I haven’t long to live at any rate. This deathbed oral history resulted in Thoreau’s first publication, an obituary of Anna Jones in the Freeman’s Gazette, though the published version suppressed most of the information he took down, as well as his closing assertion: “And who shall say that her religion was not a reality? that under much that was hollow and conventional there burned not a living and inextinguishable flame?”—a singular remark and a red flag to the self-righteous, signaling Thoreau’s dawning Transcendentalism.26
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