Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  Redpath’s collection was published in May 1860, and its hundreds of pages documented the immense and mounting wave of Northern support for John Brown, a tidal wave of ink that can be traced to the first drop from Thoreau’s pen, deep in his Journal, on October 19, 1859. Alcott was correct in saying that, where Brown went straight for the institution, Thoreau only railed at it from the sidelines; but without the words of Thoreau, Phillips, Emerson, and all who followed, Brown’s swords and rifles would have been nothing more—mere weapons of bodily harm, tools of violence used against a State able in a moment to crush Brown with tools just the same. John Brown’s sword was impressive, but without the word, it was just a sword. At the end of “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau hoped to be a kind of wild fruit, born of democracy but living aloof from it, preparing the way “for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.” The Transcendentalist philosopher-poet had helped turn Brown’s sword into an idea powerful enough to blow slavery apart—and with slavery would go every part of the nation that was all Thoreau had ever known, and all that he had ever loved.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A Constant New Creation (1860–1862)

  The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Thoreau”

  The Year of Darwin

  “Awake to winter,” Thoreau noted. It was December 4, 1859, the morning after he had smuggled Mr. X to safety. All week he had been reflecting on the changes he was witnessing: “The North is suddenly all Transcendental,” able to recognize justice and glory in Brown’s apparent failure. Even little children were asking their parents why God didn’t save John Brown. Now that the work of translating Brown to sainthood was going forward all around him, Thoreau’s mind was clarified and at peace. It struck him that the recent death of Washington Irving, that giant of American literature, had passed unremarked; real literature, literature that mattered, wasn’t conned like Irving’s from the dictionaries but fired like a bullet from a rifle. “If I were a professor of rhetoric I should insist on this”: the writer must “speak the truth. This first, this second, this third.” With that settled, Thoreau swapped his summer shoes for his winter boots and set off on a winter walk.1

  Thoreau was forty-two, old enough to have watched forests fall, but also old enough to see new forests spring up from barren fields. At Walden, the snow set off his rows of sturdy little trees. “What a change there will be in a few years, this little forest of goldenrod giving place to a forest of pines!” As winter deepened, he found new life everywhere. The gardener at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery told him they caught pouts and some hefty pickerel in the pond Thoreau designed, just months after workmen finished it. With no outlet and only a faint inlet, the fish found their way; the artificial pond was full of life. It was all about seeds, he reflected; every new tree must come from a seed. Take care of your seeds, and you will have woods again. So where did the seeds come from? The new-fallen snow was already covered with them, fine seeds of birches and alders, blown everywhere by the wind. One day he came across bits of frozen-thawed apple on the snow, under an oak tree. How? Ah—crow tracks. Crows liked the sweet cidery buzz as much as he; by dropping the seeds on the snow, they were planting wild apples for the future. Everywhere Thoreau looked, he saw tracks. Even in the heart of winter, the earth below, the skies above, and the woods around throbbed with life. He could even hear it: “The crow, flying high, touches the tympanum of the sky for us, and reveals the tone of it.”2

  On New Year’s Day 1860, Thoreau walked to Sanborn’s for a dinner party with Bronson Alcott and Sanborn’s reformist friend Charles Loring Brace, a Unitarian minister and ardent abolitionist in town to lecture on his Children’s Aid Society, which he’d founded in New York City to give orphans and street children free schooling, medical care, homes, and jobs. Brace had just been visiting his aunt and uncle, Professor and Mrs. Asa Gray, in Cambridge, where the renowned botanist had just finished reading a new book by an old friend: Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in London five weeks before. Darwin had posted an advance copy to Gray, who lent it to Brace, who showed it to Sanborn, Alcott, and Thoreau. All afternoon the four friends read Origin of Species aloud to one another and discussed Darwin’s extraordinary principle of “Natural Selection”: Darwin, declared Brace, had just exploded the scientific basis for slavery. Louis Agassiz, who hadn’t seen the book yet but hated it when he did, held that all natural species were separately created by God, unchanged through eternity. The frogs Thoreau found atop Monadnock were indeed, Agassiz would insist, created by God right there among the rocks. The same was true for humankind: God had separately created each race as an unchanging natural species, not to be mixed. Of them all, only one, the white race, was fully human. All others were lesser creations, some of them—he named the African race—closer to chimpanzees.3

  Darwin barely mentioned human beings in Origin, lest the resulting controversy prevent a fair hearing of his theory of evolution. But the four men in Sanborn’s parlor that day understood exactly what Darwin’s breakthrough meant for human beings; as Sanborn put it in an excited letter to Theodore Parker, Darwin showed “that one race can be derived from another.”4 Which meant, to this gathering of abolitionists and John Brown supporters, not only that all animals were related by common descent—but so were all human beings. Darwin knocked away the scientific foundation of racism, for if all human races were interrelated, then slavery was a moral abomination. All races, everywhere in the world, were biologically human; and humans of all shapes, sizes, and colors were a unity in diversity, one single family.

  Darwin’s revolutionary book would take on many meanings over the years, but on this New Year’s Day, for the four radicals in Sanborn’s parlor, Origin of Species was first and foremost an argument debunking the so-called scientific basis for slavery. Brace went on to write his own book, using Darwin’s theory to refute the American racial science promoted by proslavery apologists such as Agassiz.5 Thoreau, too, would use Darwin to further his own work. Over the next month he read Origin carefully, copying several pages of extracts into a notebook, making Thoreau one of the very first Americans to read Darwin’s Origin from cover to cover on American soil.6 The passages Thoreau copied show he followed Darwin’s argument closely, noting specific instances he could verify for himself: evidence that common domestic animals had wild origins, plus several facts showing the explanatory power of natural selection.

  “Why do precisely these objects we behold make a world?” he had asked in Walden. Ever since, Thoreau had studied patterns of growth and destruction, regrowth and adaptation. Though early in Walden he had celebrated the economic freedom of the seedless cypress, his interests shifted to the ecological freedom of generation and creation: all the objects he beheld—herons, owls, and chickadees; woodchucks, frogs and flying squirrels; bulrushes and willows; pines and oaks—lived precisely there because, somehow, a “seed” had found that place and flourished. The key was to study how seeds moved around, like those birch and alder seeds carried by the wind, the apple seeds carried by cider-drunk crows, the acorns buried by squirrels—even the annoying “beggar tick” seeds that hitched a ride on his pants legs, landing wherever he sat down to pick them off. Thoreau copied out Darwin’s point that the plants and animals found on ocean islands always resembled those on the neighboring mainland: “Hence not created there,” Thoreau added triumphantly. Take that, Louis Agassiz! Darwin told Thoreau he was on the right path. There was always a seed; there were always tracks, there on the ground, or in the water or the air, to be followed. “A man receives only what he is ready to receive,” he wrote three days after his Darwin dinner. “We hear and apprehend only what we already half know. . . . Every man thus tracks himself through life.”7

  With John Brown behind him and “Autumnal Tints” done, Thoreau turned to “Wild Apples.” Ever since 1855 he’d been writing of his relish for the crabbed scabby ap
ples on feral trees or in abandoned orchards. On February 8, 1860, he stepped to the podium at the Concord Lyceum to celebrate, in Alcott’s words, “the infinity of Nature,” from the apple in Eden to the wildlings in Concord’s woods. Sanborn called the lecture “full of juice and queer wit,” and one Concord schoolboy thought it the best of the season. The audience long applauded the man who, though the lyceum had nurtured his career for three decades, only now stood revealed to them all.8 “Wild Apples” is quintessential Thoreau, a puckish autobiography told in apples “wild only like myself, who belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the woods from the cultivated stock.” The shrubby little trees, browsed by cattle in their youth, put out stiff thorny branches to fence themselves from harm until, after twenty years or more, “some interior shoot, which their foes cannot reach, darts upward with joy: for it has not forgotten its high calling, and bears its own peculiar fruit in triumph.” Thoreau repeated his spicy autumn brew of wit, wisdom, and sorrow on February 14 at the Bedford Lyceum. The audience of two hundred was “pleased and surprised by it.”9 It was a good lecture, a lecture with legs, but he never got a chance to deliver it again.

  The winter of 1860 served up plenty of the cold, glittering days Thoreau liked best for river walking—“a solid crystalline sky under our feet”—and he filled his Journal with sketches of ice forms. Even after all these years, there was no end to wonder: “Thought breeds thought. It grows under your hands.”10 He turned from reading Darwin, the cutting edge of science, to reading the oldest naturalists—Aristotle, Topsell, Gessner, Gerard’s Herball—seeking the roots of ideas in words pungent as wild apples. Early in March, he met a group of Indians setting up camp on Brister’s Hill, who asked him where to find the rare black ash they needed for their baskets. Six days later they had their distinctive splint-wood baskets hanging out on the trees for sale, including a solid bushel basket with, he noticed, a white oak rim. Were not baskets of that size and style an Indian invention?11 Everywhere he looked, he saw invention and adaptation, artistry and resilience.

  He saw this in his Concord friends as well. Ed Hoar had not, as his friends feared, been lured back to the California gold fields, but stayed to marry the learned and quick-witted Elizabeth Prichard, Henry’s friend since childhood—literally, the girl next door. Ed, who hankered for a country life, bought a nearby farm, which Henry surveyed for him at the end of March. From then on, visits with Ed and Lizzie Hoar were a regular part of Henry’s life. Bronson Alcott, too, found new life: in 1859, the Town of Concord had hired the old educational reformer to be the superintendent of the Concord School District. The rejuvenated Alcott plunged into the work, converting a routine appointment into his chance to create a model public school system. Alcott’s first annual report announced an important collaboration: Henry Thoreau had agreed to prepare “a small text book, for the schools, comprising the geography, history, and antiquities of Concord.” By 1860 he was calling this the “Atlas of Concord” and was urging community support: “happily we have a sort of resident Surveyor-General” whose “illustrated Atlas for the citizens” would be a model for outdoor education, a gift to our children and to us all. “The town should find ways of using its best men,” editorialized the new superintendent.12

  That May, when Thoreau joined the wedding dance around Anna Alcott and John Pratt, he must have known that Anna’s sister Louisa planned to be a writer, but he may not have known that she was already drafting her novel Moods, in which her heroine must choose between two lovers—one a serene and kindly minister who teaches her the wisdom of self-governance, the other a dashing naturalist-explorer who liberates her deepest desires. Her thinly disguised portraits of Emerson and Thoreau hint at layers of feeling hidden beneath the few surviving anecdotes, letters, and fragmentary journals. When Louisa saw Emerson kissing the bride, she thought “the honor would make even matrimony endurable, for he is the god of my idolatry.” As for Thoreau, he was, she wrote, already married—to “swallow and aster, lake and pine.”13

  Hawthorne, too, had transfigured Thoreau into fiction: the title character of his novel The Marble Faun, published early in 1860, incarnated the half-wild qualities Hawthorne had seen in Thoreau years before. In June 1860, seven years after they had left Concord for Europe, the Hawthornes returned. The day they had arrived, Abba and Bronson Alcott, their new neighbors, dropped in to say hello amid the chaos of trunks and suitcases, and the next afternoon the Emersons threw a welcome-home party, where over strawberries and cream the Hawthornes were greeted by friends old and new. Thoreau, ignoring Nathaniel’s silvered hair, wrote his sister that his old friend had not altered beyond a suntan from the steamship voyage home, “as simple & childlike as ever.” The newcomer Sanborn was awestruck: nothing had prepared him for the famous novelist’s “remarkable personal beauty,” which made him by far “the most distinguished” in appearance of all the Concord authors.14 Sophia Hawthorne quickly made herself at home: her sister Mary Peabody Mann had moved into the Wayside after the death of her husband, the renowned educator Horace Mann; upon the Hawthornes’ return, Mary moved into her own house on Sudbury Road, conveniently next door to Sanborn’s school, which enrolled both her son Horace Jr. and Julian Hawthorne.

  Nathaniel, though, found no place in Concord life. Concord had changed, and despite Henry’s assurance, so had he. His old friends had wound themselves tightly into crises of American democracy that a newly cosmopolitan Hawthorne found repugnant. Bronson Alcott observed sadly how the “coy genius” never called on anyone, never attended any lectures, seldom left the improbable Italianate tower he added onto the sober New England house—keeping “his moats wide and deep, his drawbridges all up on all sides.” Thoreau breached those moats at least a few times. On August 20 he surveyed Hawthorne’s twenty-acre property, startling nine-year-old Rose with his “enormous” eyes, wild as an animal’s and “grey as autumn pools lit by a rift in the clouds.”15 Thoreau’s eyes haunted Nathaniel, too. As he struggled in his “sky parlor” to draft his next novel, he hit on a story of Concord’s own (fictional) Septimius Felton, “a hermit-like scholar with Indian blood in his veins” who killed a British soldier hand-to-hand in the heat of the Concord Battle. Hawthorne never completed the sketch of Thoreau he planned for the preface, perhaps because his fictional description said it all: ever “brooding, brooding, with his eyes fixed on some chip, some stone, some common plant . . . as if it were the clue and index to some mystery.” When he lifted his eyes, “there would be a kind of perplexity, a dissatisfied, wild look in them, as if, of his speculations, he found no end.”16 Thoreau was working his way into the minds of the writers around him, already finding his biographers.

  Given Hawthorne’s horror at the shrill and toxic turn in American politics, it was fortunate he returned just as the worst aftershocks of John Brown’s insurrection were subsiding. After Brown’s execution, Sanborn opened his school free of charge to Brown’s daughters Annie and Sarah. When they arrived in February, Cynthia and Sophia held a welcoming party for them at the Thoreaus, where Annie, a precocious sixteen-year old, told Alcott that Henry Thoreau “reminded her of her father.” (What Henry thought of Annie doesn’t survive, but she must have made an impression: during preparations for the Harpers Ferry raid, she ran the nearby farm her father had purchased as cover for his conspiratorial meetings.) The Thoreaus, Emersons, Alcotts, and others pitched in to provide clothing and lodging for Brown’s daughters, and Sophia Thoreau organized a quilting bee at which the women of the town made a comforter for their mother, Mary Brown, each square embroidered with a telling quotation.17

  Such aid and comfort to John Brown’s family was an act of militant defiance. Even as his daughters were being welcomed to Concord, a Senate Investigating Committee issued a summons to anyone suspected of complicity with John Brown. James Redpath refused his summons and went into hiding, sending Thoreau his address in secret to pass along to Sanborn—who had also ignored his summons, and who was living in daily fear of a
knock on the door. A few minutes after nine in the evening on Tuesday, April 3, just as Sanborn had put on his slippers and settled in at his desk, the knock came. When the unshod Sanborn opened his door and extended a hand to greet the stranger on his threshold, the stranger slapped on handcuffs while four burly assistants burst in to wrestle him to a waiting carriage, the tall and gangly Sanborn kicking and spluttering protests all the way about warrants and authority while his sister Sarah howled loud enough to raise the neighbors, then jumped the federal marshal, kicking, screaming, and pulling his beard so hard he dropped her brother to the ground, while their neighbor Mary Brooks rushed up and down the street crying bloody murder.18

  Soon everyone on Sudbury Road was pouring out of their houses. Someone ran to the First Parish and started the church bell tolling, which roused Thoreau to what he at first thought was a fire—yes indeed, he later said, “the hottest fire he ever witnessed in Concord.” While Sanborn was kicking in the side of the carriage, a dozen people held back the horses. Others pelted the carriage with rocks, and Anna Whiting squeezed inside to wale on the driver while her father Colonel Whiting tried to whip the horses on. John S. Keyes ran to the melee, sized it up, and tore off to the home of Judge Hoar, who scribbled out a writ of habeas corpus, which Keyes thrust into the face of the marshals, who refused to recognize it until the county deputy sheriff explained to them that if they did not release Sanborn, he, personally, would call on the citizens of Concord—by now numbering well over a hundred—to take back their schoolmaster by force. That persuaded the five marshals to unhand Sanborn, and the riot wound down before anyone was seriously injured. Sanborn armed himself with a six-shooter and decamped to a neighbor’s, while Henry Thoreau took up watch at the Sanborns’ lest the federal marshals return in the night.19