Henry Thoreau - Kouroo Contexture

Transcription

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EVENTS OF 21ST STANZA
The 22d Stanza in the Life of Henry Thoreau
FALL 1838
JULY 1838
WINTER 1838/1839
OCTOBER
SPRING 1839
AUGUST
SEPTEMBER
NOVEMBER DECEMBER 1838
JANUARY 1839 FEBRUARY
SUMMER 1839
APRIL
MARCH
MAY
JUNE 1839
Following the death of Jesus Christ there was a period
of readjustment that lasted for approximately one
million years.
–Kurt Vonnegut, THE SIRENS OF TITAN
1838
January
Su Mo
1
7 8
14 15
21 22
28 29
Tu
2
9
16
23
30
Su
1
8
15
22
29
Tu
3
10
17
24
We
3
10
17
24
31
Th
4
11
18
25
February
Sa
6
13
20
27
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28
Fr
6
13
20
27
Sa
7
14
21
28
Su Mo Tu
1
6 7 8
13 14 15
20 21 22
27 28 29
April
Mo
2
9
16
23
30
We
4
11
18
25
Th
5
12
19
26
March
Fr
5
12
19
26
May
We
2
9
16
23
30
Th
3
10
17
24
31
Su Mo Tu We Th
1
4 5 6 7 8
11 12 13 14 15
18 19 20 21 22
25 26 27 28 29
Fr
2
9
16
23
30
Sa
3
10
17
24
31
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr
1
3 4 5 6 7 8
10 11 12 13 14 15
17 18 19 20 21 22
24 25 26 27 28 29
Sa
2
9
16
23
30
June
Fr
4
11
18
25
Sa
5
12
19
26
EVENTS OF 23D STANZA
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July
Su
1
8
15
22
29
Mo
2
9
16
23
30
Tu
3
10
17
24
31
We
4
11
18
25
Th
5
12
19
26
August
Fr
6
13
20
27
Sa
7
14
21
28
October
Su Mo
1
7 8
14 15
21 22
28 29
Tu
2
9
16
23
30
We
3
10
17
24
31
Th
4
11
18
25
Su Mo Tu We
1
5 6 7 8
12 13 14 15
19 20 21 22
26 27 28 29
Th
2
9
16
23
30
September
Fr
3
10
17
24
31
Sa
4
11
18
25
1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30
November
Fr
5
12
19
26
Sa
6
13
20
27
Su Mo Tu We Th
1
4 5 6 7 8
11 12 13 14 15
18 19 20 21 22
25 26 27 28 29
December
Fr
2
9
16
23
30
Sa
3
10
17
24
1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30 31
Read
Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1837 (æt. 20)
Read
Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1838 (æt. 20-21)
Read
Read
Read
Read
Read
Henry Thoreau’s Journal Volume for 1845-1846 (æt. 27-29)
Read
Read
“HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE” BEING A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR
POINT IN TIME (JUST AS THE PERSPECTIVE IN A PAINTING IS A VIEW
FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN SPACE), TO “LOOK AT THE COURSE OF
HISTORY MORE GENERALLY” WOULD BE TO SACRIFICE PERSPECTIVE
ALTOGETHER. THIS IS FANTASY-LAND, YOU’RE FOOLING YOURSELF.
THERE CANNOT BE ANY SUCH THINGIE, AS SUCH A PERSPECTIVE.
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22D STANZA: 1838/1839
Henry Thoreau’s 22d stanza began on his birthday, July 12th, Thursday, 1838.
The Thoreau family apparently did not make much of holidays or birthdays — but this was a birthday we now
consider symbolic, the 21st — the day after which in our culture every male is entitled to profess himself a
grown man.
The question would be, however, whether by the year 1838 such a 21st birthday was being regarded as the
gateway to full adulthood, or whether that able-to-drink-alcohol cultural artifact is of a more recent
provenance. And if it were already the convention, why is there not something reported as going on,
similar to the “chiving” that goes on now as a young man approaches that transition-to-full-adulthood
milestone? In the JOURNAL, and in various other historical records I have been consulting, one detects none
of this sort of chiving.
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Henry Thoreau lost a tooth.
His brother John reopened the defunct Concord Academy and he became a teacher there.
The family was living in the Parkman House on the site of the present Concord Free Public Library
building. It was in this home that they would hold this school.
An exhibition of hot-air balloon ascension toured Massachusetts.
The rather humorlessly self-righteous James Russell Lowell was rusticating in Concord during this
year, having been temporarily expelled from Harvard College for some infraction of college
regulations. He was being tutored by the utterly humorlessly self-righteous Reverend Barzillai
Frost. They must have made quite a pair!
At Harvard College, Gore Hall was constructed.
Little Louisa May Alcott, about age 5, who had already while a toddler almost drowned in the
Boston frogpond, wandered away from home and was found late in the evening by a town crier,
huddled on a doorstep in Bedford Street.
The 1st Universalist Society of Concord was gathered.
A Nonresistance Society was formed in Boston, all the members of which were abolitionists
because they understood slavery to be a form of violence.
The United States House of Representatives resolved not to accept any more antislavery petitions.
Start of the “Underground Railroad.”
The Reverend Orestes Augustus Brownson began his Boston Quarterly Review.
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The Reverend William Ellery Channing suggested that the primary focus of our energies should be
toward our own rectification, rather than the rectification of society. The Reverend Brownson
retorted that systemic societal problems can never be rectified through self-culture.
Some 200 trees were being planted along the road to the Battle Monument. A burial site for the
fallen redcoats in Concord or Lexington was disturbed by a phrenologist who would use the skulls
he obtained as exhibits.
BACKGROUND EVENTS OF 1838
THE RHODE-ISLAND ALMANAC FOR 1838. By Isaac Bickerstaff. Providence, Rhode Island: Hugh H. Brown.
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While the rather humorlessly self-righteous James Russell Lowell was rusticating in Concord, Massachusetts
during this year, having been temporarily expelled from Harvard College for some infraction of college
regulations. He was being tutored by the utterly humorlessly self-righteous Reverend Barzillai Frost. They
must have made quite a pair! In this year Lowell would graduate from Harvard as Class Poet despite being
quite unable to attend his Class Day and deliver the poem which he had composed for the occasion because
he was being ostracized in Concord, so the poem would be published in Cambridge by Metcalf, Torry &
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Ballou.
One of the poetaster’s biographers would speak of this poem as “immortalizing, to Lowell’s later regret, his
reactionary tendencies and sophomoric opposition to the new thoughts and reforms then coming into fashion
[such as] Transcendentalism, abolition, woman’s rights, and temperance … Typical of the poem’s style … are
these lines directed against Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had just delivered his famous address before the
Divinity College students in Cambridge … [lines the level of which] never rises above that of diatribe: they
are abusive in their denunciation, unmemorable in phrasing, and humorlessly self-righteous”:
They call such doctrines startling, strange, and new,
But then they’re his, you know, and must be true;
The universal mind requires a change,
Its insect wings must have a wider range,
It wants no mediator — it can face
In its own littleness the Throne of Grace;
For miracles and “such things” ’t is too late,
To trust in them is now quite out of date,
They’re all explainable by nature’s laws—
Ay! if you only could find out their CAUSE!…
Alas! that Christian ministers should dare
To preach the views of Gibbon and Voltaire!
WALDO EMERSON
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Charles Pickering had been raised in Wenham, Massachusetts and after attending Harvard College and
Harvard Medical School had set up practice in Philadelphia. He had become the librarian and curator of the
Academy of Natural Sciences, and at this point was selected to be one of the scientists (functioning primarily
as a botanist, but also as a herpetologist and an ichthyologist) with the US South Seas Exploring Expedition
(until 1842).
Dr. Asa Gray had planned to participate in the US South Seas Exploring Expedition but delays would lead him
to withdraw.
WALDEN: What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring
Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect
recognition of the fact, that there are continents and seas in
the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet,
yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many
thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a
government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one,
than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific
Ocean of one’s being alone.–
PEOPLE OF
WALDEN
“Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos.
Plus habet hic vitæ, plus habet ille viæ.”
Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians.
I have more of God, they more of the road.
CHARLES WILKES
He was appointed professor of botany at the newly formed University of Michigan. Publication of the 1st
volume of Professor John Torrey’s A FLORA OF NORTH AMERICA (NY: Wiley & Putnam, 1838-1843), with
Professor Gray as a full collaborator.
BOTANIZING
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The three volumes of Thomas Carlyle’s THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: A HISTORY were printed in Boston by the
firm of C.C. Little and J. Brown, as two volumes. A copy of this set would be in the personal library of Henry
Thoreau and he would refer to the work in his journal.
FRENCH REVOLUTION, I
FRENCH REVOLUTION, II
SARTOR RESARTUS was printed in England with its anonymous preface by Waldo Emerson touting it as
“a Criticism on the Spirit of our Age” and characterizing it as philanthropic, as pure in its moral sentiment,
and as commending itself to the heart of “every lover of virtue.” Per BARTLETT’S FAMILIAR QUOTES here is
the sum total of what this volume contains that is of continuing import for the quotemongers and toastmasters
among us:
As the Swiss inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist
golden, — “Speech is silvern, Silence is golden;” or, as I might rather
express it, Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.
— Book III. Chapter III.
SARTOR RESARTUS
STUDY THIS STRANGENESS
During this year Professor Cornelius Conway Felton of Harvard College got married with Mary Whitney, who
had been born on May 5, 1815 to Asa Whitney and Mary Whitney (she would die on April 12, 1845 at the age
of 30, after producing two daughters, Mary S. on April 30, 1839 and Julia W. on August 24, 1842).1
A group of undergraduates had in September 1835 begun to publish a magazine of their own writings and
would continue this effort until June 1838. The undergraduate David Henry Thoreau had taken no part in such
activity. At this point the group reissued the accumulating materials as a 3d book volume:2
HARVARDIANA, VOL. IV
Volume IX of the Reverend Professor Jared Sparks of Harvard’s THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY.
LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. IX
This volume encompassed three contributions:
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LIFE OF BARON STEUBEN by the Reverend Francis Bowen
LIFE OF BARON STEUBEN
•
LIFE OF SEBASTIAN CABOT by Charles Haywood, Jr.
LIFE OF SEBASTIAN CABOT
•
LIFE OF WILLIAM EATON by Professor Cornelius Conway Felton
LIFE OF WILLIAM EATON
Louisa May Alcott, about age 5, who had already while a toddler almost drowned in the Boston frogpond,
wandered away from home and was found late in the evening by a town crier, huddled on a doorstep in Bedford
Street.
THE ALCOTT FAMILY
Charles T. Jackson, who had in the previous year climbed Mount Ktaadn, in his 2D REPORT ON THE GEOLOGY
MAINE, wrote of Mount Kineo:
TIMELINE OF THE MAINE WOODS
OF
Hornstone, which will answer for flints, occurs in
various parts of the State, where trap-rocks have acted
upon silicious slate. The largest mass of this stone
known in the world is Mount Kineo, upon Moosehead Lake,
which appears to be entirely composed of it, and rises
seven hundred feet above the lake level. This variety
of hornstone I have seen in every part of New England
in the form of Indian arrow-heads, hatchets, chisels,
etc., which were probably obtained from this mountain
1. According to a genealogy of the Felton family: “Some of the newspapers said in speaking of the wealth of the literary men of
Cambridge, that Prof. Felton had been equally fortunate in his matrimonial connections in regard to wealth with the other professors,
viz: Everett, Palfrey, Longfellow, Lowell and Norton, by marrying fortunes in expectancy or possession.”
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by the aboriginal inhabitants of the country.
DR. JACKSON’S 2D RPT.
2. There would be three such volumes, labeled Volume I, Volume II, and Volume IV. There does not seem to have been a Volume
III published in this book form (apparently it was produced only in monthly magazine form) and no electronic text as yet exists, for
the Volume I that had been published. The editorial board for this final volume consisted of Rufus King, George Warren Lippitt,
Charles Woodman Scates, James Russell Lowell, and Nathan Hale, Jr., and they worked out of student room #27 at Massachusetts
Hall. The illustration that they used on the cover page of their magazine was of University Hall:
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THE MAINE WOODS: Ktaadn, whose name is an Indian word signifying
highest land, was first ascended by white men in 1804. It was
visited by Professor J.W. Bailey of West Point in 1836; by Dr.
Charles T. Jackson, the State Geologist, in 1837; and by two young
men from Boston in 1845. All these have given accounts of their
expeditions. Since I was there, two or three other parties have
made the excursion, and told their stories. Besides these,
very few, even among backwoodsmen and hunters, have ever climbed
it, and it will be a long time before the tide of fashionable
travel sets that way. The mountainous region of the State of Maine
stretches from near the White Mountains, northeasterly one
hundred and sixty miles, to the head of the Aroostook River, and
is about sixty miles wide. The wild or unsettled portion is far
more extensive. So that some hours only of travel in this
direction will carry the curious to the verge of a primitive
forest, more interesting, perhaps, on all accounts, than they
would reach by going a thousand miles westward.
CHARLES TURNER, JR.
JACOB WHITMAN BAILEY
DR. CHARLES T. JACKSON
EDWARD EVERETT HALE
WILLIAM FRANCIS CHANNING
Henry Thoreau would comment in THE MAINE WOODS that he had himself
found hundreds of arrow-heads made of the same material.
It is generally slate-colored, with white specks,
becoming a uniform white where exposed to the light and
air, and it breaks with a conchoidal fracture, producing
a ragged cutting edge. I noticed some conchoidal hollows
more than a foot in diameter. I picked up a small thin
piece which had so sharp an edge that I used it as a
dull knife, and to see what I could do, fairly cut off
an aspen one inch thick with it, by bending it and
making many cuts; though I cut my fingers badly with the
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back of it in the meanwhile.
Breveted Major James Duncan Graham of the US Army’s Corps of Topographical Engineers was assigned to
reconnaissance and surveys for military defenses in Maine. Re-publication of his 1835 A REPORT UPON THE
MILITARY AND HYDROGRAPHICAL CHART OF THE EXTREMITY OF CAPE COD: INCLUDING THE TOWNSHIPS OF
PROVINCETOWN AND TRURO, WITH THEIR SEACOAST AND SHIP HARBOR: PROJECTED FROM SURVEYS
EXECUTED DURING PORTIONS OF THE YEARS 1833, 1834, AND 1835 (United States. Topographical Bureau; this
included a map of Provincetown and Truro).
CAPE COD: The Harbor of Provincetown —which, as well as the greater
part of the Bay, and a wide expanse of ocean, we overlooked from
our perch— is deservedly famous. It opens to the south, is free
from rocks, and is never frozen over. It is said that the only
ice seen in it drifts in sometimes from Barnstable or Plymouth.
Dwight remarks that “The storms which prevail on the American
coast generally come from the east; and there is no other harbor
on a windward shore within two hundred miles.” J.D. Graham, who
has made a very minute and thorough survey of this harbor and the
adjacent waters, states that “its capacity, depth of water,
excellent anchorage, and the complete shelter it affords from all
winds, combine to render it one of the most valuable ship harbors
on our coast.” It is the harbor of the Cape and of the fishermen
of Massachusetts generally. It was known to navigators several
years at least before the settlement of Plymouth. In Captain John
Smith’s map of New England, dated 1614, it bears the name of
Milford Haven, and Massachusetts Bay that of Stuard’s Bay.
His Highness, Prince Charles, changed the name of Cape Cod to Cape
James; but even princes have not always power to change a name
for the worse, and as Cotton Mather said, Cape Cod is “a name
which I suppose it will never lose till shoals of codfish be seen
swimming on its highest hills.”
PEOPLE OF
CAPE COD
DWIGHT
GRAHAM
REVEREND COTTON MATHER
CHARLES I
JOHN SMITH
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The 1st Universalist Society of Concord was gathered. (It would be laid down in 1857 when their Reverend
went into the business of manufacturing pencils.)
It was at about this point that Thoreau was struggling to come to grips with why it was that the American pencil
was so inferior to the European pencil. Since he knew his family’s graphite to be of excellent quality, though
apparently not pure enough or not occurring in large enough pieces to be used without being ground and mixed
with binding substances as could be done with the Borrowdale graphite ore, Thoreau inferred that the problem
must be in the filler materials that were being utilized, or perhaps in the lead-making process. The Thoreaus
were still mixing ground graphite, wax, glue, and spermaceti into a paste, and brushing or pouring this while
warm and soft into the grooves of their wooden cases. Thoreau hit the books to get some clue as to what was
in good European pencil lead mixtures which made possible the “polygrade” pencils, the hardness or softness
of which depended upon the proportions of clay and graphite used, or what different process the European
pencil manufacturers might be following. It has been offered that the Johann Faber pencil factory of Nürnberg
provided the model which Thoreau was trying to emulate, but this is probably not accurate, as we are not sure
that very many pencils marked as produced in Germany were at that time being manufactured by this Conté
process. It is true that the Faber family had begun in 1837 to use the Conté process for at least some of their
German pencils, but to impress the customer with their quality they were needing to offer these pencils as if
they had been produced by a firm “Pannier & Paillard” of Paris.
Thoreau may have been aware that he could obtain fine clay at the Phoenix Crucible Company in Taunton MA
or at the New England Glass Company in West Cambridge. He did obtain a good grade of clay from
somewhere, and proceeding to experiment with it, he found that while he could immediately produce a harder
and blacker pencil lead. This unfortunately did little to solve the problem of grittiness, and so he decided to
attempt to correct this fault during the graphite grinding process.
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Formation of a Nonresistance Society in Boston. All the members were abolitionists, the reason being that
slavery was understood as a form of violence. If one could create a world in which there was no resistance to
evil, it would be a world in which there could be no slavery, because this would be a world which lacked the
“martial spirit” which was “the same as the spirit of slaveholders, a spirit which leads men to dominate over
his brother, to crush and despoil him.” The general agent of the new society was the Reverend Henry C.
Wright. The vote to establish the constitution written by William Lloyd Garrison was 30 to 13. Wendell
Phillips and William Ladd were in attendance but declined to join. Arthur Tappan would decline to join such
a group.
Elizur Wright, Junior relocated to Boston where successively he would edit several gazettes.
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The United States House of Representatives resolved that there would be no more antislavery petitions.
Start of the “Underground Railroad”:
This “railroad” (metaphor) organized by US abolitionists was transporting a select few border-state slaves to
freedom in Canada, but the slavery interests in Philadelphia were playing upon the fears of Irish immigrants
and other working people who worried that freed slaves might take their jobs or drive down wage rates. In an
effort to disrupt such antislavery meetings, a Philadelphia mob would burn down the newly constructed and
magnificent Pennsylvania Hall on May 17th.3
3. Webb, Samuel. HISTORY OF PENNSYLVANIA HALL, WHICH WAS DESTROYED BY A MOB ON THE 17TH OF MAY, 1838.
Philadelphia, Merrihew and Gunn, 1838. 8vo 200pp. with a frontispiece of Pennsylvania Hall, a spectacular plate of the Hall in
flames, and a plate of the Hall after the fire.
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“The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity
to be free, that is the task.”
— André Gide, THE IMMORALIST
translation Richard Howard
NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970, page 7
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George Bourne’s PICTURE OF SLAVERY IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (Boston) described, however, not
an underground railroad but a reverse underground railroad, averring that “Nothing is more common than for
two of these white partners in kidnapping ... to start upon the prowl; and if they find a freeman on the road, to
demand his certificate, tear it in pieces, or secrete it, tie him to one of their horses, hurry off to some jail, while
one whips the citizen along as fast as their horses can travel. There by an understanding with the jailor who
shares in the spoil, all possibility of intercourse with his friends is denied the stolen citizen. At the earliest
possible period, the captive is sold out to pay the felonious claims of the law ... and then transferred to some
of their accomplices of iniquity ... who fill every part of the southern states with rapine, crime, and blood.”
According to Joseph Felt’s ANNALS OF SALEM, in this year an exhibition of a balloon ascension was touring
Massachusetts.
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A “villa book” was published by Longman in London, THE SUBURBAN GARDENER, AND VILLA COMPANION
by John Claudius Loudon (1783-1843). Would Henry Thoreau ever consult this as a source for his architectural
remarks in WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS?
REPLICA OF SHANTY
EMERSON’S SHANTY
DENTISTRY
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John Claudius Loudon’s ARBORETUM ET FRUTICETUM BRITANNICUM reported that “In the settlements of the
Hudson’s Bay Company, tents are made of the bark of [the canoe birch B. papyracea], which, for that purpose,
is cut into pieces twelve feet long and four feet wide. These are sewed together by threads made of the white
spruce roots, already mentioned; and so rapidly is a tent put up, that a circular one of twenty feet in diameter,
and ten feet high, does not occupy more than half an hour in pitching. The utility of these ‘rind tents,’ as they
are called, is acknowledged by every traveller and hunter in the Canadas. They are used throughout the whole
year; but, during the hot months of June, July, and August, they are found particularly comfortable”:
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CAPE COD: Our way to the high sand-bank, which I have described
as extending all along the coast, led, as usual, through patches
of Bayberry bushes, which straggled into the sand. This, next to
the Shrub-oak, was perhaps the most common shrub thereabouts.
I was much attracted by its odoriferous leaves and small gray
berries which are clustered about the short twigs, just below the
last year’s growth. I know of but two bushes in Concord, and they,
being staminate plants, do not bear fruit. The berries gave it a
venerable appearance, and they smelled quite spicy, like small
confectionery. Robert Beverley, in his “History of Virginia,”
published in 1705, states that “at the mouth of their rivers, and
all along upon the sea and bay, and near many of their creeks and
swamps, grows the myrtle, bearing a berry, of which they make a
hard brittle wax, of a curious green color, which by refining
becomes almost transparent. Of this they make candles, which are
never greasy to the touch nor melt with lying in the hottest
weather; neither does the snuff of these ever offend the smell,
like that of a tallow candle; but, instead of being disagreeable,
if an accident puts a candle out, it yields a pleasant fragrancy
to all that are in the room; insomuch that nice people often put
them out on purpose to have the incense of the expiring snuff.
The melting of these berries is said to have been first found out
by a surgeon in New England, who performed wonderful things with
a salve made of them.” From the abundance of berries still hanging
on the bushes, we judged that the inhabitants did not generally
collect them for tallow, though we had seen a piece in the house
we had just left. I have since made some tallow myself. Holding
a basket beneath the bare twigs in April, I rubbed them together
between my hands and thus gathered about a quart in twenty
minutes, to which were added enough to make three pints, and I
might have gathered them much faster with a suitable rake and a
large shallow basket. They have little prominences like those of
an orange all encased in tallow, which also fills the interstices
down to the stone. The oily part rose to the top, making it look
like a savory black broth, which smelled much like balm or other
herb tea. You let it cool, then skim off the tallow from the
surface, melt this again and strain it. I got about a quarter of
a pound weight from my three pints, and more yet remained within
the berries. A small portion cooled in the form of small flattish
hemispheres, like crystallizations, the size of a kernel of corn
(nuggets I called them as I picked them out from amid the
berries). Loudon says, that “cultivated trees are said to yield
more wax than those that are found wild.” (See Duplessy, Végétaux
Résineux, Vol. II. p. 60.) If you get any pitch on your hands in
the pine-woods you have only to rub some of these berries between
your hands to start it off. But the ocean was the grand fact
there, which made us forget both bayberries and men.
PEOPLE OF
CAPE COD
BEVERLEY
J.C. LOUDON
DUPLESSY
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CAPE COD: In the north part of the town there is no house from
shore to shore for several miles, and it is as wild and solitary
as the Western Prairies –used to be. Indeed, one who has seen
every house in Truro will be surprised to hear of the number of
the inhabitants, but perhaps five hundred of the men and boys of
this small town were then abroad on their fishing-grounds. Only
a few men stay at home to till the sand or watch for blackfish.
The farmers are fishermen-farmers and understand better ploughing
the sea than the land. They do not disturb their sands much,
though there is a plenty of sea-weed in the creeks, to say nothing
of blackfish occasionally rotting on the shore. Between the Pond
and East Harbor Village there was an interesting plantation of
pitch-pines, twenty or thirty acres in extent, like those which
we had already seen from the stage. One who lived near said that
the land was purchased by two men for a shilling or twenty-five
cents an acre. Some is not considered worth writing a deed for.
This soil or sand, which was partially covered with poverty and
beach grass, sorrel, &c., was furrowed at intervals of about four
feet and the seed dropped by a machine. The pines had come up
admirably and grown the first year three or four inches, and the
second six inches and more. Where the seed had been lately planted
the white sand was freshly exposed in an endless furrow winding
round and round the sides of the deep hollows, in a vortical
spiral manner, which produced a very singular effect, as if you
were looking into the reverse side of a vast banded shield. This
experiment, so important to the Cape, appeared very successful,
and perhaps the time will come when the greater part of this kind
of land in Barnstable County will be thus covered with an
artificial pine forest, as has been done in some parts of France.
In that country 12,500 acres of downs had been thus covered in
1811 near Bayonne. They are called pignadas, and according to
Loudon “constitute the principal riches of the inhabitants, where
there was a drifting desert before.” It seemed a nobler kind of
grain to raise than corn even.
PEOPLE OF
CAPE COD
J.C. LOUDON
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Gore Hall was constructed (the image below is as of 1855, before its expansion):
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This would be expanded to function as the Harvard Library until 1913 when its site would be cleared for the
construction of Widener Library (the image is as of 1876):
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The Reverend Orestes Augustus Brownson began the Boston Quarterly Review. He wrote to Martin Van
Buren, the Democratic president of the United States, that: “I wish … to say that this Review is established for
the purpose of enlisting Literature, Religion, and Philosophy on the side of Democracy.” He offered that
democracy was not merely the tenet of the President’s political party, was not merely an institution of majority
rule, but was a spiritual movement, and a social and philosophical doctrine. Democracy represented “the
movement of the masses towards a better social condition than has heretofore existed,” and thus constituted
the more perfect application of Christian principles to humankind’s social and political relations. The task
facing the Democrats was to put an end to privilege and to the political party of the Whigs, and to the moneyed
interests which that apparatus served.
The Reverend William Ellery Channing declared, in his essay “Self-Culture,” that the primary focus of our
energies should be upon our own rectification rather than the rectification of society in general, which was an
end in itself rather than merely a means to a greater end. In reaction to this, the Reverend Brownson would
declare, in his essay “The Laboring Classes” in his Boston Quarterly Review for July 1840, that “Self-culture
is a good thing, but it cannot abolish inequality, nor restore men to their rights.”4
1ST QUARTER, 1838
2D QUARTER, 1838
3D QUARTER, 1838
4TH QUARTER, 1838
4. Refer to Robinson, David. APOSTLE OF CULTURE: EMERSON AS PREACHER AND LECTURER.
Philadelphia PA: U of Pennsylvania P, 1982.
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In this year Spiridione Gambardella painted the portrait of the Reverend Channing which is now, thanks to
Mary Channing Eustis, on display at the Andover-Harvard Theological Library of the Harvard Divinity
School, 45 Francis Avenue in Cambridge. It may be that this frequently reproduced engraving has been created
on the basis of this portrait:
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In London, publication of Alexander Walker’s INTERMARRIAGE: OR THE MODE IN WHICH, AND THE CAUSES
WHY, BEAUTY, HEALTH, AND INTELLECT RESULT FROM CERTAIN UNIONS, AND DEFORMITY, DISEASE AND
INSANITY FROM OTHERS; ... EACH PARENT BESTOWS ON CHILDREN IN CONFORMITY WITH CERTAIN NATURAL
LAWS. (Since a copy of this would be found in the library of Bronson Alcott at the point of his death, it is rather
likely that Henry Thoreau had had access to it. It would be interesting to find out what this volume had to offer
about cases of racial mixture, as in the case of the mulatto young lady Mary Ann Shadd who in this year was
graduating from the Quaker Boarding School in West Chester near Philadelphia and going on to become
herself a teacher of children.)
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In Blackwood’s Magazine, Thomas De Quincey’s tales of terror “The Household Wreck” (January)
and “The Avenger” (August). In Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, two articles on his “Recollections of Charles
Lamb.”
THE PROSE WORKS OF CHARLES LAMB. IN THREE VOLUMES (London: Edward Moxon). Henry Thoreau would
quote from “Specimens from the Writings of Fuller, the Church Historian” in this set of volumes in his journal
for Fall 1846 and at two places in A WEEK.
LAMB’S PROSE WORKS, I
LAMB’S PROSE WORKS, II
LAMB’S PROSE WORKS, III
A WEEK: If one doubts whether Grecian valor and patriotism are
not a fiction of the poets, he may go to Athens and see still upon
the walls of the temple of Minerva the circular marks made by the
shields taken from the enemy in the Persian war, which were
suspended there. We have not far to seek for living and
unquestionable evidence. The very dust takes shape and confirms
some story which we had read. As Fuller said, commenting on the
zeal of Camden, “A broken urn is a whole evidence; or an old gate
still surviving out of which the city is run out.” When Solon
endeavored to prove that Salamis had formerly belonged to the
Athenians, and not to the Megareans, he caused the tombs to be
opened, and showed that the inhabitants of Salamis turned the
faces of their dead to the same side with the Athenians, but the
Megareans to the opposite side. There they were to be
interrogated.
THOMAS FULLER
WILLIAM CAMDEN
LAMB ON FULLER
PEOPLE OF
A WEEK
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A WEEK: What is called common sense is excellent in its
department, and as invaluable as the virtue of conformity in the
army and navy, — for there must be subordination, — but uncommon
sense, that sense which is common only to the wisest, is as much
more excellent as it is more rare. Some aspire to excellence in
the subordinate department, and may God speed them. What Fuller
says of masters of colleges is universally applicable, that “a
little alloy of dulness in a master of a college makes him fitter
to manage secular affairs.”
“He that wants faith, and apprehends a grief
Because he wants it, hath a true belief;
And he that grieves because his grief’s so small,
Has a true grief, and the best Faith of all.”
Or be encouraged by this other poet’s strain, —
“By them went Fido marshal of the field:
Weak was his mother when she gave him day;
And he at first a sick and weakly child,
As e’er with tears welcomed the sunny ray;
Yet when more years afford more growth and might,
A champion stout he was, and puissant knight,
As ever came in field, or shone in armor bright.
“Mountains he flings in seas with mighty hand;
Stops and turns back the sun’s impetuous course;
Nature breaks Nature’s laws at his command;
No force of Hell or Heaven withstands his force;
Events to come yet many ages hence,
He present makes, by wondrous prescience;
Proving the senses blind by being blind to sense.”
THOMAS FULLER
LAMB ON FULLER
PEOPLE OF
A WEEK
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The Boston Society of Natural History elected Curators for its various departments of knowledge.
Schoolmaster George Barrell Emerson (above) was offered the Fisher Professorship in Natural History at
Harvard College, but elected to remain instead with his Boston school for young ladies (a few years later he
would support Asa Gray’s appointment to this professorate). When Professor Gray would donate his
herbarium to the university, the schoolmaster would be instrumental in raising funds with which to endow it.
After the transfer of this herbarium to the college, the schoolmaster would serve on its visiting committee for
the herbarium and Professor Gray would turn to him when funds were needed to advance its work.
A 3d edition of the Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock’s state-subsidized REPORTS ON THE GEOLOGY,
MINERALOGY, BOTANY, AND ZOÖLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS, MADE AND PUBLISHED BY ORDER OF THE
GOVERNMENT OF THAT STATE (the Concord lyceum like every other town lyceum would possess a freebie
copy of this — available for the perusal of Henry Thoreau).
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At some point between this year and the year 1844, one or another of the burial sites for the fallen redcoats in
Concord or Lexington was disturbed by Doctor Walton Felch, a phrenologist who had obtained the prior
permission of Town selectmen. He would later be using the two skulls he obtained in his lectures and
exhibitions.
DIGGING UP THE DEAD
After his death one of these skulls would disappear but one, with a bullet hole, would be recovered by the
Concord Antiquarian Society. In darkness and secrecy on the night of December 5, 1891, Judge Ebenezer
Rockwood Hoar and a helper would reinter that skull, and would choose to do so at the Old North Bridge
gravesite in Concord. It is not known for sure, however, from which burial locale this skull had originally been
removed.
Noah Webster became president of the New Haven Common School Convention.
The Thoreaus were living in the “Parkman House, to fall of 1844,” on the site of the present Concord Free
Public Library building in Concord (which would not be erected until 1873). It was in this home that the
Thoreau brothers would hold their school.
CONCORD
ZOOM
MAP
In Concord, some 200 trees were being planted along the road to the Battle Monument.
Ephraim Merriam was chosen representative for Concord to the General Court of Massachusetts.
Nathaniel Baker died in Lincoln.
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Possibly in this timeframe Henry Thoreau was already studying a book from Waldo Emerson’s library, the 2d
edition of Baron Joseph-Marie de Gérando’s HISTOIRE COMPARÉE DES SYSTÉMES DE PHILOSOPHIE, CONSIDÉRÉS
RELATIVEMENT AUX PRINCIPES DES CONNAISSANCES HUMAINES, for we find comments in his “Miscellaneous
Extracts” notebook dating approximately to this timeframe, on Professor Christian Garve’s “Sur la Manière
d’Écrire l’Histoire de la Philosopie.”
SYSTÈMES DE PHILOSOPHIE I
SYSTÈMES DE PHILOSOPHIE II
SYSTÈMES DE PHILOSOPHIE III
SYSTÈMES DE PHILOSOPHIE IV
In this year the British government disassociated the East India Company from obligations into which it had
entered, to maintain the temples of India. Forget your promises, that’s an order!
The Reverend William Adam abandoned India and joined his family in the United States. He would further
journey from Boston to London, to attend the initial meeting of an antislavery group, the British India Society.
James Robert Ballantyne’s A GRAMMAR OF THE HINDUSTANI LANGUAGE (Edinburgh).
Monier Williams matriculated at King’s College School, Balliol College of Oxford University.
At the end of the journal entries for this year, Waldo Emerson listed his readings in Oriental materials during
the period: “Hermes Trismegistus; Synesius; Proclus; Thomas Taylor; Institutes of Menu; Sir William Jones,
Translations of Asiatic Poetry; Buddha. Zoroaster; Confucius.”
Again Emerson copied extracts from the Confucian canon into his journals, extracts such as “Action, such as
Confucius describes the speech of God.”
EMERSON AND CHINA
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M.J. Pauthier translated the TAO TÊ CHING into French.5
LIGHT FROM CHINA
TAOISM
According to Anita Haya Patterson’s FROM EMERSON TO KING: DEMOCRACY, RACE, AND THE POLITICS OF
PROTEST (NY: Oxford UP, 1997, pages 131-2), at this point Waldo Emerson’s journal demonstrates that
Emerson was ready to naturalize genocide:
Each race of man resembles an apple or a pear, the Nubian,
the Negro, the Tartar, the Greek, he vegetates, thrives,
& multiplies, usurps all the soil & nutriment, & so kills
the weaker races.
She goes on to point up the fact that although Emerson, like so many of his contemporaries who were
presuming their own race to be inherently and intrinsically superior, was wont to speculate bloodily that the
inferior nonwhite races would most likely be exterminated, this is far from all the information and guidance
that we might extrapolate from these foul droppings of his pen — if we can bring ourselves to pay careful
attention:
5. Lyman V. Cady’s inference that Henry Thoreau could not have encountered Taoism, based as it was on incomplete evidence about
the sorts of Taoist reading material available in Indo-European languages during Thoreau’s lifetime, must now be subjected to
reexamination. A Latin version of the TAO TÊ CHING would be created by Jesuits, and two German translations would appear,
during the 1840s. These were all, of course, languages that Thoreau could read. David T.Y. Ch’en has become convinced on the
basis of new evidence of the 19th-Century availability of such translations, and on the basis of detective work among several strands
of converging internal evidence, and on the basis of a series of seven paradoxes written into Thoreau’s journal on June 26, 1840,
that Thoreau had as of that date just been perusing one or another of the translations of Lao-tze, most likely this one by Pauthier. –
For more information, refer to that entry for June 26, 1840.
CHINA
THOREAU AND CHINA
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The sheer weight of evidence that proves the fact of Waldo
Emerson’s racism is disturbing. However, we would miss the focus
of this discussion –namely, the historical function of racism in
Emerson’s writings– were we simply to dismiss him for exhibiting
the racist perceptions of his time.... Emerson’s racism is
central to his vision of American nationality — a compelling,
myopic vision that must be viewed in the context of a violent
policy of westward expansion that prevailed in nineteenth-century
America. In NATURE, Emerson’s unmistakable reference to the
raciality of the American self allows him to situate that self at
the brink of egocentric absolutism: at the same time he expresses
a near disavowal of human society represented by ties to the
liberal-democratic state in NATURE, Emerson’s racist imagination
of the white, male body of Columbus is a framework for social
cohesion. For Emerson, race functions to express both a threat to
and an affirmation of social order. Generally speaking, Emerson’s
racist vision of the representative self is essential for his
articulation of a call to revolution — what Henry Thoreau (and,
much later, [the Reverend] Martin Luther King, Jr.) would
designate as “civil disobedience.”
“Waldo Emerson’s profound racism abated over time, but
it never disappeared, always hovering in the background
and clouding his democratic vision. Like all too many
of his fellow intellectuals, throughout his life and
works Emerson remained convinced that the
characteristics that made the United States, for all its
flaws, the great nation of the world were largely the
product of its Saxon heritage and history. Here, alas,
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s democratic imagination largely
failed him.”
— Peter Field
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YOU SEE, I’M A WHITE MAN
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According to Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966):
“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
WALTER HARDING’S BIOGRAPHY
Chapter 4 (1837-1838) -After graduation from Harvard, Henry David Thoreau taught
school in Concord but quit after two weeks as a result of a dispute over corporal
punishment. He searched in vain elsewhere for a teaching position. He then turned
to his father’s pencil business and through Harvard library research developed a
superior pencil.
Thoreau was developing his friendship with Waldo Emerson, who introduced him to
members of the “Hedge Club” (begun in 1836) who became known as the
Transcendentalists. Some members of the Hedge Club were: FH Hedge, Rev George
Ripley, Rev Orestes Brownson, Rev Jones Very, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody,
Bronson Alcott, Rev Theodore Parker, C.P. Cranch, Rev John Sullivan Dwight and Thoreau
(in fall of 1837.)
The Emerson/Thoreau friendship flourished. Many like Lowell saw him as an inferior
copy of Emerson, but Emerson defended Thoreau’s originality. Bronson Alcott moved
to Concord to be near Emerson and became a friend of and influence upon Thoreau.
Thoreau delivered his first lecture to the Concord Lyceum on April 11, 1838.
(Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986)
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Per Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965:
Chapter 5 (1838-1841) -Henry Thoreau opened his own tutoring service in June 1838
and by October he had taken over as master of Concord Academy, where he was soon
joined by his brother John. John taught the “English branches” and Henry Greek,
Latin, French, physical and natural sciences, philosophy and history. The school
was successful and very highly regarded but was discontinued after 3 years due to
John’s illness.
John and Henry left for a trip on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers on Aug 31, 1839.
The fourteen day journey “on the surface was simply a vacation lark of the two
young men. But as the years passed, it had a growing significance in Thoreau’s
mind.” The trip provided much of the eventual material for A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND
MERRIMACK RIVERS.
Chapter 6 (1839-1842) Thoreau’s Loves -Ellen Devereux Sewall visited Concord and
the Thoreau house in June of 1839. Henry fell deeply in love with her and began to
write love poems immediately. His brother John also fell for her, and went to visit
her immediately after their river trip (at Scituate).
Henry “stepped aside” for brother John, whose proposal of marriage was refused.
Henry proposed later by mail but, as his journal indicates, expected the refusal
he received. Henry never forgot Ellen and shortly before his death avowed “I have
always loved her.”
Henry fell in love again in 1842 with Mary Russell but it came to nothing. After
1842 Henry Thoreau was a confirmed bachelor and outwardly portrayed a Victorian
aversion to the subject of sex.
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Chapter 7(a) (1839-1843) -On Sept 18, 1839 the Hedge Club proposed the creation of
the Dial. Margaret Fuller was the first editor.
Henry Thoreau published the following in the Dial: 1st issue -poem “Sympathy” (for
Ellen Devereux Sewall) July 1840 -short critical essay on Aulus Persius Flaccus Roman poet July 1841 -“Sic Vita” Oct 1841 -poem on friendship July 1842 -(Waldo
Emerson now editor) NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS and “My Prayer” Oct 1842 -8 poems
“The Black Knight,” “The Inward Morning,” “Free Love,” “The Poet’s Delay,” “Rumors
from an Aeolian Harp,” “The Moon,” “To a Maiden in the East” and “The Summer Rain.”
It turned out to be a better than average addition due to the quality of the
contributions. October 1843 “A Winter Walk” (essay) January 1844 -Pindar
translation and appreciative essay on the anti-slavery weekly Herald of Freedom.
In all Thoreau published 31 poems, essays and other contributions in the Dial.
The Dial dissolved as the Transcendentalists drifted apart, but Thoreau “still kept
the flame of Transcendentalism burning in his own life.”
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Leverenz, David. “The Politics of Emerson’s Man-Making Words,” PMLA 101 (1986), 38-56.
Starts out with an anecdote about a professor who tried to write a book about
Emerson and never got it finished. Jonathan Bishop: “There is something at the
heart of Emerson’s message profoundly recalcitrant to the formulations of the
discursive intelligence. Emerson wrote to Thomas Carlyle in 1838:
“Here I sit
& read & write with very little system, & as far as regards composition with the
most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible each sentence an infinitely
repellent particle” (CORRESPONDENCE 185). Also picks up on Harold Bloom (Yale) and
Woody Hayes (Ohio State) both tooling around the country talking about how Emerson
is their spiritual leader, and gives them (us?) “access to manly power” (38). The
main argument begins with the early essays (“Self-Reliance” etc.), where the word
“man” should not be seen as inclusive. Emerson’s modern, democratic, individualized
“man” is not king, and he is also not a woman — several JOURNAL passages emphasize
that. Power should be in the man’s mind, not in government or property.
The second section points to Emerson’s proposal that a “new cultural elite” should
run things, and that you don’t have to be rich to get into that crowd. There’s a
bit on how Waldo Emerson resented his minister father, the Reverend
William
Emerson, who favored Waldo’s brothers — Mary Moody Emerson helped him get free of
his father. He developed an “evangelical political fantasy” (46) that the Smart
People would have to counter more obviously powerful groups who were taking over
the frontier — this matches typical New England fantasies. It also picks up on
general social changes between 1825 and 1850, where shopkeeping and the Boston
brahmins were replaced by managers and professionals. These new men took over. [cf.
EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS for a similar history of these years. People simply stopped
asking Adamses to be president.]
The third section deals with Emerson’s later sense of powerlessness, in contrast
to “The nonchalance of boys who are sure of dinner” (“Self-Reliance”). Several
biographers blamed Emerson’s “inhibited” mother for his depressive strategy and
emotional withdrawal. (Ruth Haskins Emerson died in 1853.
) Leverenz dislikes
the evasiveness of “Experience,” not just Emerson’s inability to deal with his
son’s death, but his “impersonal geometry” (52): “Two human beings are like globes,
which can touch only in a point” (“Experience”). The general conclusion is that
Emerson’s obsession with power masks rivalry, fears of failure, and a shifting
society that he could not control — “alienated liberalism” (53).
[DR 5/89]
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JULY 1838
Henry Thoreau’s 22d stanza began on his birthday, July 12th, Thursday, 1838.
The Thoreau family apparently did not make much of holidays or birthdays — but this was a birthday we now
consider symbolic, the 21st — the day after which in our culture every male is entitled to profess himself a
grown man.
The question would be, however, whether by the year 1838 such a 21st birthday was being regarded as the
gateway to full adulthood, or whether that able-to-drink-alcohol cultural artifact is of a more recent
provenance. And if it were already the convention, why is there not something reported as going on,
similar to the “chiving” that goes on now as a young man approaches that transition-to-full-adulthood
milestone? In the JOURNAL, and in various other historical records I have been consulting, one detects none
of this sort of chiving.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
His brother John reopened the defunct Concord Academy and he became a teacher there.
The family was living in the Parkman House on the site of the present Concord Free Public Library
building. It was in this home that they would hold this school.
An exhibition of hot-air balloon ascension toured Massachusetts.
The rather humorlessly self-righteous James Russell Lowell was rusticating in Concord during this
year, having been temporarily expelled from Harvard College for some infraction of college
regulations. He was being tutored by the utterly humorlessly self-righteous Reverend Barzillai
Frost. They must have made quite a pair!
At Harvard College, Gore Hall was constructed.
Little Louisa May Alcott, about age 5, who had already while a toddler almost drowned in the
Boston frogpond, wandered away from home and was found late in the evening by a town crier,
huddled on a doorstep in Bedford Street.
The 1st Universalist Society of Concord was gathered.
A Nonresistance Society was formed in Boston, all the members of which were abolitionists
because they understood slavery to be a form of violence.
The United States House of Representatives resolved not to accept any more antislavery petitions.
Start of the “Underground Railroad.”
The Reverend Orestes Augustus Brownson began his Boston Quarterly Review.
The Reverend William Ellery Channing suggested that the primary focus of our energies should be
toward our own rectification, rather than the rectification of society. The Reverend Brownson
retorted that systemic societal problems can never be rectified through self-culture.
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Some 200 trees were being planted along the road to the Battle Monument. A burial site for the
fallen redcoats in Concord or Lexington was disturbed by a phrenologist who would use the skulls
he obtained as exhibits.
“My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.”
— Henry Thoreau
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July 15, Sunday: The Reverend Waldo Emerson addressed a small audience in the chapel of the Harvard
Divinity School, on problems that would face graduating students as new Unitarian ministers. This would be
printed by James Munroe in Boston (and we may note in the copy of this that has been preserved at the Harvard
library, that it was inscribed to Henry Thoreau by Emerson):
DIVINITY SCHOOL ADDRESS
Although he actually said little that had not been said before, there would be a storm of protest. One educator
who believed in the conductivity of cowhide (Harvard College’s Dexter Lecturer in Biblical Literature
Andrews Norton) would write to a public newspaper (the Boston Daily Advertiser) and suggest that the
“people” should “whip that naughty heretic.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, however, decided that Waldo was
the greatest man that ever lived.
Emerson himself would ascertain that the Reverend Professor Norton was feminine:6
The feminine vehemence with which the Andrews Norton of the
Daily Advertiser beseeches the dear people to whip that naughty
heretic ....
John Quincy Adams would write in his diary about this “crazy address and oration,” and so we know that he
considered “An Address” to have displayed for all to see that Emerson was “ambitious of becoming the
founder of a sect, and thinks there is an urgent necessity for a new revelation.” Picking up on this a century
and a half later, in his 1992 book on the American Religion and the emergence of the US as a post-Christian
nation, Harold Bloom has quoted the “An Address” of this date in support of his contention that it is Emerson
who is at the source of the deepest idiocy of our American character, our self-worship which amounts to a
heathen idolatry and a turning away from God:
6. Precisely how Waldo Emerson obtained this information as to the Reverend Professor Andrews Norton’s genitalia has not become
a matter of historical record.
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Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets.
He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by
its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived
in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history
he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to
what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates
himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take
possession of his World. He said, in this jubilee of
sublime emotion, “I am divine. Through me, God acts;
through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see
thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.” But what
a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the
same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no
doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by
the Understanding. The understanding caught this high
chant from the poet’s lips, and said, in the next age,
“This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill
you, if you say he was a man.” The idioms of his
language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped
the place of his truth; and churches are not built on
his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became
a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of
Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that
man’s life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and
he knew that this daily miracle shines as the character
ascends.
But
the
word
Miracle,
as
pronounced
by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is
Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and
the fallen rain.
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In this Divinity School Address Emerson employed words such as “routine,” “extinct,” and “famine” in
characterization of the state of preaching and worship in Unitarian churches of the time. He started with
generalities: “Whenever a pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate.
We shrink as soon as the prayers begin, which do not uplift, but smite and offend us.” But then he went on to
very, very specific deployment of frosty imagery, suggesting that frost outside the church inspired him more
than the Reverend Frost inside: “I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say I would go to church
no more.... A snow-storm was falling around us. The snow-storm was real, the preacher merely spectral, and
the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him into the beautiful meteor
of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or
in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser
for it. The capital secret of his profession, namely to convert life into truth, he had not learned.” We do now
know how the Reverend Barzillai Frost reacted when he heard of this — but he must have heard of it from
many pairs of lips.
THE LIST OF LECTURES
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal:
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1st day 15th of 7 M / Our Meetings both today & last 5th day
were silent - rather small tho’ there were a number of
Philadelphians here who are spending a little time for the
advantages of our cool breezes — It is a low time, but some
favour experienced —
RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
July 24th, Tuesday, or 25th, Wednesday: The Reverend Waldo Emerson lectured in Hanover on “LITERARY
ETHICS” before the literary societies of Dartmouth College.7
The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my selftrust, by demonstrating what man can be and do. This is the moral
of the Plutarchs, the Cudworths, the Tennemanns, who give us the
story of men or of opinions. Any history of philosophy fortifies
my faith, by showing me, that what high dogmas I had supposed
were the rare and late fruit of a cumulative culture, and only
now possible to some recent Kant or Fichte, — were the prompt
improvisations of the earliest inquirers; of Parmenides,
Heraclitus, and Xenophanes. In view of these students, the soul
seems to whisper, “There is a better way than this indolent
learning of another. Leave me alone; do not teach me out of
Leibnitz or Schelling, and I shall find it all out myself.”
IMMANUEL KANT
JOHANN GOTTLIEB FICHTE
In his “autobiography,” John Shepard Keyes would later reminisce about how he and his father John Keyes
had accompanied Emerson on this lecture expedition:
I can remember best my trip to Dartmouth College Hanover NH It
was Fathers alma mater, and he perhaps thought it would be a
better place for me than Cambridge. So as Mr Emerson was to make
the address there before the literary societies we took him in
charge and starting Saturday morning journeyed around Monadnock
as it seemed to me all day and reached Keene N.H. at dark. Here
we staid at the Cheshire House then a famous hostelry and as I
had never been out of the state before I enjoyed myself greatly
Father had friends there Gen Perry & others Mr Emerson was known
and cordially welcomed by them And I saw that pleasant town over
Sunday under favorable auspices. At dark that night we took the
stage again for Walpole and after a striking drive by lamplight
safely were housed at the tavern at Bellows Falls for a sleep,
broken by the roaring waters, which I was out very early to see
in all their romantic wildness. With Mr. Emerson my father who
was quite familiar with them, showed us their huge worn pits and
rocky ledges and points of interest until breakfast and the
stage called us to resume the journey. All that day we rode up
the Connecticut River admiring much its beautiful valley meadows
hills and waters reaching Hanover late in the evening to find
7. Lawrence Buell’s comment on this talk is that it represented the 1st time any major literary figure had ever attempted to define
an ethics of the literary, and that it wasn’t much of a start. He says he’s personally underwhelmed, and considers “LITERARY
ETHICS” as merely a watered-down repetition of the talk the reverend had given in the previous summer at Harvard College, “THE
AMERICAN SCHOLAR” — with some gratuitous wilderness stuff thrown in to remind his audience that compared to his alma mater,
their Dartmouth College was an intellectual backwater.
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it bustling with commencement festivities. Mr E was carried off
by the societies, and we found rooms and friends at the hotel.
The next day Father renewed his youthful memories of people and
places, he knew thirty years before finding less change than I
had thought possible, while I left to my own devices strolled
about the college campus and buildings making vastly unfavorable
comparisons of it to my Cambridge. It was in holiday garb but
even that was tame and poor beside the rich and dashing Harvard.
At the hotel was a bride the wife of a friend of Fathers a Mr.
Spaulding of Nashua, a very young and lovely lady, and I paid
her very assiduous attention which her old husband smiled on
complacently and she accepted graciously in his absence at the
college meetings he attended— Of the commencement I remember but
little only in my sophomoric conceit I thought the speakers
green, and I fear was more impressed with the brides looks than
with all orations &c. The address of Mr Emerson was a revelation
to all who heard it, and reading it lately since its publication
in the new edition of his works I was reminded of the stir to
the life and spirit of those who heard it and his power and
eloquence then for the first time. It made a great sensation
partly because it shocked the orthodoxy and old-fashioned
notions of the college and mainly because it voiced the new
aspirations then just beginning to be felt all over New England.
He received much admiration and attention from every one there,
and we came in as his friends for a share of it though I confess
that even the bride overlooked her soph for the sages
conversation to my mortification. At the ball which closed the
festivities I got even however as the lady danced finely dressed
splendidly and shone so fairly as the belle in her wedding dress
and cameo necklace, that I as her escort for her husband was too
old to dance was in high feather again— We parted after supper
with arrangements all made by me, to have a special stage for
our drive home with a select party, and I dreamed of her I feel
sure, for I thought I had never seen anyone so lovely — and some
of the seniors treated me to a parting bumper in return for their
introductions to the bride and Mr Emerson. We started early next
morning in an extra stage, in which Mr Emerson Father Mr.
Spaulding and several friends of theirs of the college or old
graduates, and on the outside Mrs Spaulding and myself with the
driver, and we climbed very deliberately over the long hills
that make the back lane of New Hampshire The days ride was long
hot and dusty Mrs S. sought the shade and comfort of the inside
and I helped the driver & at last after dark, and with the
incident of losing our way & the driver’s getting off to climb
a guide post and see what it said an experience I never knew
repeated in all my staging, we reached Concord N.H. quite late
in the evening. We were all too tired to do much but sleep except
Mr. Emerson who had preached there years before and knew many
of the people, and saw some of them late as it was. The next
morning we looked over the town which I remember seemed smaller
than our Concord, although it was the state capital and had some
good buildings. It was always called then ‘New’ Concord by
Massachusetts people to distinguish it from ours, and was new
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looking. We took the Mammoth road line of stages because the
driver promised me to drive 6 horses a feat I had never tried
before, and I forget whether that parted us from the Spauldings
or whether we left them at Nashua. Anyhow we reached Lowell in
season to get brought in a carry all home Saturday night after
an exciting and eventful week. My first journey from home of any
length.
J.S. KEYES AUTOBIOGRAPHY
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AUGUST 1838
August 5, Sunday: Henry Thoreau made a distinction between an inferior kind of sound and a superior kind,
earthbound sounds seeming to “reverberate along the plain, and then settle to earth again like dust” while
“sphere music” seems to bounce off the steeples and hill-slopes up into the skies. He also made a distinction
between the written and the preached word, or between words from dark places and from dungeons and from
the Harvard academy-hall within which is “weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth — without, grain
fields and grasshoppers, which give those the lie direct.”:
August 5th.
Sphere music Some sounds seem to reverberate along the plain, and then settle to
earth again like dust; such are Noise — Discord — Jargon. But such only as spring heavenward, and I may catch
from steeples and hill tops in their upward course, which are the more refined parts of the former –are the true
sphere music –pure, unmixed music –in which no wail mingles.
Divine Service in the Academy-Hall. In dark places and dungeons these words might perhaps strike root and
grow –but utter them in the day light and their dusky hues are apparent. From this window I can compare the
written with the preached word –within is weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth — without, grain fields
and grasshoppers, which give those the lie direct.
1st day 5th of 8th M 1838 / Our Meetings were both Silent but
very solid good seasons — We have in Town several Philadelphians
members of Society who attend Meetings - The solid sitting of
some of them is very satisfactory & their presence in our
Meetings feels helpful - I particularly esteem Marmaduke Cope &
wife & Henry Longstreth there are divers others whom I am not
so well acquiainted with, but I love to see them come to Meeting.
August 10, Friday: Henry Thoreau made some comments in his journal, on the nature of the time of the
universe:
August 10th. The Time of the Universe. Nor can all the vanities that so vex the world alter one
whit the measure that night has chosen –but ever it must be short particular metre. The human soul is a silent
harp in God’s quire whose strings need only to be swept by the divine breath, to chime in with the harmonies
of creation. Every pulse beat is in exact time with the crickets chant, and the tickings of the deathwatch in the
wall. Alternate with these if you can.
TIME AND ETERNITY
Henry would recycle this reference to the cricket and to the deathwatch beetle into his essay on the NATURAL
HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS.
In the autumn days, the creaking of crickets is heard at noon over all the land, and as in summer they are heard
chiefly at night-fall, so then by their incessant chirp they usher in the evening of the year. Nor can all the vanities
that vex the world alter one whit the measure that night has chosen. Every pulse-beat is in exact time with the
cricket’s chant and the tickings of the deathwatch in the wall. Alternate with these if you can.
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Edgar Allan Poe may have seen this; it may have been inspiration for his short story using the deathwatch
beetle. However, that is rather unlikely, as Thoreau in “Natural History of Massachusetts” and Poe in “The
Tell-Tale Heart” evoke considerably different complexes of thought and emotion in regard to the hearing of
the deathwatch in the still of the night.
Note Thoreau’s careful use of the “human as instrument” theme, similar to his use of this theme on September
30, 1851, when he would write that “As the wood of an old Cremona8 its very fibre perchance harmoniously
transposed & educated to resound melody has brought a great price–so methinks these telegraph posts should
bear a great price with musical instrument makers– It is prepared to be the material of harps for ages to come,
as it were put a soak in & seasoning in music....,” and similar to what he would write in “What shall it Profit,”
his most carefully considered sermon, “It occurred to me when I awoke the other morning –feeling regret for
some intemperance of the day before which had dulled my sensibilities– that man was to be treated as a
musical instrument, and if any viol was to be made of sound timber, and kept tuned always, it was he — so
that when the bow of events is drawn across him, he may vibrate and resound in perfect harmony. A sensitive
soul will be continually trying its strings to see if they are in tune. A man’s body must be rasped down exactly
to a shaving. It is of far more importance than the wood of a Cremona violin,” and similar to “There was a time
when beauty and music were all within, and I sat and listened to my thoughts, and there was a song in them....
Man should be the harp articulate.”
William M. White9 would later present a version of this journal entry as poetry:
The human soul is a silent harp in God’s quire,
Whose strings need only to be swept
By the divine breath
To chime in with the harmonies of creation.
Every pulse-beat is in exact time
With the cricket’s chant,
And the tickings of the death-watch in the wall.
Alternate with these if you can.
The Reverend Convers Francis wrote to the Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge in Bangor, Maine summarizing
the Emerson lecture at the Harvard Divinity School and reporting upon the reaction to it:
Have you heard that Waldo Emerson delivered the sermon this
summer to the class at the Divinity School, on their leaving the
8. The famous violin-makers Nicola Amati (1596-1684), Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737), and Guiseppe Guarneri (1683-1745) had
lived and worked in Cremona, Italy, in the Po river valley.
9. A library building at the University of Colorado is named for a William M. White, Class of 1933. I wonder if that is the same
William M. White.
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seminary? I went to hear it, & found it crowded with stirring,
honest, lofty thoughts. I don’t know that anything of his has
excited me more. He dwelt much on the downfallen state of the
church, i.e. the want of a living, real interest in the present
Christianity (where I think he rather exaggerated, but not
much), on the tendency to make only a historical Christ,
separated from actual humanity, — & on the want of reference to
the great laws of man’s moral nature in preaching. These were
his principal points, & were put forth with great power, &
sometimes (under the first head especially) with unique humor.
The discourse was full of divine life, — and was a true word
from a true soul. I did not agree with him in some of his
positions, & think perhaps he did not make the peculiar
significance of Jesus so prominent as he ought, — though I am
inclined to believe not that he thinks less of Jesus than others
do, but more of man, every man as a divine being. — The discourse
gave dire offense to the rulers at Cambridge. The dean & Mr.
Norton have pronounced sentences of fearful condemnation, &
their whole clique in Boston & Cambridge are in commotion. The
harshest words are not spared, & “infidel” & “atheist” are the
best terms poor E. gets. I have sometimes thought that to Mr.
E. & his numerous detractors might be applied what Plato says
of the winged soul, that has risen to the sight of the absolute,
essential, & true, & therefore is said by the many to be stark
mad. — the multitude are not aware that he is inspired.
Per HOWE’S BIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX OF TWELVE UNITARIAN MORALISTS, PAGE 77:
Henry Ware, Jr., his father’s colleague at the Harvard Divinity
School, attempted to counteract Emerson’s address with a sermon
he preached in the Harvard Chapel soon after classes resumed in
September. Ware entitled his own address “The Personality of the
Deity” and focused his attention upon the doctrine of God.
He contrasted Unitarian orthodoxy (if the term be not
contradictory) with certain other opinions he let remain
nameless. The Unitarian God stood above and beyond the natural
order, as Ware defined Him, and should not be confused with
nature itself. Furthermore, to use the word “God” to refer to
abstract concepts like “beauty” or “virtue” was “to violate the
established use of language.” God was a conscious personality,
and to apply His name to either the universe itself or to
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inanimate abstractions was a pitiful disguise for atheism. While
the younger Ware politely refrained from identifying any local
crypto-atheists, his target was obvious. Even so, his statement
elicited no rebuttal from Emerson. Ware himself did not press
the issue further, very likely because he and Emerson had long
been personal friends.
August 13, Monday: A comet visible on this night appeared to contemporary observers as a restful kernel in
the magazine of the universe, roughly like this:
Henry Thoreau’s journal remark of this date, which I suppose may well have been prompted by this apparition,
has been utilized in the following manner by Barbara Novak on pages 27-28 of a survey volume edited by
John Wilmerding, AMERICAN LIGHT: THE LUMINIST MOVEMENT 1850-1875; PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS,
PHOTOGRAPHS (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC: Harper & Row, 1980), in an attempt to define
Luminism:
On Silence
We can also say that stroke, carrying action, implies sound. A key
correlative of luminism is silence. Luminist silence, like luminist
time, depends on measured control. Without movement between strokes
or between units of form, we hear nothing. Luminist silence implies
presence through the sense of thereness rather than through activity.
Inaudibility is a correlative of immobilized time and objects.
Contemporary critics spoke of Kensett’s repose. Yet luminist silence,
in the repose of inaction, represents not a void but a palpable space,
in which everything happens while nothing does. We have here a visual
analogue of Eckhart’s “central silence,” and Thoreau’s “restful kernel
in the magazine of the universe.”
ASTRONOMY
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August 17, Friday: Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western arrived in New-York’s harbor after a 15-day
steam across the Atlantic from Bristol, England and the age of steam was begun. The largest steamship in
existence had been 208 feet long, whereas this huge new one measured 236 feet. The Shipping and Mercantile
Gazette declared that “the whole of the mercantile world ... will from this moment adopt the new conveyance.”
Over the next eight years, this new steamship would make 60 crossings.
Lorenzo da Ponte died in New-York at the age of 89.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne visited the natural bridge in North Adams, Massachusetts.
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August 18, Saturday: Lieutenant Charles Wilkes sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, in command of a squadron
of five vessels and a store-ship, to explore the southern seas. The main ship of this group, the Vincennes, a
sloop of war of 780 tons, would be referred to as the “Ex. Ex.” because of the name of the exploring expedition.
He would visit Madeira, the Cape Verd islands, Rio de Janeiro, Tierra del Fuego, Valparaíso, Callao, the
Paumotou group, Tahiti, the Samoan group (which he would survey and explore), Wallis island, and Sydney
in New South Wales.
During its circumnavigation of the globe, the United States South Seas Exploring Expedition would survey the
Northwest coast of the North American continent. The expedition was our 1st funded and outfitted by the US
federal government. Although Wilkes would be credited with discovering Antarctica in 1840, Nathaniel
Palmer, a fur-seal hunter, had previously sailed far enough south, in 1820, to be entitled to some credit as well.
This expedition was something which would be duly noted in WALDEN under the rubric “that South-Sea
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Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense”:
WALDEN: What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring
Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect
recognition of the fact, that there are continents and seas in
the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet,
yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many
thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a
government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one,
than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific
Ocean of one’s being alone.–
PEOPLE OF
WALDEN
“Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos.
Plus habet hic vitæ, plus habet ille viæ.”
Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians.
I have more of God, they more of the road.
CHARLES WILKES
August 22, Wednesday: Olive Wiley got married with the Reverend Samuel Randall.
Henry Thoreau wrote in his journal:
SCRIPTURE
August 22. How thrilling a noble sentiment in the oldest books, — in Homer, the Zendavesta, or
Confucius! It is a strain of music wafted down to us on the breeze of time, through the aisles of innumerable
ages. By its very nobleness it is made near and audible to us.
August 25, Saturday: A Rondo-finale to Saverio Mercadantes opera I Briganti for soprano and orchestra by
Otto Nicolai was performed for the initial time.
August 26, Sunday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal:
1st day 26th of 8th M / Our Meetings were both rather small, but
solid & good Seasons. & it seemed to me the Solemnity was rather
remarkably over the Morning — NO preaching — At the close in the
Morning the funeral of Lydia Cornell was spoken of to be from
the House of her Husband Walter Cornell in Portsmouth tomorrow
at 1 OC at the house to proceed to this Town & the remains to
be intered in Friends burying ground Near the Meeting house
Father Rodman continues very feeble & low — Sits up but a few
Minutes at a time & Seems to be gradually sinking — He said today
I know it is an Awful thing to Die but I am willing to go whenever
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it please the Lord to take me. —
Henry Thoreau wrote in his journal:
EVENING SOUNDS
August 26. How strangely sounds of revelry strike the ear from over cultivated fields by the woodside,
while the sun is declining in the west. It is a world we had not known before. We listen and are capable of no
mean act or thought. We tread on Olympus and participate in the councils of the gods.
HOMER
It does one’s heart good if Homer but say the sun sets, — or, “As when beautiful stars accompany the bright
moon through the serene heavens; and the woody hills and cliffs are discerned through the mild light, and each
star is visible, and the shepherd rejoices in his heart.”
August 31, Friday: Waldo Emerson to his journal:
Yesterday at  anniversary. Steady, steady. I am convinced
that if a man will be a true scholar, he shall have perfect
freedom. The young people & the mature hint at odium, & aversion
of faces to be presently encountered in society. I say no:
I fear it not. No scholar need fear it.
6th day 8th M 31st 1838 / Today Our friend Benjamin Mott was
intered in the burying ground at our Meeting House in Portsmouth
He was in the 81 Year of his Age - He was son of Jacob Mott &
Hannah his wife & the last Male of a long & Noble line of
Ancestors who have been ornaments in our Monthly Meeting on
Rhode Island from its commencement - & tho’ he is the last of
much standing being himself an Elder in society - yet there is
some reason to hope the respectability will or may not, be lost
in his son Jacob & his family who I hope may come up in the line
of usefulness —
And altho’ Benjamin has not appeared to be so deeply baptized
as some of his predecessors, yet he has been concerned for the
welfare of our Society & that the principles of it may be kept
pure as professed by the primitive Quakers - This he manifested
on various occasions, particularly to me when I returned with
my wife to his House after our Select Meeting 18th of 7th M last
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INTELLIGENCE: Exploring Expedition. The United States Corvette
Vincennes, Captain Charles Wilkes, the flag ship of the Exploring
Expedition, arrived at New York on Friday, June 10th, from a
cruise of nearly four years. The Brigs Porpoise and Oregon may
shortly be expected. The Expedition has executed every part of
the duties confided to it by the Government. A long list of ports,
harbors, islands, reefs, and shoals, named in the list, have been
visited and examined or surveyed. The positions assigned on the
charts to several vigias, reefs, shoals, and islands, have been
carefully looked for, run over, and found to have no existence in
or near the places assigned them. Several of the principal groups
and islands in the Pacific Ocean have been visited, examined, and
surveyed; and friendly intercourse, and protective commercial
regulations, established with the chiefs and natives. The
discoveries in the Antarctic Ocean (Antarctic continent, —
Observations for fixing the Southern Magnetic pole, &c.) preceded
those of the French and English expeditions. The Expedition,
during its absence, has also examined and surveyed a large portion
of the Oregon Territory, a part of Upper California, including
the Columbia and Sacramento Rivers, with their various
tributaries. Several exploring parties from the Squadron have
explored, examined, and fixed those portions of the Oregon
Territory least known. A map of the Territory, embracing its
Rivers, Sounds, Harbors, Coasts, Forts, &c., has been prepared,
which will furnish the information relative to our possessions on
the Northwest Coast, and the whole of Oregon. Experiments have
been made with the pendulum, magnetic apparatus, and various
other instruments, on all occasions, — the temperature of the
ocean, at various depths ascertained in the different seas
traversed, and full meteorological and other observations kept up
during the cruise. Charts of all the surveys have been made, with
views and sketches of headlands, towns or villages, &c., with
descriptions of all that appertains to the localities,
productions, language, customs, and manners. At some of the
islands, this duty has been attended with much labor, exposure,
and risk of life, — the treacherous character of the natives
rendering it absolutely necessary that the officers and men
should be armed, while on duty, and at all times prepared against
their murderous attacks. On several occasions, boats have been
absent from the different vessels of the Squadron on surveying
duty, (the greater part of which has been performed in boats,)
among islands, reefs, &c., for a period of ten, twenty, and thirty
days at one time. On one of these occasions, two of the officers
were killed at the Fiji group, while defending their boat’s crew
from an attack by the Natives.
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when we had an interesting visit at his house - He was out at
Meeting Several times afterwards & attended our Qry Meeting held
at Portsmouth 4th & 5th of this Month & the Morning he died he
went out & walked round his House attending to some little
buisness, on returning to his house went in & set down on which
he family perceived him to be in some difficulty & went to him,
but found him quite gone before they could lay him on a Couch
which stood handy - I have no doubt his last days were his best
days & that his end was in Peace. —
Sister E R Nichols & Br D Rodman arrived last evening from Salem
& Lynn on a visit To Father Rodman, who is evidently wearing out
& sinking fast
This evening Br David called to see us we were glad to see him. —
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SEPTEMBER 1838
September: Henry Thoreau wrote out a receipt which still exists. It was for $7.19 paid by the prominent
lawyer, Squire Nathan Brooks, for Thoreau’s instruction of his son George Merrick Brooks (a boy who would
go on to become a lawyer, a member of the House of Representatives, and then a judge) at the Concord
Academy.
During the late 1830s, presumably during this period, Squire Nathan Brooks’s daughter Caroline Downes
Brooks was a Sunday school student in Lidian Emerson’s class at the First Parish.
The rotting hulk of the fighting Temaire, long since stripped first of her guns as a supply vessel and then, in
1812, of her masts as a prison hulk moored in a mudflat, was at this point hauled by two steam tugs to the shipdismantling yards at Rotherhilde. The Temaire had been the vessel behind Admiral Nelson’s Victory in the line
of battle at Trafalgar. J.M.W. Turner had painted this in his 1806 “The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the
Mizzen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory.” He would paint a second image, of the ship being hauled its last 55
miles in the sunset, in 1839.
September: When the drought broke, the Cherokee Nation prepared to embark on its forced exodus to the new
Indian Territory in Oklahoma. John Ross was able to obtain additional funds for food and clothing.
TRAIL OF TEARS
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September 3, Monday:
Frederick Douglass set out by boarding in some way a freight boat belonging to “Colonel” Lloyd, and then by
boarding the train from Baltimore in darkest Maryland to Wilmington, Delaware using as his cover seaman’s
protection papers he had obtained from a retired friend.10 His 1st day of freedom began in the evening when
the steamer to which he had transferred from the train reached the dock at Philadelphia.11 For the duration of
slavery, he would not be able to be frank about how he had escaped, without endangering the free persons who
had aided him and without closing that particular escape hatch to those still enslaved:
According to my resolution, on the third day of
September, 1838, I left my chains, and succeeded in
reaching New York without the slightest interruption
of any kind. How I did so, –what means I adopted, –what
direction I travelled, and by what mode of conveyance,
–I must leave unexplained.
10. A friend indeed, as this was a risky business — if he is detected, and if these papers are captured, his friend, if his neck slips
through an immediate noose, will at the very least be convicted of grand larceny, and find himself enslaved at hard labor for the
remainder of his natural life. Here, by way of illustration, is the Seaman’s Protection Certificate that would be issued for the 21year-old “light African complexion, black woolly hair and brown eyes” sailor named Samuel Fox on August 12, 1854:
11. We may well elect to celebrate this in lieu of an unknown slave birthday: “It has been a source of great annoyance to me,
never to have a birthday.”
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His sweetheart Anna Marie Murray, since she was a free woman, would be able to join him immediately.
We know that because of Frederick Douglass’s 1881 article in The Atlantic Monthly:
… I arranged with Isaac Rolls, a Baltimore hackman, to
bring my baggage to the Philadelphia train just on the
moment of starting, and jumped upon the car myself when
the train was in motion. Had I gone into the station
and offered to purchase a ticket, I should have been
instantly and carefully examined, and undoubtedly
arrested. In choosing this plan I considered the jostle
of the train, and the natural haste of the conductor,
in a train crowded with passengers, and relied upon my
skill and address in playing the sailor, as described
in my protection [papers describing a free black
sailor, loaned to Douglass at great risk by a friend],
to do the rest. One element in my favor was the kind
feeling which prevailed in Baltimore and other seaports at the time, toward “those who go down to the sea
in ships.” “Free trade and sailors’ rights” just then
expressed the sentiment of the country. In my clothing
I was rigged out in sailor style. I had on a red shirt
and a tarpaulin hat, and a black cravat tied in sailor
fashion carelessly and loosely about my neck. My
knowledge of ships and sailor’s talk came much to my
assistance, for I knew a ship from stem to stern, and
from keelson to cross-trees, and could talk sailor like
an “old salt.” I was well on the way to Havre de Grace
before the conductor came into the negro car to collect
tickets and examine the papers of his black passengers.
This was a critical moment in the drama. My whole
future depended upon the decision of this conductor.
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Agitated though I was while this ceremony was
proceeding, still, externally, at least, I was
apparently calm and self-possessed. He went on with his
duty—examining several colored passengers before
reaching me. He was somewhat harsh in tome and
peremptory in manner until he reached me, when, strange
enough, and to my surprise and relief, his whole manner
changed. Seeing that I did not readily produce my free
papers, as the other colored persons in the car had
done, he said to me, in friendly contrast with his
bearing toward the others:
“I suppose you have your free papers?”
To which I answered:
“No sir; I never carry my free papers to sea
with me.”
“But you have something to show that you are
a freeman, haven’t you?”
“Yes, sir,”
I answered;
“I have a paper with the American Eagle on it,
and that will carry me around the world.”
With this I drew from my deep sailor’s pocket my
seaman’s protection, as before described. The merest
glance at the paper satisfied him, and he took my fare
and went on about his business. This moment of time was
one of the most anxious I ever experienced. Had the
conductor looked closely at the paper, he could not
have failed to discover that it called for a very
different-looking person from myself, and in that case
it would have been his duty to arrest me on the
instant, and send me back to Baltimore from the first
station. When he left me with the assurance that I was
all right, though much relieved, I realized that I was
still in great danger: I was still in Maryland, and
subject to arrest at any moment. I saw on the train
several persons who would have known me in any other
clothes, and I feared they might recognize me, even in
my sailor “rig,” and report me to the conductor, who
would then subject me to a closer examination, which I
knew well would be fatal to me.
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Though I was not a murderer fleeing from justice,
I felt perhaps quite as miserable as such a criminal.
The train was moving at a very high rate of speed for
that epoch of railroad travel, but to my anxious mind
it was moving far too slowly. Minutes were hours, and
hours were days during this part of my flight. After
Maryland, I was to pass through Delaware—another slave
State, where slave-catchers generally awaited their
prey, for it was not in the interior of the State, but
on its borders, that these human hounds were most
vigilant and active. The border lines between slavery
and freedom were the dangerous ones for the fugitives.
The heart of no fox or deer, with hungry hounds on his
trail in full chase, could have beaten more anxiously
or noisily than did mine from the time I left Baltimore
till I reached Philadelphia. The passage of the
Susquehanna River at Havre de Grace was at that time
made by ferry-boat, on board of which I met a young
colored man by the name of Nichols, who came very near
betraying me. He was a “hand” on the boat, but, instead
of minding his business, he insisted upon knowing me,
and asking me dangerous questions as to where I was
going, when I was coming back, etc. I got away from my
old and inconvenient acquaintance as soon as I could
decently do so, and went to another part of the boat.
Once across the river, I encountered a new danger.
Only a few days before, I had been at work on a revenue
cutter, in Mr. Price’s ship-yard in Baltimore, under
the care of Captain McGowan. On the meeting at this
point of the two trains, the one going south stopped
on the track just opposite to the one going north, and
it so happened that this Captain McGowan sat at a
window where he could see me very distinctly, and would
certainly have recognized me had he looked at me but
for a second. Fortunately, in the hurry of the moment,
he did not see me; and the trains soon passed each
other on their respective ways. But this was not my
only hair-breadth escape. A German blacksmith whom
I knew well was on the train with me, and looked at me
very intently, as if he thought he had seen me
somewhere before in his travels. I really believe he
knew me, but had no heart to betray me. At any rate,
he saw me escaping and held his peace.
2nd day 9th M 3rd 1838 / Mary McClish left us by the Steam Boat
with her Son, for New York expecting to live with him & his
family at West Chester about 12 Miles from the City. She came
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into this house to live with Aunt Nancy Carpenter on the 3rd day
of 5th M 1808 & remained with her in faithful service until her
death which occured the 10th day of the 9th M 1834 — After which
we took the house & family & she continued in Service 4 Years
lacking just one Week — thus she has been a faithful & agreeable
inmate in this house for 30 Years & about 4 Months —- her health
has been declining for some time & particularly the last 6 Months
& I hope the change of Air & situation will be advantagious to
her — She was born in Newport 5 M 30th 1773, which makes her 65
Years & about 4 Months Old
I respect her for her many kindnesses & goods services & really
desire her last days may be her most tranquil & happy - I have
paid her the Legacy which Aunt Nancy gave her in her Will, &
also Settled with her for all her services. —
September 7, Friday: Henry Thoreau wrote in his journal:
HOMER
September 7. When Homer’s messengers repair to the tend of Achilles, we do not have to wonder how
they get there, but step by step accompany them along the shore of the resounding sea.
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September 8, Saturday: Giuseppe Verdi and his wife arrived in Milan during the coronation festivities for
Emperor Ferdinand as King of Lombardy. He was there in an attempt to stage his opera Oberto.
Waldo Emerson to his JOURNAL:
Henry Thoreau told a good story of William Parkman,
who (kept store) lived in the house he now occupies, & kept
a store close by. He hung out a salt fish for a sign, & it hung
so long & grew so hard, black & deformed, that the deacon forgot
what thing it was, & nobody in town knew, but being examined
chemically it proved to be salt fish. But duly every morning the
deacon hung it on its peg.
(During this year, on the Georges Bank, a fisherman brought up a humongous cod that would weigh in at 180
pounds.)
This early story about Deacon William Parkman of the general store on Main Street (near where the Concord
Free Public Library now stands) would later be worked into the WALDEN text as:
WALDEN: This closed car smells of salt fish, the strong New
England and commercial scent, reminding me of the Grand Banks and
the fisheries. Who has not seen a salt fish, thoroughly cured for
this world, so that nothing can spoil it, and putting the
perseverance of the saints to the blush? with which you may sweep
or pave the streets, and split your kindlings, and the teamster
shelter himself and his lading against sun wind and rain behind
it, –and the trader, as a Concord trader once did, hang it up by
his door for a sign when he commences business, until at last his
oldest customer cannot tell surely whether it be animal,
vegetable, or mineral, and yet it shall be as pure as a snowflake,
and if it be put into a pot and boiled, will come out an excellent
dun fish for a Saturday’s dinner.
PEOPLE OF
WALDEN
WILLIAM PARKMAN
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September 13, Thursday: Friedrich Wilhelm replaced Friedrich Hermann Otto as Prince of HohenzollernHechingen. Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka and his travelling companions returned to St. Petersburg with a troop of
new boys for the Imperial Choir.
James Thomas Fields delivered an Anniversary Poem before the Mercantile Library Association of Boston (he
would print this at the firm of his employer William D. Ticknor at the corner of Washington and School
Streets).
ANNIVERSARY POEM
Early in September, Jones Very had felt within himself the gradual coming of a new will, somewhat like his
old wicked self-will but different in that “it was not a feeling of my own but a sensible will that was not my
own,” a will “to do good.” There was “a consciousness which seemed to say —‘That which creates you creates
also that which you see or him to whom you speak.’” By Thursday, September the 13th, Very was convinced
that he had acquired an “identification with Christ.” Moved entirely by this spirit within, he began to declare
to all about him at Harvard College that the coming of Christ was at hand. That evening he went to the study
of the Reverend Henry Ware, Jr., who was working up his alarmed response to Waldo Emerson’s address at
the Divinity School, a response directed against Emerson’s “doctrine of the Divine Impersonality,” which he
was scheduled to deliver at the Divinity Hall Chapel on September 23d. Ignoring theology students who
happened to be in the professor’s study, Very proceeded to parse Matthew chapter 24 to the professor and to
insist that what he was offering was eternal, revealed truth. Ware could not agree with Very’s parsing of the
chapter, so Very pulled out his big gun:
“You are doing your own will, and not the will of your Father.”12
5th day 13th of 9th M 1838 / Our Meeting was very small owing
to the Rain & Stormy weather but to me a good solid comfortable
Meeting to me. —
Father Rodman remains very low & looks like passing away soon he is past much speaking & can scarcely be understood at all —
his Mouth is very sore & he refuses sustanance or drink he has
however appeared to know several who have called to see him &
has particularly recognized D Buffum - Yesterday he noticed John
& Mary & tried to talk with them, but failed of making them
understand much he said. —
12. Which although it was true enough to be painful –for in fact the Reverend Professor Henry Ware, Jr. was one of these “heroic
champion of the consensual reality” types– or false enough –for in fact the Reverend Professor Ware Junior was trudging along as
un-clumsily as he could in the theological footprints of his father, the Reverend Professor Ware Senior– definitely was not a helpful
thing to point out.
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September 13, Thursday-14, Friday: Waldo Emerson to his journal:
I went to New Bedford & Mr D. was in a frolicsome mood, & got
up from supper in the evening, & said, “Come let us have some
fun,” & went about to tickle his wife & his sisters. I grew
grave, &, do what I could, I felt that I looked like one
appointed to be hanged.
HANGING
NEW BEDFORD MA
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September 14, Friday: In the morning the Harvard College tutor in Greek, Jones Very, began to inform his
classes of his divine inspiration: “Flee to the mountains, for the end of all things is at hand.”13 According to a
letter of a student, which had been posted to the student’s family before Very’s announcement of his
inspiration:
[Very] bases all these instructions on the submission
of our will to that of God: to adapt everything to
that: to act, to speak, to move only as it is
conformable to his will: then, when we have arrived at
the degree of excellence, we shall see God; we shall
be able to form ideas of him suitable to his nature and
attributes; one glance into the works of Creation will
afford us more instruction than a life of intense study
of Greek and Latin, of arts and sciences: We are not
to consider our bodies as our own, Mr. Very tells us,
but as given us by God to be subservient to our souls;
that is to say, to the influence of the spirit of God
in us; and this is manifested in the conscience, which
is His voice speaking to us, when we are doing our own
will: he knocks, and too often is refused admittance:
“he comes unto his own, and his own receives him not”:
Now this is to be revolutionized. Whatever we are
called upon to do, we must consider if it is God or our
own evil desires which call on us to act thus:
Conscience will tell us in a moment: and we must act
accordingly: then God will take up his abode in us, and
we shall feel his presence, which we cannot immediately
do in our present state: Study is not to be a
mechanical performance, but a duty imposed on us by the
will of God, to render us better and happier: thus we
must always consider it, without regards to marks of
merit or demerit.
Very’s deportment on that infamous day was such as to make this student regret that the letter had already been
posted. For, very clearly, something was going seriously awry in this inspiration business, and Tutor was selfcombusting.
Later that day Very delivered an unscheduled address to the debating club at the Divinity School, pointing out
to them that while they were merely doing their own wills, he himself was “no longer a man.” It was the Holy
Spirit which spoke to him and through him, and he was merely passing on what was being imparted to him,
which was “eternal truth” insofar as he had become convinced that he was at least temporarily able to transmit
it without altering it in any way.14 That night one of the students who had been present at several of Very’s
outbursts wrote in his diary that it was “very much as Geo Fox is represented to have done, and to have very
similar views.” On the evening of the 14th, also, President Josiah Quincy, Sr. appeared at the dormitory room
of Charles Stearns Wheeler to ask that he immediately assume responsibility for Very’s classes in Greek, and
13. Presumably this was a reference to the White Mountains in which Very had recently vacationed. No, maybe it was “flee to the
mountain” that Very had hollered, and maybe it was a reference to the vicinity of solitary Mount Monadnock, which was closer than
New Hampshire and at which the Narragansetts had taken refuge during the race riot known as “King Philip’s War.” Well, whatever.
14. Recent research into this Joan of Arc phenomenon suggests that it has something to do with unconscious “subvocalization,” in
which the muscles of the voicebox exercise themselves without the blast of air which produces audible speech and in which the
patient, instead of disregarding this phenomenon, for purpose of achieving a higher social status or for purpose of becoming the
center of attention attempts to interpret what he or she is perceiving and ascribes it as a communication from holy authority.
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to describe Very as being in a state of “nervous collapse.”
Very’s discourse … sounds surprisingly like a recast
of
Emerson’s
Address.
While
Very
colored
the
“instructions” with his own non-Emersonian diction and
qualifications, and interpreted and applied Emerson’s
remarks in a more literal and specific way than Emerson
intended, the relationship is clear. This was Very’s
less
formal
equivalent
of
the
declaration
of
independence for man teaching, delivered to freshman
students instead of Divinity School graduates.
Henry Thoreau advertised in the Concord Freeman, announcing the second term of the Concord Academy.
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6th day 14th of 9th M 1838 / Father Rodman was so low last night
that I thought it best to stay in the house Anthony V Taylor
being there to Watch with him — At about 35 minutes part one
this Morning he breathed his last, his departure being so easy
& calm that it was difficult to tell whether he was gone, or in
a quiet sleep
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September 15, Saturday: Jones Very’s brother Washington, a Freshman, was asked to escort him home to
Salem. Very wanted to go through Concord and speak with Waldo Emerson, but was disregarded. His younger
brother allowed him, however, to post a letter to Emerson with a promised manuscript on William
Shakespeare:
My Brother
I am glad at last to be able to transmit what has been
told me of Shakespeare ’tis the faint echo of that
which speaks to you now. That was the utterance of the
soul still in its travail but the hour is past of which
I have often spoken to you and you hear not mine own
words but the teachings of the Holy Spirit. Rejoice
with me my brother and give thanks with me to the
Father and our Lord Jesus Christ who have now taken me
to themselves and will not let me go any more from
them. I feel that the day now is when “the tabernackle
of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and
they shall be his people.” The gathering time has come
and the harvest is now reaping from the wide plains of
earth. Here, even here the will of the Father begins
to be done as in heaven. My friend I tell you these
things as they are told me and hope soon for a day or
two of leisure perhaps in two or three weeks when I may
speak with you face to face as I now write....
Edwin Gittleman glosses Very’s “Shakespeare” of the December 1837-September 1838 period as a “Poetics
of Revelation” and as an “omnium-gatherum of his basic attitudes ... both a spiritual autobiography and a
blueprint for action.” He characterizes both Very’s “Shakespeare” and his “Hamlet” as “more revealing as
autobiography than as literary criticism.” I will attempt the feat of glossing Gittleman’s gloss:
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In [“Shakespeare”] Very contrasted the man of [mere] genius
(exemplified by Shakespeare) with the man of virtue (clearly
Very himself, but figured as Christ).... Very [had] once told
Emerson that if he could first “move Shakespeare” he could then
“move
the
world.”...
Shakespeare’s
mind
functioned
spontaneously, without deliberate control. Its actions were
not willed but reflexive and automatic ... in harmony with
Nature ... childlike.... The child, like Nature, just is and
automatically loves whatever else is. The man of genius, with
his undifferentiated love of activity and existence, is thus a
child-man, retaining his prelapsarian heritage through
unwitting obedience to the Divine Will.... [However, b]ecause
the obedience of the virtuous man is conscious, his greatness
is superior to that of genius[,] ... moral rather than [merely]
innocent.... Since man’s mind is so constituted by nature that
it is not his own, he sins whenever he acts as if it were. He
must therefore learn from genius and revelation that his
“highest glory” consists of “conscious submission” to the
Divine Will.... If ... the poet ... depicts “what ought to be,
his teaching is false and ineffectual; it is then merely the
handiwork of his own mind. But if “what is” is seen and
understood “with a spirit more nearly allied to Him who sees
all things as they are,” then poetry will exhibit God’s
presence.... The only proper subject ... is “what is” — the
“ever new, ever changing aspect of nature and of man.” ...
[V]irtue need not be “brightened” nor vice “darkened” by the
poet’s independent judgment.
Evidently, at about this point, although the promise was not publicized, Very was pledging to his mother and
siblings that whatever the outcome of this Jesus-Christ venture of his, he would “come out of it” before a year
had passed.
7th day 15th of 9th M / This evening Steam Boat bore away our
dear Son & daughter with our interesting & truly lovely
grandchild, we regretted they could not stay to the funeral of
their Grandfather Clarke Rodman, which is to be tomorrow After
Meeting in the Afternoon but their child not being well, & having
staid one day longer than they expected to, they were anxious
to return to their home, & under the considerations we were
reconciled to their going being truly thankful for their company
as long as we have had it, & in particular that they came while
their Grandfather was living & could know they were with him.
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September 16, Sunday: Early in the morning Jones Very made the rounds, attempting to baptize the ministers
of Salem as they were attempting to make their final preparations for church worship and sermonizing
performances. “The coming of Christ is at hand.” What confrontations these must have been. When he
attempted to baptize the Reverend Lucius Bolles, the local Baptist, he was bodily put out of the home. The
Reverend Charles Wentworth Upham of Salem’s upscale First Church, by way of contrast, did not lay his own
hands on Very, but did advise him that his hero Waldo Emerson was nothing but an Atheist, and did warn him
that, by force if necessary, he was very likely on his way to the insane asylum. I don’t know the sequence of
the baptisms, but Very did not overlook to attempt to baptize his own Unitarian minister, the Reverend John
Brazer of the North Church that Very had joined during the summer of 1836. Among the houses that Very then
visited was 53 Charter Street, the home of his friend Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Standing uncomfortably
close to her, he placed his hand on her head and declaimed: “I come to baptize you with the Holy Ghost and
with fire.” “I am the Second Coming.” “This day is this fulfilled.” Etc. Peabody’s understanding was that
“These impulses from above I think are never sound minded. The insanity of Quakers (which is very frequent
under my observation) always grows out of it or rather begins in it.” Edwin Gittleman’s comment is that the
young lady was “relieved that it was nothing worse than the consummation of a spiritual marriage.” By noon
Peabody had gone rushing off in a fruitless attempt to placate the furious Reverend Upham, and was with Lydia
Very, the mother, at the Very home at 54 Federal Street, with Very upstairs resting in his chamber. That evening
Very again appeared at her door, and presented her with a folio sheet on which he had inscribed four double
columns of sonnets written under the control of the Holy Ghost. Very had exaggerated ideas of his own status,
but our polite society has no difficulty tolerating this in any number of individuals. What the established
religious society cannot tolerate, however, point number one, is competition. Ministers, for instance, react with
peculiar hostility to other ministers who are attempting to spirit away contributing members of their own flock.
Very was attempting to make converts and obtain followers, and that sort of conduct was in another category
from simple grandiloquence. What an established religious society cannot tolerate, also, point number two,
is being held up to ridicule in front of other established religious societies. What the Salem Unitarians in
particular could not tolerate was that the local religion people were perceiving, in Very’s difficulties,
a manifestation of the presumptuousness of their Unitarianism. They were embarrassed, they were intensely
embarrassed. Edwin Gittleman’s comment on this is “Further scandal could be avoided only by providing him
with an audience immune to his corrupting influence. Such an audience was conveniently available at the
McLean Hospital in nearby Charlestown.” That night the Very home was raided and Very was escorted away,
clutching his dog-eared Bible, over the screams of his mother that –at least physically– he was “endangering
no one, not even himself.”
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September 18, Tuesday: 160 delegates attended the Peace Convention in the Marlboro Chapel of Boston.
This meeting creating the New England Non-Resistance Society is notable not only for creating a chain of
influence that extends down through Lev Nikolævich Tolstòy and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. to us,15 but also for a feminist “first”: William Lloyd Garrison uttered, from
the platform, the new locution “his or her” — a locution deliberately designed to de-privilege the male as the
normative specimen of the human being.
There was a smile on the countenance of many abolition
friends while others in the Convention looked grave.
However, the smiles lasted longer than the grave looks: immediately that Friend Abby Kelley called a minister
to order for speaking out of turn, the “woman-contemners” marched out of the meeting.
Garrison wrote the “Declaration of Sentiments” for this assembly:
We cannot acknowledge allegiance to any human
government....
Our
country
is
the
world,
our
countrymen are all mankind.... As every human
government is upheld by physical strength, and its laws
are enforced virtually at the point of the bayonet, we
cannot hold any office which imposes upon its incumbent
the obligation to compel men to do right, on pain of
imprisonment or death. We therefore voluntarily
exclude ourselves from every legislative and judicial
body, and repudiate all human politics, worldly
honors, and stations of authority. If we cannot occupy
a seat in the legislature or on the bench, neither can
we elect others to act as our substitutes in any such
capacity.... While we shall adhere to the doctrines of
non-resistance and passive submission to enemies, we
purpose to speak and act boldly in the cause of God,
to assail iniquity in high places.... It will be our
leading object to devise ways and means for effecting
a radical change in the views, feelings and practices
of society respecting the sinfulness of war, and the
treatment of our enemies.
15. Although the society put out a bimonthly publication named The Non-Resistant (until 1842), public newspapers quickly
characterized this un-Christian attitude of nonresistance to evil as “No-Governmentism.”
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25 of the 160 delegates were able to commit their lives to the principle that
evil can be exterminated from the earth only by good;
that it is not safe to rely on an arm of flesh, –upon
man, whose breath is in his nostrils– ...we shall
submit to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake,
obey all the requirements of government, except such
as we deem contrary to the commands of the gospel, and
in no wise resist the operation of law, except such as
we deem contrary to the commands of the gospel; and in
no wise resist the operation of law, except by meekly
submitting to the penalty of disobedience.
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September 18, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson to his journal in regard to the annular (partial) solar eclipse (#7260)
that passed from Hudson Bay down across northern New England:
This P.M. the Eclipse. Peter Howe did not like it for his rowan
would not make hay: and he said “the sun looked as if a nigger
was putting his head into it.”
Well, in some sense Peter Howe of Concord was right, black people were indeed raising their head into
the sunshine. For on this day of eclipse Frederick Douglass and Anna Murray Douglass, as free Mr. and Mrs.
Frederick Johnson, were arriving in their new hometown, New Bedford:
We arrived at Newport the next morning, and soon after
an old fashioned stage-coach, with “New Bedford” in
large yellow letters on its sides, came down to the
wharf. I had not money enough to pay our fare, and
stood hesitating what to do. Fortunately for us, there
were two Quaker gentlemen who were about to take
passage on the stage, —Friends William C. Taber and
Joseph Ricketson,— who at once discerned our true
situation, and, in a peculiarly quiet way, addressing
me, Mr. Taber said: “Thee get in.” I never obeyed an
order with more alacrity, and we were soon on our way
to our new home. When we reached “Stone Bridge” the
passengers alighted for breakfast, and paid their
fares to the driver. We took no breakfast, and, when
asked for our fares, I told the driver I would make it
right with him when we reached New Bedford. I expected
some objection to this on his part, but he made none.
When, however, we reached New Bedford, he took our
baggage, including three music-books, —two of them
collections by Dyer, and one by Shaw,— and held them
until I was able to redeem them by paying to him the
amount due for our rides. This was soon done, for Mr.
Nathan Johnson not only received me kindly and
hospitably, but, on being informed about our baggage,
at once loaned me the two dollars with which to square
accounts with the stage-driver. Mr. and Mrs. Nathan
Johnson reached a good old age, and now rest from their
labors. I am under many grateful obligations to them.
They not only “took me in when a stranger” and “fed me
when hungry,” but taught me how to make an honest
living. Thus, in a fortnight after my flight from
Maryland, I was safe in New Bedford, a citizen of the
grand old commonwealth of Massachusetts....
WILLIAM C. TABER
JOSEPH RICKETSON
NATHAN JOHNSON
SUN
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Mary J. Tabor would allege in 1907 something that does not jibe with the popular appreciation of Frederick
Douglass that is gathered from reading of his NARRATIVE, to wit, that at this point, with him arriving at
freedom in New Bedford, he was not yet able to read, let alone to write. She would allege that in New Bedford
after his escape from slavery, it had been her relative William C. Taber who had found for Douglass the
stevedoring work he mentions on the wharves (help not acknowledged in Douglass’s written account), and she
would allege that at this point Douglass had been taught to read by her relative, the New Bedford bookseller
Charles Taber:
Owing to the anti-slavery principles of Friends, New Bedford
early became a station on the “underground railroad,” and if a
fugitive slave could once reach this haven of rest, he felt
almost safe from pursuit, public opinion being so strong that
in the days of the Fugitive Slave Law it would have been
impossible to capture a runaway slave in this town.
Frederick Douglass, one of the most remarkable of colored men,
passed some time here in safety, and always retained a most
grateful recollection of his sojourn among the Quakers. It
happened on this wise: Having made his escape from slavery and
reached Newport after many perils, he was very anxious to come
to New Bedford, that place being known among the slaves as a
heaven upon earth.
Hearing the name called out, he peeped shyly around the corner
of a building and gazed longingly at the state coach which was
filled with “women Friends” on their way home from New England
Yearly Meeting. William C. Taber, sitting on the top of the
coach, observed the pleading eyes, and said, “Yes, friend, it
is all right, climb up here beside me.”
No sooner said than done, William C. Taber paid his fare, brought
him to his own house, and found work for him on the wharves, as
he had been a stevedore at the South. While in New Bedford, he
was taught to read by Charles Taber.
Thus the distinguished orator was launched on the road to fame.
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What we have, above, is essentially an assertion that when Douglass arrived in New Bedford aboard that stage
from Newport, Rhode Island, he could not yet read, let alone write. —That that is importantly discordant with
the fulsome manner in which the NARRATIVE is now conventionally read, is something that goes without
saying.
For their wedding document, the newlyweds had adopted the family name Johnson, but soon this came to seem
an unwise selection. At the time the Douglasses were there, New Bedford had the highest per capita income
in America. When the fugitive slave Freddy Bailey, then calling himself Frederick Johnson, arrived at the
home of Nathan Johnson and Mary “Polly” Johnson in New Bedford (the Douglasses are not the only guests
This is the recent
dedication of a plaque
at the site, attended
by descendants of the
original participants:
documented to have found refuge for a time at 21 Seventh Street, next door to the Friends meetinghouse),
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Nathan was reading Robert Burns, and within a day or two Johnson would rename him after the hero Douglas
in LADY OF THE LAKE, as Frederick Douglass. (Frederick decided to spell it “Douglass” because there were
some black families in New Bedford who were spelling their name that way.)16
16. But why did Freddy Bailey alias Fred Johnson accept the proffered name “Douglass”? Merely because it had been suggested
to him? I think not! The Following is from a collection of Douglass’s speeches entitled LECTURES ON AMERICAN-SLAVERY,
which would be published in 1851:
It is often said, by the opponents of the Anti-slavery
cause that, the condition of the people of Ireland is
more deplorable than that of the American slaves. Far
be it from me to underrate the sufferings of the Irish
people. They have been long oppressed; and the same
heart that prompts me to plead the cause of the
American bondman, makes it impossible for me not to
sympathize with all the oppressed of all lands. Yet I
must say that there is no analogy between the two
cases. The Irishman is poor, but he is not a slave. He
may be in rags, but he is not a slave. He is still the
master of his own body and can say with the poet,
“The hand of Douglass is his own.”
Thus in all probability the name was chosen because although it was intentionally opaque it nevertheless suggested,
at least to its bearer, in the idea that “The hand of Douglass is his own,” the same sort of thing that was suggested in that time by
the more usual name “Freeman” meaning “the free man.”
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ANNA MURRAY DOUGLASS
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
The first thing these Douglasses with a wedding certificate in the name of Johnson, but with no manumission
papers to produce for the husband whether he was named “Mr. Douglas” or “Mr. Johnson,” discovered in
“free” New Bedford was that racial prejudice would prevent the husband from using his skills as a ship calker.
It was explained that all the white calkers would quit. Work was found for him, by Friend William C. Taber,
as a stevedore, carrying oil aboard a vessel, and he then had to saw wood, shovel coal, sweep chimneys, and
roll casks in an oil refinery. However, accounts of such Jim Crow experiences would not fit into the narrative
he later needed to tell to righteous Northern abolition audiences, for whom South=Them=Evil meant
North=Us=Good, and so Douglass ordinarily suppressed this experience of racial prejudice in New Bedford.17
Finding my trade of no immediate benefit, I threw off
my calking habiliments, and prepared myself to do any
kind of work I could get to do.
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Although a skilled craftsman could not get work in his craft in that city at that time, due entirely to the color
of his skin, Frederick Douglass did not speak of this until 1881
, when in a reference to “the test of the
real civilization of the community,” he suggested that the New Bedford of the 1840s had failed that test:
I am told that colored persons can now get employment
at calking in New Bedford.
17. If “French” innocence consists in the refusal to be shamed by the nature of one’s pleasures, and if the “German” variety
consists in an awareness that so long as one is sacrificing oneself, no-one has a right to object to one’s sacrificing them as well, and
if the “English” consists in a principled refusal to take responsibility for one’s obedience to improper instructions from one’s betters,
and the “Italian” in not happening to notice where you have your hand, then the innocence of the USer must consist in a refusal or
a failure to recognize evil of which we ourselves are the beneficiaries.
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In fuller detail:
... The name given me by my dear mother was no less pretentious
and long than Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. I had,
however, while living in Maryland, dispensed with the Augustus
Washington, and retained only Frederick Bailey. Between
Baltimore and New Bedford, the better to conceal myself from
the slave-hunters, I had parted with Bailey and called myself
Johnson; but in New Bedford I found that the Johnson family
was already so numerous as to cause some confusion in
distinguishing them, hence a change in this name seemed
desirable. Nathan Johnson, mine host, placed great emphasis
upon this necessity, and wished me to allow him to select
a name for me. I consented, and he called me by my present
name—the one by which I have been known for three and forty
years—Frederick Douglass. Mr. Johnson had just been reading
the “Lady of the Lake,” and so pleased was he with its great
character that he wished me to bear his name. Since reading
that charming poem myself, I have often thought that,
considering the noble hospitality and manly character of
Nathan Johnson —black man though he was— he, far more than I,
illustrated the virtues of the Douglas of Scotland. Sure am I
that, if any slave-catcher had entered his domicile with a
view to my recapture, Johnson would have shown himself like
him of the “stalwart hand.” ...My “Columbian Orator,” almost
my only book, had done nothing to enlighten me concerning
Northern society. I had been taught that slavery was the
bottom fact of all wealth. With this foundation idea, I came
naturally to the conclusion that poverty must be the general
condition of the people of the free States. In the country
from which I came, a white man holding no slaves was usually
an ignorant and poverty-stricken man, and men of this class
were contemptuously called “poor white trash.” Hence
I supposed that, since the non-slave-holders at the South were
ignorant, poor, and degraded as a class, the non-slave-holders
at the North must be in a similar condition. I could have
landed in no part of the United States where I should have
found a more striking and gratifying contrast, not only to
life generally in the South, but in the condition of the
colored people there, than in New Bedford. I was amazed when
Mr. Johnson told me that there was nothing in the laws or
constitution of Massachusetts that would prevent a colored man
from being governor of the State, if the people should see fit
to elect him. There, too, the black man’s children attended
the
public
schools
with
the
white
man’s
children,
and apparently without objection from any quarter. To impress
me with my security from recapture and return to slavery,
Mr. Johnson assured me that no slave-holder could take a slave
out of New Bedford; that there were men there who would lay
down their lives to save me from such a fate.
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September 22, Saturday: Henry Thoreau’s advertisement about the second term of the Concord Academy
appeared in the Yeoman’s Gazette.
September 23, Sunday: The Reverend Convers Francis of Watertown exchanged pulpits for the day with the
Reverend Ezra Ripley of Concord. His prooftext for the Concord morning service was John 6:47 and his topic
was “He That Believeth on the Son Hath Everlasting Life.” His prooftext for the afternoon service was Acts
21:11 and his topic was “The Language of Action.”
September 24, Monday: Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody wrote to Waldo Emerson in regard to the situation
of Jones Very:
... I have feared insanity before. — I thought (at the time)
that the visit to Groton showed it. — These impulses from above
I think are never sound minded — the insanity of Quakers — (which
is very frequent under my observation) always grows out of it —
or rather begins in it.
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September 29, Saturday: Henry Thoreau’s advertisement about the 2d term of the Concord Academy
appeared a second time in the Yeoman’s Gazette.
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FALL 1838
Fall: The Alcotts moved to Number 6, Beach Street in Boston and gave up renting the basement of the
Masonic Temple for their schoolroom. The few remaining pupils, which of course included the Alcott girls,
would now be educated in their home. There were still nearly 20 students, but they were paying only $6.00 to
$12.00 per quarter. The family income had dropped to less than $500.00 per year. Abba Alcott was pregnant
for the seventh time, with the baby due in the summertime. Bronson Alcott began to supplement his income
by giving evening “conversations,” often for less than $1.00 per evening.
THE ALCOTT FAMILY
Fall: The railroad from Boston reached Nashua, New Hampshire, rendering steam travel along the Merrimack
River totally unnecessary. The steamboat Herald sank near the entrance of the Middlesex Canal into the
Merrimack at Wicasee Falls near Tyng’s Island.
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OCTOBER 1838
October: The Reverend Horatio Wood began his ministry in Lowell, Massachusetts (the reverend used to be
a teacher in Concord — did Henry Thoreau remember him?).
The rivalry between the Concord Light Infantry company and the Concord Artillery company culminated in
their hiring of two competing bands from Boston. As the two groups paraded, each attempted to crowd out
their enemy’s marching formation and tangle their enemy’s feet by the beat from a different drummer
(this happened on Concord common — did Henry witness this?).
October 6, Saturday: The Dundee and Arbroath Railway opened.
Troops intervened in Dewitt, Missouri because the townspeople had besieged the Mormons (over the
following three weeks the Mormons would rampage through Daviess and Caldwell Counties, killing livestock
and torching some 150 homes).
Henry Thoreau wrote from Concord to the Reverend Andrew Bigelow of Taunton, Massachusetts about a
teaching position he had learned was open.
Concord Oct. 6th—38
Sir,
I learn from my [b]rother and sister, who were recently employed as
teachers in your vicinity, that you are at present in quest of some one
to fill the vacancy in your high school, occasioned by Mr. Bellow[’s]
withdrawl. As my present school, which consists of a small number
of well advanced pup[ ]ls, is not sufficiently lucrative, I am advised
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to make application for the situation now vacant. I was graduated
at Cambridge in —37, and have since had my share of experience in
school-keeping.
I can refer you to the— President and Faculty of Harvard
Page 2
College—to Rev. Dr. Ripley, or Rev. R. W. Emerson—of this town,
or to the parents of my present pupils, among whom I would mention— Hon. Samuel Hoar—Hon. John Keyes—& Hon. Nathan
Brooks. Written recommendations by these gentlemen will be procured if desired. If you will trouble yourself to answer this letter immediately, you will much oblige your humble Servant,
Henry D. Thoreau
Page 3
<Postmark>
Address: Rev. Andrew Bigelow.
Tauton
Mass.
Postage: [ ]
October 6, Saturday: In the course of a letter to his sister Helen Louisa Thoreau in Taunton, we learn as much
as we need to know about the sort of philosophical materials Harvard College was inflicting upon its young
scholars in this period, and we learn also as much as we need to know, of the extent to which scholar Henry
had been able to distance himself from such “academic” philosophastering. This letter reminds us of the
context in which Henry Thoreau could write “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not
philosophers”:
Concord Oct. 6th –38.
Dear Helen,
I dropped Sophia’s letter into the box immediately on taking yours
out, else the tone of the former had been changed.
I have no acquaintance with “Cleavelands First Lessons,” though I
have peeped into his abridged Grammar, which I should think very
well calculated for beginners, at least, for such as would be likely to
wear out one book, before they would be prepared for the abstruser
parts of Grammar. Ahem! As no one can tell what was the Roman
pronunciation, each nation makes the Latin conform, for the most
part, to the rules of its own language; so that with us, of the vowels,
only a has a peculiar sound.
In the end of a word of more than one syllable, it is sounded like ah–
as pennah, Lydiah Hannah, &c. without regard to case.– but da is
never sounded dah because it is a monosyllable.
All terminations in es and plural cases in os, as you know, are
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pronounced long – as homines (homin;amese) dominos
(domin;amose) or in English Johnny Voss. For information see
Adam’s Latin Grammar – before the Rudiments– This is all law and
gospel in the eyes of the world – but remember I am speaking as it
were, in the third person, and should sing quite a different tune, if it
were I that made the quire. However one must occasionally hang his
harp on the willows, and play on the Jew’s harp, in such a strange
country as this.
One of your young ladies wishes to study Mental Philosophy–hey?–
well tell her that she has the very best text book that I know of
already in her possession. If she do not believe it, then she should
have bespoken a better in another world, and not have expected to
find one at “Little and Wilkins’.” But if she wishes to know how poor
an apology for a Mental Philosophy men have tacked together,
synthetically or analytically, in these latter days – how they have
squeezed the infinite mind into a compass that would not nonpluss a
surveyor of Eastern Lands – making Imagination and Memory to lie
still in their respective apartments, like ink-stand and wafers in a
l{MS torn} escritoire–why let her read Locke–or Stewart, or Brown.
The fact is, Mental Philosophy is very like poverty–which, you know,
begins at home; and, indeed, when it goes abroad, it is poverty itself.
Chorus. I should think an abridgment of one of the above authors,
or of Abercrombie, would answer her purpose. It may set her athinking.
Probably there are many systems in the market of which I am
ignorant. As for themes –say first “Miscellaneous Thoughts”– set
one up to a window to note what passes in the street, and make her
comments thereon; or let her gaze in the fire, or into a corner where
there is a spider’s web, and philosophize –moralize –theorize, or
what not.
What their hands find to putter about, or their Minds to think about,–
that let them write about.– To say nothing of Advantages or
disadvantages – of this, that, or the other. Let them set down their
ideas at any given Season – preserving the chain o f thought as
complete as may be.
This is the style pedagogical. I am much obliged to you for your
peice of information. Knowing your dislike to a sentimental letter I
remain
Yr affectionate brother.
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JOHN LOCKE
DUG. STEWART
THOS. BROWN
ABERCROMBIE
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October 10, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson to his journal:
“Everything must come round, & be told in proper time”
said Belzoni.
October 16, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson to his journal:
Here came on Sunday Morning (14th) Edward Palmer & departed
today, a gentle, faithful, sensible, well-balanced man for an
enthusiast. He has renounced since a year ago last April the use
of money. When he travels he stops at night at a house & asks
if it would give them any satisfaction to lodge a traveller
without money or price? If they do not give him a hospitable
answer he goes on but generally finds the country people free &
willing. When he goes away he gives them his papers or tracts.
He has sometimes found it necessary to go 24 hours without food
& all night without lodging. Once he found a wagon with a good
buffalo under a shed & had a very good nap. By the seashore he
finds it difficult to travel as they are inhospitable.
He presents his views with great gentleness; & is not troubled
if he cannot show the way in which the destruction of money is
to be brought about; he feels no responsibility to show or know
the details. It is enough for him that he is sure it must fall
& that he clears himself of the institution altogether.
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October 19, Friday: Waldo Emerson confided to his journal that he considered vehemence to be a feminine
characteristic (the religion of women is exterior, that of men interior):
The feminine vehemence with which the Andrews Norton of the
Daily Advertiser beseeches the dear people to whip that naughty
heretic is the natural feeling in the mind whose religion is
external.... The aim of a true teacher now would be ... to teach
the doctrine of the perpetual revelation.
Here is the message of the Reverend Doctor Andrews Norton, on Transcendentalism and the influence of
Emerson: he suggested that the danger was that what high minds would hold as high ideas, of individuality
and self-reliance, ordinary minds would establish as low ideas, enabling a boundless self-conceit. Not that this
sentiment was unique to the Reverend Norton — but seldom has the issue been paraphrased so politely.
A student fable of record, from this period, is that a number of Unitarian divines went to Heaven in a group.
Perhaps they were all in the same train accident? The Reverend Doctor Henry Ware, Sr., who held the
Hollis Chair of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School, is characterized in this fable as going “It is better than
we deserve.” The Reverend William Ellery Channing of the Federal Street Church in Boston goes “This is
another proof of the dignity of human nature.” The Reverend Ezra Stiles Gannett goes “There must be some
mistake,” and hurries away. The Reverend Doctor Andrews Norton goes “It is a very miscellaneous crowd.”
October 20, Saturday: Jones Very visited Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and apologized for having been so
“intoxicated with the Holy Spirit.” He was completing his “Hamlet” essay and preparing to deliver it to Waldo
Emerson in Concord. When Very told her about the visit he had just been paid by their Unitarian pastor of
Salem’s North Church, the Reverend John Brazer, Elizabeth was enraged with the man’s insolence. A miracle,
indeed! But she also told him that he should take this medication. —Because if he was sick the medicine could
purge him, but no medicine could purge Truth.18
Emerson to his journal:
What said my brave Asia concerning the paragraph writers, today?
that “this whole practice of self justification & recrimination
betwixt literary men seemed every whit as low as the quarrels
of the Paddies.”
18. Hey, good thinking!
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October 23, Tuesday: From this date until March 24, 1839, the last large group of the Cherokee nation, 1,766
persons led by Peter Hildebrand, would be attempting to travel from the Appalachian concentration camps to
the Oklahoma Territory, but would be held up for a month alongside the Gasconade River in Missouri, too sick
to move forward. They had left behind, hiding in the Cherokee ancestral caves in the Appalachian mountains,
a number of others such as the sons of Matiyuh who had evaded the initial roundups by the US Cavalry into
the concentration camps in the valleys.
TRAIL OF TEARS
German astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel wrote from Konigsberg to Sir J. Herschel Bart telling him that
the distance from Earth to the star 61 Cygni (Alpha Centauri), the star system that happens to be closest to us
at a distance of 11.4 light years, had been measured, using the parallax method.19
(It would seem, from the content of WALDEN, that Henry Thoreau would make himself familiar with this
astronomical discovery and its significance for the history of ideas.)
19. His calculation was remarkably accurate, being off by less than 10%, and this was the 1st time the distance of a star other than
our sun Sol had been reliably estimated and amounted to a shattering revelation since it demolished a fundamental division in
astronomy, that between the sub-aetherial realm of changefulness which existed, on the one hand, within the orbit of the moon or
perhaps within the orbits of the wandering planets, and on the other hand the aetherial realm of the fixed and eternal stellar canopy.
This discovery removed one of the two final objections to the heliocentric model of the solar system that had been sponsored by
Copernicus –to wit, it removed the fact that the geoheliocentric model sponsored by Brahe had been superior because the
Copernicus model required a stellar parallax due to the motion of the earth about the sun –but such parallax had not yet been
observed.
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WALDEN: We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as,
for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines
at once a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it
would have prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in
which I hoed them. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful
triangles! What distant and different beings in the various
mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the
same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several
constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to
another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look
through each other’s eyes for an instant?
NICOLAS COPERNICUS
TYCHO BRAHE
TYCHONIAN/COPERNICAN
October 24, Wednesday: Jones Very went to Concord with his completed “Hamlet,” to spend what would
amount to five days with the Emersons. Waldo Emerson found him very narrow and focused, like a
microscope, but marveled at the magnitude at which Very was able to examine those things which passed
under this narrow focus. Edwin Gittleman’s comment is that “Very struck a balance between oddity and good
sense which Emerson could not resist.”
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October 24. It matters not whether these strains originate there in the grass or float thitherward like
atoms of light from the minstrel days of Greece.
“The snowflakes fall thick and fast on a winter’s day. The winds are lulled, and the snow falls incessant,
covering the tops of the mountains, and the hills, and the plains where the lotus tree grows, and the cultivated
fields. And they are falling by the inlets and shores of the foaming sea, but are silently dissolved by the waves.”
October 27, Saturday: Jones Very’s autobiographical sonnet “The New Birth” was published in that day’s
Salem Observer. It must have been perused with great interest by all the persons who had been involved in or
who had heard about the recent difficulties at the Harvard Divinity School. Read between the lines, folks!
What had happened to produce these startling events in Salem and Boston, Very said in effect, was that shortly
before, at Harvard University, he had taken off his human crown of pride and laid it in the dust. This startling
behavior which he had exhibited was what they should have expected of a person who had become capable of
abandoning the false pride which keeps society on these stupid rails upon which it runs:
’Tis a new life — thoughts move not as they did
With slow uncertain steps across my mind;
In thronging haste fast pressing on they bid
The portals open to the viewless wind,
That comes not save when in the dust is laid
The crown of pride that gilds each mortal brow,
And from before man’s vision melting fade
The heavens and earth; their walls are falling now—
Fast crowding on, each thought asks utterance strong;
Storm-lifted waves swift rushing to the shore,
On from the sea they send their shouts along,
Back through the cave-worn rocks their thunders roar;
And I, a child of God by Christ made free,
Start from death’s slumbers to Eternity.
Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issued an “extermination” order against the Mormons.
Frédéric François Chopin departed from Paris, to meet George Sand in Perpignan. Their ultimate destination
would be Mallorca.
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October 28, Sunday: In a dark mood, Jones Very snapped at the pregnant Mrs. Lidian Emerson while she was
attempting to ingratiate herself. He announced that this was his “day of hate.” The spirit had informed Very
that Waldo Emerson was “not right,” and he explicated this by instructing his host that obedience was primary
and charging that Emerson was not allowing it to be primary in his own life. He announced that he hated this
entire family, and when frank cheer was displayed at receiving such a candid remark, he became perplexed.
That evening was the meeting of local Sunday School teachers in the Emerson home, and having failed to have
much of an impact upon the family, Very quite pecked the Reverend Barzillai Frost, an easy target, into little
pieces.
Giuseppe Verdi resigned as maestro di musica in Busseto.
In Vienna, Sigismond Thalberg told Robert Schumann, “there is nothing more to be done with the combination
of piano and orchestra.”
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October 29, Monday: Waldo Emerson drove Jones Very as far as Waltham. Very was on a pilgrimage to
Cambridge, to attempt to persuade the officials of the Harvard Divinity School to take him back. (Would this
be this the miracle the Reverend John Brazer had asked Very to produce as a sign? No, the age of miracles is
past.) Watching him off, Emerson thought “He is gone into the multitude as solitary as Jesus.” At Harvard,
Very sought out various officials, who politely heard him out. With no objection from anyone, he would stay
in Cambridge for over a week, but of course there was never any consideration of allowing him to return to
his status there. During the course of the week they were even able to obtain from him, to save all appearances,
the submission of a written resignation — for it turned out that the tiny sardines of job and salary and position
and status and career and prestige didn’t make all that much difference to Very, who had decided that he was
the designated fisher of men.
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NOVEMBER 1838
November: Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody persuaded George Bancroft to offer Nathaniel Hawthorne a job.
During this period Jones Very was in the habit of sending offprints of his poems from the Salem Observer to
friends and acquaintances. For at time Bronson Alcott was receiving such clippings each week, and was
pasting or copying them into his journal. Henry Thoreau received at least three such clippings of at least six
sonnets and during this month copied a couple of them into his “Miscellaneous Extracts” notebook.
Unannounced, Very appeared at the home of Hawthorne and performed his ceremony of laying on of hands
— Hawthorne meekly bowed his head for this and afterward commented that Very had managed to attain the
“entire subjectiveness” which he had attempted to depict in 1833 in his “The Story Teller” in the figure of the
minister (refer to the story “The Seven Vagabonds” which Hawthorne would insert into the December 1851
edition of TWICE-TOLD TALES). Hawthorne also suggested that as long as Very could author good sonnets, he
might remain as he was. Edwin Gittleman comments that “It is almost as if Very were an invention of
Hawthorne’s own Gothic imagination, a character whom he felt he understood completely, and for whom he
was in a sense morally responsible.” However, for years Hawthorne would avoid Jones, although the fellow
kept turning up at his doorstep: “Night before last came Mr. Jones Very; and you know he is somewhat
unconscionable as to the length of his calls.”
During this and the following month, Jones Very would be coming gradually to the recognition that his
function was being entirely fulfilled in the teaching of the message he was receiving, with no obligation to seek
the assent of his victims. He was becoming, if unpleasant, at least tolerable. Also, he was coming to an
appreciation of the fact that his orders to chop down the tree of self could not be implemented, because the
recipients of this advice could not imagine what acceptable small step, which they understood how to take,
could come first, and because they were wary of beginning a journey in which they might lose themselves and
be unable to retrace their steps. He began to attempt to identify specifically what it was, for each person, that
that person was clutching in the place of God, and demand of that person that he or she let go of their
attachment to that specific thing. Because, of course, that was what sin was: attachment to something other
than or in place of God, however innocent the thing might be in itself. When people began to receive the reward
of the Holy Spirit for their sacrifice of their most precious clutching, then of their own free will they would
accept Very as their Savior. Of course, this psychodrama of confrontation has always worked well at the level
of story. (The story is, Buddha was able to pull off such a confrontation, on occasion. The story is, Jesus was
able to pull off such a confrontation, on occasion. There aren’t many stories in which Jesus or Buddha went
“Follow me!” and somebody went “Oh, get a life, will you?” Nevertheless, the reaction to Very was such at to
make one wonder whether these confrontations ever actually worked, except at the indirect level, the level at
which they are a story being recounted of some alleged prior confrontation rather than an actual face-to-face
contemporary confrontation. It may well be that we have a category mistake here, a category mistake which
keeps recurring due to our presumption that we can’t pay attention to such a story unless the event “actually
happened.”) Anyhoo, here is the cast and the sins of which they were guilty:
•
•
•
•
•
The Reverend William Ellery Channing was clutching “Rectitude” instead of God.
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was clutching “Truth” instead of God.
Waldo Emerson was clutching “Thought” instead of God.
Bronson Alcott was clutching “Spiritual Curiosity” instead of God.
Sophia Amelia Peabody was clutching “Imagination” and “Resignation to Pain” instead of God.
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Of course, an immediate riposte would be to accuse Jones Very himself of clutching “Obedience” instead of
God, and ask him to pry his damn fingers off it. As inversion-advice goes that wouldn’t have been half bad,
but of course Very was no more capable of letting go of “Obedience” than Waldo would have been of letting
go of “Thought.” One is reminded of the Sufi poet who went (I paraphrase) “When one renounces all things,
the final item one must renounce is Renunciation.”
First week of November: Jones Very sent some sonnets to Waldo Emerson. It turned out that not only were
these the first of his poems that Emerson had seen, they were the first that he had heard of. Emerson was
impressed — he’d met a poet and didn’t know it.
Father! I bless thy name that I do live,
And in each motion am made rich with thee,
That when a glance is all that I can give,
It is a kingdom’s wealth if I but see;
This stately body cannot move, save I
Will to its nobleness my little bring;
My voice its measured cadence will not try,
Save I with every note consent to sing;
I cannot raise my hands to hurt or bless,
But I with every action must conspire;
To show me there how little I possess,
And yet that little more than I desire;
May each new act my new allegiance prove,
Till in thy perfect love I ever live and move.
I looked to find a man who walked with God,
Like to the Jewish patriarch of old;
Though gladdened millions on his footstool trod,
Yet none with him did such sweet converse hold;
I heard the wind in low complaint go by
That none its melodies like him could hear;
Day unto day spoke wisdom from on high,
Yet none like David turned a willing ear;
God walked alone unhonored through the earth;
Far him no heart-built temple open stood,
The soul forgetful of her nobler birth
Had hewn him loftly [lofty??] shrines of stone and wood,
And left unfinished and in ruins still
The only temple he delights to fill.
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November 10, Saturday/11, Sunday: Waldo Emerson to his journal:
My brave Henry Thoreau walked with me to Walden this P.M. and
complained of the proprietors who compelled him to whom as much
as to any the whole world belonged, to walk in a strip of road
& crowded him out of all the rest of God’s earth. he must not
get over the fence; but to the building of that fence he was no
party. Suppose, he said, some great proprietor, before he was
born, had bought up the whole globe. So had he been hustled out
of nature. Not having been privy to any of these arrangements
he does not feel called on to consent to them & so cuts fishpoles
in the woods without asking who has a better title to the wood
than he. I defended of course the good Institution as a scheme
not good but the best that could be hit on for making the woods
& waters & fields available to Wit & Worth, & for restraining
the bold bad man. At all events, I begged him, having this maggot
of Freedom & Humanity in his brain, to write it out into good
poetry & so clear himself of it. He replied, that he feared that
that was not the best way; that in doing justice to the thought,
the man did not always do justice to himself: the poem ought to
sing itself: if the man took too much pains with the expression
he was not any longer the Idea himself. I acceded & confessed
that this was the tragedy of Art that the Artist was at the
expense of the Man; & hence, in the first age, as they tell, the
Sons of God printed no epics, carved no stone, painted no
picture, built no railroad; for the sculpture, the poetry, the
music, & architecture, were in the Man. And truly Bolts & Bars
do not seem to me the most exalted or exalting of our
institutions. And what other spirit reigns in our intellectual
works? We have literary property. The very recording of a
thought betrays a distrust that there is any more or much more
as good for us. If we felt that the Universe was ours, that we
dwelled in eternity & advance into all wisdom we should be less
covetous of these sparks & cinders. Why should we covetously
build a St Peter’s, if we have the seeing Eye which beheld all
the radiance of beauty & majesty in the matted grass & the
overarching boughs? Why should a man spend years upon the
carving an Apollo who looked Apollos into the landscape with
every glance he threw?
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November 12, Monday: A note from Waldo Emerson invited Henry Thoreau to a picnic with the ladies at the
base of Fair Haven cliff. Specifically, Thoreau was to bring his flute.20 H.G.O. Blake was there, visiting
Emerson, and of course he and Thoreau knew each other from their years at Harvard College, but it does not
seem that Blake was cultivating Thoreau at this point in his life.
20.At this point Thoreau was beginning to use his father’s flute of fruitwood, brass, and ivory which is now on display in Concord
Museum, although his father did not formally present him with the flute until 1845.
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November 18, Sunday: Waldo Emerson to his journal, in a comment that probably had to do with Thoreau and
may have had to do with something that happened at the picnic on November 12th:
The manners of young men who are still engaged heart & soul in
uttering their Protest against society as they find it, are
perchance disagreeable; their whole being seems rough &
unmelodious; but have a little patience. And do not exaggerate
the offence of that particular objection which with such undue
and absurd dogmatism they make every day from morn till dewy
eve. The institutions of society come across each ingenuous &
original soul in some different point. One feels the jar in
Marriage; one in Property; one in Money; one in Church; one in
social Conventions; one in Slavery; one in War; each feels it
in some one & a different point according to his own
circumstance & history & for a long time does not see that it
is a central falsehood which he is contending against, & that
his protest against a particular superficial falsehood will
surely ripen with time & insight into a deeper & Universal
grudge.
Oakley, the estate of Harrison Gray Otis
November 28, Wednesday: Henry Thoreau wrote to Charles Stearns Wheeler from Concord, asking him to
deliver a lecture at the Concord Lyceum toward the middle of December.
Concord Nov. 28th 1838.
Friend Wheeler,
Does it jump with your inclinations and arrangements to read a
lecture before our Lyceum on the second or third week of
December? Mr. Frost informs me that to such date we are supplied,
and no further— So, concluding that you are not lacking in bowels
of compassion I have ventured to indite this epistle. We must trouble
you to say definitely on which, of in either of the above evenings or
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on any other, you will do us this favor. If you chance meet any one
in the course [] of the winter, who is desirous to express his thoughts
publicly, will you please suggest our town?
From yr. Classmate
Henry D. Thoreau
(one of the Curators)
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WINTER 1838/1839
Winter: Two months after the Alcott family had been forced to move to Boston’s South End, Abba Alcott,
pregnant for the 6th time, had a 2d miscarriage. She was so near death that her doctor resided at the Alcott
home for two weeks.
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Lecture Season: The 10th course of lectures offered by the Salem Lyceum consisted of:
The Salem Lyceum — 10th Season
George Catlin
The Character, Customs, Costumes, &c. of the North American Indians (six lectures
in all)
Jared Sparks
Causes of the American Revolution
Hubbard Winslow
The Sun
C.H. Brewster
The Sources of National Wealth
Charles T. Torrey of Salem
Common School Education
Ephraim Peabody
The Capacity of the Human Mind for Culture and Improvement
Henry K. Oliver of Salem
The Honey Bee
Robert C. Winthrop
Popular Education
Professor Adams
Geology
Simon Greenleaf
The Legal Rights of Women
Henry Ware, Jr.
Instinct
Joshua H. Ward of Salem
Life of Mohammed
Henry W. Kinsman
Life and Times of Oliver Cromwell
Abel L. Peirson of Salem
Memoirs of Count Rumford
Convers [Converse??] Francis
The Practical Man
John Lewis Russell of Salem
The Poetry of Natural History
John Wayland of Salem
The Progress of Democracy
Alexander H. Everett
The Discovery of America by the Northmen
Samuel Osgood
The Satanic School of Literature and its Reform
Horace Mann, Sr.
The Education of Children
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Lecture Season: The 10th course of lectures offered by the Salem Lyceum consisted of:
The Salem Lyceum — 10th Season
George Catlin
The Character, Customs, Costumes, &c. of the North American Indians (six lectures
in all)
Jared Sparks
Causes of the American Revolution
Hubbard Winslow
The Sun
C.H. Brewster
The Sources of National Wealth
Charles T. Torrey of Salem
Common School Education
Ephraim Peabody
The Capacity of the Human Mind for Culture and Improvement
Henry K. Oliver of Salem
The Honey Bee
Robert C. Winthrop
Popular Education
Professor Adams
Geology
Simon Greenleaf
The Legal Rights of Women
Henry Ware, Jr.
Instinct
Joshua H. Ward of Salem
Life of Mohammed
Henry W. Kinsman
Life and Times of Oliver Cromwell
Abel L. Peirson of Salem
Memoirs of Count Rumford
Convers [Converse??] Francis
The Practical Man
John Lewis Russell of Salem
The Poetry of Natural History
John Wayland of Salem
The Progress of Democracy
Alexander H. Everett
The Discovery of America by the Northmen
Samuel Osgood
The Satanic School of Literature and its Reform
Horace Mann, Sr.
The Education of Children
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Winter: Here is a view of the Cherokee “Trail of Tears” created by Robert Lindneux in 1942, in the Woolaroc
Museum at Bartlesville, Oklahoma:
As an expression of US national government and state government racial policy, strolling Indians21 were
herded by the US Cavalry under General Winfield Scott from their South Carolina and Georgia farms to what
is now northeastern Oklahoma, so that white settlers could seize these farms. After a week of agonizing in his
journal over whether it would be seemly for him, Waldo Emerson write a letter to the President, expressing
himself as opposed to this policy. Of 18,000 Cherokees who began the enforced trek without provisions, 4,000
died of exposure and starvation along this trail. Others, attempting to hide out in caves in the mountains of
their homeland, were hunted down. The disobedient were executed by firing squads under US Cavalry
supervision, such execution squads being –as a matter of US strategy– made up exclusively of hired
Cherokees. This was to become known as the Cherokee nation’s Trail of Tears. One of my great-great-greatgreat grandfathers, Buff Sharpe, chucking this whole scene after his father had surrendered and had been
executed by firing squad, relocated to the “Indian Territories” then being reconstituted in Indiana. At that time
these territories were supposed to include only the part of Indiana below the “National Highway” that ran
through Indianapolis and Terre Haute, because white intrusives had been playing a negotiation game of
“half of yours for me and half for you” and then again “half of yours for me and half for you,” and all the
northern half of the Indian Territories of Indiana had already been reclassified and white settlements there
legitimated after the fact. Buff Sharpe sought, unsuccessfully, to legitimate himself by marrying, or cohabiting
with, a white woman.22
TRAIL OF TEARS
21. Cf. Chapter I of WALDEN.
22. As an interesting little aside to our racist American culture, if you haven’t already realized this by reading the story I have told
of the West Point graduate Captain Seth Eastman and his local or squaw wife Lucy “Stands Like a Spirit” Eastman at Fort Snelling
and his local daughter Mary Nancy Eastman, it happens to be a real big deal whether it is a man of color marrying a white woman
–which is terribly shameful for whites because this woman can only be some slut who has been forced to marry down due to
unnatural sexual lusts or general unworthiness– or whether it is a white man consenting to shack up with a woman of color, which
is not so terrible because whites can always regard this as an arrangement of convenience and its not so bad for a man to satisfy lusts
as for a woman to have lusts (and he can walk away from his half-breed spawn later when he starts a “real” family). And thus it was
that in my family a few years ago I caught my own sister, living near Washington DC, telling her children that one of our ancestors
was an “Indian Princess”! She was really shaken up when I hollered at her for unconsciously rewriting our genealogy in her mind
in such a manner as to make it more socially acceptable!
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DECEMBER 1838
December: At some point in 1837 Margaret Fuller had accepted an offer of $1,000.00/year from Rhode
Island, and had left the Temple School of Bronson Alcott in Boston, where things were on a downward spiral
due to extremely hostile reactions from Boston parents, to teach at Providence’s Greene Street School.
(Remember that a year prior to this Thoreau’s position at Concord’s Central Grammar School, where he was
to supervise two male teachers making $100.00/year and two female teachers making $40.00/year in a school
having over 300 students as well as himself teach 100 boys, had been worth only half that $1,000.00/year
despite the fact that he possessed a college diploma! — Fuller’s salary alone is enough to indicate that not only
were the demands to be made on her in Rhode Island to be extreme, but also that for some reason the situation
there must have been dicey.) By this point, in December, exhausted, she explained to her girls that she simply
must resign her position. She wrote about this, that “I have behaved much too well for some time past; it has
spoiled my peace.… Isolation is necessary to me, as to others. Yet I keep on ‘fulfilling all my duties,’ as the
technical phrase is, except to myself.”
December: “Wrote an essay on Sound and Silence.” In the course of this essay Henry Thoreau quoted from
Thomas Gray.23
Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Thoreau’s most recent biographer, has charged that the essay, which eventually
became the ending of WEEK, was “dogged by a persistent, mechanical perversity of paradox.”
A good book is the plectrum with which our silent lyres are struck– In all epics, when, after breathless attention,
we come to the significant words “he said”– then especially our inmost man is addressed. — — We not
unfrequently refer the interest which belongs to our own unwritten sequel — to the written and comparatively
lifeless page. Of all valuable books this same sequel makes and indispensable part– It is the author’s aim to say,
once and emphatically, “he said” This is the most the book maker can attain to. If he make his volume a foil
whereon the waves of silence may break, it is well. It is not so much the sighing of the blast, as that pause, as
Grey expresses it, “When the gust is recollecting itself,” that thrills us, and is infinitely grander than the
importunate howlings of the storm.24
23. Thomas Gray. POEMS OF MR. GRAY, TO WHICH ARE ADDED MEMOIRS OF HIS LIFE AND WRITINGS,
BY WILLIAM MASON. York: A. Ward, 1778. Volume IV, 60.
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December: Henry Thoreau was definitely aware of the existence of the Magicicada cicada swarms, for in his
manuscript for “Moonlight,” after the comments “Every melodious sound is the ally of Silence — a help and
not a hindrance to abstraction and “Certain sounds more than others have found favor with the poets only as
foils to silence.,” he inserted Henri Estienne II’s “Anacreon’s Ode to the Cicada” from CARMINUM POETARUM
25
NOUEM, published in 1554.
Anacreon’s Ode to the Cicada
We pronounce thee happy, cicada,
For on the tops of the trees,
Sipping a little dew
Like any king thou singest.
For thine are they all,
Whatever thou seest in the fields,
And whatever the woods bear.
Thou art the friend of the husbandmen.
In no respect injuring any one;
And thou art honored among men,
Sweet prophet of summer.
The muses love thee,
And Phoebus himself loves thee,
And has given thee a shrill song;
Age does not wrack thee,
Thou skilful – earth-born – song-loving,
Unsuffering – bloodless one;
Almost thou art like the gods.
24.The poet W.H. Auden has in 1962 brought forward a snippet from this as:
THE VIKING BOOK OF APHORISMS, A PERSONAL SELECTION
BY W.H. AUDEN...
Pg
Topic
Aphorism Selected by Auden out of Thoreau
278
Writers and Readers
It is the author’s aim to say once and emphatically, “He said.”
25. An inclusion Thoreau would suppress either because he had transferred it to NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS as a
comment on insects or while he was in the process of transforming this into the ending of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND
MERRIMACK RIVERS. This is the person in the same generation of the Genevan publishing family Étienne who had published, in
1572, the TLG which would have been utilized by Thoreau and which would still be in use into the 19th Century.
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You will note that he would not have been doing this because he had been listening to the cicadas, because this
is the wrong season of the year for the cicada swarm and also because he hasn’t heard the singing of the 17year cicada since the late spring of 1826, at which point he had been but 8 years old. He never mentions that
he remembers having heard it then, and, when this phenomenal New England swarming occurs again in the
late spring of 1843, he still makes no entry in his journal. I’ve been trying to figure out why Thoreau, who as
a 1st-order approximation seems always to have been interested in anything and everything, didn’t pay
particular attention to this every-17th-year swarming of the cicada. These swarm years have of course been
being documented, since they were already regular like clockwork in the days of the Pilgrims. It seems to be
some sort of neural circuit in the cicada nymph’s subesophageal ganglion that ticks off the cycles of warmth
and cold until it reaches 17 seasons. Then a different system, perhaps partly based on temperature and partly
on pheromones, kicks in to determine the precise day and hour of the venturing aboveground for purposes of
mating. The reproductive strategy followed here, of course, is that of overwhelming predatory birds with food,
so that they are already gorged and so that there are still a plenty of insects left to attract one another through
their fiddling, and mate, and drop the eggs that will create the next generation of nymphs to spend 17 years
sucking on their tree roots.
December 2, Sunday: Thomas Carlyle wrote to Waldo Emerson about the American publication of two
volumes of his MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS:
To my two young Friends Henry S. McKean (be so good as write
these names more indisputably for me) and Charles Stearns
Wheeler, in particular, I will beg you to express emphatically
my gratitude; they have stood by me with right faithfulness, and
made the correctest printing; a great service: had I known that
there were such eyes and heads acting in behalf of me there, I
would have scraped out the Editorial blotches too (notes of
admiration, dashes, “we thinks” &c &c, common in Jeffrey’s time
in the Edinr Review) and London misprints; which are almost the
only deformities that remain now. It is extremely correct
printing wherever I have looked, and many things are silently
amended; it is the most fundamental service of all.
MISC. ESSAYS, VOL. I
MISC. ESSAYS, VOL. II
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December 5, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson lectured in Boston.
This was lecture Number 1 of a series of ten on “Human Life,” and was entitled “The Doctrine of the Soul.”26
He had sent Jones Very a freebee ticket and had invited him to come along afterwards from the Masonic
Temple to the Reverend Cyrus Bartol’s home for a session of the Transcendental Club.
Coming into Boston from Salem, Very arrived early and went first to the home of the Reverend William Ellery
Channing, finding Wendell Phillips and the Reverend James Freeman Clarke there and proceeding to expound
for three hours with the elderly Reverend Channing listened patiently and carefully and sympathetically.
Channing’s conclusion was that those who had presumed Very to have lost his Reason were mistaken, as what
he had lost was merely his Senses.The relationship between Unitarian ministers and anti-slavery advocates
cannot be understood unless one takes class differences into account:
They were gentlemen; they occupied a high position in the
community; they belonged to a privileged order.... With the
solitary exception of Wendell Phillips, who was regarded as an
26. Summaries of the lectures are in Cabot, Volume II, pages 733-737. The net receipts for the series would be $461.92
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aristocratic demagogue, the Abolitionists were poor, humble,
despised people, of no influence; men one could not ask to
dine.27
In fact, the class segregation was so manifest that there is only one occasion on which the Reverend William
Ellery Channing and William Lloyd Garrison were in the same room at the same time, and that was when they
encountered one another quite by accident at the meeting of a legislative committee. One of the biographers of
Channing, John W. Chadwick, has referred to his persistent refusal to have anything to do with such people as
“the most inexplicable feature of his antislavery career, and the most unfortunate.”
December 6, Thursday: French forces attacked out of San Juan de Ulúa into the port of Veracruz, devastating
the Mexican troops and the town itself.
Bernardino Fernández de Velasco Enríquez de Guzmán y López Pacheco, Duke of Frias replaced Narciso
Heredia y Begines de los Ríos, conde de Ofalia as prime minister of Spain.
Waldo Emerson began a series of lectures on “Human Life” in the Masonic Temple at Tremont Place in Boston
(the series would end abruptly on February 20th because of a “pest of a cold”).
27.
Octavius Brooks Frothingham’s BOSTON UNITARIANISM, 1820-1850. NY, 1890, pages 196-7.
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December 10, Monday: Senator Daniel Webster wrote from Boston to John P. Hine in New Hampton, New
Hampshire, wishing him well with his invention and informing him that although he would be glad to be of
assistance he would not be able to advance funds.28
Sam Houston turned over the Presidency of the State of Texas to Vice-President Mirabeau Lamar after two
years — two years during which he had stabilized the currency, secured the safety of the borders, and gained
recognition by the United States of America.
Bronson Alcott analyzed the case of Jones Very:
Is he insane? If so, there yet linger glimpses of
wisdom in his memory. He is insane with God; diswitted
in the contemplation of the holiness of Divinity. He
distrusts intellect; he would have living in the
concrete, without the interposition of the meddling,
analytic head. Curiosity he deems impious. He would
have no one stop to account to himself for what he has
done, deeming this hiatus of doing, a suicidal act of
the profane mind. Intellect, as intellect, he deems the
author of all error. Living, not thinking, he regards
as the worship meet for the soul. This is mysticism in
its highest form.
28. Stimpert, James. A GUIDE TO THE CORRESPONDENCE IN THE CHARLES WESLEY SLACK MANUSCRIPT COLLECTION: 1848-1885.
Kent State University, Library, Special Collections
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1839
January
Su Mo Tu
1
6 7 8
13 14 15
20 21 22
27 28 29
We
2
9
16
23
30
Th
3
10
17
24
31
February
Fr
4
11
18
25
Sa
5
12
19
26
April
Su Mo
1
7 8
14 15
21 22
28 29
Tu
2
9
16
23
30
We
3
10
17
24
Th
4
11
18
25
Tu
2
9
16
23
30
We
3
10
17
24
31
Th
4
11
18
25
Fr
5
12
19
26
Sa
6
13
20
27
We
2
9
16
23
30
Th
3
10
17
24
31
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr
1
3 4 5 6 7 8
10 11 12 13 14 15
17 18 19 20 21 22
24 25 26 27 28 29
31
Su Mo Tu We
1
5 6 7 8
12 13 14 15
19 20 21 22
26 27 28 29
Th
2
9
16
23
30
Fr
5
12
19
26
Sa
6
13
20
27
Su Mo Tu We Th
1
4 5 6 7 8
11 12 13 14 15
18 19 20 21 22
25 26 27 28 29
Fr
3
10
17
24
31
Sa
4
11
18
25
1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30
September
Fr
2
9
16
23
30
Sa
3
10
17
24
31
Su
1
8
15
22
29
Mo
2
9
16
23
30
November
Fr
4
11
18
25
Sa
5
12
19
26
Sa
2
9
16
23
30
June
August
October
Su Mo Tu
1
6 7 8
13 14 15
20 21 22
27 28 29
1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28
May
July
Su Mo
1
7 8
14 15
21 22
28 29
March
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr
1
3 4 5 6 7 8
10 11 12 13 14 15
17 18 19 20 21 22
24 25 26 27 28 29
Read
Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1837 (æt. 20)
Read
Read
Read
Read
Read
Tu
3
10
17
24
We
4
11
18
25
Th
5
12
19
26
Fr
6
13
20
27
Sa
7
14
21
28
Fr
6
13
20
27
Sa
7
14
21
28
December
Sa
2
9
16
23
30
Su
1
8
15
22
29
Mo
2
9
16
23
30
Tu
3
10
17
24
31
We
4
11
18
25
Th
5
12
19
26
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Read
Read
Read
THE RHODE-ISLAND ALMANAC FOR 1839. By Isaac Bickerstaff. Providence, Rhode Island: Hugh H. Brown.
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Apparently in this year Henry Thoreau was musing on some loose scraps of paper, and then left these scraps
lying loose between the pages of his journal (this unfinished jotting seems to be the sole surviving passage in
which he was contemplating the fate of the Cherokee nation):
The future reader of history will associate this generation with the red
man in his thoughts, and give it credit for some sympathy with that race.
Our history will have some copper tints and reflections, at least, and
be read as through an Indian-summer haze; but such were not our
associations. But the Indian is absolutely forgotten but by some
persevering poets.
The white man has commenced a new era. What do our anniversaries
commemorate but white men’s exploits: For Indian deeds there must be an
Indian memory; the white man will remember his own only. We have
forgotten their hostility as well as friendship. Who can realize that,
within the memory of this generation, the remnant of an ancient and dusky
race of mortals called the Stockbridge Indians, within the limits of
this very State, furnished a company for the war, on the condition only
that they should not be expected to fight white man’s fashion, or to
train, but Indian fashion. And, occasionally their wigwams are seen on
the banks of this very stream still, solitary and inobvious, like the
cabins of the muskrats in the meadows.
They seem like a race who have exhausted the secretes of nature, tanned
with age, while this young and still fair Saxon slip, on whom the sun
has not long shone, is but commencing its career.
...........
Their memory is in harmony with the russet hue of the fall of the year.
TRAIL OF TEARS
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For the Indian there is no safety but in the plow. If he would not be
pushed into the Pacific, he must seize hold of a plow-tail and let go
his bow and arrow, his fish-spear and rifle. This the only Christianity
that will save him. His fate says sternly to him, “Forsake the hunter’s
life and enter into the agricultural, the second, state of man. Root
yourselves a little deeper in the soil, if you would continue to be the
occupants of the county.”
But I confess I have no little sympathy with the Indians and hunter men.
They seem to me a distinct and equally respectable people, born to wander
and to hunt, and not to be inoculated with the twilight civilization of
the white man.
Father LeJeune, a French missionary, affirmed “That the Indians were
superior in intellect to the French peasantry of that time,” and advised
“that laborers should be sent from France in order to work for the
Indians.”
The Indian population with the present boundaries of New Hampshire,
Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut has been estimated not to
have exceeded 40,000 “before the epidemic disease which preceded the
landing of the Pilgrims” and it was far more dense here than elsewhere;
yet they had no more land than they wanted. The present white population
is more than 1,300,000 and two thirds of the land is unimproved.
The Indian, perchance, has not made up his mind to some things which the
white man has consented to; he has not, in all respects, stooped so low;
and hence, though he too loves food and warmth, he draws his tattered
blanket about him and follows his fathers, rather than barter his
birthright. He dies, and no doubt his Genius judges well for him. But
he is not worsted in the fight; he is not destroyed. He only migrates
beyond the Pacific to more spacious and happier hunting grounds.
A race of hunters can never withstand the inroads of a race of
husbandmen. The latter burrow in the night into their country and
undermine them; and {even} if the hunter is brave enough to resist, his
game is timid and has already fled. The rifle alone would never
exterminate it, but the plow is a more fatal weapon. It wins the country
inch by inch and holds all it gets. What detained the Cherokee so long
was the 2023 plows which that people possessed: and if they had grasped
their handles more firmly, they would never have been driven beyond the
Mississippi. No sense of justice will ever restrain the farmer from
plowing up the land which is only hunted over by his neighbors. No
hunting field was ever well-fenced and surveyed and its bounds
accurately marked unless it were an English park. It is a property not
held by the hunter so much as by the game which roams it, and was never
well secured by warranty deeds. The farmer in his treaties says only,
or means only “So far will I plow this summer” for he has not seed corn
to plant more; but every summer the seed is grown which plants a new
strip of the forrest.
The African will survive, for he is docile and is patiently learning his
trade and dancing at his labor; but the Indian does not often dance,
unless it be the war dance.
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The above is material in regard to which I would urge caution. One finds it on the internet as if it were being
quoted from Thoreau’s journal, which it is not. It seems, instead, to be hardly more sophisticated than the
following popular remarks:
“Ye see, Hinnissy, th’ Indyun is bound f’r to give way
to th’ onward march iv white civilization. You ’an me,
Hinnissy, is th’ white civilization... The’ on’y hope
f’r th’ Indyun is to put his house on rollers, an’ keep
a team hitched to it, an’, whin he sees a white man,
to start f’r th’ settin’ sun.”
— Finley Peter Dunne,
OBSERVATIONS BY MR. DOOLEY,
New York, 1902
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Professor Joseph-Héliodore-Sagesse-Vertu Garcin de Tassy’s major work TARIKH-E-ADABIYAT-E-HINDIVI WA
HINDUSTANI. The initial volume of his HISTOIRE DE LA LITTÉRATURE HINDOUI et hindoustani was published at
Paris under the auspices of the Oriental Translation Committee of Great Britain and Ireland and dedicated A
SA MAJESTÉ LA REINE DE LA GRANDE-BRETAGNE. From this Henry Thoreau would on September 11, 1849
extract snippets pertaining to Kabîr and to Mîr Camar uddîn Mast:
M. GARCIN DE TASSY, I
On prétend que les vers de Kabîr ont quatre sens différents: l’illusion (mâyâ),
l’esprit (âtmâ), l’intellect (man), et la doctrine exotérique des Védas.
WALDEN: Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and
praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of
men asleep, which they express by snoring. Sometimes we are
inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half witted with the
half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their
wit. Some would find fault with the morning-red, if they ever
got up early enough. “They pretend,” as I hear, “that the verses
of Kabir have four different senses; illusion, spirit,
intellect, and the exoteric doctrine of the Vedas;” but in this
part of the world it is considered a ground for complaint
if a man’s writings admit of more than one interpretation.
While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any
endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more
widely and fatally?
PEOPLE OF
WALDEN
KABÎR
The source which reported this “pretending” (exegeting?) was cited in a footnote of the HISTOIRE DE LA
LITTÉRATURE HINDOUI et Hindoustani as Horace Hayman Wilson’s ASIATIC RESEARCHES, Volume XVI, page
62.
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Thoreau also would render Mîr Camar uddîn Mast’s
Etant assis, parcourir la région du monde spirituel: j’ai eu cet avantage dans les
livres. Être enviré par une seule coupe de vin: j’ai éprouvé ce plaisir lorsque j’ai
bu la liqueur des doctrines ésotériques.
as:
WALDEN: My residence was more favorable, not only to thought,
but to serious reading, than a university; and though I was
beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library, I had more
than ever come within the influence of those books which
circulate round the world, whose sentences were first written on
bark, and are now merely copied from time to time on to linen
paper. Says the poet Mîr Camar Uddîn Mast, “Being seated to run
through the region of the spiritual world; I have had this
advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine;
I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of
the esoteric doctrines.” I kept Homer’s Iliad on my table through
the summer, though I looked at his page only now and then.
Incessant labor with my hands, at first, for I had my house to
finish and my beans to hoe at the same time, made more study
impossible. Yet I sustained myself by the prospect of such
reading in future. I read one or two shallow books of travel in
the intervals of my work, till that employment made me ashamed
of myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived.
PEOPLE OF
MÎR CAMAR UDDÎN MAST
JOHN CHARLES FRÉMONT
HOMER
WALDEN
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The full selection on Mîr Camar uddîn Mast from which Thoreau was here extracting, on pages 331-2
of Volume I of this HISTOIRE DE LA LITTÉRATURE HINDOUI et Hindoustani,29 reads as follows:
Mîr Camar uddîn Mast1, de Delhi, descendait par sa mère du
saïyid Jalâl Bukhârî Mîr. Il retira des avantages
littéraires de la société de Mîr Nûr uddîn Nawed et de
Mîr Schams uddîn Faquîr, et fut initié par eux aux
difficultés de la versification. Il fut un des disciples
du spiritualiste le maulawî Fakhr uddîn, et se dévoua à la
vie spirituelle, en sorte que Bénî Narâyan le nomme faquîr.
Il a écrit beaucoup de vers hindoustani et persans;
il avait une grande célérité de conception; il s’énonçait
avec esprit et purité de langage. En 1196 de l’hérige
(1781-1782), il était attaché à l’honorable M. Jones.2
Il était très-enclin à l’amour, et faisait beacoup
attention à la beauté. Alî Ibrâhîm cite deux pages et demie
de ses vers hindoustani, et Bénî Narâyan, un gazal mystique
qui me paraît très-geau dans l’original. Je joins ici
la traduction de quelques hémistiches de ce poëme:
Aujourd’hui j’ai vu en songe ma bienaimée; j’ai vu la lumière de Dieu sous
le voile. Moi qui suis néant, m’unir
à son essence: j’ai vu ce spectacle
pareil à celui de la bulle d’eau qui
se perd dans l’Océan.....
Étant
assis,
parcourir
la
région
du monde
spirituel:
j’ai
eu
cet
avantage dans les livres. Étre enivré
par une seule coup de vin: j’ai éprouvé
ce plaisir lorsque j’ai bu la liqueur
des doctrines ésotériques.
J’ignore si ce poëte est le même dont parle Mushafî,
et qu’il donne comme disciple de Mîr Amânî Açad, et comme
un des habitués de ses réunions littéraires.
1. mst [these characters are printed from right to left in Farsi script] ivre.
2. Probablement le célèbre Sir W. Jones.
29. Be aware that when the 2d edition of this work by M. Garcin de-Tassy would appear in 1847, the text as “revue, corigée, et
considérablement augmentée” would be not at all similar to the above.
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Thomas Mayo Brewer edited a new edition of Alexander Wilson’s AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGY; OR, THE
NATURAL HISTORY OF BIRDS OF THE UNITED STATES, adding a synopsis of all the birds then known as North
American, plus a list of newly classified birds.
AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGY
In its 1852 edition (New York: H.S. Samuels), this would be in the library of Henry Thoreau.
Anonymous publication of Philip James Bailey’s FESTUS; A POEM by W. Pickering of London. The success
of this long poem would be immediate, on both sides of the Atlantic. Although this was the edition which
would be consulted by Henry Thoreau, here we are presenting electronically instead the American edition of
1845, simply because it is what has been made available by Google Books. (Hopefully, this is virtually
identical with the English edition — although I have not verified that this is indeed the case.) Thoreau would
copy portions into his Literary Notebook and would refer to it at two points in A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND
MERRIMACK RIVERS.
FESTUS; A POEM
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A WEEK: There are few books which are fit to be remembered in our
wisest hours, but the Iliad is brightest in the serenest days,
and embodies still all the sunlight that fell on Asia Minor.
No modern joy or ecstasy of ours can lower its height or dim its
lustre, but there it lies in the east of literature, as it were
the earliest and latest production of the mind. The ruins of Egypt
oppress and stifle us with their dust, foulness preserved in
cassia and pitch, and swathed in linen; the death of that which
never lived. But the rays of Greek poetry struggle down to us,
and mingle with the sunbeams of the recent day. The statue of
Memnon is cast down, but the shaft of the Iliad still meets the
sun in his rising. “Homer is gone; and where is Jove? and where
The rival cities seven? His song outlives Time, tower, and god,
— all that then was, save Heaven.” So too, no doubt, Homer had
his Homer, and Orpheus his Orpheus, in the dim antiquity which
preceded them. The mythological system of the ancients, and it is
still the mythology of the moderns, the poem of mankind,
interwoven so wonderfully with their astronomy, and matching in
grandeur and harmony the architecture of the heavens themselves,
seems to point to a time when a mightier genius inhabited the
earth. But, after all, man is the great poet, and not Homer nor
Shakespeare; and our language itself, and the common arts of life,
are his work. Poetry is so universally true and independent
of experience, that it does not need any particular biography
to illustrate it, but we refer it sooner or later to some Orpheus
or Linus, and after ages to the genius of humanity and the gods
themselves.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
PEOPLE OF
A WEEK
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In Worcester, John Downes worked as an engraver for John Warner Barber, who in this year was publishing
his HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS. Downes was doing many natural history engravings: the “winter wren,” white-
breasted nuthatch, and other birds, engravings for A SYSTEM OF NATURAL HISTORY (Brattleboro VT, 1834),
etc. Among the woodcuts Downes executed for Barber was a view of Monument Square from the site of the
present Colonial Inn. Entitled “CENTRAL PART OF CONCORD, MASS.,” the view was “Drawn by J.W. Barber
— Engraved by J. Downes, Worcester” (Harding’s DAYS, top illustration opposite page 429).
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The Thoreaus had left their “house on the square” only two years before this engraving was 1st published.
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In this year the 7th edition of John Hayward’s THE NEW ENGLAND GAZETTEER was issued. This would be the
edition found in the personal library of Henry Thoreau, that is now in Special Collections at the Concord Free
Public Library. Thoreau would refer extensively to this resource in A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND
MERRIMACK RIVERS, in THE MAINE WOODS, and in CAPE COD, as well as mentioning it in his correspondence
and in his journal.
NEW ENGLAND GAZETTEER
PEOPLE OF
A WEEK
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A WEEK: According to the Gazetteer, the descent of Amoskeag Falls,
which are the most considerable in the Merrimack, is fifty-four feet
in half a mile. We locked ourselves through here with much ado,
surmounting the successive watery steps of this river’s staircase in
the midst of a crowd of villagers, jumping into the canal to their
amusement, to save our boat from upsetting, and consuming much riverwater in our service. Amoskeag, or Namaskeak, is said to mean “great
fishing-place.” It was hereabouts that the Sachem Wannalancet resided.
Tradition says that his tribe, when at war with the Mohawks, concealed
their provisions in the cavities of the rocks in the upper part of
these falls. The Indians, who hid their provisions in these holes, and
affirmed “that God had cut them out for that purpose,” understood their
origin and use better than the Royal Society, who in their
Transactions, in the last century, speaking of these very holes,
declare that “they seem plainly to be artificial.” Similar “pot-holes”
may be seen at the Stone Flume on this river, on the Ottaway, at
Bellows’ Falls on the Connecticut, and in the limestone rock at
Shelburne Falls on Deerfield River in Massachusetts, and more or less
generally about all falls. Perhaps the most remarkable curiosity of
this kind in New England is the well-known Basin on the Pemigewasset,
one of the head-waters of this river, twenty by thirty feet in extent
and proportionably deep, with a smooth and rounded brim, and filled
with a cold, pellucid, and greenish water. At Amoskeag the river is
divided into many separate torrents and trickling rills by the rocks,
and its volume is so much reduced by the drain of the canals that it
does not fill its bed. There are many pot-holes here on a rocky island
which the river washes over in high freshets. As at Shelburne Falls,
where I first observed them, they are from one foot to four or five in
diameter, and as many in depth, perfectly round and regular, with
smooth and gracefully curved brims, like goblets. Their origin is
apparent to the most careless observer. A stone which the current has
washed down, meeting with obstacles, revolves as on a pivot where it
lies, gradually sinking in the course of centuries deeper and deeper
into the rock, and in new freshets receiving the aid of fresh stones,
which are drawn into this trap and doomed to revolve there for an
indefinite period, doing Sisyphus-like penance for stony sins, until
they either wear out, or wear through the bottom of their prison, or
else are released by some revolution of nature. There lie the stones
of various sizes, from a pebble to a foot or two in diameter, some of
which have rested from their labor only since the spring, and some
higher up which have lain still and dry for ages, —we noticed some here
at least sixteen feet above the present level of the water,— while
others are still revolving, and enjoy no respite at any season. In one
instance, at Shelburne Falls, they have worn quite through the rock,
so that a portion of the river leaks through in anticipation of the
fall. Some of these pot-holes at Amoskeag, in a very hard brown-stone,
had an oblong, cylindrical stone of the same material loosely fitting
them. One, as much as fifteen feet deep and seven or eight in diameter,
which was worn quite through to the water, had a huge rock of the same
material, smooth but of irregular form, lodged in it. Everywhere there
were the rudiments or the wrecks of a dimple in the rock; the rocky
shells of whirlpools. As if by force of example and sympathy after so
many lessons, the rocks, the hardest material, had been endeavoring to
whirl or flow into the forms of the most fluid. The finest workers in
stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and
water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.
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THE MAINE WOODS: I found my companions where I had left them, on
the side of the peak, gathering the mountain cranberries, which
filled
every
crevice
between
the
rocks,
together
with
blueberries, which had a spicier flavor the higher up they grew,
but were not the less agreeable to our palates. When the country
is settled, and roads are made, these cranberries will perhaps
become an article of commerce. From this elevation, just on the
skirts of the clouds, we could overlook the country, west and
south, for a hundred miles. There it was, the State of Maine,
which we had seen on the map, but not much like that, —
immeasurable forest for the sun to shine on, that eastern stuff
we hear of in Massachusetts. No clearing, no house. It did not
look as if a solitary traveller had cut so much as a walking-stick
there. Countless lakes, — Moosehead in the southwest, forty miles
long by ten wide, like a gleaming silver platter at the end of
the table; Chesuncook, eighteen long by three wide, without an
island; Millinocket, on the south, with its hundred islands; and
a hundred others without a name; and mountains also, whose names,
for the most part, are known only to the Indians. The forest
looked like a firm grass sward, and the effect of these lakes in
its midst has been well compared, by one who has since visited
this same spot, to that of a “mirror broken into a thousand
fragments, and wildly scattered over the grass, reflecting the
full blaze of the sun.” It was a large farm for somebody, when
cleared. According to the Gazetteer, which was printed before the
boundary question was settled, this single Penobscot county, in
which we were, was larger than the whole State of Vermont, with
its fourteen counties; and this was only a part of the wild lands
of Maine. We are concerned now, however, about natural, not
political limits. We were about eighty miles, as the bird flies,
from Bangor, or one hundred and fifteen, as we had rode, and
walked, and paddled. We had to console ourselves with the
reflection that this view was probably as good as that from the
peak, as far as it went; and what were a mountain without its
attendant clouds and mists? Like ourselves, neither Bailey nor
Jackson had obtained a clear view from the summit.
JACOB WHITMAN BAILEY
DR. CHARLES T. JACKSON
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CAPE COD: Captain John Sears, of Suet, was the first person in
this country who obtained pure marine salt by solar evaporation
alone; though it had long been made in a similar way on the coast
of France, and elsewhere. This was in the year 1776, at which
time, on account of the war, salt was scarce and dear. The
Historical Collections contain an interesting account of his
experiments, which we read when we first saw the roofs of the
salt-works. Barnstable county is the most favorable locality for
these works on our northern coast, there is so little fresh water
here emptying into ocean. Quite recently there were about two
millions of dollars invested in this business here. But now the
Cape is unable to compete with the importers of salt and the
manufacturers of it at the West, and, accordingly, her salt-works
are fast going to decay. From making salt, they turn to fishing
more than ever. The Gazetteer will uniformly tell you, under the
head of each town, how many go a-fishing, and the value of the
fish and oil taken, how much salt is made and used, how many are
engaged in the coasting trade, how many in manufacturing palmleaf hats, leather, boots, shoes, and tinware, and then it has
done, and leaves you to imagine the more truly domestic
manufactures which are nearly the same all the world over.
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Samuel Cunard founded a steamship line.
An article on the cruelty Richard Henry Dana, Jr. had observed toward seamen on sailing vessels was
published in the American Jurist.
RICHARD HENRY DANA, JR.
Theodore Dwight Weld, evangelist-abolitionist, published AMERICAN SLAVERY AS IT IS.
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“It is simply crazy that there should ever have come
into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man
is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact
about a human being. Who could want such a world? For
an American fighting for his love of country, that the
last hope of earth should from its beginning have
swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice
so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only
with God.”
— Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY?
1976, page 141
The issue of refusing to vote was coming to the forefront among abolitionists. Maria W. Chapman estimated,
however, that only one in a hundred of the members of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society were refusing
on principle to cooperate with the government in the manner of Henry Thoreau, to the extent of declining to
cast their ballot.
In this year she published RIGHT AND WRONG IN MASSACHUSETTS, a pamphlet that argued the divisions in the
Anti-Slavery Society that were being created over the issue of woman’s rights. She and two other women,
Friend Lucretia Mott and Lydia Maria Child, were elected to the executive committee of the Anti-Slavery
Society, and this upset some members of the society. Lewis Tappan, the brother of Arthur Tappan, the president
of the society, argued that “To put a woman on the committee with men is contrary to the usages of civilized
society.”
FEMINISM
From this year until 1842, Mrs. Chapman would be editor of the abolitionist journal, Non-Resistant.
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Louisa May Alcott, age 6 and all arms and legs in beautiful downtown Boston, was such an active child that
she would roll her hoop all the way around the Boston Common (as a teenager she would be able to hike 20
miles in 5 hours and then party).
MAPS OF BOSTON
Beginning in this year and continuing for a decade, the French silhouette30 artist Auguste Edouart
toured the US. In all probability he cut some 10,000 silhouettes during this period. New-York was offered its
initial public display of Daguerreotypes.
Here, for background, is a sample ad for an itinerant silhouette cutter before the advent of photography:
Correct Profile Likenesses, taken from 8 o’clock in the morning
until 9 in the evening. M Chapman respectfully informs the
Ladies and Gentlemen ... that he takes correct Profiles, reduced
to any size, two of one person for 25 cents, neatly cut on a
beautiful paper. He also paints and shades them, if required,
for 75 cents; specimens of which may be seen at his room.
Of those persons who are not satisfied with their Profiles,
previous to leaving the room, no pay shall be required. He makes
use of a machine universally allowed by the best judges to be
30. The art form had been named in honor of a French minister of finance with a reputation for being a cheapskate, a M. Silhouette.
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more correct than any ever before invented.
September 3, 1839: Plum Island, at the mouth of this river to whose formation, perhaps, these very
banks have sent their contribution, is a similar desert of drifting sand, of various colors, blown into graceful
curves by the wind. It is a mere sand-bar exposed, stretching nine miles parallel to the coast, and, exclusive of
the marsh on the inside, rarely more than half a mile wide. There are but half a dozen houses on it, and it is
almost without a tree, or a sod, or any green thing with which a country-man is familiar. The thin vegetation
stands half buried in sand as in drifting snow. The only shrub, the beach plum, which gives the island its name,
grows but a few feet high; but this is so abundant that parties of a hundred at once come from the mainland and
down the Merrimack, in September, pitch their tents, and gather the plums, which are good to eat raw and to
preserve. The graceful and delicate beach pea, too, grows abundantly amid the sand, and several strange mosslike and succulent plants. The island for its whole length is scalloped into low hills, not more than twenty feet
high, by the wind, and, excepting a faint trail on the edge of the marsh, is as trackless as Sahara. There are dreary
bluffs of sand and valleys plowed by the wind, where you might expect to discover the bones of a caravan.
Schooners come from Boston to load with the sand for masons’ uses, and in a few hours the wind obliterates
all traces of their work. Yet you have only to dig a foot or two anywhere to come to fresh water; and you are
surprised to learn that woodchucks abound here, and foxes are found, though you see not where they can burrow
or hide themselves. I have walked down the whole length of its broad beach at low tide, at which time alone
you can find a firm ground to walk on, and probably Massachusetts does not furnish a more grand and dreary
walk. On the seaside there are only a distant sail and a few coots to break the grand monotony. A solitary stake
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stuck up, or a sharper sand-hill than usual, is remarkable as a landmark for miles; while for music you hear only
the ceaseless sound of the surf, and the dreary peep of the beach-birds.
BEACH PLUM
PLUM ISLAND
Near Litchfield, Thoreau saw an extensive desert area
where sand had blown into dunes ten and twelve feet
high. This recalled to his mind Plum Island, which he
had visited in the past, for he thought some of this
desert sand might well be borne down the Merrimack to
its mouth not far from Newburyport, and there form part
of that island so well known to the birding clan. Of
course, Thoreau did not come nearer to Plum Island on
this river trip than the junction of the Concord and
Merrimack, some thirty miles away. But Thoreau’s
description of Plum Island is especially interesting
to bird watchers. In his GUIDE TO BIRD FINDING, Dr.
Olin Sewall Pettingill, Jr., calls this one of the most
famous ornithological areas of the eastern United
States. Birds traveling north or south along the
Atlantic coast funnel over this area, and multitudes
drop down to rest and feed there. A trip to this island
is particularly rewarding during the peak of shorebird
migration in spring and fall. The half-dozen houses of
Thoreau’s day have multiplied many times over.
Nevertheless, ripe beach plums may still be picked
there in September. Untracked sand, particularly in
winter or after storms, may still be found. The fact
that Thoreau mentioned only a few beach birds running
on the sand and some coots (scoters) riding the waves
behind the surf reveals clearly that his interest in
birds was dormant when he visited Plum Island. C.
Russell Mason, then Executive Director of the
Massachusetts
Audubon
Society,
after
an
early
September visit to Plum Island with Dr. Roger Tory
Peterson, wrote, "Every shore-bird in the book can be
found on Plum Island, and as for gulls, if rare species
appear on the north-east coast, they will almost surely
be spotted at Plum Island." Plum Island is one of the
most important areas covered by the Newburyport
Christmas Bird Count. This Count is made at a time when
weather is severe and one would expect bird life in
that bleak area to be at a low ebb. Yet on the 1962
Count when winds blew off the ocean and the temperature
scarcely rose into the thirties, when snow covered the
ground and all the ponds were frozen, eighty-eight
species and about twenty-eight thousand individual
birds were seen. -Cruickshank, Helen Gere. THOREAU ON
BIRDS (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964)
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I don’t know, however, specifically when Thoreau would have visited Plum Island prior to his 1839 trip with his
brother. If he did go there at some point in his youth, he did not camp overnight, for we know that the first night
of that famous 1839 trip was his first night out-of-doors. And much later, when he mentioned Plum Island in his
journal, it was without making a comment which would indicate to us that he had been there:
September 23, 1859: Met a gunner from Lynn on the beach [of Rockport MA] who had several pigeons
[Passenger Pigeon
Ectopistes migratorius] which he had killed in the woods by the shore. Said they had
been blown off the mainland. Second, also a kingfisher. Third, what he called the “oxeye,” about size of
peetweet but with a short bill and a blackish-brown crescent on breast, and wing above like peetweet’s, but no
broad white mark below. Could it be Charadrius semipalmatus P Fourth, what he called a sandpiper, very white
with a long bill. Was this Tringa arenaria ~ Fifth, what I took to be a solitary tattler, but possibly it was the
pectoral sandpiper, which I have seen since.
On the edge of the beach you see small dunes, with white or fawn-colored sandy sides, crowned with now
yellowish smilax and with bayberry bushes. Just before reaching Loblolly Cove, near Thatcher’s Island, sat on
a beach composed entirely of small paving-stones Iying very loose and deep.
We boiled our tea for dinner on the mainland opposite Straitsmouth Island, just this side the middle of Rockport,
under the lee of a boulder, using, as usual, dead bayberry bushes for fuel. This was, indeed, all we could get.
They make a very quick fire, and I noticed that their smoke covered our dippers with a kind of japan which did
not crock or come off nearly so much as ordinary soot.
We could see the Salvages very plainly, apparently extending north and south, the Main Rock some fifteen or
twenty rods long and east-northeast of Straitsmouth Island, apparently one and a half or two miles distant, with
half-sunken ledges north and south of it, over which the sea was breaking in white foam. The ledges all together
half a mile long. We could see from our dining-place Agamenticus, some forty miles distant in the north. Its two
sides loomed thus:
so that about a third of the whole was C~-~ lifted up, while a small elevation close to it on the east, which
afterward was seen to be a part of it, was wholly lifted up.
Rockport well deserves its name,–several little rocky harbors protected by a breakwater, the houses at Rockport
Village backing directly on the beach. At Folly Cove, a wild rocky point running north, covered with beachgrass. See now a mountain on the east of Agamenticus. Isles of Shoals too low to be seen. Probably land at
Boar’s Head, seen on the west of Agamenticus, and then the coast all the way from New Hampshire to Cape
Ann plainly, Newburyport included and Plum Island. Hog Island looks like a high hill on the mainland.
It is evident that a discoverer, having got as far west as Agamenticus, off the coast of Maine, would in clear
weather discern the coast trending southerly beyond him as far round as Cape Ann, and if he did not wish to be
embayed would stand across to Cape Ann, where the Salvages would be the outmost point.
At Annisquam we found ourselves in the midst of boulders scattered over bare hills and fields, such as we had
seen on the ridge northerly in the morning, i. e., they abound chiefly in the central and northwesterly part of the
Cape. This was the most peculiar scenery of the Cape. We struck inland southerly, just before sundown, and
boiled our tea with bayberry bushes by a swamp on the hills, in the midst of these great boulders, about halfway
to Gloucester, having carried our water a quarter of a mile, from a swamp, spilling a part in threading swamps
and getting over rough places. Two oxen feeding in the swamp came up to reconnoitre our fire. We could see
no house, but hills strewn with boulders, as if they had rained down, on every side, we sitting under a shelving
one. When the moon rose, what had appeared like immense boulders half a mile off in the horizon now looked
by contrast no larger than nutshells or buri-nut against the moon’s disk, and she was the biggest boulder of all.
When we had put out our bayberry fire, we heard a squawk, and, looking up, saw five geese fly low in the
twilight over our heads. We then set out to find our way to Gloucester over the hills, and saw the comet very
bright in the northwest. After going astray a little in the moonlight, we fell into a road which at length conducted
us to the town.
As we bought our lodging and breakfast, a pound of good ship-bread, which cost seven cents, and six herring,
which cost three cents, with sugar and tea, supplied us amply the rest of the two days. The selection of suitable
spots to get our dinner or supper led us into interesting scenery, and it was amusing to watch the boiling of our
water for tea. There is a scarcity of fresh water on the Cape, so that you must carry your water a good way in a
dipper.
BEACH PLUM
PLUM ISLAND
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Henry Root Colman, whom Henry Thoreau would characterize in WALDEN as “the ministerial husbandman,”
issued a follow-on report of the agricultural condition and resources of Massachusetts.
WALDEN: A very agricola laboriosus was I to travellers bound
westward through Lincoln and Wayland to nobody knows where; they
sitting at their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins
loosely hanging in festoons; I the home-staying, laborious native
of the soil. But soon my homestead was out of their sight and
thought. It was the only open and cultivated field for a great
distance on either side of the road; so they made the most of it;
and sometimes the man in the field heard more of travellers’
gossip and comment than was meant for his ear: “Beans so late!
peas so late!” –for I continued to plant when others had begun to
hoe,– the ministerial husbandman had not suspected it.
PEOPLE OF
WALDEN
HENRY ROOT COLMAN
THE BEANFIELD
The US Congress appropriated money out of Patent Office fees for the distribution of free seed to American
farmers. (Although this was the first time the federal Congress has subsidized such a distribution, seed had
been being distributed since at least 1836.)
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Daniel Shattuck bought the home that eventually would become the east wing of Concord’s Colonial Inn. It
would be occupied in turn until 1885 by Reuben Rice, Mrs. Almira Barlow, the Tolman Family, F.S. Simonds,
and many other tenants. Rice was manager of the Green Store, where the Catholic Church now stands, until
he went west to work for the railroads; he would return to Concord as a town financial benefactor. (Simonds
would write several histories and would wind up being quoted by Adolf Hitler, and in our own century there
has been a Litt.D. named Frank Herbert Simonds (1878-1936) who has authored several Realpolitik histories,
so I wonder whether F.H. Simonds might not be the son of this F.S. Simonds.)
George B. Bartlett would explain in his 1885 history CONCORD; HISTORIC, LITERARY, AND PICTURESQUE
(3d Edition, Revised; Boston: D. Lotrop Company, Washington Street opposite Bromfield) that:
Opposite the Library stands the old inn, at which stages running
between Boston and the up-country towns used to change horses.
The swing sign marked “Shepard's Tavern,” is now in the
possession of Mr. R.N. Rice, who purchased the building, and has
modernized it into a pleasant residence. Bigelow’s tavern,
another ancient inn, stood just below, and its extensive grounds
comprise a part of his fine estate. In front of his stable stood
the old jail in which British prisoners were confined in 1775.
Mr. Rice commenced business in the old green store which
occupied the site of the Catholic church. He went to Michigan
in 1846, in the service of the Michigan Central Railroad, of
which he was afterwards general manager for thirteen years. In
1870, Mr. Rice built his present house, and was prominent in
various extensive town improvements, including Hubbard and
Thoreau streets. Other gentlemen were associated with Mr. Rice,
among whom were Mr. Samuel Staples, who has for years been an
authority on the subject of real estate, and has lived in town
for half a century.
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Lemuel Shattuck retired from the bookstore he had opened in Cambridge in 1834 in order to devote himself
to public service. In this year he became a founding member of the American Statistical Association. He also
began to work toward the enactment of a Massachusetts law that would require registration of all births,
marriages, and deaths — a law that would be enacted in 1842. (For the birth of David Henry Thoreau in 1817,
for instance, there is no public record whatever.)
The following entry was made in the Harvard College Faculty’s Book in regard to the deficiencies of senior
James Russell Lowell and the tutorship of the Reverend Barzillai Frost:
Voted, that Lowell, Senior, on account of continued neglect of his
college duties, be suspended till the Saturday before Commencement to
continue his studies with Mr. Frost in Concord ... and not to visit
Cambridge during the period of his suspension.
Placing a cocked pistol against his skull, Harvard Man and Class Poet Lowell feared to pull the trigger — so
he began to study law.
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The port of Dunbar on the east coast of Scotland was engaged in shipbuilding, sailcloth and cordage
manufacturing, herring-curing and soap making. There were an iron foundry, a steam engine works and several
breweries and distilleries. In this year a 2d harbor was being built to supplement the one that had been
constructed during the reign of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, and this new harbor was named in honor of
Queen Victoria.
DUNBAR FAMILY
Charles T. Jackson’s THIRD ANNUAL REPORT ON THE GEOLOGY OF THE STATE OF MAINE (Augusta ME:
Smith & Robinson). A copy of this book would be found in Henry Thoreau’s library — he undoubtedly read
Jackson’s geological reports on Maine in preparation for his excursions to the Maine woods. Thoreau would
arrange for Jackson to give a lecture at the Concord Lyceum in 1841. Jackson would write an endorsement for
the family’s lead pencils — highly recommending both the hard lead ones, for engineers, and the softer lead
ones, for general use.
DR. JACKSON’S 3D RPT.
The depression created by the panic of 1837 continued unabated. When they could get work, carpenters could
earn $1.25 per day, but this was paid in paper money which the banks would refuse to convert into metal
coins.
During this year the activities of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society brought more contributions into
the anti-slavery coffers at the central Boston headquarters than any other of the branch associations.
Ephraim Merriam was again chosen representative for Concord to the General Court of Massachusetts.
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At this point in the development of the “lyceum” phenomenon, there were 137 lyceums operating in
Massachusetts alone.
John Thoreau, Jr. wrote to a young boy about his memories of childhood Christmases in the Thoreau
household, mentioning that his younger brother Henry most often had gotten the nice presents for good little
boys for Christmas, he the bad things for bad little boys:
When I was a little boy I was told to hang my clean stocking
with those of my brother and sister in the chimney corner the
night before Christmas, and that “Santa Claus,” a very good sort
of sprite, who rode about in the air upon a broomstick (an odd
kind of horse I think) would come down the chimney in the night,
and fill our stockings if we had been good children, with doughnuts, sugar plums and all sorts of nice things; but if we had
been naughty we found in the stocking only a rotten potato, a
letter and a rod. I got the rotten potato once, had the letter
read to me, and was very glad that the rod put into the stocking
was too short to be used.... I determined one night to sit up
until morning that I might get a sight at [Santa Claus] when he
came down the chimney.... I got a little cricket and sat down
by the fireplace looking sharp up into the chimney, and there I
sat for about an hour later than my usual bed time, I suppose,
when I fell asleep and was carried off to bed before I knew
anything about it. So I have never seen him, and don't know what
kind of a looking fellow he was.
The outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that had begun in 1834 in the farm animals with cloven hooves
(cows, pigs, sheep, and goats) on the Hungarian plains, and by 1837 had spread to Switzerland, Belgium,
France, and Holland, at this point had spread also into the British Isles. The British response would be to ban
all imports of susceptible livestock, and in this manner would keep their islands free of this viral infection for
the remainder of the 19th Century. (The infection would, however, spread from Central Europe to the United
States in 1870, and to Australia in 1872.)
Doctor Johann Lukas Schönlein (1793-1864), a disaffected student of German Naturphilosophie, attempted to
find a system of natural classes within which the diseases of humans could be better understood, in the mode
in which botanists had profited through the systematization of their names for the various species of plants.
In 1828 he had coined the term “hemophilia,” and then in this year he applied the term “tuberculosis” to the
disease which has been with us since ancient times and which had been known, after Hippocrates of Cos (460377BCE), as phthisis.
He applied this name because the Dutch physician Franciscus Sylvius (1614-1672) had noted the presence of
small nodules in wasted cadavers, which he believed to be diseased lymph nodes, and had named these masses
“tubercles.” –Despite the fact that the terms “tubercle” and “tuberculosis” had already been formed, in the
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English-speaking nations within the life-span of Henry Thoreau this ailment was generally described in terms
of its well-known wasting terminal effects, as the disease “consumption.” It was still commonly believed by
physicians that pulmonary tuberculosis might be the result of bad heredity, or might be a form of cancer, and
it was not associated with the other forms of tuberculosis (scrofula, tabes mesenterica, cold abscess, white
swelling, lupus, and Pott’s disease), and the infectious and communicable nature of this infection was not yet
understood.
AUSTIN MEREDITH
George Sand wrote of Frédéric François Chopin: “Poor Chopin, who has had a cough since he left Paris,
became worse: we sent for a doctor — two doctors — three doctors — each more stupid than the other, who
started to spread the news in the island [Mallorca] that the sick man was consumptive in the last stage. As a
result there was great alarm. Phthisis is rare in these climate, and is looked upon as contagious. We were
regarded as plague-infested; and, furthermore, as heathen, as we did not go to the mass. The owner of the little
house in which we had rented turned us out brutally, and wished to being an action against us to compel us to
limewash his house, which he said we had infected. The law of the island plucked us like chickens.” Chopin
himself wrote: “I have been sick as a dog the last two weeks; I caught cold in spite of 18 degrees C. of heat,
roses, oranges, palms, figs and three most famous doctors on the island. One sniffed at what I spat up, the
second tapped where I spat it from, the third poked about and listened how I spat it. One said I had died, the
second that I am dying, the third that I shall die.... All this has affected the ‘Preludes’ and God knows when
you will get them.”
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The Reverend William Miller, who had by 1818 decoded God’s message in the Bible and obtained private
knowledge that the Second Coming was but 25 years in the future, at this point associated himself and his code
scheme with the Reverend Joshua Himes of the Christian Connexion, founder and pastor of the First Christian
Church in Boston. The Reverend Himes would secure a tent that would accommodate 4,000 people, and move
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it from city to city for nightly services.
S E ED S
: Who could believe in prophecies of Daniel or of Miller
that the world would end this summer, while one milkweed with
faith matured its seeds?
MILLENNIALISM
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Orestes Augustus Brownson ceased preaching and his Boston Quarterly Review declined in circulation. In his
publication, the Reverend asserted that since his aim was to startle, he “made it a point to be as paradoxical
and extravagant as he could.”
Although I confess I don’t see this suggestion, myself, as in any sense plausible or useful, Professor Walter
Roy Harding has suggested this published comment by the Reverend Brownson to have been a “source” for
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Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN epigraph.31
WALDEN: I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag
as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost,
if only to wake my neighbors up.
PEOPLE OF
WALDEN
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
CHANTICLEER
31. I do need to confess that regardless of how implausible such a connection seems to me, it was in fact during this same year, in
July, that Thoreau copied into his Commonplace Book the portion of “The Nonnes Preestes Tale” by Geoffrey Chaucer dealing
with the figure of Chanticleer.
Chan"ti*cleer (?), n. [F. Chanteclair, name of the cock in the Roman du
Renart (Reynard the Fox); chanter to chant + clair clear. See Chant, and
Clear.] A cock, so called from the clearness or loudness of his voice in
crowing.
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WALDEN: The present was my next experiment of this kind which I
purpose to describe more at length; for convenience, putting the
experience of two years into one. As I have said, I do not propose
to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as
chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake
my neighbors up.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
CHANTICLEER
PEOPLE OF
WALDEN
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According to Joseph Felt’s ANNALS OF SALEM, in this year an exhibition featuring a giraffe and an ibex was
touring Massachusetts.
At the end of the journal entries for this year, Waldo Emerson listed his readings in Oriental materials during
the period: “Vedas.”
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By this point the heath hen [Heath Hen Tympanuchus cupido cupido], New England’s version of the prairie
chicken, had been so reduced in numbers throughout New England, that it remained only on the island of
Martha’s Vineyard.32An article in the Knickerbocker Magazine reported on “an old bull whale of prodigious
size and strength,” called Mocha Dick, in the Pacific Ocean. This beast was reported to be “as white as wool.”
Herman Melville sailed before the mast, that is, as an apprentice seaman, on the merchantman St. Lawrence
bound for Liverpool and return.
32. The species probably died off in the sand plains of Long Island and southeastern New England not due to the overhunting but
in consequence of denial of habitat, caused by cessation of the native American fire management habits by the European intrusives.
Without sporadic fires to keep the pitch pine low forest burned back, the sort of grassy environment of annuals required by the heath
hen simply ceases to exist. Steps the white people were taking to preserve the value of their property in the environment actually
had been, that is, destroying this environment.
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Edward Sherman Hoar matriculated at Harvard College.
Francis Lemuel Capen, Edward Everett Hale, and William Francis Channing graduated from Harvard.
Channing would go on to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (although his practice as a
physician would never extend beyond the administration of quack applications of electricity to the heads and
feet of sufferers).
NEW “HARVARD MEN”
After leaving Harvard, Ellery Channing had spent almost five years living in the home of his father Dr. Walter
Channing, withdrawing books from the Boston Athenæum and presumably educating himself in this manner
— but otherwise not doing much of anything. In this year he determined that he was going to make something
of himself, as a farmer on the frontier! (Meanwhile, in this year, Abraham Lincoln was beginning to travel
through nine counties in central and eastern Illinois, as a lawyer on the 8th Judicial Circuit.)
The Thoreaus were living near (but not on) the site of the present Concord Free Public Library building (which
would anyway not be erected until 1873), in the “Parkman house, to fall of 1844.” It was in this home that the
Thoreau brothers would hold their school.
CONCORD
ZOOM
MAP
A word of caution: In a photo he used in his HENRY DAVID THOREAU: A PROFILE (NY: Hill and Wang, 1971),
Professor Walter Roy Harding unfortunately misidentified the Nathan Brooks house (which was the one that
was moved in 1872 to make way for the CFPL) as this Parkman house, and this misidentification has since
been perpetuated due to the unwarranted credulity of uncritical readers toward whatever gets published as a
book. In fact the Parkman store and house were located behind and to the right of the Nathan Brooks house,
on the Main Street side, and are visible as such in this photo. To summarize: the present CFPL building
occupies the Nathan Brooks house site, not the Parkman house site at which the Thoreau family resided.
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A reminisce pertaining in part to this year, by Walt Whitman:
“Specimen Days”
GROWTH — HEALTH — WORK
I develop’d (1833-4-5) into a healthy, strong youth (grew too fast, though, was
nearly as big as a man at 15 or 16.) Our family at this period moved back to the
country, my dear mother very ill for a long time, but recover’d. All these years
I was down Long Island more or less every summer, now east, now west, sometimes
months at a stretch. At 16, 17, and so on, was fond of debating societies, and had
an active membership with them, off and on, in Brooklyn and one or two country
towns on the island. A most omnivorous novel-reader, these and later years,
devour’d everything I could get. Fond of the theatre, also, in New York, went
whenever I could — sometimes witnessing fine performances.
1836-7, work’d as compositor in printing offices in New York city. Then, when little
more than eighteen, and for a while afterwards, went to teaching country schools
down in Queens and Suffolk counties, Long Island, and “boarded round.” (This latter
I consider one of my best experiences and deepest lessons in human nature behind
the scenes, and in the masses.) In ’39, ’40, I started and publish’d a weekly paper
in my native town, Huntington. Then returning to New York city and Brooklyn, work’d
on as printer and writer, mostly prose, but an occasional shy at “poetry.”
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King Ferdinand of Spain died, the claims of Don Pedro and Don Carlos were defeated, and Maria Christina
succeeded to the throne as regent for the Infanta (who would eventually be crowned, in 1843, after power was
regained from one General Espartero, as Queen Isabella):
WALDEN: For my part, I could easily do without the post-office.
I think that there are very few important communications made
through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one
or two letters in my life –I wrote this some years ago– that were
worth the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution
through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his
thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure
that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read
of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one
house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up,
or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog
killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, –we never need
read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the
principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and
applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is
gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their
tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such
a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn
the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares
of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the
pressure, –news which I seriously think a ready wit might write
a twelvemonth or twelve years beforehand with sufficient
accuracy. As for Spain, for instance, if you know how to throw in
Don Carlos and the Infanta, and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada,
from time to time in the right proportions, –they may have changed
the names a little since I saw the papers,– and serve up a bullfight when other entertainments fail, it will be true to
the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin
of things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid reports under
this head in the newspapers; and as for England, almost the last
significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of
1649; and if you have learned the history of her crops for an
average year, you never need attend to that thing again, unless
your speculations are of a merely pecuniary character. If one may
judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new does ever
happen in foreign parts, a French revolution not excepted.
ENGLISH CIVIL WAR
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Margaret Fuller’s translation of ECKERMANN’S CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE appeared in the bookstores.
Fuller saw, at the Allston Gallery in Boston, the statue of Orpheus by Thomas Crawford.33
ECKERMANN AND GOETHE
33. She would refer to this in the July 1843 issue of THE DIAL and connect it with Bronson Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings” as “lessons
in reverence.”
Orpheus was a lawgiver by theocratic commission. He
understood nature, and made all her forms move to his
music. He told her secrets in the form of hymns, nature
as seen in the mind of God. Then it is the prediction,
that to learn and to do, all men must be lovers, and
Orpheus was, in a high sense, a lover. His soul went
forth towards all beings, yet could remain sternly
faithful to a chosen type of excellence. Seeking what
he loved, he feared not death nor hell, neither could
any presence daunt his faith in the power of the
celestial harmony that filled his soul.
Referring to the statue’s posture, of shading its eyes with its hand, she wrote a poem which concluded with the following couplet:
If he already sees what he must do,
Well may he shade his eyes from the far-shining view.
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Waldo Emerson was elected to the “Social Circle” of Concord which met on Tuesday evenings during the
winters:
Much of the best society I have ever known is a club
in Concord called the Social Circle, consisting always
of twenty-five of our citizens, doctor, lawyer,
farmer, trader, miller, mechanic, etc., solidest of
men, who yield the solidest of gossip. Harvard
University is a wafer compared to the solid land which
my friends represent. I do not like to be absent from
home on Tuesday evenings in winter.
In America, Uriah Phillips Levy was placed in command of the USS Vandalia and promptly had all its guns
painted bright blue. He would soon be court-martialed (his 4th such ordeal) and dismissed in disgrace (his 2nd
such dismissal) from the US Navy — for in addition to having those guns painted blue, he had proclaimed that
no seaman under his command might be flogged. (During our war upon Mexico, Levy would become a
Washington lobbyist, campaigning against such torture of employees.)
The Reverend Charles Follen returned to the Unitarian congregation in East Lexington, Massachusetts whose
ministerial needs had been being supplied for the previous three years by the Reverend Emerson.
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He would design an octagonal sanctuary in such manner that the preacher could not elevate himself above the
congregation. However, after a short while he would again abandon that little group to take up a more lucrative
job offer, as tutor to a family in Watertown. To fill his vacancy, he recommended that the group hire their
previous supply preacher, the Reverend Emerson. He would agree to return, he said, only when the
congregation had erected its new building of his own design, and had in addition come up with enough money
to pay him the sort of ministerial stipend which he required. In our own timeframe, Lucinda Duncan, minister
of that church, has attempted to put a fine face on this: “Follen has left us a legacy of social action based on
the principle of freedom. It’s a principle that we continue to test ourselves against. He was really a man who
left a mark on this congregation. He had a vision of a free Christian church where all people could come and
speak their minds. It was an idea that was way ahead of its time.”
J.W. Alexander, Albert Dod, and Charles Hodge, in “Transcendentalism of the Germans and of Cousin and
Its Influence on Opinion in This Country,” cast Professor Victor Cousin and Waldo Emerson into the outer
darkness as, respectively, the European and the American enemies of True Christianity.
The European Enemy
of True Christianity
(You have been warned!)
The American Enemy
of True Christianity
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Samuel Staples, the bartender at the Middlesex House in Concord, married his boss’s daughter. (Since this
illustration contains telephone wires, it is assuredly not the old converted country house of 1839 but the new
structure that would be placed on the site after the older building burned down in 1845.)
Since the father of the bride, old Thomas Wesson, was irritated with the temperance agitation of the two
preachers in town, he arranged for the knot to be tied by the Reverend Waldo Emerson. Since Bronson Alcott
and John Dwight were visiting Emerson that night, they got to be the witnesses to this deed. (I guess the
Wessons were white, since none of the histories say so; Toni Morrison points this out to us all: “In matters of
race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse.”)
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John Warner Barber’s HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS, BEING A GENERAL COLLECTION OF INTERESTING FACTS,
TRADITIONS, BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES, ANECDOTES, &C., RELATING TO THE HISTORY AND ANTIQUITIES OF
EVERY TOWN IN MASSACHUSETTS, WITH GEOGRAPHICAL DESCRIPTIONS (Dorr, Howland & Company) was
published in Worcester. This volume included an untitled poem on sweets from which Henry Thoreau would
quote a couple of lines in WALDEN.
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WALDEN: Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs
in this land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant and
fluctuating markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and
independence that, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold
in the shops, and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly
used by any. For the most part the farmer gives to his cattle and hogs
the grain of his own producing, and buys flour, which is at least no
more wholesome, at a greater cost, at the store. I saw that I could
easily raise my bushel or two of rye and Indian corn, for the former
will grow on the poorest land, and the latter does not require the best,
and grind them in a hand-mill, and so do without rice and pork; and if
I must have some concentrated sweet, I found by experiment that I could
make a very good molasses either of pumpkins or beets, and I knew that
I needed only to set out a few maples to obtain it more easily still,
and while these were growing I could use various substitutes beside
those which I have named, “For,” as the Forefathers sang,–
“we can make liquor to sweeten our lips
Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips.”
Finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to obtain this might
be a fit occasion for a visit to the seashore, or, if I did without it
altogether, I should probably drink the less water. I do not learn that
the Indians ever troubled themselves to go after it.
Thus I could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food was
concerned, and having a shelter already, it would only remain to get
clothing and fuel. The pantaloons which I now wear were woven in farmer’s
family, –thank Heaven there is so much virtue still in man; for I think
the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorable as that
from the man to the farmer;– and in a new country fuel is an encumbrance.
As for a habitat, if I were not permitted still to squat, I might
purchase one acre at the same price for which the land I cultivated was
sold –namely, eight dollars and eight cents. But as it was, I considered
that I enhanced the value of the land by squatting on it.
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Here John Warner Barber presents Hannah Emerson Duston’s ordeal:
On the 15th of March, 1697, a body of Indians made a descent on the
westerly part of the town, and approached the house of Mr. Thomas
Dustin. They came, as they were wont, arrayed with all the terrors of
a savage war dress, with their muskets charged for the contest, their
tomahawks drawn for the slaughter, and their scalping knives unsheathed
and glittering in the sunbeams. Mr. Dustin at this time was engaged
abroad in his daily labor. When the terrific shouts of the blood-hounds
first fell on his ear, he seized his gun, mounted his horse, and hastened
to his house, with the hope of escorting to a place of safety his family,
which consisted of his wife, whom he tenderly and passionately loved,
and who had been confined only seven days in childbed, her nurse, Mrs.
Mary Neff, and eight young children. Immediately upon his arrival, he
rushed into his house, and found it a scene of confusion - the women
trembling for their safety, and the children weeping and calling on
their mother for protection. He instantly ordered seven of his children
to fly in an opposite direction from that in which the danger was
approaching, and went himself to assist his wife. But he was too late
- before she could arise from her bed, the enemy were upon them.
Mr. Dustin, seeing there was no hope of saving his wife from the clutches
of the foe, flew from the house, mounted his horse, and rode full speed
after his flying children. The agonized father supposed it impossible
to save them all, and he determined to snatch from death the child which
shared the most of his affections. He soon came up with the infant brood;
he heard their glad voices and saw the cheerful looks that overspread
their countenances, for they felt themselves safe while under his
protection. He looked for the child of his love - where was it? He
scanned the little group from the oldest to the youngest, but he could
not find it. They all fondly loved him - they called him by the endearing
title of father, were flesh of his flesh, and stretched out their little
arms toward him for protection. He gazed upon them, and faltered in his
resolution, for there was none whom he could leave behind; and, indeed,
what parent could, in such a situation, select the child which shared
the most of his affections? He could not do it, and therefore resolved
to defend them from the murderers, or die at their side.
A small party of the Indians pursued Mr. Dustin as he fled from the
house, and soon overtook him and his flying children. They did not,
however, approach very near, for they saw his determination, and feared
the vengeance of a father, but skulked behind the trees and fences, and
fired upon him and his little company. Mr. Dustin dismounted from his
horse, placed himself in the rear of his children, and returned the fire
of the enemy often and with good success. In this manner he retreated
for more than a mile, alternately encouraging his terrified charge, and
loading and fireing his gun, until he lodged them safely in a forsaken
house. The Indians, finding that they could not conquer him, returned
to their companions, expecting, no doubt, that they should there find
victims, on which they might exercise their savage cruelty.
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The party which entered the house when Mr. Dustin left it, found Mrs. Dustin
in bed, and the nurse attempting to fly with the infant in her arms. They
ordered Mrs. Dustin to rise instantly, while one of them took the infant
from the arms of the nurse, carried it out, and dashed out its brains against
an apple-tree. After plundering the house they set it on fire, and commenced
their retreat, though Mrs. Dustin had but partly dressed herself, and was
without a shoe on one of her feet. Mercy was a stranger to the breasts of
the conquerors, and the unhappy women expected to receive no kindnesses from
their hands. The weather at the time was exceedingly cold, the March-wind
blew keen and piercing, and the earth was alternately covered with snow and
deep mud.
They travelled twelve miles the first day, and continued their retreat, day
by day, following a circuitous route, until they reached the home of the
Indian who claimed them as his property, which was on a small island, now
called Dustin’s Island, at the mouth of the Contoocook river, about six
miles above the state-house in Concord, New Hampshire. Notwithstanding
their intense suffering for the death of the child - their anxiety for those
whom they had left behind, and who they expected had been cruelly butchered
- their sufferings from cold and hunger, and from sleeping on the damp
earth, with nothing but an inclement sky for a covering - and their terror
for themselves, lest the arm that, as they supposed, had slaughtered those
whom they dearly loved, would soon be made red with their blood, notwithstanding all this, they performed the journey without yielding, and
arrived at their destination in comparative health.
The family of their Indian master consisted of two men, three women, and
seven children; besides an English boy, named Samuel Lennardson, who was
taken prisoner about a year previous, at Worcester. Their master, some years
before, had lived in the family of Rev. Mr. Rowlandson, of Lancaster, and
he told Mrs. Dustin that “when he prayed the English way he thought it was
good, but now he found the French way better.”
These unfortunate women had been but a few days with the Indians, when they
were informed that they must soon start for a distant Indian settlement,
and that, upon their arrival, they would be obliged to conform to the
regulations always required of prisoners, whenever they entered the
village, which was to be stripped, scourged, and run the gauntlet in a state
of nudity. The gauntlet consisted of two files of Indians, of both sexes
and of all ages, containing all that could be mustered in the village; and
the unhappy prisoners were obliged to run between them, when they were
scoffed at and beaten by each one as they passed, and were sometimes marks
at which the younger Indians threw their hatchets. This cruel custom was
often practised by many of the tribes, and not unfrequently the poor
prisoner sunk beneath it. Soon as the two women were informed of this, they
determined to escape as speedily as possible. They could not bear to be
exposed to the scoffs and unrestrained gaze of their savage conquerors death would be preferable. Mrs. Dustin soon planned a mode of escape,
appointed the 31st inst. for its accomplishment, and prevailed upon her
nurse and the boy to join her. The Indians kept no watch, for the boy had
lived with them so long they considered him as one of their children, and
they did not expect that the women, unadvised and unaided, would attempt to
escape, when success, at the best, appeared so desperate.
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On the day previous to the 31st, Mrs. Dustin wished to learn on what
part of the body the Indians struck their victims when they would
despatch them suddenly, and how they took off a scalp. With this view
she instructed the boy to make inquiries of one of the men. Accordingly,
at a convenient opportunity, he asked one of them where he would strike
a man if he would kill him instantly, and how to take off a scalp. The
man laid his finger on his temple - “Strike ’em there,” said he; and
then instructed him how to scalp. The boy then communicated his
information to Mrs. Dustin.
The night at length arrived, and the whole family retired to rest,
little suspecting that the most of them would never behold another sun.
Long before the break of day, Mrs. Dustin arose, and, having ascertained
that they were all in a deep sleep, awoke her nurse and the boy, when
they armed themselves with tomahawks, and despatched ten of the twelve.
A favorite boy they designedly left; and one of the squaws, whom they
left for dead, jumped up, and ran with him into the woods. Mrs. Dustin
killed her master, and Samuel Lennardson despatched the very Indian who
told him where to strike, and how to take off a scalp. The deed was
accomplished before the day began to break, and, after securing what
little provision the wigwam of their dead master afforded, they scuttled
all the boats but one, to prevent pursuit, and with that started for
their homes. Mrs. Dustin took with her a gun that belonged to her master,
and the tomahawk with which she committed the tragical deed. They had
not proceeded far, however, when Mrs. Dustin perceived that they had
neglected to take their scalps, and feared that her neighbors, if they
ever arrived at their homes, would not credit their story, and would
ask them for some token or proof. She told her fears to her companions,
and they immediately returned to the silent wigwam, took off the scalps
of the fallen, and put them into a bag. They then started on their
journey anew, with the gun, tomahawk, and the bleeding trophies, palpable witnesses of their heroic and unparalleled deed.
A long and weary journey was before them, but they commenced it with
cheerful hearts, each alternately rowing and steering their little bark.
Though they had escaped from the clutches of their unfeeling master,
still they were surrounded with dangers. They were thinly clad, the sky
was still inclement, and they were liable to be re-captured by strolling
bands of Indians, or by those who would undoubtedly pursue them so soon
as the squaw and the boy had reported their departure, and the terrible
vengeance they had taken; and were they again made prisoners, they well
knew that a speedy death would follow. This array of danger, however,
did not appall them for home was their beacon-light, and the thoughts
of their firesides nerved their hearts. They continued to drop silently
down the river, keeping a good lookout for strolling Indians; and in
the night two of them only slept, while the third managed the boat. In
this manner they pursued their journey, until they arrived safely, with
their trophies, at their homes, totally unexpected by their mourning
friends, who supposed that they had been butchered by their ruthless
conquerors. It must truly have been an affecting meeting for Mrs.
Dustin, who likewise supposed that all she loved, - all she held dear
on earth - was laid in the silent tomb.
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After recovering from the fatigue of the journey, they started for
Boston, where they arrived on the 21st of April. They carried with
them the gun and tomahawk, and their ten scalps - those witnesses
that would not lie; and while there, the general court gave them fifty
pounds, as a reward for their heroism. The report of their daring
deed soon spread into every part of the country, and when Colonel
Nicholson, governor of Maryland, heard of it, he sent them a very
valuable present, and many presents were also made to them by their
neighbors.
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1838-1839
JOHN WARNER BARBER
ABINGTON, MASS.
ACTON, MASS.
ADAMS, MASS.
ALFORD, MASS.
AMESBURY, MASS.
AMHERST, MASS.
ANDOVER, MASS.
ASHBURNHAM, MASS.
ASHBY, MASS.
ASHFIELD, MASS.
ATHOL, MASS.
ATTLEBOROUGH, MASS.
AUBURN, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
BARNSTABLE, MASS.
BARRE, MASS.
BECKET, MASS.
BEDFORD, MASS.
BELCHERTOWN, MASS.
BELLINGHAM, MASS.
BERLIN, MASS.
BERNARDSTON, MASS.
BEVERLY, MASS.
BILLERICA, MASS.
BLANDFORD, MASS.
BOLTON, MASS.
BOSTON, MASS.
BOXBOROUGH, MASS.
BOXFORD, MASS.
BOYLSTON, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
BRADFORD, MASS.
BRAINTREE, MASS.
BREWSTER, MASS.
BRIDGEWATER, MASS.
BRIGHTON, MASS.
BRIMFIELD, MASS.
BROOKFIELD, MASS.
BROOKLINE, MASS.
BUCKLAND, MASS.
BURLINGTON, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
CANTON, MASS.
CARVER, MASS.
CHARLEMONT, MASS.
CHARLESTOWN, MASS.
CHARLTON, MASS.
CHATHAM, MASS.
CHELMSFORD, MASS.
CHELSEA, MASS.
CHESHIRE, MASS.
CHESTER, MASS.
CHESTERFIELD, MASS.
CHILMARK, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
CLARKSBURG, MASS.
COHASSET, MASS.
COLERAINE, MASS.
CONCORD, MASS.
CONWAY, MASS.
CUMMINGTON, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
DALTON, MASS.
DANA, MASS.
DANVERS, MASS.
DARTMOUTH, MASS.
DEDHAM, MASS.
DEERFIELD, MASS.
DENNIS, MASS.
DIGHTON, MASS.
DORCHESTER, MASS.
DOUGLASS, MASS.
DUDLEY, MASS.
DUNSTABLE, MASS.
DUXBURY, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
EAST BRIDGEWATER
EASTHAM, MASS.
EASTHAMPTON, MASS.
EASTON, MASS.
EDGARTOWN, MASS.
EGREMONT, MASS.
ENFIELD, MASS.
ERVING, MASS.
ESSEX, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
FAIRHAVEN, MASS.
FALL RIVER, MASS.
FALMOUTH, MASS.
FITCHBURG, MASS.
FLORIDA, MASS.
FOXBOROUGH, MASS.
FRAMINGHAM, MASS.
FRANKLIN, MASS.
FREETOWN, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
GARDNER, MASS.
GEORGETOWN, MASS.
GILL, MASS.
GLOUCESTER, MASS.
GOSHEN, MASS.
GRAFTON, MASS.
GRANBY, MASS.
GRANVILLE, MASS.
GREAT BARRINGTON
GREENFIELD, MASS.
GREENWICH, MASS.
GROTON, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
HADLEY, MASS.
HALIFAX, MASS.
HAMILTON, MASS.
HANCOCK, MASS.
HANOVER, MASS.
HANSOM, MASS.
HARDWICK, MASS.
HARVARD, MASS.
HARWICH, MASS.
HATFIELD, MASS.
HAVERHILL, MASS.
HAWLEY, MASS.
HEATH, MASS.
HINGHAM, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
HINSDALE, MASS.
HOLDEN, MASS.
HOLLAND, MASS.
HOLLISTON, MASS.
HOPKINTON, MASS.
HUBBARDSTON, MASS.
HULL, MASS.
IPSWICH, MASS.
KINGSTON, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
LANCASTER, MASS.
LANESBOROUGH, MASS.
LEE, MASS.
LEICESTER, MASS.
LENOX, MASS.
LEOMINSTER, MASS.
LEVERETT, MASS.
LEXINGTON, MASS.
LEYDEN, MASS.
LINCOLN, MASS.
LITTLETON, MASS.
LONGMEADOW, MASS.
LOWELL, MASS.
LUDLOW, MASS.
LUNENBURG, MASS.
LYNN, MASS.
LYNNFIELD, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
MALDEN, MASS.
MANCHESTER, MASS.
MANSFIELD, MASS.
MARBLEHEAD, MASS.
MARLBOROUGH, MASS.
MARSHFIELD, MASS.
MARSHPEE, MASS.
MEDFIELD, MASS.
MEDFORD, MASS.
MEDWAY, MASS.
MENDON, MASS.
METHUEN, MASS.
MIDDLEBOROUGH, MASS.
MIDDLEFIELD, MASS.
MIDDLETON, MASS.
MILFORD, MASS.
MILLBURY, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
MILTON, MASS.
MONROE, MASS.
MONSON, MASS.
MONTAGUE, MASS.
MONTGOMERY, MASS.
MOUNT WASHINGTON
NANTUCKET, MASS.
NATICK, MASS.
NEEDHAM, MASS.
NEW ASHFORD, MASS.
NEW BEDFORD, MASS.
NEW BRAINTREE, MASS.
NEWBURY, MASS.
NEWBURYPORT, MASS.
NEW MARLBOROUGH
NEW SALEM, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
NEWTON, MASS.
NORTHAMPTON, MASS.
NORTHBOROUGH, MASS.
NORTHBRIDGE, MASS.
NORTH BRIDGEWATER
NORTH BROOKFIELD
NORTHFIELD, MASS.
NORTON, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
OAKHAM, MASS.
ORANGE, MASS.
ORLEANS, MASS.
OTIS, MASS.
OXFORD, MASS.
PALMER, MASS.
PAWTUCKET, MASS.
PAXTON, MASS.
PELHAM, MASS.
PEMBROKE, MASS.
PEPPERELL, MASS.
PERU, MASS.
PETERSHAM, MASS.
PHILLIPSTON, MASS.
PITTSFIELD, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
PLYMOUTH, MASS.
PLYMPTON, MASS.
PRESCOTT, MASS.
PRINCETON, MASS.
PROVINCETOWN, MASS.
QUINCY, MASS.
RANDOLPH, MASS.
RAYNHAM, MASS.
READING, MASS.
REHOBOTH, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
RICHMOND, MASS.
ROCHESTER, MASS.
ROWE, MASS.
ROWLEY, MASS.
ROXBURY, MASS.
ROYALSTON, MASS.
RUSSELL, MASS.
RUTLAND, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
SALEM, MASS.
SALISBURY, MASS.
SANDISFIELD, MASS.
SANDWICH, MASS.
SAUGUS, MASS.
SAVOY, MASS.
SCITUATE, MASS.
SEEKONK, MASS.
SHARON, MASS.
SHEFFIELD, MASS.
SHELBURNE, MASS.
SHERBURNE, MASS.
SHIRLEY, MASS.
SHREWSBURY, MASS.
SHUTESBURY, MASS.
SOMERSET, MASS.
SOUTHAMPTON, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
SOUTHBRIDGE, MASS.
SOUTH HADLEY, MASS.
SOUTH READING, MASS.
SPENCER, MASS.
SPRINGFIELD, MASS.
STERLING, MASS.
STOCKBRIDGE, MASS.
STONEHAM, MASS.
STOUGHTON, MASS.
STOW, MASS.
STURBRIDGE, MASS.
SUDBURY, MASS.
SUNDERLAND, MASS.
SUTTON, MASS.
SWANSEY, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
TAUNTON, MASS.
TEMPLETON, MASS.
TEWKSBURY, MASS.
TISBURY, MASS.
TOLLAND, MASS.
TOWNSEND, MASS.
TRURO, MASS.
TYNGSBOROUGH, MASS.
TYRINGHAM, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
UPTON, MASS.
UXBRIDGE, MASS.
WALES, MASS.
WALPOLE, MASS.
WALTHAM, MASS.
WARE, MASS.
WAREHAM, MASS.
WARREN, MASS.
WARWICK, MASS.
WASHINGTON, MASS.
WATERTOWN, MASS.
WAYLAND, MASS.
WEBSTER, MASS.
WELLFLEET, MASS.
WENDELL, MASS.
WESTBOROUGH, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
WEST BOYLSTON, MASS.
WEST CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
WESTFIELD, MASS.
WESTFORD, MASS.
WESTHAMPTON, MASS.
WESTMINSTER, MASS.
WESTON, MASS.
WESTPORT, MASS.
WEST SPRINGFIELD
WEST STOCKBRIDGE
WEYMOUTH, MASS.
WHATELY, MASS.
WICHENDON, MASS.
WILBRAHAM, MASS.
WILLIAMSBURG, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS.
WILMINGTON, MASS.
WINDSOR, MASS.
WOBURN, MASS.
WORCESTER, MASS.
WORTHINGTON, MASS.
WRENTHAM, MASS.
YARMOUTH, MASS.
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1838-1839
1838-1839
The Phrenological Association met in Birmingham.
THE SCIENCE OF 1839
Hiram Powers finished his white marble bust of President Andrew Jackson, for which Jackson had sat to be
modeled from life while at the White House at the age of 68. “Make me as I am,” the old man had instructed,
which pretty well excluded carving the bust out of ebony, perhaps even out of hickory! The bust is now
in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It would be interesting to determine how craniologically PC or non-PC
this bust is, in consideration of contemporaneous phrenological theory.
Dr. Charles Caldwell, a racist who was a professor at a university in Kentucky, had at this point become the
most popular phrenologist in America partly by pandering to the American need for a scientific legitimation
of genocide.
Who knows what the white man knows?
— The white man knows.
However, the mainline American scientific establishment –under the leadership of the American school of
ethnology based in Philadelphia– would over the course of the next ten years take this cudgel away from
phrenology, by developing their own scientific legitimations for genocide that could not so easily be dismissed
as a sideshow-tent fad. You may have been exposed, in your early schooling, to some of this ethnological
material, in the strange scientific case study called “the Dukes versus the Kalikaks” — in which the names of
two Appalachian families were changed in order to protect innocent victims of scientific study and in order to
protect guilty perpetrators of scientific fraud. In this day and age, to be against slavery was to be antiscientific.
In this year Alexander Kinmont’s TWELVE LECTURES ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MAN and Professor
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Samuel George Morton’s CRANIA AMERICANA; OR, A COMPARATIVE VIEW OF THE SKULLS OF VARIOUS
ABORIGINAL NATIONS OF NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA: TO WHICH IS PREFIXED AN ESSAY ON THE VARIETIES
OF THE HUMAN SPECIES. ILLUSTRATED BY SEVENTY-EIGHT PLATES AND A COLOURED MAP (Philadelphia: J.
Dobson) changed the American focus for such theorizing, by supposedly demonstrating that the inferiority of
the Native American race was based on breeding rather than on environment, a conclusion supported by
detailed scientific examination of the world’s largest collection of human skulls (world’s largest in pre-Nazi
times, that is).
The intellectual faculties of this great family
appear to be of a decidedly inferior cast when
compared with those of the Caucasian or Mongolian
races.
CRANIA AMERICANA
Henry David Thoreau would read and make notes on Professor Morton’s CRANIA AMERICANA, including in his
notes the professor’s remark that the American Indians “have made but trifling progress in mental culture or
the useful arts.”
“Scientists have power by virtue of the respect
commanded by the discipline. We may therefore be sorely
tempted to misuse that power in furthering a personal
prejudice or social goal — why not provide that extra
oomph by extending the umbrella of science over a
personal preference in ethics or politics?”
— Stephen Jay Gould
BULLY FOR BRONTOSAURUS
NY: Norton, 1991, page 429
The prevailing viewpoint in America had for many years been that attitude enunciated by the Reverend Samuel
Stanhope Smith (1750-1819) in his influential 1787 treatise, AN ESSAY ON THE CAUSES OF THE VARIETY OF
COMPLEXION AND FIGURE IN THE HUMAN SPECIES... in which he had argued that the intellectual and moral
condition of black people in America had been produced by “the humiliating circumstances in which they find
themselves” just as the color of their skin had been produced by their long exposure to the African sun and
thus eventually could be expected under better conditions to fade to whiteness. Race, in other words, rather
than constituting an inflexible biological category, had been considered to be mutable. This presumption was
apparently being demolished at this point by the “objective” craniological analyses being presented in such
great detail in Dr. Morton’s treatise.
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June 25, 1852: What a mean & wretched creature is man by & by some Dr Morton may be filling
your cranium with white mustard seed to learn its internal capacity.
Of all the ways invented to come at a knowledge of a living man — this seems to me the worst — as it is the
most belated. You would learn more by once paring the toe nails of the living subject. There is nothing out of
which the spirit has more completely departed — & in which it has left fewer significant traces.
In CRANIA AMERICANA Professor Morton divided humankind primarily into four races with the following
racial characteristics:34
•
•
•
•
Europeans: “The Caucasian Race is characterized by a naturally fair skin, susceptible of every tint;
hair fine, long and curling, and of various colors. The skull is large and oval, and its anterior
portion full and elevated. The face is small in proportion to the head, of an oval form, with wellproportioned features.... This race is distinguished for the facility with which it attains the highest
intellectual endowments.... The spontaneous fertility of [the Caucasus] has rendered it the hive of
many nations, which extending their migrations in every direction, have peopled the finest portions
of the earth, and given birth to its fairest inhabitants....”
Asians: “This great division of the human species is characterized by a sallow or olive colored
skin, which appears to be drawn tight over the bones of the face; long black straight hair, and thin
beard. The nose is broad, and short; the eyes are small, black, and obliquely placed, and the
eyebrows are arched and linear; the lips are turned, the cheek bones broad and flat.... In their
intellectual character the Mongolians are ingenious, imitative, and highly susceptible of cultivation
[i.e. learning]....So versatile are their feelings and actions, that they have been compared to the
monkey race, whose attention is perpetually changing from one object to another....”
Native Americans: “The American Race is marked by a brown complexion; long, black, lank hair;
and deficient beard. The eyes are black and deep set, the brow low, the cheekbones high, the nose
large and aquiline, the mouth large, and the lips tumid [swollen] and compressed.... In their mental
character the Americans are averse to cultivation, and slow in acquiring knowledge; restless,
revengeful, and fond of war, and wholly destitute of maritime adventure. They are crafty, sensual,
ungrateful, obstinate and unfeeling, and much of their affection for their children may be traced to
purely selfish motives. They devour the most disgusting [foods] uncooked and uncleaned, and seem
to have no idea beyond providing for the present moment.... Their mental faculties, from infancy to
old age, present a continued childhood.... [Indians] are not only averse to the restraints of
education, but for the most part are incapable of a continued process of reasoning on abstract
subjects....”
Africans: “Characterized by a black complexion, and black, woolly hair; the eyes are large and
prominent, the nose broad and flat, the lips thick, and the mouth wide; the head is long and narrow,
the forehead low, the cheekbones prominent, the jaws protruding, and the chin small. In disposition
the Negro is joyous, flexible, and indolent; while the many nations which compose this race present
a singular diversity of intellectual character, of which the far extreme is the lowest grade of
humanity.... The moral and intellectual character of the Africans is widely different in different
nations.... The Negroes are proverbially fond of their amusements, in which they engage with great
exuberance of spirit; and a day of toil is with them no bar to a night of revelry. Like most other
barbarous nations their institutions are not infrequently characterized by superstition and cruelty.
They appear to be fond of warlike enterprises, and are not deficient in personal courage; but, once
overcome, they yield to their destiny, and accommodate themselves with amazing facility to every
change of circumstance. The Negroes have little invention, but strong powers of imitation, so that
they readily acquire mechanic arts. They have a great talent for music, and all their external senses
are remarkably acute.”
34. Professor Morton claimed to be able to evaluate the intellectual capacity of a race as a function of its skull volume. A large skull
meant a large brain and high intellectual capacity, and a small skull indicated a small brain and decreased intellectual capacity.
Of course, since female skull sizes are smaller than male skull sizes ... but I don’t know that Professor Morton went there.
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In this year Dr. Samuel George Morton was made Professor of Anatomy at Pennsylvania College (later to be
known as the University of Pennsylvania).
In America, volumes 3 and 4 of Thomas Carlyle’s CRITICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS were being put
through the presses:
MISC. ESSAYS, VOL. III
MISC. ESSAYS, VOL. IV
Copies of these volumes would of course be in Henry Thoreau’s personal library.
The Chartist petition presented in the previous year having gotten exactly nowhere, a “charter” of political
reforms was presented to Parliament by workers and was likewise rejected. Ebenezer Elliott renounced
Chartism. A pamphlet entitled CHARTISM was being produced in England:
[Carlyle’s]
“might
is
right”
argument
presupposes
ultimately
benevolent and uncorrupt aims behind the might; those reading Carlyle
now find it hard to share such assumptions, as indeed many of his
contemporaries did. He justified his view by saying that a purely
brutal conquest would never last, but would be flung out; in modern
times, the fate of Nazism and Stalinism supports his view, and the
Terror in France had proved it to him. The true strong man, for that
reason, was always wise; his strength lay in the soul rather than the
body, and was drawn from God.
One true inheritor of this tradition of thought:
“I cannot see why man should not be just as cruel as
nature.”
— Adolf “Mr. Natural” Hitler
Charles Darwin saw the raw effects of this Carlylean reasoning process and the alleged or eponymous founder
of “Social Darwinism” was at once fascinated and bemused — and repelled.35
The Fuegians ... struck Darwin as more like animals than men....
Thoreau’s single overt citation of Darwin in WALDEN refers to
one
of
PROTO
-NAZISM
Darwin’s few concessions to the Fuegians’ superior powers, their
adaptation to the cold climate (WALDEN, pages 12-13). This is but one
among many spots where WALDEN undermines the hierarchies of
civilization/barbarity (the villagers are bizarre penance-performing
Brahmins) and humanity/animal (the villagers as prairie dogs, himself
competing with squirrels for fall forage). Such instances of undermining
do not reflect Thoreau’s attempt to quarrel with Darwin as much as
Thoreau’s desire to accentuate tendencies already present in Darwin and
other travelers’ accounts. ...Darwin, like Thoreau albeit to a lesser
degree, was prepared to relativize moral distinctions between “advanced’
and “backward” cultures and between human and animal estates.
“It is impossible to reflect on the state of the
American continent without astonishment. Formerly it
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must have swarmed with great monsters; now we find mere
pygmies compared with the antecedent, allied races.”
Dr. William Andrus Alcott’s CONFESSIONS OF A SCHOOL MASTER. Andover, NY: Gould, Newman and
Saxton, 316 pages (Illustrative of William’s early career as a teacher, and of general conditions as well.)
35. The guy who was absolutely fascinated by this hatemongering was not Darwin, a man who still had hope for human decency,
but the headmaster of Rugby, Dr. Thomas Arnold.
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During roughly this year, one pupil at the Concord Academy was Thomas Hosmer of Bedford,
who would grow up to be a dentist in Boston, but who at this time was walking daily to Concord for classes.
Many years later, in his instar as “adult Boston dentist,” this Thomas Hosmer would write to Dr. Edward
Waldo Emerson and relate of his teacher Henry Thoreau that:
I have seen children catch him by the hand, as he was
going home from school, to walk with him and hear more.
Another of the boys being taught in this year, presumably about 12 years of age, was the Cyrus Warren whom
Thoreau would years later chance upon as a grown man walking along the sidewalk:
November 10, Monday, 1851: … In relation to politics–to society–aye to the whole out-ward world I
am tempted to ask–Why do they lay such stress on a particular experience which you have had?– That after 25
years you should meet Cyrus Warren again on the sidewalk! Haven’t I budged an inch then?– 36 This daily
routine should go on then like those–it must be conceded–vital functions of digestion–circulation of the blood
&c which in health we know nothing about. A wise man is as unconscious of the movements in the body politic
as he is of digestion & the circulation of the blood in the natural body. …
36. Thoreau was later to copy this into his early lecture “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” as:
[Paragraph 61] In relation to politics, to what is called society—aye, often to
the whole outward world, I am often tempted to ask—why such stress is laid
on a particular experience which you have had?—that after twenty-five years
you should meet Hobbins—registrar of deeds, again on the side-walk?1
Haven’t I budged an inch then?
1. There were no County Registrars of Deeds by the name of Hobbins in Massachusetts from 1823
to 1862.
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At Montréal, Thomas Clotworthy, 17 years of age, and Henry Cole, 11 years of age, found sharing a bed, were
persecuted in a court of law.
In his journal for this year, on the road to Stonewall,37 Henry Thoreau would write
“The first I conceive of true friendship when some rare specimen of manhood presents itself.”
Speculations about eroticized friendship appear also in journal
entries Thoreau was making in 1839, wherein he meditates on the
relation between love and friendship. His “rare specimens” are
described horticulturally —like Waldo Emerson’s and Walt Whitman’s
leaves— as “young buds of manhood.” “By what degrees of
consanguinity,” he inquires, “is this succulent and rank growing slip
of manhood related to me?” The “degrees of consanguinity” of course
suggest those limits within which marriage is allowed or disallowed.
The sanctified relationships he imagines with these rare specimens
of manhood are indeed holy, for in them he can “worship moral beauty”
manifest in manly flesh. He is touched by transcendental ecstasy when
he sees them, for “they are some fresher wind that blows, some new
fragrance that breathes.” Nearly divinities, Thoreau's young men
create the world he lives in: “they make the landscape and sky for
us” (JOURNAL, 1906, 1: 107-108). Thoreau's metaphors protest the
separation of and work to conflate friendship and homoerotic passion:
“commonly we degrade Love and Friendship by presenting them under a
trivial dualism” (JOURNAL, 1906, 1: 107-108). The friendship tradition
as practiced by the vast majority of heterosexual writers
participated in that dualism by imposing on friendship a misread
Platonism and by firmly separating it from the presumed sole
legitimate arena of sexual experience, the heterosexual. Such texts
expressed capitalized Friendship in terms of male friendships only,
as Emerson clearly does in his essay on the subject. This of course
could also be a complicit action, for it thus gave writers the chance
to engage in extravagant protestations of male-male friendship, which
could pass without any imputation of impropriety —either physically
or emotionally— though such impropriety may indeed have been implied,
intended, or even desired. But Thoreau is willing to theorize a
dualism between manly love and other —heterosexual— love: “the rules
of other intercourse are all inapplicable to this.” “This”
intercourse —specifically made different in his text from the “other
intercourse”— has special laws and a special site, a divine realm he
calls a “parcel of heaven.” When we are separated from that “parcel
of heaven we call our friend,” that separation is “source enough for
all the elegies that ever were written” (JOURNAL, 1906, 1: 107-108).
37. Refer to Bryne R.S. Fone’s A ROAD TO STONEWALL: MALE HOMOSEXUALITY AND HOMOPHOBIA IN ENGLISH AND
AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1750-1969.
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Per Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965:
Chapter 5 (1838-1841) -Henry Thoreau opened his own tutoring service in June 1838
and by October he had taken over as master of Concord Academy, where he was soon
joined by his brother John. John taught the “English branches” and Henry Greek,
Latin, French, physical and natural sciences, philosophy and history. The school
was successful and very highly regarded but was discontinued after 3 years due to
John’s illness.
John and Henry left for a trip on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers on Aug 31, 1839.
The fourteen day journey “on the surface was simply a vacation lark of the two
young men. But as the years passed, it had a growing significance in Thoreau’s
mind.” The trip provided much of the eventual material for A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND
MERRIMACK RIVERS.
Chapter 6 (1839-1842) Thoreau’s Loves -Ellen Devereux Sewall visited Concord and
the Thoreau house in June of 1839. Henry fell deeply in love with her and began to
write love poems immediately. His brother John also fell for her, and went to visit
her immediately after their river trip (at Scituate).
Henry “stepped aside” for brother John, whose proposal of marriage was refused.
Henry proposed later by mail but, as his journal indicates, expected the refusal
he received. Henry never forgot Ellen and shortly before his death avowed “I have
always loved her.”
Henry fell in love again in 1842 with Mary Russell but it came to nothing. After
1842 Henry Thoreau was a confirmed bachelor and outwardly portrayed a Victorian
aversion to the subject of sex.
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Chapter 7(a) (1839-1843) -On Sept 18, 1839 the Hedge Club proposed the creation of
the Dial. Margaret Fuller was the first editor.
Henry Thoreau published the following in the Dial: 1st issue -poem “Sympathy” (for
Ellen Devereux Sewall) July 1840 -short critical essay on Aulus Persius Flaccus Roman poet July 1841 -“Sic Vita” Oct 1841 -poem on friendship July 1842 -(Waldo
Emerson now editor) NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS and “My Prayer” Oct 1842 -8 poems
“The Black Knight,” “The Inward Morning,” “Free Love,” “The Poet’s Delay,” “Rumors
from an Aeolian Harp,” “The Moon,” “To a Maiden in the East” and “The Summer Rain.”
It turned out to be a better than average addition due to the quality of the
contributions. October 1843 “A Winter Walk” (essay) January 1844 -Pindar
translation and appreciative essay on the anti-slavery weekly Herald of Freedom.
In all Thoreau published 31 poems, essays and other contributions in the Dial.
The Dial dissolved as the Transcendentalists drifted apart, but Thoreau “still kept
the flame of Transcendentalism burning in his own life.”
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JANUARY 1839
January: While attending Harvard College’s law school,38 Richard Henry Dana, Jr. was appointed to instruct
in elocution at the college (he would resign during February 1840).
38. Just in case you didn’t know: Harvard Law School had been founded with money from the selling of slaves in the sugarcane
fields of Antigua.
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January: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Lily’s Quest” was published. He had become engaged to Sophia
Amelia Peabody. At the suggestion of Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, the historian George Bancroft,
Collector of the Port, arranged for him to become a Weigher and Gauger at the Boston Custom House. As a
political appointee in the customs administration, Hawthorne would willingly take part in a kickback scheme
in which his subordinates who were authorized for overtime work and the payment for such overtime were to
share their additional pay half and half with his political party. In addition, he personally suspended from their
employment those of his inspectors who refused to submit to such extortion (in today’s political climate, had
he been detected in such schemes he would most assuredly have gone to prison, like his son Julian later — but
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there’s no indication whatever that he experienced such activity as morally repugnant).
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January: In New Bedford, Frederick Douglass liked his free trial subscription to The Liberator, and so, out of
his very limited income, he went ahead and subscribed:
Frederick Douglass’s NARRATIVE
In about four months after I went to New Bedford, there came a young man to me, and
inquired if I did not wish to take the “Liberator.” I told him I did; but, just having
made my escape from slavery, I remarked that I was unable to pay for it then. I, however,
finally became a subscriber to it. The paper came, and I read it from week to week with
such feelings as it would be quite idle for me to attempt to describe. The paper became
my meat and my drink. My soul was set all on fire. Its sympathy for my brethren in bonds
— its scathing denunciations of slaveholders — its faithful exposures of slavery — and
its powerful attacks upon the upholders of the institution — sent a thrill of joy through
my soul, such as I had never felt before!
I had not long been a reader of the “Liberator,” before I got a pretty correct idea of
the principles, measures and spirit of the anti-slavery reform. I took right hold of the
cause.
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January 1, Tuesday: Per page 315 of The Crayon of New-York for October 1857, on this day John Pounds,
creator of the 1st “ragged school,” had died:
Sketchings
EXHIBITION OF THE WORKS OF BRITISH ARTISTS.
WEHNERT sends “The First Ragged School,” and connected
with this picture is the following account of the
founder of Ragged Schools.
John Pounds, the cobbler and the “founder
of Ragged Schools,” was born at Portsmouth
in 1766. The adopting of a little nephew seems
to have been the beginning of the noble career
for
which
he
has
become
celebrated;
for, thinking the boy would learn better with a
companion, he took the son of a very poor woman
to join him in his studies, and, becoming
fascinated by the occupation of teaching, he
gradually increased the number of his pupils.
The little workshop in St. Mary street,
Portsmouth, measuring only eighteen feet by
six, where he made and mended boots and shoes,
and which had hitherto been filled only with
singing-birds and small animals, now become
crowded with children of the lowest and poorest
classes, sometimes amounting to nearly forty
boys and girls. Pounds used often to go down
to the quays, and, by bribes of roasted
potatoes and such-like, induced the ragged
little children to come to his school.
Besides reading, writing, etc., he taught them
to cook their victuals, and to mend their
clothes
and
shoes.
He
was
often
their
playfellow, their doctor, or their nurse.
As he would never take payment of any kind for
his trouble, he selected his pupils from the
most wretched; and sometimes, when he has
learned that parents in a position to pay a
schoolmaster
have
fraudulently
gained
admittance to his school for their children, he
has dismissed them to make room for others more
needy. John Pounds died on New-Years Day, 1839.
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Amelia Peabody seen to have reached an understanding by this point, that
they were to be husband and wife.
Robert Schumann discovered the score of Franz Schubert’s Great C Major Symphony at the home of
Schubert’s brother, Ferdinand.
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January 7, Monday: The 1st overland contingent of 660 members of the Cherokee nation led by John Bell
arrived at Fort Gibson in the Oklahoma Territory.
TRAIL OF TEARS
Louis Daguerre presented his photographic process to the French Academy of Science.
January 11, Friday: Nathaniel Hawthorne, a loyal Democrat party hack, accepted employment as measurer of
coal and salt at the Boston Custom House in place of one Paul L. George who was dismissed, at a nominal
salary of $1,500.00 per year39 although the office actually would generate an income of about twice that per
year for its holder. While there Hawthorne would live in two rented rooms in a home at 54 Pinckney Street (in
this year the family would also live at 8 Somerset Place).
January 16, Wednesday: Gesang am Grabe by Richard Wagner to words of von Brackel was performed for
the initial time, in the Jakobi-Kirchhof, Riga.
Waldo Emerson’s 6th lecture in the “Human Life” series at the Masonic Temple in Boston, “The Protest.”
Bronson Alcott and Jones Very were in the audience although not together. Emerson made “a splendid Protest
against every lie in life.”40
January 17, Thursday: The group of some 1,200 members of the Cherokee nation led by Cherokee John
Benge arrived in the Oklahoma Territory.
TRAIL OF TEARS
39. To get a sense of what that amounted to in today’s money, consult <http://www.measuringworth.com/exchange/>
40. One almost wishes it had been a formal debate, with an opponent to sponsor the contrary attitude.
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January 18, Friday: William Henry Fox Talbot demonstrated the results of a decade of experimentation with
photography to the Royal Institute.
The following advertisement appeared in William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator:
January 29, Tuesday: The lightkeeper on Matinicus Rock, despite the demolition of his wooden home and its
lighttowers in the storm of the 27th, had managed to hang a beacon from a jury-rigged mast in order to warn
ships away from the shoal.
On this day (or possibly, shortly before) Jones Very attended one of Bronson Alcott’s “Conversations” in Lynn,
Massachusetts. The topic was “Instinct” and Alcott felt that Very had made a real contribution, although the
intensity of it made him wonder how long such a phenomenon could be sustained — whether to anticipate that
Very would “decease soon.”
Charles Darwin got married with Emma Wedgwood.
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FEBRUARY 1839
February 8, Friday: Waldo Emerson wrote a note full of condescension-humor to Margaret Fuller about
“my Henry Thoreau,” characterizing him in quasi-Old Testament terms not as “my protector” but as
“my protester,” and evaluating that the young man had “broken out into good poetry & better prose.”
A letter from Thomas Carlyle to Emerson indicates that he had just received a bill of exchange for £100 from
America in payment for some publications of his works, which had been arranged for by Emerson.
February 9, Saturday: John Thoreau, Jr. came and took over the duties of Preceptor at the Concord Academy,
and his name began to appear as such in advertisements in the Yeoman’s Gazette:
Concord Academy. / The Above School will be continued
under the care of the subscriber, after the
commencement of the spring term, Monday, March 11th. /
Terms for the Quarter: / English branches, $4.00 /
Languages included 6.00 / He will be assisted in the
classical department by Henry D. Thoreau, the present
instructor. / N.B. Writing will be particularly
attended to. / John Thoreau, Jr., Preceptor. / Concord,
Feb. 9, 1838
Hector Berlioz was appointed deputy curator of the Paris Conservatoire Library (the appointment and salary
were retroactive to January 1st).
On an expedition led by English explorer John Balleny, Captain Thomas Freeman landed at what are now
deemed the Balleny Islands, just long enough to collect some rock specimens (this happened to be the initial
landing south of the Antarctic Circle).
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February 11, Monday: After barely 2 months on the island of Mallorca, Frédéric François Chopin, George
Sand, and her children left Valldemosa. Their stay had been generally disappointing and was damaging
Chopin’s health — he coughed blood on a regular basis.
Samuel Tenney Hildreth, younger brother of Richard Hildreth, who had been at Harvard College a chum of
David Henry Thoreau, died at the age of 21. The body would be placed at Mount Auburn Cemetery beneath
an inscription:
“The Good die first,
And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust
Burn to the socket.”
February 15, Friday: For this day in Canadian history, view the film “February 15, 1839.”
Waldo Emerson sent off a note to Henry Thoreau asking that he help Margaret Fuller find a house in Concord
— and as an afterthought invited him to meet an Amos Bronson Alcott at the home of his sister-in-law Mrs.
Lucy Jackson Brown.
Friday, 15 Feb. [1840]
My dear Sir
The dull weather & some
inflammation still hold me in
the house, and so may cost you
some trouble. I wrote to Miss Fuller
at Groton a week ago that as soon
as Saturday (tomorrow) I would
endeavor to send her more accurate
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answers to her request for information in respect to houses likely
that to be let in Concord. As I know she &
^ her family must be anxious to learn
the facts, as[]soon as may be, I
beg you to help me in procuring
the information today, if your
engagements will leave you
space for this charity.
My questions are
1. Is Dr Gallup’s house to be vacant
shortly, &, if so, what is the rent?
It belongs, I believe, to Col. Shattuck.
2. What does Mrs Goodwin determine
Page 2
in regard to the house now
occupied by Mr Gourgas?
Since, if she do not wish to
apply for that house, I think
that will suit Mrs F. If it is
to be had, what is the rent?
Col. Shattuck is also the lessor
of this house.
3. What is the rent of your Aunt[’s]
house, & when will it be rentable?
4 Pray ask your father if
he knows of any other houses
in the village that may want
tenants in the spring.
If sometime this evening
you can without much
inconvenience give me an
answer to these queries,
you will greatly oblige your
imprisoned friend
R. W. Emerson.
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February 16, Saturday: On this evening Henry Thoreau would encounter Bronson Alcott for the 1st time.
Advertisement for the Concord Academy under Preceptor John Thoreau, Jr.:
String Quartet no.3 op.44/1 by Felix Mendelssohn was performed for the initial time, in Leipzig.
February 20, Wednesday: The final lecture of Waldo Emerson’s “Human Life” series.
The United States Congress banned dueling in the District of Columbia. In the future political duels would
necessitate a short carriage journey, to fields in the state of Virginia (a venue where such duels also, for
whatever this is worth, were illegal).
Simon Mayr read the 1st part of his HISTORY OF THE ORATORIO AND THE MYSTERIES at the Ateneo of
Bergamo.
According to the Congressional Globe, page 186, Appendix, Mr. Sevier of Arkansas made a comment on the
floor of the US Senate in derogation of the seriousness of attention of the American people:
[They must] at all times have an idol to worship, and a clown
to laugh at; they must have occasionally a Sam Patch, a Morgan,
an Abolitionist, or an Oceola, to marvel at, and to talk about.
February 23, Saturday: Advertisement for the Concord Academy under Preceptor John Thoreau, Jr.:
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February 24, Sunday: Mrs. Lidian “Asia” Jackson Emerson gave birth to Ellen Tucker Emerson, named after
Waldo Emerson’s first wife Mrs. Ellen Louisa Tucker Emerson. Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau acted as midwife.
Frédéric François Chopin, George Sand, and her children reached Marseilles. Wrote Sand, “A month more and
we would have died in Spain — he of melancholy and disgust and I of rage and indignation.” They would
remain in Marseilles for 3 months to give him time to recuperate.
Uruguay, claiming interference in internal affairs, declared war on Argentina.
February 25, Monday: Waldo Emerson to his journal:
Yesterday morning, 24 Feb. at 8 o’clock a daughter was born to
me, a soft, quiet, swarthy little creature, apparently perfect
& healthy. My second child. Blessings on thy head, little winter
bud! & comest thou to try thy luck in this world & know if the
things of God are things for thee? Well assured & very soft &
still, the little maiden expresses great contentment with all
she finds, & her delicate but fixed determination to stay where
she is, & grow. So be it, my fair child! Lidian, who
magnanimously makes my gods her gods, calls the babe Ellen.
I can hardly ask more for thee, my babe, than that name implies.
Be that vision & remain with us, & after us.
LIDIAN “ASIA” JACKSON EMERSON
ELLEN TUCKER EMERSON
ELLEN LOUISA TUCKER EMERSON
February 27, Wednesday or slightly before: Jones Very rode into Boston with Bronson Alcott and spent
the day at his home. Alcott became concerned for Very’s physical well-being: “He is more spectral than ever.”
The mental and emotional strain of such a sustained intensity was beginning to show up as physical wear
and tear on the body of this 26-year-old.
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MARCH 1839
March: The final group of the Cherokee Nation, headed by John Ross, reached Oklahoma. More than 3,000
Cherokee had died on this “Trail of Tears,” 1,600 of them while in the concentration camps at the point of
origin and about the same number en route. In the Oklahoma Territory during 1839, some 800 more would die.
TRAIL OF TEARS
The white Americans had succeeded in disposing of a bunch of nonwhite people they considered to be useless.
–Now, for the nonwhite people whom the white Americans considered to be useful, well, what a surprise,
during this month affairs had been being transacted quite a bit differently:
A negrero flying the Portuguese flag, the Constitucion, master J. Rodriguez, out of an unknown area of Africa
with a cargo of 213 enslaved Africans on its 2nd of two known Middle Passages, arrived at a port of Cuba.
A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Dois de Fevereiro, master unknown, out of Angola with a cargo of
414 enslaved Africans on one of its three known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at a port in Brazil.
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I have two different accounts of a slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Dois Irmaos, master unknown, on one
of its three or four known Middle Passage voyages, having sailed out of according to one account Cabinda
with a cargo of 580 enslaved Africans, arrived during this month at the port of Ilha Grande, Brazil, and,
according to the other account, having sailed out of Angola with a cargo of 195, arrived during this month at
Rio De Janeiro. Could this vessel have stopped off first at Ilha Grande and then gone on to Rio De Janeiro to
dispose of the remainder of its human cargo?
A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Liberal, master A. Sanchez, out of an unknown area of Africa with a
cargo of 257 enslaved Africans on one of its four known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at a port of Cuba.
A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Libertad, master unknown, on its one and only known Middle Passage,
arrived at its destination, Cuba.
A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Bom Jesus, master unknown, delivering a cargo of 300 enslaved
Africans on its one and only known Middle Passage, arrived at the port of Mangratiba, Brazil.
A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Augerona, master unknown, out of Angola with a cargo of
298 enslaved Africans on its one and only known Middle Passage, arrived at Rio, Brazil.
A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Carolina, master unknown, had started out of Quelimane on one of its
five known Middle Passage voyages with a cargo of 744 enslaved Africans but during this month was
delivering only 698 at the port of Paranagua, Brazil — as 46 had died in transit.
A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Doze de Outubro, master unknown, out of Angola with a cargo of
403 enslaved Africans on one of its five known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.
A Portuguese slaver, the Josefina, master A. Joze, out of an unknown area of Africa with a cargo of 235
enslaved Africans on one of its twelve-count-’em-twelve known such Passages, arrived in Cuban waters.
THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
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March: By the decade of the 1830s, it has been estimated, opium had become not only the main event of the
British-sponsored trade between India and China, but the single most lucrative item of all international
commerce. Then in this year a new mandarin arrived in Guangzhou (Canton), Imperial Commissioner Lin Tsehsü who had been governor of Hubei and Hunan provinces, and he had been the victor in an anti-opium purity
campaign in government circles in Beijing and had won a mandate from the Court of Heaven to extirpate this
unlawful wholesale recreational-drug traffic by foreigners which was proving to be so debilitating to the
citizenry and to the economy of the Central Kingdom and thus correct the outflow of the Chinese supply of
silver:
Lin Tse-hsü in 1850
In this month Lin demanded that 20,291 chests of the controlled substance, on hand in the warehouses
(godowns) of the British and their compradors, be surrendered. The Danish, German, American, and Spanish
traders immediately accommodated themselves to this new regulation and Lin confiscated and destroyed
20,283 opium chests,41 but British traders were infuriated. The British Chief Superintendent of Trade, Captain
Charles Elliot R.N., who had previously been the commander of a hospital ship and the Protector of Slaves in
British Guiana, acceded to Imperial High Commissioner Lin and handed over the opium chests, which were
promptly destroyed. The merchants withdrew to their “hell-ships” anchored in the harbor, where they would
be safe, Lin refused to sell them food or water, Captain Elliot fired on three Chinese war-junks, and hey presto:
both nations had ample reason to be at war.
41. Each chest contained 40 balls of opium wrapped in poppy leaves. Each ball weighed three pounds. Each ball had to be
completely dissolved in noxious chemicals and flushed away into the harbor in such manner as to ensure that it would not be
salvageable, as such psychotropic materials could not merely be burned without toxicity and as there existed a established secondary
market for merely sea-damaged opium balls. All in all we’re talking about a lot of hard work.
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Implementing the “forward policy” recommended by the Scottish merchants William Jardine and James
Matheson,42 Foreign Secretary Palmerston of Lord Melbourne’s whig government in London decided that the
imperialist
lackeys:
matter could be settled by putting gunboats on the major Chinese rivers.43 This would open up the Central
Kingdom both to Free Trade and to Christianity. Gladstone warned that this policy was “at variance both with
justice and religion” but succeeded only in isolating himself from other Members of Parliament in opposition.
After a few skirmishes it became clear that the British military equipment and organization could handily
defeat and destroy the Chinese war-junks, and so the Chinese agreed to cede to Britain a small, rocky island
at the sea mouth of the Pearl River, for their use as a commercial base. This island of 26 square miles had been
in use as a source of fresh water for ships, and was variously known at Incense Port, Fragrant Harbor, Aunty
Heung, Herukong, Shiankang, and Hong Kong.
During this year Samuel Russell & Co. of Boston and Hong Kong was giving up its opium trade.
SAMUEL WADSWORTH RUSSELL OF MIDDLETON CT
42. In 1939, Mao Zedong would list the “Opium Wars” as the first of “twelve historical landmarks” of the “struggle by the Chinese
people against imperialism and its lackeys” (SELECTED WORKS, Beijing 1967, Volume II, page 314).
43. One was always able to trust Henry John Temple, Lord Palmerston (1784-1865), “Lord Pumice-Stone,” to always leave a
situation worse rather than better.
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March 2, Saturday: Advertisement for the Concord Academy under Preceptor John Thoreau, Jr.:
When Pascal et Chambord, a vaudeville by Jacques Offenbach to words of Bourgeois and Brisebarre,
was performed for the initial time, at the Palais-Royal in Paris, it flopped.
March 8, Friday: Bronson Alcott reported to Margaret Fuller that he feared Jones Very would die or become
“hopelessly mad.” At this point, six months of the year which he had allotted to himself had passed, and Very
was isolating himself in his room at home at 154 Federal Street in Salem, for a sustained period of solitary
concentration, writing sonnets about the manifestation of deity on this earth, upon which to be alive is to be
dead and to be dead, alive.
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March 9, Saturday: The war between Mexico and France was brought to an end as Mexico promised to pay
compensation and French troops began to withdraw.
Prussia limited the work week, for children, to 51 hours.
Oliver Brown, the youngest of John Brown’s sons to reach adulthood, was born in Franklin, Ohio. He would
be a bookish lad.
(This son would be shot dead at the age of 20 while standing as a sentinel at the river bridge in Harpers Ferry.)
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March 12, Tuesday: At a meeting of blacks at the 3rd Christian Church in New Bedford, Frederick Douglass
opposed the idea of African colonization. This was his first public speaking.44
44. In this year Douglass would be licensed to preach by the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church of New Bedford (a
congregation distinct from the African Methodist Episcopal Church of New Bedford), although it would probably be too much to
refer to him as “Reverend Douglass” — since it appears that he was not so addressed during his lifetime.
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March 19, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson wrote Jones Very to invite him for a house visit on April 5th or 6th.
When Very did not participate in this planning, Evidently Emerson did not grasp that Very had sequestered
himself for a prolonged period –perhaps for the full remaining six months of the year allotted for his
performance as Jesus Christ– and began to fear that the invited houseguest would show up on the doorstep at
an inconvenient time and embarrass or offend other visitors. “I always value a visit the more when the time is
fixed beforehand. In the peculiar state of Jones Very, this is trebly true.”
March 20, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson lectured at the Concord Lyceum in Concord. This was the initial of a
total of 7 lectures from the “Human Life” series, “Home.”
William H. Leeman was born. He would be recruited in Maine as a 17-year-old very impressed with John
Brown. Being of a rather wild disposition, he would early leave his home in Maine. Educated in the public
schools of Saco and Hallowell ME, he would be working in a shoe factory in Haverhill MA at the age of 14.
In 1856 he would enter Kansas with the second Massachusetts colony of that year, and become a member of
Captain Brown’s “Volunteer Regulars” on September 9, 1856. He would fight well at Osawatomie when but
17 years old. Owen Brown would find him hard to control at Springdale IA. George B. Gill would say of him
that he had “a good intellect with great ingenuity.” By the raid upon Harpers Ferry he would have reached the
age of 20. On October 17, 1859, the youngest of the raiders, he would make a mad dash out of the relative
safety of the armory to swim down the Potomac River but two militiamen would catch up with him and shoot
him down on an islet in the river. His body would be used for target practice for hours by the drunken citizenry,
until the hail of bullets would push it into the current and it would be carried downstream. Mrs. Annie Brown
Adams would write of him: “He was only a boy. He smoked a good deal and drank sometimes; but perhaps
people would not think that so very wicked now. He was very handsome and very attractive.”
Lydia Maria Child petitioned the Massachusetts House of Representatives to abolish antiamalgamation
legislation.
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March 23, Saturday: At this point in journalism, it was a fad to use humorously incorrect initialisms. They
tried out for instance “K.Y.,” meaning “know yuse” or “no use,” an innovation that would not catch on.
However, in this day’s issue the Boston Morning Post pioneered something that would indeed catch on, catch
on big time, world wide: “o.k. — all correct” (so, despite whatever you have heard, the term “OK” did not
originate as a misspelling by Andrew Jackson, or as a Choctaw word, or as a superior brand of Army biscuit
— it stood, quite simply, for “oll korrekt”).
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March 24, Sunday: The final group of 1,766 members of the Cherokee Nation, led by Peter Hildebrand,
arrived at its destination in the Oklahoma Territory having lost 55 along the way due to hypothermia and
disease. The grand total for the relocation out of the concentration camps to the promised lands in the West
was that some 4,000 persons had been sacrificed. Here is a view of the Cherokee Trail of Tears by Robert
Lindneux, in the Woolaroc Museum, Bartlesville OK.
TRAIL OF TEARS
Imperial Commissioner Lin Tse-hsü ordered the arrest in Canton of Lawrence Dent, leading British opium
merchant. The foreigners refused to hand him over, so Lin ordered that the opium trade be halted and 350
foreigners were besieged in their “factories.”
Cesar Franck performed as piano soloist with the Conservatoire Concerts Society in Paris, offering the music
of Johann Nepomuk Hummel.
March 27, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson lectured at the Concord Lyceum in Concord. This was the 2d lecture
of the series, “Genius.”
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March 28, Thursday: A financial reappraisal of the Northampton Silk Company’s assets and liabilities led to
the withdrawal of Samuel Whitmarsh and his factory manager and the incorporation of an entirely new
management team. When this concern went bankrupt, it took with it the capital that David Lee Child was
counting on to underwrite his sugar beet business. Although after this event Whitmarsh would be being sued
by four of his creditors and would be being described locally as having “neither cash nor credit to buy a barrel
of flour,” he would promptly secure new investment funding in England for the foundation of a new silk
factory, this time in Jamaica.45
45. This Northampton enterprise also would founder, when its vital shipment of imported silkworms would arrive dead. However,
during this year Whitmarsh became a published author and an expert and a reputed authority on the manufacture of silk!
Whitmarsh, Samuel. EIGHT YEARS EXPERIENCE AND OBSERVATION IN THE CULTURE OF THE MULBERRY TREE
AND IN THE CARE OF THE SILK WORM. WITH REMARKS ADAPTED TO THE AMERICAN SYSTEM OF PRODUCING RAW SILK
FOR EXPORTATION. Northampton MA: J.H. Butler, 1839.
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March 29, Friday: Frederick Douglass’s remarks, at the meeting of blacks in New Bedford on March 12th, in
opposition to the idea of African colonization, were printed in William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator.
Douglass would have the important reading experience, of seeing something that he had himself said,
distanced and represented impersonally, in printed letters on a mass-produced sheet.
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SPRING 1839
Spring: Friend Lucretia Mott visited Boston for the 1st anniversary meeting of the Non-Resistance Society.
AN 1884 BIOGRAPHY
Spring: John Thoreau, Jr. and Henry Thoreau built their boat, the M USKETAQUID: “Our boat, which had cost
us a week’s labor in the spring, was in form like a fisherman’s dory, fifteen feet long by three and a half in
breadth at the widest part, painted green below, with a border of blue, with reference to the two elements in
which it was to spend its existence. It … was provided with wheels in order to be rolled around falls, as well
as two sets of oars, and several slender poles for shoving in shallow places, and also two masts, one of which
served as a tent-pole at night …. It was strongly built, but heavy, and hardly of better model than usual.”
Bronson Alcott wrote his old mother:
I am full of hope, and everything looks encouraging.
As to money, that you know, is one of the last of my
anxieties. I have many friends, and am making more
daily, and have only to be true to my principles, to
get not only a useful name, but bread and shelter, and
raiment....
I am still the same Hoper that I have always been. Hope
crowned me while I was following the plow on the barren
and rocky fields of that same farm on which you now
dwell, and Hope will never desert me either on this or
the other side of the grave.
I fancy that I was quickened and born in Hope, and Hope
in the form of a kind and smiling mother, nursed me,
rocked my cradle, and encouraged my aspirations, while
I was the child, and the youth, seeking life and light
amidst the scenes of my native hills. Those visits to
libraries; those scribblings on the floor; those hours
given to reading and study, at night or noon, or rainyday; and even those solitary wanderings over southern
lands, were this same Hope seeking to realize its
highest objects. My grandfather was a Hoper; my mother
inherited the old sentiment....
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APRIL 1839
April: Early in the month, on the River Gallindas of the Sierra Leone coast of Africa, the Havana trading house
of Don Pedro Martínez prepared human cargo for the negrero (slave ship) Tecora, and the long Middle Passage
to Cuba. Among the captives in this shipment was Joseph Cinqué, age 25, 5 feet 8 inches, a Mende who had
been a rice-grower. The passage of the Tecora across the Atlantic would require two months and more than
one out of three would fail to survive the crossing.
L A A MISTAD
The following description of conditions aboard the negrero during the Middle Passage would be given by
Gilabaru and, as passed on by James Covey for the benefit of reporters, would eventually be published in the
New-York Journal of Commerce:
On board the vessel there was a large number of men, but
the women and children were by far the most numerous.
They were fastened together by couples by the wrists and
legs and kept in that situation day and night. By day
it was no better. The space between the decks was so
small -according to their account not exceeding four
feet- that they were obliged, if they attempted to
stand, to keep a crouching posture. The decks, fore and
aft, were crowded to overflowing. They suffered
terribly. They had rice enough to eat but they had very
little to drink. If they left any of the rice that was
given to them uneaten, either from sickness or any other
cause, they were whipped. It was a common thing for them
to be forced to eat so much as to vomit. Many of the
men, women and children died on the passage.
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Arriving during this month in the New World at the completion of their arduous middle passages were a known
total of nine such slavers, all of Portuguese registry: the Emilia, master unknown, on its one and only known
Middle Passage, out of Angola with a cargo of 650 enslaved Africans, was arriving at the port of Campos,
Brazil; the Ganges, master J.R. Costa, on its second of two known Middle Passages, out of Quelimane with a
cargo of 419 enslaved Africans, was arriving at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; the Jehovah, master unknown, on one
of its three known Middle Passage voyages, out of Angola with a cargo of 504 enslaved Africans, was arriving
at the port of Macae, Brazil; the Josefina, master unknown, on one of its twelve-count-’em-twelve known
Middle Passage voyages, out of Benguela with a cargo of 294 enslaved Africans, was arriving at Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil; the Carolina, master unknown, on one of its five known Middle Passage voyages, out of an
unknown area of Africa with a cargo of 214 enslaved Africans, was arriving at Rio De Janeiro, Brazil; the
Congresso, master unknown, on its one and only known Middle Passage, sailing out of Benguela with a cargo
of 314 enslaved Africans, was arriving at Rio De Janeiro, Brazil; the Amizade Constante, master unknown, on
its one and only known Middle Passage, out of Quelimane with a cargo of 400 enslaved Africans, was arriving
at the port of Ilha Grande, Brazil; the Deligencia, master unknown, on one of its four known Middle Passage
voyages, out of Angola with a cargo of 389 enslaved Africans, was arriving at a port in Brazil; and the Leal,
master F.J. Ribeiro, on its one and only known Middle Passage, with a cargo of 364 enslaved Africans, was
arriving at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The devil was getting his due.
INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE
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April: During this month, at a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, the struggle between the
black pragmatist wing and the white Garrisonian wing of the antislavery movement –those who believed the
changing the laws of enslavement would correct the situation, almost all black women, versus those who
believed that enslavement was engraved in the American soul and that only the most diligent long-term soul
searching and self-rectification could correct such baseness, almost all white women– came to the flash point.
The black pragmatist forces took control of the society by a series of protested close votes in which it is quite
clear that they were falsifying vote counts. When a white member called out from the floor “I doubt the vote,”
the pragmatist who had just been “elected” commented “Then you may doubt it till the day of your death.”
They announced that they had won and then adjourned, and the Garrisonians were reduced to publishing lists
of membership names and affidavits of voting in order to demonstrate to the general public that the vote counts
had been falsified. For instance, to refute the claim of the pragmatists that only 65 had opposed their slate of
candidates, the Liberator printed a statement signed by 78 members, that they had voted against the
pragmatists. But the pragmatists were firmly in control, and at the next meeting the “duly elected” officials
simply ruled in their own favor. Then, at the April 1840 meeting, at which they referred to the white
Garrisonians as “the ladies of the minority,” they moved and seconded a motion that their society be dissolved,
held a quick poll which they claimed to be in the affirmative, and the presiding officer immediately declared
“I pronounce the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society dissolved.” Better there be no antislavery society, than
that it be run by a bunch of white people who were going to struggle with their souls. Nevertheless, three days
later the Garrisonians met and reconstituted the society. “We go forward joyfully in the holy work of abolishing
slavery,” the white women declared. The pragmatists issued appeals for support to Philadelphia and to
England, but the reply from Philadelphia was signed by Friend Lucretia Mott and she gave them precious little
credibility, referring to them as “high-handed.” This whole history is of great interest because it is clear that
Thoreau’s attitude toward the antislavery issue, that like charity the task of correcting souls was a task that
always began at home, was in line with the Garrisonians and in opposition to the pragmatists, despite the fact
that the great majority of the pragmatists were black46 and virtually all the Garrisonians white. As one
interesting aside, in the publications of the day no mention whatever was made of the fact that the split in the
society was fundamentally a split between black and white. As another interesting aside, the black pragmatists
who attempted to ruin the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society did not have the support of their own
community in Boston, which overwhelmingly supported William Lloyd Garrison –that man who so
frequently heard the taunting shout “white nigger” on the street– and in fact had used a “pocket veto” on 26
applications for membership from black women in the Boston community who would probably have
supported the white Garrisonian wing in this controversy rather than settle for a pragmatic “win” that would,
46. Well, two of these people were identifying themselves as black women at that point, although later in their lives they identified
themselves as white women — and I do subscribe to the principle that it is up to the person directly implicated, rather than to the
official personages of and dominant strangers of a society, to create the definition of what that person is. I don’t, myself, want to
“sex or second-guess” anyone.
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because it did not try anyone’s soul, have merely perpetuated the problems of racial discrimination and racial
prejudice.
Also, at this April 1839 annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Henry Brewster Stanton
confronted Garrison with
“Mr. Garrison! do you or do you not believe it is a sin
to go to the polls?”
to which Garrison responded:
“Sin for me.”
A general vote of the society, including the women members, produced 180 votes that abolitionists would not
be required to take part in the political process and to vote in political elections, versus 24 that abolitionists
could not be members unless they were willing to vote in political elections. Stanton, James Gillespie Birney,
etc., defeated, then resigned from the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.
April 3, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson lectured at the Concord Lyceum in Concord. This was the 3d lecture of
the series, “The Protest.”
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April 6, Saturday: Abba Alcott gave birth to a “fine boy, full grown, perfectly formed” who lived only a few
minutes. The anniversary of April 6th would become, for the next two decades, a sad gray-tinged day with a
“draught of bitterness to taste, yes to drink from death’s bitterest beaker.... Ah Me! My Boy!” Bronson Alcott
always wanted a boy, and Abba always wanted to give him one, but it would never be. Senile old Joseph May
asked to accompany Bronson to the May family vault in the Old Granary burying ground on that Sunday,
because, as Bronson was laying down the body of the baby, Joseph desired to look at his wife’s remains.
THE ALCOTT FAMILY
April 7, Sunday: The little bundle, the “fine boy, fully grown, perfectly formed” who had lived only a few
minutes, had been laid down in the crypt at the Old Granary burying grounds in Boston. Senile old Joseph May
had gotten his peek at his wife’s remains. Back at his journal, Bronson Alcott wrote:
The tombs are dank with fetor; doubt sharpens the teeth
of decay; corruption feeds his greedy gorge. Let me
tread the sweet plots of Hope and breathe the incense
of her flowering glories. There is no past in all her
borders.
Rail service began between Dresden and Leipzig.
April 10, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson lectured at the Concord Lyceum in Concord. This was the 4th lecture
of the series, “Love.”
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April 13, Saturday: Advertisement for the Concord Academy under Preceptor John Thoreau, Jr.:
(Several more such advertisements would appear during this year.)
April 16, Tuesday: William Lloyd Garrison addressed an amalgamated audience at Mechanics Hall in
New Bedford, with Frederick Douglass in the audience.47
47. Frederick Douglass also, during this period, attended lectures by Wendell Phillips, the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, and
other abolitionists.
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April 20, Saturday: A preserved waybill of the Boston, Lexington, and Concord Accommodation Stagecoach
reveals that Waldo Emerson’s fare to Concord, a two or three hour ride, was 75 cents. The coach on this trip
carried seven other male passengers and one female passenger.
William Shepherd, keeper of a Concord tavern (now 122 Main Street), had begun to offer this stagecoach
service to Boston three days each week, carrying passengers and delivering packages, in 1817.
April 24, Sunday: Waldo Emerson lectured at the Concord Lyceum in Concord. This was the 5th lecture of
the series, “Tragedy.”
April 25, Monday: James Barlow patented a couple of new thingies for the candlestick, one a new brass “rackand-pinion push-up,” the other a new “elastic holder” that could accommodate such a mechanism. This was
patent #8049.
April 25, 1839: The Kingdoms of the Earth. We see a reality hovering over things, not an actuality
underneath and behind them. Take the earth and all the interests it has known — what are they beside one deep
surmise that pierces and scatters them? The independent beggar disposes of all with one hearty significant curse
by the road-side— ’tis true they are not worth a “tinker’s damn.”48
April 26, Friday: Rufus Hosmer died in Stow, Massachusetts.
Rufus Hosmer [of Concord], son of the Hon. Joseph Hosmer, was
born March 18, 1778, and graduated [at Harvard College] in 1800.
He was admitted to the bar in Essex in 1803, and soon after
removed to Stow, where he has since [to 1835] resided as a
counsellor at law.49
48. In the April 12, 1998 The New York Times Magazine, page 18, William Safire would examine whether the idiom should
properly be “not worth a tinker’s dam” or “not worth a tinker’s damn,” and go with the OED and its interpretation of Thoreau’s 1839
usage, in voting for “damn” over “dam.”
49.
Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company;
Concord MA: John Stacy
(On or about November 11, 1837 Henry Thoreau would indicate a familiarity
with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study. On July 16, 1859 he would correct a date mistake
buried in the body of the text.)
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MAY 1839
THE 1ST TUESDAY IN MAY WAS THE ANNUAL
“MUSTER DAY,” ON WHICH ALL THE ABLEBODIED
WHITE MEN OF A TOWN WERE SUPPOSEDLY
REQUIRED TO FALL INTO FORMATION, WITH THEIR
PERSONAL FIREARMS, TO UNDERGO THEIR
ANNUAL DAY OF MILITARY TRAINING AND MILITIA
INDOCTRINATION.
May: Richard Henry Dana, Jr. submitted his manuscript of TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST to William Cullen
Bryant.
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May 1, Wednesday: In England, the 1st adhesive stamp was introduced (it was a penny stamp).
Waldo Emerson lectured at the Concord Lyceum in Concord. This was the 6th lecture of the series, “Comedy.”
In his journal Henry Thoreau mentioned “Lady of the Lake” from THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SIR WALTER
SCOTT, by Conner & Cooke in New-York in 1833.
May 7, Tuesday: The annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, in Chatham Street Chapel in
New-York: After a long and noisy day of debate, it was decided by a vote of 184 to 141 to allow women to be
seated as delegates — but this left matters of substance undecided, such as whether these female delegates
would be permitted to speak, whether they could be accepted as members of committees, and whether they
might be allowed to fill offices. (To avoid use of the gendered term “he,” one official began carefully to use
the non-gendered plural “they”!) The struggle went on for the duration of the convention, with petitions being
circulated that declared that these innovations in regard to the status of women would be
repugnant to the wishes, to the wisdom, or the moral
sense of many of the members
and would
bring unnecessary reproach and embarrassment to the
cause of the enslaved
and would be
at variance with the general usage and sentiments of
this and all other nations.
At one point Bronson Alcott rose in condemnation of the entire convention. Since he consumed “nothing but
pure vegetables,” he opinioned, then, rather than being as the rest of the delegates were, to wit, what they ate,
specifically cattle, sheep, fowl, swine, he himself was “as pure and as wise as was Jesus Christ” — and
therefore they ought to pay especial heed to his opinions. A Wesleyan Methodist from western New York state,
the Reverend Luther Lee, could not resist this opportunity and rose to opinion that Alcott also was precisely
what he ate, specifically potatoes, turnips, pumpkins, squash.
May 11, Saturday: US federal troops prevented the State of Michigan from digging a canal at Sault Ste. Marie.
May 13, Monday: Bronson Alcott, in Boston:
I am no scholar. My might is not in my pen. This is feeble. I do
no justice to myself in the literary composition. My organ is
action and voice, rather. I am an actor and a sayer, rather than
a writer. I do not detach my thoughts from life. I am concrete.
Thought manifests itself in deeds and spoken words.
I am solitary. No one enters into my purpose. None perceives my
true position. None can advise or help me. I must be selfsubsistent and take counsel of my own heart alone.
My week’s intercourse with Emerson has done me good. It has
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classified me. I apprehend my genius the more clearly. I define
my theatre of action the better by comparison with his. He is a
scholar. He lives to see and write. He looks abroad on Nature
and life and sketches their features with his pen. He sits in
the theatre of Nature and draws the players and scenes. He is
an observer, an eye, an ear, a pen. Creation is a spectacle to
him, and he sets himself to criticise her order and denote her
qualities in the form of speech. He is a literary artist and
detaches his thoughts from Nature and life and represents them
in elegant images to the eye.
May 15, Wednesday: Lewis Tappan urged Gerrit Smith to shun the Nonresistance Society, because
nonresistance to evil was “part and parcel of a system of innovations that will, so far as they succeed, overturn
all that is valuable.” The wealthy Smith’s donation to the society was the largest it would ever receive — but
he never would join.
Waldo Emerson lectured at the Concord Lyceum in Concord. This was the 7th and final lecture of the current
series, “Demonology.”
May 20, Monday: The remaining assets of the Northampton Silk Company that had been so heavily invested
in by Samuel Whitmarsh were sold to a group of the stockholders for a mere $40,000.
SWEETS
Some silk manufacturing continued. The company leased 20 acres of its old farmed-out mulberry-bush hill
acreage to David Lee Child for experiments with sugar beets.
May 21, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau included a snippet from Sir Walter Scott’s “Lady of the Lake” in his
journal:
Self-culture
Who knows how incessant a surveillance a strong man may maintain over himself — how far subject passion
and appetite to reason, and lead the life his imagination paints? Well has the poet said— “by manly mind
Not e’en in sleep is will resigned.”
By a strong effort, may he not command even his brute body in unconscious moments?
May 25, Saturday: Waldo Emerson ’s 36th birthday.
WITHOUT
S LAVERY
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May 27, Monday: Birth of Friend Daniel Ricketson’s second son Walton.50 He would be educated at the
Friends Academy of New Bedford, would become an artist, and would never marry.
Waldo Emerson to his journal:
A great genius must come & preach self reliance. Our people are
timid, desponding, recreant whimperers. If they fail in their
first enterprises they lose all heart. If the young merchant
fails, men say he is RUINED. If the finest genius studies at the
Cambridge Divinity College, and is not ordained within a year
afterwards in Boston, or New York, it seems to his friend &
himself that he is justified in being disheartened & in
complaining for the rest of his life. a sturdy New Hampshire man
or Vermonter who in turn tries all the professions, who teams
it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a
newspaper, goes to Congress, & so forth, in successive years,
and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of
these Boston dolls. My brave Henry here who is content to live
now, & feels no shame in not studying any profession, for he
does not postpone his life but lives already — pours contempt
on these crybabies of routine & Boston. He has not one chance
but a hundred chances. Now let a stern preacher arise who shall
reveal the resources of Man, & tell men they are not leaning
willows, but can & must detach themselves, that a man, a woman,
is a sovereign eternity, born to shed healing to the nations;
that he should be ashamed of our compassion; & that the moment
he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, the
idolatries, the customs, out of the window, we pity him, we pity
her no more, but thank & revere them; that with the exercise of
self trust new powers shall appear.
50. An alleged runic signature of Leif Eriksson with date MI would be observed on a boulder lying on the beach at No Man’s Land,
an island off Martha’s Vineyard, around 1920. It would form the basis of a book by Edward F. Gray, LEIF ERIKSSON DISCOVERER
OF AMERICA (Oxford, 1930), in which it is illustrated. Opinions of runic experts were so disappointing that Mr. Gray finally
concluded (page 159) that it was carved by some later explorer such as Verrazzano or Gosnold as a “monument to Lief” [sic]. The
inscription has been thoroughly investigated by Edmund B. Delabarre and Charles W. Brown for The New England Quarterly, VIII
(1935), 365-78. They concluded that it had been carved in the twentieth century by some joker, probably Walton Ricketson (18391923) of New Bedford. Refer to Samuel Eliot Morison’s THE EUROPEAN DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. THE NORTHERN VOYAGES A.D.
500-1600. NY: Oxford UP, 1971.
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JUNE 1839
June: Lydia Maria Child was in Boston at this point, staying with friends while looking for a job.
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June: Bronson Alcott admitted the child Susan51 Robinson to the shrunken “School of Human Culture” in his
home at 6 Beach Street in Boston, a school which since it had been forced to relocate to the basement no longer
looked anything like this:
A few weeks afterward the school was visited by Dr. John Flint, as the representative of a group of parents.
My patrons, through Dr. John Flint, urge the dismissal
of the Robinson Child. I decline....
Bronson had got his tit in the ringer and couldn’t get it out. Susan Robinson was black, or at least a very little
bit black, and yet she had feelings, and this sensitive man simply could not steele himself to tell her she
couldn’t come to school now, couldn’t learn any more, couldn’t associate with her schoolmates any more,
because she was not as white — because her friends were really really white. This painfully honest man also
couldn’t bear to leave it to another person to break the news to her. “You aren’t good to be with, because you
are what you are.” It was the unthinkable crime.
Immediately almost all the children, except the Alcott girls and Susan Robinson and William Russell’s boy,
were withdrawn by their parents, and the school Bronson had founded in 1834 became defunct. Sex education
in the schools might be an idea whose time would come. Apostasy about the human origins of Christ might be
winked at by the worldly wise. Amalgamation could not, however, be tolerated. To be a colored child was to
51. Interestingly, the only way we know that the name of this child was Susan is, that 8-year-old Anna wrote it in her diary. She was
not old enough to know that to history, a person who is not white is merely another nameless instance of the type “colored people.”
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be the bearer of manifold unnameable contaminations.
To help Bronson Alcott recover from the Temple School disaster, the Alcotts would visit the Mays in South
Scituate.
This experience would later show up in Louisa May Alcott’s LITTLE WOMEN, at the end of which Mrs. Jo
March Bhaer and Professor Fritz Bhaer are running a boarding school for boys in their large suburban home
“Plumfield” and are including one token “small quadroon” child (who was musically inclined, we notice), in
this melting pot.52 Here I suppose the author to be conflating her father Bronson’s upper room “Temple School”
at the Tremont Temple in Boston with the school run by the Professor and Mrs. Agassiz in Cambridge, because
I suppose that latter school would have been an unlikely venue for integration in the light of the manifest
ingrained racism of the father of that family. It would be of great interest here, if anyone could turn up any
evidence that any such gesture had been made toward integration of that later Cambridge school, of associating
an unnamed small charge with the defect of having had a black grandparent with larger defective white charges
described as “slow boys and bashful boys, feeble boys and riotous boys, boys that lisped and boys that
stuttered, one or two lame ones” including a “pale lad, who sat adoring her with his little crutch beside him,”
etc., for such evidence would generate the most serious scholarly reappraisal of the defective character of
52. A quadroon has three white grandparents and one black, that is, for the moment to tolerate this method of calculation,
it is “one quarter black and three quarters white.” By way of contrast, in our modern era the modal person who self-identifies
as black in the United States of America tests, genetically, roughly a third to a half similar to the general African genepool and
roughly a half to two-thirds similar to the general European genepool. In this arena, cultural perceptions and self-identifications and
genetic tests seldom match up with one another, and the general rule of accommodation seems to be that we should just ask people
to self-identify as they please — and then align ourselves with whatever that happens to be.
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Professor Louis Agassiz of Harvard College.
It never was a fashionable school, and the Professor did not lay up a fortune;
but it was just what Jo intended it to be, — ‘a happy, home-like place for
boys, who needed teaching, care, and kindness.’ Every room in the big house
was soon full; every little plot in the garden soon had its owner; a regular
menagerie appeared in barn and shed, — for pet animals were allowed, —
and, three times a day, Jo smiled at her Fritz from the head of a long table
lined on either side with rows of happy young faces, which all turned to her
with affectionate eyes, confiding words, and grateful hearts, full of love for
‘Mother Bhaer.’ She had boys enough now, and did not tire of them, though
they were not angels by any means, and some of them caused both Professor
and Professorin much trouble and anxiety. But her faith in the good spot
which exists in the heart of the naughtiest, sauciest, most tantalizing little
ragamuffin gave her patience, skill, and, in time, success, — for no mortal
boy could hold out long with Father Bhaer shining on him as benevolently as
the sun, and Mother Bhaer forgiving him seventy times seven. Very precious
to Jo was the friendship of the lads, their penitent sniffs and whispers after
wrongdoing, their droll or touching little confidences, their pleasant
enthusiasms, hopes, and plans; even their misfortunes, — for they only
endeared them to her all the more. There were slow boys and bashful boys,
feeble boys and riotous boys, boys that lisped and boys that stuttered, one or
two lame ones, and a merry little quadroon, who could not be taken in
elsewhere, but who was welcome to the Bhaer-garten, though some people
predicted that his admission would ruin the school. … [T]he Professor
suddenly began to sing. Then, from above him, voice after voice took up the
words, and from tree to tree echoed the music of the unseen choir, as the boys
sang, with all their hearts, the little song Jo had written, Laurie set to music,
and the Professor trained his lads to give with the best effect. This was
something altogether new, and it proved a grand success: for Mrs. March
couldn’t get over her surprise, and insisted on shaking hands with every one
of the featherless birds, from tall Franz and Emil to the little quadroon,
who had the sweetest voice of all.
June: A total of six slavers, all flying the Portuguese flag, have been registered as arriving in the New World
during this month. We immediately note that the negrero Tecora, the ship that was carrying Joseph Cinqué, is
not on this official list of six arrivals. That is because the Middle Passage voyage which brought him was an
under-the-table deal. How many such under-the-table deals were there? –How typical was that? –
How woefully unreliable and incomplete are the statistics we are able now to accumulate?
We can know now about the Josefina, master A. Rodriguez, on one of its twelve-count-’em-twelve known
Middle Passage voyages, out of Sao Tome with a cargo of 240 enslaved Africans, arriving at a port of Cuba.
We can know now about the Esperanca, master unknown, on one of its ten-count-’em-ten known Middle
Passage voyages, out of Cabinda with a cargo of 370 enslaved Africans, arriving at Campos, Brazil. We can
know now about the Amalia, master unknown, on one of its five known Middle Passage voyages, out of
Mocambique, arriving at the port of Cananeia, Brazil. We can know now about the Astrea, master Sabino, on
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its one and only known Middle Passage, out of Sao Tome with a cargo of 440 enslaved Africans, arriving at a
port of Cuba. We can know now about the Commodore, master unknown, on its second of two known Middle
Passages, out of Mocambique with a cargo of 700 enslaved Africans, arriving at Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. We
can know now about the Dois Amigos, master J. da Silva, on one of its three known Middle Passage voyages,
out of Sao Tome with a cargo of 413 enslaved Africans, arriving at a port of Cuba. About the balance we can
at best only speculate.
His illegal transportation from Africa to Cuba having been completed by offloading of captives on a secluded
beach at night, Cinque was at this point just another American slave. There was no longer any need to hide
him from the law, as the law, which legitimated slavery while outlawing international trade in slaves, was now
on the side of his “owners.” He was in one of two “barracoons” in Havana, Cuba, either in the one with a
maximum capacity of 1,000 souls, or the one with a maximum capacity of 1,500 souls.
L A A MISTAD
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Early in June: Waldo Emerson and Jones Very had for some time been discussing the publication of a book,
ESSAYS AND POEMS BY JONES VERY, to be made up of an autobiographical prologue, the three essay or lectures
“Epic Poetry,” “Shakespeare,” and “Hamlet,” and a selection of the sonnets.
At this point, from the isolation of his chamber in Salem, Very packed up all these manuscripts and sent
them off to the Emerson home in Concord. Although Emerson would be welcome to visit him in Salem,
he wrote, he would be unable to visit Concord. He requested that his book be dedicated: “To Edward Tyrrell
Channing, Boyleston Professor in Harvard University, This Volume is Inscribed, As a Token of Gratitude, By
the Author.”
June 14, Friday: A Chartist petition with 1,200,000 signatures was presented to Parliament.
Recollecting that Waldo Emerson had once attempted to improve upon the voice of the Holy Spirit by the
alteration of a line in the sonnet “In Him we live, and move, and have our being,” Jones Very was finally able
to overcome his cabin fever. He left his chamber. First he visited Bronson Alcott, attired in his customarily
meticulous black suit and frock coat, with large black hat and black walking-stick. While with the Alcotts, the
Reverend Orestes Augustus Brownson happened to drop by, and “They say opposite each other at the table;
but were sundered by spaces immeasurable.” Then Very went on to the Emersons in Concord, and would stay
three days, arguing with Emerson about which materials to include in the book, in what sequence to place the
sonnets, etc. Unfortunately, during this visit, Emerson attempted a humorous treatment of his difficult guest
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and this treatment came across as the most relentless mockery, with Mrs. Lidian Emerson sympathetically
attempting to provide the only emotional resources available to Very in that household. When Very insisted on
no changes to the sonnets because “such was the will of God,” Emerson countered with “Cannot the Spirit
parse and spell?” and declared that “We cannot permit the Holy Ghost to be careless (and in one instance) to
talk bad grammar.” Edwin Gittleman summarizes:
He was quick to answer every one of Very’s “speeches,”
and later (for the entertainment of mutual friends) he
recounted in detail how cleverly he had “dealt” with
him.[p.337]
What Waldo wanted, of course, above all else, was a volume which would look good and sell well. Prudent
and a good read. What the author wanted, of course, above all else, was to remain utterly faithful to the
instructions which he believed he was receiving from above. Emerson won, exhausting Very not only through
intransigence but with off-putting sarcasm, and the eventual volume would succeed in de-emphasizing all the
prophecy, all the apocalypticism, and all the evangelical enthusiasm which, to its author, were its very core.
SAMUEL SEWALL
June 17, Monday: The widow of Revolutionary War officer Joseph Ward and her daughter Prudence, having
been long-term boarders in the Thoreau boardinghouse, their nephew Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., age 11,
came to stay there with Prudence and was enrolled among the 25 or so boys who were in the school kept by
the Thoreau brothers. Henry Thoreau dedicated his poem on sympathy “To a Gentle Boy” to suggest a
similarity of temperament between Edmund and the title character in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tale THE GENTLE
BOY, which had appeared in a magazine called Token in 1832 and had then been included in the volume TWICETOLD TALES in 1837, and this highly regarded poem was widely circulated in the Thoreau and Sewall extended
families — although Edmund was to comment later that he had been somewhat embarrassed at all this
attention. This has been taken as an instance of Thoreau’s latent sexual attraction to males rather than females,
but it was not so taken at that time: the Sewall family’s response was to ask Henry, in fairness, if he couldn’t
write one also for Edmund’s little brother.
June 17, Monday: Samuel Sebastian Wesley matriculated at Magdalen College, Oxford for the simultaneous
degrees of Bachelor of Music and Doctor of Music.
Jones Very “departed from” the Emerson home suddenly, making a remark that he was not being permitted by
the Holy Spirit to remain. What had happened, Edwin Gittleman discretely suggests, was that Mrs. Lidian
Emerson’s “feminine ways and sensitivities, devout thoughts and encouragements” had innocently raised in
Very some wicked snake which he had supposed he had dispensed with when, at Harvard University in 1835,
to the great amusement of his bantering classmates, he had “sacrificed Beauty.” (Of course, as we know, this
would not be the last time that Lidian’s warm sensitivity would rouse an inexperienced young man’s affection.)
WALDO EMERSON
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June 22, Saturday: There had been arguments over finances, and as of this day (or perhaps the following day)
the Reverend Lemuel Capen resigned as the pastor for the Hawes Place Society of South Boston.
For the usual fee the Captain General of Cuba issued fraudulent transportation permits. In total Joseph Cinqué
would have been in a slave barracoon of Havana for ten days.
THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
L A A MISTAD
RACE SLAVERY
June 22, Saturday: That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another’s. We see so much only as we
possess.
We see so much only as we possess.
June 22, Saturday: I have within the last few days come into contact with a pure uncompromising
spirit, that is somewhere wandering in the atmosphere, but settles not positively anywhere. Some persons carry
about them the air and conviction of virtue, though they themselves are unconscious of it — and are even
backward to appreciate it in others. Such it is impossible not to love — still is their loveliness, as it were,
independent of them, so that you seem not to lose it when they are absent, for when they are near it is like an
invisible presence which attends you.
Late in June: Don José Ruiz and Don Pedro Montes purchased 49 adult males at $450 each, including Joseph
Cinqué, in the slave barracoons of Havana, Cuba for transport to the plantations of Puerto Princípe, on the
northwest coast of the same island at about two days’ sailing distance. They also purchased three little girls
and a little boy.
THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
L A A MISTAD
RACE SLAVERY
June 24, Monday: Egyptian forces routed Turkish forces at Nezib (Nizip), 100 kilometers north of Aleppo
(Halab).
In England, Thomas Carlyle was the first Englishman to theorize the Saxon success, as due to innate racial
superiority. He saw himself, a lowland Scott, as a Teuton, “a piece of the right Saxon stuff,” and he saw these
Teutons like himself as the colonizers of the earth precisely because they were the saviors of the earth. I’m
your great white hope, I’m God’s gift to you — best you hold still so’s I don’t need to whop you:
And yet, if this small rim of Europe is overpeopled, does not
everywhere else a whole vacant Earth as it were, call to us,
Come and till me, come and reap me!
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This racist genocidalist wrote to Waldo Emerson, on this date, about the possibility that it might be Boston, or
New-York, rather than London, that would become the great Wen at which “all the Saxons” would assemble,
upon which they could center their world of progress and development and civilization and great white
“All Saxondom” race-soul. He found a sympathetic ear, of course, because Emerson was a fellow believer in
worth.53
Rosetta Douglass, the 1st child of Anna Murray Douglass and Frederick Douglass, was “born free” in New
Bedford.54
Or, at least, this is the official date proclaimed by the family: notice that June 24, 1839 is nine months and a
week subsequent to the wedding ceremony and honeymoon, and note also that in the era before state-issued
birth certificates, there was quite a bit of opportunity for creative reconstruction of family history. There are
records that white persons in Douglass’s audience would amuse themselves, and perhaps others, by raising
frank questions about Rosetta, suggesting that Anna was probably pregnant at the time of her wedding and that
Rosetta was therefore possibly an illegitimate child.
(Poor little worthless dark Rosetta, in accordance with the racist theories that Thomas Carlyle and Waldo
Emerson were corresponding about on this very day of her birth –read them and weep– in this world there was
to be a Wen for all worthies like them who were “of the right Saxon stuff” but there was to be no Wen for her!)55
53. If you have begun to suspect I maybe am suggesting that what Thomas Carlyle and Waldo Emerson were up to was the
formation of a 19th-Century Nazism, and that Emerson was a full co-conspirator in advancing what he himself termed “the best
stock in the world” through genocide, then you’re paying attention. (If you didn’t know this about this gentleman, then you’ve
obviously been paying attention to the Emersonians.)
“Emersonians are all alike; every Thoreauvian
is Thoreauvian in his or her own way.”
— Austin Meredith
54. “Born free” means about as much in this context, as it does in the context of a lion cub on the veldt, since in both cases white
hunters might at any time trap the family, with total impunity and clearness of conscience, and carry it away. Nevertheless, even
when free does not mean free from fear, it does mean something.
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June 24, Monday: Gustavus Franklin Swift, who would found Swift & Company, was born.
The 1st photography exhibition took place, in France. It showed the work of inventor Hippolyte Bayard.
Robert Schumann contacted Wilhelm Einert, a Leipzig attorney, to begin legal proceedings to get married to
Clara Wieck without the consent of her father.
Henry Thoreau wrote, in honor of Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., age 11, the poem “Sympathy.”
Lately alas I knew a gentle boy,
Whose features all were cast in Virtue’s mould,
As one she had designed for Beauty’s toy,
But after manned him for her own strong-hold.
On every side he open was as day,
That you might see no lack of strength within,
For walls and ports do only serve alway
For a pretence to feebleness and sin.
Say not that Cæsar was victorious,
With toil and strife who stormed the House of Fame;
In other sense this youth was glorious,
Himself a kingdom wheresoe’er he came.
No strength went out to get him victory,
When all was income of its own accord;
For where he went none other was to see,
But all were parcel of their noble lord.
He forayed like the subtle breeze of summer,
That stilly shows fresh landscapes to the eyes,
And revolutions worked without a murmur,
Or rustling of a leaf beneath the skies.
So was I taken unawares by this,
I quite forgot my homage to confess;
Yet now am forced to know, though hard it is,
I might have loved him, had I loved him less.
Each moment, as we nearer drew to each,
A stern respect withheld us farther yet,
So that we seemed beyond each other’s reach,
And less acquainted than when first we met.
We two were one while we did sympathize,
So could we not the simplest bargain drive;
And what avails it now that we are wise,
If absence doth this doubleness contrive?
Eternity may not the chance repeat,
But I must tread my single way alone,
In sad remembrance that we once did meet,
55. If you have begun to suspect I maybe am suggesting that what Thomas Carlyle and Waldo Emerson were up to was the
formation of a 19th-Century Nazism, and that Emerson was a full co-conspirator in advancing what he himself termed “the best
stock in the world” through genocide, then you’re paying attention.
(If you didn’t know this about this gentleman, then you’ve obviously been paying attention to Emersonians.)
“Emersonians are all alike; every Thoreauvian
is Thoreauvian in his or her own way.”
— Austin Meredith
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And know that bliss irrevocably gone.
The spheres henceforth my elegy shall sing,
For elegy has other subject none;
Each strain of music in my ears shall ring
Knell of departure from that other one.
Make haste and celebrate my tragedy;
With fitting strain resound ye woods and fields;
Sorrow is dearer in such case to me
Than all the joys other occasion yields.
Is‘t then too late the damage to repair?
Distance, forsooth, from my weak grasp hath reft
The empty husk, and clutched the useless tare,
But in my hands the wheat and kernel left.
If I but love that virtue which he is,
Though it be scented in the morning air,
Still shall we be truest acquaintances,
Nor mortals know a sympathy more rare.
Which calls for some explanation. I will give you here the illustration provided by Sophia Peabody
(Hawthorne) and a lengthy synopsis provided in the curiously titled SALEM IS MY DWELLING PLACE: A
BIOGRAPHY OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE / BY EDWIN HAVILAND MILLER (Iowa City IA: U of Iowa P, 1991):
“The Gentle Boy” is the story of a beautiful youth called Ilbrahim,
a Quaker with a Turkish name who at six years of age is orphaned
by the Puritan theocracy because of the religious beliefs of his
parents. On an autumn day about 1659, a “slender and light-clad
little boy” leans “his face upon a hillock of fresh-turned and
half-frozen earth.” Half-starved because the jailers have denied
him and his father food, he has witnessed his father’s hanging
from a scaffold beneath a fir tree and has watched his mother
disappear into the wilderness, “to perish there by hunger or wild
beasts.” The authorities spare the child in what they consider an
act of kindness but make no provision for his welfare.
The truth, however, is that the Puritans have made official and
seemingly final an orphandom which began almost at birth, since
Ilbrahim’s parents have sacrificed him to their religious
persuasion. For years their flights from country to country denied
the youth the opportunity to establish roots in any society or to
form relationships. As his mother later reveals in her wild
harangue to the Puritan congregation, she has placed God’s will,
as intuited by her inner light, above the nurturing of Ilbrahim.
If the lad wishes himself dead—three times he insists that “my
home is here” on the grave of his father—it is not an instance of
nineteenth-century sentimentality but an all-too-human response
of a child who, denied the love needed to survive in an unloving
environment, represses his rage and craves the release of death
to escape terrors and losses too gigantic for his undeveloped body
and his hungry heart to deal with.
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The illustration provided by Sophia Peabody (Hawthorne)
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Ilbrahim is found on his father’s grave by Tobias Pearson, a Puritan
who with difficulty has struggled into middle age, hounded earlier
by financial failure in England and then, in the New World, robbed
of his children who could not survive transplantation to the harsh
climate of New England. According to the Puritan hierarchy, Tobias
has been punished by the loss of children because of his
materialistic motivations in coming to the new Eden. In an attempt
to remake his life and at the same time to gain community approval,
he becomes “a Representative to the General Court, and an approved
Lieutenant in the train-bands.” His semimilitary attire veils an
underlying anxiety which evidences itself in tremulousness, pallor,
and vacillation.
When Tobias discovers Ilbrahim and lays a hand on his shoulder, the
boy trembles “under his hand,” which becomes the central motif in
the tale, expressive of a desperate emotional need. When the Puritan
learns that Ilbrahim is a Quaker he withdraws his hand “as if he were
touching
a
loathsome
reptile.”
Then,
with
characteristic
vacillation, his fear of censure by the community giving way to
compassion, he takes up the boy “in his arms,” wraps him in his
cloak, and carries him: “‘Look up, child,’ said the Puritan to
Ilbrahim, whose faint head had sunk upon his shoulder, ‘there is our
home.’”
Tobias’s wife, Dorothy, “a matronly woman,” sits before a fire.
Dramatically but tenderly, Tobias thrusts aside the cloak and
unveils Ilbrahim’s face. “Be kind to him,” he says to his wife, “even
as if he were of those dear ones who have departed from us.” Such
advice is scarcely necessary to a woman with an infinite capacity to
love. “Dry your tears,” she says, “and be my child, as I will be your
mother.” When she puts the child to bed that evening he occupies “the
little bed, from which her own children had successively been borne
to another resting place.”
The reaction of the townspeople to the “adoption” of the orphaned
child is immediate and hostile, and Tobias is “both hissed and
hooted.” When the three go to Sabbath services, Ilbrahim, “clad in
the new mourning suit,” walks between Tobias and Dorothy, “each
holding a hand.” The Puritan adults gaze stonily at the trio, and
Ilbrahim hears “the reviling voices of the little children.” At this
first confrontation Ilbrahim is betrayed, not by Dorothy, who draws
him protectively “closer to her,” but by Tobias, who wavers selfprotectively, finding “it difficult to sustain their united and
disapproving gaze.” Trapped by the fears of his years, Tobias cannot
know what his momentary hesitation means to an unusually sensitive
youth. If the boy is “wanting in the stamina for self-support,”
Tobias is paralyzed by “self-suspicion” and “nervous agitation.” The
agony of the relationship between “father and son” is that both have
deep dependency needs. Fearful of censure and unsure of himself,
perhaps even uncomfortable in the role of father, Tobias cannot make
the personal loving gesture to Ilbrahim, his affection growing
“daily less productive of familiar caresses.”
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After the clergyman in “black velvet scull-cap” warns his audience
not to thwart God’s will by showing pity to Quakers, a “muffled
female”—it is Ilbrahim’s mother, Catharine—mounts the rostrum and
divests herself of cloak and hood. Her Quaker diatribe is as unloving
and inhuman as the sermon of the Puritan. “Muffled” in her faith,
she appears almost to welcome the prospect of martyrdom and the
release of death. At the conclusion of her selfjustifying but selfindulgent sermon, Ilbrahim runs to her and throws his arms around
her. “I am here, mother, it is I, and I will go with thee to prison.”
At the touch of the warm hand Catharine is no longer the would-be
martyr but a mother “as in the first moment when I pressed thee to
my bosom.” “It would seem,” the narrator comments at this point,
“that the indulgence of natural love had given her mind a momentary
sense of its errors, and made her know how far she had strayed from
duty, in following the dictates of a wild fanaticism.”
As Catharine, perhaps with a “momentary” awareness of what she has
denied to her son, hides her face on his head, her raven hair covering
him “like a veil,” Tobias becomes “agitated and uneasy,” oppressed
with “guilt,” but Dorothy, “taking Ilbrahim’s hand,” offers to become
his mother and asks for the natural mother’s blessing. The voice
“within” tells Catharine, “Break the bonds of natural affection,
martyr thy love, and know that in all these things eternal wisdom
hath its ends.” She whispers her decision to Ilbrahim, who at first
sobs and clings to her but suddenly becomes “passive.” “Having held
her hands over his head in mental prayer, she was ready to depart.”
The blessing, a “mental prayer” rather than a caress, is a nonverbal
communication that every child dreads, “I do not want thee.”
That winter, nurtured “with the gentle care of one who handles a
butterfly,” Ilbrahim finds the Pearson house a home. Within its
protective shelter he is filled with “airy gaiety,” “a domesticated
sunbeam,” but there are also “moments of deep depression,” “from
wounded love” and his awareness that “his equals in age, partook of
the enmity of their parents.” Stigmatized by his religion and
baptized with a foreign name that sets him apart in a Puritan
society, Ilbrahim silently broods over “a residue of unappropriated
love.” As comforting and comfortable as it is, the Pearson house is
a prison since he cannot venture beyond its doors.
One day a Puritan lad two years older than Ilbrahim falls from a
nearby tree, and Dorothy, always the attentive mother, takes him in.
In effect she presents Ilbrahim with a brother. The invalid is as
ugly and grotesque, almost snakelike in appearance, as Ilbrahim is
beautiful and ethereal. Ilbrahim caters to him “with a fond jealousy”
and relates tales “of human tenderness”
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drawn from the romantic atmosphere of his “barbaric birthplace.”
After the boy leaves, Ilbrahim does not see him again until one
summer day when he discovers him with a group of Puritan boys. When
Ilbrahim approaches timidly, the “baby-fiends” attack him with
sticks and stones, displaying “an instinct of destruction, far more
loathsome than the blood-thirstiness of manhood.” The invalid calls
out, “Fear not, Ilbrahim, come hither and take my hand.” When
Ilbrahim offers his hand, the “foul-hearted little villain” lifts
his crutch and strikes him on the mouth, the mouth which has related
tales of “human tenderness.”
It is the last wound, the final rejection. The acts of the howling
“unbreeched fanatics” foretell a dismal future, that Ilbrahim will
never find a home in this community to appropriate his love. He
begins “to pine and droop like a cankered rosebud.” For the Pearsons
it is the same story continued: their children “had left their native
country blooming like roses, and like roses they had perished in
foreign soil.” Ilbrahim recovers from the physical wounds but not
from “the injury done to his sensitive spirit.” He is now moody,
sometimes sullen, and when Dorothy attempts “to revive his former
sportiveness,” he runs and hides, refusing “even the hand of
kindness.” Punishing himself, as though undeserving of kindness, he
rejects Dorothy’s love as the invalid rejected his. In his dreams at
night he cries, “Mother! Mother!”
Dorothy silently endures rejection, still continuing to give of
herself as is her wont, but Tobias experiences a physical and
emotional collapse similar to that of his adopted son. Because
Ilbrahim is “dearer to me than all my buried ones,” Tobias has
attempted to play father, not by spontaneous and tactile expressions
of affection but by imitation of the natural father. He has embraced
the Quaker faith despite doubts he cannot put to rest and suffers
imprisonment and economic harassment. His love, he feels, becomes
“poison,” for once more he is to be a father in a childless household.
He finds himself guilty, “an accursed man.”
Cut off from the community and even from the child and needing a
father as much as Ilbrahim does, Tobias seeks solace and guidance
from a Quaker patriarch on a stormy night as the youth lies dying on
the deathbed of the earlier Pearson offspring. As Tobias leaned “his
forehead on his hands, his teeth were firmly closed; and his frame
was tremulous at intervals with a nervous agitation.” The patriarch
makes a confession which he intends as a lesson. Years ago he
abandoned his daughter on her “dying bed” after wrestling with two
“inner” voices, one telling him to go forth and the other upbraiding
him as a “cruel parent.” Now after the passage of time a “hale and
weather-beaten old man,” he has no doubts as to the rightness of his
decision. If Ilbrahim fails to find in Tobias an adequate, loving
paternal figure, the Quaker fails to fulfill Tobias’s expectations,
for he has gained neither in wisdom nor in feeling, only in years.
The tale of the elder Quaker, then, is one more instance of the
failure of the fathers, one more instance of the abandonment and
rejection of children.
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Suddenly Catharine comes in out of the storm to announce “glad
tidings,” that King Charles II has ordered the colonists to cease
persecuting Quakers. The patriarch informs her of the burden of
proselytizing her faith and “leading an infant by the hand”: “his
tottering footsteps shall impede thine own no more.” Shuddering,
appalled, she wails, “Hath He crushed my very heart in his hand?”
Her shriek is answered by “the very faint voice of a child.”
Moments before he hears his mother’s voice Ilbrahim begins to shiver
and takes Dorothy’s hand “in both of his.” Catharine draws the child
to her breast, where he nestles “with no violence of joy.” Looking
into her face “and reading its agony,” Ilbrahim pronounces his own
benediction: “Mourn not, dearest mother. I am happy now.” At the
breast which the mother has denied him he dies and goes home to his
father.
“The Gentle Boy” resonates on the deepest affective levels — a
child’s need for father and mother, home, caressing hands, and
peers, for love and security. After its anonymous appearance in the
Token in 1832 it became Hawthorne’s most popular tale.
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June 28, Friday: A Paris court fined Nicolò Paganini 20,000 francs plus interest and costs for the failure of his
“Casino Paganini,” and threatened arrest for debt and imprisonment for ten years if he failed to fulfil the claims
made against the project. He appealed and, losing the appeal, would be obliged to pay 50,000 francs rather
than 20,000.
That evening Don José Ruiz and Don Pedro Montez took their coffle of purchased slaves from the Havana
barracoon to their coastal vessel, La Amistad.56 By 8PM the vessel was loaded and at midnight it slipped out
to sea, with the slaves in the hold with iron collars on their necks. (Those collars would shortly be removed
from all but Joseph Cinqué — because he had been threatening to attempt an escape.)
THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
RACE SLAVERY
56. This vessel had originated in a shipyard of Baltimore as the Friendship. I wonder whether, with such a name, it had been
constructed by a Quaker shipbuilder. (Note that the US National Park Service, with the support of the Salem Partnership, is currently
building a full size reproduction of a Salem merchant vessel that had been named Friendship, but this Salem merchant vessel was
not the same as this Friendship of which we here speak, which had been constructed in a Baltimore shipyard and which eventually
became the Spanish Cuban coastal vessel La Amistad of the Amistad mutiny. This Salem square-rigged, 342-ton three-master had
been begun in 1796 in the Stage Point yard of Enos Briggs and was registered in 1797 by its owners Jerathmiel Peirce and Aaron
Waite. It was 104 feet long and 27 feet wide and the depth of the hold was 13 feet, 9 inches, which is just enormously larger than
the La Amistad. The Salem merchant vessel made at least 15 voyages to places such as China, Java, Sumatra, Madras, London,
Hamburg, Archangel, and St. Petersburg before it was captured by the British during the War of 1812. The Friendship II now being
constructed is to be permanently berthed at Derby Wharf at the Salem Maritime National Historic Site.)
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June 29, Saturday or 30, Sunday: Aboard La Amistad, still in his slave collar, Joseph Cinqué found a nail
and hid it in his armpit.
THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
RACE SLAVERY
June 30, Sunday: Waldo Emerson mused in his journal about the wu wei nature of the Transcendentalist
enterprise:
It is proposed to form a very large Society to devise & execute
means for propping in some secure & permanent manner this
planet. It has long filled the minds of the benevolent & anxious
part of the community with lively emotion, the consideration of
the exposed state of the globe; the danger of its falling & being
swamped in absolute space; the danger of its being drawn too
near the sun & roasting the race of mankind & the daily danger
of its being overturned & if a stage coach overset costs
valuable lives what will not ensue on the upset of this Omnibus?
It has been thought that by a strenuous & very extensive concert
aided by a committee of master builders & blacksmiths, a system
of booms & chains might be set round the exterior surface & that
it might be underpinned in such a manner as to enable the aged
& the women & children to sleep & eat with greater security
henceforward. It is true that there is not a perfect unanimity
on this subject at present & it is much to be regretted. A pert
& flippant orator remarked to the meeting last Sunday, that the
World could stand without linch pins & that if you should cut
all the ropes & knock away the whole underpinning, it would
swing & poise perfectly for the poise was in the globe itself.
But this is Transcendentalism.
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June 30, Sunday-July 1, Monday: To pick up their annual treaty payment three bands of Ojibwa, who used to
visit Michilimackinac for their payment, were told they had to come to Fort Snelling in the center of the
territory of their primary enemies, the Dakota nation. These three groups made up a total of 1,250 Ojibwa by
contrast with the 870 Dakotas who were living in the area of the white fort. The band of Hole-In-The-Day came
down the Mississippi River in canoes, the Mille Lacs band (Mille Lacs had only recently been taken by the
Ojibwa from the Dakotas in battle) came overland, and others came down the St. Croix River to its junction
with the Mississippi and then paddled up the Mississippi. One of the bands was called “Pillager.” This map
shows the then-current delineation of territories of the Dakota and Ojibwa nations, which generally coincided
with the southern limit of such forest trees as the pine, the black spruce, and the balsam fir between 1780 and
1850:
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Marpiyawicasta “Man of the Clouds” or “L.O. Skyman” had established the farming village “Eatonville” in
the protection of the fort near where Lakewood Cemetery touches Mde Medoza (“Lake Calhoun” Lake of the
Loons) in 1828 with the assistance of the Indian Agent at the fort, Major Lawrence Taliaferro.
Marpiyawicasta’s family had been long intermarried with prominent local whites such as Taliaferro and a West
Point graduate, Captain Seth Eastman. Although Fort Snelling threw a big friendly party that involved one of
the Ojibwa women being given as a bride to one of the Dakota men, the ancestral injuries still cried out for
blood.57 Two Ojibwa of the Pillager band were seen wailing over the grave of the Ojibwa man who had been
assassinated near Patrick Quinn’s home on the Mississippi River in a previous year by two Dakotas of the
Eatonville band,58 and at the time these two were presumed to be this man’s sons or stepsons.
57.For an account of the vengeance feud between Dakota and Ojibwa, see also “Running the Gauntlet” by William Joseph Snelling,
Volume I, pages 439-56 of the Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society. Also of interest is “A Reminiscence of Fort Snelling”
by Mrs. Charlotte O. Van Cleve, pages 76-81 in Volume III.
58.These Dakotas had received permission from the Indian Agent at the fort, Major Lawrence Taliaferro, to assassinate Chief HoleIn-The-Day “if they could, on his way home,” but they got confused and shot an Ojibwa who had borrowed some of the chief’s
finery. One of the assassins was badly wounded, and they were both “confined in the fort for a while, but were finally released on
condition that their friends should chastise them severely in the presence of the garrison.”
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SUMMER 1839
Late Summer: During the late summer of 1839 Henry Thoreau and his brother John Thoreau, Jr. would make
a 2-week boat-and-hiking trip from Concord, Massachusetts, into the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
Later, while in residence at Walden Pond, Henry would create 2 drafts of this story, which he would continue
to revise and expand until 1849, when he would arrange for its publication at his own expense. The manuscript,
while purporting to amount to a travel narrative, was actually the 1st textbook in a field that did not yet exist,
that of Comparative Religion. Fortunately, although the contemporary audience for A WEEK ON THE CONCORD
AND MERRIMACK RIVERS would find itself troubled by the writing’s heterodoxy and apparent formlessness, it
would be unable to arrive at a recognition that the work was not at all what it purported to be.
TIMELINE OF
A WEEK
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JULY 1839
July: Question: Was it at about this time that Henry Thoreau carted his old boat Red Jacket over to Walden
Pond?
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July: Henry Thoreau copied into his Commonplace Book a portion of “The Nonnes Preestes Tale” dealing
with the figure of Chanticleer, possibly from the 1830 edition by Thomas Tyrwhitt, THE CANTERBURY TALES
OF CHAUCER, WITH AN ESSAY ON HIS LANGUAGE AND VERSIFICATION ETC. First, in describing the condition
and substance of the “poure widewe”:
A yerd she had enclosed all about
With stickes, and a drie diche without,
In which she had a cok highte Chaunteclere,
In all the land of crowing n’as his pere.
His vois was merier than the mery orgon,
On masse daies that in the chirches gon
Wel sikerer was his crowing in his loge,
Than is a clok, or any abbey orloge.
By nature he knew eche ascentioun
Of the equinoctial in thilke toun;
For what degrees fiftene were ascended,
Than crew he, that it might not ben amended.
His combe was redder than the fin corall,
Embattelled, as it were a castel wall.
His bill was black, and as the jet it shone;
Like asure were his legges and his tone;
His nailes whiter than the lilie flour,
And like the burned gold was his colour.
This gentil cok had in his governance,
Seven hennes, for to don all his plesance,
Which were his susters and his paramoures,
And wonder like to him, as of coloures.
Of which the fairest hewed in the throte,
Was cleped faire damoselle Pertelote,
Curteis she was, discrete, and debonaire.
And compenable, and bare hirself so faire,
Sithen the day that she was sevennight old,
That trewelich she hath the herte in hold
OF Chaunteclere, loken in every lith:
He loved hire so, that wel was him therwith.
But swiche a joye it was to here hem sing,
Whan that the brighte Sonne gan to spring,
In swete accord: “My lefe is fare in lond.”
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Then in describing what happened after Chanticlere “flew down fro the beme”:
This Chaunteclere stood high upon his toos
Stretching his necke, and held his eyen cloos,
And gan to crowen loude for the nones;
And dan Russel the fox stert up at ones,
And by the garget hente Cha[u]nteclere,
And on his back toward the wood him bere.
And finally in regard to the ruckus that then ensued:
The sely widewe, and hire doughtren two,
Herden thise hennes crie and maken wo,
And out at the dores sterten they anon,
And saw the fox toward the wode is gon,
And bare upon his back the cok away:
They criden, out! “Harrow and wala wa!
A ha the fox!” and him they ran,
And eke with staves many another man;
Ran Colle our dogge, and Talbot, and Gerlond.
And Malkin, with her distaf in hire hond;
Ran cow and calf, and eke the very hogges
So fered were for berking of the dogges.
And shouting of the men and women eke,
They ronnen so, hem thought hir hertes broke.
They yellenden as fendes don in Helle:
The dokes crieden as men wold him quelle;
The gees for fere flewen over the trees,
Out of the hive came the swarm of bees, —
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WALDEN: I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag
as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost,
if only to wake my neighbors up.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
CHANTICLEER
PEOPLE OF
WALDEN
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WALDEN: The present was my next experiment of this kind which I
purpose to describe more at length; for convenience, putting the
experience of two years into one. As I have said, I do not propose
to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as
chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake
my neighbors up.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
CHANTICLEER
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
PHILIP CAFARO ON DEJECTION, DESPAIR,
59
AND WALDEN’S EPIGRAPH
Pages 17-18: The epigraph [“I do not propose to write an ode to
dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning,
standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.”]
suggests that Thoreau has made a choice here. Like Coleridge,
he could have written an ode to dejection: faced west at sunset,
rather than rising to greet the sun in the east. A journal entry,
written while he was composing WALDEN, confesses: “Now if there
are any who think that I am vain glorious –that I set myself up
above others –and crow over their low estate –let me tell them
that I could tell a pitiful story respecting myself as well as
them –if my spirits held out to do it, I could encourage them
PEOPLE OF
WALDEN
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with a sufficient list of failures –& could flow as humbly as
the very gutters themselves.” Here, in the relative privacy of
his journal, Thoreau lets himself moon a bit. He certainly knew
these moods and the disappointments that led to them. In fact,
he explored them, as essential human experiences having much to
teach him.
But Thoreau knows that such dejected, twilight thoughts provide
no impetus and no guidance for right living. “That man who does
not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and
auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life,
and is pursuing a descending and darkening way.” Note the word
“despair” here, from the Latin de (without) + sperare (hope). Such
hopelessness leads to lethargy and laziness. Despair is an
important term in WALDEN, often marking our “stuckness” in the
quotidian and our failure to demand more from our lives and
ourselves. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
What is called resignation [acceptance, brute endurance] is
confirmed desperation” [the final surrender, a fatalism that is
truly fatal].
Rather than despair, we must build on a recognition of the
essential goodness of life (esse qua esse bonum est, wrote Augustine,
specifying his ethical starting point). “We should impart our
courage, and not our despair,” Thoreau writes, “our health and
ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not
spread contagion.” The epigraph’s crowing cock puts a simple
“yes” to life at the center of ethics. We can get from this
simple “yes” to more complex affirmations, but never from a “no”
to a “yes.” And this first premise, or necessary practical
postulate, cannot be proven. Affirmation or negation always
59.
Philip Cafaro. THOREAU’S LIVING ETHICS: WALDEN AND THE PURSUIT OF VIRTUE. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2004
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remains the main choice facing each of us.
Consider a second key passage, one of the most often-cited in
WALDEN:
I went to the woods because I wished to live
deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,
and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and
not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so
dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it
was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out
all the marrow of life ... to know it by experience, and
be able to give a true account of it in my next
excursion.
The passage develops into a stirring peroration to life and
life’s grand possibilities (experiencing deeply, knowing truth,
sharing this knowledge with others). But Thoreau makes it clear
that these possibilities can be explored only by those who live
deliberately. The term encompasses both the ability to consider
alternatives and the ability to act — to instantiate one
alternative rather than another. The presence of liber and liberate
suggests an essential connection between such deliberation and
human freedom.
If choosing to speak a basic “yes” to life is one key antidote
to despair, another is deliberation: thinking through particular
options and actively choosing the best ones, rather than falling
into the easiest ones. Deliberation is an act of optimism,
signaling the belief that we can have choices; that we can
distinguish better from worse choices; that we can act on that
knowledge and improve our lives. “I know of no more encouraging
fact,” Thoreau writes, “than the unquestionable ability of man
to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.” Throughout WALDEN,
he renews his call for “deliberate” action in constructing a
house, choosing a career, reading a book, building a fireplace.
Deliberation is the key to living well, affirming human freedom,
and meeting life’s challenges. Life is glorious, Thoreau
insists, and so the stakes are high. For we may come to the end
of our lives and find that we have not lived. We may waste our
lives on inessential trivialities. We may fail to learn what
life has to teach. Like the penitential brahmins described in
Walden’s third paragraph, we may lead lives that deny or deform
our human nature. In all these ways we may, and often do, deny
life.
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July 1, Monday night: Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II died in Constantinople and was succeeded by his son
Abdulmejid I. Pursuant to the defeat at Nezib, the Ottoman fleet sailed to Egypt and surrendered to
Mohammed Ali.
Having used the nail to pick the lock on the collar about his neck, and then having freed others, Joseph Cinqué
and the other slaves below decks in La Amistad discovered boxes of sugar cane knives. The knives had square
steel handles and blades that gradually widened to a thickness of three inches at the tip.
THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
RACE SLAVERY
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July 2, Tuesday: Robert Schumann’s lawyer Wilhelm Einert attempted to negotiate with Friedrich Wieck in
regard to Clara but this failed, precipitating litigation.
In the Caribbean: “Murder!” the shout arose at 4AM on the schooner La Amistad.
While attempting to hold them off with a dagger, Captain Ramon Ferrer suggested “Throw some bread at
them!” As the captain and the cook were being killed, two other crewmen were leaping into the sea.
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Our national birthday, Thursday the 4th of July: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 35th birthday.
Ground was broken in East Lexington, Massachusetts for a unique octagonal Unitarian church structure,
designed by the Reverend Charles Follen (this octagonal building still stands, as the oldest church structure in
Lexington). In his prayer at the groundbreaking the Reverend declared the mission of his church — and this
mission statement now on a memorial to him in the churchyard:
[May] this church never be desecrated by intolerance,
or bigotry, or party spirit; more especially its doors
might never be closed against any one, who would plead
in it the cause of oppressed humanity; within its walls
all unjust and cruel distinctions might cease, and
[there] all men might meet as brethren.
In Hagerstown, Maryland, the only two soldiers of the American Revolution of that vicinity still alive sat
proudly in a carriage drawn by white horses.
On Staten Island, between 20,000 and 30,000 children were gathered to celebrate a Sunday School Scholars
National Jubilee while, in New-York harbor, 1,000 ships were “gaily dressed in honor of the day.”
In Boston, 1500 men gathered at Faneuil Hall in support of a Temperance Reformation.
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In Norwich, Connecticut, at a sabbath school celebration, one of the students read excerpts from the
Declaration of Independence while wearing “the identical cap” that had been worn by William Williams of
that state at the time he had placed his signature upon that document.
In Tennessee, the McMinnville Gazette published a “Declaration of Independence for an Independant
Treasury,” and the text of this would be reprinted in the Washington DC Globe.
At Norfolk, Virginia, an elephant “attached to the menagerie” was induced to swim across the harbor from
Town Point to the Portsmouth side and back.
CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY
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There was a 91-scalp victory dance on the east shore of Lake Calhoun, just south of Minneapolis in the
Minnesota Territory. One of the scalps was of the bride from the wedding at the fort (one can’t help but notice
that in none of the accounts has any white recorder of these events gone to the trouble of recording her name).
In regard to that scalp dance, one of the white people did register a comment:
“It seemed as if hell had emptied itself here.”
Henry Thoreau was inspired to perpetrate a poem, in honor of an illustrated 3-volume set of famous British
poems which he was at the moment perusing, THE BOOK OF GEMS. THE POETS AND ARTISTS OF GREAT
BRITAIN. EDITED BY S.C. HALL (London: Saunders and Otley, Conduit Street):
THE BOOK OF GEMS, I
THE BOOK OF GEMS, II
THE BOOK OF GEMS, III
July 4.
THE “BOOK OF GEMS”
With cunning plates the polished leaves were decked,
Each one a window to the poet’s world,
So rich a prospect that you might suspect
In that small space all paradise unfurled.
It was a right delightful road to go,
Marching through pastures of such fair herbage,
O’er hill and dale it led, and to and fro,
From bard to bard, making an easy stage;
Where ever and anon I slaked my thirst
Like a tired traveller at some poet’s well,
Which from the teeming ground did bubbling burst,
And tinkling thence adown the page it fell.
Still through the leaves its music you might hear,
Till other springs fell faintly on the ear.60
60. Thoreau’s extracts from these three unremarkable volumes assembled at London by S.C. Hall between 1836 and 1838 are to be
found in his Literary Notebook 1840-1848 and his Miscellaneous Extracts 1836-1840.
SAMUEL CARTER HALL
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July 9, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson wrote to Margaret Fuller:
JONES VERY
I am editing Very’s little book. Three Essays; and
verses. Out of two hundred poems, I have selected sixty
six that really possess rare merit. The book is to cost
75 cents, and I beg you to announce its coming value
to all buyers. If it sells, our prophet will get $150
which, little though it be, he wants.
His contract in Riga having not been renewed, Richard Wagner and his wife stayed one step ahead of their
creditors by abandoning Mitau near Riga, heading toward Paris.
July 10, Wednesday: According to the Caledonian Mercury of Edinburgh, Scotland for August 1st, “11th —
On the 3d of June, embarked at Halifax on board HM. brig Ringdove, one officer, two serjeants [sic], and 30
rank and file, with women and children; and on board HM. steamer Medea, one officer, two serjeants, one
drummer, and 50 rank and file, with women and children, for Sydney, Cape Breton, to relieve the detachment
stationed there, which was to return to headquarters in the Ringdove. One company, under the command of
Major Thoreau, embarked at Halifax on the 4th of June, on board HMS. Andromache for Charlottetown,
Prince Edward’s Island. The men, women, and luggage, left at Halifax on the departure of the service
companies for Canada, arrived at Quebec in the Pique the 22d of June, were landed next day and joined the
corps. The Montreal Gazette announces the arrival of the band at Quebec, which, during the past winter has
been quartered at Chambly, in the steam boat Canada, from Montreal. Two companies of the regiment still
remain at Chambly.” According to an article in the Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser of
Dublin, Ireland of July 19th, in Canada “Part of the 37th regiment, under Major Thoreau, replaced the 23d at
Prince Edward’s Island on the 10th.”
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“A YANKEE IN CANADA”: This is the site where a real battle once took
place, to commemorate which they have had a sham fight here almost
every day since. The Highlanders manœuvred very well, and if the
precision of their movements was less remarkable, they did not
appear so stiffly erect as the English or Royal Irish, but had a
more elastic and graceful gait, like a herd of their own red deer,
or as if accustomed to stepping down the sides of mountains. But
they made a sad impression on the whole, for it was obvious that
all true manhood was in the process of being drilled out of them.
I have no doubt that soldiers well drilled are as a class
peculiarly destitute of originality and independence. The
officers appeared like men dressed above their condition. It is
impossible to give the soldier a good education without making
him a deserter. His natural foe is the government that drills him.
What would any philanthropist who felt an interest in these men’s
welfare naturally do, but first of all teach them so to respect
themselves that they could not be hired for this work, whatever
might be the consequences to this government or that; — not drill
a few, but educate all. I observed one older man among them, grey
as a wharf-rat and supple as the devil, marching lock-step with
the rest, who would have to pay for that elastic gait.
MAJOR JOHN THOREAU
July 11, Thursday: Sir Charles Theophilus Metcalfe was appointed to be governor of Jamaica (he would
perform in that capacity from September 26, 1839 to May 21, 1842).
ANNURSNACK
July 11. At length we leave the river and take to the road which leads to the hilltop, if by any means we may
spy out what manner of earth we inhabit. East, west, north, and south, it is farm and parish, this world of ours.
One may see how at convenient, eternal intervals men have settled themselves, without thought for the universe.
How little matters it all they have built and delved there in the valley! It is after all but a feature in the landscape.
Still the vast impulse of nature breathes over all. The eternal winds sweep across the interval to-day, bringing
mist and haze to shut out their works. Still the crow caws from Nawshawtuct to Annursnack, as no feeble
tradesman nor smith may do. And in all swamps the hum of mosquitoes drowns this modern hum of industry.
EVERY MAN IS A ROMAN FORUM
All things are up and down, east and west, to me. In me is the forum out of which go the Appian and Sacred
ways, and a thousand beside, to the ends of the World. If I forget my centralness, and say a bean winds with or
against the sun, and not right or left, it will not be true south of the equator.
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23D STANZA: 1839/1840
Henry David Thoreau’s 23d stanza began on his birthday, July 12th, Friday, 1839.
•
•
•
•
•
He gave his 1st lecture at the Concord Lyceum.
He wrote the poem “Sympathy.” Waldo Emerson wrote Thomas Carlyle mentioning that Henry
Thoreau “writes the truest verses.”
He and John threw a melon party in Concord and then went on a boating expedition down the
Concord River, across the Middlesex Canal, and up the Merrimack River to Concord, New
Hampshire and the White Mountains.
Both John Thoreau, Jr., age 24, and his younger brother Henry Thoreau, would be falling in love
with Miss Ellen Devereux Sewall — who, we need to remember. was also at that time being
courted by another Harvard man.
The Thoreaus were living near (but not on) the site of the present Concord Free Public Library
building (which would anyway not be erected until 1873), in the “Parkman house, to fall of 1844.”
It was in this home that the Thoreau brothers would hold their school.
“My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.”
— Henry Thoreau
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others,
such as extensive quotations and reproductions of
images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great
deal of special work product of Austin Meredith,
copyright 2015. Access to these interim materials will
eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some
of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button
invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap
through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems—
allows for an utter alteration of the context within
which one is experiencing a specific content already
being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin
Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by
all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any
material from such files, must be obtained in advance
in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”
Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please
contact the project at <[email protected]>.
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until
tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”
– Remark by character “Garin Stevens”
in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: August 12, 2015
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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a
human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that
we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the
shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these
chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by
ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the
Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a
request for information we merely push a button.
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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious
deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in
the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we
need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology —
but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary
“writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this
originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves,
and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever
has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire
operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished
need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect
to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic
research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge.
Place requests with <[email protected]>. Arrgh.

Henry Thoreau - Kouroo Contexture

Transcription

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