The piece had a long incubation. Shortly after Thoreau’s incarceration, for example, in his journal he recorded his outrage at the war. “There probably never were worse crimes committed since time began than in the present Mexican war,” he wrote, yet the public had not and probably never would learn what “reckless villain” had fathered them, because so many people were complicit. One had to be master of his own actions, Thoreau continued in an Emersonian pitch, for “any can command him who doth not command himself.” He held out little hope for the counsel of the likes of Parker or Ripley. “Countless reforms are called for,” he observed, “because society is not animated or instinct enough with life, but like snakes I have seen in early spring—with alternate portions torpid & flexible—so that they could wriggle neither way.”36 The problem with society was that its individual constituents did not assume control over their relationship to the state.
Thoreau was nothing if not a man of action, and in his lecture he counseled just that, individual acts of resistance against a government whose policies he found immoral. “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day?” he asked. “I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.” As Thoreau saw it, to do nothing stripped away one’s humanity and made a citizen part of the government’s well-oiled machine. The only proper action for a decent man was to make his life a “counter friction to stop the machine,” for men should be “men first, and subjects afterward.” “It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law,” he intoned, “so much as for the right.”37
Like Parker, Thoreau recognized that too many people who claimed to oppose slavery never took concrete action to combat it, because it affected their purses. There were thousands, Thoreau declared, “who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets. And say they do not know what to do … What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot today?” 38 His main complaint with the political process that Parker championed was that it took too long and became a substitute for decisive, direct action. “Unjust laws exist,” Thoreau observed. “Shall we be content to obey them or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?” Men thought that they had to persuade the majority to agree with them before such laws could be changed, but in refusing to act, they compounded the evil. Even worse, because people were silent, the government never saw the error of its ways. Why didn’t it encourage citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults? he asked. “Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?”39 Why, but because the majority of its citizens would rather do nothing, for expediency.
Thoreau dared to challenge the Massachusetts government by not paying his poll tax. With, say, a highway levy he had no quarrel, for he used the roads as much as others. But with regard to the Mexican War he wanted it clear that he disagreed with the state. “I simply wish to refuse allegiance,” he explained, and “to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually.” He did so because he firmly believed that “any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority already.” “I know this well,” he continued, “that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name,—if ten honest men only,—aye, if one HONEST man, in this state of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from his copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor [sic], it would be the abolition of slavery in America.” Why? It mattered not “how small the beginning may seem to be,” he explained, for “what is once well done is done for ever.”40 Men and women had to act with integrity, no matter what the cost.
In this essay Thoreau took Emerson’s Romantic individualism to new heights and integrated it practically into ethics. Man’s conscience constituted the higher law, and only the state that recognized this was worthy of man’s allegiance. There never would be a really free and enlightened state, he explained, until it recognized “the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.” 41 This was not the case in the era of Clay, Webster, and Calhoun, consummate politicians all; nor was it yet the case with someone like Parker, who still believed in the political system. But Thoreau’s call to conscientious individuals to wash their hands of complicity in a government that supported slavery was a cry to arms that would resonate more and more in the next decade. In 1854 he devoted an entire book to argue against a wrongheaded and immoral economy that drove just such immoral aspirations.
If by the mid-1840s Thoreau’s understanding of the scope and importance of social issues had greatly increased, so, too, had Margaret Fuller’s, particularly after the autumn of 1844, when she left Boston for New York to work as the book reviewer for Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune. Fuller had accepted her new position after a series of personal disappointments in New England. She recently had relinquished editorship of The Dial because of ill health and disappointment in the periodical’s shrinking subscription base. She also was frustrated by Emerson’s inability to respond to, or even understand, her emotional needs, something she had in common with her friend Caroline Sturgis.42 At this point Greeley, whose wife had attended several of Fuller’s Conversations, recruited her for his Tribune, which over the three years that he had owned it had grown into a newspaper with an astonishing 50,000 subscribers (by the mid-1850s its circulation topped 300,000).
The notion of writing for such a large audience appealed to Fuller, though she initially was wary of Greeley’s offer, for the city dailies were not known for their sophistication. He assured her, however, of his sincerity in publishing a paper that, while appealing to the masses, would elevate their taste in literature, art, music, science, religion, and reform. Greeley had bought the Tribune to bring culture to the people, and he very much wanted Fuller as part of the experiment.43 She accepted, overseeing his paper’s “literary” department, writing three essays a week at a salary of five hundred dollars a year, and over the next four years she contributed more than 250 pieces, most over the byline “*”.44 In her very first assignment—a review of Emerson’s Essays, Second Series—she ruminated on what she had left behind in Concord and Boston, and on her relationship to this author. She was not afraid to present an objective view of his reputation; and thus, after granting his undeniable influence as a lecturer, she fairly, and acutely, detailed the criticism against him.
Emerson always had faced charges of willful obscurity, she observed, and of “an inclination, at times, to subtlety at the expense of strength.” But more troubling, given her own disappointment in fostering a more intimate relationship with him, was his “inadequacy” to represent the human heart’s “full vocation and its deeper needs.” Emerson was undoubtedly a man of ideas, she continued, “but we want the ideal man also; want the heart and genius of human life to interpret it, and here our satisfaction is not so perfect.”45 Once closely identified with Emerson’s ethic of self-reliance, Fuller was beginning to understand how it worked against the creation of deep interpersonal relationships.
In her columns Fuller brought precisely this “heart and genius of human life” to her observations, and her attempts in this vein plunged her more and more into reformist circles. Thus, while she took seriously her position as book reviewer, she also used her front-page columns (previously occupied by Albert Brisbane) to educate readers in significant political and social issues. Her interests centered on the city’s institutions for the criminal and the indigent, the plight of the slave, and the expansion of woman’s sphere. Her engagement with these topics marked an important transition in her career. As editor of The Dial she had worked to inculcate an interest in literature and poetry. Since her early twenties she had admired German writers, particularly Goethe.46 Her first published books were translations of the correspo
ndence between Bettina von Arnim and the canoness Günderode, and Johann Peter Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, in Ripley’s series. Now employed by Greeley, whose proclivities toward politics and reform dominated his newspaper, and having recently read Fourier’s works in the original (rather than in Brisbane’s or Godwin’s sanitized versions), Fuller moved beyond Emerson’s cerebral and self-centered response to reform.
Her largest arena was that of women’s rights. The achievement of remarkable women throughout history had preoccupied her at least since her Conversations, which often centered on this topic. Her seminal feminist statement, however, “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men, Woman versus Women,” published in one of the last numbers of The Dial and subsequently expanded into Woman in the Nineteenth Century, assured her primacy in the women’s rights movement. There was much in that book that derived from the Unitarian virtue of self-culture and the Emersonian ethic of self-reliance, for she maintained that woman, in other words, is “a child of the spirit” as much as man.47
She also insisted on the uniqueness of principles identified by social custom as “feminine” but which were present in different degrees in both women and men. “Male and female,” she wrote, “represent the two sides of the great radical dualism.” But in fact, “they are perpetually passing into one another.” “There is no wholly masculine man,” she continued, “no purely feminine woman.”48 But, most importantly, the feminine had to be melded with more “masculine” qualities to form a whole person. “The growth of Man is two-fold,” she explained, “masculine and feminine.”49 The trouble with marriage as it currently existed was that man “did not clearly see that Woman was half himself; that her interests were identical with his; and that, by the law of their common being, he could never reach his true proportions while he remained in any wise shorn of hers.”50
But Fuller’s analyses were as much economic and social as psychological. She sharply criticized women’s subordinate position in marriage and their exclusion from work that provided more economic independence as well as personal satisfaction. “Let them be sea-captains, if they will,” she exclaimed. It was not “the transient breath of poetic incense” that a woman wanted, she continued, for one could get that from a lover. Nor was it “money” or “notoriety,” either. Rather, what woman needed was not to rule but “as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded, to unfold such powers as were given her.”51 Instead, all around her Fuller saw women content as objects of “masculine” desire and confined to a domestic sphere in marriages that provided no opportunity for the independence in which she herself had been nurtured.52
Once in New York, Fuller became acutely aware of the position of workingwomen and the poor, and she was motivated to publicize their plight. She was led in this direction by her renewed friendship with William Henry Channing, who, after spending time in New England proselytizing for the Associationists, had returned to New York to minister to a small church of reform-minded parishioners.53 Never fully in the Fourierist camp, he had developed more completely his notion of “Christian Union,” a fervent, millennial faith put to the use of redressing the world’s social ills.54 For him and his followers, Christian love, and labor in its spirit, would initiate a more egalitarian society. His was an activist congregation to whom he emphasized a Christian’s obligation to work for the good of neglected or alienated segments of the population: the poor, the mentally ill, the imprisoned, immigrants, and slaves; and he celebrated Christ as chief among reformers. By 1847 he melded these ideas into what he termed the Church of Humanity.
Channing held many leadership positions in the city’s reform movements and had been a founder of the New York Prison Association. Under his auspices, Fuller gained entry for an inside look at conditions. She also renewed contact with Georgianna Bruce, an English reformer and Brook Farm member now relocated to the city, who in turn introduced her to Eliza Farnham, superintendent of the women inmates at Sing Sing, the New York state prison at Ossining on the Hudson River. As a result, shortly after taking up her tenure at the Tribune, Fuller began to alternate her literary reviews with starkly realistic descriptions of some of the city’s hitherto invisible social institutions.
Even before she started work at the Tribune, in October 1844, she had visited Sing Sing and interviewed the women prisoners, a practice usually prohibited. With Channing accompanying her and boarding nearby with the prison chaplain, Fuller stayed overnight inside the prison with Farnham. Allowed to speak with several of the women prisoners, she found that even the most incorrigible were “decorous” in their conduct and “frank in their conversations,” reminding her of her “Boston Classes,” that is, of the women in her Conversations.55 She shared with the inmates her concern for woman’s plight—she was revising what would become Woman in the Nineteenth Century—and some were enough moved to ask for private interviews. She was much impressed by how Farnham’s “gentle and intelligent treatment” already had ameliorated the inmates’ conditions, and she promised to speak with them individually when she returned. She also took the unusual step of writing directly to some, assuring them that she already had apprised others of their condition and encouraging them to read the books that “some of the ladies of Boston” would soon send at her request.56
Fuller’s visit to Sing Sing moved her deeply, and she alluded to it in her “Thanksgiving” Tribune column, issued in the late fall of 1844. Using as her occasion the quintessential New England holiday, Fuller reminded her readers that “if charity begin at home, it must not end there” but rather extend to “the great circle of humanity,” so many of whom had less to be thankful for at that season. Wherever the “impulse of social or political reform darts up its rill through the crusts of selfishness, scoff and dread arise and hang like a heavy mist above it,” she observed. She took much heart, however, from a recent meeting to organize “an Association for the benefit of Prisoners,” where among other things a participant read of the positive effect musical activities had had on prisoners in France. Fuller was forcibly reminded, she wrote, of her recent experience at Sing Sing, when female prisoners joined in singing a “choral[e]” that described “the last thoughts of spirit about to be enfranchised from the body” with the refrain “All is well.” They sang it so gently and resignedly, she recalled, that the good spirit of the music had penetrated them; she hoped that the spirit of “religious sympathy,” too, might take hold as efforts increased for their moral instruction.57 The following June, in an appeal for support of an “Asylum for Discharged Female Converts” to protect recently released prisoners from the city’s manifold temptations to vice, she reminded her readers of the comfort in which they lived and urged them to consider the sights that she had seen. “If only a released inmate had a place of refuge,” she implored, some precious soul might be saved from “unwilling sin, unutterable woe.”58
Of equal concern was an even larger population, the city’s indigent, who lived either on the streets or in almshouses. She was thunderstruck at the immense contrast between magnificent wealth and dire poverty in New York, a situation that inspired some of her most moving columns. In a brief essay on the “Prevalent Idea that Politeness is too great a Luxury to be given to the Poor,” for example, she related the story of an impoverished boy berated by an upper-class woman on a ferry. Fuller was outraged at the matron’s presumption and “vulgarity.” Reflecting on how often the rich condescended to the less fortunate, Fuller inveighed against such instances of “insolent rudeness or more insolent affability founded on no apparent grounds, except an apparent difference in pecuniary position.”59
This callous hauteur reached its peak in the city’s indifference to those who fell from working poverty into true pauperism and thus depended on private charity or the public dole. Fuller addressed the plight of these unfortunates in “Our City Charities” after a visit to several of the city’s institutions for the indigent. “The pauper establishments that belong to a great city,” she wr
ote, admonished readers of “stern realities” that had to be looked at so that people would learn of what use they could be to the less fortunate. Visiting in turn the Bellevue Alms House, the city’s Farm School for children, the Asylum for the Insane, and the penitentiary on Blackwell’s Island, Fuller succinctly characterized conditions and needs at each.60
She found the Alms House cleaner and more comfortable than she had expected, for example, but she lamented the lack of opportunities for “suitable and sufficient employment,” save gardening and sewing. Ever aware of the topic to which she had devoted her most recent book, she noted how sorry she was, in the institution’s hospital, “to see mothers with their newborn infants exposed to the careless scrutiny of male visitors.” This sensitivity to the need for an individual’s privacy and self-respect runs all through Fuller’s New York writings.
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