Henry’s aunts Betsy, Jane, and Maria were three of the nine original dissenters. Cynthia was deeply torn, but soon she, too, sought to join the Trinitarians. When the new Trinitarian minister, Rev. Daniel Southmayd, and his wife Joanna arrived in Concord in spring 1827, Cynthia welcomed them into her home. By then the Thoreaus had moved yet again, across Main Street into the large, gracious Shattuck House. To help meet their increased expenses, Cynthia took in boarders. The Southmayds were among the first, and all that spring, abstruse theological debates unfolded at the dinner table and spilled into the parlor. Cynthia began to waver. Searching conversations with Joanna Southmayd convinced her that she must not yield in her conviction that God was One, not Three, and Christ was not divine, but God’s embodiment in human form. The Trinitarians could not accept someone admitting such doubts, and Ripley proudly welcomed Cynthia back to his fold. The new Trinitarian meetinghouse continued to rise, directly across the millpond from the First Parish Church, the twin steeples marking the moment New England religion pluralized. Massachusetts dissenters pushed the legislature for formal disestablishment of the church, and in November 1833, when it was put to a vote, Massachusetts citizens agreed. From then on, the state’s churches were private and voluntary. Their ancient role in uniting a community was over.
The grave and observant young Henry took all this in. He grew up in a profoundly religious household, where Sabbath for a small boy meant endless dreary days indoors, banned even from the distraction of books, staring out the window longing for sunset and searching the sky for a hawk or two who might bear his thoughts away “from earthly things.” Fast days meant games of baseball out at Sleepy Hollow, wondering how many services there would be for his family, and whether there would be “an ordinary dinner, an extraordinary dinner, or no dinner at all.” The historian Robert Gross suggests the young Thoreau derived some important lessons from watching his household struggle over religion: first, that no one should sacrifice the claims of his or her own conscience to another—not to authority, and not to family, either. And second, that in its search for purity, religion had devolved into “a battlefield of squabbling parsons and warring churches.”61
Henry’s response was deep, even visceral: reject it all. The meetinghouse must be unbuilt, for the true church lived in no building and could be confined to no institution. Thoreau became an exacting student of the Bible, and he went beyond it to read the scriptures of other major religions, including Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism, seeking for the true fountainhead of spiritual truth. When angry readers shook the New Testament in his face, Thoreau shot back that New England hadn’t heard a single word of it: “Let but one of these sentences be rightly read from any pulpit in the land, and there would not be left one stone of that meeting-house upon another.” Religion, to be true, must be founded anew, not on some cracked cornerstone but on “a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake.”62 That quest would lead Thoreau not to the meetinghouse and not to the courthouse, but to his house of one, out on the shore among the pines that made the drapery of his dreams.
CHAPTER TWO
Higher Learning from Concord to Harvard (1826–1837)
It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.
Henry David Thoreau, October 4, 1859
A Concord Education
Concord liked to boast of its schools. Ever since 1647, Concord’s citizens had taxed themselves to make free public education available to all its children. Once Henry outgrew Phoebe Wheeler’s lessons, he was at the grammar school on the town square at 9:00 a.m. sharp, having bowed to the master and taken his seat in one of the eighty wooden desks. Attendance was voluntary, and spotty; had all the eligible children shown up at once, Henry would have had to fight for a seat. Girls and boys of all ages and abilities crowded together into the one-room schoolhouse to pick up what they could from the perpetual curriculum: spelling and grammar, enough arithmetic for bookkeeping and enough trigonometry for elementary surveying, perhaps a taste of Latin and Greek for those few who aspired to college.
Most of the town’s schoolteachers saw teaching as merely a convenient way station between college and a career. They weren’t much older than their students, and they taught as they had been taught, by oral recitation: each student read a stanza or a paragraph aloud, passing the book along, waiting as the lesson crawled up and down the rows of desks. On Saturdays, children stood up to “speak pieces”—memorized bits of lyric or oratory. The schoolroom was heated by a single wood stove, whose fumes and stench were sealed in by windows shut against the cold, and the day’s two brief recesses were needed as much to ventilate the room as to reinvigorate the children. Worst of all was the classroom’s real goal: not education, but discipline. Teachers suspected that boys fresh off the farm would submit to authority only after testing its limits. So every teacher placed, right on top of their desk where everyone could see it, a “ferule,” a thin, flat stick of wood about two feet long, ready to strike disobedient children on the palm of the hand, inflicting what one teacher admitted was “very great suffering.” Inside the desk would be hidden “a cowhide for gross cases,” and the rowdier boys could expect to be tied up and flogged for insolence or disruptive behavior.1
This was hardly the way to educate leaders for the new republic, and Concord’s town fathers knew it. One of Thoreau’s teachers, Edward Jarvis, joined the school committee and led a reform movement, hoping to replace authoritarian fear with mutual respect and courtesy. It helped, for a few years. Meanwhile, a group of concerned citizens had another idea: open a private-pay school whose cost (five dollars per term) would screen out “the lower-class rowdies” and give Concord’s most promising young men and women a high-quality secondary school education.2 Thus was born, in 1822, the Concord Academy, dedicated to fitting young men for college admission and both women and men for careers as schoolteachers. The academy had a full curriculum: Latin and Greek, plus French and Italian, English rhetoric and composition, mathematics, some chemistry and natural philosophy, a little history and geography. A parade of teachers came and went until September 1827, when the academy’s directors hired Phineas Allen, Harvard class of ’25. Allen saw teaching as his life’s work, literally—he stayed in the classroom until he dropped dead of pneumonia at eighty-three, whereupon his obituaries honored him as the oldest teacher in the state’s history. During his years at the Concord Academy, Phineas Allen shaped the intellectual horizons of a generation of Concord’s youth, the generation that included Henry Thoreau.3
Although Allen taught an imposing roster of great men, including judges, senators, and at least one famous writer, his students did not think of him as a great teacher. “The poorest teacher and the worst school,” one of them snorted. After a boy seized the ferule and broke it over Allen’s head, smashing his gold glasses, discipline was over and the school “degenerated into a merely useless machine.” Thoreau himself joked that “I was fitted, or rather made unfit, for College, at Concord Academy & elsewhere, mainly by myself, with the countenance of Phineas Allen, Preceptor.”4 Yet Allen was hardworking and anxious to be a model teacher. In a letter to the local newspaper, he admonished his successors to be mild and gentle, neat in person and dress, “conscientious in the smallest matters,” and to encourage virtue rather than punish vice. Despite these worthy ideals, Allen’s obituaries praised him for two things: being a “veritable encyclopedia” of information, and missing—in all his fifty-eight years of teaching—only five days on account of illness.5
As Thoreau hinted, his real education happened elsewhere, among the remarkable cohort of young women and men who grew up together and bonded during their academy years. “How I enjoyed it all!” sighed one classmate. “How we studied in school, and how we strolled to the cliffs and love lane in afternoons & recesses or skated on the shallow ponds. . . . We thought ourselves an uncommon lot.” Thoreau, too, listed a cornucopia of pleasures: “Amusements at school—Swimming—bo
ating—Virgil and Salust—Gardening—Squantums—nutting—Books and reading—coasting and skating music—and Society—.”6 Thoreau and his friends shared a common sensibility: they worried that commerce was overtaking American ideals; they longed for authenticity; they disdained the commands of convention and the dictates of fashion; they resolved to forge their own independent paths. This was the restless and hopeful new generation who listened so intently to Emerson, whose dreams and ideals were forged at the very moment when an explosion of newspapers, magazines, and books reinforced hopes for reform—a moment when lyceums and debating societies, libraries, musical groups, and antislavery societies opened up a new world of ideas competing in a burgeoning global marketplace.7
The Concord Academy itself was part of Concord’s transition into this new era. Even as the old consensus was splintering and the new church was welcoming religious dissenters, Phineas Allen was offering the most promising youths of Concord a new, secular intellectual center. At that very moment, the same town fathers who founded the academy set about the remaking of Concord itself. In 1825, a group of Concord’s wealthiest men constituted themselves as an unofficial chamber of commerce to clean up the Mill Dam’s ramshackle shops and noisy, stinking factories. They tore down the gristmill and opened up the dam, “redeeming” (in the word of the day) the swampy, mosquito-breeding wetlands upstream that Thoreau loved, but everyone else deemed pestilential. The noxious tannery and factories were replaced with fine, high-columned, white-painted Federal-style buildings where artisans and craftsmen shared space with banks and insurance brokers who provided capital for the newly prosperous center of commerce. They widened the narrow old Mill Dam road (a notorious bottleneck) into an inviting thoroughfare, and all along the streets, the Ornamental Tree Society planted elms, sycamores, maples, and ashes—whip-lean saplings that in a quarter century would grow into the graceful arching colonnades Thoreau celebrated in “Autumnal Tints.”
The result was the classic, picturesque New England village: lofty steeples and white-pillared buildings clustered around a convenient town center amid a leafy canopy of trees, surrounded by gracious neighborhoods and a few outlying farms. When Jean Thoreau had settled in Concord Center, it was a messy, improvised colonial hub of commerce, industry, and government. A few years later, his son John watched Concord remade as an attractive planned village, in the country but not of it. In 1843, when developers diverted the new railroad through town, Concord completed its evolution into a quiet, green residential town a world away from the urban noise and jostle of Boston, where few remembered the days when cows grazed on the commons. Concord was once again a trendsetter, and the vision realized by its city planners—order and stability, all the advantages of commerce in a quiet country retreat—would draw the rest of the famous Concord authors: Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, Channing, Sanborn.
Concord’s town planners believed education was a civic necessity for everyone, not just the wealthy. Phineas Allen took an important step in October 1828, when he founded the Concord Academic Debating Society to give his male academy students practice in forensics: the thrust and parry of political argument, the foundation of civic democracy. Academy debaters crossed swords over such questions as whether gunpowder was a benefit to humankind or whether America would always be free. A month after its founding, John Thoreau Jr. was debating the question, “Are good novels preferable to good histories?” A year later his younger brother was taking the affirmative against Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar on the question, “Does it require more talents to make a good writer than a good extemporaneous speaker?” Allen scored it against Thoreau, who thus lost his first debate, at age twelve, to a future Massachusetts chief justice. Henry’s performance was little better a month later when he came poorly prepared and won only because his opponent hadn’t prepared at all. The secretary, the jailer’s son George Moore, recorded his disgust: “Such a debate, if it may be called so, as we have had, this evening, I hope never again will be witnessed in this house, or recorded in this book.” Henry then teamed up with George (who no doubt gave him some pointers) to win the negative in a debate over the usefulness of lotteries. The academy lads must have wanted out from under Allen’s governance, however, for in January 1830 they started a new debating club of their own: the Young Men’s Society for Mutual Improvement.8
But far more exciting was the new Concord Lyceum, which became one of the organizing centers of Thoreau’s life. The lyceum movement had been founded by Josiah Holbrook. Electrified by a lecture on chemistry and geology, the Massachusetts schoolmaster envisioned an America where all workingmen—nay, all citizens!—could be inspired by knowledge of science—nay, knowledge of all things!—the arts and letters and history as well, all that was useful, that could be linked to everyday life. After Holbrook published his manifesto in October 1826, he led his movement with the fervor of a crusader: lyceums would be local associations for mutual, hands-on instruction, where citizens would speak to one another of what they knew, sharing local knowledge and community resources, and linking to nearby communities for support and exchange of speakers across growing networks—all toward “raising the moral and intellectual taste of our countrymen.”9 After founding the first lyceum in the industrial town of Millbury (near Worcester) in November 1826, Holbrook traveled from town to town, organizing new ones wherever he touched down until his lyceum movement reached right across the nation.
Only a week after this “Johnny Appleseed of the Lyceum” came to Concord in October 1828, the Concord Debating Club—the adult model for Allen’s student version—took up the question of founding a lyceum in Concord, and decided in the affirmative. On December 3, a large crowd of Concord citizens voted unanimously to make the Concord Lyceum a reality. A month later the newspaper was proclaiming its pride that Concord, “whose ancestry were among the foremost and boldest assertors of civil and political liberty,” would stand among the first to emancipate its citizens “from vice and ignorance.” For two dollars a year—half that for those who had to travel from farther away—every town citizen could bring “2 ladies and if married his children in addition” to weekly meetings that alternated lectures with debates. The fees covered expenses for out-of-town speakers, plus a cabinet of minerals, scientific apparatus, and a library, all made available (by way of the lyceum secretary Phineas Allen) to the students of the Concord Academy, and to the town’s public school students, too—providing their teachers paid the dues.10 Since Allen’s students were all eligible to attend lyceum events, Thoreau’s lifetime membership may be said to have begun at the age of eleven.
Soon the town was assembling at the Concord Academy to hear weekly debates on such politically charged questions as whether the State should build a railroad from Boston to Albany (yes), whether corporal punishment in the schools should be abolished (no), and whether it was right to remove Indian tribes from their ancestral lands to regions beyond the Mississippi (no decision). Lyceum lectures consistently drew a full house, eager to learn about geography and history, politics, theology, and the sciences; in 1829, a course of lectures on chemistry attracted an audience of a hundred. For decades the Concord Lyceum was one of the largest and most active in the nation. Thoreau attended regularly and took several turns as curator and secretary, which allowed him to direct the town’s attention to topics he thought were important, such as the abolition of slavery. He lectured there himself nearly twenty times in as many years, testing out his ideas before a live audience who, having seen him grow up from boyhood, were unawed by his growing fame and freely expressed their amusement, skepticism, and often their appreciation. “Civil Disobedience” was born at the Concord Lyceum; so were Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, and the late natural history essays. The importance of the lyceum to Thoreau is incalculable. It bound him to the town, and bound the town to him; whenever Thoreau wrote for the wider public, the faces he saw in his mind’s eye were those of his friends and neighbors.
To all this the Thoreau household was integral. John�
�s pencil business was important to Concord’s commercial success, and Phineas Allen, who taught three of the Thoreau children, joined the household for a time. But the family’s involvement went beyond this. The Thoreaus often hosted, and always attended, the lively parties held for academy students and their families. They were regulars at the lyceum, often escorting the speakers and putting them up for the night. And their household was growing: after Grandmother Jones died in 1830, the colorful Uncle Charles and the round and loving Aunt Louisa moved in, to stay for the rest of their lives. Cynthia always had final say over who could board at her home, and she made sure her boarders were people of quality who could educate her children in the newest ideas sweeping the nation, and who added to the intellectual life of the community as well.11 Henry Thoreau hardly needed to leave Concord to see the world; staying home in Concord meant the world came to him.
A Harvard Portrait
There was one thing Henry Thoreau could not get in Concord, however: a college degree. It was not immediately obvious that he needed one; the family considered apprenticing him to a cabinetmaker—a logical choice, given he liked to work with his hands.12 But his aptitude for Phineas Allen’s bookish curriculum opened up a new possibility. Cynthia was proud and ambitious for her boys and determined to send at least one of them to Harvard, where her father, Asa Dunbar, had launched his career. In the end Phineas Allen would, in the quaint phrase of the time, offer for admission to Harvard not her lively and charismatic elder son John, but the quiet and studious Henry.
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