Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  George Frisbie Hoar thought getting into Harvard was easy. Why, in a couple of years, any reasonably bright boy of fourteen could master the entrance requirements. But George Moore the jailer’s son steeled himself to get up at 4:00 a.m. every morning to read his lessons, and all summer of 1830 he flogged himself without mercy through Latin reviews, Jacobs’ Greek Reader, and the New Testament gospels before sitting for Harvard’s August entrance exams: Latin and Greek, algebra and arithmetic, geography, the Greek New Testament. In the end, he passed with only a single “condition,” in Sallust.13 By contrast, Thoreau spent a good part of his pre-exam summer building his first boat, the Rover, and taking excursions up the river. On August 24, 1833, he rode into Cambridge for a long grueling day of testing by tutor after tutor in all the branches of learning. Years later he still stung under the embarrassment: “One branch more,” President Quincy told him, “and you had been turned by entirely. You have barely got in.” Thoreau had been conditioned in Greek, Latin, and mathematics—Harvard’s three principal subjects! But get in he did, and graduate he did, even if, as he admitted, “Those hours that should have been devoted to study, have been spent in scouring the woods, and exploring the lakes and streams of my native village.”14

  Why Harvard? For a Concord son, it was the inevitable choice, the highest aspiration for the town’s best and brightest boys. Founded in 1636, only a year after Concord itself, Harvard had grown into a center for education in theology, medicine, law, and the liberal arts. Its ties to Concord were deep: when the American army laid siege to British-occupied Boston, it was to Concord that Harvard’s faculty and students decamped, and one of those students, Rev. Ezra Ripley, returned to Concord, where he became a proud advocate of the rationalist, liberal wing of New England’s ancestral Congregational Church, of which Harvard was the national leader. This made Harvard a lightning rod as well: when the 1805 appointment of the liberal icon Henry Ware (with whom Thoreau himself would study) as professor of divinity turned orthodox Calvinists into open enemies of Harvard, they fled to competing colleges—Andover, Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale. This split reinforced Harvard’s position as the great bastion of Unitarianism, as well as the mother ship for Concord’s own First Parish Church.

  That Harvard was state supported hardly meant it was open to everyone. Even the most gifted women were categorically excluded. Frisbie Hoar was prepared for Harvard by Sarah Alden Ripley, whom he called “one of the most wonderful scholars of her time, or indeed of any time.” Even Harvard’s President Edward Everett said that Ripley “could fill any professor’s chair at Harvard.” Except, of course, she couldn’t—she couldn’t even attend classes. Instead, she tutored Harvard students, boys trying to gain entrance or who’d been “rusticated” for some offense, in mathematics, Greek and Latin, German and Italian, and natural philosophy (in which Ripley particularly excelled). She gave them, thought Hoar, better instruction than they got in Cambridge.15 The same was true of the formidable Margaret Fuller, who also tutored Harvard students and who also, like Ripley, became become one of Thoreau’s most respected colleagues—but only after he was released from Harvard Yard to a world where women of intellect could make their mark.

  Cost was another barrier. At roughly $200 a year for tuition, room and board, plus other expenses, at a time when a typical wage for a laborer was less than a dollar a day, a Harvard education was out of reach for most. Even the Thoreaus—with a solid family business plus the boardinghouse—found it a financial stretch. To make ends meet during Henry’s final two years at Harvard, his family had to give up the fine but expensive Shattuck House and squeeze back in with the Misses Thoreau on the town square, where they lived from spring of 1835 to the spring of 1837. Henry Thoreau was, in short, a scholarship boy. For each of his four years he received small but essential funds from the legacy of James Penn, designated for disadvantaged students who worked hard, kept up their grades, and stayed out of trouble. For three of those four years, his hard work earned him some of the coveted prize money awarded at commencement in lieu of honors.16 The instant the college passed a regulation allowing students to take a thirteen-week leave to earn extra money by teaching school, Thoreau applied and was accepted, even though this absence put him behind in his coursework. Thoreau could never forget that not only had he barely gotten in, he barely stayed in: for him there was no room for carelessness or slacking off, no cushion for risky high-jinks.

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  On August 30, 1833, a week after his entrance exams, Henry Thoreau rose early in the morning to take the stage to Cambridge. The carriage rattled over the Lexington hills, past the cattle market at Porter Square, and down “a solitary country road, till the college buildings came in sight, grey with age, but the yard gay with students and the life of the opening term.” Once he arrived at the back entrance, Thoreau carried his few possessions to red-brick Hollis Hall, where he roomed with his academy classmate Charles Stearns Wheeler, the ruddy-cheeked son of a Lincoln farmer. It was a good match: under Wheeler’s quiet and studious good cheer was an intellect burning with high ambition.17 Their uncarpeted room lacked all the comforts of home: the only furnishings were a pine bedstead; a washstand, washbowl, and pail; a table and two plain chairs; a lamp and perhaps a desk. Students’ rooms were heated by an open wood fire and an old cannonball, which on cold days was cooked red hot and set on a skillet or stand, and on warm nights was occasionally encouraged to roll down the stairs, carefully timed so as to “bisect a proctor’s night-sleep.” Students made their own fires, drew their own water, and polished their own boots, unless they could afford the extra dollars to hire a bootblack.18 Thoreau’s stripped-down life at Walden was hardly less luxurious.

  The day’s schedule was rigidly prescribed. Students attended prayers at six in the summers, half past in winters, in the unheated college chapel, where faculty overseers noted every absence and infraction. Students who failed to show up in the mandatory black coat were docked points—except, curiously, Thoreau, whose green coat went unpunished; likely President Quincy understood that the scholarship boy could afford no other.19 The day’s first recitations followed; then breakfast at the college commons, where students fueled up on hot rolls, butter, and coffee, supplemented perhaps by a slice of yesterday’s meat pinned by a fork to the underside of the table. Another class came after, followed by a coarse but hearty dinner at half-past noon, then afternoon recitations, except on Saturdays. After evening chapel at six the students regrouped for a third time to the commons for cold rolls and tea. Then the dormitories rang with laughter and song until the study bell rang curfew at eight. Sundays were workdays, with mandatory attendance at morning and evening chapel. Only Saturday afternoons offered a window of freedom to venture off campus—though any who missed evening curfew were threatened with a penalty. After five weeks of this, Thoreau and Wheeler were homesick enough to risk it. They walked home for a visit—a long walk; Thoreau’s shoes blistered his feet so badly that he took them off, wincing the last two miles to Concord in bare feet.20 Hardly had he said hello than he had to turn back to Cambridge.

  Harvard’s curriculum was equally rigid. The College was at a low point in its history; critics fretted it was “falling behind the age,” too aristocratic, expensive, and hidebound to attract the really interesting students from the lower and middle classes, and too resistant to reform.21 It was also very small, just over a dozen professors for two hundred students. Numbers fluctuated, but Thoreau’s class of ’37 never had more than about fifty students. Fortunately this small set included some lively minds: Richard Henry Dana returned from his “two years before the mast” to join the class of ’37, and Horatio Hale left it early to sail with the Wilkes Exploring Expedition. Charles Dall would marry Caroline Healey, contributing to a second generation of Transcendentalism. Others, such as the poets Jones Very (’36) and James Russell Lowell (’38), overlapped on campus, but class years were strictly segregated; the same few students cycled together for term after term through the same sta
ndard courses offered by the same dozen professors, seldom hearing other points of view. Harvard’s professors did not socialize with the students, who regarded them as “their natural enemies.” Should a student seek out a professor for help or advice, it was by night and in secret, for it was a high crime to enter a classroom early or stay late to ask a question; anyone caught doing that was ostracized as “a fish.” Thoreau found himself in a barely larger version of the Concord Academy: youths thrown together learned from one another and bonded into a tight cohort, a little world to itself laced with rivalries and friendships that were remembered, though they might not last, for a lifetime.22

  There were advantages to this. As President Everett remarked, in a mere four hours “a young man of any capacity at all” could easily accomplish the day’s tasks, leaving him lots of time to pursue his own bent “unimpeded.”23 For Thoreau this meant walking off into the countryside to observe birds or hunt for nests and eggs. In a letter from Walden to a young naturalist, he fondly recalled paying his daily respects to a weasel living in a hollow apple tree, and with his friends annually raiding the nest of a long-suffering flicker who “steadily supplied the loss like a hen, until my chum demolished the whole with a hatchet.” It also meant daily trips to Harvard’s tremendous library, the best in the nation. On his deathbed, Thoreau would advise Edward Emerson that Harvard’s library was perhaps “the best gift Harvard had to offer.” There in the stacks Thoreau began his lifelong habit of keeping a permanent record of his reading by copying extracts into commonplace books. He developed a passion for English poetry from Chaucer to Shakespeare—a mine he worked, as his classmate John Weiss sneered, “with a quiet enthusiasm, diverting to it hours that should have sparkled with emulation.”24

  Emulation, indeed: in this environment, the social pressure to compete was intense. Another classmate remembered Thoreau as “bright and cheerful,” but Weiss thought him oddly dressed, “cold and unimpressible,” his hand “moist and indifferent,” his “prominent, gray-blue eyes” roving down the path just ahead of his feet in “his grave Indian stride”—already living at some interior Walden Pond, hiding his genius, for none of them could see it.25 While Weiss was busy sneering, others enfolded Thoreau into a lively circle of loyal friends, starting with his academy classmates Stearns Wheeler and Henry Vose (who became a Superior Court judge), and Sam Hildreth, the class poet, so poor he lived on the charity of friends, so eloquent he was hired upon graduation as Harvard’s new professor of elocution. Hildreth’s best friend was William Allen, to whom Thoreau inscribed his precious first copy of Emerson’s Nature. James Richardson, Thoreau’s sophomore roommate, was a good-hearted daydreamer who wrote poetry for the Harvardiana and died nursing soldiers in the Civil War. There was Augustus Peabody, a lover of nature who became a doctor in Maine, and Charles Russell, who became a law professor at Boston University, and Charles Rice the blacksmith’s son, who became a lawyer in Georgia. This talented circle borrowed books from one another, debated one another formally in the Institute of 1770 and informally in bull sessions, and traded letters that were by turns cheerful, anxious, and just plain silly.

  John Shepard Keyes tumbled into Thoreau’s circle when the nervous and overawed Concord Academy student arrived for his entrance exams. Thoreau greeted him at the gate and led him to his room, whereupon Thoreau’s classmates burst through the door and set about teasing the two Concordians “in all sorts of amusing ways, and took down some of our local pride, and Concord self-conceit for which I soon found out that my host was as distinguished in college as afterwards.” Amid these “roaring seniors,” Keyes forgot all about the impending terrors of the exam, and there, piled together in his dorm room, Thoreau and his rollicking friends gave him the lowdown on student life at Harvard—including, most important of all, the insiders’ story of the notorious Dunkin Rebellion, which, as Keyes drily observed, “varied essentially from the home notion.”26

  Harvard still remembers the Dunkin Rebellion of spring 1834 as one of the worst student riots in its history. Thoreau and his classmates were just freshmen, but that didn’t protect them from the riots or from the punishments that followed. Student rebellions were a Harvard tradition: the recent Great Rebellion of 1823 had inspired President Kirkland to institute reforms, including a new grading system intended to be fair and transparent. But in 1828, after Kirkland was forced to resign, the overseers brought in Josiah Quincy to tighten the ship. Tighten he did—too tight; his methods made things worse. By the time Thoreau arrived, students were protesting Quincy’s eight-point “Scale of Merit” used to rate every single class, recitation, and assignment, with points deducted for the least infraction. Quincy himself kept score, deputizing the faculty as his police force: every hour, day and night, Harvard’s professors and tutors watched, judged, and scored, penalizing such offences as “grouping” in the college yard—two students constituted a group, which explains why Keyes was entertained behind closed doors—and wearing clothing of the wrong cut or color, meaning anything but black. While Thoreau was mocked for his green homespun, James Russell Lowell was docked for reporting to chapel in a brown coat. The least offense could be terminal: Thoreau watched as a student two years behind him was suspended for cracking walnuts in chapel.27

  Marshall Tufts, who participated in the Great Rebellion, wrote, “Should not liberty of conscience be consulted in education as well as religion?”28 Thoreau agreed, and Tufts’s words became a rallying cry. In March 1834, Thoreau, along with most of his classmates, signed a petition calling for the abolition of Quincy’s point system, arguing it fostered not real learning but “the petty emulation of the schoolboy.” Thoreau had walked right into a tinderbox. The match was lit when a sophomore quarreled with the Greek tutor Christopher Dunkin. After several students were punished for insubordination, the campus erupted: students threw rocks through Dunkin’s windows, smashed his furniture, broke into the bell tower, and rang the campus bell in the middle of the night. Quincy called on county authorities to investigate, but no one would identify the guilty parties, leaving no one liable for the $300 in damages. So Quincy dismissed virtually the entire sophomore class.29 The result was all-out student riot. Every shutter in reach was ripped off to feed bonfires of classroom furniture; the chapel was bombed, and Quincy was hanged in effigy from the Rebellion Tree while a black flag fluttered over the campus. The day after, students stepped gingerly around mounds of broken glass, heaps of smashed furniture, and the smoldering ashes of bonfires. Many left for good, and new enrollments plummeted.

  Where, in all this mess, was Henry Thoreau? Nowhere, accused John Weiss, who’d grown into a hotheaded radical preacher. But this isn’t quite correct. A month into the cleanup, Dr. Henry Ware informed President Quincy that members of Thoreau’s class had made “offensive noises” at prayers. The faculty voted to smoke out the miscreants by examining each freshman individually. Their inquisition indicted one Joseph Huger of South Carolina, and one Giles Henry Whitney. But Whitney protested his innocence and pleaded that Thoreau and Wheeler both be reexamined on his behalf. The faculty refused. Whitney was dismissed from Harvard, whereupon his dismayed father petitioned for a new hearing, submitting in his son’s defense letters from Thoreau and Wheeler—which, alas, have not survived. The two letters failed to move the faculty, who voted 8 to 2 to let Whitney’s dismissal stand.30

  In short, Thoreau put himself on the line to defend his classmate’s innocence in person, and when he was refused, he wrote a letter of testimony, which the faculty read, discounted, and apparently destroyed. He may not have smashed windows and trashed classrooms, but he did stand up for a friend who, in his view, had been unjustly accused and punished, at a time when students had been dismissed for far less.

  Thereafter, for three more years, Thoreau was one of only nineteen students in his class who were never once called in for disciplinary action. Whatever his thoughts, he was very careful not to risk his class standing. This was not mere schoolboy obedience. Even Weiss, who blam
ed Thoreau for disappearing while “our young absurdity held its orgies,” grudgingly admitted that “there is nothing so conventional as the mischief of a boy who is grown large enough to light bonfires,” but not large enough to pay the bills for his “anarchy.”31 The Dunkin Rebellion gave the sixteen-year-old Thoreau occasion to think about who pays the costs for riotous anger and what courage even a modest act of civil disobedience requires. He started a slow burn: though he was consistently among the college’s better students, by his senior year, his professors, suspicious of his attitude, docked his final prize money as punishment. One can only imagine what they would have done had Thoreau exposed them to the fullness of his scorn.

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  So what exactly was this “Harvard education” for which Thoreau worked so hard and his family sacrificed so much? The hot-button controversy over “emulation” gives a clue: Harvard’s ranking system rewarded gentlemanly behaviors and discouraged eccentricities. The classroom forensics, endless recitations, and declamations all encouraged each student to measure his performances constantly against his classmates’; those who could never measure up simply stopped trying. In lectures, where much of the actual instruction occurred, students took copious notes, which they copied into their records to memorize.32 While Quincy’s rankings seemed arbitrary and punitive to the rebels, they were designed to tell each student at the end of the term precisely where he stood, who was ahead of him, and who was behind him. All Harvard’s rewards were based on these assessments.

  The core of a Harvard education was total immersion in the long-dead languages of ancient Greece and Rome. Today this seems incomprehensible; even then it was controversial. As one graduate complained, ancient literature may well have been the ark that saved civilization from the deluge of barbarism, “but we do not read, that Noah thought himself obliged to live in the ark after the deluge had subsided.”33 Thoreau, though, was indeed obliged to live in that ark. Having been conditioned in Latin and Greek, he worked hard to catch up, plunging into Livy, Horace, Seneca, and Cicero, Rome’s great orator and moral philosopher; he read the great orations of Demosthenes calming the threat of mob rule, and the austere tragedies of Sophocles illustrating the sublime poetics of Aristotle, and Homer’s Iliad, called the bible of the Greeks, showing the universality of manly virtue—all, of course, in the original Greek. This education shaped Thoreau profoundly, teaching him to measure the moderns by the standards of the ancients, and it enabled him to lean hard into every word he wrote, hearing echoes of meaning layered across a multitude of languages and ringing down through the ages.