Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  While Henry was groping for a role and a voice, the women in his family were finding theirs. When the Wards joined the Thoreau household late in 1833, they brought along their radical abolitionism and their subscription to William Lloyd Garrison’s antislavery newspaper, the Liberator. Women, proclaimed Garrison, held the destiny of slaves in their hands. Once Prudence discovered Concord was too stuffy and timid to hear such “hard things,” she and her friends set about waking people up. In 1834, three of Concord’s most prominent citizens formed the Middlesex County Anti-Slavery Society, and by 1835—the year a mob attacked Garrison, trashing his newspaper office and nearly killing him—Helen and Sophia Thoreau were involved in abolitionism. So were Elizabeth Hoar and Mary Moody Emerson, who drew in Lidian and Waldo (as Emerson was known to his friends). In short, Henry Thoreau returned from college to find his home a hotbed of radical abolitionism. The week he began teaching public school, the antislavery activists Angelina and Sarah Grimké spoke at Concord’s Trinitarian Church, where Prudence thought they won over even some of the men. A few weeks later, a group of Concord women—including Cynthia, Helen, and Sophia Thoreau, both the Wards, and Lidian Emerson—formally founded the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society.27 Henry Thoreau was too preoccupied with his “upper empire” to sign on, but simply walking through his front door put him in the midst of America’s great and growing crisis over slavery.

  Henry was also preoccupied with making a living. As a boarder he was bound by honor and duty to contribute to the family income. If he couldn’t teach, at least he could work at the pencil factory, which he did, turning the task into an intriguing intellectual problem: Why were American pencils so terrible? They functioned, more or less, but were coarse, brittle, greasy and scratchy. Leads were still made from a warm paste of ground graphite, bayberry wax, glue, and whale oil, pressed into grooves cut in slats of cedar wood, topped by a second slat, cut, and finished. But imported French Conté pencils were far superior, and unlike the English pencils of pure-cut natural graphite, the French pencils were graded, from hard to soft. Thoreau went to work to figure out how the French did it. It has been said he found the clue in an encyclopedia article on German pencil-making, but no such article has been located, and the Germans hadn’t yet cracked the secret, either.

  Somehow Henry made the leap. Perhaps his father suggested the idea, or perhaps he read how crucibles were manufactured by mixing graphite with clay, which was heat-resistant. In any case, over the next few months he figured it out: first, use just the right kind of clay (Warren Miles, who later worked in their factory, said the Thoreaus used the fine Bavarian clay imported by glassblowers). Second, vary the proportions: the more clay, the harder the pencil lead. Third, grind the graphite finer than anyone had managed to before. To do that, Henry invented a new graphite mill, a tall churn that used airflow to sift out the finest particles, leaving the rest in the chamber for further grinding. Fourth, mold the graphite-clay mix and fire it in a kiln.28 The result was a completely new kind of pencil lead: a kiln-fired ceramic that could be cut and set into grooves to make pencils graduated in hardness from 1 to 4. Artists, surveyors, and engineers paid a premium for them. The Thoreaus added a rich blue pencil to their product line, plus other styles and sizes, such as flat carpenters’ pencils that wouldn’t roll away. As their business grew, so did the series of manufacturing sheds behind the Parkman house. To keep their trade secrets, father and son wrote nothing down and kept their mouths shut. For some years, no one in America made better pencils.29

  Yet Thoreau felt his calling was not pencil-making, but teaching. He detailed his teaching philosophy in a long letter to Orestes Brownson: education should be a pleasure both for teacher and student, and discipline should be the same in the classroom as in the street; that is, not the cowhide whip but life itself. “I have ever been disposed to regard the cowhide as a nonconductor. . . . Not a single spark of truth is ever transmitted through its agency.” To transmit that spark, the teacher should be a student, too, learning with and from his pupils. But such teaching “supposes a degree of freedom which rarely exists”—the freedom to liberate the self. Brownson was too preoccupied with his new journal, the Boston Quarterly Review, to respond, so Thoreau kept working his contacts, following up rumors of a job here or there.30 Nothing.

  By mid-March he was ready to explode. “We should start in company for the West and there establish a school jointly,” he wrote John—or at least find positions together. Why, their former teacher, now in Kentucky, had listed “nearly a dozen schools which I could have.” It was high time to get started. “Go I must at all events.” Henry started calling in all his forces, and soon he had letters of support from George Ripley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Harvard’s President Quincy—an impressive portfolio. Even as Cynthia flurried around packing to send her sons West, Quincy alerted Thoreau to a plum opening in Virginia.31 But the Virginia lead fizzled, and John accepted a position in West Roxbury, near Boston, so Henry turned to Maine. In May 1838, with a hundred dollars borrowed from Emerson, he headed to Bangor to work his family connections.

  This two-week venture was Thoreau’s first trip beyond the Boston area. Midnight of May 3 found him on a ship to Portland, “head over the boat’s side,” gamely declaring that being seasick heightened the effect of the moon’s brightness. Elbowing his way into strange towns and begging for work from strangers did not come naturally to Thoreau, but on the mail coach to Brunswick, he forgot his awkwardness and grew absorbed in the succession of villages rolling past, each a world to itself, each deserving a separate study. Of his Bangor relatives he left no record, but he detailed his conversation in Oldtown with an old Indian who sat on a scow, “striking his deer-skin moccasins against the planks.” He was “the most communicative man I had met. —— Talked of hunting and fishing—old times and new times. Pointing up the Penobscot he observed—‘Two or three miles up the river one beautiful country!’”—words Thoreau would never forget.32

  The Thoreau School

  By May 17, 1838, Thoreau was back home, still jobless; he’d been either a month too late or three months too early. After spinning plans all spring to leave Concord, perhaps for far away and perhaps for good, in the end he stayed home. Ellery Channing told a family story of a youthful Henry asking his mother which profession to choose, whereupon Cynthia replied, “You can buckle on your knapsack, and roam abroad to seek your fortune.” As Henry’s eyes watered and tears rolled down his cheeks, Helen put her arm around him, kissed him and said, “No, Henry, you shall not go: you shall stay at home and live with us.”33 Which was, for the time being, exactly what he did. In mid-June, 1838, Henry Thoreau opened a school of his own, right in the Parkman House.

  The solution to Henry’s travail seemed to unfold like magic. Soon he had four students, with another engaged, and was keeping school hours: classes from eight to twelve, a break for lunch, then two to four in the afternoon, followed by some reading in Greek or English or, for variety, a stroll in the fields. When the schoolmaster of Concord Academy resigned, the trustees hired Thoreau as the new academy instructor. By September 15, he was announcing openings in Concord’s two newspapers for “a limited number of pupils, of both sexes” for instruction in “the usual English branches” and preparation for college, six dollars per quarter. When enrollments got off to a slow start, his family grew worried: early in October, at Helen’s and John’s urging, Henry inquired into an opening in Taunton, admitting his present school was “not sufficiently lucrative.” But his pupils’ fathers —Samuel Hoar, John Keyes, the lawyer Nathan Brooks—were prominent men in Concord, and word was spreading. Enrollment grew. By the end of winter quarter, the academy required a second teacher, and on February 9, John joined his younger brother. As senior teacher, John took the title preceptor, with Henry assisting him “in the classical department.” Under the Thoreau brothers, Concord Academy soon reached capacity, with twenty-five students.34

  Henry was now free to put his liberating educational princ
iples into practice, and the “Thoreau School” became one of the most important of the nation’s early educational experiments, combining intellectual rigor and a demanding curriculum with the revolutionary Transcendentalist notion of “Culture.” While Transcendentalism has been called a religious movement, the first and most electrifying application of its principles was education: the lifelong process of “educing,” or unfolding, each individual’s inward, God-given spiritual nature.35 As Emerson had announced in “The American Scholar,” the movement’s great manifesto, in the right state the scholar is “Man Thinking.” Every human being is forever a student, and all things exist to draw out each person’s latent abilities. “The main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man,” declared Emerson; “in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason.”36 What did this mean for an aspiring teacher? First, teaching was a vocation to which one could dedicate one’s life. Second, joining this revolution meant one’s own education would never end: one should find discussion groups and forge networks to explore and share new thought, such as the twice-monthly teachers’ meetings Thoreau attended at Emerson’s home. Third, it took real courage to break with generations of convention and ignite students’ love of learning. As Emerson warned, the true teacher could not instruct, but only provoke. The actual learning was in the hands of the students themselves.

  There were few guidebooks to this revolution in education, but Thoreau owned the best: Record of a School, Elizabeth Peabody’s account of Bronson Alcott’s innovative Temple School in Boston, which Peabody helped Alcott found in 1834. She, too, became a great educational reformer, introducing American readers to the progressive European educators Pestalozzi and de Gérando, popularizing the radical European idea of the “Kindergarten,” and opening a Boston bookstore to help spread Transcendentalism to the world and introduce radical books and journals to America. But educational reform didn’t come easily. By the time Thoreau met Alcott in 1839, his Temple School was dying a protracted death. Scandal had erupted in 1837 when Alcott’s Conversations with Children on the Gospels showed him drawing out his pupils on such off-limits topics as human sexuality and Christ’s humanity. Enrollment plunged, and Alcott relocated his school. Enrollment collapsed altogether when he admitted a free black child and white parents withdrew their children en masse. It’s all the more remarkable, then, that the Thoreau school succeeded, enrolled to capacity and fully supported by Concord’s mainstream community. Unlike Alcott, the Thoreau brothers taught both older and younger children, with the Harvard-trained Henry taking the most advanced classes. This meant combining a rigorous college prep curriculum—mathematics, natural philosophy, Greek, Latin, and French—with “the usual English branches” taught by John. Yet the Thoreaus dispensed with conventional methods of rote memorization, recitation, and endless drills under threat of physical punishment. How did they do it?

  The process began with an admission interview. “You say you would like to enter our school,” John would begin; “why do you wish that?” To learn Latin, Greek, and mathematics, the child would reply. “If you really wish to study those things,” John would say, “we can teach you, if you will obey our rules and promise to give your mind to your studies; but if you come to idle and play, or to see other boys study, we shall not want you for a pupil. Do you promise, then, to do what we require?” The student who disobeyed would be reminded of the promise, in a process of moral suasion the students found seamless. “It was a peculiar school,” recalled Horace Hosmer. “There was never a boy flogged or threatened, yet I never saw so absolutely military discipline. How it was done I scarcely know. Even the incorrigible were brought into line.” Where Henry was “strict,” John could “govern and get the good-will of the most unruly boys of Concord,” even those expelled from other schools. At most, John might call a misbehaving student to his desk to reprove him in a voice so low only the culprit could hear it. Once, Hosmer was called up, and instead of punishment he came away with two new books. As for Henry, one student remembered him barreling through the door and commencing work “at once in his peculiar odd way,” with no mercy to the child who had not got his lesson. Frisbie Hoar recalled how they used to call him “Trainer Thoreau, because the boys called the soldiers the ‘trainers,’” and Henry had a soldier’s erect carriage and long, measured stride.37

  On Saturday afternoons, Henry’s long stride would lead the students on weekly field trips, to the Yeoman’s Gazette to see how newspapers were made; to the gunsmith’s to try making their own gunflints; on long walks to Walden, Fairhaven, or Sleepy Hollow for field lessons in botany, geology, and natural history; or boating on the rivers in the Musketaquid, the new boat Henry and John built their first spring at the academy, which the students helped to keep clean and watertight. Sometimes the lessons were practical, like the trip to Fairhaven so Henry could show the students how surveyors worked and have them try out the instruments. One student recalled the day when, sailing through the Great Meadows, Henry landed them all on shore. “Do you see,” he asked the children, “anything here that might attract Indians to this spot?” One boy pointed to the river for fishing, another to the woodland for hunting. “Anything else?” prompted Henry, pointing to a rivulet flowing from a nearby spring, then to a hillside offering shelter. Then, taking a spade, he struck it into the soil, sampling places, until everyone began to despair. Suddenly his spade struck a stone, then it struck another. Soon Henry had uncovered the fire-scorched stones of an Indian campfire, proving the students’ conjectures. Before they left, he carefully replaced the turf to cover up their find, “not wishing to have the domestic altar of the aborigines profaned by mere curiosity.”38

  The school itself was divided into two rooms, with John in charge of the “lower” school on the main floor while Henry taught the advanced classes upstairs. One of the brothers would open with a morning prayer, not a reading of scripture but an extemporaneous address “to put their minds in proper trim for the work of the day.” Thomas Hosmer remembered Henry speaking of the beauties of the seasons, engaging the students so intensely that “you could have heard a pin drop in the School room.” Another morning, Henry asked them to imagine walking into a shop to see the “wheels, pinions, springs and frame pieces” of a watch spread out on a bench, then returning to find them all “exactly put together and working in unison” to show the passage of time—would they believe this happened by chance? Or that “somebody with plan and thought and power” had been there? One of Henry’s addresses was on profanity: “Boys, if you want to talk to a man and he insisted on thrusting a word having no connection with the subject into all parts of every sentence—Boot-jack for instance—wouldn’t you think” he was trifling with your time? Henry went on to illustrate by inserting “Boot-jack” violently and frequently into a sentence—and young Thomas never forgot the lesson.39

  Writing was central to the curriculum. Everyone had to complete a composition each week, taking half the day with no other lesson. Henry would read some of them aloud to general laughter. While Channing had assigned arcane topics that puzzled his students, Henry did the opposite: write on something you know, something before you. “What their hands find to putter about, or their Minds to think about,—that let them write about,” he suggested to his sister Helen, his fellow schoolteacher: note what passes in the street, or gaze into a fire, or study a corner “where there is a spider’s web, and philosophize—moralize—theorize, or what not.” Students were encouraged to keep journals of their thoughts and activities, too. The journal of twelve-year-old Edmund Sewall still survives: “I study in the morning. I did Geometry, Geography and grammar and in the afternoon read, spell or say definitions from the reading lesson, say Latin & Algebra. I write every other morning. Saturday is given to writing compositions.” Horace Hosmer recalled another writing exercise “called defining, but defiling would describe it better. Poetical gems were mangled and then rolled in the mud” as students translated them into their own words. One student
translated Cowper’s poem “Needless Alarm” into four words—“Look before you leap,” at which “John sprang from his chair and shouted Good, very good indeed.”40

  At noontime the day students would run home for dinner, but Horace, who lived nearly two miles away, remembered how sometimes John would take him by the hand “and say, I must eat dinner with him, and you may be sure I was willing to obey. I shall never forget those dinners while reason lasts.” Cynthia and John Sr. presided over a table loaded with “an abundance of fruit and vegetables, puddings and pies,” and best of all, delicious fresh bread and butter. “There was an absence of heat, noise, fat greasy meat, of everything unpleasant, and I learned to love Mr. and Mrs. T. quite as well as their food.” The Thoreau brothers were famous for their melon patch, and once Horace returned from dinner to find “a piece of green melon in my desk.” He almost threw it out in disgust until the smell enticed him to eat it: “I was astonished and delighted.” When watermelons were ripe, the brothers brought a bushel to school, and at recess—which they often extended far past the prescribed ten minutes—all shared in the treat.41

  Many students openly preferred John, who played with them at recess as if he were still a boy, or gathered them around and told stories. By contrast, Henry seldom mixed with the children; he seemed “rather on his dignity,” thought one. Another remembered how they made fun of him, cutting a picture of a booby out of an almanac and passing it around because, they giggled, it looked just like their teacher.42 Yet Henry’s quieter style touched some students deeply. One of the Hosmer boys said that though Henry avoided children in groups, he took an interest in individuals: “I have seen children catch him by the hand as he went away to walk with him & hear more.” He had “something beyond the dollar,” “an interest in teaching, His heart in the undertaking.”43 When he visited Thoreau at Walden Pond years later, his former teacher asked what use he’d found his school studies in life. Frisbie Hoar, too, counted him a lifelong friend, who never ceased to teach even after he’d left the classroom.