Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  So it appeared. A failure this complete slammed the door on a literary career—or at least, on the kind of literary career Thoreau had been pursuing since 1837, when he had been Emerson’s bright new genius. Now he was back in Concord, worn down and tarnished, but home. His months in New York drained the city of both its romance and its power to intimidate. From its mean crowded streets, shabby offices, and hollow parlors, Thoreau had finally seen what he’d said before but not quite believed: Concord truly was his Rome, its citizens his Romans. “Defeat is heaven’s success,” he told himself once. Abroad he’d met only defeat. Now it was time to see if success resided at home.

  The Road to Walden

  Thoreau plunged into life in Concord with renewed energy and vigor. In the heat of the New York summer, he’d longed for “those walks in the woods in ancient days—too sacred to be idly remembered,” and now he was back on sacred ground. “Yesterday I skated after a fox over the ice,” who cantered before him at top speed until he sat on his haunches as if spellbound “and barked at me like a young wolf.” The spell bound Thoreau as well—it cheered him to see any wild nature, a “free forest life” far in advance of the courts and the pulpits.96

  Yet the home he had known was gone forever. In January 1842, town leaders lobbied hard to divert the Boston-Fitchburg railroad through Concord. By late April 1843, even as Thoreau was packing to leave, the great “Locomotive Demon” filled the Concord woods with engineers and Irish railroad workers. In June Emerson warned Thoreau, “The town is full of Irish & the woods of engineers with theodolite & red flag singing out their feet & inches to each other from station to station.” By August, silent meadows unvisited since Concord’s founding were swarming with laborers straining with work, and by September Emerson was fretting that “the humanity of the town suffers with the poor Irish who receives but 60 or even 50 cents for working from dark till dark.”97 A village of Irish shanties crowded Walden’s shore, and everywhere on the forest paths one encountered laborers, “explosions all day, & now & then a painful accident,” excused with vague promises of what the railroad would “do & undo for the town hereafter.” By September the deep cut from Walden to the new depot was eighteen feet high and going forward at two rods a day. “So that you see our fate is sealed,” reported Emerson. For his part, he hadn’t yet advertised his house for sale, but he feared the railroad would soon drive him away. Thoreau teased his sister Sophia: “I hope you will not be washed away by the Irish sea.”98

  Thoreau had observed the immigrants on the streets of New York with sympathy and interest: Norwegian farmers carrying their tools, English factory workers seeking a little sun and wind, sunburned families cooking dinner on the pavement. His friends and family fretted on about the invading Irish until Thoreau finally silenced them: “The sturdy Irish arms that do the work are of more worth than oak or maple. Methinks I could look with equanimity upon a long street of Irish cabins and pigs and children reveling in the genial Concord dirt, and I should still find my Walden wood and Fair Haven in their tanned and happy faces.”99 Hawthorne, at least, found his Walden there: on an October stroll he was charmed to find “a little hamlet of huts or shanties” built on Walden’s prettiest cove, Irish houses of rough boards with earth heaped to the roof, forming “small natural hillocks” tucked among the trees as naturally as anthills or squirrels’ nests. But reared up against the picturesque hamlet was the “torment” of “the great, high, ugly embankment of the rail-road,” thrusting right into the pure Walden water. Margaret Fuller, too, who visited Thoreau in September, alerted him that “the cottages of the Irish laborers look pretty just now but their railroad looks foreign to Concord.” What indeed would the new railroad “do & undo”? Everyone worried and hoped.100

  Yet the mechanic who’d invented a better pencil was hardly antitechnology. That spring Thoreau was working again in the family pencil factory: their pencils had been selling well enough, but they were still gritty, and the grading from hard to soft needed refinement. The square lead annoyed him, too—to sharpen evenly, a pencil lead should be cylindrical. To tackle the first problem, Thoreau further refined their milling process that used an air current to lift out only the finest graphite powder, a secret process that placed the Thoreaus at the head of American graphite manufacture.101 The second problem was harder: the old way was to cut a square groove into the pencil casing, fill it with lead paste, and glue on the cap. After long days experimenting with machinery, Thoreau dreamed all night of wheels and gears.102 Finally he figured out how to turn out a round wooden case, drill a hole in it halfway (to leave a handle and avoid wasting graphite), extrude the graphite lead as a perfectly sized cylinder, and insert the hardened lead into the drilled hole. It’s unclear if his new machine was practical for scaled-up production—the few surviving Thoreau pencils all have square leads—but they may have produced a few. For the Thoreaus now made pencils of every variety—fancy drawing pencils and common pencils “of every quality and price,” “Mammoth” round and “Rulers, or flat,” in a bewildering array of packaging and labels—a pencil for every need.

  By the middle of May 1844, Henry Thoreau had a new and improved pencil ready for testing. Emerson sent some to an artist friend: Did she agree they were as good as the English drawing pencils? Yes, she replied: “excellent,—worthy of Concord art & artists and indeed one of the best productions I ever saw from there.” She would certainly recommend them to all her friends, and hoped “to destroy great numbers of them myself—Is there one softer than S—a SS. well as H.H.?”103 By June the Thoreaus had testimonials from the scientist Charles T. Jackson (Lidian’s brother), who recommended the harder pencils to engineers for their fine, even points, and from a Boston artist and engraver who pronounced them the best made in America and the equal of any made in London. The Thoreaus printed up these shining endorsements into a showy advertising flyer and started entering contests: in 1847, the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association awarded a diploma to “John Thoreau and Son” for their lead pencils, and in 1849 the Salem Charitable Mechanic Association awarded them a silver medal.104 At her Boston bookstore, Elizabeth Peabody sold fine Thoreau pencils for 75 cents a dozen. For a time, one could have purchased there both writings by Henry Thoreau and a “John Thoreau and Son” pencil with which to mark them.

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  “Henry will never be a writer,” Ellery Channing scoffed to Emerson; “he is as active as a shoemaker.”105 Yet even as he was dreaming of wheels and gears, Thoreau was staking out his principles for poetry. His newest essay at first sounded exactly like Emerson—“A man bears a poem as naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd”—but soon he added a Thoreauvian twist: the true poet “weaves into his verse the planet and the stubble.” Works of true genius (like his own?) will not be varnished and gilded but “rough-hewn from the first” with an “ingrained polish, which still appears when fragments are broken off, an essential quality of its substance. Its beauty is at the same time its strength, and it breaks with a luster.” Poetry, it turns out, is not at all like an acorn or a gourd, but exactly like an arrowhead knapped from stone, which, like the ideal poem, “anticipates the lapse of time”—a fossil with a blade sharp as steel.106

  Edged tools, edged words: Wendell Phillips was on his way back to Concord. Once again, John Keyes rose to protest, asserting that Phillips’s previous address was “vile, pernicious, and abominable” and that he should be allowed back only if he spoke on a nonpolitical topic. The lyceum curators held firm, and on January 18, 1844, Phillips’s treasonous words again held his Concord audience rapt. Furious, Keyes and Samuel Hoar called a meeting of the town at the First Parish Church, where they offered a resolution condemning Phillips, that arrogant “stripling” who had captivated the “silly” and ignorant women of Concord. Someone tipped off Phillips, who waited quietly in the back pew until the town fathers had finished. He then stood and addressed the assembly: “Stripling as I am, I but echo the voice of ages, of our venerated fathers,
of statesman, poet, philosopher. The last gentleman has painted the danger to life, liberty, and happiness that would be the consequence of doing right. That state of things is now legalized at the South.” Yet “our pulpits are silent.” Who had ever heard this terrible truth, before the alarm was raised by “the silly women and striplings?” The whole affair was reported in the Liberator. Barzillai Frost huffed that Phillips must have bewitched all the women of Concord.107

  If the women of Concord were bewitched, then Henry Thoreau lived in the very heart of the coven. Helen Thoreau was vice president of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society. Her earnest, intelligent, and deeply moral voice had always weighed heavily with Henry, who returned home to find a new album displayed in the family parlor: Helen had clipped and assembled a compendium of antislavery articles from abolitionism’s most radical periodicals— the Liberator, the Herald of Freedom, the National Anti-Slavery Standard—pasting them into an old accounting ledger from Charleston, South Carolina, covering over the shameful records of slave commerce with tales of the nationwide struggle for freedom and equality. Her brother, paging through it, must have lingered appreciatively over Lydia Maria Child’s “Letters from New York,” for she, too, had seen the “hollow glazed life” of the city, the “discouragement, desperation, crime, and suicide” written on “the anxious, care-worn faces” of its streets.108 There on those same streets Henry had met and measured the era’s most brilliant reformers: W. H. Channing, Brisbane, Greeley, Henry James. He’d watched Alcott and Lane found their utopian society and watched it collapse; he’d crossed swords with the Fourierists as they took over Brook Farm; he’d denounced their fantasies of social engineering in the pages of the nation’s leading reform periodical. It was time to speak up.

  In mid-February, Emerson gave him some pointers: stand up to your audience and paint your thought “in fire.” Just the week before, while giving a speech in Boston, Emerson had felt how the power of his eloquence awakened the assembly, beckoned the “Ghost” of their deep craving. But Thoreau was suspicious of rhetoric; he refused to perceive how “natural” was eloquence, and only heard “the word Art in a sinister sense.” No wonder: what Emerson’s lecture, “The Young American,” had painted in fire was the glory of technological expansion from sea to shining sea. “The bountiful continent is ours, state on state, and territory on territory, to the waves of the Pacific sea,” he had trumpeted. “Railroad iron is a magician’s rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.” Sinister? This was a virtual paraphrase of Etzler, the same false art and triumphant industrial fantasy Thoreau had parodied in the Democratic Review. O’Sullivan himself would give this ideology a catchy new name: Manifest Destiny.109

  A month later it was Thoreau’s turn. He’d been invited to present a two-part lecture in Boston’s Armory Hall, joining a stellar series of reformers including Garrison, Lane, Phillips, Adin Ballou (cofounder of the American Non-Resistance Society), and Emerson himself, who had just given “New England Reformers.” There, Emerson mocked the two extremes of reform: proud dissenters and “solitary nullifiers” who spoke only for “this kingdom of me”; and communal members who lowered themselves “to the humble certainties of the association.” For his part, Emerson had struck and stood on the middle ground by defending the individual who speaks divine truth, such as Phillips: “We exclaim, ‘There’s a traitor in the house!’ but at last it appears that he is the true man, and I am the traitor.” As Emerson added, Phillips marked the only path to true reform, which was to surrender to divine genius: “Obedience to his genius is the only liberating influence. . . . We drink water, we eat grass, we refuse the laws, we go to jail: it is all in vain.”110

  Now, for the first time in public, Thoreau drew the line: as a proud dissenter and a solitary nullifier himself, who had seen two close friends refuse the laws and go to jail, he, too, stood with the “traitor” Phillips—but he lashed out at Emerson’s temperate middle ground, his insinuation that his friends’ actions were “all in vain.” Extremism? “I know of few radicals as yet who are radical enough,” Thoreau countered; they meddle with “the roots of innocent institutions” and never their own roots. He had said the same thing to Helen right after meeting with William Henry Channing and his Associationist friends: “They want faith, and mistake their private ail for an infected atmosphere; but let any one of them recover hope for a moment, and right his particular grievance, and he will no longer train in that company.”111 Now he turned those words against his Boston audience. If anything ails a man,

  what does he do? He sets about reforming the world. Do ye hear it, ye Woloffs, ye Patagonians, ye Tartars, ye Nez Percés? The world is going to be reformed, formed once for all. Presto—Change! Methinks I hear the glad tidings spreading over the green prairies of the west; over the silent South American pampas, parched African deserts, and stretching Siberian versts; through the populous Indian and Chinese villages, along the Indus, the Ganges, and Hydaspes.

  But turn the tables, he challenges: Do you really believe in community? Then give us actions, not mere words: deeds speak louder than rhetoric.

  The audience (did he meet their eyes here?) knows full well, Thoreau continued, that “the speaker does not mean to abolish property or dissolve the family tie, or do without human governments all over the world to-night, but that simply, he has agreed to be the speaker and—they have agreed to be the audience.” You all know the lecturer who speaks against money is being paid for his words—and that’s the lesson you remember.112 Against such hollow words, only real action—real, not symbolic or rhetorical—can produce real progress. Don’t go to another committee meeting, gavel down another pointless set of resolutions, and adjourn for tea. Dig down to your own roots, and figure out how, radically, you must change your life.

  This was new. Thoreau was looking not to Emerson but to Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass, men of moral action, as well as Nathaniel P. Rogers, the fiery editor of the New Hampshire Herald of Freedom. The Dial had just one more issue to go, and for his final contribution, Thoreau wrote an homage to Rogers, whose words flowed “like his own mountain-torrents, now clear and sparkling, now foaming and gritty, and always spiced with the essence of the fir and Norway pine.” Into the timid pages of Emerson’s Dial Thoreau threw great chunks of Rogers’s righteous “war-whoop”: “Slavery must be cried down, denounced down, ridiculed down, and pro-slavery with it,” wrote Rogers. “Down, then, with the bloody system, out of the land with it, and out of the world with it,—into the Red Sea with it.” You say this is all fanaticism? “Wait and see.”113 Rogers was thrilled with Thoreau’s review. Where had this radical new voice come from?, he asked in the next Herald of Freedom. “Probably a German. He cannot have written much in this country, or his name would have reached me, from no farther off than Concord, Mass.” Write more! he begged of the unknown author.114 Alas, Rogers died in 1846, before they could meet and before he could read Thoreau’s own great antislavery writings.

  The end of the “felon Dial,” which had stolen so much of Emerson’s time, was a liberation. He had continued it for others, and it was time they went off “to write in their own names,” leaving him free to finish his next book: Essays, Second Series.115 Several Dial writers did go on to fame, if not fortune: Alcott published volumes of poetry and reflections, and Margaret Fuller expanded her groundbreaking essay “The Great Lawsuit” into the book Woman in the Nineteenth Century, the foundation of the women’s rights movement in the United States. And Thoreau? That October he opened Emerson’s new book to read “The Poet,” his mentor’s seminal statement on American poetry. Walt Whitman said he’d been simmering, simmering, simmering, until this essay brought him to a boil; when Emerson received his copy of Leaves of Grass, he dropped everything and wrote to Whitman, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” For Thoreau there would be no such giddy annunciation. Late in life Thoreau told Franklin Sanborn that after Emerson criticized his poetry, he burned it. No ashes surv
ive to corroborate the tale, but the story rings true. If true, the most likely date was late 1844, after the Dial ended and after Thoreau received his inscribed copy of Emerson’s new book. There, near the close of “The Poet,” he found Emerson’s crushing words: “I look in vain for the poet whom I describe.”116

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  While Emerson was finishing his new book, Thoreau was getting outdoors. April 1844 had been spectacularly warm and dry, and one fine April morning Thoreau and Edward Hoar—Samuel Hoar’s son, about to graduate from Harvard—set off to follow the Concord River to its sources, camping and fishing along the way. After catching a nice mess of fish that morning, they rowed to Fairhaven Bay and landed in the northeast corner, by Well Meadow Brook, to kindle a fire on a stump and cook them up for dinner. Thoreau had built countless campfires since his childhood picnics with Cynthia, but this time the flames caught the dry grass around the stump and flared out of control. A warm, dry southwest wind fanned the fire straight up the notch behind them like a bellows. “Where will this end?” cried Hoar in dismay. “It will go to town!” wailed Thoreau as “the demonic creature to which we had given birth” raced uphill, “leaping & crackling wildly and irreclaimably toward the wood.” Hoar rowed off to sound the alarm while Thoreau tore through the woods toward town. The first farmer he met refused his help—“Well, said he, it is none of my stuff”—but the next ran back to the fire with Thoreau, past a woodcutter fleeing with his axe. While the farmer ran back to town, Thoreau, exhausted, collapsed. “What could I do alone against a front of flame half a mile wide?”117