Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  As Thoreau explored the ruins and cellar holes in his neighborhood, a surprising reality emerged: not long before, this land was a little village of former slaves, day laborers, immigrants, and poor whites, nearly all squatters and all without money. Yet they’d had houses, gardens, and chickens, families and lives, dreams. Why had they lived here, rather than in town? The road behind his house had once been the Great Country Road connecting Boston to New Hampshire, one of the major arteries of New England. But after 1785, when the shortcut opened by way of Lexington and Charlestown, it was just Walden Road, leading out of town to nowhere in particular through marginal land too rocky and sterile to farm. The land’s owners didn’t care enough about it to evict the squatters, so Walden Woods became one of the two places where Concord tolerated the impoverished, the displaced, and the abandoned, who were left alone to scrabble out a living as best they could. The other place, the edge of the Great Field, had done better. Freed slaves would live out there for generations: Peter Hutchinson the butcher, with his family; Jack Garrison, the laborer who’d escaped from New Jersey, with his wife Susan Robbins, daughter of Caesar Robbins, and her brother Peter Robbins and his family; the Garrisons’ daughters worked in town, and their son John was the gardener at the Old Manse. In Thoreau’s day the neighborhood still survived, as families helped one another out, squatting on Humphrey Barrett’s land.52

  Why, Thoreau wondered, did Walden village fail while Concord village thrived? Could not “the basket, stable-broom, mat-making, corn-parching, linen-spinning, and pottery business have thrived here, making the wilderness to blossom like the rose?” There were no “water privileges,” he punned, leaving the “good port” of Walden Pond “alas all unimproved.” It would be up to him, now, to found the next generation, “my house raised last spring to be the oldest in the hamlet.”53 Ironically he would be right, but not in the way he envisioned. Emerson and his descendants would buy up most of the land around Walden Pond, which they deeded to future generations as a park. Long after Thoreau’s house was gone, it would be honored as the foundation of a new generation of environmental thinking. Walden Pond would not be settled after all, but preserved—and not because it was valued, but because it wasn’t. What Thoreau was studying at Walden was how to see, in the wastelands at the margins of commerce, the center of a new system of value.

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  To see this meant widening his sense of responsibility to the largest circle of all, beyond house, beyond neighbors, to the world of nature. Or perhaps, he realized, it was the circle of nature that extended to include himself. Either way, Thoreau felt a powerful intimacy: “What sweet and tender, the most innocent and divinely encouraging society there is in every natural object,” he wrote. “I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of my kindred, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild.”54 Each night he fell asleep to the sounds of wind and wild animals, and each dawn he awoke to a world humans did not dominate. He had experienced this while camping, but now he was not merely camping, but dwelling where the “outdoors” came inside with the summer air, wafting through the chinks in the walls, carrying the scent of pine and the sounds of birds.

  His first “kindred” was the mouse who built its nest under his house and, having “never seen the race of man before,” did not fear him but came to pick up the crumbs at his feet, running “over my shoes and up my pantaloons inside clinging to my flesh with its sharp claws.” Instead of repelling it, Thoreau invited it closer: “When I held it a piece of cheese it came and nibbled between my fingers and then cleaned its face and paws like a fly.” Thoreau’s new companion was still wild enough to stay hidden when Joseph Hosmer came to visit, and he had to take on faith Thoreau’s report that “when he played upon the flute, it would come and listen from its hiding place,” disappearing again when Thoreau changed the tune. Someone memorialized Thoreau’s small friend by drawing a mouse on the back of his door.55

  Wilder kindred turned his thoughts in a new direction: in the dead of his first winter, Thoreau found not three paces from his door one “Jean Lapin,” “trembling with fear—yet unwilling to move—a poor wee thing lean & bony—with ragged ears—and sharp nose—scant tail & slender paws.” He stepped toward the poor starving hare, “and lo away he scud with elastic spring over the snowy crust in to the bushes a free creature of the forest—still wild & fleet. . . . and soon put the forest between me and itself.” The wild beings he became aware of were far more intensely aware of him. In time, stories would multiply of Thoreau’s mystical bond with the wild creatures of Walden: how with one whistle he could summon a woodchuck, with another a pair of squirrels, with a third various birds, including two crows—one of them, as a startled witness recalled, “nestling upon his shoulder.” He would feed them from his pockets with his hands, stroke them gently, and dismiss them each with their own strange, low whistle. He could reach into the water and the fish would not flinch away, but allow him to clasp them gently and bring them into the air unharmed.56

  As such stories multiplied, legends grew of Thoreau as a modern Orpheus, who could draw the creatures to him and charm them with music, or an American Saint Francis of Assisi, who withdrew from the world, preached to the birds, and tamed the fearsome wild wolf with his blessing. Ridiculous, thought his Yankee townsmen. When woodchucks ravaged his beans, Thoreau asked a local farmer how to trap them without injury. “Yes, shoot ’em, you damn fool,” he snapped back.57 The town giggled at Thoreau when he trapped the woodchuck and released him miles away—with a good talking to, to be sure. But despite the legends of sweet wild harmony at Walden, Thoreau was well aware there was at least as much conflict as harmony. Living simply out in the woods didn’t eliminate problems; it only made them easier to see. Take, for example, shelter: building even this simple house to satisfy life’s most basic needs meant negotiating permission with the landowner, chopping down thriving young trees, borrowing an axe to do so (probably from Alcott, though once that axe became famous, both Channing and Emerson laid claim to it), and caring for that axe—returning it, Thoreau declared, sharper than before. It meant securing help to raise the frame and bargaining for boards to close it up, and it meant discovering his house wasn’t really “closed” at all; the field mice and ants moved in before he did, and the wasps soon after. Building a house catalyzed an army of helpers, rivals, and detractors.

  Worse yet was that other obvious essential: food. Planting beans was Thoreau’s way of teaching a basic fact forgotten by virtually the whole of philosophy: plant life is the foundation of all human intellection.58 Confronting this fact meant entangling himself with seven tedious miles of beans and their many associates, starting with the brace of oxen whose strength he needed to break open the hard soil and a man to drive the oxen and provide the plow. It also meant acquiring the seed to plant, hoping for rain (but not too much) to water the ground, and deploying a hoe (an edged weapon from a plant’s perspective) to drive back the weeds—all performed in view of passersby who jeered at Thoreau’s refusal to add manure, which would require employing a bogger—that is, a John Field. Once the beans sprouted, the entanglements multiplied: “My auxiliaries are the dews and rains—to water this dry soil,” Thoreau observed early in July. “My enemies are worms cool days—and most of all woodchucks. They have nibbled for me an eighth of an acre clean.” Eventually the beans would be too tough for woodchucks, but even then, “they will go forward to meet new foes.”59

  So, what to do about the woodchucks? If they wrecked his bean crop, his experiment’s economic foundation collapsed. Should he do what Alek Therien did—kill them and put the carcass in the cooking pot? Thoreau tried that: “Once I went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck which ravaged my bean-field . . . and devour him, partly for experiment’s sake.” He enjoyed it, too, he admitted, but even if you had “your woodchucks dressed out by the village butcher”—that is, by Peter Hutchinson—this didn’t seem in the long run precisely “a good practice.” Thoreau’s friends noticed he ate whatever
was served, even meat, rather than make a fuss over their dinner table, but when he was alone, high on his new ethical platform, Thoreau fussed plenty: How could he eat animals without worrying about the ethics of eating animals? How could he condemn savagery in others, when he was part predator himself? Fishing, his favorite display of the harmonious integration of humans and nature, posed a real dilemma. He loved to fish, but did his “mystic spiritual life” at the pond include killing to eat—even killing fish? Could he live on apples, nuts, and berries? Was his robust appetite for fish a sin, or a sacrament? Thoreau did not stop killing and eating fish, but he did start worrying about it. “I find I cannot fish without falling a little in my own respect,” he fretted in his Journal; “always I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished.”60 Over the years, his worries evolved into the conflicted defense of vegetarianism in Walden’s “Higher Laws.”

  Then there were the arrowheads that rattled against the blade of his hoe as he worked the furrows of his beanfield. They told him that the corn he planted was seeding furrows originally opened by Indians—that in a real and literal way, his act of creation was displacing even the memory of a people who’d been violently forced off their homelands. On his breaks from hoeing beans, Thoreau meditated on the ruins and cellar holes of slaves and impoverished migrants, who tried to rise to freedom but died out instead. While researching their lives, he uncovered narratives of abuse, exploitation, arson, and theft, as well as hope, determination, heroism, and at least temporary victories, like Brister Freeman’s fine orchard or Zilpah White’s defiant independence. In the open and simplified setting of Walden Woods, not only was Thoreau more visible—to himself as well as to his neighbors—but his neighbors were more visible, too: all his neighbors, nonhuman and human, past and future as well as present. As the nature and extent of his relations dawned on him, his questions multiplied. “What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond a-doing? I must know a little more—& be forever ready. . . . The elements are working their will with me.”61

  In short, Thoreau discovered that even this simple, stripped-down life offered no simple way to realize his utopian vision without some form of harm to others. There was no easy way to resolve the long history of conflict, struggle, and displacement evident everywhere in those woods, with their deep and entangled human and natural history. He began to imagine a new role for himself, looking after “the wild stock of the town,” which, being part of the commons and owned by no one, had been neglected and ignored. And if he couldn’t cure the woodchuck problem, he could at least work himself up to a state of reconciliation: “These beans have results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for woodchucks partly?”62 There was no word in Thoreau’s lifetime for what we now call “ecology,” but his growing awareness was turning his thought—far in advance of his time—to ecological relationships in which humans participated but could not declare dominance, as well as to historical struggles and inequalities that laid the foundation for his political thinking on power and justice.

  All this would go into Walden, starting with the moment Thoreau began a record of his life at the pond. But the gesture that crystallized Walden into a visionary whole occurred a few months later, in January 1846, after Walden had frozen solid enough to bear his weight safely. Thoreau brought to Walden the surveying equipment he’d used at the Concord Academy. For at least a week, maybe two, perhaps alone but probably with an assistant, Thoreau surveyed the pond in the bitter cold. This is harder than it sounds. First, he had to flag some twenty or so sighting posts along the shoreline, then haul the heavy instruments—the compass on its tripod, the metal surveying chain, an axe, a plumb line, and a round solid stone for a weight, and the graduated staff—across the ice, where he established a 925-foot baseline with two primary traverse stations. From those two stations Thoreau conducted what is known to surveyors as an “angle intersection survey” of the pond’s perimeter, measuring it out, 66 feet at a time, almost 2,900 feet. Then, with axe and ice chisel, he cut well over a hundred individual holes through the ice to lower the plumb line into the water. At each point he paused to note every bearing and measure. Finally, he collated the data set and transferred it to a meticulous and extremely accurate pencil drawing.63

  It was an extravagant thing to do, wholly impractical. No one needed the pond surveyed, and it took severe study, hard physical labor, and concentrated mathematical skill, not to mention practice with the instruments of science and technical drafting. But he did it. Thoreau used the tools of science and engineering to create a remarkable work of art, a working survey that accurately mapped Walden Pond to the inch: length, breadth, and depth. He accomplished this, he said, to prove that the pond had a bottom, for legend had it the lake was bottomless. In fact, Thoreau found it was 102 feet at the deepest point, making Walden Pond the deepest inland body of water in Massachusetts. Thank goodness, Thoreau added in Walden, “that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol.”64 What, exactly, it symbolized would take the entire book to explain, but by spring 1846 he had the takeaway in a nutshell: “The line of greatest breadth intersects the line of greatest length at the point of greatest depth or height.” This was a universal law, true for ethics as well as mechanics: “It is the heart in man—It is the sun in the system. . . . Draw lines through the length & breadth of the aggregate of a man’s particular daily experiences and volumes of life into his coves and inlets—and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character.”65

  Walden took shape here, in two key discoveries: First, that the pond had “a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake.”66 Thoreau’s quest for the “bottom” of the pond was also his quest for a bedrock truth, that face-to-face confrontation with “actuality” that drove him to the pond to begin with. But once you found that bedrock truth, what should you do about it? This was his second discovery: each person’s answer will depend upon, and will reveal, the exact height, breadth, and depth of their individual moral character. The angle intersections inscribed by our particular daily experiences, the coves and inlets of our lives, will ground the decisions we make, our actions in the world. And the sum total of all our moral actions combined will constitute the ethical character of the society we build together.

  Going to Extremes I: Thoreau in Jail

  Out on the ice in January 1846, Thoreau was drawing his first major conclusions, even as events were about to test them. Less than a year before, Wendell Phillips’s angry denunciation of Texas annexation split the Concord Lyceum, but even then it was already too late: in the 1844 presidential election, the proslavery, pro-annexation James Polk prevailed over Henry Clay, who argued that annexing Texas meant war with Mexico. Polk and the outgoing President Tyler took their victory as a national mandate. Tyler pushed annexation through Congress, which ratified it soon after Polk took office. Emerson was worried—“Mexico will poison us,” he predicted darkly—but Orestes Brownson spoke for the Democratic millions when he proclaimed in John O’Sullivan’s Democratic Review, “Our new lands are exhausted.”67 America needed more territory. In July 1845, O’Sullivan himself chimed in: only expansion would fulfill America’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” Manifest Destiny was on the move. On the very day Thoreau was unpacking at Walden Pond, Texas legislators were approving annexation. By December, Jane Thoreau had collected over a hundred signatures on her petition protesting annexation, but by then it was far too late.68 The paperwork was already under way; once it was filed, in February 1846, Texas annexation was history. As for Jane Thoreau and her fellow petitioners, in a Presidential Address of December 8, 1846, Polk declared those opposed to Texas were giving “aid and comfort” to America’s enemy. It was an accusation of treason.

  For on May 13, 1846, the United States of America declared war on the United Mexican States. It would be a hard and bloody war, making cle
ar, as historians point out, that America’s “destiny” was not so much “manifest” as it was a hard-fought campaign of violent aggression, brilliantly led by Zachary Taylor, the general in the field.69 When the peace treaty was finally signed in March 1848, Mexico was forced to surrender its entire northern half, territory it had administered and settled since the 1500s, and the United States was suddenly in possession of a Spanish Catholic empire stretching from Texas north to Colorado and west to California, where gold would be discovered within months. The resulting gold rush would flood California with “forty-niners,” prospectors and settlers from the Atlantic states, destabilizing the Spanish inhabitants and leading to a genocidal war against California’s indigenous peoples. Back in the US capital, expansion of slave territory into the newly annexed lands upset the precarious balance of power between North and South. Step by step, roads that might have led away from civil war were closing.