Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  Best of all, Carlyle kicked philosophy out-of-doors, among the common people. Thoreau saw him as the hero of the workingman—as a workingman himself, toiling through the fog and smoke of London to earn the bread of life and share it freely with the poor, “the hero, as literary man,” who would not rest until “a thousand named and nameless grievances are righted.” Thoreau saw his opening here between Carlyle the literary hero and Emerson the idealist philosopher: neither one spoke to “the Man of the Age,” to the life of the ordinary “working-man.” That would be Thoreau’s place—Thoreau the day laborer who could plow a field, swing a hammer, stone a cellar, reset a privy or plant an orchard. Work! said Carlyle. “Know what thou canst work at.” But, Thoreau added—looking at Walden’s calm waters—he missed in Carlyle “a calm depth, like a lake” that would still that whirligig working mind, so one could think, and reflect, and “feel the juices of the meadow.” Speak of what you believe; speak out of your experience. “Dig up some of the earth you stand on, and show that.”31

  On February 4, 1846, Thoreau had banked his fire at Walden and walked into town to air his thoughts on Thomas Carlyle. His neighbors listened politely but protested that they wanted to hear about Henry Thoreau, not Thomas Carlyle. What was he doing out there at the pond? Was he lonely? Was he afraid? What did he eat? Thoreau wasn’t ready to answer them yet. Instead he polished up his Carlyle piece and sent it to Horace Greeley in New York—the first test of Greeley’s offer, made nearly three years before, to serve as Thoreau’s literary agent. Greeley was as good as his word. “Carlyle” was too long, he warned, and “too solidly good” for the masses, but still, Greeley placed it almost immediately in the upscale Graham’s Magazine after assuring the editors it was “brilliant as well as vigorous” and written by “one of the only two men in America capable of giving it.” It was a good match to one of the few journals that actually paid, although Graham’s delayed getting Thoreau’s essay into print until the following spring of ’47, and then forgot to pay him until Greeley, ticked, cornered the editors in person a year later with a bill for seventy-five dollars. Thoreau was overcome with gratitude to have such a champion. Emerson made sure Carlyle received a copy, which his distant friend read “with due entertainment and recognition” for Thoreau’s “most admiring greathearted manner.”32

  A long, heavy essay on Carlyle would hardly put Thoreau’s name in lights, but even here Greeley saw an opportunity. “Just set down and write a like article about Emerson,” he prodded, then another about Hawthorne, and so on. He’d pay twenty-five dollars for each one, sell them individually, then collect them into a book. It was a great plan—for someone else. After jotting a few notes about Emerson and Alcott, Thoreau wisely stepped back from writing exposés of his friends. Indeed, he was done writing about other men. Instead he would offer what he himself wanted of any lecturer: “a more or less simple & sincere account of his life.” So a year later, in February 1847, Thoreau banked his fire again, hiked into town, and stepped up to the podium to answer his neighbors’ questions: “Some have wished to know what I got to eat—If I didn’t feel kind o’ lonesome—If I wasn’t afraid—What I should do if I were taken sick—and the like. . . . After I lectured here last winter I heard that some had expected that I would answer some of these questions in my lecture.”33 It was an instant hit—“uncommonly excellent,” thought Prudence Ward. Henry was asked to repeat it the following week, but instead he gave a whole second lecture. Soon he had a trio of lectures he could mix and match, or give as a series. Eventually they became the opening chapters of Walden.

  Reactions to the new Walden material were encouraging. Even skeptics “were charmed with the witty wisdom which ran through it all,” said Emerson. Abigail Alcott joked that “Mr. Alcott thinks we shall never be safe until we get a Hut on Walden Pond where with our Beans Books and Peace we shall live honest and independent”—then added, more seriously, “It is no small boon to live in the same age with so experimental and true a Man.” Prudence Ward was a bit more hesitant: “Of course few would adopt his notions—I mean as they are shown forth in his life.” Yet even she thought it was useful, and “much needed.”34 Walden was taking shape: edgy social satire, exaggerated for humor and sting, delivered neighbor to neighbor. “I trust that none of my hearers will be so uncharitable as to look into my house now,” at the end of a dirty winter, with “critical housewife’s eyes”—whose eyes did he catch just then?—“for I intend to celebrate the first bright & unquestionable spring morning by scrubbing my house with sand until it is white as a lily—or, at any rate, as the washerwoman said of her clothes, as white as a ‘wiolet.’”35 When Thoreau moved away from Walden to Emerson’s, he went back to work, polishing the early lectures into what he now envisioned as a second book, a sequel to A Week.

  A winter lecture by Henry Thoreau was becoming a regular feature of Concord life. Once he was settled at the Emersons’, Thoreau unpacked the manuscript of “Ktaadn” and got it ready for a test run, soon after New Year’s Day 1848. This lecture, too, went well. “I read a part of my excursion to Ktaadn to quite a large audience,” he reported to Emerson in England, “whom it interested. It contains many facts and some poetry.” The faithful Abigail and Bronson Alcott were again in the audience, and Bronson liked the lively description of wild “Kotarden”—a misspelling that suggests how the Penobscot word sounded from Thoreau’s mouth.36 Thoreau’s goal is suggested by a line from his Walden lectures: “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life . . . to drive life into a corner, and if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it . . . or if it were sublime to know it by experience and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”37

  Two months later, Thoreau had that true account ready. Hoping “Ktaadn” would bring in some much-needed dollars “to manure my roots,” he asked James Elliot Cabot—Agassiz’s assistant, now working on the new Massachusetts Quarterly Review—whether they paid for contributions. In the Dial days, Thoreau let his work go for free, but when Cabot admitted they couldn’t pay, Thoreau sent “Ktaadn” to Greeley, who snapped it up with a check for twenty-five dollars: it was worth at least that much, he said, even though it was too long for the Tribune and “too fine for the million.”38 Once again Greeley hit the mark: two months later, in July 1848, the first of five monthly installments appeared in the Union Magazine. Thoreau’s next letter from Greeley included another check, for fifty dollars. “To think that while I have been sitting comparatively idle here, you have been so active in my behalf!” Thoreau wrote back in amazement. He added a paragraph telling Greeley about life at Walden: living simply, in a house he built himself, on a dollar a day earned by manual labor. Greeley, the sharp-eyed journalist, spotted a good story. He ran the paragraph under the title “A Lesson for Young Poets” in the New-York Daily Tribune on May 25, 1848. The piece went viral, reprinted in newspapers across the country. Suddenly Thoreau was hot. “Don’t scold,” pleaded Greeley. “It will do great good,” and few people would know who it was. To sweeten his apology, he enclosed yet another check, for twenty-five dollars—the balance for “Ktaadn.”39

  The way was open: Greeley knew exactly how to propel Thoreau to the top of the national marketplace. Write short pieces, he urged; follow out your thought, write an essay on “The Literary Life.” And for goodness sakes, advertise! Get up some short passages from the book manuscript and get them printed around. “You must write to the magazines in order to let the public know who and what you are. . . . You may write with an angel’s pen, yet your writings have no mercantile, money value till you are known and talked of as an author.”40

  Greeley’s cagey business sense, plus his frank opinion that Thoreau was a major author worth real money, gave Thoreau the confidence to sass Emerson when his old mentor wrote from England to ask Thoreau to help out, for free, yet another worthy but failing literary journal—that same Massachusetts Quarterly Review he had already rejected. Shortly before Emerson le
ft for England, some of the old crew had gathered to talk about reviving the Dial. Theodore Parker took the lead, launching a new journal in December, but by May 1848, dire reports were reaching Emerson in England: the fledgling journal was faltering. Thoreau, he urged by mail, must “fly to the rescue.” But Thoreau wasn’t having any of it. The problem, he tartly wrote back, wasn’t getting “good things printed,” but getting them written. Who needed more “impassable swamps of ink & paper”? “How was it with the Mass. Quart. Rev.? . . . I read it, or what I could of it,” and if one man had written it, not one publisher would have printed it. “It should have been suppressed for nobody was starving for that.” As for himself? “Greeley has sent me $100 dollars and wants more manuscript.” So there. “Thank Henry for his letter,” Emerson wrote Lidian. “He is always absolutely right, and particularly perverse.”41 The instant Emerson was home from Europe, he withdrew his support from Parker’s magazine, which folded after three years. Thoreau never published in it.

  “Civil Disobedience”

  Thoreau now stood at a professional crossroads. He had brought whole stacks of fresh manuscripts away from Walden, enough to keep Greeley happy for years. But if he would not follow Emerson’s advice, neither would he follow Greeley’s. “Ten years hence will do for publishing books,” Greeley had warned, urging Thoreau to send him shorter pieces in the meantime to build up his reputation—but there on Thoreau’s desk was the manuscript of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, a very long book. And though he was working up a shorter piece he could have sent to Greeley, he did not: “Resistance to Civil Government.” Eventually it would earn worldwide fame and notoriety under the title “Civil Disobedience.”

  On January 26, 1848, three weeks after entertaining the lyceum with his ascent of Katahdin, Thoreau stepped to the lyceum podium again, this time to explain, at long last, why he had gone to jail rather than pay his poll tax (the disapproving Emerson was, significantly, still away in England). Thoreau called his new lecture “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government,” and he had so much to say that three weeks later he returned to finish his remarks. Bronson Alcott, his fellow tax resister, praised Thoreau’s “admirable statement” to “an attentive audience”: the Mexican War, Samuel Hoar’s expulsion from Carolina, Thoreau’s imprisonment for refusal to pay his tax, Hoar’s payment of Alcott’s tax when he was taken to prison for a similar refusal, “were all pertinent, well-considered, and reasoned. I took great pleasure in this deed of Thoreau’s.”42

  Only one other response to the lecture is on record: a year later, Elizabeth Peabody asked Thoreau if she might publish it in the first issue of her new journal, Aesthetic Papers. Yes, replied Thoreau, though he was too pressed for time to do much revising; and he stipulated it be published in the first issue only, not held over for the next. He was right to be wary, for the journal failed after the first issue and a second never materialized. Thus it was that on May 14, 1849, “Resistance to Civil Government” was published to the world, only to vanish immediately into obscurity. The few reviews were uncomprehending. The author, sniffed one, appeals to the New Testament in everything except for those ugly precepts about paying tribute and submitting to authority. Another thought Thoreau’s essay the “queerest” in this collection of oddities, but still, “he writes straight on what he thinks.” A third dismissed Thoreau outright “with an earnest prayer that he may become a better subject in time, or else take a trip to France, and preach his doctrine of ‘Resistance to Civil Government’ to the rest of the red republicans.” Nevertheless, when Thoreau’s essay was republished in 1866 under the new title “Civil Disobedience,” it coined a phrase, started a movement, and eventually earned Thoreau international fame.43

  In the interval between his arrest in July 1846 and his two-part lecture in winter 1848, Thoreau’s sense of injury at the hands of people he trusted had simmered into a question at the heart of democracy: How can the individual assert the right to live a virtuous life in a society that refuses to permit that right, or worse, actively destroys it? As Alcott’s reaction to the lecture shows, in winter 1848 Thoreau spoke directly to his friends and located his protest in the specifics of Concord politics. The lecture itself has been lost, but the essay of May 1849 shows that at some point, Thoreau universalized his arguments even as he kept them grounded in the events and personalities of the moment, speaking and writing from all the contradictory impulses, mixed reactions, and delayed responses of lived experience.

  Thoreau opens with an allusion to the red-meat motto of O’Sullivan’s Democratic Review: “That government is best which governs least.” Or, as Thoreau presses, “That government is best which governs not at all”—a nod to his instructors in peaceful protest, Alcott and Lane, followers of Garrison’s “No-Government” movement. But then he takes a startling turn: Thoreau rejects their rejection of government. “But to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.”44 Here he looks over to Emerson, who had scoffed that a person who resisted civil government could hardly claim to be a citizen of it. Thoreau’s reply is carefully considered: it is precisely “as a citizen” that he recognizes the need for government, and in turn is recognized by the government whenever it hands him a tax bill. Therefore, it is as a citizen that he has the right—indeed, the moral obligation—to speak out. This is why taxes are the proper point of protest: taxes are the sign of citizenship. And given that every tax bill presents the citizen with precisely two choices—pay, or refuse to pay—both choices have to be deliberate actions; that is, the product not of unthinking habit but of conscious thought—of conscience.

  Thoreau’s conscience was clean on the highway tax, which he paid willingly, but not on the poll tax: since only those who paid could vote, it was not merely the sign of citizenship, but also the instrument of citizenship. That’s why Emerson’s quarrel, that payment was relatively harmless since only a tiny fraction of the tax dollar went for “mischief,” misses the point: “I do not care to trace the course of my dollar, if I could, till it buys a man, or a musket to shoot one with,—the dollar is innocent,—but I am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance.” It is an allegiance Thoreau refuses: “I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.”45 For his allegiance could only abet the same government that enslaves men, shoots Mexicans, and robs Indians of their land: these are the three abuses specified by Thoreau, each a distinct form of state-sponsored violence, and each a violation not merely of his personal moral conscience, but also of the ethical conscience of the larger community. Action from conscience therefore requires effectual withdrawal from the State, at least until the State ends its abuse.

  Up to this point, Alcott would have nodded agreement, but titling the published essay “Resistance to Civil Government” defied Alcott as well. Alcott’s philosophy of “nonresistance” required submitting to the law, returning forced coercion with holy love. On this point, Thoreau listened instead to Frederick Douglass, whose narrative of self-transformation from slavery to freedom hinged on his refusal to submit to a beating by the slave master Covey: “My resistance was so entirely unexpected, that . . . [h]e trembled like a leaf. . . . He asked me if I meant to persist in my resistance. I told him I did, come what might.”46 In support of Douglass’s action, Thoreau served up William Paley’s essay “On the Duty of Submission to Civil Government”—required reading at Harvard. By using Douglass to subvert Paley, Thoreau pinpointed the error foisted onto every Harvard student and spread by all of Concord’s elite: that the ultimate social good was a smooth-running social machine. Thoreau’s very title states his counterargument. When the smooth-running machine of civil government causes injustice, the citizen’s moral duty is not submission but resistance: “
If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself. This, according to Paley, would be inconvenient. But he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it. This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.”47

  And it would cost. Perhaps the most telling aspect of “Resistance to Civil Government” is Thoreau’s sensitivity to the pain of those subjected to systemic violence. This included, remarkably, his Concord friends and neighbors. What held them back, he recognized, was neither stupidity nor cowardice, but fear for both themselves and their families: “They cannot spare the protection of the existing government, and they dread the consequences of disobedience to it to their property and families.” Thoreau acknowledged their vulnerability and his own privilege: with no property and no dependents, he risked only his body, which meant he, in particular, was obligated to assume that risk. Unlike his neighbors, he could “afford to refuse allegiance to Massachusetts, and her right to my property and life.” Ironically, poverty made him worth more, since disobedience cost him less. Yet why risk it at all? Why (Thoreau imagines someone asking him) “expose yourself to this overwhelming brute force?” Emerson’s answer was to assume Thoreau’s act was a step toward suicide. Thoreau replied it was not “wholly a brute force, but partly a human force,” and therefore “appeal is possible.” Exposing his body to violence (in the form of forced incarceration), in plain view of his neighbors, revealed a hidden violence exercised by the State, making everyone’s secret fear visible and hence actionable. Thoreau told his neighbors that their revulsion, directed at him, was misdirected; their target should be not the jailed, but the jailer. But in their very revulsion, rightly directed, Thoreau found hope: this force was not brute, but human, and humans could make moral choices. Humans could, as Douglass did, resist.48