Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  And so, finally, can those who inflict violence. Here Thoreau turns to “my civil neighbor, the tax-gatherer,” his old friend Sam Staples, and puts him on the spot. “If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, ‘But what shall I do?’ my answer is, ‘If you really wish to do any thing, resign your office.’ When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.” Now the fork in the road is faced not by the citizen, but by the public official in a position of authority, who, in turn, must make his own moral choice between two options—to enforce an unjust law, or to resist it. He, too, must choose with his conscience, as a human, not unconsciously as a cog in a machine. Here is Thoreau’s most pointed injunction, in an essay filled with them: “If the injustice . . . is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”49 The inventor who dreamed of wheels and gears knew how to build machines—and how to break them, too.

  Alcott had used his own life as counterfriction to the machine, and Thoreau had seen what it cost his family. Part of that cost was the fear implanted in all their neighbors, who, watching the Alcotts as well as Henry Thoreau, came to dread the consequences of even the mildest acts of civil disobedience. This, finally, was the point: government is necessary after all, not to inflict punishment upon such civil dissenters as Alcott and Thoreau, but to value them and protect their right, along with the right of all citizens, to live ethical lives. Thoreau ends by imagining a truly just State “which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose, if a few were to live aloof from it,” neither meddling with it nor embraced by it. “A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.”50

  Here at the essay’s end appears the utopian “better government” Thoreau calls for in his opening, one that would not merely tolerate but actually bear fruit in such dissenters as Alcott and himself, that would allow them to ripen and bear seed—wild fruits, like those in the fields where he led the huckleberry pickers upon his release from jail. Thoreau’s essay thus suggests a range of possible actions, from his own huckleberry excursions and his mother’s refusal to serve slave-grown sugar at her dinner table all the way to the heroic sacrifice of Christ himself, the ultimate martyr to the violence of the imperial State. Few citizens are called upon to be or are capable of being martyrs—but some are, and Thoreau holds that when such heroic dissenters arise, they must be recognized not as madmen but as redeemers. The seeds of Thoreau’s fierce public support for John Brown are already visible here, ready to germinate.

  Here, too, are the seeds of Thoreau’s most remarkable innovation. “Resistance” means not just self-defense, defense of one’s fellow citizens, or even of one’s own nation, but defense of all those lives entangled with our own: slaves, upon whose labor even “free” Massachusetts depended economically; Mexicans, the declared enemies of the State; and Indians, the declared enemies of civilization itself. But Thoreau was not finished even here. Life at Walden Pond helped him understand how deeply humans are related to nonhumans as well, whether animals used for labor or food, trees used for lumber, wild fishes destroyed by dams, or whole ecosystems, forests and river meadows. In the same weeks he was finishing “Resistance to Civil Government,” Thoreau put the final touches on A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. “Who hears the fishes when they cry?” he asked in its opening pages. “It will not be forgotten by some memory that we were contemporaries.” Their lives, thrown into the hydraulic machinery of the Billerica Dam, “armed only with innocence and a just cause,” were lost, but “I for one am with thee, and who knows what may avail a crow-bar against that Billerica dam?”51 Extending one’s ethical community to the nonhuman world was, in 1849, novel, shocking, ridiculous. But Thoreau would give the rest of his life to this revolutionary insight. What he worked out in writing “Resistance to Civil Government” became not only the foundation of his political philosophy but also the gateway to his environmental ethics.

  A Basket of Delicate Texture: Weaving Thoreau’s Week

  Through these years, as Thoreau grew from Emerson’s apprentice to his assistant, friend, and rival, his most treasured project, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, was always at his elbow, growing slowly and steadily. Years later he would tell readers of Walden that he had once created “a kind of basket of a delicate texture,” a fitting image for his first book. Into the narrative of his 1839 river trip with John, Henry had woven everything he ever felt, thought, and experienced: Concord fishes, the feel of dew in the river dawn, the look of a cooked passenger pigeon, nonpayment of taxes, Indian names, the philosophy of friendship, Hindu scripture, bad dreams, old poems, mountain walks. “From all points of the compass from the earth beneath and the heavens above have come these inspirations,” each inspiration duly entered in his Journal to be “winnowed” into lectures and then into essays that would stand at last “like statues on their pedestals,” lovely to look at. But “the statues rarely take hold of hands.”52 A Week would, he hoped, be better than this: not a stiff and formal gallery of statues but an organic and flowing whole, its multitudinous parts held together and watered into life by the river.

  John and Henry’s river trip during that blessed, charged summer of 1839 had been planned as a boyish adventure, not a literary excursion. But from the start, the fledgling writer couldn’t help but see its literary and symbolic overtones, though what they might mean didn’t become clear until after John’s death in January 1842. By the following fall, Henry had begun to reimagine the river voyage as an elegy for his lost brother. Into the pages of his big new notebook, the “long book,” he sowed passages at intervals like seeds in furrows, giving each one room to germinate and grow.53 Around the time his Walden plans were solidifying, he began to organize the notebook’s entries, imagining a book like nothing Emerson had ever written—not a series of self-contained essays, each one a beautiful statue on a pedestal divorced from context, but a living book, a travel narrative, enriched with reflection and literature and history.

  Margaret Fuller had shown him how to do it. When she had visited him on Staten Island in the fall of 1843, she was bubbling over with memories of her summer trip to the Great Lakes and plans for turning that trip into her first book: a travel narrative that would be “a kind of letter box” for the thoughts, observations, poems, commentaries, and extracts inspired by all she experienced along the way. Summer on the Lakes in 1843 was published just a year later, in summer 1844, and as Thoreau read it, he saw how to pull together his own book.54 He would fold their two weeks’ journey into one, a seven-days’ creation story from Saturday launch to Friday return, a journey of discovery climaxing in their climb to the summit of Mount Washington. Thoreau tested out the concept at the Concord Lyceum in March 1845, just before he built his Walden house, and on his first day at Walden he had begun the first draft. A year later he read some of it aloud to Emerson, sitting under an oak tree on the riverbank. An invigorated Emerson blessed it: “pastoral as Isaak Walton, spicy as flagroot, broad & deep as Menu.”55 Thoreau knew he was on his way.

  A year after that, March 1847, he read it aloud to an ecstatic Alcott, who called it “picturesque and flowing as the streams he sails on,” with “a toughness too, and a sinewy vigor, as of roots” and “wild meats” and “the moist lustres of the fishes in the bed below.” This was American literature at last, with “the sod and sap and fibre and flavor of New England.” Emerson was still excited about it, too: in a letter to Evert Duyckinck, the editor of Wiley and Putnam’s Literary World, he declared this book of “extraordinary merit” wo
uld attract lovers of nature, scholars of literature, and thoughtful readers of all kinds “for its originality and profoundness.” He hoped Wiley and Putnam would publish it in their Library of American Books series, alongside Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville—even though Emerson’s critical eye already spotted trouble ahead: the narrative of the little voyage “is a very slender thread for such big beads & ingots as are strung on it.”56

  Duyckinck might have been skeptical—after all, Hawthorne had warned him there was but “one chance in a thousand” Thoreau would produce a good book—but Emerson convinced him something promising was afoot, so he announced Thoreau’s forthcoming book in Literary World. But Emerson had jumped the gun. Thoreau wasn’t quite ready. A month, then two went by while he polished the manuscript. By the time he finally sent it off to Duyckinck at the end of May, it was too late: Duyckinck liked it, but he’d just been fired. After two anxious months, it became clear that Wiley and Putnam had said no. Emerson tried again, sending another enthusiastic letter to the Philadelphia publisher W. H. Furness, but his firm was too overwhelmed with submissions to bother with an unknown writer. William Emerson sent feelers to the Harpers in New York City, but they, too, said no. All through September Thoreau persisted, even after Emerson set off to England, but by November he’d given up. Four different publishers, he wrote Emerson, had turned it down, though Wiley and Putnam had agreed to publish it—if Thoreau would pay the costs. “If I liked the book well enough, I should not delay; but for the present I am indifferent. I believe this is, after all, the course you advised—to let it lie.”57

  Emerson had advised no such course. Don’t delay even a month, he fired back from England: “I should print it at once, nor do I think that you would incur any risk in doing so that you cannot well afford. It is very certain to have readers & debtors here as well as there.” Henry delayed a month, and then another. An impatient Emerson wrote to Lidian: “If Henry Thoreau means one day to come to England let him not delay another day to print his book. Or if he do not, let him print it.”58 But how could he? Emerson’s assurances that Thoreau could “well afford” to incur the “risk” would hardly pay the printer. Four years before, Emerson’s financial backing had gotten Ellery Channing’s first book into print, but to Thoreau Emerson made no such offer. Boxed in, unable to afford publishing costs, Thoreau concluded that his book would not be published until it was simply too good to turn down. So he took it off the market and set himself to making it even better. In the meantime, to raise money he polished up “Ktaadn” and sent it off to Greeley—hence his fervent gratitude when, in mere months, Greeley had not only placed “Ktaadn” but paid handsomely and begged for more.

  But what Greeley begged for was more short pieces. What Thoreau had was a book. “My book is swelling again under my hands,” he replied, “but as soon as I have leisure I shall see to those shorter articles. So look out.”59 Nothing Greeley said could dissuade him from making A Week his highest priority. Thoreau was certain only a big, new book would get him out from under Emerson’s shadow; and besides, before anything else must come his memorial to John.

  · · ·

  Emerson returned from Europe at last, steaming into Boston on July 27, 1848, and heading straight home to Concord “in good health and spirits.” “He has seen the elephant,” said Thoreau, “or perhaps I should say the British lion now, and was made a lion of himself.” After three days of unpacking, Emerson was ready to take over the household, so on July 30, Thoreau left the newly anointed literary lion alone with his family and moved back into the Texas House. From then on, remembered Ellen, the Emersons lived “as a regular family” without boarders or live-in guests;60 and from then on, Henry Thoreau never left his family.

  Emerson was preoccupied for months, putting his household, garden, family, and strained finances back in order. Thoreau continued to come by to see the children, to help finish Aunt Lucy’s new house, to help Alcott put the final touches on Emerson’s grand new summerhouse—working on it felt like being “nowhere, doing nothing,” he snapped—but the tide of warmth that had filled the two men’s letters was receding. “As for taking Thoreau’s arm, I should as soon take the arm of an elm tree,” Emerson jotted, again, in his journal. He was full of praise for England’s high civility, and suspected Thoreau of flirting with a kind of insanity: “Henry Thoreau is like the wood god who solicits the wandering poet” and draws him away, leaving him “naked, plaiting vines & with twigs in his hand. Very seductive are the first steps from the town to the woods, but the End is want & madness.”61 Now Channing, not Thoreau, was Emerson’s regular walking companion, their relaxed and happy days together a welcome relief from long hours laboring on his next book, Representative Men, which was urgently needed to offset those steep travel expenses.

  Money was on Thoreau’s mind, too; his family needed all the help he could give them. In May, the Concord Steam Mill Company, where the Thoreaus’ wooden pencil casings were manufactured, burned to the ground in a spectacular blaze that lit up the rivers and meadows. Some suspected arson. The owners were insured, but the renters weren’t, and the Thoreaus suffered the most: they lost, Henry estimated, $400 to $500. The instant he was home, he set about earning money with odd jobs—gardening, carpentry, papering, and whitewashing—lending sums to his mother, paying monthly rent to his father, putting in extra hours at the pencil shop.62

  Moving in with the Emersons had cost him his summer excursions; in the summer of 1848 he’d hoped to get away to Maine, but late in August he called it off. All he could manage was a long walk with Channing, setting out on September fourth up the Merrimack River into New Hampshire by way of Dunstable to climb Mount Uncanoonuc, and returning by way of Hooksett and Hampstead. It was partly a research trip: the route allowed Thoreau to measure changes to the country he had traveled nine years before and enter them in his growing book. It also allowed him to procure a copy of Dunstable’s town history by asking a young woman at the finest house in town if they owned the book, and “whether she ‘would not sell it to him.’” (She did.)63 They were home in four days, having walked over a hundred miles. Aunt Maria was unimpressed. “I wish he could find something better to do than walking off every now and then,” she sniffed.64

  That fall, Thoreau started looking for “something better to do” to contribute to the family income. He had two good possibilities: surveying and lecturing. Thanks to the railroad, Concord was growing, and surveyors were much in demand. Thoreau already knew the basics, and over the years he’d completed a handful of jobs. Given his love of outdoor work and his talent for mathematics and machinery, it seemed a good fit. That fall he prepared a long list of books to study and noted he’d need to fix his compass and buy some supplies—a new journal for surveying notes, some drawing paper, new shoes, a hat.65 The next spring he borrowed a compass from the town’s longtime surveyor, Cyrus Hubbard, and took on a few jobs, starting with the road his father wanted the town to lay out in front of the Texas house.

  On April 2, 1849, the Concord Town Board accepted Thoreau’s survey, approved “Belknap Street,” and hired Thoreau to help build it. Then he surveyed Emerson’s land on Walden Pond, about eighty acres; in May he surveyed a woodlot near Flint’s Pond, which he persuaded Emerson to buy for the sake of its rare flowers and beautiful waterfall. He began a new journal, “Field-Notes of Surveys”; the first entry was a large woodlot surveyed for an owner who logged it off and subdivided it into house lots. Over the next eleven years, Thoreau would complete more than 150 additional surveying jobs, each requiring days or weeks of hard work, as far away as New Jersey: house lots, woodlots, farms and orchards, town boundaries, Concord’s Middle Street and New Bedford Road, even, late in life, the length of Concord River. In a very real way, Thoreau’s work carved the map of Concord, incised on the ground in yards, fence lines, and roadways.66

  As for lecturing, so far he’d given all his lectures for free. That changed in October 1848, when Hawthorne, who’d moved away three years before to work i
n the Salem Customhouse, offered twenty dollars for a lecture at the Salem Lyceum. “Ktaadn” was even then appearing in monthly installments in the Union Magazine. “Resistance” was nearly finished, and Greeley had just whipped up a national controversy with his preview of Walden. And here was a paying engagement in the cosmopolitan port of Salem. The literary life, it seemed, was finally turning a profit. Thoreau decided to refine his trio of Walden lectures, take Walden on the road, make a little money, drum up some publicity, and try out his new material before fresh audiences. At this rate, soon he’d have to his name not one book, but two.

  An annoying setback came out of the blue late that October, when Thoreau’s old Harvard nemesis, James Russell Lowell, published a satiric pamphlet, “A Fable for Critics,” skewering America’s literary lights in phrases too delicious to resist. Of Emerson: “All admire, and yet scarcely six converts he’s got / To I don’t (nor they either) exactly know what.” Of Alcott: “When he talks he is great, but goes out like a taper, / If you shut him up closely with pen, ink, and paper.” Emerson could afford to ignore him, and Alcott had long been a national laughingstock, but the arrow Lowell reserved for Thoreau went deep: