Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  Thoreau’s move to Walden Pond nine years earlier had been a declaration of freedom in full view of an America enslaved. Weeks before he began building there, he learned Frederick Douglass was writing about his escape, “telling his name and the name of his master and the place he ran from.” “He had better not!” the audience had murmured.2 What were the chains that bound Douglass compared with the chains that bound everyone in that Concord meetinghouse? Walden grew in the shadow of that question, for Walden was not where one escaped it—but where one confronted it head-on. Leaving Walden pressed upon Thoreau a still harder question: In a world of chains and fetters, was it enough to live a free and principled life? On good days, he knew the answer was yes. On bad days, when the world looked shallow and corrupt, he believed he was seeing not its true state, but merely his own blindness: as he wrote, “The perception of beauty is a moral test.”3 His conviction that justice and beauty were the very framework of the Cosmos drove him daily to the woods and his writing desk. During peace, that would have sufficed. But all around him, America warred with itself and with nature, and he feared that more was asked of him. Ever and again some event, some “moral earthquake” would shatter his faith, and the struggle to renew his faith would infuse his walks with added purpose and his writing with added urgency. Out of that struggle, Walden was born.

  Ironically, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which tipped the nation to civil war, was part of a compromise designed to keep the peace. “Mexico will poison us,” Emerson had predicted, and he was right: in 1848, when a victorious United States annexed the northern half of Mexico, the states clashed over whether it would be slave or free. The Compromise of 1850 split the difference: California was admitted as a free state; the territories of Utah and New Mexico would decide the question for themselves; and the slave trade—but not slavery itself—was banned from the nation’s capital. In exchange, Southern states got something they dearly wanted: a strengthened Fugitive Slave Law. Their “valuable property” had been escaping north, draining away Southern capital, so the new law required all federal and state officials and all ordinary citizens to return fugitive slaves. Any person suspected of being a fugitive slave was to be arrested, jailed, and tried, with no right to testify in his or her own defense, even if he or she were free. Every United States citizen was required to assist in the capture, custody, and return of all persons who might be property. Resistance was punishable by six months in jail and a thousand-dollar fine. No state, not even Massachusetts, had the right to protect its people of color. Slavery was no longer a Southern institution; it was the law of the land, and every citizen was bound to obey it. If you weren’t a slave catcher, you were a criminal.

  When Massachusetts’ own Senator Daniel Webster threw his support to the Fugitive Slave Law, he ensured its passage. “Mr. Webster decided for slavery,” hissed Emerson, debauching moral law by agreeing to treat human beings as “a species of money.”4 Most of Massachusetts agreed with Emerson, and Webster was forced to resign in disgrace, opening the Senate seat filled by Thoreau’s friend Charles Sumner, an outspoken abolitionist who took office in 1851. Nevertheless, the law that Webster’s treachery helped to pass went into effect on September 18, 1850. Barely three weeks later, Boston put it to the test when two Georgia slave catchers arrived to arrest William and Ellen Craft, who for two years had been giving popular lectures telling the powerful story of their daring escape. The Boston Vigilance Committee swung into high gear, moving the Crafts from house to house and harassing the Georgia men until they finally gave up and returned home. Lewis Hayden, the escaped slave who had told his story standing in the doorway of Thoreau’s Walden house, sheltered the Crafts in his Boston brownstone, vowing he would blow it up before he gave them up. Once the threat passed, the Crafts fled to England, but Boston’s complacency had been shattered: slavery had arrived. Rallies mobilized thousands who vowed to defend their freedom at any cost.5

  Concord’s first test came a few months later. On February 15, 1851, Shadrach Minkins, an escaped slave who had been waiting tables in Boston, was arrested. At his hearing, hundreds of protesters stormed the Boston courthouse and, galvanized by Lewis Hayden, broke through the guards and spirited Minkins out of the clutches of the federal justice system. That night, Hayden bundled Minkins into a wagon and rushed him through a storm over muddy roads straight to Concord, where at 3:00 a.m. he knocked on the door of Ann and Francis Bigelow, neighbors of the Thoreaus. While the travelers dried out and breakfasted in front of the fire, the Bigelows arranged to drive Minkins thirty miles west, to Leominster. That morning, after hearing what had gone down in the night, Henry Thoreau stormed in his Journal: “What is it to be free from King Geo the IV. and continue the slaves of prejudice? . . . What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom.”6 Minkins was soon safe in Canada, and the identity of the Concord conspirators remained secret for many years. Hayden was arrested and tried for his open defiance, but the Boston jury refused to convict him. He went on to aid scores of fugitives, sending many more through Concord, unrecorded.

  When the fugitive slave Thomas Sims was arrested on April 4, Boston authorities were ready: instead of an open courtroom, Sims was confined to a third-floor cell with iron bars across the windows. Vigilance Committee members plotted in secret while thousands of supporters rallied in public, raising hopes that Sims would be freed. Surely this time the courts would try not just Sims but the constitutionality of the law imprisoning him. But the Boston court affirmed the law, and in the predawn darkness of April 12, to the dismay of over a hundred abolitionists keeping vigil, four hundred police armed with sabers escorted Sims out of the “Boston Bastille” and marched him down State Street to a waiting ship bound for Savannah and slavery. Should anyone resist, “draw your sabres & cut him down” were their orders. Protesters—including Concord’s new Trinitarian minister Daniel Foster—followed the police with cries of indignation and shame. As the ship cast off, the minister led the grieving company in prayer and song, earning Thoreau’s deep respect: “When I read . . . that the man who made the prayer on the wharf was Daniel Foster of Concord I could not help feeling a slight degree of pride.” Foster opened his ministry to Concord’s most radical abolitionists, preaching in the town hall and reaching the town’s “best men,” farmers and laborers like Thoreau whom Concord’s churches had rejected as “infidels.”7

  But where, fretted Thoreau, was the rest of Concord? For the first time in history, Boston had bound and fettered a black man and returned him to bondage. On April 19, as Concord was celebrating the battle that ignited the Revolution, Sims was landed in Georgia, jailed, and publicly flogged. The contradiction, the sheer moral blindness of it, was too much for Thoreau, who poured out his anger in his Journal: “As if those 3 millions had fought for the right to be free themselves—but to hold in slavery 3 million others.” Some spoke of “trampling this law under foot—why one need not go out of his way to do that” since the law’s “natural habitat” was the gutter. “Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine,” he’d asserted two years before—but now, injustice was not merely a by-product; a whole new government machine had been erected to grind men into “sausages.” Cannibalism was the order of the day. For page after page Thoreau sputtered on, but he did not make a public statement. Instead it was Emerson who spoke, two weeks later: “The last year has forced us all into politics,” he lamented. The infamy “robs the landscape of beauty, and takes the sunshine out of every hour,” and ends all the nonsense about freedom, Christian religion, and divine law echoed every April nineteenth and July fourth. Now even Emerson took a page from Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government”: “An immoral law makes it a man’s duty to break it, at every hazard.”8

  Thoreau was scheduled to speak at the lyceum on April 23, four days after Concord’s annual celebration. For months he’d been working on his new lecture, “Walking, or, The Wild,” his declaration of what Emerson was calling the higher law—a supreme mo
ral law nullifying any civil statutes that contradict it. New York Senator William Seward had popularized the phrase in a speech opposing Daniel Webster, four days after Webster spoke in support of the Compromise Act of 1850. There is, declared Seward, “a higher law than the Constitution.” Emerson used the phrase in his 1851 speech protesting the Fugitive Slave Law, and it became a touchstone for Transcendentalists. This was the crucible in which Thoreau’s posthumous essay “Walking” was originally written and delivered. Overwhelmed with dismay at a society that could ring the bell of freedom with one hand and grasp the manacles of slavery with the other, Thoreau argued for a space of true freedom and a way of life that could take us to that space daily.9

  To explain to his audience why he spoke on that “older and wider union” instead of the infamy of the moment, Thoreau rewrote his introduction: “I feel that I owe my audience an apology for speaking to them tonight on any other subject than the Fugitive Slave Law on which every man is bound to express a distinct opinion,—but I had prepared myself to speak a word now for Nature—for absolute freedom & wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture simply civil—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of nature—rather than a member of society.” “Walking” became one of Thoreau’s most popular lectures, given many times and not finished until his deathbed. Over the years it grew into the single greatest statement of his philosophy of life, for walking—away from the village, away from politics, into the “Wild” for spiritual regeneration—was not, Thoreau asserted, a form of retreat, but “a sort of crusade . . . to go forth and reconquer this holy land from the hands of the Infidels.” Higher law was not a court of appeal in which sins might be tried; it was a land where freedom was not a state of exception, where freedom was a home in which one could dwell.10

  For the time being, Thoreau enacted his antislavery principles in private—even in secret. The Thoreau household had long been a trusted station on the Underground Railroad, but under the new federal regime, this was riskier than ever. Thoreau did let his caution slip once: on October 1, 1851, he noted, “Just put a fugitive slave who has taken the name of Henry Williams into the cars for Canada.” Williams had escaped from Virginia and taken refuge in Boston. When he learned a deputy was on his trail, Williams fled on foot to Concord with a letter to the Thoreaus, where he stayed while they gathered funds for his journey to Canada. Henry went to the depot, money in hand, to buy Williams’s ticket to Burlington, Vermont, but when he saw a man who looked suspiciously like a Boston policeman, he backed away and made alternate plans, probably driving Williams ahead to West Fitchburg. How, he asked Williams, do escaping slaves navigate in the dark? By following the stars, Williams answered, including the North Star; also by following the telegraph lines—with “a turf in their hats,” a bit of the green earth, for good luck.11

  After this incriminating entry, Thoreau mostly kept his Journal silent. “To night a free colored woman is lodging at our house,” he mentioned late in 1853; she was on her way to Canada to earn money to buy her husband, a Virginia slave purchased for six hundred dollars by a man who wouldn’t sell him to his wife for less than eight hundred.12 By chance one other portrait survives. On July 26, 1853, the Virginia abolitionist Moncure Conway arrived for a visit and found Thoreau caring for a fugitive slave who had knocked on the door that morning. “I observed the tender and lowly devotion of Thoreau to the African. He now and then drew near to the trembling man, and with a cheerful voice bade him feel at home, and have no fear that any power should again wrong him. That whole day he mounted guard over the fugitive, for it was a slave-hunting time.”13 Conway’s account of the family’s skill and ease with the situation shows they sheltered and forwarded many others, but how many, or who they were, will never be known. One person they helped—legend says it was Henry Williams—gave Thoreau a Staffordshire ceramic figurine of Uncle Tom and Eva, which thereafter stood proudly on the family mantelpiece, advertising the Thoreaus’ home as an abolitionist safe house.14

  Yet Henry avoided organized abolitionism. He probably enjoyed the visit of Conway’s Quaker friend William Henry Farquhar, a Maryland abolitionist likely vetting Thoreau for future service on the Underground Railroad.15 But when three agents for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society descended upon the family in June 1853, Henry loathed the way they “rubbed you continually with the greasy cheeks of their kindness,” cuddling up with you “spoon fashion,” licking you “as a cow her calf.” The instant Thoreau opened his mouth, one said “with drawling sultry sympathy Henry,—I know all you would say—I understand you perfectly—you need not explain anything to me.” “I am going to dive into Henry’s inmost depths,” he oozed to the others. “I trust you will not strike your head against the bottom,” Henry snapped back.16

  · · ·

  Abolitionism and women’s rights were twinned causes: as Margaret Fuller had said years before, it was “the champion of the enslaved Africans” who made “the warmest appeal on behalf of woman,” partly out of principle, but also because women, not men, were the leaders of abolitionism at the grass-roots level. Fuller’s own writings were laying the foundation for women’s rights. As she proclaimed, “We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man.” Men, she added scornfully, were too much under the “slavery of habit” to help with women’s liberation.17 It’s true that her friend Henry Thoreau did not fight for women’s rights, but he did praise Fuller’s foundational women’s rights essay, and about that same time he went to a Quaker church in New York to hear Lucretia Mott speak on “Slavery and the Degradation of Woman.” “It was a good speech,” he had told Helen, “transcendentalism in its mildest form,” and he liked the Quakers’ plain-style ways.18

  Five years later, Mott had helped organize the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention—the first public meeting in the United State in support of women’s rights. In 1850, Elizabeth Oakes Smith ran a ten-part series on women’s rights in the New-York Tribune, then set off to become the first woman to lecture on the lyceum circuit. As Thoreau noted late in 1851, when she spoke in Concord, “The most important fact about the lecture was that a woman said it”—for women were forbidden from public speaking. Smith long remembered how Thoreau, “that gentle Arcadian of the nineteenth century, gave me his hand gravely, and said with solemn emphasis, ‘You have spoken!’”—which her host, Bronson Alcott, translated to her as “‘You have brought an oracle!’” Thoreau was less chivalrous in his Journal, where he complained that “she was a woman in the too common sense after all”—the pocket in which he’d carried her lecture for her reeked of perfume, and it annoyed him that “the championess of woman’s rights still asks you to be a ladies’ man.”19

  Mary Moody Emerson, though, did not. “The wittiest and most vivacious woman that I know,” Thoreau wrote in November 1851, the “least frivolous” and the surest to provoke you to “good conversation”—the tough, chewy, intellectual kind he valued above all else. Mary enjoyed his company and Henry admired her genius; she confirmed his opinion by holding that women were “frivolous almost without exception” and that wherever she went, it was the men with whom she most often found society, for they were more likely to have opinions of their own. “Be still,” Mary shushed one young woman; “I want to hear the men talk.”20 In short, Thoreau respected women who threw down the barriers and set out on their own paths—women he could meet on “the ascending path,” he wrote, women like Fuller, who thought that gender was fluid and that women, too, could be masculine.21 But “frivolous” women who merely followed the dictates of fashion or the commands of convention earned Thoreau’s instant scorn and undying contempt. He preferred the company of women who took on leadership roles, like his own mother and sisters—all bold, smart, well read, and outspoken.

  The Hermit at Home

  Through these years, Henry Thoreau’s outward life was quiet and industrious. Though he went out virtually every day, he rarely went farther than Boston, wher
e he would head out to Long Wharf to gaze on the ocean before making the rounds to Harvard Library and the Boston Society of Natural History. With rare exceptions, from May 1852 until fall 1854 he even kept his schedule clear of lectures. Yet these quiet years were the most creative of his life. For 1852 and 1853, his Journal alone fills 1,253 rich and provocative pages. He also wrote something over five hundred pages of notes in his Indian Books and two new drafts of Walden, which doubled in size. These pages show his inner life was as extravagant and inventive as his outer life was steady and disciplined. Indeed, his contented homelife provided the stability Thoreau needed to pursue his career the way that he did. Against Emerson the patriarch, Hawthorne the political appointee, Channing the occasionally loveable misanthrope, or Alcott, whose flights to the Ideal were anchored by the hard work of Abigail and their daughters, Thoreau bought his freedom by keeping his needs simple and his account books balanced to the half cent.

  Yet Thoreau in these years was no hermit, though Emerson thought so, or worse. “Emerson is too grand for me,” Thoreau muttered. “He belongs to the nobility & wears their cloak & manners,” and even his praise felt patronizing. The low point came in spring of 1852: “He finds fault with me that I walk alone, when I pine for want of a companion,” and he “curses my practice even,” accusing Thoreau of committing his thoughts selfishly to a journal instead of sharing them. Wounded, Thoreau called Emerson’s “awful” curse down upon himself: “I pray that if I am the cold intellectual skeptic who he rebukes his curse may take effect—& wither & dry up those sources of my life—and my journal no longer yield me pleasure or life.”22 Meanwhile, Emerson had his own complaints: Thoreau’s new project of endless journalizing looked like empty procrastination, a way to postpone real accomplishment. “But all this old song I have trolled a hundred times already,” he sighed. “Only, last night, Henry Thoreau insisted much on ‘expansions,’ & it sounded new.” Well, maybe it was new. Emerson was always willing to listen, even push back, knowing it took some opposition, “a little sense of victory, a roll of the drums,” to call up his friend’s highest powers.23 So they stumbled on together in their mutual misunderstandings, friends yoked in opposition.