Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  Next morning they awoke to drizzle and the sounds of red squirrels and peeping hyla. The cousins dawdled, deciding what to do, until the rain thickened and decided for them: time to go home. Thatcher lent his gun to Aitteon in exchange for a pair of moose antlers, which duly appeared, serving as a hat rack. Thoreau walked ahead, botanizing, waiting for a thoughtful hour on the lonely lakeshore while the railcar with Thatcher and the baggage caught up. At half past noon the steamer carried them down the lake to Greenville, where Thatcher reclaimed his horse and wagon. Three hours later they reached the Monson tavern, and Thoreau, disgusted at the “dirtiness,” went straight to bed. All the next day it rained, cutting off hoped-for views of Katahdin. Tension lingers in Thoreau’s account: ever since Thatcher had killed the moose, the cousins had been at cross-purposes. Even if Thoreau had managed to keep his mouth shut, his moral outrage surely ruined the fun of their great adventure. Not until they reached Bangor did the mood lift, when they traveled to Indian Island and called on Governor John Neptune, a living link to the past at eighty-six years old. Neptune sat on his bed in stocking feet, entertaining his visitors with stories about moose hunting until his son-in-law turned the conversation to local politics, including the Penobscots’ battle to bring a school to their town. As he said, “If Indians got learning they would keep their money.” Education was the path to reestablishing sovereignty and, amid the encroaching white society, staking out a future and a place for themselves.66

  Thoreau found that, unlike the lumber camp or the country tavern, the Penobscots’ village was clean: composed of neat white-painted two-story houses and enlivened by cheerful boys who ran to Thoreau, bows and arrows in hand, teasing him for a penny. “The Indians appeared to live very happily at the Island and to be well treated by the inhabitants of Old town,” he noted.67 One man was busy building canoes, and Thoreau interviewed him closely, making long and careful notes—for “the process deserves to be minutely described,” at least as much as “the white man’s arts, accounts of which now fill the journals.” Then they toured a sawmill and a batteau manufactory; Thoreau barely bothered to take notes at all. He lingered on for three more days before returning to Concord on September 27, bringing one souvenir: a fine pair of Penobscot snowshoes for which he paid five dollars—five days’ wages.68 Deep snows would no longer keep him from exploring the heart of the winter woods.

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  It was a relief, Thoreau wrote in the account he eventually published, to get back to the “smooth but still varied landscape” of home, where woods and fields were “the common which each village possesses, its true paradise,” dwelling halfway between the wilderness and the city’s “wealth-constructed” parks and gardens. Nevertheless, he concluded, we must protect the wilderness. Why not, he asks, “have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and the panther, and even some of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be ‘civilized off the face of the earth’”? Will we save our forests “for inspiration and true recreation? Or shall we, like villains, grub them all up, poaching on our own national domains?” Thoreau’s dream of a national park system began there on the Penobscot River, where he listened as Joe Aitteon and his friends and relatives spoke a language he never had ears to hear before. Earlier he called for local parks and preservation; now he called for “national preserves” to protect our “national domains”—which, in his vision, included indigenous peoples, whose right to continue living on their land would thus be protected as well.69

  “In October the man is ripe even to his stalk & leaves,” Thoreau wrote that fall; “he is pervaded by his genius.”70 He worked on “Chesuncook” well into October, and in late November, when he was invited to contribute to a new magazine, he sent in his new essay. Nothing came of it—the plan folded—but years later, the Saturday Club would revive the plan as the Atlantic, and Thoreau would indeed publish “Chesuncook” in one of its first issues. Meanwhile, he now had a brand-new lecture ready for the Concord Lyceum, where he’d again been elected curator and again resigned—this time protesting there weren’t enough good lecturers available to fill the season. Emerson took his place, and, knowing exactly where to find good lecturers, turned right around and scheduled Thoreau for December 14. Emerson’s daughter Edith immediately put Thoreau on the spot: would his lecture be “a nice interesting story, such as she wanted to hear, or . . . one of those old philosophical things that she did not care about?” Thoreau turned to the twelve-year-old girl and “bethought himself.” “Chesuncook” met her challenge: the children enjoyed it, said Lidian, even little Eddy, allowed to sit up for the occasion.71

  Edith’s opinion mattered to Thoreau: she was growing up into a helpful ally, often bringing him flowers and specimens. It was a beautiful fair-weather fall, and suddenly Thoreau was busy again in the social world. He took Ellen, Edith, and Edward “a-barberrying” at Conantum, took Ellery Channing sailing, then took Sophia boating on Fairhaven Bay, where she made a sketch; he paddled Elizabeth Hoar and her friend up the Assabet and Sophia and Cynthia down the Concord. All the while he took notes on autumn leaves, which moved him as never before. “How beautifully they go to their graves—how gently lay themselves down—& turn to mould!” They “stoop to rise—to mount higher in coming years,” the year’s great crop. “They teach us how to die.”72 Walden, with its powerful emphasis on spring and regeneration, was not the place for these darker reflections. He set them aside, to become the seeds of “Autumnal Tints.”

  The busy social season rolled on into winter. Cynthia’s friend Caroline Brooks Hoar, wife of Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, had an idea: the Christmas of 1853 should be a true community celebration. Every child in town, rich or poor, would have a gift chosen especially for them. Organizers compiled a list of every child through age sixteen—seven hundred in all—and for weeks the women of Concord prepared a present for each one, collecting money and sewing clothes for the poorest families. Henry agreed to provide the Christmas tree, and on December 22, he walked out to a swamp in Lincoln and cut a small black spruce, which he delivered to the town hall. Inside, the little tree was suddenly huge, filling the stage, so tall that its topmost spire had to be cut off. At six o’clock on Christmas Eve, the doors were thrown open and hundreds of children rushed into the hall, lit by the candles decorating the great spruce—perfectly splendid (though Thoreau, true to character, said the starlit December sky was more splendid still). Around the tree were piled hundreds of presents, and Saint Nicholas himself bounded onto the stage, tossing sweets to waiting hands as names were called and packages distributed.73

  It was a festive start to a real New England winter, so cold it nearly froze the Thoreaus’ water pump, followed by a grand snowstorm that blocked all the roads and closed the schools. Henry tried out his new snowshoes in a wind so strong that in just twenty minutes it wiped away his great snowshoe tracks. The streets were desolate and the snow banked high against the doors and windows, but inside, Thoreau found everyone merrier than ever. At the post office, every traveler was pressed for news of the railroad cars and the depths of the snow out their way—from fourteen to twenty-four inches, Thoreau calculated, out and about with his two-foot ruler. Then, as suddenly, it thawed and the eaves ran with water: “We too have our thaws,” he reflected. “They come to our January moods. . . . Thought that was frozen up under stern experience gushes forth in feeling & expression.”74

  Thoreau had indeed thawed; his busy social life continued into the new year, 1854. William Tappan, the New York acquaintance who ten years before had tried life in a wilderness cabin in New York, visited in early January, saying little but running through the snow, lifting his knees in delight like a child.75 Reluctantly Thoreau got himself fitted for a new coat, and though he hated it—“who am I that should wear this coat? It was fitted upon one of the Devil’s angels about my size”—it decked him out suitably for a court appearance in Cambridge on January 19, 1854, as an expert witness in a property dispute. His client l
ost, but the day gave him occasion to visit with Thaddeus Harris, who identified his mysterious cocoons as the magnificent emperor moth. Clad in his warm new coat, he set off late that January for a long-anticipated visit with Blake and the Worcester disciples, including a long walk with them all in the bitter cold.76

  But the news that season—the real news—had been the arrival on October 28, 1853, of 706 unsold copies of A Week, which Thoreau hefted up two flights of stairs and stacked in his attic bedroom, half as high as his head. “I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes over 700 of which I wrote myself,” he joked mordantly.77 Then followed the bittersweet moment, exactly a month later, when he walked into the office of James Munroe and Company and paid off, to the last penny, the debt of $290 for publication of A Week. It had taken him four years and seven months. He opened a new account with Munroe, placing twelve copies of A Week for sale—“How can a poet afford to keep an account with a bookseller?” he moaned—noting glumly that his first book had earned, all told, the grand sum of fifteen dollars.78

  At long last, however, he was free of debt. Thoreau celebrated his release by plunging into the final round of revisions to Walden, working in new material from his 1853 Journal and intensifying the incandescent coming of “Spring” by adding, in real time, a giddy passage from the sudden wonderful thaw: “That sand foliage! It convinces me that nature is still in her youth,” the earth not “a mere fragment of dead history . . . but living poetry like the leaves of a tree.”79 A week later, Walden Pond was thundering with the weather and Thoreau was marveling how alive it was, though “so large & cold & thick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive.” Even in the dead of winter, everything was pulsing with life, attuned to changes no human being could register. “For the earth is all alive & covered with feelers of sensation.—papillae. The hardest & largest rock—the broadest ocean—is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its tube. Though you may perceive no difference in the weather—the pond does.”80

  Walden was finished. Near the end of February 1854, Thoreau was writing out the fair copy for the printers. By mid-March he’d contracted with Ticknor and Fields, Boston’s finest publishing house, for an edition of two thousand copies. Greeley congratulated Thoreau and announced the book immediately. After nine long years, everything was accelerating: on March 28, the first proof sheets arrived, and for two months Thoreau was busy correcting them (promising an annoyed printer to write more legibly), polishing for clarity and force, coherence and accuracy.81 He was so preoccupied he missed the first skunk cabbage and the ice-out date on Walden Pond, but whenever he could break away, he was richly alive to the world around him. “The earth is all fragrant as one flower,” he wrote on May 16; “Nature is now perfectly genial to man.”82 On May 24, he walked to Emerson’s Cliff before dawn. As the sun raked across the eastward expanse of ground fog, he thought the effect gave a new aspect to the world: “The sun is eating up the fog.” He waded into Beck Stow’s swamp, observed frogs and andromeda flowers, and late in the day drew up a long list of the leafing times of shrubs and trees, casting up the true accounts that had gone into arrears, what with all the proofreading.83 He did not know that in Boston that same day, federal marshals arrested and imprisoned Anthony Burns, an escaped slave working quietly in a Boston clothing store.

  Two days later, an angry crowd led by several of Thoreau’s friends—Higginson, Alcott, Theodore Parker, and Wendell Phillips—mobbed the courthouse where Burns was held, but failed to free him. In the trial that followed, Judge Edward G. Loring ruled that, as property, Burns must be returned to his owner. On June 2, Bostonians shrouded their streets in black and watched as Burns was marched in chains to the harbor, where a ship waited to take him south. The procession was guarded by police with guns drawn, armed federal marshals, an artillery regiment, and three platoons of marines, one armed with cannon. The birthplace of the American Revolution was effectively under martial law.84

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  In the wake of Burns’s arrest, Thoreau kept walking and journalizing, but soon an uneasy note emerged. “Is our life innocent enough?” he wondered. “Do we live inhumanely—toward man or beast—in thought or act?” The least needless injury to any creature was to that extent “a suicide. What peace—or life—can a murderer have?” He had himself in mind; he’d been collecting specimens for Agassiz again. While killing for science had not worried him in 1847, now it did: “The inhumanity of science concerns me as when I am tempted to kill a rare snake that I may ascertain its species—I feel that this is not the means of acquiring true knowledge.” Next day, the storm broke. “I see the court house full of armed men holding prisoner & trying a Man to find out if he is not really a Slave. . . . It is really the trial of Massachusetts—every moment that she hesitates to set this man free—she is convicted.”85

  From now through the end of June, the heat of politics scorched and withered his customary spring roll call of shadflies and eagles, hylodes and snipes, gooseberries, rhodoras, and rainbow showers. Three years before, when Thomas Sims was arrested, Thoreau pounded out pages of outrage but kept silent. Now he was again possessed, tucking a pencil under his pillow so he could vent the rage keeping him awake at night. This time he was ready to speak. All that June, Thoreau stoked the fires he had banked after Sims’s arrest, pouring onto the pages the fresh fuel of his fury, and pounding it all together into his inflammatory address “Slavery in Massachusetts.”86 Thus on July 4, 1854, even as the printed sheets of Walden were being gathered and bound at Ticknor and Fields, Thoreau was standing under that black-draped, upside-down American flag in the Harmony Grove amphitheater in South Framingham, joining Sojourner Truth, Wendell Phillips, Moncure Conway, and William Lloyd Garrison, who set the tone at the end of his opening speech by holding up a copy of the United States Constitution, “that covenant with death and agreement with hell,” and lighting it on fire. To jeers, hisses, groans, and howls of anger Garrison held the burning Constitution aloft, until the ashes singed his fingers.87

  Thoreau was one of the last to speak. “Words That Burn,” one newspaper called his speech: “Again it happens that the Boston Court House is full of armed men, holding prisoner and trying a MAN, to find out if he is not really a SLAVE. Does any one think that Justice or God awaits Mr. Loring’s decision?” The choice was clear: serve the law of the United States Constitution—on whose ashes Thoreau was treading as he spoke—or the higher law of God, “not Edward G. God, but simple God.” Thoreau spoke, said one observer, with such “serene unconsciousness” of anything shocking in his words that he could say the unspeakable: since majority rule had produced such an obscenity, the moral path was clear. “Let the State dissolve her union with the slaveholder. . . . Let each inhabitant of the State dissolve his union with her, as long as she delays to do her duty.” For a month, he told the crowd, he had lived with a profound sense of having suffered “a vast and indefinite loss.” What was it? “At last it occurred to me that what I had lost was a country.” In a nation that could send an innocent man, Anthony Burns, to slavery, all lives, life itself, was devalued; unfreedom undoes and subverts everything. We dwell not in a state somewhere between heaven and hell, but now “wholly within hell,” in a landscape covered with ashes and cinders.88

  At the end of this address, Thoreau asked himself that terrible question: “I walk toward one of our ponds, but what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base?” Thoreau did not ask rhetorical questions. This crisis realized his deepest fear, and his words expressed his deepest betrayal. They indict not merely his walks to Walden Pond, but his entire career as an artist, including Walden itself—the culminating work of his life. What signified the beauty of his book now? Walden, too, lay in ashes. Politics had turned nature into ruin. “The remembrance of my country spoils my walk. My thoughts are murder to the State, and involuntarily go plotting against her.” But Thoreau could not, would not, go forward into night. In an extraordinary final turn, he willed himself toward hope: “But it cha
nced the other day that I scented a white water-lily, and a season I had waited for had arrived. It is the emblem of purity.” Pure to the eye, sweet to the scent, yet rooted in “the slime and muck of earth,” the lily became his emblem for “the purity and courage” that may yet—that must yet—be born of “the sloth and vice of man, the decay of humanity.”89 In offering his audience this American lotus flower, the sacred Buddhist emblem of enlightenment he had found lighting his path of Concord, Thoreau was offering them the core of his own being and belief, and the story of his own redemption.90

  The “moral earthquake” of Anthony Burns forced Thoreau to a moral reckoning: since his success and his serenity both demanded that he “be at one with the universe,” he must recognize that people live humanely only insofar as they injure no other—not man, not moose, not snake. Thoreau turned this ethical imperative first to science, according to whose dictates he must kill the animals he wished to know; then to politics, according to whose laws he must turn a person into a slave, a human into a thing. His resolve bound science, politics, and nature together: the test of human virtue was allowing all beings, human and nonhuman alike, to flourish in their own ways. But tried by this severe test, no one wholly escapes indictment. We all have roots in the mud. The redemption Thoreau offered in the lily was his deepest belief: purity and courage may be compounded of the foulest filth, even of “sewer” muck—the shit (though he used the word only in private) that spawned the Fugitive Slave Act. We must “ask ourselves weekly—Is our life innocent enough? Do we live inhumanely—toward man or beast—in thought or act?” The answer, if honest, can never be unqualified; humanity can never be innocent. But we can strive to be innocent enough. As for “slavery and servility,” they were not life at all; they could only decay and stink. Let the living bury them, he concluded; “even they are good for manure.”91