Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  Affairs multiplied: in May he helped Emerson organize his brother Bulkeley’s funeral; in August he readied the Yellow House for the September muster of six thousand Massachusetts militiamen, which packed all the boardinghouses and clogged Main Street with troops, camp followers, ragtags, and pickpockets. On his way to buy a lock for the front door, he was told the governor was coming, too: “Then I must buy a second lock for the back door,” he quipped.93 In October he was called to court to testify in a lawsuit against Aunt Maria’s neighbor who, claiming right-of-way through Maria’s yard, tore down her fence and erected a “spite fence” of her own eighteen inches from Maria’s front door and windows. (Maria won.)94 Throughout the year, he felt pressed and anxious. That fall he told Blake—starved for a good, long philosophical letter—that he was “too much like a business man” to write, besieged by “irksome” family concerns. “I have many affairs to attend to, and feel hurried these days,” he fretted to his Journal. It felt fatal. To create art, time must stand still; “the artist cannot be in hurry,” he scribbled hurriedly.95

  Affairs beyond his family multiplied as well. On March 28, 1859, the president of Harvard appointed Thoreau to the Harvard Committee for Examination in Natural History. This put him in a select company of New England naturalists who met annually in mid-July, under the direction of Asa Gray, to conduct the final examination of Harvard’s sophomores in botany. Thoreau was now officially part of the scientific establishment.96 In April he performed his own practical lesson in applied botany: for two and a half days, with the help of two men and a horse and cart, he planted four hundred young pines, each carefully selected from sunny pastures, dug up with a good root ball and set in the ground with his own hand on two acres of land where his house once stood. A week later he returned and set out, for good measure, a hundred more trees, two-year-old English larches.97 His little trees grew into a fine forest of colonnaded trunks, an evergreen memorial that survived well into the twentieth century.

  Thoreau worked on lecturing as well. By January 1859, “Autumnal Tints” was nearly finished. On February 22 he broke away from his grieving family long enough to read it to the Worcester circle, holding up as illustration a large, handsome scarlet oak leaf displayed on a board. Their initial reaction disappointed him—someone remarked he had seen plenty of autumn leaves, thank you very much—but Higginson told a friend he missed “one of the best lectures” of the season. Caroline Healey Dall thought the lecture was charming, though Thoreau was not—an impression she modified that December, when she delivered “Lives of Noted Women” at the Concord Lyceum. A literary lecture by a woman was a novelty, and Emerson laughed that Thoreau, who thought women never had anything to say, would certainly not come. Soon after she began, Dall saw a workingman in a green jacket enter and sit on the back bench by the door. As she continued, he “edged nearer and nearer” until she lost sight of him. It was, of course, Thoreau. “But this woman has something to say!” he replied to Emerson’s ribbing, before inviting Dall to stay an extra day with the Thoreaus. It was, she wrote years later, a day “filled to the brim with charming talk.” Her admiration for Thoreau reads like an Emily Dickinson poem: “His tongue—like a Damascus blade—was hardly fit for ordinary use, but it shaped or severed at a blow—the substances, which most weapons—do only tear.”98

  After staying overnight with Blake in Worcester, he read “The Allegash and East Branch” to the same gathering. Thoreau’s new work was finding an audience: a week later, on March 2, he repeated “Autumnal Tints” at the Concord Lyceum to “constant spontaneous bursts of laughter” and applause. Their energy encouraged him. As he wrote the next day, “The lecturer will read best those parts of his lecture which are best heard.”99 A week later he read it again at the Emersons’ to his circle of young people, where Alcott, as usual, was one of his best hearers: “A leaf becomes a Cosmos, a Genesis, and Paradise preserved,” he marveled. He read it one last time that season, on April 26, returning to Lynn as a last-minute substitute for a lecturer who had canceled; the local newspaper reported his audience listened with “deep attention.” He would read this hymn to life in the face of death one last time, in December 1860, in what would be his last lecture.100

  Thoreau’s multiplying responsibilities did not free him from surveying. On the contrary, he spent much of 1859 in the field, and for every hour in the field there were more hours at his desk, drawing his painstakingly accurate plans: “It is the hardest work I can do,” he wrote Thatcher that August. “While following it, I need to go to Moosehead every afternoon, & camp out every night.” To Blake—another dreamer with a family to provide for—he commiserated that worlds don’t run by themselves but must be constantly oiled and goaded along. “In short, you’ve got to carry on two farms at once,—the farm on the earth and the farm in your mind.” Maintaining a family or a state was easy compared with maintaining the children of your brain, yet that was the only way to keep up the power of original thought. “Keep up the fires of thought, and all will go well.”101

  Only once before had those “two farms” folded together into a single survey—back in January 1846, when Thoreau had sounded the depths of Walden Pond. In the summer of 1859 he would again make those two farms one, when his friends in the Concord Farmers’ Club approached him with the biggest commission he would ever undertake: a survey of the Concord River from East Sudbury all the way to the dam at Billerica Mills, over twenty-two miles in all. At stake was the future of Concord itself. For generations the Concord River’s grassy meadows had been the heart of the valley’s agricultural economy. Kept fertile by spring floods, in summers the meadows grew into lush grasslands that cured into hay so rich that cows would turn away from the finest English hay whenever they heard its distinctive rustle. Manure from those cows fertilized the croplands, leaving the wooded uplands free for fuel and timber—an elegant sustainable economy that had kept Concord Valley green for two centuries.

  But something was going wrong. Spring floods were rising too high, lingering too long, and returning in the fall. Thousands of acres of valuable grasslands had degenerated into immense reeking, stagnant bogs of decaying vegetation—“one uniform Dead Sea,” as the farmers’ petitions put it. The cause of this calamity was, they felt sure, the Middlesex Canal Company, which had built the dam in Billerica to power the Lowell textile mills. Recently the company added a three-foot riser, making a serious problem worse. The valley’s farmers had had enough. In spring 1859 they formed the River Meadow Association and prepared to bring a lawsuit. Among them were most of Thoreau’s closest Concord friends: Warren Miles, Simon Brown, Jacob Farmer, Sam Staples, Albert Stacy, Franklin Sanborn, Minot Pratt, Edmund Hosmer—townsmen of the land.102 They needed an expert witness, someone who knew the river intimately, who had witnessed and recorded the changes, and who understood what was at stake. Someone who could draw a map. They called on Henry Thoreau.

  On June 4, 1859, Simon Brown and three other men commissioned Thoreau to study and measure all the bridges from Wayland to the Billerica dam. Soon Thoreau was hard at work, often assisted by Channing, who had resigned from the New Bedford Mercury. He paddled to every bridge, studied and measured it, looked up its history in town records, and interviewed and corresponded with local informants. On June 24, the Concord Township hired him to survey the entire riverbed. Thoreau paddled every inch of the river’s twenty-two miles, measuring depths and breadths, noting sandbars and shallows and potential obstructions, charting the river’s every meander, recording vegetation and noting flood zones, piling up scores of pages of notes and calculations. Emerson was bemused: “Henry T. occupies himself with the history of the river,” he wrote Elizabeth Hoar: “measure[s] it, weighs it, & strains it through a colander to all eternity.”103

  The more Thoreau worked, the more the data spoke to him of the river as a grand human-natural system. He could tell the day of the week by the height of the water, which rose and fell as the millers upstream went to work, left off for the night, or kept
the Sabbath. As he measured depths with his foot rule, he watched a heron measure them with its legs. He thought about erosion patterns and stream flow, the gradual deposition of sand, the slow movements of sand bars and the abrupt reshaping of shoreline and riverbed by heaving blocks of melting ice. He weighed the human history spoken by the stone bridges, and studied the way the river wriggled itself into meanders and the way willows and bulrushes found the places they liked best. He drew up a huge chart of all the bridges, and he glued together heavy sheets of surveyor’s cloth to make a roll nearly seven feet long, upon which he enlarged an 1834 map of the river. On this base he recorded the grand sum of his findings, including an elevation of the Billerica Dam showing the new flashboard that raised it another three feet, blocking the river’s flow. In twenty-two miles, he measured, the river dropped just over four feet, barely enough to keep it from reverting into one huge inland lake, as it had been back in glacial times.104

  The lawsuit went to trial in January 1860. One farmer testified the river was “dammed at both ends and cursed in the middle.”105 The Massachusetts legislature agreed, ordering the dam removed and damages paid. The next year, a state commission with an army of laborers and a budget of $10,000 repeated Thoreau’s work, producing a map much like his own but far more detailed, plus a massive report that concluded the dam was only one of many causes. Restoring the Concord River would require a massive reengineering project. In 1862, the legislature reversed their earlier decision: it was too late to do anything. The farmers had lost. The flooding, which kept getting worse, was a fact of life. Today the Great Meadows, where Thoreau timed his summers by the hay harvest, is a great sheet of water fringed by cattails and crossed by dikes, a wildlife sanctuary for waterfowl. Only by orienting himself to the surrounding hills could Thoreau tell, today, where he was. No one knew then that the farmers’ own actions, clearcutting the forested hillsides and draining the swamps and bogs for croplands, had helped destroy the river meadows. Denuded hillsides could not hold runoff, and with no bogs to sponge it up, rainwater ran straight into the river. The more the river flooded and killed off the grasslands, the more farmers logged off the uplands to plant English hay and drained wetlands for new crops. In Thoreau’s short lifetime, this vicious circle rewrote the Concord landscape.106

  On October 14, with the river survey nearly completed, Thoreau took an afternoon to visit his transplanted pines and larches. The little trees made sturdy green rows in the withered autumn grasses, boding well for the future. The next day he walked up a hill to overlook the Great Meadows. As he watched the sun light up the red banners of distant forests, he returned to an old idea: “Each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation. . . . All Walden Wood might have been preserved for our park forever, with Walden in its midst.” In Wild Fruits he developed this idea into a proposal: each town should have “a committee appointed to see that the beauty of the town received no detriment,” to preserve its rivers and forests, hills and cliffs, for a higher use than “dollars and cents.” The town planners “should have made the river available as a common possession forever,” opening its banks to public walks and parks instead of lotting them off into private hands.107

  Over the Maine Woods Thoreau had no influence, but in Concord, his voice carried weight. On March 6, 1862, his friend Albert Stacy, the printer, bookseller, and occasional postmaster, stood up in front of the Concord Farmers’ Club with Thoreau’s proposal: “Why should not every village have its public park of from 50 or 100 acres in extent supported at public expense . . . Suppose we had such a park in Concord of 100 acres in extent, comprising hill and dale and water scenery, beautifully laid out in walks and drives; a perfect arboretum of all the trees and shrubs that will grow in this vicinity. . . . Would it not be the resort of the whole town; would it not have its silent influence upon everyone, making us more social and genial; bringing out all the finer traits which are inert in the human character?”108 Thoreau was heard. His friends in the Concord Farmers’ Club put his ideas into practice, and soon his words reached beyond Concord as well, leaving traces in every American public park—places protected as a “common possession forever,” so that the commons might survive.

  “A Transcendentalist above all”: Thoreau and John Brown

  Ever since the turmoil of 1854, Thoreau had watched his world slip deeper and deeper into the “hell” he had denounced in “Slavery in Massachusetts.” On May 19, 1856, his friend Senator Charles Sumner delivered to the Senate a scathing speech condemning Southern aid to proslavery insurgents who were forcibly taking control of the government of Kansas. Two days later, a proslavery militia of several hundred men attacked the free-state town of Lawrence, Kansas, founded two years before by New England immigrants. The raiders sacked, looted, and burned the town, killing most of its male population, as many as two hundred men and boys. The next day, while Sumner sat alone writing at his desk on the Senate floor, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina attacked him with a heavy cane, beating him on the head with its gold tip until Sumner, covered in blood, collapsed unconscious. Brooks kept beating Sumner’s bleeding body while his South Carolina colleague, Representative Laurence Keitt, held off horrified spectators with a pistol. Finally the cane broke. Brooks threw it down and walked away. For this act he was levied a $300 fine and given neither jail time nor reprimand.

  Sumner survived, but it took three years to recover from the brain damage. The proxy war being fought in Kansas had come home to the seat of American power. While South Carolinians gloated, brandishing pieces of the True Cane in murderous glee, Emerson told a rally of his townsmen that “we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.”109 Just two nights before, May 24 and 25, 1856, on the front lines of Kansas, a sheepherder-surveyor had gathered his followers and, in retribution for the sacking of Lawrence, dragged five proslavery householders out of their cabins along Pottawatomie Creek and murdered them, one by one. He was now a wanted man. His name was John Brown.

  Seven months later, in early January 1857, John Brown found his way to the dingy office of the State Kansas Committee in Boston, Massachusetts, where Thoreau’s friend and neighbor Franklin Sanborn, the Concord schoolmaster, was working as secretary. Sanborn had injected fresh radicalism into Concord’s long-standing community of antislavery activists, and the atrocities in Kansas allowed him to bring even Concord’s moderates into the alliance: in June 1856 his fundraiser for Kansas relief won the support of jailer Sam Staples and county sheriff John S. Keyes. On July 4, when Sanborn carried a petition around Concord calling on the Governor of Massachusetts to investigate the seizure and imprisonment of several Massachusetts citizens by Missouri border raiders, Simon Brown, lieutenant governor, signed first with a John Hancock flourish, followed by Emerson, Henry and John Thoreau, John S. Keyes, and Albert Stacy.110 Thus when John Brown sat down in Sanborn’s office and explained that he was touring the Northeast to raise funds for an army to save Kansas, Sanborn was ready to listen. There were deep pockets in Concord, he told him; Brown should come and make his case there.

  Brown arrived in Concord in March 1857. He lodged with Sanborn, still living in Channing’s house, and at noon they crossed the street to dine with the Thoreaus. Henry was fascinated by Brown, and after Sanborn left to tend school, Thoreau and Brown sat in the parlor talking Kansas. When Emerson dropped by, Thoreau introduced them to each other. Emerson, too, was interested, enough to invite Brown to spend the night at his home. His children remembered how Brown spoke to them only of “peaceful” things, such as how every sheep had its own unique face, and out of a flock of five hundred, Brown could pick out any one.111 But at the town meeting, Brown was not peaceful. He spoke of the crimes of the Missouri Ruffians and the Kansas proslavery forces, and of the penance due from a nation that countenanced slavery; he said it was better a generation should pass away than that a singl
e word of the Bible or the Declaration of Independence be violated. He claimed to abhor violence, but vowed to commit it at God’s will. He showed them the heavy chains proslavery forces used to bind his son John, and he showed them the bowie knife he had captured at the Battle of Black Jack, kept sheathed under his trousers on his right leg. Brown would use this same knife as the model for the pikes he ordered with money raised through talks like this one.112

  Rapt as he held the people of Concord, they gave little. Emerson thought Brown had given “a good account of himself,” and pledged fifty dollars; John Thoreau Sr. had donated ten dollars. Henry, suspicious of what Brown would do with the funds, tossed in “a trifle.”113 When Brown returned to Kansas later that spring, he had raised less money than he’d hoped, but he’d made vital connections that would soon pay hugely. Out of this web of contacts would crystalize the “Secret Six,” who continued to raise funds for Brown’s army. Thoreau knew them all, some of them as close friends: Franklin Sanborn, T. W. Higginson, Theodore Parker, George Luther Stearns, Gerrit Smith, and Samuel Gridley Howe. He also knew Lewis Hayden and Frederick Douglass, two of Brown’s truly secret supporters, and he likely knew the third, Harriet Tubman, who came to Concord in May and June of 1859.114

  Amid the escalating massacres, the raw violence, and the unfathomable brutalization—by their own government—of millions of enslaved Americans, Thoreau and his circle longed for a hero. For the calamities did not cease. On March 6, 1857, the eve of Brown’s first visit to Concord, the US Supreme Court handed down the infamous Dred Scott decision, declaring that under the Constitution, no black person, free or enslaved, was in fact a person, let alone a citizen, for slaves were property and therefore had no rights of personhood whatsoever. That meant any regulation of slavery was beyond the purview of the US government, which did not control or regulate property. The decision immediately revoked any protection from slave power in the disputed territories of Kansas and Nebraska.