Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  The resulting specter of the entire West dissolving into a region-wide “Bleeding Kansas” destroyed the east-west railroad lines, helping trigger the financial Panic of 1857. The nation had been polarized repeatedly: by the Fugitive Slave Act, by Bleeding Kansas, by the presidential election of 1856—when the free-soil John C. Frémont carried every state in the North while the proslavery James Buchanan carried every state in the South, and therefore the nation, which the South controlled. War was already breaking out, Thoreau wrote to Cholmondeley. Concord was mad for Frémont, but he doubted Frémont had a chance. Out in Kansas, free men were being forged into heroes, while in the North, men dithered. “I only wish,” confessed Thoreau to his English friend, “that I for one had more skill to deal with them.” Six months later, in April 1857, he watched the Reverend Daniel Foster, his friend, leave his family and his lovely Wachusett farm to join Brown’s men in Kansas.115

  The circle of hell drew tighter in 1858 as the incoming President Buchanan moved forward with plans to admit Kansas to the Union as a slave state. John Brown, defeated in Kansas, returned east with a new battle plan: the war must be brought to the heart of the nation, to “Virginia, the queen of the slave states.” On January 10, 1859, as his father lay dying, Thoreau joined Emerson and one of Brown’s Secret Six, George Luther Stearns, a sober, wealthy Boston entrepreneur who vowed he would mortgage all he owned to see the end of slavery. As they skated on Walden Pond in the bitter cold, Stearns convinced Thoreau that Brown was a hero to be trusted.116 By March, even the gentle Quaker Daniel Ricketson felt “as though a crisis was approaching,” as he wrote Thoreau, “when the use of every means that ‘God and nature affords’ will be required to oppose tyranny.” When John Brown returned to Concord in May, speaking for the second time at the town hall on May 8, Alcott, the soul of nonviolent resistance, found himself deeply moved. The imposing, steel-eyed, square-shouldered man was charged with power and graced with an apostle’s long, flowing beard. “Our best people listen to his words—Emerson, Thoreau, Judge Hoar, my wife—and some of them contribute something in aid of his plans without asking particulars, such confidence does he inspire with his integrity and abilities.”117 They had found their hero.

  On October 9, 1859, Thoreau was attempting once again to awaken the North from their “drunken somnolence.”118 Sanborn had earlier heard “Autumnal Tints,” and liked it well enough to recommend it to Theodore Parker for his Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society, the independent church whose Sunday services were held at the Boston Music Hall, the only venue large enough for the two thousand or more who gathered weekly to hear Parker’s sermons. Recently Parker’s health had collapsed under the strain of overwork, and he had traveled to Italy to recover his strength. Church leaders were looking for substitutes. Thoreau agreed to speak, but informed them he would read not “Autumnal Tints” but “Life Misspent”—a revised version of his difficult lecture “What Shall It Profit?”. Audiences had rejected this lecture time and again, but Parker’s liberal congregation listened to it with respect and approval. Emerson was pleased and relieved to hear that Thoreau had prospered. It was an “original, racy, and erratic” address, said one reviewer; it was given in “a fine voice, and a prompt, effective style of oratory,” said another—though a third was disgusted to see the audience approve Thoreau’s “fanaticism.”119 Thoreau was at the top of his game, confident in his ideas, confident in his ability to deliver them. Good thing, too: what came next called on everything he had.

  News of John Brown’s failed raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry reached Thoreau on October 19, 1859, while he and Alcott were visiting at Emerson’s house. On hearing the news of Brown’s imprisonment, Thoreau’s response was immediate, visceral, and profound: “When a government puts forth its strength on the side of injustice, as ours (especially to-day) to maintain slavery and kill the liberators of the slave, what a merely brute, or worse than brute, force it is seen to be! A demoniacal force!” Tyranny ruled—not merely in the government, but in the hearts and heads of his neighbors, who disparaged Brown “because he resorted to violence, resisted the government, threw his life away!—what way have they thrown their lives, pray?” For his own neighbors preserved the so-called peace by deeds of violence: the policeman’s club and handcuffs, the jail and the gallows, all sanctioned by the State.120

  But Brown had split open the skies to reveal another order, a higher law that transcended the State to render judgement on the State’s own criminality: “High treason which is resistance to tyranny here below has its origin in, and is first committed by, the power that makes and forever re-creates man.” Thoreau grasped immediately what no one else could yet see: Brown was neither madman nor mere criminal, but something far more uncanny, a singularity that rent open the founding logic of a State that declared itself free and holy by virtue of its right to enslave and brutalize its own subjects. Brown’s capture had opened an existential trap: The United States could return his violence with violence of its own, executing Brown to protect itself; or refuse violence, pardon him, and thereby confess its own cosmic criminality. It could destroy Brown to save itself, or destroy itself to save justice. Either way, Thoreau realized, Brown’s turn to violence had precipitated a crisis of historic proportions. Brown would, as Thoreau immediately foresaw, live forever: “There sits a tyrant holding fettered four millions of slaves. Here comes their heroic liberator; if he falls, will he not still live?”121

  Over the next three days, Thoreau kept writing at white heat, finding words for the fury he had pent up for years. The transcendent nature of the sacrificial logic Brown had triggered was the same, Thoreau realized, as the sacrifice that had founded the Christian church: “A government that pretends to be Christian and crucifies a million Christs every day!” he wrote. “Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perhaps, John Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which I rejoice to know is not without its links.” Could a new, redeemed America be founded on Brown’s sacrifice? The political crisis was upon them, poised, but the future was in doubt. Nothing, absolutely no providence whatsoever, guaranteed redemption. The nation’s fate was in their hands: “I regard this event as a touchstone designed to bring out with glaring distinctness the character of this government.”122 Kairos was upon them—the moment of sacred time when past, present, and future collapse together and await decision. Whatever happened next would reveal the true America, for all time, indelibly.

  As this realization sank in, Thoreau began thinking historically, placing Harpers Ferry in the arc of liberation history stretching from Christ to Cromwell, 1776, and John Brown. As he read the sacred and historical portents, he choked with rage at the trivializing pointlessness of every newspaper account.123 He had to speak out. No one else was. He must find a way to defend Brown—“a Transcendentalist above all”—to the world. With this, two days after hearing the news, Thoreau envisioned an audience. An effective defense required thinking biographically, so he framed Brown’s character through a narrative of his deeds and words. He was shaken to realize that two years before, he had doubted Brown. Worse, entering Brown’s life forced him to confront the unimaginable: “I do not wish to kill or to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both of these things would be by me unavoidable.”124 Thoreau wrote constantly, keeping paper and pencil under his pillow. By Sunday, October 30, he was ready. That morning he walked the town, spreading word he would speak that evening on John Brown. His family was divided; his friends counseled silence. Sanborn—who had helped orchestrate the raid, though Thoreau did not know this—had fled to Canada in a panic, forcing himself to return days later and face events. He in particular begged Thoreau to be silent. Thoreau, unmoved, replied: “I did not send to you for advice but to announce that I am to speak.”125

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  The church was full. The occasion was momentous, and the moment Thoreau had seized carried far, far beyond Concord. Until that evening, not one person in the nati
on had stood up in public to defend John Brown. Even as Thoreau stood to speak, Brown was on trial for treason in a Virginia courthouse, and everywhere the newspaper headlines pitched hysteria against him. For Thoreau to stand and speak, a minority of one in this explosive atmosphere, took great moral courage. It also took moral courage for the people of Concord to assemble and listen, as they did, with courtesy and respect. Few, if any, came out of sympathy for Brown. Many came expecting to scoff; more came in pain and confusion, uncertain what to think. To them all, Thoreau read his “Plea for Captain John Brown,” quietly and with “no oratory, as if it burned him.” To Edward Emerson, “It was as if he spoke for his own brother, so deeply stirred was he, so searching and brave his speech.” Minot Pratt was astonished at Thoreau’s extravagance for Brown, and further astonished to discover Thoreau’s sympathies “were so strong in favor of the poor slave”; he finally judged Thoreau’s speech was “full of noble, manly ideas.” As Edward Emerson summarized, “Many of those who came to scoff remained to pray.”126

  The next day Thoreau received an urgent telegram: “Thoreau must lecture for Fraternity, Tuesday evening—Douglass fails—Letter mailed.” Frederick Douglass had been scheduled to speak at Boston’s Tremont Temple as part of the popular “Fraternity Course” lectures sponsored by Theodore Parker’s congregation, secular lectures held on Tuesday evenings for the public. Douglass had long worked with Brown but had refused to join, or support, the Harpers Ferry raid. But when Brown was captured, his pocket held a letter from Douglass, evidence implicating him directly. A warrant went out for his arrest, and Douglass fled to Canada, leaving the Fraternity Course without a speaker, whereupon Emerson wrote to the organizers recommending Thoreau’s “Plea for Captain Brown” as a replacement: “every man in the Republic” needed to hear what Thoreau had to say. Thoreau had read it in Concord “with great force & effect” to an audience of “widely different parties” who heard him “without a murmur of dissent.”127

  The recommendation did its work. On November 1, Thoreau carried his “Plea” to Boston’s Tremont Temple, where 2,500 people gathered to hear him. Thoreau stepped to the podium and calmly faced the sea of faces. “The reason why Frederick Douglass is not here is the reason why I am,” he opened. For an hour and a half he held his audience enthralled, an audience that broke in, time and again, with spontaneous applause. Caroline Healey Dall listened in amazement—“I had thought Mr. Thoreau only a philosopher”—and in some discomfort, for many of his sharpest lines were, she thought, “in very bad taste.” Nevertheless, she found “the whole a grand tribute to the truest American who has lived since George Washington.” A young William Dean Howells thought Thoreau had caught something important: that “Brown has become an idea,” not a mere criminal.128 There, under Thoreau’s gaze, it seemed the tide of history was turning. Blasphemy and fanaticism!—spat the proslavery newspapers. But the wave of Brown’s supporters was growing. By now Wendell Phillips had also stood up in defense of Brown, and Emerson agreed that Brown had made “the gallows as sacred as the cross.”129 Newspapers reprinted Thoreau’s speech, spreading his words across the nation. “Just the words I so longed to have some living voice speak, loud, so that the world might hear,” one reader wrote Thoreau.130

  He gave his plea for Captain Brown once more, on November 3, to an enthusiastic audience Blake assembled in Worcester’s Mechanics Hall. History was moving fast: only the day before, the Virginia court had condemned Brown to die in a month, on December 2, 1859. In his lecture Thoreau grimly noted the date. Next day he called on Alcott, busy sorting his Baldwin apples for the market. “The men have much in common,” reflected Alcott: Thoreau comprehended Brown’s virtues so well because he so largely owned them himself. But where Brown drove “straight at institutions . . . Thoreau contents himself with railing at them and letting them otherwise alone.” Was there nothing to be done? Thoreau thought someone—Emerson?—should write the governor of Virginia for mercy; he still held out hope for a pardon, for the work a pardon could do to save the soul of the nation. Sanborn thought Alcott might go and intercede, or at least learn whether Brown would accept a rescue attempt. Neither letter nor meeting materialized. Thoreau tried to get his speech printed as a pamphlet, to reach the public directly. He planned to donate the proceeds to Brown’s widowed wife and orphaned children. But no Boston publisher would touch it; his words would be carried only in the newspapers’ abridged and distorted reports.131 Again his voice was stilled before he had finished speaking.

  In the coming weeks Thoreau was obsessed and despondent. In 1854, the white water lily had given him a vision of hope, but after the condemnation of John Brown, nature offered no comfort. It seemed strange that the “little dipper” grebe was still diving in the river as of yore, and that people were still going about their affairs indifferently. Blinded by anger, he stood and watched a sunset and he could see it was beautiful, could even describe its beauty, but he could not see it. “So great a wrong” as Brown’s fate “overshadowed all beauty in the world.”132

  Thoreau turned his attention to the least he could do: organize a memorial to mark the hour of Brown’s execution, set for 2:00 p.m. on Friday, December 2.133 He carried the idea around town, and on Monday, November 28, 150 Concord citizens gathered at the town hall to approve the memorial and appoint Thoreau, Emerson, Simon Brown, and John S. Keyes to arrange the program. They also voted to toll the church bell at the fated hour Brown was to hang, and someone—perhaps Thoreau—proposed the American flag be raised to half-mast, union down. The next day Thoreau formally asked permission of the Concord Selectmen to toll the First Parish bell during the memorial, but they recoiled at the prospect and refused. Concord was hardly united in Brown’s support. Dr. Bartlett warned Thoreau that he had heard “‘five hundred’ (!) damn me for it,” and threaten a counterdemonstration —involving guns. Much of Concord, Thoreau concluded, was in the same condition as Virginia, “afraid of their own shadows.” But, as he reminded himself, “fear creates danger, and courage dispels it,” and so plans went forward.134 Keyes insisted they must not read any speeches, as “there was too much danger of our giving way to treasonable utterances if we allowed ourselves to speak our own sentiments.” Instead they agreed to read selections of poetry, scripture, and Brown’s own words. Thoreau had a piano moved into the town hall to accompany the hymns.135

  December 2 dawned warm and oppressively humid under low and looming clouds. Sometime in the night, the opposition hung a life-size effigy of Brown on the elm tree in front of the town hall. Attached to it was John Brown’s “Last Will and Testament,” which included the line: “I bequeath to H. D. Thoreau, Esq., my body and soul, he having eulogized my character and actions at Harper’s Ferry above the Saints in Heaven.”136 Thoreau’s supporters cut the effigy down and destroyed it. By 2:00 p.m. the town hall was full, including many from neighboring towns. Simon Brown chaired the program, and after piano music quieted the crowd, Rev. Edmund Sears from nearby Wayland offered a prayer, and a hymn was sung by all assembled. Then Thoreau rose and spoke. To Keyes’s immense annoyance he did not stick with the plan but added some “rambling and incoherent sentences.”137 If true, then perhaps Thoreau extemporized: his script, “The Martyrdom of John Brown,” is succinct, ceremonial, and pointed. Emerson, Keyes, and Alcott read their selections without editorializing. At the end, the audience stood to sing a dirge Sanborn had composed for the occasion. Afterward Alcott thought it was good the bells had not been rung. Better than “any clamor of steeples and the awakening of angry feelings” were the subdued tones of grief, and silence.138

  Thoreau’s work with John Brown was not done. Late that night, Sanborn knocked on his door: before first light, Thoreau must retrieve a horse and wagon from Emerson’s, drive Mr. “X” from Sanborn’s to the South Acton depot, and put him aboard the next train to Canada, at all costs. The lowering clouds of the day before had brought in winter overnight, and Thoreau’s breath frosted in the predawn air as he directed Emerson’s
wagon through the center of town to Sanborn’s house. The frantic Mr. X would not stay seated and would not stop babbling about invading the South, about finishing the work John Brown had begun. “I know I am insane,” he chattered. He didn’t trust the unknown driver and demanded to be taken to Emerson immediately. The unswerving Thoreau unnerved him. “I don’t know but you are Emerson; are you? You look somewhat like him.” “No, I am not,” answered Thoreau, steadily urging Emerson’s horse on. In Acton, the agitated Mr. X flung himself out of the wagon. Somehow Thoreau reassured him, perhaps with some “judicious force,” and got Mr. X onto the northbound train, which delivered him safely to Montreal. Not until Thoreau was on his deathbed did Sanborn tell him that Mr. X was Francis Jackson Merriam, a member of Brown’s band who had financed the Harpers Ferry raid with $600 in gold, escaped from the melee, and fled to Canada, whereupon he seized on the resolution to return and carry on Brown’s mission. That morning, Merriam was perhaps the most wanted man in America, with a steep price on his head. Thoreau was therefore a criminal conspirator of the first order.139

  Thoreau’s “Plea for Captain John Brown” was finally published when James Redpath, a Scottish immigrant who worked for Horace Greeley as an undercover correspondent in the South, requested it as the opening entry in his collection Echoes of Harper’s Ferry, with the profits to go to the families of the “colored men” who died at Harpers Ferry. Redpath had interviewed Thoreau for his biography of Brown, which he wrote at lightning speed and published on January 5, 1860. “I hope the contents of the third page will not offend you,” he wrote Thoreau on the day of its publication.140 Thoreau opened his author’s copy and read: “To Wendell Phillips, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry D. Thoreau, Defenders of the Faithful, Who, when the mob shouted, ‘Madman!’ said, ‘Saint!’ I humbly and gratefully dedicate this work.”