Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  The next morning, Sanborn and Keyes appeared before the state Supreme Court in Boston, where Judge Lemuel Shaw voided the federal arrest warrant. Word got back to Concord, where a cheering crowd of hundreds met Sanborn and Keyes as they stepped off the train to a cannon salute, Sanborn holding his manacled hands high in triumph. The crowd filed into the town hall for a boisterous “indignation meeting” on the theme of resistance to tyranny—embodied, now, by the beloved schoolmaster’s manacled hands, which he again held high. Sanborn spoke, of course, and so did Reverend Reynolds, Emerson, Higginson—and Thoreau, to be sure, whose concluding words had them all roaring: Concord was being congratulated in the newspapers for conducting this affair in “a lawful and orderly manner.” No! He could not agree. “The Concord people didn’t ring the alarm bells according to law—they didn’t cheer according to law—they didn’t groan according to law—(loud applause)—and as he didn’t talk according to law, he thought he would stop and give way to some other speaker.”20 Fifteen years ago, Concord had jailed Thoreau for resistance to civil law; now they hailed him as a leader of their united civil disobedience.

  Sanborn was not off the hook—a new warrant was issued for his arrest for assaulting federal officers—and for several days he avoided his house, rotating among his neighbors for shelter, including a night at Mary Mann’s next door and another at the Thoreaus’ around the corner. For a year his case roiled through the Senate, until the secession of South Carolina rendered it moot. Meanwhile, Brown continued to be a flash point of resistance, and Thoreau continued to feed the fire. John Brown’s body had been buried at his home in North Elba, New York, and on July 4, 1860, supporters planned to dedicate a memorial for his grave. They invited Thoreau to speak, and he wrote out an address, “The Last Days of John Brown.” But in the end, instead of traveling to upstate New York, he passed it along to the organizer to read aloud in his absence, and the Liberator printed it on July 27.21 This was Thoreau’s last word on John Brown’s meteoric career. That the North had gone “suddenly all Transcendental” gave Thoreau hope in the power of words that “speak the truth.” Brown’s victory was won not by force of arms but by “the sword of the spirit,” which meant Brown could no longer be confined to Kansas or North Elba, and he no longer worked in secret: “He works in public, and in the clearest light that shines on this land.”22

  There was at least one more invitation to speak, at the annual picnic of Theodore Parker’s congregation on July 11, which, as Thoreau wrote Sophia, his famous allergy to picnics gave him a reason to avoid. But he was happy to speak at political meetings where he didn’t have to make small talk, such as the Middlesex Anti-Slavery Society meeting four days later in Concord. Parker Pillsbury opened by praying God would raise up others to complete the work begun by John Brown, then launched a series of resolutions affirming the duty and virtue of “treason and rebellion against such a government as ours,” which had destroyed the rights and assaulted the liberty of one of our very own, at our very doors, even while aiding in the enslavement of others. After Thoreau, Alcott, and a few other spoke their minds, the “very spicy” resolutions were unanimously adopted. Pillsbury made a point of condemning Senator Sumner for his support of Abraham Lincoln (by then running for president on a platform too moderate for the radicals), so Thoreau made a point of smoothing the waters with his old friend, writing Sumner the next day with thanks for his speech “on the Barbarism of Slavery,” which addressed the issue from a broadly ethical rather than narrowly partisan point of view. For the truth, of course, belongs to no party, and should never be used “to perfume the wheel-grease of party or national politics.”23

  It was hard, in this climate, for Thoreau to talk about anything else. That August, when a callow William Dean Howells turned up at his door, the young man’s glowing admiration for his hero barely survived Thoreau’s appearance—“a quaint, stump figure of a man” in unfashionable clothes, with a noble face, “tossed hair, a distraught eye,” and a nose that failed, despite its aquilinity, to redeem “his unfortunate short stature.” Thoreau once remarked that he didn’t know how to entertain a visitor who didn’t walk, and unfortunately Howells planted himself in the parlor, seated. Worse, he turned the conversation to John Brown, triggering Thoreau’s now well-worn platitudes about “a sort of John Brown type, a John Brown ideal, a John Brown principle, which we were somehow (with long pauses between the vague, orphic phrases) to cherish, and nourish ourselves on.” Howells had just come from an hour with Hawthorne, who, similarly tongue-tied before the young idolizer, hit on the solution of escorting his guest up the hillside for a meditative smoke. It’s too bad Thoreau didn’t jolly the timid youth out for an hour on the river. As it was, their interview “was not merely a defeat of my hopes, it was a rout”—and Howells’s “demigod” did not outlive the afternoon.24

  About this time, Thoreau took a stack of leftover programs he had printed for Concord’s John Brown memorial, flipped them over, and drafted on the backs a few pages of Wild Fruits. For months he’d been searching for a structure. Late in March he tried out one idea, “The Story of March,” from the moment when sleigh bells give way to horse carts in the slush to the “brown season” when the earth is “the color of a teamster’s coat” or his own worn coat, brown with a little green to it, that concealed him from landowners and allowed him to approach wild animals.25 He gave it up. There is no “the” story of March—every March tells a similar story, but no two tell the same story. He realized the solution was there in his Journal: a whole decade of Marches, each one similar but different, with every phenomenon carefully noted and dated. Thoreau went to work, paging back through a decade of Journal volumes and drawing up massive charts of phenomena for each month, year by year: leafing, flowering, leaf fall, fruits and seeds, when fingers are cold, when fires are lit, when windows are opened, when washing is hung outside to dry. The result arrayed a near infinity of data points across scores of pages.26

  These charts were working tools allowing Thoreau to visualize every least event in the broadest context, the grand cycle of the seasons in pointillist detail. Alcott had commissioned him to write the “Atlas of Concord,” and Thoreau’s lists mapped an atlas of details normally overlooked. In the context of larger patterns, the least observation could yield astonishing results. On June 4 he tossed a piece of wood against a pitch pine in bloom and watched a cloud of pollen float away, still visible at fifty feet. Weeks later Thoreau noticed pine pollen skimming the surfaces of lakes and pools—“pollinometers,” he called them—even far away from the nearest pine tree. How far did pine pollen travel? He found a pond as far away as possible from the nearest pine, and even there, after a rain, at the end of the season, he detected yellow pine pollen in the water. This meant pollen, in season, was everywhere in the air. Was this what caused those peculiar seasonal diseases? Moreover, beauty itself, like pine pollen, was everywhere, unseen even by the landscape artist who paints only shades of lighter and darker green; whereas the botanist knows each green is a particular species of grass and finds “another and different beauty” so deep it goes to the core formative processes of being. The more one knows, the more beauty one sees. Thoreau’s charts were telescopes, instruments of vision—drafts, in names, of poems written by the earth.27

  In Darwin Thoreau read how plants and animals were “bound together by a web of complex relations.”28 Now he was finding cycles within cycles, wheels within wheels. Darwin untangled a bit of that web on ocean islands like the Galapagos. This summer, Thoreau decided, he would go back to the bare rocky summit of Mount Monadnock, a kind of alpine island in the sky, and camp out long enough to study everything, get the whole big alpine picture in one place. On Saturday morning, August 4, 1860, Thoreau led the every-ready Channing, who had never been camping before, slogging straight through a rainstorm to the very same hollow on Monadnock’s summit where he and Blake had camped two years before. Once they got their spruce hut built and their fire going—rotating before it like roasting
meat—they were dry and positively radiant with glee: the genius of the mountain had driven off all the summer tourists to welcome these two pilgrims from Concord. The storm cleared that night, and shreds of cloud chased the stars; overhead the nighthawks hunted while firelight glimmered off the wet rocks and the green boughs that tucked them in. Thoreau was in his heaven.

  He wanted time, lots of it—time enough to allow the mountain to sink in. He would happily have stayed for weeks, but after five nights Channing declared he’d put in a week’s work and was ready to leave. After two nights at the first camp they found an even better one, where they could lie and gaze out over the world without lifting their heads. Thoreau was up by four every morning to set his watch by the sunrise, followed by breakfasts of blueberries and wild mountain cranberries. They watched sunsets over suppers of bread and salt beef. In between, for four long days, Thoreau roamed and inspected, took notes and gazed into the distance, thinking. They were hardly alone—at least a hundred people a day whooped and hallooed from the summit, squinted through spyglasses, chipped their names in the rocks, and gathered berries, covering the peak “with men, women, and children in dresses of all colors, like an observatory on a muster-field.”29

  Thoreau’s notes go on for more than twenty-five pages: scores of plants, from trees to grasses to lichens; birds, both visiting and resident; mammals (only two, rabbit droppings and a porcupine skull); insects, frogs—and people, of course, and their ways of making the mountain their own. Thoreau mapped the summit, studied the bogs, and decided which rivers drained out of each. He sketched the rocks and described their glacial grooves, aligned so precisely northwest to southeast they could have steered him in a fog. He studied the clouds and the fogs below, the way the light changed, the feel of the air, the way that, up there, distance defied judgment and sound carried far. Had he owned one of Humboldt’s cyanometers to measure the blue of the sky, he would surely have used it.

  At the end of his notes, Thoreau added memos—what to pack next time (no eggs, more sweet cake), what to observe next time. He had found his laboratory, “an example of what the earth was before it was finished.” Here on this alpine island, he could trace to their origin the threads of Concord’s bewildering maze of landscapes. This mountain would be his Galapagos. His Journal shivers with excitement: not only was Monadnock a laboratory of ecological science, it was also a spiritual center and a magnet for ordinary people, local mechanics and farmers’ boys and girls. This was a place of beauty and paradox, one that people cared about. He would go back. So enthralled were the Emerson children by his stories of rocks and berries that they all clamored to set off for Monadnock at once, with Henry as their guide.30

  All he needed, this man who set his watch by the mountain sunrise—all he needed was a little more time.

  Thoreau returned from Monadnock ready to write. The Concord Farmers’ Club had devoted its last spring meeting to “Forest Trees,” and in the lively discussion that followed, they agreed they needed a more accurate knowledge of trees. Some questions were easy, like how to tell the different species of pines and maples apart, but there were harder questions, too: “We find a succession of different trees grow on the same soil. If we cut off pines, oaks will come up. If we cut off oaks, pines will follow”—except on some soils, when oaks follow instead. Odd, that. They argued: Should one prune forest trees? Replant the forests, or let them seed in naturally? Such questions were so ubiquitous that Darwin could confidently state, “Everyone has heard that when an American forest is cut down, a very different vegetation springs up.”31 But why? Reading Darwin, then hearing the question resurface at the Farmers’ Club, put Thoreau on the alert. He knew why—he’d figured it out back in 1856. On September 1, he wrote it up: the missing piece was the seed. Since we don’t associate great trees with little seeds, we hardly bother to think about them. But the time will come “when this regular succession will cease and we shall be obliged to plant,” as in England and Germany. The organizers of the Middlesex County Agricultural Fair announced their annual honorary speaker would be Henry Thoreau, and his topic would be “The Succession of Forest Trees.”

  Thursday, September 20, 1860, turned out wet and stormy, a terrible day for the county fair, which raised everyone’s general hilarity and made the damp, slightly inebriated crowds all the happier to elbow their way into the town hall to listen to the afternoon’s “excellent address” by one of Concord’s own. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” he quipped, “every man is entitled to come to Cattle-show, even a transcendentalist”—and with that good laugh at his own expense, Thoreau was off, leading them straight out into their familiar woodlots with wit and charm, guiding them through his own story of puzzlement, discovery, and widening understanding. He closed with the six wonderful patent office seeds that grew 310 pounds of prizewinning squash for him. “I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been,” he told this audience of planters, but “I have great faith in a seed.” Give me a seed, and I shall expect wonders—even the millennium itself, once the people begin to plant the seeds of “the reign of justice.”32

  Thoreau’s old professor Cornelius Felton, now president of Harvard, stood up to applaud his former student, who he’d once said was too pertinaciously odd to amount to much, and to urge upon them all “a higher culture as a means of still greater advancement.” The society’s president, George S. Boutwell—the former governor of Massachusetts and the current secretary of the state’s Board of Education—congratulated them all on hearing an address “so plain and practical” yet showing such close observation. Thoreau, he admonished, was a model they all should follow. “If they would exhibit a little of the spirit shown by Mr. Thoreau in his experiments and researches, they could greatly benefit themselves and the whole community.”33 Thoreau, come down from the mountaintop, had found his new audience.

  More people read “The Succession of Forest Trees” in Thoreau’s lifetime than anything else he ever published. Horace Greeley printed it immediately in the New-York Weekly Tribune, and it was reprinted widely across the country. No doubt Greeley cocked an eyebrow when the author asked him to return the manuscript: “It is a part of a chapter on the Dispersion of Seeds.”34 A new book by Thoreau! Greeley, a weekend farmer himself, got ready to give it the same publicity bump he’d arranged for Walden. He wrote Thoreau a long, lively letter arguing he must be wrong: only spontaneous generation could account for the sudden appearance of, say, fireweed on burned-over land, where no fireweed grew for miles. Thoreau wrote a detailed and pointed reply, and Greeley ran them both in his newspaper, stoking the fire of a good national controversy—for in the roil over Darwin’s Origin of Species, this debate was terrific copy. Better still, at the very moment when the fact of mass deforestation was troubling landowners, farmers, and the general public from Maine to Minnesota, Thoreau’s new work not only answered their “plain and practical” concerns, but turned such matters of concern toward the “higher culture” called for by President Felton.35

  Now Thoreau had not just one new book in the offing, but two. Writing “Succession” had sent him paging through his old Journal volumes, which he began to reread in the new light of Darwin’s Origin of Species—and suddenly Darwin’s ideas came to life. Thoreau hurried back to the woods with new sets of questions. Farmers were making a botch of their forests, and they knew it, but now Thoreau realized they didn’t mean to damage their woodlots; they simply needed more knowledge. For instance, take the mess on Smith’s Hill—a textbook case of a bare, eroded hillside. If Smith would just stop hacking down the little hickories seeding in and keep his cattle out for a few seasons, he would soon have a dense and valuable hickory wood.36 As for oaks, 1860 was an astonishing year: no one had ever seen the white oaks so prolific. Their acorns covered the forest floor solid—enough to feed the squirrels, busy planting future oak forests under the pines, with plenty left over for farmers to reseed new oak plantations all over Concord. Emerson gathered some up for his own planting. It was
all so elegant: everywhere, it seemed, Nature’s design was playing into humanity’s benign stewardship of the land.

  Then something strange happened. On September 28, a “black frost” hit, lasting nearly a week. By October third, all Thoreau saw were shriveled, hoary leaves, dead before they could ripen into their fall colors. The stench of decay permeated the woods. Ten days later, still pleased with the bumper crop of acorns, he opened a few and found them decaying inside. Yet there were plenty left, so he gathered more, still rejoicing in Nature’s plenitude. His Journal snowballed as he followed the track of seeds and woods, woodlots and old fields, coursing across boundary lines, examining stumps and seedlings, marveling at the seed’s significance and the forest’s tender nursery.37 It all came together on October 18: the frogs on Monadnock, the fish in Sleepy Hollow, the water plants in Beck Stow’s swamp, where there was no inlet stream—“How did they get there?” The point, he wrote, was how did anything get anywhere? “We are not to suppose as many creations as pools.” Greeley and Louis Agassiz were both wrong; everything came from an actual, material seed, which meant Darwin was right: all seeds came originally from one seed, which had multiplied, spread, and evolved into new varieties, from the fossil lilies of geologists to the white lilies we carry to church. All were dispersed by seeds, all were evolving new forms and new lives. “The development theory implies a greater vital force in nature, because it is more flexible and accommodating, and equivalent to a sort of constant new creation.”38