Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  But still, there was a problem. Thoreau went back out to reexamine those white oaks. There were acorns still on the tree, a bad sign; by then they should all have ripened and fallen. Thoreau pulled a few off the tree, cut them open. Dead! Black within, or sour and soft, every one—all of them, on the ground, too. Baffled and dismayed, he stopped short: what kind of nursery kills off all its infants in their cradle? He’d been so certain he held the key in his hand, but here was “a glaring imperfection in Nature, that the labor of the oaks for the year should be lost to this extent.” All woodland creatures—pigeons, jays, squirrels—were “impoverished” by this unaccountable loss. “It is hard to say what great purpose is served by this seeming waste.”39

  Darwin’s breakthrough came when he realized natural selection had not one key but two: the fecundity of nature and the pressure of mortality. Darwin’s theory of evolution was driven by differential survival, or “survival of the fittest.” Thoreau understood that most seeds died, but he reasoned that since they were eaten, they still supported life: design still ruled the great beneficent cycle of the universe. But this spectacle, an entire year’s bumper crop pointlessly destroyed, meant other forces were in play, random contingencies and strange cruelties. Thoreau knew he was at the cutting edge of science, one of the first to apply Darwin’s theories in the field. Now he knew something even more powerful: there was more to learn, more he did not understand. He was finding answers to questions that puzzled even Darwin himself.

  Virtually every day Thoreau was back outside, scouting fresh sites, observing, questioning, counting, gathering. His Journal exploded, from 28 pages in September to 104 in October and another 81 in November. When he heard of Inches Woods in Boxborough, an old-growth forest about to be logged, he took the train to see it, walking in awe under the tremendous spreading oak trees. Here he could study forest succession in a New England forest that had never seen an axe, glimpse the whole panorama rolling forward from its origins. Once, he had begged the farmers to leave a few trees standing, lest New England’s forests exist only on the crumbling paper of old property deeds. Now he saw that the forest itself, dating back before the first English settlement, was writing its own deeds—deeds he now could read: “Thus you can unroll the rotten papyrus on which the history of the Concord forest is written.”40

  “My own destiny made & mended here”—that should be his signboard, he joked with Blake.41 The year after his father’s death had been riddled with challenges and pressures, leaving him hurried, even embattled. Somehow this year he had, indeed, mended his destiny: rebalanced his life, rededicated himself to walking and writing, reoriented to a deeper social purpose. He was connecting better than ever with his audiences, from the town hall, to the Concord classroom, to readers far beyond the reach of his voice—audiences so moved by his words that he could feel he’d changed the course of history. On Thanksgiving Day, November 29, 1860, Thoreau had a lifetime of thanks to give. At 7:00 a.m. he walked to the riverbank and pulled in his boat for the winter; that afternoon he inspected the woods on Fairhaven Hill, where a field of seedling hickories begged for his attention. There are never any hard times for poets or philosophers, he reflected at day’s end, for they deal not with moonshine but with “permanent values.”42

  Around noon Alcott dropped by to firm up their plans for the commemoration of John Brown’s death on December 2. Perhaps, as they put their heads together over the program, Alcott apologized for the cold he had caught earlier in the week, attending the crowded Teachers’ Association Meeting in the drafty town hall. The next day Alcott couldn’t leave the house. The day after, he took to his bed, so wracked with fever, sore throat, and a bad cough that for a week he couldn’t even write in his journal. Not till Sunday, December 9, did he feel a little better, though still hoarse and “choked full.”43

  Four days after his meeting with Alcott, Thoreau, too, came down with a cold. It was just a cold, he must have thought, annoyed as he went about his day: back out to Fairhaven Hill for more work with the hickories, stopping off on his way home for a vigorous argument with neighbors about—what else?—John Brown. Despite the sniffles, work went on: next day he stormed on about a fugitive slave who had been tracked to Toronto (in free Canada!) by his “kidnappers.” Then he finished drawing up his survey of a house lot on Monument Road.

  It would be his last survey. Thoreau’s Journal stops here. It would sputter back to life weeks later, for a few more pages. Never again would Thoreau walk across Concord’s hillsides, tramp through its swamps, or seek out oak seedlings among the pines. It was just a cold, maybe the flu—but for a man with lurking tuberculosis, it was the beginning of the end.

  “The West of which I speak”: Thoreau’s Last Journey

  It was obvious to no one yet, including Thoreau, that this was no ordinary cold. At first he soldiered on: anxious to extend his lecture circuit, he had expanded his advertising, and while engagements in Rochester and Buffalo fell through, he had read two lectures in September before a group of spiritualists in Lowell, probably “Walking” in the morning and “Life Misspent” that afternoon. He’d also arranged to lecture before the Young Men’s Institute in Waterbury, Connecticut, on December 11. By then he’d been ill for a week, but on December 10, in the teeth of a nor’easter spitting snow and rain, Thoreau boarded the train to Worcester anyway for a social evening with old friends: the Blakes, Browns, and a handful of others, including Harry’s friend E. Harlow Russell, who in 1893 would inherit Thoreau’s manuscripts from Blake and determine their fate. Russell never forgot this evening, the only time they met. While taking off his overcoat, he heard Thoreau’s “deep musical voice” from within. As he entered the parlor, Thoreau leaped to his feet, extending a hand with a friendly “I am glad to see you, Mr. Russell.” Russell noted that Thoreau spoke with a certain deliberation: “The emphatic words seemed to hang fire or to be held back for an instant as if to gather force and weight”—something Emerson did as well, though Russell saw not imitation but a way of “looking at his thought” before speaking. He also noted Thoreau’s hoarseness and cough. Only later did he realize their significance.44

  By the time Thoreau reached Waterbury the next day, he was exhausted. He had brought along “Autumnal Tints,” his crowd-pleaser, and a good-sized audience bundled through the season’s coldest night yet to hear him—only to be bitterly disappointed. The lecture was “dull, commonplace and unsatisfactory,” neither practical nor poetic, delivered in a “monotonous” style that kept anyone from detecting any merits it had. All in all the worst lecture, the reviewer cruelly concluded, not merely in that year’s season but in the entire history of the institute.45 Thoreau returned from this debacle a very sick man. He’d had his share of colds, but something sent this one deeper, deep enough to ignite the slow-burning tuberculosis that slumbered in his lungs. It’s entirely possible that his fervent desire to connect with audiences—especially audiences of young people—was his undoing.

  By Christmas Day the flu symptoms had abated, and Thoreau was up to a holiday visit at the Alcotts, where he laid into Emerson’s latest book, The Conduct of Life, charging that it lacked the “fire and force” of the earlier works. A cocky thing to say, but back at his own writing desk he was working again, using the downtime to explore his new ideas, and he was writing brilliantly. With two book projects on hand, Wild Fruits and the emerging Dispersion of Seeds, he reopened his Journal and drafted chunks of both, starting with “Huckleberries,” his next lecture. For days he relived golden moments picking blueberries, reviewing his books to place blueberries, as he had placed apples, within the great narrative of human history, infusing poetry with polemics. By mid-January he was back to seeds, which were, in his revision of Darwin, “the origins of things.”46

  Reaching from his youthful reading of Lyell all the way to October’s frost-killed acorns, Thoreau began to lift his new vision into place: there has not been a sudden new creation of the world, “but a steady progress, according to existing laws
.” Seeds were a material way to trace the workings of those laws. It was easy to see destruction, which is sudden and spectacular: everyone hears the crash of a falling tree. But who hears the growth of a tree, the constant, slow work of creation? “Nature is slow but sure.” She wins the race by perseverance; she knows that seeds have many uses, not just to reproduce their kind. “If every acorn of this year’s crop is destroyed, never fear! She has more years to come.”47 Here was his solution to the baffling waste of the white oak crop: what made no sense on a human scale could be understood by lengthening the measure of time to the scale of the planet. The man who was running out of time now thought as if he had all the time, literally, in the world.

  Channing worried and Alcott sympathized, knowing how hard it was for Thoreau, who so loved to live outdoors, to be cooped up in the house. But spring would come with its good medicine, and meanwhile Thoreau was busy and happy, spreading out his Journals, arranging new subjects by topic, “as if he had a new book in mind.”48 Perhaps, nudged Alcott, it would be that atlas of Concord? “But he must work in his own ways and times,” and whatever it turned out to be would surprise, and be worth the wait. Alcott added Thoreau to the program for the upcoming Concord School exhibit; Channing came by with new data to update Thoreau’s seasonal charts; Emerson came by to stretch his thoughts. “All the music, Henry T. says, is in the strain, the tune don’t signify, ’tis all one vibration of the string. He says, people sing a song, or play a tune, only for one strain that is in it.” Waldo didn’t agree, and he challenged his friend, but he stayed with Thoreau’s thinking long enough to draw him out, and afterward kept considering the idea until he caught something in it he liked.49

  Channing fretted the most, posting worried letters alerting Mary Russell Watson that their dear friend was coughing heavily and losing weight.50 By late February, he was escorting Thoreau outside for a stroll or two in town—Was that a bluebird? thrilled Thoreau one mild afternoon—and on March first, Blake and Brown walked all the way from Worcester on a pilgrimage to see him. Alcott thought walking all that way in the slush was a bit extreme, but still, their gesture impressed him. “I know of nothing more creditable to Thoreau than this thoughtful regard and constancy” shown him by “some of the best persons of his time.”51 When the school exhibition came, on March 14, Thoreau was too ill to attend, but he wrote Ricketson proudly that Alcott was now “perhaps the most successful man in the town,” aglow in the universal praise for his work in their schools. As for himself, he insisted to everyone that while the house kept him prisoner, still he was happy, working hard, and hopeful, ever hopeful, that spring’s mild air would bring an end to his cough.52

  What spring brought was civil war. Thoreau kept up with politics: in March he fulminated to Thatcher against the cowardice of Lincoln’s presidency—just a month old—for being “no government at all.” It had punished not one Southerner for “treason—stealing from the public treasury—or murdering on political accounts,” and the North must know there could be “no Union between freemen & slaveholders, & vote & act accordingly.”53 The “purgatory” ended two weeks later, on April 12, 1861, when South Carolina fired on the federal garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. It had been coming for months. Lincoln’s election galvanized the South, and South Carolina seceded just before Christmas. Six more Southern states followed, and on February 4, 1861, the seven seceders formed the Confederate States of America, electing Jefferson Davis their president. Lincoln, in his inaugural address, called their actions void. Since he did not recognize their rebellion, he would fire no shots. Hence Thoreau’s fury: all this, and still no action! But the attack on Fort Sumter changed everything, crystallizing years of seething anger. When Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to retake the fort, Concord ignited. “Everyone is boiling over with excitement,” wrote Louisa May Alcott. Young men and boys “drill with all their might,” women and girls sew uniforms, old folks “settle the fate of the Nation in groves of newspapers, & the children make the streets hideous with distracted drums & fifes.”54

  But on April 19, as Concord’s forty-man militia marched to war, Thoreau’s Journal recorded only the specimens and observations brought him by friends—mostly young Horace Mann, Mary’s oldest boy, who had lately become Thoreau’s eyes, ears, and hands. As for war, Thoreau could not bear to acknowledge it. “What anyone can want to read your ‘battle of the Pissmires’ for, at a time like this, is past finding out,” spluttered a furious Parker Pillsbury, who’d begun his letter by calmly asking for a copy of Walden for a friend. But good lord! “Who wants to read how you can play with a ‘bream’ in the water, when the Leviathan of Slavery is hourly threatening to swallow ‘Old Abe’ like Jonah?” In one thrust, Thoreau’s life’s work was swept into the dust, worthless, pointless. From his imprisonment, he nevertheless held firm: “I hope that he ignores Fort Sumpter [sic], & Old Abe, & all that, for that is just the most fatal and indeed the only fatal, weapon you can direct against evil, ever.” What business had an “angel of light” to be pondering the deeds of darkness? “I do not so much regret the present condition of things in this country (provided I regret it at all) as I do that I ever heard of it.”55

  Lincoln had miscalculated; Southern secession was not a local rebellion to be put down in a mere police action. But the terrible truth and cataclysmic costs that unfolded over the coming months and years shaped a course of events that Thoreau would not witness. In the midst of spring’s war fever, Dr. Bartlett told him his lungs might not heal in time for another New England winter. He must “clear out” somewhere healthful, perhaps the West Indies. Too muggy, thought Thoreau; he settled instead on Minnesota. Today it seems an odd choice, but then the Upper Midwest was touted as a uniquely healthful climate for consumptives. For Thoreau there were other, still more telling reasons: he had always wanted to see the West. “West I must go, at all accounts,” he had pleaded with John in his youth. “The West has many attractions for me, particularly the lake country & the Indians,” he had told Calvin Greene, tempted by his invitation to Michigan.56 Margaret Fuller had gone West to restart her career, and her book on that trip provided the model for A Week. Emerson toured the West regularly, and with many contacts there, Thoreau would never be far from friends. He also had family out there: Samuel Thatcher Jr., George Thatcher’s brother, had moved from Maine to St. Anthony, Minnesota, where his own lung disease had cleared up; he’d lived there happily ever since. The Thatchers could provide a home base and local contacts. Minnesota it would be.

  But with whom? Channing was Thoreau’s first choice, but Channing waffled. So he turned to Blake, the kind, wise, and ever-devoted disciple: they would have to go slow and take it easy, he warned; he’d need perhaps three months, and would come back by a different route, say, through Mackinaw and Montreal. His romance with Canada pulled him still. “I have no right to offer myself as a companion to anybody,” he apologized, in his invalid condition—but perhaps Blake could make a part of this journey with him?57 Blake, though, had to say no. But the seventeen-year-old Horace Mann Jr., Thoreau’s attentive young friend, said yes. Horace had grown up in Ohio, where his famous father founded and was the first president of Antioch, and he had visited Michigan, so he knew something of the West already. Best of all, he wanted to enroll at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School, study with Agassiz and Gray, and become a natural scientist. Thoreau with his many Harvard connections would make a perfect tutor. And the boy had a pesky cough, too—Minnesota might be just what he needed. Young Horace was shy, amiable, eager to please, and naively unabashed by the responsibility; as for his mother—a teacher herself, sister to Sophia Hawthorne and to Elizabeth Peabody who had published the Dial and “Civil Disobedience”—well, of course she said yes. Henry Thoreau was practically a member of the family.

  “It is all a mistake,” protested Emerson. Thoreau should stay home, buy “Mr. Minot’s piece” instead. That’s what he told Ellen, when she came back from bringing Thoreau a map the day before they we
re set to leave. Ellen invited Henry over to dinner, where the two old friends divided their discussion between natural history and politics, and Emerson did not persuade Thoreau to call it off. Next morning Emerson sent over a farewell note and a list of names of “good men” that an invalid traveler could call on for aid and comfort.58

  And with that, on Saturday afternoon, May 11, 1861, Henry Thoreau and Horace Mann Jr. boarded the train, gaining speed as they passed Damon’s Mills in West Concord, busy cranking out blue Union uniforms.59 They stayed two nights in Worcester, where Harry Blake took them riding to Quinsigamond Pond; it would be Thoreau’s last visit. From there they took the great Western Railroad to Niagara Falls. Passing Pittsfield, Thoreau might have craned his head to see Mount Greylock on the horizon. In Albany they overnighted at the Delavan Hotel, said to be the best in town: “Not so good as costly,” grumbled Thoreau, worried about finances. Horace assured his mother that Thoreau “has got along very well, only he is pretty tired.” They would rest in Niagara Falls, where they put up for the night at a tourist stop before seeking a boardinghouse next morning, only to find them all full—they had arrived on May 15, the opening day of tourist season. Finally the American House took them in for a dollar a day, and Horace sat down dutifully and again wrote home: Thoreau is better already; he can hear the Falls even as he writes.60

  Thoreau, too, was writing home: the world-famous falls sounded like “a train coming or a locomotive letting off steam,” a sound so familiar he’d hardly noticed it. It was, he jotted in his notes, the “most imposing sight as yet,” like the sea off Cape Cod.61 They botanized around Goat Island, where Thoreau collected his first specimens of the trip, tucking them into his plant press and listing them by the dozen. When they crossed over to Canada for the best view of the falls, they, like everyone else, fell victim to a tourist scam that cost a painful five dollars. He poked around all the little wild spaces he could find. It was cold and wet, and Thoreau felt it. He bought some “trochees,” or throat lozenges, to help with his cough.