39. Ibid., 373, 375, 383 (Greeley to HDT, May 17 to May 25, 1848).
40. Ibid., 388–90 (Greeley to HDT, October 28 and November 19, 1848).
41. LRWE, 4:56; Corr., 1:378–80 (HDT to RWE, May 21, 1848); LRWE, 4:81.
42. ABAJ, 201.
43. Quoted in Thoreau Log, 157, 160, 153. In England, the feminist and freethinker Sophia Dobson Collet, herself on the fringes of the “red republicans,” called attention to Thoreau’s essay in the London People’s Review (Days of HT, 207). Since the essay’s working manuscripts have been lost, how much the published essay changed from the original lecture cannot be known. The title of the second printing, “Civil Disobedience,” is probably Thoreau’s, but the evidence is not definitive; this explains why, confusingly, the identical essay appears under two different titles. Good starting points are Lawrence Rosenwald, “The Theory, Practice, and Influence of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience,” in A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau, ed. William E. Cain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 153–79; and Anthony J. Parel, “Thoreau, Gandhi, and Comparative Political Thought,” in A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau, ed. Jack Turner (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009), 372–92.
44. RP, 63–64.
45. JMN, 9:446; RP, 84, 67.
46. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, in Autobiographies (New York: Library of America, 1994), 64.
47. RP, 68. In resisting Covey, then, Douglass was asserting himself as a free citizen.
48. Ibid., 78–79, 85.
49. Ibid., 73–77.
50. Ibid., 89–90.
51. Week, 77.
52. PEJ, 2:205–6.
53. Week, “Historical Introduction” 453.
54. Ibid, 451. For more on Fuller’s and Thoreau’s influence on each other, see Marie Urbanski, “Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller,” Thoreau Journal Quarterly 8.4 (1976): 24–30.
55. LRWE, 3:338 (RWE to Charles Newcomb).
56. ABAJ, 213-14; LRWE, 3:384.
57. The Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1843-1853, edited by Thomas Woodson, L. Neal Smith, and Norman Holmes Pearson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 106 (Hawthorne to E. A. Duyckinck, July 1, 1845); Corr., 1:316 (HDT to RWE, November 14, 1847).
58. Corr., 1:325 (RWE to HDT, December 2, 1847); LRWE, 4:16.
59. Corr., 1:376 (HDT to Greeley, May 19, 1848).
60. Ibid., 376; 384 (HDT to George Thatcher, August 24, 1848); Ellen Tucker Emerson, Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, 109.
61. JMN, 10:347, 343, 344.
62. Corr., 1:377 (HDT to RWE, May 21, 1848); PEJ, 3:3. Sanborn printed a typical page of Thoreau’s record of debts to his father, scribbled on the back of a poem: “Dec. 8, 1840, Owe Father $41.73,” and so on (Sanborn, Life of Thoreau, 241).
63. William Ellery Channing II, Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873), 26–27; Days of HT, 233–34. The Uncanoonuc Mountains are, as Thoreau notes, a pair, as the name (meaning “breasts”) makes clear; which of the two they climbed is unclear.
64. Maria Thoreau to unknown correspondent, September 7, 1848. “Thoreau Memorial Scrap Book,” item #17, Thoreau-Ward-Sewall Papers, Thoreau Society Archives, Henley Library.
65. Keith Walter Cameron, Transcendentalists and Minerva, 3 vols. (Hartford, CT: Transcendental Books, 1958), 2:374–76.
66. CFPL has Thoreau’s surveys online, under Special Collections (http://www.concordlibrary.org). See also Marcia E. Moss, A Catalog of Thoreau’s Surveys in the Concord Free Public Library, Thoreau Society Booklet 28 (Geneseo, NY: Thoreau Society, 1976); and Patrick Chura, Thoreau the Land Surveyor (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010). Thoreau surveyed Emerson’s Walden holdings three times over many years to settle a boundary dispute dating back to colonial days; see LRWE, 8:210–11n34.
67. The complete schedule of Thoreau’s Walden lectures this season, with supporting details, is given in TL I, 155–84.
68. Corr., 1:391 (HDT to George Thatcher, December 26, 1848); TL I, 157–59.
69. Thoreau as Seen, 117; Thoreau Log, 153.
70. TL I, 165–66; Maria Thoreau to Prudence Ward, February 28, 1849, Thoreau-Sewall Papers, 1790–1917, HM 64932, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
71. TL I, 169–70.
72. Thoreau Log, 145.
73. TL I, 177.
74. Maria Thoreau to Prudence Ward, February 28, 1849, Thoreau-Sewall Papers, 1790–1917, HM 64932, Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Maria Thoreau to Prudence Ward, March 15, 1849, Thoreau-Sewall Papers, 1790–1917, HM 64933, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
75. Corr., 2:12 (HDT to Nathaniel Hawthorne, February 20, 1849).
76. Maria Thoreau to Prudence Ward, May 1, 1849, Thoreau-Sewall Papers, 1790–1917, HM 64935, Huntington Library, San Marino, California; JMN, 15:165.
77. ABAJ, 209. For a synopsis of the major reviews, see “Historical Introduction,” in Week, 472–77.
78. Anon., “H. D. Thoreau’s Book,” New-York Daily Tribune, June 13, 1849; reprinted in Myerson, ed. Emerson and Thoreau: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 341–43.
79. PEJ, 4:310; Week, “Historical Introduction,” 472.
80. LRWE, 4:145, 151.
81. Myerson, Emerson and Thoreau: Reviews, 352–59; Maria Thoreau to Prudence Ward, December 17, 1849, Thoreau-Sewall Papers, 1790–1917, HM 64937, Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Days of HT, 251.
82. Walter Harding, “Amanda Mather’s Recollections of Thoreau,” TSB 188 (Summer 1989): 2.
83. Liberator, June 22, 1849 (it is unclear whether the author was Garrison or Mary Brooks); “Farewell,” in CEP, 622–23; Harding, “Mather’s Recollections,” 2.
84. PEJ, 3:19, 26.
85. Ibid., 3:29.
86. Corr., 2:27 (HDT to Ellen Emerson, July 31, 1849); see also Emerson’s letter to Ellen, giving her fatherly advice on how to write a letter to Thoreau (LRWE, 4:154, July 4, 1849).
87. JMN, 11:283. For searching discussions of the collapse and partial recovery of this famous, and famously difficult, friendship, see Robert Sattelmeyer, “‘When He Became My Enemy’: Emerson and Thoreau, 1848–49,” New England Quarterly 62.2 (June 1989): 187–204; and William Rossi, “Performing Loss, Elegy, and Transcendental Friendship,” New England Quarterly 81.2 (June 2008): 252–77.
88. Linck C. Johnson, Thoreau’s Complex Weave: The Writing of “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” with the Text of the First Draft (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), 252, 259–60; Johnson’s book provides the single best and most exhaustive analysis of Thoreau’s important first book. See also Steven Fink, Prophet in the Marketplace: Thoreau’s Development as a Professional Writer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), especially ch. 8.
89. Walden, 19; Week, 353.
90. Week, 5.
91. Ibid., 15–16.
92. See Alan D. Hodder, Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 123.
93. Week, 393.
94. EEM, 238; Week, 67, 142. Note that on April 16, 1846, when Elizabeth Hoar hosted Alcott’s “Conversation” on Jesus as “the genius of modern culture,” Thoreau dissented “with some vehemence” (ABAJ, 175–76).
95. Week, 72–73.
96. Ibid., 140, 70.
Chapter Seven
1. LRWE, 4:156–57; PEJ, 3:23–24.
2. Corr., 2:42 (HDT to H. G. O. Blake, November 20, 1849); JMN, 11:240; Week, 70.
3. PEJ, 3:201.
4. Ibid., 1:191 (October 18, 1840), 411–12 (transcribed 1842). For Thoreau’s use of Lyell to open a channel between poetry and science, see William Rossi, “Poetry and Progress: Thoreau, Lyell, and the Geological Principles of A Week,” American Literature 66.2 (June 1994): 275–300; and Laura Dassow Walls, Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 42–45.
5. Week, 128.
6. Ibid., 363; PEJ, 4:385, Walden, 290.
7. E&L, 20, 25; Week, 382.
8. PEJ, 3:27.
9. CC, 5–7.
10. CHDT, 498 (RWE to H. G. O. Blake, November 16, 1857). See Bradley P. Dean, “Natural History, Romanticism, and Thoreau,” in American Wilderness: A New History, ed. Michael Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 78–79.
11. CC, 23, 32, 50.
12. Ibid., 79, 139. On October 23, soon after Thoreau and Channing returned to Boston, two men broke in and robbed the Union Wharf Company in Provincetown of $15,000. In the investigation that followed, police tracked Thoreau and Channing, questioning everyone with whom they came into contact, including Newcomb. When Thoreau returned in June 1850, the case was still not cleared, and it’s remotely possible that he was even then under suspicion. See James H. Ellis, “The Provincetown Burglary,” TSB 162 (Winter 1983): 3.
13. CC, 98, 137.
14. As of the time of writing, Thoreau’s twelve Indian Books—the “Canada &c.” volume plus eleven more—remain unpublished except in partial form; an incomplete transcript is available through the Morgan Library.
15. William Ellery Channing II, Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873), 55; Corr., 2:35–36 (HDT to Jared Sparks, September 17, 1849; emphasis in the original). Emerson had claimed, and been awarded, the same privilege in 1846 (LRWE, 3:335–36).
16. Maria Thoreau to Prudence Ward, December 17, 1849, Thoreau-Sewall Papers, 1790–1917, HM 64937, Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Corr 2:50 (RWE to HDT, February 6, 1850).
17. ABAJ, 227; PEJ, 3:161 (Thoreau’s Newburyport host, who gave him the microscope view, was Dr. Henry Coit Perkins), 170–72 (Thoreau’s host in Clinton, who gave him the tour of the gingham mills, was Franklin Forbes, the mill’s agent). Thoreau’s lecture was delivered on January 1, 1851, in a series that included Emerson, Greeley, and Henry Ward Beecher; see TL I, 191–93.
18. Quoted in TL I, 193 (Clinton, Mass.), 194–96 (Portland, Maine).
19. PEJ, 3:43.
20. Ibid., 3:133, 4:32, 3:84.
21. Days of HT, 261–63; Henry Petroski, “H. D. Thoreau, Engineer,” Invention and Technology 5.2 (Fall 1989), 8–16, pp. 14–15; Petroski, The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (New York: Knopf, 1990), 148–51; Randall Conrad, “The Machine in the Garden: Re-imagining Thoreau’s Plumbago Grinder,” TSB 243 (Fall 2005): 5–8. The Thoreaus used Eben Wood’s mill in Acton, and after 1853, according to Conrad, they used Warren Miles’s mills; there may have been others.
22. Maria Thoreau to Prudence Ward, November 15, 1849, Thoreau-Sewall Papers, 1790–1917, HM 64936, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
23. PEJ, 3:326; J, 9:83. Thoreau’s herbarium alone eventually included more than nine hundred specimens; see Ray Angelo, “Thoreau as Botanist: An Appreciation and a Critique,” Arnoldia 45.3 (Summer 1985): 20.
24. PEJ, 7:168–69. Thoreau gave up the scheme when he found cranberries selling in New York for less than he could buy them in Boston.
25. Thoreau’s handbill is reproduced in Milton Meltzer and Walter Harding, A Thoreau Profile (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1962), 169, and Patrick Chura, Thoreau the Land Surveyor (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2010), 85.
26. Chura, Thoreau the Land Surveyor, 73–80. A surveyor’s chain is one hundred iron links, for a total of four rods, or 66 feet. Thoreau’s compass, made by C. G. King Company of Broad Street, Boston, is in the collection of the CFPL; some of his surveying tools are on display at the Concord Museum. The complicated procedure for finding true north and the spiritual use Thoreau made of the results are ably described by Patrick Chura, Thoreau the Land Surveyor, 114–21. The Massachusetts Register for 1852 lists Thoreau as a “civil engineer”; see Thoreau Log, 240.
27. Thoreau Log, 173–74. Thoreau himself was less impressed: “The last two bearings are useless being taken after dark,” he underscored. Marcia E. Moss, A Catalog of Thoreau’s Surveys in the Concord Free Public Library, Thoreau Society Booklet 28 (Geneseo, NY: Thoreau Society, 1976), 12.
28. ABAJ 239 (January 22, 1851).
29. PEJ, 3:134–35, 139, 315.
30. Ibid., 4:77ff; 85. Thoreau had looked forward to this job, but it soured when he found himself adjudicating a nasty boundary dispute. See Chura, Thoreau the Land Surveyor, 98–100.
31. PEJ, 4:203–4.
32. Corr., 1:310 (HDT to Sophia Thoreau, October 24, 1847), 315–16 (HDT to RWE, November 14, 1847).
33. PEJ, 3:296–99 (Harvard observatory, July 9, 1851); Corr., 2:23–26 (HDT to Louis Agassiz, June 30, 1849, and Agassiz’s reply, July 5, 1849).
34. Ibid., 2–3 (HDT to George Thatcher, February 9, 1849); PEJ, 3:170–77.
35. PEJ, 3:49–53; for an extended reading of the toy waterwheel passage, see Laura Dassow Walls, “Romancing the Real: Thoreau’s Technology of Inscription,” in Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau, ed. William E. Cain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 123–51. The figure of the Aeolian harp invoked here was crucial to Thoreau, who was repeatedly moved to ecstasy by the sound of wind through the telegraph wires strung, in 1852, along the railroad tracks through the Deep Cut. Thoreau built an Aeolian harp small enough to set in a window frame, to bring the wind’s song into his family’s home; this harp is in the collections of the Concord Museum.
36. Walden, 320; PEJ, 4:28. For Thoreau and early Darwin, see Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 240–45. John Aldrich Christie documented 172 separate travel accounts read by Thoreau, 146 of them cover-to-cover, plus collections and periodicals; see Thoreau as World Traveler (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965). I have discussed at length Thoreau’s reading in the natural sciences in Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (1995), where I develop my founding analysis of Thoreau’s indebtedness to Alexander von Humboldt and the Humboldtian scientific tradition—a tradition I detail in Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
37. Corr., 1:94 (Margaret Fuller to HDT, October 18, 1841), 203 (HDT to RWE and LJE, July 8, 1843).
38. When Emerson first learned of her secret family, in October 1849, he assumed they must all come home to America, but by April 1850, with the political situation stabilizing, he begged her to stay: life in Italy would give “new rays of reputation & wonder to you as a star.” LRWE, 4:168, 199.
39. Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, the Public Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 495–503.
40. “Thoreau’s First Draft of His Account of the Wreck of the Elizabeth and the Aftermath,” in Corr., 2:66–75, in a footnote to Thoreau’s July 24, 1850, letter to Emerson. Thoreau wrote up a report based on these notes, which he read to Waldo and Lidian Emerson and Elizabeth Hoar upon his return; this manuscript was scattered, and most of it has yet to be recovered. Part of one leaf is transcribed in Steve Grice, “A Leaf from Thoreau’s Fire Island Manuscript,” TSB 258 (Spring 2007): 1–4.
41. Corr., 2:63–64 (HDT to RWE, July 25, 1850).
42. LRWE, 8:254, 4:219.
43. Bayard Taylor, “The Wreck on Fire Island,” New-York Daily Tribune July 24, 1850, 1; “Thoreau’s Account of the Wreck.”
44. PEJ, 3:99–100; Grice, “Thoreau’s Fire Island Manuscript.”
45. Smith Oakes and six other men were later charged by the US Marshal’s office for being in possession of goods stolen from the Elizabeth. See Grice, “Thoreau’s Fire Island Manuscript,” 2n6; “From Fire Island—Proceedings against the Plunderers of the Elizabeth,” New-York Daily Tribune, July 31, 1850, 4.
46. Corr., 2:76 (HDT to Charles Sumner, July 29, 1850), 76–77 (Sumner to HDT, July 31, 1850).
47. PEJ, 3:95; Corr., 2:78 (HDT to H. G. O. Blake, August 9, 1850).
48. PEJ, 3:95; CC, 84–85 (cf. PEJ, 3:127–28).
49. Ellery Channing quoted in Robert N. Hudspeth, “Dear Friend: Letter Writing in Concord,” Concord Saunterer, n.s., 11 (2003): 84; Corr., 2:78; PEJ, 3:96–97.
50. Exc., 471. Panoramas were then all the rage; Thoreau also went, about this time, to see a panorama of the Rhine and another of the Mississippi. See PEJ, 3:181; Joseph J. Moldenhauer, “Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the ‘Seven-Mile Panorama,’” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 44.4 (1998): 227–73; and Richard J. Schneider, “Thoreau’s Panorama of the Mississippi: Its Identity and Significance,” TSB 245 (Fall 2003): 5–6.
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