Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  124. J, 12:420, 437.

  125. Thoreau’s words, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in TL II, 311–12 (which collects several versions of this same story, including an alternate version told by Edward Emerson).

  126. Edward Emerson and Minott Pratt quoted in TL II, 312–13; see also Edward Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend (1917; Concord, MA: Thoreau Foundation, 1968), 71.

  127. CHDT, 564 (Charles W. Slack to HDT, October 31, 1859); see also Milton Meltzer and Walter Harding, A Thoreau Profile (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1962), which reprints a photograph of the telegram; Emerson quoted in To Set This World, 137.

  128. Thoreau and Dall quoted in TL II, 316 (emphasis in the original); Howells quoted in ibid., 319 (emphasis added). This source usefully compiles a wide range of responses from newspapers and various unpublished manuscripts.

  129. JMN, 14:333, n.d. This memorable phrase was not Emerson’s; he was quoting Mattie Griffith, abolitionist and woman’s rights advocate. For other abolitionists’ initial responses to John Brown’s insurrection, see To Set This World, 135–36.

  130. Corr., 3: [in press, previously unpublished letter] (Mary Jane Tappan to HDT, November 7, 1859).

  131. ABAJ, 321–22; CHDT, 566 (HDT to C. Greene, November 24, 1859). On November 29, 1859, Emerson recorded that Thoreau donated ten dollars to the relief fund for John Brown’s family.

  132. J, 12:447–48, 443.

  133. The Liberator had published a resolution passed by the American Anti-Slavery Society calling for the friends of freedom to observe Brown’s execution with appropriate memorials, and William Lloyd Garrison further recommended church bells be tolled for one hour; see Michael Meyer, “Discord in Concord on the Day of John Brown’s Hanging,” TSB 146 (Winter 1979): 1.

  134. J, 12:457–58; ABAJ, 322; J, 12:443.

  135. “John Shepard Keyes’s Unpublished Account,” TSB 143 (Spring 1978): 4; ABAJ, 322; Days of HT, 420.

  136. For the entire document, see To Set This World, 140; and Meyer, “Discord in Concord,” 3. Thoreau noted in his Journal that none of those who hung the effigy were long resident in Concord (J, 13:15).

  137. “Keyes’s Unpublished Account.”

  138. RP, 141; ABAJ, 323; the memorial program is reproduced in RP, facing page 233. Emerson reimbursed Thoreau the three-dollar printing costs.

  139. To Set This World, 142. Petrulionis tells the story of Thoreau and Merriam in To Set This World, 1–2; Thoreau tells it in J, 13:3–4. For Sanborn’s version, see Thoreau as Seen, 53–55.

  140. Corr., 3: [in press, previously unpublished letter] (James Redpath to HDT, January 5, 1860).

  Chapter Eleven

  1. J, 13:4–14.

  2. Ibid., 30 (Walden pines), 41 (fish in Sleepy Hollow pond), 50 (take care of seeds), 76 (crows and apples), 115 (crow touches the sky).

  3. On this “Darwin dinner” and its fateful consequences for the four principals involved, see Randall Fuller, The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation (New York: Viking, 2017).

  4. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn to Theodore Parker, January 2, 1860 (Franklin Benjamin Sanborn Papers, vault A35, Sanborn, unit 1, series 3, folder 23, CFPL).

  5. Charles Loring Brace, Races of the Old World: A Manual of Ethnology (London: Charles Murray, 1863).

  6. Thoreau had completed his transcriptions from Origin of Species (the British first edition) by February 6, 1860: Henry David Thoreau, “Extracts Mostly upon Natural History,” 1856–1861, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. My thanks to Randall Fuller for providing a transcription. See also Fuller, Book that Changed America, 126–36.

  7. Walden, 225; J, 13:77; Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 384. Richardson points out that in contrast to Walden, Thoreau opened “The Dispersion of Seeds” by citing Pliny on the unhappiness of trees such as the cypress that bear no fruit; see “Thoreau and Science,” in American Literature and Science, ed. Robert J. Scholnick (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 125.

  8. ABAJ, 326; Sanborn quoted in TL II, 332–33.

  9. Exc., 281, 280, 270–74; Bronson Alcott quoted in TL II, 333.

  10. J, 13:141, 145.

  11. Ibid., 186–87, 192.

  12. Amos Bronson Alcott, “Superintendent’s Report for the Concord Schools . . . for the Year 1859–60,” 11; “Superintendent’s Report for the Concord Schools . . . for the year 1860–61,” 26, in Essays on Education by Amos Bronson Alcott, ed. Walter Harding (Gainesville, FL: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1960).

  13. ABAJ, 326–27; Louisa May Alcott, “Thoreau’s Flute,” in THOT, 55–56.

  14. ABAJ, 328; CHDT, 582; Sanborn quoted in Philip McFarland, Hawthorne in Concord (New York: Grove, 2004), 229.

  15. ABAJ, 334–36, 339; Rose Hawthorne quoted in THOT, 145–46.

  16. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Septimius Felton,” in The Elixir of Life Manuscripts, Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, vol. 13 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1977), 6; see Larry J. Reynolds, Righteous Violence: Revolution, Slavery, and the American Renaissance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 130.

  17. To Set This World, 146-48; Annie Brown quoted on 147.

  18. Sanborn, Recollections, 1:208–10; To Set This World, 148–51.

  19. To Set This World, 151–52; Sanborn, Recollections, 1:210–12; Liberator, April 13, 1860.

  20. Quoted in TL II, 359.

  21. J. R. Hinton, who picked up Thoreau’s address from him in person when he stopped by the Thoreaus’ on his way to North Elba, saw that it was given a place of honor on the program. RP, 363–64; TL II, 334–36.

  22. RP, 147, 152–53.

  23. CHDT, 585 (HDT to Charles Sumner, July 16, 1860); Liberator, July 31, 1860.

  24. J, 10:74; William Dean Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintances (New York: Harper, 1911), 59–60.

  25. J, 13:218, 231.

  26. For an analysis of these charts and their larger poetics, see the groundbreaking work of Kristen Case, starting with her recent essay “Knowing as Neighboring: Approaching Thoreau’s Kalendar,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 2.1 (Spring 2014): 107–29.

  27. J, 13:328, 364–67 (emphasis in the original), 14:3.

  28. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (London: John Murray, 1859), 73; Thoreau copied a passage from the same page beginning a few lines down from this quotation.

  29. J, 14:36. Channing, who complained bitterly of the fatigue and filth of camping, nevertheless recounted their Monadnock explorations and debates as the epic climax of his long poem “The Wanderer.”

  30. J, 14:52; The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, ed. Edith E. W. Gregg, 2 vols. (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1982), 1:216–17.

  31. Jacob Farmer, Concord Farmers’ Club Records, Vault A10, Unit 3, series 1, vol 4, p. 130, CFPL (minutes for meeting of April 12, 1860, on “Forest Trees”); Darwin, Origin, 74. Thoreau copied into his notes a passage from Origin appearing on the same page as Darwin’s comment about American forests.

  32. Exc., 181–82.

  33. TL II, 339–41; Days of HT, 33.

  34. CHDT, 530 (HDT to Horace Greeley, September 29, 1860). Thoreau’s unfinished manuscript “Dispersion of Seeds” was eventually published in Faith in a Seed: “The Dispersion of Seeds” and Other Late Natural History Writings, ed. Bradley P. Dean (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993), 23–173.

  35. Corr., 3: [in press], Horace Greeley to HDT, December 13, 1860; HDT to Horace Greeley, December 30, 1960; “Are Plants Ever Spontaneously Generated,” New-York Weekly Tribune, February 2, 1861.

  36. J, 14:93–94.

  37. Ibid., 97 (frost kills everything); 112, 132, 139 (tracking the significance of the seed).

  38. Ibid., 146–47 (emphasis in the original); see also Thoreau, Faith in a Seed, 101–2, where Thoreau specifically links this phrase, “
the development theory,” to Darwin. Scholars who have studied Thoreau and evolutionary theory do not doubt that Thoreau’s late work builds on Darwin, and not, say, Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (American edition, 1845), which proposed a theory Emerson succinctly called “arrested and progressive development.” While Thoreau’s notes on Darwin are extensive, his only mention of Chambers (in a Journal entry for September 28, 1851 [PEJ, 4:107]) criticizes the Scottish journalist’s “latent infidelity” for “describing that as an exception which is in fact the rule”—or, in Sattelmeyer’s words, an exception rather than “a continual state of becoming, where nature is dynamic and evolving.” See Robert Sattelmeyer, Thoreau’s Reading: A Study in Intellectual History with Bibliographical Catalogue (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 86–90; Michael Benjamin Berger, Thoreau’s Late Career and “The Dispersion of Seeds”: The Saunterer’s Synoptic Vision (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000), 48–53; William Rossi, “Evolutionary Theory,” in The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, ed. Joel Myerson, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, and Laura Dassow Walls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 583–96; and William Howarth, The Book of Concord: Thoreau’s Life as a Writer (New York: Viking, 1982), 181–97.

  39. J, 14:148–49.

  40. Ibid., 11:299, 14:152.

  41. CHDT, 579 (HDT to H. G. O. Blake, May 20, 1860).

  42. J, 14:279–84.

  43. Edmund A. Schofield, “The Origin of Thoreau’s Fatal Illness,” TSB 171 (Spring 1985): 2.

  44. Quoted in TL II, 349.

  45. Quoted in ibid., 352.

  46. ABAJ, 330–31; J, 14:295, 310 (even as the seed of the giant California redwood is a little thing, “so are all seeds or origins of things”; emphasis added).

  47. J, 14:310–12.

  48. ABAJ, 333–34.

  49. JMN, 15:112 (February 1861).

  50. Francis B. Dedmond, “The Selected Letters of William Ellery Channing the Younger (Part Three),” in Studies in the American Renaissance (1991): 289–90.

  51. J, 14:320; CHDT, 609 (HDT to D. Ricketson, March 22, 1861), ABAJ, 337.

  52. CHDT, 609 (HDT to D. Ricketson, March 22, 1861); Corr., 3: [in press] (HDT to G. Thatcher, March 31, 1861).

  53. Corr., 3: [in press] (HDT to G. Thatcher, March 31, 1861).

  54. Quoted in To Set This World, 154.

  55. Corr., 3: [unpublished letter in press] (Parker Pillsbury to HDT, April 9, 1861); CHDT, 611 (HDT to Parker Pillsbury, April 10, 1861)

  56. CHDT, 425 (HDT to C. Greene, May 31, 1856).

  57. CHDT, 615 (HDT to H. G. O. Blake, May 3, 1861).

  58. Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, 1:250; CHDT, 616 (RWE to HDT, May 11, 1861); the list, sadly, is lost.

  59. Corinne Hosfeld Smith, Westward I Go Free: Tracing Thoreau’s Last Journey (Winnipeg: Green Frigate Books, 2012), 62. The following account is deeply indebted to Smith’s lively and painstaking reconstruction of Thoreau’s trip to Minnesota.

  60. J, 14:340; Walter Harding, ed., Thoreau’s Minnesota Journey: Two Documents (Geneseo, NY: Thoreau Society Booklet No. 16, 1962), 47. This booklet prints Harding’s transcript of Thoreau’s “Notes on the Journey West” (held at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California), as well as the letters Horace Mann Jr. wrote home during their excursion to Minnesota; the following account draws from this source as well.

  61. Corr., 3: [in press, previously unpublished letter] (HDT to Cynthia and Sophia Thoreau, May 15, 1861); Harding, Thoreau’s Minnesota Journey, 1.

  62. Thoreau as Seen, 130–31.

  63. Harding, Thoreau’s Minnesota Journey, 3, 48.

  64. Ibid., 4–5.

  65. Ibid., 17–18; Exc., 271–72; cf. C. H. Smith, Westward I Go Free, 229–31.

  66. CHDT, 622 (HDT to F. B. Sanborn, June 25, 1861).

  67. Harding, Thoreau’s Minnesota Journey, 12; C. H. Smith, Westward I Go Free, 251; for a detailed account of Thoreau’s journey aboard the Frank Steele, see C. H. Smith, 251-84.

  68. CHDT, 621 (HDT to F. B. Sanborn, June 25, 1861).

  69. Harding, Thoreau’s Minnesota Journey, 22; C. H. Smith, Westward I Go Free, 264.

  70. CHDT, 621 (HDT to F. B. Sanborn, June 25, 1861). The saddle and the fragile items of Dakota clothing are held by the Concord Museum.

  71. Quoted in C. H. Smith, Westward I Go Free, 270.

  72. Ibid., 285-347; Harding, Thoreau’s Minnesota Journey, 25–27.

  73. ABAJ, 340; Daniel Moncure Conway, Autobiography, Memories and Experiences, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), 1:335; New-York Tribune, July 30, 1861.

  74. CHDT, 593 (D. Ricketson to HDT, October 14, 1860), 599–600 (HDT to D. Ricketson, November 4, 1860), 609 (HDT to D. Ricketson, March 22, 1861); Corr., 3: [in press] (D. Ricketson to HDT, June 30, 1861), CHDT, 625 (HDT to D. Ricketson, August 15, 1861); Corr., 3: [in press] (D. Ricketson to HDT, August 16, 1861).

  75. Thomas Blanding and Walter Harding, A Thoreau Iconography (Geneseo, NY: Thoreau Society Booklet 30, 1980), 20–23; Anna Ricketson and Walton Ricketson, Daniel Ricketson and His Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), 317–19, 147. Ricketson’s copy is now held by the Concord Museum; Sophia Thoreau’s darker, “stronger” image was stolen in 1910 and has yet to resurface.

  76. Ricketson and Ricketson, Ricketson and His Friends, 320–22; Dedmond, “Letters of Channing,” 302 (October 2, 1861); Annie Russell Marble, Thoreau: His Home, Friends, and Books (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902), 175.

  77. Ricketson and Ricketson, Ricketson and His Friends, 135; Thoreau Log, 599.

  78. CHDT, 629 (HDT to D. Ricketson, October 14, 1861).

  79. J, 14:346.

  80. Anonymous quoted in THOT, 170; ABAJ, 343; William Ellery Channing II, Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873), 323.

  81. Sophia Thoreau to Daniel Ricketson, in Ricketson and Ricketson, Ricketson and His Friends, 141–43; Days of HT, 462 (musicbox); Alcott brought the apples and cider (Thoreau Log, 604).

  82. Anonymous quoted in THOT, 154–55; Edith Emerson quoted in Days of HT, 463 (“I love them as if they were my own”).

  83. JMN, 15:441; Edward S. Burgess Papers, vault A45, Burgess unit 1 [interviews with Edward S. Hoar], folder 4b, CFPL.

  84. Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley in THOT, 49 (“in a handsome suit of black,” letter to Sophia Thayer, 1862); Ricketson and Ricketson, Ricketson and His Friends, 214 (“skating on this river”); Anonymous in THOT, 155 (“gray as a rat”).

  85. Edward Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend (1917; Concord, MA: Thoreau Foundation, 1968), 117–18 (“I did not know we had ever quarreled”); Parker Pillsbury quoted in Thoreau as Seen, 101.

  86. E. W. Emerson, Henry Thoreau as Remembered, 117 (“it’s respectable to leave an estate”); Corr., 3: [in press, previously unpublished letter] (Mary Stearns to HDT, February 23, 1862). Mary Stearns was the wife of George Luther Stearns, one of Brown’s “Secret Six,” and the niece of Lydia Maria Child.

  87. E. Harlow Russell would break these bundles apart and distribute the pages—now worth money as holograph manuscript of the great author—to the winds; Brad Dean would spend much of his own too-short life reassembling the bulk of Thoreau’s pages, which he published as Wild Fruits (New York: 2000) and Faith in a Seed (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993). For an excellent starting point on Wild Fruits, see Lance Newman’s illuminating discussion in Our Common Dwelling: Henry Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and the Class Politics of Nature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 171–83.

  88. On Sophia Thoreau’s crucial and largely unrecognized role in editing Thoreau’s posthumous publications and in protecting her brother’s writings intact for future generations, see Kathy Fedorko, “‘Henry’s Brilliant Sister’: The Pivotal Role of Sophia Thoreau in Her Brother’s Posthumous Publications,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 84.2 (2016): 222–56.

  89. CHDT, 635–36 (HDT to the editors of Atlantic Monthly, February 11, 1862), and 640 (HDT to Ticknor a
nd Fields, March 11, 1862); Exc., 241–42. Thoreau had wanted a white oak leaf engraved as well, to appear on the facing page so readers could compare them, but engraving cost so much that he had to make do with one.

  90. Exc., 202; both Pillsbury and Channing noted Thoreau was in these weeks censoring out his more cheerful passages. See Pillsbury in Thoreau as Seen, 101; Channing quoted in Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, The Life of Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 171. Blanding established that the handwriting on Thoreau’s last two published essays, “Wild Apples” and “The Allegash and East Branch,” was Elizabeth Hoar’s: see Thomas Blanding, “Beans, Baked and Half-Baked,” Concord Saunterer 11.3 (Fall 1976) 11–14, 13.