The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau

by Henry David Thoreau

  133 Constitution is the evil: The U.S. Constitution, being from the outset a compromise between free and slave states, offered no redress in regard to laws upholding slavery. See Section IV of the Introduction.

  133 majority of one: an idea that goes back to John Knox (1513?-1572), the founder of Scottish Presbyterianism, who declared that “a man with God is always in the majority.”

  134 the State’s ambassador: By South Carolina law, “any free negro, or person of color” coming to the state “on board any vessel, as a cook, steward or mariner” had to be taken from the ship while it was in port and confined “closely in jail” until the ship was ready to leave, at which point the ship’s captain had to redeem the prisoner by paying “the expenses of his or her commitment.” The law had been passed in 1835 as part of a wave of legislation following the 1831 slave revolt led by Nat Turner, the fear being that any free black entering the state might incite further rebellions. When the state of Massachusetts found its own black citizens being incarcerated in South Carolina, it tried to challenge the law’s constitutionality. No one in the South would help bring a test case, however, and thus in 1844 Massachusetts sent one of its own lawyers south with instructions to commence prosecutions in order to settle the question.

  The “State’s ambassador” for this task was the former congressman from Concord “Squire” Samuel Hoar (1778-1856). As soon as Hoar arrived in Charleston, the South Carolina legislature passed a resolution censuring him for meddling and expelling him from the state. Before he could be apprised of that order, however, white citizens in Charleston forced him from the city under threat of violence.

  The incident was incendiary on both sides. In Massachusetts the legislature resolved that the treatment of Hoar was a plausible cause for war between the states. In Charleston, on the other hand, The Southern Quarterly Review declared that “if our rights … are to be trampled upon without mercy,—let the sword be raised, and the sooner, perhaps, the struggle comes, the better!”

  134 the prisons of Carolina: It was black seamen, not Samuel Hoar, who were threatened with imprisonment, Thoreau’s point being more figurative: Northern reformers are apt to talk of human rights and litigate in distant cities but not to engage in acts of resistance close to home.

  134 Indian come to plead: This adds a third issue, after slavery and the Mexican War, to Thoreau’s complaint.

  135 the Herodians: followers of King Herod of Judaea. The Pharisees and the Herodians try to trap Jesus in several Gospel versions of the question of paying taxes to Caesar.

  135 “Show me the tribute-money”: Matthew 22:15-22.

  135 “Render therefore to Cæsar”: Matthew 22:15-22.

  136 Confucius: Chinese philosopher and political theorist (551-479 B.C.) whose Analects contain sayings and dialogues compiled by his disciples. Thoreau’s quotations from Confucius are usually his own translations from Jean-Pierre-Guillaume Pauthier’s Confucius et Mencius, 2 vols. (Paris: Charpentier, 1841).

  136 “If a state is governed”: The Analects 8.13.

  136 the State met me in behalf of the Church: For a discussion of the church tax in Concord, see the Introduction, pp. xxiv-xxvi. It is unlikely that Thoreau was threatened with jail for refusing to pay his tax, “signing off” being a common practice at the time.

  136 another man saw fit to pay it: This might be more of Thoreau’s selfdramatizing, as he would have owed no tax once he signed off. Or perhaps someone paid the tax as a matter of decorum. If so, it might have been Samuel Hoar. In 1843 both Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane were arrested for refusal to pay the poll tax, and Hoar paid the tax for them.

  136 schoolmaster: Thoreau himself was a schoolmaster at the time he refused the First Parish tax. From 1838 to 1841 he and his brother ran the Concord Academy. They charged their students six dollars per quarter. The ministerial poll tax that Thoreau refused was about eight dollars in 1840.

  136 lyceum: in New England a cooperative town institution for lectures and debates (the name derives from the gymnasium outside Athens where Aristotle taught philosophy). Thoreau was always active in the Concord Lyceum; in 1842-1843 he was its curator and organized the lecture series.

  137 “Know all men”: Thoreau’s statement signing off from First Parish is preserved in the Concord Free Public Library. It reads: “Mr Clerk Concord Jan 6th 1841. I do not wish to be considered a member of the First Parish in this town. Henry D. Thoreau.”

  137 poll-tax: A poll is a head and hence a person. It is also an individual enumerated in a list, and hence the list itself, made up to enumerate taxpayers or voters. A poll tax, or capitation, is one levied at so much per head of the adult population. Such taxes had been a standard source of revenue since colonial days.

  137 six years: The essay was written in 1848 and published in 1849, meaning Thoreau stopped paying taxes in either 1842 or 1843. The former is more likely, because he was living on Staten Island in 1843 and would not have owed taxes in Concord. In either case, it should be noted that the Mexican War is one of the issues Thoreau says he is protesting, but the war did not start until several years after he stopped paying his taxes.

  137 walls of solid stone: The jail in question was not a small-town lockup but the Middlesex County Jail, three stories high and built of granite blocks.

  139 shire town: the town that is the seat of county government. Concord and Cambridge both served as Middlesex County seats.

  139 some one interfered: probably Thoreau’s aunt Maria Thoreau.

  140 huckleberry: the fruit of a New World shrub of the genus Gaylussacia, of which there are several species. The most common in Concord is the black huckleberry, which Thoreau calls Gaylussacia resinosa and which is now classified as G. baccata. In notes for a lecture on huckleberries, Thoreau writes that the Concord berries ripen in the first half of July, “are thick enough to pick about the twenty-second, at their height about the fifth of August, and last fresh till after the middle of that month.” Thoreau was arrested on July 23 or 24, and thus was released just as the berries were “thick enough to pick.”

  140 tackled: harnessed.

  140 “My Prisons”: a reference to Le mie prigioni (1832), the memoirs of the Italian patriot Silvio Pellico (1789-1854). Thoreau had read an 1836 English translation.

  141 the course of my dollar: The tax Thoreau paid would not, in fact, have gone to hire a soldier or buy a musket. Concord’s poll tax was not a federal tax but a composite levy for the town, county, and (sometimes) state. Neither the town nor the county provided any financial support for slavery or the war with Mexico, and the state of Massachusetts had passed “personal liberty laws” that forbade the use of state resources to support federal fugitive slave laws. As Lawrence Rosenwald points out, however, “in linking the slave’s government and the poll tax, Thoreau was strictly wrong but broadly and prophetically right.” After 1850, whenever a fugitive slave was captured in Massachusetts, events soon demonstrated that there were no clear demarcations between town, county, state, and federal governments. In Boston, city police and state militia would soon be called out to support federal troops enforcing the fugitive slave laws, personal liberty laws notwithstanding.

  142 Mussulman: a Muslim.

  142 Orpheus: in Greek mythology the poet whose song had the power to charm even inanimate things.

  142 “We must affect our country”: George Peele (1558?-1598?), The Battle of Alcazar II.ii.425-30, inexactly copied. These lines were added after the first printing (1849).

  142 the State will soon: John Broderick suggests that this is “almost certainly a reference to the possibility that the poll tax would be abolished, and, since the poll tax was the only tax for which Thoreau was liable (except the highway tax, which he paid), he would have no opportunity to demonstrate his patriotism by assessing the actions of the state.”

  143 no resting-place without: a reference to Archimedes (287?-212 B.C.), who supposedly said, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth,” meaning that if one had
a place to put a fulcrum and a long enough lever, one could lift any weight, no matter how large. A similar image of desired metaphysical mechanics recurs in Thoreau. In Walden he imagines finding a point d’appui (a base or fulcrum) by getting outside “poetry and philosophy and religion.” In “Paradise (To Be) Regained” he asserts that love “can move the globe without a resting-place.” Here he argues that true political change requires a total removal from politics.

  143 Webster: Daniel Webster (1782-1852), famous orator and U.S. senator from Massachusetts whose willingness to compromise with the South in order to save the Union was seen as a betrayal by abolitionists.

  143 the men of ’87: that is, 1787, the year of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

  143 “I have never made an effort”: taken, slightly altered, from Webster’s Senate speech of December 22, 1845, “The Admission of Texas.”

  143 “Because it was a part”: The source for this sentence is not known. Webster elaborated the idea in his famous Senate speech of March 7, 1850, “The Constitution and the Union,” but that speech was delivered ten months after this essay first appeared in print.

  143 “The manner”: taken, slightly altered, from Webster’s Senate speech of August 12, 1848, “Exclusion of Slavery from the Territories.”

  144 gird up their loins: “Let your loins be girded about.” Luke 12:35.

  144 Chinese philosopher: Confucius. See the note for page 136 above. This sentence was added to the text of the first printing (1849).

  WALKING

  This essay began as an 1851 lecture, “Walking, or the Wild,” which grew as Thoreau delivered it over the years until he split it into two lectures, one on walking and one on wildness. These were finally reassembled by Thoreau just before he died, the final essay appearing posthumously in The Atlantic Monthly in 1862.

  The manuscript page reproduced here is from 1851, as the first sentence implies. It reads: “I feel that I owe my audience an apology for speaking to them tonight on any other subject than the Fugitive Slave Law, on which every man is bound to express a distinct opinion,—but I had prepared myself to speak a word now for nature—for absolute freedom & wildness, as compared with a freedom and culture simply civil—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of nature—rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one—for there are enough champions of civilization—the minister and the school committee—and every one of you will take care of that.” The manuscript is in the Houghton Library at Harvard (MS Am278.5, folder 21B).

  149 sauntering: Thoreau takes this false etymology from Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), where “to saunter” is derived as follows: “aller à la sainte terre, from idle people who roved about the country, and asked charity under pretence of going à la sainte terre, to the holy land; or sans terre, as having no settled home.” Thoreau may have been led to Johnson by Richard Chenevix Trench’s On the Study of Words (New York: Redfield, 1852), which paraphrases Johnson in the context of a discussion of Crusades to the Holy Land (pp. 86-87). Lexicographers now say that “saunter” is of obscure origin.

  150 Peter the Hermit: Peter of Amiens (1050-1115), French monk and one of the leading preachers of the Crusades. In 1096 he led the advance division of the first Crusade as far as Asia Minor. Trench’s On the Study of Words (see the previous note) mentions him just before the discussion of “saunter.” When the abolitionist John Brown attacked Harpers Ferry in 1859, the Chicago Press and Tribune compared him to Peter the Hermit: the name belongs to the nineteenth century’s list of heroic individualists (see the note for “rural exterior,” page 359 below).

  150 embalmed hearts: Nobles who fell during the Crusades, when it was impossible to send a body home, might have their hearts removed, embalmed, and sent home for burial.

  150 Equestrians, Chevaliers, Ritters: None of these is an actual order of knights; rather, the etymology of each implies men who ride horses.

  150 Ambulator nascitur, non fit: A walker is born, not made. Thoreau alters the Latin proverb Poeta nascitur, non fit.

  150 foresters: officers appointed to watch or maintain a forest.

  151 “When he came to grene wode”: lines 1777-84 of “A Gest of Robyn Hode,” the fullest of the early Robin Hood texts. It was first printed around 1530 but probably composed a century earlier.

  151 three-o’clock-in-the-morning courage: Emerson’s Representative Men (1850) contains an essay on Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) and quotes him as saying: “As to moral courage, I have rarely met with the two-o’clock-in-the-morning kind: I mean unprepared courage; that which is necessary on an unexpected occasion, and which, in spite of the most unforeseen events, leaves full freedom of judgment and decision.” The source is Napoleon’s Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène (1823), dictated to Emmanuel de Las Cases.

  152 Wordsworth: William Wordsworth (1770-1850), English Romantic poet.

  153 mall: in the nineteenth century, a public walk, both level and shady.

  153 “They planted groves”: Thoreau’s source is not known.

  153 “Platanes”: plane trees; in America the plane tree is the sycamore.

  153 subdiales ambulationes: pleasure walks in the open air.

  153 Dahomey: a kingdom in West Africa, now part of Nigeria. From 1818 to 1858 Dahomey was ruled by King Gezo, who greatly extended the range of his dominions.

  154 quadrivial: Although “quadrivial” literally means having four roads meeting (as “trivial” means having three roads meeting), Thoreau is inventing a superlative for the common sense of “trivial.”

  154 villa: a farm or country house; rightly the root of “village.”

  154 ved: Thoreau may be taking the Sanskrit veda (knowledge) as a form of “the way.”

  154 vella: Thoreau here follows the Roman author Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 B.C.), who in his book on farming, De re rustica, says that the peasants call a farm a vella rather than a villa because of the connection to veho, the verb meaning “to carry.” This is not now an accepted etymology.

  154 teaming: hauling goods with a team (of horses, oxen, and such).

  154 vellaturam facere: See De re rustica I.ii.14, where Varro derives “teaming” or “hauling” from vectura, cart.

  154 vilis: of small price or value, cheap; common, worthless, vile.

  154 villain: A “villein” is one class of feudal serf, from which “villain” came to mean a brutish peasant.

  154 roadster: a horse ridden on the road, that is to say, for pleasure or light work rather than for draft.

  155 Menu: or Manu Vaivasvata, legendary Hindu lawmaker. In 1843 Thoreau selected excerpts for The Dial from Sir William Jones’s translation of this Sanskrit classic, Institutes of Hindu Law, or the Ordinances of Menu, 2 vols. (London: Rivingtons and Cochran, 1825).

  155 Americus Vespucius: Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512), Italian explorer of the coast of South America.

  155 Old Marlborough Road: This road begins about two miles west of Walden Pond and runs southwest toward Marlborough, Massachusetts.

  155 Martial Miles: a neighbor of Thoreau’s whose house was near the Marlborough Road. Elijah Wood and Elisha Dugan were also neighbors.

  156 Quin: generic Irish name.

  156 guide-boards: signposts.

  156 Gourgas, Lee, Clark, Darby: all surnames of Concord families.

  156 Grave: engrave.

  157 man-traps: traps formerly set on estates to catch poachers and trespassers. They have spring-loaded jaws with serrated edges to catch and hold the leg of anyone who steps on the trigger.

  158 settlement of Australia: Among the initial colonists in Australia were deported felons from England and Ireland.

  158 Tartars: the Mongolian peoples. Thoreau knew of “the eastern Tartars”—inhabitants of western China—from his 1852 reading of a book by the Christian missionary Évariste Régis Huc, Recollections of a Journey through Tartary, Thibet, and China, during the Years 1844,
1845, and 1846 … (New York: Appleton & Co., 1852). The citation below is from this book. For a good discussion of Thoreau’s knowledge of Asia, see chapter 10 of John Aldrich Christie’s Thoreau as World Traveler.

  158 Thibet: variant of Tibet.

  158 Lethean stream: In Greek mythology Lethe is a river in Hades whose waters induce forgetfulness. The Styx is also a river in Hades, across which the dead must be ferried.

  159 “Than longen folk”: lines 12-13 of the “Prologue” to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. When spring has come, Chaucer writes, “then folk long to go on pilgrimages, and palmers [pilgrims] to seek out foreign shores.”

  159 Atlantis: in antiquity, a legendary sunken island city lying to the west of the known world. The earliest version of the Atlantis legend is found in Plato’s Timaeus.

  159 Hesperides: in Greek mythology, celebrated nymphs, “the Western Maidens,” whose garden of golden apples lies at the end of the Western world.

  159 Castile and Leon: two Spanish kingdoms, united under one rule in 1230. Isabella I and Ferdinand V, the sponsors of Columbus’s voyages, had succeeded to the throne of Castile and Léon in 1474.

  159 “And now the sun had stretched”: the last lines of John Milton’s “Lycidas” (emphasis added).

  159 Michaux: Thoreau quotes from François Michaux’s The North American Sylva, vol. 1, p. 1. See the note for page 94 of “Ktaadn.”

  159 Humboldt: Baron Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). He describes the forests of the Amazon in his Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America during the Years 1799-1804, 3 vols. (London: H. G. Bohn, 1852).

  160 Guyot: Arnold Henry Guyot (1807-1884), Swiss-born geographer who taught at Princeton. Thoreau quotes from his book The Earth and Man: Lectures on Comparative Physical Geography, in Its Relation to the History of Mankind (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1851), pp. 232-33. As Richard J. Schneider has explained, Guyot’s book provided a scientific rationale for the ideology of Manifest Destiny.

  160 The younger Michaux: the same Michaux as above, here differentiated from his father, André Michaux (1746-1802), also a botanist. Thoreau quotes from Michaux’s Voyage à l’ouest des monts Alléghanys (Paris: Dentu, 1808).