HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

VARIOUS PERSONAGES INVOLVED

IN THE

FOMENTING OF RACE WAR (RATHER THAN CIVIL WAR)

IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

The anarchist (or, to deploy a more recent term, libertarian) Boston attorney Lysander Spooner, who was well aware of John Brown’s plans for the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, wrote to Gerrit Smith during January 1859 warning that Brown had neither the men nor the resources to succeed. After the raid he would plot the kidnapping of Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the idea being to take him at pistol point aboard a tug and hold him off the Atlantic coast at threat of execution should Brown be hanged. The motto he chose for himself, that might well be inscribed on his tombstone in Forest Hills Cemetery, was from the INSTITUTES of the Emperor Justinian I of the eastern Roman Empire: “To live honestly is to hurt no one, and give to every one his due.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

THOSE INVOLVED, ARRANGED ALPHABETICALLY

SECRET “SIX”

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Charles Francis Adams, Sr. No No No Finance white

Charles Francis Adams, Sr. subscribed to the racist agenda of Eli Thayer’s and Amos Lawrence’s New England Emigrant Aid Company, for the creation of an Aryan Nation in the territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas,” to the tune of $25,000.

Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson Yes Yes Captain or Lt. 26 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

The maternal grandfather of Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson, Colonel Jacob Westfall of Tygert Valley, Virginia, had been a soldier in the revolution and a slaveholder. Jeremiah had gone to school at Galesburg, Illinois and Kossuth, Iowa and had worked as a peddler, farmer, and sawmill laborer before settling a mile from Fort Bain on the Little Osage in Bourbon County in “Bleeding Kansas” during August 1857. He had twice been arrested by proslavery activists, and had been held for 10 weeks at Fort Scott. He then became a lieutenant of Captain Montgomery and was with him in the attack on Captain Anderson’s troop of the 1st US Cavalry. He witnessed a murder, of a Mr. Denton, on his own doorstep by border ruffians. He went with John Brown on the slave raid into Missouri and remained with him thereafter. He was “J. Anderson” among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18th, 1859. On July 5th, 1859 this 27-year-old had written of his determination to continue to fight for freedom: “Millions of fellow-beings require it of us; their cries for help go out to the universe daily and hourly. Whose duty is it to help them? Is it yours? Is it mine? It is every man’s, but how few there are to help. But there are a few who dare to answer this call and dare to answer it in a manner that will make this land of liberty and equality shake to the centre.” He was thrust through with a bayonet by one of the Marines, and pinned against the wall “vomiting gore.” A white man, he was tortured because he was perceived by the attackers as a light mulatto: “One of the prisoners described Anderson as turning completely over against the wall [to which he was pinned by the bayonet] in his dying agony. He lived a short time, stretched on the brick walk without, where he was subjected to savage brutalities, being kicked in body and face, while one brute of an armed farmer spat a huge quid of tobacco from his vile jaws into the mouth of the dying man, which he first forced open.” A local commented “Well, it takes you a hell of a long time to die.” When opportunistic medical students would go to transport the remains to their college in Winchester, Virginia for dissection, their treatment of this corpse was so casual as to be recorded by a bystander: “In order to take him away handily they procured a barrel and tried to pack him into it. Head foremost, they rammed him in, but they could not bend his legs so as to get them into the barrel with the rest of the body. In their endeavor to accomplish this feat, they strained so hard that the man’s bones or sinews fairly cracked.” His remains were taken to the college along with the remains of Watson Brown (a corpse found on the banks of the Shenandoah River was more likely that of a local slave).

John Anderson ? ? Private < 30 of color

John Anderson, a free black youth from Boston allegedly killed at Harpers Ferry. Nothing is known as to who he was, other than that he was young, or where he came from, other than from Boston — and it is even possible that actually there had been no such person as this in John Brown’s company. (The John Anderson we do know about had an entirely different life trajectory, in Canada.)

Osborn Perry Anderson Yes No No Private 29 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Osborn Perry Anderson, “O.P. Anderson, or as we used to call him Chatham Anderson,” the only participant of color to survive Harpers Ferry and elude capture, had been born free on July 27, 1830 in West Fallowfield, Pennsylvania. He had learned the printing trade in Canada, where he had met John Brown in 1858. He was a member of Congress of John Brown’s Provisional Government in Chatham, Ontario in May 1858 and was “Osborn Anderson” on the list of signatories of the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States”; a member of the Vigilance Committee in Chatham and Windsor in September 1858. He would write later of the fight at Harpers Ferry and his escape in A VOICE FROM HARPER’S FERRY: “We were together eight days before [John Edwin Cook and Albert Hazlett were] captured, which was near Chambersburg, and the next night Meriam [Francis Jackson Meriam] left us and went to Shippensburg, and there took cars for Philadelphia. After that there were but three of us left [Brown’s son Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Charles Plummer Tidd], and we kept together, until we got to Centre County, Pennsylvania, where we bought a box and packed up all heavy luggage, such as rifles, blankets, etc., and after being together three or four weeks we separated….” Anderson, Coppoc, and Meriam had journeyed separately to safe exile in the area of St. Catharines, Canada. Anderson enlisted in the US Army in 1864, becoming a recruiter and/or noncommissioned officer for a unit as yet undetermined, and mustered out in Washington DC at the close of the war (he would be identified by his father Vincent Anderson in 1872 as having been a recruiter for the “western regiments”). He was a member of the Equal Rights League in 1865, and represented Michigan at the National Convention of Colored Men in 1869. He died a pauper of TB and lack of care in Washington on December 13, 1872.

John Albion Andrew No white

Despite the fact that John Albion Andrew was a prominent Massachusetts politician, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of the Secret “Six” would indicate long after the raid on Harpers Ferry, John Brown’s “general purpose of attacking slavery by force, in Missouri or elsewhere, was known in 1857-8-9” to Governor Andrew.

Henry Ward Beecher No No No Propaganda white

The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher induced the congregation of his Plymouth Church to procure a crate of 25 rifles to ship illegally to “Bleeding Kansas” and to stamp upon that crate the term of art BIBLES. The Reverend’s personal attitude toward American blacks was that although those like Frederick Douglass whose blood had become partly mingled with the blood of whites were worthy of consideration as human beings, those who yet remained of pure African stock were still in such a “low animal condition” (his category, his words) of pure blackness that such consideration as human beings would be inappropriate.

Charles Blair No No No Armament white

Charles Blair supplied the pikes.

Ann Brown No No No Supporter white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Ann Brown, a daughter of Captain John Brown, was with the conspirators at the Kennedy farm until shortly before the attack upon Harpers Ferry. In the aftermath she would move to the West Coast.

Frederick Brown No No No Supporter white

Frederick Brown was fanatically religious to the extent that he attempted to sever his sexual organs when he was attracted to a young lady. He would have been 28 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, but in 1856 had been killed in the fighting in “Bleeding Kansas.”

Jason Brown No No No Supporter 38 white

Jason Brown, one of the elder sons of Captain John Brown, was a gentle sort of person who actually was trying to become an inventor. He took part in the battle at Black Jack in “Bleeding Kansas,” and in the killings on the Osawatomie Creek, but was not at Harpers Ferry. He and his brother Owen Brown would become grape growers in the mountains above Pasadena, California.

John Brown Yes Multiple Yes Commander white wounds

John Brown, “Captain” John “Nelson Hawkins” “Shubel Morgan” “Isaac Smith” Brown.

John Brown, Jr. No No No Supporter 38 white

John Brown, Jr., 38 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid and Captain John Brown’s eldest son, had trained as a phrenologist. After the raid he would go into hiding in Ohio and, when summoned to appear before the investigatory committee of the US Senate, would refuse to appear. During the Civil War he served as Captain of Company K of the 7th Kansas Cavalry. He and his family would then find permanent safe haven on South Bass Island in Lake Erie.

Martha Brewster Brown No No No Supporter white

Martha Brewster Brown, wife of Oliver Brown and daughter-in-law of Captain John Brown, was with the conspirators at the Kennedy farm until shortly before the attack upon Harpers Ferry.

Oliver Brown Yes Yes Captain 20 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Oliver Brown, the youngest of John Brown’s sons to reach adulthood, had been born in Franklin, Ohio on March 9, 1839. He was a bookish lad, considered by his mother Mary Ann Day Brown to be the most promising. He went to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1855 with his father and returned to North Elba during October 1856, where he got married with Martha E. Brewster in 1858. She was sent back north just before the raid on Harpers Ferry. “I think there is no good reason why any of us should be discouraged,” he had written his family, “for if we have done but one good act, life is not a failure.... Keep a stiff lip, a sound pluck, and believe that all will come out right in the end.” He had reached the age of 20 when he was shot while serving as a sentinel at the river bridge. His body was dumped into a shallow hole on the bank of the Shenandoah River, with the bodies of other fighters.

Owen Brown Yes No No Captain 35 white

Owen Brown, 3d of John Brown’s sons and his stalwart aid both in “Bleeding Kansas” and at Harper’s Ferry, was born November 4, 1824 at Hudson, Ohio. With a withered arm, he had been attempting to make a career of writing humor articles for newspapers. His name was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. He was 35 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid. He escaped on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. It was due largely to his psychological grit and his endurance that the little group of survivors of which he was the leader managed to make it out. He and Charles Plummer Tidd found work and safety under assumed names on an oil-well crew in Crawford County, Pennsylvania. He was the only one of the 5 escaped raiders not to participate in the civil war. He would never marry. He would grow grapes for some time in Ohio in association with 2 of his brothers, and then migrate west, and would be the final survivor of the raiders when he would die on January 9, 1891 at his mountain home “Brown’s Peak” near Pasadena, California. A marble monument marked the mountain grave, until during July 2002 it mysteriously disappeared — since the grave was not a registered historical landmark, and not in a cemetery, there would be no investigation.

Salmon Brown No 23 white

Salmon Brown, 23 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, was said to have been exactly like his father, Captain John Brown, in every particular. He would once comment to a newspaper reporter that “The tannery business, farming, wool buying and the raising of blooded stock were my father’s life occupations, though all of them were subordinated to his one consuming passion — freeing the slaves.” Salmon would die in Portland, Oregon in 1919.

Watson Brown Yes Yes Captain 24 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Watson Brown, born at Franklin, Ohio on October 7, 1835, got married with young Isabella M. Thompson during September 1856. “Dear Belle,” he had written to his child-wife, “I would gladly come home and stay with you always but for the cause which brought me here — a desire to do something for others, and not live wholly for my own happiness.... I sometimes feel as if I could not make this sacrifice, but what would I not want others to do were I in their place?” Their son would live only to his 5th year but would nevertheless survive his father, because he was sent out with a white flag by his father John Brown to parley and was gut-shot by the citizens of Harpers Ferry. He managed to crawl back to the shelter of the engine house and live on, groaning, his head cradled in Edwin Coppoc’s lap, for a longish period. When one of his captors asked “What brought you here?” he responded “Duty, sir.” The corpse would be sent for the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia. Recovering the skeleton from this college during the Civil War, his mother Mary Ann Day Brown eventually would be able to rebury it in the Adirondacks, before heading off to her retirement in California.

John E. Cook Yes No Yes Captain 29 white

John Edwin Cook, a well-connected 5'7" gentleman with blue eyes and long, curly blond hair, born during Summer 1830 to a well-to-do family in Haddam, Connecticut, had been a law clerk in Brooklyn and Manhattan after being expelled from Yale College on account of some student indiscretion, and had in 1855 become a member of the guerrilla force operated out of Lawrence in “Bleeding Kansas” by Charles Lenhart and had made himself an excellent shot. The name “John E. Cook” was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18th, 1859. He had been dispatched by John Brown to Harpers Ferry more than a year before the raid to work out the details on the ground and had secured employment as a lock tender on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, as a schoolteacher, and as a bookseller. He had gotten married with a Chambersburg, Pennsylvania woman, Mary V. Kennedy, on April 18th, 1859. After being sent out by Captain Brown to collect weapons, and having escaped by climbing into a tree and watching the events transpire, and after having evaded capture for some months, against the advice of his comrades he became reckless in his search for food and was captured on October 25th, 8 miles from Chambersburg. As an incessant and compulsive communicator he had always been considered by the Brown operatives to be indiscreet. In a confession which would be published as a pamphlet at Charles Town in the middle of November 1859 for the benefit of Samuel C. Young, a man who had been crippled for life in the fighting, Cook would detail for his captors all his movements from the point of his 1st meeting with Brown after the battle of Black Jack in June 1856 until after his capture. At the last moment he would seek to save himself by representing that he had been deceived through false promises. For this revelation Cook would be severely censured at the time, being termed “Judas.” Despite his confession, and despite his brother-in-law A.P. Willard being the governor of Indiana, he would in the end, one of the last, be also hanged for treason and murder at Harpers Ferry, on December 16th.

John Anderson Copeland, Jr. Yes No Yes Private < 30 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

John Anderson Copeland, Jr. was an Oberlin, Ohio carpenter and freeborn black American who was the son of a slave. He was active in the Oberlin Anti-Slavery Society. It was rumored that he escorted John Price to Canada after the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue. Copeland later participated in the raid on the Harpers Ferry armory with John Brown. He got trapped in “Hall’s Rifle Works” along with his uncle Lewis Sheridan Leary and John Henry Kagi. When the 3 made a run for the Shenandoah River they got caught in a crossfire, but after Kagi had been killed and Leary had been shot several times and placed under arrest, Copeland was able to surrender without having been wounded. He refused to speak during his trial and was hanged with too short a drop and thus strangled slowly. On December 29, when a crowd of 3,000 would attend his funeral in his hometown of Oberlin, Ohio, there would be no body to bury, for after his cadaver had been temporarily interred in Charles Town it had been dug up and was in service in the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia. A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their three fallen free citizens of color, Copeland, Leary, and Shields Green (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971). Judge Parker would assert in his story of the trials (St. Louis Globe Democrat, April 8, 1888) that Copeland had been “the prisoner who impressed me best. He was a free negro. He had been educated, and there was a dignity about him that I could not help liking. He was always manly.” Andrew Hunter at the same time was quoted as saying– “Copeland was the cleverest of all the prisoners ... and behaved better than any of them. If I had had the power and could have concluded to pardon any man among them, he was the man I would have picked out.” On the day that he died Copeland declared, “If I am dying for freedom, I could not die for a better cause — I had rather die than be a slave!” (Paul Finkelman avers on page 49 of HIS SOUL GOES MARCHING ON: RESPONSES TO JOHN BROWN AND THE HARPERS FERRY RAID that his middle name was “Anthony” rather than “Anderson.”)

Barclay Coppoc Yes No No Private < 21 white

Barclay Coppoc, from the Quaker settlement of Springdale, Iowa, was born in Salem, Ohio on January 4, 1839, and had not attained his majority at the time of the raid on Harpers Ferry. This Quaker escaped, although his adopted brother Edwin Coppoc surrendered and was tried and hanged. “We were together eight days before [John Edwin Cook and Albert Hazlett were] captured, which was near Chambersburg, and the next night Meriam [Francis Jackson Meriam] left us and went to Shippensburg, and there took cars for Philadelphia. After that there were but three of us left [John Brown’s son Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Charles Plummer Tidd], and we kept together, until we got to Centre County, Pennsylvania, where we bought a box and packed up all heavy luggage, such as rifles, blankets, etc., and after being together three or four weeks we separated and I went on through with the box to Ohio on the cars.” Osborn Perry Anderson, Barclay Coppoc, and Francis Jackson Meriam would travel separately to safe exile in the area of St. Catharines, Canada. Barclay then went to his family home in Iowa, with Virginia agents in close pursuit. There a band of young men armed themselves to defend him, and the Religious Society of Friends disowned him for bearing arms. He was back in “Bleeding Kansas” in 1860, helping to run off some Missouri slaves, and nearly lost his life in a second undertaking of this kind. He became a 1st Lieutenant in Colonel Montgomery’s regiment, the 3d Kansas Infantry. Soon he was killed by the fall of a train into the Platte river from a trestle 40 feet high, the supports of which had been burned away by Confederates.

Edwin Coppoc Yes Unwounded Yes Lieutenant < 30 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Edwin Coppoc, who had been born on June 30, 1835 and orphaned and adopted at the age of 6 into a nonresistant- abolitionist Quaker farm family first of Salem, Ohio and then of Springdale, Iowa. On March 6, 1857 he was disowned by the Religious Society of Friends and in the spring of 1858 went to “Bleeding Kansas” as a settler — but did not take part in the fighting. It was during a visit to Springdale in the fall of 1858 that he met John Brown. He would surrender with Captain Brown in the engine house at Harpers Ferry, and would be tried by a jury of his white male peers immediately after the conclusion of the trial of Captain Brown while his still-Quaker brother Barclay Coppoc was eluding capture. He was sentenced on November 2. From prison before his hanging, he wrote his adoptive mother that he was

“sorry to say that I was ever induced to raise a gun.” THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

He was hung with John Edwin Cook on December 16th, 1859 and a day later his brother turned up at home in Iowa (he also would soon be disowned). The body of Edwin Coppoc was buried in Winona, Iowa after a funeral attended by the entire town (later the body would be reburied in Salem, Ohio).

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. No No No Enabler white

Treason being punished as what it is, why would the downtown Boston lawyer Richard Henry Dana, Jr. allow himself to become legal counsel to a “Secret Six” committee that was funding the activities of Captain John Brown, as that loose cannon prepared to raid the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia? He was going to be implicated as having obviously had guilty prior knowledge, and was obviously making himself of necessity a prime candidate for the noose. As the going got hot he would make himself unavailable for prosecution –by venturing on a luxury trip around the globe– but the issue is not how he might extricate himself from this, but why he would have so endangered himself.

Martin Robison Delany No No No Supporter of color

Dr. Martin Robison Delany, Pennsylvania, 1843; attended the Colored National Convention of 1848; attended the Emigration Convention of 1854; a member of the Niger Valley Exploring Party in 1858; a member of the Vigilance Committee in Chatham and Windsor in September 1858. At a meeting of the conspirators in Chatham in Canada West in May 1858, “M.R. Delany,” the Reverend William Charles Munroe of Detroit, and several other leaders of the large black expatriate community approved something termed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the people of the United States,” as the charter for the pike-wielding fugitive society of raiders which was to be created in the remote fastness of the Allegheny Mountains by Captain John Brown subsequent to his raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. That document would be discovered on Brown’s person when he was taken into custody. He would be a Major in the 104th Colored Infantry, and Sub-Assistant Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina, in 1865. He was a Freemason.

Frederick Douglass No No No Supporter 41 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Waldo Emerson urged Frederick Douglass early on, to make himself into the General Toussaint Louverture of the North American continent. When Captain John Brown made a speech offering himself as the leader for the forces of freedom in “Bleeding Kansas”, Douglass stood in the audience and endorsed Brown and his mission despite the unpleasant fact that the plan of the abolitionists was to permanently exclude all persons of color, whether free or enslaved, from that new state. When the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry was raided, his role was intended to be the raising aloft of the sword of General George Washington and the generaling of the black forces. His involvement in this raid was acceptable to such personages as the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher only because his blood had been mixed with white it was removed to a degree from its original “low animal condition” (the Reverend’s category, the Reverend’s words) of blackness. At the very last moment Douglass perceived that the prospects of the raid were for either failure or betrayal, and fled by way of Canada to England.

Ralph Waldo Emerson No No No Supporter white

Waldo Emerson, acting as an agent provocateur of race war, recommended to Frederick Douglass in 1844 that he become the liberator of his people on the North American continent, modeling himself upon the leader of the successful Haitian revolution of the turn of the century, Toussaint Louverture. “Let me hold your coat while some white man kills you,” or something to that effect. We only know about this because Henry Thoreau rushed down to Boston right after the lecture, and had the lecture printed up as a pamphlet — after which there was no lying about the provocation that had been made and so all Emerson could do was pretend that Douglass hadn’t been present.

John Buchanan Floyd No No No Supporter white

Secretary of War John Buchanan Floyd was one of those who had been warned, months in advance, that Captain John Brown was planning to attack a federal arsenal to seize weapons with which to arm black slaves, in the creation of a servile insurrection (he didn’t know precisely when, and didn’t know it would be at Harpers Ferry, Virginia). Such a prospect did not alarm him in the slightest. The official story, if the official story is what you want to believe, is that our Secretary of War would pass this warning along to no-one. I myself find it difficult to regard this as anything more than a cover. I think the truth was that these folks were aware that such a servile insurrection could lead to nothing but a race genocide, with white Americans exterminating the black ones, and what I fear is that such a race genocide would have been considered to be just fine, an improvement in our national condition. Let’s not have ourselves a civil war of brother against brother, that would be so nasty — let’s prevent that by having ourselves a nice little race war!

Hugh Forbes No No No Lieutenant white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Captain John Brown’s scheme, which he referred to as the “Subterranean Pass Way,” was that the escaped, armed slaves were to “swarm” into and set up a center of resistance in the Alleghenies from which they could liberate Virginia and then invade Tennessee and northern Alabama. Such a scoping of the situation never met with much respect from other of the other schemers. In particular, the Scottish adventurer Hugh Forbes, Brown’s onetime principal lieutenant, regarding blacks as inherently childlike, credulous, and cowardly, believed such a scheme to be doomed to failure from its inception. The scenario preferred by Forbes would have involved the herding of the slaves together by armed bands of white men and the driving of such herds of humans up the mountain chain toward Canada, neatly disposing of America’s entire race problem — by simple relocation of it to another nation. Evidently the two planners parted company over issues such as this after Forbes had functioned in Tabor, Iowa as the leader of military training for the recruits (Forbes was a veteran of the Grenadier Guards, and had fought along with Garibaldi in defense of the Roman Republic of 1849), and then Forbes attempted blackmail. When not offered a payoff, he wrote long, detailed letters to congressmen and to others, and it is one of the unresolved issues, how anyone in high office in Washington DC could have avoided knowing in advance that Brown was plotting a strike of some sort against slavery (another of the unresolved issues is what happened to Forbes once his extortion had failed — he simply disappeared from the pages of history).

George B. Gill

George B. Gill had come to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1857 after whaling in the Pacific Ocean, and had there been recruited by John Brown. His name was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18th, 1859. He alarmed other conspirators by conducting himself in such manner as to attract attention and arouse suspicion, for instance displaying weapons, bragging to lady friends that he had been in Kansas and had killed 5 men, informing other boarders at his lodgings that he was in town on a secret expedition with other fighters, who were under his command, etc. During the year before the raid, Captain Brown sent Gill to visit a black con artist named Mr. Reynolds who persuaded Gill that he had gone through the South organizing and had brought into existence in areas of the South a militant organization of black men and women. Pointing out to Gill that Southern newspapers carried numerous references to the death of a favorite slave, he alleged that these were leaders of servile insurrection plots who were being discovered and offed. According to this “mumper” Southern blacks were ready and needed only to be given a cue. There is evidence that several slaves from the vicinity of the arsenal did participate in the raid itself, but returned hastily to their plantations when it became obvious that the raid was a failure. Several fires were set in the vicinity of Harpers Ferry in the week after the raid, probably by slaves and free black Americans (Richard Hinton estimates that $10,000,000 was lost in the sale of Virginia slaves in the year 1859; census figures show that between 1850 and 1860 there was almost a 10% decline in blacks in the three counties surrounding Harpers Ferry, a period during which the total number of blacks in Maryland and Virginia was increasing by about 4%).

The Rev. and Mrs. Gloucester No Financial support of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

The Reverend James Newton Gloucester and Elizabeth A. Parkhill Gloucester of Brooklyn, New York were wealthy financial supporters of the servile-insurrection plot of Captain John Brown, or “Shubel Morgan,” or “Isaac Smith” (depending on what alias he was using at the time), and had put him up for a week at their home while he was enroute to Harpers Ferry. According to a report in a local newspaper: Brown said, “Goodbye, Sister Gloucester. I’ve only sixteen men, but I’m to conquer.” Mrs. Gloucester said to him, “Perhaps you will lose your life.” “Well, my life,” he replied, “is not worth much. I’m an old man. In Kansas, the balls flew around my head as thick as hail. I’ll never be killed by a ball. If I fall, I’ll open a ball in this country that will never stop until every slave is free.”

Shields Green Yes No Yes Private < 30 of color

Shields Green was an escapee from South Carolina who had served as clothes cleaner in Rochester, New York (his business card there declared “I make no promise that I am unable to perform”) and acted as a bodyguard for Frederick Douglass. He was known as “Emperor,” although how he obtained this nickname is not now known. He decided to go with John Brown when Douglass turned back at the stone quarry prior to the Harpers Ferry raid, saying to his boss “I believe I’ll go with the old man.” He took part in the raid and then refused to speak during his trial. At the time of his hanging he was about 23 years of age. His cadaver would be dug up and used for the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia. He, like John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Lewis Sheridan Leary, had been a resident of Oberlin, Ohio. A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their 3 fallen free citizens of color (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971).

James Henry Harris HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

No one associated with Captain John Brown, and no one associated with politics in North Carolina, has ever been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. “J.H. Harris” signed, as a member of a Vigilance Committee, on May 8th, 1858, the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, Ontario West, Canada, a document which would be found on the person of John Brown when he was captured at Harpers Ferry on October 18th, 1859. Although another person of this name, James Henry Harris, had been born a slave in Granville County, North Carolina and had gained his freedom at the age of 18 in about 1848, he was not this “J.H. Harris.” Educated at Oberlin College, he would hold a teaching certificate from the New England Freedman’s Aid Society. He was of Cleveland in 1859, and a member of the 102d US Colored Infantry formed in Michigan by George DeBaptiste that included so many men from Chatham. He would attend the 1st Freedmen’s Convention in the South, held in what would become the St. Paul A.M.E. Church on Edenton Street in Raleigh during September 1865 as a representative of Wake County. He would become the 1st black alderman from Raleigh, and a delegate from Raleigh to the North Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1868; he got married with Bettie Miller, a daughter of Addison J. Smith and Mary Anderson, a cousin of Osborn Perry Anderson; he died in 1891 in Washington DC and the remains are at Mount Hope Cemetery in Raleigh. There is yet a 3d James H. Harris, who was not this “J.H. Harris” signatory, who was belatedly awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and is interred in the remote section of Arlington National Cemetery that was reserved for colored soldiers, and for contrabands.

Lewis Hayden

Lewis Hayden, a black leader in downtown Boston whose escape from Kentucky had been aided by Delia Webster in 1844. Eight years after escaping from slavery, he raised, as an act of gratitude and duty, a sum of $650, in order to ransom the Reverend Calvin Fairbanks out of the Kentucky State Prison at Frankfort, where the Reverend had been languishing under the accusation that he had assisted 47 slaves in their escape, and had served 14 years, and had been whipped and beaten. Just before the raid on Harpers Ferry, Hayden helped recruit Francis Jackson Meriam to carry a message and cash money to the hideout of John Brown, and take part in that struggle.

Albert Hazlett Yes No Yes Capt. or Lt. < 30 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Albert Hazlett, born in Pennsylvania on September 21st, 1837, did not take part in the fight at Harpers Ferry but, with John Edwin Cook who had escaped from that fight by climbing a tree and who later identified him to the prosecutors, would be belatedly hanged. Before the raid he had worked on his brother’s farm in western Pennsylvania, and he had joined the others at Kennedy Farm in the early part of September 1859. He was arrested on October 22d in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, near Chambersburg, where he was using the name “William Harrison,” was extradited to Virginia, was tried and sentenced at the spring term of the Court, and was hanged on March 16th, 1860. George B. Gill wrote “I was acquainted with Hazlett well enough in Kansas, yet after all knew but little of him. He was with Montgomery considerably, and was with [Aaron D. Stevens] on the raid in which Cruise was killed. He was a good-sized, fine-looking fellow, overflowing with good nature and social feelings.... Brown got acquainted with him just before leaving Kansas.” He wrote to Mrs. Rebecca B. Spring on March 15th, 1860, the eve of his hanging, “Your letter gave me great comfort to know that my body would be taken from this land of chains.... I am willing to die in the cause of liberty, if I had ten thousand lives I would willingly lay them all down for the same cause.”

Reverend T. W. Higginson No White

The Reverend Thomas Wentworth “Charles P. Carter” Higginson of the Secret “Six”’s earliest American ancestor was the 1st minister of Salem. He believed that “Never in history was there an oppressed people who were set free by others” (it was therefore up to American black people to demonstrate their courage, and their worthiness to be free — basically by getting themselves exterminated). After Harpers Ferry he would attempt to organize an expedition to raid the Charles Town lockup and rescue the accused — this was an expedition Henry Thoreau would oppose, asserting that to the contrary Captain Brown’s highest and best purpose was to be hung.

Richard J. Hinton

Richard Josiah Hinton, abolitionist journalist whose opposition to slavery led him to transform himself into a gunslinger. Refer to: Richard J. Hinton, JOHN BROWN AND HIS MEN (NY: Funk & Wagnalls, 1894; Reprint NY: The Arno Press, 1968).

WHAT TO TAKE: Let your trunk, if you have to buy one, be of moderate size and of the strongest make. Test it by throwing it from the top of a three-storied house; if you pick it up uninjured, it will do to go to Kansas. Not otherwise. — James Redpath and Richard J. Hinton, HAND-BOOK TO KANSAS TERRITORY, 1859, as quoted on page 3 of William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth (a deep map) [Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1991].

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and others of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee raised $5,000 in one day, to buy enough Sharp’s rifles to arm 200 men to the teeth in “Bleeding Kansas.” He, as well as the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war (black Americans against white), would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces of servile insurrection. These 5 of the white conspirators of the Secret “Six” finance committee clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in order to foment sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans.

Julia Ward Howe No White

Julia Ward Howe was a racist and, because she carried out errands for her husband Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe who was on the Secret “Six” finance committee (such as having a surreptitious meeting in their home with Captain John Brown), must surely have been aware of and must surely have approved of that committee’s agendas.

Thaddeus Hyatt No white

Thaddeus Hyatt was a businessman and financier involved in the preparation of “Bleeding Kansas” as a “free soil” or “Aryan Nation” enclave. Summoned to give testimony before the congressional committee investigating the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, he would refuse to appear and would be imprisoned for a period —but ultimately would get away with this refusal.

John Jones No No No Support of color

John Jones was a Chicago businessman of mixed race, an upscale tailor (John Brown visited his home). He and his wife Mary Jane Richardson Jones were active abolitionists whose home was a station on the Underground Railroad while they agitated for repeal of “Black Laws” (not only did these laws obligate black Americans to prove that they were free to enter the state of Illinois but, once there, these laws barred them from visiting the homes of whites, owning any property or merchandise, or entering into any contract).

John Henry Kagi Yes Yes Secretary of War 24 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Although John Henry Kagi, AKA Maurice Maitland, AKA John Henrie, was largely self-taught, his letters to the New-York Tribune, the New-York Evening Post, and the National Era reveal him as the best educated of the raiders. A debater, public speaker, stenographer, wannabee writer, and total abstainer from alcohol, he was cold in manner and rough in appearance. A nonparticipant in organized religion, he was an able man of business. He had been born on March 15, 1835, a son of the blacksmith for Bristolville, Ohio in a family of Swiss descent (the name originally having been Kagy). During 1854/1855 he had taught school at Hawkinstown, Virginia but had indicated an objection to the system of slavery there and been compelled to return to Ohio with a pledge never to return. He had gone to Nebraska City in 1856 and been admitted to the bar. He then entered Kansas with one of General James H. Lane’s parties and enlisted in Aaron D. Stevens’s (“Colonel Whipple’s”) 2d Kansas Militia. In fighting in the town of Tecumseh in “Bleeding Kansas” he proved himself by killing at least one man, who had been coming after him with a club. After being captured by US troops he had been imprisoned at Lecompton and at Tecumseh, but was finally released. On January 31, 1857 he had been struck on the head with a gold-headed cane by a slaveowning territorial judge, drew his revolver and shot the judge in the groin, but Judge Physic Rush Elmore got off 3 shots and one struck Kagi over the heart, the bullet being stopped by a memorandum-book. He was long with his family in Ohio recovering from these wounds, but then returned to Kansas and joined John Brown. He bore the title of Secretary of War in the provisional government and was next in command to John Brown; he was also the adjutant. His name was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. When in Chambersburg as agent for the raiders, he boarded with Mrs. Mary Rittner. “In a very few days we shall commence,” he wrote on the eve of the raid, “things could not be more cheerful and more certain of success than they are. We have worked hard and suffered much, but the hardest is down now, and a glorious success is in sight.... Be cheerful. Don’t imagine dangers. All will be well.” At Harpers Ferry he was trapped along with John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Lewis Sheridan Leary in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the 3 made a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they got caught in crossfire and Kagi was the first killed, shot in the head, his body being left to float in the river.

Amos Lawrence No White

Amos Lawrence and his son Amos Adams Lawrence provided the large bulk of the investment capital needed by Eli Thayer’s New England Emigrant Aid Company for the purchase land in the new territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas,” needed in order to encourage the right sort of black-despising poor white Americans to settle there as “decent antislavery” homesteaders. The idea was to send entire communities in one fell swoop, increasing the value of the properties owned by this company. If political control over this territory could be achieved, they would be able to set up a real Aryan Nation, from which slaves would of course be excluded because they were enslaved, and from which free blacks Americans would of course be excluded because as human material they were indelibly inferior.

Lewis Sheridan Leary Yes Yes Private 25 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Lewis Sheridan “Shad” Leary was a mulatto citizen of Oberlin, Ohio, a saddler and harness maker whose father had been a freeborn black harness maker as well. He was descended from an Irishman, Jeremiah O’Leary, who had fought in the Revolution under General Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, who had married a woman of mixed blood, partly African, partly of that Croatan Indian stock of North Carolina, which is believed by some to be lineally descended from the “lost colonists” left by John White on Roanoke Island in 1587. Leary was born at Fayetteville, North Carolina on March 17th, 1835, and was therefore in his 25th year when killed during the raid upon the federal arsenal. In 1857 he had gone to Oberlin to live, marrying there and making the acquaintance of John Brown in Cleveland. To go to Harpers Ferry he left his wife with a 6-month-old child at Oberlin, his wife being in ignorance of the purpose of his trip. He was given funds to go from Oberlin to Chambersburg in the company of his nephew John Anderson Copeland, Jr. “Tell no man where I have gone,” he commented, “you’ll see me again, but I’ll be marching at the top of the drum.... Men must suffer for a good cause.” He was isolated along with his nephew and John Henry Kagi in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the men made a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they got themselves caught in a crossfire, and after Kagi had been killed and Leary shot several times, he was taken, his wounds so severe that he would die the following morning. He was able to dictate messages to his family and is reported as having said “I am ready to die.” The Leary child would subsequently be educated by James Redpath and Wendell Phillips. The corpse was dumped into the common pit beside the Shenandoah River, not to be exhumed until 1899. A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their fallen free men of color, Leary, Copeland, and Shields Green (this 8-foot marble monument would be relocated to Vine Street Park in 1971).

William H. Leeman Yes Yes Captain < 21 white

William H. Leeman was of a wild disposition. Educated in the public schools of Saco and Hallowell, Maine, by the age of 14 he was working in a shoe factory in Haverhill, Massachusetts. He went to “Bleeding Kansas” with the 2d batch of recruits from Massachusetts, and on September 9, 1856 became a member of Captain John Brown’s “Volunteer Regulars.” He fought well at Osawatomie when but 17 years of age. At Springdale, Iowa, Owen Brown found him full of swagger and bluster and difficult to control George B. Gill said of him that he had “a good intellect with great ingenuity.” He signed “W.H. Leeman” to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when the raiders were subdued at Harpers Ferry. By the raid upon Harpers Ferry he had reached the age of 20, the youngest of the raiders. He wrote his mother, “I shall be in danger, but it is natural to me. I shall not get killed. I am in a good cause, and I am not afraid.” He made a mad dash out of the relative safety of the armory to attempt to escape by swimming down the Potomac River, where two militiamen caught up with him and shot him down on an islet. For hours his corpse would be used for target practice by drunken citizens, until their hail of bullets pushed the riddled remains into a current that drew it along until only his black hair could be glimpsed in the ripples on the surface. Mrs. Annie Brown Adams would write of him: “He was only a boy. He smoked a good deal and drank sometimes; but perhaps people would not think that so very wicked now. He was very handsome and very attractive.”

Francis Jackson Merriam Yes No No Private < 30 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Francis Jackson Meriam, grandson and namesake of the Garrisonian abolitionist and Boston historian Francis Jackson, was a young manic-depressive with one good eye. He helped James Redpath collect materials in Haiti and across the American South for use in a book dedicated to John Brown and Redpath arranged for him to join the Harpers Ferry guerrillas. He was not captured or killed because he had been left during the raid in one of his fits of despair at the Kennedy farmhouse. After escaping through Shippensburg, Philadelphia, Boston, Concord, and the area of St. Catharines, Canada he served as a captain in the 3d South Carolina Colored Infantry. Erratic and unbalanced, he urged wild schemes upon his superiors and sometimes attempted them. He created, for instance, a list of 5 secret-writing inks for confidential correspondence. In an engagement under General Ulysses S. Grant he received a serious leg wound. He died suddenly on November 28, 1865 in New-York.

Charles W. Moffett Yes white

We believe that the name of Charles W. Moffett of Iowa was among the signatories to Chatham, Ontario’s “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” as “C.W. Moffit,” per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. Perhaps this “W” stood for “Wesley,” if we can rely upon a tombstone in the Maple Hill cemetery in Montour, Iowa (“Charles Wesley Moffett / Jun. 20, 1827-Aug. 19, 1904”). We wonder if perhaps he did not attend the raid on the federal arsenal because he got cold feet, or perhaps because he was one of a number of people suspected by the others of having written to alert Secretary of War John Buchanan Floyd to the plan for a raid on a federal arsenal (the Cabinet member received these warnings while at Red Sweet Springs in Virginia and neglected to alert anyone to be on the lookout for such an attack — he would remind people later that as War Secretary he had been getting a whole lot of spurious warnings).

Edwin Morton No White

The very tall Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s intimate college friend Edwin Morton of Plymouth, a descendant of one of the prominent Founding Fathers, and from a long line of violinists, was about as deeply involved in the Harpers Ferry raid as any member of the Secret “Six.” He was Gerrit Smith’s private secretary and resided with that family, tutoring the son. After the raid, with the heat on while Jefferson Davis was conducting a congressional investigation, he fled overseas as did Frederick Douglass, and for the duration chummed around at Shrewsbury and Hodnet with Henry Thoreau’s very tall friend Thomas Cholmondeley before settling for health reasons in Switzerland.

Dangerfield Newby Yes Yes bridge sentinel 39 light mulatto HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Dangerfield Newby, a free light mulatto, son of a Scotsman, very tall and with a splendid physique, was written by his wife begged him to obtain funds to purchase her and their baby who that had just “commenced to crawl ... as soon as possible, for if you do not get me somebody else will.” She pleaded “Oh Dear Dangerfield, come this fall without fail, money or no money I want to see you so much; that is the one bright hope I have before me.” He was serving as a sentinel at the Harpers Ferry bridge and was shot to death as he and the two white men with him retreated before the charge of the Jefferson Guards of Charles Town, Virginia, coming across the Potomac from the Maryland side. He was not brought down by ball or bullet but by a 6-inch spike being used as a musket projectile, which caught him in the throat and ripped him severely. Since neither of the white men were shot, it appears that as a mulatto he was targeted. The body was beaten savagely, and its ears snipped off as trophies, and then a herd of hogs was driven up to root on it. His corpse was dumped into the shallow group pit beside the Shenandoah River, to be exhumed in 1899.

Reverend Theodore Parker No White

The Reverend Theodore Parker, a stone racist, declared from his pulpit that while he ordinarily spent $1,500 a year on books, the equivalent of 4 or 5 men’s annual wages, for the time being he was going to restrict himself to spending less than one man’s annual wage on books per year, and devote the remaining moneys to the purchase of guns and ammunition for the white people going to the Kansas Territory. Sharps rifles, the very latest in deadliness, cost $25 apiece when had in sufficient quantity:

“I make all my pecuniary arrangements with the expectation of civil war.”

He would take to marking the boxes of new Sharps rifles he shipped illegally to “Bleeding Kansas” with the word BOOKS, and he would take to referring to these firearms as so many copies of RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE as in “The right of the people to keep and to bear arms shall not be infringed.” He, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns of the Secret “Six”, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces of servile insurrection. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their allies among the Northern and Southern black Americans slave and free, in order to foment a rectification of the Southern white Americans.

Luke F. Parsons White

Luke Fisher Parsons was a free-state fighter seasoned in “Bleeding Kansas.” He took part in the battle of Black Jack near Baldwin City on June 2d, 1856, the battle of Osawatomie on August 30th, 1856, and the raid on Iowa during Winter 1857/1858. His name “L.F. Parsons” was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” per a document in John Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when the raiders were subdued at Harpers Ferry. He had gone off toward a supposed Colorado gold rush and, summoned by letters from Brown and Kagi, did not manage to make it back to take part in the raid on the federal arsenal, or to attempt to rescue the prisoners once they were waiting to be hanged, at the jail in Charlestown, Virginia. He started a family and lived out a long life as a farmer in Salina, Kansas. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Friend John Hunt Painter White

John Hunt Painter, a birthright Quaker who owned a farm near Springdale, Iowa, a farm that was used as a waystation on the Underground Railroad, forwarded stored firearms to Captain John Brown at his hideout near Harpers Ferry. After disownment by the Religious Society of Friends he would relocate his farm family to downtown Pasadena, California to there construct and be the proprietor of the toney La Pintoresca hotel.

Richard Realf White

Richard Realf, English poet, was the son of a blacksmith who had become a rural constable. In 1852 he had published GUESSES AT THE BEAUTIFUL and in 1854, after giving up being the lover of George Gordon, Lord Byron’s aging widow Lady Noell Byron, he had been led to the United States of America by “instincts” he characterized as “democratic and republican, or, at least, anti-monarchical.” At the end of November or beginning of December 1857 he had been introduced to John Brown in Mount Tabor, Iowa by John Edwin Cook, whom he had met in Lawrence in “Bleeding Kansas” while working as a correspondent for the Illinois State Gazette. He traveled through Chicago and Detroit to Chatham, Ontario West, Canada and signed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” per a document in Brown’s handwriting found when the survivors were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18th, 1859. By reading a book of ethical philosophy written by the President of Brown University, he determined that this violent agenda, and radical abolitionism in general, were a forbidden path, and so he returned to England to lecture, and visited France. He embarked at Le Havre on March 2d, 1859, arriving at New Orleans on April 17th, 1959 with the intention of becoming a Jesuit priest, then with an aim to join the Shakers, and made no further contact with Captain Brown. After the raid he would voluntarily testify before the US Senate Committee and then fight in the Civil War and then contemplate joining the Oneida Perfectionists and then attempt to become a Colonel of colored troops, before being laid low on account of his messy sexual life.

James Redpath

James Redpath, crusading journalist out to make a buck in the best way. –Panderer in the pornography of armchair violence, at first in regard to the horrors of Southern slavery, –then in regard to the horrors of “Bleeding Kansas” –then in regard to the horrors of starving Ireland. Finally, after the Civil War, without fresh horrors to proffer to his armchair audience, he would resort to publishing defamatory doggerel poetry — lines in which he age-shames and fat-shames various Boston society ladies. –Never a dull moment for this “tell it like it is” dude! The Charleston, Virginia hangman sent him a piece of the scaffold, for which he devised a label: “A Bit of the True Cross, a Chip from the Scaffold of John Brown.”

George J. Reynolds of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

George J. Reynolds was a light mulatto with native American as well as black African heritage, a blacksmith or coppersmith, from Virginia although claiming to be from Vermont, aged about 35 at the time of the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, and active in the Underground Railroad. He attended the Convention of Colored Men in 1858, and signed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, Ontario West, Canada per a document in John Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued on October 18th, 1859, as “J.G. Reynolds” (3 weeks after signing on to this conspiracy he was disclosing some of Captain Brown’s agenda to a black secret paramilitary group at the Masonic Lodge of his home town, Sandusky, Ohio).

Richard Richardson No of color

Richard Richardson, a fugitive slave from Lexington, Missouri who had joined John Brown in southern Iowa, was going through that unfortunate but now-well-understood initial period of reaction to freedom in which a former slave, accustomed to servitude and unaccustomed to self-origination, attaches himself to some authoritative white man who is able with courtesy to make use of him. He had been in 1858 a member of the African Mysteries, a secret defense group in Michigan, and signed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued on October 18th, 1859, but evidently because of a religious conversion and a dedication to missionary work in Canada did not get from Ontario to Harpers Ferry (of the 34 black signatories to the Chatham document, only Osborn Perry Anderson would be at Harpers Ferry). He became a private in Company E of the 113th US Colored Infantry formed from the 13th US Colored Infantry, that was recruited in Arkansas and provided Civil War post and garrison duty in Little Rock, Arkansas, mustering out on April 9th, 1866.

Judge Thomas Russell No White

Thomas Russell and Mary Ellen “Nellie” Taylor Russell visited John Brown in jail in Charleston, Virginia a few weeks before his execution. She said that although she had never approved of his violent methods, she admired him as a man of vision and idealism. Brown had been friends with the Russells for years and had stayed at their home on several occasions despite the husband being prominent in the Massachusetts judiciary. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of the Secret “Six” would allege long after the raid on Harpers Ferry that “Brown’s general purpose of attacking slavery by force, in Missouri or elsewhere, was known in 1857-8-9” to Judge Russell.

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn No White HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of Concord descended from the founder and 1st minister of the old New Hampshire plantation of Hampton. Another ancestor, the Reverend Stephen Bachiler, was the 1st minister of Lynn, and probably had among his parishioners there, in 1635-1636, Thomas Parker, the 1st American ancestor of Theodore Parker. He, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These 5 of the white Secret “Six” conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies for servile insurrection in order to foment sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans. (John Brown, who had himself buried a wife and promptly recruited another one, once commented to Sanborn, in regard to the young man’s grief over the prompt death of his young bride Ariana Walker, that he was too young to be married to a gravestone.)

Gerrit Smith No White

The immensely wealthy “H. Ross Perot” political figure of that era was a former Millerite millennialist: Gerrit Smith. In this American’s mansion outside Syracuse, New York, standing in the center of his study, was an ornate mahogany desk. Rumor had it that this had once been the desk of the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte himself. The millennium of William Miller not having arrived on schedule, Smith had become determined to, as he put it, “make himself a colored man” –he desired to explore his inner blackness– and thus he befriended Frederick Douglass (Smith would be Douglass’s friend, that is, up to the point at which he would discover that black Americans were inherently racially inferior to white Americans and thus unworthy of consideration). He, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and George Luther Stearns of the Secret “Six” fully grasped from the earliest moment that the probable result of their attempt to incite a servile insurrection of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies, in order to disrupt relations between Northern and Southern white Americans, toward the generation of a sectional civil war.

Stephen Smith

Stephen Smith, lumber dealer of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Lysander Spooner

The anarchist (or, to deploy a more recent term, libertarian) Boston attorney Lysander Spooner, who was well aware of John Brown’s plans for the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, wrote to Gerrit Smith during January 1859 warning that Brown had neither the men nor the resources to succeed. After the raid he would plot the kidnapping of Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the idea being to take him at pistol point aboard a tug and hold him off the Atlantic coast at threat of execution should Brown be hanged. The motto he chose for himself, that might well be inscribed on his tombstone in Forest Hills Cemetery, was from the INSTITUTES of the Emperor Justinian I of the eastern Roman Empire: “To live honestly is to hurt no one, and give to every one his due.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

George Luther Stearns

George Luther Stearns, a Boston manufacturer of lead pipe and the secretary of the Boston Emancipation League, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and Gerrit Smith of the Secret “Six,” fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in servile insurrection in order to forestall a sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans.

Aaron Dwight Stevens Yes Badly Yes Captain 28 white wounded

Aaron Dwight Stevens, John Brown’s drillmaster, was of old Puritan stock, his great-grandfather having served as a captain during the Revolution. He had run away from home at the age of 16 to serve with a Massachusetts volunteer regiment during the Mexican War. Well over 6 feet, he made himself proficient with the sword. Enlisted in Company F of the 1st US Dragoons, he became their bugler, but at Taos, New Mexico during 1855 he received a sentence of death for “mutiny, engaging in a drunken riot, and assaulting Major George [Alexander Hamilton] Blake.” This was commuted by President Franklin Pierce to 3 years hard labor but he escaped from Fort Leavenworth in 1856, 1st finding refuge with the Delaware tribe and then joining the Kansas Free State militia of James Lane under the name “Whipple.” He became Colonel of the 2d Kansas Militia and met Brown on August 7th, 1856 at the Nebraska line when Lane’s Army of the North marched into “Bleeding Kansas”. He became a devoted follower. He was a spiritualist. At Harpers Ferry, when Brown sent this middleaged man out along with his son Watson Brown to negotiate under a flag of truce, he received 4 bullets but was taken alive. The never- married Stevens had a relationship of sorts with Rebecca B. Spring of the Eagleswood social experiment near Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and after his execution on March 16th would be buried there alongside Albert Hazlett. According to George B. Gill, writing after his death, “Stevens — how gloriously he sang! His was the noblest soul I ever knew. Though owing to his rash, hasty way, I often found occasion to quarrel with him more so than with any of the others, and though I liked [John Henry Kagi] better than any man I ever knew, our temperaments being adapted to each other, yet I can truly say that Stevens was the most noble man that I ever knew.” He was not a 2d time reprieved by the President, and was hanged on March 16th, 1860.

Stewart Taylor Yes Yes Private 23 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Stewart Taylor was born on October 29th, 1836 at Uxbridge in Canada. He became a wagonmaker and in 1853 went to Iowa, where in 1858 he became acquainted with Captain Brown through George B. Gill. He was a very good phonographer [stenographer], rapid and accurate. A spiritualist, he confidently predicted his own death. He signed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, Ontario, Canada West per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. A relative, Jacob L. Taylor of Pine Orchard, Canada West, wrote to Richard J. Hinton on April 23d, 1860 that he had been “heart and soul in the anti-slavery cause.” An excellent debater and very fond of studying history, he stayed at home in Canada during Winter 1858/1859 and then went to Chicago, thence to Bloomington, Illinois and thence to Harper’s [sic] Ferry.” While out of touch with the John Brown movement, the 23-year-old had feared being left behind: “I felt as though I was deprived of my chief object in life.... I believe that fate has decreed me for this undertaking.... It is my chief desire to add fuel to the fire.” When mortally wounded in the engine house, begging to be put out of his misery, Brown instructed him “Die like a man.” What remained of his corpse would be recovered in 1899 from a soggy group pit near the Shenandoah River above Harpers Ferry.

Eli Thayer No

Eli Thayer, an entrepreneur who believed in “doing well by doing good,” formed the New England Emigrant Aid Company, to purchase land in the new territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas” and encourage the right sort of black-despising poor white Americans to settle there by providing information, cheapening transportation, and setting up saw mills and flour mills to give work and incomes to such “decent antislavery” homesteaders. The idea was to send entire communities in one fell swoop, increasing the value of the properties owned by this company. If political control over this territory could be achieved, they would be able to set up a real Aryan Nation, from which slaves would of course be excluded because they were enslaved, and from which free blacks Americans would of course be excluded because as human material they were indelibly inferior. Thayer would comment in retrospect, about the antebellum abolitionists with whom he had been affiliated, that they had constituted “a mutual admiration society possessed by an unusual malignity towards those who did not belong to it.” He would instance that there was never “any diffidence or modesty in sounding their own praises.”

Dauphin Adolphus Thompson Yes Yes Lieutenant < 30 white

Dauphin Adolphus Thompson, brother of William Thompson and a North Elba neighbor of the family of John Brown, was born April 17, 1838. He was “very quiet, with fair, thoughtful face, curly blonde hair, and baby-blue eyes,” a “pippin-cheeked country boy.” His sister Isabella M. Thompson got married with Watson Brown and his elder brother Henry Thompson got married with Captain Brown’s daughter Ruth. “I suppose the folk think we are a set of fools,” he wrote from someplace he described as “Parts Unknown,” “but they will find out we know what we are about.” The two brothers died at Harpers Ferry, Dauphin cowering beneath a fire engine until skewered by a Marine bayonet. Their bodies were placed in the common pit beside the Shenandoah River above town, and exhumed in 1899.

William Thompson Yes Yes Captain? < 30 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

William Thompson was born in New Hampshire in August 1833, the son of Roswell Thompson. During Fall 1858 he married a Mary Brown who was not related to the family of John Brown. His sister Isabella M. Thompson married Watson Brown; his elder brother Henry Thompson married Captain Brown’s daughter Ruth. He “would have made a successful comic actor ... he was very lively and full of funny stories and jokes.” He had started for “Bleeding Kansas” in 1856 but upon meeting the Brown sons returned with them to North Elba. Along with his brother Dauphin Adolphus Thompson, he took part in the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, and the two of them were shot dead. When Captain Brown sent him out from the engine house to negotiate under flag of truce, the mob of citizens placed him under arrest, took him to the local hotel barroom, discussed what to do, dragged him into the street, executed him by shooting him in the head, and dumped his body onto the rocks of the Potomac River. The corpse “could be seen lying at the bottom of the river, with his ghastly face still showing what a fearful death agony he had experienced.” One of his captors commented that for such “villainous Abolitionists,” he “felt justified in shooting any that I could find. I felt it my duty, and I have no regrets.” The corpse was dumped into a common pit on the bank of the Shenandoah River above town, and buried about a foot deep.

Henry David Thoreau No white

When, in 1844, Waldo Emerson, acting as an agent provocateur, recommended to Frederick Douglass’s face that, modeling himself upon the leader of the successful Haitian revolution of the turn of the century, Toussaint Louverture, he fashion himself into the liberator of his people and initiate on the North American continent a servile insurrection or race war, it was Henry Thoreau who after the lecture rushed this information right down to Boston, and had a pamphlet printed up, after which there was no way to dissimulate about the provocation that had been made — and so all Emerson was able to do was pretend that Douglass hadn’t been present. (We, of course, have credited Emerson’s cover story, not because there is any corroboration for it but because ... well, he’s Mr. Emerson and wouldn’t lie to us.)

Charles Plummer Tidd Yes No No Captain 25 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Charles Plummer Tidd was born in Palermo, Maine on January 1st, 1834 and had emigrated to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1856 with the party of Dr. Calvin Cutter of Worcester in search of excitement. After joining John Brown’s party at Mount Tabor, Iowa in 1857 he became one of the followers of “Shubel Morgan” who returned in 1858 to raid into Missouri. During the Winter 1857/1858 encampment of the Brown forces in Springdale, Iowa, he “ruined” a Quaker girl and the other members of the team had to sneak him away during the night. Nevertheless, the group obtained some recruits not overly impressed with the Peace Testimony of George Fox from among the residents of this town, such as the brothers Barclay Coppoc and Edwin Coppoc. He and John E. Cook were particularly warm friends. He signed, as “Charles P. Tidd,” the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, Canada per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18th, 1859. He opposed the attack on Harpers Ferry but nevertheless took part both in the raid on the planter Washington’s home and on the federal arsenal itself, escaped, and made his way on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. He and John Brown’s son Owen Brown would find work and safety, under assumed names, on an oil well in the vicinity of Crawford County, Pennsylvania. He visited Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Canada and took part in the planning for the rescue of Aaron D. Stevens and Albert Hazlett while the Mason Commission of the Congress was presuming that he had been killed in the fighting at Harpers Ferry. According to Mrs. Annie Brown Adams, “Tidd had not much education, but good common sense. After the raid he began to study, and tried to repair his deficiencies. He was by no means handsome. He had a quick temper, but was kind-hearted. His rages soon passed and then he tried all he could to repair damages. He was a fine singer and of strong family affections.” On July 19th, 1861 he was able to enlist under the name “Charles Plummer” and would become a 1st Sergeant of the 21st Massachusetts Volunteers. On February 8th, 1862 he died of fever aboard the transport Northerner during the battle of Roanoke Island. (This was a battle he had particularly wished to take part in because ex-Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the nemesis of the Harpers Ferry raiders, was in command of the Confederates.) Tidd’s, or Charles Plummer’s, grave is #40 in the National Cemetery in New Berne, North Carolina. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

Harriet Tubman No of color

Harriet Tubman was negotiated with by John Brown for participation in the raid on the federal arsenal. She mistrusted these men and had persistent dreams in which Brown and his sons appeared as serpents. The attack had been scheduled to occur on the 4th of July, symbolic of national birth. At the last moment she alleged she was ill, and for this reason as well as delays in the deliveries of supplies, the attack needed to be postponed for months. On the day of the actual attack at Harpers Ferry she had a premonition that it would fail.

Henry Watson No of color

Henry Watson, barber of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania involved both with John Brown and with Frederick Douglass.

etc. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

19TH-CENTURY MASSACHUSETTS ANARCHISTS:

LYSANDER SPOONER

One of the staunchest of Thoreau attackers, Vincent Buranelli, in “The Case Against Thoreau” (Ethics 67), would allege in 1957 that Henry from time to time altered his principles and his tactics with little or no legitimation. Buranelli charged him with having practiced a radical and dangerous politics. In this article we learn that Thoreau’s political theory “points forward to Lenin, the ‘genius theoretician’ whose right it is to force a suitable class consciousness on those who do not have it, and HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

to the horrors that resulted from Hitler’s ‘intuition’ of what was best for Germany.” In this article we learn that Thoreau’s defense of John Brown gave “allegiance to inspiration rather than to ratiocination and factual evidence.” According to this source “Thoreau’s commitment to personal revelation made him an anarchist.” 1 An anarchist? According to the ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA, the term “anarchism” derives from a Greek root signifying “without a rule” and indicates “a cluster of doctrines whose principal uniting feature is the belief that government is both harmful and unnecessary.” So who the hell are these people, the “Anarchists”? —Well, although an early theorist of the no- government society was the Gerrard Winstanley who had founded

the Digger movement in England as of 1649, and although the first widely distributed anarchist writings had been those of William

1. The initials of the person who prepared this material for the EB were “G.W.” — the PROPÆDIA volume lists these initials as belonging to George Woodcock, apparently a recidivist encyclopedist as he is listed as also having prepared a number of other ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA articles. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Godwin as of 1793, and although the first person willing to term

himself an anarchist had been Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, as of 1840, — it turns out that our Henry Thoreau has the honor of

being first on the EB’s shortlist of American suspects! In the United States, a native and mainly nonviolent tradition developed during the 19th century in the writings of Henry Thoreau, Josiah Warren, Lysander Spooner, and Benjamin Tucker (editor of The Anarchist, a highly individualist journal published in Boston). Activist Anarchism in the U.S. was mainly sustained by immigrants from Europe, including Johann Most (editor of Die Frieheit), Alexander Berkman, and Emma Goldman, whose LIVING MY LIFE gives a picture of radical activity in the United States at the turn of the century. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

David S. Reynolds has offered us an interestingly different shortlist in his BENEATH THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE.2 This is to be found on page 98: In reestablishing Thoreau’s links with his age, we should remind ourselves initially of what is already known but sometimes forgotten: he can be directly connected with other reformers and writers of his time. Other Thoreau-like figures included the notable nineteenth-century individualistic anarchists —Josiah Warren, Ezra Heywood, William Batchelder Greene, Stephen Pearl Andrews, and Benjamin Tucker– who were from Thoreau’s home state of Massachusetts and were his contemporaries. What I immediately flashed on when I saw the above allegation was, “Hey, here are 5 guys, all Thoreau’s contemporaries, and all from his home state — and not one of these guys has as yet been captured to be represented in the Stack of the Artist of Kouroo contexture in spite of the fact that we have been working on this database for all of seven years [at that point] and are pushing toward having recorded 500 thumbnail biographies of such contemporaries! –So, why not, have I been overlooking something? Did these five guys have something in common with Thoreau over and above proximity in location and in duration?” The results of my initial Boolean searches are below: Josiah Warren — Nothing found. Ezra Heywood — Nothing found. William Batchelder Greene — There happened to have been a Thomas A. Greene in New Bedford who had rare plants of interest to Thoreau. There happened to have been a Calvin Greene who asked for and paid for a photograph of Thoreau. There happened to have been an Anne Greene Phillips who went to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in the summer of 1840. Relatives maybe? No, there was no William B. Greene to be found. Stephen Pearl Andrews — Nothing found. Benjamin Ricketson Tucker — Nothing found.

I’m not sure what conclusion could be derived from such a study as this, other than perhaps that individualistic anarchists aren’t all that interested in networking with one another, or that proximity in location and duration, such as co-presence in a State or co-presence in a Century, tends to amount to hardly anything at all in the great scheme of things.

One thing I am sure of, however, is that using the standard tactic employed by our FBI, of guilt by association, if the

2. Reynolds, David S. BENEATH THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE: THE SUBVERSIVE IMAGINATION IN THE AGE OF EMERSON AND MELVILLE. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1989. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Federal Bureau of Investigation had ever investigated Thoreau on suspicion of his being an anarchist, they would have concluded that he was “not a keeper.” My reasoning is as follows. The type case of the anarchist would be Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the property-is-theft internationalist who lived and wrote at the same time as Thoreau, and was in and out of prison in France. He would be at the exact center of every anarchist’s hotlist. If Thoreau had been intrigued at all by the various ideas of the various anarchists, for sure he –who read French very adequately– would have been consulting the writings of Proudhon, whose life exactly overlapped his, as they appeared, QUEST CE-QUE LA PROPRIÉTÉ (WHAT IS PROPERTY?) in 1840 followed by WARNING TO PROPRIETORS in 1842 followed by PHILOSOPHIE DE LA MISÈRE (SYSTEM OF ECONOMIC CONTRADICTIONS; OR, THE PHILOSOPHY OF POVERTY) in 1846 followed by LE REPRESENTANT DU PEUPLE in 1848 followed by CONFESSIONS D’UN REVOLUTIONAIRRE in 1849 followed by THE GENERAL IDEA OF THE REVOLUTION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY in 1851 followed by DE LA JUSTICE DANS LA REVOLUTION ET DANS L’EGLISE in 1858. However, we have records on Thoreau’s reading which are at least as good as the stacks of reports which our FBI obsessively collects of the readings and contacts of “suspect” (marginal) persons, and the interesting fact is, Thoreau never ever displayed the slightest interest either in Proudhon or in any other of this mottled collection of scribblers and agitators.

So, here’s the report I would make, if I were an operative investigating Henry Thoreau as a security risk. Taking a clue from the manner in which, in the early 1960s, the national security investigators actually behaved in regard to me personally, I would deliver the following report to my superior officer: “We weren’t able to come up with much, but maybe if we lean on him, we can turn something up. Let’s interrogate, wink wink nudge nudge, him about the fact that Waldo Emerson’s first wife Ellen Louisa Tucker was a Tucker, and in a considerably later timeframe the known anarchist Benjamin Ricketson Tucker was also a Tucker. Had Henry perhaps met Emerson’s first wife? Let’s interrogate him about the fact that Emerson’s second wife, Lidian Jackson Emerson, did receive, in 1843 in Concord, evidently by post, a gift of a volume of tales translated by the man who in 1854 would become the father of the know anarchist William Batchelder Greene. Did Thoreau perhaps borrow this book from Lidian and read these tales? What did he make of them? Was there any suspicious disloyal content? We both know that the real purpose of such “investigations” is persecution, and that they are designed to put the fear of the Lord in people and make sure they understand who is boss. Let’s do like we did with Austin Meredith and tell him that we interviewed his mother — and that his mother had told us all about how when he was a teenager, she found out that he masturbated. Who knows what guilty connections will show up?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1808

January 19, Tuesday: Ebenezer Hubbard Flint was born in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, son of the Congregational Reverend Timothy Flint and Abigail Hubbard Flint.3

Lysander Spooner was born on a family farm near Athol, Massachusetts. The father, about whom this son would record not one single word, was Asa Spooner (February 20, 1778, Petersham-August 14, 1850, Athol, Massachusetts). The mother, whom this son would characterize as “one of the kindest of mothers and one of the best of women,” was Dolly Brown Spooner (July 3, 1784, Petersham-October 20, 1845, Athol, Massachusetts).4

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 3rd day 19 of 1 M / At the funeral of a child of Asa Sissions my mind was lead into a precious feeling state & was truly thankful that I was thus kept alive notwithstanding my unfaithfulness -While setting in the room I felt much for the poor mother who was present with another sick child in her Arms & altho’ it was very uneasy a part of the time & crying, yet it did not disturb me or to appearance the rest of the company, but was a time of favor tho’ the company was but small —

3. Hey, this time the reverend bothered himself to write down the date of birth in the church records! Is the guy turning over a new leaf? 4. Lysander was the Spartan admiral who brought the long and bitter Peloponnesian War to an end by destroying the Athenian fleet. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

It has been my lot of late to keep much in shallow waters fearing to lanch out into the deep least my faith fail & I like poor Peter begin to sink, but now find my strength has a little increased, or at least I have thought so today RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1825

January 19, Wednesday: Ezra Daggett and a nephew, Thomas Kensett, of New-York, obtained a patent for storing food in a tin can.

This was Lysander Spooner’s 16th birthday, a “coming of age.” It may seem strange in this modern era, but in that era and in that locale this teenager was considered obligated to commence to repay his own father and mother for having fed and reared him during the tender years of his childhood. From his 16th to his 25th year, therefore, Lysander would be bound by a formal apprentice document to labor on the Spooner family farm in Athol, Massachusetts with his family of origin in return obligated to provide an apprentice’s room and board, plus “good educational advantages.”5

5. In addition Lysander Spooner would receive a salary as the tutor of a wealthy farmer’s children, in nearby Winchendon, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1833

January 19, Saturday: Ferdinand Herold died of tuberculosis in Paris at the age of 41.

(Which is to say, per the literature published in this year by Dr. William Alcott, that he had masturbated himself to death.)

On his birthday Lysander Spooner became free of his 9-year “apprenticeship” to his father on the family farm in Athol, Massachusetts, required in order to “pay his father back” for the expenses of having reared him through his tender years. He would go to nearby Worcester and read law in the offices of John Davis and Charles Allen, coming eventually to being considered “very reliable” in the examination and execution of titles. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1834

The name of the Church Christ was changed, to The Church of the Latter Day Saints.

Lysander Spooner’s THE DEIST’S IMMORTALITY, AND AN ESSAY ON MAN’S ACCOUNTABILITY FOR HIS BELIEF was a pamphlet intended to “awaken opposition to the Clergy and Christianity.” The type case offered, of a Christian clergyman, was not the Reverend William Ellery Channing, but contemporary revivalists, and in particular the sort of religious opportunist such as Joseph Smith, who was capable of deluding and enslaving “the imaginations of the young” and transforming all of us into “dupes, fools, slaves, cowards, bigots, and fanatics.” –All these folks are doing when they don the clerical collar, he suggested, is seeking easy prestige and easy living. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1835

April 8, Wednesday: Lysander Spooner purchased business cards: Lysander Spooner. Offers to the public his services In the Profession of the Law. Offices in the Central Exchange. Worcester, April 8, 1835.

May 13, Wednesday: The 1st foreign embassy in Hawaii was established.

Lysander Spooner placed an advertisement in the Worcester Republican: Lysander Spooner. Offers to the public his services In the Profession of the Law. Offices in the Central Exchange.

August 9, Sunday: Henry Thoreau’s espousal of a “higher law,” a need to obey the dictates of one’s personal conscience even when this conflicted with the demands of statute law and of custom and precedent, can usefully be compared and contrasted with the attitude of the US Postmaster General, Amos Kendall, toward the South’s perceived need to purge abolitionist writings such as the Liberator from the US mail. On this date Kendall wrote to the postmaster of Charleston allowing that he could begin to search the mails for incoming materials like the Liberator, and burn any offending documents:6

We owe an obligation to the laws, but a higher one to the community in which we live and, if the former be perverted to destroy the latter, it is patriotism to disregard them.

Here is what Lewis Perry has had to say about this concept of the Higher Law, which, he pointed out, was “a phrase with important variations in meaning”: The phrase has been much favored by historians, but was not used frequently by nonresistant abolitionists. The higher law could refer simply to the obligations of Christian conscience which prevented compliance with an unjust civil statute (in which case it was a component of the divine government as understood by non- nonresistants). It could refer to the embodiment of universal, legal morality within the unwritten code of the land (as in [Lysander] Spooner’s writings). It could also refer to a

6. This would be termed the “Post Office Lynch Law.” It was a volkish attitude worthy of the Third Reich. Thoreau, by espousing a higher law based not upon this putative “obligation to the community in which we live” but instead upon one’s personal relationship with God, was at least in part seeking to subvert such racist illegalism. Tongue in cheek, he turned the US Postmaster’s own argument quite against these racists and their all-white community. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Christian standard of politics toward which saints were expected to drive their governments (whether this was a libertarian or authoritarian standard varied among political abolitionists). And in contemporary justification of John Brown it referred to a state of grace in which one man, by virtue of his faith in his ideas, became his own source of law, higher than any government. Nonresistants may be compared with Transcendentalists to clarify different implications of the higher law. With few exceptions, nonresistants believed that there was one grand source of law outside their sphere of understanding: God. Fear of affronting this authority dictated broad leeway of private judgment. It was clear that intermediate forms of coercion, government, and enslavement violated God’s law; the range of options left for private judgment was clearly restricted by God’s law. Transcendentalism, generally speaking, assumed correspondence between abstract verities and human impulses, and thus it trusted strictly individual, but nonetheless human, sources of law. Less attention was paid to God the lawmaker. A man had to obey his own nature. Lacking the security of fixed prohibitions, such as that violence and homicide are infractions of the divine law, the transcendentalist might be left in deeper difficulties than the nonresistant by the relativity of private judgment. He might feel unqualified admiration for John Brown as, in Emerson’s words, “a pure idealist, with no by-ends of his own,” as a man who “believed in his ideas to the extent that he existed to put them all into action; he said ‘he did not believe in moral suasion, he believed in putting the thing through.’” Bronson Alcott, the only one of those ordinarily called Transcendentalists who was also a Garrisonian nonresistant, provided one of the most striking examples of nonviolent action in the 1850s. When armed abolitionists were being repelled in their attempt to deliver a Negro fugitive from Boston’s court house, Alcott stepped forward and asked quietly, “Why are we not within?” His dignity was unruffled by a response of gunfire, but no one followed him. Though his action did not free anyone, Alcott furnished one of the rare examples of “practical Christianity” or active nonresistance. It is meaningful to say that he excelled other nonresistants on their own terms. We might conclude that, when the law of intuition was made identical with the Christian injunction of nonresistance, the result was proof against even such temptations as the plight of an imprisoned runaway. Alcott did not need to devise categories to exhort other men to violence. But no one else combined nonresistance and transcendentalism. And even Alcott, when he met John Brown, wrote ominously in his journal: “This is the man to do the Deed.” Most Transcendentalists spurned nonresistance. Brook Farm criticized Hopedale for presuming that divine laws, such as nonresistance, could be generalized in a creed. Orestes Brownson carried transcendentalism into a militant espousal of the interests of labor; in this cause he thought that armed HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

resistance could be a Christian necessity. Although he wished that the world might comply with the principle of peace, he was shocked when nonresistants criticized Bunker Hill, “where Liberty and Slavery once met in the death-struggle.” Emerson praised the principle of nonresistance lavishly in his diaries, but these private judgments were part of an inner life, walled off from public action. [The Reverend] Adin Ballou could not admire Emerson for this reason. If some of his “transcendental abstractions” were put into practice, they might “regenerate the world. But the fatal hitch with such moralists is that neither they nor their admirers can sail out of the old ship of society as it is.” Emerson had told Ballou that his “utmost” would be to guide his own family above the plane of earthly strife. [The Reverend Theodore Parker] did not lay the same priority on private life; he was an active abolitionist. Clear on most subjects, he was ambiguous about nonresistance. Although he respected nonresistants, he stated that the doctrine “never went down with me” — and for a transcendentalist it was what went down with him that counted. He admitted that his private opinions had fluctuated considerably on nonresistance; the BIBLE was not altogether clear, but he was not in any case “inclined to settle such questions on the authority of Jesus.... I could not cast down my own nature and be faithless to my own soul.” He did not preach on the question, favorably or unfavorably, because his mind was not made up, because men needed no urging to fight, and because nonviolence was right in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. But in being faithful to his own ideas, of course, he was associated with the most violent quarters of antislavery; he was one of the “Secret Six” who conspired with John Brown. Thoreau deserves special attention since he is often called an anarchist and since his philosophy is sometimes compared to Garrisonianism. His views had little in common with nonresistance. Alcott’s program for the New England nonresistants was the distillation from their consciences of persuasive simple truths; these were the measures with which he sought to evangelize the coercive world. Thoreau, on the other hand, paid little attention to the existence of universal truths. He placed a somewhat mystical value on particular experiences; he doubted the possibility of universal reform with a Calvinistic vehemence. His few remarks on antislavery, including his praise of John Brown, reveal a violent potential in what often is considered a philosophy of principled nonviolence. Thoreau was generally critical of the reformers. In 1854, however, after Massachusetts had rendered a fugitive slave back to his owners, he spoke at a protest meeting in Framingham, Massachusetts. Much of his time was spent in arguing the superiority of the countryside to the city and in attacking newspapers as bulwarks of slavery. He also used higher law to support arguments already familiar to antislavery — any HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

perceiver of truth must judge the judges, law cannot make men free. But it was necessary for Thoreau to explain how he had gotten onto an antislavery platform in the first place: “I had never respected the government near to which I had lived, but I had foolishly thought I might manage to live here, minding my private affairs, and forget it.” How he was impressed that his life was passing, not through some neutral zone, but “wholly within hell.” Even this shock did not mean that he joined organized reform. But he was ready, four years later, to condemn it for failing to equal his admiration for the hero John Brown. “A man of rare common sense and directness of speech, as of action; a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and principles,” was his conception of Brown. This soldier “had no need to invent anything but to tell the simple truth, and communicate his own resolution.” His martyrdom fed Thoreau’s hatred of the respectable, commercial world. But Thoreau was not opposed to any government except that which disturbed his peace of mind. He explicitly identified Brown with a government needing no suffrage to establish justice and resist tyranny and occupying a Christian beachhead. Thoreau brooded over the execution of John Brown and, a year later, he set his reflections down clearly. The martyr had been “the embodiment of principle,” and therefore it was irrelevant to pass judgment on his means: “The man who does not recognize in Brown’s words a wisdom and nobleness, and therefore an authority, superior to our laws, is a modern Democrat. This is the test by which to discover him. He is not wilfully but constitutionally blind on this side, and he is consistent with himself.” Harpers Ferry was a test of personal sanctification; sinners could be discriminated from saints according to the ways in which different persons responded to Brown. As Thoreau proceeded to ridicule the ambitions and even the physical appearance of his neighbors, he spoke in terms of original sin:

“It is not every man who can be a Christian, even in a very moderate sense, whatever education you give him. It is a matter of constitution and temperament, after all. He may have to be born again many times. I have known many a man who pretended to be a Christian, in whom it was ridiculous, for he had no genius for it. It is not every man who can be a free man, even.”

We may judge from this last sentence that not even in his veneration of Captain John Brown had Thoreau become an abolitionist. Brown became Thoreau’s personal Christ, a figure of unquestionable authority to liberate him from oppressive visions of authority. In the resulting scheme of law, Brown’s importance HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

as a reformer was dismissed; he was simply a vengeful foe of the unregenerate. Thoreau was able to celebrate “Resistance to Civil Government” (this was the original title of his great 1849 essay on civil disobedience).

So intent was he on the signs of his private consciousness, however, that he scarcely spoke of sinless alternatives to civil government. It was enough to worship the heroism –the faith in ideas– of Captain John Brown. This brief look at the Transcendentalists gives perspective on the vacillations of the nonresistants in the 1850s. Nonresistants may not have measured up very well to their own original standards of pacifism, but they never ventured to proclaim any man a law unto himself. They also kept their minds on the goal of abolishing slavery more clearly than such a worshiper of John Brown as Thoreau. But transcendentalists and nonresistants shared the problem of how the validity of principles could be fixed between the sovereign individual and the sovereign God. The transcendentalists decided some men could embody principles and bring them to life. The nonresistant was left with the relativity of private judgment.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day Morning rose early & Seth Davis took me to the Lexington & returned home in plenty of time to have gone to Meeting, but feeling quite fatigued & unwell, was satisfied to stay at home but attended the Afternoon sitting, it was however to me a season of leanness tho’ Father was engaged in testimony & I have no doubt it was a time of favour & good feeling to some -but the body & mind are so connected that when one suffers the other is very likely to RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

8th month 26th (August 26, Wednesday): Friend Joseph Ricketson, Senior of New Bedford wrote to Dr. William Andrus Alcott about his family’s food habits: VIEW THE PAGE IMAGES

Lysander Spooner published in the Worcester Republican a petition, against the tradition that non-college- graduates would be required to read law in a law office for 5 full years before sitting for the bar examination, that also would be posted to each member of the Massachusetts General Court. Rich kids get sent to college, whereas poor kids need to be self-educated, but, he wondered, was that any reason to discriminate against them? Was it really necessary that the state rally to the safeguarding of its most privileged ones, against the prospect that the unprivileged might somewhere somehow someday take unfair advantage of them? To the Members of the Legislature of Massachusetts ...No one has yet ever dared advocate, in direct terms, so monstrous a principle as that the rich ought to be protected by law from the competition of the poor.... HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1836

Lysander Spooner may well have had his own parents Asa and Dolly Brown Spooner in mind as case types when, in THE DEIST’S REPLY TO THE ALLEGED SUPERNATURAL EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY, another pamphlet intended to “awaken opposition to the Clergy and Christianity,” he ventured the sexist notion that only women, not men, were gullible enough to believe fables such as those of the NEW TESTAMENT. However, the type case he actually did offer in this pamphlet was neither his mom nor the Reverend William Ellery Channing, but contemporary revivalists, and in particular the sort of religious opportunist such as Joseph Smith, who was capable of deluding and enslaving “the imaginations of the young” and transforming all of us into “dupes, fools, slaves, cowards, bigots, and fanatics.” –All these folks are doing when they don the clerical collar, he suggested, is seeking easy prestige and easy living. HISTORY OF THE BIBLE

Granville Penn’s THE BOOK OF THE NEW COVENANT OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST, BEING A CRITICAL REVISION OF THE TEXT AND TRANSLATION OF THE ENGLISH VERSION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, WITH THE AID OF MOST ANCIENT MANUSCRIPTS UNKNOWN TO THE AGE IN WHICH THAT VERSION WAS LAST PUT FORTH BY AUTHORITY (London: James Moyes, for James Duncan, Paternoster Row).

Elijah Abel, a black American, became an Elder in the Mormon priesthood, and was then ordained to the highest priesthood office of “Seventy.” He would serve as a minister of the Gospel in upstate New York and Canada for the remainder of the 1830s, surviving even a charge that he had murdered a mother and her 5 children, up to the point at which he began to be suspected of having contrary ideas about the group’s doctrine. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

March: Lysander Spooner applied to Albert Gallatin, president of the National Bank of New-York, for an entry-level job as bank clerk, but would not then complete even a year of employment. Instead, as soon as he was able, he and a friend, Hezekiah Lord Hosmer, headed toward a land speculation boom in the Maumee River Basin of the Ohio country.

From this month into May, the Alamo was reoccupied by Centralist forces. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1837

Life in a farming community proving rather monotonous, John Augustus Roebling sought work in the discipline for which he had trained. Extensive canal and slack-water improvements were then in progress in most of the states of the Union, and he was able to obtain work as an assistant engineer on the slack-water navigation of the Beaver river, a tributary of the Ohio. This would be followed by an engagement on the Sandy and Beaver Canal intended to connect the waters of Lake Erie with the Ohio River, which would never be completed due to lack of means and due to the progress of the railways. His last employment on works of this kind would be on the upper Allegheny River, installing a feeder for the Pennsylvania state canal. Entering the service of the state of Pennsylvania, he would be employed for three years in surveying and locating three lines of railway across the Allegheny mountains, from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, the road being ultimately built by the Pennsylvania central railway company rather than by the state.

It seemed like a great idea at the time, so Lysander Spooner purchased 80 acres on the Maumee River, an empty plot that eventually would comprise the entire municipality of Gilead, since renamed Grand Rapids, Ohio (if you’ve never heard of this place, that’s only because it would be bypassed in canal-development plans and now has merely a few hundred inhabitants). Payment at that time could be financed by mortgages –with even down payments consisting entirely of other mortgage documents– but however small the amount of cash money Spooner actually had invested, this land scheme would be hit hard by the Panic of 1837, beginning on the eastern seaboard in the month of May and striking with full force in Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan by 1839. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1838

September 8, Saturday: Giuseppe Verdi and his wife arrived in Milan during the coronation festivities for Emperor Ferdinand as King of Lombardy. He was there in an attempt to stage his opera Oberto.

For Lysander Spooner it was “a self-evident truth that all men are naturally and rightfully free.” That human beings are born with the inalienable quality of freedom underlay all his arguments. Nathaniel Peabody Rogers outlined Spooner’s principle in this day’s issue of his newspaper, The Herald of Freedom. “A man cannot be a subject of human ownership; neither can he be the owner of humanity. There is a clear and eternal incompetency on both sides A man cannot alienate his right to liberty and to himself, — still less can it be taken from him.” Spooner also argued that “the principle of natural law, which makes a calf belong to the owner of the cow, does not make the child of a slave belong to the owner of the slave because both cow and calf are naturally subjects of property; while neither men nor children are naturally subjects of property.”

Waldo Emerson to his JOURNAL:

Henry Thoreau told a good story of William Parkman, who (kept store) lived in the house he now occupies, & kept a store close by. He hung out a salt fish for a sign, & it hung so long & grew so hard, black & deformed, that the deacon forgot what thing it was, & nobody in town knew, but being examined chemically it proved to be salt fish. But duly every morning the deacon hung it on its peg.

(During this year, on the Georges Bank, a fisherman brought up a humongous cod that would weigh in at 180 pounds.)

This early story about Deacon William Parkman of the general store on Main Street (near where the Concord HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Free Public Library now stands) would later be worked into the WALDEN text as:

WALDEN: This closed car smells of salt fish, the strong New PEOPLE OF England and commercial scent, reminding me of the Grand Banks and WALDEN the fisheries. Who has not seen a salt fish, thoroughly cured for this world, so that nothing can spoil it, and putting the perseverance of the saints to the blush? with which you may sweep or pave the streets, and split your kindlings, and the teamster shelter himself and his lading against sun wind and rain behind it, –and the trader, as a Concord trader once did, hang it up by his door for a sign when he commences business, until at last his oldest customer cannot tell surely whether it be animal, vegetable, or mineral, and yet it shall be as pure as a snowflake, and if it be put into a pot and boiled, will come out an excellent dun fish for a Saturday’s dinner.

WILLIAM PARKMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1840

The beginning of the Signs of the Times gazette of the Millerites. At some point, poorly documented, the attorney Lysander Spooner sprang to the pro bono legal defense of some Worcester area true believers who had refused to retain an attorney after being arrested on vagrancy charges, and secured their release.

SEEDS : Who could believe in prophecies of Daniel or of Miller that the world would end this summer, while one milkweed with faith matured its seeds?

WILLIAM MILLER HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

July 15, Wednesday: Without the knowledge of the French ambassador, François Pierre Guillaume Guizot, and definitely against his better judgment, France signed a treaty that led it to begin preparations for war. The French king would need to bring this crisis to an end by refusing his assent to these military preparations. He would summon Guizot from London to form a new French government and assist him in what His Majesty termed “ma lutte tenace contre l’anarchie.”

Great Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia signed an alliance which imposed terms on the Egyptian Mohammed Ali and supported the Ottoman Sultan against him. The terms stated that if he would withdraw his troops from Syria and return the Turkish fleet, he would be recognized as Pasha of Egypt and Syria.

After his financial collapse in Ohio Lysander Spooner had returned to his father Asa Spooner’s farm in Athol, Massachusetts. He hadn’t sulked there, he had put on his thinking cap. He had acquired a new hard-won appreciation of the modalities of banking and finance. What the world obviously needed was some sort of banking system that instead of enabling such catastrophes as the Panic of 1837, would effectively prevent any recurrence. How does a nation transform from being financially exuberant, in 1836, to being virtually bankrupt (in 1840) when it is in possession of all the resources of an entire continent, and has in addition a plenty of human ingenuity? The Democrats were blaming the panic on the monopoly power of the Second Bank of the United States and the paper values that lack of hard specie had brought forward (paper currency, bonds, mortgages, stock, what have you), while the Whigs were blaming it all on President Andrew Jackson and his Specie Circular of 1836 forbidding government agents from accepting anything other than specie in payment for public lands, and his struggle against the bank, but Spooner paid no attention to such partisan chatter. He was searching for the sort of certitude and indisputability that would only be found through the discovery of a natural law like the law of gravity: “Natural law, in regard to all human rights, is capable of being ascertained with nearly absolute certainty.” Reality, that was what he was after — reality. He therefore posted on this day a letter to the Worcester Palladium. I will spare you the letter itself but the ideas he sponsored in it would come to further development in 1843 in CONSTITUTIONAL LAW RELATIVE TO CREDIT, CURRENCY AND BANKING, and be expanded in 1846 in POVERTY, ITS ILLEGAL CAUSES AND LEGAL CURE, and be expanded further in 1861 in A NEW SYSTEM OF PAPER CURRENCY. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1842

Sorely disappointed by his Ohio prospects, Lysander Spooner sought out another avenue to wealth and freedom in New-York City. The United States Postal Service, legally secure from any competition, had been being its usual bureaucratic, lackadaisical self. Canals, turnpikes, and the 1st railroads had cheapened and hastened transportation while the cost of postage had remained the same. It cost a dollar to send a 1-ounce letter from New-York to Buffalo, New York. Most postage needed to be paid for, at this point, in Spanish coins. During the 1840s people responded to this by discovering ways to circumvent the law. It was illegal for citizens to “take up, receive, order, dispatch, carry, convey or deliver any letter or letters, packet or packets, other than newspapers for hire or reward,” but some found that they could send a newspaper at its cheaper rate, while conveying on it a message by underlining certain letters or words. Or, they might send a package of letters as merchandise by an express company. When postal inspectors in this year proceeded against one of the most flagrant violators, Adams & Company, seeking with this case to discourage the general practice, the Post Office would discover that neither the court nor the postal customers had any sympathy for them.

February 15, Tuesday: A private New-York mail delivery company issued the 1st adhesive postage stamp in the U.S.

The Reverend William Adam was elected Treasurer of the Association of Industry and Education, and Joseph Conant was elected its President. During this month the Reverend Adam was helping issue a “Preliminary Circular” describing the plan for the Association, which evidently caused Lucy Maria Kollock Brastow Mack and David Mack to change their minds about papers they had just signed with Brook Farm, and come to Northampton to reside instead. The focus of the Northampton association was going to be upon an early version of the Socialist dream of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” in that each participant would contribute according to his or her ability, without recourse to any patriarchal hierarchy or racial division of labor, and would receive according to his or her individual need, in a spirit which was referred to as “equal brotherhood.” (Although the ideology of this association has been portrayed by some as Fourierist, by others as “middle class,” by others as “Transcendentalist,” and by others as “extreme perfectionist” and as “nonresistant,” their contemporary, the newspaper editor of Concord, New Hampshire, Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, would categorize them merely as “a peculiar body, and of peculiar individual character.” The Northampton Association of Education and Industry was so advanced in its racial thinking that it even accepted as a member the white widow of a black man.7) COMMUNITARIANISM

Cass advised Webster that, since the Quintuple Treaty obligated its signers to board and search commercial vessels on the high seas in a manner objectionable to the USA, altering the hitherto recognized law of nations, he had on his own responsibility sent a warning to M. Guizot, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, that this was something that we might be prepared to go to war over:

7. Otohiko Okugawa’s “Annotated List of Communal and Utopian Societies, 1789-1919,” published as part of the DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN COMMUNAL AND UTOPIAN HISTORY (editor Robert S. Fogarty, Westport CT, 1980, pages 173-233), listed some 119 communal societies established in the USA between 1800 and 1859, not counting those that existed only in “plan and prospectus.” This list of 119 is known, however, to be incomplete; see Dare, Philip N., AMERICAN COMMUNES TO 1860, for a more recent take. Evidence of previously unknown communities continues to turn up from time to time. This decade of the 1840s would turn out to be the key decade for the trend, with at least 59 new communities being formed, most of which would last no longer than two years. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

“SIR: The recent signature of a treaty, having for its object the suppression of the African slave trade, by five of the powers of Europe, and to which France is a party, is a fact of such general notoriety that it may be assumed as the basis of any diplomatic representations which the subject may fairly require.” The United States is no party to this treaty. She denies the Right of Visitation which England asserts. [quotation from the presidential message of December 7, 1841] This principle is asserted by the treaty. “... The moral effect which such a union of five great powers, two of which are eminently maritime, but three of which have perhaps never had a vessel engaged in that traffic, is calculated to produce upon the United States, and upon other nations who, like them, may be indisposed to these combined movements, though it may be regretted, yet furnishes no just cause of complaint. But the subject assumes another aspect when they are told by one of the parties that their vessels are to be forcibly entered and examined, in order to carry into effect these stipulations. Certainly the American Government does not believe that the high powers, contracting parties to this treaty, have any wish to compel the United States, by force, to adopt their measures to its provisions, or to adopt its stipulations ...; and they will see with pleasure the prompt disavowal made by yourself, sir, in the name of your country, ... of any intentions of this nature. But were it otherwise, ... They would prepare themselves with apprehension, indeed, but without dismay —with regret, but with firmness— for one of those desperate struggles which have sometimes occurred in the history of the world.” If, as England says, these treaties cannot be executed without visiting United States ships, then France must pursue the same course. It is hoped, therefore, that his Majesty will, before signing this treaty, carefully examine the pretensions of England and their compatibility with the law of nations and the honor of the United States. SENATE DOCUMENT, 27th Congress, 3d session, II. No. 52, and IV. No. 223; 29th Congress, 1st session, VIII. No. 377, pages 192-5. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1843

Although the full details of Lysander Spooner’s monetary proposal would not appear until 1861 (A NEW SYSTEM OF PAPER CURRENCY), his legal defense of his new system, CONSTITUTIONAL LAW RELATIVE TO CREDIT, CURRENCY AND BANKING, appeared at this point, and POVERTY, ITS ILLEGAL CAUSES AND LEGAL CURE would appear in 1846. What he was after was a completely voluntary political economy, one capable of functioning without governmental intervention, and capable of functioning without coercion, whether public or private –face it, this guy was a Libertarian –and not just a Libertarian, he was a “Libertarian With A Plan.” He with an appeal for enforcement of Article 1, Section 10 of the existing US Constitution: “The Constitution of the United States declares that ‘No state shall pass any law impairing the obligation of contracts.’” It would be quite enough, for the courts merely to enforce this one single simple sentence. Doing so would create a free banking system by eliminating all this governmental interference with the currency.

In an attempt to implement the ideas of Charles Fourier, the North American Phalanx began its operations on nearly 700 acres of land on Raritan Bay near Red Bank, New Jersey. It would have its own “Eagleswood” school and would be credited by some with being “the first to grow okra or gumbo for the New-York market.”8

The association agreed upon a constitution which provided for administration through a council. Initially, only stockholders were able to vote in elections for the council, but in an 1848 amendment all members would be given a vote. The council was composed of a president, vice-president, a treasurer, and 12 directors. Its directors served for two years with staggered terms, so that half were elected each year. The president, vice-

8. During the 1840s Albert Brisbane and other followers of the theories of Charles Fourier would be establishing 28 working “phalanx” communities across the United States, and the longest lasting of these, this North American Phalanx in New Jersey, would keep going and going like the Energizer Bunny, until 1856. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

president, and treasurer served one-year terms. COMMUNITARIANISM

November: Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts traveled to dedicate an observatory in Cincinnati, and to other points in Ohio, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. He would return from these celebrations just in time for his work in the 28th federal Congress as it opened.

The Britannia docked at Boston after a rough passage.

Adams & Company was being prosecuted for attempting to deny the Post Office its presumed monopoly by offering a competitive because more affordable postal service. When the case of the United States of America v. Adams & Company was put before the jury for its decision, the judge in the case instructed the jury that although under postal law it was illegal for anyone to set up a stagecoach or other company to transport the mail, the law had not forbidden commissioned passengers from carrying mail. The jury, therefore, found the company not guilty because “there is no law to convict them” (this jury decision may have been what provoked Lysander Spooner’s TRIAL BY JURY). After this decision, a number of companies would be formed to carry letters, as it would be easy to make money by hand-carrying letters in such a manner, handing them directly to their recipient. Lysander Spooner’s American Letter Mail Company was one of those opportunistic companies. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1844

January 11, Monday: The Alcott family was in temporary accommodations in 3 rooms of the Lovejoy home in the nearby village of Harvard, Massachusetts. Their assets were $32.00 in cash and 4 daughters from age 4 to age 13. The assets of the Consociate Family at Fruitlands were assumed by Joseph Palmer “in consideration of seventeen hundred dollars” additional investment, and his assumption of a $300.00 mortgage still held by Godfrey Sparrow.

Before beginning his American Letter Mail Company, Lysander Spooner sent a personal letter to Postmaster General Charles Wickliffe to alert him that he would soon “establish a letter mail from Boston to Baltimore. I shall myself remain in this city, where I shall be ready at any time to answer to any suit.” With this letter he sent along a copy of his “The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress Prohibiting Private Mails” (clearly, he was out looking for trouble, and in the worst way: “Please stop me before I make a pile of money!”). HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

January 23, Tuesday: Charles Calistus Burleigh lectured against slavery at Boston’s Amory Hall.

Lysander Spooner’s American Letter Mail Company began operations. The company advertisements in all the major newspapers announced an intention to “test the constitutional right of free competition, in the business of carrying letters.” It began to print its own stamps and hire letter carriers, and would soon be doing good business. Indeed, in a few short months, such private mail companies would capture the bulk of the mail service between Boston, New-York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

June: In Northampton, George W. Benson made a kind offer to buy out the Association of Industry and Education and convert its facilities into a private manufacturing corporation — but 26 members, a large majority, would decline this salvation.

COMMUNITARIANISM

Lysander Spooner issued a pamphlet the argument of which was that while citizens have a “natural right” to work and thereby accumulate property, no agency of government has any “natural right” to abrogate this (he had previously challenged the notion that it was the government who handed out permissions, rather than the citizens having intrinsic rights, when he had argued in opposition to the licensing of lawyers by the government). Of course, the federal Congress and the Postmaster General would need to rise to such a challenge, because private enterprise would pick all the low-hanging fruit of mail delivery between large cities that were close to each other, while neglecting the vast ranges of the nation in which postal customers were sparsely distributed! If Spooner was allowed to get away with such skimming, the US Post Office would soon find itself restricted to delivering only the lossy stuff: mail service that it was not lucrative for such private carriers to provide. The Postmaster General therefore advised the transport companies that he would cancel the government contracts of anyone caught carrying mail for Spooner’s American Letter Mail Company. Sitting in Circuit Court, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story ruled that it was an open question “whether the United States had any exclusive right to establish post office and post routes.” Nevertheless, while the case of a letter carrier arrested in Baltimore was under appeal, the US Postal Service continued to harass the American Letter Mail Company by arresting other of its carriers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

July: Under a barrage of harassing lawsuits and arrests of agents by the US Postal Service, directed by the Postmaster General himself, Lysander Spooner’s American Letter Mail Company soon found itself unable to conduct business. The failed businessman returned to the Spooner family farm in Athol, Massachusetts.

Orestes Augustus Brownson went public with his own convincement:

We have no wish to disguise the fact, nor could we, if we would — that our ecclesiastical, theological, and philosophical studies have brought us to the full conclusion, that, either the Church in communion with the See of Rome is the one holy catholic apostolic church, or the one holy catholic does not exist.

Actual acceptance into the Holy Roman Catholic Church, however, would not occur until October 20th. During the intervening months Brownson would need to be studying theology under Bishop Fitzpatrick, a prelate who was most strongly suspicious of Brownson’s original doctrine of life and communion and who would insist upon careful tutoring of this particular hot potato in the traditional Scholastic apologetic.

While much of this was going down Henry Thoreau wasn’t in the vicinity. He was hiking to Mount

Monadnock and Mount Greylock (Saddleback), where by prearrangement he would join up with Ellery HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Channing, and then they would go on to the Hudson River, take a boat, and visit the Catskills.9

He wouldn’t be back in Concord until August.

July 22, Monday: The Reverend William Archibald Spooner began to use “spoonerisms.”

The Overture to Faust was performed for the initial time, in the Palais des Königlichen grossen Gartens of Dresden, and was conducted by the composer Richard Wagner himself. LISTEN TO IT NOW

9. I have seen a report out of The Thoreau Society that he met, in Catskill, New York, the painters Thomas Cole and Frederick Church – but this is something I have been unable to verify. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

September 8, Sunday: Lysander Spooner appealed to Gerrit Smith for financial support for 3 months’ living expenses in Boston, so he would be able to complete a work demonstrating that, no matter what attitude was being taken by the Garrisonians toward the US Constitution, that document was simply not proslavery. As an indication of the sort of author that he was, he sent along a copy of his 1843 work, THE UNCONSTITUTIONALITY OF THE LAW RELATIVE TO BANKING, CURRENCY, AND MONEY. Smith would respond not only with cash but also with encouragement. In challenging the slaveowners’ interpretation of the US Constitution, an interpretation which they commonly based upon the legal tradition of Blackstone, Spooner would meet the enemy on what they took to be their strongest ground. His argument in THE UNCONSTITUTIONALITY OF SLAVERY would base itself not on historical or sociological evidences but on the logic and reason of abstract law. “The Constitution itself is the same now that it was the moment it was adopted. It cannot have been altered by all the false interpretations that may have been put upon it” (page 218). He based this largely on the preamble to the Constitution, which deployed the category “We the people” rather than “We the states of the union,” arguing that the phrase “people” included all men, women, and children, living in the country as of 1789 and their posterity, which group definitely included people with dark skin. Spooner argued that various of the provisions and benefits of the Constitution, such as the rights of commerce, post office service, military protection, bearing of arms in self-defense, making contracts, eligibility to be President, trial by jury, and the privilege of habeas corpus, apply to all people born within the territory claimed by the United States of America. The document guarantees to such persons a republican form of government. This is the view of the constitutional rights of citizens that would be written into the XIVth Amendment: No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Spooner’s insistence on the right of the people to resist the usurpations of their government, “a strictly constitutional right ... the exercise of [which] is neither rebellion against the constitution, nor revolution, [but] a maintenance of the constitution itself, by keeping the government within the constitution,” has not, of course, despite repeated incidents, ever become any recognized part of our jurisprudence. However, it is not difficult to grasp what rock it is that all these “Second Amendment Solutions” people, such as the Bundy family, have been crawling out from underneath: Nothing but the strength of the people, and a knowledge that they will forcibly resist any very gross transgression of the authority granted by them to their representatives, deters representatives from enriching themselves, and perpetuating their power, by plundering and enslaving the people. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Henry Thoreau had helped arrange for the printing of Waldo Emerson’s speech of August 1st at the annual fair of the Anti-Slavery Society of Middlesex County, celebrating the 1st of August liberation of the slaves of the British West Indies, by James Munroe & Company. On this day “On the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies” was published in Boston. [see following screen]

Emerson would forward this American publication on emancipation to his British publisher, John Chapman. The Concord address, he would comment, although it was responding to a “popular call,” was also an “intrusion.”10

“EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES”

10. Slater, Joseph, ed. THE CORRESPONDENCE OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE. NY: Columbia UP, 1964, page 373. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

AN ADDRESS

DELIVERED IN

THE COURT-HOUSE IN CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS,

ON 1ST AUGUST, 1844,

ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE EMANCIPATION

OF THE

NEGROES IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES.

BY R. W. EMERSON

Published by Request. ————

SECOND THOUSAND. ——.——

BOSTON : JAMES MUNROE AND COMPANY. 1844. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

In the course of this lecture Waldo had given an interesting reprise of the early contribution of Granville Sharp:

“EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES”: Granville Sharpe was accidentally made acquainted with the sufferings of a slave, whom a West Indian planter had brought with him to London, and had beaten with a pistol on his head so badly, that his whole body became diseased, and the man, useless to his master, who left him to go whither he pleased. The man applied to Mr. William Sharpe, a charitable surgeon, who attended the diseases of the poor. In process of time, he was healed. Granville Sharpe found him at his brother’s, and procured a place for him in an apothecary’s shop. The master accidentally met his recovered slave, and instantly endeavored to get possession of him again. Sharpe protected the slave. In consulting with the lawyers, they told Sharpe the laws were against him. Sharpe would not believe it; no prescription on earth could ever render such iniquities legal. “But the decisions are against you, and Lord Mansfield, now chief justice of England, leans to the decisions.” Sharpe instantly sat down and gave himself to the study of English law for more than two years, until he had proved that the opinions relied on of Talbot and Yorke, were incompatible with the former English decisions, and with the whole spirit of English law. He published his book in 1769, and he so filled the heads and hearts of his advocates, that when he brought the case of George Somerset, another slave, before Lord Mansfield, the slavish decisions were set aside, and equity affirmed. There is a sparkle of God’s righteousness in Lord Mansfield’s judgment, which does the heart good. Very unwilling had that great lawyer been to reverse the late decisions; he suggested twice from the bench, in the course of the trial, how the question might be got rid of: but the hint was not taken; the case was adjourned again and again, and judgment delayed. At last judgment was demanded, and on the 22d June, 1772, Lord Mansfield is reported to have decided in these words; Immemorial usage preserves the memory of positive law, long after all traces of the occasion, reason, authority, and time of its introduction, are lost; and in a case so odious as the condition of slaves, must be taken strictly; (tracing the subject to natural principles, the claim of slavery never can be supported.) The power claimed by this return never was in use here. We cannot say the cause set forth by this return is allowed or approved of by the laws of this kingdom; and therefore the man must be discharged. This decision established the principle that the “air of England is too pure for any slave to breathe,” but the wrongs in the islands were not thereby touched. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Also, in the course of the lecture, Waldo had cited some of the early Quaker involvement:

“EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES”: Six Quakers met in London on the 6th July, 1783; William Dillwyn, Samuel Hoar, George Harrison, Thomas Knowles, John Lloyd, Joseph Woods, “to consider what step they should take for the relief and liberation of the negro slaves in the West Indies, and for the discouragement of the slave-trade on the coast of Africa.” They made friends and raised money for the slave; they interested their Yearly Meeting; and all English and all American Quakers.

There had been servile insurrections in the Caribbean late in 1843 and earlier in 1844 which must have reinforced the concerns of revolt Waldo suggested in this address. There had been a nasty insurrection on the island of Haiti on November 5, 1843, in which blacks and mulattoes had killed six white men, women, and children in an effort to drive the whites off the island. The National Anti-Slavery Standard had during the spring and summer reported that in Cuba, a plot for a servile insurrection had been discovered and “The white population of our island have most narrowly escaped the fate of those of St. Domingo, and even now very little security is felt by the greater portion, from the impossibility of knowing how far the machinations of the mulattoes and negroes have been counteracted.” The white backlash was of course amounting to the usual Cuban bloodbath. The National Anti-Slavery Standard of May 30th had reported that “upwards of 3000” slaves had been executed for supposed complicity and that the island government was “actually strangling twenty-five daily, by the public executioner at Mantanzas! There were upwards of 3000 confined in the prisons at Havana.”

However, Friend John Greenleaf Whittier read Waldo’s address and, supposing the author to be like himself committed to the cause of abolition (“That thou canst sympathize with us in the great idea which underlies our machinery of conventions & organizations, I have little doubt after reading thy Address”), asked him to dash off a letter in support of Charles Torrey. Emerson would respond on September 13th that he was simply too busy to get that involved: “Since you are disposed to give so friendly a hearing to opinions of mine, I am almost ready to promise you as soon as I am free of this present coil of writing, my thought on the best way of HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

befriending the slave & ending slavery. We will see.” This, from someone who supposedly had committed himself to the cause of the abolition of human slavery? — let’s get serious! Emerson would not even include this address about emancipation in his ESSAYS: SECOND SERIES, which he would publish on October 19, 1844! –It wasn’t that he was too busy to blow his own horn; this man was not convinced.

Why was Waldo in fact not committed to the abolition of human slavery? We find out in a letter he would send off to his buddy the stone racist Thomas Carlyle in Britain on December 31, 1844. In this letter Emerson would denounce his emancipation speech in no uncertain terms: “though I sometimes accept a popular call, & preach on Temperance or the Abolition of slavery, as lately on the First of August, I am sure to feel before I have done with it, what an intrusion it is into another sphere & so much loss of virtue in my own.” –In other words, Emerson would confirm to Carlyle that he had been merely pandering to an audience. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1845

During this year and the next, Lysander Spooner’s THE UNCONSTITUTIONALITY OF SLAVERY was being issued in two parts, and he was attempting to persuade the Liberty Party that it ought to change its name to “Constitutionalist” in support of his interpretation of the US Constitution as implicitly or explicitly, when properly understood, antislavery. His argument that the US Constitution did not sanction slavery was that if a lawyer from a society entirely unfamiliar with the practice of human enslavement were to inspect “the naked instrument,” he would not be able to infer anything about the nature of the practice. An instrument, he offered, which did not even mention the existence of slavery, could not be said to constitute any sanction for it.

Were we to accept the notion that the federal Congress could render human enslavement illegal, we would be forced also to accept an absurd corollary, that they could make human enslavement legal. However “Congress [has] no such power” because men are by nature free. Such legislation, either way, amounts to the sheerest HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

pretense, for only natural law is real law.

(Of course, that’s just weird, because it is based on the notion that all law is top-down law imposed by a legislative body by fiat, whereas anyone who has ever cracked into Blackstone knows very well that the bulk of our law is bottom-up law, common law developing out of series after series of court cases and judicial verdicts and precedents. The reason why our foundational document does not mention slavery is purely and simply, that slavery was entirely a matter of the common law of local judicial practice and precedent, no legislative endorsement of this ever having been sought or ever having been needed either in England or in America. The only reason for inserting slavery into such a top-down document would be to forbid it, not to enable it, and therefore because it remained unmentioned, it had most definitely not been forbidden.)

William Lloyd Garrison was advocating that abolitionists stay out of government, even to the extent of refusing to vote in protest against any union with slaveholders. The abolitionists of New-York were generally opposed to such a position, and Lydia Maria Child, who had been building up the circulation of the National Anti-Slavery Standard as a family newspaper, considered that this extreme anti-government stance was sure to alienate the audience she wished to reach with the antislavery appeal. She resigned as editor and separated from the movement, but stayed on in New-York where the art and music of the city intrigued her, and continued writing for the cause. She was still seeking a satisfying relation to a church: “The Unitarian meetings here chill me with their cold intellectual respectability.” The Swedenborgians and Episcopalians she found similarly inadequate.

March 3, Monday: Closure of the 2d (lame duck) session of the 28th federal Congress. Florida was accepted as a state — as a slave state. At this point, allegedly, a victory had been won. At this point, allegedly, it had become possible to discuss the possibility of the criminalization of the practice of human enslavement as routinely practiced in the United States of America, land of the free and home of the brave. So, what would happen next? Stay tuned....

Although postal rates were vastly higher in the United States of America than they were in England, the English postal service was doing very well indeed (the key was greatly enhanced volume). The US federal Congress therefore responded to the loss of postal customers to the American Letter Mail Company by nearly halving the cost of postage. Driven out of business, Lysander Spooner would lose all interest in postal reform until his attention would be called to a campaign launched in 1848, which ultimately would lead to an additional 1851 reduction of postal rates. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

October 20, Monday: Dolly Brown Spooner died.

Rushing 60 miles from Boston to be at her deathbed, her son Lysander Spooner counted it “no slight consolation” that his mother had seen in print his THE UNCONSTITUTIONALITY OF SLAVERY, published in this same year. “During those two days, she was too sick to talk much,” Lysander would write to George Bradburn, “but she expressed great pleasure that my book was out and that it was thought likely to do so much good” (he further explained that she and their entire family had been “ardent abolitionists for years”). UNCONSTITUTIONALITY HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1846

Lysander Spooner’s POVERTY: ITS ILLEGAL CAUSES AND LEGAL CURE. The problem we have, of a rich class and a radically distinct poor class, is not a problem of production of wealth, but a problem of proper distribution. Forget about increasing the Gross National Product, for with proper distribution, everyone would have enough and more than enough. To avert class war, what we all require is a greater degree of intimacy with one another’s lives, for “sufficient personal acquaintance, and sufficient similarity of experiences with each other, to awaken their sympathies, [would] soften or avert the collision of their feelings, interests, and rights.” What is it that is preventing this from occurring? –The “overgrown rich.” All it will take is getting rid of the legal tender laws and enforcing the right of all to enter into free contracts, because this will humble the rich, restore the rule of law, bring us to justice, protect the right to property, and establish civilization. The luxury, the vices, the power, and the oppressions of the overgrown rich. and of those who are becoming such at the expense of other men’s rights, are probably much greater evils than the simple poverty of the poor would be, if it were the result of natural and necessary causes.

For some time Lysander had been friendly with a married woman, Mrs. Elizabeth Sargent, and indeed she had moved to Athol, Massachusetts to be near him, but it would appear that by this point the relationship had cooled because of the reaction of her husband: “‘Twas bad policy, babbling your notions of divorce in his hearing!” Eventually she would divorce this husband, but then would remarry with a mutual acquaintance, William Brackett.

April 12, Easter Sunday: At a memorable concert in Leipzig, Felix Mendelssohn accompanied Jenny Lind and later Ferdinand David. He also performed the Moonlight Sonata and played duets with Clara Schumann.

Mexican forces erected Fort Paredes near Matamoros. They warned the US forces on the opposite side of the Rio Grande to evacuate north to the Nueces River.

Wendell Phillips had attacked Lysander Spooner’s arguments from a Garrisonian viewpoint in a pamphlet, REVIEW OF LYSANDER SPOONER’S ESSAY “THE UNCONSTITUTIONALITY OF SLAVERY.” The Garrisonians believed in the power of moral suasion and non-resistance to drive power and numbers into shame, and Phillips noted that “Mr. Spooner’s idea is practical no-governmentism. It leaves every one to do what is right in his own eyes.” On this day, in a letter to George Bradburn, Thomas Earle (who had been the vice-presidential candidate of the Liberty Party in 1840) also responded: “Force or numbers must, of necessity, be the ultimate law giver, and I think it would be far from an improvement to permit the supreme court to make the law in conformity to its own view of justice.” One must choose between force or numbers, or “society would collapse at once into anarchy.” Only by being fairly elected to office can we deploy the political power that will enable the abolition of human enslavement. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1847

Frederick Douglass inscribed a copy of his NARRATIVE in ink on the flyleaf and presented it to N.B. [Boone?] Spooner of Plymouth MA in a quarter-leather clamshell box with ornate gold stamping on the spine: “N.B. Spooner / From his sincere / Friend. / Frederick Douglass / 1847” (estimated present value at auction, $12,500- HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

$15,000):

The Spooner family was a founding family, although we do not know on what ship they came over. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Their Plymouth home is presently open for tourist visits. This N.B. Spooner was of the same household in Plymouth as Thoreau’s friend and disciple James Walter Spooner.

Wendell Phillips responded to Lysander Spooner’s THE UNCONSTITUTIONALITY OF SLAVERY, issued in 1845 and 1846 in two parts, with a lengthy legal brief REVIEW OF LYSANDER SPOONER’S ESSAY ON THE CONSTITUTIONALITY OF SLAVERY, demonstrating that the Founding Fathers had intended the Constitution to legalize human slavery. Under this circumstance, the only corrective was disunion. The Constitution, because it allowed the use of force by one man, the slavemaster, over another man, the slave, was not an instrument of order but one of anarchy.

YOU HAVE TO ACCEPT EITHER THE REALITY OF TIME OVER THAT OF CHANGE, OR CHANGE OVER TIME — IT’S PARMENIDES, OR HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

HERACLITUS. I HAVE GONE WITH HERACLITUS.

March 31, Wednesday: In beautiful downtown Boston, a temperance meeting was broken up at Faneuil Hall.

The anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews, whose SCIENCE OF SOCIETY had in 1852 summarized many anti-state ideas, had been in correspondence with Lysander Spooner and at this point had made a contribution to help Spooner finish THE UNCONSTITUTIONALITY OF SLAVERY.

An undated letter from Margaret Fuller on art, music, and ether was printed as a column by the New-York Tribune: It needs not to speak in this cursory manner of the treasures of Art, pictures, sculptures, engravings, and the other riches which France lays open so freely to the stranger in her Musées. Any examination worth writing of such objects, or account of the thoughts they inspire, demands a place by itself, and an ample field in which to expatiate. The American, first introduced to some good pictures by the truly great geniuses of the religious period in Art, must, if capable at all of mental approximation to the life therein embodied, be too deeply affected, too full of thoughts, to be in haste to say anything, and for me, I bide my time. No such great crisis, however, is to be apprehended from acquaintance with the productions of the modern French school. They are, indeed, full of talent and of vigor, but also melodramatic and exaggerated to a degree that seems to give the nightmare passage through the fresh and cheerful day. They sound no depth of soul, and are marked with the signet of a degenerate age. Thus speak I generally. To the pictures of Horace Vernet one cannot but turn a gracious eye, they are so faithful a transcript of the life which circulates around us in the present state of things, and we are willing to see his nobles and generals mounted on such excellent horses. De la Roche gives me pleasure; there is in his pictures a simple and natural poesy; he is a man who has in his own heart a well of good water, whence he draws for himself when the streams are mixed with strange soil and bear offensive marks of the bloody battles of life. The pictures of Leopold Robert I find charming. They are full of vigor and nobleness; they express a nature where all is rich, young, and on a large scale. Those that I have seen are so happily expressive of the thoughts and perceptions of early manhood, I can hardly regret he did not live to enter on another stage of life, the impression now received is so single. The effort of the French school in Art, as also its main tendency in literature, seems to be to turn the mind inside out, in the Not Civil War “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

coarsest acceptation of such a phrase. Art can only be truly Art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life. But then it is a symbol that Art seeks to present, and not the fact itself. These French painters seem to have no idea of this; they have not studied the method of Nature. With the true artist, as with Nature herself, the more full the representation, the more profound and enchanting is the sense of mystery. We look and look, as on a flower of which we cannot scrutinize the secret life, yet b; looking seem constantly drawn nearer to the soul that causes and governs that life. But in the French pictures suffering is represented by streams of blood, — wickedness by the most ghastly contortions. I saw a movement in the opposite direction in England; it was in Turner’s pictures of the later period. It is well known that Turner, so long an idol of the English public, paints now in a manner which has caused the liveliest dissensions in the world of connoisseurs. There are two parties, one of which maintains, not only that the pictures of the late period are not good, but that they are not pictures at all, — that it is impossible to make out the design, or find what Turner is aiming at by those strange blotches of color. The other party declare that these pictures are not only good, but divine, — that whoever looks upon them in the true manner will not fail to find there somewhat ineffably and transcendently admirable, — the soul of Art. Books have been written to defend this side of the question. I had become much interested about this matter, as the fervor of feeling on either side seemed to denote that there was something real and vital going on, and, while time would not permit my visiting other private collections in London and its neighborhood, I insisted on taking it for one of Turner’s pictures. It was at the house of one of his devoutest disciples, who has arranged everything in the rooms to harmonize with them. There were a great many of the earlier period; these seemed to me charming, but superficial, views of Nature. They were of a character that he who runs may read, — obvious, simple, graceful. The later pictures were quite a different matter; mysterious-looking things, — hieroglyphics of picture, rather than picture itself. Sometimes you saw a range of red dots, which, after long looking, dawned on you as the roofs of houses, — shining streaks turned out to be most alluring rivulets, if traced with patience and a devout eye. Above all, they charmed the eye and the thought. Still, these pictures, it seems to me, cannot be considered fine works of Art, more than the mystical writing common to a certain class of minds in the United States can be called good writing. A great work of Art demands a great thought, or a thought of beauty adequately expressed. Neither in Art nor literature more than in life can an ordinary thought be made interesting because well dressed. But in a transition state, whether of Art or literature, deeper thoughts are imperfectly expressed, because they cannot yet be held and treated masterly. This seems to be the case with Turner. He has HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

got beyond the English gentleman’s conventional view of Nature, which implies a little sentiment and a very cultivated taste; he has become awake to what is elemental, normal, in Nature, — such, for instance, as one sees in the working of water on the sea- shore. He tries to represent these primitive forms. In the drawings of Piranesi, in the pictures of Rembrandt, one sees this grand language exhibited more truly. It is not picture, but certain primitive and leading effects of light and shadow, or lines and contours, that captivate the attention. I saw a picture of Rembrandt’s at the Louvre, whose subject I do not know and have never cared to inquire. I cannot analyze the group, but I understand and feel the thought it embodies. At something similar Turner seems aiming; an aim so opposed to the practical and outward tendency of the English mind, that, as a matter of course, the majority find themselves mystified, and thereby angered, but for the same reason answering to so deep and seldom satisfied a want in the minds of the minority, as to secure the most ardent sympathy where any at all can be elicited. Upon this topic of the primitive forms and operations of nature, I am reminded of something interesting I was looking at yesterday. These are botanical models in wax, with microscopic dissections, by an artist from Florence, a pupil of Calamajo, the Director of the Wax-Model Museum there. I saw collections of ten different genera, embracing from fifty to sixty species, of Fungi, Mosses, and Lichens, detected and displayed in all the beautiful secrets of their lives; many of them, as observed by Dr. Leveillé of Paris. The artist told me that a fisherman, introduced to such acquaintance with the marvels of love and beauty which we trample under foot or burn in the chimney each careless day, exclaimed, “‘Tis the good God who protects us on the sea that made all these”; and a similar recognition, a correspondent feeling, will not be easily evaded by the most callous observer. This artist has supplied many of these models to the magnificent collection of the Jardin des Plantes, to Edinburgh, and to Bologna, and would furnish them, to our museums at a much cheaper rate than they can elsewhere be obtained. I wish the Universities of Cambridge, New York, and other leading institutions of our country, might avail themselves of the opportunity. In Paris I have not been very fortunate in hearing the best music. At the different Opera-Houses, the orchestra is always good, but the vocalization, though far superior to what I have heard at home, falls so far short of my ideas and hopes that — except to the Italian Opera — I have not been often. The Opera Comique I visited only once; it was tolerably well, and no more, and, for myself, I find the tolerable intolerable in music. At the Grand Opera I heard Robert le Diable and Guillaume Tell almost with ennui; the decorations and dresses are magnificent, the instrumental performance good, but not one fine singer to fill these fine parts. Duprez has had a great reputation, and probably has sung better In former days; still he has a vulgar HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

mind, and can never have had any merit as an artist. At present I find him unbearable. He forces his voice, sings in the most coarse, showy style, and aims at producing effects without regard to the harmony of his part; fat and vulgar, he still takes the part of the lover and young chevalier; to my sorrow I saw him in Ravenswood, and he has well-nigh disenchanted for me the Bride of Lammermoor. The Italian Opera is here as well sustained, I believe, as anywhere in the world at present; all about it is certainly quite good, but alas! nothing excellent, nothing admirable. Yet no! I must not say nothing: Lablache is excellent, — voice, intonation, manner of song, action. Ronconi I found good in the Doctor of “L’Elisire d’Amore”. For the higher parts Grisi, though now much too large for some of her parts, and without a particle of poetic grace or dignity, has certainly beauty of feature, and from nature a fine voice. But I find her conception of her parts equally coarse and shallow. Her love is the love of a peasant; her anger, though having the Italian picturesque richness and vigor, is the anger of an Italian fishwife, entirely unlike anything in the same rank elsewhere; her despair is that of a person with the toothache, or who has drawn a blank in the lottery. The first time I saw her was in Norma; then the beauty of her outline, which becomes really enchanting as she recalls the first emotions of love, the force and gush of her song, filled my ear, and charmed the senses, so that I was pleased, and did not perceive her great defects; but with each time of seeing her I liked her less, and now I do not like her at all. Persiani is more generally a favorite here; she is indeed skilful both as an actress and in the management of her voice, but I find her expression meretricious, her singing mechanical. Neither of these women is equal to Pico in natural force, if she had but the same advantages of culture and environment. In hearing Semiramide here, I first learned to appreciate the degree of talent with which it was cast in New York. Grisi indeed is a far better Semiramis than Borghese, but the best parts of the opera lost all their charm from the inferiority of Brambilla, who took Pico’s place. Mario has a charming voice, grace and tenderness; he fills very well the part of the young, chivalric lover, but he has no range of power. Coletti is a very good singer; he has not from Nature a fine voice or personal beauty; but he has talent, good taste, and often surpasses the expectation he has inspired. Gardini, the new singer, I have only heard once, and that was in a lovesick-shepherd part; he showed delicacy, tenderness, and tact. In fine, among all these male singers there is much to please, but little to charm; and for the women, they never fail absolutely to fill their parts, but no ray of the Muse has fallen on them. Don Giovanni conferred on me a benefit, of which certainly its great author never dreamed. I shall relate it, — first begging pardon of Mozart, and assuring him I had no thought of turning his music to the account of a “vulgar utility.” It was quite by HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

accident. After suffering several days very much with the toothache, I resolved to get rid of the cause of sorrow by the aid of ether; not sorry, either, to try its efficacy, after all the marvellous stories I had heard. The first time I inhaled it, I did not for several seconds feel the effect, and was just thinking, “Alas! this has not power to soothe nerves so irritable as mine,” when suddenly I wandered off, I don’t know where, but it was a sensation like wandering in long garden- walks, and through many alleys of trees, — many impressions, but all pleasant and serene. The moment the tube was removed, I started into consciousness, and put my hand to my cheek; but, sad! the throbbing tooth was still there. The dentist said I had not seemed to him insensible. He then gave me the ether in a stronger dose, and this time I quitted the body instantly, and cannot remember any detail of what I saw and did; but the impression was as in the Oriental tale, where the man has his head in the water an instant only, but in his vision a thousand years seem to have passed. I experienced that same sense of an immense length of time and succession of impressions; even, now, the moment my mind was in that state seems to me a far longer period in time than my life on earth does as I look back upon it. Suddenly I seemed to see the old dentist, as I had for the moment before I inhaled the gas, amid his plants, in his nightcap and dressing-gown; in the twilight the figure had somewhat of a Faust-like, magical air, and he seemed to say, “C’est inutile.” Again I started up, fancying that once more he had not dared to extract the tooth, but it was gone. What is worth, noticing is the mental translation I made of his words, which, my ear must have caught, for my companion tells me he said, “C’est le moment,” a phrase of just as many syllables, but conveying just the opposite sense. Ah! I how I wished then, that you had settled, there in the United States, who really brought this means of evading a portion of the misery of life into use. But as it was, I remained at a loss whom to apostrophize with my benedictions, whether Dr. Jackson, Morton, or Wells, and somebody thus was robbed of his clue; — neither does Europe know to whom to address her medals. However, there is no evading the heavier part of these miseries. You avoid the moment of suffering, and escape the effort of screwing up your courage for one of these moments, but not the jar to the whole system. I found the effect of having taken the ether bad for me. I seemed to taste it all the time, and neuralgic pain continued; this lasted three days. For the evening of the third, I had taken a ticket to Don Giovanni, and could not bear to give up this opera, which I had always been longing to hear; still I was in much suffering, and, as it was the sixth day I had been so, much weakened. However, I went, expecting to be obliged to come out; but the music soothed the nerves at once. I hardly suffered at all during the opera; however, I supposed the pain would return as soon as I came out; but no! it left me from that time. Ah! if physicians only understood the influence of the mind over the body, instead of HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

treating, as they so often do, their patients like machines, and according to precedent! But I must pause here for to-day.

December 5, Sunday: Lysander Spooner wrote to George Bradburn that he could not belong to the Liberty Party “until it comes up to my principles,” i.e. “founding government on natural law.” For the Liberty Party’s successor, the Free Soil Party, founded in 1848, this I’m-So-Sharp-I-Can-Figure-It-All-Out explainer guy would have even greater contempt: “Its ideas are all fogyish, and tame, and cowardly. It is led by a few old stereotypes, or rather fossilized Whigs.” –Love me, love my ideology. –Ignore my ideology, I detest you. He had through his abject poverty purified his thought processes. He had learned that the edicts of kings were mediated by selfish interest, learned that the votes of legislatures were mediated by selfish interest, learned that even the democratic vote of all the people in the world would be incompetent to establish natural law, due to selfish interest. Justice could be attained only through reason unmediated through such selfishness. Having become of necessity less contaminated by encumbrances, Spooner had obtained a direct glimpse of truth. He had mastered natural law. Now what he needed to do was somehow to persuade others to establish him as the master of the political process, so that process could in the future be directed by this truth as he had sighted it uncontaminated by the usual fog of selfishness. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1848

Richard Wagner wrote a prose sketch for the Nibelung myth and completed the poem for SIEGFRIED’S TOD (SIEGFRIED’S DEATH) — later to be changed to GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG (TWILIGHT OF THE GODS).

When Barnabas Bates published A BRIEF STATEMENT OF THE EXERTIONS OF THE FRIENDS OF CHEAP POSTAGE IN THE CITY OF NEW-YORK, an association was formed terming itself “The Friends of Cheap Postage in the City of New-York,” and began to campaign to persuade the US Postal Service to again reduce its rates. There was even an impulse to take up a collection to reward Bates by voluntary subscription, in the manner in which Rowland Hill had been rewarded for a similar contribution in England. However, when Samuel E. Sewall, a Boston friend of Lysander Spooner, informed him of this voluntary subscription to reward Bates in New-York, the fit really hit the Shah (that’s something we used to say in Tehran, during the Khomeini Revolution). Spooner had been existing in such total poverty for such a long period of time and nobody, nobody, nobody ever had attempted to reward him with one red cent for having helped to bring about the previous reduction in American postal rates — and so now comes this upstart Bates — and he’s the one who is going to get a reward? –No, no, life’s not fair! –I’m going to lie down on the floor and kick and turn red in the face! HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1849

Early in the year, the escaping slaves William and Ellen Craft arrived at Boston from Philadelphia, and after an appearance at the Brookline Town Hall, found refuge at the William Ingersoll Bowditch home at 9 Toxteth Street in Brookline, outside Boston, Massachusetts, and at other Underground Railroad facilities in Brookline. (It would seem, on the basis of a comment by Prudence Ward in one of her letters, that the Crafts made an appearance at least once in Concord. The couple would need to flee once again after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, to England, but eventually after the Civil War they would return to Georgia to convert a former slave plantation into a freedman’s school.)

When Lysander Spooner obtained the proof sheets for his pamphlet “Who Caused the Reduction of Postage in 1845?” he sent them to 5 of the largest merchants in Boston, but of course received no response whatever. He therefore wrote to his friend Gerrit Smith to obtain the $200 he needed in order to retain the services of several prominent lawyers, to obtain their opinions on his constitutional argument. Smith would have none of it. Nonetheless, his Boston friends, Samuel Sewall, Robert Apthrop, and others would encourage Spooner.

June 25, Monday: The new father Ellery Channing signed the deed for the house in which the family had been living on Main Street opposite the Thoreaus.

For the previous 5 years Lysander Spooner had subsisted on but $200 a year (remarkably little, for a day laborer’s pittance would have amounted to some $350 per year — although such a laborer would have needed to eat hardy in order to sustain himself during his daily backbreaking stint). He explained to his rich patron Gerrit Smith why he was so reluctant to seek a “civil service” (political patronage) position at the Boston custom house: “I should consider it less dishonest to go upon the highway and make my living by force than to get it in these ways — for I should then, in addition to the robbery, practice the fraud of pretending to do it legally.”

November 8, Thursday: According to a letter from Lysander Spooner to George Bradburn, Spooner’s Boston friends, Samuel Sewall, Robert Apthrop, and others, were intending to provide funds for the publication of his pamphlet “Who Caused the Reduction of Postage in 1845?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1850

Lysander Spooner’s pamphlet “Who Caused the Reduction of Postage in 1845?” failed to obtain any benefit for him. Its primary impact among Boston’s merchants was to cause them not to support the other contender, Barnabas Bates.

In ILLEGALITY OF THE TRIAL OF JOHN W. WEBSTER, Spooner questioned the discrimination practiced in the selection of Webster’s jury and challenged the justice of capital punishment (other than attracting some attention to himself, the publication had no impact).

Lysander Spooner argued, in DEFENCE FOR FUGITIVE SLAVES, that “The rescue of a person, who is assaulted, or restrained of his liberty, without authority of law, is not only morally, but legally, a meritorious act;” everyone should “go to the assistance of one who is assailed by assassins, robbers, ravishers, kidnappers, or ruffians of any kind” (page 27). This right, he insisted, was legally recognized by the constitutional guarantee that citizens could bear and use arms.

George DeBaptiste, general manager of the Underground Railroad in Michigan, purchased the steamship T. Whitney. George J. Reynolds had moved from 8th Street near the grain elevator in Detroit to Portland, Ohio to Sandusky, Ohio. His new home, like his old home, would be a stop on the Underground Railroad, conveniently close to Lake Erie — and a boat-ride away from freedom in Canada.

In the 1850 United States Federal Census Record, George J. Reynolds was listed as still at his home location of Portland, Ohio, a Republican community on the north bank of the Ohio River. He was the proprietor of a “Black-Smith Shop” and was listed as coming from Vermont and as having reached the age of 26, which means that he had been born in about 1824:

At this point Harriet Tubman had set aside enough money from her pittance as a fugitive laundress/cook to make her 1st courageous trip back into the slave states, one in which she intended to rescue members of her family. As a conductor on the “Underground Railroad she would be making at least 18 additional trips into slave territory and would be leading some 300 fugitives –counting her parents– to freedom. Slaveholders would offer rewards of up to $40,000 for her capture but she would never be intercepted. During her journeys guiding more slaves to the North, she often would resort to “coaxing” weary and frightened fugitives by the waving of a loaded pistol, but somehow she managed never having to shoot a single one. From Annapolis, Maryland, if you cross the bridge linking to the Eastern Shore and drive south to Cambridge, you will arrive at the Long Wharf at which she arrived by boat to boldly manumit her sister — who was being sold on the courthouse steps a few blocks away.11 HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Here is the scene as imagined by one of our artists of today, Paul Collins (he would be pleased to sell you a print):

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

11. It is an interesting perspective on the noble life of Harriet Tubman, that the family name “Tubman” was an occupational title, a synonym for “nightsoil-collector,” in the manner in which a white family might know itself as Cooper (barrel-maker) or Fletcher (arrow-maker). One may imagine that the humor of the situation –that they were being carried north to freedom by a tubman and were therefore analogous to human wastes– would not have been lost on the black escapees whom this Underground Railroad conductor escorted out of the South. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

April 23, Tuesday: Lysander Spooner recounted to Gerrit Smith an unpleasant experience he had recently had in the practice of law. The police of Washington DC had arrested William L. Chaplin and some others, them of having aided Robert Toombs and Alexander Stephens, slaves, in their escape. Chaplin’s bail was set at $19,000 by Maryland authorities and $6,000 by Washington authorities, and the abolitionists who raised the bail money had retained Spooner as his defense attorney. When Chaplin escaped to New-York with a girlfriend, the bail the abolitionist had put up was forfeited (left with nobody to defend, Spooner resigned from the case).

In Arizona, John Glanton and his gang of professional scalphunters were surrounded and killed by the Yuma. Over the previous couple of years Glanton’s gang had killed approximately a thousand native Americans, earning roughly $100,000 by turning in their scalps for the Mexican government’s reward. Since they also sold Mexican and anglo scalps as native American scalps, the United States of America had been offering a $75,000 reward for their capture (the Yuma, being colored people, would of course not be eligible for such a monetary reward from the government — however, Fort Yuma would be named in their honor).

William Wordsworth died at Rydal Mount, Grasmere, Westmorland at the age of 80. Alfred, Lord Tennyson would be chosen to succeed him as Poet Laureate. (The Poet Laureate of England was considered a life member of the Royal Household, charged with creating occasional verse upon occasion, but no longer received his traditional annual award of one “pipe,” or double-hogshead cast containing 126 gallons, of Canary wine. The monarchy, which had begun that practice in 1630, had for reasons unknown discontinued it as of 1790.) POETS LAUREATE

“WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT”: The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself. If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly. Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man. The State does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet- laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe. As for my own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that I should do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. When I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is the most correct. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1851

February 24, Monday: In a letter to Lysander Spooner, Senator James Murray Mason of Virginia argued that African slaves are “a form of property ... originating in Africa, and when brought into the colonies of North America simply recognized as property by the common law.”

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR FEBRUARY 24th]

March 6, Thursday: Hector Berlioz composed his application for the chair vacated by Gaspare Spontini at the Institute.

Henry Thoreau began to work with the heirs of Timothy Brooks in describing their house and fields (this evaluation would continue on the 13th, 14th, 15th, 21st, 22d, and 25th).

Lysander Spooner wrote to Barnabas Bates: Boston March 6 – 1851 Barnabas Bates Esq. Sir. I saw a notice lately to take the responsibility of the mail service of the country, giving large bonds for the faithful performance of the duty to. From this fact I inferred that there was probably a large company in New York, who wished to engage in that business – If there be such a company, I should like, for a proper compensation, to take the risk of testing the constitutionality of the laws which prohibit private mails. I would establish a mail from New York to Boston, simply to bring the question to a decision. As you may wish for some evidence of the probable success of the experiment, I send you a pamphlet, (prepared for another purpose), containing a copy of the argument I published seven years ago on “The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress prohibiting Private Mails,” also the opinions of Hon. Rufus Choate, Hon. Franklin Dexter, Hon. Simon Greanleaf, Hon. B.F. Butler, and others as to the merits of that argument. I have so much confidence of success that I should be willing to take the risk of any judgments that might be obtained against me, provided I could be properly compensated in case of success. If you feel any interest in the matter, I should be happy to hear from you. If you feel none, please excuse the liberty I have taken in addressing you. Very Respectfully Your Obedient Servant Lysander Spooner HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Spring: Lysander Spooner visited New-York, to discover that he had been hopelessly outdistanced by his competitor for recognition Barnabas Bates. He would be informed frankly by Joshua Leavitt that the postal reformers could not understand why they should feel any obligation to someone like him — who had engaged in a business for profit and then failed. Duh.

At the age of 19 Franklin Benjamin Sanborn visited Boston a 2d time.

After a hiatus Henry Thoreau began to work again upon his WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS manuscript (Draft C becoming Draft D). TIMELINE OF WALDEN

May 11, Sunday: Lysander Spooner wrote to George Bradburn that Barnabas Bates and his supporters in New-York had “acquaintances and friends in the city to aid them, before my claims were made known. –That seems to be of a piece with all my fortune. –The World seems determined to starve me to death, and I suspect it will succeed in doing so.”

Friend Levi Coffin wrote to Friend William Still: CINCINNATI, 5TH MO., 11TH, 1851. WM. STILL:—Dear Friend—Thy letter of 1st inst., came duly to HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

hand, but not being able to give any further information concerning our friend, Concklin, I thought best to wait a little before I wrote, still hoping to learn something more definite concerning him. We that became acquainted with Seth Concklin and his hazardous enterprises (here at Cincinnati), who were very few, have felt intense and inexpressible anxiety about them. And particularly about poor Seth, since we heard of his falling into the hands of the tyrants. I fear that he has fallen a victim to their inhuman thirst for blood. I seriously doubt the rumor, that he had made his escape. I fear that he was sacrificed. Language would fail to express my feelings; the intense and deep anxiety I felt about them for weeks before I heard of their capture in Indiana, and then it seemed too much to bear. O! my heart almost bleeds when I think of it. The hopes of the dear family all blasted by the wretched blood-hounds in human shape. And poor Seth, after all his toil, and dangerous, shrewd and wise management, and almost unheard of adventures, the many narrow and almost miraculous escapes. Then to be given up to Indianians, to these fiendish tyrants, to be sacrificed. O! Shame, Shame!! My heart aches, my eyes fill with tears, I cannot write more. I cannot dwell longer on this painful subject now. If you get any intelligence, please inform me. Friend N.R. Johnston, who took so much interest in them, and saw them just before they were taken, has just returned to the city. He is a minister of the Covenanter order. He is truly a lovely man, and his heart is full of the milk of humanity; one of our best Anti-Slavery spirits. I spent last evening with him. He related the whole story to me as he had it from friend Concklin and the mother and children, and then the story of their capture. We wept together. He found thy letter when he got here. He said he would write the whole history to thee in a few days, as far as he could. He can tell it much better than I can. Concklin left his carpet sack and clothes here with me, except a shirt or two he took with him. What shall I do with them? For if we do not hear from him soon, we must conclude that he is lost, and the report of his escape all a hoax. Truly thy friend, LEVI COFFIN. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Summer: Lysander Spooner (who had already written extensively on the unconstitutionality of laws on currency, slavery, and capital punishment), repulsed by the successive fugitive slave acts and in general by injustices embedded in the law and perpetuated mindlessly by generations of hidebound judges and lawyers, began work on a corrective recommendation, which he titled TRIAL BY JURY. Turning away from the legal fraternity he had been trying so hard and so fruitlessly to persuade, he turned toward the community at large. He would make his new appeal to the common citizens who sat on the juries that would, or should, decide what was right and what was wrong.

In his antislavery lecturing that summer, the Reverend Samuel Ringgold Ward was paying more and more attention to the situation in regard to the new Fugitive Slave Law: In the summer of 1851, business called me to travel in various parts of the country. I visited numerous districts of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana, as well as Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. Smarting as we were under the recently passed Fugitive Law —and irritations being inflamed and aggravated by the dragging of some poor victim of it from some Northern town to the South and to slavery, every month or so— of course this law became the theme of most I said and wrote. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1852

Fall: As he had done with his brother John Thoreau at the beginning of fall in 1839, at the beginning of this fall season Henry Thoreau went river-sailing. This time he went with Ellery Channing to Peterboro and Mount Monadnock and returned from Troy, New Hampshire by train (when Ellery would return to Concord he would find his wife preparing to take their children and separate from him).

Lysander Spooner’s TRIAL BY JURY attempted to make it the duty of the juror to produce justice. What justice these legal professionals, the judges and lawyers, are unwilling to provide, the people must produce on their own behalf — an argument in favor of that ever-proscribed and always-punished behavior, juror nullification.

John Adams went up into the mountains of California in an old wagon pulled by two oxen, armed with a pistol and two rifles, plus bowie knives. Despite his maimed condition after having been mauled by a Bengal tiger, he would be able to catch bears in log traps and construct cages in which to transport them for sale. He would venture eventually as far as eastern Washington. He would contribute mightily to the extinction of the grizzly, so that the only bear that now remains in this mountain range is the smaller brown bear.

Kate Fox left for school and Maggie Fox, in the company of her mother, traveled to Philadelphia and set up shop in the bridal suite of Webb’s Union Hotel. It was there that the young and handsome Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, still grieving from the recent death of his youngest brother Willie, would come one November morning to investigate the “Spiritual Manifestations” that enthralled the nation (whether this is properly to be described as “love at first sight” as Margaret would later assert is a matter for speculation). SPIRITUALISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1853

May 28, Saturday: Lysander Spooner had been providing pro bono counsel and advice in escaped-slave cases. In this year, he informed Gerrit Smith, he sent to Lewis Tappan some arguments to use in the case of Jane Trainer (abolitionists in New York were hoping to save this minor from enslavement by arguing that since all God’s children are born free, it is logically preposterous that she had inherited a status such as slavery from the social predicament of her mother).

Sheppard’s Asylum, an early private mental hospital, was founded on this day by Moses Sheppard and others. Actual construction of a facility for this institution outside Baltimore would be delayed, however, by lack of funding and then by the outbreak of civil war although a groundbreaking would take place on May 25, 1862. In 1898 the name would be changed to recognize a major benefactor, to the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital.12 PSYCHOLOGY

Mrs. Lucy Stone, the 1st woman from Massachusetts to complete a BA degree, was pioneering the Bloomer

12. Street, W.R. A CHRONOLOGY OF NOTEWORTHY EVENTS IN AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY. Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 1994 HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

costume, a costume we have lost the ability to recognize as daring and defiant and impious:

At about this point, in late May, Henry Thoreau was studying Henry Mayhew’s 1851 LONDON LABOUR AND THE LONDON POOR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

August 18, Thursday: James Gillespie Birney wrote to Lysander Spooner from Cincinnati, soliciting legal advice on how to answer a circuit court ruling by Judge John McLean, upholding the Fugitive Slave Act.

General John A. Quitman of Mississippi signed a formal agreement with the Junta Cubana of the filibuster Narciso López, that appointed him the “civil and military chief of the revolution, with all the powers and attributes of dictatorship as recognized by civilized nations, to be used and exercised by him for the purpose of overthrowing the Spanish government in the island of Cuba and its dependencies, and substituting in the place thereof a free and independent government.” Article II of this signed formal agreement stipulated that General Quitman, as dictator, was to exercise the freedom and independence of his island government through the protection of the institution of human slavery (of course, General Quitman, a Mississippi politician and a true believer in freedom and slavery, had no problem whatever with any of this). HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1854

April 19, Wednesday: In a concert in Weimar the phrase “symphonic poem” was heard for the initial time, as a description of “Tasso” by Franz Liszt.

Lysander Spooner wrote to George Bradburn to express the contempt in which he held the Liberty Party’s successor, the Free Soil Party, a scorn which seemed only to deepen as the influence of this non-Spooner antislavery politics spread. –Love me, love my ideology. –Ignore my ideology, I detest you.

In the morning Henry Thoreau went paddling on the Assabet River, and in the afternoon he went to the Cliffs.

April 19. I had chosen to come to the river that afternoon, for there, the air being warm though the earth was covered with snow, there was least change. The few sparrows and warblers along the water’s edge and on the twigs over the water seemed to forget the wintry prospect…. That is a good stream to explore any summer weather, because the woods border it immediately and you can observe a greater variety of small birds. I can approach them more nearly in my boat than on foot…. I thought yesterday that the sparrows must rejoice to sit in the sun again and dry their feathers and feel its warmth…. It is remarkable how scarce and silent the birds are even in a pleasant afternoon like this, compared with the morning. Within a few days the warblers have begun to come. They are of every hue. Nature made them to show her colors with. There are as many as there are colors and shades. In certain lights, as yesterday against the snow, nothing can be more splendid and celestial than the color of the bluebird. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

It was decided that the last mile of the railroad link to Harvard College campus in Cambridge be abandoned (service would discontinue in 1855 and part of the former right-of-way has now become Museum Street; in 1856 a street railway would begin operation). HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1855

During the early 1850s Lysander Spooner had become engaged with a Boston teacher, Mary Booth, “quite an attractive person; graceful, & intellectual, with grand blue eyes, & a spiritual face,” but first they needed to save enough to buy a house. In this year, however, while Spooner was laboring on his lengthy manuscript for THE LAW OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY which would never be completed or see publication, she cut off her engagement to her perennially impoverished paramour, explaining that she needed to care for her mother. After their break, for several years Lysander could not bring himself to write this woman who had “stolen” his heart away. In a long and painful letter, he would write: “The idea that, after I had loved you devotedly for years and after you had professed so much love for me, you should suddenly refuse to write me seemed to me very heartless and indeed very insulting.” George Bradburn, a mutual friend, would counsel the disappointed man on September 14, 1857 that actually, this thieving Mary had been attracted to him only as a “means of giving her a home, ... something of a coquette, willing enough to hold on to S. until she should be offered a man who could house her.” Spooner went into such a depression that he developed a leg problem that put him on crutches. After a couple of bad years he would write Mary that “during the last year my health was very poor — so poor at times that Dr. Hoyt thought it was going to fail altogether, and that I should not live long.” In his manuscript the impoverished lawyer/scholar sought to guarantee a living for those such as himself who worked with their minds. He established his “law of intellectual property” on the basis of first principles. Not only the productions of a person’s hands, but also the productions of a person’s mind, were the value of his labor, and that person’s private property, and private property is an inalienable and self-evident natural right. Any legislation that takes a thinker’s production and without his or her consent assigns it to others is an unconstitutional law. “It is poor economy, on the part of the common people, to attempt by stealing [the work product of intellectual workers] instead of buying it, to defraud intellect of its wages.” The doctor, fearing that his patient was suffering from “too much mental labor and excitement,” prescribed a complete rest from this writing labor that could be “stolen” from its author by an audience unwilling to pay money for such writings — and so his patient turned from this unpaid labor to the making of inner-spring beds and chairs, conveniences that folks would actually be willing to pay money for. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

WALDEN: Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “What!” exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off, –that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and by some magic wealth and standing followed, he had said to himself; I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

November 9, Sunday: Lysander Spooner wrote an account of Passamore Williamson’s case for the Liberator, which showed his concern for the arrogation of judicial power to the government. Judge Kane had imprisoned Williamson because he would not give evidence regarding his help to a fugitive, and Williamson’s rights not to incriminate himself were denied. He was sent to prison without a jury trial, and in fact without a sentence, “until he shall purge himself of the contempt by making true answers to such interrogations as the honorable court shall address to him.” To Spooner this was no better than Star Chamber justice. In a much later timeframe, Spooner would defend Thomas Drew, an old abolitionist friend, in another contempt case — contempt of the Massachusetts legislature. Again Spooner would argue that if any government claimed power to imprison a citizen at will, such a government would forfeit a citizen’s obedience.

Henry Thoreau was written to by a firm of Boston shippers, Crosby & Nichols, in regard to Cholmondeley’s shipment of books.

H.D. Thoreau Esq D’r Sir, The parcel of books referred to in your letter of the 9th has not yet reached us. We suppose that our case [which] contained it was left behind at Liverpool and shall expect it by next Steamer. On its arrival it shall ... HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

William M. White’s version of a portion of the Journal entry for this day would be:

That duck was all jewels combined, Showing different lustres As it turned on the unrippled element In various lights, Now brilliant glossy green, Now dusky violet, Now a rich bronze, Now the reflections that sleep in the ruby’s grain.

November 9: A.M. Grass white and stiff with frost. 9 A.M. — With Blake up Assabet. A clear and beautiful day after frost. Looking over the meadow westward from Merrick’s Pasture Shore, I see the alders beyond Dodd’s, now quite bare and gray (maple-like) in the morning sun (the frost melted off, though I found a little ice on my boat-seat), — that true November sight, — ready to wear frost leaves and to transmit (so open) the tinkle of tree sparrows. How wild and refreshing to see these old black willows of the river-brink, unchanged from the first, which man has never cut for fuel or for timber! Only the muskrat, tortoises, blackbirds, bitterns, and swallows use them. Two blackbirds fly over pretty near, with a chuck, — either red-wings or grackles, but I see no red. See a painted tortoise and a wood tortoise in different places out on the bank still! Saw in the pool at the Hemlocks what I at first thought was a brighter leaf moved by the zephyr on the surface of the smooth dark water, but it was a splendid male summer duck, which allowed us to approach within seven or eight rods, sailing up close to the shore, and then rose and flew up the curving stream. We soon overhauled it again, and got a fair and long view of it. It was a splendid bird, a perfect floating gem, and Blake, who had never seen the like, was greatly surprised not knowing that so splendid a bird was found in this part of the world. There it was, constantly moving back and forth by invisible means and wheeling on the smooth surface, showing now its breast, now its side, now its rear. It had a large, rich, flowing, green burnished crest – a most ample headdress, –two crescents of dazzling white on the side of the head and the black neck, a pinkish(?) red bill (with black tip) and similar irides, and a long white mark under and at wing point on sides; the side, as if the form of a wing at this distance, a light bronze or greenish brown; but, above all, its breast, when it turns into the right light, all aglow with splendid purple(?) or ruby(?) reflections, like the throat of the hummingbird. It might not appear so close at hand. This was the most surprising to me. What an ornament to a river to see that glowing gem floating in contact with its water! As if the hummingbird should recline its ruby throat and its breast on the water. Like dipping a glowing coal in water! It so affected me. It became excited, fluttered or flapped its wings with a slight whistling noise, and arose and flew two or three rods and alighted. It sailed close up to the edge of a rock, by which it lay pretty still, and finally sailed fast up one side of the river by the willows, etc., off the duck swamp beyond the spring, now and then turning and sailing back a foot or two, while we paddled up the opposite side a rod in the rear, for twenty or thirty rods. At length we went by it, and it flew back low a few rods to where we roused it. It never offered to dive. We came equally near it again on our return. Unless you are thus near, and have a glass, the splendor and beauty of its colors will not be discovered. Found a good stone jug, small size, floating stopple up. I drew the stopple and smelled, as I expected, molasses and water, or something stronger (black-strap?), which it had contained. Probably some meadow haymakers’ jug left in the grass, which the recent rise of the river has floated off. It will do to put with the white pitcher I found and keep flowers in. Thus I get my furniture. Yesterday I got a perfectly sound oak timber, eight inches square and twenty feet long, which had lodged on HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

some rocks. It had probably been the sill of a building. As it was too heavy to lift aboard, I towed it. As I shall want some shelves to put my Oriental books on, I shall begin to save boards now. I deal so much with my fuel, — what with finding it, loading it, conveying it home, sawing and splitting it, — get so many values out of it, am warmed in so many ways by it, that the heat it will yield when in the stove is of a lower temperature and a lesser value in my eyes, — though when I feel it I am reminded of all my adventures. I just turned to put on a stick. I had my choice in the box of gray chestnut rail, black and brown snag of an oak stump, dead white pine top, gray and round, with stubs of limbs, or else old bridge plank, and chose the last. Yes, I lose sight of the ultimate uses of this wood and work, the immediate ones are so great, and yet most of mankind, those called most successful in obtaining the necessaries of life, — getting their living, — obtain none of this, except a mere vulgar and perhaps stupefying warmth. I feel disposed, to this extent, to do the getting a living and the living for any three or four of my neighbors who really want the fuel and will appreciate the act, now that I have supplied myself. There was a fat pine plank, heavy as lead, I gave to Aunt L. for kindling. That duck was all jewels combined, showing different lustres as it turned on the unrippled element in various lights, now brilliant glossy green, now dusky violet, now a rich bronze, now the reflections that sleep in the. ruby's grain. I see floating, just above the Hemlocks, the large sliding door of a railroad car, burnt to a cinder on one side and lettered in large bright-yellow letters on the other, “Cheshire 1510.” It may have been cast over at the railroad bridge. I affect what would commonly be called a mean and miserable way of living. I thoroughly sympathize with all savages and gypsies in so far as they merely assert the original right of man to the productions of Nature and a place in her. The Irishman moves into the town, sets up a shanty on the railroad land, and then gleans the dead wood from the neighboring forest, which would never get to market. But the so-called owner forbids it and complains of him as a trespasser. The highest law gives a thing to him who can use it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1856

March 12, Wednesday: Lysander Spooner wrote Gerrit Smith that “honest men who know its true character” would be unable to support the US Constitution. Having already given up on the judiciary, in TRIAL BY JURY Spooner essentially abandoned as well the constitutional document. It simply did not compare with the MAGNA CARTA, that great guarantor of trial by jury, a document expressing “the principles of natural equity,” principles that would be brought forward in the common law and documented in Blackstone. From that point forward he would feel at liberty “to interpret the constitution, on those points wherein it is right, and then appeal to those, who profess to be governed by it, to act up to their own standard.” American juries must become in essence “courts of conscience,” deciding not only issues of fact but also the nature of justice and equity.

Horace Greeley, in Washington DC, wrote to Henry Thoreau.

Washington, D. C. March 12, ’56. My Friend Thoreau, I thank you for yours of the 10th. I hope we shall agree to know each other better, and that we shall be able to talk over some matters on which we agree, with others on which we may differ. I will say now that money shall not divide us — that is, I am very sure that I shall be willing to pay such sum as you will consider satisfactory. I will not attempt to fix on a price just now, as I wish to write to Mrs. Greeley in Europe and induce her (if I can) to return somewhat earlier in view of the prospect of securing your services. I concur entirely in your suggestion that both parties be left at liberty to terminate the engagement when either shall see fit. But I trust no such termination will be deemed advisable, for a year or two at least; and I hope at least a part of your books and other surroundings will follow you to our cottage in the woods after you shall have had time to pronounce us endurable. I will write by Saturday’s steamer to Mrs. Greeley, and trust you will make no arrangements incompatible with that we contemplate until farther communication between us. I expect to have you join us, if you will, in early summer. Your obliged friend, Horace Greeley. Henry D. Thoreau, Concord, Mass. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

May 25, Sunday: Waldo Emerson’s 53d birthday.

Lysander Spooner wrote to George Bradburn about having filed for a patent: I have great confidence that it is going to be valuable. I wish I had the money for it now, that I might give my attention to other things. The world is “famishing for lack of knowledge,” which I could give them; and I every day reproach myself for being engaged in such commonplace business as making money, or getting a living.... If I should establish a good reputation for beds and chairs, that may prove such a stepping stone to public favor, that I may hope to resume my profession of author, philosopher, reformer, and oracle.

Edward Bridgman had grown up in Northampton and at age 22 migrated to “Bleeding Kansas”. He came simply to homestead but was soon caught up in the struggle over slavery. He described his arrival at

Osawatomie and the destruction of the town of Lawrence by proslavery forces, and the retaliation led by John Brown at Pottawatomie Creek, in which 5 men from the South had been killed. Several months after Lawrence was sacked, a group of proslavery men would attack Osawatomie and Bridgman would fight alongside Captain Brown. Several months later he would return to Massachusetts to sign up with the 37th Massachusetts infantry. In the early 1870s he would migrate again, this time to northern Wisconsin. In 1901 he would move into the city of Madison, where he would reside until his death in 1915. Dear Cousin Sidney HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

I write now to let you know my present situation and a little about the affairs of Kansas.... In some small towns the men are called up nearly every night to hold themselves in readiness to meet the worst as scouting parties of Alabamians Georgians and Missourians are around continually, plundering clothes yards, horses and cattle, and everything they can lay hold of. A few miles from Lawrence a man was plowing. A party of Southerners came along and being hungry killed his best ox, ate what they wanted, took away some and left the rest. Such like occurrences are almost daily taking place. Last Thursday, news came from Lawrence that she was in the hands of the Ruffians, and that they had demolished the free state Hotel, burned Robinson's house, and destroyed the two printing presses. Almost immediately a company of 30 was raised. There was no reason why I could not go for one, so I borrowed a rifle and ammunition and joined them. The thought of engaging in battle is not a pleasing one, but the free state men are compelled to. Why should I not do [so] as well as others, I have nothing to hinder me and my life is no dearer to me than the lives of others are to them. At sundown we divided into 2 divisions and took turns in walking. It was really affecting to see husbands and wives bid each other good bye. — not knowing as they would ever see each other again. yet the feeling and sympathies of the women are as much enlisted in the cause as the men. It is nothing uncommon to see them running bullets and making cartriges. One woman yesterday told me that she had often been called up nights to make them....

Tuesday, 27. Since I wrote the above the Osawatomie company has returned to O. as news came that we could do nothing immediately, so we returned back. On our way back we heard that 5 men had been killed by Free State men. the men were butchered — ears cut off and the bodies thrown into the river[.] the murdered men (Proslavery) had thrown out threats and insults, yet the act was barbarous and inhuman whoever committed by[.] we met the men going when we were going up and knew that they were on a secret expedition, yet didn't know what it was. Tomorrow something will be done to arrest them. there were 8 concerned in the act. perhaps they had good motives, some think they had, how that is I dont know. The affairs took place 8 miles from Osawatomie. The War seems to have commenced in real earnest. Horses are stolen on all sides whenever they can be taken....

Weds eve. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Since yesterday I have learned that those men who committed those murders were a party of Browns. one of them was formerly in the wool business in Springfield, John Brown[.] his son, (Jn) has been taken today, tho he had no hand in the act, but was knowing to it, but when I write to Maria I will give further particulars[.] Osawatomie is in much fear and excitement[.] News came tonight that a co. of Georgains and Alibamians were coming to make this their headquarters. All work is nearly suspended, the women are in constant fear[.] It was really pleasing to witness the reception of our co. by the women after they came in to O. [I]t was a little after dark. A long line of women and children stood by the roadside to greet us and joy was depicted on every countenance. hands were heartily shaken and congratulations offered[.] but I must close.... Yours truly, E It wont be best for me to write my name so you must guess who wote this[.] but very few now attach their full name to a letter THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

June 3, Tuesday: Lysander Spooner received Patent #15,021, “Improvement in Elastic Bottoms for Chairs and other articles.” Perhaps money from such mundane items as improved beds and chairs would make it possible for him to finish THE LAW OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY. For financial support in the manufacture of his patented elastic bottoms, Spooner turned to a friend, Elias Howe, who had invented a sewing machine in 1845 and had won in a court battle over patent rights in 1854. Howe seems to have agreed to purchase an option on Spooner’s patent although he would find it difficult to come up with the cash and eventually, during Fall 1857, would need to back away. Spooner would retaliate in a pamphlet “The Sewing Machine Fraud” no copy of which now exists, and which seems never actually to have been put through a printing press or distributed (which nevertheless would be the demise of this friendship between Spooner and Howe).

Henry Thoreau surveyed, on this day and the following one, for John Hosmer, about 25 acres of meadow and woods in the western part of Concord beyond the pail factory.

View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm

(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.)

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/63a.htm

http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/63b.htm

June 3. Tuesday. Surveying for John Hosmer beyond pail-factory. Hosmer says that seedling white birches do not grow larger than your arm, but cut them down and they spring up again and grow larger. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

While clearing a line through shrub oak, which put his eyes out, he asked, “What is shrub oak made for?” R. Hoar, I believe, bought that (formerly) pine lot of Loring's which is now coming up shrub oak. Hosmer says that he will not see any decent wood there as long as he lives. H. says he had a lot of pine in Sudbury, which being cut, shrub oak came up. He cut and burned and raised rye, and the next year (it being surrounded by pine woods on three sides) a dense growth of pine sprang up. As I have said before, it seems to me that the squirrels, etc., disperse the acorns, etc., amid the pines, they being a covert for them to lurk in, and when the pines are cut the fuzzy shrub oaks, etc., have the start. If you cut the shrub oak soon, probably pines or birches, maples, or other trees which have light seeds will spring next, because squirrels, etc., will not be likely to carry acorns into open land. If the pine wood had been surrounded by white oak, probably that would have come up after the pine. While running a line in the woods, close to the water, on the southwest side of Loring’s Pond, I observed a chickadee sitting quietly within a few feet. Suspecting a nest, I looked and found it in a small hollow maple stump which was about five inches in diameter and two feet high. I looked down about a foot and could just discern the eggs. Breaking off a little, I managed to get my hand in and took out some eggs. There were seven, making by their number an unusual figure as they lay in the nest, a sort of egg rosette, a circle around with one (or more) in the middle. In the meanwhile the bird sat silent, though rather restless, within three feet. The nest was very thick and warm, of average depth, and made of bluish-slate rabbit’s(?) fur. The eggs were a perfect oval, five eighths inch long, white with small reddish-brown or rusty spots, especially about larger end, partly developed. The bird sat on the remaining eggs next day. I called off the boy in another direction that he might not find it. Plucked a white lily pad with rounded sinus and lobes in Loring’s pond, a variety. Picked uh a young wood tortoise, about an inch and a half long, but very orbicular. Its scales very distinct, and as usual very fine and distinctly sculptured, but there was no orange on it, curly buff or leather-color on the sides beneath. So the one of similar rounded form and size and with distinct scales but faint yellow spots on back must have been a young spotted turtle, I think, after all. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1857

At this point the term “keeping-room” was in use to designate a home’s common sitting room. Thus, in S.G. Goodrich’s RECOLLECTIONS: Carpets were then only known in a few families, and were confined to the keeping-room and parlor.

Lysander Spooner returned from his chair and bed making activities to his equivalently unrewarding legal speculations and writing. Although he criticized his former fiancé Mary Booth as “heartless” and “insulting,” he would not entirely give up his dreams of someday engaging in a courtship and a marriage, with some woman somehow, and among his papers we find scattered letters from Lizzie Doten, a medium, during the 1860s, and from Virginia Vaughn, a lecturer on poetry, during the 1870s.

September 10, Thursday: The Mormons, embittered by persecution, assaulted a “Gentile” wagon train in what would become known as the massacre of Mountain Meadows.13

Lysander Spooner wrote to Gerrit Smith that “The idea of going to the people at large on this question seems to me utterly futile. The mass of them have neither time nor inclination for such investigations.” If the masses could, somehow, be persuaded by the lawyers of the soundness of the principles of his arguments, they could be counted on to “march up to the cannon’s mouth.” — But how might they persuade the lawyers to function as intermediaries, and persuade the masses?

Henry Thoreau was being written to by Friend Daniel Ricketson FRIEND DANIEL RICKETSON in New Bedford, Massachusetts NEW BEDFORD MA . The Shanty, 10th Sept 1857— Dear Philosopher, I received your note of yesterday this a.m. I am glad you write me so frankly. I know well how dear one's own time & solitude may be, and I would not on any consideration, violate the sanctity of your prerogative. I fear too that I may have heretofore trespassed upon your time too much— If I have please pardon me as I did so unwittingly— I felt the need of congenial society & sought yours— I forgot that I could not render you an equivalent. It is good for one to be checked — to be thrown more and more upon his own resources. I have lived years of solitude (seeing only my own family, & Uncle James occasionally, and was never happier. My heart however was then more buoyant, and the woods and fields — the birds & flowers, but more than these,

13. Now do you see what’s wrong with persecution? It circulates. What goes around comes around. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

my rural meditations afforded me a constant source of the truest enjoyment. I admire your strength & fortitude to battle the world. I am a weak and broken reed. Have charity for me, if not sympathy. Can any one heart know another's? If not let us suspend our too hasty judgement against those from whom we differ. I hope to see you in due time at Brooklawn where you are always a welcome & instructive guest. With my kind regards to your family I remain Yours faithfully D. Ricketson

September 10, Thursday: P.M. –To Cardinal Ditch and Peter’s. Cardinal-flower, nearly done. Beach plum, almost ripe. Squash vines on the Great Fields, generally killed and blackened by frost (though not so much in our garden), revealing the yellow fruit, perhaps prematurely. Standing by Peter’s well, the white maples by the bank of the river a mile off now give a rosaceous tinge to the edge of the meadow. I see lambkill ready to bloom a second time. Saw it out on the 20th; how long? HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1858

Lysander Spooner spelled out in a broadside how the constitutional guarantee that citizens could bear and use arms, the “2d Amendment Remedy,” might be exercised. This broadside was headlined on one side “A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery,” to be read by northerners, and headlined on the other side “To the Non- Slaveholders of the South.” Groups should form in the North to send arms to the South, and even fight in the South. Groups of southern blacks should “form themselves into bands, build forts in the forests, and there collect arms, stores, horses, everything that will enable them to sustain themselves, and carry on their warfare upon the Slaveholders.” Such guerrilla forces or maroon forces could undermine white authority by capturing, stripping, and flogging individual slavemasters in the presence of their slaves. These forces, North as well as South, could finance themselves (in the manner in which Communist revolutionaries in Russia would sustain themselves during the early years of the 20th Century by robbing banks) by robbing the slavemasters. The state of slavery is a state of war, in this case it is a just war, on the part of the negroes — a war for liberty, and recompense of injuries; and necessity justifies them in carrying it on by the only means their oppressors have left them. In war, the plunder of enemies is as legitimate as the killing of them; and stratagem is as legitimate as open force. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

John Brown would ask Spooner to cease distributing this pamphlet, pointing out to him that the effect would be to alert and alarm and forewarn the slavesmasters.

Democrats in Ohio gained control of the state legislature and repealed the personal liberty law that had been allowing fugitives to apply for a writ of habeas corpus. In the future, the runaway slaves who sought refuge around Oberlin, Ohio would become targets of slavecatchers from the South, who would be able to operate in Ohio under authority of the federal Fugitive Slave Act. A professor and his students at Oberlin College, who rescued John Price, an 18-year-old black fugitive slave who had escaped from owner John Bacon of Maysville,

Kentucky the previous winter by riding horseback over the frozen Ohio River, and made arrangements to send him to Canada, got into a certain amount of trouble. This group of rescuers who got themselves into trouble with the law included John Mercer Langston, Ohio’s 1st black lawyer. At the urging of President James

Buchanan, the government indicted 37 of them for violating the Fugitive Slave Law and put them on trial before US District Judge Hiram Willson. While the rescuers cooled their heels in the Cleveland jail, they were visited by John Brown — whose father Owen had been during the 1830s an Oberlin College trustee. Eventually, by negotiations between the federal government and the state government, all but two would be released, and during the following year those two, Simeon M. Bushnell, white, and Charles H. Langston, a free HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

black, would be put on trial.

UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

December: This issue of The Atlantic Monthly magazine had an interesting article on birdsong. The Reverend Samuel Joseph May, accompanied by the abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond of Salem, Massachusetts and the Reverend William Henry Channing of Boston, embarked upon the Arabia for a tour of England and Europe: I’ve seen the Pope!!!

Hinton Rowan Helper replied to Lysander Spooner: My dear Sir, Above, in brief, is my candid criticism of the circular in regard to which you have done me the honor to request my opinion. It is possible that I may be mistaken, but I feel as well assured as I can of anything not absolutely certain, that the result of the Lopez expedition to ___, some years since, was a brilliant triumph, compared with the result that would ineviatbly follow the attempt to carry out your present plan of operations in the faith. The circular in its present form can never be more serviceable in accomplishing the great obeject you have in view, Here at the south it will effect no good – it might do harm, at the South it would certainly strengthen the clains of slavery. I sincerely trust that you will not distribute it, or, to say HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

the least, that you will withhold it from the public until the next presidential campaign. For several months past I have had it in contemplation to issue a circular especially designed to reach the South in the right way; and if I am not failed or prejudicied in my aims and efforts, I think I shall, in connection with other southerners, who are willing and anxious to cooperate with me, be successful in accomplishing more in the direction within the next two or three years than has been accomplished within the last fifteen. My friend, Prof. Fredrick, has seen your circular, and fully concurs in the opinion which I have expressed in reference to the same. Neither the Professor nor myself, however, desire to be taken as criticisms to go by. Probably, it would be well for you to consult others. Yours very truly, H.R. Helper Box 1077 New York, Dec. 1858

December 3, Friday: Francis Jackson wrote to Lysander Spooner about his recognition that the entirety of the property of the white slavemasters of the South properly belonged to their black slaves, and could be justly appropriated and redistributed from white citizens to black ones: Boston Dec. 3, 1858 Lysander Spooner Dear Sir, I have received your “Plan for the Abolition of Slavery,” the same I think that you shew me in Mos [?] some weeks since; being much engaged then, I did not give it much consideration; now that I have it before me in point, with the form of a petition apended, I have more fully considered it, and I ought to tell you, why I cannot accept your “Plan,” or your “League.” I believe that the doctrine of Non-Resistance is true; altho’ I have not been able to practice it, because of my early training, & long habits to the contrary; therefore, I made no professions in that direction, fearing that the force of habit would break them. I have arrived at my three score and tenth year: – have labored a quarter of a century with the Garrisonians, to put an end to slavery. I accept most fully their plans of operation; I am loaded down to the gunwales with their apparatus, & have no money to spare in other directions; – I do not doubt, but that I shall stand by them, as long as I shall be able to stand anywhere. I shall neither encourage, or discourage you, because I know your motives are true to your own light, and convictions of duty; I wish every one was as true, to the light and faith within them. I have but little strength left, but if I had ever so much, I could not ask, or encourage others to go, where I was not ready and willing to go myself. With sincere respect and esteem, Francis Jackson HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

December 3. P.M.– to Walden. A deliciously mild afternoon, though the ground is covered with snow. The cocks crowed this morning as of yore. I carry hatchet and rake in order to explore the Pout’s Nest for frogs and fish,–the pond not being frozen. A small part of that chink of the 26th is not yet frozen, and is crowded with pollywogs, mostly of large size, and very many have legs more or less developed. With my small iron rake, about a foot long by four inches wide, I jerk on to the ice at one jerk forty-five pollywogs, and more than as many more fall into the water. Many of the smallest pollywogs have bright copper-red bellies, prettily spotted, while the large are commonly pale-yellow, either clear or spotted. Many are dying. They have crowded so thickly along the open chink three or four inches wide by the side of a boat in the ice that, when I accidentally rock it, about a hundred are washed out on to the bream ice. One salamander among them, and four of the new breams, much larger, darker, and richer-colored than any I had found. I have often seen pollywogs in small numbers in the winter, in spring-holes, etc., but never such crowding to air-holes in the ice. A11 that is peculiar in this case is that this small pond has recently been cut off from the main pond by the falling of the water and that it is crowded with vegetable matter, chiefly target-weed, so that apparently the stagnant water has not only killed the breams and perch (of which last I find three dead) but many pollywogs, and compels others to seek the surface. As I return home by the Shanty Field and the railroad, I cannot help contrasting this evening with the th (on Fair Haven Hill-side). Now there is a genial, soft air, and in the west many clouds of purplish dove-color. I walk with unbuttoned coat, taking in the influences of the hour. Coming through the pitch pines east of the Shanty Field, I see the sun through the pines very yellow and warm-looking, and every twig of the pines and every weed is lit with yellow light (not silvery). The other night the few cloudy islets about [the] setting sun (where it had set) were glitteringly bright afar through the cold air. Now (when I get to the causeway) all the west is suffused with an extremely rich, warm purple or rose-color, while the edges of what were dove-colored clouds have a warm saffron glow, finally deepening to rose or damask when the sun has set. The other night there was no reddening of the clouds after sunset, no afterglow, but the glittering clouds were almost immediately snapped up in the crisped air. I improve every opportunity to go into a grist-mill, any excuse to see its cobweb-tapestry. I put questions to the miller as an excuse for staying, while my eye rests delighted on the cobwebs above his head and perchance on his hat. The salamander above named, found in the water of the Pout’s Nest, is the Salamandra symmetrica.14 It is some three inches long, brown (not dark-brown) above and yellow with small dark spots beneath, and the same spots on the sides of the tail; a row of very minute vermilion spots, not detected but on a close examination, on each side of the back; the tail is waved on the edge (upper edge, at least); has a pretty, bright eye. Its tail, though narrower, reminds me of the pollywog. Why should not it lose its tail as well as that? 15 The largest of the four breams (vide November 26th) two and nine twentieths inches long, by one inch broad and nine twentieths thick. The back, sides forward, tail, and anal fin black or blackish or very dark; the transverse dark bars few and indistinct except in middle of fish; sides toward tail yellowish-olive. Rear of abdomen has violet reflections (and about base of anal fin). Operculums tinged, streaked, and spotted with golden, coppery, greenish, and violet reflections. A vertical dark mark or line, corresponding to the stripes, through the eye. Iris copper-color or darker. The others, about two inches long, are differently colored, not so dark, more olive, and distinctly barred. The smallest are the lightest-colored, but the larger on the whole richer, as well as darker. The fins, especially the dorsal, caudal, and anal, are remarkably pretty, in color a fine network of light and dark. The lower jaw extends about three fortieths of an inch beyond the upper. The rich dark, almost black, back, with dark-barred sides alternating with yellowish olive, and the fine violet-purple reflections from the sides of the abdomen, like the nacre of a shell, as coin-like they lie flat in a basin, –such jewels they swam between the stems (clothed in transparent jelly) of the target-weed. R.W.E. saw quite a flock of ducks in the pond (Walden) this afternoon.

14. Probably dorsalis. Vide Apr. 18, 1859. 15. See one with much larger vermilion spots, Apr. 18,1859. Are they not larger in the spring? HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1859

When abolitionists went to the Ohio Republican convention, they managed to add repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 to the party platform.

During this year or the following one George William Curtis would become chairman of the Richmond County Republican Party Committee (a post he would retain until 1879).

James Henry Harris was in Cleveland, Ohio. He would travel to Canada.

Feelings had run high in Ohio in the aftermath of John Price’s rescue. When the federal jury issued its indictments, state authorities arrested the federal marshal, his deputies, and other men involved in Price’s detention. After negotiations, state officials agreed to release the arresting officials, while federal officials agreed to release 35 of the men indicted. Simeon M. Bushnell, a white man, and Charles H. Langston, a mulatto, were the only two men to be put on trial, in the federal court. Four prominent local attorneys –Franklin Thomas Backus, Rufus P. Spalding, Albert G. Riddle, and Seneca O. Griswold– made up their defense team. The jurors were all known Democrats. After convicting the white defendant, the same jury heard the case against the free black defendant despite protests that using the same jurors was illicit. Langston gave a speech in court that was a rousing statement of the case for abolition and for justice for people of color (following this, the court needed to make sustained efforts to suppress applause from onlookers). After the jury also convicted the black defendant, Judge Philemon Bliss assigned light sentences, 60 days in jail for the white defendant and 20 days in jail for the free mulatto one. Bushnell and Langston would file a writ of habeas corpus with the Ohio Supreme Court, asserting that the federal court did not have the authority to arrest and try them because the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was unconstitutional. The Ohio Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the law by a 3-over-2 ruling. Although Chief Justice Joseph Rockwell Swan was personally opposed to slavery, he wrote that his judicial duty left him no choice but to acknowledge that under the Supremacy Clause of the federal constitution an Act of the United States Congress was the supreme law of the land, and must be upheld. More than 10,000 citizens of Ohio then participated in a Cleveland rally to oppose the federal and state courts’ decisions. Appearing with Republican leaders such as Governor Salmon Portland Chase and Joshua Giddings. John Mercer Langston was the sole black speaker. Chief Justice Joseph Rockwell Swan would fail to win reelection and would be driven from politics.

The New York Democratic Vigilant Association (these were supporters of the candidacy of Democratic President James Buchanan) attributed Lysander Spooner’s 1858 PLAN FOR THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY to Gerrit Smith, in this manner attempting to blame on him John Brown’s attack at the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Of course, they were leveling such accusations in an attempt to discredit the Republican Party and in particular William Seward, Republican candidate for governor. They published this libel repeatedly in the New-York Herald (October 19th, October 20th, October 21st, October 22d, and October 27th) and as a pamphlet. Smith had seen Spooner’s broadside only months after publication and had written to the author on February 2d, 1859 to express a fear that it was going to be “laughed at as a ‘joke’.” He retained several attorneys in the case but Spooner was his lead lawyer and would be able to bill for $2,000, a minor fortune for him since he had been being forced to live on about $200 a year. After William Seward won the election, the Vigilant Association would be ready to settle out of court. Smith’s other counsel, Charles Sedgwick, would HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

want to drop the lawsuit, but Spooner would be eager to pursue the case all the way to the Supreme Court. Spooner became impatient during the lengthy legal maneuvering and several times threatened to resign unless he got his way. On August 29th, 1860, Spooner would write Smith that he was acting “not from wounded pride, but from a feeling of the inutility, and unprofitableness and even impertinence of my offering arguments, that were to produce no effect.” Smith would manage to persuade him to stay and indeed would take much of Spooner’s advice. Eventually Smith would settle for costs plus lawyers’ fees, most of which would go to Spooner. On October 25th, 1860 Smith would write “From the bottom of my heart do I rejoice that a good Providence has at last brought round to you some recompense for your invaluable services in the cause of freedom and of sound sense. Little did we forsee [sic] this way of your getting pay for writing your admirable books.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

January: Lysander Spooner, who was well aware of John Brown’s plans for the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, wrote to Gerrit Smith warning that Brown had neither the men nor the resources to succeed.

(Since this man was not a member of the Secret “Six”, but was what we would ordinarily identify instead as a philosophical anarchist, obviously the secret held by the group was not that much of a secret!)

It was, for instance, no secret to the American business community, and had not been since his bankruptcy in 1842, that John Brown’s “wherewithal” was scanty: A failed surveyor, farmer, speculator, schoolteacher, tanner, and cattleman, he showed up as a wool dealer in an 1848 credit report: “his condition is questionable.” Winter 1849: “may or may not be good.” Summer 1850: “his means are equally obscure.” Still in his forties, he looked sixty to credit reporters. The agency lost him when he switched lines of work yet again, only HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

to fail yet again. Like many another misfit who pushed a doomed venture too far, he quit when he had no other choice. Having grown whiskers for the first time, his craggy face looked still more ancient. Everyone had an opinion of this broken man. “Served him right.” Overhearing such comments, Thoreau said he felt proud even to know him and questioned why people “talk as if a man’s death were a failure, and his continued life, be it of whatever character, were a success.” The bankrupt court had restored this loser’s freedom in 1842. Now it was 1859, and no earthly court could save John Brown after his failure at Harpers Ferry.

January 31, Monday: Irrlichter op.218, a waltz by Johann Strauss, was performed for the initial time, in the Sophiensaal, Vienna.

Hinton Rowan Helper responded again to Lysander Spooner: 19 East 35th Street New York, Jany 31, 1859 Dear Spooner: You may have thought that my criticism of your circular to the Non-Slaveholders of the South was rather severe; but I gave you my candid opinion, and by reference to the inclosed Boston correspondence of the Tribune, in today’s issue, you will find that the writer’s views of the document differ but very little from my own, I am yet decidedly of the opinion that your circular is calculated to strengthen slavery rather than weaken it, and I regret that you did not withhold it from the public. Still, I know you intentions were good & we are all liable to make mistakes. I know nothing about the authorship of the inclosed slip. Please send me another circular. Prof. Fredrick has the one you sent me. Yours Truly, H.R. Helper HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Representative Kilgore moved that the rules of the US House of Representatives be suspended so he could submit a resolution in support of the existing ban upon the African slave-trade. The House then voted not to suspend its rules — and he was unable to submit it. This is what he had been trying to submit: “Whereas the laws prohibiting the African slave trade have become a topic of discussion with newspaper writers and political agitators, many of them boldly denouncing these laws as unwise in policy and disgraceful in their provisions, and insisting on the justice and propriety of their repeal, and the revival of the odious traffic in African slaves; and whereas recent demonstrations afford strong reasons to apprehend that said laws are to be set at defiance, and their violation openly countenanced and encouraged by a portion of the citizens of some of the States of this Union; and whereas it is proper in view of said facts that the sentiments of the people’s representatives in Congress should be made public in relation thereto: Therefore — “Resolved, That while we recognize no right on the part of the federal government, or any other law-making power, save that of the States wherein it exists, to interfere with or disturb the institution of domestic slavery where it is established or protected by State legislation, we do hold that Congress has power to prohibit the foreign traffic, and that no legislation can be too thorough in its measures, nor can any penalty known to the catalogue of modern punishment for crime be too severe against a traffic so inhuman and unchristian. “Resolved, That the laws in force against said traffic are founded upon the broadest principles of philanthropy, religion, and humanity; that they should remain unchanged, except so far as legislation may be needed to render them more efficient; that they should be faithfully and promptly executed by our government, and respected by all good citizens. “Resolved, That the Executive should be sustained and commended for any proper efforts whenever and wherever made to enforce said laws, and to bring to speedy punishment the wicked violators thereof, and all their aiders and abettors.” HOUSE JOURNAL, 35th Congress, 2d session, pages 298-9. W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: Early in December 1856, the subject reached Congress; and although the agitation was then new, fifty-seven Southern Congressmen refused to declare a re-opening of the slave-trade “shocking to the moral sentiment of the enlightened portion of mankind,” and eight refused to call the reopening even “unwise” and “inexpedient.”16 Three years later, January 31, 1859, it was impossible, in a House of one hundred and ninety-nine members, to get a two-thirds vote in order even to consider Kilgore’s resolutions, which declared “that no

16. HOUSE JOURNAL, 34th Congress, 3d session, pages 105-10; CONGRESSIONAL GLOBE, 34th Congress, 3d session, pages 123-6; Cluskey, POLITICAL TEXT-BOOK (14th edition), page 589. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

legislation can be too thorough in its measures, nor can any penalty known to the catalogue of modern punishment for crime be too severe against a traffic so inhuman and unchristian.”17 Congressmen and other prominent men hastened with the rising tide.18 Dowdell of Alabama declared the repressive acts “highly offensive;” J.B. Clay of Kentucky was “opposed to all these laws;”19 Seward of Georgia declared them “wrong, and a violation of the Constitution;”20 Barksdale of Mississippi agreed with this sentiment; Crawford of Georgia threatened a reopening of the trade; Miles of South Carolina was for “sweeping away” all restrictions;21 Keitt of South Carolina wished to withdraw the African squadron, and to cease to brand slave-trading as piracy;22 Brown of Mississippi “would repeal the law instantly;”23 Alexander Stephens, in his farewell address to his constituents, said: “Slave states cannot be made without Africans.... [My object is] to bring clearly to your mind the great truth that without an increase of African slaves from abroad, you may not expect or look for many more slave States.”24 Jefferson Davis strongly denied “any coincidence of opinion with those who prate of the inhumanity and sinfulness of the trade. The interest of Mississippi,” said he, “not of the African, dictates my conclusion.” He opposed the immediate reopening of the trade in Mississippi for fear of a paralyzing influx of Negroes, but carefully added: “This conclusion, in relation to Mississippi, is based upon my view of her present condition, not upon any general theory. It is not supposed to be applicable to Texas, to New Mexico, or to any future acquisitions to be made south of the Rio Grande.”25 John Forsyth, who for seven years conducted the slave-trade diplomacy of the nation, declared, about 1860: “But one stronghold of its [i.e., slavery’s] enemies remains to be carried, to complete its triumph and assure its welfare, — that is the existing prohibition of the African 26 Slave-trade.” Pollard, in his BLACK DIAMONDS, urged the importation of Africans as “laborers.” “This I grant you,” said he, “would be practically the re-opening of the African slave trade; but ... you will find that it very often becomes necessary to evade the letter of the law, in some of the greatest measures of social happiness and patriotism.”27

17. HOUSE JOURNAL, 35th Congress, 2d session, pages 298-9. Cf. 26TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 45. 18. Cf. REPORTS OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, especially the 26th, pages 43-4. 19. 26TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 43. He referred especially to the Treaty of 1842. 20. 26TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 43; CONGRESSIONAL GLOBE, 35th Congress, 2d session, Appendix, pages 248-50. 21. 26TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 44. 22. 26TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 44; 27TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, pages 13-4. 23. 26TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 44. 24. Quoted in Lalor, CYCLOPÆDIA, III. 733; Cairnes, THE SLAVE POWER (New York, 1862), page 123, note; 27TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 15. 25. Quoted in Cairnes, THE SLAVE POWER, page 123, note; 27TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 19. 26. 27TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 16; quoted from the Mobile Register. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

January 31: P.M.– Up river across Cyanean Meadow. Now we have quite another kind of ice. It has rained hard, converting into a very thin liquid the snow which had fallen on the old ice, and this, having frozen, has made a perfectly smooth but white snow ice. It is white like polished marble (I call it marble ice), and the trees and hill are reflected in it, as not in the other. It is far less varied than the other, but still is very peculiar and interesting. You notice the polished surface much more, as if it were the marble floor of some stupendous hall. Yet such is its composition it is not quite so hard and metallic, I think. The skater probably makes more of 3 scratch. The other was hard and crystalline. As I look south just before sunset, over this fresh and shining ice, I notice that its surface is divided, as it were, into a great many contiguous tables in different planes, somewhat like so many different facets of a polyhedron as large as the earth itself. These tables or planes are bounded by cracks, though without any appreciable opening, and the different levels are betrayed by the reflections of the light or sky being interrupted at the cracks. The ice formed last night is a day old, and these cracks, as I find, run generally from northeast to southwest across the entire meadow, some twenty-five or thirty rods, nearly at right angles with the river, and are from five to fifteen feet apart, while there are comparatively few cracks crossing them in the other direction. You notice this phenomenon looking over the ice some rods before you; otherwise might not observe the cracks when upon them. It is as if the very globe itself were a crystal with a certain number of facets. When I look westward now to the flat snow-crusted shore, it reflects a strong violet color. Also the pink light reflected from the low, flat snowy surfaces amid the ice on the meadows, just before sunset, is a constant phenomenon these clear winter days. Whole fields and sides of hills are often the same, but it is more distinct on these flat islands of snow scattered here and there over the meadow ice. I also see this pink in the dust made by the skaters. Perhaps the green seen at the same time in ice and water is produced by the general yellow or amber light of this hour, mingled with the blue of the reflected sky?? Surely the ice is a great and absorbing phenomenon. Consider how much of the surface of the town it occupies, how much attention it monopolizes! We do not commonly distinguish more than one kind of water in the river, but what various kinds of ice there are! Young Heywood told me that the trout which he caught in Walden was twenty-seven inches long and weighed five pounds, but was thin, not in good condition. (He saw another.) It was in the little cove between the deep one and the railroad.

October 28, Friday: Hinton Rowan Helper was under suspicion in New-York and, indeed, back home, and wrote again to Lysander Spooner: 43 Pine Street, New York, Oct. 28, 1859 Lysander Spooner, Esq. Dear Sir: Some persons here, and many, I suppose, in the South, are of the opinion that I was one of the prime movers in the Harpers Ferry Folly. I had nothing to do, and never expect to have anything to do, with any such ill-advised proceeding. It is impossible for us to achieve victory on the Brown basis. I hope we shall have no more such foolhardy expeditions. Let all good Antislavery men reserve their strength until the final struggle comes, which is, perhaps, not far off. Meanwhile please favor me, if you can, with a copy (or, if you will lend me the letter, I’ll return it to you if you desire it) of the letter I wrote you some time since disapproving your circular. I wish to show a friend here exactly what I said on the subject. H.R. Helper

27. Edition of 1859, pages 63-4. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Frederick Douglass wrote from Canada to Charles Wesley Slack in Boston advising that he would be unable to speak in Boston on November 1st. Slack was the organizer of the Fraternity Course, a popular series of lectures sponsored by Theodore Parker’s Congregational parish, and Douglass’s scheduled topic had been “Self Made Men.”

Confidential My Dear Sir: Seventeen Marshalls are on the look out for me in the States, and to avoid arrest I must avoid a journey to Boston —....

I should have written before — but for the hope that the clouds that now overshadow me would pass away— Instead of this they grow darker every hour— In haste yours HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Truly Frederick Douglass

October 28: Goldenrods and asters have been altogether lingering some days. Walnuts commonly fall, and the black walnuts at Smith’s are at least half fallen. They are of the form and size of a small lemon and– what is singular–have a rich nutmeg fragrance. They are now turning dark-brown. Gray says it is rare in the Eastern but very common in the Western States. Is it indigenous in Massachusetts? [Emerson says it is, but rare.] If so, it is much the most remarkable nut that we have.

November 14, Monday: The New-York Times reported that on account of the flight of the original proprietor, “Fred. Douglass’ Paper in New Hands,” to wit, the hands of son Lawrs. H. Douglass.

Lysander Spooner had been scheming about how the abolitionists might force the release of John Brown, through the kidnapping and holding for ransom of Governor Henry Alexander Wise of Virginia. He schemed that they might approach from the sea, by way of Chesapeake Bay and then the James River. From the poorly controlled region near the James, the group could sneak into the state capital, Richmond, and overcome the governor some evening while he was out for a walk; once out to sea. They could then retrace their route, to safety at sea. On this day he called on John LeBarnes to discussed this scheme.

Although Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of the Secret “Six” conspiracy was believed to be hard at work on a plan to rescue John Brown from his Virginia prison, a letter to his co-conspirator, the Reverend Theodore Parker, in exile in Rome, indicates otherwise: “The feeling of sympathy with Brown is spreading fast over all the North, and will grow stronger if he is hanged…. The failure is a success; it has done more for Freedom than years of talk could…. It grieves me sadly to think that Brown must die, but he is ready for it; and if we cannot avert it, we must think it best. It will undoubtedly add millions to the righteous side.” Someone writing in this manner while otherwise purporting to be taking action to save a life, very clearly, is sponsoring a delusion, and is doing so not in order to save that life himself but in order to ensure that no-one else has a chance to originate an effort to save that life. Sanborn was pretending, quite cold-bloodedly, in order to ensure that no last-minute event would cheat the conspirators of Brown’s hanging and martyrdom. In my own personal opinion, in addition, it would have occurred to Sanborn that dead men are no longer capable of telling tales, and that it was not altogether a bad thing that while Captain Brown’s lips were still sealed by his agenda of silent martyrdom they were going to become forever sealed by the glue of death.

At some point Richard Josiah Hinton had come to Luke Fisher Parsons at the mill where he was working in Osawatomie, Kansas to persuade him to take part in a scheme in which James Montgomery would lead a party that would free the Harpers Ferry prisoners from the jail at Charlestown, Virginia. Parsons enlisted in this scheme and was given $15 and told to join up with James Montgomery in Leavenworth, Kansas. However, when he arrived in Leavenworth he could find no trace of Montgomery, and so he went to Lawrence, where he learned that since 18 inches of snow had fallen in the Charlestown, Virginia region, the rescue attempt had been called off.

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR NOVEMBER 14th] HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

November 15, Tuesday-December 9: Newspapers were reporting on the sentencing phase of the treason trials taking place in Charlestown, Virginia:

John LeBarnes wrote Thomas Wentworth Higginson that “L[ysander] S[pooner] called upon me yesterday. His idea has certainly the merit of audacity.” Although Higginson and LeBarnes were able to turn up a boat and a willing crew of mercenaries, they would be utterly unable to obtain donations stalled their plans. For most of the usual suspects, clearly, John Brown would function better in the role of dead martyr than as a continuing loose cannon (certainly, that was the attitude of Henry Thoreau).

Luke Fisher Parsons continued in his diary: November 15, 1859: Read about Harper’s Ferry. Read of HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

proceedings of convention held May 8, 1858 in Chatam, Canada in which my name was mentioned several times.

Henry Thoreau composed the substance of his remarks that would be read on July 4, 1860 at the “anniversary celebration” in John Brown’s family’s home town, North Elba, New York (material he composed in this period would be altered only slightly). Ross/Adams commentary

THE LAST DAYS OF JOHN BROWN: Commonly, men live according to a formula, and are satisfied if the order of law is observed, but in this instance they, to some extent, returned to original perceptions, and there was a slight revival of old religion....(REFORM PAPERS 147) They remembered the old formula, but did not hear the new revelation.... How can a man behold the light, who has no answering inward light? They are true to their right, but when they look this way they see nothing, they are blind. For the children of the light to contend with them is as if there should be a contest between eagles and owls....(148)

It is not every man who can be a Christian, even in a very moderate sense, whatever education you give him. It is a matter of constitution and temperament, after all. He may have to be born again many times. I have known many a man who pretended to be a Christian, in whom it was ridiculous, for he had no genius for it. It is not every man who can be a freeman, even.... They seem to have known nothing about living or dying for a principle....(148-9)

We soon saw, as he saw. that he was not to be pardoned or rescued by man. That would have been to disarm him, to restore to him a material weapon, a Sharpe’s rifle, when he had taken up the sword of the spirit, — the sword with which he has really won his greatest and most memorable victories.... He works in public, and in the clearest light that shines on this land.(153) HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

John Brown marked up this Bible in prison to show the righteousness of returning evil for evil

November 15. A very pleasant Indian-summer day. P. M.–To Ledum Swamp. I look up the river from the railroad bridge. It is perfectly smooth between the uniformly tawny meadows, and I see several musquash-cabins off Hubbard Shore distinctly outlined as usual in the November light. I hear in several places a faint cricket note, either a fine z-ing or a distincter creak, also see and hear a grasshopper’s crackling flight. The clouds were never more fairly reflected in the water than now, as I look up the Cyanean Reach from Clamshell. A fine gossamer is streaming from every fence and tree and stubble, though a careless observer would not notice it. As I look along over the grass toward the sun at Hosmer’s field, beyond Lupine Hill, I notice the shimmering effect of the gossamer, – which seems to cover it almost like a web, – occasioned by its motion, though the air is so still. This is noticed at least forty rods off. I turn down Witherell Glade, only that I may bring its tufts of andropogon between me and the sun for a moment. They are pretty as ever. [Vide Oct. 16th and November 8th.] CAT In the midst of Ledum Swamp I came upon a white cat under the spruces and the water brush, which evidently had not seen me till I was within ten feet. There she stood, quite still, as if hoping to be concealed, only turning her head slowly away from and toward me, looking at me thus two or three times with an extremely worried expression in her eyes, but not moving any other part of her body. It occurred to me from her peculiar anxious expression and this motion, as if spellbound, that perhaps she was deaf; but when I moved toward her she found the use of her limbs and dashed off, bounding over the andromeda by successive leaps like a rabbit, no longer making her way through or beneath it. I noticed on the 3d, in Worcester, that the white pines had been as full of seed there as here this year. Also gathered half a pocketful of shagbarks, of which many still hung on the trees though most had fallen. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

All through the excitement occasioned by Brown’s remarkable attempt and subsequent behavior, the Massachusetts Legislature, not taking any steps for the defense of her citizens who are likely to be carried to Virginia as witnesses and exposed to the violence of a slaveholding mob, is absorbed in a liquor-agency question. That has, in fact, been the all-absorbing question with it!! I am sure that no person up to the occasion, or who perceived the significance of the former event, could at present attend to this question at all. As for the Legislature, bad spirits occupied their thoughts. If any person, in a lecture or a conversation, should now cite any ancient example of heroism, such as Cato, or Tell, or Winkelried, passing over the recent deeds and words of John Brown, I am sure that it would be felt by any intelligent audience of Northern men to be tame and inexcusably far-fetched. I do not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, in Roman, or English, or any, history. It is a fact proving how universal and widely related any transcendent greatness is, like the apex of a pyramid to all beneath it, that when I now look over my extracts of the noblest poetry the best is oftenest applicable in part or wholly to this man’s position. Almost any noble verse may be read either as his elegy or eulogy or be made the text of an oration on him. Indeed, such are now first discerned to be the parts of a divinely established liturgy, applicable to those rare cases for which the ritual of no church has provided, – the case of heroes, martyrs, and saints. This is the formula established on high, their burial service, to which every great genius has contributed its line or syllable. Of course the ritual of no church which is wedded to the state can contain a service applicable to the case of a state criminal unjustly condemned, – a martyr. The sense of grand poetry read by the light of this event is brought out distinctly like an invisible writing held to the fire. About the 23d of October I saw a large flock of goldfinches [Vide November 11th.] (judging from their motions and notes) on the tops of the hemlocks up the Assabet, apparently feeding on their seeds, then falling. They were collected in great numbers on the very tops of these trees and flitting from one to another. Rice has since described to me the same phenomenon as observed by him there since (says he saw the birds picking out the seeds), though he did not know what birds they were. William Rice says that these birds get so much of the lettuce seed that you can hardly save any. They get sunflower seeds also. Are called “lettuce-birds” in the books. A lady who was suitably indignant at the outrage on Senator Sumner, lamenting to me to-day the very common insensibility to such things, said that one woman to whom she described the deed and on whom she thought that she had made some impression, lately inquired of her with feeble curiosity: “How is that young man who had his head hurt? I haven’t heard anything about him for a good while.” As I returned over the Corner Bridge I saw cows in the sun half-way down Fair Haven Hill next the Cliff, half a mile off, the declining sun so warmly reflected from their red coats that I could not for some time tell if they were not some still bright-red shrub oaks, – for they had no more form at that distance.

Charles Dickens completed the serialization of A TALE OF TWO CITIES in his magazine All the Year Round. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Middle of November: The fugitive Francis Jackson Meriam showed up at the door of the conspiratorial Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe of the Secret “Six” conspiracy in exile at the St. Lawrence Hotel in Montréal, and was in need of succor. Howe “declined talking to” this wanted man and gave him nothing, since he was in a “wild state … a state of painful excitement” — and changed hotels as soon as his victim was out of sight. Meriam would seek aid from George Luther Stearns of the Secret “Six” conspiracy in Montréal as well and would likewise strike out with this other conspirator. Sorry, guy, this isn’t about you, we’ve used you up and thrown you away. Lots of luck out there in Christendom, hear?

Lysander Spooner had been scheming about how the abolitionists might force the release of John Brown, through the kidnapping and holding for ransom of Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia. He schemed that they might approach from the sea, by way of Chesapeake Bay and then the James River. From the poorly controlled region near the James, the group could sneak into the state capital, Richmond, and overcome the governor some evening while he was out for a walk; once out to sea. They could then retrace their route, to safety at sea. On this day, in a letter to the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, John LeBarnes wrote about the visit he had received on the previous day from one “L.S.”, commenting that “His idea has certainly the merit of audacity.”

November 28, Monday: Professor Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who would be referred to as the “Swiss Thoreau,” wrote in his JOURNAL INTIME: “This evening I heard the first lecture of Ernest Naville on “The Eternal Life.” It was admirably sure in touch, true, clear, and noble throughout. He proved that, whether we would or no, we were bound to face the question of another life. Beauty of character, force of expression, depth of thought, were all equally visible in this extemporized address, which was as closely reasoned as a book, and can scarcely be disentangled from the quotations of which it was full. The great room of the Casino was full to the doors, and one saw a fairly large number of white heads.”

Prime Minister Leopoldo O’Donnell landed at Ceuta to reinforce the Spanish garrison against Moroccans.

Old and full of years, the beloved American author Washington Irving died of a heart attack in his home, having earned a sum total of $205,383.34 from his writings during the course of his life. Here are two sentiments he had recently penned:

I hope none of those whose interests and happiness are dear to me will be induced to follow my footsteps, and wander into the seductive but treacherous paths of literature. There is no life more precarious in its profits and fallacious in its enjoyments than that of an author.

I shouldn’t mind about the Niggers if they only brought them over before they had drilled out their tails.

John Goodwin told Henry Thoreau that Alek Therien, who was living in Lincoln in a shanty of his own construction, was drinking only checkerberry-tea. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

In the evening, at the Concord Town Hall, Thoreau addressed a planning meeting for the services to be enacted upon the day of the killing of the prisoner John Brown, attended by Bronson Alcott, Dr. Josiah Bartlett, Simon Brown, Waldo Emerson, John Shepard Keyes, and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. Alcott noted in his journal that Thoreau had “taken a prominent part in this movement, and arranged for it chiefly.”

The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote from Worcester to Lysander Spooner to put on record his utter disagreement with the unworkable plan to rescue John Brown. The sympathies of any mercenaries they would need to hire for such an exploit would undoubtedly be with Virginia, and the state of Virginia could offer far more money than the abolitionists, therefore these people would inevitably sell them out It seemed useless to him, to waste words on a thing so clear: The real sympathy of these men is with Virginia. And if we offered them $1000 apiece, any one of them could make $2000 in Virginia by telling the project in time to defeat it.... Virginia may be weak and cowardly but she has proved strong enough to defeat us.... There is no need of burning this.

November 28. P. M.–To E. Hubbard’s Wood. Goodwin tells me that Therien, who lives in a shanty of his own building and alone in Lincoln, uses for a drink only checkerberry-tea. (G. also called it “ivory-leaf.”) Is it not singular that probably only one tea-drinker in this neighborhood should use for his beverage a plant which grows here? Therien, really drinking his checkerberry- tea from motives of simplicity or economy and saying nothing about it, deserves well of his country. As he does now, we may all do at last. There is scarcely a wood of sufficient size and density left now for an owl to haunt in, and if I hear one hoot I may be sure where he is. Goodwin is cutting out a few cords of dead wood in the midst of E. Hubbard’s old lot. This has been Hubbard’s practice for thirty years or more, and so, it would seem, they are all dead before he gets to them. Saw Abel Brooks there with a half-bushel basket on his arm. He was picking up chips on his and neighboring lots; had got about two quarts of old and blackened pine chips, and with these was returning home at dusk more than a mile. Such a petty quantity as you would hardly have gone to the end of your yard for, and yet he said that he had got more than two cords of them at home, which he had collected thus and sometimes with a wheelbarrow. He had thus spent an hour or two and walked two or three miles in a cool November evening to pick up two quarts of pine chips scattered through the woods. He evidently takes real satisfaction in collecting his fuel, perhaps gets more heat of all kinds out of it than any man in town. He is not reduced to taking a walk for exercise as some are. It is one thing to own a wood-lot as he does who perambulates its bounds almost daily, so as to have worn a path about it, and another to own one as many another does who hardly knows where it is. Evidently the quantity of chips in his basket is not essential; it is the chippy idea which he pursues. It is to him an unaccountably pleasing occupation. And no doubt he loves to see his pile grow at home. Think how variously men spend the same hour in the same village! The lawyer sits talking with his client in the twilight; the trader is weighing sugar and salt; while Abel Brooks is hastening home from the woods with his basket half full of chips. I think I should prefer to be with Brooks. He was literally as smiling as a basket of chips. A basket of chips, therefore, must have been regarded as a singularly pleasing (if not pleased) object. We make a good deal of the early twilights of these November days, they make so large a part of the afternoon. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1860

Lysander Spooner’s THE UNCONSTITUTIONALITY OF SLAVERY, originally issued in 1845-1846 in two parts, was republished in Boston as a single volume.

The Republican Party, organized in 1845, was the target of Spooner’s wrath in a pamphlet, ADDRESS OF THE FREE CONSTITUTIONALISTS TO THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES: “The Republicans are double-faced, double-tongued, hypocritical, and inconsistent to the last degree.” Spooner had had only contempt for the Liberty Party, which had spurned his ideology, and had had only contempt for the Free Soil Party, which likewise had spurned his ideology — and now comes this Republican Party, yet again spurning his ideology. What, are they forever clueless? The national presidential election of 1860 amounted to “a mere contest of hypocrisy, rhetoric, and fustian and a selfish struggle for the honors and spoils of office.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

January 22, Sunday: In a letter to William Henry Seward, Lysander Spooner attacked the Republican Party and its war effort and came close to espousing the defense of the secessionists. A civil war would not be about the elimination of human slavery, but would be merely a Northern device pursuing an illegitimate hegemony over the South. These Republicans were “double-faced demagogues” seeking to “ride into power on the two horses of Liberty and Slavery.” He “would much rather the government be in the hands of declared enemies of liberty, than in those of treacherous friends.” Yes, he believed in human liberty, and yes the blacks were humans deserving of liberty, but while the Southerners were seeking wrongly to enslave the blacks, the Northerners were seeking to use this as an excuse to wrongly enslave all the Southerners.

Jan. 22. P.M.— Up river to Fair Haven Pond; return via Andromeda Ponds and railroad. Overcast, but some clear sky in southwest horizon; mild weather still. Where the sedge grows rankly and is uncut, as along the edge of the river and meadows, what fine coverts are made for mice, etc., at this season! It is arched over, and the snow rests chiefly on its ends, while the middle part is elevated from six inches to a foot and forms a thick thatch, as it were, even when all is covered with snow, under which the mice and so forth can run freely, out of the way of the wind and of foxes. After a pretty deep snow has just partially melted, you are surprised to find, as you walk through such a meadow, how high and lightly the sedge lies up, as if there had been no pressure upon it. It grows, perhaps, in dense tufts or tussocks, and when it falls over, it forms a thickly thatched roof. Nature provides shelter for her creatures in various ways. If the musquash, etc., has no longer extensive fields of weed and grass to crawl in, what an extensive range it has under the ice of the meadows and river-sides! for, the water settling directly after freezing, an icy roof of indefinite extent is thus provided for it, and it passes almost its whole winter under shelter, out of the wind and invisible to men. The ice is so much rotted that I observe in many places those lunar-shaped holes, and dark places in the ice, convex up-stream, sometimes double-lunar.

I perceive that the open places in the river do not preserve the same relative importance that they had December 29th. Then the largest four or five stood in this order: (l) below boat’s place, (2) below junction, (3) Barrett’s Bar, (4) Clamshell or else Hubbard’s Bath. Now it is (l) below junction, (2) Hubbard’s Bath or else Clamshell. I do not know but Clamshell is as large as Hubbard’s Bath. Which of the others is largest I am not quite sure. In other words, below junction and Hubbard’s Bath (if not also Clamshell, not seen) retain about their former size, while below boat’s place and Barrett’s Bar have been diminished, especially below boat’s place. Birds are commonly very rare in the winter. They are much more common at some times than at others. I see more tree sparrows in the beginning of the winter (especially when snow is falling) than in the course of it. I think that by observation I could tell in what kind of weather afterward these were most to be seen. Crows come about houses and streets in very cold weather and deep snows, and they are heard cawing in pleasant, thawing winter weather. and their note is then a pulse by which you feel the quality of the air, i. e., when cocks crow. For the most part, lesser redpolls and pine grosbeaks do not appear at all. Snow buntings are very wandering. They were quite numerous a month ago, and now seem to have quit the town. They seem to ramble about the country at will. C. says that he followed the track of a fox all yesterday afternoon, though with some difficulty, and then lost it at twilight. I suggested that he should begin next day where he had left off, and that following it up thus for many days he might catch him at last. “By the way,” I asked, “did you go the same way the fox did, or did you take-the back track?” “Oh,” said he, “I took the back track. It would be of no use to go the other way, you know.” DOG Minott says that a hound which pursues a fox by scent cannot tell which way he is going; that the fox is very cunning and will often return on its track over which the dog had already run. It will ascend a high rock and then leap off very far to one side; so throw the dogs off the scent for a while and gain a breathing-spell. I see, in one of those pieces of drifted meadow (of last spring) in A. Wheeler’s cranberry meadow, a black willow thus transplanted more than ten feet high and five inches in diameter. It is quite alive. The snow-fleas are thickest along the edge of the wood here, but I find that they extend quite across the river, HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

though there are comparatively few over the middle. There are generally fewer and fewer the further you are from the shore. Nay, I find that they extend quite across Fair Haven Pond. There are two or three inches of snow on the ice, and thus they are revealed. There are a dozen or twenty to a square rod on the very middle of the pond. When I approach one, it commonly hops away, and if it gets a good spring it hops a foot or more, so that it is at first lost to me. Though they are scarcely the twentieth of an inch long they make these surprising bounds, or else conceal themselves by entering the snow. We have now had many days of this thawing weather, and I believe that these fleas have been gradually hopping further and further out from the shore. To-day, perchance, it is water, a day or two later ice, and no fleas are seen on it. Then snow comes and covers the ice, and if there is no thaw for a month, you see no fleas for so long. But, at least soon after a thaw, they are to be seen on the centre of ponds at least half a mile across. Though this is my opinion, it is by no means certain that they come here thus, for I am prepared to believe that the water in the middle may have had as many floating on it, and that these were afterward on the surface of the ice, though unseen, and hence under the snow when it fell, and ready to come up through it when the thaw came. But what do they find to eat in apparently pure snow so far from any land? Has their food come down from the sky with the snow? They must themselves be food for many creatures. This must be as peculiarly a winter animal as any. It may truly be said to live in snow. I see some insects of about this form on the snow:

I scare a partridge that was eating the buds and ends of twigs of the Vaccinium vacillans on a hillside. At the west or nesaea end of the largest Andromeda Pond, I see that there has been much red ice, more than I ever saw, but now spoiled by the thaw and snow. The leaves of the water andromeda are evidently more appressed to the twigs, and showing the gray under sides, than in summer. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1861

January 1, Tuesday: Lysander Spooner brought the case of a fugitive slave, John Anderson, to the attention of Gerrit Smith. This escapee had killed, in upstate New York, a farmer who had been attempting to intercept him, and had then made it safely to freedom in Canada, but the United States government had initiated extradition proceedings. Smith would travel to Toronto to provided aid for Anderson. This American would remain safe in Canada and would never be tried in British courts or extradited, in the absence of any law that “would make it murder for a man to kill another who was attempting to seize him as a slave.”

Early in this month the publishing firm of Thayer & Eldridge at 1116 Washington Street in Boston, that had put out James Redpath’s THE PUBLIC LIFE OF CAPT. JOHN BROWN and ECHOES OF HARPER’S FERRY, filed for bankruptcy.

Soon Franklin Benjamin Sanborn would abandon his lawsuit against his would-be captors. I saw them indicted in the Middlesex County Courtroom for the criminal offense of kidnapping. But I halted any further litigation, as the Civil War was coming on and some of these men, along with their legal counsel, were going to the front.

(Sanborn himself –for some reason no-one has seen fit to examine– would not be playing any part in our nation’s civil-war contest. Waldo Emerson would raise the issue as “Why does he not participate in the war he did so much to precipitate?” –and this may have something to do with his later excluding Sanborn from participation in his deathbed ceremonial.) US CIVIL WAR

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR JANUARY 1st] HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1863

Last issue of the Boston Journal of Natural History, begun in 1834. The Boston Society of Natural History’s future publications would be as MEMOIRS READ BEFORE THE BOSTON SOCIETY OF NATURAL HISTORY.

With a bequest from Dr. William Johnson Walker, the museum of the Boston Society of Natural History was completed at the corner of Berkeley Street and Boylston Street in Boston.28

After the failure of the publishing firm of Thayer & Eldridge at 1116 Washington Street in Boston during the 1st week of 1861 (the firm that had put out James Redpath’s THE PUBLIC LIFE OF CAPT. JOHN BROWN and ECHOES OF HARPER’S FERRY), Redpath set up his own firm at 221 Washington Street in Boston and began a series categorized as BOOKS FOR THE TIMES, which would include William Wells Brown’s THE BLACK MAN, John R. Beard’s TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE, and Louisa May Alcott’s HOSPITAL SKETCHES.

Lysander Spooner organized a Spooner Copyright Company with which to monetize his banking ideas. – Does anybody want to open a bank under the system I expounded in 1861 in my NEW SYSTEM OF PAPER CURRENCY? (The line forms on the left. I can make myself available, if you give me a cut of 1%, to consult and advise in regard to “my invention”!) –Unfortunately, no one would be willing to step forward and express any interest at all. It was like shouting down a well and not hearing any echo. Please, is nobody home? Hello? Hello?

November 6, Friday: Demetrios Georgiou Voulgaris replaced Benizelos Athanasiou Rouphos as Prime Minister of Greece.

Gerrit Smith wrote a goodbye letter to Lysander Spooner, who had asked him to return all his letters and never to write again: “Your letter came last evening finding me in poor health. It kept me awake nearly all the night. How shall I account for such a letter? I supposed that you numbered me amongst your truest friends.”

There was fighting at Droop Mountain. US CIVIL WAR

The Boston Commonwealth printed stanzas 1-4 of the poem “The Fall of the Leaf,” attributed to the recently deceased Henry Thoreau, the effort of which they had previously printed stanzas 5-13. (They would never get around to publishing the final 3 stanzas.) Thank God who seasons thus the year, And sometimes kindly slants his rays; For in his winter he’s most near And plainest seen upon the shortest days.

Who gently tempers now his heats, And then his harsher cold, lest we Should surfeit on the summer’s sweets, Or pine upon the winter’s crudity.

28. This structure is currently used by Bonwit Teller. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

A sober mind will walk alone, Apart from nature, if need be, And only his own seasons own; For nature leaving its humanity. Sometimes a late autumnal thought Has crossed my mind in green July, and to its early freshness brought Late ripened fruits, and an autumnal sky. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1864

Lysander Spooner’s CONSIDERATIONS FOR BANKERS, AND HOLDERS OF UNITED STATES BONDS (Boston: A. Williams & Co., 100 Washington Street; New-York: American News Company, 121 Nassau Street) put on display the author’s lack of any inclination toward sentimentality. In his consideration the marriage bond was merely another legal contract, possessing no romantic overtones more compelling than a protection against “lewdness.” He asked on page 47 “If a handsome and spirited young man has promised marriage with a young and beautiful woman, have Congress power to enact that he may tender a decrepit old man in his stead?” One of the great advantages of the proposed banking system, he suggested, was the manner in which it would put an end to American licentiousness “by making marriage nearly universal, and by inducing it in early life.” One of the primary deleterious impacts of poverty was that it enforced loneliness, creating a large pool of persons who have not legitimate outlet for their temptations toward sensuality and libertinism.

October 12, Wednesday: The Civil War, fought on the false issue of national union, had never aroused Lysander Spooner’s enthusiasm as had John Brown’s provocation at Harpers Ferry. At this point he publicly assailed Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, accusing him of the treason of pretending to be in favor of the abolition of human enslavement while actually seeking through strife merely to deprive the states of the South of their liberty. The Senator, a “deliberately perjured traitor to the constitution, to liberty, and to truth,” had “placed the North wholly in the wrong, and the South wholly in the right.” “You, and others like you have done more, according to your abilities, to prevent the peaceful abolition of slavery, than any other men in the nation….” ...the slaveholders would never have dared, in the face of the world, to attempt to overthrow a government that gave freedom to all, for the sake of establishing in its place one that should make slaves of those who, by the existing constitution, were free. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Republican politicians were aggressors, and “upon your heads, more even, if possible, than upon the slaveholders themselves, (who have acted only in accordance with their associations, interests, and avowed principles as slave-holders) rests the blood of this horrible, unnecessary, and therefore guilty, war.”

Mary Ann Day Brown buried what she was being led to suppose was the body of her son Watson Brown in the Adirondacks and then set out be the guest of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn and Sarah E. Sanborn for a week in Concord. After several days of receptions in Boston, knowing that Salmon Brown planned to take his family and join a train of 40 wagons, she and her younger daughters would board ship with an ample retirement fund made up of solicited donations, to spend her remaining years with her daughter Mrs. Ellen Fablinger at various locations on the West Coast.29

Richard Realf of the 88th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment wrote to Laura B. Merritt and Marian M. Cramer from Chattanooga, Tennessee (injury, railroad accident, hospital).

29. Eventually she would have 4 children and 17 grandchildren living in various parts of California and Oregon. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1866

August: Lysander Spooner placed an article in DeBow’s Review, the leading periodical in the South: “Proposed Banking System for the South.” His conceit was that if they would only adopt his proprietary monetary system, they would instantly double the value of all the remaining real property in the South: “It would at once establish credit in the North and in England, and enable her to supply herself with everything she needs.” This would be good for both the white Southerners and the freed blacks, because of the trickle-down: “the benefits of this increased wealth, industry and credit would not be monopolized by the whites, but would be liberally shared in by the blacks as a necessary result from the increased demand for their labor.”

During this period, from August to December, Varina Davis, wife of former Confederate President and accused traitor Jefferson Davis, was in Montréal.

The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway’s “Thoreau” began to appear in the Eclectic Magazine, LXVII (this would be concluded in the LXXIXth issue — where he would describe Henry Thoreau as, of all imaginable similes, a modern-day Julius Caesar): He did not care for people; his classmates seemed very remote. This reverie hung always about him, and not so loosely as the odd garments which the pious household care furnished. Thought had not yet awakened his countenance; it was serene, but rather dull, rather plodding. The lips were not yet firm; there was almost a look of smug satisfaction lurking round their corners. It is plain now that he was preparing to hold his future views with great setness, and personal appreciation of their importance. The nose was prominent, but its curve fell forward without firmness over the upper lip; and we remember him as looking very much like some Egyptian sculptures of faces, large- featured, but brooding, immobile, fixed in a mystic egotism. Yet his eyes were sometimes searching, as if he had dropped, or expected to find, something. It was the look of Nature’s own child learning to detect her way-side secrets; and those eyes have stocked his books with subtile traits of animate and inanimate creation which had escaped less patient observers. For he saw more upon the ground than anybody suspected to be there. His eyes slipped into every tuft of meadow or beach grass, and went winding in and out of the thickest undergrowth, like some slim, silent, cunning animal. They were amphibious besides, and slid under fishes’ eggs and into their nests at the pond’s bottom, to rifle all their contents. Mr. Emerson has noticed, that Thoreau could always find an Indian arrow-head in places that had been ploughed over and ransacked for years. “There is one,” he would say, kicking it up with his foot. In fact, his eyes seldom left the ground, even in his most earnest conversation with you, if you can call earnest a tone and manner that was very confident, as of an opinion that had formed from granitic sediment, but also very level and unflushed with feeling. The Sphinx might have become passionate and exalted as HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

soon. In later years his chin and mouth grew firmer as his resolute and audacious opinions developed, the curves of the lips lost their flabbiness, the eyes twinkled with the latent humor of his criticisms of society. Still the countenance was unruffled: it seemed to lie deep, like a mountain tarn, with cool, still nature all around. There was not a line upon it expressive of ambition or discontent: the affectional emotions had never fretted at it. He went about, like a priest of Buddha who expects to arrive soon at the summit of a life of contemplation, where the divine absorbs the human. All his intellectual activity was of the spontaneous, open-air kind, which keeps the forehead smooth. His thoughts grew with all the rest of nature, and passively took their chance of summer and winter, pause and germination: no more forced than pine-cones; fragrant, but not perfumed, owing nothing to special efforts of art. His extremest and most grotesque opinion had never been under glass. It all grew like the bolls on forest-trees, and the deviations from stem-like or sweeping forms. No man was ever such a placid thinker. It was because his thinking was observation isolated from all the temptations of society, from the artificial exigencies of literature, from the conventional sequence. Its truthfulness was not logically attained, but insensibly imbibed, during wood. chopping, fishing, and scenting through the woods and fields. So that the smoothness and plumpness of a child were spread over his deepest places. His simple life, so free from the vexations that belong to the most ordinary provision for the day, and from the wear and tear of habits helped his countenance to preserve this complacency. He had instincts, but no habits; and they wore him no more than they do the beaver and the blue-jay. Among them we include his rare intuitive sensibility for moral truth and for the fitness of things. For, although he lived so closely to the ground, he could still say, “My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not knowledge, but sympathy with intelligence.” But this intuition came up, like grass in spring, with no effort that is traceable, or that registers itself anywhere except in the things grown. You would look in vain for the age of his thoughts upon his face. Now, it is no wonder that he kept himself aloof from us in college; for he was already living on some Walden Pond, where he had run up a temporary shanty in the depths of his reserve. He built it better afterwards, but no nearer to men. Did anyone ever tempt him down to Snow’s, with the offer of an unlimited molluscous entertainment? The naturalist was not yet enough awakened to lead him to ruin a midnight stomach for the sake of the constitution of an oyster. Who ever saw him sailing out of Willard’s long entry upon that airy smack which students not intended for the pulpit launched from port-sangarees? We are confident that he never discovered the back-parlor aperture HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

through which our finite thirst communicated with its spiritual source. So that his observing faculty must, after all, be charged with limitations. We say, our thirst, but would not be understood to include those who were destined for the ministry, as no clergyman in the embryonic state was ever known to visit Willard’s. But Thoreau was always indisposed to call at the ordinary places for his spiritual refreshment; and he went farther than most persons when apparently he did not go so far. He soon discovered that all sectarian and denominational styles of thinking had their Willard within economical distance; but the respective taps did not suit his country palate. He was in his cups when he was out of doors, where his lips fastened to the far horizon, and he tossed off the whole costly vintage that mantled in the great circumference. But he had no animal spirits for our sport or mischief. We cannot recollect what became of him during the scenes of the Dunkin Rebellion [a student uprising]. He must have slipped off into some “cool retreat or mossy cell.” We are half inclined to suppose that the tumult startled him into some metamorphose, that corresponded to a yearning in him of some natural kind, whereby he secured a temporary evasion till peace was restored. He may also, in this interim of qualified humanity, have established an understanding with the mute cunning of nature, which appeared afterwards in his surprising recognition of the ways of squirrels, birds, and fishes. It is certainly quite as possible that man should take off his mind, and drop into the medium of animal intelligence, as that Swedenborg, Dr. Channing, and other spirits of just men made perfect, should strip off the senses and conditions of their sphere, to come dabbling about in the atmosphere of earth among men’s thoughts. However this may be, Thoreau disappeared while our young absurdity held its orgies, stripping shutters from the lower windows of the buildings, dismantling recitation rooms, greeting tutors and professors with a frenzied and groundless indignation which we symbolized by kindling the spoils of sacked premises upon the steps. It probably occurred to him that fools might rush in where angels were not in the habit of going. We recollect that he declined to accompany several fools of this description, who rushed late, all in a fine condition of contempt, with Corybantic gestures, into morning prayers, — a college exercise which we are confident was never attended by the angels. It is true he says, “Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones;” and a little after, in the same essay, “I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society.” But, in fact, there is nothing so conventional as the mischief of a boy who is grown large enough to light bonfires, and run up a bill for “special repairs,” and not yet large enough to include in such a bill his own disposition to “haze” his comrades and to have his fits of HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

anarchy. Rebellion is “but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.” There was no conceit of superior tendencies and exclusive tastes which prevented him from coming into closer contact with individuals. But it was not shyness alone which restrained him, nor the reticence of an extremely modest temperament. For he was complacent; his reserve was always satisfactory to himself. Something in his still latent and brooding genius was sufficiently attractive to make his wit “home-keeping;” and it very early occurred to him, that he should not better his fortunes by familiarity with other minds. This complacency, which lay quite deep over his youthful features, was the key to that defect of sympathy which led to defects of expression, and to unbalanced statements of his thought. It had all the effect of the seclusion that some men inflict upon themselves, when from conceit or disappointment they restrict the compass of their life to islands in the great expanse, and become reduced at last, after nibbling every thing within the reach of their tether, to simple rumination, and incessant returns of the same cud to the tongue. This, and not listlessness, nor indolence, nor absolute incapacity for any professional pursuit, led him to the banks of Walden Pond, where his cottage, sheltering a self-reliant and homely life, seemed like something secreted by a quite natural and inevitable constitution. You might as well quarrel with the self-sufficiency of a perfect day of Nature, which makes no effort to conciliate, as with this primitive disposition of his. The critic need not feel bound to call it a vice of temper because it nourished faults. He should, on the contrary, accept it as he sees that it secured the rare and positive characteristics which make Thoreau’s books so full of new life, of charms unborrowed from the resources of society, of suggestions lent by the invisible beauty to a temperate and cleanly soul. A greater deference to his neighborhood would have impaired the peculiar genius which we ought to delight to recognize as fresh from a divine inspiration, filled with possibilities like an untutored America, as it hints at improvement in its very defects, and is fortunately guarded by its own disability. It was perfectly satisfied with its own ungraciousness, because that was essential to its private business. Another genius might need to touch human life at many points, to feel the wholesome shocks; to draw off the subtile nourishment which the great mass generates and comprises; to take in the reward for parting with some effluence: but this would have been fatal to Thoreau. It would have cured his faults and weakened his genius. He would have gained friends within the world, and lost his friends behind it. * * * He once asked the writer, with that deliberation from which there seemed as little escape as from the pressure of the atmosphere, “Have you ever yet in preaching been so fortunate HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

as to say anything?” Tenderness for the future barrel, which was then a fine plump keg, betrayed us into declaring confidently that we had. “Then your preaching days are over. Can you bear to say it again? You can never open your mouth again for love or money.” * * * Toward the close of his life, he was visited by one of those dealers in ready-made clothing, who advertise to get any soul prepared at a moment’s notice for a sudden trip. Complete outfits, including “a change,” and patent fire-proof, are furnished at the very bedside, or place of embarkation, of the most shiftless spirits. “Henry, have you made your peace with God?” To which our slop-dealer received the somewhat noticeable reply, “I have never quarrelled with him.” We fancy the rapid and complete abdication of the cheap-clothing business in the presence of such forethought. A friend of the family was very anxious to know how he stood affected toward Christ, and he told her that a snow-storm was more to him than Christ. So he got rid of these cankers that came round to infest his soul’s blossoming time. Readers ought not to bring a lack of religion to the dealing with his answers. * * * On a summer morning about fourteen years ago I went with Mr. Emerson and was introduced to Thoreau. I was then connected with Divinity College at Cambridge, and my new acquaintance was interested to know what we were studying there at the time. “Well, the Scriptures.” “But which” he asked, not without a certain quiet humor playing about his serious blue eye. It was evident that, as Morgana in the story marked all the doors so that the one ceased to be a sign, he had marked Persian and Hindu and other ethnical Scriptures with the reverential sign usually found on the Hebrew writings alone. He had the best library of Oriental books in the country, and subsequently Mr. Cholmondeley, an English gentleman to whom he was much attached, sent him from England more than a score of important works of this character. His books show how closely and reverently he had studied them, and indeed are worthy of attention from lovers of Eastern Scriptures apart from their other values. Out of courtesy to my introducer, doubtless, he asked me to go with him on the following day to visit some of the pleasant places around the village (in which I was as yet a stranger), and I gladly accepted the offer. When I went to the house next morning, I found them all (Thoreau was then living in his father’s house) in a state of excitement by reason of the arrival of a fugitive negro from the South, who had come fainting to their door about daybreak and thrown himself on their mercy. Thoreau took me in to see the poor wretch, whom I found to be a man with whose face as that of a slave in the South I was familiar. The negro was much terrified at seeing me, supposing that I was one of his HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

pursuers. Having quieted his fears by the assurance that I too, though in a different sense, was a refugee from the bondage he was escaping, and at the same time being able to attest the negro’s genuineness, I sat and watched the singularly tender and lowly devotion of the scholar to the slave. He must be fed, his swollen feet bathed, and he must think of nothing but rest. Again and again this coolest and calmest of men drew near to the trembling negro, and bade him feel at home, and have no fear that any power should again wrong him. He could not walk that day, but must mount guard over the fugitive, for slave-hunters were not extinct in those days; and so I went away after a while much impressed by many little traits that I had seen as they had appeared in this emergency, and not much disposed to cavil at their source, whether Bible or Bhaghavat. A day or two later, however, I enjoyed my first walk with Thoreau which was succeeded by many others. We started westward from the village, in which direction his favorite walks lay, for I then found out the way he had of connecting casual with universal things. He desired to order his morning walk after the movement of the planet. The sun is the grand western pioneer; he sets his gardens of Hesperides on the horizon every evening to lure the race; the race moves westward, as animals migrate by instinct; therefore we are safe in going by Goose Pond to Baker’s farm. Of every square acre of ground, he contended, the western side was the wildest, and therefore the fittest for the seeker to explore. Ex oriente lux, ex occidente frux. I now had leisure to observe carefully this man. He was short of stature, well built, and such a man as I have fancied Julius Caesar to have been. Every movement was full of courage and repose; the tones of his voice were those of Truth herself; and there was in his eye the pure bright blue of the New-England sky, as there was sunshine in his flaxen hair. He had a particularly strong aquiline Roman nose, which somehow reminded me of the prow of a ship. There was in his face and expression, with all its sincerity, a kind of intellectual furtiveness; no wild thing could escape him more than it could be harmed by him. The gray huntsman’s suit which he wore enhanced this expression. “He took the color of his vest From rabbit’s coat and grouse’s breast; For as the wild kinds lurk and hide, So walks the huntsman unespied.”

The cruellest weapons of attack, however, which this huntsman took with him were a spyglass for birds, a microscope for the game that would hide in smallness, and an old book in which to press plants. His powers of conversation were extraordinary. I remember being surprised and delighted at every step with revelations of laws and significant attributes in common things — as a relation between different kinds of grass, and the geological characters beneath them, the variety and grouping of pine needles, and the effect of these differences on the sounds HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

they yield when struck by the wind, and the shades, so to speak, of taste represented by grasses and common herbs when applied to the tongue. The acuteness of his senses was marvellous: no hound could scent better, and he could hear the most faint and distant sounds without even laying his ear to the ground like an Indian. As we penetrated farther and farther into the woods he seemed to gain a certain transformation, and his face shone with a light that I had not seen in the village. He had a calendar of the plants and flowers of the neighborhood, and would sometimes go around a quarter of a mile to visit some floral friend, whom he had not seen for a year, who would appear for that day only. We were too early for the hibiscus, a rare flower in New-England which I desired to see. He pointed out the spot by the river side where alone it could be found, and said it would open about the following Monday and not stay long. I went on Tuesday evening and found myself a day too late — the HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

petals were scattered on the ground.

“SHORT OF STATURE, WELL BUILT” — AND BORN ON JULY 12TH AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1867

John Mitchel founded the Irish Citizen in New-York, but angered Fenians by suggesting they should give allegiance to their new country.

Aware of special favors to business, military occupation of the South, corruption, abandonment of abolitionist ideals, and other characteristics of the Reconstruction era, the great explainer Lysander Spooner would produce ever more pamphlets, pointing at hypocrisy everywhere. This year there would be NO TREASON, NUMBER I and NO TREASON, NUMBER II, and then in 1870 there would be NO TREASON, NUMBER VI (for some reason there weren’t any numbers III, IV, or V). The following is from number VI: All these cries of having “abolished slavery,” of having “saved the country,” of having “preserved the union,” of establishing “a government of consent,” and of “maintaining the national honor,” are all gross, shameless, transparent cheats. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Concerned over the poor fortunes of his Medical College of Alabama (in the Reconstruction era the building was been, maddeningly, converted into a school for “two or three hundred negroes racing through it and tearing everything to pieces — the chemical laboratory is occupied by negro cobblers,” Dr. Josiah Clark Nott gave up in disgust and abandoned Mobile in favor of Baltimore. “What, seize the facility in which I had intended to teach white men how to mend human bodies, and use it to teach black men how to mend boots? — that’s just disgusting” (later he would relocate again, and open a practice on West 23d Street on Manhattan Island, where because of a very large influx of well-to-do Southerners fleeing Reconstruction, he had reason to expect that people would sympathize with the white man’s postwar plight).

William Wells Brown noted well a strange factoid: that by having participated in the fighting in our Civil War, American blacks had, rather than gaining the respect and admiration of very many white Americans, merely HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

“gained the hatred of their old masters and put themselves throughout the South in a very bad position.”

He had come at this point to consider that he had made a serious mistake, in having sponsored black enlistment in the Union Army. It would seem that these soldiers and recruiters had fallen victim to a con, a little white lie that he had unfortunately been susceptible to. The US Civil War had been merely a conversation among white men, with the fate of the American people of color being merely one of the topics of this conversation. RACISM

! OHNE MICH

It is I think unfortunate that he was able to figure this out only afterward, by virtue of hindsight — but it occurs to me now that this may be a truth worth repeating, a truth to which some white people have yet to adjust themselves.

Trooper Farrier O’Meara, who had while engaged in military actions against the native Americans of New Mexico and Colorado been taken into custody following the riot of Company F of the 1st US Regiment of HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Dragoons against the abuses by their commanding officer, Major George Alexander Hamilton Blake in Taos, had since then twice reenlisted, and had seen combat with the regiment during the Civil War. In this year he received a honorable discharge (but it is an open question whether he ever realized that what he was fighting for was the freedom of American people of color). HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1873

A large district in Boston having burned down in the previous year, Lysander Spooner produced A NEW BANKING SYSTEM: THE NEEDFUL CAPITAL FOR REBUILDING THE BURNT DISTRICT. During the depression that followed, which would linger into 1879, he would be producing a series of little pamphlets—OUR FINANCIERS (1877), LAW OF PRICES (1877), GOLD AND SILVER (1878), and UNIVERSAL WEALTH (1879). By and large this stuff would of course be ignored, it goes without saying.

Building the cred of authors in his backlist such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Boston publisher James Thomas Fields’s YESTERDAYS WITH AUTHORS. Can you spell self-serving? YESTERDAYS W/AUTHORS

Josiah Gilbert Holland’s ARTHUR BONNICASTLE, AN AMERICAN NOVEL. ARTHUR BONNICASTLE

Nobody ever reads this now.

Also, GARNERED SHEAVES: THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF J.G. HOLLAND, RED LINE EDITION. GARNERED SHEAVES

Nobody ever reads this either.

Also, ILLUSTRATED LIBRARY OF FAVORITE SONG. BASED UPON FOLK SONGS, AND COMPRISING SONGS OF THE HEART, SONGS OF HOME, SONGS OF LIFE, AND SONGS OF NATURE. LIBRARY OF FAVORITE SONG

Nobody sings these now. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1874

April 14, Tuesday: L’ultimo Abenzeraggio, an opera by Felipe Pedrell to words of Fors de Casamayor, was performed for the initial time, at the Liceo, Barcelona.

The anarchist Josiah Warren, after utopian experiments in Ohio, Indiana, and New York, had returned in 1863 to Boston. He had been hanging out quite a bit with another anarchist, Edward D. Linton, and they and Lysander Spooner had become “a notable trio together.” On this day Warren, who had developed dropsy (edema), died in the home of a friend in Charlestown, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1878

February 26, Tuesday: Lysander Spooner wrote to Octavius Brooks Frothingham. Since John Brown wrote very little about his incursion into Virginia, Lysander Spooner’s broadside and writings on slavery offer an understandable and very possible context for events at Harpers Ferry. Brown was certainly familiar with Spooner’s work. Gerrit Smith, Spooner’s benefactor, had been very close to Brown, supplying funds for his stays in Kansas and for the Harpers Ferry raid. Smith made a point of sending his friends copies of Spooner’s UNCONSTITUTIONALITY OF SLAVERY. Brown and Spooner met in Boston shortly before Harpers Ferry. And although he was told little about the details of the raid beforehand, Spooner had confidence in its success and, after the raid, admired Brown as a model of just action. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1880

Lysander Spooner’s REVOLUTION appealed yet again for direct popular action to create justice.

July 29, Thursday: Robert Louis Stevenson, Frances (Fanny) Matilda Vandegrift (or Van de Grift) Stevenson, and her son Samuel Lloyd Osbourne boarded a train, presumably in Alameda, California, for their 9-day transcontinental journey to New-York.

At the funeral of George Bradburn, his closest friend, Lysander Spooner, read a eulogy and served as one of the pallbearers: Of the strong men of the Anti-slavery cause in its days of trial, of those in whose ability, fidelity and courage most reliance was placed, George Bradburn was one of the select few. He enlisted at an early day, and continued in the service more than twenty years, doing a great deal of speaking and writing, and was one of the most effective workers, especially as a speaker. He had many and rare gifts as a popular speaker, a face and figure of striking dignity and beauty, a courage that feared no antagonism, a frankness, sincerity and disinterestedness so transparent as to compel universal confidence, a style of oratory remarkably unique, picturesque and impressive, and powers of wit, eloquence and argument that usually left his adversary little else than a wreck, oftentimes a very ridiculous one. The absurd and exclusive social, political and religious customs, opinions and prejudices which he had to meet and combat at every step, received many stunning blows at his hands. All these qualities made him not only a hero to be admired, but, what was more, a champion to be trusted. He became at one time more widely known throughout the Northern States than almost any of the other Anti-slavery orators; and neither his fidelity nor his power was ever called in question. He remained an intimate associate of Garrison and the other original Abolitionists until Garrison pronounced for the dissolution of the Union. Then Bradburn dissented, and afterwards became a political Abolitionist of the most ultra type, being finally and thoroughly convinced of the Anti-slavery character of the Constitution, and of its competency to give freedom to the slave. He was a delegate to the World’s Anti-slavery Convention held in London in 1840, and took a very prominent part in its proceedings. His speeches were among the best, both for moral courage and intellectual power. With an intense scorn of everything mean, bigoted or narrow, he protested against the exclusion of women, and also against introducing into the resolutions of the Convention any such words as “Christian,” “religious,” and the like, by which persons of any religion HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

whatever, or of no religion whatever, should be excluded from the Anti-slavery platform. It required a man like him to do these things; for at that time, neither in this country nor in England, had either mean social customs or religious bigotry or pride been beaten down or humbled as they have been since. To one clerical bigot, who feared that the anathemas of the Convention against slavery might be so sweeping as to conflict with the apostle Paul’s apparent sanction of it, Bradburn replied that, if it were proved that the New Testament sanctioned American slavery, he would “repudiate its authority” and “scatter its leaves to the four winds.” This was said to a convention of five hundred persons, of whom more than one hundred were clergymen, and doubtless many more were Christians of very strait sects. Such a declaration would now, at least in this country, be considered commonplace, a mere matter of course. But it was not so then. It so shocked some of the pietists present that it was omitted from the published reports of the debates. Truly the world has moved, in more senses than one, within the last forty years, and the Abolitionists did their part towards making it move. In addition to his labors as a platform speaker, he served four years from 1839 to 1842, inclusive in the Legislature of Massachusetts, as a representative from Nantucket. There his talents as a debater and his courage as an innovator were as conspicuous as they were before popular assemblies. Taking the lead in all questions where the rights of the colored people of the State were concerned, and also a rare thing at that day advocating the rights of women, who at that time were scarcely acknowledged to have any rights at all, he frightened the cowardly conservatives by the novelty of his ideas, while he conquered them by his arguments, scorched and stung them by his wit, and covered them with ridicule for their absurdities, bigotry and selfishness. He was altogether a new kind of man in that place. There were no drowsy members in the House when he had the floor. As a token of her appreciation of his services at this time, Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, as competent a judge certainly as any other, sent him the following tribute, inscribed in a copy of the “Oasis,” edited by herself: TO GEORGE BRADBURN, The bold opposer of any limitation of rights by the graduation of color, and the true- hearted champion of woman’s freedom, this volume is presented with the best wishes and gratitude of the author. God give you strength to run, Unawed by earth or hell, The race you have begun So gloriously and well. This tribute to him was presented when it seemed in a sense which the present generation can hardly realize as if “earth and hell” had actually combined against everything like truth, justice or liberty for the colored race. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Surely, in this country and within this century, no other cause has so tested the moral natures of men and women as did the Anti- slavery cause in its early days; and no one who knew George Bradburn at that time will question his right to a high place among the tried and true. His colloquial powers in private had the same characteristics, and were perhaps as attractive as those exhibited in his public speeches. It can hardly be necessary to say that he had hosts of friends. It could not be otherwise with a man so frank, courageous, generous and large-hearted. For the last twenty years he has been little before the public. An increasing deafness has contributed, among other things, to keep him in private. It is understood that a memoir of him is likely to be prepared, which will certainly be very highly valued by those who were associated with him in Anti-slavery days. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1881

Lysander Spooner would write several articles for Benjamin Ricketson Tucker’s new anarchist magazine Liberty in defense of Charles J. Guiteau, assassin of President James A. Garfield, and in defense of the martyred workers at Haymarket Square. *NOT THE DAUGHTER BUT THE MOTHER OF ORDER* — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

The Reverend William Rounseville Alger moved from Chicago to Portland. He would not remain there, but would return to Boston. His THE SCHOOL OF LIFE would be published in this year in Boston. His A SYMBOLIC HISTORY OF THE CROSS OF CHRIST also would be published in this year. HISTORY OF THE CROSS

Horatio Alger, Sr., the minister father of his cousin Horatio Alger, Jr., died in Natick, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1882

July: Lysander Spooner wrote in Benjamin Ricketson Tucker’s anarchist magazine Liberty: If Congress were really waging an honest war against unchaste men, or even unchaste women, or even religious hypocrites and impostors, they would not need to go to Utah to find them. And the fact that they do go to Utah to find them –passing by the hundreds of thousands of vicious persons of both sexes at home, and the religious hypocrites that are not supposed to be very scarce anywhere– is proof of their hypocrisy; and of their design to make political capital for themselves, by currying favor with bigots and hypocrites, rather than to promote chastity on the part of either men or women.

*NOT THE DAUGHTER BUT THE MOTHER OF ORDER* — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

In American Church Review, under the heading “Literary Notices,” there was a review of HENRY D. THOREAU that deemed its author Franklin Benjamin Sanborn to be “better qualified than perhaps any one else to give Thoreau his rightful place in a great religious and literary movement.... [He] puts this singularly eccentric and brilliant personage properly before the world..... [He] has done Thoreau’s genius an imperishable service and himself great credit in this little volume. And yet Thoreau was such an exceptional being, his tastes and opinions were so entirely out of accord with the practical majority, that it is quite possible to dismiss it with a sneer and say that it is ‘much ado about nothing.’” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

JOHN BURROUGHS ON HENRY D. THOREAU30

In WALDEN Thoreau enumerates, in a serio-humorous vein, his various unpaid occupations, such as inspector of storms, surveyor of forest-paths and all across-lot routes, shepherd and herder to the wild stock of the town, etc., etc. Among the rest he says “For a long time I was reporter to a journal of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward.” The journal to which Thoreau so playfully alludes, consisting of many manuscript volumes, is now the property of Mr. H.G.0. Blake, an old friend and correspondent of his, and his rejected contributions to it, after a delay of nearly twenty years, are being put into print. “Early Spring in Massachusetts,” lately published by Houghton, Muffin & Co., is made up of excerpts from this journal. A few of the passages have been in print before; I notice one in the WEEK, one or more in his discourse on “Walking, or the Wild,” and one in the essay called “Life without Principle.” Thoreau published but two volumes in his life-time,— A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS —which, by the way, is mainly a record of other and much longer voyages upon other and less tangible rivers than those named in the title— and WALDEN, OR LIFE IN THE WOODS. The other six volumes of his works, including Mr. Blake’s, have been collected and published since his death. It is to be hoped that, in time, we shall have the rest of his journal in print — at least a series of year-books from it, one volume for each of the four seasons. His journal was probably written with an eye to its future publication. It does not consist of mere scraps, hasty memoranda, and jottings-down, like Hawthorne’s note-book, and like the blotter most literary men keep, but of finished work — blocks carefully quarried, and trimmed, and faced, at least with a plumb spot upon each, to be used or rejected in the construction of future works. When he wrote a book, or a lecture, or an essay, he probably went to his journal for the greater share of the material. The amount of this manuscript matter he left behind him at his death was, perhaps, equal to all the matter he had printed, and, though it had doubtless been sorted over more or less, yet a large per cent of it seems to be quite as good as any of his work and quite as characteristic. He revised, and corrected, and supplemented his record from day to day and from year to year, till it reflects truly his life and mind. Every scrap he ever wrote carries his flavor and quality unmistakably, as much as a leaf

30. John Burroughs, HENRY D. THOREAU, The Century, July 1882. This magazine had become in 1881 a successor to Scribner’s Monthly Magazine. It would continue in publication until 1930. There is an online archive of its issues from 1881 to 1899 at http:/ /cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/browse.journals/cent.html. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

or twig of a sassafras-tree carries its quality and flavor. He was a man so thoroughly devoted to principle and to his own aims in life that he seems never to have allowed himself one indifferent or careless moment. He was always making the highest demands upon himself and upon others. In his private letters his bow is strung just as taut as in his printed works, and he uses arrows from the same quiver, and sends them just as high and far as he can. In his journal it is the same. Thoreau’s fame has steadily increased since his death, in 1862, as it was bound to do. It was little more than in the bud at that time, and its full leaf and flowering are not yet, perhaps not in many years yet. He improves with age; in fact, requires age to take off a little of his asperity and fully ripen him. The generation he lectured so sharply will not give the same heed to his words as will the next and the next. The first effect of the reading of his books, upon many minds, is irritation and disapproval; the perception of their beauty and wisdom comes later. He makes short work of our prejudices; he likes the wind in his teeth, and to put it in the teeth of his reader. He was a man devoid of. compassion, devoid of sympathy, devoid of generosity, devoid of patriotism, as these words are usually understood, yet his life showed a devotion to principle such as one life in millions does not show; and matching this there runs through his works a vein of the purest and rarest poetry and the finest wisdom. For both these reasons time will enhance rather than lessen the value of his contributions. The world likes a good hater and refuser almost as well as it likes a good lover and acceptor, only it likes him farther off. In writing of Thoreau, I am not conscious of having any criticism to make of him. I would fain accept him just as he was, and make the most of him, defining and discriminating him as I would a flower or a bird or any other product of nature — perhaps exaggerating some features the better to bring them out. I suppose there were greater men among his contemporaries, but I doubt if there were any more genuine and sincere, or more devoted to ideal ends. If he was not this, that, or the other great man, he was Thoreau, and he fills his own niche well, and has left a positive and distinct impression upon the literature of his country. He did his work thoroughly; he touched bottom; he made the most of his life. He was, perhaps, a little too near his friend and master, Emerson, and brought too directly under his influence. If he had lived farther from him, he would have felt his attraction less. But he was just as positive a fact as Emerson. The contour of his moral nature was just as firm and resisting. He was no more a soft-shelled egg, to be dented by every straw in the nest, than was his distinguished neighbor. An English reviewer has summed up his estimate of Thoreau by calling him a “skulker,” which is the pith of Dr. Johnson’s smart epigram about Cowley, a man in whom Thoreau is distinctly foreshadowed: “If his activity was virtue, his retreat was HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

cowardice.” Thoreau was a skulker if it appears that he ran away from a noble part to perform an ignoble, or one less noble. The world has a right to the best there is in a man, both in word and deed: from the scholar, knowledge; from the soldier, courage; from the statesman, wisdom; from the farmer, good husbandry, etc.; and from all, virtue; but has it a right to say arbitrarily who shall be soldiers and who poets? Is there no virtue but virtue? no religion but in the creeds? no salt but what is crystallized? Who shall presume to say the world did not get the best there was in Thoreau — high and much needed service from him? — albeit there appear in the account more kicks than compliments. Would you have had him stick to his lead-pencils, or to school-teaching, and let Walden Pond and the rest go? We should have lost some of the raciest and most antiseptic books in English literature, and an example of devotion to principle that provokes and stimulates like a winter morning. I am not aware that Thoreau shirked any responsibility or dodged any duty proper to him, and he could look the world as square in the face as any man that ever lived. The people of his native town remember at least one notable occasion on which Thoreau did not skulk, nor sulk either. I refer to the 30th of October, 1859, when he made his plea for Captain John Brown, while the hero was on trial in Virginia. He was about the only Northern man who was not a skulker, or who did not hide behind some pretext or other. It was proposed to stop Thoreau’s mouth, persuade him to keep still and lie low, but he was not to be stopped. He thought there were enough lying low — the ranks were all full there, the ground was covered; and in an address delivered in Concord he glorified the old hero in words that, at this day and in the light of subsequent events, it thrills the blood to read. This instant and unequivocal indorsement of Brown by Thoreau, in the face of the most overwhelming public opinion even among anti-slavery men, throws a flood of light upon him. It is the most significant act of his life. It clinches him; it makes the colors fast. We know he means what he says after that. It is of the same metal and has the same ring as Brown’s act itself. It shows what thoughts he had fed his soul on, what school he had schooled himself in, what his devotion to the ideal meant. His hatred of slavery and injustice, and of the government that tolerated them, was pure, and it went clean through; it stopped at nothing. Iniquitous laws must be defied, and there is no previous question. “The fact that the politician falls,” he says, referring to the repeal of the Fugitive Slave law, “is merely that there is less honor among thieves than was supposed, and not the fact that they are thieves.” For the most part, Thoreau’s political tracts and addresses seem a little petulant and willful, and fall just short of enlisting one’s sympathies, and his himself to be put in jail rather than pay a paltry tax, savors a little bit of the grotesque and the melodramatic. But his plea for John Brown when the whole country was disowning him, abolitionists and all, fully satisfies one’s HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

sense of the fitness of things. It does not overshoot the mark. The mark was high, and the attitude of the speaker was high and scornful, and uncompromising in the extreme. It was just the occasion required to show Thoreau’s metal. “If this man’s acts and words do not create a revival, it will be the severest possible satire on the acts and words that do. It is the best news that America has ever heard.” “Think of him — of his rare qualities — such a man as it takes ages to make, and ages to understand; no mock hero, nor the representative of any party. A man such as the sun may not rise upon again in this benighted land. To whose making went the costliest material, the finest adamant; sent to be the redeemer of those in captivity; and the only use to which you can put him is to hang him at the end of a rope!” “Do yourselves the honor to recognize him; he needs none of your respect.” It was just such radical qualities as John Brown exhibited, or their analogue and counterpart in other fields, that Thoreau coveted and pursued through life; in man, devotion to the severest ideal, friendship founded upon antagonism, or hate, as he preferred to call it; in nature the untamed and untamable, even verging on the savage and pitiless; in literature the heroic — “books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by.” Indeed, Thoreau was Brown’s spiritual brother, the last and finer flowering of the same plant — the seed flowering; he was just as much of a zealot, was just as gritty and unflinching in his way; a man whose brow was set, whose mind was made up, and leading just as forlorn a hope, and as little quailed by the odds. In the great army of Mammon, the great army of the fashionable, the complacent and church-going, Thoreau was a skulker, even a deserter, if you please — yea, a traitor fighting on the other side. Emerson regrets the loss to the world of his rare powers of action, and thinks that, instead of being the captain of a huckleberry-party, he might have engineered for all America. But Thoreau, doubtless, knew himself better when he said, with his usual strength of metaphor, that he was as unfit for the coarse uses of this world as gossamer for ship-timber. A man who believes that “life should be lived as tenderly and daintily as one would pluck a flower,” and actually and seriously aims to live his life so, is not a man to engineer for all America. If you want a Columbiad you must have tons and tons of gross metal, and if you want an engineer for all America, leader and wielder of vast masses of men, you must have a certain breadth and coarseness of fiber in your hero; but if you want a trenchant blade like Thoreau, you must leave the pot-metal out and look for something bluer and finer. Thoreau makes a frank confession upon this very point in his journal, written when he was but twenty-five. “I must confess I have felt mean enough when asked how I was to act on society, HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

what errand I had to mankind. Undoubtedly I did not feel mean without a reason, and yet my loitering is not without a defense. I would fain communicate the wealth of my life to men, would really give them what is most precious in my gift. I would secrete pearls with the shell-fish, and lay up honey with the bees for them. I will sift the sunbeams for the public good. I know no riches I would keep back.” And his subsequent life made good these words. He gave the world the strongest and bravest there was in him, the pearls of his life, — not a fat oyster, not a reputation unctuous with benevolence and easy good-will, but a character crisp and pearl-like, full of hard, severe words, and stimulating taunts and demands. Thoreau was an extreme product, an extreme type of mind and character, and was naturally more or less isolated from his surroundings. He planted himself far beyond the coast-line that bounds most lives, and seems insular and solitary, but he believed he had the granite floor of principle beneath him, and without the customary intervening clay or quicksands. Of a profile we say the outlines are strong, or they are weak and broken. The outlines of Thoreau’s moral nature are strong and noble, but the direct face-to-face expression of his character is not always pleasing, not always human. He appears best in profile, when looking away from you and not toward you — when looking at Nature and not at man. He combined a remarkable strength of will with a nature singularly sensitive and delicate — the most fair and fragile of wood-flowers on an iron stem. With more freedom and flexibility of character, greater capacity for self-surrender and self-abandonment, he would have been a great poet. But his principal aim in life was moral and intellectual, rather than artistic. He was an ascetic before he was a poet, and he cuts the deepest in the direction of character and conduct. He had no caution or prudence in the ordinary sense, no worldly temporizing qualities of any kind, was impatient of the dross and alloy of life — would have it pure flame, pure purpose and aspiration; and, so far as he could make it, his life was so. He was, by nature, of the Opposition; he had a constitutional No in him that could not be tortured into Yes. He was of the stuff that saints and martyrs and devotees, or, if you please, fanatics are made of and, no doubt, in an earlier age, would have faced the rack or the stake with perfect composure. Such a man was bound to make an impression by contrast, if not by comparison, with the men of his country and time. He is, for the most part, a figure going the other way from that of the eager, money-getting, ambitious crowd, and he questions and admonishes and ridicules the passers-by sharply. We all see him and remember him, and feel his shafts. Especially was his attitude upon all social and political questions scornful and exasperating. His devotion to principle, to the ideal, was absolute; it was like that of the Hindu to his idol. If it devoured him or crushed him — what business was that of his? There was no conceivable failure in adherence to principle. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Thoreau was, probably, the wildest civilized man this country has produced, adding to the shyness of the hermit and woodsman the wildness of the poet, and to the wildness of the poet the greater ferity and elusiveness of the mystic. An extreme product of civilization and of modern culture, he was yet as untouched by the worldly and commercial spirit of his age and country as any red man that ever haunted the shores of his native stream. He put the whole of Nature between himself and his fellows. A man of the strongest local attachments — not the least nomadic, seldom wandering beyond his native township, yet his spirit was as restless and as impatient of restraint as any nomad or Tartar that ever lived. He cultivated an extreme wildness, not only in his pursuits and tastes, but in his hopes and imaginings. He says to his friend, “Hold fast your most indefinite waking dream.” Emerson says his life was an attempt to pluck the Swiss edelweiss from the all but inaccessible cliffs. The higher and the wilder, the more the fascination for him. Indeed, the loon, the moose, the beaver were but faint types and symbols of the wildness he coveted and would have re-appear in his life and books; — not the cosmical, the universal — he was not great enough for that — but simply the wild as distinguished from the domestic and the familiar, the remote and the surprising as contrasted with the hackneyed and the commonplace, arrow-heads as distinguished from whet-stones or jack-knives. Thoreau was French on one side and Puritan on the other. It was the wild, untamable French core in him — a dash of the gray wolf that stalks through his ancestral folk-lore, as in Audubon and the Canadian voyageurs — that made him turn with such zest and such genius to aboriginal nature; and it was the Puritan element in him — strong, grim, uncompromising, almost heartless — that held him to such high, austere, moral and ideal ends. His genius was Saxon in its homeliness and sincerity, in its directness and scorn of rhetoric, but that wild revolutionary cry of his, and that sort of restrained ferocity and hirsuteness, are more French. He said in one of his letters, when he was but twenty- four: “I grow savager and savager every day, as if fed on raw meat, and my tameness is only the repose of untamableness.” But his savageness took a mild form. He could not even eat meat; it was unclean and offended his imagination, and when he went to Maine he felt for weeks that his nature had been made the coarser because he had witnessed the killing of a moose. His boasted savageness, the gray wolf in him, only gave a more decided grit or grain to his mental and moral nature, — made him shut his teeth the more firmly, sometimes even with an audible snap and growl, upon the poor lambs and ewes and superannuated wethers of the social, religious, political folds. In his moral and intellectual growth and experience, Thoreau seems to have reacted strongly from a marked tendency to invalidism in his own body. He would be well in spirit at all hazards. What was this never-ending search of his for the wild but a search for health, for something tonic and antiseptic in HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

nature? Health, health, give me health, is his cry. He went forth into nature as the boys go to the fields and woods in spring after wintergreens, black-birch, crinkle-root, and sweet-flag; he had an unappeasable hunger for the pungent, the aromatic, the bitter-sweet, for the very rind and salt of the globe. He fairly gnaws the ground and the trees in his walk, so craving is his appetite for the wild. He went to Walden to study, but it was as a deer goes to a deer-lick; the brine he was after did abound there. Any trait of wildness and freedom suddenly breaking out in any of the domestic animals, as when your cow leaped your fence like a deer and ate up your corn, or your horse forgot that he was not a mustang on the plains, and took the bit in his mouth, and left your buggy and family behind high and dry, etc., was eagerly snapped up by him. Ah, you have not tamed them, you have not broken them yet! He makes a most charming entry in his journal about a little boy he one day saw in the street, with a home-made cap on his head made of a woodchuck’s skin. He seized upon it as a horse with the crib-bite seizes upon a post. It tasted good to him. “The great gray-tipped hairs were all preserved, and stood out above the brown ones, only a little more loosely than in life. It was as if he had put his head into the belly of a woodchuck, having cut off his tail and legs, and substituted a visor for the head. The little fellow wore it innocently enough, not knowing what he had on forsooth, going about his small business pit-a-pat, and his black eyes sparkled beneath it when I remarked on its warmth, even as the woodchuck’s might have done. Such should be the history of every piece of clothing that we wear.” He says how rarely are we encouraged by the sight of simple actions in the street, but when one day he saw an Irishman wheeling home from far a large, damp, and rotten pine-log for fuel, he felt encouraged. That looked like fuel; it warmed him to think of it. The piles of solid oak-wood which he saw in other yards did not interest him at all in comparison. It savored of the wild, and though water-soaked, his fancy kindled at the sight. He loved wild men, not tame ones. Any half-wild Irishman, or fisherman, or hunter in his neighborhood he was sure to get a taste of sooner or later. He seems to have had a hankering for the Indian all his life; could eat him raw, one would think. In fact, he did try him when he went to Maine, and succeeded in extracting more nutriment out of him than any other man has done. He found him rather tough diet, and was, probably, a little disappointed in him, but he got something out of him akin to that which the red squirrel gets out of a pine-cone. In his books he casts many a longing and envious glance upon the Indian. Some old Concord sachem seems to have looked into his fount of life and left his image there. His annual spring search for arrow- heads was the visible outcropping of this aboriginal trace. How HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

he prized these relics! One is surprised to see how much he gets out of them. They become arrow-root instead of arrow-stones. “They are sown, like a grain that is slow to germinate, broadcast over the earth. As the dragon’s teeth bore a crop of soldiers, so these bear a crop of philosophers and poets, and the same seed is just as good to plant again. It is a stone-fruit. Each one yields me a thought. I come nearer to the maker of it than if I found his bones.” “When I see these signs I know that the subtle spirits that made them are not far off into whatever form transmuted.” (Journal, pages 257 — 58.) Our poetry, he said, was white man’s poetry, and he longed to hear what the Indian muse had to say. I think he liked the Indian’s paint and feathers. Certainly he did his skins, and the claws and hooked beaks with which he adorned himself. He puts a threatening claw or beak into his paragraphs whenever he can, and feathers his shafts with the nicest art. So wild a man and such a lover of the wild, and yet it does not appear that he ever sowed any wild oats. Though he somewhere exclaims impatiently: “What demon possesses me that I behave so well?” he took it all out in transcendentalism and arrow-heads. His only escapades were eloping with a mountain or coquetting with Walden Pond! His weakness was that he had no weakness — it was only unkindness. He had a deeper center-board than most men, and he carried less sail. The passions and emotions and ambitions of his fellows, which are sails that so often need to be close-reefed and double-reefed, he was quite free from. Thoreau’s isolation, his avoidance of the world, was in self- defense, no doubt. His genius would not bear the contact of rough hands any more than would butterflies’ wings. He says, in WALDEN: “The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling.” This bloom, this natural innocence, Thoreau was very jealous of and sought to keep unimpaired, and, perhaps, succeeded as few men ever have. He says you cannot even know evil without being a PARTICEPS CRIMINIS. He did not so much regret the condition of things in this country (in 1861) as that he had ever heard of it. Yet Thoreau creates as much consternation among the saints as among the sinners. His delicacy and fineness were saved by a kind of cross-grain there was in him — a natural twist and stubbornness of fiber. He was not easily reduced to kindling- wood. His self-indulgences were other men’s crosses. His attitude was always one of resistance and urge. He hated sloth and indolence and compliance as he hated rust. He thought nothing was so much to be feared as fear, and that atheism might, comparatively, be popular with God himself. Beware even the luxury of affection, he says — “There must be some nerve and heroism in our love, as in a winter morning.” He tells his correspondent to make his failure tragical by the earnestness and steadfastness of his endeavor, and then it will not differ from success. His saintliness is a rock-crystal. He says in WALDEN: “Probably I should not consciously and deliberately HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation; and I believe that a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it.” Is this crystal a diamond? What will it not cut? There is no grain of concession or compromise in this man. He asks no odds and he pays no boot. He will have his way, but his way is not down the stream with the current. He loves to warp up it against wind and tide, holding fast by his anchor at night. When he is chagrined or disgusted, it convinces him his health is better — that there is some vitality left. It is not compliments his friends get from him — rather taunts. The caress of the hand may be good, but the sting of its palm is good also. No is more bracing and tonic than Yes. He said: “I love to go through a patch of scrub-oaks in a bee-line — where you tear your clothes and put your eyes out.” The spirit of antagonism never sleeps with Thoreau, and the love of paradox is one of his guiding stars. “The longer I have forgotten you, the more I remember you,” he says to his correspondent. “My friend is cold and reserved, because his love for me is waxing and not waning,” he says in his journal. The difficult and the disagreeable are in the line of his self-indulgence. Even lightning will choose the easiest way out of the house — an open window or door. Thoreau would rather go through the solid wall, or mine out through the cellar. When he is sad, his only regret is that he is not sadder. He says if his sadness was only sadder it would make him happier. In writing to his friend, he says it is not sad to him to hear she has sad hours: “I rather rejoice in the richness of your experience.” In one of his letters, he charges his correspondent to “improve every opportunity to be melancholy,” and accuses himself of being too easily contented with a slight and almost animal happiness. “My happiness is a good deal like that of the woodchucks.” He says that “of acute sorrow I suppose that I know comparatively little. My saddest and most genuine sorrows are apt to be but transient regrets.” Yet he had not long before lost by death his brother John, with whom he made his voyage on the Concord and Merrimack. Referring to John’s death, he said: “I find these things more strange than sad to me. What right have I to grieve who have not ceased to wonder?” and says in effect, afterward, that any pure grief is its own reward. John, he said, he did not wish ever to see again — not the John that was dead (0 Henry! Henry!), John as he was in the flesh, but the ideal, the nobler John, of whom the real was the imperfect representative. When the son of his friend died, he wasted no human regrets. It seemed very natural and proper that he should die. “Do not the flowers die every autumn?” “His fine organization demanded it [death], and nature gently yielded its request. It would have been strange if he had lived.” Thoreau was either destitute of pity and love (in the human sense), and of many other traits that are thought to be both HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

human and divine, or else he studiously suppressed them and thought them unworthy of him. He writes and talks a great deal about love and friendship, and often with singular beauty and appreciation, yet he always says to his friend: “Stand off — keep away! Let there be an unfathomable gulf between us — let there be a wholesome hate.” Indeed, love and hatred seem, inseparable in his mind, and curiously identical. He writes in his journal that “words should pass between friends as the lightning passes from cloud to cloud.” One of his poems begins: “Let such pure hate still underprop Our love, that we may be Each other’s conscience, And have our sympathy Mainly from thence.” “Surely, surely, thou wilt trust me When I say thou dost disgust me. Oh, I hate thee with a hate That would fain annihilate; Yet, sometimes, against my will, My dear friend, I love thee still. It were treason to our love, And a sin to God above, One iota to abate Of a pure, impartial hate.” This is the salt with which he seasons and preserves his love — hatred. In this pickle it will keep. Without it, it would become stale and vulgar. This is characteristic of Thoreau; he must put in something sharp and bitter. You shall not have the nut without its bitter acrid rind or prickly sheath. As a man, Thoreau appears to have been what is called a crusty person — a loaf with a hard bake, a good deal of crust, forbidding to tender gums, but sweet to those who had good teeth and unction enough to soften him. He was no fair-weather walker. He delighted in storms, and in frost and cold. They were congenial to him. They came home. “Yesterday’s rain,” he begins an entry in his journal, “in which I was glad to be drenched,” etc. Again he says: “I sometimes feel that I need to sit in a far-away cave through a three weeks’ storm, cold and wet, to give a tone to my system.” Another time: “A long, soaking rain, the drops trickling down the stubble, while I lay drenched on a last year’s bed of wild oats, by the side of some bare hill, ruminating.” And this in March, too! He says “to get the value of a storm we must be out a long time and travel far in it, so that it may fairly penetrate our skin,” etc. He rejoices greatly when, on an expedition to Monadnock, he gets soaked with rain and is made thoroughly uncomfortable. It tastes good. It made him appreciate a roof and a fire. The mountain gods were especially kind and thoughtful to get up the storm. When they saw himself and friend coming, they said: “There come two of our folks. Let us get ready for them — get HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

up a serious storm that will send a-packing these holiday guests. Let us receive them with true mountain hospitality — kill the fatted cloud,” etc. In his journal he says: “If the weather is thick and stormy enough, if there is a good chance to be cold, and wet, and uncomfortable — in other words, to feel weather-beaten, you may consume the afternoon to advantage, thus browsing along the edge of some near wood, which would scarcely detain you at all in fair weather,” etc. “There is no better fence to put between you and the village than a storm into which the villagers do not venture forth.” This passion for storms and these many drenchings no doubt helped shorten Thoreau’s days. This crustiness, this playful and willful perversity of Thoreau, is one source of his charm as a writer. It stands him instead of other qualities — of real unction and heartiness — is, perhaps, these qualities in a more seedy and desiccated state. Hearty, in the fullest sense, he was not, and unctuous he was not, yet it is only by comparison that we miss these qualities from his writings. Perhaps he would say that we should not expect the milk on the outside of the cocoa-nut, but I suspect there is an actual absence of milk here, though there is sweet meat, and a good, hard shell to protect it. Good-nature and conciliation were not among his accomplishments, and yet he puts his reader in a genial and happy frame of mind. He is the occasion of unction and heartiness in others, if he has not them in himself. He says of himself, with great penetration: “My only integral experience is in my vision. I see, perchance, with more integrity than I feel.” His sympathies lead you into narrow quarters, but his vision takes you to the hill-tops. As regards humanity and all that goes with it, he was like an inverted cone, and grew broader and broader the farther he got from it. He approached things, or even men, but very little through his humanity or his manliness. How delightful his account of the Canadian wood-chopper in WALDEN, and yet he sees him afar off, across an impassable gulf! — he is a kind of Homeric or Paphlagonian man to him. Very likely he would not have seen him at all had it not been for the classic models and ideals with which his mind was filled, and which saw for him. Yet Thoreau doubtless liked the flavor of strong, racy men. He said he was naturally no hermit, but ready enough to fasten himself, like a blood-sucker for the time, to any full-blooded man that came in his way; and he gave proof of this when he saw and recognized the new poet, Walt Whitman. Here is the greatest democrat the world has seen, he said, and he found him exhilarating and encouraging, while yet he felt somewhat imposed upon by his heartiness and broad generalities. As a writer, Thoreau shows all he is, and more. Nothing is kept back; greater men have had far less power of statement. His thoughts do not merely crop out, but lie upon the surface of his pages. They are fragments; there is no more than you see. It is not the edge or crown of the native rock, but a drift bowlder. He sees clearly, thinks swiftly, and the sharp emphasis and decision of his mind HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

strew his pages with definite and striking images and ideas. His expression is never sod-bound, and you get its full force at once. One of his chief weapons is a kind of restrained extravagance of statement, a compressed exaggeration of metaphor. The hyperbole is big, but it is gritty and is firmly held. Sometimes it takes the form of paradox, as when he tells his friend that he needs his hate as much as his love: “Indeed, indeed, I cannot tell, Though I ponder on it well, Which were easier to state, All my love or all my hate.” Or when he says, in WALDEN: “Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints,” and the like. Sometimes it becomes downright brag, as when he says, emphasizing his own preoccupation and indifference to events: “I would not run around the corner to see the world blow up “; or again: “Methinks I would hear with indifference if a trustworthy messenger were to inform me that the sun drowned himself last night.” Again it takes an impish, ironical form, as when he says: “In heaven I hope to bake my own bread and clean my own linen.” Another time it assumes a half-quizzical, half-humorous turn, as when he tells one of his correspondents that he was so warmed up in getting his winter’s wood that he considered, after he got it housed, whether he should not dispose of it to the ash-man, as if he had extracted all its heat. Often it gives only an added emphasis to his expression, as when he says: “A little thought is sexton to all the world”; or, “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk”; but its best and most constant office is to act as a kind of fermenting, expanding gas that lightens, if it sometimes inflates, his page. His exaggeration is saved by its wit, its unexpectedness. It gives a wholesome jostle and shock to the mind. Thoreau was not a racy writer, but a trenchant; not nourishing so much as stimulating; not convincing, but wholesomely exasperating and arousing, which, in some respects, is better. There is no heat in him, and yet in reading him one understands what he means when he says that, sitting by his stove at night, he sometimes had thoughts that kept the fire warm. I think the mind of his reader always reacts healthfully and vigorously from his most rash and extreme statements. The blood comes to the surface and to the extremities with a bound. He is the best of counter- irritants when he is nothing else. There is nothing to reduce the tone of your moral and intellectual systems in Thoreau. Such heat as there is in refrigeration, as he himself might say, — you are always sure of that in his books. His literary art, like that of Emerson’s, is in the unexpected turn of his sentences. Shakespeare says: “It is the witness still of excellency To put a strange face on his own perfection.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

This “strange face” Thoreau would have at all hazards, even if it was a false face. If he could not state a truth he would state a paradox, which, however, is not always a false face. He must make the commonest facts and occurrences wear a strange and unfamiliar look. The commonplace he would give a new dress, even if he set it masquerading. But the reader is always the gainer by this tendency in him. It gives a fresh and novel coloring to what in other writers would prove flat and weansome. He made the whole world interested in his private experiment at Walden Pond by the strange and, on the whole, beaming face he put upon it. Of course, this is always more or less the art of genius, but it was preeminently the art of Thoreau. We are not buoyed up by great power, we do not swim lightly as in deep water, but we are amused and stimulated, and now and then positively electrified. To make an extreme statement, and so be sure that he made an emphatic one, that was his aim. Exaggeration is less to be feared than dullness and tameness. The far-fetched is good if you fetch it swift enough; you must make its heels crack — jerk it out of its boots, in fact. Cushions are good provided they are well stuck with pins; you will be sure not to go to sleep in that case. Warm your benumbed hands in the snow; that is a more wholesome warmth than that of the kitchen stove. This is the way he underscored his teachings. Sometimes he racked his bones to say the unsayable. His mind had a strong gripe, and he often brings a great pressure to bear upon the most vague and subtle problems, or shadows of problems, but he never quite succeeds to my satisfaction in condensing bluing from the air or from the Indian summer haze, any more than he succeeded in extracting health and longevity from water-gruel and rye-meal. He knew what an exaggeration he was, and he went about it deliberately. He says to one of his correspondents, a Mr. B whom he seems to have delighted to pummel with these huge boxing-gloves: “I trust that you realize what an exaggerator I am, — that I lay myself out to exaggerate whenever I have an opportunity, — pile Pelion upon Ossa to reach heaven so. Expect no trivial truth from me, unless I am on the witness-stand. I will come as near to lying as you can drive a coach-and-four.” We have every reason to be thankful that he was not always or commonly on the witness-stand. The record would have been much duller. Eliminate from him all his exaggerations, all his magnifying of the little, all his inflation of bubbles, etc., and you make sad havoc in his pages — as you would, in fact, in any man’s. Of course it is one thing to bring the distant near, and thus magnify as does the telescope, and it is quite another thing to inflate a pigmy to the stature of a giant with a gas- pipe. But Thoreau brings the stars as near as any writer I know of, and if he sometimes magnifies a will-o’-the-wisp, too, what matters it? He had a hard common-sense, as well as an uncommon sense, and he knows well when he is conducting you to the brink of one of his astonishing hyperboles, and inviting you to take the leap with him, and what is more, he knows that you know it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Nobody is deceived and the game is well played. Writing to a correspondent who had been doing some big mountain-climbing, he says: “It is after we get home that we really go over the mountain if ever. What did the mountain say? What did the mountain do? I keep a mountain anchored off eastward a little way, which I ascend in my dreams, both awake and asleep. Its broad haze spreads over a village or two, which do not know it; neither does it know them, nor do I when I ascend it. I can see its general outline as plainly now in my mind as that of Wachusett. I do not invent in the least, but state exactly what I see. I find that I go up it when I am light-footed and earnest. I am not aware that a single villager frequents it or knows of it. I keep this mountain to ride instead of a horse.” What a saving clause is that last one, and what humor! The bird Thoreau most admired was Chanticleer, crowing from his perch in the morning. He says the merit of that strain is its freedom from all plaintiveness. Unless our philosophy hears the cock-crow in the morning it is belated. “It is an expression of the health and soundness of Nature — a brag for all the world.” “Who has not betrayed his Master many, times since he last heard that note?” “The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter, but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy? When in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or perchance a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow, far or near, I think to myself, ‘There is one of us well, at any rate,’ — and with a sudden gush return to my senses” Thoreau pitched his WALDEN in this key; he claps his wings and gives forth a clear, saucy, cheery, triumphant note — if only to wake his neighbors up. And the book is certainly the most delicious piece of brag in literature. There is nothing else like it; nothing so good, certainly. It is a challenge and a triumph, and has a morning freshness and Èlan. Read the chapter on his “bean-field.” One wants to go forthwith and plant a field with beans, and hoe them barefoot. It is a kind of celestial agriculture. “When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I remembered with as much pity as. pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios.” “On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like pop-guns to these woods, and some waif of martial music occasionally penetrated thus far. To me, away there in my bean- field and the other end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a puff-ball had burst; and when there was a military turn-out of which I was ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague sense all day, — of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon, as HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

if some eruption would break out there soon, either scarlatina or canker-rash, — until at length some more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the Wayland road, brought me information of the ‘trainers’!” What visitors he had, too, in his little hut — what royal company! — “especially in the morning, when nobody called.” “One inconvenience I sometimes experience in so small a house — the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest, when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words.” “The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plough out again through the side of his head.” He bragged that Concord could show him nearly everything worth seeing in the world or in nature, and that he did not need to read Dr. Kane’s “Arctic Voyages” for phenomena that he could observe at home. He declined all invitations to go abroad, because he should then lose so much of Concord. As much of Paris, or London, or Berlin as he got, so much of Concord should he lose. He says in his journal: “It would be a wretched bargain to accept the proudest Paris in exchange for my native village.” “At best, Paris could only be a school in which to learn to live here — a stepping- stone to Concord, a school in which to fit for this university.” “The sight of a marsh-hawk in Concord meadows is worth more to me than the entry of the Allies into Paris.” This is very Parisian and Victor Hugoish, except for its self-consciousness and the playful twinkle in the author’s eye. Thoreau had humor, but it had worked a little — it was not quite sweet; a vinous fermentation had taken place more or less in it. There was too much acid for the sugar. It shows itself especially when he speaks of men. How he disliked the average social and business man, and said his only resource was to get away from them. He was surprised to find what vulgar fellows they were. “They do a little business commonly each day, in order to pay their board, and then they congregate in sitting-rooms, and feebly fabulate and paddle in the social slush; and when I think that they have sufficiently relaxed, and am prepared to see them steal away to their shrines, they go unashamed to their beds, and take on a new layer of sloth.” Methinks there is a drop of aquafortis in this liquor. Generally, however, there is only a pleasant acid or sub-acid flavor to his humor, as when he refers to a certain minister who spoke of God as if he enjoyed a monopoly of the subject; or when he says of the good church- people that “they show the whites of their eyes on the Sabbath, and the blacks all the rest of the week.” He says the greatest bores who visited him in his hut by Walden Pond were the self- styled reformers, who thought that he was forever singing: “This is the house that I built; This is the man that lives in the house that I built.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

But they did not know that the third line was: “These are the folks that worry the man That lives in the house that I built.” “I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no chickens, but I feared the men-harriers rather.” What sweet and serious humor in that passage in WALDEN wherein he protests that he was not lonely in his hermitage: “I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old settler and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond and stoned it, and fringed it with pine-woods; who tells me stories of old time and of new eternity; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even without apples or cider — a most wise and humorous friend, whom I love much, who keeps himself more secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley; and though he is thought to be dead, none can show where he is buried. An elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, in whose odorous herb-garden I love to stroll sometimes, gathering simples and listening to her fables; for she has a genius of unequaled fertility, and her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original of every fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the incidents occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her children yet.” Emerson says Thoreau’s determination on natural history was organic, but it was his determination on supernatural history that was organic. Natural history was but one of the doors through which he sought to gain admittance to this inner and finer heaven of things. He hesitated to call himself a naturalist; probably even poet-naturalist would not have suited him. He says in his journal: “The truth is, I am a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot,” and the least of these is the natural philosopher. He says: “Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her. To look at her is as fatal as to look at the head of Medusa. It turns the man of science to stone.” It is not looking at Nature that turns the man of science to stone, but looking at his dried and labeled specimens, and his dried and labeled theories of her. Thoreau always sought to look through and beyond her, and he missed seeing much there was in her; the jealous goddess had her revenge. I do not make this remark as a criticism, but to account for his failure to make any new or valuable contribution to natural history. He did not love Nature for her own sake, or HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

the bird and the flower for their own sakes, or with an unmixed and disinterested love, as Gilbert White did, for instance, but for what he could make out of them. He says (Journal, page 83): “The ultimate expression or fruit of any created thing is a fine effluence, which only the most ingenuous worshiper perceives at a reverent distance from its surface even.” This “fine effluence” he was always reaching after, and often grasping or inhaling. This is the mythical hound and horse and turtle-dove which he says in WALDEN he long ago lost, and has been on their trail ever since. He never abandons the search, and in every woodchuck-hole or musk-rat-den, in retreat of bird, or squirrel, or mouse, or fox that he pries into, in every walk and expedition to the fields or swamps, or to distant woods, in every spring note and call that he listens to so patiently, he hopes to get some clew to his lost treasures, to the effluence that so provokingly eludes him. Hence, when we regard Thoreau simply as an observer or as a natural historian, there have been better, though few so industrious and persistent. He was up and out at all hours of the day and night, and in all seasons and weathers, year in and year out, and yet he saw and recorded nothing new. I cannot say that there was any felicitous and happy seeing; there was no inspiration of the eye, certainly not in the direction of natural history. He has added no new line or touch to the portrait of bird or beast that I can recall — no important or significant fact to their lives. What he saw in this field everybody may see who looks; it is patent. He had not the detective eye of the great naturalist; he did not catch the dews and hints dropped here and there, the quick, flashing movements, the shy but significant gestures by which new facts are disclosed, mainly because he was not looking for them. His eye was not penetrating and interpretive. It was full of speculation; it was sophisticated with literature, sophisticated with Concord, sophisticated with himself. His mood was subjective rather than objective. He was more intent on the natural history of his own thought than on that of the bird. To the last his ornithology was not quite sure, not quite trustworthy. In his published journal he sometimes names the wrong bird, and what short work a naturalist would have made of his night-warbler, which Emerson reports Thoreau had been twelve years trying to identify. It was perhaps his long-lost turtle- dove, in some one of its disguises. From his journal it would seem that he was a long time puzzled to distinguish the fox- colored sparrow from the tree or Canadian sparrow — a very easy task to one who has an eye for the birds. But he was looking too intently for a bird behind the bird — for a mythology to shine through his ornithology. “The song-sparrow and the transient fox-colored sparrow — have they brought me no message this year? Is not the coming of the fox-colored sparrow something more earnest and significant than I have dreamed of? Have I heard what this tiny passenger has to say while it flits thus from HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

tree to tree?” “I love the birds and beasts because they are mythologically in earnest.” (Journal, page 284.) If he had had the same eye for natural history he possessed for arrow-heads, what new facts he would have disclosed! But he was looking for arrow-heads. He had them in his mind; he thought arrow-heads; he was an arrow-head himself, and these relics fairly kicked themselves free of the mold to catch his eye.

Thoreau was a man eminently “preoccupied of his own soul.”31 He had no self-abandonment, no self-forgetfulness; he could not give himself to the birds or animals: they must surrender to him. He says to one of his correspondents: “Whether he sleeps or wakes, whether he runs or walks, whether he uses a microscope or a telescope, or his naked eye, a man never discovers anything, never overtakes anything, or leaves anything behind, but himself.” This is half true of some; it is wholly true of others. It is wholly true of Thoreau. Nature was the glass in which he saw himself. He says the partridge loves peas, but not those that go into the pot with her! All the peas Thoreau loved had been in the pot with him and were seasoned by him. I trust I do not in the least undervalue Thoreau’s natural history notes; I only wish there were more of them. What makes them so valuable and charming is his rare descriptive powers. He could give the simple fact with the freshest and finest poetic bloom upon it. He says: “The note of the first blue-bird in the air answers to the purling nil of melted snow beneath. It is evidently soft and soothing, and, as surely as the thermometer, indicates a higher temperature. It is the accent of the south wind, its vernacular.” Of the return of the highhole, or pigeon wood-pecker, he says: “The loud PEEP! of a pigeon woodpecker is heard, and, anon, the prolonged loud and shrill cackle calling the thin-wooded hill-sides and pastures to life. It is like the note of an alarm-clock set last fall so as to wake Nature up at exactly this date. UP UP UP UP UP UP UP UP UP!” Often a single word or epithet of his tells the whole story. Thus he says, speaking of the music of the black-bird, that it has a “split-whistle “; the note of the red-shouldered starling is “gurgle-ee.” Looking out of his window one March day, he says he cannot see the heel of a single snow-bank anywhere. He does not seem to have known that the shrike sang in the fall and winter as well as in the spring; and is he entirely sure he saw a musk-rat building its house in March (the fall is the time they build); or that he heard the whippoorwill singing in September; or that the woodchuck dines principally upon crickets? With what patience and industry he watched things for a sign! From his journal it would appear that Thoreau kept nature about Concord under a sort of police surveillance the year round. He shadowed every flower and bird and musquash that appeared. His vigilance was unceasing; not a mouse or a squirrel

31. “I NEED no assurances — I am a man who is preoccupied, of his own Soul” - Walt Whitman, “Assurances.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

must leave its den without his knowledge. If the birds or frogs were not on hand promptly at his spring roll-call, he would know the reason; he would look them up; he would question his neighbors. He was up in the morning and off to some favorite haunt earlier than the day-laborers, and he chronicled his observations on the spot as if the case was to be tried in court the next day and he was the principal witness. He watched the approach of spring as a doctor watches the development of a critical case. He felt the pulse of the wind and the temperature of the day at all hours. He examined the plants growing under water, and noted the radical leaves of various weeds that keep green all winter under the snow. He felt for them with benumbed fingers amid the wet and the snow. The first sight of bare ground and of the red earth excites him. The fresh meadow spring odor was to him like the fragrance of tea to an old tea-drinker. In early March he goes to the Corner Spring to see the tufts of green grass, or he inspects the minute lichens that spring from the bark of trees. “It is short commons,” he says, “and innutritious.” He brings home the first frog-spittle he finds in a ditch and studies it in a tumbler of water. The first water- beetle that appears he makes a note of, and the first skunk- cabbage that thrusts its spathe up through the mold is of more interest to him than the latest news from Paris or London. “I go to look for mud-turtles in Heywood’s meadow,” he says, March 23, 1853. The first water-fowl that came in the spring he stalked like a pot-hunter, crawling through the swamps and woods, or over a hill on his stomach, to have a good shot at them with his — journal. He is determined nature shall not get one day the start of him; and yet he is obliged to confess that “no mortal is alert enough to be present at the first dawn of spring “; still he will not give up trying. “Can you be sure,” he says, “that you have heard the first frog in the township croak?” A lady offered him the life of Dr. Chalmers to read, but he would not promise. The next day she was heard through a partition shouting to some one who was deaf: “Think of it — he stood half an hour to-day to hear the frogs croak, and he wouldn’t read the life of Chalmers!” He would go any number of miles to interview a musk-rat or a woodchuck, or to keep an “appointment with an oak-tree,” but he records in his journal that he rode a dozen miles one day with his employer, keeping a profound silence almost all the way. “I treated him simply as if he had bronchitis and could not speak — just as I would a sick man, a crazy man, or an idiot.” Thoreau seems to have been aware of his defect on the human side. He says: “If I am too cold for human friendship, I trust I shall not soon be too cold for natural influences”; and then he goes on with this doubtful statement: “It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature. Those qualities which bring you near to the one estrange you from the other.” One day he met a skunk in the field, and he describes its peculiar gait exactly when he says: “It runs, even when HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

undisturbed, with a singular teter or undulation, like the walking of a Chinese lady.” He ran after the animal to observe it, keeping out of the reach of its formidable weapon, and when it took refuge in the wall he interviewed it at his leisure. If it had been a man or a woman he had met, he would have run the other way. Thus he went through the season, Nature’s reporter, taking down the words as they fell from her lips, and distressed if a sentence is missed. The Yankee thrift and enterprise that he had so little patience with in his neighbors, he applied to his peculiar ends. He took the day and the season by the foretop. “How many mornings,” he says in WALDEN, “summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine!” He had an eye to the main chance, to a good investment. He probed the swamps like a butter-buyer, he sampled the plants and the trees and lichens like a tea-taster. He made a burning-glass of a piece of ice; he made sugar from a pumpkin and from the red-maple, and wine from the sap of the black-birch, and boiled rock-tripe for an hour and tried it as food. If he missed any virtue or excellence in these things or in anything in his line, or any suggestion to his genius, he felt like a man who had missed a good bargain. Yet he sometimes paused in this peeping and prying into nature, and cast a regretful look backward. “Ah, those youthful days,” he says in his journal, under date of March 30, 1853, “are they never to return? — when the worker does not too enviously observe particulars, but sees, hears, scents, tastes, and feels only himself — the phenomena that showed themselves in him, his expanding body, his intellect and heart. No worm or insect, quadruped or bird confined his view, but the unbounded universe was his. A bird has now become a mote in his eye.” Then he proceeds to dig out a woodchuck. In WALDEN, Thoreau pretends to quote the following passage from the Gulistan, or Rose Garden of Sadi of Shiraz, with an eye to its application to his own case, but as he evidently found it not in, but under, Sadi’s lines, it has an especial significance, and may fitly close this paper: “They asked a wise man, saying: ‘Of the many celebrated trees which the Most High God has created, lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; what mystery is there in this?’ He replied: ‘Each has its appropriate produce and appointed season, during the continuance of which it is fresh and blooming, and during their absence dry and withered; to neither of which states is the cypress exposed, being always flourishing; and of this nature are the azads, or religious independents — Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory; for the Dijlah or Tigris will continue to flow through Bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date-tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress.’” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1884

THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE by Stephen Crane.

Lysander Spooner, in A LETTER TO SCIENTISTS AND INVENTORS A LETTER TO SCIENTISTS AND INVENTORS, ON THE SCIENCE OF JUSTICE, AND THEIR RIGHT OF PERPETUAL PROPERTY IN THEIR DISCLOSURES AND INVENTIONS (Boston: Cupples, Upham & Co.; 283 Washington Street, page 7), wrote “Thus legislators, judges, lawyers, editors, teachers of all kinds, physicians, and soldiers are continually selling their knowledge –and, perhaps, quite as frequently their ignorance and falsehoods– for money.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1886

Lysander Spooner’s A LETTER TO GROVER CLEVELAND, ON HIS FALSE INAUGURAL ADDRESS, THE USURPATIONS AND CRIMES OF LAWMAKERS AND JUDGES, AND THE CONSEQUENT POVERTY, IGNORANCE, AND SERVITUDE OF THE PEOPLE (Boston: Benj. R. Tucker, Publisher).

Spooner wrote in Benjamin Ricketson Tucker’s anarchist magazine Liberty: ...the right of property is the right of supreme, absolute, and irresponsible dominion over anything that is naturally a subject of property, — that is, of ownership. It is a right against all the world. *NOT THE DAUGHTER BUT THE MOTHER OF ORDER* — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

May 3, Monday: At the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company factory in Chicago, 176 policemen attempted to intervene in a fight between employees who were striking for an 8-hour workday and “scab” strikebreakers, and two of the crowd of 200 employees were killed. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

May 4, Tuesday: Queen Victoria officially opened the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in Royal Albert Hall, London. Ode for the Opening of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition by Arthur Sullivan to words of Tennyson was performed for the initial time.

Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter received 3 patents to cover improvements on their graphophone (this would be the first practical phonograph).

During a protest rally at Haymarket Square in Chicago, about the police killings of the previous day, someone lobbed a bomb and the police opened fire. Many people were injured and there were at least 10 killed, including policemen. Eight of the activists would be singled out for prosecution and convicted of inciting to riot through “inflammatory speeches and publications.” One of the accused men would comment sarcastically to the trial judge that they ought to hang his wife and children with him — since in attending the Haymarket speeches these innocents had been doing exactly as much as he had. Four of these thought-criminals would be hanged, and another would commit suicide while awaiting hanging.

Lysander Spooner would write about these martyred workers in Boston’s anarchist magazine Liberty.

After passions had cooled and it had come to be recognized that no link had been established between them and the unknown person who had thrown the bomb, the three still surviving eventually would receive full HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

pardons!

When the four men would be hanged, they would be hanged inside all-enveloping white shrouds with hoods, and short ropes would be used so that when they fell their necks would not snap. They were intended to hang there jerking, swinging from side to side and dying slowly by strangulation.

Those who know something about this sort of thing (I do, since I was trapped inside the Khomeini Revolution in Iran in 1977-1979) know that there is always the possibility of reverse responsibility, or what is known as a “false flag” maneuver. That is to say, just as it turned out to be SAVAK, the Shahanshah’s secret police, who were responsible for the Rex Theater tragedy in Abadan in which so many innocent families were burned to death rather than the fundamentalist revolutionaries who were the prime suspects at the time, so also, in the case of the Haymarket incident, it is at least theoretically possible that it was a policeman who threw the dynamite that set off the incident, in an attempt to make the Chicago anarchists more culpable and therefore more vulnerable to police action. That possibility should at least have been the cause to some investigation, and most definitely it was not. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Since we have suicide bombers today and most of them seem to be Muslim, there is a detail of these 19th- Century circumstances to which we now should be paying careful attention. It is that in this American labor situation is the origin of the idea of the suicide bomber despite the fact that there were zero Muslims on the scene. Nitroglycerin had been around since the 1840s, and Alfred Nobel had figured out a way to make the substance stable enough to be carried and handled by mixing it with an inert filler material. It was being speculated that if every worker had a few pounds of dynamite in his pocket, every worker would be being treated with respect: dynamite as the great equalizer. In this year, therefore, the wife of Albert Parsons, an anarchist, suggested that since there were always unfortunates who were contemplating drowning themselves, there was a better course that might be made available to them: they be rendered useful to society, and make their deaths meaningful, by becoming suicide bombers. By their death as a sacrifice they could make themselves a force of protest on behalf of justice in an otherwise out-of-all-control labor situation. Perhaps, if enough workers could be persuaded to make themselves suicide bombers, killing themselves in conjunction with the police and capitalists who were oppressing them, she speculated, it would be possible to get the average workweek down from 60 hours to, say, 48 — so that laborers could have some time to feel the sunshine and smell the flowers:

We want to feel the sunshine We want to smell the flowers; We’re sure God has willed it, And we mean to have eight hours.

July 12, Monday: On Henry Thoreau’s birthday, workmen began applying copper sheets to the scaffolding framework of the Statue of Liberty.

Daniel McFarland popped the question to Lysander Spooner, “I take you to be an anarchist of moral suasion; am I right? or rather that you would advocate the abolition of all human laws that Natural Law might work unimpeded.” If there be, in nature, no such principle as justice, there is no moral standard, and never can be any moral standard, by which any controversy whatever, between two or more human beings, can be settled in a manner to be obligatory upon either; and the inevitable doom of the human race must consequently be to be forever at war; forever striving to plunder, enslave, and murder each other; with no instrumentalities but fraud and force to end the conflict. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1887

May 14, Saturday: 2 scenes from Ernest Chausson’s drame lyrique after Leconte de Lisle Hélène were performed by the Société National de Musique, Paris.

Lysander Spooner died in Boston.

May 15, Sunday: Lysander Spooner’s obituary appeared in the Boston Globe and in Benjamin Ricketson Tucker’s anarchist magazine Liberty. He died at one o’clock in the afternoon of Saturday, May 14, in his little room at 109 Myrtle Street, surrounded by trunks and chests bursting with the books, manuscripts, and pamphlets which he had gathered about him in his active pamphleteer’s warfare over half a century ago. *NOT THE DAUGHTER BUT THE MOTHER OF ORDER* — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

May 29, Sunday: Russian was made the language of instruction in schools throughout the Russian Empire.

Maurice Rouvier replaced René Goblet as prime minister of France.

With the body of Lysander Spooner already deposited in Forrest Hills Cemetery, on this day a memorial meeting was staged at Wells Hall in Boston. Speakers were Theodore Dwight Weld, George W. Searle, Henry Appleton, and J.M.L. Babcock. There was a letter from Victor Drury, Knights of Labor leader in New-York City. On any day except Sunday, for as many years back as the present writer can remember, a visitor at the Boston Athenaeum Library between the hours of nine and three might have noticed, as nearly all did notice, in one of the alcoves overlooking Tremont Street across the Old Granary burying-ground, the stooping figure of an aged man, bending over a desk piled high with dusty volumes of history, jurisprudence, political science, and constitutional law, and busily absorbed in studying and writing. Had the old man chanced to raise his head for a moment, the visitor would have seen, framed in long and snowy hair and beard, one of the finest, kindliest, sweetest, strongest, grandest faces that ever gladdened the eyes of man. Resolved: That, while he fought this good fight and kept the faith, he did not finish his course, for his goal was in the eternities; that, starting in his youth in pursuit of truth, he kept it up through a vigorous manhood, undeterred by poverty, neglect, or scorn, and in his later life relaxed his energies not one jot; that his mental vigor seemed to grow as his physical HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

powers declined; that although, counting his age by years, he was an octogenarian, we chiefly mourn his death, not as that of an old man who has completed his task, but as that of the youngest man among us, — youngest because, after all that he had done, he still had so much service that the best we can do his memory is to take up his work where he was forced to drop it, carry it on with all that we can summon of his energy and indomitable will, and as old age creeps upon us, not lay the harness off, but following his example and Emerson’s advice, “obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1968

CABIN ESCAPISM AND HOW IT GREW:

“We went to the wilderness because 100 years ago a man wrote a book.”

YEAR PERSON BOOK PLACE

1889 Philip G. Herbert, Jr. LIBERTY AND A LIVING Long Island

1951 Vena Angier and AT HOME IN THE WOODS: LIVING Hudson Hope, Bradford Angier THE LIFE OF THOREAU TODAY British Columbia

1968 Edward Abby DESERT SOLITAIRE Utah

1971 Charles Seib THE WOODS: North Carolina ONE MAN’S ESCAPE TO NATURE

1974 Annie Dillard PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK Virginia

1978 George Sibley PART OF A WINTER mountains of Colorado

1983 Gilbert Byron COVE DWELLER Maryland’s eastern shore

1987 Anne LaBastille BEYOND BLACK BEAR LAKE Adirondack Mountains HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Edward Abbey’s DESERT SOLITAIRE, large portions of which have been alleged to have been penned while living at “a Death Valley cathouse.” Although this book has been characterized, by Bill Kauffman in AMERICA FIRST! ITS HISTORY, CULTURE, AND POLITICS (Amherst NY: Prometheus Books, 1995, page 156, page 160), as a “Thoreauvian masterpiece of naturalism and reflection,” Kauffman went on to add that “the critics never quite knew what to make of Mr. Abbey,” professing that “over time his ornery wit and scorn for liberal pieties alienated practically everyone…. [A]s Wayne Lutton put it in CHRONICLES, ‘Abbey was part Henry Thoreau and Lysander Spooner — with a heavy infusion of John T. Flynn and Charles Lindbergh.’”

ANARCHISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Here is Lawrence Buell on Edward Abbey, per pages 71-72 of THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION:

The new world paradox of filling with pastoral accoutrements the landscape one has willed to be empty reaches a kind of extreme in latter-day Thoreauvian Edward Abbey. Abbey chose one of the loneliest environments possible as his literary province: the desert lands of southern Utah. Like Muir and other western environmental writers, Abbey saw the element of self-deception in Thoreau’s professed love of wildness and wanted both to chide and to fulfill Thoreau’s self-styled narrative of return to the primal by bonding to a landscape far more primal than Thoreau ever knew: “a country with only the slightest traces of human history.” Abbey’s best-known book, DESERT SOLITAIRE[: A SEASON IN THE WILDERNESS], builds on a summer’s experience spent as a park ranger in then remote Arches National Monument, interspersing vignettes of the park setting with essays about desert ecology and narratives of the author’s increasingly daring adventures in primitivism (mountain climbing, rafting down the Colorado, going naked for a month in a branch of the Grand Canyon, and so on). Yet it soon becomes clear that his quest for the nitty-gritty will depend heavily on the imported imagery of the not-there. Approaching his post-to-be for the first time at night, Abbey turns onto a dirt road, “into the howling wilderness” (of New England tradition). Summing up his reasons for going there, he describes his deepest purpose as “to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence”: Thoreau redivivus. Just as Milton could not attempt the unattempted without referring the attempt to the Aonian mount (even borrowing the trope of attempting itself), just as Thoreau turned to the now classic Thoreau as a way of expressing his own turn to a more primal nature. That he finds a snug prefabricated trailer waiting for him at the end of his drive is a symbolically fitting happenstance. But in Abbey the paradox is most striking given the extreme of primality to which he says he wishes to go. “I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1971

Charles Shively’s THE COLLECTED WORKS OF LYSANDER SPOONER (M&S Press).

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2016. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: November 15, 2016 HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.