PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN 1 “GARRISON HAS NOT YET WON ... SELF-VICTORIES.” 1800 1801 1802 1803 1804 BORN 1806 1807 1808 1809 1810 1811 1812 1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 DIED 1. A comment made during February 1847 by Bronson Alcott. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN Henry Mayer’s biography of William Lloyd Garrison, ALL ON FIRE, is well-written even if there are niggling errors. Mayer comments on the failure of people at the time who were espousing the “higher law” doctrine in the north against the Fugitive Slave law to note Henry Thoreau’s speech, delivered in 1848, and later retitled “Civil Disobedience.” He points out that Garrison, who knew Thoreau and his family well, didn’t pick up on it. Well, we know that Thoreau and Garrison definitely didn’t see eye to eye. When Garrison went on the attack against Nathaniel Peabody Rogers of Concord, New Hampshire, and deprived him of his Herald of Freedom gazette, eventuating in Rogers’s discouragement, disillusionment, and death, Henry sought to defend this editor in the April 1844 last issue of The Dial. Rogers had been advocating that society could be reformed only through a process in which individuals reformed themselves, and therefore was abolitionist but was not attracted to the antislavery societies, which he believed were on a path toward self-institutionalization. Thoreau endorsed Rogers’s principles, not Garrison’s: He refused to adopt the new war-cry lifted up by Mr. Garrison — “No union with slave-holders.” He could bring his lips only to say, “No union with slave-holding.” He looked upon Anti-Slavery as exclusively a moral agitation, and felt that its high office was degraded by connecting it with party politics, or with a political party. He was a thorough, and meant to be a consistent, Non-resistant. As such, he warmly condemned the formation of the “Liberty Party;” and having denounced the “Third Party,” he did not feel himself inclined to join a Fourth, and, with it, or in it, to commence an agitation for the dissolution of the Union, even though that party was headed by Mr. Garrison. He went farther. Having, in company with his non- resistant friends, repudiated all political organization, by following out the same principle, he became an advocate for “free meetings,” and opposed putting the Anti-Slavery movement under the guardianship and control of Chairmen, Committees, and Boards. Disquieted by this inconvenient consistency, and this thorough carrying out of his non-resistant principles, his non-resistant friends in Massachusetts, consulting and coöperating with some of those in New Hampshire, decided that the property of the “Herald of Freedom” was not in him, but in the Board of the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society. Now, as you are perfectly well aware, Garrison was not the sort of person to take this sort of resistance to his theocracy lightly! What is amazing to me is that nobody has questioned why, after this critique, an ideologue such as Garrison would HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN have continued to work with Thoreau at all! It speaks to the issue that there must have been something further about their relationship, which has by now been suppressed. (And, as you know, I think I do understand what that “something further” was — Garrison’s society owed Thoreau, owed him big time, for contributing greatly to their greatest publishing success.) On the 4th of July, 1854 in the Harmony Grove of Framingham, Henry Thoreau had ample opportunity to observe Garrison at his worst. Thoreau was on that platform, along with Sojourner Truth, allowed to deliver only a part of his speech, before Garrison torched a copy of the US Constitution. Thoreau went back home and soon was making jottings, which wound up as last-moment admonitions to avoid despair and desperate haste in Chapter 1 of his WALDEN manuscript — desperate men being led into desperate deeds. In other words, my contention would be that when we read such logoi as “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” it is Mr. William Lloyd Garrison who should spring to mind as a type case of what Thoreau was attempting to depict. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN WALDEN: I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, PEOPLE OF I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign WALDEN form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination, – what Wilberforce is there to bring that about? Think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates! As if you could kill time without injuring eternity. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. WILLIAM WILBERFORCE JOSEPH ADDISON “CATO, A TRAGEDY” WM. LLOYD GARRISON Notice that Garrison did not remain a nonresistant, but instead during the civil war became a proxy belligerent, and then after the war he did little to attempt to improve the lot in life of the “freed” blacks. To my way of thinking, Garrison represented the pathological self-righteousness of the antislavery movement which helped polarize white Americans North and South in equal and opposite demonizations, and thus create the war. He doesn’t impress me, not one little bit. “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN 1804 December 12, Wednesday: For many years William Lloyd Garrison had reason to presume that he had been born on this date (actually, he would later find out, it was more likely that he had been born on December 10th, 1805). At the insistence of France, Spain declared war on Britain. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN 1805 December 10, Tuesday: William Lloyd Garrison was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts. (Actually, for quite awhile during his youth, it would be supposed that he had been born on December 12th, 1804, and so his printing apprenticeship would be complete on December 10, 1825 with everyone presuming that he had just reached the majority age of 21 years.) NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT The People of Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN 1808 In Newburyport, Massachusetts, the mother of little Lloyd Garrison (William Lloyd Garrison), a Baptist charismatic, separated from his father due to his use of alcohol and his conviviality with other men who were users of alcohol. This happened when the oldest son, James, was seven, and by the time James was a teenager he had chosen a path of defiance of his mother and what she stood for, and was, to the greatest of excess, repeating his father’s mode of conduct. The second son, Lloyd, in contrast became the exact opposite of his absent father, of whom he always insisted he had no memory. He was, his mother explained, “a good boy and a great comfort to me.” He would have, as a memento of his father, only a compass with his initials inscribed on it. LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project The People of Walden HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN 1811 May 31, Friday night: There was an extreme conflagration in Newburyport, Massachusetts, beginning in a stable on Merchants’ Row and proceeding before a dry wind toward the market house and the ferry wharf.