GAVE HIGH COUNSELS.
IT WAS THE PRIVILEGE OF
CERTAIN BOYS TO HAVE
THIS IMMEASURABLY
HIGH STANDARD
INDICATED TO THEIR CHILDHOOD;
A BLESSING WHICH
NOTHING ELSE IN
1 EDUCATION COULD SUPPLY.
1. This description was created by Elizabeth Hoar and would appear on Miss Mary Moody Emerson’s tombstone. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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2 MISS MARY “POLLY” MOODY EMERSON
WALDO’S RELATIVES
“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY
2. “Tnamurya” and “Amita” were names used by Waldo Emerson to mask or minimize the influence upon him of his Aunt Mary. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Table of Altitudes
Yoda 2 ' 0 '' Lavinia Warren 2 ' 8 '' Tom Thumb, Jr. 3 ' 4 '' Lucy (Australopithecus Afarensis) 3 ' 8 '' Hervé Villechaize (“Fantasy Island”) 3 ' 11'' Charles Proteus Steinmetz 4 ' 0 '' Mary Moody Emerson per FBS (1) 4 ' 3 '' Alexander Pope 4 ' 6 '' Benjamin Lay 4 ' 7 '' Dr. Ruth Westheimer 4 ' 7 '' Gary Coleman (“Arnold Jackson”) 4 ' 8 '' Edith Piaf 4 ' 8 '' Queen Victoria with osteoporosis 4 ' 8 '' Linda Hunt 4 ' 9 '' Queen Victoria as adult 4 ' 10 '' Mother Teresa 4 ' 10 '' Margaret Mitchell 4 ' 10 '' length of newer military musket 4 ' 10'' Charlotte Brontë 4 ' 10-11'' Tammy Faye Bakker 4 ' 11'' Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut 4 ' 11'' jockey Willie Shoemaker 4 ' 11'' Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 4 ' 11'' Joan of Arc 4 ' 11'' Bonnie Parker of “Bonnie & Clyde” 4 ' 11'' Harriet Beecher Stowe 4 ' 11'' Laura Ingalls Wilder 4 ' 11'' a rather tall adult Pygmy male 4 ' 11'' Gloria Swanson 4 ' 11''1/2 Clara Barton 5 ' 0 '' Isambard Kingdom Brunel 5 ' 0 '' Andrew Carnegie 5 ' 0 '' Thomas de Quincey 5 ' 0 '' Stephen A. Douglas 5 ' 0 '' Danny DeVito 5 ' 0 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX
T N A M U R Y A A M I T A
Immanuel Kant 5 ' 0 '' William Wilberforce 5 ' 0 '' Dollie Parton 5 ' 0 '' Mae West 5 ' 0 '' Pia Zadora 5 ' 0 '' Deng Xiaoping 5 ' 0 '' Dred Scott 5 ' 0 '' (±) Captain William Bligh of HMS Bounty 5 ' 0 '' (±) Harriet Tubman 5 ' 0 '' (±) Mary Moody Emerson per FBS (2) 5 ' 0 '' (±) John Brown of Providence, Rhode Island 5 ' 0 '' (+) John Keats 5 ' 3/4 '' Debbie Reynolds (Carrie Fisher’s mother) 5 ' 1 '' Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) 5 ' 1 '' Bette Midler 5 ' 1 '' Dudley Moore 5 ' 2 '' Paul Simon (of Simon & Garfunkel) 5 ' 2 '' Honore de Balzac 5 ' 2 '' Sally Field 5 ' 2 '' Jemmy Button 5 ' 2 '' Margaret Mead 5 ' 2 '' R. Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller 5 ' 2 '' Yuri Gagarin the astronaut 5 ' 2 '' William Walker 5 ' 2 '' Horatio Alger, Jr. 5 ' 2 '' length of older military musket 5 ' 2 '' 1 the artist formerly known as Prince 5 ' 2 /2'' 1 typical female of Thoreau's period 5 ' 2 /2'' Francis of Assisi 5 ' 3 '' Vol ta i re 5 ' 3 '' Mohandas Gandhi 5 ' 3 '' Sammy Davis, Jr. 5 ' 3 '' Kahlil Gibran 5 ' 3 '' Friend Daniel Ricketson 5 ' 3 '' The Reverend Gilbert White 5 ' 3 '' Nikita Khrushchev 5 ' 3 '' Sammy Davis, Jr. 5 ' 3 '' Truman Capote 5 ' 3 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Kim Jong Il (North Korea) 5 ' 3 '' Stephen A. “Little Giant” Douglas 5 ' 4 '' Francisco Franco 5 ' 4 '' President James Madison 5 ' 4 '' Iosef Vissarionovich Dzugashvili “Stalin” 5 ' 4 '' Alan Ladd 5 ' 4 '' Pablo Picasso 5 ' 4 '' Truman Capote 5 ' 4 '' Queen Elizabeth 5 ' 4 '' Ludwig van Beethoven 5 ' 4 '' Typical Homo Erectus 5 ' 4 '' 1 typical Neanderthal adult male 5 ' 4 /2'' 1 Alan Ladd 5 ' 4 /2'' comte de Buffon 5 ' 5 '' (-) Captain Nathaniel Gordon 5 ' 5 '' Charles Manson 5 ' 5 '' Audie Murphy 5 ' 5 '' Harry Houdini 5 ' 5 '' Hung Hsiu-ch'üan 5 ' 5 '' 1 Marilyn Monroe 5 ' 5 /2'' 1 T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia” 5 ' 5 /2'' average runaway male American slave 5 ' 5-6 '' Charles Dickens 5 ' 6? '' President Benjamin Harrison 5 ' 6 '' President Martin Van Buren 5 ' 6 '' James Smithson 5 ' 6 '' Louisa May Alcott 5 ' 6 '' 1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 5 ' 6 /2'' 1 Napoleon Bonaparte 5 ' 6 /2'' Emily Brontë 5 ' 6-7 '' Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 5 ' ? '' average height, seaman of 1812 5 ' 6.85 '' Oliver Reed Smoot, Jr. 5 ' 7 '' minimum height, British soldier 5 ' 7 '' President John Adams 5 ' 7 '' President John Quincy Adams 5 ' 7 '' President William McKinley 5 ' 7 '' “Charley” Parkhurst (a female) 5 ' 7 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Ulysses S. Grant 5 ' 7 '' Henry Thoreau 5 ' 7 '' 1 the average male of Thoreau's period 5 ' 7 /2 '' Edgar Allan Poe 5 ' 8 '' President Ulysses S. Grant 5 ' 8 '' President William H. Harrison 5 ' 8 '' President James Polk 5 ' 8 '' President Zachary Taylor 5 ' 8 '' average height, soldier of 1812 5 ' 8.35 '' 1 President Rutherford B. Hayes 5 ' 8 /2'' President Millard Fillmore 5 ' 9 '' President Harry S Truman 5 ' 9 '' 1 President Jimmy Carter 5 ' 9 /2'' 3 Herman Melville 5 ' 9 /4'' Calvin Coolidge 5 ' 10'' Andrew Johnson 5 ' 10'' Theodore Roosevelt 5 ' 10'' Thomas Paine 5 ' 10'' Franklin Pierce 5 ' 10'' Abby May Alcott 5 ' 10'' Reverend Henry C. Wright 5 ' 10'' 1 Nathaniel Hawthorne 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 Louis “Deerfoot” Bennett 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 Friend John Greenleaf Whittier 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 President Dwight D. Eisenhower 5 ' 10 /2'' Sojourner Truth 5 ' 11'' President Grover Cleveland 5 ' 11'' President Herbert Hoover 5 ' 11'' President Woodrow Wilson 5 ' 11'' President Jefferson Davis 5 ' 11'' 1 President Richard Milhous Nixon 5 ' 11 /2'' Robert Voorhis the hermit of Rhode Island < 6 ' Frederick Douglass 6 ' (-) Anthony Burns 6 ' 0 '' Waldo Emerson 6 ' 0 '' Joseph Smith, Jr. 6 ' 0 '' David Walker 6 ' 0 '' Sarah F. Wakefield 6 ' 0 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Thomas Wentworth Higginson 6 ' 0 '' President James Buchanan 6 ' 0 '' President Gerald R. Ford 6 ' 0 '' President James Garfield 6 ' 0 '' President Warren Harding 6 ' 0 '' President John F. Kennedy 6 ' 0 '' President James Monroe 6 ' 0 '' President William H. Taft 6 ' 0 '' President John Tyler 6 ' 0 '' John Brown 6 ' 0 (+)'' President Andrew Jackson 6 ' 1'' Alfred Russel Wallace 6 ' 1'' President Ronald Reagan 6 ' 1'' 1 Venture Smith 6 ' 1 /2'' John Camel Heenan 6 ' 2 '' Crispus Attucks 6 ' 2 '' President Chester A. Arthur 6 ' 2 '' President George Bush, Senior 6 ' 2 '' President Franklin D. Roosevelt 6 ' 2 '' President George Washington 6 ' 2 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX
T N A M U R Y A A M I T A
Gabriel Prosser 6 ' 2 '' Dangerfield Newby 6 ' 2 '' Charles Augustus Lindbergh 6 ' 2 '' 1 President Bill Clinton 6 ' 2 /2'' 1 President Thomas Jefferson 6 ' 2 /2'' President Lyndon B. Johnson 6 ' 3 '' Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 6 ' 3 '' 1 Richard “King Dick” Seaver 6 ' 3 /4'' President Abraham Lincoln 6 ' 4 '' Marion Morrison (AKA John Wayne) 6 ' 4 '' Elisha Reynolds Potter, Senior 6 ' 4 '' Thomas Cholmondeley 6 ' 4 '' (?) Franklin Benjamin Sanborn 6 ' 5 '' Peter the Great of Russia 6 ' 7 '' Giovanni Battista Belzoni 6 ' 7 '' Thomas Jefferson (the statue) 7 ' 6'' Jefferson Davis (the statue) 7 ' 7'' 1 Martin Van Buren Bates 7 ' 11 /2'' M. Bihin, a Belgian exhibited in Boston in 1840 8 ' Anna Haining Swan 8 ' 1''
“Always do what you are afraid to do.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1774
August 25, Thursday: After a 2d stroke, Nicolò Jommelli died in Naples, at the age of 59. The body would be buried next to that of his wife, in the Chapel of San Tommaso da Villanova in the Church of San Agostino della Zecca.
The initial North Carolina Provincial Congress was convened at New Bern. They would resolve, as a good partner of the Virginia colony just to the north, “That we will not import any slave or slaves, or purchase any slave or slaves, imported or brought into this Province by others, from any part of the world, after the first day of November next.”3
Mary Moody Emerson was born (in just eight months she would be “in arms” at the Concord Fight):
There she is, in her mother’s arms. —See?
3. This had nothing whatever to do with the wellbeing of black people –this had nothing whatever to do with an antipathy toward human slavery –what it had to do with, unfortunately, was that a tax was being levied on such imports by the British crown:
“No taxation (of black property) without representation (for white male citizens of property)!” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miss Mary Moody Emerson HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1775
April 19, Wednesday: People were trying to kill each other at Lexington, and then people were trying to kill each other at Concord.
The Reverend Asa Dunbar recorded of this day in his journal that: “Hostilities commenced at Concord & Lexington.” The day that would be remembered as “Patriots Day” because folks perceived was a one-day reprieve from the obtrusive Old Testament commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” and from the intrusive new New Testament commandment “Love thine enemy.”4 For 24 hours, apparently, the operating rule would be not the Ten Commandments (portrayed here as they have been presented on a T-shirt), not the Golden Rule, but a
much more intriguing “Thou shalt lay waste thine enemy.” The Bedford Minutemen, for instance, bore with them a banner emblazoned with the motto of the Dukes of Kent, “Conquer or die.” [next screen]
4. A POP ESSAY QUESTION. In terms of the above, define and provide synonyms for the term “patriot”: ______. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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WALDEN: I was witness to events of a less peaceful character. One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two reds ones to one black. The legions of these Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely. I watched a couple that were fast locked in each other’s embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noon-day prepared to fight till the sun went down, or life went out. The smaller red champion had fastened himself like a vice to his adversary’s front, and through all the tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root, having already caused the other to go by the board; while the stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and, as I saw on looking nearer, had already divested him of several of his members. They fought with more pertinacity than bull-dogs. Neither manifested the least disposition to retreat. It was evident that their battle- cry was Conquer or die.... I should not have wondered by this time to find that they had their respective musical bands stationed on some eminent chip, and playing their national airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants. I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers and for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight! Two killed on the patriots’ side, and Luther Blanchard wounded! Why here every ant was a Buttrick, –“Fire! for God’s sake fire!”– and thousands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer. There was not one hireling there. I have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea; and the results of this battle will be as important and memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker Hill, at least. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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This all came about because the army that had been camped on Boston Common, early that morning, embarked to cross the Charles River estuary with muffled oarlocks at the point which is now the corner of Boyleston and Charles streets (this part of the estuary long since filled in). The “two lantern” signal from the steeple of one or another Boston church (we don’t actually know which one, perhaps the Congregational church of which Revere was a member, or the nearby Anglican church in the North End) meant that the soldiers were crossing the Charles River (Quinobequin) and being marched through Cambridge, not that they were coming by sea, and the “one lantern” signal would have meant that the soldiers were being marching down Boston Neck, through Roxbury. The two lanterns which were used had been made in the workshops of Paul Revere or Rivière.5 General Thomas Gage had sent an army detail to dismantle the steeple of the Old West Church, to ensure that it could not be used for any such signaling. SLAVERY
As the Army marched up the Charlestown road from the Boston ferry landing, it would have passed a specimen of local justice: an old set of chains with human bones inside them, dating to an incident of September 1755. This had been an African slave, Mark, who had been left to rot after throttling, disemboweling and beheading upon suspicion of having poisoned, or of having attempted to poison, his American owner, Captain John Codman. (Keep this cage in mind, when you are tempted to suspect that what these indignant colonials had
5. This Huguenot silversmith received the warning signal from the church steeple while still in Boston and only afterward departed from the city on his errand, rather than seeing the signal from the opposite shore as has commonly been fantasized. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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decided to fight for was freedom and justice for all.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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One of the men who were marching to unite with the Lexington militia, had slept the previous night in this house:
He was Francis Nurse, a great grandson of Goodwife Rebecca Towne Nurse who had been hanged in Salem as a witch and then, when the witch fervor had died down, been reinstated postmortem into her church.
The Lexington militia had assembled too early, in response to the riders coming out of Boston such as Revere, and when the army column had not showed up by 2AM they decided to disperse and get some sleep. Shortly before daybreak there were some 70 of them on the Lexington green, and they spread out in two lines to face HDT WHAT? INDEX
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the oncoming troops. Major John Pitcairn of the Marines called out to the army troops that they were not to
fire but were to surround these militiamen and then take away their weapons, and Captain John Parker of the militia (ancestor of the Reverend Theodore Parker of Thoreau’s day, carrying his Charleville musket) called
out to the militiamen that they were not to fire, but were to disperse. At that point there was a gunshot, origins unclear, and the army troops broke ranks and began to fire at the 27 militiamen. It would be pointless to inquire who fired, as in such a situation at the instant that it occurs nobody has any idea where the round came from or where it went and therefore everyone becomes terrified and presumes that he is being fired upon and proceeds to fire as rapidly as possible at anyone who appears to be holding a weapon. As Parker stated it, the result was that the army killed “eight of our party, with out receiving any provocation therefor from us.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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After this killing, and presumably after the army had collected the militia’s weapons,6 neighbors were allowed
to come forward to tend the wounded and remove the corpses, while the army got itself back into a column, fired off one massive victory volley to clear their weapons, and marched on toward Concord. Major John Buttrick sent Captain Reuben Brown on horseback down Lexington Road toward Boston to report the firing in Lexington. Captain Brown would ride more than 100 miles to the coast and back, while the soldiers were looting his liveries and setting his barn on fire (neither the barn nor the house would be destroyed).
As the redcoat drums rumbled like thunder through the town’s streets, a panic-stricken 18-year-old named Harry Gould was being consoled by the Reverend William Emerson. In Concord, while destroying what few military stores they could get their hands on, the army also set afire the liberty pole in front of the courthouse. The scene would be re-imagined and painted by Amos Doolittle and then a famous lithograph would be made
6. Likewise, we do not refer here to the militia as “the Americans” and the army as “the British,” since that is a later conceptual framework and anyhow would have been false to the actual constitution of these bodies of armed men. There were in fact many Americans in the paid colonial army, and I know of at least one Brit who was assembled with the Minutemen militia — before the battle we know that he put aside his rifle for awhile and went down the hill to chat up various Redcoats. This was a struggle of a militia faction of British subjects in America, the separatist faction, versus an army faction of British subjects in America, the loyalist faction, similar to the struggle during the Iranian Revolution of 1979 between the Imperial Iranian Air Force cadets and warrant officers, adherents of the religious faction in Iranian politics, versus the Imperial Iranian Ground Forces brigades, controlled by officers adherent to the secular faction in Iranian politics. It is significant, then, using this more accurate terminology, that rather than attempt to seize “the militia’s” stores and withdraw with them to Boston, “the army” was attempting to destroy those military stores in place. This means that, going into this action, “the army” was already regarding its withdrawal to Boston to be the difficult part of the day’s military operation, because, had they seized and relocated these military stores, “the army” could have made use of them itself — the military may upon occasion become wanton in the destruction of civilian properties, just as it may upon occasion rape, but military stores are never destroyed in place without at least one damned good reason. The major military stores available to “the militia” were being stockpiled in Worcester rather than in Concord, because it was more of a march from Boston for “the army” and was therefore safer. Had “the army” succeeded in its withdrawal from Concord, of course, it would have marched to Worcester to destroy the bulk of the stores in the possession of “the militia,” in order to force “the militia” to return once again to the political faction favored by the officers of “the army.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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of this famous painting by Smith: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Sparks from the liberty pole, however, ignited the courthouse roof, and while that fire was extinguished without great harm to the structure, the smoke from this fire caused the some 400 militiamen assembled in safety on the rise on the opposite side of the Concord River to presume that it was the army’s intention to burn their dissident town to the ground. In a column of pairs they approached the Old North Bridge, on the Concord side of which were three army companies. The army made some attempt to render the bridge impassible by removing planks, and then fired a volley which killed the militia Captain Isaac David and Abner Hosmer, in the front rank of the Acton minutemen as their drummer, whose face was half shot away.7 It was then that
Major John Buttrick called out “Fire, fellow soldiers, for God’s sake, fire.” Thus it came to be that here the embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard ’round the world.8
Not counting those who were wounded but would survive, three redcoats of the Light Infantry Company, 4th
7. When Deacon Jonathan Hosmer inspected Private Abner Hosmer’s faceless corpse, he found a breastpin his son had received for his 21st birthday. 8. A footnote to Waldo Emerson’s famed line “Here the embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard ’round the world”: A publication of the Boeing Corporation would eventually declare that with the employees of the Boeing Corporation on the job, making Minuteman ICBMs, it was quite a bit less likely that “some future poet” would be forced to “modify the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson” into “Here the embattled farmers stood and fired the shot reaching ’round the world.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Regiment fell in the responding volley, Thomas Smith, Patrick Gray, and James Hall. One went down evidently with a bullet through the head and two would die of bodily wounds. Two would be buried by colonials where they had fallen next to the Bridge, and one would be buried in Concord center by the army (somewhere “in the ragged curb where that road wound around the side of the hill,” a gravesite now evidently disturbed during later centuries of construction activity). Through the affair Acton’s fifer, Luther Blanchard, and the drummer Francis Barker, were performing a lively Jacobin tune, “The White Cockade.”9 According to the Reverend William Emerson, the Reverend Waldo Emerson’s grandfather, who was watching from an upstairs window at the Old Manse as these people shot off muskets at each other out at the North Bridge, one or the other of the seriously wounded soldiers was then struck, as he attempted to rise, on the head with a hatchet.
Ammi White was a private in Captain David Brown’s company of militia. Captain Brown10 had his home near the Old North Bridge and in 1770 had been paid by the town of Concord to care for the causeway and wall associated with that bridge. As the redcoats fell back from the firing, Colonel Barrett’s militia unit advanced a short distance. According to reconstructions of what happened, the gravely wounded British soldier, between the retreating and the advancing lines, was attempting to rise when he was chopped down with a small hatchet by militiaman White, “not under the feelings of humanity.” He “barbarously broke his skull,” he “uplifted his axe, and dealt the wounded soldier a fierce and fatal blow upon the head,” with Thomas Thorp of Acton nearby but unable or unwilling to intercede:
This one circumstance has borne more fruit for me, than all that history tells us of the fight. Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Reverend William Emerson acknowledged the fact of an ax blow and acknowledged also that the soldier languished for hours before expiring, but would insist that neither scalp nor ears were removed. When the
9. Major Francis Faulkner led a company, the “Acton Patriots.” 10. Captain David Brown of Concord (1732-1802) kept a diary of Bunker Hill action in 1775. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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redcoats returned from Barrett’s farm and were grossing out at the sight of the wound on the head of their fallen comrade, they told one another the story that the American militia had scalped him as if they were red savages (the usual story, things like this typically are done to innocent white people by vicious persons of color). Five soldiers would testify to having themselves seen the wounded man with the skin over his eyes cut and also the top part of his ears cut off. There was not only misunderstanding, there was considerable exaggeration: A rumor would begin to circulate that the dying soldier’s eyes had been gouged out. Ensign Jeremy Lister later would write tendentiously and falsely that “4 men...killd who afterwards scalp’d their eyes goug’d their noses and ears cut of, such barbarity execut’d upon the Corps could scarcely be paralleled by the most uncivilised savages.” The army would be forced to abandon its dead and wounded that hot day, with soldiers falling not only from bullets but also from sunstroke, and the citizens of Concord would need to dig a hole and inter two of the bodies where they lay (there being no particular reason for the extra labor of transporting these dead bodies anywhere else prior to interment), and one of the wounded soldiers, Samuel Lee of the 10th Regiment, left behind, eventually would become a Concord citizen. The commander of the Concord column, LTC Smith, reported to his superiors Lord Percy and General Gage that “after the bridge was quitted, they scalped and otherwise ill-treated one or two of the men who were either killed or severely wounded.” General Gage would summarize this as: “... one scalped, his head much mangled and his ears cut off, though not quite dead ... a sight which struck the soldiers with horror.” In Concord, stories would be generated that the person who had used the hatchet had been merely a wood-chopping chore boy of the Emersons, or had been Frank, the Emersons’ slave (the usual story, blame everything on some nearby flunky or on some handy person of color) — but in fact there had been no such chore boy and black Frank’s activities on that date had been well vouched for by members of the Emerson family. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Here is the story per D. Michael Ryan: Various explanations for the cause of this deed were advanced. The culprit was “half-witted”; excused only by excitement and inexperience; startled by the soldier and acted out of fear; acting to end the soldier’s suffering. Extreme claims noted that the victim was trying to drown himself in a water puddle and begged someone to kill him; had thrust at the American with his bayonet; or was an escaping prisoner. None of these theories have a basis in fact and had such mitigating circumstances existed, would certainly have been mentioned by the Reverend William Emerson. While the British publicized the incident, Americans chose to ignore it possibly due to embarrassment, fear of reprisals, failure to appreciate its importance or a notion that it would blot a historic cause. Provincial authorities hesitated to confirm that the act had occurred but in response to a Boston story insured that the burial detail testified that “neither of those persons (2 dead soldiers buried at the bridge) were scalped nor their ears cut off.” Concord historians Ripley [??] and Lemuel Shattuck ignored the incident completely while well into the 19th Century, British historians continued to write of the scalping and ear cutting episode. A long guarded secret was the name of the young culprit who tradition acknowledges as Ammi White.... The British troops returning to Boston would remember the “scalping” with fear, anger and a sense of revenge. This, together with civilian hostility in Boston and the tactics of the colonials along the retreat route, considered cowardly, would lead to army reprisals and atrocities (house burnings, killing of unarmed men, bayoneting of wounded and dead colonials, etc.) especially in the village of Menotomy. Lord Percy’s relief column had been informed of the “scalping” and General Gage would later use the story to offset atrocity charges leveled against his troops.
In a much later timeframe Waldo Emerson would declaim at this famed bridge that “Here once the embattled farmers stood / and fired the shot heard round the world” for the freedom of white people, and would sagely say nothing about the alleged offing of a defenseless, critically wounded man with a hatchet. And then at an even later date Henry Thoreau would be refused an audience in Concord, and would declare in Framingham MA that “The inhabitants of Concord are not prepared to stand by one of their own bridges” for the freedom of black people. (That was in 1854 in his speech “Slavery in Massachusetts,” but Thoreau would be preparing this sentiment as early as 1851.)
After some two hours more in Concord, the army began its disastrous withdrawal to Lexington, where its remnants were reinforced by the 1st Brigade under Sir Hugh Percy.
11 In his SACRED GROUND, Edward Linenthal has presented an extended treatment of dissidence in the Concord context in effect with one hand tied behind his back. That is, he does this while accomplishing the feat of not once bringing in the name of Thoreau. Picking up on the Emersonian description of the fallen farmer
11. Linenthal, Edward Tabor. SACRED GROUND: AMERICANS AND THEIR BATTLEFIELDS. Urbana IL: U of Illinois P, 1991 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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minutemen of April 19, 1775 as having acted “from the simplest instincts,”12 Linenthal states that: These instinctive warriors were ceremoniously perceived as men whose New England origins nurtured republican principles that protected them from the moral pollution of old-world warriors. Consequently, the minuteman became a powerful cultural model for generations of Americans at war and at peace: from Billy Yank and Johnny Reb in the Civil War to the doughboys of World War I and the GI’s of World War II; from the right-wing Minutemen of the 1960s to a more recent transformation into the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile. Patriotic rhetoric portrayed the minutemen as Christ-like saviors, and citizens of Lexington and Concord were proud that these new-world warriors drank from the wellsprings of liberty which, they believed, ran especially deep in their towns.... Beyond the ever-present threat of failing to measure up to the principles embodied by the minutemen, the specter of defilement appeared in other ways. Beginning in rancorous debate in the 1820s, a number of citizens of Lexington and Concord claimed that their town was the authentic birthplace of the nation. Each was accused of falsifying the national creation story by refusing to grant this sacred status to the other.... If the encounter on Lexington Green was not a battle but a massacre, were the martyred minutemen really the first models of how Americans die in war or just further examples of colonial victims? And if they were only victims, could that affect popular perception of the potency of their sacrifice?... On occasion, what some people perceived as defilement, others viewed as creative attempts to redefine the meaning of the events of April 19, 1775. Both the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and the Peoples Bicentennial Commission understood Lexington and Concord to be sacred ground when they held separate protests on the Battle Green and at the North Bridge in the mid-1970s. In their view, the purpose of protest was not desecration of a sacred spot, for they believed the real defilement had been perpetrated by a new class of American Tories who had severed the link between revolutionary war principles (especially the principle of dissent) and contemporary American life. Each group believed that its protest would spark the recovery of the American revolutionary tradition, which was viewed as crucial to the resuscitation of authentic American values that had fallen into disrepair because of public apathy. OLD NORTH BRIDGE The fifer boy of the Concord Minutemen was the son of Major John Buttrick, 15 years of age. The side drum he used would belong to the son of Colonel James Barrett, Nathan Barrett, until it would fall apart and the town would need to purchase a new one. One source alleges that a severe earthquake shook Concord.13 March and early April having been extraordinarily warm, the apple trees around Concord were in bloom by April 19th, and the soldiers being marched through Lexington toward Concord suffered heat prostration. Later, when Lafayette would visit Concord as part of a triumphal tour, tiny Mary Moody Emerson would approach him to let him know that she had been “‘in arms’ at the Concord fight” — she having been a newborn during that period. 12. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. A HISTORICAL DISCOURSE DELIVERED BEFORE THE CITIZENS OF CONCORD, 12 SEPTEMBER 1835 ON THE CENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY OF THE INCORPORATION OF THE TOWN. Boston MA: W.B. Clarke, 1835. 13. Such an earthquake is not listed on the comprehensive scientific list of known New England earthquakes, which has no entries between August 15, 1772 and February 7, 1776. –Presumably some historian has misunderstood a casual comment on the order of “the earth certainly shook that day.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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When word of approaching British troops was received, Captain Charles Miles had mustered his company near the Wright Tavern.14 Included with the muster roll we can discover a handwritten note by Sergeant David Hartwell, “Concord, April 19th 1775, then the battel begune....”
On the high ground above North Bridge where the colonial force reformed, Captain Miles then joined the officers’ conference. When it was decided to march into Town, the story is, the lead was initially offered to a Concord captain but this man said he “should rather not go.” Since it was Captain Miles who was in command of the senior minute company, and would not be in the lead, it is speculated that he might have been the one to have said this. Captain Isaac Davis’s Acton company then led the march to the Bridge and while the position of other units is uncertain, several accounts have placed Miles’s company either second or third in line. Years later, the Reverend Ezra Ripley noted that when Captain Miles was asked his feelings when marching on the
14. The Wright Tavern is called that because Amos Wright was renting the building from its owner Samuel Swan and keeping tavern there when first the local militia gathered there and then Army officers Lt. Col. Smith and Maj. Pitcairn used it as their headquarters. In such a quarrel the businessman of course would sell drinks to all comers. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Battle Bridge on April 19, 1775, he responded “that he went to the service of the day with the same seriousness and acknowledgement of God which he carried to church. During the fighting it was though that this reluctant captain had been killed, but he had only been somewhat wounded and would be able to continue to direct his company during the chasing of the Regulars back to Charlestown.
We don’t have the names of the army casualties of this glorious day, only those of the militia and of bystanders. The numerical estimate of General Gage’s intelligence officer was that about 25 of the soldiers had been killed and almost 150 wounded; the estimate by a soldier, John Pope, was that 90 soldiers had been killed and 181 wounded; the estimate by Ensign De Berniere was that 73 soldiers had been killed, 174 wounded, and 25 were missing in action; — and General Gage reported to his superior officer that 65 of his soldiers had been killed, 180 wounded, and 27 were missing in action.
Presumably what we would discover, if we had the names of the army casualties, would be that a significant number of them had been Americans who had enlisted in the army. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Here are the names of the militia casualties and the civilian casualties including an unarmed 14-year-old bystander (that’s termed “collateral damage”):
Town Killed Wounded Missing
Acton Isaac Davis Luther Blanchard James Hayward Abner Hosmer (would die this year of wound)
Bedford Captain Jonathan Wilson Job Lane
Beverly Reuben Kenyme Nathaniel Cleves William Dodge III Samuel Woodbury
Billerica Timothy Blanchard John Nichols
Brookline Isaac Gardner
Cambridge John Hicks Samuel Whittemore Samuel Frost William Marcy Seth Russell Moses Richardson James Russell Jason Winship Jabez Wyman
Charlestown Edward Barber James Miller
Chelmsford Oliver Barron Aaron Chamberlain
Concord Nathan Barrett Jonas Brown Captain Charles Miles George Minot Abel Prescott, Jr.
Danvers Samuel Cook Nathan Putnam Joseph Bell Benjamin Deland Dennis Wallace Ebenezer Golwait Henry Jacobs Perley Putnam George Southwick Jothan Webb
Dedham Elias Haven Israel Everett
Framingham Daniel Hemminway HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Lexington John Brown Francis Brown Samuel Hadley Joseph Comee Caleb Harrington Prince Estabrook Jonathan Harrington, Jr. Nathaniel Farmer Jonas Parker Ebenezer Munroe, Jr. Jedidiah Munroe Jedidiah Munroe Robert Munroe Solomon Pierce Isaac Muzzy John Robbins John Raymond John Tidd Nathaniel Wyman Thomas Winship
Lynn William Flint Joseph Felt Josiah Breed Thomas Hadley Timothy Monroe Abednego Ramsdell Daniel Townsend
Medford Henry Putnam William Holly
Needham John Bacon Eleazer Kingsbury Nathaniel Chamberlain Xxxxx Tolman Amos Mills Elisha Mills Jonathan Parker
Newton Noah Wiswell
Roxbury Elijah Seaver
Salem Benjamin Pierce
Stow Daniel Conant Daniel Conant
Sudbury Deacon Josiah Haynes Joshua Haynes, Jr. Asahael Reed Thomas Bent
Watertown Joseph Coolidge
Woburn Daniel Thompson Jacob Bacon Asahel Porter Xxxxx Johnson George Reed HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Here is an example of what we don’t know. When we somewhat belatedly erected this grave marker, in the Year of Our Lord 2000, we presumed that the slain army soldier was a Brit although he may very well have been simply one of the Americans who had enlisted not in what was at that time our militia but in what was at that time our army:
Dr. Charles Russell, son of the Hon. James Russell, born in Charlestown, graduated at Harvard College, 1757, and inherited his uncle Chambers’s estate in Lincoln, where he resided as a physician. He married Miss Elizabeth Vassall of Cambridge, and from his father-in-law he contracted opinions opposed to the measures of the people in the revolution, and left Lincoln on the 19th of April, 1775, and went to Martinique, in the West- Indies, where he died.... Dr. Joseph Adams was also unfriendly to the revolution, and went to England, where he died.15
15. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy (On or about November 11, 1837 Henry David Thoreau would indicate a familiarity with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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When Timothy Dwight would write of his 1795 travels, while speaking of his passing through Concord he would give a small amount of attention to the bucolic details of the place:
Concord was purchased of the Indians and incorporated in 1635. Three persons only are known to have been killed within the limits of this township by the savages, although it was the first settlement made in New England so far from the shore. From Boston it is distant nineteen miles, from Williams’ in Marlboro, fifteen. The soil of this township is various. The higher grounds have loam mixed with gravel. The plains are sandy, light but warm, and friendly to rye and maize, of which considerable quantities are carried to market. Pastures are visibly few and indifferent. Along the river, which is named from this town and runs through the middle of it, lie extensive and rich meadows. Hemp and flax grow here luxuriantly. Two acres are said to have yielded in one instance one thousand pounds of flax. Few fruits are seen except apples, and these plainly do not abound as in most other parts of the country. The face of this township is generally a plain. A hill of no great height ascends at a small distance from the river on the eastern side and pursues a course northward, parallel with that of the river. Between this hill and the river lies the principal street. Another containing a considerable number of houses abuts upon it, perpendicularly from the western side. The houses in Concord are generally well built, and with the outbuildings and fences make a good appearance. The public buildings are the church, courthouse, and jail, all of them neat.
But then he would devote a good deal of his attention to this locale’s belligerent status as the site of this notorious squabble. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Concord will be long remembered as having been, partially, the scene of the first military action in the Revolutionary War, and the object of an expedition, the first in that chain of events which terminated in the separation of the British colonies from their mother country. A traveler on this spot, particularly an American traveler, will irresistibly recall to his mind an event of this magnitude, and cannot fail of being deeply affected by a comparison of so small a beginning with so mighty an issue. In other circumstances, the expedition to Concord and the contest which ensued would have been merely little tales of wonder and woe, chiefly recited by the parents of the neighborhood to their circles at the fireside, commanding a momentary attention of childhood, and calling forth the tear of sorrow from the eyes of those who were intimately connected with the sufferers. Now, the same events preface the history of a nation and the beginning of an empire, and are themes of disquisition and astonishment to the civilized world. From the plains of Concord will henceforth be dated a change in human affairs, an alteration in the balance of human power, and a new direction to the course of human improvement. Man, from the events which have occurred here, will in some respects assume a new character, and experience in some respects a new destiny. General Gage, to whom was committed one of the most unfortunate trusts ever allotted to an individual, having obtained information that a considerable quantity of arms and military stores was by order of the Provincial Congress deposited in this town,1 sent Lieut. Col. Smith and Major Pitcairn at the head of eight hundred grenadiers and light infantry, with orders to march to Concord and destroy the deposit. The troops were accordingly embarked from the common in Boston, and landed on the opposite shore in Cambridge at a place called Phipps’s farm. Thence they marched by the shortest route to this town.
1.The whole amount of the warlike stores in the province of Massachusetts as they appear on a return, April 14, 1775, is contained in the following list. Firearms 21,549 Pounds of powder 17,441 Pounds of ball 22,191 No. of flints 144,699 No. of bayonets 10,103 No. of pouches 11,979 The whole of the town stocks Firearms 68 Pounds of powder 357 1/2 Pounds of ball 66,78 No. of flints 100,531 Duke’s county and Nantucket were not included in this list. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The salubrity of Concord violates the most received medical theories concerning such diseases as are supposed to be generated by stagnant waters. I know of no stream which approaches nearer to a state of stagnation than Concord River. Yet diseases of this class are seldom, or never, found here. The cause I shall not pretend to assign. Within these thirteen years the baptisms in Concord amounted to 395,. Three fourths only of those who were born are supposed to have been baptized. The number of births, therefore, was about 527. Concord contains a single congregation. The whole number of inhabitants in 1790, as has been observed, was 1,590. In 1800, it contained 227 dwelling houses, and 1,679 inhabitants; and in 1810, 1,633.
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 Miss Mary Moody Emerson HDT WHAT? INDEX
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After this work was completed, the troops advanced to the bridge in order to disperse the Americans. Major Buttrick, of Concord, who commanded the militia, being ignorant of the tragedy at Lexington, had directed his men not to begin the fire.1 As he advanced with his party, the light infantry began to pull up the bridge; and, as he approached, fired, and killed two Americans one of them a Captain Davis, of Acton, in the neighborhood.2 The fire was instantly returned, and the troops were compelled to retreat. Several of them were killed, several wounded, and a few taken prisoners. The party was pursued; and, after they had rejoined the main body, the whole retired with the utmost expedition. On their way to Lexington they were continually harassed by an irregular and not ill-directed fire from the buildings and walls on their route. Every moment increased the number of their assailants and their own fatigue, distress, and danger. Upon the first intelligence that the Americans had betaken themselves to arms, General Gage sent a second detachment to the relief of Lieutenant Colonel Smith under the command of Lord Percy.3 It amounted to nine hundred men and marched from Boston with two fieldpieces, their music playing the tune of Yankee Doodle to insult the Americans. As they were passing through Roxbury, a young man who was making himself merry on the occasion being asked, as is said, by his lordship, why he laughed so heartily, replied “To think how you will dance by and by to Chevy Chase.” This detachment joined their friends at Lexington, where the whole body rested for a short time, and with their fieldpieces kept the Americans at a distance. The neighboring country was now in arms, and moving both to attack the enemy and to intercept their retreat. The troops, therefore speedily recommenced their march. From both sides of the road issued a continual fire, directed often by excellent marksmen, and particularly dangerous to the officers. Major Pitcairn thought it prudent to quit his horse and lose himself among the soldiery. Everywhere the retreating army was pursued and flanked. Their enemies descended from every new hill and poured through every new valley. Perplexed by a mode of fighting to which they were strangers, and from which neither their valor, nor their discipline furnished any security; exhausted by fatigue, and without a hope of succor; the troops wisely withdrew from impending destruction with the utmost celerity.
1.John Buttrick (1715-1791) was a leader of the Concord militia in action on April 19, 1775. 2.Isaac Davis (1745-1775), who led the Acton minute men against the British on the Concord bridge, was killed in the first volley. 3.Hugh Percy, Duke of Northumberland (1742-1817), apparently disapproved of the war with the American colonies although he entered military service against them. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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In their retreat, however, they set fire to several houses, plundered whatever pleased their fancy or gratified their avarice, and killed several unarmed persons: particularly two old men, whose hoary locks pleaded for compassion in vain. Bunker Hill, which they reached about sunset, was the first place of safety and repose in their march. The next day they returned to Boston. In this expedition the British had sixty-five killed, and one hundred and eighty wounded, and twenty-eight made prisoners: two hundred and seventy-three. Among the wounded were fifteen officers, one of them Lieutenant Colonel Smith. Of the Americans, fifty were killed, thirty-four wounded, and four missing: eighty-eight. Several gentlemen of reputation fell in this conflict, and were regarded as martyrs in the cause of freedom and their country. Such was the issue of this memorable day, and such the commencement of the Revolutionary War in the United States. Whatever opinions may be adopted concerning the controversy between the British government and the colonies by those who come after us, every man of sober, candid reflection must confess that very gross and very unfortunate errors existed in the measures adopted, both in Great Britain and America, toward the colonies. In both countries information was drawn and received almost solely from those who espoused the system of the reigning administration. It hardly needs to be observed that deception and mischief were the necessary consequence. An opinion also was boldly advanced, sedulously adopted, and extensively diffused that the Americans were mere blusterers and poltroons. In the British Parliament, Colonel Grant declared, with equal folly and insolence, that at the head of five hundred, or perhaps (as numerals are easily misprinted) of five thousand men, he would undertake to march from one end of the British settlements to the other, in spite of all American opposition.1 This declaration would almost of itself have converted a nation of real cowards into soldiers. Why it should be believed that the descendants of Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Irishmen were cowards, especially by their brethren descended from the same ancestors, I shall not take upon me to explain. The difficulties and hazards attendant upon a war conducted at the distance of three thousand miles from the source of control and supplies were certainly not realized by the British cabinet. As little did they realize the disposition or the circumstances of the Americans.
1.Probably Dwight refers to James Grant (1720-1806), member of Parliament at different times, a military man who went to America with reinforcements under Howe and became a general. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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An expedition of this nature had for some time been expected. Certain intelligence of it had been obtained the preceding afternoon by Dr. Warren, who afterwards fell in the battle of Breed’s Hill,1 and was forwarded by him with the utmost celerity to the intervening towns, particularly to Lexington, where were at that time Mr. Hancock and Mr. Adams, both afterwards governors of Massachusetts.2 As these gentlemen were supposed to be the principal objects of the expedition, the expresses who carried the intelligence (Col. Paul Revere and Mr. William Dawes) were peculiarly directed to them.3 They reached Lexington, which is four miles from Concord, in such season that Messrs. Hancock and Adams made their escape.4 Here, however, the expresses were stopped by the British as they were advancing toward Concord; but Dr. Prescott, a young gentleman to whom they had communicated their message, escaped and alarmed the inhabitants of Concord.5 The British troops reached Lexington at five o’clock in the morning. Here they found about seventy militia and forty unarmed spectators by the side of the church. Major Pitcairn rode up to them and cried out with vehemence, “Disperse you rebels; throw down your arms, and disperse.” As this command was not immediately obeyed, he discharged a pistol and ordered his soldiers to fire upon the inhabitants. The soldiers fired, and the people instantly fled. The soldiers, however, continued to fire at individuals. This at length provoked a return, and several were killed on both sides. Still the troops continued their march toward Concord, where they arrived early in the morning. For the purpose of defense, the inhabitants had drawn themselves up in a kind of order; but, upon discovering the number of the enemy withdrew over the North Bridge, half a mile below the church, where they waited for reinforcements. The soldiers then broke open and scattered about sixty barrels of flour, disabled two twenty-four pounders, destroyed the carriages of about twenty cannon, and threw five hundred pounds of ball into the river and neighboring wells. The principal part of the stores, however, was not discovered.
1.Joseph Warren (1741-1755), Harvard 1759, an excellent physician in Boston, became deeply involved in Revolutionary politics. Early in 1775, he gave up his profession to enter the army. He became president pro tempore of the Provincial Congress and was elected a major general four days before his death. 2.John Hancock (1737-1793), Harvard 1754, adopted by his rich uncle Thomas, joined his successful mercantile firm. The famous Revolutionary patriot was treasurer of Harvard College, 1773-1777, president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, and first governor of Massachusetts in the new republic, 1780-1785. His successor was Samuel Adams (1722-1803), Harvard 1740, better remembered for his incendiary role as one of the “Sons of Liberty” in the Revolution. As lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 1789, acting governor in 1793, and elected governor, 1794- 1798, this turbulent man showed little understanding of the problems of the state or of the nation. 3.See Colonel Revere’s letters to the corresponding secretary of the Mass. Hist. Society…. 4.Revolutionary patriot Paul Revere (1735-1818), a silversmith, was the official courier for the massachusetts Provincial Assembly as well as an effective political cartoonist and the acknowledged leader of Boston’s artisans. William Dawes (1745-1799) was one of the two men chosen to spread the alarm if the British troops should move to raid the military stores deposited in Concord. 5.Samuel Prescott (1751-c. 1777) completed the famous midnight ride after Paul Revere was captured, but died later in a prison in Halifax. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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General Gage’s principal advisers were of two classes, both very unhappily fitted to give him useful advice. One class was composed of Britons, utterly unacquainted with the state of the country, unwarrantably relying on their own prowess, and foolishly presuming on the supposed pusillanimity of the colonists. The other class was composed of colonists who had embarked their all in British measures, were generally deceived themselves, and were strongly prompted by every motive to deceive him. When the expedition to Concord was planned, it is probable that neither General Gage, nor his advisers, expected the least attempt at resistance. This opinion was bandied through the whole party in Boston. At the same time were continually circulated fulsome panegyrics on the bravery of the British troops. Silly jests and contemptible sneers were also reiterated concerning the dastardly character of the colonists. All these were spread, felt, and remembered. The expedition to Concord refuted them all. Concord, as has been observed, lies almost equally on both sides of the river to which it gives its name. The surface of the township is generally level and low, and the river remarkably sluggish. From these facts a traveler would naturally conclude that Concord must be unhealthy. The following statement will however prove this conclusion to be unsound. In the year 1790, the township contained 1,590 inhabitants. Of these, seventy-five were seventy years of age, or upward. From the year 1779 to 1791 inclusive, a period of thirteen years, 222 persons died. The greatest number in a single year was twenty-five, the least ten. The average number was seventeen. Of these, fifty-nine were more than seventy, thirty others more than eighty, and eight more than ninety, amounting in the whole to ninety-seven (out of 222) who passed the limit of seventy years. It is presumed, a more remarkable instance of health and longevity cannot be produced. Almost 7/17 of the whole number deceased have during this period reached the boundary of human life. It is scarcely to be imagined that even here a similar list will be furnished a second time. Yet the Rev. Mr. Ripley, minister of Concord, who kept this register, informed me that the state of health during this period did not, so far as he had observed, differ very materially from what was common.1
1.Ezra Ripley (1751-1841), Harvard 1776, became pastor of the First Church in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1778. There he founded what was perhaps the first temperance society in the country. He was the stepfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1776
Pert little Mary Moody Emerson came into her father the Reverend William Emerson’s study at the Manse in Concord without curtseying, so he whipped her. Her mother Madam Phoebe Bliss Emerson interceded, protesting that at less than two years of age she was as yet too young for such strict discipline, whereupon her father whipped her again. He was breaking the will of his wife and his child over whom he had charge, so that they could free themselves from original sin and prepare their souls for grace. This was an act of kindness, and responsibility. This was Christian stewardship. It hurt him far more than it did them.
DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.
August 16, Friday: Mary Moody Emerson would later declare that though she was still in her 3d year of life at the time, she could remember her father, the Reverend William Emerson, standing in the doorway of the Old Manse and then riding away to war.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miss Mary Moody Emerson HDT WHAT? INDEX
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October 20, Sunday: Fiume was transferred from Venice to Croatia.
The Reverend William Emerson died in Otter Creek, Vermont at the home of the minister at Rutland. At this early time there was a large barn with associated farmland across the road from what we now know as the “Old Manse” in Concord, which farm was being worked by three or more black slaves. There is a story that on his deathbed in Vermont the Reverend Emerson expressed a desire to free these slaves. Although it is unclear how the surviving family could have funded such a manumission except by its being a merely nominal one, it is a fact that two black men, named Caesar and Peter, would live across the road from the Old Manse for years. The body of the Reverend must have been buried at or near Rutland but no-one now knows exactly where.16 The deceased left five children of whom one, William Emerson, Junior, would become minister of the 1st Church (Old South Church) of Boston and father of Ralph Waldo Emerson, while another was Mary Moody Emerson — Waldo’s aunt “Polly” who had been in arms at the time of the Concord fight.
16. Eventually Waldo would go searching for his grandfather William Emerson’s grave and not be able to locate it. The brick tomb constructed to house his casket, close to the Old Manse and the North Bridge in Concord, has therefore always been empty, and the stone qualifies as a memorial rather than a gravestone. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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WALDO’S RELATIVES
There Mary is, in her mother’s arms. —See? HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1780
November 16, Thursday: When the Reverend Ezra Ripley sought to marry the widow of his predecessor in charge of
the spiritual health of the citizenry of Concord, Phebe Walker Bliss Emerson, town tradition has it that there was some principled opposition to this from church members of the town, on the ground that the bride was so much older than the groom. He was about 29, she 39 and already the mother of 5 children, the eldest of whom was the prepubescent boy William Emerson who had at this point just begun the study of the Greek language and would become the father of Ralph Waldo Emerson – she would bear for this new young husband three more children. PHEBE BLISS EMERSON RIPLEY
Thus it was that the Reverend Ripley, who would baptize David Henry Thoreau, would also be the Reverend Waldo Emerson’s step-grandfather.
There is no surviving explanation for why, when Madam Phoebe Bliss Emerson remarried, she neglected to retrieve her little girl Mary Moody Emerson from relatives in Malden, Massachusetts.
THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miss Mary Moody Emerson HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1791
With Mary Moody Emerson’s sister Hannah Bliss Emerson having married William Farnham of Newburyport MA, and with her having been relieved of her nursing duties by the death of Nathan Sargent, she was invited to reside with her sister and husband there:
[A]t 17 I entered refined society at N.Port.
“Polly” was a petite blue-eyed blond, at this point reaching her full adult stature of five feet zero inches (though Franklin Benjamin Sanborn would assert four feet three inches).
THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miss Mary Moody Emerson HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1793
After a couple of years of living in Newburyport MA, at the age of 19, Mary Moody Emerson relocated to Concord.
In Concord, Ephraim Wood, Asa Brooks, and Jacob Brown were Selectmen.
Joseph Hosmer of Concord was a Senator.
John Merrick practiced law in Concord.
In Concord, the offices of “Sealer of Leather” and of “Deer-reeve” (officer to regulate the deer) were discontinued.
Jonathan Fay was Concord’s deputy and representative to the General Court.
CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miss Mary Moody Emerson HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1795
During her stay in Concord, Mary Moody Emerson knew not only Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau but also Mrs. Rebecca Hurd Kettell Thoreau, who would become David Henry Thoreau’s step-grandmother. It was in approximately this year, at the age of 20, with her move to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Woodbridge and their Medford Academy, that Polly began her “Almanack.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1804
Mary Moody Emerson’s essays began to appear anonymously in her brother William Emerson’s Monthly Anthology.
WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miss Mary Moody Emerson HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1807
April 26, Sunday: In the Convention of Bartenstein, Russia and Prussia agreed to pool their forces to drive French troops out of Germany.
Death of 3-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brother John Clarke Emerson.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1 day 26 of 4 M / Pretty good meetings in the afternoon D Buffum bore a livly [testimony] to the necessity of our preparing for the final change, God being just and equal in all his ways would afford sufficient means to enable us to attain a seat in the Kingdom. Between meetings finished a letter began the day before to my friend J Austin [of] Nantucket Took tea at D Williams where my mind was cover’d with the precious life. Oh I love to feel it & desire to be found worthy more & more to receive the heavenly Bounty. ——————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1813
April 16, Friday: The 1st mass-production factory started up in the manufacture of that greatly needed object, the pistol. (Every year we find a new way to kill you — and yet some folks will claim there to be no such thing as progress!)
The Emperor Napoléon I departed from Paris on his way to rejoin his army, or what was left of it, at Erfurt.
A letter from little Ralph Waldo Emerson, when he was about ten years old, to his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, provided an account of one of his days:— Boston, April 16, 1813. Dear Aunt,—I am much obliged to you for your kind letter. I mean now to give you an account of what I do commonly in one day, if that is what you meant by giving an account of one single day in my life. Friday, 9th, I choose for the day of telling what I did. In the Morning I rose, as I commonly do, about 5 minutes before 6. I then help Wm. in making the fire, after which I set the table for Prayers. I then call mamma about quarter after 6. We spell as we did before you went away. I confess I often feel an angry passion start in one corner of my heart when one of my Brothers gets above me, which I think sometimes they do by unfair means, after which we eat our breakfast; then I have from about quarter after 7 till 8 to play or read. I think I am rather inclined to the former. I then go to school, where I hope I can say I study more than I did a little while ago. I am in another book called Virgil, and our class are even with another which came to the Latin School one year before us. After attending this school I go to Mr. Webb's private school, where I write and cipher. I go to this place at eleven and stay till one o'clock. After this, when I come home I eat my dinner, and at two o'clock I resume my studies at the Latin School, where I do the same except in studying grammar. After I come home I do mamma her little errands, if she has any; then I bring in my wood to supply the breakfast room. I then have some time to play and eat my supper. After that we say our hymns or chapters, and then take our turns in reading Rollin, as we did before you went. We retire to bed at different times. I go at a little after eight, and retire to my private devotions, and then close my eyes in sleep, and there ends the toils of the day.... I have sent a letter to you in a Packet bound for Portland, which I suppose you have not received, as you made no mention of it in your letter to mamma. Give my love to Aunt Haskin and Aunt Ripley, with Robert and Charles and all my cousins, and I hope you will send me an answer to this the first opportunity, and believe me, I remain your most dutiful Nephew,
R. Waldo Emerson. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 16 of 4 M / The times on which we have fallen are indeed distressing and alarming. I see & feel it every Day - but what has excited my feeling particularly at this time is this Afternoon a sharp & successive fireing was heard from Fort Wolcot & the first time 3 Guns fired in succession which is a signal of Alarm at the approach of the English which affrighted many people & for the first time since the war startled me a little, it all however proved to be nothing more than that they were exercising their men & Guns - I think however such fireing is injudicious & a few Afternoons ago when a British ship chased a vessel within the Reef she fired sharply & affrighted a poor Young Woman the Wife of —— Marvel who was near her lying in so the she went into fits & labor pains & died in a few hours. Oh the hevy Guilt that will lay on the heads of those who are the Authrs of this most wicked War. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1814
August 24, Wednesday: Viscount Castlereagh arrived at Paris, where he would be meeting with King Louis XVIII and Talleyrand before traveling on to Vienna.
As part of a conflict that was essentially a continuation of the American Revolution by way of a dispute over the seas and over the border of Canada, on this day and the following one a British army defeated hastily assembled defenders of Washington DC at Bladensburg, Maryland, just north of the capital. The British would go on to burn Washington, including the White House and most of the 3,076 books and 53 maps, charts, and plans of the Library of Congress, along with paintings of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette by Madame Vigee Lebruin. They would also put the chambers of the House and the Senate in Washington DC to the torch — but beware, it is sheer mythology that the books were used as kindling for the fire in the legislative chambers.17
Waldo Emerson would reminisce in his journal in about April or May of 1856 about a British-invasion-of- Boston scare that had occurred in about this period of his childhood:18
I have but one military recollection in all my life. In 1813 or 1814, all Boston, young & old, turned out to build the fortifications on Noddle’s Island; and, the Schoolmaster at the Latin School announced to the boys, that, if we wished, we might all go on a certain day to work on the Island. I went with the rest in the ferry boat, & spent a summer day; but I cannot remember that I did any kind of work. I remember only the pains we took to get water in our tin pails, to relieve our intolerable thirst. I am afraid not valuable effect of my labor remains in the existing defences.
17.There is a patriotic or accommodative story in which the invading British army is persuaded not to burn the Library of Congress, by being reminded of the ignominy of the burning of the Library of Alexandria in antiquity. This story sacrifices historical accuracy to patriotism or to accommodationism. Contrast this with another story which has a much greater likelihood of having been the truth, that the British were retaliating to the 1812 burning of the Canadian congressional library in York (Toronto) by an American expeditionary force. 18. We do not know whether Emerson was referring here to Head Master William Bigelow or to his successor Benjamin Apthorp Gould, a senior at Harvard College, for during 1814 after nine trying years Head Master Bigelow was being replaced in an attempt to restore order and scholarship (many features of the Boston Latin School of today –among them the “misdemeanor mark” and the practice of declamation– would be initiated during this disciplinary period.
I (Austin Meredith) have my own recollections similar to this, from World War II in San Diego CA. Have you seen the movie “1943”? –It is exceedingly accurate to the spirit of the times, while the necessary task of routing all Americans of Japanese ancestry into the new concentration camps in the inland desert was still going on, and the utter cooperation of the civilian (white) population, real Americans, was vitally needed by our government authorities. As a 6-year-old my parents had me in a class digging lines of foxholes across a football field, and marching around the parade ground of a religious school where my father was Chaplain, named Brown Military Academy, with a wooden rifle. I lost my first baby tooth when I Left-Ho’d in formation when I should have Right- Ho’d –because the butt of the “rifle” of the boy next to me in formation slapped me up alongside the head– and I sat down on the parade ground and began to cry and was afraid I was going to be courts-martialed. The vicious little yellow Japs were going to invade, the Hearst newspapers were reporting that already they might be lurking offshore in their submarines, just out of sight, and in a port city on the Pacific Ocean we were on the front lines and we needed to be utterly ready to defend our soil with our blood. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Because of the perceived danger that the English navy would besiege Boston, the Emerson family then moved to Concord. Ralph Waldo attended the wooden schoolhouse in Concord square. He recited not only in school but also from the top of the sugar barrel in Deacon John White’s store nearby. Here is a silhouette of the “pilgrim profile” of Emerson’s aunt Mary Moody Emerson, who would loom large in his life though she stood at most 5 feet 0 inches tall, as she appeared in her youth, probably before her return to Malden MA:
THE DEACONS OF CONCORD Joshua Barney was wounded and captured at Bladensburg, Maryland. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1815
In India, Rammohan Roy moved to Calcutta and established the Atmiya Sabha or “Friendly Association,” devoted to the VEDANTA and the UPANISHADS as a doctrine of monotheism. This association held weekly meetings at his residence. One of the practices of the Indian members of this association was to decline to take oaths, such as to swear in court by the waters of the Holy Ganges, but instead to give simple affirmations, and they alleged they were doing this “as practiced in England by the society of Quakers.”19 During this period he was publishing and distributing at his own expense, in Bengali, the VEDANTA GRANTHA. This Atmiya Sabha Friendly Association, however, would encounter so much resistance that it would have to be disbanded. He wrote his condensation of the ISHOPANISHAD which presumably made its way to Concord via Mary Moody Emerson, and into Waldo Emerson’s library (because she had recommended the book to him while he was at Harvard College). During the period 1815 to 1830, contemporary historians allow, he in effect created what would be the blueprint for the Indian national movement.
19. Quotation from the Asiatic Journal of August 1819. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1817
Mary Moody Emerson confided to her private Almanack that she was not without ambition for her life to make an impact upon the world: “I want influence — agency — ... offer my every sense & faculty to God ... waiting for His sending for me.” HOLOGRAPHIC IMAGES
Says her biographer Phyllis Cole: Mary deflected personal ambition onto protégés of both sexes.... Through correspondence with her nephew Waldo ... Mary became a direct source of Transcendentalism. Just as William Wordsworth wrote some of the founding texts of British Romanticism through silent partnership with his diary-writing sister Dorothy, so Ralph Waldo Emerson appropriated and assimilated his aunt’s language from youth through old age. Mary’s authority surpassed Dorothy Wordsworth’s, though, because she held generational priority and actively served as her kinsman’s mentor. WALDO EMERSON HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1821
Early in the year, Mary Moody Emerson was writing Ralph Waldo Emerson letters about “a remarkable Hindoo Reformer.”
In India, Rammohan Roy was publishing at his own expense a book of 150 pages, SECOND APPEAL TO THE CHRISTIAN PUBLIC IN DEFENCE OF “THE PRECEPTS OF JESUS,” asserting that what was important about Christianity had nothing to do with those Biblical miracles — miracles, that is, other than the main miracle, of the love of God as it can be made manifest in the beneficence which we can occasionally summon toward our fellow creatures. One of the Baptist missionaries in Calcutta, a Reverend William Adam who had been discussing religion with Rammohan in an effort to bring him “over to the belief of that Doctrine,” was beginning to “entertain some doubts respecting the Supreme Deity of Jesus Christ” and was becoming Unitarian and was starting up what would be known as the Sambad Kaumudi.
King Frederick VI of Denmark endowed the college which the Baptist missionaries had founded at Serampore on the river Hoogly in India with the rent of a house worth about $5,000, and sent them in addition a gold medal. At that point a visitor described the Reverend William Carey as short in stature, with white hair, and a HDT WHAT? INDEX
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countenance equally bland and benevolent in feature and expression. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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July 17, Tuesday: At Harvard College’s commencement, the Reverend Samson Reed gave a lecture “Oration on Genius” on mystic doctrines quite similar to those of Emanuel Swedenborg, and Waldo Emerson, a graduating senior eighteen years of age, the youngest of the 59 members of the Class of 1821 [youngest by how many days??], was allowed to read a valedictory poem despite ranking but 30th (he had been made the class poet after six others who had been asked had “positively refused”). It would presumably be this lecture by the Reverend Reed which would attract Lydia Maria Francis (Lydia Maria Child) to Swedenborgian doctrines. Emerson would borrow the Reverend Reed’s manuscript, take notes from it, and then refer to these notes a number of times over the subsequent years.
Rajah Rammohan Roy’s condensation of the ISHOPANISHAD presumably had already at this point made its way via Mary Moody Emerson into Waldo’s library — because she had recommended it to him while he was still attending Harvard. INDIA HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Hodder, Alan D. “Emerson and Rammohan Roy.” Studies in the American Renaissance (1988): 133-47: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
The Oriental influence on Waldo Emerson’s writing and theological beliefs is evident early in his career. Both his father and his Aunt Mary Moody Emerson were interested in the Orient and his aunt actively encouraged Emerson in his pursuit of Oriental studies. Shortly after Emerson graduated from college, his aunt wrote him a letter suggesting that he look into the writings of Rammohan Roy, an Indian brahman from a high-caste Hindu background who was interested in the merging of world religions and had recently been published in the Christian Register (1819 and 1821). Hodder states that Emerson was probably already familiar with Roy, since the articles on Roy had been published in the Concord paper and because Emerson had developed in interest in the Orient when he was still at school. His poem “Indian Superstition” grew out of a paper that he was assigned as a senior: “As a graduating senior, Emerson had been assigned this topic in conjunction with the Harvard College exhibition of April 24, 1821. For the several months prior to his presentation, Emerson had poured over the growing body of literature on India and the Orient available at that time to the Boston readership” (140). Emerson was both fascinated and repelled with what he read about India. He was especially shocked over the practice of widow-burning or sati as it was called, a Hindu custom. However shocked he may have been when he read about some of the contemporary practices of India, he still found a great deal to admire concerning the idealism of the ancient Hindu texts. In 1819 the Christian Register printed excerpts of Roy’s letters to John Digby, his British East India Company supervisor, plus a review of five of his recent treatises. In 1821 a second treatment of Roy’s writing was printed. In his critique of world religions, Roy developed a consuming interest in the Muslim doctrine of tawhid, or the absolute unity of God. From this viewpoint, he criticized Hindu “idolatry” and Christian Unitarianism. The liberal Unitarians were delighted because Roy provided convenient fodder for their arguments against the Trinitarians: “Today, among Hindus and Westerners alike, Rammohan Roy is hailed as the founder of the Hindu Renaissance and the father of modern India. For Emerson, however, as for his Aunt and other Boston Unitarians, Roy was at this time chiefly significant as a compelling advocate for the Unitarians in their heated exchanges with the Calvinist Trinitarian opposition.”(134) The Reverend Henry Ware, Jr., professor at Harvard Divinity School, went so far as to write Roy and William Adam, a former Baptist, now Unitarian convert, a list of questions concerning the potential for Unitarian missionary work in India. Some money was collected and Roy and Adam did establish a base for the Unitarians in India, but by 1824 interest in Roy had begun to die down. Roy died in London on Sept. 27, 1833. There was still some interest in him, although it is likely that the Unitarians continued to misunderstand his motivation in assisting their cause. He had always been more interested in social reform in India than he had been in proselytizing his fellow Indians. Emerson visited England in August 1833. He met Roy’s famous patron, Dr. Lant Carpenter, but he did not meet Roy. Hodder notes that Emerson’s commentary on the Orient continued to mature as he grew older. The more he read the more he was impressed with Oriental literature and philosophy: “By 1845 he is ready to insist that there is nothing in theology so “subtle” as the BHAGAVAD GITA and the VISHNU PURÁNA.” Emerson’s introduction to Roy, who viewed the BIBLE as an ethical tract, probably helped to pave the way, according to Hodder, for his growing sympathy with the Orient. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1822
January 22, Tuesday: The wedding of Martha Tilden Bradford and Dr. Josiah Bartlett took place at the Ripley parsonage (according to another record, the wedding took place on November 24, 1821). The couple would set up housekeeping in Concord. A frequent visitor in their household would be Mrs. Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley — and occasionally Mary Moody Emerson would pass through. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1824
During this year Waldo Emerson mentioned things Chinese in his journal for the 1st time, by recording the following couplet anent the current Western fascination with things Chinese, and with their supposed great antiquity which supposedly was of great merit: I laugh at those who, while they gape and gaze, The bald antiquity of China praise.
The following misleading message appeared on http://webteach.ubalt.edu/ECON640ALUMNI, posted by James V. Kolmansberger
Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is, to genius, the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which bear it farther than suns and stars.
This 1859 printed Waldo sentence had appeared in 1824 as his aunt’s holographic comment:
Solitude, w’h to people, not talented to deviate from the beaten track (w’h is the safe gaurd of mediocrity) without offending, is to learning & talents the only sure labyrinth (tho’ sometimes gloomy) to form the eagle wings w’h will bear one farther than suns and stars.
In fact when Miss Mary’s biographer Phyllis Cole remarked in her new book upon this evidence, she leveled no charge whatever of plagiarism. The description of this would fall squarely within the realm, instead, of influence scholarship: One sentence might seem inconsequential, but this one defines his essential stance of solitary, transcendent genius. It echoes across the decades separating this origins [circa 1824] from his closing reflections [circa 1859]. Even in the proclamation of self-reliance, Waldo never wholly outgrew or left behind this “benefactor.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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September 2, Thursday: The Marquis de Lafayette breakfasted in Newburyport on yet another rainy day, and William Lloyd Garrison was among the hundreds of townspeople who obtained his handshake at the Tracy mansion on State Street (a building which now houses the town’s public library) prior to his departure for Concord.
When the illustrious citoyen reached Concord, Squire Samuel Hoar, on behalf of all, rose to deliver the welcome.
Lafayette, nous sommes ici!
—General “Black Jack” Pershing, arriving with US troops in France at the very end of the WWI trench warfare.
Unfortunately, Squire Hoar did this in a manner which would begin a long and bitter controversy with Lexington over which town’s militia had been the first to fire upon the colonial army in America, by pointing out in his speech of welcome that it had been at the Old North Bridge over the Concord River rather than during the prior slaughter on the green in Lexington town that “the first forcible resistance” had been offered by the militia to the army. Before this visit by the marquis, there had in fact been very little note taken either in Concord or in Lexington of the anniversary of the April 19th dustup between the militia and the army. This invidious discrimination between two outbreaks of smallarms fire would produce a “storm of protest” from indignant Lexingtonians. Major Elias Phinney of Lexington would begin to pull together the depositions of survivors, none of whom had forgotten any details of the “battle” and some of whom were finding that they were able to recall details that hadn’t actually happened.
When Mary Moody Emerson was introduced to the general, she coquettishly told him that since she had been at the time a newborn infant, she also could lay claims to having been “‘in arms’ at the Concord fight.”20
John Shepard Keyes would later preserve a dim memory of having been pulled by a sister out of the way of the horses that drew Lafayette through Concord, and of the pageantry of that very special day.
20. I don’t know whether this presentation of Mary Moody Emerson to Lafayette occurred earlier during this day, in Newburyport, or later, in Concord. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Franklin Benjamin Sanborn would later allege that Henry Thoreau had been able to summon a childhood memory of this event, which would have occurred subsequent to his 7th birthday, but Thoreau’s memory of the event would have been rather more like the trace memory of Keynes (John Shepard Keyes) and nothing like Walt Whitman’s — for Walt’s memory much later (a memory produced for the amazement of his friend John Burroughs), was that somehow he had obtained for himself a manly kiss:
On the visit of General Lafayette to this country, in 1824, he came over to Brooklyn in state, and rode through the city. The children of the schools turn’d out to join in the welcome. An edifice for a free public library for youths was just then commencing, and Lafayette consented to stop on his way and lay the corner-stone. Numerous children arriving on the ground, where a huge irregular excavation for the building was already dug, surrounded with heaps of rough stone, several gentlemen assisted in lifting the children to safe or convenient spots to see the ceremony. Among the rest, Lafayette, also helping the children, took up the five-year-old Walt Whitman, and pressing the child a moment to his breast, and giving him a kiss, handed him down to a safe spot in the excavation. — John Burroughs.
Abba Alcott would love to recount, in her old age, how her aunt Dorothy Sewall Quincy met the marquis at the ball held in his honor. We may be able to judge the nature of the reception and ball at which Dorothy Sewall Quincy “met her marquis” –presumably in Boston rather than in Concord where there would not have been an adequate infrastructure of edifices, servants, and the paraphernalia of privilege– by considering that the visit of this distinguished “friend of America,” who had been declared a guest of the nation by President James Monroe and by the federal Congress, was our nation’s chief social excitement of this year.
In Philadelphia, for instance, the celebrations had occupied several days, with the good general Lafayette bowing with grace of manner and greeting each lady and gentleman presented to him with “How do you do?” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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in very careful English, and the following account subsequently appeared in Niles’ Weekly Register:
THE NATION’S GUEST On Monday morning, the 4th inst., about three hundred children of both sexes, from the different schools in Philadelphia, were arranged in the State House yard to receive General La Fayette: the spectacle was most beautiful and highly interesting. In the evening he attended a grand ball at the theatre: the lobby of which was converted into a magnificent saloon, adorned with beautiful rose, orange and lemon trees, in full bearing, and a profusion of shrubbery, pictures, busts, banners with classical inscriptions, etc., all illuminated with a multitude of lamps. For the dancers there were two compartments, the house and the stage; the upper part of the former was hung with scarlet drapery, studded with golden stars, while the great chandelier, with two additional ones, and a row of wax tapers, arranged over the canopy, shed down a blaze of light. The first and second tiers of boxes were crowded with ladies in the richest apparel, as spectators of the dazzling array. Beyond the proscenium the stage division wore the appearance of an Eastern pavilion in a garden, terminating with a view of an extended sea and landscape, irradiated by the setting sun, and meant to typify the Western world. The company began to assemble soon after seven o’clock, and consisted of two thousand or more persons, of whom 600 or 700 were invited strangers. Twenty-two hundred tickets had been issued. No disorder occurred in the streets, with the arrival and departure of the carriages, which formed a line along the adjoining squares. General La Fayette appeared at nine o’clock and was received at the door by the managers of the ball. He was conducted the whole length of the apartments through an avenue formed by the ladies to the bottom of the stage, where Mrs. Morris, Governor Shulze, and the Mayer waited to greet him in form: the full band playing an appropriate air during his progress. As soon as he was seated, the dancers were called, and at least four hundred were immediately on the floor. The dancing did not cease until near five o’clock, though the company began to retire about three. At twelve, one of the managers, from an upper box, proclaimed a toast “to the nation’s guest,” which was hailed with enthusiasm and accompanied by the descent of a banner from the ceiling. Behind this was suddenly displayed a portrait of the general, with allegorical figures.
A short while later, churning this topic, Niles’ Weekly Register offered information about the sexual overtones HDT WHAT? INDEX
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of toasts which had been offered at a similar upscale bash in Baltimore, and the manner in which such gallantries had been offered and received:
When the music for the dancing ceased, the military band of the first rifle regiment played the most pleasing and fashionable airs.... Just before the ladies of the first tables retired, General La Fayette requested permission to give the following toast, which was received in a manner that reflected credit on the fair objects of it: “The Baltimore ladies — the old gratitude of a young soldier mingles with the respectful sense of new obligation conferred on a veteran.” The ladies rose and saluted the general, and the sensation and effect is not to be described; when he sat down there was a burst of applause from all the gentlemen present.
Need we explore the overtones of this toast? The old French general is relying upon the national stereotypes according to which Frenchmen in tights are “gallant,” and is reminiscing about when he and his fellows were young and horny, traveling around in magnificent uniforms diddling the lovely young colonial maidens. He is saying to these ladies at the banquet “Maybe it was you I swived with when you were much younger, and you will remember but not I, or consider that maybe it was your mama,” and he was saying to their husbands as well, “Maybe it was your wife I swived with when we were so much younger, and she will remember but not I and she will most certainly not tell you about it, or maybe it was your mama, or your wife’s mama.” He remembers youthful delights and is grateful. Lafayette says all this in the most careful innuendo, “and the sensation and effect is not to be described.” What could the American males do but applaud wildly? –They couldn’t very well rush the main table and shove this codger’s head into his soup, could they?
In Newport, Rhode Island Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day Morng - called a little while at Jos Anthonys, then came on board the Packet & got home in about five hours - This little jant [jaunt] to Providence has been attended with depression on account of the inconvenience of leaving home when I have considerable of my own to attend too, & my outward circumstances require my attention - yet I have (I trust) humbly to acknowledge an evidence of divine favour & even an enlargement of my views & exercises which is worth sacrifice & even suffering for & as to my spiritual condition I have returned refreshed & enlivened, with renew’d desires for myself & the society of which I am a member, that I may grow in grace, & there by become increasingly usefull to the latter RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1826
I have to figure out how to deal with a sentence that the Reverend Waldo Emerson included in a letter to Mary Moody Emerson during this year (LETTERS, Volume I, page 127): It is one of the feelings of modern philosophy, that it is wrong to regard ourselves so much in a historical light as we do, putting Time between God [and?] us; and that it were better to account every moment of the existence of the Universe as a new Creation, and all as a revelation proceeding each moment from the Divinity to the mind of the observer. Leave out of this sentence the construal of the universe as a revelation rather than a gift, leave out entirely the “ideology” that the world consists of a message, an intellectual communication of truth from one mind to another, consider the invention of a series of moments of which “each moment” is but one in a series to be merely an unfortunate acceptance of conventional terminology, and — is there not a residue here, of Thoreauvian immediate contact between God and us?
(I would say not, because the Thoreauvian attitude toward time requires the unreality not only of the past but also of the future, whereas the only temporality that Emerson ever renounces as illusory is past time.) Waldo’s understanding of the nature of eternity was entirely trivial. Eternity was for him merely a very long period of time free of the defect of change: “Now the eternity of physical nature is but a metaphor of speech; an occasional comparison between the longevity of nature and man’s momentary life. For in fact the whole period of the material universe may be but a span of time considered in relation to the existence of mind.... [Study] the secrets of that universal and immortal Kingdom which alone will survive this fair and perishable World” (JOURNALS AND MISCELLANEOUS NOTEBOOKS, 1960-1982, Volume II, page 130). It is clear that in this conception eternity is merely for him that portion of temporal duration before change began and after change will end. He loved the clarity of this “eternity” merely because he feared change and the confusion and loss caused by changefulness. Which is to say, his thought in this matter is entirely without sophistication.
Our national birthday, Tuesday the 4th of July: Construction was initiated at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on the Main Line Canal.
The cornerstone was laid for the first lock of the Oswego Canal.
About noon, Stephen Collins Foster was born in Lawrenceville (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, the 9th child of William Barclay Foster, a businessman, and Eliza Clayland Tomlinson, daughter of a fairly well-off farmer.
Giacomo Meyerbeer and Eugene Scribe met in Paris to discuss Robert le diable for perhaps the 1st time.
English newspapers picked up and translated, word for word, the hoax or invention that had appeared in the Journal du Commerce de Lyon about an Englishman, one Roger Dodsworth, who had apparently been frozen in a Mount Saint Gothard glacier since an avalanche in 1654, and had on July 4th been recovered and HDT WHAT? INDEX
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reanimated “by the usual remedies” by a Dr. Hotham of Northumberland. Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley read this newspaper account and by October would produce her THE REANIMATED MAN.
The newspapers of 1826 abounded with descriptions of solemn odes, processions, orations, toasts, and other such commemoratives of July 4th, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. One reflection of the public conception of the Declaration was Royall Tyler’s “Country Song for the Fourth of July,” a poem that describes a New England celebration of the Brother Jonathan type, where neighbors gather for food, fun, and festivities. A clear view of just how the political ideals of the Declaration were received by the masses shines through Tyler’s rhymed directions for the country dance. Here is how his dance appeared in an 1841 publication (although Tyler, who would die on August 26, 1826 from cancer of the face, could only have composed this in a considerably earlier timeframe). Squeak the fife and beat the drum, Independence day is come!! Let the roasting pig be bled, Quick twist off the cockerel’s head. Quickly rub the pewter platter. Heap the nutcakes, fried in butter. Set the cups, and beaker glass, The Pumpkin and the apple sauce. Send the keg to shop for brandy; Maple sugar we have handy, Independent, staggering Dick, A noggin mix of swingeing thick, Sal, put on your russet skirt, Jotham, get your boughten shirt, To-day we dance to tiddle diddle. —Here comes Sambo with his fiddle; Sambo, take a dram of whiskey, And play up Yankee doodle frisky. Moll, come leave your witched tricks, And let us have a reel of six; Father and mother shall make two; Sal, Moll, and I, stand all a-row, Sambo, play and dance with quality; This is the day of blest equality, Father and mother are but men, And Sambo — is a citizen. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Come foot it, Sal, — Moll, figure in. And, mother, you dance up to him; Now saw fast as e’er you can do And father, you cross o’er to Sambo, —Thus we dance, and thus we play, On glorious Independence Day. — [2 more verses in like manner]
In Salem, Massachusetts, 4th-of-July orator the Reverend Henry Root Colman delivered the necessary oration. This would be printed by the town as AN ORATION DELIVERED IN SALEM, JULY 4, 1826, AT THE REQUEST OF THE TOWN, ON THE COMPLETION OF A HALF CENTURY SINCE THE DECLARATION OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE. Meanwhile, elsewhere, 4th-of-July orator George Bancroft was alerting an audience to the fact that his attitudes about government were coming to tend toward the democratic.
On this 50th anniversary of our American independence, which at the time we were referring to as our “Jubilee of Freedom” event, on the 22d birthday of Nathaniel Hawthorne, both former President Thomas Jefferson and former President John Adams died.21 This was taken at the time to constitute a sign of national favor from Heaven, although why death ought to be regarded as a sign of favor remains untheorized — perhaps once again we Americans were “pushing the envelope” of what it is to be a human being. At any rate, this coincidence would become quite the topic for conversation in our American republic.
FAMOUS LAST WORDS: Jefferson: “Is it the 4th?” —Ah.” John Adams: “Thomas Jefferson still survives” (actually Jefferson had died at 12:50PM and then Adams died at 5:30PM.)
Even before news of Jefferson’s demise had reached Washington DC, Mayor Roger C. Weightman was having his final letter read aloud at that city’s Independence Day national-birthday festivities. The most stirring words in that former president’s missive –his assertion that the mass of mankind had not been born “with saddles on their backs” nor a favored few “booted and spurred” to “ride” them– had of course originated in the speech delivered by the leveler Colonel Richard Rumbold on the scaffold moments before his execution for treason against the English monarchy, at the conclusion of the English Civil War, in the Year of Our Lord 1685.22 Those who noticed that the former President had intentionally or unknowingly been borrowing sentiments did not see fit to record that fact in writing.23
21. At any rate, this coincidence would become quite the topic for conversation in our American republic. Refer to L. H. Butterfield, "The Jubilee of Independence, July 4, 1826," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, LXI (1953), pages 135-38; Joseph J. Ellis, Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (NY, 1993), pages 210-16; Robert P. Hay, "The Glorious Departure of the American Patriarchs: Contemporary Reactions to the Deaths of Jefferson and Adams," Journal of Southern History, XXXV (1969), pages 543-55; Merrill D.Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind, 1960, pages 3-14. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Former president Jefferson’s death at Monticello (“All my wishes and where I hope my days will end — at Monticello.”) would be followed shortly by the auction of his 90 black slaves over 12 years of age –along with his 12 black slaves between 9-12 years of age, his 73 cows of unknown coloration, and his 27 horses also of unknown coloration– for he had been living quite beyond his means, bringing back with him for instance from France no fewer than 86 large crates of civilized goodies. Jefferson did, however, set free his mulatto blood relatives. Jefferson, one might say, in allowing that after a certain number of crosses with white daddys, an infant ought to be considered to be white, had “pushed the envelope” of what it meant to be a human being. Yeah, right.
THOMAS JEFFERSON JOHN ADAMS
Mary Moody Emerson entered into her Almanack a comment that this was the day on which her Country had thrown the gage (thrown down the gauntlet, issued a challenge to a duel of honor): tho’ the revolution gave me to slavery of poverty & ignorance & long orphanship, — yet it gave my fellow men liberty
22. Macaulay’s HISTORY OF ENGLAND, Chapter V; Adair, Douglass. “Rumbold’s Dying Speech, 1685, and Jefferson’s Last Words on Democracy, 1826,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, IX (1952): pages 526, 530: I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden.
Rumbold was not merely being hanged but being hanged, drawn, and quartered — the penalty for an attempt upon the monarch. This trope about horses, saddles, boots, and spurs was taken at the time to have been originated by Jefferson, in John A. Shaw’s EULOGY, PRONOUNCED AT BRIDGEWATER, MASSACHUSETTS, AUGUST 2D, 1826 and in Henry Potter’s EULOGY, PRONOUNCED IN FAYETTEVILLE, NORTH-CAROLINA, JULY 20TH, 1826 and in John Tyler’s EULOGY, PRONOUNCED AT RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, JULY 11, 1826 in A SELECTION OF EULOGIES, PRONOUNCED IN THE SEVERAL STATES, IN HONOR OF THOSE ILLUSTRIOUS PATRIOTS AND STATESMEN, JOHN ADAMS AND THOMAS JEFFERSON (Hartford CT: 1826). See also THE LAST LETTER OF THE ILLUSTRIOUS STATESMAN, THOMAS JEFFERSON, ESQ. AUTHOR OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE: BEING HIS ANSWER TO AN INVITATION TO JOIN THE CITIZENS OF WASHINGTON IN CELEBRATING THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE: MONTICELLO, JUNE 24, 1826 (Washington DC: 1826).
That 17th-Century incident was not the first one in our history to conform to the dictum “there must be none higher than us, though of course there must always be some lower than us,” for in the 14th Century the Reverend John Ball had been hanged for preaching against public toleration of privileged classes: “When Adam dalf [digged] and Eve span, Who was then a gentleman?” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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HOLOGRAPHIC IMAGES Isabella (Sojourner Truth), who would have been approximately 29 years old, had in this year borne another daughter, whom she had named Sophia, who would need to grow up laboring as an indentured servant, by the husband Thomas to whom she had been assigned by her master who would not admit that he was a husband. She had once again increasing the prosperity of the master race! The remaining slaves of New York State were to be freed one year from this date, and John Dumont had solemnly promised Isabella in some earlier period that he would free her and her husband “a year early” and set them up in a nearby log cabin. So it had come time for the white race to be true to its word. However, since the master had made that commitment to this enslaved woman, she had carelessly chopped off one of her fingers while working for him –so he figured she couldn’t work as productively with only nine fingers as she had with ten, and so –he figured she must still owe him some work. Fair’s fair, right? No freedom, no cabin, not yet, instead work some more for nothing. (But don’t lose heart, as maybe later I’ll be able to keep my solemn promise.) TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS
23. Note that we have here an American author who is establishing his claim to fame upon his being the author of the memorable phrases of our foundational document, and who is attempting incautiously to do so by appropriating phrases originated by someone else. Also, we have here an American public so stupid or so patriotic that it lets him get away with it. Witness John A. Shaw, EULOGY, PRONOUNCED AT BRIDGEWATER, MASSACHUSETTS, AUGUST 2D, 1826 in A Selection of Eulogies, Pronounced in the Several States, in Honor of Those Illustrious Patriots and Statesmen, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (Hartford, Conn., 1826), 163; Henry Potter, “Eulogy, Pronounced in Fayetteville, North-Carolina, July 20th, 1826,” A Selection of Eulogies...., 130; John Tyler, “Eulogy, Pronounced at Richmond, Virginia, July 11, 1826,” A Selection of Eulogies...., 7-8; National Intelligencer, July 4, 1826; Independent Chronicle and Boston Patriot, July 12, 1826; Philadelphia Gazette, July 5, 1826; Commercial Chronicle and Baltimore Advertiser, July 11, 1826; The last letter of the illustrious statesman, Thomas Jefferson, Esq. author of the Declaration of Independence: Being his answer to an invitation to join the citizens of Washington in celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of American independence: Monticello, June 24, 1826 (Washington, D.C., 1826). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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In New Harmony, Indiana, Robert Dale Owen gave a speech he called his “Declaration of Mental Independence.”
In Providence, Rhode Island, four of those who had participated in the capture of the British armed schooner Gaspe during the Revolutionary War rode in a parade.
In Newport, Rhode Island, Major John Handy read the Declaration of Independence “on the identical spot which he did 50 years ago,” in the presence of Isaac Barker of Middletown, “who was at his side in the same place fifty years before.” Patriotic fun and games! Friend Stephen Wanton Gould protested to his journal: 3rd day 4th of 7th M 1826 / This is what is called Independence Day - & an exceeding troublesome one it is to all sober Minded people - The expence of this day given to the poor or appropriated to public school would school all the poor children in town for some time. — Last night, we were the whole night greatly troubled & kept Awake, by the firing of squibs & crackers, great Bonfire in the middle of the Parade & tar Barrells, with various noises which were kept up all night & consequently kept us & many others awake, to our great discomfiture - in addition to which is the bitter reflection of the discipation & corruption of habits & morals to which our youth are exposed. — & today we have had numerous scenes of drunkness both among the Aged & Youth, & many act of wickedness -besides the pomp & vain show apparant in all parts of the Town -This evening again we are troubled with noise & tumult & what kind of a night we are to have cannot be told. - RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
In New-York, 4 gold medals had been ordered to be struck by the Common Council: 3 were for surviving signers of the Declaration of Independence, and the 4th was given to the son of Robert Fulton as a memorial of “genius in the application of steam.”
In a celebration at Lynchburg, Virginia, among the “aged patriots of ’76” were General John Smith and Captain George Blakenmore.
At the South Meeting House of Worcester, Massachusetts, Isaiah Thomas stood on the spot from which he had read the Declaration of Independence in 1776. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The Frederick-Town Herald of Frederick, Maryland announced that it would no longer be publishing the usual round of “generally dull, insipid” dinner toasts, “about which few feel any interest.”
In Salem, North Carolina, the Moravian Male Academy was dedicated.
In Quincy, Massachusetts, Miss Caroline Whitney delivered an address on the occasion of the presentation of a flag to the Quincy Light Infantry.
In Arlington, Virginia, General Washington’s tent, the very same tent that the General had been using at the heights of Dorchester in 1775, was re-erected near the banks of the Potomac River for purposes of celebration. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1827
May 16, Wednesday: Mary Moody Emerson declared, in her Almanack, her approbation of war:
Happy the man who finds an early bed of honor.
HOLOGRAPHIC IMAGES Isn’t this a wondrous testimony to the truth of an old adage?
Only those choose war whose lives are worse than war.
Two songs by Franz Schubert to words of Pyrker were published by Haslinger as his op.79: Das Heimweh and Die Allmacht. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1834
In this year Waldo’s brother Edward Bliss Emerson, who had been studying law in the Boston office of Senator Daniel Webster until he experience episodes of dementia, died in San Juan, Puerto Rico of TB.
Waldo’s Aunt Mary Moody Emerson came to live with them in Concord for a year.
At the end of the journal entries for this year, Emerson listed his recent readings in Oriental materials: “Plotinus; Hermes Trismegistus; Vyasa (?); Sheking (Chinese); Arabian Proverbs.”
Disapproving of what he was learning about the Oriental attitude toward women, Emerson recorded from the SHIKING or BOOK OF ODES some material which he considered could be used to illustrate this point: In barbarous society the position of women is always low — in the Eastern nations lower than in the West. “When a daughter is born,” says the Shiking, the old Sacred Book of China, “she HDT WHAT? INDEX
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sleeps on the ground, she is clothed with a wrapper; she plays with a tile; she is incapable of evil or good.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1835
April: In West Cambridge, Miss Mary Moody Emerson, who, since she had been living in Concord, obviously had perused Waldo Emerson’s copy of SARTOR RESARTUS, was discussing Thomas Carlyle with the Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge just as he was departing to take up his new ministry in Maine. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, Harriet Martineau was being “[fed] with the SARTOR” by the Reverend William Henry Furness out of the copy he had just received from Emerson.
SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1837
At the early height of his career, Waldo Emerson recorded his aunt Mary Moody Emerson’s name in his journal as the 1st on his list of his 7 most vital “benefactors” but commented also that he would rather take gifts of thought from others, “as we take apples off a tree without any thanks.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1839
75 September: ESSAYS AND POEMS. BY JONES VERY went on sale at $0. the copy. It was dedicated, as the author had required, “To Edward Tyrrell Channing, Boyleston Professor in Harvard University, This Volume is Inscribed, As a Token of Gratitude, By the Author.” Jones Very celebrated the one-year anniversary and self-selected limit for his illumination by retracing his steps through Cambridge and Concord. While passing through Boston he picked up his bundle of authorial copies from the publishers, Charles C. Little and James Brown.24 Passing through Cambridge, Very again asked for reinstatement at Harvard and was again, of course, rebuffed by the authorities. Proceeding through the familiar dormitories and study rooms after the rebuffs, he informed a number of persons cryptically that “the Romans” were still “masters of the world.” He had distanced himself from his vatic role, but not by much.
The volume would be belatedly reviewed in THE DIAL in 1841: This little volume would have received an earlier notice, if we had been at all careful to proclaim our favorite books. The genius of this book is religious, and reaches an extraordinary depth of sentiment. The author, plainly a man of a pure and kindly temper, casts himself into the state of the high and transcendental obedience to the inward Spirit. He has apparently made up his mind to follow all its leadings, though he should be taxed with absurdity or even with insanity. In this enthusiasm he writes most of these verses, which rather flow through him than from him. There is no composition, no elaboration, no artifice in the structure of the rhyme, no variety in the imagery; in short, no pretension to literary merit, for this would be departure from his singleness, and followed by loss of insight. He is not at liberty even to correct these unpremeditated poems for the press; but if another will publish them, he offers no objection. In this way they have come into the world, and as yet have hardly begun to be known. With the exception of the few first poems, which appear to be of an earlier date, all these verses bear the unquestionable stamp of grandeur. They are the breathings of a certain entranced 24. No-one would seem concerned at all to promote the sale of this little volume, and the copies that had been printed would not all be sold for a generation. Edwin Gittleman says that
Rather than publicize the book he was instrumental in having printed, rather than praise essays he once called among the finest of their kind, rather than recommend poems he once considered worthy of being read “to all who have ears to hear,” Waldo Emerson (especially when among close friends) preferred to repeat Very’s most recent “speeches,” and to relate how he had “dealt” with them.
However, Mrs. Lidian Emerson did present a copy to Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and Bronson Alcott sent a copy to one of his British correspondents, and Henry David Thoreau sent a copy to Miss Ellen Devereux Sewall’s father, the Reverend Edmund Quincy Sewall, Sr. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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devotion, which one would say, should be received with affectionate and sympathizing curiosity by all men, as if no recent writer had so much to show them of what is most their own. They are as sincere a litany as the Hebrew songs of David or Isaiah, and only less than they, because indebted to the Hebrew muse for their tone and genius. This makes the singularity of the book, namely, that so pure an utterance of the most domestic and primitive of all sentiments should in this age of revolt and experiment use once more the popular religious language, and so show itself secondary and morbid. These sonnets have little range of topics, no extent of observation, no playfulness; there is even a certain torpidity in the concluding lines of some of them, which reminds one of church hymns; but, whilst they flow with great sweetness, they have the sublime unity of the Decalogue or the Code of Menu, and if as monotonous, yet are they almost as pure as the sounds of Surrounding Nature. We gladly insert from a newspaper the following sonnet, which appeared since the volume was printed. THE BARBERRY BUSH. The bush that has most briers and bitter fruit, Wait till the frost has turned its green leaves red, Its sweetened berries will thy palate suit, And thou may’st find e’en there a homely bread. Upon the hills of Salem scattered wide, Their yellow blossoms gain the eye in Spring; And straggling e’en upon the turnpike’s side, Their ripened branches to your hand they bring, I’ve plucked them oft in boyhood’s early hour, That then I gave such name, and thought it true; But now I know that other fruit as sour Grows on what now thou callest Me and You; Yet, wilt thou wait the autumn that I see, Will sweeter taste than these red berries be. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1841
November: William Henry Harrison, a Whig, the elected President, died after one month and John Tyler took the office.
The Samuel Gray Ward family had refused to allow extensive public access to Thomas Cole’s series of paintings depicting life as a journey through space. Private property. Get rich and buy your own damn artist. But never mind, while in Rome up until May 1842 the artist was painting a 2d version from his initial sketches.
Miss Mary Moody Emerson came to Concord in order to be with Lidian Emerson during the final weeks of Lidian’s pregnancy, residing at what was known as “Howe’s Tavern” –due to her vow never again to stay at the Emerson home– while being accompanied by Elizabeth Sherman Hoar.25
At this point she already had enough knowledge of Henry Thoreau’s proclivities –he was residing at the Emerson home– to ask after her “man of the wilderness.”
25. New meaning for the phrase “the little woman.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1842
Spring: Henry Thoreau was still quite ill and confined indoors, so when during this period Mary Moody Emerson wrote to Elizabeth Sherman Hoar and inquired: “How and what doing HDT?” even though we do not have this letter, we may infer that the nature and extent of his illness would very likely have been the substance of what Elizabeth wrote Polly in response. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1851
November: Henry Thoreau spent a number of evenings with Miss Mary Moody Emerson as memorialized in the Newell Convers Wyeth painting that appears on the following screen. One of the things they would have had to talk about was their mutual respect for the writings of this contemporary of theirs in India, Rammohan Roy, who was engaged in a grand way in bringing the scriptures of the world to the attention of the peoples of the world. However, in all probability they would not have known that Roy had gone to England, or that he was deceased — but how important is it, actually, that the rajah had gone to visit the King of England, or that he had already gone to meet his maker?
On one evening early in this month, during a lengthy encounter at the tavern in Concord where she was staying, Thoreau found Miss Emerson to be “singular among women at least in being really & perseveringly interested to know what thinkers think.” According to Phyllis Cole, at this point Thoreau “pronounced Mary both a female genius and a misogynist”: It is perhaps her greatest praise & peculiarity that she more surely than any other woman gives her companion occasion to utter his best thought. In spite of her own biases, she can entertain a large thought with hospitality — and is not prevented by any intellectuality in it — as women commonly are. In short she is a genius –as woman seldom is– reminding you less often of her sex than any woman whom I know. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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TRANSLATION
OF SEVERAL
PRINCIPAL BOOKS, PASSAGES, AND TEXTS
OF THE VEDS,
AND OF
SOME CONTROVERSIAL WORKS
ON
BRAHMUNICAL THEOLOGY.
————
BY
RAJAH RAMMOHUN ROY.
————
SECOND EDITION.
————
LONDON: PARBURY, ALLEN, & CO., LEADENHALL STREET. —— HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Cole explains that in her consideration, it is more likely that Thoreau inaccurately projected his own attitude toward women into the thought of Miss Emerson, perhaps with Miss Emerson’s encouragement, than that Miss Emerson herself actually had embraced Thoreau’s attitude: Thoreau took away a great deal more than he gave in these sentences — granting Mary’s ability to recognize a thinker rather than be one, meanwhile condemning the rest of womankind. But finally Thoreau enlisted Mary to support his own view: “Miss Emerson expressed to- night a singular want of respect for her own sex, saying that they were frivolous almost without exception, that woman was the weaker vessel, etc.: that into whatever family she might go, she depended more upon the ‘clown’ for society than upon the lady of the house. Men are more likely to have opinions of their own.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Again, this description revealed only part of Mary’s mind. She had always wanted to hear “genius” rather than to prove her own, as Fuller had expected her to do a decade earlier; having reveled in Thoreau’s intellectualism, she might well have dismissed her own sex. But Mary did not avoid the conversation of women, either through a lifetime or in 1851. “Tell of ... my dear sisterhood the T[horeau]’s,” Mary had requested of a Concord friend earlier that year, and once before had explicitly declined “the childish worldly desire to see & hear the men talk” for the company of Mary Brooks [this happened on January 9, 1851]. Mary wanted both sisterhood and men’s talk. Indeed, with Brooks and with Henry’s sister Sophia Thoreau, both serving on the executive committee of the Middlesex Anti-Slavery Society, she was not declining all of her deepest thoughts when she chose to sit with the women [this happened in 1845?]. In the meantime, Mary’s part in the men’s talk of Concord was of real substance. She not only allowed Thoreau to voice ideas but also read or heard him read from his writing. In December she could allude to “Henry’s ‘scuttle of dirt’” in a letter to Waldo, assuming shared knowledge of the journal from which that phrase had come. In February she asked Thoreau why he had not visited her solitude. “Why not bring me the Plymouth lecture? ...Age loves the old fashion of catechising the young.” Thoreau’s lecture in Plymouth on February 22 was a chapter from WALDEN, the fourth draft of which he had begun that January after two years’ interruption. These meager references point to the reason for Thoreau’s high praise of Mary: the “best thought” she elicited from him foreshadowed WALDEN. We can only speculate on the range of conversation that Mary Emerson and Henry Thoreau might have enjoyed at this crucial juncture. The year’s antislavery politics were on both minds, but they also admired each other’s solitude and devotion to natural history. Both had made experiments in independent living. They had Maine and its mountains in common: Thoreau had already published “Ktaadn and the Maine Woods.” Unlike Mary’s protégée Sarah Bradford Ripley, Thoreau the naturalist did not shrink from sublimity as he read the progress of seasons or the flight of birds. On December 31 he witnessed the thawing clay bank by the Walden railroad cut and recorded the journal passage that propelled him back into WALDEN. Mary would have urged him to a seasonal thaw ending in the “amaranthine” bloom of heaven, but she (old seeker of analogy and design) would also have kindled to his account of these “fancy sketches and designs of the artist” of the world. Together they also followed an interest in Asian quietism and Romantic philosophy. “Love to Henry T.,” she wrote a year later [to Martha Bartlett on December 14, 1853], “do tell me of his phenom[en]al existence.” The joke assumes earlier conversation about his noumenal self as well. [Next page: for the benefit of the painting Waldo Emerson’s Aunt Mary Moody Emerson evidently did not wear the white burial shroud in which she customarily dressed HDT WHAT? INDEX
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(unless that is what she has wrapped around her shoulders as a shawl), and this is of course not her bedchamber so we cannot see the tiny casket inside which she customarily slept.]
December 2, Tuesday: On the 47th anniversary of the coronation of Napoléon I as the Emperor of France and the 46th anniversary of the Battle of Austerlitz, French President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte staged his coup d’état against the 2d French Republic. The National Assembly was dissolved, with nearly all political leaders of the Republic taken into custody. There was but sporadic resistance.
An Englishman named Bainbridge was visiting the Niagara Falls in the off season and, while on the icy catwalk to the Terrapin Tower, slipped under the railing. He was able to hang onto a rock for a half an hour in the torrent until someone noticed him down there and summoned two tour guides, J. Davy and H. Brewster. By tying together their horse reins they were able to make a lifeline long enough to reach Bainbridge on his rock — and he got pulled to safety.
Miss Mary Moody Emerson was such a rigid defender of the sanctity of the Sabbath day that often she would spend the day in solitude, refusing to profane it by church and sermon: Pulpits & all the wonders dark & light of nature are but means — not the end of existing — that is for God! Note that this sort of ultra-pious attitude, rather than distancing her from such non-observers of the Sabbath as Margaret Fuller and Henry Thoreau, actually served to bring her closer to them.
On this day Thoreau made no entry in his journal, clearly because he was too busy beginning the survey of a line between Carlisle and Concord that would continue to occupy him on the 3d, 4th, 5th, 10th, and 13th (there had been a lot of controversy about this line for years; the Town Report for 1851/1852 says that Henry was paid $42.00 for setting this line; Henry’s measurements would not resolve the issue), and lotting off a 40-acre “Ministerial lot” in the southeast part of Concord between Cambridge Turnpike and Walden Streets so the lots could be sold to John McKeen, Nathan Brooks, Aaron A. Kelsey, Daniel Shattuck, Reuben Brown, Richard Barrett, Charles B. Davis, Moses Prichard, the Reverend Addison Grant Fay, Patrick MacManners, Dr. Josiah Bartlett, Colonel Charles Holbrook, R.A. Messer, and Jonathan Farwell. (He would continue on this project during the following month.) 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/89.htm HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1852
January 8, Thursday: Henry Thoreau read from his WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS MS, Draft C, to Miss Mary Moody Emerson. TIMELINE OF WALDEN
January 8, Thursday: I notice that almost every track which I made yesterday in the snow – perhaps 10 inches deep – has got a dead leaf in it – though none is to be seen on the snow around. Even as early as 3 o’clock these winter afternoons the axes in the woods sound like night fall as if – like the sound of a twilight labor. Reading from my MSS to Miss Emerson this evening & using the word God in one instance in perchance a merely heathenish sense – she inquired hastily in a tone of dignified anxiety– “Is that god spelt with a little g?” Fortunately it was. (I had brought in the word god without any solemnity of voice or connexion.) I perceive that the livid lettuce leaved lichen which I gathered the other day – has dried almost an ash or satin with no green about has bleached.
Herman Melville wrote to Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: My Dear Mrs Hawthorne I have hunted up the finest Bath I could find, gilt-edged and stamped, whereon to inscribe my humble acknowledgement of your highly flattering letter of the 29th Dec: — It really amazed me that you should find any satisfaction in that book. It is true that some men have said they were pleased with it, but you are the only woman — for as a general thing, women have small taste for the sea. But, then, since you, with your spiritualizing nature, see more things than other people, and by the same HDT WHAT? INDEX
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process, refine all you see, so that they are not the same things that other people see, but things which while you think you but humbly discover them, you do in fact create them for yourself — Therefore, upon the whole, I do not so much marvel at your expressions concerning Moby Dick. At any rate, your allusion for example to the “Spirit Spout” first showed to me that there was a subtile significance in that thing — but I did not, in that case, mean it. I had some vague idea while writing it, that the whole book was susceptible of an allegoric construction, & also that parts of it were — but the speciality of many of the particular subordinate allegories, were first revealed to me, after reading Mr Hawthorne’s letter, which, without citing any particular examples, yet intimated the part-&-parcel allegoricalness of the whole. But, My Dear Lady, I shall not again send you a bowl of salt water. The next chalice I shall commend, will be a rural bowl of milk. And now, how are you in West Newton? Are all domestic affairs regulated? Is Miss Una content? and Master Julien satisfied with the landscape in general? And does Mr Hawthorne continue his series of calls upon all his neighbors within a radius of ten miles? Shall I send him ten packs of visiting cards? And a box of kid gloves? and the latest style of Parisian handkerchief? — He goes into society too much altogether — seven evenings out, a week, should content any reasonable man. Now, Madam, had you not said anything about Moby Dick, & had Mr Hawthorne been equally silent, then had I said perhaps, something to both of you about another Wonder- (full) Book. But as it is, I must be silent. How is it, that while all of us human beings are so entirely disembarrased in censuring a person; that so soon as we would praise, then we begin to feel awkward? I never blush after denouncing a man: but I grow scarlet, after eulogizing him. And yet this is all wrong; and yet we can’t help it; and so we see how true was that musical sentence of the poet when he sang — “We can’t help ourselves” For tho’ we know what we ought to be; & what it would be very sweet & beautiful to be; yet we can’t be it. That is most sad, too. Life is a long Dardenelles, My Dear Madam, the shores whereof are bright with flowers, which we want to pluck, but the bank is too high; & so we float on & on, hoping to come to a landing-place at last — but swoop! we launch into the great sea! Yet the geographers say, even then we must not despair, because across the great sea, however desolate & vacant it may look, lie all Persia & the delicious lands roundabout Damascus. So wishing you a pleasant voyage at last to that sweet & far countree — Beleive Me Earnestly Thine— Herman Melville
I forgot to say, that your letter was sent to me from Pittsfield — which delayed it. My sister Augusta begs me to send her sincerest regards both to you & Mr Hawthorne. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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January 18, Sunday: The Reverend Convers Francis preached in Concord. His prooftext for the morning service was 1st Corinthians 3:17 and his topic was “The Agency of God and Man in Union with Each Other.” His prooftext for the afternoon service was Acts 5:38-39 and his topic was “Gamaliel’s Advice.”
January 18, Sunday: E Hosmer tells me that his daughter walking with Miss Mary Emerson to some MARY EMERSON meeting or lecture, perhaps it was Mrs Smith’s–the latter was saying that she did not want to go– She did not think it was worth the while to be running after such amusements &c &c Whereupon Miss Hosmer asked “what do you go for then?”– “None of your business.” was the characteristic reply. Sometimes when a woman was speaking where gentlemen were present–she put her hand on her & said “be still–I want to hear the men talk.” I still remember those wonderful sparkles at Pelham Pond. The very sportsmen in the distance–with their guns & dogs–presented some surfaces on which a sparkle could impinge–such was the transparent flashing air. It was a most exhiliarating intoxicating air–as when poets sing of the sparkling wine. I have seen some men in whom the usually posthumous decay appeared to have commenced– They impressed me as actually rotting alive– As if there was not salt enough in their composition to preserve them. I could not approach them without a smelling bottle at my nose–not till the Fates strengthened the pickle in which they were. While the snow is falling, the telegraph harp is resounding across the fields. As if the telegraph approached So near an attribute of divinity, that music naturally attends it. AEOLIAN HARP To day again I saw some of the blue in the crevices of the snow– It is snowing–but not a moist snow. Perhaps the snow in the air as well as on the ground–takes up the white rays & reflects the blue There is no blue to be seen overhead & it has as it were taken refuge in the chinks & crevices in the snow. What is like the peep or whistle of a bird in the midst of a winter storm? The pines–some of them–seen through this fine driving snow have a bluish hue. IDA PFEIFFER Barbarous as we esteem the Chinese they have already built their steam boat Swiftly the arts spread in these CHINESE days. Madame Pfeiffer visited the garden of a mandarin in Canton26 “in which” says she “I was the more interested because it was the birthplace of the first Chinese steamboat, built by order of the mandarin and by Chinese workmen. The Mandarin had gone through his studies in N America, where he remained for 13 years”. She was there after ’46.
26. Note that when Canton MA had been named in 1797, it had been so named because someone had ignorantly asserted it to be on the exact opposite side of the earth from Canton, China. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1853
December 14, Wednesday: Ephraim Buck of Boston wrote to the Citizen’s Union, declining a nomination.
Miss Mary Moody Emerson sent her “Love to Henry T.” requesting that her correspondent Martha Bartlett, who had once been a student of the Thoreau brothers at the Concord Academy in Concord, “do tell me of his phenomal existence.”
Meanwhile, Henry Thoreau was delivering “Journey to Moose Head Lake” at the Concord lyceum, telling about the cow moose his cousin had shot. (This would eventually become “The Moose, the Pine Tree, and the Indian.”) TIMELINE OF THE MAINE WOODS
Here is a contemporary photograph in which two men are mourning the recent demise of a moose (one of the two was willing to pay $3,450 to the other of the two, in a jet boat at Chilko Lake BC, to lead him to this moose so he could off it): HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1854
After October 8: On the basis of an undated letter from Mary Moody Emerson to Henry Thoreau, Thoreau may have given a private reading of his “Moonlight” piece which he had delivered in Plymouth on October 8th, for her benefit, at some point during this month, at the Emerson home “Bush” in Concord. If Mr. Thoreau took the least dislike at the close of his last visit to me—why it is not the home of genius to notice trifles. Why not have visited my deeper solitude? Why not bring me the Plymouth lecture? And a budget of literary news? Are you under no obligation to benefit or gratify your neighbours? Age loves the old fashion of catechising the young. Love to your parents & Aunts & forget not MME HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1856
April: It would appear that Miss Mary Moody Emerson was back in Concord again at this point, settled by Elizabeth Sherman Hoar in the “Deacon Brown” house — for we date this remark in Waldo Emerson’s journal to approximately this month:
Monochord. Mary Moody Emerson cannot sympathize with children. I know several persons whose world is only large enough for one person, and each of them, though he were to be the last man, would, like the executioner in Hood’s poem, guillotine the last but one. ’Tis A’s [Alcott’s] misfortune, & T’s [Thoreau’s].
HEADCHOPPING The biographer Phyllis Cole would explain the meeting between Waldo’s petite Aunt Mary and Henry Thoreau as follows: Back in Concord a year and a half later, Mary gave Thoreau the attention across generations that she had no way of giving Dickinson. Once more he recorded the event in his journal. “Talking with Miss Mary Emerson this evening, she said, ‘It was not the fashion to be so original when I was young.’ She is readier to take my view –look through my eyes for the time– than any young person that I know in this town.” Mary endorsed his high valuing of simplicity, even at the expense of his own mother. Holding court at the “Deacon Brown” house the same year, she shut her eyes while conversing with her old friend Cynthia Thoreau in protest against the long yellow ribbons on her cap. “I did not wish to look upon those ribbons of yours,” she explained, “so unsuitable at your time of life and to a person of your serious character.” Perhaps others in the room challenged her to defend the more “original” oddities of her own apparel. CYNTHIA DUNBAR THOREAU
July 12, Saturday: The series of poems by Louisa May Alcott, entitled “Beach Bubbles,” continued in Boston’s Saturday Evening Gazette.
Henry Thoreau was being written to by Mary Moody Emerson.
[Sat] Noon Will my young friend visit me tomorrow early as he can— This eve. My Sister Ripley sends word she HDT WHAT? INDEX
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will come & go to see Mrs William Emerson who is in Town. I wish for your writings — hoping they will give me a clearer clue to your faith — its nature its destination & Object! While excited by your original wit & thoughts, I lose sight, perhaps, of [the] motive & end & infinite responsibility of talent in any of its endless consequences. To enter the interior of a peculiar organisation of mind is desirable to all who think & read in intermited solitude. They believe when the novelty of genius opens on their unprac- tised eye that the spirit itself must own and feel its natural relations to their God of revelation where alone every talent can be perfected and bring it’s additions to the Owner — that faith in the discipline towards moral excellence can alone in- sure an immortal fame or even sucess & happiness here. God bles you & thus make you usefull to your Country & kind prays MME.
July 12. P. M. — Down Turnpike to Red Lily Meadow. Hear the plaintive note of young bluebirds, a reviving and gleaming of their blue ray. In Moore’s meadow by Turnpike, see the vetch in purple patches weighing down the grass, as if a purple tinge were reflected there. White vervain. Smooth sumach, apparently yesterday. Rue is beginning now to whiten the meadows on all hands. The Ranunculus aquatilis appears to be about done, though it may have been submerged by the rain of yesterday. I see hardly one freshly open, and it [is] quite moist and lowering yet. By the myosotis ditch there is an abundance of Galium trifidum (apparently obtusum or latifolium, in press). It is densely massed and quite prickly, with three corolla-lobes. As yet I think I have observed only two varieties of G. trifidum, smooth and rough. Lactuca sauguinea, some time, with dark-purple stem, widely branched. Pycnanthemum muticum and the narrow-leaved, not long. In the still wet road on the hill, just beyond Lincoln bound, a short-tailed shrew (Sorex brevicaudus of Say), dead after the rain. I have found them thus three or four times before. It is 4 1/2 inches long; tail 1+; head and snout, 1+. Roundish body. Lead-color above, somewhat lighter beneath, with a long snout, 3/8 inch beyond lower jaw, incisors black, delicate light-colored (almost silvery) mustachial bristles, and also from lower lip, nose emarginate; nails long and slender, a purple bar across each; cars white and concealed in the fur; the nostrils plainly perforated, though Emmons says that in the specimens of Sorex he had seen he could detect no perforations with a microscope. It has a peculiar but not very strong muskiness. There was an insect-wing in its mouth. Its numerous teeth distinct. Have I not commonly noticed them (lead after rain? I am surprised to read in Emmons that it was first observed in Missouri, and that he has “not been able to meet with it” and doubts its EMMONS existence in the State; retains it on the authority of former catalogues; says it nests on the surface and is familiar with water. In spirits. Red lilies in prime, single upright fiery flowers, their throats how splendidly and variously spotted, hardly two of quite the same hue and not two spotted alike, — leopard-spotted, — averaging a foot or more in height, amid the huckleberry and lambkill, etc., in the moist, meadowy pasture. Apparently a bluebird’s egg in a woodpecker’s hole in an apple tree, second brood, just laid. In collection. Parsnip at Bent’s orchard; how long? Also on July 5th, almost out. Agrimony well out. Chestnut in prime. See Lysimachia quadrifolia with from three to five (or six?) leaves in a whorl. Iberis umbellata, candytuft, roadside, Tuttle’s, naturalized; how long? New plant. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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July 17, Thursday: On the single-line tracks in existence at this point, on which two railroad trains could be directed at one another on the same track, one of the trains was supposed to pull off onto a siding and allow the other train to pass. Adherence to schedule was important not only for the timeliness of travel but also for its safety, because being on schedule meant, at least in theory, that your train was alone on the section of track over which you were traveling. The rule of the roadway was that a train which was more than 15 minutes behind schedule was supposed to travel slowly, constantly ring its bell and toot its whistle, keep careful watch ahead, and on every appropriate occasion pull onto a siding and yield the right of way to a train coming toward it which was scheduled to be using that track at that time. However, on this particular morning, a regularly scheduled passenger train headed toward Philadelphia having been delayed in the station, the stationmaster ordered its engineer to get back on his schedule no matter what he had to do. The passengers, sensing the danger in which they were being placed, all went as far to the rear as they could and huddled in the last car. Also on those tracks at that time was an excursion train and heading for a pic nic at Fort Washington. The engineer of that train coming out of Philadelphia had no schedule and therefore was not governed by the rule of yielding right-of- way, and in accordance with the railroad schedule he understood the tracks ahead were supposed to be clear. The train was carrying 1,500 Irish-American children of Philadelphia’s St. Michael’s Church on a day’s excursion, the pic nic at Fort Washington, and the engineer was trying to get the children to their pic nic as quickly as possible.
The conductor on the passenger train coming toward Philadelphia survived the head-on collision and the fire which followed among the shattered wooden coaches, and saw the carnage among the children. Of the children in the lead cars, 66 were dead and 60 had been seriously injured. The conductor found a handcar alongside the tracks, levered it up onto the rails, and pumped his way as quickly as he could into Philadelphia, where he alerted the authorities to send help. “I’m so sorry,” he said. He then ran to an apothecary and to the railroad office, gulped arsenic, and died on the floor in convulsions in front of the other employees. TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS
That evening, Henry Thoreau was written to by Mary Moody Emerson.
Dear Henry, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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I expect to [set] out to- morrow morn. for Goshen. A place where “wit & gaety never comes that comes to all” But hopes lives & travels on with the speed of suns & stars. And [when] there are none but clouds in the sky its very nakedness has power to aid the hour says old Sir Walter. But however the “old Bobin woman was steady to her bible” where each page unfolded worlds of comfort & asurance, yet the memo ry of [intelligence] extensive mentality will never fail to give a vivid pleasure to reflectio[n-]-if shaded by the faith of future uncertainties—tis well to admit the decrees of unerring rectitude—[If] you write to ME it will brighten the solitude so desired. Had I not been de- tained by nothing but weather—but I must pack up by day light.
Page 2 It is a pleasure I've dependended on for weeks to visit you and was sure last eve. When I returned from the Manse that I should spend part of this day at your house. But [the] weather is extremely trying when visit ing and I conclude I must forgo the gratifiation of seeing your sons library and daughters drawings and leaving my good wishes with Mr Thoreau and family personally But they will exist without [vow] that you may all be prepared to meet your friends [and] the good of all [nations] & denominations in a world delivered from the alternations of woes caused by the passions of undisciplined men and rulers.
Affectionately aduie MM Emerson Thurs. eve July 17. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Page 3 Mr & Mrs Thoreau & family HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1858
November 29, Monday: After visiting the “Hill,” Henry Thoreau went with Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau to one of Bronson Alcott’s “Conversations,” held at the Emerson home. The topic of this particular conversation was “Private Life.” Also attending were Henry James, Sr., Ellery Channing, Mrs. Lidian Emerson and Miss Mary Moody Emerson, the Pratts (John Bridge Pratt, his sister Caroline Pratt, and their mother?), Miss Ripley, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Albert Stacy, and Samuel Gray Ward. After a number of confrontations and
verbal exchanges one-to-one, the Concord people finally ganged up on James. The coup de grace was administered as a monologue by Miss Mary, and is unrecorded except for her peroration “Let me confront the monster.” James made a record that “The old lady had the flavour to me of primitive woods wherein the wolf howls, and the owl has never been dislodged; and I enjoyed the novelty of her apparition in these days too much to mind the scratches I got in making her better acquaintance.” Indeed. However unrecorded in detail, we know the monologue was effective, for Bronson, who earlier that evening had been reduced to silence by Henry James, Sr.’s gibes, recorded in his journal that her “gifts of speech and mode of handling poor James, win the admiration of the party and the thanks of everyone present.”
Here is biographer Phyllis Cole’s account of the Alcott reading in the Emerson parlor, with the famous encounter between Henry James, Sr. and Mary Moody Emerson. Note that she considers Bronson Alcott and Miss Mary Moody Emerson as “two Platonists”: Only the immediacy of conversation now brought out Mary’s fullest verbal power. Bronson Alcott, who had won enough of Mary’s confidence to attract her to his public conversations, offered dinner and an afternoon’s talk in early September. She appeared witty and incisive, regaling the company with stories HDT WHAT? INDEX
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about Waldo’s childhood and forbears. The two Platonists finally pursued their common ground as well: Alcott declared her “metaphysical in her tendencies and a match for any theologian,” favoring Dr. Price and his school. Their reconciliation came just in time for Mary to make her justly famous last stand in Concord a defense of Bronson Alcott. Waldo was out of town lecturing the evening of Alcott’s conversation on “Private Life” in the Emersons’ parlor; but those present, in addition to Mary, included Henry Thoreau and his sister Sophia, Ellery Channing, Franklin Sanborn, Lidian Emerson, Mary Brooks and her son George, Sarah Ripley’s daughter Elizabeth, “others of our townfolk,” and from out of town Sam Ward and Henry James Sr. Alcott’s list of guests amounts to a group photograph of a Concord cultural event, rather easily blending genders and generations, writers and their neighbors. But Sanborn’s report of the evening brings the photograph to life. James did not understand Alcottian conversation and took charge, so that neither Alcott nor Thoreau could “check the flow of the semi-Hibernian rhetoric.” Even worse, James’s point was to exonerate criminals from their crimes and charge society instead. Such moral relativism appealed to no Concordian. But Mary, amidst the men’s consternation, grappled with the enemy directly. When James “spoke repeatedly and scornfully of the Moral Law,” she burst forth to the whole group. Rising from her chair at the west side of the room, and turning her oddly-garnished head toward the south side, where the offender smilingly sat, she clasped her little wrinkled hands and raised them toward the black band over her left temple (a habit she had when deeply moved), and began her answer to these doctrines of Satan, as she thought them. She expressed her amazement that any man should denounce the Moral Law, — the only tie of society, except religion, to which, she saw, the speaker made no claim. She referred him to the Bible and to Dr. Adam Clark (one of her great authorities from childhood) and she denounced him personally in the most racy terms. She did not cross the room and shake him, as some author, not an eye-witness, has fancied, — but she retained her position, sat down quietly when she had finished, and was complemented by the smiling James, who then perhaps for the first time had felt the force of her untaught rhetoric. Sanborn’s account of Mary’s gestures and style of speech is unparalleled among all her chroniclers, but he did not fully grasp the issues at stake in this encounter. Mistaken in the name of Mary’s philosopher (it was Dr. Samuel Clarke), he knew even less about the eighteenth-century school to which Clarke, along with Price, belonged. In fact, moral law was the center of the Enlightenment ethics, allowing for an affirmation at once of the mind’s intuition and of God’s universal truths. The “fitness” between these two realities had been the formative HDT WHAT? INDEX
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discovery of Mary’s youth and the basis of her first argument with Alcott in 1834. Now it was her bond to the Transcendentalists, despite their replacement of Clarke with Kant: Waldo had written in 1841 that he and Mary could meet across generations “where truly we are one in our perception of one Law in our adoration of the Moral Sentiment.” All of the inhabitants and visitors at the Emerson house except James wanted to affirm the individual’s intuition of moral right as one with a “higher law.” Sanborn seriously underestimated Mary as well in calling the speech a piece of “untaught rhetoric,” as though it were the natural effusion of her soul rather than the result of long and difficult self-education. James himself was guilty of much greater condescension in his description of Mary several years later. He had not really been upset at “that confabulation at Mr Emerson’s,” James recalled, when “‘shamefully treated’ by the old Lady from Maine.” “The old lady had the flavour to me of primitive woods wherein the wolf howls, and the owl has never been dislodged; and I enjoyed the novelty of her apparition in those days too much to mind the few scratches I got in making her better acquaintance.” Leaving Clarke and the issues of universal ethics wholly behind, he jovially dismissed his critic by lowering her to a backwoods animality beneath mental life. In truth her response to James was a triumphant ending to Mary’s years of intellectual exchange in Concord, at once a recollection of her reading as a young woman at the Manse and a major defense of her vexatious allies the Transcendentalists. Alcott recorded that she won “the admiration of the party and thanks of everyone present.” Then, after a Thanksgiving including all the Emersons and Ripleys, she was gone, finally assenting to Hannah Parsons’s request that she come live in Williamsburg. Lidian and Ellen put in several hours packing her worldly goods and papers at the Brown house (she had either gotten them from Maine or collected more); Waldo accompanied her by train through Hartford, where they stayed in a hotel that was an “old lady’s paradise”; William and his wife welcomed her for dinner at their Manhattan townhouse on December 15. At the age of eighty-four, Mary became a New Yorker.
November 29: P.M.– To Hill. About three inches of snow fell last evening, and a few cows on the hillside have wandered about in vain to come at the grass. They have at length found that place high on the south side where the snow is thinnest. How bright and light the day now! Methinks it is as good as half an hour added to the day. White houses no longer stand out and stare in the landscape. The pine woods snowed up look more like the bare oak woods with their gray boughs. The river meadows show now far off a dull straw-color or pale brown amid the general white, where the coarse sedge rises above the snow; and distant oak woods are now more distinctly reddish. It is a clear and pleasant winter day. The snow has taken all the November out of the sky. Now blue shadows, green rivers, – both which I see, – and still winter life. I see partridge and mice tracks and fox tracks, and crows sit silent on a bare oak-top. I see a living shrike caught to-day in the barn of the Middlesex House. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1862
September 6, Saturday: 1st issue of the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway’s and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s anti- slavery Commonwealth. This paper would publish works by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Lydia Maria Child, Julia Ward Howe, the Reverend David Wasson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Bronson Alcott, and Louisa May Alcott.
On some date subsequent to Miss Mary Moody Emerson’s death, I haven’t established exactly when, Sanborn would provide a savage “obituary” in which he would declare that this little lady while still among the living had been capable of “saying more disagreeable things in a half-hour than any person living.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1863
May 1, Friday: Mary Moody Emerson died in Williamsburgh near Brooklyn on Long Island, New York (where she had been being cared for in her feebleness by her niece Hannah Haskins Parsons), at the age of 88.
There was fighting at Port Gibson / Thompson’s Hill.
May 4, Monday: The first boat to take Dakotas off Pike Island was the Davenport, guarded by 40 men of Company G of the 10th Minnesota regiment. 812 people, plus of course the crew, were jammed onto a boat 205 feet long and 35 feet wide. As they stopped at the steamboat landing in St. Paul at the base of the Iminijaska “White Rocks,” with the decks jammed, a mob of white men threw rocks and several women were injured — although in an attempt to avoid the rocks they were singing hymns and praying. The soldiers finally managed to clear the docks by threatening a bayonet charge. Note that the old pacifist Marpiyawicasta “Man of the Clouds” was not on the trip, having succumbed that winter. The radical theologian Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller of the Bekennende Kirche Confessing Church was imprisoned at the Konzentrationslager the Nazis set up in Dachau during World War II, and we have not be outdone in this regard: the first Minnesota pacifist finished his course in our Konzentrationslager full of hostages in St. Paul during our race war of the 1860s. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The 4th of May was also marked, at the First Unitarian Church in Concord, Massachusetts, by the funeral of Mary Moody Emerson. I do not know whether they buried her in the coffin in which she had slept at night for so many years, in that black shroud she had worn as a house dress for so many years. Waldo Emerson was prepared to play a standard game of “Remember this, remember that” at the wake and was surprised that in this case no-one else was interested. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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May 14, Thursday: There was fighting at Jackson.
The Boston Evening Transcript carried an obituary tribute on Mary Moody Emerson by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.27 Peabody praised Mary for how unusually undogmatic she had been despite a lifetime of preoccupation with theological speculations. An “adequate” dialog with others, serious thought, she believed, was not merely incidental to life but actually was what constructed the soul.
27. This would be privately printed in 1913 as part of NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF WATERFORD, MAINE, edited by the Reverend Thomas Hovey Gage, Jr. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1869
March 1, Monday: Waldo Emerson memorialized his Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, without naming her, in a lecture entitled “Amita” in Boston’s Chickering Hall before the newly formed New England Woman’s Club. Mrs. Harriet Hanson Robinson, who was in the audience, misunderstood Emerson’s title “Amita” as “Ermita,” or in pseudo-Latin, “female hermit.” FEMINISM
By this point his aunt had been wearing her white shroud for forty years, and dead for six years. He began with an extract from his poem “Nun’s Aspiration,” was originally had been entitled “Amita” and had consisted of a rendering into verse of a passage in Miss Mary Moody Emerson’s diary, and then there was this:28 “She is of too high a mind and dignity not only to seek, but almost to wish, the friendship of any creature. They whom she is pleased to choose are such as are of the most eminent condition both for power and employment,- not with any design towards her own particular, either of advantage or curiosity, but her nature values fortunate persons. She prefers the conversation of men to that of women; not but she can talk on the fashions with her female friends, but she is too soon sensible that she can set them as she wills; that pre-eminence shortens all equality. She converses with those who are most distinguished for their conversational powers. Of Love freely will she discourse, listen to all its faults and mark its power: and will take a, deep interest for persons of celebrity.”29 I wish to meet the invitation with which the ladies have honored me by offering them a portrait of real life. It is a representative life, such as could hardly have appeared out of New England; of an age now past, and of which I think no types survive. Perhaps I deceive myself and overestimate its interest. It has to me a value like that which many readers find in Madame Guyon, in Rahel, in Eugénie de Guérin, but it is purely original and hardly admits of a duplicate. Then it is a fruit of Calvinism and New England, and marks the precise time when the power of the old creed yielded to the influence of modern science and humanity. I have found that I could only bring you this portrait by selections from the diary of my heroine, premising a sketch of her time and place. I report some of the thoughts and soliloquies of a country girl, poor, solitary, –‘a goody’ as she called herself,– growing from youth to age amid slender opportunities and usually very humble company. Mary Moody Emerson was born just before the outbreak of the Revolution. When introduced to Lafayette at Portland, she told 28. This would be recycled in an essay entitled “Mary Moody Emerson” in an 1883 Atlantic Monthly. 29. Lucy Percy, Countess of Carlisle, the friend of Strafford and of Pym, as described by Sir Toby Matthews. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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him that she was “in arms” at the Concord Fight. Her father, the minister of Concord, a warm patriot in 1775, went as a chaplain to the American army at Ticonderoga: he carried his infant daughter, before he went, to his mother in Malden and told her to keep the child until he returned. He died at Rutland, Vermont, of army-fever, the next year, and Mary remained at Malden with her grandmother, and, after her death, with her father’s sister, in whose house she grew up, rarely seeing her brothers and sisters in Concord. This aunt and her husband lived on a farm, were getting old, and the husband a shiftless, easy man. There was plenty of work for the little niece to do day by day, and not always bread enough in the house. One of her tasks, it appears, was to watch for the approach of the deputy-sheriff, who might come to confiscate the spoons or arrest the uncle for debt. Later, another aunt, who had become insane, was brought hither to end her days. More and sadder work for this young girl. She had no companions, lived in entire solitude with these old people, very rarely cheered by short visits from her brothers and sisters. Her mother had married again, - married the minister who succeeded her husband in the parish at Concord, [Dr. Ezra Ripley,] and had now a young family growing up around her. Her aunt became strongly attached to Mary, and persuaded the family to give the child up to her as a daughter, on some terms embracing a care of her future interests. She would leave the farm to her by will. This promise was kept; she came into possession of the property many years after, and her dealings with it gave her no small trouble, though they give much piquancy to her letters in after years. Finally it was sold, and its price invested in a share of a farm in Maine, where she lived as a boarder with her sister, for many years. It was in a picturesque country, within sight of the White Mountains, with a little lake in front at the foot of a high hill called Bear Mountain. Not far from the house was a brook running over a granite floor like the Franconia Flume, and noble forests around. Every word she writes about this farm (“Elm Vale,” Waterford,) her dealings and vexations about it, her joys and raptures of religion and Nature, interest like a romance, and to those who may hereafter read her letters, will make its obscure acres amiable. In Malden she lived through all her youth and early womanhood, with the habit of visiting the families of her brothers and sisters on any necessity of theirs. Her good will to serve in time of sickness or of pressure was known to them, and promptly claimed, and her attachment to the youths and maidens growing up in those families was secure for any trait of talent or of character. Her sympathy for young people who pleased her was almost passionate, and was sure to make her arrival in each house a holiday. Her early reading was Milton, Young, Akenside, Samuel Clarke, Jonathan Edwards, and always the BIBLE. Later, Plato, Plotinus, Marcus Antoninus, Stewart, Coleridge, Cousin, Herder, Locke, Madame De Staël, Channing, Mackintosh, Byron. Nobody can read HDT WHAT? INDEX
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in her manuscript, or recall the conversation of old-school people, without seeing that Milton and Young had a religious authority in their mind, and nowise the slight, merely entertaining quality of modern bards. And Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, — how venerable and organic as Nature they are in her mind! What a subject is her mind and life for the finest novel! When I read Dante, the other day, and his paraphrases to signify with more adequateness Christ or Jehovah, whom do you think I was reminded of? Whom but Mary Emerson and her eloquent theology? She had a deep sympathy with genius. When it was unhallowed, as in Byron, she had none the less, whilst she deplored and affected to denounce him. But she adored it when ennobled by character. She liked to notice that the greatest geniuses have died ignorant of their power and influence. She wished you to scorn to shine. “My opinion,” she writes, (is) “that a mind like Byron’s would never be satisfied with modern Unitarianism, that the fiery depths of Calvinism, its high and mysterious elections to eternal bliss, beyond angels, and all its attendant wonders would have alone been fitted to fix his imagination.” Her wit was so fertile, and only used to strike, that she never used it for display, any more than a wasp would parade his sting. It was ever the will and not the phrase that concerned her. Yet certain expressions, when they marked a memorable state of mind in her experience, recurred to her afterwards, and she would vindicate herself as having said to Dr. R—— or Uncle L—— so and so, at such a period of her life. But they were intensely true when first spoken. All her language was happy, but inimitable, unattainable by talent, as if caught from some dream. She calls herself “the puny pilgrim, whose sole talent is sympathy.” “I like that kind of apathy that is a triumph to overset.” She writes to her nephew Charles Emerson, in 1833: - “I could never have adorned the garden. If I had been in aught but dreary deserts, I should have idolized my friends, despised the world and been haughty. I never expected connections and matrimony. My taste was formed in romance, and I knew I was not destined to please. I love God and his creation as I never else could. I scarcely feel the sympathies of this life enough to agitate the pool. This in general, one case or so excepted, and even this is a relation to God through you. ‘T was so in my happiest early days, when you were at my side.” Destitution is the Muse of her genius, - Destitution and Death. I used to propose that her epitaph should be: “Here lies the angel of Death.” And wonderfully as she varies and poetically repeats that image in every page and day, yet not less fondly and sublimely she returns to the other, - the grandeur of humility and privation, as thus; “The chief witness which I have had of a Godlike principle of action and feeling is in the disinterested joy felt in others’ superiority. For the love of superior virtue is mine own gift from God.” “Where were thine own intellect if others had not lived? “ She had many acquaintances among the notables of the time; and HDT WHAT? INDEX
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now and then in her migrations from town to town in Maine and Massachusetts, in search of a new boarding-place, discovered some preacher with sense or piety, or both. For on her arrival at any new home she was likely to steer first to the minister’s house and pray his wife to take a boarder; and as the minister found quickly that she knew all his books and many more, and made shrewd guesses at his character and possibilities, she would easily rouse his curiosity, as a person who could read his secret and tell him his fortune. She delighted in success, in youth, in beauty, in genius, in manners. When she met a young person who interested her, she made herself acquainted and intimate with him or her at once, by sympathy, by flattery, by raillery, by anecdotes, by wit, by rebuke, and stormed the castle. None but was attracted or piqued by her interest and wit and wide acquaintance with books and with eminent names. She said she gave herself full swing in these sudden intimacies, for she knew she should disgust them soon, and resolved to have their best hours. “Society is shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her attentions.” She surprised, attracted, chided and denounced her companion by turns, and pretty rapid turns. But no intelligent youth or maiden could have once met her without remembering her with interest, and learning something of value. Scorn trifles, lift your aims: do what you are afraid to do: sublimity of character must come from sublimity of motive: these were the lessons which were urged with vivacity, in ever new language. But if her companion was dull, her impatience knew no bounds. She tired presently of dull conversations, and asked to be read to, and so disposed of the visitor. If the voice or the reading tired her, she would ask the friend if he or she would do an errand for her, and so dismiss them. If her companion were a little ambitious, and asked her opinions on books or matters on which she did not wish rude hands laid, she did not hesitate to stop the intruder with “How’s your cat, Mrs. Tenner?” “I was disappointed,” she writes, “in finding my little Calvinist no companion, a cold little thing who lives in society alone, and is looked up to as a specimen of genius. I performed a mission in secretly undermining his vanity, or trying to. Alas! never done but by mortifying affliction.” From the country she writes to her sister in town, “You cannot help saying that my epistle is a striking specimen of egotism. To which I can only answer that, in the country, we converse so much more with ourselves, that we are almost led to forget everybody else. The very sound of your bells and the rattling of the carriages have a tendency to divert selfishness.” “This seems a world rather of trying each others’ dispositions than of enjoying each others’ virtues.” She had the misfortune of spinning with a greater velocity than any of the other tops. She would tear into the chaise or out of it, into the house or out of it, into the conversation, into the thought, into the character of the stranger, - disdaining all the graduation by which her fellows time their steps: and though HDT WHAT? INDEX
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she might do very happily in a planet where others moved with the like velocity, she was offended here by the phlegm of all her fellow-creatures, and disgusted them by her impatience. She could keep step with no human being. Her nephew [R. W. E.] wrote of her: “I am glad the friendship with Aunt Mary is ripening. As by seeing a high tragedy, reading a true poem, or a novel like ‘Corinne,’ so, by society with her, one’s mind is electrified and purged. She is no statutebook of practical commandments, nor orderly digest of any system of philosophy, divine or human, but a BIBLE, miscellaneous in its parts, but one in its spirit, wherein are sentences of condemnation, promises and covenants of love that make foolish the wisdom of the world with the power of God.” Our Delphian was fantastic enough, Heaven knows, yet could always be tamed by large and sincere conversation. Was there thought and eloquence she would listen like a child. Her aspiration and prayer would begin, and the whim and petulance in which by diseased habit she had grown to indulge without suspecting it, was burned up in the glow of her pure and poetic spirit, which dearly loved the Infinite. She writes: “August, 1847: Vale. — My oddities were never designed — effect of an uncalculating constitution, at first, then through isolation; and as to dress, from duty. To be singular of choice, without singular talents and virtues, is as ridiculous as ungrateful.” “It is so universal with all classes to avoid contact with me that I blame none. The fact has generally increased piety and self-love.” “As a traveller enters some fine palace and finds all the doors closed, and he only allowed the use of some avenues and passages, so have I wandered from the cradle over the apartments of social affections, or the cabinets of natural or moral philosophy, the recesses of ancient and modern lore. All say — Forbear to enter the pales of the initiated by birth, wealth, talents and patronage. I submit with delight, for it is the echo of a decree from above; and from the highway hedges where I get lodging, and from the rays which burst forth when the crowd are entering these noble saloons, whilst I stand in the doors, I get a pleasing vision which is an earnest of the interminable skies where the mansions are prepared for the poor.” “To live to give pain rather than pleasure (the latter so delicious) seems the spider-like necessity of my being on earth, and I have gone on my queer way with joy, saying, “Shall the clay interrogate?” But in every actual case, ‘t is hard, and we lose sight of the first necessity, — here too amid works red with default in all great and grand and infinite aims. Yet with intentions disinterested, though uncontrolled by proper reverence for others.” When Mrs. Thoreau called on her one day, wearing pink ribbons, she shut her eyes, and so conversed with her for a time. By and by she said, “Mrs. Thoreau, I don’t know whether you have observed that my eyes are shut.” “Yes, Madam, I have observed it.” “Perhaps you would like to know the reasons?” “Yes, I HDT WHAT? INDEX
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should.” “I don’t like to see a person of your age guilty of such levity in her dress.” When her cherished favorite, E. H., was at the Vale, and had gone out to walk in the forest with Hannah, her niece, Aunt Mary feared they were lost, and found a man in the next house and begged him to go and look for them. The man went and returned saying that he could not find them. “Go and cry, ‘Elizabeth!’" The man rather declined this service, as he did not know Miss H. She was highly offended, and exclaimed, “God has given you a voice that you might use it in the service of your fellow- creatures. Go instantly and call ‘Elizabeth’ till you find them.” The man went immediately, and did as he was bid, and having found them apologized for calling thus, by telling what Miss Emerson had said to him. When some ladies of my acquaintance by an unusual chance found themselves in her neighborhood and visited her, I told them that she was no whistle that every mouth could play on, but a quite clannish instrument, a pibroch, for example, from which none but a native Highlander could draw music. In her solitude of twenty years, with fewest books and those only sermons, and a copy of “Paradise Lost,” without covers or title-page, so that later, when she heard much of Milton and sought his work, she found it was her very book which she knew so well, — she was driven to find Nature her companion and solace. She speaks of “her attempts in Malden, to wake up the soul amid the dreary scenes of monotonous Sabbaths, when Nature looked like a pulpit.” “Malden, November 15th, 1805. — What a rich day, so fully occupied in pursuing truth that I scorned to touch a novel which for so many years I have wanted. How insipid is fiction to a mind touched with immortal views! November 16th. — I am so small in my expectations, that a week of industry delights. Rose before light every morn; visited from necessity once, and again for books; read Butler’s Analogy; commented on the Scriptures; read in a little book, — Cicero’s Letters, a few: touched Shakspeare, — washed, carded, cleaned house, and baked. To-day cannot recall an error, nor scarcely a sacrifice, but more fulness of content in the labors of a day never was felt. There is a sweet pleasure in bending to circumstances while superior to them. “Malden, September, 1807. — The rapture of feeling I would part from, for days more devoted to higher discipline. But when Nature beams with such excess of beauty, when the heart thrills with hope in its Author, — feels that it is related to him more than by any ties of Creation, — it exults, too fondly perhaps for a state of trial. But in dead of night, nearer morning, when the eastern stars glow or appear to glow with more indescribable lustre, a lustre which penetrates the spirit with wonder and curiosity, — then, however awed, who can fear? Since Sabbath, Aunt B —— [the insane aunt] was brought here. Ah! mortifying sight! instinct perhaps triumphs over reason, and every dignified respect to herself, in her anxiety about recovery, and HDT WHAT? INDEX
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the smallest means connected. Not one wish of others detains her, not one care. But it alarms me not, I shall delight to return to God. His name my fullest confidence. His sole presence ineffable pleasure. “I walked yesterday five or more miles, lost to mental or heart existence, through fatigue, — just fit for the society I went into, all mildness and the most commonplace virtue. The lady is celebrated for her cleverness, and she was never so good to me. Met a lady in the morning walk, a foreigner, — conversed on the accomplishments of Miss T. My mind expanded with novel and innocent pleasure. Ah! were virtue, and that of dear heavenly meekness attached by any necessity to a lower rank of genteel people, who would sympathize with the exalted with satisfaction? But that is not the case, I believe. A mediocrity does seem to me more distant from eminent virtue than the extremes of station; though after all it must depend on the nature of the heart. A mediocre mind will be deranged in either extreme of wealth or poverty, praise or censure, society or solitude. The feverish lust of notice perhaps in all these cases would injure the heart of common refinement and virtue.” Later she writes of her early days in Malden: “When I get a glimpse of the revolutions of nations — that retribution which seems forever going on in this part of creation, — I remember with great satisfaction that from all the ills suffered, in childhood and since, from others, I felt that it was rather the order of things than their individual fault. It was from being early impressed by my poor unpractical aunt, that Providence and Prayer were all in all. Poor woman! Could her own temper in childhood or age have been subdued, how happy for herself, who had a warm heart; but for me would have prevented those early lessons of fortitude, which her caprices taught me to practise. Had I prospered in life, what a proud, excited being, even to feverishness, I might have been. Loving to shine, flattered and flattering, anxious, and wrapped in others, frail and feverish as myself.” She alludes to the early days of her solitude, sixty years afterward, on her own farm in Maine, speaking sadly the thoughts suggested by the rich autumn landscape around her: “Ah! as I walked out this afternoon, so sad was wearied Nature that I felt her whisper to me, ‘Even these leaves you use to think my better emblems have lost their charm on me too, and I weary of my pilgrimage, — tired that I must again be clothed in the grandeurs of winter, and anon be bedizened in flowers and cascades. Oh, if there be a power superior to me, — and that there is, my own dread fetters proclaim, — when will He let my lights go out, my tides cease to an eternal ebb? Oh for transformation! I am not infinite, nor have I power or will, but bound and imprisoned, the tool of mind, even of the beings I feed and adorn. Vital, I feel not: not active, but passive, and cannot aid the creatures which seem my progeny, - myself. But you are ingrate to tire of me, now you want to look beyond. ‘T was I who soothed your thorny childhood, though you knew me not, and you were placed in my HDT WHAT? INDEX
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most leafless waste. Yet I comforted thee when going on the daily errand, fed thee with my mallows, on the first young day of bread failing. More, I led thee when thou knewest not a syllable of my active Cause, (any more than if it had been dead eternal matter,) to that Cause; and from the solitary heart taught thee to say, at first womanhood, Alive with God is enough, — ‘t is rapture.’" “This morning rich in existence; the remembrance of past destitution in the deep poverty of my aunt, and her most unhappy temper; of bitterer days of youth and age, when my senses and understanding seemed but means of labor, or to learn my own unpopular destiny, and that — but no more; — joy, hope and resignation unite me to Him whose mysterious Will adjusts everything, and the darkest and lightest are alike welcome. Oh! could this state of mind continue, death would not be longed for.” “I felt, till above twenty years old, as though Christianity were as necessary to the world as existence; — was ignorant that it was lately promulged, or partially received.” Later: “Could I have those hours in which in fresh youth I said, To obey God is joy, though there were no hereafter, I should rejoice, though returning to dust.” “Folly follows me as the shadow does the form. Yet my whole life devoted to find some new truth which will link me closer to God. And the simple principle which made me say, in youth and laborious poverty, that, should He make me a blot on the fair face of his Creation, I should rejoice in His will, has never been equalled, though it returns in the long life of destitution like an Angel. I end days of fine health and cheerfulness without getting upward now. How did I use to think them lost! If more liberal views of the divine government make me think nothing lost which carries me to His now hidden presence, there may be danger of losing and causing others the loss of that awe and sobriety so indispensable.” She was addressed and offered marriage by a man of talents, education and good social position, whom she respected. The proposal gave her pause and much to think, but after consideration she refused it, I know not on what grounds: but a few allusions to it in her diary suggest that it was a religious act, and it is easy to see that she could hardly promise herself sympathy in her religious abandonment with any but a rarely- found partner. “1807. Jan. 19, Malden [alluding to the sale of her farm]. Last night I spoke two sentences about that foolish place, which I most bitterly lament, — not because they were improper, but they arose from anger. It is difficult, when we have no kind of barrier, to command our feelings. But this shall teach me. It humbles me beyond anything I have met, to find myself for a moment affected with hope, fear, or especially anger, about interest. But I did overcome and return kindness for the repeated provocations. What is it? My uncle has been the means of lessening my property. Ridiculous to wound him for that. He was honestly seeking his own. But at last, this very night, the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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bargain is closed, and I am delighted with myself: — my dear self has done well. Never did I so exult in a trifle. Happy beginning of my bargain, though the sale of the place appears to me one of the worst things for me at this time.” “Jan. 21. Weary at times of objects so tedious to hear and see. O the power of vision, then the delicate power of the nerve which receives impressions from sounds! If ever I am blest with a social life, let the accent be grateful. Could I at times be regaled with music, it would remind me that there are sounds. Shut up in this severe weather with careful, infirm, afflicted age, it is wonderful, my spirits: hopes I can have none. Not a prospect but is dark on earth, as to knowledge and joy from externals: but the prospect of a dying bed reflects lustre on all the rest. “The evening is fine, but I dare not enjoy it. The moon and stars reproach me, because I had to do with mean fools. Should I take so mach care to save a few dollars? Never was I so much ashamed. Did I say with what rapture I might dispose of them to the poor? Pho! self-preservation, dignity, confidence in the future, contempt of trifles! Alas, I am disgraced. Took a momentary revenge on for worrying me.” “Jan. 30. I walked to Captain Dexter’s. Sick. Promised never to put that ring on. Ended miserably the month which began so worldly. “It was the choice of the Eternal that gave the glowing seraph his joys, and to me my vile imprisonment. I adore Him. It was His will that gives my superiors to shine in wisdom, friendship, and ardent pursuits, while I pass my youth, its last traces, in the veriest shades of ignorance and complete destitution of society. I praise Him, though when my strength of body falters, it is a trial not easily described.” “True, I must finger the very farthing candle-ends, — the duty assigned to my pride; and indeed so poor are some of those allotted to join me on the weary needy path, that ‘t is benevolence enjoins self-denial. Could I but dare it in the bread-and-water diet! Could I but live free from calculation, as in the first half of life, when my poor aunt lived. I had ten dollars a year for clothes and charity, and I never remember to have been needy, though I never had but two or three aids in those six years of earning my home. That ten dollars my dear father earned, and one hundred dollars remain, and I can’t bear to take it, and don’t know what to do. Yet I would not breathe to or my want. ‘T is only now that I would not let pay my hotel- bill. They have enough to do. Besides, it would send me packing to depend for anything. Better anything than dishonest dependence, which robs the poorer, and despoils friendship of equal connection.” In 1830, in one of her distant homes, she reproaches herself with some sudden passion she has for visiting her old home and friends in the city, where she had lived for a while with her brother [Mr. Emerson’s father] and afterwards with his widow. “Do I yearn to be in Boston? ‘T would fatigue, disappoint; I, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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who have so long despised means, who have always found it a sort of rebellion to seek them? Yet the old desire for the worm is not so greedy as [mine] to find myself in my old haunts.” 1833. “The difficulty of getting places of low board for a lady, is obvious. And, at moments, I am tired out. Yet how independent, how better than to hang on friends! And sometimes I fancy that I am emptied and peeled to carry some seed to the ignorant, which no idler wind can so well dispense.” “Hard to contend for a health which is daily used in petition for a final close.” “Am I, poor victim, swept on through the sternest ordinations of nature’s laws which slay? yet I’ll trust.” “There was great truth in what a pious enthusiast said, that, if God should cast him into hell, he would yet clasp his hands around Him.” “Newburyport, Sept. 1822. High, solemn, entrancing noon, prophetic of the approach of the Presiding Spirit of Autumn. God preserve my reason! Alone, feeling strongly, fully, that I have deserved nothing; according to Adam Smith’s idea of society, ‘done nothing;’ doing nothing, never expect to; yet joying in existence, perhaps striving to beautify one individual of God’s creation. “Our civilization is not always mending our poetry. It is sauced and spiced with our complexity of arts and inventions, but lacks somewhat of the grandeur that belongs to a Doric and unphilosophical age. In a religious contemplative public it would have less outward variety, but simpler and grander means; a few pulsations of created beings, a few successions of acts, a few lamps held out in the firmament enable us to talk of Time, make epochs, write histories, — to do more, — to date the revelations of God to man. But these lamps are held to measure out some of the moments of eternity, to divide the history of God’s operations in the birth and death of nations, of worlds. It is a goodly name for our notions of breathing, suffering, enjoying, acting. We personify it. We call it by every name of fleeting, dreaming, vaporing imagery. Yet it is nothing. We exist in eternity. Dissolve the body and the night is gone, the stars are extinguished, and we measure duration by the number of our thoughts, by the activity of reason, the discovery of truths, the acquirement of virtue, the approach to God. And the gray-headed god throws his shadows all around, and his slaves catch, now at this, now at that, one at the halo he-throws around poetry, or pebbles, bags, or bubbles. Sometimes they climb, sometimes creep into the meanest holes — but they are all alike in vanishing, like the shadow of a cloud.” To her nephew Charles: “War; what do I think of it? Why in your ear I think it so much better than oppression that if it were ravaging the whole geography of despotism it would be an omen of high and glorious import. Channing paints its miseries, but does he know those of a worse war, — private animosities, pinching, bitter warfare of the human heart, the cruel oppression of the poor by the rich, which corrupts old worlds? How much better, more honest, are storming and conflagration of towns! They are but letting blood which corrupts into worms and HDT WHAT? INDEX
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dragons. A war-trump would be harmony to the jars of theologians and statesmen such as the papers bring. It was the glory of the Chosen People, nay, it is said there was war in Heaven. War is among the means of discipline, the rough meliorators, and no worse than the strife with poverty, malice and ignorance. War devastates the conscience of men, yet corrupt peace does not less. And if you tell me of the miseries of the battle-field, with the sensitive Charming, (of whose love of life I am ashamed), what of a few days of agony, what of a vulture being the bier, tomb and parson of a hero, compared to the long years of sticking on a bed and wished away? For the widows and orphans — Oh, I could give facts of the long-drawn years of imprisoned minds and hearts, which uneducated orphans endure! “O Time! Thou loiterer. Thou, whose might has laid low the vastest and crushed the worm, restest on thy hoary throne, with like potency over thy agitations and thy graves. When will thy routines give way to higher and lasting institutions? When thy trophies and thy name and all its wizard forms be lost in the Genius of Eternity? In Eternity, no deceitful promises, no fantastic illusions, no riddles concealed by thy shrouds, none of thy Arachnean webs, which decoy and destroy. Hasten to finish thy motley work, on which frightful Gorgons are at play, spite of holy ghosts. ‘T is already moth-eaten and its shuttles quaver, as the beams of the loom are shaken. “Sat. 25. Hail requiem of departed Time! Never was incumbent’s funeral followed by expectant heir with more satisfaction. Yet not his hope is mine. For in the weary womb are prolific numbers of the same sad hour, colored by the memory of defeats in virtue, by the prophecy of others, more dreary, blind and sickly. Yet He who formed thy web, who stretched thy warp from long ages, has graciously given man to throw his shuttle, or feel he does, and irradiate the filling woof with many a flowery rainbow, — labors, rather — evanescent efforts, which will wear like flowerets in brighter soils; — has attuned his mind in such unison with the harp of the universe, that he is never without some chord of hope’s music. ‘T is not in the nature of existence, while there is a God, to be without the pale of excitement. When the dreamy pages of life seem all turned and folded down to very weariness, even this idea of those who fill the hour with crowded virtues, lifts the spectator to other worlds, and he adores the eternal purposes of Him who lifteth up and casteth down, bringeth to dust, and raiseth to the skies. ‘T is a strange deficiency in Henry Peter Brougham’s title of a System of Natural Theology, when the moral constitution of the being for whom these contrivances were made is not recognized. The wonderful inhabitant of the building to which unknown ages were the mechanics, is left out as to that part where the Creator had put his own lighted candle, placed a vicegerent. Not to complain of the poor old earth’s chaotic state, brought so near in its long and gloomy transmutings by the geologist. Yet its youthful charms as decked by the hand of Moses’ Cosmogony, will linger about the heart, while Poetry succumbs to Science. Yet there is HDT WHAT? INDEX
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a sombre music in the whirl of times so long gone by. And the bare bones of this poor embryo earth may give the idea of the Infinite far, far better than when dignified with arts and industry: — its oceans, when beating the symbols of ceaseless ages, than when covered with cargoes of wax and oppression. How grand its preparation for souls, — souls who were to feel the Divinity, before Science had dissected the emotions, and applied its steely analysis to that state of being which recognizes neither psychology nor element. “September, 1836. Vale. The mystic dream which is shed over the season. O, to dream more deeply; to lose external objects a little more! Yet the hold on them is so slight, that duty is lost sight of perhaps, at times. Sadness is better than walking talking acting somnambulism. Yes, this entire solitude with the Being who makes the powers of life! Even Fame, which lives in other states of Virtue, palls. Usefulness, if it requires action, seems less like existence than the desire of being absorbed in God, retaining consciousness. Number the waste- places of the journey, — the secret martyrdom of youth, heavier than the stake, I thought, the narrow limits which know no outlet, the bitter dregs of the cup, — and all are sweetened by the purpose of Him I love. The idea of being no mate for those intellectualists I’ve loved to admire, is no pain. Hereafter the same solitary joy will go with me, were I not to live, as I expect, in the vision of the Infinite. Never do the feelings of the Infinite, and the consciousness of finite frailty and ignorance, harmonize so well as at this mystic season in the deserts of life. Contradictions, the modern German says, of the Infinite and finite.” I sometimes fancy I detect in her writings, a certain — shall I say — polite and courtly homage to the name and dignity of Jesus, not at all spontaneous, but growing out of her respect to the Revelation, and really veiling and betraying her organic dislike to any interference, any mediation between her and the Author of her being, assurance of whose direct dealing with her she incessantly invokes: for example, the parenthesis “Saving thy presence, Priest and Medium of all this approach for a sinful creature!” “Were it possible that the Creator was not virtually present with the spirits and bodies which lie has made: — if it were in the nature of things possible He could withdraw himself, — I would hold on to the faith, that, at some moment of His existence, I was present: that, though cast from Him, my sorrows, my ignorance and meanness were a part of His plan; my death, too, however long and tediously delayed to prayer, — was decreed, was fixed. Oh how weary in youth — more so scarcely now, not whenever I can breathe, as it seems, the atmosphere of the Omnipresence: then I ask not faith nor knowledge; honors, pleasures, labors, I always refuse, compared to this divine partaking of existence; — but how rare, how dependent on the organs through which the soul operates! The sickness of the last week was fine medicine; pain disintegrated the spirit, or became spiritual. I rose, — I felt HDT WHAT? INDEX
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that I had given to God more perhaps than an angel could, — had promised Him in youth that to be a blot on this fair world, at His command, would be acceptable. Constantly offer myself to continue the obscurest and loneliest thing ever heard of, with one proviso, — His agency. Yes, love Thee, and all Thou dost, while Thou sheddest frost and darkness on every path of mine.” For years she had her bed made in the form of a coffin; and delighted herself with the discovery of the figure of a coffin made every evening on their sidewalk, by the shadow of a church tower which adjoined the house. Saladin caused his shroud to be made, and carried it to battle as his standard. She made up her shroud, and death still refusing to come, and she thinking it a pity to let it lie idle, wore it as a night-gown, or a day-gown, nay, went out to ride in it, on horseback, in her mountain roads, until it was worn out. Then she had another made up, and as she never travelled without being provided for this dear and indispensable contingency, I believe she wore out a great many. “1833. I have given up, the last year or two, the hope of dying. In the lowest ebb of health nothing is ominous; diet and exercise restore. So it seems best to get that very humbling business of insurance. I enter my dear sixty the last of this month.” “1835, June 16. Tedious indisposition: —hoped, as it took a new form, it would open the cool, sweet grave. Now existence itself in any form is sweet. Away with knowledge; — God alone. He communicates this our condition and humble waiting, or I should never perceive Him. Science, Nature, — O, I’ve yearned to open some page; — not now, too late. Ill health and nerves. O dear worms, — how they will at some sure time take down this tedious tabernacle, most valuable companions, instructors in the science of mind, by gnawing away the meshes which have chained it. A very Beatrice in showing the Paradise. Yes, I irk under contact with forms of depravity, while I am resigned to being nothing, never expect a palm, a laurel, hereafter.” “1826, July. If one could choose, and without crime be gibbeted, — were it not altogether better than the long drooping away by age without mentality or devotion? The vulture and crow would caw caw, and, unconscious of any deformity in the mutilated body, would relish their meal, make no grimace of affected sympathy, nor suffer any real compassion. I pray to die, though happier myriads and mine own companions press nearer to the throne. His coldest beam will purify and render me forever holy. Had I the highest place of acquisition and diffusing virtue here, the principle of human sympathy would be too strong for that rapt emotion, that severe delight which I crave; nay for that kind of obscure virtue which is so rich to lay at the feet of the Author of morality. Those economists (Adam Smith) who say nothing is added to the wealth of a nation but what is dug out of the earth, and that, whatever disposition of virtue may exist, unless something is done for society, deserves no fame, — why I am content with such paradoxical kind of facts; but one secret sentiment of virtue, disinterested (or perhaps not), is HDT WHAT? INDEX
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worthy, and will tell, in the world of spirits, of God’s immediate presence, more than the blood of many a martyr who has it not.” “I have heard that the greatest geniuses have died ignorant of their power and influence on the arts and sciences. I believe thus much, that their large perception consumed their egotism, or made it impossible for them to make small calculations.” “That greatest of all gifts, however small my power of receiving, — the capacity, the element to love the All-perfect, without regard to personal happiness: — happiness? — ‘t is itself.” She checks herself amid her passionate prayers for immediate communion with God; — “I who never made a sacrifice to record, — I cowering in the nest of quiet for so many years; — I indulge the delight of sympathizing with great virtues, — blessing their Original: Have I this right?” “While I am sympathizing in the government of God over the world, perhaps I lose nearer views. Well, I learned his existence a priori. No object of science or observation ever was pointed out to me by my poor aunt, but His Being and commands; and oh how much I trusted Him with every event till I learned the order of human events from the pressure of wants.” “What a timid, ungrateful creature! Fear the deepest pit-falls of age, when pressing on, in imagination at least, to Him with whom a day is a thousand years, — with whom all miseries and irregularities are conforming to universal good! Shame on me who have learned within three years to sit whole days in peace and enjoyment without the least apparent benefit to any, or knowledge to myself; — resigned, too, to the memory of long years of slavery passed in labor and ignorance, to the loss of that character which I once thought and felt so sure of, without ever being conscious of acting from calculation.” Her friends used to say to her, “I wish you joy of the worm.” And when at last her release arrived, the event of her death had really such a comic tinge in the eyes of every one who knew her, that her friends feared they might, at her funeral, not dare to look at each other, lest they should forget the serious proprieties of the hour. She gave high counsels. It was the privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard indicated to their childhood; a blessing which nothing else in education could supply. It is frivolous to ask, — And was she ever a Christian in practice?” Cassandra uttered, to a frivolous, skeptical time, the arcana of the Gods: but it is easy to believe that Cassandra domesticated in a lady’s house would have proved a troublesome boarder. Is it the less desirable to have the lofty abstractions because the abstractionist is nervous and irritable? Shall we not keep Flamsteed and Herschel in the observatory, though it should even be proved that they neglected to rectify their own kitchen clock? It is essential to the safety of every mackerel fisher that latitudes and longitudes should be astronomically ascertained; and so every banker, shopkeeper and wood-sawyer has a stake in the elevation of the moral code by saint and prophet. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Very rightly, then, the Christian ages, proceeding on a grand instinct, have said: Faith alone, Faith alone.
“NUN’S ASPIRATION”30 The yesterday doth never smile, To-day goes drudging through the while, Yet in the name of Godhead, I The morrow front and can defy; Though I am weak, yet God, when prayed, Cannot withhold his conquering aid. Ah me! it was my childhood's thought, If He should make my web a blot On life's fair picture of delight, My heart's content would find it right. But O, these waves and leaves, — When happy, stoic Nature grieves, — No human speech so beautiful As their murmurs mine to lull. On this altar God hath built I lay my vanity and guilt; Nor me can Hope or Passion urge, Hearing as now the lofty dirge Which blasts of Northern mountains hymn; Nature's funeral high and dim, — Sable pageantry of clouds, Mourning summer laid in shrouds. Many a day shall dawn and die, Many an angel wander by, And passing, light my sunken turf, Moist perhaps by ocean surf, Forgotten amid splendid tombs, Yet wreathed and hid by summer blooms On earth I dream; — I die to be: Time! shake not thy bald head at me. I challenge thee to hurry past, Or for my turn to fly too fast.
30. This was originally entitled “Amita” and consisted of Waldo Emerson’s rendering into verse of a passage in Miss Mary Moody Emerson’s diary. Part of the poem was read in advance of the “Amita” paper the nephew presented at this 1869 meeting of the Woman’s Club in Boston. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1872
July 24, Wednesday: From the roof of the burning Emerson home, Ephraim Bull, Jr., the son of Ephraim Wales Bull who had lost an arm in the Civil War, directed the firefighting as a number of volunteers pitched books and belongings out of windows into the yard where the Emersons were standing in their nightgowns, and carried them off to safety. Although the house would be lost, almost all possessions including the books and papers would be salvaged. (Among the items which would appear to have been lost, however, was the 1862 photograph of Mary Moody Emerson, the only one that had ever been taken.) Waldo Emerson to his journal:
House burned.
(One of the maids of the household had been rooting around in a trunk in the attic at 2AM, using a candle for light.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1947
The Concord Free Public Library acquired Newell Convers Wyeth’s “Thoreau and Miss Mary Emerson” and “Johnny and His Woodchuck-Skin Cap.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1976
Moller, Mary Elkins. “Thoreau, Womankind, and Sexuality.” ESQ 22 (1976): 123-48 HOMOSEXUALITY HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
FIRST REVIEW: In this article Moller analyzes Henry Thoreau’s attitudes toward women andFIRST his REVIEW own: Insexuality. this article She identifies Moller analyzes two popular HENRY opinions THOREAU regarding ’s attitudes this subject: toward womenthat Thoreauand his was own “a sexuality. woman-hater, She andidentifies that his two feeling popular about opinions sex was regarding consistently this subject:negative.” that Moller, Thoreau however, was “a woman-hater,recognizes aand “functional that his feelingdistinction” about sexbetween was consistentlyThoreau’s view negative.” of women inMoller, general however, and his viewrecognizes of sexuality a “functional and proceeds distinction” to prove betweenthe “striking Thoreau’s contradictions” view of women — thein “frequentgeneral and ambivalence” his view of — sexualityexisting betweenand proceeds them. to prove the “striking contradictions” — the “frequent ambivalence” — existing betweenThoreau’s them. relationships with the members of his own family, reveal that “there is little in what is known ... which would have disposed him to serious or chronic Thoreau’smisogyny.” relationships He had a good with relationship the members withof his his own active family, mother reveal [ Cynthiathat “there Dunbar is littleThoreau ],in whata close is knownrelationship ... which with would his haveolder disposed sister Helenhim to Louisa serious Thoreau or chronic, and misogyny.”after Helen’s Hedeath, had an aincreasingly good relationship strong relationship with withhis hisactive other sistermother CYNTHIA DUNBAR THOREAU [Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau ],. Anda althoughclose therelationship death of hiswith brother his John older Thoreau, sister Jr. madeHELEN the L OUISAfamily THOREAU “quite lopsidedly, and after female,” Helen’s Thoreau’s death, “escapes” an increasinglyinto the countryside strong relationshipare balanced bywith his his desired other returnssister toS OPHIAthe E.Concord THOREAU home. . And although the death of his brother JOHN THOREAU, JR. made the family “quite lopsidedly female,” Thoreau’sDuring the “escapes” years 1837-1842, into the countrysidehis “impressionable are balanced years,” by hisseveral desired women returns evoked to theThoreau’s CONCORD response. home. Among these is Margaret Fuller, the intelligent, strong-willed editor of THE DIAL, with whom he maintained a constant though never intimate friendship.During the yearsIn contrast 1837-1842, to hishis admiration“impressionable of Margaret, years,” Thoreauseveral revealedwomen evoked his impatienceThoreau’s response.with the lecturerAmong these Mrs. Elizabethis MARGARET Oakes FULLER Smith, , whosethe intelligent, “flirtatiousness strong- or THE DIAL frivolity”willed editor annoyed of him. Thoreau , with included whom heseveral maintained “exasperated a constant outbursts” though innever his JintimateOURNAL as friendship. he reacted In against contrast the to stereotypical his admiration “ideal of Margaret, woman”: Thoreauthe woman revealed whose hispriority impatience was “to with be asthe pretty lecturer and charmingMRS. ELIZABETH as possible, O. SMITH and , aswhose pliant, “flirtatiousness and helpless oras necessary,frivolity” inannoyed order him.to attract Thoreau the included admiration several of men.” “exasperated While he outbursts”condemned women’s in his J“slavery”OURNAL as tohe fashion reacted and against to the theidea stereotypical of marriage, he“ideal praised woman”: Waldo theEmerson woman’s whoseaunt, Marypriority Moody was Emerson “to be, as for pretty her andwisdom charming and clear as possible, thinking. and Thoreau as pliant, also and maintained helpless aspositive necessary, relationships in order to with attract other the women admiration in the ofConcord men.” Whilecommunity, he condemned women suchwomen’s as “slavery”Emerson’s daughtersto fashion [ Ellenand toEmerson the ideaand Edithof marriage, Emerson ],he Sophiapraised Peabody Emerson’s Hawthorne aunt,, Mrs.MARY Mary MOODY Peabody EMERSON Mann,, for etc. her wisdom and clear thinking. Thoreau also maintained positive relationships with other women in the Concord community, women such as However,Emerson’s there weredaughters four women [to EwhomLLEN EThoreauMERSON was attractedand romanticallyEDITH EMERSON during ], 1837-1845.SOPHIA PEABODY The HAWTHORNEfirst was, Mrs.MRS . LucyHORACE Jackson MANN , Brownetc., Mrs. Lidian Emerson’s elder sister. Although she was twenty years older than he, Thoreau revealed a “half younger-brotherlyHowever, there were and four half women lover-like” to whom Thoreauaffection was for attracted her. It romanticallywas Ellen Devereux during Sewall,1837-1845. however, The first to whom was ThoreauMRS . LeventuallyUCY JACKSON Bproposed.ROWN , Mrs.During aL IDIANvisit EMERSON with her ’s grandmotherelder sister. then Although living she with was the twenty Thoreaus, years Ellenolder sparkedthan he, the Thoreau interest revealed of both a “half John andyounger-brotherly Henry. Later, afterand Johnhalf had lover-like”proposed to Ellen,affection been initiallyfor her. accepted It thenwas rejected,ELLEN D EVEREUXHenry SaskedEWALL for, however,her hand toin whommarriage Thoreau but eventually was also proposed.refused. ThisDuring was a Thoreau’svisit with “closest her grandmother brush with then matrimony.” living withHis thirdthe Thoreaus,romantic encounterEllen sparked was withthe Maryinterest Ellen of Russell,both John a andyoung Henry. friend Later, of the after Emersons John hadwho proposedsometimes to acted Ellen, as beenthe children’sinitially accepted governess. then While rejected, both sheHenry and asked Thoreau for herwere hand living in marriagein the Emerson but was home, also theyrefused. developed This wasa strong Thoreau’s mutual “closest attraction. brush with matrimony.” His third romantic encounter was with MARY RUSSELL , a young friend of the Emersons who sometimes Butacted it as was the Mrs. children’s Lidian Emersongoverness. for Whilewhom Thoreauboth she probably and Thoreau maintained were living the longestin the sustainedEmerson home, admiration they developed and attraction. a strong Gettingmutual attraction.to know Lydia during his residences in the Emerson home, Thoreau wrote letters to her that were often intimate in tone, althoughBut it was there M isRS . noLIDIAN evidence “ASIA” J“thatACKSON any EMERSON physical for intimacy whom Thoreau ever tookprobably place.” maintained Thoreau realizedthe longest Lydian sustained was “ultimately admiration inaccessible” and attraction. and eventuallyGetting to decidedknow Lydia he wouldduring never his residences in the Emerson home, Thoreau wrote letters to her that were often intimate in tone, although there is no evidence “that any physical intimacy ever took place.” Thoreau realized Lydian was “ultimately inaccessible” and eventually HDT WHAT? 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marry. This decision did not seem to be based solely on the fact that he could not marry the woman he loved or on some critics’ assumption that he was not capable of propagation. Indeed, Thoreau appeared to be “an extraordinarily sensuous man” who had “by no means lost all interest in sexual love.” His view of love and marriage, however, seemed to be ambivalent. While taking offense at Channing’s vulgar allusions to sex, Henry Thoreau often maintained a seemingly “puritanical” attitude: he expressed “diffidence and shame” regarding his thoughts in the piece “Chastity and Sensuality” and in a journal entry expressed “disgust” toward his own body with its sexual desires. Nevertheless, Thoreau at times wrote idealistically of the “passionate love between men and women,” revealing “his own yearning for a mate.” And in many different passages Thoreau used “erotically suggestive imagery” or “sex-related figures of speech.” Clearly Thoreau was not “hostile” to the idea of sexual love but “acknowledged his own sexuality, and that of every other man and woman, as a valued part of his and their emotional nature and thus at the core of a sympathetic relatedness to all other human beings.” [Janet B. Ergino (Sommers), May 1989] HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
SECOND REVIEW: A long article the sole purpose of which seems to be to prove that Thoreau was heterosexual, had sexual attractions to several women (we know which ones), and perhaps was actually sexually active. Moller makes a distinction between Thoreau’s general attitude toward women and his feelings for specific women. She points out his idealization of women and contrasts it with the way he felt about young, non-intellectual women. “What Thoreau reacted against was a traditional stereotype of ideal womanhood: the assumption that the first business of any girl or woman is to be as pretty and charming as possible” to attract a mate and that intellect and independence are dangerous. She then cites several journal passages which are critical of women’s frivolity and explores Thoreau’s feelings toward older, intellectual women, such as Mary Moody Emerson and Mrs. Lidian Emerson. Moller discounts homosexual tendencies that Thoreau might have had with a cursory look at his poem “Sympathy” (the “gentle boy” poem). She calls his attraction to Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr. “a fleeting emotional complication.” She does not however mention any journal passages from that time which are also homoerotic and celebrate masculinity. She cites four passages that illustrate Thoreau’s feelings for Ellen Devereux Sewall at that time, though she admits that by the time he proposed to her he probably wasn’t seriously interested. She, of course, spends a lot of time on the relationship with Lidian Emerson and points out the passionate letters. She contrasts the letters from Staten Island to later letters which treat Lidian as a sister. Finally Moller discusses “Love” and “Chastity and Sensuality.” Her conclusion is that Thoreau meant “control” when he said “chastity” and not “celibacy.” She asserts that sexual love was not necessarily taboo for Thoreau unless it was outside of a truly affectionate and highly intellectual relationship. She suggests that Thoreau may have been sexually active himself, though he probably was limited to wet dreams and masturbation. The point of all this sex talk, of course, is to find out what Thoreau’s sexuality had to do with his writing and his views of women, ideas of purity, etc. Moller doesn’t discuss Thoreau’s asceticism at all and largely ignores his feelings toward men and the sexuality that may have been behind it. The article seems to be a justification of Thoreau as a lover of women and not a misogynist. [James J. Berg, May 8, 1989] HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1986
Leverenz, David. “The Politics of Emerson’s Man-Making Words,” PMLA 101 (1986), 38-56. “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
Starts out with an anecdote about a professor who tried to write a book about Emerson and never got it finished. Jonathan Bishop: “There is something at the heart of Emerson’s message profoundly recalcitrant to the formulations of the discursive intelligence. Emerson wrote to Thomas Carlyle in 1838: “Here I sit & read & write with very little system, & as far as regards composition with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible each sentence an infinitely repellent particle” (CORRESPONDENCE 185). Also picks up on Harold Bloom (Yale) and Woody Hayes (Ohio State) both tooling around the country talking about how Emerson is their spiritual leader, and gives them (us?) “access to manly power” (38). The main argument begins with the early essays (“Self-Reliance” etc.), where the word “man” should not be seen as inclusive. Emerson’s modern, democratic, individualized “man” is not king, and he is also not a woman — several JOURNAL passages emphasize that. Power should be in the man’s mind, not in government or property. The second section points to Emerson’s proposal that a “new cultural elite” should run things, and that you don’t have to be rich to get into that crowd. There’s a bit on how Waldo Emerson resented his minister father, the Reverend William Emerson, who favored Waldo’s brothers — Mary Moody Emerson helped him get free of his father. He developed an “evangelical political fantasy” (46) that the Smart People would have to counter more obviously powerful groups who were taking over the frontier — this matches typical New England fantasies. It also picks up on general social changes between 1825 and 1850, where shopkeeping and the Boston brahmins were replaced by managers and professionals. These new men took over. [cf. EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS for a similar history of these years. People simply stopped asking Adamses to be president.] The third section deals with Emerson’s later sense of powerlessness, in contrast to “The nonchalance of boys who are sure of dinner” (“Self-Reliance”). Several biographers blamed Emerson’s “inhibited” mother for his depressive strategy and emotional withdrawal. (Ruth Haskins Emerson died in 1853.) Leverenz dislikes the evasiveness of “Experience,” not just Emerson’s inability to deal with his son’s death, but his “impersonal geometry” (52): “Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point” (“Experience”). The general conclusion is that Emerson’s obsession with power masks rivalry, fears of failure, and a shifting society that he could not control — “alienated liberalism” (53).
[DR 5/89] HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1998
Cole, Phyllis. MARY MOODY EMERSON AND THE ORIGINS OF TRANSCENDENTALISM: A FAMILY HISTORY. NY: Oxford UP, 1998
The following review is by Nancy Crabb
EMERSON’S AUNT PLAYED CRUCIAL ROLE IN HIS WRITING PHILADELPHIA — Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the fathers of American literature, freely borrowed words and ideas from the aunt who raised him, and used them as his own, a Penn State professor reveals in a new book. In MARY MOODY EMERSON AND THE ORIGINS OF TRANSCENDENTALISM, author Phyllis Cole brings Emerson’s oft-described “eccentric aunt” to the center of American literature and demonstrates through painstaking research the crucial role she played in her nephew’s intellectual thinking and published writings. The book, which consumed Cole’s energies for 17 years, has been heralded by scholars nationwide. “Mary has largely been dismissed by generations of Emerson scholars as little more than the beloved but quirky aunt of Ralph Waldo,” says Cole, an associate professor of English at Penn State Delaware County in suburban Philadelphia. “But my research shows she is far more than that. And though Ralph Waldo Emerson HDT WHAT? INDEX
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struggled throughout his life to say what his aunt meant to him –she was always on his mind– he only told half the story. The truth is that he copied her letters and diary into his own journal, and used them later as a source for his published writing.” Cole researched the book at Harvard University, where Mary Moody Emerson’s letters to her nephew are kept, and discovered her long-lost diary in an uncataloged box. In that diary, she soon found evidence of Mary’s role as a primary source of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Transcendentalism.” Previous scholarship largely credits Boston Unitarianism and English Romanticism as his likely inspiration, but Cole found that Mary actually introduced her nephew to both of those traditions. The Penn State scholar describes Ralph Waldo’s “borrowing” of his aunt’s writings in detail, a habit he continued through most of his life. At the age of 18, she writes, he began copying her whole letters into his journals; he begged and transcribed her personal journal as much as she would allow. Years later, he filled a thick notebook, titled “MME,” with passages from her letters and three more with excerpts from her diary. In 1837, at the early height of his career, Ralph Waldo recorded Mary’s name in his journal as first among his seven most vital “benefactors,” but wrote that he would rather take gifts of thought from others “as we take apples off a tree without any thanks.” Published by Oxford University Press, MARY MOODY EMERSON AND THE ORIGINS OF TRANSCENDENTALISM is foremost a book about Mary’s own historical standing as a writer, thinker, spiritual seeker and self-reliant, self-creating woman. In the book’s more than 300 pages, Cole introduces a self-taught, strikingly independent woman who read poetry and philosophy a full generation before her nephew — for her own sake, rather than his. “She was an isolated person by choice,” says Cole, “but her independence and her capacity for joy are absolutely wonderful. I most admire the sheer fervor of her spirit and her genius with words, even though she lacked a formal education.” In recent years, a number of scholars have revealed the unspoken contributions that women have made to some of the world’s most famous writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald (Zelda), William Wordsworth (Dorothy) and James Joyce (Nora). In the book’s introduction, Cole writes of this trend: “Through correspondence with her nephew Waldo, however, Mary became a direct source of Transcendentalism. Just as William Wordsworth wrote some of the founding texts of British Romanticism through silent partnership with his diary writing sister Dorothy, so Ralph Waldo Emerson appropriated and assimilated his aunt’s language from youth through old age.” The Penn State scholar believes Mary’s contributions surpass those of Dorothy, Zelda and Nora. “Mary seems to me to be the most amazing of all of them, because of the reading and writing she did,” Cole says. “She told Ralph Waldo what books to read, and he did. She was a whole generation ahead of him, and that HDT WHAT? INDEX
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put her in a different framework than a wife or sister, because she really mentored him.” Cole’s research on Mary Moody Emerson was supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Women’s Studies in Religion Program of Harvard Divinity School.
The following review is by Millie Jackson:
Phyllis Cole. MARY MOODY EMERSON AND THE ORIGINS OF TRANSCENDENTALISM: A FAMILY HISTORY. NY: Oxford UP, 1998 Reviewed for H-PCAACA by Millie Jackson, Grand Valley State University This review is copyrighted (c) 1998 by H-Net and the Popular Culture and the American Culture Associations. It may be reproduced electronically for educational or scholarly use. The Associations reserve print rights and permissions. (Contact: P.C. Rollins at the following electronic address: [email protected])
Phyllis Cole provides a compelling portrait of Mary Moody Emerson (1774-1863) and her influence on the entire Emerson family. In MARY MOODY EMERSON AND THE ORIGINS OF TRANSCENDENTALISM: A FAMILY HISTORY, Cole traces Mary Moody Emerson’s life from her childhood to her death by analyzing her relationships, her intellectual life, and her contributions to New England Renaissance. Cole writes that Mary Moody Emerson’s “language of solitude, nature, and imagination directly nurtured the more renowned generation that followed hers” (page 8). Emerson’s language is portrayed through passages from almanacs, letters and conversations with siblings, nephews, and friends. MME, as she is referred to throughout the book, frequently “wrote rather than spoke her boldest thoughts” (page 107) which she preserved and passed on to family members. These written thoughts are the basis for a fine study that brings Mary Moody Emerson to the forefront of the Emerson family. When Mary rejected the idea of marriage in 1807, she vowed she would live a celibate and solitary life. Mary’s rebellion reached beyond refusing marriage when she pushed the boundaries for acceptable female behavior through both what she read and what she thought. Though not formally educated as her brothers were, Emerson was clearly one of the geniuses in the family. She learned early that books could “[sustain] her life” (page 87) and provide solace. Cole delineates Mary’s thinking about her readings through the almanac entries and letters. Her reading included religious philosophy, with liberal tendencies, and often took the place of hearing sermons. She also enjoyed novelists such as Anne Radcliffe. Expression of political views also provided an opportunity for Mary to push the boundaries of acceptable female behavior. The “public evil of slavery” (page 221) was particularly bothersome to Mary and to other members of the Emerson family. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Cole’s depiction of Mary’s travels and wanderings provide a picture of an independent woman who was more complicated than the eccentric Aunt Mary. Distaste for dependence dated from Emerson’s early life when she was sent to live with relatives. As an adult she did not want to be a burden and sought accommodations that would provide her with the most independence until late in life when illness prevented living on her own. One of her greatest pleasures was in the solitary confinement of nature. Retreating to Waterford, Maine, she enjoyed the comforts of Elm Vale where she kept her treasures — books and mementos of family and of her life. MME returned to Concord, however, when she was needed. Following her brother William’s death, Mary helped Ruth, his widow, raise not only Ralph Waldo, but also her other nephews. While each nephew held a special place for her, Waldo, as she referred to her famous nephew, seemed to listen more intently to Mary and was influenced by her thinking and letters. Nurturing Waldo was of primary importance to Mary, and she “consciously assumed the role of mentor” (page 164) to her nephew. Throughout Cole’s study the reader sees not only the influence of Aunt Mary on Waldo’s thinking and development as a poet but also the sometimes difficult relationship which ensued. Despite difficult times, Waldo depended on his aunt’s almanacs and letters for inspiration and for guidance as he wrote and developed his thinking about Transcendentalism. Mary also knew that kinship with other females was vital for survival. At an early age Martha Dexter, “the person [she said] who first gave [her] a taste for books and idea of a friend,” influenced Mary (page 86). Having a mentor in her life may have shown Mary the importance of befriending young women as she aged. Several female friends, both related and not related, are mentioned throughout the text. This depiction of female friendship reaches beyond the usual domestic friendships to intellectual friendship. Mary was not an easy woman to befriend as Cole describes in stories about mentorships to young women. Connections with women such as Ruth, her sister-in-law, and Lidian, Waldo’s second wife, are emphasized. Cole also notes that “a network of women grew up around Mary to protect her health, hear her wisdom, and comment among each other about her outrages to sense” (page 250). Though a patriarchal family, Mary chose to pass on the history of the family to her niece, Ellen, Waldo’s daughter, as it had been passed on to her. Mary was confident that the females would preserve the family history and relate stories to other family members. This excellent biography adds a significant dimension to the Emerson family history by removing Mary Moody Emerson from the shadows. By placing her in an inner circle of influence, we can clearly see the roots of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thinking. With Cole’s biography, Mary Moody Emerson is no longer only the eccentric Aunt Mary who dressed in a white shroud; rather, she HDT WHAT? INDEX
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is one of the important feminist and intellectual women of her era.
“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY
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Prepared: October 5, 2014 “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Miss Mary Moody Emerson HDT WHAT? INDEX
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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
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AN UNDATED SERMON, BY THE REVEREND LAURIE BILYEU, AT THE 1ST PARISH UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH OF MILTON She wore a shroud. There is the anecdote which might first attract our attention. Mary Moody Emerson had her bed made in the shape of a coffin and she wore her funeral shroud as her daily dress. When death did not come, and the shroud wore thin, she had another made. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s biographer, Robert Richardson, calls her HDT WHAT? INDEX
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a Dickensian figure and rightly so. She stood less than five feet tall. In an age when women had no possibility of earning a living, she declared herself forever single and independent. In an age when women had very little voice outside their own kitchens, Mary Moody Emerson was outspoken to the degree that when she finally did die, the writer of her obituary said “she was thought to have the power of saying more disagreeable things in half an hour than any person living.” Her oddities and eccentricities and the trail of anecdotes they leave behind, though, hide the genius of the woman who stood behind the genius of the Transcendentalist Movement. She lived at the fulcrum of great change in our American History — between the world of the colonies and a budding nation, between the worlds of Calvinism and the Great Awakening and budding Unitarianism. She absorbed and combined those worlds with a heart of poetry and an incisive and vigorous mind. Her father was the minister of the First Parish in Concord. She lay in her mother’s arms, an infant, as the battle of Concord raged outside the Old Manse at the North Bridge. Not long after, her father died, leaving her mother responsible for the family with no possibility of income. Mary spent her childhood fostered to an aunt, began early to care for the elderly and sick of her family. Became early used to the reality of death and interpreted it through the religious self she inherited from her clerical father and her saintly mother. She lived her life to be in union with God. Her celibacy and singleness was as much out of her single-minded quest after that unity as it was out of her fiercely independent spirit. To die, for her, meant finally achieving that unity. To die was great joy and she often celebrated the deaths of her relatives –within herself and her journal– envying them their newfound presence with God. The shroud she later wore was an outward manifestation of her inward longing for God. She was a child of the Great Awakening — a religious movement which shook the Boston establishment with its embrace of emotionalism and fervor. Its travelling preachers would preach to thousands at a time in the open air, egging them on to displays of rapturous conversion and salvation. At the same time, the Unitarian controversy was stirring. Liberal Boston ministers were embracing the scholarly methods of biblical study, preaching a salvation by character instead of emotion, questioning even the divinity of Christ. Mary walked a creative line between the two. She was the constant critic of her clergy brother William Emerson, minister at the First Church, Boston whom she seemed to think had become trapped in a religion of the mind (and of that which is socially proper) and had lost all of the inspiration of the heart. Yet after William died, she became partners with his widow in raising the children, including Ralph Waldo Emerson. An irony in her demands for independence is that in the 18th and 19th centuries, when women had no means of becoming financially independent, a single woman either depended on her family or hoped to inherit enough money to keep her. Mary lived her life HDT WHAT? INDEX
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moving from one relation’s home to another, caring for the sick and teaching the children. When the “earthly” duties and demands became too much, she would flee to relative solitude to a house in Maine, which she was eventually able to purchase. Teaching the children, though, seemed a constant joy and obsession. She demanded scholarship of them, engaged them in conversation about their studies, and drove them to think and think and think. And feel. And here is the genius which was the first Muse of our American Transcendentalist Movement. Phyllis Cole is Mary’s biographer and we can be grateful to her fine scholarship which has restored so much of Aunt Mary’s life to us. Mary Moody Emerson was self- educated. She read everything she could get — which was quite a bit in the libraries of clergymen relatives. She wrote constantly, but not for publication. She wrote her own ALMANACK of thoughts and ideas. She directed correspondence at her nephews and at young women whose minds she wished to influence. Her penmanship was horrid and her ideas couched in sometimes wildly creative syntax. When Waldo quoted her, he first rearranged her sentences to make them useful to an audience not accustomed to her “undisciplined” thinking. In Mary’s constant personal spiritual quest for oneness with God, she went far beyond the preachers of her day. She recorded one Sunday that she couldn’t listen to Rev. Green’s sermon, but rather found herself “dancing to the music of her own imajanation.” She consistently mis-spelled this favorite word “imajanation” and probably on purpose in order to make it her own term. By it she didn’t mean mental flights of fancy, but rather imagination was the method by which she might “join in the divine act of creation.” It was the self-differentiation which allowed her to infuse the religion of her time with novelty and transcendence. She was not content with the somber truth available in the scholarship of the day. She sought after a direct experience of the divine, and she pushed her nephews to do the same. She sought after that experience by pursuing theological and philosophical truths in her constant reading and original thinking. And she sought out God in Nature. “What an enchanting day this,” she wrote in her almanac, “I rode and walked home a little. The trees lose their beauty –but it is renewed for them– the stream is afresh supplied, and the bubbles with new pomp. The very straw which floats on its hoary surface is carried no one cares whither, but lodged in a warmer nest springs in some lovely lilly and is painted by the hand of the supreme Artist. ...Blessed God I am passing away with the clouds — I am flying with the gale of Autumn — with the waves and winds. On all I trace the bright impression of thy hand....” (Cole, page 160) What we read in later works of the men we call the Transcendentalists has its roots in many strains of philosophy and theology—Kant, Neo-Platonism, Deism, Hinduism, German and HDT WHAT? INDEX
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English Romanticism. “Transcendentalism holds that the world we perceive with our senses is not all of existence and reality. There is a transcendent reality that lies beyond sensual experience. It is in this transcendent reality that the truth about humanity’s place in the universe, humanity’s relationship with God, and the nature of God can be revealed.” (Crim) Those we think of as the transcendentalist thinkers maintained that “each individual had an innate ability to transcend, or go beyond, ordinary sensory experience. They called this ability intuition. ...” They said that the person seeking a deeper understanding of his or her existence should be open to these transcendental experiences...one way to experience an intuitive insight is to clear the mind of all the petty details of everyday life and concentrate on the significant and the important. One of the best ways to do this is by returning to God’s direct creation: Nature.” (Crim) Phyllis Cole points out that it took an entire culture of American idealism, of that battle for independence, and of family values and inter-dependence to weave those influences into the thoughts and beliefs which produced Thoreau’s WALDEN, Emerson’s NATURE. When Henry David Thoreau went to the Walden woods to live deliberately, when Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that a true preacher “deals out to the people his life, — life passed through the fire of thought,” when Bronson Alcott insisted on a new method of teaching children which engaged their minds in conversation, which taught them to think instead of memorize, when Margaret Fuller persisted in improving the lot of women and slaves and the poor, all of these were acting out of the same imagination, self-differentiation and transcendent experience of God with which the eccentric Aunt Mary blanketed those whom she could find to influence, and most especially her nephew Waldo. I have observed that in our religious development at individuals and as a culture, we swing like a pendulum along a certain continuum. I have so internalized this observation, that I can’t remember where I’ve picked up which of the thoughts which inform it. We know in Religious Education that there is a stage in young adolescence when the facts are all that count. When one needs real, hands-on proof and experience. Then, in the later teen years, romantic notions might take over. Emotions rule. Youth worship in our own UU conferences is filled with candle-lit rooms and crying and hugging which remind me of the feeling of the charismatic, Christian groups I knew in my own youth. In the college years, emotion is abandoned and reason rules again. In our culture as well, and in our Unitarian Universalist history, we have moved from the emotionalism of the Great Awakening to HDT WHAT? INDEX
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the intellectualism of early Unitarianism to the individualism and imagination of Transcendentalism to the rationalism of Humanism and the scientific method in this century to a current renewed passion for “spirituality” which includes a resurgent interest in the Transcendentalists. I don’t know if the pendulum will ever stop swinging and I don’t know that it should. But within its swinging, how awesome, how perfectly marvelous to sometimes discover that mind which spans the continuum, which connects the edges as did Mary Moody Emerson. She who was able to hold on with one hand to New England’s religious tradition and reach with the other toward an enthusiasm of the solitary soul that was universalist, idealist, and eclectic (Cole, page 180). From Emerson himself: Let us learn the revelation of all nature and thought; that the Highest dwells within us, that the sources of nature are in our own minds. As there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so there is no bar or wall in the soul where we, the effect, cease, and God, the cause, begins. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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