GO TO LIST OF PEOPLE INVOLVED IN HARPERS FERRY

OBERLIN, OHIO

“THE TOWN THAT STARTED THE CIVIL WAR”

“The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free, that is the task.” — André Gide, THE IMMORALIST translation Richard Howard NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970, page 7 HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1821

The James Monroe who would be associated with Oberlin College (not the president named James Monroe) was born in Plainfield, Connecticut. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1825

In this year, Thomas Cole’s Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill), now at the Allen Art Museum at Oberlin College. In a display at a framing shop in New-York, Cole was “discovered” by Colonel John Trumbull, William Dunlap, and Asher Brown Durand. They bought his works and found him patrons, assuring his future success: “That painter is good for nothing who cannot impress us with the moral sublimity of virtue, and give us the majesty of religion with all her sweetness.”1

1. By comparison with this unnamed good-for-nothing whom they characterized above (were they anticipating Andy Warhol?), Cole must have seemed to this threesome to be indeed sublime. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1826

Pietro Bachi found work in the United States as a teacher of Italian and Spanish at Harvard College, at a salary of $500 per year.

Benjamin Peirce, Senior became Harvard’s librarian.

Doctor John White Webster compiled A MANUAL OF CHEMISTRY.

Richard Hildreth graduated from Harvard and would teach school for a year, at the Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts, before deciding to follow the example of Sir Walter Scott and pursue a career in law and literature.

In about this year Nathaniel Baker arrived at the age of 80 and sold his portion of the Baker farm to Amos Baker’s son James Baker.

Elizur Wright, Junior graduated at Yale College and went to teach in a school at Groton.

In upstate New York, Geneva College (Hobart and William Smith Colleges) held its initial Commencement exercise, graduating five.

John Brown’s father Owen Brown was a farmer and tanner for whom locution was always problematic due to a stutter (unless, of course, he was raising his voice in prayer). When Western Reserve College was established at Hudson, Ohio during this year (it has since become Western Reserve University in Cleveland), Owen was one of its founders and one of its initial trustees. An antislavery Christian he was one of the early Western Reserve abolitionists and for the 1st few years the conduct of the institution would accord with his own point of view. Faculty changes, however, and internal dissensions, would lead to a decline in the institution’s antislavery zeal and in 1835 Owen would sever his affiliation. The recently established Oberlin Collegiate Institute (now Oberlin College) in the neighboring town of Oberlin, Ohio would seem more nearly to meet his views, so he would transfer his allegiance to Oberlin and would serve as a trustee of that institution as well as its local agent at Hudson from 1835 to 1844 (his daughter Florilla Brown would be a graduate in the class of 1839 and at least one of his younger sons would be a student there; Florilla would get married with the Reverend Samuel L. Adair, another Oberlin graduate who would become an early missionary to Kansas, they would settle at Osawatomie, and it would be in front of the Adair home that Frederick Brown, son of John Brown, would be gunned down by Border Ruffians guided by a proslavery reverend in the Battle of Osawatomie on August 30th, 1856).

It would no doubt be through the father Owen that the son John would initially learn of the gift of Gerrit Smith of 20,000 acres of wild land to nearby Oberlin College, and it would perhaps be the father who would send him into negotiations with the institution, which would result in a journey down the Ohio and a full month of land-inspection in Tyler County during April and May 1840. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1833

There were a number of antislavery movements, which at times made for strange bedfellows. There was a racist anti-black anti-slavery movement, made up primarily of white persons, which sought to do away with slavery in order to benefit the soul of the white owner, and also in order to destroy the economic basis of the black life of the time, and basically these people believed that black people should not exist, or at least, should not exist here where we white people exist, and that white slaveholders should not exist, or at least, should not be a part of the society which we decent white folks inhabit. In distinct opposition to these folks, there was an anti-slavery movement, made up primarily of persons of color, which sought improved conditions of life for persons of color, ameliorations both material and spiritual. To cut across the division created by two such contrasting motivational patterns, there was an anti-slavery movement made up of persons who sought gradual, step-by-step, piecemeal practical improvements, new good amelioration following new good amelioration, a building process, and there was an anti-slavery movement made up of persons like William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Dwight Weld, Arthur Tappan, and Lewis Tappan who demanded immediate utter freedom and emancipation regardless of the personal or social cost, a tear-it-all-down-and-start-over project, and who were willing to see great harm done to real people if only the result would be some change in the wording of a law, written on paper somewhere. There was an Old Abolitionism which was racist, and an Old Abolitionism which was paternalist. There was a New Abolitionism which was Evangelical and millennialist and sought utter total top-down changes in society, and there was a New Abolitionism which was immanentist and which demanded utter total bottom-up personal transformation, within each individual soul. In Ohio, Shiperd Stewart and Philo Penfield Stewart (a student minister) established Oberlin College (more properly, the Oberlin Collegiate Institute), creating a town of Oberlin, Ohio (one of the last settlements to be created in Lorain County), as our nation’s 1st coeducational institution of higher learning (Oberlin College would be in fact the 1st in the US of A to admit either girls or persons of color on an equal basis with the white boys). The first home of the town was a log cabin put up by Peter Pindar Pease just north of the historic elm. The Pease family became the first Oberlin colonists. The first business, a sawmill, was established at what is now the southeast corner of Vine and Main Streets. It would be owned and operated by the college, at first, to forestall any type of greed or cheating that might derive from the profit motive, the college would be owning and operating all local businesses. (However, this sawmill would become such a financial burden to the college that eventually it would be sold to a private individual, thus setting a precedent for more private ownership of businesses in the town.) The first college building was constructed: “Oberlin Hall,” a boarding house for 40 students, was located approximately where the Ben Franklin store now stands. This building included classrooms for study — and would function as a church on Sundays. Its basement quarters were reserved for the college’s professors. (Oberlin Hall would be used by the college until 1854, when it would be sold to be turned into a retail outlet. It would burn down in 1886.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

December 3, Tuesday: The 1st Oberlin College classes met. By the end of this first year, there would be 11 families in residence in Oberlin, Ohio and 44 students in the college — 15 of them would be women (in a later terminology, “coeds”).

This is what Oberlin would be looking like by the 1850s:

At Portsmouth, New Hampshire, William Emerson got married with Susan Woodward Haven, who had been born on January 7, 1807 in that locale, daughter of John Haven and Ann Woodward Haven (she would die on February 6, 1868 in Concord, Massachusetts). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1834

The English reformer George Thompson was lecturing across the USA at the invitation of William Lloyd

Garrison. His tour of the northern states would be said to have led to the formation of more than 150 anti- slavery societies. Theodore Dwight Weld, while a ministerial student at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, helped the young men there create one such abolitionist group, and also he had begun working with black leaders to start a practical night school for black grownups. These “Lane Rebels” would relocate themselves from Cincinnati’s seminary to Oberlin College, bringing new students, faculty and the first college president, Asa Mahan (1835-1850), but Weld himself would withdraw to become an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society.

ABOLITIONISM I don’t have an illustration of what Lane Theological Seminary looked like before this concerned group’s departure, but this is what it would like in 1846, quite a while after the impact of the exodus had been absorbed HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and theology-as-usual had been reestablished:

Oberlin, Ohio’s population grew to include 200 colonists and 100 students. For the education of children, an Oberlin School District was organized. ABOLITIONISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1835

Boundary disputes between Michigan and Ohio brought about a “Toledo War.”

The Reverend Lyman Beecher had returned from his rabble-rousing and convent-burning in Boston to the directorship of the Lane Theological Seminary near Cincinnati, Ohio. His rabble-rousing and convent-burning Know-Nothing sermon was being published by Truman & Smith in Cincinnati and by Leavitt, Lord & Company in New-York as PLEA FOR THE WEST. There was a student revolt against his religious institution. The consequences of this revolt would be the relocation of the majority of the students to Oberlin College’s Theological Seminary, where they could continue their abolitionist activism. The leader of this revolt was Theodore Dwight Weld.

SURVEY OF AMERICAN ANTI-CATHOLICISM

An English visitor named David Robertson was traveling in Virginia. Because of the similarity in name and origin to the English visitor Robinson who in 1831 had expressed an antislavery sentiment, some Virginians came to suspect incorrectly that this was the same man whom they had “scourged almost to death.” One planter, who understood that this was not the same man, hid the English visitor until public outrage had had a chance to subside and the visitor was then able to make his escape from the South. (But that wouldn’t be the end of the matter, wouldn’t be the end of it at all: )

W.E. Burghardt Du Bois has attributed the notorious Southern penchant for violence to hegemony:

The white people of the South are essentially a fine kindly breed.... Perhaps their early and fatal mistake was that they refused long before the Civil War to allow the South differences of opinion.... Men act as they do in the South, they murder, they lynch, they insult, because they listen to but one side of a question. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

A reward of $100,000 was offered to anyone who would murder the abolitionists Arthur Tappan and Lewis Tappan, payable upon delivery of their dead bodies in any slave state. The sponsor of this offer was anonymous. Various presents of pieces of rope would be showing up in the mails received by the Tappan family. On one occasion the family would receive a severed human ear — of course, it was a severed black human ear.

Arthur Tappan lent $10,000 to Oberlin College, to tide the school over a tight spot.

Spring: The Reverend Charles Grandison Finney, famous New-York evangelist, arrived on campus at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio to become a professor of theology. (Arthur and Lewis Tappan, strong supporters of

the Lane Theological Seminary rebels, were members of Finney’s New-York congregation.) In this year he would publish his LECTURES ON REVIVALS. He decided to preach that we need not wait upon God to bring this world we know to an end in His own good time — but may act on his behalf in order to bring it more speedily to its end:

“If the church will do her duty the millennium may come in this country in three years.”

Note please now, if you will, that among dangerous doctrines, this doctrine that one ought to hasten the end of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the world qualifies as perhaps the most utterly dangerous of all. Such a doctrine will legitimate any preposterous self-sacrifice –and sacrifice of others– at all. Invoke this, guys and gals, and you can get away with literally anything. Take another look at the image above, of the Reverend Finney. Can you perceive no horns? “What are you getting so excited about? I was only bringing the world to an end!”

Immediately the trustees of Oberlin College voted to admit black students to the institution (although this was among the earliest schools to admit black Americans, it was not the first to do so). By the end of the year, there would be 300 students on its Ohio campus, listening carefully to the Reverend Finney’s moral instruction. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1836

At Oberlin College, Tappan Hall was built in the middle of what is today Tappan Square. This 4-story building had 94 rooms. (It would be torn down in 1885.) The first one-room ungraded school building was built for a

cost of $215. (It still stands today, owned and operated by O.H.I.O. and known as The Little Red Schoolhouse.) Shiperd Stewart left Oberlin to create similar colonies in Indiana and Michigan. Philo Penfield Stewart also left Oberlin, unhappy at the events of 1835, but would continue to make financial contributions. (He would go on to be an inventor, and patent and sell three versions of an iron stove, and would donate money to the college from the sale of these stoves.)

In accepting appointment as trustee of Oberlin College, Owen Brown wrote President John Jay Shipherd, “I trust God will make you faithful. Inform me when my seat will be wanted for a better man.” Defying all the rules of grammar in s curiously spelled letter, he advised “planning and making handsom gardens and yards,” requiring punctual payment from the students, and finally recommended several “female studants in these parts which wish to get admitted into the institution.” At this point he gave the school $500 in cash and he would be a liberal contributor to the school’s support — there is still a record of a gift of a bull of “verry good” stock.

Oberlin, Ohio’s fire protection consisted of 4 ladders, 2 hooks, and 2 axes positioned in accessible locations. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1837

In Oberlin, Ohio, 2 volunteer fire companies were set up. Also, Julia Finney (Monroe) was born. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

April 28, Friday: As the first Underground Railroad activity of record in Oberlin, Ohio, a former student at Oberlin College, Martin L. Brooks, transported four fugitive slaves in a wagon toward Canada. (They evidently stooped off at the college dining hall to be fed, where evidently they were surrounded by cheerful and encouraging students.) UNDERGROUND RAILROAD HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

September 6, Wednesday: Mary Hosford, Mary Fletcher Kellogg, Elizabeth Smith Prall, and Caroline Mary Rudd matriculated at Oberlin College — an idea whose time had come, “coeds.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1838

Trial fields of sugar beets were being grown in Northampton and in Oberlin, Ohio. (No attempts to grow either beets or sorghum for sugar in the US would be profitable on any scale until after our Civil War had removed the competition of the slave plantations.) SWEETS WITHOUT SLAVERY

BETWEEN ANY TWO MOMENTS ARE AN INFINITE NUMBER OF MOMENTS, AND BETWEEN THESE OTHER MOMENTS LIKEWISE AN INFINITE NUMBER, THERE BEING NO ATOMIC MOMENT JUST AS THERE IS NO ATOMIC POINT ALONG A LINE. MOMENTS ARE THEREFORE FIGMENTS. THE PRESENT MOMENT IS A MOMENT AND AS SUCH IS A FIGMENT, A FLIGHT OF THE IMAGINATION TO WHICH NOTHING REAL CORRESPONDS. SINCE PAST MOMENTS HAVE PASSED OUT OF EXISTENCE AND FUTURE MOMENTS HAVE YET TO ARRIVE, WE NOTE THAT THE PRESENT MOMENT IS ALL THAT EVER EXISTS — AND YET THE PRESENT MOMENT BEING A MOMENT IS A FIGMENT TO WHICH NOTHING IN REALITY CORRESPONDS.

Not Civil War “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1839

Arthur Tappan was having a difficult time saving himself from bankruptcy. As the Eastern financial agent for Oberlin College, collections made in England were being cleared through his institution. Something more than $2,000 of the college’s debt had been paid off through subscription when in this year –grabbing at straws to save himself– Tappan misappropriated a draft for $4,752 sent from England, applying it at least temporarily against his business debt. He needed to do this, but it would cause financial crisis at the college.

The issue of refusing to vote was coming to the forefront among abolitionists. Maria W. Chapman estimated, however, that only 1 in 100 of the members of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society were refusing on principle to cooperate with the government in the manner of Henry Thoreau, to the extent of declining to cast their ballot.

In this year she published RIGHT AND WRONG IN MASSACHUSETTS, a pamphlet that argued the divisions in the Anti-Slavery Society that were being created over the issue of woman’s rights. She and two other women, Friend Lucretia Mott and Lydia Maria Child, were elected to the executive committee of the Anti-Slavery Society, and this upset some members of the society. Lewis Tappan, the brother of the president of the society, Arthur Tappan, argued that “To put a woman on the committee with men is contrary to the usages of civilized society.”

FEMINISM (Well, yeah, don’t you know?)

From this year until 1842, Mrs. Chapman would be editor of the abolitionist journal, Non-Resistant.

April 25, Monday: James Barlow patented a couple of new thingies for the candlestick, one a new brass “rack- and-pinion push-up,” the other a new “elastic holder” that could accommodate such a mechanism (this was patent #8049).

Gerrit Smith made a gift of 20,000 acres of wild land to Oberlin College: HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Peterboro, (NY) April 25, 1839 Charles G. Finney & Asa Mahan My friends: My late father purchased April 22, 1815, for $8000 a Tract of Land in the new County of Tyler — a County lying on the Ohio River in Virginia. There are about 21,000 acres in the Tract. Nov. 1, 1819, he conveyed the Tract to myself. Although it is held under a very old title derived directly from the State of Virginia, it is probable that a still older title -older by about a year- covers some three or four thousand acres of the land. This is not certain however. My father never sold any of the land - nor have I sold any of it. There have been repeated applications for small parcels of it. There are a few families on it, who pay rent enough to cancel the demands for taxes and for the fees of my Agent, Judge Wm. Underwood of the said County of Tyler. The land is so far from me, that I cannot make judicious and profitable sales of it. I have thought, very frequently within the last few weeks, as it is not more than some two hundred miles from the Oberlin Collegiate Institute - as this Institute makes good use of the property given to it - and as it is in great need of more property - that I could not do better with this tract of land than to give it to the Institute. I take additional pleasure in making this gift from the fact that the American Education Society has proscribed Oberlin Institute, as well as Oneida Institute - and that you are now under greater need than ever of the liberality of your friends. Immediately after making the purchase, my father had, at an expense of 4 or 500$ the whole Tract surveyed into Farm Lots. Most of these Lots will be unsaleable for many years - a few of them could probably be sold soon for one or two dollars per acre. I presume the Institute is incorporated. Let me know what must be the name or style of the party of the second part in the Deed. The Deed together with Maps & Survey bills and a large bundle of papers pertaining to the Tract, I will hand to any person whom you may authorize to receive them. This gift may be, to a great extent, if not entirely unavailable for several years, I am aware, that you are in present need - and I therefore add to the gift two thousand dollars in money. Your draught on me for two thousand dollars payable 1st February next at the Bank of Utica (let it be written by Br. Mahan and signed by both of you) will be accepted by me. Your friend and brother Gerrit Smith

April 25, 1839: The Kingdoms of the Earth. We see a reality hovering over things, not an actuality underneath and behind them. Take the earth and all the interests it has known — what are they beside one deep surmise that pierces and scatters them? The independent beggar disposes of all with one hearty significant curse by the road-side — ’tis true they are not worth a “tinker’s damn.”2 HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1840

At a house on Lorain Street in Oberlin, Ohio, two slave catchers from Kentucky captured two escaped slaves — a man and a woman. They attempted to leave the Oberlin area with the slaves but word of their actions had spread to the town where some residents were at a chapel meeting. The churchgoers rushed out to pursue the slavecatchers and caught them about three miles from the village. The slavecatchers appealed to the court in Elyria, Ohio but were themselves arrested on a charge of house-breaking. The runaway slaves were put into jail while the slavecatchers were released on bail. But before the slave catchers could go on trial one died. The other one was released when it turned out that the two runaway slaves, who had been in jail, had themselves escaped to freedom. (Or so we now hear. The problem is, there are any number of stories using this sort of scenario — and in all likelihood some of these stories amount merely to half-remembered variants of others.)

John Brown had removed from Pennsylvania to Ohio in 1836 but his family had done no better there. In this year he surveyed land in western Virginia belonging to Oberlin College, seemingly with some scheme to create a colony in that area for free Americans of color.

April 2, Thursday: Nearly a full year after Gerrit Smith’s letter of gift, John Brown was at Oberlin College in conference with the Prudential Committee of the College. After some discussion he made a proposal in writing: Oberlin 2d April 1840 Gentlemen of the Prudential Committee In negotiating in regard to the Virginia lands or any investigation to be made in regard to the title or boundary of those lands I wish to be perfectly frank. I wish to see those lands with a particular view to settle my family on them if I can find encouragement sufficient to justify me in so doing, and in offering my service as a surveyor, am not induced to do it for the sake of getting employment or wages. If you are disposed to send me I will charge you but one dollar pr day with the addition of a moderate allowance for such expense as shall of necessity be incurred.... If I should settle my family on those lands I believe I could be the means of rendering them a source of allmost immediate income to your institution, and believe the institution can well afford to be quite liberal towards a family like my own who should go to commence a settlement uppon them. The three eldest of my children are sons, all resolute, energetic, intelligent boys & as I trust of verry decided religious character, such as I think will if they are continued will prove to be valuable members of any community, or faithful and competent agents should they be kneeded. The business we now follow is mainly wool growing in which branch I have been

2. In the April 12, 1998 The New York Times Magazine, page 18, William Safire would examine whether the idiom should properly be “not worth a tinker’s dam” or “not worth a tinker’s damn,” and would go with the OED and its evaluation of Thoreau’s 1839 usage, above, in voting for “damn” over “dam.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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hitherto prosperous. Respectfully yours, John Brown. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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April 3, Friday: The colored citizens of Boston defended, in the pages of The Liberator, the manner in which that gazette had been being administered by William Lloyd Garrison: HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

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John Brown’s proposal was accepted and he became an agent of Oberlin College, authorized “to enter upon, explore and occupy, a certain tract of land in the County of Tyler in the state of Virginia ... to lease or rent the said lands or any part thereof ... to demand and receive and if necessary sue for and collect any and all moneys due for rent or damage due from tenants or former occupants ... and to do all other acts and things ... which the Board of Trustees may themselves lawfully do” (this formal power of attorney bore the signatures of President Asa Mahan and Secretary Levi Burnell, with an official seal).

The Institute provided its new agent with a $50 cash advance. Secretary Burnell immediately corresponded to advise Trustee Owen Brown of the action they had taken: “Should he [your son John Brown] succeed in clearing up titles without difficulty or lawsuits, it would be easy, as it appears to me, to make provision for religious and school privileges, and by proper efforts, with the blessing of God, soon see that wilderness bud and blossom as the rose.”

April 14, Tuesday: John Brown set out from Franklin Mills, Ohio, and began to note every item of expense against his $50 cash advance in a little book, to the half cent. When he would return on May 16th, the book would reveal about $33 in expenses for Oberlin College including charges for guides and other help.

May 16, Saturday: When John Brown had set out from Franklin Mills, Ohio to act under power of attorney for Oberlin College, he had begun to note his expenses in a little book to the half cent. At this point he returned and the book indicated about $33 in expenses including charges for guides and other help (presumably he would be able to return about $17 of his $50 cash advance to the college).

September 9, Wednesday: It was reported that a branch of the Nonresistance Society was formed at Oberlin College, with John Orvis (son of a Vermont Quaker farmer, who would go on to Brook Farm) as its secretary. This society would profoundly disturb that college community. OBERLIN, OHIO

British gunboats began to fire upon Beirut; the city would fall as troops under General James Charles Napier (1782-1853) would disembark on October 11th. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1841

At Oberlin College, 4 women received the Bachelor of Arts degree. Four firsts for the U.S. of A!

February 1, Monday: At Oberlin College, with payment due on Arthur Tappan’s 1835 loan of $10,000, it seemed an excellent bargain to exchange 10,000 acres of wild Virginia land located in Tyler County, of debatable title, for the balance due. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1842

John Anderson Copeland, Jr.’s parents removed to Oberlin, Ohio. He would be for some time a student in the preparatory department of Oberlin College. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1843

After being refused admittance to Williams College, presumably on account of the color of his skin although I do not know that for a fact, William H. Day entered Oberlin College.Lucy Stone at this point was 25 years OBERLIN, OHIO

of age, and despite the fact that her father would not support his daughter’s desire for an education, had saved enough to finance her initial year at Oberlin College. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1844

William Wells Brown was an invited speaker before the annual assembly of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New-York.

When William Still was 23, he left the family farm in New Jersey. He arrived at Philadelphia, friendless, with $5, and worked for a wealthy widow, and as a waiter, and in a brickyard.

The 1st Church of Oberlin, Ohio was completed, with the Reverend Charles Grandison Finney as its pastor. For a time this would be the largest building west of the Appalachian Mountains, holding just shy of 2,000 people.

John Mercer Langston became a student at Oberlin College (this Daguerreotype would be made as of his graduation in 1849).

John Jay Shipherd, President of Oberlin College, died at the age of 42.

Frank Fanning Jewett was born in Newton Corner, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1846

Oberlin, Ohio incorporated as a village, with its townspeople electing a city council and a mayor. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1847

In Oberlin, Ohio, James Monroe got married with Elizabeth Maxwell.

Lucy Stone graduated from Oberlin College, after 4 years during which she had taught school and done housework in order to pay her own way. Asked to write a commencement speech for her class, which because she was a female would need to be read for her by one or another graduating male, she refused. And so, shortly after Stone returned to Massachusetts, the 1st woman in that state to receive a college degree, she gave her first public speech, a speech of course on women’s rights. She delivered the speech from the pulpit of the Evangelical Congregational Church of her brother the Reverend William Bowman Stone at 55 Green Street in Gardner, Massachusetts. FEMINISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1848

In Oberlin, Ohio, a block of buildings bounded by East College and Main Streets burned down (rebuilt, this block would again be consumed by flames in 1882). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1849

When John Mercer Langston graduated from Oberlin College, his Daguerreotype was made.

Frederick DeBourg Richards of Philadelphia persuaded Daniel Webster to pose in his top hat, after a speech, for a Daguerreotype. By this point the process had proceeded to the point that Webster, who had expected that he would need to hold exceedingly still for perhaps half an hour, was pleasantly surprised to be informed by Richards that the exposure was already completed. Later the result would be the basis for an engraving by T. Johnson, with the product shown on a following screen. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1850

Lucy Sessions graduated from Oberlin College. This was the first college diploma knowingly granted to a woman of color in America. In her childhood, this girl had been driven from every public school in Toledo, Ohio, on account of her color: “But never, my dear, did a teacher send me home; it was only the visitors that did not know me, who objected to my presence.” When she had been taken in at Oberlin College, on trial, she had been too young to be formally admitted. She appears to have been the daughter of the Mrs. Lucy Sessions who had taken part in the Convention of Friends of Universal Reform at the Chardon Street Chapel in Boston in 1840.

Ohio led all the states not only in the production of college graduates of color and of female gender but also in the production of corn, horses, sheep, and wool.

Horace Greeley persuaded the poet sisters Phoebe and Alice Cary to come from Cincinnati, Ohio to live in New-York.

Spirit rappings were demonstrated in Cincinnati, Ohio by Mrs. B.G. Bushnell, a witness to the Rochester manifestations. SPIRITUALISM

At about this point Theodatus Garlick returned to Cleveland, Ohio for additional work in anatomical dissection. He would practice surgery in the Youngstown area until 1852, and during this decade would produce eight sets of precise painted plaster anatomical models for use at the Cleveland Medical College and elsewhere (meanwhile he would be, also, experimenting with the Daguerreotype).

The 2d US Women’s Rights Convention was held, in Salem, Ohio (men were not permitted to speak). FEMINISM

BETWEEN ANY TWO MOMENTS ARE AN INFINITE NUMBER OF MOMENTS, AND BETWEEN THESE OTHER MOMENTS LIKEWISE AN INFINITE NUMBER, THERE BEING NO ATOMIC MOMENT JUST AS THERE IS NO ATOMIC POINT ALONG A LINE. MOMENTS ARE THEREFORE FIGMENTS. THE PRESENT MOMENT IS A MOMENT AND AS SUCH IS A FIGMENT, A FLIGHT OF THE IMAGINATION TO WHICH NOTHING REAL CORRESPONDS. SINCE PAST MOMENTS HAVE PASSED OUT OF EXISTENCE AND FUTURE MOMENTS HAVE YET TO ARRIVE, WE NOTE THAT THE PRESENT MOMENT IS ALL THAT EVER EXISTS — AND YET THE PRESENT MOMENT BEING A HDT WHAT? INDEX

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MOMENT IS A FIGMENT TO WHICH NOTHING IN REALITY CORRESPONDS.

August 21, Thursday/22, Friday: A Fugitive Slave Law Convention was held in the orchard of Grace Wilson’s School, on Sullivan Street in Cazenovia, New York. Attending were Mary Edmondson and Emily Edmondson, who had been among 14 siblings born into slavery in Washington DC because their mother (not their father) was enslaved. In 1848 they, with their brothers Samuel Edmondson and Richard Edmondson and 73 others, had attempted to flee aboard the schooner Pearl. When that ship was intercepted, the girls had been carried by a slavetrader to New Orleans to serve as “fancy girls,” but their father Paul Edmondson had however gone to New-York to petition the New York Anti-Slavery Society, and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and the congregation of his Plymouth Church had raised a sum of money to purchase his daughters. Harriet Beecher Stowe having undertaken responsibility for their education, Emily Edmondson and Mary Edmondson would in 1852 enroll in Oberlin’s Preparatory Department with the intention of becoming missionaries to American blacks who were escaping to Canada. Mary Edmondson was, however, suffering from phthisis, and would

Not Civil War “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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become progressively weaker throughout her first year at Oberlin College and die on May 18, 1853. Emily Edmundson would, until her marriage, assist at Myrtilla Miner’s school for black girls in the District of Columbia. She would, with the sponsorship of Frederick Douglass, armed with her manumission papers, go to the deep South and buy one of her brothers out of slavery. On this Daguerreotype plate exposed by local photographer Ezra Greenleaf Weld, Mary Edmondson is wearing a shawl, at the elbow of Frederick Douglass. Gerrit Smith, whose home was in nearby Peterboro, is gesturing behind Douglass, and the figure at center is presumably Abby Kelley Foster, with Emily Edmundson behind her in a bonnet. The Reverend Samuel Joseph May is standing behind the man who is taking notes. Theodore Dwight Weld, recognizable by his miss-shapen skull, is in front of Douglass. We suspect therefore that the diminutive figure between Emily Edmundson and the Reverend May would be Angelina Emily Grimké Weld. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1851

The sect known as “the Christians” (sometimes, “the Christian Connexion”) differed greatly from the Unitarians, in that they advocated conversion through Great Awakening-style revivals and emotionally charged prayer meetings. For much of their history this group had been hostile to the idea of allowing a ministerial education for their leaders. Opening their own institution of higher learning, to be known as Antioch College and to be located in Yellow Springs, Ohio, was for them a big step into the unknown. One of the driving forces behind the new Christian college was an ambitious carpenter known as “the master-builder from Massachusetts,” Alpheus Marshall Merrifield. His considerable wealth, and his dedication to the sectarian cause, propelled him to the leadership of the college movement. As a major player at the convention in Marion, New York at which Antioch had been conceived, Merrifield had promised a donation of $1,000 and been made the college’s first treasurer. He would receive the commission to design and build the main structures:

Alpheus Marshall Merrifield would have himself a great time as the pledges would seem to be pouring in like an unending torrent. Aren’t pledges the same as cash in the bank? The man refused to waste any of the money by hiring an accountant — God would provide. In the end, there being no particular records, the college wouldn’t even be able to figure out for sure, just how much money it owed.

Horace Mann, Sr. in becoming the first president of this new institution of learning, had obtained a prior agreement that a new house would be erected for him and his family and that he would be allowed to appoint Calvin and Rebecca Pennell to the faculty. He had been generally assured that the college was to be “determinedly nonsectarian,” but the more conservative members of the faculty would soon begin to suspect him of the thought crime of scheming to take their college Unitarian. Finances would be tricky, and Mann HDT WHAT? INDEX

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would manage to save his ass by succeeding in arranging a badly needed cash transfusion courtesy of the Reverend Henry Whitney Bellows, then of the First Unitarian Church of New York, and Dr. Rufus Phineas Stebbins. Evidently the conservatives and the doctrinaires, since he was meeting the payroll with the help of his Unitarian contacts, were willing to ease up on him for awhile.

In Oberlin, Ohio, the 1st Union School House, a two-story, graded school, was erected on Professor Street (the original schoolhouse, purchased by Elizure Leonard, would be moved to 73 South Main Street). The Reverend Charles Grandison Finney, professor of theology, would serve as Oberlin College’s president until 1866.

Sallie Holley graduated from Oberlin College. While in college she had met Caroline Putnam, who would be her lifelong companion. She would become a traveling lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society:

“How much happier and richer my life has been than I ever expected it would be.”

At that time an experiment had begun at Yellow Springs which interested me deeply — coeducation of young men and women. The sect called “Christians” had built a college there, naming it “Antioch,” but their enterprise having failed, the building was purchased by the Unitarians and the institution placed under the Hon. Horace Mann.... Early in 1858 I visited Yellow Springs, stopping at its one inn, in which the only other guest was a beautiful woman, and one of rare intellectual power. She was the only one left of “Memnona,”3 a community which had built the house converted to an inn.... Next morning (Sunday) I heard an eloquent discourse by President Mann in the college chapel, and excellent music from a well-trained choire of students. Horace Mann was radical in politics and a rationalist in religion, his friend and prophet being Emerson. The Puritan survived in his ethics and was evoked by the proximity of “Memnona,” founded by the once famous Dr. T.L. Nichols. Although the community had dissolved, probably because of Horace Mann’s denunciations, he was still excited on the subject.... The fear then was that there would be too much courtship, and rash marriages.... AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II

3. When Mann termed Memnona “the superfœtation of diabolism upon polygamy,” we are left to wonder what animosity he was struggling to express. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1852

Sojourner Truth continued as an itinerant antislavery speaker in Ohio.

“[The railroad will] only encourage the common people to move about needlessly.” — Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In order to prevent New York’s Erie Railroad from establishing a route to Ohio through Pennsylvania, the state of Pennsylvania deliberately selected a non-standard gauge on which the Erie Railroad’s locomotives could not travel.

A railroad was constructed from Toledo to Grafton. Since this railroad passed through Oberlin, Ohio, and since from Grafton, rail passengers might continue on to Cleveland and to Cincinnati, the college town was becoming directly linked to the great world.

This drawing of the train station in Hartford, Connecticut, which had been in existence since 1846, was made in this year: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The last mile of the railroad link to the campus of Harvard College in Cambridge, begun in 1849, was complete. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1853

During this year or the next, Walt Whitman would visit Dr. Henry Abbott’s museum of Egyptian antiquities in New-York and there acquire a general interest in the whole topic.

In an effort to overcome segregation by Masonic lodges, Martin Robison Delany presented his THE ORIGIN AND OBJECTS OF ANCIENT FREEMASONRY. This was an attempt to reconstruct the history of freemasonry as out of “Ethiopia, Egypt, and Assyria — all settled and peopled by the children of Ham.” He seems to have claimed also that Euclid was a black man, since he was out of Egypt, “a colony from Ethiopia”:

(And, Moses was a fugitive slave, etc.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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John Mercer Langston graduated from the seminary associated with Oberlin College. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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March 26, Saturday: Here is how the city of New-York was depicted, in the pages of Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing- Room Companion, as viewed looking west from the Brooklyn shore and as viewed looking east from the New Jersey shore (the lines in the sky are mere artifacts of the modern copying process):

CONSULT THE WIKIPEDIA

The slave Miriam Dobbins had reached Oberlin, Ohio after fleeing Kentucky with her children and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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grandchildren, including a small foster child, but this 4-year-old had become too wasted with consumption to continue on with the group to safety in Canada. The child was left in the care of a local couple who sheltered the group, and died on this day. In 1st Church, there was a funeral for him. The tombstone, to protect it, is now being stored in the archives of Oberlin College: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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LET SLAVERY PERISH LEE HOWARD DOBBINS A FUGITIVE SLAVE ORPHAN BROUGHT HERE BY AN ADOPTED MOTHER IN HER FLIGHT TO LIBERTY MARCH 17, 1853 LEFT HERE WASTED WITH CONSUMPTION FOUND A REFUGE IN DEATH MARCH 26, 1853 AGED 4 YRS.

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Henry Thoreau began to use the word “honk,” not before of record in English. (All any duck had ever been able to say in English was “quack.”) Thoreau may have borrowed this from the Narragansett or Wampanoag term for “Canada goose,” which is Honck, or he may merely have been being his usual inventive self. (The origin of the term “honkey” is also still in doubt.)

March 26: Saw about 10 A.M. a gaggle of geese [Canada Goose Branta canadensis], forty-three in number, in a very perfect harrow flying northeasterly. one side [of] the harrow was a little longer than the other. They appeared to be four or five feet apart. At first I heard faintly, as I stood by Minott’s gate, borne to me from GEORGE MINOTT the southwest through the confused sounds of the village, the indistinct honking of geese. I was somewhat surprised to find that Mr. Loring at his house should have heard and seen the same flock. I should think that the same flock was commonly seen and heard from the distance of a mile east and west. It is remarkable that we commonly see geese go over in the spring about 10 o ’clock in the morning, as if they were accustomed to stop for the night at some place southward whence they reached us at that time. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1854

Having studied law under an anti-slavery judge in Elyria, Ohio, John Mercer Langston became the 1st black lawyer in the United States. After leaving Oberlin, Ohio and going to Virginia in 1871, he would make himself the first black American admitted to practice law before the US Supreme Court. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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This was Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio in 1854: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1855

The Republican party nominated Salmon Portland Chase for Governor of Ohio.

In Ohio, John Mercer Langston became the first black to be elected to public office, as clerk of Brownhelm Township. (Later, he would be elected to the Oberlin, Ohio City Council and to the town’s Board of Education.)

President Horace Mann, Sr. was plumping for an education in all religions. The conservatives of Antioch College, backed by Alpheus Marshall Merrifield and even to some extent by Judge William Mills, were being led by mathematics professor Ira Allen. They wanted Antioch to a be denominational college, and they wanted HDT WHAT? INDEX

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a department of theology that would preach the truth and only the truth. The dispute culminated in a failed attempt to replace Mann with Allen.

February: Anthony Burns had been kept in the traders’ jail in Richmond, Virginia until he had been sold to a white man from North Carolina, and in this month this man retailed him to a Massachusetts minister at Barnum’s Hotel in Baltimore for the sum of $1,325.00. (Carefully, discretely, by way of an acceptable mediary, the black community of Boston was purchasing Burns’s freedom.) On March 7, 1855 a slave would be feted at Tremont Temple and handed his manumission papers. The former slave free at last would attend the School of Divinity at Oberlin College and become a minister of the gospel, God bless him. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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March 7, Wednesday: Anthony Burns, back from his 2nd enslavement at a ransom price of $1,325.00, was feted at the Tremont Temple and handed manumission papers. The former slave, free at last, would attend the School of Divinity at Oberlin College and become a minister of the gospel, pastor at the Zion Baptist Church of St. Catherine’s, Canada West.

During that spring, however, in Boston, due to the parental boycott of racially segregated school facilities, enrollment at Boston’s all-black Smith School was standing at but 28. In the petition drive to desegregate Boston’s system, William C. Nell would obtain 311 signatures and Lewis Hayden would obtain 87. A bill prohibiting all distinction of color and religion would be passed by the Massachusetts House of Representatives, at that time under the control of Know-Nothings. Then that bill would be passed by the Massachusetts Senate, also at that time under the control of these people.4

4. In Massachusetts at least, this party was not only nativist and anti-immigrant but also anti-aristocratic and anti-slavery. Nothing in this blazing amazing world is so strange and strained as politics! An explanation for this phenomenon might be that the Catholic Irish, who had to compete with free blacks for the roughest and dirtiest of laboring jobs, were violently pro-slavery and, since the Know-Nothings were violently anti-Catholic and anti-Irish and the Catholic Irish were reaching what were seen as dangerous proportions, actually in Boston by that point the majority of the citizenry, then, on the principle “an enemy of my enemy is my friend,” the Know-Nothings were making common cause with the free black minority. One Know-Nothing representative is recorded as having stated that he resented the idea that some black children had to travel a long way to Black Smith, passing other schools on the way, when the “dirtiest Irish” could step directly from their teeming tenements into the nearest and most convenient public school. The Boston Pilot, a Catholic paper, suggested that this integration of the public schools was intended “as an insult” to Boston’s Catholics, who were of course all white. Boston Catholics were at this time so anti-black that they didn’t even bother to establish a segregated section in their cathedral for blacks. When a temperance speaker who had spoken against slavery in Ireland, where it was unpopular, came to speak of temperance in the Catholic churches of America, for the most pragmatic of reasons he needed to cease saying anything at all about this topic of slavery. ANTI-CATHOLICISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

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March 7. P. M. — To Red-Ice Pond. A raw east wind and rather cloudy. Methinks the buds of the early willows, the willows of the railroad bank, show more of the silvery down than ten days ago. Did I not see crows flying northeasterly yesterday toward night? The redness in the ice appears mostly to have evaporated, so that, melted, it does not color the water in a bottle. Saw, about a hemlock stump on the hillside north of the largest Andromeda Pond, very abundant droppings of some kind of mice, on that common green moss (forming a firm bed about an inch high, like little pines, surmounted by a fine red stem with a green point, in all three quarters of an inch high), which they had fed on to a great extent, evidently when it was covered with snow, shearing it off level. Their droppings could be collected by the hand probably, [550307a.jpg (2597 bytes)] a light brown above, green next the earth. There were apparently many of their holes in the earth about the stump. They must have fed very extensively on this moss the past winter [Vide Mar. 14th.]. It is now difficult getting on and off Walden. At Brister's Spring there are beautiful dense green beds of moss, which apparently has just risen above the surface of the water, tender and compact. I see many tadpoles of medium or full size in deep warm ditches in Hubbard's meadow. They may probably be seen as soon as the ditches are open, thus earlier than frogs. At his bridge over the brook it must have been a trout I saw glance, — rather dark, as big as my finger. To-day, as also three or four days ago, I saw a clear drop of maple sap on a broken red maple twig, which tasted very sweet. The Pyrola secunda is a perfect evergreen. It has lost none of its color or freshness, with its thin ovate finely serrate leaves, revealed now the snow is gone. It is more or less branched. Picked up a very handsome white pine cone some six and a half inches long by two and three eighths near base and two near apex, perfectly blossomed. It is a very rich and wholesome brown color, of various shades as you turn it in your hand, — a light ashy or gray brown, somewhat like unpainted wood. as you look down on it, or as if the lighter brown were covered with a gray lichen, seeing only those parts of the scales always exposed, — with a few darker streaks or marks ([DRAWING]) and a drop of pitch at the point of each scale. Within, the scales are a dark brown above (i. e. as it hangs) and a light brown beneath, very distinctly being marked beneath by the same darker [550307b.jpg (3940 bytes)] brown, down the centre and near the apex somewhat anchorwise. We were walking along the sunny hillside on the south of Fair Haven Pond (on the 4th), which the choppers had just laid bare, when, in a sheltered and warmer place, we heard a rustling amid the dry leaves on the hillside and saw a striped squirrel eying us from its resting-place on the bare ground. It sat still till we were within a rod, then suddenly dived into its hole, which was at its feet, and disappeared. The first pleasant days of spring come out like a HDT WHAT? INDEX

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squirrel and go in again HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1856

October: William Cooper Nell attended graduation ceremonies at Oberlin, Ohio.

Sojourner Truth addressed the Michigan Progressive Friends at their annual meeting in Battle Creek, Michigan. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1857

The mulatto Lewis Sheridan Leary went to Oberlin, Ohio to live.

(He would marry there and make the acquaintance of John Brown in Cleveland. To go to Harpers Ferry, he would leave behind his wife with a 6-month-old child at Oberlin, she being in ignorance of the purpose of his trip. He was given funds to go from Oberlin to Chambersburg in the company of his nephew John Anderson Copeland, Jr., a student at Oberlin College. He would get isolated along with his nephew and John Henry Kagi

in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the three men would make a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they would get themselves caught in a crossfire, and after Kagi had been killed and Leary shot several times, he would be taken, his wounds so severe that he would die the following morning. He would be able to dictate messages to his family and is reported as saying “I am ready to die.” The Leary child would subsequently be educated by James Redpath and Wendell Phillips.)

Charles Plummer Tidd joined John Brown’s party at Tabor, Kansas. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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(He would become one of the followers of “Shubel Morgan” who would return to Kansas in 1858 to raid into Missouri. During the Winter 1857-1858 encampment of the Brown forces in the Iowa Territory, he would “ruin” a Quaker girl and the other members of the team would need to sneak him away from Springdale, Iowa during the night. Nevertheless, the group would obtain some recruits not overly impressed with the Peace Testimony of George Fox from among the residents of this town, such as the brothers Barclay Coppoc and Edwin Coppoc. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

Tidd and John E. Cook would be particularly warm friends. He opposed the attack on Harpers Ferry but nevertheless took part both in the raid on the planter Washington’s home and on the federal arsenal itself, escaped, and made his way on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. He and John Brown’s son Owen Brown would find work and safety, under assumed names, on an oil well in the vicinity of Crawford County, Pennsylvania. He would visit Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Canada and take part in the planning for the rescue of Aaron D. Stevens and Albert Hazlett while the Mason Commission of the Congress was presuming that he had been killed in the fighting at Harpers Ferry. On July 19, 1861 he would be able to enlist under the name “Charles Plummer” and would become a 1st Sergeant of the 21st Massachusetts Volunteers. On February 8, 1862 he would die of fever aboard the transport Northerner during the battle of Roanoke Island, a battle he had particularly wished to take part in because ex-Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the nemesis of the Harpers Ferry raiders, was in command of the Confederates. Charles Plummer Tidd’s grave is #40 in the National Cemetery in New Berne, North Carolina.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1858

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

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

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

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black, would be put on trial.

UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

September 13, Monday: In Oberlin, Ohio, gas street lights were beginning to be provided by a private gas factory on what is now Vine Street, run by Samuel Plum. But was that fine technological innovation the real big news of the day in this town? No, for on the morning of this day, John Price, an 18-year-old black fugitive slave who had been staying at the house of James Armstrong, a black laborer who often boarded fugitives, while attempting to find work in the local area, was “hired” to “harvest potatoes” by Shakespeare Boynton, son of a wealthy Oberlin landholder. Boynton had been deputized by a group of Maysville, Kentucky slavecatchers and was in cahoots with a couple of deputies from Columbus, Ohio, on behalf of the slave’s owner John Bacon in Maysville! These deputies intercepted the buggy in which Boynton and the young black man were riding and with guns and knives forced the young black man into their own carriage. News of this reached Oberlin about noon and a large crowd of black and white Oberlinians, both townies and students, rode off toward the nearby town of Wellington, where the captive was being held at a hotel, preparatory to putting him on a train and taking him back to his enslavement in Kentucky. This was no mean posse, for it included Charles Langston, brother of the black attorney John Mercer Langston, and James M. Fitch, the bookseller who was superintendent of the Oberlin Sunday School, as well as Professor Henry C. Peck and preparatory student John HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Anderson Copeland, Jr.

John Watson, a grocer, arrived in Wellington about 2PM, sounding the alarm by hollering “Kidnappers!” (he meant by “kidnappers,” of course, these approaching law-defying rescuers, not these righteous slave- hunting officials who were merely implementing the federal government’s Fugitive Slave Act of 1850). The slavecatchers secreted their slave in the attic of the Wadsworth Hotel (The Herrick Memorial Library in Wellington now occupies the site of this hotel) and then hid themselves, while a posse of decent white citizens was collected to guard the doors of the hotel. This mob of Oberlinians rode up and demanded the 18-year-old’s release.

Here is a later publicity photograph of the rescuers in their finest fettle:

They must have made a fine sight, churning about on the street in front of the hotel on their snorting steeds! Meanwhile, Charles Langston, John Watson, and O.B. Wall were fruitlessly attempting to obtain legal redress from the stonewalling village constable, alleging that a crime was being committed and seeking a writ of habeas corpus. There was bargaining, the slave catcher and the federal marshal trying to allege that their HDT WHAT? INDEX

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prisoner was a fugitive slave while the townspeople objected that no proper warrant had been shown to any local magistrate. Charles Langston attempted to calm the crowd, and went inside to talk with Jacob Lowe, one of the deputies. Realizing that the kidnappers had no intention of giving up their captive, he threatened that “we will have him anyhow.” Wilson Evans, John Copeland, Jr., and Jerry Fox rushed the door guards and some of the rescuers got inside the hotel. During a struggle inside, Richard Winsor, a theological student, was able to climb a ladder placed against the back of the structure and help John Price to a buggy, and everyone rushed back to Oberlin. The rescuers secreted Price in the home of Oberlin College President James Fairchild, to be

later taken across the border into Canada. Thirty-seven of them would face arrest, including Professor Peck and student John Anderson Copeland, Jr. Over the course of their trial, in solidarity with Charles Langston who was sentenced to 20 days and Simeon Bushnell who was sentenced to 60 days, they would refuse to post any bail and remain in the Cleveland lockup. These “jail-birds,” as they preferred to be known, would put out from the jail a newspaper, The Rescuer. While they were being held, Professor Peck was permitted to preach from his cell, and Sunday School children trooped through the corridors of the institution to view these happenings with their own eyes (this is what is known technically as “bad press”). Eventually the slavecatchers from Kentucky and from Columbus, Ohio would be arrested by state officials on a charge of kidnapping and, in return for the charge being dropped, would agree to drop the charges against the rescuers. Thus, on July 7, 1859, everyone except Simeon Bushnell, who was still serving out his 60-day sentence, would be able to return to Oberlin and be the guests of honor at a great celebration. When Simeon Bushnell also would be released HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and would be able to return on July 11, 1859, he also would be greeted by a hailing crowd of his fellow citizens.

UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

September 13. P. M.–To Annursnack. Solidago puberula, apparently in prime and handsome, roadside, Colburn’s Hill. I noticed the black willows quite imbrowned on the 10th, and the button-bushes beginning to look yellowish. A. Hosmer is pleased because from the cupola of his new barn he can see a new round-topped mountain in the northwest. Is curious to know what one it is. Says that if he lived as near Annursnack as Heywood does, he should go up it once a week, but he supposes that Heywood does not go up it more than once a year. What is that grass still in bloom a foot or more in height in Heywood’s potato-field, some fifty rods west of houseleek? It is somewhat like what I have wrongly called Danthonia spicata, but with a longer and a round spike, etc., etc. Vide press. There is a man there mowing the Panicum Crusgalli, which is exceedingly rank and dense, completely concealing the potatoes, which have never been hoed, it was so wet. He saves this grass and says the cattle like it well. I notice that the large ant-hills, though they prevent bushes and ferns from growing where they are built, keeping open a space four to seven feet wide in their midst, do not keep out grass, but they are commonly little grassy mounds with bare tops. Looking from the top of Annursnack, the aspect of the earth generally is still a fresh green, especially the woods, but many dry fields, where apparently the June-grass has withered uncut, are a very pale tawny or lighter still. It is fit that some animals should be nearly of this color. The cougar would hardly be observed stealing across these plains. In one place I still detect the ruddiness of sorrel. Euphorbia hypericifolia still, and gone to seed, on the top of Annursnack. From many a barn these days I hear the sound of the flail. For how many generations this sound will continue to be heard here! At least until they discover a new way of separating the chaff from the wheat. Saw one raking cranberries on the 10th; rather early.

September 13: A small dense flock of wild pigeons [American Passenger Pigeons Ectopistes HDT WHAT? INDEX

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migratorius] dashes by over the side of the hill, from west to east, –perhaps from Wetherbee’s to Brooks, for I see the latter’s pigeon-place. They make a dark slate-gray impression. Fringed gentian out well, on easternmost edge of the Painted-Cup Meadows, by wall.[FOOTNOTE: Caroline Pratt tells me the 20th that her father found it out full a fortnight before that date.] Saw a striped snake run into the wall, and just before it disappeared heard a loud sound like a hiss! I think it could hardly have been made by its tail among leaves. The squirrels know better than to open unsound hazelnuts. At most they only peep into them. I see some on the walls with a little hole gnawed in them, enough to show that they are empty. Muskmelons and squashes are turning yellow in the gardens, and ferns in the swamps. Hear many warbling vireos these mornings. Many yellow butterflies in road and fields all the country over.

September 14, Tuesday: On this date Moses Farmer and John Batchelder took out a patent on a telegraph-line insulator of the “ramshorn” variety. These are the actual examples at the US patent office, with the original tag:

The group of abolitionist rescuers immediately returned John Price to Oberlin, Ohio, where they hid him in the home of James Harris Fairchild, a future president of Oberlin College.

September14. Half a dozen Bidens chrysanthemoides in river, not long. Picked eleven of those great HDT WHAT? INDEX

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potatoworms, caterpillars of the sphinx moth, off our privet. The Glyceria obtusa, about eighteen inches high, purple grasses quite common, in the meadow west of Brooks Clark’s, has turned a dull purple, probably on account of frosts.

September 15, Wednesday: Soon the underground railroad worker Richard Winsor would be conveying John Price, escaped 19-year-old slave of John Bacon who had been recaptured in Oberlin, Ohio, from the attic of a hotel in nearby Wellington, Ohio, where he had been sequestered by bounty hunters acting as federal marshals under the federal Fugitive Slave Law in order to put him on a train and return him to his owner in Maysville, Kentucky, to his safety in Canada, land of the free.

September 15. I have not seen nor heard a bobolink for some days at least, numerous as they were three weeks ago, and even fifteen days. They depart early. I hear a nuthatch occasionally, but it reminds me of winter.

P.M.– To Walden. I paddle about the pond, for a rarity. The eriocaulon, still in bloom there, standing thinly about the edge, where it is stillest and shallowest, in the color of its stem and radical leaves is quite in harmony with the glaucous water. Its radical leaves and fine root-fibres form a peculiar loose but thick and continuous carpet or rug on the sandy bottom, which you can lift up in great flakes, exposing the fine white beaded root-fibres. This evidently affords retreats for the fishes, musquash, etc., etc., and you can see where it has been lifted up into galleries by them. I see one or two pickerel poised over it. They, too, are singularly greenish and transparent, so as not to be easily detected, only a little more yellowish than the water and the eriocaulon; ethereal fishes, not far from the general color of heart-leaf and target-weed, unlike the same fish out of water. I notice, as I push round the pond close to the shore, with a stick, that the weeds are eriocaulon, two or three kinds of potamogeton, – one with a leaf an inch or two long, one with a very small, floating leaf, a third all immersed, four or five inches high and yellowish-green (this (vide press) is apparently an immersed form of P. hybridus), – target-weed, heart-leaf, and a little callitriche. There is but little of any of them, however, in the pond itself. It is truly an ascetic pond, and lives very sparingly on vegetables at any rate. I gather quite a lot of perfectly fresh high blueberries overhanging the south side, and there are many green ones among them still. They are all shrivelled now in swamps commonly. The target-weed still blooms a little in the Pout’s Nest, though half the leaves have turned a reddish orange, are sadly eaten, and have lost nearly all their gelatinous coating. But perfect fresh green leaves have expanded and are still expanding in their midst. The whole pool is covered, as it were, with one vast shield of reddish and green scales. As these leaves change and decay, the firmer parts along the veins retain their life and color longest, as with the heart-leaf. The leaves are eaten in winding lines about a tenth of an inch wide, scoring them all over in a curious manner, and also in spots. These look dark or black because they rest on the dark water. Looking closely, I am surprised to find how many frogs, mostly small, are resting amid these target leaves, with their green noses out. Their backs and noses are exactly the color of this weed. They retreat, when disturbed, under this close shield. It is a frog’s paradise. I see, in the paths, pitch pine twigs gnawed off, where no cones are left on the ground. Are they gnawed off in order to come at the cones better? I find, just rising above the target-weed at Pout’s Nest, Scirpus subterminalis, apparently recently out of bloom. The culms two to three feet along, appearing to rise half an inch above the spikes. The long, linear immersed leaves coming off and left below At entrance of the path (on Brister’s Path) near Staples and Jarvis bound, apparently the true Danthonia spicata, still green. It is generally long out of bloom and turned straw-color. I will call the other (which I had so named), of Hosmer’s meadow, for the present, meadow oat grass, as, indeed, I did at first. A hummingbird in the garden. There is a southeast wind, with clouds, and I suspect a storm brewing. It is very rare that the wind blows from this quarter. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1859

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

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

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

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

April 5, Tuesday: Francis Jackson wrote from Boston to friends, in order to introduce Antoinette Brown Blackwell to the Standing Committee of the 28th Congregational Society Friends as a speaker representing the “Pulpit” and “Woman’s Rights” at the same time.

In the course of the federal trial of two of the rescuers, one white and one black, the events of the 1858 Oberlin/ Wellington Rescue would be summarized in The Daily Cleveland Herald. Simeon M. Bushnell, a white man, and Charles H. Langston, a free black man, were the only two put on trial. What had happened was that after negotiation failed, abolitionist rescuers had stormed the hotel and located John Price where he had been secreted in the hotel’s attic. A federal grand jury had initially brought indictments against 25 white men and 12 free blacks in the crowd that had freed Price. Among the free blacks was Charles Henry Langston, who had helped ensure that Price was taken to Canada rather than released to the authorities. Charles and his brother John Mercer Langston were both Oberlin College graduates. The Langston brothers led the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society in 1858. They both were politically active all their lives, Charles in Kansas and John taking leadership roles in state and national politics, in 1888 becoming the first African-American to be elected to the US Congress from Virginia. John H. Scott, a freed slave who had become a harness and trunk maker in Oberlin, Ohio, had also been there. Two other such participants in the rescue, Lewis Sheridan Leary and John Anderson Copeland, Jr., along with Oberlin resident Shields Green who had not participated, would go on to enlist in John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. On this day the newspaper reported: The cases of the Rescuers of slave John from his captors ... was called this morning.

April 5, 1859: In running a line through a wood-lot in the southwest part of Lincoln to-day, I started from an old pine stump, now mostly crumbled away, though a part of the wood was still hard above ground, which was described in his deed of 1813 (forty-six years ago) as a pine stump. It was on the side of a hill above Deacon Farrar’s meadow. As I stood on a hill just cut off, I saw, half a dozen rods below, the bright-yellow catkins of a tall willow just opened on the edge of the swamp, against the dark-brown twigs and the withered leaves. This early blossom looks bright and rare amid the withered leaves and the generally brown and dry surface, like the early butterflies. This is the most conspicuous of the March flowers (i.e. if it chances to be so early as March). It suggests unthought-of warmth and sunniness. It takes but little color and tender growth to make miles of dry brown woodland and swamp look habitable and home-like, as if a man could dwell there. Mr. Haines, who travelled over the lots with us this very cold and blustering day, was over eighty. “What raw, blustering weather!” said I to my employer to-day. “Yes,” answered he “Did you see those two sun- dogs on Saturday?” They are a pretty sure sign of cold and windy weather. SUDBURY “HEAVY” HAYNES

April 6, Wednesday: In the course of the federal trial of two of the Ohio rescuers of John Price, one white and one black, the events of the 1858 Oberlin/Wellington Rescue were being summarized in The Daily Cleveland Herald: Anderson Jennings, the nigger catcher, was sworn in ... John was a full bloodied nigger ... There was not a drop of white blood in him.

April 6, 1859: Another remarkably windy day; cold northwest wind and a little snow spitting from HDT WHAT? INDEX

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time to time, yet so little that even the traveller might not perceive it. For nineteen days, from the 19th of March to the 6th of April, both inclusive, we have had remarkably windy weather. For ten days of the nineteen the wind has been remarkably strong and violent, so that each of those day.s the wind was the subject of general remark. The first one of these ten days was the warmest, the wind being southwest, but the others. especially of late, were very cold, the wind being northwest, and for the most part icy cold. There have also been five days that would be called windy and only four which were moderate. The last seven, including to-day, have all been windy, five of them remarkably so; wind from northwest. [Vide 10th, forward.] The sparrows love to flit along any thick hedge, like that of Mrs. Gourgas’s. Tree sparrows, F. hyemalis, and fox-colored sparrows in company. A fish hawk sails down the river, from time to time almost stationary one hundred feet above the water, notwithstanding the very strong wind. I see where moles have rooted in a meadow and cast up those little piles of the black earth.

April 9, Saturday: Henry Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, the Schneider edition, issued in Leipzig in 1784, of Claudius Ælianus (170-235CE)’s DENATURA ANIMALIUM LIBRI XVII. CUM ANIMADVERSIONIBUS C. GESNERI ET D.W. TRILLERI. CONRAD GESNER

http://www.flyfishinghistory.com/aelian_westwood_trans.htm

In the course of the federal trial of two of the Ohio rescuers of John Price, one white and one black, the events of the 1858 Oberlin/Wellington Rescue were being summarized in The Daily Cleveland Herald. The newspaper related that on the previous day Governor Salmon Portland Chase of Ohio had been among the attenders in the courtroom: The court yesterday was visited by Govenor Chase.

April 9. P. M.–To Goose Pond. The wind is as strong, and yet colder, being more from the north, than before. Through, I think, all this windy weather, or at least for about three weeks, the wind has regularly gone down with the sun, strong as it has been each day. As we go up the hill in the woods east of Hubbard’s Close, I hear a singular sound through the roaring of the wind amid the trees, which I think at first some creature forty rods off, but it proves to be the creaking of one bough on another. When I knew what it was I was surprised to find it so near, even within a rod. It was occasioned by two little dead limbs, an inch or less in diameter, on two different white pines which stood four or five feet apart, – such limbs as are seen on every white pine below the living ones, some twelve feet from the ground. These with every motion of the trees in the wind were grating back and forth on each other, and had worn into one another, and this produced, not a mere coarse, grating sound, but a perfect viol sound, such as I never heard from trees before, – a jarring or vibratory creak, as if the bow leaped on the strings, for one limb was bow and the other string. It was on one key or note when the trees approached, and quite another and very fine and sharp when they receded. I raised one limb with a pole, and the music ceased. This was as musical as a viol, a forest viol, which might have suggested that instrument to some Orpheus wandering in the wood. He would only have to place a box of resonant wood beneath to complete a simple viol. We heard several others afterward which made a coarse, squeaking noise like a bird, but this would have suggested music to any one. It was mythologic, and an Indian might have referred it to a departed spirit. The fiddles made by the trees whose limbs cross one another, – played on by the wind! When we listened, in the wood, we heard all kinds of creaking and groaning sounds from the laboring trees. We go seeking the south sides of hills and woods, or deep hollows, to walk in this cold and blustering day. We sit by the side of Little Goose Pond, which C. calls Ripple Lake or Pool, to watch the ripples on it. Now it is nearly smooth, and then there drops down on to it, deep as it lies amid the hills, a sharp and narrow blast of the icy north wind careering above, striking it, perhaps, by a point or an edge, and swiftly spreading along it, making a dark-blue ripple. Now four or five windy bolts, sharp or blunt, strike it at once and spread different ways. The boisterous but playful north wind evidently stoops from a considerable height to dally with this fair pool which HDT WHAT? INDEX

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it discerns beneath. You could sit there and watch these blue shadows playing over the surface like the light and shade on changeable silk, for hours. It reminds me, too, of the swift Camilla on a field [of] grain. The wind often touches the water only by the finest points or edges. It is thus when you look in some measure from the sun, but if you move round so as to come more opposite to him, then all these dark-blue ripples are all sparkles too bright to look at, for you now see the sides of the wavelets which reflect the sun to you. A large fox-hole in Britton’s hollow, lately dug; an ox-cartload of sand, or more, thrown up on the hillside. Watching the ripples fall and dash across the surface of low-lying and small woodland lakes is one of the amusements of these windy March and April days. It is only on small lakes deep sunk in hollows in the woods that you can see or study them these days, for the winds sweep over the whole breadth of larger lakes incessantly, but they only touch these sheltered lakelets by fine points and edges from time to time. And then there is such a fiddling in the woods, such a viol-creaking of bough on bough, that you would think music was being born again, as in the days of Orpheus. Orpheus and Apollo are certainly there taking lessons; aye, and the jay and the blackbird, too, learn now where they stole their “thunder.” They are perforce silent, meditating new strains. When the playful breeze drops on the pool, it springs to right and left, quick as a kitten playing with dead leaves, clapping her paw on them. Sometimes it merely raises a single wave at one point, as if a fish darted near the CAT surface. While to you looking down from a hillside partly from the sun, these points and dashes look thus dark- blue, almost black, they are seen by another, standing low and more opposite to the sun, as the most brilliant sheeny and sparkling surface, too bright to look at. Thus water agitated by the wind is both far brighter and far darker than smooth water, seen from this side or that, – that is, as you look at the inclined surface of the wave which reflects the sun, or at the shaded side. For three weeks past, when I have looked northward toward the flooded meadows they have looked dark-blue or blackish, in proportion as the day was clear and the wind high from the northwest, making high waves and much shadow. We can sit in the deep hollows in the woods, like Frosty Hollow near Ripple Lake, for example, and find it quite still and warm in the sun, as if a different atmosphere lurked there; but from time to time a cold puff from the rude Boreas careering overhead drops on us, and reminds us of the general character of the day. While we lie at length on the dry sedge, nourishing spring thoughts, looking for insects, and counting the rings on old stumps. These old gray or whitish stumps, with their porous structure where the ducts are seen, are very much like bones, – the bones of trees. I break a little cube out of this old oak stump, which was sawed off some thirty years ago, and which has about one hundred rings, – a piece sharply square-cornered and exactly the form of a square bunch of matches; and, the sawed end being regularly channelled by time in the direction of the ducts and of the silver grain, it looks precisely like the loose ends, or dipped end of the bunch, and would be mistaken for such on any shelf. Those ripple lakes lie now in the midst of mostly bare brown or tawny dry woodlands, themselves the most living objects. They may say to the first woodland flowers, We played with the north winds here before ye were born. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

April 16, Saturday: A story by Louisa May Alcott appeared in Boston’s Saturday Evening Gazette, entitled “Mark Field’s Success.”

Charles Chauncy Shackford replied from Lynn, Massachusetts to Henry Thoreau’s concerned letters of April 6th and 13th, letting him know that the date on which he was being expected to deliver his lecture in Lynn was the first Tuesday in May, May 3rd. (Evidently there had been one or another misunderstanding as to the exact date on the schedule.)

Henry Thoreau wrote to the aged Jonathan Buffum of Lynn, Massachusetts, asking him to communicate with Shackford, whom he was supposing he had been unable to reach, in regard to the date on which he was being invited to lecture in Lynn.

(The Lynn lecture eventually would be delivered on April 26th.)

In the course of the federal trial of two of the Ohio rescuers of John Price, one white and one black, the events of the 1858 Oberlin/Wellington Rescue were being summarized in The Daily Cleveland Herald: Thirty seven in the hands of the Marshall.

April 16. Sheldrakes yet on Walden, but I have not identified a whistler for several weeks, – three or more.

April 19, Tuesday: In the course of the federal trial of two of the Ohio rescuers of John Price, one white and one black, the events of the 1858 Oberlin/Wellington Rescue were being summarized in The Daily Cleveland Herald: Jury struck - new Jury chosen.

April 19. Was it a vireo I heard this forenoon on the elms? Channing sees the same small flock of sheldrakes, three birds, in Walden still. They have been there a week or two, but I cannot see them the 22d.

P.M.– Began to set white pines in R.W.E.’s Wyman lot.

April 20, Wednesday: Secretary of the Navy Isaac Toucey designated the new USS Constellation as the flagship, or headquarters vessel, of a 6-ship US African Squadron on anti-slavery patrol, commanded by Flag Officer William Inman. Captain John Nicholas would be in command of this particular vessel of the flotilla. It would capture three slavers, the brig Delicia, the bark Cora, and the brig Triton.

Antioch College was sold at auction to a group of Horace Mann, Sr.’s friends led by Josiah Quincy.

In the course of the federal trial of two of the Ohio rescuers of John Price, one white and one black, the events of the 1858 Oberlin/Wellington Rescue were being summarized in The Daily Cleveland Herald. On this day the newspaper reported that the trial of Charles Henry Langston, the free black defendant, began.

April 20: Hear and see my ruby-crowned or crested wren singing at 6 A.M. on Wheildon’s pines. Setting pines all day. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

April 22, Friday: Henry Thoreau was being written to by Hobart & Robbins in Boston, enclosing three checks for the total amount of $12.00 in payment for plumbago and requesting a receipt.

Boston 22d. April 1859 Mr. Henry D. Thoreaux Concord, Mass.

Dr. Sir, Enclosed please find twelve dollars to pay for the Plumbago Receipt bill & return by mail One $5.00 bill The [M]averick Bank (No. 800) One 5.00 " " [M]alden do, ( " 1678.) One 2.00 " " Lechemere do, ( " 9570.) Yr’s Truly Hobart & Robbins

In the course of the federal trial of two of the Ohio rescuers of John Price, one white and one black, the events of the 1858 Oberlin/Wellington Rescue were being summarized in The Daily Cleveland Herald: Busnell Convicted.

April 22: The Salix purpurea in prime, out probably three or four days; say 19th. Arbor-vitæ, how long? P. M. – In a fine rain, around Walden. I go by a Populus grandidentata on the eastern sand slope of the Deep Cut just after entering, whose aments (which apparently here began to shed pollen yesterday) in scattered clusters at the ends of the bare-twigs, but just begun to shed their pollen, not hanging loose and straight yet, but curved, are a very rich crimson, like some ripe fruit, as mulberries, seen against the sand. I cannot represent the number in a single cluster, but they are much the handsomest now before the crimson anthers have burst, and are all the more remarkable for the very open and bare habit of the tree.

When setting the pines at Walden the last three days, I was sung to by the field sparrow [Field Sparrow Spizella pusilla]. For music I heard their jingle from time to time. That the music the pines were set to, and I have no doubt they will build many a nest under their shelter. It would seem as if such a field as this –a dry open or half-open pasture in the woods, with small pines scattered in it– was well-nigh, if not quite, abandoned to this one alone among the sparrows. The surface of the earth is portioned out among them. By a beautiful law of distribution, one creature does not too much interfere with another. I do not hear the song sparrow here. As the pines gradually increase, and a wood-lot is formed, these birds will withdraw to new pastures, and the thrushes, etc., will take their place. Yes, as the walls of cities are fabled to have been built by music, so my pines were established by the song of the field sparrow. They commonly-place their nests here under the shelter of a little pine in the field. As I planted there, wandering thoughts visited me, which I have now forgotten. My senses were busily suggesting them, though I was unconscious of their origin. E.g., I first consciously found myself entertaining the thought of a carriage on the road, and directly after I was aware that I heard it. No doubt I had heard it before, or rather my ears had, but I was quite unconscious of it, — it was not a fact of my then state of existence; yet such was the force of habit, it affected my thoughts nevertheless, so double, if not treble, even, are we. Sometimes the senses bring us information quicker than we can receive it. Perhaps these thoughts which run in ruts by themselves while we are engaged in some routine may be called automatic. I distinctly entertained the idea of a carriage, without the slightest suspicion how it had originated or been suggested to my mind. I have HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

no doubt at all that my ears had heard it, but my mind, just then preoccupied, had refused to attend to it. This suggests that most, if not all, indeed, of our ideas may be due to some sort of sensuous impression of which we may or may not be conscious. This afternoon there is an east wind, and a rain-storm accordingly beginning, the eighth of the kind with this wind. I still see a large flock of grackles. Within a few days I pricked my fingers smartly against the sharp, stiff points of some sedge coming up. At Heywood’s meadow, by the railroad, this sedge, rising green and dense with yellow tips above the withered clumps, is very striking, suggesting heat, even a blaze, there. Scare up partridges [Ruffed Grouse Bonasa umbellus (Partridge)] feeding about the green springy places under the edge of hills. See them skim or scale away for forty rods along and upward to the woods, into which they swiftly scale, dodging to right and left and avoiding the twigs, yet without once flapping the wings after having launched themselves. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

April 23, Saturday: The 1st patient was admitted to the Michigan Asylum for the Insane. This facility at Kalamazoo was Michigan’s 1st state mental hospital. It had originally been proposed by the governor on February 28, 1848, but would not officially open until August 29, 1859. The facility would later be known as Kalamazoo State Hospital.5 PSYCHOLOGY

Dr. Alfred I. Tauber has explored the significance of Henry Thoreau’s writing, “A wise man will know what game to play to-day, and play it. We must not be governed by rigid rules, as by an almanac, but let the season rule us. The moods and thoughts of man are revolving just as steadily and incessantly as nature’s. Nothing must be postponed. Take time by the forelock. Now or never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment” (which he attributes to this day rather than the following one), for an appreciation of his attitude toward time and eternity.

In the course of the federal trial of two of the Ohio rescuers of John Price, one white and one black, the events of the 1858 Oberlin/Wellington Rescue were being summarized in The Daily Cleveland Herald. On this day the newspaper reported that during the previous night “Oberlin Women” had been allowed to share the cells of their accused husbands.

April 23, 1859: Rain, rain. Hear seringo, by chance the first, and while it rains. The tree sparrows abundant and singing in the yard, but I have not noticed a hyemalis of late. The field sparrow sings in our yard in the rain. The sidewalk is all strewn with fishworms this forenoon, up and down the street, and many will evidently die

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

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in the cold rain. Apparently the rain tempted them to remain on the surface, and then the cold and wet benumbs and drowns them. Some of them are slowly crawling across the paths. What an abundant supply of food for the GILBERT WHITE birds lately arrived! From Gilbert White, and the notes by others to his last edition, I should infer that these were worms which, having been tempted out in unusual numbers by the rain, lost their way back to their holes. They say that they never take their tails out of their holes. In about five quarts of scarlet oak acorns gathered the other day there [WERE] only some three gills that had life in them, or say one in seven. I do not know how many the squirrels had got, but as it was quite near a house, a tree by itself, I think not a great many. The rest were apparently destroyed by worms; so that I should say the worms destroyed before spring three fourths of them. As the grub is already in the acorn, it may be just as well (except for the squirrels) to sow them now as in the fall, whatever you can get.

Clears up at 3 P.M., and a very strong south wind blows. I go on the water. I frequently observe that the waves do not always run high in proportion to the strength of the wind. The wind seems sometimes to flat them down, perhaps when it blows very hard in gusts, which interrupt a long roll. What is that small willow on the north side of S. Brown’s stump, which apparently began to open two days ago? A large hickory by the wall on the north side (or northeast side) of the hill apparently just blown down, the one I saw the screech owl go into two or three years ago. I think it may have fallen in this very high wind which arose within an hour; at any rate it has fallen since the grass began to spring, for the owl-hole contains a squirrel’s nest made of half-green grass somewhat withered, which could only have been found quite recently, and also the limbs have been driven so deep into the ground that I cannot pull them out, which shows that the ground was thawed when it fell; also the squirrel’s nest, which is perfectly sheltered, now the tree is fallen, was quite wet through with rain, that of the morning, as I think. This nest, which I suppose was that of a red squirrel, was at the bottom of a large hole some eighteen inches deep and twenty-five feet from the ground, where a large limb had been broken off formerly. An opening on the side had been stopped with twigs as big as a pipe-stem and larger, some of them the hickory twigs quite green and freshly gnawed off with their buds, forming a rude basketwork which kept up and in the grass and rotten wood, four or five handfuls of which, mixed with the rotten wood of the inside, composed the nest. This was the half old and withered and half green grass gathered a few days since about the base of the tree.

April 29, Friday: Austria invaded Piedmont and soon, on May 12th, France would be declaring war on Austria in defense of Piedmont. The defeat of the Austrian troops would be widespread and revolutions would take place in Tuscany, Modena, Parma, Bologna, Ferrara, and other areas; this war would end with the Peace of Villafranca on July 11th (which would be later confirmed by the Treaty of Zürich).

The federal Supreme Court ruled in regard to habeas corpus for the accused Ohio rescuers of John Price.

April 29. 7 A.M.– To Walden, and set one hundred larch trees from England, all two years from seed, about nine inches high, just begun to leaf. See and hear a black and white creeper. First observe the dandelion well out in R.W.E.’s yard; also anemone at Sassafras Shore. Interrupted fern scrolls there, four to five inches high. Those red maples are reddest in which the fertile flowers prevail. Haynes was fishing for pickerel with a pole yesterday, and said that he caught several the day before, i.e. 27th.

May 2, Monday: According to The Daily Cleveland Herald, reporting the case of the federal trial of two of the Ohio rescuers of John Price, it seemed there was plenty of damning testimony against the mulatto defendant, Charles Henry Langston. Evidence such as: Langston had a gun.

In his journal Henry Thoreau described among other things the alderfly Sialidae sialis spp: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 2: Small pewee and young lackey caterpillars. I see on the Salix rostrata by railroad many honeybees laden with large and peculiarly orange-colored pellets of its pollen. P.M. – Up Assabet. Those swarms of small miller-like insects which fly low over the surface of the river, sometimes constantly falling to and touching the surface and then rising again. When at rest they are seen to be blackish-winged, but flying they look light-colored. They flutter low and continuously over the same place. Theirs is a sort of dance. A peetweet [Spotted Sandpiper Actitis macularia] and its mate at Mantatuket Rock. The river seems really inhabited when the peetweet is back and those little light-winged millers (?). This bird does not return to our stream until the weather is decidedly pleasant and warm. He is perched on the accustomed rock. Its note peoples the river, like the prattle of children once more in the yard of a house that has stood empty. I am surprised by the tender yellowish green of the aspen leaf just-expanded suddenly, even like a fire, seen in the sun, against the dark-brown twigs of the wood, though these leafets are yet but thinly dispersed. It is very enlivening. I heard yesterday, and perhaps for several days, the soft purring sound of what I take to be the Rana palustris, breeding, though I did not this time see the frog. I feel no desire to go to California or Pike’s Peak, but I often think at night with inexpressible satisfaction and yearning of the arrowheadiferous sands of Concord. I have often spent whole afternoons, especially in the spring, pacing hack and forth over a sandy field, looking for these relics of a race. This is the gold which our sands yield. The soil of that rocky spot on Simon Brown’s land is quite ash-colored – now that the sod is turned up – by Indian fires, with numerous pieces of coal in it. There is a great deal of this ash-colored soil in the country. We do literally plow up the hearths of a people and plant in their ashes. The ashes of their fires color much of our soil. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 12, Thursday: Charles Henry Langston was sentenced.

May 12. Dug up to-day the red-brown dor-bugs. My red oak acorns have sent down long radicles underground. A parti-colored warbler hangs dead downward like a goldfinch on our gooseberries, within a few feet of me, apparently about the blossoms. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 21, Saturday: Ballou’s Magazine published a Winslow Homer drawing of scavengers on the Back Bay dumplands of Boston, in which he detailed the “operations of the chiffoniers, these ‘pickers up of unconsidered trifles.’” This largest of our nation’s earthmoving projects was adding 1,000 acres of land, flat land, to Boston. A 10- mile railroad was conveying the earth of Needham Heights to mix with Boston’s abundant garbage.6 Swamp no more!

6. The project took a total of four decades. The Back Bay district would not be completely covered with structures as now, until about the year 1910. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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PROVENANCE

GOD IN CONCORD by Jane Langton © 1992 Penguin Books USA Inc. 13 The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken. . . . Walden, “Economy” Viking Penguin

Julian Snow’s two-week vacation was over. He was back at work at the landfill next to Pond View. His boss at Public ISBN 0-670-84260-5 — PS3562.A515G58 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Eventually the Back Bay area of Boston would begin to look like this:

In the course of the federal trial of two of the Ohio rescuers of John Price, one white and one black, the events of the 1858 Oberlin/Wellington Rescue were being summarized in The Daily Cleveland Herald. On this day the newspaper reported that Charles Henry Langston, the convicted free black defendant, had been allowed to speak to the court: But I stand up here to say, that if for doing what I did on that day at Wellington, I am to go to jail 6 months, and pay a fine of a thousand dollars, according to the Fugitive Slave Law, and such is the protection the laws of this country afford me, I must take upon my self the responsibility of self-protection; and when I come to be claimed by some perjured wretch as his slave, I shall never be taken into slavery. And as in that trying hour I would have others do to me, as I would call upon my friends to help me; as I would call upon you, your Honor [Judge Philemon Bliss], to help me; as I would call upon you [the District-Attorney], to help me; and upon you [Judge Philemon Bliss], and upon you [his defense team Franklin Thomas Backus, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Rufus P. Spalding, Albert G. Riddle, and Seneca O. Griswold], so help me GOD! I stand here to say that I will do all I can, for any man thus seized and help, though the inevitable penalty of 6 months imprisonment and 1,000 dollars fine for each offense hangs over me! We have a common humanity. You would do so; your manhood would require it; and no matter what the laws might me, you would honor yourself for doing it; your friends would honor you for doing it; your children to all generations would honor you for doing it; and every good and honest man would say, you had done right.

May 24, Tuesday: Prideaux John Selby’s wife Tabitha Lewis Mitford Selby died.

Martin Robison Delany departed with others aboard the Mendi from New-York harbor toward Liberia. Is freedom going to be an option?

A great rally was held in Cleveland, organized by Joshua Reed Giddings, and featured as speakers the Rescuers’ black leader John Mercer Langston, and Ohio Governor Salmon Portland Chase. The rally was held in the jailyard and four of the prisoners were able to make speeches from cell windows. Until this rescue crisis, Chase had been a Republican moderate, opposed violence, and had been criticized for doing nothing in 1856 to help Margaret Garner who had tried to escape from slavery in Kentucky with her husband and parents and 4 children by crossing the Ohio River at Cincinnati. (When she had been caught, she had started to kill her children rather than allow them to return to slavery, killing one daughter before being stopped by the slavecatchers. When the steamboat she was being transported on collided in the river with another steamboat, one of her infant children drowned — and Margaret had wept with joy.) The two convicted Ohio rescuers of John Price, one white and one black, were allowed to post a letter from their prison.

May 24. What that brilliant warbler on the young trees on the side of the Deep Cut? Orange throat and beneath, with distinct black stripes on breast (i.e. on each side?), and, I think, some light color on crown. Was [IT] Blackburnian? or maculosa?? [Probably first.] Hear the wood pewee. Sand cherry flower is apparently at its height. I see (the 9th of June) that its fruit is an abortive puff, like that of some plums. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July 7, Thursday: The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson of the Secret “Six” conspiracy wrote to Gerrit Smith that “I could not live with myself if I thought I were knowingly sending Brown [!] in the way of certain death.”7

Eventually the slavecatchers from Kentucky and from Columbus who had trapped the fugitive John Price had been arrested by Ohio officials and charged with kidnapping and, in return for that charge being dropped, had agreed to drop their charges against the rescuers, including Professor Henry C. Peck of Oberlin College. Thus,

on this day, everyone except Simeon M. Bushnell, who was still serving out his 60-day sentence, was able to return to Oberlin, Ohio. There they were the guests of honor at a great celebration. Bonfires lined the streets that led to the church in which this celebration was held. Even their Cleveland jailer got introduced during the celebrations, and was able to go on about how he had been acting as the prisoners’ “postmaster.” All sang the “Marseillaise.” (When Simeon Bushnell also would be released and would be able to return on July 11, 1859,

7. Later, with the benefit of hindsight and with the benefit of self-legitimation, it would become clear to Higginson that his co- conspirators Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns of the Secret “Six” conspiracy had, unlike him, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These other five of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in order to foment civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans. But not him, he believed in the light of his Monday-morning quarterbacking, and he dug out this old letter to Smith to prove how unaware he himself had been of the outcome to be anticipated for the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. (However, if you look carefully at this quoted letter, you see that Higginson was not agonizing over the fate to which he had unknowingly subjected a number of anonymous black men, but was, rather, agonizing over the fate to which he had unknowingly subjected one particular named white friend: “…if I thought I were knowingly sending Brown in the way of certain death.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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he also would be greeted by a hailing crowd of his fellow citizens.)8

July 7: P.M.–To Great Meadows. P. Hutchinson says he once found a wood duck’s nest in a hollow maple by Heywood’s meadow (now by railroad), and tried to get the young as soon as hatched, but they were gone too soon for him. On the first, or westerly, part of the Great Meadows, i. e. the firmer parts and the bank, I find, mixed with sedges of different kinds, much red-top (coloring the surface extensively), fowl-meadow (just begun to bloom and of a purplish lead-color, taller than the red-top), the slender purple-spiked panic, Agrostis (perennans? or scabra??). In the wet, or main, part, beside various other sedges,–as [CAREX] stellulata, lanuginosa, stricta, etc., etc.,–wool-grass, now in flower, a sedge (apparently C. ampullacea var. utriculata toward Holbrook’s) thicker-culmed than wool-grass, but softer and not round, with fertile spikes often three inches long, and slender. A great part of the meadow is covered with, I think, either this or wood grass (not in flower). I am not certain which prevails, but I think wool-grass, which does not flower. Also, mixed with these and lower,

8. We know definitely that Oberlin College preparatory student John Anderson Copeland, Jr. did not go to jail with the other rescuers. The rumor was that he had escorted John Price to Canada and was staying there with his adopted sister. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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dulichium, Eleocharis palustris, etc., etc. [Vide back, June 16th.] First notice pontederia out; also tephrosia, how long? The note of the bobolink has begun to sound rare? Do not young nighthawks run pretty soon after being hatched? I hear of their being gone very soon. Bathing at Barrett’s Bay, I find it to be composed in good part of sawdust, mixed with sand. There is a narrow channel on each side, deepest on the south. The potamogeton is eight feet long there in eighteen inches of water. I learn from measuring on Baldwin’s second map that the river (i. e. speaking of that part below Framingham) is much the straightest in the lower part of its course, or from Ball’s Hill to the Dam. It winds most in the broad meadows. The greatest meander is in the Sudbury meadows. From upper end of Sudbury Canal to Sherman’s Bridge direct is 558 rods (1 mile 238 rods); by thread of river, 1000 rods (3 miles 40 rods), or nearly twice as far. But, though meandering, it is straighter in its general course than would be believed. These nearly twenty-three miles in length (or 16+ direct) are contained within a breadth of two miles twenty-six rods; i. e., so much it takes to meander in. It can be plotted by the scale of one thousand feet to an inch on a sheet of paper seven feet one and one quarter inches long by eleven inches wide. The deep and lake-like are the straightest reaches. The straightest reach within these limits above Ball’s Hill is from Fair Haven Pond to Clamshell Hill. I observed in Maine that the dam at the outlet of Chesuncook Lake, some twenty miles off, had raised the water so as to kill the larches on the Umbazookskus extensively. They were at least four or five miles up the Umbazookskus.

July 11,Monday: At 6:50AM, while the steam boiler at the Hiram Wells & Company machine works in Florence was being fired up for the day’s work, someone became irritated at the delay and instructed the engineer, Frank Spear, 38 years of age, to weigh down the safety valve, which was releasing some steam, so that pressure could build up a bit more quickly in the system. The engineer reluctantly did so, while commenting that if the boiler should burst, “he would catch it.” That was the last thing he said on this earth. The boiler, 30 feet in length, did burst. The force of the explosion scattered the bricks of a nearby wall over a distance of five or six rods. Although they managed to dig the engineer out of the rubble, he lived only until 9:30AM. The owner of the shop, Hiram Wells, 48 years of age, lived through the day. Another employee, John Franzen, would succumb to his burns after some six weeks of suffering. TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

Simeon M. Bushnell completed his 60-day sentence in Cleveland jail for having helped to rescue the fugitive slave John Price (his black co-defendant had already been released), and was able to return to Oberlin, Ohio to be the guest of honor at a great celebration. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July 11. Another hot day with blue haze, and the sun sets red, threatening still hotter weather, and the very moon looks through a somewhat reddish air at first. The position of the button-bushes determines the width of the river, no less than the width or depth of the water determines the position of the button-bushes. We call that all river between the button-bushes, though sometimes they may have landed or sprung up in a regular brink fashion three or four rods further from, or nearer to, the channel. That mass (described on the 9th, seen the 10th) in the Wayland meadows above Sherman’s Bridge was, I think, the largest mass drifted or growing at all on that great meadow. So this transplantation is not on an insignificant scale when compared with [THE] whole body that grows by our river. The largest single mass on the Wayland meadows, considering both length and breadth, was the recently drifted one. To-day the farmer owns a meadow slightly inclined toward the river and generally (i.e. taking the year together) more or less inundated on that side. To-morrow it is a meadow quite cut off from the river by a fence of button-bush and black willow, a rod or more in width and four to seven or eight feet high, set along the inundated side and concealing the river from sight. I hear that Mr. and Mrs. Such-a-one are “going to the beach” for six weeks. What a failure and defeat this suggests their lives to be! Here they live, perchance, the rest of the year, trying to do as they would be done by and to exercise charity of all kinds, and now at last, the parents not having realized their aspirations in the married state, and the misses now begun to be old maids without having found any match at all, succumb and slope to the beach for six weeks. Yet, so far from being felt to be a proof of failure in the lives of these Christians, it is thought to be the culminating-point of their activity. At length their season of activity is arrived, and they go to the beach, they energetically keep cool. They bathe daily and are blown on by the sea-breeze. This keeps their courage up for the labors of the year. This recess which the Sabbath-school teachers take! What if they were to abide, instead, with the caravan of sweltering pilgrims making their way over this Sahara to their Mecca? We hear at length that Miss Such-a-one, now well advanced in years, has at length shut up house and gone to the beach. Man servant and maid servant went long ago to prepare the way for her,–to get the bottles of all kinds ready. She has fought the good fight here until at length no shield nor pretense will serve, and now she has gone to the beach, and have not her principles gone with her? She has flitted to Swallow Cave, where, perchance, no duties lurk. Ah, shall we not go to the beach after another fashion some of us one day? Think of the numbers who are imbeached by this time! How they flutter like devil’s-needles and butterflies commingled along our pontederia’d shores! They have gone and left an empty house. The silver is cached, as prairie travellers leave behind provisions which they expect to return to. But the rent of the last house goes on nevertheless, and is to be added to the board at the great watering-place. So is it with every domicil we rent; the rent never ceases, but enlarges from year to year. They have gone to the beach to get a few pebbles, which help digestion for the rest of the year. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Pilgrim Costumes HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September: Uniforms were distributed to Boston’s policemen.

John Anderson Copeland, Jr., a student at Oberlin College, was enlisted for Captain John Brown by Lewis Sheridan Leary, his uncle, who at that time was also in Oberlin, Ohio.

uncle nephew

To get the two of them to Harpers Ferry, the uncle was given funds to go from Oberlin to Chambersburg. He would have to leave behind his wife and 6-month-old child at Oberlin, keeping her in ignorance as to the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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purpose of his trip.

He would be isolated along with his nephew and John Henry Kagi in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the three men would make a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they would get themselves caught in a crossfire, and after Kagi had been killed and Leary shot several times, the uncle would be taken, his wounds so severe that he would die the following morning, while the nephew would attempt to swim for it in the river (he wouldn’t make it either). The uncle would be able to dictate messages to his family back in Oberlin and is reported as saying “I am ready to die.” (The child left behind would subsequently be educated with financial assistance from James Redpath and Wendell Phillips.)

November 26, Saturday: Louis Moreau Gottschalk arrived back in Havana aboard the English steamer Trent after a concert tour of several Caribbean islands.

From his cell in Charles Town, John Anderson Copeland, Jr., who had remained entirely silent throughout his trial for the Harpers Ferry treason, wrote his parents:9

DEAR P ARENTS,— my fate as far as man can seal it is sealed but let this not occasion you any misery for remember the cause in which I was engaged, remember that it was a “Holy Cause,” one in which men who in every point of view better than I am have suffered and died, remember that if I must die I die in trying to liberate a few of my poor and oppress people from my condition of servitude which God in his Holy Writ has hurled his most bitter denunciations against and in which men who were by the color of

9. Letter later in the possession of his sister, Miss Mary Copeland of Oberlin, Ohio. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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their faces removed from the direct injurious affect, have already lost their lives and still more remain to meet the same fate which has been by man decided that I must meet. OBERLIN COLLEGE The Reverend Andrew T. Foss, who been holding to the nonviolent principles of William Lloyd Garrison and the Reverend Adin Ballou when he took part in the attempt to rescue Anthony Burns in the streets of Boston, had at some later point entered into an alliance with Charles Lenox Remond and ceased to be a Nonresistant. He explained that although he would not press the slaves toward rebellion, “when it comes, God knows, I will pray that the slave may be victorious.” At a meeting of an antislavery society in Worcester County, the Reverend Adin Ballou proposed that they reaffirm their original Declaration of Sentiments of December 4,

1833, inclusive of its words “Our principles forbid the doing of evil that good may come.” Charles Lenox Remond responded that he had never supposed, in joining that society, that he had committed himself to such a thing! In fact “I should be glad if a National Vigilance Committee was formed to hang upon every tree and lamppost every slaveholder.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Abby Kelley Foster joined with this challenge to the Reverend Ballou. Then Stephen Symonds Foster declared that although he was a nonresistant, he claimed also “not to be a fool.”

In response, the Reverend Ballou pointed out the very real scenario, that if America’s blacks freed themselves by means of a bloody massacre, this would render them psychically incompetent to collaborate with whites for many generations, and fill whites with such horror that they also would be animated by loathing and a lust for vengeance: “It may seem hard to wait, but if we do not wait, we shall do worse.” However, the Reverend Ballou’s resolution reaffirming its Declaration of Sentiments, which had been adopted at its founding and which had included the words “Our principles forbid the doing of evil that good may come,” was voted down, and the assembly embraced instead this Charles Lenox Remond/Andrew T. Foss viewpoint.

Stephen Symonds Foster tried to organize a new political party which favored “revolution” over “dissolution” of the union, to be named the New England Political Anti-Slavery Society:

“I claim to be a Non-Resistant, but not to be a fool. John Brown has shown himself a man, in comparison with the Non-Resistants.”

A contrasting attitude was taken, however, by the Russian Minister, Edouard de Stoeckl, who reported to the government of the Tzar that

When the sad results of this foray became known, John Brown was proclaimed from the very roof-tops as the equal of our Savior. I quote these facts to point out how far Puritan fanaticism can go. Little by little, the extreme doctrines of New England have spread throughout the land.

November 26, Saturday: P.M.–Walk over the Colburn Farm wood-lot south [OF] the road. I find, sometimes, after I have been lotting off a large wood-lot for auction, that I have been cutting new paths to walk in. I cut lines an inch [SIC] or two long in arbitrary directions, in and around some dense woodlot which perhaps is not crossed once a month by any mortal, nor has been for thirty or fifty years, and thus I open to myself new works [SIC],–enough in a lot of forty acres to occupy me for an afternoon. A forty-acre wood-lot HDT WHAT? INDEX

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which otherwise would not detain a walker more than half an hour, being thus opened and carved out, will entertain him for half a day. In this case there was a cultivated field here some thirty years ago, but, the wood being suffered to spring up, from being open and revealed this part of the earth became a covert and concealed place. Excepting an occasional hunter who crossed it maybe once in several months, nobody has walked there, nobody has penetrated its recesses. The walker habitually goes round it, or follows the single cart-path that winds through it. Woods, both the primitive and those which are suffered to spring up in cultivated fields, thus preserve the mystery of nature. How private and sacred a place a grove thus becomes!–merely because its denseness excludes man. It is worth the while to have these thickets on various sides of the town, where the rabbit lurks and the jay builds its nest. When I ran out the boundary lines of this lot, I could commonly distinguish the line, not merely by the different growth of wood, but often by a kind of ditch which I think may have been produced by the plow, which heaped up the soil along the side of the field when it was cultivated. I could also detect trees variously bent and twisted, which probably had made part of a hedge fence when young, and others which were scarred by the fencing-stuff that had been fastened to them. The chickadee is the bird of the wood the most unfailing. When, in a windy, or in any, day, you have penetrated some thick wood like this, you are pretty sure to hear its cheery note therein. At this season it is almost their sole inhabitant. I see here to-day one brown creeper [Certhia americana] busily inspecting the pitch pines. It begins at the base, and creeps rapidly upward by starts, adhering close to the bark and shifting a little from side to side often till near the top, then suddenly darts off downward to the base of another tree, where it repeats the same course. This has no black cockade, like the nuthatch. In the midst of this wood there occur less valuable patches, of an eighth of an acre or more, where there is much grass, and cladonia, shrub oaks, and lichen-covered birches, and a few pitch pines only,–places of a comparatively sterile character, as if the soil had been run out. The birches will have much of the birch fungus on them, and their fallen dead tops strew the ground.

PER MABEE, PAGES 322-4: Even among those who still considered themselves nonviolent Garrisonians, Brown’s raid brought excited speculation that slave revolts might sharply increase if abolitionists encouraged them. Becoming uneasy over this speculation and the acceptance of violence it implied, Adin Ballou once president of the Nonresistance Society and still the leader of the nonresistant community at Hopedale, Massachusetts, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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brought the issue out into the open. While Brown was still in a Virginia jail, at a meeting of a Garrisonian Worcester County antislavery society Ballou proposed a resolution reaffirming the Declaration of Sentiments, which had been adopted at the founding of the American Antislavery Society, including the words, “Our principles forbid the doing of evil that good may come.” Ballou interpreted the declaration as a nonresistance pledge. The Salem Negro Charles Remond –who at the 1843 Negro national convention opposed Garnet’s calling for slave insurrection but recently had been calling for it himself– grew excited. “I never supposed on becoming a member of this society,” Remond told Ballou, “that I committed myself to the nonresistant sentiments lo which you have referred. For whenever I have heard the question asked, ‘What constitutes a member of the American Antislavery Society?’ the only answer I have heard given was this: that a man who believed that the immediate, unconditional emancipation of the slave was right ... is a member of this society.” And then Remond made clear the extent to which he had become willing to accept violence: “I should be glad if a National Vigilance Committee was formed,” he said, “to hang upon every tree and lamppost every slaveholder. They would be doing a glorious work!” “I am not contending,” replied Ballou evenly, “that ... a man cannot be a member of this society unless he is a nonresistant.... What the society should be, as a society, is one thing, and what its individual members should be outside of the society is another thing. In respect to the measures of the society, as a society, it is bound by its declarations.... As a society we are pledged not to resort to ... violence.” The Quaker come-outer, Abby Kelley Foster, put Ballou on the spot. She said she would rejoice if the North had gone so far up the moral scale as to point its guns not at slaves, as was then the case, but at slaveholders instead. Would you? she asked Ballou bluntly. Ballou was cautious. “I should rejoice with trembling and sorrow,” he replied. Abby’s husband, the doughty Stephen S. Foster, spoke up. “I claim to a be nonresistant,” he said, “but not to be a fool.” The audience laughed. “Every man is bound to use the most formidable weapons in his power,” Foster continued. “Why should I use the sword when I can do better without it? But,” he admitted, “Brown has shown himself a man in comparison with the nonresistants.” Foster explained, I want to act more like a man myself. Since slave insurrections are coming in the South, “I want to go down South and guide an insurrection, to preserve it from those excesses which Brother Ballou so much deprecates.” Evidently Foster considered that slave revolt by nonviolent methods –such as Birney had hinted at in 1835– was hopeless. He was proposing to be an adviser to slave insurrectionists with the hope of keeping them from the excesses of violence only. Ballou ridiculed Foster’s notion that he could guide an insurrection. “How pretty he would look,” said Ballou, “undertaking to regulate myriads of raging insurrectionists HDT WHAT? INDEX

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scattered over the Southern country! A rebellion once started would involve all the outrages in the calendar of crime.” Besides, if the slaves were freed by rebellion, Ballou added with prescience, “what is to be done with them for the next hundred years? It would take at least a century to educate them out of the ferocity engendered by such conflict. How are they to be employed, trained for liberty, and organized into well ordered communities? And above all how is this work to be accomplished with the great mass of the whites in the country full of horror, loathing, and revenge toward them? ... Can’t we wait the operations of a more peaceful process? Can’t we content ourselves with holy efforts to bring about a change of public sentiment, so that this thing may be accomplished, without resorting to such horrible measures? It may seem hard to wait, but if we do not wait, we shall do worse.” The New Hampshire abolitionist agent, Andrew T. Foss, a long-time Baptist minister, said that he had held to the nonviolent principles of Garrison and Ballou as recently as when he took part in the attempt to rescue Burns in the streets of Boston. But since then he had ceased to be a nonresistant. Indicating Ballou, Foss said, “I do not say that he is not higher than I am. I have an impression, a sort of instinct, that he is. [But] I ask the privilege of working on this platform in my own way.... I don’t undertake to justify rebellion [by slaves], but when it comes, God knows, I will pray that the slave may be victorious.” The crowd cheered. “Men will come to see,” added Foss, “that if our fathers had a right to strike for their liberty, then John Brown had a right to strike for the liberty of the slave.” Why did so many abolitionists forget, Ballou replied later in a prophetic statement, “the vast differences between a people trained for liberty and self-government through a century and a half, and millions of long crushed slaves, schooled to servility and studiously kept in ignorance? Such a people need all the help and benefit of a peaceful emancipation.” But the meeting accepted the Remond-Foss view. It voted down Ballou’s resolution reaffirming the American Society’s tradition of nonviolence. Even among Garrisonians, John Brown was reducing faith in nonresistance.

December 10, Saturday: From his cell in Charles Town, John Anderson Copeland, Jr., who had remained entirely silent throughout his trial, wrote to his brother: Charlestown, Va. Dec. 10, 1859: MY DEAR BROTHER:— I now take my pen to write you a few lines to let you know how I am, and in answer to your kind letter of the 5th instant. Dear Brother, I am, it is true, so situated at present as scarcely to know how to commence writing; not that my mind is filled with fear or that it has become shattered in view of my near approach to death. Not that I am terrified by the gallows which I see HDT WHAT? INDEX

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staring me in the face, and upon which I am so soon to stand and suffer death for doing what George Washington, the so-called father of his great but slavery-cursed country, was made a hero for doing, while he lived, and when dead his name was immortalized, and his great and noble deeds in behalf of freedom taught by parents to their children. And now, brother, for having lent my [faith?] to a General no less brave, and engaged in a cause no less honorable and glorious, I am to suffer death. Washington entered the field to fight for the freedom of the American people- not for the white men alone, but for both black and white. Nor were they white men alone who fought for the freedom of this country. The blood of black men flowed as freely as that of white men. Yes, the very first blood that was spilt was that of a negro. It was the blood of that heroic man, (though black he was,) Crispus Attucks. And some of the very last blood shed was that of black men. To the truth of this, history, though prejudiced is compelled to attest. It is true that black men did an equal share of the fighting for American Independence, and they were assured by the whites that they should share equal benefits for so doing. But after having performed their part honorably, they were by the whites most treacherously deceived- they refusing to fulfill their part of the contract. But this you know as well as I do, and I will therefore make no more in reference to the claims which we, as colored men, have on the American people. It was a sense of the wrongs which we have suffered that prompted the noble but unfortunate Captain Brown and his associates to attempt to give freedom to a small number, at least of those who are now held by cruel and unusual laws, and by no less cruel and unjust men. To this freedom they were entitled by every known principal of justice and humanity, and for the enjoyment of it God created them. And how dear brother, could I die in a more noble cause? Could I, brother die in a manner and for a cause which would induce true and honest men more to honor me and angels more readily to receive me to their happy home of everlasting joy above? I imagine that I hear you and all of you mother, father, sisters and brothers, say- “No there is not a cause for which we with less sorrow, could see you die.” Believe me when I tell you, that though shut up in prison and under sentence of death, I have spent some very happy hours here. And were it not that I know that the heart of those to whom I am attached by the nearest and most endearing ties of blood relationship- yea, by the closest and strongest ties that God has instituted- will be filled with sorrow, I would almost as [unintelligible] die now as at any time, for I feel that I am now prepared to meet my Maker. Dear brother, I want you and all of you to meet me in Heaven. Prepare your soul for death. Be ready to meet your God at any moment, and then, though we meet no more on earth, we shall meet in Heaven where parting is no more. Dear William and Fred, be good boys- mind your mother and father- love and honor them- grow up to be good men, and feat the Lord your God. Now, I want you, dear brothers, to take HDT WHAT? INDEX

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this advice and follow it; remember, it comes from your own brother, and is written under most peculiar circumstances. Remember it is my dying advice to you, and I hope you will, from that love you have for me, receive it. You may think I have been treated very harshly since I have been here, but it is not so. I have been treated exceedingly well- far better than I expected to be. My jailor is a most kind-hearted man, and has done all he could, consistent with duty, to make me and the rest of the prisoners comfortable. Capt. John Avis is a gentle man who has a heart in his bosom as brave as any other. He met us at the Ferry and fought us as a brave man would do. But since we have been in his power has protected us from insults and abuse which cowards would have heaped upon us. He has done as a brave man and gentleman only would do. Also one of his aids, Mr. John Sheats, has been very kind to us and has done all he could to serve us. And now, Henry, if fortune should ever throw either of them in your way, and you can confer the least favor on them, do it for my sake. Give my love to all my family, and now my dear brothers, one and all, I pray to God we may meet in Heaven. Good bye. I am now, and shall remain, your affectionate brother, John Copeland OBERLIN COLLEGE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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A depiction of “Emperor” Shields Green appeared in Leslie’s Weekly:

During the specific uproar over the John Brown raid on Harpers Ferry, a public crisis of sorts had broken out in our general discussions about how to achieve progress in our nation. This public crisis had to do with the materials contained in Hinton Rowan Helper’s polemical compilation of census data published in Baltimore in 1857, titled THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT. This admirer of the thought processes of Waldo Emerson was an egregious case of what we might term an Antislavery Racist. —Which is to say, he was a Southern white man, from North Carolina, who owned no slaves, whose fixation was that of the victim. It wasn’t the blacks who were being harmed by slavery, it was real decent folks like him who were being harmed by slavery. All these slaves, who belonged to other people, were impacting his life! He hated the nigger who was doing him wrong, He hated the slavemaster who was doing him wrong. What he needed most urgently was a lily-white, pure America of which he could be proud, where he could stand tall. Slavery was a tainted and archaic social system that was standing in the way of white people’s cultural and material progress. Blacks were a tainted and inferior group who had no business being here in our New World in the first place.10

10. This interesting book has been republished in Cambridge MA in 1968. For more on this guy and his not-all-that-novel conceit that the victims were victimizing him and needed to be trumped, see Bailey, Hugh C. HINTON ROWAN HELPER: ABOLITIONIST- RACIST (University AL: 1965). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“History, among its many ironies, often places enemies in life into various positions of posthumous conjunction.” — Stephen Jay Gould Here is how Peter Wallenstein has parsed the situation in his article “Incendiaries All”: Different as they were, then, THE IMPENDING CRISIS and Harpers Ferry brought similar messages to proslavery Southerners. Regardless of whether either Brown or Helper in fact spoke for mainstream Northern public opinion, each appeared to garner widespread approval across the North, and each had declared war on slavery in the South. Each represented, at least in part, the dreaded triple threat against slavery — from nonslaveholding whites in the South, from the slaves themselves, and from outside forces. Each, too, pointed up the need and offered the opportunity to unify white Southerners against all such threats, an observation that could come from a variety of perspectives. Thus, as a letter from one Southern slaveholder [a Southern Whig, to Congressman John Sherman] put the matter in December [10] 1859, “John Brown and Helper may do more to build up the Democratic party than anything that has happened for years.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December 16, Friday: Henry Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, the 2d volume of a 5-volume set prepared 1818-1821 (THEOPHRASTI ERESII QUAE SUPERSUNT OPERA: ET EXCERPTA LIBRORUM by Theophrastus of Eresus (circa 372-circa 287BCE), JOHANN GOTTLOB SCHNEIDER, HEINRICH FRIEDRICH LINK. Lipsiae: Sumtibus Frid. Christ. Guil. Vogelii) of .

THEOPHRASTUS

He also checked out the two volumes of Aristotle’s HISTOIRE DES ANIMAUX D’ARISTOTE in Greek and in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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French translation by M. Camus (Paris: Chez la veuve Desaint, 1783).

HISTOIRE DES ANIMAUX I HISTOIRE DES ANIMAUX II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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While at the Harvard Library, Thoreau read from but did not check out John Gerard’s 1597 botanical resource, THE HERBALL OR GENERALL HIſTORIE OF PLANTES: GREAT HERBALL OF 1597

INTERNET COMMENTARY

December 16, 1859: A.M.–To Cambridge, where I read in Gerard’s Herbal. [Vide extracts from preface made in October 1859.] His admirable though quaint descriptions are, to my mind, greatly superior to the modern more scientific ones. He describes not according to rule but to his natural delight in the plants. He brings them vividly before you, as one who has seen and delighted in them. It is almost as good as to see the plants themselves. It suggests that we cannot too often get rid of the barren assumption that is in our science. His leaves are leaves; his flowers, flowers; his fruit, fruit. They are green and colored and fragrant. It is a man’s BOTANY knowledge added to a child’s delight. Modern botanical descriptions approach ever nearer to the dryness of an algebraic formula, as if c + y were = to a love-letter. It is the keen joy and discrimination of the child who has just seen a flower for the first time and comes running in with it to its friends. How much better to describe your object in fresh English words rather than in these conventional Latinisms! He has really seen, and smelt, and tasted, and reports his sensations. Bought a book at Little & Brown’s, paying a nine-pence more on a volume than it was offered me for elsewhere. The customer thus pays for the more elegant style of the store. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The Select Committee on the Invasion of Harpers Ferry created by Democratic Senator James Mason of Virginia held its first meeting in regard to the John Brown affair and its Secret “Six” conspiracy. The committee would be in existence for six months before delivering its final report and would summon, in all, 32 witnesses.

Edwin Coppoc and John E. Cook were hanged in Charlestown, Virginia.11 Edwin’s body would be buried in Winona after a funeral attended by the entire town. Later his body would be reburied in Salem, Ohio.

(Edwin had written from the prison to his adoptive mother, of a nonresistant-abolitionist Quaker farm family, that he was “sorry to say that I was ever induced to raise a gun.”

11. I have been advised that according to THE QUAKERS OF IOWA by Louis Thomas Jones, a scholarly work published under the auspices of the State Historical Iowa at Iowa City, Iowa in 1914 (I haven’t myself actually seen this book), prior to their deaths the Coppoc brothers were disowned by the Red Cedar Monthly Meeting of Friends in the West Branch/Springdale area. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Edwin’s brother Barclay Coppoc was still eluding capture.)

John E. Cook had made a full confession of his activities with the raiders and at the last moment had sought to save his neck by representing that he had been deceived through false promises, but this had not saved him, nor had the fact that his brother-in-law A.P. Willard was Governor of Indiana.

When it came the turn of John Anderson Copeland, Jr. to be hanged, too short a drop was used. He strangled slowly.

Just before being taken from his cell to the execution field that morning, he had completed a last letter to his family: Charlestown Jail, Va., Dec. 16, ‘59 Dear Father, Mother, Brothers Henry, William and Freddy, and Sisters Sarah and Mary: The last Sabbath with me on earth has passed away. The last Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday that I shall ever see on this earth have now passed by God’s glorious sun, which he has placed in the heavens to illuminate this earth- whose refulgent beams are watched for by this poor invalid, to enter & make as it were in heaven of the room in which he is confined- I have seen declining behind the western mountains for the last time. Last night for the last time, I beheld the soft bright moon as it rose, casting its mellow light into my felons cell, dissipating the darkness and filling it with that soft pleasant light which causes such thrills of joy to all those in like circumstance with myself. This morning for the last time, I beheld the glorious sun of yesterday rising in the far-off East, away off in the country where our Lord Jesus Christ first proclaimed salvation to man, and now as he rises higher and his HDT WHAT? INDEX

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bright light takes the place of the pale, soft moonlight, I will take my pen, for the last time, to write you who are bound to me by those strong ties (yea, the strongest that God ever instituted,) the ties of blood and relationship. I am well, both in body and in mind. And now, dear ones, if it were not that I know your hearts will be filled with sorrow at my fate, I could pass from this earth without a regret. Why should you sorrow? Why should your hearts be racked with grief? Have I not everything to gain and nothing to lose by the change? I fully believe that not only myself but also all three of my poor comrades who are to ascend the same scaffold- (a scaffold already made sacred to the cause of freedom, by the death of that great champion of human freedom, Capt. JOHN BROWN) are prepared to meet our God. I am only leaving a world filled with sorrow and woe to enter one in which there is but one lasting day of happiness and bliss. I feel that God in his mercy has spoken peace to my soul, and that all my numerous sins are now forgiven me. Dear parents, brothers and sisters, it is true that I am now in a few hours to start on a journey from which no traveler returns. Yes, long before this reaches you, I shall as I sincerely hope, have met our brother and sister who have for years been worshiping God around his throne — singing praises to him, and thanking him that he gave his Son to die that they might have eternal life. I pray daily and hourly that I may be fitted to have my home with them, and that you, one and all, may prepare your souls to meet your God, that so, in the end, though we meet no more on earth, we shall meet in Heaven, where we shall not be parted by the demands of the cruel and unjust monster Slavery. But think not that I am complaining, for I feel reconciled to meet my fate. I pray God that his will be done; not mine. Let me tell you that it is not the mere act of having to meet death, which I should regret, (if I should express regret I mean,) but that such an unjust institution should exist as the one which demands my life; and not my life only, but the lives of those to whom my life bears but the relative value of zero to the infinite. I beg of you one and all that you will not grieve about me, but that you will thank God that he spared me time to make my peace with Him. And now, dear ones, attach no blame to anyone for my coming here for not any person but myself is to blame. I have no antipathy against anyone, I have freed my mind of all hard feelings against every living being, and I ask all who have any thing against me to do the same. And now dear parents, Brothers and sisters, I must bid you to serve your God and meet me in heaven. I must with a few words, close my correspondence with those who are the most near and dear to me: but I hope, in the end, we may again commune, never to cease. Dear ones, he who writes this will, in a few hours, be in this world no longer. Yes, these fingers which hold the pen with which this is written will, before to-day’s sun has reached his meridian have laid it aside forever, and this poor soul have taken its flight to meet its God. And now dear ones I must bid HDT WHAT? INDEX

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you that last, long, sad farewell. Good-day, Father, Mother, Henry, William, and Freddy, Sarah and Mary, serve your God and meet me in heaven. Your Son and Brother to eternity, John A. Copeland. OBERLIN COLLEGE Is it that Aaron D. Stevens, and 10 of Captain Brown’s black supporters, having been duly found guilty of treason and murder by a jury of their white male peers, were hanged on this date?

Or is it that the other surrendered survivors of the raid on Harpers Ferry, John Anderson Copeland, Jr., Shields Green, and Aaron D. Stevens, having been duly found guilty of treason and murder by a jury of their white male peers, were hanged on this date?12

A monument would be erected by the citizens of Oberlin, Ohio in honor of their three free citizens of color who had died in the raid or been hanged, Shields Green, John Anderson Copeland, Jr., and Lewis Sheridan Leary (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971).

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

December 17, Saturday: Oberlin College Professor James Monroe set off from Oberlin, Ohio to retrieve the corpse of John Anderson Copeland, Jr. from Virginia authorities.

Precious opportunity! Lydia Maria Child responded to the indignant letter she had received from the slaveholding wife of Senator James Mason: Wayland, Mass., Dec. 17th, 1859.

Not Civil War “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Prolonged absence from home has prevented my answering your letter so soon as I intended. I have no disposition to retort upon you the “two-fold damnation” to which you consign me. On the Contrary, I sincerely wish you well, both in this world and the next. If the anathema proved a safety valve to your own boiling spirit, it did some good to you, while it fell harmless upon me. Fortunately for all of us, the Heavenly Father rules His universe by laws, which the passions or the prejudices of mortals have no power to change. As for John Brown, his reputation may be safety trusted to the impartial pen of History; and his motives will be righteously judged by Him who knoweth the secrets of all hearts. Men, however great they may be, are of small consequence in comparison with principles; and the principle for which John Brown died is the question issue between us. You refer me to the Bible, from which you quote the favorite text of slaveholders:— “Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the forward.” — 1 PETER, 2:18.

Abolitionists also have favorite texts, to some of which I would

12. In THE CAPTURE AND EXECUTION OF JOHN BROWN: A TALE OF MARTYRDOM, BY ELIJAH AVEY, EYE WITNESS, WITH THIRTY ILLUSTRATIONS, dated 1906, we have on page 45 an assertion that the white men John E. Cook and Edwin Coppoc, and then the black men John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Shields Green, were hanged on December 16th, 1859. The reference says that, the gallows being not large enough, the 2 black men Copeland and Green were forced to stand and watch the 2 white men Cook and Coppoc being hanged before themselves ascending the scaffold. But I have from another reference this assertion that it was one surrendered surviving white man, Aaron D. Stevens, who was hanged on the 16th along with 10 black supporters of Captain John Brown, and that Cook actually would be among the last hanged. Which account would be correct — and why is there such a glaring discrepancy between these various accounts?

The book SECRET SIX treats each retreating admission of each of the co-conspirators in treason as if it were holy writ. No attempt has been made to discern, behind this haze of post-facto explanations and justifications, what the brags of these participants might have been had their plot been successful in initiating the race war they contemplated and had this race war been completed, as it would certainly have been completed, by a historic genocide against black Americans. (Joel Silbey has contended, in “The Civil War Synthesis in American History,” that postbellum American historians have been misconstruing antebellum American politics by viewing them in conjunction with our knowledge of the bloodbath that followed. It is only after the fact that we can “know” that the US Civil War amounted to a sectional dispute, North versus South. We avoid learning that before the fact, it was undecided whether this conflict was going to shape up as a race conflict, a class conflict, or a sectional conflict. We avoid knowing that the raid on Harpers Ferry might have resulted in a race war, in which peoples of color would be exterminated in order to create an all-white America, or might have resulted in a class war, in which the laboring classes might have first destroyed the plantation owners’ equity by killing their slaves, and then gone on to purge the nation of the white plantation owners themselves, with their privileged-class endowments.) Also, according to the endmatter, the SECRET SIX study had obtained its material on Frederick Douglass basically from McFeely’s FREDERICK DOUGLASS of 1991, and its material on Thoreau from Sanborn’s HENRY DAVI D THOREAU of 1917, neither of which were the last word on the subject when the book was prepared. In addition, this work provides no reference whatever for the Emerson life: evidently he was simply presumed not to be of even marginal pertinence. There is no consideration to be found anywhere in this volume of the comparison event: the other American struggle for freedom, the one which had taken place in Haiti under General Toussaint Louverture. For these reasons, the study is, fundamentally, incompetent. It is as if O.J. Simpson and his Dream Team had been allowed to control what would appear in our social history texts. Or, it is as if the White House staff had been allowed to define once and for all the extent of President Richard Milhouse Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate break-in, with, after their initial defensive testimony, after their establishment of the official consensus “truth,” all explanations accepted at their putative face value — with no further questioning tolerated. SECRET “SIX” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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call your attention:— “Remember those that are in bonds as bound with them.” — HEBREWS 13:3. “Hide the outcasts. Betray not him that wandereth. Let mine outcasts dwell with thee. Be thou a convert to them from the face of the spoiler.” — ISAIAH 16: 3, 4. “Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee. He shall dwell with thee where it liketh him best. Thou shalt not oppress him.” — DEUTERONOMY 23: 15, 16. “Open thy mouth for the dumb, in the cause of all such are appointed to destruction. Open thy mouth judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.” — PROVERBS 29: 8,9. “Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and show my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins.” — ISAIAH 58: 1. I would especially commend to slaveholders the following portions of that volume, wherein you say God has revealed the duty of masters:— “Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal, knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven.” — COLOSSIANS 4:1.

“Neither be ye called masters; for one is your master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren.” — MATTHEW 23: 8, 10.

“Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.” — MATTHEW 7: 12. “Is not this the fast that I have chosen, to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?” — ISAIAH 58: 6.

“They have given a boy for a harlot, and sold a girl for wine, that they might drink.” — JOEL 3: 3.

“He that oppresseth the poor, reproacheth his Maker.” — PROVERBS 14: 31. “Rob not the poor, because he is poor; neither oppress the afflicted. For the Lord will plead their cause, and spoil the soul of those who spoiled them.” — PROVERBS 22: 22, 23. “Woe unto him that useth his neighbor’s service without wages, and giveth him not for his work.” — JEREMIAH 22: 13.

“Let him that stole, steal no more, but rather let him labor, working with his hands.” — EPHESIANS 4: 28. “Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless.” — ISAIAH 10: 1, 2. “If I did despise the cause of my man-servant or my maid-servant, when they contend with me, what then shall I do when God riseth up? and when he visiteth, what shall I answer Him?” — JOB 31: 13, 14. “Thou hast sent widows away empty, and the arms of the fatherless have been broken. Therefore snares are round about thee, and sudden fear troubleth thee; and darkness, that thou canst not see.” — JOB 22: 9, 10, 11.

“Behold, the hire of your laborers, who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth; and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabbath. Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourishes your hearts as in a day of slaughter; ye have condemned and killed the just.” — JAMES 5: 4.

If the appropriateness of these texts is not apparent, I will try to make it so, by evidence drawn entirely from Southern sources. The Abolitionists are not such an ignorant set of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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fanatics as you suppose. They know whereof they affirm. They are familiar with the laws of the Slave States, which are alone sufficient to inspire abhorrence in any humane heart or reflecting mind not perverted by the prejudices of education and custom. I might fill many letters with significant extracts from your statue-books; but I have space only to glance at a few, which indicate the leading features of the system you cherish so tenaciously. The universal rule of the slave State is, that “the child follows the condition of its mother.” This is an index to many things. Marriages between white and colored people are forbidden by law; yet a very large number of the slaves are brown or yellow. When Lafayette visited this country in his old age, he said he was very much struck by the great change in the colored population of Virginia; that in the time of the Revolution, nearly all the household slaves were black, but when he returned to America, he found very few of them black. The advertisements in Southern newspapers often describe runaway slaves that “pass themselves for white men.” Sometimes they are described as having straight, light hair blue eyes, and clear complexion.” This could not be, unless their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers had been white men. But as their mothers were slaves, the law pronounces them slaves, subject to be sold on the auction-block whenever the necessities or convenience of their masters or mistresses required it. The sale of one’s own children, brother, or sisters, has an ugly aspect to those who are unaccustomed to it; and, obviously, it cannot have a good moral influence, that law and custom should render licentiousness a profitable vice. Throughout the Slave States, the testimony of no colored person, bond or free, can be received against a white man. You have some laws, which, on the face of them, would seem to restrain inhuman men from murdering or mutilating slaves; but they are rendered nearly null by the law I have cited. Any drunken master, overseer, or patrol, may go into the negro cabins, and commit what outrages he pleases, with perfect impunity, if no white person is present who chooses to witness against him. North Carolina and Georgia leave a large loophole for escape, even if white persons present, when murder is committed. A law to punish persons for “maliciously killing a slave” has this remarkable qualification: “Always provided that this act shall not extend to any dying of moderate correction.” We at the North find it difficult to understand how moderate punishment can cause death. I have read several of your law books attentively, and I find no cases of punishment for the murder of a slave, except by fines paid to the owner, to indemnify him for the loss of his property: the same as if his horse or cow had been killed. In South Carolina Reports is a case where the State had indicated Guy Raines for the murder of slave Isaac. It was proved that William Gray, the owner of Isaac, had given him a thousand lashes. The poor creature made his escape, but was caught, and delivered to the custody of Raines, to be carried to the county HDT WHAT? INDEX

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jail. Because he refused to go, Raines gave him five hundred lashes, and he died soon after. The counsel for Raines proposed that he should be allowed to acquit himself by his own oath. The Court decided against it, because white witnesses had testified; but the Court of afterward decided he ought to have been exculpated by his own oath, and he was acquitted. Small indeed is the chance for justice to a slave, when his own color are not allowed to testify, if they see him maimed or his children murdered; when he has slaveholders for Judges and Jurors; when the murderer can exculpate himself by his own oath; and when the law provides that it is no murder to kill a slave by “moderate correction”! Your laws uniformly declare that “slave shall be deemed a chattel personal in the hands of his master, to all intents, constrictions, and purposes whatsoever.” This, of course, involves the right to sell his children, as if they were pigs; also, to take his wife from him “for any intent or purpose whatsoever.” Your laws also make it death for him to resist a white man, however brutally he may be treated, or however much his family may be outraged before his eyes. If he attempts to run away, your laws allow any man to shoot him. By your laws, all a slave’s earnings belong to his master. He can neither receive donations or transmit property. If his master allows him some hours to work for himself, and by great energy and perseverance he earns enough to buy his own bones and sinews, his master may make him pay two or three times over, and he has no redress. Three such cases have come within my knowledge. Even a written promise from his master has no legal value, because slave can make no contracts. Your laws also systematically aim at keeping the minds of the colored people in the most abject state of ignorance. If white people attempt to teach them to read or write, they are punished by imprisonment or fines; if they attempt to teach each other, they are punished with from twenty to thirty-nine lashes each. It cannot be said that the anti-slavery agitation produced such laws, for they date much further back; many of them when we were Provinces. They are the necessities of the system, which, being itself an outrage upon human nature, can be sustained only by perpetual outrages. The next reliable source of information is the advertisements in the Southern papers. In the North Carolina (Raleigh) Standard, Mr. Mieajah Ricks advertises, “Runaway, a negro woman and her two children. A few days before went off, I burned her with a hot iron on the left side of her face. I tried to make the letter M.” in the Natchez Courier, Mr. J.P. Ashford advertises a runaway negro girl, with “a good many teeth missing, and the letter A branded on her cheek and forehead.” In the Lexington (Ky.) Observer, Mr. William Overstreet advertises a runaway negro with “his left eye out, scars from a dirk on his left arm, and much scarred with the whip.” I might quote from hundreds of such advertisements, offering rewards for HDT WHAT? INDEX

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runaways, “dead or alive,” and describing them with “ears cut off,” “jaws broken,” scarred by rifle-balls,” &c. Another source of information is afforded by your “Fugitives from Injustice,” with many of whom I have conversed freely. I have seen scars of the whip and marks of the branding-iron, and I have listened to their heart-breaking sobs, while they told of “piccaninnies” torn from their arms and sold. Another source of information is furnished by emancipated slaveholders Sarah Moore Grimké, daughter of the late Judge Grimké, of the Supreme Court of South Carolina, testifies as follows: “As I left my native State on account of Slavery, and deserted the home of my fathers to escape the sound of the lash and the shrieks of tortured victims, I would gladly bury in oblivion the recollection of those scenes with which I have been familiar. But this cannot be. They come over my memory like gory sceptres, and implore me, with resistless power, in the name of a God of mercy, in the name of a crucified Saviour, in the name of humanity, for the sake of the slaveholder, as well as the slave, to bear witness to the horrors of the Southern prison-house.” She proceeds to describe dreadful tragedies, the actors in which she says were “men and women of the families in South Carolina;” and that their cruelties did not, in the slightest degree, affect their standing in society. Her sister, Angelina Emily Grimké Weld, declared: “While I live, and Slavery lives, I must testify against it. Not merely for the sake of my poor brothers and sisters in bonds; for even were Slavery no curse to its victims, the exercise of arbitrary power works such fearful ruin upon the hearts of slaveholders, that I should feel impelled to labor and pray for its overthrow with my latest breath.” Among the horrible barbarities she enumerates is the case of a girl thirteen years old, who was flogged to death by her master. She says: “I asked a prominent lawyer, who belonged to one of the first families in the State, whether the murderer of this helpless child could not be indicted, and he coolly replied that the slave was Mr. ----’s property, and if he chose to suffer the loss, no one else had any thing to do with it.” She proceeds to say: “I felt there could be for me no rest in the midst of such outrages and pollutions. Yet I saw nothing of Slavery in its most vulgar and repulsive forms. I saw it in the city, among the fashionable and the honorable, where it was garnished by refinement and decked out for show. It is my deep, solemn, deliberate conviction, but this is a cause worth dying for. I say so from what I have seen, and heard, and known, in a land of Slavery, whereon rest the darkness of Egypt and the sin of Sodom.” I once asked Miss Angelina if she thought Abolitionists exaggerated the horrors of Slavery. She replied, with earnest emphasis: “They cannot be exaggerated. It is impossible for imagination to go beyond the fact.” To a lady who observed that the time had not yet come for agitating the subject, she answered: “I apprehend if thou wert a slave, toiling in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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fields of Carolina, thou wouldst think the time had fully come.” Mr. Thome, of Kentucky, in the course of his eloquent lectures on this subject, said: “I breathed my first breath in an atmosphere of Slavery. But though I am heir to a slave inheritance, I am bold to denounce the whole system as an outrage, a complication of crimes, and wrongs, and cruelties, that make angels weep.” Mr. Allen of Alabama, in a discussion with the students at Lane Theological Seminary in 1834, had told of a slave who was tied up and beaten all day, with a paddle full of holes. “At night, his flesh was literally pounded to a jelly. The punishment was inflicted within hearing of the Academy and the Public Green. But no one took any notice of it. No one thought any wrong was done. At our house, it is so common to hear screams from a neighboring plantation, that we think nothing of it. Lest any one should think that the slaves are generally well treated, and that the cases I have mentioned are exceptions, let me be distinctly understood that cruelty is the rule, and kindness is the exception.” In the same discussion, a student from Virginia, after relating cases of great cruelty, had related: “Such things are common all over Virginia; at least, so far as I am acquainted. But the planters generally avoid punishing their slaves before strangers.” Miss Mattie Griffith, of Kentucky, whose entire property consisted in slaves, emancipated them all. The noble-hearted girl wrote to me: “I shall go forth into the world penniless; but I shall work with a heart, and, best of all, I shall live with an easy conscience.” Previous to this generous resolution, she had never read any Abolition document, and entertained the common Southern prejudice against them. But her own observation so deeply impressed her with the enormities of Slavery, that she was impelled to publish a book, called “The Autobiography of a Female Slave.” I read it with thrilling interest; but some of the scenes made my nerves quiver so painfully, that told her I hoped they were too highly colored. She shook her head sadly, and replied: “I am sorry to say that every incident in the book has come within my own knowledge.” St. George Tucker, Judge and Professor of Law in Virginia, speaking of the legalized murder of runaways, said: “Such are the cruelties to which a state of Slavery gives birth — such the horrors to which the human mind is capable of being reconciled by its adoption.” Alluding to our struggle in ’76, he said: “While we proclaimed our resolution to live free or die, we imposed on our fellow-men, of different complexion, a Slavery ten thousand times worse than the utmost extremity of the oppressions of which we complained.” Governor Giles, in a Message to the Legislature of Virginia, referring to the custom of selling free colored people into Slavery, as a punishment for offences not capital, said: “Slavery must be admitted to be a punishment of the highest HDT WHAT? INDEX

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order; and, according to the just rule for the apportionment of punishment to crimes, it ought to be applied only to crimes of the highest order. The most distressing reflection in the application of this punishment to female offenders, is that it extends to their offspring; and the innocent are thus punished with the guilty.” Yet one hundred and twenty thousand innocent babies in this country are annually subjected to a punishment which your Governor declared “ought to be applied only to crimes of the highest order.” Jefferson said: “One day of American Slavery is worse than a thousand years of that which we rose in arms to oppose.” Alluding to insurrections, he said: “The Almighty has no attribute that can take side with us in such a contest.” John Randolph declared: “Every planter is a sentinel at his own door. Every Southern mother, when she hears an alarm of fire in the night, instinctively presses her infant closer to her bosom.” Looking at the system of slavery in the light of all this evidence, do you candidly think we deserve “two-fold damnation” for detesting it? Can you not believe that we may hate the system, and yet be truly your friends? I make allowance for the excited state of your mind, and for the prejudices induced by education. I so not care to change your opinion of me; but I so wish you could be persuaded to examine this subject dispassionately, for the sake of the prosperity of Virginia, and the welfare of unborn generations, both white and colored. For thirty years, Abolitionists have been trying to reason with slaveholders, through the press, and in the halls of Congress. Their efforts, though directed to the masters only, have been met with violence and abuse almost equal to that poured on head of John Brown. Yet surely we, as a portion of the Union, involved in the expense, the degeneracy, the danger, and the disgrace, of the iniquitous and fatal system, have a right to speak about it, and a right to be heard also. At the North, we willingly publish pro-slavery arguments, and ask only a fair field and no favor for the other side. But you will not even allow your own citizens a chance to examine this important subject. Your letter to me is published in Northern papers, as well as Southern; my reply will not be allowed to appear in any Southern paper. The despotic measures you take to silence investigation, and shut out the light from your own white population, prove how little reliance you have on the strength of your cause. In this enlightened age, all despotisms ought to come to an end by the agency of moral and rational means. But if they resist such agencies, it is in the order of Providence that they must come to an end by violence. History is full of such lessons. Would that the evil of prejudice could be removed from your eyes. If you would candidly examine the statements of Governor Hincks of the British West Indies, and of the Rev. Mr. Bleby, long time a Missionary in those Islands, both before and after emancipation, you could not fail to be convinced that Cash is a HDT WHAT? INDEX

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more powerful incentive to labor than the Lash, and far safer also. One fact in relation to those Islands is very significant. While the working people were slaves, it was always necessary to order out the military during the Christmas holidays; but since emancipation, not a soldier is to be seen. A hundred John Browns might land there, without exciting the slightest alarm. To the personal questions you ask me, I will reply in the name of all the women of New England. It would be extremely difficult to find any woman in our villages who does not sew for the poor, and watch with the sick, whenever occasion requires. We pay our domestic generous wages, with which they can purchase as many Christmas gown as they please; a process far better for their characters, as well as our own, than to receive their clothing as a charity, after being deprived of just payment for their labor. I have never known an instance where the “pangs of maternity” did not meet with requisite assistance; and here at the North, after we have helped the mothers, we do not sell the babies. I readily believe what you state concerning the kindness of many Virginia matrons. It is creditable to their hearts: but after all, the best that can be done in that way is a poor equivalent for the perpetual wrong done to the slaves, and the terrible liabilities to which they are always subject. Kind masters and mistresses among you are merely lucky accidents. If any one chooses to be a brutal despot, your laws and customs give him complete power to do so. And the lot of those slaves who have the kindest masters is exceedingly precarious. In case of death, or pecuniary difficulties, or marriages in the family, they may at any time be suddenly transferred from protection and indulgence to personal degradation, or extreme severity; and if they should try to escape from such sufferings, any body is authorized to shoot them down like dogs. With regard to your declaration that “no Southerner ought henceforth to read a line of my composition,” I reply that I have great satisfaction in the consciousness of having nothing to loose in that quarter. Twenty-seven years ago, I published a book called “An Appeal in behalf of that class of Americans called Africans.” It influenced the minds of several young men, afterward conspicuous in public life, through whose agency the cause was better served than it could have been by me. From that time to this, I have labored too earnestly for the slave to be agreeable to slaveholders. Literary popularity was never a paramount object with me, even in my youth; and, now that I am old, I am utterly indifferent to it. But, if I cared for the exclusion you threaten I should at least have the consolation of being exiled with honorable company. Dr. Channing’s writings, mild and candid as they are, breathe what you would call arrant treason. William C. Bryant, in his capacity of editor, is openly on our side. The inspired muse of Whittier has incessantly sounded the trumpet for moral warfare with your iniquitous institution; and his stirring tones have been answered, more or HDT WHAT? INDEX

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less loudly, by Pierpont, Lowell, and Longfellow. Emerson, the Plato of America, leaves the scholastic seclusion he love so well, and disliking noise with all his poetic soul, bravely takes his stand among the trumpeters. George W. Curtis, the brilliant wealth of his talent on the altar of Freedom, and makes common cause with rough-shod reformers. The genius of Mrs. Stowe carried the outworks of your institution at one dash, and left the citadel open to besiegers, who are pouring in amain. In the church, on the ultra-liberal side, it is assailed by the powerful battering-ram of Theodore Parker’s eloquence. On the extreme orthodox side is set a huge fire, kindled by the burning words of Dr. [George Barrell?] Cheever. Between them is Henry Ward Beecher, sending a shower of keen arrows into your entrenchments; and with him ride a troop of sharp-shooters from all sects. If you turn to the literature of England or France, you will find your institution treated with as little favor. The fact is, the whole civilized world proclaims Slavery an outlaw, and the best intellect of the age is active in hunting it down. L. MARIA CHILD. THE TOUCHSTONE. BY WILLIAM ALLENGHAME. A man there came, whence none could tell, Bearing a touchstone in his hand, And tested all things in the land By its unerring spell. A thousand transformations rose, From fair to foul, from foul to fair; The golden crown he did not share, Nor scorn the beggar’s clothes. Of heirloom jewels, prized so much, Were many changed to chips and clods, And even statues of the gods Crumbled beneath its touch. Then angrily the people cried, “The loss outweighs the profit far, Our goods suffice us as they are, We will not have them tried.” But since they could not so avail To check his unrelenting quest, They seized him, saying, “Let him test How real is our jail.” But though they slew him with their swords, And in the fire the touchstone burned, Its doings could not be o’erturned, Its undoings restored. And when, to stop all future harm, They strewed his ashes to the breeze, They little guessed each grain of these Conveyed the perfect charm. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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After escaping from the raid on Harpers Ferry Barclay Coppoc appeared on this day at the family home in Cedar County, Iowa. A most unusual situation developed there: despite its Quaker status, during his presence the Coppoc house would be surrounded at night by men waiting in the dark with firearms, to protect him in his rest if the occasion arose, from capture by federal agents!

On March 6, 1857 Edwin Coppoc had been disowned by the Red Cedar Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends in the West Branch/Springdale area. During April 1857 Barclay Coppoc had been disciplined by the Quakers for using profane language and for striking a man in anger. Several months after his return from Harpers Ferry, Barclay Coppoc would be disowned for absenting himself from meetings for worship and for bearing arms. The following is from chapters entitled “The Iowa Quakers and the Negroes” and “The Springdale Quakers and Old John Brown” in Louis Thomas Jones’s THE QUAKERS OF IOWA (Iowa City: Iowa State Historical Society, 1914, pages 195-7): Haggard and worn with his long flight, with a price upon his head, and hunted by an official with a requisition from Governor Wise of Virginia upon Governor Kirkwood of Iowa for his immediate rendition to justice, Barclay Coppoc reached his home in Iowa on December 17th [1859]. On the day before, his brother Edwin, loaded with chains and shackles, had yielded up his life upon a Virginia scaffold. Thus the mother’s parting prophecy had been fulfilled. [According to this source, when the two departed the mother had said to them: “When you get the halters around your necks, will you think of me?”] For the sake of accurate history, it now seems necessary to make plain the real relation which the much-eulogized Coppoc boys bore to the Society of Friends at the time of the events in question. Early in life both of the boys developed wayward tendencies, discomfiting to their mother and to the church. Edwin took to dancing, and though repeatedly dealt with in the “spirit of restoring love” by the Monthly Meeting, he spurned all advice, refused to “condemn his course,” and was in consequence duly disowned from membership in the Society on March 6, 1857. Barclay, also, about the same time gave the Springdale Friends grave concern. Fresh from the stirring scenes in Kansas, he had engaged in a fight soon after reaching home, and a month after his brother’s disownment the complaint was entered on the records of the Monthly Meeting that “Barclay Coppoc has used profane language, and struck a man in anger.” “Coppoc gave the proper satisfaction for this first offense. and the meeting “passed it by.” But immediately upon his return from Harpers Ferry his conduct called for new attention. With the officers close upon his heels Coppoc sought his home in Cedar County; and upon his arrival there a large number of the young men in the vicinity united as a military guard to prevent his capture, while he himself went heavily armed. His presence of course attracted wide attention, and the Overseers of the Preparative Meeting called upon him. Action was made to the [Red Cedar] Monthly Meeting that “Barclay Coppoc has neglected attendance at our religious meetings & is in the practice of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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bearing arms.” The usual care was extended to him, but with no avail. Two months later Barclay, like his brother, was formally disowned; and thus came to a close this interesting episode in the history of the Iowa Friends.

December 24, Saturday: Oberlin College Professor James Monroe returned empty-handed that Christmas Eve to Oberlin, Ohio, having failed to retrieve John Anderson Copeland, Jr.’s body from Virginia authorities.

The Reverend Samuel Joseph May had written to the Reverend Theodore Parker — who had gone off to Rome in part for his health and in part because he knew what was going to happen at Harpers Ferry and very well understood that he would pay for his part in this were he captured by the federal government. Now a belligerent letter arrived from Parker in Italy characterizing John Brown as “an upright & a downright man, who took his life in his hand & said ‘Slavery shall go down.’.”

[NOTE THAT FRIEND JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, WHEN OFFERED ONE OF THE PIKES WHICH HAD BEEN INTENDED FOR DISTRIBUTION TO REBELLING SLAVES FOR HIS INSPECTION, WOULD DECLINE WITH THE COMMENT “IT LOOKS TOO MUCH LIKE MURDER,” AND THAT THE REVEREND ADIN BALLOU HAD JUST INSISTED THAT TO CHARACTERIZE SUCH A MAN AS JOHN BROWN, A MERE “MILITARY ADVENTURER,” AS A “SELF-SACRIFICING REDEEMER” ON THE MODEL OF JESUS WOULD BE “UNTRUTHFUL, UNJUST, AND UTTERLY ABSURD.”]

December 24: P.M.–To Flint’s Pond. A strong and very cold northwest wind. I think that the cold winds are oftenest not northwest, but northwest by west. There is, in all, an acre or two in Walden not yet frozen, though half of it has been frozen more than a week. I measure the blueberry bush on Flint’s Pond Island. The five stems are united at the ground, so as to make one round and solid trunk thirty-one inches in circumference, but probably they have grown together there, for they become separate at about six inches above. They may have sprung from different seeds of one berry. At three feet from the ground they measure eleven inches, eleven, eleven and a half, eight, and six and a half, or, on an average, nine and a half. I climbed up and found a comfortable seat with my feet four feet above the ground, and there was room for three or four more there, but unfortunately this was not the season for berries. There were several other clumps of large ones there. One clump close by the former contained twenty-three stems within a diameter of three feet, and their average diameter at three feet from the ground was about two inches. These had not been cut, because they stood on this small island which has little wood beside, and therefore had grown the larger. The two prevailing lichens on them were Parmelia caperata and saxatilis, extending quite around their trunks; also a little of a parmelia more glaucous than the last one, and a little green usnea and a little ramalina. [Vide specimens in drawer.] This island appears to be a mere stony ridge three or four feet high, with a very low wet shore on each side, even as if the water and ice had shoved it up, as at the other end of the pond. I saw the tracks of a partridge [Ruffed Grouse Bonasa umbellus (Partridge)] more than half an inch deep in the ice, extending from this island to the shore, she having walked there in the slosh. They were quite perfect and reminded me of bird-tracks in stone. She may have gone there to bud on these blueberry trees. I saw where she spent the night at the bottom of that largest clump, in the snow. Perhaps yet larger ones were seen here before we came to cut off the trees. Judging from those whose rings I have counted, the largest of those stems must be about sixty years old. The stems rise up in a winding and zigzag manner, one sometimes resting in the forks of its neighbor. There were many more clumps of large ones there. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December 25, Christmas Day: Walden Pond had frozen during the night.

A memorial service for John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Shields Green was held at First Church in Oberlin, Ohio.

T. Drew wrote from Boston to Charles Wesley Slack sending a “small specimen of the ornithological productions,” and Christmas greetings.

We find the following indication of the tension between the sacred and the secular observation of Christmas in two diary entries of Miss E.W. Lindsley of Downsville, New York: Sunday 25 A.M. Heard Mr. Hearnel lecture to the Children on Missions P.M. — Evening — He preached from Deut. 4.5 — a very pointed discourse against frivolity and dancing December Tuesday 27 1859 Attended the Masonic festival, with Julia, at H.A. Williams — Addresses by Dr Meerwin & Rev. L. Learicom — Had a Ball in the evening — Felt very much grieved at Mr. Beares dancing, after what Mr. Harnel Said Sabbath evening.

December 25: The last our coldest night, as yet. No doubt Walden froze over last night entirely.

P.M.–To Carlisle Bridge on river and meadow. I now notice a great many flat, annular, glow-worm-like worms frozen in the ice of the Great Meadow, which were evidently washed out of the meadow-grass lately; but they are almost all within the ice, inaccessible to birds; are only in certain parts of the meadow. especially about that island in it, where it is shallow. It is as if they were created only to be frozen, for this must be their annual fate. I see one which seems to be a true glow- worm. [No. I compare it with description September 16, 1857, and find it is not the glow-worm, though somewhat like it.] The transparent ice is specked black with them, as if they were cranberry leaves in it. You can hardly get one out now without breaking it, they are so brittle. The snow buntings are about, as usual, but I do not think that they were after these insects the other day. Standing by the side of the river at Eleazer Davis’s Hill, –prepared to pace across it,– I hear a sharp fine screep from some bird, which at length I detect amid the button-bushes and willows. The screep was a note of recognition meant for me. I saw that it was a novel bird to me. Watching it a long time, with my glass and without it, I at length made out these marks: It was slate-colored above and dirty-white beneath, with a broad and very conspicuous bright-orange crown, which in some lights was red-orange, along the middle of the head; this was bounded on each side by a black segment, beneath which was a yellow or whitish line. There was also some yellow and a black spot on the middle of the closed wings, and yellow within the tail-feathers. The ends of the wings and the tail above were dusky, and the tail forked. It was so very active that I could not get a steady view of it. It kept drifting about behind the stems of the button- bushes, etc., half the time on the ice, and again on the lower twigs, busily looking for its prey, turning its body this way and that with great restlessness, appearing to hide from me behind the stems of the button-bush and the withered coarse grass. When I came nearest it would utter its peculiar screep, or screep screep, or even screep screep screep. Yet it was unwilling to leave the spot, and when I cornered it, it hopped back within ten feet of me. However, I could see its brilliant crown, even between the twigs of the button-bush and through the withered grass, when I could detect no other part. It was evidently the golden-crested wren [Golden-crowned Kinglet Regulus satrapa], which I have not made out before. This little creature was contentedly seeking its food here alone this cold winter day on the shore of our frozen river. If it does not visit us often it is strange that it should choose such a season. I see that the strong wind of yesterday has blown off quite a number of white pine cones, which lie on the ice opposite E. Davis’s Hill. As I crossed Flint’s about 4 P. M. yesterday on my way home, when it was bitter cold, the ice cracked with an exceedingly brittle shiver, as if all the pond’s crockery had gone to smash, suggesting a high degree of tension, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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even of dryness,–such as you hear only in very cold weather,–right under my feet, as if I had helped to crack it. It is the report of the artillery which the frost foe has discharged at me. As you arc swiftly pacing homeward, taking your way across the pond, with your mittened hands in your pocket and your cap drawn down over your ears, the pond loves to give a rousing crack right under your feet, and you hear the whole pond titter at your surprise. It is bracing its nerves against the unheard-of cold that is at hand, and it snaps some of them. You hear this best where there is considerable depth and breadth of water,–on ponds rather than on the river and meadow. The cold strains it up so tight that some of the strings snap. On hearing that sound you redouble your haste toward home, where vestal virgins keep alive a little fire still. In the same manner the very surface of the earth cracks in frosty weather. To-night, when I get just below Davis’s Hill the ice displays its green flag and fires its evening gun as a warning to all walkers to return home. Consider how the pickerel-fisher lives. G., whom I saw at Flint’s Pond on the 22d, had been there all day, eaten all the dinner he had brought, and caught only four little fish, hardly enough for his supper, if he should cook them. His companion swore that he would not go a-fishing again for ten years. But G. said nothing of that sort. The next day I found him five miles from here on the other side of the town, with his lines set in the bay of the river off Ball’s Hill. There, too, he had been tramping about from hole to hole,–this time alone,–and he had done a trifle better than the day before, for he had caught three little fish and one great one. But instead of giving up here, he concluded to leave his lines in overnight,–since his bait would die if he took them off,–and return the next morning. The next was a bitter cold day, but I hear that Goodwin had some fish to dispose of. Probably not more than a dollar’s worth, however. You may think that you need take no care to preserve your woodland, but every tree comes either from the stump of another tree or from a seed. With the present management, will there always be a fresh stump, or a nut in the soil, think you? Will not the nobler kinds of trees, which bear comparatively few seeds, grow more and more scarce? What is become of our chestnut wood? There are but few stumps for sprouts to spring from, and, as for the chestnuts, there are not enough for the squirrels, and nobody is planting them. The sweet-gale rises above the ice of the meadow on each side of the river, with its brown clusters of little aments (some of its seeds begun to fall) amid its very dark colored twigs. There is an abundance of bright- yellow resin between its seeds, and the aments, being crushed between the fingers, yield an odoriferous, perhaps terebinthine (piney) fragrance and stain the fingers yellow. It is worth the while, at this season especially, when most plants are inexpressive, to meet with one so pronounced. I see the now withered spikes of the chelone here and there, in which (when diseased?) a few of its fiat winged seeds are still found. How different are men and women, even in respect to the adornment of their heads! Do you ever see an old or jammed bonnet on the head of a woman at a public meeting? But look at any assembly of men with their hats on; how large a proportion of the hats will be old, weather-beaten, and indented, but I think so much the more picturesque and interesting! One farmer rides by my door in a hat which it does me good to see, there is so much character in it,–so much independence to begin with, and then affection for his old friends, etc., etc. I should not wonder if there were lichens on it. Think of painting a hero in a bran-new hat! The chief recommendation of the Kossuth hat is that it looks old to start with, and almost as good as new to end with. Indeed, it is generally conceded that a man does not look the worse for a somewhat dilapidated hat. But go to a lyceum and look at the bonnets and various other headgear of the women and girls,–who, by the way, keep their hats on, it being too dangerous and expensive to take them off!! Why, every one looks as fragile as a butterfly’s wings, having just come out of a bandbox,–as it will go into a bandbox again when the lyceum is over. Men wear their hats for use; women theirs for ornament. I have seen the greatest philosopher in the town with what the traders would call “a shocking bad hat” on, but the woman whose bonnet does not come up to the mark is at best a “bluestocking.” The man is not particularly proud of his beaver and musquash, but the woman flaunts her ostrich and sable in your face. Ladies are in haste to dress as if it were cold or as if it were warm, –though it may not yet be so,– merely to display a new dress. Again, what an ado women make about trifles! Here is one tells me that she cannot possibly wear india-rubber hoots in sloshy weather, because they have heels. Men have been wearing boots with heels from time immemorial; little boys soon learn the art, and are eager to try the experiment. The woodchoppers and teamsters, and the merchants and lawyers, go and come quietly the livelong day, and though they may meet with many accidents, I do not remember any that originated in the heels of their boots. But not so with women; they bolt at once, recklessly as runaway horses, the moment they get the boots on, before they have learned the wonderful art of wearing them. My informant tells me of a friend who has got a white swelling from coming down-stairs imprudently in boots, and of another seriously injured on the meeting-house steps,–for when you deal with HDT WHAT? INDEX

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steps, then comes the rub,–and of a third who involuntarily dashed down the front stairs, knocked a hat-tree, through the side-lights, and broke I do not know how many ribs. Indeed, that quarter-inch obstruction about the heels seems to be an insuperable one to the women.

December 29, Thursday: An empty-casket13 funeral was staged for John Anderson Copeland, Jr. in his hometown of Oberlin, Ohio and 3,000 of his family’s friends, neighbors, and supporters attended. A year later, a monument would be erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their three free men of color who had died in the raid or been hanged, Copeland, his uncle Lewis Sheridan Leary, and Shields Green (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Martin Luther King, Jr. Park on Vine Street in 1971). OBERLIN COLLEGE

December 29: A very cold morning,–about–15 at 8 A.M. at our door. I went to the river immediately after sunrise. I could [SEE] a little greenness in the ice, and also a little rose- color from the snow, but far less than before the sun set. Do both these phenomena require a gross atmosphere? Apparently the ice is greenest when the sun is twenty or thirty minutes above the horizon. From the smooth open place behind Cheney’s a great deal of vapor was rising to the height of a dozen feet or more, as from a boiling kettle. This, then, is a phenomenon of quite cold weather. I did not notice it yesterday afternoon. These open places are a sort of breathing-holes of the river. When I look toward the sun, now that they are smooth, they are hardly to be distinguished from the ice. Just as cold weather reveals the breath of a man, still greater cold reveals the breath of, i. e. warm, moist air over, the river. I collect this morning the little shining black seeds of the amaranth, raised above the snow in its solid or dense spike. P.M.–To Ball’s Hill, skating. Walked back, measuring the river and ice by pacing. [Feb. 15,1860, when the river was much more open than Dec. 29, 1859, it was scarcely open at the narrowest place above Bound Rock, only puffed up in the channel, and the first decided opening was at Rice’s Bend; all below Bound Rock to Fair Haven Pond, etc., was quite solid. Hence the statements below are true.] The first open place in the main stream in Concord, or no doubt this side Carlisle Bridge, coming upstream, were [SIC]:–

1st, Holt Ford, 10 rods by 1 (extreme width). 2d, east side Holt Bend, near last, 8 by 1 1/2. 3d, west side Holt Bend (midway), 3 by 1/2. (On the 28th it must have been open nearly all round to Holt Bend.) 4th, Barrett’s Bar, 42 rods by 6 at west end, where it reaches 12 rods above ford; extends down the north side very narrow to the rock and only little way down the south side; can walk in middle half-way. 5th, a bar above Monument, 10 by 5. 6th, from Hunt’s Bridge to Island, or say 54 rods by 4. 7th, from 8 below willow-row to 5 below boat’s place, or 80+ rods by 3. This as far as I looked to-day, but no doubt [Proved by looking the 30th.] the next was:– 8th, just above ash tree, probably three or four rods long. 9th, at Hubbard’s Bath Bend. 10th, Clamshell Bend. 11th, below Nut Meadow, probably two or three rods long.

This is the last in Concord. (I do not include the small openings which are to be found now at bridges.) The longest opening is that below my boat’s place; next, at junction next Barrett’s Bar; next, either Clamshell or Hubbard’s Bath. But for area of water that below the junction is considerably the largest of all. [Vide Jan. 22.] When I went to walk it was about 10 above zero, and when I returned, 1. I did not notice any vapor rising

13. After his cadaver had been temporarily interred in Charles Town it had been dug up and was in service in the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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from the open places, as I did in the morning, when it was–16 and also–6. Therefore the cold must be between +1 and–6 in order that vapor may rise from these places. It takes a greater degree of cold to show the breath of the river than that of man. Apparently, the river is not enough warmer than the air to permit of its rising into it, i. e., evaporating, unless the air is of a very low temperature. When the air is say four or five degrees below, the water being + 32, then there is a visible evaporation. Is there the same difference, or some 40, between the heat of the human breath and that air in which the moisture in the breath becomes visible in vapor? This has to do with the dew-point. Next, what makes the water of those open places thus warm? and is it any warmer than elsewhere? There is considerable heat reflected from a sandy bottom where the water is shallow, and at these places it is always sandy and shallow, but I doubt if this actually makes the water warmer, though it may melt the more opaque ice which absorbs it. The fact that Holt Bend, which is deep, is late to freeze, being narrow, seems to prove it to be the swiftness of the water and not reflected heat that prevents freezing. The water is apparently kept warm under the ice and down next to the unfrozen earth, and by a myriad springs from within the bowels of the earth. I notice that, on the thin black ice lately formed on these open places, the breath of the water has made its way up through and is frozen into a myriad of little rosettes, which nearly cover its surface and make it white as with snow. You see the same on pretty thick ice. This occurs whenever the weather is coldest in the night or very early in the morning. Also, where these open places have lately closed, the ice for long distances over the thread of the river will often be heaved up roofwise a foot or more high and a rod wide, apparently pushed up by the heat of this breath beneath.

As I come home, I observe much thin ice, just formed as it grows colder, drifting in gauze-like masses down these open places, just as I used to see it coming down the open river when it began to freeze. In this case it is not ice which formed last night, but which is even now forming. The musquash make a good deal of use of these open spaces. I have seen one four times in three several places this winter, or within three weeks. They improve all the open water they can get. They occasionally leave their clamshells upon the edges of them now. This is all the water to reflect the sky now, whether amber or purple. I sometimes see the musquash dive in the midst of such a placid purple lake. Where the channel is broad the water is more sluggish and the ice accordingly thick, or it will answer just as well if the channel is deep, i. e., if its capacity is the same, though it be very narrow. The ice will be firm there too, e. g. at Ash Tree Rock (though it was lately open off the willows eight or ten rods above, being less deep and narrower); and even at the deeper hole next below the opening is not where it is deep, though very narrow, but half a dozen rods below, where it is much wider. To-night I notice the rose-color in the snow and the green in the ice at the same time, having been looking out for them. The clouds were very remarkable this cold afternoon, about twenty minutes before sunset, consisting of very long and narrow white clouds converging in the horizon (melon-rind-wise) both in the west and east. They looked like the skeletons and backbones of celestial sloths, being pointed at each end, or even like porcupine quills or ivory darts sharp at each end. So long and slender, but pronounced, with a manifest backbone and marrow. It looked as if invisible giants were darting them from all parts of the sky at the setting sun. These were long darts indeed. Well underneath was an almost invisible rippled vapor whose grain was exactly at right angles with the former, all over the sky, yet it was so delicate that it did not prevent your seeing the former at all. Its filmy arrows all pointed athwart the others. I know that in fact those slender white cloud sloths were nearly parallel across the sky, but how much handsomer are the clouds because the sky is made to appear concave to us! How much more beautiful an arrangement of the clouds than parallel lines! At length those white arrows and bows, slender and sharp as they were, gathering toward a point in the west horizon, looked like flames even, forked and darting flames of ivory-white, and low in the west there was a piece of rainbow but little longer than it was broad. Taking the river in Concord in its present condition, it is, with one exception, only the shallowest places that are open. Suppose there were a dozen places open a few days ago, if it has grown much colder since, the deepest of them will be frozen over; and the shallowest place in all in Concord is the latest of all to freeze, e. g. at the junction. So, if you get into the river at this season, it is most likely to be at the shallowest places, they being either open or most thinly frozen over. That is one consolation for you. The exception is on the west side of the Holt (and the depth is one side from the opening), but that is on account of the narrowness of the river there. Indeed, the whole of Holt Bend is slow to freeze over, on account of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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great narrowness and consequent swiftness of the stream there; but the two narrowest points of it are among the first to freeze over, because they are much the deepest, the rush of waters being either below or above them, where it is much shallower, though broader. To be safe a river should be straight and deep, or of nearly uniform depth. I do not remember any particular swiftness in the current above the railroad ash tree, where there is still an opening (seen December 30th), and it may be owing to the very copious springs in the high bank for twenty rods. There is not elsewhere so long a high and springy bank bounding immediately on the river in the town. To be sure, it is not deep. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1860

In Fairfield, South Carolina in the fall of 1843, one John L. Brown had been sentenced “to hang by the neck until your body be dead” for having aided a South Carolinan who was trying to escape from enslavement in South Carolina. But this had not been the famous enslaver of Providence, Rhode Island, John Brown, nor had it been the businessman John Brown of Newburyport, nor had it been the businessman John Brown of Concord, nor had it been the northern interloper of 1859, Captain John Brown — this had been a Maine man. The national and international petitions for clemency in this case, landing on the desk of Governor James Henry Hammond (1810-1864), had caused the governor to commute the sentence of death and then to respond at length in defense of the institution of chattel slavery and in opposition to the practice of slave stealing, and the Charleston SC Mercury had subsequently put his thoughts out in the form of pamphlets, and then they had been republished as PRO-SLAVERY ARGUMENT, and in this year this Southern gentleman’s responses received additional general publication as COTTON IS KING AND PRO-SLAVERY ARGUMENTS. COTTON UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

William Still went into the stove business. Later he branched out into the coal business.

Oberlin, Ohio’s population of 2,115 including 422 black Americans, which would work out to be 20%. A monument was erected in honor of the town’s three free men of color who had died in the raid on Harpers Ferry or been hanged for treason, John Anderson Copeland, Jr., his uncle Lewis Sheridan Leary, and “Emperor” Shields Green (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Martin Luther King, Jr. Park on Vine Street in 1971).

There was severe drouth in Kansas and 30,000 disillusioned white settlers abandoned the state. “BLEEDING KANSAS” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1861

A company of 100 college students was formed, called the “Monroe Rifles” after their Professor James Monroe. They were led by Captain Giles Shurtleff, a theology student and tutor in Latin at Oberlin College. They would become Company C of the 7th Ohio Volunteer Infantry that was being formed up with the assistance of John Mercer Langston and Shurtleff would become the Colonel in charge of the regiment (in this

formation, this being America, neither a professional man such as Langston nor any of the other men of color would ever have any chance whatever of becoming officers). Besides the college students, 4 of Oberlin, Ohio’s black men were in the regiment. In all, eventually, close to a thousand men of the town (including 50 black men) would enlist during the Civil War.

In New Orleans, also, many able-bodied free black men were seeking to enlist, to fight on the side of the Confederacy! Louisiana would decline their services, but would proudly hold bragging rights about the fact that these black citizens had sought to volunteer. Most of these black volunteers were merely property-owners seeking, like white local householders, to protect the city from a destructive foreign invasion. They may also have held false hopes that such patriotic service could reduce the levels of white persecution, or, they may have had a presentiment that if the North freed the slaves, the general impact of this would be seen not so much in HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the leveling upward of the condition of the former slaves to match the current condition of the Southern free black population, as in the leveling downward of the condition of the former freemen, under the “Jim Crow” –As we will see, the general impact of the Emancipation Proclamation and the XIIIth Amendment to the US Constitution would be not so much in the leveling upward of the condition of the “liberated” black slaves to match the previous condition of the small Southern free black population, as in the leveling downward of the condition of these former freemen, under the “Jim Crow” Black Code of segregation, to the condition of “sharecropper” — someone who would always be, as depicted in the movie “The Color Purple,” merely a disposable slave of the white society as a while, toward whom no particular white person needed to display any affect other than hostility or any behavior other than persecution. US CIVIL WAR

Willard Woolson, a carpenter in Watertown, New York, and his son Albert Woolson, an apprentice carpenter, served also as musicians in the band of a traveling circus. When President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers, the musicians enlisted as a body, leaving 14-year-old Albert –who would later become a drummer boy and even later than that become the last surviving pensioned member of the army of the Union– behind as too young. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1862

Professor Joseph Leidy came to be in charge of autopsies at Salterlee General Hospital of the US Army in West Philadelphia.

The Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy moved their St. Aloysius orphanage in Providence, Rhode Island from their convent on Claverick Street into a newer building on Prairie Avenue.

In New-York, Quakers founded a Friends Employment Society to train young women to work in hospitals and other jobs.

With the beginning of civil war, for financial reasons the Female (later Woman’s) Medical College of Pennsylvania was forced to discontinue its instruction. Friend Ann Preston was, however, able to open the doors of her new Woman’s Hospital on North College Avenue in Philadelphia, and was able to raise enough money to send her colleague Dr. Emeline Horton Cleveland off to the Maternité hospital in Paris to study obstetrics — so that upon her return the new hospital could have a resident physician. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The federal Congress passed the Morrill Act which established land-grant colleges in rural areas: through such land-grant colleges, millions of women would be able to acquire low-cost degrees. The Homestead Act promised 160 acres of free land to anyone regardless of gender, who would live on it and improve it for five years: many single women would “prove up claims” under this act, especially teachers who would be able to work the land during the summer vacation.

In 1841, three women had already receive full baccalaureate degrees from Oberlin College, but Mary Hosford, Elizabeth Smith Prall, and Caroline Mary Rudd had been white. In this year’s graduating class at Oberlin College, Mary Jane Patterson became the 1st woman of color to receive a full baccalaureate degree (she would become the “principal of the first preparatory high school for colored youth” in Washington DC). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1863

August: The initial burial in Westwood Cemetery, established on 47 acres at the west end of Morgan Street in Oberlin, Ohio (many graves from an earlier cemetery located on a hill overlooking the Plum Creek between Professor and South Man Streets would soon be relocated to Westwood).

Sam Patch of Pawtucket, Rhode Island was gone but not forgotten. There was a report of the death of a young Civil War lieutenant who had recently written home, to his mother:

“I shall rival Sam Patch at a leap, and jump to the head at once. Three months is enough to make a colonel of me.”14

Still Dead, Still an Inspiration US CIVIL WAR

14. Paul E. Johnson’s SAM PATCH, THE FAMOUS JUMPER (NY: Hill & Wang). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1865

With the Civil War and her usefulness as a spy (if not as a cook or as a nurse) over, Harriet Tubman settled in Auburn, New York.

The Oberlin, Ohio fire department resigned because of inadequate equipment.

When General James Miranda Barry, Inspector General of the British Army Medical Department, died in London, he was discovered to have been female. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1866

The Reverend Charles Grandison Finney resigned as president of Oberlin College. Although the beginnings of that college had been auspicious, with an abolitionist as its first president and an interracial student body, the college’s avowed goal in fact was preparing students for evangelical missions. After this initial president, the administration would become entirely indifferent to racial justice, and the college’s blacks –a tiny minority of the students– and Oberlin, Ohio’s citizens of color, would need to stand alone.

After the Civil War, John Mercer Langston, who had gotten his start at Oberlin College, would become a national leader for blacks, founding the National Equal Rights League, organizing the Freedman’s Bureau, becoming a professor at Howard University, serving as minister to Haiti, and in 1890 becoming the only black HDT WHAT? INDEX

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congressman from Virginia.

A steam fire engine was purchased for the community of Oberlin, Ohio. The nice red-brick Italianate house later known as the Monroe House was erected for its 1st owner, General Giles Shurtleff. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1870

In Oberlin, Ohio, Professor James Monroe purchased the grand “Monroe House” from General Giles Shurtleff. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1871

John Mercer Langston, who had made himself the 1st black lawyer in the United States, left Oberlin, Ohio for Virginia. He would make himself the 1st black American admitted to practice law before the US Supreme Court.

President U.S. Grant extended the grounds of the White House south and a great round pool was built on the south lawn.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s brother Abraham Shadd graduated from the law school of Howard College and moved to Mississippi, where he was admitted to the bar. He was also admitted to practice in Arkansas.

In this year Ms. Cary and 63 other women were unsuccessful in an attempt to register to vote at the local HDT WHAT? INDEX

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polling place in Washington DC. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1880

Mary Ann Shadd Cary formed the Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise Association. In this year, also, she completed her law studies at Howard College (although she would not receive her graduation papers until a later year).

Frank and Frances Jewett arrived in Oberlin, Ohio.

During this year and the following one, Sojourner Truth would be speaking in Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois, especially for temperance and against capital punishment. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1884

Having already sold off some of its endowment land to meet current expenses in 1876 and apparently gotten away with this, it is not surprising that the Yearly Meeting School of the Religious Society of Friends atop the hill in Providence, Rhode Island would find an opportunity to do so again. In this year, to raise funds, not only were day students admitted to the school thus beginning the end of its status as a boarding school, but also, more of its endowment was sold off to meet current expenses on the excuse that this was “vacant land” anyway. (It is very much an open question, whether such disposal of trust property was in accordance with the original bequest, or was an utterly unlawful raid on the endowment and a violation of their standing as a society incorporated in Rhode Island by legislative charter. It would be lawful, if the money was placed in a trust fund only the income of which would be used for school expenses; however, it would be entirely unlawful, if the money was simply being misappropriated to be used for current school expenses.)

The Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women at 10 Garden Street in Cambridge was accepted by the Massachusetts legislature as Radcliffe College, sister to Harvard University.

In Oberlin, Ohio, the Jewett House, located on Professor Street, was built and purchased-unfinished-from the Reverend Reuben Hatch for $6,000. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1886

Annie Maria Russell graduated from Smith College.

A block bounded by West College and South Main Streets burned, taking with it Oberlin College’s oldest building — Oberlin Hall.

Benjamin West Ball died.

February 23, Tuesday: At Oberlin College, Ohio, 4th-year student Charles Martin Hall completed work on an electrolytic method of extracting aluminum metal from ore. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1888

Jefferson Davis agreed to begin work on another book.

The White Caps, an Indiana Ku Klux Klan offshoot, surfaced in the city of Rochester, New York.

Oberlin, Ohio constructed a water works plant, with fire hydrants positioned at strategic locations. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1893

Bliss Perry began to teach at the College of New-Jersey, which while he was there would relocate to Princeton, New Jersey and change its name to Princeton University.

Oberlin, Ohio contracted to have sanitation and storm sewers put in.

The Oberlin Gas and Electric Company, a private concern located on the south side of the railroad tracks crossing South Main Street, begins supplying gas to Oberlin customers. The company provides 39 electric arc lights for major streets. That same year electricity was first used in private homes (initially, electric light fixtures would be located only in the middle of the ceilings of rooms; there would be no additional outlets due to the fact that there were as yet no appliances!) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1894

James Lane Allen’s A KENTUCKY CARDINAL was obviously modeled upon Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN — despite this being ostensibly a novel describing a conflict between love for a woman and love for a pet bird.

In Oberlin, Ohio, all major streets were made of brick, replacing mud, wood, and sandstone (today all municipal streets have become blacktop; the last brick street, Morgan Street, would be blacktopped in 1975). HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1895

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was arrested while smuggling illegal literature into Russia, and would be exiled to Siberia for 3 years during which time his brother would be executed for plotting against Czar Aleksandr II (this might well have been the end of a budding political career).

Alice Swing was elected as the 1st woman on the Oberlin School Board, and would be among the 1st women to be on any Ohio school board (this could be the beginning of something great).

The Oberlin Telephone Company was incorporated. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1896

Andrew Dickson White reissued his outrageous 1876 tract THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE as the extra-outrageous tome A HISTORY OF THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY IN CHRISTENDOM. The scandalous falsehood that religious people had once held as a consensus position that the earth was flat had at this point become a central feature of the scientistic doctrine.

The 1st telephones came to Oberlin, Ohio (by some accounts, private telephone lines had been being strung among a very few Oberlinians as early as 1877). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1897

This is the year in which “Transportation” of British convicts to New Calcedonia finally came to an end.15

A traction line (street railway) was opened between Elyria, Ohio and Oberlin — a round-trip ticket would set you back 25 cents.

15. The alternative which had originally been suggested by the developers of Botany Bay had been the importation of quantities of Chinese slave laborers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1943

Robert Samuel Fletcher’s A HISTORY OF OBERLIN COLLEGE FROM ITS FOUNDATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR (Oberlin, Ohio). There was a Tappan enterprise which was Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, founded to help save the Mississippi valley from Godlessness, rum, and Romanism. Lyman Beecher was put at the head, and Theodore Weld was, by design, a sort of leader of the student body. Largely through Weld’s efforts, Lane became a hotbed of abolitionism, anti-racism, and mingling between the races. Cincinnatians had already once threatened the African Americans of their town with so much violence that half of them fled (approximately a thousand persons). They again got up in arms, the Lane Regents forbade free discussion of such things. Weld and most of the student body then left Lane and while they were in limbo, an arrangement was made such that most of them went to the struggling little institution at Oberlin, and Tappan became their financier, with a stipulation that they also accept black students. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1971

A monument had been erected by the citizens of Oberlin, Ohio in honor of their 3 free citizens of color who had died during the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry before the US Civil War, or been hanged afterward in Charles Town, Virginia: Shields Green, John Anderson Copeland, Jr., and Lewis Sheridan Leary. At this point the 8-foot marble monument was moved to Vine Street Park.

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

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

Prepared: August 21, 2016 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

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

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request for information we merely push a button.

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

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