Henry Thoreau

HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

EVENTS OF 21ST STANZA

The 22d Stanza in the Life of Henry Thoreau FALL 1838 JULY 1838 AUGUST SEPTEMBER WINTER 1838/1839 OCTOBER NOVEMBER DECEMBER 1838 SPRING 1839 JANUARY 1839 FEBRUARY MARCH SUMMER 1839 APRIL MAY JUNE 1839

Following the death of Jesus Christ there was a period of readjustment that lasted for approximately one million years. –Kurt Vonnegut, THE SIRENS OF TITAN

1838

January February March Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 1 2 3 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 28 29 30 31 25 26 27 28 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 April May June Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 29 30 27 28 29 30 31 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

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July August September Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 1 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 29 30 31 26 27 28 29 30 31 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 October November December Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 1 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 28 29 30 31 25 26 27 28 29 30 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1837 (æt. 20)

Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1838 (æt. 20-21)

Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1839 (æt. 21-22)

Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1840 (æt. 22-23)

Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1841 (æt. 23-24)

Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1842 (æt. 24-25)

Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal Volume for 1845-1846 (æt. 27-29)

Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal Volume for 1845-1847 (æt. 27-30)

Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal Volume for 1837-1847 (æt. 20-30)

“HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE” BEING A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN TIME (JUST AS THE PERSPECTIVE IN A PAINTING IS A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN SPACE), TO “LOOK AT THE COURSE OF HISTORY MORE GENERALLY” WOULD BE TO SACRIFICE PERSPECTIVE ALTOGETHER. THIS IS FANTASY-LAND, YOU’RE FOOLING YOURSELF. THERE CANNOT BE ANY SUCH THINGIE, AS SUCH A PERSPECTIVE. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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22D STANZA: 1838/1839

Henry Thoreau’s 22d stanza began on his birthday, July 12th, Thursday, 1838.

The Thoreau family apparently did not make much of holidays or birthdays — but this was a birthday we now consider symbolic, the 21st — the day after which in our culture every male is entitled to profess himself a grown man.

The question would be, however, whether by the year 1838 such a 21st birthday was being regarded as the gateway to full adulthood, or whether that able-to-drink-alcohol cultural artifact is of a more recent provenance. And if it were already the convention, why is there not something reported as going on, similar to the “chiving” that goes on now as a young man approaches that transition-to-full-adulthood milestone? In the JOURNAL, and in various other historical records I have been consulting, one detects none of this sort of chiving. • Henry Thoreau lost a tooth. • His brother John reopened the defunct Concord Academy and he became a teacher there. The family was living in the Parkman House on the site of the present Concord Free Public Library building. It was in this home that they would hold this school. • An exhibition of hot-air balloon ascension toured Massachusetts. • The rather humorlessly self-righteous James Russell Lowell was rusticating in Concord during this year, having been temporarily expelled from Harvard College for some infraction of college regulations. He was being tutored by the utterly humorlessly self-righteous Reverend Barzillai Frost. They must have made quite a pair! • At Harvard College, Gore Hall was constructed. • Little Louisa May Alcott, about age 5, who had already while a toddler almost drowned in the Boston frogpond, wandered away from home and was found late in the evening by a town crier, huddled on a doorstep in Bedford Street. • The 1st Universalist Society of Concord was gathered. • A Nonresistance Society was formed in Boston, all the members of which were abolitionists because they understood slavery to be a form of violence. • The United States House of Representatives resolved not to accept any more antislavery petitions. • Start of the “Underground Railroad.” • The Reverend Orestes Augustus Brownson began his Boston Quarterly Review. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• The Reverend William Ellery Channing suggested that the primary focus of our energies should be toward our own rectification, rather than the rectification of society. The Reverend Brownson retorted that systemic societal problems can never be rectified through self-culture. • Some 200 trees were being planted along the road to the Battle Monument. A burial site for the fallen redcoats in Concord or Lexington was disturbed by a phrenologist who would use the skulls he obtained as exhibits.

BACKGROUND EVENTS OF 1838 BACKGROUND EVENTS OF 1839

THE RHODE-ISLAND ALMANAC FOR 1838. By Isaac Bickerstaff. Providence, Rhode Island: Hugh H. Brown. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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While the rather humorlessly self-righteous James Russell Lowell was rusticating in Concord, Massachusetts during this year, having been temporarily expelled from Harvard College for some infraction of college regulations. He was being tutored by the utterly humorlessly self-righteous Reverend Barzillai Frost. They

must have made quite a pair! In this year Lowell would graduate from Harvard as Class Poet despite being quite unable to attend his Class Day and deliver the poem which he had composed for the occasion because he was being ostracized in Concord, so the poem would be published in Cambridge by Metcalf, Torry & HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Ballou.

One of the poetaster’s biographers would speak of this poem as “immortalizing, to Lowell’s later regret, his reactionary tendencies and sophomoric opposition to the new thoughts and reforms then coming into fashion [such as] Transcendentalism, abolition, woman’s rights, and temperance … Typical of the poem’s style … are these lines directed against Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had just delivered his famous address before the Divinity College students in Cambridge … [lines the level of which] never rises above that of diatribe: they are abusive in their denunciation, unmemorable in phrasing, and humorlessly self-righteous”: They call such doctrines startling, strange, and new, But then they’re his, you know, and must be true; The universal mind requires a change, Its insect wings must have a wider range, It wants no mediator — it can face In its own littleness the Throne of Grace; WALDO EMERSON For miracles and “such things” ’t is too late, To trust in them is now quite out of date, They’re all explainable by nature’s laws— Ay! if you only could find out their CAUSE!… Alas! that Christian ministers should dare To preach the views of Gibbon and Vol tair e ! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Charles Pickering had been raised in Wenham, Massachusetts and after attending Harvard College and Harvard Medical School had set up practice in Philadelphia. He had become the librarian and curator of the Academy of Natural Sciences, and at this point was selected to be one of the scientists (functioning primarily as a botanist, but also as a herpetologist and an ichthyologist) with the US South Seas Exploring Expedition (until 1842).

Dr. Asa Gray had planned to participate in the US South Seas Exploring Expedition but delays would lead him to withdraw.

WALDEN: What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring PEOPLE OF Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact, that there are continents and seas in WALDEN the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone.– “Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos. Plus habet hic vitæ, plus habet ille viæ.” Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians. I have more of God, they more of the road.

CHARLES WILKES He was appointed professor of botany at the newly formed University of Michigan. Publication of the 1st volume of Professor John Torrey’s A FLORA OF NORTH AMERICA (NY: Wiley & Putnam, 1838-1843), with Professor Gray as a full collaborator. BOTANIZING HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

The three volumes of Thomas Carlyle’s THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: A HISTORY were printed in Boston by the firm of C.C. Little and J. Brown, as two volumes. A copy of this set would be in the personal library of Henry Thoreau and he would refer to the work in his journal. FRENCH REVOLUTION, I FRENCH REVOLUTION, II

SARTOR RESARTUS was printed in England with its anonymous preface by Waldo Emerson touting it as “a Criticism on the Spirit of our Age” and characterizing it as philanthropic, as pure in its moral sentiment, and as commending itself to the heart of “every lover of virtue.” Per BARTLETT’S FAMILIAR QUOTES here is the sum total of what this volume contains that is of continuing import for the quotemongers and toastmasters among us: As the Swiss inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden, — “Speech is silvern, Silence is golden;” or, as I might rather express it, Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity. — Book III. Chapter III.

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS

During this year Professor Cornelius Conway Felton of Harvard College got married with Mary Whitney, who had been born on May 5, 1815 to Asa Whitney and Mary Whitney (she would die on April 12, 1845 at the age of 30, after producing two daughters, Mary S. on April 30, 1839 and Julia W. on August 24, 1842).1

A group of undergraduates had in September 1835 begun to publish a magazine of their own writings and would continue this effort until June 1838. The undergraduate David Henry Thoreau had taken no part in such activity. At this point the group reissued the accumulating materials as a 3d book volume:2 HARVARDIANA, VOL. IV

Volume IX of the Reverend Professor Jared Sparks of Harvard’s THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY. LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. IX

This volume encompassed three contributions: HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

•LIFE OF BARON STEUBEN by the Reverend Francis Bowen LIFE OF BARON STEUBEN

•LIFE OF SEBASTIAN CABOT by Charles Haywood, Jr. LIFE OF SEBASTIAN CABOT

•LIFE OF WILLIAM EATON by Professor Cornelius Conway Felton LIFE OF WILLIAM EATON

Louisa May Alcott, about age 5, who had already while a toddler almost drowned in the Boston frogpond, wandered away from home and was found late in the evening by a town crier, huddled on a doorstep in Bedford Street. THE ALCOTT FAMILY

Charles T. Jackson, who had in the previous year climbed Mount Ktaadn, in his 2D REPORT ON THE GEOLOGY OF MAINE, wrote of Mount Kineo: TIMELINE OF THE MAINE WOODS Hornstone, which will answer for flints, occurs in various parts of the State, where trap-rocks have acted upon silicious slate. The largest mass of this stone known in the world is Mount Kineo, upon Moosehead Lake, which appears to be entirely composed of it, and rises seven hundred feet above the lake level. This variety of hornstone I have seen in every part of New England in the form of Indian arrow-heads, hatchets, chisels, etc., which were probably obtained from this mountain

1. According to a genealogy of the Felton family: “Some of the newspapers said in speaking of the wealth of the literary men of Cambridge, that Prof. Felton had been equally fortunate in his matrimonial connections in regard to wealth with the other professors, viz: Everett, Palfrey, Longfellow, Lowell and Norton, by marrying fortunes in expectancy or possession.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

by the aboriginal inhabitants of the country.

DR. JACKSON’S 2D RPT.

2. There would be three such volumes, labeled Volume I, Volume II, and Volume IV. There does not seem to have been a Volume III published in this book form (apparently it was produced only in monthly magazine form) and no electronic text as yet exists, for the Volume I that had been published. The editorial board for this final volume consisted of Rufus King, George Warren Lippitt, Charles Woodman Scates, James Russell Lowell, and Nathan Hale, Jr., and they worked out of student room #27 at Massachusetts Hall. The illustration that they used on the cover page of their magazine was of University Hall: HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

THE MAINE WOODS: Ktaadn, whose name is an Indian word signifying highest land, was first ascended by white men in 1804. It was visited by Professor J.W. Bailey of West Point in 1836; by Dr. Charles T. Jackson, the State Geologist, in 1837; and by two young men from Boston in 1845. All these have given accounts of their expeditions. Since I was there, two or three other parties have made the excursion, and told their stories. Besides these, very few, even among backwoodsmen and hunters, have ever climbed it, and it will be a long time before the tide of fashionable travel sets that way. The mountainous region of the State of Maine stretches from near the White Mountains, northeasterly one hundred and sixty miles, to the head of the Aroostook River, and is about sixty miles wide. The wild or unsettled portion is far more extensive. So that some hours only of travel in this direction will carry the curious to the verge of a primitive forest, more interesting, perhaps, on all accounts, than they would reach by going a thousand miles westward.

CHARLES TURNER, JR. JACOB WHITMAN BAILEY DR. CHARLES T. JACKSON EDWARD EVERETT HALE WILLIAM FRANCIS CHANNING

Henry Thoreau would comment in THE MAINE WOODS that he had himself found hundreds of arrow-heads made of the same material. It is generally slate-colored, with white specks, becoming a uniform white where exposed to the light and air, and it breaks with a conchoidal fracture, producing a ragged cutting edge. I noticed some conchoidal hollows more than a foot in diameter. I picked up a small thin piece which had so sharp an edge that I used it as a dull knife, and to see what I could do, fairly cut off an aspen one inch thick with it, by bending it and making many cuts; though I cut my fingers badly with the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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back of it in the meanwhile.

Breveted Major James Duncan Graham of the US Army’s Corps of Topographical Engineers was assigned to reconnaissance and surveys for military defenses in Maine. Re-publication of his 1835 A REPORT UPON THE MILITARY AND HYDROGRAPHICAL CHART OF THE EXTREMITY OF CAPE COD: INCLUDING THE TOWNSHIPS OF PROVINCETOWN AND TRURO, WITH THEIR SEACOAST AND SHIP HARBOR: PROJECTED FROM SURVEYS EXECUTED DURING PORTIONS OF THE YEARS 1833, 1834, AND 1835 (United States. Topographical Bureau; this included a map of Provincetown and Truro).

CAPE COD: The Harbor of Provincetown —which, as well as the greater PEOPLE OF part of the Bay, and a wide expanse of ocean, we overlooked from CAPE COD our perch— is deservedly famous. It opens to the south, is free from rocks, and is never frozen over. It is said that the only ice seen in it drifts in sometimes from Barnstable or Plymouth. Dwight remarks that “The storms which prevail on the American DWIGHT coast generally come from the east; and there is no other harbor on a windward shore within two hundred miles.” J.D. Graham, who GRAHAM has made a very minute and thorough survey of this harbor and the adjacent waters, states that “its capacity, depth of water, excellent anchorage, and the complete shelter it affords from all winds, combine to render it one of the most valuable ship harbors on our coast.” It is the harbor of the Cape and of the fishermen of Massachusetts generally. It was known to navigators several years at least before the settlement of Plymouth. In Captain John Smith’s map of New England, dated 1614, it bears the name of JOHN SMITH Milford Haven, and Massachusetts Bay that of Stuard’s Bay. His Highness, Prince Charles, changed the name of Cape Cod to Cape James; but even princes have not always power to change a name for the worse, and as Cotton Mather said, Cape Cod is “a name which I suppose it will never lose till shoals of codfish be seen swimming on its highest hills.”

REVEREND COTTON MATHER CHARLES I HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The 1st Universalist Society of Concord was gathered. (It would be laid down in 1857 when their Reverend went into the business of manufacturing pencils.)

It was at about this point that Thoreau was struggling to come to grips with why it was that the American pencil was so inferior to the European pencil. Since he knew his family’s graphite to be of excellent quality, though apparently not pure enough or not occurring in large enough pieces to be used without being ground and mixed with binding substances as could be done with the Borrowdale graphite ore, Thoreau inferred that the problem must be in the filler materials that were being utilized, or perhaps in the lead-making process. The Thoreaus were still mixing ground graphite, wax, glue, and spermaceti into a paste, and brushing or pouring this while warm and soft into the grooves of their wooden cases. Thoreau hit the books to get some clue as to what was in good European pencil lead mixtures which made possible the “polygrade” pencils, the hardness or softness of which depended upon the proportions of clay and graphite used, or what different process the European pencil manufacturers might be following. It has been offered that the Johann Faber pencil factory of Nürnberg provided the model which Thoreau was trying to emulate, but this is probably not accurate, as we are not sure that very many pencils marked as produced in Germany were at that time being manufactured by this Conté process. It is true that the Faber family had begun in 1837 to use the Conté process for at least some of their German pencils, but to impress the customer with their quality they were needing to offer these pencils as if they had been produced by a firm “Pannier & Paillard” of Paris.

Thoreau may have been aware that he could obtain fine clay at the Phoenix Crucible Company in Taunton MA or at the New England Glass Company in West Cambridge. He did obtain a good grade of clay from somewhere, and proceeding to experiment with it, he found that while he could immediately produce a harder and blacker pencil lead. This unfortunately did little to solve the problem of grittiness, and so he decided to attempt to correct this fault during the graphite grinding process. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Formation of a Nonresistance Society in Boston. All the members were abolitionists, the reason being that slavery was understood as a form of violence. If one could create a world in which there was no resistance to evil, it would be a world in which there could be no slavery, because this would be a world which lacked the “martial spirit” which was “the same as the spirit of slaveholders, a spirit which leads men to dominate over his brother, to crush and despoil him.” The general agent of the new society was the Reverend Henry C. Wright. The vote to establish the constitution written by William Lloyd Garrison was 30 to 13. Wendell Phillips and William Ladd were in attendance but declined to join. Arthur Tappan would decline to join such a group.

Elizur Wright, Junior relocated to Boston where successively he would edit several gazettes. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

The United States House of Representatives resolved that there would be no more antislavery petitions.

Start of the “Underground Railroad”:

This “railroad” (metaphor) organized by US abolitionists was transporting a select few border-state slaves to freedom in Canada, but the slavery interests in Philadelphia were playing upon the fears of Irish immigrants and other working people who worried that freed slaves might take their jobs or drive down wage rates. In an effort to disrupt such antislavery meetings, a Philadelphia mob would burn down the newly constructed and magnificent Pennsylvania Hall on May 17th.3

3. Webb, Samuel. HISTORY OF PENNSYLVANIA HALL, WHICH WAS DESTROYED BY A MOB ON THE 17TH OF MAY, 1838. Philadelphia, Merrihew and Gunn, 1838. 8vo 200pp. with a frontispiece of Pennsylvania Hall, a spectacular plate of the Hall in flames, and a plate of the Hall after the fire. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

“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

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George Bourne’s PICTURE OF SLAVERY IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (Boston) described, however, not an underground railroad but a reverse underground railroad, averring that “Nothing is more common than for two of these white partners in kidnapping ... to start upon the prowl; and if they find a freeman on the road, to demand his certificate, tear it in pieces, or secrete it, tie him to one of their horses, hurry off to some jail, while one whips the citizen along as fast as their horses can travel. There by an understanding with the jailor who shares in the spoil, all possibility of intercourse with his friends is denied the stolen citizen. At the earliest possible period, the captive is sold out to pay the felonious claims of the law ... and then transferred to some of their accomplices of iniquity ... who fill every part of the southern states with rapine, crime, and blood.”

According to Joseph Felt’s ANNALS OF SALEM, in this year an exhibition of a balloon ascension was touring Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

A “villa book” was published by Longman in London, THE SUBURBAN GARDENER, AND VILLA COMPANION by John Claudius Loudon (1783-1843). Would Henry Thoreau ever consult this as a source for his architectural remarks in WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS?

REPLICA OF SHANTY

EMERSON’S SHANTY

Henry Thoreau lost a tooth. DENTISTRY HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

John Claudius Loudon’s ARBORETUM ET FRUTICETUM BRITANNICUM reported that “In the settlements of the Hudson’s Bay Company, tents are made of the bark of [the canoe birch B. papyracea], which, for that purpose, is cut into pieces twelve feet long and four feet wide. These are sewed together by threads made of the white

spruce roots, already mentioned; and so rapidly is a tent put up, that a circular one of twenty feet in diameter, and ten feet high, does not occupy more than half an hour in pitching. The utility of these ‘rind tents,’ as they are called, is acknowledged by every traveller and hunter in the Canadas. They are used throughout the whole year; but, during the hot months of June, July, and August, they are found particularly comfortable”: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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CAPE COD: Our way to the high sand-bank, which I have described PEOPLE OF as extending all along the coast, led, as usual, through patches CAPE COD of Bayberry bushes, which straggled into the sand. This, next to the Shrub-oak, was perhaps the most common shrub thereabouts. I was much attracted by its odoriferous leaves and small gray berries which are clustered about the short twigs, just below the last year’s growth. I know of but two bushes in Concord, and they, being staminate plants, do not bear fruit. The berries gave it a venerable appearance, and they smelled quite spicy, like small confectionery. Robert Beverley, in his “History of Virginia,” BEVERLEY published in 1705, states that “at the mouth of their rivers, and all along upon the sea and bay, and near many of their creeks and swamps, grows the myrtle, bearing a berry, of which they make a hard brittle wax, of a curious green color, which by refining becomes almost transparent. Of this they make candles, which are never greasy to the touch nor melt with lying in the hottest weather; neither does the snuff of these ever offend the smell, like that of a tallow candle; but, instead of being disagreeable, if an accident puts a candle out, it yields a pleasant fragrancy to all that are in the room; insomuch that nice people often put them out on purpose to have the incense of the expiring snuff. The melting of these berries is said to have been first found out by a surgeon in New England, who performed wonderful things with a salve made of them.” From the abundance of berries still hanging on the bushes, we judged that the inhabitants did not generally collect them for tallow, though we had seen a piece in the house we had just left. I have since made some tallow myself. Holding a basket beneath the bare twigs in April, I rubbed them together between my hands and thus gathered about a quart in twenty minutes, to which were added enough to make three pints, and I might have gathered them much faster with a suitable rake and a large shallow basket. They have little prominences like those of an orange all encased in tallow, which also fills the interstices down to the stone. The oily part rose to the top, making it look like a savory black broth, which smelled much like balm or other herb tea. You let it cool, then skim off the tallow from the surface, melt this again and strain it. I got about a quarter of a pound weight from my three pints, and more yet remained within the berries. A small portion cooled in the form of small flattish hemispheres, like crystallizations, the size of a kernel of corn (nuggets I called them as I picked them out from amid the berries). Loudon says, that “cultivated trees are said to yield J.C. LOUDON more wax than those that are found wild.” (See Duplessy, Végétaux DUPLESSY Résineux, Vol. II. p. 60.) If you get any pitch on your hands in the pine-woods you have only to rub some of these berries between your hands to start it off. But the ocean was the grand fact there, which made us forget both bayberries and men. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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CAPE COD: In the north part of the town there is no house from PEOPLE OF shore to shore for several miles, and it is as wild and solitary CAPE COD as the Western Prairies –used to be. Indeed, one who has seen every house in Truro will be surprised to hear of the number of the inhabitants, but perhaps five hundred of the men and boys of this small town were then abroad on their fishing-grounds. Only a few men stay at home to till the sand or watch for blackfish. The farmers are fishermen-farmers and understand better ploughing the sea than the land. They do not disturb their sands much, though there is a plenty of sea-weed in the creeks, to say nothing of blackfish occasionally rotting on the shore. Between the Pond and East Harbor Village there was an interesting plantation of pitch-pines, twenty or thirty acres in extent, like those which we had already seen from the stage. One who lived near said that the land was purchased by two men for a shilling or twenty-five cents an acre. Some is not considered worth writing a deed for. This soil or sand, which was partially covered with poverty and beach grass, sorrel, &c., was furrowed at intervals of about four feet and the seed dropped by a machine. The pines had come up admirably and grown the first year three or four inches, and the second six inches and more. Where the seed had been lately planted the white sand was freshly exposed in an endless furrow winding round and round the sides of the deep hollows, in a vortical spiral manner, which produced a very singular effect, as if you were looking into the reverse side of a vast banded shield. This experiment, so important to the Cape, appeared very successful, and perhaps the time will come when the greater part of this kind of land in Barnstable County will be thus covered with an artificial pine forest, as has been done in some parts of France. In that country 12,500 acres of downs had been thus covered in 1811 near Bayonne. They are called pignadas, and according to Loudon “constitute the principal riches of the inhabitants, where J.C. LOUDON there was a drifting desert before.” It seemed a nobler kind of grain to raise than corn even. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Gore Hall was constructed (the image below is as of 1855, before its expansion): HDT WHAT? INDEX

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This would be expanded to function as the Harvard Library until 1913 when its site would be cleared for the construction of Widener Library (the image is as of 1876): HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The Reverend Orestes Augustus Brownson began the Boston Quarterly Review. He wrote to Martin Van Buren, the Democratic president of the United States, that: “I wish … to say that this Review is established for the purpose of enlisting Literature, Religion, and Philosophy on the side of Democracy.” He offered that democracy was not merely the tenet of the President’s political party, was not merely an institution of majority rule, but was a spiritual movement, and a social and philosophical doctrine. Democracy represented “the movement of the masses towards a better social condition than has heretofore existed,” and thus constituted the more perfect application of Christian principles to humankind’s social and political relations. The task facing the Democrats was to put an end to privilege and to the political party of the Whigs, and to the moneyed interests which that apparatus served.

The Reverend William Ellery Channing declared, in his essay “Self-Culture,” that the primary focus of our energies should be upon our own rectification rather than the rectification of society in general, which was an end in itself rather than merely a means to a greater end. In reaction to this, the Reverend Brownson would declare, in his essay “The Laboring Classes” in his Boston Quarterly Review for July 1840, that “Self-culture is a good thing, but it cannot abolish inequality, nor restore men to their rights.”4 1ST QUARTER, 1838 2D QUARTER, 1838 3D QUARTER, 1838 4TH QUARTER, 1838

4. Refer to Robinson, David. APOSTLE OF CULTURE: EMERSON AS PREACHER AND LECTURER. Philadelphia PA: U of Pennsylvania P, 1982. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In this year Spiridione Gambardella painted the portrait of the Reverend Channing which is now, thanks to Mary Channing Eustis, on display at the Andover-Harvard Theological Library of the Harvard Divinity School, 45 Francis Avenue in Cambridge. It may be that this frequently reproduced engraving has been created on the basis of this portrait: HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

In London, publication of Alexander Walker’s INTERMARRIAGE: OR THE MODE IN WHICH, AND THE CAUSES WHY, BEAUTY, HEALTH, AND INTELLECT RESULT FROM CERTAIN UNIONS, AND DEFORMITY, DISEASE AND INSANITY FROM OTHERS; ... EACH PARENT BESTOWS ON CHILDREN IN CONFORMITY WITH CERTAIN NATURAL LAWS. (Since a copy of this would be found in the library of Bronson Alcott at the point of his death, it is rather likely that Henry Thoreau had had access to it. It would be interesting to find out what this volume had to offer about cases of racial mixture, as in the case of the mulatto young lady Mary Ann Shadd who in this year was FEMINISM graduating from the Quaker Boarding School in West Chester near Philadelphia and going on to become herself a teacher of children.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839 HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

In Blackwood’s Magazine, Thomas De Quincey’s tales of terror “The Household Wreck” (January) and “The Avenger” (August). In Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, two articles on his “Recollections of Charles Lamb.”

THE PROSE WORKS OF CHARLES LAMB. IN THREE VOLUMES (London: Edward Moxon). Henry Thoreau would quote from “Specimens from the Writings of Fuller, the Church Historian” in this set of volumes in his journal for Fall 1846 and at two places in A WEEK. LAMB’S PROSE WORKS, I LAMB’S PROSE WORKS, II LAMB’S PROSE WORKS, III

A WEEK: If one doubts whether Grecian valor and patriotism are PEOPLE OF not a fiction of the poets, he may go to Athens and see still upon A WEEK the walls of the temple of Minerva the circular marks made by the shields taken from the enemy in the Persian war, which were suspended there. We have not far to seek for living and unquestionable evidence. The very dust takes shape and confirms some story which we had read. As Fuller said, commenting on the zeal of Camden, “A broken urn is a whole evidence; or an old gate still surviving out of which the city is run out.” When Solon endeavored to prove that Salamis had formerly belonged to the Athenians, and not to the Megareans, he caused the tombs to be opened, and showed that the inhabitants of Salamis turned the faces of their dead to the same side with the Athenians, but the Megareans to the opposite side. There they were to be interrogated.

THOMAS FULLER WILLIAM CAMDEN LAMB ON FULLER HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

A WEEK: What is called common sense is excellent in its PEOPLE OF department, and as invaluable as the virtue of conformity in the A WEEK army and navy, — for there must be subordination, — but uncommon sense, that sense which is common only to the wisest, is as much more excellent as it is more rare. Some aspire to excellence in the subordinate department, and may God speed them. What Fuller says of masters of colleges is universally applicable, that “a little alloy of dulness in a master of a college makes him fitter to manage secular affairs.” “He that wants faith, and apprehends a grief Because he wants it, hath a true belief; And he that grieves because his grief’s so small, Has a true grief, and the best Faith of all.” Or be encouraged by this other poet’s strain, — “By them went Fido marshal of the field: Weak was his mother when she gave him day; And he at first a sick and weakly child, As e’er with tears welcomed the sunny ray; Yet when more years afford more growth and might, A champion stout he was, and puissant knight, As ever came in field, or shone in armor bright. “Mountains he flings in seas with mighty hand; Stops and turns back the sun’s impetuous course; Nature breaks Nature’s laws at his command; No force of Hell or Heaven withstands his force; Events to come yet many ages hence, He present makes, by wondrous prescience; Proving the senses blind by being blind to sense.”

THOMAS FULLER LAMB ON FULLER HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

The Boston Society of Natural History elected Curators for its various departments of knowledge.

Schoolmaster George Barrell Emerson (above) was offered the Fisher Professorship in Natural History at Harvard College, but elected to remain instead with his Boston school for young ladies (a few years later he would support Asa Gray’s appointment to this professorate). When Professor Gray would donate his herbarium to the university, the schoolmaster would be instrumental in raising funds with which to endow it. After the transfer of this herbarium to the college, the schoolmaster would serve on its visiting committee for the herbarium and Professor Gray would turn to him when funds were needed to advance its work.

A 3d edition of the Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock’s state-subsidized REPORTS ON THE GEOLOGY, MINERALOGY, BOTANY, AND ZOÖLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS, MADE AND PUBLISHED BY ORDER OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THAT STATE (the Concord lyceum like every other town lyceum would possess a freebie copy of this — available for the perusal of Henry Thoreau). HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

At some point between this year and the year 1844, one or another of the burial sites for the fallen redcoats in Concord or Lexington was disturbed by Doctor Walton Felch, a phrenologist who had obtained the prior permission of Town selectmen. He would later be using the two skulls he obtained in his lectures and exhibitions. DIGGING UP THE DEAD

After his death one of these skulls would disappear but one, with a bullet hole, would be recovered by the Concord Antiquarian Society. In darkness and secrecy on the night of December 5, 1891, Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar and a helper would reinter that skull, and would choose to do so at the Old North Bridge gravesite in Concord. It is not known for sure, however, from which burial locale this skull had originally been removed.

Noah Webster became president of the New Haven Common School Convention.

The Thoreaus were living in the “Parkman House, to fall of 1844,” on the site of the present Concord Free Public Library building in Concord (which would not be erected until 1873). It was in this home that the Thoreau brothers would hold their school.

CONCORD ZOOM MAP

In Concord, some 200 trees were being planted along the road to the Battle Monument.

Ephraim Merriam was chosen representative for Concord to the General Court of Massachusetts.

Nathaniel Baker died in Lincoln. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Possibly in this timeframe Henry Thoreau was already studying a book from Waldo Emerson’s library, the 2d edition of Baron Joseph-Marie de Gérando’s HISTOIRE COMPARÉE DES SYSTÉMES DE PHILOSOPHIE, CONSIDÉRÉS RELATIVEMENT AUX PRINCIPES DES CONNAISSANCES HUMAINES, for we find comments in his “Miscellaneous Extracts” notebook dating approximately to this timeframe, on Professor Christian Garve’s “Sur la Manière d’Écrire l’Histoire de la Philosopie.” SYSTÈMES DE PHILOSOPHIE I SYSTÈMES DE PHILOSOPHIE II SYSTÈMES DE PHILOSOPHIE III SYSTÈMES DE PHILOSOPHIE IV

In this year the British government disassociated the East India Company from obligations into which it had entered, to maintain the temples of India. Forget your promises, that’s an order!

The Reverend William Adam abandoned India and joined his family in the United States. He would further journey from Boston to London, to attend the initial meeting of an antislavery group, the British India Society.

James Robert Ballantyne’s A GRAMMAR OF THE HINDUSTANI LANGUAGE (Edinburgh).

Monier Williams matriculated at King’s College School, Balliol College of Oxford University.

At the end of the journal entries for this year, Waldo Emerson listed his readings in Oriental materials during the period: “Hermes Trismegistus; Synesius; Proclus; Thomas Taylor; Institutes of Menu; Sir William Jones, Translations of Asiatic Poetry; Buddha. Zoroaster; Confucius.”

Again Emerson copied extracts from the Confucian canon into his journals, extracts such as “Action, such as Confucius describes the speech of God.” EMERSON AND CHINA HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

5 M.J. Pauthier translated the TAO TÊ CHING into French.

LIGHT FROM CHINA TAOISM

According to Anita Haya Patterson’s FROM EMERSON TO KING: DEMOCRACY, RACE, AND THE POLITICS OF PROTEST (NY: Oxford UP, 1997, pages 131-2), at this point Waldo Emerson’s journal demonstrates that Emerson was ready to naturalize genocide:

Each race of man resembles an apple or a pear, the Nubian, the Negro, the Tartar, the Greek, he vegetates, thrives, & multiplies, usurps all the soil & nutriment, & so kills the weaker races.

She goes on to point up the fact that although Emerson, like so many of his contemporaries who were presuming their own race to be inherently and intrinsically superior, was wont to speculate bloodily that the inferior nonwhite races would most likely be exterminated, this is far from all the information and guidance that we might extrapolate from these foul droppings of his pen — if we can bring ourselves to pay careful attention:

5. Lyman V. Cady’s inference that Henry Thoreau could not have encountered Taoism, based as it was on incomplete evidence about the sorts of Taoist reading material available in Indo-European languages during Thoreau’s lifetime, must now be subjected to reexamination. A Latin version of the TAO TÊ CHING would be created by Jesuits, and two German translations would appear, during the 1840s. These were all, of course, languages that Thoreau could read. David T.Y. Ch’en has become convinced on the basis of new evidence of the 19th-Century availability of such translations, and on the basis of detective work among several strands of converging internal evidence, and on the basis of a series of seven paradoxes written into Thoreau’s journal on June 26, 1840, that Thoreau had as of that date just been perusing one or another of the translations of Lao-tze, most likely this one by Pauthier. – For more information, refer to that entry for June 26, 1840. CHINA THOREAU AND CHINA HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

The sheer weight of evidence that proves the fact of Waldo Emerson’s racism is disturbing. However, we would miss the focus of this discussion –namely, the historical function of racism in Emerson’s writings– were we simply to dismiss him for exhibiting the racist perceptions of his time.... Emerson’s racism is central to his vision of American nationality — a compelling, myopic vision that must be viewed in the context of a violent policy of westward expansion that prevailed in nineteenth-century America. In NATURE, Emerson’s unmistakable reference to the raciality of the American self allows him to situate that self at the brink of egocentric absolutism: at the same time he expresses a near disavowal of human society represented by ties to the liberal-democratic state in NATURE, Emerson’s racist imagination of the white, male body of Columbus is a framework for social cohesion. For Emerson, race functions to express both a threat to and an affirmation of social order. Generally speaking, Emerson’s racist vision of the representative self is essential for his articulation of a call to revolution — what Henry Thoreau (and, much later, [the Reverend] Martin Luther King, Jr.) would designate as “civil disobedience.”

“Waldo Emerson’s profound racism abated over time, but it never disappeared, always hovering in the background and clouding his democratic vision. Like all too many of his fellow intellectuals, throughout his life and works Emerson remained convinced that the characteristics that made the United States, for all its flaws, the great nation of the world were largely the product of its Saxon heritage and history. Here, alas, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s democratic imagination largely failed him.” — Peter Field HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

YOU SEE, I’M A WHITE MAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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According to Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966):

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar” WALTER HARDING’S BIOGRAPHY Chapter 4 (1837-1838) -After graduation from Harvard, Henry David Thoreau taught school in Concord but quit after two weeks as a result of a dispute over corporal punishment. He searched in vain elsewhere for a teaching position. He then turned to his father’s pencil business and through Harvard library research developed a superior pencil. Thoreau was developing his friendship with Waldo Emerson, who introduced him to members of the “Hedge Club” (begun in 1836) who became known as the Transcendentalists. Some members of the Hedge Club were: FH Hedge, Rev George Ripley, Rev Orestes Brownson, Rev Jones Very, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, Bronson Alcott, Rev Theodore Parker, C.P. Cranch, Rev John Sullivan Dwight and Thoreau (in fall of 1837.) The Emerson/Thoreau friendship flourished. Many like Lowell saw him as an inferior copy of Emerson, but Emerson defended Thoreau’s originality. Bronson Alcott moved to Concord to be near Emerson and became a friend of and influence upon Thoreau. Thoreau delivered his first lecture to the Concord Lyceum on April 11, 1838. (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986) HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Per Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965: “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar” Chapter 5 (1838-1841) -Henry Thoreau opened his own tutoring service in June 1838 and by October he had taken over as master of Concord Academy, where he was soon joined by his brother John. John taught the “English branches” and Henry Greek, Latin, French, physical and natural sciences, philosophy and history. The school was successful and very highly regarded but was discontinued after 3 years due to John’s illness. John and Henry left for a trip on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers on Aug 31, 1839. The fourteen day journey “on the surface was simply a vacation lark of the two young men. But as the years passed, it had a growing significance in Thoreau’s mind.” The trip provided much of the eventual material for A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986)

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar” Chapter 6 (1839-1842) Thoreau’s Loves -Ellen Devereux Sewall visited Concord and the Thoreau house in June of 1839. Henry fell deeply in love with her and began to write love poems immediately. His brother John also fell for her, and went to visit her immediately after their river trip (at Scituate). Henry “stepped aside” for brother John, whose proposal of marriage was refused. Henry proposed later by mail but, as his journal indicates, expected the refusal he received. Henry never forgot Ellen and shortly before his death avowed “I have always loved her.” Henry fell in love again in 1842 with Mary Russell but it came to nothing. After 1842 Henry Thoreau was a confirmed bachelor and outwardly portrayed a Victorian aversion to the subject of sex. (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986) HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Chapter 7(a) (1839-1843) -On Sept 18, 1839 the Hedge Club proposed the creation of the Dial. Margaret Fuller was the first editor. Henry Thoreau published the following in the Dial: 1st issue -poem “Sympathy” (for Ellen Devereux Sewall) July 1840 -short critical essay on Aulus Persius Flaccus - Roman poet July 1841 -“Sic Vita” Oct 1841 -poem on friendship July 1842 -(Waldo Emerson now editor) NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS and “My Prayer” Oct 1842 -8 poems “The Black Knight,” “The Inward Morning,” “Free Love,” “The Poet’s Delay,” “Rumors from an Aeolian Harp,” “The Moon,” “To a Maiden in the East” and “The Summer Rain.” It turned out to be a better than average addition due to the quality of the contributions. October 1843 “A Winter Walk” (essay) January 1844 -Pindar translation and appreciative essay on the anti-slavery weekly Herald of Freedom. In all Thoreau published 31 poems, essays and other contributions in the Dial. The Dial dissolved as the Transcendentalists drifted apart, but Thoreau “still kept the flame of Transcendentalism burning in his own life.” (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986) HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Leverenz, David. “The Politics of Emerson’s Man-Making Words,” PMLA 101 (1986), 38-56. “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Starts out with an anecdote about a professor who tried to write a book about Emerson and never got it finished. Jonathan Bishop: “There is something at the heart of Emerson’s message profoundly recalcitrant to the formulations of the discursive intelligence. Emerson wrote to Thomas Carlyle in 1838: “Here I sit & read & write with very little system, & as far as regards composition with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible each sentence an infinitely repellent particle” (CORRESPONDENCE 185). Also picks up on Harold Bloom (Yale) and Woody Hayes (Ohio State) both tooling around the country talking about how Emerson is their spiritual leader, and gives them (us?) “access to manly power” (38). The main argument begins with the early essays (“Self-Reliance” etc.), where the word “man” should not be seen as inclusive. Emerson’s modern, democratic, individualized “man” is not king, and he is also not a woman — several JOURNAL passages emphasize that. Power should be in the man’s mind, not in government or property. The second section points to Emerson’s proposal that a “new cultural elite” should run things, and that you don’t have to be rich to get into that crowd. There’s a bit on how Waldo Emerson resented his minister father, the Reverend William Emerson, who favored Waldo’s brothers — Mary Moody Emerson helped him get free of his father. He developed an “evangelical political fantasy” (46) that the Smart People would have to counter more obviously powerful groups who were taking over the frontier — this matches typical New England fantasies. It also picks up on general social changes between 1825 and 1850, where shopkeeping and the Boston brahmins were replaced by managers and professionals. These new men took over. [cf. EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS for a similar history of these years. People simply stopped asking Adamses to be president.] The third section deals with Emerson’s later sense of powerlessness, in contrast to “The nonchalance of boys who are sure of dinner” (“Self-Reliance”). Several biographers blamed Emerson’s “inhibited” mother for his depressive strategy and emotional withdrawal. (Ruth Haskins Emerson died in 1853. ) Leverenz dislikes the evasiveness of “Experience,” not just Emerson’s inability to deal with his son’s death, but his “impersonal geometry” (52): “Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point” (“Experience”). The general conclusion is that Emerson’s obsession with power masks rivalry, fears of failure, and a shifting society that he could not control — “alienated liberalism” (53).

[DR 5/89] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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JULY 1838

Henry Thoreau’s 22d stanza began on his birthday, July 12th, Thursday, 1838.

1838-1839 1838-1839

• Some 200 trees were being planted along the road to the Battle Monument. A burial site for the fallen redcoats in Concord or Lexington was disturbed by a phrenologist who would use the skulls he obtained as exhibits.

BACKGROUND EVENTS OF 1838 BACKGROUND EVENTS OF 1839

“My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.” — Henry Thoreau HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

July 15, Sunday: The Reverend Waldo Emerson addressed a small audience in the chapel of the Harvard Divinity School, on problems that would face graduating students as new Unitarian ministers. This would be printed by James Munroe in Boston (and we may note in the copy of this that has been preserved at the Harvard library, that it was inscribed to Henry Thoreau by Emerson): DIVINITY SCHOOL ADDRESS

Although he actually said little that had not been said before, there would be a storm of protest. One educator who believed in the conductivity of cowhide (Harvard College’s Dexter Lecturer in Biblical Literature Andrews Norton) would write to a public newspaper (the Boston Daily Advertiser) and suggest that the “people” should “whip that naughty heretic.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, however, decided that Waldo was

the greatest man that ever lived.

Emerson himself would ascertain that the Reverend Professor Norton was feminine:6

The feminine vehemence with which the Andrews Norton of the Daily Advertiser beseeches the dear people to whip that naughty heretic ....

John Quincy Adams would write in his diary about this “crazy address and oration,” and so we know that he considered “An Address” to have displayed for all to see that Emerson was “ambitious of becoming the founder of a sect, and thinks there is an urgent necessity for a new revelation.” Picking up on this a century and a half later, in his 1992 book on the American Religion and the emergence of the US as a post-Christian nation, Harold Bloom has quoted the “An Address” of this date in support of his contention that it is Emerson who is at the source of the deepest idiocy of our American character, our self-worship which amounts to a heathen idolatry and a turning away from God:

6. Precisely how Waldo Emerson obtained this information as to the Reverend Professor Andrews Norton’s genitalia has not become a matter of historical record. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his World. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, “I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.” But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet’s lips, and said, in the next age, “This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.” The idioms of his language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man’s life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the fallen rain. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

In this Divinity School Address Emerson employed words such as “routine,” “extinct,” and “famine” in characterization of the state of preaching and worship in Unitarian churches of the time. He started with generalities: “Whenever a pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate. We shrink as soon as the prayers begin, which do not uplift, but smite and offend us.” But then he went on to very, very specific deployment of frosty imagery, suggesting that frost outside the church inspired him more than the Reverend Frost inside: “I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say I would go to church no more.... A snow-storm was falling around us. The snow-storm was real, the preacher merely spectral, and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital secret of his profession, namely to convert life into truth, he had not learned.” We do now know how the Reverend Barzillai Frost reacted when he heard of this — but he must have heard of it from many pairs of lips. THE LIST OF LECTURES

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

1st day 15th of 7 M / Our Meetings both today & last 5th day were silent - rather small tho’ there were a number of Philadelphians here who are spending a little time for the advantages of our cool breezes — It is a low time, but some favour experienced — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

July 24th, Tuesday, or 25th, Wednesday: The Reverend Waldo Emerson lectured in Hanover on “LITERARY 7 ETHICS” before the literary societies of Dartmouth College. The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self- trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do. This is the moral of the Plutarchs, the Cudworths, the Tennemanns, who give us the story of men or of opinions. Any history of philosophy fortifies my faith, by showing me, that what high dogmas I had supposed were the rare and late fruit of a cumulative culture, and only now possible to some recent Kant or Fichte, — were the prompt improvisations of the earliest inquirers; of Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Xenophanes. In view of these students, the soul seems to whisper, “There is a better way than this indolent learning of another. Leave me alone; do not teach me out of Leibnitz or Schelling, and I shall find it all out myself.” IMMANUEL KANT JOHANN GOTTLIEB FICHTE THE LIST OF LECTURES In his “autobiography,” John Shepard Keyes would later reminisce about how he and his father John Keyes had accompanied Emerson on this lecture expedition: I can remember best my trip to Dartmouth College Hanover NH It was Fathers alma mater, and he perhaps thought it would be a better place for me than Cambridge. So as Mr Emerson was to make the address there before the literary societies we took him in charge and starting Saturday morning journeyed around Monadnock as it seemed to me all day and reached Keene N.H. at dark. Here we staid at the Cheshire House then a famous hostelry and as I had never been out of the state before I enjoyed myself greatly Father had friends there Gen Perry & others Mr Emerson was known and cordially welcomed by them And I saw that pleasant town over Sunday under favorable auspices. At dark that night we took the stage again for Walpole and after a striking drive by lamplight safely were housed at the tavern at Bellows Falls for a sleep, broken by the roaring waters, which I was out very early to see in all their romantic wildness. With Mr. Emerson my father who was quite familiar with them, showed us their huge worn pits and rocky ledges and points of interest until breakfast and the stage called us to resume the journey. All that day we rode up the Connecticut River admiring much its beautiful valley meadows hills and waters reaching Hanover late in the evening to find 7. Lawrence Buell’s comment on this talk is that it represented the 1st time any major literary figure had ever attempted to define an ethics of the literary, and that it wasn’t much of a start. He says he’s personally underwhelmed, and considers “LITERARY ETHICS” as merely a watered-down repetition of the talk the reverend had given in the previous summer at Harvard College, “THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR” — with some gratuitous wilderness stuff thrown in to remind his audience that compared to his alma mater, their Dartmouth College was an intellectual backwater. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

it bustling with commencement festivities. Mr E was carried off by the societies, and we found rooms and friends at the hotel. The next day Father renewed his youthful memories of people and places, he knew thirty years before finding less change than I had thought possible, while I left to my own devices strolled about the college campus and buildings making vastly unfavorable comparisons of it to my Cambridge. It was in holiday garb but even that was tame and poor beside the rich and dashing Harvard. At the hotel was a bride the wife of a friend of Fathers a Mr. Spaulding of Nashua, a very young and lovely lady, and I paid her very assiduous attention which her old husband smiled on complacently and she accepted graciously in his absence at the college meetings he attended— Of the commencement I remember but little only in my sophomoric conceit I thought the speakers green, and I fear was more impressed with the brides looks than with all orations &c. The address of Mr Emerson was a revelation to all who heard it, and reading it lately since its publication in the new edition of his works I was reminded of the stir to the life and spirit of those who heard it and his power and eloquence then for the first time. It made a great sensation partly because it shocked the orthodoxy and old-fashioned notions of the college and mainly because it voiced the new aspirations then just beginning to be felt all over New England. He received much admiration and attention from every one there, and we came in as his friends for a share of it though I confess that even the bride overlooked her soph for the sages conversation to my mortification. At the ball which closed the festivities I got even however as the lady danced finely dressed splendidly and shone so fairly as the belle in her wedding dress and cameo necklace, that I as her escort for her husband was too old to dance was in high feather again— We parted after supper with arrangements all made by me, to have a special stage for our drive home with a select party, and I dreamed of her I feel sure, for I thought I had never seen anyone so lovely — and some of the seniors treated me to a parting bumper in return for their introductions to the bride and Mr Emerson. We started early next morning in an extra stage, in which Mr Emerson Father Mr. Spaulding and several friends of theirs of the college or old graduates, and on the outside Mrs Spaulding and myself with the driver, and we climbed very deliberately over the long hills that make the back lane of New Hampshire The days ride was long hot and dusty Mrs S. sought the shade and comfort of the inside and I helped the driver & at last after dark, and with the incident of losing our way & the driver’s getting off to climb a guide post and see what it said an experience I never knew repeated in all my staging, we reached Concord N.H. quite late in the evening. We were all too tired to do much but sleep except Mr. Emerson who had preached there years before and knew many of the people, and saw some of them late as it was. The next morning we looked over the town which I remember seemed smaller than our Concord, although it was the state capital and had some good buildings. It was always called then ‘New’ Concord by Massachusetts people to distinguish it from ours, and was new HDT WHAT? INDEX

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looking. We took the Mammoth road line of stages because the driver promised me to drive 6 horses a feat I had never tried before, and I forget whether that parted us from the Spauldings or whether we left them at Nashua. Anyhow we reached Lowell in season to get brought in a carry all home Saturday night after an exciting and eventful week. My first journey from home of any length. J.S. KEYES AUTOBIOGRAPHY HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

AUGUST 1838

August 5, Sunday: Henry Thoreau made a distinction between an inferior kind of sound and a superior kind, earthbound sounds seeming to “reverberate along the plain, and then settle to earth again like dust” while “sphere music” seems to bounce off the steeples and hill-slopes up into the skies. He also made a distinction between the written and the preached word, or between words from dark places and from dungeons and from the Harvard academy-hall within which is “weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth — without, grain fields and grasshoppers, which give those the lie direct.”:

August 5th. Sphere music Some sounds seem to reverberate along the plain, and then settle to earth again like dust; such are Noise — Discord — Jargon. But such only as spring heavenward, and I may catch from steeples and hill tops in their upward course, which are the more refined parts of the former –are the true sphere music –pure, unmixed music –in which no wail mingles. Divine Service in the Academy-Hall. In dark places and dungeons these words might perhaps strike root and grow –but utter them in the day light and their dusky hues are apparent. From this window I can compare the written with the preached word –within is weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth — without, grain fields and grasshoppers, which give those the lie direct.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 5th of 8th M 1838 / Our Meetings were both Silent but very solid good seasons — We have in Town several Philadelphians members of Society who attend Meetings - The solid sitting of some of them is very satisfactory & their presence in our Meetings feels helpful - I particularly esteem Marmaduke Cope & wife & Henry Longstreth there are divers others whom I am not so well acquiainted with, but I love to see them come to Meeting. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

August 10, Friday: Henry Thoreau made some comments in his journal, on the nature of the time of the universe:

August 10th. The Time of the Universe. Nor can all the vanities that so vex the world alter one whit the measure that night has chosen –but ever it must be short particular metre. The human soul is a silent harp in God’s quire whose strings need only to be swept by the divine breath, to chime in with the harmonies of creation. Every pulse beat is in exact time with the crickets chant, and the tickings of the deathwatch in the wall. Alternate with these if you can. TIME AND ETERNITY

Henry would recycle this reference to the cricket and to the deathwatch beetle into his essay on the NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS.

In the autumn days, the creaking of crickets is heard at noon over all the land, and as in summer they are heard chiefly at night-fall, so then by their incessant chirp they usher in the evening of the year. Nor can all the vanities that vex the world alter one whit the measure that night has chosen. Every pulse-beat is in exact time with the cricket’s chant and the tickings of the deathwatch in the wall. Alternate with these if you can. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Edgar Allan Poe may have seen this; it may have been inspiration for his short story using the deathwatch beetle. However, that is rather unlikely, as Thoreau in “Natural History of Massachusetts” and Poe in “The Tell-Tale Heart” evoke considerably different complexes of thought and emotion in regard to the hearing of the deathwatch in the still of the night.

Note Thoreau’s careful use of the “human as instrument” theme, similar to his use of this theme on September 30, 1851, when he would write that “As the wood of an old Cremona8 its very fibre perchance harmoniously transposed & educated to resound melody has brought a great price–so methinks these telegraph posts should bear a great price with musical instrument makers– It is prepared to be the material of harps for ages to come, as it were put a soak in & seasoning in music....,” and similar to what he would write in “What shall it Profit,” his most carefully considered sermon, “It occurred to me when I awoke the other morning –feeling regret for some intemperance of the day before which had dulled my sensibilities– that man was to be treated as a musical instrument, and if any viol was to be made of sound timber, and kept tuned always, it was he — so that when the bow of events is drawn across him, he may vibrate and resound in perfect harmony. A sensitive soul will be continually trying its strings to see if they are in tune. A man’s body must be rasped down exactly to a shaving. It is of far more importance than the wood of a Cremona violin,” and similar to “There was a time when beauty and music were all within, and I sat and listened to my thoughts, and there was a song in them.... Man should be the harp articulate.”

William M. White9 would later present a version of this journal entry as poetry:

The human soul is a silent harp in God’s quire, Whose strings need only to be swept By the divine breath To chime in with the harmonies of creation.

Every pulse-beat is in exact time With the cricket’s chant, And the tickings of the death-watch in the wall.

Alternate with these if you can.

The Reverend Convers Francis wrote to the Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge in Bangor, Maine summarizing the Emerson lecture at the Harvard Divinity School and reporting upon the reaction to it: Have you heard that Waldo Emerson delivered the sermon this summer to the class at the Divinity School, on their leaving the 8. The famous violin-makers Nicola Amati (1596-1684), Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737), and Guiseppe Guarneri (1683-1745) had lived and worked in Cremona, Italy, in the Po river valley. 9. A library building at the University of Colorado is named for a William M. White, Class of 1933. I wonder if that is the same William M. White. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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seminary? I went to hear it, & found it crowded with stirring, honest, lofty thoughts. I don’t know that anything of his has excited me more. He dwelt much on the downfallen state of the church, i.e. the want of a living, real interest in the present Christianity (where I think he rather exaggerated, but not much), on the tendency to make only a historical Christ, separated from actual humanity, — & on the want of reference to the great laws of man’s moral nature in preaching. These were his principal points, & were put forth with great power, & sometimes (under the first head especially) with unique humor. The discourse was full of divine life, — and was a true word from a true soul. I did not agree with him in some of his positions, & think perhaps he did not make the peculiar significance of Jesus so prominent as he ought, — though I am inclined to believe not that he thinks less of Jesus than others do, but more of man, every man as a divine being. — The discourse gave dire offense to the rulers at Cambridge. The dean & Mr. Norton have pronounced sentences of fearful condemnation, & their whole clique in Boston & Cambridge are in commotion. The harshest words are not spared, & “infidel” & “atheist” are the best terms poor E. gets. I have sometimes thought that to Mr. E. & his numerous detractors might be applied what Plato says of the winged soul, that has risen to the sight of the absolute, essential, & true, & therefore is said by the many to be stark mad. — the multitude are not aware that he is inspired.

Per HOWE’S BIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX OF TWELVE UNITARIAN MORALISTS, PAGE 77: Henry Ware, Jr., his father’s colleague at the Harvard Divinity School, attempted to counteract Emerson’s address with a sermon he preached in the Harvard Chapel soon after classes resumed in September. Ware entitled his own address “The Personality of the Deity” and focused his attention upon the doctrine of God. He contrasted Unitarian orthodoxy (if the term be not contradictory) with certain other opinions he let remain nameless. The Unitarian God stood above and beyond the natural order, as Ware defined Him, and should not be confused with nature itself. Furthermore, to use the word “God” to refer to abstract concepts like “beauty” or “virtue” was “to violate the established use of language.” God was a conscious personality, and to apply His name to either the universe itself or to HDT WHAT? INDEX

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inanimate abstractions was a pitiful disguise for atheism. While the younger Ware politely refrained from identifying any local crypto-atheists, his target was obvious. Even so, his statement elicited no rebuttal from Emerson. Ware himself did not press the issue further, very likely because he and Emerson had long been personal friends.

August 13, Monday: A comet visible on this night appeared to contemporary observers as a restful kernel in the magazine of the universe, roughly like this:

Henry Thoreau’s journal remark of this date, which I suppose may well have been prompted by this apparition, has been utilized in the following manner by Barbara Novak on pages 27-28 of a survey volume edited by John Wilmerding, AMERICAN LIGHT: THE LUMINIST MOVEMENT 1850-1875; PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC: Harper & Row, 1980), in an attempt to define Luminism: On Silence We can also say that stroke, carrying action, implies sound. A key correlative of luminism is silence. Luminist silence, like luminist time, depends on measured control. Without movement between strokes or between units of form, we hear nothing. Luminist silence implies presence through the sense of thereness rather than through activity. Inaudibility is a correlative of immobilized time and objects. Contemporary critics spoke of Kensett’s repose. Yet luminist silence, in the repose of inaction, represents not a void but a palpable space, in which everything happens while nothing does. We have here a visual analogue of Eckhart’s “central silence,” and Thoreau’s “restful kernel in the magazine of the universe.”

ASTRONOMY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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August 17, Friday: Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western arrived in New-York’s harbor after a 15-day steam across the Atlantic from Bristol, England and the age of steam was begun. The largest steamship in existence had been 208 feet long, whereas this huge new one measured 236 feet. The Shipping and Mercantile Gazette declared that “the whole of the mercantile world ... will from this moment adopt the new conveyance.” Over the next eight years, this new steamship would make 60 crossings.

Lorenzo da Ponte died in New-York at the age of 89. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Nathaniel Hawthorne visited the natural bridge in North Adams, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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August 18, Saturday: Lieutenant Charles Wilkes sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, in command of a squadron of five vessels and a store-ship, to explore the southern seas. The main ship of this group, the Vincennes, a sloop of war of 780 tons, would be referred to as the “Ex. Ex.” because of the name of the exploring expedition. He would visit Madeira, the Cape Verd islands, Rio de Janeiro, Tierra del Fuego, Valparaíso, Callao, the Paumotou group, Tahiti, the Samoan group (which he would survey and explore), Wallis island, and Sydney in New South Wales.

During its circumnavigation of the globe, the United States South Seas Exploring Expedition would survey the Northwest coast of the North American continent. The expedition was our 1st funded and outfitted by the US federal government. Although Wilkes would be credited with discovering Antarctica in 1840, Nathaniel Palmer, a fur-seal hunter, had previously sailed far enough south, in 1820, to be entitled to some credit as well.

This expedition was something which would be duly noted in WALDEN under the rubric “that South-Sea HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense”:

CHARLES WILKES

August 22, Wednesday: Olive Wiley got married with the Reverend Samuel Randall.

Henry Thoreau wrote in his journal:

SCRIPTURE

August 22. How thrilling a noble sentiment in the oldest books, — in Homer, the Zendavesta, or Confucius! It is a strain of music wafted down to us on the breeze of time, through the aisles of innumerable ages. By its very nobleness it is made near and audible to us.

August 25, Saturday: A Rondo-finale to Saverio Mercadantes opera I Briganti for soprano and orchestra by Otto Nicolai was performed for the initial time.

August 26, Sunday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 26th of 8th M / Our Meetings were both rather small, but solid & good Seasons. & it seemed to me the Solemnity was rather remarkably over the Morning — NO preaching — At the close in the Morning the funeral of Lydia Cornell was spoken of to be from the House of her Husband Walter Cornell in Portsmouth tomorrow at 1 OC at the house to proceed to this Town & the remains to be intered in Friends burying ground Near the Meeting house Father Rodman continues very feeble & low — Sits up but a few Minutes at a time & Seems to be gradually sinking — He said today I know it is an Awful thing to Die but I am willing to go whenever HDT WHAT? INDEX

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it please the Lord to take me. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS Henry Thoreau wrote in his journal:

EVENING SOUNDS

August 26. How strangely sounds of revelry strike the ear from over cultivated fields by the woodside, while the sun is declining in the west. It is a world we had not known before. We listen and are capable of no mean act or thought. We tread on Olympus and participate in the councils of the gods.

HOMER

It does one’s heart good if Homer but say the sun sets, — or, “As when beautiful stars accompany the bright moon through the serene heavens; and the woody hills and cliffs are discerned through the mild light, and each star is visible, and the shepherd rejoices in his heart.”

August 31, Friday: Waldo Emerson to his journal:

Yesterday at  anniversary. Steady, steady. I am convinced that if a man will be a true scholar, he shall have perfect freedom. The young people & the mature hint at odium, & aversion of faces to be presently encountered in society. I say no: I fear it not. No scholar need fear it.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 8th M 31st 1838 / Today Our friend Benjamin Mott was intered in the burying ground at our Meeting House in Portsmouth He was in the 81 Year of his Age - He was son of Jacob Mott & Hannah his wife & the last Male of a long & Noble line of Ancestors who have been ornaments in our Monthly Meeting on Rhode Island from its commencement - & tho’ he is the last of much standing being himself an Elder in society - yet there is some reason to hope the respectability will or may not, be lost in his son Jacob & his family who I hope may come up in the line of usefulness — And altho’ Benjamin has not appeared to be so deeply baptized as some of his predecessors, yet he has been concerned for the welfare of our Society & that the principles of it may be kept pure as professed by the primitive Quakers - This he manifested on various occasions, particularly to me when I returned with my wife to his House after our Select Meeting 18th of 7th M last HDT WHAT? INDEX

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INTELLIGENCE: Exploring Expedition. The United States Corvette Vincennes, Captain Charles Wilkes, the flag ship of the Exploring Expedition, arrived at New York on Friday, June 10th, from a cruise of nearly four years. The Brigs Porpoise and Oregon may shortly be expected. The Expedition has executed every part of the duties confided to it by the Government. A long list of ports, harbors, islands, reefs, and shoals, named in the list, have been visited and examined or surveyed. The positions assigned on the charts to several vigias, reefs, shoals, and islands, have been carefully looked for, run over, and found to have no existence in or near the places assigned them. Several of the principal groups and islands in the Pacific Ocean have been visited, examined, and surveyed; and friendly intercourse, and protective commercial regulations, established with the chiefs and natives. The discoveries in the Antarctic Ocean (Antarctic continent, — Observations for fixing the Southern Magnetic pole, &c.) preceded those of the French and English expeditions. The Expedition, during its absence, has also examined and surveyed a large portion of the Oregon Territory, a part of Upper California, including the Columbia and Sacramento Rivers, with their various tributaries. Several exploring parties from the Squadron have explored, examined, and fixed those portions of the Oregon Territory least known. A map of the Territory, embracing its Rivers, Sounds, Harbors, Coasts, Forts, &c., has been prepared, which will furnish the information relative to our possessions on the Northwest Coast, and the whole of Oregon. Experiments have been made with the pendulum, magnetic apparatus, and various other instruments, on all occasions, — the temperature of the ocean, at various depths ascertained in the different seas traversed, and full meteorological and other observations kept up during the cruise. Charts of all the surveys have been made, with views and sketches of headlands, towns or villages, &c., with descriptions of all that appertains to the localities, productions, language, customs, and manners. At some of the islands, this duty has been attended with much labor, exposure, and risk of life, — the treacherous character of the natives rendering it absolutely necessary that the officers and men should be armed, while on duty, and at all times prepared against their murderous attacks. On several occasions, boats have been absent from the different vessels of the Squadron on surveying duty, (the greater part of which has been performed in boats,) among islands, reefs, &c., for a period of ten, twenty, and thirty days at one time. On one of these occasions, two of the officers were killed at the Fiji group, while defending their boat’s crew from an attack by the Natives. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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when we had an interesting visit at his house - He was out at Meeting Several times afterwards & attended our Qry Meeting held at Portsmouth 4th & 5th of this Month & the Morning he died he went out & walked round his House attending to some little buisness, on returning to his house went in & set down on which he family perceived him to be in some difficulty & went to him, but found him quite gone before they could lay him on a Couch which stood handy - I have no doubt his last days were his best days & that his end was in Peace. — Sister E R Nichols & Br D Rodman arrived last evening from Salem & Lynn on a visit To Father Rodman, who is evidently wearing out & sinking fast This evening Br David called to see us we were glad to see him. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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SEPTEMBER 1838

September: Henry Thoreau wrote out a receipt which still exists. It was for $7.19 paid by the prominent lawyer, Squire Nathan Brooks, for Thoreau’s instruction of his son George Merrick Brooks (a boy who would go on to become a lawyer, a member of the House of Representatives, and then a judge) at the Concord Academy.

During the late 1830s, presumably during this period, Squire Nathan Brooks’s daughter Caroline Downes Brooks was a Sunday school student in Lidian Emerson’s class at the First Parish.

The rotting hulk of the fighting Temaire, long since stripped first of her guns as a supply vessel and then, in 1812, of her masts as a prison hulk moored in a mudflat, was at this point hauled by two steam tugs to the ship- dismantling yards at Rotherhilde. The Temaire had been the vessel behind Admiral Nelson’s Victory in the line of battle at Trafalgar. J.M.W. Turner had painted this in his 1806 “The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizzen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory.” He would paint a second image, of the ship being hauled its last 55 miles in the sunset, in 1839.

September: When the drought broke, the Cherokee Nation prepared to embark on its forced exodus to the new Indian Territory in Oklahoma. John Ross was able to obtain additional funds for food and clothing. TRAIL OF TEARS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September 3, Monday:

Frederick Douglass set out by boarding in some way a freight boat belonging to “Colonel” Lloyd, and then by boarding the train from Baltimore in darkest Maryland to Wilmington, Delaware using as his cover seaman’s protection papers he had obtained from a retired friend.10 His 1st day of freedom began in the evening when the steamer to which he had transferred from the train reached the dock at Philadelphia.11 For the duration of slavery, he would not be able to be frank about how he had escaped, without endangering the free persons who had aided him and without closing that particular escape hatch to those still enslaved:

According to my resolution, on the third day of September, 1838, I left my chains, and succeeded in reaching New York without the slightest interruption of any kind. How I did so, –what means I adopted, –what direction I travelled, and by what mode of conveyance, –I must leave unexplained.

10. A friend indeed, as this was a risky business — if he is detected, and if these papers are captured, his friend, if his neck slips through an immediate noose, will at the very least be convicted of grand larceny, and find himself enslaved at hard labor for the remainder of his natural life. Here, by way of illustration, is the Seaman’s Protection Certificate that would be issued for the 21- year-old “light African complexion, black woolly hair and brown eyes” sailor named Samuel Fox on August 12, 1854:

11. We may well elect to celebrate this in lieu of an unknown slave birthday: “It has been a source of great annoyance to me, never to have a birthday.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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His sweetheart Anna Marie Murray, since she was a free woman, would be able to join him immediately.

We know that because of Frederick Douglass’s 1881 article in The Atlantic Monthly:

… I arranged with Isaac Rolls, a Baltimore hackman, to bring my baggage to the Philadelphia train just on the moment of starting, and jumped upon the car myself when the train was in motion. Had I gone into the station and offered to purchase a ticket, I should have been instantly and carefully examined, and undoubtedly arrested. In choosing this plan I considered the jostle of the train, and the natural haste of the conductor, in a train crowded with passengers, and relied upon my skill and address in playing the sailor, as described in my protection [papers describing a free black sailor, loaned to Douglass at great risk by a friend], to do the rest. One element in my favor was the kind feeling which prevailed in Baltimore and other sea- ports at the time, toward “those who go down to the sea in ships.” “Free trade and sailors’ rights” just then expressed the sentiment of the country. In my clothing I was rigged out in sailor style. I had on a red shirt and a tarpaulin hat, and a black cravat tied in sailor fashion carelessly and loosely about my neck. My knowledge of ships and sailor’s talk came much to my assistance, for I knew a ship from stem to stern, and from keelson to cross-trees, and could talk sailor like an “old salt.” I was well on the way to Havre de Grace before the conductor came into the negro car to collect tickets and examine the papers of his black passengers. This was a critical moment in the drama. My whole future depended upon the decision of this conductor. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Agitated though I was while this ceremony was proceeding, still, externally, at least, I was apparently calm and self-possessed. He went on with his duty—examining several colored passengers before reaching me. He was somewhat harsh in tome and peremptory in manner until he reached me, when, strange enough, and to my surprise and relief, his whole manner changed. Seeing that I did not readily produce my free papers, as the other colored persons in the car had done, he said to me, in friendly contrast with his bearing toward the others: “I suppose you have your free papers?” To which I answered: “No sir; I never carry my free papers to sea with me.” “But you have something to show that you are a freeman, haven’t you?” “Yes, sir,” I answered; “I have a paper with the American Eagle on it, and that will carry me around the world.”

With this I drew from my deep sailor’s pocket my seaman’s protection, as before described. The merest glance at the paper satisfied him, and he took my fare and went on about his business. This moment of time was one of the most anxious I ever experienced. Had the conductor looked closely at the paper, he could not have failed to discover that it called for a very different-looking person from myself, and in that case it would have been his duty to arrest me on the instant, and send me back to Baltimore from the first station. When he left me with the assurance that I was all right, though much relieved, I realized that I was still in great danger: I was still in Maryland, and subject to arrest at any moment. I saw on the train several persons who would have known me in any other clothes, and I feared they might recognize me, even in my sailor “rig,” and report me to the conductor, who would then subject me to a closer examination, which I knew well would be fatal to me. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Though I was not a murderer fleeing from justice, I felt perhaps quite as miserable as such a criminal. The train was moving at a very high rate of speed for that epoch of railroad travel, but to my anxious mind it was moving far too slowly. Minutes were hours, and hours were days during this part of my flight. After Maryland, I was to pass through Delaware—another slave State, where slave-catchers generally awaited their prey, for it was not in the interior of the State, but on its borders, that these human hounds were most vigilant and active. The border lines between slavery and freedom were the dangerous ones for the fugitives. The heart of no fox or deer, with hungry hounds on his trail in full chase, could have beaten more anxiously or noisily than did mine from the time I left Baltimore till I reached Philadelphia. The passage of the Susquehanna River at Havre de Grace was at that time made by ferry-boat, on board of which I met a young colored man by the name of Nichols, who came very near betraying me. He was a “hand” on the boat, but, instead of minding his business, he insisted upon knowing me, and asking me dangerous questions as to where I was going, when I was coming back, etc. I got away from my old and inconvenient acquaintance as soon as I could decently do so, and went to another part of the boat. Once across the river, I encountered a new danger. Only a few days before, I had been at work on a revenue cutter, in Mr. Price’s ship-yard in Baltimore, under the care of Captain McGowan. On the meeting at this point of the two trains, the one going south stopped on the track just opposite to the one going north, and it so happened that this Captain McGowan sat at a window where he could see me very distinctly, and would certainly have recognized me had he looked at me but for a second. Fortunately, in the hurry of the moment, he did not see me; and the trains soon passed each other on their respective ways. But this was not my only hair-breadth escape. A German blacksmith whom I knew well was on the train with me, and looked at me very intently, as if he thought he had seen me somewhere before in his travels. I really believe he knew me, but had no heart to betray me. At any rate, he saw me escaping and held his peace.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day 9th M 3rd 1838 / Mary McClish left us by the Steam Boat with her Son, for New York expecting to live with him & his family at West Chester about 12 Miles from the City. She came HDT WHAT? INDEX

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into this house to live with Aunt Nancy Carpenter on the 3rd day of 5th M 1808 & remained with her in faithful service until her death which occured the 10th day of the 9th M 1834 — After which we took the house & family & she continued in Service 4 Years lacking just one Week — thus she has been a faithful & agreeable inmate in this house for 30 Years & about 4 Months —- her health has been declining for some time & particularly the last 6 Months & I hope the change of Air & situation will be advantagious to her — She was born in Newport 5 M 30th 1773, which makes her 65 Years & about 4 Months Old I respect her for her many kindnesses & goods services & really desire her last days may be her most tranquil & happy - I have paid her the Legacy which Aunt Nancy gave her in her Will, & also Settled with her for all her services. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

September 7, Friday: Henry Thoreau wrote in his journal: HOMER

September 7. When Homer’s messengers repair to the tend of Achilles, we do not have to wonder how they get there, but step by step accompany them along the shore of the resounding sea. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

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

Waldo Emerson to his JOURNAL:

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

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

This early story about Deacon William Parkman of the general store on Main Street (near where the Concord Free Public Library now stands) would later be worked into the WALDEN text as:

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

WILLIAM PARKMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September 13, Thursday: Friedrich Wilhelm replaced Friedrich Hermann Otto as Prince of Hohenzollern- Hechingen. Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka and his travelling companions returned to St. Petersburg with a troop of new boys for the Imperial Choir.

James Thomas Fields delivered an Anniversary Poem before the Mercantile Library Association of Boston (he would print this at the firm of his employer William D. Ticknor at the corner of Washington and School Streets). ANNIVERSARY POEM

Early in September, Jones Very had felt within himself the gradual coming of a new will, somewhat like his old wicked self-will but different in that “it was not a feeling of my own but a sensible will that was not my own,” a will “to do good.” There was “a consciousness which seemed to say —‘That which creates you creates also that which you see or him to whom you speak.’” By Thursday, September the 13th, Very was convinced that he had acquired an “identification with Christ.” Moved entirely by this spirit within, he began to declare to all about him at Harvard College that the coming of Christ was at hand. That evening he went to the study of the Reverend Henry Ware, Jr., who was working up his alarmed response to Waldo Emerson’s address at the Divinity School, a response directed against Emerson’s “doctrine of the Divine Impersonality,” which he was scheduled to deliver at the Divinity Hall Chapel on September 23d. Ignoring theology students who happened to be in the professor’s study, Very proceeded to parse Matthew chapter 24 to the professor and to insist that what he was offering was eternal, revealed truth. Ware could not agree with Very’s parsing of the chapter, so Very pulled out his big gun: “You are doing your own will, and not the will of your Father.”12

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 13th of 9th M 1838 / Our Meeting was very small owing to the Rain & Stormy weather but to me a good solid comfortable Meeting to me. — Father Rodman remains very low & looks like passing away soon - he is past much speaking & can scarcely be understood at all — his Mouth is very sore & he refuses sustanance or drink he has however appeared to know several who have called to see him & has particularly recognized D Buffum - Yesterday he noticed John & Mary & tried to talk with them, but failed of making them understand much he said. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

12. Which although it was true enough to be painful –for in fact the Reverend Professor Henry Ware, Jr. was one of these “heroic champion of the consensual reality” types– or false enough –for in fact the Reverend Professor Ware Junior was trudging along as un-clumsily as he could in the theological footprints of his father, the Reverend Professor Ware Senior– definitely was not a helpful thing to point out. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September 13, Thursday-14, Friday: Waldo Emerson to his journal:

I went to New Bedford & Mr D. was in a frolicsome mood, & got up from supper in the evening, & said, “Come let us have some fun,” & went about to tickle his wife & his sisters. I grew grave, &, do what I could, I felt that I looked like one appointed to be hanged.

HANGING NEW BEDFORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

September 14, Friday: In the morning the Harvard College tutor in Greek, Jones Very, began to inform his classes of his divine inspiration: “Flee to the mountains, for the end of all things is at hand.”13 According to a letter of a student, which had been posted to the student’s family before Very’s announcement of his inspiration:

[Very] bases all these instructions on the submission of our will to that of God: to adapt everything to that: to act, to speak, to move only as it is conformable to his will: then, when we have arrived at the degree of excellence, we shall see God; we shall be able to form ideas of him suitable to his nature and attributes; one glance into the works of Creation will afford us more instruction than a life of intense study of Greek and Latin, of arts and sciences: We are not to consider our bodies as our own, Mr. Very tells us, but as given us by God to be subservient to our souls; that is to say, to the influence of the spirit of God in us; and this is manifested in the conscience, which is His voice speaking to us, when we are doing our own will: he knocks, and too often is refused admittance: “he comes unto his own, and his own receives him not”: Now this is to be revolutionized. Whatever we are called upon to do, we must consider if it is God or our own evil desires which call on us to act thus: Conscience will tell us in a moment: and we must act accordingly: then God will take up his abode in us, and we shall feel his presence, which we cannot immediately do in our present state: Study is not to be a mechanical performance, but a duty imposed on us by the will of God, to render us better and happier: thus we must always consider it, without regards to marks of merit or demerit.

Very’s deportment on that infamous day was such as to make this student regret that the letter had already been posted. For, very clearly, something was going seriously awry in this inspiration business, and Tutor was self- combusting.

Later that day Very delivered an unscheduled address to the debating club at the Divinity School, pointing out to them that while they were merely doing their own wills, he himself was “no longer a man.” It was the Holy Spirit which spoke to him and through him, and he was merely passing on what was being imparted to him, which was “eternal truth” insofar as he had become convinced that he was at least temporarily able to transmit it without altering it in any way.14 That night one of the students who had been present at several of Very’s outbursts wrote in his diary that it was “very much as Geo Fox is represented to have done, and to have very similar views.” On the evening of the 14th, also, President Josiah Quincy, Sr. appeared at the dormitory room of Charles Stearns Wheeler to ask that he immediately assume responsibility for Very’s classes in Greek, and 13. Presumably this was a reference to the White Mountains in which Very had recently vacationed. No, maybe it was “flee to the mountain” that Very had hollered, and maybe it was a reference to the vicinity of solitary Mount Monadnock, which was closer than New Hampshire and at which the Narragansetts had taken refuge during the race riot known as “King Philip’s War.” Well, whatever. 14. Recent research into this Joan of Arc phenomenon suggests that it has something to do with unconscious “subvocalization,” in which the muscles of the voicebox exercise themselves without the blast of air which produces audible speech and in which the patient, instead of disregarding this phenomenon, for purpose of achieving a higher social status or for purpose of becoming the center of attention attempts to interpret what he or she is perceiving and ascribes it as a communication from holy authority. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to describe Very as being in a state of “nervous collapse.”

Very’s discourse … sounds surprisingly like a recast of Emerson’s Address. While Very colored the “instructions” with his own non-Emersonian diction and qualifications, and interpreted and applied Emerson’s remarks in a more literal and specific way than Emerson intended, the relationship is clear. This was Very’s less formal equivalent of the declaration of independence for man teaching, delivered to freshman students instead of Divinity School graduates.

Henry Thoreau advertised in the Concord Freeman, announcing the second term of the Concord Academy.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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6th day 14th of 9th M 1838 / Father Rodman was so low last night that I thought it best to stay in the house Anthony V Taylor being there to Watch with him — At about 35 minutes part one this Morning he breathed his last, his departure being so easy & calm that it was difficult to tell whether he was gone, or in a quiet sleep RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September 15, Saturday: Jones Very’s brother Washington, a Freshman, was asked to escort him home to Salem. Very wanted to go through Concord and speak with Waldo Emerson, but was disregarded. His younger brother allowed him, however, to post a letter to Emerson with a promised manuscript on William Shakespeare:

My Brother

I am glad at last to be able to transmit what has been told me of Shakespeare ’tis the faint echo of that which speaks to you now. That was the utterance of the soul still in its travail but the hour is past of which I have often spoken to you and you hear not mine own words but the teachings of the Holy Spirit. Rejoice with me my brother and give thanks with me to the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ who have now taken me to themselves and will not let me go any more from them. I feel that the day now is when “the tabernackle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people.” The gathering time has come and the harvest is now reaping from the wide plains of earth. Here, even here the will of the Father begins to be done as in heaven. My friend I tell you these things as they are told me and hope soon for a day or two of leisure perhaps in two or three weeks when I may speak with you face to face as I now write....

Edwin Gittleman glosses Very’s “Shakespeare” of the December 1837-September 1838 period as a “Poetics of Revelation” and as an “omnium-gatherum of his basic attitudes ... both a spiritual autobiography and a blueprint for action.” He characterizes both Very’s “Shakespeare” and his “Hamlet” as “more revealing as autobiography than as literary criticism.” I will attempt the feat of glossing Gittleman’s gloss: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In [“Shakespeare”] Very contrasted the man of [mere] genius (exemplified by Shakespeare) with the man of virtue (clearly Very himself, but figured as Christ).... Very [had] once told Emerson that if he could first “move Shakespeare” he could then “move the world.”... Shakespeare’s mind functioned spontaneously, without deliberate control. Its actions were not willed but reflexive and automatic ... in harmony with Nature ... childlike.... The child, like Nature, just is and automatically loves whatever else is. The man of genius, with his undifferentiated love of activity and existence, is thus a child-man, retaining his prelapsarian heritage through unwitting obedience to the Divine Will.... [However, b]ecause the obedience of the virtuous man is conscious, his greatness is superior to that of genius[,] ... moral rather than [merely] innocent.... Since man’s mind is so constituted by nature that it is not his own, he sins whenever he acts as if it were. He must therefore learn from genius and revelation that his “highest glory” consists of “conscious submission” to the Divine Will.... If ... the poet ... depicts “what ought to be, his teaching is false and ineffectual; it is then merely the handiwork of his own mind. But if “what is” is seen and understood “with a spirit more nearly allied to Him who sees all things as they are,” then poetry will exhibit God’s presence.... The only proper subject ... is “what is” — the “ever new, ever changing aspect of nature and of man.” ... [V]irtue need not be “brightened” nor vice “darkened” by the poet’s independent judgment.

Evidently, at about this point, although the promise was not publicized, Very was pledging to his mother and siblings that whatever the outcome of this Jesus-Christ venture of his, he would “come out of it” before a year had passed.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 7th day 15th of 9th M / This evening Steam Boat bore away our dear Son & daughter with our interesting & truly lovely grandchild, we regretted they could not stay to the funeral of their Grandfather Clarke Rodman, which is to be tomorrow After Meeting in the Afternoon but their child not being well, & having staid one day longer than they expected to, they were anxious to return to their home, & under the considerations we were reconciled to their going being truly thankful for their company as long as we have had it, & in particular that they came while their Grandfather was living & could know they were with him. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September 16, Sunday: Early in the morning Jones Very made the rounds, attempting to baptize the ministers of Salem as they were attempting to make their final preparations for church worship and sermonizing performances. “The coming of Christ is at hand.” What confrontations these must have been. When he attempted to baptize the Reverend Lucius Bolles, the local Baptist, he was bodily put out of the home. The Reverend Charles Wentworth Upham of Salem’s upscale First Church, by way of contrast, did not lay his own hands on Very, but did advise him that his hero Waldo Emerson was nothing but an Atheist, and did warn him that, by force if necessary, he was very likely on his way to the insane asylum. I don’t know the sequence of the baptisms, but Very did not overlook to attempt to baptize his own Unitarian minister, the Reverend John Brazer of the North Church that Very had joined during the summer of 1836. Among the houses that Very then visited was 53 Charter Street, the home of his friend Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Standing uncomfortably close to her, he placed his hand on her head and declaimed: “I come to baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.” “I am the Second Coming.” “This day is this fulfilled.” Etc. Peabody’s understanding was that “These impulses from above I think are never sound minded. The insanity of Quakers (which is very frequent under my observation) always grows out of it or rather begins in it.” Edwin Gittleman’s comment is that the young lady was “relieved that it was nothing worse than the consummation of a spiritual marriage.” By noon Peabody had gone rushing off in a fruitless attempt to placate the furious Reverend Upham, and was with Lydia Very, the mother, at the Very home at 54 Federal Street, with Very upstairs resting in his chamber. That evening Very again appeared at her door, and presented her with a folio sheet on which he had inscribed four double columns of sonnets written under the control of the Holy Ghost. Very had exaggerated ideas of his own status, but our polite society has no difficulty tolerating this in any number of individuals. What the established religious society cannot tolerate, however, point number one, is competition. Ministers, for instance, react with peculiar hostility to other ministers who are attempting to spirit away contributing members of their own flock. Very was attempting to make converts and obtain followers, and that sort of conduct was in another category from simple grandiloquence. What an established religious society cannot tolerate, also, point number two, is being held up to ridicule in front of other established religious societies. What the Salem Unitarians in particular could not tolerate was that the local religion people were perceiving, in Very’s difficulties, a manifestation of the presumptuousness of their Unitarianism. They were embarrassed, they were intensely embarrassed. Edwin Gittleman’s comment on this is “Further scandal could be avoided only by providing him with an audience immune to his corrupting influence. Such an audience was conveniently available at the McLean Hospital in nearby Charlestown.” That night the Very home was raided and Very was escorted away, clutching his dog-eared Bible, over the screams of his mother that –at least physically– he was “endangering no one, not even himself.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September 18, Tuesday: 160 delegates attended the Peace Convention in the Marlboro Chapel of Boston.

This meeting creating the New England Non-Resistance Society is notable not only for creating a chain of influence that extends down through Lev Nikolævich Tolstòy and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. to us,15 but also for a feminist “first”: William Lloyd Garrison uttered, from the platform, the new locution “his or her” — a locution deliberately designed to de-privilege the male as the normative specimen of the human being.

There was a smile on the countenance of many abolition friends while others in the Convention looked grave.

However, the smiles lasted longer than the grave looks: immediately that Friend Abby Kelley called a minister to order for speaking out of turn, the “woman-contemners” marched out of the meeting.

Garrison wrote the “Declaration of Sentiments” for this assembly:

We cannot acknowledge allegiance to any human government.... Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind.... As every human government is upheld by physical strength, and its laws are enforced virtually at the point of the bayonet, we cannot hold any office which imposes upon its incumbent the obligation to compel men to do right, on pain of imprisonment or death. We therefore voluntarily exclude ourselves from every legislative and judicial body, and repudiate all human politics, worldly honors, and stations of authority. If we cannot occupy a seat in the legislature or on the bench, neither can we elect others to act as our substitutes in any such capacity.... While we shall adhere to the doctrines of non-resistance and passive submission to enemies, we purpose to speak and act boldly in the cause of God, to assail iniquity in high places.... It will be our leading object to devise ways and means for effecting a radical change in the views, feelings and practices of society respecting the sinfulness of war, and the treatment of our enemies.

15. Although the society put out a bimonthly publication named The Non-Resistant (until 1842), public newspapers quickly characterized this un-Christian attitude of nonresistance to evil as “No-Governmentism.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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25 of the 160 delegates were able to commit their lives to the principle that

evil can be exterminated from the earth only by good; that it is not safe to rely on an arm of flesh, –upon man, whose breath is in his nostrils– ...we shall submit to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake, obey all the requirements of government, except such as we deem contrary to the commands of the gospel, and in no wise resist the operation of law, except such as we deem contrary to the commands of the gospel; and in no wise resist the operation of law, except by meekly submitting to the penalty of disobedience. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September 18, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson to his journal in regard to the annular (partial) solar eclipse (#7260) that passed from Hudson Bay down across northern New England: SUN

This P.M. the Eclipse. Peter Howe did not like it for his rowan would not make hay: and he said “the sun looked as if a nigger was putting his head into it.”

Well, in some sense Peter Howe of Concord was right, black people were indeed raising their head into the sunshine. For on this day of eclipse Frederick Douglass and Anna Murray Douglass, as free Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Johnson, were arriving in their new hometown, New Bedford:

We arrived at Newport the next morning, and soon after an old fashioned stage-coach, with “New Bedford” in large yellow letters on its sides, came down to the wharf. I had not money enough to pay our fare, and stood hesitating what to do. Fortunately for us, there were two Quaker gentlemen who were about to take passage on the stage, —Friends William C. Taber and Joseph Ricketson,— who at once discerned our true situation, and, in a peculiarly quiet way, addressing me, Mr. Taber said: “Thee get in.” I never obeyed an order with more alacrity, and we were soon on our way to our new home. When we reached “Stone Bridge” the passengers alighted for breakfast, and paid their fares to the driver. We took no breakfast, and, when asked for our fares, I told the driver I would make it right with him when we reached New Bedford. I expected some objection to this on his part, but he made none. When, however, we reached New Bedford, he took our baggage, including three music-books, —two of them collections by Dyer, and one by Shaw,— and held them until I was able to redeem them by paying to him the amount due for our rides. This was soon done, for Mr. Nathan Johnson not only received me kindly and hospitably, but, on being informed about our baggage, at once loaned me the two dollars with which to square accounts with the stage-driver. Mr. and Mrs. Nathan Johnson reached a good old age, and now rest from their labors. I am under many grateful obligations to them. They not only “took me in when a stranger” and “fed me when hungry,” but taught me how to make an honest living. Thus, in a fortnight after my flight from Maryland, I was safe in New Bedford, a citizen of the grand old commonwealth of Massachusetts....

WILLIAM C. TABER JOSEPH RICKETSON NATHAN JOHNSON HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Mary J. Tabor would allege in 1907 something that does not jibe with the popular appreciation of Frederick Douglass that is gathered from reading of his NARRATIVE, to wit, that at this point, with him arriving at freedom in New Bedford, he was not yet able to read, let alone to write. She would allege that in New Bedford after his escape from slavery, it had been her relative William C. Taber who had found for Douglass the stevedoring work he mentions on the wharves (help not acknowledged in Douglass’s written account), and she would allege that at this point Douglass had been taught to read by her relative, the New Bedford bookseller Charles Taber: Owing to the anti-slavery principles of Friends, New Bedford early became a station on the “underground railroad,” and if a fugitive slave could once reach this haven of rest, he felt almost safe from pursuit, public opinion being so strong that in the days of the Fugitive Slave Law it would have been impossible to capture a runaway slave in this town. Frederick Douglass, one of the most remarkable of colored men, passed some time here in safety, and always retained a most grateful recollection of his sojourn among the Quakers. It happened on this wise: Having made his escape from slavery and reached Newport after many perils, he was very anxious to come to New Bedford, that place being known among the slaves as a heaven upon earth. Hearing the name called out, he peeped shyly around the corner of a building and gazed longingly at the state coach which was filled with “women Friends” on their way home from New England Yearly Meeting. William C. Taber, sitting on the top of the coach, observed the pleading eyes, and said, “Yes, friend, it is all right, climb up here beside me.” No sooner said than done, William C. Taber paid his fare, brought him to his own house, and found work for him on the wharves, as he had been a stevedore at the South. While in New Bedford, he was taught to read by Charles Taber. Thus the distinguished orator was launched on the road to fame. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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What we have, above, is essentially an assertion that when Douglass arrived in New Bedford aboard that stage from Newport, Rhode Island, he could not yet read, let alone write. —That that is importantly discordant with the fulsome manner in which the NARRATIVE is now conventionally read, is something that goes without saying.

For their wedding document, the newlyweds had adopted the family name Johnson, but soon this came to seem an unwise selection. At the time the Douglasses were there, New Bedford had the highest per capita income in America. When the fugitive slave Freddy Bailey, then calling himself Frederick Johnson, arrived at the home of Nathan Johnson and Mary “Polly” Johnson in New Bedford (the Douglasses are not the only guests

This is the recent dedication of a plaque at the site, attended by descendants of the original participants:

documented to have found refuge for a time at 21 Seventh Street, next door to the Friends meetinghouse), HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Nathan was reading Robert Burns, and within a day or two Johnson would rename him after the hero Douglas

in LADY OF THE LAKE, as Frederick Douglass. (Frederick decided to spell it “Douglass” because there were some black families in New Bedford who were spelling their name that way.)16

16. But why did Freddy Bailey alias Fred Johnson accept the proffered name “Douglass”? Merely because it had been suggested to him? I think not! The Following is from a collection of Douglass’s speeches entitled LECTURES ON AMERICAN-SLAVERY, which would be published in 1851:

It is often said, by the opponents of the Anti-slavery cause that, the condition of the people of Ireland is more deplorable than that of the American slaves. Far be it from me to underrate the sufferings of the Irish people. They have been long oppressed; and the same heart that prompts me to plead the cause of the American bondman, makes it impossible for me not to sympathize with all the oppressed of all lands. Yet I must say that there is no analogy between the two cases. The Irishman is poor, but he is not a slave. He may be in rags, but he is not a slave. He is still the master of his own body and can say with the poet, “The hand of Douglass is his own.”

Thus in all probability the name was chosen because although it was intentionally opaque it nevertheless suggested, at least to its bearer, in the idea that “The hand of Douglass is his own,” the same sort of thing that was suggested in that time by the more usual name “Freeman” meaning “the free man.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ANNA MURRAY DOUGLASS FREDERICK DOUGLASS

The first thing these Douglasses with a wedding certificate in the name of Johnson, but with no manumission papers to produce for the husband whether he was named “Mr. Douglas” or “Mr. Johnson,” discovered in “free” New Bedford was that racial prejudice would prevent the husband from using his skills as a ship calker. It was explained that all the white calkers would quit. Work was found for him, by Friend William C. Taber, as a stevedore, carrying oil aboard a vessel, and he then had to saw wood, shovel coal, sweep chimneys, and roll casks in an oil refinery. However, accounts of such Jim Crow experiences would not fit into the narrative he later needed to tell to righteous Northern abolition audiences, for whom South=Them=Evil meant North=Us=Good, and so Douglass ordinarily suppressed this experience of racial prejudice in New Bedford.17

Finding my trade of no immediate benefit, I threw off my calking habiliments, and prepared myself to do any kind of work I could get to do. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Although a skilled craftsman could not get work in his craft in that city at that time, due entirely to the color of his skin, Frederick Douglass did not speak of this until 1881 , when in a reference to “the test of the real civilization of the community,” he suggested that the New Bedford of the 1840s had failed that test:

I am told that colored persons can now get employment at calking in New Bedford.

17. If “French” innocence consists in the refusal to be shamed by the nature of one’s pleasures, and if the “German” variety consists in an awareness that so long as one is sacrificing oneself, no-one has a right to object to one’s sacrificing them as well, and if the “English” consists in a principled refusal to take responsibility for one’s obedience to improper instructions from one’s betters, and the “Italian” in not happening to notice where you have your hand, then the innocence of the USer must consist in a refusal or a failure to recognize evil of which we ourselves are the beneficiaries. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In fuller detail:

... The name given me by my dear mother was no less pretentious and long than Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. I had, however, while living in Maryland, dispensed with the Augustus Washington, and retained only Frederick Bailey. Between Baltimore and New Bedford, the better to conceal myself from the slave-hunters, I had parted with Bailey and called myself Johnson; but in New Bedford I found that the Johnson family was already so numerous as to cause some confusion in distinguishing them, hence a change in this name seemed desirable. Nathan Johnson, mine host, placed great emphasis upon this necessity, and wished me to allow him to select a name for me. I consented, and he called me by my present name—the one by which I have been known for three and forty years—Frederick Douglass. Mr. Johnson had just been reading the “Lady of the Lake,” and so pleased was he with its great character that he wished me to bear his name. Since reading that charming poem myself, I have often thought that, considering the noble hospitality and manly character of Nathan Johnson —black man though he was— he, far more than I, illustrated the virtues of the Douglas of Scotland. Sure am I that, if any slave-catcher had entered his domicile with a view to my recapture, Johnson would have shown himself like him of the “stalwart hand.” ...My “Columbian Orator,” almost my only book, had done nothing to enlighten me concerning Northern society. I had been taught that slavery was the bottom fact of all wealth. With this foundation idea, I came naturally to the conclusion that poverty must be the general condition of the people of the free States. In the country from which I came, a white man holding no slaves was usually an ignorant and poverty-stricken man, and men of this class were contemptuously called “poor white trash.” Hence I supposed that, since the non-slave-holders at the South were ignorant, poor, and degraded as a class, the non-slave-holders at the North must be in a similar condition. I could have landed in no part of the United States where I should have found a more striking and gratifying contrast, not only to life generally in the South, but in the condition of the colored people there, than in New Bedford. I was amazed when Mr. Johnson told me that there was nothing in the laws or constitution of Massachusetts that would prevent a colored man from being governor of the State, if the people should see fit to elect him. There, too, the black man’s children attended the public schools with the white man’s children, and apparently without objection from any quarter. To impress me with my security from recapture and return to slavery, Mr. Johnson assured me that no slave-holder could take a slave out of New Bedford; that there were men there who would lay down their lives to save me from such a fate. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September 22, Saturday: Henry Thoreau’s advertisement about the second term of the Concord Academy appeared in the Yeoman’s Gazette.

September 23, Sunday: The Reverend Convers Francis of Watertown exchanged pulpits for the day with the Reverend Ezra Ripley of Concord. His prooftext for the Concord morning service was John 6:47 and his topic was “He That Believeth on the Son Hath Everlasting Life.” His prooftext for the afternoon service was Acts 21:11 and his topic was “The Language of Action.”

September 24, Monday: Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody wrote to Waldo Emerson in regard to the situation of Jones Very: ... I have feared insanity before. — I thought (at the time) that the visit to Groton showed it. — These impulses from above I think are never sound minded — the insanity of Quakers — (which is very frequent under my observation) always grows out of it — or rather begins in it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September 29, Saturday: Henry Thoreau’s advertisement about the 2d term of the Concord Academy appeared a second time in the Yeoman’s Gazette. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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FALL 1838

Fall: The Alcotts moved to Number 6, Beach Street in Boston and gave up renting the basement of the Masonic Temple for their schoolroom. The few remaining pupils, which of course included the Alcott girls, would now be educated in their home. There were still nearly 20 students, but they were paying only $6.00 to $12.00 per quarter. The family income had dropped to less than $500.00 per year. Abba Alcott was pregnant for the seventh time, with the baby due in the summertime. Bronson Alcott began to supplement his income by giving evening “conversations,” often for less than $1.00 per evening. THE ALCOTT FAMILY

Fall: The railroad from Boston reached Nashua, New Hampshire, rendering steam travel along the Merrimack River totally unnecessary. The steamboat Herald sank near the entrance of the Middlesex Canal into the Merrimack at Wicasee Falls near Tyng’s Island. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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OCTOBER 1838

October: The Reverend Horatio Wood began his ministry in Lowell, Massachusetts (the reverend used to be a teacher in Concord — did Henry Thoreau remember him?).

The rivalry between the Concord Light Infantry company and the Concord Artillery company culminated in their hiring of two competing bands from Boston. As the two groups paraded, each attempted to crowd out their enemy’s marching formation and tangle their enemy’s feet by the beat from a different drummer (this happened on Concord common — did Henry witness this?).

October 6, Saturday: The Dundee and Arbroath Railway opened.

Troops intervened in Dewitt, Missouri because the townspeople had besieged the Mormons (over the following three weeks the Mormons would rampage through Daviess and Caldwell Counties, killing livestock and torching some 150 homes).

Henry Thoreau wrote from Concord to the Reverend Andrew Bigelow of Taunton, Massachusetts about a teaching position he had learned was open. Concord Oct. 6th—38 Sir, I learn from my [b]rother and sister, who were recently employed as teachers in your vicinity, that you are at present in quest of some one to fill the vacancy in your high school, occasioned by Mr. Bellow[’s] withdrawl. As my present school, which consists of a small number of well advanced pup[ ]ls, is not sufficiently lucrative, I am advised HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to make application for the situation now vacant. I was graduated at Cambridge in —37, and have since had my share of experience in school-keeping. I can refer you to the— President and Faculty of Harvard

Page 2 College—to Rev. Dr. Ripley, or Rev. R. W. Emerson—of this town, or to the parents of my present pupils, among whom I would mention— Hon. Samuel Hoar—Hon. John Keyes—& Hon. Nathan Brooks. Written recommendations by these gentlemen will be pro- cured if desired. If you will trouble yourself to answer this letter immediately, you will much oblige your humble Servant, Henry D. Thoreau

Page 3 Address: Rev. Andrew Bigelow. Tauton Mass. Postage: [ ]

October 6, Saturday: In the course of a letter to his sister Helen Louisa Thoreau in Taunton, we learn as much as we need to know about the sort of philosophical materials Harvard College was inflicting upon its young scholars in this period, and we learn also as much as we need to know, of the extent to which scholar Henry had been able to distance himself from such “academic” philosophastering. This letter reminds us of the context in which Henry Thoreau could write “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers”:

Concord Oct. 6th –38. Dear Helen, I dropped Sophia’s letter into the box immediately on taking yours out, else the tone of the former had been changed. I have no acquaintance with “Cleavelands First Lessons,” though I have peeped into his abridged Grammar, which I should think very well calculated for beginners, at least, for such as would be likely to wear out one book, before they would be prepared for the abstruser parts of Grammar. Ahem! As no one can tell what was the Roman pronunciation, each nation makes the Latin conform, for the most part, to the rules of its own language; so that with us, of the vowels, only a has a peculiar sound. In the end of a word of more than one syllable, it is sounded like ah– as pennah, Lydiah Hannah, &c. without regard to case.– but da is never sounded dah because it is a monosyllable. All terminations in es and plural cases in os, as you know, are HDT WHAT? INDEX

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pronounced long – as homines (homin;amese) dominos (domin;amose) or in English Johnny Voss. For information see Adam’s Latin Grammar – before the Rudiments– This is all law and gospel in the eyes of the world – but remember I am speaking as it were, in the third person, and should sing quite a different tune, if it were I that made the quire. However one must occasionally hang his harp on the willows, and play on the Jew’s harp, in such a strange country as this. One of your young ladies wishes to study Mental Philosophy–hey?– well tell her that she has the very best text book that I know of already in her possession. If she do not believe it, then she should have bespoken a better in another world, and not have expected to find one at “Little and Wilkins’.” But if she wishes to know how poor an apology for a Mental Philosophy men have tacked together, synthetically or analytically, in these latter days – how they have squeezed the infinite mind into a compass that would not nonpluss a surveyor of Eastern Lands – making Imagination and Memory to lie still in their respective apartments, like ink-stand and wafers in a l{MS torn} escritoire–why let her read Locke–or Stewart, or Brown. JOHN LOCKE The fact is, Mental Philosophy is very like poverty–which, you know, DUG. STEWART begins at home; and, indeed, when it goes abroad, it is poverty itself. THOS. BROWN Chorus. I should think an abridgment of one of the above authors, ABERCROMBIE or of Abercrombie, would answer her purpose. It may set her a- thinking. Probably there are many systems in the market of which I am ignorant. As for themes –say first “Miscellaneous Thoughts”– set one up to a window to note what passes in the street, and make her comments thereon; or let her gaze in the fire, or into a corner where there is a spider’s web, and philosophize –moralize –theorize, or what not. What their hands find to putter about, or their Minds to think about,– that let them write about.– To say nothing of Advantages or disadvantages – of this, that, or the other. Let them set down their ideas at any given Season – preserving the chain o f thought as complete as may be. This is the style pedagogical. I am much obliged to you for your peice of information. Knowing your dislike to a sentimental letter I remain Yr affectionate brother. H D T HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 10, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson to his journal:

“Everything must come round, & be told in proper time” said Belzoni.

October 16, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson to his journal:

Here came on Sunday Morning (14th) Edward Palmer & departed today, a gentle, faithful, sensible, well-balanced man for an enthusiast. He has renounced since a year ago last April the use of money. When he travels he stops at night at a house & asks if it would give them any satisfaction to lodge a traveller without money or price? If they do not give him a hospitable answer he goes on but generally finds the country people free & willing. When he goes away he gives them his papers or tracts. He has sometimes found it necessary to go 24 hours without food & all night without lodging. Once he found a wagon with a good buffalo under a shed & had a very good nap. By the seashore he finds it difficult to travel as they are inhospitable. He presents his views with great gentleness; & is not troubled if he cannot show the way in which the destruction of money is to be brought about; he feels no responsibility to show or know the details. It is enough for him that he is sure it must fall & that he clears himself of the institution altogether. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 19, Friday: Waldo Emerson confided to his journal that he considered vehemence to be a feminine characteristic (the religion of women is exterior, that of men interior):

The feminine vehemence with which the Andrews Norton of the Daily Advertiser beseeches the dear people to whip that naughty heretic is the natural feeling in the mind whose religion is external.... The aim of a true teacher now would be ... to teach the doctrine of the perpetual revelation.

Here is the message of the Reverend Doctor Andrews Norton, on Transcendentalism and the influence of Emerson: he suggested that the danger was that what high minds would hold as high ideas, of individuality and self-reliance, ordinary minds would establish as low ideas, enabling a boundless self-conceit. Not that this sentiment was unique to the Reverend Norton — but seldom has the issue been paraphrased so politely.

A student fable of record, from this period, is that a number of Unitarian divines went to Heaven in a group. Perhaps they were all in the same train accident? The Reverend Doctor Henry Ware, Sr., who held the Hollis Chair of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School, is characterized in this fable as going “It is better than we deserve.” The Reverend William Ellery Channing of the Federal Street Church in Boston goes “This is another proof of the dignity of human nature.” The Reverend Ezra Stiles Gannett goes “There must be some mistake,” and hurries away. The Reverend Doctor Andrews Norton goes “It is a very miscellaneous crowd.”

October 20, Saturday: Jones Very visited Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and apologized for having been so “intoxicated with the Holy Spirit.” He was completing his “Hamlet” essay and preparing to deliver it to Waldo Emerson in Concord. When Very told her about the visit he had just been paid by their Unitarian pastor of Salem’s North Church, the Reverend John Brazer, Elizabeth was enraged with the man’s insolence. A miracle, indeed! But she also told him that he should take this medication. —Because if he was sick the medicine could purge him, but no medicine could purge Truth.18

Emerson to his journal:

What said my brave Asia concerning the paragraph writers, today? that “this whole practice of self justification & recrimination betwixt literary men seemed every whit as low as the quarrels of the Paddies.”

18. Hey, good thinking! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 23, Tuesday: From this date until March 24, 1839, the last large group of the Cherokee nation, 1,766 persons led by Peter Hildebrand, would be attempting to travel from the Appalachian concentration camps to the Oklahoma Territory, but would be held up for a month alongside the Gasconade River in Missouri, too sick to move forward. They had left behind, hiding in the Cherokee ancestral caves in the Appalachian mountains, a number of others such as the sons of Matiyuh who had evaded the initial roundups by the US Cavalry into the concentration camps in the valleys. TRAIL OF TEARS

German astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel wrote from Konigsberg to Sir J. Herschel Bart telling him that the distance from Earth to the star 61 Cygni (Alpha Centauri), the star system that happens to be closest to us at a distance of 11.4 light years, had been measured, using the parallax method.19

(It would seem, from the content of WALDEN, that Henry Thoreau would make himself familiar with this astronomical discovery and its significance for the history of ideas.)

19. His calculation was remarkably accurate, being off by less than 10%, and this was the 1st time the distance of a star other than our sun Sol had been reliably estimated and amounted to a shattering revelation since it demolished a fundamental division in astronomy, that between the sub-aetherial realm of changefulness which existed, on the one hand, within the orbit of the moon or perhaps within the orbits of the wandering planets, and on the other hand the aetherial realm of the fixed and eternal stellar canopy. This discovery removed one of the two final objections to the heliocentric model of the solar system that had been sponsored by Copernicus –to wit, it removed the fact that the geoheliocentric model sponsored by Brahe had been superior because the Copernicus model required a stellar parallax due to the motion of the earth about the sun –but such parallax had not yet been observed. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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WALDEN: We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

NICOLAS COPERNICUS TYCHO BRAHE TYCHONIAN/COPERNICAN

October 24, Wednesday: Jones Very went to Concord with his completed “Hamlet,” to spend what would amount to five days with the Emersons. Waldo Emerson found him very narrow and focused, like a microscope, but marveled at the magnitude at which Very was able to examine those things which passed under this narrow focus. Edwin Gittleman’s comment is that “Very struck a balance between oddity and good sense which Emerson could not resist.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 24. It matters not whether these strains originate there in the grass or float thitherward like atoms of light from the minstrel days of Greece. “The snowflakes fall thick and fast on a winter’s day. The winds are lulled, and the snow falls incessant, covering the tops of the mountains, and the hills, and the plains where the lotus tree grows, and the cultivated fields. And they are falling by the inlets and shores of the foaming sea, but are silently dissolved by the waves.”

October 27, Saturday: Jones Very’s autobiographical sonnet “The New Birth” was published in that day’s Salem Observer. It must have been perused with great interest by all the persons who had been involved in or who had heard about the recent difficulties at the Harvard Divinity School. Read between the lines, folks! What had happened to produce these startling events in Salem and Boston, Very said in effect, was that shortly before, at Harvard University, he had taken off his human crown of pride and laid it in the dust. This startling behavior which he had exhibited was what they should have expected of a person who had become capable of abandoning the false pride which keeps society on these stupid rails upon which it runs:

’Tis a new life — thoughts move not as they did With slow uncertain steps across my mind; In thronging haste fast pressing on they bid The portals open to the viewless wind, That comes not save when in the dust is laid The crown of pride that gilds each mortal brow, And from before man’s vision melting fade The heavens and earth; their walls are falling now— Fast crowding on, each thought asks utterance strong; Storm-lifted waves swift rushing to the shore, On from the sea they send their shouts along, Back through the cave-worn rocks their thunders roar; And I, a child of God by Christ made free, Start from death’s slumbers to Eternity.

Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issued an “extermination” order against the Mormons.

Frédéric François Chopin departed from Paris, to meet George Sand in Perpignan. Their ultimate destination would be Mallorca. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 28, Sunday: In a dark mood, Jones Very snapped at the pregnant Mrs. Lidian Emerson while she was attempting to ingratiate herself. He announced that this was his “day of hate.” The spirit had informed Very that Waldo Emerson was “not right,” and he explicated this by instructing his host that obedience was primary and charging that Emerson was not allowing it to be primary in his own life. He announced that he hated this entire family, and when frank cheer was displayed at receiving such a candid remark, he became perplexed. That evening was the meeting of local Sunday School teachers in the Emerson home, and having failed to have much of an impact upon the family, Very quite pecked the Reverend Barzillai Frost, an easy target, into little pieces.

Giuseppe Verdi resigned as maestro di musica in Busseto.

In Vienna, Sigismond Thalberg told Robert Schumann, “there is nothing more to be done with the combination of piano and orchestra.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 29, Monday: Waldo Emerson drove Jones Very as far as Waltham. Very was on a pilgrimage to Cambridge, to attempt to persuade the officials of the Harvard Divinity School to take him back. (Would this be this the miracle the Reverend John Brazer had asked Very to produce as a sign? No, the age of miracles is past.) Watching him off, Emerson thought “He is gone into the multitude as solitary as Jesus.” At Harvard, Very sought out various officials, who politely heard him out. With no objection from anyone, he would stay in Cambridge for over a week, but of course there was never any consideration of allowing him to return to his status there. During the course of the week they were even able to obtain from him, to save all appearances, the submission of a written resignation — for it turned out that the tiny sardines of job and salary and position and status and career and prestige didn’t make all that much difference to Very, who had decided that he was the designated fisher of men. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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NOVEMBER 1838

November: Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody persuaded George Bancroft to offer Nathaniel Hawthorne a job.

During this period Jones Very was in the habit of sending offprints of his poems from the Salem Observer to friends and acquaintances. For at time Bronson Alcott was receiving such clippings each week, and was pasting or copying them into his journal. Henry Thoreau received at least three such clippings of at least six sonnets and during this month copied a couple of them into his “Miscellaneous Extracts” notebook. Unannounced, Very appeared at the home of Hawthorne and performed his ceremony of laying on of hands — Hawthorne meekly bowed his head for this and afterward commented that Very had managed to attain the “entire subjectiveness” which he had attempted to depict in 1833 in his “The Story Teller” in the figure of the minister (refer to the story “The Seven Vagabonds” which Hawthorne would insert into the December 1851 edition of TWICE-TOLD TALES). Hawthorne also suggested that as long as Very could author good sonnets, he might remain as he was. Edwin Gittleman comments that “It is almost as if Very were an invention of Hawthorne’s own Gothic imagination, a character whom he felt he understood completely, and for whom he was in a sense morally responsible.” However, for years Hawthorne would avoid Jones, although the fellow kept turning up at his doorstep: “Night before last came Mr. Jones Very; and you know he is somewhat unconscionable as to the length of his calls.”

During this and the following month, Jones Very would be coming gradually to the recognition that his function was being entirely fulfilled in the teaching of the message he was receiving, with no obligation to seek the assent of his victims. He was becoming, if unpleasant, at least tolerable. Also, he was coming to an appreciation of the fact that his orders to chop down the tree of self could not be implemented, because the recipients of this advice could not imagine what acceptable small step, which they understood how to take, could come first, and because they were wary of beginning a journey in which they might lose themselves and be unable to retrace their steps. He began to attempt to identify specifically what it was, for each person, that that person was clutching in the place of God, and demand of that person that he or she let go of their attachment to that specific thing. Because, of course, that was what sin was: attachment to something other than or in place of God, however innocent the thing might be in itself. When people began to receive the reward of the Holy Spirit for their sacrifice of their most precious clutching, then of their own free will they would accept Very as their Savior. Of course, this psychodrama of confrontation has always worked well at the level of story. (The story is, Buddha was able to pull off such a confrontation, on occasion. The story is, Jesus was able to pull off such a confrontation, on occasion. There aren’t many stories in which Jesus or Buddha went “Follow me!” and somebody went “Oh, get a life, will you?” Nevertheless, the reaction to Very was such at to make one wonder whether these confrontations ever actually worked, except at the indirect level, the level at which they are a story being recounted of some alleged prior confrontation rather than an actual face-to-face contemporary confrontation. It may well be that we have a category mistake here, a category mistake which keeps recurring due to our presumption that we can’t pay attention to such a story unless the event “actually happened.”) Anyhoo, here is the cast and the sins of which they were guilty: • The Reverend William Ellery Channing was clutching “Rectitude” instead of God. • Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was clutching “Truth” instead of God. • Waldo Emerson was clutching “Thought” instead of God. • Bronson Alcott was clutching “Spiritual Curiosity” instead of God. • Sophia Amelia Peabody was clutching “Imagination” and “Resignation to Pain” instead of God. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Of course, an immediate riposte would be to accuse Jones Very himself of clutching “Obedience” instead of God, and ask him to pry his damn fingers off it. As inversion-advice goes that wouldn’t have been half bad, but of course Very was no more capable of letting go of “Obedience” than Waldo would have been of letting go of “Thought.” One is reminded of the Sufi poet who went (I paraphrase) “When one renounces all things, the final item one must renounce is Renunciation.”

First week of November: Jones Very sent some sonnets to Waldo Emerson. It turned out that not only were these the first of his poems that Emerson had seen, they were the first that he had heard of. Emerson was impressed — he’d met a poet and didn’t know it.

Father! I bless thy name that I do live, And in each motion am made rich with thee, That when a glance is all that I can give, It is a kingdom’s wealth if I but see; This stately body cannot move, save I Will to its nobleness my little bring; My voice its measured cadence will not try, Save I with every note consent to sing; I cannot raise my hands to hurt or bless, But I with every action must conspire; To show me there how little I possess, And yet that little more than I desire; May each new act my new allegiance prove, Till in thy perfect love I ever live and move. I looked to find a man who walked with God, Like to the Jewish patriarch of old; Though gladdened millions on his footstool trod, Yet none with him did such sweet converse hold; I heard the wind in low complaint go by That none its melodies like him could hear; Day unto day spoke wisdom from on high, Yet none like David turned a willing ear; God walked alone unhonored through the earth; Far him no heart-built temple open stood, The soul forgetful of her nobler birth Had hewn him loftly [lofty??] shrines of stone and wood, And left unfinished and in ruins still The only temple he delights to fill. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

November 10, Saturday/11, Sunday: Waldo Emerson to his journal:

My brave Henry Thoreau walked with me to Walden this P.M. and complained of the proprietors who compelled him to whom as much as to any the whole world belonged, to walk in a strip of road & crowded him out of all the rest of God’s earth. he must not get over the fence; but to the building of that fence he was no party. Suppose, he said, some great proprietor, before he was born, had bought up the whole globe. So had he been hustled out of nature. Not having been privy to any of these arrangements he does not feel called on to consent to them & so cuts fishpoles in the woods without asking who has a better title to the wood than he. I defended of course the good Institution as a scheme not good but the best that could be hit on for making the woods & waters & fields available to Wit & Worth, & for restraining the bold bad man. At all events, I begged him, having this maggot of Freedom & Humanity in his brain, to write it out into good poetry & so clear himself of it. He replied, that he feared that that was not the best way; that in doing justice to the thought, the man did not always do justice to himself: the poem ought to sing itself: if the man took too much pains with the expression he was not any longer the Idea himself. I acceded & confessed that this was the tragedy of Art that the Artist was at the expense of the Man; & hence, in the first age, as they tell, the Sons of God printed no epics, carved no stone, painted no picture, built no railroad; for the sculpture, the poetry, the music, & architecture, were in the Man. And truly Bolts & Bars do not seem to me the most exalted or exalting of our institutions. And what other spirit reigns in our intellectual works? We have literary property. The very recording of a thought betrays a distrust that there is any more or much more as good for us. If we felt that the Universe was ours, that we dwelled in eternity & advance into all wisdom we should be less covetous of these sparks & cinders. Why should we covetously build a St Peter’s, if we have the seeing Eye which beheld all the radiance of beauty & majesty in the matted grass & the overarching boughs? Why should a man spend years upon the carving an Apollo who looked Apollos into the landscape with every glance he threw? HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

November 12, Monday: A note from Waldo Emerson invited Henry Thoreau to a picnic with the ladies at the base of Fair Haven cliff. Specifically, Thoreau was to bring his flute.20 H.G.O. Blake was there, visiting Emerson, and of course he and Thoreau knew each other from their years at Harvard College, but it does not seem that Blake was cultivating Thoreau at this point in his life.

20.At this point Thoreau was beginning to use his father’s flute of fruitwood, brass, and ivory which is now on display in Concord Museum, although his father did not formally present him with the flute until 1845. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November 18, Sunday: Waldo Emerson to his journal, in a comment that probably had to do with Thoreau and may have had to do with something that happened at the picnic on November 12th:

The manners of young men who are still engaged heart & soul in uttering their Protest against society as they find it, are perchance disagreeable; their whole being seems rough & unmelodious; but have a little patience. And do not exaggerate the offence of that particular objection which with such undue and absurd dogmatism they make every day from morn till dewy eve. The institutions of society come across each ingenuous & original soul in some different point. One feels the jar in Marriage; one in Property; one in Money; one in Church; one in social Conventions; one in Slavery; one in War; each feels it in some one & a different point according to his own circumstance & history & for a long time does not see that it is a central falsehood which he is contending against, & that his protest against a particular superficial falsehood will surely ripen with time & insight into a deeper & Universal grudge.

Oakley, the estate of Harrison Gray Otis

November 28, Wednesday: Henry Thoreau wrote to Charles Stearns Wheeler from Concord, asking him to deliver a lecture at the Concord Lyceum toward the middle of December. Concord Nov. 28th 1838. Friend Wheeler, Does it jump with your inclinations and arrangements to read a lecture before our Lyceum on the second or third week of December? Mr. Frost informs me that to such date we are supplied, and no further— So, concluding that you are not lacking in bowels of compassion I have ventured to indite this epistle. We must trouble you to say definitely on which, of in either of the above evenings or HDT WHAT? INDEX

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on any other, you will do us this favor. If you chance meet any one in the course [] of the winter, who is desirous to express his thoughts publicly, will you please suggest our town? From yr. Classmate Henry D. Thoreau (one of the Curators) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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WINTER 1838/1839

Winter: Two months after the Alcott family had been forced to move to Boston’s South End, Abba Alcott, pregnant for the 6th time, had a 2d miscarriage. She was so near death that her doctor resided at the Alcott home for two weeks. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Lecture Season: The 10th course of lectures offered by the Salem Lyceum consisted of:

The Salem Lyceum — 10th Season George Catlin The Character, Customs, Costumes, &c. of the North American Indians (six lectures in all) Jared Sparks Causes of the American Revolution Hubbard Winslow The Sun C.H. Brewster The Sources of National Wealth Charles T. Torrey of Salem Common School Education Ephraim Peabody The Capacity of the Human Mind for Culture and Improvement Henry K. Oliver of Salem The Honey Bee Robert C. Winthrop Popular Education Professor Adams Geology Simon Greenleaf The Legal Rights of Women Henry Ware, Jr. Instinct Joshua H. Ward of Salem Life of Mohammed Henry W. Kinsman Life and Times of Oliver Cromwell Abel L. Peirson of Salem Memoirs of Count Rumford Convers [Converse??] Francis The Practical Man John Lewis Russell of Salem The Poetry of Natural History John Wayland of Salem The Progress of Democracy Alexander H. Everett The Discovery of America by the Northmen Samuel Osgood The Satanic School of Literature and its Reform Horace Mann, Sr. The Education of Children HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Lecture Season: The 10th course of lectures offered by the Salem Lyceum consisted of:

1838-1839 1838-1839

Winter: Here is a view of the Cherokee “Trail of Tears” created by Robert Lindneux in 1942, in the Woolaroc Museum at Bartlesville, Oklahoma:

As an expression of US national government and state government racial policy, strolling Indians21 were herded by the US Cavalry under General Winfield Scott from their South Carolina and Georgia farms to what is now northeastern Oklahoma, so that white settlers could seize these farms. After a week of agonizing in his journal over whether it would be seemly for him, Waldo Emerson write a letter to the President, expressing himself as opposed to this policy. Of 18,000 Cherokees who began the enforced trek without provisions, 4,000 died of exposure and starvation along this trail. Others, attempting to hide out in caves in the mountains of their homeland, were hunted down. The disobedient were executed by firing squads under US Cavalry supervision, such execution squads being –as a matter of US strategy– made up exclusively of hired Cherokees. This was to become known as the Cherokee nation’s Trail of Tears. One of my great-great-great- great grandfathers, Buff Sharpe, chucking this whole scene after his father had surrendered and had been executed by firing squad, relocated to the “Indian Territories” then being reconstituted in Indiana. At that time these territories were supposed to include only the part of Indiana below the “National Highway” that ran through Indianapolis and Terre Haute, because white intrusives had been playing a negotiation game of “half of yours for me and half for you” and then again “half of yours for me and half for you,” and all the northern half of the Indian Territories of Indiana had already been reclassified and white settlements there legitimated after the fact. Buff Sharpe sought, unsuccessfully, to legitimate himself by marrying, or cohabiting with, a white woman.22 TRAIL OF TEARS

21. Cf. Chapter I of WALDEN. 22. As an interesting little aside to our racist American culture, if you haven’t already realized this by reading the story I have told of the West Point graduate Captain Seth Eastman and his local or squaw wife Lucy “Stands Like a Spirit” Eastman at Fort Snelling and his local daughter Mary Nancy Eastman, it happens to be a real big deal whether it is a man of color marrying a white woman –which is terribly shameful for whites because this woman can only be some slut who has been forced to marry down due to unnatural sexual lusts or general unworthiness– or whether it is a white man consenting to shack up with a woman of color, which is not so terrible because whites can always regard this as an arrangement of convenience and its not so bad for a man to satisfy lusts as for a woman to have lusts (and he can walk away from his half-breed spawn later when he starts a “real” family). And thus it was that in my family a few years ago I caught my own sister, living near Washington DC, telling her children that one of our ancestors was an “Indian Princess”! She was really shaken up when I hollered at her for unconsciously rewriting our genealogy in her mind in such a manner as to make it more socially acceptable! HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

DECEMBER 1838

December: At some point in 1837 Margaret Fuller had accepted an offer of $1,000.00/year from Rhode Island, and had left the Temple School of Bronson Alcott in Boston, where things were on a downward spiral due to extremely hostile reactions from Boston parents, to teach at Providence’s Greene Street School. (Remember that a year prior to this Thoreau’s position at Concord’s Central Grammar School, where he was to supervise two male teachers making $100.00/year and two female teachers making $40.00/year in a school having over 300 students as well as himself teach 100 boys, had been worth only half that $1,000.00/year despite the fact that he possessed a college diploma! — Fuller’s salary alone is enough to indicate that not only were the demands to be made on her in Rhode Island to be extreme, but also that for some reason the situation there must have been dicey.) By this point, in December, exhausted, she explained to her girls that she simply must resign her position. She wrote about this, that “I have behaved much too well for some time past; it has spoiled my peace.… Isolation is necessary to me, as to others. Yet I keep on ‘fulfilling all my duties,’ as the technical phrase is, except to myself.”

December: “Wrote an essay on Sound and Silence.” In the course of this essay Henry Thoreau quoted from Thomas Gray.23

Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Thoreau’s most recent biographer, has charged that the essay, which eventually became the ending of WEEK, was “dogged by a persistent, mechanical perversity of paradox.” A good book is the plectrum with which our silent lyres are struck– In all epics, when, after breathless attention, we come to the significant words “he said”– then especially our inmost man is addressed. — — We not unfrequently refer the interest which belongs to our own unwritten sequel — to the written and comparatively lifeless page. Of all valuable books this same sequel makes and indispensable part– It is the author’s aim to say, once and emphatically, “he said” This is the most the book maker can attain to. If he make his volume a foil whereon the waves of silence may break, it is well. It is not so much the sighing of the blast, as that pause, as Grey expresses it, “When the gust is recollecting itself,” that thrills us, and is infinitely grander than the importunate howlings of the storm.24

23. Thomas Gray. POEMS OF MR. GRAY, TO WHICH ARE ADDED MEMOIRS OF HIS LIFE AND WRITINGS, BY WILLIAM MASON. York: A. Ward, 1778. Volume IV, 60. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December: Henry Thoreau was definitely aware of the existence of the Magicicada cicada swarms, for in his manuscript for “Moonlight,” after the comments “Every melodious sound is the ally of Silence — a help and not a hindrance to abstraction and “Certain sounds more than others have found favor with the poets only as foils to silence.,” he inserted Henri Estienne II’s “Anacreon’s Ode to the Cicada” from CARMINUM POETARUM 25 NOUEM, published in 1554. Anacreon’s Ode to the Cicada

We pronounce thee happy, cicada, For on the tops of the trees, Sipping a little dew Like any king thou singest. For thine are they all, Whatever thou seest in the fields, And whatever the woods bear. Thou art the friend of the husbandmen. In no respect injuring any one; And thou art honored among men, Sweet prophet of summer. The muses love thee, And Phoebus himself loves thee, And has given thee a shrill song; Age does not wrack thee, Thou skilful – earth-born – song-loving, Unsuffering – bloodless one; Almost thou art like the gods.

24.The poet W.H. Auden has in 1962 brought forward a snippet from this as:

THE VIKING BOOK OF APHORISMS, A PERSONAL SELECTION BY W.H. AUDEN...

Pg Topic Aphorism Selected by Auden out of Thoreau

278 Writers and Readers It is the author’s aim to say once and emphatically, “He said.”

25. An inclusion Thoreau would suppress either because he had transferred it to NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS as a comment on insects or while he was in the process of transforming this into the ending of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. This is the person in the same generation of the Genevan publishing family Étienne who had published, in 1572, the TLG which would have been utilized by Thoreau and which would still be in use into the 19th Century. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

You will note that he would not have been doing this because he had been listening to the cicadas, because this is the wrong season of the year for the cicada swarm and also because he hasn’t heard the singing of the 17- year cicada since the late spring of 1826, at which point he had been but 8 years old. He never mentions that he remembers having heard it then, and, when this phenomenal New England swarming occurs again in the late spring of 1843, he still makes no entry in his journal. I’ve been trying to figure out why Thoreau, who as a 1st-order approximation seems always to have been interested in anything and everything, didn’t pay particular attention to this every-17th-year swarming of the cicada. These swarm years have of course been being documented, since they were already regular like clockwork in the days of the Pilgrims. It seems to be some sort of neural circuit in the cicada nymph’s subesophageal ganglion that ticks off the cycles of warmth and cold until it reaches 17 seasons. Then a different system, perhaps partly based on temperature and partly on pheromones, kicks in to determine the precise day and hour of the venturing aboveground for purposes of mating. The reproductive strategy followed here, of course, is that of overwhelming predatory birds with food, so that they are already gorged and so that there are still a plenty of insects left to attract one another through their fiddling, and mate, and drop the eggs that will create the next generation of nymphs to spend 17 years sucking on their tree roots.

December 2, Sunday: Thomas Carlyle wrote to Waldo Emerson about the American publication of two volumes of his MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS: To my two young Friends Henry S. McKean (be so good as write these names more indisputably for me) and Charles Stearns Wheeler, in particular, I will beg you to express emphatically my gratitude; they have stood by me with right faithfulness, and made the correctest printing; a great service: had I known that there were such eyes and heads acting in behalf of me there, I would have scraped out the Editorial blotches too (notes of admiration, dashes, “we thinks” &c &c, common in Jeffrey’s time in the Edinr Review) and London misprints; which are almost the only deformities that remain now. It is extremely correct printing wherever I have looked, and many things are silently amended; it is the most fundamental service of all. MISC. ESSAYS, VOL. I MISC. ESSAYS, VOL. II HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

December 5, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson lectured in Boston.

This was lecture Number 1 of a series of ten on “Human Life,” and was entitled “The Doctrine of the Soul.”26 He had sent Jones Very a freebee ticket and had invited him to come along afterwards from the Masonic Temple to the Reverend Cyrus Bartol’s home for a session of the Transcendental Club.

Coming into Boston from Salem, Very arrived early and went first to the home of the Reverend William Ellery Channing, finding Wendell Phillips and the Reverend James Freeman Clarke there and proceeding to expound for three hours with the elderly Reverend Channing listened patiently and carefully and sympathetically. Channing’s conclusion was that those who had presumed Very to have lost his Reason were mistaken, as what he had lost was merely his Senses.The relationship between Unitarian ministers and anti-slavery advocates THE LIST OF LECTURES

cannot be understood unless one takes class differences into account: They were gentlemen; they occupied a high position in the community; they belonged to a privileged order.... With the solitary exception of Wendell Phillips, who was regarded as an 26. Summaries of the lectures are in Cabot, Volume II, pages 733-737. The net receipts for the series would be $461.92 HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

aristocratic demagogue, the Abolitionists were poor, humble, despised people, of no influence; men one could not ask to dine.27 In fact, the class segregation was so manifest that there is only one occasion on which the Reverend William Ellery Channing and William Lloyd Garrison were in the same room at the same time, and that was when they encountered one another quite by accident at the meeting of a legislative committee. One of the biographers of Channing, John W. Chadwick, has referred to his persistent refusal to have anything to do with such people as “the most inexplicable feature of his antislavery career, and the most unfortunate.”

December 6, Thursday: French forces attacked out of San Juan de Ulúa into the port of Veracruz, devastating the Mexican troops and the town itself.

Bernardino Fernández de Velasco Enríquez de Guzmán y López Pacheco, Duke of Frias replaced Narciso Heredia y Begines de los Ríos, conde de Ofalia as prime minister of Spain.

Waldo Emerson began a series of lectures on “Human Life” in the Masonic Temple at Tremont Place in Boston (the series would end abruptly on February 20th because of a “pest of a cold”).

27. Octavius Brooks Frothingham’s BOSTON UNITARIANISM, 1820-1850. NY, 1890, pages 196-7. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

December 10, Monday: Senator Daniel Webster wrote from Boston to John P. Hine in New Hampton, New Hampshire, wishing him well with his invention and informing him that although he would be glad to be of assistance he would not be able to advance funds.28

Sam Houston turned over the Presidency of the State of Texas to Vice-President Mirabeau Lamar after two years — two years during which he had stabilized the currency, secured the safety of the borders, and gained recognition by the United States of America.

Bronson Alcott analyzed the case of Jones Very:

Is he insane? If so, there yet linger glimpses of wisdom in his memory. He is insane with God; diswitted in the contemplation of the holiness of Divinity. He distrusts intellect; he would have living in the concrete, without the interposition of the meddling, analytic head. Curiosity he deems impious. He would have no one stop to account to himself for what he has done, deeming this hiatus of doing, a suicidal act of the profane mind. Intellect, as intellect, he deems the author of all error. Living, not thinking, he regards as the worship meet for the soul. This is mysticism in its highest form.

28. Stimpert, James. A GUIDE TO THE CORRESPONDENCE IN THE CHARLES WESLEY SLACK MANUSCRIPT COLLECTION: 1848-1885. Kent State University, Library, Special Collections HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

1839

January February March Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 1 2 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 27 28 29 30 31 24 25 26 27 28 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 April May June Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 1 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 28 29 30 26 27 28 29 30 31 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 July August September Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 28 29 30 31 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 29 30 October November December Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 27 28 29 30 31 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 29 30 31

Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1837 (æt. 20)

Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1838 (æt. 20-21)

Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1839 (æt. 21-22)

Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1840 (æt. 22-23)

Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1841 (æt. 23-24)

Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1842 (æt. 24-25) HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal Volume for 1845-1846 (æt. 27-29)

Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal Volume for 1845-1847 (æt. 27-30)

Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal Volume for 1837-1847 (æt. 20-30)

THE RHODE-ISLAND ALMANAC FOR 1839. By Isaac Bickerstaff. Providence, Rhode Island: Hugh H. Brown. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Apparently in this year Henry Thoreau was musing on some loose scraps of paper, and then left these scraps lying loose between the pages of his journal (this unfinished jotting seems to be the sole surviving passage in which he was contemplating the fate of the Cherokee nation):

The future reader of history will associate this generation with the red man in his thoughts, and give it credit for some sympathy with that race. Our history will have some copper tints and reflections, at least, and be read as through an Indian-summer haze; but such were not our associations. But the Indian is absolutely forgotten but by some persevering poets. The white man has commenced a new era. What do our anniversaries commemorate but white men’s exploits: For Indian deeds there must be an Indian memory; the white man will remember his own only. We have forgotten their hostility as well as friendship. Who can realize that, within the memory of this generation, the remnant of an ancient and dusky race of mortals called the Stockbridge Indians, within the limits of this very State, furnished a company for the war, on the condition only that they should not be expected to fight white man’s fashion, or to train, but Indian fashion. And, occasionally their wigwams are seen on the banks of this very stream still, solitary and inobvious, like the cabins of the muskrats in the meadows. They seem like a race who have exhausted the secretes of nature, tanned with age, while this young and still fair Saxon slip, on whom the sun has not long shone, is but commencing its career...... Their memory is in harmony with the russet hue of the fall of the year.

TRAIL OF TEARS HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

For the Indian there is no safety but in the plow. If he would not be pushed into the Pacific, he must seize hold of a plow-tail and let go his bow and arrow, his fish-spear and rifle. This the only Christianity that will save him. His fate says sternly to him, “Forsake the hunter’s life and enter into the agricultural, the second, state of man. Root yourselves a little deeper in the soil, if you would continue to be the occupants of the county.” But I confess I have no little sympathy with the Indians and hunter men. They seem to me a distinct and equally respectable people, born to wander and to hunt, and not to be inoculated with the twilight civilization of the white man. Father LeJeune, a French missionary, affirmed “That the Indians were superior in intellect to the French peasantry of that time,” and advised “that laborers should be sent from France in order to work for the Indians.” The Indian population with the present boundaries of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut has been estimated not to have exceeded 40,000 “before the epidemic disease which preceded the landing of the Pilgrims” and it was far more dense here than elsewhere; yet they had no more land than they wanted. The present white population is more than 1,300,000 and two thirds of the land is unimproved. The Indian, perchance, has not made up his mind to some things which the white man has consented to; he has not, in all respects, stooped so low; and hence, though he too loves food and warmth, he draws his tattered blanket about him and follows his fathers, rather than barter his birthright. He dies, and no doubt his Genius judges well for him. But he is not worsted in the fight; he is not destroyed. He only migrates beyond the Pacific to more spacious and happier hunting grounds. A race of hunters can never withstand the inroads of a race of husbandmen. The latter burrow in the night into their country and undermine them; and {even} if the hunter is brave enough to resist, his game is timid and has already fled. The rifle alone would never exterminate it, but the plow is a more fatal weapon. It wins the country inch by inch and holds all it gets. What detained the Cherokee so long was the 2023 plows which that people possessed: and if they had grasped their handles more firmly, they would never have been driven beyond the Mississippi. No sense of justice will ever restrain the farmer from plowing up the land which is only hunted over by his neighbors. No hunting field was ever well-fenced and surveyed and its bounds accurately marked unless it were an English park. It is a property not held by the hunter so much as by the game which roams it, and was never well secured by warranty deeds. The farmer in his treaties says only, or means only “So far will I plow this summer” for he has not seed corn to plant more; but every summer the seed is grown which plants a new strip of the forrest. The African will survive, for he is docile and is patiently learning his trade and dancing at his labor; but the Indian does not often dance, unless it be the war dance. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

The above is material in regard to which I would urge caution. One finds it on the internet as if it were being quoted from Thoreau’s journal, which it is not. It seems, instead, to be hardly more sophisticated than the following popular remarks:

“Ye see, Hinnissy, th’ Indyun is bound f’r to give way to th’ onward march iv white civilization. You ’an me, Hinnissy, is th’ white civilization... The’ on’y hope f’r th’ Indyun is to put his house on rollers, an’ keep a team hitched to it, an’, whin he sees a white man, to start f’r th’ settin’ sun.” — Finley Peter Dunne, OBSERVATIONS BY MR. DOOLEY, New York, 1902 HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Professor Joseph-Héliodore-Sagesse-Vertu Garcin de Tassy’s major work TARIKH-E-ADABIYAT-E-HINDIVI WA HINDUSTANI. The initial volume of his HISTOIRE DE LA LITTÉRATURE HINDOUI et hindoustani was published at Paris under the auspices of the Oriental Translation Committee of Great Britain and Ireland and dedicated A SA MAJESTÉ LA REINE DE LA GRANDE-BRETAGNE. From this Henry Thoreau would on September 11, 1849 extract snippets pertaining to Kabîr and to Mîr Camar uddîn Mast:

M. GARCIN DE TASSY, I

On prétend que les vers de Kabîr ont quatre sens différents: l’illusion (mâyâ), l’esprit (âtmâ), l’intellect (man), et la doctrine exotérique des Védas.

WALDEN: Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and PEOPLE OF praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of WALDEN men asleep, which they express by snoring. Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit. Some would find fault with the morning-red, if they ever got up early enough. “They pretend,” as I hear, “that the verses of Kabir have four different senses; illusion, spirit, intellect, and the exoteric doctrine of the Vedas;” but in this part of the world it is considered a ground for complaint if a man’s writings admit of more than one interpretation. While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?

KABÎR

The source which reported this “pretending” (exegeting?) was cited in a footnote of the HISTOIRE DE LA LITTÉRATURE HINDOUI et Hindoustani as Horace Hayman Wilson’s ASIATIC RESEARCHES, Volume XVI, page 62. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Thoreau also would render Mîr Camar uddîn Mast’s

Etant assis, parcourir la région du monde spirituel: j’ai eu cet avantage dans les livres. Être enviré par une seule coupe de vin: j’ai éprouvé ce plaisir lorsque j’ai bu la liqueur des doctrines ésotériques.

as:

WALDEN: My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, PEOPLE OF but to serious reading, than a university; and though I was WALDEN beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time on to linen paper. Says the poet Mîr Camar Uddîn Mast, “Being seated to run through the region of the spiritual world; I have had this advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines.” I kept Homer’s Iliad on my table through the summer, though I looked at his page only now and then. Incessant labor with my hands, at first, for I had my house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same time, made more study impossible. Yet I sustained myself by the prospect of such reading in future. I read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived.

MÎR CAMAR UDDÎN MAST JOHN CHARLES FRÉMONT HOMER HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

The full selection on Mîr Camar uddîn Mast from which Thoreau was here extracting, on pages 331-2 29 of Volume I of this HISTOIRE DE LA LITTÉRATURE HINDOUI et Hindoustani, reads as follows:

Mîr Camar uddîn Mast1, de Delhi, descendait par sa mère du saïyid Jalâl Bukhârî Mîr. Il retira des avantages littéraires de la société de Mîr Nûr uddîn Nawed et de Mîr Schams uddîn Faquîr, et fut initié par eux aux difficultés de la versification. Il fut un des disciples du spiritualiste le maulawî Fakhr uddîn, et se dévoua à la vie spirituelle, en sorte que Bénî Narâyan le nomme faquîr. Il a écrit beaucoup de vers hindoustani et persans; il avait une grande célérité de conception; il s’énonçait avec esprit et purité de langage. En 1196 de l’hérige (1781-1782), il était attaché à l’honorable M. Jones.2 Il était très-enclin à l’amour, et faisait beacoup attention à la beauté. Alî Ibrâhîm cite deux pages et demie de ses vers hindoustani, et Bénî Narâyan, un gazal mystique qui me paraît très-geau dans l’original. Je joins ici la traduction de quelques hémistiches de ce poëme: Aujourd’hui j’ai vu en songe ma bien- aimée; j’ai vu la lumière de Dieu sous le voile. Moi qui suis néant, m’unir à son essence: j’ai vu ce spectacle pareil à celui de la bulle d’eau qui se perd dans l’Océan..... Étant assis, parcourir la région du monde spirituel: j’ai eu cet avantage dans les livres. Étre enivré par une seule coup de vin: j’ai éprouvé ce plaisir lorsque j’ai bu la liqueur des doctrines ésotériques. J’ignore si ce poëte est le même dont parle Mushafî, et qu’il donne comme disciple de Mîr Amânî Açad, et comme un des habitués de ses réunions littéraires.

1. mst [these characters are printed from right to left in Farsi script] ivre. 2. Probablement le célèbre Sir W. Jones.

29. Be aware that when the 2d edition of this work by M. Garcin de-Tassy would appear in 1847, the text as “revue, corigée, et considérablement augmentée” would be not at all similar to the above. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Thomas Mayo Brewer edited a new edition of Alexander Wilson’s AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGY; OR, THE NATURAL HISTORY OF BIRDS OF THE UNITED STATES, adding a synopsis of all the birds then known as North American, plus a list of newly classified birds.

AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGY

In its 1852 edition (New York: H.S. Samuels), this would be in the library of Henry Thoreau.

Anonymous publication of Philip James Bailey’s FESTUS; A POEM by W. Pickering of London. The success of this long poem would be immediate, on both sides of the Atlantic. Although this was the edition which would be consulted by Henry Thoreau, here we are presenting electronically instead the American edition of 1845, simply because it is what has been made available by Google Books. (Hopefully, this is virtually identical with the English edition — although I have not verified that this is indeed the case.) Thoreau would copy portions into his Literary Notebook and would refer to it at two points in A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. FESTUS; A POEM HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

A WEEK: There are few books which are fit to be remembered in our PEOPLE OF wisest hours, but the Iliad is brightest in the serenest days, A WEEK and embodies still all the sunlight that fell on Asia Minor. No modern joy or ecstasy of ours can lower its height or dim its lustre, but there it lies in the east of literature, as it were the earliest and latest production of the mind. The ruins of Egypt oppress and stifle us with their dust, foulness preserved in cassia and pitch, and swathed in linen; the death of that which never lived. But the rays of Greek poetry struggle down to us, and mingle with the sunbeams of the recent day. The statue of Memnon is cast down, but the shaft of the Iliad still meets the sun in his rising. “Homer is gone; and where is Jove? and where The rival cities seven? His song outlives Time, tower, and god, — all that then was, save Heaven.” So too, no doubt, Homer had his Homer, and Orpheus his Orpheus, in the dim antiquity which preceded them. The mythological system of the ancients, and it is still the mythology of the moderns, the poem of mankind, interwoven so wonderfully with their astronomy, and matching in grandeur and harmony the architecture of the heavens themselves, seems to point to a time when a mightier genius inhabited the earth. But, after all, man is the great poet, and not Homer nor Shakespeare; and our language itself, and the common arts of life, are his work. Poetry is so universally true and independent of experience, that it does not need any particular biography to illustrate it, but we refer it sooner or later to some Orpheus or Linus, and after ages to the genius of humanity and the gods themselves.

PHILIP JAMES BAILEY HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

In Worcester, John Downes worked as an engraver for John Warner Barber, who in this year was publishing his HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS. Downes was doing many natural history engravings: the “winter wren,” white-

breasted nuthatch, and other birds, engravings for A SYSTEM OF NATURAL HISTORY (Brattleboro VT, 1834), etc. Among the woodcuts Downes executed for Barber was a view of Monument Square from the site of the present Colonial Inn. Entitled “CENTRAL PART OF CONCORD, MASS.,” the view was “Drawn by J.W. Barber — Engraved by J. Downes, Worcester” (Harding’s DAYS, top illustration opposite page 429). HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

The Thoreaus had left their “house on the square” only two years before this engraving was 1st published. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

In this year the 7th edition of John Hayward’s THE NEW ENGLAND GAZETTEER was issued. This would be the edition found in the personal library of Henry Thoreau, that is now in Special Collections at the Concord Free Public Library. Thoreau would refer extensively to this resource in A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, in THE MAINE WOODS, and in CAPE COD, as well as mentioning it in his correspondence and in his journal.

NEW ENGLAND GAZETTEER

PEOPLE OF A WEEK HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839 HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

A WEEK: According to the Gazetteer, the descent of Amoskeag Falls, which are the most considerable in the Merrimack, is fifty-four feet in half a mile. We locked ourselves through here with much ado, surmounting the successive watery steps of this river’s staircase in the midst of a crowd of villagers, jumping into the canal to their amusement, to save our boat from upsetting, and consuming much river- water in our service. Amoskeag, or Namaskeak, is said to mean “great fishing-place.” It was hereabouts that the Sachem Wannalancet resided. GOOKIN Tradition says that his tribe, when at war with the Mohawks, concealed their provisions in the cavities of the rocks in the upper part of these falls. The Indians, who hid their provisions in these holes, and affirmed “that God had cut them out for that purpose,” understood their origin and use better than the Royal Society, who in their Transactions, in the last century, speaking of these very holes, declare that “they seem plainly to be artificial.” Similar “pot-holes” may be seen at the Stone Flume on this river, on the Ottaway, at Bellows’ Falls on the Connecticut, and in the limestone rock at Shelburne Falls on Deerfield River in Massachusetts, and more or less generally about all falls. Perhaps the most remarkable curiosity of this kind in New England is the well-known Basin on the Pemigewasset, one of the head-waters of this river, twenty by thirty feet in extent and proportionably deep, with a smooth and rounded brim, and filled with a cold, pellucid, and greenish water. At Amoskeag the river is divided into many separate torrents and trickling rills by the rocks, and its volume is so much reduced by the drain of the canals that it does not fill its bed. There are many pot-holes here on a rocky island which the river washes over in high freshets. As at Shelburne Falls, where I first observed them, they are from one foot to four or five in diameter, and as many in depth, perfectly round and regular, with smooth and gracefully curved brims, like goblets. Their origin is apparent to the most careless observer. A stone which the current has washed down, meeting with obstacles, revolves as on a pivot where it lies, gradually sinking in the course of centuries deeper and deeper into the rock, and in new freshets receiving the aid of fresh stones, which are drawn into this trap and doomed to revolve there for an indefinite period, doing Sisyphus-like penance for stony sins, until they either wear out, or wear through the bottom of their prison, or else are released by some revolution of nature. There lie the stones of various sizes, from a pebble to a foot or two in diameter, some of which have rested from their labor only since the spring, and some higher up which have lain still and dry for ages, —we noticed some here at least sixteen feet above the present level of the water,— while others are still revolving, and enjoy no respite at any season. In one instance, at Shelburne Falls, they have worn quite through the rock, so that a portion of the river leaks through in anticipation of the fall. Some of these pot-holes at Amoskeag, in a very hard brown-stone, had an oblong, cylindrical stone of the same material loosely fitting them. One, as much as fifteen feet deep and seven or eight in diameter, which was worn quite through to the water, had a huge rock of the same material, smooth but of irregular form, lodged in it. Everywhere there were the rudiments or the wrecks of a dimple in the rock; the rocky shells of whirlpools. As if by force of example and sympathy after so many lessons, the rocks, the hardest material, had been endeavoring to whirl or flow into the forms of the most fluid. The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

THE MAINE WOODS: I found my companions where I had left them, on the side of the peak, gathering the mountain cranberries, which filled every crevice between the rocks, together with blueberries, which had a spicier flavor the higher up they grew, but were not the less agreeable to our palates. When the country is settled, and roads are made, these cranberries will perhaps become an article of commerce. From this elevation, just on the skirts of the clouds, we could overlook the country, west and south, for a hundred miles. There it was, the State of Maine, which we had seen on the map, but not much like that, — immeasurable forest for the sun to shine on, that eastern stuff we hear of in Massachusetts. No clearing, no house. It did not look as if a solitary traveller had cut so much as a walking-stick there. Countless lakes, — Moosehead in the southwest, forty miles long by ten wide, like a gleaming silver platter at the end of the table; Chesuncook, eighteen long by three wide, without an island; Millinocket, on the south, with its hundred islands; and a hundred others without a name; and mountains also, whose names, for the most part, are known only to the Indians. The forest looked like a firm grass sward, and the effect of these lakes in its midst has been well compared, by one who has since visited this same spot, to that of a “mirror broken into a thousand fragments, and wildly scattered over the grass, reflecting the full blaze of the sun.” It was a large farm for somebody, when cleared. According to the Gazetteer, which was printed before the boundary question was settled, this single Penobscot county, in which we were, was larger than the whole State of Vermont, with its fourteen counties; and this was only a part of the wild lands of Maine. We are concerned now, however, about natural, not political limits. We were about eighty miles, as the bird flies, from Bangor, or one hundred and fifteen, as we had rode, and walked, and paddled. We had to console ourselves with the reflection that this view was probably as good as that from the peak, as far as it went; and what were a mountain without its attendant clouds and mists? Like ourselves, neither Bailey nor Jackson had obtained a clear view from the summit.

JACOB WHITMAN BAILEY DR. CHARLES T. JACKSON HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

CAPE COD: Captain John Sears, of Suet, was the first person in this country who obtained pure marine salt by solar evaporation alone; though it had long been made in a similar way on the coast of France, and elsewhere. This was in the year 1776, at which time, on account of the war, salt was scarce and dear. The Historical Collections contain an interesting account of his experiments, which we read when we first saw the roofs of the salt-works. Barnstable county is the most favorable locality for these works on our northern coast, there is so little fresh water here emptying into ocean. Quite recently there were about two millions of dollars invested in this business here. But now the Cape is unable to compete with the importers of salt and the manufacturers of it at the West, and, accordingly, her salt-works are fast going to decay. From making salt, they turn to fishing more than ever. The Gazetteer will uniformly tell you, under the head of each town, how many go a-fishing, and the value of the fish and oil taken, how much salt is made and used, how many are engaged in the coasting trade, how many in manufacturing palm- leaf hats, leather, boots, shoes, and tinware, and then it has done, and leaves you to imagine the more truly domestic manufactures which are nearly the same all the world over. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Samuel Cunard founded a steamship line.

An article on the cruelty Richard Henry Dana, Jr. had observed toward seamen on sailing vessels was published in the American Jurist.

RICHARD HENRY DANA, JR.

Theodore Dwight Weld, evangelist-abolitionist, published AMERICAN SLAVERY AS IT IS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

“It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God.” — Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141

The issue of refusing to vote was coming to the forefront among abolitionists. Maria W. Chapman estimated, however, that only one in a hundred 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 Arthur Tappan, the president of the society, argued that “To put a woman on the committee with men is contrary to the usages of civilized society.”

FEMINISM From this year until 1842, Mrs. Chapman would be editor of the abolitionist journal, Non-Resistant. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Louisa May Alcott, age 6 and all arms and legs in beautiful downtown Boston, was such an active child that she would roll her hoop all the way around the Boston Common (as a teenager she would be able to hike 20 miles in 5 hours and then party).

MAPS OF BOSTON

Beginning in this year and continuing for a decade, the French silhouette30 artist Auguste Edouart toured the US. In all probability he cut some 10,000 silhouettes during this period. New-York was offered its initial public display of Daguerreotypes.

Here, for background, is a sample ad for an itinerant silhouette cutter before the advent of photography: Correct Profile Likenesses, taken from 8 o’clock in the morning until 9 in the evening. M Chapman respectfully informs the Ladies and Gentlemen ... that he takes correct Profiles, reduced to any size, two of one person for 25 cents, neatly cut on a beautiful paper. He also paints and shades them, if required, for 75 cents; specimens of which may be seen at his room. Of those persons who are not satisfied with their Profiles, previous to leaving the room, no pay shall be required. He makes use of a machine universally allowed by the best judges to be

30. The art form had been named in honor of a French minister of finance with a reputation for being a cheapskate, a M. Silhouette. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839 HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

more correct than any ever before invented.

September 3, 1839: Plum Island, at the mouth of this river to whose formation, perhaps, these very banks have sent their contribution, is a similar desert of drifting sand, of various colors, blown into graceful curves by the wind. It is a mere sand-bar exposed, stretching nine miles parallel to the coast, and, exclusive of the marsh on the inside, rarely more than half a mile wide. There are but half a dozen houses on it, and it is almost without a tree, or a sod, or any green thing with which a country-man is familiar. The thin vegetation stands half buried in sand as in drifting snow. The only shrub, the beach plum, which gives the island its name, grows but a few feet high; but this is so abundant that parties of a hundred at once come from the mainland and down the Merrimack, in September, pitch their tents, and gather the plums, which are good to eat raw and to preserve. The graceful and delicate beach pea, too, grows abundantly amid the sand, and several strange moss- like and succulent plants. The island for its whole length is scalloped into low hills, not more than twenty feet high, by the wind, and, excepting a faint trail on the edge of the marsh, is as trackless as Sahara. There are dreary bluffs of sand and valleys plowed by the wind, where you might expect to discover the bones of a caravan. Schooners come from Boston to load with the sand for masons’ uses, and in a few hours the wind obliterates all traces of their work. Yet you have only to dig a foot or two anywhere to come to fresh water; and you are surprised to learn that woodchucks abound here, and foxes are found, though you see not where they can burrow or hide themselves. I have walked down the whole length of its broad beach at low tide, at which time alone you can find a firm ground to walk on, and probably Massachusetts does not furnish a more grand and dreary walk. On the seaside there are only a distant sail and a few coots to break the grand monotony. A solitary stake HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

stuck up, or a sharper sand-hill than usual, is remarkable as a landmark for miles; while for music you hear only the ceaseless sound of the surf, and the dreary peep of the beach-birds. BEACH PLUM PLUM ISLAND

Near Litchfield, Thoreau saw an extensive desert area where sand had blown into dunes ten and twelve feet high. This recalled to his mind Plum Island, which he had visited in the past, for he thought some of this desert sand might well be borne down the Merrimack to its mouth not far from Newburyport, and there form part of that island so well known to the birding clan. Of course, Thoreau did not come nearer to Plum Island on this river trip than the junction of the Concord and Merrimack, some thirty miles away. But Thoreau’s description of Plum Island is especially interesting to bird watchers. In his GUIDE TO BIRD FINDING, Dr. Olin Sewall Pettingill, Jr., calls this one of the most famous ornithological areas of the eastern United States. Birds traveling north or south along the Atlantic coast funnel over this area, and multitudes drop down to rest and feed there. A trip to this island is particularly rewarding during the peak of shorebird migration in spring and fall. The half-dozen houses of Thoreau’s day have multiplied many times over. Nevertheless, ripe beach plums may still be picked there in September. Untracked sand, particularly in winter or after storms, may still be found. The fact that Thoreau mentioned only a few beach birds running on the sand and some coots (scoters) riding the waves behind the surf reveals clearly that his interest in birds was dormant when he visited Plum Island. C. Russell Mason, then Executive Director of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, after an early September visit to Plum Island with Dr. Roger Tory Peterson, wrote, "Every shore-bird in the book can be found on Plum Island, and as for gulls, if rare species appear on the north-east coast, they will almost surely be spotted at Plum Island." Plum Island is one of the most important areas covered by the Newburyport Christmas Bird Count. This Count is made at a time when weather is severe and one would expect bird life in that bleak area to be at a low ebb. Yet on the 1962 Count when winds blew off the ocean and the temperature scarcely rose into the thirties, when snow covered the ground and all the ponds were frozen, eighty-eight species and about twenty-eight thousand individual birds were seen. -Cruickshank, Helen Gere. THOREAU ON BIRDS (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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I don’t know, however, specifically when Thoreau would have visited Plum Island prior to his 1839 trip with his brother. If he did go there at some point in his youth, he did not camp overnight, for we know that the first night of that famous 1839 trip was his first night out-of-doors. And much later, when he mentioned Plum Island in his journal, it was without making a comment which would indicate to us that he had been there:

September 23, 1859: Met a gunner from Lynn on the beach [of Rockport MA] who had several pigeons [Passenger Pigeon Ectopistes migratorius] which he had killed in the woods by the shore. Said they had been blown off the mainland. Second, also a kingfisher. Third, what he called the “oxeye,” about size of peetweet but with a short bill and a blackish-brown crescent on breast, and wing above like peetweet’s, but no broad white mark below. Could it be Charadrius semipalmatus P Fourth, what he called a sandpiper, very white with a long bill. Was this Tringa arenaria ~ Fifth, what I took to be a solitary tattler, but possibly it was the pectoral sandpiper, which I have seen since. On the edge of the beach you see small dunes, with white or fawn-colored sandy sides, crowned with now yellowish smilax and with bayberry bushes. Just before reaching Loblolly Cove, near Thatcher’s Island, sat on a beach composed entirely of small paving-stones Iying very loose and deep. We boiled our tea for dinner on the mainland opposite Straitsmouth Island, just this side the middle of Rockport, under the lee of a boulder, using, as usual, dead bayberry bushes for fuel. This was, indeed, all we could get. They make a very quick fire, and I noticed that their smoke covered our dippers with a kind of japan which did not crock or come off nearly so much as ordinary soot. We could see the Salvages very plainly, apparently extending north and south, the Main Rock some fifteen or twenty rods long and east-northeast of Straitsmouth Island, apparently one and a half or two miles distant, with half-sunken ledges north and south of it, over which the sea was breaking in white foam. The ledges all together half a mile long. We could see from our dining-place Agamenticus, some forty miles distant in the north. Its two sides loomed thus:

so that about a third of the whole was C~-~ lifted up, while a small elevation close to it on the east, which afterward was seen to be a part of it, was wholly lifted up. Rockport well deserves its name,–several little rocky harbors protected by a breakwater, the houses at Rockport Village backing directly on the beach. At Folly Cove, a wild rocky point running north, covered with beach- grass. See now a mountain on the east of Agamenticus. Isles of Shoals too low to be seen. Probably land at Boar’s Head, seen on the west of Agamenticus, and then the coast all the way from New Hampshire to Cape Ann plainly, Newburyport included and Plum Island. Hog Island looks like a high hill on the mainland. It is evident that a discoverer, having got as far west as Agamenticus, off the coast of Maine, would in clear weather discern the coast trending southerly beyond him as far round as Cape Ann, and if he did not wish to be embayed would stand across to Cape Ann, where the Salvages would be the outmost point. At Annisquam we found ourselves in the midst of boulders scattered over bare hills and fields, such as we had seen on the ridge northerly in the morning, i. e., they abound chiefly in the central and northwesterly part of the Cape. This was the most peculiar scenery of the Cape. We struck inland southerly, just before sundown, and boiled our tea with bayberry bushes by a swamp on the hills, in the midst of these great boulders, about halfway to Gloucester, having carried our water a quarter of a mile, from a swamp, spilling a part in threading swamps and getting over rough places. Two oxen feeding in the swamp came up to reconnoitre our fire. We could see no house, but hills strewn with boulders, as if they had rained down, on every side, we sitting under a shelving one. When the moon rose, what had appeared like immense boulders half a mile off in the horizon now looked by contrast no larger than nutshells or buri-nut against the moon’s disk, and she was the biggest boulder of all. When we had put out our bayberry fire, we heard a squawk, and, looking up, saw five geese fly low in the twilight over our heads. We then set out to find our way to Gloucester over the hills, and saw the comet very bright in the northwest. After going astray a little in the moonlight, we fell into a road which at length conducted us to the town. As we bought our lodging and breakfast, a pound of good ship-bread, which cost seven cents, and six herring, which cost three cents, with sugar and tea, supplied us amply the rest of the two days. The selection of suitable spots to get our dinner or supper led us into interesting scenery, and it was amusing to watch the boiling of our water for tea. There is a scarcity of fresh water on the Cape, so that you must carry your water a good way in a dipper. BEACH PLUM PLUM ISLAND HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Henry Root Colman, whom Henry Thoreau would characterize in WALDEN as “the ministerial husbandman,” issued a follow-on report of the agricultural condition and resources of Massachusetts.

WALDEN: A very agricola laboriosus was I to travellers bound PEOPLE OF westward through Lincoln and Wayland to nobody knows where; they WALDEN sitting at their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins loosely hanging in festoons; I the home-staying, laborious native of the soil. But soon my homestead was out of their sight and thought. It was the only open and cultivated field for a great distance on either side of the road; so they made the most of it; and sometimes the man in the field heard more of travellers’ gossip and comment than was meant for his ear: “Beans so late! peas so late!” –for I continued to plant when others had begun to hoe,– the ministerial husbandman had not suspected it.

HENRY ROOT COLMAN THE BEANFIELD

The US Congress appropriated money out of Patent Office fees for the distribution of free seed to American farmers. (Although this was the first time the federal Congress has subsidized such a distribution, seed had been being distributed since at least 1836.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Daniel Shattuck bought the home that eventually would become the east wing of Concord’s Colonial Inn. It would be occupied in turn until 1885 by Reuben Rice, Mrs. Almira Barlow, the Tolman Family, F.S. Simonds, and many other tenants. Rice was manager of the Green Store, where the Catholic Church now stands, until he went west to work for the railroads; he would return to Concord as a town financial benefactor. (Simonds would write several histories and would wind up being quoted by Adolf Hitler, and in our own century there has been a Litt.D. named Frank Herbert Simonds (1878-1936) who has authored several Realpolitik histories, so I wonder whether F.H. Simonds might not be the son of this F.S. Simonds.)

George B. Bartlett would explain in his 1885 history CONCORD; HISTORIC, LITERARY, AND PICTURESQUE (3d Edition, Revised; Boston: D. Lotrop Company, Washington Street opposite Bromfield) that: Opposite the Library stands the old inn, at which stages running between Boston and the up-country towns used to change horses. The swing sign marked “Shepard's Tavern,” is now in the possession of Mr. R.N. Rice, who purchased the building, and has modernized it into a pleasant residence. Bigelow’s tavern, another ancient inn, stood just below, and its extensive grounds comprise a part of his fine estate. In front of his stable stood the old jail in which British prisoners were confined in 1775. Mr. Rice commenced business in the old green store which occupied the site of the Catholic church. He went to Michigan in 1846, in the service of the Michigan Central Railroad, of which he was afterwards general manager for thirteen years. In 1870, Mr. Rice built his present house, and was prominent in various extensive town improvements, including Hubbard and Thoreau streets. Other gentlemen were associated with Mr. Rice, among whom were Mr. Samuel Staples, who has for years been an authority on the subject of real estate, and has lived in town for half a century. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Lemuel Shattuck retired from the bookstore he had opened in Cambridge in 1834 in order to devote himself to public service. In this year he became a founding member of the American Statistical Association. He also began to work toward the enactment of a Massachusetts law that would require registration of all births, marriages, and deaths — a law that would be enacted in 1842. (For the birth of David Henry Thoreau in 1817, for instance, there is no public record whatever.)

The following entry was made in the Harvard College Faculty’s Book in regard to the deficiencies of senior James Russell Lowell and the tutorship of the Reverend Barzillai Frost: Voted, that Lowell, Senior, on account of continued neglect of his college duties, be suspended till the Saturday before Commencement to continue his studies with Mr. Frost in Concord ... and not to visit Cambridge during the period of his suspension. Placing a cocked pistol against his skull, Harvard Man and Class Poet Lowell feared to pull the trigger — so he began to study law. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

The port of Dunbar on the east coast of Scotland was engaged in shipbuilding, sailcloth and cordage manufacturing, herring-curing and soap making. There were an iron foundry, a steam engine works and several breweries and distilleries. In this year a 2d harbor was being built to supplement the one that had been constructed during the reign of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, and this new harbor was named in honor of Queen Victoria.

DUNBAR FAMILY

Charles T. Jackson’s THIRD ANNUAL REPORT ON THE GEOLOGY OF THE STATE OF MAINE (Augusta ME: Smith & Robinson). A copy of this book would be found in Henry Thoreau’s library — he undoubtedly read Jackson’s geological reports on Maine in preparation for his excursions to the Maine woods. Thoreau would arrange for Jackson to give a lecture at the Concord Lyceum in 1841. Jackson would write an endorsement for the family’s lead pencils — highly recommending both the hard lead ones, for engineers, and the softer lead ones, for general use.

DR. JACKSON’S 3D RPT.

The depression created by the panic of 1837 continued unabated. When they could get work, carpenters could earn $1.25 per day, but this was paid in paper money which the banks would refuse to convert into metal coins.

During this year the activities of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society brought more contributions into the anti-slavery coffers at the central Boston headquarters than any other of the branch associations.

Ephraim Merriam was again chosen representative for Concord to the General Court of Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

At this point in the development of the “lyceum” phenomenon, there were 137 lyceums operating in Massachusetts alone.

John Thoreau, Jr. wrote to a young boy about his memories of childhood Christmases in the Thoreau household, mentioning that his younger brother Henry most often had gotten the nice presents for good little boys for Christmas, he the bad things for bad little boys: When I was a little boy I was told to hang my clean stocking with those of my brother and sister in the chimney corner the night before Christmas, and that “Santa Claus,” a very good sort of sprite, who rode about in the air upon a broomstick (an odd kind of horse I think) would come down the chimney in the night, and fill our stockings if we had been good children, with dough- nuts, sugar plums and all sorts of nice things; but if we had been naughty we found in the stocking only a rotten potato, a letter and a rod. I got the rotten potato once, had the letter read to me, and was very glad that the rod put into the stocking was too short to be used.... I determined one night to sit up until morning that I might get a sight at [Santa Claus] when he came down the chimney.... I got a little cricket and sat down by the fireplace looking sharp up into the chimney, and there I sat for about an hour later than my usual bed time, I suppose, when I fell asleep and was carried off to bed before I knew anything about it. So I have never seen him, and don't know what kind of a looking fellow he was.

The outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that had begun in 1834 in the farm animals with cloven hooves (cows, pigs, sheep, and goats) on the Hungarian plains, and by 1837 had spread to Switzerland, Belgium, France, and Holland, at this point had spread also into the British Isles. The British response would be to ban all imports of susceptible livestock, and in this manner would keep their islands free of this viral infection for the remainder of the 19th Century. (The infection would, however, spread from Central Europe to the United States in 1870, and to Australia in 1872.)

Doctor Johann Lukas Schönlein (1793-1864), a disaffected student of German Naturphilosophie, attempted to find a system of natural classes within which the diseases of humans could be better understood, in the mode in which botanists had profited through the systematization of their names for the various species of plants. In 1828 he had coined the term “hemophilia,” and then in this year he applied the term “tuberculosis” to the disease which has been with us since ancient times and which had been known, after Hippocrates of Cos (460- 377BCE), as phthisis.

He applied this name because the Dutch physician Franciscus Sylvius (1614-1672) had noted the presence of small nodules in wasted cadavers, which he believed to be diseased lymph nodes, and had named these masses “tubercles.” –Despite the fact that the terms “tubercle” and “tuberculosis” had already been formed, in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

English-speaking nations within the life-span of Henry Thoreau this ailment was generally described in terms of its well-known wasting terminal effects, as the disease “consumption.” It was still commonly believed by physicians that pulmonary tuberculosis might be the result of bad heredity, or might be a form of cancer, and it was not associated with the other forms of tuberculosis (scrofula, tabes mesenterica, cold abscess, white swelling, lupus, and Pott’s disease), and the infectious and communicable nature of this infection was not yet understood. AUSTIN MEREDITH

George Sand wrote of Frédéric François Chopin: “Poor Chopin, who has had a cough since he left Paris, became worse: we sent for a doctor — two doctors — three doctors — each more stupid than the other, who started to spread the news in the island [Mallorca] that the sick man was consumptive in the last stage. As a result there was great alarm. Phthisis is rare in these climate, and is looked upon as contagious. We were regarded as plague-infested; and, furthermore, as heathen, as we did not go to the mass. The owner of the little house in which we had rented turned us out brutally, and wished to being an action against us to compel us to limewash his house, which he said we had infected. The law of the island plucked us like chickens.” Chopin himself wrote: “I have been sick as a dog the last two weeks; I caught cold in spite of 18 degrees C. of heat, roses, oranges, palms, figs and three most famous doctors on the island. One sniffed at what I spat up, the second tapped where I spat it from, the third poked about and listened how I spat it. One said I had died, the second that I am dying, the third that I shall die.... All this has affected the ‘Preludes’ and God knows when you will get them.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

The Reverend William Miller, who had by 1818 decoded God’s message in the Bible and obtained private knowledge that the Second Coming was but 25 years in the future, at this point associated himself and his code scheme with the Reverend Joshua Himes of the Christian Connexion, founder and pastor of the First Christian Church in Boston. The Reverend Himes would secure a tent that would accommodate 4,000 people, and move HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

it from city to city for nightly services.

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

MILLENNIALISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Orestes Augustus Brownson ceased preaching and his Boston Quarterly Review declined in circulation. In his publication, the Reverend asserted that since his aim was to startle, he “made it a point to be as paradoxical and extravagant as he could.”

Although I confess I don’t see this suggestion, myself, as in any sense plausible or useful, Professor Walter Roy Harding has suggested this published comment by the Reverend Brownson to have been a “source” for HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

31 Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN epigraph.

WALDEN: I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag PEOPLE OF as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, WALDEN if only to wake my neighbors up.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

CHANTICLEER

31. I do need to confess that regardless of how implausible such a connection seems to me, it was in fact during this same year, in July, that Thoreau copied into his Commonplace Book the portion of “The Nonnes Preestes Tale” by Geoffrey Chaucer dealing with the figure of Chanticleer. Chan"ti*cleer (?), n. [F. Chanteclair, name of the cock in the Roman du Renart (Reynard the Fox); chanter to chant + clair clear. See Chant, and Clear.] A cock, so called from the clearness or loudness of his voice in crowing. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

WALDEN: The present was my next experiment of this kind which I PEOPLE OF purpose to describe more at length; for convenience, putting the WALDEN experience of two years into one. As I have said, I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER CHANTICLEER HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

According to Joseph Felt’s ANNALS OF SALEM, in this year an exhibition featuring a giraffe and an ibex was touring Massachusetts.

At the end of the journal entries for this year, Waldo Emerson listed his readings in Oriental materials during the period: “Vedas.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

By this point the heath hen [Heath Hen Tympanuchus cupido cupido], New England’s version of the prairie chicken, had been so reduced in numbers throughout New England, that it remained only on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.32An article in the Knickerbocker Magazine reported on “an old bull whale of prodigious

size and strength,” called Mocha Dick, in the Pacific Ocean. This beast was reported to be “as white as wool.” Herman Melville sailed before the mast, that is, as an apprentice seaman, on the merchantman St. Lawrence bound for Liverpool and return.

32. The species probably died off in the sand plains of Long Island and southeastern New England not due to the overhunting but in consequence of denial of habitat, caused by cessation of the native American fire management habits by the European intrusives. Without sporadic fires to keep the pitch pine low forest burned back, the sort of grassy environment of annuals required by the heath hen simply ceases to exist. Steps the white people were taking to preserve the value of their property in the environment actually had been, that is, destroying this environment. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Edward Sherman Hoar matriculated at Harvard College.

Francis Lemuel Capen, Edward Everett Hale, and William Francis Channing graduated from Harvard. Channing would go on to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (although his practice as a physician would never extend beyond the administration of quack applications of electricity to the heads and feet of sufferers). NEW “HARVARD MEN”

After leaving Harvard, Ellery Channing had spent almost five years living in the home of his father Dr. Walter Channing, withdrawing books from the Boston Athenæum and presumably educating himself in this manner — but otherwise not doing much of anything. In this year he determined that he was going to make something of himself, as a farmer on the frontier! (Meanwhile, in this year, Abraham Lincoln was beginning to travel through nine counties in central and eastern Illinois, as a lawyer on the 8th Judicial Circuit.)

The Thoreaus were living near (but not on) the site of the present Concord Free Public Library building (which would anyway not be erected until 1873), in the “Parkman house, to fall of 1844.” It was in this home that the Thoreau brothers would hold their school. CONCORD ZOOM MAP

A word of caution: In a photo he used in his HENRY DAVID THOREAU: A PROFILE (NY: Hill and Wang, 1971), Professor Walter Roy Harding unfortunately misidentified the Nathan Brooks house (which was the one that was moved in 1872 to make way for the CFPL) as this Parkman house, and this misidentification has since been perpetuated due to the unwarranted credulity of uncritical readers toward whatever gets published as a book. In fact the Parkman store and house were located behind and to the right of the Nathan Brooks house, on the Main Street side, and are visible as such in this photo. To summarize: the present CFPL building occupies the Nathan Brooks house site, not the Parkman house site at which the Thoreau family resided. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

A reminisce pertaining in part to this year, by Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

GROWTH — HEALTH — WORK I develop’d (1833-4-5) into a healthy, strong youth (grew too fast, though, was nearly as big as a man at 15 or 16.) Our family at this period moved back to the country, my dear mother very ill for a long time, but recover’d. All these years I was down Long Island more or less every summer, now east, now west, sometimes months at a stretch. At 16, 17, and so on, was fond of debating societies, and had an active membership with them, off and on, in Brooklyn and one or two country towns on the island. A most omnivorous novel-reader, these and later years, devour’d everything I could get. Fond of the theatre, also, in New York, went whenever I could — sometimes witnessing fine performances. 1836-7, work’d as compositor in printing offices in New York city. Then, when little more than eighteen, and for a while afterwards, went to teaching country schools down in Queens and Suffolk counties, Long Island, and “boarded round.” (This latter I consider one of my best experiences and deepest lessons in human nature behind the scenes, and in the masses.) In ’39, ’40, I started and publish’d a weekly paper in my native town, Huntington. Then returning to New York city and Brooklyn, work’d on as printer and writer, mostly prose, but an occasional shy at “poetry.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

King Ferdinand of Spain died, the claims of Don Pedro and Don Carlos were defeated, and Maria Christina succeeded to the throne as regent for the Infanta (who would eventually be crowned, in 1843, after power was regained from one General Espartero, as Queen Isabella):

WALDEN: For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life –I wrote this some years ago– that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, –we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure, –news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelvemonth or twelve years beforehand with sufficient accuracy. As for Spain, for instance, if you know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta, and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to time in the right proportions, –they may have changed the names a little since I saw the papers,– and serve up a bull- fight when other entertainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the newspapers; and as for England, almost the last significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649; and if you have learned the history of her crops for an average year, you never need attend to that thing again, unless your speculations are of a merely pecuniary character. If one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a French revolution not excepted.

ENGLISH CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Margaret Fuller’s translation of ECKERMANN’S CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE appeared in the bookstores. Fuller saw, at the Allston Gallery in Boston, the statue of Orpheus by Thomas Crawford.33

ECKERMANN AND GOETHE

33. She would refer to this in the July 1843 issue of THE DIAL and connect it with Bronson Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings” as “lessons in reverence.”

Orpheus was a lawgiver by theocratic commission. He understood nature, and made all her forms move to his music. He told her secrets in the form of hymns, nature as seen in the mind of God. Then it is the prediction, that to learn and to do, all men must be lovers, and Orpheus was, in a high sense, a lover. His soul went forth towards all beings, yet could remain sternly faithful to a chosen type of excellence. Seeking what he loved, he feared not death nor hell, neither could any presence daunt his faith in the power of the celestial harmony that filled his soul.

Referring to the statue’s posture, of shading its eyes with its hand, she wrote a poem which concluded with the following couplet:

If he already sees what he must do, Well may he shade his eyes from the far-shining view. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Waldo Emerson was elected to the “Social Circle” of Concord which met on Tuesday evenings during the winters:

Much of the best society I have ever known is a club in Concord called the Social Circle, consisting always of twenty-five of our citizens, doctor, lawyer, farmer, trader, miller, mechanic, etc., solidest of men, who yield the solidest of gossip. Harvard University is a wafer compared to the solid land which my friends represent. I do not like to be absent from home on Tuesday evenings in winter.

In America, Uriah Phillips Levy was placed in command of the USS Vandalia and promptly had all its guns painted bright blue. He would soon be court-martialed (his 4th such ordeal) and dismissed in disgrace (his 2nd such dismissal) from the US Navy — for in addition to having those guns painted blue, he had proclaimed that no seaman under his command might be flogged. (During our war upon Mexico, Levy would become a Washington lobbyist, campaigning against such torture of employees.)

The Reverend Charles Follen returned to the Unitarian congregation in East Lexington, Massachusetts whose ministerial needs had been being supplied for the previous three years by the Reverend Emerson. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

He would design an octagonal sanctuary in such manner that the preacher could not elevate himself above the congregation. However, after a short while he would again abandon that little group to take up a more lucrative job offer, as tutor to a family in Watertown. To fill his vacancy, he recommended that the group hire their previous supply preacher, the Reverend Emerson. He would agree to return, he said, only when the congregation had erected its new building of his own design, and had in addition come up with enough money to pay him the sort of ministerial stipend which he required. In our own timeframe, Lucinda Duncan, minister of that church, has attempted to put a fine face on this: “Follen has left us a legacy of social action based on the principle of freedom. It’s a principle that we continue to test ourselves against. He was really a man who left a mark on this congregation. He had a vision of a free Christian church where all people could come and speak their minds. It was an idea that was way ahead of its time.”

J.W. Alexander, Albert Dod, and Charles Hodge, in “Transcendentalism of the Germans and of Cousin and Its Influence on Opinion in This Country,” cast Professor Victor Cousin and Waldo Emerson into the outer darkness as, respectively, the European and the American enemies of True Christianity.

The European Enemy The American Enemy of True Christianity of True Christianity

(You have been warned!) HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839 HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Samuel Staples, the bartender at the Middlesex House in Concord, married his boss’s daughter. (Since this illustration contains telephone wires, it is assuredly not the old converted country house of 1839 but the new structure that would be placed on the site after the older building burned down in 1845.)

Since the father of the bride, old Thomas Wesson, was irritated with the temperance agitation of the two preachers in town, he arranged for the knot to be tied by the Reverend Waldo Emerson. Since Bronson Alcott and John Dwight were visiting Emerson that night, they got to be the witnesses to this deed. (I guess the Wessons were white, since none of the histories say so; Toni Morrison points this out to us all: “In matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

John Warner Barber’s HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS, BEING A GENERAL COLLECTION OF INTERESTING FACTS, TRADITIONS, BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES, ANECDOTES, &C., RELATING TO THE HISTORY AND ANTIQUITIES OF EVERY TOWN IN MASSACHUSETTS, WITH GEOGRAPHICAL DESCRIPTIONS (Dorr, Howland & Company) was published in Worcester. This volume included an untitled poem on sweets from which Henry Thoreau would quote a couple of lines in WALDEN. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

WALDEN: Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs in this land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant and fluctuating markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and independence that, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops, and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by any. For the most part the farmer gives to his cattle and hogs the grain of his own producing, and buys flour, which is at least no more wholesome, at a greater cost, at the store. I saw that I could easily raise my bushel or two of rye and Indian corn, for the former will grow on the poorest land, and the latter does not require the best, and grind them in a hand-mill, and so do without rice and pork; and if I must have some concentrated sweet, I found by experiment that I could make a very good molasses either of pumpkins or beets, and I knew that I needed only to set out a few maples to obtain it more easily still, and while these were growing I could use various substitutes beside those which I have named, “For,” as the Forefathers sang,– “we can make liquor to sweeten our lips Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips.” Finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to obtain this might be a fit occasion for a visit to the seashore, or, if I did without it altogether, I should probably drink the less water. I do not learn that the Indians ever troubled themselves to go after it. Thus I could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food was concerned, and having a shelter already, it would only remain to get clothing and fuel. The pantaloons which I now wear were woven in farmer’s family, –thank Heaven there is so much virtue still in man; for I think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorable as that from the man to the farmer;– and in a new country fuel is an encumbrance. As for a habitat, if I were not permitted still to squat, I might purchase one acre at the same price for which the land I cultivated was sold –namely, eight dollars and eight cents. But as it was, I considered that I enhanced the value of the land by squatting on it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Here John Warner Barber presents Hannah Emerson Duston’s ordeal:

On the 15th of March, 1697, a body of Indians made a descent on the westerly part of the town, and approached the house of Mr. Thomas Dustin. They came, as they were wont, arrayed with all the terrors of a savage war dress, with their muskets charged for the contest, their tomahawks drawn for the slaughter, and their scalping knives unsheathed and glittering in the sunbeams. Mr. Dustin at this time was engaged abroad in his daily labor. When the terrific shouts of the blood-hounds first fell on his ear, he seized his gun, mounted his horse, and hastened to his house, with the hope of escorting to a place of safety his family, which consisted of his wife, whom he tenderly and passionately loved, and who had been confined only seven days in childbed, her nurse, Mrs. Mary Neff, and eight young children. Immediately upon his arrival, he rushed into his house, and found it a scene of confusion - the women trembling for their safety, and the children weeping and calling on their mother for protection. He instantly ordered seven of his children to fly in an opposite direction from that in which the danger was approaching, and went himself to assist his wife. But he was too late - before she could arise from her bed, the enemy were upon them. Mr. Dustin, seeing there was no hope of saving his wife from the clutches of the foe, flew from the house, mounted his horse, and rode full speed after his flying children. The agonized father supposed it impossible to save them all, and he determined to snatch from death the child which shared the most of his affections. He soon came up with the infant brood; he heard their glad voices and saw the cheerful looks that overspread their countenances, for they felt themselves safe while under his protection. He looked for the child of his love - where was it? He scanned the little group from the oldest to the youngest, but he could not find it. They all fondly loved him - they called him by the endearing title of father, were flesh of his flesh, and stretched out their little arms toward him for protection. He gazed upon them, and faltered in his resolution, for there was none whom he could leave behind; and, indeed, what parent could, in such a situation, select the child which shared the most of his affections? He could not do it, and therefore resolved to defend them from the murderers, or die at their side. A small party of the Indians pursued Mr. Dustin as he fled from the house, and soon overtook him and his flying children. They did not, however, approach very near, for they saw his determination, and feared the vengeance of a father, but skulked behind the trees and fences, and fired upon him and his little company. Mr. Dustin dismounted from his horse, placed himself in the rear of his children, and returned the fire of the enemy often and with good success. In this manner he retreated for more than a mile, alternately encouraging his terrified charge, and loading and fireing his gun, until he lodged them safely in a forsaken house. The Indians, finding that they could not conquer him, returned to their companions, expecting, no doubt, that they should there find victims, on which they might exercise their savage cruelty. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

The party which entered the house when Mr. Dustin left it, found Mrs. Dustin in bed, and the nurse attempting to fly with the infant in her arms. They ordered Mrs. Dustin to rise instantly, while one of them took the infant from the arms of the nurse, carried it out, and dashed out its brains against an apple-tree. After plundering the house they set it on fire, and commenced their retreat, though Mrs. Dustin had but partly dressed herself, and was without a shoe on one of her feet. Mercy was a stranger to the breasts of the conquerors, and the unhappy women expected to receive no kindnesses from their hands. The weather at the time was exceedingly cold, the March-wind blew keen and piercing, and the earth was alternately covered with snow and deep mud. They travelled twelve miles the first day, and continued their retreat, day by day, following a circuitous route, until they reached the home of the Indian who claimed them as his property, which was on a small island, now called Dustin’s Island, at the mouth of the Contoocook river, about six miles above the state-house in Concord, New Hampshire. Notwithstanding their intense suffering for the death of the child - their anxiety for those whom they had left behind, and who they expected had been cruelly butchered - their sufferings from cold and hunger, and from sleeping on the damp earth, with nothing but an inclement sky for a covering - and their terror for themselves, lest the arm that, as they supposed, had slaughtered those whom they dearly loved, would soon be made red with their blood, - notwithstanding all this, they performed the journey without yielding, and arrived at their destination in comparative health. The family of their Indian master consisted of two men, three women, and seven children; besides an English boy, named Samuel Lennardson, who was taken prisoner about a year previous, at Worcester. Their master, some years before, had lived in the family of Rev. Mr. Rowlandson, of Lancaster, and he told Mrs. Dustin that “when he prayed the English way he thought it was good, but now he found the French way better.” These unfortunate women had been but a few days with the Indians, when they were informed that they must soon start for a distant Indian settlement, and that, upon their arrival, they would be obliged to conform to the regulations always required of prisoners, whenever they entered the village, which was to be stripped, scourged, and run the gauntlet in a state of nudity. The gauntlet consisted of two files of Indians, of both sexes and of all ages, containing all that could be mustered in the village; and the unhappy prisoners were obliged to run between them, when they were scoffed at and beaten by each one as they passed, and were sometimes marks at which the younger Indians threw their hatchets. This cruel custom was often practised by many of the tribes, and not unfrequently the poor prisoner sunk beneath it. Soon as the two women were informed of this, they determined to escape as speedily as possible. They could not bear to be exposed to the scoffs and unrestrained gaze of their savage conquerors - death would be preferable. Mrs. Dustin soon planned a mode of escape, appointed the 31st inst. for its accomplishment, and prevailed upon her nurse and the boy to join her. The Indians kept no watch, for the boy had lived with them so long they considered him as one of their children, and they did not expect that the women, unadvised and unaided, would attempt to escape, when success, at the best, appeared so desperate. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

On the day previous to the 31st, Mrs. Dustin wished to learn on what part of the body the Indians struck their victims when they would despatch them suddenly, and how they took off a scalp. With this view she instructed the boy to make inquiries of one of the men. Accordingly, at a convenient opportunity, he asked one of them where he would strike a man if he would kill him instantly, and how to take off a scalp. The man laid his finger on his temple - “Strike ’em there,” said he; and then instructed him how to scalp. The boy then communicated his information to Mrs. Dustin. The night at length arrived, and the whole family retired to rest, little suspecting that the most of them would never behold another sun. Long before the break of day, Mrs. Dustin arose, and, having ascertained that they were all in a deep sleep, awoke her nurse and the boy, when they armed themselves with tomahawks, and despatched ten of the twelve. A favorite boy they designedly left; and one of the squaws, whom they left for dead, jumped up, and ran with him into the woods. Mrs. Dustin killed her master, and Samuel Lennardson despatched the very Indian who told him where to strike, and how to take off a scalp. The deed was accomplished before the day began to break, and, after securing what little provision the wigwam of their dead master afforded, they scuttled all the boats but one, to prevent pursuit, and with that started for their homes. Mrs. Dustin took with her a gun that belonged to her master, and the tomahawk with which she committed the tragical deed. They had not proceeded far, however, when Mrs. Dustin perceived that they had neglected to take their scalps, and feared that her neighbors, if they ever arrived at their homes, would not credit their story, and would ask them for some token or proof. She told her fears to her companions, and they immediately returned to the silent wigwam, took off the scalps of the fallen, and put them into a bag. They then started on their journey anew, with the gun, tomahawk, and the bleeding trophies, - palpable witnesses of their heroic and unparalleled deed. A long and weary journey was before them, but they commenced it with cheerful hearts, each alternately rowing and steering their little bark. Though they had escaped from the clutches of their unfeeling master, still they were surrounded with dangers. They were thinly clad, the sky was still inclement, and they were liable to be re-captured by strolling bands of Indians, or by those who would undoubtedly pursue them so soon as the squaw and the boy had reported their departure, and the terrible vengeance they had taken; and were they again made prisoners, they well knew that a speedy death would follow. This array of danger, however, did not appall them for home was their beacon-light, and the thoughts of their firesides nerved their hearts. They continued to drop silently down the river, keeping a good lookout for strolling Indians; and in the night two of them only slept, while the third managed the boat. In this manner they pursued their journey, until they arrived safely, with their trophies, at their homes, totally unexpected by their mourning friends, who supposed that they had been butchered by their ruthless conquerors. It must truly have been an affecting meeting for Mrs. Dustin, who likewise supposed that all she loved, - all she held dear on earth - was laid in the silent tomb. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

After recovering from the fatigue of the journey, they started for Boston, where they arrived on the 21st of April. They carried with them the gun and tomahawk, and their ten scalps - those witnesses that would not lie; and while there, the general court gave them fifty pounds, as a reward for their heroism. The report of their daring deed soon spread into every part of the country, and when Colonel Nicholson, governor of Maryland, heard of it, he sent them a very valuable present, and many presents were also made to them by their neighbors. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

JOHN WARNER BARBER

ABINGTON, MASS. ACTON, MASS. ADAMS, MASS. ALFORD, MASS. AMESBURY, MASS. AMHERST, MASS. ANDOVER, MASS. ASHBURNHAM, MASS. ASHBY, MASS. ASHFIELD, MASS. ATHOL, MASS. ATTLEBOROUGH, MASS. AUBURN, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

BARNSTABLE, MASS. BARRE, MASS. BECKET, MASS. BEDFORD, MASS. BELCHERTOWN, MASS. BELLINGHAM, MASS. BERLIN, MASS. BERNARDSTON, MASS. BEVERLY, MASS. BILLERICA, MASS. BLANDFORD, MASS. BOLTON, MASS. BOSTON, MASS. BOXBOROUGH, MASS. BOXFORD, MASS. BOYLSTON, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

BRADFORD, MASS. BRAINTREE, MASS. BREWSTER, MASS. BRIDGEWATER, MASS. BRIGHTON, MASS. BRIMFIELD, MASS. BROOKFIELD, MASS. BROOKLINE, MASS. BUCKLAND, MASS. BURLINGTON, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. CANTON, MASS. CARVER, MASS. CHARLEMONT, MASS. CHARLESTOWN, MASS. CHARLTON, MASS. CHATHAM, MASS. CHELMSFORD, MASS. CHELSEA, MASS. CHESHIRE, MASS. CHESTER, MASS. CHESTERFIELD, MASS. CHILMARK, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

CLARKSBURG, MASS. COHASSET, MASS. COLERAINE, MASS. CONCORD, MASS. CONWAY, MASS. CUMMINGTON, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

DALTON, MASS. DANA, MASS. DANVERS, MASS. DARTMOUTH, MASS. DEDHAM, MASS. DEERFIELD, MASS. DENNIS, MASS. DIGHTON, MASS. DORCHESTER, MASS. DOUGLASS, MASS. DUDLEY, MASS. DUNSTABLE, MASS. DUXBURY, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

EAST BRIDGEWATER EASTHAM, MASS. EASTHAMPTON, MASS. EASTON, MASS. EDGARTOWN, MASS. EGREMONT, MASS. ENFIELD, MASS. ERVING, MASS. ESSEX, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

FAIRHAVEN, MASS. FALL RIVER, MASS. FALMOUTH, MASS. FITCHBURG, MASS. FLORIDA, MASS. FOXBOROUGH, MASS. FRAMINGHAM, MASS. FRANKLIN, MASS. FREETOWN, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

GARDNER, MASS. GEORGETOWN, MASS. GILL, MASS. GLOUCESTER, MASS. GOSHEN, MASS. GRAFTON, MASS. GRANBY, MASS. GRANVILLE, MASS. GREAT BARRINGTON GREENFIELD, MASS. GREENWICH, MASS. GROTON, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

HADLEY, MASS. HALIFAX, MASS. HAMILTON, MASS. HANCOCK, MASS. HANOVER, MASS. HANSOM, MASS. HARDWICK, MASS. HARVARD, MASS. HARWICH, MASS. HATFIELD, MASS. HAVERHILL, MASS. HAWLEY, MASS. HEATH, MASS. HINGHAM, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

HINSDALE, MASS. HOLDEN, MASS. HOLLAND, MASS. HOLLISTON, MASS. HOPKINTON, MASS. HUBBARDSTON, MASS. HULL, MASS. IPSWICH, MASS. KINGSTON, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

LANCASTER, MASS. LANESBOROUGH, MASS. LEE, MASS. LEICESTER, MASS. LENOX, MASS. LEOMINSTER, MASS. LEVERETT, MASS. LEXINGTON, MASS. LEYDEN, MASS. LINCOLN, MASS. LITTLETON, MASS. LONGMEADOW, MASS. LOWELL, MASS. LUDLOW, MASS. LUNENBURG, MASS. LYNN, MASS. LYNNFIELD, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

MALDEN, MASS. MANCHESTER, MASS. MANSFIELD, MASS. MARBLEHEAD, MASS. MARLBOROUGH, MASS. MARSHFIELD, MASS. MARSHPEE, MASS. MEDFIELD, MASS. MEDFORD, MASS. MEDWAY, MASS. MENDON, MASS. METHUEN, MASS. MIDDLEBOROUGH, MASS. MIDDLEFIELD, MASS. MIDDLETON, MASS. MILFORD, MASS. MILLBURY, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

MILTON, MASS. MONROE, MASS. MONSON, MASS. MONTAGUE, MASS. MONTGOMERY, MASS. MOUNT WASHINGTON NANTUCKET, MASS. NATICK, MASS. NEEDHAM, MASS. NEW ASHFORD, MASS. NEW BEDFORD, MASS. NEW BRAINTREE, MASS. NEWBURY, MASS. NEWBURYPORT, MASS. NEW MARLBOROUGH NEW SALEM, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

NEWTON, MASS. NORTHAMPTON, MASS. NORTHBOROUGH, MASS. NORTHBRIDGE, MASS. NORTH BRIDGEWATER NORTH BROOKFIELD NORTHFIELD, MASS. NORTON, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

OAKHAM, MASS. ORANGE, MASS. ORLEANS, MASS. OTIS, MASS. OXFORD, MASS. PALMER, MASS. PAWTUCKET, MASS. PAXTON, MASS. PELHAM, MASS. PEMBROKE, MASS. PEPPERELL, MASS. PERU, MASS. PETERSHAM, MASS. PHILLIPSTON, MASS. PITTSFIELD, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

PLYMOUTH, MASS. PLYMPTON, MASS. PRESCOTT, MASS. PRINCETON, MASS. PROVINCETOWN, MASS. QUINCY, MASS. RANDOLPH, MASS. RAYNHAM, MASS. READING, MASS. REHOBOTH, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

RICHMOND, MASS. ROCHESTER, MASS. ROWE, MASS. ROWLEY, MASS. ROXBURY, MASS. ROYALSTON, MASS. RUSSELL, MASS. RUTLAND, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

SALEM, MASS. SALISBURY, MASS. SANDISFIELD, MASS. SANDWICH, MASS. SAUGUS, MASS. SAVOY, MASS. SCITUATE, MASS. SEEKONK, MASS. SHARON, MASS. SHEFFIELD, MASS. SHELBURNE, MASS. SHERBURNE, MASS. SHIRLEY, MASS. SHREWSBURY, MASS. SHUTESBURY, MASS. SOMERSET, MASS. SOUTHAMPTON, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

SOUTHBRIDGE, MASS. SOUTH HADLEY, MASS. SOUTH READING, MASS. SPENCER, MASS. SPRINGFIELD, MASS. STERLING, MASS. STOCKBRIDGE, MASS. STONEHAM, MASS. STOUGHTON, MASS. STOW, MASS. STURBRIDGE, MASS. SUDBURY, MASS. SUNDERLAND, MASS. SUTTON, MASS. SWANSEY, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

TAUNTON, MASS. TEMPLETON, MASS. TEWKSBURY, MASS. TISBURY, MASS. TOLLAND, MASS. TOWNSEND, MASS. TRURO, MASS. TYNGSBOROUGH, MASS. TYRINGHAM, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

UPTON, MASS. UXBRIDGE, MASS. WALES, MASS. WALPOLE, MASS. WALTHAM, MASS. WARE, MASS. WAREHAM, MASS. WARREN, MASS. WARWICK, MASS. WASHINGTON, MASS. WATERTOWN, MASS. WAYLAND, MASS. WEBSTER, MASS. WELLFLEET, MASS. WENDELL, MASS. WESTBOROUGH, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

WEST BOYLSTON, MASS. WEST CAMBRIDGE, MASS. WESTFIELD, MASS. WESTFORD, MASS. WESTHAMPTON, MASS. WESTMINSTER, MASS. WESTON, MASS. WESTPORT, MASS. WEST SPRINGFIELD WEST STOCKBRIDGE WEYMOUTH, MASS. WHATELY, MASS. WICHENDON, MASS. WILBRAHAM, MASS. WILLIAMSBURG, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS. WILMINGTON, MASS. WINDSOR, MASS. WOBURN, MASS. WORCESTER, MASS. WORTHINGTON, MASS. WRENTHAM, MASS. YARMOUTH, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

The Phrenological Association met in Birmingham. THE SCIENCE OF 1839

Hiram Powers finished his white marble bust of President Andrew Jackson, for which Jackson had sat to be modeled from life while at the White House at the age of 68. “Make me as I am,” the old man had instructed, which pretty well excluded carving the bust out of ebony, perhaps even out of hickory! The bust is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It would be interesting to determine how craniologically PC or non-PC this bust is, in consideration of contemporaneous phrenological theory.

Dr. Charles Caldwell, a racist who was a professor at a university in Kentucky, had at this point become the most popular phrenologist in America partly by pandering to the American need for a scientific legitimation of genocide.

Who knows what the white man knows? — The white man knows. However, the mainline American scientific establishment –under the leadership of the American school of ethnology based in Philadelphia– would over the course of the next ten years take this cudgel away from phrenology, by developing their own scientific legitimations for genocide that could not so easily be dismissed as a sideshow-tent fad. You may have been exposed, in your early schooling, to some of this ethnological material, in the strange scientific case study called “the Dukes versus the Kalikaks” — in which the names of two Appalachian families were changed in order to protect innocent victims of scientific study and in order to protect guilty perpetrators of scientific fraud. In this day and age, to be against slavery was to be antiscientific. In this year Alexander Kinmont’s TWELVE LECTURES ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MAN and Professor HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Samuel George Morton’s CRANIA AMERICANA; OR, A COMPARATIVE VIEW OF THE SKULLS OF VARIOUS ABORIGINAL NATIONS OF NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA: TO WHICH IS PREFIXED AN ESSAY ON THE VARIETIES OF THE HUMAN SPECIES. ILLUSTRATED BY SEVENTY-EIGHT PLATES AND A COLOURED MAP (Philadelphia: J. Dobson) changed the American focus for such theorizing, by supposedly demonstrating that the inferiority of the Native American race was based on breeding rather than on environment, a conclusion supported by detailed scientific examination of the world’s largest collection of human skulls (world’s largest in pre-Nazi times, that is). The intellectual faculties of this great family appear to be of a decidedly inferior cast when compared with those of the Caucasian or Mongolian races. CRANIA AMERICANA

Henry David Thoreau would read and make notes on Professor Morton’s CRANIA AMERICANA, including in his notes the professor’s remark that the American Indians “have made but trifling progress in mental culture or the useful arts.” “Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline. We may therefore be sorely tempted to misuse that power in furthering a personal prejudice or social goal — why not provide that extra oomph by extending the umbrella of science over a personal preference in ethics or politics?” — Stephen Jay Gould BULLY FOR BRONTOSAURUS NY: Norton, 1991, page 429

The prevailing viewpoint in America had for many years been that attitude enunciated by the Reverend Samuel Stanhope Smith (1750-1819) in his influential 1787 treatise, AN ESSAY ON THE CAUSES OF THE VARIETY OF COMPLEXION AND FIGURE IN THE HUMAN SPECIES... in which he had argued that the intellectual and moral condition of black people in America had been produced by “the humiliating circumstances in which they find themselves” just as the color of their skin had been produced by their long exposure to the African sun and thus eventually could be expected under better conditions to fade to whiteness. Race, in other words, rather than constituting an inflexible biological category, had been considered to be mutable. This presumption was apparently being demolished at this point by the “objective” craniological analyses being presented in such great detail in Dr. Morton’s treatise. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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June 25, 1852: What a mean & wretched creature is man by & by some Dr Morton may be filling your cranium with white mustard seed to learn its internal capacity. Of all the ways invented to come at a knowledge of a living man — this seems to me the worst — as it is the most belated. You would learn more by once paring the toe nails of the living subject. There is nothing out of which the spirit has more completely departed — & in which it has left fewer significant traces.

In CRANIA AMERICANA Professor Morton divided humankind primarily into four races with the following racial characteristics:34 • Europeans: “The Caucasian Race is characterized by a naturally fair skin, susceptible of every tint; hair fine, long and curling, and of various colors. The skull is large and oval, and its anterior portion full and elevated. The face is small in proportion to the head, of an oval form, with well- proportioned features.... This race is distinguished for the facility with which it attains the highest intellectual endowments.... The spontaneous fertility of [the Caucasus] has rendered it the hive of many nations, which extending their migrations in every direction, have peopled the finest portions of the earth, and given birth to its fairest inhabitants....” • Asians: “This great division of the human species is characterized by a sallow or olive colored skin, which appears to be drawn tight over the bones of the face; long black straight hair, and thin beard. The nose is broad, and short; the eyes are small, black, and obliquely placed, and the eyebrows are arched and linear; the lips are turned, the cheek bones broad and flat.... In their intellectual character the Mongolians are ingenious, imitative, and highly susceptible of cultivation [i.e. learning]....So versatile are their feelings and actions, that they have been compared to the monkey race, whose attention is perpetually changing from one object to another....” • Native Americans: “The American Race is marked by a brown complexion; long, black, lank hair; and deficient beard. The eyes are black and deep set, the brow low, the cheekbones high, the nose large and aquiline, the mouth large, and the lips tumid [swollen] and compressed.... In their mental character the Americans are averse to cultivation, and slow in acquiring knowledge; restless, revengeful, and fond of war, and wholly destitute of maritime adventure. They are crafty, sensual, ungrateful, obstinate and unfeeling, and much of their affection for their children may be traced to purely selfish motives. They devour the most disgusting [foods] uncooked and uncleaned, and seem to have no idea beyond providing for the present moment.... Their mental faculties, from infancy to old age, present a continued childhood.... [Indians] are not only averse to the restraints of education, but for the most part are incapable of a continued process of reasoning on abstract subjects....” • Africans: “Characterized by a black complexion, and black, woolly hair; the eyes are large and prominent, the nose broad and flat, the lips thick, and the mouth wide; the head is long and narrow, the forehead low, the cheekbones prominent, the jaws protruding, and the chin small. In disposition the Negro is joyous, flexible, and indolent; while the many nations which compose this race present a singular diversity of intellectual character, of which the far extreme is the lowest grade of humanity.... The moral and intellectual character of the Africans is widely different in different nations.... The Negroes are proverbially fond of their amusements, in which they engage with great exuberance of spirit; and a day of toil is with them no bar to a night of revelry. Like most other barbarous nations their institutions are not infrequently characterized by superstition and cruelty. They appear to be fond of warlike enterprises, and are not deficient in personal courage; but, once overcome, they yield to their destiny, and accommodate themselves with amazing facility to every change of circumstance. The Negroes have little invention, but strong powers of imitation, so that they readily acquire mechanic arts. They have a great talent for music, and all their external senses are remarkably acute.” 34. Professor Morton claimed to be able to evaluate the intellectual capacity of a race as a function of its skull volume. A large skull meant a large brain and high intellectual capacity, and a small skull indicated a small brain and decreased intellectual capacity. Of course, since female skull sizes are smaller than male skull sizes ... but I don’t know that Professor Morton went there. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In this year Dr. Samuel George Morton was made Professor of Anatomy at Pennsylvania College (later to be known as the University of Pennsylvania).

In America, volumes 3 and 4 of Thomas Carlyle’s CRITICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS were being put through the presses: MISC. ESSAYS, VOL. III MISC. ESSAYS, VOL. IV

Copies of these volumes would of course be in Henry Thoreau’s personal library.

The Chartist petition presented in the previous year having gotten exactly nowhere, a “charter” of political reforms was presented to Parliament by workers and was likewise rejected. Ebenezer Elliott renounced Chartism. A pamphlet entitled CHARTISM was being produced in England: [Carlyle’s] “might is right” argument presupposes ultimately benevolent and uncorrupt aims behind the might; those reading Carlyle now find it hard to share such assumptions, as indeed many of his contemporaries did. He justified his view by saying that a purely brutal conquest would never last, but would be flung out; in modern times, the fate of Nazism and Stalinism supports his view, and the Terror in France had proved it to him. The true strong man, for that reason, was always wise; his strength lay in the soul rather than the body, and was drawn from God. One true inheritor of this tradition of thought:

“I cannot see why man should not be just as cruel as nature.” — Adolf “Mr. Natural” Hitler

Charles Darwin saw the raw effects of this Carlylean reasoning process and the alleged or eponymous founder of “Social Darwinism” was at once fascinated and bemused — and repelled.35 The Fuegians ... struck Darwin as more like animals than men.... Thoreau’s single overt citation of Darwin in WALDEN refers toPROTO one-N AZISMof Darwin’s few concessions to the Fuegians’ superior powers, their adaptation to the cold climate (WALDEN, pages 12-13). This is but one among many spots where WALDEN undermines the hierarchies of civilization/barbarity (the villagers are bizarre penance-performing Brahmins) and humanity/animal (the villagers as prairie dogs, himself competing with squirrels for fall forage). Such instances of undermining do not reflect Thoreau’s attempt to quarrel with Darwin as much as Thoreau’s desire to accentuate tendencies already present in Darwin and other travelers’ accounts. ...Darwin, like Thoreau albeit to a lesser degree, was prepared to relativize moral distinctions between “advanced’ and “backward” cultures and between human and animal estates. “It is impossible to reflect on the state of the American continent without astonishment. Formerly it HDT WHAT? INDEX

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must have swarmed with great monsters; now we find mere pygmies compared with the antecedent, allied races.”

Dr. William Andrus Alcott’s CONFESSIONS OF A SCHOOL MASTER. Andover, NY: Gould, Newman and Saxton, 316 pages (Illustrative of William’s early career as a teacher, and of general conditions as well.)

35. The guy who was absolutely fascinated by this hatemongering was not Darwin, a man who still had hope for human decency, but the headmaster of Rugby, Dr. Thomas Arnold. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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During roughly this year, one pupil at the Concord Academy was Thomas Hosmer of Bedford, who would grow up to be a dentist in Boston, but who at this time was walking daily to Concord for classes. Many years later, in his instar as “adult Boston dentist,” this Thomas Hosmer would write to Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson and relate of his teacher Henry Thoreau that:

I have seen children catch him by the hand, as he was going home from school, to walk with him and hear more.

Another of the boys being taught in this year, presumably about 12 years of age, was the Cyrus Warren whom Thoreau would years later chance upon as a grown man walking along the sidewalk:

November 10, Monday, 1851: … In relation to politics–to society–aye to the whole out-ward world I am tempted to ask–Why do they lay such stress on a particular experience which you have had?– That after 25 years you should meet Cyrus Warren again on the sidewalk! Haven’t I budged an inch then?– 36 This daily routine should go on then like those–it must be conceded–vital functions of digestion–circulation of the blood &c which in health we know nothing about. A wise man is as unconscious of the movements in the body politic as he is of digestion & the circulation of the blood in the natural body. …

36. Thoreau was later to copy this into his early lecture “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” as:

[Paragraph 61] In relation to politics, to what is called society—aye, often to the whole outward world, I am often tempted to ask—why such stress is laid on a particular experience which you have had?—that after twenty-five years you should meet Hobbins—registrar of deeds, again on the side-walk?1 Haven’t I budged an inch then?

1. There were no County Registrars of Deeds by the name of Hobbins in Massachusetts from 1823 to 1862. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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At Montréal, Thomas Clotworthy, 17 years of age, and Henry Cole, 11 years of age, found sharing a bed, were persecuted in a court of law.

In his journal for this year, on the road to Stonewall,37 Henry Thoreau would write “The first I conceive of true friendship when some rare specimen of manhood presents itself.” Speculations about eroticized friendship appear also in journal entries Thoreau was making in 1839, wherein he meditates on the relation between love and friendship. His “rare specimens” are described horticulturally —like Waldo Emerson’s and Walt Whitman’s leaves— as “young buds of manhood.” “By what degrees of consanguinity,” he inquires, “is this succulent and rank growing slip of manhood related to me?” The “degrees of consanguinity” of course suggest those limits within which marriage is allowed or disallowed. The sanctified relationships he imagines with these rare specimens of manhood are indeed holy, for in them he can “worship moral beauty” manifest in manly flesh. He is touched by transcendental ecstasy when he sees them, for “they are some fresher wind that blows, some new fragrance that breathes.” Nearly divinities, Thoreau's young men create the world he lives in: “they make the landscape and sky for us” (JOURNAL, 1906, 1: 107-108). Thoreau's metaphors protest the separation of and work to conflate friendship and homoerotic passion: “commonly we degrade Love and Friendship by presenting them under a trivial dualism” (JOURNAL, 1906, 1: 107-108). The friendship tradition as practiced by the vast majority of heterosexual writers participated in that dualism by imposing on friendship a misread Platonism and by firmly separating it from the presumed sole legitimate arena of sexual experience, the heterosexual. Such texts expressed capitalized Friendship in terms of male friendships only, as Emerson clearly does in his essay on the subject. This of course could also be a complicit action, for it thus gave writers the chance to engage in extravagant protestations of male-male friendship, which could pass without any imputation of impropriety —either physically or emotionally— though such impropriety may indeed have been implied, intended, or even desired. But Thoreau is willing to theorize a dualism between manly love and other —heterosexual— love: “the rules of other intercourse are all inapplicable to this.” “This” intercourse —specifically made different in his text from the “other intercourse”— has special laws and a special site, a divine realm he calls a “parcel of heaven.” When we are separated from that “parcel of heaven we call our friend,” that separation is “source enough for all the elegies that ever were written” (JOURNAL, 1906, 1: 107-108).

37. Refer to Bryne R.S. Fone’s A ROAD TO STONEWALL: MALE HOMOSEXUALITY AND HOMOPHOBIA IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1750-1969. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

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JANUARY 1839

January: While attending Harvard College’s law school,38 Richard Henry Dana, Jr. was appointed to instruct in elocution at the college (he would resign during February 1840).

38. Just in case you didn’t know: Harvard Law School had been founded with money from the selling of slaves in the sugarcane fields of Antigua. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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January: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Lily’s Quest” was published. He had become engaged to Sophia Amelia Peabody. At the suggestion of Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, the historian George Bancroft, Collector of the Port, arranged for him to become a Weigher and Gauger at the Boston Custom House. As a political appointee in the customs administration, Hawthorne would willingly take part in a kickback scheme in which his subordinates who were authorized for overtime work and the payment for such overtime were to share their additional pay half and half with his political party. In addition, he personally suspended from their employment those of his inspectors who refused to submit to such extortion (in today’s political climate, had he been detected in such schemes he would most assuredly have gone to prison, like his son Julian later — but HDT WHAT? INDEX

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there’s no indication whatever that he experienced such activity as morally repugnant). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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January: In New Bedford, Frederick Douglass liked his free trial subscription to The Liberator, and so, out of his very limited income, he went ahead and subscribed: Frederick Douglass’s NARRATIVE

In about four months after I went to New Bedford, there came a young man to me, and inquired if I did not wish to take the “Liberator.” I told him I did; but, just having made my escape from slavery, I remarked that I was unable to pay for it then. I, however, finally became a subscriber to it. The paper came, and I read it from week to week with such feelings as it would be quite idle for me to attempt to describe. The paper became my meat and my drink. My soul was set all on fire. Its sympathy for my brethren in bonds — its scathing denunciations of slaveholders — its faithful exposures of slavery — and its powerful attacks upon the upholders of the institution — sent a thrill of joy through my soul, such as I had never felt before! I had not long been a reader of the “Liberator,” before I got a pretty correct idea of the principles, measures and spirit of the anti-slavery reform. I took right hold of the cause. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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January 1, Tuesday: Per page 315 of The Crayon of New-York for October 1857, on this day John Pounds, creator of the 1st “ragged school,” had died:

Sketchings EXHIBITION OF THE WORKS OF BRITISH ARTISTS. WEHNERT sends “The First Ragged School,” and connected with this picture is the following account of the founder of Ragged Schools. John Pounds, the cobbler and the “founder of Ragged Schools,” was born at Portsmouth in 1766. The adopting of a little nephew seems to have been the beginning of the noble career for which he has become celebrated; for, thinking the boy would learn better with a companion, he took the son of a very poor woman to join him in his studies, and, becoming fascinated by the occupation of teaching, he gradually increased the number of his pupils. The little workshop in St. Mary street, Portsmouth, measuring only eighteen feet by six, where he made and mended boots and shoes, and which had hitherto been filled only with singing-birds and small animals, now become crowded with children of the lowest and poorest classes, sometimes amounting to nearly forty boys and girls. Pounds used often to go down to the quays, and, by bribes of roasted potatoes and such-like, induced the ragged little children to come to his school. Besides reading, writing, etc., he taught them to cook their victuals, and to mend their clothes and shoes. He was often their playfellow, their doctor, or their nurse. As he would never take payment of any kind for his trouble, he selected his pupils from the most wretched; and sometimes, when he has learned that parents in a position to pay a schoolmaster have fraudulently gained admittance to his school for their children, he has dismissed them to make room for others more needy. John Pounds died on New-Years Day, 1839.

Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Amelia Peabody seen to have reached an understanding by this point, that they were to be husband and wife.

Robert Schumann discovered the score of Franz Schubert’s Great C Major Symphony at the home of Schubert’s brother, Ferdinand. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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January 7, Monday: The 1st overland contingent of 660 members of the Cherokee nation led by John Bell arrived at Fort Gibson in the Oklahoma Territory. TRAIL OF TEARS

Louis Daguerre presented his photographic process to the French Academy of Science.

January 11, Friday: Nathaniel Hawthorne, a loyal Democrat party hack, accepted employment as measurer of coal and salt at the Boston Custom House in place of one Paul L. George who was dismissed, at a nominal salary of $1,500.00 per year39 although the office actually would generate an income of about twice that per year for its holder. While there Hawthorne would live in two rented rooms in a home at 54 Pinckney Street (in this year the family would also live at 8 Somerset Place).

January 16, Wednesday: Gesang am Grabe by Richard Wagner to words of von Brackel was performed for the initial time, in the Jakobi-Kirchhof, Riga.

Waldo Emerson’s 6th lecture in the “Human Life” series at the Masonic Temple in Boston, “The Protest.” Bronson Alcott and Jones Very were in the audience although not together. Emerson made “a splendid Protest against every lie in life.”40

January 17, Thursday: The group of some 1,200 members of the Cherokee nation led by Cherokee John Benge arrived in the Oklahoma Territory.

TRAIL OF TEARS 39. To get a sense of what that amounted to in today’s money, consult 40. One almost wishes it had been a formal debate, with an opponent to sponsor the contrary attitude. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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January 18, Friday: William Henry Fox Talbot demonstrated the results of a decade of experimentation with photography to the Royal Institute.

The following advertisement appeared in William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator:

January 29, Tuesday: The lightkeeper on Matinicus Rock, despite the demolition of his wooden home and its lighttowers in the storm of the 27th, had managed to hang a beacon from a jury-rigged mast in order to warn ships away from the shoal.

On this day (or possibly, shortly before) Jones Very attended one of Bronson Alcott’s “Conversations” in Lynn, Massachusetts. The topic was “Instinct” and Alcott felt that Very had made a real contribution, although the intensity of it made him wonder how long such a phenomenon could be sustained — whether to anticipate that Very would “decease soon.”

Charles Darwin got married with Emma Wedgwood. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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FEBRUARY 1839

February 8, Friday: Waldo Emerson wrote a note full of condescension-humor to Margaret Fuller about “my Henry Thoreau,” characterizing him in quasi-Old Testament terms not as “my protector” but as “my protester,” and evaluating that the young man had “broken out into good poetry & better prose.”

A letter from Thomas Carlyle to Emerson indicates that he had just received a bill of exchange for £100 from America in payment for some publications of his works, which had been arranged for by Emerson.

February 9, Saturday: John Thoreau, Jr. came and took over the duties of Preceptor at the Concord Academy, and his name began to appear as such in advertisements in the Yeoman’s Gazette:

Concord Academy. / The Above School will be continued under the care of the subscriber, after the commencement of the spring term, Monday, March 11th. / Terms for the Quarter: / English branches, $4.00 / Languages included 6.00 / He will be assisted in the classical department by Henry D. Thoreau, the present instructor. / N.B. Writing will be particularly attended to. / John Thoreau, Jr., Preceptor. / Concord, Feb. 9, 1838

Hector Berlioz was appointed deputy curator of the Paris Conservatoire Library (the appointment and salary were retroactive to January 1st).

On an expedition led by English explorer John Balleny, Captain Thomas Freeman landed at what are now deemed the Balleny Islands, just long enough to collect some rock specimens (this happened to be the initial landing south of the Antarctic Circle). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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February 11, Monday: After barely 2 months on the island of Mallorca, Frédéric François Chopin, George Sand, and her children left Valldemosa. Their stay had been generally disappointing and was damaging Chopin’s health — he coughed blood on a regular basis.

Samuel Tenney Hildreth, younger brother of Richard Hildreth, who had been at Harvard College a chum of David Henry Thoreau, died at the age of 21. The body would be placed at Mount Auburn Cemetery beneath an inscription: “The Good die first, And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust Burn to the socket.”

February 15, Friday: For this day in Canadian history, view the film “February 15, 1839.”

Waldo Emerson sent off a note to Henry Thoreau asking that he help Margaret Fuller find a house in Concord — and as an afterthought invited him to meet an Amos Bronson Alcott at the home of his sister-in-law Mrs. Lucy Jackson Brown.

Friday, 15 Feb. [1840] My dear Sir The dull weather & some inflammation still hold me in the house, and so may cost you some trouble. I wrote to Miss Fuller at Groton a week ago that as soon as Saturday (tomorrow) I would endeavor to send her more accurate HDT WHAT? INDEX

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answers to her request for information in respect to houses likely that to be let in Concord. As I know she & ^ her family must be anxious to learn the facts, as[]soon as may be, I beg you to help me in procuring the information today, if your engagements will leave you space for this charity. My questions are 1. Is Dr Gallup’s house to be vacant shortly, &, if so, what is the rent? It belongs, I believe, to Col. Shattuck. 2. What does Mrs Goodwin determine

Page 2 in regard to the house now occupied by Mr Gourgas? Since, if she do not wish to apply for that house, I think that will suit Mrs F. If it is to be had, what is the rent? Col. Shattuck is also the lessor of this house.

3. What is the rent of your Aunt[’s] house, & when will it be rentable?

4 Pray ask your father if he knows of any other houses in the village that may want tenants in the spring. If sometime this evening you can without much inconvenience give me an answer to these queries, you will greatly oblige your imprisoned friend R. W. Emerson. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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February 16, Saturday: On this evening Henry Thoreau would encounter Bronson Alcott for the 1st time.

Advertisement for the Concord Academy under Preceptor John Thoreau, Jr.:

String Quartet no.3 op.44/1 by Felix Mendelssohn was performed for the initial time, in Leipzig.

February 20, Wednesday: The final lecture of Waldo Emerson’s “Human Life” series.

The United States Congress banned dueling in the District of Columbia. In the future political duels would necessitate a short carriage journey, to fields in the state of Virginia (a venue where such duels also, for whatever this is worth, were illegal).

Simon Mayr read the 1st part of his HISTORY OF THE ORATORIO AND THE MYSTERIES at the Ateneo of Bergamo.

According to the Congressional Globe, page 186, Appendix, Mr. Sevier of Arkansas made a comment on the floor of the US Senate in derogation of the seriousness of attention of the American people: [They must] at all times have an idol to worship, and a clown to laugh at; they must have occasionally a Sam Patch, a Morgan, an Abolitionist, or an Oceola, to marvel at, and to talk about.

February 23, Saturday: Advertisement for the Concord Academy under Preceptor John Thoreau, Jr.: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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February 24, Sunday: Mrs. Lidian “Asia” Jackson Emerson gave birth to Ellen Tucker Emerson, named after Waldo Emerson’s first wife Mrs. Ellen Louisa Tucker Emerson. Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau acted as midwife.

Frédéric François Chopin, George Sand, and her children reached Marseilles. Wrote Sand, “A month more and we would have died in Spain — he of melancholy and disgust and I of rage and indignation.” They would remain in Marseilles for 3 months to give him time to recuperate.

Uruguay, claiming interference in internal affairs, declared war on Argentina.

February 25, Monday: Waldo Emerson to his journal:

Yesterday morning, 24 Feb. at 8 o’clock a daughter was born to me, a soft, quiet, swarthy little creature, apparently perfect & healthy. My second child. Blessings on thy head, little winter bud! & comest thou to try thy luck in this world & know if the things of God are things for thee? Well assured & very soft & still, the little maiden expresses great contentment with all she finds, & her delicate but fixed determination to stay where she is, & grow. So be it, my fair child! Lidian, who magnanimously makes my gods her gods, calls the babe Ellen. I can hardly ask more for thee, my babe, than that name implies. Be that vision & remain with us, & after us.

LIDIAN “ASIA” JACKSON EMERSON ELLEN TUCKER EMERSON ELLEN LOUISA TUCKER EMERSON

February 27, Wednesday or slightly before: Jones Very rode into Boston with Bronson Alcott and spent the day at his home. Alcott became concerned for Very’s physical well-being: “He is more spectral than ever.” The mental and emotional strain of such a sustained intensity was beginning to show up as physical wear and tear on the body of this 26-year-old. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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MARCH 1839

March: The final group of the Cherokee Nation, headed by John Ross, reached Oklahoma. More than 3,000 Cherokee had died on this “Trail of Tears,” 1,600 of them while in the concentration camps at the point of origin and about the same number en route. In the Oklahoma Territory during 1839, some 800 more would die.

TRAIL OF TEARS

The white Americans had succeeded in disposing of a bunch of nonwhite people they considered to be useless. –Now, for the nonwhite people whom the white Americans considered to be useful, well, what a surprise, during this month affairs had been being transacted quite a bit differently:

A negrero flying the Portuguese flag, the Constitucion, master J. Rodriguez, out of an unknown area of Africa with a cargo of 213 enslaved Africans on its 2nd of two known Middle Passages, arrived at a port of Cuba. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Dois de Fevereiro, master unknown, out of Angola with a cargo of 414 enslaved Africans on one of its three known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at a port in Brazil. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

I have two different accounts of a slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Dois Irmaos, master unknown, on one of its three or four known Middle Passage voyages, having sailed out of according to one account Cabinda with a cargo of 580 enslaved Africans, arrived during this month at the port of Ilha Grande, Brazil, and, according to the other account, having sailed out of Angola with a cargo of 195, arrived during this month at Rio De Janeiro. Could this vessel have stopped off first at Ilha Grande and then gone on to Rio De Janeiro to dispose of the remainder of its human cargo? A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Liberal, master A. Sanchez, out of an unknown area of Africa with a cargo of 257 enslaved Africans on one of its four known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at a port of Cuba. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Libertad, master unknown, on its one and only known Middle Passage, arrived at its destination, Cuba. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Bom Jesus, master unknown, delivering a cargo of 300 enslaved Africans on its one and only known Middle Passage, arrived at the port of Mangratiba, Brazil. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Augerona, master unknown, out of Angola with a cargo of 298 enslaved Africans on its one and only known Middle Passage, arrived at Rio, Brazil. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Carolina, master unknown, had started out of Quelimane on one of its five known Middle Passage voyages with a cargo of 744 enslaved Africans but during this month was delivering only 698 at the port of Paranagua, Brazil — as 46 had died in transit. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Doze de Outubro, master unknown, out of Angola with a cargo of 403 enslaved Africans on one of its five known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. A Portuguese slaver, the Josefina, master A. Joze, out of an unknown area of Africa with a cargo of 235 enslaved Africans on one of its twelve-count-’em-twelve known such Passages, arrived in Cuban waters. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

March: By the decade of the 1830s, it has been estimated, opium had become not only the main event of the British-sponsored trade between India and China, but the single most lucrative item of all international commerce. Then in this year a new mandarin arrived in Guangzhou (Canton), Imperial Commissioner Lin Tse- hsü who had been governor of Hubei and Hunan provinces, and he had been the victor in an anti-opium purity campaign in government circles in Beijing and had won a mandate from the Court of Heaven to extirpate this unlawful wholesale recreational-drug traffic by foreigners which was proving to be so debilitating to the citizenry and to the economy of the Central Kingdom and thus correct the outflow of the Chinese supply of silver:

Lin Tse-hsü in 1850 In this month Lin demanded that 20,291 chests of the controlled substance, on hand in the warehouses (godowns) of the British and their compradors, be surrendered. The Danish, German, American, and Spanish traders immediately accommodated themselves to this new regulation and Lin confiscated and destroyed 20,283 opium chests,41 but British traders were infuriated. The British Chief Superintendent of Trade, Captain Charles Elliot R.N., who had previously been the commander of a hospital ship and the Protector of Slaves in British Guiana, acceded to Imperial High Commissioner Lin and handed over the opium chests, which were promptly destroyed. The merchants withdrew to their “hell-ships” anchored in the harbor, where they would be safe, Lin refused to sell them food or water, Captain Elliot fired on three Chinese war-junks, and hey presto: both nations had ample reason to be at war.

41. Each chest contained 40 balls of opium wrapped in poppy leaves. Each ball weighed three pounds. Each ball had to be completely dissolved in noxious chemicals and flushed away into the harbor in such manner as to ensure that it would not be salvageable, as such psychotropic materials could not merely be burned without toxicity and as there existed a established secondary market for merely sea-damaged opium balls. All in all we’re talking about a lot of hard work. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Implementing the “forward policy” recommended by the Scottish merchants William Jardine and James Matheson,42 Foreign Secretary Palmerston of Lord Melbourne’s whig government in London decided that the

imperialist lackeys:

matter could be settled by putting gunboats on the major Chinese rivers.43 This would open up the Central Kingdom both to Free Trade and to Christianity. Gladstone warned that this policy was “at variance both with justice and religion” but succeeded only in isolating himself from other Members of Parliament in opposition. After a few skirmishes it became clear that the British military equipment and organization could handily defeat and destroy the Chinese war-junks, and so the Chinese agreed to cede to Britain a small, rocky island at the sea mouth of the Pearl River, for their use as a commercial base. This island of 26 square miles had been in use as a source of fresh water for ships, and was variously known at Incense Port, Fragrant Harbor, Aunty Heung, Herukong, Shiankang, and Hong Kong.

During this year Samuel Russell & Co. of Boston and Hong Kong was giving up its opium trade.

SAMUEL WADSWORTH RUSSELL OF MIDDLETON CT

42. In 1939, Mao Zedong would list the “Opium Wars” as the first of “twelve historical landmarks” of the “struggle by the Chinese people against imperialism and its lackeys” (SELECTED WORKS, Beijing 1967, Volume II, page 314). 43. One was always able to trust Henry John Temple, Lord Palmerston (1784-1865), “Lord Pumice-Stone,” to always leave a situation worse rather than better. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

March 2, Saturday: Advertisement for the Concord Academy under Preceptor John Thoreau, Jr.:

When Pascal et Chambord, a vaudeville by Jacques Offenbach to words of Bourgeois and Brisebarre, was performed for the initial time, at the Palais-Royal in Paris, it flopped.

March 8, Friday: Bronson Alcott reported to Margaret Fuller that he feared Jones Very would die or become “hopelessly mad.” At this point, six months of the year which he had allotted to himself had passed, and Very was isolating himself in his room at home at 154 Federal Street in Salem, for a sustained period of solitary concentration, writing sonnets about the manifestation of deity on this earth, upon which to be alive is to be dead and to be dead, alive. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

March 9, Saturday: The war between Mexico and France was brought to an end as Mexico promised to pay compensation and French troops began to withdraw.

Prussia limited the work week, for children, to 51 hours.

Oliver Brown, the youngest of John Brown’s sons to reach adulthood, was born in Franklin, Ohio. He would be a bookish lad.

(This son would be shot dead at the age of 20 while standing as a sentinel at the river bridge in Harpers Ferry.)

Advertisement for the Concord Academy under Preceptor John Thoreau, Jr.: HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

March 12, Tuesday: At a meeting of blacks at the 3rd Christian Church in New Bedford, Frederick Douglass opposed the idea of African colonization. This was his first public speaking.44

March 16, Saturday: Advertisement for the Concord Academy under Preceptor John Thoreau, Jr.:

44. In this year Douglass would be licensed to preach by the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church of New Bedford (a congregation distinct from the African Methodist Episcopal Church of New Bedford), although it would probably be too much to refer to him as “Reverend Douglass” — since it appears that he was not so addressed during his lifetime. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

March 19, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson wrote Jones Very to invite him for a house visit on April 5th or 6th. When Very did not participate in this planning, Evidently Emerson did not grasp that Very had sequestered himself for a prolonged period –perhaps for the full remaining six months of the year allotted for his performance as Jesus Christ– and began to fear that the invited houseguest would show up on the doorstep at an inconvenient time and embarrass or offend other visitors. “I always value a visit the more when the time is fixed beforehand. In the peculiar state of Jones Very, this is trebly true.”

March 20, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson lectured at the Concord Lyceum in Concord. This was the initial of a total of 7 lectures from the “Human Life” series, “Home.”

William H. Leeman was born. He would be recruited in Maine as a 17-year-old very impressed with John Brown. Being of a rather wild disposition, he would early leave his home in Maine. Educated in the public schools of Saco and Hallowell ME, he would be working in a shoe factory in Haverhill MA at the age of 14. In 1856 he would enter Kansas with the second Massachusetts colony of that year, and become a member of Captain Brown’s “Volunteer Regulars” on September 9, 1856. He would fight well at Osawatomie when but 17 years old. Owen Brown would find him hard to control at Springdale IA. George B. Gill would say of him that he had “a good intellect with great ingenuity.” By the raid upon Harpers Ferry he would have reached the age of 20. On October 17, 1859, the youngest of the raiders, he would make a mad dash out of the relative safety of the armory to swim down the Potomac River but two militiamen would catch up with him and shoot him down on an islet in the river. His body would be used for target practice for hours by the drunken citizenry, until the hail of bullets would push it into the current and it would be carried downstream. Mrs. Annie Brown Adams would write of him: “He was only a boy. He smoked a good deal and drank sometimes; but perhaps people would not think that so very wicked now. He was very handsome and very attractive.”

Lydia Maria Child petitioned the Massachusetts House of Representatives to abolish antiamalgamation legislation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

March 23, Saturday: At this point in journalism, it was a fad to use humorously incorrect initialisms. They tried out for instance “K.Y.,” meaning “know yuse” or “no use,” an innovation that would not catch on. However, in this day’s issue the Boston Morning Post pioneered something that would indeed catch on, catch on big time, world wide: “o.k. — all correct” (so, despite whatever you have heard, the term “OK” did not originate as a misspelling by Andrew Jackson, or as a Choctaw word, or as a superior brand of Army biscuit — it stood, quite simply, for “oll korrekt”).

Advertisement for the Concord Academy under Preceptor John Thoreau, Jr.: HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

March 24, Sunday: The final group of 1,766 members of the Cherokee Nation, led by Peter Hildebrand, arrived at its destination in the Oklahoma Territory having lost 55 along the way due to hypothermia and disease. The grand total for the relocation out of the concentration camps to the promised lands in the West was that some 4,000 persons had been sacrificed. Here is a view of the Cherokee Trail of Tears by Robert Lindneux, in the Woolaroc Museum, Bartlesville OK. TRAIL OF TEARS

Imperial Commissioner Lin Tse-hsü ordered the arrest in Canton of Lawrence Dent, leading British opium merchant. The foreigners refused to hand him over, so Lin ordered that the opium trade be halted and 350 foreigners were besieged in their “factories.”

Cesar Franck performed as piano soloist with the Conservatoire Concerts Society in Paris, offering the music of Johann Nepomuk Hummel.

March 27, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson lectured at the Concord Lyceum in Concord. This was the 2d lecture of the series, “Genius.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

March 28, Thursday: A financial reappraisal of the Northampton Silk Company’s assets and liabilities led to the withdrawal of Samuel Whitmarsh and his factory manager and the incorporation of an entirely new management team. When this concern went bankrupt, it took with it the capital that David Lee Child was counting on to underwrite his sugar beet business. Although after this event Whitmarsh would be being sued by four of his creditors and would be being described locally as having “neither cash nor credit to buy a barrel of flour,” he would promptly secure new investment funding in England for the foundation of a new silk factory, this time in Jamaica.45

45. This Northampton enterprise also would founder, when its vital shipment of imported silkworms would arrive dead. However, during this year Whitmarsh became a published author and an expert and a reputed authority on the manufacture of silk!

Whitmarsh, Samuel. EIGHT YEARS EXPERIENCE AND OBSERVATION IN THE CULTURE OF THE MULBERRY TREE AND IN THE CARE OF THE SILK WORM. WITH REMARKS ADAPTED TO THE AMERICAN SYSTEM OF PRODUCING RAW SILK FOR EXPORTATION. Northampton MA: J.H. Butler, 1839. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

March 29, Friday: Frederick Douglass’s remarks, at the meeting of blacks in New Bedford on March 12th, in opposition to the idea of African colonization, were printed in William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator. Douglass would have the important reading experience, of seeing something that he had himself said, distanced and represented impersonally, in printed letters on a mass-produced sheet.

March 30, Saturday: Advertisement for the Concord Academy under Preceptor John Thoreau, Jr.: HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

SPRING 1839

Spring: Friend Lucretia Mott visited Boston for the 1st anniversary meeting of the Non-Resistance Society. AN 1884 BIOGRAPHY

Spring: John Thoreau, Jr. and Henry Thoreau built their boat, the MUSKETAQUID: “Our boat, which had cost us a week’s labor in the spring, was in form like a fisherman’s dory, fifteen feet long by three and a half in breadth at the widest part, painted green below, with a border of blue, with reference to the two elements in which it was to spend its existence. It … was provided with wheels in order to be rolled around falls, as well as two sets of oars, and several slender poles for shoving in shallow places, and also two masts, one of which served as a tent-pole at night …. It was strongly built, but heavy, and hardly of better model than usual.”

Bronson Alcott wrote his old mother:

I am full of hope, and everything looks encouraging. As to money, that you know, is one of the last of my anxieties. I have many friends, and am making more daily, and have only to be true to my principles, to get not only a useful name, but bread and shelter, and raiment.... I am still the same Hoper that I have always been. Hope crowned me while I was following the plow on the barren and rocky fields of that same farm on which you now dwell, and Hope will never desert me either on this or the other side of the grave. I fancy that I was quickened and born in Hope, and Hope in the form of a kind and smiling mother, nursed me, rocked my cradle, and encouraged my aspirations, while I was the child, and the youth, seeking life and light amidst the scenes of my native hills. Those visits to libraries; those scribblings on the floor; those hours given to reading and study, at night or noon, or rainy- day; and even those solitary wanderings over southern lands, were this same Hope seeking to realize its highest objects. My grandfather was a Hoper; my mother inherited the old sentiment.... HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839 HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

APRIL 1839

April: Early in the month, on the River Gallindas of the Sierra Leone coast of Africa, the Havana trading house of Don Pedro Martínez prepared human cargo for the negrero (slave ship) Tecora, and the long Middle Passage to Cuba. Among the captives in this shipment was Joseph Cinqué, age 25, 5 feet 8 inches, a Mende who had been a rice-grower. The passage of the Tecora across the Atlantic would require two months and more than one out of three would fail to survive the crossing.

LA AMISTAD

The following description of conditions aboard the negrero during the Middle Passage would be given by Gilabaru and, as passed on by James Covey for the benefit of reporters, would eventually be published in the New-York Journal of Commerce: On board the vessel there was a large number of men, but the women and children were by far the most numerous. They were fastened together by couples by the wrists and legs and kept in that situation day and night. By day it was no better. The space between the decks was so small -according to their account not exceeding four feet- that they were obliged, if they attempted to stand, to keep a crouching posture. The decks, fore and aft, were crowded to overflowing. They suffered terribly. They had rice enough to eat but they had very little to drink. If they left any of the rice that was given to them uneaten, either from sickness or any other cause, they were whipped. It was a common thing for them to be forced to eat so much as to vomit. Many of the men, women and children died on the passage. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Arriving during this month in the New World at the completion of their arduous middle passages were a known total of nine such slavers, all of Portuguese registry: the Emilia, master unknown, on its one and only known Middle Passage, out of Angola with a cargo of 650 enslaved Africans, was arriving at the port of Campos, Brazil; the Ganges, master J.R. Costa, on its second of two known Middle Passages, out of Quelimane with a cargo of 419 enslaved Africans, was arriving at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; the Jehovah, master unknown, on one of its three known Middle Passage voyages, out of Angola with a cargo of 504 enslaved Africans, was arriving at the port of Macae, Brazil; the Josefina, master unknown, on one of its twelve-count-’em-twelve known Middle Passage voyages, out of Benguela with a cargo of 294 enslaved Africans, was arriving at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; the Carolina, master unknown, on one of its five known Middle Passage voyages, out of an unknown area of Africa with a cargo of 214 enslaved Africans, was arriving at Rio De Janeiro, Brazil; the Congresso, master unknown, on its one and only known Middle Passage, sailing out of Benguela with a cargo of 314 enslaved Africans, was arriving at Rio De Janeiro, Brazil; the Amizade Constante, master unknown, on its one and only known Middle Passage, out of Quelimane with a cargo of 400 enslaved Africans, was arriving at the port of Ilha Grande, Brazil; the Deligencia, master unknown, on one of its four known Middle Passage voyages, out of Angola with a cargo of 389 enslaved Africans, was arriving at a port in Brazil; and the Leal, master F.J. Ribeiro, on its one and only known Middle Passage, with a cargo of 364 enslaved Africans, was arriving at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The devil was getting his due.

INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

April: During this month, at a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, the struggle between the black pragmatist wing and the white Garrisonian wing of the antislavery movement –those who believed the changing the laws of enslavement would correct the situation, almost all black women, versus those who believed that enslavement was engraved in the American soul and that only the most diligent long-term soul searching and self-rectification could correct such baseness, almost all white women– came to the flash point. The black pragmatist forces took control of the society by a series of protested close votes in which it is quite clear that they were falsifying vote counts. When a white member called out from the floor “I doubt the vote,” the pragmatist who had just been “elected” commented “Then you may doubt it till the day of your death.” They announced that they had won and then adjourned, and the Garrisonians were reduced to publishing lists of membership names and affidavits of voting in order to demonstrate to the general public that the vote counts had been falsified. For instance, to refute the claim of the pragmatists that only 65 had opposed their slate of candidates, the Liberator printed a statement signed by 78 members, that they had voted against the pragmatists. But the pragmatists were firmly in control, and at the next meeting the “duly elected” officials simply ruled in their own favor. Then, at the April 1840 meeting, at which they referred to the white Garrisonians as “the ladies of the minority,” they moved and seconded a motion that their society be dissolved, held a quick poll which they claimed to be in the affirmative, and the presiding officer immediately declared “I pronounce the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society dissolved.” Better there be no antislavery society, than that it be run by a bunch of white people who were going to struggle with their souls. Nevertheless, three days later the Garrisonians met and reconstituted the society. “We go forward joyfully in the holy work of abolishing slavery,” the white women declared. The pragmatists issued appeals for support to Philadelphia and to England, but the reply from Philadelphia was signed by Friend Lucretia Mott and she gave them precious little credibility, referring to them as “high-handed.” This whole history is of great interest because it is clear that Thoreau’s attitude toward the antislavery issue, that like charity the task of correcting souls was a task that always began at home, was in line with the Garrisonians and in opposition to the pragmatists, despite the fact that the great majority of the pragmatists were black46 and virtually all the Garrisonians white. As one interesting aside, in the publications of the day no mention whatever was made of the fact that the split in the society was fundamentally a split between black and white. As another interesting aside, the black pragmatists who attempted to ruin the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society did not have the support of their own community in Boston, which overwhelmingly supported William Lloyd Garrison –that man who so frequently heard the taunting shout “white nigger” on the street– and in fact had used a “pocket veto” on 26 applications for membership from black women in the Boston community who would probably have supported the white Garrisonian wing in this controversy rather than settle for a pragmatic “win” that would,

46. Well, two of these people were identifying themselves as black women at that point, although later in their lives they identified themselves as white women — and I do subscribe to the principle that it is up to the person directly implicated, rather than to the official personages of and dominant strangers of a society, to create the definition of what that person is. I don’t, myself, want to “sex or second-guess” anyone. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

because it did not try anyone’s soul, have merely perpetuated the problems of racial discrimination and racial prejudice.

Also, at this April 1839 annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Henry Brewster Stanton confronted Garrison with

“Mr. Garrison! do you or do you not believe it is a sin to go to the polls?”

to which Garrison responded:

“Sin for me.”

A general vote of the society, including the women members, produced 180 votes that abolitionists would not be required to take part in the political process and to vote in political elections, versus 24 that abolitionists could not be members unless they were willing to vote in political elections. Stanton, James Gillespie Birney, etc., defeated, then resigned from the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

April 3, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson lectured at the Concord Lyceum in Concord. This was the 3d lecture of the series, “The Protest.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

April 6, Saturday: Abba Alcott gave birth to a “fine boy, full grown, perfectly formed” who lived only a few minutes. The anniversary of April 6th would become, for the next two decades, a sad gray-tinged day with a “draught of bitterness to taste, yes to drink from death’s bitterest beaker.... Ah Me! My Boy!” Bronson Alcott always wanted a boy, and Abba always wanted to give him one, but it would never be. Senile old Joseph May asked to accompany Bronson to the May family vault in the Old Granary burying ground on that Sunday, because, as Bronson was laying down the body of the baby, Joseph desired to look at his wife’s remains. THE ALCOTT FAMILY

Advertisement for the Concord Academy under Preceptor John Thoreau, Jr.:

April 7, Sunday: The little bundle, the “fine boy, fully grown, perfectly formed” who had lived only a few minutes, had been laid down in the crypt at the Old Granary burying grounds in Boston. Senile old Joseph May had gotten his peek at his wife’s remains. Back at his journal, Bronson Alcott wrote:

The tombs are dank with fetor; doubt sharpens the teeth of decay; corruption feeds his greedy gorge. Let me tread the sweet plots of Hope and breathe the incense of her flowering glories. There is no past in all her borders.

Rail service began between Dresden and Leipzig.

April 10, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson lectured at the Concord Lyceum in Concord. This was the 4th lecture of the series, “Love.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

April 13, Saturday: Advertisement for the Concord Academy under Preceptor John Thoreau, Jr.:

(Several more such advertisements would appear during this year.)

April 16, Tuesday: William Lloyd Garrison addressed an amalgamated audience at Mechanics Hall in New Bedford, with Frederick Douglass in the audience.47

47. Frederick Douglass also, during this period, attended lectures by Wendell Phillips, the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, and other abolitionists. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

April 20, Saturday: A preserved waybill of the Boston, Lexington, and Concord Accommodation Stagecoach reveals that Waldo Emerson’s fare to Concord, a two or three hour ride, was 75 cents. The coach on this trip carried seven other male passengers and one female passenger.

William Shepherd, keeper of a Concord tavern (now 122 Main Street), had begun to offer this stagecoach service to Boston three days each week, carrying passengers and delivering packages, in 1817.

April 24, Sunday: Waldo Emerson lectured at the Concord Lyceum in Concord. This was the 5th lecture of the series, “Tragedy.”

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.

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.”48

April 26, Friday: Rufus Hosmer died in Stow, Massachusetts. Rufus Hosmer [of Concord], son of the Hon. Joseph Hosmer, was born March 18, 1778, and graduated [at Harvard College] in 1800. He was admitted to the bar in Essex in 1803, and soon after removed to Stow, where he has since [to 1835] resided as a counsellor at law.49

48. 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 go with the OED and its interpretation of Thoreau’s 1839 usage, in voting for “damn” over “dam.” 49. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy (On or about November 11, 1837 Henry Thoreau would indicate a familiarity with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study. On July 16, 1859 he would correct a date mistake buried in the body of the text.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

MAY 1839

THE 1ST TUESDAY IN MAY WAS THE ANNUAL “MUSTER DAY,” ON WHICH ALL THE ABLEBODIED WHITE MEN OF A TOWN WERE SUPPOSEDLY REQUIRED TO FALL INTO FORMATION, WITH THEIR PERSONAL FIREARMS, TO UNDERGO THEIR ANNUAL DAY OF MILITARY TRAINING AND MILITIA INDOCTRINATION.

May: Richard Henry Dana, Jr. submitted his manuscript of TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST to William Cullen Bryant. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839 HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

May 1, Wednesday: In England, the 1st adhesive stamp was introduced (it was a penny stamp).

Waldo Emerson lectured at the Concord Lyceum in Concord. This was the 6th lecture of the series, “Comedy.”

In his journal Henry Thoreau mentioned “Lady of the Lake” from THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SIR WALTER SCOTT, by Conner & Cooke in New-York in 1833.

May 7, Tuesday: The annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, in Chatham Street Chapel in New-York: After a long and noisy day of debate, it was decided by a vote of 184 to 141 to allow women to be seated as delegates — but this left matters of substance undecided, such as whether these female delegates would be permitted to speak, whether they could be accepted as members of committees, and whether they might be allowed to fill offices. (To avoid use of the gendered term “he,” one official began carefully to use the non-gendered plural “they”!) The struggle went on for the duration of the convention, with petitions being circulated that declared that these innovations in regard to the status of women would be

repugnant to the wishes, to the wisdom, or the moral sense of many of the members

and would

bring unnecessary reproach and embarrassment to the cause of the enslaved

and would be

at variance with the general usage and sentiments of this and all other nations.

At one point Bronson Alcott rose in condemnation of the entire convention. Since he consumed “nothing but pure vegetables,” he opinioned, then, rather than being as the rest of the delegates were, to wit, what they ate, specifically cattle, sheep, fowl, swine, he himself was “as pure and as wise as was Jesus Christ” — and therefore they ought to pay especial heed to his opinions. A Wesleyan Methodist from western New York state, the Reverend Luther Lee, could not resist this opportunity and rose to opinion that Alcott also was precisely what he ate, specifically potatoes, turnips, pumpkins, squash.

May 11, Saturday: US federal troops prevented the State of Michigan from digging a canal at Sault Ste. Marie.

May 13, Monday: Bronson Alcott, in Boston: I am no scholar. My might is not in my pen. This is feeble. I do no justice to myself in the literary composition. My organ is action and voice, rather. I am an actor and a sayer, rather than a writer. I do not detach my thoughts from life. I am concrete. Thought manifests itself in deeds and spoken words. I am solitary. No one enters into my purpose. None perceives my true position. None can advise or help me. I must be self- subsistent and take counsel of my own heart alone. My week’s intercourse with Emerson has done me good. It has HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

classified me. I apprehend my genius the more clearly. I define my theatre of action the better by comparison with his. He is a scholar. He lives to see and write. He looks abroad on Nature and life and sketches their features with his pen. He sits in the theatre of Nature and draws the players and scenes. He is an observer, an eye, an ear, a pen. Creation is a spectacle to him, and he sets himself to criticise her order and denote her qualities in the form of speech. He is a literary artist and detaches his thoughts from Nature and life and represents them in elegant images to the eye.

May 15, Wednesday: Lewis Tappan urged Gerrit Smith to shun the Nonresistance Society, because nonresistance to evil was “part and parcel of a system of innovations that will, so far as they succeed, overturn all that is valuable.” The wealthy Smith’s donation to the society was the largest it would ever receive — but he never would join.

Waldo Emerson lectured at the Concord Lyceum in Concord. This was the 7th and final lecture of the current series, “Demonology.”

May 20, Monday: The remaining assets of the Northampton Silk Company that had been so heavily invested in by Samuel Whitmarsh were sold to a group of the stockholders for a mere $40,000.

SWEETS Some silk manufacturing continued. The company leased 20 acres of its old farmed-out mulberry-bush hill WITHOUT acreage to David Lee Child for experiments with sugar beets. SLAVERY

May 21, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau included a snippet from Sir Walter Scott’s “Lady of the Lake” in his journal:

Self-culture

Who knows how incessant a surveillance a strong man may maintain over himself — how far subject passion and appetite to reason, and lead the life his imagination paints? Well has the poet said— “by manly mind Not e’en in sleep is will resigned.” By a strong effort, may he not command even his brute body in unconscious moments?

May 25, Saturday: Waldo Emerson ’s 36th birthday. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

May 27, Monday: Birth of Friend Daniel Ricketson’s second son Walton.50 He would be educated at the Friends Academy of New Bedford, would become an artist, and would never marry.

Waldo Emerson to his journal:

A great genius must come & preach self reliance. Our people are timid, desponding, recreant whimperers. If they fail in their first enterprises they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is RUINED. If the finest genius studies at the Cambridge Divinity College, and is not ordained within a year afterwards in Boston, or New York, it seems to his friend & himself that he is justified in being disheartened & in complaining for the rest of his life. a sturdy New Hampshire man or Vermonter who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, & so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these Boston dolls. My brave Henry here who is content to live now, & feels no shame in not studying any profession, for he does not postpone his life but lives already — pours contempt on these crybabies of routine & Boston. He has not one chance but a hundred chances. Now let a stern preacher arise who shall reveal the resources of Man, & tell men they are not leaning willows, but can & must detach themselves, that a man, a woman, is a sovereign eternity, born to shed healing to the nations; that he should be ashamed of our compassion; & that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, the idolatries, the customs, out of the window, we pity him, we pity her no more, but thank & revere them; that with the exercise of self trust new powers shall appear.

50. An alleged runic signature of Leif Eriksson with date MI would be observed on a boulder lying on the beach at No Man’s Land, an island off Martha’s Vineyard, around 1920. It would form the basis of a book by Edward F. Gray, LEIF ERIKSSON DISCOVERER OF AMERICA (Oxford, 1930), in which it is illustrated. Opinions of runic experts were so disappointing that Mr. Gray finally concluded (page 159) that it was carved by some later explorer such as Verrazzano or Gosnold as a “monument to Lief” [sic]. The inscription has been thoroughly investigated by Edmund B. Delabarre and Charles W. Brown for The New England Quarterly, VIII (1935), 365-78. They concluded that it had been carved in the twentieth century by some joker, probably Walton Ricketson (1839- 1923) of New Bedford. Refer to Samuel Eliot Morison’s THE EUROPEAN DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. THE NORTHERN VOYAGES A.D. 500-1600. NY: Oxford UP, 1971. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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JUNE 1839

June: Lydia Maria Child was in Boston at this point, staying with friends while looking for a job. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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June: Bronson Alcott admitted the child Susan51 Robinson to the shrunken “School of Human Culture” in his home at 6 Beach Street in Boston, a school which since it had been forced to relocate to the basement no longer looked anything like this:

A few weeks afterward the school was visited by Dr. John Flint, as the representative of a group of parents.

My patrons, through Dr. John Flint, urge the dismissal of the Robinson Child. I decline....

Bronson had got his tit in the ringer and couldn’t get it out. Susan Robinson was black, or at least a very little bit black, and yet she had feelings, and this sensitive man simply could not steele himself to tell her she couldn’t come to school now, couldn’t learn any more, couldn’t associate with her schoolmates any more, because she was not as white — because her friends were really really white. This painfully honest man also couldn’t bear to leave it to another person to break the news to her. “You aren’t good to be with, because you are what you are.” It was the unthinkable crime.

Immediately almost all the children, except the Alcott girls and Susan Robinson and William Russell’s boy, were withdrawn by their parents, and the school Bronson had founded in 1834 became defunct. Sex education in the schools might be an idea whose time would come. Apostasy about the human origins of Christ might be winked at by the worldly wise. Amalgamation could not, however, be tolerated. To be a colored child was to

51. Interestingly, the only way we know that the name of this child was Susan is, that 8-year-old Anna wrote it in her diary. She was not old enough to know that to history, a person who is not white is merely another nameless instance of the type “colored people.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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be the bearer of manifold unnameable contaminations.

To help Bronson Alcott recover from the Temple School disaster, the Alcotts would visit the Mays in South Scituate.

This experience would later show up in Louisa May Alcott’s LITTLE WOMEN, at the end of which Mrs. Jo

March Bhaer and Professor Fritz Bhaer are running a boarding school for boys in their large suburban home “Plumfield” and are including one token “small quadroon” child (who was musically inclined, we notice), in this melting pot.52 Here I suppose the author to be conflating her father Bronson’s upper room “Temple School” at the Tremont Temple in Boston with the school run by the Professor and Mrs. Agassiz in Cambridge, because I suppose that latter school would have been an unlikely venue for integration in the light of the manifest ingrained racism of the father of that family. It would be of great interest here, if anyone could turn up any evidence that any such gesture had been made toward integration of that later Cambridge school, of associating an unnamed small charge with the defect of having had a black grandparent with larger defective white charges described as “slow boys and bashful boys, feeble boys and riotous boys, boys that lisped and boys that stuttered, one or two lame ones” including a “pale lad, who sat adoring her with his little crutch beside him,” etc., for such evidence would generate the most serious scholarly reappraisal of the defective character of

52. A quadroon has three white grandparents and one black, that is, for the moment to tolerate this method of calculation, it is “one quarter black and three quarters white.” By way of contrast, in our modern era the modal person who self-identifies as black in the United States of America tests, genetically, roughly a third to a half similar to the general African genepool and roughly a half to two-thirds similar to the general European genepool. In this arena, cultural perceptions and self-identifications and genetic tests seldom match up with one another, and the general rule of accommodation seems to be that we should just ask people to self-identify as they please — and then align ourselves with whatever that happens to be. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Professor Louis Agassiz of Harvard College.

It never was a fashionable school, and the Professor did not lay up a fortune; but it was just what Jo intended it to be, — ‘a happy, home-like place for boys, who needed teaching, care, and kindness.’ Every room in the big house was soon full; every little plot in the garden soon had its owner; a regular menagerie appeared in barn and shed, — for pet animals were allowed, — and, three times a day, Jo smiled at her Fritz from the head of a long table lined on either side with rows of happy young faces, which all turned to her with affectionate eyes, confiding words, and grateful hearts, full of love for ‘Mother Bhaer.’ She had boys enough now, and did not tire of them, though they were not angels by any means, and some of them caused both Professor and Professorin much trouble and anxiety. But her faith in the good spot which exists in the heart of the naughtiest, sauciest, most tantalizing little ragamuffin gave her patience, skill, and, in time, success, — for no mortal boy could hold out long with Father Bhaer shining on him as benevolently as the sun, and Mother Bhaer forgiving him seventy times seven. Very precious to Jo was the friendship of the lads, their penitent sniffs and whispers after wrongdoing, their droll or touching little confidences, their pleasant enthusiasms, hopes, and plans; even their misfortunes, — for they only endeared them to her all the more. There were slow boys and bashful boys, feeble boys and riotous boys, boys that lisped and boys that stuttered, one or two lame ones, and a merry little quadroon, who could not be taken in elsewhere, but who was welcome to the Bhaer-garten, though some people predicted that his admission would ruin the school. … [T]he Professor suddenly began to sing. Then, from above him, voice after voice took up the words, and from tree to tree echoed the music of the unseen choir, as the boys sang, with all their hearts, the little song Jo had written, Laurie set to music, and the Professor trained his lads to give with the best effect. This was something altogether new, and it proved a grand success: for Mrs. March couldn’t get over her surprise, and insisted on shaking hands with every one of the featherless birds, from tall Franz and Emil to the little quadroon, who had the sweetest voice of all.

June: A total of six slavers, all flying the Portuguese flag, have been registered as arriving in the New World during this month. We immediately note that the negrero Tecora, the ship that was carrying Joseph Cinqué, is not on this official list of six arrivals. That is because the Middle Passage voyage which brought him was an under-the-table deal. How many such under-the-table deals were there? –How typical was that? – How woefully unreliable and incomplete are the statistics we are able now to accumulate?

We can know now about the Josefina, master A. Rodriguez, on one of its twelve-count-’em-twelve known Middle Passage voyages, out of Sao Tome with a cargo of 240 enslaved Africans, arriving at a port of Cuba.

We can know now about the Esperanca, master unknown, on one of its ten-count-’em-ten known Middle Passage voyages, out of Cabinda with a cargo of 370 enslaved Africans, arriving at Campos, Brazil. We can know now about the Amalia, master unknown, on one of its five known Middle Passage voyages, out of Mocambique, arriving at the port of Cananeia, Brazil. We can know now about the Astrea, master Sabino, on HDT WHAT? INDEX

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its one and only known Middle Passage, out of Sao Tome with a cargo of 440 enslaved Africans, arriving at a port of Cuba. We can know now about the Commodore, master unknown, on its second of two known Middle Passages, out of Mocambique with a cargo of 700 enslaved Africans, arriving at Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. We can know now about the Dois Amigos, master J. da Silva, on one of its three known Middle Passage voyages, out of Sao Tome with a cargo of 413 enslaved Africans, arriving at a port of Cuba. About the balance we can at best only speculate.

His illegal transportation from Africa to Cuba having been completed by offloading of captives on a secluded beach at night, Cinque was at this point just another American slave. There was no longer any need to hide him from the law, as the law, which legitimated slavery while outlawing international trade in slaves, was now on the side of his “owners.” He was in one of two “barracoons” in Havana, Cuba, either in the one with a maximum capacity of 1,000 souls, or the one with a maximum capacity of 1,500 souls. LA AMISTAD HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Early in June: Waldo Emerson and Jones Very had for some time been discussing the publication of a book, ESSAYS AND POEMS BY JONES VERY, to be made up of an autobiographical prologue, the three essay or lectures “Epic Poetry,” “Shakespeare,” and “Hamlet,” and a selection of the sonnets.

At this point, from the isolation of his chamber in Salem, Very packed up all these manuscripts and sent them off to the Emerson home in Concord. Although Emerson would be welcome to visit him in Salem, he wrote, he would be unable to visit Concord. He requested that his book be dedicated: “To Edward Tyrrell Channing, Boyleston Professor in Harvard University, This Volume is Inscribed, As a Token of Gratitude, By the Author.”

June 14, Friday: A Chartist petition with 1,200,000 signatures was presented to Parliament.

Recollecting that Waldo Emerson had once attempted to improve upon the voice of the Holy Spirit by the alteration of a line in the sonnet “In Him we live, and move, and have our being,” Jones Very was finally able to overcome his cabin fever. He left his chamber. First he visited Bronson Alcott, attired in his customarily meticulous black suit and frock coat, with large black hat and black walking-stick. While with the Alcotts, the Reverend Orestes Augustus Brownson happened to drop by, and “They say opposite each other at the table; but were sundered by spaces immeasurable.” Then Very went on to the Emersons in Concord, and would stay three days, arguing with Emerson about which materials to include in the book, in what sequence to place the sonnets, etc. Unfortunately, during this visit, Emerson attempted a humorous treatment of his difficult guest HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and this treatment came across as the most relentless mockery, with Mrs. Lidian Emerson sympathetically attempting to provide the only emotional resources available to Very in that household. When Very insisted on no changes to the sonnets because “such was the will of God,” Emerson countered with “Cannot the Spirit parse and spell?” and declared that “We cannot permit the Holy Ghost to be careless (and in one instance) to talk bad grammar.” Edwin Gittleman summarizes:

He was quick to answer every one of Very’s “speeches,” and later (for the entertainment of mutual friends) he recounted in detail how cleverly he had “dealt” with him.[p.337]

What Waldo wanted, of course, above all else, was a volume which would look good and sell well. Prudent and a good read. What the author wanted, of course, above all else, was to remain utterly faithful to the instructions which he believed he was receiving from above. Emerson won, exhausting Very not only through intransigence but with off-putting sarcasm, and the eventual volume would succeed in de-emphasizing all the prophecy, all the apocalypticism, and all the evangelical enthusiasm which, to its author, were its very core.

June 17, Monday: The widow of Revolutionary War officer Joseph Ward and her daughter Prudence, having been long-term boarders in the Thoreau boardinghouse, their nephew Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., age 11, came to stay there with Prudence and was enrolled among the 25 or so boys who were in the school kept by SAMUEL SEWALL the Thoreau brothers. Henry Thoreau dedicated his poem on sympathy “To a Gentle Boy” to suggest a similarity of temperament between Edmund and the title character in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tale THE GENTLE BOY, which had appeared in a magazine called Token in 1832 and had then been included in the volume TWICE- TOLD TALES in 1837, and this highly regarded poem was widely circulated in the Thoreau and Sewall extended families — although Edmund was to comment later that he had been somewhat embarrassed at all this attention. This has been taken as an instance of Thoreau’s latent sexual attraction to males rather than females, but it was not so taken at that time: the Sewall family’s response was to ask Henry, in fairness, if he couldn’t write one also for Edmund’s little brother.

June 17, Monday: Samuel Sebastian Wesley matriculated at Magdalen College, Oxford for the simultaneous degrees of Bachelor of Music and Doctor of Music.

Jones Very “departed from” the Emerson home suddenly, making a remark that he was not being permitted by the Holy Spirit to remain. What had happened, Edwin Gittleman discretely suggests, was that Mrs. Lidian Emerson’s “feminine ways and sensitivities, devout thoughts and encouragements” had innocently raised in Very some wicked snake which he had supposed he had dispensed with when, at Harvard University in 1835, to the great amusement of his bantering classmates, he had “sacrificed Beauty.” (Of course, as we know, this would not be the last time that Lidian’s warm sensitivity would rouse an inexperienced young man’s affection.) WALDO EMERSON HDT WHAT? INDEX

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June 22, Saturday: There had been arguments over finances, and as of this day (or perhaps the following day) the Reverend Lemuel Capen resigned as the pastor for the Hawes Place Society of South Boston.

For the usual fee the Captain General of Cuba issued fraudulent transportation permits. In total Joseph Cinqué would have been in a slave barracoon of Havana for ten days. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE LA AMISTAD RACE SLAVERY

June 22, Saturday: That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another’s. We see so much only as we possess.

We see so much only as we possess.

June 22, Saturday: I have within the last few days come into contact with a pure uncompromising spirit, that is somewhere wandering in the atmosphere, but settles not positively anywhere. Some persons carry about them the air and conviction of virtue, though they themselves are unconscious of it — and are even backward to appreciate it in others. Such it is impossible not to love — still is their loveliness, as it were, independent of them, so that you seem not to lose it when they are absent, for when they are near it is like an invisible presence which attends you.

Late in June: Don José Ruiz and Don Pedro Montes purchased 49 adult males at $450 each, including Joseph Cinqué, in the slave barracoons of Havana, Cuba for transport to the plantations of Puerto Princípe, on the northwest coast of the same island at about two days’ sailing distance. They also purchased three little girls and a little boy. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE LA AMISTAD RACE SLAVERY

June 24, Monday: Egyptian forces routed Turkish forces at Nezib (Nizip), 100 kilometers north of Aleppo (Halab).

In England, Thomas Carlyle was the first Englishman to theorize the Saxon success, as due to innate racial superiority. He saw himself, a lowland Scott, as a Teuton, “a piece of the right Saxon stuff,” and he saw these Teutons like himself as the colonizers of the earth precisely because they were the saviors of the earth. I’m your great white hope, I’m God’s gift to you — best you hold still so’s I don’t need to whop you: And yet, if this small rim of Europe is overpeopled, does not everywhere else a whole vacant Earth as it were, call to us, Come and till me, come and reap me! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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This racist genocidalist wrote to Waldo Emerson, on this date, about the possibility that it might be Boston, or New-York, rather than London, that would become the great Wen at which “all the Saxons” would assemble, upon which they could center their world of progress and development and civilization and great white “All Saxondom” race-soul. He found a sympathetic ear, of course, because Emerson was a fellow believer in worth.53

Rosetta Douglass, the 1st child of Anna Murray Douglass and Frederick Douglass, was “born free” in New Bedford.54

Or, at least, this is the official date proclaimed by the family: notice that June 24, 1839 is nine months and a week subsequent to the wedding ceremony and honeymoon, and note also that in the era before state-issued birth certificates, there was quite a bit of opportunity for creative reconstruction of family history. There are records that white persons in Douglass’s audience would amuse themselves, and perhaps others, by raising frank questions about Rosetta, suggesting that Anna was probably pregnant at the time of her wedding and that Rosetta was therefore possibly an illegitimate child.

(Poor little worthless dark Rosetta, in accordance with the racist theories that Thomas Carlyle and Waldo Emerson were corresponding about on this very day of her birth –read them and weep– in this world there was to be a Wen for all worthies like them who were “of the right Saxon stuff” but there was to be no Wen for her!)55

53. If you have begun to suspect I maybe am suggesting that what Thomas Carlyle and Waldo Emerson were up to was the formation of a 19th-Century Nazism, and that Emerson was a full co-conspirator in advancing what he himself termed “the best stock in the world” through genocide, then you’re paying attention. (If you didn’t know this about this gentleman, then you’ve obviously been paying attention to the Emersonians.)

“Emersonians are all alike; every Thoreauvian is Thoreauvian in his or her own way.” — Austin Meredith

54. “Born free” means about as much in this context, as it does in the context of a lion cub on the veldt, since in both cases white hunters might at any time trap the family, with total impunity and clearness of conscience, and carry it away. Nevertheless, even when free does not mean free from fear, it does mean something. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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June 24, Monday: Gustavus Franklin Swift, who would found Swift & Company, was born.

The 1st photography exhibition took place, in France. It showed the work of inventor Hippolyte Bayard.

Robert Schumann contacted Wilhelm Einert, a Leipzig attorney, to begin legal proceedings to get married to Clara Wieck without the consent of her father.

Henry Thoreau wrote, in honor of Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., age 11, the poem “Sympathy.” Lately alas I knew a gentle boy, Whose features all were cast in Virtue’s mould, As one she had designed for Beauty’s toy, But after manned him for her own strong-hold. On every side he open was as day, That you might see no lack of strength within, For walls and ports do only serve alway For a pretence to feebleness and sin. Say not that Cæsar was victorious, With toil and strife who stormed the House of Fame; In other sense this youth was glorious, Himself a kingdom wheresoe’er he came. No strength went out to get him victory, When all was income of its own accord; For where he went none other was to see, But all were parcel of their noble lord. He forayed like the subtle breeze of summer, That stilly shows fresh landscapes to the eyes, And revolutions worked without a murmur, Or rustling of a leaf beneath the skies. So was I taken unawares by this, I quite forgot my homage to confess; Yet now am forced to know, though hard it is, I might have loved him, had I loved him less. Each moment, as we nearer drew to each, A stern respect withheld us farther yet, So that we seemed beyond each other’s reach, And less acquainted than when first we met. We two were one while we did sympathize, So could we not the simplest bargain drive; And what avails it now that we are wise, If absence doth this doubleness contrive? Eternity may not the chance repeat, But I must tread my single way alone, In sad remembrance that we once did meet, 55. If you have begun to suspect I maybe am suggesting that what Thomas Carlyle and Waldo Emerson were up to was the formation of a 19th-Century Nazism, and that Emerson was a full co-conspirator in advancing what he himself termed “the best stock in the world” through genocide, then you’re paying attention. (If you didn’t know this about this gentleman, then you’ve obviously been paying attention to Emersonians.)

“Emersonians are all alike; every Thoreauvian is Thoreauvian in his or her own way.” — Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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And know that bliss irrevocably gone. The spheres henceforth my elegy shall sing, For elegy has other subject none; Each strain of music in my ears shall ring Knell of departure from that other one. Make haste and celebrate my tragedy; With fitting strain resound ye woods and fields; Sorrow is dearer in such case to me Than all the joys other occasion yields. Is‘t then too late the damage to repair? Distance, forsooth, from my weak grasp hath reft The empty husk, and clutched the useless tare, But in my hands the wheat and kernel left. If I but love that virtue which he is, Though it be scented in the morning air, Still shall we be truest acquaintances, Nor mortals know a sympathy more rare.

Which calls for some explanation. I will give you here the illustration provided by Sophia Peabody (Hawthorne) and a lengthy synopsis provided in the curiously titled SALEM IS MY DWELLING PLACE: A BIOGRAPHY OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE / BY EDWIN HAVILAND MILLER (Iowa City IA: U of Iowa P, 1991):

“The Gentle Boy” is the story of a beautiful youth called Ilbrahim, a Quaker with a Turkish name who at six years of age is orphaned by the Puritan theocracy because of the religious beliefs of his parents. On an autumn day about 1659, a “slender and light-clad little boy” leans “his face upon a hillock of fresh-turned and half-frozen earth.” Half-starved because the jailers have denied him and his father food, he has witnessed his father’s hanging from a scaffold beneath a fir tree and has watched his mother disappear into the wilderness, “to perish there by hunger or wild beasts.” The authorities spare the child in what they consider an act of kindness but make no provision for his welfare. The truth, however, is that the Puritans have made official and seemingly final an orphandom which began almost at birth, since Ilbrahim’s parents have sacrificed him to their religious persuasion. For years their flights from country to country denied the youth the opportunity to establish roots in any society or to form relationships. As his mother later reveals in her wild harangue to the Puritan congregation, she has placed God’s will, as intuited by her inner light, above the nurturing of Ilbrahim. If the lad wishes himself dead—three times he insists that “my home is here” on the grave of his father—it is not an instance of nineteenth-century sentimentality but an all-too-human response of a child who, denied the love needed to survive in an unloving environment, represses his rage and craves the release of death to escape terrors and losses too gigantic for his undeveloped body and his hungry heart to deal with. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The illustration provided by Sophia Peabody (Hawthorne) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Ilbrahim is found on his father’s grave by Tobias Pearson, a Puritan who with difficulty has struggled into middle age, hounded earlier by financial failure in England and then, in the New World, robbed of his children who could not survive transplantation to the harsh climate of New England. According to the Puritan hierarchy, Tobias has been punished by the loss of children because of his materialistic motivations in coming to the new Eden. In an attempt to remake his life and at the same time to gain community approval, he becomes “a Representative to the General Court, and an approved Lieutenant in the train-bands.” His semimilitary attire veils an underlying anxiety which evidences itself in tremulousness, pallor, and vacillation. When Tobias discovers Ilbrahim and lays a hand on his shoulder, the boy trembles “under his hand,” which becomes the central motif in the tale, expressive of a desperate emotional need. When the Puritan learns that Ilbrahim is a Quaker he withdraws his hand “as if he were touching a loathsome reptile.” Then, with characteristic vacillation, his fear of censure by the community giving way to compassion, he takes up the boy “in his arms,” wraps him in his cloak, and carries him: “‘Look up, child,’ said the Puritan to Ilbrahim, whose faint head had sunk upon his shoulder, ‘there is our home.’” Tobias’s wife, Dorothy, “a matronly woman,” sits before a fire. Dramatically but tenderly, Tobias thrusts aside the cloak and unveils Ilbrahim’s face. “Be kind to him,” he says to his wife, “even as if he were of those dear ones who have departed from us.” Such advice is scarcely necessary to a woman with an infinite capacity to love. “Dry your tears,” she says, “and be my child, as I will be your mother.” When she puts the child to bed that evening he occupies “the little bed, from which her own children had successively been borne to another resting place.” The reaction of the townspeople to the “adoption” of the orphaned child is immediate and hostile, and Tobias is “both hissed and hooted.” When the three go to Sabbath services, Ilbrahim, “clad in the new mourning suit,” walks between Tobias and Dorothy, “each holding a hand.” The Puritan adults gaze stonily at the trio, and Ilbrahim hears “the reviling voices of the little children.” At this first confrontation Ilbrahim is betrayed, not by Dorothy, who draws him protectively “closer to her,” but by Tobias, who wavers self- protectively, finding “it difficult to sustain their united and disapproving gaze.” Trapped by the fears of his years, Tobias cannot know what his momentary hesitation means to an unusually sensitive youth. If the boy is “wanting in the stamina for self-support,” Tobias is paralyzed by “self-suspicion” and “nervous agitation.” The agony of the relationship between “father and son” is that both have deep dependency needs. Fearful of censure and unsure of himself, perhaps even uncomfortable in the role of father, Tobias cannot make the personal loving gesture to Ilbrahim, his affection growing “daily less productive of familiar caresses.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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After the clergyman in “black velvet scull-cap” warns his audience not to thwart God’s will by showing pity to Quakers, a “muffled female”—it is Ilbrahim’s mother, Catharine—mounts the rostrum and divests herself of cloak and hood. Her Quaker diatribe is as unloving and inhuman as the sermon of the Puritan. “Muffled” in her faith, she appears almost to welcome the prospect of martyrdom and the release of death. At the conclusion of her selfjustifying but self- indulgent sermon, Ilbrahim runs to her and throws his arms around her. “I am here, mother, it is I, and I will go with thee to prison.” At the touch of the warm hand Catharine is no longer the would-be martyr but a mother “as in the first moment when I pressed thee to my bosom.” “It would seem,” the narrator comments at this point, “that the indulgence of natural love had given her mind a momentary sense of its errors, and made her know how far she had strayed from duty, in following the dictates of a wild fanaticism.” As Catharine, perhaps with a “momentary” awareness of what she has denied to her son, hides her face on his head, her raven hair covering him “like a veil,” Tobias becomes “agitated and uneasy,” oppressed with “guilt,” but Dorothy, “taking Ilbrahim’s hand,” offers to become his mother and asks for the natural mother’s blessing. The voice “within” tells Catharine, “Break the bonds of natural affection, martyr thy love, and know that in all these things eternal wisdom hath its ends.” She whispers her decision to Ilbrahim, who at first sobs and clings to her but suddenly becomes “passive.” “Having held her hands over his head in mental prayer, she was ready to depart.” The blessing, a “mental prayer” rather than a caress, is a nonverbal communication that every child dreads, “I do not want thee.” That winter, nurtured “with the gentle care of one who handles a butterfly,” Ilbrahim finds the Pearson house a home. Within its protective shelter he is filled with “airy gaiety,” “a domesticated sunbeam,” but there are also “moments of deep depression,” “from wounded love” and his awareness that “his equals in age, partook of the enmity of their parents.” Stigmatized by his religion and baptized with a foreign name that sets him apart in a Puritan society, Ilbrahim silently broods over “a residue of unappropriated love.” As comforting and comfortable as it is, the Pearson house is a prison since he cannot venture beyond its doors. One day a Puritan lad two years older than Ilbrahim falls from a nearby tree, and Dorothy, always the attentive mother, takes him in. In effect she presents Ilbrahim with a brother. The invalid is as ugly and grotesque, almost snakelike in appearance, as Ilbrahim is beautiful and ethereal. Ilbrahim caters to him “with a fond jealousy” and relates tales “of human tenderness” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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drawn from the romantic atmosphere of his “barbaric birthplace.” After the boy leaves, Ilbrahim does not see him again until one summer day when he discovers him with a group of Puritan boys. When Ilbrahim approaches timidly, the “baby-fiends” attack him with sticks and stones, displaying “an instinct of destruction, far more loathsome than the blood-thirstiness of manhood.” The invalid calls out, “Fear not, Ilbrahim, come hither and take my hand.” When Ilbrahim offers his hand, the “foul-hearted little villain” lifts his crutch and strikes him on the mouth, the mouth which has related tales of “human tenderness.” It is the last wound, the final rejection. The acts of the howling “unbreeched fanatics” foretell a dismal future, that Ilbrahim will never find a home in this community to appropriate his love. He begins “to pine and droop like a cankered rosebud.” For the Pearsons it is the same story continued: their children “had left their native country blooming like roses, and like roses they had perished in foreign soil.” Ilbrahim recovers from the physical wounds but not from “the injury done to his sensitive spirit.” He is now moody, sometimes sullen, and when Dorothy attempts “to revive his former sportiveness,” he runs and hides, refusing “even the hand of kindness.” Punishing himself, as though undeserving of kindness, he rejects Dorothy’s love as the invalid rejected his. In his dreams at night he cries, “Mother! Mother!” Dorothy silently endures rejection, still continuing to give of herself as is her wont, but Tobias experiences a physical and emotional collapse similar to that of his adopted son. Because Ilbrahim is “dearer to me than all my buried ones,” Tobias has attempted to play father, not by spontaneous and tactile expressions of affection but by imitation of the natural father. He has embraced the Quaker faith despite doubts he cannot put to rest and suffers imprisonment and economic harassment. His love, he feels, becomes “poison,” for once more he is to be a father in a childless household. He finds himself guilty, “an accursed man.” Cut off from the community and even from the child and needing a father as much as Ilbrahim does, Tobias seeks solace and guidance from a Quaker patriarch on a stormy night as the youth lies dying on the deathbed of the earlier Pearson offspring. As Tobias leaned “his forehead on his hands, his teeth were firmly closed; and his frame was tremulous at intervals with a nervous agitation.” The patriarch makes a confession which he intends as a lesson. Years ago he abandoned his daughter on her “dying bed” after wrestling with two “inner” voices, one telling him to go forth and the other upbraiding him as a “cruel parent.” Now after the passage of time a “hale and weather-beaten old man,” he has no doubts as to the rightness of his decision. If Ilbrahim fails to find in Tobias an adequate, loving paternal figure, the Quaker fails to fulfill Tobias’s expectations, for he has gained neither in wisdom nor in feeling, only in years. The tale of the elder Quaker, then, is one more instance of the failure of the fathers, one more instance of the abandonment and rejection of children. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Suddenly Catharine comes in out of the storm to announce “glad tidings,” that King Charles II has ordered the colonists to cease persecuting Quakers. The patriarch informs her of the burden of proselytizing her faith and “leading an infant by the hand”: “his tottering footsteps shall impede thine own no more.” Shuddering, appalled, she wails, “Hath He crushed my very heart in his hand?” Her shriek is answered by “the very faint voice of a child.” Moments before he hears his mother’s voice Ilbrahim begins to shiver and takes Dorothy’s hand “in both of his.” Catharine draws the child to her breast, where he nestles “with no violence of joy.” Looking into her face “and reading its agony,” Ilbrahim pronounces his own benediction: “Mourn not, dearest mother. I am happy now.” At the breast which the mother has denied him he dies and goes home to his father. “The Gentle Boy” resonates on the deepest affective levels — a child’s need for father and mother, home, caressing hands, and peers, for love and security. After its anonymous appearance in the Token in 1832 it became Hawthorne’s most popular tale. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

June 28, Friday: A Paris court fined Nicolò Paganini 20,000 francs plus interest and costs for the failure of his “Casino Paganini,” and threatened arrest for debt and imprisonment for ten years if he failed to fulfil the claims made against the project. He appealed and, losing the appeal, would be obliged to pay 50,000 francs rather than 20,000.

That evening Don José Ruiz and Don Pedro Montez took their coffle of purchased slaves from the Havana barracoon to their coastal vessel, La Amistad.56 By 8PM the vessel was loaded and at midnight it slipped out to sea, with the slaves in the hold with iron collars on their necks. (Those collars would shortly be removed from all but Joseph Cinqué — because he had been threatening to attempt an escape.)

THE MIDDLE PASSAGE RACE SLAVERY

56. This vessel had originated in a shipyard of Baltimore as the Friendship. I wonder whether, with such a name, it had been constructed by a Quaker shipbuilder. (Note that the US National Park Service, with the support of the Salem Partnership, is currently building a full size reproduction of a Salem merchant vessel that had been named Friendship, but this Salem merchant vessel was not the same as this Friendship of which we here speak, which had been constructed in a Baltimore shipyard and which eventually became the Spanish Cuban coastal vessel La Amistad of the Amistad mutiny. This Salem square-rigged, 342-ton three-master had been begun in 1796 in the Stage Point yard of Enos Briggs and was registered in 1797 by its owners Jerathmiel Peirce and Aaron Waite. It was 104 feet long and 27 feet wide and the depth of the hold was 13 feet, 9 inches, which is just enormously larger than the La Amistad. The Salem merchant vessel made at least 15 voyages to places such as China, Java, Sumatra, Madras, London, Hamburg, Archangel, and St. Petersburg before it was captured by the British during the War of 1812. The Friendship II now being constructed is to be permanently berthed at Derby Wharf at the Salem Maritime National Historic Site.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

June 29, Saturday or 30, Sunday: Aboard La Amistad, still in his slave collar, Joseph Cinqué found a nail and hid it in his armpit.

THE MIDDLE PASSAGE RACE SLAVERY

June 30, Sunday: Waldo Emerson mused in his journal about the wu wei nature of the Transcendentalist enterprise:

It is proposed to form a very large Society to devise & execute means for propping in some secure & permanent manner this planet. It has long filled the minds of the benevolent & anxious part of the community with lively emotion, the consideration of the exposed state of the globe; the danger of its falling & being swamped in absolute space; the danger of its being drawn too near the sun & roasting the race of mankind & the daily danger of its being overturned & if a stage coach overset costs valuable lives what will not ensue on the upset of this Omnibus? It has been thought that by a strenuous & very extensive concert aided by a committee of master builders & blacksmiths, a system of booms & chains might be set round the exterior surface & that it might be underpinned in such a manner as to enable the aged & the women & children to sleep & eat with greater security henceforward. It is true that there is not a perfect unanimity on this subject at present & it is much to be regretted. A pert & flippant orator remarked to the meeting last Sunday, that the World could stand without linch pins & that if you should cut all the ropes & knock away the whole underpinning, it would swing & poise perfectly for the poise was in the globe itself. But this is Transcendentalism. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

June 30, Sunday-July 1, Monday: To pick up their annual treaty payment three bands of Ojibwa, who used to visit Michilimackinac for their payment, were told they had to come to Fort Snelling in the center of the territory of their primary enemies, the Dakota nation. These three groups made up a total of 1,250 Ojibwa by contrast with the 870 Dakotas who were living in the area of the white fort. The band of Hole-In-The-Day came down the Mississippi River in canoes, the Mille Lacs band (Mille Lacs had only recently been taken by the Ojibwa from the Dakotas in battle) came overland, and others came down the St. Croix River to its junction with the Mississippi and then paddled up the Mississippi. One of the bands was called “Pillager.” This map shows the then-current delineation of territories of the Dakota and Ojibwa nations, which generally coincided with the southern limit of such forest trees as the pine, the black spruce, and the balsam fir between 1780 and 1850: HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Marpiyawicasta “Man of the Clouds” or “L.O. Skyman” had established the farming village “Eatonville” in the protection of the fort near where Lakewood Cemetery touches Mde Medoza (“Lake Calhoun” Lake of the Loons) in 1828 with the assistance of the Indian Agent at the fort, Major Lawrence Taliaferro. Marpiyawicasta’s family had been long intermarried with prominent local whites such as Taliaferro and a West Point graduate, Captain Seth Eastman. Although Fort Snelling threw a big friendly party that involved one of the Ojibwa women being given as a bride to one of the Dakota men, the ancestral injuries still cried out for blood.57 Two Ojibwa of the Pillager band were seen wailing over the grave of the Ojibwa man who had been assassinated near Patrick Quinn’s home on the Mississippi River in a previous year by two Dakotas of the Eatonville band,58 and at the time these two were presumed to be this man’s sons or stepsons.

57.For an account of the vengeance feud between Dakota and Ojibwa, see also “Running the Gauntlet” by William Joseph Snelling, Volume I, pages 439-56 of the Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society. Also of interest is “A Reminiscence of Fort Snelling” by Mrs. Charlotte O. Van Cleve, pages 76-81 in Volume III. 58.These Dakotas had received permission from the Indian Agent at the fort, Major Lawrence Taliaferro, to assassinate Chief Hole- In-The-Day “if they could, on his way home,” but they got confused and shot an Ojibwa who had borrowed some of the chief’s finery. One of the assassins was badly wounded, and they were both “confined in the fort for a while, but were finally released on condition that their friends should chastise them severely in the presence of the garrison.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

SUMMER 1839

Late Summer: During the late summer of 1839 Henry Thoreau and his brother John Thoreau, Jr. would make a 2-week boat-and-hiking trip from Concord, Massachusetts, into the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Later, while in residence at Walden Pond, Henry would create 2 drafts of this story, which he would continue to revise and expand until 1849, when he would arrange for its publication at his own expense. The manuscript, while purporting to amount to a travel narrative, was actually the 1st textbook in a field that did not yet exist, that of Comparative Religion. Fortunately, although the contemporary audience for A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS would find itself troubled by the writing’s heterodoxy and apparent formlessness, it would be unable to arrive at a recognition that the work was not at all what it purported to be.

TIMELINE OF A WEEK HDT WHAT? INDEX

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JULY 1839

July: Question: Was it at about this time that Henry Thoreau carted his old boat Red Jacket over to Walden Pond? HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

July: Henry Thoreau copied into his Commonplace Book a portion of “The Nonnes Preestes Tale” dealing with the figure of Chanticleer, possibly from the 1830 edition by Thomas Tyrwhitt, THE CANTERBURY TALES OF CHAUCER, WITH AN ESSAY ON HIS LANGUAGE AND VERSIFICATION ETC. First, in describing the condition and substance of the “poure widewe”:

A yerd she had enclosed all about With stickes, and a drie diche without, In which she had a cok highte Chaunteclere, In all the land of crowing n’as his pere. His vois was merier than the mery orgon, On masse daies that in the chirches gon Wel sikerer was his crowing in his loge, Than is a clok, or any abbey orloge. By nature he knew eche ascentioun Of the equinoctial in thilke toun; For what degrees fiftene were ascended, Than crew he, that it might not ben amended. His combe was redder than the fin corall, Embattelled, as it were a castel wall. His bill was black, and as the jet it shone; Like asure were his legges and his tone; His nailes whiter than the lilie flour, And like the burned gold was his colour. This gentil cok had in his governance, Seven hennes, for to don all his plesance, Which were his susters and his paramoures, And wonder like to him, as of coloures. Of which the fairest hewed in the throte, Was cleped faire damoselle Pertelote, Curteis she was, discrete, and debonaire. And compenable, and bare hirself so faire, Sithen the day that she was sevennight old, That trewelich she hath the herte in hold OF Chaunteclere, loken in every lith: He loved hire so, that wel was him therwith. But swiche a joye it was to here hem sing, Whan that the brighte Sonne gan to spring, In swete accord: “My lefe is fare in lond.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Then in describing what happened after Chanticlere “flew down fro the beme”:

This Chaunteclere stood high upon his toos Stretching his necke, and held his eyen cloos, And gan to crowen loude for the nones; And dan Russel the fox stert up at ones, And by the garget hente Cha[u]nteclere, And on his back toward the wood him bere.

And finally in regard to the ruckus that then ensued:

The sely widewe, and hire doughtren two, Herden thise hennes crie and maken wo, And out at the dores sterten they anon, And saw the fox toward the wode is gon, And bare upon his back the cok away: They criden, out! “Harrow and wala wa! A ha the fox!” and him they ran, And eke with staves many another man; Ran Colle our dogge, and Talbot, and Gerlond. And Malkin, with her distaf in hire hond; Ran cow and calf, and eke the very hogges So fered were for berking of the dogges. And shouting of the men and women eke, They ronnen so, hem thought hir hertes broke. They yellenden as fendes don in Helle: The dokes crieden as men wold him quelle; The gees for fere flewen over the trees, Out of the hive came the swarm of bees, — HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

WALDEN: I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag PEOPLE OF as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, WALDEN if only to wake my neighbors up.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

CHANTICLEER HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

GEOFFREY CHAUCER CHANTICLEER

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

PHILIP CAFARO ON DEJECTION, DESPAIR, 59 AND WALDEN’S EPIGRAPH Pages 17-18: The epigraph [“I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.”] suggests that Thoreau has made a choice here. Like Coleridge, he could have written an ode to dejection: faced west at sunset, rather than rising to greet the sun in the east. A journal entry, written while he was composing WALDEN, confesses: “Now if there are any who think that I am vain glorious –that I set myself up above others –and crow over their low estate –let me tell them that I could tell a pitiful story respecting myself as well as them –if my spirits held out to do it, I could encourage them HDT WHAT? INDEX

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with a sufficient list of failures –& could flow as humbly as the very gutters themselves.” Here, in the relative privacy of his journal, Thoreau lets himself moon a bit. He certainly knew these moods and the disappointments that led to them. In fact, he explored them, as essential human experiences having much to teach him. But Thoreau knows that such dejected, twilight thoughts provide no impetus and no guidance for right living. “That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way.” Note the word “despair” here, from the Latin de (without) + sperare (hope). Such hopelessness leads to lethargy and laziness. Despair is an important term in WALDEN, often marking our “stuckness” in the quotidian and our failure to demand more from our lives and ourselves. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation [acceptance, brute endurance] is confirmed desperation” [the final surrender, a fatalism that is truly fatal]. Rather than despair, we must build on a recognition of the essential goodness of life (esse qua esse bonum est, wrote Augustine, specifying his ethical starting point). “We should impart our courage, and not our despair,” Thoreau writes, “our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread contagion.” The epigraph’s crowing cock puts a simple “yes” to life at the center of ethics. We can get from this simple “yes” to more complex affirmations, but never from a “no” to a “yes.” And this first premise, or necessary practical postulate, cannot be proven. Affirmation or negation always

59. Philip Cafaro. THOREAU’S LIVING ETHICS: WALDEN AND THE PURSUIT OF VIRTUE. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2004 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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remains the main choice facing each of us. Consider a second key passage, one of the most often-cited in WALDEN: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life ... to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. The passage develops into a stirring peroration to life and life’s grand possibilities (experiencing deeply, knowing truth, sharing this knowledge with others). But Thoreau makes it clear that these possibilities can be explored only by those who live deliberately. The term encompasses both the ability to consider alternatives and the ability to act — to instantiate one alternative rather than another. The presence of liber and liberate suggests an essential connection between such deliberation and human freedom. If choosing to speak a basic “yes” to life is one key antidote to despair, another is deliberation: thinking through particular options and actively choosing the best ones, rather than falling into the easiest ones. Deliberation is an act of optimism, signaling the belief that we can have choices; that we can distinguish better from worse choices; that we can act on that knowledge and improve our lives. “I know of no more encouraging fact,” Thoreau writes, “than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.” Throughout WALDEN, he renews his call for “deliberate” action in constructing a house, choosing a career, reading a book, building a fireplace. Deliberation is the key to living well, affirming human freedom, and meeting life’s challenges. Life is glorious, Thoreau insists, and so the stakes are high. For we may come to the end of our lives and find that we have not lived. We may waste our lives on inessential trivialities. We may fail to learn what life has to teach. Like the penitential brahmins described in Walden’s third paragraph, we may lead lives that deny or deform our human nature. In all these ways we may, and often do, deny life. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

July 1, Monday night: Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II died in Constantinople and was succeeded by his son Abdulmejid I. Pursuant to the defeat at Nezib, the Ottoman fleet sailed to Egypt and surrendered to Mohammed Ali.

Having used the nail to pick the lock on the collar about his neck, and then having freed others, Joseph Cinqué and the other slaves below decks in La Amistad discovered boxes of sugar cane knives. The knives had square steel handles and blades that gradually widened to a thickness of three inches at the tip. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE RACE SLAVERY HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

July 2, Tuesday: Robert Schumann’s lawyer Wilhelm Einert attempted to negotiate with Friedrich Wieck in regard to Clara but this failed, precipitating litigation.

In the Caribbean: “Murder!” the shout arose at 4AM on the schooner La Amistad.

While attempting to hold them off with a dagger, Captain Ramon Ferrer suggested “Throw some bread at them!” As the captain and the cook were being killed, two other crewmen were leaping into the sea. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

Our national birthday, Thursday the 4th of July: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 35th birthday.

Ground was broken in East Lexington, Massachusetts for a unique octagonal Unitarian church structure, designed by the Reverend Charles Follen (this octagonal building still stands, as the oldest church structure in Lexington). In his prayer at the groundbreaking the Reverend declared the mission of his church — and this mission statement now on a memorial to him in the churchyard: [May] this church never be desecrated by intolerance, or bigotry, or party spirit; more especially its doors might never be closed against any one, who would plead in it the cause of oppressed humanity; within its walls all unjust and cruel distinctions might cease, and [there] all men might meet as brethren.

In Hagerstown, Maryland, the only two soldiers of the American Revolution of that vicinity still alive sat proudly in a carriage drawn by white horses.

On Staten Island, between 20,000 and 30,000 children were gathered to celebrate a Sunday School Scholars National Jubilee while, in New-York harbor, 1,000 ships were “gaily dressed in honor of the day.”

In Boston, 1500 men gathered at Faneuil Hall in support of a Temperance Reformation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

In Norwich, Connecticut, at a sabbath school celebration, one of the students read excerpts from the Declaration of Independence while wearing “the identical cap” that had been worn by William Williams of that state at the time he had placed his signature upon that document.

In Tennessee, the McMinnville Gazette published a “Declaration of Independence for an Independant Treasury,” and the text of this would be reprinted in the Washington DC Globe.

At Norfolk, Virginia, an elephant “attached to the menagerie” was induced to swim across the harbor from Town Point to the Portsmouth side and back. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

There was a 91-scalp victory dance on the east shore of Lake Calhoun, just south of Minneapolis in the Minnesota Territory. One of the scalps was of the bride from the wedding at the fort (one can’t help but notice that in none of the accounts has any white recorder of these events gone to the trouble of recording her name). In regard to that scalp dance, one of the white people did register a comment:

“It seemed as if hell had emptied itself here.”

Henry Thoreau was inspired to perpetrate a poem, in honor of an illustrated 3-volume set of famous British poems which he was at the moment perusing, THE BOOK OF GEMS. THE POETS AND ARTISTS OF GREAT BRITAIN. EDITED BY S.C. HALL (London: Saunders and Otley, Conduit Street): THE BOOK OF GEMS, I THE BOOK OF GEMS, II THE BOOK OF GEMS, III

July 4. THE “BOOK OF GEMS”

With cunning plates the polished leaves were decked, Each one a window to the poet’s world, So rich a prospect that you might suspect In that small space all paradise unfurled.

It was a right delightful road to go, Marching through pastures of such fair herbage, O’er hill and dale it led, and to and fro, From bard to bard, making an easy stage;

Where ever and anon I slaked my thirst Like a tired traveller at some poet’s well, Which from the teeming ground did bubbling burst, And tinkling thence adown the page it fell. Still through the leaves its music you might hear, Till other springs fell faintly on the ear.60

60. Thoreau’s extracts from these three unremarkable volumes assembled at London by S.C. Hall between 1836 and 1838 are to be found in his Literary Notebook 1840-1848 and his Miscellaneous Extracts 1836-1840. SAMUEL CARTER HALL HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839 HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

July 9, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson wrote to Margaret Fuller:

JONES VERY I am editing Very’s little book. Three Essays; and verses. Out of two hundred poems, I have selected sixty six that really possess rare merit. The book is to cost 75 cents, and I beg you to announce its coming value to all buyers. If it sells, our prophet will get $150 which, little though it be, he wants.

His contract in Riga having not been renewed, Richard Wagner and his wife stayed one step ahead of their creditors by abandoning Mitau near Riga, heading toward Paris.

July 10, Wednesday: According to the Caledonian Mercury of Edinburgh, Scotland for August 1st, “11th — On the 3d of June, embarked at Halifax on board HM. brig Ringdove, one officer, two serjeants [sic], and 30 rank and file, with women and children; and on board HM. steamer Medea, one officer, two serjeants, one drummer, and 50 rank and file, with women and children, for Sydney, Cape Breton, to relieve the detachment stationed there, which was to return to headquarters in the Ringdove. One company, under the command of Major Thoreau, embarked at Halifax on the 4th of June, on board HMS. Andromache for Charlottetown, Prince Edward’s Island. The men, women, and luggage, left at Halifax on the departure of the service companies for Canada, arrived at Quebec in the Pique the 22d of June, were landed next day and joined the corps. The Montreal Gazette announces the arrival of the band at Quebec, which, during the past winter has been quartered at Chambly, in the steam boat Canada, from Montreal. Two companies of the regiment still remain at Chambly.” According to an article in the Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser of Dublin, Ireland of July 19th, in Canada “Part of the 37th regiment, under Major Thoreau, replaced the 23d at Prince Edward’s Island on the 10th.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

“A YANKEE IN CANADA”: This is the site where a real battle once took place, to commemorate which they have had a sham fight here almost every day since. The Highlanders manœuvred very well, and if the precision of their movements was less remarkable, they did not appear so stiffly erect as the English or Royal Irish, but had a more elastic and graceful gait, like a herd of their own red deer, or as if accustomed to stepping down the sides of mountains. But they made a sad impression on the whole, for it was obvious that all true manhood was in the process of being drilled out of them. I have no doubt that soldiers well drilled are as a class peculiarly destitute of originality and independence. The officers appeared like men dressed above their condition. It is impossible to give the soldier a good education without making him a deserter. His natural foe is the government that drills him. What would any philanthropist who felt an interest in these men’s welfare naturally do, but first of all teach them so to respect themselves that they could not be hired for this work, whatever might be the consequences to this government or that; — not drill a few, but educate all. I observed one older man among them, grey as a wharf-rat and supple as the devil, marching lock-step with the rest, who would have to pay for that elastic gait.

MAJOR JOHN THOREAU

July 11, Thursday: Sir Charles Theophilus Metcalfe was appointed to be governor of Jamaica (he would perform in that capacity from September 26, 1839 to May 21, 1842).

ANNURSNACK July 11. At length we leave the river and take to the road which leads to the hilltop, if by any means we may spy out what manner of earth we inhabit. East, west, north, and south, it is farm and parish, this world of ours. One may see how at convenient, eternal intervals men have settled themselves, without thought for the universe. How little matters it all they have built and delved there in the valley! It is after all but a feature in the landscape. Still the vast impulse of nature breathes over all. The eternal winds sweep across the interval to-day, bringing mist and haze to shut out their works. Still the crow caws from Nawshawtuct to Annursnack, as no feeble tradesman nor smith may do. And in all swamps the hum of mosquitoes drowns this modern hum of industry.

EVERY MAN IS A ROMAN FORUM All things are up and down, east and west, to me. In me is the forum out of which go the Appian and Sacred ways, and a thousand beside, to the ends of the World. If I forget my centralness, and say a bean winds with or against the sun, and not right or left, it will not be true south of the equator. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

23D STANZA: 1839/1840

Henry David Thoreau’s 23d stanza began on his birthday, July 12th, Friday, 1839. • He gave his 1st lecture at the Concord Lyceum. • He wrote the poem “Sympathy.” Waldo Emerson wrote Thomas Carlyle mentioning that Henry Thoreau “writes the truest verses.” • He and John threw a melon party in Concord and then went on a boating expedition down the Concord River, across the Middlesex Canal, and up the Merrimack River to Concord, New Hampshire and the White Mountains. • Both John Thoreau, Jr., age 24, and his younger brother Henry Thoreau, would be falling in love with Miss Ellen Devereux Sewall — who, we need to remember. was also at that time being courted by another Harvard man. • The Thoreaus were living near (but not on) the site of the present Concord Free Public Library building (which would anyway not be erected until 1873), in the “Parkman house, to fall of 1844.” It was in this home that the Thoreau brothers would hold their school.

BACKGROUND EVENTS OF 1839 BACKGROUND EVENTS OF 1840

“My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.” — Henry Thoreau HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

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 2015. 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 12, 2015 HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

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 request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

1838-1839 1838-1839

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.