19TH-CENTURY MASSACHUSETTS ANARCHISTS:

EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD

One of the staunchest of Thoreau attackers, Vincent Buranelli, in “The Case Against Thoreau” (Ethics 67), would allege in 1957 that Henry from time to time altered his principles and his tactics with little or no legitimation. Buranelli charged him with having practiced a radical and dangerous politics. In his article we learn that Thoreau’s political theory “points forward to Lenin, the ‘genius theoretician’ whose right it is to force a suitable class consciousness on those who do not have it, and to the horrors that resulted from Hitler’s ‘intuition’ of what was best for Germany.” In his article we learn that Thoreau’s defense of John Brown gave “allegiance to inspiration rather than to ratiocination and factual evidence.” According to this source “Thoreau’s commitment to personal revelation made him an anarchist.” 1 An anarchist? According to the ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA, the term “anarchism” derives from a Greek root signifying “without a rule” and indicates “a cluster of doctrines whose principal uniting feature is the belief that government is both harmful and unnecessary.” So who the hell are these people, the “Anarchists”? —Well, although an early theorist of the no- 1. The initials of the person who prepared this material for the EB were “G.W.” — the PROPÆDIA volume lists these initials as belonging to George Woodcock, apparently a recidivist encyclopedist as he is listed as also having prepared a number of other ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA articles. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD government society was the Gerrard Winstanley who had founded

the Digger movement in England as of 1649, and although the first widely distributed anarchist writings had been those of William Godwin as of 1793, and although the first person willing to term

himself an anarchist had been Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, as of HDT WHAT? INDEX

EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD 1840, — it turns out that our Henry Thoreau has the honor of

being first on the EB’s shortlist of American suspects! In the United States, a native and mainly nonviolent tradition developed during the 19th century in the writings of Henry Thoreau, Josiah Warren, Lysander Spooner, and Benjamin Tucker (editor of The Anarchist, a highly individualist journal published in Boston). Activist Anarchism in the U.S. was mainly sustained by immigrants from Europe, including Johann Most (editor of Die Frieheit), Alexander Berkman, and Emma Goldman, whose LIVING MY LIFE gives a picture of radical activity in the United States at the turn of the century. David S. Reynolds has offered us an interestingly different 2 shortlist in his BENEATH THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. This is to be found on page 98: In reestablishing Thoreau’s links with his age, we should remind ourselves initially of what is already known but sometimes forgotten: he can be directly connected with other reformers and writers of his time. Other Thoreau-like figures included the notable nineteenth-century individualistic anarchists —Josiah Warren, Ezra Heywood, William Batchelder Greene, Stephen Pearl Andrews, and Benjamin Tucker– who were from Thoreau’s home state of Massachusetts and were his contemporaries. What I immediately flashed on when I saw the above allegation was, “Hey, here are 5 guys, all Thoreau’s contemporaries, and all from his home state — and not one of these guys has as yet been captured to be represented in the Stack of the Artist of Kouroo contexture in spite of the fact that we have been working on this database for all of seven years [at that point] and are pushing toward having recorded 500 thumbnail biographies of such contemporaries! –So, why not, have I been overlooking something? Did these 5 guys have something in common with Thoreau over and above proximity in location and in duration?” The results of my initial Boolean searches are below: Josiah Warren — nothing in common, no connection at all. 2. Reynolds, David S. BENEATH THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE: THE SUBVERSIVE IMAGINATION IN THE AGE OF EMERSON AND MELVILLE. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1989. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD Ezra Heywood — nothing in common, no connection at all.

William Batchelder Greene — There happened to have been a Thomas A. Greene in New Bedford who had rare plants of interest to Thoreau. There happened to have been a Calvin Greene who asked for and paid for a photograph of Thoreau. There happened to have been an Anne Greene Phillips who went to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in the summer of 1840. Relatives maybe? No, there was no William B. Greene to be found. Stephen Pearl Andrews — nothing in common, no connection at all. Benjamin Ricketson Tucker — nothing in common, no connection at all.

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

One thing I am sure of, however, is that using the standard tactic employed by our FBI, of guilt by association, if the Federal Bureau of Investigation had ever investigated Thoreau on suspicion of his being an anarchist, they would have concluded that he was “not a keeper.” My reasoning is as follows. The type case of the anarchist would be Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the property-is-theft internationalist who lived and wrote at the same time as Thoreau, and was in and out of prison in France. He would be at the exact center of every anarchist’s hotlist. If Thoreau had been intrigued at all by the various ideas of the various anarchists, for sure he –who read French very HDT WHAT? INDEX

EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD adequately– would have been consulting the writings of Proudhon, whose life exactly overlapped his, as they appeared, QUEST CE-QUE LA PROPRIÉTÉ (WHAT IS PROPERTY?) in 1840 followed by WARNING TO PROPRIETORS in 1842 followed by PHILOSOPHIE DE LA MISÈRE (SYSTEM OF ECONOMIC CONTRADICTIONS; OR, THE PHILOSOPHY OF POVERTY) in 1846 followed by LE REPRESENTANT DU PEUPLE in 1848 followed by CONFESSIONS D’UN REVOLUTIONAIRRE in 1849 followed by THE GENERAL IDEA OF THE REVOLUTION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY in 1851 followed by DE LA JUSTICE DANS LA REVOLUTION ET DANS L’EGLISE in 1858. However, we have records on Thoreau’s reading which are at least as good as the stacks of reports which our FBI obsessively collects of the readings and contacts of “suspect” (marginal) persons, and the interesting fact is, Thoreau never ever displayed the slightest interest either in Proudhon or in any other of this mottled collection of scribblers and agitators.

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

EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD

1857

December 18, Friday: Friend Daniel Ricketson in Concord, to his journal:

Took tea with Thoreau and spent the evening with him and his father’s family. Parker Pillsbury, the anti- slavery lecturer, there. Took Channing’s room for lodging, hard bed, poor sleep. Cleared this P.M. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD

Carleton Mabee’s BLACK FREEDOM

Americans at large often held the abolitionists responsible for the war. They argued that the abolitionists’ long agitation, strident as it often was, had antagonized the South into secession, thus beginning the war, and that the abolitionists’ insistence that the war should not end until all slavery had been abolished kept the war going. In 1863 the widely read New York Herald made the charge devastatingly personal. It specified that by being responsible for the war, each abolitionist had in effect already killed one man and permanently disabled four others. … While William Lloyd Garrison preferred voluntary emancipation, during the war he came to look with tolerance on the abolition of slavery by military necessity, saying that from seeming evil good may come. Similarly, the Garrisonian-Quaker editor, Oliver Johnson, while also preferring voluntary emancipation, pointed out that no reform ever triumphed except through mixed motives. But the Garrisonian lecturer Pillsbury was contemptuous of such attitudes. Freeing the slaves by military necessity would be of no benefit to the slave, he said in 1862, and the next year when the Emancipation Proclamation was already being put into effect, he said that freeing the slaves by military necessity could not create permanent peace. Parker Pillsbury won considerable support for his view from abolitionist meetings and from abolitionist leaders as well. Veteran Liberator writer Edwin Percy Whipple insisted that “true welfare” could come to the American people “only through a willing promotion of justice and freedom.” Henry C. Wright repeatedly said that only ideas, not bullets, could permanently settle the question of slavery. The recent Garrisonian convert, the young orator Ezra Heywood, pointed out that a government that could abolish slavery as a military necessity had no antislavery principles and could therefore re-establish slavery if circumstances required it. The Virginia aristocrat-turned-abolitionist, Moncure Daniel Conway, had misgivings that if emancipation did not come before it became a fierce necessity, it would not reflect true benevolence and hence could not produce true peace. The Philadelphia wool merchant, Quaker Alfred H. Love, asked, “Can so sublime a virtue as … freedom … be the offspring of so corrupt a parentage as war?” The long-time abolitionist Abby Kelley –the speak-inner and Underground Railroader– predicted flatly, if the slave is freed only out of consideration for the safety of the Union, “the hate of the colored race will still continue, and the poison of that wickedness will destroy us as a nation.” Amid the searing impact of the war –the burning fields, the mangled bodies, the blood-splattered hills and fields– a few abolitionists had not forgotten their fundamental belief that to achieve humanitarian reform, particularly if it was to be thorough and permanent reform, the methods used to achieve it must be consistent with the nature of the reform. … What abolitionists often chose to brush aside was that after the war most blacks would still be living in the South, among the same Confederates whom they were now trying to kill.

THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY HDT WHAT? INDEX

EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD

1860

May 17, Thursday: Princess Caroline Sayn-Wittgenstein and Ladislaw Okraszewski, one of her tenants from Ukraine who negotiated her annulment, departed from Weimar toward Rome in order to press her case that the suspension of the annulment be lifted.

77 Japanese diplomatic and trade officials arrived in San Francisco. After meetings and celebrations with California leaders, they would board ship for Washington DC.

In the morning Jacob B. Farmer sent Henry Thoreau what was plainly a Cooper’s Hawk Accipiter cooperii. That afternoon Thoreau visited him.

Ezra Hervey Heywood wrote to Charles Wesley Slack to inform him that “Phillips” will be unable to speak because of throat problems, but that he would take his place, and would speak on the topic “Things which are not, versus things that are.”

Wasson, David Atwood, 1823-1887; Concord MA. To Charles Wesley Slack. Will come to speak the next Sunday if needed, though weak from an attack.

May 17. Quite a fog till 8 A. M., and plowed ground blackened with the moisture absorbed. J. Farmer sends me to-day what is plainly Cooper’s hawk. It is from eighteen to nineteen inches long, and from flexure of wing eleven inches (alar extent thirty-four). The tail extends four or five inches beyond the wings. Tarsus about three inches long and with feet yellow. The bird above is nearly a uniform dark brown, or dark chocolate-brown, with bluish reflections; head darker. Tail with four blackish bands, and narrowly tipped with whitish. Cere greenish. Breast transversely barred with pale rusty, centred longitudinally with darker-brown lines. Under wing-coverts like breast, without the transverse bars. Vent white. Wings beneath (secondaries and primaries) thickly barred with blackish brown and light,—white. Iris yellow. There is attached to the breast HDT WHAT? INDEX

EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD fragments of a bluish-white egg. No ruff about eye as in the harrier. (Vide the large Falco fuscus of August 29, 1858.) It was shot on its nest (a female, then) in a white pine north of Ponkawtasset, on the 16th, and had four eggs which may have been sat on one week. [Vide May 29th.] It agrees very well with Nuttall’s account (q. v. in my scrap in Giraud), except that the second primary is not equal to the sixth and the tail is full nine inches long; also sufficiently with Giraud’s account, except that the tarsus is about three inches long. It is a large bird, but rather slender, with a very long tail. This makes the tenth species of the hawk kind that I have seen in Concord. The egg which Farmer saved is one and ten twelfths inches by one and five and a half twelfths, of a regular oval form, bluish-white with a few large, rough dirty spots.

P. M.—To J. Farmer’s. Is not that little fern which I have seen unrolling four or five days, scattered along the low meadow-edge next the river, the Aspidium Thelypteris? Now five or six inches high. A nighthawk with its distinct white spots. Early aspen down has just begun (before mouse-ear). Carex crinita just out, or say a day, on the grassy island. The C. stricta is common yet there, and interesting, in large thick tufts with its brown spikes. That island is thickly covered with white violets. Common cress out, how long? Many flowers fallen, showing minute pods. The river is seven and one eighth inches below summer level. See the sium pushing up near the waterside. It smells, when broken off, like a parsnip. Standing in the meadow near the early aspen at the island, I hear the first fluttering of leaves,—a peculiar sound, at first unaccountable to me. The breeze causes the now fully expanded aspen leaves there to rustle with a pattering sound, striking on one another. It is much like a gentle surge breaking on a shore, or the rippling of waves. This is the first softer music which the wind draws from the forest, the woods generally being comparatively bare and just bursting into leaf. It was delicious to behold that dark mass and hear that soft rippling sound. Tupelo buds just expanding, but inconspicuous as yet. Round-leafed cornel leafets, one inch wide. Salix sericea, half an inch wide. Lambkill leaf, a day or two. Sarsaparilla flower, apparently yesterday. Polygala paucifolia common, how long? Rhodora generally out. Eleocharis tenuis, probably two or three days (some of it) in river meadows, as near mouth of Dakin’s Brook. May be earlier in midst of Hubbard’s Close. By Sam Barrett’s meadow-side I see a female Maryland yellow-throat busily seeking its food amid the dangling fruit of the early aspen, in the top of the tree. Also a chestnut-sided warbler,—the handsome bird,—with a bright-yellow crown and yellow and black striped back and bright-chestnut sides, not shy, busily picking about the expanding leaves of a white birch. I find some minute black flies on them. Rye two and a half to three feet high. It is so dry that much of the sidesaddle leaf has no water in it. Old brown rocks in the river and mill-ponds show by their water-lines how high the water has formerly stood. Hear of a hummingbird on the 12th. Willow (alba) catkins are in the midst of their fall. Hear the first bullfrog’s trump. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1861

April: Ezra Hervey Heywood spoke at Hopedale on “Moral Agitation.” He was one nonresistant who would never be seduced by the war fever. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD When President Abraham Lincoln planned to send supplies to Fort Sumter, in an attempt to avoid hostilities he alerted the state in advance. South Carolina, however, feared a trick. On April 10, 1861, Brigadier General Beauregard, in command of the provisional Confederate forces at Charleston, demanded the surrender of the Union garrison of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The Garrison commander Anderson refused. On April 12, Confederate batteries opened fire on the fort, which was unable to reply effectively. At 2:30PM, April 13, Major Anderson surrendered Fort Sumter, evacuating the garrison on the following day. The bombardment of Fort Sumter was the opening engagement of the American Civil War. Although there were no casualties during the bombardment, a Union artillerist was killed and 3 wounded (one mortally) when a cannon exploded prematurely, upon firing a salute during the evacuation.

The attack on Fort Sumter prompted 4 more states to join the Confederacy, and Richmond was named as its capitol.

There was a war starting and there were defense contracts starting. There were people to kill and there was money to be made. In Boston yards, work began in the April-June period on four new screw steamers. Volunteer formations of troops needed to have uniforms and were uniformed, and the Boston city government was allocating the sum of $100,000.00 simply for ceremonies in which various troop formations would be formally meeting one another, on their way marching off to the war. When President Lincoln called for troops, units of the 6th Massachusetts Regiment had secretly already been armed and alerted by the Massachusetts governor, and left immediately for Ft. Monroe, Virginia. As the apparent threat to the District of Columbia would increase, the Massachusetts unit and subsequently mobilized Massachusetts militia-now-Federal Army units would prove to be the only forces available for the immediate defense of the Union capital.

The Madison, Wisconsin Weekly Patriot managed the difficult trick (well, OK, it’s not so difficult :-) of combining xenophobia with racism: Satisfactory — The appointment of L. Park Coon, of Milwaukee, as Col. of the 2d Regiment is well received. The Col. is a gentlemen who has had a military training and possesses the qualities of heart and mind necessary to make a popular and effective commanding officer.

Greatest natural phenomenon

A sharp young gentleman in a drug store near the Capitol House sends us the following good one.

Why is the 2d Regiment of Wisconsin Active Militia the greatest phenomenon of the age?

Because it is composed of Badgers led by a Coon. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD

1863

April 9, Thursday: Diomidis Kyriakos replaced Zinovios Valvis as Prime Minister of Greece.

Ezra Heywood wrote from Princeton, New Jersey to Charles Wesley Slack to indicate that he regretted that he would be unable to make a scheduled speaking engagement.

April 27, Monday: Rückblick for chorus and piano by Edvard Grieg was performed for the initial time, in Bergen.

Ezra Heywood wrote from Princeton, New Jersey to Charles Wesley Slack to make arrangements for an upcoming lecture.

September: Emily Dickinson “was ill since September.”

Ezra Heywood’s writings on the “War method of Peace” appeared in the LIBERATOR. He was one nonresistant who would never be seduced by the war fever. US CIVIL WAR

December 10, Thursday: Ezra Hervey Heywood wrote from Princeton, New Jersey in regard to his plans for being in Boston. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD

1864

January 26, Tuesday: Gut bürgerlich op.282, a polka française by Johann Strauss, was performed for the initial time, in the Redoutensaal, Vienna.

About 4AM a detachment of about 600 Confederate cavalrymen attacked Athens, Georgia. The rebels were repulsed by the garrison of about 100 Union soldiers after a couple of hours of fighting. US CIVIL WAR

Ezra Hervey Heywood wrote from Princeton, New Jersey to Charles Wesley Slack to make arrangements for the upcoming Sunday service.3

3. Blatt, M.H. (1983). THE ANARCHISM OF EZRA HEYWOOD (1829-1893): ABOLITION, LABOR REFORM, AND FREE LOVE. Boston: Boston UP; Blatt, M.H. (1989). FREE LOVE AND ANARCHISM: THE BIOGRAPHY OF EZRA HEYWOOD. Chicago: U of Illinois P HDT WHAT? INDEX

EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD

1873

The Chicago Public Library opened with the donation of 8,000 books from city residents (the municipality’s many private or subscription libraries had of course been consumed during the Great Fire of 1871). Queen Victoria and the people of Britain shipped them cartons of books.

Ezra Hervey Heywood was sentenced to 2 years hard labor under the new Comstock Act for having been the author of, and for having mailed through the United States Postal Service, the obscene 23-page CUPID’S YOKES: OR, THE BINDING FORCES OF CONJUGAL LIFE: AN ESSAY TO CONSIDER SOME MORAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL PHASES OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE, WHEREIN IS ASSERTED THE NATURAL RIGHT AND NECESSITY OF SEXUAL SELF-GOVERNMENT (Princeton MA: Co-operative Publishing Company). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1893

May 22, Monday: Ezra Hervey Heywood died of tuberculosis. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD

1907

March 8, Friday: Emma Goldman gave an interview to the Ohio State Journal in which she alleged grandiosely that “The doctrine of anarchy taught in this country was founded by Americans. It originated with men of the Concord School. “David Thoreau,” Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews were anarchists. They were associates of William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and Emerson. Those men were anarchists too.” In fact, as the interviewer ought to have explained to this Lithuanian immigrant, the actual identifiable American anarchists of that 19th-Century period had been Stephen Pearl Andrews, Colonel William Batchelder Greene, Ezra Hervey Heywood, Benjamin Ricketson Tucker, and Josiah Warren, that none of these men had been

associated in any way either with the town of Concord or with the Concord School (except that Lidian Emerson did receive, in 1843 in Concord, evidently by post, a gift of a volume of tales translated by Greene’s father), that these identified individuals had had no detectable contact with or influence over Thoreau, and that in any event, Emerson, Garrison, Phillips, and Thoreau had not been, in any sense of the term, “anarchists.” Here in the case of Emma Goldman we have an example, pure and simple, of someone pretending to do influence study — and firing for effect.

Three Idylls for string quintet by Frank Bridge was performed for the initial time, in Bechstein Hall, London (a theme in the 2d idyll would be used by Benjamin Britten in his “Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge”). HDT WHAT? INDEX

EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD 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 2017. 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: July 27, 2017 HDT WHAT? INDEX

EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD 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.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX

EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD EZRA HERVEY HEYWOOD 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.