HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
EVENTS OF 1838
General Events of 1839 SPRING JANUARY FEBRUARY MARCH SUMMER APRIL MAY JUNE FALL JULY AUGUST SEPTEMBER WINTER OCTOBER NOVEMBER DECEMBER
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
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
EVENTS OF 1840 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
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)
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
1839 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
1839 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.
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: HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
“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
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 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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. 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
1839 1839 The full selection on Mîr Camar uddîn Mast from which Thoreau was here extracting, on pages 331-2 1 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.
1. 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
1839 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
1839 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
1839 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
1839 1839 The Thoreaus had left their “house on the square” only two years before this engraving was 1st published. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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
1839 1839 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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
1839 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
1839 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
1839 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
1839 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
1839 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 silhouette2 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
2. 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
1839 1839 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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 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 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
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)
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 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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
Henry Root Colman, whom Henry Thoreau would characterize in WALDEN as “the ministerial husbandman,” HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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.)
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 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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.
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
1839 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.
At this point in the development of the “lyceum” phenomenon, there were 137 lyceums operating in Massachusetts alone. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
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 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 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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
1839 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 it from city to city for nightly services.
SEEDS : 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
1839 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
1839 1839 3 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
3. 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
1839 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
1839 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
1839 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.4An 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.
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.)
4. 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
1839 1839 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.
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
1839 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
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.5
ECKERMANN AND GOETHE HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
5. 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
1839 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
1839 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
1839 1839 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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.”)
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
1839 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
1839 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
1839 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
1839 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
1839 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
1839 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
1839 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
1839 1839
BRADFORD, MASS. BRAINTREE, MASS. BREWSTER, MASS. BRIDGEWATER, MASS. BRIGHTON, MASS. BRIMFIELD, MASS. BROOKFIELD, MASS. BROOKLINE, MASS. BUCKLAND, MASS. BURLINGTON, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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
1839 1839
CLARKSBURG, MASS. COHASSET, MASS. COLERAINE, MASS. CONCORD, MASS. CONWAY, MASS. CUMMINGTON, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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
1839 1839
EAST BRIDGEWATER EASTHAM, MASS. EASTHAMPTON, MASS. EASTON, MASS. EDGARTOWN, MASS. EGREMONT, MASS. ENFIELD, MASS. ERVING, MASS. ESSEX, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
FAIRHAVEN, MASS. FALL RIVER, MASS. FALMOUTH, MASS. FITCHBURG, MASS. FLORIDA, MASS. FOXBOROUGH, MASS. FRAMINGHAM, MASS. FRANKLIN, MASS. FREETOWN, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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
1839 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
1839 1839
HINSDALE, MASS. HOLDEN, MASS. HOLLAND, MASS. HOLLISTON, MASS. HOPKINTON, MASS. HUBBARDSTON, MASS. HULL, MASS. IPSWICH, MASS. KINGSTON, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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
1839 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
1839 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
1839 1839
NEWTON, MASS. NORTHAMPTON, MASS. NORTHBOROUGH, MASS. NORTHBRIDGE, MASS. NORTH BRIDGEWATER NORTH BROOKFIELD NORTHFIELD, MASS. NORTON, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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
1839 1839
PLYMOUTH, MASS. PLYMPTON, MASS. PRESCOTT, MASS. PRINCETON, MASS. PROVINCETOWN, MASS. QUINCY, MASS. RANDOLPH, MASS. RAYNHAM, MASS. READING, MASS. REHOBOTH, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
RICHMOND, MASS. ROCHESTER, MASS. ROWE, MASS. ROWLEY, MASS. ROXBURY, MASS. ROYALSTON, MASS. RUSSELL, MASS. RUTLAND, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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
1839 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
1839 1839
TAUNTON, MASS. TEMPLETON, MASS. TEWKSBURY, MASS. TISBURY, MASS. TOLLAND, MASS. TOWNSEND, MASS. TRURO, MASS. TYNGSBOROUGH, MASS. TYRINGHAM, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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
1839 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
1839 1839
WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS. WILMINGTON, MASS. WINDSOR, MASS. WOBURN, MASS. WORCESTER, MASS. WORTHINGTON, MASS. WRENTHAM, MASS. YARMOUTH, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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
1839 1839 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.
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. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
In CRANIA AMERICANA Professor Morton divided humankind primarily into four races with the following racial characteristics:6 • 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.”
In this year Dr. Samuel George Morton was made Professor of Anatomy at Pennsylvania College (later to be known as the University of Pennsylvania).
6. 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
1839 1839 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
PROTO-NAZISM HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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.7 The Fuegians ... struck Darwin as more like animals than men.... Thoreau’s single overt citation of Darwin in WALDEN refers to one of 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 must have swarmed with great monsters; now we find mere pygmies compared with the antecedent, allied races.”
7. 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
1839 1839 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.)
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?– 8 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. … HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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,9 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).
8. 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.
9. 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
1839 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
1839 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
1839 1839
THE RHODE-ISLAND ALMANAC FOR 1839. By Isaac Bickerstaff. Providence, Rhode Island: Hugh H. Brown. The July Monarchy was threatened by Mathieu Molé, who had formed an intermediate government in France. Professor François Pierre Guillaume Guizot and the leaders of the left centre and the left, Thiers and Odilon Barrot, worked together to stop Molé, Victory was secured at the expense of principle and Professor Guizot’s attack on the government gave rise to a crisis and a republican insurrection. None of the three leaders of that alliance were able to secure the ministerial office.
The Reverend Professor Jared Sparks of Harvard College’s LIFE OF GEORGE WASHINGTON (this would be translated into French and would receive an introduction in French in that edition by Professor Guizot — which introduction would then be backtranslated and published in English, and this backtranslation would find a place in the personal library of Henry Thoreau). SPARKS ON G. WASHINGTON GUIZOT ON G. WASHINGTON
Volume X of the Reverend Professor Sparks’s THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY. LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. X
He was appointed McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History, the first professor of secular history, in which post he would author not merely the above hagiography of Washington, but a hagiography of Franklin as well, not to mention one of Gouverneur Morris — assiduously omitting any events which might be the occasion of “international ill will.”
This tenth volume encompassed four contributions:
•LIFE OF ROBERT FULTON by James Renwick, LL.D. LIFE OF ROBERT FULTON
•LIFE OF JOSEPH WARREN by Alexander H. Everett, LL.D. LIFE OF JOSEPH WARREN
•LIFE OF HENRY HUDSON by Henry R. Cleveland LIFE OF HENRY HUDSON
•LIFE OF FATHER MARQUETTE by Jared Sparks LIFE OF FATHER MARQUETTE
The Curtis family relocated from Providence, Rhode Island to Washington Place on the north side of Manhattan Island, New-York, New York (at this point George William Curtis began to receive the benefit of private tutoring).
Having studied law at the firms of Cleveland & Campbell and Griffin, Strong & Griffin, William Mackay Prichard was admitted to the bar and accepted as the law partner of William Emerson. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
The University of Durham conferred on Prideaux John Selby an honorary degree of Master of Arts.
JOURNAL OF THE REV. JOSEPH WOLFF, LL.D. OF THE UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN; AND DOCTOR OF THEOLOGY OF THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL COLLEGE OF ST. JOHN’S, ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND, IN THE UNITED STATES OF NORTH AMERICA; CHAPLAIN TO THE LORD VISCOUNT LORTON; INCUMBENT OF LINTHWAITE, NEAR HUDDERSFIELD, YORKSHIRE; AND LATE MISSIONARY TO THE JEWS: IN A SERIES OF LETTERS TO SIR THOMAS BARING, BART. CONTAINING AN ACCOUNT OF HIS MISSIONARY LABOURS FROM THE YEARS 1827 TO 1831; AND FROM THE YEARS 1835 TO 1838 (London: James Burns, 17, Portman-Street, Portman-Square: and may be had of all country booksellers).
Since Lucy Stone’s father would not support her desire for an education, she was forced to alternate between teaching and being a student, earning her own way. At this point she was attending Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts.
No-worry sex and no-worry death had quite a year:
• Robert Dale Owen’s MORAL PHYSIOLOGY, OR A BRIEF AND PLAIN TREATISE ON THE POPULATION QUESTION, originally printed in New-York in 1831, MORAL PHYSIOLOGY
and Dr. Charles Knowlton’s THE FRUITS OF PHILOSOPHY, OR THE PRIVATE COMPANION OF YOUNG MARRIED PEOPLE, originally printed in Boston in 1832, describing the various ways to prevent conception and recommending coitus interruptus and douching after sexual intercourse, had each by this point gone through nine printings, meaning that there were some 20,000-30,000 copies in circulation. PRIVATE COMPANION • The Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock’s A WREATH FOR THE TOMB: OR EXTRACTS FROM EMINENT WRITERS ON DEATH AND ETERNITY: WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY AND SERMON ON THE LESSONS TAUGHT BY SICKNESS (Amherst: J.S. and C. Adams; Boston: Crocker and Brewster; New York: Dayton and Saxton). A WREATH FOR THE TOMB HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 The lunatic asylum on Blackwell’s Island near New-York, in this year:
René-Marie Cazal patented an umbrella with a catch and spring inside the stick: Whilst dilating upon different inventions which either contribute to comfort or convenience, I must not omit that of M. Cazal, who has obtained two patents, and medals for the umbrellas and parasols he has invented, with which he furnishes the Queen and Princesses, and which are entirely superseding all those of any other construction. In such as M. Cazal has brought into vogue, instead of the catches or springs which retain the umbrella when open or shut, being inserted in the stick, which always contributes towards weakening it, they are attached to the wire frame-work, and by merely touching a little button will slide up or down as required with the greatest facility, without those little annoyances which so frequently happen in the old method, of either pinching one’s fingers, or the glove catching in the spring, or the latter breaking or losing its elasticity, etc., etc. The stick by this system, it must also be observed, is stronger, therefore can if desired be thinner, and consequently lighter. Another description, called travelling umbrellas, is also invented by M. Cazal and is particularly convenient, containing a cane inside the stick, by which it may be used as one or as the other, according as the weather or caprice may require; these are extremely desirable for lame HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
persons who require a stick, as the umbrella when closed answers the purpose, and if required to be opened the cane drawing out equally affords support. M. Cazal has an assortment of canes and whips the most varied that can be imagined; it would be difficult to fancy any pattern or form that is not to be found in his HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 numerous collection. His establishment is No. 23, Boulevard Italien, where there is always some one in attendance who speaks English.
The New England Institute for the Education of the Blind had moved from the home at 17 Pearl Street donated in 1833 for their use by Thomas Handasyd Perkins, to a larger facility in South Boston. PERKINS INSTITUTE
Christopher Dunkin was awarded an Honorary MA degree by Yale College.
William Wordsworth received an honorary degree from Oxford. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
Nicolò Paganini traveled to Marseilles, where he learned that he was being sued in Paris over the failure of his “Casino Paganini.” When he lost the case and appealed, he lost also the appeal, and would wind up obliged to pay a huge fine. He took the waters at Balaruc and Vernet. Since he could no longer perform in public, in conjunction with the Milan-based cellist Vincenzo Merighi he began to sell stringed instruments.
Samuel Laing’s A TOUR IN SWEDEN IN 1838, strongly critical of the Swedish-Norwegian union and suggesting that Norway ought to seek its independence. This would cause the Swedish-Norwegian ambassador in London, M. Björnstierna, to respond in 1840 with ON THE MORAL STATE AND POLITICAL UNION OF SWEDEN AND NORWAY.
George Payne Rainsford James’s THE LIFE AND TIMES OF LOUIS THE FOURTEENTH, and his HENRY OF GUISE.
Edward Jesse’s A SUMMER’S DAY AT HAMPTON COURT, BEING A GUIDE TO THE PALACE AND GARDENS, WITH AN ILLUSTRATIVE CATALOGUE OF THE PICTURES... (London: J. Murray).10 A SUMMER’S DAY ...
This year’s currency inflation would be:11
1830 $111 £87.2
1831 $104 £95.9
1832 $103 £88.8
1833 $101 £83.4
1834 $103 £76.9
1835 $106 £78.1
1836 $112 £86.8
1837 $115 £89.0
1838 $112 £89.6
1839 $112 £96.1
1840 $104 £97.9
10. Many American publishers consider Henry Thoreau to fall within their category “nature writer” — some have considered him the creator of this category in America, others derogate him as one of it poorest exemplars because he fails to focus on the pleasantries they vend. It may be useful, therefore, to contrast Thoreau with a well-published “nature writer” of his own period such as this Edward Jesse, Esquire — why don’t you struggle to detect some similarities with the life or writings of Thoreau? 11. Get a sense of what this amounts to in today’s money, at:
1839 1839 In upstate New York, the Genesee Valley Canal reached Mount Morris.
Company directors liquidated the Rochester Canal and Railway Company.
The Tidewater and Susquehanna Canal was completed.
US canal engineer David Stanhope Bates died.
E.H. Gill became Principal Assistant Engineer on the James River and Kanawha Canal, in charge of construction above Lynchburg. Charles Ellet, Jr. lost his job as Chief Engineer on account of refusing to compromise with others, and was replaced by Judge Wright.
A 650-foot-deep salt well was drilled alongside the enlarged Erie Canal at Montezuma, New York.
Junius peppermint farmer Peter Hill moved to Lyons, New York, having purchased property at the future site of Erie Canal Lock E-56. Over a dozen local companies had risen up to haul passengers and freight on the Erie Canal.
Isaac-Farwell Holton graduated from the Union Theological Seminary in New-York and became a home missionary in McDonough, Adams, and Pike Counties in Illinois. Soon he would become a teacher of Greek and Natural History in the Mission Institute near Quincy, Illinois, founded by the Reverend David Nelson, D.D.
Professor Benedict Jaeger offered to the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University, his private cabinet of Natural History, consisting of some 150 specimens of mammalia, reptiles, and birds, and a scientifically arranged entomological collection of some 2,000 specimens. His compensation for this would be that in the future his salary would be paid in advance. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Thomas Hood’s HOOD’S OWN, OR LAUGHTER FROM YEAR TO YEAR.
A NARRATIVE. BY SIR FRANCIS B. HEAD, BART. (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street). A NARRATIVE
Plus, a supplemental chapter added into to 3d edition in this same year: SUPPLEMENTAL CHAPTER
I WAS GROSSLY IGNORANT OF EVERYTHING HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
RELATING TO THE GOVERNMENT OF OUR COLONIES:
DIFFICULTIES ABOUT A “SWEET”: HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
HARD WORK AND LITTLE PAY:
AN AWKWARD QUERY:
TAKING POSSESSION OF A NEW GOVERNOR: HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 The Reverend Joel Hawes’s MEMOIR OF NORMAND SMITH, JUN: OR, THE CHRISTIAN SERVING GOD IN HIS BUSINESS (Spalding & Storrs).
NORMAND SMITH, JUN.
Professor Richard Harlan visited Europe a 2d time. He would be abroad until 1843. The Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris would present to him, to convey to the American Philosophical Society at Philadelphia, a plaster cast of what may be one of the most famous fossils in the world, Mosasaurus hoffmannii, “Hoffman’s mosasaur,” as it had been described in 1829 by the English paleontologist Gideon Mantell. The fossil is both jaws, virtually complete, and the front portion of the skull and some vertebrae, all still arranged in matrix, found in a mine on Saint Peter’s Mount near Maestrict in the Netherlands. It came from strata of Upper Cretaceous age and was a relic of a large carnivorous marine reptile had been abundant in the seas.
Major James Duncan Graham of the US Army’s Corps of Topographical Engineers was sent on a tour of inspection of harbor improvements on Lake Ontario and Lake Champlain. Then, during this year and into the following one, he would be serving as astronomer for a surveying party that, in behalf of the United States, was taxed to establish a boundary-line between the United States of America and the new Republic of Texas.
Benjamin Lundy, who had been defeated in all his plans to establish colonies for manumitted US slaves in Mexico, died.12
John Niles, in his HISTORY OF SOUTH AMERICA AND MEXICO (Hartford CT: H. Huntington), characterized the abolition of slavery by Mexico a decade earlier as having been a “hazardous experiment.” US Senator Niles argued that Spanish methods of colonization, in particular the practice of amalgamation with indigenous peoples, produced a deterioration in innate intelligence levels and in the ability to practice democracy. He predicted that if this racially degenerative trend were to continue no Mexican republic could possibly succeed. To be right you gotta be white.
Salma Hale’s AN ORATION ON THE CHARACTER OF WASHINGTON.
12. A.M. Shotwell. BENJAMIN LUNDY. (Lansing MI: Robert Smith Printing Company, 1897), page 9. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Francis Joseph Grund’s ARISTOCRACY IN AMERICA. FROM THE SKETCH-BOOK OF A GERMAN NOBLEMAN. EDITED BY FRANCIS J. GRUND (London: Richard Bentley, New Burlington Street. Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty). ARISTOCRACY IN AMERICA ARISTOCRACY IN AMERICA
Augustus Addison Gould submitted “Descriptions of Shells” in the American Journal of Science and Arts, xxxvi, on pages 179-81, “On the Marine Product commonly called Neptune’s Goblet” on page 386, and “Remarks on Rostellaria occidentalis” on page 396.
At the age of 33, Lt. Matthew Fontaine Maury’s seagoing days came to an abrupt end when his hip and knee were shattered in a stagecoach accident. Thereafter, he would devote himself to the study of naval meteorology, navigation, charting the winds and currents, seeking out the “Paths of the Seas” that had been mentioned in THE BOOK OF PSALMS 8. TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS REFER TO PSALMS 8:8 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Richard Hildreth ran for the Massachusetts House of Representatives as a Temperance Whig, but was defeated by eight votes. He supported the campaign of William Henry Harrison for President of the United States of America with speeches, pamphlets, and a campaign biography THE PEOPLE’S PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE. By election day, however, health issues would force him to sail from Boston for British Guiana.
Returning from America to England, Philip Henry Gosse was reduced to subsisting on eightpence a day, or as he would put it “one herring eaten as slowly as possible, and a little bread.” His fortunes began to improve when a leading publisher of naturalist writing, John Van Voorst, agreed, on the recommendation of Thomas Bell, to publish THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. A SERIES OF CONVERSATIONS ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF LOWER CANADA, a book that despite the fact that he did not have a son, he had constructed as a conversation between father and son. The book, which would be printed in the following year and which would in 1860 be accessed by Henry Thoreau, indicates to us that well before his contemporaries, Gosse acquired a practical grasp of the value of conservation.
THE CANADIAN NATURALIST HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 George Field’s OUTLINES OF ANALOGICAL PHILOSOPHY, BEING A PRIMARY VIEW OF THE PRINCIPLES, RELATIONS, AND PURPOSES OF NATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART, AND A METHODOLOGICAL ENCYCLOPÆDIA (London: Charles Tilt, Fleet Street). The gist of these two volumes was that since only God is perfect, there’s not even a glimmer of hope that any of us could imagine the truth. Any and all scientific theories that we might be capable of generating here below would always inherently and of necessity contain flaws and imperfections and falsehoods (making due allowance, of course, for Mr. George Field’s overarching perfect understanding that our understanding is inherently imperfect).
Henry William Herbert began to use the pen name “Frank Forester” when writing for the American Turf Register.
Theodore Sedgwick Fay’s SYDNEY CLIFTON; OR, VICISSITUDES IN BOTH HEMISPHERES. A TALE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (two volumes).
Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Les Huguenots was performed at the Theatre d’Orleans in New Orleans.
As president of the Beaufort Agricultural Society and vice president of the South Carolina Agricultural Society, William Elliott urged crop diversification and industrialization; he sought the appointment of an agricultural professorship at South Carolina College and the establishment of an experimental farm.
Thomas De Quincey’s “Second Paper on Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” in Blackwood’s Magazine. His “William Wordsworth” in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 The schoolteacher Benjamin Dudley Emerson was mustered as a private under arms and marched north to participate in the “Aroostook War,” a bit of wilderness hoo-hah intended somehow to protect the upper frontier of Maine from the New Brunswick forces of Her Majesty the Queen of England, while US Secretary of State Daniel Webster and special delegate General Winfield Scott sought to negotiate a suitable buffer zone between the two nations with British Minister Alexander Baring, 1st Baron Ashburton — in a mountainous woodsy frontier region peopled primarily by native Americans and by “Acadian” descendants of the original French colonists. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
The result of said wilderness hoo-hah, after one death of unknown causes, would be the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, settled on the basis of an old map allegedly discovered by Jared Sparks in the Paris Archives that allegedly had been marked in 1782 with a red line by none other than our Benjamin Franklin, Minister Extraordinary (which may very well have been a fake created for this very occasion by the British team of HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 negotiators, as it placed the entirety of the disputed region on the Canadian side of the line).
The following is per AROOSTOOK WAR: HISTORICAL SKETCH AND ROSTER OF COMMISSIONED OFFICERS AND ENLISTED MEN CALLED INTO SERVICE FOR THE PROTECTION OF THE NORTHEASTERN FRONTIER OF MAINE, FROM FEBRUARY TO MAY, 1839 (Augusta, Maine: Kennebec Journal Print, 1904). Muster Roll of Captain William S. Haines’ Company of Infantry in the Detachment of drafted Militia of Maine, called into actual service by the State, for the protection of its Northeastern Frontier, from the twenty-fifth day of Februay [sic], 1839, the time of its rendezvius [sic] at Augusta, Maine, to the nineteenth day of April, 1839, when discharged or mustered.
Captain William S. Haines
Lieutenant Thomas Hovey
Ensign [no name given]
Sergeants HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Abner Pitts, Jr. Alexander T. Katon F. M. Collier William Thornton, Jr.
Corporals Eliphalet Rollins Asa Trask John Tarr Nathan Swetland
Musicians Silas Hunt
Privates Jesse Austin William Beedle James Booker Abial Brown Rufus Bunker William Christopher William H. Collins John Covell Samuel Crocker Moses C. Cummings Moses Davis Benjamin D. Emerson Samuel Gray Jacob Heath Thomas W. Holbrook William Little, Jr. George W. Lyon Charles McKenney Dwight Minor Charles Moody Lewis Moody John Moody Joseph F. Norton James W. Potter T. W. Rollins William H. Stacy Hiram B. Stevens HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”
— Ambrose G. Bierce US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Acclaim for John Gardner Wilkinson’s MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE ANCIENT Egyptians, INCLUDING THEIR PRIVATE LIFE, GOVERNMENT, LAWS, ARTS, MANUFACTURES, RELIGION, AGRICULTURE, AND EARLY HISTORY, DERIVED FROM A COMPARISON OF THE PAINTINGS, SCULPTURES, AND MONUMENTS STILL EXISTING, WITH THE ACCOUNTS OF ANCIENT AUTHORS brought knighthood.
William Fullerton Cumming’s NOTES OF A WANDERER IN SEARCH OF HEALTH, THROUGH ITALY, EGYPT, GREECE, TURKEY; UP THE DANUBE AND DOWN THE RHINE (2 volumes).
Alexander “Ksistuki Pokah” (Beaver Child) Culbertson took charge of the fur trade at Fort Union, Dakota after being at Fort McKenzie.
Doctor Walter Channing received an appointment as physician at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Ralph Gordon Noel King (later the 9th Baron King of Ockham, 2nd Earl of Lovelace, and the 13th Baron Wentworth), son of Ada and Lord Lovelace, was born.
Rosina Doyle Wheeler Bulwer’s novel CHEVELEY, OR THE MAN OF HONOUR bitterly caricatured her former husband Edward George Earle Bulwer — who at this point had become a baronet and was staging a 2d play, Richelieu.
Francis Trevelyan Buckland, who had been being educated at his uncle John Buckland’s preparatory school in Northamptonshire, received a scholarship to Winchester College, a boys’ independent school in the city of Winchester in Hampshire that had been in existence for some 600 years. The Second Master, Charles Wordsworth, would send letters praising this pupil to the family of origin.
Archbishop Richard Whately’s ESSAYS ON SOME OF THE DANGERS TO CHRISTIAN FAITH.
Three years after Christopher Wordsworth had become headmaster at Harrow School near London, Vicar John William Cunningham of St Mary’s at Harrow on the Hill opposed the building of a school chapel — lest the boys should become Papists.
Richard Biddle was re-elected to the federal House of Representatives. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Publication in 3 volumes of the poetical works of the Reverend Professor Henry Hart Milman. Publication of his LIFE OF GIBBON. He became dean of St Paul’s.
The Reverend Henry Whitney Bellows was accepted as the pastor of the 1st Congregational (Unitarian) Church in New-York (afterward All Souls Church).
The 2d Trinity Church needed to be demolished because the building’s structure had been weakened by heavy snow loads.
Professor Thomas Bell, FRS’s A HISTORY OF BRITISH REPTILES ILLUSTRATED BY MORE THAN 40 WOODCUTS (London: J. Van Voorst). THE BRITISH REPTILES HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 The Reverend William Daniel Conybeare was appointed Bampton lecturer. A great landslip occurred near Lyme Regis, which he would describe for the benefit of other British geologists. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 The Reverend John Stetson Barry began to serve the Universalist church of Weymouth, Massachusetts.
Alexander Dallas Bache would be serving for a period of years as the 1st president of Central High School of Philadelphia (one of the oldest public high schools in the US).
John James Audubon returned to America, and the family settled in New-York. At the age of 59 he had achieved a most extraordinary feat. In his grand work there were 435 plates, each one printed on double elephant folio paper. Each bird was depicted life-size in its natural environment.
In Edinburgh during this year, the firm of Adam and Charles Black was putting through its press Audubon’s A SYNOPSIS OF THE BIRDS OF NORTH AMERICA, which Thoreau would consult in 1853. I do not have an electronic version of this actual 1839 volume that Thoreau looked at to show you, but perhaps that is inconsequential since, when Audubon’s THE BIRDS OF AMERICA would be issued in 1840-1845, those seven volumes would in fact be arranged according to this SYNOPSIS rather than according to the previous ORNITHOLOGICAL BIOGRAPHY. BIRDS OF AMERICA HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 The homeopathy journal American Prover’s Union published the 1st of many reports on the effects of cannabis.
In the final years of Napoleon coffee beans grown on St. Helena had been popular in France, but then the demand had fallen as interest in this dead self-made man had waned. At this point the London coffee merchant firm Wm. Burnie & Co. was flogging such beans as of “very superior quality and flavour.”
In the “blue book” issued by the St. Helena government (a statistical record) columns previously labeled “Coloured” and “White” were rendered as a single column labeled “Population.”
Loring Woart Bailey was born (named after a friend of his mother Maria Slaughter Bailey, he would grow up to attend Harvard College and then do graduate work in chemistry at Brown and Harvard — his professors would include Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louis Agassiz, and Asa Gray). The father, Lieutenant Jacob Whitman Bailey, at this point became Professor of Chemistry, Mineralogy and Geology in the United States Military Academy. His specialty was diatoms.
The father of Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevski died, possibly murdered by the serfs on his estate Chermashnya in the province of Tula, Russia. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
Johnson Heed (Martin Johnson Heade) was continuing to work with Edward Hicks, and possibly also with Thomas Hicks, in Newtown, Pennsylvania.
In Jamaica in this year, with the end of slavery, sugar production began to fall by more than 50%.
Mary Howitt’s HYMNS AND FIRESIDE VERSES.
Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward described his Wardian Case in Gardener’s Magazine (he would in 1842 expand this into a book). BOTANIZING
Salicylic acid (chemically related to salicin, the compound in willow that gave this plant its pain-relieving powers) was isolated from flowerbuds of Filipendula ulmaria (at that time called Spiraea ulmaria), a member of the rose family native to Europe. (By 1853 a number of synthetically prepared derivatives would include this acetylsalicylic acid. The Bayer Company would select that chemical as a substitute for the commonly used salicylic acid, designating it “aspirin” by combining the letter “a” from acetyl and “spirin” from Spiraea.)
The prickly pear plant was introduced to Australia, for use as hedging. (By 1925 over 60,000,000 acres of Australian land would be infested with it, with prickly pear dominating over nearly half the landscape — HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 control would come eventually in the form of South American caterpillars that can predate this plant.) PLANTS
Charles Goodyear, who had earlier sold his father’s patent for the steel-tine pitchfork to support his own experiments with raw rubber, found a method to “vulcanize” the substance.13
Because of this, the first effective rubbers would be making their appearance — not the kind of rubbers we know as “safes” or “condoms” or “English overcoats,” since such devices had been around for almost as long as safe sex has been around, but effective rubber galoshes that would not melt in the sun.
Vulcanization was a heat-driven process of combining sulphur with natural rubber. (The cross-linking of molecular chains known as isoprene units rendered rubber non-sticky, more durable, and more elastic. This would change life in Brazil, causing a rubber boom, with exports rising from 31 tons in 1827 to more than 27,000 tons by 1900. Manaus would become by 1877 a cosmopolitan city.) PLANTS
Per James Parton’s PEOPLE’S BOOK OF BIOGRAPHY (Hartford: A.S. Hale, 1868): In the fifth year of his investigations a glorious success rewarded him. He made one of the simplest, and yet one of the most useful, discoveries which has ever been made in the United States. It was this: Take a piece of common, sticky India Rubber, sprinkle upon it powdered sulphur, put it into an oven heated to 275 degrees, bake it a short time, and it comes out a new HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 material, which has all the good properties of India Rubber, without that liability to harden in cold weather and dissolve in warm, which had hitherto baffled all his endeavors to turn it to useful account. It was found, by subsequent experiments, that, by varying the proportions and the heat, he could make it as soft or as hard as he chose. He could make the softest cloth or the hardest ivory. He could make it as flexible as whalebone or as rigid as flint. In short, he had produced not merely a new material, but a new class of materials, applicable to a thousand uses. Overjoyed with his success he thought his troubles were over. Never was a poor inventor more mistaken. By this time, he had utterly tired out all his friends and acquaintances. He was thought to be India Rubber mad. As soon as he opened his mouth to speak of India Rubber, his friends manifested such signs of repugnance, pity, or incredulity, that he was abashed and ashamed to continue. As to mere acquaintances, they laughed at him. One of them, being asked one day how Mr. Goodyear could be recognized in the street, replied: “If you see a man with an India Rubber cap, an India Rubber coat, India Rubber shoes, and an India Rubber purse in his pocket, with not a cent in it, that is Charles Goodyear.” He used to say, in after times, that two years passed, after he had made his discovery before he could get one man to believe him. During that period be endured everything that a man can endure and live. Very often he knew not how to get the next loaf for his children. Very often, in the coldest day of a New England winter, he had neither food nor fire. Once he had a dead child in his house, and no means with which to bury it. He was denounced as a man who neglected his family to pursue a 13. Of course, the Aztecs had been able to vulcanize the rubber they used for the eight to ten pound balls of their Tlachtli game, many many centuries before this Mr. Goodyear had even been so much as a gleam in his daddy’s eye, but the Aztecs were not white people and, according to our habitual mode of thinking, only something that comes to be known to a white person can truly be said to be known.
(The athletes, who wore leather belts as above to protect their kidneys against strikes by the eight to ten pounds ball, could propel it only with their feet and hips. The only score in this game was one to nothing, because as soon as the ball passed through one or the other stone hoop, the game was over.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 ridiculous idea, which could never be of the slightest use to any one. In New York, at length, he found a man who had faith enough in his discovery to enter into partnership with him for bringing the new material before the public. From that time his children, indeed, had enough to eat; but it was three or four years before his patent began to bring him in any considerable return. Any one but Charles Goodyear would then have stopped and quietly enjoyed the fruit of his labors. But he, we repeat, was an inventor. He saw that the application of India Rubber to the arts was still in its infancy, and he felt it a kind of religious duty to go on developing his discovery. Therefore, he never entered into the manufacture of India Rubber goods, but, selling rights to manufacture for a low percentage on the sales, he spent all the rest of his life in applying the varied forms of his material to new uses. Like all other inventors, he was tormented with litigation. His right to his discovery was unquestionable, yet men there were who infringed that right; and, though the courts sustained him, the defence of his rights cost him enormous sums. The present condition of the India Rubber manufacture in the United States and Europe testifies to the ingenuity and devotion of this remarkable man. We are informed, by a gentleman engaged in the business, that a single firm in the city of New York sells two million dollars’ worth of India Rubber belting and engine- packing every year; and this firm is only one out of forty engaged in the Rubber business in this city alone. By Goodyear’s process one girl can make twenty pairs of India Rubber shoes in a day, so easily is the material worked, — and yet the various branches of the trade give employment to fifty thousand persons in the United States. Take one item, — the new clothes-wringer made of India Rubber rollers, invented three years ago. The companies engaged in the manufacture of this article are now selling the astonishing number of two hundred thousand per annum in this country; and, recently, a whole shipload was sent to England. During the late war, more than a million blankets of India Rubber were supplied to the armies. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 By this point the followers of “Universal Friend,” Jemimah Wilkinson, in and around the town of Penn Yan, New York at the head of Crooked Lake (now Keuka Lake), had entirely dispersed. James Brown and George Clark, through marriages to heirs of Rachel Malin, had come into possession of the magnificent Friend House that Universal Friend had bequeathed to Rachel and her sister, and there was no longer that little real-estate embarrassment of there being a dead body in the basement.
Jemimah’s only residue was that doctrinal pamphlet consisting primarily of Scriptural quotations, THE UNIVERSAL FRIEND’S ADVICE TO THOSE OF THE SAME RELIGIOUS SOCIETY, that she had caused to be issued in 1794.
George H. Moore attended Dartmouth College.
George W. Boynton engraved, for Nathaniel Dearborn, an 18 inch by 17 inch plan of Boston similar to the Alonzo Lewis map of 1835.14
The Railway Express Company was founded in Boston.
The restaurant proprietor Harvey D. Parker got married. Just as we have no idea as to his middle name, we do not know the name or family of his bride (there would not be surviving children of this union, and in the obituary the wealthy widow would be identified merely as “Mrs. Harvey D. Parker”).
The New England Gazetteer expanded upon previous reports about the hermitess Sarah Bishop: She lived on Long Island at the time of the Revolutionary war. Her father’s house was burned by the British, and she was cruelly treated by a British officer. She then left society and wandered among the mountains near this part of the state: she found a kind of cave near Ridgefield, where she resided till about the time of her death, which took place in 1810.
14. This would be annually reissued by E.P. Dutton & Co., with alterations, from 1860 to 1867. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
This sort of tale of course expands and expands. Later elaborations would have her forced to service the entire crew of a British privateer. Linda Grant DePauw’s SEAFARING WOMEN would portray her as a rape survivor and, perhaps, subject to PTSD, the “post-traumatic stress” syndrome. (There never being enough of a good thing, some websites now list her among female pirates.) HERMITS
William Benjamin Carpenter’s THE PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL AND COMPARATIVE PHYSIOLOGY, which has been characterized as “the first English book which contained adequate conceptions of a science of biology.”
John Adolphus Etzler evidently spent this year in the West Indies — for instance Haiti. He may well have been drafting his volume which would see publication in 1841, THE NEW WORLD OR MECHANICAL SYSTEM. He may have been checking out various locales for a projected tropical paradise. FUTURE-WORSHIP
Baron Joseph-Marie de Gérando’s De la bienfaisance publique (4 volumes, Paris).
The US Army sent Lieutenant John Charles Frémont with the French explorer Jean-Nicolas Nicollet (July 24, 1786-September 11, 1843, of course not the same person as the Jean Nicollet who had explored in the same area in the 17th Century), to map the rivers of the midwest.
Eugène Michel Chevreul, after 15 years of experimenting with the phenomenological aspects of the perception of colors for the weavers at the Gobelin tapestry factory in Paris, issued a book titled THE PRINCIPLES OF HARMONY AND CONTRAST OF COLORS AND THEIR APPLICATION TO THE ARTS.
In France, Louis Blanc (1811-1882) published L’ORGINISATION DU TRAVAIL.
Distress in Ireland, particularly in the south. FAMINE
Alfred Russel Wallace took employment as an apprentice to a watchmaker. This would not last and by the end of the year he would again be working for his brother in the surveying business.
Robert Southey used the term “Flue,” meaning influenza. (The English, in 1743, had begun to use the Italian word “influenza,” meaning “influence,” for this illness, because they were hypothesizing that the illness might be an influence from the stars. In 1951, W.H. Auden would shorten Southey’s “Flue” into “flu.”)
Publication of THE POETICAL WORKS OF ROBERT SOUTHEY, COLLECTED BY HIMSELF. TEN VOLUMES IN ONE (New York: Published by D. Appleton & Co. / 200, Broadway).15 TEN VOLUMES IN ONE
Founding of The Seminary (or, The Methodist Theological School) at Newbury, Vermont and Concord, New Hampshire. The school moved to Boston in 1867 as the Boston Theological Seminary, becoming Boston University in 1869. The Seminary, the oldest Methodist Seminary in the USA, would become Boston University School of Theology.
15. This volume would be in the personal library of Henry Thoreau. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Luke Howard’s MEMORANDA OF RACHEL HOWARD, IN 3 PARTS (London, Simpkin and Marshall, 1839). It has to do with his daughter Rachel Howard who had died at Tottenham, the 24th of 9th month, 1837, age 37. HOWARD PUBLICATIONS
Harriet Martineau’s DEERBROOK, and THE MARTYR AGE OF THE UNITED STATES (Boston: Weeks, Jordan). Her health, never good, at this point collapsed, and until 1844 she would be forced to inaction, a complete invalid.
[The antislavery abolitionists are] the true republicans ... the sufferers, the moral soldiers who have gone out armed only with faith, hope, and charity.... Let us not wait ... for another century to greet the confessors and martyrs who stretch out their strong arm to bring down Heaven upon our earth; but even now ... let us make our reverent congratulations heard over the ocean which divides us from the spiritual potentates of our age.
Calvin Colton declared, in ABOLITION A SEDITION. BY A NORTHERN MAN, that the sort of immediatist abolitionism represented by the New England non-resistance Society amounted to a turn toward anarchism.
One logical outcome of such immediatism and perfectionism was a disregard of all civil government. In placing such stress upon the prospect of individual freedom from sin, he offered, these people had come to disregard the prior necessity for social order. There were some antislavery activists who would profoundly agree with Colton, people such as William Goodell, Orange Scott, and Theodore Dwight Weld, and who therefore would be seeking to pin the “anarchist” tail on the NENRS donkey: “no-governmentism,” they would term it. The term antinomian may be more useful than the term anarchist.... As their resentment at being called no-governmentalists suggests, the Garrisonian nonresistants opposed anarchy and yearned for government. If there is a paradox here, it is at the heart of their faith. They were anarchists –or, more properly, we would call them anarchists– because they detested anarchy. In their categories, human government was synonymous with anarchy and antithetical to the rule of Christ and moral principle. Slavery, government, and violence were considered identical in principle...all tried to set one man between another man and his rightful ruler...to end all coercion was to...secure peace and order on earth.... All that was needed to usher in peace was to expel the intermediaries who pretended to keep the peace. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 William F. Harnden initiated a Boston/New-York package service, by carrying the packages back and forth in his carpetbag.
Up to this point, letters had been simply folded over, and mailed as such. This year, in New-York, manufacture of mailing envelopes was initiated.
A guide to the houses of prostitution on Manhattan Island was published in its 5th edition under the title PROSTITUTION EXPOSED; OR, A MORAL REFORM DIRECTORY, LAYING BARE THE LIVES, HISTORIES, RESIDENCES, SEDUCTIONS, &C. OF THE MOST CELEBRATED COURTEZANS AND LADIES OF PLEASURE OF THE CITY OF NEW-YORK, TOGETHER WITH A DESCRIPTION OF THE CRIME AND ITS EFFECTS, AS ALSO, OF THE HOUSES OF PROSTITUTION AND THEIR KEEPERS, HOUSES OF ASSIGNATION, THEIR CHARGES AND CONVENIENCES, AND OTHER PARTICULARS INTERESTING TO THE PUBLIC. (This little book with a long title is illustrated with a crude woodcut of a young lady, with her modesty protected only by crotch-length tresses but wearing a necklace and earrings and what appears to be a maid’s cap.)
Samuel Ringgold Ward became for awhile a teacher at the Coloured Lancasterian School in Poughkeepsie, New York, and then became an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, that is, a touring antislavery lecturer:
I was engaged in Poughkeepsie, as teacher of the Coloured Lancasterian School. Anxious to pursue further studies, I applied to one or two gentlemen for aid. One of them confessed himself but a beginner in one of the branches in which I had made some progress; and he soon after gave me a deeper wound, and more severe discouragement, than any other man ever did. A debate upon the peace question was to occur, in a hall of which this gentleman and I were joint proprietors for the time. I had another engagement to speak, at some distance from home, within a day or two of the time of the debate. This gentleman urged my return in time to participate in the discussion. I complied, went to the hall. A few only attended; and after a little conversation instead of a debate, it was concluded to form a Literary Society. My friend was requested to pass a paper for the names of such persons present as would enter such a society. He did not solicit my name. He came to me after the proceeding had terminated, and said, “Mr. Ward, you must have noticed that I did not hand the paper to you for your signature. I omitted you on purpose, because I saw that if your name was taken several of those present would bolt.” Then, thought I, what is the use of my acting uprightly, seeking to win fame, and gaining it, if in this country a professed friend, a man who goes with me to the house of God, hearing me preach, visits my house, after all treads upon me to please his neighbours? My determination was formed to leave the country. I accordingly wrote to Mr. Burnley, of the Trinidad Legislature, a relation of the late Joseph Hume, Esq., M.P., who kindly encouraged my going to that HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 island. I wrote also to Rev. Joshua Leavitt, asking for letters of recommendation. Mr. L. deprecated my leaving America, thinking I might be of some service to the anti-slavery cause. I wrote him again, bitterly stating my utter despair of doing anything for myself or my people amid so many discouragements. The reply I received was an appointment as agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, to travel and lecture for them. I accepted the appointment, my commission being signed by Henry B. Stanton, Esq., who was then, and Hon. James Gillespie Birney, who yet professes to be, an abolitionist; these gentlemen being secretaries of that Society; in the same capacity they came to London, to attend the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840. Thus was I introduced into the anti-slavery agency.
Friend Abby Kelley joined the lecture circuit. She spent the majority of this first year going from city to city in Connecticut, starting up anti-slavery societies, raising funds, and soliciting subscriptions for The Liberator and the National Anti-Slavery Standard.
A “villa book” was published, AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF COTTAGE, FARM, AND VILLA ARCHITECTURE 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 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 An elaborate and expensively colored “Amalgamation Series” of cartoons prepared by E.W. Clay was published in New-York by John Childs. In the illustration, William Lloyd Garrison appears as the man in the doorway, and in a portrait on the wall, and the proud father in the smoking jacket is looking at an issue of The Emancipator: HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
Have we any other image from this period of any mother giving suck to any child? HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
The fortunate firstborn HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
William Lloyd Garrison is outrageously being touched by a woman of color:
The picture on the wall absolutely defines responsibility. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
The “clincher”: this black American has a white servant. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
Nothing but tragedy is to be anticipated:
A railroad connected Corning, New York with the Pennsylvania coal fields.
A Stafford, New York silkworm operation contained 6,000 mulberry trees and 72,000 worms.
American Revolution heroine Sybil Ludington died, in her late seventies.
The Albany Exchange Building was erected at Broadway and State Street by a joint stock company. It would host the post office, the New York Central Railroad office, and other offices.
H. and W. Clark’s Cobblestone Hotel (the J.P. Hicks Building) was completed in Liverpool, New York.
General William Kerley Strong erected a Greek Revival mansion on Geneva, New York’s Rose Hill Farm.
The route for the Oswego and Syracuse Railroad company was surveyed.
Rochester, New York had a permanent 12-man police force, but close to one out of each three children of that city were receiving no education whatever. Of the fortunate two out of three, half were attending private, and half public fee-based schools. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 New York Loyalist-in-exile Anthony Allaire died in New Brunswick, Canada, in his mid-eighties.
Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s THE BUBBLES OF CANADA, and his A REPLY TO THE REPORT OF THE EARL OF DURHAM.
Catherine Fox of the Spiritualist Fox Sisters was probably born in this year near Bath, New Brunswick in Canada.
William Hobson was instructed to establish British rule in New Zealand, which initially was to be a dependency of New South Wales. Colonel William Wakefield arrived on board the Tory with instructions from his brother Edward to buy as much land as possible for future colonists.
Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar graduated from Harvard Law School16 with receipt of the LL.B. degree. He would join the Boston law firm of Rufus Choate and Daniel Webster and eventually become the Attorney General of the United States of America.
(However, when nominated by President Ulysses S. Grant, as Attorney General, to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court, the US Senate would react against a reputation he had acquired, of displaying “supercilious contempt” for senators — and would refuse him confirmation by a vote of 33 over 24.)
Catherine Sinclair’s HOLIDAY HOUSE.
16. Just in case you didn’t know: Harvard Law School had been founded with money from the selling off of some slaves in the sugarcane fields of Antigua. (Try not to let that bother you.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 In London, Highgate Cemetery opened.
Opening of the London & Croydon Railway from Corbett’s Lane to Croydon.
In London, opening of the Eastern Counties Railway from Mile End to Romford.
Lord Melbourne, leader of the Whigs, resigned after a defeat in the House of Commons and Sir Robert Peel, as the head of the Tory party, became Prime Minister. Since it was the custom at the time for the Queen’s ladies of the bedchamber to be of the same political party as the government, Peel asked Victoria to replace her Whig ladies with Tory ladies. When Queen Victoria refused, Peel resigned and Melbourne and his Whigs returned to office. Soon after the return of Lord Melbourne as Prime Minister, the Queen saw Lady Flora Hastings, one of her ladies-in-waiting, getting into a carriage with Sir John Conroy, and a few months later she noticed that
Lady Hastings appeared pregnant. When Victoria approached Lady Hastings about this she claimed to be still a virgin. Victoria insisted upon a medical examination by her personal physician, who ascertained that although Lady Hastings was indeed swelling, she was indeed also a virgin. The swelling was an internal cancer. The story was leaked to the newspapers so that when a few months later Lady Hastings died of what was found to have been cancer of the liver, Victoria became very unpopular with the British public. Soon afterwards an attempt was made to kill Victoria while she was riding in her carriage in London.
She was quite the target — further attempts would be made in 1842 (twice), 1849, 1850, 1872, and 1882.
Roderick Murchison and Adam Sedgwick named the Devonian System. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 A foreign tourist named Captain Frederick Marryat commented about Niagara Falls in his DIARY IN AMERICA: “For about half an hour more I continued to watch the rolling waters and then I felt a slight dizziness and a creeping sensation come over me — that sensation arising from strong excitement, and the same, probably, that occasions the bird to fall into the jaws of the snake. This is a feeling which, if too long indulged in, becomes irresistible, and occasions a craving desire to leap into the flood of rushing waters. It increased upon me every minute; and retreating from the brink, I turned my eyes to the surrounding foliage, until the effect of the excitement had passed away.”17 SUICIDE
Between this year and 1843, the US Army Corps of Engineers would be directing a remake of Fort Niagara. A heavy stone wall would be put along the riverside to shield the interior of the American fortification from the gun emplacements of Fort Mississauga. A seawall would be put in to arrest years of erosion by Lake Ontario. There would be new emplacements for heavy guns, there would be a shot furnace, the land side earthworks would be given new timber revetments, and old stone buildings would be upgraded. The fortification would never again house a substantial force, but it would once again possess a certain style.
From his wife Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (halfbreed daughter of fur trader John Johnston and Ozhaw- Guscoday-Wayquay), Henry Rowe Schoolcraft had been learning over the years the Anishinabeg language, and acquiring a store of Anishinabe Ojibway lore. In this year was published his ALGIC RESEARCHES: COMPRISING INQUIRIES RESPECTING THE MENTAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. FIRST SERIES. INDIAN TALES AND LEGENDS (New-York: Harper & Brothers, 82 Cliff-Street). ALGIC RESEARCHES, I ALGIC RESEARCHES, II
Prince Alexander Philipp Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied’s Reise in das Innere Nord-Amerika in den Jahren 1832 bis 1834; VON MAXIMILIAN PRINZ ZU WIED (two volumes, Koblenz: J. Hoelscher, 1839-1841).
The US federal mint created a $10 proof coin which is now worth approximately a million dollars, each, to collectors (because there are but four or five known samples still in existence).
17. One may speculate that there must have been some sort of linkage between the 19th-Century concept of the sublime and repressed forbidden thoughts of suicide. Otherwise, it would be difficult to explain their great preoccupation with the sublime. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
The family of Susan B. Anthony moved from Battenville, New York to Hardscrabble (a town that would later be renamed Center Falls :-), and she left the home to help pay off her father’s debts through a teaching salary at Eunice Kenyon’s Friends’ Seminary in New Rochelle. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Roderick Murchison and Adam Sedgwick named the Devonian System.
THE SCIENCE OF 1839
From this year until the great European revolution of 1848, Professor Arnold Henri Guyot would be teaching physical geography and history at the Academy of Neuchâtel. His interests were in glaciology, physical geography, meteorology, and cartography. His early studies on the flow of ice and the distribution of glacial erratics in the mountains of central Europe served to underpin the catastrophist theory of glaciation that had been advanced and championed by Professor Louis Agassiz. PALEONTOLOGY
OUR MOST RECENT GLACIATION Timothy Abbott Conrad accepted Agassiz’s catastrophist theory of glaciation as an explanation for various surface features in the United States, such as the Mississippi depression.
Samuel Slocum of Poughkeepsie, New York formed a company to manufacture his “Poughkeepsie pins” having a solid head. One laborer, tending two such machines, was able to produce 100,000 such improved pins in an ordinary factory workday 11 hours. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 The USS Constitution was serving as the flagship of the US squadron in the Pacific, until 1841. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Charles King Whipple “came out of” (to use the idiom of the time) his orthodox church in Salem.
Johann August Sutter, abandoning his wife and five children, had become an American capitalist. After ventures in St. Louis, Santa Fe, Honolulu, Sitka, and Monterey, in this year he received the political plum of a huge land grant on the Sacramento and American Rivers from California governor Alvarado. He forced local native Americans to construct for him a frontier fortress and mounted Russian cannon salvaged from Fort Ross on its walls.
Bayard Taylor made his first visit to California. Upon his return in 1849 he would find himself considerably offended by the things which had been brought there in merely one decade:
Nature here reminds one of a princess fallen into the hands of robbers, who cut off her fingers for the sake of the jewels she wears. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s CHURCH AND STATE. SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s POETICAL WORKS, edited by Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley. Also, his prose works. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 In North Carolina, for the 1st time, charcoal began to be used in the flue-curing of tobacco. Charcoal curing was not only cheaper, but also the intense heat it generated turned the thinner, low-nicotine “Piedmont leaf” a brilliant golden color, the result being a “Slade yallercure” presaging our flue-cured classic American “Bright leaf” — a product so mild that smokers find it pleasurable to inhale deeply.
If you ask the contemporary whites of North Carolina, they’ll volunteer that this important discovery had been made by a slave named Steven, a blacksmith who was supposed to stay awake and tend the curing fire and keep it from going out, who nevertheless went to sleep and let the fire go out. In a panic when he woke to discover that he had let the fire go out and the curing shed cool off, fearful of the coming punishment, he had rushed to his blacksmithing forge and scooped up its charcoal and shoveled that into the curing shed. –When you hear this story from the contemporary whites of North Carolina, please be receptive while they go on to assure you that said Steven was rewarded for having made such an important discovery rather than punished for typical slave laziness and inattention to duties.
Marryat’s DIARY IN AMERICA noted that American free enterprise was ingenious: An act was passed to prohibit playing at nine pins; as soon as the law was put in force, it was notified everywhere, Ten Pins played here.
The idiom “all creation” was in use, meaning “very strongly,” as witness this from the Yale Literary Magazine: He pulls like all creation, as the woman remarked when the horse ran away with her.
Enoch Cobb Wines’s PEEP AT CHINA IN MR. DUNN’S CHINESE COLLECTION: WITH MISCELLANEOUS NOTICES RELATING TO THE INSTITUTIONS AND CUSTOMS OF THE CHINESE, AND OUR COMMERCIAL INTERCOURSE WITH THEM.
James Legge was ordained at Trevor Chapel, London and got married with Mary Isabella Morison (1817- 1852). The newlyweds set out on a sailing vessel for the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca, an institution for the education of Chinese and Malayan youth that had been established in 1818 by the pioneering protestant missionary Robert Morrison (1782-1834). He would remain at Malacca, coming to be in charge of the college, for 3 years. When, subsequently, the college would remove to Hong Kong, the Reverend Legge would live there for nearly 3 decades. Keuh Agong, a Christian, would accompany Legge on his move to Hong Kong in 1844.
When Chinese “water-braves” laid claim to an ability to walk along the sea-bottom and remain hidden there all night were audited by government officials, it turned out not to be possible for them to validate their claims (although they were pretty good underwater, it remains a fact that although we know of people who can remain underwater for fully five minutes, we have never observed anyone reach the sixth minute, and it remains a fact that no-one can expect to swim underwater for more than about 70 yards laterally, max, before being forced to the surface to take a breath). HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Father Évariste Régis Huc, sent by his order, the Vincentians or Lazarists, landed in Macau. He would pass through South China, Peking, Hei-shui some 300 miles north of that capital, and Lhasa, Tibet before returning to Canton in Kwantung province in September 1846 and writing a book about his travels that would be consulted by Waldo Emerson. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Charles Darwin was seeing through the presses his JOURNAL OF RESEARCHES ... DURING THE VOYAGE OF 18 HMS BEAGLE about, among other things, his 1835 visit to the Galápagos.
From this year until 1841, he would be publishing five separate volumes about his trip aboard HMS Beagle.
He began by dedicating his effort to Charles Lyell, the successive volumes of whose THE PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY: AN ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN THE FORMER CHANGES OF THE EARTH’S SURFACE BY REFERENCE TO CAUSES NOW IN OPERATION (London) had kept him so very preoccupied during his long days at sea: When Darwin left England for his round-the-world voyage in 1831, he carried with him a departure gift: Volume I of Lyell’s PRINCIPLES, published in its first edition the previous year. Before reaching the Cape Verde Islands, he had already been swept into Lyell’s orbit. Thrilled, he preordered copies of Volumes II and III for pickup in ports of call as they were published. So influential was Lyell’s thinking during the voyage that Darwin dedicated his JOURNAL OF RESEARCHES to him with this 18. Henry Thoreau would not read this until 1846. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 comment: “The chief part of whatever scientific merit this journal and the other works of the author may possess, have been derived from studying the well-known and admirable PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY.” This dedication may have jumped out at Thoreau when he read it in 1851, because he, himself, had been smitten by Lyell’s great book in 1840, eleven years earlier.
During this year he published the 3rd volume in the series NARRATIVE OF THE SURVEYING VOYAGES OF HIS MAJESTY’S SHIPS ADVENTURE AND BEAGLE, BETWEEN THE YEARS 1826 AND 1836. This established his further reputation as a scientist and author.
This was the year in which Charles Darwin himself alleged that he had first clearly formulated his theory of development with modification. Extremely reluctant to engage in controversy after what had happened to his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, he would wait until he had amassed an enormous amount of documentation and until his theory was at risk of being sketched out by others before he would publish. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 We know that as of this year, Charles Darwin was unaware of his family motto E conchis omnia or of what it meant.
In the following year this new author would have his obligatory authorial portrait prepared:
Robert FitzRoy published two volumes of NARRATIVE OF THE SURVEYING VOYAGES OF HIS MAJESTY’S SHIPS ADVENTURE AND BEAGLE BETWEEN THE YEARS 1826 AND 1836, DESCRIBING THEIR EXAMINATION OF THE SOUTHERN SHORES OF SOUTH AMERICA, AND THE BEAGLE’S CIRCUMNAVIGATION OF THE GLOBE.
Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911), son of Professor Sir William Jackson Hooker, had met Darwin in 1834 and in a few years they had become friends. In this year he received his MD degree from the University of Glasgow and sailed to the Antarctic in the HMS Erebus.
Fredrika Bremer’s HEMMET (THE HOME).
Walter Savage Landor’s ANDREA OF HUNGARY AND GIOVANNA OF NAPLES.
Professor John G. Palfrey stepped down from the deanship of the Harvard Divinity School. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 The dark area surrounding the north polar cap of the planet Mars was observed to have become fainter and narrower.
ASTRONOMY
Biela’s comet returned during this year, but it was this time so situated in the skies that it was not seen. SKY EVENT
In this year Sojourner Truth (still as Isabella Van Wagenen) would have been approximately 42 years old.
The serial installments of Charles Dickens’s OLIVER TWIST, OR THE PARISH BOY’S PROGRESS and his NICHOLAS NICKLEBY wound to their respective conclusions:
“John, dear, I’m ashamed to show you my book, for I’ve really been dreadfully extravagant lately. I go about so much I must have things, you know, and Sallie advised my getting it, so I did, and my New-Year’s money will partly pay for it, but I was sorry after I had done it, for I knew you’d think it wrong in me.” John laughed, and drew her round beside him, saying good-humoredly, “Don’t go and hide. I won’t beat you if you have got a pair of killing boots. I’m rather proud of my wife’s feet, and don’t mind if she does pay eight or nine dollars for her boots, if they are good ones.” That had been one of her last ‘trifles,’ and John’s eye had fallen on it as he spoke. “Oh, what will he say when he comes to that awful fifty dollars!” thought Meg, with a shiver. “It’s worse than boots, it’s a silk dress,” she said, with the calmness of desperation, for she wanted the worst over. “Well, dear, what is the ‘dem’d total,’ as Mr. Mantalini says?”
NICHOLAS NICKLEBY was already being dramatized before its publication was completed.
Arthur Schopenhauer’s competition essay ÜBER DIE FREIHEIT DES MENSCHLICHEN WILLENS (ON THE FREEDOM OF HUMAN WILL) won first prize.
John Lothrop Motley’s MORTON’S HOPE. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Captain Richard Delafield used hollow elliptical cast-iron tubes that were bolted at their flanges in the bridge construction of the oldest existing all-metal bridge in the USA, the Dunlaps Creek bridge in Brownsville PA, for the Cumberland Road. This bridge spanned, and spans, 80 feet.
If you can find a copy of the Long Islander journal of Huntington NY for this year of the previous one, don’t show it to anyone until after you have negotiated, because it’s worth real money: all copies are lost and we no longer have any idea what sort of material Whitman was producing in those early days.
Dueling became illegal in the US. Imprisonment for debt became, under certain circumstances, illegal.
John Henry Clifford became district attorney for southern Massachusetts (until 1849).
Shortly after Pentecost, Johann Mendel became seriously ill and left school to recover at home. He would not return to Troppau until September. Despite this absence, in the following year he would be admitted to the highest class in the school. GREGOR MENDEL
During this year the Ottoman sultan Abdul Majid started his “Tanzimat,” a program of modernization.
Aden was added to the British Empire.
Seven theaters simultaneously perform versions of John Buckstone’s “Jack Sheppard.”
G. Boole’s Analytical transformations.
Isaac Babbitt of Taunton MA, who in 1824 had begun to manufacture the first Britannia ware produced in the New World, and had also been manufacturing a brand of soap named “Babbitt soap,” had been experimenting further with alloys of copper, tin, and antimony, and had produced a compound he called “Babbitt metal” which was far superior in slipperiness to all other alloys as a material for ball bearings and journal bearings. (This alloy is still in use and is still termed “Babbitt metal.”)
In Leipzig, Felix Mendelssohn conducted the first performance of the Symphony in C Major, the “Hungarian Rhapsodies,” by Franz Shubert (1797-1828).
From this year into 1842, the 1st Afghan War with the British; in this year a British army was annihilated.
The Whigs nominated William Henry Harrison.
Mathematician Gabriel Lamxxxx (1795-1870) proved that Fermat’s last theorem is true for n=7.
Inventor Erastus Brigham Bigelow (1814-1879) introduced the power loom in Massachusetts.
In Aix-en-Provence, Paul Cezanne was born.
Poe published “The Fall of the House of Usher.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Felicia Hemans’s WORKS OF MRS. HEMANS began to appear, the first of seven volumes to be completed in 1851 (includes a MEMOIR by her sister, and critical reviews of her work).
William Harrison Ainsworth’s JACK SHEPPARD: A ROMANCE.
J.P. Bailey’s FESTUS.
Mary Louisa Boyle’s THE FORESTER: A TALE OF 1688.
Edward Bulwer Lytton’s CARDINAL RICHELIEU.
Eliza Cook’s ILLUSTRATIONS OF POEMS BY ELIZA COOK.
Alfred Domett’s VENICE.
Letitia Landon’s THE ZENANA AND MINOR POEMS OF L.E.L.
Samuel Naylor’s CERACCHI, A DRAMA AND OTHER POEMS.
John Edmund Reade’s THE DELUGE.
George Sand’s SPIRIDION.
George Scharf’s RECOLLECTIONS OF THE SCENIC EFFECTS OF COVENT GARDEN THEATRE.
Stendhal’s LA CHARTREUSE DE PARME.
Philip Meadows Taylor’s CONFESSIONS OF A THUG. William Gladstone married Catherine Glynne and Benjamin Disraeli married Mary Anne Lewis.
From 1839 into 1844, Charles Hale, son of the Nathan Hale who was the head of the Boston and Worcester line and also the head of the Daily Advertiser, while age 8 to 14, would be issuing 148 numbers of a hand- lettered and illustrated newsletter, the Rail-Road Journal of the Boston and Worcester R.R.19
19. This material is said to be in Box #17 of the Hale Family Papers, wherever they are to be found, in four folders under the heading “Railroad Journal.”I wonder if we can somehow access this to derive “.bmp” images for the RR history of Walden Pond?? HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 An escaped woman working as a servant in the Stowe home was being searched out by her owner. To defeat this man the Reverends Henry Ward Beecher and Calvin Ellis Stowe took this servant under cover of darkness to the home of a friend outside the Cincinnati city limits. Later, evidently because of this solitary incident in which the white men involved ran no risk whatever of being either detected or, if detected, prosecuted, Harriet Beecher Stowe would assert that “the Underground Railroad ran through” her home — a fabrication quite typical of her MO (modus operandi, mode of operation). UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
(Well, OK, few such stories ever lose anything in the retelling. But, we will find this variety of self- magnification typical of this person at all phases of her life.20)
The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher took up a pastorate in Indianapolis, IndianaN (until 1847).
A free black American applied for a passport and was denied by our State Department on grounds of noncitizenship: how could any black person, on any basis, be considered to be a citizen of these United States of America?
20. Her son, Charles Edward Stowe, would recount to a historian (who was investigating her claims of having had a role in the Underground Railroad) how his mother Harriet Beecher Stowe had been caught in one of her self-serving confabulations. She had claimed to have been present to hear one of President Lincoln’s speeches in 1862, when that couldn’t possibly have happened — the speech she was claiming to have been present to hear in 1862, actually hadn’t been delivered by him until several years later, and in a location at which she couldn’t possibly have been present. Oops, never mind. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 “In those parts of the Union in which the negroes are no longer slaves, they have in no wise drawn nearer to the whites. On the contrary, the prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in the States which have abolished slavery ... and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those States where servitude has never been known.” — Alexis de Tocqueville
While on a visit to Syracuse, New York, the slave Harriett Powell was liberated. SLAVERY
Henry Clay delivered a conciliatory address against militant abolitionism.
He began campaigning for the Presidency, but was denied the Whig nomination; General Harrison was nominated. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 The 1st book of poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, VOICES OF THE NIGHT, with the 3d version of “A Psalm of Life” (it also contains “Hyperion”). HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Louis A. Godey’s Godey’s Lady’s Book had 25,000 subscribers (at its highest point, in 1860, the circulation
would rise to 150,000). Sarah Josepha Hale, as literary editor, was relying on original material, mostly by women, rather than following the American practice of plagiarizing from European authors. Although she had a nasty habit of stiffing unknown authors, paying them sometimes not at all, she did pay her more well-known contributors well. At one time or another, William Cullen Bryant, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were all contributing to the magazine and being well rewarded for so doing. Edgar Allan Poe would supply several of the best-known of his tales, such as “The Mask of the Red Death,” as well as literary essays such as “Tale Writing — Nathaniel Hawthorne” and a series on the “New York Literati.” Even more than Graham’s Magazine, this girlie mag relied upon fashion plates and engravings. Godey was even known to refer to the article text as “the illustration of the plate” (in a later timeframe men would be insisting that they subscribed to Playboy only to read the articles, but that is neither here nor there). Godey declared these plates to be “service to the cause of civilization.” Initially one hand- colored plate was being included in every third issue, but soon there was a single hand-colored plate in each issue of the magazine (the origin of the centerfold?). By 1870 civilization had been served most exceedingly well, for a total of a thousand such services to the cause of civilization had at that point appeared in the magazine.
However, in this year, Poe, having moved to Philadelphia, was living on little but bread and molasses and writing “Ligeia” and other stories which appeared in the American Museum of Baltimore. He became co- editor of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Thomas B. Laighton, the businessman of Portsmouth, New Hampshire who owned Appledore Island, Cedar Island, Malaga Island, and Smuttynose Island, got mad because he had been defeated by means which he considered unfair in a race for governor of New Hampshire. So he sold his business and moved his family out to White Island on a 2-year contract to be the keeper of the Isles of Shoals Lighthouse. He was the father of the poet Celia Thaxter, at this time still a child. Celia’s father and his friend Levi Thaxter had the notion to build a grand hotel on Appledore. The daughter’s memories in books such as AMONG THE ISLES OF SHOALS
(1873) would make her and the locale known throughout the country. By the time her 1st poem was published, the two men would have turned their unlikely $2,000 investment into a successful business. Celia’s literary fame and Boston connections provided the ideal public relations tool, drawing the cream of big city society to the isolated hotel. Laighton would be so smitten by life away from the mainland that he would never leave the Isles. Visitors during his lifelong tenure would include Richard Henry Dana, Jr. and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who at this point were neither of them yet the sort of famous author whose name would noticeably distinguish one’s guestbook, plus Harriet Beecher Stowe and Friend John Greenleaf Whittier, the painter Childe Hassam, and the politician Franklin Pierce. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Robert Salmon’s luminous painting “Boston Harbor from Castle Island,” now at the Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond VA (or was this done in 1829?):
CASTLE ISLAND PAINTING BOSTON HARBOR The Perkins Institute for the Blind moved to Mount Washington House in South Boston, formerly a great hotel, on high ground overlooking the harbor. The blind students enjoyed taking sighted visitors up to the roof and pointing: “Here is Fort Independence; there you can see Fort Warren and Deer Island; the steamers for Europe pass in this direction, and the Nahant boat in that.”
July 25, Friday, 1851: ... Ascended to the top of the hill where is the old French Fort with the well said to be 90 feet deep now covered. I saw some horses standing on the very top of the ramparts the highest part of Hull, where there was hardly room to turn round –for the sake of the breeze. It was excessively warm, and their TELEGRAPHY instincts –or their experience perchance guided them as surely to the summit as it did me. Here is the Telegraph 9 miles from Boston whose state House was just visible –moveable signs on a pole with holes in them for the passage of the wind. A man about the Telegraph Station thought it the highest point in the harbor –said they could tell the kind of vessel 30 miles off –the no at mast head 10 or 12 miles –name on hull 6 or 7 miles. They can see furthest in the fall. There is a mist summer and winter when the contrast bet. the temperature of the sea & the air is greatest. I did not see why this Hill should not be fortified as well as George’s Island, it being higher & also commanding the main channel– However an enemy could go by all the forts in the dark –as Wolfe did at Quebec They are bungling contrivances. Here the bank is rapidly washing away –on every side in Boston Harbor– The evidences of the wasting away of the islands are so obvious and striking that they appear to be wasting faster than they are– You will sometimes see a springing hill showing by the interrupted arch of its surface against the sky how much space must have occupied where there is now water as at Pt Allerton –what Botanists call premorse Hull looks as if it had been two islands since connected by a beach– I was struck by the gracefully curving & fantastic shore of a small island (Hog I.) inside of Hull – where every thing seemed to be gently lapsing into futurity as if the inhabitants should bear a ripple for device on their coat of arms –a wave passing over them with the Datura growing on their shores– The wrecks of isles fancifully arranged into a new shore. To see the sea nibbling thus voraciously at the continents.– A man at the Telegraph told me of a White oak pole 11/2 ft in diam. 40 feet high & 4 feet or more in the rock at Minots ledge with 4 guys –which stoood HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 only one year – – Stone piled up cob fashion near same place stood 8 years. Hull pretty good land but bare of trees only a few cherries for the most part & mostly uncultivated being owned by few. I heard the voices of men shouting aboard a vessel half a mile from the shore which sounded as if they were in a barn in the country –they being between the sails. It was not a sea sound. It was a purely rural sound....
For interest, here is a closeup look at the distant dome of the State House, to which Thoreau above refers:
Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Baroda died. This maharaja had been a fan of combative sports, supportive of a court wrestler named Sadika Gilgoo or “Man Mountain.”
James Robert Ballantyne’s A GRAMMAR OF THE MAHRATTA LANGUAGE (Edinburgh), PRINCIPLES OF PERSIAN CALIGRAPHY, ILLUSTRATED BY LITHOGRAPHIC PLATES OF THE NASKH-TA'LIK CHARACTER (London and Edinburgh), and ELEMENTS OF HINDĪ AND BRAJ BHĀKHĀ GRAMMAR: COMPILED FOR THE USE OF THE EAST- INDIA COLLEGE AT HAILEYBURY (London and Edinburgh: Sold by J. Madden and Co., 8, Leadenhall Street, London; C. Smith, 87, Princes Street, Edinburgh; and at the Military Academy, Lothian Road).
In the previous year the British government had 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! In this year the Reverend Robert Spence Hardy’s pamphlet THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT AND IDOLATRY IN CEYLON would cry out again for an end to the “unnatural, sinful, and pernicious connexion between the British Government of Ceylon and idolatry.” Just as the sole purpose for the existence of the Roman Empire way back then obviously had been to facilitate the initial flourishing of Christianity in the known world, he argued, the sole purpose of the British Empire in the present era obviously must be to consolidate and hegemonize this entire globe under the sway of Christianity. The issue was that when the British had taken possession of Ceylon in 1815 their emissaries had done so with the explicit pledge, made to the Buddhist sangha and the Kandyan chiefs, that they would be responsible for maintenance of the Tooth Relic in Kandy — the ceremonies attendant upon this annual act of idolatry were at the present time costing the crown the unholy sum of £15.19.9½ per year! HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 (Although such an expense might seem to be small potatoes in the eyes of some, it amounts to a jab in the eye of God — God will not be mocked!) It was “the bounden duty of the government of the country, from its possession of Truth, to discountenance the system [of Buddhism] by every legitimate means.” Buddhism must be confronted in a struggle that can end only “in the discomfiture of those who have risen against the Lord and his Christ.”
Opium was India’s largest export.
Commissioner Lin Tse-hsü arrived at Canton to take charge of the prohibition of the opium traffic. The first war between the British and the Chinese over the opium trade began.
A very popular medical book that had first appeared in 1830, Dr. John C. Gunn’s DOMESTIC MEDICINE OR POOR MAN’S FRIEND, IN THE HOUSE OF AFFLICTION, PAIN AND SICKNESS, reached its 9th edition despite being all of a thousand pages. A feature of this medical treatise was a sizeable section titled “Of the Passions” which attempted to deliver advice on mental health, religion, and love. The “passions” analyzed were those of: • fear •anger • love • jealousy •joy •grief • intemperance
Thankfully, the remedies which the popular Dr. Gunn commended to his self-medicants for their “passions” were not drugs such as opiates but amounted instead to: •religion • education • self-discipline
Friend Thomas Clarkson’s THE HISTORY OF THE RISE, PROGRESS, AND ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE ABOLITION OF THE SLAVE-TRADE, BY THE BRITISH PARLIAMENT: THE TRAFFIC IN MAN-BODY That foreign states continue shamefully to carry it on, is no less certain. There are yearly transported to Cuba and Brazil, above 100,000 unhappy beings, by the two weakest nations in Europe, and these two most entirely subject to the influence and even direct control of England. The inevitable consequence is, that more misery is now inflicted on Africa by the criminals, gently called Slave-traders, of these two guilty nations, than if there were no treaties for the abolition of the traffic. The number required is always carried over, and hence, as many HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 perish by a miserable death in escaping from the cruisers, as reach their destination. The recitals of horror which have been made to Parliament and the country on this dreadful subject, are enough to curdle the blood in the veins and heart of any one endued with the common feelings of humanity. The whole system of prevention, or rather of capture, after the crime has been committed, seems framed with a view to exasperate the evils of the infernal traffic, to scourge Africa with more intolerable torments, and to make human blood be spilt like water. Our cruisers are excited to an active discharge of their duty by the benefit of sharing in the price fetched when the captured ship is condemned and sold; but this is a small sum, indeed, compared with the rich reward of head-money held out, being so much for every slave taken on board. It is thus made the direct interest of these cruisers, that the vessels should have their human cargoes on board, rather than be prevented from shipping them. True, this vile policy may prove less mischievous where no treaty exists, giving a right to seize when there are no slaves in the vessel, because here a slave ship is suffered to pass, how clear soever her destination might be; yet, even here, the inducement to send in boats, and seize as soon as a slave or two may be on board, is removed, and the cruiser is told, “only let all these wretched beings be torn from their country, and safely lodged in the vessel’s hold, and your reward is great and sure.” Then, whenever there is an outfit clause, that is a power to seize vessels fitted for the traffic, this mischievous plan tends directly to make the cruiser let the slaver make ready and put to sea, or it has no tendency or meaning at all. Accordingly, the course is for the cruiser to stand out to sea, and not allow herself to be seen in the offing –the crime is consummated –the slaves are stowed away –the pirate-captain weighs anchor –the pirate-vessel freighted with victims, and manned by criminals fares forth –the cruiser, the British cruiser, gives chace –and then begin those scenes of horror, surpassing all that the poet ever conceived, whose theme was the torments of the damned and the wickedness of the fiends. Casks are filled with the slave, and in these they are stowed away; or to lighten the vessel, they are flung overboard by the score; sometimes they are flung overboard in casks, that the chasing ship may be detained by endeavours to pick them up; the dying and the dead strew the deck; women giving birth to the fruit of the womb, amidst the corpses of their husbands and their children; and other, yet worse and nameless atrocities, fill up the terrible picture, of impotent justice and triumphant guilt. But the guilt is not all Spanish and Portuguese. The English Government can enforce its demands on the puny cabinets of Madrid and Lisbon, scarce conscious of a substantive existence, in all that concerns our petty interests: wherever justice and mercy to mankind demand our interference, there our voice sinks within us, and no sound is uttered. That any treaty without an outfit clause should be suffered to exist between powers so situated, is an outrage upon all justice, all reason, all common sense. But one thing is certain, that unless we are to go further, we have gone too far, and must in mercy to hapless Africa retrace our steps. Unless we really put the traffic down with a strong hand, and instantly, we must instantly repeal the treaties that pretended to abolish it, for these exacerbate the evil a hundred fold, and are ineffectual to any one purpose but putting money into the HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 pockets of our men of war. The fact is as unquestionable, as it is appalling, that all our anxious endeavours to extinguish the Foreign Slave Trade, have ended in making it incomparably worse than it was before we pretended to put it down; that owing to our efforts, there are thrice the number of slaves yearly torn from Africa; and that wholly because of our efforts, two thirds of these are murdered on the high seas and in the holds of the pirate vessels.
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In Baltimore, Pope Gregory XVI’s latest Apostolic Letter was read from the pulpit. White Catholic Marylanders learned that their Pope had issued this apostolic letter in order, in the name of Christ, to “vehemently admonish and adjure” them not to any longer “molest Indians, negroes, or other men of this sort; or to spoil them of their goods, or to reduce them to slavery; or to extent help or favor to others who perpetrate such things against them; or to exercise that inhuman trade by which negroes, as if they were not men, but mere animals, howsoever reduced to slavery, are ... bought, sold, and doomed sometimes to the most severe and exhausting labors.” Of course, their Pope wasn’t condemning slavery as such, he was merely condemning the international slave trade.
John T. Noonan, Jr., in A CHURCH THAT CAN AND CANNOT CHANGE: THE DEVELOPMENT OF CATHOLIC MORAL TEACHING (U of Notre Dame P, 2005), has pointed up the fact that a popular impression, that the Papacy elaborates upon, expands, previous teachings, but never reverses its course, is in error. Catholic moral doctrines have, in fact, over the centuries, sometimes changed radically, one example of this being a reversal of the papal attitude toward slavery. In our own era, Pope John Paul II has as you know included slavery among human relations that are “intrinsically evil” and prohibited “always and forever” “without any exception.” Yet a form of slavery is clearly regarded as a fact of life in both Hebrew and Christian scripture, and in much Christian theology, and in Catholic teaching well into the 19th Century. Under Christianity, certain slaves have become saints. Under Christianity, slavery became a metaphor and model for the leading of a proper life. Jesus did not ever, nor did any of his early followers ever, issue any direct challenge to the institution of human enslavement. The fathers of the church had accepted the buying, selling, and owning of human beings, as had all the popes. Until 1800, the papal galleys had been rowed by enslaved Muslims. In colonial Maryland, the Jesuits owned slaves. Nuns in Europe and in Latin America had owned slaves. St. Peter Claver, who in Colombia befriended, instructed, and baptized African slaves, purchased interpreters. Admittedly, theologians had challenged various abuses of slaveholding, but rarely had they ever challenged the practice itself. At this point, in 1839, the only thing that was being condemned was one method for the creation of new slaves, not enslavement itself. It would only be in 1888 –after every Christian nation had abolished human slavery– that the Vatican finally would condemn the practice itself, and when Pope Leo XIII would do so on May 5, 1888, in a letter to the bishops of Brazil, “In Plurimis,” it would do so with a kind of historical rewriting and self- congratulation that John Noonan considers to have been palpably dishonest. W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: In 1839 Pope Gregory XVI. stigmatized the slave-trade “as utterly unworthy of the Christian name;” and at the same time, although proscribed by the laws of every civilized State, the trade was flourishing with pristine vigor. Great advantage was given the traffic by the fact that the United States, for two decades after the abortive attempt of 1824, refused to co-operate with the rest of the civilized world, and allowed her flag to shelter and protect the slave-trade. If a fully equipped slaver sailed from New York, Havana, Rio Janeiro, or Liverpool, she had only to hoist the stars and stripes in order to proceed unmolested on her piratical voyage; for there was seldom a United States cruiser to be met with, and there were, on the other hand, diplomats at Washington so jealous of HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 the honor of the flag that they would prostitute it to crime rather than allow an English or a French cruiser in any way to interfere. Without doubt, the contention of the United States as to England’s pretensions to a Right of Visit was technically correct. Nevertheless, it was clear that if the slave-trade was to be suppressed, each nation must either zealously keep her flag from fraudulent use, or, as a labor-saving device, depute to others this duty for limited places and under special circumstances. A failure of any one nation to do one of these two things meant that the efforts of all other nations were to be fruitless. The United States had invited the world to join her in denouncing the slave-trade as piracy; yet, when such a pirate was waylaid by an English vessel, the United States complained or demanded reparation. The only answer which this country for years returned to the long-continued exposures of American slave-traders and of the fraudulent use of the American flag, was a recital of cases where Great Britain had gone beyond her legal powers in her attempt to suppress the slave-trade.21 In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Secretary of State Forsyth declared, in 1840, that the duty of the United States in the matter of the slave-trade “has been faithfully performed, and if the traffic still exists as a disgrace to humanity, it is to be imputed to nations with whom Her Majesty’s Government has formed and maintained the most intimate connexions, and to whose Governments Great Britain has paid for the right of active intervention in order to its complete extirpation.”22 So zealous was Stevenson, our minister to England, in denying the Right of Search, that he boldly informed Palmerston, in 1841, “that there is no shadow of pretence for excusing, much less justifying, the exercise of any such right. That it is wholly immaterial, whether the vessels be equipped for, or actually engaged in slave traffic or not, and consequently the right to search or detain even slave vessels, must be confined to the ships or vessels of those nations with whom it may have treaties on the subject.”23 Palmerston courteously replied that he could not think that the United States seriously intended to make its flag a refuge for slave- traders;24 and Aberdeen pertinently declared: “Now, it can scarcely be maintained by Mr. Stevenson that Great Britain should be bound to permit her own subjects, with British vessels and British capital, to carry on, before the eyes of British officers, this detestable traffic in human beings, which the law has declared to be piracy, merely because they had the audacity to commit an additional offence by fraudulently usurping the American flag.”25 Thus the dispute, even after the advent of Webster, went on for a time, involving itself in metaphysical subtleties, and apparently leading no nearer to an understanding.26 In 1838 a fourth conference of the powers for the consideration of the slave-trade took place at London. It was attended by representatives of England, France, Russia, Prussia, and Austria. England laid the projet of a treaty before them, to which all but France assented. This so-called Quintuple Treaty, signed 21. Cf. BRITISH AND FOREIGN STATE PAPERS, from 1836 to 1842. 22. BRITISH AND FOREIGN STATE PAPERS, 1839-40, page 940. 23. HOUSE DOCUMENT, 27th Congress 1st session, No. 34, pages 5-6. 24. SENATE DOCUMENT, 29th Congress 1st session, VIII. No. 377, page 56. 25. SENATE DOCUMENT, 29th Congress 1st session, VIII. No. 377, page 72. 26. SENATE DOCUMENT, 29th Congress 1st session, VIII. No. 377, pages 133-40, etc. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 December 20, 1841, denounced the slave-trade as piracy, and declared that “the High Contracting Parties agree by common consent, that those of their ships of war which shall be provided with special warrants and orders ... may search every merchant- vessel belonging to any one of the High Contracting Parties which shall, on reasonable grounds, be suspected of being engaged in the traffic in slaves.” All captured slavers were to be sent to their own countries for trial.27 While the ratification of this treaty was pending, the United States minister to France, Lewis Cass, addressed an official note to Guizot at the French foreign office, protesting against the institution of an international Right of Search, and rather grandiloquently warning the powers against the use of force to accomplish their ends. This extraordinary epistle, issued on the minister’s own responsibility, brought a reply denying that the creation of any “new principle of international law, whereby the vessels even of those powers which have not participated in the arrangement should be subjected to the right of search,” was ever intended, and affirming that no such extraordinary interpretation could be deduced from the Convention. Moreover, M. Guizot hoped that the United States, by agreeing to this treaty, would “aid, by its most sincere endeavors, in the definitive abolition of the trade.”28 Cass’s theatrical protest was, consciously or unconsciously, the manifesto of that growing class in the United States who wanted no further measures taken for the suppression of the slave-trade; toward that, as toward the institution of slavery, this party favored a policy of strict laissez-faire.
In this year in which the West Point cadet Abner Doubleday was initiating a set of rules for the game of baseball (allegedly, on June 12th at Cooperstown) but did not invent baseball, in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, after four years of experimentation, the blacksmith Kirkpatrick Macmillan (1813-1878) introduced his pedaled bicycle. The bike had iron tires and weighed nearly 60 pounds.29 SPORTS
27. BRITISH AND FOREIGN STATE PAPERS, 1841-2, page 269 ff. 28. SENATE DOCUMENT, 29th Congress 1st session, VIII. No. 377, page 201. 29. In the 1997 Stephen Spielberg movie AMISTAD, we watch an individual paddling along a road astride a bicycle-like device. One reviewer therefore indignantly derogated the historical accuracy of this Hollywood movie on the grounds that it would be unrealistic to presume that the pedaled bicycle being invented in this year in Scotland would already have made its way to the New World. However, that bicycle-like contraption shown in the movie as being on Gardiner’s Island in Peconic Bay, where the La Amistad mutineers had sought to refresh their water supply in August 1839, was not one of the many egregious factual errors of the movie. What the movie depicted was what we now term a Draisine rather than a bicycle — if you notice, the thing is being kicked along with no pedals. Machines of the sort were first seen in Paris in the 1790s and had already been perfected by Karl Drais in Baden in 1816. –Perhaps Julia Gardiner, soon to become President Tyler’s wife, had managed to get a Draisine imported to Gardiner’s Island, or had had one manufactured by a local blacksmith. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 During this year a total of 23 American negreros would clear from the harbor of Havana on their way, presumably, to the coast of Africa, presumably to there load human cargoes (HOUSE DOCUMENT, 26th Congress, 2d session V, No. 115, pages 190-1, 221).
During this year a total of 5 American negreros would arrive at the port of Havana from the coast of Africa, proudly flying the American stars-and-bars (HOUSE DOCUMENT, 26th Congress, 2d session V, No. 115, page 192).
The negrero Morris Cooper, a vessel from Philadelphia, landed 485 Negroes in Cuba (Niles’s Register, LVII. 192).
The negrero Edwin and George Crooks was boarded by British cruisers (HOUSE DOCUMENT, 26th Congress, 2d session V, No. 115, pages 12-4, 61-4).
The negreros Eagle, Clara, and Wyoming, with American and Spanish flags and papers and crews made up of Americans, were captured by British naval cruisers and brought into the harbor of New-York. The United States government declined to interfere in the cases of the Eagle and the Clara, and these vessels were taken on to Jamaica. The Wyoming, however, was forfeited by the British to the United States (HOUSE DOCUMENT, 26th Congress, 2d session V, No. 115, pages 92-104, 109, 112, 118-9, 180-4; Niles’s Register, LVI. 256; LVII. 128, 208).
The negrero Florida was protected from British cruisers by the fact that it was able to show them American papers (HOUSE DOCUMENT, 26th Congress, 2d session V, No. 115, pages 113-5).
The part-Spanish negrero Rebecca was condemned at Sierra Leone (HOUSE REPORTS, 27th Congress, 3d session, III, No. 283, pages 649-54, 675-84).
The negreros Asp, Laura, and Mary Ann Cassard, although they were foreign, were for protection sailing under the American flag (HOUSE DOCUMENT, 26th Congress, 2d session V, No. 115, pages 126-7, 209-18; HOUSE REPORTS, 27th Congress, 3d session, III, No. 283, page 688 ff).
The negrero Two Friends, of New Orleans, was equipped to sail under Spanish and Portuguese flags as well as under the American flag (HOUSE DOCUMENT, 26th Congress, 2d session V, No. 115, pages 120, 160-2, 305).
The negrero Euphrates, of Baltimore, although it was sailing under American papers, was seized by cruisers of the British navy as Spanish property. Prior to its seizure this vessel had been boarded fifteen times (HOUSE DOCUMENT, 26th Congress, 2d session V, No. 115, pages 41-4; A.H. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, pages 152-6).
The American negrero Ontario, for purposes of carrying a cargo of slaves, was temporarily “sold” to the Spanish (HOUSE DOCUMENT, 26th Congress, 2d session V, No. 115, pages 45-50).
The nationality of the negrero Mary, although it had originated in Philadelphia was disputed (HOUSE REPORTS, 27th Congress, 3d session, III, No. 283, pages 736-8; SENATE DOCUMENT, 29th Congress, 1st session VIII, No. 377, pages 19, 24-5). HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 The American negreros Douglas and Iago were boarded by British cruisers — the United States would demand indemnity for this interference with our rights (HOUSE REPORTS, 27th Congress, 3d session, III, No. 283, pages 542-65, 731-55; SENATE DOCUMENT, 29th Congress, 1st session VIII, No. 377, pages 39-45, 107-12, 116-24, 160-1, 181-2). INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE
A mutiny was led by Joseph Cinqué,30 with the mutineers captured but, after trial in Connecticut, helped to return to Africa.
30. His African name was Sengbe Pieh. Try pronouncing it in Spanish instead of French: it sounds like sinke or thereabouts. According to J.W. Barber’s A HISTORY OF THE AMISTAD CAPTIVES (New Haven: E.L. and J.W. Barber, 1840) “Sing-gbe” was pronounced “Cin-gue,” I assume intending “Singuay,” and was “generally spelt Cinquez.” This contemporary book offered silhouette profiles of him, and of Grabeau and others, together with brief biographical accounts. The 1840 publication date and New Haven location may give this some authenticity. Yale professors, especially the linguist Josiah Willard Gibbs, learned something of the Mende language and had much conversation with Cinqué. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
What happened was as follows: 53 African natives had been kidnapped from an area now known as Sierra Leone, transported to Havana, Cuba aboard the slave ship Tecora,31 and illegally sold into the Spanish slave trade.
They had been sold at auction under the standard pretext, which nobody believed, that they were native-born Cuban slaves, to two “Spanish gentlemen.” These Spaniards were transporting the Africans and other cargo to another part of Cuba on board their schooner La Amistad when the Africans killed the captain32 and the cook and frightening the others of the crew overboard.
31. The tall ship Pilgrim now docked among the pleasure craft of opulent Dana Point CA and owned by the Orange County Marine Institute was recently be refitted for an undisclosed fee for a starring role in this Stephen Spielberg film AMISTAD, which also featured such human actors as Anthony Hopkins and Morgan Freeman. In this film it bore the name Tecora and represented not the La Amistad but the slaver which had previously brought its cargo of 53 kidnap victims from Africa to Cuba. 32. Captain Ramón Ferrer of the La Amistad, killed during the rebellion of the captives, was the owner not merely of this little coastal schooner but also two or three seagoing vessels engaged in contraband transatlantic traffic, such as the steamship Vapor Principeño. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 The Spaniards, ordered to sail the vessel to Africa, by day sailed eastward and by night surreptitiously sailed westward, hoping to land back in Cuba or the southern United States and redeem their substantial investment. After 63 days at sea, however, the La Amistad was sighted in a dilapidated condition off Long Island by the US Navy and taken as a prize. The ship was towed to New London because in Connecticut slavery was still legal, and a lengthy court struggle began.
Early documents from the National Archives of the Northeast Region contain testimony and depositions relating to the first sightings of the La Amistad off of Long Island. Navy Lieutenant R.W. Meade testified on August 29, 1839, that “said schooner was manned by forty-five negroes some of whom had landed near said [Montauk] Point.... Also on board two Spanish Gentlemen who represented and were part owners of the cargo and of the Negroes on board who were slaves belonging to said Spanish Gentlemen....” The report enumerated the “large and valuable cargo” which the schooner was carrying at the time: “25 bags of beans, 25 boxes of raisons, 10 doz. morocco skins, 5 doz. calf skins, 11 boxes of crockery and glass, 30 pieces of muslin, 1 doz. shawls, gloves, fans, shirts ... and also 54 slaves to wit 51 male slaves and 3 young female slaves who are worth $25,000 and while on said voyage from Havana to Principe the said slaves rose upon the captain and crew of said schooner and killed and murdered the captain and one of said crew and two more of said crew escaped and got away from said schooner....” HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
Abolitionists seized upon the case as a vehicle to publicly display the cruelties of slavery and the slave trade. The freedom of the Africans became entangled in the conflicting claims of the Spaniards who had brought the “human cargo” and the American officials who had salvaged the ship. The case captured national and international attention as it made its way through the lower courts to the US Supreme Court, where the cause of the prisoners was argued by former President John Quincy Adams. On March 9, 1841 the Supremes would rule that all of the Africans were legally free — that they had never been slaves because the African slave trade was illegal, and that they should be released and allowed to return to Africa. The Court also affirmed that “it was the ultimate right of all human beings in extreme cases to resist oppression, and to apply force against ruinous injustice.”33
Three years after they were kidnapped, in January 1842, the 35 surviving Africans would finally return to their homeland where, allegedly, they would establish the mission colony “which formed the basis for the eventual independence of Sierra Leone from Great Britain.” The black artists Hale Woodruff and Jacob Lawrence helped keep the La Amistad legacy alive during the 1930s and 1940s. The Amistad Research Center at Tulane University
33. Documentation of the international slave trade, per W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: [La Amistad Case.] HOUSE DOCUMENT, 26 Cong. 1 sess. IV. No. 185 (correspondence); 27 Cong. 3 sess. V. No. 191 (correspondence); 28 Cong. 1 sess. IV No. 83; HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 32 Cong. 2 sess. III. No. 20; HOUSE REPORTS, 26 Cong. 2 sess. No. 51 (case of altered Ms.); 28 Cong. 1 sess. II. No. 426 (Report of Committee); 29 Cong. 1 sess. IV. No. 753 (Report of Committee); SENATE DOCUMENT, 26 Cong. 2 sess. IV. No. 179 (correspondence); SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 31 Cong. 2 sess. III. No. 29 (correspondence); 32 Cong. 2 sess. III. No. 19; SENATE REPORTS, 31 Cong. 2 sess. No. 301 (Report of Committee); 32 Cong. 1 sess. I. No. 158 (Report of Committee); 35 Cong. 1 sess. I. No. 36 (Report of Committee). HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Secretary of State John Forsyth pointed out34 that however unjust the slave trade may be considered by some to be, it was most definitely not contrary to the law of nations, and therefore most definitely not any of our beeswax: • ....It is true, by the treaty between Great Britain and Spain, the slave trade is prohibited to the subjects of each; but the parties to this treaty or agreement are the proper judges of any infraction of it, and they have created special tribunals to decide questions arising under the treaty; nor does it belong to any other nation to adjudicate upon it, or to enforce it.... In the case of the Antelope, (10 Wheaton, page 66), this subject was fully examined, and the opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States establishes the following points: 1. That, however unjust and unnatural the slave trade may be, it is not contrary to the law of nations. 2. That having been sanctioned by the usage and consent of almost all civilized nations, it could not be pronounced illegal, except so far as each nation may have made it so by its own acts or laws; and these could only operate upon itself, its own subjects or citizens; and, of course, the trade would remain lawful to those whose Government had not forbidden it. 3. That the right of bringing in and adjudicating upon the case of a vessel charged with being engaged in the slave trade, even where the vessel belongs to a nation which has prohibited the trade, cannot exist. The courts of no country execute the penal laws of another.... • In the case now before me, the vessel is a Spanish vessel, belonging exclusively to Spaniards, navigated by Spaniards, and sailing under Spanish papers and flag, from one Spanish port to another. It therefore follows, unquestionably, that any offence committed on board is cognizable before the Spanish tribunals, and not elsewhere. • These two points being disposed of — 1st. That the Government of the United States is to consider these Negroes as the property of the individuals in whose behalf the Spanish minister has put up a claim; 2d. That the United States cannot proceed against them criminally; — the only remaining inquiry is, what is to be done with the vessel and cargo? the Negroes being part of the latter. • ...The claimants of these Negroes have violated none of our laws.... They have not come within our territories with the view or intention of violating the laws of the United States.... They have not introduced these Negroes into the United Sates for the purpose of sale, or holding them in servitude within the United States.... It therefore appears to me that this subject must be disposed of upon the principles of international law and the existing treaties between Spain and the United States.... • These Negroes are charged with an infraction of the Spanish laws; therefore, it is proper that they should be surrendered to the public functionaries of that Government, that if the laws of Spain have been violated, they may not escape punishment.... • These Negroes deny that they are slaves; if they should be delivered to the claimants, no opportunity may be afforded for the assertion of their right to freedom. For these reasons, it seems to me that a delivery to the Spanish minister is the only safe course for this Government to pursue.
As an example of Quaker disownment, here is something that was announced in this year at the Somerset monthly meeting: S.W. has neglected the attendance of our religious meetings and attended those of the Hicksite; and having been treated with therefor, manifested no desire to retain her right of membership with friends. We therefore disown her from being a member of our 34. “Africans Taken in the Amistad.” –US 26th Congress, 1st Session, House Executive Document #185. NY: Blair & Rives, 1840, pages 57-62 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 religious society.35 RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
35. Somerset Monthly Meeting (Ohio Yearly Meeting), Minutes. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 There would be 3, count ’em, 3 great hurricanes along the New England coast during this year of 1839.
Wow. Wow. Wow. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would be motivated to commit “The Wreck of the Hesperus” — see below.) ENSO Largest Scale Global Weather Oscillations 1833-1839 Southern South Pacific Indonesian Australian Indian Annual Nile flood Oscillation current reversal monsoon droughts monsoon 1833 very strong cold La Niña drought adequate deficient extremely poor 1834 absent cold La Niña adequate adequate adequate adequate 1835 moderate cold La Niña drought adequate adequate extremely poor 1836 moderate cold La Niña adequate adequate adequate 2d year, very low 1837 strong warm El Niño moderate + adequate drought deficient 3d year, extremely poor 1838 strong cold La Niña drought adequate deficient 4th year, quite weak 1839 strong cold La Niña adequate adequate adequate 5th year, very low The southern ocean / atmosphere “seesaw” links to periodic Indonesian east monsoon droughts, Australian droughts, deficient Indian summer monsoons, and deficient Ethiopian monsoon rainfall causing weak annual Nile floods. This data is presented from Tables 6.2-6.3 of Quinn, William H. “A study of Southern Oscillation-related climatic activity for AD 622-1900 incorporating Nile River flood data,” pages 119-49 in Diaz, Henry F. and Vera Markgraf, eds. EL NIÑO: HISTORICAL AND PALEOCLIMATIC ASPECTS OF THE SOUTHERN OSCILLATION. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
Two vessels out of Gloucester would be lost this year. The schooner Transport capsized but its crew was saved, and the schooner Sevo was run down in the night by the steamer Huntress off Thacher’s Island, and sank almost immediately. Captain Peletiah Barker, Jr., of Portland, succeeded in climbing on board the steamer. Winthrop Sargent, a lad of twelve years, crawled out to the end of the bowsprit, and as the vessel was going down, grasped a splitting table which floated by, and by his cries attracted the attention of those on board the steamer, who rescued him with much difficulty. The steamer pursued her course, and the sails of the vessel drifting ashore near Brace’s Cove, it was thought all hands were lost. On the return trip of the steamer, young Sargent was brought home, and at two o’clock in the morning, was landed at Eastern Point, and, lad though he was, commenced his lonely journey of walking to town. He reached his father’s house at about four o’clock, and knowing that he slept in a bed-room on the lower floor, tapped on the window. His father immediately awoke and exclaimed, “Who is there?” “It’s your boy Winthrop,” was the reply. Mr. Sargent at first thought it must be the ghost of the lad, as he had given him up as drowned; but young Winthrop had no idea of being taken for a ghost, and soon gave evidence that he was alive and well, which caused great rejoicing in the family. Four men were lost in this vessel: •Richard Triton • Nathaniel Remby • Jonathan Osgood • James McDonald HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 The fishing vessel had been owned by Messrs. Ellery & Gaffney, valued at $1,300, and insured for $1,150.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “The Wreck of the Hesperus” It was the schooner Hesperus That sailed the wintry sea: And the skipper had taken his little daughter, To bear him company. Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax, Her cheeks like the dawn of day, And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds That open in the month of May. The skipper he stood beside the helm, His pipe was in his mouth, And he watched how the veering flaw did blow The smoke now West, now South. Then up and spake an old sailor, Had sailed to the Spanish Main, “I pray thee, put into yonder port, For I fear a hurricane. “Last night, the moon had a golden ring, And tonight no moon we see!” The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe, And a scornful laugh laughed he. Colder and louder blew the wind, A gale from the Northeast, The snow fell hissing in the brine, And the billows frothed like yeast. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
Down came the storm, and smote amail, The vessle in ins strength: She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed, Then leaped her cable's length. “Come hither! come hither! my litle daughter, And do not tremble so: For I can weather the roughest gale, That ever wind did blow.” He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat Against the stinging blast; He cut a rope from a broken spar, And bound her to the mast. “O father! I hear the church-bells ring, O say, what may it be?” “Tis a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!”- And he steered for the open sea. “O father! I hear the sound of guns, O say, what may it be?” “Some ship in distress, that cannot live In such an angry sea!” “O father! I see a gleaming light, O say, what may it be?” But the father answered never a word, A froxed corpse was he. Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark, With his face turned to the skies, The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow On his fixed and glassy eyes. Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed That savéd she might be; And she though of Christ, who stilled the wave, On the Lake of Galilee. And fast through the midnight dark and drear Through the whistling sleet and snow, Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept Towards the reef of Norman's Woe. And ever the fitful gusts between A sound came from the land; It was the sound of the trampling surf, On the rocks and the hard sea-sand. The breakers were right beneath her bows, She drifted a weary wreck, And a whooping billow swept the crew Like icicles from her deck. She struck where the white and fleecy waves Looked soft as carded wool, But the cruel rocks, they gored her side Like the horns of an angry bull. Her rattling shouds, all sheathed in ice, With the masts went by the board; Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank, Ho! ho! the breakers roared! At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach, A fisherman stood aghast, To see the form of a maiden fair Lashed close to a drifting mast. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 The salt sea was frozed on her breast, The salt tears in her eyes; And he say her hair, like the brown sea-weed, On the billows fall and rise. Such was the wreck of the Hesperus, In the midnight and the snow! Christ save us all from a death like this, On the reef of Norman's Woe!
Here’s John L. O’Sullivan on our manifest national destiny in an article “The Great Nation of Futurity” in his The United States Magazine and Democratic Review:
America is destined for better deeds.... We have no interest in the scenes of antiquity, only as lessons of avoidance of nearly all their examples. The expansive future is our arena, and for our history. We are entering on its untrodden space, with the truths of God in our minds, beneficent objects in our hearts and with a clear conscience unsullied by the past. We are the nation of human progress, and who will ... set limits on our onward march. Providence is with us.... The far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era of American greatness. In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation ... is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles; to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High — the Sacred and the True. Its floor shall be a hemisphere — its roof the firmament of the star-studded heavens, and its congregation an Union ... comprising hundreds of happy millions ... governed by God’s natural law of equality, the law of brotherhood.... Yes, we are the nation of progress, of individual freedom, of universal enfranchisement.... [All of] this is our high destiny ... we must accomplish it. All this will be our future history, to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man.... For this blessed mission ... has America been chosen.
“For fifty years the inhabitants of the United States have been repeatedly and constantly told that they are the only religious, enlightened, and free people. They ... have an immensely high opinion of themselves and are not far from believing that they form a species apart from the rest of the human race.” — Alexis de Tocqueville AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
Lothar Faber took over his father’s A.W. Faber pencil factory in Nürnberg, Germany.
A.W. FABER, LOTHAR FABER HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 By this point, by having worked under the careful supervision of two doctors, Martin Robison Delany had attained competency as a doctor’s assistant, and in dental care. After working in medical care in the South and the Southwest, he would return to Pittsburgh PA and develop a weekly newspaper, the Mystery.
A cane had been fashioned from a scorched fragment of the wood-work of Pennsylvania Hall and presented to Friend John Greenleaf Whittier. He wrote:
THE RELIC TOKEN Of friendship true and tried, From one whose fiery heart of youth With mine has beaten, side by side, For Liberty and Truth; With honest pride the gift I take, And prize it for the giver’s sake. But not alone because it tells Of generous hand and heart sincere; Around that gift of friendship dwells A memory doubly dear; Earth’s noblest aim, man’s holiest thought, With that memorial frail inwrought! Pure thoughts and sweet like flowers unfold, And precious memories round it cling, Even as the Prophet’s rod of old In beauty blossoming: And buds of feeling, pure and good, Spring from its cold unconscious wood. Relic of Freedom’s shrine! a brand Plucked from its burning! let it be Dear as a jewel from the hand Of a lost friend to me! Flower of a perished garland left, Of life and beauty unbereft! Oh, if the young enthusiast bears, O’er weary waste and sea, the stone Which crumbled from the Forum’s stairs, Or round the Parthenon; Or olive-bough from some wild tree Hung over old Thermopylæ: If leaflets from some hero’s tomb, Or moss-wreath torn from ruins hoary; Or faded flowers whose sisters bloom On fields renowned in story; Or fragment from the Alhambra’s crest, Or the gray rock by Druids blessed; Sad Erin’s shamrock greenly growing Where Freedom led her stalwart kern, Or Scotia’s “rough bur thistle” blowing On Bruce’s Bannockburn; Or Runnymede’s wild English rose, Or lichen plucked from Sempach’s snows! HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
If it be true that things like these To heart and eye bright visions bring, Shall not far holier memories To this memorial cling? Which needs no mellowing mist of time To hide the crimson stains of crime! Wreck of a temple, unprofaned; Of courts where Peace with Freedom trod, Lifting on high, with hands unstained, Thanksgiving unto God; Where Mercy’s voice of love was pleading For human hearts in bondage bleeding! Where, midst the sound of rushing feet And curses on the night-air flung, That pleading voice rose calm and sweet From woman’s earnest tongue; And Riot turned his scowling glance, Awed, from her tranquil countenance! That temple now in ruin lies! The fire-stain on its shattered wall, And open to the changing skies Its black and roofless hall, It stands before a nation’s sight A gravestone over buried Right! But from that ruin, as of old, The fire-scorched stones themselves are crying, And from their ashes white and cold Its timbers are replying! A voice which slavery cannot kill Speaks from the crumbling arches still! And even this relic from thy shrine, O holy Freedom! hath to me A potent power, a voice and sign To testify of thee; And, grasping it, methinks I feel A deeper faith, a stronger zeal. And not unlike that mystic rod, Of old stretched o’er the Egyptian wave, Which opened, in the strength of God, A pathway for the slave, It yet may point the bondman’s way, And turn the spoiler from his prey. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 THE NEW YEAR, BY WHITTIER Addressed to the Patrons of the Pennsylvania Freeman. THE wave is breaking on the shore, The echo fading from the chime; Again the shadow moveth o’er The dial-plate of time! O seer-seen Angel! waiting now With weary feet on sea and shore, Impatient for the last dread vow That time shall be no more! Once more across thy sleepless eye The semblance of a smile has passed: The year departing leaves more nigh Time’s fearfullest and last. Oh, in that dying year hath been The sum of all since time began; The birth and death, the joy and pain, Of Nature and of Man. Spring, with her change of sun and shower, And streams released from Winter’s chain, And bursting bud, and opening flower, And greenly growing grain; And Summer’s shade, and sunshine warm, And rainbows o’er her hill-tops bowed, And voices in her rising storm; God speaking from His cloud! And Autumn’s fruits and clustering sheaves, And soft, warm days of golden light, The glory of her forest leaves, And harvest-moon at night; And Winter with her leafless grove, And prisoned stream, and drifting snow, The brilliance of her heaven above And of her earth below: And man, in whom an angel’s mind With earth’s low instincts finds abode, The highest of the links which bind Brute nature to her God; His infant eye hath seen the light, His childhood’s merriest laughter rung, And active sports to manlier might The nerves of boyhood strung! And quiet love, and passion’s fires, Have soothed or burned in manhood’s breast, And lofty aims and low desires By turns disturbed his rest. The wailing of the newly-born Has mingled with the funeral knell; And o’er the dying’s ear has gone The merry marriage-bell. And Wealth has filled his halls with mirth, While Want, in many a humble shed, Toiled, shivering by her cheerless hearth, The live-long night for bread. And worse than all, the human slave, The sport of lust, and pride, and scorn! HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Plucked off the crown his Maker gave, His regal manhood gone! Oh, still, my country! o’er thy plains, Blackened with slavery’s blight and ban, That human chattel drags his chains, An uncreated man! And still, where’er to sun and breeze, My country, is thy flag unrolled, With scorn, the gazing stranger sees A stain on every fold. Oh, tear the gorgeous emblem down! It gathers scorn from every eye, And despots smile and good men frown Whene’er it passes by. Shame! shame! its starry splendors glow Above the slaver’s loathsome jail; Its folds are ruffling even now His crimson flag of sale. Still round our country’s proudest hall The trade in human flesh is driven, And at each careless hammer-fall A human heart is riven. And this, too, sanctioned by the men Vested with power to shield the right, And throw each vile and robber den Wide open to the light. Yet, shame upon them! there they sit, Men of the North, subdued and still; Meek, pliant poltroons, only fit To work a master’s will. Sold, bargained off for Southern votes, A passive herd of Northern mules, Just braying through their purchased throats Whate’er their owner rules. And he,36 the basest of the base The vilest of the vile, whose name, Embalmed in infinite disgrace, Is deathless in its shame! A tool, to bolt the people’s door Against the people clamoring there, An ass, to trample on their floor A people’s right of prayer! Nailed to his self-made gibbet fast, Self-pilloried to the public view, A mark for every passing blast Of scorn to whistle through; There let him hang, and hear the boast Of Southrons o’er their pliant tool, — A new Stylites on his post, “Sacred to ridicule!” Look we at home! our noble hall, To Freedom’s holy purpose given, Now rears its black and ruined wall, Beneath the wintry heaven, Telling the story of its doom, 36.“He” = The Northern author of the Congressional rule against receiving petitions of the people on the subject of Slavery. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 The fiendish mob, the prostrate law, The fiery jet through midnight’s gloom, Our gazing thousands saw. Look to our State! the poor man’s right Torn from him: and the sons of those Whose blood in Freedom’s sternest fight Sprinkled the Jersey snows, Outlawed within the land of Penn, That Slavery’s guilty fears might cease, And those whom God created men Toil on as brutes in peace. Yet o’er the blackness of the storm A bow of promise bends on high, And gleams of sunshine, soft and warm, Break through our clouded sky. East, West, and North, the shout is heard, Of freemen rising for the right: Each valley hath its rallying word, Each hill its signal light. O’er Massachusetts’ rocks of gray, The strengthening light of freedom shines, Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay, And Vermont’s snow-hung pines! From Hudson’s frowning palisades To Alleghany’s laurelled crest, O’er lakes and prairies, streams and glades, It shines upon the West. Speed on the light to those who dwell In Slavery’s land of woe and sin, And through the blackness of that hell, Let Heaven’s own light break in. So shall the Southern conscience quake Before that light poured full and strong, So shall the Southern heart awake To all the bondman’s wrong. And from that rich and sunny land The song of grateful millions rise, Like that of Israel’s ransomed band Beneath Arabians skies: And all who now are bound beneath Our banner’s shade, our eagle’s wing, From Slavery’s night of moral death To light and life shall spring. Broken the bondman’s chain, and gone The master’s guilt, and hate, and fear, And unto both alike shall dawn A New and Happy Year. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Friend Joseph Sturge proposed the calling of a world’s anti-slavery convention, and his proposal was promptly seconded by the American Anti-Slavery Society.
The call was addressed to “friends of the slave of every nation and of every clime,” and Friend John Greenleaf Whittier would write:
THE WORLD’S CONVENTION OF THE FRIENDS OF EMANCIPATION, HELD IN LONDON IN 1840. YES, let them gather! Summon forth The pledged philanthropy of Earth. From every land, whose hills have heard The bugle blast of Freedom waking; Or shrieking of her symbol-bird From out his cloudy eyrie breaking: Where Justice hath one worshipper, Or truth one altar built to her; Where’er a human eye is weeping O’er wrongs which Earth’s sad children know; Where’er a single heart is keeping Its prayerful watch with human woe: Thence let them come, and greet each other, And know in each a friend and brother! Yes, let them come! from each green vale Where England’s old baronial halls Still bear upon their storied walls The grim crusader’s rusted mail, Battered by Paynim spear and brand On Malta’s rock or Syria’s sand.! And mouldering pennon-staves once set Within the soil of Palestine, By Jordan and Gennesaret; Or, borne with England’s battle line, O’er Acre’s shattered turrets stooping, HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Or, midst the camp their banners drooping, With dews from hallowed Hermon wet, A holier summons now is given Than that gray hermit’s voice of old, Which unto all the winds of heaven The banners of the Cross unrolled! Not for the long-deserted shrine; Not for the dull unconscious sod, Which tells not by one lingering sign That there the hope of Israel trod; But for that truth, for which alone In pilgrim eyes are sanctified The garden moss, the mountain stone, Whereon His holy sandals pressed, — The fountain which His lip hath blessed, — Whate’er hath touched His garment’s hem At Bethany or Bethlehem, Or Jordan’s river-side. For Freedom in the name of Him Who came to raise Earth’s drooping poor, To break the chain from every limb, The bolt from every prison door! For these, o’er all the earth hath passed An ever-deepening trumpet blast, As if an angel’s breath had lent Its vigor to the instrument. And Wales, from Snowrich’s mountain wall, Shall startle at that thrilling call, As if she heard her bards again; And Erin’s “harp on Tara’s wall” Give out its ancient strain, Mirthful and sweet, yet sad withal, — The melody which Erin loves, When o’er that harp, ’mid bursts of gladness And slogan cries and lyke-wake sadness, The hand of her O’Connell moves! Scotland, from lake and tarn and rill, And mountain hold, and heathery hill, Shall catch and echo back the note, As if she heard upon the air Once more her Cameronian’s prayer. And song of Freedom float. And cheering echoes shall reply From each remote dependency, Where Britain’s mighty sway is known, In tropic sea or frozen zone; Where’er her sunset flag is furling, Or morning gun-fire’s smoke is curling; From Indian Bengal’s groves of palm And rosy fields and gales of balm, Where Eastern pomp and power are rolled Through regal Ava’s gates of gold; And from the lakes and ancient woods And dim Canadian solitudes, Whence, sternly from her rocky throne, Queen of the North, Quebec looks down; And from those bright and ransomed Isles Where all unwonted Freedom smiles, And the dark laborer still retains The scar of slavery’s broken chains! From the hoar Alps, which sentinel The gateways of the land of Tell, Where morning’s keen and earliest glance On Jura’s rocky wall is thrown, And from the olive bowers of France And vine groves garlanding the Rhone, — “Friends of the Blacks,” as true and tried HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 As those who stood by Oge’s side, And heard the Haytien’s tale of wrong, Shall gather at that summons strong; Broglie, Passy, and he whose song Breathed over Syria’s holy sod, And in the paths which Jesus trod, And murmured midst the hills which hem Crownless and sad Jerusalem, Hath echoes whereso’er the tone Of Israel’s prophey-lyre is known. Still let them come; from Quito’s walls, And from the Orinoco’s tide, From Lima’s Inca-haunted halls, From Santa Fe and Yucatan, — Men who by swart Guerrero’s side Proclaimed the deathless rights of man, Broke every bond and fetter off, And hailed in every sable serf A free and brother Mexican! Chiefs who across the Andes’ chain Have followed Freedom’s flowing pennon, And seen on Junin’s fearful plain, Glare o’er the broken ranks of Spain The fire-burst of Bolivar’s cannon! And Hayti, from her mountain land, Shall send the sons of those who hurled Defiance from her blazing strand, The war-gage from her Petition’s hand, Alone against a hostile world. Nor all unmindful, thou, the while, Land of the dark and mystic Nile! Thy Moslem mercy yet may shame All tyrants of a Christian name, When in the shade of Gizeh’s pile, Or, where, from Abyssinian hills El Gerek’s upper fountain fills, Or where from Mountains of the Moon El Abiad bears his watery boon, Where’er thy lotus blossoms swim Within their ancient hallowed waters; Where’er is heard the Coptic hymn, Or song of Nubia’s sable daughters; The curse of slavery and the crime, Thy bequest from remotest time, At thy dark Mehemet’s decree Forevermore shall pass from thee; And chains forsake each captive’s limb Of all those tribes, whose hills around Have echoed back the cymbal sound And victor horn of Ibrahim. And thou whose glory and whose crime To earth’s remotest bound and clime, In mingled tones of awe and scorn, The echoes of a world have borne, My country! glorious at thy birth, A day-star flashing brightly forth, The herald-sign of Freedom’s dawn! Oh, who could dream that saw thee then, And watched thy rising from afar, That vapors from oppression’s fen Would cloud the upward tending star? Or, that earth’s tyrant powers, which heard, Awe-struck, the shout which hailed thy dawning, Would rise so soon, prince, peer, and king, To mock thee with their welcoming, Like Hades when her thrones were stirred HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 To greet the down-east Star of Morning! “Aha! and art thou fallen thus? Art thou become as one of us?” Land of my fathers! there will stand, Amidst that world-assembled band, Those owning thy maternal claim Unweakened by thy crime and shame; The sad reprovers of thy wrong; The children thou hast spurned so long. Still with affection’s fondest yearning To their unnatural mother turning. No traitors they! but tried and leal, Whose own is but thy general weal, Still blending with the patriot’s zeal The Christian’s love for human kind, To caste and climate unconfined. A holy gathering! peaceful all: No threat of war, no savage call For vengeance on an erring brother! But in their stead the godlike plan To teach the brotherhood of man To love and reverence one another, As sharers of a common blood, The children of a common God! Yet, even at its lightest word, Shall Slavery’s darkest depths be stirred: Spain, watching from her Moro’s keep Her slave-ships traversing the deep, And Rio, in her strength and pride, Lifting, along her mountain-side, Her snowy battlements and towers, Her lemon-groves and tropic bowers, With bitter hate and sullen fear Its freedom-giving voice shall hear; And where my country’s flag is flowing, On breezes from Mount Vernon blowing, Above the Nation’s council halls, Where Freedom’s praise is loud and long, While close beneath the outward walls The driver plies his reeking thong; The hammer of the man-thief falls, O’er hypocritic cheek and brow The crimson flush of shame shall glow And all who for their native land Are pledging life and heart and hand, Worn watchers o’er her changing weal, Who for her tarnished honor feel, Through cottage door and council-hall Shall thunder an awakening call. The pen along its page shall burn With all intolerable scorn; An eloquent rebuke shall go On all the winds that Southward blow; From priestly lips, now sealed and dumb, Warning and dread appeal shall come, Like those which Israel heard from him, The Prophet of the Cherubim; Or those which sad Esaias hurled Against a sin-accursed world! Its wizard leaves the Press shall fling Unceasing from its iron wing, With characters inscribed thereon, As fearful in the despot’s hall As to the pomp of Babylon The fire-sign on the palace wall! And, from her dark iniquities, HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Methinks I see my country rise: Not challenging the nations round To note her tardy justice done; Her captives from their chains unbound, Her prisons opening to the sun: But tearfully her arms extending Over the poor and unoffending; Her regal emblem now no longer A bird of prey with talons reeking, Above the dying captive shrieking, But, spreading out her ample wing, A broad, impartial covering, The weaker sheltered by the stronger! Oh, then to Faith’s anointed eyes The promised token shall be given; And on a nation’s sacrifice, Atoning for the sin of years, And wet with penitential tears, The fire shall fall from Heaven!
Anonymous publication of Elizur Wright, Junior’s small volume LA FONTAINE; A PRESENT FOR THE YOUNG.
In this year in which in England Friend Joseph Sturge was founding the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and in which in America John A. Collins was becoming general agent for the Massachusetts Anti- Slavery Society, for some reason abolitionism simply was not prospering. Those whites who had an economic investment in or social interest in or libidinal involvement in human enslavement were proving to be quite immune to, merely hardened and angered by, all the relentless propaganda. The initial idea, that first the abolitionists would convince the institutions of the North to be righteous, and then the North would bring righteous pressure on the South, had proved in application to be utterly disconnected from the reality of our condition. For instance, in eight years of agitation not a single one of the white religious denominations had separated into a northern sect opposed to human enslavement and a southern sect in favor of human enslavement, despite the standoff between their northern white congregations and their southern white congregations over this issue. Although there had been a few anti-enslavement advocates positioned in the US House of Representatives, there had also been enacted a very specific gag rule to silence them on this one central topic. The ideological and emotional commitment of a number of leaders in the struggle against practices of human enslavement, however, the ones whom I am here terming “pragmatics,” was that American democracy was basically sound, and that the flaws in American character that had led to this enslavement situation were minor and isolated flaws. A few agreements, a few insights, a few changes in the rules, and the institutions supporting the practice of human enslavement would crumble. There was no need to tamper with anyone’s soul. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Examples of this attitude were: • Elizur Wright, Jr. • Henry Brewster Stanton • James Gillespie Birney (who wanted to establish a third political party, the “Liberty” party, which would be antislavery, and compete directly in the political process, making deals and peddling influence like the Republicans/Democrats of that era) HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 In this year Gerrit Smith condemned his denomination, Presbyterianism, for its failure to denounce slavery, yet when it was proposed to him that young black men be trained in Canada and Mexico and sent into the slave states to lead revolts, he rejected that plan. SERVILE INSURRECTION
Then there were the Garrisonians. The struggle between the two abolitionist psychologies, like the struggle between the Orthodox or Evangelical Quakers and the Hicksites, was a struggle that can readily be described in terms of a binary split over a single issue. Previous analyzers of the split have attempted to conceive of a binary split between the abolitionists who wanted to mix anti-slavery with the “confounded woman question” and those who wanted to keep such issues in separate compartments, and have not been able to make a case for that analysis, or have attempted to conceive of a binary split between the abolitionists who embraced the principle of non-resistance to evil and those who regarded this principle as the pinnacle of wickedness, and have not been able to make a case for that analysis. Some have suggested that the split was not binary, that the struggle was between those abolitionists who wanted to be understood as “pragmatics,” and those abolitionists who wanted to be understood as “strugglers” and as “Come-outers.” COME-OUTISM
These are not the analyses that I favor. In this “Kouroo” contexture, you will find, the analysis that I have favored is that of a binary split between, on the one hand, the abolitionists who wanted a future of racial integration, “amalgamation” as it was then called, in which all God’s children could live together on God’s holy mountain (these people known as “Hicksites,” a type case of this being Friend Lucretia Mott), and, on the other hand, the abolitionists who wanted a future of apartheid, of racial segregation, of Jim Crow, in which we were equal, more or less, but existed separately (these people known as “Quietist Friends,” and as “Orthodox Friends,” and as “Evangelical Friends,” a type case of this being Friend Moses Brown). HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
In this year the Reverend Adin Ballou, definitely a “struggler,” put out his pamphlet NON-RESISTANCE AND HUMAN GOVERNMENTS.
Acting with a few ministerial colleagues and some laymen, Adin Ballou composed the STANDARD OF PRACTICAL CHRISTIANITY. The signatories announced their withdrawal from “the governments of the world,” which they judged contaminated by dependence on the use of force to maintain order. While they could not participate in government, neither would they rebel nor “resist any of their ordinances by physical force.” “We cannot employ carnal weapons nor any physical violence whatsoever,” they proclaimed, “not even for the preservation of our lives. We cannot render evil for evil . . . nor do otherwise than ‘love our enemies.’” He had come to believe that Practical Christians were called to make their convictions a reality — that they should begin to fashion a new civilization. Accordingly, after studying other current utopian community plans, such as Brook Farm, he and his fellow Practical Christians began to design their own community.
News items relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: •In London, the first commercial electric telegraph line was installed. • The first electric clock was built, by Carl August Steinheil (1801-1870). • A mechanism termed a “typographer” was developed, by which type on a semicircular frame could be turned to bring a desired letter to the printing point, and then, by means of a lever, be pressed against paper. Several early events in the development of photography: HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 • The Daguerreotype photographic process was announced in France.
• Sir John Herschel coined the term “photograph” on analogy with the existing term “telegraph.” Telegraphy, photography. • The first photograph was taken in the New World — of some buildings in Philadelphia.
• A negative/positive “photogenic” process was announced, by William Henry Fox Talbot. Only five minutes of exposure were necessary: • The very first “selfie” was taken, by Robert Cornelius (he removed the lens cap and stood still in front of the Daguerreotype box for a minute or more, before reaching out and replacing the lens cap).
Humboldt published, for the first time, an informative letter that Girolamo Vianello had written to the Signoria of Venice dated December 23, 1506 regarding Amerigo Vespucci’s 5th voyage. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Samuel Langhorn Clemens, four years old, moved with his family to Hannibal, Missouri, on the west bank of the Mississippi River.
In Rhode Island, Samuel W. King became the Acting Governor.
Rhode Island determined to appropriate future incomes from lotteries and auctioneers to repaying its longstanding indebtedness to its school fund, with the plan being that after such indebtedness had been completely repaid, such income was to be devoted wholly to increasing the permanent school fund.
In Providence, Friend Anna A. Jenkins was among the founders of an Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans. (This institution would relocate in 1849 to a new facility called “The Shelter,” at 20 Olive Street on College Hill, that could provide sleeping areas for 50 such children. Black boys would become apprentices at the age of 10, black girls at the age of 12.)
At Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, Nicholas Brown, Jr. provided land and most of the funding for a new house of the sciences, to be known as Rhode Island Hall.
1839. The Public Schools of this city were re-organized under a new system; the number of schools was increased, and several new, elegant and spacious school-houses were erected. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Shortly after voyaging on the bucolic Genesee River of western New York state, Thomas Cole received a commission from a New-York banker, Samuel Ward (this was the father, not his banker son Samuel Gray Ward), for a series of paintings depicting life as a journey, to be entitled “The Voyage of Life.”37 • The Voyage of Life: Childhood • The Voyage of Life: Youth • The Voyage of Life: Manhood • The Voyage of Life: Old Age
[The Voyage of Life: Childhood]
37. Please note that some have experienced Thoreau’s poem “Sic Vita” as a direct verbal counterpart to the Cole paintings of the path of life. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 [The Voyage of Life: Youth]
[The Voyage of Life: Manhood] HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 [The Voyage of Life: Old Age]
In Boston, the American Anti-Slavery Society put out for sale a printing entitled THE LIBERTY BELL, as a fund-raising effort of the “Friends of Freedom”:
THE LIBERTY BELL, 1839 • Maria W. Chapman. “Sonnet Suggested by the Inscription on the Philadelphia Liberty Bell” • Bradburn, George. “Incendiarism of Abolitionists” • Lydia Maria Child. “Lines to Those Men and Women, Who Were Avowed Abolitionists in 1831, ’32, ’33, ’34, and ’35” • Quincy, Edmund. “Mother Coelia” • Chapman, Ann Greene. “Address of a Russian to the Corpse of his Friend” • Garrison, William Lloyd. “To the Memory of Ann Greene Chapman” Like the previous item, an obituary poem for a cherished friend and inspired advocate of the oppressed. Departing from HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 conventional gender constructions, Garrison praises not Chapman’s private life, but her public and political work. • Weston, Anne Warren. “Lines written on hearing the remark of a friend, that a large number of abolitionists had died during the preceding years” • David Lee Child. [Untitled prayer] • Lydia Maria Child. “Charity Bowery” • Weston, Caroline. “The Church and the World” Lengthy poem chronicling the world’s hostility to Truth since the age of prophecy. As in times past, “Christ’s faithful servants here/Must walk with DANGER grim!” Interesting example of abolitionist literary iconography, particularly their self- representation as isolated, persecuted, and misunderstood, much like Christ. • Robbins, Mary Eliza. “Freedom” • Chapman, Maria Weston. “Lines Inscribed to the Intolerant, throughout New England and the Coasts thereof” Poem defending fund-raising fairs as valuable abolitionist work. • Harriet Martineau. “Extract from a Letter” • Sargent, Henrietta. “Queen Esther’s Banquet” • Lydia Maria Child. “Anecdote of Elias Hicks” ELIAS HICKS • Chapman, Maria Weston. “Sonnet: The Anniversary of Lovejoy’s Martyrdom” Elijah Parish Lovejoy was an abolitionist newspaper editor who was murdered by a pro-slavery mob in 1837 in Alton, Illinois. This sonnet praises Lovejoy’s “sacrifice”; the poet urges readers to rejoice rather than mourn.
• Lydia Maria Child. “The Emancipated Slaveholders” • John Pierpont. “The Fugitive Slave’s Apostrophe to the North Star.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 This swiftly-paced poem relies on vivid imagery.
• Chapman, Maria Weston. “The British India Society” • Phillips, Wendell. “Extract From a Letter, Read Before the Glasgow Emancipation Society” • Follen, Eliza Lee. “Pious Trust” • Garrison, William Lloyd. “The Cause of Emancipation” • Clark, Mary. “Perfect Freedom” Poem praising freedom in conventional terms; the Liberty Bell is a metaphor for freedom. • Follen, Charles. “The Last Hope” HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Catherine Jane Chase, the 4-year-old daughter of Salmon Portland Chase, died.
From this point into 1845, the Smith family would be boarding in New-York with cousins of the Princes, Dr. Cyrus Weeks and Maria Child Weeks, while planning to make their living by writing. Elizabeth Oakes Smith wrote poetry, prose sketches, travel narratives, literary and theater criticism, children’s literature, and frontier tales. She would be placing her stories in Godey’s Lady’s Book, Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion, The Southern Literary Messenger, and other journals, using either the courteous signature “Mrs. Seba Smith” or a male pen name “Ernest Helfenstein.”
The mulatto Robert Purvis became the president of the Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia. He would serve in that capacity during the organization’s six-year existence, until 1844 (the activities of this group would later be carried forward by the General Vigilance Committee from 1852 to 1857, a group of which he would also be the only chairman). The group would often meet at his house at 9th and Lombard Streets to plan ways to assist runaway slaves. This home had a secret room behind a trap door, and who knows what that was for? UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
The mulatto Mary Ann Shadd completed her education and began teaching nearby, outside Philadelphia. She would later also hold teaching positions in Delaware, and in Trenton, New Jersey, until 1848.
The American Anti-Slavery Society put out the 13th issue of its “omnibus” entitled The Anti-Slavery Examiner, containing “On the Condition of the Free People of Color in the United States”; containing, also, “Can Abolitionists Vote or Take Office Under the United States Constitution?”; containing, also, “Address to the Friends of Constitutional Liberty, on the Violation by the United States House of Representatives of the Right of Petition at the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
JANUARY
January: A negrero flying the Portuguese flag, the Amalia, master Miquete, on one of its five known Middle Passage voyages, starting with a cargo of 710 enslaved Africans out of Mocambique, delivered only 510 at a port of Cuba during this month — as 200 had died in transit. A Portuguese slaver, the Brilhante, master Sanchez, on one of its seven known Middle Passage voyages, out of an unknown area of Africa with a cargo of 233 enslaved Africans, arrived at the port of Santiago de Cuba. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Curiga, master J.A. Pereira, out Angola with a cargo of an unknown number of enslaved Africans on its one and only known Middle Passage, arrived at Pernambuco, Brazil. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Dichosa, master Seltos, on its one and only known Middle Passage, sailing out of Luanda with a cargo of 220 enslaved Africans, arrived at a port of Cuba. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Felicidade, master unknown, on one of its nine known Middle Passage voyages, out of an unknown area of Africa with a cargo of 250 enslaved Africans, arrived at a port of Cuba. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Duquesa de Braganca, master Caelet, on one of its three known Middle Passage voyages, out of Sao Tome with a cargo of 840 enslaved Africans, arrived at a port of Cuba. A Portuguese slaver, the Josefina, master unknown, out of an unknown area of Africa with a cargo of 227 enslaved Africans on one of its twelve-count-’em-twelve known Middle Passages, arrived at a port of Cuba. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Livramento, master J.A. Branco, out of Angola with a cargo of an unknown number of enslaved Africans on its one and only known Middle Passage, arrived at Pernambuco. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Julia, master unknown, on its one and only known Middle Passage, sailing out of Ouidah with a cargo of 273 enslaved Africans, arrived at the port of Sao Sebastiao, Brazil. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
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
1839 1839 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 there’s no indication whatever that he experienced such activity as morally repugnant). HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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
1839 1839 Gennaio 1-5: The maw of Mount Vesuvius opened and it transited into its eruptive, non-quiescent condition, which phase typically obtains for this particular volcano for between half an year and just shy of 31 years. “Effusiva-Esplosiva — Formazione di un piccolo cratere profondo 285 m. Lave a SW (sopra la colata del 1767 e del 1810) e SE verso Boscotrecase ed Ercolano. Boscotrecase e Castellamare coperti da uno strato di scorie. Danni per caduta di lapilli.”
MOUNT VESUVIUS HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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.
January 2, Wednesday: Louis Daguerre took the 1st photographic image of the Moon (unfortunately, this has not survived). HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 January 4, Friday: Barclay Coppoc of Springdale, Iowa was born in Salem, Ohio.
The initial large group of Cherokee arrived in Oklahoma from Georgia after enduring the Trail of Tears.
January 6, Sunday: January 6, Sunday, 1839 Robert Schumann wrote to Raimund Hartel from Vienna, informing him that he had several meetings with Ferdinand Schubert and found many unpublished or unknown works of Franz Schubert “operas, four grand Masses, four or five symphonies, and much else.”
A massive wind and rain storm struck Ireland that night killing 250-300. Structures were demolished, floods occurred, and £500,000 in shipping was lost.
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 8, Tuesday: Clara Wieck left Leipzig for a concert tour to Paris with Claudine Dufourd, a French companion hired by her father.
January 9, Wednesday: The Daguerreotype process was announced at the French Academy of Science.
Incidental music to Birnbaum’s play Der Matrose by Louis Spohr was performed for the 1st time, in Kassel.
John Knowles Paine was born in Portland, Maine, 2d of 5 children born to Jacob Small Paine, a craftsman of umbrellas and musical instruments, also a music publisher and distributor of sheet music and pianos, with Rebecca Beebe Downes.
January 10, Thursday: Notre-Dame des orages, a cantata for two voices and piano by Cesar Franck to words of the Comte de Pastoret, was performed for the first time, in the Salle Erard, Paris. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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
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 19, Saturday: Paul Cezanne was born.
The British East India Company conquered Aden.
Philipp replaced Ludwig as Landgrave of Hesse-Homburg.
39. To get a sense of what that amounted to in today’s money, consult
1839 1839 January 20, Sunday: Chilean forces defeated Peru-Bolivia at Yungay southeast of Antofagasta. This defeat would lead to the dissolution of the union of Peru and Bolivia.
January 22, Tuesday: Frédéric François Chopin finally was able to sit down to his piano on Mallorca after it had lingered for 3 weeks in customs and after the process had consumed a considerable amount of money. He would be able to complete revision of his Preludes op.28.
January 24, Thursday: Charles Darwin was elected a member of Royal Society.
January 27, Sunday: The lightkeeper on Matinicus Rock reported that a series of seven waves had washed across the island, completely demolishing his wooden home and its light towers. His log states laconically: “Lighthouse tore down by the sea”
Jacques Offenbach offered his 1st public concert (along with 11 other performers), in the music rooms of Pape’s instrument shop, Paris.
January 28, Monday: La gipsy, a ballet by Ambroise Thomas’ Benoist and Marliani, to a scenario by Saint- Georges after Cervantes was performed for the first time, at the Paris Opera.
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.
January 31, Thursday: A paper explaining the negative photography process developed by English scientist W.H. Fox Talbot (a process congenial to publication by which not merely a single positive image, but numerous positive images, could be generated) was read to the Royal Society in London. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
FEBRUARY
February: During the Southern Hemisphere summer, Charles Wilkes moved into Antarctic waters.
February: William Whipper commented that “The national prejudice [antimelanism] has so complexionally separated the interests of the people of this nation that when those of opposite complexions meet each other, it is for the most part under a mask, like courtiers, so that it is next to impossible, generally speaking, to divine their real meaning and intent.” Whipper, himself black and an abolitionist, was speaking here not of the generality of this nation’s citizenry but of his fellow black and white abolitionists.
A negrero flying the Portuguese flag, the Isabel, master unknown, out of Angola with a cargo of 779 enslaved Africans on its one and only known Middle Passage, arrived at the port of Paranagua, Brazil. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Lavandeira, master unknown, out of an unknown area of Africa with a cargo of 229 enslaved Africans on its second of two known Middle Passages, arrived at a port of Cuba. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Ligera, master Souza, out of Onim with a cargo of an unknown number enslaved Africans on one of its eight known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at a port of Cuba. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Felicidade, master unknown, out of an unknown area of Africa with a cargo of 447 enslaved Africans on one of its nine known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at a port of Cuba. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Duque de Victoria, master unknown, out of Angola with a cargo of 427 enslaved Africans on its first of two known Middle Passages, arrived at the port of Ilha Grande, Brazil. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Eliza, master unknown, out of an unknown area of Africa with a cargo of 116 enslaved Africans on one of its seven known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at a port of Cuba. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Maria Carolta, master unknown, out of Angola with a cargo of 612 enslaved Africans on its second of two known Middle Passages, arrived at the port of Ilha Grande, Brazil. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Esperanca, master unknown, out of Mocambique with a cargo of 730 enslaved Africans on one of its ten-count-’em-ten known such voyages, arrived at Ilha Grande, Brazil. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Aventureiro, master unknown, out of Mocambique with a cargo of 683 enslaved Africans on one of its three known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at the port of Macae, Brazil. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Dom Manoel de Portugal, master unknown, out of Quelimane with a cargo of 714 enslaved Africans on its second of two known Middle Passages, arrived at Campos, Brazil. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Maria Rita, master J.P. Silva, out of Ambriz with a cargo of an unknown number enslaved Africans on its first of two known such Passages, arrived at Pernambuco, Brazil. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Mercantile, master unknown, out of an unknown area of Africa with a cargo of 296 enslaved Africans on its second of two known Middle Passages, arrived at a port of Cuba. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
February: A Chartist Convention met in London.
February 1, Friday: Headman John Ross’s wife, Quati, died near Little Rock, Arkansas. TRAIL OF TEARS
February 1, Friday: Joanna Kent Southmayd, the widow of the Reverend Daniel Starr Southmayd, remarried with the Reverend John B. Warren, the Presbyterian minister in Brazoria, Texas.
February 2, Saturday: Charles Wesley Slack. HISTORY OF THE ELIOT SCHOOL. Autograph Essay Signed. 4 pages, 30.7 cm.41
February 4, Monday: A national convention of chartists, deeming itself the “General Convention of the Industrious Classes,” met in London.
John George Lambton, Earl of Durham presented his work REPORT ON THE AFFAIRS OF BRITISH NORTH AMERICA to the British Colonial Office. He recommended that Upper and Lower Canada be united and power be devolved to the local populace, and that emigration from the British Isles needed to increase.
February 5, Tuesday: When the US Senate received a proposal that it change the rules in regard to the slave- trade, it referred the matter to its Committee on Commerce, and as you might imagine, nothing much happened. “Mr. Strange, on leave, and in pursuance of notice given, introduced a bill to amend an act entitled an act to prohibit the importation of slaves into any port in the jurisdiction of the United States; which was read twice, and referred to the Committee on Commerce.” March 1, the Committee was discharged from further consideration of the bill. CONGRESSIONAL GLOBE, 25th Congress, 3d session, page 172; SENATE JOURNAL, 25th Congress, 3d session, pages 200, 313. W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: In reviewing efforts toward the suppression of the slave-trade from 1820 to 1850, it must be remembered that nearly every cabinet had a strong, if not a predominating, Southern element, and that consequently the efforts of the executive were powerfully influenced by the changing attitude of the South. Naturally, under such 41. 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
1839 1839 circumstances, the government displayed little activity and no enthusiasm in the work. In 1824 a single vessel of the Gulf squadron was occasionally sent to the African coast to return by the route usually followed by the slavers; no wonder that “none of these or any other of our public ships have found vessels engaged in the slave trade under the flag of the United States, ... although it is known that the trade still exists to a most lamentable extent.”42 Indeed, all that an American slaver need do was to run up a Spanish or a Portuguese flag, to be absolutely secure from all attack or inquiry on the part of United States vessels. Even this desultory method of suppression was not regular: in 1826 “no vessel has been despatched to the coast of Africa for several months,”43 and from that time until 1839 this country probably had no slave-trade police upon the seas, except in the Gulf of Mexico. In 1839 increasing violations led to the sending of two fast-sailing vessels to the African coast, and these were kept there more or less regularly;44 but even after the signing of the treaty of 1842 the Secretary of the Navy reports: “On the coast of Africa we have no squadron. The small appropriation of the present year was believed to be scarcely sufficient.”45 Between 1843 and 1850 the coast squadron varied from two to six vessels, with from thirty to ninety-eight guns;46 “but the force habitually and actively engaged in cruizing on the ground frequented by slavers has probably been less by one-fourth, if we consider the size of the ships employed and their withdrawal for purposes of recreation and health, and the movement of the reliefs, whose arrival does not correspond exactly with the departure of the vessels whose term of service has expired.”47 The reports of the navy show that in only four of the eight years mentioned was the fleet, at the time of report, at the stipulated size of eighty guns; and at times it was much below this, even as late as 1848, when only two vessels are reported on duty along the African coast.48 As the commanders themselves acknowledged, the squadron was too small and the cruising-ground too large to make joint cruising effective.49 The same story comes from the Brazil station: “Nothing effectual can be done towards stopping the slave trade, as our squadron is at present organized,” wrote the consul at Rio Janeiro in 1847; “when it is considered that the Brazil station extends from north of the equator to Cape Horn on this continent, and includes a great part of Africa south of the equator, on both sides of the Cape of Good Hope, it must be admitted that one frigate and one brig is a very insufficient force to protect American commerce, and repress the participation in the slave trade by our own vessels.”50 In the Gulf of Mexico cruisers were stationed most of the time, although even here there were at times urgent representations that the scarcity or the absence
42. REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE NAVY, 1824. 43. REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE NAVY, 1826. 44. REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE NAVY., 1839. 45. REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE NAVY, 1842. 46. BRITISH AND FOREIGN STATE PAPERS, 1857-8, page 1250. 47. Lord Napier to Secretary of State Cass, December 24, 1857: BRITISH AND FOREIGN STATE PAPERS, 1857-8, page 1249. 48. PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1847-8, Volume LXIV. No. 133, PAPERS RELATIVE TO THE SUPPRESSION OF THE SLAVE TRADE ON THE COAST OF AFRICA, page 2. 49. Report of Perry: SENATE DOCUMENTS, 28th Congress, 2d session, IX. No. 150, page 118. 50. Consul Park at Rio Janeiro to Secretary Buchanan, Aug. 20, 1847: HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENTS, 30th Congress, 2d session, VII. No. 61, page 7. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 of such vessels gave the illicit trade great license.51 Owing to this general negligence of the government, and also to its anxiety on the subject of the theoretic Right of Search, many officials were kept in a state of chronic deception in regard to the trade. The enthusiasm of commanders was dampened by the lack of latitude allowed and by the repeated insistence in their orders on the non-existence of a Right of Search.52 When one commander, realizing that he could not cover the trading- track with his fleet, requested English commanders to detain suspicious American vessels until one of his vessels came up, the government annulled the agreement as soon as it reached their ears, rebuked him, and the matter was alluded to in Congress long after with horror.53 According to the orders of cruisers, only slavers with slaves actually on board could be seized. Consequently, fully equipped slavers would sail past the American fleet, deliberately make all preparations for shipping a cargo, then, when the English were not near, “sell” the ship to a Spaniard, hoist the Spanish flag, and again sail gayly past the American fleet with a cargo of slaves. An English commander reported: “The officers of the United States’ navy are extremely active and zealous in the cause, and no fault can be attributed to them, but it is greatly to be lamented that this blemish should in so great a degree nullify our endeavours.”54
February 6, Wednesday: Giuseppe Verdi, with his wife and son, left Busseto for Milan.
Clara Wieck arrived in Paris from Leipzig, traveling in the company of a French woman previously unknown to her. She would remain there for 6 months, eventually residing with her friend Emilie List.
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.
51. Suppose “an American vessel employed to take in negroes at some point on this coast. There is no American man-of-war here to obtain intelligence. What risk does she run of being searched? But suppose that there is a man-of-war in port. What is to secure the master of the merchantman against her [the man-of-war’s commander’s knowing all about his [the merchant-man’s] intention, or suspecting it in time to be upon him [the merchant-man] before he shall have run a league on his way to Texas?” Consul Trist to Commander Spence: HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 27th Congress, 1st session, No. 34, page 41.] 52. A typical set of instructions was on the following plan: 1. You are charged with the protection of legitimate commerce. 2. While the United States wishes to suppress the slave-trade, she will not admit a Right of Search by foreign vessels. 3. You are to arrest slavers. 4. You are to allow in no case an exercise of the Right of Search or any great interruption of legitimate commerce. — To Commodore Perry, March 30, 1843: HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENTS, 35th Congress, 2d session, IX. No. 104. 53. HOUSE REPORTS, 27th Congress, 3d session, III. No. 283, pages 765-8. Cf. Benton’s speeches on the treaty of 1842. 54. Report of Hotham to Admiralty, April 7, 1847: PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1847-8, Volume LXIV. No. 133, PAPERS RELATIVE TO THE SUPPRESSION OF THE SLAVE TRADE ON THE COAST OF AFRICA, page 13. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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).
February 9, Saturday: The American Anti-Slavery Society put out the 10th issue of its “omnibus” entitled TEXT The Anti-Slavery Examiner, containing “Speech of Hon. Thomas Morris, of Ohio, in Reply to the Speech of INDEX the Hon. Henry Clay”; containing, also, “American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses;” containing, also, the Reverend Beriah Green’s CHATTEL PRINCIPLE / THE ABHORRENCE OF JESUS CHRIST AND THE APOSTLES; OR NO REFUGE FOR AMERICAN SLAVERY IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. CHATTEL PRINCIPLE THE ABHORRENCE OF JESUS CHRIST AND THE APOSTLES; OR, NO REFUGE FOR AMERICAN SLAVERY IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. BY BERIAH GREEN. NEW YORK PUBLISHED BY THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, NO. 143 NASSAU STREET 1839 This No. contains 4-1/2 sheet—Postage under 100 miles, 7 cts. over 100, 10 cts. Please Read and circulate.
THE NEW TESTAMENT AGAINST SLAVERY. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 “THE SON OF MAN IS COME TO SEEK AND TO SAVE THAT WHICH WAS LOST.” Is Jesus Christ in favor of American slavery? In 1776 THOMAS JEFFERSON, supported by a noble band of patriots and surrounded by the American people, opened his lips in the authoritative declaration: “We hold these truths to be SELF-EVIDENT, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness.” And from the inmost heart of the multitudes around, and in a strong and clear voice, broke forth the unanimous and decisive answer: Amen—such truths we do indeed hold to be self-evident. And animated and sustained by a declaration, so inspiring and sublime, they rushed to arms, and as the result of agonizing efforts and dreadful sufferings, achieved under God the independence of their country. The great truth, whence they derived light and strength to assert and defend their rights, they made the foundation of their republic. And in the midst of this republic, must we prove, that He, who was the Truth, did not contradict “the truths” which He Himself; as their Creator, had made self-evident to mankind? Is Jesus Christ in favor of American slavery? What, according to those laws which make it what it is, is American slavery? In the Statute-book of South Carolina thus it is written:55 “Slaves shall be deemed, held, taken, reputed and adjudged in law to be chattels personal in the hands of their owners and possessors, and their executors, administrators and assigns, to all intents, construction and purposes whatever.” The very root of American slavery consists in the assumption, that law has reduced men to chattels. But this assumption is, and must be, a gross falsehood. Men and cattle are separated from each other by the Creator, immutably, eternally, and by an impassable gulf. To confound or identify men and cattle must be to lie most wantonly, impudently, and maliciously. And must we prove, that Jesus Christ is not in favor of palpable, monstrous falsehood? Is Jesus Christ in favor of American slavery? How can a system, built upon a stout and impudent denial of self-evident truth—a system of treating men like cattle—operate? Thomas Jefferson shall answer. Hear him. “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions; the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives loose to his worst passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy, who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.”56 Such is the practical operation of a system, which puts men and cattle into the same family and treats them alike. And must we prove, that Jesus Christ is not in favor of a school where the worst vices in their most hateful forms are systematically and efficiently taught and practiced? Is Jesus Christ in favor of American slavery? What, in 1818, did the General Assembly of the Presbyterian church affirm respecting its nature and operation? “Slavery creates a paradox in the moral system—it exhibits rational, accountable, and immortal beings, in such circumstances as scarcely to leave them 55. Stroud’s SLAVE LAWS, page 23. 56. NOTES ON VIRGINIA, Boston Ed. 1832, pp. 169, 170. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 the power of moral action. It exhibits them as dependent on the will of others, whether they shall receive religious instruction; whether they shall know and worship the true God; whether they shall enjoy the ordinances of the gospel; whether they shall perform the duties and cherish the endearments of husbands and wives, parents and children, neighbors and friends; whether they shall preserve their chastity and purity, or regard the dictates of justice and humanity. Such are some of the consequences of slavery; consequences not imaginary, but which connect themselves with its very existence. The evils to which the slave is always exposed, often take place in their very worst degree and form; and where all of them do not take place, still the slave is deprived of his natural rights, degraded as a human being, and exposed to the danger of passing into the hands of a master who may inflict upon him all the hardship and injuries which inhumanity and avarice may suggest.”57 Must we prove, that Jesus Christ is not in favor of such things? Is Jesus Christ in favor of American slavery? It is already widely felt and openly acknowledged at the South, that they cannot support slavery without sustaining the opposition of universal Christendom. And Thomas Jefferson declared, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice can not sleep forever; that considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events; that it may become practicable by supernatural influences! The Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us in such a contest.”58 And must we prove, that Jesus Christ is not in favor of what universal Christendom is impelled to abhor, denounce, and oppose; is not in favor of what every attribute of Almighty God is armed against? “YE HAVE DESPISED THE POOR.” It is no man of straw, with whom, in making out such proof, we are called to contend. Would to God we had no other antagonist! Would to God that our labor of love could be regarded as a work of supererogation! But we may well be ashamed and grieved to find it necessary to “stop the mouths” of grave and learned ecclesiastics, who from the heights of Zion have undertaken to defend the institution of slavery. We speak not now of those, who amidst the monuments of oppression are engaged in the sacred vocation; who, as ministers of the Gospel, can “prophesy smooth things” to such as pollute the altar of Jehovah with human sacrifices; nay, who themselves bind the victim and kindle the sacrifice. That they should put their Savior to the torture, to wring from his lips something in favor of slavery, is not to be wondered at. They consent to the murder of the children; can they respect the rights of the Father? But what shall we say of distinguished theologians of the north—professors of sacred literature at our oldest divinity schools—who stand up to defend, both by argument and authority, southern slavery! And from the Bible! Who, Balaam-like, try a thousand expedients to force from the mouth of Jehovah a sentence which they know the heart of Jehovah abhors! Surely we have here something more mischievous and formidable than a man of straw. More than two years ago, and just before the meeting of the General Assembly 57. Minutes of the General assembly for 1818, page 29. 58. NOTES ON VIRGINIA, Boston Ed. 1832, pp. 170, 171. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 of the Presbyterian church, appeared an article in the Biblical Repertory,59 understood to be from the pen of the Professor of Sacred Literature at Princeton, in which an effort is made to show, that slavery, whatever may be said of any abuses of it, is not a violation of the precepts of the Gospel. This article, we are informed, was industriously and extensively distributed among the members of the General Assembly—a body of men, who by a frightful majority seemed already too much disposed to wink at the horrors of slavery. The effect of the Princeton Apology on the southern mind, we have high authority for saying, has been most decisive and injurious. It has contributed greatly to turn the public eye off from the sin—from the inherent and necessary evils of slavery to incidental evils, which the abuse of it might be expected to occasion. And how few can be brought to admit, that whatever abuses may prevail nobody knows where or how, any such thing is chargeable upon them! Thus our Princeton prophet has done what he could to lay the southern conscience asleep upon ingenious perversions of the sacred volume! About a year after this, an effort in the same direction was jointly made by Dr. Fisk and Professor Stuart. In a letter to a Methodist clergyman, Mr. Merrit, published in Zion’s Herald, Dr. Fisk gives utterance to such things as the following:— “But that you and the public may see and feel, that you have the ablest and those who are among the honestest men of this age, arrayed against you, be pleased to notice the following letter from Prof. Stuart. I wrote to him, knowing as I did his integrity of purpose, his unflinching regard for truth, as well as his deserved reputation as a scholar and biblical critic, proposing the following questions:— 1. Does the New Testament directly or indirectly teach, that slavery existed in the primitive church? 2. In 1 Tim. vi. 2, And they that have believing masters, &c., what is the relation expressed or implied between “they” (servants) and “believing masters?” And what are your reasons for the construction of the passage? 3. What was the character of ancient and eastern slavery?— Especially what (legal) power did this relation give the master over the slave?” PROFESSOR STUART’S REPLY. ANDOVER, 10th Apr., 1837 REV. AND DEAR SIR,—Yours is before me. A sickness of three month’s standing (typhus fever) in which I have just escaped death, and which still confines me to my house, renders it impossible for me to answer your letter at large. 1. The precepts of the New Testament respecting the demeanor of slaves and of their masters, beyond all question, recognize the existence of slavery. The masters are in part “believing masters,” so that a precept to them, how they are to behave as masters, recognizes that the relation may still exist, salva fide et salva ecclesia, (“without violating the Christian faith or the 59. For April, 1836. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church met in the following May, at Pittsburgh, where, in pamphlet form, this article was distributed. The following appeared upon the title page: PITTSBURGH: 1836. For gratuitous distribution. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 church.”) Otherwise, Paul had nothing to do but to cut the band asunder at once. He could not lawfully and properly temporize with a malum in se, (“that which is in itself sin.”) If any one doubts, let him take the case of Paul’s sending Onesimus back to Philemon, with an apology for his running away, and sending him back to be his servant for life. The relation did exist, may exist. The abuse of it is the essential and fundamental wrong. Not that the theory of slavery is in itself right. No; “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” “Do unto others that which ye would that others should do unto you,” decide against this. But the relation once constituted and continued, is not such a malum in se as calls for immediate and violent disruption at all hazards. So Paul did not counsel. 2. 1 Tim. vi. 2, expresses the sentiment, that slaves, who are Christians and have Christian masters, are not, on that account, and because as Christians they are brethren, to forego the reverence due to them as masters. That is, the relation of master and slave is not, as a matter of course, abrogated between all Christians. Nay, servants should in such a case, a fortiori, do their duty cheerfully. This sentiment lies on the very face of the case. What the master’s duty in such a case may be in respect to liberation, is another question, and one which the apostle does not here treat of. 3. Every one knows, who is acquainted with Greek or Latin antiquities, that slavery among heathen nations has ever been more unqualified and at looser ends than among Christian nations. Slaves were property in Greece and Rome. That decides all questions about their relation. Their treatment depended, as it does now, on the temper of their masters. The power of the master over the slave was, for a long time, that of life and death. Horrible cruelties at length mitigated it. In the apostle’s day, it was at least as great as among us. After all the spouting and vehemence on this subject, which have been exhibited, the good old Book remains the same. Paul’s conduct and advice are still safe guides. Paul knew well that Christianity would ultimately destroy slavery, as it certainly will. He knew, too, that it would destroy monarchy and aristocracy from the earth: for it is fundamentally a doctrine of true liberty and equality. Yet Paul did not expect slavery or anarchy to be ousted in a day; and gave precepts to Christians respecting their demeanor ad interim. With sincere and paternal regard, Your friend and brother, M. STUART. —This, sir, is doctrine that will stand, because it is Bible doctrine. The abolitionists, then, are on a wrong course. They have traveled out of the record; and if they would succeed, they must take a different position, and approach the subject in a different manner. Respectfully yours, W. FISK “SO THEY WRAP [SNARL] IT UP.” What are we taught here? That in the ecclesiastical HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 organizations which grew up under the hands of the apostles, slavery was admitted as a relation that did not violate the Christian faith; that the relation may now in like manner exist; that “the abuse of it is the essential and fundamental wrong;” and of course, that American Christians may hold their own brethren in slavery without incurring guilt or inflicting injury. Thus, according to Prof. Stuart, Jesus Christ has not a word to say against “the peculiar institutions” of the South. If our brethren there do not “abuse” the privilege of enacting unpaid labor, they may multiply their slaves to their hearts’ content, without exposing themselves to the frown of the Savior or laying their Christian character open to the least suspicion. Could any trafficker in human flesh ask for greater latitude! And to such doctrines, Dr. Fisk eagerly and earnestly subscribes. He goes further. He urges it on the attention of his brethren, as containing important truth, which they ought to embrace. According to him, it is “Bible doctrine,” showing, that “the abolitionists are on a wrong course,” and must, “if they would succeed, take a different position.” We now refer to such distinguished names, to show, that in attempting to prove that Jesus Christ is not in favor of American slavery, we contend with something else than a man of straw. The ungrateful task, which a particular examination of Professor Stuart’s letter lays upon us, we hope fairly to dispose of in due season. Enough has now been said to make it clear and certain, that American slavery has its apologists and advocates in the northern pulpit; advocates and apologists, who fall behind few if any of their brethren in the reputation they have acquired, the stations they occupy, and the general influence they are supposed to exert. Is it so? Did slavery exist in Judea, and among the Jews, in its worst form, during the Savior’s incarnation? If the Jews held slaves, they must have done in open and flagrant violation of the letter and the spirit of the Mosaic Dispensation. Whoever has any doubts of this may well resolve his doubts in the light of the Argument entitled “The Bible against Slavery.” If, after a careful and thorough examination of that article, he can believe that slaveholding prevailed during the ministry of Jesus Christ among the Jews and in accordance with the authority of Moses, he would do the reading public an important service to record the grounds of his belief—especially in a fair and full refutation of that Argument. Till that is done, we hold ourselves excused from attempting to prove what we now repeat, that if the Jews during our Savior’s incarnation held slaves, they must have done so in open and flagrant violation of the letter and spirit of the Mosaic Dispensation. Could Christ and the Apostles every where among their countrymen come in contact with slaveholding, being as it was a gross violation of that law which their office and their profession required them to honor and enforce, without exposing and condemning it? In its worst forms, we are told, slavery prevailed over the whole world, not excepting Judea. As, according to such ecclesiastics as Stuart, Hodge and Fisk, slavery in itself is not bad at all, the term “worst” could be applied only to “abuses” of this innocent relation. Slavery accordingly existed among the Jews, disfigured and disgraced by the “worst abuses” to which it is liable. These abuses in the ancient world, Professor Stuart describes as HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 “horrible cruelties.” And in our own country, such abuses have grown so rank, as to lead a distinguished eye-witness—no less a philosopher and statesman than Thomas Jefferson—to say, that they had armed against us every attribute of the Almighty. With these things the Savior every where came in contact, among the people to whose improvement and salvation he devoted his living powers, and yet not a word, not a syllable, in exposure and condemnation of such “horrible cruelties” escaped his lips! He saw—among the “covenant people” of Jehovah he saw, the babe plucked from the bosom of its mother; the wife torn from the embrace of her husband; the daughter driven to the market by the scourge of her own father;—he saw the word of God sealed up from those who, of all men, were especially entitled to its enlightening, quickening influence;—nay, he saw men beaten for kneeling before the throne of heavenly mercy;—such things he saw without a word of admonition or reproof! No sympathy with them who suffered wrong—no indignation at them who inflicted wrong, moved his heart! From the alleged silence of the Savior, when in contact with slavery among the Jews, our divines infer, that it is quite consistent with Christianity. And they affirm, that he saw it in its worst forms; that is, he witnessed what Professor Stuart ventures to call “horrible cruelties.” But what right have these interpreters of the sacred volume to regard any form of slavery which the Savior found, as “worst,” or even bad? According to their inference—which they would thrust gag-wise into the mouths of abolitionists—his silence should seal up their lips. They ought to hold their tongues. They have no right to call any form of slavery bad—an abuse; much less, horribly cruel! Their inference is broad enough to protect the most brutal driver amidst his deadliest inflictions! “THINK NOT THAT I AM COME TO DESTROY THE LAW OR THE PROPHETS; I AM NOT COME TO DESTROY, BUT TO FULFIL.” And did the Head of the new dispensation, then, fall so far behind the prophets of the old in a hearty and effective regard for suffering humanity? The forms of oppression which they witnessed, excited their compassion and aroused their indignation. In terms the most pointed and powerful, they exposed, denounced, threatened. They could not endure the creatures, “who used their neighbors’ service without wages, and gave him not for his work;”60 who imposed “heavy burdens”61 upon their fellows, and loaded them with “the bands of wickedness;” who, “hiding themselves from their own flesh,” disowned their own mothers’ children. Professions of piety joined with the oppression of the poor, they held up to universal scorn and execration, as the dregs of hypocrisy. They warned the creature of such professions, that he could escape the wrath of Jehovah only by heart-felt repentance. And yet, according to the ecclesiastics with whom we have to do, the Lord of these prophets passed by in silence just such enormities as he commanded them to expose and denounce! Every where, he came in contact with slavery in its worst forms— “horrible cruelties” forced themselves upon his notice; but not a word of rebuke or warning did he utter. He saw “a boy given for a harlot, and a girl sold for wine, that they might drink,”62 without the slightest feeling 60. JEREMIAH xxii. 13. 61. ISAIAH lviii. 6, 7. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 of displeasure, or any mark of disapprobation! To such disgusting and horrible conclusions, do the arguings which, from the haunts of sacred literature, are inflicted on our churches, lead us! According to them, Jesus Christ, instead of shining as the light of the world, extinguished the torches which his own prophets had kindled, and plunged mankind into the palpable darkness of a starless midnight! O savior, in pity to thy suffering people, let thy temple be no longer used as a “den of thieves!” “THOU THOUGHTEST THAT I WAS ALTOGETHER SUCH AN ONE AS THYSELF.” In passing by the worst forms of slavery, with which he every where came in contact among the Jews, the Savior must have been inconsistent with himself. He was commissioned to preach glad tidings to the poor; to heal the broken-hearted; to preach deliverance to the captives; to set at liberty them that are bruised; to preach the year of Jubilee. In accordance with this commission, he bound himself, from the earliest date of his incarnation, to the poor, by the strongest ties; himself “had not where to lay his head;” he exposed himself to misrepresentation and abuse for his affectionate intercourse with the outcasts of society; he stood up as the advocate of the widow, denouncing and dooming the heartless ecclesiastics, who had made her bereavement a source of gain; and in describing the scenes of the final judgment, he selected the very personification of poverty, disease and oppression, as the test by which our regard for him should be determined. To the poor and wretched; to the degraded and despised, his arms were ever open. They had his tenderest sympathies. They had his warmest love. His heart’s blood he poured out upon the ground for the human family, reduced to the deepest degradation, and exposed to the heaviest inflictions, as the slaves of the grand usurper. And yet, according to our ecclesiastics, that class of sufferers who had been reduced immeasurably below every other shape and form of degradation and distress; who had been most rudely thrust out of the family of Adam, and forced to herd with swine; who, without the slightest offence, had been made the footstool of the worst criminals; whose “tears were their meat night and day,” while, under nameless insults and killing injuries they were continually crying, O Lord, O Lord:—this class of sufferers, and this alone, our biblical expositors, occupying the high places of sacred literature, would make us believe the compassionate Savior coldly overlooked. Not an emotion of pity; not a look of sympathy; not a word of consolation, did his gracious heart prompt him to bestow upon them! He denounces damnation upon the devourer of the widow’s house. But the monster, whose trade it is to make widows and devour them and their babes, he can calmly endure! O Savior, when wilt thou stop the mouths of such blasphemers! “IT IS THE SPIRIT THAT QUICKENETH.” It seems that though, according to our Princeton professor, “the subject” of slavery “is hardly alluded to by Christ in any of his personal instructions,”63 he had a way of “treating it.” What was that? Why, “he taught the true nature, DIGNITY, EQUALITY, and destiny of men,” and “inculcated the principles of justice
62. JOEL iii. 3. 63. Pittsburg pamphlet, (already alluded to,) page 9. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 and love.”64 And according to Professor Stuart, the maxims which our Savior furnished, “decide against” “the theory of slavery.” All, then, that these ecclesiastical apologists for slavery can make of the Savior’s alleged silence is, that he did not, in his personal instructions, “apply his own principles to this particular form of wickedness.” For wicked that must be, which the maxims of the Savior decide against, and which our Princeton professor assures us the principles of the gospel, duly acted on, would speedily extinguish.65 How remarkable it is, that a teacher should “hardly allude to a subject in any of his personal instructions,” and yet inculcate principles which have a direct and vital bearing upon it!—should so conduct, as to justify the inference, that “slaveholding is not a crime,”66 and at the same time lend its authority for its “speedy extinction!” Higher authority than sustains self-evident truths there cannot be. As forms of reason, they are rays from the face of Jehovah. Not only are their presence and power self-manifested, but they also shed a strong and clear light around them. In their light, other truths are visible. Luminaries themselves, it is their office to enlighten. To their authority, in every department of thought, the same mind bows promptly, gratefully, fully. And by their authority, he explains, proves, and disposes of whatever engages his attention and engrosses his powers as a reasonable and reasoning creature. For what, when thus employed and when most successful, is the utmost he can accomplish? Why, to make the conclusions which he would establish and commend, clear in the light of reason;—in other words, to evince that they are reasonable. He expects that those with whom he has to do will acknowledge the authority of principle—will see whatever is exhibited in the light of reason. If they require him to go further, and, in order to convince them, to do something more than show that the doctrines he maintains, and the methods he proposes, are accordant with reason—are illustrated and supported with “self- evident truths”—they are plainly “beside themselves.” They have lost the use of reason. They are not to be argued with. They belong to the mad-house.
“COME NOW, LET US REASON TOGETHER, SAITH THE LORD.” Are we to honor the Bible, which Professor Stuart quaintly calls “the good old book,” by turning away from “self-evident truths” to receive its instructions? Can these truths be contradicted or denied there? Do we search for something there to obscure their clearness, or break their force, or reduce their authority? Do we long to find something there, in the form of premises or conclusions, of arguing or of inference, in broad statement or blind hints, creed-wise or fact-wise, which may set us free from the light and power of first principles? And what if we were to discover what we were thus in search of?—something directly or indirectly, expressly or impliedly prejudicial to the principles, which reason, placing us under the authority of, makes self-evident? In what estimation, in that case, should we be constrained to hold the Bible? Could we longer honor it as the book of God? The book of God opposed to the authority of REASON! Why, before what tribunal do we dispose of the claims of the sacred 64. Pittsburg pamphlet, page 9. 65. The same, page 34. 66. The same, page 13. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 volume to divine authority? The tribunal of reason. This every one acknowledges the moment he begins to reason on the subject. And what must reason do with a book, which reduces the authority of its own principles—breaks the force of self-evident truths? Is he not, by way of eminence, the apostle of infidelity, who, as a minister of the gospel or a professor of sacred literature, exerts himself, with whatever arts of ingenuity or show of piety, to exalt the Bible at the expense of reason? Let such arts succeed and such piety prevail, and Jesus Christ is “crucified afresh and put to an open shame.” What saith the Princeton professor? Why, in spite of “general principles,” and “clear as we may think the arguments against DESPOTISM, there have been thousands of ENLIGHTENED and good men, who honestly believe it to be of all forms of government the best and most acceptable to God.”67 Now these “good men” must have been thus warmly in favor of despotism, in consequence of, or in opposition to, their being “enlightened.” In other words, the light, which in such abundance they enjoyed, conducted them to the position in favor of despotism, where the Princeton professor so heartily shook hands with them, or they must have forced their way there in despite of its hallowed influence. Either in accordance with, or in resistance to the light, they became what he found them—the advocates of despotism. If in resistance to the light—and he says they were “enlightened men”— what, so far as the subject with which alone he and we are now concerned, becomes of their “honesty” and “goodness?” Good and honest resisters of the light, which was freely poured around them! Of such, what says Professor Stuart’s “good old Book?” Their authority, where “general principles” command the least respect, must be small indeed. But if in accordance with the light, they have become the advocates of despotism, then is despotism “the best form of government and most acceptable to God.” It is sustained by the authority of reason, by the word of Jehovah, by the will of Heaven! If this be the doctrine which prevails at certain theological seminaries, it must be easy to account for the spirit which they breathe, and the general influence which they exert. Why did not the Princeton professor place this “general principle” as a shield, heaven-wrought and reason approved, over that cherished form of despotism which prevails among the churches of the South, and leave the “peculiar institutions” he is so forward to defend, under its protection? What is the “general principle” to which, whatever may become of despotism, with its “honest” admirers and “enlightened” supporters, human governments should be universally and carefully adjusted? Clearly this—that as capable of, man is entitled to, self government. And this is a specific form of a still more general principle, which may well be pronounced self-evident—that every thing should be treated according to its nature. The mind that can doubt this, must be incapable of rational conviction. Man, then,—it is the dictate of reason, it is the voice of Jehovah—must be treated as a man. What is he? What are his distinctive attributes? The Creator impressed his own image on him. In this were found the grand peculiarities of his character. Here shone his glory. Here REASON manifests its laws. Here the WILL puts forth its volitions. Here is the crown of IMMORTALITY. Why such 67. Pittsburg pamphlet, page 12. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 endowments? Thus furnished—the image of Jehovah—is he not capable of self-government? And is he not to be so treated? Within the sphere where the laws of reason place him, may he not act according to his choice—carry out his own volitions?—may he not enjoy life, exult in freedom, and pursue as he will the path of blessedness? If not, why was he so created and endowed? Why the mysterious, awful attribute of will? To be a source, profound as the depths of hell, of exquisite misery, of keen anguish, of insufferable torment! Was man, formed “according to the image of Jehovah,” to be crossed, thwarted, counteracted; to be forced in upon himself; to be the sport of endless contradictions; to be driven back and forth forever between mutually repellant forces; and all, all “at the discretion of another!”68 How can man be treated according to his nature, as endowed with reason or will, if excluded from the powers and privileges of self-government?—if “despotism” be let loose upon him, to “deprive him of personal liberty, oblige him to serve at the discretion of another” and with the power of “transferring” such “authority” over him and such claim upon him, to “another master?” If “thousands of enlightened and good men” can so easily be found, who are forward to support “despotism” as “of all governments the best and most acceptable to God,” we need not wonder at the testimony of universal history, that “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.” Groans and travail pangs must continue to be the order of the day throughout “the whole creation,” till the rod of despotism be broken, and man be treated as man—as capable of, and entitled to, self-government. But what is the despotism whose horrid features our smooth professor tries to hide beneath an array of cunningly selected words and nicely-adjusted sentences? It is the despotism of American slavery—which crushes the very life of humanity out of its victims, and transforms them to cattle! At its touch, they sink from men to things! “Slaves,” saith Professor Stuart, “were property in Greece and Rome. That decides all questions about their relation.” Yes, truly. And slaves in republican America are property; and as that easily, clearly, and definitely settles “all questions about their relation,” why should the Princeton professor have put himself to the trouble of weaving a definition equally ingenious and inadequate—at once subtle and deceitful. Ah, why? Was he willing thus to conceal the wrongs of his mother’s children even from himself? If among the figments of his brain, he could fashion slaves, and make them something else than property, he knew full well that a very different pattern was in use among the southern patriarchs. Why did he not, in plain words and sober earnest, and good faith, describe the thing as it was, instead of employing honied words and courtly phrases, to set forth with all becoming vagueness and ambiguity, what might possibly be supposed to exist in the regions of fancy. “FOR RULERS ARE NOT A TERROR TO GOOD WORKS, BUT TO THE EVIL.” But are we, in maintaining the principle of self-government, to overlook the unripe, or neglected, or broken powers of any of our fellow-men with whom we may be connected?—or the strong passions, vicious propensities, or criminal pursuits of others? Certainly not. But in providing for their welfare, we are to exert influences and impose restraints suited to their character. In wielding those prerogatives which the social of 68. Pittsburg pamphlet, page 12. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 our nature authorizes us to employ for their benefit, we are to regard them as they are in truth, not things, not cattle, not articles of merchandize, but men, our fellow-men—reflecting, from however battered and broken a surface, reflecting with us the image of a common Father. And the great principle of self- government is to be the basis, to which the whole structure of discipline under which they may be placed, should be adapted. From the nursery and village school on to the work-house and state-prison, this principle is ever and in all things to be before the eyes, present in the thoughts, warm on the heart. Otherwise, God is insulted, while his image is despised and abused. Yes, indeed; we remember, that in carrying out the principle of self-government, multiplied embarrassments and obstructions grow out of wickedness on the one hand and passion on the other. Such difficulties and obstacles we are far enough from overlooking. But where are they to be found? Are imbecility and wickedness, bad hearts and bad heads, confined to the bottom of society? Alas, the weakest of the weak, and the desperately wicked, often occupy the high places of the earth, reducing every thing within their reach to subserviency to the foulest purposes. Nay, the very power they have usurped, has often been the chief instrument of turning their heads, inflaming their passions, corrupting their hearts. All the world knows, that the possession of arbitrary power has a strong tendency to make men shamelessly wicked and insufferably mischievous. And this, whether the vassals over whom they domineer, be few or many. If you cannot trust man with himself, will you put his fellows under his control?—and flee from the inconveniences incident to self- government, to the horrors of despotism? “THOU THAT PREACHEST A MAN SHOULD NOT STEAL, DOST THOU STEAL.” Is the slaveholder, the most absolute and shameless of all despots, to be entrusted with the discipline of the injured men who he himself has reduced to cattle?—with the discipline with which they are to be prepared to wield the powers and enjoy the privileges of freemen? Alas, of such discipline as he can furnish, in the relation of owner to property, they have had enough. From this sprang the very ignorance and vice, which in the view of many, lie in the way of their immediate enfranchisement. He it is, who has darkened their eyes and crippled their powers. And are they to look to him for illumination and renewed vigor!—and expect “grapes from thorns and figs from thistles!” Heaven forbid! When, according to arrangements which had usurped the sacred name of law, he consented to receive and use them as property, he forfeited all claims to the esteem and confidence, not only of the helpless sufferers themselves, but also of every philanthropist. In becoming a slaveholder, he became the enemy of mankind. The very act was a declaration of war upon human nature. What less can be made of the process of turning men to cattle? It is rank absurdity—it is the height of madness, to propose to employ him to train, for the places of freemen, those whom he has wantonly robbed of every right—whom he has stolen from themselves. Sooner place Burke, who used to murder for the sake of selling bodies to the dissector, at the head of a hospital. Why, what have our slaveholders been about these two hundred years? Have they not been constantly and earnestly engaged in the work of education?— training up their human cattle? And how? Thomas Jefferson shall HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 answer. “The whole commerce between master and slave, is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions; the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other.” Is this the way to fit the unprepared for the duties and privileges of American citizens? Will the evils of the dreadful process be diminished by adding to its length? What, in 1818, was the unanimous testimony of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church? Why, after describing a variety of influences growing out of slavery, most fatal to mental and moral improvement, the General Assembly assure us, that such “consequences are not imaginary, but connect themselves WITH THE VERY EXISTENCE69 of slavery. The evils to which the slave is always exposed, often take place in fact, and IN THEIR VERY WORST DEGREE AND FORM; and where all of them do not take place,” “still the slave is deprived of his natural right, degraded as a human being, and exposed to the danger of passing into the hands of a master who may inflict upon him all the hardships and injuries which inhumanity and avarice may suggest.” Is this the condition in which our ecclesiastics would keep the slave, at least a little longer, to fit him to be restored to himself? “AND THEY STOPPED THEIR EARS.” The methods of discipline under which, as slaveholders; the Southrons now place their human cattle, they with one consent and in great wrath, forbid us to examine. The statesman and the priest unite in the assurance, that these methods are none of our business. Nay, they give us distinctly to understand, that if we come among them to take observations, and make inquiries, and discuss questions, they will dispose of us as outlaws. Nothing will avail to protect us from speedy and deadly violence! What inference does all this warrant? Surely, not that the methods which they employ are happy and worthy of universal application. If so, why do they not take the praise, and give us the benefit of their wisdom, enterprise, and success? Who, that has nothing to hide, practices concealment? “He that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be manifest, that they are wrought in God.” Is this the way of slaveholders? Darkness they court—they will have darkness. Doubtless “because their deeds are evil.” Can we confide in methods for the benefit of our enslaved brethren, which it is death for us to examine? What good ever came, what good can we expect, from deeds of darkness? Did the influence of the masters contribute any thing in the West Indies to prepare the apprentices for enfranchisement? Nay, verily. All the world knows better. They did what in them lay, to turn back the tide of blessings, which, through emancipation, was pouring in upon the famishing around them. Are not the best minds and hearts in England now thoroughly convinced, that slavery, under no modification, can be a school for freedom? We say such things to the many who allege, that slaves cannot at once be entrusted with the powers and privileges of self- government. However this may be, they cannot be better qualified under the influence of slavery. That must be broken up from which their ignorance, and viciousness, and wretchedness proceeded. That which can only do what it has always done, pollute and degrade, 69. The words here marked as emphatic, were so distinguished by ourselves. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 must not be employed to purify and elevate. The lower their character and condition, the louder, clearer, sterner, the just demand for immediate emancipation. The plague-smitten sufferer can derive no benefit from breathing a little longer an infected atmosphere. In thus referring to elemental principles—in thus availing ourselves of the light of self-evident truths—we bow to the authority and tread in the foot-prints of the great Teacher. He chid those around him for refusing to make the same use of their reason in promoting their spiritual, as they made in promoting their temporal welfare. He gives them distinctly to understand, that they need not go out of themselves to form a just estimation of their position, duties, and prospects, as standing in the presence of the Messiah. “Why, EVEN OF YOURSELVES,” he demands of them, “judge ye not what is right?”70 How could they, unless they had a clear light, and an infallible standard within them, whereby, amidst the relations they sustained and the interests they had to provide for, they might discriminate between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, what they ought to attempt and what they ought to eschew? From this pointed, significant appeal of the Savior, it is clear and certain, that in human consciousness may be found self-evident truths, self-manifested principles; that every man, studying his own consciousness, is bound to recognize their presence and authority, and in sober earnest and good faith to apply them to the highest practical concerns of “life and godliness.” It is in obedience to the Bible, that we apply self-evident truths, and walk in the light of general principles. When our fathers proclaimed these truths, and at the hazard of their property, reputation, and life, stood up in their defence, they did homage to the sacred Scriptures— they honored the Bible. In that volume, not a syllable can be found to justify that form of infidelity, which in the abused name of piety, reproaches us for practising the lessons which nature teacheth. These lessons, the Bible requires us71 reverently to listen to, earnestly to appropriate, and most diligently and faithfully to act upon in every direction, and on all occasions. Why, our Savior goes so far in doing honor to reason, as to encourage men universally to dispose of the characteristic peculiarities and distinctive features of the Gospel in the light of its principles. “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.”72 Natural religion—the principles which nature reveals, and the lessons which nature teaches—he thus makes a test of the truth and authority of revealed religion. So far was he, as a teacher, from shrinking from the clearest and most piercing rays of reason—from calling off the attention of those around him from the import, bearings, and practical application of general principles. And those who would have us escape from the pressure of self-evident truths, by betaking ourselves to the doctrines and precepts of Christianity, whatever airs of piety they may put on, do foul dishonor to the Savior of mankind. And what shall we say of the Golden Rule, which, according to the Savior, comprehends all the precepts of the Bible? “Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so 70. LUKE xii. 57. 71. CORINTHIANS xi. 14. 72. JOHN vii. 17. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 to them; for this is the law and the prophets.” According to this maxim, in human consciousness, universally, may be found, 1. The standard whereby, in all the relations and circumstances of life, we may determine what Heaven demands and expects of us. 2. The just application of this standard, is practicable for, and obligatory upon, every child of Adam. 3. The qualification requisite to a just application of this rule to all the cases in which we can be concerned, is simply this—to regard all the members of the human family as our brethren, our equals. In other words, the Savior here teaches us, that in the principles and laws of reason, we have an infallible guide in all the relations and circumstances of life; that nothing can hinder our following this guide, but the bias of selfishness; and that the moment, in deciding any moral question, we place ourselves in the room of our brother, before the bar of reason, we shall see what decision ought to be pronounced. Does this, in the Savior, look like fleeing self-evident truths!—like decrying the authority of general principles!—like exalting himself at the expense of reason!—like opening a refuge in the Gospel for those whose practice is at variance with the dictates of humanity! What then is the just application of the Golden Rule—that fundamental maxim of the Gospel, giving character to, and shedding light upon, all its precepts and arrangements—to the subject of slavery?—that we must “do to” slaves as we would be done by, AS SLAVES, the RELATION itself being justified and continued? Surely not. A little reflection will enable us to see, that the Golden Rule reaches farther in its demands, and strikes deeper in its influences and operations. The natural equality of mankind lies at the very basis of this great precept. It obviously requires every man to acknowledge another self in every other man. With my powers and resources, and in my appropriate circumstances, I am to recognize in any child of Adam who may address me, another self in his appropriate circumstances and with his powers and resources. This is the natural equality of mankind; and this the Golden Rule requires us to admit, defend, and maintain. “WHY DO YE NOT UNDERSTAND MY SPEECH; EVEN BECAUSE YE CANNOT HEAR MY WORD.” They strangely misunderstand and grossly misrepresent this doctrine, who charge upon it the absurdities and mischiefs which any “levelling system” cannot but produce. In all its bearings, tendencies, and effects, it is directly contrary and powerfully hostile to any such system. EQUALITY OF RIGHTS, the doctrine asserts; and this necessarily opens the way for variety of condition. In other words, every child of Adam has, from the Creator, the inalienable right of wielding, within reasonable limits, his own powers, and employing his own resources, according to his own choice;—the right, while he respects his social relations, to promote as he will his own welfare. But mark—HIS OWN powers and resources, and NOT ANOTHER’S, are thus inalienably put under his control. The Creator makes every man free, in whatever he may do, to exert HIMSELF, and not another. Here no man may lawfully cripple or embarrass another. The feeble may not hinder the strong, nor may the strong crush the feeble. Every man may make HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 the most of himself, in his own proper sphere. Now, as in the constitutional endowments; and natural opportunities, and lawful acquisitions of mankind, infinite variety prevails, so in exerting each HIMSELF, in his own sphere, according to his own choice, the variety of human condition can be little less than infinite. Thus equality of rights opens the way for variety of condition. But with all this variety of make, means, and condition, considered individually, the children of Adam are bound together by strong ties which can never be dissolved. They are mutually united by the social of their nature. Hence mutual dependence and mutual claims. While each is inalienably entitled to assert and enjoy his own personality as a man, each sustains to all and all to each, various relations. While each owns and honors the individual, all are to own and honor the social of their nature. Now, the Golden Rule distinctly recognizes, lays its requisitions upon, and extends its obligations to, the whole nature of man, in his individual capacities and social relations. What higher honor could it do to man, as an individual, than to constitute him the judge, by whose decision, when fairly rendered, all the claims of his fellows should be authoritatively and definitely disposed of? “Whatsoever YE WOULD” have done to you, so do ye to others. Every member of the family of Adam, placing himself in the position here pointed out, is competent and authorized to pass judgment on all the cases in social life in which he may be concerned. Could higher responsibilities or greater confidence be reposed in men individually? And then, how are their claims upon each other herein magnified! What inherent worth and solid dignity are ascribed to the social of their nature! In every man with whom I may have to do, I am to recognize the presence of another self, whose case I am to make my own. And thus I am to dispose of whatever claims he may urge upon me. Thus, in accordance with the Golden Rule, mankind are naturally brought, in the voluntary use of their powers and resources, to promote each other’s welfare. As his contribution to this great object, it is the inalienable birthright of every child of Adam, to consecrate whatever he may possess. With exalted powers and large resources, he has a natural claim to a correspondent field of effort. If his “abilities” are small, his task must be easy and his burden light. Thus the Golden Rule requires mankind mutually to serve each other. In this service, each is to exert himself—employ his own powers, lay out his own resources, improve his own opportunities. A division of labor is the natural result. One is remarkable for his intellectual endowments and acquisitions; another, for his wealth; and a third, for power and skill in using his muscles. Such attributes, endlessly varied and diversified, proceed from the basis of a common character, by virtue of which all men and each—one as truly as another—are entitled, as a birthright, to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Each and all, one as well as another, may choose his own modes of contributing his share to the general welfare, in which his own is involved and identified. Under one great law of mutual dependence and mutual responsibility, all are placed—the strong as well as the weak, the rich as much as the poor, the learned no less than the unlearned. All bring their wares, the products of their enterprise, skill and industry, to HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 the same market, where mutual exchanges are freely effected. The fruits of muscular exertion procure the fruits of mental effort. John serves Thomas with his hands, and Thomas serves John with his money. Peter wields the axe for James, and James wields the pen for Peter. Moses, Joshua, and Caleb, employ their wisdom, courage, and experience, in the service of the community, and the community serve Moses, Joshua, and Caleb, in furnishing them with food and raiment, and making them partakers of the general prosperity. And all this by mutual understanding and voluntary arrangement. And all this according to the Golden Rule. What then becomes of slavery—a system of arrangements in which one man treats his fellow, not as another self, but as a thing—a chattel—an article of merchandize, which is not to be consulted in any disposition which may be made of it;—a system which is built on the annihilation of the attributes of our common nature—in which man doth to others what he would sooner die than have done to himself? The Golden Rule and slavery are mutually subversive of each other. If one stands, the other must fall. The one strikes at the very root of the other. The Golden Rule aims at the abolition of THE RELATION ITSELF, in which slavery consists. It lays its demands upon every thing within the scope of human action. To “whatever MEN DO.” it extends its authority. And the relation itself, in which slavery consists, is the work of human hands. It is what men have done to each other—contrary to nature and most injurious to the general welfare. This RELATION, therefore, the Golden Rule condemns. Wherever its authority prevails, this relation must be annihilated. Mutual service and slavery—like light and darkness, life and death—are directly opposed to, and subversive of, each other. The one the Golden Rule cannot endure; the other it requires, honors, and blesses. “LOVE WORKETH NO ILL TO HIS NEIGHBOR.” Like unto the Golden Rule is the second great commandment— “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” “A certain lawyer,” who seems to have been fond of applying the doctrine of limitation of human obligations, once demanded of the Savior, within what limits the meaning of the word “neighbor” ought to be confined. “And who is my neighbor?” The parable of the good Samaritan set that matter in the clearest light, and made it manifest and certain, that every man whom we could reach with our sympathy and assistance, was our neighbor, entitled to the same regard which we cherished for ourselves. Consistently with such obligations, can slavery, as a RELATION, be maintained? Is it then a labor of love— such love as we cherish for ourselves—to strip a child of Adam of all the prerogatives and privileges which are his inalienable birthright? To obscure his reason, crush his will, and trample on his immortality?—To strike home to the inmost of his being, and break the heart of his heart?—To thrust him out of the human family, and dispose of him as a chattel—as a thing in the hands of an owner, a beast under the lash of a driver? All this, apart from every thing incidental and extraordinary, belongs to the RELATION, in which slavery, as such, consists. All this—well fed or ill fed, underwrought or overwrought, clothed or naked, caressed or kicked, whether idle songs break from his thoughtless tongue or “tears be his meat night and day,” fondly cherished or cruelly murdered;—all this ENTERS VITALLY INTO THE RELATION ITSELF, by which every slave, AS A SLAVE, is set apart from the rest of HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 the human family. Is it an exercise of love, to place our “neighbor” under the crushing weight, the killing power, of such a relation?—to apply the murderous steel to the very vitals of his humanity? “YE THEREFORE APPLAUD AND DELIGHT IN THE DEEDS OF YOUR FATHERS; FOR THEY KILLED THEM, AND YE BUILD THEIR SEPULCHRES.”73 The slaveholder may eagerly and loudly deny, that any such thing is chargeable upon him. He may confidently and earnestly allege, that he is not responsible for the state of society in which he is placed. Slavery was established before he began to breathe. It was his inheritance. His slaves are his property by birth or testament. But why will he thus deceive himself? Why will he permit the cunning and rapacious spiders, which in the very sanctuary of ethics and religion are laboriously weaving webs from their own bowels, to catch him with their wretched sophistries?—and devour him, body, soul, and substance? Let him know, as he must one day with shame and terror own, that whoever holds slaves is himself responsible for the relation, into which, whether reluctantly or willingly, he thus enters. The relation cannot be forced upon him. What though Elizabeth countenanced John Hawkins in stealing the natives of Africa?—what though James, and Charles, and George, opened a market for them in the English colonies?—what though modern Dracos have “framed mischief by law,” in legalizing man-stealing and slaveholding?—what though your ancestors, in preparing to go “to their own place,” constituted you the owner of the “neighbors” whom they had used as cattle?—what of all this, and as much more like this, as can be drawn from the history of that dreadful process by which men are “deemed, held, taken, reputed, and adjudged in law to be chattels personal?” Can all this force you to put the cap upon the climax—to clinch the nail by doing that, without which nothing in the work of slave-making would be attempted? The slaveholder is the soul of the whole system. Without him, the chattel principle is a lifeless abstraction. Without him, charters, and markets, and laws, and testaments, are empty names. And does he think to escape responsibility? Why, kidnappers, and soul-drivers, and law-makers, are nothing but his agents. He is the guilty principal. Let him look to it. But what can he do? Do? Keep his hands off his “neighbor’s” throat. Let him refuse to finish and ratify the process by which the chattel principle is carried into effect. Let him refuse, in the face of derision, and reproach, and opposition. Though poverty should fasten its bony hand upon him, and persecution shoot forth its forked tongue; whatever may betide him—scorn, flight, flames—let him promptly and steadfastly refuse. Better the spite and hate of men than the wrath of Heaven! “If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee; for it is profitable for thee, that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.” Professor Stewart admits, that the Golden Rule and the second great commandment “decide against the theory of slavery, as being in itself right.” What, then, is their relation to the particular precepts, institutions, and usages, which are authorized and enjoined in the New Testament? Of all these, they are the summary expression—the comprehensive description. No 73. You join with them in their bloody work. They murder, and you bury the victims. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 precept in the Bible, enforcing our mutual obligations, can be more or less than the application of these injunctions to specific relations or particular occasions and conditions. Neither in the Old Testament nor the New, do prophets teach or laws enjoin, any thing which the Golden Rule and the second great command do not contain. Whatever they forbid, no other precept can require; and whatever they require, no other precept can forbid. What, then, does he attempt, who turns over the sacred pages to find something in the way of permission or command, which may set him free from the obligations of the Golden Rule? What must his objects, methods, spirit be, to force him to enter upon such inquiries?—to compel him to search the Bible for such a purpose? Can he have good intentions, or be well employed? Is his frame of mind adapted to the study of the Bible?—to make its meaning plain and welcome? What must he think of God, to search his word in quest of gross inconsistencies, and grave contradictions! Inconsistent legislation in Jehovah! Contradictory commands! Permissions at war with prohibitions! General requirements at variance with particular arrangements! What must be the moral character of any institution which the Golden Rule decides against?—which the second great command condemns? It cannot but be wicked, whether newly established or long maintained. However it may be shaped, turned, colored—under every modification and at all times—wickedness must be its proper character. It must be, IN ITSELF, apart from its circumstances, IN ITS ESSENCE, apart from its incidents, SINFUL. “THINK NOT TO SAY WITHIN YOURSELVES, WE HAVE ABRAHAM FOR OUR FATHER.” In disposing of those precepts and exhortations which have a specific bearing upon the subject of slavery, it is greatly important, nay, absolutely essential, that we look forth upon the objects around us from the right post of observation. Our stand we must take at some central point, amidst the general maxims and fundamental precepts, the known circumstances and characteristic arrangements, of primitive Christianity. Otherwise, wrong views and false conclusions will be the result of our studies. We cannot, therefore, be too earnest in trying to catch the general features and prevalent spirit of the New Testament institutions and arrangements. For to what conclusions must we come, if we unwittingly pursue our inquiries under the bias of the prejudice, that the general maxims of social life which now prevail in this country, were current, on the authority of the Savior, among the primitive Christians! That, for instance, wealth, station, talents, are the standard by which our claims upon, and our regard for, others, should be modified?—That those who are pinched by poverty, worn by disease, tasked in menial labors, or marked by features offensive to the taste of the artificial and capricious, are to be excluded from those refreshing and elevating influences which intelligence and refinement may be expected to exert; that thus they are to constitute a class by themselves, and to be made to know and keep their place at the very bottom of society? Or, what if we should think and speak of the primitive Christians, as if they had the same pecuniary resources as Heaven has lavished upon the American churches?—as if they were as remarkable for affluence, elegance, and splendor? Or, as if they had as high a position and as extensive an influence in politics HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 and literature?—having directly or indirectly, the control over the high places of learning and of power? If we should pursue our studies and arrange our arguments—if we should explain words and interpret language—under such a bias, what must inevitably be the results? What would be the worth of our conclusions? What confidence could be reposed in any instruction we might undertake to furnish? And is not this the way in which the advocates and apologists of slavery dispose of the bearing which primitive Christianity has upon it? They first ascribe, unwittingly, perhaps, to the primitive churches; the character, relations, and condition of American Christianity, and amidst the deep darkness and strange confusion thus produced, set about interpreting the language and explaining the usages of the New Testament! “SO THAT YE ARE WITHOUT EXCUSE.” Among the lessons of instruction which our Savior imparted, having a general bearing on the subject of slavery, that in which he sets up the true standard of greatness, deserves particular attention. In repressing the ambition of his disciples, he held up before them the methods by which alone healthful aspirations for eminence could be gratified, and thus set the elements of true greatness in the clearest light. “Ye know, that they which are accounted to rule over the Gentiles, exercise lordship over them; and their great ones exercise authority upon them. But so shall it not be among you; but whosoever will be great among you, shall be your minister; and whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all.” In other words, through the selfishness and pride of mankind, the maxim widely prevails in the world, that it is the privilege, prerogative, and mark of greatness, TO EXACT SERVICE; that our superiority to others, while it authorizes us to relax the exertion of our own powers, gives us a fair title to the use of theirs; that “might,” while it exempts us from serving, “gives the right” to be served. The instructions of the Savior open the way to greatness for us in the opposite direction. Superiority to others, in whatever it may consist, gives us a claim to a wider field of exertion, and demands of us a larger amount of service. We can be great only as we are useful. And “might gives right” to bless our fellow men, by improving every opportunity and employing every faculty, affectionately, earnestly, and unweariedly, in their service. Thus the greater the man, the more active, faithful, and useful the servant. The Savior has himself taught us how this doctrine must be applied. He bids us improve every opportunity and employ every power, even through the most menial services, in blessing the human family. And to make this lesson shine upon our understandings and move our hearts, he embodied in it a most instructive and attractive example. On a memorable occasion, and just before his crucifixion, he discharged for his disciples the most menial of all offices—taking, in washing their feet, the place of the lowest servant. He took great pains to make them understand, that only by imitating this example could they honor their relations to him as their Master; that thus only would they find themselves blessed. By what possibility could slavery exist under the influence of such a lesson, set home by such an example? Was it while washing the disciples’ feet, that our Savior authorized one man to make a chattel of another? HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 To refuse to provide for ourselves by useful labor, the apostle Paul teaches us to regard as a grave offence. After reminding the Thessalonian Christians, that in addition to all his official exertions he had with his own muscles earned his own bread, he calls their attention to an arrangement which was supported by apostolical authority, “that if any would not work, neither should he eat.” In the most earnest and solemn manner, and as a minister of the Lord Jesus Christ, he commanded and exhorted those who neglected useful labor, “with quietness to work and eat their own bread.” What must be the bearing of all this upon slavery? Could slavery be maintained where every man eat the bread which himself had earned?—where idleness was esteemed so great a crime, as to be reckoned worthy of starvation as a punishment? How could unrequited labor be exacted, or used, or needed? Must not every one in such a community contribute his share to the general welfare?—and mutual service and mutual support be the natural result? The same apostle, in writing to another church, describes the true source whence the means of liberality ought to be derived. “Let him that stole steal no more; but rather let him labor, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.” Let this lesson, as from the lips of Jehovah, be proclaimed throughout the length and breadth of South Carolina. Let it be universally welcomed and reduced to practice. Let thieves give up what they had stolen to the lawful proprietors, cease stealing, and begin at once to “labor, working with their hands,” for necessary and charitable purposes. Could slavery, in such a case, continue to exist? Surely not! Instead of exacting unpaid services from others, every man would be busy, exerting himself not only to provide for his own wants, but also to accumulate funds, “that he might have to give to” the needy. Slavery must disappear, root and branch, at once and forever. In describing the source whence his ministers should expect their support, the Savior furnished a general principle, which has an obvious and powerful bearing on the subject of slavery. He would have them remember, while exerting themselves for the benefit of their fellow men, that “the laborer is worthy of his hire.” He has thus united wages with work. Whoever renders the one is entitled to the other. And this manifestly according to a mutual understanding and a voluntary arrangement. For the doctrine that I may force you to work for me for whatever consideration I may please to fix upon, fairly opens the way for the doctrine, that you, in turn, may force me to render you whatever wages you may choose to exact for any services you may see fit to render. Thus slavery, even as involuntary servitude, is cut up by the root. Even the Princeton professor seems to regard it as a violation of the principle which unites work with wages. The apostle James applies this principle to the claims of manual laborers—of those who hold the plough and thrust in the sickle. He calls the rich lordlings who exacted sweat and withheld wages, to “weeping and howling,” assuring them that the complaints of the injured laborer had entered into the ear of the Lord of Hosts, and that, as a result of their oppression, their riches were corrupted, and their garments moth-eaten; their gold and silver were cankered; that the rust of them should HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 be a witness against them, and should eat their flesh as it were fire; that, in one word, they had heaped treasures together for the last days, when “miseries were coming upon them,” the prospect of which might well drench them in tears and fill them with terror. If these admonitions and warnings were heeded there, would not “the South” break forth into “weeping and wailing, and gnashing of teeth?” What else are its rich men about, but withholding by a system of fraud, his wages from the laborer, who is wearing himself out under the impulse of fear, in cultivating their fields and producing their luxuries! Encouragement and support do they derive from James, in maintaining the “peculiar institution” which they call patriarchal, and boast of as the “corner-stone” of the republic? In the New Testament, we have, moreover, the general injunction, “Honor all men.” Under this broad precept, every form of humanity may justly claim protection and respect. The invasion of any human right must do dishonor to humanity, and be a transgression of this command. How then, in the light of such obligations, must slavery be regarded? Are those men honored, who are rudely excluded from a place in the human family, and shut up to the deep degradation and nameless horrors of chattelship? Can they be held as slaves, and at the same time be honored as men? How far, in obeying this command, we are to go, we may infer from the admonitions and instructions which James applies to the arrangements and usages of religious assemblies. Into these he can not allow “respect of persons” to enter. “My brethren,” he exclaims, “have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons. For if there come unto your assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel; and there come in also a poor man in vile raiment; and ye have respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him, sit thou here in a good place; and say to the poor, stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool; are ye not then partial in yourselves, and are become judges of evil thoughts?” If ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin, and are convinced of the law as transgressors. On this general principle, then, religious assemblies ought to be regulated—that every man is to be estimated, not according to his circumstances—not according to anything incidental to his condition; but according to his moral worth—according to the essential features and vital elements of his character. Gold rings and gay clothing, as they qualify no man for, can entitle no man to, a “good place” in the church. Nor can the “vile raiment of the poor man,” fairly exclude him from any sphere, however exalted, which his heart and head may fit him to fill. To deny this, in theory or practice, is to degrade a man below a thing; for what are gold rings, or gay clothing, or vile raiment, but things, “which perish with the using?” And this must be “to commit sin, and be convinced of the law as transgressor.” In slavery, we have “respect of persons,” strongly marked, and reduced to system. Here men are despised not merely for “the vile raiment,” which may cover their scarred bodies. This is bad enough. But the deepest contempt of humanity here grows out of birth or complexion. Vile raiment may be, often is, the result of indolence, or improvidence, or extravagance. It may be, often is, an index of character. But how can I be responsible for the incidents of my birth?—how for my complexion? To despise or honor me for these, is to be guilty of “respect of persons” in HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 its grossest form, and with its worst effects. It is to reward or punish me for what I had nothing to do with; for which, therefore, I cannot, without the greatest injustice, be held responsible. It is to poison the very fountains of justice, by confounding all moral distinctions. What, then, so far as the authority of the New Testament is concerned, becomes of slavery, which cannot be maintained under any form nor for a single moment, without “respect of persons” the most aggravated and unendurable? And what would become of that most pitiful, silly, and wicked arrangement in so many of our churches, in which worshippers of a dark complexion are to be sent up to the negro pew?74 Nor are we permitted to confine this principle to religious assemblies. It is to pervade social life everywhere. Even where plenty, intelligence and refinement, diffuse their brightest rays, the poor are to be welcomed with especial favor. “Then said he to him that bade him, when thou makest a dinner or a supper, call not thy friends, nor thy brethren, neither thy kinsmen, nor thy rich neighbors, lest they also bid thee again, and a recompense be made thee. But when thou makest a feast, call the poor and the maimed, the lame and the blind, and thou shalt be blessed; for they cannot recompense thee, but thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just.” In the high places of social life then—in the parlor, the drawing-room, the saloon—special reference should be had, in every arrangement, to the comfort and improvement of those who are least able to provide for the cheapest rites of hospitality. For these, ample accommodations must be made, whatever may become of our kinsmen and rich neighbors. And for this good reason, that while such occasions signify little to the latter, to the former they are pregnant with good—raising their drooping spirits, cheering their desponding hearts, inspiring them with life, and hope, and joy. The rich and the poor thus meeting joyfully together, cannot but mutually contribute to each other’s benefit; the rich will be led to moderation, sobriety, and circumspection, and the poor to industry, providence, and contentment. The recompense must be great and sure. A most beautiful and instructive commentary on the text in which these things are taught, the Savior furnished in his own conduct. He freely mingled with those who were reduced to the very bottom of society. At the tables of the outcasts of society he did not hesitate to be a cheerful guest, surrounded by publicans and sinners. And when flouted and reproached by smooth and lofty ecclesiastics, as an ultraist and leveler, he explained and justified himself by observing, that he had only done what his office demanded. It was his to seek the lost, to heal the sick, to pity the wretched;—in a word, to bestow just such benefits as the various necessities of mankind made appropriate and welcome. In his great heart, there was room enough for those who had been excluded from the sympathy of little souls. In its spirit and design, the gospel overlooked none—least of all, the outcasts of a selfish world. Can slavery, however modified, be consistent with such a 74. In Carlyle’s REVIEW OF THE MEMOIRS OF MIRABEAU, we have the following anecdote illustrative of the character of a “grandmother” of the Count. “Fancy the dame Mirabeau sailing stately towards the church font; another dame striking in to take precedence of her; the dame Mirabeau despatching this latter with a box on the ear, and these words, ‘Here, as in the army, THE BAGGAGE goes last!’” Let those who justify the negro-pew arrangement, throw a stone at this proud woman—if they dare. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 gospel?—a gospel which requires us, even amidst the highest forms of social life, to exert ourselves to raise the depressed by giving our warmest sympathies to those who have the smallest share in the favor of the world? Those who are in “bonds” are set before us as deserving an especial remembrance. Their claims upon us are described as a modification of the Golden Rule—as one of the many forms to which its obligations are reducible. To them we are to extend the same affectionate regard as we would covet for ourselves, if the chains upon their limbs were fastened upon ours. To the benefits of this precept, the enslaved have a natural claim of the greatest strength. The wrongs they suffer spring from a persecution which can hardly be surpassed in malignancy. Their birth and complexion are the occasion of the insults and injuries which they can neither endure nor escape. It is for the work of God, and not their own deserts, that they are loaded with chains. This is persecution. Can I regard the slave as another self—can I put myself in his place—and be indifferent to his wrongs? Especially, can I, thus affected, take sides with the oppressor? Could I, in such a state of mind as the gospel requires me to cherish, reduce him to slavery or keep him in bonds? Is not the precept under hand naturally subversive of every system and every form of slavery? The general descriptions of the church, which are found here and there in the New Testament, are highly instructive in their bearing on the subject of slavery. In one connection, the following words meet the eye: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”75 Here we have— 1. A clear and strong description of the doctrine of human equality. “Ye are all ONE;”—so much alike, so truly placed on common ground, all wielding each his own powers with such freedom, that one is the same as another. 2. This doctrine, self-evident in the light of reason, is affirmed on divine authority. “IN CHRIST JESUS, ye are all one.” The natural equality of the human family is a part of the gospel. For— 3. All the human family are included in this description. Whether men or women, whether bond or free, whether Jews or Gentiles, all are alike entitled to the benefit of this doctrine. Whether Christianity prevails, the artificial distinctions which grow out of birth, condition, sex, are done away. Natural distinctions are not destroyed. They are recognized, hallowed, confirmed. The gospel does not abolish the sexes, forbid a division of labor, or extinguish patriotism. It takes woman from beneath the feet, and places her by the side of man; delivers the manual laborer from “the yoke,” and gives him wages for his work; and brings the Jew and the Gentile to embrace each other with fraternal love and confidence. Thus it raises all to a common level, gives to each the free use of his own powers and resources, binds all together in one dear and loving brotherhood. Such, according to the description of the apostle, was the influence, and such the effect of primitive Christianity. “Behold the picture!” Is it like American slavery,
75. GALATIANS iii. 28. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 which, in all its tendencies and effects, is destructive of all oneness among brethren? “Where the spirit of the Lord is,” exclaims the same apostle, with his eye upon the condition and relations of the church, “where the spirit of the Lord is, THERE IS LIBERTY.” Where, then, may we reverently recognize the presence, and bow before the manifested power, of this spirit? There, where the laborer may not choose how he shall be employed!—in what way his wants shall be supplied!—with whom he shall associate!—who shall have the fruit of his exertions! There, where he is not free to enjoy his wife and children! There, where his body and his soul, his very “destiny,”76 are placed altogether beyond his control! There, where every power is crippled, every energy blasted, every hope crushed! There, where in all the relations and concerns of life, he is legally treated as if he had nothing to do with the laws of reason, the light of immortality, or the exercise of will! Is the spirit of the Lord there, where liberty is decried and denounced, mocked at and spit upon, betrayed and crucified! In the midst of a church which justified slavery, which derived its support from slavery, which carried on its enterprises by means of slavery, would the apostle have found the fruits of the Spirit of the Lord! Let that Spirit exert his influences, and assert his authority, and wield his power, and slavery must vanish at once and for ever. In more than one connection, the apostle James describes Christianity as “the law of liberty.” It is, in other words, the law under which liberty cannot but live and flourish—the law in which liberty is clearly defined, strongly asserted, and well protected. As the law of liberty, how can it be consistent with the law of slavery? The presence and the power of this law are felt wherever the light of reason shines. They are felt in the uneasiness and conscious degradation of the slave, and in the shame and remorse which the master betrays in his reluctant and desperate efforts to defend himself. This law it is which has armed human nature against the oppressor. Wherever it is obeyed, “every yoke is broken.” In these references to the New Testament we have a general description of the primitive church, and the principles on which it was founded and fashioned. These principles bear the same relation to Christian history as to Christian character, since the former is occupied with the development of the latter. What then is Christian character but Christian principle realized, acted out, bodied forth, and animated? Christian principle is the soul, of which Christian character is the expression—the manifestation. It comprehends in itself, as a living seed, such Christian character, under every form, modification, and complexion. The former is, therefore, the test and interpreter of the latter. In the light of Christian principle, and in that light only we can judge of and explain Christian character. Christian history is occupied with the forms, modifications, and various aspects of Christian character. The facts which are there recorded serve to show, how Christian principle has fared in this world—how it has appeared, what it has done, how it has been treated. In these facts we have the various institutions, usages, designs, doings, 76. “The legislature (of South Carolina) from time to time, has passed many restricted and penal acts, with a view to bring under direct control and subjection the DESTINY of the black population.” See the REMONSTRANCE of James S. Pope and 352 others against home missionary efforts for the benefit of the enslaved—a most instructive paper. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 and sufferings of the church of Christ. And all these have of necessity, the closest relation to Christian principle. They are the production of its power. Through them, it is revealed and manifested. In its light, they are to be studied, explained, and understood. Without it they must be as unintelligible and insignificant as the letters of a book scattered on the wind. In the principles of Christianity, then, we have a comprehensive and faithful account of its objects, institutions, and usages— of how it must behave, and act, and suffer, in a world of sin and misery. For between the principles which God reveals, on the one hand, and the precepts he enjoins, the institutions he establishes, and the usages he approves, on the other, there must be consistency and harmony. Otherwise we impute to God what we must abhor in man—practice at war with principle. Does the Savior, then, lay down the principle that our standing in the church must depend upon the habits formed within us, of readily and heartily subserving the welfare of others; and permit us in practice to invade the rights and trample on the happiness of our fellows, by reducing them to slavery. Does he, in principle and by example, require us to go all lengths in rendering mutual service, or comprehending offices that most menial, as well as the most honorable; and permit us in practice to EXACT service of our brethren, as if they were nothing better than “articles of merchandize!” Does he require us in principle “to work with quietness and eat our own bread;” and permit us in practice to wrest from our brethren the fruits of their unrequited toil? Does he in principle require us, abstaining from every form of theft, to employ our powers in useful labor, not only to provide for ourselves but also to relieve the indigence of others; and permit us in practice, abstaining from every form of labor, to enrich and aggrandize ourselves with the fruits of man-stealing? Does he require us in principle to regard “the laborer as worthy of his hire”; and permit us in practice to defraud him of his wages? Does he require us in principle to honor ALL men; and permit us in practice to treat multitudes like cattle? Does he in principle prohibit “respect of persons;” and permit us in practice to place the feet of the rich upon the necks of the poor? Does he in principle require us to sympathize with the bondman as another self; and permit us in practice to leave him unpitied and unhelped in the hands of the oppressor? In principle, “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty;” in practice, is slavery the fruit of the Spirit? In principle, Christianity is the law of liberty; in practice, it is the law of slavery? Bring practice in these various respects into harmony with principle, and what becomes of slavery? And if, where the divine government is concerned, practice is the expression of principle, and principle the standard and interpreter of practice, such harmony cannot but be maintained and must be asserted. In studying, therefore, fragments of history and sketches of biography—in disposing of references to institutions, usages, and facts in the New Testament, this necessary harmony between principle and practice in the government of God, should be continually present to the thoughts of the interpreter. Principles assert what practice must be. Whatever principle condemns, God condemns. It belongs to those weeds of the dung-hill which, planted by “an enemy,” his hand will assuredly “root up.” It is most certain then, that if slavery prevailed in the first ages of Christianity, it could nowhere have prevailed under its influence and with its HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 sanction. * * * * * The condition in which in its efforts to bless mankind, the primitive church was placed, must have greatly assisted the early Christians in understanding and applying the principles of the gospel. Their Master was born in great obscurity, lived in the deepest poverty, and died the most ignominious death. The place of his residence, his familiarity with the outcasts of society, his welcoming assistance and support from female hands, his casting his beloved mother, when he hung upon the cross, upon the charity of a disciple—such things evince the depth of his poverty, and show to what derision and contempt he must have been exposed. Could such an one, “despised and rejected of men— a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,” play the oppressor, or smile on those who made merchandize of the poor! And what was the history of the apostles, but an illustration of the doctrine, that “it is enough for the disciple, that he be as his Master?” Were they lordly ecclesiastics, abounding with wealth, shining with splendor, bloated with luxury! Were they ambitious of distinction, fleecing, and trampling, and devouring “the flocks,” that they themselves might “have the pre- eminence!” Were they slaveholding bishops! Or did they derive their support from the wages of iniquity and the price of blood! Can such inferences be drawn from the account of their condition, which the most gifted and enterprising of their number has put upon record? “Even unto this present hour, we both hunger, and thirst, and are naked, and are buffetted, and have no certain dwelling place, and labor working with our own hands. Being reviled, we bless; being persecuted, we suffer it; being defamed, we entreat; we are made as the filth of the world, and are THE OFFSCOURING OF ALL THINGS unto this day.”77 Are these the men who practised or countenanced slavery? With such a temper, they WOULD NOT; in such circumstances, they COULD NOT. Exposed to “tribulation, distress, and persecution;” subject to famine and nakedness, to peril and the sword; “killed all the day long; accounted as sheep for the slaughter,”78 they would have made but a sorry figure at the great- house or slave-market. Nor was the condition of the brethren, generally, better than that of the apostles. The position of the apostles doubtless entitled them to the strongest opposition, the heaviest reproaches, the fiercest persecution. But derision and contempt must have been the lot of Christians generally. Surely we cannot think so ill of primitive Christianity as to suppose that believers, generally, refused to share in the trials and sufferings of their leaders; as to suppose that while the leaders submitted to manual labor, to buffeting, to be reckoned the filth of the world, to be accounted as sheep for the slaughter, his brethren lived in affluence, ease, and honor! despising manual labor and living upon the sweat of unrequited toil! But on this point we are not left to mere inference and conjecture. The apostle Paul in the plainest language explains the ordination of Heaven. “But God hath CHOSEN the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath CHOSEN the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and 77. 1 CORINTHIANS iv. 11-13. 78. ROMANS viii. 35, 36. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 base things of the world, and things which are despised hath God CHOSEN, yea, and THINGS WHICH ARE NOT, to bring to nought things that are.”79 Here we may well notice, 1. That it was not by accident, that the primitive churches were made up of such elements, but the result of the DIVINE CHOICE— an arrangement of His wise and gracious Providence. The inference is natural, that this ordination was co-extensive with the triumphs of Christianity. It was nothing new or strange, that Jehovah had concealed his glory “from the wise and prudent, and had revealed it unto babes,” or that “the common people heard him gladly,” while “not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, had been called.” 2. The description of character, which the apostle records, could be adapted only to what are reckoned the very dregs of humanity. The foolish and the weak, the base and the contemptible, in the estimation of worldly pride and wisdom—these were they whose broken hearts were reached, and moulded, and refreshed by the gospel; these were they whom the apostle took to his bosom as his own brethren. That slaves abounded at Corinth, may easily be admitted. They have a place in the enumeration of elements of which, according to the apostle, the church there was composed. The most remarkable class found there, consisted of “THINGS WHICH ARE NOT”—mere nobodies, not admitted to the privileges of men, but degraded to a level with “goods and chattels;” of whom no account was made in such arrangements of society as subserved the improvement, and dignity, and happiness of MANKIND. How accurately the description applies to those who are crushed under the chattel principle! The reference which the apostle makes to the “deep poverty of the churches of Macedonia,”80 and this to stir up the sluggish liberality of his Corinthian brethren, naturally leaves the impression, that the latter were by no means inferior to the former in the gifts of Providence. But, pressed with want and pinched by poverty as were the believers in “Macedonia and Achaia, it pleased them to make a certain contribution for the poor saints which were at Jerusalem.”81 Thus it appears, that Christians everywhere were familiar with contempt and indigence, so much so, that the apostle would dissuade such as had no families from assuming the responsibilities of the conjugal relation!82 Now, how did these good people treat each other? Did the few among them, who were esteemed wise, mighty, or noble, exert their influence and employ their power in oppressing the weak, in disposing of the “things that are not,” as marketable commodities!—kneeling with them in prayer in the evening, and putting them up at auction the next morning! Did the church sell any of the members to swell the “certain contribution for the poor saints at Jerusalem!” Far other wise—as far as possible! In those Christian communities where the influence of the apostles was most powerful, and where the arrangements drew forth their highest commendations, believers treated each other
79. 1 CORINTHIANS i. 27, 28. 80. 2 CORINTHIANS viii. 2. 81. ROMANS xviii. 18-25. 82. CORINTHIANS vii. 26, 27. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 as brethren, in the strongest sense of that sweet word. So warm was their mutual love, so strong the public spirit, so open- handed and abundant the general liberality, that they are set forth as “having all things common.”83 Slaves and their holders here? Neither the one nor the other could, in that relation to each other, have breathed such an atmosphere. The appeal of the kneeling bondman, “Am I not a man and a brother,” must here have met with a prompt and powerful response. The tests by which our Savior tries the character of his professed disciples, shed a strong light upon the genius of the gospel. In one connection,84 an inquirer demands of the Savior, “What good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?” After being reminded of the obligations which his social nature imposed upon him, he ventured, while claiming to be free from guilt in his relations to mankind, to demand, “what lack I yet?” The radical deficiency under which his character labored, the Savior was not long or obscure in pointing out. “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shall have treasure in heaven; and come and follow me.” On this passage it is natural to suggest— 1. That we have here a test of universal application. The rectitude and benevolence of our Savior’s character forbid us to suppose, that he would subject this inquirer, especially as he was highly amiable, to a trial, where eternal life was at stake, peculiarly severe. Indeed, the test seems to have been only a fair exposition of the second great command, and of course it must be applicable to all who are placed under the obligations of that precept. Those who cannot stand this test, as their character is radically imperfect and unsound, must, with the inquirer to whom our Lord applied it, be pronounced unfit for the kingdom of heaven. 2. The least that our Savior can in that passage be understood to demand is, that we disinterestedly and heartily devote ourselves to the welfare of mankind, “the poor” especially. We are to put ourselves on a level with them, as we must do “in selling that we have” for their benefit—in other words, in employing our powers and resources to elevate their character, condition, and prospects. This our Savior did; and if we refuse to enter into sympathy and co-operation with him, how can we be his followers? Apply this test to the slaveholder. Instead of “selling that he hath” for the benefit of the poor, he BUYS THE POOR, and exacts their sweat with stripes, to enable him to “clothe himself in purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously every day;” or, HE SELLS THE POOR to support the gospel and convert the heathen! What, in describing the scenes of the final judgment, does our Savior teach us? By what standard must our character be estimated, and the retributions of eternity be awarded? A standard, which both the righteous and the wicked will be surprised to see erected. From the “offscouring of all things,” the meanest specimen of humanity will be selected—a “stranger” in the hands of the oppressor, naked, hungry, sickly; and this stranger, placed in the midst of the assembled universe, by the side of the sovereign Judge, will be openly acknowledged as his
83. ACTS iv. 32. 84. LUKE xviii. 18-25. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 representative. “Glory, honor, and immortality,” will be the reward of those who had recognized and cheered their Lord through his outraged poor. And tribulation, anguish, and despair, will seize on “every soul of man” who had neglected or despised them. But whom, within the limits of our country, are we to regard especially as the representatives of our final Judge? Every feature of the Savior’s picture finds its appropriate original in our enslaved countrymen. 1. They are the LEAST of his brethren. 2. They are subject to thirst and hunger, unable to command a cup of water or a crumb of bread. 3. They are exposed to wasting sickness, without the ability to procure a nurse or employ a physician. 4. They are emphatically “in prison,” restrained by chains, goaded with whips, tasked, and under keepers. Not a wretch groans in any cell of the prisons of our country, who is exposed to a confinement so vigorous and heartbreaking as the law allows theirs to be continually and permanently. 5. And then they are emphatically, and peculiarly, and exclusively, STRANGERS—strangers in the land which gave them birth. Whom else do we constrain to remain aliens in the midst of our free institutions? The Welch, the Swiss, the Irish? The Jews even? Alas, it is the negro only, who may not strike his roots into our soil. Every where we have conspired to treat him as a stranger—every where he is forced to feel himself a stranger. In the stage and steamboat, in the parlor and at our tables, in the scenes of business and in the scenes of amusement—even in the church of God and at the communion table, he is regarded as a stranger. The intelligent and religious are generally disgusted and horror-struck at the thought of his becoming identified with the citizens of our republic—so much so, that thousands of them have entered into a conspiracy to send him off “out of sight,” to find a home on a foreign shore!—and justify themselves by openly alleging, that a “single drop” of his blood, in the veins of any human creature, must make him hateful to his fellow citizens!—That nothing but banishment from “our coasts,” can redeem him from the scorn and contempt to which his “stranger” blood has reduced him among his own mother’s children! Who, then, in this land “of milk and honey,” is “hungry and athirst,” but the man from whom the law takes away the last crumb of bread and the smallest drop of water? Who “naked,” but the man whom the law strips of the last rag of clothing? Who “sick,” but the man whom the law deprives of the power of procuring medicine or sending for a physician? Who “in prison,” but the man who, all his life, is under the control of merciless masters and cruel keepers! Who a “stranger,” but the man who is scornfully denied the cheapest courtesies of life—who is treated as an alien in his native country? There is one point in this awful description which deserves particular attention. Those who are doomed to the left hand of HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 the Judge, are not charged with inflicting positive injuries on their helpless, needy, and oppressed brother. Theirs was what is often called negative character. What they had done is not described in the indictment. Their neglect of duty, what they had NOT done, was the ground of their “everlasting punishment.” The representative of their Judge, they had seen a hungered and they gave him no meat, thirsty and they gave him no drink, a stranger and they took him not in, naked and they clothed him not, sick and in prison and they visited him not. In as much as they did NOT yield to the claims of suffering humanity—did NOT exert themselves to bless the meanest of the human family, they were driven away in their wickedness. But what if the indictment had run thus: I was a hungered and ye snatched away the crust which might have saved me from starvation; I was thirsty and ye dashed to the ground the “cup of cold water,” which might have moistened my parched lips; I was a stranger and ye drove me from the hovel which might have sheltered me from the piercing wind; I was sick and ye scourged me to my task; in prison and you sold me for my jail-fees—to what depths of hell must not those who were convicted under such charges be consigned! And what is the history of American slavery but one long indictment, describing under ever-varying forms and hues just such injuries! Nor should it be forgotten, that those who incurred the displeasure of their Judge, took far other views than he, of their own past history. The charges which he brought against them, they heard with great surprise. They were sure that they had never thus turned away from his necessities. Indeed, when had they seen him thus subject to poverty, insult, and oppression? Never. And as to that poor friendless creature, whom they left unpitied and unhelped in the hands of the oppressor, and whom their Judge now presented as his own representative, they never once supposed, that he had any claims on their compassion and assistance. Had they known, that he was destined to so prominent a place at the final judgment, they would have treated him as a human being, in despite of any social, pecuniary, or political considerations. But neither their negative virtue nor their voluntary ignorance could shield them from the penal fire which their selfishness had kindled. Now amidst the general maxims, the leading principles, the “great commandments” of the gospel; amidst its comprehensive descriptions and authorized tests of Christian character, we should take our position in disposing of any particular allusions to such forms and usages of the primitive churches as are supported by divine authority. The latter must be interpreted and understood in the light of the former. But how do the apologists and defenders of slavery proceed? Placing themselves amidst the arrangements and usages which grew out of the corruptions of Christianity, they make these the standard by which the gospel is to be explained and understood! Some Recorder or Justice. without the light of inquiry or the aid of a jury, consigns the negro whom the kidnapper has dragged into his presence to the horrors of slavery. As the poor wretch shrieks and faints, Humanity shudders and demands why such atrocities are endured. Some “priest” or “Levite,” “passing by on the other side,” quite self-possessed and all complacent, reads in reply from his broad phylactery, Paul sent back Onesimus to Philemon! Yes, echoes the negro-hating mob, made up of “gentlemen HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 of property and standing” together with equally gentle-men reeking from the gutter; Yes—Paul sent back Onesimus to Philemon! And Humanity, brow-beaten, stunned with noise and tumult, is pushed aside by the crowd! A fair specimen this of the manner in which modern usages are made to interpret the sacred Scriptures? Of the particular passages in the New Testament on which the apologists for slavery especially rely, the epistle to Philemon first demands our attention. 1. This letter was written by the apostle Paul while a “prisoner of Jesus Christ” at Rome. 2. Philemon was a benevolent and trustworthy member of the church at Colosse, at whose house the disciples of Christ held their assemblies, and who owed his conversion, under God, directly or indirectly to the ministry of Paul. 3. Onesimus was the servant of Philemon; under a relation which it is difficult with accuracy and certainty to define. His condition, though servile, could not have been like that of an American slave; as, in that case, however he might have “wronged” Philemon, he could not also have “owed him ought.”85 The American slave is, according to law, as much the property of his master as any other chattel; and can no more “owe” his master than can a sheep or a horse. The basis of all pecuniary obligations lies in some “value received.” How can “an article of merchandise” stand on this basis and sustain commercial relations to its owner? There is no person to offer or promise. Personality is swallowed up in American slavery! 4. How Onesimus found his way to Rome it is not easy to determine. He and Philemon appear to have parted from each other on ill terms. The general character of Onesimus, certainly, in his relation to Philemon, had been far from attractive, and he seems to have left him without repairing the wrongs he had done him or paying the debts which he owed him. At Rome, by the blessing of God upon the exertions of the apostle, he was brought to reflection and repentance. 5. In reviewing his history in the light of Christian truth, he became painfully aware of the injuries he had inflicted on Philemon. He longed for an opportunity for frank confession and full restitution. Having, however, parted with Philemon on ill terms, he knew not how to appear in his presence. Under such embarrassments, he naturally sought sympathy and advice of Paul. His influence upon Philemon, Onesimus knew must be powerful, especially as an apostle. 6. A letter in behalf of Onesimus was therefore written by the apostle to Philemon. After such salutations, benedictions, and thanksgiving as the good character and useful life of Philemon naturally drew from the heart of Paul, he proceeds to the object of the letter. He admits that Onesimus had behaved ill in the service of Philemon; not in running away, for how they had parted with each other is not explained; but in being unprofitable and in refusing to pay the debts86 which he had contracted. But his character had undergone a radical change. Thenceforward fidelity and usefulness would be his aim and mark his course. And as to any pecuniary obligations which he had violated, the apostle 85. PHILEMON, 18. 86. Verse 18. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 authorized Philemon to put them on his account.87 Thus a way was fairly opened to the heart of Philemon. And now what does the apostles ask? 7. He asks that Philemon would receive Onesimus, How? “Not as a servant, but above a servant.”88 How much above? Philemon was to receive him as “a son” of the apostle— “as a brother beloved”— nay, if he counted Paul a partner, an equal, he was to receive Onesimus as he would receive the apostle himself.89 So much above a servant was he to receive him! 8. But was not this request to be so interpreted and complied with as to put Onesimus in the hands of Philemon as “an article of merchandise,” CARNALLY, while it raised him to the dignity of a “brother beloved,” SPIRITUALLY? In other words, might not Philemon consistently with the request of Paul have reduced Onesimus to a chattel, as A MAN, while he admitted him fraternally to his bosom, as a CHRISTIAN? Such gibberish in an apostolic epistle! Never. As if, however to guard against such folly, the natural product of mist and moonshine, the apostle would have Onesimus raised above a servant to the dignity of a brother beloved, “BOTH IN THE FLESH AND IN THE LORD;”90 as a man and Christian, in all the relations, circumstances, and responsibilities of life. It is easy now with definiteness and certainty to determine in what sense the apostle in such connections uses the word “brother”. It describes a relation inconsistent with and opposite to the servile. It is “NOT” the relation of a “SERVANT.” It elevates its subject “above” the servile condition. It raises him to full equality with the master, to the same equality, on which Paul and Philemon stood side by side as brothers; and this, not in some vague, undefined, spiritual sense, affecting the soul and leaving the body in bonds, but in every way, “both in the FLESH and in the Lord.” This matter deserves particular and earnest attention. It sheds a strong light on other lessons of apostolic instruction. 9. It is greatly to our purpose, moreover, to observe that the apostle clearly defines the moral character of his request. It was fit, proper, right, suited to the nature and relation of things— a thing which ought to be done.91 On this account, he might have urged it upon Philemon in the form of an injunction, on apostolic authority and with great boldness.92 The very nature of the request made it obligatory on Philemon. He was sacredly bound, out of regard to the fitness of things, to admit Onesimus to full equality with himself—to treat him as a brother both in the Lord and as having flesh—as a fellow man. Thus were the inalienable rights and birthright privileges of Onesimus, as a member of the human family, defined and protected by apostolic authority. 10. The apostle preferred a request instead of imposing a command, on the ground of CHARITY.93 He would give Philemon an opportunity of discharging his obligations under the impulse of 87. Verse 16. 88. Verse 10, 16, 17. 89. Verse 11, 18. 90. Verse 16. 91. Verse 8. To [Greek: anaekon]. See Robinson’s NEW TESTAMENT LEXICON; “it is fit, proper, becoming, it ought.” In what sense King James’ translators used the word “convenient” any one may see who will read ROMANS i. 28 and EPHESIANS v. 3, 4. 92. Verse 8. 93. Verse 9—[Greek: dia taen agapaen] HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 love. To this impulse, he was confident Philemon would promptly and fully yield. How could he do otherwise? The thing itself was right. The request respecting it came from a benefactor, to whom, under God, he was under the highest obligations.94 That benefactor, now an old man, and in the hands of persecutors, manifested a deep and tender interest in the matter and had the strongest persuasion that Philemon was more ready to grant than himself to entreat. The result, as he was soon to visit Collosse, and had commissioned Philemon to prepare a lodging for him, must come under the eye of the apostle. The request was so manifestly reasonable and obligatory, that the apostle, after all, described a compliance with it, by the strong word “obedience.”95 Now, how must all this have been understood by the church at Colosse? —a church, doubtless, made up of such materials as the church at Corinth, that is, of members chiefly from the humblest walks of life. Many of them had probably felt the degradation and tasted the bitterness of the servile condition. Would they have been likely to interpret the apostle’s letter under the bias of feelings friendly to slavery!—And put the slaveholder’s construction on its contents! Would their past experience or present sufferings—for doubtless some of them were still “under the yoke”—have suggested to their thoughts such glosses as some of our theological professors venture to put upon the words of the apostle! Far otherwise. The Spirit of the Lord was there, and the epistle was read in the light of “liberty.” It contained the principles of holy freedom, faithfully and affectionately applied. This must have made it precious in the eyes of such men “of low degree” as were most of the believers, and welcome to a place in the sacred canon. There let it remain as a luminous and powerful defence of the cause of emancipation! But what saith Professor Stuart? “If any one doubts, let him take the case of Paul’s sending Onesimus back to Philemon, with an apology for his running away, and sending him back to be his servant for life.”96 “Paul sent back Onesimus to Philemon.” By what process? Did the apostle, a prisoner at Rome, seize upon the fugitive, and drag him before some heartless and perfidious “Judge,” for authority to send him back to Colosse? Did he hurry his victim away from the presence of the fat and supple magistrate, to be driven under chains and the lash to the field of unrequited toil, whence he had escaped? Had the apostle been like some teachers in the American churches, he might, as a professor of sacred literature in one of our seminaries, or a preacher of the gospel to the rich in some of our cities, have consented thus to subserve the “peculiar” interests of a dear slaveholding brother. But the venerable champion of truth and freedom was himself under bonds in the imperial city, waiting for the crown of martyrdom. He wrote a letter to the church a Colosse, which was accustomed to meet at the house of Philemon, and another letter to that magnanimous disciple, and sent them by the hand of Onesimus. So much for the way in which Onesimus was sent back to his master. A slave escapes from a patriarch in Georgia, and seeks a refuge in the parish of the Connecticut doctor of Divinity, who once gave public notice that he saw no reason for caring for the 94. Verse 19. 95. Verse 21. 96. See his letter to Dr. Fisk, supra pp. 7, 8. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 servitude of his fellow men.97 Under his influence, Caesar becomes a Christian convert. Burning with love for the son whom he hath begotten in the gospel, our doctor resolves to send him back to his master. Accordingly, he writes a letter, gives it to Caesar, and bids him return, staff in hand, to the “corner- stone of our republican institutions.” Now, what would my Caesar do, who had ever felt a link of slavery’s chain? As he left his spiritual father, should we be surprised to hear him say to himself, What, return of my own accord to the man who, with the hand of a robber, plucked me from my mother’s bosom!—for whom I have been so often drenched in the sweat of unrequited toil!—whose violence so often cut my flesh and scarred my limbs!—who shut out every ray of light from my mind!—who laid claim to those honors to which my Creator and Redeemer only are entitled! And for what am I to return? To be cursed, and smitten, and sold! To be tempted, and torn, and destroyed! I cannot thus throw myself away—thus rush upon my own destruction. Who ever heard of the voluntary return of a fugitive from American oppression? Do you think that the doctor and his friends could persuade one to carry a letter to the patriarch from whom he had escaped? And must we believe this of Onesimus? “Paul sent back Onesimus to Philemon.” On what occasion?— “If,” writes the apostle, “he hath wronged thee, or oweth the aught, put that on my account.” Alive to the claims of duty, Onesimus would “restore” whatever he “had taken away.” He would honestly pay his debts. This resolution the apostle warmly approved. He was ready, at whatever expense, to help his young disciple in carrying it into full effect. Of this he assured Philemon, in language the most explicit and emphatic. Here we find one reason for the conduct of Paul in sending Onesimus to Philemon. If a fugitive slave of the Rev. Dr. Smylie, of Mississippi, should return to him with a letter from a doctor of divinity in New York, containing such an assurance, how would the reverend slaveholder dispose of it? What, he exclaims, have we here? “If Cato has not been upright in his pecuniary intercourse with you— if he owes you any thing—put that on my account.” What ignorance of southern institutions! What mockery, to talk of pecuniary intercourse between a slave and his master! The slave himself, with all he is and has, is an article of merchandise. What can he owe his master? A rustic may lay a wager with his mule, and give the creature the peck of oats which he has permitted it to win. But who, in sober earnest, would call this a pecuniary transaction? “TO BE HIS SERVANT FOR LIFE!” From what part of the epistle could the expositor have evolved a thought so soothing to tyrants—so revolting to every man who loves his own nature? From this? “For perhaps he therefore departed for a season, that thou shouldst receive him for ever.” Receive him how? As a servant, exclaims our commentator. But what wrote the apostle? “NOT now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved, especially to me, but how much more unto thee, both in the flesh and in the Lord.” Who authorized the professor to bereave the word “not” of its negative influence? According to Paul, Philemon was to receive Onesimus “not as a servant;”—according to Stuart, he was to receive him “as a servant!” If the professor will apply the same rules of exposition to the writings of the abolitionists, all difference 97. “Why should I care?” HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 between him and them must in his view presently vanish away. The harmonizing process would be equally simple and effectual. He has only to understand them as affirming what they deny, and as denying what they affirm. Suppose that Professor Stuart had a son residing, at the South. His slave, having stolen money of his master, effected his escape. He fled to Andover, to find a refuge among the “sons of the prophets.” There he finds his way to Professor Stuart’s house, and offers to render any service which the professor, dangerously ill “of a typhus fever,” might require. He is soon found to be a most active, skilful, faithful nurse. He spares no pains, night and day, to make himself useful to the venerable sufferer. He anticipates every want. In the most delicate and tender manner, he tries to sooth every pain. He fastens himself strongly on the heart of the reverend object of his care. Touched with the heavenly spirit, the meek demeanor, the submissive frame, which the sick bed exhibits, Archy becomes a Christian. A new bond now ties him and his convalescent teacher together. As soon as he is able to write, the professor sends Archy with the following letter to the South, to Isaac Stuart, Esq.:— “MY DEAR SON,—With a hand enfeebled by a distressing and dangerous illness, from which I am slowly recovering, I address you on a subject which lies very near my heart. I have a request to urge, which our mutual relation to each other, and your strong obligations to me, will, I cannot doubt, make you eager fully to grant. I say a request, though the thing I ask is, in its very nature and on the principles of the gospel, obligatory upon you. I might, therefore, boldly demand, what I earnestly entreat. But I know how generous, magnanimous, and Christ-like you are, and how readily you will ‘do even more than I say’—I, your own father, an old man, almost exhausted with multiplied exertions for the benefit of my family and my country and now just rising, emaciated and broken, from the brink of the grave. I write in behalf of Archy, whom I regard with the affection of a father, and whom, indeed, ‘I have forgotten in my sickness.’ Gladly would I have retained him, to be an Isaac to me; for how often did not his soothing voice, and skilful hand, and unwearied attention to my wants remind me of you! But I chose to give you an opportunity of manifesting, voluntarily, the goodness of your heart; as, if I had retained him with me, you might seem to have been forced to grant what you will gratefully bestow. His temporary absence from you may have opened the way for his permanent continuance with you. Not now as a slave. Heaven forbid! But superior to a slave. Superior, did I say? Take him to your bosom, as a beloved brother; for I own him as a son, and regard him as such, in all the relations of life, both as a man and a Christian. ‘Receive him as myself.’ And that nothing may hinder you from complying with my request at once, I hereby promise, without adverting to your many and great obligations to me, to pay you every cent which he took from your drawer. Any preparation which my comfort with you may require, you will make without much delay, when you learn, that I intend, as soon as I shall be able ‘to perform the journey,’ to make you a visit.” And what if Dr. Baxter, in giving an account of this letter should publicly declare that Professor Stuart, of Andover regarded slaveholding as lawful; for that “he had sent Archy HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 back to his son Isaac, with an apology for his running away” to be held in perpetual slavery? With what propriety might not the professor exclaim: False, every syllable false. I sent him back, NOT TO BE HELD AS A SLAVE, but recognized as a dear brother, in all respects, under every relation, civil and ecclesiastical. I bade my son receive Archy as myself. If this was not equivalent to a requisition to set him fully and most honorably free, and that, too, on the ground of natural obligation and Christian principle, then I know not how to frame such a requisition. I am well aware that my supposition is by no means strong enough fully to illustrate the case to which it is applied. Professor Stuart lacks apostolical authority. Isaac Stuart is not a leading member of a church consisting, as the early churches chiefly consisted, of what the world regard as the dregs of society— “the offscouring of all things.” Nor was slavery at Colosse, it seems, supported by such barbarous usages, such horrid laws as disgrace the South. But it is time to turn to another passage which, in its bearing on the subject in hand, is, in our view, as well as in the view of Dr. Fisk. and Prof. Stuart, in the highest degree authoritative and instructive. “Let as many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honor, that the name of God and his doctrines be not blasphemed. And they that have believing masters, let them not despise them because they are brethren; but rather do them service, because they are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit.”98 1. The apostle addresses himself here to two classes of
98. 1 TIM. vi. 1. 2. The following exposition of this passage is from the pen of ELIZUR WRIGHT, JR.:— “This word [Greek: antilambanesthai] in our humble opinion, has been so unfairly used by the commentators, that we feel constrained to take its part. Our excellent translators, in rendering the clause ‘partakers of the benefit,’ evidently lost sight of the component preposition, which expresses the opposition of reciprocity, rather than the connection of participation. They have given it exactly the sense of [Greek: metalambanein], (2 Tim. ii. 6.) Had the apostle intended such a sense, he would have used the latter verb, or one of the more common words, [Greek: metochoi, koinonomtes, &c.] (See Heb. iii. 1, and 1 Tim. v. 22, where the latter word is used in the clause, ‘neither be partaker of other men’s sins.’ Had the verb in our text been used, it might have been rendered, ‘neither be the part-taker of other men’s sins.’) The primary sense of [Greek: antilambans] is to take in return—to take instead of, &c. Hence, in the middle with the genitive, it signifies assist, or do one’s part towards the person or thing expressed by that genitive. In this sense only is the word used in the New Testament,—(See Luke i. 54, and Acts, xx. 35.) If this be true, the word [Greek: emsgesai] cannot signify the benefit conferred by the gospel, as our common version would make it, but the well doing of the servants, who should continue to serve their believing masters, while they were no longer under the yoke of compulsion. This word is used elsewhere in the New Testament but once (Acts. iv. 3.) in relation to the ‘good deed’ done to the impotent man. The plain import of the clause, unmystified by the commentators, is, that believing masters would not fail to do their part towards, or encourage by suitable returns, the free service of those who had once been under the yoke.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 servants, with instructions to each respectively appropriate. Both the one class and the other, in Professor Stuart’s eye, were slaves. This he assumes, and thus begs the very question in dispute. The term servant is generic, as used by the sacred writers. It comprehends all the various offices which men discharge for the benefit of each other, however honorable, or however menial; from that of an apostle99 opening the path to heaven, to that of washing “one another’s feet.”100 A general term it is, comprehending every office which belongs to human relations and Christian character.101 A leading signification gives us the manual laborer, to whom, in the division of labor, muscular exertion was allotted. As in his exertions the bodily powers are especially employed—such powers as belong to man in common with mere animals—his sphere has generally been considered low and humble. And as intellectual power is superior to bodily, the manual laborer has always been exposed in very numerous ways and in various degrees to oppression. Cunning, intrigue, the oily tongue, have, through extended and powerful conspiracies, brought the resources of society under the control of the few, who stood aloof from his homely toil. Hence his dependence upon them. Hence the multiplied injuries which have fallen so heavily upon him. Hence the reduction of his wages from one degree to another, till at length, in the case of millions, fraud and violence strip him of his all, blot his name from the record of mankind, and, putting a yoke upon his neck, drive him away to toil among the cattle. Here you find the slave. To reduce the servant to his condition, requires abuses altogether monstrous—injuries reaching the very vitals of man—stabs upon the very heart of humanity. Now, what right has Professor Stuart to make the word “servants,” comprehending, even as manual laborers, so many and such various meanings, signify “slaves,” especially where different classes are concerned? Such a right he could never have derived from humanity, or philosophy, or hermeneutics. It is his by sympathy with the oppressor? Yes, different classes. This is implied in the term “as many,”102 which sets apart the class now to be addressed. From these he proceeds to others, who are introduced by a particle,103 whose natural meaning indicates the presence of another and a different subject. 2. The first class are described as “under the yoke”—a yoke from which they were, according to the apostle, to make their escape if possible.104 If not, they must in every way regard the master with respect—bowing to his authority, working his will, subserving his interests so far as might be consistent with Christian character.105 And this, to prevent blasphemy—to prevent the pagan master from heaping profane reproaches upon the name of God and the doctrines of the gospel. They should beware of rousing his passions, which, as his helpless victims, they might be unable to allay or withstand.
99. MAT. xx, 26-28. 100. CORINTHIANS iv. 5. 101. JOHN xiii, 14. 102. [Greek: Ochli] See Passow’s Schneider. 103. [Greek: Dd.] See Passow. 104. See 1 CORINTHIANS vii, 21—[Greek: All’ ei kai dunasai eleuphoros genesthai]. 105. See 1 CORINTHIANS vii, 23—[Greek: Mae ginesthe doulos anthroton]. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 But all the servants whom the apostle addressed were not “under the yoke”106—an instrument appropriate to cattle and to slaves. These he distinguishes from another class, who instead of a “yoke”—the badge of a slave—had “believing masters.” To have a “believing master,” then, was equivalent to freedom from “the yoke.” These servants were exhorted not to despise their masters. What need of such an exhortation, if their masters had been slaveholders, holding them as property, wielding them as mere instruments, disposing of them as “articles of merchandise.” But this was not consistent with believing. Faith, “breaking every yoke,” united master and servants in the bonds of brotherhood. Brethren they were, joined in a relation which, excluding the yoke,107 placed them side by side on the ground of equality, where, each in his appropriate sphere, they might exert themselves freely and usefully, to the mutual benefit of each other. Here, servants might need to be cautioned against getting above their appropriate business, putting on airs, despising their masters, and thus declining or neglecting their service.108 Instead of this, they should be, as emancipated slaves often have been,109 models of enterprise, fidelity, activity, and usefulness— especially as their masters were “worthy of their confidence and love,” their helpers in this well-doing. Such, then, is the relation between those who, in the view of Professor Stuart, were Christian masters and Christian slaves110—the relation of “brethren,” which, excluding “the yoke,” and of course conferring freedom, placed them side by side on the common ground of mutual service, both retaining, for convenience sake, the one while giving and the other while receiving employment, the correlative name, as is usual in such cases, under which they had been known. Such was the instruction which Timothy was required, as a Christian minister, to give. Was it friendly to slaveholding? And on what ground, according to the Princeton professor, did these masters and these servants stand in their relation to each other? On that of a “perfect religious equality.”111 In all the relations, duties, and privileges—in all the objects, interests, and prospects, which belong to the province of Christianity, servants were as free as their master. The powers of the one, were allowed as wide a range and as free an exercise, with as warm encouragements, as active aids, and as high results, as the other. Here, the relation of a servant to his master imposed no restrictions, involved no embarrassments, occasioned no injury. All this, clearly and certainly, is implied in “perfect religious equality,” which the Princeton professor accords to servants in relation to their master. Might the master, then, in order more fully to attain the great ends for which he was created and redeemed, freely exert himself to increase his acquaintance with his own powers, and relations, and resources—with his prospects, opportunities, and advantages? So might his servants. Was he at liberty to “study to approve himself to God,” to submit to his will and bow to his authority, as the sole standard of affection and exertion? So were they. Was he at liberty to sanctify the 106. See LEV. xxvi. 13; ISA lviii. 6, 9. 107. Supra page 44. 108. See MAT. vi. 24. 109. Those, for instance, set free by that “believing master” James G. Birney. 110. Letter to Dr. Fisk, supra, page 7. 111. Pittsburg Pamphlet, page 9. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Sabbath, and frequent the “solemn assembly?” So were they. Was he at liberty so to honor the filial, conjugal, and paternal relations, as to find in them that spring of activity and that source of enjoyment, which they are capable of yielding? So were they. In every department of interest and exertion, they might use their capacities, and wield their powers, and improve their opportunities, and employ their resources, as freely as he, in glorifying God, in blessing mankind, and in laying up imperishable treasures for themselves! Give perfect religious equality to the American slave, and the most eager abolitionist must be satisfied. Such equality would, like the breath of the Almighty, dissolve the last link of the chain of servitude. Dare those who, for the benefit of slavery, have given so wide and active a circulation to the Pittsburg pamphlet, make the experiment? In the epistle to the Colossians, the following passage deserves earnest attention:— “Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but in singleness of heart, fearing God: and whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men; knowing, that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance; for ye serve the Lord Christ. But he that doeth wrong shall receive for the wrong which he hath done: and there is no respect of persons.—Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal; knowing that ye have a Master in heaven.”112 Here it is natural to remark— 1. That in maintaining the relation, which mutually united them, both masters and servants were to act in conformity with the principles of the divine government. Whatever they did, servants were to do in hearty obedience to the Lord, by whose authority they were to be controlled and by whose hand they were to be rewarded. To the same Lord, and according to the same law, was the master to hold himself responsible. Both the one and the other were of course equally at liberty and alike required to study and apply the standard, by which they were to be governed and judged. 2. The basis of the government under which they thus were placed, was righteousness—strict, stern, impartial. Nothing here of bias or antipathy. Birth, wealth, station,—the dust of the balance not so light! Both master and servants were hastening to a tribunal, where nothing of “respect of persons” could be feared or hoped for. There the wrong-doer, whoever he might be, and whether from the top or bottom of society, must be dealt with according to his deservings. 3. Under this government, servants were to be universally and heartily obedient; and both in the presence and absence of the master, faithfully to discharge their obligations. The master on his part, in his relations to the servants, was to make JUSTICE AND EQUALITY the standard of his conduct. Under the authority of such instructions, slavery falls discountenanced, condemned, abhorred. It is flagrantly at war with the government of God, consists in “respect of persons” the most shameless and outrageous, treads justice and equality under foot, and in its natural tendency and practical effects is nothing else than a system of wrong-doing. What have they to do with the just and the equal who in their “respect of persons” proceed to such a pitch 112. COL. iii. 22 to iv. 1. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 as to treat one brother as a thing because he is a servant, and place him, without the least regard to his welfare here, or his prospects hereafter, absolutely at the disposal of another brother, under the name of master, in the relation of owner to property? Justice and equality on the one hand, and the chattel principle on the other, are naturally subversive of each other— proof clear and decisive that the correlates, masters and servants, cannot here be rendered slaves and owners, without the grossest absurdity and the greatest violence. “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; with good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men: knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free. And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him.”113 Without repeating here what has already been offered in exposition of kindred passages, it may be sufficient to say:— 1. That the relation of the servants here addressed, to their master, was adapted to make him the object of their heart-felt attachment. Otherwise they could not have been required to render him an affectionate service. 2. This relation demanded a perfect reciprocity of benefits. It had its soul in good-will, mutually cherished and properly expressed. Hence “THE SAME THINGS,” the same in principle, the same in substance, the same in their mutual bearing upon the welfare of the master and the servants, was to be rendered back and forth by the one and the other. It was clearly the relation of mutual service. Do we here find the chattel principle? 3. Of course, the servants might not be slack, time-serving, unfaithful. Of course, the master must “FORBEAR THREATENING.” Slavery without threatening! Impossible. Wherever maintained, it is of necessity a system of threatening, injecting into the bosom of the slave such terrors, as never cease for a moment to haunt and torment him. Take from the chattel principle the support, which it derives from “threatening,” and you annihilate it at once and forever. 4. This relation was to be maintained in accordance with the principles of the divine government, where “RESPECT OF PERSONS” could not be admitted. It was, therefore, totally inconsistent with, and submissive of, the chattel principle, which in American slavery is developed in a system of “respect of persons,” equally gross and hurtful. No Abolitionist, however eager and determined in his opposition to slavery, could ask for more than these precepts, once obeyed, would be sure to confer. “The relation of slavery,” according to Professor Stuart, is recognized in “the precepts of the New Testament,” as one which “may still exist without violating the Christian faith or the church.”114 Slavery and the chattel principle! So our professor thinks; otherwise his reference has nothing to do with the 113. EPHESIANS vi. 5-9. 114. Letter to Dr. Fisk, supra page 7. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 subject—with the slavery which the abolitionist, whom he derides, stands opposed to. How gross and hurtful is the mistake into which he allows himself to fall. The relation recognized in the precepts of the New Testament had its basis and support in “justice and equality;” the very opposite of the chattel principle; a relation which may exist as long as justice and equality remain, and thus escape the destruction to which, in the view of Professor Stuart, slavery is doomed. The description of Paul obliterates every feature of American slavery, raising the servant to equality with his master, and placing his rights under the protection of justice; yet the eye of Professor Stuart can see nothing in his master and servant but a slave and his owner. With this relation he is so thoroughly possessed, that, like an evil angel, it haunts him even when he enters the temple of justice! “It is remarkable,” saith the Princeton professor, “that there is not even an exhortation” in the writings of the apostles “to masters to liberate their slaves, much less is it urged as an imperative and immediate duty.”115 It would be remarkable, indeed, if they were chargeable with a defect so great and glaring. And so they have nothing to say upon the subject? That not even the Princeton professor has the assurance to affirm. He admits that KINDNESS, MERCY, AND JUSTICE, were enjoined with a distinct reference to the government of God.116 “Without respect of persons,” they were to be God-like in doing justice. They were to act the part of kind and merciful “brethren.” And whither would this lead them? Could they stop short of restoring to every man his natural, inalienable rights?—of doing what they could to redress the wrongs, sooth the sorrows, improve the character, and raise the condition of the degraded and oppressed? Especially, if oppressed and degraded by any agency of theirs. Could it be kind, merciful, or just to keep the chains of slavery on their helpless, unoffending brother? Would this be to honor the Golden Rule, or obey the second great command of “their Master in Heaven?” Could the apostles have subserved the cause of freedom more directly, intelligibly, and effectually, than to enjoin the principles, and sentiments, and habits, in which freedom consists—constituting its living root and fruitful germ! The Princeton professor himself, in the very paper which the South has so warmly welcomed and so loudly applauded as a scriptural defence of “the peculiar institution,” maintains, that the “GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF THE GOSPEL have DESTROYED SLAVERY throughout the greater part of Christendom”117 — “THAT CHRISTIANITY HAS ABOLISHED BOTH POLITICAL AND DOMESTIC BONDAGE WHEREVER IT HAS HAD FREE SCOPE—that it ENJOINS a fair compensation for labor; insists on the mental and intellectual improvement of ALL classes of men; condemns ALL infractions of marital or parental rights; requires, in short, not only that FREE SCOPE should be allowed to human improvement, but that ALL SUITABLE MEANS should be employed for the attainment of that end.”118 It is indeed “remarkable,” that while neither Christ nor his apostles ever gave “an exhortation to masters to liberate their slaves,” they enjoined such “general principles as have destroyed domestic slavery throughout the greater part of Christendom;” that while Christianity forbears “to urge” emancipation “as an imperative and immediate duty,” it throws a 115. Pittsburg pamphlet, page 9. 116. The same, page 10. 117. Pittsburg pamphlet, page 18, 19. 118. The same, page 31. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 barrier, heaven high, around every domestic circle; protects all the rights of the husband and the father; gives every laborer a fair compensation; and makes the moral and intellectual improvement of all classes, with free scope and all suitable means, the object of its tender solicitude and high authority. This is not only “remarkable,” but inexplicable. Yes and no—hot and cold, in one and the same breath! And yet these things stand prominent in what is reckoned an acute, ingenious, effective defence of slavery! In his letter to the Corinthian church, the apostle Paul furnishes another lesson of instruction, expressive of his views and feelings on the subject of slavery. “Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called. Art thou called being a servant? care not for it; but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather. For he that is called in the Lord, being a servant, is the Lord’s freeman: likewise also he that is called, being free, is Christ’s servant. Ye are bought with a price; be not ye the servants of men.”119 In explaining and applying this passage, it is proper to suggest: 1. That it could not have been the object of the apostle to bind the Corinthian converts to the stations and employments in which the gospel found them. For he exhorts some of them to escape, if possible, from their present condition. In the servile state, “under the yoke,” they ought not to remain unless impelled by stern necessity. “If thou canst be free, use it rather.” If they ought to prefer freedom to bondage and to exert themselves to escape from the latter for the sake of the former, could their master consistently with the claims and spirit of the gospel have hindered or discouraged them in so doing? Their “brother” could he be, who kept “the yoke” upon their neck, which the apostle would have them shake off if possible? And had such masters been members of the Corinthian church, what inferences must they have drawn from this exhortation to their servants? That the apostle regarded slavery as a Christian institution?— or could look complacently on any efforts to introduce or maintain it in the church? Could they have expected less from him than a stern rebuke, if they refused to exert themselves in the cause of freedom? 2. But while they were to use their freedom, if they could obtain it, they should not, even on such a subject, give themselves up to ceaseless anxiety. “The Lord was no respecter of persons.” They need not fear, that the “low estate,” to which they had been wickedly reduced, would prevent them from enjoying the gifts of his hand or the light of his countenance. He would respect their rights, sooth their sorrows, and pour upon their hearts, and cherish there, the spirit of liberty. “For he that is called in the Lord, being a servant, is the Lord’s freeman.” In him, therefore, should they cheerfully confide. 3. The apostle, however, forbids them so to acquiesce in the servile relation, as to act inconsistently with their Christian obligations. To their Savior they belonged. By his blood they had been purchased. It should be their great object, therefore, to render Him a hearty and effective service. They should permit no man, whoever he might be, to thrust in himself between them 119. 1 CORINTHIANS vii. 20-23. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 and their Redeemer. “Ye are bought with a price; BE NOT YE THE SERVANTS OF MEN.” With his eye upon the passage just quoted and explained, the Princeton professor asserts that “Paul represents this relation”—the relation of slavery— “as of comparatively little account.”120 And this he applies—otherwise it is nothing to his purpose—to American slavery. Does he then regard it as a small matter, a mere trifle, to be thrown under the slave-laws of this republic, grimly and fiercely excluding their victim from almost every means of improvement, and field of usefulness, and source of comfort; and making him, body and substance, with his wife and babes, “the servant of men?” Could such a relation be acquiesced in consistently with the instructions of the apostle? To the Princeton professor we commend a practical trial of the bearing of the passage in hand upon American slavery. His regard for the unity and prosperity of the ecclesiastical organizations, which in various forms and under different names, unite the southern with the northern churches, will make the experiment grateful to his feelings. Let him, then, as soon as his convenience will permit, proceed to Georgia. No religious teacher121 from any free State, can be likely to receive so general and so warm a welcome there. To allay the heat, which the doctrines and movements of the abolitionists have occasioned in the southern mind, let him with as much despatch as possible, collect, as he goes from place to place, masters and their slaves. Now let all men, whom it may concern, see and own that slavery is a Christian institution! With his Bible in his hand and his eye upon the passage in question, he addresses himself to the task of instructing the slaves around him. Let not your hearts, my brethren, be overcharged with sorrow, or eaten up with anxiety. Your servile condition cannot deprive you of the fatherly regards of Him “who is no respecter of persons.” Freedom you ought, indeed, to prefer. If you can escape from “the yoke,” throw it off. In the mean time rejoice that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty;” that the gospel places slaves “on a perfect religious equality” with their master; so that every Christian is “the Lord’s freeman.” And, for your encouragement, remember that “Christianity has abolished both political and domestic servitude wherever it has had free scope. It enjoins a fair compensation for labor; it insists on the moral and intellectual improvement of all classes of men; it condemns all infractions of marital or parental rights; in short it requires not only that free scope be allowed to human improvement, but that all suitable means should be employed for the attainment of that end.”122 Let your lives, then, be honorable to your relations to your Savior. He bought you with his own blood; and is entitled to your warmest love and most effective service. “Be not ye the servants of men.” Let no human arrangements prevent you, as citizens of the kingdom of heaven, from making the most of your powers and opportunities. Would such an effort, generally and heartily made, allay 120. Pittsburg pamphlet, page 10. 121. Rev. Mr. Savage, of Utica, New York, had, not very long ago, a free conversation with a gentleman of high standing in the literary and religious world from a slaveholding State, where the “peculiar institution” is cherished with great warmth and maintained with iron rigor. By him, Mr. Savage was assured, that the Princeton professor had, through the Pittsburg pamphlet, contributed most powerfully and effectually to bring the “whole South” under the persuasion, that slaveholding is in itself right—a system to which the Bible gives countenance and support. 122. Pittsburg pamphlet, page 31. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 excitement at the South, and quench the flames of discord, every day rising higher and waxing hotter, in almost every part of the republic, and cement “the Union?” In an extract from an article in the Southern Christian Sentinel, a new Presbyterian paper established in Charleston, South Carolina, and inserted in the Christian Journal for March 21, 1839, we find the following paragraphs from the pen of Rev. C.W. Howard, and, according to Mr. Chester, ably and freely endorsed by the editor. “There is scarcely any diversity of sentiment at the North upon this subject. The great mass of the people, believing slavery to be sinful, are clearly of the opinion that, as a system, it should be abolished throughout this land and throughout the world. They differ as to the time and mode of abolition. The abolitionists consistently argue, that whatever is sinful should be instantly abandoned. The others, by a strange sort of reasoning for Christian men, contend that though slavery is sinful, yet it may be allowed to exist until it shall he expedient to abolish it; or, if, in many cases, this reasoning might be translated into plain English, the sense would be, both in Church and State, slavery, though sinful, may be allowed to exist until our interest will suffer us to say that it must be abolished. This is not slander; it is simply a plain way of stating a plain truth. It does seem the evident duty of every man to become an abolitionist, who believes slavery to be sinful, for the Bible allows no tampering with sin. “To these remarks, there are some noble exceptions, to be found in both parties in the church. The South owes a debt of gratitude to the Biblical Repertory, for the fearless argument in behalf of the position, that slavery is not forbidden by the Bible. The writer of that article is said, without contradiction, to be Professor Hodge, of Princeton—HIS NAME OUGHT TO BE KNOWN AND REVERED AMONG YOU, my brethren, for in a land of anti-slavery men, he is the ONLY ONE who has dared to vindicate your character from the serious charge of living in the habitual transgression of God’s holy law.”] “It is,” affirms the Princeton professor, “on all hands acknowledged, that, at the time of the advent of Jesus Christ, slavery in its worst forms prevailed over the whole world. The Savior found it around him IN JUDEA.”123 To say that he found it in Judea, is to speak ambiguously. Many things were to be found “in Judea,” which neither belonged to, nor were characteristic of the Jews. It is not denied that the Gentiles, who resided among them, might have had slaves; but of the Jews this is denied. How could the professor take that as granted, the proof of which entered vitally into the argument and was essential to the soundness of the conclusions to which he would conduct us? How could he take advantage of an ambiguous expression to conduct his confiding readers on to a position which, if his own eyes were open, he must have known they could not hold in the light of open day! We do not charge the Savior with any want of wisdom, goodness, or courage,124 for refusing to “break down the wall of partition between Jews and Gentiles” “before the time appointed.” While this barrier stood, he could not, consistently with the plan of redemption, impart instruction freely to the Gentiles. To some extent, and on extraordinary occasions, he might have done so. But his business then was with “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”125 The propriety of this arrangement is not the matter 123. The same, page 9. 124. Pittsburg pamphlet, page 10. 125. MATT. xv. 24. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 of dispute between the Princeton professor and ourselves. In disposing of the question whether the Jews held slaves during our Savior’s incarnation among them, the following points deserve earnest attention:— 1. Slaveholding is inconsistent with the Mosaic economy. For the proof of this, we would refer our readers, among other arguments more or less appropriate and powerful, to the tract already alluded to.126 In all the external relations and visible arrangements of life, the Jews, during our Savior’s ministry among them, seem to have been scrupulously observant of the institutions and usages of the “Old Dispensation.” They stood far aloof from whatever was characteristic of Samaritans and Gentiles. From idolatry and slaveholding—those twin-vices which had always so greatly prevailed among the heathen—they seem at length, as the result of a most painful discipline, to have been effectually divorced. 2. While, therefore, John the Baptist; with marked fidelity and great power, acted among the Jews the part of a reprover, he found no occasion to repeat and apply the language of his predecessors,127 in exposing and rebuking idolatry and slaveholding. Could he, the greatest of the prophets, have been less effectually aroused by the presence of “the yoke,” than was Isaiah?—or less intrepid and decisive in exposing and denouncing the sin of oppression under its most hateful and injurious forms? 3. The Savior was not backward in applying his own principles plainly and pointedly to such forms of oppression as appeared among the Jews. These principles, whenever they have been freely acted on, the Princeton professor admits, have abolished domestic bondage. Had this prevailed within the sphere of our Savior’s ministry, he could not, consistently with his general character, have failed to expose and condemn it. The oppression of the people by lordly ecclesiastics, of parents by their selfish children, of widows by their ghostly counsellors, drew from his lips scorching rebukes and terrible denunciations.128 How, then, must he have felt and spoke in the presence of such tyranny, if such tyranny had been within his official sphere, as should have made widows, by driving their husbands to some flesh-market, and their children not orphans, but cattle? 4. Domestic slavery was manifestly inconsistent with the industry, which, in the form of manual labor, so generally prevailed among the Jews. In one connection, in the Acts of the Apostles, we are informed, that, coming from Athens to Corinth, Paul “found a certain Jew, named Aquila, born in Pontus, lately come from Italy, with his wife Priscilla; (because that Claudius had commanded all Jews to depart from Rome;) and came unto them. And because he was of the same craft, he abode with them and wrought: (for by their occupation they were tent-makers.”)129 This passage has opened the way for different commentators to refer us to the public sentiment and general practice of the Jews respecting useful industry and manual labor. According to Lightfoot, “it was their custom to bring up their children to some trade, yea, 126. “The Bible against Slavery.” 127. PSALM lxxxii; ISA. lviii. 1-12 JER. xxii. 13-16. 128. MATT. xxiii; MARK vii. 1-13. 129. ACTS xviii. 1-3. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 though they gave them learning or estates.” According to Rabbi Judah, “He that teaches not his son a trade, is as if he taught him to be a thief.”130 It was, Kuinoel affirms, customary even for Jewish teachers to unite labor (opificium) with the study of the law. This he confirms by the highest Rabbinical authority.131 Heinrichs quotes a Rabbi as teaching, that no man should by any means neglect to train his son to honest industry.132 Accordingly, the apostle Paul, though brought up at the “feet of Gamaliel,” the distinguished disciple of a most illustrious teacher, practised the art of tent-making. His own hands ministered to his necessities; and his example is so doing, he commends to his Gentile brethren for their imitation.133 That Zebedee, the father of John the Evangelist, had wealth, various hints in the New Testament render probable.134 Yet how do we find him and his sons, while prosecuting their appropriate business? In the midst of the hired servants, “in the ship mending their nets.”135 Slavery among a people who, from the highest to the lowest, were used to manual labor! What occasion for slavery there? And how could it be maintained? No place can be found for slavery among a people generally inured to useful industry. With such, especially if men of learning, wealth, and station, “labor, working with their hands,” such labor must be honorable. On this subject, let Jewish maxims and Jewish habits be adopted at the South, and the “peculiar institution” would vanish like a ghost at daybreak. 5. Another hint, here deserving particular attention, is furnished in the allusions of the New Testament to the lowest casts and most servile employments among the Jews. With profligates, publicans were joined as depraved and contemptible. The outcasts of society were described, not as fit to herd with slaves, but as deserving a place among Samaritans and publicans. They were “hired servants,” whom Zebedee employed. In the parable of the prodigal son we have a wealthy Jewish family. Here servants seem to have abounded. The prodigal, bitterly bewailing his wretchedness and folly, described their condition as greatly superior to his own. How happy the change which should place him by their side? His remorse, and shame, and penitence made him willing to embrace the lot of the lowest of them all. But these— what was their condition? They were HIRED SERVANTS. “Make me as one of thy hired servants.” Such he refers to as the lowest menials known in Jewish life. Lay such hints as have now been suggested together; let it be remembered, that slavery was inconsistent with the Mosaic economy; that John the Baptist in preparing the way for the Messiah makes no reference “to the yoke” which, had it been before him, he would, like Isaiah, have condemned; that the Savior, while he took the part of the poor and sympathized with the oppressed, was evidently spared the pain of witnessing within the sphere of his ministry, the presence, of the chattel principle, that it was the habit of the Jews, whoever they might
130. Henry on ACTS xviii. 1-3. 131. Kuinoel on ACTS. 132. Heinrichs on ACTS. 133. ACTS xx. 34, 35; 1 THESS. iv. 11. 134. See Kuinoel’s PROLEGOM. TO THE GOSPEL OF JOHN. 135. MARK i. 19, 20. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 be, high or low, rich or poor, learned or rude, “to labor, working with their hands;” and that where reference was had to the most menial employments, in families, they were described as carried on by hired servants; and the question of slavery “in Judea,” so far as the seed of Abraham were concerned, is very easily disposed of. With every phase and form of society among them slavery was inconsistent. The position which, in the article so often referred to in this paper, the Princeton professor takes, is sufficiently remarkable. Northern abolitionists he saw in an earnest struggle with southern slaveholders. The present welfare and future happiness of myriads of the human family were at stake in this contest. In the heat of the battle, he throws himself between the belligerent powers. He gives the abolitionists to understand, that they are quite mistaken in the character of the objections they have set themselves so openly and sternly against. Slaveholding is not, as they suppose, contrary to the law of God. It was witnessed by the Savior “in its worst forms”136 without extorting from his laps a syllable of rebuke. “The sacred writers did not condemn it.”137 And why should they? By a definition138 sufficiently ambiguous and slippery, he undertakes to set forth a form of slavery which he looks upon as consistent with the law of Righteousness. From this definition he infers that the abolitionists are greatly to blame for maintaining that American slavery is inherently and essentially sinful, and for insisting that it ought at once to be abolished. For this labor of love the slaveholding South is warmly grateful and applauds its reverend ally, as if a very Daniel had come as their advocate to judgment.139 A few questions, briefly put, may not here be inappropriate. 1. Was the form of slavery which our professor pronounces innocent the form witnessed by our Savior “in Judea?” That, he will by no means admit. The slavery there was, he affirms, of the “worst” kind. How then does he account for the alleged silence of the Savior?—a silence covering the essence and the form—the institution and its “worst” abuses? 2. Is the slaveholding, which, according to the Princeton professor, Christianity justifies, the same as that which the abolitionists so earnestly wish to see abolished? Let us see. Christianity in supporting The American system Slavery, according to Professor for supporting Slavery, Hodge, “Enjoins a fair compensation Makes compensation for labor” impossible by reducing the laborer to a chattel. “It insists on the moral and It sternly forbids its intellectual improvement of all victim to learn to read classes of men” even the name of his Creator and Redeemer. “It condemns all infractions of It outlaws the conjugal marital or parental rights.” and parental relations.
136. Pittsburg pamphlet, page 9. 137. The same, page 13. 138. The same, page 12. 139. Supra, page 58. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 “It requires that free scope It forbids any effort, on should be allowed to human on the part of myriads of improvement.” the human family, to improve their character, condition, and prospects. “It requires that all suitable It inflicts heavy means should be employed to penalties for teaching improve mankind” letters to the poorest of the poor. “Wherever it has had free scope, Wherever it has free it has abolished domestic scope, it perpetuates bondage.” domestic bondage. Now it is slavery according to the American system that the abolitionists are set against. Of the existence of any such form of slavery as is consistent with Professor Hodge’s account of the requisitions of Christianity, they know nothing. It has never met their notice, and of course, has never roused their feelings or called forth their exertions. What, then, have they to do with the censures and reproaches which the Princeton professor deals around? Let those who have leisure and good nature protect the man of straw he is so hot against. The abolitionists have other business. It is not the figment of some sickly brain; but that system of oppression which in theory is corrupting, and in practice destroying both Church and State;—it is this that they feel pledged to do battle upon, till by the just judgment of Almighty God it is thrown, dead and damned, into the bottomless abyss. 3. How can the South feel itself protected by any shield which may be thrown over SUCH SLAVERY, as may be consistent with what the Princeton professor describes as the requisitions of Christianity? Is this THE slavery which their laws describe, and their hands maintain? “Fair compensation for labor”— “marital and parental rights”— “free scope” and “all suitable means” for the “improvement, moral and intellectual, of all classes of men;”—are these, according to the statutes of the South, among the objects of slaveholding legislation? Every body knows that any such requisitions and American slavery are flatly opposed to and directly subversive of each other. What service, then, has the Princeton professor, with all his ingenuity and all his zeal, rendered the “peculiar institution?” Their gratitude must be of a stamp and complexion quite peculiar, if they can thank him for throwing their “domestic system” under the weight of such Christian requisitions as must at once crush its snaky head “and grind it to powder.” And what, moreover, is the bearing of the Christian requisitions, which Professor Hodge quotes, upon the definition of slavery which he has elaborated? “All the ideas which necessarily enter into the definition of slavery are, deprivation of personal liberty, obligation of service at the discretion of another, and the transferable character of the authority and claim of service of the master.”140 According to Professor Hodge’s According to Professor account of the requisitions Hodge’s definition of Christianity, of Slavery, The spring of effort in the The laborer must serve at 140. Pittsburg pamphlet page 12. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 laborer is a fair compensation. the discretion of another. Free scope must be given for He is deprived of personal his moral and intellectual liberty—the necessary improvement. condition, and living soul of improvement, without which he has no control of either intellect or morals. His rights as a husband and The authority and claims of a father are to be protected. the master may throw an ocean between him and his family, and separate them from each other’s presence at any moment and forever. Christianity, then, requires such slavery as Professor Hodge so cunningly defines, to be abolished. It was well provided for the peace of the respective parties, that he placed his definition so far from the requisitions of Christianity. Had he brought them into each other’s presence, their natural and invincible antipathy to each other would have broken out into open and exterminating warfare. But why should we delay longer upon an argument which is based on gross and monstrous sophistry? It can mislead only such as wish to be misled. The lovers of sunlight are in little danger of rushing into the professor’s dungeon. Those who, having something to conceal, covet darkness, can find it there, to their heart’s content. The hour cannot be far away, when upright and reflective minds at the South will be astonished at the blindness which could welcome such protection as the Princeton argument offers to the slaveholder. But Professor Stuart must not be forgotten. In his celebrated letter to Dr. Fisk, he affirms that “Paul did not expect slavery to be ousted in a day.”141 Did not EXPECT! What then! Are the requisitions of Christianity adapted to any EXPECTATIONS which in any quarter and on any ground might have risen to human consciousness? And are we to interpret the precepts of the gospel by the expectations of Paul? The Savior commanded all men every where to repent, and this, though “Paul did not expect” that human wickedness, in its ten thousand forms would in any community “be ousted in a day.” Expectations are one thing; requisitions quite another. In the mean time, while expectation waited, Paul, the professor adds, “gave precepts to Christians respecting their demeanor.” That he did. Of what character were these precepts? Must they not have been in harmony with the Golden Rule? But this, according to Professor Stuart, “decides against the righteousness of slavery” even as a “theory.” Accordingly, Christians were required, without respect of persons, to do each other justice—to maintain equality as common ground for all to stand upon—to cherish and express in all their intercourse that tender love and disinterested charity which one brother naturally feels for another. These were the “ad interim precepts.”142 which cannot fail, if obeyed, to cut up slavery, “root and branch,” at once and forever. Professor Stuart comforts us with the assurance that “Christianity will ultimately certainly destroy slavery.” Of this we have not the feeblest 141. Supra, page 7. 142. Letter to Dr. Fisk, page 7. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 doubt. But how could he admit a persuasion and utter a prediction so much at war with the doctrine he maintains, that “slavery may exist without VIOLATING THE CHRISTIAN FAITH OR THE CHURCH?”143 What, Christianity bent on the destruction of an ancient and cherished institution which hurts neither her character nor condition?144 Why not correct its abuses and purify its spirit; and shedding upon it her own beauty, preserve it, as a living trophy of her reformatory power? Whence the discovery that, in her onward progress, she would trample down and destroy what was no way hurtful to her? This is to be aggressive with a witness. Far be it from the Judge of all the earth to whelm the innocent and guilty in the same destruction! In aid of Professor Stuart, in the rude and scarcely covert attack which he makes upon himself, we maintain that Christianity will certainly destroy slavery on account of its inherent wickedness—its malignant temper—its deadly effects—its constitutional, insolent, and unmitigable opposition to the authority of God and the welfare of man. “Christianity will ultimately destroy slavery.” “ULTIMATELY!” What meaneth that portentous word? To what limit of remotest time, concealed in the darkness of futurity, may it look? Tell us, O watchman, on the hill of Andover. Almost nineteen centuries have rolled over this world of wrong and outrage—and yet we tremble in the presence of a form of slavery whose breath is poison, whose fang is death! If any one of the incidents of slavery should fall, but for a single day, upon the head of the prophet, who dipped his pen in such cold blood, to write that word “ultimately,” how, under the sufferings of the first tedious hour, would he break out in the lamentable cry, “How long, O Lord, HOW LONG!” In the agony of beholding a wife or daughter upon the table of the auctioneer, while every bid fell upon his heart like the groan of despair, small comfort would he find in the dull assurance of some heartless prophet, quite at “ease in Zion,” that “ULTIMATELY Christianity would destroy slavery.” As the hammer falls, and the beloved of his soul, all helpless and most wretched, is borne away to the haunts of legalized debauchery, his hearts turns to stone, while the cry dies upon his lips, “How LONG, O Lord, HOW LONG!” “Ultimately!” In what circumstances does Professor Stuart assure himself that Christianity will destroy slavery? Are we, as American citizens, under the sceptre of a Nero? When, as integral parts of this republic—as living members of this community, did we forfeit the prerogatives of freemen? Have we not the right to speak and act as wielding the powers which the privileges of self-government has put in our possession? And without asking leave of priest or statesman of the North or the South, may we not make the most of the freedom which we enjoy under the guaranty of the ordinances of Heaven and the Constitution of our country! Can we expect to see Christianity on higher vantage- ground than in this country she stands upon? In the midst of a republic based on the principle of the equality of mankind, where every Christian, as vitally connected with the state, freely wields the highest political rights and enjoys the richest political privileges; where the unanimous demand of one- half of the members of the churches would be promptly met in the abolition of slavery, what “ultimately” must Christianity here wait 143. Letter to Dr. Fisk, page 7. 144. Professor Stuart applies here the words, salva fide et salva ecclesia. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 for before she crushes the chattel principle beneath her heel? Her triumph over slavery is retarded by nothing but the corruption and defection so widely spread through the “sacramental host” beneath her banners! Let her voice be heard and her energies exerted, and the ultimately of the “dark spirit of slavery” would at once give place to the immediately of the Avenger of the Poor.
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 12, Tuesday: Representative Joshua Reed Giddings’s “Anacostia bridge” speech.
Through the influence of Gaspare Spontini, Nicolò Paganini was named a member of the Santa Cecilia Society in Rome.
February 13, Wednesday: When the lawyer Heinrich Blumner died he left a bequest of 20,000 thaler. At the recommendation of Felix Mendelssohn, this money would found the Leipzig Conservatory.
Frédéric François Chopin, George Sand, and her children left Palma aboard a boat conveying 100 pigs to Barcelona.
Guatemala seceeded from Central America.
February 14, Thursday: In the harbor of Barcelona, George Sand managed to get Frédéric François Chopin and her children aboard a French ship. The ship’s doctor would succeed in stopping his hemorrhaging from the lungs. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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 answers to her request for infor- mation 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 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
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.
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 18, Monday: At Estrella, Carlist generals Juan Antonio Guergue, Francisco Garcia, and Pablo Sanz Baeza were executed, along with 3 others accused of plotting against the leading Carlist moderate in Spain, General Rafael Maroto.
February 19, Tuesday: Sarah Anthony Wood (Taber) was born, daughter of John Wood III and Elizabeth H Wood. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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 21, Thursday: William Henry Fox Talbot published the details of his “photogenic drawing process.”
Emory Wiley got married with Abbie S. Williams.
A setting of Psalm 95 for solo voices, chorus and orchestra by Felix Mendelssohn was performed for the initial time, in Leipzig.
February 21, Thursday: According to Roll #12 of microfilmed records of “Inward Slave Manifests,” now available on the Internet for your ready consultation, on this day the brig Smithfield of the firm of Nicholas Brown & Co. of Providence, Rhode Island, a coastwise vessel, arrived in the port of Charleston, South Carolina under the command of Captain Thomas Andros or Andrews (both spellings are listed)145 conveying two coffles of American slaves to their destiny on the auction block for the Southern plantation market. The coffles were divided according to their white ownership, with the consignment pertaining to the factor Alex M. Donald, a middleman, consisting of the following persons: NAME GENDER AGE HEIGHT COLOR Charles male 21 5-5 Black John male 21 5-10 Black Harry male 14 4-10 Black Jack male 19 5-11 Mulatto Joseph male 23 5-8 Black Antony male 15 4-9 Mulatto Lucy female 28 5-2 Black The other consignment, pertaining to the factor T. Ely Gragg of Chesaw, South Carolina, consisted of the following persons: NAME GENDER AGE HEIGHT COLOR Melesa female 22 5-9 Brown Nancy female 40 5-4 Black Martha Jane female 12 4-5 Black Nancy Peters female 9 3-11 Black Judy female 4 3-3 Black Joseph male (infant) Black Lseeila female 15 5-3 Black
145. Clearly, this “Captain Thomas Andros or Andrews” of this coastal slave ship was one and the same person as the Thomas Andrews who had been born on December 1, 1790 in Smithfield, a son of Jonathan Andrews and Marcy Ames Andrews of North Smithfield. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 February 22, Friday: Frédéric François Chopin, George Sand, and her children boarded ship in Barcelona to travel to Marseilles.
February 23, Saturday: Advertisement for the Concord Academy under Preceptor John Thoreau, Jr.:
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: Representative John Quincy Adams proposed a constitutional amendment abolishing hereditary enslavement in the United States, prohibiting admission of new slave states, and abolishing slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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
1839 1839
MARCH
March: Angelina Emily Grimké Weld became pregnant.
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. 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 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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
1839 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,146 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.
146. 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
1839 1839 Implementing the “forward policy” recommended by the Scottish merchants William Jardine and James Matheson,147 Foreign Secretary Palmerston of Lord Melbourne’s whig government in London decided that
imperialist lackeys:
the matter could be settled by putting gunboats on the major Chinese rivers.148 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
March: François Dominique Arago, as head of a special commission of the Académie des Sciences, began to investigate some discoveries allegedly made by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and/or Joseph-Nicephor NiépceJOSEPH-NICEPHOR NIÉPCE . PHOTOGRAPHY
147. 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). 148. 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
1839 1839 March: Charles Wilkes moved again into Antarctic waters.
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 3, Sunday: William Henry Fox Talbot wrote the phrase “words of light” into his notebook, thus assigning the name to our medium of photography. Citation, I would argue, is perhaps another name for photography. When Walter Benjamin claims that “to write history therefore means to quote history,” he suggests that historiography follows the principles of photography. Words of light. This names, then, not only the relation between history and photography but also the relation between language and photography. Photography is nothing else than a writing of light, a script of light, what Talbot elsewhere called “the pencil of nature.” Its citational characteristic tells us as well that history is sealed within the movement of language. This is why photography requires that we think about the impact of history on language: there is no word or image that is not haunted by history. Or, as Benjamin would have it, history cannot occur without the event of language, without the corresponding emergence of an image. Words of light. This phrase also names the relation between language and light, between language and the possibility of lucidity, and of knowledge in general. Evoking photography’s relation to both language and light, it bears the traces of Benjamin’s reflections on the technology of reproduction. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
March 3, Sunday: Completion of the 3d (lame duck) session of the 25th federal Congress. Human enslavement was still legal in these United States of America, land of the free and home of the brave.
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.
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.:
March 11, Monday: Felix Mendelssohn’s Ruy Blas overture op.95 was performed for the initial time, in Leipzig. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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.149
March 13, Wednesday: Mercy Snow Pratt, 2d wife of the Reverend Enoch Pratt, died.
March 16, Saturday: Advertisement for the Concord Academy under Preceptor John Thoreau, Jr.:
149. 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
1839 1839
March 18, Monday: George Back had been further honored following his triumphant return, receiving such items as the gold medal of the Société de Géographie de Paris. On this day he was made a “Sir.”
NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF PAUL CUFFE, A PEQUOT INDIAN: DURING THIRTY YEARS SPENT AT SEA, AND IN TRAVELLING IN FOREIGN LANDS (Vernon: Printed by Horace N. Bill; Stockbridge, New York). NARRATIVE OF PAUL CUFFE
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
1839 1839
March 21, Thursday: Modest Petrovich Musorgsky was born in Karevo, Pskov south of St. Petersburg, the 4th and youngest child of well-to-do landowner Pyotr Alyekseyevich Musorgsky with Yulia Ivanovna Chirikova (herself a daughter of a middle-class landowner).
Symphony in C major "Great" D.944 by Franz Schubert was performed for the initial time, in Leipzig, conducted by Felix Mendelssohn. The score had been found 3 months earlier as Robert Schumann visited Schubert’s brother Ferdinand in Vienna.
Clara Wieck made her Paris debut at the Salle Erard. The same evening she played for Paris society at the home of Pierre Zimmerman, a professor of piano at the Conservatoire. She created a “sensation.”
The American Anti-Slavery Society put out the 9th issue of its “omnibus” entitled The Anti- TEXT Slavery Examiner, containing “Letter of Gerrit Smith, to Hon. Henry Clay.” INDEX
March 22, Friday: This date was inscribed on the 1st composition of Camille Saint-Saens, for piano. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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
1839 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
1839 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.150
150. 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
1839 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
1839 1839 March 31, Easter Sunday: Israel Proctor of Chelmsford died at the age of 65 at Washington, New Hampshire, where he had resided for most of his life. He had gotten married on March 7, 1798 with 17-year-old Lydia Reed of Acton, Massachusetts, who with 7 children survived him. Her father William Proctor of Chelmsford had been a captain during the American Revolution in a Massachusetts regiment in 1775 and a captain in the 23d Regiment of the Continental Infantry during 1776. The couple had produced Israel Procter on April 5, 1799, who had died on March 6, 1803, Roxanna Proctor, born at Windsor, Vermont on March 12, 1801, Lydia Proctor, born at Washington, New Hampshire on March 27, 1803, who had died on June 4, 1803, Martha Proctor on August 14, 1804, Moses D. Proctor on January 5, 1807, Israel Proctor again, on March 25, 1809, Isaac Proctor on May 18, 1811, Lydia Proctor again, on October 37, 1814, Elizabeth Proctor on August 17, 1816, and Lucy Proctor on June 27, 1819, who had died on March 20, 1836.
An entirely laudatory review, by Hector Berlioz, of Cesar Franck’s performance of March 24th, appeared in the Revue musicale. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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
1839 1839 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
APRIL
April: Gabriel Franchère remarried with a widow, Charlotte Prince, in Detroit.
April: James Ellsworth De Kay, Zoologist for the Geological Survey of New York, had created by this point full descriptions and drawings for 700 of the nearly 2,300 New York animals he had collected or observed.
April: The disowned American Quaker Sarah Moore Grimké authored a statement for distribution among Friends in England, about the racial discrimination that existed within monthly meetings of the Religious Society of Friends in the United States of America, “Society of Friends in the United States, Their Views of the Anti-Slavery Question, and Treatment of People of Color.”151
(In the previous year Friend William Bassett of Lynn, Massachusetts had spoken out against racially segregated seating, which is to say, Negro lofts such as the one in the meetinghouse in Saylesville, Rhode Island, in Friends meetinghouses. When Friend Sarah asked Sarah Douglass to contribute to the writing of this material by describing incidents that had occurred in her personal experience, she was warned that it would be counterproductive to name names, because “I believe Friends in this country as a body are given over to a reprobate mind.” Friend Sarah persisted, however, and her first draft amounted to a letter to Elizabeth Pease on this subject bearing the date April 10, 1839, “Letter on the Subject of Prejudice against Colour amongst the Society of Friends in the United States.”152 In the following year, in a speech to the Anti-Slavery Convention in London, Friend Arnold Buffum of Providence, Rhode Island would charge that a woman had been denied membership in the Society of Friends in Philadelphia because she was black, and it would seem that in all likelihood he was making reference to Sarah Douglass’s account of how her mother had been encouraged not to apply for membership. In this speech Friend Arnold indicated that the practice of asking blacks to sit aside, in special seats, still was continuing among American Friends.)
151. This would be printed in Darlington, England in the following year, but not distributed. A copy is in the Quaker Collection at the Haverford College Library. 152. It is said that this letter can be examined among the Anti-Slavery Papers at the Boston Public Library. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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
1839 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
April: Joseph Smith, Jr. escaped while being transferred to another county in Missouri, and fled to Illinois. Settlement began of what was to become Nauvoo, Illinois.
The Cherokee from the East built houses in the Oklahoma Territory, cleared land, planted, and began to rebuild their nation. TRAIL OF TEARS HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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 black153 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,
153. 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
1839 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: Harriet Martineau’s “Literary Lionism” appeared in the Westminster Review. [Literary Lion: for illustration of this Emersonian trope used in regard to Thoreau, use George Cruickshank’s “The Lion of the Party!” as found in Gilbert Abbott à Beckett’s GEORGE CRUICKSHANK’S TABLE-BOOK, published in July 1845.]
April: Hippolyte Bayard produced a paper negative. He was, of course, a month to late to achieve immortality, since the Daguerreotype had been announced as of March. Eventually, due to this sad fact, he would feel the need to off himself. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
April 1, Monday: Le lac des fees, an opera by Daniel-Francois-Esprit Auber to words of Scribe and Melesville, was performed for the initial time, at the Paris Opera.
April 3, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson lectured at the Concord Lyceum in Concord. This was the 3d lecture of the series, “The Protest.”
April 4, Thursday: Robert Schumann, learning of the grave illness of his brother Eduard, departed from Vienna toward his home town of Zwickau.
April 4: Drifting in a sultry day on the sluggish waters of the pond, I almost cease to live — and begin to be. A boat-man stretched on the deck of his craft, and dallying with the noon, would be as apt an emblem of eternity for me, as the serpent with his tail in his mouth. I am never so prone to lose my identity. I am dissolved in the haze.
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. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
April 8, Monday: Plans were approved for a Boston Hospital for the Insane.
April 9, Tuesday: Robert Schumann arrived in Zwickau from Vienna. His brother Eduard had died 3 days earlier. Clara Wieck wrote to Robert from Paris that her friend Emilie List has informed on her to her father, who was threatening to disinherit her and begin a lawsuit unless they broke off their relationship.
The Susan, suspected by the British of being a negrero, was boarded (HOUSE DOCUMENT, 26th Congress, 2d session V, No. 115, pages 34-41).154 INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE
April 10, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson lectured at the Concord Lyceum in Concord. This was the 4th lecture of the series, “Love.”
April 11, Thursday: His health having for some time been impaired, John Galt died in Greenock, Scotland.
April 13, Saturday: Advertisement for the Concord Academy under Preceptor John Thoreau, Jr.:
(Several more such advertisements would appear during this year.)
April 14, Sunday: Robert Schumann arrived back in Leipzig from his home town of Zwickau.
April 15, Monday: Les treize, an opera comique by Fromental Halevy to words of Scribe and Duport, was performed for the initial time, at the Theatre de la Bourse, Paris. The critics were mixed but it would receive 39 performances.
154. Well, would you care to hazard a guess whether the Brits had been correct in their surmise? HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 April 16, Tuesday: William Lloyd Garrison addressed an amalgamated audience at Mechanics Hall in New Bedford, with Frederick Douglass in the audience.155
April 18, Thursday: Rodrigo Pinto Pizarro Pimentel de Almeida Carvalhais, barao da Ribeira de Sabrosa replaced Bernardo de Sa Nogueira de Figueiredo, visconde e barao de Sa Bandeira as Prime Minister of Portugal.
April 19, Friday: By terms of a treaty signed in London by Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Great Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, Belgium and the Netherlands became independent nations. Luxembourg was made an independent grand duchy, and all powers guaranteed the neutrality of Belgium.
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.
155. Frederick Douglass also, during this period, attended lectures by Wendell Phillips, the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, and other abolitionists. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 April 21, Sunday: A Turkish army invaded Syria to oppose Mohammed Ali.
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.”156
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.157
April 28, Sunday: Gioachino Rossini agreed to become “perpetual honorary consultant” to the Liceo Musicale in Bologna.
156. 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.” 157. 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
1839 1839
MAY
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. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
May: While on a trip to Mobile, Sam Houston met Margaret Lea of Marion, Alabama.
May: The Western Cherokee invited the new arrivals from the east to meet to establish a united Cherokee Nation government. TRAIL OF TEARS
Meanwhile, the American system was bringing in fresh recruits:
A negrero flying the Portuguese flag, the Jupiter, master unknown, out of Cabinda with a cargo of 390 enslaved Africans on one of its five known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Ligera, master Sales, out of an unknown area of Africa with a cargo of 233 enslaved Africans on one of its eight known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at a port of Cuba. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Macsismo, master Silva, sailing out of Mocambique with a cargo of 360 enslaved Africans on its one and only known Middle Passage, arrived at a port of Cuba. A Portuguese slaver, the Cospe-Fogo, master A.S.D. Almedia, out of an unknown area of Africa with a cargo of an unknown number of enslaved Africans on its first of two known such voyages, arrived at Pernambuco. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Constancia, master unknown, out of Quelimane with a cargo of 617 enslaved Africans on one of its three known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at Campos, Brazil. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Bellona, master unknown, out of the Congo River with a cargo of 357 enslaved Africans on one of its three known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Bom Sucesso, master C. J. Oliveira, out of Angola with a cargo of an unknown number of enslaved Africans on its one and only known Middle Passage, arrived at Pernambuco. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Adamster, master unknown, out of Quelimane with a cargo of 574 enslaved Africans on one of its three known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at the port of Baia Sepetiba. A Portuguese slaver, the Doze de Janeiro, master J.F. Dias, out of Angola with a cargo of an unknown number of enslaved Africans on its one and only known Middle Passage, arrived at Pernambuco, Brazil.
May: George R. Graham purchased the magazine The Casket from Samuel Atkinson and Charles Alexander.
May: Richard Henry Dana, Jr. submitted his manuscript of TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST to William Cullen Bryant.
May: Samuel Ringgold Ward was licensed to preach the gospel by the New York Congregational Association, assembled at Poughkeepsie. (We will, therefore, from this point, refer to him as the Reverend Ward.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
May: An unusually cold and wet month in New England spoiled many acres of newly sprouted Chinese mulberry seedlings and damaged many of the newly planted cuttings. Soon the speculative craze would be over. SILK HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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 6, Monday: Le panier fleuri, an opera comique by Ambroise Thomas to words of de Leuven and Brunswick, was performed for the initial time, at the Theatre de Nouveautes, Paris.
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 9, Thursday: A 3d child, Daniel, was born to Franz Liszt and Countess Marie d’Agoult in Rome, during their extended sojourn in Italy.
May 10, Friday: Hector Berlioz was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. He chose Giacomo Meyerbeer as his sponsor.
Giuseppe Verdi’s resignation as maestro di musica in Busseto became effective.
May 11, Saturday: US federal troops prevented the State of Michigan from digging a canal at Sault Ste. Marie. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
May 12, Sunday: At Paris, Republicans armed themselves with stolen weapons and attempted an insurrection, attacking the Palais de Justice and the Hotel de Ville. They killed a small number of soldiers and held positions until late afternoon, when troops retook the buildings. At various points in the city barricades were erected, and insurgents attacked some National Guard positions. By 9PM the troops had regained all positions and restored order, with 94 fatalities. At 10PM Nicolas Jean de Dieu Soult, duc de Dalmatie replaced Louis Matthieu, Comte Mole as prime minister of France.
[Sunday of WEEK, in regard to the year 1839] As we thus dipped our way along between fresh masses of foliage overrun with the grape and smaller flowering vines, the surface was so calm, and both air and water so transparent, that the flight of a kingfisher or robin over the river was as distinctly seen reflected in the water below as in the air above. The birds seemed to flit through submerged groves, alighting on the yielding sprays, and their clear notes to come up from below.
“While it was old, the canal between the Concord and the Merrimack just above Billerica Falls plainly revealed its youthfulness in comparison to the untouched lands about it. Thoreau noted that birds that fed in, and creatures which swam in the waters were the first to be at home in the man-made water-way. Plants adjust themselves more slowly to areas disturbed by man.” -Cruickshank, Helen Gere. THOREAU ON BIRDS (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964)
[Sunday of WEEK] This canal, which is the oldest in the country, and has even an antique look beside the more modern railroads, is fed by the Concord, so that we were still floating on its familiar waters. It is so much water which the river lets for the advantage of commerce. There appeared some want of harmony in its scenery, since it is not of equal date with the woods and meadows through which it is led, and we missed the conciliatory influence of time on land and water; but in the lapse of ages, Nature will recover and indemnify herself, and gradually plant fit shrubs and flowers along its borders. Already the kingfisher sat upon a pine over the water, and the bream and pickerel swam below.
Sunday sep 1st [1839] We passed the noon under an oak on the banks of the canal in chelmsford. From Ball’s hill which is the St Anne’s of Concord voyageurs to Billerica meeting house the river is twice or three times as broad as in Concord– A deep and dark stream, flowing between gentle hills and occasional cliffs, and well wooded all the way It is one long lake bordered with willows. The boatmen call it a dead stream. For long reaches you can see but few traces of any village. It seemed a natural sabbath today — a stillness so intense that it could not be heightened. There was not breeze enough to ruffle the water. The cattle stood up to their bellies in the river and made you think of Rembrandt. we encamped under some oaks in Tyngsboro, on the east bank of the Merrimack, just below the ferry.
The hardest material obeys the same law with the most fluid. Trees are but rivers of sap and woody fibre flowing from the atmosphere and emptying in to the earth by their trunks — as their roots flow upward to the surface. And in the heavens there are rivers of stars and milky ways– There are rivers of rock on the surface and rivers of ore in the bowels of the earth. From this point the river runs perfectly straight for a mile or more to Carlisle bridge — which consists of 20 piers — and in the distance its surface looks like a cobweb gleaming in the sun. {Two-fifths page blank} In the morning the whole river and adjacent country was covered by a dense fog — through which the smoke of our fire curled up like a subtler mist. But before we had rowed many rods the fog dispersed as by magic and only a slight steam curled up from the surface of the water.– We reached the falls in Billerica before noon, where we left the river for the canal, which runs six miles through the woods to the Merrimack at Middlesex. As we did not care to loitre in this part of our voyage while one ran along the tow path drawing the boat by a cord, the other kept it off from the shore with a pole, so that we accomplished the whole distance in little more than an hour. There is some abruptness and want of harmony in this scenery since the canal is not of equal date with the forests and meadows it runs through. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 You miss the conciliatory influence of time on land and water. In the lapse of ages no doubt nature will recover and idemnify herself. Gradually fit shrubs and flowers will be planted along the borders. Already the king-fisher sits on a pine over the water, and the dace and pickerel swim below. All works pass directly out of the hands of the architect. and though he has bungled she will perfect them at last. Her own fish-hawks hover over our fish-ponds were pleased to find that our boat would float in M. water By noon we were fairly launched upon the bosom of the merrimack — having passed through the locks at Middlesex — and felt as if we were on the ocean stream itself. Beaver river comes in a little lower down draining the meadows of Pelham, Windham, and Londonderry, the Irish settlers of which latter town were the first to introduce the potatoe into N.E. {One-fourth page blank} Two men called out from the steep and wooded banks to be taken as far as Nashua but we were too deeply laden– As we glided away from them with even sweeps while the fates scattered oil in our course — as the sun was sinking behind the willows of the distant shore, — we could see them far off over the water — running along the shore and climbing over the rocks and fallen trees like ants till they reached a spot where a broad stream poured its placid tribute into the Merrimack– When a mile distant we could see them preparing to ford the stream– But whether they got safely through or went round by the source, we never learned. Thus nature puts the busiest merchant to pilgrim’s shifts. She soon drives us to staff and scrip and scallop shell. The Mississippi the Nile the Ganges can their personality be denied? have they not a personal history in the annals of the world– These journeying atoms from the andes and ural and mountains of the moon — by villas — villages — and mists — with the moccasined tread of an Indian warrior. Their sources not yet drained. The mountains of the moon send their tribute to the pasha as they did to Pharoah without fail. though he most collect the rest of his revenue at the point of the bayonnette Consider the phenomena of morn — or eve — and you will say that Nature has perfected herself by an eternity of practice– Evening stealing over the fields– The stars come to bathe in retired waters The shadows of the trees creeping farther and farther into the meadows. And a myriad phenomena beside. Occasionally a canal boat with its large white sail glided around a promontory a quarter of a mile before us and changed the scene in an instant– Occasionally attaching ourselves to its side we would float back in company awhile — interchanging a word with the voyageurs and obtaining a draught of cooler water from their stores. Occasionally we had to muster all our energy to get round a point where the river broke rippling over rocks and the maples trailed their branches in the stream. The rain had pattered all night And now the whole country wept, the drops falling in the river, and on the alder, and in the pastures, but instead of any bow in the heavens there was the trill of the tree sparrow all the morning. The cheery faith of this little bird atoned for the silence of the whole woodland quire.
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 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. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 May 14, Tuesday: At Macao, the scholar administrator Wei Yuan ordered that river ferries be examined at departure and arrival: “Smuggling must be stopped but the passengers’ personal effects will not be disturbed.” Dent and other named foreigners who had obtained his approval would be allowed to pass through the Custom Houses without examination, but those he had not pre-authorized would be “brought back and punished together with their Linguist and Hong merchant. If the boat people assist foreigners to escape they will wear the cangue on the river bank”
Tuesday– At intervals when there was a suitable reach in the river — we caught sight of the Goffstown mountain — the Indian Un-can-nu-nuc rising before us, on the left of the river– “The far blue mountain.” {One-fourth page blank} We soon after saw the Piscataquoag emptying in on our left — and heard the falls of Amoskieg above. It was here according to tradition that the sachem Wonolanset resided, and when at war with the mohawks his tribe are said to have concealed their provisions in the cavities of the rocks in the upper part of the falls The descent is 54 feet in half a mile. The manchester manufacturing company have constructed a canal here — through which we passed. Above the falls the river spreads out into a lake — stretching up toward Hooksett– We could see several canal boats at intervals of a mile or more standing up to Hooksett with a light breeze. With their broad sails set they moved slowly up the stream in the sluggish and fitful breeze — as if impelled by some mysterious counter current — like Antediluvian birds. A grand motion so slow and steady. For the most part they were returning empty, or at most with a few passengers aboard. As we rowed near to one which was just getting under way, the steers man offered to take us in tow — but when we came along side we found that he intended to take us on board, as otherwise we should retard his own voyage too much — but as we were too heavy to be lifted aboard — we left him and proceeded up the stream a half a mile to the shade of some maples to spend our noon In the course of half an hour several boats passed up the river at intervals of half a mile — and among them came the boat we have mentioned, keeping the middle of the stream and when within speaking distance the steers man called out if we would come along side now he would take us in tow. But not heeding their taunts we made no haste to give chase until our preparations were made — by which time they were a quarter of a mile ahead. Then with our own sails set — and plying our four oars, we were soon along side of them — and we glided close under their side, we quietly promised if they would throw us a rope that we would take them in tow. And then we gradually overhauled each boat in succession untill we had the river to ourselves again.
[Tuesday of WEEK. American Passenger Pigeons Ectopistes migratorius near the mouth of the Souhegan River.] During the heat of the day, we rested on a large island a mile above the mouth of this river, pastured by a herd of cattle, with steep banks and scattered elms and oaks, and a sufficient channel for canal- boats on each side. When we made a fire to boil some rice for our dinner, the flames spreading amid the dry grass, and the smoke curling silently upward and casting grotesque shadows on the ground, seemed phenomena of the noon, and we fancied that we progressed up the stream without effort, and as naturally as the wind and tide went down, not outraging the calm days by unworthy bustle or impatience. The woods on the neighboring shore were alive with pigeons, which were moving south, looking for mast, but now, like ourselves, spending their noon in the shade. We could hear the slight, wiry, winnowing sound of their wings as they changed their roosts from time to time, and their gentle and tremulous cooing. They sojourned with us during the noon-tide, greater travellers far than we. You may frequently discover a single pair sitting upon the lower branches of the white pine in the depths of the woods, at this hour of the day, so silent and solitary, and with such a hermit-like appearance, as if they had never strayed beyond its skirts, while the acorn which was gathered in the forests of Maine was still undigested in their crops. We obtained one of these handsome birds, which lingered too long upon its perch, and plucked and broiled it here with some other game, to be carried along for our supper; for, beside provisions which we carried with us, we depended mainly on the river and forest for our supply. It was true, it did not seem to be putting this bird to its right use to pluck off its feathers, and extract its entrails, and broil its carcass on the coals; but we heroically persevered, nevertheless, waiting for further information. The same regard for Nature which excited our sympathy for her creatures nerved our hands to carry through what we had begun. For we would be honorable to the party we deserted; we would fulfill fate, and so at length, perhaps, detect the secret innocence of these incessant tragedies which Heaven allows. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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 16, Thursday: Charles Turner, Jr. died at Scituate, Massachusetts at the age of 78. The body would be placed in the burial ground of the First Parish of Norwell.
May 17, Friday: Archibald Alison (the elder, the minister) died.
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 22, Wednesday: After 3 months in Marseilles, Frédéric François Chopin, George Sand, and her children left for her estate in Berry.
May 25, Saturday: Waldo Emerson ’s 36th birthday. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 May 27, Monday: Birth of Friend Daniel Ricketson’s second son Walton.158 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.
May 29, Wednesday: Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres presented his drawing of Franz Liszt to Countess Marie d’Agoult in Rome.
May 30, Thursday: Charles Gounod was awarded the Prix de Rome for his cantata Fernand.
158. 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
1839 1839
JUNE
June: In an attempt to intercept the reunification negotiations between John Ross and Sequoyah, the Old Treaty Party Cherokee leaders had the Treaty Party leaders, John Ridge, Major Ridge, and Elias Boudinot, assassinated. TRAIL OF TEARS
June: The Reverend William Henry Channing began to edit the Western Messenger (until March 1841).
June: Lydia Maria Child was in Boston at this point, staying with friends while looking for a job. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 June: Bronson Alcott admitted the child Susan159 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 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. 159. 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
1839 1839
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.160 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
160. 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
1839 1839 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 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 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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
1839 1839 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 1, Saturday: Frédéric François Chopin, George Sand and her children arrive from Marseilles at her chateau Nohant in Berry. It is the first time he has seen it.
June 5, Wednesday: The London and Croydon Railway opened.
June 7, Friday: The Hawaiian Declaration of Rights was signed.
June 12, Wednesday: The 1st baseball game was played in America. At Cooperstown, New York, Abner Doubleday had devised the game of baseball. Supposedly.
June 13, Thursday: Prince Milos Obrenovic I of Serbia abdicated for lack of support, in favor of his son Milan Obrenovic II. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 June 20, Thursday: Gioachino Rossini and his mistress Olympe Pelissier left Bologna for Naples.
June 21, Friday: Samuel Sebastian Wesley graduated at Magdalen College, Oxford with the degrees of BMus and DMus.
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 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: The balloon of master Boston goldbeater Louis Lauriat was gracing the skies above Chelsea, Massachusetts when it was dragged by a high wind through trees and across the surfline, and out to sea thirty miles toward Cape Ann. The intrepid aeronaut Lauriat would be rescued by Captain John Pierce of Wellfleet but his balloon and apparatus would be lost to a value of approximately $1,000. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
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
June 20, Thursday: Gioachino Rossini and his mistress Olympe Pelissier left Bologna for Naples.
June 21, Friday: Samuel Sebastian Wesley graduated at Magdalen College, Oxford with the degrees of BMus and DMus.
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 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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!
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.161
Rosetta Douglass, the 1st child of Anna Murray Douglass and Frederick Douglass, was “born free” in New Bedford.162
Or, at least, this is the official date proclaimed by the family: notice that June 24, 1839 is nine months and a
161. 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
162. “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
1839 1839 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!)163
163. 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
1839 1839 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, 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. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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
1839 1839
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
1839 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.164 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
164. 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
1839 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
1839 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:
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. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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.165 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,166 and at the time these two were presumed to be this man’s sons or stepsons.
165.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. 166.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
1839 1839
SUMMER 1839
Summer: Sam Houston continued his trip through the states, visiting Andrew Jackson at The Hermitage near Nashville, Tennessee. On his return to Mobile, Alabama, Margaret Lea agreed to get married with him. On his return to Nacogdoches, Texas, he made a speech denouncing President Lamar’s campaign against the Indians (his old friend Cherokee Headman Bowl had been killed). HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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
July: Sir George Back determined to attempt to recover his health at Marienbad (Mariánské Láznĕ), a fashionable German spa. Finding this treatment ineffective, he would continue to Italy, where he would remain until 1842. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 July: Henry Bibb was ready to try again to retrieve his wife and daughter from slavery. He took the steamboat across the river from Cincinnati into Kentucky and made his way to the place where his mother was enslaved. There, however, he made the mistake of placing trust in one of his mother’s slave friends, and was betrayed when this slave was offered $5 by the slavemaster. This time not only he, but also his wife and child, would be sold South in chains as incorrigibles.
A ship manifest of black Americans being “sold south” A Portuguese negrero, the Magadalena, master Morillo, out of Sao Tome with a cargo of an unknown number of enslaved Africans on its second of two known Middle Passage voyages, arrived in Cuban waters. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Florinda de Africa, master unknown, out of Benguela with a cargo of 324 enslaved Africans on its second of two known Middle Passages, arrived at the port of Paranagua, Brazil. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Fortuna, master Barbosa, out of an unknown area of Africa with a cargo of 350 enslaved Africans on one of its five known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at a port of Cuba. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Dois D’Abril, master unknown, out of the Congo River with a cargo HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 of 339 enslaved Africans on one of its three known such Passages, arrived at the port of Ilha Grande, Brazil. A slaver flying the Spanish flag (as shown below), the Caridad Cubana, master S. Fabrequez, out of Bissau with a cargo of 174 enslaved Africans on its one and only known Middle Passage, arrived at the port of Havana, Cuba.
In this general timeframe the negreros Dolphin (or Constitução), Hound, and Mary Cushing (or Sete de Avril), would be discovered to be protected in their activities by American as well as by Spanish flags and papers (HOUSE DOCUMENT, 26th Congress, 2d session V, No. 115, pages 28, 51-5, 109-10, 136, 234-8; HOUSE REPORTS, 27th Congress, 3d session, III, No. 283, pages 709-15). INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
THE MIDDLE PASSAGE HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
July: Question: Was it at about this time that Henry Thoreau carted his old boat Red Jacket over to Walden Pond? HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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.”
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. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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, —
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
1839 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
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
PHILIP CAFARO ON DEJECTION, DESPAIR, 167 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 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, HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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 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 167. Philip Cafaro. THOREAU’S LIVING ETHICS: WALDEN AND THE PURSUIT OF VIRTUE. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2004 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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.
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
1839 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
1839 1839 July 2, Tuesday: In the Minnesota Territory, each Ojibwa band began to go home the same way it came. But it appears that the two bereaved sons of the Pillager band set up an ambush in tall grass near the south-eastern shore of Lake Harriet, by a path that ran on the east side of the lake and then on to a great body of timber, a wild pigeon grove, in what is now a rather posh district of Minneapolis (in our own era, the popular poet Robert Bly, for instance, would reside there –between expeditions to the primeval forest to beat his tom-tom in his male-sensitivity circles– before his Mrs. divorced him). They were going to get some revenge.
When Hku-pa Choki Mahzah “Middle Iron Wing,” also known as “The Badger,” went pigeon hunting before dawn, he walked right into the ambush set up by the two Pillagers and didn’t have a chance.
After this act of revenge the Pillager warriors would attempt to hide out at the Minnehaha Falls. The Lakota who found and killed them there later said the two had hidden on the ledge behind the Minnehaha falls “as if they were behind a big white blanket.”
July 3, Wednesday: The first public normal school in the United States of America opened in Lexington, Massachusetts.168 Students had to be at least 16 years old to attend. On this first day only three girls showed up, but, by the end of the year, 25 students would be enrolled. This experiment by Headmaster Cyrus Pierce would be so successful that Massachusetts would open several more of these normal schools over the next couple of years.
In the Minnesota Territory, in the morning, Marpiyawicasta Man of the Clouds’ son-in-law Rupacoka II “One Who Drifts” went out to hunt pigeons. He took the path past Lake Harriet and, when his body was recovered, he had been scalped. The Reverend Stephens of the Lake Harriet mission brought the news to169 the fort, while Reverend Pond attempted to explain to the savages what the Christian thing to do would be:
When the Dakota was killed at Lake Harriet, I was there a few minutes after he was killed, and saw in the tall grass the trail of the Chippewas [Ojibwa] leading to a small cluster of young poplars. There were no tracks leading from the grove, and all knew that they were there. We afterwards learned that they remained there till dark. I urged the Indians to try to kill them, but though there were as many as fifty armed Dakotas, they refused to go near them, and leaving them to escape, started off in pursuit of the Mille Lacs Indians.
Man of the Clouds, who had been a pacifist since the age of 25, refused to engage in yet another round of retributions in this intertribal feud, and commented that war begot only war. His brother-in-law Zitkadanduta Red Bird seized command as temporary war chief. With the prior knowledge and concurrence of officers at Fort Snelling, a war party of 150 Dakotas prepared to go after the unsuspecting Mille Lacs band that went up the Mississippi, and others prepared to go after the unsuspecting band that had left with fur trader William R. Aitkin the morning before to go to La Pointe by way of the St. Croix River. The Dakota war parties assembled at St. Anthony “Place where the Water Falls.” The Reverend Samuel W. Pond watched the war party ferry itself across the Mississippi by detachments, in the 168. A private such institution had been created in 1823 at Concord Corners, Vermont on the New Hampshire border. A “normal school” is a school where high school graduates train to become primary school teachers (such a service is now provided by the “Department of Education” of a college). In 19th-Century-speak the institution was “normal” because it established a “norm,” an elevated uniform standard. Shortly, this public institution would be relocated from Lexington to Framingham, where it is now referred to as Framingham State University. By the way, those who can do, those who can’t teach, and those who can’t teach teach others how to teach. 169. The Reverend S.W. Pond wrote on “Indian Warfare in Minnesota” in Shakopee in March 1870, and his account has been published in Volume III for 1870-1880, pages 129-138 of the Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society (St. Paul MN: Published by the Society, 1880). HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 available canoes, near sundown just above Hennepin Island, and watched as the medicine-man-turned-war- chief Red Bird blessed each warrior in turn. He would report that “The agent [Major Taliaferro] had already given them permission to retaliate in case any of them should be killed.” According to Pond, the Dakotas decided not to pursue the offending Pillager band because they “would be watching and probably ready for them.” Instead, they made bold to attack the Mille Lacs and St. Croix bands of Ojibwa “who would suspect no danger.” The band of Ojibwa that was with William R. Aitkin were intercepted drunk by a war party led by Zitkadanduta Red Bird, in a ravine near Stillwater where Minnesota Penitentiary is now located, and 21 of them were killed and 29 wounded. However, the Dakotas lost 16 warriors in addition to their war leader.
[You will note that the Stillwater prison is not listed in current travel literature –unless this prison is included implicitly under “cozy bed and breakfasts”– as shown below:]
Stillwater One of Minnesota’s oldest cities, Stillwater is nestled into the bluffs and hills that rise above the scenic St. Croix. Walking tours of downtown Stillwater take visitors past many of its historic buildings, and browsers can also tour the Northern Vineyard Winery or local Wolf Brewery Caves, Aamodt’s Apple Farm, or take a ride on sternwheeler excursions or the Rivertown Trolley. Popular with fine diners, the Minnesota Zephyr dinner train offers both haute cuisine and great views of the river. Cozy bed and breakfasts and historic inns abound in Stillwater, such as the classic Lowell Inn and the rustic Outing Lodge at Pine Point. Stillwater events to watch for include the Rivertown Art Fair in May, Taste of St. Croix in June, Lumberjack Days in July, Music on the Waterfront in July and August, Valley Antique Show and Sale in September, Fall Colors Art Fair in October and a Victorian Christmas in November. Call 612-439-7700 for more information. — The City Pages “Annual Manual,” 1992-1993
The white people who had set up this encounter in the ravine near Stillwater in 1839 had very definitely achieved their objective of exacerbating the tension between the peoples they were intent on dominating: “divide and conquer, but pose as a mediator” was an old trick, and it had worked again.
We interrupt this account to bring you a news flash: even as late as 1915 the race war continued, for a 350- pound Indian brave was attacking white passers-by in front of Byron Mosier’s Cigar Store in downtown Stillwater, Minnesota: HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
Indian Brave Tomahawking White People in
Downtown Stillwater MN in 1915 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Meanwhile, the other Dakota war party intercepted the women and children of the Mille Lacs band of Ojibwa that had gone up the river, while they were occupied in their Rum River portage. The Mille Lacs men were away hunting. An old man Mazomani orated: “Let them all die.… The Great Spirit has delivered them to us!” As the Dakota warriors charged, some of the Mille Lacs women didn’t even drop the packs from their backs. They had just taken part in this big friendly party at the white father’s fort and had no awareness of the act of retribution by the brothers of the Pillager band. Only the young women who could run the fastest escaped. The right reverend was keeping score:170
Extract from a Memorandum book of Indian Murders
At Lake Harriet, one Dakota by Ojibwa.
On Rum river, and at Stillwater, ninety-one Ojibwas killed by Dakotas in one day — Dakota loss seventeen. This broke up the Dakota Mission station at Lake Harriet.
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.
170. From the Dakota Tawaxitku Kin, or The Dakota Friend, St. Paul, Minnesota, May 1852. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
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
1839 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
1839 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.171
July 5, Friday: Timothy Alden, Jr. died outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The grave is in the Greendale Cemetery in Meadville, Pennsylvania.
July 8, Monday: John D. Rockefeller was born.172
When Prince Milan Obrenovic II of Serbia died he was succeeded by his brother Michael, under a 3-person regency council.
Mehmed Husrev Pasha replaced Mehmed Emin Rauf Pasha as Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire.
171. 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 172. And immediately, one may presume, he began to monopolize his mother’s attention. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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.”
“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 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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
1839 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 and John 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.
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
July 12, Friday: By a vote of 235 over 46 the British Parliament rejected the Chartist petition bearing 1,200,000 signatures. Democracy is not the way we do government here. Definitely not.
The Cherokee nation Act of Union brought together the eastern and western Cherokee Nations. TRAIL OF TEARS
July 15, Monday: Winthrop Mackworth Praed died of tuberculosis at Chester Square, London.
Clara Wieck signed a formal statement in Paris that would lead to legal proceedings for the setting-aside of her father’s refusal to consent to her marriage with Robert Schumann (should he decline his consent).
July 16, Tuesday: Robert Schumann filed a complaint against Friedrich Wieck in Leipzig, asking the court of appeal for permission to get married with his daughter Clara Wieck.
Waltz in G for orchestra by Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka was performed for the initial time, at the Winter Palace, St. Petersburg.
Over the past couple of days Cherokee warriors and the Texas militia had been battling on the Neches River, producing more than 100 corpses. TRAIL OF TEARS
July 18, Thursday: The scholars of Concord strutted their stuff. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 July 18. THE ASSABET Up this pleasant stream let’s row For the livelong summer’s day, Sprinkling foam where’er we go In wreaths as white as driven snow. Ply the oars! away! away!
Now we glide along the shore, Chucking lilies as we go, While the yellow-sanded floor Doggedly resists the oar, Like some turtle dull and slow.
Now we stein the middle tide, Plowing through the deepest soil; Ridges pile on either side, While we through the furrow glide, Reaping bubbles for our toil.
Dew before and drought behind, Onward all doth seem to fly; Naught contents the eager mind, Only rapids new are kind, Forward arc the earth and sky.
Sudden music strikes the ear, Leaking out from yonder bank, Fit such voyagers to cheer. Sure there must be Naiads here, Who have kindly played this prank.
There I know the cunning pack Where yon self-sufficient rill All its telltale hath kept back, Through the meadows held its clack, And now bubbleth its fill.
Silent flows the parent stream, And if rocks do lie below Smothers with her waves the din, As it were a youthful sin, Just as still and just as slow.
But this gleeful little rill, Purling round its storied pebble, Tinkles to the selfsame tune From December until June, Nor doth any drought enfeeble.
See the sun behind the willows, Rising through the golden haze, How he gleams along the billows, Their white crests the easy pillows Of his do-,v-besprinkled rays.
Forward press we to the dawning, For Aurora leads the way, Sultry noon and twilight scorning; In each dewdrop of the morning Lies the promise of a day.
Rivers from the sun do flow, Springing with the dewy morn; Voyageurs ’gainst time do row, HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Idle noon nor sunset know, Ever even with tile dawn.
Since that first “Away! away!” Many a lengthy league we’ve rowed, Still the sparrow on the spray Hastes to usher in the day With her simple stanza’d ode.
July 19, Friday: After crossing into Prussia, Richard and Minna Wagner board ship in Pillau (Baltiysk), making for Paris. On their way, the couple was in a carriage accident, which shortly thereafter caused Minna to miscarry. They have to sneak on to the ship and hide, since they crossed into Prussia illegally and Wagner is fleeing creditors in Riga.
A Leipzig court orders an attempt to arbitrate between Friedrich Wieck and Robert Schumann in the case of Clara Wieck.
July 20, Saturday: Miss Ellen Devereux Sewall, age 17, joined her young brother, Master Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., and her aunt, Miss Prudence Ward, at the Thoreau boardinghouse in Concord, for a stay of a couple of weeks. Both John Thoreau, Jr., age 24, and his younger brother Henry Thoreau, would be falling in love with Ellen — who was also at that time being courted by another Harvard man:
GOD IN CONCORD by Jane Langton © 1992 Penguin Books USA Inc. 39 There is no remedy for love but to love more. Journal, July 25, 1839 Viking Penguin
Hope Fry didn’t know what to do about Ananda Singh. Here he was in her own house, sleeping in the room across ISBN 0-670-84260-5 — PS3562.A515G58
Thoreau would take her to see the camelopard (giraffe) that was on tour through Concord, and take her and her aunt sailing. The only request he would refuse would be her request that he accompany her to church on a Sunday morning. They would play a phrenology game: manipulating Ellen’s cranium, Henry would announce that he could feel no bumps at all (which, in the evaluations of the time, was an ambiguous reading indicative either of idiocy or genius). HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 July 20. THE BREEZE’S INVITATION Come let’s roam the breezy pastures, Where the freest zephyrs blow, Batten on the oak tree’s rustle, And the pleasant insect bustle, Dripping with the streamlet’s flow.
What if 1 no wings do wear, Thro’ this solid-seeming air 1 can skim like any swallow; Whoso dareth let her follow, And we’ll be a jovial pair.
Like two careless swifts let’s sail, Zephyrus shall think for me; Over hill and over dale, Riding on the easy gale, We will scan the earth and sea.
Yonder see that willow tree Winnowing the buxom air; You a gnat and I a bee, With our merry minstrelsy We will make a concert there.
One green leaf shall be our screen, Till the sun cloth go to bed, I the king and you the queen Of that peaceful little green, Without any subject’s aid.
To our music Time will linger, And earth open wide her car, Nor shall any need to tarry To immortal verse to marry Such sweet music as he’ll hear.
Nature doth have her dawn each day, But mine are far between; Content, I cry, for, sooth to say, Mine brightest are, I weep.
For when my sun doth deign to rise, Though it be her noontide, Her fairest field in shadow lies, Nor can my light abide.
Sometimes I bask me in her day, Conversing with my mate; But, if we interchange one ray, Forthwith her heats abate.
Through his discourse I climb and see, As from some eastern hill, A brighter morrow rise to me Than lieth in her skill.
As ’t were two summer rla.vs in one. Two Sundays come together, Our rays united make one sun. With fairest summer weather. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 July 22, Monday: George Heriot died in London at the age of approximately 80, of what was at the time said to be “decay of nature” (this presumably meant “extreme old age”). He had never married.
The Mormons had been driven out of Far West, Missouri and founded Nauvoo, Illinois. This instantly became the largest city (population 10,000) in what was to become the state of Illinois. There, however, they were dying and dying and dying of malaria. On this “day of God’s power” President Joseph Smith rose from his bed of sickness “and the power of God rested upon him. He commenced in his own house and door-yard, commanding the sick, in the name of Jesus Christ, to arise and be made whole, and they were healed according to his word. He then continued to travel from house to house from tent to tent upon the bank of the river, healing the sick as he went until he arrived at the upper stone house, where he crossed the river in a boat, accompanied by several of the Quorum of the Twelve, and landed in Montrose. He walked into the cabin where I [Brigham Young] was lying sick, and commanded me, in the name of Jesus Christ, to arise and be made whole. I arose and was healed, and followed him and the brethren of the Twelve into the house of Elijah Fordham, who was supposed to be dying, by his family and friends. Joseph stepped to his bedside, took him by the hand and commanded him, in the name of Jesus Christ, to arise and be made whole. His voice was as the voice of God. Brother Fordham instantly leaped from his bed, called for his clothing and followed us up the street. We then went into the house of Joseph B. Noble, who also lay very sick, and he was healed in the same manner; and when, by the power of God granted unto him, Joseph had healed all the sick, he recrossed the river and returned to his home. This was a day never to be forgotten. During my further stay in Montrose I attended meetings and administered to the sick when I was well myself.
The USS Shark put to sea from Hampton Roads for duty with the Pacific Squadron of the US Navy. On her way around the Horn to Callao, Peru she would be the initial United States man-of-war to accomplish a passage through the Straits of Magellan from east to west.
July 23, Tuesday: Anton Rubinstein made his debut in Moscow. He played a movement from the A-minor concerto of Hummel and pieces by Field, Henselt, Thalberg, and Liszt.
July 25, Thursday: In upstate New York, at the Niagara Falls, a carpenter working on a tourist bridge to Goat Island fell into the rapids. Myron Chapin had gone in about 500 feet before the curl of the always-deadly American Falls, and as the current pulled him along he managed to swim so as to collide with a pile of rocks about 90 feet from the curl. After about half an hour of handwaving from the rocks and from the shore of the island, Joel Robinson tipped a light skiff into the waters at the lower end of Bath Island and rowed from an eddy behind one rock to an eddy behind another rock, resting in each eddy while plotting out his next dash across the torrent. After one mishap in which he almost lost control of his skiff, he made it to the eddy downstream of Chapin’s pile. With Chapin aboard, Robinson made his way back from eddy to eddy to the safety of Goat Island. Chapin, clambering out of the skiff safe and sound, embraced his wife and children. Someone began a cash collection among the onlookers in honor of Robinson’s courage and selflessness, and the crowd put Robinson and Chapin back into the skiff and marched to town as a triumphal procession — carrying the skiff with the two men in it on their shoulders.
July 25. There is no remedy for love but to love more.
July 26, Friday: In upstate New York, the Rochester Lyceum (or, Youths Debating Association) argued the question, “Resolved that Henry Clay deserves the office of President of the United States of America more than Gen. Scott.”
July 27, Saturday: Dr. John Kimball de Laski got married with Anne Wise in Eastport, Maine. This couple’s children would be born in Lubec and Elliottsville, Maine. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
July 29, Monday: Richard Wagner and Minna Wagner were aboard the Thetis, attempting to reach England from eastern Prussia, when it needed put into a Norwegian fjord during a gale. The composer was struck by the mountains rising from the sea, and the calm water, and would recall this in “Der fliegende Hollander.”
End of July: The schooling of Joseph Leidy at the Classical Academy in Philadelphia was completed, as he approached the age of 16. The question needed to be answered, in what way would he train to earn his living? His father Philip Leidy supposed that, with his aptitude for draughting and drawing, he might train to be a sign painter, but young Joseph, who had passed many leisure hours in the wholesale drug store of his cousin Napoleon B. Leidy, M.D., preferred to apprentice himself to an apothecary. After several months of this, his stepmother prevailed on his father, to allow him to study medicine. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
AUGUST
August: On St. Helena, the Girls School at Plantation was closed, and a new school opened at Hutts Gate.
A negrero flying the Portuguese flag, the Amable Salome, master A. Sanchez, on its one and only known Middle Passage, arrived at its destination, Cuba. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Casualidad, master Flores J., on its one and only known Middle Passage, delivered a cargo of 489 enslaved Africans, arrived at the port of Guanimar, Cuba. A slaver flying the Spanish flag (as shown below), the Felicidade, master Freitas, on its one and only known Middle Passage, out of Sao Tome, arrived at a port of Cuba.
THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
August: Stand Watie, Elias Boudinot’s brother, vowed that he was going to take revenge for the assassination of Treaty Party leaders John Ridge, Major Ridge, and Elias Boudinot. TRAIL OF TEARS
August 1, Thursday: In New Bedford, on this anniversary of the emancipation of the slaves of the British West Indies, the Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society sponsored a program featuring the Reverend Thomas Andros173 at the Old Congregational meetinghouse at the corner of William and Purchase streets. Over the next few years, there would be similar gatherings in this town, organized by similar groups. EMANCIPATION DAY ABOLITIONISM HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 August 1, Thursday: Waldo Emerson reported that “Last night came to me a beautiful poem from Henry Thoreau, ‘Sympathy.’ The purest strain & the loftiest, I think, that has yet pealed from this unpoetic American forest.”
COMMENTARY: [I am going to include several pages of commentary here, because the above was the poem that would become the controversial “To a Gentle Boy.”]
There’ve been Gay Pride parades in which posters of Henry Thoreau have been proudly carried. The evidence that he was gay was that he wrote a poem to one of his students, the little brother of the girl to whom he proposed marriage, and from the circumstance that after she turned him down he never did marry. Let us go into this in order to see that it is a simpleminded and as wrong as the idea of long standing, that Thoreau had no sense of humor. This is going to be a bit complicated, so pay attention. William Sewell [Willem Séwel Amsterdammer] published THE HISTORY OF THE RISE, INCREASE AND PROGRESS OF THE CHRISTIAN PEOPLE CALLED QUAKERS in English as a corrective to Gerard Croese’s HISTORY OF QUAKERISM. The records of the Salem library show that Nathaniel Hawthorne used their edition of this book for a week in 1828 and a month in 1829. The book recounted the activities of some of his ancestors, such as his great-great-great-grandfather William Hathorne (1607-1681) who sailed on the Arbella in 1630, settling in Dorchester in New England and then moving to Salem, who served at the rank of major in wars against the Americans, who became a magistrate and judge of the Puritans, and who had one Anne Coleman whipped out of the town of Salem for being a Quaker:
...naked from the waist upward, and bound to the tail of a cart, is dragged through the Main-street at the pace of a brisk walk, while the constable follows with a whip of knotted cords. A strong-armed fellow is that constable; and each time that he flourishes his lash in the air, you see a frown wrinkling and twisting his brow, and, at the same instant, a smile upon his lips. He loves his business, faithful officer that he is, and puts his soul into every stroke, zealous to fulfill the injunction of Major Hawthorne’s warrant, in the spirit and to the letter. There came down a stroke that has drawn blood! Ten such stripes are to be given in Salem, ten in Boston, and ten in Dedham; and, with those thirty stripes of blood upon her, she is to be driven into the forest.... Heaven grant that, as the rain of so many years has wept upon it, time after time, and washed it all away, so there may have been a dew of mercy, to cleanse this cruel blood-stain out of the record of the persecutor’s life!
And such as William’s son John Hathorne (1641-1717), a chip off the old block, a colonel in the Massachusetts militia and a deputy to the General Court in Boston who was a magistrate during the Salem witch episode
173. Clearly, this Reverend Thomas Andros was not the “Captain Thomas Andros or Andrews” who in February of this year was engaging in the coastal slave trade, taking the brig Smithfield, one of Nicholas Brown & Company’s ships, into the port of Charleston, South Carolina with a couple of coffles of American slaves aboard. This was instead the Reverend Thomas Andros who had been born in Norwich, Connecticut on May 1, 1759. This Thomas Andros had joined the revolutionary army at 16 as a private and musician and had served under Sullivan at the Battle of Rhode Island. He had also been in the battles of Long Island and White Plains. In 1781 he had enlisted on a privateer in New London, but had been captured by the British forces and confined aboard the Jersey, a dismasted 74-gun frigate, one of the decommissioned hulks anchored in Wallabout Bay (later the site of the Brooklyn Navy Yard). He had after a few months escaped from this floating hell, and later studied theology with Dr. Benedict in Plainfield, Connecticut. He had been ordained at Berkley, Massachusetts in 1788, and for 46 years would remain in charge of the Church there. He published sermons, and a narrative of his experience with the Jersey. For an account of this Reverend’s life by his son R.S.S. Andros, refer to Emery’s “Ministry of Taunton.” (He would die in Berkley on December 30, 1845.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 which featured one person being tortured to death and 19 hanged. Hawthorne was much stimulated by the blood curse that Sarah Good had placed on her executioners, “God will give you Blood to drink.” His tale “The Gentle Boy” of 1831 made reference to this history.
Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of the ages.
This was Hawthorne in 1840, according to a portrait painter, Samuel Stillman Osgood:
“The Gentle Boy” was published anonymously in a gift annual of The Token magazine in 1831, and then republished under Hawthorne’s name as a part of TWICE-TOLD TALES in 1832 and 1837 after deletion of the detail that, in being attacked by a gang of vicious Puritan children, the gentle Quaker boy had been struck in “a tender part.” The book THE GENTLE BOY: A TWICE-TOLD TALE, when published in 1839, was dedicated to Sophia Amelia Peabody (to become Sophia Peabody Hawthorne), some of whose ancestors are also in Sewel’s history, and included a drawing by her. Printing was interrupted briefly to make the boy’s countenance more gentle in the engraved version of the drawing.
In 1842 Nathaniel and Sophia Peabody got married and moved to Concord, where Thoreau had just prepared for them a large garden. Although Hawthorne was vague on the spelling of Thoreau’s name, and his bride thought Thoreau repulsively ugly, Thoreau visited them several times in the Old Manse where Waldo Emerson had penned “Nature,” and for $7.00 sold them the boat he and his brother had used on their famous trip – so that they could row out and pluck pond lilies. Although Thoreau read little fiction, he could not have been unaware of their newly republished “Gentle Boy” story, at least by its title.
With this background, we can now consider the gay speculation about the poem Thoreau wrote to his pupil Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., “Once there was a gentle boy.” Is this poem’s emphasis on the nonmasculine characteristics of a young boy to be interpreted as evidence of a homoerotic longing on Thoreau’s part, or, since the age of eleven is not the age of sexual maturity, interpreted as evidence of an incipient pederasty? No, because the poem’s use of “gentle boy” might well have been a deliberate tie-in to the Hawthorne story. We must ask, what might have been the motivation for calling this particular story to Edmund’s attention? There are several reasons having nothing to do with sexuality or with Thoreau’s personal needs. The nonviolent Quaker boy in the story is treated with utter viciousness by a gang of local Puritan children, and in particular by one boy whom he had nursed with kindness and attention during an illness. Was Edmund, a visitor in Concord, having trouble being accepted by some of the local children in Thoreau’s school? This 174 historian William Sewell referred to by Hawthorne, was he one of Edmund’s ancestors? Were some of the people described in that history Sewall ancestors, as some were Ha(w)thorne ancestors and some Peabody ancestors? If so, the Thoreau family would surely have been aware of it, since they had known intimately at least three generations of the Sewall family starting with Mrs. Joseph Ward, Cynthia Thoreau’s star boarder, the widow of a colonel in the American revolutionary army, the mother of Caroline Ward who in turn was the mother of Ellen Devereux Sewall and Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
Hawthorne’s story is of a boy in an adoptive family, a “little quiet, lovely boy” who is heartsick for his parents. In the tale, in the face of the most extreme religious persecution of Friends by Puritans, the boy’s birth mother had violated her “duties of the present life” by “fixing her attention wholly on” her future life: she left her child with this Puritan family to venture on a “mistaken errand” of “unbridled fanaticism.” That is, after being whipped out of town by the Puritans, she followed a spirit leading to become a traveling Friend. At the end, the boy’s mother returns to him.
Hawthorne’s tale involves the hanging of an innocent person. Would this have been of interest to Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr.? Yes, for a Sewall was involved in the hanging of the nineteen witches in Salem on September 22, 1692. This Samuel Sewall was a lifelong bigot (he once refused to sell a plot of land because the bidders wanted to build a church, and they were Protestants but not of his own denomination) but he was worse than a bigot: not only did he hang women for being in league with the devil, he helped condemn and hang one of his Harvard peers, the Reverend George Burrough –whom he had once heard preach on the Sermon on the Mount– for being in league with the devil. It was an interesting period, a period in which one could lose control of oneself and cry out during the Puritan service, and be suspected of having acquired a taint of Quakerism, and be placed in great personal danger. And that was an interesting day, August 16, 1692: an arresting officer for the court, one John Willard, was “cried out upon” for doubting the guilt of the accused, and was hanged beside the Reverend Burrough. We find this in Sewall’s diary:
Mr. Burrough by his Speech, Prayer, protestation of his Innocence, did much move unthinking persons, which occasions their speaking hardly concerning his being executed.
A few years later, after some bad events in his family, Samuel suffered pangs of conscience: a public fast was declared for January 14, 1697 and he stood in Old South Church in Boston while the minister read a statement that the Sewall family had been cursed of God because of the trials, and that he took “the Blame and shame” upon himself. The twelve jurors were in attendance to acknowledge that they had “unwittingly and unwillingly” brought “upon ourselves and this people of the Lord the guilt of innocent blood.”
This Puritan’s son, the Reverend Joseph Sewall, was the father of Samuel Sewall, who was the father of Samuel Sewall, Jr., who was the father of the Reverend Edmund Quincy Sewall, Sr., who was of course Master Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr.’s father. It is an interesting question, how a teacher can help a young man like this venture into his manhood, after the decency of manliness has been utterly destroyed as an option for him in such a manner, by the indecency of a male ancestor. I would suggest that teacher Thoreau’s tactic – to emphasize to this lad Edmund the nominally feminine virtue of gentleness by providing him with a poem into which to grow – constitutes a legitimate and even profound maneuver on extremely difficult terrain. I would suggest, in addition, that those who seek to appropriate Thoreau by interpreting this “Once there was a gentle boy” poem as evidence of an unconscious erotic impulse are, in effect, debasing him. Debasing him not by accusing him of homosexuality – for it is not base to be gay – but by interpreting a complex and difficult situation in a manner that is merely simpleminded and doctrinaire. I want to emphasize the open-endedness of the questions involved: was Edmund, the new boy in town, having the sort of trouble with his peers that would have caused him to be in the situation of the gentle boy in the Hawthorne tale – ganged up against, beaten as
174. According to Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges’s 1988 A DICTIONARY OF SURNAMES (Oxford UP), “Sewall” is a variant of “Sewell,” which can be from the Old English “Sigeweald,” meaning government by right of conquest, or “Sœ¯weald” [œ with ¯ over it], meaning rule over the sea – an appropriate name for a family that included some wealthy shipbuilders in Maine! The same dictionary of surnames denies Thoreau’s derivation of his name from Thor, the god of lightning, giving “Thoreau,” “Thoret,” “Thoré,” and “Thorez” as variants of “Thorel,” a nickname for a strong or violent individual (like Uncle “J.C.” Charles Jones Dunbar!), from the Old French “t(h)or(el)” meaning bull. However, this dictionary allows that the name may also have originated in a diminutive of an aphetic short form of the given name “Maturin,” or that it may be from a medieval given name which was an aphetic short form of various names such as “Victor” and “Salvador” (“Salvador” is equivalent to the Hebrew “Yehoshua”), or that it may be related to an Italian/Spanish nickname for a lusty person, or metonymic occupational name for a tender of bulls: “Toro!” (Now going to a bullfight in Spain and rooting for the bull, something I had the opportunity to do when I was a teenager, couldn’t be the same for me.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 a sissy? The American Antiquarian Society in Worcester has preserved pages of Edmund’s Concord journal that may contain an answer. And what exactly was the perception of a blood guilt and an inherited shame among the Sewels and Sewells and Seawells and Sewalls? We should be led by this story, not into considerations of eroticism among 19th-Century virgins (which would be a mere shallow –not demeaning, surely, but surely both appropriative and dismissive– sidetrack) but into a full consideration of how a compassionate and concerned teacher like Henry Thoreau can help a young male pupil grow to maturity even in a situation in which the option “manhood” has for this pupil been virtually eliminated – by the foul deed and foul mind of a Samuel Sewall, his blood ancestor.
We need to begin to take into account various of the cultural influences upon Thoreau which we have not previously been considering due to the fact that few people read the dead languages anymore. There’s quite a body of ancient evidence to indicate that the poet Virgil may well have been by inclination a pederast, and the scholar S. Lilja confirms that Virgil’s apparent sexual persona does inform a great deal of his poetry, including of course his AENEID. If one refers to John F. Makowski’s “Nisus and Euryalus: a Platonic Relationship,” in HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Classical Journal (1985) 1-15, and also to J. Griffin’s LATIN POETS AND ROMAN LIFE, one finds that: • In Virgil’s autobiographical poetry of the Catalepton, poems 5 and 7, in which he sings of Sextus his cura curarum and of the boy aptly named Pothos, poems for the authenticity of which Buechler and Richmond indicate that there is now strong consensus, Thoreau could have read of a sexuality seems to have been grounded in life experience rather than merely to have been following in the literary convention we now term “posing as sodomites.” • In Donatus’s life of Virgil, Thoreau could have read: “(sc. Vergilius) libidinis in pueros pronioris, quorum maxime dilexit Cebetem et Alexandrum, quem secunda bucolicorum ecloga Alexim appellat, donatum sibi ab Asinio Pollione, utrumque non ineruditum, Cebetem vero et poetam.” Donatus goes on to say that Virgil, invited by a friend to partake of a heterosexual liaison, “verum pertinacissime recusasse.” • Apuleius Apologia 10 pretty much agrees with the picture presented to Thoreau by Donatus. • By the time of Martial a joking tradition was in place that the Muse behind Virgil’s prodigious poetic output was his Alexis, his love slave, given to him (note the divergence from Servius) by Maecenas rather than by Pollio. See epigrams 5.6, 6.68, 7.29, 8.56, 8.73 in which he attributes the sad state of contemporary poetry to the failure of patrons to provide poets with beautiful boys a la Maecenas and Virgil. This material was available to Thoreau. • Juvenal echoes this tradition in Satire 7.69. • In Philargyrius, Thoreau could have read: “Alexim dicunt Alexandrum, qui fuit servus Asinii Pollionis, quem Vergilius, rogatus ad prandium cum vidisset in ministerio omnium pulcherrimum, dilexit eumque dono accepit. Caesarem quidam acceperunt, formosum in operibus et gloria. alii puerum Caesaris, quem si laudasset, gratem rem Caesari fecisset. nam Vergilius dicitur in pueros habuisse amorem: nec enim turpiter eum diligebat. alii Corydona, Asinii Pollionis puerum adamatum a Vergilio ferunt, eumque a domino datum. . .” • What did Servius mean to say to Thoreau, and to us, when he offered that Virgil had not loved boys turpiter (disgracefully)? Possibly Servius meant that Virgil had been able to do so without loss of personal dignity (the courting of the beloved, whether woman or boy, could involve erotic service that was seen as beneath the dignity of a free man), the other that he did so without ever achieving, or perhaps even pursuing, physical consummation (which would have taken the form of sodomizing the lad if he was willing to submit, but Dover’s GREEK HOMOSEXUALITY --which seems to be in large part valid for Roman society as well-- shows that nice boys were supposed to say no in thunder and that men who insisted upon using their penises might have to settle for intercrural satisfaction). We should probably take into account as well the poetry of a man who died in the same year as Virgil, Albius Tibullus, from whom Thoreau would quote (or would suppose he was quoting) in WALDEN. What is conventionally known as “Book 1” of Tibullus contains poems on his beloved Delia but also several on a beloved boy named Marathus (4, 8, 9); these can offer some insight into the process of courting a boy. Another possibility, of course, is simply that Virgil’s love had nothing cruel or abusive about it, but perhaps the most plausible explanation for judging a liaison as turpis is the man’s loss of dignity in becoming enslaved to the object of his desire, his loss of face. Two examples that come to mind from Virgil’s own time are Anthony’s passion for Cleopatra and Maecenas’s scandalous affair with the ballet-dancer Bathyllus. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
Horsfall’s COMPANION TO THE STUDY OF VIRGIL summarizes the “evidence” such as it is. Although he demonstrates that there is not one detail in the ancient LIVES OF VIRGIL that can be taken at face value, the persistent availability of such materials about the life of Virgil has been such as to make this a moot point. Whether true or false it has obviously had an influence, and may well have had an influence of some sort on Thoreau. Those scholars could all be found to have been mistaken, and yet we will still need to deal with the manner in which Virgil was being received during the first half of the 19th Century, and I am not certain that we have done that, and of course it is important, in dealing with a situation such as Thoreau’s temporary involvement with the gentle young Sewall boy, that we most carefully do that. In none of these texts, nor in Servius, would Thoreau have been able to find any suggestion of a condemnation of what Virgil was projecting as being his proclivities. DUNBAR FAMILY HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 William Sewell. THE HISTORY OF THE RISE, INCREASE AND PROGRESS, OF THE CHRISTIAN PEOPLE CALLED QUAKERS; WITH SEVERAL REMARKABLE OCCURRENCES INTERMIXED, WRITTEN ORIGINALLY IN LOW-DUTCH, AND ALſO TRANſLATED INTO ENGLISH, BY WILLIAM SEWEL. THE THIRD EDITION, CORRECTED. The title varies slightly from edition to edition (1722, 1725, 1728, 1774, 1776, 1811, 1844), for instance ...WITH SEVERAL REMARKABLE OCCURRENCES INTERMIXED, TO WHICH IS PREFIXED A BRIEF MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR, COMPILED FROM VARIOUS SOURCES, and WRITTEN ORIGINALLY IN LOW DUTCH, AND TRANSLATED BY HIMSELF INTO ENGLISH, Baker & Crane, No. 158 Pearl-Street, New-York. The author’s name was, according to Alexander Chalmers’s GENERAL BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY of 1812-1817, Volume 27, page 361, a recognized variant of “Sewell”: there was a Henry Sewall who spelled his name also as Sewell and Seawell, and there was a loyalist “Sewall” who changed the family name to “Sewell” in London in order to confuse the American authorities and better protect his children in America –and his American properties– after being proscribed. Among recorded immigrants, the “United States Index to Records of Aliens’ Declarations” show a proportion of 1 Sewel, 11 Sewalls, and 30 Sewells. Henry Thoreau first encountered this book in this 1774 3d edition prepared and sold by Isaac Collins of Burlington, New-Jersey:
WM. SEWEL’S 3D ED., VOL. I WM. SEWEL’S 3D ED., VOL. II HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 August 5, Monday: Ebenezer Bailey had just relocated his school for boys from Roxbury to Lynn, Massachusetts, and his alma mater, Yale College had just awarded him the Master of Arts degree, when on this day he died in Lynn.
August 6, Tuesday: William Lovett was put on trial for seditious libel.
August 7, Wednesday: On a day the Brits would be led to much regret, an expeditionary force captured Kabul, Afghanistan and declared a protectorate.175
August 8, Thursday: Waldo Emerson wrote Thomas Carlyle mentioning that Henry Thoreau “writes the truest verses.”
August 12, Monday: In England, a Chartist or National Holiday celebration was unsuccessful.
After 3 weeks at sea for a trip that should have taken but 1 week, and after having suffered through furious gales, Richard Wagner and his wife docked at London.
August 17, Saturday: In England, the Postal Duties Act passed.
August 18, Sunday: Robert Schumann met Clara Wieck for the 1st time in over a year, at Altenburg near Leipzig. This was the 1st time they met since failing to obtain her father’s consent to marry. They would spend a few days together and then go separately to Leipzig. There Clara would find she was no longer welcome in her family home.
175. It is said to be the “Pottery Barn Rule” that if you break it you own it, but actually Pottery Barn hasn’t ever sponsored such a policy. Accurately, if you break it you own it is the “Afghanistan Rule.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 August 19, Monday: Since March, a couple of men had been going around Paris with a big box, giving demonstrations of the permanent capture of mirror images and trying to persuade people to invest in this new process, called the Daguerreotype after the name of one of them. Here is one of the images which they preserved during this year, of a Parisian boulevard:
They were having remarkably little success, presumably because people were having a certain amount of difficulty imagining why anyone would be willing to pay good money for an expensive mirror with an unchanging image on it when they already owned an inexpensive mirror with a changing image on it. Then, at a joint meeting of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Arts, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (representing the invention process begun by Joseph-Nicephor Niépce) and Dominique François Jean Arago (representing the recognition of the usefulness of the invention, and providing scientific connections and “clout”) presented this method for capturing and preserving reversed “pictorial delineations by light,” for purposes of scientific recording of experimental results, on a special mirror of silver-plated copper coated with silver iodide inside a dark box with a pinhole. Exposure time was 3 to 30 minutes, depending on available light. Developing this process had taken twenty years of research and experimentation and Arago’s investigation of it as head of a special commission had taken six months. What Arago recommended at this point was that the secrets of the process be purchased on behalf of the French nation by the granting of a pension to Daguerre. (Upon receipt of this pension, Daguerre would go back to the painting of illusionist pictures.) By 1850 the retail market for Daguerreotypy in America alone would be estimated at HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 between 8 and 12 million dollars per year.176
HOW TO TELL THEM APART:
Daguerreotype direct positive, mirrorlike surface shifts from positive August 19, 1839- reversed image to negative as you tilt it circa 1860 Ambrotype direct positive, pry the sheets apart and shine a light 1855-circa 1865 reversed image through from the back to verify that the image is negative Carte de Visite non-reversed wedding band is on the proper hand, 1854-circa 1925 image you can read the titles of books, and clothing is buttoned properly for each gender “Tintype” direct positive, The metal is attracted to a magnet 1856-circa 1945 (Ferrotype) reversed image and there is no mirror appearance
176. By way of contrast with the development of the steam engine –which was a development driven by a perceived imminent need for more power for pumping water out of mines than could be provided by animals, and a perceived imminent need for a more reliable source of power for driving ships than could be provided by winds that are by their very nature variable both in quantity and in direction– there is an interesting similarity between the development of the photographic process and the development of the computer.
There was no pressing need for the technology that photography presented. Why would anyone want to take photographs under awkward and time-consuming conditions when one could hire an artist who would prepare a skillfully arranged illustration and delete superfluous detail? It was only after Niépce and Daguerre made their discovery that people realized the implications of the new technology, and its use spread like wildfire. This phenomenon has been repeated throughout history. The most amazing modern technology is the computer. In the 1940s, when the computer was being designed and invented by Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and others, there was a real debate as to whether there was any practical point in spending the large sums of money that would be needed to develop the computational machine. At one time there was an estimate that six to ten computers would satisfy the computing needs of the entire United States. Once the technology was in place, its implications were apparent to everyone, and the computer revolution spread like wildfire. The daguerreotype demonstrated a new way of viewing the world, just as in modern times the computer has demonstrated a new means of managing information.
Of course, you know my bias, I would insist that large hypertext textbases represent a new technological development unlike the steam engine, for which there was immediate perceived need, and like the ’ and the computer, use of which created needs that had previously been unknown — or nonexistent. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 August 20, Tuesday: Adolf replaced Wilhelm as Duke of Nassau.
While Giacomo Meyerbeer was taking the cure at Boulogne-sur-Mer, Richard Wagner met him and asked for assistance. This would be generously provided, both in cash and with professional recommendations (the relationship would collapse when Meyerbeer discovered Wagner to be speaking ill of him behind his back).
August 22, Thursday: Benjamin Lundy died. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 August 23, Friday: The British took control of an isolated island hosting an assortment of fishing villages, near the sea outlet of the Pearl River passage toward the port of Canton (to be known henceforward as Victoria Island).177
Hot news flash: Information as to the chemical means that M. Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was using in Paris to achieve such remarkable images appeared in London, in the evening edition of The Globe:
177. In 1841, after a flag-raising ceremony at Possession Point on Victoria Island, Queen Victoria would write to King Leopold of Belgium “Albert is so amused at my having got the island of Hong Kong” (Cantonese hèung-gáwng, fragrant harbor). HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 August 25, Sunday: Fearful of the Chinese, the last of 57 British families abandoned Macao for Victoria Island (Hong Kong, Cantonese hèung-gáwng, fragrant harbor).
The La Amistad blacks wandered from one isolated home to another, on the shore of Culloden Point, attempting to use the few gold doubloons they had discovered on their ship to purchase water and supplies for their journey back to Africa.
(While on this provisioning expedition, at least according to the Spielberg movie, they perhaps caught sight on Long Island of a Draisienne, an early bicycle prototype — and so it needs to be mentioned that although such a sighting would have been possible, in fact in this Year of our Lord 1839, the design of the ordinary pedaled bicycle we know and love was already in the process of being refined.)
As they had been sailing along the eastern coast of the continent, several pilot boats had already run across La Amistad and the Columbian Centinel had already printed a report by Captain Seaman of the pilot boat Gratitude: She spoke the long, low, black schooner twenty-five miles East of Fire Island and about eighteen miles from the land, standing E.N.E. The Gratitude ran within a few yards of her with the intention of putting a pilot aboard. Two or three of the blacks, who appeared to be the ringleaders and kept the others in awe, made signs to the pilot not to come. One had a pistol in one hand and a cutlass in the other, which he flourished over his head to keep the others down. These appeared to be very anxious to receive a pilot and when the eye of the fellow who had the pistol was aft of them, they would beckon the pilot to come aboard. The schooner held a name on her stern which they took to be Almeda. She had a small gilt eaglehead. The latest news from the suspicious vessel is that on Saturday at sunset she was
off the end of Long Island, Montauk Point, North by East, twenty miles distant. She was standing east with HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 sail she was able to make.
August 26, Monday: Lieutenant Gedney of the brig USS Washington seized the La Amistad and its 53 Negroes and headed for Connecticut, where, unlike in New York State, slavery was legal. –In Connecticut they would be able to sell these blacks they had captured! (So what did you suppose this was about?) The following appeared in the New London Gazette: While this vessel was sounding this day between Gardner’s and Montauk Points, a schooner was seen lying in shore off Culloden Point, under circumstances so suspicious as to authorize Lt. Com. Gedney to stand in to see what was her character — seeing a number of people on the beach with carts and horses, and a boat passing to and fro a boat was armed and dispached [sic] with an officer to board her. On coming along side a number of negroes were discovered on her deck, and twenty or thirty more were on the beach — two white men came forward and claimed the protection of the officer. The schooner proved to be the “Amistad,” Capt. Ramonflues, from the Havana bound to Guanaja, Port Principe, with 54 blacks and two passengers on board ; the former, four nights after they were out, rose and murdered the captain and three of the crew ; they then took possession of the vessel with the intention of returning to the coast of Africa. Pedro Montes, passenger, and Jose Rues owner of the slaves and part of the cargo, were only saved to navigate the vessel. After boxing about for four days in the Bahama Channel the vessel was steered for the Island of St. Andrews, near New Providence ; from thence she went to Green Key, where the blacks laid in a supply of water. After leaving this place the vessel was steered by Pedro Montes for New Providence, the negroes being under the HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 impression that she was steering for the coast of Africa — they would not, however, permit her to enter the port but anchored every night off the coast. The situation of the two whites was all this time truly deplorable, being treated with the greatest severity, and Pedro Montes, who had charge of the navigation, was suffering from two severe wounds, one in the head and one in the arm, their lives threatened every instant. He was ordered to change the course again for the coast of Africa, the negroes themselves steering by the sun in the day time, while at night he would alter their course so as to bring them back to their original place of destination. — They remained three days off Long Island, to the Eastward of Providence, after which time they were two months on the ocean, sometimes steering to the Eastward, and whenever an occasson [sic] would permit the whites would alter the course to the Northward and Westward, always in hopes of falling in with some vessel of war, or being enabled to run into some port, when they would be relieved from their horrid situation. Several times they were boarded by vessels ; once by an American schooner from Kingston. On these occasions the whites were ordered below, while the negroes communicated and traded with the vessel ; the schooner from Kingston supplied them with a demijohn of water, for the moderate sum of one doubloon — this schooner, whose name was not ascertained, finding that the negroes had plenty of money, remained lashed alongside the “Amistad” for twenty-four hours, though they must have been aware that all was not right on board, and probably suspected the character of the vessel — that was on the 18th of the present month ; the vessel was steered to the northward and westward, and on the 20th instant, distant from N.Y. 25 miles, the pilot boat No. 3 came alongside and gave the negroes some apples. She was also hailed by No. 4 ; when the latter boat came near, the negroes armed themselves and would not permit her to board them ; they were so exasperated with the two whites for bringing them so much out of their way that they expected every moment to be murdered. On the 24th they made Montauk Light and steered for it in the hope of running the vessel ashore, but the tide drifted them up the bay and they anchored where they were found by the brig Washington, off Culloden point. The negroes were found in communication with shore, where they laid in a fresh supply of water, and were on the point of sailing again for the coast of Africa. They had a god supply of money with them, some of which it is likely was taken by the people on the beach. — After they were disarmed, and sent on board from the beach, the ringleader jumped overboard with three hundred doubloons about him, the property of the captain, all of which he succeeded in loosing from his person and then permitted himself to be captured. The schooner was taken in tow by the brig and carried into New London. TUESDAY, 12 o’clock, M. We have just returned from a visit to the Washington and her prize, which are riding at anchor in the bay, near the fort. On board the former HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 we saw and conversed with the two Spanish gentlemen who were passengers on board the schooner, as well as owners of the negroes and most of the cargo. One of them, Jose Rues, is very gentlemanly and intelligent young man, and speaks English fluently. He was the owner of most of the slaves and cargo, which he was conveying to his estate on the Island of Cuba. The other, Pedro Montes, is about fifty years of age, and is the owner of three slaves. He was formerly a ship-master, and has navigated the vessel since her seizure by the blacks. Both of them, as may be naturally supposed are most unfeignedly thankful for their deliverance. Signor Pedro is the most striking instance of complacency and unalloyed delight we ever have seen, and it is not strange, since only yesterday his sentence was pronounced by the chief of the buccaniers [sic], and his death song chanted by the grim crew, who gathered with uplifted sabres around his devoted head, which, as well as his arms, bear the scars of several wounds inflicted at the time of the murder of the ill-fated captain and crew. He sat smoking his Havana on the deck, and, to junge [sic] from the martyr-like serenity of his countenance, his emotions are such as rarely stir the heart of man. When Mr. Porter, the prize-master, assured him of his safety, he threw his arms around his neck, while gushing tears coursing down his furrowed cheek, bespoke the overflowing transport of his soul Every now and then he clasps his hands, and with uplifted eyes gives thanks to “the Holy Virgin” who had led him out of all his troubles. Senor Rues has given us two letters for his agents. Messrs, Shelton, Brothers & Co., of Boston, and Peter A. Harmony & Co., of New York. It appears that the slaves, the greater portion of whom were his, were very much attached to him, and had determined, after reaching the coast of Africa, to allow him to seek his home what way he could, while his poor companion was to be sacrificed. On board the brig we also saw Cingues, the master-spirit and hero of this bloody tragedy, in irons. He is about five feet eight inches in height, 25 or 26 years of age, of erect figure, well built, and very active. He is said to be a match for any two men on board the schooner. His countenance, for a native African, is unusually intelligent, evincing uncommon decision and coolness, with a composure characteristic of true courage and nothing to mark him as a malicious man. He is a negro who would command, in New Orleans, under the hammer, at least $1,500. He is said to have killed the captain and crew with his own hand, by cutting their throats. He also has several times attempted to take the life of Senor Montes, and the backs of several poor negroes are scored with the scars of blows inflicted by his lash to keep them in submission. He expects to be executed, but nevertheless manifests a sang froid worthy of a Sto[ne] under similar circumstances. With Capt. Gedney, the surgeon of the port, and others, we visited the schooner, which is anchored within musket shot of the HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Washington, and there we saw such a sight as we never saw before, and never wish to see again. The bottom and sides of this vessel are covered with barnacles and sea- grass, while her rigging and sales [sic] present a scene worthy of the Flying Dutchman, after her fabled cruise. She is a Baltimore built vessel of matchless model for speed, about 120 tons burthen and about six years old. On her deck were grouped, amid various goods and arms, the remnant of her Ethiop crew, some decked in the most fantastic manner in the silks and finery pilfered from the cargo while others, in a state of nudity, emaciated to mere skeletons, lay coiled upon the decks. Here could be seen a negro with white pantaloons and the sable shirt which nature gave him, and a planter’s broad- brimmed hat upon his head, with a string of gewgaws around his neck ; and another with a linen cambric shirt, whose bosom was worked by the hand of some dark- eyed daughter of Spain, while his nether proportions were enveloped in a shawl of gauze and Canton crape. Around the windlass were gathered the three little girls, from eight to thirteen years of age, the very images of health and gladness. Over the deck were scattered, in the most wanton and disorderly profusion, raisins, vermicelli, bread, rice, silk, and cotton goods. In the cabin and hold were the marks of the same wasteful destruction—Her cargo appears to consist of silks, crapes, calicoes, cotton and fancy goods of various descriptions, glass and hardware, bridles, saddles, holsters, pictures, looking-glasses, books, fruits, olives, and olive oil, and “other things too numerous to mention,” which are now all mixed up in a strange and fantastic medldy [sic]. On the forward hatch we unconsciously rested our hand on a cold object, which we soon discovered to be a naked corpse enveloped in a pall of black bombazine. On removing its folds we beheld the rigid countenance and glazed eye of a poor negro who died last night. His mouth was unclosed, and still wore the ghastly expression of his last struggle. Near by him, like some watching fiend, sat the most horrible creature we ever saw in human shape, an object of terror to the very blacks, who said that he was a cannibal. His teeth projected at almost right angles from his mouth, while his eyes had a most savage and demoniac expression. We were glad to leave this vessel, as the exhalations from her hold and deck were like anything but “gales wafted over the gardens of Gul.” Capt. Gedney has dispatched an express to the U. S. marshal, at New Haven, while he has made the most humane arrangements for the health and comfort of the prisoners, and the purification of the prize. There are now alive 44 negroes, three of whom are girls ; about 10 have died. They have been at sea 63 days. The vessel and cargo were worth $40,000 when they let Havana, exclusive of the negroes, which cost from 20 to $30,000. Vessel and cargo were insured in Havana. Capt. Gedney, when he first espied the Amistad, was running a line of sounding toward Montauk Point. He had heard nothing of this vessel being on the coast till after his arrival in this HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 port.178 THE MIDDLE PASSAGE JOSEPH CINQUÉ RACE SLAVERY
August 27, Tuesday: Frank Robert Pierce was born to Franklin Pierce and Jane Means Appleton Pierce (this child would succumb to typhoid fever at the age of four).
Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, her husband, and her son left Berlin heading eventually for a sojourn in Italy (they would travel immediately to Leipzig for a week with her brother Felix).
The federal district judge for Connecticut, Andrew T. Judson, held an inquiry on board the USS Washington in the New London, Connecticut harbor, and decided to hold the La Amistad issue over for consideration by the grand jury which was scheduled to meet in Hartford in September 1839, as The U.S. v. The Libelants, etc., of the Schooner Amistad.
At about this point our hearts go out to Jose Ruiz and Pedro Montes, who were writing a Thank-You note to the newspapers of New London, Connecticut in appreciation for their having been rescued from the tender affections of those bad niggers who had resisted being what they rightfully should be, slaves: The subscribers, Don Jose Ruiz and Don Pedro Montes, in gratitude for their most unhoped for and most providential rescue from the hands of a ruthless gang of African buccaneers, and an awful death, would take this means of expressing, in some slight degree, their thankfulness and obligations to Lieutenant Commander T.R. Gedney, and the officers and crew of the U.S. surveying brig Washington, for their decision in seizing the Amistad, and their unremitting kindness and hospitality in providing for their comfort on board their vessel, as well as the means they have taken for the protection of their property. We also must express our indebtedness to that nation whose flag they so worthily bear, with an assurance that this act will be duly appreciated by our most gracious sovereign, Her Majesty the Queen of Spain. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE JOSEPH CINQUÉ
178. HOUSE DOCUMENT, 26th Congress, 1st session IV, No. 185; 27th Congress, 3d session, V, No. 191; 28th Congress, 1st session IV, No. 83; HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 32d Congress, 2d session III, No. 20; HOUSE REPORTS, 26th Congress, 2d session No. 51; 28th Congress, 1st session II, No. 426; 29th Congress, 1st session IV, No. 753; SENATE DOCUMENT, 26th Congress, 2d session IV, No. 179; SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 31st Congress, 2d session III, No. 29; 32d Congress, 2d session III, No. 19; SENATE REPORTS, 31st Congress, 2d session No. 301; 32d Congress, 1st session I, No. 158; 35th Congress, 1st session I, No. 36; Decisions of the United States Supreme Court in 15 Peters, 518; OPINIONS OF THE ATTORNEYS-GENERAL, III. 484-92. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 August 29, Thursday: At the Convention of Vergara conservatives in the north of Spain gave up their struggle to place Don Carlos on the throne and recognized Isabella as queen, in return for their pay and promotion.
John Shepard Keyes, who had been a schoolmate of Henry Thoreau at the Concord Academy, commented in his diary on a melon party, the first melons to ripen that year, that was being thrown by Thoreau in anticipation of his and his brother John Thoreau, Jr.’s departure for an adventure from Concord, Massachusetts to Concord, New Hampshire by boat and on into the White Mountains:
Went up to see Henry Thoreau who is about starting on his expedition to the White Mts[.] in his boat. He has all things arranged prime and will have a glorious time if he is fortunate enough to have good weather. He showed me all the minutiae of packing and invited me up there to eat some fine melons in the evening.... I spent ... the rest of the time getting the fellows ready to go to the Thoreaus[’] melon spree. We went about 9 and saw a table spread in the very handsomest style with all kinds and qualities of melons and we attacked them furiously and I eat [sic] till what with the wine & all I had quite as much as I could carry home.
This is perhaps the Thursday evening party mentioned by Professor Walter Roy Harding as in “a recently discovered letter”:
David had a party of gentlemen, Thursday evening, to eat melons. I went in to see the table, which was adorned with sunflowers, cornstalks, beet leaves & squash blossoms. There were forty-six melons, fifteen different kinds; & apples, all the production of his own garden. This is the only thing of interest that has happened in town this week. When we went in to see the tables, Mrs. Thoreau felt called upon to apologize for Henry having a party, it having been spread abroad by her that such customs met with his contempt & entire disapprobation.
August 30, Friday: In the evening the Thoreau brothers loaded their MUSKETAQUID, which they had provided with wheels in order to be able to roll it around falls, with potatoes and melons from a patch they had cultivated, and a few utensils, at the door of the family home half a mile from the river. JOHN THOREAU, JR. HENRY THOREAU HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 August 31-September 13: The trip that would be described in A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS: Henry Thoreau kept a brief log. TIMELINE OF A WEEK
This log, however brief, must have included some records of bird sightings, for in regard to the American Passenger Pigeons Ectopistes migratorius we find the material on the following screen: HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
A WEEK: During the heat of the day, we rested on a large island a mile above the mouth of this river, pastured by a herd of cattle, with steep banks and scattered elms and oaks, and a sufficient channel for canal-boats on each side. When we made a fire to boil some rice for our dinner, the flames spreading amid the dry grass, and the smoke curling silently upward and casting grotesque shadows on the ground, seemed phenomena of the noon, and we fancied that we progressed up the stream without effort, and as naturally as the wind and tide went down, not outraging the calm days by unworthy bustle or impatience. The woods on the neighboring shore were alive with pigeons, which were moving south, looking for mast, but now, like ourselves, spending their noon in the shade. We could hear the slight, wiry, winnowing sound of their wings as they changed their roosts from time to time, and their gentle and tremulous cooing. They sojourned with us during the noontide, greater travellers far than we. You may frequently discover a single pair sitting upon the lower branches of the white-pine in the depths of the wood, at this hour of the day, so silent and solitary, and with such a hermit-like appearance, as if they had never strayed beyond its skirts, while the acorn which was gathered in the forests of Maine is still undigested in their crops. We obtained one of these handsome birds, which lingered too long upon its perch, and plucked and broiled it here with some other game, to be carried along for our supper; for, beside the provisions which we carried with us, we depended mainly on the river and forest for our supply. It is true, it did not seem to be putting this bird to its right use to pluck off its feathers, and extract its entrails, and broil its carcass on the coals; but we heroically persevered, nevertheless, waiting for further information. The same regard for Nature which excited our sympathy for her creatures nerved our hands to carry through what we had begun. For we would be honorable to the party we deserted; we would fulfil fate, and so at length, perhaps, detect the secret innocence of these incessant tragedies which Heaven allows. “Too quick resolves do resolution wrong, What, part so soon to be divorced so long? Things to be done are long to be debated; Heaven is not day’d, Repentance is not dated.” We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice. Where is the skilful swordsman who can give clean wounds, and not rip up his work with the other edge? Nature herself has not provided the most graceful end for her creatures. What becomes of all these birds that people the air and forest for our solacement? The sparrows seem always chipper, never infirm. We do not see their bodies lie about. Yet there is a tragedy at the end of each one of their lives. They must perish miserably; not one of them is translated. True, “not a sparrow falleth to the ground without our Heavenly Father’s knowledge,” but they do fall, nevertheless. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 August 31, Saturday: Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck met in Leipzig with Archdeacon R.R. Fischer, court-appointed mediator — but her father Friedrich Wieck didn’t show up.
In Vergara, liberal General Baldomero Espartero and absolutist General Rafael Maroto joined in an “Abrazo de Vergara” ending the 1st Carlist War.
“Fall of 1839 up Merrimack to White Mountains.” As Lucy Maddox has unsympathetically pointed out in her REMOVALS: NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE POLITICS OF INDIAN AFFAIRS, “The journey that is recorded in WEEK took place in 1839, the year after the Trail of Tears (although Thoreau did not publish his book until ten years later).
JOHN THOREAU, JR.
Thoreau knew where the real Indians were and what was happening to them, and he looked for ways to justify what was happening.
He also sought out some of the Indians remaining in the East; he just didn’t like them much when he found them.”179 Well, it does appear that this adventure of the brothers was in fact Henry Thoreau’s first overnight outing after a number of years of he and his brother playing Indian, and that despite many day excursions it was his first night in a tent: “I shall not soon forget my first night in a tent –how the distant barking of dogs for so many still hours revealed to me the riches of the night.– Who would not be a dog and bay the moon? —
179. NY: Oxford UP, 1991, pages 176-7. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 ”180 Ross/Adams commentary
Cruickshank commentary
TIMELINE OF A WEEK
We note that at this point in time there was no “Old North Bridge” whatever, only the abutments of that historic structure still being available for view on the banks of the river:
A WEEK: We were soon floating past the first regular battle-ground PEOPLE OF of the Revolution, resting on our oars between the still visible A WEEK abutments of that “North Bridge,” over which in April, 1775, rolled the first faint tide of that war, which ceased not, till, as we read on the stone on our right, it “gave peace to these United States.” As a Concord poet has sung:— “By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. “The foe long since in silence slept; Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; And Time the ruined bridge has swept Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.”
WALDO EMERSON
A WEEK: (August 31, Saturday, 1839) At length, when we had made about seven miles, as far as Billerica, we moored our boat on the west side of a little rising ground which in the spring forms an island in the river. Here we found huckleberries still hanging upon the bushes, where they seemed to have slowly ripened for our especial use. Bread and sugar, and cocoa boiled in river water, made our repast, and as we had drank in the fluvial prospect all day, so now we took a draft of the water with our evening meal to propitiate the river gods, and whet our vision for the sights it was to behold.
COCOA
180. At about this same time, Waldo Emerson was setting off with George Bradford on a sightseeing tour of the White Mountains, and Emerson was shipping off a bushel of potatoes for his brother William on Staten Island. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
A WEEK: Late in the afternoon we passed a man on the shore fishing with a long birch pole, its silvery bark left on, and a dog at DOG his side, rowing so near as to agitate his cork with our oars, and drive away luck for a season; and when we had rowed a mile as straight as an arrow, with our faces turned towards him, and the bubbles in our wake still visible on the tranquil surface, there stood the fisher still with his dog, like statues under the other side of the heavens, the only objects to relieve the eye in the extended meadow; and there would he stand abiding his luck, till he took his way home through the fields at evening with his fish. Thus, by one bait or another, Nature allures inhabitants into all her recesses. This man was the last of our townsmen whom we saw, and we silently through him bade adieu to our friends. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
A WEEK: For the most part, there was no recognition of human life in the night, no human breathing was heard, only the breathing of DOG the wind. As we sat up, kept awake by the novelty of our situation, we heard at intervals foxes stepping about over the dead leaves, and brushing the dewy grass close to our tent, and once a musquash fumbling among the potatoes and melons in our boat, but when we hastened to the shore we could detect only a ripple in the water ruffling the disk of a star. At intervals we were serenaded by the song of a dreaming sparrow or the throttled cry of an owl, but after each sound which near at hand broke the stillness of the night, each crackling of the twigs, or rustling among the leaves, there was a sudden pause, and deeper and more conscious silence, as if the intruder were aware that no life was rightfully abroad at that hour. There was a fire in Lowell, as we judged, this night, and we saw the horizon blazing, and heard the distant alarm-bells, as it were a faint tinkling music borne to these woods. But the most constant and memorable sound of a summer’s night, which we did not fail to hear every night afterward, though at no time so incessantly and so favorably as now, was the barking of the house-dogs, from the loudest and hoarsest bark to the faintest aerial palpitation under the eaves of heaven, from the patient but anxious mastiff to the timid and wakeful terrier, at first loud and rapid, then faint and slow, to be imitated only in a whisper; wow-wow-wow-wow — wo — wo — w — w. Even in a retired and uninhabited district like this, it was a sufficiency of sound for the ear of night, and more impressive than any music. I have heard the voice of a hound, just before daylight, while the stars were shining, from over the woods and river, far in the horizon, when it sounded as sweet and melodious as an instrument. The hounding of a dog pursuing a fox or other animal in the horizon, may have first suggested the notes of the hunting-horn to alternate with and relieve the lungs of the dog. This natural bugle long resounded in the woods of the ancient world before the horn was invented. The very dogs that sullenly bay the moon from farm-yards in these nights excite more heroism in our breasts than all the civil exhortations or war sermons of the age. “I would rather be a dog, and bay the moon,” than many a Roman that I know. The night is equally indebted to the clarion of the cock, with wakeful hope, from the very setting of the sun, prematurely ushering in the dawn. All these sounds, the crowing of cocks, the baying of dogs, and the hum of insects at noon, are the evidence of nature’s health or sound state. Such is the never- failing beauty and accuracy of language, the most perfect art in the world; the chisel of a thousand years retouches it.
Sat. Aug 31st 1839. A warm drizzling rain obscured the morning and threatened to delay our voyage, but at length the leaves and grass were dried, and it came out a mild afternoon, as serene and fresh as if nature were maturing some greater scheme of her own– After this long dripping and oozing from every pore, she began to respire again more healthily than ever. So with a vigorous shove we launched our boat from the bank, while the flags ad bullrushes curtsey’d a Good-speed, and dropped silently down the stream. It had been loaded at the door the evening before, half a mile from the river — and provided with wheels against emergencies but with the bulky cargo which we stevedores had stowed in it — it proved but an indifferent land carriage– For water and water casks there was a plentiful supply of muskmelons from our patch which had just HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 begun to be ripe — and chests and spare spars and sails and tents and guns and munitions for the galleon– And as we pushed it through the meadows to the river’s bank we stepped as lightly about it as if a portion of our own bulk and burden was stowed in its hold — we were amazed to find ourselves outside still Some of our neighbors stood in a recess of the shore — the last inhabitants of Ithaca — to whom we fired a parting salute, and conferred the welfare of the state. {One-fifth page blank} Gradually the village murmur subsided, and we seemed to be embarked upon the placid current of our dreams, and floating from past to future, over billows of fresh morning or evening thoughts. {Four-fifths page blank} Our boat which had cost us a week’s labor in the spring was what the Lynn fishermen call a dory — 15 feet long by 3 in breadth at the widest part — a little forward of the centre. It was green below with a border of blue, out of courtesy to the green sea and the blue heavens. Stout and servicable but consequently heavy and difficult to be dragged over shallow places or carried around falls. A boat, when rightly made and once launched upon its element has a sort of life of its own– It is a kind of amphibious animal — a creature of two elements — a fish to swim and a bird to fly — related by one half of its structure to some swift and shapely fish, and by the other to a strong-winged and graceful bird. The fins of the fish direct where to set the oars, and the tail gives some hints for the form and position of the rudder. So also we learn where should be the greatest breadth of beam and depth in the hold. The bird shows how to rig and trim the sails, and what form to give to the prow that it may best balance the boat and divide the air and water. In the present case our boat took readily to the water, since from of old there had been a tacit league struck between them, and now it gladly availed itself of the old law that the heavier shall float the lighter. One of our masts served for a tent pole at night, and we had other long and slender poles for shoving in shallow places. A buffalo-skin was our bed at night and a tent of twilled cotton our roof — a snow white house 8 feet in height and as many in diameter.… Faint purple clouds began to be reflected in the water, and the cow-bells tinkled louder along the banks. Like sly water rats we stole along nearer the shore — looking out for a place to pitch our camp. It seemed insensibly to grow lighter as the night shut in, and the farthest hamlet began to be revealed which before lurked in the shadows of the noon. {One-fourth page blank} To-day the air was as elastic and crystalline as if it were a glass to the picture of this world– It explained the artifice of the picture-dealer who does not regard his picture as finished until it is glassed. It was like the landscape seen through the bottom of a tumbler, clothed in a mild quiet light, in which the barns & fences chequer and partition it with new regularity, and rough and uneven fields stretch away with lawn-like smoothness to the horizon. The clouds (in such a case) are finely distinct and picturesque– The light blue of the sky contrasting with their feathery whiteness.– They are a light etherial Persian draperry — fit to hang over the Persia of our imaginations– The Smith’s shop resting in this Greek light seemed worthy to stand beside the Parthenon. The potato and grain fields are such as he imagines who has schemes of ornamental husbandry. So may you see the true dignity of the farmer’s lie. A little bread and sugar and Cocoa boiled in river water made our repast– As we had drank in the fluvial prospect all day so now we took a draught of the water with our evening meal, to propitiate the river gods, & whet our vision of the sights it was to behold. The building a fire and spreading our buffalo skins was too frank an advance to be resisted. The fire and smoke seemed to tame the scene– The rocks consented to be our walls and the pines our roof. {One-third page blank} I have never insisted enough on the nakedness and simplicity of friendship — the result of all emotions — their subsidence a fruit of the temperate zone. The friend is an unrelated man, solitary and of distinct outline. On this same river a young maiden once saild in my boat — thus solitary and unattended but by invisible spirits– As she sat in the prow there was nothing but herself between me and the sky — so that her form and lie itself was picturesque as rocks and trees– She was not child to any mortal, and has no protector she called no mortal father. No priest was keeper of her soul no guardian of her free thoughts. She dared ever to stand exposed on the side of heaven. Our life must be seen upon a proper back ground– For the most part only the life of the anchorite will bear to be considered. Our motions should be as impressive as objects in the desert, a broken shaft or crumbling mound against a limitless horizon. I shall not soon forget the sounds which I heard when falling asleep this night on the banks of the Merrimack. Far into night I hear some tyro beating a drum incessantly, preparing for a country muster — in Campton as we have heard — and think of the line “When the drum beat at dead of night” I am thrilled as by an infinite sweetness, and could have exclaimed — Cease not thou drummer of the night — thou too shalt have thy reward– The stars hear thee, and the firmament shall echo thy beat, till it is answerd, and the forces are mustered. Fear not, I too will be there. While this darkness lasts heroism will not be deferred. 181 But still he drums on alone in the silence & the dark. {One-fifth page blank} We had made 7 miles, and moored our boat on the west side of a little rising ground which in the spring forms an island in the river. The sun was setting on the one hand while the shadow of our little eminence was rapidly stretching over the fields on the other. Here we found huckleberries still hanging on the bushes and palatable, which seemed to have slowly ripened for our especial use, and partook of this unlooked for repast with even a 181. See June 19, 1840 entry. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 devout feeling. When we had pitched our tent on the hill side a few rods from the shore, we sat looking though its triangular door in the twilight at our lonely mast on the shore, just seen above the alders, the first encroachments of commerce on this land– Here was the incipient city and there the port — it was Rome & Ostia– That straight geometrical line against the water — stood for the last refinements of civilized life. Whatever of sublimity there is in history was there symbolized. It was the founding of Tyre and Carthage. For the most part there seemed to be no recognition of human life in the night– No human breathing was heard. Only the wind was alive and stirring. And as we sat up awakened by the novelty of the situation, we heard at intervals foxes stepping about over the dead leaves and brushing the dewy grass close to our tent; and once the the musquash fumbling among the potatoes and melons in our boat, but when we hastened to the shore to reconnoitre, we could see only the stars reflected in the water scarcely disturbed by a distant ripple on its surface. After each sound which near at hand broke the stillness of the night each crackling of the twigs or rustling of leaves there seemed to be a sudden pause and deeper silence, as if the intruder were aware that no life was rightfully abroad at that hour. But as if to be reminded of the presence of man in nature as well as of the inferior orders — we heard the sound of distant alarm bells come to these woods not far from mid night probably from the town of Lowel But a most constant and characteristic sound of a summer night, which we did not fail to hear every night afterwards though at no time so incessantly and musically as now — was the barking of the house dog– I thought of Shakspeare’s line “I had rather be a dog and bay the moon” Every variety of tone and time nearer and more remote from the patient but anxious mastiff to the timid and wakeful terrier — even in a country like this where the farm houses were few and far between –was a sufficiency of sound to lull the ears of night WOW-WOW-WOW-WOW–WO–W I have heard the voice of a hound just before dawn while the stars were still shining from over the woods & river far off in the horizon when it sounded sweet & melodious like an instrument The night is almost equally indebted to a less constant and more musical interruption from the cock — who at intervals from the very shutting of nigh — prematurely ushers in the day. The hounding of a dog pursuing a fox in the horizon seems naturally to have first suggested the harmonious notes of the hunting horn, to alternate with and relieve the lungs of the dog. How long this natural bugle must have rung in the woods of Attica and Latium before the horn was invented.
“Few people except those who arise with the sun have the good fortune to see such perfect reflections as Thoreau describes. For a short time after sunrise, broad expanses of water often reflect the surroundings perfectly, but as the earth warms unevenly a movement of the air shatters the image.” -Cruickshank, Helen Gere. THOREAU ON BIRDS (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964) HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
A WEEK: It is worth the while to make a voyage up this stream, if PEOPLE OF you go no farther than Sudbury, only to see how much country there A WEEK is in the rear of us; great hills, and a hundred brooks, and farm- houses, and barns, and haystacks, you never saw before, and men everywhere, Sudbury, that is Southborough men, and Wayland, and Nine-Acre-Corner men, and Bound Rock, where four towns bound on a rock in the river, Lincoln, Wayland, Sudbury, Concord. Many waves are there agitated by the wind, keeping nature fresh, the spray blowing in your face, reeds and rushes waving; ducks by the hundred, all uneasy in the surf, in the raw wind, just ready to rise, and now going off with a clatter and a whistling like riggers straight for Labrador, flying against the stiff gale with reefed wings, or else circling round first, with all their paddles briskly moving, just over the surf, to reconnoitre you before they leave these parts; gulls wheeling overhead, muskrats swimming for dear life, wet and [page 9] cold, with no fire to warm them by that you know of; their labored homes rising here and there like haystacks; and countless mice and moles and winged titmice along the sunny windy shore; cranberries tossed on the waves and heaving up on the beach, their little red skiffs beating about among the alders; — such healthy natural tumult as proves the last day is not yet at hand. And there stand all around the alders, and birches, and oaks, and maples full of glee and sap, holding in their buds until the waters subside. You shall perhaps run aground on Cranberry Island, only some spires of last year’s pipe-grass above water, to show where the danger is, and get as good a freezing there as anywhere on the Northwest Coast. I never voyaged so far in all my life. You shall see men you never heard of before, whose names you don’t know, going away down through the meadows with long ducking-guns, with water-tight boots wading through the fowl-meadow grass, on bleak, wintry, distant shores, with guns at half-cock, and they shall see teal, blue-winged, green-winged, shelldrakes, whistlers, black ducks, ospreys, and many other wild and noble sights before night, such as they who sit in parlors never dream of. You shall see rude and sturdy, experienced and wise men, keeping their castles, or teaming up their summer’s wood, or chopping alone in the woods, men fuller of talk and rare adventure in the sun and wind and rain, than a chestnut is of meat; who were out not only in ’75 and 1812, but have been out every day of their lives; greater men than Homer, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare, only they never got time to say so; they never took to the way of writing. Look at their fields, and imagine what they might write, if ever they should put pen to paper. Or what have they not written on the face of the earth already, clearing, and burning, and scratching, and harrowing, and ploughing, and subsoiling, in and in, and out and out, and over and over, again and again, erasing what they had already written for want of parchment.
THOMAS GRAY HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
FALL 1839
Fall: Sam Houston was elected a member of the Texas Congress from Nacogdoches.
Fall: As soon as the harvest was in, in order to be farther away from Ojibwa retribution, the Lake Calhoun band of Dakotas moved to a site on the Minnesota River near Bloomington.182
Fall 1839: The lively decay of autumn promises as infinite duration and freshness, as the green leaves of spring. TIME AND ETERNITY
182. After they had moved away, the fort prevented their moving back, using the argument that this land was the property of the United States, so that local whites could quickly build their dummy claims cabins and put in their dummy crops (dropping pieces of potato into scooped-out hollows in the snow, for instance) and file very real claims for the real estate — and be awarded titles that have always been upheld, in the fair courts of Minnesota. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Fall: The family of Henry Bibb had been sold “at a depreciated price because I was a runaway” to Madison Garrison, a slavetrader headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, and taken on the steamboat Water Witch from Louisville toward New Orleans. The trip would be slow, and they would be held over for three weeks in Vicksburg, Ohio while the slavetrader negotiated the sale of some of the other slaves in his coffle. It took six weeks to make the trip all the way down the river, and when they reached New Orleans he was sold for $1,200, and his wife and child were sold for $1,000 together, to Francis E. Whitfield, a Baptist deacon and the owner of a plantation some 50 miles up the Red River at Claiborn. Malinda arrived there pregnant, but would soon lose the baby she was carrying. Then Henry would be caught attending a prayer meeting and informed that on the following day he would be tied down between four stakes and lashed. In the night before the punishment he stole a long Bowie knife and fled into the Red River swamps, managing to stay out of sight for more than
James Bowie
a week before being tracked down with bloodhounds. He would receive 50 lashes, and then, much worse, some eight to ten blows with a paddle. An iron collar would be riveted on his neck with prongs extending above his head, and atop this a small bell which he could not reach. At night he would be chained to a log or placed in stocks. He would soon manage somehow to escape again, with an old Virginia slave missing two toes on one foot, and they would manage to steal a gun, ammo, a Bowie knife, a blanket, a joint of meat, and some bread, and head for Little Rock, Arkansas. They would be trackable, however, by the distinctive footprint of the other HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 slave, and by their taking a white hat from a drunken man, and again recaptured. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
SEPTEMBER
September: The wife and the daughter of Samuel F.B. Morse sat for their Daguerreotype portrait, facing into bright sunlight for 20 minutes and trying not to blink or move their heads.
September: The Reverend Professor Charles Brooks had gotten married a 2d time, with Mrs. Charlotte Ann H. Lord of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He closed his pastorate at Hingham and the couple embarked for Europe, where the husband would be preparing himself, in Paris, for the position he had been offered at the University of the City of New York, as a professor of natural history — a task for which he had no educational background. On his return he would present a copy of a textbook ELEMENTS OF ORNITHOLOGY to the library of Harvard College.
75 September: ESSAYS AND POEMS. BY JONES VERY went on sale at $0. the copy. It was dedicated, as the author had required, “To Edward Tyrrell Channing, Boyleston Professor in Harvard University, This Volume is Inscribed, As a Token of Gratitude, By the Author.” Jones Very celebrated the one-year anniversary and self- selected limit for his illumination by retracing his steps through Cambridge and Concord. While passing through Boston he picked up his bundle of authorial copies from the publishers, Charles C. Little and James Brown.183 Passing through Cambridge, Very again asked for reinstatement at Harvard and was again, of course, rebuffed by the authorities. Proceeding through the familiar dormitories and study rooms after the rebuffs, he informed a number of persons cryptically that “the Romans” were still “masters of the world.” He had distanced himself from his vatic role, but not by much.
The volume would be belatedly reviewed in THE DIAL in 1841: This little volume would have received an earlier notice, if we had been at all careful to proclaim our favorite books. The genius of this book is religious, and reaches an extraordinary depth of sentiment. The author, plainly a man of a pure and kindly temper, casts himself into the state of the high and transcendental obedience to the inward Spirit. He has apparently made up his mind to follow all its leadings, though he should be taxed with absurdity or even with insanity. In this enthusiasm he writes most of these verses, which rather flow through him than from him. There is no composition, no elaboration, no artifice in the structure of the rhyme, no variety in the imagery; in short, no pretension to literary merit, for this would be departure from his singleness, and followed by loss of 183. No-one would seem concerned at all to promote the sale of this little volume, and the copies that had been printed would not all be sold for a generation. Edwin Gittleman says that
Rather than publicize the book he was instrumental in having printed, rather than praise essays he once called among the finest of their kind, rather than recommend poems he once considered worthy of being read “to all who have ears to hear,” Waldo Emerson (especially when among close friends) preferred to repeat Very’s most recent “speeches,” and to relate how he had “dealt” with them.
However, Mrs. Lidian Emerson did present a copy to Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and Bronson Alcott sent a copy to one of his British correspondents, and Henry David Thoreau sent a copy to Miss Ellen Devereux Sewall’s father, the Reverend Edmund Quincy Sewall, Sr. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 insight. He is not at liberty even to correct these unpremeditated poems for the press; but if another will publish them, he offers no objection. In this way they have come into the world, and as yet have hardly begun to be known. With the exception of the few first poems, which appear to be of an earlier date, all these verses bear the unquestionable stamp of grandeur. They are the breathings of a certain entranced devotion, which one would say, should be received with affectionate and sympathizing curiosity by all men, as if no recent writer had so much to show them of what is most their own. They are as sincere a litany as the Hebrew songs of David or Isaiah, and only less than they, because indebted to the Hebrew muse for their tone and genius. This makes the singularity of the book, namely, that so pure an utterance of the most domestic and primitive of all sentiments should in this age of revolt and experiment use once more the popular religious language, and so show itself secondary and morbid. These sonnets have little range of topics, no extent of observation, no playfulness; there is even a certain torpidity in the concluding lines of some of them, which reminds one of church hymns; but, whilst they flow with great sweetness, they have the sublime unity of the Decalogue or the Code of Menu, and if as monotonous, yet are they almost as pure as the sounds of Surrounding Nature. We gladly insert from a newspaper the following sonnet, which appeared since the volume was printed. THE BARBERRY BUSH. The bush that has most briers and bitter fruit, Wait till the frost has turned its green leaves red, Its sweetened berries will thy palate suit, And thou may’st find e’en there a homely bread. Upon the hills of Salem scattered wide, Their yellow blossoms gain the eye in Spring; And straggling e’en upon the turnpike’s side, Their ripened branches to your hand they bring, I’ve plucked them oft in boyhood’s early hour, That then I gave such name, and thought it true; But now I know that other fruit as sour Grows on what now thou callest Me and You; Yet, wilt thou wait the autumn that I see, Will sweeter taste than these red berries be.
September: The negrero My Boy, of New Orleans, was seized by a British cruiser, and condemned at Sierra Leone (Niles’s Register, LVII. 353). Gotcha!
However, you can’t win them all. During this month a negrero flying the Portuguese flag, the Conceicao, master J. Antonio, out of Sao Tome on its one and only known Middle Passage, arrived at Bahia, Brazil. And, a slaver flying the US flag, the Octavia, master Hicaling, on its one and only known Middle Passage, delivered a cargo of enslaved Africans to Popo, Cuba. And, a Portuguese slaver, the General Cabreira, master unknown, on one of its five known Middle Passage voyages, out of Angola with a cargo of 360 enslaved Africans, arrived at the port of Camarivea, Brazil. And, a slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Formosa, master Betman, out of an unknown point in Africa with a cargo of 330 enslaved Africans on its one and only known Middle Passage, arrived at a port of Cuba. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
Early in September: There was a Whig gathering on Boston Common, that would be described in the “autobiography” of John Shepard Keyes: HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Our senior year began almost with an incident not very conducive to study, the great Whig gathering on Boston Common early in September. Here 50000 Tippecanoe & Tyler too men formed and marched to Bunker Hill, the big ball of Concord heading the Middlesex Delegation and creating great interest as it rolled on— In the thills were Father Jos Barrett Sam Hoar Deas Brown and Wood, Cols Shattuck & Whiting and the other magnates of the village and on the ropes were lots of us boys I so well recall that at a halt in State St I procured a bunch of cigars from some enthusiastic Whig of Boston and handing them round, all the old dons lighted up and smoked defiantly of all city ordinances It was the first smoking I ever saw done openly in Boston streets, for then even college boys walking home would have to put off their cigars till they got to the bridge or run the risks of a policeman’s stopping them, so strictly was the rule enforced. We labored at the drag ropes up Bunker Hill, heard Webster, Choate, Everett, and N.Y. and Va orators in plenty and wound up the day at John Skinners house on Main Street, with a great spread and lots of fun and champagne. How I got back to Cambridge I dont remember or when after it I got to studying but I fancy the politics had much more attraction for me than lessons, and I know that it was the begining of many pleasant visits to Charlestown and that family that lasted for more than a dozen years, till Harry Fairbanks time. J.S. KEYES AUTOBIOGRAPHY
September 1, Sunday: After prayers on board the New Zealand Company vessel Tory, Colonel William Wakefield and his 19-year-old nephew Edward Jerningham Wakefield went ashore on Queen Charlotte’s Sound of the island of New Zealand at the whaling town Te-awa-iti. “There were about twenty houses presented to our view; the walls generally constructed of wattled supple-jack, called kareau, filled in with clay; the roof thatched with reeds; and a large unsightly chimney at one of the ends, constructed of either the same materials as the walls, or of stones heaped together by rude masonry. Dicky Barrett’s house, or ware [whare] as it is called in maori or native language, was a very superior edifice, built of sawn timber, floored and lined inside, and sheltered in front by an ample veranda. A long room was half full of natives and whalers. His wife E Rangi, a fine stately woman, gave us a dignified welcome; and his pretty half-caste children laughed and commented on our appearance, to some of their mother’s relations, in their own language. He had three girls of his own, and had adopted a son of an old trader and friend of his named Jacky Love, who was on his death- bed, regretted by the natives as one of themselves. He had married a young chieftainess of great rank, and his son Dan was treated with that universal respect and kindness to which he was entitled by the character of his father and the rank of his mother.... There were about twenty-five half-caste children at Te-awa-iti. They were all strikingly comely, and many of them quite fair, with light hair and rosy cheeks; active and hardy as the goats with which the settlement also swarmed. The women of the whalers were remarkable for their cleanliness and the order which they preserved in their companion’s house. They were most of them dressed in loose gowns or printed calico, and their hair, generally very fine, was always clean and well-combed.”
September 1, Sunday: [Sunday of WEEK] As we thus dipped our way along between fresh masses of foliage overrun with the grape and smaller flowering vines, the surface was so calm, and both air and water so transparent, that the flight of a kingfisher or robin over the river was as distinctly seen reflected in the water below as in the air above. The birds seemed to flit through submerged groves, alighting on the yielding sprays, HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 and their clear notes to come up from below. MIDDLESEX CANAL
“While it was old, the canal between the Concord and the Merrimack just above Billerica Falls plainly revealed its youthfulness in comparison to the untouched lands about it. Thoreau noted that birds that fed in, and creatures which swam in the waters were the first to be at home in the man-made water-way. Plants adjust themselves more slowly to areas disturbed by man.” -Cruickshank, Helen Gere. THOREAU ON BIRDS (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964)
[Sunday of WEEK] This canal, which is the oldest in the country, and has even an antique look beside the more modern railroads, is fed by the Concord, so that we were still floating on its familiar waters. It is so much water which the river lets for the advantage of commerce. There appeared some want of harmony in its scenery, since it was not of equal date with the woods and meadows through which it is led, and we missed the conciliatory influence of time on land and water; but in the lapse of ages, Nature will recover and indemnify herself, and gradually plant fit shrubs and flowers along its borders. Already the kingfisher sat upon a pine over the water, and the bream and pickerel swam below.
Sunday Sep 1st: We glided over the broad bosom of the merrimack between Middlesex and Tyngsboro at noon, here a quarter of a mile wide, while the rattling of our oars was echoed over the water to those villages, and their slight sounds to us. Their harbors lay as smooth and fairy like as the Lido, or Syracuse or Rhodes in our imaginations. Like a strange piratical craft we flitted past the dwellings of noble home-staying men — seeming to float upon a tide which came up to every villager’s breast, as conspicuous as if we were on an eminence. Communicating with the villas and hills and forests on either hand by the glances we sent to them, or the echoes we awakened. We glanced up many a pleasant ravine with its farm house in the distance, where some contributory stream came in, Again the site of a saw-mill, and a few forsaken eel pots were all that greeted us. {One-third page blank} Our thoughts reverted to Arabia Persia and Hindostan — the lands of contemplation — and dwelling place of the ruminant nations. And in the experience of those noon tides we found an apology and an instinct for the opium — betel — and tobacco chewers. Mount Saber, according to the French traveller and naturalist Botta is celebrated for producing the Kat tree. Of which “The soft tops of the twigs and tender leaves are eaten,” says his reviewer, “and produce an agreeable soothing excitement, restoring from fatigue, banishing sleep, and disposing to the enjoyment of conversation.” What a dignified oriental life might be lived along this stream, browsing the tree tops — and chewing mallows and apple tree buds like the camelopards — rabbits and partridges. Salmon Brook runs under the rail-way — but we sailed up far enough into the meadows which border it, to learn its piscatorial history from a haymaker on its banks. He told us that silver eel was formerly abundant here, and pointed to some sinker creels at its mouth. TOBACCO OPIUM
Salmon Brook Silver eels Pennichook Wooden creels Ye sweet waters of my brain These the baits that still allure When shall I look And dragon fly Or cast the hook That floated by In thy waves again? May they still endure?
Sunday 1st At a 3d of a mile over the water we heard distinctly children repeating their catechism in a cottage by the river side– While in the broad shallows between a herd of cows were cooling their hides and waging war with the mosquitoes. While we sail here we can remember unreservedly those friends who dwell far away on the banks and by the HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 sources of this very river and people this world for us — without any harsh and unfriendly interruptions. (2, 27)
Sunday sep 1st We passed the noon under an oak on the banks of the canal in chelmsford. From Ball’s hill which is the St Anne’s of Concord voyageurs to Billerica meeting house the river is twice or three times as broad as in Concord– A deep and dark stream, flowing between gentle hills and occasional cliffs, and well wooded all the way It is one long lake bordered with willows. The boatmen call it a dead stream. For long reaches you can see but few traces of any village. It seemed a natural sabbath today — a stillness so intense that it could not be heightened. There was not breeze enough to ruffle the water. The cattle stood up to their bellies in the river and made you think of Rembrandt. we encamped under some oaks in Tyngsboro, on the east bank of the Merrimack, just below the ferry. MIDDLESEX CANAL
September 2, Monday: A progressive Spanish Cortes opened, but would dissolve in 2 months.
Fromental Halevy’s opera comique Le sherif, to words of Scribe after Balzac was performed for the initial time, at the Theatre de la Bourse, Paris. It was a failure.
“Camped in Merrimack, on the west bank, by a deep ravine.”
A WEEK: (September 2, Monday, 1839) We had found a safe harbor for our boat, and as the sun was setting carried up our furniture, and soon arranged our house upon the bank, and while the kettle steamed at the tent door, we chatted of distant friends and of the sights which we were to behold, and wondered which way the towns lay from us. Our cocoa was soon boiled, and supper set upon our chest, and we lengthened out this meal, like old voyageurs, with our talk. Meanwhile we spread the map on the ground, and read in the Gazetteer when the first settlers came here and got a township granted.
COCOA HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
A WEEK: (September 2, Monday, 1839) The bass, Tilia Americana, also called the lime or linden, which was a new tree to us, overhung the water with its broad and rounded leaf, interspersed with clusters of small hard berries now nearly ripe, and made an agreeable shade for us sailors. The inner bark of this genus is the bast, the material of the fisherman’s matting, and the ropes and peasant’s shoes of which the Russians make so much use, and also of nets and a coarse cloth in some places. According to poets, this was once Philyra, one of the Oceanides. The ancients are said to have used its bark for the roofs of cottages, for baskets, and for a kind of paper called Philyra. They also made bucklers of its wood, “on account of its flexibility, lightness, and resiliency.” It was once much used for carving, and is still in demand for sounding-boards of piano-fortes and panels of carriages, and for various uses for which toughness and flexibility are required. Baskets and cradles are made of the twigs. Its sap affords sugar, and the honey made from its flowers is said to be preferred to any other. Its leaves are in some countries given to cattle, a kind of chocolate has been made of its fruit, a medicine has been prepared from an infusion of its flowers, and finally, the charcoal made of its wood is greatly valued for gunpowder.
CHOCOLATE
Although the following is an entry in Henry Thoreau’s JOURNAL of June 13, 1851, Thoreau ascribed this remark, while working on his A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS manuscript, to the night of his mystic experience, September 2, 1839: “I heard partridges drumming to-night as late as 9 o’clock. What singularly space penetrating and filling sound! Why am I never nearer to its source? We do not commonly live our life out and full; we do not fill all our pores with our blood; we do not inspire and expire fully and entirely enough, so that the wave, the comber, of each inspiration shall break upon our extremest shores, rolling till it meets the sand which bounds us, and the sound of the surf come back to us. Might not a bellows assist us to breathe? That our breathing should create a wind on a calm day! We live but a fraction of our life. Why do we not let on the flood, 184raise the gates, and set all our wheels in motion? He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. Employ your senses.” TIMELINE OF A WEEK
184. However, when he had copied the penciled events of Sept. 2nd 1839 into his journal on June 21, 1840, the only reference Thoreau had copied was “Sept. 2nd Camped in Merrimack, on the west bank, by a deep ravine.…” Presumably, then, he first heard these famous partridges drumming and thought these famous thoughts when they were camped near Penichook Brook and Nashville, on the west bank of the Merrimack River in the vicinity of a deep ravine and a pine wood, on September 2, 1839 as described on pages 171-7 of A WEEK. Possibly, when young Thoreau lay on his pine branches, and then wrote as above of “some tyro beating a drum incessantly, preparing for a country muster,” he was mistaking the sound of a ruffed grouse for the sound of some boy in a nearby village, practicing incessantly on a drum. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
A WEEK: Far in the night as we were falling asleep on the bank of the Merrimack, we heard some tyro beating a drum incessantly, in preparation for a country muster, as we learned, and we thought of the line,— “When the drum beat at dead of night.” CAMPBELL We could have assured him that his beat would be answered, and the forces be mustered. Fear not, thou drummer of the night, we too will be there. And still he drummed on in the silence and the dark. This stray sound from a far-off sphere came to our ears from time to time, far, sweet, and significant, and we listened with such an unprejudiced sense as if for the first time we heard at all. No doubt he was an insignificant drummer enough, but his music afforded us a prime and leisure hour, and we felt that we were in season wholly. These simple sounds related us to the stars. Ay, there was a logic in them so convincing that the combined sense of mankind could never make me doubt their conclusions. I stop my habitual thinking, as if the plough had suddenly run deeper in its furrow through the crust of the world. How can I go on, who have just stepped over such a bottomless skylight in the bog of my life. Suddenly old Time winked at me, — Ah, you know me, you rogue, — and news had come that IT was well. That ancient universe is in such capital health, I think undoubtedly it will never die. Heal yourselves, doctors; by God, I live. Then idle Time ran gadding by And left me with Eternity alone; I hear beyond the range of sound, I see beyond the verge of sight, — I see, smell, taste, hear, feel, that everlasting Something to which we are allied, at once our maker, our abode, our destiny, our very Selves; the one historic truth, the most remarkable fact which can become the distinct and uninvited subject of our thought, the actual glory of the universe; the only fact which a human being cannot avoid recognizing, or in some way forget or dispense with. It doth expand my privacies To all, and leave me single in the crowd. I have seen how the foundations of the world are laid, and I have not the least doubt that it will stand a good while. Now chiefly is my natal hour, And only now my prime of life. I will not doubt the love untold, Which not my worth nor want hath bought, Which wooed me young and wooes me old, And to this evening hath me brought. What are ears? what is time? that this particular series of sounds called a strain of music, an invisible and fairy troop which never brushed the dew from any mead, can be wafted down through the centuries from Homer to me, and he have been conversant with that same aerial and mysterious charm which now so tingles my ears? What a fine communication from age to age, of the fairest and noblest thoughts, the aspirations of ancient men, even such as were never communicated by speech, is music! It is the flower of language, thought colored and curved, fluent and flexible, its crystal fountain tinged with the sun’s rays, and its purling ripples reflecting the grass and the clouds. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
A strain of music reminds me of a passage of the Vedas, and I associate with it the idea of infinite remoteness, as well as of beauty and serenity, for to the senses that is farthest from us which addresses the greatest depth within us. It teaches us again and again to trust the remotest and finest as the divinest instinct, and makes a dream our only real experience. We feel a sad cheer when we hear it, perchance because we that hear are not one with that which is heard. Therefore a torrent of sadness deep, Through the strains of thy triumph is heard to sweep. The sadness is ours. The Indian poet Calidas says in the Sacontala: “Perhaps the sadness of men on seeing beautiful forms and hearing sweet music arises from some faint remembrance of past joys, and the traces of connections in a former state of existence.” As polishing expresses the vein in marble, and grain in wood, so music brings out what of heroic lurks anywhere. The hero is the sole patron of music. That harmony which exists naturally between the hero’s moods and the universe the soldier would fain imitate with drum and trumpet. When we are in health all sounds fife and drum for us; we hear the notes of music in the air, or catch its echoes dying away when we awake in the dawn. Marching is when the pulse of the hero beats in unison with the pulse of Nature, and he steps to the measure of the universe; then there is true courage and invincible strength.
Continuing with this material about the drumming of the ruffed grouse that night, Thoreau modernized the spelling of a snippet from Book II of the Reverend John Milton’s PARADISE LOST: HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
A WEEK: Still the drum rolled on, and stirred our blood to fresh PEOPLE OF extravagance that night. The clarion sound and clang of corselet and buckler were heard from many a hamlet of the soul, and many A WEEK a knight was arming for the fight behind the encamped stars. “Before each van Prick forth the aery knights, and couch their spears Till thickest legions close; with feats of arms MILTON From either end of Heaven the welkin burns.” ______Away! away! away! away! Ye have not kept your secret well, I will abide that other day, Those other lands ye tell. Has time no leisure left for these, The acts that ye rehearse? Is not eternity a lease For better deeds than verse? ’T is sweet to hear of heroes dead, To know them still alive, But sweeter if we earn their bread, And in us they survive. Our life should feed the springs of fame With a perennial wave, As ocean feeds the babbling founts Which find in it their grave. Ye skies drop gently round my breast, And be my corselet blue, Ye earth receive my lance in rest, My faithful charger you; Ye stars my spear-heads in the sky, My arrow-tips ye are; I see the routed foemen fly, My bright spears fixed are. Give me an angel for a foe, Fix now the place and time, And straight to meet him I will go Above the starry chime. And with our clashing bucklers’ clang The heavenly spheres shall ring, While bright the northern lights shall hang Beside our tourneying. And if she lose her champion true, Tell Heaven not despair, For I will be her champion new, Her fame I will repair.
Monday 2nd At noon we rested under the shade of a willow or maple which hung over the water, and drew forth a melon from our repast — and contemplated at our leisure the lapse of the river and of human life. The still unravelled fate of men ministered to the entertainment of our chance hours. As that current with its floating twigs and leaves so did all things pass in review before us– Far away in cities and marts and on this very stream the old routine was proceeding still– At length we would throw our rinds into the water for the fishes to nibble — and add our breath to the life of living men. Our melons lay at home on the sands of the merrimack, and our potatoes in the sun and water on the bottom of the boat — looked like a fruit of the country. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Monday Sep 2nd Now & then we scared up a king-fisher or a summer duck.
“On Monday afternoon the Thoreaus saw their first basswood, a tree new to them. This reminded them that they had reached a strange land quite unlike Concord. Thoreau speculated on the wonderful variety of nature’s creations. The selection which follows cannot be called good science as far as the origin of species is concerned. If food chains are considered, a different light may be thrown on Thoreau’s remarks. Leaves may be eaten by insects, which in turn are consumed by song birds, and the song birds may be devoured by a hawk. Thus the leaves may truly become a hawk.”
[Monday of WEEK] In all her products, Nature only develops her simplest germs. One would say that it was no great stretch of invention to create birds. The hawk which now takes his flight over the top of the wood was at first, perchance, only a leaf which fluttered in its aisles. From the rustling leaves she came in the course of ages to the loftier flight and clear carol of the bird. [HERE IS THE SMOKING GUN!!!] HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 September 3, Tuesday: Clara Wieck moved in with her mother in Berlin.
The 1st anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s freedom, which we may well elect to celebrate in lieu of an unknown slave birthday.
“It has been a source of great annoyance to me, never to have a birthday.”
September 3: Tuesday We passed a boat before sunrise, and though we could not distinguish it for the fog, the few dull sounds we heard, carried with them a sense of weight and irresistible motion which was impressive. {Four-fifths page blank} If ever our idea of a friends is realised it will be in some broad and generous natural person — as frank as the daylight — in whose presence our behavior will be as simple and unconstrained, as the wanderer amid the recesses of the hills. The language of excitement is picturesque merely — but not so with enthusiasm You must be calm before you can utter oracles– What was the excitement of the Delphic priestess compared with the calm wisdom of Socrates! God is calm Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity. {Two-fifths page blank} Rivers are the natural highways of all nations, not only levelling and removing obstacles from the path of the traveller — quenching his thirst — and bearing him on their bosom, but conducting him through the most interesting scenery of a country most rich in natural phenomena, through the most populous portions of the globe where the animal and vegetable kingdoms attain the greatest perfection. {Three-fifths page blank} We passed a man on the shore fishing with a long birch pole and a dog at his side — standing like caryatides under the cope of heaven– We passed so near as to agitate his float with our oars, and drive luck away for an indefinite term — but when we had rowed a mile as straight as an arrow with our faces toward him, he still stood with the proverbial patience of a fisherman the only object to relieve the eye in the extended meadow — under the other side of heaven — and there would stand abiding his luck — till he took his way home at evening with his fish — — He and his dog! (it was a superior contemplative dog) may they fare well. I trust we shall meet again. He was no chimera or vision to me. When we had passed the bridge we saw men haying far off in the meadows, their heads moving like the herds grass. In the distance the wind seemed to bend all alike.185 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Plum Island, at the mouth of this river [The Merrimack] 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 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
185.The poet W.H. Auden has in 1962 brought forward a snippet from this day’s entry as:
THE VIKING BOOK OF APHORISMS, A PERSONAL SELECTION BY W.H. AUDEN…
Pg Topic Aphorism Selected by Auden out of Thoreau
6 7 The Talker The language of excitement is picturesque merely — but not so with enthusiasm You must be calm before you can utter oracles. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
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
1839 1839 September 3: Tuesday The banks of the Merrimack are steep and clayey for the most part and trickling with water — and where a spring oozes out a few feet above the level of the river, the boatmen cut a trough out of a slab with their axes and place it so as to receive the water, and fill their jugs conveniently. Bursting out from under the root of a pine or a rock, sometimes this purer and cooler water is collected into a little basin close to the edge of and level with the river — a fountain head of the Merrimack.– so near along lifes stream lie the fountains of innocence and youth — making fertile the margin of its turbid stream. Let the voyageur replenish his vessel at these uncontaminated sources.– Some youthful spring perchance still empties with tinkling music into the oldest river, even when it is falling into the sea. I imagine that its music is distinguished by the river gods from the general lapse of the stream and falls sweeter upon their ears in proportion as it is nearer the sea. As thus the evaporations of the river feed these unsuspected springs which filter through its banks so our aspirations fall back again in springs upon the margin of our life’s stream to refresh and purify it. The routine of these boatmen’s lives suggests to me how indifferent all employments are, and how any may be infinitely noble and poetic in the eyes of men, if pursued with sufficient boyancy and freedom. For the most part they carry down wood and bring back stores for the country, piling the wood so as to leave a little shelter in one part where they may sleep, or retire from the rain if they choose. I can hardly imagine a more healthy employment, or more favorable to contemplation, or the observation of nature.– In no weather subject to great exposure — as the lumberers of Maine — and in summer inhaling the healthfullest breezes. But slightly encumbered with clothing — frequently with the head and feet bare. From morning till night the boatman walks backwards and forwards on the side of his boat, now stooping with his shoulder to the pole, then drawing it back slowly to set it again — meanwhile moving steadily and majestically forward through an endless valley, amid an ever changing scenery, — now distinguishing his course for a mile or two — and now finding himself shut in by a sudden turn of the river, in a small woodland lake. All the phenomena which surround him are simple and grand– The graceful majestic motion of his craft, must communicate something of the same to his character. So will he over forward to his objects on land. There is something impressive and stately in this motion which he assists. He feels the slow irresistible motion under him with pride as if it were the impetus of his own energy. At noon his horn is heard echoing from shore to shore to give notice of his approach — to the farmer’s wife with whom he is to take his dinner — frequently in such retired scenes that only muskrats and king fisher’s seem to hear.
Tuesday sep 3d About noon we passed the village of Merrimac were some carpenters were at work mending a scow on the shore. The strokes of their mallets echoed from shore to shore and up and down the river, and their tools gleamed in the sun a quarter of a mile from us, which made boat building seem as ancient and honorable as agriculture, and we realized how there might be a naval as well as pastoral life– We thought of a traveller building his boat on the banks of the stream under the heavens– As we glided past at a distance these out-door workmen seemed to have added some dignity to their labor by its publickness — it seemed a part of the industry of nature like the work of hornets and mud wasps The whole history of commerce was made plain in this scow turned bottom upward on the shore. Thus men begin to go down upon the sea in ships. There was Iolchos and the launching of the Argo. ——
The waves slowly beat Just to keep the noon sweet And no sound is floated oer Save the mallet on shore Which echoing on high Seems a caulking the sky We passed some shag-bark trees on the opposite shore skirting the waters edge. The first I had ever seen On the sandy shore of the Merrimack opposite to Tyngsboro, we first discovered the blue bell– A pleasant sight it must be to the Scotchman in Lowell mills. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 The moon now rises to her absolute rule, And the husbandman and hunter Acknowledge her for their mistress. Asters and golden reign in the fields And the life everlasting withers not. The fields are reaped and shorn of their pride But an inward verdure still crowns them The thistle scatters its down on the pool And yellow leaves clothe the vine– And nought disturbs the serious life of men. But behind the sheaves and under the sod There lurks a ripe fruit which the reapers have not gathered The true harvest of the year Which it bears forever. With fondness annually watering and maturing it. But man never severs the stalk Which bears this palatable fruit.
Mills of Lowell The hardest material obeys the same law with the most fluid. Trees are but rivers of sap and woody fibre flowing from the atmosphere and emptying in to the earth by their trunks — as their roots flow upward to the surface. And in the heavens there are rivers of stars and milky ways– There are rivers of rock on the surface and rivers of ore in the bowels of the earth. From this point the river runs perfectly straight for a mile or more to Carlisle bridge — which consists of 20 piers — and in the distance its surface looks like a cobweb gleaming in the sun. {Two-fifths page blank} In the morning the whole river and adjacent country was covered by a dense fog — through which the smoke of our fire curled up like a subtler mist. But before we had rowed many rods the fog dispersed as by magic and only a slight steam curled up from the surface of the water.– We reached the falls in Billerica before noon, where we left the river for the canal, which runs six miles through the woods to the Merrimack at Middlesex. As we did not care to loitre in this part of our voyage while one ran along the tow path drawing the boat by a cord, the other kept it off from the shore with a pole, so that we accomplished the whole distance in little more than an hour. There is some abruptness and want of harmony in this scenery since the canal is not of equal date with the forests and meadows it runs through. You miss the conciliatory influence of time on land and water. In the lapse of ages no doubt nature will recover and idemnify herself. Gradually fit shrubs and flowers will be planted along the borders Already the king-fisher sits on a pine over the water, and the dace and pickerel swim below. All works pass directly out of the hands of the architect. and though he has bungled she will perfect them at last. Her own fish-hawks hover over our fish-ponds HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 were pleased to find that our boat would float in M. water By noon we were fairly launched upon the bosom of the merrimack — having passed through the locks at Middlesex — and felt as if we were on the ocean stream itself. Beaver river comes in a little lower down draining the meadows of Pelham, Windham, and Londonderry, the Irish settlers of which latter town were the first to introduce the potatoe into N.E. {One-fourth page blank} POTATO Two men called out from the steep and wooded banks to be taken as far as Nashua but we were too deeply laden– As we glided away from them with even sweeps while the fates scattered oil in our course — as the sun was sinking behind the willows of the distant shore, — we could see them far off over the water — running along the shore and climbing over the rocks and fallen trees like ants till they reached a spot where a broad stream poured its placid tribute into the Merrimack– When a mile distant we could see them preparing to ford the stream– But whether they got safely through or went round by the source, we never learned. Thus nature puts the busiest merchant to pilgrim’s shifts. She soon drives us to staff and scrip and scallop shell. The Mississippi the Nile the Ganges can their personality be denied? have they not a personal history in the annals of the world– These journeying atoms from the andes and ural and mountains of the moon — by villas — villages — and mists — with the moccasined tread of an Indian warrior. Their sources not yet drained. The mountains of the moon send their tribute to the pasha as they did to Pharoah without fail. though he most collect the rest of his revenue at the point of the bayonnette Consider the phenomena of morn — or eve — and you will say that Nature has perfected herself by an eternity of practice– Evening stealing over the fields– The stars come to bathe in retired waters The shadows of the trees creeping farther and farther into the meadows. And a myriad phenomena beside. Occasionally a canal boat with its large white sail glided around a promontory a quarter of a mile before us and changed the scene in an instant– Occasionally attaching ourselves to its side we would float back in company awhile — interchanging a word with the voyageurs and obtaining a draught of cooler water from their stores. Occasionally we had to muster all our energy to get round a point where the river broke rippling over rocks and the maples trailed their branches in the stream. The rain had pattered all night And now the whole country wept, the drops falling in the river, and on the alder, and in the pastures, but instead of any bow in the heavens there was the trill of the tree sparrow all the morning. The cheery faith of this little bird atoned for the silence of the whole woodland quire. MIDDLESEX CANAL
Tuesday– At intervals when there was a suitable reach in the river — we caught sight of the Goffstown mountain — the Indian Un-can-nu-nuc rising before us, on the left of the river– “The far blue mountain.” {One-fourth page blank} We soon after saw the Piscataquoag emptying in on our left — and heard the falls of Amoskieg above. It was here according to tradition that the sachem Wonolanset resided, and when at war with the mohawks his tribe are said to have concealed their provisions in the cavities of the rocks in the upper part of the falls The descent is 54 feet in half a mile. The manchester manufacturing company have constructed a canal here — through which we passed. Above the falls the river spreads out into a lake — stretching up toward Hooksett– We could see several canal boats at intervals of a mile or more standing up to Hooksett with a light breeze. With their broad sails set they moved slowly up the stream in the sluggish and fitful breeze — as if impelled by some mysterious counter current — like Antediluvian birds. A grand motion so slow and steady. For the most part they were returning empty, or at most with a few passengers aboard. As we rowed near to one which was just getting under way, the steers man offered to take us in tow — but when we came along side we found that he intended to take us on board, as otherwise we should retard his own voyage too much — but as we were too heavy to be lifted aboard — we left him and proceeded up the stream a half a mile to the shade of some maples to spend our noon In the course of half an hour several boats passed up the river at intervals of half a mile — and among them came the boat we have mentioned, keeping the middle of the stream and when within speaking distance the steers man called out if we would come along side now he would take us in tow. But not heeding their taunts we made no haste to give chase until our preparations were made — by which time they were a quarter of a mile ahead. Then with our own sails set — and plying our four oars, we were soon along side of them — and we glided close under their side, we quietly promised if they would throw us a rope that we would take them in tow. And then we gradually overhauled each boat in succession untill we had the river to ourselves again. No man was ever party to a secure and settled friendship — it is no more a constant phenomenon than meteors and lightning– It is a war of positions of silent tactics. With a fair wind and the current in our favor we commenced our return voyage, sitting at ease in our boat and conversing, or in silence watching, for the last sign of each reach in the river, as a bend concealed it from view. The lumbermen who were throwing down wood from the top of the high bank, 30 or 40 feet above the water, that it might be sent down the river — paused in their work to watch our retreating sail. {One-fifth page blank} In summer I live out of doors and have only impulses and feelings which are all for action– And must wait for the quiet & stillness and longer nights of Autumn and Winter, before any thought will subside. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 ______I mark the summer’s swift decline The springing sward its grave clothes weaves Oh could I catch the sounds remote Could I but tell to human ear The strains which on the breezes float And sing the requiem of the dying year. None of the feathered race have yet realized my conception of the woodland depths. I had fancied that their plumage would assume stronger and more dazzling colors, like the brighter tints of evening, in proportion as I advanced farther into the darkness and solitude of the forest. The red election, brought from their depth, did in some degree answer my expectation — gleaming like a coal of fire amid the pines. In Autumn what may be termed the dry colors preponderate in Summer the moist. The Asters and golden rod are the livery which nature wears at present. The golden rod alone seem to express all the ripeness of the autumn, and sheds its mellow lustre on the fields as if the now declining summer sun had bequeathed its hues to it. Asters everywhere spot the fields like so many fallen stars.
Thoreau shot a Passenger Pigeon, one of a large flock near the mouth of the Souhegan River, and broiled it for supper. Scientists are not sure why these birds, once fantastically abundant, became extinct. Some attribute it to excessive slaughter on the breeding grounds and throughout the year. Some believe the destruction of the beech and oak forests was largely responsible. Some believe that the numbers having been severely reduced by overshooting, the species was no longer able to reproduce. Thoreau’s concern about the dead pigeon was philosophical. Did he have a right to kill such a beautiful bird? Having killed it, he decided it should be eaten and not wasted.? Though Thoreau seldom saw a dead bird in the woods or fields, had he visited a nesting place of colonial birds, or walked along the drift of an ocean beach, he would have seen many dead birds. Probably the majority of song birds are finally caught and eaten by other creatures. Most of those that do die of disease or age, being quite small, are eaten by insects, mice, or even snakes, for the latter have been seen eating birds killed on highways. Certainly birds are never translated, as some of the Old Testament prophets were said to have been, being taken directly from earth to heaven without dying. –Cruickshank, Helen Gere. THOREAU ON BIRDS (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964)
[Tuesday of WEEK. American Passenger Pigeon Ectopistes migratorius near the mouth of the Souhegan River.] During the heat of the day, we rested on a large island a mile above the mouth of this river, pastured by a herd of cattle, with steep banks and scattered elms and oaks, and a sufficient channel for canal- boats on each side. When we made a fire to boil some rice for our dinner, the flames spreading amid the dry grass, and the smoke curling silently upward and casting grotesque shadows on the ground, seemed phenomena of the noon, and we fancied that we progressed up the stream without effort, and as naturally as the wind and tide went down, not outraging the calm days by unworthy bustle or impatience. The woods on the neighboring shore were alive with pigeons, which were moving south, looking for mast, but now, like ourselves, spending their noon in the shade. We could hear the slight, wiry, winnowing sound of their wings as they changed their roosts from time to time, and their gentle and tremulous cooing. They sojourned with us during the noon-tide, greater travellers far than we. You may frequently discover a single pair sitting upon the lower branches of the white pine in the depths of the woods, at this hour of the day, so silent and solitary, and with such a hermit-like HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 appearance, as if they had never strayed beyond its skirts, while the acorn which was gathered in the forests of Maine is still undigested in their crops. We obtained one of these handsome birds, which lingered too long upon its perch, and plucked and broiled it here with some other game, to be carried along for our supper; for, beside provisions which we carried with us, we depended mainly on the river and forest for our supply. It is true, it did not seem to be putting this bird to its right use to pluck off its feathers, and extract its entrails, and broil its carcass on the coals; but we heroically persevered, nevertheless, waiting for further information. The same regard for Nature which excited our sympathy for her creatures nerved our hands to carry through what we had begun. For we would be honorable to the party we deserted; we would fulfill fate, and so at length, perhaps, detect the secret innocence of these incessant tragedies which Heaven allows. Nature herself has not provided the most graceful end for her creatures. What becomes of all these birds that people the air and forest for our solacement? The sparrows seem always chipper, never infirm. We do not see their bodies lie about. Yet there is a tragedy at the end of each one of their lives. They must perish miserably, not one of them is translated. True, “not a sparrow falleth to the ground without our Heavenly Father’s knowledge,” but they do fall, nevertheless. That night the Thoreau brothers camped “In [the township of] Bedford, on the west bank [of the Merrimack River], opposite a large rock, above Coos Falls.” Did they, due to rainy weather, completely miss the northern lights display of that night? The next morning, as they shoved off, they would see a Green-backed Heron Butorides striatus. TIMELINE OF A WEEK
September 4, Wednesday: According to the journal of Friend Thomas B. Hazard or Hafsard or Hasard of Kingstown, Rhode Island, also known as “Nailer Tom,”186 there had been “strange Northern lights last night.”
AURORA BOREALIS The Chinese having ignored a British ultimatum to turn over needed supplies to British civilians in Hong Kong, British warships opened fire on Chinese naval junks. Although the British got the better of this gunfire the Chinese would continue to refuse to hand over any supplies.
Sept 4th [Wednesday of WEEK] As we shoved away from this rocky coast, before sunrise, the smaller bittern, the genius of the shore, was moping along its edge, or stood probing the mud for its food, with ever an eye on us, though so demurely at work, or else he ran along over the wet stones like a wrecker in his storm-coat, looking out for wrecks of snails and cockles. Now away he goes, with a limping flight, uncertain where he will alight, until a rod of clear sand amid the alders invites his feet; and now our steady approach compels him to seek a new retreat. It is a bird of the oldest Thalesian school, and no doubt believes in the priority of water to the other elements; the relic of a twilight antediluvian age which yet inhabits these bright American rivers with us Yankees. There is something venerable in this melancholy and contemplative race of birds, which may have trodden the earth while it was yet in a slimy and imperfect state. Perchance their tracks, too, are still visible on the stones. It still lingers into our glaring summers, bravely supporting its fate without sympathy from man, as if it looked forward to some second advent of which he has no assurance. One wonders if, by its patient study by rocks and sandy capes, it has wrested the whole of her secret from Nature yet. What a rich experience it must have gained, standing on one leg and looking out from its dull eye so long on sunshine and rain, moon and stars! What could it tell of stagnant pools and reeds and dank night fogs! It would be worth the while to look closely into the eye which has been open and seeing at such hours, and in such solitudes its dull, yellowish, greenish eye. Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green. I have seen these birds stand by the half dozen together in the shallower water along the shore, with their bills thrust into the mud at the bottom, probing for
186. He was called “Nailer Tom” because his trade was the cutting of nails from scrap iron, and in order to distinguish him from a relative known as “College Tom,” from another relative known as “Shepherd Tom,” and from his own son who –because he had fits– was known as “Pistol-Head Tom.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 food, the whole head being concealed, while the neck and body formed an arch above the water.
Thoreau’s smaller bittern, the Green Heron, like all members of the heron family, catches its food with quick stabs of its bill. It does not probe the mud as do many species of shorebird. Since Green Herons often feed in still, shallow water, reflections may have caused Thoreau to think their bills were thrust into the mud. It must be remembered that Thoreau had no optical equipment at this time to aid his observations. –Cruickshank, Helen Gere. THOREAU ON BIRDS (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964)
Sept 4th Wednesday. Hooksett east bank 2 or 3 miles below the village, opposite mr. Mitchels.
On Thursday, Thoreau and his brother halted at a point east of Uncannunuc Mountain near Manchester, New Hampshire. They hung their tent and buffalo robes in a farmer’s barn to dry and then continued on foot up the Merrimack until it became the Pemigewasset and then the Wild Amonoosuck to its very fountainhead. This part of the adventure is not included in the book. However, Thursday morning as the brothers lay in their tent listening to the rain, they found such enjoyment in birds as those who never venture into a wet world can never know. –Cruickshank, Helen Gere. THOREAU ON BIRDS (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964) HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
A WEEK: The small houses which were scattered along the river at intervals of a mile or more were commonly out of sight to us, but sometimes, when we rowed near the shore, we heard the peevish note of a hen, or some slight domestic sound, which betrayed them. The lock-men’s houses were particularly well placed, retired, and high, always at falls or rapids, and commanding the pleasantest reaches of the river, –for it is generally wider and more lake- like just above a fall,– and there they wait for boats. These humble dwellings, homely and sincere, in which a hearth was still the essential part, were more pleasing to our eyes than palaces or castles would have been. In the noon of these days, as we have said, we occasionally climbed the banks and approached these houses, to get a glass of water and make acquaintance with their inhabitants. High in the leafy bank, surrounded commonly by a small patch of corn and beans, squashes and melons, with sometimes a graceful hop-yard on one side, and some running vine over the windows, they appeared like beehives set to gather honey for a summer. I have not read of any Arcadian life which surpasses the actual luxury and serenity of these New England dwellings. For the outward gilding, at least, the age is golden enough. As you approach the sunny doorway, awakening the echoes by your steps, still no sound from these barracks of repose, and you fear that the gentlest knock may seem rude to the Oriental dreamers. The door is opened, perchance, by some Yankee-Hindoo woman, whose small-voiced but sincere hospitality, out of the bottomless depths of a quiet nature, has travelled quite round to the opposite side, and fears only to obtrude its kindness. You step over the white-scoured floor to the bright “dresser” lightly, as if afraid to disturb the devotions of the household, –for Oriental dynasties appear to have passed away since the dinner-table was last spread here,– and thence to the frequented curb, where you see your long-forgotten, unshaven face at the bottom, in juxtaposition with new-made butter and the trout in the well. “Perhaps you would like some molasses and ginger,” suggests the faint noon voice. Sometimes there sits the brother who follows the sea, their representative man; who knows only how far it is to the nearest port, no more distances, all the rest is sea and distant capes, — patting the dog, or dandling the kitten in arms CAT that were stretched by the cable and the oar, pulling against Boreas or the trade-winds. He looks up at the stranger, half pleased, half astonished, with a mariner’s eye, as if he were a dolphin within cast. If men will believe it, sua si bona norint, there are no more quiet Tempes, nor more poetic and Arcadian lives, than may be lived in these New England dwellings. We thought that the employment of their inhabitants by day would be to tend the flowers and herds, and at night, like the shepherds of old, to cluster and give names to the stars from the river banks.
[The full Latin expression that goes with “sua si bona norint” is “O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint,” which means “0 more than happy, if they only knew their advantages,” and was used by Virgil to describe those who led the rustic bucolic agricultural life. We can say, therefore, that Virgil is a presence not only in Thoreau’s WALDEN, but also in A WEEK.] HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
September 5, Thursday: Again the intrepid Thoreau brothers had fortified themselves against the damp with hot cocoa:
A WEEK: (September 5, Thursday, 1839) There we went to bed that summer evening, on a sloping shelf in the bank, a couple of rods from our boat, which was drawn up on the sand, and just behind a thin fringe of oaks which bordered the river; without having disturbed any inhabitants but the spiders in the grass, which came out by the light of our lamp, and crawled over our buffaloes. When we looked out from under the tent, the trees were seen dimly through the mist, and a cool dew hung upon the grass, which seemed to rejoice in the night, and with the damp air we inhaled a solid fragrance. Having eaten our supper of hot cocoa and bread and watermelon, we soon grew weary of conversing, and writing in our journals, and, putting out the lantern which hung from the tent- pole, fell asleep.
COCOA The brothers would leave their Musketaquid on the bank of the Merrimack River near the village of Hooksett NH and hoof it 10 miles to Concord, New Hampshire.
“On Thursday, Thoreau and his brother halted at a point east of Uncannunuc Mountain near Manchester, New Hampshire. They hung their tent and buffalo robes in a farmer’s barn to dry and then continued on foot up the Merrimack until it became the Pemigewasset and then the Wild Amonoosuck to its very fountainhead. This part of the adventure is not included in the book. However, Thursday morning as the brothers lay in their tent listening to the rain, they found such enjoyment in birds as those who never venture into a wet world can never know.”
[Thursday of WEEK] When we awoke this morning, we heard the faint, deliberate, and ominous sound of raindrops on our cotton roof. The rain had pattered all night, and now the whole country wept, the drops falling in the river, and on the alders, and in the pastures, and instead of any bow in the heavens, there was the trill of the hair-bird all the morning. The cheery faith of this little bird atoned for the silence of the whole woodland choir beside.... The birds draw closer and are more familiar under the thick foliage, seemingly composing new strains upon their roots against the sunshine. What were the amusements of the drawing room and the library in comparison, if we had them here?
Sept 5th walked to Concord 10 miles HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 September 6, Friday: Spain demanded that the United States release La Amistad and return its slave cargo to Cuba.
The intrepid Thoreau brothers took the stage from Concord, New Hampshire to Plymouth, New Hampshire, then hiked through Thornton, Peeling, and Lincoln to Franconia below Mount Washington in the Presidential Range (Agiocochuck, elevation 6,288 feet). TIMELINE OF A WEEK
The Thoreau brothers presumably both climbed and descended along the 1819 Crawford Path that begins at Crawford Notch and follows along the treeless ridge line, passing Mt. Eisenhower and Mt. Monroe and the Lake of the Clouds at about 5,000 feet to the summit of Mt. Washington. Thoreau’s description of the actual climb, in A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, would be succinct: HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
A WEEK: Wandering on through notches which the streams had made, PEOPLE OF by the side and over the brows of hoar hills and mountains, across A WEEK the stumpy, rocky, forested, and bepastured country, we at length crossed on prostrate trees over the Amonoosuck, and breathed the free air of Unappropriated Land. Thus, in fair days as well as foul, we had traced up the river to which our native stream is a tributary, until from Merrimack it became the Pemigewasset that leaped by our side, and when we had passed its fountain-head, the Wild Amonoosuck, whose puny channel was crossed at a stride, guiding us toward its distant source among the mountains, and at length, without its guidance, we were enabled to reach the summit of AGIOCOCHOOK. “Sweet days, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky, Sweet dews shall weep thy fall to-night, For thou must die.” — HERBERT
When we returned to Hooksett, a week afterward, the melon man, in whose corn-barn we had hung our tent and buffaloes and other things to dry, was already picking his hops, with many women and children to help him. We bought one watermelon, the largest in his patch, to carry with us for ballast. It was Nathan’s, which he might sell if he wished, having been conveyed to him in the green state, and owned daily by his eyes. After due consultation with “Father,” the bargain was concluded, — we to buy it at a venture on the vine, green or ripe, our risk, and pay “what the gentlemen pleased.” It proved to be ripe; for we had had honest experience in selecting this fruit.
RECTOR GEORGE HERBERT
Thoreau’s text does not remain at this elevation. With the words “When we returned to Hookset...” he embarked the brothers upon their literary return voyage downriver. The full poem “Vertue” by Rector George Herbert in his 1633 THE TEMPLE had been as follows: Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridall of the earth and skie: The dew shall weep thy fall to night; For thou must die. Sweet rose, whose hue angrie and brave Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye: Thy root is ever in its grave And thou must die. Sweet spring, full of sweet dayes and roses, A box where sweets compacted lie; My musick shows ye have your closes, And all must die.
Onely a sweet and vertuous soul, Like season’d timber, never gives; But though the whole world turn to coal, HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Then chiefly lives.
THE TEMPLE
We may note that our adventurous author has referred earlier, in the text of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, to the poem “The Elixir” among the literary remainders of Herbert:
A WEEK: It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the PEOPLE OF mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and blade A WEEK of grass was so faithfully reflected; too faithfully indeed for art to imitate, for only Nature may exaggerate herself. The shallowest still water is unfathomable. Wherever the trees and skies are reflected, there is more than Atlantic depth, and no danger of fancy running aground. We notice that it required a separate intention of the eye, a more free and abstracted vision, to see the reflected trees and the sky, than to see the river bottom merely; and so are there manifold visions in the direction of every object, and even the most opaque reflect the heavens from their surface. Some men have their eyes naturally intended to the one and some to the other object. “A man that looks on glass, On it may stay his eye, Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass, And the heavens espy.” Two men in a skiff, whom we passed hereabouts, floating buoyantly amid the reflections of the trees, like a feather in mid-air, or a leaf which is wafted gently from its twig to the water without turning over, seemed still in their element, and to have very delicately availed themselves of the natural laws. Their floating there was a beautiful and successful experiment in natural philosophy, and it served to ennoble in our eyes the art of navigation; for as birds fly and fishes swim, so these men sailed. It reminded us how much fairer and nobler all the actions of man might be, and that our life in its whole economy might be as beautiful as the fairest works of art or nature.
RECTOR GEORGE HERBERT HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
Teach me, my God and King, In all things thee to see, And what I do in any thing, To do it as for thee: Not rudely, as a beast, To runne into an action; But still to make thee prepossest, And give it his perfection. A man that looks on glasse, On it may stay his eye; Or if he pleaseth, through it passe, And then the heav’n espie. All may of thee partake: Nothing can be so mean, Which with his tincture (for thy sake) Will not grow bright and clean. A servant with this clause Makes drudgerie divine: Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, Makes that and th’ action fine. This is the famous stone That turneth all to gold: For that which God doth touch and own Cannot for lesse be told. THE TEMPLE
September 6, Friday: David Ruggles, a blind black man of New-York, became entangled in the allegations of an Arkansas white man, a Mr. John P. Darg, that a Thomas Hughes who had belonged to him in Arkansas had managed to escape, and had in the process stolen some $9,000.00 which also belonged to Mr. Darg. (Actually, this makes a swell joke, when read with the indicated emphases, but it wasn’t considered to be in good taste at the time.)
Frederick Douglass’s NARRATIVE
Mr. Ruggles was then very deeply engaged in the memorable Darg case, as well as attending to a number of other fugitive slaves, devising ways and means for their successful escape; and, though watched and hemmed in on almost every side, he seemed to be more than a match for his enemies.
Mr. Ruggles was being categorized as an after-the-fact accessory to grand larceny, as, when Mr. Hughes had made his way to the Big Apple and had come to his boarding-house at the corner of Church and Lespenard Streets in need, Mr. Ruggles had merely played Good Samaritan rather than paying proper heed to our society’s concern for the maintenance of lawn order. For very shame! (Well, anyway, Ruggles would be out on bail for a long time and then the case would be dropped but in the meanwhile the case would make good newspaper copy and a lot of people would be attitudinizing about it.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
September 10, Tuesday: Charles Sanders Peirce was born in Cambridge, the son of Professor Benjamin Peirce and the grandson of Benjamin Peirce, who had been librarian of Harvard College.187
Samuel F.B. Morse demonstrated his telegraph to the Institut de France. HISTORY OF TELEGRAPHY
September 10, Tuesday: Ascended the mountain and rode to Conway.
September 11, Wednesday: Tua of the La Amistad died. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE RACE SLAVERY
Just before 10AM in London, Margaret Moyes, 23 years of age, whose mother was dead and her master-baker father bedridden, leaped or allowed herself to fall from the top of London’s Monument (erected in 1667, observation platform reached by a 311-step spiral staircase inside and 202 feet above the pavement). She had arrived from Charing Cross station some 20 minutes before and had spoken with the monument’s door-keeper Thomas Jenkins before paying sixpence to ascend the stairs. He recalled her conversation as rather jocular, and her countenance as pleasant. She appeared quite rational. She inquired whether two females and a gentleman had been there waiting for anybody, indicating that she had come with them by steamboat and had arranged to meet them at the Monument. About 15 minutes after she entered the staircase, he heard the sounds of her fall. Her left arm was severed above the elbow by the railing at the foot of the monument, and had then struck a birdcage and a potted lilac. On the following day a Coroner’s inquest would be held lit the Old Swan Tavern on Fish Street Hill. The door-keeper indicated that he had found the body across the doorway with legs partly uncovered and a deal of blood coming from the stump of the arm. The back of the head was caved in. She had tied a rope with a large knotted loop at the end to the railings of the gallery and had placed her bonnet and veil, with a waistband and a pair of gloves, on the floor near the door. The 4 sisters had intended to get Margaret a situation in a confectioner’s shop, but in a memorandum-book on the mantel-shelf of her father’s room the following entry was found: “You need not expect to see me back again, for I have made up my mind to make away with — Margaret Moyes.” On the suggestion of the Coroner, a note was sent to the Corporation of London recommending that a guard railing be placed at the top of the Monument, but in the following month a 15-year-old boy, Richard Hawes, after making suicide threats, would re-enact her plunge.
187. Charles Sanders Peirce would be credited with founding the philosophical school known as Pragmatism. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 September 12, Thursday: The Hindostan, that had sailed on the 2d of its 3 voyages from England on May 6th, arrived at Van Dienem’s Land with its 179 to 190 involuntary passengers, 6 of whom had been sentenced to life in exile there as slaves (the average sentence being 9 years) .
Sept 12th Thursday Rowed to the northern part of Merrimack near the ferry, to a large island near which we camped.
September 12, Thursday-13, Friday: The brothers made a rapid return voyage downstream before the wind. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 September 13, Friday: At the annual convention of the Middlesex County education Association, in Concord, Horace Mann, Sr. was orating about “the modern gloomy view of our democratical institutions,” and drawing out some obvious inferences about “the importance of Schools.” Waldo Emerson sat there ruminating on the fact that the dreary evening of oratory was emblematic of the dreary daytime learning experiences being provided by these people to their charges, and contrasting this in his mind with the sort of learning experiences which he fancied that the adventurous Thoreau brothers were currently providing themselves with in their boat upon the waters of the Concord River and the Middlesex Canal and the Merrimack River.
It was on this day that the adventurous Thoreau brothers began to retrace their path, back toward their family’s home in Concord, Massachusetts. Why would you suppose Henry would spend so many of the pages in Week describing the journey out, and so few describing the return trip? It seems this is a known characteristic of all exploration literature: TIMELINE OF A WEEK Coming back is not only essential to the traveller’s personal survival: it is also essential to his historic future. For, in so far as the journey has to become a journal, a map or a drawing in order to enter spatial history, going back is the traveller’s opportunity to check his facts. It is analogous to the process of revision. Indeed, these two processes are very closely related. If, for instance, we look at the journals of Sturt or Stuart or Mitchell, all of which recount double journeys, outwards and backwards, we find that a very small proportion of the text is given over to describing the return journey. The larger part of their journals is taken up with a narrative of the journey out. If, as I have suggested, the journal is not primarily a description of the country, but a symbolic representation of track-making, this is understandable. But it does not mean that the return journey has been left out: rather, it has been incorporated into the account of the outward journey as a series of marginal interpolations, erasures and name changes which, at a yet later stage of revision, can be woven into the narrative to increase its dramatic interest. The seamlessness of the journals is a literary illusion. Unfortunately, though, it has too often been taken at face value, with the result that the reflective attitude the explorer and settler literature embodies has been overlooked. Instead, the historical experience it records has been subjected to an “I came, I saw, I conquered” mythologizing, as if the explorers did not ride in elaborate circles, taking hours and sometimes days to get back where they had last begun; as if pioneers did not reconnoitre, did not go back to town, stake legal claims, take out loans, buy supplies and (perhaps only after half a dozen journeys, and even perhaps after rejecting half a dozen other places) eventually set about the business of making a home for themselves. And not only have the backtrackings implicit in such spatial experiences been ironed out, but the order of them has been linearized, subjected to a one-way imperial chronology. But spatial history does not advance. Or, better, it only advances by reflection, by going back and looking again at already trodden ground. The ground is not virgin: it already has a history. It is not a question of correcting what is already there, of replacing it with a better route. It is a question of interpretation, of attempting to recapture and evoke more fully “the world of the text” — not just the HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
biographical and stylistic history of the journals, but the “world” they refer to. If this process is not to become a tyranny, effacing what it attempts to describe, if it is to avoid falling into the positivist fallacy of supposing its own account of event decisively replaces the original one, then it is essential that it respect the difference of the historical tests it deals with. We can illustrate this by the journey analogy: however many times an explorer’s biographer takes the route first taken by the explorer, he can never take it for the first time. The route has already been constituted for him. In this sense, his journey is always a return journey; and, if he ignores this, imagining himself in the explorer’s place, the result may be good fiction, but not good history. For, by a too zealous and unreflective imitation, the explorer’s experience has been rendered infinitely repeatable. It has been translated into an experience anyone can have: it is but a matter of time before the television crews and the motorcyclists will be there. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 September 13, Friday: Rowed and sailed to Concord — about 50 miles. I shall not soon forget my first DOG night in a tent — how the distant barking of dogs for so many still hours revealed to me the riches of the night. — Who would not be a dog and bay the moon? —
September 13th we sailed along as gently and steadily as the clouds through the atmosphere over our heads — watching the receding shores and the motions of our sails. The north wind stepped readily into the harness we had provided for it — and pulled us along with good will– We were not tired of watching the motions of our sail — so thin and yet so full of life, now bending to some generous impulse of the breeze. And then fluttering and flapping with a kind of human suspense. We watched the play of its pulse as if it were our own blood beating there. It was a scale on which the varying temperature of distant atmospheres was graduated. It was some attraction that the breeze it played with had been out of doors so long. Our lives are much like a sail alternately steady and fluttering — and always at the mercy of the breeze.
We had gone to bed in summer, and we awoke in autumn; for summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable point of time, like the turning of a leaf.... As the mist gradually rolled away, and we were relieved from the trouble of watching for rocks, we saw by the flitting clouds, by the first russet tinge on the hills, by the rushing river, the cottages on shore, and the shore itself, so coolly fresh and shining with dew, and later in the day, by the hue of the grape-vine, the goldfinch on the willow, the flickers flying in flocks, and when we passed near enough to the shore, as we fancied, by the faces of men, that the fall had commenced....
Friday We skimmed lightly over the water before a smacking breeze with all sails set– The wind in the horizon seemed to roll in a flood over valley and plain — and every tree bent to the blast, and the mountains — like school-boys turned their cheeks to the blast. {One-fifth page blank} We lay listening to the sound of the current We already knew — before we had looked abroad — by the fresh wind that was blowing, the rustling of the leaves and the rippling of the water that there was a change in the weather. The mist gradually rolled away, and we were relieved from the trouble of watching for rocks. We soon passed the mouth of the Souhegan with a fair wind, and the village of Merrimack.
Friday When we awoke the face of nature seemed to have undergone a change– We heard the sigh of the first autumnal wind, and saw the first tinge of russet on the hills — even the water seemed to have got a grayer hue. We saw by the flitting clouds, by the rushing river, and the lights in the cottages on shore– We saw by the faces of men that the fall had commenced. The grape vine — the goldfinch in the willow — the flickers flying in flocks, and the piping of the plover — all repeated the tale. Cottages looked more snug and comfortable, and their tapers told more tales– We looked in vain for the south wind. It proved a cool breezy autumn day, and by the time we reached Nashua we were obliged to sit muffled in our cloaks, while the wind and current carried us along. The inhabitants left their houses to gaze at us from the banks. I who sail now in a boat, have I not sailed in a thought? V chaucer Shad Salmon and bass are still taken in this river as well as at the mouth of the Concord.
[Return to Concord, Friday evening of WEEK] The sun was just setting behind the edge of a wooded hill, so rich a sunset as would never have ended but for some reason unknown to men, and to be marked with brighter colors than ordinary in the scroll of time. Though the shadows of the hills were beginning to steal over the stream, the whole valley undulated with mild light, purer and more memorable than the noon. For so the day bids farewell even to solitary vales uninhabited by man. Two herons (Ardea herodias), with their long and slender limbs relieved against the sky, were seen traveling high over our heads, -their lofty and silent flight, as they were wending their way at evening, surely not to alight in any marsh on the earth’s surface, but, perchance, on the other side of our atmosphere, a symbol for the ages to study, whether impressed upon the sky or sculptured amid the hieroglyphics of Egypt. Bound for some northern meadow, they held their stately, stationary flight, like the storks in the picture, and disappeared at length behind the clouds. Dense flocks of blackbirds were winging their way along the river’s course, as if on a short evening pilgrimage to some shrine of theirs, or to celebrate so fair a sunset. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
September 14, Saturday: We-lu-wa of the La Amistad died. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE RACE SLAVERY
September 14, Saturday: With the Thoreau brothers back in town, Waldo Emerson heard of their great summer adventure down the Concord River and up the Middlesex Canal and the Merrimack River, possibly from Dr. Josiah Bartlett, and considered that it must truly have been a learning experience, of a class with being able to grow up as a farm boy rather than a city boy:
An education in things is not: we are all involved in the condemnation of words, an Age of words. We are shut up in schools & college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years & come out at last with a bellyfull of words & do not know a thing. We cannot use our hands or our legs or our eyes or our arms. We do not know an edible root in the woods. We cannot tell our course by the stars nor the hour of the day by the sun. It is well if we can swim & skate. We are afraid of a horse, of a cow, of a dog, of a cat, of a spider. Far better was the Roman rule to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing. Now here are my wise young neighbors who instead of getting like the wordmen into a railroad-car where they have not even the activity of holding the reins, have got into a boat which they have built with their own hands, with sails which they have contrived to serve as a tent by night, & gone up the river Merrimack to live by their wits on the fish of the stream & the berries of the wood. My worthy neighbor Dr Bartlett expressed a true parental instinct when he desired to send his boy with them to learn something. the farm, the farm is the right school. The reason of my deep respect for the farmer is that he is a realist & not a dictionary. The farm is a piece of the world, the School house is not. The farm by training the physical rectifies & invigorates the metaphysical & moral nature.
Between this day and the 17th, Waldo Emerson manifested to his journal that his readings about the Peace Testimony of the Religious Society of Friends had left him in the approximate state of awareness of a 9-year- old boy playing with a sabre made out of a stick:
I do not like to speak to the Peace Society if so I am to restrain me in so extreme a privilege as the use of the sword & bullet. For the peace of the man who has forsworn the use of the bullet seems to me not quite peace, but a canting impotence: but with knife & pistol in my hands, if I, from greater bravery & honor, cast them aside, then I know the glory of peace. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 September 15, Sunday: On September 18th the New-York Morning Herald would carry on page 2 a report of the events of this day, under the headline: The Captured Africans Correspondence of the Herald. EN ROUTE TO HARTFORD, SEPT. 15 Mr. Bennett: The Abolitionists are of course greatly annoyed by your exposure of their hypocrisy; and are endeavoring to attract the sympathy and extract the money of the humane by accusing those who have desired to divest the main question of the perplexing difficulties thrown around it by Tappan & Co. of subserviency to the views of the slave holders. But such charges are too preposterous to receive a moment’s consideration, and the effect of the indiscreet and foolish movements of the Abolitionists has been highly prejudicial to the Africans. I heard one of our most distinguished citizens remark yesterday, that his sympathies had at first been warmly enlisted in favor of the blacks--that he had been induced to believe, by the representations of the pseudo-philanthropists, that they were a set of hapless beings who had been torn from the enjoyments of social and domestic life and sold to hopeless misery, to feed the insatiate avarice of a blackhearted planter; and he should have rejoiced at their escape, even if they had reached our shores dyed to the elbows in the blood of their oppressors. He thought of Cinguez as he had been represented by Leavitt and his coadjutors, the heroic liberator of his enslaved brethren, who nobly preferred death to the degrading bondage of the white man; and was almost ready to wink at an infraction of our treaty with Spain, if necessary, to protect him from the consequences of his daring gallantry. But a look at the hero and his compatriots had wrought an instantaneous change in his sentiments. Instead of a chivalrous leader with the dignified and graceful bearing of Othello, imparting energy and confidence to his intelligent and devoted followers, he saw a sullen, dumpish looking negro, with a flat nose, thick lips, and all the other characteristics of his debased countrymen, without a single redeeming or striking trait, except the mere brute qualities of strength and activity, who had inspired terror among his companions by the indiscriminate and unsparing use of the lash. And instead of intelligent and comparatively civilized men, languishing in captivity and suffering under the restraints of the prison, he found them the veriest animals in existence, perfectly contented in confinement, without a ray of intelligence, and sensible only to the wants of the brute. No man, he said, more thoroughly appreciated the hideous horrors of the slave trade, or had conceived a more decided aversion to slavery in all its phases; but he was certain that the natives of Africa would be improved and elevated by transferring them to the genial climate of Carolina, and the mild restraints of an intelligent and humane planter. Still although the abstract idea of liberty was utterly incomprehensible to an African, and ridiculous as applied to him; and his physical condition was made better by the change, he has natural rights which it is enormous wickedness to invade. The previous impressions, as well as present views of this gentleman, are precisely coincident to my own, and the effect of my examination of the condition and character of the captured HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 blacks was identically the same. The conclusion that I arrive at, therefore, is, that the monstrous perversions of the fact of which the Abolitionists have been guilty, and their hypocritical and insidious appeals to the sympathies of the public, have operated to the serious disadvantage of the blacks, and will have a greater influence in precluding a fair trial, than all other causes combined. Antonio, who is detained as a witness against the murderers of the captain, was the cabin boy of the L’Amistad. His life was saved by the interposition of Manuel, one of the blacks, who assisted in the murder of the captain. He is an active and rather sprightly boy, of fifteen, and had been with Captain Ferrer in the L’Amistad, upwards of three years. He says his master treated him kindly, and he occasionally expresses great indignation towards the blacks. He, however, tells different stories at different times, but this is perhaps owing to his confusion and want of memory. When told that the negroes would perhaps be sent to their own country, he laughed and said they would be caught and carried back to Havana again in less than six months. He is very comfortable and contented, but he says he likes Havana better, because the weather is warmer. Tomorrow I will write you from Hartford, and give you all the proceedings as they occur. LA AMISTAD
September 16, Monday: Richard Wagner and his wife, armed with introductions from Meyerbeer, reached Paris for the 1st time. Wagner expressed disappointment with the city.
The dashing Thoreau brothers, just back from their excellent adventure, heard that the Reverend Edmund Quincy Sewall, Sr. and Mrs. Edmund Quincy Sewall were vacationing at Niagara Falls, and so dashing brother John Thoreau, Jr. promptly dashed off to Scituate in order to be able to visit Miss Ellen Devereux Sewall in her home — while she was without adult supervision (George and Edmund, her younger brothers, were the only chaperonage). Meanwhile the younger brother, Henry Thoreau, left behind in Concord, worked furiously at his essay on bravery, at his essay on friendship, at his translation of Æschylus’s PROMETHEUS BOUND, and at his essay on the satirist Aulus Persius Flaccus:
The life of a wise man is most of all extemporaneous, for he lives out of an eternity which includes all time.
All questions rely on the present for their solution. Time measures nothing but itself.
September 17, Tuesday evening: Shah Shoojah-ool-Moolk (who looked a whole lot like Osama bin Laden, and one of whose bracelets contained the Koh-i-Noor diamond), grateful for restoration to the throne of Afghanistan, staged a grand dunbar in the courtyard of the Harem Serae of the Bala Hissar in Kabul at which he presented a number of British poo-bahs with a gee-gaw he was terming “The order of the Dooranee Empire.” History does not record whether drinks were served, but history does record that the tray of these gee-gaws was empty before the shah got to the end of the line of attending poo-bahs, and that therefore he would need to have additional gee-gaws (differing slightly in the number of their stars and rays) manufactured later and sent around to the various Brits who had been obliged to leave the ceremony empty-handed. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 September 17, 1839: –Nature never makes haste; her systems revolve at an even pace. The bud swells imperceptibly — without hurry or confusion, as though the short spring days were an eternity. All her operations seem separately for the time, the single object for which all things tarry.– Why, then, should man hasten as if anything less than eternity were allotted for the least deed? Let him consume never so many æons, so that he go about the meanest task well, though it be but the paring of his nails. If the setting sun seems to hurry him to improve the day while it lasts, the chant of the crickets fails not to reassure him, even-measured as of old, teaching him to take his own time henceforth forever. The wise man is restful, never restless or impatient. He each moment abides there where he is, as some walkers actually rest the whole body at each step, while others never relax the muscles of the leg till the accumulated fatigue obliges them to stop short. As the wise is not anxious that time wait for him, neither does he wait for it.
September 19, Thursday: The official “opening day” for the Albion Mines Railroad between Albion Coal Mines and New Glasgow, Nova Scotia (operations had begun during December 1838 using the Timothy Hackwork steam locomotives “Samson,” “Hercules,” and “John Buddle” imported from England).
The grand jury met in Hartford, Connecticut to deliberate upon The U.S. v. The Libelants, etc., of the Schooner Amistad. The crowds in the city had been swelled by the rumor that there was to be a mass hanging, and since, three of the black pirates having died after their capture, all of forty of them were still alive — such a mass hanging would definitely be something not to be missed.
LA AMISTAD HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 September 20, Friday: Theodore Sedgwick argued before the grand jury in The U.S. v. The Libelants, etc., of the Schooner Amistad that the blacks of La Amistad were not slaves, but were rather recently kidnapped African natives. The Spaniards claimed the Africans as their property while others claimed that since they had salvaged the schooner and its cargo, the Africans should be counted as property (under the law of salvage, those who saved a sea vessel were entitled to a portion of the value of all that they saved from the sea) when determining a salvage amount given to them.
Caramo, oder Das Fischerstechen, a grosse komische Oper by Albert Lortzing to his own words after Vilain de Saint Hillaire and Duport, was performed for the initial time, in Leipzig Stadttheater.
September 21, Saturday: The Liberator carried a notice of the recent sale of a slave at auction in New Orleans, not a recent import in the international slave trade out of Africa but a native speaker of the English language –a light-skinned woman obviously born and reared in America– who had been believed by the bidders at this auction to be a natural daughter of President Thomas Jefferson. The item had been communicated to the journal by an abolitionist from Sodus, New York, and it was given the headline: Sale of a Daughter of Thomas Jefferson HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 (The market for enslaved women with light skins was of course known to be highly influenced by their desirability as sex objects — and the idea that the buyer would be able to tie down and fuck a relative of a famous founding-father United States president would of course have done nothing to detract from his hot fantasies. The lady in question was said to have fetched only $1,000, which would have been the equivalent of only about three years gross earnings of a skilled laborer –order of magnitude about $100,000 in today’s money– so she must have been elderly or ill or not at all appealing. –None of this, of course, would have been lost on the readers of this abolitionist journal, although of course nobody had any way to be sure beyond controversy that this woman actually was as advertised, any more than today despite our ability to do DNA tests we have any way to establish beyond controversy and to the satisfaction of the invested Jefferson scholars that Jefferson did have sex with his slaves and did thereby engender some of the light-skinned Monticello slave children who were sold at auction.)
John Conolly did away with the use of restraints for the mentally ill at the Hanwell County Asylum of Middlesex, England. While humanitarian reforms in mental treatment were well under way by this time, eliminating mechanical restraints of all kinds was a radical and controversial move and would make this psychiatrist a prominent figure. His THE TREATMENT OF THE INSANE WITHOUT MECHANICAL RESTRAINTS would, in 1856, further advance the non-restraint movement.188 PSYCHOLOGY
September 23, Monday: The judge for The U.S. v. The Libelants, etc., of the Schooner Amistad, Andrew T. Judson, held the captives over.189
Meanwhile, in African waters, the Butterfly from New Orleans, fitted as a negrero, was captured by a cruising British warship (HOUSE DOCUMENT, 26th Congress, 2d session No. 115, pages 191, 244-7; Niles’s Register, LVII. 223). INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE
September 24, Tuesday: When Robert Schumann met Friedrich Wieck privately over the issue of getting married with his daughter, it not go well.
188. Street, W.R. A CHRONOLOGY OF NOTEWORTHY EVENTS IN AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY. Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 1994 189. At some point the Hartford Courant editorialized that since engaging in the international slave trade was a federal capital crime, there were no legal grounds for action against these Africans of the La Amistad who had merely been attempting to protect themselves as crime victims, and merely attempting to prevent the successful commission of such a capital crime: By the laws of the United States, the African slave trade is declared to be piracy and the persons engaged in it are liable to be punished as pirates. It would be very extraordinary then if these men, who had been stolen from their own country, and brought away for the purpose of being reduced to slavery, should be punished in the United States for using such means as they possessed to extricate themselves from the power and custody of men who gained that custody by the perpetration of a crime which by our laws would cost them their lives. It would be a singular case if both parties in the same transaction should be held guilty of a capital offense and suffer the same penalty of the law for their crimes. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 September 25, Wednesday: France made itself the 1st European nation to recognize the independence of the Republic of Texas.
At the 1st anniversary meeting of the New England Non-Resistance Society, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May waxed positively Thoreauvian, offering that: I find that I place every year less value on organization, as I more clearly discern the power that resides in the individual.
At this meeting the Reverend Adin Ballou advocated that the purpose of nonresistance was “neither to purify nor to subvert human governments, but to advance in the earth that kingdom of peace and righteousness, which supersedes all such governments.” He opinioned, however, that not everyone was capable immediately of perfect self-government, that there were some humans “who will not be in willing subjection to the divine,” and for those, at least in the short run, coercion was “a necessary evil.”
Remarks of Adin Ballou at the First Annual Meeting of the Non-Resistance Society, held in Boston, Sept. 25, 1839.190
Friend President — ‘Where the Spirit of The Lord is, there is liberty.’ I feel that the Spirit of the Lord is in this meeting, and that all who participate in its discussions are at liberty to express their convictions and peculiar views in their own way, without fear of offending each other. We are of various religious connexions, and have not only different opinions on many points, but
190. NON-RESISTANCE IN RELATION TO HUMAN GOVERNMENTS (Boston MA: Non-resistance Society, 1839) HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 different modes of thought and expression. Be it so; since we come together in love for the consideration and promotion of that grand virtue of Christianity without which all others become practically unfruitful. For my own part, I am not only not offended at hearing opinions and ideas expressed here contrary in some respects to my own, but I am happy to hear them delivered with that freedom and independence which evinces the absence of even a suspicion that any one can take offence. This is a sure presage of the triumph of truth over all our errors, whatever they may be, or whoever may hold them. My views of the subject presented in the resolution just submitted may not entirely coincide with those of my friends; but I offer them frankly, expecting that they will be accepted or rejected, as each individual may judge that they deserve. I perceive with joy that a divine instinct, if so I may term it, actuates my brethren and sisters of this convention in favor of non-resistance. This instinct is strong, and true as the needle to the pole; while at the same time few of us clearly understand how a non-resistant should carry out his principles, especially with respect to human government. The heart is right though the head may err. We love the blessed principle of non-resistance, though perhaps not sufficiently acute and discriminating, either to state or defend it always correctly. Hence we are not to be argued down by polemic ingenuity and eloquence; which however confounding is yet unconvincing, that on the whole we are not right. If I can contribute any thing towards a better understanding of this important subject, so as to obviate any of its seeming difficulties, I shall deem myself happy in the privilege of being for a few moments a speaker. The resolution before us is in these words:-’Resolved, That it is the object of this Society neither to purify nor to subvert human governments, but to advance in the earth that kingdom of peace and righteousness, which supersedes all such governments.’ In speaking to this resolution, I do so, not formally and technically in the name of this Society (of which I am not a member) but simply as a non-resistant, in defence of the common cause in which we are all engaged. I therefore take the resolution as if it read: ‘Resolved, That it is the object of all true non-resistants’ &. What then are the capital points which it embraces? It seems to suggest three general inquiries, viz. What is human government? What is divine government? What is the object of non-resistants with respect to human government? What is human government? It is the will of man-whether of one, few, many or all, in a state or nation — exercising absolute authority over man, by means of cunning and physical force. This will may be ascertained, declared and executed, with or without written constitutions and laws, regularly or irregularly, in moderation or in violence; still it is alike human government under all forms and administrations, the will of man exercising absolute authority over man, by means of cunning and physical force. It may be patriarchal, hierarchal, monarchal, aristocratical, democratical, or mobocratical — still it answers to this definition. It originates in man, depends on man, and makes man the lord — the slave of man. What is the divine government? It is the infallible will of God prescribing the duty of moral agents, and claiming their primary HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 undivided allegiance, as indispensable to the enjoyment of pure and endless happiness. In the resolution it is denominated ‘the kingdom and reign of Christ.’ The kingdom of Christ is the kingdom of God; for what is Christ’s is God’s. The Father dwelleth in the Son, and without HIM the Son can do nothing. In this kingdom the all perfect God is sole King, Lawgiver, and Judge. He divides his authority with no creature; he is absolute Sovereign; he claims the whole heart, mind, and strength. His throne is in the spirit, and he writes his law on the understanding. Whosoever will not obey him implicitly is not yet delivered from the kingdom of darkness, and abides in moral death. From this it appears that human government, properly so called, can in no case be either superior to, or coequal with, the divine. Can this conclusion be avoided? There are three, and but three cases, in which human government may dispute supremacy with the divine. 1. When God requires one thing and man requires the contrary. In this case, whom ought we to obey? All christians must answer, with the faithful apostles of old, ‘We ought to obey God rather than men.’ But must we disobey parents, patriarchs, priests, kings, nobles, presidents, governors, generals, legislatures, constitutions, armies, mobs, all rather than disobey God? We MUST; and then patiently endure the penal consequences. Then surely human government is nothing against the government of God. 2. Human government and divine government sometimes agree in prescribing the same duty; i. e. God and man both require the same thing. In this case ought not the reverence of human authority constitute at least a part of the motive for doing right. We will see. Did man originate this duty? No. Did he first declare it? No. Has he added one iota of obligation to it? No. God originated it, first declared it, and made it in the highest possible degree obligatory. Human government has merely borrowed it, reechoed, and interwoven it with the tissue of its own enactments. How then can the christian turn his back on Jehovah, and make his low obeisance to man? Or how can he divide his reverence between the divine and mere human authority? How can he perform this duty any more willingly or faithfully, because human government has reenacted it? Evidently be cannot. He will feel that it is the Creator’s law, not the creature’s; that he is under the highest possible obligation to perform it from reverence to God alone. Man has adopted it, and incorporated it with his own devices, but he has added nothing to its rightfulness or force. Here again human government is virtually nothing. It has not even a claim of joint reverence with that of the divine. 3. Human legislators enact many laws for the relief, convenience, and general welfare of mankind, which are demonstrably right and salutary, but which God never expressly authorized in detail. In this case has not human authority a primary claim to our reverence? Let us see. What is the motive from which a true christian will perform these requirements of man? Must he not first be convinced that they are in perfect harmony with the great law of love to God and man — that they agree with what list the divine Lawgiver has expressly required? Doubtless. Well, when fully convinced of this, what are they to him but mere amplifications of the heavenly law-new applications of its plain principles — more minute details of acknowledged general duty? What, therefore, is demonstrably right, he will feel bound to approve and HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 scrupulously practice, not for human government’s sake, but for righteousness sake — or, in other words, for the divine government’s sake. This must be his great motive; for no other would be a holy motive. It is one thing to discover new items of duty-new applications of moral obligation-and another to create them. Men may discover and point out new details- circumstantial peculiarities of duty-but he cannot create principles, nor originate moral obligation. The infinite Father has preoccupied this whole field. What then if the Legislature discover a new item of duty, arising out of a new combination of circumstances, and enact a good law for the observance of that duty, with pains and penalties annexed; or what if a Convention like this discover the existence of such an item of duty, and affirm it in the form of a solemn resolution; the duty once made plain, no matter how, would not the truly good man be under precisely the same obligation to perform it? And if the Legislature should afterwards without cause repeat such law, and enact a bad one in its stead; or if this Convention should not affirm the existence of the duty before declared, would not the enlightened christian be under precisely the same obligation still? None of these supposed circumstances ought to weigh a feather upon the conscience. The sense of obligation must look directly to the Great Source of moral perfection, and the grand controlling motive of a holy heart in the performance of every duty must be, God requires it-it is right-it is best. We must perform all our duties as out unto God, and not unto man. The conclusion is therefore unavoidable, that the will of man [human government] whether in one, a thousand, or many millions, has no intrinsic authority-no moral supremacy-and no rightful claim to the allegiance of man. It has no original, inherent authority whatsoever over the conscience. What then becomes of human government, as contradistinguished from the divine government? Is it not a mere cypher? When it opposes God’s government it is nothing; when it agrees with his government it is nothing; and when it discovers a new item of duty-a new application of the general law of God-it is nothing. We now arrive at the third inquiry suggested in the resolution before us, viz. What is the object of non-resistants with respect to human government? Is it their object to purify it, to reform it? No; for our principles forbid us to take any part in the management of its machinery. We can neither fight for it, legislate in it, hold its offices, vote at its elections, nor act any political part within its pale. To purify, to reform it — if such were our object-we must actively participate in its management. Moreover, if human government, properly so called, is what I have shown it to be, there can be no such thing as purifying it. Where there is nothing but dross, there is nothing to retire. Separate from what is commonly considered human government all that it has borrowed, or stolen from the divine, and what remains? What is there in the mere human worth purifying-capable of purification? Nothing. Again; is it our object to subvert human government-to overthrow it-to turn it upside down? By no means. We utterly disclaim any such object. We are no Jacobins, Revolutionists, Anarchists; though often slanderously so denominated. And here I must be permitted to make some explanations, demanded by the public misapprehension of our real position and general movement. It seems to be taken for granted, that we have started a crusade to force the practice HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 of non-resistance upon nations, states, bodies politic and all existing organizations of human society; which is considered tantamount to an attempt for the violent subversion of human government. This is a very great mistake. We are not so insane as to imagine any such result practicable in the nature of things. We put our enterprize on purely christian grounds, and depend for success wholly on the use of christian means. We have nothing to do with nations, states, and bullies politic, merely as such; for they have neither souls nor consciences. We address ourselves to individuals, who have both soul and conscience, and expect to affect organized masses of men only through their individual members. And as to any kind of force, other than that of truth and love sustained by a consistent example, as non- resistants, we utterly eschew it, with respect to all moral agents, collectively and individually. We very well know that neither bodies politic, nor individuals, can practise christian non-resistance while actuated by the spirit of this world and void of christian principle, that is to say, while they are radically anti-christian in feeling, motive, conduct, and moral character. We are not so wild and visionary as to expect such impossibilities. Nor do we go against all human government in favor of no government. We make no such issue. On the contrary, we believe it to be among the irrevocable ordinations of God, that all who will not be governed by Him shall be governed by one another-shall be tyrannized over by one another; that so long as men will indulge the lust of dominion, they shall be filled with the it fruits of slavery; that they who will not be obedient to the law of love, shall bow down under the yoke of physical force; that ‘they who take the sword shall perish with the sword and that while so many as twenty ambitious, proud, selfish revengeful, sinful men remain in any corner of the world, they shall be subject to a human government of violence among themselves. If men will make themselves sick, physic is a necessary evil. If they will not observe the laws of health, they must bow to the dictation of doctors. If they will be gluttons, drunkards, debauches, and pugilists, they must make the best of emetics, cathartics, cautery, amputation, and whatever else ensues. So if men will not be governed by God, it is their doom to be enslaved one by another. And in this view, human government -defective as it is, bad as it is- is a necessary evil to those who will not be in willing subjection to the divine. Its restraints are better than no restraints at all-and its evils are preventives of greater. For thus it is that selfishness is made to thwart selfishness, pride to humble pride, revenge to check revenge, cruelty to deter cruelty, and wrath to punish wrath; that the vile lusts of men, overruled by infinite wisdom, may counterwork and destroy each other. In this way human government grows out of the disorder of rebellious moral natures, and will continue, by inevitable consequence, in some form or other among men, till HE whose right it is to reign ‘shall be all in all.’ Meantime, non-resistants are required by their principles not to resist any of the ordinances of these governments by physical force, however unjust and wicked; but to be subject to the powers that be, either actively or passively. Actively, in doing whatever they require that is agreeable to the law of God, or which may be innocently consented to. Passively, in the patient sufferance of their penalties, whenever duty to the divine government requires that man should HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 be disobeyed. No unnecessary offence is to be given to Caesar; but his tribute money is to be rendered to him, and his taxes quietly paid; while at the same time the things which belong unto God are to be most scrupulously rendered to HIM, regardless alike of the favor or the frowns of all the governments earth. What then is to be the object of non-resistants with respect to human governments-if it is neither to purify nor subvert them? The resolution declares that it is to supersede them. To supersede them with what? With the kingdom of Christ. How? By the spiritual regeneration of their individual subjects-by implanting in their minds higher principles of feeling and action — by giving them heavenly instead of earthly motives. And now, to understand this process of superseding, let us consider the nature of Christ’s kingdom. It is not an outward, temporal kingdom, like those of this world. It is spiritual, moral, eternal. When the Jews demanded information about the coming of this kingdom, ignorantly expecting it to appear with unparalleled external majesty, pomp, and circumstance, Jesus replied: ‘The kingdom of God cometh not with observation; neither shall men say, lo here, or lo there; for behold, the kingdom of God is within you.’ When before Pilate, charged by his enemies with having set himself up against Cæsar as a king, he said-’My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews. But now is my kingdom not from hence.’ When his yet worldly minded disciples strove among themselves which should be greatest in his kingdom, he washed their feet with his own hands, for an example, and declared unto them that he among them who would be greatest should be least of all, and servant of all. He forbade them to exercise lordship, after the manner of carnal men among the nations of the earth, but to esteem each other better than themselves, and to regard humility as the only true greatness; to vie with each other-not for the highest, but for the lowest place — not for a chance to rule, but for a chance to serve-not for the blessedness of receiving, but for that of giving-not for the praise of man, but for the approval of God-not for the prerogative of inflicting physical suffering for righteousness’ sake, but for the privilege of enduring it. Hence he made himself the great Exemplar of non- resistants; and ‘when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to HIM that judgeth righteously; enduring every insult, reproach; cruelty, and torture of his enemies, with unprovokable patience, and unconquerable love; forgiving his most deadly persecutors, and expiring with a prayer upon his lips for their salvation. Thus he overcame evil, with good; and, leaving behind him the Alexanders and Cæsars of this world in their base murderous glory, earned for himself a name which is above every name, whether in this world or that to come; being highly exalted at the DIVINE RIGHT HAND, ‘that unto him every knee should bow, of things in heaven, in earth, and under the earth-and every tongue confess him Lord to the glory of God the Father. Such is the Lord and Master of christians; whom they are to obey and vari imitate, rather than Moses, or Samuel, or David, or Solomon, or Elijah, or Daniel, or even John. His kingdom is the kingdom of heaven; wherein all legislative, judicial, and avenging power is vested exclusively in that High and Holy One, who cannot ERR, either in sentiment, judgment, or action. Of this kingdom the HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 apostle truly says-it ‘is not meat and drink; but righteousness and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.’ The fruit of its spirit, he further says — ‘is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.’ ‘Now they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts.’ Having learned to renounce carnal weapons of defence, worldly honors, political preferments, and a vain dependence on the operations of human government for the care of moral disorders, they cease to avenge themselves on evil doers, either on their own responsibility as individuals, or on that of the State through its penal laws. They deem it their duty to forgive, not punish — to yield unto wrath and suffer wrong, without recompensing evil for evil-rereferring their cause always unto Him who had said, ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay,’ — and thus obeying Christ in his injunction, to love enemies; bless them that curse, do good to them that hate, and pray for the despiteful and persecuting. This is the doctrine and practice which non-resistants profess to have embraced, and according to the tenor of which they propose to supersede all human government with the divine. This is the real object of their present movement. They cease to take any active part in the affairs of human government. They cease to put their trust in the wisdom of man for guidance, or in the arm of flesh for protection. Yet they stand not in the attitude of antagonists to human government; nor can they allow themselves to be mistaken for anarchists, nor be considered as willing to give any just cause of offence to the ‘powers that be.’ Neither can they enter into any quarrel with professedly good men, who feel called to no higher mission than that of reigning or serving in the kingdoms of this world. But we hear a voice from above, saying — ‘What is that to thee? follow thou me.’ — And we deem it our privilege, through whatever of reproach or suffering we may be called, to show unto all good men whose reliance is even secondarily upon human government for the conversion of the world, ‘a more excellent way.’ And now, what is there so horrible, so dangerous, so alarming in all this? Why are we so misunderstood, misrepresented and denounced? These principles and this cause must prevail if christianity itself shall prevail; and blessed are they among our opposers, whose mistaken zeal shall not betray them into a warfare against God. But the cry salutes our ears from the open months even of professing christians.– ‘Non-resistance is impracticable in the present state of the world; you must wait till the millennium.’ I answer; ‘to him that believeth all things are possible.’ Let the power of love and forbearance be faithfully exemplified, and it will remove mountains. And as to the millennium, what is it? Is it a state of things to come about like the seasons, by the HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 revolution of the planets? Is it to be the result of some
arbitrary mechanical process? or of a mere chemical agency? Is it to be the effect of physical or of moral causes? Alas! how many are expecting the millennium to come ‘with observation;’ just as the Jews of old were expecting the kingdom of God; not knowing that this millennium and kingdom, must be within men, before it can ever be around them. Let us have the spirit of the millennium and do the works of the millennium. Then will the millennium have already come; and then will it speedily embosom the whole earth. What is this cry of impracticability, but a cry of rebellion against the living God? What though under preliminary dispensations he winked at the ignorance of mankind, and even commanded his chosen servants to act a conspicuous part in the great system of governmental violence: this was only until ‘the times of reformation.’ In Christ He annuls the temporary ordinances of revenge, and commands forbearance — non- resistance to the physical violence of man, even of the most injurious. Hear his ‘Revised Statutes,’ — ‘Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, that ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.’ Now is it impracticable to obey this holy commandment? Is not God the best judge of what is practicable? Who has a right to question the expediency or practicability of what the Infinite Father through his Son has enjoined. And let us be careful not to narrow down the meaning of this commandment. It is much more comprehensive than most expositors have been willing to allow. It forbids not merely all personal, individual, self-assumed right of retaliation, but all revenge at law-all procuring of punishment to our injurers in the way of legal prosecution and judicial sentence. It goes this whole length. When our Lord says-’Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’-he refers to the Mosaic Statute Law. By consulting Exodus 21: 22-25; Leviticus 24: 19, 20, and Deuteronomy 19: 18-21, we find the HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 Statutes referred to; according to which life must be given ‘for life, breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, and stripe for stripe.’ The injured party, or his friends in his stead, had their redress and revenge at law. They might not take the business into their own hands, but must enter their complaint in due form to the elders of their town or city, and have a fair trial of the accused before the proper tribunals. When the sentence of the judges had been pronounced, it was executed in legal form; the criminal being doomed to suffer the same injury to life or limb, which he be(! caused to his neighbor. Thus when a man had received a wound from his fellow man, or lost an eye, or a tooth, a hand or a foot, he had his revenge at law; by due process of which he could thrust out an eye: or a tooth, or cut off a hand or a foot, or inflict any other injury which had been indicted on him. But however salutary this statute, and however necessary to the good order of society in the opinion of political moralists, the great Master of christians has abrogated it, end commanded his followers not to resist evil not to resist it even according to law-not to procure punishment to their injurers through the regular judicial medium; but to bear all indignities, insults, assaults and wrongs, with forgiving meekness and patience. Here then is an end to controversy, with all who mean to be wholly Christ’s; they must be non-resistants. Who dares to question the rectitude, propriety, practicability, or expediency, of doing what the All-wise God has thus plainly required? Is it one who calls Christ Lord and Master? Alas! for the faithless, distrustful man. Do not such hear the words of Christ, in just reproof — saying ‘Why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I command?’ But all this passes for nothing with many, who exclaim — ‘What are you going to do with the wolves and tigers of human kind? Are you going to give them full range for their prey? Will you invite the thief, the robber, the burglar, the murderer-to come and carry off your property, ravish away your treasures, spoil your house, butcher your wife and children, and shed your own heart’s blood? Will you be such a fool, such an enemy to yourself, your family and society? Will you encourage all manner of rapine and bloodshed, by assurances that you will never resist, nor even prosecute the basest ruffians?’ ‘What a terrible appeal is this? how full of frightful images, and horrid anticipations of evil, from the practice of non- resistance. But if I am a christian, will such appeals move me? Am I a christian, and do I doubt that God will protect me and mine against all the thieves, robbers and murderers in the world, while I conscientiously do my duty? Am I more willing to rely upon forbidden means of defence, than upon the power of HIM who doeth his will in the armies of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth-and who hath said, ‘I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee?’ ‘But are you sure that God will always render your property, person and life secure from these attacks?’ No; for it may be best that I should suffer-that I should even lose all things earthly. What then; is treasure on earth my only treasure? is worldly substance my chief good; is this life my only life? What if I should actually lose my money; have I not treasure laid up in heaven, where neither moth, nor rust, nor thieves can touch it? What if I should suffer great HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 cruelties in my person ‘for righteousness sake;’ should I therefore be miserable? What if I should lose my own life and that of my family; should I not find life eternal for them and myself? I may be robbed, but I shall still be rich; I may be murdered, but I shall live forevermore; I way suffer the loss of all things earthly, but I shall gain all things heavenly. If I cannot confidently say this, am I a christian? ‘Who then shall harm us, if we be followers of that which is good?’ I have a right to expect, and I do confidently expect, that in practising the sublime virtue of non-resistance for the kingdom of heaven’s sake, God will keep all that I commit to him in perfect safety, even here on earth, as long as it is for my good to be exempted from loss and suffering. I do firmly believe that in acting out these principles steadily and consistently, I shall continue longer uninjured, longer in the enjoyment of life, longer safe from the depredations, assaults and murderous violence of wicked men, than with all the swords, guns, pistols, dirks, peace officers, sheriffs, judges, prisons and gallows of the world. If this is the faith of a fool, then am I willing to be accounted a fool, till time shall test the merits of my position. It may not prove to be such great folly after all. ‘Well, says the objector, I should like to know how you would manage matters, if the ruffian should actually break into your house with settled intent to rob and murder; would you shrink back coward like, and see your wife and children slaughtered before your eyes?’ I cannot tell how I might act in such a dreadful emergency — how weak and frail I should prove. But I can tell how I ought to act — how I should wish to act. If a firm, consistent non- resistant, I should prove myself no coward; for it requires the noblest courage, the highest fortitude, to be a true non- resistant. If what I ought to be, I should be calm, and unruffled by the alarm at my door. I should meet my wretched fellow-man with a spirit, and air, a salutation, a deportment, so Christ- like, so little expected, so confounding, so morally irresistible, that in all probability his weapons of violence and death would fall harmless to his side. I would say — ‘friend, why comest thou hither? surely not to injure those who wish thee nothing but good? This house is one of peace and friendship to all mankind. If thou art cold, warm thyself at our fire; if hungry, refresh thyself at our table; if thou art weary, sleep in our bed; if thou art destitute, poor, and needy, freely take of our goods. Come, let us be friends, that God may keep us all from evil and bless us with his protection.’ What would be the effect of such treatment as this? Would it not completely overcome the feelings of the invader, so as either to make him retreat inoffensively out of the house, or at least forbear all meditated violence? Would it not be incomparably safer than o rush o the shattered door, half distracted with alarm, grasping some deadly weapon and bearing i aloft, looking fiery wrath, and mad defiance at the enemy? How soon would follow the mortal encounter, and how extremely uncertain the issue? The moment I appeared in such an attitude, (just the thing expected) would not coolness and well trained muscular force be almost sure to seal the fate of myself and family? But in acting the non- resistant part, should I not be likely, in nine cases out of ten, to escape with perfect safety? [’Yes,’ said a brother, ‘in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. — Yea, and perhaps nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand. Not however, to HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 expect too much; suppose the robber should not be wholly deterred; would he, it worst, seek any thing beyond mere booty? Would not our lives and persons escape untouched? It would hardly be worth his while to murder or mangle those who opposed no force to his depredations. But we will make the case utterly desperate. Contrary to all probability, we will suppose that no moral majesty, no calm and dignified remonstrance, no divine interposition, availed any thing towards the prevention of the slaughter of an innocent family; what then would I do in the last resort? I would gather my loved ones in a group behind my person; I would cover their retreat to the farthest corner of our room; and there in their front would I receive the blows of the murderer. I would say to him — ‘Since nothing but our blood will satisfy thy thirst, I commend my all to that God in whom I trust. He will receive us to his bosom; and may he have mercy on thee. Strike if thou wilt; but thou must come through my poor body to the bodies of these helpless victims!’ Well, suppose the horrible tragedy complete, and our butchered remains all lying silent in their gore; what then? We are all dead; we fell clinging to each other in a moment the pains of death were over; the ‘debt of nature’ is paid, where are we now? Where? Annihilated? Miserable? No! Our happy spirits, conveyed by holy angels, wing their lightning flight to the bowers of paradise- to the home of the blest-to the blissful arms of an approving Redeemer — to the welcome embrace ‘of the just made perfect.’ Who would not rather pass away thus unstained with blood, into the joys of that Lord, who himself quenched the fiery darts of his malicious murderers with his own vital blood, than to purchase a few days of mortal life by precipitating into eternity a fellow creature, with his millstone of unrepentant crime about his neck? Is it so dreadful a thing for the christian to be hurried to heaven — to be sent into eternal life a little before his natural time — to have all his pains of dissolution crowded into a moment? Is life on earth, (brief at longest, and often embittered by distressing ills,) of so much value, that we would murder, rather than be murdered? O, let me die the death of the christian non-resistant, and let my last end be like his! Let me suffer and die with Christ, that I also may live and reign with him. The conclusion then is, in a vast majority of cases the non-resistant would remain unharmed by the sons of violence, and that in he worst supposable case, he would only be hurried out of this life, with his dear family, into a better. But rejoins the objector — ‘I consider it the duty of a christian to look to the good of society at large, and to contribute what he can, in a lawful way, o the security of life, person and property around him. Therefore let him assist in bringing malefactors to justice, and not shrink from aiding the magistrate in preserving the bulwarks of order.’ And so we are to throw away God’s judgment of what is best, and trample under foot the solemn injunction of Christ! Well, what shall we gain by this infidelity and rebellion? ‘Nay, — but we are in duty bound to love our neighbor — to seek the peace and welfare of society — to do our part towards protecting the innocent and helpless against the ravages of merciless wolves — to maintain wholesome penal restraints.’ Answer. We think we are seeking this great end more effectually, as non-resistants, than we could do by becoming informers, prosecutors, jailers or hang- men. ‘An ounce of preventive is worth more than a pound of HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 curative.’ But at all events, since we cannot fight, nor go to law for ourselves or our dearest relatives, we must decline doing so for any other description of persons. It is a favorite argument of our opposers, that we are not required to love our neighbors BETTER than ourselves. Whether this argument be sound or not, perhaps it is not now necessary to affirm; but it is certainly a very conclusive one, or ought to be, with the objector in this case, to show the unreasonableness of requiring us to do more for our neighbors in society at large, than for ourselves, our wives and children. We must act on the same principles, and pursue the same general course with respect to all; and in so doing ‘we stand or fall to our own master.’ But we want the best men in office, the best laws and the best administration of government. Will you be recreant to your trust as citizens? Will you withhold your votes from the side and cause of light? Will you leave knaves and villains to govern the world?’ Answer. We expect to do as much towards keeping the world in order by a straight-forward, consistent, exemplary practice of our principles, nay more, than by voting, office-holding, legislating, or punishing criminals. A truly good man wields an influence on our ground great and salutary wherever he is known. It is not by the poor test of numbers that righteousness can gain its deserved respect in the world. It is not by getting into places of worldly power and emolument, that christians are to promote human welfare. It is not by fighting with carnal weapons, and wielding the instruments of legal vengeance, that they can hope to strengthen the bonds of moral restraint. Majorities often decree folly and iniquity. Power oftener corrupts its possessor, than benefits the powerless. The real power which restrains the world is moral power, acting silently and unostentatiously within and upon the soul. He, therefore, who has the fewest outward signs of authority, will, if wise and holy, contribute most to the good order of mankind. Besides, even unprincipled men in office are compelled to bow to a strong public sentiment, superinduced by the efforts of good men in private life. They are not wanting in vanity to be esteemed the friends of virtue, and from this motive generally conform their laws and proceedings more or less to a right general opinion. If we can do any thing towards promoting a sound morality, as we hope to do we shall make our influence felt without envy, not only in the lowest depths of society, but ion the high places of political power. I expect, if true to my sense of duty, to do as much in my town and community towards preserving wholesome moral order, as if clothed with the official dignity of a first select-man, a representative to General Court, a justice of the peace, or even a member of Congress. Whatever my natural ambition might have coveted in the blindness of unchastened nature, I now envy not Governor, Presidents, or Monarchs, their stations of usefulness and glory; but feel that in humble obscurity I have a higher mission assigned me, in the faithful fulfillment of which it may be my privilege to do more for my race, than if elevated to either of their world-envied seats. Every true non-resistant will be a great conservator of public as well as private morals. Away then with the intrigues and tricks of political ambition, the petty squabbles of partizans and office-holders, the hollow bluster of demagogues, and the capricious admiration of a tickled multitude. Let us obey God, declare the truth, walk in love, and deserve the gratitude of HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 the world, though we never receive it. ‘But should non-resistants ever become the great majority in any community, pray how would they get on with public affairs. There must be highways, and bridges, and school houses, and education, and almshouses, and hospitals.’ Very well; nothing easier than for communities of christian non-resistants to get along with all these matters. Suppose them to meet, in those days, from time to time within each town, or more general community, voluntarily, just as we are here assembled. Suppose them all anxious to know their duty, and ready to do it, as soon as clearly pointed out. Then of course the wisest will speak to attentive ears and upright minds. They will propose measures, discuss them in friendship, and come to a conclusion in favor of the best without wounding personal vanity, or breeding a quarrel with each other’s selfishness. The law of love and the counsels of wisdom will prevail without strife, and all be eager to contribute their full share of expense and effort to the object. Instead of the leading few striving, as now who shall be first and greatest, the strife will then be who shall have the least authority. And among the mass, instead of the strife, as now, who shall bear the lightest burden, the only strife will be who shall do most for the promoting of every good work. Happy days, whenever they arrive! If there shall be any poor in those days, or any insane, or any unlettered, or unaccommodated travellers, they will soon be abundantly provided for, without the aid of physical force, pains or penalties. God hasten that blessed era of love and peace, and grant success to all our well directed efforts in this holy cause. Thus finally may all human governments be superseded by the divine government, and the kingdoms of this world be swallowed up in the one all-glorious kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ. And now, having freely expressed my views and feelings on the subject of the resolution presented, I submit them to the consideration of the friends; hoping that they will receive into good and honest hearts whatever is worth retaining, and the worthless cast away. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 September 26, Thursday: Friend Lucretia Mott addressed the 1st Anniversary meeting of the New England Non-Resistance Society in Boston.191
Salmon Portland Chase married for a 2d time, to Eliza Ann Smith. Of the three daughters that would be born to this union only Catherine Jane (Kate) would survive. Kate would marry Senator William Sprague of Rhode Island, textile manufacturer and former Governor of that state, and Sprague money would be made available to finance Chase’s political ambitions.
Jose Lucio Travassos Valdez, conde e barao de Bomfim replaced Rodrigo Pinto Pizarro Pimentel de Almeida Carvalhais, barao da Ribeira de Sabrosa as Prime Minister of Portugal.
191. I do not know whether Lucretia Mott made it to Concord on this trip — but I would like to know, if anyone can advise me. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 September 30, Monday: Miss Prudence Ward wrote to a friend describing the visit which John Thoreau, Jr. had paid to Miss Ellen Devereux Sewall in Scituate in the absence of her parents, the Reverend and Mrs. Edmund Quincy Sewall.
Waldo Emerson had reminisced in his journal:
When I was thirteen years old, my uncle Samuel Ripley one day asked me, “How is it Ralph, that all the boys dislike you & quarrel with you, whilst the grown people are fond of you?” — Now am I thirty six and the fact is reversed — the old people suspect & dislike me, & the young love me.
William Basset (Jr.), only child of the Quaker couple William Basset and Mary Boyce Basset, was born in Lynn, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
OCTOBER
October: President Josiah Quincy, Sr. of Harvard College had managed to attract William Cranch Bond to bring his home astronomical equipment from Dorchester to Cambridge, and set it up as the official Harvard Observatory to belatedly replace the telescopes and chronometers which had been lost in the great Harvard Yard fire of 1764. During this month, Bond having already been “drawn to Cambridge by the strong hand of President Quincy,” approval for this was sought of the Board of Overseers of the Corporation. ASTRONOMY
October: The negrero Catharine, out of Baltimore, was captured on the African coast by a British cruiser and brought by her to the harbor of New-York (HOUSE DOCUMENT, 26th Congress, 2d session V No. 115, pages 191, 215, 239-44; Niles’s Register, LVII. 119, 159).
A negrero flying the Portuguese flag, the Felicidade, master Lonsa, out of Lagos with a cargo of an unknown number of enslaved Africans on one of its nine known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at a port of Cuba.
A negrero flying the Portuguese flag, the Eliza, master Vives, out of Rio Pongo with a cargo of an unknown number of enslaved Africans on one of its seven known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at a port of Cuba.
A Portuguese negrero, the Frutosa, master J. Salgeyro, from an unknown point on the African coast on its only known Middle Passage, delivered a cargo of 115 enslaved Africans at the port of Arcos de Canasi, Cuba.
A negrero flying the Portuguese flag, the Dom Joao de Castro, master V. de F. Serpa, from an unknown point on the African coast on its one and only known Middle Passage voyage, delivered a cargo of 450 enslaved Africans at the port of Ilha Marambaia, Brazil.
A negrero flying the Portuguese flag, the Montana, master Viana, out of Luanda with a cargo of an unknown number of enslaved Africans on its second of two known Middle Passages, arrived at a port of Cuba. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
After September: British men-of-war blockaded and shelled the port of Canton. The port of Tinghai at the mouth of the Yangtze River was occupied. What would be known as the 1st Opium War, which would lead to the initial humiliating “Unequal Treaty” of Europeans with China, had begun. HONG KONG
October: David Lee Child joined Lydia Maria Child in Boston.
The Seneca River Towing Path of the New York State Barge Canal connected Mud Lock on the Oswego Canal to the outlet of Onondaga Lake.
Ellery Channing departed from Massachusetts on a pilgrimage by canal boat, steamboat, and stagecoach toward the Illinois region, to take up a life behind the plow.
October 2, Wednesday: A court hearing in Leipzig over the Robert Schumann-Clara Wieck marriage issue was postponed until December 18th when the father, Friedrich Wieck, failed to show up. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 October 3, Thursday: The 1st public railroad in what would become Italy opened, an 4-and-a-half mile track between Naples and a royal palace at Portici at the foot of Vesuvius.
Waldo Emerson responded to Samuel Gray Ward, one of Ellery Channing’s friends, in regard to a poem by Channing that Ward had sent him. Emerson considered the poem to be evidence of the poet’s promise. However, before Channing could be told of this, he had departed on his pilgrimage by canal boat, steamboat, and stagecoach toward the Illinois region, to take up a life behind the plow. If you remember, Henry Thoreau later made a passing remark about this, in CAPE COD: HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
CAPE COD: We found ourselves at once on an apparently boundless PEOPLE OF plain, without a tree or a fence, or, with one or two exceptions, CAPE COD a house in sight. Instead of fences, the earth was sometimes thrown up into a slight ridge. My companion compared it to the rolling prairies of Illinois. In the storm of wind and rain, which raged when we traversed it, it no doubt appeared more vast and desolate than it really is. As there were no hills, but only here and there a dry hollow in the midst of the waste, and the distant horizon was concealed by mist, we did not know whether it was high or low. A solitary traveller, whom we saw perambulating in the distance, loomed like a giant. He appeared to walk slouchingly, as if held up from above by straps under his shoulders, as much as supported by the plain below. Men and boys would have appeared alike at a little distance, there being no object by which to measure them. Indeed, to an inlander, the Cape landscape is a constant mirage. This kind of country extended a mile or two each way. These were the “Plains of Nauset,” once covered with wood, where in winter the winds howl and the snow blows right merrily in the face of the traveller. I was glad to have got out of the towns, where I am wont to feel unspeakably mean and disgraced, – to have left behind me for a season the bar-rooms of Massachusetts, where the full-grown are not weaned from savage and filthy habits,– still sucking a cigar. My spirits rose in proportion to the outward dreariness. The towns need to be ventilated. The gods would be pleased to see some pure flames from their altars. They are not to be appeased with cigar-smoke.
ELLERY CHANNING
October 9, Wednesday: The phrenologist George Combe accompanied the Honorable Horace Mann, Sr., secretary to the Massachusetts Board of Education, and Massachusetts governor Edward Everett, to a school convention scheduled for the following day in Taunton. At issue was the nature of the school-books to be approved by the state. It had been agreed that a 9-person panel would decide, made up of a representative of each of 9 religious bodies, and only one orthodox minister of this group was holding out against the incorporation of Combe’s THE CONSTITUTION OF MAN as this textbook.
“I look upon Phrenology as the guide of Philosophy, and the handmaid of Christianity; whoever disseminates true Phrenology, is a public benefactor.” — Horace Mann, Sr.
October 11, Friday: Frédéric François Chopin and George Sand arrived in Paris from Nohant. He would remain there for the following 16 months.
October 12, Saturday: Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and her family arrived in Venice, the initial stop on their year-long tour of Italy. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 October 16, Wednesday: Charles Wesley Slack. THE MECHANICS’ EXHIBITION Boston. Autograph Essay Signed. 3 pages, 24.8 cm.192
The 1st documented public performance of the music of Frédéric François Chopin in North America took place when Ludwig Rakemann, an immigrant from Germany, played a nocturne and two mazurkas at his debut in New-York.
October 18, Friday: Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal:
In these golden days it behoves me once more to make my annual inventory of the world. For the five last years I have read each winter a new course of lectures in Boston, and each was my creed & confession of faith. Each told all I thought of the past, the present, & the future. Once more I must renew my work and I think only once in the same form though I see that he who thinks he does something for the last time ought not to do it at all.... So I submit to sell tickets again.
192. 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
1839 1839 October 19, Saturday: On this Cornwallis Day –in order to avoid the excesses of military competition experienced in the previous year when the Concord Light Infantry and the Concord Artillery had hired two competing bands from Boston and had paraded on Concord Common, with each attempting to crowd out their enemy’s marching formation and tangle their enemy’s feet by the beat from a different drummer– instead of competing, the Concord Light Infantry unit and the Concord Artillery unit united and began to portray the British soldiers under the leadership of General Cornwallis. Meanwhile, the state militia, attired in clothing
from attics, portrayed the Americans under the leadership of General Washington. James Russell Lowell, who
DIFFERENT DRUMMER
was present, has reported that after firing blanks at each other, these citizen soldiers adjourned to taverns to fraternize and tell war stories. (This sort of training was the only experience the soldiers would receive in fighting, and the only experience their officers would receive in ordering men to fight, prior to some training they would conduct near Manassas Junction, Virginia on July 21, 1861!) HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
October 19, Saturday: According to the Herald of Freedom, the following article “On Cinques” appeared in The Colored American: 1. We are inclined to call the noble African by this name, although he is called by as many different titles as our republicanism offers reasons for enslaving his people. We have seen a wood-cut representation of the royal fellow. It looks as we think it would. It answers well to his lion-like character. —The head has the towering front of Webster, and though some shades darker than our great country-man, we are struck at first sight, with his resemblance to him. He has Webster’s lion aspect —his majestic, quiet, uninterested cast of expression, looking, when at rest, as if there was nobody and nothing about him to care about or look at. His eye is deep, heavy —the cloudy iris extending up behind the brow almost inexpressive, and yet as if volcanoes of action might be asleep behind it. It looks like the black sea or the ocean in a calm —an unenlightened eye, as Webster’s would have looked, had he been bred in the desert, among the lions, as Cinguea [sic] was, and if instead of pouring upon Homer and Shakespeare, and Coke and the BIBLE (for Webster read the Bible when he was young, and got his regal style there) it had rested, from savage boyhood, on the sands and sky of Africa. It looks like a wilderness, a grand, but uninhabited land, or, if peopled, the abode of aboriginal man. Webster’s eye like a civilized and cultivated country –country rather than city –more on the whole like woods and wilderness than fields or villages. For after all, nature predominates greatly in the eye of our majestic countryman. 2. The nose and mouth of Cingues are African. We discover the expanded and powerful nostrils mentioned in the description, and can fancy readily its contractions and dilations, as he made those addresses to his countrymen and called upon them to rush, with a greater than Spartan spirit, upon the countless white people, who he apprehended would doom them to a life of slavery. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 He has none of the look of an Indian —nothing of the savage. It is a gentle, magnanimous, generous look, not so much of the warrior as the sage —a sparing and not a destructive look, like the lion’s when unaroused by hunger or the spear of the huntsman. It must have flashed terribly upon that midnight deck, when he was dealing with the wretched Ramonflues. 3. We bid pro-slavery look upon Cingues and behold in him the race we are enslaving. He is a sample. Every Congolese or Mandingan is not, be sure, a Cingues. Nor was every Corsican a Napolian [sic], or every Yankee a Webster. “Giants are rare,” said Ames, “and it is forbidden that there should be races of them.” But call not the race inferior, which in now and then an age produces such men. 4. Our shameless people have made merchandise of the likeness of Cingues —as they have of the originals of his (and their own) countrymen. They had the effrontery to look him in the face long enough to delineate it, and at his eye long enough to copy its wonderful expression. 5. By the way, Webster ought to come home to defend Cingues. He ought to have no counsel short of his twin spirit. His defence were a nobler subject for Webster’s giant intellect, than the Foote resolutions or Calhoun’s nullification. There is indeed no defence to make. It would give Webster occasion to strike at the slave trade and at our people for imprisoning and trying a man admitted to have risen only against the worst of pirates, and for more than life —for liberty, for country and for home. 6. Webster should vindicate him if he must be tried. Old Marshall would be the man to try him. And after his most honorable acquittal and triumph, a ship should be sent to convey him to his country —not an American ship. They are all too near a kin to the “low, long, black schooner.” A British ship —old Nelson’s line of battle, if it is yet afloat, the one he had at Trafalgar; and Hardy, Nelson’s captain, were a worthy sailor to command it to Africa. He would steer more honestly than the treacherous old Spaniard. He would steer them toward the sunrise, by night as well as by day. An old British sea captain would have scorned to betray the noble Cinques. He would have been as faithful as the compass. 7. We wait to see the fate of the African hero. We feel no anxiety for him. The country can’t reach him. He is above their reach and above death. He has conquered death. But his wife and children —they who
Weep beside the cocoa tree — 8. And we wait to see the bearings of this providential event upon American Slavery. LA AMISTAD
October 21, Monday: Giacomo Meyerbeer attended a gathering in Paris where Frédéric François Chopin performed some “new mazurkas” and the Polonaise op.53, and found the polonaise “heavenly.”
October 22, Tuesday: Giuseppe Verdi’s 2d child, 1-year-old Icilio Romano, died. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
October 24, Thursday: In Brimfield, Massachusetts, John Wells Foster got married with Lydia Lyon Converse (March 4, 1815-March 30, 1895). The union would be blessed with a number of children.
October 29, Tuesday: Frédéric François Chopin and Ignaz Moscheles provided entertainment for the French royal family and their guest, US minister Lewis Cass.
October 30, Wednesday: Verleih’ uns Frieden for chorus and orchestra by Felix Mendelssohn was performed for the initial time, in Leipzig.
Ka-pe-li of the La Amistad died. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE RACE SLAVERY HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
NOVEMBER
November: A white sailor who visited his black shipmates in the jail of Charleston SC reported that there were at the time of his visit 52 free ship’s stewards and cooks of color under detention in adherence to the law while their ships were in port.193 SLAVERY
November: The National Reformer, published by the Reverend Theodore S. Wright in New-York, acknowledged that antimelanism (color prejudice) was so strong in America, that when black parents had children of varying degrees of blackness of skin they found it easier to love the ones that were lighter. (The Reverend Wright was evidently not in any mood to tell any little white lies about this racism thing for, a few years previously, his wife had died, after she had been excluded from the whites-only shelter of a steamboat cabin, and it was therefore as construable that she had died on account of being black, as in result of said exposure.)
November: A negrero flying the Stars and Stripes, the Mary, master Hutton, that had sailed out of Gallinas during October 1839 with a cargo of an unknown number of enslaved Africans on its one and only known Middle Passage, during this month dropped anchor at a port of Cuba. A slaver flying the US flag, the Deposit, master C. Foster, that had sailed out of Angola during November 1839 with a cargo of an unknown number of enslaved Africans on its one and only known Middle Passage, shuffled its cargo during this month into the barracoon at Rio, Brazil. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Maria, master G. Affonco, out of Onim with a cargo of an unknown number of enslaved Africans on its one and only known Middle Passage, arrived at Bahia, Brazil. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Amalia, master Costa, sailing out of Mocambique during September 1839 with a cargo of an unknown number of enslaved Africans on one of its five known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at a port of Cuba. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Flor de’ Loanda, master L.J. Passos, out of Angola with a cargo of 370 enslaved Africans on one of its five known Middle Passages, arrived at the port of Ilha Grande, Brazil. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Felicidade, master Medail, out of Lagos with a cargo of an unknown number of enslaved Africans on one of its nine known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at a port of Cuba. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Mariana, master J.G. da Cunha, out of Benguela with a cargo of an unknown number of enslaved Africans on its first of two known Middle Passages, arrived at Rio de Janeiro. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Generoso Feliz, master unknown, out of Quelimane with a cargo of 384 enslaved Africans on its second of two known Middle Passages, arrived at Campos, Brazil. A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Josefina, master Carballo, sailing out of Sao Tome with a cargo of an unknown number of enslaved Africans during September 1839 on one of its twelve-count-’em-twelve known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at a port of Cuba. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
November: The Reverend Samuel Ringgold Ward became the travelling agent of the American Anti-slavery Society (afterward, of the New York Anti-slavery Society). I made my début as a lecturer. It cost me a great deal of effort and self-denial. My youthful wife and my infant boy I must leave, to go hundreds of miles, travelling in all weathers, meeting all 193. Of course, the skippers of their ships would be billed by the city for this room and board provided to their black employees in the jail, and then these skippers would automatically deduct such sums from their employees’ lump-sum pay at the end of the voyage. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 sorts of people, combatting some of the most deeply seated prejudices, and in the majority of instances denied the ordinary courtesies of civilized life. I suffered more than can be here described. At length I considered that every Christian has not only a cross to bear, but his peculiar cross; and that God, not man, must judge and decide in what shape that cross must come: aye, and he too would give grace to bear it. Thus fortified, I went forth; and from that day to this I have never been able to see this travelling, homeless, wandering part of the work in any other light than a cross. No place can be a substitute for home, though the latter be a hovel, the former a palace. No observer can enter into one’s inner feelings, live over again one’s life, as does the loving wife. In sickness, in sorrow, to be away from home adds mountain weights to what the wanderer’s bosom must bear; and I may as well add, that the poisoned tongue of censure — cool, deliberate, granite-hearted censure — censure from unbridled but professedly Christian tongues, to be found alike on both sides of the Atlantic, even among brethren and others — doth not diminish the rigour of the cross. Still, with God’s blessing I went forth, making my first speech at a private house, and afterwards speaking in public places until I become accustomed somewhat to the sound of my own voice, and a little skilled in the handling of the subject, receiving kind encouragement from one friend and another....
November 1, Friday: A negrero flying the US flag, the Luiza, master Champion, which had sailed out of Onim on September 24, 1839 on its one and only known Middle Passage, on this day arrived at Bahia, Brazil. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE RACE SLAVERY
November 3, Sunday: Two Royal Navy ships defeated 29 Chinese warships at Chuenpi.
By the Reform Decree, all citizens of the Ottoman Empire were guaranteed the right to life, liberty, and property. This was done to solidify western support for the regime.
November 4, Monday: A Chartist rising in Newport, England was suppressed. Some leading Chartists were arrested.
Yam-mo-ni of the La Amistad died. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE RACE SLAVERY HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 November 5, Tuesday: Franz Liszt performed a concert in Trieste that was so successful a 2d one was scheduled for November 11th.
At Apia, Upolu, the principal headmen of the Samoa group of islands concurred on a set of commercial regulations. READ THE FULL TEXT HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 November 6, Wednesday-April 1844: Margaret Fuller was supporting herself (and other members of her family, I suppose) through offering two-hour “Conversations” for 25-40 women at a time, in Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s parlor on West Street in Boston.
November 8, Friday: The Reverend Elijah Demond was dismissed as the pastor of the Congregational Church of Princeton, Massachusetts. For some years he would function as an agent of the American Tract Society and the Doctrinal Tract Society, until due to a bronchial problem, he would go for a dozen years to reside on a farm, preaching sometimes. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 November 9, Saturday: Ellery Channing purchased three parcels of farmland and forest in McHenry County, Illinois.
November 10, Sunday: Austin Bacon of Natick, Massachusetts got married with Nancy Coolidge (May 25, 1819-January 22, 1905). The couple would produce Theoda C. [Coolidge?] Bacon in 1840 and Lucy Ann Bacon in 1847.
November 12, Tuesday: A Thomas Paine memorial column was erected at North and Paine Avenues in New Rochelle NY:194 The world is my country, to do good my religion.
November 13, Wednesday: The Metamora arrived at Trinidad bearing a group of 216 free black Americans who were planning to settle there. It is quite possible that this vessel had sailed from Boston.
Waldo Emerson delivered his Introductory Lecture from the “Philosophy of History” series at the Concord Lyceum in Concord.
November 14, Thursday: Lucy Brown Derby, wife of Elias Hasket Derby (1766-1826), died.
November 15, Friday: Elizabeth Orrock Thoreau died in Concord: Thoreau Deaths
Name Death Date Age Buried
John March 1801 47 Concord
Mary July 24, 1811 25 Concord
Sarah August 1829 38 Concord
Miss Betsey November 1839 60s? Concord
John January 1842 27 Concord
Helen L. June 1849 36 Concord
194. We may note that, if such a column had been erected in Concord on November 12, 1939, it could well have recorded “Concord is my country, to be good my religion,” and “The bowers of paradise are built upon the palaces (pallaces??) of kings.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 November 15, Friday: William Murdock died in Birmingham, Warwickshire at the age of 86.
Franz Liszt reached Vienna from Trieste.
Abolitionists met in Warsaw, New York to form a Liberty Party, with the black abolitionist Reverends Samuel
Ringgold Ward and Henry Highland Garnet as leading supporters, accepting James Gillespie Birney as their
candidate for President of the United States and Pennsylvania’s Francis J. Lemoyne for his Vice-President. Boycotts of crops produced by slave labor were organized (knowing that if the market for cotton were to collapse, slavery would not be able to survive, Garnet would try to organize in England a worldwide HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 boycott).
Samuel Ringgold Ward would attempt to explain, later, this foray into American politics: [T]he abolitionists, such as those with whom it was my honour to be associated, inquired how far they could wield their political powers, with the parties of the day, innocently. About the time to which I was referring —viz., 1839-40— they began to see the great fact, that the political parties of the country departed as widely from the old maxims of democracy and republicanism as did the Churches from the gospel. They saw the North divided into two great parties, wielding two thirds of the votes of the nation, each of these having Southern members who controlled them, and both of them catering for the largest share of the Southern vote, which was about one third of the entire suffrage. They saw the best, highest offices, given freely to Southern men, on purpose to propitiate the South; while the South demanded and accepted this unnatural, undue, and disproportioned amount of power and emolument, both as the price of their aid to the party giving them, and as a means of securing the interests of slavery. Hence it was that the diplomatic agents of the country were sure to be Southerners, or pro- slavery men. Who ever knew any other character at the Court of St. James, or the Court of St. Cloud? Hence it was, too, that ere a Northern man could be qualified for any post of honour in the national gift, he must prove himself to have been always entirely free from the least taint of abolitionism, or to have been thoroughly purged of it, if he had ever been so much as reasonably suspected of it. At the same time, in Northern localities the friends and members of these parties sought to cajole and seduce abolitionists into voting with one or the other of them, under the plea that it was more favourable to the anti-slavery cause than its opposite, while manifestly both were the tools and the props of the slave powers. Abolitionists did HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 not fail to see, that to vote with either of these parties was alike repugnant to their cherished principles and to their self- respect. Then, they must do one of two things; either refrain from voting altogether, or concentrate their votes upon candidates of their own selection — in other words, form a political party upon anti-slavery principles. They adopted, wisely, the latter. That party was formed in August, 1840, at Syracuse. I then became, for the first time, a member of a political party. With it I cast my first vote; to it I devoted my political activities; with it I lived my political life — which terminated when, eleven years subsequently, I left the country. As the abolitionists saw the Churches were trampling under foot the fundamental principles of Christianity, touching slavery, so they saw the Government and the political parties to be false to their own sworn principles of freedom and democracy. They departed from the constitution, which was made “to secure the blessings of liberty,” and which ordained that “no man shall be deprived of liberty without due process of law.” The Whigs denied the faith of their revolutionary fathers, whose Whiggism was but another name for self-sacrificing love of liberty. The Democrats, claiming Thomas Jefferson as their father and boasting of his having written the Declaration of Independence, hated nothing so intensely as Jefferson’s writings against slavery — and that very Declaration of Independence, when, among “ALL MEN” in it declared to be entitled by God to the unalienable right to liberty, Negroes were said to be included. Both professed to be admirers of the great Washington; but neither of them, like him, coveted the opportunity of using his political power against slavery in his native State. What the abolitionists then demanded, and now contend for, is the simple application of the principles of the Declaration of Independence to the black as well as the white, and that the former should share the benefits secured by the constitution as well as the latter. Believing just what the Declaration of Independence says, that the right of man to liberty is unalienable, they hold that no enactments, no constitutions, no consent of the man himself, no combinations of men, can alienate that which is by God’s fiat made unalienable. They agree with England’s greatest living jurist, Henry Peter Brougham, that the idea that man can be the property of man is to be rejected as a “wild and guilty phantasy”: neither overlooking nor neglecting other great questions with which governments and parties have to do, they make their basis principle the unalienable right of man “to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It was to the promulgation of these political principles, and of those religious principles to which I referred in the preceding pages, that, as an agent of the New York State Anti-Slavery Society, it was my duty and my pleasure to devote myself. This duty brought me into contact with all classes of the enemies of the cause — made me familiar with all the different objections urged against it on the one hand; and it gave me the ever-to-be- remembered pleasure of meeting all classes of abolitionists, profiting by their suggestions, accepting their hospitalities, rejoicing in their sympathies, and sharing their devotions. A truer, a more discerning set of men, America does not hold. They are fully alive to the issue before them. They see that, if the principle be admitted that a black man may be legally, HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 righteously enslaved, so may any other man; that slavery is altogether regardless of the colour of its victims: that its encroachments upon the right of petition, the freedom of the press, the freedom of speech — its whipping, tarring and feathering, and lynching, white abolitionists at the South — its enslavement of the light-coloured children of white men — its unscrupulous, insatiate demands, nature, character — all make it the enemy of any and every class opposing it, willing to jeopard and to destroy the liberties of any whom it can crush as its victims. They see that the real political issue is, not whether the black man’s slavery shall be perpetuated, but whether the freedom of any Americans can be permanent. Blessings on the men who, at all hazards, are prepared to welcome and to meet that issue, with all its sacrifices and all its consequences! Whether they succeed or not, whether there is sufficient soundness and vitality in the republic to admit of its being saved or not, they, let the worst come, will ever bear in their bosoms the satisfaction of having done their duty in times of the utmost trial. Yea, blessings on that fearless band! Allow me once more to state, what I fear Englishmen but too seldom and too slightly consider — 1. The religious issue betwixt the American antislavery men and their opposers is deep, radical, vital, involving the religious weal or woe of the American Church. 2. The political issue is as deep, radical, and vital, in its kind: involving the safety, the stability — not the unity alone, but the very existence, of the republic. It is not like the emancipation question in Great Britain, or the corn-law question, or the reform question. It is not, What are the powers and scope of the Government, to what limit do they extend, to what classes do they apply, and of what improvements are they capable? It is a question affecting all classes, involving the fate of the whole people, undermining the basis of their best institutions, lying at the root of all constitutional government, and in its grasp including the whole range of American rights.
November 16, Saturday: Edmund Quincy declared, in the Non-Resistant, that the distinction between resistance and Non-Resistance was that “the one believes that the evil which is in the world, is to be overcome by the infliction of suffering or death upon the evil-doer; the other, by the voluntary endurance of suffering or death themselves in their stead.”
[Question: Would this not be the redeeming feature that Thoreau would see in Captain John Brown, not that he was willing to kill so that others could be free but that he became willing to himself die, to set an example so that others could be free?]
Jones Very’s “The Barberry Bush” was published in the Salem Observer:
THE BARBERRY BUSH. BARBERRY The bush that has most briers and bitter fruit, Wait till the frost has turned its green leaves red, Its sweetened berries will thy palate suit, And thou may’st find e’en there a homely bread. Upon the hills of Salem scattered wide, Their yellow blossoms gain the eye in Spring; And straggling e’en upon the turnpike’s side, Their ripened branches to your hand they bring, I’ve plucked them oft in boyhood’s early hour, HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 That then I gave such name, and thought it true; But now I know that other fruit as sour Grows on what now thou callest Me and You; Yet, wilt thou wait the autumn that I see, Will sweeter taste than these red berries be.
November 17, Sunday: After receiving many reports of his wife’s infidelity, Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka overheard his mother-in-law arranging for a meeting of his wife with her lover. “For me this was sufficient.”
Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio, a dramma by Giuseppe Verdi to words of Solera possibly after Piazza, was performed for the initial time, in Teatro alla Scala, Milan. The work enjoyed a reasonable success. This opera marked the 1st time Giuseppina Strepponi appeared in a Verdi production.
November 18, Monday: Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka, having moved to a friend’s house in St. Petersburg, wrote to his wife informing her that because of her infidelity, he could no longer live with her. He was not himself blameless on that score.
November 19, Tuesday: Franz Liszt gave the first of six recitals in Vienna, this one attended by the dowager empress. He premiered his transcription of Symphony no.6 by Ludwig van Beethoven. The recitals would be very well received.
Representative John Quincy Adams wrote to the New-York Journal of Commerce: The Africans of the Amistad were cast upon our coast in a condition perhaps as calamitous as could befall human beings, not by their own will - not with any intention hostile or predatory on their part, not even by the act of God as in the case of shipwreck, but by their own ignorance of navigation and the deception of one of their oppressors whom they had overpowered, and whose life they had spared to enable them by his knowledge of navigation to reach their native land. They were victims of the African slave trade, recently imported into the island of Cuba, in gross violation of the laws of the Island and of Spain; and by acts which our own laws have made piracy - punishable with death. They had indicated their natural right to liberty, by conspiracy, insurrection, homicide and capture and they were accused by the two Cuban Spaniards embarked with them in the ship, of murder and piracy - and they were claimed by the same two Cuban Spaniards, accessories after the fact to the slave-trade piracy, by which they had been brought from Africa to Cuba, as their property, because they had bought them from slave-trade pirates. They knew nothing of the Constitution, laws or language of the country upon which they were thus thrown, and accused as pirates and murderers, claimed as slaves of the very men who were their captives, they were deprived even of the faculty of speech in their own defense. This condition was sorely calamitous; it claimed from the humanity of a civilized nation compassion;- it claimed from brotherly love of a Christian land sympathy;- it claimed from a Republic professing reverence for the rights of man justice - and what have we done? A naval officer of the United States seizes them, their HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 ship and cargo, with themselves; tramples on the territorial jurisdiction of the state of New York, by seizing, disarming and sending on board their ship, without warrant of arrest, several of them whom he found on shore; releases their captives; admits the claim of the two captives to fifty masters as their slaves; and claims salvage for restoring them to servitude. They are then brought before a court of the United States, at once upon the charge of piracy and murder, upon a claim to them as slaves, and upon a claim against their pretended masters for salvage, by kidnapping them again into slavery. The Circuit Judge decides that the United States do not exercise the right of all other civilized nations to try piracies committed in foreign vessels; that he thereupon cannot try them for piracy or murder, but that the District Court may try whether they are slaves or not; as it is doubtful whether this trial will be held in Connecticut or New York, and it must take time to ascertain in which, they shall in the mean time be held as slaves to abide the issue. Is this compassion? Is it sympathy? Is it justice? But here the case now stands. LA AMISTAD
November 23, Saturday: During this year Queen Victoria’s cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, had been visiting London, and Victoria had been falling in love with the guy. Although he initially had doubts about such a relationship, on this date Queen Victoria was able to publicly announce an engagement to be wed.
The couple would wed in February 1840 and then during the following 18 years of royal wedded bliss Albert would inflict 9 childbirths upon his queen — while meanwhile her personal bodyguards would be thwarting 4 more assassination attempts. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 November 24, Sunday: Romeo et Juliette, a symphonie dramatique for solo voices, double chorus and orchestra to words of Deschamps after Shakespeare, was performed for the initial time, at the Paris Conservatoire, and was conducted by its composer, Hector Berlioz. He dedicated this to Nicolò Paganini. Richard Wagner was most impressed, either by this performance or by the one on December 1st.
James Nasmyth made in his sketchbook the 1st preserved drawing for a steam hammer.
November 25, Monday: The Universalist Society of Concord voted to construct a meetinghouse in the town square, on the site of Keyes Green’s store.
William Henry Fox Talbot published a photographic negative and publicly explained the negative-to-positive procedure he had developed 4 years earlier. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 November 26, Tuesday: Enrico II, a melodramma serio by Otto Nicolai to words of Romani, was performed for the initial time, in Teatro grande Trieste.
Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and her family arrived in Rome on a year-long tour of Italy.
November 27, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson lectured at the Concord Lyceum in Concord on “Philosophy of Labor.”
The Reverend William Cogswell, Dr. John Dix Fisher, Richard Fletcher, Oliver W.B. Peabody, and Lemuel Shattuck met at Number 15 Cornhill in Boston and agreed upon the formation of a statistical society, to be known as the American Statistical Society. For these persons, it seems clear now that the vision of Shattuck was leading. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
November 28, Thursday: Henry Thoreau wrote to Charles Stearns Wheeler asking him to lecture at the Concord Lyceum in Concord during the middle of December. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
WINTER 1839/1840
Lecture Season: The 11th course of lectures offered by the Salem Lyceum consisted of:
The Salem Lyceum — 11th Season Boston Musical Institute of Boston The Oratorio of Joseph and His Brethren Orville Dewey Human Progress Andrew P. Peabody Influence of the BIBLE on the Sciences, Poetry, and the Fine Arts Leonard Withington Phariseeism Convers Francis The Huguenots or French Protestants in America George E. Ellis The Persecution of the Quakers J.S.C. Abbott Russia John L. Hayes Volcanic Activity J. Francis Tuckerman of Salem Life and Genius of Ludwig van Beethoven Oliver Wendell Holmes National Prejudices J.S.C. Abbott Louis Philippe B.B. Thatcher A Reading of the lecture by Governor Everett introductory to the course before the “Lowell Institute” of Boston James W. Thompson of Salem The Conditions of a Healthful Literature Thomas B. Fox Education of the Eye Charles Francis Adams, Sr. The Influence of Domestic Manners on the American Revolution Waldo Emerson of Concord Analysis, the Characteristic of the Present Age Henry Ware, Jr. The Biography of the Globe Henry W. Kinsman The Institution of Chivalry and its Influence on Society Edward Hitchcock The Wonders of Science Compared with the Wonders of Romance Reverend John G. Palfrey The Siege and Capture of Louisburg
As lectures began, the endowment of The Lowell Institute had reached to nearly $250,000.00. Fees provided HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 to its lecturers would often exceed the salaries of the most highly paid professors in America.
1st Season of the Lowell Institute Honorable Edward Everett, LL.D. Introductory. Memoir of John Lowell, Jr. 2 lectures Professor Benjamin Silliman, LL.D. Geology 24 lectures Reverend John G. Palfrey, D.D. Evidences of Christianity lectures Professor Thomas Nuttall, A.M. Botany 18 lectures
In those early days, the lecture serieses were quite popular: 8,000 to 10,000 people might apply for tickets to a course. For, as the Lowell Institute’s historian would later boast:
Crude theories and plans for moral and political reforms are not to be found in the Lowell lectures. The selection of lectures and lecturers is made from a broad and comprehensive knowledge of the safe thought and intelligent study of the time.
THE LOWELL INSTITUTE HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
DECEMBER
Toward the end of this year, the Reverend George Gilfillan prepared a volume containing five of his discourses.
December: Following Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s methods, Theodatus Garlick constructed for himself a camera and, using a silvered brass plate, exposed the 1st Daguerreotype done in the Western Reserve (that is, in the territory then claimed by Connecticut in the Northwest Territory, which has now become northeastern Ohio).
December: Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. sailed from Ireland for New Orleans aboard the Dumfriesshire: “Like other striplings escaped from college, I was no longer happy at home. The yearning for travel was upon me, and without a sigh I beheld the hills of my native land sink behind the black waves, not much caring whether I should ever see them again.”
December: During an unexpected gale the light on the tower on Plum Island was not being manned and the brig Richmond Packet went aground. The wife of its skipper drowned as attempts were being made to get her ashore through the surf. During this gale 41 of the 130 vessels in Newburyport harbor were damaged. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 December: Charles Wilkes left Sydney in New South Wales during the Southern Hemisphere summer and, sailing along vast ice-fields for several weeks, sighted what he took to be an Antarctic continent.
OH LOOKIE OVER THERE!
December: Waldo Emerson to his journal, in a passage which may explain not only the title of the Transcendentalist periodical THE DIAL, but also something about the nature of the Transcendentalist movement as a whole:
I say how the world looks to me without reference to Blair’s Rhetoric or Johnson’s Lives. And I call my thoughts The Present Age, because I use no will in the matter, but honestly record such impressions as things make. So transform I myself into a Dial, and my shadow will tell where the sun is.
The brave man’s step corresponded to the movement of the heavenly bodies. The brave man’s universal tunefulness compelled discord into concord everywhere. This would become, in A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, the hero’s heart beating “in unison with the pulse of Nature,” as he “steps to the measure of the universe.”
A WEEK: The sadness is ours. The Indian poet Calidas says in the Sacontala: “Perhaps the sadness of men on seeing beautiful forms and hearing sweet music arises from some faint remembrance of past joys, and the traces of connections in a former state of existence.” As polishing expresses the vein in marble, and grain in wood, so music brings out what of heroic lurks anywhere. The hero is the sole patron of music. That harmony which exists naturally between the hero’s moods and the universe the soldier would fain imitate with drum and trumpet. When we are in health all sounds fife and drum for us; we hear the notes of music in the air, or catch its echoes dying away when we awake in the dawn. Marching is when the pulse of the hero beats in unison with the pulse of Nature, and he steps to the measure of the universe; then there is true courage and invincible strength. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 In WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, this would become the injunction that one should step to the music which one hears, “however measured or far away.”
WALDEN: Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. Shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves, though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not?
DIFFERENT DRUMMER THE INNER LIGHT HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 (Some may consider that I am here deviating from my identification of the distant, different drummer as the ruffed grouse Bonasa umbellus, but I am not. You will note that those who provide a militaristic interpretation of this most famous citation from WALDEN commonly reduce “step” to “march,” as if they were insisting that
Henry Thoreau remain with his young-mannish military preoccupation and resisting the implications of “step” as in “dance step.” The advantage I see to the “drumming of the ruffed grouse in the woods” interpretation is that it resists this simplification of the metaphor to a merely military signification.)
December: Bravery deals not so much in resolute action, as in healthy and assured rest. Its palmy state HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 is a staying at home, and compelling alliance in all directions. The brave man never heareth the din of war; he is trustful and unsuspecting, so observant of the least trait of good or beautiful that, if you turn toward him the dark side of anything, he will still see only the bright.
One moment of serene and confident life is more glorious than a whole campaign of daring. We should be ready for all issues, not daring to die but daring to live. To the brave even danger is an ally.
In their unconscious daily life all are braver than they know. Man slumbers and wakes in his twilight with the confidence of noonday; he is not palsified nor struck dumb by the inexplicable riddle of the universe. A mere surveyor’s report or clause in a preëmption bill contains matter of quite extraneous interest, of a subdued but confident tone, evincing such a steadiness in the writer as would have done wonders at Bunker’s Hill or Marathon. Where there is the collected eye, there will not fail the effective hand;
One tap of the drum sets the political and moral harmonies all ajar. His ethics may well bear comparison with the priest’s.… When Bravery first grew afraid and went to war, it took music along with it.… The brave warrior must have harmony if not melody at any sacrifice.… All sounds, and more than all silence, do fife and drum for us.… To the sensitive soul, The universe has its own fixed measure, which is its measure also, and as a regular pulse is inseparable from a healthy body, so is its healthiness dependent on the regularity of its rhythm. In all sounds the soul recognizes its own rhythm, and seeks to express its sympathy by a correspondent movement of the limbs. When the body marches to the measure of the soul, then is true courage and invincible strength. The coward would reduce this thrilling sphere music to a universal wail — this melodious chant to a nasal cant. He thinks to conciliate all hostile influences by compelling his neighborhood into a partial concord with himself, but his music is no better than a jingle which is akin to a jar — jars regularly recurring.… But the brave man, without drum or trumpet, compels concord every where every where by the universality and tunefulness of his soul. “Take a metallic plate” says Coleridge, “and strew sand on it; sound a harmonic chord over the sand, and the grains will whirl about in circles, and other geometrical figures, all, as it were, depending on some point relatively at rest. Sound a discord, and every grain will whisk about without any order at all, in no figures, and with no points of rest.” The brave man is such a point of relative rest, over which the soul sounds ever a harmonic chord.
December: It was a conceit of Plutarch, accounting for the preferences given to signs observed on the left hand, that men may have thought “things terrestrial and mortal directly over against heavenly and divine things, and do conjecture that the things which to us are on the left hand, the gods send down from their right hand.” If we are not blind, we shall see how a right hand is stretched over all, as well the unlucky as lucky, and that the ordering soul is only right-handed, distributing with one palm all our fates.
Men have made war from a deeper instinct than peace. War is but the compelling of peace. When the world is declared under martial law, every Esau retakes his birthright, and what there is in him does not fail to appear. He wipes off all old scores and commences a new account. The world is interested to know how any soul will demean itself in so novel a position. But when war too, like commerce and husbandry, gets to be a routine, and men go about it as indented apprentices, the hero degenerates into a marine, and the standing army into a standing jest.
December: Music is either a sedative or a tonic to the soul. I read that “Plato thinks the gods never gave men music, the science of melody and harmony, for mere delectation or to tickle the ear; but that the discordant parts of the circulations and beauteous fabric of the soul, and that of it that roves about the body, and many times, for want of tune and air, breaks forth into many extravagances and excesses, might be sweetly recalled and artfully wound up to their former consent and agreement.’”
By dint of wind and stringed instruments the coward endeavors to put the best face on the matter, –whistles to keep his courage up.
There are some brave traits related by Plutarch; e. g.: “Homer acquaints us how Ajax, being to engage in a single combat with Hector, bade the Grecians pray to the gods for him; and while they were at their devotions, he was putting on his armor.” On another occasion, a storm arises, “which as soon as the pilot sees, he falls to his prayers, and invokes his HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 tutelar dæmons, but neglects not in the meantime to hold to the rudder and let down the main yard.”195
195. Waldo Emerson had in his library the 1822 edition in 8 volumes of PLUTARCH’S LIVES. TR. FROM THE ORIGINAL GREEK, WITH NOTES CRITICAL AND A LIFE OF PLUTARCH BY JOHN LANGHORNE AND WILLIAM LANGHORNE, NEW ED., WITH CORRECTIONS AND ADDITIONS... (New York: Samuel Campbell). Henry Thoreau himself had but a one-volume abridgment, perhaps the following one: PLUTARCH’S LIVES
Thoreau also had available to him in Emerson’s library the 5-volume 1718 edition of PLUTARCH’S MORALS: TRANſLATED FROM THE GREEK BY SEVERAL HANDS, THE FIFTH EDITION CORRECTED AND AMENDED (London: Printed for William Taylor, at the Ship in Paternoſter-Row). PLUTARCH’S MORALS, I PLUTARCH’S MORALS, II PLUTARCH’S MORALS, III PLUTARCH’S MORALS, IV PLUTARCH’S MORALS, V HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 December: On St. Helena, of the £31,645 2s 0d that the government had paid out in “emancipation loans” a total of £28,694 13s 1d, which is to say, 91% of the amount lent, remained still unpaid and was at this point taken off the books, forgiven.196
In the ongoing effort to eliminate human slavery from the world by exploring various ways in which white people might more readily do without slaves without in any way inconveniencing themselves, David Lee Child SWEETS won a premium of $100 from the Massachusetts Agricultural Society for his beet sweetener. The Sugar Beet WITHOUT Company again guaranteed his salary and expenses. Lydia Maria Child’s father Convers Francis agreed to SLAVERY move to Northampton and live with them and thus help with expenses.
A world that obtained its sweetness out of sugar beets grown by free farmers would not need to have slavers arriving every month or so from Africa, with new crops of black slaves to use up in the sugar cane fields. There would be no need for a negrero such as the Alexander, master Hill, flying the Stars and Stripes on its one and only known Middle Passage, which vessel of US registry had sailed out of Principe during October 1839 and was at this point arriving in Cuban waters. There would be no need for the Portuguese negreros either, slave ships such as the Maria Segundo, master Figuera, on one of its ten-count-’em-ten known Middle Passage voyages, Mocambique with a cargo of 580 enslaved Africans, presently arriving at a port of Cuba. There would be no need for a negrero such as the Flor de’ Loanda, master J.J. Lopez, on one of its five known Middle Passage voyages, which had sailed out of the Congo River with a cargo of 320 enslaved Africans and was presently arriving at the port of Macae, Brazil. There would be no need for a negrero such as the Felicidade, master J. de Almeida, on one of its nine known Middle Passage voyages, which had sailed out of Angola and was presently arriving at a port of Cuba. Well, this does go on and on, doesn’t it? In a world of economic justice there would be no need for a negrero such as the Idalia, flying the Portuguese flag, under its master J. Romeiro, which had sailed out of Angola during September 1839 on its one and only known Middle Passage, and was at this point delivering its cargo of 244 enslaved Africans into the barracoon at the port of Ponta Negra, Brazil. There would be no need for a negrero such as the Ligeiro, master unknown, on one of its four known Middle Passage voyages, out of Benguela with a cargo of 321 enslaved Africans, presently arriving at the port of Paranagua, Brazil. There would be no need for a negrero such as the Animo Grande, master F. Silveira, on its one and only known Middle Passage, which had sailed out of Quelimane during October 1839 with a cargo of 590 enslaved Africans and was presently arriving at Campos, Brazil. There would be no need for a negrero such as the Aucorinha, master J. F. Silveira, on its one and only known Middle Passage, which had sailed out of Angola during November 1839 with a cargo of 280 enslaved Africans, and was presently arriving at the port
196. You wouldn’t suppose this would fall under the rubric REPARATIONS, would you? HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 of Sao Sebastiao, Brazil. There would be no need for a negrero such as the General Cabreira, master J.P. de A. Kansia, on one of its five known Middle Passage voyages, which had sailed out of Angola with a cargo of 127 enslaved Africans, and was presently arriving at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. There would be no need for a negrero such as the Doze de Outubro, master J.F. da Cruz, on one of its five known Middle Passage voyages, which had sailed out of Angola during November 1839 with a cargo of 263 enslaved Africans, and was presently arriving at the port of Ilha Grande, Brazil. There would be no need for a negrero such as the Fortuna de Africa, master J.A. Passagem, on one of its three known Middle Passage voyages, which had sailed out of Quelimane, and was presently off-loading its cargo of 429 enslaved Africans into the barracoon at the port of Macae, Brazil. A world of economic justice would be a sweet world indeed. Sometimes David and Maria dreamed of this. They were dedicating their lives in Northampton to make it be so. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE
December: The Reverend Samuel Ringgold Ward was transferred to the service of the New York Anti-slavery Society: I had the unspeakable pleasure of making the acquaintance of some of its most distinguished members and officers, and, at the same time, of avoiding official connection with the quarrels which divided the Anti-Slavery Society in 1840, and the subsequent dissensions among them. This same December, 1839, was eventful as the month in which I became personally acquainted with Hon. Gerrit Smith, Rev. Beriah Green, and William Goodell, Esq. — three men whose peers are not to be found in New York or any other State. Gerrit Smith had not then been sent to Congress, but he had shown himself every way qualified for the highest seat in any legislature, for the highest office in the gift of any people. Not that office would adorn or ennoble him, but that, in office HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 as everywhere else, the majestic dignity of his mien, the easy, graceful perfection of his manners, his highly cultivated intellect, his rich and varied learning, his profoundly instructive conversation, his princely munificence, the natural stream springing in and flowing from a most benevolent heart — and, above all, his sweet, childlike, simple, earnest, constant piety, pervading his whole life and sparkling in all he says or does — these traits would have shed lustre upon any office, and have made their possessor the most admired and most attractive as they make him one of the very best of men. In spite of all that was said of this gentleman by his enemies during his short career in Congress, fourteen years after the time I speak of, the very bitterest of his foes — or, what is tantamount, the falsest of his professed friends — were obliged to acknowledge him to be one of the noblest of earth’s noble sons.... The Rev. Beriah Green, President of Oneida Institute (the alma mater of several of my dear schoolfellows, among them Henry Highland Garnet and Alexander Crummell), was among the acquaintances I had the privilege of making in 1839. Few clergymen, of any denomination, in any country, equal the profound, the learned, the original Beriah Green. His love for humanity, especially the poorest of the poor, is of the most ardent type. Upon its altar he will lay salary, name, place, reputation, not only, but submit to all manner of abuse and misrepresentation, and toil at any kind of hard labour, “for dear humanity’s sake,” to use his own beautiful, expressive, emphatic phrase. Such was this devoted philanthropist, sixteen years ago; such is he now, in spite of increasing years and undiminished sacrifices. I never knew a person who put a higher estimate upon simple manhood, and who relied upon the simple truth more fully, than he. In argument, in analyzing principles, in applying metaphysical tests, I never saw nor read of his equal.... William Goodell, then the editor of the “Friend of Man,” differs somewhat from both of his contemporaries, but he is a great man in all that makes a man truly great. He has not the eloquence of Mr. Smith, nor, technically speaking, the metaphysical acumen and power of Mr. Green; but for pure, sound, strong logic — for clear, consecutive reasoning — for the keen ability to detect a fallacy, a sophism, a tendency to defect or unsoundness — for a downright refinement and sublimation, as well as an acute and well tempered use, of common sense — William Goodell has not his superior, if his equal, among all whom I have met on either side of the Atlantic. If, then, these gentlemen differ in taste, education, former pursuits, habits of thought, and intellectual character, as doubtless they do, they agree in one thing — the earnest, simple devotion of the entire soul to the love of God and the love of man. To have formed the acquaintance of these three personages, to work under their advice and direction, to acquire their friendship, and to be unconscious of any diminution of it for sixteen years, was and is, to me, a priceless privilege. This is the best apology I can offer, if indeed any is needed, for occupying so much of these pages in speaking of them. To know them is to love them; and it is among the most pleasing of one’s anticipations of the happiness of the future state, that eternity will be enjoyed in such excellent association. Is it not one of the highest proofs of the power of divine grace, that HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 it can and does furnish such specimens of redeemed man, in the midst of a generation however wicked and perverse? Is it not an earnest of God’s favour to the anti-slavery cause, that he calls into labour and sacrifice gifts so sound, talent so exalted, intellects so cultivated, piety so Christlike?
December: In Henry Thoreau’s journal for this month we find an indication that he had at least a passing familiarity with James Boswell on Dr. Samuel Johnson:
December: If his fortune deserts him, the brave man in pity still abides by her. Samuel Johnson and his friend Savage, compelled by poverty to pass the night in the streets, resolve that they will stand by their country.
December: During this month the brothers John Thoreau, Jr. and Henry Thoreau, and Miss Prudence Ward from the Thoreau boardinghouse in Concord, visited Miss Ellen Devereux Sewall in Scituate, Massachusetts. Henry sent to Miss Ellen’s father the Reverend Edmund Quincy Sewall, Sr. as a Christmas present Jones Very’s new volume of poems, and John sent to Miss Ellen herself some opals, and to Ellen’s little brother Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr. some books. Afterward, during this month, Henry also sent to Miss Ellen some of his own poems, along with the counsel that she refuse the use of tea and coffee.
December: The Romans “made Fortune surname to Fortitude,” for fortitude is that alchemy that turns all things to good fortune. The man of fortitude, whom the Latins called fortis, is no other than that lucky person whom fors favors, or vir summae fortis. If we will, every bark may “carry Cæsar and Cæsar’s fortune.” The brave man stays at home. For an impenetrable shield, stand inside yourself; he was an arrant coward who first made shields of brass. For armor of proof, mea virtute me involvo (I wrap myself in my virtue);197
“Tumble me down, and I will sit Upon my ruins, smiling yet.”198 197. This is a reference to Horace that Henry Thoreau would insert into his “The Service,” rejected during his lifetime but eventually to be published in 1902: “THE SERVICE” IN 1902 Thoreau had the following volumes of Horace’s variorum writings in his personal library: HORACE’S OPERA HORACE’S OPERA HORACE’S OPERA HORACE’S OPERA HORACE’S OPERA HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
The bravest deed, which for the most part is left quite out of history, which alone wants the staleness of a deed done and the uncertainty of a deed doing, is the life of a great man. To perform exploits is to be temporarily bold, as becomes a courage that ebbs and flows, the soul quite vanquished by its own deed subsiding into indifference and cowardice: but the exploit of a brave life consists in its momentary completeness.
By dint of wind and stringed instruments the coward endeavours to put the best face on the matter — whistles to keep his courage up.
December 1, Sunday: Nathaniel Hawthorne declined a free ticket to Waldo Emerson’s current Boston lecture series, writing in a note to his wife Sophia that he had never profited by attending lectures and that his evenings were very precious to him.
December 2, Monday: Opening of the 1st (long) session of the 26th US Congress. There were about 126 Democrats and about 116 Whigs — depending upon how one counted the contestants of the New Jersey election the results of which were in dispute.
December 2,: A rare landscape immediately suggests a suitable inhabitant, whose breath shall be its wind, whose mood its seasons, and to whom it will always be fair. To be chafed and worried, and not as serene as Nature, does not become one whose nature is as steadfast as she. We do all stand in the front ranks of the battle every moment of our lives; where there is a brave man there is the thickest of the fight, there the post of honor. Not he who procures a substitute to go to Florida is exempt from service; he gathers his laurels in another field. Waterloo is not the only battle-ground: as many and fatal guns are pointed at my breast now as are contained in the English arsenals.
December 3, Tuesday: Abraham Lincoln was admitted to practice before the United States Circuit Court for central and eastern Illinois. (It was in about this timeframe that, at a dance, the tall, young, upwardly mobile attorney was first meeting a handsome 21-year-old, Mary Todd, most definitely eligible and socially of a higher class than himself.)
King Frederik VI of Denmark died and was succeeded by his nephew Christian VIII.
198. Robert Herrick’s poem “To Fortune.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 December 4, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson to his journal:
In Boston ... I read the first lecture of my course on the Present Age; with the old experience that when it was done, & the time had come to read it, I was then first ready to begin to write.
December 5, Thursday: George Armstrong Custer was born.
Charles Gounod left Paris for his “Prix de Rome” year in Rome.
December 6, Friday: An advertisement in the local gazette:
On the coast of South China, Imperial Commissioner Lin Tse-hsü ended trade with Great Britain “forever.”
December 7, Saturday: Horace Greeley’s New-Yorker magazine featured an article on “Remarkable Suicides.”
December 14, Saturday: Angelina Emily Grimké Weld gave birth to Charles Stuart Faucheraud Weld.199 THEODORE DWIGHT WELD
Edward “Ned” William Hooper was born in Boston to Dr. Robert William Hooper and Mrs. Ellen Sturgis Hooper.200
Friedrich Wieck filed an 11-page appeal with the court, attacking both his daughter Clara Wieck and her suitor Robert Schumann. He called Schumann incompetent as a musician, composer, and editor, averred that he had lied about his finances, that he was vain and egotistical, that he drank to excess, and that he only wants to get married with his musician daughter so he could mooch off her career. His nastiest allegation against his daughter was that she was incompetent to manage a home.
199. It would appear, from materials on the Internet, that this Weld/Grimké union would also produce a daughter who would marry with a man who was the product of a white man and a black woman slave and their union would in 1880 create a great-niece biracial child Angelina Weld Grimké who would spend her life as an English teacher and writer: At the age of 16 she would write to another girl that if she weren’t too young, she would ask that girl to be her wife: “How my brain whirls, how my pulse leaps with joy and madness when I think of those two words, ‘my wife’.” She is perhaps best known for apparent lesbianism and for her play “Rachel” about an African-American woman who rejects marriage and motherhood and refuses to produce children for white society to torment. 200. Ned would get married with Fanny Hudson Chapin and become a professor and treasurer of Harvard University. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
December 16, Monday: After doing long battle over the New Jersey delegation and over the speakership of the House of Representatives, Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts rose and declared “I will put the question,” and Robert T.M. Hunter, an Independent from Virginia, was made Speaker.
December 18, Wednesday: All parties in the Robert Schumann/Friedrich Wieck case appeared before a Leipzig court of appeal. Wieck made such a scene that the president of the court needed to order him to be silent. Judgement was reserved until January 4th.
Franz Liszt arrived in Pressburg (Bratislava), seat of the Hungarian Diet, the initial stop in what would become his triumphal return to Hungary.
The new American Statistical Society, in which Lemuel Shattuck was a mover and shaker, on this day elected a president, two vice presidents, a recording secretary, a home secretary, a foreign secretary, and nine counselors. Richard Fletcher would serve as president.
In New-York Dr. John William Draper, working with Samuel F.B. Morse and the new “Daguerreotype” method Morse has brought back from France, made the first US celestial photograph — one of the moon. ASTRONOMY
December 19, Thursday: Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka petitioned Tsar Nikolai I to release him from his position as Imperial Kapellmeister “because of ill health ... and domestic disorders....”
Franz Liszt played a matinee concert in Pressburg (Bratislava). “Enthusiasm impossible to describe.” As an encore, he played his arrangement of the Rakoczy March, a melody banned by the Austrians, and drove the audience into a patriotic frenzy.
December 21, Saturday: A negrero flying the US flag, the Dido, master Phillip, which had sailed out of Onim on the first of its two known Middle Passage voyages on November 23, 1839, on this day was arriving at Bahia, Brazil. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE RACE SLAVERY HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 December 21, Saturday: Using a metaphor of a legislature passing a temperance law while by its drunkenness promoting drunkenness, Nathaniel Peabody Rogers published the following paragraph in Concord, New Hampshire’s anti-slavery paper Herald of Freedom:
Some of our temperance friends are in love with legislative reform in this state, in this behalf. We are decidedly opposed to it. It is an illegitimate mode of reform, and is, we believe, resorted to by those clergymen and politicians, and other great men, who are afraid of the effect of moral agitation upon their influential positions in community. We say, let every man sell as much rum and drink as much rum as he chooses, for all legislation. If we can’t stop drunkenness without the paltry aid of our state house, let it go on. It is a less evil than sumptuary legislation, — and a legislative reformation would be good for nothing, if it could be effected. It would be a totally unprincipled reformation. And as much as we loathe drunkenness, we had as lief witness any bar-room scene we ever saw, as some scenes enacted at our stone state house. Why, we have to keep the legislature itself, sober, in the very session time, by influence of the Temperance society. Stop that influence, and the legislative session would be a time of general drunkenness, gambling and debauchery, wherever the legislature should hold its sittings. And is the country to look to legislation for the preservation of its morals! We would as soon look to the general muster, as the general court. We say this with all deference to our public servants, as they call themselves when they want our votes. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 December 22, Sunday: During a storm at sea, the brig Pocahontas, out of Cadiz bound for Newburyport, was swept so close to White Island in the Isles of Shoals that the family of the lighthouse keeper there was able to hear its signal gun being fired. It was blown on, its sails in rags and its ropes a tangle, to its destruction on a sandbar off Plum Island, with the loss of all aboard.
Since the gale had been so entirely unexpected, the light on the tower on Plum Island was not being manned. The brig Richmond Packet also went aground, presumably for lack of this warning. The wife of its skipper HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 would drown as attempts were being made to get her ashore through the surf.
During this gale 41 of the 130 vessels in Newburyport harbor were damaged.
On December 15th, 22d/23d, and 27th-28th, three successive northeasters battered the New England coast and buried its interior in deep snow. In the first of these storms, in Gloucester Harbor alone, 50 vessels were wrecked and many lives were lost. The third of these gales would be very severe in Boston, and on Cape Cod and on the islands. Inland, the snow cover was increased to 36 inches. Losses would exceed $1,000,000. A descriptive pamphlet entitled “Awful Calamities” would sell out in several editions. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 December 23, Monday: Franz Liszt arrived in Pest from Pressburg (Bratislava) in the carriage of Count Casimir Esterhazy, in the company of several Hungarian noblemen.
The 2d of the three great hurricanes of 1839.
The schooner Deposit out of Belfast ME went aground near the Ipswich Light at Plumb Island near midnight.
Unable to make it to shore through the surf and through the waves washing over the vessel, the crew climbed into the rigging and began to die of exposure. The next dawn two men made it out to the vessel, almost losing their lives in the process, but the only person they managed to save besides themselves, and two sailors who were floating in to shore on pieces of wreckage, was the skipper’s wife. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839
December 24, Tuesday: President Martin Van Buren addressed the federal Congress. “It will be seen by the report of the Secretary of the navy respecting the disposition of our ships of war, that it has been deemed necessary to station a competent force on the coast of Africa, to prevent a fraudulent use of our flag by foreigners. “Recent experience has shown that the provisions in our existing laws which relate to the sale and transfer of American vessels while abroad, are extremely defective. Advantage has been taken of these defects to give to vessels wholly belonging to foreigners, and navigating the ocean, an apparent American ownership. This character has been so well simulated as to afford them comparative security in prosecuting the slave trade, a traffic emphatically denounced in our statutes, regarded with abhorrence by our citizens, and of which the effectual suppression is nowhere more sincerely desired than in the United States. These circumstances make it proper to recommend to your early attention a careful revision of these laws, so that ... the integrity and honor of our flag may be carefully preserved.” HOUSE JOURNAL, 26th Congress, 1st session, pages 117-8. W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: The enhanced price of slaves throughout the American slave market, brought about by the new industrial development and the laws against the slave-trade, was the irresistible temptation that drew American capital and enterprise into that traffic. In the United States, in spite of the large interstate traffic, the average price of slaves rose from about $325 in 1840, to $360 in 1850, and to $500 in 1860.201 Brazil and Cuba offered similar inducements to smugglers, and the American flag was ready to protect such pirates. As a result, the American slave-trade finally came to be carried on principally by United States capital, in United States ships, officered by United States citizens, and under the United States flag. Executive reports repeatedly acknowledged this fact. In 1839 “a careful revision of these laws” is recommended by the President, in order that “the integrity and honor of our flag may be carefully preserved.”202 In June, 1841, the President declares: “There is reason to believe that the traffic is on the increase,” and advocates “vigorous efforts.”203 His message in December of the same year acknowledges: “That the American flag is grossly abused by the abandoned and profligate of other nations is but too probable.”204 The special message of 1845 explains at length that “it would seem” that a regular policy of evading the laws is carried on: American vessels with the knowledge of the owners are chartered by notorious slave dealers in Brazil, aided by English capitalists, with this intent.205 The message of 1849 “earnestly” invites the attention of Congress “to an amendment of our existing laws relating to the African slave-trade, with a view to the effectual suppression of that barbarous traffic. It is not to be denied,” continues the message, “that this trade is still, in part, carried on by means of vessels built in the United States, and owned or navigated by some of our 201. Cf. United States census reports; and Olmsted, COTTON KINGDOM. 202. HOUSE JOURNAL, 26th Congress, 1st session, page 118. 203. HOUSE JOURNAL, 27th Congress, 1st session, pages 31, 184. 204. HOUSE JOURNAL, 27th Congress, 2d session, pages 14, 15, 86, 113. 205. SENATE JOURNAL, 28th Congress, 2d session, pages 191, 227. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 citizens.”206 Governor Buchanan of Liberia reported in 1839: “The chief obstacle to the success of the very active measures pursued by the British government for the suppression of the slave-trade on the coast, is the American flag. Never was the proud banner of freedom so extensively used by those pirates upon liberty and humanity, as at this season.”207 One well-known American slaver was boarded fifteen times and twice taken into port, but always escaped by means of her papers.208 Even American officers report that the English are doing all they can, but that the American flag protects the trade.209 The evidence which literally poured in from our consuls and ministers at Brazil adds to the story of the guilt of the United States.210 It was proven that the participation of United States citizens in the trade was large and systematic. One of the most notorious slave merchants of Brazil said: “I am worried by the Americans, who insist upon my hiring their vessels for slave-trade.”211 Minister Proffit stated, in 1844, that the “slave-trade is almost entirely carried on under our flag, in American-built vessels.”212 So, too, in Cuba: the British commissioners affirm that American citizens were openly engaged in the traffic; vessels arrived undisguised at Havana from the United States, and cleared for Africa as slavers after an alleged sale.213 The American consul, Trist, was proven to have consciously or unconsciously aided this trade by the issuance of blank clearance papers.214 The presence of American capital in these enterprises, and the connivance of the authorities, were proven in many cases and known in scores. In 1837 the English government informed the United States that from the papers of a captured slaver it appeared that the notorious slave-trading firm, Blanco and Carballo of Havana, who owned the vessel, had correspondents in the United States: “at Baltimore, Messrs. Peter Harmony and Co., in New York, Robert Barry, Esq.”215 The slaver “Martha” of New York, captured by the “Perry,” contained among her papers curious revelations of the guilt of persons in America who were little suspected.216 The slaver “Prova,” which was allowed to lie in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, and refit, was afterwards captured with two hundred and twenty-five slaves on board.217 The real reason that prevented many belligerent Congressmen from pressing certain search claims against England lay in the fact that the unjustifiable detentions had unfortunately revealed so much American guilt that it was deemed
206. HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENTS, 31st Congress, 1st session, III. pt. I. No. 5, page 7. 207. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, page 152. 208. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, pages 152-3. 209. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, page 241. 210. Cf. e.g. HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 28th Congress, 2d session, IV. pt. I. No. 148; 29th Congress, 1st session, III. No. 43; HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENTS, 30th Congress, 2d session, VII. No. 61; SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENTS, 30th Congress, 1st session, IV. No. 28; 31st Congress, 2d session, II. No. 6; 33d Congress, 1st session, VIII. No. 47. 211. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, page 218. 212. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, page 221. 213. Palmerston to Stevenson: HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115, page 5. In 1836 five such slavers were known to have cleared; in 1837, eleven; in 1838, nineteen; and in 1839, twenty-three: HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115, pages 220-1. 214. PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1839, Volume XLIX., SLAVE TRADE, class A, Further Series, pages 58-9; class B, Further Series, page 110; class D, Further Series, page 25. Trist pleaded ignorance of the law: Trist to Forsyth, HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115. 215. HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115. 216. Foote, AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN FLAG, page 290. 217. HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115, pages 121, 163-6. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 wiser to let the matter end in talk. For instance, in 1850 Congress demanded information as to illegal searches, and President Fillmore’s report showed the uncomfortable fact that, of the ten American ships wrongly detained by English men-of- war, nine were proven red-handed slavers.218 The consul at Havana reported, in 1836, that whole cargoes of slaves fresh from Africa were being daily shipped to Texas in American vessels, that 1,000 had been sent within a few months, that the rate was increasing, and that many of these slaves “can scarcely fail to find their way into the United States.” Moreover, the consul acknowledged that ships frequently cleared for the United States in ballast, taking on a cargo at some secret point.219 When with these facts we consider the law facilitating “recovery” of slaves from Texas,220 the repeated refusals to regulate the Texan trade, and the shelving of a proposed congressional investigation into these matters,221 conjecture becomes a practical certainty. It was estimated in 1838 that 15,000 Africans were annually taken to Texas, and “there are even grounds for suspicion that there are other places ... where slaves are introduced.”222 Between 1847 and 1853 the slave smuggler Drake had a slave depot in the Gulf, where sometimes as many as 1,600 Negroes were on hand, and the owners were continually importing and shipping. “The joint-stock company,” writes this smuggler, “was a very extensive one, and connected with leading American and Spanish mercantile houses. Our island223 was visited almost weekly, by agents from Cuba, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, and New Orleans.... The seasoned and instructed slaves were taken to Texas, or Florida, overland, and to Cuba, in sailing-boats. As no squad contained more than half a dozen, no difficulty was found in posting them to the United States, without discovery, and generally without suspicion.... The Bay Island plantation sent ventures weekly to the Florida Keys. Slaves were taken into the great American swamps, and there kept till wanted for the market. Hundreds were sold as captured runaways from the Florida wilderness. We had agents in every slave State; and our coasters were built in Maine, and came out with lumber. I could tell curious stories ... of this business of smuggling Bozal negroes into the United States. It is growing more profitable every year, and if you should hang all the Yankee merchants engaged in it, hundreds would fill their places.”224 Inherent probability and concurrent testimony confirm the substantial truth of such confessions. For instance, one traveller discovers on a Southern plantation Negroes who can speak no English.225 The careful reports of the Quakers “apprehend that many [slaves] are also introduced into the United States.”226 Governor Mathew of the Bahama Islands 218. SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENTS, 31st Congress, 1st session, XIV No. 66. 219. Trist to Forsyth: HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115. “The business of supplying the United States with Africans from this island is one that must necessarily exist,” because “slaves are a hundred per cent, or more, higher in the United States than in Cuba,” and this profit “is a temptation which it is not in human nature as modified by American institutions to withstand”: HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 2d session, V. No. 115. 220. STATUTES AT LARGE, V. 674. 221. Cf. STATUTES AT LARGE, V., page 157, note 1. 222. Buxton, THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE AND ITS REMEDY, pages 44-5. Cf. 2D REPORT OF THE LONDON AFRICAN SOCIETY, page 22. 223. I.e., Bay Island in the Gulf of Mexico, near the coast of Honduras. 224. REVELATIONS OF A SLAVE SMUGGLER, page 98. 225. Mr. H. Moulton in SLAVERY AS IT IS, page 140; cited in FACTS AND OBSERVATIONS ON THE SLAVE TRADE (Friends’ ed. 1841), page 8. 226. In a memorial to Congress, 1840: HOUSE DOCUMENTS, 26th Congress, 1st session, VI. No. 211. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 reports that “in more than one instance, Bahama vessels with coloured crews have been purposely wrecked on the coast of Florida, and the crews forcibly sold.” This was brought to the notice of the United States authorities, but the district attorney of Florida could furnish no information.227 Such was the state of the slave-trade in 1850, on the threshold of the critical decade which by a herculean effort was destined finally to suppress it.
Christmas: Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck spent Christmas together at her mother’s house in Berlin.
The dashing Thoreau brothers paid a visit to the Sewalls of Scituate. JOHN THOREAU, JR.
December 30, Monday: Representative Henry A. Wise of Virginia (that century’s wise-ass political provocateur and loudmouth, as Donald Trump is this century’s) moved to suspend the rules of the House of Representatives in order to enact a permanent gag rule. This would kick off almost a month of speeches and struggles in regard to the institution of human enslavement in America, and over the reception of petitions in regard to the abolition of that institution.
Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka, depressed over his break with his wife, was granted release from the position of Imperial Kapellmeister, St. Petersburg (he’d been in the post long enough to retire with the rank of collegiate assessor).
December 31, Tuesday: William Cranch Bond made his initial astronomical observations in Cambridge. Pending funds for construction, the cupola of the existing Richard Henry Dana, Sr. house228 would have to serve until 1844 as the Harvard Observatory. ASTRONOMY
A bequest of $250,000 having been left at the death of John Lowell, Jr. in 1836, on this day the Honorable Edward Everett, LL.D. delivered the inaugural lecture crediting the wisdom of the founder of “The Lowell Institute.”
December 31, Tuesday: Ka-ba of the La Amistad died. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE RACE SLAVERY
227. BRITISH AND FOREIGN STATE PAPERS, 1845-6, pages 883, 968, 989-90. The governor wrote in reply: “The United States, if properly served by their law officers in the Floridas, will not experience any difficulty in obtaining the requisite knowledge of these illegal transactions, which, I have reason to believe, were the subject of common notoriety in the neighbourhood where they occurred, and of boast on the part of those concerned in them”: BRITISH AND FOREIGN STATE PAPERS, 1845-6, page 990. 228. At that time the Dana house was located where Lamont Library is now located — not on Quincy Street where it is now. HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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 10, 2015 HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 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.
Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX
1839 1839 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
General Events of 1839 SPRING JANUARY FEBRUARY MARCH SUMMER APRIL MAY JUNE FALL JULY AUGUST SEPTEMBER WINTER OCTOBER NOVEMBER DECEMBER
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
GO ON TO EVENTS OF 1840