Reverend Timothy Dwight

THE REVEREND TIMOTHY DWIGHT

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

The People of Cape Cod: Rev. Timothy Dwight “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:REVEREND TIMOTHY DWIGHT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

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

REVEREND COTTON MATHER CHARLES I

CAPE COD: Early the next morning I walked into a fish-house near PEOPLE OF our hotel, where three or four men were engaged in trundling out CAPE COD the pickled fish on barrows, and spreading them to dry. They told me that a vessel had lately come in from the Banks with forty- four thousand codfish. Timothy Dwight says that, just before he arrived at Provincetown, “a schooner came in from the Great Bank with fifty-six thousand fish, about one thousand five hundred quintals, taken in a single voyage; the main deck being, on her return, eight inches under water in calm weather.” The cod in this fish-house, just out of the pickle, lay packed several feet deep, and three or four men stood on them in cowhide boots, pitching them on to the barrows with an instrument which had a single iron point. One young man, who chewed tobacco, spat on the fish repeatedly. Well, sir, thought I, when that older man sees you he will speak to you. But presently I saw the older man do the same thing. It reminded me of the figs of Smyrna. “How long does it take to cure these fish?” I asked. “Two good drying days, sir,” was the answer.

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THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:REVEREND TIMOTHY DWIGHT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

CAPE COD: In Dwight’s Travels in New England it is stated that the PEOPLE OF inhabitants of Truro were formerly regularly warned under the CAPE COD authority of law in the month of April yearly, to plant beach- grass, as elsewhere they are warned to repair the highways. They dug up the grass in bunches, which were afterward divided into several smaller ones, and set about three feet apart, in rows, so arranged as to break joints and obstruct the passage of the wind. It spread itself rapidly, the weight of the seeds when ripe bending the heads of the grass, and so dropping directly by its side and vegetating there. In this way, for instance, they built up again that part of the Cape between Truro and Provincetown where the sea broke over in the last century. They have now a public road near there, made by laying sods, which were full of roots, bottom upward and close together on the sand, double in the middle of the track, then spreading brush evenly over the sand on each side for half a dozen feet, planting beach-grass on the banks in regular rows, as above described, and sticking a fence of brush against the hollows.

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THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:REVEREND TIMOTHY DWIGHT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1752

May 14, Sunday: Timothy Dwight (IV) was born, a grandson of the Reverend Jonathan Edwards.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

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1772

September 9, Wednesday: Timothy Dwight offered, at his Yale College graduation, an address “A dissertation on the history, eloquence, and poetry of the Bible Delivered at the public commencement, at New-Haven,” in which the new minister proclaimed that the BIBLE was literature, differing from other literature in being the very highest.

THEOLOGY SCHOOLS Oh, Reverend Dwight, what a can of worms you open! If the BIBLE is literature, is it only literature? –does it not differ from other literature other than being the highest? –is it the very highest possible, or, swallow your tongue, may there be a higher literature which is yet to be understood? What is to prevent someone from coming along and offering a literature that is also the very highest, so that it constitutes competition for the BIBLE? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1775

The more devout and more racially unmixed of the Narragansett of Rhode Island went to the West in two moves, the first in 1775 to found Brothertown, New York and the second between 1783 and 1785 to join those already there, leaving their “monigs”1 behind to survive as best they might. (They would move again in the 1830s for similar reasons, and that community of Christian New Englanders would finally come to abide at Brothertown, Wisconsin.)2 The Reverent Timothy Dwight felt that “we” ought to “do good to this miserable people,” the Native Americans, and he held up the Stockbridge Indians of Massachusetts and the Brothertown Indians of the vicinity of Paris in New York State as emblems for imitation. He believed that the complexions of Indians and Negroes would “turn white” as their dispositions improved. However, he felt it was also quite important that dark people never be treated too well:3

The black population wherever it prevails instead of increasing the strength of this country only increases its weakness. Every black man in time of war would need a white man to watch him.

In the Reverend Samuel Peters’s A GENERAL HISTORY OF CONNECTICUT there appeared the following material dealing with an earlier shift in social convention, which at this point had come to its completion with the general abandonment of the practice that had been known as “bundling”: The Indians, who had this method of courtship when the English arrived among them, are the most chaste set of people in the world.... Bundling takes place only in the cold seasons of the year — the sofa in summer is more dangerous than the bed in winter. About 1756, Boston, Salem, Newport, and New York, resolving to be more polite than their ancestors, forbade their daughters bundling on the bed with any young men whatever, and introduced a sofa to render courtship more palatable and Turkish. In 1776 a clergyman from one of the polite towns went into the country, and preached against the unchristian custom of young men and maidens lying together on a bed.... [and received as response from the country people that] “experience has told us that city folks send more children into the country without fathers or mothers than are born among us. Therefore you see a sofa is more dangerous than a bed.”

1. Note well that this local term “monig” is not a pleasant one. Whether employed by a red person or by a white person, it is not only racist but also derogatory and offensive (it is a truncation of the description “more nigger than Indian”). It is a term used here in Rhode Island by racist Native Americans to describe other Native Americans with whom they do not wish to be associated, and by racist whites to describe people whom they consider to be “putting on as Indians when they ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of niggers with attitude.” The only appropriate use for such a term is as here, in the graphic depiction of the nastiness of the nasty attitude of anyone nasty enough to employ it. 2. The saga of those Christian pureblood Narragansett who moved toward the West is well beyond the scope of this database, but you could consult Thomas Commuck’s SKETCH OF THE BROTHERTOWN INDIANS in the COLLECTIONS OF THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN IV:291-298. 3. Hey, Rev, wait ’till it gets so dark you can’t see ’em ’less they are grinning at you! Scary, huh? HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:REVEREND TIMOTHY DWIGHT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1776

The English were pressing “hulks,” old unseaworthy hulls, into “temporary” service as floating prison annexes in the harbors of Woolwich, the Medway, and Portsmouth. (This practice would, actually, continue until 1858.)

Prior to this point, Americans had been buying their salt from foreign ports or boiling seawater in pans at an enormous cost in firewood. In this year John Sears figured out how to cause the rays of the sun to gradually concentrate salt along a series of linked shallow troughs of progressively stronger salinity, thus saving on the cost of firewood. (Perhaps this was just the region growing warmer, rather than a technological innovation.) The Reverend Timothy Dwight had the idea that working long hours in the hot sun and high humidity would be an excellent cure for a sinner’s soul: May not multitudes who habitually spend life in casual and parsimonious efforts to acquire a bare subsistence, interluded with long periods of sloth and drunkenness, become sober, diligent, and even virtuous, and be formed for usefulness and immortality? By the 1840s some 440 saltworks would be in operation in accordance with this principle along the shores of Cape Cod and Buzzards Bay, although exactly how much sobriety and virtuosity was being produced by all this unrelentingly unpleasant labor would have been rather hard to estimate.

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

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1780

May 19, Friday, mid-morning: As Friend John Greenleaf Whittier would later record it, this was “the famous Dark Day of New England,” which was “a physical puzzle for many years to our ancestors”:

’Twas on a May-day of the far old year Seventeen hundred eighty, that there fell Over the bloom and sweet life of the Spring, Over the fresh earth and the heaven of noon, A horror of great darkness, like the night....

For days the sun had been shining on the northeastern United States from New Jersey to Maine with a reddish hue out of a sky of dull yellow. At mid-morning on this day a blanket of darkness descended and the birds sang their evening songs and the cows began walking back to their barns. Noon was nearly as dark as night, and outdoor travel became difficult. New Haven’s Connecticut Journal reported that inside houses, candles were lit as if it were evening. Samuel Williams of Bradford, Connecticut would report that “In some places, the darkness was so great, that persons could not see to read common print in the open air.... The extent of this darkness was very remarkable.” The Reverend Timothy Dwight, Yale College president, would report that “It was the general opinion that the day of judgment was at hand.”

The followers of “Universal Friend” Jemimah Wilkinson, having been disappointed that the millennium had not appeared on April 1st, wondered whether this “Dark Day” might be the end, but again they were disappointed, and again they fell back and regrouped:

People were supposing that a biblical prophecy had come true and Judgement Day had arrived (Abanes, Richard. END-TIME VISIONS. NY: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998, page 217). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:REVEREND TIMOTHY DWIGHT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

The House of Representatives in Hartford, Connecticut adjourned on account of the darkness. At the urging of Colonel Abraham Davenport, however, the governor’s council continued its meeting: “Either the day of judgment is at hand or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for adjournment. If it is, I wish to be found in the line of my duty.”

The Reverend William Miller and others would not be able to resist seeing in such heavenly displays a fulfillment of words associated with Jesus Christ, “Immediately after the tribulation in those days shall the sun be darkened and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven and the powers of heaven shall be shaken” (MATTHEW 24:29). This darkening of the sun, combined with the stars falling in November 1833, would convince many devout believers that the second advent of Jesus was indeed near. HERE COME DA JUDGE!

From the town records of Ipswich we learn that:

Darkness came on like that of an eclipse. By 9 o’clock, A.M., persons could not see to weave. Candles were lighted to dine by. As the day began prematurely to put on the appearance of twilight, cattle lowed, and fowls went to roost. The darkness of the succeeding evening was almost palpable. Many feared and trembled, lest the end of all things had come. They alone are truly wise, who seek the Lord when the bow of his mercy is over them, as well as when they hear his thunders, and behold his lightnings.

From the diary of Phineas Sprague, as well as from many, many other sources, we can be assured that this day was indeed a quite unusual and memorable one:

This day was the most Remarkable day that ever my eyes beheld the air had bin so full of smoak to an uncommon degree So that wee could scairce see a mountain at two miles distance for 3 or 4 days Past till this day after Noon the smoak all went off to the South at sunset a very black bank of a cloud appeared in the south and west the Nex morning cloudey and thundered in the west about ten oclock it began to Rain and grew vere dark and at 12 was allmost as dark as Nite so that wee was obliged to lite our candels and Eate our dinner by candel lite at Noon day but between 1 and 2 oclock it grew lite again but in the Evening the cloud caim over us again the moon was about the full it was the darkest Nite that ever was seen by us in the world.

This atmospheric effect probably was caused by numerous forest fires in upstate New York and in Canada. In Boston the air was observed to smell like a “malt-house or coal-kiln,” and something resembling ashes settled on pools of rainwater. However, refer also to the date October 15, 1785 for a comparison volcanic phenomenon. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:REVEREND TIMOTHY DWIGHT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1783

The Reverend Timothy Dwight became the parson of Greenfield Hill near Fairfield, Connecticut, looking across to Long Island Sound, at a salary of $500.00 per year plus parsonage and 20 cords of firewood per year. He would remain at his post until 1798.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

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THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:REVEREND TIMOTHY DWIGHT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1794

In Selborne, England, Tortoise Timothy died. Investigation revealed that although she had been thought for some 60 years to be a male, since she had never laid an egg, actually she had been a solitary female, and that although the naturalist Reverend Gilbert White had presumed her to be from Virginia in America, actually she had been a Testudo ibera, and hence from Algeria in Africa. In any event you will be able to view her carapace in the British Museum of Natural History, where the sign cautiously reads “Died in Selborne in 1794, after an existence of about 54 years in England … formerly in the possession of the Rev. Gilbert White.”

In America, the Reverend Timothy Dwight offered a poem “Greenfield Hill.”

The poet was no known relation to Tortoise Timothy — despite the fact that this is very much the sort of effort that this tortoise might (under other circumstances) have composed:

http://narcissus.umd.edu:8080/eada/html/display.jsp?docs=dwight_greenfieldhill.xml&action=show HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:REVEREND TIMOTHY DWIGHT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1795

October: Thanks were sent to Governor Colonel Sir Robert Brooke, Captain Seale, and oh yeah, also, the guys of the St. Helena Corps, for the part they had played in securing victory for British forces in the capture of the Cape of Good Hope from the Dutch.

In the course of this month the Reverend Timothy Dwight would pass through Marlborough on his way through Concord. The following material is to be found in his TRAVELS, and also in his STATISTICAL ACCOUNT: Marlboro is an ancient settlement, begun in 1654, and incorporated in 1660. … Its surface is like that of the country last described. The soil is rich grazing land of the first quality rewarding abundantly the toil of the owners, and presenting to the eye of the traveler a continued succession of the deepest verdure. Great numbers of cattle, of the largest size and best quality, are fed on these rich pastures; and the large, well-built barns and good farmers’ houses are decisive indications of prosperity. This town is universally settled in plantations, except a small village on the road near to one of the churches. From Marlboro eastward, throughout a country extending to Piscataqua River on the north and to the counties of Bristol and Plymouth on the south, the barberry bush is spread, not universally, but in spots, and those often extensive. In some fields they occupy a sixth, fifth, and even a fourth of the surface. Neat farmers exterminate them, except from the sides of their stone enclosures. Here it is impossible to eradicate them, unless by removing the walls, for the roots pass under the walls and spring up so numerously as to make a regular and well- compacted hedge. It is altogether improbable therefore that they will ever be extirpated This bush is in New England generally believed to blast both wheat and rye. Its blossoms, which are very numerous and continue a considerable time, emit very copiously a pungent effluvium, believed to be so acrimonious as to injure essentially both these kinds of grain. Among other accounts intended to establish the truth of this opinion, I have heard the following A farmer on Long Island sowed a particular piece of ground with wheat every second year for near twenty years. On the southern limit of this field grew a single barberry bush. The southern winds prevailing at the season in which this bush was in bloom carried the effluvia, and afterwards the decayed blossoms, over a small breadth of this field to a considerable distance; and, wherever they fell, the wheat was blasted, while throughout the remainder of the field it was sound. This account I have from a respectable gentleman who received it from the farmer himself, a man of fair reputation. In Southboro, a township in the county of Worcester, a Mr. Johnson sowed with rye a field of new ground, or ground lately deforested. At the south end of this field also grew a single barberry bush. The grain was blasted throughout the whole breadth of the field, on a narrow tract commencing at the bush HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:REVEREND TIMOTHY DWIGHT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD and proceeding directly in the course and to the extent in which the blossoms were diffused by the wind.… As no part of the grain was blasted in either of these cases except that which lay in a narrow tract leeward of the barberry bushes, these facts appear to be decisive and to establish the correctness of the common opinion. Should the conclusion be admitted, we cannot wonder that wheat and rye should be blasted wherever these bushes abound. A laboring man attached to the family of Mr. Williams, our host in this town, informed me that in Mr. Williams’ garden a barberry bush grew in the wall a number of years;4 that during this period esculent roots, although frequently planted near it, never came to such a degree of perfection as to be fit for use; that such as grew at all appeared to be lean and shriveled, as if struggling with the influence of an unfriendly climate; that the wall was afterwards removed and the bush entirely eradicated; that in the first succeeding season such roots flourished perfectly well on the same spot and were of a good quality; and that, ever since, they had grown year by year to the same perfection. My informant added that the soil was very rich, and throughout every other part of the garden was always entirely suited to the growth of these vegetables, and that it was not more highly manured after the removal of the bush than before. This is the only instance of the kind within my knowledge. If there be no error in the account, it indicates that the barberry bush has an unfavorable influence on other vegetable productions besides wheat and rye.… In the year 1790, Marlboro contained 218 dwelling houses, and 1,554 inhabitants; in the year 1800, 239 dwelling houses, and 1,735 inhabitants; and in 1810, 1,674. From the year 1760 to 1795, thirty-five years, there were 726 deaths, and 1,672 births in this town. The average of the deaths is somewhat less than twenty-one annually; the average of births a small fraction less than forty-eight. The road from Marlboro to Concord passes through the skirts of Stow. The surface is a succession of gradual acclivities and flat valleys. The soil of the acclivities is loam, mixed with gravel, and moderately good. The valleys, or as they might with equal propriety be styled the plains, are sandy and lean. Among a considerable number of indifferent houses we saw a few good ones.

4.Capt. George Williams (1737-1813) of Marlboro ran Williams’ Tavern as well as his farm. A town selectman, he was evidently the kind host of the ailing Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, whose TRAVELS THROUGH THE UNITED STATES OF NORTH AMERICA … (trans. H. Neuman, London, 1799), II, 205, makes clear that Williams’ place was in Marlboro. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:REVEREND TIMOTHY DWIGHT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

October 1, Thursday: Beginning a series of journeys through New England towns which would occupy him into the year 1815, the Reverend Timothy Dwight passed through Concord, Massachusetts and conversed with the

Reverend Ezra Ripley in regard to the exceptional health of the citizenry:

The salubrity of Concord violates the most received medical theories concerning such diseases as are supposed to be generated by stagnant waters. I know of no stream which approaches nearer to a state of stagnation than Concord River. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:REVEREND TIMOTHY DWIGHT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD Dwight analyzed the stagnant-water situation in great detail:

Mr. Williams informed us that he knew no spot more healthy than the borders of this piece of water; particularly, that no endemic had ever prevailed here; that his own father, who had spent his life on this spot, and died between eighty and ninety years of age, had enjoyed the best health; and that there were, and generally had been, as many healthy and aged people in these houses as in any equal number of habitations within his knowledge. It has been commonly supposed that standing waters are insalubrious in countries subjected to such intense heat as that of a New England summer. The supposition, however, is almost, if not quite absolutely erroneous so far as New England is concerned. There is probably as great a number of small lakes and ponds in this country as in any of the same extent on the globe. After very extensive inquiries, I have been unable to find one, the margin of which is not healthy ground I speak not here of artificial ponds; these are often unhealthy. I speak of those which nature has formed, and all these appear to be perfectly salubrious. Within the township of Plymouth, which is very large, the number is uncommonly great; but they have never been known to produce any disagreeable effects. Decayed vegetables have been imagined to furnish an explanation of the insalubrity of stagnant waters. To some extent this opinion may be just. They cannot, I think, be ordinarily concerned in producing the fever and ague, because this disease is almost always experienced originally in the spring. Besides, vegetables decay in New England as well as elsewhere; and yet, eastward of the western ridge of the Green Mountains, the fever and ague, so far as I have been able to learn, is absolutely unknown, except in solitary instances in the neighborhood of two or three marshes within the township of Guilford. But I suppose vegetable putrefaction to be especially considered as the cause of autumnal diseases. That vegetable putrefaction may be an auxiliary cause of these evils may, I think, be rationally admitted. But that it is the sole, or even the principal cause may be fairly questioned. This putrefaction exists regularly every year; the diseases in any given place, rarely. The putrefaction exists throughout the whole country; the diseases, whenever they exist, are confined to a few particular spots Should it be said that stagnant waters are necessary to this effect, I answer that in the large tract of country which I have specified no such effect is produced by these waters, and that the diseases here prevail as often where no such waters exist as in their neighborhood; that they are found on plains, in valleys, on hills, and even on the highest inhabited mountains. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:REVEREND TIMOTHY DWIGHT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

A number of years since, I put a quantity of ground pepper into a tumbler of water, and a few days afterwards found a thin scum spread over the surface. Within a few days more, I perceived on examining this scum with a microscope that it exhibited an immense number of living animalcules. Two or three days after, examining the same scum again, I found not the least appearance of life. After another short period, the scum was replenished with living beings again, and after another became totally destitute of them. This alternate process continued until the water became so fetid as to forbid a further examination. The conclusion which I drew from these facts was that the first race of animalcules, having laid their eggs, died, and were succeeded in a short time by a second, and these by a third. The fetor which arose from the putrefaction of these ephemeral beings differed in one respect from that which is produced by the decay of larger animals. Although it was perceptible at a small distance only, and perhaps less loathsome than the smell of a corrupted carcass, it was far more suffocating. When the effluvia were received into the lungs, it seemed as if nature gave way and was preparing to sink under the impression. A pungency, entirely peculiar, accompanied the smell, and appeared to lessen the vis vita in a manner different from anything which I had ever experienced before. The scum which covered this pepper water was in appearance the same with that which in hot seasons is sometimes seen on standing waters, and abounds on those of marshes exposed to the sun. To the production, and still more to the sustenance of animalcules, vegetable putrefaction seems to be necessary, or at least concomitant: the nidus perhaps in which the animalculine existence is formed, or the pabulum by which it is supported. Whatever instrumentality vegetable putrefaction may have, I am inclined to suspect, for several reasons, than animalculine putrefaction is the immediate cause of those diseases, whatever they are, which are justly attributed to standing waters. It will, I believe, be found universally that no such disease is ever derived from any standing waters which are not to a considerable extent covered with a scum; and perhaps most, if not all, of those which have this covering will be found unhealthy. The New England lakes, so far as I have observed, are universally free even from the thinnest pellicle of this nature; are pure potable water; are supplied almost wholly by subjacent springs; and are, therefore, too cool, as well as too much agitated by winds, to permit ordinarily the existence of animalcules.... HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:REVEREND TIMOTHY DWIGHT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1801

April 29, Wednesday: During the visit of the Reverend Timothy Dwight with the Reverend Gideon Hawley on the reservation at Mashpee, Massachusetts in the previous October, the Reverend Hawley’s son James Hawley had been seriously ill. At this point, in a letter to the Reverend Dwight, the father mentioned that after this visit his son had survived only for an additional eight days.

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

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THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:REVEREND TIMOTHY DWIGHT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1802

September 21, Tuesday: The Reverend Gideon Hawley again wrote to his friend the Reverend Timothy Dwight. This letter also would be included in the Reverend Dwight’s TRAVELS IN NEW ENGLAND AND NEW YORK, published in 1823 in London.

On this evening, above the Volunteer Ground in North Audley Street, Grosvernor Square, London, Andrè- Jacques Garnerin made the world’s 1st actual parachute leap (previous parachute descents had been inside a balloon gondola rather than with the parachute strapped to the jumper’s body). The leap was from the gondola of a hydrogen balloon and he landed in a field near St Pancras. Garnerin’s wife Jeanne-Geneviève was his balloon pilot, and his niece Elisa would often fly and jump with him.

“One Captain Learned took his own life by Lodnum at Mr Williams’s Tavern.” LAUDANUM

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

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1807

Thomas Smith Grimké, one of Sarah Moore Grimké and Angelina Emily Grimké’s brothers, returned from Yale College as a convert to the Reverend Timothy Dwight’s brand of revivalism. His father Judge John Fauchereau Grimké insisted, however, that instead of studying for the ministry and making of himself an evangelist, his son needed to read for the law.

James Ellsworth De Kay matriculated at Yale (he would repeat his junior year but then fail to graduate).

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

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1817

January 10, Friday: The head and torso of the statue known then as “younger Memnon” arrived at Rosetta in the Nile delta.

The Reverend Timothy Dwight who had written about his visits to New England, and in particular, about his visit to Concord, by this point was president of Yale College, and was dying. At the turn of the nineteenth century the indefatigable regional traveler Timothy Dwight, who never mentioned Walden Pond, declared that “from the plains of Concord will henceforth be dated a change in human affairs” (TRAVELS IN NEW-ENGLAND AND NEW-YORK, ed. Barbara Miller Solomon [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969], I: 280). This unshakable faith in the centrality of the Concord battle to the historical and spiritual landscape of Concord is reflected in Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” and again in Thoreau’s WEEK but parodied in WALDEN’s dismissal of Fourth of July celebrations (WALDEN, pages 160-61) and its mock- heroic account of the battle of the ants (“there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this” [WALDEN, page 230]). Thoreau knew very well, as did Emerson when he saluted Concord’s “embattled farmers” (with just a faint trace of condescension, however?) that “the fight in Concord history” was mythically the great exemplum of American military valor generally. Whereas WEEK memorializes the Concord battle in a conventional way, WALDEN sets the tone for a counter-cultural definition of what counts as local sacred space. He said to Benjamin Silliman, Sr., Yale’s professor of Chemistry:

I do not seem to have any directions, except as to publication of books.

Professor Silliman has testified to us that he responded to this deathbed declaration with the question:

What manuscripts shall be published?

Whereupon the Reverend Dwight indicated that:

I should wish these travels of mine.

(Which is, of course, how it is that we have the above material as rendered in THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION by Lawrence Buell.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:REVEREND TIMOTHY DWIGHT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1821

Publication of the first two volumes of the Reverend Timothy Dwight’s TRAVELS IN NEW ENGLAND AND NEW YORK: DWIGHT’S TRAVELS, I DWIGHT’S TRAVELS, II

April 10, Friday, 1857: D.R.’s Shanty … The more characteristic books were Bradley’s Husbandry, Drake’s Indians, Barber’s Hist. Coll., Zimmermann on Solitude, Bigelow’s Plants of Boston, &c., Farmer’s Register of the first Settlers of New England, Marshall’s Gardening, Vick’s Gardener, John Woolman, The Modern Horse Doctor, Downing’s Fruits, &c., The Farmer’s Library, Walden, Dymond’s Essays, Jobb Scott’s Journal, Morton’s Memorial, Bailey’s Dictionary, Downing’s Landscape Gardening, etc., The Task, Nuttall’s Ornithology, Morse’s Gazetteer, The Domestic Practice of Hydropathy, John Buncle, Dwight’s Travels, Virgil, Young’s Night Thoughts, History of Plymouth, and other Shanty books. … FRIEND DANIEL RICKETSON

The final two volumes would appear in following years. According to Walter Harding,5 Thoreau was very familiar with this series TRAVELS IN NEW ENGLAND AND NEW YORK, written before the Reverend Wright’s death in 1817 in description of various trips he had taken between 1795 and 1815. DWIGHT’S TRAVELS, III DWIGHT’S TRAVELS, IV

The Reverend Dwight visited Rhode Island.

REV. TIMOTHY DWIGHT 5. Per an April 1958 article by Walter Harding in the Boston Public Library Quarterly. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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REVEREND COTTON MATHER CHARLES I

REVEREND TIMOTHY DWIGHT HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD:REVEREND TIMOTHY DWIGHT PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

REVEREND TIMOTHY DWIGHT HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1831

William Ingraham Kip graduated from Yale College. Briefly, he would study law.

In this year a proposal was being made, to establish in New Haven a separate college for black scholars. What an embarrassment! Yale would argue that harboring such students in the same town would be “incompatible with the prosperity, if not the existence” of Yale, — and they would successfully prevent that new institution from being formed and successfully prevent those black youths from receiving a higher education.6

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

6. The Reverend Timothy Dwight, when he was head of Yale, would argue that a man “who receives slaves from his parents by inheritance, certainly deserves no censure for holding them.” Fully a tenth of the graduates of Yale would be proslavery, which is approximately double the percentage that obtained among Harvard grads or Princeton grads. Larry Tise has tried to make a case, in his 1987 book PROSLAVERY, that Yale was more important than any other college or university in the 19th Century in turning out major proslavery clergymen and, in effect, helping to make proslavery a national and not a purely sectional ideology. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1836

November 24, Thursday: David Henry Thoreau supplemented his borrowings from the Harvard Library by checking out, from the library of the “Institute of 1770”, SHAKSPEARE’S ROMANCES COLLECTED AND ARRANGED BY SHAKSPEARE II (two volumes, London, 1825 — there is a copy of this rare pseudonymous work in the British Museum), as well as Volume 93 of the North American Review — the volume which contains: • a survey of Greek folk lyrics entitled “Romaic Popular Poetry” • a survey of works on education by the Reverend Joseph Emerson of Malden (a great-grandfather of Waldo Emerson who had prayed every night that no descendant of his might ever be rich), Dr. Timothy Dwight, and Warren Burton entitled “Principle of Emulation,” including an account of German universities • an article “Lives of Pinckney, Ellery, and Mather” • a review of Volume VI of the Reverend Jared Sparks’s LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY (LIFE OF WILLIAM PINKNEY, by Henry Wheaton; LIFE OF WILLIAM ELLERY, by Edward T. Channing; LIFE OF COTTON MATHER, by William B.O. Peabody.) LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. VI • a critical notice of the Reverend John Snelling Popkin’s THREE LECTURES ON LIBERAL EDUCATION (which was a book, published during this year, which Harvard College students would be needing to deal with in taking that professor’s course in “Greek Literature” and the “good taste of the ancients”)

Richard Wagner got married with Christine Wilhelmine (Minna) Planer, an actress, in Tragheim near Konigsberg (Kaliningrad).

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 24th of 11th M / Our first Meeting was a very remarkably favourd one. Father was favourd to exceed almost any thing I ever heard from him then Hannah Dennis, & then Mary Hicks in a well Authorised & truly Gospel testimony - We had considerable buisness in the last & prety well resulted — Benjn. Mott & Jonathon & Hannah Dennis dined with us When I returned home I found two parcells & a letter from my friend Thos Thompson of Liverpool.- Cousin Henry Gould & Thos Nichols called & sat most of the evening with us. — When we returned from Meeting we were shocked with the information that our dear little neighbour Sam Bailey about an hour before had by some means at the Coal grate got shockingly burned & the case was very doubtful as to his living - his stomach, Arm, face & Neck was sad to behold so that he could talk but not sensing his pains — his feet was cold & she rubbed them he asked who it was that rubbed him, some of the by standers told him it was Miss Gould & asked him if he did not know her, he said I cant see her, something is in my eye” he is a little boy not quite three years old grandson for our neighbour HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Faisneay & came in to see us nearly every day & was a sweet little interesting fellow He died about twelve hours after it happened. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1840

Northampton’s Unitarian minister would be, for a brief period, the Reverend John Sullivan Dwight,7 who was ordained in this year. (But he would soon discover the region to be uncongenial for religious reform, and follow the Reverend George Ripley to Brook Farm. Of course, he would be wise to recognize when he had bitten off more than he could chew: Northampton had been the town of the Reverend Jonathan Edwards, and one of its two Congregational churches was still named after him. The Tappan brothers –Arthur Tappan, Lewis Tappan, Benjamin, William, Charles, and John– had grown up in this vicinity. One of the oldest towns in the region, a bastion of New England Federalism priding itself on its conservatism, the town was dominated by the Whig party. When Lydia Maria Child lived here, while her husband David Lee Child was attempting to grow slavery-fighting sugar beets, she called this region a “Desert where no water is” in the “iron-bound Valley of the Connecticut.” Referring to the self-righteous religious attitude which she encountered while there, she opinioned that “Calvinism sits here enthroned, with high ears, blue nose, thin lips and griping fist.”)

7. Bear tradition in mind here: the Reverend Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, had been the grandson of the Reverend Jonathan Edwards of Northampton. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1844

Midsummer: Henry Thoreau joined up with Ellery Channing where he was waiting for him in the railroad station in Pittsfield MA at the foot of Saddleback (Mount Greylock, that is) after coming up from New-York, and the two young men went on a midsummer walking tour of the Berkshires and the Catskills. While in the Catskill Mountains, Thoreau would notice an attractive little habitation not unlike William Cowper’s 18th-Century English “Peasant’s Nest” along the River Ouse, that would figure large in his later thoughts and plans:

WALDEN: To my imagination it [the shanty on Walden Pond] retained throughout the day more or less of this auroral character, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain which I had visited the year before. This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth every where. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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BERKSHIRE, MASS. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn would allege in 1905 that much of the material Thoreau would insert into his account of his adventure with his brother John Thoreau, Jr. on the Concord and the Merrimack rivers into the mountains of southern New Hampshire in 1849 actually had originated during this 1844 hiking tour with Channing into the mountains of western Massachusetts and New York state: “This journey Thoreau in WEEK breaks into two parts, printing the last first, near the beginning of his “Tuesday,” where it runs on for fourteen pages. Then ... he takes up the tale of his tramp from Shelburne Falls on the Deerfield River, up the valley of that stream, and over the Hoosac Mountain, through which the railroad has since bored its way.” This is the famous chronicle in which Thoreau is attracted by a young lady intimately combing out her long black hair while attired merely in her housedress: “Its mistress was a frank and hospitable young woman, who stood before me in a dishabille, busily and unconcernedly combing her long black hair while she talked, giving her head the necessary toss with each sweep of the comb, with lively sparkling eyes, and full of interest in that lower world from which I had come, talking all the while as familiarly as if she had known me for years, and reminding me of a cousin of mine.”

Thoreau supposed he could view Williams College from at or near the summit of Mount Greylock, or “Saddleback.” Correcting some of the details, the central campus is not visible from the peak itself, the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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college was never named Williamstown, and the summit of Greylock is at 3491 feet rather than 3600:

A WEEK: I had come over the hills on foot and alone in serene summer days, plucking the raspberries by the wayside, and occasionally buying a loaf of bread at a farmer’s house, with a knapsack on my back which held a few traveller’s books and a change of clothing, and a staff in my hand. I had that morning looked down from the Hoosack Mountain, where the road crosses it, on the village of North Adams in the valley three miles away under my feet, showing how uneven the earth may sometimes be, and making it seem an accident that it should ever be level and convenient for the feet of man. Putting a little rice and sugar and a tin cup into my knapsack at this village, I began in the afternoon to ascend the mountain, whose summit is three thousand six hundred feet above the level of the sea, and was seven or eight miles distant by the path. My route lay up a long and spacious valley called the Bellows, because the winds rush up or down it with violence in storms, sloping up to the very clouds between the principal range and a lower mountain. There were a few farms scattered along at different elevations, each commanding a fine prospect of the mountains to the north, and a stream ran down the middle of the valley on which near the head there was a mill. It seemed a road for the pilgrim to enter upon who would climb to the gates of heaven. Now I crossed a hay-field, and now over the brook on a slight bridge, still gradually ascending all the while with a sort of awe, and filled with indefinite expectations as to what kind of inhabitants and what kind of nature I should come to at last. It now seemed some advantage that the earth was uneven, for one could not imagine a more noble position for a farm-house than this vale afforded, farther from or nearer to its head, from a glen-like seclusion overlooking the country at a great elevation between these two mountain walls. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Thoreau has recently been accused of a plagiarism. He must have been carrying along in his knapsack, according to Lauren Stevens (a tour guide who has coauthored a history of Mount Greylock), not only sugar, rice, and a change of clothes, but also the Reverend Timothy Dwight’s TRAVELS IN NEW ENGLAND AND NEW YORK –to plagiarize from– for Dwight had described a view from Mount Greylock and had described Williamstown, and Thoreau wrote that he could view Williamstown from the peak although that is simply not possible. Stevens, reading between the lines, sees in this sufficient evidence to allege, in his history which has been reviewed in the Boston Globe in 1998 by B.J. Roche, that he has caught Thoreau red-handed.

Upon reaching the summit Thoreau read some stock price quotations in a castoff newspaper and lay down to sleep next to the outside wall of the only building, an observatory, on the summit:

A WEEK: This observatory was a building of considerable size, erected by the students of Williamstown College, whose buildings might be seen by daylight gleaming far down in the valley. It would be no small advantage if every college were thus located at the base of a mountain, as good at least as one well-endowed professorship. It were as well to be educated in the shadow of a mountain as in more classical shades. Some will remember, no doubt, not only that they went to the college, but that they went to the mountain. Every visit to its summit would, as it were, generalize the particular information gained below, and subject it to more catholic tests. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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After hiking in Massachusetts mountains, Thoreau and Channing boarded an excursion boat on the Hudson River and went on into the Catskill Mountains of New York state.

According to Channing, the sentence I have emphasized here from WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS pertains not to the shanty on the pond but to his boat ride on the Hudson River with Thoreau of this summer:

WALDEN: I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

Because the moon was bright, they spent the night in the bow of the excursion boat.

Thoreau would be back in Concord by August 1st. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1851

Henry Thoreau observed while on Manamoyik (Cape Cod) that the fish for which it had been named was stacked dry on the docks as if it were cordwood: Salt fish were stacked on the wharves, looking like corded wood, maple and yellow birch with the bark left on. I mistook them for this at first, and such in one sense they were, —fuel to maintain our vital fires —an eastern wood which grew on the Grand Banks.

One wonders what Thoreau would have jotted down had he heard someone singing a 19th-Century sailer shanty about the “Cape Cod Girls”: O Cape Cod girls don’t have no combs! Haul away, haul away! They comb their hair with a codfish bone, And we’re bound away for Australia! Now heave ’er up, my bully, bully boys! Haul away, haul away! Heave ’er up and don’t you make a noise, For we’re bound away for Australia! Now Cape Cod kids don’t have no sleds Haul away, haul away! They slide down hill on a codfish head! And we’re bound away for Australia! Now heave ’er up, my bully, bully boys! Haul away, haul away! Heave ’er up and don’t you make a noise, For we’re bound away for Australia! Cape Cod cats don’t have no tails, Haul away, haul away! They lost them all in a northeast gale, And we’re bound away for Australia! Now heave ’er up, my bully, bully boys! Haul away, haul away! Heave ’er up and don’t you make a noise, For we’re bound away for Australia! Cape Cod girls don’t wear no frills, Haul away, haul away! They’re plain and skinny as a codfish gill, And we’re bound away for Australia! Now heave ’er up, my bully, bully boys! Haul away, haul away! Heave ’er up and don’t you make a noise, For we’re bound away for Australia! The abolition of slavery in 1834 in the British West Indies such as on the island of Jamaica, in 1848 in the French Antilles, and in 1849 in the Dutch Antilles, had not resolved the Caribbean market’s need for cheap low-quality salt cod for the feeding of black people as they labored in the sun on the sugar cane, which is why in 1851, while Thoreau was visiting Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod, he still saw disgusting practices in HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the codfish salting yard: EARLY the next morning I walked into a fish-house near our hotel, where three or four men were engaged in trundling out the pickled fish on barrows, and spreading them to dry. They told me that a vessel had lately come in from the Banks with forty-four thousand codfish. Timothy Dwight says that, just before he arrived at Provincetown, “a schooner came in from the Great Bank with fifty- six thousand fish, about one thousand five hundred quintals, taken in a single voyage; the main deck being, on her return, eight inches under water in calm weather.” The cod in this fish- house, just out of the pickle, lay packed several feet deep, and three or four men stood on them in cowhide boots, pitching them on to the barrows with an instrument which had a single iron point. One young man, who chewed tobacco, spat on the fish repeatedly. Well, sir, thought I, when that older man sees you he will speak to you. But presently I saw the older man do the same thing. It reminded me of the figs of Smyrna.

There is a good reason why these laborers were treating these split fish carcasses with such contempt. The primary use of such salt fish was still in the feeding of the black workers on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean despite the fact that these black workers were no longer being referred to as slaves. Therefore the tobacco juice which these workers were spitting onto the drying fish, and the fact that these workers were damaging their own product by gaffing it around with those single-point processing poles, truly did not matter at all. One may well wonder whether Thoreau ought have been aware of the reason why such a low-grade industrial indifference to product quality was able to persist.

Since, in 1755, Dr. Samuel Johnson had defined a cod as “any case or husk in which seeds are lodged” on the basis of the Middle English etymology in which a cod is a sack or pouch, Thoreau hypothesized that HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the codfish might have received its name on account of the female containing such a large quantity of eggs:

CAPE COD: I suppose that the word Cape is from the French cap; which is from the Latin caput, a head; which is, perhaps, from the verb capere, to take, –that being the part by which we take hold of a thing:–Take Time by the forelock. It is also the safest part to COD take a serpent by. And as for Cod, that was derived directly from that “great store of codfish” which Captain Bartholomew Gosnold caught there in 1602; which fish appears to have been so called from the Saxon word codde, “a case in which seeds are lodged,” either from the form of the fish, or the quantity of spawn it contains; whence also, perhaps, codling (“pomum coctile”?) and coddle, –to cook green like peas. (V. Dic.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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An old rhyme goes: The codfish lays a thousand eggs The homely hen lays one. The codfish never cackles To tell you what she’s done. And so we scorn the codfish While the humble hen we prize Which only goes to show you That it pays to advertise.

Well, this old rhyme may not date to Thoreau’s era, but we note that the inventor of the microscope, Leeuwenhoek, had counted the eggs in a single female cod of a middling size and had numbered them at 9,384,000. Alexandre Dumas would write in 1873 in LEGRANDE DICTIONAIRE DE CUISINE that “it has been calculated that if no accident prevented the hatching of the eggs and each egg reached maturity, it would take only three years to fill the sea so that you could walk across the Atlantic dryshod on the backs of cod.”

While Thoreau was on Cape Cod, he heard rumors of cows eating cod heads:

CAPE COD: It is rumored that in the fall the cows here are sometimes fed cod’s-head! The godlike part of the cod, which, like the human head, is curiously and wonderfully made, forsooth has but little less brain in it, —coming to such an end! To be craunched by cows! I felt my own skull crack with sympathy. What if the heads of men were to be cut off to feed the cows of a superior order of beings who inhabit the islands in the ether? Away goes your fine brain, the house of thought and instinct, to swell the cud of a ruminant animal! —However, an inhabitant assured me that they did not make a practice of feeding cows on cod-heads; the cows merely would eat them sometimes. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Actually, cows weren’t being fed the cod heads, which were a local delicacy pretty much reserved for the humans unless they were spoiled remnants, although Herman Melville, in MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHALE, did describe seeing a cow that had been parsing a pile of such remnants and offal and was wandering around in fishhead slippers:

MOBY-DICK: Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved its name; for the pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes. The area before the house was paved with clam-shells. Mrs. Hussey wore a polished necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his account books bound in superior old shark-skin. There was a fishy flavor to the milk, too, which I could not at all account for, till one morning happening to take a stroll along the beach among some fishermen’s boats, I saw Hosea’s brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and marching along the sand with each foot in a cod’s decapitated head, looking very slip-shod, I assure ye.

One split the cod heads and floured them before frying, and then crunched them bones and all. The heads for this recipe had the eyes and lips removed, and the fish’s air sacs were often included. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1853

September:During this period Henry Thoreau was reading in Charles Pickering’s THE RACES OF MAN, that had been published in 1848 in the US and in 1851 in England, and commenting on its page 394, created the remarkable assertion which would be positioned in the concluding chapter of WALDEN, “It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar:”

WALDEN: It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, CAT and you may perhaps find some “Symmes’ Hole” by which to get at the inside at last. England and France, Spain and Portugal, Gold Coast and Slave Coast, all front on this private sea; but no bark from them has ventured out of sight of land, though it is without doubt the direct way to India. If you would learn to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther than all travellers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the Sphinx to dash her head against a stone, even obey the precept of the old philosopher, and Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve. Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards that run away and enlist. Start now on that farthest western way, which does not pause at the Mississippi or the Pacific, nor conduct toward a worn-out China or Japan, but leads on direct a tangent to this sphere, summer and winter, day and night, sun down, moon down, and at last earth down too.

SYMMES HOLE “THE OLD PHILOSOPHER” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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However, According to Lawrence Buell, Thoreau was but just another of those genre-ridden, predictable antiemigrationists, like the Reverend Timothy Dwight. He wasn’t striving to fill in the blank of the unexplored terrain of the human soul, but merely trying to stay within hearing distance of his mama’s dinner bell!

Dwight’s defense of emotional bonding to place as a means of social control would have seemed small-minded to Thoreau, yet Thoreau actually follows Dwight closely in prescribing a closer rapport with one’s immediate surroundings as a better antidote to the spirit of restlessness than indulgence of wanderlust. Why pan gold in California, why “count the cats in Zanzibar” (WALDEN), when so much richer a journey is possible near at hand? On this level, both Dwight and Thoreau belong to a tradition of antiemigration propaganda literature that deserves a chapter as a New England genre in itself. How pitiful to read a book as fine as this one and be able to derive so little from the experience!

According to Bradley P. Dean, contextual evidence in Thoreau’s Indian Notebook #8 indicates that most likely it was during this month that he perused the Western Australia captivity narrative of the English sailor William Jackman. Dr. Dean was unable to determine precisely how Thoreau came across THE AUSTRALIAN CAPTIVE; OR, AN AUTHENTIC NARRATIVE OF 15 YEARS IN THE LIFE OF WILLIAM JACKMAN. IN WHICH, AMONG VARIOUS OTHER ADVENTURES, IS INCLUDED A FORCED RESIDENCE OF A YEAR AND A HALF AMONG THE CANNIBALS OF NUYTS’ LAND, ON THE COAST OF THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN BIGHT. THE AUSTRALIAN CAPTIVE

ALSO INCLUDING, WITH OTHER APPENDICES, AUSTRALIA AND ITS GOLD, FROM THE LATEST AND BEST AUTHORITIES. WITH VARIOUS ILLUSTRATIONS. EDITED BY REV. I. CHAMBERLAYNE (Auburn: Derby & Miller. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Buffalo: Derby, Orton & Mulligan).

December 5, Friday: An auction advertisement in the Alexandria, Virginia Gazette: “NEGROES FOR SALE — Will be sold for cash on the 16th inst., at the residence of the late Thomas Wilkins, Prince William county, Va., (three miles below Brentsville), five or six likely negroes. —James W. Wilkins, Administrator of Thos. Wilkins, dec’d. Prince Wm. co, Va., dec 5 -- eo2w”

SLAVERY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December 5, Friday: What you call barrenness and poverty is to me simplicity. God could not be unkind to me if he should try…. It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all. I find it invariably true, the poorer I am, the richer I am…. I have never gotten over my surprise that I should have been born into the most estimable place in all the world, and in the very nick of time, too. TIMOTHY DWIGHT HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1857

April 10, Friday: Henry Thoreau noticed among the decorations in Friend Daniel Ricketson’s shanty a wall-motto from Horace’s ODES. We note that although he jotted down several such conceits, this stands out as the only one for which it was unnecessary to also register the name of an author.

April 10: D.R.’s Shanty is about half a dozen rods S.W. of his house (which may be one hundred rods from the road), nearly between his house and barn, is 12 x 14 feet, with 7 feet posts, with common pent roof. In building it he directed the carpenter to use western boards and timbers, though some eastern studs (spruce?) were inserted. He had already occupied a smaller shanty at “Woodlee,” about a mile S. The roof is shingled, and the sides made of matched boards, and painted a light clay color, with chocolate (?) colored blinds. Within, it is not plastered, and is open to the roof, showing the timbers and rafters, and rough boards and cross-timbers overhead, as if ready for plastering. The door is at the east end, with a small window on each side of it, a similar window on each side of the building, and one at the west end, the latter looking down the garden walk. In front of the last window is a small box stove with a funnel rising to a level with the plate, and there inserted in a small brick chimney which rests on planks. On the south side of the room, against the stove, is a rude settle with a coarse cushion and pillow; on the opposite side a large low desk with some bookshelves above it; on the same side by the window, a small table covered with books; and in the N.E. corner, behind the door, an old-fashioned secretary, its pigeonholes stuffed with papers. On the opposite side as you enter is a place for fuel, which the boy leaves each morning, a place to hang greatcoats. there were two small pieces of carpet on the floor, and R. or one of his guests swept out the Shanty each morning. There was a small kitchen clock hanging in the S.W. corner, and a map of Bristol County behind the settle. The west and N.W. side is well-nigh covered with slips ANACREON of paper on which are written some sentences or paragraphs from R.’s favorite books. I noticed among the most characteristic Didbin’s “Tom Tackle,” a translation of Anacreon’s Cicada, lines celebrating tobacco, Milton’s “How charming is divine philosophy,” &c., “Inveni requiem; Spes et Fortuna valete: Nil mihi vobiscum est: laudite nunc alios.” (Is it Petrarch?) this is also over the door, “Mors pallida æquo pulsat pede HORACE pauperum tabernas regumque turres.” Some lines of his own in memory of A.J. Downing, “Not to be in a A.J. DOWNING hurry,” over the desk, and many other quotations, celebrating retirement, country life, simplicity, humanity, COWPER sincerity, &c., &c., from Cowper and other English poets, and similar extracts from newspapers. There were also two or three advertisements of cattle-show exhibitions, and the warning not to kill birds contrary to laws, he being one of the subscribers notified to enforce the act, an advertisement of a steamboat on Lake Winnepiseogee, &c., cards of his business friends. The size of different brains, from “Hall’s Journal of Health,” and “Take the world Easy.” A sheet of blotting paper tacked up, and of Chinese characters from a tea-chest. Also a few small pictures and pencil sketches, the latter commonly caricatures of his visitors or friends, as “The Trojan” (Channing) and Van Beest; I take the most notice of these particulars because his peculiarities are so commonly unaffected. He has long been accustomed to put these scraps on his walls, and has a basket full somewhere saved from the old Shanty, though there were some quotations which had no right there. I found all his peculiarities faithfully expressed, his humanity, his fear of death, love of retirement, simplicity, &c. The BARBER more characteristic books were Bradley’s Husbandry, Drake’s Indians, Barber’s Hist. Coll., Zimmermann on BIGELOW Solitude, Bigelow’s Plants of Boston, &c., Farmer’s Register of the first Settlers of New England, Marshall’s Gardening, Vick’s Gardener, John Woolman, The Modern Horse Doctor, Downing’s Fruits, &c., The Farmer’s A.J. DOWNING Library, Walden, Dymond’s Essays, Jobb Scott’s Journal, Morton’s Memorial, Bailey’s Dictionary, Downing’s Landscape Gardening, etc., The Task, Nuttall’s Ornithology, Morse’s Gazetteer, The Domestic Practice of Hydropathy, John Buncle, Dwight’s Travels, Virgil, Young’s Night Thoughts, History of Plymouth, and other DWIGHT Shanty books. There was an old gun, hardly safe to fire, said to be loaded with an inextractable charge, and also an old sword over the door; also a tin sign, “D. Ricketson’s office” (he having set up for a lawyer once), and a small crumpled horn; there I counted more than 20 rustic canes scattered about, a dozen or 15 pipes of various patterns (mostly PIPE the common), two spy-glasses, an open paper of tobacco, an Indian’s jaw (dug up), a stuffed Bluejay, and Pine Grosbeak, and a rude Indian stone hatchet, &c., &c. There was a box with fifteen or twenty knives, mostly very large old-fashioned jack-knives, kept for curiosity, occasionally giving one to a boy or friend. A large book full of pencil sketches, “to be inspected by whomsomever,” containing mostly sketches of his friends, &c., HDT WHAT? INDEX

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QUAKERS acquaintances, and himself, of wayfaring men whom he had met, Quakers, &c., &c., and now and then a verse under fence rail, or an old-fashioned house sketched on a peculiar pea-green paper. A pail of water stands behind the door, with a peculiar tin cup for drinking, made in France. JONATHAN DYMOND FRIEND DANIEL RICKETSON HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1862

April: Waldo Emerson read Bronson Alcott’s quasi-obituary “The Forester”8 to Henry Thoreau. Thoreau commented

The blue birds and robins are charming my solitary room bringing their music to my dulled senses — but this brings light and love, almost revives my life.

THE FORESTER. Then bless thy secret growth, nor catch At noise, but thrive unseen and dumb, Keep clean, bear fruit, earn life, and watch Till the white-winged reapers come. —Henry Vaughan

I had never thought of knowing a man so thoroughly of the country as this friend of mine, and so purely a son of Nature. Perhaps he has the profoundest passion for it of any one living; and had the human sentiment been as tender from the first, and as pervading, we might have had pastorals of which Virgil and Theocritus would have envied him the authorship, had they chanced to be his contemporaries. As it is, he has come nearer the antique spirit than any of our native poets, and touched the fields and groves and streams of his native town with a classic interest that shall not fade. Some of his verses are suffused with an elegiac tenderness, as if the woods and fields bewailed the absence of their forester, and murmured their griefs meanwhile to one another, —responsive like idyls. Living in close companionship with Nature, his Muse breathes the spirit and voice of poetry; his excellence lying herein: for when the heart is once divorced from the senses and all sympathy with common things, then poetry has fled, and the love that sings. The most welcome of companions, this plain countryman. One shall not meet with thoughts invigorating like his often; coming so scented of mountain and field breezes and rippling springs, so like a luxuriant clod from under forest-leaves, moist and mossy with earth-spirits. His presence is tonic, like ice-water in dog-days to the parched citizen pent in chambers and under 8. Note that this article for The Atlantic Monthly which was being read to Henry approximated an obituary. Also, this term “forester” deserves some explanation as it does not mean what you are probably thinking. It did not, in this period, mean “forest ranger” as in the US Forest Service with a Smokey-the-Bear hat. Note that in the Reverend Timothy Dwight’s TRAVELS, at approximately the turn of the 19th Century, the first English settlers of the interior of the continent were referred to as “foresters.” Ethan Allen would be a type case. These people which the Reverend Dwight denominated “foresters” of the frontier were characterized as lacking the time and the wherewithal for the niceties of life, in contrast with the people who followed who were able to benefit from their industry and struggle and adventure in the semi-savage life. The first “foresters” were people who had “met with difficulties at home.” The next wave was made up of “the discontented, the enterprising, the ambitious, and the covetous.” But it was good stock and the bloodlines held true. Eventually their descendants were able to use the wherewithal which had been produced in New England, and the guidance of the civic and spiritual leaders who had sprung up among them, to transform themselves into the earnest, responsible types we see about us today. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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brazen ceilings. Welcome as the gurgle of brooks, the dripping of pitchers, —then drink and be cool! He seems one with things, of Nature’s essence and core, knit of strong timbers, most like a wood and its inhabitants. There are in him sod and shade, woods and waters manifold, the mould and mist of earth and sky. Self- poised and sagacious as any denizen of the elements, he has the key to every animal’s brain, every plant, every shrub; and were an Indian to flower forth, and reveal the secrets hidden in his cranium, it would not be more surprising than the speech of our Sylvanus. He must belong to the Homeric age, —is older than pastures and gardens, as if he were of the race of heroes, and one with the elements. He, of all men, seems to be the native New-Englander, as much so as the oak, the granite ledge, our best sample of an indigenous American, untouched by the Old Country, unless he came down from Thor, the Northman; as yet unfathered by any, and a nondescript in the books of natural history. A peripatetic philosopher, and out of doors for the best parts of his days and nights, he has manifold weather and seasons in him, and the manners of an animal of probity and virtues unstained. Of our moralists he seems the wholesomest; and the best republican citizen in the world, —always at home, and minding his own affairs. Perhaps a little over-confident sometimes, and stiffly individual, dropping society clean out of his theories, while standing friendly in his strict sense of friendship, there is in him an integrity and sense of justice that make possible and actual the virtues of Sparta and the Stoics, and all the more welcome to us in these times of shuffling and of pusillanimity. Plutarch would have made him immortal in his pages, had he lived before his day. Nor have we any so modern as be, —his own and ours; too purely so to be appreciated at once. A scholar by birthright, and an author, his fame has not yet travelled far from the banks of the rivers he has described in his books; but I hazard only the truth in affirming of his prose, that in substance and sense it surpasses that of any naturalist of his time, and that he is sure of a reading in the future. There are fairer fishes in his pages than any now swimming in our streams, and some sleep of his on the banks of the Merrimack by moonlight that Egypt never rivalled; a morning of which Memnon might have envied the music, and a greyhound that was meant for Adonis; some frogs, too, better than any of Aristophanes. Perhaps we have had no eyes like his since Pliny’s time. His senses seem double, giving him access to secrets not easily read by other men: his sagacity resembling that of the beaver and the bee, the dog and the deer; an instinct for seeing and judging, as by some other or seventh sense, dealing with objects as if they were shooting forth from his own mind mythologically, thus completing Nature all round to his senses, and a creation of his at the moment. I am sure he knows the animals, one by one, and everything else knowable in our town, and has named them rightly as Adam did in Paradise, if he be not that ancestor himself. His works are pieces of exquisite HDT WHAT? INDEX

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sense, celebrations of Nature’s virginity, exemplified by rare learning and original observations. Persistently independent and manly, he criticizes men and times largely, urging and defending his opinions with the spirit and pertinacity befitting a descendant of him of the Hammer. A head of mixed genealogy like his, Franco-Norman crossed by Scottish and New-England descent, may be forgiven a few characteristic peculiarities and trenchant traits of thinking, amidst his great common sense and fidelity to the core of natural things. Seldom has a head circumscribed so much of the sense of Cosmos as this footed intelligence, —nothing less than all out-of-doors sufficing his genius and scopes, and, day by day, through all weeks and seasons, the year round. If one would find the wealth of wit there is in this plain man, the information, the sagacity, the poetry, the piety, let him take a walk with him, say of a winter’s afternoon, to the Blue Water, or anywhere about the outskirts of his village-residence. Pagan as he shall outwardly appear, yet he soon shall be seen to be the hearty worshipper of whatsoever is sound and wholesome in Nature, —a piece of russet probity and sound sense that she delights to own and honor. His talk shall be suggestive, subtile, and sincere, under as many masks and mimicries as the shows he passes, and as significant, —Nature choosing to speak through her chosen mouth-piece, —cynically, perhaps, sometimes, and searching into the marrows of men and times he chances to speak of, to his discomfort mostly, and avoidance. Nature, poetry, life, —not politics, not strict science, not society as it is, —are his preferred themes: the new Pantheon, probably, before he gets far, to the naming of the gods some coming Angelo, some Pliny, is to paint and describe. The world is holy, the things seen symbolizing the Unseen, and worthy of worship so, the Zoroastrian rites most becoming a nature so fine as ours in this thin newness, this worship being so sensible, so promotive of possible pieties, —calling us out of doors and under the firmament, where health and wholesomeness are finely insinuated into our souls, —not as idolaters, but as idealists, the seekers of the Unseen through images of the Invisible. I think his religion of the most primitive type, and inclusive of all natural creatures and things, even to "the sparrow that falls to the ground,” —though never by shot of his, —and, for whatsoever is manly in man, his worship may compare with that of the priests and heroes of pagan times. Nor is he false to these traits under any guise, —worshipping at unbloody altars, a favorite of the Unseen, Wisest, and Best. Certainly he is better poised and more nearly self-reliant than other men. Perhaps he deals best with matter, properly, though very adroitly with mind, with persons, as he knows them best, and sees them from Nature’s circle, wherein he dwells habitually. I should say he inspired the sentiment of love, if, indeed, the sentiment he awakens did not seem to partake of a yet purer sentiment, were that possible, —but nameless from its excellency. Friendly he is, and holds his friends by bearings HDT WHAT? INDEX

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as strict in their tenderness and consideration as are the laws of his thinking, —as prompt and kindly equitable, —neighborly always, and as apt for occasions as he is strenuous against meddling with others in things not his. I know of nothing more creditable to his greatness than the thoughtful regard, approaching to reverence, by which he has held for many years some of the best persons of his time, living at a distance, and wont to make their annual pilgrimage, usually on foot, to the master, —a devotion very rare in these times of personal indifference, if not of confessed unbelief in persons and ideas. He has been less of a housekeeper than most, has harvested more wind and storm, sun and sky; abroad night and day with his leash of keen scents, bounding any game stirring, and running it down, for certain, to be spread on the dresser of his page, and served as a feast to the sound intelligences, before he has done with it. We have been accustomed to consider him the salt of things so long that they must lose their savor without his to season them. And when he goes hence, then Pan is dead, and Nature ailing throughout. His friend sings him thus, with the advantages of his Walden to show him in Nature: — “It is not far beyond the Village church, After we pass the wood that skirts the road, A Lake, —the blue-eyed Walden, that doth smile Most tenderly upon its neighbor Pines; And they, as if to recompense this love, In double beauty spread their branches forth. This Lake has tranquil loveliness and breadth, And, of late years, has added to its charms; For one attracted to its pleasant edge Has built himself a little Hermitage, Where with much piety he passes life.

“More fitting place I cannot fancy now, For such a man to let the line run off The mortal reel, —such patience hath the Lake, Such gratitude and cheer is in the Pines. But more than either lake or forest’s depths This man has in himself: a tranquil man, With sunny sides where well the fruit is ripe, Good front and resolute bearing to this life, And some serener virtues, which control This rich exterior prudence, —virtues high, That in the principles of Things are set, Great by their nature, and consigned to him, Who, like a faithful Merchant, does account To God for what he spends, and in what way. Thrice happy art thou, Walden, in thyself! Such purity is in thy limpid springs, — In those green shores which do reflect in thee, And in this man who dwells upon thy edge, A holy man within a Hermitage. May all good showers fall gently into thee, May thy surrounding forests long be spared, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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And may the Dweller on thy tranquil marge There lead a life of deep tranquillity, Pure as thy Waters, handsome as thy Shores, And with those virtues which are like the Stars!” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2000

Round numbers really do get people going, don’t they? • One of the earliest predictions for events of this year had been made by Petrus Olivi, who wrote in 1297 CE that the Antichrist was going to come to power between 1300 CE and 1340 CE, with the Last Judgment taking place around 2000 (Weber, Eugen. APOCALYPSES. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1999, page 54). • The Reverend Jonathan Edwards suspected that Christ’s thousand-year reign was going to begin in 2000 (Weber, sic, page 171).

• The Reverend Timothy Dwight, President of Yale University, cautiously anticipated only that the Year of Our Lord 2000 would mark “the beginning of the new millennium.” (Kyle, Richard. THE LAST DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1998, page 81)

• Sir Isaac Newton, in OBSERVATIONS UPON THE PROPHECIES OF DANIEL, AND THE APOCALYPSE OF ST. JOHN, predicted that Christ’s Millennium was going to begin in the year 2000 (later he would revise this estimate until after the year 2060). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• A radical apocalyptic sect, the Convulsionaries, had emerged in early 18th-Century France. One of the members of this sect, Jacques-Joseph Duguet, had anticipated that the Parousia would arrive in the Year of Our Lord 2000. (Kyle, sic, page 192)

• In the 19th Century the founder of Theosophy, Helena Petrova Blavatsky, had suspected that the year 2000 would bring the End Times (Shaw, Eva. EVE OF DESTRUCTION. Los Angeles CA: Lowell House, 1995, page 83). • Edgar Cayce predicted the Second Coming of Christ in 2000, followed by a New Age (Hanna, Nick. THE MILLENNIUM: A ROUGH GUIDE TO THE YEAR 2000. London: Rough Guides, 1998, page 219). • Hal Lindsey, with his failed 1988 prediction behind him, suggested in PLANET EARTH – 2000 A.D. (Palos Verdes CA: Western Front, 1994, page 306) that “The Rapture may not occur between now and the year 2000.” • The year 2000 would be the beginning of Christ’s millennium, according to the Mormon publication WATCH AND BE READY: PREPARING FOR THE SECOND COMING OF THE LORD. The New Jerusalem would come to Earth in 2000, descending from the heavens above Independence, Missouri (McIver, Tom. THE END OF THE WORLD: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY. Jefferson NC: McFarlane & Co., 1999 #3377; Skinner, Stephen. MILLENNIUM PROPHECIES. Stamford CT: Longmeadow Press, 1994, page 100). • Ruth Montgomery has predicted that the planet Earth’s axis would shift in 2000 and the Antichrist reveal himself (Kyle, sic, pages 156, 195). • The Reverend Sun Myung Moon predicted that in 2000 the Kingdom of Heaven would establish itself on Earth (Kyle, sic, page 148). • Ed Dobson’s THE END: WHY JESUS COULD RETURN BY A.D. 2000 predicted the Second Coming of Christ. • Lester Sumrall in I PREDICT 2000 had predicted the end of the world (Abanes, Richard. END-TIME VISIONS. NY: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998, page 99, 341). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• The Tribulation was to occur prior to this year, according to the founder of the Christ for the Nations Ministry, Gordon Lindsay (Abanes, sic, page 280). • Texe Marrs had felt certain that the Last Days could “wrap up by the year 2000” (Abanes, sic, page 311). • According to a series of lectures given by Shoko Asahara in 1992, 90% of the world’s population were to have been annihilated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons by this point in time (Thompson, Damian. THE END OF TIME. Hanover NH: UP of New England, 1996, page 262). • According to Sun Bear, who portrays himself as a Native American spokesperson, the end of the world would come in this year unless human beings turned over a new leaf (Abanes, sic, page 307). • According to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the world would be devastated by AIDS in this year. The world would, however, then be rebuilt as a peaceful matriarchal society (Robbins, Thomas et al. MILLENNIUM, MESSIAHS AND MAYHEM. NY: Routledge, 1997, page 164). • William Kamm, AKA “Little Pebble,” leader of the Australian doomsday cult “Order of St. Charbel,” had predicted that a comet would already have destroyed planet Earth before the beginning of this new millennium. ASTRONOMY • Before the end of 1999, Hon-Ming Chen of the 30-member cult Chen Tao had begun to backpedal on his prediction that a nuclear holocaust and UFO rescue would occur by December 31. Then, according to cult spokesman Richard Liu, he rescheduled Doomsday to “the next year” (St. Cloud Times, December 26, 1999). HERE COME DA JUDGE! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• According to the ABC News, a Japanese cult, Sukyo Mahikari, had taught that the world might be destroyed by this point in a “baptism of fire.”

MILLENNIALISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.” — Henry Thoreau, “LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2002

Colin Wells’s THE DEVIL AND DOCTOR DWIGHT: SATIRE AND THEOLOGY IN THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC (Chapel Hill NC: U of North Carolina P): Published by [email protected] (September 2002) Reviewed for H-SHEAR by Robert J. Imholt , Albertus Magnus College Copyright 2002 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses contact the Reviews editorial staff: [email protected]. In 1788, there appeared, in pamphlet form, a 778-line satiric poem entitled THE TRIUMPH OF INFIDELITY. Neither the author nor the publisher was identified. A second edition of the poem appeared soon after and another edition was printed in London in 1791. Although the attribution of authorship to the Reverend Timothy Dwight of Fairfield, Connecticut, is not universal, both contemporaries and later scholars have generally agreed that the pastor of Greenfield Hill Congregational Church and future President of Yale was the anonymous poet.9 It is this poem that was the subject of Colin Wells’s doctoral dissertation at Rutgers and that he seeks “to recover for students of early America” (p. 16) in the THE DEVIL AND DOCTOR DWIGHT.10 In Wells’s view, THE TRIUMPH OF INFIDELITY is “a lost classic of late Augustan satire ... [and] a unique example of the convergence of literature, religion and politics at the moment the new American Republic was first being imagined” (p. 16). The poem is a microcosm through which to view the culture wars of the age and, in embryonic form, the thought and career of its author Timothy Dwight. The eighteenth century was the great age of English satire and Wells’s “explication de texte” identifies many specific parallels between THE TRIUMPH OF INFIDELITY and the works of Dwight’s Augustan predecessors, particularly Alexander Pope’s DUNCIAD. Common to both is a “dense, allusive” (p. 3) style that makes them difficult for the modern reader unfamiliar with the 9. THE TRIUMPH OF INFIDELITY: A POEM ([Hartford]: printed in the World, 1788); THE TRIUMPH OF INFIDELITY: A POEM SUPPOSED TO BE WRITTEN BY TIMOTHY DWIGHT, D.D., OF GREENFIELD IN CONNECTICUT IN 1788 (London, 1791). The first Connecticut edition has forty pages; the second, twenty-four pages. There are minor changes in the poem. Surprisingly Wells does not discuss the question of authorship. For a discussion of this issue see Lewis Leary, “The Author of the Triumph of Infidelity,” New England Quarterly 20 (1947), 377-385. 10. Colin Wells, “Timothy Dwight, ‘The Triumph of Infidelity,’ and the Universalist Controversy” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1995). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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many referents. They also share the view that satire has a moral function and has as its theme a “grand struggle of historic forces” (p. 24). In Dwight’s case, according to Wells, the target was a society “drawn unwittingly towards its own corruption by self-interest and moral complacency” (p. 37). According to Wells, THE TRIUMPH OF INFIDELITY is also an entry in ongoing theological debates. For many in New England, Calvinism’s emphasis on human weakness had become problematic and attempts at theological clarification had divided ministers into Edwardseans, Arminians, Old and New Divinity camps. Added to this mix were various strands of British thought including the modern Pelagianism of Lord Shaftesbury, latitudinarianism, deism, and other forms of religious rationalism. Wells does a commendable job of sorting through this morass of ideas and capturing the essence of the argument. In the America of the 1780s, the focus of these debates was on the universalism of Boston minister Charles Chauncy. Chauncy’s writings had circulated privately for some time, and the years following the American Revolution seemed an opportune time for their publication. The most significant of these was THE M YSTERY H ID FROM AGES AND G ENERATIONS (1784). The result was an internecine war among New England clergy in which Chauncy had both his critics and defenders. Wells sees THE TRIUMPH OF INFIDELITY as part of this debate and, more significantly, sees Dwight as looking beyond the doctrinal squabble to the broader cultural and political implications of universalist ideas. To Dwight, both in the satire and in his posthumously published THEOLOGY, the idea that all men would be saved leads inevitably to a moral complacency by eliminating the individual Christian’s moral struggle which is essential to salvation. In Wells’s view, Dwight saw this human struggle as a never-ending effort to overcome self-delusion by viewing the world from the perspective of a transcendent “eternal present.” The decades following the publication of THE TRIUMPH OF INFIDELITY saw the evolution and expanding influence of both universalist theories and Dwight’s thought. Swept up in the currents of a revolutionary age, universalism led some of its adherents to various forms of secular utopianism that “celebrated the virtues and capabilities of man.” From this perspective, Christianity and its clergy, including Dwight, were a counter-revolutionary conspiracy. When wedded to “the older language of republican virtue,” these ideas led directly to “the great ideological victory of Jeffersonian democracy” (p. 141). To Dwight, this constellation of ideas represented not simply an attack upon religion, but a competitor religion. In contrast to the cult of reason, Dwight, according to Wells, “posit[ed] the harmonious relation of science and religion” (p. 111). But as the perfectionism expounded by William Godwin, Bavarian Illuminati and French revolutionary radicals gained in acceptance, “the confident Augustan voice of THE TRIUMPH OF HDT WHAT? INDEX

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INFIDELITY” gave way “to the fierce and thundering tones of the New England jeremiad” (p. 151). The struggle against infidelity was the consistent thread that ran through Dwight’s life and thought from 1788 to his death in 1817. The conclusion of THE DEVIL AND DOCTOR DWIGHT is a wide-ranging attempt to illustrate the long-ignored influence of Dwight’s struggle against infidelity. Wells finds echoes in the Unitarian controversies of the 1820s, abolitionism, Transcendentalism, and in the writings of Whittier and Hawthorne.11 Wells is to be congratulated for his efforts to look at Dwight’s poetry, theology, and public career not as isolated parts of his larger life, but as integral parts of the man. Previous book- length studies of Dwight have failed to do justice to this poet, preacher, and president of Yale who played an important (albeit secondary) role in the early republic. Charles Cunningham’s 1943 biography is a well-written narrative with only a sprinkling of analytical substance. As part of the Twayne American authors series, Kenneth Silverman contributed a volume on Dwight that understandably focuses on his literary endeavors and minimizes Dwight as minister and college president. Stephen Berk’s CALVINISM VERSUS DEMOCRACY does an adequate job of connecting Dwight to evangelical reform movements, but ignores the rest of his long career. Annabelle Wenzke’s 1989 volume has the single-minded purpose of connecting Dwight to the development of Evangelical Protestantism around the globe. The most recent book length study, John R. Fitzmier’s NEW ENGLAND’S MORAL LEGISLATOR: TIMOTHY DWIGHT, 1752-1817, clearly surpasses other treatments of the subject, but by focusing heavily upon Dwight as preacher and theologian it also fails to see Dwight as a whole, rather than 12 a collection of parts. Readers of THE DEVIL AND DOCTOR DWIGHT will never again be satisfied with a unidimensional portrait, nor will they fail to recognize the interplay of politics, culture, and religion in late eighteenth-century America. 11. Although Wells does not say so, this more positive image of Dwight is consistent with recent students of New England clergymen that see them in a more positive light than the traditional image of them as reactionary complainers totally out of step with the trends of the early Republic. David W. Kling, A FIELD OF DIVINE WONDERS: THE NEW DIVINITY AND VILLAGE REVIVALS IN NORTHWESTERN CONNECTICUT, 1792-1822 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993); James R. Rohrer, KEEPERS OF THE COVENANT: FRONTIER MISSIONS AND THE DECLINE OF CONGREGATIONALISM, 1774-1818 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Jonathan D. Sassi, A REPUBLIC OF RIGHTEOUSNESS: THE PUBLIC CHRISTIANITY OF THE POST- REVOLUTIONARY NEW ENGLAND CLERGY (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Mark R. Valeri, LAW AND PROVIDENCE IN JOSEPH BELLAMY’S NEW ENGLAND: THE ORIGINS OF THE NEW DIVINITY IN REVOLUTIONARY AMERICA (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Although its chief focus is Fisher Ames, another recent work that is consistent with the more positive image of Dwight and the Federalist world view is Marc M. Arkin, “The Federalist Trope: Power and Passion in Abolitionist Rhetoric,” Journal of American History, 88 (June 2001), 75-98. 12. Charles Cuningham, TIMOTHY DWIGHT, 1752-1817: A BIOGRAPHY (New York: Macmillan, 1942); Kenneth Silverman, TIMOTHY DWIGHT (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969); Stephen Berk, CALVINISM VERSUS DEMOCRACY: TIMOTHY DWIGHT AND THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN EVANGELICAL ORTHODOXY (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1974); Annabelle S. Wenzke, TIMOTHY DWIGHT (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989); John R. Fitzmier, NEW ENGLAND’S MORAL LEGISLATOR: TIMOTHY DWIGHT, 1752-1817 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). Mention of these book-length works is not meant to ignore many fine discussions of Dwight in journals and other books. In his introduction, John Fitzmeir provides a magnificent discussion of the “problem” of Timothy Dwight and at the end of his biography he provides a superb bibliographic essay that should be consulted by anyone working on Dwight. Works on Dwight published after Fitzmier’s bibliography include Christopher Grasso, A SPEAKING ARISTOCRACY: TRANSFORMING PUBLIC DISCOURSE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CONNECTICUT (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), chap. 7; Robert J. Imholt, “Timothy Dwight: Federalist Pope of Connecticut,” New England Quarterly, 73 (September 200), 386-411; Mark Garrett Longaker, “Timothy Dwight’s Rhetorical Ideology of Taste in Federalist Connecticut,” Rhetorica 19 (Winter 2001), 93-124; Colin Wells, “Timothy Dwight’s American DUNCIAD: THE TRIUMPH OF INFIDELITY and the Universalist Controversy,” Early American Literature, 33 (Spring 1998), 173-191. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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This does not mean that THE DEVIL AND DOCTOR DWIGHT is successful in achieving its objectives. Part of the reason for this is that it seems to have three subjects, rather than one. Moreover, none of these three is the one suggested by the title, which is too obviously an attempt to market the work to Faust scholars, Stephen Vincent Benet aficionados, or fans of THE DEVIL AND MISS JONES. The subtitle, SATIRE AND THEOLOGY IN THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC, is, however, an accurate descriptor of the work. First, the work is a close textual analysis of some of Dwight’s secondary works, most particularly THE TRIUMPH OF INFIDELITY. Wells is absolutely correct about the “dense, allusive” character of eighteenth-century satire and he does an excellent job in teasing out many of the allusions. Many of these discoveries, however, are buried in the explanatory notes and are not integrated into the analysis. This is particularly true when it comes to attempts to determine whom Dwight might have had in mind in his portraits of “the Smooth Divine,” Euclio, Florio, and others. Were these social types or men who would have been familiar to the closed circle of Connecticut literati? THE DEVIL AND DOCTOR DWIGHT curiously rejects a central role for Dwight’s millennialism and Biblical exegesis in the poem and his thought. According to Wells, Dwight “immediately discarded” his belief in America’s rising glory “at the moment the victory [in the Revolution] was secured” (pp. 42-43; see also, pp. 131- 132n). This conclusion seems to run counter to the idea expressed in lines 12-14 of THE TRIUMPH OF INFIDELITY where America is described as “the realms of freedom, peace, and virtue ... / the realms, where Heaven, ere Time’s great empire fall,/ Shall bid new Edens dress this dreary ball.” References to the Book of Revelation suffuse the poem from these opening lines to the conclusion where Satan has “mark’d all the throng” (line 775). In Dwight’s poem, might Chauncy be the false prophet? As Dwight himself wrote in the early 1770s, “Nothing gives greater weight and dignity to Poetry than Prophecy.”13 Satire can have its roots in religion as much as in early modern republican thought.14 What is also missing from Wells’ discussion is a sense of the fun of satire. Whether bawdy, raunchy, or characterized by a sharp wit that with “the fineness of a stroke ... separates the head from the body, and leaves it standing in its place,” satire since the time of Horace and Juvenal has tried to tell the truth with a smile.15 Visitors to Dwight’s home in Fairfield and later to Yale saw in him an engaging conversationalist who enjoyed clever repartee. This comes across no more clearly than in “The Friend” essays that appeared in the New-Haven Gazette and Connecticut Magazine in 1786 and 1787, the very period in which Dwight was composing THE TRIUMPH OF INFIDELITY. Since satire forces us to reflect on our own self-delusion as well as the foibles of others, Dwight’s ability to laugh at himself was a way of

13. Timothy Dwight, A DISSERTATION ON THE HISTORY, ELOQUENCE, AND POETRY OF THE BIBLE, DELIVERED AT THE PUBLIC COMMENCEMENT, AT NEW-HAVEN (New-Haven: printed by T. and S. Green, 1772), 16. 14. Although he does not consider Dwight or the Connecticut Wits, the observation of Pascal Covici, Jr., seems on the mark: “American humor, in its iconoclastic bumptiousness and focus on the foibles of the individual, has its origins in Puritan thought” (HUMOR AND REVELATION IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: THE PURITAN CONNECTION [Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1997], 2-3). 15. John Dryden, “A Discourse Concerning the Original and Purpose of Satire,” ESSAYS OF JOHN DRYDEN (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), II, 93. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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viewing the world from the perspective of the “eternal present.” These observations aside, Wells should be commended for the task he has undertaken. Any scholar who has spent time in the newspapers and other products of eighteenth-century American printers is struck by the enormous quantity of satiric material- -poems, essays, drawings. It is easy to dismiss them as poor imitations of Swift, Hogarth, and other critics of British life. A recent British reviewer of a CD-ROM, for example, dismissed M’FINGAL (1775), John Trumbull’s satire of a loyalist in revolutionary America, as worthless.16 In contrast to the enormous quantity of scholarly work by students of Georgian England, few Americanists have shown the patience to probe the cultural world that lies underneath the often horrid versification and stilted style.17 Second, the work is a study of ideas in the eighteenth century as they impact and flow from the THE TRIUMPH OF INFIDELITY. Wells does an excellent job of summarizing and clarifying the ideas of Augustan poets, Charles Chauncy, and others. The influence of Jonathan Edwards, however, is minimized. At times it seems that Dwight’s theology came more from Alexander Pope than his own grandfather (p. 85). One textual reference (and two explanatory notes) do not seem to do justice to the important influence of Edwards’s THE HISTORY OF THE WORK OF REDEMPTION on Dwight’s poem. Also missing is the profound influence of Reverend Jonathan Edwards, Jr., Dwight’s uncle under whom he studied for the ministry. Edwards the Younger was a major participant in the universalist controversy of the 1780s.18 Finally, while Wells’s effort to establish connections between the ideas expressed in the war over infidelity and “the more momentous ideological struggles and transformations taking place in America during this period” (p. 1) is laudable, this argument needs considerably more elaboration and development. The discussion of universalism in THE DEVIL AND DOCTOR DWIGHT is largely limited to debates occurring in the rarified atmosphere of high culture. In the poem, however, Dwight showed an awareness of how these ideas filtered down to the common people through such men as Ethan Allen and John Murray. Wells refers to this connection “between Universalism and backwoods itinerant 16. M’FINGAL “goes on (and on) for 52 pages of text. I can’t imagine any first degree, or even MA/PhD research, students finding this document of any value” (Alan Farmer in History Review [December 2001], 52). 17. Bruce I. Granger, POLITICAL SATIRE IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, 1763-1783 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1960); Alison Olson, “The Zenger Case Revisited: Satire, Sedition, and Political Debate in Eighteenth Century America,” Early American Literature, 35 (Fall 2000), 223-245; Lewis P. Simpson, “The Satiric Mode: The Early National Wits,” in Louis D. Rubin, Jr., ed., THE COMIC IMAGINATION IN AMERICAN LITERATURE (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 49-61. One work that recognizes the importance of this satire is Linda K. Kerber, FEDERALISTS IN DISSENT: IMAGERY AND IDEOLOGY IN JEFFERSONIAN AMERICA (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970). David S. Shields also recognizes the importance of satire in his study of the public sphere in eighteenth-century America, CIVIL TONGUES AND POLITE LETTERS IN BRITISH AMERICA (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). And although his primary effort is to see the connection between republican thought and poetry, no student of poetry in this era can ignore William C. Dowling, POETRY AND IDEOLOGY IN REVOLUTIONARY CONNECTICUT (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990). 18. Jonathan Edwards, Jr., THE NECESSITY OF ATONEMENT, AND THE CONSISTENCY BETWEEN THAT AND FREE GRACE, IN FORGIVENESS; ILLUSTRATED IN THREE SERMONS, PREACHED BEFORE HIS EXCELLENCY THE GOVERNOR AND A LARGE NUMBER OF BOTH HOUSES OF THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT, DURING THEIR SESSIONS AT NEW-HAVEN, IN OCTOBER, A.D. M.DCC.LXXXV (New-Haven: Printed by Meigs, Bowen and Dana, 1785); idem, THE SALVATION OF ALL MEN STRICTLY EXAMINED; AND THE ENDLESS PUNISHMENT OF THOSE WHO DIE IMPENITENT, ARGUED AND DEFENDED AGAINST THE OBJECTIONS AND REASONINGS OF THE LATE REV. DOCTOR CHAUNCY, OF BOSTON, IN HIS BOOK ENTITLED “THE SALVATION OF ALL MEN,” &C (New-Haven: Printed by A. Morse, 1790). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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religion” (p. 235) in his explanatory notes but does not explore the development of popular religious movements of the era. Insights garnered from the recent work of historians such as John Brooke, Peter Hughes, and Stephen A. Marini would have added a new dimension to the understanding of the poem and Dwight.19 While Dwight’s obsession with infidelity may have dominated the last three decades of his life, his efforts on behalf of missionary societies and education on the fringes of New England evidence his concern with popular universalism as much as the speculations of Cambridge divines. Finally, THE DEVIL AND DOCTOR DWIGHT is an attempt to set forth the ideas of a man for whom Wells has developed a certain fondness. While it does succeed in transcending some of the boundaries dividing students of history, literature, and theology that have limited previous analyses of Dwight, the portrait presented here has its own limitations. A faithful portrait of Dwight and his ideas must take into account his two major poems, THE CONQUEST OF CANAAN (1785) and GREENFIELD HILL (1794), as well as demonstrate a firmer command of his TRAVELS IN NEW ENGLAND AND NEW YORK (1821- 1822). Analysis of these works shows a Dwight who owes as much, if not more, to John Milton and such eighteenth-century poets of the natural order as James Thomson, George Crabbe, and Oliver Goldsmith than to the Augustan satirists. Such a portrait must also attempt to show greater connection between Dwight’s ideas and his actions as pastor, college president, and reformer. Attempting to see Dwight primarily through the lens of THE T RIUMPH OF INFIDELITY creates a blurred image. In his appendices, Colin Wells provides a workmanlike edition of THE TRIUMPH OF INFIDELITY and extremely helpful explanatory notes. For those unfamiliar with the poem, the following is meant as a brief synopsis with which Wells may very well take exception. Some familiarity with the poem, however, seems necessary background for understanding THE DEVIL AND DOCTOR DWIGHT. After a dedicatory epistle to Mons. de Voltaire, Dwight opens THE TRIUMPH OF INFIDELITY with a brief description of the prince of darkness being majestically transported from the Old World to the New. Satan then delivers a monologue occupying over half of the satire (lines 17-452) in which he sets forth the successes of infidelity in the Old World from before the birth of Christ as well as his reasons for coming to the American shore. In this review of two thousand years of providential history, the triumph of infidelity was never complete. According to Satan, the final victory seemed near “ere Bethlehem’s wonder rose” (line 23). But the apostolic church fell when “My Goths, my Huns, the cultur’d world o’er ran / and darkness buried all the pride of man” (lines 61-62). Infidelity then took the form of the medieval papacy and held unquestioned sway until the 19. John Brooke, THE REFINER’S FIRE: THE MAKING OF MORMON COSMOLOGY, 1644-1844 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Peter Hughes, “The Origins of New England Universalism: A Religion Without a Founder,” Journal of Unitarian Universalist History, 24 (1997), 31-63; idem, “Early New England Universalism: A Family Religion,” ibid., 26 (1999), 93-113; Stephen A. Marini, “The Origins of New England Universalism: Daughter of the New Light,” ibid., 24 (1997), 31-63; idem, RADICAL SECTS OF REVOLUTIONARY NEW ENGLAND (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). Wells makes good use of the still valuable study of Universalism by Conrad Wright, THE BEGINNINGS OF UNIVERSALISM IN AMERICA (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). Wells’s study was clearly completed before the publication of Ann Lee Bressler’s more recent study, THE UNIVERSALIST MOVEMENT IN AMERICA, 1770-1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Reformation. Infidelity then reared its head again under Charles II and gave unbelief new life until God brought forth Newton, Locke, and Berkeley to turn the tide of battle. New legions now Satan raised and new champions found in Hume and Voltaire. “While thus by art and perseverance won, / Again the old world seem’d almost my own” (lines 343-344). The greatest barrier to infidelity’s triumph, according to Satan’s narrative, existed in the New World in the person of “that moral Newton, that second Paul” (line 356), Dwight’s own grandfather, Jonathan Edwards. Satan’s response was to raise up the universalist Charles Chauncy to lead new souls astray with “sweet sophism” (line 419). Through the remainder of the poem Dwight introduces the reader to a number of real individuals and social types who are Satan’s minions in the ongoing battle. There are epicures and hypocrites, some who cultivate wealth and others who curry popular favor. What all of them share, according to Dwight, is the belief that the road to salvation is easy and open to all men. They have no sense of their own sinfulness or belief in eternal damnation. They eagerly listened to the message of Chauncy that “Hell is no more, or no more to be feared “(line 654). “The decent christian threw his mask aside, / and smil’d, to see the path of heaven so wide” (lines 763-764). The poem ends on a rather enigmatic note: From a dim cloud, the spirit eyed the scene,/ Now proud with triumph, and now vex’d with spleen,/ Mark’d all the throng, beheld them all his own,/ And to his cause no friend of virtue won:/ Surpriz’d, enrag’d, he wing’d his sooty flight,/ And hid beneath the pall of endless night. (1ines 773-778) Wells recognizes that the weight of scholarly opinion finds this ending an example of what Kenneth Silverman labeled the poem’s “technical ineptitudes” (p. 41n). Wells, however, considers the conclusion as consistent with his larger interpretation of the poem.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

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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

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

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

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

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