THE REVEREND HENRY CLARKE “NATURE’S NATURAL DEMANDS

1 ARE GOD’S ONLY COMMANDS” WRIGHT

“What is slavery, but the carrying out of the war principle and spirit to the end?”

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

1. There is another Henry Wright in the record, who was an Englishman and a companion of Charles Lane. This one is the one who, (Freddy Bailey) Frederick Douglass suggested, “created against himself prejudices.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

1797

Henry C. Wright was born in a poor Calvinist family of Connecticut: Seth Wright and Miriam Clarke, a farming couple. Seth was a veteran of the Revolutionary War who also did contract work as a carpenter. This was an old-fashioned Presbyterian family, stern and paternalistic.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

Henry Clarke Wright “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

1801

Winter: Henry C. Wright’s earliest memory would be of his family’s move from Sharon CT to “the Western country” near Cooperstown NY. On the way he and his pregnant mother and his older siblings nearly drowned when the ice of the Hudson River cracked beneath the horses. As the sleigh was crossing, in which were my mother and the younger children, one of the horses broke through the ice into the deep river. This caused great alarm, lest the whole should be dragged down and drowned. I remember the alarm and commotion, and the struggle to rescue the horse, and the success of it.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

Henry Clarke Wright “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

1803

While Henry C. Wright was still 5 years of age, almost 6, his mother Miriam Clarke Wright, seated with the family around the supper table, suddenly and unexpectedly, while protesting mildly that everything would be all right, died of apoplexy. His father Seth would marry again and his new stepmother would bear the name Polly Wright. The death of my mother was an event that deeply affected the happiness of the family, and the first to give me an idea of death as applying to human beings. I was five years old. It was evening. My father had just come home from his labor abroad. We were all seated around the supper table. The scene is fresh in my mind. One of my sisters anxiously cried out, “Mother, what is the matter?” She answered, sweetly and calmly, “Don’t be alarmed about me; all is well.” This called the attention of my father and all to her. She was carried to her bed, and never spoke again. In a few hours she was dead. She died of apoplexy. I stood by her bedside, frightened to see her so pale, silent and motionless.... My mother was buried at the foot of a high hill, or cliff, amidst some beech and pine trees, in a solitary spot, which, in after life, was often visited by me. After some months, my father married again, and brought another woman into the house, whom I was told to call mother; but it was long before I could call her so. The child Henry would grow up to exemplify a form of Christian aggression released by the idea of reform.2

2. Are such things connected to each other? –Is the head bone connected to the neck bone? HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

1806

June 16, Monday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2 day / Owing to the great Eclipse of the Sun which happened this morning & was nearly total, the meeting began buisness [sic] after a solid silence of about fifteen minutes which is much sooner than is common — at near eleven O Clock the meeting broke, as it was very dark & adjourned to three in the Afternoon — In the afternoon we met & entered on the State of Society as represented by the Queries which drew forth the testimonys of divers living members among whom were Wm Crotch, Enoch Dorland, Isaac Bonsall, Daniel Quinby & others. ——————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

A total eclipse of the sun was visible from San Diego, California to New-York. In the Indiana Territory, the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa accurately predicted this eclipse. As a result of observing this eclipse from Kinderhook, New York, José Joaquin de Ferrer came up with the name “corona” to designate the faint outer glowing atmosphere of the sun visible only during such a total occultation. On Boston Neck the grazing cattle began their evening walk home at noon as the eclipse blackened the cloudless sky. Observing this phenomenon, William Cranch Bond determined to become an astronomer. In the garden behind his home on Chestnut Street3 in Salem sat Nathaniel Bowditch with a telescope, and a lantern by which to consult his watch.

“The moon was seen like a black spot in the heavens surrounded by light like that of twilight. Several of the fixed stars were visible to the naked eye. At 11h 32’ 18" the light burst forth with great splendor.” SKY EVENT HARVARD OBSERVATORY Many years later, a description of this event belatedly recollected by James Fenimore Cooper in about the year 1831 would belatedly appear in 1869 in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine (Volume 21, pages 352-359): THE ECLIPSE. FROM AN UNPUBLISHED MS. OF JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. Note by the Editor.— During Mr. Cooper’s residence at Paris, he wrote, at the request of an English friend, his recollections of the great eclipse of 1806. This article, which is undated, must have been written about the year 1831, or twenty-five years after the eclipse. His memory was at that period of his life very clear and tenacious, where events of importance were concerned. From some accidental cause, this article was never sent to England, but lay, apparently forgotten, among Mr. Cooper’s papers, where it was found after his death. At the date of the eclipse, the writer was a young sailor of seventeen, just returned from a cruise. At the time of writing these 3. Now 12 Chestnut Street. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

recollections, he had been absent from his old home in Otsego County some fifteen years, and his affectionate remembrance of the ground may be traced in many little touches, which would very possibly have been omitted under other circumstances. S.F.C. THE eclipse of the sun, which you have requested me to describe, occurred in the summer of 1806, on Monday, the 16th of June. Its greatest depth of shadow fell upon the American continent, somewhere about the latitude of 42 deg. I was then on a visit to my parents, at the home of my family, among the Highlands of Otsego, in that part of the country where the eclipse was most impressive. My recollections of the great event, and the incidents of the day, are as vivid as if they had occurred but yesterday. Lake Otsego, the headwaters of the Susquehanna, lies as nearly as possible in latitude 42 deg. The village, which is the home of my family, is beautifully situated at the foot of the lake, in a valley lying between two nearly parallel ranges of heights, quite mountainous in character. The Susquehanna, a clear and rapid stream, flowing from the southeastern shore of the lake, is crossed by a high wooden bridge, which divides the main street of the little town from the lawns and meadows on the eastern bank of the river. Here were all the materials that could be desired, lake, river, mountain, wood, and the dwellings of man, to give full effect to the varied movement of light and shadow through that impressive day. Throughout the belt of country to be darkened by the eclipse, the whole population were in a state of almost anxious expectation for weeks before the event. On the eve of the 16th of June, our family circle could think or talk of little else. I had then a father and four brothers living, and as we paced the broad hall of the house, or sat about the family board, our conversation turned almost entirely upon the movements of planets and comets, occultations and eclipses. We were all exulting in the feeling that a grand and extraordinary spectacle awaited us — a spectacle which millions then living could never behold. There may have been a tinge of selfishness in the feeling that we were thus favored beyond others, and yet, I think, the emotion was too intellectual in its character to have been altogether unworthy. Many were the prophecies regarding the weather, the hopes and fears expressed by different individuals, on this important point, as evening drew near. A passing cloud might veil the grand vision from our sight; rain or mist would sadly impair the sublimity of the hour. I was not myself among the desponding. The great barometer in the hall — one of the very few then found in the State, west of Albany — was carefully consulted. It was propitious. It gave promise of dry weather. Our last looks that night, before sleep fell on us, were turned toward the starlit heavens. And the first movement in the morning was to the open window — again to examine the sky. When I rose from my bed, in the early morning, I found the heavens serene, and cloudless. Day had dawned, but the shadows of night were still lingering over the valley. For a moment, my eye rested on the familiar HDT WHAT? INDEX

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view — the limpid lake, with its setting of luxuriant woods and farms, its graceful bay and varied points, the hills where every cliff and cave and glen had been trodden a thousand times by my boyish feet — all this was dear to me as the face of a friend. And it appeared as if the landscape, then lovely in summer beauty, were about to assume something of dignity hitherto unknown — were not the shadows of a grand eclipse to fall upon every wave and branch within a few hours! There was one object in the landscape which a stranger would probably have overlooked, or might perhaps have called unsightly, but it was familiar to every eye in the village, and endowed by our people with the honors of an ancient landmark — the tall gray trunk of a dead and branchless pine, which had been standing on the crest of the eastern hill, at the time of the foundation of the village, and which was still erect, though rocked since then by a thousand storms. To my childish fancy, it had seemed an imaginary flag-staff, or, in rustic parlance, the “liberty pole” of some former generation; but now, as I traced the familiar line of the tall trunk, in its peculiar shade of silvery gray, it became to the eye of the young sailor the mast of some phantom ship. I remember greeting it with a smile, as this was the first glance of recognition given to the old ruin of the forest since my return. But an object of far higher interest suddenly attracted my eye. I discovered a star — a solitary star — twinkling dimly in a sky which had now changed its hue to a pale grayish twilight, while vivid touches of coloring were beginning to flush the eastern sky. There was absolutely no other object visible in the heavens — cloud there was none, not even the lightest vapor. That lonely star excited a vivid interest in my mind. I continued at the window gazing, and losing myself in a sort of day-dream. That star was a heavenly body, it was known to be a planet, and my mind was filling itself with images of planets and suns. My brain was confusing itself with vague ideas of magnitude and distance, and of the time required by light to pierce the apparently illimitable void that lay between us — of the beings who might inhabit an orb like that, with life, feeling, spirit, and aspirations like my own. Soon the sun himself rose into view. I caught a glimpse of fiery light glowing among the branches of the forest, on the eastern mountain. I watched, as I had done a hundred times before, the flushing of the skies, the gradual illuminations of the different hills, crowned with an undulating and ragged outline of pines, nearly two hundred feet in height, the golden light gliding silently down the breast of the western mountains, and opening clearer views of grove and field, until lake, valley, and village lay smiling in one cheerful glow of warm sunshine. Our family party assembled early. We were soon joined by friends and connections, all eager and excited, and each provided with a colored glass for the occasion. By nine o’clock the cool air, which is peculiar to the summer nights in the Highlands, had left us, and the heat of midsummer filled the valley. The heavens were still absolutely cloudless, and a more brilliant day never shone in HDT WHAT? INDEX

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our own bright climate. There was not a breath of air, and we could see the rays of heat quivering here and there on the smooth surface of the lake. There was every appearance of a hot and sultry noontide. We left the house, and passed beyond the grounds into the broad and grassy street which lay between the gates and the lake. Here there were no overhanging branches to obstruct the view; the heavens, the wooded mountains, and the limpid sheet of water before us, were all distinctly seen. As the hour for the eclipse drew near, our eagerness and excitement increased to an almost boyish impatience. The elders of the party were discussing the details of some previous eclipse: leaving them to revive their recollections, I strolled away, glass in hand, through the principal streets of the village. Scarce a dwelling, or a face, in the little town, that was not familiar to me, and it gave additional zest to the pleasure of a holiday at home, to meet one’s townsfolk under the excitement of an approaching eclipse. As yet there was no great agitation, although things wore a rather unusual aspect for the busy hours of a summer’s day. Many were busy with their usual tasks, women and children were coming and going with pails of water, the broom and the needle were not yet laid aside, the blacksmith’s hammer and the carpenter’s plane were heard in passing their shops. Loaded teams, and travellers in waggons, were moving through the streets; the usual quiet traffic at the village counters had not yet ceased. A farm-waggon, heavily laden with hay, was just crossing the bridge, coming in from the fields, the driver looking drowsy with sleep, wholly unconscious of the movement in the heavens. The good people in general, however, were on the alert; at every house some one seemed to be watching, and many groups were passed, whose eager up-turned faces and excited conversation spoke the liveliest interest. It was said, that there were not wanting one or two philosophers of the skeptical school, among our people, who did not choose to commit themselves to the belief in a total eclipse of the sun — simply because they had never seen one. Seeing is believing, we are told, though the axiom admits of dispute. But what these worthy neighbors of ours had not seen, no powers of reasoning, or fulness of evidence, could induce them to credit. Here was the dignity of human reason! Here was private judgment taking a high stand! Anxious to witness the conversion of one of these worthies, with boyish love of fun I went in quest of him. He had left the village, however, on business. But, true to his principles, before mounting his horse that morning, he had declared to his wife that “he was not running away from that eclipse;” nay, more, with noble candor, he averred that if the eclipse did overtake him, in the course of his day’s journey, “he would not be above acknowledging it!” This was highly encouraging. I had scarcely returned to the family party, left on the watch, when one of my brothers, more vigilant, or with clearer sight than his companions, exclaimed that he clearly saw a dark line, drawn on the western margin of the sun’s disc! All faces were instantly turned upwards, and through the glasses we HDT WHAT? INDEX

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could indeed now see a dusky, but distinct object, darkening the sun’s light. An exclamation of delight, almost triumphant, burst involuntarily from the lips of all. We were not to be disappointed, no cloud was there to veil the grand spectacle; the vision, almost unearthly in its sublime dignity, was about to be revealed to us. In an incredibly short time, the oval formation of the moon was discerned. Another joyous burst of delight followed, as one after another declared that he beheld with distinctness the dark oval outline, drawn against the flood of golden light. Gradually, and at first quite imperceptibly to our sight, that dark and mysterious sphere gained upon the light, while a feeling of watchful stillness, verging upon reverence, fell upon our excited spirits. As yet there was no change perceptible in the sunlight falling upon lake and mountain; the familiar scene wore its usual smiling aspect, bright and glowing as on other days of June. The people, however, were now crowding into the streets — their usual labors were abandoned — forgotten for the moment — and all faces were turned upward. So little, however, was the change in the power of the light, that to a careless observer it seemed more the gaze of faith, than positive perception, which turned the faces of all upward. Gradually a fifth, and even a fourth, of the sun’s disc became obscured, and still the unguarded eye could not endure the flood of light — it was only with the colored glass that we could note the progress of the phenomenon. The noon-day heat, however, began to lessen, and something of the coolness of early morning returned to the valley. I was looking upward, intently watching for the first moment where the dark outline of the moon should be visible to the naked eye, when an acquaintance passed. “Come with me!” he said quietly, at the same moment drawing his arm within my own, and leading me away. He was a man of few words, and there was an expression in his face which induced me to accompany him without hesitation. He led me to the Court House, and from thence into an adjoining building, and into a room then occupied by two persons. At a window, looking upward at the heavens, stood a figure which instantly riveted my attention. It was a man with haggard face, and fettered arms, a prisoner under sentence of death. By his side was the jailor. A painful tragedy had been recently enacted in our little town. The schoolmaster of a small hamlet in the county had beaten a child under his charge very severely — and for a very trifling error. The sufferer was a little girl, his own niece, and it was said that natural infirmity had prevented the child from clearly pronouncing certain words which her teacher required her to utter distinctly. To conquer what he considered the obstinacy of the child, this man continued to beat her so severely that she never recovered from the effects of the blows, and died some days after. The wretched man was arrested, tried for murder, condemned, and sentenced to the gallows. This was the first capital offence in Otsego County. It produced a very deep impression. The general character of the schoolmaster had been, until that evil hour, very good, in every way. He was deeply, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and beyond all doubt unfeignedly, penitent for the crime into which he had been led, more, apparently, from false ideas of duty, than from natural severity of temper. He had been entirely unaware of the great physical injury he was doing the child. So great was his contrition, that public sympathy had been awakened in his behalf, and powerful petitions had been sent to the Governor of the State, in order to obtain a respite, if not a pardon. But the day named by the judge arrived without a return of the courier. The Governor was at his country-house, at least eighty miles beyond Albany. The petition had been kept to the last moment, for additional signatures, and the eighty miles to be travelled by the courier, after reaching Albany, had not been included in the calculation. No despatch was received, and there was every appearance that there would be no reprieve. The day arrived — throngs of people from Chenango, and Unadilla, and from the valley of the Mohawk, poured into the village, to witness the painful, and as yet unknown, spectacle of a public execution. In looking down, from an elevated position, upon the principal street of the village that day, it had seemed to me paved with human faces. The hour struck, the prisoner was taken from the jail, and, seated, as is usual, on his coffin, was carried to the place of execution, placed between two ministers of the gospel. His look of utter misery was beyond description. I have seen other offenders expiate for their crimes with life, but never have I beheld such agony, such a clinging to life, such mental horror at the nearness of death, as was betrayed by this miserable man. When he approached the gallows, he rose from his seat, and wringing his fettered hands, turned his back upon the fearful object, as if the view were too frightful for endurance. The ministers of the gospel succeeded at length in restoring him to a decent degree of composure. The last prayer was offered, and his own fervent “Amen!” was still sounding, hoarse, beseeching, and almost despairing, in the ears of the crowd, when the respite made its tardy appearance. A short reprieve was granted, and the prisoner was carried back to the miserable cell from which he had been drawn in the morning. Such was the wretched man who had been brought from his dungeon that morning, to behold the grand phenomenon of the eclipse. During the twelve-month previous, he had seen the sun but once. The prisons of those days were literally dungeons, cut off from the light of day. That striking figure, the very picture of utter misery, his emotion, his wretchedness, I can never forget. I can see him now, standing at the window, pallid and emaciated by a year’s confinement, stricken with grief, his cheeks furrowed with constant weeping, his whole frame attesting the deep and ravaging influences of conscious guilt and remorse. Here was a man drawn from the depths of human misery, to be immediately confronted with the grandest natural exhibition in which the Creator deigns to reveal his Omnipotence to our race. The wretched criminal, a murderer in fact, though not in intention, seemed to gaze upward at the awful spectacle, with an intentness and a distinctness of mental vision far beyond our own, and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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purchased by an agony scarcely less bitter than death. It seemed as if, for him, the curtain which veils the world beyond the grave, had been lifted. He stood immovable as a statue, with uplifted and manacled arms and clasped hands, the very image of impotent misery and wretchedness. Perhaps human invention could not have conceived of a more powerful moral accessory, to heighten the effect of the sublime movement of the heavenly bodies, than this spectacle of penitent human guilt afforded. It was an incident to stamp on the memory for life. It was a lesson not lost on me. When I left the Court House, a sombre, yellowish, unnatural coloring was shed over the country. A great change had taken place. The trees on the distant heights had lost their verdure and their airy character; they were taking the outline of dark pictures graven upon an unfamiliar sky. The lake wore a lurid aspect, very unusual. All living creatures seemed thrown into a state of agitation. The birds were fluttering to and fro, in great excitement; they seemed to mistrust that this was not the gradual approach of evening, and were undecided in their movements. Even the dogs — honest creatures — became uneasy, and drew closer to their masters. The eager, joyous look of interest and curiosity, which earlier in the morning had appeared in almost every countenance, was now changed to an expression of wonder or anxiety or thoughtfulness, according to the individual character. Every house now gave up its tenants. As the light failed more and more with every passing second, the children came flocking about their mothers in terror. The women themselves were looking about uneasily for their husbands. The American wife is more apt than any other to turn with affectionate confidence to the stronger arm for support. The men were very generally silent and grave. Many a laborer left his employment to be near his wife and children, as the dimness and darkness increased. I once more took my position beside my father and my brothers, before the gates of our own grounds. The sun lay a little obliquely to the south and east, in the most favorable position possible for observation. I remember to have examined, in vain, the whole dusky canopy in search of a single cloud. It was one of those entirely unclouded days, less rare in America than in Europe. The steadily waning light, the gradual approach of darkness, became the more impressive as we observed this absolutely transparent state of the heavens. The birds, which a quarter of an hour earlier had been fluttering about in great agitation, seemed now convinced that night was at hand. Swallows were dimly seen dropping into the chimneys, the martins returned to their little boxes, the pigeons flew home to their dove-cots, and through the open door of a small barn we saw the fowls going to roost. The usual flood of sunlight had now become so much weakened, that we could look upward long, and steadily, without the least pain. The sun appeared like a young moon of three or four days old, though of course with a larger and more brilliant crescent. Looking westward a moment, a spark appeared to glitter before my eye. For a second I believed it to be an optical illusion, but in HDT WHAT? INDEX

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another instant I saw it plainly to be a star. One after another they came into view, more rapidly than in the evening twilight, until perhaps fifty stars appeared to us, in a broad, dark zone of the heavens, crowning the pines on the western mountain. This wonderful vision of the stars, during the noontide hours of day, filled the spirit with singular sensations. Suddenly one of my brothers shouted aloud, “The moon!” Quicker than thought, my eye turned eastward again, and there floated the moon, distinctly apparent, to a degree that was almost fearful. The spherical form, the character, the dignity, the substance of the planet, were clearly revealed as I have never beheld them before, or since. It looked grand, dark, majestic, and mighty, as it thus proved its power to rob us entirely of the sun’s rays. We are all but larger children. In daily life we judge of objects by their outward aspect. We are accustomed to think of the sun, and also of the moon, as sources of light, as etherial, almost spiritual, in their essence. But the positive material nature of the moon was now revealed to our senses, with a force of conviction, a clearness of perception, that changed all our usual ideas in connection with the planet. This was no interposition of vapor, no deceptive play of shadow; but a vast mass of obvious matter had interposed between the sun above us and the earth on which we stood. The passage of two ships at sea, sailing on opposite courses, is scarcely more obvious than this movement of one world before another. Darkness like that of early night now fell upon the village. My thoughts turned to the sea. A sailor at heart, already familiar with the face of the ocean, I seemed, in mental vision, to behold the grandeur of that vast pall of supernatural shadow falling suddenly upon the sea, during the brightest hour of the day. The play of light and shade upon the billows, always full of interest, must at that hour have been indeed sublime. And my fancy was busy with pictures of white-sailed schooners, and brigs, and ships, gliding like winged spirits over the darkened waves. I was recalled by a familiar and insignificant incident, the dull tramp of hoofs on the village bridge. A few cows, believing that night had overtaken them, were coming homeward from the wild open pastures about the village. And no wonder the kindly creatures were deceived, the darkness was now much deeper than the twilight which usually turns their faces homeward; the dew was falling perceptibly, as much so as at any hour of the previous night, and the coolness was so great that the thermometer must have fallen many degrees from the great heat of the morning. The lake, the hills, and the buildings of the little town were swallowed up in the darkness. The absence of the usual lights in the dwellings rendered the obscurity still more impressive. All labor had ceased, and the hushed voices of the people only broke the absolute stillness by subdued whispering tones. “Hist! The whippoorwill!” whispered a friend near me; and at the same moment, as we listened in profound silence, we distinctly heard from the eastern bank of the river the wild, plaintive note of that solitary bird of night, slowly HDT WHAT? INDEX

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repeated at intervals. The song of the summer birds, so full in June, had entirely ceased for the last half hour. A bat came flitting about our heads. Many stars were now visible, though not in sufficient number to lessen the darkness. At one point only in the far distant northern horizon, something of the brightness of dawn appeared to linger. At twelve minutes past eleven, the moon stood revealed in its greatest distinctness — a vast black orb, so nearly obscuring the sun that the face of the great luminary was entirely and absolutely darkened, though a corona of rays of light appeared beyond. The gloom of night was upon us. A breathless intensity of interest was felt by all. There would appear to be something instinctive in the feeling with which man gazes at all phenomena in the heavens. The peaceful rainbow, the heavy clouds of a great storm, the vivid flash of electricity, the falling meteor, the beautiful lights of the aurora borealis, fickle as the play of fancy, — these never fail to fix the attention with something of a peculiar feeling, different in character from that with which we observe any spectacle on the earth. Connected with all grand movements in the skies there seems an instinctive sense of inquiry, of anxious expectation; akin to awe, which may possibly be traced to the echoes of grand Christian prophecies, whispering to our spirits, and endowing the physical sight with some mysterious mental prescience. In looking back to that impressive hour, such now seem to me the feelings of the youth making one of that family group, all apparently impressed with a sensation of the deepest awe — I speak with certainty — a clearer view than I had ever yet had of the majesty of the Almighty, accompanied with a humiliating, and, I trust, a profitable sense of my own utter insignificance. That movement of the moon, that sublime voyage of the worlds, often recurs to my imagination, and even at this distant day, as distinctly, as majestically, and nearly as fearfully, as it was then beheld. A group of silent, dusky forms stood near me; one emotion appeared to govern all. My father stood immovable, some fifteen feet from me, but I could not discern his features. Three minutes of darkness, all but absolute, elapsed. They appeared strangely lengthened by the intensity of feeling and the flood of overpowering thought which filled the mind. Thus far the sensation created by this majestic spectacle had been one of humiliation and awe. It seemed as if the great Father of the Universe had visibly, and almost palpably, veiled his face in wrath. But, appalling as the withdrawal of light had been, most glorious, most sublime, was its restoration! The corona of light above the moon became suddenly brighter, the heavens beyond were illuminated, the stars retired, and light began to play along the ridges of the distant mountains. And then a flood of grateful, cheering, consoling brightness fell into the valley, with a sweetness and a power inconceivable to the mind, unless the eye has actually beheld it. I can liken this sudden, joyous return of light, after the eclipse, to nothing of the kind that is familiarly known. It was certainly nearest to the change produced by the swift HDT WHAT? INDEX

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passage of the shadow of a very dark cloud, but it was the effect of this instantaneous transition, multiplied more than a thousand fold. It seemed to speak directly to our spirits, with full assurance of protection, of gracious mercy, and of that Divine love which has produced all the glorious combinations of matter for our enjoyment. It was not in the least like the gradual dawning of day, or the actual rising of the sun. There was no gradation in the change. It was sudden, amazing, like what the imagination would teach us to expect of the advent of a heavenly vision. I know that philosophically I am wrong; but, to me, it seemed that the rays might actually be seen flowing through the darkness in torrents, till they had again illuminated the forest, the mountains, the valley, and the lake with their glowing, genial touch. There was another grand movement, as the crescent of the sun reappeared, and the moon was actually seen steering her course through the void. Venus was still shining brilliantly. This second passage of the moon lasted but a moment, to the naked eye. As it ceased, my eye fell again on the scene around me. The street, now as distinctly seen as ever, was filled with the population of the village. Along the line of road stretching for a mile from the valley, against the side of the mountain, were twenty waggons bearing travellers, or teams from among the hills. All had stopped on their course, impelled, apparently, by unconscious reverence, as much as by curiosity, while every face was turned toward heaven, and every eye drank in the majesty of the sight. Women stood in the open street, near me, with streaming eyes and clasped hands, and sobs were audible in different directions. Even the educated and reflecting men at my side continued silent in thought. Several minutes passed, before the profound impressions of the spectacle allowed of speech. At such a moment the spirit of man bows in humility before his Maker. The changes of the unwonted light, through whose gradations the full brilliancy of the day was restored, must have been very similar to those by which it had been lost, but they were little noted. I remember, however, marking the instant when I could first distinguish the blades of grass at my feet — and later again watching the shadows of the leaves on the gravel walk. The white lilies in my mother’s flower-garden were observed by others among the first objects of the vegetation which could be distinguished from the windows of the house. Every living creature was soon rejoicing again in the blessed restoration of light after that frightful moment of a night at noon-day. Men who witness any extraordinary spectacle together, are apt, in after-times, to find a pleasure in conversing on its impressions. But I do not remember to have ever heard a single being freely communicative on the subject of his individual feelings at the most solemn moment of the eclipse. It would seem as if sensations were aroused too closely connected with the constitution of the spirit to be irreverently and familiarly discussed. I shall only say that I have passed a varied and eventful life, that it has been my fortune to see earth, heavens, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ocean, and man in most of their aspects; but never have I beheld any spectacle which so plainly manifested the majesty of the Creator, or so forcibly taught the lesson of humility to man as a total eclipse of the sun.

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Greatest Saros Eclipse Sun Path Center Date Eclipse Type # Gamma Mag. Lat. Long. Alt Width Dur. 1806 Jun 16 16:24 T 124 0.320 1.060 42.2N 64.5W 71 210 04m55s HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

From Henry C. Wright’s Autobiography:

When quite young, there was a total eclipse of the sun in June. That event made a deep impression on me. I heard much about it for weeks beforehand. I knew not what it was to be like, except that it was to be dark about mid-day. I was hoeing Indian corn, with two older brothers. They sent me off on an errand, and as I passed to the place, I could see the woods becoming dingy. I started to return, and by this time, birds and beasts began to be in extraordinary excitement, rushing to the roost and the lair. The woods became dark and gloomy. I was in the midst, and night seemed to drop down upon the scene in the midst of daylight. The forest had the same gloomy appearance which it had at night. The sun had an appearance I never saw before; it seemed to be in a process of going out, till, for a moment, it was all gone. I knew where I was, and the way out of the wood, and what was the matter, and had no fear. I stood still in the woods, and contemplated the scene with wonder. It soon passed, and I went on my way; but an awe was on my spirit long afterwards, whenever I saw the heavens by day or night.

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.

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Henry Clarke Wright HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

1814

When he had been 5, almost 6, Henry C. Wright’s mother had suddenly and unexpectedly died. His father remarried but at this point, while he was 17, his stepmother Polly also died. His father thereupon apprenticed him to a hatter of Norwich, David Bright and he began to live in this person’s attic. After five months he was able to walk home for a visit with his family, 30 miles — only to encounter there his father’s new, 3d, wife.

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

Henry Clarke Wright “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

1816

Winter: Henry C. Wright underwent a religious conversion during a revival in Norwich, New York. While he was in the little chamber which he shared with other apprentices, lying on his bed reading and “thinking over my calamitous state,” he was “brought out” suddenly from “deep anguish” to “great joy.” He had experienced his religious conversion and would ask to join the Presbyterian church. He wrote home to his father to inform him of this conversion and this was the first letter he ever had mailed. He informed his father that “this world is nothing but a prison, and that death is the only door out of it.” In a postscript, he urged his siblings to also bring to an end their rebellions against God the Father. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

1817

Henry C. Wright went back to school for four months, embarrassed at being “a man” among the schoolboys (he was 5' 10'' with light blue eyes and dark hair), and then after attempting the hatting trade and failing, resolving to make of himself a minister, he moved into a reverend’s home — to attend him at his duties. The clergyman of choice was the Reverend Henry Chapman, a Yale College grad who was serving the town of Hartwick. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

Table of Altitudes

Yoda 2 ' 0 '' Lavinia Warren 2 ' 8 '' Tom Thumb, Jr. 3 ' 4 '' Lucy (Australopithecus Afarensis) 3 ' 8 '' Hervé Villechaize (“Fantasy Island”) 3 ' 11'' Charles Proteus Steinmetz 4 ' 0 '' Mary Moody Emerson per FBS (1) 4 ' 3 '' Alexander Pope 4 ' 6 '' Benjamin Lay 4 ' 7 '' Dr. Ruth Westheimer 4 ' 7 '' Gary Coleman (“Arnold Jackson”) 4 ' 8 '' Edith Piaf 4 ' 8 '' Queen Victoria with osteoporosis 4 ' 8 '' Linda Hunt 4 ' 9 '' Queen Victoria as adult 4 ' 10 '' Mother Teresa 4 ' 10 '' Margaret Mitchell 4 ' 10 '' length of newer military musket 4 ' 10'' Charlotte Brontë 4 ' 10-11'' Tammy Faye Bakker 4 ' 11'' Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut 4 ' 11'' jockey Willie Shoemaker 4 ' 11'' Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 4 ' 11'' Joan of Arc 4 ' 11'' Bonnie Parker of “Bonnie & Clyde” 4 ' 11'' Harriet Beecher Stowe 4 ' 11'' Laura Ingalls Wilder 4 ' 11'' a rather tall adult Pygmy male 4 ' 11'' Gloria Swanson 4 ' 11''1/2 Clara Barton 5 ' 0 '' Isambard Kingdom Brunel 5 ' 0 '' Andrew Carnegie 5 ' 0 '' Thomas de Quincey 5 ' 0 '' Stephen A. Douglas 5 ' 0 '' Danny DeVito 5 ' 0 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

Immanuel Kant 5 ' 0 '' William Wilberforce 5 ' 0 '' Dollie Parton 5 ' 0 '' Mae West 5 ' 0 '' Pia Zadora 5 ' 0 '' Deng Xiaoping 5 ' 0 '' Dred Scott 5 ' 0 '' (±) Captain William Bligh of HMS Bounty 5 ' 0 '' (±) Harriet Tubman 5 ' 0 '' (±) Mary Moody Emerson per FBS (2) 5 ' 0 '' (±) John Brown of Providence, Rhode Island 5 ' 0 '' (+) John Keats 5 ' 3/4 '' Debbie Reynolds (Carrie Fisher’s mother) 5 ' 1 '' Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) 5 ' 1 '' Bette Midler 5 ' 1 '' Dudley Moore 5 ' 2 '' Paul Simon (of Simon & Garfunkel) 5 ' 2 '' Honore de Balzac 5 ' 2 '' Sally Field 5 ' 2 '' Jemmy Button 5 ' 2 '' Margaret Mead 5 ' 2 '' R. Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller 5 ' 2 '' Yuri Gagarin the astronaut 5 ' 2 '' William Walker 5 ' 2 '' Horatio Alger, Jr. 5 ' 2 '' length of older military musket 5 ' 2 '' 1 the artist formerly known as Prince 5 ' 2 /2'' 1 typical female of Thoreau's period 5 ' 2 /2'' Francis of Assisi 5 ' 3 '' Vol ta i re 5 ' 3 '' Mohandas Gandhi 5 ' 3 '' Sammy Davis, Jr. 5 ' 3 '' Kahlil Gibran 5 ' 3 '' Friend Daniel Ricketson 5 ' 3 '' The Reverend Gilbert White 5 ' 3 '' Nikita Khrushchev 5 ' 3 '' Sammy Davis, Jr. 5 ' 3 '' Truman Capote 5 ' 3 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

Kim Jong Il (North Korea) 5 ' 3 '' Stephen A. “Little Giant” Douglas 5 ' 4 '' Francisco Franco 5 ' 4 '' President James Madison 5 ' 4 '' Iosef Vissarionovich Dzugashvili “Stalin” 5 ' 4 '' Alan Ladd 5 ' 4 '' Pablo Picasso 5 ' 4 '' Truman Capote 5 ' 4 '' Queen Elizabeth 5 ' 4 '' Ludwig van Beethoven 5 ' 4 '' Typical Homo Erectus 5 ' 4 '' 1 typical Neanderthal adult male 5 ' 4 /2'' 1 Alan Ladd 5 ' 4 /2'' comte de Buffon 5 ' 5 '' (-) Captain Nathaniel Gordon 5 ' 5 '' Charles Manson 5 ' 5 '' Audie Murphy 5 ' 5 '' Harry Houdini 5 ' 5 '' Hung Hsiu-ch'üan 5 ' 5 '' 1 Marilyn Monroe 5 ' 5 /2'' 1 T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia” 5 ' 5 /2'' average runaway male American slave 5 ' 5-6 '' Charles Dickens 5 ' 6? '' President Benjamin Harrison 5 ' 6 '' President Martin Van Buren 5 ' 6 '' James Smithson 5 ' 6 '' Louisa May Alcott 5 ' 6 '' 1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 5 ' 6 /2'' 1 Napoleon Bonaparte 5 ' 6 /2'' Emily Brontë 5 ' 6-7 '' Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 5 ' ? '' average height, seaman of 1812 5 ' 6.85 '' Oliver Reed Smoot, Jr. 5 ' 7 '' minimum height, British soldier 5 ' 7 '' President John Adams 5 ' 7 '' President John Quincy Adams 5 ' 7 '' President William McKinley 5 ' 7 '' “Charley” Parkhurst (a female) 5 ' 7 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

Ulysses S. Grant 5 ' 7 '' Henry Thoreau 5 ' 7 '' 1 the average male of Thoreau's period 5 ' 7 /2 '' Edgar Allan Poe 5 ' 8 '' President Ulysses S. Grant 5 ' 8 '' President William H. Harrison 5 ' 8 '' President James Polk 5 ' 8 '' President Zachary Taylor 5 ' 8 '' average height, soldier of 1812 5 ' 8.35 '' 1 President Rutherford B. Hayes 5 ' 8 /2'' President Millard Fillmore 5 ' 9 '' President Harry S Truman 5 ' 9 '' 1 President Jimmy Carter 5 ' 9 /2'' 3 Herman Melville 5 ' 9 /4'' Calvin Coolidge 5 ' 10'' Andrew Johnson 5 ' 10'' Theodore Roosevelt 5 ' 10'' Thomas Paine 5 ' 10'' Franklin Pierce 5 ' 10'' Abby May Alcott 5 ' 10'' Reverend Henry C. Wright 5 ' 10'' 1 Nathaniel Hawthorne 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 Louis “Deerfoot” Bennett 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 Friend John Greenleaf Whittier 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 President Dwight D. Eisenhower 5 ' 10 /2'' Sojourner Truth 5 ' 11'' President Grover Cleveland 5 ' 11'' President Herbert Hoover 5 ' 11'' President Woodrow Wilson 5 ' 11'' President Jefferson Davis 5 ' 11'' 1 President Richard Milhous Nixon 5 ' 11 /2'' Robert Voorhis the hermit of Rhode Island < 6 ' Frederick Douglass 6 ' (-) Anthony Burns 6 ' 0 '' Waldo Emerson 6 ' 0 '' Joseph Smith, Jr. 6 ' 0 '' David Walker 6 ' 0 '' Sarah F. Wakefield 6 ' 0 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

Thomas Wentworth Higginson 6 ' 0 '' President James Buchanan 6 ' 0 '' President Gerald R. Ford 6 ' 0 '' President James Garfield 6 ' 0 '' President Warren Harding 6 ' 0 '' President John F. Kennedy 6 ' 0 '' President James Monroe 6 ' 0 '' President William H. Taft 6 ' 0 '' President John Tyler 6 ' 0 '' John Brown 6 ' 0 (+)'' President Andrew Jackson 6 ' 1'' Alfred Russel Wallace 6 ' 1'' President Ronald Reagan 6 ' 1'' 1 Venture Smith 6 ' 1 /2'' John Camel Heenan 6 ' 2 '' Crispus Attucks 6 ' 2 '' President Chester A. Arthur 6 ' 2 '' President George Bush, Senior 6 ' 2 '' President Franklin D. Roosevelt 6 ' 2 '' President George Washington 6 ' 2 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

Gabriel Prosser 6 ' 2 '' Dangerfield Newby 6 ' 2 '' Charles Augustus Lindbergh 6 ' 2 '' 1 President Bill Clinton 6 ' 2 /2'' 1 President Thomas Jefferson 6 ' 2 /2'' President Lyndon B. Johnson 6 ' 3 '' Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 6 ' 3 '' 1 Richard “King Dick” Seaver 6 ' 3 /4'' President Abraham Lincoln 6 ' 4 '' Marion Morrison (AKA John Wayne) 6 ' 4 '' Elisha Reynolds Potter, Senior 6 ' 4 '' Thomas Cholmondeley 6 ' 4 '' (?) Franklin Benjamin Sanborn 6 ' 5 '' Peter the Great of Russia 6 ' 7 '' Giovanni Battista Belzoni 6 ' 7 '' Thomas Jefferson (the statue) 7 ' 6'' Jefferson Davis (the statue) 7 ' 7'' 1 Martin Van Buren Bates 7 ' 11 /2'' M. Bihin, a Belgian exhibited in Boston in 1840 8 ' Anna Haining Swan 8 ' 1''

Winter: Henry C. Wright found at least a temporary “deliverance” from whatever demons of the soul it was, that were haunting him as a young man: A Presbyterian church had been organized in the village.... The minister [the Reverend John Truair of Sherburne] assured the people who flocked to hear his eloquence, “that the Lord was about to visit that village, and to gather into His fold His elect.”... I had a Bible, in which my father had written his own name and mine, and which he had given me when I left home. This I began to read with a purpose to go through the whole of it. I read on, verse after verse and chapter after chapter, from the first to the last, and ... wondered how my parents could dare to cause me to be, when they believed my being must, of necessity, be “under the wrath and curse of God.” ... I was in a distracted state. My heart was at war with my head ... after being several weeks under this distress of mind, at length I “was brought out.” ...from deep anguish, I passed to great joy.... I had found deliverance.... I did then and long afterwards think I was then and there made a Christian by that operation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

1818

Henry C. Wright delivered an “Address” to the Ladies Missionary Society of the Presbyterian Church in Hartwick. The time was approaching for the conversion of the entire earth to Christianity. Those foreigners with their strange ways and their strange beliefs need to be taught how right we are. He began to court a young lady by letter, a Miss Laura West Hartwick, his “Respected Juvenile Friend,” demanding to know from her whether she “who is now in the bloom of life” would “be willing to act a part in that great drama”?

Page 259: By the time he left home he had read Goethe’s SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER and was acquainted with popular modes of acting out and savoring sadness. Sometimes he actually posed as a sensitive, weary young man in a world that had lost its meaning.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Henry Clarke Wright HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

1819

Fall: For the next couple of years, helped financially by friends in Hartwick, Henry C. Wright would be attending Andover Theological Seminary, twenty miles north of Boston next to the boys’ school.

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Henry Clarke Wright HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

1821

For his annual exams this year at Andover Theological Seminary, Henry C. Wright was assigned the topic “The Evils of Indulging a Disputatious Spirit.” After this he would stop out for a year of schoolteaching in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he would meet a rich widow a number of years his senior, complete with four kiddies in need of a father figure. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

1822

October 1822-Spring 1823: Henry C. Wright spent a 3d and final year at Andover Theological Seminary, until he could get himself accepted as a Congregational minister and marry the rich widow he had met earlier in the year while teaching school in Newburyport (Elizabeth LeBreton Stickney, daughter of Peter LeBreton the shipowner).

He was 26, she 43. She already had four children, age 11 to 6.

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

Henry Clarke Wright “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

1823

Spring: At this point the Reverend Henry C. Wright began musing about “colonizing the free negroes in Africa.” If they weren’t going to be slaves they didn’t have any business being over here bothering us! He would not, however, become energized on this topic for another dozen years.

June 26, Thursday: Henry C. Wright and Elizabeth LeBreton Stickney were wed by the Reverend Luther Dimmick and set off for a honeymoon at romantic Niagara Falls. He was 26, she 43. They took along with them on their honeymoon the bride’s youngest, her 7-year-old Mary.

The groom found “she wishes not to be caressed by me, nor do I by her.”

August: Henry C. Wright was licensed to preach by the presbytery of Otsego, New York, and began earning money as a supply preacher. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

1826

The Reverend Henry C. Wright became the regular minister in West Newbury, near Newburyport, Massachusetts, at a salary of $350 per year. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

1830

The Reverend Henry C. Wright began a notebook on peace and war, and mused in this notebook that Jesus’s injunctions not to retaliate or do harm to others in response to their harmfulness to you were injunctions which applied not only to individuals but also to governments. For so long as governments maintained themselves by force, he theorized, it would be improper for the Christian even to cast a ballot. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

1831

The charges for board and tuition at the Yearly Meeting School for young Quaker scholars in Providence, Rhode Island had been dropping steadily, and at this point had been cut in half, to $50 per year. A north wing had been added in the rear of the original building, the “Classical Building,” as indicated, to house an “academic department” (now known as the Upper School). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

John Comly published, in Philadelphia in two volumes, THE WORKS OF THAT EMINENT MINISTER OF THE GOSPEL, JOB SCOTT, LATE OF PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND. JOB SCOTT WORKS I APPENDIX SALVATION BY CHRIST FURTHER CONSIDERED OPENINGS OF TRUTH JOB SCOTT WORKS II TENDER CAUTION ONE TRUE GOD ON PERSEVERANCE REWARD / PUNISHMENT ON BAPTISM LIBERTY / NECESSITY The Reverend Henry C. Wright’s later books would attribute his conversion to pacifism to a chance encounter he had at this point in time with some old Quaker man of Providence. According to Wright’s later account of the conversation, the old man’s persuasive ploy in regard to the Peace Testimony of the Religious Society of Friends was to twit or tease him: were he to kill someone in self-defense, obviously as a Christian he would need to do so “with love,” no? (However, it is unlikely that Wright’s conversion to pacifism was so sudden and single-caused as he later would make it out to have been, for in fact in the previous year he had begun a notebook on peace and war, and in this notebook we find that he was already thinking that Jesus’s injunctions not to retaliate or do harm to others in response to their harmfulness to you were injunctions which applied not only to individuals but also to governments. For so long as governments maintained themselves by force, he had been theorizing, it would be improper for the Christian even to cast a ballot.) THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

1832

Henry C. Wright became a fundraiser for Amherst College and raised $50,000 in small donations. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

1833

July: Henry C. Wright resigned his pastorate in West Newbury to become a missionary (fundraiser, organizer) for the American Home Missionary Society, and was assigned to Chicago. En route to Chicago he would reconsider, and take a job instead with the American Sunday School Union in Essex County and New Hampshire. He would then proceed to get involved as well with the American Peace Society and the American Antislavery Society. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

August 8, Thursday: Henry C. Wright had a “coffin” dream.

On this day or the following one Marc Isambard Brunel advised Charles Babbage to fire his intransigent contractor Joseph Clement on the Calculational Engine, suggesting instead a man named Spiller.

Commander George Back arrived at Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake. On the 8th of August we reached Great Slave Lake, and were received at Fort Resolution by Mr. M’Donnell, the gentleman in charge. THE FROZEN NORTH

September 23, Monday: Maria II was once again proclaimed Queen of Portugal under the regency of her father, Dom Pedro.

The Daily Sun of New-York, 1st of the American “penny papers.”

With the assistance of Christ Jesus, Henry C. Wright revealed in his private journal, he had won his victory over the vice of self-onanism (what we know under the rubric “masturbation”). What was the result of “THE UNNATURAL AND MONSTROUS EXPENDITURE OF THE SEXUAL ELEMENT, FOR MERE SENSUAL GRATIFICATION? Failure in business, without any apparent cause; imbecility and folly in plans and purposes, and indecision in execution, where strength, wisdom and promptitude were expected; dyspepsia, rheumatism, gout, apoplexy, paralysis, consumption and disease ... and a premature and agonizing death, where a healthy, vigorous youth gave promise of a long life...; a morose and selfish temper, where, in youth, a loving and manly spirit reigned; domestic circles converted into scenes of discontent, strife, cruelty and blood...; women, whose girlhoods were seasons of health, beauty and joyous life and activity, become prematurely nervous, fretful, sickly, helpless and deformed; ... children ... dead under five years of age...; the many premature births; the sufferings and deaths in child-birth; the inconceivable amount and variety of disease and suffering peculiar to the female organism; idiots, born of intellectual parents; insane, born of the sane; diseased and deformed, born of the healthy and beautiful; hating, revengeful and bloody spirits, born of the loving, the forgiving, and the gentle; — these and many other facts connected with human life, are ever before us, and ever marvellous. On the contrary, the retention of the semen, “except for offspring,” was “deep, vitalizing, ennobling, and intensely joyous and elevating.”4

4. There’s this beach-front property in Arizona.... HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

September 28, Saturday: On this day and the following one Henry C. Wright was deciding to leave behind him not only masturbation but also, shudder, fiction. Having perused Sir Walter Scott’s SCOTTISH CHIEFS he was concluding that such tale-spinning was “pernicious” (he would later visit Abbotsford and Scott’s gravesite there, and his summation would be that despite the manner in which other tourists treated this as if it were some sort of shrine, the reputation which this tale-spinner Scott had left behind was an entirely insignificant one): I believe [Shakespear (sic) & Scott] have ruined many souls. WOuld God they had never seen the light of day & that I had more strength to resist temptation. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Sir Walter Scott’s Abbotsford HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

October 7, Monday: George Stephenson filed the initial patent for a high-speed steam locomotive.

Waldo Emerson arrived in New-York harbor aboard the New York.

The Reverend Henry C. Wright first met Nathaniel Peabody Rogers in New Hampshire. (On one overcast day this month, I don’t know whether before or after this encounter with the editor Rogers, the Reverend Wright was traveling through the New Hampshire mountains when he was caught in a rainstorm. The though crossed his mind that were he the one who was in charge of this universe, rather than God Almighty, he would make a better job of it. The thought drove him to his knees in the mud, as he prayed for forgiveness. Nothing, no sin, was worse than the “dreadful thought” of becoming God’s substitute!)

The French physician Joseph-Honor-Simon Beau began daily observations of his epileptic patients in order to determine whether there was a correlation between their seizures and meteorological events. By a series of observations that would continue until November 20, 1833 he would be able to establish that epilepsy was in fact not related in any manner to weather conditions. This was good to know (other studies would establish that epileptic seizures were similarly quite independent of the various phases of the moon).5 PSYCHOLOGY

Margaret Fox of the Spiritualist Fox Sisters was born near Bath, New Brunswick in Canada, on this day and probably in this year (because Margaret and Catherine were promoted as child prodigies their ages have frequently been understated, but a deposition sworn by the mother at the time that the rappings began in 1848 stated that Margaret was 15).6

DATE: The Reverend Henry C. Wright offered that, since any vote under an enslaver-protecting Constitution amounted to a vote to sustain human enslavement, the North ought to secede from the federal union.

5. Street, W.R. A CHRONOLOGY OF NOTEWORTHY EVENTS IN AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY. Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 1994 6. Different sources give one daughter’s name as Margaret, Margaretta, Maggie, and Maggy and the other’s as Catherine, Katherine, Kate, Katty, Katie, and Cathie. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

1834

In St. Michaels, Maryland, Frederick Douglass was assigned by his owner to work for a white farmer, Edward “The Snake” Covey, who had the reputation of a “nigger-breaker,” on his 150-acre rented farm some seven miles to the northwest of St. Michaels, but Mr. Covey had a spot of difficulty with this particular nigger. We notice that at no point was Douglass trying to kill Covey, something reasonable and easy, for he was trying to do something considerably more fraught, get such a person’s attention and then talk turkey to him: “I seized Covey hard by the throat…. I told him….” Strange to relate, although in this struggle Douglass drew blood from Covey and could reasonably have anticipated that as soon as order and propriety had been restored he HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

would be tortured to death by “The Snake” and his crowd — he found that instead he was no longer being

lashed. Douglass seems to have attributed this to his master’s economic need to obtain maximum work from him with minimum expenditure of effort. Consider this as bravado, in the face of the fact that the only difficulty Covey would have had in killing Douglass, other than in ordering the other laborers to dig a shallow hole in HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

the field alongside the corpse, would have come when he had to reimburse Thomas Auld for his economic loss:

I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.

But one wonders whether this hopeless resistance may have inspired Thomas Covey to respect Frederick Douglass as a man and as a human. I offer that this fight in the fields of Maryland may well have been a turning-point not only in the individual life of Douglass, but also –unfortunately– in the ideology of nonresistance to evil as espoused by William Ladd, the Reverend Adin Ballou, the Reverend Henry C. Wright,

Abby Kelley, John A. Collins, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May, Edmund Quincy, John Humphrey Noyes (!),

and William Lloyd Garrison. For later on Douglass would use this memory as fuel for his breach with other antislavery advocates over Garrison’s principled nonresistance to evil and as fuel for the encouragement, by the allies of John Brown, of an indigenous uprising of the black slaves of the South, when Douglass began in 1851 to find alternate funding from the “Liberty Party” created by the intemperate wealthy white man Gerrit Smith.

Richard Hildreth’s REPORT OF A PUBLIC DISCUSSION BETWEEN THE REVS. ADIN BALLOU AND DANIEL D. SMITH; ON THE QUESTION, “DO THE HOLY SCRIPTURES TEACH THE DOCTRINE, THAT MEN WILL BE PUNISHED AND REWARDED SUBSEQUENTLY TO THIS LIFE, OR AFTER DEATH, FOR THE DEEDS DONE IN THIS LIFE?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

Hildreth created a pamphlet defending Abner Kneeland against a charge of blasphemy, APPEAL TO COMMON SENSE AND THE CONSTITUTION ON BEHALF OF UNLIMITED FREEDOM OF DISCUSSION.

Suffering from tuberculosis, and clinically depressed, the author and editor sold his share in Boston’s The Atlas and sought the more healthful climate of Florida. He would find lodgings on a slave plantation. During 18 months of tropical sunshine he would create the 1st American antislavery novel, THE SLAVE, OR MEMOIRS OF A FUGITIVE, while laboring toward a description of the deleterious effects on our economic and political development of the South’s racist “peculiar institution,” that would see publication in 1840 as DESPOTISM IN AMERICA. His wife, his child, his toil, his blood, his life, and everything that gives his life a value, they are not his; he holds them all but at his master’s pleasure. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

Because the Reverend Hosea Hildreth had been exchanging services with pastors of the new Unitarian persuasion, the Essex Association expelled him as Congregationalist minister over the First Parish Church of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Until his death in the following year, the Reverend Hildreth would be serving as minister of a Unitarian congregation in Westboro, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

We see that Frederick Douglass believed he had already put what would become the doctrine of ahimsa to the ultimate test, and that he had already discovered this doctrine to be ultimately wrongheaded — and was following the path of Nehru rather than the path of Gandhiji. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

January 1, Wednesday: A Zollverein or customs union among 18 German states, headed by Prussia, went into effect.

Frederick Douglass later reported that:

At daybreak I was ordered to get a load of wood from a forest about two miles from the house.... I had never driven oxen before.... Once the gate was opened in front of them, my oxen charged through full tilt. They caught the huge gate between the wheel and the cart body, crushing it into splinters and coming within a few inches of crushing me with it.... Covey told me that he would now teach me how to break gates and idle away my time.... [He] ordered me to take off my clothes.... “If you beat me,” I thought, “you shall do so over my clothes.” After many threats he rushed at me..., tore off the few thin clothes I had on, and proceeded to wear out on my back the heavy goads which he had cut from the gum tree.... [D]uring the first six months there I was whipped, either with sticks or a cowhide whip, every week.... I was sometimes tempted to take my life and that of Covey but was prevented by a combination of hope and fear.

“The morning of January 1, 1834, found me on the road to Covey’s. The chilling wind and pinching frost matched the winter of my own mind as I trudged along.... [Chesapeake Bay] was now white with foam raised by a heavy northwest wind.” Frederick Douglass the troublemaker who had attempted to set up a Sunday School for black children, had been contracted by his owner to Mr. Edward “The Snake” Covey’s on his 150-acre rented farm some seven miles to the northwest of St. Michaels, Maryland –where discipline was HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

by whip– to work for the first time as field rather than house slave: Frederick Douglass’s NARRATIVE

In my new employment, I found myself even more awkward than a country boy appeared to be in a large city. I had been at my new home but one week before Mr. Covey gave me a very severe whipping, cutting my back, causing the blood to run, and raising ridges on my flesh as large as my little finger. The details of this affair are as follows: Mr. Covey sent me, very early in the morning of one of our coldest days in the month of January, to the woods, to get a load of wood. He gave me a team of unbroken oxen. He told me which was the in-hand ox, and which the off-hand one. He then tied the end of a large rope around the horns of the in-hand ox, and gave me the other end of it, and told me, if the oxen started to run, that I must hold on upon the rope. I had never driven oxen before, and of course I was very awkward. I, however, succeeded in getting to the edge of the woods with little difficulty; but I had got a very few rods into the woods, when the oxen took fright, and started full tilt, carrying the cart against trees, and over stumps, in the most frightful manner. I expected every moment that my brains would be dashed out against the trees. After running thus for a considerable distance, they finally upset the cart, dashing it with great force against a tree, and threw themselves into a dense thicket. How I escaped death, I do not know. There I was, entirely alone, in a thick wood, in a place new to me. My cart was upset and shattered, my oxen were entangled among the young trees, and there was none to help me. After a long spell of effort, I succeeded in getting my cart righted, my oxen disentangled, and again yoked to the cart. I now proceeded with my team to the place where I had, the day before, been chopping wood, and loaded my cart pretty heavily, thinking in this way to tame my oxen. I then proceeded on my way home. I had now consumed one half of the day. I got out of the woods safely, and now felt out of danger. I stopped my oxen to open the woods gate; and just as I did so, before I could get hold of my ox-rope, the oxen again started, rushed through the gate, catching it between the wheel and the body of the cart, tearing it to pieces, and coming within a few inches of crushing me against the gate-post. Thus twice, in one short day, I escaped death by the merest chance. On my return, I told Mr. Covey what had happened, and how it happened. He ordered me to return to the woods again immediately. I did so, and he followed on after me. Just as I got into the woods, he came up and told me to stop my cart, and that he would teach me how to trifle away my time, and break gates. He then went to a large gum-tree, and with his axe cut three large switches, and, after trimming them up neatly with his pocketknife, he ordered me to take off my clothes. I made him no answer, but stood with my clothes on. He repeated his order. I still made him no answer, nor did I move to strip myself. Upon this he rushed at me with the fierceness of a tiger, tore off my clothes, and lashed me till he had worn out his switches, cutting me so savagely as to leave the marks visible for a long time after. This whipping was the first of a number just like it, and for similar offences.

Mr. Covey had a reputation as a “nigger-breaker,” but was going to experience considerable difficulties, even a threat to his professional standing, in his attempts to break this particular nigger.

[We will notice, however, that at no point in the struggle would Douglass try to kill Edward Covey, something reasonable and easy, for he was trying to do something considerably more fraught, get such a person’s attention and then talk turkey to him: “I seized Covey hard by the throat.... I told him....” Strange to relate, although in this struggle Douglass had drawn blood from Covey and could reasonably have anticipated that as soon as order and propriety had been restored he would be tortured to death by “The Snake” and his Christian crowd HDT WHAT? INDEX

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— he would find that instead he was no longer being lashed. Douglass seems to have attributed this to his master’s economic need to obtain maximum work from him with minimum expenditure of effort. Consider this as bravado, in the face of the fact that the only difficulty Covey would have had in killing Douglass, other than in ordering the other laborers to dig a shallow hole in the field alongside the corpse, would have come when he had to reimburse Thomas Auld for his economic loss:

I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.

But one wonders whether it was not precisely this hopeless resistance which may have inspired Covey to respect Douglass as a man and as a human. I offer that these fights in the fields of Maryland may well have been a turning-point not only in the individual life of Douglass, but also –unfortunately– in the ideology of nonresistance to evil as espoused by William Ladd, the Reverend Adin Ballou, the Reverend Henry C. Wright, Abby Kelley, John A. Collins, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May, Edmund Quincy, John Humphrey Noyes of the Perfectionist, and William Lloyd Garrison. For later on Douglass would use this memory as fuel for his breach with other antislavery advocates over Garrison’s principled nonresistance to evil and as fuel for the encouragement, by the allies of John Brown, of an indigenous uprising of the black slaves of the South, when Douglass began in 1851 to find alternate funding from the “Liberty Party” created by the intemperate wealthy white man Gerrit Smith. We see that Frederick Douglass believed he had already put what would become the doctrine of ahimsa to the ultimate test, and that he had already discovered this doctrine to be ultimately wrongheaded — and was following the path of Nehru rather than the path of Gandhiji.] SLAVERY

While this sturm-und-drang about becoming free from slavery was going on in Maryland, in Newport, Rhode Island, the quietist Friend Stephen Wanton Gould was writing in his journal about becoming free from sin: 4th day 1st of 1 M 1834 / I am thankful in being Able to insert today that is has been a day of some favour - a good day, wherein my soul has experienced some access to the fountain of good, & been enabled to cry in Secret Abba Father.—— Our Meeting which was silent was free from conflict which has often awaited me of late. —— I rejoice in it & most ardently have I desired for help & preservation.7 RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

7. Stephen Wanton Gould Diary, 1833-1836: The Gould family papers are stored under control number 2033 at the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections of Cornell University Library, Box 9 Folder 15: January 1, 1833-August 28, 1836; also on microfilm, see Series 7 HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

January 19, Sunday: Over the course of ten days, Henry C. Wright would religiously view every piece of Scott memorabilia there was to be seen at Abbotsford. Wright had read Scott’s SCOTTISH CHIEFS and had concluded, on September 28-29, 1833, that such works were “pernicious.” He visited Scott’s gravesite. His summation was that despite the manner in which other tourists were treating this place as if it were some sort of shrine, the reputation which Sir Walter Scott had left behind was an insignificant one: I believe [Shakespear (sic) & Scott] have ruined many souls. WOuld God they had never seen the light of day & that I had more HDT WHAT? INDEX

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strength to resist temptation.

Sir Walter Scott’s Abbotsford Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 19 of 1 M / I have been quite unwell for some days with a cold Cough & some fever, but feel some better this evening. — -Our meetings were both silent but I was favourd with some feeling - A portion of J J Gurneys Portable Evidences were read this evening in our School collection, & tho’ I do not unit with every thing he has written, yet I thought what was read was very good. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

September: The Reverend Henry C. Wright met William Ladd for the 2d time. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

1835

This was the year during which the Reverend Henry C. Wright became an abolitionist. Going down a street in Boston “on an errand of kindness and mercy to the poor,” he made the mistake of going arm-in-arm with the woman whom he was accompanying. When he returned to his boarding-house, he was informed that he had sacrificed his standing in all respectable society. The woman in question had been — black!

Perhaps the most important incident occurred when he accompanied a Negro schoolteacher to visit the parents of her pupils. It was a wintry night, and he offered her his arm. At his boardinghouse he was teased for being seen arm-in-arm with a colored woman (and he reproached himself for feeling the sting of disapproval). A decade later he told an English friend that this incident caused his conversion to antislavery. Actually neither this nor any other single event effected his conversion, but he may well have remembered it with special intensity as summing up the entire process of withdrawal from the prejudices of the circle in which he lived.

Rebecca Reed, a nun who had escaped from the Ursuline Convent in 1832, left little to the imagination when she described her SIX MONTHS IN A CONVENT. SURVEY OF AMERICAN ANTI-CATHOLICISM

What sort of person would be impressed by this sort of literature? Well, for one thing, a person who had helped burn down this convent in Charlestown would be impressed, very impressed. “Hey, we did the right thing!”

To Henry C. Wright, of course, Rebecca Read’s SIX MONTHS IN A CONVENT bore “the impress of Truth.” Damn those Catholics anyway. ANTI-CATHOLICISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

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January: The Reverend Henry C. Wright was voted the magnificent salary of $1,000 per year to carry on his work with some 600 of Boston’s children on behalf of the Presbyterian and Congregational churches. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

May 16, Saturday: Mrs. Felicia Hemans, the immensely popular British romantic poet who had for many years been issuing one or more books of poetry per year, died in Dublin, Ireland at the age of 42, reportedly of tuberculosis complicated by scarlet fever.

The Reverend Henry C. Wright went to the downtown Boston office of the Garrisonians (this may have happened on the 16th, or it may have happened on the 18th), waited around until someone showed up, and asked to sign up for membership in the antislavery crusade.

In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 7th day 15th [sic] Spent this day in much sweetness of feeling & in resting after our journey, finding our new acquaintance highly interesting & affectionately disposed towards us. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

June 11, Thursday: Pedro Gilbert, Manuel Costello, Monelle Bogga, Jose Bassello De Costa, and Angeloa Garcia, Spanish pirates from aboard the Panda, were hanged in the rear of the Leverett Street jail of Boston. Although the Reverend Henry C. Wright had faithfully attended the trials in Boston of the accused dozen pirates, on the day of execution of the 6 who had committed murder he was so alienated by the jeering, drunken mob of spectators that he had to walk away before the hangings began.8

(One of the convicted men, Don Bernardo de Soto, a native of Corunna, Spain and the mate and owner of the 8. Beginning at about this point, in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, the authorities were becoming uncomfortable and embarrassed at the enthusiasm with which the crowds attending public hangings were greeting the public humiliation of the condemned. Sheriffs gradually would be beginning to enhance their personal standing among the influential members of the communities which they served, by carrying out such executions within prison courtyards to which they could admit as spectators only the privileged few to whom they might be willing to grant passes.

During this year, also, England was beginning to proscribe the use of hanging as a punishment for housebreaking, forgery, and “bodily harm dangerous to life with the intent to murder.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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pirate vessel Panda, had been pardoned by President Andrew Jackson after a personal appeal from his lovely young wife, Donna Petrona Pereyra de Soto, and on consideration of his having while previously the captain of the brig Leon rescued 70 individuals on board the American ship Minerva during a voyage from Philadelphia to Havana.) Andrew Jackson, President of the United States of America, to all to whom these presents shall come,

Greeting: Whereas, at the October Term, 1834, of the Circuit Court of the United States, Bernardo de Soto was convicted of Piracy, and sentenced to be hung on the 11th day of March last from which sentence a respite was granted him for three months, bearing date the third day of March, 1835, also a subsequent one, dated on the fifth day of June, 1835, for sixty days. And whereas the said Bernardo de Soto has been represented as a fit subject for executive clemency —

Now therefore, I, Andrew Jackson, President of the United States of America, in consideration of the premises, divers good and sufficient causes me thereto moving, have pardoned, and hereby do pardon the said Bernardo de Soto, from and after the 11th August next, and direct that he be then discharged from confinement. In testimony whereof I have hereunto subscribed my name, and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed to these presents.

Done at the City of Washington the sixth day of July, AD. 1835, and of the independence of the United States and sixtieth.

Andrew Jackson.

July 17, Friday: On November 21, 1783, in a garden in the Bois de Boulogne, the Frenchmen Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Mongolfier had ascended into the skies in a hot-air balloon for a period of 26 minutes. But things they had been a-changing. So, when during this year of 1835 a French gunboat received orders to shoot down a hostile hot-air balloon — it would be discovered that what it had been ordered to shoot down was instead the planet Venus. Also, in this year of 1835 John Wise rode by balloon from Philadelphia to Haddonfield, New Jersey, a distance of some 9 miles. (“Now to figure out how to steer this thing.”) And, on this date in this year, the citizens of Boston got involved in the rage of the age, as their goldbeater Louis Lauriat made his first ascents.

The Reverend Henry C. Wright paid $15 to become a life member of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. He borrowed a volume of Blackstone from the Boston lawyer David Lee Child in order to read up on the law of Theft, with the objective of ascertaining what was the legal definition for human slavery. (He wouldn’t find much in the book that was helpful –of course– and would settle on a definition of slavery as consisting in involuntary and uncompensated labor — a definition which could only be described as “personal” as it would to this day never be codified either in federal jurisprudence or in federal legislation.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

November: The Reverend Henry C. Wright and William Lloyd Garrison first met. They mused together on the Christian attitude of foregoing retaliation.

December: For yet another episode in yet another of America’s race wars, the Seminole warriors agreed to have Osceola as their war chief with Jumper and Alligator as his seconds in command. Forming an alliance with the headman of the group to the east of Saint John’s River, Philip, they assaulted the white plantations along that river:

Black Native Warriors? Where Had That Come From? December 1835 The destruction of sugar plantations along the St. Johns River south of St. Augustine, Florida

December 18, 1835 The battle of Black Point, west of the town of Micanopy in the Florida Territory

December 28, 1835 Massacre of Major Francis Dade’s troops heading for Fort King

December 31, 1835 The 1st battle on the Withlacoochee River of Florida (Clinch’s Battle)

February-March 1836 The siege of Camp Izard

October 12, 1836 The 2d battle on the Withlacoochee River of Florida (Call’s Battle)

November 21, 1836 An action in the Wahoo Swamp on the Withlacoochee River

January 27, 1837 The battle of Hatcheelustee Creek at the head of the Kissimmee River

December 25, 1837 The battle of Lake Okeechobee

January 15, 1838 An action at Jupiter Inlet, on the east coast of Florida

January 24, 1838 The battle of Lockahatchee

SEMINOLES WHITE ON RED, RED ON WHITE SWAMP HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

1836

Publication of the initial volume Richard Hildreth’s THE SLAVE, OR MEMOIRS OF A FUGITIVE (THE SLAVE: OR, MEMOIRS OF ARCHY MOORE), considered the 1st American antislavery novel (fictionalized in the mode of autobiography).9 The voice the author constructed for his point-of-view character has been considered by some commentators to be “uncannily similar in many ways” to the voice which would later appear as Frederick Douglass. Despite fragile health, the author returned to Massachusetts and to Boston’s The Atlas. To Maria Weston Chapman, a friend and a fellow abolitionist, he would write, “I am impelled by an irresistible impulse to act –or rather to write– for the sharpened point of a goose quill is the most potent instrument in my power to employ.” He would add, “To perish in the breach in the assault against tyranny and error is not the worst death a man might die.” MEMOIRS OF ARCHY MOORE

The issues occupying him would include not only human slavery but also the dispossession of the Cherokee and other native tribes of the southeast, the movement to annex the slaveholding sovereign nation of Texas, the banking crisis, and the Massachusetts liquor license law of 1838. While serving as a court reporter for The Atlas and as its correspondent in Washington DC, Hildreth would churn out articles and pamphlets on political issues, found a short-lived temperance newspaper, and author two monographs on the economic collapse of 1837. A literature so diffuse obviously varies widely in style, purpose, and competence. Some books are works of enduring value from a literary as well as a “protest” perspective. The autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, Henry Bibb, and Solomon Northup fuse imaginative style with keenness of insight. They are penetrating and self-critical, superior autobiography by any standards. The quality of mind and spirit of their authors is apparent.... The majority of slave narratives, like most autobiographies, are more parochial and weaker in literary quality. Many are confused.... The very shortcomings of their books as literature in part testify to their authenticity as historical sources. The style of their books is a product of their schooling. A number of slave narratives are of such doubtful validity that they may be shelved at the start. When the authenticity of a “memoir,” THE NARRATIVE OF JAMES WILLIAMS (1838), dictated by one black man to the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier, was questioned, Williams was nowhere to be found. The book was withdrawn from publication. James Williams seems to have been a free Negro who culled stories from neighbors and invented others for a little ready cash. The antislavery press is full of warnings against such bogus fugitives. Two other books, THE SLAVE: OR THE MEMOIRS OF ARCHIE MOORE (1836) and THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FEMALE SLAVE (1856), were works of antislavery fiction. The first was written by the American historian Richard Hildreth; the second was composed by Mattie Griffith, the white daughter of a Kentucky slaveholder. Such potential hoaxes led 9. An expanded version of this novelistic “autobiography” would be produced in 1852. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to careful investigation of the stories fugitives wrote for publication. Narrators were subjected to detailed questioning by committees of knowledgeable people; letters were written to former masters and neighbors for corroboration. A tale so seemingly improbable as the life of Henry Bibb led to an extensive correspondence with white Southerners, all of whom verified Bibb’s account — the improbable was the real. Solomon Northup’s fantastic experiences were verified by a basketful of legal documents. Because few slaves were literate enough to write their names, much less their autobiographies, and were thus forced to rely on amanuenses, usually abolitionists, scholars have rightly wondered where the slave’s experience began and that of the antislavery recorder left off. Some have maintained that the typical slave narrative is so doctored that all are suspect as sources. Ulrich B. Phillips, for example, believed that such narratives “were issued with so much abolitionist editing that as a class their authenticity is doubtful.”10 From this year into 1838, the slave Freddy Bailey who eventually would become known to the world as Frederick Douglass, working for the time being under the name Stanley, would be an apprentice in the calking trade in Baltimore. One of the conditions of this servitude was, of course, being brutally beaten by gangs of white calkers whose livelihoods were being threatened by slave labor simply because a slave can be induced to survive and continue laboring at a lesser standard of consumption than any free person. Douglass reported that they felt it “degrading to them to work with me” for $1.50 a day all of which they got to keep and spend, when from his salary his owner was deducting the sum of $3.00 per week “not because he possessed the slightest shadow of a right to it; but solely because he had the power to compel me to give it up.”11 When Hugh Auld saw the damage that the other calkers had done to his slave, he was outraged. How dare they infringe upon his “rights of property”? He tried to take the case to the magistrate, but the magistrate pointed out quite reasonably that the only evidence he could produce was the testimony of a black man, and testimony by a black against a white was not admissible in court.

10. Osofsky, Gilbert, comp. PUTTIN’ ON OLE MASSA; THE SLAVE NARRATIVES OF HENRY BIBB, WILLIAM WELLS BROWN, AND SOLOMON NORTHUP. NY: Harper & Row, 1969

11. To get a sense of what that amounted to in today’s money, consult HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Douglass was helping construct the ships Delorez, Teayer, and Eagle. These ships were being fitted out with calked and coated bilge compartments that were to contain stores of fresh water as ballast — rather than the usual salt water for ballast. These ships were also being fitted out with horizontal racks in their holds, some 15 inches apart. As Douglass well knew, therefore, he was helping fit out these ships to compete in the allegedly illegal American slave trade, and was participating in bringing even more unfortunate black people from Africa to America in bondage.12

These new recruits into the condition of slavery would be forced to lie on these racks, on their sides, chained, and the water in the ballast tanks was to be their drinking water during the voyage. It is an interesting comment on Douglass’s situation in life later, as an anti-slavery orator, that he would never be able to foreground the fact that as a slave he had been reduced to helping in the construction of such slave ships.

12. Although the international slave trade was supposed at this point to have been illegal (since 1824 at least), illegal to the point of being classified as a capital crime, one punishable by death, actually all the white people were merely looking the other way while it continued. The whole thing was amounting to a colossal fraud. No white American had ever, ever been punished for such a crime as the illegal importation of slaves, nor anything even remotely similar to this. During the entire period, only one white American would be executed for this capital crime, and this one solitary execution would not occur until after the US Civil War had begun. The whole thing even now continues as a colossal fraud, as our children are still being misinformed in our public schools that our original constitution had contemplated that the importation of slaves would automatically become illegal in about 1808 — when in point of fact what the Constitution actually says, for anyone who dares to actually inspect that document, is that at least until the year 1808 the importation of slaves instead was to be considered as a legitimate wholesale enterprise constitutionally protected against any and all government interference, and could not be rendered illegal by the federal congress. You should therefore once and for all clear your mind of such sponsored misconceptions! HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

Who would have understood? What white person could have sympathized with such an ultimate degradation? —Well, maybe Friend John Greenleaf Whittier. During this year would appear his poem “Clerical Oppressors,” eventually to be quoted by Frederick Douglass:

“Just God! and these are they, Who minister at thine altar, God of right! Men who their hands, with prayer and blessing, lay On Israel’s ark of light. “What! preach, and kidnap men? Give thanks, and rob thy own afflicted poor? Talk of thy glorious liberty, and then Bolt hard the captive’s door? “What! servants of thy own Merciful Son, who came to seek and save The homeless and the outcast, fettering down The tasked and plundered slave! “Pilate and Herod friends! Chief priests and rulers, as of old, combine! Just God and holy! is that church which lends Strength to the spoiler thine?”

It is an open question whether Henry C. Wright, in reading Richard Hildreth’s THE MEMOIRS OF ARCHY MOORE, realized that he was reading a novel written by a white man rather than an autobiographical narrative written by a mulatto: “No man can read this book & not feel that a desire to hold power over a fellow being, is in itself most wicked & possession of power most corrupting to the heart.”

April: The Reverend Henry C. Wright asked for release from his work with the children of Boston.

June: For the next period of time, until September, the Reverend Henry C. Wright would be working out of the American Peace Society offices in Rochester NY, but there was friction because he was insisting on discussing with the general public the wrongness of even defense in warfare. The cause’s general attitude would be “Look, fella, you have no freedom of speech as a spokesperson for a propagandizing organization. You are to talk about what we tell you to talk about and you are not to talk about what we tell you not to talk about.”

“I know of no country in which there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America.” — Alexis de Tocqueville

September: From this point into November the Reverend Henry C. Wright would be transiting from working on behalf of the American Peace Society to working on behalf of the American Anti-Slavery Society. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

1837

July 17, Monday: The Grimké sisters Angelina and Sarah were staying for the summer with the Henry C. Wrights in Newburyport , Massachusetts.

ANGELINA EMILY GRIMKÉ SARAH MOORE GRIMKÉ Meanwhile an assembly of Congregationalist ministers was resolving that it was simply not appropriate for a white female speaker from the South to state to a decent church audience that black female slaves were subject to the “brutal lust” of their white masters.

All religions are at the deepest level systems of cruelties.

No, this stuff about black female slaves being subject to the “brutal lust” of their white masters was a thing “which ought not to be named” which would consume the “modesty and delicacy” of such a white female speaker, opening the way to her “degeneracy and ruin.” No, according to the pastoral letter put out by these reverends, “your minister is ordained of God to be your preacher” and it would be “unnatural” for a woman to be a “public performer.”

It was while the sisters were staying with the Wrights in Newburyport that Friend Sarah Moore Grimké in response wrote another in the series of her public reports of her thinking by way of a letter to Mary S. Parker, the President of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, which would be publicly circulated in LETTERS ON THE EQUALITY OF THE SEXES, AND THE CONDITION OF WOMAN:

Whatever is morally right for a man to do, is morally right for a woman. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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[see following screens] HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

Newburyport, 7th mo. 17, 1837. My DEAR SISTER,- In my last, I traced the creation and the fall of man and woman from that state of purity and happiness which their beneficent Creator designed them to enjoy. As they were one in transgression, their chastisement was the same. “So God drove out the man, and he placed at the East of the garden of Eden a cherubim and a flaming sword, which turned every way to keep the way of the tree of life.” We now behold them expelled from Paradise, fallen from their original loveliness, but still bearing on their foreheads the image and superscription of Jehovah; still invested with high moral responsibilities, intellectual powers, and immortal souls. They had incurred the penalty of sin, they were shorn of their innocence, but they stood on the same platform side by side, acknowledging no superior but their God. Notwithstanding what has been urged, woman I am aware stands charged to the present day with having brought sin into the world. I shall not repel the charge by any counter assertions, although, as was before hinted, Adam’s ready acquiescence with his wife’s proposal, does not savor much of that superiority in strength of mind, which is arrogated by man. Even admitting that Eve was the greater sinner, it seems to me man might be satisfied with the dominion he has claimed and exercised for nearly six thousand years, and that more true nobility would be manifested by endeavoring to raise the fallen and invigorate the weak, than by keeping woman in subjection. But I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy. If he has not given us the rights which have, as I conceive, been wrested from us, we shall soon give evidence of our inferiority, and shrink back into that of man has assigned us as our appropriate obscurity, which the high souled magnanimity of man has assigned us as our appropriate sphere. As I am unable to learn from sacred writ when woman was deprived by God of her equality with man, I shall touch upon a few points in the Scriptures, which demonstrate that no supremacy was granted to man. When God had destroyed the world, except Noah and his family, by the deluge, he renewed the grant formerly made to man, and again gave him dominion over every beast of the earth, every fowl of the air, over all that moveth upon the earth, and over all the fishes of the sea; into his hands they were delivered. But was woman, bearing the image of her God, placed under the dominion of her fellow man? Never! Jehovah could not surrender his authority to govern his own immortal creatures into the hands of a being, whom he knew, and whom his whole history proved, to be unworthy of a trust so sacred and important. God could not do it, because it is a direct contravention of his law, “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou “serve.” If Jehovah had appointed man as the guardian, or teacher of woman, he would certainly have given some intimation of this surrender of his own prerogative. But so far from it, we find the commands of God invariably the same to man and woman; and not the slightest intimation is given in a single passage of the BIBLE, that God designed to point woman to man as her instructor. The tenor of his language always is, “Look unto ME, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am God, and there is none else.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

The lust of dominion was probably the first effect of the fall; and as there was no other intelligent being over whom to exercise it, woman was the first victim of this unhallowed passion. We afterwards see it exhibited by Cain in the murder of his brother, by Nimrod in his becoming a mighty hunter of men, and setting up a kingdom over which to reign. Here we see the origin of that Upas of slavery, which sprang up immediately after the fall, and has spread its pestilential branches over the whole face of the known world. All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and says, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior. Woman has been placed by John Quincy Adams, side by side with the slave, whilst he was contending for the right side of petition. I thank him for ranking us with the oppressed; for I shall not find it difficult to show, that in all ages and countries, not even excepting enlightened republican America, woman has more or less been made a means to promote the welfare of man, without due regard to her own happiness, and the glory of God as the end of her creation.... SARAH M. GRIMKE

August: The Henry C. Wrights of Newburyport MA were in the throes of a permanent relocation to Philadelphia. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

September: During this year the Grimké sisters Angelina and Sarah had been lecturing throughout New England on the general topic “An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States.”

The Misses Grimké have made speeches, wrote pamphlets, exhibited themselves in public, etc. for a long time, but have not found husbands yet. We suspect that they would prefer white children to black under certain circumstances, after all.

During the early part of this month the Quaker sisters were visiting Concord, staying with the Brooks family and being entertained by Mrs. Lidian Emerson among others (before moving on to spend the remainder of the hot season with the Henry C. Wrights in Newburyport MA).

ANGELINA EMILY GRIMKÉ SARAH MOORE GRIMKÉ

September: Friend John Greenleaf Whittier, Theodore Dwight Weld, and a number of others having come to regard him as nothing more than a self-promoting troublemaker, the Reverend Henry C. Wright was formally notified by the American Anti-Slavery Society that they would no longer be using him as an agent. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

1838

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

Elizur Wright, Junior relocated to Boston where successively he would edit several gazettes.

January 8, Monday: Henry C. Wright confided to his journal the thought that we are each of us now to be as Adam was, “solely under God’s dominion.” Government was only “as necessary as human wickedness — no more so.” By annulling all allegiances other than to God we can “change this field of blood into a paradise of love.”

(That’s exactly the same sort of thing that the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini would, in a later timeframe, propose as the basis for the new Islamic Republic of Iran. “Instead of a man on a white horse,” he would opinion, “let’s have a man in a white turban.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Midsummer: In midsummer William Lloyd Garrison announced that the formation of a Non-Resistance Society was being contemplated. The 1st organizers for this new society would be the Reverends Henry C. Wright and Samuel Joseph May, Friend Abby Kelley, John A. Collins, and Edmund Quincy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

1840

This was the year during which the Reverend Henry C. Wright got his article on the “Christian Reformer” published in the Union Herald, and the year in which he excommunicated his Congregational church in HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Newbury, Massachusetts before it had a chance to excommunicate him. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Lewis Perry’s biography of the Reverend Wright indicates that during the 1840s he was keeping a diary “written on the fly with a metallic pencil” (page 196, CHILDHOOD, MARRIAGE, AND REFORM). So, what the deuce was this thingie, a “metallic pencil,” during the 1st half of the 19th Century? (I am aware that the Romans had used a crescent of lead to mark stones for architectural cutting, and that light lines of lead from such a crescent had customarily been marked onto a fresh sheet of papyrus or parchment to guide the hand of the copyist as he applied ink to the page with a quill pen — but I had supposed such “metallic pencil” practices to have been over and done with by the end of the Middle Ages. No? I am able to locate a patent for a “metallic writing pen,” issued to Peregrine Williamson of Baltimore on November 22, 1809, and in 1829 in New Lebanon, New York, a Shaker, Isaac Youngs, began to manufacture “silver pens,” although these designs may have been merely steel pen nibs traveling under another name, but I can find no patents or manufacturing methods for metallic anything of specifically the pencil persuasion.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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During this decade Henry C. Wright would be making a transition from nonresistance to spiritualism, that is to say, to communicating with souls who had passed “beyond the veil.” He would hail Andrew Jackson Davis of Poughkeepsie, one of the more notorious of the seers or spirit-communicators, as “a Jesus of this day.” He would shill for the Canadian Fox Sisters and their toe-joint-popping antics.

SPIRITUALISM (In all fairness to the Reverend Wright, I must add that the Reverend Adin Ballou and Friend John Greenleaf Whittier were being similarly gullible.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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January 19, Sunday: Charles Wilkes supposed he sighted land as he moved along the edge of the ice pack south of Australia during the Southern Hemisphere summer.

He would claim to have made this observation on several later occasions as well, as he moved along the edge of the ice pack for some 1,500 miles. Although he couldn’t possibly have sighted any land directly from his reported positions, the highest known peaks always being in fact below his sea horizon, he did perhaps see something by reflection from the sky, in a local atmospheric phenomenon known as “looming.” Thus, Wilkes is considered by his fellow Americans to be the first to provide some proof of the existence of an Antarctic continent.13

OH LOOKIE OVER THERE!

Representative William Slade’s filibuster speech before the US House of Representatives, urging the 13. More or less simultaneous with the Wilkes expedition were expeditions from two other of the dominant players in Antarctic exploration, Great Britain and France. The French expedition, commanded by Captain Jules Sébastien César Dumont d’Urville, explored the Antarctic Peninsula from January to March 1838 and landed on the Adélie Coast, on the other side of Antarctica, in January 1840. The French expedition sailed earlier than the American one, sighted the landmass earlier, and returned earlier. The British Expedition under James Clark Ross explored the Ross Sea in 1840-1841 and returned there again the following year.

(Captain Ross delighted in making a notation in his log whenever he was sailing across an area of the globe that had, by the Wilkes expedition, been charted as dry land.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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immediate abolition of the practice of human enslavement throughout these United States of America, was continuing interminably. While the honorable Representative was flogging the issue to death, Henry C. Wright, quoting from the OLD TESTAMENT, was bringing before the readers of the Liberator the spectre of the blacks of America doing to the whites, under Frederick Douglass, what the Jews out of Egypt had done to the previous inhabitants of the Holy Land.14 The three million slaves in the South combine under Frederick Douglass, as the Jews combined under Moses, and march upon New York, take the city and slaughter every man, woman, and child in it; and then spread over the state, and kill “infants and sucklings,” and “every thing that breatheth in it; and take possession of the gold and silver, the horses, lands and cattle for themselves.”

November: At the Chardon Street Chapel in Boston, a continuation of the 1st meeting of the Convention of Friends of Universal Reform, that had begun during March. Attending “to discuss the origin and authority of the ministry” were, among others, the Reverend George Ripley from Brook Farm and David Mack from the Association of Industry and Education, plus at least four other future members of that Northampton association. Waldo Emerson’s report of this is on the following screen.

[go to the following screen]

14. At some point Frederick Douglass would comment that Henry C. Wright had some sort of personal problem that resulted in the unfortunate fact, that he unwittingly “created against himself prejudices.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

In the month of November, 1840, a Convention of Friends of Universal Reform assembled in the Chardon Street Chapel, in Boston, in obedience to a call in the newspapers signed by a few individuals, inviting all persons to a public discussion of the institutions of the Sabbath, the Church and the Ministry. The Convention organized itself by the choice of Edmund Quincy, as Moderator, spent three days in the consideration of the Sabbath, and adjourned to a day in March, of the following year, for the discussion of the second topic. In March, accordingly, a three- days’ session was holden, in the same place, on the subject of the Church, and a third meeting fixed for the following November, which was accordingly holden, and the Convention, debated, for three days again, the remaining subject of the Priesthood. This Convention never printed any report of its deliberations, nor pretended to arrive at any Result, by the expression of its sense in formal resolutions, — the professed object of those persons who felt the greatest interest in its meetings being simply the elucidation of truth through free discussion. The daily newspapers reported, at the time, brief sketches of the course of proceedings, and the remarks of the principal speakers. These meetings attracted a good deal of public attention, and were spoken of in different circles in every note of hope, of sympathy, of joy, of alarm, of abhorrence, and of merriment. The composition of the assembly was rich and various. The singularity and latitude of the summons drew together, from all parts of New England, and also from the Middle States, men of every shade of opinion, from the straitest orthodoxy to the wildest heresy, and many persons whose church was a church of one member only. A great variety of dialect and of costume was noticed; a great deal of confusion, eccentricity, and freak appeared, as well as of zeal and enthusiasm. If the assembly was disorderly, it was picturesque. Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-Outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day-Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and Philosophers, — all came successively to the top, and seized their moment, if not their hour, wherein to chide, or pray, or preach, or protest. The faces were a study. The most daring innovators, and the champions-until-death of the old cause, sat side by side. The still living merit of the oldest New England families, glowing yet, after several generations, encountered the founders of families, fresh merit, emerging, and expanding the brows to a new breadth, and lighting a clownish face with sacred fire. The assembly was characterized by the predominance of a certain plain, sylvan strength and earnestness, whilst many of the most intellectual and cultivated persons attended its councils. Dr. William Henry Channing, Edward Thompson Taylor, Bronson Alcott, Mr. William Lloyd Garrison, Mr. Samuel Joseph May, Theodore Parker, Henry C. Wright, Dr. Joseph Osgood, William Adams, Edward Palmer, Jones Very, Maria W. Chapman, and many other persons of a mystical, or sectarian, or philanthropic renown, were present, and some of them participant. And there was no want of female speakers; Mrs. Little and Mrs. Lucy Sessions took a pleasing and memorable part in the debate, and that flea of Conventions, Mrs. Abigail Folsom, was but too ready with her interminable scroll. If there was not parliamentary order, there was life, and the assurance of that constitutional love for religion and religious liberty, which, in all periods, characterizes the inhabitants of this part of America. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1841

Charles James Fox, in connection with the Reverend Samuel Osgood, then pastor of the Unitarian Church in Nashua, prepared the THE NEW HAMPSHIRE BOOK OF PROSE AND POETRY (SPECIMENS OF THE LITERATURE OF THE GRANITE STATE), a collection of pieces in prose and verse, from the writings of natives and adopted citizens of that state.

During this year Henry C. Wright took part in an “anti-ministry” convention and determined that Quaker HDT WHAT? INDEX

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principles seemed to be the most Christian: I would have every man his own minister, and his own church, and his own state, under God.

His treatise MAN-KILLING, BY INDIVIDUALS AND NATIONS, WRONG — DANGEROUS IN ALL CASES was published in Boston by Moses A. Dow and his 8-page DUTY OF ABOLITIONISTS TO PRO-SLAVERY MINISTERS AND CHURCHES was published in Concord, New Hampshire by John R. French. This latter pamphlet marked his personal break with compromise on the issue of abolitionism — it is in the form of a letter directed to his congregation in Newbury, Massachusetts in which he says the members are as sinful and guilty as slave owners, and that he hereby excommunicates them all! (The elders of the church of course accepted his resignation. From this point forward it is inappropriate for us to refer to him any longer as “the Reverend.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1842

March: The executive committee of the American Non-Resistance Society sent Henry C. Wright to Great Britain and Ireland. He would be spending five years overseas:

If there is one salient theme in the visits of American abolitionists to Britain, it is the stirring up of old- fashioned odium theologicum. No one orchestrated religious hatred more zealously than Wright, no one leveled more dramatically phrased charges, no one occasioned more fury. Even Garrisonians might have hesitated before the zeal which he attached to religious controversy.... One can understand why some abolitionists, notably Frederick Douglass, became reluctant to be associated with him.... It was no accident that Wright began to adopt the Quaker thee- and-thouing in these years. Amidst all the rancor and vilification of his stay in Europe, he was taking steps toward agitation as a profession rather than a calling.

June 20, Monday: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, George Bradburn, and Henry C. Wright spoke at an Anti-Slavery Meeting in Hyannis, Massachusetts.

Christopher A. Greene got married with one of William Chace’s three daughters, Sarah Anne Chace (1818-

1904). The couple would produce five children, Abby Sophia on December 11, 1844, Sarah Anna on November 28, 1846, Christopher Wanton Casey on September 26, 1848, Eliza Chace on March 2, 1851, and William Chace on December 16, 1852. For the first two years the newlyweds would reside, along with Sarah’s two sisters and their husbands, at what they were terming “Holly Home” — a small communal farm in North Providence, Rhode Island. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

June 21, Tuesday: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, George Bradburn, and Henry C. Wright spoke at a Non-Resistance Meeting in North Dennis, Massachusetts.

[Another account has it that on this day Douglass was speaking instead before the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society in Danvers.]

June 22, Wednesday: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, George Bradburn, and Henry C. Wright spoke at an Anti-Slavery Meeting in Brewster MA.

CAPE COD: The same author (the Rev. John Simpkins) said of the inhabitants [of Brewster], a good while ago: “No persons appear to have a greater relish for the social circle and domestic pleasures. They are not in the habit of frequenting taverns, unless on public occasions. I know not of a proper idler or tavern-haunter in the place.” This is more than can be said of my townsmen. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

July 1, Friday: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Henry C. Wright went off on a 3-week lecture tour of Cape Cod.

John Francis had been sentenced to death for taking a shot at Queen Victoria on May 30th. On this day his life was reprieved — he was to spend the remainder of his life in a penal colony. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

October 21, Friday: Frederick Douglass lectured at Rome, New York.

Commodore Thomas Jones USN learned that in fact war has not broken out between Mexico and the United States of America, lowered his flag, and sailed out of the harbor of Monterrey, California. The United States of America would need to apologize to Mexico.

Bronson Alcott, Henry Gardiner Wright15, Charles Lane, and Lane’s son William Lane arrived at Dove Cottage in Concord, bringing with them from England many invaluably impressive volumes of metaphysical

15. This Henry Gardiner Wright was an English companion of Charles Lane. (The American ex-reverend, Henry C. Wright, was at this point on an extended tour of Europe.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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speculation.

…And speaking of sentiment brings us very naturally to the ‘Dovecote.’ That was the name of the little brown house which Mr. Brooke had prepared for Meg’s first home. Laurie had christened it, saying it was highly appropriate to the gentle lovers who ‘went on together like a pair of turtle- doves, with first a bill and then a coo.’ It was a tiny house, with a little garden behind and a lawn about as big as a pocket-handkerchief in the front. Here Meg meant to have a fountain, shrubbery, and a profusion of lovely flowers, though just at present the fountain was represented by a weather-beaten urn, very like a dilapidated slop-bowl, the shrubbery consisted of several young larches, who looked undecided whether to live or die, and the profusion of flowers was merely hinted by regiments of sticks to show where seeds were planted. But inside, it was altogether charming, and the happy bride saw no fault from garret to cellar. To be sure, the hall was so narrow it was fortunate that they had no piano, for one never could have been got in whole, the dining-room was so small that six people were a tight fit, and the kitchen stairs seemed built for the express purpose of precipitating both servants and china pell-mell into the coal-bin. But once get used to these slight blemishes and nothing could be more complete, for good sense and good taste had presided over the furnishing, and the result was highly satisfactory. There were no marble-topped tables, long mirrors, or lace curtains in the little parlor, but simple furniture, plenty of books, a fine picture or two, a stand of flowers in the bay-window, and, scattered all about, the pretty gifts which came from friendly hands and were the fairer for the loving messages they brought.

THE ALCOTT FAMILY

October 21st 42 The atmosphere is so dry and transparent, and as it were inflammable at this season — that a candle in the grass shines white and dazzling, and purer and brighter the farther off it is. Its heat seems to have been extracted and only its harmless refulgent light left. It is a star dropt down. The ancients were more than poetically true when they called fire Vulcan’s flower. Light is somewhat almost moral– The most intense — as the fixed stars and our own sun — has an unquestionable preeminence among the elements. At a certain stage in the generation of all life, no doubt, light as well as heat is developed– It guides to the first rudiments of life. There is a vitality in heat and light {One-third page blank} I never tire of the beauty of certain epithets which the ages have slowly bestowed, as the — Hunters moon and the Harvest moon. There is something pleasing in the fact that the irregularity in the rising of these two moons, and their continuing to rise nearly at the same time for several nights should have been observed by the husbandman before it attracted the attention of Science. All great laws are really known to the necessities men, before they become the subject of study to the intellect. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1843

May: During this month Henry C. Wright confided to his diary the situation in regard to his life, and also in regard to his wife (who had been 43 when they married and already into her menopause): I have borne a heavy load, all my days since I was 12 years old. That burden often seemed too heavy to be borne. I have reeled & staggered under the heavy weight. That burden is my heart.... No marriage love is between us. She was past child-bearing when I first knew her —we have not had intercourse as husband and wife for 15 years— it is many years since we have slept in the same bed.

May: Bronson Alcott’s English friend Charles Lane bought the Wyman Farm at Prospect Hill, in Harvard MA.

The Alcotts, Lane, and Henry Gardiner Wright16 would relocate to Harvard, to “Fruitlands,” on the 1st of June.

16. This Henry Gardiner Wright was an English companion of Charles Lane. (The American ex-reverend, Henry C. Wright, was at this point on an extended tour of Europe.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

September 5, Tuesday: Henry C. Wright reported in the Liberator that he had visited St. Jour, where General Toussaint Louverture, “greater than Bonaparte,” had been detained.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE FREDERICK DOUGLASS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1844

January 15, Monday: The Reverend William Henry Channing reported to The Present that there had been a Fourierist convention in Boston’s Amory Hall, the Convention for the Reorganization of Society called by David Mack, Henry C. Wright, and others, which had created a new “Friends of Social Reform” society and had chosen William Basset of Lynn as its president, and as its vice-presidents the Association of Industry and Education in Northampton’s George W. Benson, Brook Farm’s Reverend George Ripley, Hopedale’s Reverend Adin Ballou, and James N. Buffum of Lynn:

“It is a pleasure to express gratitude to Charles Fourier, for having opened a whole new world of study, hope and action.”

In consequence of this rethinking, Brook Farm would be changing its name from the “Brook-Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education” to the “Brook-Farm Association, for Industry and Education.”

COMMUNITARIANISM

The local evangelist for this sort of Fourierism would be Charles A. Dana, who was being referred to at Brook Farm as “The Professor.” It would be he who would lead them down the primrose path, of constructing a magnificent central “phalanstère” edifice in order to achieve the true Fourierist economy of scale, a massive structure which could therefore be destroyed by one disastrous fire accident on one unfortunate night — the primrosy path which would lead to their group’s utter collapse and dissolution. One of the debates of the 18th Century was what human nature might be, under its crust of civilization, under the varnish of culture and manners. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had an answer. Thomas Jefferson had an answer. One of the most intriguing answers was that of Charles Fourier, who was born in Besançon two years before the Shakers arrived in New York. He grew up to write twelve sturdy volumes designing a New Harmony for mankind, an experiment in radical sociology that began to run parallel to that of the Shakers. Fourierism (Horace Greeley founded the New- York Tribune to promote Fourier’s ideas) was Shakerism for intellectuals. Brook Farm was Fourierist, and such place-names as Phalanx, New Jersey, and New Harmony, Indiana, attest to the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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movement’s history. Except for one detail, Fourier and Mother Ann Lee were of the same mind; they both saw that humankind must return to the tribe or extended family and that it was to exist on a farm. Everyone lived in one enormous dormitory. Everyone shared all work; everyone agreed, although with constant revisions and refinements, to a disciplined way of life that would be most harmonious for them, and lead to the greatest happiness. But when, of an evening, the Shakers danced or had “a union” (a conversational party), Fourier’s Harmonians had an orgy of eating, dancing, and sexual high jinks, all planned by a Philosopher of the Passions. There is a strange sense in which the Shakers’ total abstinence from the flesh and Fourier’s total indulgence serve the same purpose. Each creates a psychological medium in which frictionless cooperation reaches a maximum possibility. It is also wonderfully telling that the modern world has no place for either. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1845

Henry C. Wright’s SIX MONTHS AT GRAEFENBERG; WITH CONVERSATIONS IN THE SALOON, ON NONRESISTANCE AND OTHER SUBJECTS (London: Charles Gilpin).

During the late 1840s, Wright’s focus was shifting to lectures on marriage and sexuality. He was a salesman of ideas, devoted not to the truth but instead to the reassuring, crowdpleasing task of telling people whatever it was they most desired to be told. He was always Wright. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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August: In Rosneath, under the shadow of Mount Maria and Mount Elizabeth in what would become Czechoslovakia [?], Henry C. Wright began to muse on “The Blood of Woman & the Blood of Christ.” What he was preparing to announce to the world was the Victorian notion of the redeeming virtue of True Womanhood, that woman should be “to man, a Messiah, a Savior.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

November: In the Scientific American magazine there appeared a note that “The accounts of the general failure of the potato crops by the rot, especially in Ireland, are of a very serious and alarming character.”

William Lloyd Garrison returned from England to the United States. In Ireland, Frederick Douglass traveled from Cork to Limerick, along the way noting the condition of the Irish rural poor due to rotting potato crops. Although he reported back to Garrison that

I see much here to remind me of my former condition and I confess I should be ashamed to lift my voice against American slavery, but that I know the cause of humanity is one the world over.

he did not mix this issue that his audiences did not want to hear about into his anti-slavery talks. 17 English sales of his NARRATIVE meanwhile reached 500 copies.

17. I do not know the date on which this occurred, but it would have needed to have occurred before Garrison embarked in November 1845 to return to America. From William Lovett’s THE LIFE AND STRUGGLES OF WILLIAM LOVETT, IN HIS PURSUIT OF BREAD, KNOWLEDGE, AND FREEDOM (London: Trubner, 1876, page 321) we learn that on a particular evening in London, evidently at a private party in a home, not only did Henry Vincent perform “The Marseillaise,” but also Garrison presented “several anti- slavery pieces,” the “grave” Henry C. Wright “sang an old Indian war song,” and Frederick Douglass, “who had a fine voice, sang a number of negro melodies.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1846

The Reverend Theodore Parker’s “A Sermon on War”: “Every man who understands Christianity ... knows that war is wrong.” Evil people should beware for, by reading this closely, we discover the author not to be a pacifist. Jesus wants us not to go to war unless we really need to. If your understanding that war is wrong is inferior to his understanding that war is wrong, then watch out, for this man is going to be buying rifles with which you are going to be brought up to par.

Henry C. Wright’s DEFENSIVE WAR PROVED TO BE A DENIAL OF CHRISTIANITY AND OF THE GOVERNMENT OF GOD (London: Charles Gilpin). Lewis Perry observes of Wright, on page 230, that “He was expert in making his ideas sound novel.” I suppose that observation would apply to Wright’s prognostications on the topic of nonresistance, for there is nothing particularly novel about the wrong idea of endorsing theocracy, nor is there anything particularly novel about the wrong idea that we have an obligation to follow the path of least overall resistance and do whatever comes most naturally: “Nature’s Natural Demands are God’s Only Commands.” What would be novel in these ideas would be the attempt at a linkage with the Sermon on the Mount/Plain in Matthew/Luke, and the straightforward advice found there in regard to nonresistance to evil/ the evil one. The linkage would be novel because in fact there is no such linkage. PAGES 288-289: Some contemporaries balked at the gymnastics whereby Wright (and other pacifists) tried to adhere to principle and defend violence. As early as 1847 the Liberator carried criticism of speeches on natural law in which Wright urged listeners both to live out their convictions and to renounce violence. Did he mean they should follow their consciences to war or simulate an unfelt nonresistance? Eventually Wright discovered in John Brown the genius to override all inconsistencies, the martyr of a new religion of self-abnegation. In the meantime he endured —or reveled in— interminable controversies over means and ends. At the 1857 meetings of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, for example, he announced that his opinions were irrelevant; he held the nation to “its own acknowledged rule of action,” violence. His old friend James Buffum wondered whether it would then be obligatory for Brigham Young to stick to the polygamy in which he believed. Wright had no good answer. And yet to focus exclusively on tactical disputes is to miss ideological meanings of slave revolts and white violence, issues that revised family excitement over the sweep of Napoleon’s armies, that tested the vision of society developed on his mission abroad. A philosopher could make short work of Wright’s preachings on natural law, and an expert strategist might challenge his credentials to hold office in the anti-slavery army. But logic and strategy were not essential to the work of constructing and transmitting a sense of reality consistent with a new America. Wright was preoccupied by the universality of the revolution out of which the modern world was born. Would the slaves, he asked, be allowed to shout the battle cries of their eighteenth-century forerunners? Some Jacksonian intellectuals looked back HDT WHAT? INDEX

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wistfully to a patriotic past that they imagined to have been peaceful, but Wright’s specialty was change, the future, the children, and he came to terms with a legacy of violence. He turned his back on the God of his Andover teachers who declared “that if the slave dare to draw the sabre of revolution, and imitate your Kossuths and Lamartines, if he dares to strike for liberty,” the law of the land should strike him down. Instead of this deity Wright honored “the God of humanity” who commanded free men to support the cause of liberation everywhere. Wright’s apparent defection from the pacifism he had championed for decades, on two continents, signified his continuing extension to all men of the right of self-determination. Against his selective inattention to the poor we must place his widening embrace of revolution. Wright’s contempt for acquiescent slaves has already been noted: servility and aristocracy alike were out of place in the bustling, entrepreneurial world. He did not, however, imitate the bigotry that sometimes accompanied the West’s hatred of the slave power. “I am a Negro,” he declared in 1861. “The scorn & hate cast on him are cast on me.” Even thought the union represented the “hope of oppressed Millions in other lands,” it could not endure so long as the white American refused to accept the black “as a Man.” This declaration recalls how his evangelical colleagues’ racism had once driven him toward Garrisonism, how he then attempted to adopt the voice of Africa. But Wright never laid eyes on slavery, and an unmistakable irony clung to habits of empathy developed while he was discovering his own role in a fluid society. Some of the motives that made him an abolitionist also explained an ultimate inability to comprehend the existence of slaves. Back at the 1836 training sessions he had attacked servitude as a way of eschewing passivity in himself; if a slave voluntarily remained servile, it seemed, then no one was accountable. Out of rigorous Northern concern for self-improvement arose the call for Southern blacks to strike off their chains.

April 28, Tuesday: Friend Lucretia Mott wrote Elizabeth Pease in England to express her sympathy on the death of Elizabeth’s father and to share her own feelings on the recent death of her own mother, Friend Anna Coffin, incidentally mentioning Frederick Douglass, James N. Buffum, and citing without any undue deference Henry C. Wright (Wright had, while recovering recently from an illness at her home, fallen in love with Elizabeth): You have Douglass & Buffum with you –good men & true– H.C. Wright also –still stirring the muddy waters of sect– and preachg. humanity. How much need is there of his labors of love, while your National cry is, “Blessed are the War makers” – rather than the peace-makers! What dreadful battles on the plains of India! a monstrous sacrifice of human life, by a professedly Christian HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

Nation!

Here is Friend Lucretia’s letter in full: Philada. 4 Mo. 28th, 1846. My dear Elizh. Pease More than two years have passed, since the reception of thy truly acceptable letter. During that time I have not written to any of our dear English or Irish friends — for after the severe illness which so greatly affected my nervous system I was advised to avoid much reading or writing. Edwd. M. Davis’ prospect of again visiting your country & seeing some of our friends revived the desire to communicate with you again. More especially do I wish to convey a line to thee dear Elizh., expressive of the sympathy I feel with thee, in thy late bereavement.18 Thy long-continued devotion to thy dear Father, doubtless renders this stroke doubly trying to thee. In many ways we feel such a loss! Your feelings & sentiments were congenial upon many points. You could travel together & were each other’s helper in the truth. The tear will then naturally flow at the severance of such a tie. And far be it from me to seek to stay it. I know full well the keenness of the separation between Parent & child. My dear Mother was taken from us, when I could illy bear such a shock to my nature. She was companionable in every way. Her Grandchildn. as well as her childn. delighted in her society. She was vigorous in constitution of both body & mind, and promised a longer life than 73 — But we had to yield her — and resignation to the event has been a hard lesson. I therefore feel less able to preach it to others. The thought has already occurred to us, now, that thou hast no longer that tender tie to home, whether a visit to this Country may not be effected by thee — gladdening the hearts of many here, and perhaps cheering for the time some lonely hours for thyself. We need not say such a visit would be very pleasant to us, and a hearty welcome would await thee as a guest, under which of our roofs thou might choose to abide. The contents of thy last letter may not, after so long silence on my part in reply, be familiar to thee now. Thou alluded to 18. Joseph Pease died 16 March 1846. Dictionary of Quaker Biography, Library of the Religious Society of Friends, London. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

our intercourse together, in England — and thy remarks to H.C. Wright respectg some little restraint that thou afterward thought existed between us.19 As to thy fear of engrossing too much of our time, & thy regardg us, as among the ‘lions of the Convention’ the thought I believe never occurred to us — We felt truly grateful for thy prompt attention to us, while some from Sectarian bigotry were standing aloof. As to the lion part, we felt much more, that we were “counted as sheep for the slaughter.” That feeling added to the knowledge that many among you were greatly shocked at our supposed heresies, did cause a little restraint in our mingling with you. I remember Sarah Pugh reproved me after our first call or visit at your lodgings, because I did not go forward more cordially & offer the hand, in takg. leave of thy Father & Mother. When I was restrained by the feeling, that they would not care to give me the “right hand of fellowship” in any respect. Again, when we met accidentally at Meeting, at the Devonshire house I think, I felt quite a pity for thee, that thou would be brought into a strait after Meeting, whether to speak cordially to us, & thus identify thyself with those, who were “despised & rejected of Men;” or to “cut” us, and thus do violence to the promptings of thy kind nature. So, thy after feelings were not without some foundation. But, the more intercourse we had, the more these fears & restraints vanished — and our latter interviews — specially the last, at Liverpool were “free & easy” as any could desire. Since that time, our firm adherance to the great cause, which first bound us together, and the freedom of correspondence have knit us together ‘as the heart of one man’, and we can greet one another as very friends. As to differences in points of faith sundering us, if that be sufficient cause of division, “oh Lord, who shall stand?”20 Have not those, who at that time, formed a strong & united phalanx of opposition to “Hicksism,” now become divided among themselves, on little hair-splitting points of Theology? Let us rather look, as the truth-loving Jesus recommended, for the fruits which proceed from a good heart — for about these there is no controversy. There is a response in every heart to the exhibition of justice — mercy — love — peace — & Charity, which goes far to convince prove that God has created man upright; and that the counter doctrine of human depravity, has done much to make the heart wicked, and to produce the giant sins that afflict mankind. But I wish not to provoke discussion. A similar feeling to that I have endeavored to express, prevented my calling on thy cousin John Pease, when in this City, & trying to influence him in accordance with thy wish, for the Slave. He did not identify himself with any Anti-Slavery Socy. here. Neither have your pseudo-Abolitionists — the Forsters, Stacey &.c —21 Have they not shamefully betrayed the 19. Sponsored by the New England Non-Resistance Society, Henry C. Wright toured Britain from 1842 to 1847. According to Walter Merrill, Wright fell in love with Pease while recovering from an illness at her home. See Ruchames and Merrill, Letters, 3:16, 126. In her diary Mott described frequent meetings with the Pease family in 1840, including a farewell breakfast in Liverpool. See Tolles, Diary, 23-25, 32, 35, 41, 44, 47-49, 53, 56-58, 77. 20. “Sheep for the slaughter,” Psalms 44:22; “despised and rejected,” Isaiah 53:3. Possibly a variation of “who then is able to stand before me?” (Job 41:10) or “who shall stand in his holy place?” (Psalms 24:3). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

cause of the Slave, for their love of sect? Thy letter mentioned a concern to write an out-door Epistle of sympathy for the Indiana Seceders — Now, that 2 years have passed since the concern arose, has it not ripened into completion? It would doubtless cheer their disappointed hearts, after such a visit from the English bigots — or sectarians — (for I dont want to use hard words —) — and is it not a duty, to do what we can to strengthen one another in this great work. I am ready at any time to sign such an Epistle to our Green Plain Friends — who are set at naught by their rulers. Gennessee Yy. Mg. ^Anti. S. Frds. met in conference last year^ did so — and others will likely follow their example.22 We still have much opposition to encounter in our several Meetings, as the accompanyg. documents will shew. But of this, as well as of our progress in the great cause, so constant a reader as thyself of our Liberators & Standard, needs not to be informed. You have Douglass & Buffum with you — good men & true — H. C. Wright also — still stirring the muddy waters of sect — and preachg. humanity. How much need is there of his labors of love, while your National cry is, “Blessed are the War makers” — rather than the peace-makers!’ What dreadful battles on the plains of India! a monstrous sacrifice of human life, by a professedly Christian Nation!23 And your poor starved people at home too — overworked & underpaid until driven to desperation. What is to be done, in view of all these evils? The remedy looks at times so hopeless, that I am ready to choose death rather than life, if I must feel as I have done for these classes. There was an extensive Strike of the hand-loom weavers, in this City last winter. They were a month or more idle about twelve hundred — until reduced almost to starvation — deprivg themselves of some 25 or $30.000, wh. they might have recd. even at their all-too low wages. I could not but sympathise with them, in their demand for a better recompense to their early & late toil. But it was most unfortunate for them, for they did not gain the added wages claimed — for “with the Oppressor there is power.”24 I have written thus far, without telling thee, how much we have felt for Elizh. J. (Neall) Gay during the two or three weeks past, in the extreme illness & death of her Father. She came on from

21. Probably George Stacey (1786-1857), clerk of the London Yearly Meeting and an anti-Hicksite. Tolles, Diary, 30. 22. In 1845 a delegation from the London Yearly Meeting went to Indiana to try to resolve differences between the two branches after the 1842-43 split. The anti-slavery branch, the Indiana State Anti-Slavery Society, protested that the London delegation had sided with the anti-abolitionist stand of the Indiana Yearly Meeting. Further evidence of discord was the rejection by the Ohio Yearly Meeting of the May 1845 epistle from the Green Plain Friends Quarterly Meeting asking for acceptance. In New York some Friends of Genesee Yearly Meeting signed an epistle in June 1845 expressing support to the Green Plain Quarterly Meeting and other meetings which had been disowned by Indiana Yearly Meeting. The epistle criticized the proscriptive spirit which “impugns the actions of brethren and sisters, in their efforts to relieve suffering humanity” and urged Friends to “Hold all your meetings in the Power of God.” Pennsylvania Freeman 6 November 1845:3; National Anti-Slavery Standard., 14 August:42; 21 August:46; 9 October 1845:74; see also Thomas Hamm, God’s Government Begun: The Society for Universal Inquiry and Reform (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 63, 67-68. 23. James N. Buffum (1807-1887), abolitionist and vice-president of the Friends of Social Reform, was touring Britain with Frederick Douglass, then an agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. See Ruchames and Merrill, Letters, 3:138. The British continued their conquest of India with a February 1846 victory over the Sikhs in Kashmir. 24. Most weavers worked at home and in February 1846 in Moyamensing struck unsuccessfully for higher wages. Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-50 (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1980), 159. The final quote comes from Ecclesiastes 4:1. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

New York soon after he was confined to his bed, and ministered constantly to his wants during his ten days suffering[.] He will be much missed as a friend to the poor — as a liberal-minded overseer of our Meeting, and such are needed, and as the Slave’s friend. The Obituary in the Freeman & Standard is a just tribute to his worth — Poor Elizh. feels it deeply. It will be the breaking up of the pleasant home here, for many of our Anti- Slavery lecturers & friends. He had paid Sydney & Elizh. a very pleasant visit, only a short time before he was taken ill.25 I must refer thee to our E.M. Davis for any further particulars of our doings. We shall miss him much from the Mgs. of our Ex. Com. as well as from our family circle. They are settled next door to us, & it has added much to our enjoyment to have them so near us. An added son to their family, prevented Maria’s accompanyg. him to England, as was their first plan — when it would not have taken much persuasion to induce J. Mott & self to cross the Atlantic again. Our childn. are all married save one — and all settled in this City. We are lookg. for S.S. Foster & his Abby (Kelly)26 next week accompd. by 2 of their frds. from Ohio. Abby Kimber is now in the City. Her company is ever pleasant to us. She & Sarah Pugh — Isaac Winslow & Emily visited us last week. We talked over our visit abroad as we ever do when we meet. We go to Sarah’s this eveg. to the Ex. Com. where we always find something interesting to engage us. I dont know whether Sarah & Abby are writing to thee by Edward — Mary Grew will meet with us this evening. She is putting her talents to good use as editor of the Freeman — Let me hear from thee soon & please write on thicker paper — so that my old eyes may more easily decipher it. My J. Mott desires most affectionate remembrances —

Thine — L. Mott —

Thy contributn. to our Fair was gratefully recd. as S. Pugh says she wrote thee.

25. Elizabeth Neall had married Sydney Howard Gay 7 November 1845. Daniel Neall died 15 April 1846. National Anti-Slavery Standard, 23 April 1846:3. 26. Stephen S. Foster (1809-81), antislavery lecturer, had married Abby Kelley on December 21, 1845. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

December 10, Thursday: Henry C. Wright objected to Frederick Douglass’s having allowed English friends to purchase his freedom: “[W]hy dignify a robbery with a bill of sale?” In this, of course, he did not show much appreciation of the precariousness of Douglass’s position, since the obvious answer to Wright’s impertinent question would be “Until something or other like this manumission was accomplished, Mr. Douglass had been, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days of the year, at risk of being waylaid and set upon and captured by one or another band of white thugs, who could chain him and transport him back to his slavemaster, potentially to be whipped to death. This was potentially a very serious problem, since such a band of white thugs would be operating within the letter and spirit of American federal law, and could appeal for help from the local police and judicial system in the commission of such a kidnapping and torture.” We can be very sure that had the righteous Mr. Wright himself been thus at risk of abuse, he would most definitely have thought and thought — until he had fabricated one or another nice-sounding justification for dignifying such a robbery with a bill of sale.27

Believing all hope to be gone, Stephen W. Kearny began to plan to attempt a breakout from their entrapment at San Pasqual, scheduled for the following morning. That night, however 200 American troops on fresh horses arrived from San Diego, California, summoned by Kit Carson and his scouts, and the Mexican military immediately dispersed.

27. At some point Frederick Douglass would comment that Henry C. Wright had some sort of personal problem that resulted in the unfortunate fact, that he unwittingly “created against himself prejudices.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

December 22, Tuesday: On December 10th, Henry C. Wright had written to Frederick Douglass, objecting to his allowing English friends to purchase his manumission: “[W]hy dignify a robbery with a bill of sale?” Douglass, of course, was able to respond, and eventually, in The Liberator for January 29, 1847, his response would be made available to all.28

How titillating it must have been in an era such as this for an audience to be able to peruse an actual letter from a man of color to a white man, one in which the man of color is literate and in command of his language, and rational, and begins by addressing the white man as on a par with himself, and intimately as “Dear Friend”! Frederick Douglass 22, St. Ann’s Square, Manchester (England) December 22, 1846 To Henry C. Wright Dear Friend: Your letter of the 12th December reached me at this place, yesterday. Please accept my heartfelt thanks for it. I am sorry that you deemed it necessary to assure me, that it would be the last letter of advice you would ever write me. It looked as if you were about to cast me off for ever! I do not, however, think you meant to convey any such meaning; and if you did, I am sure you will see cause to change your mind, and to receive me again into the fold of those, whom it should ever be your pleasure to advise and instruct. The subject of your letter is one of deep importance, and upon which, I have thought and felt much; and, being the party of all others most deeply concerned, it is natural to suppose I have an opinion, and ought to be able to give it on all fitting occasions. I deem this a fitting occasion, and shall act accordingly. You have given me your opinion: I am glad you have done so. You have given it to me direct, in your own emphatic way. You never speak insipidly, smoothly, or mincingly; you have strictly adhered to your custom, in the letter before me. I now take great pleasure in giving you my opinion, as plainly and unreservedly as you have given yours, and I trust with equal good feeling and purity of motive. I take it, that nearly all that can be said against my position is contained in your letter; for if any man in the wide world would be likely to find valid objections to such a transaction as the one under consideration, 28. At some point Frederick Douglass would comment that Henry C. Wright had some sort of personal problem that resulted in the unfortunate fact, that he unwittingly “created against himself prejudices.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

I regard you as that man. I must, however, tell you, that I have read your letter over, and over again, and have sought in vain to find anything like what I can regard a valid reason against the purchase of my body, or against my receiving the manumission papers, if they are ever presented to me. Let me, in the first place, state the facts and circumstances of the transaction which you so strongly condemn. It is your right to do so, and God forbid that I should ever cherish the slightest desire to restrain you in the exercise of that right. I say to you at once, and in all the fulness of sincerity, speak out; speak freely; keep nothing back; let me know your whole mind. “Hew to the line, though the chips fly in my face.” Tell me, and tell me plainly, when you think I am deviating from the strict line of duty and principle; and when I become unwilling to hear, I shall have attained a character which I now despise, and from which I would hope to be preserved. But to the facts. I am in England, my family are in the United States. My sphere of usefulness is in the United States; my public and domestic duties arc there; and there it seems my duty to go. But I am legally the property of Thomas Auld, and if I go to the United States, (no matter to what part, for there is no City of Refuge there, no spot sacred to freedom there,) Thomas Auld, aided by the American Government, can seize, bind and fetter, and drag me from my family, feed his cruel revenge upon me, and doom me to unending slavery. In view of this simple statement of facts, a few friends, desirous of seeing me released from the terrible liability, and to relieve my wife and children from the painful trepidation, consequent upon the liability, and to place me on an equal footing of safety with all other anti-slavery lecturers in the United States, and to enhance my usefulness by enlarging the field of my labors in the United States, have nobly and generously paid Hugh Auld, the agent of Thomas Auld, £150—in consideration of which, Hugh Auld (acting as his agent) and the Government of the United States agree, that I shall be free from all further liability. These, dear friend, are the facts of the whole transaction. The principle here acted on by my friends, and that upon which I shall act in receiving the manumission papers, I deem quite defensible. First, as to those who acted as my friends, and their actions. The actuating motive was, to secure me from a liability full of horrible forebodings to myself and family. With this object, I will do you the justice to say, I believe you fully unite, although some parts of your letters would seem to justify a different belief. Then, as to the measure adopted to secure this result. Does it violate a fundamental principle, or does it not? This is the question, and to my mind the only question of importance, involved in the discussion. I believe that, on our part, no just or holy principle has been violated. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

Before entering upon the argument in support of this view, I will take the liberty (and I know you will pardon it) to say, I think you should have pointed out some principle violated in the transaction, before you proceeded to exhort me to repentance. You have given me any amount of indignation against “Auld” and the United States, in all which I cordially unite, and felt refreshed by reading; but it has no bearing whatever upon the conduct of myself, or friends, in the matter under consideration. It does not prove that I have done wrong, nor does it demonstrate what is right, or the proper course to be pursued. Now that the matter has reached its present point, before entering upon the argument, let me say one other word; it is this—I do not think you have acted quite consistently with your character for promptness, in delaying your advice till the transaction was completed. You knew of the movement at its conception, and have known it through its progress, and have never, to my knowledge, uttered one syllable against it, in conversation or letter, till now that the deed is done. I regret this, not because I think your earlier advice would have altered the result, but because it would have left me more free than I can now be, since the thing is done. Of course, you will not think hard of my alluding to this circumstance. Now, then, to the main question. The principle which you appear to regard as violated by the transaction in question, may be stated as follows:—Every man has a natural and inalienable right to himself. The inference from this is, “that man cannot hold property in man”—and as man cannot hold property in man, neither can Hugh Auld nor the United States have any right of property in me—and having no right of property in me, they have no right to sell me and, having no right to sell me, no one has a right to buy me. I think I have now stated the principle, and the inference from the principle, distinctly and fairly. Now, the question upon which the whole controversy turns is, simply, this: does the transaction, which you condemn, really violate this principle? I own that, to a superficial observer, it would seem to do so. But I think I am prepared to show, that, so far from being a violation of that principle, it is truly a noble vindication of it. Before going further, let me state here, briefly, what sort of a purchase would have been a violation of this principle, which, in common with yourself, I reverence, and am anxious to preserve inviolate. Ist. It would have been a violation of that principle, had those who purchased me done so, to make me a slave, instead of a free- man. And, 2ndly. It would have been a violation, of that principle, had those who purchased me done so with a view to compensate the slaveholder, for what he and they regarded as his rightful property. In neither of these ways was my purchase effected. My liberation was, in their estimation, of more value than £150; the happiness HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

and repose of my family were, in their judgment, more than paltry gold. The £150 was paid to the remorseless plunderer, not because he had any just claim to it, but to induce him to give up his legal claim to something which they deemed of more value than money. It was not to compensate the slaveholder, but to release me from his power; not to establish my natural right to freedom, but to release me from all legal liabilities to, slavery. And all this, you and I, and the slaveholders, and all who know anything of the transaction, very well understand. The very letter to Hugh Auld, proposing terms of purchase, informed him that those who gave, denied his right to it. The error of those, who condemn this transaction, consists in their confounding the crime of buying men into slavery, with the meritorious act of buying men out of slavery, and the purchase of legal freedom with abstract right and natural freedom. They say, “If you BUY, you recognize the right to sell. If you receive, you recognize the right of the giver to give.” And this has a show of truth, as well as of logic. But a few plain cases will show its entire fallacy. There is now, in this country, a heavy duty on corn. The government of this country has imposed it; and though I regard it a most unjust and wicked imposition, no man of common sense will charge me with endorsing or recognizing the right of this government to impose this duty, simply because, to prevent myself and family from starving, I buy and eat this corn. Take another case:—I have had dealings with a man. I have owed him one hundred dollars, and have paid it; I have lost the receipt. He comes upon me the second time for the money. I know, and he knows, he has no right to it; but he is a villain, and has me in his power. The law is with him, and against me. I must pay or be dragged to jail. I choose to pay the bill a second time. To say I sanctioned his right to rob me, because I preferred to pay rather than go to jail, is to utter an absurdity, to which no sane man would give heed. And yet the principle of action, in each of these cases, is the same. The man might indeed say, the claim is unjust—and declare, I will rot in jail, before I will pay it. But this would not, certainly, be demanded by any principle of truth, justice, or humanity; and however much we might be disposed to respect his daring, but little deference could be paid to his wisdom. The fact is, we act upon this principle every day of our lives, and we have an undoubted right to do so. When I came to this country from the United States, I came in the second cabin. And why? Not because my natural right to come in the first cabin was not as good as that of any other man, but because a wicked and cruel prejudice decided, that the second cabin was the place for me. By coming over in the second, did I sanction or justify this wicked proscription? Not at all. It was the best I could do. I acted from necessity. One other case, and I have done with this view of the subject. I think you will agree with me, that the case I am now about to HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

put is pertinent, though you may not readily pardon me for making yourself the agent of my illustration. The case respects the passport system on the continent of Europe. That system you utterly condemn. You look upon it as an unjust and wicked interference, a bold and infamous violation of the natural and sacred right of locomotion. You hold, (and so do I,) that the image of our common God ought to be a passport all over the habitable world. But bloody and tyrannical governments have ordained otherwise; they usurp authority over you, and decide for you, on what conditions you shall travel. They say, you shall have a passport, or you shall be put in prison. Now, the question is, have they a right to prescribe any such terms? and do you, by complying with these terms, sanction their interference? I think you will answer, no; submission to injustice, and sanction of injustice, are different things; and he is a poor reasoner who confounds the two, and makes them one and the same thing. Now, then, for the parallel, and the application of the passport system to my own case. I wish to go to the United States. I have a natural right to go there, and be free. My natural right is as good as that of Hugh Auld, or James K. Polk; but that plundering government says, I shall not return to the United States in safety—it says, I must allow Hugh Auld to rob me, or my friends, of £150, or be hurled into the infernal jaws of slavery. I must have a “bit of paper, signed and sealed,” or my liberty must be taken from me, and I must be torn from my family and friends. The government of Austria said to you, “Dare to come upon my soil, without a passport, declaring you to be an American citizen, (which you say you are not,) you shall at once be arrested, and thrown into prison.” What said you to that Government? Did you say that the threat was a villainous one, and an infamous invasion of your right of locomotion? Did you say, “I will come upon your soil; I will go where I please—I dare and defy your government!” Did you say, “I will spurn your passports; I would not stain my hand, and degrade myself, by touching your miserable parchment. You have no right to give it, and I have no right to take it. I trample your laws, and will put your constitutions under my feet! I will not recognize them!” Was this your course? No! dear friend, it was not. Your practice was wiser than your theory. You took the passport, submitted to be examined while travelling, and availed yourself of all the advantages of your “passport”—or, in other words, escaped all the evils which you ought to have done, without it, and would have done, but for the tyrannical usurpation in Europe. I will not dwell longer upon this view of the subject; and I dismiss it, feeling quite satisfied of the entire correctness of the reasoning, and the principle attempted to be maintained. As to the expediency of the: measures, different opinions may well prevail; but in regard to the principle, I feel it difficult to conceive of two opinions. I am free to say, that, had I possessed one hundred and fifty pounds, I would have seen Hugh HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

Auld kicking, before I would have given it to him. I would have waited till the emergency came, and only given up the money when nothing else would do. But my friends thought it best to provide against the contingency; they acted on their own responsibility, and I am not disturbed about the result. But, having acted on a true principle, I do not feel free to disavow their proceedings. In conclusion, let me say, I anticipate no such change in my position as you predict. I shall be Frederick Douglass still, and once a slave still. I shall neither be made to forget nor cease to feel the wrongs of my enslaved fellow-countrymen. My knowledge of slavery will be the same, and my hatred of it will be the same. By the way, I have never made my own person and suffering the theme of public discourse, but have always based my appeal upon the wrongs of the three millions now in chains; and these shall still be the burthen of my speeches. You intimate that I may reject the papers, and allow them to remain in the hands of those friends who have effected the purchase, and thus avail myself of the security afforded by them, without sharing any part of the responsibility of the transaction. My objection to this is one of honor. I do not think it would be very honorable on my part, to remain silent during the whole transaction, and giving it more than my silent approval; and then, when the thing is completed, and I am safe, attempt to play the hero, by throwing off all responsibility in the matter. It might be said, and said with great propriety, “Mr. Douglass, your indignation is very good, and has but one fault, and that is, it comes too late!” It would be a show of bravery when the danger is over. From every view I have been able to take of the subject, I am persuaded to receive the papers, if presented,— not, however, as a proof of my right to be free, for that is self-evident, but as a proof that my friends have been legally robbed of £150, in order to secure that which is the birth-right of every man. And I will hold up those papers before the world, in proof of the plundering character of the American government. It shall be the brand of infamy, stamping the nation, in whose name the deed was done, as a great aggregation of hypocrites, thieves and liars,—and their condemnation is just. They declare that all men are created equal, and have a natural and inalienable right to liberty, while they rob me of £150, as a condition of my enjoying this natural and inalienable right. It will be their condemnation, in their own hand-writing, and may be held up to the world as a means of humbling that haughty republic into repentance. I agree with you, that the contest which I have to wage is against the government of the United States. But the representative of that government is the slaveholder, Thomas Auld. He is commander-in-chief of the army and navy. The whole civil and naval force of the nation are at his disposal. He may command all these to his assistance, and bring them all to bear upon me, until I am made entirely subject to his will, or submit to be robbed myself, or allow my friends to be robbed, of seven HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

hundred and fifty dollars. And rather than be subject to his will, I have submitted to be robbed, or allowed my friends to be robbed, of the seven hundred and fifty dollars. Sincerely yours, Frederick Douglass HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

1847

January 29, Friday: On December 22nd, 1846 Frederick Douglass had replied to Henry C. Wright, defending himself for allowing English friends to purchase his manumission. At this point, in The Liberator, his response was made available to all.29

How titillating it must have been in an era such as this for an audience to be able to peruse an actual letter from a man of color to a white man, one in which the man of color is literate and in command of his language, and rational, and begins by addressing the white man as on a par with himself, and intimately as “Dear Friend”! Frederick Douglass 22, St. Ann’s Square, Manchester (England) December 22, 1846 To Henry C. Wright Dear Friend: Your letter of the 12th December reached me at this place, yesterday. Please accept my heartfelt thanks for it. I am sorry that you deemed it necessary to assure me, that it would be the last letter of advice you would ever write me. It looked as if you were about to cast me off for ever! I do not, however, think you meant to convey any such meaning; and if you did, I am sure you will see cause to change your mind, and to receive me again into the fold of those, whom it should ever be your pleasure to advise and instruct. The subject of your letter is one of deep importance, and upon which, I have thought and felt much; and, being the party of all others most deeply concerned, it is natural to suppose I have an opinion, and ought to be able to give it on all fitting occasions. I deem this a fitting occasion, and shall act accordingly. You have given me your opinion: I am glad you have done so. You have given it to me direct, in your own emphatic way. You never speak insipidly, smoothly, or mincingly; you have strictly adhered to your custom, in the letter before me. I now take great pleasure in giving you my opinion, as plainly and unreservedly as you have given yours, and I trust with equal good feeling and purity of motive. I take it, that nearly all 29. At some point Frederick Douglass would comment that Henry C. Wright had some sort of personal problem that resulted in the unfortunate fact, that he unwittingly “created against himself prejudices.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

that can be said against my position is contained in your letter; for if any man in the wide world would be likely to find valid objections to such a transaction as the one under consideration, I regard you as that man. I must, however, tell you, that I have read your letter over, and over again, and have sought in vain to find anything like what I can regard a valid reason against the purchase of my body, or against my receiving the manumission papers, if they are ever presented to me. Let me, in the first place, state the facts and circumstances of the transaction which you so strongly condemn. It is your right to do so, and God forbid that I should ever cherish the slightest desire to restrain you in the exercise of that right. I say to you at once, and in all the fulness of sincerity, speak out; speak freely; keep nothing back; let me know your whole mind. “Hew to the line, though the chips fly in my face.” Tell me, and tell me plainly, when you think I am deviating from the strict line of duty and principle; and when I become unwilling to hear, I shall have attained a character which I now despise, and from which I would hope to be preserved. But to the facts. I am in England, my family are in the United States. My sphere of usefulness is in the United States; my public and domestic duties arc there; and there it seems my duty to go. But I am legally the property of Thomas Auld, and if I go to the United States, (no matter to what part, for there is no City of Refuge there, no spot sacred to freedom there,) Thomas Auld, aided by the American Government, can seize, bind and fetter, and drag me from my family, feed his cruel revenge upon me, and doom me to unending slavery. In view of this simple statement of facts, a few friends, desirous of seeing me released from the terrible liability, and to relieve my wife and children from the painful trepidation, consequent upon the liability, and to place me on an equal footing of safety with all other anti-slavery lecturers in the United States, and to enhance my usefulness by enlarging the field of my labors in the United States, have nobly and generously paid Hugh Auld, the agent of Thomas Auld, £150—in consideration of which, Hugh Auld (acting as his agent) and the Government of the United States agree, that I shall be free from all further liability. These, dear friend, are the facts of the whole transaction. The principle here acted on by my friends, and that upon which I shall act in receiving the manumission papers, I deem quite defensible. First, as to those who acted as my friends, and their actions. The actuating motive was, to secure me from a liability full of horrible forebodings to myself and family. With this object, I will do you the justice to say, I believe you fully unite, although some parts of your letters would seem to justify a different belief. Then, as to the measure adopted to secure this result. Does it violate a fundamental principle, or does it not? This is the question, and to my mind the only question of importance, involved in the discussion. I believe that, on our part, no just HDT WHAT? INDEX

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or holy principle has been violated. Before entering upon the argument in support of this view, I will take the liberty (and I know you will pardon it) to say, I think you should have pointed out some principle violated in the transaction, before you proceeded to exhort me to repentance. You have given me any amount of indignation against “Auld” and the United States, in all which I cordially unite, and felt refreshed by reading; but it has no bearing whatever upon the conduct of myself, or friends, in the matter under consideration. It does not prove that I have done wrong, nor does it demonstrate what is right, or the proper course to be pursued. Now that the matter has reached its present point, before entering upon the argument, let me say one other word; it is this—I do not think you have acted quite consistently with your character for promptness, in delaying your advice till the transaction was completed. You knew of the movement at its conception, and have known it through its progress, and have never, to my knowledge, uttered one syllable against it, in conversation or letter, till now that the deed is done. I regret this, not because I think your earlier advice would have altered the result, but because it would have left me more free than I can now be, since the thing is done. Of course, you will not think hard of my alluding to this circumstance. Now, then, to the main question. The principle which you appear to regard as violated by the transaction in question, may be stated as follows:—Every man has a natural and inalienable right to himself. The inference from this is, “that man cannot hold property in man”—and as man cannot hold property in man, neither can Hugh Auld nor the United States have any right of property in me—and having no right of property in me, they have no right to sell me and, having no right to sell me, no one has a right to buy me. I think I have now stated the principle, and the inference from the principle, distinctly and fairly. Now, the question upon which the whole controversy turns is, simply, this: does the transaction, which you condemn, really violate this principle? I own that, to a superficial observer, it would seem to do so. But I think I am prepared to show, that, so far from being a violation of that principle, it is truly a noble vindication of it. Before going further, let me state here, briefly, what sort of a purchase would have been a violation of this principle, which, in common with yourself, I reverence, and am anxious to preserve inviolate. Ist. It would have been a violation of that principle, had those who purchased me done so, to make me a slave, instead of a free- man. And, 2ndly. It would have been a violation, of that principle, had those who purchased me done so with a view to compensate the slaveholder, for what he and they regarded as his rightful property. In neither of these ways was my purchase effected. My liberation was, in their estimation, of more value than £150; the happiness and repose of my family were, in their judgment, more than paltry HDT WHAT? INDEX

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gold. The £150 was paid to the remorseless plunderer, not because he had any just claim to it, but to induce him to give up his legal claim to something which they deemed of more value than money. It was not to compensate the slaveholder, but to release me from his power; not to establish my natural right to freedom, but to release me from all legal liabilities to, slavery. And all this, you and I, and the slaveholders, and all who know anything of the transaction, very well understand. The very letter to Hugh Auld, proposing terms of purchase, informed him that those who gave, denied his right to it. The error of those, who condemn this transaction, consists in their confounding the crime of buying men into slavery, with the meritorious act of buying men out of slavery, and the purchase of legal freedom with abstract right and natural freedom. They say, “If you BUY, you recognize the right to sell. If you receive, you recognize the right of the giver to give.” And this has a show of truth, as well as of logic. But a few plain cases will show its entire fallacy. There is now, in this country, a heavy duty on corn. The government of this country has imposed it; and though I regard it a most unjust and wicked imposition, no man of common sense will charge me with endorsing or recognizing the right of this government to impose this duty, simply because, to prevent myself and family from starving, I buy and eat this corn. Take another case:—I have had dealings with a man. I have owed him one hundred dollars, and have paid it; I have lost the receipt. He comes upon me the second time for the money. I know, and he knows, he has no right to it; but he is a villain, and has me in his power. The law is with him, and against me. I must pay or be dragged to jail. I choose to pay the bill a second time. To say I sanctioned his right to rob me, because I preferred to pay rather than go to jail, is to utter an absurdity, to which no sane man would give heed. And yet the principle of action, in each of these cases, is the same. The man might indeed say, the claim is unjust—and declare, I will rot in jail, before I will pay it. But this would not, certainly, be demanded by any principle of truth, justice, or humanity; and however much we might be disposed to respect his daring, but little deference could be paid to his wisdom. The fact is, we act upon this principle every day of our lives, and we have an undoubted right to do so. When I came to this country from the United States, I came in the second cabin. And why? Not because my natural right to come in the first cabin was not as good as that of any other man, but because a wicked and cruel prejudice decided, that the second cabin was the place for me. By coming over in the second, did I sanction or justify this wicked proscription? Not at all. It was the best I could do. I acted from necessity. One other case, and I have done with this view of the subject. I think you will agree with me, that the case I am now about to put is pertinent, though you may not readily pardon me for making yourself the agent of my illustration. The case respects the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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passport system on the continent of Europe. That system you utterly condemn. You look upon it as an unjust and wicked interference, a bold and infamous violation of the natural and sacred right of locomotion. You hold, (and so do I,) that the image of our common God ought to be a passport all over the habitable world. But bloody and tyrannical governments have ordained otherwise; they usurp authority over you, and decide for you, on what conditions you shall travel. They say, you shall have a passport, or you shall be put in prison. Now, the question is, have they a right to prescribe any such terms? and do you, by complying with these terms, sanction their interference? I think you will answer, no; submission to injustice, and sanction of injustice, are different things; and he is a poor reasoner who confounds the two, and makes them one and the same thing. Now, then, for the parallel, and the application of the passport system to my own case. I wish to go to the United States. I have a natural right to go there, and be free. My natural right is as good as that of Hugh Auld, or James K. Polk; but that plundering government says, I shall not return to the United States in safety—it says, I must allow Hugh Auld to rob me, or my friends, of £150, or be hurled into the infernal jaws of slavery. I must have a “bit of paper, signed and sealed,” or my liberty must be taken from me, and I must be torn from my family and friends. The government of Austria said to you, “Dare to come upon my soil, without a passport, declaring you to be an American citizen, (which you say you are not,) you shall at once be arrested, and thrown into prison.” What said you to that Government? Did you say that the threat was a villainous one, and an infamous invasion of your right of locomotion? Did you say, “I will come upon your soil; I will go where I please—I dare and defy your government!” Did you say, “I will spurn your passports; I would not stain my hand, and degrade myself, by touching your miserable parchment. You have no right to give it, and I have no right to take it. I trample your laws, and will put your constitutions under my feet! I will not recognize them!” Was this your course? No! dear friend, it was not. Your practice was wiser than your theory. You took the passport, submitted to be examined while travelling, and availed yourself of all the advantages of your “passport”—or, in other words, escaped all the evils which you ought to have done, without it, and would have done, but for the tyrannical usurpation in Europe. I will not dwell longer upon this view of the subject; and I dismiss it, feeling quite satisfied of the entire correctness of the reasoning, and the principle attempted to be maintained. As to the expediency of the: measures, different opinions may well prevail; but in regard to the principle, I feel it difficult to conceive of two opinions. I am free to say, that, had I possessed one hundred and fifty pounds, I would have seen Hugh Auld kicking, before I would have given it to him. I would have waited till the emergency came, and only given up the money when nothing else would do. But my friends thought it best to provide HDT WHAT? INDEX

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against the contingency; they acted on their own responsibility, and I am not disturbed about the result. But, having acted on a true principle, I do not feel free to disavow their proceedings. In conclusion, let me say, I anticipate no such change in my position as you predict. I shall be Frederick Douglass still, and once a slave still. I shall neither be made to forget nor cease to feel the wrongs of my enslaved fellow-countrymen. My knowledge of slavery will be the same, and my hatred of it will be the same. By the way, I have never made my own person and suffering the theme of public discourse, but have always based my appeal upon the wrongs of the three millions now in chains; and these shall still be the burthen of my speeches. You intimate that I may reject the papers, and allow them to remain in the hands of those friends who have effected the purchase, and thus avail myself of the security afforded by them, without sharing any part of the responsibility of the transaction. My objection to this is one of honor. I do not think it would be very honorable on my part, to remain silent during the whole transaction, and giving it more than my silent approval; and then, when the thing is completed, and I am safe, attempt to play the hero, by throwing off all responsibility in the matter. It might be said, and said with great propriety, “Mr. Douglass, your indignation is very good, and has but one fault, and that is, it comes too late!” It would be a show of bravery when the danger is over. From every view I have been able to take of the subject, I am persuaded to receive the papers, if presented,— not, however, as a proof of my right to be free, for that is self-evident, but as a proof that my friends have been legally robbed of £150, in order to secure that which is the birth-right of every man. And I will hold up those papers before the world, in proof of the plundering character of the American government. It shall be the brand of infamy, stamping the nation, in whose name the deed was done, as a great aggregation of hypocrites, thieves and liars,—and their condemnation is just. They declare that all men are created equal, and have a natural and inalienable right to liberty, while they rob me of £150, as a condition of my enjoying this natural and inalienable right. It will be their condemnation, in their own hand-writing, and may be held up to the world as a means of humbling that haughty republic into repentance. I agree with you, that the contest which I have to wage is against the government of the United States. But the representative of that government is the slaveholder, Thomas Auld. He is commander-in-chief of the army and navy. The whole civil and naval force of the nation are at his disposal. He may command all these to his assistance, and bring them all to bear upon me, until I am made entirely subject to his will, or submit to be robbed myself, or allow my friends to be robbed, of seven hundred and fifty dollars. And rather than be subject to his will, I have submitted to be robbed, or allowed my friends to be robbed, of the seven hundred and fifty dollars. Sincerely yours, HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

Frederick Douglass

August: On his return voyage to America, Henry C. Wright suffered, as he knew very well that he would, “11 days of Nausea, Vomit & Starvation.” His return was noted in The Liberator by Edmund Quincy, who commented that “no man in the country has more true friends, or has deserved to have them.”

Soon Wright would announce that he was going to attempt to function as “the voluntary, unpaid agent” of the New England Non-Resistance Society, free of any “restrictions imposed by the relation of a paid agent.” His headquarters would be in the Hopedale community near Worcester. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1849

1 30 Henry C. Wright bought a /2-acre lot in the Hopedale Community as his autobiography, HUMAN LIFE AS ILLUSTRATED IN MY INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE, went on sale in Boston:

30. Henry C. Wright would reside at Hopedale for only the brief period that, you note, he ordinarily devoted to any particular thingie in his life before moving on to try something else. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

There was a long tradition in political theory that stressed analogies between good arrangements in the state and in the family. But Wright’s preoccupations with the family and aggression had a more immediate source in his passionate self-analysis: he searched out the origins of violent feelings in his own boyhood, then extended his findings to all mankind. he composed an autobiography audaciously entitled HUMAN LIFE, a compilation of memories that took its cue from Emerson’s dictum, “There is properly no history; only biography.” He belonged unmistakably to the generation Emerson described as “born with knives in their brains, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives.” Yet he surpassed many of his contemporaries in recognizing how fixed his responses to experience had become in early childhood. HUMAN LIFE is an unjustly obscure book, comparable to the best introspective autobiographies of the century, and a great assistance in understanding men’s motives in an important period of transition in American life. HUMAN L IFE was nearly contemporaneous with Max Stirner’s THE E GO AND H IS OWN (1844), which began with a discussion “OF HUMAN LIFE.” It is extremely unlikely that Wright ever heard of Stirner, who was not translated into English until 1907, and then was familiar only to a small circle of individualists and iconoclasts. But their works shared a common view of Western history and individual psychology. Both opposed the reappearance of authoritarianism in the postmonarchical era, an opposition that won both some reputation as precursors of anarchism. Wright’s HUMAN LIFE, moreover, can be read as a Stirnerian quest for emancipation, commencing with birth, in which the individual, whipped and propagandized, struggles to create a hold over his own identity quite apart from the definitions of reality that others seek to impose. Wright’s antislavery pronouncements often intimated goals of unfettered autonomy that bring to mind not only his German contemporary but also some radical psychologies of the twentieth century. And yet his life illustrates just how illusory the promise of “self-ownership’ usually is, how powerful –even in the life of an emancipator in a fluid society– are the commands imposed by those who conceived, protected, and punished him. HUMAN LIFE illustrates the allure of Stirnerian, liberating goals at the cultural moment when it appeared; it may also be read as a step in the direction of Freud’s codification of the mechanisms of repression. Because of his discoveries in self-analysis, Wright stands as a distant precursor of Freud. As a belligerent nonresistant, however, he also resembles one of those “walking contradictions” whom Freud liked to analyze. He was known, on the one hand, as a joyous man who liked to sing, play the fife and flute, and romp with children; his life was crisis ridden, on the other hand, and he passed through sloughs of personal depression and caused bitterness around him.... HDT WHAT? INDEX

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We suspect that nonresistance was, among other things, Wright’s way of living with powerfully belligerent feelings.... Wright often brings to mind Freud’s view that neurotics “cannot get free of the past.”... His best known contribution to reform was the “no-government” idea that obedience to the kingdom of God precluded support to slaveholders, rulers, armies, and other embodiments of human force. He influenced Garrison to blend a version of Christian anarchism with opposition to slavery; he caused other abolitionists, like William Goodell, to downplay their own perfectionism lest they further embarrass the cause of the slave; and he furnished a useful target to conservatives who wished to draw boundaries around the permissible range of evangelical belief. He got a lot of attention, in other words, in the anonymous role he played in behalf of the kingdom of God; and all his uncertainty on matters of theology was past. He had placed himself on long-sought ground, detached from selfish and local interests. To his own mind, his position seemed impregnable: if charged with disrespect for order he would answer that he was escalating respect for the supreme authority; if charged with heterodoxy he could insist on his total submission to God. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

1850

Publication of Henry C. Wright’s ANTHROPOLOGY; OR, THE SCIENCE OF MAN: IN ITS BEARINGS ON WAR AND SLAVERY, AND ON ARGUMENTS FROM THE BIBLE, MARRIAGE, GOD, DEATH, RETRIBUTION, ATONEMENT AND GOVERNMENT IN SUPPORT OF THESE AND OTHER SOCIAL WRONGS (Cincinnati OH: E. Shepard; Boston MA: Bela Marsh). During this year the author would become a travelling representative for the New England Non- Resistance Society. HUMAN GOVERNMENT. — What is it? A government in which the will of man is law, and death the penalty. Dost thou ask, what I think of human government? If it be true that God works out his purposes solely by fixed laws, and that man cannot be justly held amenable to arbitrary laws and penalties, then all human governments must be wrong, for they cannot be other than governments of arbitrary law and penalty. How can man have the right to dictate law to his equal brother, and kill him if he disobeys? for all human government must fall back on death for execution. Death is personified in every legislature, judge and ruler; the government is but an embodiment of death. No man can be under obligation to do anything because human governments tell him to do it. If they require what is right, we are to do it.; not because they require, but because it is right, and not because congress of parliament commands it. But thy query is, “Does not their bible sanction human government?” My answer is, if the bible says our Creator ever authorized human beings to dictate laws to their fellows and to punish those who disobey, the bible is mistaken. A benevolent and all-wise God never placed men under the dominion of men. Nature acknowledges allegiance only to the Creator. To say that God makes man his viceregent in the government of this world, and arms him with governing power over his brother, is to say that he intended man’s earthly existence to be the scene of hatred, contention, violence, and blood. To say that he instituted human governments, and armed them with death as the executive power - is to charge him with the folly of setting up an institution to protect life, and basing its existence on the right to kill men; that he protects liberty by enslaving men, truth by lying, purity by impurity, and justice by injustice. Death the guardian of life! Slavery the guardian of liberty, falsehood the guardian of truth, war of peace, violence of love; the author of all evil, the protector of the Author of all good! The author of man and this universe never committed such folly. The history of all human governments demonstrates, that he who could do this knew not what he was about. As well say, that the only way to make men love us is to hate them, as to say that governments of violence ever did or ever can protect life. They exist by death, and they make of earth a charnel house. I cannot and will not love and worship any being as God, that ever did HDT WHAT? INDEX

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or ever can approve of their existence. Dost thou ask, “What can we do without the protection of governments of human will and death?” Better ask, what has the human race done with them? Just what might have been expected they would do. Such governments have made criminals and killed them. That is all. Nature says, man was made to be governed, not to govern. Whatever says man was made to govern, says what cannot be true, because it is opposed to nature. The history of all attempts of man to rule over man, to dictate to him a rule of life, and to punish him if he disobeys, demonstrates that an assumption of such power is opposed to nature and to nature’s God. They have made earth a scene of blood and carnage.

The moment a man claims the right to control the will of a fellow by physical force, he is at heart a slaveholder. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

October 4, Friday: Henry Thoreau and Ellery Channing returned from Canada: We left Montreal Wednesday, the 2d of October [this can only be an inaccurate transcription from notes, for our pair of intrepid travelers had left Montréal for Québec on Wednesday the 2d, and they were leaving Montréal for home on Friday the 4th, and there is simply no way to reconstrue their reported travels and adventures into 8 days rather than 10], late in the afternoon. In the La Prairie cars the Yankees made themselves merry, imitating the cries of the charette- drivers to perfection, greatly to the amusement of some French-Canadian travellers, and they kept it up all the way to Boston. I saw one person on board the boat at St. John’s, and one or two more elsewhere in Canada, wearing homespun gray great-coats, or capotes, with conical and comical hoods, which fell back between their shoulders like small bags, ready to be turned up over the head when occasion required, though a hat usurped that place now. They looked as if they would be convenient and proper enough as long as the coats were new and tidy, but would soon come to have a beggarly and unsightly look, akin to rags and dust-holes. We reached Burlington early in the morning, where the Yankees tried to pass off their Canada coppers, but the news-boys knew better. Returning through the Green Mountains, I was reminded that I had not seen in Canada such brilliant autumnal tints as I had previously seen in Vermont. Perhaps there was not yet so great and sudden a contrast with the summer heats in the former country as in these mountain valleys. As we were passing through Ashburnham, by a new white house which stood at some distance in a field, one passenger exclaimed, so that all in the car could hear him, “There, there’s not so good a house as that in all Canada!” I did not much wonder at his remark, for there is a neatness, as well as evident prosperity, a certain elastic easiness of circumstances, so to speak, when not rich, about a New England house, as if the proprietor could at least afford to make repairs in the spring, which the Canadian houses do not suggest. Though of stone, they are not better constructed than a stone barn would be with us; the only building, except the château, and while every village here contains at least several gentlemen or “squires,” there there is but one to a seigniory. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

It was Frederick Douglass’s speech at Faneuil Hall on this evening that prompted the formation of the Boston

Vigilance Committee, which eventually would spawn the Secret “Six” conspiracy in support of the activities of Captain John Brown,31 with the Boston attorney Richard Henry Dana, Jr. providing it with legal counsel.

Frederick Douglass declared bravely, in accordance with the Southern code of honor which equated willingness to abandon life with deservingness of freedom,32 that “I should welcome the intelligence 31. (Of course, this was Captain Brown’s conspiracy, since he was a white man and therefore a leader, and not Frederick Douglass’s conspiracy, since he was a black man and therefore a follower — despite the fact that while said conspiracy was being hatched John Brown was residing in the spare bedroom of Douglass’s home in Rochester NY! :-) 32. Cf the slavemaster Patrick Henry’s often-quoted “patriotic” declaration before the Virginia House of Burgesses, “I know not what course others may take, but as for me, Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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tomorrow, should it come, that slaves had risen in the South, and that the sable arms which had been engaged in beautifying and adorning the South, were engaged in spreading death and devastation.”

(Of course, although the idea of the raid on Harpers Ferry happened to be hatched while Brown was residing in Douglass’s spare bedroom, the idea of the raid was obviously all the white man’s idea and obviously none of the colored man’s idea, since we all know that colored people are not either originative or possessed of leadership capabilities. ;-)

A Vigilance Committee was also forming on this day in Syracuse, New York. It was made up of: • P.H. Agan • George Barnes • Abnr. Bates • Lyman Clary • C.W. Levenworth • J.W. Loguen •H. Putnam • R.R. Raymond • C.B. Sedgwick • V.W. Smith • John Thomas • C.A. Wheaton • John Wilkinson HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Under the pressure of the Fugitive Slave Law, the “nonresistant” Henry C. Wright eventually came –surprise, surprise– to legitimate violence. No more Mr. Nice Guy: Every man, who believes resistance to tyrants to be obedience to God, is bound by his own principles (not by mine) to arm himself with a pistol or a dirk, a bowie-knife, a rifle, or any deadly weapon, and inflict death with his own hand, on each and ever man who shall attempt to execute the recent law of Congress, or any other law, made with a view to re-capture and return to bondage fugitive slaves.

James Bowie HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

1851

May 20, Tuesday: Henry C. Wright wrote an open letter to the Woman’s Rights Convention that was to be held shortly in Akron, Ohio: FLUSHING, Long Island, May 20, 1851. TO THE WOMAN'S RIGHTS CONVENTION. Dear Friends;— * * * The effort being made by yourselves and others to secure to woman her rights as a human being, and her true position in reference to the customs and institutions of society, ought to be, and ere long will be, regarded as one of the most important movements of the age. It involves all that is pure, elevating and endearing in domestic life; all that is lovely, good and great in social life; all that is useful and enduring in religious and social institutions. The abolition of intemperance, war, slavery, and all the individual and social wrongs of mankind, and the regeneration and redemption of the race from the physical, intellectual, social and moral evils that now crush it, must be associated with this movement. I see not how any being, whose destiny is linked with that of human-kind, can treat this subject lightly, or remain indifferent to it. Man and Woman cannot be separated in their destiny. Where woman goes, man must go; where man goes, woman must go; as the one rises or sinks in intelligence, in wisdom and virtue, so must the other rise or fall. * * * Man cannot be saved without the aid of woman; woman cannot be saved without the aid of man. United in love, in counsel and effort, progress in wisdom and goodness, towards the heavenly and divine, is certain; disunited in affection, in interest, in plans or in their execution, degradation and ruin must follow. This should be settled as a fixed fact in the minds of all who take part in this movement. * * * Whatever right of property or person, of government or religion; in the family, in the market, in the church, the court, the cabinet, legislative hall, or in the public assembly, belongs to man, belongs also to woman. In arranging and conducting the affairs of life in regard to our domestic, pecuniary, social, religious and civil concerns, this fact is denied or disregarded. To enlighten the understanding and consciences of men, and to arouse their moral nature in regard to this great law of our being, should be one great aim of all who are interested in this enterprise. In asserting your Humanity, you assert the fact that whatever right belongs to one human being, belongs to each and every one, without regard to sex, complexion, condition, caste or country. Woman is a human being; and it is a self-evident truth that whatever right belongs to HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

man by virtue of his membership in the human family, belongs to her by the same tenure. This truth is not to be reasoned about; it is self-evident. No power in the universe can have the right to put woman in a position of subjection to man, or man in subjection to woman. As regards their relations to each other, they are equals; and neither can justly be held responsible, as subject to any power but the Divine. It is not right or expedient to submit this question to the contingency of a discussion, for you could not submit it if the decision were against you. Why appeal to a tribunal at all, whose decision, in this matter you have determined not to abide by, if it is against you? To do so would be neither dignified nor honest. Dear friends, permit me to remind you not to be disheartened though few join you. There are tens of thousands interested in this movement who have not courage to become a part of it. Be more anxious to plant yourselves on the rock of eternal truth, and to abide there, than to increase your numbers. Truth goes not by numbers, but is instinct with divine life, and it must triumph. * * * May truth, in regard to the rights and position of woman, and to her connexion with the true development and destiny of our nature, be your aim, and uncompromising fidelity to that truth, your endeavor. Yours truly, HENRY C. WRIGHT

May 29, Thursday: The Worcester Spy was keeping its eye peeled for the more daring ladies: The New Costume. The first Bloomer made its appearance in our city yesterday. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

SAMUEL JOSEPH MAY

At the Berry Street Conference in Boston, debate began over the Reverend May’s resolution condemning Daniel Webster, Millard Fillmore, Edward Everett, Samuel A. Eliot, the Reverend Professor Jared Sparks, the Reverend Ezra Stiles Gannett, and the Reverend Orville Dewey as “traffickers IN HUMAN FLESH.” May charged that Gannett was acting in a manner “utterly subversive of Christian morality and of all true allegiance to God.” The question became how much the Federal Union was worth, compared with for instance the Laws of God. The Reverend Theodore Parker rose to assert that if and when George Ticknor Curtis, a member of the Reverend Gannett’s Unitarian assembly and an officer charged with local administration of the Fugitive Slave Law, came to his parsonage to take a black fugitive from slavery into custody, he would defend not only with an open Bible but with the sword, the brace of pistols, and the musket which his father had carried at Lexington Green on April 19, 1775. He was, he declared, no “foolish nonresistant,” and one wonders whether he would have had that “open Bible” open to one or another of the same Old Testament passages that would be firmly underlined, while in prison awaiting execution, by Captain John Brown in 1859. This controversy would not be over until 1853, and when it was concluded, it was concluded by instructions to Unitarian ministers that the debate over slavery was driving away potential converts to Unitarianism, and that therefore they should avoid discussion of the peculiar institution of slavery, avoid discussion of Webster, and avoid discussion of the merits of the Fugitive Slave Law — and that those unable to avoid such discussion would be find themselves no longer recognized as Unitarian ministers.

At the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, the letter of May 20th from Henry C. Wright was read: FLUSHING, Long Island, May 20, 1851. TO THE WOMAN'S RIGHTS CONVENTION. Dear Friends;— * * * The effort being made by yourselves and others to secure to woman her rights as a human being, and her true position in reference to the customs and institutions of society, ought to be, and ere long will be, regarded as one of the most important movements of the age. It involves all that is pure, elevating and endearing HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

in domestic life; all that is lovely, good and great in social life; all that is useful and enduring in religious and social institutions. The abolition of intemperance, war, slavery, and all the individual and social wrongs of mankind, and the regeneration and redemption of the race from the physical, intellectual, social and moral evils that now crush it, must be associated with this movement. I see not how any being, whose destiny is linked with that of human-kind, can treat this subject lightly, or remain indifferent to it. Man and Woman cannot be separated in their destiny. Where woman goes, man must go; where man goes, woman must go; as the one rises or sinks in intelligence, in wisdom and virtue, so must the other rise or fall. * * * Man cannot be saved without the aid of woman; woman cannot be saved without the aid of man. United in love, in counsel and effort, progress in wisdom and goodness, towards the heavenly and divine, is certain; disunited in affection, in interest, in plans or in their execution, degradation and ruin must follow. This should be settled as a fixed fact in the minds of all who take part in this movement. * * * Whatever right of property or person, of government or religion; in the family, in the market, in the church, the court, the cabinet, legislative hall, or in the public assembly, belongs to man, belongs also to woman. In arranging and conducting the affairs of life in regard to our domestic, pecuniary, social, religious and civil concerns, this fact is denied or disregarded. To enlighten the understanding and consciences of men, and to arouse their moral nature in regard to this great law of our being, should be one great aim of all who are interested in this enterprise. In asserting your Humanity, you assert the fact that whatever right belongs to one human being, belongs to each and every one, without regard to sex, complexion, condition, caste or country. Woman is a human being; and it is a self-evident truth that whatever right belongs to man by virtue of his membership in the human family, belongs to her by the same tenure. This truth is not to be reasoned about; it is self-evident. No power in the universe can have the right to put woman in a position of subjection to man, or man in subjection to woman. As regards their relations to each other, they are equals; and neither can justly be held responsible, as subject to any power but the Divine. It is not right or expedient to submit this question to the contingency of a discussion, for you could not submit it if the decision were against you. Why appeal to a tribunal at all, whose decision, in this matter you have determined not to abide by, if it is against you? To do so would be neither dignified nor honest. Dear friends, permit me to remind you not to be disheartened though few join you. There are tens of thousands interested in this movement who have not courage to become a part of it. Be more anxious to plant yourselves on the rock of eternal truth, HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

and to abide there, than to increase your numbers. Truth goes not by numbers, but is instinct with divine life, and it must triumph. * * * May truth, in regard to the rights and position of woman, and to her connexion with the true development and destiny of our nature, be your aim, and uncompromising fidelity to that truth, your endeavor. Yours truly, HENRY C. WRIGHT HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

May 29: It is evident that the virtues of plants are almost completely unknown to us– And we esteem the few with which we are better acquainted unreasonably above the many which are comparatively unknown BIGELOW to us. Bigelow says –“It is a subject of some curiosity to consider, if the knowledge of the present Materia Medica were by any means to be lost, how many of the same articles would again rise into notice and use. Doubtless a variety of new substances would develop unexpected powers, while perhaps the poppy would be shunned as a deleterious plant, and the cinchona might grow unmolested upon the mountains of Quito.” Sawyer regards Nux vomica among the most valuable. B. says 1817 “We have yet to discover our anodynes & our emetics, although we abound in bitters, astringents, aromatics, and demulcents. In the present state of our knowledge we could not well dispense with opium and ipicacuanha, yet a great number of foreign drugs, such as gentian, columbo, chamomile, kino, catechu, cascarilla, canella, &c. for which we pay a large annual tax to other countries, might in all probability be superceded by the indigenous products of our own. It is certainly better that our own country people should have the benefit of collecting such articles, than that we should pay for them to the Moors of Africa, or the Indians of Brazil.” The Thorn apple Datura stramonium (Apple of Peru –Devil’s Apple –Jamestown Weed) “emigrates with great facility, and often springs up in the ballast of ships, and in earth carried from one country to another.” It secretes itself in the hold of vessels –& migrates –it is a sort of cosmopolitan weed –a roving weed –what adventures– What historian knows when first it came into a country! He quotes Beverly’s Hist. of Virginia as saying that some soldiers in the days of Bacon’s rebellion –having eaten some of this plant –which was boiled for salad by mistake –were made natural fools & buffoons by it for 11 days, without injury to their bodies?? The root of a biennial or perennial will accumulate the virtues of the plant more than any other part. BIGELOW B says that Pursh states that the sweetscented Golden Rod Solidago odora “has for some time (i.e. before 1817] been an article of exportation to China, where it fetches a high price.” And yet it is known to very few New Englanders. BIGELOW “No botanist, says B. even if in danger of starving in a wilderness, would indulge his hunger on a root or fruit taken from an unknown plant of the natural order Luridae, of the Multisiliquae, or the umbelliferous aquatics. On the contrary he would not feel a moment’s hesitation in regard to any of the Gramina, the fruit of the Pomaceae, and several other natural families of plants, which are known to be uniformly innocent in their effects” The aromatic flavor of the Checquer Berry is also perceived in the Gaultheria hispidula; in Spiraea ulmaria and the root of Spiraea lobata –and in the birches. GINSENG He says Ginseng, Spigelia, Snake-root, &c. form considerable articles of exportation. The odor of Skunk cabbage is perceived in some N.A. currants –as Ribes rigens of MX on high mts– At one time the Indians above Quebec & Montreal were so taken up with searching for Ginseng that they could not be hired for any other purpose. It is said that both the Chinese & the Indians named this plant from its resemblance to the figure of a man The Indians used the bark of Dirca palustris or Leather Wood for their cordage. It was after the long continued search of many generations that these qualities were discovered. BIGELOW Of Tobacco, Nicotiana Tabacum, B. says after speaking of its poisonous qualities “Yet the first person who had courage & patience enough to persevere in its use, until habit had overcome his original disgust, eventually found in it a pleasing sedative, a soother of care, and a material addition to the pleasures of life. Its use, which originated among savages, has spread into every civilized country; it has made its way against the declamations of the learned, and the prohibitions of civil & religious authority, and it now gives rise to an extensive branch of agriculture, or of commerce, in every part of the globe.” Soon after its introduction into Europe –“The rich indulged in it as a luxury of the highest kind; and the poor gave themselves up to it, as a solace for the miseries of life.” Several varieties are cultivated. BIGELOW In return for many foreign weeds we have sent abroad, says B. “The Erigeron Canadense & the prolific families HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

of Ambrosia & Amaranthus.”

“The Indians were acquainted with the med. properties of more than one species of Euphorbia” Night shade is called bitter sweet. Poke also called Garget V root of Arum Triphyllum –Dragon Root or Ind. turnip V Gold Thread Coptis trifolia V sanguinaria Canadensis or Blood Root V Conium Maculatum Hemlock V Cicuta maculata Am. Hemlock V Asarum Canadense Wild Ginger snake root–colt’s foot– V Hyoscyamus Niger Henbane V sweetscented Golden rod GINSENG V Panax quinquefolium Ginseng. V Polygala Senega Seneca snake root V veratrum viride Am. Hellebore V Dirca palustris Leather Wood.

I noticed the button bush May 25th around an elevated pond or mudhole –its leaves just beginning to expand– This slight amount of green contrasted with its –dark craggly naked looking stem & branches –as if subsiding waters had left them bare –looked Dantesque –& infernal. It is not a handsome bush at this season it is so slow to put out its leaves & hide its naked & unsightly stems. The Andromeda ligustrina is late to leave out. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

malus excelsa –amara –florida –palustris –gratissima –ramosa –spinosa ferruginea –aromatica –aurea – rubigenosa –odorata –tristis –officinalis!! herbacea –vulgaris –aestivalis –autumnalis riparia –odora –versicolor –communis –farinosa –super septa pendens malus sepium virum Nov. Angliae –succosa saepe formicis preoccupata –vermiculosa aut verminosa –aut a vermisbus corrupta vel erosa –Malus semper virens et viridis viridis –cholera –morbifera or dysenterifera –(M. sylvestrispaludosa –excelsa et ramosa superne –difficilis conscendere (aut adoepere), fructus difficillimus stringere –parvus et amara.) Picis perforata or perterebata – rupestris –agrestis –arvensis –Assabettia –Railroad apple –Musketaquidensis –dew apple rorifera. The apple whose fruit we tasted in our youth which grows passim et nusquam,– Our own particular apple malus numquam legata vel stricta. (Malus cujus fructum ineunte aetate gustavi quae passim et nusquam viget) cortice muscosâ Malus viae-ferreae HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

1853

January 7, Friday: Henry C. Wright reported in the Liberator that a medium had informed him, in a seance at an Ohio farmhouse, that his brother Chester had died of apoplexy on a certain date in a certain town. SPIRITUALISM

On this day in New Orleans, the rescuer of Solomon Northup was obtaining a pass by which the man could travel back into his Northern freedom:

State of Louisiana - City of New-Orleans: Recorder’s Office, Second District. To all to whom these presents shall come: - This is to certify that Henry B. Northup, Esquire, of the county of Washington, New-York, has produced before me due evidence of the freedom of Solomon, a mulatto man, aged about forty-two years, five feet, seven inches and six lines, woolly hair, and chestnut eyes, who is a native born of the State of New-York. That the said Northup, being about bringing the said Solomon to his native place, through the southern routes, the civil authorities are requested to let the aforesaid colored man Solomon pass unmolested, he demeaning well and properly. Given under my hand and the seal of the city of New-Orleans this 7th January, 1853. [L.S.] “TH. GENOIS, Recorder.

REVERSE UNDERGROUND RR

January 21, Friday: It was reported in the Liberator that in a spiritualist seance, a “magnetized woman” had been asked to send the spirit of Nathaniel Peabody Rogers from “beyond the veil,” and then those attending the seance in the dark heard the sound of a horn. One of those attending the seance, Henry C. Wright, informed the others that once upon a time he had been with Rogers in the White Mountains, when a hotel keeper had sounded a horn in precisely the same manner! SPIRITUALISM

January 21st: A fine still warm moonlight evening – we have had 1 or 2 already moon not yet full. To the woods by the deep cut at 9 o’clock. The blueness of the sky at night is an everlasting surprise to me – suggesting the constant presence & prevalence of light in the firmament – the color it wears by day – that we see through the veil of night to the constant blue as by day. The night is not black – when the air is clear – but blue still as by day – the great ocean of light and ether is unaffected by our partial night Night is not universal. At midnight I see into the universal day. Walking at midnight unless it is cloudy still the blue sky o’er arches as by day. I am somewhat oppressed & saddened by the sameness & apparent poverty of the heavens – that these irregular & few geometrical figures which the constellations make are no other than those seen by the Chaldaean shepherds – I pine for a new World in the heavens as well as on the earth – And though it is some consolation to hear of the wilderness of stars & systems invisible to the naked eye – yet the sky does not make that HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

impression of variety & wildness that even the forest does – as it ought It makes an impression rather of simplicity & and unchangeableness as of eternal laws – This being the same constellation which the shepherds saw & obedient still to the same law – It does not affect me as that unhandselled wilderness which the forest is – I seem to see it pierced with visual rays from a thousand observatories – It is more the domain of science than of poetry. But it is the stars as not known to science that I would know – the stars which the lonely traveller knows. The chaldaean shepherd saw not the same stars which I see, and I am elevated in the least toward the heavens I do not accept their classification of them. I am not to be distracted by the names which they have imposed. The sun which I know is not Apollo – nor is the evening star Venus. The heavens shall be as new at VENUS least as the world is new. This classification of the stars is old and musty – it is as if a mildew had taken place in the heavens – as if the stars so closely packed had heated & moulded there. If they appear fixed, it is because that hitherto men have been thus necessitated to see them – I see not merely old but new testaments in the skies. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

Do not I stand as near the stars as the Chaldaean shepherds? The heavens commonly look as dry & meagre as our astronomies are – mere troops as the latter are catalogues of stars – The milky way yields no milk. A few good anecdotes is our science – with a few imposing facts respecting distance & size – & little or nothing about the stars as they concern man – teaching how he may survey a country or sail a ship – & not how he may steer his life – Astrology contained the germ of a higher truth than this – It may happen that the stars are more significant & truly celestial to the teamster than to the astronomer – Nobody sees the stars now – they study astronomy at the district school – & learn that the sun is 195 millions distant & the like – a statement which never made any impression on me because I never walked it and which I cannot be said to believe – But the sun shines nevertheless. Though observatories are multiplied the heavens receive very little attention. The naked eye may easily see farther than the armed. It depends on who looks through it – No superior telescope to this has been invented – In those big ones the recoil is equal to the force of the discharge. The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling ranges from earth to heaven – but this the astronomer’s does not often do. It does not see far beyond the dome of Greenwich observatory. Compared with the visible phenomena of the heavens the anecdotes of science affect me as trivial & petty. Mans eye is the true star-finder – the comet-seeker. As I sat looking out the window the other evening just after dark I saw the lamp of a freight train – & nearly just over the train a bright star – which looked exactly like the former as if it belonged to a different part of the same train – It was difficult to realize that the one was a feeble oil lamp – the other a world.33 As I walk the RR causeway I am – disturbed by the sound of my steps on the frozen ground – I wish to hear the silence of the night. I cannot walk with my ears covered – The silence is something positive & to be heard. I must stand still & listen with open ear far from the noises of the village that the night may make its impression on me – a fertile & eloquent silence. Sometimes the silence is merely negative an arid & barren waste in which I shudder – where no ambrosia grows. I must hear the whispering of a myriad voices. Silence alone is worthy to be heard. Silence is of various depth & fertility like soil. Now it is a mere Sahara where men perish of hunger & thirst – now a fertile bottom or prairie of the west As I leave the village drawing nearer to the woods – I listen from time to time – to hear the hounds of Silence baying the moon – to know if they are on the track of any game – 34 If there’s no Diana in the night – what is it worth? I hark the Goddess Diana. The silence rings – it is musical & thrills me. A night in which the silence was audible – I hear the unspeakable. I easily read the moral of my dreams – Yesterday I was impressed with the rottenness of human relations – they appeared full of death & decay – & offended the nostrils – In the night I dreamed of delving amid the graves of the dead and soiled my fingers with their rank mould. It was sanitarily – morally – & physically true. If night is the mere negation of day I hear nothing but my own steps in it – Death is with me & life far away – If the elements are not human – if the winds do not sing or sigh – as the stars twinkle – my life runs shallow – I measure the depth of my own being. I walk with vast alliances. I am the Allied powers The holy alliance – absorbing the European potentates. – I do not get much from this blue sky – these twinkling stars – & bright snow fields reflecting an almost rosaceous light. But when I enter the woods – I am fed by the variety – the forms of the trees above against the blue, with the stars seen through the pines like the lamps hung on them in an illumination – the somewhat indistinct and misty fineness of the pine tops – And the finely divided spray of the oaks &c – And the shadows of all these on the snow – The first shadow I came to I thought was a black place where the wood- choppers had had a fire – These myriad shadows checker the white ground & enhance the brightness of the enlightened portions. See the shadows of these young oaks – which have lost half their leaves – more beautiful than themselves like the shadow of a shandelier – & motionless as if they were fallen leaves on the snow – but shake the tree and all is in motion – In this stillness & at this distance I hear the 9 o’clock bell in Bedford 5 miles off – which I might never hear in the village but here its music surmounts the village din – and has some- thing very sweet & noble & inspiring in it, associated in part with the hooting of owls. Returning – I thought I heard the creaking of a wagon – just starting from Hubbards door – & rarely musical it sounded – It was the Telegraph harp. It began to sound but at one spot only. It is Very fitful – & only sounds when it is in the mood – You may go by 20 times both when the wind is high & when it is low – & let it blow which way it will – & yet hear no strain from it – but another time – at a particular spot you may hear a strain 33. From the sheaf Thoreau collected under the heading “The Moon,” from which after Thoreau’s death either Ellery Channing or Sophia Thoreau would extrapolate the Atlantic Monthly article “Night and Moonlight”: As I sat looking out the window the other evening just after dark, I saw the lamp of a freight-train, and nearly ^further along at the same height, just over the train, a bright star which looked exactly like the former, as if it belonged to a different part of the same train. It was difficult to realize that the one was a feeble oil lamp, ^and the other ^perhaps a world. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

rising & swelling on the string – which may at last ripen to something glorious – The wire will perhaps labor long with it before it attains to melody. AEOLIAN HARP Even the creaking of a wagon in a frosty night has music in it which allies it to the highest & purest strain of the muse – I think it was Jan 20th that I saw that which I think an otter track in path under the Cliffs. no doubt it was A deep trail in the snow 6 or 7 inches wide & 2 or 3 deep in the middle, as if a log had been drawn along – similar to a muskrats only much larger – & the legs evidently short & the steps short sinking 3 or 4 inches deeper still as if it had waddled along It finally turned into my old tracks & went toward the river – & Fair Haven Pond One was killed there last spring. Israel Rice tells of one shot within the year in a ditch near White Pond – prob. the same He says I saw an otter track Minot says his mother told him she had seen a deer come down the hill behind her house – where J. Moores now is & cross the road & the meadow in front. – thinks it may have been 80 years ago. Otter are very rare here now – I have not heard of any killed here-abouts for 20 or 30 years till within 2 years – 2 or 3 of them. in Sudbury & at Fair Haven Pond.35

34. William M. White’s version of the journal entry is:

Silence alone is worthy to be heard. Silence is of various depth and fertility, Like soil.

Now it is a mere Sahara, Where men perish of hunger and thirst, Now a fertile bottom, or prairie, Of the West.

As I leave the village, Drawing nearer to the woods, I listen from time to time To hear the hounds of Silence baying the Moon,— To know if they are on the track of any game. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

April 29, Friday: It was reported that when Gerrit Smith had been elected to Congress, he had been advised by Henry C. Wright not to associate with congressmen who held slaves. Instead, Wright had urged, demand that Congress expel these men. And if it fail so to do, resign and return home. But Smith and his wife had come from slaveholding families, and Smith’s brother currently held slaves, and these slaveholding Congressmen were welcomed into Smith’s home although he of course made it very clear to such guests that he was boycotting all commodities produced through the labor of enslaved persons. This came as no surprise to Wright, who had commented on April 15, 1840 that “Bro. Smith is influenced — it may be unconsciously.... His conscience and reason are with nonresistance, but his circumstances battle against it.”

The Junta Cubana of New-York called on a former associate of Narciso López, General John A. Quitman, to lead yet another American invasion of Cuba, proposing that as his reward for success he would become “exclusive chief of our revolution, not only in its military, but also in its civil sense.”

April 29: x 35.The poet W.H. Auden has in 1962 brought forward a snippet from this day’s entry as:

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

Pg Topic Aphorism Selected by Auden out of Thoreau

263 Science It is the stars as not known to science that I would know – the stars which the lonely traveller knows. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

May 27, Friday: Henry C. Wright acknowledged to the readers of the Liberator that, checking up on his brother Chester who had been claimed by a medium to be dead at a specific time and place of a specific thing, he had discovered that his brother was still quite alive and kicking. There had been “a mistake, somewhere.” However, Wright continued, he still believed in spiritualism despite your occasional extraneous mistake such as this one. Those who refused to believe in spiritualism, he suggested, were “hunkers,” people who automatically scoffed at any novel idea. SPIRITUALISM

June 17, Friday: Henry Thoreau made an entry in his journal that he was later to copy into his early lecture “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” as:

[Paragraph 33] If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!

June 17: Here have been three ultra-reformers, lecturers on Slavery, Temperance, the Church, etc., in and about our house and Mrs. Brooks’s the last three or four days, — A.D. Foss, once a Baptist minister in Hopkinton, N.H.; Loring Moody, a sort of traveling pattern-working chaplain; and H.C. Wright, who shocks old women with his infidel writings. Though Foss was a stranger to the others, you would have thought them old and familiar cronies.... I was awfully pestered with his benignity; feared I should get greased all over with it past restoration; tried to keep some starch in my clothes. He wrote a book called “A Kiss for a Blow,” and he behaved as if there were no alternative between these, or as if I had given him a blow. I would have preferred the blow, but he was bent on giving me the kiss, when there was neither quarrel nor agreement between us. I wanted that he should straighten his back, smooth out those ogling wrinkles of benignity about his eyes, and, with a healthy reserve, pronounce something in a downright manner. It was difficult to keep clear of his slimy benignity, with which he sought to cover you before he swallowed you and took you fairly into his bowels. It would have been far worse than the fate of Jonah. I do not wish to get any nearer to a man's bowels than usual. They lick you as a cow her calf. They would fain wrap you about with their bowels. — addressed me as “Henry” within one minute from the time I first laid eyes on him, and when I spoke, he said with drawling, sultry sympathy, “Henry, I know all you would say; I understand you perfectly; you need not explain anything to me;” and to another, “I am going to dive into Henry's inmost depths.” I said, “I trust you will not strike your head against the bottom.” He could tell in a dark room, with his eyes blinded and in perfect stillness, if there was one there whom he loved. One of the most attractive things about the flowers is their beautiful reserve. The truly beautiful and noble puts its lover, as it were, at an infinite distance, while it attracts him more strongly than ever. I do not like the men who come so near me with their bowels. It is the most disagreeable kind of snare to be caught in. Men's bowels are far more slimy than their brains. They must be ascetics indeed who approach you by this side. What a relief to have heard the ring of one healthy reserved tone! With such a forgiving disposition, as if he were all the while forgiving you for existing. Considering our condition or habit of soul, maybe corpulent and asthmatic, — maybe dying of atrophy, with all our bones sticking out, — is it kindness to embrace HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

a man? They lay their sweaty hand on your shoulder, or your knee, to magnetize you.... P.M. — To Walden.

The most famous example of the revulsion that his style could inspire came from Henry David Thoreau. He saw [Henry Clarke] Wright as a repulsive, feminine, anal creature who threatened his own independent action. His blows were preferable to his kisses. “It was difficult to keep clear of his slimy benignity, with which he sought to cover you and took you into his bowels.... I do not like the men who come so near me with their bowels.” This reaction tells much more about Thoreau, but it may also indicate snares with which the Christian reformer encircled others while professing to have no concern for earthly reputation. The radiance with which he converted one person to pacifism appeared to another as sanctimonious encroachment.

A.D. FOSS ANDREW T. FOSS LORING MOODY HENRY C. WRIGHT ... If a man walks in the woods for love of them and [to] see his fellows with impartial eye afar, for half his days, he is esteemed a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods, he is esteemed industrious and enterprising –making earth bald before its time....

June 17: One of the nighthawk’s [Common Nighthawk Chordeiles minor] eggs is hatched. The young is unlike any that I have seen, exactly like a pinch of rabbit’s fur or down of that color dropped on the ground, not two inches long, with a dimpling or geometrical or somewhat regular arrangement of minute feathers in the middle, destined to become the wings and tail. Yet even it half opened its eye, and peeped if I mistake not. Was ever bird more completely protected, both by the color of its eggs and of its own body, that sits on them, and of the young bird just hatched? Accordingly the eggs and young are rarely discovered. There was one egg still, and by the side of it this little pinch of down, flattened out and not observed at first, and a foot down the hill had rolled a half of the egg it came out of. There was no callowness, as in the young of most birds. It seemed a singular place for a bird to begin its life, –to come out of its egg,– this little pinch of down, – and lie still on the exact spot where the egg lay, on a flat exposed shelf on the side of a bare hill, with nothing but the whole heavens, the broad universe above, to brood it when its mother was away. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1854

April 23, Sunday: Mrs. Lucy Stone told Henry C. Wright that reading his MARRIAGE AND PARENTAGE; OR, THE REPRODUCTIVE ELEMENT IN MAN, AS A MEANS TO HIS ELEVATION AND HAPPINESS over and over, every time she was seeing “more clearly its absolute truth, and exceeding beauty.” She was presenting copies of it to other young people, inscribing these copies with “for all that is pure, and true between man and woman.” One of Stone’s friends, however, considered the book unfit to read and refused to show it to a daughter who was becoming a bride.36

April 23. A kingfisher with his crack, — cr-r-r-rack. Rain Yesterday and to-day; yet this morning the robin sings and the blackbirds and, in the yard, the tree sparrow, hyemalis, and song sparrow. A rain is sure to 36. This may be an earlier edition which we do not have, for the edition of MARRIAGE AND PARENTAGE; OR, THE REPRODUCTIVE ELEMENT IN MAN, AS A MEANS TO HIS ELEVATION AND HAPPINESS which we know about bears a publisher’s imprint of the following year. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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bring the tree-sparrow and hyemalis to the gardens. I suppose it must be the seeds of weeds which they are so busily picking from the bare ground, which their sharp eyes detect. George Minott says that he used to shoot the red-headed woodpecker, and found their nests on the trees on his hillside. He used to steal up to the pigeon woodpeckers’ holes and clap his hand over them and take out the old bird; then let her go. The first April showers are even fuller of promise and a certain moist serenity than the sunny days. How thickly the green blades are starting up amid the russet! The tinge of green is gradually increasing in the face of the russet earth. Now that the very earliest shrubs are beginning to unfold, — spirwa, gooseberry, honeysuckle vine, lilac, Missouri currant, — many herbaceous plants, not evergreen merely, make quite a show, as the skunk-cabbage in favorable places, nuphar in the most favorable places though muddy yellow and dilapidated, callitriche and the narrow tooth-leafed water plant, etc., etc., cowslip, columbine (cress and chrysosplenium, — are not both chiefly evergreen?), celandine, catnep, saxifrage, dandelion, clover, golden senecio, sweet flag, hellebore (the most forward buds begin to open), thistle, shepherd’s-purse, meadow saxifrage, elder probably. As for the birds, I have this to remark: The crows still frequent the meadows. The lark sings morning and evening. The blackbirds — red-wing [Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoeniceus] and crow — have since their arrival kept up their bobylee and chattering and split notes on the willows and maples by the river and along the meadow’s edge. They appear to depend much (as well as crows and robins) on the meadow, just left bare, for their food. They are the noisiest birds yet. Both still fly in flocks, though the male red-wings have begun to chase the females. Robins still frequent the meadows in flocks and sing in the rain. The song sparrows not in such flocks nor singing so tumultuously along the watercourses in the morning as in the last half of March. how wary they are! They will dodge you for half an hour behind a wall or a twig, and only a stone will make them start, looking every which way in a minute. So the blackbirds, both kinds, sidle, till they bring a twig between me and them. The flock of black ducks which stayed by so long is now reduced to a quarter part their number. Before the 4th or 5th of April the F. hyemalis was apparently the most abundant bird of any, in great drifting flocks with their lively jingle, their light-colored bill against slate breasts; then, on the advent of warmer weather, the greater part departed. Have the fox sparrows gone also? I have not seen them of late. As for hawks, after the one or two larger (perhaps) hen-hawks in the winter and a smaller one in December (?), the first were large marsh (?) hawks on trees on the meadow edge or skimming along it, since which the eagle, the sharp- shinned, and the smaller brown and white-rumped over meadows, which may be the same, etc., etc. Have seen the black duck, golden-eye, Merganser, blue(?)-winged teal, wood duck. The golden-eye seems to have gone. Heard a nuthatch yesterday, April 22d. The tree sparrows are the prevailing bird on ground, and most numerous of any for the past month except one while the hyemalis. They are a chubby little bird with a clear chestnut crown, a dark spot on the otherwise clear whitish breast, and two light bars on the wings. The pigeon woodpecker now scolds long and loud morning and evening. The snipes are still feeding on the meadows. The turtle dove darts solitary about as if lost, or it had lost its mate. The yellow redpoll, with a faint clear chip, is the commonest yellow bird on hills, etc., about water. The chip sparrow does not sing much in morning yet. New kinds of warblers have begun to come within a few days. I saw yesterday the smoke of the first burning of brush which I have noticed, though the leaves cannot be very dry yet.

P.M. –To Lee’s Cliff on foot. It has cleared up. At Ivy Bridge I see the honeybees entering the crypts of the skunk-cabbage, whose tips have been bitten by the frost and cold. The first sweet-gale, which opened a day or two ago on the sunny sides of brooks where the sun reached it above the bank, was an interesting sight, full of amber dust. Those are blossom, not leaf buds, so forward on the shad-bush. The myrtle-bird, — yellow-rumped warbler, — was not this warbler c of the 20th? — on the willows, alders, and the wall by Hubbard’s Bridge, slate and white spotted with yellow. Its note is a fine, rapid, somewhat hissing or whistling se se se se se ser riddler se, somewhat like the common yellowbird’s. The yellow redpolls [Palm Warbler Dendroica palmarum] are very common on the willows and alders and in the road near the bridge. They keep jerking their tails. I heard one male sing a jingle like che ve ve ve ve ve, very fast, and accenting the last syllable. They are quite tame. I sit awhile on the lee side of Conant’s Wood, in the sun, amid the dry oak leaves, and hear from time, to time the fine ringing note of a pine warbler, which I do not see. It reminds me of former days and indescribable things. Swarms of those little fuzzy gnats now make a faint humming about the railing of the bridge. The bay-wing has a light ring at some distance around the eye. It is also too dark for my prisoner of the 15th. Saw my white-headed eagle [Bald Eagle Haliaeetus leucocephalus] again, first at the same place, the outlet of Fair Haven Pond. It was a fine sight, he is mainly — i.e. his wings and body — so black against the sky, and they contrast so strongly with his white head and tail. He was first flying low over the water; then rose gradually and circled westward toward White Pond. Lying on the ground with my glass, I could watch him easily and by turns he gave me all possible views of himself when I observed him edgewise I noticed that the tips of his wings HDT WHAT? INDEX

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curved upward slightly the more, like a stereotyped undulation.

He rose very high at last, till I almost lost him in the clouds circling or rather looping along westward, high over the river and wood and farm, effectually concealed in the sky.

We who live this plodding life here below never know how many eagles fly over us. They are concealed in the empyrean I think I have got the worth of my glass now that it has revealed to me the white-headed eagle. Now I see him edgewise like a black ripple in the air, his white head still as ever turned to earth and now he turns his under side to me, and I behold the full breadth of his broad black wings, somewhat ragged at the edges. ... HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1855

Henry C. Wright’s MARRIAGE AND PARENTAGE; OR, THE REPRODUCTIVE ELEMENT IN MAN, AS A MEANS TO HIS ELEVATION AND HAPPINESS (Boston MA: Bela Marsh). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

1856

October 4, Saturday-5, Sunday: During the time that she was teaching in the freedman school, Frances Walling Titus was beginning her work as a new scribe for Sojourner Truth. They first met in 1856 at the Progressive Friends meeting in Harmonia, where Truth was one of several speakers. According to a “Notice” in the Battle Creek Journal for October 3, 1856, other scheduled speakers at this Friends of Human Progress Meeting were Joel Tiffany of Ohio, Joseph A. Dugdale of Pennsylvania, Henry C. Wright of Boston, and Andrew T. Foss of New Hampshire. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1857

Henry C. Wright’s THE ERRORS OF THE BIBLE, DEMONSTRATED BY THE TRUTHS OF NATURE; OR, MAN’S ONLY INFALLIBLE RULE OF FAITH AND PRACTICE (Boston MA: Bela Marsh).

September 13, Sunday: The Practical Christian reported that Henry C. Wright had succeeded in summoning and conversing with the spirit of Jesus Christ at a seance presided over by the eldest of the Fox Sister mediums, Mrs. Ann Leah Fox Fish.37 Jesus told Wright that indeed, as Wright had suspected, he had been “mortal like other men.” The stories of his life in the New Testament were quite false. Jesus summed up his new message by announcing, through Wright, that:

“The time had now come when prejudice and superstition must cease.”

SPIRITUALISM

September 13, Sunday: Nabalus Fraseri, top of Cliffs, –a new plant, –yet in prime and not long out. The nabalus family generally, apparently now in prime.

37. This is the one who later would be accused by her younger sisters of having transformed their toe-joint-snapping hoax into a cash-flow enterprise. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1858

Henry C. Wright’s A KISS FOR A BLOW; OR, A COLLECTION OF STORIES FOR CHILDREN SHOWING THEM HOW TO PREVENT QUARRELING (Boston MA: Bela Marsh). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1859

Henry C. Wright’s THE NATICK RESOLUTION; OR, RESISTANCE TO SLAVEHOLDERS THE RIGHT AND DUTY OF SOUTHERN SLAVES AND NORTHERN FREEMEN (Boston MA: published by the Author). THE NATICK RESOLUTION HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1860

Henry C. Wright’s THE UNWELCOME CHILD; OR, THE CRIME OF AN UNDESIGNED AND UNDESIRED MATERNITY (Boston MA: Bela Marsh).

Henry C. Wright’s NO RIGHTS, NO DUTIES: OR, SLAVEHOLDERS, AS SUCH, HAVE NO RIGHTS, SLAVES, AS SUCH, OWE NO DUTIES: AN ANSWER TO A LETTER FROM HON. HENRY WILSON, TOUCHING RESISTANCE TO SLAVE HOLDERS BEING THE RIGHT AND DUTY OF THE SLAVES, AND OF THE PEOPLE AND STATES OF THE NORTH (Boston MA: Wright). This publication relates to a letter from the Honorable Henry Wilson, written from Natick, Massachusetts on December 27, 1859, in regard to the John Brown raid on Harpers Ferry and in regard to the slavery question.

Yes, Henry C. Wright was nonresistant, but, he said, he did recognize that others were not. He stood always ready to urge those who believed in the efficacy of violence toward violence: PAGE 56: While the news of John Brown’s aborted coup d’etat at Harpers Ferry initially confused other abolitionists, Wright from the start saw it as a splendid act that would stir up Northern hatred of slavery. When Brown was put to death, Wright’s praises became extravagant. Brown would be the central figure in a new man-centered religion; it was not Christ crucified but Brown hanged who would emancipate humanity. When war came Wright put aside “nonresistance” altogether and recommended instead the “self-abnegation” shown in the lives of Christ, Brown, and dying union soldiers. All the families he visited had boys missing on the battlefields. Wright spoke passionately in commemoration of one of his nephews who died in Tennessee; he was glad another had enlisted to fill his place. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1863

Henry C. Wright’s THE EMPIRE OF THE MOTHER OVER THE CHARACTER AND DESTINY OF THE RACE (Boston MA: Bela Marsh).

Henry C. Wright’s THE SELF-ABNEGATIONIST; OR, THE TRUE KING AND QUEEN (Boston MA: Bela Marsh). Here is what Lewis Perry has to say about it: Wright had wandered too far from his original premises ... to reassert the doctrine [of nonresistance] in terms of divine commands. Only about five pages of THE SELF-ABNEGATIONIST ... consider religious arguments, and these pages are concerned only with the life of Jesus. The Old Testament was worthless; Jesus by preaching self-denial had conquered the world. Unlike the Progressive Group, Wright avoided schemes of progress. “There is no new truth; all truth is old as Creation, old as God is.... Truth is discovered by men, and expressed in words, and to them it is new; but in the age of Creation, there is no age to truth.” Examples were Newton and gravity, Galileo and the solar system, the Declaration of Independence and equal rights, Garrison and immediate emancipation. No historical questions about the New Testament mattered: “The record of principles is there, and I am to judge of them without any regard to the question, how they came to be there.” Human nature spontaneously perceived the truth of the preachings of Jesus. Wright conspicuously failed to use the term nonresistance. Instead he favored “self- abnegation,” meaning “SUFFER RATHER THAN INFLICT SUFFERING; DIE, RATHER THAN KILL.” This was the great antonym of “self- preservation,” meaning “INFLICT RATHER THAN ENDURE SUFFERING; KILL RATHER THAN DIE.” By renouncing absolute Scriptural authority he was obliged to stake his faith on human nature.... As a nonresistant analysis of the war THE SELF-ABNEGATIONIST was packed with inconsistencies. For example, John Brown had been praised for his disinterested benevolence. Wright was compelled to include him among the exemplars of self-abnegation. “Not John Brown the warrior, but John Brown the martyr; not John Brown in military array and armed with pike and gun, but John Brown ‘WORTH INCONCEIVABLY MORE TO HANG THAN FOR ANY OTHER PURPOSE,’ is the hero of Harpers Ferry; a king among men.” Moreover, the death of young men on the battlefield could be regarded as a triumph of self-sacrifice: “What grandeur and glory, what kingly and queenly majesty in this self-abnegation of twenty millions of men and women to preserve and perpetuate a government based on the great self-evident truth, that ‘all men are created equal’ in regard to natural rights!” Wright tried to repair the damage to nonresistance in his argument with a series of modifications. It was unjust to require sacrifice to preserve an institution; it would harm posterity to have complied with the requirement; HDT WHAT? INDEX

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patriotism contains “the concentrated selfishness of sectarianism.” But repair was impossible: “As their highest light assures them that the demand and their compliance are just, the self-abnegation is none the less sublime.” This magnanimous judgment was specifically restricted to the people of the North. Self-abnegation, furthermore, indicated the evil of slaveholding. But it was also possible to respect the slave as the epitome of self-abdication. Not surprisingly, therefore, Wright’s restatement of nonresistance is mainly silent on the subjects of the war and slavery. On the topic of nonresistance, here is an account of the wartime experiences of Friend William B. Hockett, a Quaker youth from Greensboro, Guilford County, North Carolina, as paraphrased from Fernando Cartland’s SOUTHERN HEROES (Boston, 1895): Hocket was thirty-six in 1863. He had been conscripted in 9th mo. 1862, but allowed to return home, possibly because he was hard of hearing. He was called up subsequently, but always allowed to return home until June 1863, when he was called up again and given the choice of fighting or paying a fee. He would do neither, saying “I believe true Christianity and war as far apart as Heaven and Hell.” He was assigned to the 21st North Carolina, but refused to put on a uniform. He was sent to Virginia to join the regiment which was about to join in Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania. Another attempt was made to force him to pick up arms, and he again refused. On the 23rd of 6 Mo. 1863, he was taken before the Colonel of the regiment, and again given the choice of fighting or paying a $500 exemption fee. “He asked me if I was not worth $500. I told him that my property was worth that or more. He said that authorities in North Carolina had sent me out as a man capable of making a soldier, and that I would have to comply with orders or he would order me shot, and said I might take a gun and go into the ranks, or he would order me shot that evening or the next morning, and I might take my choice. I told him that I would not take a gun nor march in the drill, so he said: “Which will you chose, to be shot evening or morning?” I told him I should choose neither, but if my God whom I served permitted him to take my life I would submit to it; I would die a martyr for Christ’s sake. He said he had full power, without permission, to kill me if I did not comply. I told him I did not deny that he had, so far as the power of man extended, but there was a power above man’s, and he could not remove a hair of my head without my Heavenly Father’s notice.” The Colonel then tries to put him to work in the wagon yard. “I told him that I would receive no appointment to work on any thing that was to carry on war.” He is sent to the wagon train and instructed to mow grass for the horses, which he refuses. “They said that I should be shot. I said that my God told me not to do so, and that I feared Him more than what they could do.... They then reported me to the colonel, who said that he would have me shot that night or the next morning.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“6th month 24th. I was ordered out and required to fall into line with the company and drill, but I refused. They tried to make me, and I sat down on the ground. They reminded me of the orders to shot me, but I told them my God said to fear not them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; but rather to fear Him that is able to destroy both soul and body in Hell. The company was then ordered to fall back eight paces, leaving me in front of them. They were then ordered by Colonel Kirkland to “Load; Present arms; Aim,” and their guns were pointed directly at my breast. I raised my arms and prayed, “Father, forgive them; they know not what they do.” Not a gun was fired. They lowered them without orders, and some of the men were heard to say that they “could not shoot such a man.” The order was then given, “Ground arms.” He is again ordered to pick up a gun and cartridge box which he refuses. The colon attempts to ride over him, but the horse will not step on him [I wonder here and earlier whether the Colonel was bluffing. Horses don’t like to step on people.] The captain hit him on the head, and order two men to take him into the ranks. He was dragged there and sat down. He was ordered to drill or be killed. He kneeled and prayed “that the Lord would not lay this sin to their charge, but grant him the strength to bear these afflictions for his Name’s sake.” “The captain order the men to fix bayonets. One replied that he had no bayonet. The other obeyed and was ordered to run him though if he would not get up and get into the drill. The man put the bayonet against William Hockett’s back and began to push. Others took his arms and tried to persuade him to go forward. They said that did not wish to hurt him but they must obey orders or be shot themselves.” “The captain then ordered the man with a gun to “blow a ball though him.” The muzzle of the gun was placed against him, and the soldier pressed but did not shoot. Finally the man with a bayonet pretended to run it through him, but the bayonet only passed through his clothing and by his side without injuring him.” After a bit more of this they give up trying to may Hockett carry a gun or work, but Hockett walks along with the regiment to the battle of Gettysburg. On the retreat, he is left behind and captured by Union Cavalry, and taken to a prison camp. “This is a trying place for a civil man. Both Northern and Southern men content that they are right, when, in my opinion, they are both wrong. The bitter oaths they are continually sounding in my ears are disgusting to me.” [The man who refused to pick up a gun is now in a Northern prison camp as a Confederate POW.] In prison, he, and some other peace church prisoners in similar circumstances, are visited by Northern Quakers who bring them food. Finally, on July 25, the Quakers are told they would be discharged from prison and sent to Philadelphia, but first they had to take the oath of allegiance to sign “but for conscience sake, we could not take them in their full form. The general told us we might take them as they were or remain there until HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the war ended, for we would not be discharged. He said we professed to be a law-abiding people We told him we were, and when we, for conscience sake, could not comply with the law, we submitted to the penalty, and that we were willing to be bound in that respect; but if the law required things of us that came into conflict with our religious feelings, we peaceably submitted to the penalty, if it was death, rather than wound our conscience.” The general finally allows them to sign a modified statement, and the Quakers are released, and William eventually reaches home at the war’s end on June 6, 1865. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1865

Henry C. Wright’s THE LIVING PRESENT AND THE DEAD PAST; OR, GOD MADE MANIFEST AND USEFUL IN LIVING MEN AND WOMEN AS HE WAS IN JESUS (Boston MA: Bela Marsh).

At the end of our civil war, Wright saw very clearly the fact of the matter, that while the peculiar institution of human slavery itself might have been interrupted by military power, “its spirit and its results live.” Per Professor Carleton Mabee’s BLACK FREEDOM, pages 334-39: Americans at large often held the abolitionists responsible for the war. They argued that the abolitionists’ long agitation, strident as it often was, had antagonized the South into secession, thus beginning the war, and that the abolitionists’ insistence that the war should not end until all slavery had been abolished kept the war going. In 1863 the widely read New HDT WHAT? INDEX

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

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December: In a reaction against the compromising tactics adopted by the American Peace Society during the civil war, a Universal Peace Union was launched in Boston, planned by the Reverend Adin Ballou, Henry C. Wright, Friend Alfred Henry Love, Friend Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Buffum Chace, and William Lloyd Garrison. This group favored amending the US Constitution to remove the power to make war. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1866

The 1st official meeting of the Universal Peace Union, in Providence, Rhode Island. The founding members included Joshua P. Blanshard, Reverend Adin Ballou, Henry C. Wright, Friend Alfred Henry Love, and Friend Lucretia Mott. The group pledged itself to remove the causes of war, and to discountenance all resorts to deadly force, “never acquiescing in present wrongs.” There was to be no further compromising of the principles of love and nonviolence, but instead immediate disarmament and a general treaty among nations, marked by arbitration and by an unconditional submission to an international tribunal. Imperialism, compulsory military training, memorials and war demonstrations, war taxes, capital punishment, the spread of white imperialism in Africa, the exclusion of Asian immigration, and the continued denial of rights to native Americans were denounced. For many years the annual meetings of this group would take place at Mystic Grove, Connecticut, and attendance would grow over the years toward 10,000. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1869

Henry C. Wright’s THE MERITS OF JESUS CHRIST AND THE MERITS OF THOMAS PAINE: AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR MERIT IN OTHERS — WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEM? (Published by the Author) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1870

August 16, Tuesday: It was reported that Henry C. Wright, while staying with friends in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, had been “taken with a fit” at 7AM one morning after breakfast, while riding into town, and that he had died at midday. William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips would speak at his funeral. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1980

Lewis Perry’s CHILDHOOD, MARRIAGE, AND REFORM: HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT, 1797-1870 (Chicago IL: U of Chicago P).

At the Anniversary dinner of the War Resisters League the League Peace Award was presented to Grace Paley. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1985

Michael Meyer placed articles on “Henry Thoreau” and “Henry C. Wright” in THE BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF MODERN PEACE LEADERS (Ed. Harold Josephson. Greenwood Press. Pages 544-45 and 1035- 37).

At the Anniversary dinner of the War Resisters League the League Peace Award was presented to Barbara Reynolds. No secret medical experiments were performed in the course of this meal.

Dr. Murray Sanders, a former lieutenant colonel who was a US adviser on biological warfare, claimed that it had been he who had brokered the sweetheart deal between General Douglas MacArthur –a man to whom the concept of insisting upon personal principles and standards must have seemed truly weird– and the World War II-era Japanese germ warfare perps, during Fall 1945, promising them immunity in return for their teaching us how to use bugs to off civilians en masse. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Henry Clarke Wright HDT WHAT? INDEX

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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 2014. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

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

Prepared: August 9, 2014 HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY C. WRIGHT HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT

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

HENRY CLARKE WRIGHT HENRY C. WRIGHT

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

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