Theodore Parker

GO TO LIST OF PEOPLE INVOLVED IN HARPERS FERRY

VARIOUS PERSONAGES INVOLVED

IN THE

FOMENTING OF RACE WAR (RATHER THAN CIVIL WAR)

IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

THEODORE PARKER

It is clear that Henry Thoreau was not trusted with any of the secrets of the conspiracy we have come to know as the Secret “Six,” to the extent that his future editor and biographer Franklin Benjamin Sanborn confided to him nothing whatever about the ongoing meetings which he was having with the Reverend Thomas Wentworth “Charles P. Carter” Higginson, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, and George Luther Stearns. For Thoreau commented in his JOURNAL in regard to Captain John Brown, “it would seem that he had not confidence enough in me, or in anybody else that I know [my emphasis], to communicate his plans to us.” –And, Thoreau could not have believed this and could not have made such an entry in his journal had any member of the Secret Six been providing him with any clues whatever that there was something going on behind the scenes, within their own private realm of scheming! Had it been the case, that Thoreau had become aware that there was in existence another, parallel, universe of scheming, rather than writing “or in anybody else that I know,” he would most assuredly have written something more on the order of (perhaps) “it would seem that they had not confidence enough in me, to provide me any insight into their plans.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Treason being punished as what it is, why would the downtown Boston lawyer Richard Henry Dana, Jr. allow himself to become legal counsel to a “Secret Six” committee that was funding the activities of Captain John Brown, as that loose cannon prepared to raid the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia? He was going to be implicated as having obviously had guilty prior knowledge, and was obviously making himself of necessity a prime candidate for the noose. As the going got hot he would make himself unavailable for prosecution –by venturing on a luxury trip around the globe– but the issue is not how he might extricate himself from this, but why he would have so endangered himself.

The Reverend Thomas Wentworth “Charles P. Carter” Higginson of the Secret “Six” believed that “Never in history was there an oppressed people who were set free by others” (it was therefore up to American black people to demonstrate their courage, and their worthiness to be free — basically by getting themselves exterminated). After Harpers Ferry he would attempt to organize an expedition to raid the Charles Town lockup and rescue the accused — this was an expedition Henry Thoreau would oppose, asserting that to the contrary Captain Brown’s highest and best purpose was to be hung.

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and others of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee raised $5,000 in one day, to buy enough Sharp’s rifles to arm 200 men to the teeth in “Bleeding Kansas.” He, as well as the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war (black Americans against white), would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces of servile insurrection. These 5 of the white conspirators of the Secret “Six” finance committee clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in order to foment sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans.

The Reverend Theodore Parker, a stone racist, declared from his pulpit that while he ordinarily spent $1,500 a year on books, the equivalent of 4 or 5 men’s annual wages, for the time being he was going to restrict himself to spending less than one man’s annual wage on books per year, and devote the remaining moneys to the purchase of guns and ammunition for the white people going to the Kansas Territory. Sharps rifles, the very latest in deadliness, cost $25 apiece when had in sufficient quantity:

“I make all my pecuniary arrangements with the expectation of civil war.”

He would take to marking the boxes of new Sharps rifles he shipped illegally to “Bleeding Kansas” with the word BOOKS, and he would take to referring to these firearms as so many copies of RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE as in “The right of the people to keep and to bear arms shall not be infringed.” He, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns of the Secret “Six”, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces of servile insurrection. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their allies among the Northern and Southern black Americans slave and free, in order to foment a rectification of the Southern white Americans. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of Concord, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These 5 of the white Secret “Six” conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies for servile insurrection in order to foment sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans. (John Brown, who had himself buried a wife and promptly recruited another one, once commented to Sanborn, in regard to the young man’s grief over the prompt death of his young bride Ariana Walker, that he was too young to be married to a gravestone.)

The immensely wealthy “H. Ross Perot” political figure of that era was a former Millerite millennialist: Gerrit Smith. In this American’s mansion outside Syracuse, New York, standing in the center of his study, was an ornate mahogany desk. Rumor had it that this had once been the desk of the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte himself. The millennium of William Miller not having arrived on schedule, Smith had become determined to, as he put it, “make himself a colored man” –he desired to explore his inner blackness– and thus he befriended Frederick Douglass (Smith would be Douglass’s friend, that is, up to the point at which he would discover that black Americans were inherently racially inferior to white Americans and thus unworthy of consideration). He, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and George Luther Stearns of the Secret “Six” fully grasped from the earliest moment that the probable result of their attempt to incite a servile insurrection of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies, in order to disrupt relations between Northern and Southern white Americans, toward the generation of a sectional civil war.

George Luther Stearns, a Boston manufacturer of lead pipe and the secretary of the Boston Emancipation League, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and Gerrit Smith of the Secret “Six,” fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in servile insurrection in order to foment a sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

THOSE INVOLVED, ARRANGED ALPHABETICALLY

SECRET “SIX”

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Charles Francis Adams, Sr. No No No Finance white

Charles Francis Adams, Sr. subscribed to the racist agenda of Eli Thayer’s and Amos Lawrence’s New England Emigrant Aid Company, for the creation of an Aryan Nation in the territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas”, to the tune of $25,000.

Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson Yes Yes Captain or Lt. 26 white

Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson, one of Captain Brown’s lieutenants, was born April 17, 1833, in Indiana, the son of John Anderson. His maternal grandfather, Colonel Jacob Westfall of Tygert Valley VA, had been a soldier in the revolution and a slaveholder. He went to school at Galesburg IL and Kossuth IA and worked as a peddler, farmer, and sawmill laborer before settling a mile from Fort Bain on the Little Osage in Bourbon County in “Bleeding Kansas” in August 1857. He was twice arrested by the proslavery activists, and for ten weeks was held at Fort Scott. He then became a lieutenant of Captain Montgomery and was with him in the attack on Captain Anderson’s troop of the First US Cavalry. He witnessed a murder on his own doorstep by border ruffians, of a Mr. Denton. He went with John Brown on the slave raid into Missouri and remained with him thereafter. On July 5, 1859 he wrote of his determination to continue to fight for freedom: “Millions of fellow-beings require it of us; their cries for help go out to the universe daily and hourly. Whose duty is it to help them? Is it yours? Is it mine? It is every man’s, but how few there are to help. But there are a few who dare to answer this call and dare to answer it in a manner that will make this land of liberty and equality shake to the centre.” He was killed by a bayonet-thrust of one of the Marines at Harpers Ferry. “One of the prisoners described Anderson as turning completely over against the wall [to which he was pinned by the bayonet] in his dying agony. He lived a short time, stretched on the brick walk without, where he was subjected to savage brutalities, being kicked in body and face, while one brute of an armed farmer spat a huge quid of tobacco from his vile jaws into the mouth of the dying man, which he first forced open.”

John Anderson ? ? Private < 30 of color

John Anderson, a free black youth from Boston allegedly killed at Harpers Ferry. Nothing is known as to who he was, other than that he was young, or where he came from, other than from Boston — and it is even possible that actually there had been no such person as this in John Brown’s company. (The John Anderson we do know about had an entirely different life trajectory, in Canada.)

Osborn Perry Anderson Yes No No Private 29 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Osborn Perry Anderson, “O.P. Anderson, or as we used to call him Chatham Anderson,” the only participant of color to survive Harpers Ferry and elude capture, had been born free on July 27, 1830 in West Fallowfield PA. He had learned the printing trade in Canada, where he had met John Brown in 1858. He would write later of the fight at Harpers Ferry and his escape in A VOICE FROM HARPER’S FERRY: “We were together eight days before [John Edwin Cook and Albert Hazlett were] captured, which was near Chambersburg, and the next night Meriam [Francis Jackson Meriam] left us and went to Shippensburg, and there took cars for Philadelphia. After that there were but three of us left [Brown’s son Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Charles Plummer Tidd], and we kept together, until we got to Centre County, Pennsylvania, where we bought a box and packed up all heavy luggage, such as rifles, blankets, etc., and after being together three or four weeks we separated….” Anderson, Coppoc, and Meriam had journeyed separately to safe exile in the area of St. Catharines, Canada. Anderson enlisted in the US Army in 1864, becoming a noncommissioned officer, and mustered out in Washington DC at the close of the war, to die a pauper of TB and lack of care in Washington on December 13, 1872.

John Albion Andrew No white

Despite the fact that John Albion Andrew was a prominent Massachusetts politician, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of the Secret “Six” would indicate long after the raid on Harpers Ferry, John Brown’s “general purpose of attacking slavery by force, in Missouri or elsewhere, was known in 1857-8-9” to Governor Andrew.

Henry Ward Beecher No No No Propaganda white

The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher induced the congregation of his Plymouth Church to procure a crate of 25 rifles to ship illegally to “Bleeding Kansas” and to stamp upon that crate the term of art BIBLES. The Reverend’s personal attitude toward American blacks was that although those like Frederick Douglass whose blood had become partly mingled with the blood of whites were worthy of consideration as human beings, those who yet remained of pure African stock were still in such a “low animal condition” (his category, his words) of pure blackness that such consideration as human beings would be inappropriate.

Ann Brown No No No Supporter white

Ann Brown, a daughter of Captain John Brown, was with the conspirators at the Kennedy farm until shortly before the attack upon Harpers Ferry. In the aftermath she would move to the West Coast.

Frederick Brown No No No Supporter white

Frederick Brown was fanatically religious to the extent that he attempted to sever his sexual organs when he was attracted to a young lady. He would have been 28 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, but in 1856 had been killed in the fighting in “Bleeding Kansas”.

Jason Brown No No No Supporter 38 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Jason Brown, one of the elder sons of Captain John Brown, was a gentle sort of person who actually was trying to become an inventor. He took part in the battle at Black Jack in “Bleeding Kansas”, and in the killings on the Osawatomie Creek, but was not at Harpers Ferry. He and his brother Owen Brown would become grape growers in the mountains above Pasadena, California.

John Brown Yes Multiple Yes Commander white wounds

John Brown, “Captain” John “Shubel Morgan” “Isaac Smith” Brown.

John Brown, Jr. No No No Supporter 38 white

John Brown, Jr., 38 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid and Captain John Brown’s eldest son, had trained as a phrenologist. After the raid he would go into hiding in Ohio and, when summoned to appear before the investigatory committee of the US Senate, would refuse to appear. During the Civil War he served as Captain of Company K of the 7th Kansas Cavalry. He and his family would then find permanent safe haven on South Bass Island in Lake Erie.

Martha Brewster Brown No No No Supporter white

Martha Brewster Brown, wife of Oliver Brown and daughter-in-law of Captain John Brown, was with the conspirators at the Kennedy farm until shortly before the attack upon Harpers Ferry.

Oliver Brown Yes Yes Captain 20 white

Oliver Brown, the youngest of John Brown’s sons to reach adulthood, was born in Franklin OH on March 9, 1839. He was a bookish lad. He went to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1855, with his father, and returned to North Elba in October 1856, where he married Martha E. Brewster (Martha Brewster Brown) in 1858. She was sent back north just before the raid on Harpers Ferry and he was shot dead at the age of 20 while serving as a sentinel at the river bridge.

Owen Brown Yes No No Captain 35 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Owen Brown, 3d of John Brown’s sons and his stalwart aid both in “Bleeding Kansas” and at Harper’s Ferry, was born November 4, 1824, at Hudson OH. He had been attempting to make a career of writing humor articles for newspapers. He was 35 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid. He escaped from Harpers Ferry on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. It was due largely to his psychological grit, and physical endurance despite a withered arm, that the little group of survivors of which he was the leader did reach safety. He and Charles Plummer Tidd found work and safety under assumed names, on an oil well crew in Crawford County PA. He never married. After the civil war he would grow grapes for some time in Ohio in association with two of his brothers, before migrating to California. He was the only one of the five escaped raiders not to participate in the civil war, and was the last of the raiders when he died on January 9, 1891 near Pasadena at his mountain home “Brown’s Peak.” A marble monument marked the mountain grave until in July 2002 it mysteriously disappeared — since the site is not a registered historical landmark or cemetery, there is not going to be an investigation.

Salmon Brown No 23 white

Salmon Brown, 23 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, was said to have been exactly like his father, Captain John Brown, in every particular. He would once comment to a newspaper reporter that “The tannery business, farming, wool buying and the raising of blooded stock were my father’s life occupations, though all of them were subordinated to his one consuming passion — freeing the slaves.” Salmon would die in Portland, Oregon in 1919.

Watson Brown Yes Yes Captain 24 white

Watson Brown, born at Franklin OH on October 7, 1835, married Isabella M. Thompson in September 1856. His son by this marriage would live only to his 5th year but would nevertheless survive him. He was sent out by his father John Brown to negotiate and was shot down by the citizens of Harpers Ferry. He managed to crawl back to the shelter of the engine house and lived on, groaning, his head cradled in Edwin Coppoc’s lap, for a considerable period. He expired on October 18th. Recovering his body, his mother Mary Ann Day Brown eventually would be able to rebury it in the Adirondacks before heading off to her retirement in California.

John E. Cook Yes No Yes Captain 29 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

John Edwin Cook, a well-connected 5'7" gentleman with blue eyes and long, curly blond hair, born in Summer 1830 to a well-to-do family in Haddam, Connecticut, had been a law clerk in Brooklyn and Manhattan after being expelled from Yale College for some indiscretion, and had in 1855 become a member of the guerrilla force operated out of Lawrence in “Bleeding Kansas” by Charles Lenhart and had made himself an excellent shot. He had been dispatched by John Brown to Harpers Ferry more than a year before the raid to work out the details on the ground, and had secured employment as a lock tender on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, as a schoolteacher, and as a bookseller. He married a Chambersburg PA woman, Mary V. Kennedy, on April 18, 1859. After having escaped by climbing into a tree and watching after Brown had sent him out to collect weapons, and after evading capture for some months, against the advice of his comrades he became reckless in his search for food, was captured on October 25th eight miles from Chambersburg PA. As an incessant and compulsive communicator he had always been considered by the Brown operatives to be indiscreet. In a confession which would be published as a pamphlet at Charles Town in the middle of November 1859 for the benefit of a man who had been crippled for life in the fighting at Harper’s Ferry (Samuel C. Young), Cook would detail for his captors all his movements from the point of his 1st meeting with Brown after the battle of Black Jack in June 1856 until after his capture. At the last moment he would seek to save his life by representing that he had been deceived through false promises. For this revelation Cook would be severely censured at the time, being termed “Judas” by the friends of Brown. Despite his confession and despite his brother-in-law A.P. Willard being the governor of Indiana, he would in the end be also hanged for the treason and murder at Harpers Ferry, one of the last, on December 16th.

John Anderson Copeland, Jr. Yes No Yes Private < 30 of color

John Anderson Copeland, Jr. was trapped along with his uncle Lewis Sheridan Leary and John Henry Kagi in “Hall’s Rifle Works” at the Harpers Ferry armory. When the three men made a run for the Shenandoah River they were trapped in a crossfire, but after Kagi had been killed and Leary had been shot several times and placed under arrest, Copeland was able to surrender without having been wounded. He refused to speak during his trial and was hanged with too short a drop and thus strangled slowly. On December 29, when a crowd of 3,000 would attend his funeral in his hometown of Oberlin, Ohio, there would be no body to bury, for after his cadaver had been temporarily interred in Charles Town it had been dug up and was in service in the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia. A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their three fallen free citizens of color, Copeland, Leary, and Shields Green (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971). Judge Parker stated in his story of the trials (St. Louis Globe Democrat, April 8, 1888) that Copeland had been “the prisoner who impressed me best. He was a free negro. He had been educated, and there was a dignity about him that I could not help liking. He was always manly.” Andrew Hunter at the same time was quoted as saying– “Copeland was the cleverest of all the prisoners ... and behaved better than any of them. If I had had the power and could have concluded to pardon any man among them, he was the man I would have picked out.” (Paul Finkelman avers on page 49 of HIS SOUL GOES MARCHING ON: RESPONSES TO JOHN BROWN AND THE HARPERS FERRY RAID that his middle name was Anthony rather than Anderson.)

Barclay Coppoc Yes No No Private < 21 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Barclay Coppoc, from the Quaker settlement of Springdale, Iowa, was born in Salem OH on January 4, 1839, and had not attained his majority at the time of the raid on Harpers Ferry. This Quaker escaped, although his adopted brother Edwin Coppoc surrendered and was tried and hanged. “We were together eight days before [John Edwin Cook and Albert Hazlett were] captured, which was near Chambersburg, and the next night Meriam [Francis Jackson Meriam] left us and went to Shippensburg, and there took cars for Philadelphia. After that there were but three of us left [John Brown’s son Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Charles Plummer Tidd], and we kept together, until we got to Centre County, Pennsylvania, where we bought a box and packed up all heavy luggage, such as rifles, blankets, etc., and after being together three or four weeks we separated and I went on through with the box to Ohio on the cars.” Osborn Perry Anderson, Barclay Coppoc, and Francis Jackson Meriam would travel separately to safe exile in the area of St. Catharines, Canada. Barclay then went to his family home in Iowa, with Virginia agents in close pursuit. There a band of young men armed themselves to defend him, and the Religious Society of Friends disowned him for bearing arms. He was back in “Bleeding Kansas” in 1860, helping to run off some Missouri slaves, and nearly lost his life in a second undertaking of this kind. He became a 1st Lieutenant in Colonel Montgomery’s regiment, the 3d Kansas Infantry. Soon he was killed by the fall of a train into the Platte river from a trestle 40 feet high, the supports of which had been burned away by Confederates.

Edwin Coppoc Yes Unwounded Yes Lieutenant < 30 white

Edwin Coppoc, who had been born on June 30, 1835 and orphaned and adopted at the age of 6 into a nonresistant- abolitionist Quaker farm family first of Salem, Ohio and then of Springdale IA. On March 6, 1857 he was disowned by the Religious Society of Friends and in the spring of 1858 went to “Bleeding Kansas” as a settler — but did not take part in the fighting. It was during a visit to Springdale in the fall of 1858 that he met John Brown. He would surrender with Captain Brown in the engine house at Harpers Ferry, and would be tried by a jury of his white male peers immediately after the conclusion of the trial of Captain Brown while his still-Quaker brother Barclay Coppoc was eluding capture. He was sentenced on November 2. From prison before his hanging, he wrote his adoptive mother that he was

“sorry to say that I was ever induced to raise a gun.”

He was hung with John Edwin Cook on December 16, 1859 and a day later his brother turned up at home in Iowa (he also would soon be disowned). The body of Edwin Coppoc was buried in Winona, Iowa after a funeral attended by the entire town (later the body would be reburied in Salem, Ohio).

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. No No No Enabler white

Martin Robison Delany No No No Supporter of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Dr. Martin Robison Delany. At a meeting of the conspirators in Chatham in Canada West in May 1858, Doctor Delany, the Reverend William Charles Munroe of Detroit, and several other leaders of the large black expatriate community approved something termed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the people of the United States,” as the charter for the pike-wielding fugitive society of raiders which was to be created in the remote fastness of the Allegheny Mountains by Captain John Brown subsequent to his raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

Frederick Douglass No No No Supporter 41 of color

Waldo Emerson urged Frederick Douglass early on, to make himself into the General Toussaint Louverture of the North American continent. When Captain John Brown made a speech offering himself as the leader for the forces of freedom in “Bleeding Kansas”, Douglass stood in the audience and endorsed Brown and his mission despite the unpleasant fact that the plan of the abolitionists was to permanently exclude all persons of color, whether free or enslaved, from that new state. When the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry was raided, his role was intended to be the raising aloft of the sword of General George Washington and the generaling of the black forces. His involvement in this raid was acceptable to such personages as the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher only because his blood had been mixed with white it was removed to a degree from its original “low animal condition” (the Reverend’s category, the Reverend’s words) of blackness. At the very last moment Douglass perceived that the prospects of the raid were for either failure or betrayal, and fled by way of Canada to England.

Ralph Waldo Emerson No No No Supporter white

Waldo Emerson, acting as an agent provocateur of race war, recommended to Frederick Douglass in 1844 that he become the liberator of his people on the North American continent, modeling himself upon the leader of the successful Haitian revolution of the turn of the century, Toussaint Louverture. “Let me hold your coat while some white man kills you,” or something to that effect. We only know about this because Henry Thoreau rushed down to Boston right after the lecture, and had the lecture printed up as a pamphlet — after which there was no lying about the provocation that had been made and so all Emerson could do was pretend that Douglass hadn’t been present.

Hugh Forbes No No No Lieutenant white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Captain John Brown’s scheme, which he referred to as the “Subterranean Pass Way,” was that the escaped, armed slaves were to “swarm” into and set up a center of resistance in the Alleghenies from which they could liberate Virginia and then invade Tennessee and northern Alabama. Such a scoping of the situation never met with much respect from other of the other schemers. In particular, the Scottish adventurer Hugh Forbes, Brown’s onetime principal lieutenant, regarding blacks as inherently childlike, credulous, and cowardly, believed such a scheme to be doomed to failure from its inception. The scenario preferred by Forbes would have involved the herding of the slaves together by armed bands of white men and the driving of such herds of humans up the mountain chain toward Canada, neatly disposing of America’s entire race problem — by simple relocation of it to another country. Evidently the two planners parted company over issues such as this after Forbes had functioned in Tabor, Iowa as the leader of military training for the recruits, and then Forbes attempted blackmail. When not offered a payoff, he wrote long, detailed letters to congressmen and to others, and it is one of the unresolved issues, how anyone in high office in Washington DC could have avoided knowing in advance that Brown was plotting a strike of some sort against slavery.

George B. Gill

George B. Gill had come to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1857 after whaling in the Pacific Ocean, and had there been recruited by John Brown. During the year before the raid, Captain Brown sent Gill to visit a black “mumper” (con artist) named Mr. Reynolds who persuaded Gill that he had gone through the South organizing and had brought into existence in areas of the South a militant organization of black men and women. Pointing out to Gill that Southern newspapers carried numerous references to the death of a favorite slave, he alleged that these were leaders of liberation plots who were being discovered and offed. Southern blacks were ready and needed only to be given a cue. There is evidence that several slaves from the Harpers Ferry area did participate in the raid itself, but returned hastily to their plantations when it became obvious that the raid was a failure. Several fires were set in the vicinity of Harpers Ferry in the week after the raid, probably by slaves and free Negroes. Richard Hinton estimates that $10,000,000 was lost in the sale of Virginia slaves in the year 1859. Census figures show that between 1850 and 1860 there was almost a 10% decline in blacks in the three counties surrounding Harpers Ferry while the total number of blacks in Maryland and Virginia was increasing by about 4%.

Reverend James Gloucester No Financial support of color

The Reverend James Newton Gloucester of Brooklyn.

Shields Green Yes No Yes Private < 30 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Shields Green was an escapee from South Carolina who had served as clothes cleaner in Rochester, New York (his business card there declared “I make no promise that I am unable to perform”) and acted as a bodyguard for Frederick Douglass. He was known as “Emperor,” although how he obtained this nickname is not now known. He decided to go with John Brown when Douglass turned back at the stone quarry prior to the Harpers Ferry raid, saying to his boss “I believe I’ll go with the old man.” He took part in the raid and then refused to speak during his trial. At the time of his hanging he was about 23 years of age. His cadaver would be dug up and used for the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia. He, like John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Lewis Sheridan Leary, had been a resident of Oberlin, Ohio. A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their 3 fallen free citizens of color (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971).

James H. Harris

Lewis Hayden

Lewis Hayden, a black leader in downtown Boston whose escape from Kentucky had been aided by Delia Webster in 1844. Eight years after escaping from slavery, he raised, as an act of gratitude and duty, a sum of $650, in order to ransom the Reverend Calvin Fairbanks out of the Kentucky State Prison at Frankfort, where the Reverend had been languishing under the accusation that he had assisted 47 slaves in their escape, and had served 14 years, and had been whipped and beaten. Just before the raid on Harpers Ferry, Hayden helped recruit Francis Jackson Meriam to carry a message and cash money to the hideout of John Brown, and take part in that struggle.

Albert Hazlett Yes No Yes Capt. or Lt. < 30 white

Albert Hazlett, born in Pennsylvania on September 21, 1837, did not take part in the fight at Harpers Ferry but, with John Edwin Cook who had escaped from that fight by climbing a tree and who later identified him to the prosecutors, would be belatedly hanged. Before the raid he had worked on his brother’s farm in western Pennsylvania, and he had joined the others at Kennedy Farm in the early part of September 1859. He was arrested on October 22d in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, near Chambersburg, where he was using the name “William Harrison,” was extradited to Virginia, was tried and sentenced at the spring term of the Court, and was hanged on March 16, 1860. George B. Gill said that “I was acquainted with Hazlett well enough in Kansas, yet after all knew but little of him. He was with Montgomery considerably, and was with [Aaron D. Stevens] on the raid in which Cruise was killed. He was a good-sized, fine-looking fellow, overflowing with good nature and social feelings.... Brown got acquainted with him just before leaving “Bleeding Kansas”.” To Mrs. Rebecca B. Spring he wrote on March 15, 1860, the eve of his execution, “Your letter gave me great comfort to know that my body would be taken from this land of chains.... I am willing to die in the cause of liberty, if I had ten thousand lives I would willingly lay them all down for the same cause.”

The Reverend Thomas Went- No White worth Higginson HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Richard J. Hinton

Richard J. Hinton, abolitionist journalist whose opposition to slavery led him to transform himself into a gunslinger. Refer to: Richard J. Hinton, JOHN BROWN AND HIS MEN (NY: Funk & Wagnalls, 1894; Reprint NY: The Arno Press, 1968).

WHAT TO TAKE: Let your trunk, if you have to buy one, be of moderate size and of the strongest make. Test it by throwing it from the top of a three-storied house; if you pick it up uninjured, it will do to go to Kansas. Not otherwise. — James Redpath and Richard J. Hinton, HAND-BOOK TO KANSAS TERRITORY, 1859, as quoted on page 3

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe

Julia Ward Howe No White

Julia Ward Howe was a racist and, because she carried out errands for her husband Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe who was on the Secret “Six” finance committee (such as having a surreptitious meeting in their home with Captain John Brown), must surely have been aware of and must surely have approved of that committee’s agendas.

Thaddeus Hyatt No white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Thaddeus Hyatt was a businessman and financier involved in the preparation of “Bleeding Kansas” as a “free soil” or “Aryan Nation” enclave. Summoned to give testimony before the congressional committee investigating the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, he would refuse to appear — and would be imprisoned for a period but ultimately would get away with this refusal.

John Jones No Support white

John Jones was a Chicago businessman of color (John Brown stayed at his home). He and his wife Mary Richardson Jones were active abolitionists, agitating for the repeal of the Illinois Black Laws. (Not only did these laws obligate black Americans to prove that they were free in order to enter the state, but once they were in state these laws barred them not only from visiting white homes, but from owning any property or merchandise, or entering into any contracts.)

John Henry Kagi Yes Yes Secretary of War, 24 white adjutant

Although John Henry Kagi, the best educated of the raiders, was largely self-taught, his letters to the New-York Tribune, the New-York Evening Post, and the National Era testify to his grounding. A debater, public speaker, stenographer, wannabee writer, and total abstainer from alcohol, he was cold in manner and rough in appearance. A nonparticipant in organized religion, he was an able man of business. He had been born on March 15, 1835, a son of the blacksmith for Bristolville OH in a family of Swiss descent (the name originally having been Kagy). In 1854-1855 he had taught school at Hawkinstown VA but had indicated an objection to the system of slavery there and had been compelled to return to Ohio under a pledge never to return. He had gone to Nebraska City in 1856 and been admitted to the bar. He then entered Kansas with one of General James H. Lane’s parties and enlisted in Aaron D. Stevens’s (“Colonel Whipple’s”) 2d Kansas Militia. In fighting in the town of Tecumseh in “Bleeding Kansas” he proved himself by killing at least one man, who had been coming after him with a club. After being captured by US troops he had been imprisoned at Lecompton and at Tecumseh, but was finally released. On January 31, 1857 he had been struck on the head with a gold-headed cane by a proslavery judge, drew his revolver and shot the judge in the groin, but Judge Elmore got off three shots and one struck Kagi over the heart, the bullet being stopped by a memorandum-book. He was long in recovering from these wounds, with his family in Ohio, he then returned to Kansas and joined John Brown. He bore the title of Secretary of War in the provisional government and was next in command to John Brown; he was also the adjutant. When in Chambersburg as agent for the raiders, he boarded with Mrs. Mary Rittner. At Harpers Ferry he was trapped along with John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Lewis Sheridan Leary in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the three men made a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they got themselves trapped in a crossfire and John Henry Kagi was the first killed, his body being left to float in the river. [Eyal J. Naveh in CROWN OF THORNS: POLITICAL MARTYRDOM IN AMERICA FROM ABRAHAM LINCOLN TO MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. (NY: New York UP, 1990) described Kagi as black (Page 31: “Even though black followers of Brown, such as John Henry Kagi, were also executed in Virginia, for blacks, John Brown became the most famous martyr for their freedom.”), but this was just another of the long series of tendentious but uncontested errors which make such literature so unreliable.]

Amos Lawrence No White HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Amos Lawrence provided the large bulk of the investment capital needed by Eli Thayer’s New England Emigrant Aid Company for the purchase land in the new territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas”, needed in order to encourage the right sort of black-despising poor white Americans to settle there as “decent antislavery” homesteaders. The idea was to send entire communities in one fell swoop, increasing the value of the properties owned by this company. If political control over this territory could be achieved, they would be able to set up a real Aryan Nation, from which slaves would of course be excluded because they were enslaved, and from which free blacks Americans would of course be excluded because as human material they were indelibly inferior.

Lewis Sheridan Leary Yes Yes Private 25 of color

Lewis Sheridan “Shad” Leary was a mulatto citizen of Oberlin, Ohio. He was descended from an Irishman, Jeremiah O’Leary, who had fought in the Revolution under General Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, who had married a woman of mixed blood, partly African, partly of that Croatan Indian stock of North Carolina, which is believed by some to be lineally descended from the “lost colonists” left by John White on Roanoke Island in 1587. Leary was born at Fayetteville NC on March 17, 1835, and was therefore in his 25th year when killed during the raid upon the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Like his father, he was a saddler and harness-maker. In 1857 he had gone to Oberlin to live, marrying there and making the acquaintance of John Brown in Cleveland. To go to Harper’s Ferry, he left his wife with a 6-month-old child at Oberlin, his wife being in ignorance of the purpose of his trip. He was given funds to go from Oberlin to Chambersburg in the company of his nephew John Anderson Copeland, Jr. He was isolated along with his nephew and John Henry Kagi in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the three men made a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they got themselves caught in a crossfire, and after Kagi had been killed and Leary shot several times, he was taken, his wounds so severe that he would die the following morning. He was able to dictate messages to his family and is reported as saying “I am ready to die.” A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their three fallen free men of color, Leary, Copeland, and Shields Green (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971). The Leary child would subsequently be educated by James Redpath and Wendell Phillips.

William H. Leeman Yes Yes Captain < 21 white

William H. Leeman was born on March 20, 1839 and was recruited in Maine as a 17-year-old very impressed with John Brown. Being of a rather wild disposition, he had early left his home in Maine. Educated in the public schools of Saco and Hallowell ME, he was working in a shoe factory in Haverhill MA at the age of 14. In 1856 he entered “Bleeding Kansas” with the second Massachusetts colony of that year, and became a member of Captain Brown’s “Volunteer Regulars” on September 9, 1856. He fought well at Osawatomie when but 17 years old. Owen Brown found him hard to control at Springdale, Iowa. George B. Gill said of him that he had “a good intellect with great ingenuity.” By the raid upon Harpers Ferry he had reached the age of 20. On October 17, 1859, the youngest of the raiders, he made a mad dash out of the relative safety of the armory to swim down the Potomac River but two militiamen caught up with him and shot him down on an islet in the river. His body would be used for target practice for hours by the drunken citizenry, until the hail of bullets pushed it into the current and it was carried downstream. Mrs. Annie Brown Adams would write of him: “He was only a boy. He smoked a good deal and drank sometimes; but perhaps people would not think that so very wicked now. He was very handsome and very attractive.”

Francis Jackson Merriam Yes No No Private < 30 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Francis Jackson Meriam, grandson and namesake of the Garrisonian abolitionist and Boston historian Francis Jackson, was a young manic-depressive with but one good eye. He helped James Redpath collect materials in Haiti and across the American South for use in a book dedicated to John Brown and Redpath arranged for Meriam to join Brown’s guerrillas. He was not captured or killed at Harpers Ferry because he had been left in one of his fits of despair at the Kennedy farmhouse during the raid. After escaping through Shippensburg, Philadelphia, Boston, Concord, and the area of St. Catharines, Canada he served as a captain in the 3rd South Carolina Colored Infantry. Erratic and unbalanced, he urged wild schemes upon his superiors and sometimes attempt them. In an engagement under General Grant he received a serious leg wound. He died suddenly on November 28, 1865 in New-York.

Charles Moffett Yes

Charles Moffett, a drifter from Iowa about whom little is known.

Edwin Morton No

The very tall Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s intimate college friend Edwin Morton of Plymouth, a descendant of one of the prominent Founding Fathers, was about as deeply involved in the Harpers Ferry raid as any member of the Secret “Six”. He was Gerrit Smith’s private secretary and resided with his family, and after the raid, while the congressional investigation was going on, he fled overseas and chummed around at Shrewsbury and Hodnet with Henry Thoreau’s very tall friend Thomas Cholmondeley.

Dangerfield Newby Yes Yes bridge sentinel 39 light mulatto

Dangerfield Newby, a free light mulatto, very tall and with a splendid physique, was serving as a sentinel at the Harpers Ferry bridge and was shot to death as he and the two white men with him retreated before the charge of the Jefferson Guards of Charles Town VA, coming across the Potomac from the Maryland side. He was not brought down by ball or bullet, but by a 6-inch spike being used as a musket projectile, which caught him in the throat and ripped him severely. Since neither of the two white men were shot, it appears that as a mulatto he was targeted. The body was beaten savagely, and its ears snipped off as trophies, and then a herd of hogs was driven up to root on it.

The Reverend Theodore No White Parker HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

“I make all my pecuniary arrangements with the expectation of civil war.”

Luke F. Parsons

Luke F. Parsons, 22 years old and already a mercenary fighter seasoned in “Bleeding Kansas”, a petty thief in need of a paycheck and a legitimating excuse.

Richard Realf

Richard Realf was a 23-year-old Englishman, the son of a rural constable. In 1852 he had put out a collection of poetry, GUESSES AT THE BEAUTIFUL, and in 1854, after giving up being the lover of Lady Noell Byron, widow of George Gordon, Lord Byron, he was led to the United States of America by “instincts” which he characterized as “democratic and republican, or, at least, anti-monarchical.” He had been introduced to John Brown at the end of November 1857 in Lawrence in “Bleeding Kansas” while working as a correspondent for the Illinois State Gazette. It has been John Edwin Cook who had persuaded him to sign up with Brown’s god-squad.

James Redpath

James Redpath, crusading journalist out to make a buck in the best way.

G.J. Reynolds

George J. Reynolds, a light mulatto blacksmith or coppersmith of Sandusky, Ohio, from Virginia although saying he was from Vermont, with native American as well as black African heritage, age 35 at the time of the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, and active in the Underground Railroad. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Richard Richardson of color

Richard Richardson, a fugitive slave from Lexington, Missouri who had joined John Brown in southern Iowa, was going through that unfortunate but now-well-understood initial period of reaction to freedom in which a former slave, accustomed to servitude and unaccustomed to self-origination, attaches himself to some authoritative white man who is able with courtesy to make use of him.

Judge Thomas Russell No White

Mary Ellen Russell visited John Brown in jail a few weeks before his execution. She said that although she had never approved of his violent methods, she admired him as a man of vision and idealism. Brown had been friends with the Russells for years, and had stayed at their home on several occasions despite the fact that Thomas Russell was a prominent member of the Massachusetts judiciary. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of the Secret “Six” would allege long after the raid on Harpers Ferry that “Brown’s general purpose of attacking slavery by force, in Missouri or elsewhere, was known in 1857-8-9” to Judge Russell.

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn No White

Gerrit Smith No White

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Stephen Smith

Stephen Smith, lumber dealer of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Lysander Spooner

The anarchist Boston attorney Lysander Spooner, who was well aware of John Brown’s plans for the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, wrote to Gerrit Smith in January 1859 warning that Brown had neither the men nor the resources to succeed. After the raid he would plot the kidnapping of Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the idea being to take him at pistol point aboard a tug and hold him off the Atlantic coast, at threat of execution should Brown be executed.

George Luther Stearns

Aaron Dwight Stevens Yes Badly Yes Captain 28 white wounded

Aaron Dwight Stevens, John Brown’s drillmaster, born in Lisbon, Connecticut on March 15, 1831, had run away from home in 1847 at the age of 16 to serve with a Massachusetts volunteer regiment in Mexico. He made himself proficient with the sword. At Taos in May 1855, he received a sentence of death for “mutiny, engaging in a drunken riot, and assaulting Major George A.H. Blake” of the 1st US Dragoons. This was commuted by President Franklin Pierce to 3 years hard labor but he escaped from Fort Leavenworth in 1856, 1st finding refuge with the Delaware tribe and then joining the Kansas Free State militia of James Lane under the name “Whipple.” He became Colonel of the 2d Kansas Militia and met Brown on August 7, 1856 at the Nebraska line when Lane’s Army of the North marched into “Bleeding Kansas”. He became a devoted follower. He was a spiritualist. At Harpers Ferry, when Brown sent this middleaged man out along with his son Watson Brown to negotiate under a flag of truce, he received four bullets and was taken alive. The never-married Stevens was of old Puritan stock, and his great- grandfather had been a captain in the Revolutionary army. Because of a relationship with Rebecca B. Spring of the Eagleswood social experiment near Perth Amboy, New Jersey, after his execution on March 16th he would be buried there alongside Albert Hazlett. According to George B. Gill, writing after his death, “Stevens — how gloriously he sang! His was the noblest soul I ever knew. Though owing to his rash, hasty way, I often found occasion to quarrel with him more so than with any of the others, and though I liked [John Henry Kagi] better than any man I ever knew, our temperaments being adapted to each other, yet I can truly say that Stevens was the most noble man that I ever knew.”

Stewart Taylor Yes Yes Private 23 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Stewart Taylor, the only raider not of American birth, had been born on October 29, 1836 at Uxbridge in Canada. He became a wagonmaker and in 1853 he went to Iowa, where in 1858 he became acquainted with John Brown through George B. Gill. He was a spiritualist. A relative, Jacob L. Taylor of Pine Orchard, Canada West, wrote to Richard J. Hinton on April 23, 1860 that he had been “heart and soul in the anti-slavery cause. An excellent debater and very fond of studying history. He stayed at home, in Canada, for the winter of 1858-1859, and then went to Chicago, thence to Bloomington IL, and thence to Harper’s Ferry. He was a very good phonographer [stenographer], rapid and accurate. He was overcome with distress when, getting out of communication with the John Brown movement, he thought for a time that he was to be left out.”

Eli Thayer No

Eli Thayer, an entrepreneur who believed in “doing well by doing good,” formed the New England Emigrant Aid Company, to purchase land in the new territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas” and encourage the right sort of black-despising poor white Americans to settle there by providing information, cheapening transportation, and setting up saw mills and flour mills to give work and incomes to such “decent antislavery” homesteaders. The idea was to send entire communities in one fell swoop, increasing the value of the properties owned by this company. If political control over this territory could be achieved, they would be able to set up a real Aryan Nation, from which slaves would of course be excluded because they were enslaved, and from which free blacks Americans would of course be excluded because as human material they were indelibly inferior. Thayer would comment in retrospect, about the antebellum abolitionists with whom he had been affiliated, that they had constituted “a mutual admiration society possessed by an unusual malignity towards those who did not belong to it.” He would instance that there was never “any diffidence or modesty in sounding their own praises.”

Dauphin Adolphus Thompson Yes Yes Lieutenant < 30 white

Dauphin Adolphus Thompson, brother of William Thompson and a North Elba neighbor of the family of John Brown, was born April 17, 1838. He was “very quiet, with fair, thoughtful face, curly blonde hair, and baby-blue eyes.” His sister Isabella M. Thompson married Watson Brown and his elder brother Henry Thompson married Captain Brown’s daughter Ruth. The two brothers were shot dead at Harpers Ferry.

William Thompson Yes Yes Captain? < 30 white

William Thompson was born in New Hampshire in August 1833, the son of Roswell Thompson. In Fall 1858 he married a Mary Brown who was not related to the family of John Brown. His sister Isabella M. Thompson married Watson Brown; his elder brother Henry Thompson married Captain Brown’s daughter Ruth. He had started for “Bleeding Kansas” in 1856 but upon meeting the Brown sons returned with them to North Elba. Along with his brother Dauphin Adolphus Thompson, he took part in the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, and the two of them were shot dead. When Captain Brown sent him out from the engine house to negotiate under flag of truce, the mob of citizens placed him under arrest, took him to the local hotel barroom, discussed what to do, dragged him into the street, executed him by shooting him in the head, and dumped his body into the Potomac River.

Henry David Thoreau No white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

When, in 1844, Waldo Emerson, acting as an agent provocateur, recommended to Frederick Douglass’s face that, modeling himself upon the leader of the successful Haitian revolution of the turn of the century, Toussaint Louverture, he fashion himself into the liberator of his people and initiate on the North American continent a servile insurrection or race war, it was Henry Thoreau who after the lecture rushed this information right down to Boston, and had a pamphlet printed up, after which there was no way to dissimulate about the provocation that had been made — and so all Emerson was able to do was pretend that Douglass hadn’t been present. (We, of course, have credited Emerson’s cover story, not because there is any corroboration for it but because ... well, he’s Mr. Emerson and wouldn’t lie to us.)

Charles Plummer Tidd Yes No No Captain 25 white

Charles Plummer Tidd was born in Palermo ME in 1834 and had emigrated to Kansas in 1856 with the party of Dr. Calvin Cutter of Worcester in search of excitement. After joining John Brown’s party at Tabor in 1857 he became one of the followers of “Shubel Morgan” who returned to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1858 to raid into Missouri. During the Winter 1857-1858 encampment of the Brown forces in the Iowa Territory, he “ruined” a Quaker girl and the other members of the team had to sneak him away from Springdale, Iowa during the night. Nevertheless, the group obtained some recruits not overly impressed with the Peace Testimony of George Fox from among the residents of this town, such as the brothers Barclay Coppoc and Edwin Coppoc. He and John E. Cook were particularly warm friends. He opposed the attack on Harpers Ferry but nevertheless took part both in the raid on the planter Washington’s home and on the federal arsenal itself, escaped, and made his way on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. He and John Brown’s son Owen Brown would find work and safety, under assumed names, on an oil well in the vicinity of Crawford County PA. He visited Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Canada and took part in the planning for the rescue of Aaron D. Stevens and Albert Hazlett while the Mason Commission of the Congress was presuming that he had been killed in the fighting at Harpers Ferry. On July 19, 1861 he was able to enlist under the name “Charles Plummer” and would become a 1st Sergeant of the 21st Massachusetts Volunteers. On February 8, 1862 he died of fever aboard the transport Northerner during the battle of Roanoke Island. (This was a battle he had particularly wished to take part in because ex-Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the nemesis of the Harpers Ferry raiders, was in command of the Confederates.) Charles Plummer Tidd’s grave is #40 in the National Cemetery in New Berne NC. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

Harriet Tubman No of color

Harriet Tubman was negotiated with by John Brown for participation in the raid on the federal arsenal. She mistrusted these men and had persistent dreams in which Brown and his sons appeared as serpents. The attack had been scheduled to occur on the 4th of July, symbolic of national birth. At the last moment she alleged she was ill, and for this reason as well as delays in the deliveries of supplies, the attack needed to be postponed for months. On the day of the actual attack at Harpers Ferry she had a premonition that it would fail.

Henry Watson No of color HDT WHAT? INDEX Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR Henry Watson, barber of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania involved both with John Brown and with Frederick Douglass.

etc. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

THE REVEREND THEODORE PARKER,

GRANDSON OF A PATRIOT LEADER ON LEXINGTON GREEN

BORN 1811 1812 1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 DIED 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869

I have taken the Reverend Theodore Parker, rather than the Reverend Waldo Emerson, as my type case of what I have come to term the “antebellum anti-slavemaster anti-slave racist personality,” simply because the Reverend Emerson enjoys such an ignorantly loyal following that he cannot yet be seen for what he was. Please read the materials which follow with the awareness that it really irks me, to have to listen in silence HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

as scholars blindly attempt to cast Henry Thoreau in the same mold with such lamentable excuses for human beings. Make allowance, if you can, for the manner in which I have been provoked. With melanin having had such overt and blatant enemies, why should we nourish covert enemies in our bosom? As an example of the sort of material which provokes me, please consider the following entry from the Encyclopædia Britannica — material which I have here reproduced in its entirety:

Parker, Theodore (b. Aug. 24, 1810, Lexing- By 1841 he had formulated his liberal religious ton, Mass.—d. May 10, 1860, Florence), Unitar- views and had incorporated them in the sermon ian theologian, pastor, scholar, and social “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity.” reformer active in the anti-slavery movement. The transient, to him, was Christianity’s theolog- Theologically, he repudiated much traditional ical and scriptural dogma, and the permanent Christian dogma, putting in its place an intuitive was its moral truths. The following winter he knowledge of God derived from man’s experi- elaborated his position in lectures published as ence of nature and insight into his own mind. A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion. He resembled Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Opposition to his liberalism increased and he New England Transcendentalists in his emphasis soon resigned his pastorate. His supporters on intuition but differed in the way he tempered founded the 28th Congregational Society of Bos- his romanticism with rationalism and scientific ton and installed him as minister. interest. He combined his belief in intuition, Believing that the moral truths of Christianity for example, with a critical and historical study had application to contemporary social prob- of religion. lems, Parker worked for prison reform, temper- Although Parker passed the entrance examina- ance, women’s education, and other such causes. tion for Harvard College in 1830, he had no He made impassioned speeches against slavery, funds to attend. He was allowed, however, helped fugitive slaves to escape, and wrote an to take the examinations for his course of study abolitionist tract, A Letter to the People of the without enrolling and was granted an honorary United States Touching the Matter of Slavery degree. He then attended Harvard Divinity (1848). He also served on the secret committee School, from which he graduated in 1836. that aided the abolitionist John Brown. The next year he was ordained pastor of the Uni- tarian Church in West Roxbury, Mass. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1750

The Huguenot refugee community in Boston had been outmarrying, mostly with the Dutch up to this point, and were blending in with the resident “wasp” types so successfully that in four more generations they would be able to remain quite invisible in the pews of establishment churches while preachers like the Reverend Theodore Parker pontificated about the marvelous Nordic race. Their assimilation has been so successful and so silent that we now refer to this resultant grouping as “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” without any awareness that significant portions of the background of these people are with persecuted Mediterranean peoples rather than with either the dominant “Angles” or the dominant “Saxons.”1

1. Yet Lavender, from whom I have extracted this information, has jested that the title of his book should have been not FRENCH HUGUENOTS: FROM MEDITERRANEAN CATHOLICS TO WHITE ANGLO-SAXON PROTESTANTS but instead FRENCH HUGUENOTS: FROM MEDITERRANEAN CATHOLICS TO WHITE ANGLO-SAXON PROTESTANTS, ALMOST. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1810

August 24, Friday: Theodore Parker was born in Lexington, Massachusetts. The youngest of 11 children, he was the son of a proud farmer and the proud grandson of the Captain Parker who had commanded the Lexington minutemen.

Two works for wind band by Ludwig van Beethoven were performed for the initial time, in Vienna: “Marsch für böhmische Landwehr” and “Marsch für Erzherzog Anton.”

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 24th of 8th M 1810// Aunt Martha Stanton is about going to NYork having heard of her husbands arrival which seems to occasion some stir in the family, to get her things prepared, but the Wind continues the wrong way — Edward Wanton of Richmond Virg. in [is] a son of Gideon Wanton late of this town Deceased, spent most of the Afternoon with me in the Shop. — My mind is much in the usual mood, except feeling a little more depressed than common ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1823

Friend Jonathan Dymond’s AN INQUIRY INTO THE ACCORDANCY OF WAR WITH THE PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY: AND AN EXAMINATION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL REASONING BY WHICH IT IS DEFENDED: WITH OBSERVATIONS ON SOME OF THE CAUSES OF WAR AND ON SOME OF ITS EFFECTS (Philadelphia: Tract Association of Friends, between 1823 and 1825). [Bound in with this volume, eventually, as it now exists as a book on the shelf of a research library, would be A LETTER TO THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES TOUCHING THE MATTER OF SLAVERY / BY THEODORE PARKER, a tract which would be issued in Boston in 1848 by J. Munroe.] Thomas Hancock remarked that this volume “completed succeeded in overthrowing the delusive and pernicious doctrines of Paley, with regard to ‘expediency’ as a rule of conduct either for states or individuals.” WILLIAM PALEY THEODORE PARKER

THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

AN INQUIRY INTO THE ACCORDANCY OF WAR WITH THE PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY, AND AN EXAMINATION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL REASONING BY WHICH IT IS DEFENDED. WITH OBSERVATIONS ON SOME OF THE CAUSES OF WAR AND ON SOME OF ITS EFFECTS. BY JONATHAN DYMOND. Contempt prior to examination, however comfortable to the mind which entertains it, or how ever natural to great parts, is extremely dangerous; and more apt than almost any other disposition, to produce erroneous judgments both of persons and opinions.-PALEY. PHILADELPHIA: URIAH HUNT & SON, No. 62 NORTH FOURTH STREET JACOB SMEDLEY, JR., 304 ARCH STREET. COLLINS & BROTHER, NEW YORK. EPHRAIM MORGAN & SON CINCINNATI. CUSHING & BROTHER, BALTIMORE.1

1. Another source alleges that the 1st edition of AN ENQUIRY, ETC. was printed in London in 1823 without the author’s name. The 3rd edition “corrected and enlarged” was published in 1824. It was republished in Philadelphia in 1834 with notes by Thomas S. Grimké, and again in 1835, that being referred to as the 4th edition.

READ THIS BOOK HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1830

Summer: Having passed the entrance examination for Harvard College by virtue of tutoring by his lifelong friend, the Reverend Caleb Stetson, but lacking financial resources, Theodore Parker was allowed to be a

nonresident student and to take the examinations for his courses of study. Passing everything, he would at the urging of the Reverend Convers Francis be straightforward enrolled with an “honorary” bachelor’s degree in HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1834 directly into the Harvard Divinity School.

“HUCKLEBERRIES”: I served my apprenticeship and have since done considerable journeywork in the huckleberry field. Though I never paid for my schooling and clothing in that way, it was some of the best schooling that I got and paid for itself. Theodore Parker is not the only New England boy who has got his education by picking huckleberries, though he may not have gone to Harvard thereafter, nor to any school more distant than the huckleberry field. Here was the university itself where you could learn the everlasting Laws, and Medicine and Theology, not under Story, and Warren, and Ware, but far wiser professors than they. Why such haste to go from the huckleberry field to the College yard?

THEODORE PARKER HARVARD COLLEGE JOHN COLLINS WARREN HENRY WARE, SR. HENRY WARE, JR.

CONTINGENCY ALTHOUGH VERY MANY OUTCOMES ARE OVERDETERMINED, WE TRUST THAT SOMETIMES WE ACTUALLY MAKE REAL CHOICES.

Not Civil War “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1831

Theodore Parker taught school in Boston. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1832

Until 1834, Theodore Parker would be teaching school in Watertown, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1834

Having managed to survive at Harvard College as a nonresident poor-boy student, Theodore Parker was allowed to take examinations for his courses of study and passed in everything. At the urging of the Reverend Convers Francis he was straightaway designated an “honorary” bachelor and enrolled in the Divinity School. He would finish the 3-year course there in two years, that is, by 1836.

Concord’s George Moore, son of the sheriff, graduated from Harvard College. He would become a minister.

Edward Jarvis got married with Almira Hunt of Concord.

Henry Ward Beecher graduated from Amherst College.

At Harvard Divinity School, the following gentlemen completed their studies:

George Ware Briggs (A.B. Brown University) Richard Sullivan Edes (A.B. Brown University) William Greenleaf Eliot (A.B. Col. [Columbia College?]) Nathanael Hall Frederick West Holland George Wheelock Woodward (A.B. Dartmouth College)

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY Not Civil War “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1835

October 6, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson received the 2d set of 4 offprints of SARTOR RESARTUS from the Boston Custom Shed, which Thomas Carlyle had dispatched to him in June, and set out quite as enthusiastically to disseminate these as he had the previous set of 4.

SARTOR RESARTUS STUDY THIS STRANGENESS

One he would dispatch to the Reverend Convers Francis in Watertown. We can be pretty sure that Francis’s sister Lydia Maria Child perused that copy, for she was departing for a tour of England and asked Emerson for a letter of introduction to its author. Francis would pass this copy on to Theodore Parker, then a student at the Theological School in Cambridge, and Parker would then loan it to his “most intimate friend,” another student, William Silsbee.

Another copy Emerson would dispatch to the Reverend William Ellery Channing in Newport, Rhode Island. With the Reverend when that copy arrived was Harriet Martineau.

Meanwhile a long anonymous review (written by Alexander H. Everett and made possible by the copy that Emerson had made available to the editor during the late summer) was appearing in the North American Review.2

Sam Houston purchased a general’s uniform in New Orleans after being named Commander-in-Chief by the

2. “Thomas Carlyle,” North American Review 41: 454-482 HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Nacogdoches “Committee of Vigilance.”

TEXAS

Young Lydia Jackson’s friend Dr. LeBaron Russell in Plymouth “determined to publish an American edition” of SARTOR RESARTUS and approached the firm of James Munroe and Company, which of course stipulated that he come up somehow with the usual list of 150 paying subscribers — to ensure recovery of the cost of setting the type for such a printing. Much of this successful subscription gathering would be undertaken by William Silsbee and Theodore Parker in Cambridge, as well of course as by Russell himself.

THOMAS CARLYLE

This by way of contrast with the customary story which appears in our storybooks, which tend to simplify accounts to the greatest convenience by assigning meretricious actions to famous names: “Regular book publication of SARTOR did not take place until 1836, when Emerson arranged for publication in Boston and wrote an enthusiastic preface.” WALDO EMERSON HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1836

At Harvard Divinity School, the following gentlemen completed their studies:

Samuel Page Andrews Richard Thomas Austin (A.B. Ham. [Hamilton College?]) John Sullivan Dwight George Edward Ellis Oliver Capen Everett Abiel Abbot Livermore Theodore Parker William Silsbee HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

September 19, Monday: Formation of “Hedge’s Club” centering around the visits of the Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge to Boston from Bangor, Maine.3 In September 1836, on the day of the second centennial anniversary of Harvard College, Mr. Emerson, George Ripley, and myself [Frederic Henry Hedge], with one other [who was this fourth person: would it have been an unnamed woman, an unnamed wife, specifically Sophia Ripley??], chanced to confer together on the state of current opinion in theology and philosophy, which we agreed in thinking was very unsatisfactory. Could anything be done in the way of protest and introduction of deeper and broader views? What we strongly felt was dissatisfaction with the reigning sensuous philosophy, dating from John Locke, on which our Christian theology was based. The writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, recently edited by Marsh [Henry Nelson Coleridge had only at this point initiated publication of THE LITERARY REMAINS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE], and some of Thomas Carlyle’s earlier essays, especially the “Characteristics” and “SIGNS OF THE TIMES,” had created a ferment in the minds of some of the young clergy of that day. There was a promise in the air of a new era of intellectual life. We four concluded to call a few like-minded seekers together in the following week. Some dozen of us met in Boston, in the house, I believe, of Mr. Ripley. Among them I recall the name of Orestes Augustus Brownson (not yet turned Romanist), Cyrus Augustus Bartol, Theodore Parker, and Charles Stearns Wheeler and Robert Bartlett, tutors in Harvard College. There was some discussion, but no conclusion reached, on the question whether it were best to start a new journal as the organ of our views, or to work through those already existing. The next meeting, in the same month, was held by invitation of Emerson, at his house in Concord. A large number assembled; besides some of those who met at Boston, I remember Mr. Alcott, [Bronson Alcott] John Sullivan Dwight, Ephraim Peabody, Dr. Convers Francis, Mrs. Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Margaret Fuller, Caleb Stetson, James Freeman Clarke. These were the earliest of a series of meetings held from time to time, as occasion prompted, for seven or eight years. Jones Very was one of those who occasionally attended; H.D. Thoreau another. There was no club, properly speaking; no organization, no presiding officer, no vote ever taken. How the name “Transcendental,” given to these gatherings and the set of persons who took part in them, originated, I cannot say. It certainly was never assumed by the persons so called. I suppose I was the only one who had any first-hand acquaintance with German transcendental philosophy, at the start. THE DIAL was the product of the movement, and in some sort its organ.

CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

October 25, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson’s friend the Reverend William Henry Furness of the First Unitarian Society of Philadelphia issued his major treatise “The Remarks on the Four Gospels in the Annus Mirabilis,” which took issue with the doctrine of miracles:4 “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Guy R. Woodall states that William Henry Furness has always been treated as a minor figure, partly because he failed to evolve as an intellectual after a certain point. His major treatise, a work entitled “The Remarks on the Four Gospels in the “Annus Mirabilis,” is a work that he wrote and rewrote many times before his death. It was published in Philadelphia on Oct. 25, 1836 and reached Boston Nov. 12. He was roundly criticized by classical Unitarians for taking issue with the doctrine of miracles: The Remarks engendered controversy principally because Furness went against the commonly held view of the miracles of Christ by insisting that while the miracles were indeed real, they were natural, not supernatural interruptions or violations of the natural order….He also declared to the dismay of the Conservative Unitarians, that the miracles were wrought for their intrinsic beauty and worth — i.e. were commensurate with the natural beauties and goodness of nature of which they were a part and not merely as evidences or proofs of the special mission of Christ upon which Christianity must finally rest. (235) George Ripley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Theodore Parker have received more attention for their part in the controversy, but Furness enunciated his views more fully. Furness managed to stay friendly with both the classical Unitarians and his best friend, Emerson, despite the disagreement that existed. Emerson, of course, felt that to concentrate on miracles was a mistake; that one should look inside oneself for revelation. See also the review of an article by Len Gongeon on Furness. (Kathryn Mapes, February 18, 1992).

In the presence of the French royal family and 150,000 others, a single-stone granite obelisk from Luxor, Egypt was gently eased into an upright position at the center of Place de la Concorde in Paris.5

3. This would become the Transcendental Club. It was at this first regular meeting that the Reverend Convers Francis first met Bronson Alcott. Francis would also be present for the second meeting, in Alcott’s home in Boston. As the eldest member of the Club, it would become the lot of the Reverend Francis to announce the principal topic for conversation, and to preside. 4. Woodall, Guy R. “Remarks on the Four Gospels in the ‘Annus Mirabilis.’” ATQ 3:3 (Sept. 1989): 233-42 5. The height of the obelisk at the Lateran in Rome is 105 feet 6 inches, that of the Piazza del Popolo in Rome 87 feet 6 inches, and that of the Piazza San Pietro in Rome 83 feet, while this Place de la Concorde obelisk is a mere 76 feet 6 inches. Only about 50 feet of the obelisk in the Atmeidan at Constantinople remain in existence but its proportions indicate that it must originally have exceeded 80 feet (there are in addition a couple of obelisks in the British Museum but the Brits cannot boast much of their mechanical or naval skill in transporting them as they are merely 8 feet high). HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1837

April: The Reverend Theodore Parker got married with Lydia Cabot of Watertown, Massachusetts. He would soon be selected as pastor of the Unitarian Church of West Roxbury, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Per Gary L. Collison’s “Theodore Parker and the Unitarian Controversy in 1837,” ESQ 30:4 (1984): 211-19: “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Collison discusses Theodore Parker’s “Reasons” as a precursor to Waldo Emerson’s Divinity School Address and as an important Unitarian document that has not been given enough critical attention. It appeared under the initial “W” in the November 4, 1837 issue of the Unitarian weekly, the Christian Register, under the title: “Reasons Why a Clergyman Should Not Study the Scriptures Carefully and Critically.” Parker sarcastically posed the essay as a letter from a young minister to an old one. His article was divided into two arguments: “First, in thrusting German rationalistic views of the BIBLE into the public arena, he challenged the denomination to come to terms with advanced nineteenth century criticism. Second, in caricaturing the rigidly conservative Unitarians who had not accepted the new perspectives, he urged the ministry to abandon its timidity and lead the denomination to a more enlightened, scientifically-based religious consciousness.” (213) On November 11, 1837, editor Chandler Robbins printed two critical letters, one from a “J.C.” of Worcester who considered the article to be an unprincipled attack on the BIBLE and another from “Lover of the BIBLE,” who understood Parker’s points but thought that he should have been more respectful. Parker thought that his critics were unsophisticated men who were unskilled in German idealism. However, he was more interested in rousing the clergy than he was in biblical exegesis. He thought that ministers should educate their congregations and that this task would be impossible if they refused to allow theology to progress and correct its errors. His essay was meant to be a thorn in the sides of the Unitarian ministers: “Reasons Why a Clergyman Should Not Study the Scriptures Carefully and Critically” was thus intentionally provocative, designed not to instruct laymen but to spur the Unitarian ministry to a renewed sense of its duty in an enlightened age. They had failed, in Parker’s view, to prepare the average believer to understand that critical reasoning was the sole legitimate authority: it was the fire of truth, the grand inquisitor.”(218) Because “Reasons Why a Clergyman Should Not Study the Scriptures Carefully and Critically” appeared in a forum that was approved of by the Unitarian church, it, like Emerson’s Divinity School Address, made it appear that the conservative hierarchy of the church went along with Transcendentalist notions. (Kathryn C. Mapes, March 9, 1992)

June: The Reverend Theodore Parker and his bride Lydia Cabot moved to West Roxbury, Massachusetts, where the groom had been selected as pastor for the local Unitarian congregation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

November 4, Saturday: Per Gary L. Collison’s “Theodore Parker and the Unitarian Controversy in 1837.” ESQ 30:4 (1984): 211-19, “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Collison discusses the Reverend Theodore Parker’s “Reasons” as a precursor to Waldo Emerson’s Divinity School Address and as an important Unitarian document that has not been given enough critical attention. It appeared under the initial “W” in the November 4, 1837 issue of the Unitarian weekly, the Christian Register, under the title: “Reasons Why a Clergyman Should Not Study the Scriptures Carefully and Critically.” Parker sarcastically posed the essay as a letter from a young minister to an old one. His article was divided into two arguments: “First, in thrusting German rationalistic views of the Bible into the public arena, he challenged the denomination to come to terms with advanced nineteenth century criticism. Second, in caricaturing the rigidly conservative Unitarians who had not accepted the new perspectives, he urged the ministry to abandon its timidity and lead the denomination to a more enlightened, scientifically-based religious consciousness.” (213) On November 11, 1837, editor Chandler Robbins printed two critical letters, one from a “J.C.” of Worcester who considered the article to be an unprincipled attack on the bible and another from “Lover of the Bible,” who understood Parker’s points but thought that he should have been more respectful. Parker thought that his critics were unsophisticated men who were unskilled in German idealism. However, he was more interested in rousing the clergy than he was in biblical exegesis. He thought that ministers should educate their congregations and that this task would be impossible if they refused to allow theology to progress and correct its errors. His essay was meant to be a thorn in the sides of the Unitarian ministers: “”Reasons” was thus intentionally provocative, designed not to instruct laymen but to spur the Unitarian ministry to a renewed sense of its duty in an enlightened age. They had failed, in Parker’s view, to prepare the average believer to understand that critical reasoning was the sole legitimate authority: it was the fire of truth, the grand inquisitor.”(218) Because “Reasons” appeared in a forum that was approved of by the Unitarian church, it, like Emerson’s Divinity School Address, made it appear that the conservative hierarchy of the church went along with Transcendentalist notions. (Kathryn C. Mapes, March 9, 1992) HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1838

Middle of May: The Transcendental Club met at the home of the Reverend Caleb Stetson in Medford, Massachusetts.

Present were the Reverends Frederic Henry Hedge, George Ripley, and Theodore Parker, John Sullivan Dwight, Bronson Alcott, Cyrus Bartol, and Jones Very. The topic for the evening was “The Question of Mysticism.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1840

The Reverend Theodore Parker reviewed Professor David Friedrich Strauss’s DAS LEBEN JESU KRITISCHE BEARBEITET (published in German in two volumes in 1835-1836, would be published in English as THE LIFE OF JESUS, CRITICALLY EXAMINED in 1846) in The Christian Examiner.

Professor Strauss had been offered a professorship at the University of Zürich but upon this book the offer had been withdrawn; later he would be dismissed from the post he held at Tübingen. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

The Reverend Theodore Parker’s “Cudworth’s INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM” appeared in The Christian Examiner. (Waldo Emerson had the Thomas Birch edition of 1820 in his library.) CUDWORTH’S SYSTEM, I CUDWORTH’S SYSTEM, II CUDWORTH’S SYSTEM, III

Republication of Joseph-Héliodore-Sagesse-Vertu Garcin de Tassy’s 1826 DOCTRINES ET DEVOIRS DE LA RELIGION MUSELMANE.

At the end of the journal entries for this year, Emerson listed his readings in Oriental materials during the period: “Buddha; Vedas; Sir William Jones; Zoroaster; Koran; Ockley, History of the Saracens.”

CHALDÆAN ORACLES

April 25, Saturday: The Reverend Theodore Parker placed an anonymous humorous piece about the reaction to Transcendentalism (by “Senex”) on pages 66–67 of the Christian Register: It shall be my pride That I have dared to tread this holy ground. Speaking no dream, but things oracular, Matter not lightly to be heard by those, Who to the letter of the outward promise, Do read the invisible soul. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

I have been a dreamer of dreams for nearly fourscore years, Mr. Reader, and now see visions like a young man. The first thing I can remember is a sleep; and the next, in point of age, is a dream. What is remarkable, my visions almost always prove true. I relate this to my friends, who usually laugh at my odd conceit, as they call it; but the event always fulfils the prediction. “Coming events cast their shadows before;” or their splendors, as the case may be. I dreamed of the battle of Lexington (just sixty five years ago yesterday) thirteen days before it happened; of the Declaration of Independence; and the treaty of Peace, and various other matters all came just as I had dreamed them. I have even learned when the greatest event in modern history is to take place, and General Jackson is to die. These things I state, to show you that “old men dream dreams” as the prophet foretold — another proof that we have fallen on good times. Now one of my most remarkable visions occurred after this wise. I was sitting after dinner, in the great oaken arm-chair, — which was brought over from Devonshire by my ancestors in the time of the Long-Parliament, and in which three generations of them have dreamed their sermons after dinner, and I read that remarkable tract lately edited by “A.N.” which relates to Transcendentalism. It was the first time I had ever seen the word in print, and I never yet have heard it pronounced except by myself, with the accent on the second syllable, Trans-cend- ent-al-ism. (Is that right?) and I wondered what it meant. I thought of Trans-sylvanian, and Transsubstantiation, but found no light, though I consulted my Dictionary, which did not contain it; so I resolved to read the Pamphlet. Then to my great surprise I learned that Trans-cendentalism, was a very naughty thing. I was very much surprised, to hear there were such men as we find there; and such men even in America, and some of them near Cambridge it seemed. I never closed the book till I read the last word, “Hegel.” Then while I was resolving to go to Cambridge, and consult with my old friends there, as to this great evil, about to fall on the churches I fell into a profound sleep, and was visited with a dream so remarkable that I will write it down for the edification of the churches. I thought I stood on the extreme point of Cape Cod, and the ocean lay before me, rolling like a great giant in his sleep. The waves rolled in upon the beach, with that sweet sound so soothing to the ear of an old man. I looked out on the porpoises tumbling heavily along, in their uncooth gambols, and the distant sails moving swiftly or slowly, as the wind favored or opposed them. Far away in the East, while I looked, I saw a little misty speck, on the ocean, no bigger than a man’s hand. It increased rapidly in size, and seemed to approach. Then it became a large cloud, extending for many miles in breadth, and with a depth that I could not measure. It came nearer and nearer, and seemed larger and larger. At last I observed it was divided into several clouds. There was a large division into two bodies, the Right and Left; each of which was again parted in two smaller bodies, the Centre and Extreme. On HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

the cloud came, and when within a mile of the shore, for old men are far-sighted, I saw each of these divisions was composed of countless smaller parties, which, as they came still nearer I found were men, flying swiftly along, who made up this immense cloud. They spoke to one another, and seemed to laugh, and chatter, and I could now and then catch the word “Begriff,” which I took to be Hebrew, (Be Geriff, i.e. in sweeping away.) What it meant I could not devise. Presently the men all alighted on the shore and sat down, some on great Books, which they brought under their arms, some on nothing that I could see, others on kegs, wine-skins, and fifteen-gallon jugs,—still keeping their relative position, of Right and Left, Centre and Extreme. They kept chatting, and I could now and then catch the words, “Menschhiet,” “Idee,” “Vorstellang,” “Gegensatz,” but knew not what they meant. One of them often repeated the Greek word “To- Hori,” another said “Kehabilitation” continually. Presently they all fell a smoking, with large tobacco pipes, but kept talking as fiercely as before. But they did not seem to agree, for the Centres, often made insulting gestures towards the Extremes, and which were very promptly returned. While I wondered what these things should mean, one of them, the only one who saw me, stepped up, and relieved my wonder, by telling me in good English, “These are the Transcendentalists.” I asked him to go on and tell me all about them, and inform me if he was one of them. He said he was not, but was a good Christian; a deacon, who kept a green and white grocery in Munchon, and had been sent by Mr. Hengstenberg, as a spy upon their actions. He affected to be a Transcendentalist and repeated “Begriff,” as often as the others, and passed for a very profound Philosopher. But he heard all he could, and should write it home to his master. He then told me the names of the men in that great army. I will mention only a few. Some had been taken from the tombs; some from Pulpits, or professorial chairs; some from Parlors, others from Beer-shops, and some from places still worse. Among these were Plato, and Proclus, Plotinus, Ammonius with his old bag, Stilpo, Strato, Zeno, Camedes, Basilides, and Bardesanes; Pelagius, Boethius, Rabanus-Maurus, Erigena; the St. Victors, Dyonisius the Areopagite, Albertus Magnus, Thomas a Kempis; Ficinus and Picus; Cardanus, Agrippa and Roger Bacon. There was Melancthon and Jordano Bruno, Savonarola, Campanella, Dr. Faustus, Scotus and Ramus; Behme, and Helmont, Grotius and Leclerc, Kepler and Spinoza, Bayle, Berkeley, Samuel Clarke, and Cudworth and Parker and More; Leibnitz and Wolff, Kant, Jacobi, Schleiermacher, Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Tiedeman, Krause, Hegel, de Wette, Fries, Eichhorn, Gesenius, Strauss, Weisse, Schiller, the Schlegels, Heine, Borne, Schafer, Goethe, Richter, Rosenkrantz, Ammon, Herbart and Vatke, Paulus and Rohr, and Ullmann, Lucke and Tholuck. All these men and countless others were thrown together in the greatest confusion, without any regard to age, opinion or character. My deacon of Munchon, told me that Mr. Hengstenberg had been making a great stir in Germany; had “harried the land,” and rendered it too hot for these men, dead or alive, so that HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

he had driven them clean across the ocean. “Alas” said I, “alas for the churches in New England. We be all dead men, for the Transcendentalists have come! They say there is no Christ; no God; no soul; only ‘an absolute nothing’ and Hegel is the Holy Ghost. Our churches will be pulled down; there will be no Sabbath; our wives will wear the breeches, and the Transcendentalists will ride over us rough shod. How shall we be delivered, from these desperate fellows; this ‘mixed multitude of devils?’” “Fear not,” said he, “they will work desolation only for a time. I have come to save the Faith of the Land, and Mr. Hengstenberg will soon be here.” Again I looked, and far away in the East, I saw a giant figure, like a man, approaching. It was Mr. Hengstenberg himself, mounted on a monstrous broom, alike his weapon, and his chariot. He looked worn with toil, and eager haste, and devoured by self- consuming fires. Wonderful to tell, he grew smaller, and smaller as he came near us, till at last he was an homunculus, “no bigger than a tobacco-seed,” still he made a great cry. But soon he recovered his original size, and seemed a mere mortal like ourselves. I asked “what help, oh mighty man!” He told us, “we must go back, to the thirteenth century; must take the whole of the Old Testament, letter for letter, and believe it; must admit that a special Revelation was made to Balaam’s ass; and to Jonah’s whale. That Joshua really stopped the sun a whole day, and Elisha’s bones raised up a dead man; that Samson drank water out of the jaw bone of an ass. That we must never consult Reason, but bow to the letter, and reckon a doubt as the sin not to be pardoned, — instigated by the Devil. Least of all should we make the slightest attempt to reconcile Faith and Reason, Religion and Philosophy, for this would be like marrying Christ and Belial.” “We will do it all,” said I, “illustrious sage, or angel if such thou art!” Thereupon I awoke, and there was nothing before me but the “pamphlet of 100 pages” and my pipe, broken at my feet.

May 8, Friday: Waldo Emerson was making arrangements for the Transcendental Club, the “club of clubs,” to meet at his home on the succeeding Wednesday. He asked Margaret Fuller to let Mr. Ripley6 bring her, “& see me & inspire our reptile wits.” He informed her that he had invited other females, Mrs. Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley and Sarah Freeman Clarke, not to mention of course his Mrs., the lady of the house, Lydian Emerson, and in addition the Reverends Frederic Henry Hedge and Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, and Henry Thoreau would be there.

On the previous day at 1PM while all had been at peace and most of the population had been at the dining table, a tornado had burst upon the city of Natchez, Mississippi. On this day the surviving citizens were looking around them at devastation. The local Courier would report that a Mrs. Alexander had been pulled “from the ruins of the Steamboat Hotel; she was found greatly injured, with two children in her arms, and they both dead!”

6. George Ripley? Christopher Gore Ripley? HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

August: The Reverends Theodore Parker, George Ripley, Christopher Pearse Cranch and other Transcendentalists attended a Come-Outer convention at Groton.

August 10, Monday: The Reverend Theodore Parker made an entry in his journal indicating that he considered Henry Thoreau’s essay on the Roman satirist Aulus Persius Flaccus, “AULUS PERSIUS FLACCUS,” to be “foolish”; the evening he had spent reading THE DIAL had been an “evening wasted.” “I would recommend him to the editor of the New World to keep the youth out of mischief.” (Had I any respect for the Transcendental genius of this reverend, this would have been one appropriate point, at which I might have inserted some sort of expression, of embarrassment. The reverend would persist in this sort of attitude, and when it would come time to form the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, would in advance bar the very idea of ever allowing Thoreau to write anything at all for this new journal.)

The balloon of the intrepid master Boston goldbeater and aeronaut Louis Lauriat graced the skies above St. John, New Brunswick, Canada, and traveled a lateral distance of some 21 miles.

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] HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

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.

CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1841

Charles King Whipple first heard the Reverend Theodore Parker, and the scales fell from his eyes and he supposed that for the first time he was hearing the real gospel.

May 19, Wednesday: The Reverend Theodore Parker, a motherhood-and-apple-pie preacher in West Roxbury, preached a sermon “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity” in which he began to declare a heretical doctrine to his tiny flock, that the truth of religion depended not on the “authority of Bibles or Churches” but on a man’s individual religious consciousness as created in him by his mother during his childish dependency. And Parker went around for the whole of his life claiming that, although never in fact indicted, for such blasphemy “Trinitarians” had called on the attorney general of Massachusetts to prosecute him, and that although in fact he never spent the night in any hoosegow, he had bravely been risking 3 years imprisonment in order to declare the truth. “I cannot be otherwise than hated.… There is no living man in America so widely, abundantly, and deeply hated as I have been, and still continue to be” (this is from the 13th volume of his collected writings, page 65).7 [Parker worked this sort of crowd-pleasing stuff into a “28th Congregational Society” which by 1852 was able to hold its meetings in the Boston Music Hall on Winter Street near the Tremont Temple, which boasted 1,500 comfortable seats. In other words, God-loving Parker was the Robert Schuyler of his century, on the eastern seaboard instead of the western, near Faneuil Hall rather than near Disneyland. At the end of his life, retired in Italy, Parker would write an autobiography that is interesting for the sorts of thing it recollects and considers worth recording. Absolutely central to his entire development and to his life as a religious leader, he said, was his mother teaching him that he must always heed an inner voice or it will “fade out little by little, and leave you all in the dark and without a guide.” This inner voice she theorized as “the voice of God in the soul of man” (XIII, 16). Parker came to theorize this inner voice as “the oracle God places in the breast” (IV, 22). When Parker found a toy he had lost, his mother informed him of Sir Matthew Hale who “never passed the Sabbath well without being prospered the succeeding week.” His mother drew for him the moral of greed in its starkest simplicity: “If you would be happy and prosperous you must remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy” (XIII, 188). Parker bought into this consequentialist religiosity, and for all of his life what was appropriate in religion was, for him, whatever he needed to believe in order to make his own life work. He needed to be happy and prosperous so he called that loving God. Remembering the Sabbath day and keeping it holy, for many pious Bostonians, amounted in practice to listening to Parker. I mention the date May 19, 1841 and this inaugural event because some historians of literature have theorized that this sort of religiosity had a determining influence on Henry

7. CENTENARY EDITION OF THE WORKS OF THEODORE PARKER. Boston MA: American Unitarian Association, 1907-1910. The Reverend Joseph Allen of Harvard class of 1811’s summarization of Parker’s theology at the time was that what it amounted to was “dogmatism resting on sentiment.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Thoreau. The reasoning is torturous but let me lay it out as simply as I can: 1.) Parker called himself “a Transcendentalist” and Thoreau called himself “a Transcendentalist.”

2.) Parker was well respected in his time and had a full-time day job and Thoreau was, let’s face it, not being taken all that seriously.

3.) Therefore Transcendentalism was what Parker wanted it to be and not what Thoreau wanted it to be unless Thoreau really was expressing in a confused and partial way what Parker was expressing more clearly and adequately.

4.) Therefore, to the extent to which Thoreau is important in the history of our ideas, to that extent he obviously conformed to the beliefs of Parker.

So what sort of convenient thing was it that Parker believed? He committed himself to something he grandiloquently termed “absolute, pure religion” (IV, 28). In deciding what is absolute and pure in religion, man is the “final” (I, 34) judge and “Unitarianism must … affirm the great doctrines of” (I, 427) this because these doctrines are drawn from “human nature” (XIII, 330). The great doctrines of absolute religion are the three facts which Parker derived from his consciousness, the intuitive apprehension of God, right and wrong, and immortality. Parker’s key text was LUKE 21:33, which declaimed that Heaven and earth shall pass away but not My Words, because this provided him with a doctrine of religious progress. All we have to do is wait in the flock of a leader like the Reverend Parker, and over the course of time all that is accidental and peripheral and, to use Parker’s own term of art, transient, will reveal itself as Transitory by its very changeableness, and therefore as part of Error. What is left is absolute, true religion. As Michelangelo maybe said, “Buried somewhere inside this slab is a statue, and it’s my job to find it.” Anyway, this material is here for what you want to do with it. You can probably figure that from my perspective, although the activities of Parker may or may not have had something to do with what Waldo Emerson was doing as a Unitarian minister without the responsibility of a pastorate, they had little or nothing to do with anything that was of importance in Thoreau’s HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

life or in his preoccupations.]

For their part, the Transcendentalists respected William Ellery Channing as they did no other “Harvard” Unitarian. “In our wantonness we often flout Dr. Channing, and say he is getting old,” Waldo Emerson is reported to have said once when Channing was thought near death; “but as soon as he is ill we remember that he is our Bishop, and we have not done with him yet.” But Transcendental relations with the Federal Street pastor became strained after “he drew back in horror” from Theodore Parker’s “Discourse of the Transient and the Permanent in Christianity” of 1841. When Channing died the following year Emerson was under no illusions that his “Bishop” had been a Transcendentalist. He noted in his journal that Channing had been the best of the Unitarian rationalists: “the nearest that mechanism could get to the flowering of genius.” Although the contributors to the Dial discussed the possibility of an article on Channing in the Transcendentalist organ, they never produced one. Their inability to decide what to say about the dead preacher is a revealing comment on the relationship between Channing and the Transcendental movement. That the New England Transcendentalists owed an enormous intellectual and spiritual debt to Channing (and to Harvard Unitarianism in general) one may wholeheartedly grant. To identify Channing’s outlook with theirs, however, would be to confuse the parent with the child. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

A Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity Delivered at the Ordination of the Reverend Charles Chauncy Shackford in the Hawes Place Church, Boston on May 19, 1841.

Luke xxi.33. “Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my word shall not pass away.”

In this sentence we have a very clear indication that Jesus of Nazareth believed the religion he taught would be eternal, that the substance of it would last forever. Yet there are some, who are affrighted by the faintest rustle which a heretic makes among the dry leaves of theology; they tremble lest Christianity it self should perish without hope. Ever and anon the cry is raised, “The Philistines be upon us, and Christianity is in danger.” The least doubt respecting the popular theology, or the existing machinery of the church; the least sign of distrust in the Religion of the Pulpit, or the Religion of the Street, is by some good men supposed to be at enmity with faith in Christ, and capable of shaking Christianity itself. On the other hand, a few bad men and a few pious men, it is said, on both sides of the water, tell us the day of Christianity is past. The latter — it is alleged — would persuade us that, hereafter, Piety must take a new form; the teachings of Jesus are to be passed by; that Religion is to wing her way sublime, above the flight of Christianity, far away, toward heaven, as the fledged eaglet leaves forever the nest which sheltered his callow youth. Let us, therefore, devote a few moments to this subject, and consider what is TRANSIENT in Christianity, and what is PERMANENT therein. The topic seems not inappropriate to the times in which we live, or the occasion that calls us together. Christ says, his Word shall never pass away. Yet at first sight nothing seems more fleeting than a word. It is an evanescent impulse of the most fickle element. It leaves no track where it went through the air. Yet to this, and this only did Jesus entrust the truth wherewith he came laden, to the earth; truth for the salvation of the world. He took no pains to perpetuate hiss thoughts; they were poured fourth where occasion found him an audience, — by the side of the lake, or a well; in a cottage, or the temple; in a fisher's boat, or the synagogue of the Jews. He founds no institution as a monument of his words. He appoints no order of men to preserve his bright and glad revelations. He only bids his friends give freely the truth they had freely received. He did not even write his words in a book. With a noble confidence, the result of his abiding faith, he scattered them broad-cast on the world, leaving the seed to its own vitality. He knew, that is of God cannot fail, for God keeps his own. He sowed his seed in the heart, and left it there, to be watered and warmed by the dew and the sun which heaven sends. He felt his words were for eternity. So he trusted them to the uncertain air; and for eighteen hundred years that faithful element has held them good, — distinct as when first warm from his lips. Now they are translated into every human speech, and murmured in all earth's thousand tongues, from the pine forests of the North to the palm groves of eastern Ind. They mingle, as it were, with the roar of a populous city, and join the chime of the desert sea. Of a Sabbath morn they are repeated from church to church, from isle to isle, and land to land, till their music goes round the world. Those words have become the breath of the good, the hope of the wise, the joy of the pious, and that for many millions of hearts. They are the prayers of our churches; our better devotions by fireside and fieldside; the enchantment of our hearts. It is these words, that still work wonders, to which the first recorded miracles were nothing in grandeur and utility. It is these, which build our temples and beautify our homes. They raise our thoughts of sublimity; they purify our ideal of purity: they hallow our prayer for truth and love. The make beauteous and divine the life which plain men lead. The give wings to our aspirations. What charmers they are! Sorrow is lulled at their bidding. They take the sting out of disease, and rob adversity of his power to disappoint. They give health and wings to the pious soul, broken-hearted and shipwrecked in his voyage of life, and encourage him to tempt the perilous way once more. The make all things ours: Christ our brother; Time our servant; Death our ally and the witness of our triumph. They reveal to us the presence of God, which else we might not have seen so clearly, in the first wind-flower of spring; in the falling of a sparrow; in the distress of a nation; in the sorrow or the rapture of the world. Silence the voice of Christianity, and the world is well nigh dumb, for gone is that sweet music which kept in awe the rulers and the people, which cheers the poor widow in her lonely toil, and comes like light through the windows of morning, to men who sit stooping and feeble, with failing eyes and a hungering heart. It is gone — all gone! only the cold, bleak world left before them. Such is the life of these Words; such the empire they have won for themselves over men's minds since they were spoken first. In the mean time, the words of great men and mighty, whose name shook whole continents, though graven in metal and stone, though stamped in institutions and defended by whole tribes of priest and troops of followers — their words have gone to the ground, and the world gives back no echo of their voice. Meanwhile the great works also of old times, castle and tower and town, their cities and their empires, have perished, and left scarce a mark on the bosom of the earth to show they once have been. The philosophy of the wise, the art HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

of the accomplished, the song of the poet, the ritual of the priest, though honored as divine in their day, have gone down, a prey to oblivion. Silence has closed over them; only their spectres now haunt the earth. A deluge of blood has swept over the nations; a night of darkness, more deep than the fabled darkness of Egypt, has lowered down upon that flood, to destroy or to hide what the deluge had spared. But through all this, the words of Christianity have come down to us from the lips of that Hebrew youth, gentle and beautiful as the light of a star, not spent by their journey through time and through space. They have built up a new civilization, which the wisest Gentile never hoped for; which the most pious Hebrew never foretold. Through centuries of wasting, these words have flown on like a dove in the storm, and now wait to descend on hearts pure and earnest, as the Father's spirit, we are told, came on his lowly Son. The old heavens and the old earth are indeed passed away, but the Word stands. Nothing shows clearer than this, how fleeting is what man calls great; how lasting what God pronounces true. Looking at the Word of Jesus, at real Christianity, the pure religion he taught, nothing appears more fixed and certain. Its influence widens as light extends; it deepens as the nations grow more wise. But, looking at the history of what men call Christianity, nothing seems more uncertain and perishable. While true religion is always the same thing, in each century and every land, in each man that feels it, the Christianity of the Pulpit, which is the religion taught; the Christianity of the People, which is the religion that is accepted and lived out; has never been the same thing in any two centuries or lands, except only in name. The difference between what is called Christianity by the Unitarians in our times, and that of some ages past, is greater than the difference between Mahomet and the messiah. The difference at this day between opposing classes of Christians; the difference between the Christianity of some sects, and that of Christ himself; is deeper and more vital than that between Jesus and Plato, Pagan as we call him. The Christianity of the seventh century has passed away. We recognize only the ghost of Superstition in its faded features, as it comes up at our call. It is one of the things which has been, and can be no more, for neither God nor the world goes back. Its terrors do not frighten, nor its hopes allure us. We rejoice that it has gone. But how do we know that our Christianity shall not share the same fate? Is there that difference between the nineteenth century, and some seventeen that have gone before it, since Jesus, to warrant the belief that our notion of Christianity shall last forever? The stream of time has already beat down Philosophies and Theologies, Temple and Church, though never so old and revered. How do we know there is not a perishing element in what we call Christianity? Jesus tells us, HIS Word is the word of God, and so shall never pass away. But who tells us, that OUR word shall never pass away? that OUR NOTION of his Word shall stand forever? Let us look at this matter a little more closely. In actual Christianity — that is, in that portion of Christianity which is preached and believed — there seem to have been, ever since the time of its earthly founder, two elements, the one transient, the other permanent. The one is the thought, the folly, the uncertain wisdom, the theological notions, the impiety of man; the other, the eternal truth of God. These two bear perhaps the same relation to each other that the phenomena of outward nature, such as sunshine and cloud, growth, decay, and reproduction, bear to the great law of nature, which underlies and supports them all. As in that case, more attention is commonly paid tot he particular phenomena than to the general law; so in this case, more is generally given to the Transient in Christianity than to the Permanent therein. It must be confessed, though with sorrow, that transient things form a great part of what is commonly taught as Religion. An undue place has often been assigned to forms and doctrines, while too little stress has been laid on the divine life of the soul, love to God, and love to man. Religious forms may be useful and beautiful. They are so, whenever they speak to the soul, and answer a want thereof. In our present state some forms are perhaps necessary. But they are only the accident of Christianity; not its substance. They are the robe, not the angel, who may take another robe, quite as becoming and useful. One sect has many forms; another none. Yet both may be equally Christian, in spite of the redundance or the deficiency. They are a par of the language in which religion speaks, and exist, with few exceptions, wherever man is found. In our calculating nation, in our rationalizing sect, we have retained but two of the rites so numerous in the early Christian church, and even these we have attenuated to the last degree, leaving them little more than a spectre of the ancient form. Another age may continue or forsake both; may revive old forms, or invent new ones to suit the altered circumstance of the times, and yet be Christians quite as good as we, or our fathers of the dark ages. Whether the Apostles designed these rites to be perpetual, seems a question which belongs to scholars and antiquarians; not to us, as Christian men and women. So long as they satisfy or help the pious heart, so long they are good. Looking behind, or around us, we see that the forms and rites of the Christians are quite as fluctuating as those of the heathens; from whom some of them have been, not unwisely, adopted by the earlier church. Again, the doctrines that have been connected with Christianity, and taught in its name, are quite as changeable as the form. This also takes place unavoidably. If observations be made upon Nature, — which must take place so long as man has sense and understanding, — there will be a philosophy of Nature, and philosophical doctrines. These will differ as the observations are just or inaccurate, and as the deductions from observed facts are true or false. Hence there will be different schools of natural philosophy, so long as men have eyes and HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

understandings of different clearness and strength. And if men observe and reflect upon Religion, — which will be done so long as man is a religious and reflective being, — there must also be a philosophy of religion, a theology and theological doctrines. These will differ, as men have felt much or little religion, as they analyze their sentiments correctly or otherwise, and as they have reasoned right or wrong. Now the true system of Nature which exists in the outward facts, whether discovered our not, is always the same thing, though the philosophy of Nature, which men invent, changes every month, and be one thing at London and the opposite at Berlin. Thus there but one system of Nature as it exits in fact, though many theories, which exist in our imperfect notion of that system, and by which we may approximate and at length reach it. Now there can be but one Religion which is absolutely true, existing in the facts of human nature, and the ideas of Infinite God. That. whether acknowledged or not, is always the same thing and never changes. So far as a man has any real religion — either the principle or the sentiment thereof — so far he has that, by whatever name he may call it. For, strictly speaking, there is but one kind of religion, as there is but one kind of love, though the manifestations of this religion, in forms, doctrine, and life, be never so diverse. It is through these, men approximate to the true expression of this religion. Now while this religion is one and always the same thing, there may be numerous system of theology or philosophies of religion. These with their creeds, confessions, and collections of doctrines, deduced by reasoning upon the facts observed, may be baseless and false, either because the observation was too narrow in extent, or otherwise defective in point of accuracy, or because the reasoning was illogical, and therefore the deduction spurious. Each of these three faults is conspicuous in the systems of theology. Now the solar system as it exists in fact is permanent, though the notions of Thales and Ptolemy, of Copernicus and Descartes about this system, prove transient, imperfect approximations to the true expression. So the Christianity of Jesus is permanent, though what passes for Christianity with Popes and catechisms, with sects and churches, in the first century or in the nineteenth century, prove transient also. Now it has sometimes happened that a man took his philosophy of Nature at second hand, and then attempted to make his observations conform to his theory, and Nature ride in his panniers. Thus some philosophers refused to look at the Moon through Galileo's telescope, for, according to their theory of vision, such an instrument would not aid the sight. Thus their preconceived notions stood up between them and Nature. Now it has often happened that men took their theology thus at second hand, and distorted the history of the world an man's nature besides, to make Religion conform to their notions. Their theology stood between them and God. Those obstinate philosophers have disciples in no small number. What another has said of false systems of science, will apply equally to the popular theology: “It is barren in effects, fruitful in questions, slow and languid in its improvement, exhibiting in it generality the counterfeit of perfection, but ill filled up in its details, popular in its choice, but suspected by its very promoters, and therefore bolstered up and countenanced with artifices. Even those who have been determined to try for themselves, to add their support to earning, and to enlarge its limits, have not dared entirely to desert received opinions, nor to seek the spring-head of things. But they think they have done a great thing if they intersperse and contribute something of their own; prudently considering, that by their assent they can save their modesty, and by their contributions, their liberty. Neither is there, nor ever will be, an end or limit to these things. One snatches at one thing, another is pleased with another; there is no dry nor clear sight of anything. Every one plays the philosopher out of the small treasures of his own fancy. The more sublime wits more acutely and with better success; the duller with less success but equal obstinacy, and, by the discipline of some learned men, sciences are bounded within the limits of some certain authors which they have set down, imposing them upon old men and instilling them into young. So that now (as Tully cavilled upon Cæsar’s consulship) the star Lyra riseth by an edict, and authority is taken for truth and not truth for authority; which kind of order and discipline is very convenient for our present use, but banisheth those which are better.” Any one, who traces the history of what is called Christianity, will see that nothing changes more from age to age than the doctrines taught as Christian, and insisted on as essential to Christianity and personal salvation. What is falsehood in one province passes for truth in another. The heresy of one age is the orthodox belief and “only infallible rule” of the next. Now Arius, and now Athanasius is Lord of the ascendant. Both were excommunicated in their turn, each for affirming what the other denied. Men are burned for professing what men are burned for denying. For centuries the doctrines of the Christians were no better, to say the least, than those of their contemporary pagans. The theological doctrines derived from our fathers seem to have come from Judaism, Heathenism, and the caprice of philosophers, far more than they have come from the principle and sentiment of Christianity. The doctrine of the Trinity, the very Achilles of theological dogmas, belongs to philosophy and not religion; its subtleties cannot even be expressed in our tongue. As old religions became superannuated and died out, they left to the rising faith, as to a residuary legatee, their forms and their doctrines; or rather, as the giant in the fable left his poisoned garment to work the overthrow of his conqueror. Many tenets, that pass current in our theology, seem to be the refuse of idol temples; the off-scourings of Jewish and heathen cities, rather than the sands of virgin gold, which the stream of Christianity has worn off from the rock of ages, and brought in it bosom for us. It is wood, hay, an stubble, wherewith men have built on the corner stone Christ HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

laid. What wonder the fabric is in peril when tried by fire? The stream of Christianity, as men receive it, has caught a stain from every soil it has filtered through, so that now it is not the pure water from the well of Life, which is offered to our lips, but streams troubled and polluted by man with mire and dirt. If Paul and Jesus could read our books of theological doctrines, would they accept as their teaching, what men have vented in their name? Never till the letters of Paul had faded out of his memory; never till the words of Jesus had been torn out from the Book of Life. It is their notions about Christianity men have taught as the only living word of God. They have piled their own rubbish against the temple of Truth where Piety comes to worship; what wonder the pile seems unshapely and like to fall? But these theological doctrines are fleeting as the leaves on the trees. They — “Are found Now green in youth, now withered on the ground; Another race the following spring supplies; They fall successive and successive rise.”

Like clouds of the sky, they are here to-day; to-morrow, all swept off and vanished; while Christianity itself, like the heaven above, with its sun, and moon, and uncounted stars, is always over our head, though the cloud sometimes debars us of the needed light. It must of necessity be the case that our reasonings, and therefore our theological doctrines, are imperfect, and so perishing. It is only gradually that we approach to the true system of Nature by observation and reasoning, and work out our philosophy and theology by the toil of the brain. But meantime, it we are faithful, the great truths of morality and religion, the deep sentiment of love to man and love to God, are perceived intuitively, and by instinct, as it were, though our theology be imperfect and miserable. The theological notions of Abraham, to take the story as it stands, were exceedingly gross, yet a great than Abraham has told us Abraham desired to see my day, saw it, and was glad. Since these notions are so fleeting, why need we accept the commandment of men, as the doctrine of God? This transitoriness of doctrines appears, in many instances, of which two may be selected for a more attentive consideration. First, the doctrine respecting the origin and authority of the Old and New Testament. There has been a time when men were burned for asserting doctrines of natural philosophy, which rested on evidence the most incontestable, because those doctrines conflicted with sentences in the Old Testament. Every word of that Jewish record was regarded as miraculously inspired, and therefore as infallibly true. It was believed that the Christian religion itself rested thereon, and must stand or fall with the immaculate Hebrew text. He was deemed no small sinner who found mistakes in manuscripts. On the authority of the written Word, man was taught to believe impossible legends, conflicting assertions; to take fiction for fact; a dream for a miraculous revelation of God; an oriental poem for a grave history of miraculous events; a collection of amatory idyls for a serious discourse “touching the mutual love of Christ and the Church;” they have been taught to accept a picture sketched by some glowing eastern imagination, never intended to be taken for reality, as proof that the Infinite God spoke in human words, appeared in the shape of a cloud, a flaming bush, or a man who ate, and drank, and vanished into smoke; that he gave counsels today, and the opposite tomorrow; that he violated his own laws; was angry, and was only dissuaded by a mortal man from destroying at once a whole nation — millions of men who rebelled against their leader in a moment of anguish. Questions in philosophy, questions in the Christian religion, have been settled by an appeal to that book. The inspiration of its authors has been assumed as infallible. Every fact in the early Jewish history has been taken as a type of some analogous fact in Christian history. The most distant events, even such as are still in the arms of time, were supposed to be clearly foreseen and foretold by pious Hebrews several centuries before Christ. It has been assumed at the outset, with no shadow of evidence, that those writers held a miraculous communication with God, such as he has granted to no other man. What was originally a presumption of bigoted Jews became an article of faith, which Christians were burned for not believing. This has been for centuries the general opinion of the Christian church, both Catholic and Protestant, though the former never accepted the BIBLE as the only source or religious truth. It has been so. Still worse, it is now the general opinion of religious sects at this day. Hence the attempt, which always fails, to reconcile the philosophy or our times with the poems in Genesis writ a thousand years before Christ; hence the attempt to conceal the contradictions in the record itself. Matters have come to such a pass, that even now he is deemed an infidel, if not by implication an atheist, whose reverence for the Most High forbids him to believe that God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his Son, a thought at which the flesh creeps with horror; to believe it solely on the authority of an oriental story, written down nobody know when or by whom, or for what purpose; which may be a poem, but cannot be the record of a fact, unless God is the author of confusion and a lie. Now this idolatry of the Old Testament has not always existed. Jesus says that none born of a woman is greater than John the Baptist, yet the least in the kingdom of heaven was greater than John. Paul tells us the Law — the very crown of the old Hebrew revelation — is a shadow of good things, which have now come, that we are no longer under the schoolmaster; that it was a law of sin and death, from which we are made free by the Law of HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

the spirit of Life. Christian teachers themselves have differed so widely in their notion of the doctrines and meaning of those books, that it makes one weep to think of the follies deduced therefrom. But modern Criticism is fast breaking to pieces this idol which men have made out of the Scriptures. It has show that here are the most different works thrown together. That their authors, wise as they sometimes were; pious as we feel often their spirit to have been, had only that inspiration which is common to other men equally pious and wise; that they were by no means infallible; but were mistaken in facts or in reasoning; uttered predictions which time has not fulfilled; men who in some measure partook of the darkness and limited notions of their age, and where not always above its mistakes or its corruptions. The history of opinions on the New Testament is quite similar. It has been assumed at the outset, it would seem with no sufficient reason, without the smallest pretence on its writers' part, that all of its authors were infallibly and miraculously inspired, so that they could commit no error of doctrine or fact. Men have been bid to close their eyes at the obvious difference between Luke and John; the serious disagreement between Paul and Peter; to believe, on the smallest evidence, accounts which shock the moral sense and revolt the reason, and tend to place Jesus in the same series with Hercules, and Apollonius of Tyana; accounts which Paul in the Epistles never mentions, thought he also had a vein of the miraculous running quite through him. Men have been told that all these things must be taken as part of Christianity, and if they accepted the religion, they must take all these accessories along with it; that the living spirit could not be had without the killing letter. All the books, which caprice or accident had brought together between the lids of the BIBLE, were declared to be the infallible word of God; the only certain rule of religious faith and practice. Thus the BIBLE was made not a single channel, but the only certain rule of religious faith and practice. To disbelieve any of its statements, or even the common interpretation put upon those statements by the particular age or church in which the man belonged, was held to be infidelity if not atheism. In the name of him who forbid us to judge our brother, good men and pious men have applied these terms to others, good and pious as themselves. That state of things has by no means passed away. Men, who cry down the absurdities of Paganism in the worst spirit of the French “free- thinkers,” call others infidels and atheists, who point out, though reverently, other absurdities which men have piled upon Christianity. so the world goes. An idolatrous regard for the imperfect scripture of God's word, is the apple of Atalanta, which defeats theologians running for the hand of divine truth. But the current notions respecting the infallible inspiration of the BIBLE have no foundation in the BIBLE itself. Which Evangelist, which Apostle of the New Testament, what Prophet or Psalmist of the Old Testament, ever claims infallible authority for himself or for others? Which of them does not in his own writings show that he was finite, and with all his zeal and piety, possessed but a limited inspiration, the bound whereof we can sometimes discover? Did Christ ever demand that men should assent to the doctrines of the Old Testament, credit its stories, and take its poems for histories, and believe equally two accounts that contradict one another? Has he ever told you that all the truths of his religion, all the beauty of a Christian life should be contained in the writings of those men, who, even after his resurrection, expected him to be a Jewish king; of men who were sometimes at variance with one another and misunderstood his divine teachings? Would not those modest writers themselves be confounded at the idolatry we pay them? Opinions may change on these points, as thy have often changed — changed greatly and for the worse since the days of Paul. They are changing now, and we may hope for the better; for God makes man's folly as well as his wrath to praise Him, and continually brings good out of evil. Another instance of the transitoriness of doctrines, taught as Christian, is found in those which relate to the nature and authority of Christ. One ancient party has told us, that he is the infinite God; another, that he is both God and man; a third, that he was a man, the son of Joseph and Mary, — born as we are; tempted like ourselves; inspired, as we may be, if we will pay the price. Each of the former parties believed its doctrine on this head was infallibly true, and formed the very substance of Christianity, and was one of the essential conditions of salvation, though scarce any two distinguished teachers, of ancient or modern times, agree in their expression of this truth. Almost every sect, that has ever been, makes Christianity rest on the personal authority of Jesus, and not the immutable truth of the doctrines themselves, or the authority of God, who sent him into the world. Yet it seems difficult to conceive any reason, why moral and religious truths should rest for their support on the personal authority of their revealer, any more than the truths of science on that of him who makes them known first or most clearly, It is hard to see why the great truths of Christianity rest on the personal authority of Jesus, more than the axioms of geometry rest on the personal authority of Euclid, or Archimedes. The authority of Jesus, as of all teachers, one would naturally think, must rest on the truth of his words, and not their truth on his authority. Opinions respecting the nature of Christ seem to be constantly changing. In the three first centuries after Christ, it appears, great latitude of speculation prevailed. Some said he was God, with nothing of human nature, his body only an illusion; others, that he was man, with nothing of the divine nature, his miraculous birth having not foundation in fact. In a few centuries it was decreed by councils that he was God, thus honoring the divine element; next, that he was man also, thus admitting the human side. For some ages the Catholic Church seems HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

to have dwelt chiefly on the divine nature that was in him, leaving the human element to mystics and other heretical persons, whose bodies served to flesh the swords of orthodox believers. The stream of Christianity has come to us in two channels — one within the Church, the other without the Church — and it is not hazarding too much to say, that since the fourth century the true Christian life has been out of the established Church, and not in it, but rather in the ranks of dissenters. From the Reformation till the latter part of the last century, we are told, the Protestant Church dwelt chiefly on the human side of Christ, and since that time many works have been written to show how the to - perfect Deity and perfect manhood — were united in his character. But, all this time, scarce any two eminent teachers agree on these points, however orthodox they may be called. What a difference between the Christ of John Gerson and John Calvin, - - yet were both accepted teachers and pious men. What a difference between the Christ of Unitarians and the Methodists — yet may men of both sects be true Christians and acceptable with God. What a difference between the Christ of Matthew and John — yet both were disciples, and their influence is wide as Christendom and deep as the heart of man. But on this there is not time to enlarge. Now it seems clear, that the notion men form about the origin and nature of the scriptures; respecting the nature and authority of Christ, having nothing to do with Christianity except as it aids or its adversaries; they are not the foundation of its truths. These are theological questions; not religious questions. Their connection with Christianity appears accidental; for if Jesus had taught at Athens, and not a Jerusalem if he had wrought no miracle, and none but the human nature had ever been ascribed to him; if the Old Testament had forever been perished at his birth, — Christianity would still have been the Word of God; it would have lost none of its truths. It would be just as true, just as beautiful, just as lasting, as now it is; though we should have lost so many a blessed word, and the work of Christianity itself would have been, perhaps, a long time retarded. To judge the future by the past, the former authority of the Old Testament can never return. Its present authority cannot stand. It must be taken for what it is worth. The occasional folly and impiety of its authors must pass for no more than their value; — while the religion, the wisdom, the love, which make fragrant its leaves, will still speak to the best hearts as hitherto, and in accents even more divine, when Reason is allowed her rights. The ancient belief in the infallible inspiration of each sentence of the New Testament is fast changing; very fast. One writer, not a skeptic, but a Christian of unquestioned piety, sweeps off the beginning of Matthew; another, of a different church and equally religious, the end of John. Numerous critics strike off several epistles. The Apocalypse itself it not spared, notwithstanding its concluding curse. Who shall tell us the work of retrenchment is to stop here; that others will not demonstrate, what some pious hearts have long felt, that errors of doctrine and errors of fact may be found in many parts of the record, here and there, from the beginning of Matthew to the end of Acts? We see how opinions have changed ever since the apostles' time; and who shall assure us that they were not sometimes mistaken in historical, as well as doctrinal matters; did not sometimes confound the actual with the imaginary; and that the fancy of these pious writers never stood in the place of their recollection? But what if this should take place? Is Christianity then to perish out of the heart of the nations, and vanish from the memory of the world, like the religions that were before Abraham? It must be so, if it rest on a foundation which a scoffer may shake, and a score of pious critics shake down. But this is the foundation of a theology, not of Christianity. That does not rest on the decision of Councils. It is not to stand or fall with the infallible inspiration of a few Jewish fishermen, who have writ their names in characters of light all over the world. It does not continue to stand through the forbearance of some critic, who can cut, when he will, the thread on which its life depends. Christianity does not rest on the infallible authority of the New Testament, It depends o this collection of books for the historical statement of its facts. In this we do not require infallible inspiration on the part of the writers, more than in the record of other historical facts. To me it seems as presumptuous, on the one hand, for the believer to claim this evidence for the truth of Christianity, as it is absurd, on the other hand, for the skeptic to demand such evidence to support these historical statements. I cannot see that it depends on the personal authority of Jesus. He was the organ through which the Infinite spoke. It is God that was manifested in the flesh by him, on whom rests the truth which Jesus brought to light and made clear and beautiful in his life; and if Christianity be true, it seems useless to look for any other authority to uphold it, as for some one to support Almighty God. So if it could be proved, — as it cannot, — in opposition to the greatest amount of historical evidence ever collected on any similar point, that the gospels were the fabrication of designing and artful men, that Jesus of Nazareth had never lived, still Christianity would stand firm, and fear no evil. None of the doctrines of that religion would fall to the ground; for if true, they stand by themselves. But we should lose, — oh, irreparable loss! — the example of that character, so beautiful, so divine, that no human genius could have conceived it, as none, after all the progress and refinement of eighteen centuries, seems fully to have comprehended its lustrous life. If Christianity were true, we should still think it was so, not because its record was written by infallible pens; nor because it was lived out by an infallible teacher, — but that it is true, like the axioms of geometry, because it is true, and is to be tried by the oracle God places in the breast. If it rest on the personal authority of Jesus alone, then there is no certainty of its truth, if he were ever mistake in the smallest matter, as some Christians have thought he was, in predicting his second coming. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

These doctrines respecting the scriptures have often changed, and are but fleeting. Yet men lay much stress on them. Some cling to these notions as if they were Christianity itself. It is about these and similar points that theological battles are fought from age to age. Men sometimes use worst the choicest treasure God bestows. This is especially true of the use men make of the BIBLE. Some men have regarded it as the heathen their idol, or the savage his fetish. They have subordinated Reason, Conscience, and Religion to this. Thus have they lost half the treasure it bears in its boom. No doubt the time will come when its true character shall be felt. Then it will be seen, that, amid all the contradictions of the Old Testament; its legends so beautiful as fictions, so appalling as facts; amid its predictions that have never been fulfilled; amid the puerile conceptions of God, which sometimes occur, and the cruel denunciations that disfigure both Psalm and Prophecy, there is a reverence for man's nature, a sublime trust in God, and a depth of piety rarely felt in these cold northern hearts of ours. Then the devotion of is authors, the loftiness of their aim, and the majesty of their life, will appear doubly fair, and Prophet and Psalmist will warm our hearts as never before. Their voice will cheer the young and sanctify the gray-headed; will charm us in the toil of life, and sweeten the cup Death gives us, when he comes to shake off this mantle of flesh. Then will it be seen, that the words of Jesus are music of heaven, sung in an earthy voice, and the echo of these words in John and Paul owe their efficacy to their truth and their depth, and to no accidental matter connected therewith. Then can the Word, — which was in the beginning and now is, — find access to the innermost heart of man, and speak these as now it seldom speaks. Then shall the BIBLE, — which is a whole library of the deepest and most earnest thoughts and feelings an piety and love, ever recorded in human speech, — be read oftener than ever before, not with Superstition, but with Reason, Conscience, and Faith fully active. Then shall it sustain men bowed down with many sorrows; rebuke sin; encourage virtue; sow the world broad-cast and quick with the seed of love, that man may reap a harvest for life everlasting. With all the obstacles men have thrown in its path, how much has the BIBLE done for mankind. No abuse has deprived us of all its blessings. You trace its path across the world from the day of Pentecost to this day. As a river springs up in the heart of a sandy continent, having its father in the skies and its birth- place in distant, unknown mountains; as the stream rolls on, enlarging itself, making in that arid waste a belt of verdure, wherever it turns its way; creating palm groves and fertile plains, where the smoke of the cottager curls up at even-tide, and marble cities send the gleam of their splendor far into the sky; — such has been the course of the BIBLE on the earth. Despite of idolaters bowing to the dust before it, it has made a deeper mark on the world than the rich and beautiful literature of all the heathen. The first book of the Old Testament tells man he is made in the image of God; the first of the New Testament gives us the motto, Be perfect as your Father in heaven. Higher words were never spoken. How the truths of the BIBLE have blest us. There is not a boy on all the hills of New England; not a girl born in the filthiest cellar which disgraces a capital in Europe, and cries to God against the barbarism of modern civilization; not a boy or a girl all Christendom through, but their lot is made better by that great book. Doubtless the time will come when men shall see Christ also as he is. Well might he still say: “Have I been so long with you, and yet hast thou not known me?” No! we have made him an idol, have bowed the knee before him, saying, “Hail, king of the Jews;” called him “Lord, Lord!” but done not he things which he said. The history of the Christian world might well be summed up in one word of the evangelist — “and there they crucified him,” for there has never been an age when men did not crucify the Son of God afresh. But if error prevail for a time and grow old in the world, truth will triumph at the last, and then we shall see the Son of God as he is. Lifted up he shall draw all nations unto him. Then will men understand the Word of Jesus, which shall not pass away. Then shall we see and love the divine life that he lived. How vast has his influence been. How his spirit wrought in the hearts of his disciples, rude, selfish, bigoted, as at first they were. How it has wrought in the world. His words judge the nations. The wisest son of man has not measured their height. They speak to what is deepest in profound men; what is holiest in good men; what is divinest in religious men. They kindle anew the flame of devotion in hearts long cold. They are Spirit and Life. His truth was not derived from Moses and Solomon; but the light of God shone through him, not colored, not bent aside. His life is the perpetual rebuke of all time since. It condemns ancient civilization; it condemns modern civilization. Wise men we have since had, and good men; but this Galilean youth strode before the world whole thousands of years, — so much of Divinity was in him. His words solve the questions of the present age. In him the Godlike and the Human met and embraced, and a divine Life was born. Measure him by the world's greatest sons; — how poor they are. Try him by the best of men, — how little and low hey appear. Exalt him as much as we may, we shall yet, perhaps, come short of the mark. But still was he not our brother; the son of man, as we are; the Son of God, like ourselves? His excellence, was it not human excellence? His wisdom, love, piety, — sweet and celestial as they were, — are they not what we also may attain? In him, as in mirror, we may see the image of God, and go on from glory to glory, till we are changed into the same image, led by the spirit which enlightens the humble. Viewed in this way, how beautiful is the life of Jesus. Heaven has come down to earth, or rather, earth has become heaven. The Son of God, come of age, has taken possession of his birthright. The brightest revelation is this, — of what is possible for all men, if not now at least hereafter. How pure is his spirit, and how HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

encouraging its words. “Lowly sufferer,” he seems to say, “see how I bore the cross. Patient laborer, be strong; see how I toiled for the unthankful and the merciless. Mistaken sinner, see of what thou art capable. Rise up, and be blessed.” But if, as some early Christians began to do, you take a heathen view, and make him a God, the Son of God in a peculiar and exclusive sense — much of the significance of his character is gone. His virtue has no merit; his love no feeling; his cross no burthen; his agony no pain. His death is an illusion; his resurrection but a show. For if he were not a man, but a god, what are all these thing; what his words, his life, his excellence of achievement? — It is all nothing, weighed against the illimitable greatness of Him who created the worlds and fills up all time and space! Then his resignation is no lesson; his life not model; his death no triumph to you or me, — who are not gods, but mortal men, that know not what a day shall bring forth, and walk by faith “dim sounding on our perilous way.” Alas, we have despaired of man, and so cut off his brightest hope. In respect of doctrines as well as forms we see all is transitory. “Every where is instability and insecurity.” Opinions have changed most, on points deemed most vital. Could we bring up a Christian teacher of any age, — from the sixth to the fourteenth century, for example, though a teacher of undoubted soundness of faith, whose word filled the churches of Christendom, clergymen would scarce allow him to kneel at their altar, or sit down with them at the Lord's table. His notions of Christianity could not be expressed in our forms; nor could our notions be made intelligible to his ears. The questions of his age, those on which Christianity was thought to depend, — questions which perplexed and divided the subtle doctors, — are no questions to us. The quarrels which then drove wise men mad, now only excite a smile or a tear, as we are disposed to laugh or weep at the frailty of man. We have other straws of our own to quarrel for. Their ancient books of devotion do not speak to us; their theology is a vain word. To look back but a short period, the theological speculations of our fathers during the last two centuries; their “practical divinity;” even the sermons written by genius and piety, are, with rare exceptions, found unreadable; such a change is there in the doctrines. Now who shall tell us that the change is to stop here? That this sect or that, or even all sects united, have exhausted the river of life, and received it all in their canonized urns, so that we need draw no more out of the eternal well, but get refreshment nearer at hand? Who shall tell us that another age will not smile at our doctrines, disputes, and unchristian quarrels about Christianity, and make wide the mouth at men who walked brave in orthodox raiment, delighting to blacken the names of heretics, and repeat again the old charge “he hath blasphemed”? Who shall tell us they will not weep at the folly of all such as fancied Truth shone only into the contracted nook of their school, or sect, or coterie? Men of other times may look down equally on the heresy- hunters, and men hunted for heresy, and wonder at both. The men of all ages before us, were quite as confident as we, that their opinion was truth; that their notion was Christianity and the whole thereof. The men who lit the fires of persecution, from the first martyr to Christian bigotry down to the last murder of the innocents, had no doubt their opinion was divine. The contest about transubstantiation, and the immaculate purity of the Hebrew and Greek texts of the scriptures, was waged with a bitterness unequalled in these days. The Protestant smiles at one, the Catholic at the other, and men of sense wonder at both. It might teach us a lesson, at least of forbearance. No doubt, an age will come, in which ours shall be reckoned a period of darkness — like the sixth century — when men groped for the wall but stumbled and fell, because they trust a transient notion, not an eternal truth; an age when temples were full of idols, set up by human folly, an age in which Christian light had scarce begun to shine into men's hearts. But while this changed goes on; while one generation of opinions passes away, and another rises up; Christianity itself, that pure Religion, which exists eternal in the constitution of the soul and the mind of God, is always the same. The Word that was before Abraham, in the very beginning, will not change, for that word is Truth. From this Jesus subtracted nothing; to this he added nothing. But he came to reveal it as the secret of God, that cunning men could not understand, but which filled the souls of men meek and lowly of heart. This truth we owe to God; the revelation thereof to Jesus, our elder brother, God's chosen son. To turn away from the disputes of the Catholics and the Protestants, of the Unitarian and the Trinitarian, of Old School and New School, and come to the plain words of Jesus of Nazareth, Christianity is a simple thing; very simple. It is absolute, pure Morality; absolute, pure Religion; the love of man; the love of God acting without let or hindrance. The only creed it lays down is the great truth which springs up spontaneous in the holy heart — there is a God. Its watchword is, be perfect as your Father in Heaven. The only form it demands is a divine life; doing the best thing, in the best way, from the highest motives; perfect obedience to the great law of God. Its sanction is the voice of God in your heart; the perpetual presence of Him, who made us and the stars over our head; Christ and the Father abiding within us. All this is very simple; a little child can understand it; very beautiful, the loftiest mind can find nothing so lovely. Try it by Reason, Conscience, and Faith — things highest in man's nature — we see no redundance, we feel no deficiency. Examine the particular duties it enjoins; humility, reverence, sobriety, gentleness, charity, forgiveness, fortitude, resignation, faith, and active love; try the whole extent of Christianity so well summed up in the command, “Thou shalt love he Lord they God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind — thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself;” and is there HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

anything therein that can perish? No, the very opponents of Christianity have rarely found fault with the teachings of Jesus. The end of Christianity seems to be to make all men one with God as Christ was one with Him; to bring them to such a state of obedience and goodness, that we shall think divine thoughts and feel divine sentiments, and so keep the law of God by living a life of truth and love. Its means are Purity and Prayer; getting strength from God and using it for our fellow men as well as ourselves. It allows perfect freedom. It does not demand all men to think alike, but to think uprightly, and get as near as possible to the truth; not all men to live alike, but to live holy, and get as near as possible to a life perfectly divine. Christ set up no pillars of Hercules, beyond which men must not sail the sea in quest of truth. He says, “I have many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now ... Greater works than these shall ye do.” Christianity lays no rude hand on the sacred peculiarity of individual genius and character. But there is no Christian sect which does not fetter a man. It would make all men think alike, or smother their conviction in silence. Were all men Quakers or Catholics, Unitarians or Baptists, there would be much less diversity of thought, character, and life; less of truth active in the world than now. But Christianity gives us the largest liberty of the sons of God, and were all men Christians after the fashion of Jesus, this variety would be a thousand times greater than now; for Christianity is not a system of doctrines, but rather a method of attaining oneness with God. It demands, therefore, a good life of piety within, of purity without, and gives the promise that who does God's `will, shall know of God's doctrine. In an age of corruption, as all ages are, Jesus stood and looked up to God. There was nothing between him and the Father of all; no old word, be it of Moses or Esaias, of a living Rabbi or Sanhedrin of Rabbis; no sin or perverseness of the finite will. As the result of this virgin purity of soul and perfect obedience, the light of God shone down into the very deeps of his soul, bringing all of the Godhead which flesh can receive. He would have us do the same; worship with nothing between us and God; act, think feel, live, in perfect obedience to Him; and we never are Christians as he was the Christ, until we worship, as Jesus did, with no mediator, with nothing between us and the Father of all. He felt that God's word was in him; that he was one with God. He told what he saw — the Truth; he lived what he felt — a life of Love. The truth he brought to light must have been always the same before the eyes of all-seeing God, nineteen centuries before Christ, or nineteen centuries after him. A life supported by the principle and quickened by the sentiment of religion, if true to both, is always the same thing in Nazareth or New England. Now that divine man received these truths from God; was illumined more clearly by “the light that lighteneth every man”; combined or involved all the truths of Religion and Morality in his doctrine, and made them manifest in his life. Then his words and example passed into the world, and can no more perish than the stars be wiped out of the sky. The truths he taught; his doctrines respecting man and God; the relation between man and man, and man and God, with the duties that grow out of that relation, are always the same, and can never change till man ceases to be man, and creation vanishes into nothing. No; forms and opinions change and perish; but the Word of God cannot fail. The form Religion takes, the doctrines wherewith she is girded, can never be the same in any two centuries or two men; for since the sum of religious doctrines is both the result and the measure of a man's total growth in wisdom, virtue, and piety, and since men will always differ in these respects, so religious doctrines and forms will always differ, always be transient, as Christianity goes forth and scatters the seed she bears in her hand. But the Christianity holy men feel in the heart — the Christ that is born within us, is always the same thing to each soul that feels it. This differs only in degree and not in kind, from age to age and man to man; there is something in Christianity which no sect from the “Ebionites” to the “latter day saints” ever entirely overlooked. This is that common Christianity, which burns in the hearts of pious men. Real Christianity gives men new life. It is the growth and perfect action of the Holy Spirit God puts into the sons of men. It makes us outgrow any form, or any system of doctrines we have devised, and approach still closer to the truth. It would lead us to take what help we can find. It would make the BIBLE our servant, not our master. It would teach us to profit by the wisdom and piety of David and Solomon; but not to sin their sins, nor bow to their idols. it would make us revere the holy words spoken by “godly men of old,” but revere still more the word of God spoken through Conscience, Reason, and Faith, as the holiest of all. It would not make Christ the despot of the soul, but the brother of all men. It would not tell us, that even he had exhausted the fulness of God, so that He could create none greater; for with Him “all things are possible,” and neither Old Testament or New Testament ever hints that creation exhausts the creator. Still less would it tell us, the wisdom, the piety the love, the manly excellence of Jesus, was the result of miraculous agency alone, but, that it was won, like the excellence of humbler men, by faithful obedience to Him who gave his Son such ample heritage. It would point to him as our brother, who went before, like he good shepherd, to charm us with the music of his words, and with he beauty of his life to tempt us up the steeps of mortal toil, within the gate of Heaven. It would have us make the kingdom of God on earth, and enter more fittingly the kingdom on high. It would lead us to form Christ in the heart, on which Paul laid such stress, and work out our salvation by this. For it is not so much by the Christ who lived so blameless and beautiful eighteen centuries ago, that we are saved directly, but by the Christ we form in our hearts and live out in our daily life, that we save ourselves, God working with us, both to will and HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

to do. Compare the simpleness of Christianity, as Christ sets it forth on the Mount, with what is sometimes taught and accepted in that honored name; and what a difference. One is of God; one is of man. There is something in Christianity which sects have not reached; something that will not be won, we fear, by theological battles, or the quarrels of pious men; still we may rejoice that Christ is preached in any way. The Christianity of sects, of the pulpit, of society, is ephemeral — a transitory fly. It will pass off and be forgot. Some new form will take its place, suited to the aspect of the changing times. Each will represent something of the truth; but no one the whole. It seems the whole race of man is needed to do justice to the whole of truth, as “the whole church, to preach the whole gospel.” Truth is entrusted for the time to a perishable Ark of human contrivance. Though often shipwrecked, she always comes safe to land, and is not changed by her mishap. That pure ideal Religion which Jesus saw on the mount of his vision, and lived out in the lowly life of a Galilean peasant; which transforms his cross into an emblem of all that is holiest on earth; which makes sacred the ground he trod, and is dearest to the best of men, most true to what is truest in them, cannot pass away. Let men improve never so far in civilization, or soar never so high on the wings of Religion and Love, they can never outgo the flight of truth and Christianity. It will always be above them. It is as if we were to fly towards a Star, which becomes larger and more bright the nearer we approach, till we enter and are absorbed in its glory. If we look carelessly on the ages that have gone by, or only on the surfaces of things as they come up before us, there is reason to fear; for we confound the truth of God with the word of man. So at a distance the cloud and the mountain seem the same. When the drift changes with he passing wind, an unpractised eye might fancy the mountain itself was gone. But the mountain stands to catch the clouds, to win the blessing they bear, and send it down to moisten the fainting violet, to form streams which gladden valley and meadow, and sweep on at last to the sea in deep channels, laden with fleets. Thus the forms of the church, the creeds of sects, the conflicting opinions of teachers, float round the sides of the Christian mount, and swell and toss, and rise and fall, and dart their lightening, and roll their thunder, but they neither make nor mar the mount itself. Is loft summit far transcends the tumult; knows nothing of the storm which roars below; but burns with rosy light at evening and at morn; gleams in the splendors of the midday sun; sees his light when the long shadows creep over plain and moorland, and all night long has its head in the heavens, and is visited by troops of stars which never set, nor veil their face to ought so pure and high. Let then the Transient pass, fleet as it will, and may God send us some new manifestation of the Christian faith, that shall stir men's hearts as they were never stirred; some new Word, which shall teach us what we are, and renew us all in the image of God; some better life, that shall fulfill the Hebrew prophecy, and pour out the spirit of God on young men and maidens, and old men and children; which shall realize the Word of Christ, and give us the comforter, who shall reveal all needed things. There are Simeons enough in the cottages and Churches of New England, plain men and pious women, who wait for the Consolation, and would die in gladness, if their expiring breath could stir quicker the wings that bear him on. There are men enough, sick and “bowed down, in no wise able to lift up themselves,” who would be healed could they kiss the hand of their Saviour, or touch but the hem of his garment; men who look up and are not fed, because they ask bread from heaven and water from the rock, not traditions or fancies, Jewish or heathen, or new or old; men enough who, with throbbing hearts, pray for the spirit of healing to come upon the waters, which other than angels have long kept in trouble; men enough who have lain long time sick of theology, nothing bettered by man physicians, and are now dead, too dead to bury their dead, who would come out of their graves at the glad tidings. God send us a real religious life, which shall pluck blindness out of the heart, and make us better fathers, mothers, and children; a religious life, that shall go with us where we go, and make every home the house of God, every act acceptable as a pray. We would work for this, and pray for it, though we wept tears of blood while we prayed. Such, then, is the Transient, and such the Permanent in Christianity. What is of absolute value never changes; we may cling round it and grow to it forever. No one can say his notions shall stand. But we may all say, the Truth, as it is in Jesus, shall never pass away. Yet there are lays some even religious men, who do not see the permanent element, so they rely on the fleeting; and, what is also an evil, condemn others for not doing the same. They mistake a defence of the Truth for an attack upon the Holy of Holiest; the removal of a theological error for the destruction of all religion. Already men of the same sect eye one another with suspicion, and lowering brows that indicate a storm, and, like children who have fallen out in their play, call hard names. Now, as always, there is a collision between these two elements. The question puts itself to each man, “Will you cling to what is perishing, or embrace what is eternal?” This question each must answer for himself. My friends, if you receive the notions about Christianity, which chance to be current in your sect or church, solely because they are current, and thus accept the commandment of men instead of God's truth — there will always be enough to commend you for soundness of judgment, prudence, and good sense; enough to call you Christian for that reason. But it this is all you rely upon, alas for you. The ground will shake under your feet if you attempt to walk uprightly and like men. You will be afraid of very new opinion, lets it shake down your church; you will fear “lest if a fox go up, he will break down your stone wall.” The smallest contradiction in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

New Testament or Old Testament; the least disagreement between the Law and the Gospel; any mistake of the Apostles, will weaken your faith. It shall be with you “as when a hungry man dreameth, and behold, he eateth; but he awaketh, and his soul is empty. If, on the other hand, you take the true Word of God, and live out this, nothing shall harm you. Men may mock, but their mouthfuls of wind shall be blown back upon their own face. If the master of the house were called Beelzebub, it matters little what name is given to the household. The name Christian, given in mockery, will last till the world go down. He that loves God and man, and lives in accordance with that love, needs not fear what man can do to him. His Religion comes to him in his hour of sadness, it lays its hand on him when he has fallen among thieves, and raise him up, heals, and comforts him. If he is crucified, he shall rise again. My friends, you this day receive, with the usual formalities, the man you have chosen to speak to you on the highest of all themes, — what concerns your life on earth; you lie in heave. It is a work for which no talents, no prayerful diligence, no piety, is too great; an office, that would dignify angels, if worthily filled. In the eyes of this man be holden, that he cannot discern between the perishing and the true, you will hold him guiltless of all sin in this; but look for light where it can be had; for his office will then be of no use to you. But if he sees the truth, and is scared by worldly motives, and will not tell it, alas for him! If the watchman see the foe coming and blow not the trumpet, the blood of the innocent is on him. Your own conduct and character, the treatment you offer this young man, will is some measure influence him. The hearer affects the speaker. There were some places where even Jesus “did not many mighty works, because of their unbelief.” Worldly motives — not seeming such — sometimes deter good men from their duty. Gold and Ease have, before now, enervated noble minds. Daily contact with men of low aims takes down the ideal of life, which a bright spirit casts out of itself. Terror has sometimes palsied tongues that, before, were eloquent as the voice of Persuasion. But thereby Truth is not holden. She speaks in a thousand tongues, and with a pen of iron graves her sentence on the rock forever. You may prevent the freedom of speech in this pulpit if you will. You may hire you servants to preach as you bid; to spare your vices and flatter your follies; to prophecy smooth things, and say, It is peace, when there is no peace. Yet is so doing you weaken and enthrall yourselves. And alas for that man who consents to think one thing in his closet, and preach another in his pulpit. God shall judge him in his mercy not man in his wrath. But over his study and over his pulpit might be writ — EMPTINESS; on his canonical robes, on his forehead and right hand — DECEIT, DECEIT. But, on the other hand, you may encourage you brother to tell you the truth. Your affection will then be precious to him; your prayers of great price. Every evidence of your sympathy will go to baptize him anew to Holiness and Truth. You will then have his best words, his brightest thoughts, and his most hearty prayers. He may grow old in your service, blessing and blest. He will have “The sweetest, best of consolation, The thought, that he has given, To serve the cause of Heaven, The freshness of his early inspiration.”

Choose as you will choose; but weal or woe depends upon your choice.

Lecture Season: The Reverend Theodore Parker delivered a series of five lectures entitled “Discourses on Religion” at the Masonic Temple in Boston. He would offer them as a volume, A DISCOURSE OF MATTERS PERTAINING TO RELIGION. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1842

Henry Thoreau, in charge of selecting speakers for the Concord Lyceum, received $109.20 instead of the customary $125.00, and chose to spend exactly $100.00 and return exactly $9.20 in order to remind the town’s citizens of their frugality. The historian George Bancroft received $10.00 for his lecture, and others received

this sum which was the highest that Thoreau would consent to pay, but some he was able to persuade to lecture for $8.00 and the Reverend Theodore Parker was willing to come for $3.00. In addition, Horace Greeley,

Wendell Phillips, Waldo Emerson, and he himself lectured gratis. However, Thoreau found that he had stirred up a noisy controversy by inviting the abolitionist Phillips to speak freely –even for free– for some inhabitants of Concord believed more in the achieving of concord through silence, than in the free discussion of ideas with which they happened to disagree. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE

October 26, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson to his JOURNAL:

Boston is not quite a mean place since in walking yesterday in the street I met George Bancroft, Horatio Greenough, Samson Reed, Theodore Parker Sam Ward, George Bradford, & had a little talk with each of them.

SAMUEL GRAY WARD GEORGE PARTRIDGE BRADFORD

The Spirit of the Times (page 2, column 1) reported that Francis Joseph Grund had been appointed “weigh master” at the Philadelphia Custom House. Yet another political plum, courtesy of the Whig party!8

Not Civil War “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Oct 26th, 1842: The maples stripped of their leaves so early, stand like a wreathe of smoke along the edge of the meadow. Kindness which has so good a reputation elsewhere, can least of all consist with friendship– No such affront can be offered as a conscious good will — a friendliness which is not a necessity of the friends’ character. Its foundations must be surer than those of the globe itself — secure from whim or passion, and the laws of truth and magnanimity have their root and abiding place in our friend. He seeking a friend walks on and on through the crowds of men as if in a straight line without stopping.

8. Since Edgar Allan Poe and Grund knew one another, it seems plausible that when Poe sought an appointment in the Philadelphia Custom House, he would of course have solicited a recommendation by Grund. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1843

January 6, Friday: According to a schedule for the Concord Lyceum put out by its curators, there was to be “a Lecture HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1 before this Institution every Wednesday Evening, at 7 /2 o’clock precisely,” all being invited to attend:

Concord Lyceum. THERE is a Lecture before this Institution every 1 Wednesday Evening, at 7 /2 o’clock precisely. The course for the present season, as far as ascertained, is as follows: Nov. 18, (Introductory) R.W. Emerson, Concord. " 30, R.W. Emerson, Concord. Dec. 7, James Richardson, Cambridge. " 14, James Freeman Clarke, Boston. " 19, (Extra lecture) Horace Greeley, N. York. " 21, Wendell Phillips, Boston. " 28, O.A. Brownson, Chelsea. Jan. 4, Charles Lane, England. " 11, M.B. Prichard, Concord " 18, John S. Keyes, Cambridge. " 25, J.F. Barrett, Boston. Feb. 1, C.T. Jackson, " " 8, H.D. Thoreau, Concord. " 15, Mr. Knapp, Lexington. " 22, Edward Jarvis, Louisville. March 1, E.H. Chapin, Charlestown. " 8, Charles Bowers, Concord. " 16, (Thursday) Henry Giles, Ireland. " 22, Theodore Parker, Roxbury. " 29, E.W. Bull, Concord. " 30, Extra Lecture, R.W. Emerson, Concord. April 5, George Bancroft, Boston. " 12, Charles Lane, England. " 19, Reverend Barzillai Frost, Concord, and Conversation. " 26, R.W. Emerson, Concord. All are invited to attend. By order of the Curators. January 6, 1843. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

September: The Reverend Theodore Parker visited Lydia Maria Child in New-York while on his way to Europe. (Parker, as a schoolteacher and divinity student in the early 1830s, had been a frequent visitor at the Reverend Convers Francis’s parsonage in Watertown, Massachusetts, for it had been Child’s brother who had been preparing him for admission to the Harvard Divinity School.) Parker’s version of Transcendentalism was the version which Child was prepared to credit.

Fall: The Reverend Theodore Parker, pressed to resign his pastorate in West Roxbury, Massachusetts in view of the scandal over the heretical opinions revealed during his lectures at the Masonic Temple in Boston and proclaimed in A DISCOURSE OF MATTERS PERTAINING TO RELIGION, was awarded as his consolation prize a year’s tour in Europe. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1844

March 4, Monday: The Reverend Theodore Parker, touring the catacombs of Rome, collected some bones belonging to early Christians, to bring home to Boston. (Quite an honor I’m sure. Too bad they weren’t the bones of Peter himself, as this would have provided the Boston Music Hall a good deal of additional cachet. :-)

March 7, Thursday: The Reverend Theodore Parker was impressed by the structure in which he supposed the emperor Constantine the Great’s 384 bishops had 1st assembled upon the surrender of the Roman empire to the universal church.9

Christ Jesus works for me or vice versa.

“History teaches us that religion and patriotism have always gone hand in hand.” — General Douglas MacArthur

As soon as Benjamin Robert Haydon had succeeded in selling one of his paintings, his practice was to set about generating more copies of the same thing for sale. He had sold one of his paintings of Napoléon musing in the sunset on the cliff at St. Helena to the King of Hanover, so he entered in his diary: I have painted nineteen Napoleons. Thirteen Musings

9. (It seems that the Reverend Parker was crediting a now-exposed 8th-Century forgery — but that’s not the point here.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

at S. Helena, and six other Musings. By heavens! how many more?

May 18, Saturday: An announcement of regret for the closing of THE DIAL appeared in the New-York Daily Tribune, noting that that journal had been “sustained for three years by the free-will contributions of” Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Ellery Channing, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Charles Lane, Charles A. Dana, Henry Thoreau, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, “and others of the deepest thinkers and most advanced minds of our country.”10

Here then are the accumulated issues of this publication, from midyear 1840 to midyear 1844: THE DIAL, 1840 THE DIAL, 1841 THE DIAL, 1842 THE DIAL, 1843 THE DIAL, 1844

10. There would be a successor magazine, and one of the first principles of this successor magazine would be that no contribution would ever be accepted from Thoreau — his participation would be ruled out categorically from the get-go. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1845

The Reverend Theodore Parker’s supporters founded the 28th Congregational Society of Boston and installed him as minister.

By this point Charles King Whipple had joined the Reverend Parker’s congregation. “A Scotch lass ushers you into the second story front chamber, which is the spacious workshop of the world maker.” Here he sits a long time together, with many books and papers about him; many new books, we have been told, on the upper shelves, uncut, with the “author’s respects” in them; in late months, with many manuscripts in an old English hand, and innumerable pamphlets, from the public libraries, relating to the Cromwellian period; now, perhaps, looking out into the street on brick and pavement, for a change, and now upon some rod of grass ground in the rear; or, perchance, he steps over to the British Museum, and makes that his studio for the time. This is the fore part of the day; that is the way with literary men commonly; and then in the afternoon, we presume, he takes a short run of a mile or so through the suburbs out into the country; we think he would run that way, though so short a trip might not take him to very sylvan or rustic places. In the meanwhile, people are calling to see him, from various quarters, very few worthy of being seen by him, “distinguished travellers from America,” not a few, to all and sundry of whom he gives freely of his yet unwritten rich and flashing soliloquy, in exchange for whatever they may have to offer; speaking his English, as they say, with a “broad Scotch accent,” talking, to their astonishment and to ours, very much as he writes, a sort of Carlylese, his discourse “coming to its climaxes, ever and anon, in long, deep, chest-shaking bursts of laughter.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

RECORDS OF THE 28TH CONGREGATIONAL SOCIETY OF BOSTON

AT THE ANDOVER-HARVARD THEOLOGICAL LIBRARY OF HARVARD

DIVINITY SCHOOL

Call No.: bMS 7. Title: Twenty-eighth Congregational Society (Boston, Mass.) Records 1845-1889 Repository: Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School 45 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138-1911

Quantity: 1 c.f. (3 boxes) Abstract: Financial records of the Parker Memorial Meeting House, 1873-1887; correspondence; printed matter and manuscripts relating to the founding of the society; membership lists; society constitution; miscellaneous records.

Preferred Citation: Twenty-eighth Congregational Society, Boston, Mass. Records (bMS 7); Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School. Processing Information: Processed by: Douglas Stange 1966 Acquisition Information: Gift of the Unitarian Universalist Association Restrictions on access: Unrestricted Ministers of the 28th Congregational Society: • 1846-1860, Theodore Parker • 1865-1867, David Atwood Wasson • 1867-1868, Samuel Robert Calthorp • 1868-1871, James Vila Blake Ministers of the Parker Memorial: • 1883-1889, William Gustavus Babcock • 1900-1901, John McDowell • 1901-1905, Charles William Wendte.

The church was begun in 1845; it met in the Melodeon. The Theodore Parker Memorial Church (founded 1873) was considered a continuation of this Society. A new meeting house, called the Appleton Street Chapel, was built at the corner of Berkeley and Appleton Streets. The Parker Memorial merged with the Bulfinch Street Chapel Society.

• bMS 7/1 (1) Financial Records of the Parker Memorial Meeting House, 1873-1887. • bMS 7/1 (2) Correspondence - John Albion Andrew, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn [Including a published poem], William Francis Channing, Samuel Joseph May, William Lloyd Garrison, George Ripley, Wendell Phillips, James Freeman Clarke, Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, et al., 1857-1859. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

• bMS 7/1 (3) Printed matter and MSS relating to the founding of the 28th Congregational Society and later the Parker Memorial; financial material, including subscription lists; and correspondence related to ministerial changes at the 28th Congregational Society, 1865-1868. • bMS 7/1 (4) Financial Receipts, 1862-1866. • bMS 7/1 (5) “Revd. Thdo. Parker’s Society at Melodeon,” membership list; and Correspondence relating to practical business of the congregation, 1846-1861. • bMS 7/1 (6) Practical affairs of the congregation (music, building, etc.) - correspondence, 1845-1869; and Letter from the London Humanistic Association, 1854. • bMS 7/1 (7) Financial papers, including treasurer’s reports, 1845-1871. • bMS 7/1 (8) Resolutions of meeting leading to foundation of the 28th Congregational Society, 1845; some newspaper clippings; and membership lists. • bMS 7/1 (9) Membership List [?], n.d. • bMS 7/1 (10) “Records of the Standing Committee of the 28th Congregational Society,” 1845-1889. • bMS 7/2 (1) Constitution of the 28th Congregational Society and registry of names for 1858-1882. • bMS 7/2 (2) Records of the Fraternity of the 28th Congregational Society, 1858-1860. • bMS 7/2 (3) Records of the Fraternity of the 28th Congregational Society, 1860-1864. • bMS 7/2 (4) Records of the Fraternity of the 28th Congregational Society, 1864-1869. • bMS 7/3 (1) Records of the Fraternity of the 28th Congregational Society, 1869-1875. • bMS 7/3 (2) “The Proprietors of the Parker Meeting House,” 1872-1889. • bMS 7/3 (3) “The Fraternity Independent,” 1859-1861. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Summer: Horace Mann, Sr. issued his counter-counter-counter-counterpublication titled ANSWER TO THE “REJOINDER” OF TWENTY-NINE SCHOOLMASTERS, PART OF THE “THIRTY-ONE” WHO PUBLISHED “REMARKS” ON THE SEVENTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BOARD OF EDUCATION, in 124 pages. HORACE’S 124 PAGES

From the Messerli biography of Mr. Mann, we learn that:

[D]espite claims that [Horace] Mann laid the basis for a philosophy of public education, ... there is a relative dearth of philosophical content in his writings.... Philosophical discussions only impeded results and besides, they carried the troublesome implication that he just might be wrong. Those who opposed him did so because they lacked moral rectitude and honest motives.... Desperately, Mann struggled for the opportunity to demonstrate his sincerity to himself so that he might know that he was right and his opponents therefore wrong. Developing a bigotry of purpose, he worked toward his self-conceived goal ... one cannot escape the monomania at work in Mann, and its corollary, the total absence of self-doubt among the reformers. In fact, among them one finds the same hypercertainty, narrowness of purpose, and adamancy which Mann utterly detested in his opponents.... He knew what society needed and how to accomplish it.... Thoughts of his own fallibility were anathema to him.... In Mann, there was what Herman Melville described in Ahab, “an infirmity of the firmest fortitude.”

The Manns were spending their summer in Concord, boarding where they could overlook the river and watch the sunsets for $10.00 the week. When Mann found out that the Reverends Theodore Parker and Waldo Emerson were scheduled to speak at the inauguration of one of his normal schools, he barfed. It was all right to have such personages as friends and acquaintances, but not as spokespersons for his public school system: it WILL NOT DO.... [O]ne of these men may do, but not both — better neither.” Mann, who was never anything other than confrontational and self-righteous, was by his own lights seeking to avoid controversy and get on with the grand job of storming Heaven through the shoving of rote memorization at little children. Instead of these controversial speakers, he obtained the Reverend Heman Humphrey, an orthodox type. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

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 wistfully to a patriotic past that they imagined to have been peaceful, but Wright’s specialty was change, the future, the HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

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.

Sometime early in this year the Reverend Theodore Parker moved to Boston to preach.

John Adolphus Etzler had designed some floating islands on which people could live, and C.F. Stollmeyer, along with other members of the Tropical Emigration Society in Trinidad, had built a working model of bamboo and balsa. Unfortunately, the design for these islands relied upon a unique sail system that could not be fabricated in the tropics and would need to be shipped from England, and unfortunately, Etzler asked the emigration society’s sister organization, the Venezuelan Transit Company for some £3,000 to cover this expense. (The money would not be forthcoming and the inventor, who always had been fundamentally motivated by profit, would depart. The settlement in Trinidad would disappear into the background population of the place –a shipload of escapees would be lost at sea –and the settlement in Guinimita would be destroyed by fever and flooding.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

July: At the convention of the New England Anti-Slavery Society in Boston, the Reverends William Henry Channing and Theodore Parker joined in a pledge to oppose the new war against Mexico “at all hazards, and at every sacrifice, to refuse enlistment, contribution, aid and countenance.” Helen Louisa Thoreau and Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau were also at this convention, and signed this pledge.11

September 24, Thursday: From records of the Donner party kept by Hiram Miller and James F. Reed, it would appear that they made camp near the entrance to the canyon of the South Fork of the Humboldt River just downstream from Twin Bridges: “Thu 24 this day North west we mad down Sinking Creek valley about 10 and encamped at the foot of a Red earth hill good grass and water wood plenty in the Vallies Such as sage greace wood & ceder &C—.”

There was a convention in Faneuil Hall to protest against returning “Joe” to New Orleans as a fugitive slave. John Quincy Adams presided. Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, the Reverend Theodore Parker, and Samuel Gridley Howe spoke. Waldo Emerson sent a letter: It is high time our bad wealth came to an end. I am sure I shall cheerfully take my share in the ruin of such a prosperity, and shall very willingly turn to the mountains to chop wood, and seek to find for myself and my children labors compatible with freedom and honor.

At some point toward the end of this month Navajo warriors raided Socorro, New Mexico. General Kearny, passing nearby on his way to California after his recent conquest of Santa Fe, would learn of the raid and send a note to Colonel Alexander William Doniphan, his 2d in command in Santa Fe, ordering a regiment of soldiers into Navajo territory to one way or another secure a peace treaty with these natives.

THE AGE OF REASON WAS A PIPE DREAM, OR AT BEST A PROJECT. ACTUALLY, HUMANS HAVE ALMOST NO CLUE WHAT THEY ARE DOING,

11. Within the month, Helen Louisa Thoreau’s and Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau’s surviving brother Henry David Thoreau would not only refuse to pay his past-due poll tax but also suggest that he be imprisoned. WAR ON MEXICO HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Colonel Alexander William Doniphan HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

WHILE CREDITING THEIR OWN LIES ABOUT WHY THEY ARE DOING IT.

Not Civil War “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1847

March 14, Sunday: At the Alder Creek camp, George Donner was dying from infection in the hand he injured months before. His wife Tamzene, though in comparatively good health, refuses to leave him; she sends her three little girls on without her. The Third Relief departs with Frances, Georgia, and Eliza Donner and Simon Murphy. Elizabeth and Lewis Donner have died. Samuel Donner, Levinah Murphy, and Louis Keseberg are too weak to travel. Jean-Baptiste Trudeau and rescuer Nicholas Clark are left behind to care for the Donners, but abandon them to catch up with the Relief.

The Reverend Theodore Parker wrote to Waldo Emerson recommending the creation of a a successor journal to THE DIAL that would engage the real political events of the era. MASSACHUSETTS QUARTERLY REVIEW

April 14, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson invited 13 of his friends to his home to discuss the possibility of a successor journal to THE DIAL, a new quarterly review to address the major political, theological, and literary topics of the era. Bronson Alcott, Alfred W. Arrington of Texas, George Partridge Bradford, James Elliot Cabot, the Reverend William Henry Channing, the Reverend John Weiss, the Reverend James Freeman Clarke, the Reverend John Sullivan Dwight, the Reverend Theodore Parker, the Reverend Caleb Stetson, Thomas T. Stone, Charles Sumner, and Henry Thoreau were on the list. The Reverend Parker stated that his concept of this journal was that it was to be “the DIAL with a beard.” Although Thoreau wanted it explained to him why the large number of existing journals was inadequate so that they had to create yet another one, Emerson agreed to write the address to the public to be included in the 1st issue, and the Reverend Parker would start the Massachusetts Quarterly Review and put out three volumes.12

12. The Reverend Theodore Parker made a triage list in which he pre-evaluated his potential contributors: Certain and Valuable Valuable but not Certain Certain but not Valuable

He placed Thoreau’s name in the unfortunate category, “Certain but not Valuable,” but it appears the Reverend was in error for we don’t know Thoreau ever offered a manuscript to such a man — despite the fact that Waldo tried to coax him to give the Reverend Parker some help. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

May 24, Monday: John Brown, Jr. wrote from the Kansas Territory: “I tell you the truth when I say that while the interest of despotism has secured to its cause hundreds of thousands of the meanest and most desperate of men, armed to the teeth with Revolvers, Bowie Knives, Rifles & Cannon —while they are not only thoroughly organized, but under pay from Slaveholders— the friends of freedom are not one fourth of them half armed, and as to military organization among them it no where exists in this territory unless they have recently done something in Lawrence. The result of this is that the people here exhibit the most abject and cowardly spirit, whenever their dearest rights are invaded and trampled down by the lawless band of miscreants which Missouri has ready at a moment’s call to pour in upon them. This is the general effect upon the people here so far as I have noticed; there are a few, and but a few exceptions…. Now the remedy we propose is that the Anti- Slavery portion of the inhabitants should immediately, thoroughly arm, and organize themselves in military companies. In order to effect this, some persons must begin and lead off in the matter.” My goodness, is someone going to volunteer to lead such a virtuous army of white men?13

October: The Reverend Theodore Parker, a definite Caucasian, was holding forth at about this time that14

The Caucasian differs from all other races: he is humane, he is civilized, and progresses. He conquers with his head as well as with his hand.... The Caucasian has been often master of the other races — never their slave. He has carried his religion to other races, but never taken theirs. In history, all religions are of Caucasian origin.... Republics are Caucasian. All the great sciences are of Caucasian origin; all inventions are Caucasian; ... all the great poets are of Caucasian origin.

13. As an enterprise in the spirit of “doing well by doing good,” the New England Emigrant Aid Company had been formed by Eli Thayer, an entrepreneur from Worcester, to purchase land in the new territory known as Kansas and encourage the right sort of black-despising poor white Americans to settle there by providing information, cheapening transportation, and setting up saw mills and flour mills to give work and incomes to such “decent antislavery” homesteaders. The idea was to send entire communities in one fell swoop, increasing the value of the properties owned by this company. If political control over this territory could be achieved, they would be able to set up a real Aryan Nation, from which slaves would of course be excluded because they were enslaved, and from which free blacks Americans would of course be excluded because as human material they were indelibly inferior. The large bulk of the investment capital came from the industrialist Amos Lawrence, but Charles Francis Adams, Sr. subscribed to the tune of $25,000, and Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, on the board of directors, invested what he could. The Reverend Theodore Parker would become one of their shills, explaining that America need not have race problems. SECRET “SIX” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

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

October: During the late 1840s, which is to say, at about this point in time, we know that William Lloyd Garrison began to attend the Reverend Theodore Parker’s independent Unitarian church group in downtown Boston. –Which would suggest that, although since he was such an abolitionist who had black friends he might or might not have been a little bit disturbed at the Reverend Parker’s racism, he wasn’t all that disturbed by it!

14. You keep wanting this guy to stop, it is so embarrassing to be told at such great length how fine you are. This sounds exactly like my father Benjamin Bearl Smith, a resident of Corpus Christi TX now dead a good number of years, who was during his lifetime such a racist that he could attempt to tell painful “Texican” jokes to his own son, at the expense of his own racially and ethnically mixed grandchildren (part Yaqui, part Chiraquahua, part Cherokee, part European), with whom he refused to have any contact. My father was such a racist that he could not comprehend why his son found these often-repeated jokes, at the expense of his little brown-eyed grandchildren, so utterly painful. My father was, like Parker, a Protestant minister: he read so little, I wonder if he read Parker or if he merely absorbed this during his childhood in the racist town of Olney IL? –Well, it’s too late to ask him.

As I write this, Andy Rooney has authored a newspaper column speaking to the Native American experience as a “they” experience: “They can’t have their country back. Next question.” –The next question would be, Mr. Rooney, did you arrive at your stated belief, that no Native American religious experience amounted/amounts to more than “meaningless superstition,” by some process of investigation and consideration, or is this belief of yours merely the prejudice of a public clown? –And the question after that, Mr. Rooney: Did you arrive at your stated conclusion that “There’s no Indian art” after some period of research and frustration, or is this belief of yours merely the prejudice of a public clown? Thing is, when Mr. Rooney wrote these things in his newspaper column, I recognized his attitudes as precisely the attitudes of my father. How could I have shamed my father by marrying a woman who wasn’t even white? How could I have so cruelly and shallowly denied him the opportunity to be a grandfather? My father’s persistent, preemptive question, same as Parker’s in the 19th century, same as Rooney’s in the 20th: “In the long history of human culture starting with the ancient Greeks, what had any race other than the white race ever contributed to the development of this planet, or civilization, or progress, or even plain and simple decency?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

An American native contemplates the progress of civilization: HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Waldo Emerson seems to have agreed with the “racist antislavery” views of the Reverend Parker, views which gave to Negritude the same function that Jewishness would come to have, a century later, in the thinking of Alfred Rosenberg, philosopher of the National Socialists in Germany. That is to say, just as for Rosenberg the

HANGED

THEODORE PARKER / ALFRED ROSENBERG / WALDO EMERSON real danger for Germany came not directly from the pure Jew himself so much as from the internal Jewish tendencies toward weakness and pity in the heart of those who should harden themselves and become true Aryans, so for Parker (and, it seems, Emerson) the real danger for America came not directly from the black slave so much as from the black slavishness and savagery that infected the hearts of white people who had to live in the same world with such people. The slave was the perpetrator of an assault on the soul of that victim, the slave’s owner:

The abolitionist (theoretical) wishes to abolish Slavery, but because he wishes to abolish the black man. He considers that it is violence, brute force, which, counter to intellectual rule, holds property in man; but he thinks the negro himself the very representative & exponent of that brute base force; that it is the negro in the white man which holds slaves. He attacks Legree, MacDuffie, & slaveholders north & south generally, but because they are the foremost negroes of the world, & fight the negro fight. When they are extinguished, & law, intellectual law prevails, it will then appear quickly enough that the brute instinct rallies and centres in the black man. He is created on a lower plane than the white, & eats men & kidnaps & tortures, if he can. The Negro is imitative, secondary, in short, reactionary merely in his successes, & there is no origination with him in mental & moral spheres. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

December: The Reverend Theodore Parker, he who had been declaring from the pulpit that “Every man who understands Christianity ... knows that war is wrong,” declared from the pulpit that while he ordinarily spent $1,500 a year on books, the equivalent of four or five men’s annual wages, for the time being he was going to restrict himself to spending less than one man’s annual wage on books per year, and devote the remaining moneys to the purchase of guns and ammunition for the white people going to the Kansas Territory. It seems

After they took Captain John Brown’s Sharps rifle away from him at Harpers Ferry, they allowed this little boy to pose with it. Grow up, son, and be a Christian like us: kill people, own slaves.

there’s wrong, and then there’s wrong.

Sharps rifles cost $25 apiece, when bought in quantity: “I make all my pecuniary arrangements with the expectation of civil war.” He would take to marking the boxes of new Sharps rifles he shipped illegally to Kansas with the word BOOKS, and he would take to referring to these firearms as so many copies of RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE, as in “The right of the people to keep and to bear arms shall not be infringed.” There were twenty copies of Sharp’s RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE in their hands, of the new and improved edition, and diverse Colt’s six shooters also.... But what a comment were the weapons of that company on the boasted democracy of America! Those rifles and pistols were to defend their soil from the American Government, which wishes to plant slavery in Kansas!

By way of contrast with the improved rifle above, here is an image of the Brunswick, which was the model then in use by the British Army: HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

In New-York, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher induced the congregation of the Plymouth Church to procure a crate of 25 rifles to ship illegally to Kansas and to stamp upon that crate, as Jesus H. Christ himself would have done, the word BIBLES. (Chuckle.) Dr. Howe [Samuel Gridley Howe] and others [of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee] raised five thousand dollars one day last week to buy Sharp’s rifles. We want a thousand rifles, and got two hundred in one day.

This “Massachusetts State Kansas Committee” would evolve into the Secret “Six”. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1848

The Reverend Theodore Parker of Boston published an abolitionist tract, A LETTER TO THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES TOUCHING THE MATTER OF SLAVERY. “It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God.” — Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141 HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Lecture15 TIMELINE OF THE MAINE WOODS

DATE PLACE TOPIC

February 17, Wednesday, 1847, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “A History of Myself” (II) January 3, Monday, 1848, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “An Excursion to Ktaadn” January 14, Friday, 1848 Concord “Friendship”

15. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s THOREAU’S LECTURES BEFORE WALDEN: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Narrative of Event: Although minutes of individual meetings of the Concord Lyceum were not recorded during the 1847-48 lecture season, a retrospective summary of the course by the Lyceum secretary, A.G. Fay, lists Henry Thoreau along with eight other speakers (THE MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM DURING THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE, page 163). Thoreau, in fact, lectured three times before the Concord Lyceum during the season, on 3 January, 26 January, and 16 February. On 29 December 1847 he wrote to Waldo Emerson, then traveling in England: “Next week I am going to give an account to the Lyceum of my expedition to Maine. Theodore Parker lectures tonight — We have had [E.P.] Whipple on Genius — too weighty a subject for him …. [H.N.] Hudson too has been here with a dark shadow in the core of him, and his desperate wit so much indebted to the surface of him” (THE CORRESPONDENCE OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU, page 199). On 12 January 1848, Thoreau reported on his lecture in another letter to Emerson: “I read a part of the story of my excursion to Ktadn to quite a large audience of men and boys, the other night, whom it interested. It contains many facts and some poetry” (CORRESPONDENCE, page 204). Thoreau’s brief description of the lecture’s content belies the seriousness with which he may have regarded this lecture, the first “excursion” he delivered after saying a year earlier in the first of the two “Walden; or, Life in the Woods” lectures he delivered before his neighbors: “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life … to drive life into a corner, and … if it were sublime to know it by experience and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”16

Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: In his diary entry of January 3, 1848, Bronson Alcott also alluded to the success of Thoreau’s lecture: “Evening — Mrs. A. accompanied me to the Lyceum where we heard a lecture from Thoreau on a jaunt of his to Kotarden, the highest mountain in Maine. — The lecture drew a lively picture of these wild scenes and of his adventures in ascending the rivers to reach the summit of Kotarden. — “17 Alcott’s “Kotarden” spelling, if it reflects Thoreau’s pronunciation, suggests the same New England accent that prompted Emerson to seek a name change from Lydia to Lidian for his wife so as to avoid hearing her called “Lidier” by his neighbors. But the spelling may just as well reflect Alcott’s New England ear (compare the New England pronunciation and spelling of “Harvard,” for instance).

Description of Topic: The relative paucity of surviving leaves from the lecture manuscript, as well as the relatively brief interval between Thoreau’s delivery of the lecture and his submission to Horace Greeley (early or mid April 1848) of the printer’s copy manuscript for the essay, suggests that Thoreau used most or all of his lecture manuscript in his printer’s copy manuscript.

16. Shanley, THE MAKING OF WALDEN, page 141. 17. Bronson Alcott, MS “Diary for 1848,” entry of 3 January, MH (*59M-308). HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

November (Prior to the 25th, probably on the 22d, Wednesday): Henry Thoreau delivered the “Student life in New England, its economy” portion of “Economy” chapter of WALDEN at Salem. This was his first trip to lecture and was at the invitation of Nathaniel Hawthorne. This year the slate at their Lyceum included Daniel Webster, Waldo Emerson, Professor Louis Agassiz, and the Reverend Theodore Parker. Note that, as of that time, Senator Webster and Nathaniel Bowditch were Great Men with statues in Boston:

The magnificent building for the use of the BOSTON ATHENÆUM is situated on Beacon Street, near the State House. It is of Patterson freestone, and in the Palladian style of architecture. It is one hundred and fourteen feet in length, of irregular breadth, sixty feet in height, and stands ten feet back from the street, the ground space in front being surrounded by a balustrade with stone coping. The main entrance opens into a pillared and paneled rotunda, from which fine iron staircases conduct above.... Near the foot of the staircase stands Ball Hughes’s statue of Bowditch, and a very fine one of Webster, by Powers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1849

June: Phineas Taylor Barnum came to observe the Fox Sisters and quickly arranged for them to exhibit their Spiritualism stuff at his Barnum Museum in New-York at an admission charge of $2. As a 16-year-old and a 10-year-old, Maggie and Kate began a life of public display as Leah took them from city to city where they were questioned, examined, believed, and scorned by some of the most prominent citizens of the nation. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, and Bayard Taylor attended sittings during this period (that’ll be $6 please). At one particular sitting George Bancroft, James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, the Reverend George Ripley, and Nathaniel Parker Willis were in attendance (that’ll be $10 please).

Dr. Joseph Leidy edited HUMAN ANATOMY BY JONES QUAIN, M.D., published in Philadelphia by Lea & Blanchard.

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

Not Civil War “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

August 29, Wednesday: On about this day Waldo Emerson recorded in his JOURNAL:

Love is the bright foreigner, the foreign self. [The Reverend Theodore] Parker thinks, that, to know Plato, you must read Plato thoroughly, & his commentators, &, I think, Parker would require a good drill in Greek history too. I have no objection to hear this urged on any but a Platonist. But when erudition is insisted on to Herbert or Henry More, I hear it as if to know the tree you should make me eat all the apples. It is not granted to one man to express himself adequately more than a few times: and I believe fully, in spite of sneers, in interpreting the French Revolution by anecdotes, though not every diner out can do it. To know the flavor of tanzy, must I eat all the tanzy that grows by the Wall? When I asked Mr Thom in Liverpool — who is Gilfillan? & who is Mac-Candlish? he began at the settlement of the Scotch Kirk in 1300 ? & came down with the history to 1848, that I might understand what was Gilfillan, or what was Edin. Review &c &c. But if a man cannot answer me in ten words, he is not wise.”

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s birth, the final section of Robert Schumann’s “Scenes from Goethe’s Faust” was performed publicly for the initial time, simultaneously in Dresden, Weimar, and Leipzig. The composer himself conducted in Dresden.

At a meeting of the School Committee of Boston Charles Theodore Russell submitted the REPORT OF THE MINORITY OF THE COMMITTEE UPON THE PETITIONS OF JOHN T. HILTON AND OTHERS, COLORED CITIZENS OF BOSTON, PRAYING FOR THE ABOLITION OF THE SMITH SCHOOL, AND THAT COLORED CHILDREN MAY BE PERMITTED TO ATTEND THE OTHER SCHOOLS OF THE CITY (Printed by order of the School Committee; Boston: J.H. Eastburn...... City Printer). ABOLITION OF SMITH SCHOOL

THE TASK OF THE HISTORIAN IS TO CREATE HINDSIGHT WHILE INTERCEPTING ANY ILLUSION OF FORESIGHT. NOTHING A HUMAN CAN SEE CAN EVER BE SEEN AS IF THROUGH THE EYE OF GOD. IN A BOOK THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT HISTORY, ISSUED BY RANDOM HOUSE IN 2016, I FIND THE PHRASE “LOOKED UPON FROM THE BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF HISTORY, ....” ONLY A MERE STORYTELLER, NEVER A HISTORIAN, COULD HAVE PENNED SUCH A PHRASE — Not Civil War “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

BECAUSE NO BIRD HAS EVER FLOWN OVER HISTORY.

Fall: Henry Thoreau made extracts in his Literary Note-Book from James Elliot Cabot’s “The Philosophy of the Ancient Hindoos” JAMES ELLOT CABOT

in the 4th issue of Cabot’s and the Reverend Theodore Parker’s Massachusetts Quarterly Review and thus brought his careful attention to the BHAGAVAD-GÍTÁ, the SÁNKHYA KÁRIKÁ, and the VISHNU PURÁNA. In quoting THE SANKHYA KARIKA

primarily from the Horace Hayman Wilson translation of THE VISHNU PURÁNA (London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1840), the Henry Thomas Colebrooke translation, edited by Horace Hayman Wilson, of the SÁNKHYA KÁRIKÁ (Oxford: Oriental Translation Fund, 1837), the Charles Wilkins translation of the THE BHAGVAT-GEETA OR DIALOGUES OF KREESHNA AND ARJOON... (London: Nourse, 1785), and Henry Thomas Colebrook’s BHAGVAT-GEETA

MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS in two volumes (London, 1837), Cabot was presented Hindus as Idealists — as Eastern Immanuel Kant-wannabees or, more accurately, Johann Gottlieb Fichte-imitators. VISHNU PURÁNA: “As long as man lives he is immersed in manifold afflictions, like the seed of the cotton amidst its down.” VISHNU PURÁNA: “Travelling the path of the world for many thousands of births, man attains only the weariness of bewilderment, and is smothered by the dust of imagination.” VISHNU PURÁNA: “I am neither going nor coming; nor is my dwelling in any one place; nor art thou, thou; nor are others, others; nor am I, I.” VISHNU PURÁNA: “The story of Prahláda who became as one with Vishnu, by meditating upon him.” VISHNU PURÁNA: “Liberation, which is the object to be affected, being accomplished, discriminative knowledge ceases. When endowed with the apprehension of the nature of the object of inquiry, then there is no difference between it and supreme spirit; difference is the consequence of the absence of true knowledge. When that ignorance which is the cause of the difference between individual and universal spirit is destroyed, finally and for ever, who shall ever make that distinction between them which does not exist?” VISHNU PURÁNA: “That is active duty, which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge, which is for our liberation: all other duty is good only unto weariness: all other knowledge is only the HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

cleverness of an artist.” SÁNKHYA KÁRIKÁ: “As a dancer, having exhibited herself to the spectator, desists from the dance, so does nature desist, having manifested herself to soul. Generous Nature, endued with qualities, does by manifest means accomplish, without benefit (to herself) the wish of ungrateful soul, devoid as he is of qualities. Nothing, in my opinion, is more gentle than Nature; once aware of having been seen, she does not again expose herself to the gaze of soul.” SÁNKHYA KÁRIKÁ: “By attainment of perfect knowledge, virtue and the rest become causeless; yet soul remains awhile invested with body, as the potter’s wheel continues whirling from the effects of the impulse previously given to it.” INDIA

December: 9th issue of the Massachusetts Quarterly Review: • Senatorial Speeches on Slavery, by James G. Birney • A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. By HENRY D. THOREAU. Boston and Cambridge: James Monroe & Company. 1849. pp. 413 [this review was by James Russell Lowell]. • A Scientific Statement of the Doctrine of the Lord, or Divine Man, by Henry James • Validity of Instruments and Contracts executed on Sunday, by Richard Hildreth • European Agriculture and Rural Economy. From Professional Observation. By HENRY COLMAN, Honorary Member of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, of the National Agricultural Society of France, and of the National Agricultural Society of the United States. 1849. Boston: Little & Brown. London: John Petheram. 2d Edition: 2 vols. 8vo. pp. xxvi. and 492, and xxiv. and 588 [this review was by Frederic Howes]. • The Financial Condition of Russia, by Major Pelt, (Leipsic.) • Report of the Commissioners relating to the Condition of the Indians in Massachusetts, by Wendell Phillips • The Administration of the Late Mr. Polk, by Theodore Parker • Ten Discourses on Orthodoxy. By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, Pastor of the Unitarian Church, Washington, D.C. Boston: Crosby & Nichols. Washington: Taylor & Maury. • List of New Publications Received. • Pamphlets. CONSULT THIS ISSUE HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1850

The Reverend Theodore Parker sheltered William and Ellen Craft, who were fleeing from slaveholders in Georgia, and married them to one another.

In an antislavery address, the Reverend Theodore Parker characterized democracy as “a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.”18

During this decade Abraham Lincoln would begin to exploit the conflicting uses of the Declaration of Independence and, by the time of his debates with Stephen Douglas, would have come to see the document’s statements on equality and rights, according to Pauline Maier, “as setting a standard for the future, one that demanded the gradual extinction of conflicting practices” (AMERICAN SCRIPTURE: MAKING THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997, page 205).

18. It is not clear that Abraham Lincoln ever learned of this. The alliteration is of course an obvious one. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Fall: The Alcott family moved from Atkinson Street in Boston to 50 High Street on the edge in between the highfalutin’ neighborhoods of the family’s rich supporters and the utter slums of Fort Hill. During this period Bronson’s mother, Anna Alcox, stayed with them for several months and, although she was very intimate with rural poverty, was horrified at this urban squalor: “…you are so good to wate on them that neade.” Abba was musing in her journal:

It is more respectable to be in my family —than a Servant of the Public in any capacity— and to be used by it is ignoble.

At that time in Boston, for a family of four, unless you had an income of at least $550.00 per year, you would probably wind up being badly victimized by one or another of the “bottom-feeders” who abounded in the slums, and yet, for the years 1851, 1852, and 1853, Abba Alcott’s income varied, usually somewhere between $0.05 to $1.00 per day while Bronson Alcott brought in hardly anything at all, perhaps a dollar very occasionally.19 Meanwhile, however, Abba was organizing a petition that women should be allowed to vote on proposed amendments to the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that were to be offered at the forthcoming Massachusetts State Constitutional Convention. According to Harriet Robinson’s 20 MASSACHUSETTS IN THE WOMAN SUFFERAGE MOVEMENT, this petition was signed not only by persons such as A. Bronson Alcott but also by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Samuel Eliot Sewall, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucy Stone, Wendell Phillips, and the Reverend Samuel Joseph May. The motion to allow women to vote on these proposed amendments to the state constitution, however, failed badly, 14 male delegates for to 108 male delegates against.

December 5, Thursday: Jefferson Davis returned to his seat in the federal Senate.

The Reverend Theodore Parker, a man quite dedicated to getting his own way if possible without the need to resort to the inefficiency of violence, opinioned “I deplore violence. Let us do without it while we can....” (It would seem that few of us who read of such an utterance are prepared to contemplate that such an opinion has been voiced by others as well, such as for instance by Richard Nixon and Adolf Hitler, and that it has nothing whatever to do with pacifism.)

19. According to Leone Levi’s WAGES AND EARNINGS OF THE WORKING CLASSES - REPORT TO SIR ARTHUR BASS (London: John Murray, 1885), the population of England was at this point divided into a laboring class of 19,300,000 persons, a lower middle class of 6,900,000, and an upper class of 1,500,000 “taxpayers” (we don’t know what tax is referred to here). In the laboring classes, spinners (in cotton factories) earned about £1 a week, which amounted to perhaps £50 a year. Skilled labourers were lucky to earn more than £1.25 a week, say £65 a year. Agricultural workers earned around half these amounts, though they usually received in addition their accommodation and some food. The average sort of earnings in 1851 for the English laboring class was £52 a year, and for the lower middle class £80 per year. To receive such wages people often worked 60 hours a week or more. The lower middle class were people like teachers who earned between £75 and £100 a year. What were regarded as “the middle classes” had family incomes of between £150 and £500 per annum -- there were just over 90,000 English households in that category. What were considered “the higher middles classes” had incomes between £500 and £3000, and in this category were situated 18,300 families. The “higher class” English, of which there were 1,889, had annual incomes of between £3000 and £50,000. (In GREAT EXPECTATIONS, therefore, Pip, since he had acquired a newfound income of £500 a year, was being described by Charles Dickens as having been propelled straight up all the way from having been the apprentice to a blacksmith, lowest of the low, into the higher end of the middle classes — with an income approximately one order of magnitude greater than Joe the blacksmith’s accompanied by no responsibilities whatever.) 20. Boston: Roberts, 1881, page 91 HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1851

May 26, Monday: Four people were killed and dozens wounded as a nativist mob attacked German immigrants in Hoboken, New Jersey during Pentecost celebrations.

At the American Unitarian Association’s spring convention in Boston, known as the Berry Street Conference, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May introduced a resolution in condemnation of Daniel Webster, Millard Fillmore, Edward Everett, Samuel A. Eliot, the Reverend Professor Jared Sparks, the Reverend Ezra Stiles Gannett, and even the president of the AUS, the Reverend Orville Dewey as accomplices to the wickedness of the Fugitive Slave Law. May charged that Gannett was acting in a manner “utterly subversive of Christian morality and of all true allegiance to God.”21 (Although the initial vote on this day was 72 to 27 to refuse to consider such a resolution, the convention would find that it had not heard the last of it.)

Meanwhile, in England, Unitarianism was doing very well, and thank you for asking:

English Unitarians

1830 200

1851 50,000

The Transcript had been keeping an eye on the more daring ladies: The Turkish Dress. On Saturday afternoon, says the [Boston] Times, a young lady of 18, daughter of a well-known West End citizen, made her appearance on Cambridge Street, accompanied with her father, dressed in a round hat, short dress, fitting tightly, and pink satin trousers.... The same young lady was out yesterday afternoon, for a walk around the Common and upon the Neck.... The “Bee” says the daughter of Dr. Hanson, of this city, appeared in the Bloomer suit at a convention at South Reading last week.

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.

21. The force of such an accusation can be felt if you reflect that this divine here being criticized was a teacher of the new crops of Unitarian reverends, at the Harvard Divinity School. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

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 in domestic life; all that is lovely, good and great in social HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

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, and to abide there, than to increase your numbers. Truth goes not by numbers, but is instinct with divine life, and it must triumph. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

* * * 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

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

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. BIGELOW 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

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

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. malus excelsa –amara –florida –palustris –gratissima –ramosa –spinosa ferruginea –aromatica –aurea – HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

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

July 2, Wednesday: Henry Thoreau wrote in his journal about the reactions he experienced during speeches by Theodore Parker and Wendell Phillips.

July 2, Wednesday: It is a fresh cool summer morning– From the road at N Barretts on my way to P. Blood’s at 81/2 A M. the Great Meadows have a slight bluish misty tinge in part; elsewhere a sort of hoary sheen –like a fine downiness –inconceivably fine & silvery far away –the light reflected from the grass blades –a sea of grass hoary with light –the counterpart of the frost in spring As yet no mower has profaned it – scarcely a foot-step since the waters left it. Miles of waving grass adorning the surface of the earth. Last night –a sultry night –which compelled to leave all windows open, I heard two travellers talking aloud – was roused out of my sleep by their loud day-like & somewhat unearthly discourse at perchance 1 o’clock– THEODORE PARKER From the country whiling away the night with loud discourse– I heard the words Theodore Parker & Wendell WENDELL PHILLIPS Phillips loudly spoken –& so did half a dozen of my neighbors who also were awakened –such is fame– It affected like Dante talking of the men of this world in the infernal regions– If the traveller had called my own name I should equally have thought it an unearthly personage which it would take me some hours into day-light to realize. My genius hinted before I fairly awoke –Improve your time. What is the night that a traveller’s voice should sound so hollow in it! That a man speaking aloud in the night –speaking in regions under the earth should utter the words Theodore Parker? A Traveller! I love his title A Traveller is to be reverenced as such– His profession is the best symbol of our life Going from –toward– It is the history of every one of us. I am interested in those that travel in the night. It takes but little distance to make the hills & even the meadows look blue today– That principle which gives the air an azure color is more abundant. To-day the milk-weed is blossoming– Some of the raspberries are ripe –the most innocent & simple of fruits – the purest & most etherial. Cherries are ripe –strawberries in the gardens have passed their prime Many large trees –especially elms about a house are a surer indication of old family distinction & worth –than any evidence of wealth. Any evidence of care bestowed on these trees –secures the traveller’s respect as for a nobler husbandry than the raising of corn & potatoes. I passed a regular country door-yard this forenoon. the unpainted one story house –long & low with projecting stoop –a deep grass plot unfenced for yard –hens & chickens scratching amid the chip dirt about the door– This last the main feature relics of wood-piles –sites of the wooden towers– The night shade has bloomed & the Prinos or winter-berry. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

November: Bronson Alcott, attending a party at which Waldo Emerson, Charles Sumner, the Reverend Theodore Parker, and Seth Wells Cheney were present, felt awkward.

A circus elephant named Columbus weighing some five tons, perhaps the largest animal then on exhibit to size-worshiping Americans, fell through a South Adams bridge and severely injure itself. Columbus then died or, presumably, was slaughtered, in Lenox. In the modern era there has arisen a piece of urban folklore, that “an elephant lies buried somewhere in Concord,” but this event when it occurred had nothing whatever to do with the town of Concord. Also, although I have no information as to what happened to Columbus’s body, it is probably not to be found buried in Lenox. There is little likelihood that in antebellum America the owner of such a pile of meat, from the body of a vegetarian animal that had died of an injury rather than of an illness, would have gone to the additional expense of burying it — rather than recovering what could be recovered from the situation by selling it to the Lenox slaughterhouse.

Henry Stephens Randall ran again for Secretary of State for New York on the Democratic ticket, this time successfully. He would serve from 1852 to 1853.

Samuel Ringgold Ward had removed from Cortland to Syracuse, New York, but in consequence of his having participated on October 1st in the “Jerry rescue case,” it was necessary for him to abandon his interest in his newspapers, during this month, and for the Ward family to take refuge in Canada: From Cortland we removed to Syracuse in 1851, whence, on account of my participating in the “Jerry rescue case,” on the first day of October in that year, it became quite expedient to remove in some haste to Canada, in November. During the last few years of my residence in the United States I was editor and proprietor of two newspapers, both of which I survive, and in both of which I sunk every shred of my property. While at this business, it seemed necessary that I should know something of law. For this purpose, I commenced the reading of it....

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn entered Exeter Academy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1852

Professor Henry Youle Hind became the first editor of the Canadian Institute’s Canadian Journal: a Repertory of Industry, Science and Art (Toronto), the initial scientific periodical in Canada, a position he would fill until 1855.

Mary Ann Shadd, a product of the detested racial amalgamation and constantly on the lookout for someplace in this woebegone universe where she might find acceptance and a home, in this year published a pamphlet entitled “A Plea for Emigration or Notes on Canada West in Its Moral, Social, and Political Aspect: Suggestions Respecting Mexico, W. Indies and Vancouver’s Island / For the Information of Colored Emigrants.” She extolled the virtues of Canada in her pamphlet and urged free American blacks, under threat from the new Fugitive Slave Law, to venture north. She cited the common language, culture, and religion as the primary reasons for American blacks to consider Canada first. Her agenda was that perhaps Canada could become the place where American blacks could successfully integrate, amalgamate, merge into the general cultural context, and then no longer live lives in which they were reduced to being objects for “special attention.”

The document subverted pro-slavery allegations that the British would expropriate and exploit the labour of emigrating blacks even more severely than the slave owner. “The master tells [the slave],” explains Lewis Clarke in his slave narrative, that “if he goes to Canada the British will put him in a mine under ground, with both eyes put out, for life.” Better let the Colonizationists send you back to Africa where you belong. Shadd responded that “Tropical Africa, the land of promise of the colonizationists [teemed] with the breath of pestilence, a burning sun and fearful maladies.” Africa was death. When Shadd does broach the topic of racism, under the sub-heading “Churches—Schools,” she offers an explicit indictment of Black, rather than White, racism. She observes that Black racism toward Whites is encouraged by the fugitive leadership’s insistence on segregated institutions (churches, schools, and segregated communities such as Josiah Henson’s Dawn settlement), contending that “their influence on colored people is fatal.” It would be a fatal mistake for Blacks to respond to the wickedness of white racism by imitating it. Shadd launched her public attack not only on segregated institutions in general but, in particular, on the lucrative little pyramid of local power at the apex of which sat prominent abolitionists Henry Bibb and Mary Bibb, ostensibly servants of the needs of the rapidly growing fugitive community. Shadd pointed out that the Bibbs’s insistence upon segregated institutions had less to do with the collective welfare of the fugitive population than with their own standing as unchallengeable spokespersons for and leaders of the fugitive community: [T]here are those who pretend to have been enlightened, and to have at heart the common good, whose influence and operations he will find designedly counteracting his conscientious efforts, the more effectively appealing to a common origin and kindred sufferings, secretly striking behind and bringing his character as a missionary, and his operations, into discredit in the eyes of a sympathizing Christian community. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Shadd first chose to settle in Windsor, Canada West (present-day southern Ontario), on the advice of Henry Bibb and Mary Bibb. The relationship between Shadd and the Bibbs thus appears to have begun on a promising note — but the honeymoon turned out to be short-lived, as a bitter feud would begin over the vital issue of integrated versus segregated schools.

Due to the boycott of race segregation of the public schools, the enrollment at Boston’s all-black Smith School on the back side of Beacon Hill stood at 54.

Remembering the Sabbath day and keeping it holy, for many pious Bostonians in Henry Thoreau’s day, amounted in practice to listening to the Reverend Theodore Parker preach a sermon at his downtown megachurch. Parker’s key text was Luke 21:33, which declaimed that Heaven and earth shall pass away but not My Words, because this provided him with a doctrine of religious progress. All we Anglo-Saxons have to do is wait in the flock of a megachurch leader like the Reverend Parker, and over the course of time all that is accidental and peripheral and, to use Parker’s own term of art, transient, will reveal itself as Transitory by its very changeableness, and therefore as part of Error. What is left is absolute, true religion. Therefore our Anglo- Saxon agenda must be to purge “the negro in us” and become really white. Parker worked so much crowd- pleasing stuff into his “28th Congregational Society” that by 1852 he was able to begin to hold the worship services of this society in the new Boston Music Hall, which boasted 1,500 comfortable seats of a Sunday HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

morning. In other words, God-loving Parker was the Robert Schuller of his century, on the eastern seaboard instead of the western, near Faneuil Hall rather than near Disneyland.

An Anglo-Saxon with common sense does not like this Africanization of America.

horrified at slavery RACISM

But wait, wait! –Wasn’t this Anglo-Saxon Reverend Parker one of the forefront anti-slavery fighters of his day? Wouldn’t he become a member of the Secret “Six” devoted to ending human slavery? Wasn’t he risking the charge of treason to rectify this shame? Doesn’t that mean that he just couldn’t be a racist? Get a clue, he wanted to end slavery not because he was not a racist, but because he was a racist. Just as he wanted to purge “the negro in us,” he wanted to purge our society of its black Americans. They had no business being here and were to have no place here. Hear him: “An Anglo-Saxon with common sense does not like this Africanization of America.” Getting rid of the possibility of our enslaving them was merely an advance step to purging the negro from our society entirely! SLAVERY

Spring: Bronson Alcott’s brother Junius Alcott apparently committed suicide by throwing himself into the machinery at the mill. At least we should presume this was suicide, since Junius had just gone to his mother and said good-by and shaken hands with her, explaining that he was going to Boston, but instead of leaving for Boston he had gone unexplainedly to the mill. This apparently threw Bronson into a personal crisis in which he attempted to reassure himself that there was not a hereditary strain of madness in his family. At any rate, Alcott would spend the next several years attempting obsessively to establish by historical investigations and by weird scientific theories of genetics that his family was not the victim if some “dark inheritance.” He would travel all over the Massachusetts and Connecticut area, investigating old tombstones and documenting a possible descent, or, rather, documenting a likely non-descent, from the Lord High Chancellor of England under King Henry VII, one John Alcocke. Eventually his theories began to take the form of a dichotomy between a blond, blue-eyed “angelic man” of fair complexion, possibly Saxon like himself, and a “demonic man.” That this sort of thinking —so typical of the poor white trash of our own era who have something to prove and are looking for a cheap way to prove it— was very dangerous, especially so in those times prior to the Civil War while racism was still utterly in its ascendancy, and especially for a man like himself who had married and had children with a vivacious dark lady probably with a Spanish/Jewish-diaspora background hidden in her family closet. Would he decide that his wife, and therefore his four vivacious dark daughters, were tainted — that he had unknowingly been tricked into polluting his precious Saxon bloodlines? HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

No,

Intermarriage may modify but cannot blot out quite the fixed family type. In our case, it leaves to us the fair complexion, prominent features and slender form; while the intellectual disposition, though qualified more by intermarriage perhaps, and social position, run still visibly in the family, especially the Puritanism and Protestantism of our ancestors.

This, as you can see, is thin ice.

About the only thing I can say in Alcott’s defense is that he was getting a lot of help, in this angel/demon stuff, from the popular Americanist culture of that time, from, for instance, respected figures such as the Reverend Theodore Parker of downtown Boston and, if the truth be told, probably from Waldo Emerson as well. In that day, a person’s being anti-slavery told nothing whatever about whether or not they were a racist, or were a racist of more savory or of less savory stripe, a racist of the love-filled variety or a racist of the hate-filled variety. THE ALCOTT FAMILY HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1853

February 27, Sunday: Moncure Daniel Conway attended the Reverend Theodore Parker’s sermon in the downtown Boston Music Hall and was put off when Parker cracked jokes from the pulpit. Members of the congregation were, would you believe, chuckling during worship.

February 27. Went to hear Theodore Parker. His sermon was on Good and Evil Temper. Text, Proverbs 15:17, “Better is a dinner of herbs,” etc. I don’t like him at all, and wish I had worshipped at King’s Chapel with Mr. Peabody, whom with his whole family I love.

Not only that, but Conway observed that some of the men in the congregation had mustaches, and that some of the women were wearing rouge. Still, he needed to talk to the Reverend Parker because he was bearing a message from Nancy Williams, one of the family’s slaves in Virginia, to her escaped husband Benjamin Williams who was thought to be residing in the Boston area. Conway needed to make the contact by way of some white man who could trust him, who also had contacts in the local black community. The two men soon made contact with a black man who assured them that, although Benjamin Williams had escaped on to Canada, he would know how to pass this written message on to him.22 AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II

Conway would explain why at first he didn’t like the Reverend Parker, and went to hear Father Taylor at the Seamen’s Bethel:

22. Of course, there’s every possibility that this communicant merely trotted around the corner and handed his wife’s note to Benjamin Williams. Why take a risk when you aren’t obliged to? HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

As to my worry at the first sermon I heard in Boston, –that of Theodore Parker,– I was disturbed by the lack of anything in the Music Hall or in the secular music sympathetic with my lonely and forlorn heart. In the afternoon I was consoled by hearing at the Seamen’s Bethel the famous Father Taylor. I had read the graphic description of him by Charles Dickens (“American Notes”), and had heard that Emerson was an admirer of Father Taylor. Some one told me that Taylor was a sort of Arian; also that in a circle of his ministerial brethren where Emerson was spoken of as leading youth to hell, Father Taylor remarked, “It may be that Emerson is going to hell, but of one thing I am certain: he will change the climate there, and emigration will set that way.” After listening to his sermon, –plain, practical, in no part sensational,– I approached Father Taylor and told him I had just left the Baltimore Conference. He urged me to go home with him, and on the way was at first severe about my leaving the Methodist Church. I answered that if I could, like himself, be a Methodist and ignore the Trinitarian dogma, I would have done so; but Methodism in Boston and that in the Baltimore Conference differed. The old man relented. “Well,” said he, “our Southern brethren are very strict about some things of which they know nothing.” I then knocked at the door of his heart with the name of Emerson, and it opened wide. Our talk became cordial. He told me, I think, that Emerson was a contributor to the Seamen’s Bethel, and at any rate interested me in his account of Emerson as a man, and apart from his writings. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

There was something rather hard about Parker’s manner at first that may have been due to very natural misgivings. Having found that he was the man most likely to help me fulfil aunt Nancy’s commission, I carried a note of introduction to him from some antislavery friend at Cambridge, but even antislavery men might be mistaken. A Virginian asking the whereabouts of a negro might properly be met with hesitation, though it did not occur to me. I was courteously received in his large library, where he sat at his desk beneath his grandfather’s old musket fixed to the wall. He took down the fugitive’s name, etc., and said he would make inquiries, appointing a day for my return. For the rest he showed interest in my experiences, and spoke with such admiration of Emerson that I began to warm toward him. A few days later he went with me through the negro quarters, and I got still nearer to him. I remember by the way that a man met us and asked the way to the Roman Catholic Church. Parker took pains to inform him, and then remarked, “A heretic may sometimes point a man to the True Church.” But he did not smile. At length we entered into the house of some intelligent coloured people, who saluted Parker with the greatest homage, which he received with pathetic humility. “This,” he said, “is a Virginian, but an honourable Virginian, who wishes to find one Benjamin Williams, who some time ago escaped from his master in Stafford County, Va, and for whom he has a message from his wife, Nancy Williams. I hope you will be able to discover Mr. Williams.” After a brief consultation with others of the family, the man went out to bring some neighbours, and meanwhile I was quite overcome by the pleasant conversation of Parker with the humble women around him. He spoke sweetly and graciously to young and old. It was all beautiful and touching, and I was ashamed that I had disliked him. The man returned with several neighbours, and having inquired closely as to the fugitive’s appearance, they remembered such a man, who was in Canada. A little later I had the satisfaction of sending his address to a free negro in Falmouth, who conveyed it to aunt Nancy.

Henry Thoreau wrote to H.G.O. Blake.

Concord Feb. 27th ’53 Mr Blake, I have not answered your letter before because I have been almost constantly in the fields surveying of late. It is long since I have spent HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

so many days so profitably in a pecuniary sense; so unprofitably, it seems to me, in a more important sense. I have earned just a dollar a day for 76 days past; for though I charge at a higher rate for the days which are seen to be spent, yet so many more are spent than appears. This is instead of lecturing, which has not offered, to pay for that book which I printed. I have not only cheap hours, but cheap weeks and months, i.e. weeks which are bought at the rate I have named. Not that they are quite lost to me, or make me very melan- choly, alas! for I too often take a cheap satisfaction in so spending them, – weeks of pasturing and browsing, like beeves and deer, which give me animal health, it may be, but create a tough skin over the soul and intellectual part. Yet if men should offer my body a maintenance for the work of my head alone, I feel that it would be a dangerous temptation. As to whether what you speak of as the “world’s way” (Which for the most part is my way) or that which is shown me, is the better. The former is imposture, the latter is truth. I have the coldest confidence in the last. There is only such hesitation as the appetites feel in following the aspirations The clod hesitates because it is inert, wants animation. The one is the way of death, the other of life everlasting. My hours are not “cheap in such a way that I doubt whether the world’s way would not have been better,” but cheap in such a way that I doubt whether the world’s way, which I have adopted for the time, could be worse. The whole enterprise of this nation which is not an upward, but a west-ward one, toward Oregon California, Japan &c, is totally devoid of interest to me, whether performed on foot or by a Pacific railroad. It is not illustrated by a thought, it is not warmed by a sentiment. There is nothing in it which one should lay down his life for, nor even his gloves, hardly which one should take up a newspaper for. It is perfectly heathenish – a flibustiering toward heaven by the great western route. No, they may go their way to their manifest destiny which I trust is not mine. May my 76 dollars whenever I get them help to carry me in the other direction. I see them on their winding way, but no music is wafted from their host, only the rattling of change in their pockets. I would rather be a cap- tive knight, and let them all pass by, than be free only to go whither they are bound. What end do they propose to themselves beyond Ja- pan? What aims more lofty have they than the prairie dogs? As it respects these things I have not changed an opinion one iota from the first. As the stars looked to me when I was a shepherd i n Assyria, they look to me now a New Englander. The higher the mt. on which you stand, the less change in the prospect f rom year to year, from age to age. Above a certain height, there is no change. I am a Switzer on the edge of the glacier, with his advantages & dis- advantages, goitre, or what not. (You may suspect it to be some kind HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

of swelling at any rate). I have had but one spiritual birth (excuse the word,) and now whether it rains or snows, whether I laugh or cry, fall farther below or approach nearer to my standard, whether Pierce or Scott is elected, – not a new scintillation of light flashes on me, but ever and anon, though with longer intervals, the same surprising & everlastingly new light dawns to me, with only such vari- ations as in the coming of the natural day, with which, indeed, it is often coincident. As to how to preserve potatoes from rotting, your opinion may change from year to year, but as how to preserve your Soul from rotting, I have nothing to learn, but something to practise. Thus I declaim against them, but I in my folly am the world I condemn. I very rarely indeed if ever “feel any itching to be what is called useful to my fellow men”. Sometimes, it may be, when my thoughts for want of employment, fall into a beaten path or humdrum, I have dreamed idly of stopping a man’s horse that was running away, but perchance I wished that he might run in order that I might stop him, – or, of putting out a fire, but then of course it must have got well a- going. Now, to tell the truth, I do not dream much of acting upon horses before they run, or of preventing fires which are not yet kin- dled. What a foul subject is this of doing good, instead of minding ones life, which should be his business –doing good as a dead car- cass, which is only fit for manure, instead of as a living man, – In- stead of taking care to flourish & smell & taste sweet and refresh all mankind to the extent of our capacity & quality. People will sometimes try to persuade you that you have done something from that motive, as if you did not already know enough about it. If I ever did a man any good, in their sense, of course it was something excep- tional, and insignificant compared with the good or evil which I am constantly doing by being what I am. As if you were to preach to ice to shape itself into burning glasses, which are sometimes useful, and so the peculiar properties of ice be lost— Ice that merely performs the office of a burning glass does not do its duty. The problem of life becomes one cannot say by how many degrees more complicated as our material wealth is increased, whether that needle they tell of was a gate-way or not, – since the problem is not merely nor mainly to get life for our bodies, but by this or a similar discipline to get life for our souls; by cultivating the lowland farm on right principles, that is with this view, to turn i t into an upland farm. You have so many more talents to account for. If I accomplish as much more in spiritual work as I am richer i n worldly goods, then I am just as worthy, or worth just as much as I was before, and no more. I see that, in my own case, money might be of great service to me, but probably it would not be, for the difficulty now is that I do not improve my opportunities, and therefore I am not prepared to HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

have my opportunities increased. Now I warn you, if it be as you say, you have got to put o n the pack of an Upland Farmer in good earnest the coming spring, the lowland farm being cared for, aye you must be selecting your seeds forth with and doing what winter work you can; and while others are raising potatoes and Baldwin apples for you, you must be raising apples of the Hesperides for them. (Only hear how he preaches!) No man can suspect that he is the proprietor of an Upland farm, i.e. upland in the sense that it will produce nobler crops and better repay cultivation in the long run, but he will be perfectly sure that he ought to cultivate it. Though we are desirous to earn our bread, we need not be anxious to satisfy men for it –though we shall take care to pay them, – but Good who alone gave it to us— Men may in effect put us in the debt- ors jail, for that matter, simply for paying our whole debt to God, which includes our debt to them, and though we have his receit for it, for his paper is dishonored. The cashier will tell you that he has no stock in his bank. How prompt we are to satisfy the hunger & thirst of our bodies; how slow to satisfy the hunger & thirst of our souls. In deed we would be practical folks cannot use this word without blushing because of our infidelity, having starved this substance almost to a shadow. We feel it to be as absurd as if a man were to break forth into a eulogy on his dog who has’nt any. An ordinary man will work every day for a year at shovelling dirt to support his body, or a family of bodies, but he is an extraordinary man who will will work a whole day in a year for the support of his soul. Even the priests, the men of God, so called, for the most part confess that they work for the support of the body. But he alone is the truly enterprising & practical man who succeeds in maintaining his soul here. Have’nt we our everlasting life to get? and is’nt that the only excuse at last for eating drinking sleeping, or even carrying an umbrella when it rains? A man might as well devote himself to raising pork, as to fattening the bodies or tem- poral part merely of the whole human family. If we made the true distinction we should almost all of us be seen to be in the almshouse for Souls. I am much indebted to you because you look so steadily at the better side, or rather the true center of me (for our true center may & perhaps oftenest does lie entirely aside from us, and we are in fact ec- centric,) and as I have elsewhere said “Give me an opportunity to live.” You speak as if the image or idea which I see were reflected from me to you, and I see it again reflected from you t o me, because we stand at the right angle to one another; and so it goes zigzag, to what successive reflecting surfaces, before it is all dissipated, or absorbed by the more unreflecting, or differently reflecting, – who knows? Or perhaps what you see directly you refer to me. What a lit- HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

tle shelf is required, by which we may impinge upon another, and build there our eirie in the clouds, and all the heavens we see above us we refer to the crags around and beneath us. Some piece of mica, as it were, in the face or eyes of o ne, as on the Delectable Mts., slanted at the right angle, reflects the heavens to us. But in the slow geological upheavals & depressions, these mutual angles are disturbed, these suns set, & new ones rise to us. That ideal which I worshipped was a greater stranger to the mica than to me. It was not the hero I admired but the reflection from his epaulet or helmet. It is nothing (for us) permanently inherent in another, but his attitude or relation to what we prize that we admire. The meanest man may glit- ter with micacious particles to his fellow’s eye. These are the span- gles that adorn a man. The highest union – the only un-ion (don’t laugh) or central oneness, is the coincidence of visual rays. Our club room was an apartment in a constellation where our visual rays met (and there was no debate about about the restaurant) The way between us is over the mount. Your words make me think of a man of my acquaintance whom I occasionally meet, whom you too appear to have met, one Myself, as he is called, Yet why not call him Your-self? If you have met with him & know him it is all I have done, and surely where the re is a mutual acquaintance the my & thy make a distinction without a difference. I do not wonder that you do not like my Canada story. It concerns me but little, and probably is not worth the time it took to tell it. Yet I had absolutely no design whatever in my mind, but simply to report what I saw. I have inserted all of myself that was implicated or made the excursion. It has come to an end at any rate, they will print no more, but return me my mss. when it is but little more than half done –as well as another I had sent them, because the editor Curtis requires the liberty to omit the heresies without consulting me – a privelege California is not rich enough to bid for. I thank you again & again for attending to me; that is to say I am glad that you hear me and that you also are glad. Hold fast to yo ur most indefinite waking dream. The very green dust on the walls is an organised vegetable; the atmosphere has its fauna & flora floating in it; & shall we think that dreams are but dust & ashes, are always disintegrated & crumbling thoughts and not dust like thoughts trooping to its standard with music, systems beginning to be organized. These expectations these are roots these are nuts which even the poorest man has in his bin, and roasts or cracks them occasionally in winter evenings, which even the poor debtor retains with his bed and his pig, i.e. his idleness & sensuality. Men go to the opera because they hear there a faint expression in sound of this news which is never quite distinctly proclaimed. Suppose a man were to sell the hue, the least amount of coloring matter in the superficies of HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

his thought, –for a farm. –were to exchange an absolute & infinite value for a relative –& finite one –to gain the whole world & lose his own soul! Do not wait as long as I have before you write. If you will look at another star, I will try to supply my side of the triange Tell Mr Brown that I remember him & trust that he remembers me. Yrs H.D.T. PS. Excuse this rather flippant preaching – which does not cost me enough –and do not think that I mean you always– though your letter suggested the subjects.

Frank Brown has killed within a day or two a tree sparrow Emberiza Canadensis Canada Bunting or Tree sparrow of Audubon’s Synopsis– I think this must be my bright chestnut fronted bird of the winter though Peabody says it is distinguished by the spot on the breast? which reminds me of the larger finch like bird. A week or two ago I brought home a handsome pitch pine cone which had freshly fallen and was closed perfectly tight.... Mr Herbert is strennuous that I say ruffed grouse for Partridge & hare for rabbit He says of the snipe “I am myself satisfied that the sound is produced by the fact, that the bird, by some muscular action or other, turns the quill-feathers edgewise, as he drops plumb through the air; and that, while in this position, during his accelerated descent, the vibration of the feathers, and the passage of the air between them, gives utterance to this wild humming sound.”

August 24, Wednesday: The Reverend Theodore Parker wrote to Professor Pierre Jean Édouard Desor, mentioning how tolerant he was of Spiritualism and Swedenborgianism. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1854

January 1, Sunday: Lincoln University was chartered in Oxford, Pennsylvania, initially as the Ashmun Institute. This would be one of America’s earliest “Negro colleges.”

At the Cruz Bay Battery on the Caribbean island of St. John, Judge (Landfoged) Carl Henschell was advised of the death of a 7-year-old at the Cinnamon Bay plantation on the island’s north shore, from what appeared to be cholera (by the following year the epidemic would eliminate almost one out of every four of the human inhabitants of this island).

At 9PM the steamer S.S. Golden Gate, “probably the most magnificent sea steamer afloat,” built in 1851 for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, sailed under Captain J.B.G. Isham from Panama for San Diego, California carrying 750 passengers such as the 3-person Kip family. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Henry Thoreau was being written to by Waldo Emerson.

Concord 1 Jany 1854 Dear Henry, I meant to have seen you, but for delays that grew out of the snowbanks, to ask your aid in these following particulars. On the 8 February, Harvard Professor Horsford is to lecture at the Lyceum; on the 15th THEODORE PARKER Feb.y, Theodore Parker. They are both to come to my house for the night. Now I wish to entreat your courtesy & counsel to receive these lonely pilgrims, when they arrive, to guide them to our house, & help the alarmed wife to entertain them, & see that they do not lose the way to the Lyceum, nor the hour. For, it seems pretty certain that I shall not be at home until perhaps the next week following these two. If you shall be in town, & can help these gentlemen so far, You will serve the whole community as well as Yours faithfully, R.W. Emerson

Thoreau was reading Father Paul Le Jeune on American and Canadian natives.

January 1. Le Jeune, describing the death of a young Frenchwoman who had devoted her life to the savages of Canada, uses the expression: “Finally this beautiful soul detached itself from its body the 15th of March,” etc. The drifts mark the standstill or equilibrium between the currents of air or particular winds. In our greatest snow-storms, the wind being northerly, the greatest drifts are on the south sides of the houses and fences and accordingly on the left-hand side of the street going down it. The north tract: of the railroad was not open till a day or more later than the south. I notice that in the angle made by our house and shed, a southwest exposure, the snow-drift does not lie close about the pump, but is a foot off, forming a circular bowl, showing that there was an eddy about it. It shows where the wind has been, the form of the wind. The snow is like a mould, showing the form of the eddying currents of air which have been impressed on it, while the drift and all the rest is that which fell between the currents or where they counterbalanced each other. These boundary lines are mountain barriers. The white-in-tails, or grass finches [Vesper Sparrow Pooecetes gramineus], linger pretty late, flitting in flocks before, but they come so near winter only as the white in their tails indicates. They let it come near enough to whiten their tails, perchance, and they are off. The snow buntings and the tree sparrows are the true spirits of the snow-storm; they are the animated beings that ride upon it and have their life in it. The snow is the great betrayer. It not only shows the tracks of mice, otters, etc., etc., which else we should rarely if ever see, but the tree sparrows are more plainly seen against its white ground, and they in turn are attracted by the dark weeds which it reveals. It also drives the crows and other birds out of the woods to the villages for food. We might expect to find in the snow the footprint of a life superior to our own, of which no zoology takes cognizance. Is there no trace of a nobler life than that of an otter or an escaped convict to be looked for in the snow? Shall we suppose that that is the only life that has been abroad in the night? It is only the savage that can see the track of no higher life than an otter. Why do the vast snow plains give us pleasure, the twilight of the bent and half-buried woods? Is not all there consonant with virtue, justice, purity, courage, magnanimity? Are we not cheered by the sight? And does not all this amount to the track of a higher life than the otter's, a life which has not gone by and left a footprint merely,23 but is there with its beauty, its music, its perfume, its sweetness,

23. But all that we see is the impress of its spirit. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

to exhilarate and recreate us? Where there is a perfect government of the world according to the highest laws, is there no trace of intelligence there, whether in the snow or the earth, or in ourselves? No other trail but, such as a dog can smell? Is there none which an angel can detect and follow? None to guide a man on his pilgrimage, which water will not conceal? Is there no odor of sanctity to be perceived? Is its trail too old? Have mortals lost the scent? The great game for mighty hunters as soon as the first snow, falls is Purity, for, earlier than any rabbit or fox, it is abroad, and its trail may be detected by curs of lowest degree. Did this great snow come to reveal the track merely of some timorous hare, or of the Great Hare, whose track no hunter has seen? Is there no trace nor suggestion of Purity to be detected? If one could detect the meaning of the snow, would he not be on the trail of some higher life that has been abroad in the night? Are there not hunters who seek for something higher than foxes, with judgment more discriminating than the senses of foxhounds, who rally to a nobler music than that of the hunting-horn? As there is contention among the fishermen who shall be the first to reach the pond as soon as the ice will bear, in spite of the cold, as the hunters are forward to take the field as soon as the first snow has fallen, so the observer, or lie who would make the most of his life for discipline, must be abroad early and late, in spite of cold and wet, in pursuit of nobler game, whose traces are then most distinct. A life which, pursued, does not earth itself, does not burrow downward but upward, which takes not to the trees but to the heavens as its home, which the hunter pursues with winged thoughts and aspirations, — these the dogs that tree it, — rallying his pack with the bugle notes of undying faith, and returns with some worthier trophy than a fox's tail, a life which we seek, not to destroy it, but to save our own. Is the great snow of use to the hunter only, and not to the saint, or him who is earnestly building up a life? Do the Indian and hunter only need snow-shoes, while the saint sits indoors in embroidered slippers? The Indians might have imagined a large snow bunting to be the genius of the storm. This morning it is snowing again fast, and about six inches has already fallen by 10 A.M., of a moist and heavy snow. It is about six inches in all this day. This would [be] two feet and a half in all, if it has not settled, — but it has. I would fain be a fisherman, hunter, farmer, preacher, etc., but fish, hunt, farm, preach other things than usual. When, in 1641, the five hundred Iroquois in force brought to Three Rivers two French prisoners (whom they had taken), seeking peace with the French,- I believe this preceded any war with them, -at the assembling for this purpose, they went through the form of tying their prisoners, that they might pass for such; then, after a speech, they broke their bonds and cast them into the river that it might carry them so far that they might never be remembered. The speaker “then made many presents, according to the custom of the country where the word for presents is speech (où le mot de présens se nomme parole), to signify that the present speaks more strongly than the mouth.” (Le Jeune.) Our orators might learn much from the Indians. They are remarkable for their precision; nothing is left at loose ends. They address more senses than one, so as to preclude misunderstanding. A present accompanies each proposition. In delivering one present, the speaker said, “This is the house which we shall have at Three Rivers when we come here to treat with you,” etc. This is in Paul Le Jeune’s Relation for ’40 and ’41, page 156. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

January 21, Saturday: John Mitchel responded in The Citizen to the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher’s sermon against him, by referring to Beecher as “his reverence” and promising that in his eventual response he meant “not only to parry but to thrust.” Henry Thoreau wrote to H.G.O. BlakeH.G.O. BLAKE in Worcester, telling him that he would visit on Monday.

Concord Jan 21st ’54 Mr Blake, My coat is at last done, and my mother & sister allow that I am so far in a condition to go abroad. I feel as if I had gone abroad the moment I put it on. It is, as usual a production strange to me the wearer, invented by some Count D’Orsay, and the maker of it was not acquainted with any of my real depressions or elevations. He only measured a peg to hang it on, and might have made the loop big enough to go over my head. It requires a not quite innocent indifference not to say inso- HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

lence to wear it. Ah, the process by which we get our coats is not what it should be. Though the church declares it righteous & its priest pardons me, my own Good Genius tells me that it is hasty & coarse & false. I expect a time when, or rather an integrity by which a man will get his coat as honestly, and as perfectly fitting as a tree its bark. Now <> our garments are typical of our con[ ]

Page 2 formity to the world, i. e. of the Devil — & to some extent react on us and poison us like that shirt which Hercules put on. I think to come & see you next week on monday, if nothing hinders. I have just returned from Court at Cambridge, whither I was called as a witness, having surveyed a water-privelege about which there is a dispute since you were here. Ah! what foreign countries there are, greater in extent than the U. S. or Russia, and with no more souls to a square mile — stretching away on every side from every human being with whom you have no sympathy. Their humanity affects me as simply monstrous. Rocks — earth — brute beasts comparatively are not so strange to me. When I sit in the parlors or kitchens of some with whom my business brings me — I was going to say in contact — (business, like misery, makes strange bed- fellows) I feel a sort of awe and as forlorn as if I were cast away on a desolate shore — I think of Riley’s Narrative & his suffering. You y who roared like a merlin with your mate through the realms of ether — in the presence of the unlike drop at once to earth a mere amorphus <> HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

squab — divested of your air inflated pinions. (By the way, excuse

Page 3 this writing, for I am using the stub of the last feather I chance to possess —) You travel on, however, through this dark & desert world, you see in the distance an intelligent & sympathizing lineament, — the stars come forth in the dark & oases appear in the desert. But (to return to the subject of coats), we are well nigh smothered under yet more fatal coats, which do not fit us, our whole lives long. Consider the cloak that our employment or station is — how rarely men treat each other for what in their true & naked characters they are — How we use & tolerate pretension; how the judge is clothed with dignity which does not belong to him, and the trembling witness with humility as that does not belong to him, and the criminal perchance with shame or impudence which no more belong to him — It does not matter so much then what is the fashion of the cloak with which we cloak these cloaks. Change the coat — put the judge in the criminal box & the criminal on the bench, and you might think that you had changed the men. No doubt the thinnest of all cloaks is it is sleazy & frays out conscious deception, or lies, it is not close ^ woven like cloth — but its meshes are a coarse net-work. A man can afford to lie only at the intersection of the threads, but truth <> puts in the filling & makes a consistent stuff.

Page 4 I mean merely to suggest how much the station affects the demeanor & self-respectability of the parties, & that the difference between the judge’s coat of cloth & the criminal[’s] is insignificant compared with — or only partially significant of — the difference HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

between the coats which their respective stations permit[s] them to wear —. What airs the judge may put on over his coat which the criminal may not! The judge’s opinion (sententia) of the criminal sentences him & is read by the clerk of the court, & published to the world, & executed by the sheriff — but the criminal’s opinion of the judge has the weight of a sentence & is published & executed only in the supreme court of the universe — a court not of common pleas. How much juster is the one than the other? Men are continually sentencing each other, but whether we be judges or criminals, the sentence is ineffectual unless we condemn ourselves. I am glad to hear that I do not always limit your vision when you look this way — that you sometimes see the light through me, that I am here & there windows & not all dead wall. Might not the community sometimes petition a man to remove himself as a [nuiisance] a darkener of the day — a too large <> mote? H.D.T.

Bronson Alcott returned home from his Western lecture tour. Almost immediately upon his return, he joined the Committee of Vigilance headed by the white-supremacist Reverend Theodore Parker:

Perhaps blood is to be spilt to rescue the nation from slavery and bring these desperate conservatives to sanity. A retribution is not far off. Let it come. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

May 26, Friday: An annular solar eclipse (#7298) was visible (local weather conditions permitting) in a path from Washington state along the Canadian border and across New England and Nova Scotia:

ASTRONOMY In Boston, the solar eclipse was precluded by clouds and rain. However, in Roxbury, Caroline Barrett White got a view and was able to mark down the totality as occurring precisely at 5:40 PM. In Cambridge, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in his journal that “Yesterday a fugitive slave was arrested in Boston! To-day there is an eclipse of the sun. ‘Hung be the heavens in black!’”

At 5:30 AM Henry Thoreau visited the climbing ivy, and in the afternoon he went to Walden Pond. Presumably he caught no glimpse of the eclipse through the clouds. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Moncure Daniel Conway heard the Reverend Theodore Parker’s incendiary oration at Faneuil Hall:

There is a means, and there is an end; liberty is the end, and sometimes peace is not the means toward it.

Hey, that’s not bad, coming from a white man who believed his own Caucasian race to be uniquely humane, civilized, and progressive, never enslaved because able to conquer by use of the head as well as by use of the hand. (Yeah, that’s just about a quote unquote, for the Reverend Parker besides being a warmonger was also a racist.) Let’s have a war so that superior and inferior races can live together in harmony!

The lawyer Seth Webb, Jr. managed to persuade Judge Daniel Wells of Boston’s Court of Common Pleas to issue to Boston’s coroner, Charles Smith, a writ of personal replevin according to which US Marshal Watson Freeman was to surrender “the body of Anthony Burns.” Freeman, however, refused to comply with this writ. Meanwhile, there were maneuvers to raise $1,200 to purchase the escaped slave in order directly to manumit him.24 MANUMISSION

This Anthony Burns affair made Conway (among others) into an abolitionist, by forcing him to choose sides. As the industrialist Amos Lawrence of the Secret “Six” conspiracy commented,

We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.

24. It would have been at best problematic, for such a sale of Burns to the abolitionists for $1,200 to have gone through. Under Massachusetts law, the sale of a slave within the Commonwealth would have been a criminal offense committed by the seller and punishable by a fine of $1,000 plus ten years in prison. Even if Mr. Charles Francis Suttle were to carefully phrase the transaction as a manumission financed by others rather than as a financial transaction for gain, he very well knew that this would provide his enemies with a pretext for indefinite legal harassment — a pretext upon which in the utter absence of all good will they would be quite likely to act. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Bronson Alcott took the train from Boston for Worcester on a mission for the Boston Vigilance Committee. He was to attract the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had organized the guerrilla action of 1851 which had failed to rescue Thomas Simms (Sims), to head the Vigilance Committee and to take action in regard to the kidnapping of Burns.25

May 28, Sunday: Early in the morning, Judge Lemuel Shaw of the Supreme Judicial Court sentenced the murderer James Wilson to be “confined to hard labor in the House of Correction for one year from the 26th of May, 1854, and then to be taken to the place of execution, and hanged by the neck until dead.” He then left the courthouse, freeing it for the important proceedings of the Burns case.

Judge Edward Greeley Loring then sat, and ruled that since the defense would be allowed more time to prepare if someone was accused of writing a bad check for $25.00, he considered that in a case affecting a man’s liberty, it was reasonable and within the discretion of the court to allow some further delay.

In his Ascension Sunday sermon the Reverend Theodore Parker condemned Edward Greeley Loring, a teacher at Harvard College who doubled as a judge of probate in the Massachusetts court system, for issuing the warrant as United States Commissioner for Anthony Burns’s arrest, and thus, in effect, for causing the murder of the 1 out of the 184 courthouse guards, James Batchelder who had been unfortunately shot to death during the citizen riot. The Woburn ladies of the congregation took up a collection and sent Commissioner Loring thirty pieces of silver.

May 28. 12 M. —By boat to Lee’s Cliff. The night-warbler , after his strain, drops down almost perpendicularly into a tree-top and is lost.

May 28: The inhumanity of science concerns me, as when I am tempted to kill a rare snake that I may ascertain its species. I feel that this is not the means of acquiring true knowledge.

25. For the attempt at rescuing Anthony Burns, see the Reverend Higginson’s CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898). HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

May 30, Tuesday: The Kansas-Nebraska Act.

In Boston, the New England Anti-Slavery Society met to try to figure out what to do, while the presser of the Brattle Street tailor shop, Anthony Burns, was on trial in the courthouse, on the charge of being a fugitive from enslavement. Behind barricades of ropes stretched across Courthouse Square, the courthouse was being guarded by regiments of US troops. The night was so cold that Thoreau had to go out and cover his watermelon plants. The Boston Post, a Democratic mouthpiece, was editorializing that “What these bold, bad men [the paper instances the Reverend Theodore Parker and aristocrat Wendell Phillips by name] are doing, is nothing more nor less than committing treason.”

A false report had appeared in the Boston Daily Times, on Monday, May 29th, that Friend John Greenleaf Whittier had offered “any aid, by money or muscle,” to effect a violent rescue of Anthony Burns. (Whittier had in fact incautiously commented in a message that had become generally known, that “anything” would be preferred to sending Burns “out of Boston as a slave.”) On this day Whittier wrote to the newspaper, offering as further explanation of the attitude he was seeking to express, that “I regard all violence as evil and self- destructive.”

In Concord in the afternoon Henry Thoreau went to Clintonia swamp and Pond.

May 30. Tuesday. Whiteweed. Spergularia rubra, apparently a day or two, side of railroad above red house. Yarrow. P.M. — To Clintonia Swamp and Pond. Saw a black snake, dead, tour feet three inches long, slate-colored beneath. Saw what was called a California cat which a colored man brought home from California, — an animal at least a third smaller than a cat and shaped more like a polecat or weasel, brown-gray, with a cat-like tail of alternate black and white rings, very large cars, and eyes which were prominent, long body like a weasel, and sleeps with its head between its fore paws, curling itself about; a rank smell to it. It was lost several days in our woods, and was caught again in a tree; about a crow’s nest.26 Ranunculus repens, perhaps a day or two; channelled peduncle and spreading calyx and conspicuously spotted leaves. The leaves of the tall buttercup are much larger and finely cut and, as it were, peltate. Pickerel are not easily detected, — such is their color, — as if they were transparent. Vetch. I see now green high blueberries, and gooseberries in Hubbard’s Close, as well as shad-bush berries and strawberries. In this dark, cellar-like maple swamp are scattered at pretty regular intervals tufts of green ferns, Osmunda cinnamomea, above the dead brown leaves, broad, tapering fronds, curving over on every side from a compact centre, now three or four feet high. Wood frogs skipping over the dead leaves, whose color they resemble. Clintonia. Medeola. The last may be earlier. I am surprised to find arethusas abundantly out in Hubbard’s Close, maybe two or three days, though not yet at Arethusa Meadow, probably on account of the recent freshet. It is so leafless that it shoots up unexpectedly. It is all color, a little hook of purple flame projecting from the meadow into the air. Some are comparatively pale. This high-colored plant shoots up suddenly, all flower, in meadows where it is wet walking. A superb flower. Cotton-grass here also, probably two or three days for the same reason. Eriophorum polystachyon var. latifolium, having rough peduncles. The twigs of the dwarf willow, now gone to seed, are thickly invested with cotton, containing little green seed- vessels, like excrement of caterpillars, and the shrubs look at a little distance like sand cherries in full bloom. These are among the downy seeds that fly. Found a ground-robin’s nest, under a tuft of dry sedge which the winter had bent clown, in sprout-land on the side of Heywood Peak, perfectly concealed, with two whitish eggs very thickly sprinkled with brown; made of coarse grass and weed stems and lined with a few hairs and stems of the mahogany moss. The pink is certainly one of the finest of our flowers and deserves the place it holds in my memory. It is now in its prime on the south side of the Heywood Peak, where it grows luxuriantly in dense rounded tufts or hemispheres, raying out on every side and presenting an even and regular surface of expanded flowers. I count in one such tuft, of an oval form twelve inches by eight, some three hundred fully open and about three times as many buds, — more than a thousand in all. Some tufts consist wholly of white ones with a very faint tinge

CAT 26. Ringtail (Bassariscus astutus) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring-tailed_Cat HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

of pink. This flower is as elegant in form as in color, though it is not fragrant. It is associated in my mind with the first heats of summer, or [those] which announce its near approach. Few plants are so worthy of cultivation. The shrub oak pincushion (?) galls are larger, whiter, and less compact than those of the white oak. I find the linnaea, and budded, in Stow’s Wood by Deep Cut. Sweet flag. Waxwork to-morrow. I see my umbrella toadstool on the hillside has already pierced the ground.

July 2, Sunday: At 4 AM Henry Thoreau went to Hill. In the afternoon he and Ellery Channing went to Flint’s Pond and Smith’s Hill.

The Reverend Theodore Parker’s sermon this morning at Boston Music Hall in beautiful downtown Boston would be taken down “phonographically” (which is to say, stenographically) by Rufus Leighton and printed by James Manning Winchell Yerington as A SERMON OF THE DANGERS WHICH THREATEN THE RIGHTS OF MAN IN AMERICA; PREACHED AT THE MUSIC HALL, ON SUNDAY, JULY 2, 1854, BY THEODORE PARKER, MINISTER OF THE XXVIII. CONGREGATIONAL SOCIETY. {PHONOGRAPHICALLY REPORTED BY MESSRS. YERINGTON AND LEIGHTON.] HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

July 20, Thursday: This was a very hot day, a bathing day, and in the afternoon Henry Thoreau went to Hubbard’s Bath:

Meanwhile, on this day, at Harvard University, Moncure Daniel Conway was being graduated from the Divinity School, and ordained. However, for good and sufficient reason his classmate William H. Leeman of Hallowell, Maine, was not graduating with him:

This fellow had drunk some illicit alcohol that Conway had smuggled onto campus, and then refilled Conway’s illicit bottles with water — and so the indignant Conway had turned him in to the college administration. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Refused graduation on grounds of moral turpitude, William H. Leeman was warned to make no attempt to preach. He would be dropping out of sight, evidently in a great deal of anguish. At a later point he will reappear, or his mutilated body will reappear — salvaged from the Potomac River after being used for target practice by passing drunken Virginians, and, barely recognizable, thrown onto the common pit at Harpers Ferry at midnight.27

(From the manner in which this story appears in Conway’s reliably self-promotional autobiography, we can be quite confident that he took no direct part in any of these proceedings and that here he was merely recounting events of which someone else had informed him.)

While I loved Theodore Parker and honoured him as the standard-bearer of religious liberty, and derived instruction from his discourses, I received no important aid from his philosophy or his theology. Indeed, none of our class in the Harvard Divinity School adopted “Parkerism” but we all felt –and I suspect our professors felt– that Parker was defending our right to enter on an unfettered ministry. We unanimously resolved to ask him to give the sermon at our graduation. When one or two of us conveyed to Parker this invitation, we were received in his library, where he sat at his desk. The conspicuous musket borne by his grandfather at Lexington was in curious contrast with the tenderness which this captain in a nobler revolution displayed for his antagonists. He was moved by our invitation, and after some moments of silence said, “I should rejoice to do it; but the professors have already been embarrassed at the reputation of your class for radicalism, and this would embarrass them further; get some one less notorious.” After some discussion we took his advice, and the address was given by Rev. Dr. Furness of Philadelphia. After us came a class which without consulting Parker invited him to deliver their address. The Faculty having refused consent, and the young men to elect another, the address that year was an eloquent silence.

THEODORE PARKER

November: During this month and the following one, the Reverend Theodore Parker was writing and rewriting and rewriting a 125,000-word sermon in his own defense, which he intended to deliver in court. (This effort would eventually be published as THE TRIAL OF THEODORE PARKER FOR THE “MISDEMEANOR” OF A SPEECH IN FANEUIL HALL AGAINST KIDNAPPING, BEFORE THE CIRCUIT COURT OF THE UNITED STATES, AT BOSTON, WITH THE DEFENCE.)

27. (Nothing was done to Moncure Daniel Conway for having merely broken the rules, rules being of course made to be broken. :-) See pages 87-8 and 240-1 of d’Entremont, where this account of William Leaman was put together for the first time. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1855

April 3, Tuesday: The Reverend Theodore Parker went on trial in Boston, on the charge of having the previous spring addressed an abolitionist crowd gathered at Faneuil Hall, urging them to take direct vigilante action to prevent a fugitive slave, Anthony Burns, from being returned to his master. This was being categorized as an incitement to riot.

April 3. It is somewhat and warmer, but still windy, and — P.M. — I go to sail down to the Island and up to Hubbard’s Causeway. Most would call it cold to-day. I paddle without gloves. It is a coolness like that of March 29th and 30th, pleasant to breathe, and, perhaps, like that, presaging decidedly warmer weather. It is an amelioration, as nature does nothing suddenly. The shores are lined with frozen spray-like foam, with an abrupt edge, a foot high often on the waterside. Occasionally where there [are] twigs there is a nest of those short, thick bulls’-horn icicles, pointing in every direction. I see many hens feeding close to the river’s edge, like the crows, — and robins and blackbirds later, — and I have no doubt they are attracted by a like cause. The ground being first thawed there, not only worms but other insect and vegetable life is accessible there sooner than elsewhere. See several pairs of ducks, mostly black. Returning, when off the hill was attracted by the noise of crows, which betrayed to me a very large hawk (?), large enough for an eagle, sitting on a maple beneath them. Now and then they dived at him, and at last he sailed away low round the hill, as if hunting. The hillside was alive with sparrows, red-wings, and the first grackles [Editorial note in 1906 edition: “That is, rusty grackles, or rusty blackbirds.” See Rusty Blackbird Euphagus carolinus.] I have seen. I detected them first by their more rasping note, — or was that a crow blackbird?— after a short stuttering, then a fine, clear whistle. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1856

March 21, Friday: William Lloyd Garrison wrote to the Reverend Samuel Joseph May: “You see that such men as Gerrit Smith, Ward Beecher [the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher], and [the Reverend] Theodore Parker are finding in Sharp’s rifles more than in the peaceful Gospel of Christ to aid the cause of right and freedom!”

SWEETS March 21, 1856: Had a dispute with Father about the use of my making this sugar when I ... might have bought sugar cheaper at Holden’s. He said it took me from my studies. I said I made it my study; I felt as if I WITHOUT had been to a university. SLAVERY

June 17, Tuesday: The Reverend Theodore Parker wrote to Dr. Füster, a Viennese professor, mentioning news of Professor Pierre Jean Édouard Desor.

In Worcester, Henry Thoreau, H.G.O. Blake, and Theophilus Brown needed to use a carriage when they went out to Quinsigamund Pond, because they were being accompanied by Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau.

Friend Daniel Ricketson abandoned Newport, Rhode Island to visit Concord to see Henry, unaware that Henry had gone to Worcester. The father John Thoreau must have been very short indeed, for a man who himself stood 5'3'' to have pronounced him “very short”:

Left Newport this morning at five o’clock for Concord, Mass., via Providence and Boston, and arrived at C. about 12 M. The sail up the Providence or Blackstone River was very fine, the morning being clear and the air very refreshing. My object in coming to Concord was to see H.D. Thoreau, but unfortunately I found him on a visit at Worcester, but I was received with great kindness and cordiality by his father and mother, and took tea with them. Mrs. Thoreau, like a true mother, idolizes her son, and gave me a long and interesting account of his character. Mr. Thoreau, a very short old gentleman, is a pleasant person. We took a short walk together after tea, returned to the Middlesex Hotel at ten. Mrs. T. gave me a long and particular account of W.E. Channing, who spent so many years here.

CYNTHIA DUNBAR THOREAU ELLERY CHANNING DUNBAR FAMILY PROVIDENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

November 16, Sunday Evening: On First Day evening, Henry Thoreau delivered his “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” sermon for the benefit of the little community of Quaker exiles on the New Jersey at the intentional Eagleswood community. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

BRAD DEAN’S COMMENTARY THOREAU’S SERMON

[Various versions of “LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE”, variously titled, would be delivered:

•“WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” on December 6, 1854 at Railroad Hall in Providence •“WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” on December 26, 1854 in the New Bedford Lyceum •“WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” on December 28, 1854 at the Athenaeum on Nantucket Island • On January 4, 1855 in the Worcester Lyceum, as “The Connection between Man’s Employment and His Higher Life” •“WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” on February 14, 1855 in the Concord Lyceum •“WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” on November 16, 1856 for the Eagleswood community • “Getting a Living” on December 18, 1856 in the vestry of the Congregational Church of Amherst, New Hampshire •“LIFE MISSPENT” on Sunday morning, October 9, 1859 to the Reverend Theodore Parker’s 28th Congregational Society in Boston Music Hall •“LIFE MISSPENT” on Sunday, September 9, 1860 at Welles Hall in Lowell.] HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1857

India had been under Muslim control for a millennium. After controlling the subcontinent for 332 years, the Mughal dynasty ended when the British captured Delhi. The Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar found refuge in Rangoon, Burma. During this year and the following one, the Indian Mutiny would be shaking British rule in India; in 1858 the East India Company would be abolished.

Debendranath Tagore informed the Reverend Charles Henry Appleton Dall that he was no longer welcome at the Brahmo Samaj in Calcutta, even as a visitor let alone as a teacher. The Reverend embarked on a course of language training in Bengali, Hindustani, Tamil, and Sanskrit, began to study the BHAGAVAD GITA, and formed a competing group, the Rammohun Roy Society (later to be known as the Hitoisini Sabha, or Association), to promote the writings of the Reverends William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker.

July: The Reverend Theodore Parker of Boston wrote to Charles Wesley Slack to inform him of the date of celebration at the Harvard Divinity School.28

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

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1858

Here is a somewhat strange message, that the Reverend Theodore Parker is said to have delivered at some point during this year, at the Progressive Friends meeting of Chester County, Pennsylvania: I have swum in clear, sweet waters all my days; and if sometimes they were a little cold, and the stream ran adverse and something rough, it was never too strong to be breasted and swam though. From the days of earliest boyhood, when I went stumbling through the grass, “as merry as a May bee,” up to the grey bearded manhood of this time, there is none but has let me honey in the hive of memory that I now freed on for present delight. When I recall the years of boyhood, youth, early manhood, I am filled with a sense of sweetness and wonder that such little things can make a mortal so exceedingly rich! But I must confess that the chiefest of all my delights is still the religious. This the lowest down, the inwardest of all — it is likewise highest up. What delight have I in my consciousness of God, the certainty of his protection, of his infinite love? God loves man as my natural mother never did, nor could, nor can, even now with the added beatitudes of well-nigh 2 score years in heaven. How the religious disposition inclines the little boy or girl to veneration and gratitude, virtues which in the child are what good breeding is in the full grown gentleman, giving a certain air of noble birth and well bred superiority! There is a Jacob’s ladder for our young pilgrim, whereon he goes up from his earthly mother, who manages the little room he sleeps in, to the dear heavenly mother, who never slumbers nor sleeps, who is never careful nor troubled about anything, but yet cares continually for the great housekeeping of all the world, giving likewise to her beloved even in their sleep. In the child it is only a faint twilight, the beginning of religion which you take notice of, like the voice of the blue bird and the Phoebe come early in March, but only as a prelude to that whole summer of joyous song, which when the air is delicate, will ’ere long gladden and beautify the procreant nest. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

Go figure! HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

During this year the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote “Saints and Their Bodies,” the 1st of his many essays for The Atlantic Monthly. He wrote the 1st of his many nature essays, this one entitled “Water Lilies.” He collaborated with Lucy Stone on the Woman’s Rights Almanac.

He met with John Brown and agreed to provide financial support for his cause.

Pages 476-7 of Henry Mayer’s ALL ON FIRE: Brown spent the balance of the year [1858] recruiting soldiers, including an adventurer named Hugh Forbes who had fought with Garibaldi in Italy. With Kansas embroiled in political combat rather than open warfare, however, the captain brooded more and more upon the idea of “troubling Israel” with raids in the South and asked his eastern friends to help him raise money “for secret service, and no questions asked.” At the end of January 1858, Brown came east to meld his black and white supporters into a revolutionary conspiracy. With magnetic fervor he sketched for Frederick Douglass the latest version of his plan to build a guerrilla strike force, and although Douglass had some tactical criticism, he agreed to help Brown raise some money and find recruits. From Douglass’s house, Brown wrote manipulative letters to his best Boston prospects, making each out to be his more trustworthy friend, with news that he had “perfected arrangements for carrying out an important measure, in which the world has a deep interest,” that lacked only money from people willing to given “practical shape” to their abolition theories. “Do you think any of my Garrisonian friends either at Boston, Worcester, or in any other place, can be induced to supply a little ‘straw,’ if I will absolutely make ‘bricks’?” Brown asked [the Reverend Theodore Parker]. While awaiting replies, Brown went on to Peterboro and persuaded his old patron Gerrit Smith to support the idea, which had now metamorphosed from a slave- running operation (“railroad business on a somewhat extended scale,” he called it) into provocation of a full-fledged slave insurrection and establishment —under a constitution he had drafted at Douglass’s— of a provisional mountain republic of liberated slaves and freedom fighters. There is absolutely no evidence that Parker or anyone else approached William Lloyd Garrison about Brown’s latest scheme, but Sanborn, Higginson, Howe, and Stearns all manifested interest, and in the first week of March 1858, the mysterious “Nelson Hawins” from somewhere in Iowa or perhaps Ohio registered at the American Hotel for a few days of conferences with his business associates. [Henry Mayer indicates that this material is a synthesis of material in Oswald Garrison Villard’s JOHN BROWN 1800-1859: A BIOGRAPHY FIFTY HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

YEARS AFTER (Boston, 1910), Stephen B. Oates’s TO PURGE THIS LAND WITH BLOOD: A BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN BROWN (NY, 1970), Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s LIFE AND LETTERS OF JOHN BROWN (Concord MA, 1885), and Edward J. Renehan, Jr.’s THE SECRET SIX: THE TRUE TALE OF THE MEN WHO CONSPIRED WITH JOHN BROWN (NY, 1995).]

April: The Reverend Theodore Parker almost fainted while lecturing in New Bedford. A little sherry helped him, but he was clearly falling victim to TB, the family curse.

May 17, Monday: The Reverend Edwin Hubell Chapin notified Charles Wesley Slack that to his regret he would be unable to supply the Reverend Theodore Parker’s pulpit on July 3d.

During an extended attack, two of the white officers under Lieutenant Colonel Edward J. Steptoe were killed by the Coeur d’Alene warriors.

May 17, 1858: It rains gently from time to time as I walk, but I see a farmer with his boys, John Hosmer, still working in the rain, bent on finishing his planting. He is slowly getting a soaking, quietly dropping manure in the furrows. The rain is good for thought. It is especially agreeable to me as I enter the wood and hear the soothing dripping on the leaves. It domiciliates me in nature. The woods are the more like a house for the rain; the few slight noises sound more hollow in them; the birds hop nearer; the very trees seem still and pensive. The clouds are but a higher roof. The clouds and rain confine me to near objects, the surface of the earth and the trees.

May 21, Friday: Charlotte L. Forten wrote that Mr. Putnam [George W. Putnam of Lynn] “and Mr. N [William Cooper Nell] both left this morn....”

Amory Dwight Mayo of Albany, New York declined an opportunity to be scheduled to deliver a sermon from the pulpit of the Reverend Theodore Parker.

May 21. P. M. — To Boulder Field. Horse-chestnut in bloom. Actæa spicata var. rubra will bloom, apparently, in four or five days. It is now fifteen inches high. Lilac in bloom. Pratt shows me what I take to be Genista tinctoria (not budded) from the Boulder Field. It has leafed; when? Also a ranunculus from his land, — which has been out how long? — which is very near to R. repens, but has small flowers, petals less than the calyx, and leaves, methinks, more divided, but I did not see it open. It may be a variety of repens. [When I look May 29th, the flower open is of usual size and true R. Repens.] His daughter has found in bloom: huckleberry on the 19th; Viola pubescens, 16th; Geranium maculatum, 18th. I notice that the old indigo-bird path behind Pratt’s is for some distance distinctly defined by young birches, three or four feet high, which are now clothed with tender leaves before the young oaks, etc., on each side. They are especially thick in the ruts, while there are but few here and there in the sprout-land generally. I suspect that the seed was blown and lodged there in the winter. E. Hoar saw Silene Pennsylvanica out in Lincoln today, in a warm cleft of a rock; also Cerasus pumila between here and Newton. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Fall: While searching for employment in Boston, staying with the Sewalls on Beacon Hill, Louisa May Alcott took a walk on the dam which then connected Boston to the mainland. This dam had been built in 1821 and was 50 1 feet wide and 1 /2 miles long. She watched the sluices emptying water from the Great Bay of the Charles River on her right into the Back Bay receiving area on her left, to keep the Back Bay from drying and releasing clouds of dust, and contemplated suicide. “[I]t seemed so cowardly to run away before the battle was over.” The following Sunday she heard the Reverend Theodore Parker giving advice to “Laborious Young Women” from the pulpit: “[A]ccept the humblest work you can find.” Then Mrs. Parker helped Louisa obtain a position at $250.00 per year, caring for a wealthy invalid.29

29. Louisa May Alcott evidently felt greatly threatened by the Women’s Libbers of her day. In fact she elaborated a comic persona which she denominated “Miss Oranthy Bluggage” , and used this scathing comic persona, more or less like the “Ernestine” persona developed by a humorist of our own day, to hold women concerned for women’s liberation up to general ridicule:

ADVERTISEMENTS ______

MISS ORANTHY BLUGGAGE, the accomplished strong-minded lecturer, will deliver her famous lecture on “WOMAN AND HER POSITION” at Pickwick Hall, next Saturday Evening, after the usual performances. ______HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Eventually this bleak Back Bay region in which despairing Louisa had almost committed suicide would acquire streets and housing and trees and patina, and begin to look like this:

October: The Reverend Theodore Parker began to bleed from the lungs. His family’s curse, TB, was gaining on him. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1859

January: The consumptive Reverend Theodore Parker’s health failed.

As he prepared to board ship in Boston harbor for the West Indies in an attempt to recover his health, he gave his consent to the stenographer Rufus Leighton to prepare an edition of his Sunday morning sermons at the Boston Music Hall during the previous decade (they would appear in 1908 as LESSONS FROM THE WORLD OF MATTER AND THE WORLD OF MAN: SELECTED FROM NOTES OF UNPUBLISHED SERMONS BY THEODORE PARKER EDITED WITH A PREFACE BY RUFUS LEIGHTON (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 25 Beacon Street)). HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

January 2, Sunday: The Reverend Frederick Llewellyn Hovey Willis offered “A new-year’s discourse: preached before the First Congregational Society of Coldwater, Michigan, Sunday, January 2, 1859.” This would be turned into a 7-page pamphlet. A notable event happened to him while in Coldwater, in that after a small locket on a gold chain securely secreted in his waistcoat pocket had somehow disappeared during the night, some weeks later as an audience watched in Boston, this same locket and chain somehow descended as if out of the high ceiling of the room in which all were seated, and though no visible agent was present, was observed to position itself carefully about the neck of the Reverend Willis. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Erastus Flavel Beadle’s 72-page THE DIME BOOK OF PRACTICAL ETIQUETTE.

At the Tabernacle of Great Salt Lake City, Utah, Elder Orson Pratt compared the evidences of the BIBLE with those of the BOOK OF MORMON.

W.H. Gurnell wrote to Charles Wesley Slack, to promise that he was going to write to the Reverend James Freeman Clarke about meeting in “Theo Parker’s Place” in a few weeks.30 THEODORE PARKER

January 2: P.M.–To Cliffs and Walden. Going up the hill through Stow’s young oak woodland, I listen to the sharp, dry rustle of the withered oak leaves. This is the voice of the wood now. It would be comparatively still and more dreary here in other respects, if it were not for these leaves that hold on. It sounds like the roar of the sea, and is enlivening and inspiriting like

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

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

that, suggesting how all the land is seacoast to the aerial ocean. It is the sound of the surf, the rut of an unseen ocean, billows of air breaking on the forest like water on itself or on sand and rocks. It rises and falls, wells and dies away, with agreeable alternation as the sea surf does. Perhaps the landsman can foretell a storm by it. It is remarkable how universal these grand murmurs are, these backgrounds of sound, –the surf, the wind in the forest, waterfalls, etc.,– which yet to the ear and in their origin are essentially one voice, the earth-voice, the breathing or snoring of the creature. The earth is our ship, and this is the sound of the wind in her rigging as we sail. Just as the inhabitant of Cape Cod hears the surf ever breaking on its shores, so we countrymen hear this kindred surf on the leaves of the forest. Regarded as a voice, –though it is not articulate,– as our articulate sounds are divided into vowels (but this is nearer a consonant sound), labials, dentals, palatals, sibilants, mutes, aspirate, etc., so this may be called folial or frondal, produced by air driven against the leaves, and comes nearest to our sibilants or aspirate. The color of young oaks of different species is still distinct, but more faded and blended, becoming a more uniform brown. Michaux said that white oaks would be distinguished by their retaining their leaves in the winter, but as far as my observation goes they cannot be so distinguished. All our large oaks may retain a. few leaves at the base of the lower limbs and about the trunks, though only a few, and the white oak scarcely more than the others, while the same trees when young are all alike thickly clothed in the winter, but the leaves of the white oaks are the most withered and shrivelled of them all. Why do young oaks retain their leaves while old ones shed them? Why do they die on the stem, having some life at the base in the one case, while they wither through at the base in the other case? Is it because in the former case they have more sap and vigor? There being some snow on the ground, I can easily distinguish the forest on the mountains (the Peterboro Hills, etc.) and tell which are forested, those parts and those mountains being dark like a shadow. I cannot distinguish the forest thus far in the summer. The white pines, etc., as I look down on them from this hill, are now darker, as becomes the sterner season, like a frost-bitten apple, – a sombre green. When I hear the hypercritical quarrelling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs, –Mr. Webster, perhaps, not having spoken according to Mr. Kirkham’s rule,– I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat. The grammarian is often one who can neither cry nor laugh, yet thinks that he can express human emotions. So the posture.masters tell you how you shall walk, –turning your toes out, perhaps, excessively,– but so the beautiful walkers are not made. Mediaeval, or law, Latin seems to have invented the word “forest,” not being satisfied with silva, nemus, etc. Webster makes it from the same root with “L. foris, Fr. hors, and the Saxon faran, to go, to depart.” The allied words “all express distance from cities and civilization, and are from roots expressing departure or wandering,” – as if this newer term were needed to describe those strange, wild woods furthest from the centres of civilization. The earth, where quite bare, is now, and for five or six weeks, russet without any lively red, – not golden-russet. I notice on the top of the Cliffs that the extremities of the smooth sumach are generally dead and withered, while those of the staghorn, which are so downy, are alive. Is this a prevailing difference? Which extends furthest north? The outside bark-scales of some large pitch pines in the midst of the woods having dropped off gives a peculiar flatness to the ridges, as if it had been shaved or scraped. Minott says that a fox will lead a dog on to thin ice in order that he may get in. Tells of Jake Lakin losing a hound DOG so, which went under the ice and was drowned below the Holt; was found afterward by Sted. Buttrick, his collar taken off and given to Lakin. They used to cross the river there on the ice, going to market, formerly. GEORGE MINOTT Looking from the southwest side of Walden toward Heywood’s Peak before sunset, the brown light on the oak leaves is almost dazzling.

BETWEEN ANY TWO MOMENTS ARE AN INFINITE NUMBER OF MOMENTS, AND BETWEEN THESE OTHER MOMENTS LIKEWISE AN INFINITE NUMBER, HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

THERE BEING NO ATOMIC MOMENT JUST AS THERE IS NO ATOMIC POINT ALONG A LINE. MOMENTS ARE THEREFORE FIGMENTS. THE PRESENT MOMENT IS A MOMENT AND AS SUCH IS A FIGMENT, A FLIGHT OF THE IMAGINATION TO WHICH NOTHING REAL CORRESPONDS. SINCE PAST MOMENTS HAVE PASSED OUT OF EXISTENCE AND FUTURE MOMENTS HAVE YET TO ARRIVE, WE NOTE THAT THE PRESENT MOMENT IS ALL THAT EVER EXISTS — AND YET THE PRESENT MOMENT BEING A MOMENT IS A FIGMENT TO WHICH NOTHING IN REALITY CORRESPONDS.

January 21, Friday: Henry Hallam died.

José Mariano de Salas replaced Manuel Robles Pezuela as acting President of Mexico.

The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote from Worcester to Charles Wesley Slack to provide a receipt for a lecture. He mentioned how necessary it was to obtain interesting speakers for church congregations (otherwise people would not attend). He mentioned the Reverend Theodore Parker’s 28th Congregational Society and the attempt he had made to sustain irregular meetings.

January 21. A January thaw, with some fog, occasioned as yet wholly by warm weather, without rain; high wind in the night; wind still south. The last two days have been remarkably pleasant and warm, with a southerly wind, and last night was apparently warmer yet (I think it was 46 this morning); and this morning I am surprised to see much bare ground and ice where was snow last evening, and though last evening it was good sleighing and the street was not wet at all, –though the snow was moist,– now it is almost entirely bare ice except for the water. The sluices are more than full, rushing like mill-streams on each side the way and often stretching in broad lakes across the street. It is the worst or wettest of walking, requiring india-rubber boots. Great channels, eight inches deep and a foot or more wide, are worn in the ice across the street, revealing a pure, clear ice on the sides, contrasting with the dirty surface. I do not remember so sudden a change, the effect of warmth without rain. Yesterday afternoon it was safe sledding wood along the riverside on the ice, –Hubbard was doing so,– and I saw at the bridges that the river was some eight inches lower than it had been when it froze, the ice adhering to the piers, and all held up there so much higher than the surrounding surface; and now it is rapidly rising, and the river is forbidden ground. It is surprising how suddenly the slumbering snow has been melted, and with what a rush it now seeks the lowest ground on all sides. Yesterday, in the streets and fields, it was all snow and ice and rest; now it is chiefly water and motion. Yesterday afternoon I walked in the merely moist snow-track of sleds and sleighs, while all the sides of the road and the ditches rested under a white mantle of snow. This morning I go picking my way in rubbers through broad puddles on a slippery icy bottom, stepping over small torrents which have worn channels six or eight inches deep, and on each side rushes past with a loud murmur a stream large enough to turn a mill, occasionally spreading out into a sizable mill-pond. It begins to rain by afternoon, and rains more or less during the night. Before night I heard of the river being over the road in one place, though it was rather low before. Saw Melvin buying an extra quantity of shot in anticipation of the freshet and musquash-shooting tomorrow. Not Civil War “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

February: In Brooklyn, New York, The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher wrote to Charles Wesley Slack seeking a list of the lecturers in the Lyceum course and also mentioning the fact that the Reverend Theodore Parker was no longer welcome to lecture at the Boston Lyceum on account of his “peculiar moral doctrines.” Meanwhile, the Reverend and Mrs. Parker were seen off by the Reverend George Ripley, as they departed by steamship, accompanied on this leg of their quest for health by their friends and co-conspirators Doctor and Mrs. Samuel Gridley Howe (Samuel Gridley Howe and Julia Ward Howe), for the warmer climes of Cuba and Santa Cruz never to return.

February 28, Monday: George William Curtis wrote from the north shore of Staten Island to Charles Wesley Slack agreeing to read on December 11th a lecture that he had prepared for Philadelphia and elsewhere on “The Recent Aspect of the Slavery Question.” In a postscript he made reference to the Reverend Theodore Parker.

Sallie Holley wrote to Mrs. Porter about having attended Henry Thoreau’s Worcester lectures in H.G.O. Blake’s parlor on “AUTUMNAL TINTS”: The last two evenings we had in Worcester, we were at two parlour lectures given by Mr. Henry D. Thoreau, the author of that odd book, Walden, or Life in the Woods. The first lecture was upon “Autumnal Tints,” and was a beautiful and, I doubt not, a faithful report of the colours of leaves in October. Some of you may have read his “Chesuncook,” in The Atlantic Monthly; if so you can fancy how quaint and observing, and humorous withal, he is as traveller — or excursionist-companion in wild solitudes. Several gentlemen, friends of his, tell us much of their tour with him to the White Mountains last summer, of his grand talk with their guide in “Tuckerman’s Ravine,” where they had their camp. He paid us the compliment of a nice long morning call after we heard him read his “Autumnal Tints,” and remembered our being once at his mother’s to tea, and Miss Putnam’s looking over his herbarium with his sister. SOPHIA E. THOREAU HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

“AUTUMNAL TINTS”: Europeans coming to America are surprised by the brilliancy of our autumnal foliage. There is no account of such a phenomenon in English poetry, because the trees acquire but few bright colors there. The most that Thomson says on this subject in his “Autumn” is contained in the lines — “But see the fading many-colored woods, Shade deepening over shade, the country round Imbrown; a crowded umbrage, dusk and dun, Of every hue, from wan declining green To sooty dark.”

And the line in which he speaks “Of Autumn beaming o’er the yellow woods.”

The autumnal change of our woods has not made a deep impression on our own literature yet. October has hardly tinged our poetry.

JAMES THOMSON HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, the two volumes of Sir Alexander Mackenzie’s VOYAGES FROM MONTREAL, ON THE RIVER ST. LAURENCE, THROUGH THE CONTINENT OF NORTH AMERICA TO THE FROZEN AND PACIFIC OCEANS IN THE YEARS 1789 AND 1793. WITH A PRELIMINARY ACCOUNT OF THE RISE, PROGRESS, AND PRESENT STATE OF THE FUR TRADE OF THAT COUNTRY. WITH ORIGINAL NOTES BY BOUGAINVILLE, AND VOLNEY. ILLUSTRATED WITH MAPS. (London: Printed for T. Cadell; Jun. and W. Davies; and W. Creech by R. Noble; Edinburgh, W. Creech, 1802).

VOYAGES FROM MONTREAL

“A YANKEE IN CANADA”: I got home this Thursday evening, having spent just one week in Canada and travelled eleven hundred miles. The whole expense of this journey, including two guidebooks and a map, which cost one dollar twelve and a half cents, was twelve dollars seventy five cents. I do not suppose that I have seen all British America; that could not be done by a cheap excursion, unless it were a cheap excursion to the Icy Sea, as seen by Hearne or McKenzie, and then, no doubt, some interesting features would be omitted. I wished to go a little way behind that word Canadense, of which naturalists make such frequent use; and I should like still right well to make a longer excursion on foot through the wilder parts of Canada, which perhaps might be called Iter Canadense.

SAMUEL HEARNE ALEXANDER MACKENZIE HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Thoreau also checked out John Halkett, Esq.’s HISTORICAL NOTES RESPECTING THE INDIANS OF NORTH AMERICA: WITH REMARKS ON THE ATTEMPTS MADE TO CONVERT AND CIVILIZE THEM (London: Printed for Archibald Constable and Co. Edinburgh; and Hurst, Robinson, and Co. 90, Cheapside, and 8, Pall Mall, 1825).31

RESPECTING THE INDIANS

Thoreau also checked out Lionel Wafer (1640-1705)’s A NEW VOYAGE AND DESCRIPTION OF THE ISTHMUS OF AMERICA, GIVING AN ACCOUNT OF THE AUTHOR’S ABODE THERE, THE FORM AND MAKE OF THE COUNTRY, THE COASTS, HILLS, RIVERS, &C. WOODS, SOIL, WEATHER, &C. TREES, FRUIT, BEASTS, BIRDS, FISH, &C. (London: Printed for J. Knapton, 1699).

http://web.princeton.edu/sites/english/eng321/WAFER.HTM

“There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away” — Emily Dickinson

31. He would put his notes on this reading into his Indian Notebook #12. He would also, in about 1861, read a review of this book by Lewis Cass and put his notes on this reading of this review into that same Indian Notebook. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

February 28. To Cambridge and Boston. Saw a mackerel in the market. The upper half of its sides is mottled blue and white like the mackerel sky, as stated January 19th, 1858.

March 21, Monday: The Reverend Theodore Parker of the Secret “Six” conspiracy reported from the island of Saint Croix in the Caribbean that he had learned that “Slavery continued here until 1848 when all over the little island the blacks rose, took possession of all except the two forts, & demanded their freedom. There were 3,000 white & 25,000 blacks on the island. The negroes did not shed a drop of blood. They burnt a few houses but destroyed very little property & took no man’s life. Imagine the consternation of the whites who knew what they would do under like circumstances.”

March 21. 6 A.M.–The water has fairly begun to fall. It was at its height the 17th; fell a little–two or three inches–the morning of the 18th. On the 18th it rained very considerably all day, which would ordinarily have raised the river a foot, or perhaps two, but, the wind being very strong from the southwest, it only prevented its falling any more until this morning. It did not probably raise it more than two inches. Of course, there could not have been much melted snow and ice to be added to the last rain about the sources of the river, since they are considerably further south, where the ground must have been much more bare than here. A crow blackbird. P.M.–Sail to Fair Haven Pond. A strong northwest wind. Draw my boat over the road on a roller. Raising a stone for ballast from the south side of the railroad causeway, where it is quite sunny and warm, I find the under sides very densely covered with little ants, all stirring and evidently ready to come out, if some have not already. They feel the heat through the stone on the ground. It blowed very smartly in gusts, and my boat scud along this way and that, not minding its helm much, as if it were lifted partly out of water. I went from point to point as quickly as you could say “here” and “there.” I see a female marsh hawk sailing and hunting over Potter’s Swamp. I not only see the white rump hut the very peculiar crescent-shaped curve of its wings.

Fair Haven Pond is only two thirds open. The east end is frozen still, and the body of the ice has drifted in to shore a rod or two, before the northwest wind, and its edge crumbled against the trees. I see, on a yellow lily root washed up, leaf-buds grown five or six inches, or even seven or eight, with the stems. Everywhere for several days the alder catkins have dangled long and loose, the most alive apparently of any tree. They seem to welcome the water which half covers them. The willow catkins are also very conspicuous, in silvery masses rising above the flood. I see several white pine cones in the path by Wheildon’s which appear to have fallen in the late strong winds, but perhaps the ice in the winter took them off. Others still hold on. From the evening of March 18th to this, the evening of the 21st, we have had uninterrupted strong wind,–till the evening of the 19th very strong southwest wind, then and since northwest,–three days of strong wind. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

April 21, Thursday: Waldo Emerson paid Henry Thoreau to work a final day to complete the planting of 100 larch and 240 pine seedlings in his “Wyman” lot in Walden Woods. The total payment listed in the Emerson Account Book was $7.50 for Thoreau and $3.13 for Thoreau’s assistant Peter Pindays.

That evening Thoreau, the wealthy New-York banker Samuel Gray Ward, and James Elliot Cabot dined in

Boston at the home of Mary E.D. Parkman (1821-1879), widow of Dr. Samuel Parkman of Massachusetts General Hospital, a relative of the Doctor George Parkman who had been murdered and of Professor Francis Parkman.

Thomas Russell wrote to Charles Wesley Slack regretting that he would not be able to attend a festival — he would have been pleased to take part in order to pay honor to the Reverend Theodore Parker.

April 21: Setting pines all day. This makes two and a half days, with two men and-a horse and cart to help me. We have set some four hundred trees at fifteen feet apart diamondwise, covering some two acres. I set every one with my own hand, while another digs the holes where I indicate, and occasionally helps the other dig up the trees. We prefer bushy pines only one foot high which grow in open or pasture land, yellow-looking trees which are used to the sun, instead of the spindling dark-green ones from the shade of the woods. Our trees will not average much more than two feet in height, and we take a thick sod with them fifteen to eighteen inches in diameter. There are a great many more of these plants to be had along the edges and in the midst of any white pine wood than one would suppose. One man charged us five or six cents for them about a mile and a half distant! Got about one hundred and twenty from George Heywood’s land and the rest from the Brister lot and this Wyman lot itself. R. W. E. has bought a quarter of a pound of white pine seed at $4.00 per pound. We could not dig up pines on the north side of the wood on the Brister lot to-day on account of frost! Though we had quite forgotten it, and put the winter so far behind us. See the Vanessa Antiopa. C. has seen it a week or so. C. sees a cicindela to-day. I hear of a robin’s est begun, and that geese go over to-day. Put out a fire in the woods, the Brister lot. Quite a warm day. Storer’s account of the salamanders concludes with these words, “All the salamanders here described, feed upon insects, which they devour in very large numbers, and hence their utility cannot be questioned.” The same might be said in behalf of the creatures that devour the salamanders. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

In those little Ripple Lakes in the cool hollows in the woods, there you find these active bright-spotted salamanders, – S. dorsalis, the brown (olive-brown or palish-brown), with carinated and wave-crenate thin tail, and the S. symmetrica, the bright orange salmon, with a thick, straight-edged tail, – both with vermilion spots on back and countless fine black dots above and beneath. The first-named is quite voracious, catching many of the larvae in the aquarium, in fact depopulating it. He gulps them down very deliberately after catching them. What pretty things go to make up the sum of life in any valley! This Ripple Lake with the wind playing over it, the bright spotted butterflies that flutter from time to time over the dry leaves, and the minnows and salamanders that dart in the water itself. Beneath this play of ripples which reflect the sky, – a darker blue than the real, – the vermilion-spotted salamanders are darting at the various grotesque-formed larvae of the lake.

April 28: L.A. Jenkins of New-York wrote to the Trustees of the Reverend Theodore Parker’s Congregation to discuss some confusion which had arisen, as to whether he had or had not accepted an invitation, to speak before that congregation.

Henry Thoreau noted in his journal that Samuel Storrow Higginson brought him “the arbutus in bloom on the 26th, one twig only out”:

April 28. 8.30 A. M.–Row to Carlisle Bridge with Blake and Brown. See black ducks and sheldrakes still. The first myrtle-bird that I have noticed. A small hawk, perhaps pigeon hawk. A gull. Sit on Ball’s Hill. The water partly over the Great Meadows. The wind is northeast, and at the western base of the hill we are quite sheltered; yet the waves run quite high there and still further up the river, – waves raised by the wind beyond the hill, – while there are very-slight waves or ripples over the meadow south of the hill, which is much more exposed, evidently because the water is shallow there and large waves are not so easily formed on account of friction. S. Higginson brought me the arbutus in bloom on the 26th, one twig only out. See a shad-fly, one only, on water. A little snake, size of little brown snake, on pine hill, but uniformly grayish above as far as I could see. E. Emerson’s Salamandra dorsalis has just lost its skin. H.G.O. BLAKE THEOPHILUS BROWN

May 1, Sunday: A revolution against Austrian rule began in Parma.

In the Ungers Casino of Vienna, Nachtigall-Polka op.222 by Johann Strauss was performed for the initial time.

New York State began directly letting its contracts on canal work, no longer allowing that function to be performed by the supervisor of the Contracting Board.

At this point the Unitarian congregation of the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway, in Cincinnati, Ohio was at a low of a couple hundred, since the BIBLE believers of his congregation had recently separated themselves to constitute a “Church of the Redeemer,” and so he delivered his “East and West” sermon in which he described the Redeemer concept of Jesus Christ as “an idea out of the dark ages.” The Reverend Conway confessed he was no “believer in what the churches call Christianity” as it would be a “pious insult to the holiest relations HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

of life” to suppose Jesus to have lacked a human biological father.32

33 Waldo Emerson lectured on ““WEALTH”,” a topic appropriate for downtown Boston, to the Parker Fraternity in the 1,500 comfortable seats of the Boston Music Hall, and wrote to Thomas Carlyle on the American race

32. Moncure Daniel Conway. EAST AND WEST: AN INAUGURAL DISCOURSE, DELIVERED IN THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, CINCINNATI, O., MAY 1, 1859, BY M.D. CONWAY, MINISTER OF THE CHURCH. Pamphlet. Cincinnati: Truman & Spofford, 1859. READ THE FULL TEXT

33. The megachurch “28th Congregational Society” established by the Reverend Theodore Parker, who had gone to live in Italy in an attempt to recover his health. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

problem:

I flatter myself I see some emerging of our people from the poison of their politics the insolvency of slavery begins to show, & we shall perhaps live to see that putrid Black Vomit extirpating by mere diking & planting. Another ground of contentment is the mending of the race here.

My curiosity about the origins and literary uses of this carefully observed, and carefully invented, Africanist presence has become an informal study of what I call American Africanism. It is an investigation into the ways in which a nonwhite, Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the United States, and the imaginative uses this fabricated presence served. I am using the term “Africanism” not to suggest the larger body of knowledge on Africa that the philosopher Valentine Mudimbe means by the term “Africanism,” nor to suggest the varieties and complexities of African people and their descendants who have inhabited this country. Rather I use it as a term for the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people. As a trope, little restraint has been attached to its uses. As a disabling virus within literary discourse, Africanism has become, in the Eurocentric tradition that American education favors, both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability. Through the simple expedient of demonizing and reifying the range of color on a palette, American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless. It provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom.

This “putrid Black Vomit” of which the Sage of Concord here speaks is of course the yellow fever, an infection which needs to be extirpated. The disease was called Yellow Fever because it damages the liver in such manner as to cause jaundicing of skin and eyes, and was called black vomit because a classic manifestations of severe HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

infection was hemorrhage into the mucous membranes, with frightful vomiting of dark blood.

However, putrid Black vomit also was, of course, in the opinion of the Sage of Concord, the words that were coming out of the mouths of Americans of color, whose infectious thoughts and presumptions were as delusion-provoking in the white man as the fevers of this plague. What we would regard as two separate topics, the prevention of the tropical disease and the prevention of the tropical human, were quite conflated for a 19th- Century white man of Emerson’s mentality. The dark man and the dark vomit were predicting the same thing: the blackness of death. Preventing the one was preventing the other.

(Is it any wonder that this Emerson had blacklisted Frederick Douglass a decade earlier for membership in the Town and Country Club? His dark words would have been a “disabling virus” within polite literary discourse. Society, meaning white society, was not ready for that.)

May 1: Hear the ruby-crowned wren. We accuse savages of worshipping only the bad spirit, or devil, though they may distinguish both a good and a bad; but they regard only that one which they fear and worship the devil only. We too are savages in this, doing HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

precisely the same thing. This occurred to me yesterday as I sat in the woods admiring the beauty of the blue butterfly. We are not chiefly interested in birds and insects, for example, as they are ornamental to the earth and cheering to man, but we spare the lives of the former only on condition that they eat more grubs than they do cherries, and the only account of the insects which the State encourages is of the “Insects Injurious to Vegetation.” We too admit both a good and a bad spirit, but we worship chiefly the bad spirit, whom we fear. We do not think first of the good but of the harm things will do us. The catechism says that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, which of course is applicable mainly to God as seen in his works. Yet the only account of its beautiful insects–butterflies, etc.– which God has made and set before us which the State ever thinks of spending any money on is the account of those which are injurious to vegetation! This is the way we glorify God and enjoy him forever. Come out here and behold a thousand painted butterflies and other beautiful insects which people the air, then go to the libraries and see what kind of prayer and glorification of God is there recorded. Massachusetts has published her report on “Insects Injurious to Vegetation,” and our neighbor the “Noxious Insects of New York.” We have attended to the evil and said nothing about the good. This is looking a gift horse in the mouth with a vengeance. Children are attracted by the beauty of butterflies, but their parents and legislators deem it an idle pursuit. The parents remind me of the devil, but the children of God. Though God may have pronounced his work good, we ask, “Is it not poisonous?” Science is inhuman. Things seen with a microscope begin to be insignificant. So described, they are as monstrous as if they should be magnified a thousand diameters. Suppose I should see and describe men and houses and trees and birds as if they were a thousand times larger than they are! With our prying instruments we disturb the balance and harmony of nature. P.M.– To Second Division. Very warm. Looking from Clamshell over Hosmer’s meadow, about half covered with water, see hundreds of turtles, chiefly picta, now first lying out in numbers on the brown pieces of meadow which rise above the water. You see their black backs shine on these hummocks left by the ice, fifty to eighty rods off. They would rapidly tumble off if you went much nearer. This heat and stillness draws them up. It is remarkable how surely they are advertised of the first warm and still days, and in an hour or two are sure to spread themselves over the hummocks. There is to-day a general resurrection of them, and there they bask in the sun. It is their sabbath. At this distance, if you are on the lookout, especially with a glass, you can discover what numbers of them there are, but they are shy and will drop into the water on a near approach. All up and down our river meadows their backs are shining in the sun to-day. It is a turtle day. As we sat on the steep hillside south of Nut Meadow Brook Crossing, we noticed a remarkable whirlwind on a small scale, which carried up the oak leaves from that Island copse in the meadow. The oak leaves now hang thinly and are very dry and light, and these small whirlwinds, which seem to be occasioned by the sudden hot and calm weather (like whirlpools or dimples in a smooth stream), wrench them off, and up they go, somewhat spirally, in countless flocks like birds, with a rustling sound; and higher and higher into the clear blue deeps they rise above our heads, till they are fairly lost to sight, looking, when last seen, mere light specks against the blue, like stars by day, in fact. I could distinguish some, I have no doubt, five or six hundred feet high at least, but if I looked aside a moment they were lost. The largest oak leaves looked not bigger than a five-cent-piece. These were drifting eastward,–to descend where? Methought that, instead of decaying on the earth or being consumed by fire, these were being translated and would soon be taken in at the windows of heaven. I had never observed this phenomenon so remarkable. The flight of the leaves. This was quite local, and it was comparatively still where we sat a few rods on one side. Thousands went up together in a rustling flock. Many of the last oak leaves hang thus ready to go up. I noticed two or more similar whirlwinds in the woods elsewhere this afternoon. One took up small twigs and clusters of leaves from the ground, matted together. I could easily see where it ran along with its nose (or point of its tunnel) close to the ground, stirring up the leaves as it travelled, like the snout of some hunting or rooting animal. See and hear chewink. See a little snake on the dry twigs and chips in the sun, near the arbutus, uniformly brown (or reddish-brown) above except a yellowish ring on the occiput, the head also lighter than the body; beneath vermilion, with apparently a row of light dots along each side. It is apparently Coluber amaenus (?), except that it has the yellowish ring. Luzula campestris. Also the Oryzopsis Canadensis by the Major Heywood path-side, say a day, or April 30th, six inches high or more, with fine bristle-like leaves. See a thrasher. What is that rush at Second Division? It now forms a dense and very conspicuous mass some four rods long and one foot high. The top for three inches is red, and the impression at a little distance is like that made by sorrel. Certainly no plant of this character exhibits such a growth now, i. e. in the mass. It surprises you to see it, carries your thoughts on to June. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

The climbing fern is persistent, i.e. retains its greenness still, though now partly brown and withered.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

Not Civil War “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

June 10, Friday: John Brown was at Westport, Connecticut.

C.F. Bernard wrote to Charles Wesley Slack to request the distribution of a report. He praised the 28th Congregational Society and the Reverend Theodore Parker, and sent well wishes.

Henry Thoreau surveyed on College Road below Annursnack Hill near the Acton town line, for Daniel Brooks Clark, and was informed that the road had received that name due to “a house so called once standing on it”:

He also surveyed 16 acres near Prescott Barrett’s house on Barrett’s Mill Road west of Spencer Brook. Thoreau remarked that the whole area had belonged to Peter Temple in 1811, and part was sold to Jonathan Hildreth 50 and part to Stephen Barrett. The List of Bills in the FIELD NOTES shows a bill for $2. for this date.

http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_surveys/4.htm

June 10, Friday: Surveying for D. B. Clark on “College Road,” so called in Peter Temple’s deed in 1811, Clark thought from a house so called once standing on it. Cut a line, and after measured it, in a thick wood, which passed within two feet of a blue jay’s nest which was about four feet up a birch, beneath the leafy branches and quite exposed. The bird sat perfectly still with its head up and bill open upon its pretty large young, not moving in the least, while we drove a stake close by, within three feet, and cut and measured, being about there twenty minutes at least. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

July 19, Tuesday: In the morning was Harvard University’s commencement. After lunch was the annual meeting of the alumni of the Harvard Divinity School, to be followed at 4PM by an address by the Reverend Henry Whitney Bellows. At the after-lunch session the controversy between liberal and conservative Unitarian reverends came out into the open on a motion to praise the terminally ill Reverend Theodore Parker made by the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway and seconded by the Reverend James Freeman Clarke. The meeting degenerated into wild argument and first tried to expel all newspaper reporters and then, failing to get these people to depart, cautioned them that they “knew well enough what to report and what not to.” The Reverend Conway proposed that his motion to praise the Reverend Parker be limited to a simple expression of sympathy in affliction, but even that had become too tainted to be brought to a vote. The participants in this meeting went into the lecture with the issue entirely unresolved, and in the lecture the Reverend Bellows condemned the Reverend Conway as a minister who would “dance in a church” and the Reverend Parker as a minister who would “worship in a theatre.” What was needed was recognition that society depended upon its institutions, and that religion was first and foremost one of those institution. The title of this lecture, which was being offered by the very Reverend who had originally suggested back in 1852 in Virginia that Conway abandon his Methodism and become a Unitarian minister, was, appropriately, “The New Catholic Church.”

The Transcendental philosophy ... delights in making the secular and the sacred, the right and the wrong, the grave and the gay, the male and the female, the world and the church, the human and the divine, the natural and the supernatural, the one and the same.

Since I do love a good fight I can’t help but point out that the Reverend Bellows, who was bellowing this condemnation of the integration of religion into one’s life, neglected to include an important phrase, “the Anglo-Saxon and the inferior races.” Why was this important distinction not also cited? A direct vote was after all escaped. The advertised hour for the annual address, to be delivered that year by Dr. Bellows of New York, had already been passed by a few minutes, and a motion for adjournment was carried. Next day I breakfasted at [James Russell] Lowell’s house with Edmund Quincy, who said, “So you could n’t get the Unitarians to pray for Parker?” He and others regarded it as due to my want of familiarity with the old Parkerite polemics that, while repudiating miracles, I should have attempted such a miracle as to soften the heart of militant Unitarianism. AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II

July 19. P. M.–Up Assabet. The architect of the river builds with sand chiefly, not with mud. Mud is deposited very slowly, only in the stagnant places, but sand is the ordinary building-material. It is remarkable how the river, while it may be encroaching on the bank on one side, preserves its ordinary breadth by filling up the other side. Generally speaking, up and down this and the other stream, where there is a swift place and the bank worn away on one side,–which, other things being equal, would leave the river wider there,–a bank or island or bar is being built up on the other, since the eddy where, on one side, sand, etc., are HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

deposited is produced by the rapidity of the current, thus:–

e.g. north side of Egg Rock, at Hemlocks, at Pigeon Rock Bend, at Swift Place Bank, etc., and on main stream at Ash Tree Bend. The eddy occasioned by the swiftness deposits sand, etc., close by on one side and a little offshore, leaving finally a low meadow outside where was once the bed of the river. There are countless places where the one shore is thus advancing and, as it were, dragging the other after it. I dug into that sand-bank, once sand-bar, at the narrow and swift place off Hildreth’s, five and a half feet deep, this afternoon. It is more than a rod wide and covered with willows and alders, etc. It is built up four or five feet above the summer level. It is uniformly fine sand, more or less darkened with decayed vegetation, probably much of it sawdust, and it has been deposited this depth here by the eddy at high water within a very recent period. The same agent is in a great many places steadily advancing such a bar or bank down the stream a rod or more from the old shore. The more recent and lower extremity of this bank or bar is composed of sawdust and shavings, almost entirely so to a depth of two feet. Before it reaches the surface, pads spring up in it; when [IT] begins to appear, pontederia shows itself, and bulrushes, and next black willows, button-bushes, etc. The finest black willows on the river grow on these sand-banks. They are also much resorted to by the turtles for laying their eggs. I dug up three or four nests of the Emys insculpta and Sternothaerus odoratus while examining the contents of the bank this afternoon. This great pile of dry sand in which the turtles now lay was recently fine particles swept down the swollen river. Indeed, I think that the river once ran from opposite Merriam’s to Pinxter Swamp and thence along Hosmer’s hard land toward the bridge, and all the firm land north of Pinxter Swamp is such a sand-bank which the river has built (leaving its old bed a low meadow behind) while following its encroaching northeast side. That extensive hard land which the river annually rises over, and which supports a good growth of maples and swamp white oaks, will probably be found to be all alluvial and free from stones. The land thus made is only of a certain height, say four to six feet above summer level, or oftener four or five feet. At highest water I can still cut off this bend by paddling through the woods in the old bed of the river. Islands are formed which are shaped like the curving ridge of a snow-drift. Stagnant rivers are deep and muddy; swift ones shallow and sandy. Scirpus subterminalis, river off Hoar’s and Cheney’s, not long. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

July 20, Wednesday: In a letter from Montreux, Canton de Vaud, Switzerland to Charles Wesley Slack, the Reverend Theodore Parker informed Slack that Charles Sumner would not be able to return to lecture soon without making himself an invalid, and discussed Edwin McMasters Stanton as a presidential candidate.

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. started on a trip around the world (ending September 27, 1860). As an aging man he reminisced 24 years subsequent to the one great boyish adventure of his life:

AND NOW, FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, A REPORT FROM OUR SAILOR: It was in the winter of 1835-6 that the ship Alert, in the prosecution of her voyage for hides on the remote and almost unknown coast of California, floated into the vast solitude of the Bay of San Francisco. All around was the stillness of nature. One vessel, a Russian, lay at anchor there, but during our whole stay not a sail came or went. Our trade was with remote Missions, which sent hides to us in launches manned by their Indians. Our anchorage was between a small island, called Yerba Buena, and a gravel beach in a little bight or cove of the same name, formed by two small projecting points. Beyond, to the westward of the landing place, were dreary sand-hills, with little grass to be seen, and few trees, and beyond them higher hills, steep and barren, their sides gullied by the rains. Some five or six miles beyond the landing-place, to the right, was a ruinous Presidio, and some three or four miles to the left was the Mission of Dolores, as ruinous as the Presidio, almost deserted, with but few Indians attached to it, and but little property in cattle. Over a region far beyond our sight there were no other human habitations, except that an enterprising Yankee, years in advance of his time, had put up, on the rising ground above the landing, a shanty of rough boards, where he carried on a very small retail trade between the hide ships and the Indians. Vast banks of fog, invading us from the North Pacific, drove in through the entrance, and covered the whole bay; and when they disappeared, we saw a few well-wooded islands, the sand-hills on the west, the grassy and wooded slopes on the east, and the vast stretch of the bay to the southward, where we were told lay the Missions of Santa Clara and San Jose, and still longer stretches to the northward and northeastward, where we understood smaller bays spread out, and large rivers poured in their tributes of waters. There were no settlements on these bays or rivers, and the few ranchos and Missions were remote and widely separated. Not only the neighborhood of our anchorage, but the entire region of the great bay, was a solitude. On the whole coast of California there was not a lighthouse, a beacon, or a buoy, and the charts were made up from old and disconnected surveys by British, Russian, and Mexican voyagers. Birds of prey and passage swooped and dived about us, wild beasts ranged through the oak groves, and as we slowly floated out of the harbor with the tide, herds of deer came to the water’s edge, on the northerly side of the entrance, to gaze at the strange spectacle.

July 20: The little Holbrook boy showed me an egg which I unhesitatingly pronounced a peetweet’s, given him by Joe Smith. The latter, to my surprise, declares it a meadow-hen’s; saw the bird and young, and says the latter were quite black and had hen bills. Can it be so? Humphrey Buttrick says he finds snipes’ nests in our meadows oftener than woodcocks’. P. M.–To Eddy Bridge. Abel Hosmer says that the Turnpike Company did not fulfill their engagement to build a new bridge over the Assabet in 1807; that the present stone bridge was not built till about the time the Orthodox meeting-house was built. (That was in 1826.) Benjamin says it was built soon after the meeting-house, or perhaps 1827, and was placed some fifty feet higher up-stream than the old wooden one. Hosmer says that the eddy and wearing away of the bank has been occasioned wholly by the bridge; that there was only the regular bend there before. He had thought that it was in consequence of the bridge being set askew HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

or diagonally with the stream, so that the abutments turned the water and gave it a slant into the banks, thus:

I think that this did not create, only increased, the evil. The bank which it has worn away rises some sixteen feet above low water, and, considering the depth of the water, you may say that it has removed the sand to a depth of twenty-five feet over an area of a quarter of an acre, or say to the depth of three feet or a yard over two acres, or 9680 cubic yards or cartloads, which, at twenty-five cents per load, it would have cost $2420 to move in the ordinary manner, or enough to fill the present river for a quarter of a mile, calling it six rods wide and twelve feet deep. Beside creating some small islands and bars close by, this sand and gravel has, of course, been distributed along in the river and on the adjacent meadows below. Hosmer complains that his interval has accordingly been very much injured by the sand washed on to it below,– “hundreds of dollars” damage done to him. All this within some thirty-five [Or thirty-two?] years. It may well be asked what has become of all this sand? Of course it has contributed to form sand-bars below, possibly a great way below. Jacob Farmer tells me that he remembers that when about twenty-one years old he and Hildreth were bathing in the Assabet at the mouth of the brook above Winn’s, and Hildreth swam or waded across to a sandbar (now the island there), but the water was so deep on that bar that he became frightened, and would have been drowned if he had not been dragged out and resuscitated by others. This was directly over where that island is now, and was then only a bar beginning under water. That island, as he said, had been formed within thirty-five years, [Farrar (blacksmith) does not remember such a change.] or since the Eddy Bridge was built; and I suggest that it may have been built mainly of the ruins of that bank. It is the only island in the Assabet for two and a half miles. There is a perfect standstill in the eddy at Eddy Bridge now, and there is a large raft of grass, weeds, and lumber perfectly at rest there, against Hosmer’s bank. The coarser materials–stones as big as a hen’s egg–are dropped close by, but the sand must have been carried far down-stream. Hosmer says that when he digs down in his millet-field, twenty rods or more from the river, in his interval at three or four feet depth he comes to coarse stones which look like an old bed of the river. I see them at each of the small wooden bridges, and very likely they underlie the whole of that interval, covered with sand. Such is the character of a river-bottom,–the stones from a hen’s egg to the size of your head dropped down to one level, the sand being washed away, and now found in one stratum. So completely emasculated and demoralized is our river that it is even made to observe the Christian Sabbath, and Hosmer tells me that at this season on a Sunday morning [He should rather say Monday morning.] (for then the river runs lowest, owing to the factory and mill gates being shut above) little gravelly islands begin to peep out in the channel below. Not only the operatives make the Sunday a day of rest, but the river too, to some extent, so that the very fishes feel the influence (or want of influence) of man’s religion. The very rivers run with fuller streams on Monday morning. All nature begins to work with new impetuosity on Monday. I see where turtles’ eggs are still being dug up! HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

September 5, Monday: Henry Thoreau wrote to E.G. Dudley in Boston that on October 9th he planned to “read a lecture to your company” on “Life Misspent” rather than upon “Autumnal Tints.” Dudley’s “company” was the 28th Congregational Society whose regular pastor, the Reverend Theodore Parker, had fled to Europe in a vain attempt to regain his health. While the right Reverend was absent, Dudley was trying to fill the pulpit with speakers and Waldo Emerson had suggested to him that he solicit Thoreau to 34 deliver “AUTUMNAL TINTS”. Thoreau continued, however, by saying that

I should prefer, however, to bring one which I call “Life Misspent,” instead of “Autumnal Tints.” (CORRESPONDENCE 557)

This lecture Thoreau referred to as “LIFE MISSPENT” was an altered version of “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT”. It is curious that he changed the title of the lecture, for the earlier title was eminently appropriate for the pulpit. The reason he called the earlier lecture “What Shall It Profit?” is that the sentence immediately following the exordium was

My text this evening is “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (paragraph 4)

When revising the lecture in the weeks before his engagement in Boston, however, he dropped this sentence and placed in its stead the sentence

Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives. ( paragraph 2)

This change accounts for the change of titles. What is curious, though, is that Thoreau should drop the biblical quotation and the reference to his “text” before he delivered the lecture as a sermon to the Reverend Parker’s Society. Bradley P. Dean wonders if he thought that retaining the earlier sentence in its place of prominence – immediately following the exordium– would be too close to pandering to the expectations of his audience. Thoreau made several other changes in his text of “What Shall It Profit?” in the weeks prior to his first delivery of “LIFE MISSPENT”. In order to add more current material to the lecture, he turned to his journal of 1855-59, and Dean has found, interlined on a few of the leaves he would soon drop from his text, and quotes for us from a MS in the Collection of Walter Harding, notes keyed to passages from his journal of this period. One such note, for example, reads:

V[ide] Journal—Aug 9—58 for news of Commencements & telegraphic rejoicings.

Since he dropped these leaves from the lecture, he did not use the journal passages cited on them in “LIFE MISSPENT”. Of the seven new paragraphs he added to his text, however, he drew six almost verbatim from his journal of 1855-59. The seven new paragraphs are “LIFE MISSPENT” 20-23, 38-39, 47. All except “LIFE MISSPENT” 23 were drawn from the journal. For the journal sources of the six new paragraphs, see the textual

34. Walter Harding, DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU, page 414. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

commentary on “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” 45, 59, 71. To accommodate this new material, he dropped and placed in his file the leaves containing the material in “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” 1-2, 7-30, 65-66, 69, 75, 77, 35 84-92, and 94-95. He also combined the material in “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” 61 and 76, and in “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” 67-68 and 70; transposed “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” 31 with “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” 32- 33 and “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” 71 with “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” 72; and added new leaves containing the material in “LIFE MISSPENT” 20-23, 38-39, and 47. When he had made these and several minor changes, “What Shall It Profit?” was transformed into “Life Misspent.” He did not rewrite an entire draft. All he did was add leaves to, drop leaves from, and interline revisions in his reading draft of “What Shall It Profit?”

This item appeared in the Buffalo, New York Daily Courier: THE MEN OVER THE FALLS. — In our Saturday’s issue we copied from the Lockport Advertiser, a report that three persons went over the Falls on Thursday, and gave their names as Rousseau, Morse, and a woman. We are informed by Mr. Morse, of Chippawa, whom we saw in this city last week, that there were but two persons lost — two men, named Johnson and Young, both of whom lived on Grand Island. It seems they had been to Chippawa in a sail boat, and before starting on their return, became considerably intoxicated. When in the river, the sail jibed, being struck with a gust of wind, and the boat was upset. They both managed to get hold of the boat, and in this way floated over the falls. No doubt the reason of its being reported that it was Mr. Morse, came from the fact of Young having whiskers very like those of Mr. Morse, and at the distance, seen through a spy- glass, the mistake was a very natural one. Johnson has been a dissipated man, and has had two or three very narrow escapes. About five years ago, he fell asleep while rowing from Navy Island, and his boat providentially floated to the head of Goat Island, where his companion, a boy, secured it. NIAGARA FALLS

September 5. Spent a part of the forenoon in the woods in the northwest part of Acton, searching for a stone suitable for a millstone for my lead-mill. PLUMBAGO ACTON

October 9, Sunday: At a meeting of abolitionists at Faneuil Hall, John Beeson spoke.

Henry Thoreau’s sermon “LIFE MISSPENT”, for the Reverend Theodore Parker’s 28th Congregational Society in the Boston Music Hall on that Sunday morning, had been advertised in the religious columns of at least three Boston newspapers. Waldo Emerson had expressed concern that Thoreau do well but this express concern had not induced him to be present.36

35. The textual and historical evidence for this and the other assertions about the structural changes summarized in this paragraph is presented in Bradley P. Dean, “Sound of a Flail,” pages 99-118. 36. Boston Evening Transcript, October 8, page 2, column 5; Boston Daily Traveller, October 8, page 2, column 3; and an unidentified newspaper clipping pasted into Bronson Alcott’s “Diary for 1859,” entry for October 2, MH (*59M-308 [29:555]). HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

October 9: P.M.–Boston. Read a lecture to Theodore Parker’s society. THEODORE PARKER Aster cordifolius abundant and commonly in bloom in Roxbury. See the privet everywhere with dense pyramidal clusters of berries. Salsola kali common in bloom, with pretty crimson flowers. Chenopodium maritimum perhaps in bloom. Senecio vulgaris still in bloom.

THOREAU’S SERMON

[Various versions of “LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE”, variously titled, would be delivered:

October 13, Thursday: Edward Douwes Dekker’s MAX HAVELAAR, OR THE COFFEE AUCTIONS OF THE DUTCH TRADING COMPANY, which has been compared to the UNCLE TOM’S CABIN that did so much to kill slavery, and characterized as “the book that killed colonialism.” This book was published under the pseudonym “Multatuli,” which in Latin means “he who has suffered greatly.” Page 6 of The New York Evening Post had an article “Boston” about Henry Thoreau’s sermon “LIFE MISSPENT” before the Reverend Theodore Parker’s 28th Congregational Society at the Boston Music Hall on the previous Sunday morning:

H.D. Thoreau, one of the Concord philosophers, read a lecture on Sunday in Parker’s pulpit at the Music Hall. Some of his intonations and phrases were quite Emersonian; some of his palpable hits were eminently Parkerish; he began by announcing his subject –“a pretty good dose of myself”– and then talked for an hour and a half on the “misuse of life.” Some things he said were true, but these were not new, and some were new but not true — a criticism always applicable to this class of speakers and writers.

This reviewer described the audience’s reaction to Thoreau’s sharp criticism of the state, concluding with:

The choir giggled, and the assembly broke up without benediction, prayer, or hymn, like a theatre or caucus. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

THOREAU’S SERMON

[Various versions of “LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE”, variously titled, would be delivered:

October 13. P.M.–Up Assabet. Many of the small hypericums, mutilum and Canadense. have survived the frosts as yet, after all. The hemlock seed is now in the midst of its fall, some of it, with the leaves, floating on the river. The cones, being thus expanded, are more conspicuous on the trees. Many feverwort berries are fresh yet, though the leaves are quite withered. They are remarkable for their peculiar color. The thorn fruit on the hill is considerably past prime, though abundant and reddening the bushes still. The common alder up the Assabet is nerved like the hornbeam. I see no acorns on the trees. They appear to have all fallen before this. The swamp amelanchier is leafing again, as usual. What a pleasing phenomenon, perhaps an Indian-summer growth, an anticipation of the spring, like the notes of birds and frogs, etc., an evidence of warmth and genialness. Its buds are annually awakened by the October sun as if it were spring. The shad-bush is leafing again by the sunny swamp-side. It is like a youthful or poetic thought in old age. Several times I have been cheered by this sight when surveying in former years. The chickadee seems to lisp a sweeter note at the sight of it. I would not fear the winter more than the shad-bush which puts forth fresh and tender leaves on its approach. In the fall I will take this for my coat-of-arms. It seems to detain the sun that expands it. These twigs are so full of life that they can hardly contain themselves. They ignore winter. They anticipate spring. What faith! Away in some warm and sheltered recess in the swamp you find where these leaves have expanded. It is a foretaste of spring. In my latter years, let me have some shad-bush thoughts. [Vide Nov. 25th, 1858. Vide mountain-ash, October 30th, 1858.] I perceive the peculiar scent of the witch-hazel in bloom for several rods around, which at first I refer to the decaying leaves. I see where dodder was killed, with the button-bush, perhaps a week. British naturalists very generally apologize to the reader for having devoted their attention to natural history to the neglect of some important duty. Among plants which spring in cellars (vide September 22d) might be mentioned funguses. I remember seeing in an old work a plate of a fungus which grew in a wine-cellar and got its name from that circumstance. It is related in Chambers’s Journal that Sir Joseph Banks, having caused a cask of wine to be placed in a cellar in order to improve it, “at the end of three years he directed his butler to ascertain the state of the wine, when, on attempting to open the cellar door, he could not affect it, in consequence of some powerful obstacle; the door was consequently cut down, when the cellar was found to be completely filled with a fungous production, so firm that it was necessary to use an axe for its removal. This appeared to have grown from, or to have been nourished by, the decomposing particles of the wine, the cask being empty, and carried up to the ceiling, where it was supported by the fungus.” Perhaps it was well that the fungus instead of Sir Joseph Banks drank up the wine. The life of a wine-bibber is like that of a fungus. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

October 22, Saturday: The Lunatic Asylum West of the Alleghany Mountains opened for patients in Weston, Virginia. This facility would wind up in West Virginia due to the Civil War and be renamed the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane. It would later be known as Weston State Hospital and then as Weston Hospital.37 PSYCHOLOGY

The Reverend Samuel Joseph May sailed from England for the United States.

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn wrote from his Canadian hideout to his co-conspirator of the Secret “Six” conspiracy, the Reverend Theodore Parker, in exile in Rome: “Our old friend struck his blow in such a way, —either by his own folly or the direction of Providence,— that it has recoiled, and ruined him, and perhaps those who were his friends…. The poor old man fought like a hero, and will die like one, —by the rope, it is

37. Street, W.R. A CHRONOLOGY OF NOTEWORTHY EVENTS IN AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY. Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 1994 HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

most likely. Two of his sons were shot by his side, and three-fourths of his men. There has been nothing so much in the ‘high Roman fashion’ seen in this country for many a year. Now he lies in a Virginia jail, tormented with questions, wounded, and waiting his trial for murder and treason…. What course the government will pursue remains to be seen; but most likely they will follow up the matter as closely as possible; and we shall have plenty of treason-trials, and bloody threats, and some bloodshed. All this will weaken the Slave Power; and the good of the tragedy will outweigh the evil, no doubt.”

Henry Thoreau developed his thoughts on Captain John Brown, positing a future in which just as the American society was doing away with dueling or fighting one another with pistols, in course of time it might be possible also to do away with fighting one another with lawyers — “Such improvements are not altogether unheard of.”

October 22: P.M.–To Cliffs and Fair Haven. I am surprised to find in the field behind the top of the Cliffs a little vetch still perfectly fresh and blooming, where Wheeler had grain a year or two since, with numerous little plump pods four or five eighths of an inch long and commonly four roundish seeds to each. It must be, I think, Gray’s Vicia tetrasperma, though he makes that have white flowers (apparently same as Bigelow’s V. pusilla, also made to have white flowers, but Dewey calls them “bluish white”), while these are purple. Otherwise it corresponds. A marsh hawk sails over Fair Haven Hill. In the wood-path below the Cliffs I see perfectly fresh and fair Viola pedata flowers, as in the spring, though but few together. No flower by its second blooming more perfectly brings back the spring to us. In my blustering walk over the Mason and Hunt pastures yesterday, I saw much of the withered indigo-weed which was broken off and blowing about, and the seeds in its numerous black pods rattling like the rattlepod though not nearly so loud. The very surface of the earth itself has been rapidly imbrowned of late, like the acorns in their cups, in consequence of cold and frost; and the evergreens and few deciduous plants which are slow to wither, like Jersey tea, are more and more distinct. F. hyemalis quite common for a week past. One would say that the modern Christian was a man who had consented to say all the prayers in their liturgy, provided you would let him go straight to bed and sleep quietly afterward. All his prayers begin with “Now I lay me down to sleep.” He has consented to perform certain old-established charities, too, after a fashion, but he doesn’t wish to hear of any new-fangled ones; he doesn’t want to have any codicils added to the contract, to fit it to the present time,–unexpected demands made on him, after he has said his prayers. He shows the whites of his eyes on the Sabbath and the blacks all the rest of the week. It was evidently far from being a wild and desperate and insane attempt. It was a well-matured plan. The very fact that he had no rabble or troop of hirelings about him would alone distinguish him from ordinary heroes. His company was small indeed, because few could be found worthy to pass muster. He would have no rowdy or swaggerer, no profane swearer, for, as he said, he always found these men to fail at last. He would have only men of principle, and they are few. When it was observed that if he had had a chaplain his would have been a perfect Cromwellian company, he said that he would have had a chaplain if he could [HAVE] found one who could perform that service suitably. Each one who there laid down his life for the poor and oppressed was thus a picked man, culled out of many thousands, if not millions; a man of principle, of rare courage, and of devoted humanity; ready to lay down their lives any moment for the weak and enslaved. It may be doubted if there were any more their equals in all the land, for their leader scoured the land far and wide, seeking to swell his troop. These alone stood forward, prepared to step between the oppressor and the oppressed. Surely they were the very best men you could select to be hung. That was the greatest compliment this country could pay them. They were ripe for the gallows. I regard this event as a touchstone designed to bring out with glaring distinctness the character of this government. A man of Spartan habits, who at sixty has scruples about his diet at your table, must eat sparingly and fare hard, as becomes a soldier, he says, and one who is ever fitting himself for difficult enterprises. A man of rare common sense and directness of speech, as of action; a Transcendentalist above all, a man of ideals and principles,–that was what distinguished him. Of unwavering purposes, not to be dissuaded but by an experience and wisdom greater than his own. Not yielding to a whim or transient impulse, but carrying out the purpose of a life. He did not go to the college called Harvard; he was not fed on the pap that is there furnished. As he phrased it, “I know no more of grammar than one of your calves.” But he went to the great university of the West, where HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

he sedulously pursued the study of Liberty, for which he had early betrayed a fondness, and, having taken many degrees, he finally commenced the practice of Humanity, as you all know. I see now that it was necessary that the bravest and humanest man in all the country should be hung. Perhaps he saw it himself. If any leniency were shown him, any compromise made with him, any treating with him at all, by the government, he might be suspected. We needed to be thus assisted to see our government by the light of history. It needed to see itself. Compare the platform of any or all of the political parties, which deem themselves sane, with the platform on which he lay and uttered these things!! I foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene, the poet will sing it, the historian record it, and, with the Landing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery, when the present form of slavery shall be no more. We shall then be at liberty to weep for John Brown. Then and not till then we will take our revenge. I rejoice that I live in this age, that I was his contemporary. When I consider the spectacle of himself, and his six sons, and his son-in-law, enlisted for this fight, proceeding coolly, reverently, humanely to work, while almost all America stood ranked on the other side, I say again that it affects me as a sublime spectacle. For months if not years, sleeping and waking upon it, summering and wintering the thought, without expecting any reward but a good conscience and the gratitude of those made free. If he had had any journal advocating “his cause,” it would have been fatal to his efficiency,–any “organ,” as the phrase is, monotonously and wearisomely playing that same old tune, and then passing round the hat. If he had acted in any way so as to gain the respect or toleration of the government, he might have been suspected. It was the fact that the tyrant must give place to him, or he to the tyrant, that distinguished him from all other reformers that I know. For once the Sharp’s rifle and the revolver were employed in a righteous cause. The tools were in the hands of one who could use them. I know that the mass of my neighbors think that the only righteous use that can be made of them is to fight duels with them when we are insulted by other nations, or hunt Indians, or shoot fugitive slaves with them. Talk of political parties and their platforms! he could not have any platform but that of the Harper’s Ferry engine-house. I am aware that I anticipate a little,–that he was still, at the last accounts, alive in the hands of his foes; but that being the case, I find myself most naturally thinking and speaking of him as physically dead. The same indignation that cleared the temple once will clear it again. The question is not about the weapon, but the spirit in which you use it. No man has appeared in America as yet who loved his fellowman so well and treated him so tenderly. He lived for him; he took up his life and he laid it down for him. Though you may not approve of his methods or his principles, cease to call names, to cry mad dog. The method is nothing; the spirit is all in all. It is the deed, the devotion, the soul of the man. For you this is at present a question of magnanimity. If the schoolboy, forgetting himself, rushed to the rescue of his drowning playmate, what though he knock down somebody on his way, what though he does not go to the same church with you, or his father belong to the same political party! Would you not like to claim kindred with him in this, though in no other thing he is like, or likely, to you? Heroes have fought well on their stumps when their legs were shot off, but I never heard of any good done by a government that had no heart, or at least had not brains of a high order. This is not the time to hear what Tom, Dick, or Harry is doing, or in such a case would have done. We shall have time enough to find that out in, if we do not know it already. We ask you to the extent of your ability to appreciate this man and his deed, in spite of the difference between you and him. Who cares whether he belonged to your clique, or party, or sect, or not? A man does a brave and humane deed, and at once, on all sides, we hear people and parties declaring: “I didn’t do it, nor countenance him to do it, in any conceivable way. It can’t fairly be inferred from my past career.” Now, I am not interested to hear you define your position. I don’t know that I ever was, or ever shall be. I am not now, at any rate. I think [IT] is mere egotism, and impertinent. On the whole my respect for my fellow-men, except as one may outweigh a million, is not being increased these days. I have noticed the cold-blooded way in which newspaper-writers and men generally speak of this event, as if an ordinary malefactor, though one of unusual pluck,–as the Governor of Virginia says, using the language of the cockpit, “the gamest man he ever saw,”–had been caught and were about to be hung. He was not dreaming of his foes when the Governor thought he looked so brave. Think of him,–of his rare qualities!–such a man as it takes ages to make, and ages to understand; no mock hero, not the representative of any party. A man such as the sun may never rise upon again in this benighted land, to whose making went the costliest material, the finest adamant, the purest gold; sent to be the redeemer of those HANGING in captivity;–and the only use to which you can put him, after mature deliberation, is to hang him at the end of a rope. I need not describe him. He has stood where I now stand; you have all seen him. You who pretend to HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

care for Christ crucified, consider what you are about to do to him who offered himself to be the savior of four millions of men! I wish to correct the tone and some of the statements of the newspapers respecting the life and character and last action of John Brown. The newspapers seem to ignore, or perhaps they are really ignorant of, the fact that there are at least as many as one or two individuals to a town throughout the North who think much as I do about him and his enterprise. I do not hesitate to assert that they are an important and growing party. I speak for the slave when I say that I prefer the philanthropy of John Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me. Talk of failure and throwing his life away! he is not dead yet in any sense, and if he were dead he would still live. Were the battles of Black Jack and Ossawatomie and many encounters of less note useless and a failure? I think that it was he more than any other who made Kansas as free as she is, who taught the slaveholder that it was not safe for him to carry his slaves thither. None of the political parties have ever accomplished anything of the sort. It was he who taught Missouri that it was not profitable to hold slaves in that neighborhood. Was it a failure to deliver from bondage thirteen human beings and walk off with them by broad daylight, for weeks if not months, at a leisurely pace, through one State after another, for half the length of the North, conspicuous to all parties, with a price set upon his head, going into a court-room on his way and telling what he had done? To face singly in his work of righteousness the whole power of this unrighteous government, and successfully too! Who has gained the most ground within five years,–Brown or the Slave Power? And this, not because the government was lenient, but because none of its menials dared to touch him. They counted the cost and concluded that a thousand dollars was not enough. There are a few–there are more than you suppose–who cannot help thinking of that man now in the clutches of the enraged slaveholder. He is one of that class of whom we hear a great deal, but, for the most part, see nothing at all,–the Puritans. It is in vain to kill him. He died lately in the time of Cromwell, but he reappeared here. Why should he not? Some of the Puritan stock are said to have come over and settled in New England. They were a class that did something else than celebrate their forefathers’ day and eat parched corn in remembrance of their ancestors. They were neither Democrats nor Republicans. They were men of simple habits, straightforward, prayerful; not thinking much of rulers who did not fear God, not making many compromises, or seeking after available candidates. He is of the same age with the century. He is what is called a thin and wiry-looking man, being composed of nerves instead of flesh, some five feet nine or ten inches high, with a sharp eye, and the last time he was hereabouts wore a long white beard; with a very soldier-like bearing. I understand his grandfather was an officer in the Revolution; that he himself was born in Connecticut, but early went to Ohio with his father. His father was a contractor who furnished beef to the army there in the last war, and young Brown, accompanying his father to the camp and assisting him in his employment, saw considerable of military life,–more perhaps than he would if he had been a soldier, for he was sometimes present at the councils of the officers. He saw enough, at any rate, to disgust him with war and excite in him a great abhorrence of it; so much so that, though he was offered some petty office in the army, he not only refused it, but also refused to train when he was warned, and was fined for it. He was then about eighteen. He said that few persons had any conception of the cost, even the pecuniary cost, of firing a single bullet in war. Above all, he learned by experience how armies were collected, supplied, and maintained in the field for a length of time,–a work which required at least as much experience and skill as to lead them in battle. And he then resolved that he would never have anything to do with war, unless it were a war for liberty. I should say that he was an old-fashioned man in his respect for the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and his faith in the permanence of this Union. Slavery he saw to be wholly opposed to all of these, and he was its determined foe. When the troubles first broke out in Kansas, he sent several of his sons thither to strengthen the party of the Free State men, fitting them out with such weapons as he had, telling them if the troubles should increase, and there should be need of him, he should follow, to assist them with his hand and counsel. It was not long before he felt it to be his duty to give the Free State men of Kansas, who had no leader of experience, the benefit of what experience he had had. At a time when scarcely a man from the Free States was able to reach Kansas by any direct route, at least without having his arms taken from him, he, carrying what imperfect firelocks and other weapons he could collect, openly drove an ox-cart through Missouri, with his surveyor’s compass exposed in it, and, passing for a simple surveyor, who by his very profession must be neutral, he met with no resistance and in the course of his leisurely journey became thoroughly acquainted with the plans of the Border Ruffians. For some time after his arrival he pursued, before he was known, similar tactics. When, for instance, he saw a knot of the Ruffians on the prairie, discussing, of course, the single topic that then occupied their minds, he would take his compass and one of his sons, and perhaps proceed to run an imaginary line which passed through the very spot on which that conclave had assembled, and then of course he would have some talk with them, learn their news and their plans, and when he had heard all they had to impart, he would resume his surveying, and run on his line till he was out of HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

sight. This is enough to show that his plans were not crazily laid. For a good part of his life he was a surveyor, part of the time, I think, in Illinois. At one time he was engaged in wool-growing, and went to Europe once as the agent of some wool-growers; and there too he carried his common sense with him. I have been told, for instance, that he made such a remark as this,–that he saw why the soil of England was so rich and that of Germany (or a part of it at least) so exhausted, and he thought of writing to some of the crowned heads about it. It was because in England the peasantry lived on the soil which they cultivated, while in Germany they were gathered into villages at night. It would be worth the while to have collected all the remarks of such a traveller. Of course, he is not so foolish as to ask or expect any favors from the government, nor probably will his friends for him. No wonder it struck the politicians and preachers generally very forcibly that either he was insane or they, and they, being the painters, or judges, this time, decided, naturally enough, that it must be he. Such, however, as far as I learn, has not been nor is likely to be the decision of those who have recently stood face to face to him HANGING and who are now about to hang him. They have not condescended to such insult. The slaveholders and the slaves who have really dealt with him are not likely sincerely to question his sanity, but rather political or religious parties, who stand further off from a living man. I almost fear to hear of his deliverance, doubting if a prolonged life, if any life, can do as much good as his death. No doubt many of you have seen the little manuscript book which he carried about him, during the Kansas troubles,–his “orderly book,” as I think he called it,–containing the names of his small company, a score at most, and half of them his own family, and the rules which bound them together,–a contract which many of them have sealed with their blood. There was one rule, as I remember, which prohibited prophane swearing in his camp. I believe that he never was able to find more than a score or so of recruits whom he would accept, and only ten or a dozen in whom he had perfect faith. Perhaps anxious politicians may prove that only seventeen white men and five negroes were concerned in this enterprise, but the anxiety to prove this might suggest to themselves that all is not told. Why do they still dodge the truth? Do they not realize why they are so anxious? It is because of a dim consciousness of the fact, which they do not distinctly face, that at least five millions of the inhabitants of the United States who were not pining to attempt, would have rejoiced if it had succeeded. They at most only criticise the tactics. He said that if any man offered himself to be a soldier under him who was forward to tell what he could or would do if he could only get sight of the enemy, he had but little confidence in him. One writer says, I know not with what motive, that it is a fact “illustrative of Brown’s insanity, that he has charts of nearly all the great battle-fields of Europe.” I fear that his collection is not to be compared for completeness with that which this government possesses, however his sanity may be compared with its, though it did not make them itself, but there are two or three fields in Kansas of which he did not need to make any chart. At any rate, I do not think it is sane to spend one’s whole life talking or writing about this matter, and I have not done so. A man may have other affairs to attend to. The murderer always knows that he is justly punished; but when a government takes the life of a man without the consent of his conscience, it is an audacious government, and is taking a step toward its own dissolution. Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong? Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made, and declared by any number of men to be good, when they are not good? Is there any necessity for a man’s being a tool to perform a deed of which he disapproves? Is it the intention of lawmakers that good men shall be hung ever? Are judges to interpret the law according to the letter, and not the spirit? Who is it whose safety requires that Captain Brown be hung? Is it indispensable to any Northern man? If you do not wish it, say so distinctly. What right have you to enter into a compact with yourself (even) that you will do thus or so, against your better nature? Is it for you to make up your mind,–to form any resolution whatever,–and not accept the convictions that are forced upon you, and which even pass your understanding? Any man knows when he is justified, and not all the wits in the world can enlighten him on that point. I do not believe in lawyers,–in that mode of defending or attacking a man,–because you descend to meet the judge on his own ground, and, in cases of the highest importance, it is of no consequence whether a man breaks a human law or not. Let lawyers decide trivial cases. If they were interpreters of the everlasting laws which rightfully bind man, that would be another thing. Just as we are doing away with duelling or fighting one another with pistols. I think that we may in course of time do away with fighting one another with lawyers. Such improvements are not altogether unheard of. A counterfeiting law-factory, standing half in a slave land and half in a free! What kind of laws for freemen can you expect from that? Substantial justice!! There’s nothing substantial about it, but the Judge’s salary and the lawyer’s fee. The thought of that man’s position and probable fate is spoiling many a man’s day here at the North for other thinking. We do not think of buying any crape this time. It seems that one of his abettors had lived there for years, and Brown took all his measures deliberately. The HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

country was mountainous, and it was given out that they were concerned in mining operations, and to play this part required very little invention on his part, such had been his previous pursuits and habits. Having been a surveyor, he would not make a strange figure in the fields and woods; this, too, would account [FOR] quantities of spades and pickaxes, and strangers from time to time visiting and conferring with him in a somewhat mysterious manner. I have no respect for the judgment of any man who can read the report of that conversation and still call the principal insane. It has the ring of a saner sanity than an ordinary discipline and habits of life, than an ordinary organization, secures. Take any sentence of it,–”Any questions that I can honorably answer, I will; not otherwise. So far as I am myself concerned, I have told everything truthfully. I value my word, sir.” He never overstated anything, but spoke within bounds. I remember particularly how, in his speech here, he referred to what his family had suffered in Kansas, never giving the least vent to his pent-up fire. It was a volcano with an ordinary chimney-flue. Also, referring to the deeds of certain Border Ruffians, he said, rapidly paring away his speech, like an experienced soldier keeping a reserve of force and meaning, “They had a perfect right to be hung.” I would fain do my best to correct, etc., little as I know of him. But I believe, without having any outward evidence, that many have already silently retracted their words. They (Allen and Stark) may have possessed some of his love of liberty, indignation, and courage to face their country’s foes, but they had not the rare qualities–the peculiar courage and self-reliance–which could enable them to face their country itself, and all mankind, in behalf of the oppressed. He could give you information on various subjects, for he had travelled widely and observed closely. He said that the Indians with whom he dealt in Kansas were perhaps the richest people in a pecuniary sense on the earth. The money that this government annually paid them gave so much to each member of the community. They were, moreover, more intelligent than the mass of the Border Ruffians, or that class of the inhabitants of Missouri. Much of the time of late years he has had to skulk in the swamps of Kansas with a price set upon his head, suffering from sickness and poverty and exposure, befriended only by Indians and [A] few white men. When surprise was expressed that he was not taken, he accounted for it by saying that it was perfectly well understood that he would not be taken alive. He would even show himself openly in towns which were half composed of Border Ruffians, and transact some business, without delaying long, and yet nobody attempted to arrest [HIM], because, as he said, a small party did not like to undertake it, and a large one could not be got together in season. I thought the same of his speech which I heard some years ago,–that he was not in the least a rhetorician, was not talking to Buncombe or his constituents anywhere, who had no need to invent anything, but to tell the simple truth and communicate his resolution. Therefore he appeared incomparably strong, and eloquence in Congress or elsewhere was at a discount. It was like the speeches of Cromwell compared with those of an ordinary king. They have tried a long time; they have hung a good many, but never found the right one before. Dispersing the sentiments of humanity! As if they were ever found unaccompanied by its deeds! as if you could disperse them as easily as water with a watering-pot and they were good only to lay the dust with! A few ministers are doing their duty in New York. This use of the word “insane” has got to be a mere trope. Newspaper-editors talk as if it were impossible that a man could be “divinely appointed” in these days to do any work whatever, as if vows and religion were out of date as connected with any man’s daily work, and as if a man’s death were a failure and his continued life, be it of whatever character, were a success. They argue that it is a proof of his insanity that he thought he was appointed to do this work which he did,–that he did not suspect himself for a moment! If they do not mean this, then they do not speak the truth and say what they mean. They are simply at their old tricks still. He said truly that the reason why such greatly superior numbers quailed before him with a handful of men only was, as some of his prisoners stated, that the former lacked a cause,–a kind of armor which he and his party never lacked. He said that when the time arrived, few men were found willing to lay down their lives in defense of what they knew to be wrong. They did not like that this should be their last act in this world. As if the agent to abolish slavery could only be somebody “appointed” by the President or some political party. All this–his insanity (monomania, says one), etc.–made him to be “dreaded by the Missourians as a supernatural being.” Sure enough, a hero in the midst of us cowards is always so dreaded. He is just that thing. He shows himself superior to nature. He has a spark of divinity in him.

“Unless above himself he can Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!”

I have read all the newspapers I could get within a week, and I do not remember in them a single expression of sympathy for these men. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Most of them decided not to print the full report of Brown’s words in the armory “to the exclusion of other matter.” Why, they have matterated, and there is no safety for them but in excluding the dead part and giving place to the living and healthy. But I object not so much to what they have not done as to what they have done. He was by descent and birth a New England farmer, a man of great common sense, deliberate and practical as that class, and tenfold more so. He was like the best of those who stood at our bridge once, on Lexington Common, and on Bunker Hill, only he was firmer and higher-principled than any that I chance to have heard of as there. It was no Abolition lecturer that converted him. A Western paper says, to account for his escape from so many perils, that he was concealed under a “rural exterior,” as if in that prairie land a hero should by good rights wear a citizen’s dress only. It would appear from published letters that the women of the land are where the men should be. What sort of violence is that which is encouraged not by soldiers but by citizens, not so much by laymen as by ministers of the Gospel, not so much by the fighting sects as by Quakers, and not so much by Quaker men as Quaker women? The enemy may well “quake” at the thought of it. Is not that a righteous war where the best are thus opposed to the worst? Governor Wise speaks far more justly and admiringly of him than any Northern editor that I have heard of. “They are themselves mistaken who take him to be a madman. . . . He is cool, collected, and indomitable, and it is but just to him to say that he was humane to his prisoners. . . . And he inspired me with great trust in his integrity as a man of truth. He is a fanatic, vain and garrulous (!!), but firm, truthful, and intelligent. His men, too, who survive, are like him. . . . Colonel Washington says that he was the coolest and firmest man he ever saw in defying danger and death. With one son dead by his side, and another shot through, he felt the pulse of his dying son with one hand, and held his rifle with the other, and commanded his men with the utmost composure, encouraging them to be firm, and to sell their lives as dear as they could. Of the three white prisoners, Brown, Stevens, and Coppoc, it was hard to say which was the most firm.” There is another man with whom the South and a good part of the North heartily sympathize. His name is Walker. I subscribed a trifle when he was here three years ago, I had so much confidence in the man,–that he would do right,–but it would seem that he had not confidence enough in me, nor in anybody else that I know, to communicate his plans to us. I do not wish to kill or to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both of these things would be by me unavoidable. In extremities I could even be killed. This event advertises me that there is such a fact as death,–the possibility of a man’s dying. It seems as if no man had ever died in America; for in order to die you must first have lived. I don’t believe in the hearses and palls and funerals that they have had. There was no death in the case, because there had been no life; they merely rotted or sloughed off, pretty much as they had rotted or sloughed along. No temple’s veil was rent, only a hole dug somewhere. The best of them fairly ran down like a clock. I hear a good many pretend that they are going to die; or that they have died, for aught I know. Nonsense! I’ll defy them to do it. They haven’t got life enough in them. They deliquesce like fungi, and keep a hundred eulogists mopping the spot where they left off. Only half a dozen or so have died since the world began. Memento mori! they don’t understand that sublime sentence which some worthy got sculptured on his gravestone once. They’ve understood it in a grovelling and snivelling sense. They’ve wholly forgotten how to die. Be sure you die. Finish your work. Know when to leave off. Men make a needless ado about taking lives,–capital punishment. Where is there any life to take? You don’t know what it means to let the dead bury the dead. Beauty stands veiled the while, and music is a screeching lie. These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live. If this man’s acts and words do not create a revival, it will be the severest possible satire on the acts and words of those who are said to have effected such things. Do you ever think you have died, or are going to die, sir? No! there is no hope of you, sir. You haven’t got your lesson yet. You’ve got to stay after school. It is the best news that America has ever heard. Franklin,–Washington,–they were let off without dying; these were merely missing one day. It has already quickened the public pulse of the North; it has infused more, and more generous, blood into her veins and heart than any number of years of what is called commercial and political prosperity could. How many a man who was lately contemplating suicide has now something to live for! Mr. Giddings says of them that “their sad fate will occupy a brief page in the history of our nation.” Does he think that the history of the Republican Party–hitherto, for it may be re-created by his death–will be in the proportion of a sentence to that page? When I reflect to what a cause this man devoted himself, and how religiously, and then reflect to what cause his judges and all who condemn him so angrily and fluently devote themselves, I see that they are as far apart as the heavens and earth are asunder. The amount of it is our “leading men” are a harmless kind of folk, and they know well enough that they were not divinely appointed, but elected by the votes of their party. The most sensible of the apparently editorial articles on this event that I have met with is in the Wheeling HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Intelligence. Vide Supplement to Journal, October 29th.

October 23, Sunday: After meeting with Ferdinand de Lesseps, Napoléon III announced his support for the Suez Canal project. EGYPT

Running into Hector Berlioz on a Paris street, Richard Wagner found him “in a pitiable state of health” because he had just come from an electrical treatment intended to help his nervous condition. The two of them resumed their personal, if not their professional, relationship.

News of Captain John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia having reached Cincinnati, the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway in his sermon described the enterprise as “worse than a crime — a blunder”38 and declared that the Abolitionists, since they were non-resistants, would repudiate him. (However, upon Brown’s execution the Reverend would opinion that “Two days later my sermon exalted him to the right hand of God,” and then looking back through the perspective of old age, he would write that “Reading his career by the light of subsequent history, I am convinced that few men ever wrought so much evil.”) JOHN HOLLADAY LATANÉ

Several weeks earlier Henry Thoreau had delivered his sermon “LIFE MISSPENT” before the Reverend Theodore Parker’s Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society at the Boston Music Hall on Winter Street near the Tremont Temple.

Swamp-pink and waxwork were bare October 23d; how long?

38. We have no reason to suspect that the Reverend ever became aware that one of the participants in the raid had been a college classmate of his, a young student whom he had caused to be expelled from the college for a very minor infraction. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

His sermon had been reported by Boston newspapers and the Reverend D.C. Eddy had read one of these reviews. Eddy responded with an argumentative theological sermon of his own which, as we might expect, was quite a bit more thoroughly covered, by the Boston Journal, than Thoreau’s lecture had originally been covered:

Misspent Lives. This was the subject of a lecture delivered at Harvard Street Church, last evening, by the pastor, Rev. D. C. Eddy, his text being Matt. vii. 26:27. The speaker referred to a recent lecture delivered in this city, by Henry D. Thoreau, on “Misspent Lives,” conceiving that the lecturer had given no true idea of a model life, either in his lecture or in himself; and turned from him to one wiser than Solomon in all his glory—and the estimate by Christ of a misspent life, as one who hearing and not doing his sayings, was likened to a man building his house upon the sand—turning from the epigrammatic nonsense of the Walden Pond cynic and the transcendental mysticism of Emerson to the Great Teacher whose language was as transparent as his life, and his life an illustration of his teachings, the speaker took the following positions: 1. Every life which did not recognize human brotherhood, and which is not in itself an effort to lift the world up to God, is a misspent life. There are men all around us who do nothing to fulfill one noble purpose—never reach forth a hand to save the lost—rise up and lie down to rest without being conscious of striking of[f] the fetter of [a] single bondman, or giving to a single immortal soul a heavenward impulse. Men may make the world blaze with their deeds, and their lives be misspent. The world is none the better for many a man who has lived in it. How many men with language glowing with eloquence, leave but misspent lives; they have shown their literature and their learning, but the wounds which have festered on the breast of humanity do not heal for anything they have done. Men use their gifted tongues on great public occasions and charm their hearers, and others applaud the sawing off of the heads of bronze statues rather than the heads of vice and crime, but who can help wondering that these great men do nothing to make the world better? They are burdened with learning and the graces of literature, but what is done to draw anything from the ocean of sorrow, or add anything to the sum of human happiness? HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

2. A life is misspent which is not in harmony with Christ and His salvation, which does not comprehend the Cross as its centre and rest upon the atonement as its basis. All the skill a man may have will not compensate him for the want of salvation. Salvation is what men need—Christ in his heart, will, and conscience; Christ crucified as the power of the Cross—as a living energy and the grand object of his life.3. A life is misspent which does not make a large and conscious preparation for a future world. A writer in one of the public journals tells us there is too much attention paid to the future life, and too little bestowed upon this world; that more attention should be given to the stomach, to the teeth, to the hair. What can such a man be thinking of? He forgets a man is to live forever. He can take care of himself, but he needs to care for his soul. All the care of his body, and all he can amass of things of this life, will do him no good without Christ. What did God say to the man who had nothing but barns and stores? “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee.” How is it with you who hear me to-night? How do you feel about the great brotherhood of man? Do you feel yourself bound to the great heart of humanity? Is Christ your life and your hope? If you trust in Him, it shall be with you as it was with him who built his house upon the rock. Without Christ your misspent life shall be as he who built upon the sand, and the winds and flood beat upon that house, and it fell. The house was crowded by an attentive audience.

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRIES IN HIS JOURNAL, OCTOBER 23d-27th] HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

An anonymous letter of this date, to the Clerk of Court, Kanawha County, in Charlestown VA: Copy “Clerk of the Court Charlestown Va Sir. You had better caution your authorities to be careful what you— with “Ossawatimi Brown” So sure as you hurt One hair of his head— mark my word, the following day you will see every City—Town and Village South of Mason & Dixons line in Flames We are determined to put down Slavery at any odds Forcibly if it must Peacefully if it can Believe me when I tell you the end is not yet– by a long odds All of us at the North Sympathize with the Martyr of Harpers Ferry” On the Envelope “Clerk of the Court Charlestown Kanawha Coy Virginia” Postmarked “New York Oct 23 1859” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

OSAWATOMIE

August 31: George Freeman Noyes (1824-1868) wrote from Portland, Maine to Charles Wesley Slack offering to preach from the pulpit of the Reverend Theodore Parker on September 18th. He made mention of the present condition of American religion.39

August 31. P. M.–To Fair Haven Hill. Was caught in five successive showers, and took refuge in Hayden’s barn, under the cliffs, and under a tree. A thunder-cloud, seen from a hilltop, as it is advancing rapidly across the sky on one side, whose rear at least will soon strike us. The dark-blue mass (seen edgewise) with its lighter upper surface and its copious curving rain beneath and behind, like an immense steamer holding its steady way to its port, with tremendous mutterings from time to time, a rush of cooler air, and hurried flight of birds. These later weeds,–chenopodiums, Roman wormwood, amaranth, etc.,–now so rank and prevalent in the

cultivated fields which were long since deserted by the hoers, now that the potatoes are for the most part ripened, are preparing a crop for the small birds of the fall and winter, those pensioners on civilization. These weeds require cultivated ground, and Nature perseveres each year till she succeeds in producing a bountiful harvest by their seeds, in spite of our early assiduity. Now that the potatoes are cared for, Nature is preparing a crop of

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

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

chenopodium and Roman wormwood for the birds. Now especially the crickets are seen and heard on dry and sandy hanks and fields, near their burrows, and some hanging, back down, to the stems of grass, feeding. I entered a dry grassy hollow where the cricket alone seemed to reign,–open like a bowl to the sky. While I stand under a pine for shelter during the rain, on Fair Haven Hill-side, I see many sarsaparilla plants fallen and withering green, i. e. before changing. It is as if they had a weak hold on the earth, on the subterranean stocks. The nightshade berries are handsome, not only for their clear red, but the beautifully regular form of their drooping clusters, suggesting a hexagonal arrangement for economy of room. There was another shower in the night (at 9 P. M.), making the sixth after 1.30 P. M. It was evidently one cloud thus broken into six parts, with some broad intervals of clear sky and fair weather. It would have been convenient for us, if it had been printed on the first cloud; “Five more to come!” Such a shower has a history which has never been written. One would like to know how and where the cloud first gathered, what lands and water it passed over and watered, and where and when it ceased to rain and was finally dissipated. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

September 1, Thursday: George Freeman Noyes (1824-1868) wrote from New-York to Charles Wesley Slack expressing his gratitude in having received a copy of Reverend Theodore Parker’s letter to the 28th Congregational Society and his sermon on Beauty, and reaffirming his acceptance of a speaking engagement.

In California, Joshua A. Norton proclaimed himself the Emperor Norton I. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

November 14, Monday: The New-York Times reported that on account of the flight of the original proprietor, “Fred. Douglass’ Paper in New Hands,” to wit, the hands of son Lawrs. H. Douglass.

Although Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of the Secret “Six” conspiracy was believed to be hard at work on a plan to rescue John Brown from his Virginia prison, a letter to his co-conspirator, the Reverend Theodore Parker, in exile in Rome, indicates otherwise: “The feeling of sympathy with Brown is spreading fast over all the North, and will grow stronger if he is hanged…. The failure is a success; it has done more for Freedom than years of talk could…. It grieves me sadly to think that Brown must die, but he is ready for it; and if we cannot avert it, we must think it best. It will undoubtedly add millions to the righteous side.” Someone writing in this manner while otherwise purporting to be taking action to save a life, very clearly, is sponsoring a delusion, and is doing so not in order to save that life himself but in order to ensure that no-one else has a chance to originate an effort to save that life. Sanborn was pretending, quite cold-bloodedly, in order to ensure that no last-minute event would cheat the conspirators of Brown’s hanging and martyrdom. In my own personal opinion, in addition, it would have occurred to Sanborn that dead men are no longer capable of telling tales, and that it was not altogether a bad thing that while Captain Brown’s lips were still sealed by his agenda of silent martyrdom they were going to become forever sealed by the glue of death.

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR NOVEMBER 14th]

November 24, Thursday: Henry Thoreau wrote to Calvin H. Greene. Concord Nov. 24. ’59

Dear Sir, The lectures which you refer to were reported in the newspaper, after a fashion, the last one in some half dozen of them, and if I possessed one, or all, of those reports I would send them to you, bad as they are. The best, or at least longest one of the Brown Lecture was in the Boston “Atlas & Bee” of Nov 2d. May be half the whole— There were others in the Traveller— The Journal &c of the same date.

I am glad to know that you are interested to see my things, & I wish that I had them in a printed form to send to you. I exerted myself considerably to get the last discourse printed & sold for the benefit of Brown’s family—but the publishers are afraid of pamphlets & it is now too late.

I return the stamp which I have not used.

I shall be glad to see you if I ever come your way

[One-third page missing] HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Yrs truly Henry D. Thoreau

JOHN BROWN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVORED SPECIES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE was published to acclaim and controversy by a gentleman naturalist with whose work Thoreau was already familiar. Have you ever wondered how Charles Darwin ever got his ORIGIN book, with its so utterly novel and abhorrent thesis, through the London presses? The standard accounts merely say that he sent off his MS and it was published.

ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

But what actually happened was that Charles Lyell fronted for him with a publisher, John Murray, and based on this recommendation Murray, being himself an amateur geologist, accepted the MS sight unseen. Once he got his hands on the actual manuscript, he became quite disenchanted at what he had committed himself to. He commented, in fact, that this new theory of descent with modification was like “contemplating the fruitful union of a poker and a rabbit.” The new theory was “absurd.” Pointing out to Darwin that “everybody is interested in pigeons,” he urged that the MS be entirely rewritten to limit the author’s remarks to pigeons, with only a brief reference to general principles. His recommendation, he confessed, was based upon a standard publishers’ fantasy, that of placing a copy of his book on the tea-table of every pigeon-fancier in Britain. The publisher was willing to put out only an edition of 1,250 copies, which at fifteen shillings was quickly sold out.

The argument about this had driven Darwin to one of those English water-resorts for “the cure.” While at this resort he was reading a new novel, ADAM BEDE, and on the evening of this day on which ORIGIN came out, George Eliot (Herbert Spencer’s girlfriend, sort of, although we have room to hope that they were never HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

intimate) read Darwin’s book.

We don’t know either what he thought of her fiction or what she thought of his nonfiction. We do know that the publisher’s trepidations would prove to have been unwarranted, that two pirate editions would quickly roll off the American presses without the formality of permission or the forwarding of any royalties — and that at Cambridge College, William Whewell would not tolerate such a treatise as the ORIGIN to be placed in the library stacks.

The natural history encyclopedias of the 19th Century rarely included extinct animals. An exception was Samuel Goodrich’s ILLUSTRATED NATURAL HISTORY published in this year, in which, upon a notice of the common chameleon, the audience suddenly found itself in the presence of “fossil lizards.” Below is its woodcut of the Hylaeosaurus. Other illustrations show the Iguanodon, the Megalosaurus, and a collection of marine reptiles such as Ichthyosaurus. All these illustrations had been copied from the Crystal Palace concretions. Hylaeosaurus had been discovered by Gideon Mantell in 1832 and had been announced in his GEOLOGY OF THE SOUTHEAST OF ENGLAND in 1833. It was one of Richard Owen’s original three dinosaurs and stood proud on the relocated Crystal Palace’s grounds: HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Friend Daniel Ricketson’s journal for this day reads:

1 Clear and fine for the season. Left Concord at 8 /2 A.M.

Frederick Douglass’s ship was arriving on this day in Liverpool harbor.

In a private letter, the Reverend Theodore Parker, who was entirely unfamiliar with evolutionary theory, confessed on this day to Francis Jackson (the namesake grandfather of the mentally imbalanced Francis Jackson Meriam of the Harpers Ferry raid whom Thoreau would help escape, supposedly toward Canada) that the reason he did not like slavery was, that if these inferior colored people were allowed to have any place at all in human society, they would merely take the opportunity to fecundate. To be kind to them was merely to create more of them that one would need to be kind to. The Reverend was an Aryan possessed of Aryan common sense, a veteran of preaching in downtown Boston to other Aryans possessed of Aryan common HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

sense, and so of course he belabored the obvious, that:

An Anglo-Saxon with common sense does not like this Africanization of America.

Brit horrified at slavery USer horrified at slavery Confusing Darwinism with Spencerism and triumphalism (that is, with “Social Darwinism,” as is so very usual), the Reverend Parker would eventually get around to congratulating himself that on account of his deeply ingrained racism he had been “Darwinian before Darwin” (actually, in this “Anglo-Saxon” Aryan race- soulism of his, what he was in fact was Hitlerian before Hitler).40

November 24. The river has risen considerably, at last, owing to the rain of the 22d. Had been very low before. See, on the railroad-slope by the pond, and also some days ago, a flock of goldfinches eating the seed of the Roman wormwood. At Spanish Brook Path. the witch-hazel (one flower) lingers.

40. Adolf Hitler, a Catholic, understood something about Christianity which few Christians are able to accept. “Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature” (HITLER’S TABLE TALK, Weidenfield and Nicolson, London 1963). Many German Christians supported Hitler because they had the spirit of Hitler within them while they supposed they had the spirit of Christ within them. Even today some Christians are unable to accept the truth of this remark, because they have the spirit of Hitler, or the Emperor Constantine, within them while they suppose they have the spirit of Christ within them. That sort of Christianity was in fact the only sort of Christianity which my mother in Indiana had ever known, which is why she could not consider me a Christian but needed to agonize over me as an “atheist” howevermuch I insisted that I was attempting to follow the way of Jesus as I construed it. If someone were to tell these “Constantinian” Christians that Hitler said that two plus two equals four, they would try to find some perversity in this remark by which to dismiss it (the guy lost a war, and that has forever discredited him as the leader of the state church), and if someone told them that the problem is not that Hitler did not know what true Christianity is, but that the actual problem is that they themselves do not know what true Christianity is, they .... My mother was in fact, like E.O. Wilson the Harvard sociobiologist, an admirer of Ronald Reagan. Wilson perceived President Reagan as the model of the “soft-core altruist,” which is the good because fake kind of altruist who does not qualify as a Christian “enemy of civilization” (Edward O. Wilson, ON HUMAN NATURE, Harvard UP, Cambridge MA 1978, page 157) because he does not operate out of a mere mindless death-wish. As Mary Midgley has pointed out, “Social Darwinism or Spencerism is the unofficial religion of the west. The official western religion, Christianity, is well known to be rather demanding and to have its eye on the next world rather than this one. In such situations, other doctrines step in to fill the gap. People want a religion for this world as well. They find it in the worship of individual success” (Mary Midgley, EVOLUTION AS A RELIGION: STRANGE HOPES AND STRANGER FEARS, Methuen, London 1985, page 140). The mock altruist is a person whose calculating “good behavior” is well rewarded. His “psychological vehicles are lying, pretense and deceit, including self-deceit, because the actor is most convincing who believes that his performance is real” (page 156). The real altruist, the hard-core one, “irrational,” would in fact be Social Darwinism’s enemy, sociobiology’s enemy, and the enemy of civilization. There were some German Christians, a few, to leaven Hitler’s loaf; they insisted on their right to die by way of the cross rather than the sword. There are some American Christians, a few, to leaven America’s loaf; they are of course condemned, but here they are. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

I observe that ferns grow especially where there is an abrupt or broken bank, as where, in the woods, sand has been anciently dug out of a hillside to make a dam with and the semicircular scar has been covered with a sod and shrubs again. The shelter and steepness are favorable when there is shade and moisture. How pretty amid the downy and cottony fruits of November the heads of the white anemone, raised a couple of feet from the ground on slender stalks, two or three together,–small heads of yellowish-white down, compact and regular as a thimble beneath, but, at this time, diffusive and bursting forth above, somewhat like a little torch with its flame,–a very neat object!

Winter: An ice-skating rink had opened this year in Montréal. This illustration, however, depicts some skaters who had gone out to Jamaica Pond near Boston:

The Reverend Theodore Parker was spending the winter in Roma — because it doesn’t freeze up there all that often.

December 24, Saturday: Oberlin College Professor James Monroe returned empty-handed that Christmas Eve to Oberlin, Ohio, having failed to retrieve John Anderson Copeland, Jr.’s body from Virginia authorities.

The Reverend Samuel Joseph May had written to the Reverend Theodore Parker — who had gone off to Rome in part for his health and in part because he knew what was going to happen at Harpers Ferry and very well understood that he would pay for his part in this were he captured by the federal government. Now a belligerent letter arrived from Parker in Italy characterizing John Brown as “an upright & a downright man, who took his life in his hand & said ‘Slavery shall go down.’.”

[NOTE THAT FRIEND JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, WHEN OFFERED ONE OF THE PIKES WHICH HAD BEEN INTENDED FOR DISTRIBUTION TO REBELLING SLAVES FOR HIS INSPECTION, WOULD DECLINE WITH THE COMMENT “IT LOOKS TOO MUCH LIKE MURDER,” AND THAT THE REVEREND ADIN BALLOU HAD JUST INSISTED THAT TO CHARACTERIZE SUCH A MAN AS JOHN BROWN, A MERE “MILITARY ADVENTURER,” AS A “SELF-SACRIFICING REDEEMER” ON THE MODEL OF JESUS WOULD BE “UNTRUTHFUL, UNJUST, AND UTTERLY ABSURD.”]

December 24: P.M.–To Flint’s Pond. A strong and very cold northwest wind. I think that the cold winds are oftenest not northwest, but northwest by west. There is, in all, an acre or two in Walden not yet frozen, though half of it has been frozen more than a week. I measure the blueberry bush on Flint’s Pond Island. The five stems are united at the ground, so as to make one round and solid trunk thirty-one inches in circumference, but probably they have grown together there, for they HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

become separate at about six inches above. They may have sprung from different seeds of one berry. At three feet from the ground they measure eleven inches, eleven, eleven and a half, eight, and six and a half, or, on an average, nine and a half. I climbed up and found a comfortable seat with my feet four feet above the ground, and there was room for three or four more there, but unfortunately this was not the season for berries. There were several other clumps of large ones there. One clump close by the former contained twenty-three stems within a diameter of three feet, and their average diameter at three feet from the ground was about two inches. These had not been cut, because they stood on this small island which has little wood beside, and therefore had grown the larger. The two prevailing lichens on them were Parmelia caperata and saxatilis, extending quite around their trunks; also a little of a parmelia more glaucous than the last one, and a little green usnea and a little ramalina. [Vide specimens in drawer.] This island appears to be a mere stony ridge three or four feet high, with a very low wet shore on each side, even as if the water and ice had shoved it up, as at the other end of the pond. I saw the tracks of a partridge [Ruffed Grouse Bonasa umbellus (Partridge)] more than half an inch deep in the ice, extending from this island to the shore, she having walked there in the slosh. They were quite perfect and reminded me of bird-tracks in stone. She may have gone there to bud on these blueberry trees. I saw where she spent the night at the bottom of that largest clump, in the snow. Perhaps yet larger ones were seen here before we came to cut off the trees. Judging from those whose rings I have counted, the largest of those stems must be about sixty years old. The stems rise up in a winding and zigzag manner, one sometimes resting in the forks of its neighbor. There were many more clumps of large ones there. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1860

April 21, Saturday: The Reverend Theodore Parker relocated from Rome to Firenze, Italy.

May 10, Thursday: At 1PM at the office of the Old State House in Boston, the firm of N.A. Thompson & Co. auctioned John B. Moore’s farm in Concord on the basis of the survey plan that Henry Thoreau had prepared on April 19th, showing his farmland and the owners of the land that abutted his, oriented with true north at upper left (a 17-inch by 25-inch document printed on cloth):

http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/94b.htm

Theodore Parker died of tuberculosis in Firenze, Italy, not quite 50 years of age. The physician in attendance removed his brain and posted it, floating in a jar of preservative, to the Reverend’s Secret “Six” co-conspirator still in Boston, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe.41 Here is a remark by the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway: From many censorious lips came the homage to Parker’s dust which had been denied in his living presence. AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II Here is the Reverend’s reverent obituary as it would appear in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly: THEODORE PARKER. “Sir Launcelot! ther thou lyest; thou were never matched of none earthly knights hands; thou were the truest freende to thy lover that ever bestrood horse; and thou were the kindest man that ever strooke with sword; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortall foe that ever put spere in the rest.” LA MORTE D’ARTHUR. In the year 1828 there was a young man of eighteen at work upon a farm in Lexington, performing bodily labor to the extent of twenty hours in a day sometimes, and that for several days together, and at other times studying intensely when work was less pressing. Thirty years after, that same man sat in the richest private library in Boston, working habitually from twelve to seventeen hours a day in severer toil. The interval was crowded with labors, with acquisitions, with reproaches, with victories, with honors; and he who experienced all this died exhausted at the end of it, less than fifty years old, but looking seventy. That man was Theodore Parker. The time is far distant when out of a hundred different statements of contemporaries some calm biographer will extract sufficient materials for a true picture of the man; and meanwhile all that each can do is to give fearlessly his own honest impressions, and so tempt others to give theirs. Of the multitude of different photographers, each perchance may catch some one trait without which the whole portraiture would have

41. Not knowing what to do with this grisly item, the Howe family would stick it up on the top shelf of a back cupboard and attempt to forget it was there. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

remained incomplete; and the time to secure this is now, while his features are fresh in our minds. It is a daring effort, but it needs to be made. Yet Theodore Parker was so strong and self-sufficing upon his own ground, he needed so little from any other, while giving so freely to all, that one would hardly venture to add anything to the autobiographies he has left, but for the high example he set of fearlessness in dealing with the dead. There may be some whose fame is so ill-established, that one shrinks from speaking of them precisely as one saw them; but this man’s place is secure, and that friend best praises him who paints him just as he seemed. To depict him as he was must be the work of many men, and no single observer, however intimate, need attempt it. The first thing that strikes an observer, in listening to the words of public and private feeling elicited by his departure, is the predominance in them all of the sentiment of love. His services, his speculations, his contests, his copious eloquence, his many languages, these come in as secondary things, but the predominant testimony is emotional. Men mourn the friend even more than the warrior. No fragile and lovely girl, fading untimely into heaven, was ever more passionately beloved than this white-haired and world-weary man. As he sat in his library, during his lifetime, he was not only the awakener of a thousand intellects, but the centre of a thousand hearts; — he furnished the natural home for every foreign refugee, every hunted slave, every stray thinker, every vexed and sorrowing woman. And never was there one of these who went away uncomforted, and from every part of this broad nation their scattered hands now fling roses upon his grave. This immense debt of gratitude was not bought by any mere isolated acts of virtue; indeed, it never is so bought; love never is won but by a nobleness which, pervades the life. In the midst of his greatest cares there never was a moment when he was not all too generous of his time, his wisdom, and his money. Borne down by the accumulation of labors, grudging, as a student grudges, the precious hour that once lost can never be won back, he yet was always holding himself at the call of some poor criminal, at the Police Office, or some sick girl in a suburban town, not of his recognized parish perhaps, but longing for the ministry of the only preacher who had touched her soul. Not a mere wholesale reformer, he wore out his life by retailing its great influences to the poorest comer. Not generous in money only, — though the readiness of his beneficence in that direction had few equals, — he always hastened past that minor bestowal to ask if there were not some other added gift possible, some personal service or correspondence, some life-blood, in short, to be lavished in some other form, to eke out the already liberal donation of dollars. There is an impression that he was unforgiving. Unforgetting he certainly was; for he had no power of forgetfulness, whether for good or evil. He had none of that convenient oblivion which in softer natures covers sin and saintliness with one common, careless pall. So long as a man persisted in a wrong attitude before God or man, there was no day so laborious or exhausting, HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

no night so long or drowsy, but Theodore Parker’s unsleeping memory stood on guard full-armed, ready to do battle at a moment’s warning. This is generally known; but what may not be known so widely is, that, the moment the adversary lowered his spear, were it for only an inch or an instant, that moment Theodore Parker’s weapons were down and his arms open. Make but the slightest concession, give him but the least excuse to love you, and never was there seen such promptness in forgiving. His friends found it sometimes harder to justify his mildness than his severity. I confess that I, with others, have often felt inclined to criticize a certain caustic tone of his, in private talk, when the name of an offender was alluded to; but I have also felt almost indignant at his lenient good-nature to that very person, let him once show the smallest symptom of contrition, or seek, even in the clumsiest way, or for the most selfish purpose, to disarm his generous antagonist. His forgiveness in such cases was more exuberant than his wrath had ever been. It is inevitable, in describing him, to characterize his life first by its quantity. He belonged to the true race of the giants of learning; he took in knowledge at every pore, and his desires were insatiable. Not, perhaps, precocious in boyhood, —for it is not precocity to begin Latin at ten and Greek at eleven, to enter the Freshman class at twenty and the professional school at twenty-three,— he was equalled by few students in the tremendous rate at which he pursued every study, when once begun. With strong body and great constitutional industry, always acquiring and never forgetting, he was doubtless at the time of his death the most variously learned of living Americans, as well as one of the most prolific of orators and writers. Why did Theodore Parker die? He died prematurely worn out through this enormous activity, — a warning, as well as an example. To all appeals for moderation, during the latter years of his life, he had but one answer, — that he had six generations of long-lived farmers behind him, and had their strength to draw upon. All his physical habits, except in this respect, were unexceptionable: he was abstemious in diet, but not ascetic, kept no unwholesome hours, tried no dangerous experiments, committed no excesses. But there is no man who can habitually study from twelve to seventeen hours a day (his friend Mr. Clarke contracts it to “from six to twelve,” but I have Mr. Parker’s own statement of the fact) without ultimate self-destruction. Nor was this the practice during his period of health alone, but it was pushed to the last moment: he continued in the pulpit long after a withdrawal was peremptorily prescribed for him; and when forbidden to leave home for lecturing, during the winter of 1858, he straightway prepared the most laborious literary works of his life, for delivery as lectures in the Fraternity Course at Boston. He worked thus, not from ambition, nor altogether from principle, but from an immense craving for mental labor, which had become second nature to him. His great omnivorous, hungry intellect must have constant food, — new languages, new HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

statistics, new historical investigations, new scientific discoveries, new systems of Scriptural exegesis. He did not for a day in the year nor an hour in the day make rest a matter of principle, nor did he ever indulge in it as a pleasure, for he knew no enjoyment so great as labor. Wordsworth’s “wise passiveness” was utterly foreign to his nature. Had he been a mere student, this had been less destructive. But to take the standard of study of a German Professor, and superadd to that the separate exhaustions of a Sunday-preacher, a lyceum- lecturer, a radical leader, and a practical philanthropist, was simply to apply half a dozen distinct suicides to the abbreviation of a single life. And, as his younger companions long since assured him, the tendency of his career was not only to kill himself, but them; for each assumed that he must at least attempt what Theodore Parker accomplished. It is very certain that his career was much shortened by these enormous labors, and it is not certain that its value was increased in a sufficient ratio to compensate for that evil. He justified his incessant winter-lecturing by the fact that the whole country was his parish, though this was not an adequate excuse. But what right had he to deprive himself even of the accustomed summer respite of ordinary preachers, and waste the golden July hours in studying Sclavonic dialects? No doubt his work in the world was greatly aided both by the fact and the fame of learning, and, as he himself somewhat disdainfully said, the knowledge of Greek and Hebrew was “a convenience” in theological discussions; but, after all, his popular power did not mainly depend on his mastery of twenty languages, but of one. Theodore Parker’s learning was undoubtedly a valuable possession to the community, but it was not worth the price of Theodore Parker’s life. “Strive constantly to concentrate yourself,” said the laborious Goethe, “never dissipate your powers; incessant activity, of whatever kind, leads finally to bankruptcy.” But Theodore Parker’s whole endeavor was to multiply his channels, and he exhausted his life in the effort to do all men’s work. He was a hard man to relieve, to help, or to cooperate with. Thus, the “Massachusetts Quarterly Review” began with quite a promising corps of contributors; but when it appeared that its editor, if left alone, would willingly undertake all the articles, — science, history, literature, everything,— of course the others yielded to inertia and dropped away. So, some years later, when some of us met at his room to consult on a cheap series of popular theological works, he himself was so rich in his own private plans that all the rest were impoverished; nothing could be named but he had been planning just that for years, and should by-and-by get leisure for it, and there really was not enough left to call out the energies of any one else. Not from any petty egotism, but simply from inordinate activity, he stood ready to take all the parts. In the same way he distanced everybody; every companion-scholar found soon that it was impossible to keep pace with one who was always accumulating and losing nothing. Most students find it necessary to be constantly forgetting some things to make room HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

for later arrivals; but the peculiarity of his memory was that he let nothing go. I have more than once heard him give a minute analysis of the contents of some dull book read twenty years before, and have afterwards found the statement correct and exhaustive. His great library, —the only private library I have ever seen which reminded one of the Astor,— although latterly collected more for public than personal uses, was one which no other man in the nation, probably, had sufficient bibliographical knowledge single-handed to select, and we have very few men capable of fully appreciating its scholarly value, as it stands. It seems as if its possessor, putting all his practical and popular side into his eloquence and action, had indemnified himself by investing all his scholarship in a library of which less than a quarter of the books were in the English language. All unusual learning, however, brings with it the suspicion of superficiality; and in this country, where, as Mr. Parker himself said, “every one gets a mouthful of education, but scarce one a full meal,” —where every one who makes a Latin quotation is styled “a ripe scholar,”— it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the true from the counterfeit. It is, however, possible to apply some tests. I remember, for instance, that one of the few undoubted classical scholars, in the old-fashioned sense, whom New England has seen, —the late John Glen King of Salem,— while speaking with very limited respect of the acquirements of Rufus Choate in this direction, and with utter contempt of those of Daniel Webster, always became enthusiastic on coming to Theodore Parker. “He is the only man,” said Mr. King more than once to the writer, “with whom I can sit down and seriously discuss a disputed reading and find him familiar with all that has been written upon it.” Yet Greek and Latin were only the preliminaries of Mr. Parker’s scholarship. I know, for one, —and there are many who will bear the same testimony,— that I never went to Mr. Parker to talk over a subject which I had just made a speciality, without finding that on that particular matter he happened to know, without any special investigation, more than I did. This extended beyond books, sometimes stretching into things where his questioner’s opportunities of knowledge had seemed considerably greater, — as, for instance, in points connected with the habits of our native animals and the phenomena of out-door Nature. Such were his wonderful quickness and his infallible memory, that glimpses of these things did for him the work of years. But, of course, it was in the world of books that this wonderful superiority was chiefly seen, and the following example may serve as one of the most striking among many. It happened to me, some years since, in the course of some historical inquiries, to wish for fuller information in regard to the barbarous feudal codes of the Middle Ages, —as the Salic, Burgundian, and Ripuarian,— before the time of Charlemagne. The common historians, even Hallam, gave no very satisfactory information and referred to no very available books; and supposing it to be a matter of which every well-read lawyer would at least know something, I asked help of the most scholarly HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

member of that profession within my reach. He regretted his inability to give me any aid, but referred me to a friend of his, who was soon to visit him, a young man, who was already eminent for legal learning. The friend soon arrived, but owned, with some regret, that he had paid no attention to that particular subject, and did not even know what books to refer to; but he would at least ascertain what they were, and let me know. (N.B. I have never heard from him since.) Stimulated by ill-success, I aimed higher, and struck at the Supreme Bench of a certain State, breaking in on the mighty repose of His Honor with the name of Charlemagne. “Charlemagne?” responded my lord judge, rubbing his burly brow, — “Charlemagne lived, I think, in the sixth century?” Dismayed, I retreated, with little further inquiry; and sure of one man, at least, to whom law meant also history and literature, I took refuge with Charles Sumner. That accomplished scholar, himself for once at fault, could only frankly advise me to do at last what I ought to have done at first, — to apply to Theodore Parker. I did so. “Go,” replied he instantly, “to alcove twenty-four, shelf one hundred and thirteen, of the College Library at Cambridge, and you will find the information you need in a thick quarto, bound in vellum, and lettered ‘Potgiesser de Statu Servorum.’” I straightway sent for Potgiesser, and found my fortune made, it was one of those patient old German treatises which cost the labor of one man’s life to compile and another’s to exhaust, and I had no reason to suppose that any reader had disturbed its repose until that unwearied industry had explored the library. Amid such multiplicity of details he must sometimes have made mistakes, and with his great quickness of apprehension he sometimes formed hasty conclusions. But no one has a right to say that his great acquirements were bought by any habitual sacrifice of thoroughness. To say that they sometimes impaired the quality of his thought would undoubtedly be more just; and this is a serious charge to bring. Learning is not accumulation, but assimilation; every man’s real acquirements must pass into his own organization, and undue or hasty nutrition does no good. The most priceless knowledge is not worth the smallest impairing of the quality of the thinking. The scholar cannot afford, any more than the farmer, to lavish his strength in clearing more land than he can cultivate; and Theodore Parker was compelled by the natural limits of time and strength to let vast tracts lie fallow, and to miss something of the natural resources of the soil. One sometimes wished that he had studied less and dreamed more, — for less encyclopedic information, and more of his own rich brain. But it was in popularizing thought and knowledge that his great and wonderful power lay. Not an original thinker, in the same sense with Emerson, he yet translated for tens of thousands that which Emerson spoke to hundreds only. No matter who had been heard on any subject, the great mass of intelligent, “progressive” New-England thinkers waited to hear the thing summed up by Theodore Parker. This popular interest went far beyond the circle of his avowed sympathizers; he might be a heretic, but nobody could deny that he was a marksman. No matter HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

how well others seemed to have hit the target, his shot was the triumphant one, at last. Thinkers might find no new thought in the new discourse, leaders of action no new plan, yet, after all that had been said and done, his was the statement that told upon the community. He knew this power of his, and had analyzed some of the methods by which he attained it, though, after all, the best part was an unconscious and magnetic faculty. But he early learned, so he once told me, that the New-England people dearly love two things, — a philosophical arrangement, and a plenty of statistics. To these, therefore, he treated them thoroughly; in some of his “Ten Sermons” the demand made upon the systematizing power of his audience was really formidable; and I have always remembered a certain lecture of his on the Anglo-Saxons as the most wonderful instance that ever came within my knowledge of the adaptation of solid learning to the popular intellect. Nearly two hours of almost unadorned fact, — for there was far less than usual of relief and illustration, — and yet the lyceum-audience listened to it as if an angel sang to them. So perfect was his sense of purpose and of power, so clear and lucid was his delivery, with such wonderful composure did he lay out, section by section, his historical chart, that he grasped his hearers as absolutely as he grasped his subject: one was compelled to believe that he might read the people the Sanscrit Lexicon, and they would listen with ever fresh delight. Without grace or beauty or melody, his mere elocution was sufficient to produce effects which melody and grace and beauty might have sighed for in vain. And I always felt that he well described his own eloquence while describing Luther’s, in one of the most admirably moulded sentences he ever achieved, — “The homely force of Luther, who, in the language of the farm, the shop, the boat, the street, or the nursery, told the high truths that reason or religion taught, and took possession of his audience by a storm of speech, then poured upon them all the riches of his brave plebeian soul, baptizing every head anew, — a man who with the people seemed more mob than they, and with kings the most imperial man.” Another key to his strong hold upon the popular mind was to be found in his thorough Americanism of training and sympathy. Surcharged with European learning, he yet remained at heart the Lexington farmer’s-boy, and his whole atmosphere was indigenous, not exotic. Not haunted by any of the distrust and over - criticism which are apt to effeminate the American scholar, he plunged deep into the current of hearty national life around him, loved it, trusted it, believed in it; and the combination of this vital faith with such tremendous criticism of public and private sins formed an irresistible power. He could condemn without crushing, — denounce mankind, yet save it from despair. Thus his pulpit became one of the great forces of the nation, like the New York “Tribune.” His printed volumes had but a limited circulation, owing to a defective system of publication, which his friends tried in vain to correct; but the circulation of his pamphlet-discourses was very great; he issued them faster and faster, latterly often in pairs, and they instantly spread far and wide. Accordingly he found his listeners everywhere; he HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

could not go so far West but his abundant fame had preceded him; his lecture-room in the remotest places was crowded, and his hotel-chamber also, until late at night. Probably there was no private man in the nation, except, perhaps, Beecher and Greeley, whom personal strangers were so eager to see; while from a transatlantic direction he was sought by visitors to whom the two other names were utterly unknown. Learned men from the continent of Europe always found their way, first or last, to Exeter Place; and it is said that Thackeray, on his voyage to this country, declared that the thing in America which he most desired was to hear Theodore Parker talk. Indeed, his conversational power was so wonderful that no one could go away from a first interview without astonishment and delight. There are those among us, it may be, more brilliant in anecdote or repartee, more eloquent, more profoundly suggestive; but for the outpouring of vast floods of various and delightful information, I believe that he could have had no Anglo-Saxon rival, except Macaulay. And in Mr. Parker’s case, at least, there was no alloy of conversational arrogance or impatience of opposition. He monopolized, not because he was ever unwilling to hear others, but because they did not care to hear themselves when he was by. The subject made no difference; he could talk on anything. I was once with him in the society of an intelligent Quaker farmer, when the conversation fell on agriculture: the farmer held his own ably for a time; but long after he was drained dry, our wonderful companion still flowed on exhaustless, with accounts of Nova Scotia ploughing and Tennessee hoeing, and all things rural, ancient and modern, good and bad, till it seemed as if the one amusing and interesting theme in the universe were the farm. But it soon proved that this was only one among his thousand departments, and his hearers felt, as was said of old Fuller, as if he had served his time at every trade in town. But it must now be owned that these astonishing results were bought by some intellectual sacrifices which his nearer friends do not all recognize, but which posterity will mourn. Such a rate of speed is incompatible with the finest literary execution. A delicate literary ear he might have had, perhaps, but he very seldom stopped to cultivate or even indulge it. This neglect was not produced by his frequent habit of extemporaneous speech alone; for it is a singular fact, that Wendell Phillips, who rarely writes a line, yet contrives to give to his hastiest efforts the air of elaborate preparation, while Theodore Parker’s most scholarly performances were still stump-speeches. Vigorous, rich, brilliant, copious, they yet seldom afford a sentence which falls in perfect cadence upon the ear; under a show of regular method, they are loose and diffuse, and often have the qualities which he himself attributed to the style of John Quincy Adams, — “disorderly, ill-compacted, and homely to a fault.” He said of Dr. Channing,— “Diffuseness is the old Adam of the pulpit. There are always two ways of hitting the mark, — one with a single bullet, the other with a shower of small shot: Dr. Channing chose the latter, as most of our pulpit orators have done.” Theodore Parker chose it also. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Perhaps Nature and necessity chose it for him. If not his temperament, at least the circumstances of his position, cut him off from all high literary finish. He created the congregation at the Music Hall, and that congregation, in turn, moulded his whole life. For that great stage his eloquence became inevitably a kind of brilliant scene-painting, —large, fresh, profuse, rapid, showy;— masses of light and shade, wonderful effects, but farewell forever to all finer touches and delicate gradations! No man can write for posterity, while hastily snatching a half- day from a week’s lecturing, during which to prepare a telling Sunday harangue for three thousand people. In the perpetual rush and hurry of his life, he had no time to select, to discriminate, to omit anything, or to mature anything. He had the opportunities, the provocatives, and the drawbacks which make the work and mar the fame of the professional journalist. His intellectual existence, after he left the quiet of West Roxbury, was from hand to mouth. Needing above all men to concentrate himself, he was compelled by his whole position to lead a profuse and miscellaneous life. All popular orators must necessarily repeat themselves, — preachers chiefly among orators, and Theodore Parker chiefly among preachers. The mere frequency of production makes this inevitable, — a fact which always makes every finely organized intellect, first or last, grow weary of the pulpit. But in his case there were other compulsions. Every Sunday a quarter part of his vast congregation consisted of persons who had never, or scarcely ever, heard him before, and who might never hear him again. Not one of those visitors must go away, therefore, without hearing the great preacher define his position on every point, — not theology alone, but all current events and permanent principles, the Presidential nomination or message, the laws of trade, the laws of Congress, woman’s rights, woman’s costume, Boston slave-kidnappers, and Dr. Banbaby, — he must put it all in. His ample discourse must be like an Oriental poem, which begins with the creation of the universe, and includes all subsequent facts incidentally. It is astonishing to look over his published sermons and addresses, and see under how many different names the same stirring speech has been reprinted; — new illustrations, new statistics, and all remoulded with such freshness that the hearer had no suspicions, nor the speaker either, — and yet the same essential thing. Sunday discourse, lyceum lecture, convention speech, it made no difference, he must cover all the points every time. No matter what theme might be announced, the people got the whole latitude and longitude of Theodore Parker, and that was precisely what they wanted. He broke down the traditional non-committalism of the lecture-room, and oxygenated all the lyceums of the land. He thus multiplied his audience very greatly, while perhaps losing to some degree the power of close logic and of addressing a specific statement to a special point. Yet it seemed as if he could easily leave the lancet to others, grant him only the hammer and the forge. Ah, but the long centuries, where the reading of books is concerned, set aside all considerations of quantity, of popularity, of immediate influence, and sternly test by quality HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

alone, — judge each author by his most golden sentence, and let all else go. The deeds make the man, but it is the style which makes or dooms the writer. History, which always sends great men in groups, gave us Emerson by whom to test the intellectual qualities of Parker. They cooperated in their work from the beginning, in much the same mutual relation as now; in looking back over the rich volumes of the “Dial,” the reader now passes by the contributions of Parker to glean every sentence of Emerson’s, but we have the latter’s authority for the fact that it was the former’s articles which originally sold the numbers. Intellectually, the two men form the complement to each other; it is Parker who reaches the mass of the people, but it is probable that all his writings put together have not had so profound an influence on the intellectual leaders of the nation as the single address of Emerson at Divinity Hall. And it is difficult not to notice, in that essay in which Theodore Parker ventured on higher intellectual ground, perhaps, than anywhere else in his writings, —his critique on Emerson in the “Massachusetts Quarterly,”— the indications of this mental disparity. It is in many respects a noble essay, full of fine moral appreciations, bravely generous, admirable in the loyalty of spirit shown towards a superior mind, and all warm with a personal friendship which could find no superior. But so far as literary execution is concerned, the beautiful sentences of Emerson stand out like fragments of carved marble from the rough plaster in which they are imbedded. Nor this alone; but, on drawing near the vestibule of the author’s finest thoughts, the critic almost always stops, unable quite to enter their sphere. Subtile beauties puzzle him; the titles of the poems, for instance, giving by delicate allusion the key-note of each, — as “Astraea,” “Mithridates,” “Hamatreya,” and “Étienne de la Boéce,” — seem to him the work of “mere caprice”; he pronounces the poem of “Monadnoc” “poor and weak”; he condemns and satirizes the “Wood-notes,” and thinks that a pine-tree which should talk like Mr. Emerson’s ought to be cut down and cast into the sea. The same want of fine discrimination was usually visible in his delineations of great men in public life. Immense in accumulation of details, terrible in the justice which held the balance, they yet left one with the feeling, that, after all, the delicate main-springs of character had been missed. Broad contrasts, heaps of good and evil, almost exaggerated praises, pungent satire, catalogues of sins that seemed pages from some Recording Angel’s book, — these were his mighty methods; but for the subtilest analysis, the deepest insight into the mysteries of character, one must look elsewhere. It was still scene- painting, not portraiture; and the same thing which overwhelmed with wonder, when heard in the Music Hall, produced a slight sense of insufficiency, when read in print. It was certainly very great in its way, but not in quite the highest way; it was preliminary work, not final; it was Parker’s Webster, not Emerson’s Swedenborg or Napoleon. The same thing was often manifested in his criticisms on current events. The broad truths were stated without fear or favor, the HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

finer points passed over, and the special trait of the particular phase sometimes missed. His sermons on the last revivals, for instance, had an enormous circulation, and told with great force upon those who had not been swept into the movement, and even upon some who had been. The difficulty was that they were just such discourses as he would have preached in the time of Edwards and the “Great Awakening”; and the point which many thought the one astonishing feature of the new excitement, its almost entire omission of the “terrors of the Lord,” the far gentler and more winning type of religion which it displayed, and from which it confessedly drew much of its power, this was entirely ignored in Mr. Parker’s sermons. He was too hard at work in combating the evangelical theology to recognize its altered phases. Forging lightning-rods against the tempest, he did not see that the height of the storm had passed by. These are legitimate criticisms to make on Theodore Parker, for he was large enough to merit them. It is only the loftiest trees of which it occurs to us to remark that they do not touch the sky, and a man must comprise a great deal before we complain of him for not comprising everything. But though the closest scrutiny may sometimes find cases where he failed to see the most subtile and precious truth, it will never discover one where, seeing, he failed to proclaim it, or, proclaiming, failed to give it force and power. He lived his life much as he walked the streets of Boston, — not quite gracefully, nor yet statelily, but with quick, strong, solid step, with sagacious eyes wide open, and thrusting his broad shoulders a little forward, as if butting away the throng of evil deeds around him, and scattering whole atmospheres of unwholesome cloud. Wherever he went, there went a glance of sleepless vigilance, an unforgetting memory, a tongue that never faltered, and an arm that never quailed. Not primarily an administrative nor yet a military mind, he yet exerted a positive control over the whole community around him, by sheer mental and moral strength. He mowed down harvests of evil as in his youth he mowed the grass, and all his hours of study were but whetting the scythe. And for this great work it was not essential that the blade should have a razor’s edge. Grant that Parker was not also Emerson; no matter, he was Parker. If ever a man seemed sent into the world to find a certain position, and found it, he was that man. Occupying a unique sphere of activity, he filled it with such a wealth of success, that there is now no one in the nation whom it would not seem an absurdity to nominate for his place. It takes many instruments to complete the orchestra, but the tones of this organ the Music Hall shall never hear again. One feels, since he is gone, that he made his great qualities seem so natural and inevitable, we forgot that all did not share them. We forgot the scholar’s proverbial reproach of timidity and selfishness, in watching him. While he lived, it seemed a matter of course that the greatest acquirements and the heartiest self-devotion should go together. Can we keep our strength, without the tonic of his example? How petty it now seems to ask for any fine-drawn subtilties of poet or seer in HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

him who gave his life to the cause of the humblest! Life speaks the loudest. We do not ask what Luther said or wrote, but only what he did; and the name of Theodore Parker will not only long outlive his books, but will last far beyond the special occasions out of which he moulded his grand career.

May 10. River six and one eighth inches below summer level. Thermometer at 2 P. M., 71. The winds died away with April. In the midst of a remarkable drought. Hear of great fires in the woods up country the past week, it is so dry. Some farmers plowed around their houses to save them.

P. M.—To Bateman’s Pond. Salix alba flower in prime and resounding with the hum of bees on it. The sweet fragrance fills the air for a long distance. How much the planting of this willow adds to the greenness and cheerfulness of our landscape at this season! As I stand on Hunt’s Bridge, I notice the now comparatively dark green of the canary grass (Phalaris), the coarse grass vigorously spring[ing] up on the muddy islands and edges, the glaucous green of Carex stricta tufts, and the light yellowish green of the very coarse sedges of the meadow. Going over the hill behind S. Brown’s, when we crossed the triangular space between the roads beyond the pump-maker’s, I saw countless little heaps of sand like the small ant-hills, but, looking more closely, the size of the holes (a little less than a quarter of an inch) and the comparative irregularity of the heaps — as if the sand had been brought forth and dropped in greater quantity at once — attracted my attention and I found they were the work of bees. The bees were hovering low over the surface, and were continually entering and issuing from the holes. They were about the size of a honey-bee, black bodied, with, I thought, yellow thighs, — if it was not pollen. Many of the holes appeared to have been freshly stopped up with granules of moist sand. These holes were made close together in the dry and sandy soil there, with very little grass on it, sloping toward the west, between the roads, and covered a triangular space some seven rods by three. I counted twenty-four in a square foot. There must have been some twenty-five thousand of these nests in all. The surface was yellowed with them. Evidently a kind of mining bee. I see in roadside hard sward, by the brook beyond, a sedge darker than the stricta and not in tufts, quite short. Is it the C. vulgaris? Its leading spikes are effete. Evergreen-forest note. Some very young oaks — white oak, etc. — in woods begin to leaf. Hear the first cricket. The red maples, fruiting now, are in the brick-red state. I heard yesterday one or two warblers. One’s note was, in rhythm, like a very feeble field sparrow. Was it the redstart? Probably one or two strange warblers now. Was it not the parti-colored warbler, — with bluish head and yellow beneath, but not the screeper note, but note ending with a jingle slightly like the field sparrow? Meadow fox-tail grass out several days. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

May 12, Saturday: Henry Thoreau surveyed the boundary between Moses Prichard’s woods skirting the river, which were furnished with winding walks and rustic seats and formed an attractive and cool retreat, and the Joseph Holbrook houselots on Main Street in Concord. Thoreau’s charge was $1.50. Holbrook’s house was on the site of the house of common entertainment that belonged to William Buss in 1660, almost opposite the site that is now the Concord Free Public Library. This survey shows that the garbage disposal of that day was the pig, for Thoreau included the “piggery.” Thoreau’s charge was $0.25. Joseph Holbrook also owned land in Great Meadows and part of Frosty Poplar Hollow near Gowing’s Swamp and Copan.

View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm

(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.)

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/55.htm

A group of 105 white miners were trekking toward Pyramid Lake, seeking retribution against the redskins for their having massacred the five white rapists at Williams Station, when the Payute intercepted the group, managing to kill roughly half of them. Two days after the Reverend Theodore Parker’s death, Dr. B. Appleton (a Boston physician who had been in attendance during his last months) and Parker’s close friend Professor Pierre Jean Édouard Desor performed an autopsy, removing the brain and the heart. Expecting the corpse to be shipped back to Massachusetts for reburial, they sealed it in a lead casket, packed tightly in hemp and pickled in strong spirits. The brain and heart were put in separate boxes and sent on ahead, perhaps assuming that after the organs were studied they would be interred in the casket with the rest of Parker’s corpse. Parker’s widow, however, considered that moving his HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

corpse would violate one of his final wishes, and would have the remainder interred in the Protestant cemetery

in Firenze in which Elizabeth Barrett Browning would be being interred in the following year, and Thoreau’s friend Thomas Cholmondeley in 1864:

So have I seen a pine tree in the woods, old, dry at its roots, capped with age-resembling snow; it stood there, and seemed to stand; but a little touch of wind drove it headlong, and it fell with a long, resounding crash. —Theodore Parker

We know that his brain was sent to Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe at the Perkins School for the Blind, for a sailor would show up at the Howes’ door unexpectedly with a brain in a box. The cover letter had been lost in transit, so Julia Ward Howe stuck the box and its grisly contents in a closet on the top floor of the Perkins School (one of the Howe daughters would reminisce about being terrified of that closet as a child). Dr. Howe, meanwhile, would not mention the disgusting matter to anyone; for years, even Mrs. Parker would not know where her husband’s brain had gotten to. What happened to the box containing the heart is even more unclear; it may have been sent to Dr. Samuel Cabot, Parker’s physician and president of the Boston Society of Natural History.

Parker’s gravestone in Italy is of marble, about 4 feet high, and is topped by an “eternal flame” in a lamp that resembles a Unitarian-Universalist chalice. The stone provides a side view of Parker’s bust, with laurel wreath. The stone has become tilted and someday may fall and shatter. The cemetery is opened for visitors from 10AM to 1PM, except on Sundays and Mondays. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

THEODORE PARKER THE GREAT AMERICAN PREACHER BORN AT LEXINGTON MASSACHUSETTS UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AUGUST 24 1810 DIED AT FLORENCE ITALY MAY 10 1860 HIS NAME IS ENGRAVED IN MARBLE HIS VIRTUES IN THE HEARTS OF THOSE HE HELPED TO FREE FROM SLAVERY AND SUPERSTITION

May 12. Celandine. Very hot.

2.30 P. M.—81°. We seek the shade to sit in for a day or two. The neck-cloth and single coat is too thick; wear a half-thick coat at last [?]. The sugar maple blossoms on the Common resound with bees. Ostrya flower commonly out on Island, how long? Maybe a day or two. First bathe in the river. Quite warm enough. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

River five and one half plus inches below summer level. Very heavy dew and mist this morning; plowed ground black and moist with it. The earth is so dry it drinks like a sponge.

June 3, Sunday: At the church on Bullfinch Street in Boston, the Reverend William Rounseville Alger delivered a commemorative discourse on the Reverend Theodore Parker. (The Reverend Parker had just died in Italy, and his brain and heart had been removed and were on its way back to the USA in two boxes entrusted to a sailor. The box containing the brain would soon arrive on the doorstep of Julia Ward Howe without anything to indicate what the hell it was that was in the box — and for lack of anything better to do with it she would shove the grisly object into the back of a closet. This commemorative discourse by the Reverend Alger, however, would fare better: it would soon be published in Boston by the firm of Walker, Wise and Company as A TRIBUTE TO THE MEMORY AND SERVICES OF THE REV. THEODORE PARKER: FROM A DISCOURSE PRONOUNCED IN THE BULLFINCH-STREET CHURCH, BOSTON, JUNE 3, 1860.) Henry Thoreau did not make an appearance.

June 3. 6 A.M.—River three and three sixteenth inches above summer level; i.e., the river has begun to fall within twenty-four hours and less after the rain ceased. 2 P. M.—To bayberry. These are the clear breezy days of early June, when the leaves are young and few and the sorrel not yet in its prime. Perceive the meadow fragrance. Am surprised to [see] some twenty or more crows in a flock still, cawing about us. The roads now strewn with red maple seed. The pines’ shoots have grown generally from three to six inches, and begin to make a distinct impression, even at some distance, of white and brown above their dark green. The foliage of deciduous trees is still rather yellow-green than green. There are in the Boulder Field several of the creeping juniper which grow quite flat on the ground, somewhat like the empetrum, most elevated in the middle. Not only brakes, many of them tall, and branching two feet at least from the ground, have their branches nibbled off, but the carrion-flower has very commonly lost its leaves, either by rabbits or woodchucks. Tree-toads heard. See a common toad three quarters of an inch long. There are various sweet scents in the air now. Especially, as I go along an arbor-vitæ hedge, I perceive a very distinct fragrance like strawberries from it.

June 17, Sunday: In Concord, Martha Tilden Bradford Bartlett died.

A funeral ceremony was held for Theodore Parker, at the Boston Music Hall. Waldo Emerson laid on this tomb “an unfading wreath.” Henry Thoreau did not make an appearance.

June 17. Quite a fog this morning. About 1 P.M, notice thunder-clouds in west and hear the muttering. As yesterday, it splits at sight of Concord and goes south and north. Nevertheless about 3 P.M. begins a steady gentle rain here for several hours, and in the night again, the thunder, as yesterday, mostly forerunning or superficial to the shower. This the third day of thunder-showers in afternoon, though the 14th it did not rain here. Carex flava out, possibly a week. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1861

Fall: At about this point the estate of and the self-concept artifacts of the Reverend Theodore Parker of the Secret “Six” conspiracy (who had died of TB while in exile in Florence, Italy), was being dispositioned. Another of the conspirators, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, was present with his wife at a ceremony at the Massachusetts State House as Governor John Andrew, who as an attorney had advised the conspirators in how to evade prosecution, presented the legislature with the British rifle which the Reverend’s grandfather, Captain John Parker, had obtained during the “battle” of Lexington. Here is Mrs. Julia Ward Howe:42 After a brief but very appropriate address, the governor pressed the gun to his lips before giving it into the keeping of the official guardian of such treasures.

42. One must be very careful at such ceremonies. Had the governor, for instance, instead of kissing the British gun, taken its barrel in his mouth — such a gesture might have been misunderstood. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

At the outbreak of civil war, William James Hubard beat his plowshare into a sword by converting the Washington Foundry near Richmond, Virginia, in which he had created his statue of George Washington after the Houdon marble, to the production of rough bronze castings for machining into cannon barrels. Suddenly

the focus was shifting from honoring one’s heroes to killing one’s enemies. Our guy also began experimenting with gunpowder. His cannon were finished in the Richmond machine shops of Thomas Samson and James Pae — bronze field pieces, battlefield litter, have been found marked with Hubard’s initials coupled with “S & P” indicating “Samson & Pae Company” and in rare instances with an additional “W.F.” presumably indicating “Washington Foundry.”

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1862

February: Waldo Emerson lectured to the Reverend Theodore Parker’s “Fraternity” in Boston, and made some remarks in his journal about the dying Henry Thoreau:43

H D T ... Perhaps his fancy for Walt Whitman grew out of his taste for wild nature, for an otter, a wood-chuck, or a loon. He loved sufficiency, hated a sum that would not prove: loved Walt & hated Alcott. * * * Therien came to see Thoreau on business, but Thoreau at once perceived that he had been drinking; and advised him to go home & cut his throat, and that speedily. Therien did not well know what to make of it, but went away, & Thoreau said, he learned that he had been repeating it about town, which he was glad to hear, & hoped that by this time he had begun to understand what it meant.

ALEK THERIEN WALT WHITMAN Emerson also remarked in his journal about Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, mobilizing for this purpose a Thoreau trope:

Holmes came out late in life with a strong sustained growth for two or three years, like old pear trees which have done nothing for ten years, & at last begin & grow great. The Lowells come forward slowly, & H.T. remarks, that men may have two growths like pears.

43. We may here treat as a projection of his own attitudes, a displacement, Waldo Emerson’s strange and entirely unsupported assertion that Henry Thoreau’s affect toward Bronson Alcott amounted to a species of contempt, and we may likewise desire to distance ourselves from Emerson’s idea that Thoreau in this reported incident with Alek Therien was merely expressing a hostile attitude — rather than attempting to administer to this long-term friend a much needed corrective.

As a temperance Friend, John Greenleaf Whittier “would have been quite incapable of such an act as Henry Thoreau committed when he advised an intemperate man who came to see him under the influence of liquor to go home and cut his throat and do it quickly.… [He] contributed an article to The American Manufacturer on ‘Cultivation of the Vine’” (pages 24-25 of Wagenknecht, Edward. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER: A PORTRAIT IN PARADOX. NY: Oxford UP, 1967). There is abundant evidence that, despite temperance convictions, despite being known as “a cold-water man by habit and principle,” Whittier not only drank hard cider and used alcoholic drinks for medicinal purposes and for sleeplessness but even, while traveling, carried on his person a flask of brandy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

June 29, Tuesday: As Southern forces attacked across the Chickahominy River, Federal troops withdrew to safety leaving behind 2,500 sick and wounded.

There was fighting at Savage’s Station. US CIVIL WAR

Waldo Emerson repeated his funeral oration on Henry David Thoreau for the benefit of the Reverend Theodore Parker’s “Fraternity” in Boston.

After Thoreau’s death Louisa May Alcott wrote a poem “Thoreau’s Flute” for The Atlantic Monthly. According to Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson she wrote the poem while she was nursing in the military hospital in Washington DC where she had received the news of Henry Thoreau’s death:

We sighing said, “Our Pan is dead— His pipe hangs mute beside the river, Around it friendly moonbeams quiver, But music’s airy voice is fled. Spring comes to us in guise forlorn, The blue-bird chants a requiem, The willow-blossom waits for him, The genius of the wood is gone” Then from the flute, untouched by hands, There came a low, harmonious breath: For such as he there is no death. His life the eternal life commands. Above men’s aims his nature rose. The wisdom of a just content Make one small spot a continent, And turned to poetry life’s prose

Haunting the hills, the stream, the wild, Swallow and aster, lake and pine To him seemed human or divine, Fit mates for this large-hearted child. Such homage nature ne’er forgets; And yearly on the coverlid ’Neath which her darling lieth hid Will write his name in violets. To him no vain regrets belong Whose soul, that finer instrument, Gave to the world no poor lament, But wood-notes ever sweet and strong. Oh lonely friend, He still will be A potent presence, though unseen, Steadfast, sagacious and serene. Seek not for him: he is with Thee.

At that time the magazine was withholding the names of contributors, and Louisa was informed by her father Bronson Alcott that one day while he was visiting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the poet had picked up the The Atlantic Monthly and had read aloud a few lines from her poem, and had asked her father whether he had read “Emerson’s fine poem on Thoreau’s Flute?” THE ALCOTT FAMILY HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Whittier-Holmes-Emerson-Motley-Alcott-Hawthorne-Lowell-Agassiz-Longfellow HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

In “Chiefly about War Matters,” edited and expurgated by Ticknor & Fields, Nathaniel Hawthorne revealed that he had been utterly at odds with Emerson’s and Thoreau’s attitude while John Brown was awaiting execution in 1859.

I shall not pretend to be an admirer of old John Brown, any farther than sympathy with Whittier’s excellent ballad about him may go; nor did I expect ever to shrink so unutterably from any apophthegm of a sage, whose happy lips have uttered a hundred gold sentences, as from that saying (perhaps falsely attributed to so honored a source), that the death of this blood-stained HANGING fanatic has “made the Gallows as venerable as the Cross!” Nobody was ever more justly hanged. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Plan of Fort Ridgely as it was in 1862 during the race war HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1863

August 8, Saturday: President Abraham Lincoln wrote to his wife regarding their surviving son Tad’s lost goat.

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

HOME-MADE MUSIC To-night, as I was trying to keep cool, sitting by a wounded soldier in Armory- square, I was attracted by some pleasant singing in an adjoining ward. As my soldier was asleep, I left him, and entering the ward where the music was, I walk’d half- way down and took a seat by the cot of a young Brooklyn friend, S. R., badly wounded in the hand at Chancellorsville, and who has suffer’d much, but at that moment in the evening was wide awake and comparatively easy. He had turn’d over on his left side to get a better view of the singers, but the mosquito-curtains of the adjoining cots obstructed the sight. I stept round and loop’d them all up, so that he had a clear show, and then sat down again by him, and look’d and listen’d. The principal singer was a young lady-nurse of one of the wards, accompanying on a melodeon, and join’d by the lady-nurses of other wards. They sat there, making a charming group, with their handsome, healthy faces, and standing up a little behind them were some ten or fifteen of the convalescent soldiers, young men, nurses, [Page 732] &c., with books in their hands, singing. Of course it was not such a performance as the great soloists at the New York opera house take a hand in, yet I am not sure but I receiv’d as much pleasure under the circumstances, sitting there, as I have had from the best Italian compositions, express’d by world-famous performers. The men lying up and down the hospital, in their cots, (some badly wounded — some never to rise thence,) the cots themselves, with their drapery of white curtains, and the shadows down the lower and upper parts of the ward; then the silence of the men, and the attitudes they took — the whole was a sight to look around upon again and again. And there sweetly rose those voices up to the high, whitewash’d wooden roof, and pleasantly the roof sent it all back again. They sang very well, mostly quaint old songs and declamatory hymns, to fitting tunes. Here, for instance: My days are swiftly gliding by, and I a pilgrim stranger, Would not detain them as they fly, those hours of toil and danger; For O we stand on Jordan’s strand, our friends are passing over, And just before, the shining shore we may almost discover. We’ll gird our loins my brethren dear, our distant home discerning, Our absent Lord has left us word, let every lamp be burning, For O we stand on Jordan’s strand, our friends are passing over, And just before, the shining shore we may almost discover. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

August 10, Monday: President Abraham Lincoln was meeting with Frederick Douglass to consider his petition for the full equality of the Union’s “Negro troops.” While they were at it, the President wrote Douglass out a pass enabling him to go with safety through Union lines. US CIVIL WAR

Meanwhile, Professor Louis Agassiz of Harvard College was writing to Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, who was at the time on the American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission, to warn him against government policies that might allow our “manly population descended from cognate nations” to deteriorate into “effeminate progeny of mixed races, half indian, half negro, sprinkled with white blood,” like our neighbor to our south, Mexico. That would reduce us to the same “degradation” as that mongrel nation. Amalgamation was clearly an “unnatural” thing. The scientist recommended to the medical doctor that “all legislation with reference to [half-breeds] ... be regulated with this view & so ordained as to accelerate their disappearance from the Northern States.” EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS

“Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline. We may therefore be sorely tempted to misuse that power in furthering a personal prejudice or social goal — why not provide that extra oomph by extending the umbrella of science over a personal preference in ethics or politics?” — Stephen Jay Gould BULLY FOR BRONTOSAURUS NY: Norton, 1991, page 429 We may presume that Dr. Howe was persuaded by this scientifically objective information about race purity, coming as it was from a prominent scientist of impeccable credentials. (At some point during this year Dr. Howe confided to a friend that the Reverend Theodore Parker’s brain had come into his possession and that he was planning to deposit this grisly object in the family crypt at Mt. Auburn — whether Dr. Howe ever would carry out this resolution, we do not know.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1868

The Reverend William Rounseville Alger became the pastor of the Reverend Theodore Parker’s “fraternity” (congregation) worshiping in the Boston Music Hall. His MAN FROM THE MEDICAL POINT OF VIEW, and his THE ABUSES AND USES OF CHURCH-GOING: A DISCOURSE SPOKEN AT THE FIRST SERVICE OF THE MUSIC-HALL SOCIETY IN BOSTON, OCT. 18, 1868, were published in Boston.

His disgraced cousin Horatio Alger, Jr. offered his photograph as a bonus to subscribers to Student and Schoolmate:

Horatio Alger, Jr. began basically to write the same formula story 130 times. He would be putting out what would amount to RAGGED DICK; OR, STREET LIFE IN NEW YORK WITH THE BOOT-BLACKS, using 130 different hero names and 130 different titles. This was a story America needed to believe because it was so far in every particular from the truth. Even today it would seem we have a need to believe in this story, still as false as ever it was. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

February 22, Saturday: William White & Co. of 158 Washington Street, Boston and the Banner of Light Branch Office, 544 Broadway, New-York prepared thousands of copies of “Theodore Parker in Spirit Life. A narration of personal experience inspirationally given to Fred. L.H. Willis, M.D.” (22 pages).

PARKER IN SPIRIT LIFE HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

FIGURING OUT WHAT AMOUNTS TO A “HISTORICAL CONTEXT” IS WHAT THE CRAFT OF HISTORICIZING AMOUNTS TO, AND THIS NECESSITATES DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN THE SET OF EVENTS THAT MUST HAVE TAKEN PLACE BEFORE EVENT E COULD BECOME POSSIBLE, AND MOST CAREFULLY DISTINGUISHING THEM FROM ANOTHER SET OF EVENTS THAT COULD NOT POSSIBLY OCCUR UNTIL SUBSEQUENT TO EVENT E.

Not Civil War “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1873

In this year the Reverend Theodore Parker’s 28th Congregational Society relocated from the Boston Music Hall to Parker Memorial Hall, at the corner of Berkeley Street and Appleton Street.There is a view of the Boston area made at this point in time by Currier & Ives, looking north with Harvard College visible. This color lithograph should be available as a 19 5/8” x 27 1/2” reproduction on text weight paper in a heavy mailing tube, from Historic Urban Plans, Inc., Box 276, Ithaca NY 14851 (607 272-MAPS), for roughly $21.50 inclusive of postage.

March 28, Friday: Octavius Brooks Frothingham wrote from New-York to Charles Wesley Slack discussing his intention to write a biography of the Reverend Theodore Parker and asking for any material that would be beneficial in its completion.

Portions of the town of Cranston were annexed to the city of Providence, Rhode Island. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1883

July: Antonio Maceo resigned his posts in Honduras and declared,

Our enslaved Cuba demands that its sons fight for its freedom.

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s “Comment by a radical Abolitionist” appeared in the Century Magazine, commenting upon the article immediately preceding it, by Alexander R. Boteler, entitled “Recollections of the John Brown Raid by a Virginian Who Witnessed the Fight” (Volume 26, pages 411-15, 399-411): It is hard –nay, impossible– to carry the reader of these pages in 1883 back in memory to that period of our country’s history when John Brown captured the town and arsenal at Harpers Ferry, or make real to ourselves the despotism which a few slaveholders then exercised over the rest of mankind in this country. Though a meager minority in their own South, they absolutely controlled there not only four millions of slaves, but six millions of white people, nominally free, while they directed the policy and the opinions of more than half the free people of the non- slaveholding States. They had dictated the nomination and secured the election of James Buchanan as President, — the most complete servant of the slave power who ever held that office; they had not only refused to terminate the slave-trade (as by treaty we were bound to assist in doing), but they had induced the importation of a few cargoes of slaves into Carolina and Georgia; they had broken down the Missouri compromise of 1820 (imposed by themselves on the unwilling North), and had done their best to extend slavery over the new territories of the nation, and to legalize its existence in all the Free States. Through the mouth of Chief-Justice Roger Brooke Taney, who simply uttered the decrees of the slave-holding oligarchy, they had made the Supreme Court declare that four million Americans, of African descent, had practically “no rights which a white man was bound to respect”; and they exerted themselves in every way to give due effect to that dictum. The Dred Scott decision was given by Taney in 1857, and it led at once to the execution of John Brown’s long-cherished purpose of striking a blow at slavery in its own Virginian stronghold. That decision flashed into the minds of Northern men the conviction which John Quincy Adams had long before formulated and expressed — that “the preservation, propagation, and perpetuation of slavery was the vital and animating spirit of the national Government.” It was this conviction that led to the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, as it had led John Brown and his small band of followers HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

to form their conspiracy and begin their campaign in 1858-’59. While the unpaid labor of the slaves was believed by the slaveholders to be the real source of our national prosperity, it was the merit and the fate of John Brown first to see and act upon the sad knowledge that slavery and our national existence were incompatible. Thirty years before he died for the blacks in Virginia, he chose the side of the nation against slavery; and in less than ten years after his death the whole people followed in the path he had marked out — the straight and thorny road of emancipation by force. It is in this broad way that the Harpers Ferry raid must be looked at, — not as a midnight foray of robbers and murderers. It was an act of war, and was accepted by the South as a sure omen that war was at hand. Brown told the slave-holders this in his famous conversation with James Mason of Virginia and Vallandigham of Ohio. “I claim to be here,” he said, “carrying out a measure I believe to be perfectly justifiable, and not to be acting the part of an incendiary or ruffian; on the contrary, I am here to aid those suffering under a great wrong. I wish to say, furthermore, that you had better —all you people of the South— prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question. It must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it, and the sooner you commence that preparation the better for you. You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly disposed of now. But this question is still to be settled; this negro question, I mean. The end of that is not yet.” This was a veritable “Thus saith the Lord” — as his hearers and the whole world soon found out. But to such as then doubted the message of the prophet Brown condescended to verify his credentials in that wonderfully eloquent speech to the court that sentenced him to the gallows: This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the Law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the BIBLE or, at least, the New Testament. That teaches me, “that all things whatsoever I would that men should do unto me, I should do even so to them.” It teaches me further, to “remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.” I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done —as I have always freely admitted I have done— in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong but right. There was John Brown’s authority for the capture of Harpers Ferry, — the same which Ethan Allen alleged, with less reason, a Ticonderoga, where he commanded surrender “in the name of the great Jehovah.” Brown “had gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord” long before his death, and the song of the people marching to avenge that death were but the public proclamation of his commission from above. Since the details of that strange conversation with Mason of Virginia have faded from the popular memory, let me quote another passage in which Brown pursues the HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

same line of reasoning he afterward held in court. SENATOR MASON: How do you justify your acts? CAPTAIN BROWN: I think, my friend, you are guilty of a great wrong against God and humanity –I say it without wishing to be offensive,– and it would be perfectly right for any one to interfere with you so far as to free those you willfully and wickedly hold in bondage. I do not say this insultingly. SENATOR MASON: I understand that. CAPTAIN BROWN: I think I did right, and that others will do right who interfere with you, at any time, and all times. I hold that the golden rule, “Do unto others as you would that others should do unto you,” applies to all who would help others to gain their liberty. LIEUTENANT STUART: But you don’t believe in the BIBLE? CAPTAIN BROWN: Certainly I do. * * * I want you to understand, gentlemen, that I respect the rights of the poorest and weakest of the colored people, oppressed by the slave system, just as much as I do those of the most wealthy and powerful. That is the idea that has moved me, and that alone. We expected no reward except the satisfaction of endeavoring to do for those in distress –the greatly oppressed– as we would be done by. The cry of distress of the oppressed is my reason, and the only thing that prompted me to come here. Brown’s plan of action in Virginia was wholly his own, as he more than once declared; and it was not until he had long formed and matured it that he made it known (so far as an attack on slavery in Virginia was concerned) to the few friends who shared his confidence in that matter. I cannot say how numerous these were; but beyond his own family and the armed followers who accompanied him, I have never supposed that his Virginia plan was known to fifty persons. Even to those few it was not fully communicated, though they knew that he meant to fortify himself somewhere in the mountains of Virginia or Tennessee, and from that fastness, with his band of soldiers, sally out and liberate slaves by force. His plan to this extent was known, early in 1858, by Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith (at whose house and in whose presence I first heard Brown declare it), Theodore Parker, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, George Luther Stearns, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and myself, and we all raised money to aid Brown in carrying this plan forward. I know this, because some of the money and nearly all the correspondence relating to the contributions passed through my hands in 1858-9. I talked more than once in those years with all the persons above named, concerning Brown’s Virginia plans and had letters from all except Douglass in regard to it. Brown’s general purpose of attacking slavery by force, in Missouri or elsewhere, was known in 1857-8-9 to Waldo Emerson, A. Bronson Alcott, Henry Thoreau, Wendell Phillips, Thomas Russell, John HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Albion Andrew, and others of the anti-slavery men of Massachusetts, none of whom discountenanced it, while most of them, in my hearing, distinctly approved it, generally, however, as a last resort or a measure of retaliation for the outrages of the slave-holders and their allies. Had these gentlemen known of the Virginia plan, most of them would have strongly disapproved it as premature or impracticable. Such, also, it seemed at first, and generally afterward, to those of us who contributed money to aid Brown in it. I speak particularly of Gerrit Smith, Theodore Parker, George L. Stearns, Dr. Howe, Col. Higginson, and myself. But we all felt, as Governor Andrew afterward said, that whatever the old worthy might plan or do, “John Brown himself was right,” and upon that feeling we acted, in spite of doubts and many misgivings. The end has justified our instinctive sentiment; and it has more than justified, it has glorified Brown. I do not wonder that Virginians cannot all see this yet; but the world sees it, and Brown has become, to the world in general, one of the immortal champions of liberty —historical or mythical— among whom we reckon Leonidas, Maccabeus, Tell, Winkelried, Wallace, Hofer, and Marco Bozzaris. I knew John Brown well. He was often a my house and at the houses of my friends and I traveled with him for days. He was what all his speeches, letters, and actions avouch him — a simple, brave, heroic person incapable of anything selfish or base. The higher elements of his character are well seen in the portrait which accompanies these pages There were darker and sterner traits which fitted him for the grim work he had to do and which are better shown in his bearded portraits, and in some which I possess, taken in the year 1857. But the face that here looks out upon us bespeaks that warm love for God’s despised poor which was his deepest trait, and that noble disregard of everything but justice which distinguished his every action But above and beyond these personal qualities he was what we may best term a historic character; that is, he had, like Cromwell and Spartacus, a certain predestined relation to the political crisis of his time, for which his character fitted him and which, had he striven against it, he could not avoid. Like Cromwell and all the great Calvinists, he was an unquestioning believer in God’s fore-ordination and the divine guidance of human affairs; but he was free from the taint of guile that disfigured Cromwell’s greatness. Of course, he could not rank with Cromwell or with many inferior men in leadership; but in this God- appointed, inflexible devotion to his object in life he was inferior to no man, and he rose in fame far above more gifted persons because of this very fixedness and simplicity of character. His renown is secure, and the artless (I must think prejudiced) narrative of Mr. Boteler does but increase it for those who read understandingly. As Tennyson said of the great Duke, we may say of Brown: Whatever record leap to light, He never shall be shamed. Young men never knew, perhaps, and some old men have forgotten, that we once had statesmen (so called) who loudly declared that HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

negro slavery was the basis not only of our national greatness, but of the white man’s freedom. This groveling doctrine found favor in Virginia in John Brown’s time, and it was his work, as much as any man’s, to overthrow it. A hundred years ago one of the great Virginians, a statesman indeed by nature and by training, said: With what execration should that statesman be loaded who, permitting one-half the citizens to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots and these into enemies? Can the liberties of a nation be deemed secure when we have removed their only firm basis — a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God, that they are not to be violated without his wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country (Virginia) when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever; that, considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune is among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural interference. The Almighty has no attribute that can take sides with us in such a contest. This was the language of Jefferson in his “Notes on Virginia,” written in 1783, and it was in the county of Jefferson that Brown made his foray in 1859. He harbored in the county of Washington, in Maryland, for three months. He descended upon Jefferson County in Virginia at the end of that time; and when the astonished successors of Washington and Jefferson saw him first, he held in his hand Washington’s sword, and was enacting Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence in favor of the slaves of Colonel Washington, — that the Scriptures might be fulfilled. And they were fulfilled to the utmost in the years of war and ruin that followed. At the critical period of that Civil War when its issue was still undecided save in the councils of heaven, — at the close of the year 1862 Abraham Lincoln put forth his first edict of emancipation, and followed it up, January 1, 1863, with the final proclamation that the slaves in the rebellious States were from that day free. John Brown had been in his woodland grave among the Adirondack Mountains but little more than three years when we saw this triumph of his hopes, this crown of his toil and martyrdom. His friends gathered to celebrate so happy an event at the house of one of the most faithful and active of his supporters in the Virginia campaign, George Stearns, of Medford, in Massachusetts. It was one of the last of those meetings in which the old anti-slavery men and women came together with hearts united, and rejoiced together face to face. Garrison and Phillips were there, Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott (Thoreau had died eight months before), Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and his poetic wife, Mrs. Child, Moncure Conway, Martin Conway of Kansas, and many others now dead or widely sundered. The host and his wife, Mrs. Mary Stearns, who also had been an enthusiastic friend of John Brown, could give their guests not only the graceful hospitalities of a house always open to the HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

friends of freedom, but what was then a new sight, Brackett’s marble bust of Brown, standing crowned with flowers in the wide hall. This is the only bust of Brown for which the sculptor studied the hero’s own features, and it was made after a visit by Brackett to Brown in prison at Charlestown. Though not, in all respects, a portrait, it has the air of Brown, with a majesty that made Charles Sumner exclaim, when he first saw it: “This is like the Moses of Michael Angelo.” And when a sibylline negress, a fugitive from Maryland, saw it in my house, she went into an ecstasy of grief and adoration, declaring that Brown was not a mere man, but the Messiah of her people. “In a great age,” says Cousin, speaking of Pascal, “everything is great.” John Brown came to prominence in an age by no means grand or noble; but such was his own heroic character that he conferred importance on events in themselves trivial. His petty conflicts in Kansas and the details of his two days’ campaign in Virginia will be remembered when a hundred battles of our Civil War are forgotten. He was one of ten thousand, and, as Thoreau said, could not be tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist; yet so much was he in accord with what is best in the American character that he will stand in history for one type of our people, as Franklin and Lincoln do, but with a difference. He embodied the distinctive qualities of the Puritan, but with a strong tincture of the more humane sentiments of later times. No man could be more sincere in his faith toward God, more earnest in love for man; his belief in fore-ordination was absolute, his courage not less so. The emotion of fear seemed to be quite unknown to him, except in the form of diffidence, — if that were not rather a sort of pride. He was diffident of his power in speech or writing, yet who, of all his countrymen, has uttered more effective or immortal words? Part of the service he rendered to his country was by this heroic impersonation of traits that all mankind recognize as noble. The cause of the poor slave had need of all the charm that romantic courage could give it; his defenders were treated with the contempt which attached to himself. They were looked upon with aversion by patriots; they were odious to trade, distasteful to fashion and learning, impious in the sight of the Church. At the single stroke of Brown, all this was changed; the cause that had been despised suddenly became hated, feared, and respected; and out of this new fear and hatred our national safety was born. Ten years more of disgraceful security, and the nation might have been lost; but the rash and frantic efforts of the South to defend its barbarous system brought on the revolution that has regenerated us politically. No doubt the affair at Harpers Ferry hastened our political crisis by at least ten years, — and what fatal years they might have been but for John Brown! One evening in January, 1860, as I sat in Emerson’s study at Concord, talking of this old friend of ours, for whose widow and HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

orphans we were then raising a fund, I spoke to Emerson about a

speech of his at Salem, a few weeks earlier, in which the poet- philosopher had renewed his homage to the memory of Brown. He went to one of the cabinets in which his manuscripts were kept, took out the half-dozen pages on which his remarks had been written down, and gave them to me for publication. I have ever since cherished the manuscript, in which, with bold strokes of his quill, Emerson had written these words at the close: It would be nearer the truth to say that all people, in proportion to their sensibility and self-respect, sympathize with John Brown. For it is impossible to see courage and disinterestedness and the love that casts out fear, without sympathy. All gentlemen, of course are on his side. I do not mean by “gentlemen” people of scented hair and perfumed handkerchiefs, but men of gentle blood and generosity, “fulfilled with all nobleness”; who, like the Cid, give the outcast leper a share of their bed — like the dying Sidney, pass the cup of cold water to the wounded soldier who needs it more. For what is the oath of gentle blood and knighthood? What but to protect the weak and lowly against the strong oppressor? * * * Who makes the abolitionist? The slave-holder. The sentiment of mercy is the natural recoil which the laws of the universe provide to protect mankind from destruction by savage passions. The arch-abolitionist, older than Brown, and older than the Shenandoah Mountains, is Love, whose other name is Justice, — which was before Alfred, before Lycurgus, before Slavery and will be after it. The generous, immortal traits which these words portray in Brown and bespeak in Emerson, are those which the artist has caught in the remarkable engraving of my old friend in this number of THE CENTURY. F.B. Sanborn SECRET “SIX” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1889

Dissolution of the Reverend Theodore Parker’s 28th Congregational Society. The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway spoke.

In this year the Reverend Conway was publishing, as Volume IV of the Memoirs of the Long Island Historical 44 Society, GEORGE WASHINGTON AND MOUNT VERNON.

44. Moncure Daniel Conway. GEORGE WASHINGTON AND MOUNT VERNON: BEING VOL. IV. OF MEMOIRS OF THE LONG ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 8vo, pp. 352. Brooklyn, 1889. Published by the Society. READ THE FULL TEXT HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1900

Lev Nikolævich Tolstòy responded to a letter from Edward Garnett:

[I]f I had to address the American people, I should like to thank them for the great help I have received from their writers who flourished about the fifties. I would mention Garrison, Parker, Emerson, Ballou and Thoreau, not as the greatest but those who I think specially influenced me.

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON THEODORE PARKER WALDO EMERSON HENRY THOREAU ADIN BALLOU HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1906

August 12, Sunday: Here is A. Goldenweiser’s record of a conversation he had with Lev Nikolævich Tolstòy on this day:

... talking about an outstanding pleiad of American writers, Channing, Parker, Emerson, Garrison, Thoreau, Lev Nikolævich said: “By the way, it is generally assumed that England has great writers while America does not have any. I remember how Turgenev, who was a highly educated man, told me very seriously that there were no significant writers at all in America.”

WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING THEODORE PARKER WALDO EMERSON HENRY THOREAU HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1908

LESSONS FROM THE WORLD OF MATTER AND THE WORLD OF MAN: SELECTED FROM NOTES OF UNPUBLISHED SERMONS BY THEODORE PARKER EDITED WITH A PREFACE BY RUFUS LEIGHTON (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 25 Beacon Street). These Sunday morning Boston Music Hall sermons of the Reverend Theodore Parker had been taken down “phonographically,” which is to say, stenographically, during the period 1849- 1859 and the tubercular Reverend Parker had given his consent for the creation of this volume in the latter part of January 1859 as he prepared to board ship in Boston harbor for the West Indies in an attempt to recover his health.

A news item relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: During the second half of the 19th Century there had been this great battle between those typewriter advocates who held that such a device would need to enable visual writing, in which one could see what one was typing as one typed it, versus ELECTRIC those typewriter advocates who held that one ought not to be able to see what one was typing until afterward. WALDEN This battle of the visibles versus the nonvisibles had raged on and on — but by this point in time most manufacturers of typewriters had gone visible. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1909

October 17, Sunday: It was the 50th anniversary of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, and the survivors of that scheme met in the riverside brick mansion of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, on Elm Street in Concord.

When the 77-year-old Sanborn took Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s elbow to lead his 86-year-old friend into the sitting room, the Colonel pulled his arm away — despite the fact that the Reverend was now walking by use of a cane. In the siting room, a circle of six chairs had been set out, one chair for each of the original Secret “Six”: The Reverend Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, George Luther Stearns, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, Colonel Higginson, and Sanborn, despite the fact that Parker, Smith, Stearns, and Howe had by this point deceased. The chair for Dr. Howe was occupied by 90-year-old Julia Ward Howe, who remained seated when the others entered, with a shawl around her shoulders. Julia had her ear trumpet with her so that she would not need to miss any of the conversation. Also in the room was a young reporter, Katherine Mayo, who had been detailed to take copious notes by a grandson of William Lloyd Garrison, the author Oswald Garrison Villard. Villard was then wrapping up work on a study of Captain Brown that hopefully would be an improvement on Sanborn’s botched 1885 attempt at a biography. Colonel Higginson needed to make certain that Miss Mayo clearly understood, so that she could convey this information to Villard, that he and the other members of this 6-member finance committee had been entirely aware of John Brown’s intent to incite a slave rebellion in Virginia, and that they’d been quite as prepared that Brown’s raid would turn into a disaster for him and his little band as they had been prepared that it might prove against all odds to be a success. SERVILE INSURRECTION HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

2001

Summer: Paul E. Teed’s “The Politics of Sectional Memory: Theodore Parker and the ‘Massachusetts Quarterly Review’, 1847-1850” (Journal of the Early Republic, Volume 21, Number 2, pages 301-329). READ THIS ARTICLE

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 2016. 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 4, 2016 HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

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

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

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.