Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID

This self-publicizing invalid wrote lots and lots of “easy reading” crowd-pleasers, none of which have been found in Thoreau’s personal library. Out of “Captain” Mayne Reid’s shelflist of something like half a hundred to a hundred bestselling editions, Thoreau’s INDIAN NOTEBOOKS and FACT BOOK reveal that he copied from perhaps six — copying only supposedly factual material such as how to prepare rock moss as starvation fare. Looking at Thoreau’s extracts they seem of the sort that might easily be obtained by means of 15-minute perusals scribbling on some scrap with the stub of a pencil while standing in the aisle at Stacy’s bookstore in Concord. Nevertheless a supposed Thoreau scholar, not to be daunted, has recently inferred on the basis of such evidence that “Dissatisfied with the present, Thoreau looked back in time for happiness.... In an attempt to recapture that sense of well-being he had begun reading Mayne Reid’s BOOKS OF ADVENTURES FOR BOYS, immersing himself in each volume of the series as it appeared in the 1850s”!

Perusing the material reminds one of Poe’s evaluation that the man was “a colossal but most picturesque liar.” It is marvelous how an invalid who had had in his youth one great remembered war adventure could, by an ability to write interestingly about adventures and locales he had not himself ever experienced, make himself into such a sustained hot item of public interest.

The purpose of this PDF file is to reassure myself that there is no shred of evidence in Thoreau’s accessing of Mayne Reid’s “easy reiding” that any portion of such an interpretation as above, about dissatisfaction with the present, is plausible. It is a mark of the general low condition of Thoreau scholarship, that a hypothetical that is so sweeping, gratuitous, and unsubstantiated might be offered in 1999 in a book published by the University of Massachusetts Press, supposedly an academic press that adheres to standards of peer review! HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1818

April 4, Saturday: Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. was born in the hamlet Ballyroney near Katesbridge in County Down, a son of the Irish Presbyterian Reverend Thomas Mayne Reid.

In our federal House of Representatives, Mr. Livermore proposed amending the US Constitution to do away forever with the peculiar institution of human enslavement. The House of course voted to entertain no such notion. “No person shall be held to service or labour as a slave, nor shall slavery be tolerated in any state hereafter admitted into the Union, or made one of the United States of America.” Read, and on the question, “Will the House consider the same?” it was determined in the negative. HOUSE JOURNAL, 15th Congress, 1st session, pages 420-1; ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 15th Congress, 1st session, pages 1675-6. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE SLAVERY

Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley reached Milan, where they would visit the Italian lakes.

ESSENCE IS BLUR. SPECIFICITY, THE OPPOSITE OF ESSENCE, IS OF THE NATURE OF TRUTH.

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1834

September: Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. was enrolled at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. He would be there for four years preparing for the Irish dissenting ministry in order to follow in the paternal footsteps of the Reverend Thomas Mayne Reid, Sr., but would depart without a degree to teach school in his home town Ballyroney, leaving the role of shepherd of the flock to a younger brother John. What a disappointment to the family this was: “My mother would rather have had me settle down as a minister, on a stipend of one hundred a year, than know me to be the most famous man in history.”

ESSENCES ARE FUZZY, GENERIC, CONCEPTUAL; ARISTOTLE WAS RIGHT WHEN HE INSISTED THAT ALL TRUTH IS SPECIFIC AND PARTICULAR (AND WRONG WHEN HE CHARACTERIZED TRUTH AS A GENERALIZATION).

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1839

December: Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. sailed from Ireland for New Orleans aboard the Dumfriesshire: “Like other striplings escaped from college, I was no longer happy at home. The yearning for travel was upon me, and without a sigh I beheld the hills of my native land sink behind the black waves, not much caring whether I should ever see them again.”

“HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE” BEING A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN TIME (JUST AS THE PERSPECTIVE IN A PAINTING IS A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN SPACE), TO “LOOK AT THE COURSE OF HISTORY MORE GENERALLY” WOULD BE TO SACRIFICE PERSPECTIVE ALTOGETHER. THIS IS FANTASY-LAND, YOU’RE FOOLING YOURSELF. THERE CANNOT BE ANY SUCH THINGIE, AS SUCH A PERSPECTIVE.

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1840

January: The Dumfriesshire, conveying Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. from Ireland, arrived at the port of New Orleans.

YOUR GARDEN-VARIETY ACADEMIC HISTORIAN INVITES YOU TO CLIMB ABOARD A HOVERING TIME MACHINE TO SKIM IN METATIME BACK ACROSS THE GEOLOGY OF OUR PAST TIMESLICES, WHILE OFFERING UP A GARDEN VARIETY OF COGENT ASSESSMENTS OF OUR PROGRESSION. WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP! YOU SHOULD REFUSE THIS HELICOPTERISH OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORICAL PAST, FOR IN THE REAL WORLD THINGS HAPPEN ONLY AS THEY HAPPEN. WHAT THIS SORT WRITES AMOUNTS, LIKE MERE “SCIENCE FICTION,” MERELY TO “HISTORY FICTION”: IT’SNOT WORTH YOUR ATTENTION.

July: Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. left New Orleans after having worked for some half year as a clerk for a corn factor (trader in the corn market), a “storekeeper,” and a “nigger driver.” It has been alleged that he quit rather than whip slaves. He would take a position as tutor of the children of Dr. Peyton Robertson on a plantation near Nashville, Tennessee, and then begin a private “New English, Mathematical, and Classical School” in Nashville.

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1841

Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. became a clerk for a provision dealer somewhere in Mississippi or Louisiana.

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.

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1842

Fall: Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. began literary production for the Morning Chronicle under the pen name “The Poor Scholar” (it would seem he not only composed fill material for this gazette but also helped to distribute it throughout Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania).

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

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1843

Spring: Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. relocated from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia to work as a journalist and from time to time publish his “The Poor Scholar” poetry in such venues as Godey’s Lady’s Book, Graham’s Magazine, and the Ladies National Magazine. While in Philadelphia he would be for several years a drinking buddy of Edgar Allan Poe, who would remember him as “a colossal but most picturesque liar. He fibs on a surprising scale but with the finish of an artist, and that is why I listen to him attentively.” Not to be outdone, he would remember Poe in the following manner: “Nearly a quarter of a century ago, I knew a man named Edgar Allan Poe. I knew him as well as one man may know another, after an intimate and almost daily association extending over a period of two years. He was then a reputed poet; I only an humble admirer of the Muses. But it is not of his poetic talent I here intend to speak. I never myself had a very exalted opinion of it — more especially as I knew that the poem upon which rests the head corner-stone of his fame is not the creation of Edgar Allan Poe, but of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,’ you will find the original of ‘The Raven.’ I mean the tune, the softly flowing measure, the imagery and a good many of the words—even to the ‘rustling of the soft and silken curtain.’”

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1846

Spring: As the War on Mexico broke out, Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. was in Newport, Rhode Island as a correspondent for the New-York Herald and was using the pen name “Ecolier” in addition to “The Poor Scholar.”

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID November 23, Monday: Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. obtained a commission as a 2d Lieutenant in the 1st New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment, Colonel Ward B. Burnett commanding (his widow would report “Young Mayne Reid early evinced a taste for war. When a small boy he was often found running barefooted along the road after a drum and fife band, greatly to his mother’s dismay. She chided him, saying, ‘What will the folks think to see Mr Reid’s son going about like this?’ To which young Mayne replied, ‘I don’t care. I’d rather be Mr Drum than Mr Reid.’”).

The office of governor of St. Helena had been empty since the previous governor had died, in May. At this point a new governor, Major-General Sir Patrick Ross, took office. The new governor would create Barnes Road, which runs between upper Jamestown and Francis Plan, around Peak Hill (although remnants of this remain, it is no longer a road).

NEVER READ AHEAD! TO APPRECIATE NOVEMBER 23D, 1846 AT ALL ONE MUST APPRECIATE IT AS A TODAY (THE FOLLOWING DAY, TOMORROW, IS BUT A PORTION OF THE UNREALIZED FUTURE AND IFFY HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID AT BEST).

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1847

January: Waldo Emerson made a remark in his journal about the possibility of Henry Thoreau going to the Oregon territory:

H.D.T. wants to go to Oregon, not to London. Yes surely; but what seeks he but the most energetic nature? & seeking that, he will find Oregon indifferently in all places; for it snows & blows & melts & adheres & repels all the world over.

Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. sailed from the port of New-York as a 2d Lieutenant with the 1st New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment, Colonel Ward B. Burnett commanding, destination the Mexican port of Vera Cruz. WAR ON MEXICO

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

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID March 9, Tuesday: After camping for several weeks on Lobos Island, the 1st New York Volunteer Infantry participated in Major General Winfield Scott’s 1st-ever amphibious landing attempt by the US Army, at Vera Cruz, Mexico. 2d Lieutenant Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. would use the nom-de-guerre “Ecolier” to prepare “Sketches by a Skirmisher” as a correspondent for the New-York gazette Spirit of the Times.

WAR ON MEXICO HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID From this day until the 29th, the siege:

In early April 1847, when the news of this bombardment would arrive in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the bells of all but one local church would ring out in celebration of the grand American victory. Only the bells of Portsmouth’s South Church would remain silent. This was in protest. In his sermon that Sunday, the Reverend Andrew Preston Peabody, D.D. would have the following to offer: I pity, from the bottom of my heart, the man who can have so much as a momentary feeling of exultation at such horrors. What! rejoice at the explosion of those infernal missiles in those late peaceful homes, — at the scattering of those dissevered limbs and mangled corpses of those hundreds of women and children? It was no unknown thing, that what the United States military had just done was a war atrocity, in that it had chosen to ignore the vital distinction between civilian and military, intentionally destroying the lives of civilian men, women, and children in order to oblige the Mexican military to withdraw from the town’s fortifications. The Reverend Peabody was no pacifist and he was not protesting the invasion of Mexico as such, but rather, he was condemning our atrocity of the bombing of innocent families. Again, the Mexicans are called our enemies. They probably are so. We have done enough to make them so... [but] Those Mexicans have human hearts. There are there, as here, fond parents and loving children. They have the same susceptibilities of suffering and anguish with ourselves.... I confess, my sympathies are with the bereaved, suffering homeless Mexicans – of the multitudes that, without fault of their own, have been made to feel the direst of earthly calamities, and have been given over to the wasting of the war-fiend, whose tender mercies are cruelty. They are our brethren. He could not in his own study of the New Testament discover any way in which a Christian might rationalize such systematic killing as in accordance with the fundamentally peaceful teachings of Christ. He would continue in his anti-war-atrocity sermon: Suppose our whole population surrounded by the engines of war — our wives and children forbidden egress — witnessing day after day spectacles of the utmost agony...The groans of the wounded, the wild shrieks of the dying rises from house to house above HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID the roar of the artillery. The Reverend Peabody didn’t stop with protesting the month-long atrocity of American bombardment of the civilian population of Vera Cruz. He also posed the question we have attempted to answer at the Nürnberg Trials — How can a soldier be considered to be under obligation to implement an immoral order, when, if the order is immoral, that soldier’s moral obligation is instead to refuse to obey it? War frees no individual of any moral responsibility, he insisted: When the individual soul stands before the divine tribunal, stained with the wanton butchery of those women and babes, think you that the plea, “I knew that it was wrong and vile, but my country bade me do it?” will be accepted in Heaven’s chancery in mitigation of the crime? Soldiers, Peabody said, should be rewarded for acting on their moral beliefs, rather than punished. After this sermon the Dover NH newspaper would editorialize that “The Rev. Andrew P. Peabody, of Portsmouth, N.H. has made himself particularly ridiculous.”

South Church, in which the Reverend Andrew Preston Peabody delivered this homily, stands yet. It is a dark stone Greek-revival building on State Street, now known as the Unitarian Universalist church.

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

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID Summer: Waldo Emerson agreed to pay Bronson Alcott $50.00 to foreman the construction of a summerhouse in his garden. Both Alcott and Henry Thoreau worked on this summerhouse for the Emerson family. Thoreau, while attempting to realize the exceedingly complex roof structure that Alcott had imagined (Alcott was unconsciously re-creating, it appears, on the basis of an illustration he had once seen, a Nepalese temple), fell off the steep slope, fortunately onto a pile of straw. This summerhouse was a more elaborate version of the bower house that Alcott had constructed on the hill behind his home Hillside. Alcott worked on it all summer and into the fall, disregarding the fact that $50.00 was all he was going to get for his labors in total and disregarding the fact that at this level of income, his family could not be maintained. “I call this my style of building, the Sylvan.”

One merit is its simplicity. The curved rafters to the gables and the depending brackets under the cornice are original with me. The edifice seems to be upheld by the broad cornice, the rafters aspiring in handsome curves to their apex and uniting at the ridge-pole, with broad weather-boards and the bending brackets … serving both as braces to the building and as supporters of the heavy cornice…. I have seen the same style in pictures of the Egyptian architectures. Such things must originate in the one idea of the Infinite Beauty and fitness of the curve over the straight line in building. The highest art will employ the curve always. The serpentine is ever mystic. HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID It was becoming clear to the Alcotts that at their level of income, even buttressed as it was by the payments that were being made to Abba quarterly out of her inheritance so that it totaled at about $300.00 per year, they could not afford to maintain and live at a home like Hillside. Their debts were already adding up to about $200.00 and Concord merchants were telling them that they were about ready to cut off their credit, and an installment payment of $90.00 was coming due on a mortgage on the hillside land behind the house which Alcott had so neatly terraced. However, when they put the house on the market, there were no takers.

Meanwhile, in the heat of Pueblao, Mexico, 2d Lieutenant Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. had it seems gotten into some sort of altercation with an enlisted man. At his court-martial he would assert that this soldier’s demise had been both accidental and in self-defense while he had been performing his duty as an officer in charge: “Still, when I thrust out, it was with no intention to kill, only to keep him off, and in point of fact, in his mad rush toward me he impaled himself on my sword.” In addition, this soldier had been a “noted desperado, and, I may add, robber, long the pest and terror not only of his comrades in the regiment, but the poor Mexican people who suffered from his depredations, as all who were then there and are still living may remember.” — (The world having been simplified and made a better place by the lieutenant’s inopportune sword thrust, he was found not guilty and was able to return to his command.)

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID September 13, Monday: In Salem, customs inspector Nathaniel Hawthorne approved a shipment:

Brigadier General Franklin Pierce, lucky guy, had an opportunity to vicariously experience one more battle: There remained but one other battle, —that of Chepultepec,— which was fought on the 13th of September. On the preceding day, (although the injuries and the over-exertion, resulting from previous marches and battles, had greatly enfeebled him,) General Pierce had acted with his brigade. In obedience to orders, it had occupied the field of Molino del Rey. Contrary to expectation, it was found that the enemy’s force had been withdrawn from this position. Pierce remained in the field until noon, when, it being certain that the anticipated attack would not take place before the following day, he returned to the quarters of General Worth, which were near at hand. There he became extremely ill, and was unable to leave his bed for the thirty-six hours next ensuing. In the mean time, the Castle of Chepultepec was stormed by the troops under Generals Pillow and Quitman. Pierce’s brigade behaved itself gallantly, and suffered severely; and that accomplished officer, Colonel Ransom, leading the Ninth Regiment to the attack, was shot through the head, and fell, with many other brave men, in that last battle of the war. BAWTHORNE’S BIO OF PIERCE

WAR ON MEXICO HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

The American troops, under Quitman and Worth, had established themselves within the limits of the city, having possession of the gates of Belen and of San Cosma, but, up till nightfall, had met with a vigorous resistance from the Mexicans, led on by Santa Anna in person. They had still, apparently, a desperate task before them. It was anticipated, that, with the next morning’s light, our troops would be ordered to storm the citadel, and the city of Mexico itself. When this was told to Pierce, upon his sick bed, he rose, and attempted to dress himself; but Captain Hardcastle, who had brought the intelligence from Worth, prevailed upon him to remain in bed, and not to exhaust his scanty strength, until the imminence of the occasion should require his presence. Pierce acquiesced for the time, but again arose, in the course of the night, and made his way to the trenches, where he reported himself to General Quitman, with whose division was a part of his brigade. Quitman’s share in the anticipated assault, it was supposed, owing to the position which his troops occupied, would be more perilous than that of Worth. WAR ON MEXICO

At this “Battle of Chapultepec” 2d Lieutenant Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. was wounded in the left leg above the knee by an escopette ball (he would receive a battlefield promotion to 1st Lieutenant and ever afterward would proclaim himself to have been a captain). He would assert later that he had been shot while leading “up the men who received the last volley of the enemy’s fire, and thus left the scaling of the wall [and the political plum, a political plum worth a vice presidency under Polk in the case of the candidate Major General Gideon Johnson Pillow, of being shot in the left leg while in command of the 1st group of soldiers to scale the wall into the fortress of Chapultepec] a mere matter of climbing, as scarcely any one was shot afterwards.”

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

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID December 19, Sunday: At an Anti-Slavery meeting in the Minerva Hall of Rochester, New York, William Cooper Nell and Giles B. Stebens were appointed as secretaries.

While laid up in Mexico City with his thigh wound, 2d Lieutenant Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. almost engaged in a duel of honor. The encounter was, however, on this day averted by means of a most carefully worded exchange of correspondence: City of Mexico, December 19th, 1847. Sir, Captain McKinstry has received your note of yesterday, and has requested me, as his friend, to inform you that he has not made any remarks reflecting upon you as a gentleman and a man of honour. Very respectfully, Your obedient servant, John B. Grayson, Captain 165 A.

Lieutenant Mayne Reid, N.Y. Volunteers.

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1848

May 5, Friday: Speaker of the House of Representatives Robert Winthrop of Massachusetts signed a resolution bestowing yet a 3d Congressional Gold Medal on Army Major General Zachary Taylor, and that legislative body approved the award with but a single dissenting vote. The general had received three of these things within a span of two years. He remains the only President to be awarded three of them.

There wouldn’t be any such recognition for 1st Lieutenant Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. while recuperating from the wound to his thigh, only a lifelong disability pension. He resigned his commission. In roughly this timeframe he consoling himself through the commission of war poetry: Monterey. We were not many – we who stood Before the iron sleet that day— Yet many a gallant spirit would Give half his years if he but could Have been with us at Monterey. Now here, now there, the shot it hailed In deadly drifts of fiery spray, Yet not a single soldier quailed, When wounded comrades round them wailed Their dying shouts at Monterey. And on – still on our columns kept, Through walls of flame, its withering way; Where fell the dead, the living stept, Still charging on the guns which swept The slippery streets of Monterey. The foe himself recoiled aghast, When, striking where he strongest lay, We swooped his flanking batteries past, And braving full their murderous blast, Stormed home the towers of Monterey. Our banners on those turrets wave, And there our evening bugles play; Where orange boughs above their grave Keep green the memory of the brave Who fought and fell at Monterey. We were not many – we who pressed Beside the brave who fell that day; But who of us has not confessed He’d rather share their warrior rest, HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID Than not have been at Monterey?

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

July: Farmers along the west coast of Ireland were beginning to notice blight on the leaves of their potato crop.

IRISH POTATO FAMINE

War wounded Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. sailed back from Mexico to New-York with what remained of the 1st New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment. WAR ON MEXICO

October: Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr.’s “Love’s Martyr” played for five nights at the Walnut Street Theater in New-York.

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1849

June 27, Wednesday: Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr.’s described his experiences with the 1st New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment during Major General Winfield Scott’s campaign toward the interior and Mexico City in WAR LIFE. WAR ON MEXICO

THE FALLACY OF MOMENTISM: THIS STARRY UNIVERSE DOES NOT CONSIST OF A SEQUENCE OF MOMENTS. THAT IS A FIGMENT, ONE WE HAVE RECOURSE TO IN ORDER TO PRIVILEGE TIME OVER CHANGE, APRIVILEGING THAT MAKES CHANGE SEEM UNREAL, DERIVATIVE, A MERE APPEARANCE. IN FACT IT IS CHANGE AND ONLY CHANGE WHICH WE EXPERIENCE AS REALITY, TIME BEING BY WAY OF RADICAL CONTRAST UNEXPERIENCED — A MERE INTELLECTUAL CONSTRUCT. THERE EXISTS NO SUCH THING AS A MOMENT. NO “INSTANT” HAS EVER FOR AN INSTANT EXISTED.

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1850

Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr.’s THE RIFLE RANGERS: A THRILLING STORY OF DARING ADVENTURE AND HAIRBREADTH ESCAPES DURING THE MEXICAN WAR. WAR ON MEXICO

Jeez, guy, give it a rest, will you?

Literally thousands of escaped US slaves were living in Mexico, having in the absence of an organized network made their way there either individually or in small groups. These thousands did not compare, however, with the numbers still enslaved in Texas. According to the US census there were 58,161 slaves there, out of a population of 212,592: more than 28% of the Texas population was enslaved.1 Finding the Mexican government to be totally uncooperative, Texas slaveowners took measures to stop escapes as well as reclaim runaways, pressuring the US government to set up border patrols. With only a few troops available to patrol an extended frontier, this would never prove adequate.2

Over the following couple of years Mrs. William Cazneau, who lived in the border town of Eagle Pass between Texas and Mexico, would be documenting the experience of an acquaintance of hers who encountered an ex- slave in Monterey. Much to the surprise of white Americans, former slaves were obtaining wealth and status in their new communities south of the border.

1. Frederick Law Olmsted. A JOURNEY THROUGH TEXAS. (NY: Dix, Edwards and Company, 1857), page 472. 2. Ronnie C. Tyler. “Fugitive Slaves in Mexico,” Journal of Negro History, Volume 57, Issue 1 (January 1972), page 4. HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1851

Breveted Lieutenant-Colonel James Duncan Graham of the US Army’s Corps of Topographical Engineers was making himself useful as Principal Astronomer and “Head of the Scientific Corps,” on the part of the United States, for the joint demarcation of the Boundary between the United States and Mexico, under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in the final resolution of boundary issues resulting from the War with Mexico.

Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr.’s THE SCALP HUNTERS; OR, ROMANTIC ADVENTURES IN NORTHERN MEXICO.

The author, implementing a folk maxim “when they’re big enough they’re old enough,” began to groom his London publisher’s teenybopper daughter Elizabeth Hyde: Captain Mayne Reid had now met his fate; not in the dark-eyed Mexican señorita, but a fair little English girl, a child scarce thirteen years of age. Her name was Elizabeth Hyde, the only daughter of George William Hyde, a lineal descendant of the first Earl of Clarendon. In his novel of “The Child Wife,” he describes his first meeting this young girl: “In less than ten minutes after, he was in love with a child! There are those who will deem this an improbability. Nevertheless it was true; for we are recording an actual experience.” Later on he says to his friend Roseveldt: “That child has impressed me with a feeling I never had before. Her strange look has done it. I feel as if she had sounded the bottom of my soul! It may be fate, destiny, but as I live, Roseveldt, I have a presentiment she will yet be my wife!” The courtship was in itself a romance. Elizabeth Hyde was living in London with Mrs Hyde, the widow of her Uncle Clarendon, who brought her up after her mother’s death. At Mrs Hyde’s house Captain Reid was one evening a guest. Afterwards he told his wife, “I fell in love with you that evening at first sight.” The next morning her aunt said, “Captain Mayne Reid has quite fallen in love with you.” Elizabeth answered, “You can tell him I have not fallen in love with him.” A short time afterwards to the question of some one who had not seen the “lion,” “What is Captain Reid like?” she replied, “Oh, he is a middle-aged gentleman.” This was repeated to Captain Reid, and he afterwards allowed that his vanity was much wounded at the time. A few weeks passed and the “middle-aged gentleman” was quite forgotten. HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID Other matters occupied Elizabeth Hyde’s thoughts. One day she was alone in the drawing-room making a doll’s outfit. Captain Reid entered the room, but she did not recognise him. He looked surprised, and said, “Do you not remember me?” As he had a very foreign appearance, she exclaimed, “Oh, yes, you are Monsieur—” Then he mentioned his name. He asked how old she was, and, on hearing, said, “You are getting old enough to have a lover, and you must have me.” The “middle-aged gentleman” did not, however, come up to her standard. Her uncle was her ideal. After this Captain Reid made long and frequent visits to the aunt’s house, but saw the niece very little. With her, indeed, he found so little favour that she intentionally avoided his society. Mrs Hyde began to believe herself the attraction, as Mayne Reid spent hours in her society. All is fair in love and war.

BETWEEN ANY TWO MOMENTS ARE AN INFINITE NUMBER OF MOMENTS, AND BETWEEN THESE OTHER MOMENTS LIKEWISE AN INFINITE NUMBER, 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.

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1852

In London, Lajos Kossuth became an intimate of Giuseppe Mazzini, and joined his revolutionary committee. ITALY

Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr.’s THE YOUNG VOYAGEURS; OR, THE BOY HUNTERS IN THE NORTH. The author engaged in a plan for Kossuth to travel incognito across Europe as his man-servant “James Hawkins” under a Foreign Office passport “for the free passage of Captain Mayne Reid, British subject, travelling on the Continent with a man-servant.”

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE (initially being issued in London by Chapman and Hall as 2 volumes octavo in blind-stamped brown cloth with spines lettered in gilt, prior to being printed in America) there was talk of the reading of THE DIAL:

Being much alone, during my recovery, I read interminably [page 677] in Mr. Emerson’s Essays, the Dial, Carlyle’s works, George Sand’s romances, (lent me by Zenobia,) and other books which one or another of the brethren or sisterhood had brought with them. Agreeing in little else, most of these utterances were like the cry of some solitary sentinel, whose station was on the outposts of the advance-guard of human progression; or, sometimes, the voice came sadly from among the shattered ruins of the past, but yet had a hopeful echo in the future. They were well adapted (better, at least, than any other intellectual products, the volatile essence of which had heretofore tinctured a printed page) to pilgrims like ourselves, whose present bivouac was considerably farther into the waste of chaos than any mortal army of crusaders had ever marched before. Fourier’s works, also, in a series of horribly tedious volumes, attracted a good deal of my attention, from the analogy which I could not but recognize between his system and our own. There was far less resemblance, it is true, than the world chose to imagine; inasmuch as the two theories differed, as widely as the zenith from the nadir, in their main principles. HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID There was also talk of the reading of Waldo Emerson’s essays:

At some point during this year the proud author sat for his portrait in the studio of G.P.A. Healy at West Street and Washington Street in Boston. His new book was in part about “the Juvenalian and Thoreauvian ideology of Blithedale,” an experiment in community which was “in spite of its Edenic pretensions, located in an area of market gardens catering to the needs of the expanding ‘New England metropolis’.” When “Wakefield” was published in 1836, most of Hawthorne’s audience, like Hawthorne himself, would only have known of the conditions of urban life treated in the sketch by having read about them. Hawthorne takes advantage of the exoticism of a European metropolitan setting, just as Poe was to have done a few years later in “The Man of the Crowd” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Yet by 1852, when THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE was published, the urbanization of American was no longer an abstract possibility; it was, thanks to economic growth, industrial development, and large-scale immigration, an increasingly insistent reality. The intellectual and social movements represented by the Blithedale community were, in large measure, a response to these historic changes. The process of urbanization is therefore never entirely out of sight in THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE. Expressing the ideas implicit in the agrarian experiment, Coverdale offers several standard Transcendentalist criticisms of urban life. Driving through the streets of Boston, he describes “how the buildings, on either side, seemed to press too closely upon us, insomuch that our mighty hearts found barely room enough to throb between them” (3:11). Observing how the snow falling upon the city is blackened by smoke, and molded by boots, Coverdale makes it into a metaphor for the way in which human nature is corrupted by the “falsehood, formality, and error” (3:11) of city life. In HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID addition, Coverdale identifies cities as the sources of the “selfish competition,” which powers the “weary treadmill of established society” (3:19). Yet, although Coverdale will occasionally express the Juvenalian and Thoreauvian ideology of Blithedale, he implicitly recognizes, late in the book, that it may be futile to attempt to arrest the advance of urban civilization. When he observes a crowd at a village lyceum, it seems to him to be “rather suburban than rural” (3:197). The decline of authentic rusticity has been implied earlier when we learn that Blithedale, in spite of its Edenic pretensions, is located in an area of market gardens catering to the needs of the expanding “New England metropolis.” From the very beginning of THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE, we know that the utopian experiment has failed and that Coverdale has returned to the urban existence he originally fled. During this year Kossuth was fundraising practically everywhere in America, including in the First Church at Northampton. He had a letter of introduction to the Motts of Philadelphia, and they invited him to dinner at their home. The Governor’s advisers insisted that he call there only for an informal chat while refraining from breaking bread with any such notorious abolitionists — lest news of such an indiscretion get out and he be embarrassed. During his visit and chat, Friend Lucretia somehow formed the opinion that although this politician was afraid to say so, in his heart he would have to be opposed to human slavery in any form. (Madam Pulzysky, Kossuth’s sister, also visited the Motts, and by way of contrast she was willing to argue the advantages of human slavery with them.)

What sort of man was this Kossuth? Utterly ruthless. Cold-blooded murder was not beyond him, when the result would prove useful. When he had needed to safeguard the royal gems of Hungary, for instance, including the crown of St. Stephen which was held to be necessary for the coronation of any true king of Hungary, he had had them buried at a spot on the banks of the Danube, and he had employed for this work “a detachment of prisoners who were shot after the concealment was complete.” His plot was that this portable property was to be recovered later, packed in marmalade, and carried via Constantinople to “the well-known Philhellene” of Boston, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe. However, when it came to be time, during this year, to dig up the jewels and pack them in marmalade for shipment to Boston, the man whom he would entrust to do this would betray his trust. –Eventually the jewels, including the crown of St. Stephen, would come into the control of the government of Austria. HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

Kossuth somehow suborned the cooperation of William James Stillman in his abortive scheme to recover the jewels, and this American artist sailed off to Hungary on this wild-goose chase.

According to page 153 and pages 161-6 of Larry J. Reynolds’s influence study EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY RENAISSANCE (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988), virtually everything about Henry Thoreau during this period is to be accounted for in terms of the manifold influences upon him and upon the times, of European revolutionaries such as Kossuth here:

Faced with this threat of mental contamination, our guy allegedly has become literally obsessed with maintaining his self-concept and his self-satisfaction: Thoreau, stirred by Lajos Kossuth’s visit and news of European affairs, returned to the manuscript of WALDEN and revised and expanded it throughout 1852. Although engaged by current events, Thoreau fought a spiritual battle to remain aloof, “to preserve the mind’s chastity” by reading “not the Times” but “the Eternities.” Imagining that he had won, he celebrated his victory in WALDEN.... Kossuth’s visit to the United States and Concord brought to a head a struggle Thoreau had been engaged in for some time. During the years following the European revolutions of 1848-1849, Thoreau struggled to develop his spiritual side and rid himself of what he considered a degrading interest in current events. He also tried to communicate to Waldo Emerson and the world his own capacity for heroism. After the disappointing reception of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS in the summer of 1849, Thoreau had become uncertain about how to proceed with his life. Setting the third draft of WALDEN aside as unpublishable, he studied Hinduism, visited Cape Cod several times, took a trip to Canada, and began his Indian book project. The next year, 1851, he started to focus his energies, and, as Lewis Leary has said, these twelve months were a watershed in his life, a time of consolidation, of self- discovery, of preparation for some important new effort. “I find myself uncommonly prepared for some literary work...,” he wrote in his journal on September 7, 1851. “I am prepared not so much for contemplation, as for forceful expression.” Subsequently, 1852 became Thoreau’s annus mirabilis, the year his months of living deliberately yielded a value of its own, he lavished upon it the care and craft that turned it into his richest literary achievement; he also wrote at this time most of his essay “Life without Principle,” which, as Walter Harding has observed, “contains virtually all the fundamental principles upon which he based his life”; and, more important, he radically revised and reshaped WALDEN, changing it from a factual account of his life in the woods into the embryo of a profound spiritual HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID autobiography, illuminated by the idea of spiritual renewal, shaped and informed by the cycle of the seasons. The catalyst for the metamorphosis of WALDEN was Thoreau’s desire to resolve, in writing if not in fact, the conflict he felt between the spiritual and the animal in himself. On the one hand, his recent communion with nature had yielded, as it had in his youth, transcendence — not of the world of material fact, but rather of the world of trivial fact. At times he achieved a state of pure spirituality in the woods. On August 17, 1851, for example, he recorded in his journal, “My heart leaps into my mouth at the sound of the wind in the woods. I, whose life was but yesterday so desultory and shallow, suddenly recover my spirits, my spirituality, through my hearing.... I did not despair of worthier moods, and now I have occasion to be grateful for the flood of life that is flowing over me.” At such times, he reexperienced the ecstasy of his youth, when, as he put it, “the morning and the evening were sweet to me, and I led a life aloof from society of men.” Despite these experiences, which he valued greatly, another aspect of Thoreau’s personality cared about society, cared passionately about justice, about the actions of governments, about the fate of actual men in the nineteenth century. This part of him, however, he associated with his impure animal nature, and he sought to purge it. Thoreau had no way of knowing whether the body was Margaret Fuller’s or not, but she was surely on his mind, and her endeavor to convince others of the legitimacy of her “title” may have been as well. His description, which obviously contrasts with his earlier one, reveals the power and significance the facts possessed in his eyes. Here as always he cared too much about the human to dismiss its annihilation with convincing disdain. During the last months of 1850 and all of 1851, Thoreau dedicated himself to living deliberately, to fronting what he called the essential. During these months, he spent many hours walking through the fields and woods of Concord, recording his observations in his journal. At the same time, he read the newspapers and found himself engaged by what he found. The political news from Europe focused upon the failure of the republican movement, the reaction and reprisals, the futile attempts by exiles such as Mazzini and Kossuth to enlist aid in the struggle for a new round of upheavals. Austria, meanwhile, charged that the United States, especially its new Secretary of State Daniel Webster, was encouraging anti-Austrian sentiment and intruding in the affairs of Europe. On November 17, 1850, Thoreau revealed both his disdain for the news of the day and his concern about its power to capture his attention: “It is a strange age of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to our doors and utter their complaints at our elbows. I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it, — more importunate than an Italian beggar.” At times the newspapers contributed to the problem he called “the village,” which kept him from getting to the woods in spirit, although he walked miles into it bodily. One way he tried to overcome this problem was through the process of diminution, which can be seen in the following outburst of May 1, 1851: “Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like insects they swarm. The HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men.” Quoting from “The Spirit of Lodin,” ... he claims to “look down from my height on nations, / And they become ashes before me.” By adopting an Olympian point of view, Thoreau elevates himself and diminishes men both in size and importance. Like Waldo Emerson in the “Mind and Manners” lectures, he also reaffirms his belief that the regeneration of the self, the building up of the single solitary soul, is far more important than the activities of masses of men, be they parties, tribes, or nations. Throughout 1851, as Thoreau continued to read the papers, he developed a loathing for them linked to that part of himself unable to ignore them. The news, he came to assert, could profane the “very sanctum sanctorum” of the mind: I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my mind with the most insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news, — in newspapers and conversation. It is important to preserve the mind’s chastity in this respect.... By all manners of boards and traps, threatening the extreme penalty of the divine law, ... it behooves us to preserve the purity and sanctity of the mind.... It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember. If I am to be a channel or thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain springs, and not the town sewers, — the Parnassian streams. “I do not think much of the actual,” he wrote himself. “It is something which we have long since done with. It is a sort of vomit in which the unclean love to wallow.” During the writing of the 4th version of WALDEN, which coincided with Kossuth’s tour of the country, Thoreau created a myth about himself as someone who had risen above the affairs of men, someone who felt the animal dying out in him and the spiritual being established. In WALDEN, the European revolutions of 1848-1849, the reaction and reprisals that followed, all the attention given in the newspapers to Kossuth’s visit, to Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état, to a possible war between France and Great Britain, all these go unmentioned, and the absence reveals how earnestly, perhaps even how desperately, Thoreau sought to diminish their importance to his life. In his journals we see his fascination with and antagonism toward the news of national and international affairs. He devotes half of his essay “Life without Principle,” moreover, to a castigation of the news, telling the reader about its dangers, its foulness, its profanity — even mentioning Kossuth by name and ridiculing the “stir” about him: “That excitement about Kossuth, consider how characteristic, but superficial, it was!... For all the fruit 3 of that stir we have the Kossuth hat.” In WALDEN, however, he purifies his book and his persona by ignoring contemporary world affairs. Characterizing himself (untruthfully) as one “who rarely looks into the newspapers,” he claims that “nothing new 3. The Kossuth hat was a black, low-crowned felt hat with left brim fastened to crown, having a peacock feather. The story of its “invention” by John Nicholas Genin (1819-1878) and its rise to high fashion is told in Donald S. Spencer’s LOUIS KOSSUTH AND YOUNG AMERICA — A STUDY IN SECTIONALISM AND FOREIGN POLICY, 1848-1852 (Columbia, London: U of Missouri P, 1977, pages 59-61). This proprietor of a hat shop on Broadway in New-York next to the American Museum, Genin, also designed a bestselling Jenny Lind Riding Hat. HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID does ever happen in foreign parts, a French revolution not excepted.” Thoreau’s struggle to achieve an oriental aloofness from the affairs of men seems to have first become a serious endeavor for him in the summer of 1850, when Emerson asked him to go to Fire Island to retrieve the body and possessions of Margaret Fuller. As Robert D. Richardson, Jr. has pointed out, “Death gave life a new imperative for Thoreau.” Despite Fuller’s rejections of his DIAL contributions in the early 1840s, Thoreau became her friend and admirer, and during her last summer in Concord, he took her boat riding at dawn on the river. The task he faced at Fire Island thus could not have been pleasant, yet in his journal and in letters to others, he strove to project a philosophical serenity about what he found. In a letter to his admirer H.G.O. Blake, he wrote that he had in his pocket a button torn from the coat of Giovanni Angelo, marchése d’Ossoli: “Held up, it intercept the light, — and actual button, — and yet all the life it is connected with is less substantial to me, and interests me less, than my faintest dream. Our thoughts are the epochs in our lives: all else is but a journal of the winds that blew while we were here.” Thoreau had not known Ossoli, so his aloof serenity here comes easily; he had known Fuller though, and his attempt to rise above the fact of her death shows strain. When Thoreau arrived at the site of the wreck, Fuller’s body had not been found, but he stayed in the area and a week later learned that something once human had washed ashore. As he approached it, he saw bones, and in the draft of this letter to Blake he asserted, “There was nothing at all remarkable about them. They were simply some bones lying on the beach. They would not detain the walker there more than so much seaweed. I should think that the fates would not take the trouble to show me any bones again, I so slightly appreciated the favor.” He recalled the experience in his journal some three months later, however, and there revealed the difficulty he had in dismissing what he had seen: “I once went in search of the relics of a human body...,” he wrote, “which had been cast up the day before on the beach, though the sharks had stripped off the flesh.... It was as conspicuous on that sandy plain as if a generation had labored to pile up a cairn there.... It reigned over the shore. That dead body possessed the shore as no living one could. It showed a title to the sands which no living ruler could.” In the winter of 1851-1852, Thoreau’s struggle to assure his own purity became obsessive. Sherman Paul has traced his dissatisfaction with himself to surveying, which Thoreau found trivial and coarsening. Mary Elkins Moller has speculated that Thoreau was also having sexual fantasies about Mrs. Lidian Emerson and felt ashamed of them. Whatever the truth of these views (and I think the second takes Thoreau’s references to chastity too literally), the fact remains that Thoreau at this time was also struggling to escape from his interest in current events. Surprisingly, this private denouncer of the press had become a subscriber to Horace Greeley’s Weekly Tribune, a fact that heightened the tension he felt about preserving his mind’s chastity. On January 20, 1852, he wrote, I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper in a week, for I now take the weekly Tribune, and for a HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID few days past, it seems to me, I have not dwelt in Concord; the sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters.... To read the things distant and sounding betrays us into slighting these which are then apparently near and small. We learn to look abroad for our mind and spirit’s daily nutriment, and what is this dull town to me? ...All summer and far into the fall I unconsciously went by the newspapers and the news, and now I find it was because the morning and the evening were full of news to me. My walks were full of incidents. I attended not to the affairs of Europe, but to my own affairs in Concord fields. Thoreau’s quest for purity and serenity had become particularly difficult because of the excitement surrounding Lajos Kossuth’s visit and the new interest Waldo Emerson had taken in things Thoreau considered trivial, including Kossuth. The gradual estrangement of the two men may have begun while Emerson was in England in 1847-1848, writing letters home for Lidian and Thoreau which were little more than catalogs of the great people he had met. Although we know this was his way of providing himself a record of his activities, it probably disappointed. After his return from Europe, Emerson had lectured throughout the country, praising England and its people, but when he engaged Thoreau in a conversation on the topic, Henry, not surprisingly, said that the English were “mere soldiers” and their business was “winding up.” In the summer of 1851, Emerson, unaware of the new scope and grandeur of Thoreau’s journal, unaware of the growth in his spiritual development, wrote off his friend as one who “will not stick.” “He is a boy,” Emerson added, “& will be an old boy. Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding Empires, but not, if at the end of years, it is only beans.” In a like manner, Thoreau at about this time began to see that his friend would continue to disappoint him. He bristles at Emerson’s patronizing attitude; he disagreed with his treatment of Margaret Fuller in the MEMOIRS; and most of all he resented his new worldliness. In ENGLISH TRAITS (1856) Emerson, drawing on his lectures of 1848-1850, would celebrate the manners of the British aristocracy and assert that “whatever tends to form manners or to finish men, has a great value. Every one who has tasted the delight of friendship will respect every social guard which our manners can establish.” For Thoreau, there was “something devilish in manners” that could come between friends, and writing of Emerson in the winter of 1851, he complained, “One of the best men I know often offends me by uttering made words — the very best words, of course, or dinner speeches, most smooth and gracious and fluent repartees.... O would you but be simple and downright! Would you but cease your palaver! It is the misfortune of being a gentleman and famous.” As Joel Porte has observed, the failure of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS and Emerson’s “manifest success” had probably contributed to Thoreau’s bitterness. HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID A pushy little ultra-conservative mofo, the Reverend Professor Francis Bowen had what was termed at the time “a remarkable talent for giving offense.” Precisely while Kossuth was riding the crest of the wave of American political correctness, Bowen publicly denounced that revolutionary. (Nota Bene: This differs from Henry Thoreau’s reaction not merely as public denunciation differs from private distaste but also as cheap motivation differs from abundant reason.)

But this is all very easy to figure out, at least as far as Larry J. Reynolds is concerned — what has happened was merely that Kossuth has come between Waldo Emerson and Thoreau! – Wow, now that we understand that, it all becomes perfectly clear. Continuing to quote, from pages 166-70 of this extraordinarily confident EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY RENAISSANCE influence study: In the early months of 1852, Kossuth’s visit to Concord widened the separation between Thoreau and Emerson into a permanent gulf. As Thoreau spent more and more time communing with nature, trying to cleanse himself of what he called the “news,” Emerson saw fit to criticize him for these efforts. Frustrated, Thoreau declared in his journal, “I have got to that pass with my friend that our words do not pass with each other for what they are worth. We speak in vain; there is none to hear. He finds fault with me that I walk alone, when I pine for want of a companion; that I commit my thoughts to a diary even on my walks, instead of seeking to share them generously with a friend; curses my practice even.” Emerson, who would soon lecture on the “Conduct of Life” in Canada and then deliver his “Address to Kossuth” in Concord, could not see the heroism in Thoreau’s aloofness. Thoreau, meanwhile, who sought to become a better man through his solitary walks, felt unappreciated and frustrated. On May 4, in an entry both defensive and immodest, he dismissed the great Kossuth and those like Emerson who honored him: This excitement about Kossuth is not interesting to me, it is so superficial. It is only another kind of dancing or of politics. Men are making speeches to him all over the country, but each expresses only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stands on truth.... You can pass your hand under the largest mob, a nation in revolution even, and, however solid a bulk they may make, like a hail-cloud in the atmosphere, you may not meet so much as a cobweb of support. They may not rest, even by a point, on eternal foundations. But an individual standing on truth you cannot pass your hand under, for his foundations reach to the centre of the universe. So superficial these men and their doings, it is life on a leaf or a chip which has nothing but air or water beneath. The length and tone of this entry reveals the importance of the matter to him; obviously, he considers himself the “individual standing on truth,” whose depth far exceeds that of any “nation in revolution” or military hero. And one week later, during the excitement surrounding Kossuth’s visit to Concord, during the afternoon of Emerson’s speech and reception, Thoreau, in order to show how little he thought of these matters, entered only the following in his journal: “P.M. — Kossuth here.” All of Thoreau’s struggle with current events, with Kossuth’s visit, with Emerson’s worldliness and disesteem lay behind the important fourth version of WALDEN. As he revised and expanded his manuscript throughout 1852, Thoreau endowed his persona with HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID a serene aloofness, creating a hero interested in eternal truths, not pointless political ones. Having discovered that “a sane and growing man revolutionizes every day” and that no “institutions of man can survive a morning experience,” he fashioned an answer to his best friend, who thought Kossuth a great man and Henry Thoreau an unsociable boy. As he revised WALDEN, Thoreau made major additions.... The thrust of almost all of these additions is to show how nature, which is holy and heroic, can bestow those virtues on one who practices chastity. His central statement on chastity was added, of course, to “Higher Laws” and asserts that “we are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as out higher nature slumbers.... Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open.... He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established. Not surprisingly, Thoreau presents himself as having achieved this assuredness. He is among the blessed. The chastity Thoreau has in mind is as much intellectual as physical, and to attain it one must abstain not merely from sexual intercourse but also from trivial thoughts and interests. In his addition to “Solitude” he explains the process it involves: “By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent.” The result is a feeling of doubleness, whereby a person “may be either a drift-wood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it.” He admits that “this doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes,” but he makes it clear that it is worth the price. In “The Ponds” he adds paragraphs stressing the “serenity and purity” of Walden and suggests a correspondence between it and himself. “Many men have been likened to it,” he writes, “But few deserve that honor.” That he has earned the honor through his way of life is a point made repeatedly. In his addition to “Baker Farm”, Thoreau highlights the blessedness which communion with nature has accorded him. Like Walt Whitman’s persona in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” or more recently Loren Eiseley’s star thrower, Thoreau’s hero becomes literally illuminated by nature. He stands one day at the base “of a rainbow’s arch, which filled the lower stratum of the atmosphere, tinged the grass and leaves around, and dazzling [him] as if [he] looked through colored crystal.” TO emphasize the religious implications of the experience, he adds, “As I walked on the railroad causeway, I used to wonder at the halo of light around my shadow, and would fain fancy myself one of the elect.” In the additions to the “Conclusion,” Thoreau makes explicit the successful effort to achieve spiritual renewal through aloofness. “I delight to come to my bearings, —” he declares, “not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk even with the Builder of the universe, if I may, — not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by.” The place he would sit, of course, is far above men and their doings, which diminishes them in his eyes. And this particular view is the one dramatized in his most famous addition, the classic battle of the ants in “Brute Neighbors.” The episode HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID comes from an entry made in his journal on January 22, 1852, while Kossuth was visiting Washington and while Horace Greeley in his Tribune and James Watson Webb in his Courier and Enquirer were debating the nature of the Hungarian War. Thoreau, like most of his contemporaries, found himself engaged (against his will, however) by what called “the great controversy now going on in the world between the despotic and the republican principle,” and this is why he associates the two tribes of warring ants with the European revolutionary scene and calls them “the red republicans and the black despots or imperialists.” His description of their war has become famous because of its frequent use in anthologies, and is surely right when he says that one reason for its selection is that it is “easily taken from its context.” Raymond Adams errs though in adding that “it is an episode that hardly has so much as a context.” By virtue of both its hidden connection to revolutionary Europe and its subtle connection to the theme of spiritual serenity, the episode is part of larger contexts that shaped its features. As Thoreau describes the battle of the ants, he reveals that side of his personality engaged by physical heroism in the actual world. The ferocity and resolve of the combatants, the mutilation and gore that attend their life-and-death struggle thoroughly engage him. “I felt for the rest of that day,” he admits, “as if I had had my feelings excited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human battle before my door.” On the other hand, through the use of the mock-heroic, Thoreau generates an irony that allows him to stress once more the spiritual side of his persona, the side that dismisses politics, revolutions, and wars as trivial. The mother of a single red ant, we are told, has charged her son “to return with his shield or upon it,” and the fighting ants, the narrator speculates, could, not to his surprise, have “had their respective musical bands stationed on some eminent chip, and played their national airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants.” With such irony Thoreau diminishes the importance, not of the ants, but of the men they resemble. Just as he claimed that Kossuth and his American admirers were involved in “life on a leaf or a chip,” he here brings the metaphor to life and makes the same statement about warring nations. The purpose of this addition, and of his others, is to show that true heroism is associated with aloof serenity, not brutal warfare. When Thoreau revised his journal entry for inclusion in WALDEN, he claimed the ant battle occurred “in the Presidency of James Knox Polk, five years before the passage of Daniel Webster’s Fugitive-Slave Bill,” thus making it contemporaneous with his stay at the pond and registering his criticism, as he had in “Civil Disobedience,” of the Mexican War. Ultimately, the issue of slavery disturbed him far more than revolution in Europe, and he found it difficult to resist the temptation to speak out against it. In later versions of WALDEN, Thoreau expanded upon the ideas he introduced in 1852, extending his treatment of the triumph of the spiritual over the animal and filling out his account of the progress of the seasons, which, of course, complements the theme of renewal. Meanwhile, paradoxically, he remained a deeply passionate man, more engaged than others of HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID his acquaintance by the “trivial Nineteenth Century.” When the slave Anthony Burns was arrested in 1854, Thoreau, burning with rage, publicly denounced the Massachusetts authorities in his inflammatory “Slavery in Massachusetts”: “I walk toward one of our ponds,” he thundered, “but what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base? ...Who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle? The remembrance of my country spoils my walk. My thoughts are murder to the State, and involuntarily go plotting against her.” Five years later, of course, he stepped forward to defend John Brown more ardently than anyone else in the country. Clearly then, in 1852, when Thoreau endowed the persona of WALDEN with remarkable purity and serenity, he was mythologizing himself; he was, in response to the “tintinnabulum from without,” creating a new kind of hero for a revolutionary age.

Have we got this very clear now? According to Larry J. Reynolds, it has been demonstrated that Thoreau, a boy playing at life, was not merely fighting a spiritual battle to remain aloof but indeed was fantasizing that he had won this battle, and celebrating his final victory. But Thoreau has been detected as nevertheless full of bitterness, as resentful, as feeling unappreciated and frustrated. Fundamentally a “defensive and immodest” pretense rather than any sort of record of a spiritual journey, WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS merely celebrated cheaply in words what its author could not accomplish in fact: the big win in a struggle between the spiritual in its author and the warrior-wannabee. This is Thoreau as a mere self-deluding boy who, when confronted by a real life hero out of the real world of struggle, struggles to stand “aloof” in order to console himself by considering himself to be the true hero, to be indeed the “individual standing on truth” whose real worth far exceeds the appreciation offered to any such mere celebrity wrapped up in mere mundane push-and- shove concerns. It is hard to imagine that Reynolds is not terming Thoreau a self-deluded coward.

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.

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1853

Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr.’s THE DESERT HOME, OR ADVENTURES OF A FAMILY LOST IN THE WILDERNESS: THE ENGLISH FAMILY ROBINSON and THE BOY HUNTERS, OR ADVENTURES IN SEARCH OF A WHITE BUFFALO (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields). Henry Thoreau would make notes from THE DESERT HOME in about 1856 and THE BOY HUNTERS in about 1857 in his Indian Notebook #10 and Fact Book (these books are “easy reading” and our guy might have gotten everything he needed out of them in 15 minutes of quickie standing- in-the-aisle perusal at Stacy’s bookstore in Concord).

The author continued his innocent flirtation with his publisher’s young daughter: “My Little Zoë, — Only say that you love me, and I will be with you at once.” My reply was: “I think I do love you.” On receipt of this the Captain put himself into an express train, quickly covering the hundred and fifty miles which separated us. My lover told me that when we parted in London he had feared that it was impossible to make me love him, but he could never forget me, and, in spite of all obstacles, had the firm conviction I should yet be his. HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID My father rather reluctantly gave his consent to our marriage, the date of which was then fixed.

YOU HAVE TO ACCEPT EITHER THE REALITY OF TIME OVER THAT OF CHANGE, OR CHANGE OVER TIME — IT’S PARMENIDES, OR HERACLITUS. I HAVE GONE WITH HERACLITUS.

February 24, Thursday: The British Foreign Office in London issued a passport “for the free passage of Captain Mayne Reid, British subject, travelling on the Continent with a man-servant, James Hawkins, British subject.” This “James Hawkins” was to have been Lajos Kossuth traveling incognito — except that Kossuth would back out his co-conspiracy with Reid at the last moment.

The Chinese Christian Army took Anqing, the capital of Anhui province. CHINESE CIVIL WAR

HISTORY’S NOT MADE OF WOULD. WHEN SOMEONE REVEALS, FOR INSTANCE, AS ABOVE, THAT KOSSUTH “WOOD” BACK OUT HIS CO- CONSPIRACY WITH REID AT THE LAST MOMENT, S/HE DISCLOSES THAT WHAT IS BEING CRAFTED IS NOT REALITY BUT PREDESTINARIANISM. THE RULE OF REALITY IS THAT THE FUTURE HASN’T EVER HAPPENED, YET. UNTIL THE MOMENT THAT KOSSUTH DOES BACK OUT, THIS ISN’T REAL, THIS IS A MERE POTENTIALITY.

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1854

Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr.’s 1852 THE YOUNG VOYAGEURS; OR, THE BOY HUNTERS IN THE NORTH was reprinted in Boston by Ticknor, Reed, and Fields (Henry Thoreau would comment on his reading of this on March 9th in his journal, and make notes in his Indian Notebook #8 and Fact Book).

After this author’s marriage to his publisher’s young daughter there were any number of amusing incidents in and about London, as people continually presumed her to be his daughter (although she would fondly remember all these incidents, I will here relate but one): The milliner, looking very much astonished, said: “I beg your pardon, sir, I thought the young lady was about returning to school, and that you were choosing a bonnet for her to take.”

IT IS NO COINCIDENCE THAT IT IS MORTALS WHO CONSUME OUR HISTORICAL ACCOUNTS, FOR WHAT WE ARE ATTEMPTING TO DO IS EVADE THE RESTRICTIONS OF THE HUMAN LIFESPAN. (IMMORTALS, HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID WITH NOTHING TO LIVE FOR, TAKE NO HEED OF OUR STORIES.)

March 9, Thursday: In the afternoon Henry Thoreau walked to the Great Meadows, and conducted an experiment to verify an account he had seen in “Captain” Mayne Reid’s THE YOUNG VOYAGEURS; OR, THE BOY HUNTERS IN THE NORTH, an American edition of which had just been published in Boston.

March 9. A.M.— Clearing up. Water is fast taking place of ice on the river and meadows, and morning and evening we begin to have some smooth water prospects. Saw this morning a muskrat sitting “in a round form on the ice” or, rather, motionless like the top of a stake or a mass of muck on the edge of the ice. He then dove for a clam, whose shells he left on the ice beside him. Boiled a handful of rock-tripe (Umbilicaria Muhlenbergii) — which Tuckerman says “was the favorite Rock- Tripe in Franklin’s Journey” — for more than an hour. It produced a black pulp, looking somewhat like boiled tea leaves, and was insipid like rice or starch. The dark water in which it was boiled had a bitter taste and was slightly gelatinous. The pulp was not positively disagreeable to the palate. The account in “The Young Voyageurs” is correct.

P.M.— To Great Meadows. Peter H. says that he saw gulls (?) and sheldrakes about a month ago, when the meadow was flooded. I detect the trout minnows not an inch long by their quick motions or quirks, soon concealing themselves. The river channel is open, but there is a very thin ice of recent formation over the greater part of the meadows. It is a still, moist, louring day, and the water is smooth. Saw several flocks of large grayish and whitish or speckled ducks, — I suppose the same that P. calls sheldrakes. They, like ducks commonly, incline to fly in a line about an equal distance apart. I hear the common sort of quacking from them. It is pleasant to see them at a distance alight on the water with a slanting flight, launch themselves, and sail along so stately. The pieces of ice, large and small, drifting along, help to conceal them, supply so many objects on the water. There is this last night’s ice on the surface, but the old ice still at the bottom of the meadows. In the spaces of still open water I see the reflection of the hills and woods, which for so long I have not seen, and it gives expression to the face of nature. The face of nature is lit up by these reflections in still water in the spring, Sometimes you see only the top of a distant hill reflected far within the meadow, where a dull-gray field of ice

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID intervenes between the water and the shore. HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1855

Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr.’s THE WHITE CHIEF; A LEGEND OF NORTH MEXICO and THE FOREST EXILES; OR, THE PERILS OF A PERUVIAN FAMILY AMID THE WILDS OF THE AMAZON (Boston: Ticknor and Fields). In about 1856 Henry Thoreau made notes from THE FOREST EXILES in his Indian Notebook #10 and Fact Book.

(Note that this material is “easy reading.” Since Thoreau wasn’t your typical one-handed reader of such popular materials, who needs to consult with them in the privacy of their own bedchamber, he might well have derived everything he needed from this volume by standing for 15 minutes in the aisle of Stacy’s bookstore in Concord writing on a scrap of paper with the stub of a pencil.)

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

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1856

Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr.’s THE HUNTER’S FEAST; OR, CONVERSATIONS AROUND THE CAMP-FIRE (New York: DeWitt & Davenport), THE BUSH BOYS; OR, THE HISTORY AND ADVENTURES OF A CAPE FARMER AND HIS FAMILY IN THE WILD KAROOS OF SOUTHERN AFRICA, and THE QUADROON: OR, A LOVER’S ADVENTURES IN LOUISIANA. In about this year Henry Thoreau made notes from this author’s 1853 THE DESERT HOME, OR ADVENTURES OF A FAMILY LOST IN THE WILDERNESS: THE ENGLISH FAMILY ROBINSON, his 1855 THE FOREST EXILES, and his 1856 THE HUNTER’S FEAST, in his Indian Notebook #10 and Fact Book.

ONE COULD BE ELSEWHERE, AS ELSEWHERE DOES EXIST. ONE CANNOT BE ELSEWHEN SINCE ELSEWHEN DOES NOT. (TO THE WILLING MANY THINGS CAN BE EXPLAINED, THAT FOR THE UNWILLING WILL REMAIN FOREVER MYSTERIOUS.) Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1857

Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr.’s THE WAR-TRAIL: OR THE HUNT OF THE WILD HORSE; A ROMANCE OF THE PRAIRIE. In about this year Henry Thoreau made notes from this author’s 1853 THE BOY HUNTERS, OR ADVENTURES IN SEARCH OF A WHITE BUFFALO in his Indian Notebook #10 and Fact Book. HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1858

Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr.’s THE PLANT HUNTERS OR ADVENTURES AMONG THE HIMALAYA MOUNTAINS, OSCEOLA THE SEMINOLE, OR, THE RED FAWN OF THE FLOWER LAND, and THE YOUNG YÄGERS, OR, A NARRATIVE OF HUNTING ADVENTURES IN SOUTHERN AFRICA. Henry Thoreau made notes from THE YOUNG YÄGERS in his Indian Notebook #10 and Fact Book. HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1860

Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr.’s THE LONE RANCHE: A TALE OF THE “STAKED PLAIN” and THE SCALP HUNTERS; OR, ROMANTIC ADVENTURES IN NORTHERN MEXICO.

In London, Victoria Station opened.

In London, the Hampstead Junction Railway opened from Kentish Town to Willesden.

The main gate to the author’s imitation Mexican “ranche” outside London:

THE AGE OF REASON WAS A PIPE DREAM, OR AT BEST A PROJECT. ACTUALLY, HUMANS HAVE ALMOST NO CLUE WHAT THEY ARE DOING, WHILE CREDITING THEIR OWN LIES ABOUT WHY THEY ARE DOING IT.

Thomas Mayne Reid “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1861

December 14, Saturday: Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, beloved Prince Consort of Queen Victoria, succumbed to the typhoid fever at Windsor Castle. Oh you horrid boy Dirty Bertie you spawn of Satan you killed your own father my beloved Albert for whom I will now grieve for all of my life! Queen Victoria continued to carry out her constitutional duties such as reading all diplomatic despatches. However, she completely withdrew from public view and now spent most of her time in the Scottish Highlands at her home at Balmoral Castle, drinking claret mixed with whiskey. Victoria even refused requests from her government to open Parliament in person. Politicians began to question whether Victoria was earning the money that the State paid her. While at Balmoral the queen became very close to John Brown, a Scottish servant. Victoria’s friendship with Brown caused some concern and rumors began to circulate that the two had secretly married. Hostility towards Victoria increased and some Radical MPs even spoke in favor of abolishing the British monarchy and replacing it with a republic.

Upon the demise of Victoria’s main squeeze, Charles Dickens canceled some of his public readings of GREAT EXPECTATIONS.

Psalm 146 for solo voices, double chorus and orchestra by Anton Bruckner was performed for the initial time, at St. Florian.

Heinrich August Marschner died of a heart attack in Hannover, at the age of 66.

The author Captain Mayne Reid defended the accuracy and originality of his page-turner THE QUADROON about interracial sexuality in New Orleans context, in the pages of the Athenaeum: During a residence of many years —commencing in 1839, and ending, with intervals of absence, in 1848— the author of “The Quadroon” was an eye-witness of nearly a score of slave auctions, at which beautiful Quadroon girls were sold in bankruptcy, and bought up, too, notoriously with the motives that actuated the “Gayarre” of his tale; and upon such actual incidents was the story of “The Quadroon” founded. Most of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID book was written in 1852; but, as truthfully stated in its preface, in consequence of the appearance of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” its publication was postponed until 1856. The writing of it was finished early in 1855. With regard to “The Quadroon” and the Adelphi drama, the resemblance is just that which must ever exist between a melodrama and the romance from which it is taken; and when “The Octoroon” was first produced in New York —January, 1860— its scenes and characters were at once identified by the newspaper critics of that city as being transcripts from the pages of “The Quadroon.” Some of its scenes as at present performed are original —at least, they are not from “The Quadroon”— but these introduced incidents are generally believed not to have improved the story; and one of them —the poisoning of the heroine— Mr Boucicault has had the good taste to alter, restoring the beautiful Quadroon to the happier destiny to which the romance had consigned her. It might be equally in good taste if the clever dramatist were to come out before the public with a frank avowal of the source whence his drama has been drawn. HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1862

4 Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr.’s THE MAROON. A NOVEL.

4. You do understand –I hope– that although in this PDF file I am giving you a whole potfull of publications, this is only a sampling out of this popular author’s literary productivity. Nobody has as yet attempted any complete publication list for this prolific writer. HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1863

Fall: Had Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. not been so gravely injured during the Mexican War, who knows what real adventures might have come his way rather than all the totally imaginary adventures about which he wrote to such great profit! However, his physical constitution was such that he was still able to participate in the new British sport known as lawn croquet, and so he produced the landmark treatise CROQUET.

“All’s fair in love and war, but croquet is different.”

As a highly competitive croquet player the “Captain” delighted to send his opponent’s ball “to Hong-Kong.” As an author he delighted in a successful lawsuit in Chancery for plagiarizing his treatise, humiliating Lord Arthur Algernon Capell, 6th Earl of Essex. HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1864

Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr.’s THE CLIFF CLIMBERS; OR, THE LONE HOME IN THE HIMALAYAS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1865

Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr.’s THE BOY SLAVES and THE WHITE GAUNTLET. A ROMANCE. HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1866

Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr.’s THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN, A STRANGE TALE OF TEXAS.

November: Imitation Mexico: Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. was forced into bankruptcy, primarily due to the expenses of the “Ranche,” his “Mexican hacienda” sprawling across the English countryside at Gerrard’s Cross in Buckinghamshire, just outside London.

Real Mexico: Seeking to protect American residents, Brevet Brigadier-General Thomas D. Sedgwick and 100 men obtained the surrender of the Mexican town of Matamoras, but after 3 days was ordered to withdraw. His act would be repudiated by the executive branch of the federal government in Washington DC. US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1867

Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr.’s THE GIRAFFE-HUNTERS, AFLOAT IN THE FOREST; OR A VOYAGE AMONG THE TREE-TOPS, and THE OCEAN WAIFS; A STORY OF ADVENTURE ON LAND AND SEA.

October: Bankrupt, Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. and his wife Elizabeth Hyde Reid relocated from England to a furnished rental in Newport, Rhode Island. In New-York, the author would found Onward Magazine.

By this point Thomas Carlyle’s “Shooting Niagara” had sold 7,000 copies: One always rather likes the Nigger; evidently a poor blockhead with good dispositions, with affections, attachments, — with a turn for Nigger Melodies, and the like: — he is the only Savage of all the coloured races that doesn’t die out on sight of the White Man; but can actually live beside him, and work and increase and be merry. The Almighty Maker has appointed him to be a Servant. Under penalty of Heaven’s curse, neither party to this pre-appointment shall neglect or misdo his duties therein; — and it is certain (though as yet widely unknown), Servantship on the nomadic principle, at the rate of so many shillings per day, cannot be other than misdone. The whole world rises in shrieks against you, on hearing of such a thing.

THOMAS CARLYLE HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1868

Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr.’s THE WHITE SQUAW, AND THE YELLOW CHIEF, A ROMANCE OF THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS and THE HELPLESS HAND: A TALE OF BACKWOODS RETRIBUTION.

July 9, Thursday: Mayne Reid’s father the Reverend Thomas Mayne Reid, Sr. died at the age of 92.

The Democrats closed their convention after nominating Horatio Seymour of New York, with Missouri’s Francis P. Blair, Jr. as his running mate.

Amendment XIV to the federal Constitution of the United States of America was adopted, requires each state to provide equal protection under the law to all people within its jurisdiction and, cynically we may add, on this day South Caroline and Louisiana were readmitted to the federal union despite the fact that they blatantly had no intention of ever providing such equal protection under the law.

THE MATTER, EXPLAINED

Unionist govt. appointed by Missouri Constitutional Convention 1861 Missouri

Elected Union & unelected rump CSA governments from 1861 Kentucky

July 24, 1866 Tennessee

June 22, 1868 Arkansas

June 25, 1868 Florida

July 4, 1868 North Carolina

July 9, 1868 South Carolina

July 9, 1868 Louisiana

July 13, 1868 Alabama

July 21, 1868; July 15, 1870 Georgia

January 26, 1870 Virginia

February 23, 1870 Mississippi

March 30, 1870 Texas HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1869

Thomas Mayne Reid’s THE FATAL CORD: A TALE OF BACKWOODS RETRIBUTION. HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1870

Thomas Mayne Reid’s THE CASTAWAYS: A STORY OF ADVENTURE IN THE WILDS OF BORNEO and THE VEE- BOERS; A TALE OF ADVENTURE IN SOUTHERN AFRICA. –Yet more “easy reiding.”

June: Thomas Mayne Reid needed to check into the St. Luke Hospital of New-York due to suppuration of the wound he had received in 1847 at the fortress of Chapultepec (I will spare you an image of what the dashing handsome Captain looked like by this point in his life, although such an image does exist).

Professor Louis Agassiz of Harvard University demonstrated how much respect he had for academic freedom of speech and of expression, by declaring:

[E]very one who has something to say, is welcome. Let him only prove his qualification to say something and he should be heard.

THE SCIENCE OF 1870

“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 HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

Our national birthday, Monday the 4th of July: At Woodstock, Connecticut, President Ulysses S. Grant participated in 4th-of-July opening exercises.

In Newark, New Jersey 13 young ladies dressed up to represent the 13 original states and were paraded in a carriage.

In Marysville, Pennsylvania at a picnic of the black military companies, there was a riot and several people got shot. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY

Joseph Aitteon (or Atteon) died on the West Branch of the Penobscot River near Millinocket “Place of Islands,”5 as he attempted to rescue three boatmen who had gotten caught in a log jam.

Evidently the beloved author Thomas Mayne Reid wasn’t getting as much attention as he considered his due, for he would write to the Sun from his hospital bed in the St. Luke Hospital of New-York protesting the loud manner in which Americans chose to celebrate their nation’s birthday: To the Editor of the Sun. 5.Smith, Marion Whitney. THOREAU’S WEST BRANCH GUIDES. 1971. HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID Sir,— I have been for some days an inmate of Saint Luke’s Hospital, a sufferer from a severe and dangerous malady. To save my life calls for the highest surgical skill, along with combination of the most favourable circumstances, among them quiet. And yet during the whole of yesterday, and part of the day before (the Lord’s Day), the air around me has been resonant with what, in the bitterness of my spirit, I pronounce a feu d’enfer. It has resembled an almost continuous fusillade of small arms, at intervals varied by a report like the bursting of a bombshell or the discharge of a cannon. I am told that this infernal fracas proceeds from a row of dwelling houses in front of this hospital, and that it is caused by the occupants of these dwellings or their children. Accustomed in early life to the roar of artillery, my nerves are not easily excited by concussive sounds, and, therefore, I have not been seriously affected by them. But, alas! how different with scores of my fellow-sufferers in the hospital, beside the couch of many of whom death stands waiting for his victim. I am informed by my nurses, intelligent and experienced men, that they have known several cases where death has not only been hastened, but actually caused by the nervous startling and torture inflicted by these Fourth of July celebrations. I have been also informed that the venerable and philanthropic founder of this valuable institution has done all in his power to have this cruel infliction stayed, even by personal appeal to the inhabitants of the houses in question, and that he has been met by refusal, and the reply, “We have a right to do as we please upon our own premises.” I need not point out the utter falsity of this assured view of civic rights, but I would remark that the man, who, even under the sanction of long custom, and the pretence of country’s love, permits his children, through mere wanton sport, to murder annually one or more of his fellow citizens, I say that such a man is not likely to make out of these children citizens who will be distinguished either for their patriotism or humanity. In the name of humanity I ask you, sir, to call public attention to this great cruelty, and, if possible, have it discontinued. Yours very truly, Mayne Reid. Saint Luke’s Hospital, July 5th, 1870.

October 22, Saturday: Thomas Mayne Reid and his wife Elizabeth Hyde Reid relocated from the United States to Ross on Wye, Herefordshire. HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1873

Thomas Mayne Reid’s THE DEATH SHOT. –Yet more “easy reiding.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1877

Thomas Mayne Reid’s GWEN WYNN; A ROMANCE OF THE WYE. –Yet more “easy reiding.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1878

Thomas Mayne Reid’s THE MAN-EATERS AND OTHER ODD PEOPLE: A POPULAR DESCRIPTION OF SINGULAR RACES OF MAN. –Yet more “easy reiding.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1880

Thomas Mayne Reid’s GASPAR, THE GAUCHO, OR, LOST ON THE PAMPAS: A TALE OF THE GRAN CHACO. – Yet more “easy reiding.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1883

October 22, Monday: Toward the end of his life, no longer young and no longer handsome, suffering from his pustulating war wound, Thomas Mayne Reid had entered what his widow would describe as an incapacitating melancholia. He died at the age of 65 in London (the burial marker in Kensal Green Cemetery would depict, most appropriately, a crossed sword and pen).

That evening in beautiful Dresden, a Cello Sonata in A op.36 was being performed for the initial time, with the composer Edvard Grieg himself at the piano.

The Metropolitan Opera House opened its doors on Broadway at 39th Street in New-York, offering a partial performance in Italian of Charles Gounod’s French-language FAUST tale of a sorcerer who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge, power, youth, and love, based loosely on the initial portion of an 1808 German-language poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, FAUST. DER TRAGÖDIE ERSTER TEIL. HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1900

Elizabeth Hyde Reid’s MAYNE REID: A MEMOIR OF HIS LIFE (Ward and Downey, 12, York Street, Covent Garden, London, 1890): “It was officially stated that ‘Mayne Reid is the most popular English author in Russia’; and you will find the whole of Mayne Reid’s works translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, and for all we know to the contrary into Arabic, and the native tongue of the Red Indian.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

1999

Harmon D. Smith’s MY FRIEND, MY FRIEND: THE STORY OF THOREAU’S RELATIONSHIP WITH EMERSON (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P).

(It is on page 162 of this that we find the disingenuous observation “Dissatisfied with the present, Thoreau looked back in time for happiness.... In an attempt to recapture that sense of well-being he had begun reading Mayne Reid’s ‘Books of Adventures for Boys,’ immersing himself in each volume of the series as it appeared in the 1850s.”)

Harmon D. Smith of Columbia College’s Class of 1956 had a career in advertising before taking an early retirement to write full time. He has completed a biographical study of male friendship in his book, “My Friend, My Friend: The Story of Thoreau’s Relationship with Emerson” and a 2001 collection of short stories “Tunnel of Love.” I obtained his book on male friendship by interlibrary loan and read it without finding it sufficiently useful to make any notes. The only impression I retain now is that the book might well have been written in the 1930s or 1940s, the thoughts it expresses being so typical of the Emersonian writings of that period of scholarship rather than of our current epoch. He is evidently a Freudian true believer who supposes he has an ability to look into other people’s minds at long distances in space and time. There was initially a problem with the listing of his book on Amazon.com, etc. in that they had him confused with an author on religious and ethical subjects, a Reverend Harmon L. Smith. Here are reviews: The classic literary mentoring tale is fully imagined, through graceful writing and the right amount of psychologizing.... Smith’s gift is making the ambiguities, nuances, and importance of this friendship come alive. If only Emerson and Thoreau had been Edwardian women, Masterpiece Theatre would have its next miniseries. — Kirkus Reviews Smith brings Thoreau, Emerson, and many others in their circle alive as rounded characters and sets them in the context of their times. His emphasis upon personal rather than intellectual relations between Thoreau and Emerson allows us to understand each man and his writing in a fresh way. — Shaun O’Connell, author of IMAGINING BOSTON: A LITERARY LANDSCAPE Smith’s study provides an instructive glimpse into the ways that the seeds of personal relationships produce the fruits of intellectual endeavor. Recommended. — Library Journal Henry David Thoreau was a twenty-year-old scholarship student at Harvard when he met Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1837. Emerson, fourteen years Thoreau’s senior and independently wealthy, had recently shaken the intellectual world of New England with the publication of “Nature.” Despite the disparity in their HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID circumstances, Thoreau and Emerson quickly formed a close relationship that lasted until Thoreau’s death at the age of forty-four. This book tells the story of their friendship. Harmon Smith emphasizes their personal bond, but also shows how their relationship affected their thought and writing, and was in turn influenced by their careers. Without Emerson’s interest and support, it is unlikely that Thoreau could have expended the energy on writing that enabled him to achieve greatness. By inviting Thoreau into his home to live during two different periods in the 1840’s, Emerson effectively made Thoreau “one of the family.” He provided him with work, lent him money, and allowed him to build a cabin on the shore of Walden Pond. Emerson also broadened Thoreau’s horizon immeasurably by introducing him to an ever-widening circle of friends and colleagues. Although the bond between Thoreau and Emerson was strong, their needs were often greatly at variance. While this led to a prolonged period of estrangement between them, they were ultimately able to reconcile their differences. Many years after Thoreau died, Emerson could look back over his long life and say that Henry had been his best friend. Since the thoughts and feelings of the two men are so well documented in their journals and letters, Smith is able to trace the pattern of their emotional involvement in great detail. What emerges is both a remarkable portrait of their relationship and an intimate look at the nature of friendship itself.

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 HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID

Prepared: April 7, 2016 HDT WHAT? INDEX

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

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

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

“CAPTAIN” THOMAS MAYNE REID THOMAS MAYNE REID 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.