MACARISM: “WE CANNOT CAST OUT THE DEVIL OF SLAVERY BY
THE DEVIL [OF WAR].”
A friend contacted me recently to inquire what Thoreau’s attitude toward the civil war had been. When I responded that Thoreau had felt ashamed that he ever became aware of such a thing, my friend found this to be at variance with the things that other Thoreau scholars had been telling him and inquired of me if I “had any proof” for such a nonce attitude. I offered my friend a piece of background information, that in terms of the 19th Century “Doctrine of Affinities” (according to which, in order to even experience anything, there has to be some sort of resonant chord within you, that will begin to vibrate in conjunction with the external vibe, like an aeolian harp that HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY is hung in an open window that begins to hum as the breezes blow in and out) for there to be an experience, there must be something inward that is vibrating in harmony. I explained that what Thoreau had been saying in the letter to Parker Pillsbury from which I was quoting, was that in accordance with such a Doctrine of Affinities there must unfortunately be some belligerent spirit within himself, something wrong inside — or he couldn’t even have noticed all that Civil War stuff in the newspapers.
This relates, I explained, to an argument I had once upon a time had with Robert Richardson, who I had accused of authoring an autobiography that he was pretending to be a biography of Thoreau. Thoreau scholar Richardson had expressed the attitude during one of the Thoreau birthday celebrations in Concord that of course, had Henry been well, he would have enlisted and picked up a rifle and gone south to fight alongside the other Concord young men — that being what Robert Richardson himself would have done. Henry Thoreau was an American patriot because he was Robert Richardson in a 20th-Century re-enactor costume. I said to my friend that no, Thoreau was acute enough to grasp that in order to solve a serious social problem, we can’t just take a national holiday from the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule and march off and kill one another (after which that serious social problem will be discovered to have magically been improved and rectified). Our nation fighting a Civil War, I opinioned, had amounted to a failure rather than a triumph not only for the white enslavers but also for the black enslaved whose lives would be hopelessly fucked during the ensuing period of “Jim Crow” and “lynch law.”
My friend wanted to know how I could take such an attitude, considering that everybody else he was tracking on the internet was arguing that Thoreau wasn’t really a pacifist, wasn’t really a nonviolenter, but was really just as violent and vicious as anyone else would have been such those circumstances. These wannabee scholars were cherry-picking Thoreau quotations taken out of context in order to demonstrate such a point ad infinitum, was what I responded.
What I have since discovered, in doing my own diligent Google searches of the material available on the internet, is that the reference materials to which I had been referring, such as Thoreau’s letter to Parker Pillsbury in 1861, are nowhere to be found. Somehow all these cherry-pickers had been able to disregard the contrary cherries, so that they are nowhere to be located by the most diligent Google searching! They are pseudo- facts that don’t exist!
I produce the following quotation for our attention: Carleton Mabee, pages 321-2: “Even Thoreau insisted on calling Brown ‘the bravest and humanist [sic] man in all the country.’ As the crisis over slavery deepened, Thoreau, too, the man who had stated the positive philosophy of nonviolent action as sharply as any American of his time, had abandoned what he had called ‘peaceable revolution.’ Thoreau explained that he agreed with Brown that ‘a man has a perfect right to HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY interfere by force with the slaveholders, in order to rescue the slave.’ Thoreau now believed that circumstances would occur in which he himself could kill, much as he wished to avoid doing so.” The reason I summon this particular quotation is not that this is as bad as it gets. No, the reason I summon this particular quotation is that this is about as good as it gets! Here we witness a dedicated and diligent Thoreau scholar, Carleton Mabee, going hog wild with a “Henry First-Let’s-Go-Kill-Somebody Thoreau” concept. —Par for the course, among all the belligerents who have seized upon the Internet as their venue of choice for making their tendentious case.
Now, the fact of the matter is, we know quite a bit more about the life and attitudes of Henry David Thoreau, than about any other particular human being in the course of human history. And yet, and yet, what we have now on the internet amounts to little more than persistent opinioning. It literally makes me sick to my stomach.
Well, here’s a biography of Parker Pillsbury for the Internet — and I hope that at least this will prove to be a discoverable venue for the 1861 letter from Thoreau to Pillsbury that most frankly and eloquently sets forth Henry’s attitude toward civil war, that telling piece of correspondence that has been nowhere to be located to date in present Internet searching. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
1809
September 22, Friday: Parker Pillsbury was born in Hamilton, Massachusetts, a son of Oliver Pillsbury and Anna Smith Pillsbury. The family would relocate to a farm near Henniker, New Hampshire. Initially, Parker would work as a wagoner.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6 day 22 of 9 Mo// This Afternoon attended the funeral of Peter Taylor. he was carried to the Meeting House, the funeral was very large & in my opinion conducted with much more decent solemnity than if the meeting was held at his dwelling — My mind was solemnized & believe the minds of many more that were present was also — ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
1835
Parker Pillsbury, with the encouragement of his local Congregational Church, entered Gilmanton Theological Seminary.
The Genius of Universal Emancipation ceased publication. BENJAMIN LUNDY HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
1839
The American Anti-Slavery Society put out the 13th issue of its “omnibus” entitled The Anti-Slavery Examiner, containing “On the Condition of the Free People of Color in the United States”; containing, also, “Can Abolitionists Vote or Take Office Under the United States Constitution?”; containing, also, “Address to the Friends of Constitutional Liberty, on the Violation by the United States House of Representatives of the Right of Petition at the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society.”
Parker Pillsbury graduated from Gilmanton Theological Seminary. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
1840
Parker Pillsbury studied for an additional year, at Andover Theological Seminary. There he came under the influence of John A. Collins. He would accept a church in Loudon, New Hampshire but, after making an accusation that his association of Congregational ministers was guilty of the “sin of conniving at American slavery,” his license to preach would be revoked. He would become active in the ecumenical Free Religious Association and preach to its societies in New York, Ohio, and Michigan. He would edit the Concord, New Hampshire Herald of Freedom.
The platform of the National Anti-Slavery Standard would be the immediate, complete abolition of slavery. The editors would include Lydia Maria Child, Oliver Johnson, Parker Pillsbury, and Aaron Powell. This paper would exist until 1870.
Abby Kelley continued to travel, at this point all over New England. She met Frederick Douglass and the radical New Hampshire abolitionist, Stephen Symonds Foster. Many of Abby’s letters and speeches were being published in The Liberator. Abby and Douglass went on a New York tour conducting conventions twice per week, each convention lasting two to three days. While living with Paulina and Francis Wright in Utica NY, Stephen came to stay there during a convention. It was at this point that they decided to marry. ABOLITIONISM
January 1, Wednesday: Parker Pillsbury got married with Sarah Hall Sargent (June 14, 1814-March 8, 1898) of Concord, New Hampshire. The union would produce one child, Helen Pillsbury.
Waldo Emerson lectured in Boston. This was the 4th lecture of his 10-lecture private “The Present Age” series: “Politics.” THE LIST OF LECTURES HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
1841
January 13, Wednesday: It was reported that a branch of the Nonresistance Society was formed for New Hampshire, at Concord, New Hampshire, with the following members: Parker Pillsbury, Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, Stephen Symonds Foster, and Amos Wood.1
August 9, Monday: The Lake Erie steamboat Erie departed from Buffalo, New York, heading for Chicago. When it caught on fire off Silver Creek, 215 people perished.
At the Liberty Hall in New Bedford, William C. Coffin heard Frederick Douglass speak briefly at the annual meeting of the Bristol County Anti-Slavery Society, and invited him to come along to the Massachusetts Anti- Slavery Society convention that was to take place the next day on Nantucket Island. (Others at this meeting: George Bradburn, John A. Collins, Parker Pillsbury, Edmund Quincy.)
In his journal Henry Thoreau mused “If I am not I — who will be?” (He would transcribe this in 1842.)
August 9: It is vain to try to write unless you feel strong in the knees. Any book of great authority and genius seems to our imagination to permeate and pervade all space. Its spirit, like a more subtle ether, sweeps along with the prevailing winds of the country. Its influence conveys a new gloss to the meadows and the depths of the wood, and bathes the huckleberries on the hills, as sometimes a new influence in the sky washes in waves over the fields and seems to break on some invisible beach in the air. All things confirm it. It spends the mornings and the evenings.2 Everywhere the speech of Menu demands the widest apprehension and proceeds from the loftiest plateau of the 1. There was an Amos Wood in the Concord fight in 1775, and there were Woods present in Concord MA at this time, and there was a Mrs. Amos Wood present in Concord in 1875. Was this the person in New Hampshire perhaps the son of the Amos Wood who was born on 28 Oct 1734 in Mendon to James Wood and Grace Thayer Wood? Or maybe the Amos Wood who was born in Canada in 1820, either in Ontario or Quebec and died in Chicago in 1913? 2. A WEEK, page 157; Riv. 195. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY soul. It is spoken unbendingly to its own level, and does not imply any contemporaneous speaker. I read history as little critically as I consider the landscape, and am more interested in the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than in its groundwork and composition. It is the morning now turned evening and seen in the west, - the same sun, but a new light and atmosphere. Its beauty is like the sunset; not a fresco painting on a wall, Hat and bounded, but atmospheric and roving, or free. But, in reality, history fluctuates as the face of the landscape from morning to evening. What is of moment if it is its hue and color. Time hides no treasures – we want not its then – but its now. We do not complain that the mountains in the horizon are blue and indistinct — they are the more like the heavens… Of what moments are facts that can be lost. — which need to be commemorated? The monument of death will outlast the memory of the dead. The Pyramids do not tell the tale confided to them. The living fact commemorates itself– Why look in the dark for light– look in the light rather. Strictly speaking, the Societies have not recovered one fact from oblivion, but they themselves are instead of the fact that is lost. The researcher is more memorable than the researched. The crowd stood admiring the mist and the dim outline of the trees seen through it, and when one of their number advanced to explore the phenomenon, with fresh admiration all eyes were turned on his dimly retreating figure. Critical acumen is exerted in vain to uncover the past; the past cannot be presented – we cannot know what we are not– But one veil hangs over past– present– and future– and it is the province of the historian to find out not what was, but what is. When a battle has been fought you will find nothing but the bones of men and beasts — where a battle is being fought there are hearts beating.3 We will sit on a mound and muse, and not try to make these skeletons stand on their legs again. Does nature remember, think you, that they were men, or not rather that they are bones? Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the spectator should be thinking of the back side of the picture on the wall, as if the author expected the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience. Men seem anxious to accomplish an orderly retreat through the centuries –earnestly rebuilding the works behind as they are battered down by the incroachments of time– but while they loiter — they and their works both fall a prey to the enemy. Biography is liable to the same objection — it should by autobiography. Let us not leave ourselves empty that so vexing our bowels — we may go abroad and be somebody else to explain him– If I am not I– who will be?– As if it were to dispense justice to all– But the time has not come for that.4
3.The poet W.H. Auden has in 1962 brought forward a snippet from this day’s entry as:
THE VIKING BOOK OF APHORISMS, A PERSONAL SELECTION BY W.H. AUDEN…
Pg Topic Aphorism Selected by Auden out of Thoreau
It is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is. Where a battle has been 238 History fought, you will find nothing but the bones of men and beasts; where a battle is being fought, there are hearts beating.
4. A WEEK, pages 161-63; Riv. 200-04. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY August 10, Tuesday: William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Parker Pillsbury, and John A. Collins, as members of a “promiscuous” (that is, “integrated”) group totaling about 45, boarded the steamboat to Nantucket Island from which David Ruggles had been ejected in July, and held an antislavery meeting in the “Blacks Only” section. Possibly, they sang (to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne” all six stanzas of the following song, which was composed by Garrison during this year: HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
Parker Pillsbury “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
1845
During this and the following year Parker Pillsbury would again edit the Concord, New Hampshire Herald of Freedom (as he had in 1840).
The American Anti-Slavery Society put out the 12th issue of its “omnibus” The Anti-Slavery Examiner, TEXT INDEX entitled “Disunion. Address of the American Anti-Slavery Society and F. Jackson’s Letter on the Pro-Slavery Character of the Constitution;” containing, also, “Chattel Principle / The Abhorrence of Jesus Christ and the Apostles; Or No Refuge for American Slavery in the New Testament,” by Beriah Green.
EDWARD HICKS In Oberlin, Ohio, the Reverend Professor Charles Grandison Finney’s thunderous sermons induced the young abolitionist student James Wilbur Monroe to abandon Quakerism and become instead a member of his1st Church (he would remain a member of 1st Church for his entire life) and also influenced him to pursue theological studies. He would receive much guidance from Professor James Harris Fairchild, professor of languages. As a member of the institute’s admissions committee, Fairchild agreed to allow Monroe to enter the junior class if after 5 months of study that summer, he could demonstrate readiness. Not only was he allowed to enter the junior class, but also, he was allowed to become a tutor for other students. Fairchild would later observe that “During my sixty years of teaching at Oberlin I have known many bright scholars, but no one ever surprised me as did this young student from Connecticut.” He would quickly advance, and accept an appointment as a teacher of the advanced class in the preparatory department in Greek and Latin. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
1850
October 23, Wednesday: According to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, speaking retrospectively in 1870, “The movement in England, as in America, may be dated from the first National Convention, held at Worcester, Mass., October, 1850.”
FEMINISM
Although Angelina Emily Grimké Weld was elected to be a member for this vital convention, it would turn out that she would be unable to attend.
Why was it that Stanton, and also Susan B. Anthony, Friend Lucretia Mott, and other pioneers regarded this 1850 Convention in Worcester as the beginning of the crusade for woman’s equality? Why had it not been the 1848 meeting at Seneca Falls for which Stanton had drafted the celebrated Declaration of Sentiments and in which Mott had played such a leading role? • The gathering at Seneca Falls had been largely a local affair as would be several others that followed, whereas by way of radical contrast this Worcester convention had attracted delegates from most of the northern states. • Seneca Falls had sparked discussion but it was not clear in its aftermath that there was a national constituency ready to take up the cause. The attendance in response to this Worcester meeting’s Call of those who wanted to see a woman’s rights movement, and the positive reaction to its published proceedings both here and in Europe, showed that a sufficient number of women, and some men, were indeed ready. • This 1850 convention eventuated in a set of standing committees which marked the beginnings of organized work for woman’s rights. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY The records of the convention may be studied at:
http://www.wwhp.org/Resources/WomensRights/proceedings.html
Waldo Emerson declined to address this convention, and continued to decline such invitations until the 1855 convention in Boston, saying “I do not think it yet appears that women wish this equal share in public affairs,” meaning of course “I do not think it yet appears that we wish to grant women this equal share in public affairs.”
Were I in a sarcastic mood, I would characterize this attitude by inventing a news clipping something like the following:
His Excellency, Hon. Ralph W. Emerson, Representative of the Human Race, treated with the woman, Mrs. James Mott, for purposes of pacification and common decency.
At the beginning of the meeting a Quaker male, Friend Joseph C. Hathaway of Farmington, New York, was appointed President pro tem. As the meeting was getting itself properly organized, however, Paulina Wright Davis was selected as President, with Friend Joseph sitting down instead as Secretary for the meeting. At least three New York Quakers were on the body’s Central Committee — Hathaway, Friend Pliny Sexton and Friend Sarah H. Hallock, and we immediately note that although this Central Committee was by and large female, two of the three Quakes in this committee were male.
During the course of this convention Friend Lucretia Mott had occasion to straighten out Wendell Phillips, and he later commented that “she put, as she well knows how, the silken snapper on her whiplash,” that it had been “beautifully done, so the victim himself could enjoy the artistic perfection of his punishment.”
Now here is a news clipping from this period, equally legitimately offensive, which I didn’t make up:5
His Excellency, Gov. Ramsey and Hon. Richard W. Thompson, have been appointed Commissioners, to treat with the Sioux for the lands west of the Mississippi. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY The list of the “members” of this Convention is of interest in that it includes Sophia Foord of Dedham MA, Sojourner Truth of Northampton, Elizabeth Oakes Smith the lyceum lecturer, etc. The newspaper report described Truth’s appearance as dark and “uncomely.” Friend Lucretia Mott, a leader at the convention, described Truth more charitably as “the poor woman who had grown up under the curse of Slavery.” Those on the list, those who officially registered as “members” of the Convention, some 267 in all, were only a fraction of the thousands who attended one or more of the sessions. As J.G. Forman reported in the New-York Daily Tribune for October 24, 1850, “it was voted that all present be invited to take part in the discussions of the Convention, but that only those who signed the roll of membership be allowed to vote.” The process of signing probably meant that people who arrived together or sat together would have adjacent numbers in the sequence that appears in the Proceedings. This would explain the clustering of people by region and by family name: • 1 Hannah M. Darlington Kennett Square, Pennsylvania • 2 T.B. Elliot Boston • 3 Antoinette L. Brown Henrietta NY • 4 Sarah Pillsbury Concord NH • 5 Eliza J. Kenney Salem MA • 6 M.S. Firth Leicester MA • 7 Oliver Dennett Portland ME • 8 Julia A. McIntyre Charlton MA • 9 Emily Sanford Oxford MA • 10 H.M. Sanford Oxford MA • 11 C.D.M. Lane Worcester, Massachusetts • 12 Elizabeth Firth Leicester MA • 13 S.C. Sargent Boston • 14 C.A.K. Ball Worcester, Massachusetts • 15 M.A. Thompson Worcester, Massachusetts • 16 Lucinda Safford Worcester, Massachusetts • 17 S.E. Hall Worcester, Massachusetts • 18 S.D. Holmes Kingston MA • 19 Z.W. Harlow Plymouth MA • 20 N.B. Spooner Plymouth MA • 21 Ignatius Sargent Boston • 22 A.B. Humphrey Hopedale •23M.R. Hadwen Worcester, Massachusetts •24J.H. Shaw Nantucket Island • 25 Diana W. Ballou Cumberland RI •26Olive Darling Millville MA • 27 M.A. Walden Hopedale • 28 C.M. Collins Brooklyn CT • 29 A.H. Metcalf Worcester, Massachusetts • 30 P.B. Cogswell Concord NH • 31 Sarah Tyndale Philadelphia • 32 A.P.B. Rawson Worcester, Massachusetts • 33 Nathaniel Barney Nantucket Island • 34 Sarah H. Earle Worcester, Massachusetts •35 Parker Pillsbury Concord NH • 36 Lewis Ford Abington MA •37J.T. Everett Princeton MA • 38 Loring Moody Harwich MA •39 Sojourner Truth Northampton •40 Friend Pliny Sexton Palmyra NY • 41 Rev. J.G. Forman W. Bridgewater MA • 42 Andrew Stone M.D. Worcester, Massachusetts • 43 Samuel May, Jr. Leicester MA 5. From the Dakota Tawaxitku Kin, or The Dakota Friend, St. Paul, Minnesota, November 1850. This word “Sioux,” incidentally, is a hopelessly offensive and alienating term, for it is short for the Ojibwa term “nadouessioux” or “enemy.” A better term would be “Dakota,” which in the Dakota language means “union” or “ally.” It tells you a lot about the patronizing attitude of these missionaries, that they would be willing to use an offputting term like “Sioux” in this newspaper. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY • 44 Sarah R. May Leicester MA •45 Frederick Douglass Rochester NY • 46 Charles Bigham Feltonville MA • 47 J.T. Partridge Worcester, Massachusetts • 48 Eliza C. Clapp Leicester MA • 49 Daniel Steward East Line MA • 50 E.B. Chase Valley Falls MA •51 Sophia Foord Dedham MA •52E.A. Clark Worcester, Massachusetts •53E.H. Taft Dedham MA • 54 Olive W. Hastings Lancaster, Pennsylvania • 55 Rebecca Plumly Philadelphia • 56 S.L. Hastings Lancaster, Pennsylvania • 57 Sophia Taft • 58 Anna E. Ruggles Worcester, Massachusetts • 59 Mrs. A.E. Brown Brattleboro VT • 60 Janette Jackson Philadelphia • 61 Anna R. Cox Philadelphia • 62 Cynthia P. Bliss Pawtucket, Rhode Island • 63 R.M.C. Capron Providence • 64 M.H. Mowry Providence • 65 Mary Eddy Providence •66Mary Abbott Hopedale • 67 Anna E. Fish Hopedale • 68 C.G. Munyan Hopedale • 69 Maria L. Southwick Worcester, Massachusetts • 70 Anna Cornell Plainfield CT • 71 S. Monroe Plainfield CT • 72 Anna E. Price Plainfield CT • 73 M.C. Monroe Plainfield CT • 74 F.C. Johnson Sturbridge MA • 75 Thomas Hill Webster MA • 76 Elizabeth Frail Hopkinton MA • 77 Eli Belknap Hopkinton MA • 78 M.M. Frail Hopkinton MA • 79 Valentine Belknap Hopkinton MA • 80 Phebe Goodwin West Chester, Pennsylvania • 81 Edgar Hicks Brooklyn NY • 82 Ira Foster Canterbury NH • 83 Effingham L. Capron Worcester, Massachusetts • 84 Frances H. Drake Leominster MA • 85 Calvin Fairbanks Leominster MA • 86 E.M. Dodge Worcester, Massachusetts • 87 Eliza Barney Nantucket Island • 88 Lydia Barney Nantucket Island • 89 Alice Jackson Avondale, Pennsylvania • 90 G.D. Williams Leicester MA • 91 Marian Blackwell Cincinnati OH • 92 Elizabeth Earle Worcester, Massachusetts •93 Friend Joseph C. Hathaway Farmington NY •94E. Jane Alden Lowell MA • 95 Elizabeth Dayton Lowell MA • 96 Lima H. Ober Boston • 97 Mrs. Lucy N. Colman Saratoga Springs NY • 98 Dorothy Whiting Clintonville MA • 99 Emily Whiting Clintonville MA • 100 Abigail Morgan Clinton MA • 101 Julia Worcester Milton NH HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY • 102 Mary R. Metcalf Worcester, Massachusetts • 103 R.H. Ober Boston • 104 D.A. Mundy Hopedale • 105 Dr. S. Rogers Worcester, Massachusetts • 106 Jacob Pierce PA • 107 Mrs. E.J. Henshaw W. Brookfield MA • 108 Edward Southwick Worcester, Massachusetts • 109 E.A. Merrick Princeton MA • 110 Mrs. C. Merrick Princeton MA •111Lewis E. Capen PA • 112 Joseph Carpenter New-York • 113 Martha Smith Plainfield CT • 114 Lucius Holmes Thompson CT • 115 Benj. Segur Thompson CT •116C.S. Dow Worcester, Massachusetts • 117 S.L. Miller PA • 118 Isaac L. Miller PA • 119 Buel Picket Sherman CT • 120 Josiah Henshaw W. Brookfield MA • 121 Andrew Wellington Lexington MA • 122 Louisa Gleason Worcester, Massachusetts • 123 Paulina Gerry Stoneham MA • 124 Lucy Stone West Brookfield MA • 125 Ellen Blackwell Cincinnati OH • 126 Mrs. Chickery Worcester, Massachusetts • 127 Mrs. F.A. Pierce Worcester, Massachusetts • 128 C.M. Trenor Worcester, Massachusetts • 129 R.C. Capron Worcester, Massachusetts • 130 Wm. Lloyd Garrison Boston • 131 Emily Loveland Worcester, Massachusetts • 132 Mrs. S. Worcester Worcester, Massachusetts • 133 Phebe Worcester Worcester, Massachusetts • 134 Adeline Worcester Worcester, Massachusetts • 135 Joanna R. Ballou MA • 136 Abby H. Price Hopedale • 137 B. Willard MA • 138 T. Poole Abington MA • 139 M.B. Kent Boston • 140 D.H. Knowlton • 141 E.H. Knowlton Grafton MA • 142 G. Valentine MA • 143 A. Prince Worcester, Massachusetts • 144 Lydia Wilmarth Worcester, Massachusetts • 145 J.G. Warren Worcester, Massachusetts • 146 Mrs. E.A. Stowell Worcester, Massachusetts • 147 Martin Stowell Worcester, Massachusetts • 148 Mrs. E. Stamp Worcester, Massachusetts • 149 C. M. Barbour Worcester, Massachusetts • 150 Daniel Mitchell Pawtucket, Rhode Island • 151 Alice H. Easton • 152 Anna Q.T. Parsons Boston • 153 C.D. McLane Worcester, Massachusetts • 154 W.H. Channing Boston • 155 Wendell Phillips Boston • 156 Abby K. Foster Worcester, Massachusetts • 157 S. S. Foster Worcester, Massachusetts • 158 Paulina Wright Davis Providence • 159 Wm. D. Cady Warren MA HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY • 160 Ernestine L. Rose New-York • 161 Mrs. J. G. Hodgden Roxbury MA • 162 C.M. Shaw Boston • 163 Ophilia D. Hill Worcester, Massachusetts • 164 Mrs. P. Allen Millbury MA • 165 Lucy C. Dike Thompson CT • 166 E. Goddard Worcester, Massachusetts • 167 M.F. Gilbert West Brookfield MA • 168 G. Davis Providence • 169 A.H. Johnson Worcester, Massachusetts • 170 W.H. Harrington Worcester, Massachusetts • 171 E.B. Briggs Worcester, Massachusetts • 172 A.C. Lackey Upton MA • 173 Ora Ober Worcester, Massachusetts • 174 A. Barnes Princeton RI • 175 Thomas Provan Hopedale • 176 Rebecca Provan Hopedale • 177 A.W. Thayer Worcester, Massachusetts • 178 M.M. Munyan Millbury MA • 179 W.H. Johnson Worcester, Massachusetts • 180 Dr. S. Mowry Chepachet RI • 181 George W. Benson Northampton • 182 Mrs. C.M. Carter Worcester, Massachusetts • 183 H.S. Brigham Bolton MA • 184 E.A. Welsh Feltonville MA • 185 Mrs. J.H. Moore Charlton MA • 186 Margaret S. Merrit Charlton MA • 187 Martha Willard Charlton MA • 188 A.N. Lamb Charlton MA • 189 Mrs. Chaplin Worcester, Massachusetts • 190 Caroline Farnum • 191 N.B. Hill Blackstone MA • 192 K. Parsons Worcester, Massachusetts • 193 Jillson Worcester, Massachusetts • 194 E.W.K. Thompson • 195 L. Wait Boston • 196 Mrs. Mary G. Wright CA • 197 F.H. Underwood Webster MA • 198 Asa Cutler CT • 199 J.B. Willard Westford MA • 200 Perry Joslin Worcester, Massachusetts • 201 Friend Sarah H. Hallock Milton NY • 202 Elizabeth Johnson Worcester, Massachusetts • 203 Seneth Smith Oxford MA • 204 Marian Hill Webster MA • 205 Wm. Coe Worcester, Massachusetts • 206 E.T. Smith Leominster MA • 207 Mary R. Hubbard • 208 S. Aldrich Hopkinton MA • 209 M.A. Maynard Feltonville MA • 210 S.P.R. Feltonville MA • 211 Anna R. Blake Monmouth ME • 212 Ellen M. Prescott Monmouth ME • 213 J.M. Cummings Worcester, Massachusetts • 214 Nancy Fay Upton MA • 215 M. Jane Davis Worcester, Massachusetts • 216 D.R. Crandell Worcester, Massachusetts • 217 E.M. Burleigh Oxford MA HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY • 218 Sarah Chafee Leominster MA • 219 Adeline Perry Worcester, Massachusetts • 220 Lydia E. Chase Worcester, Massachusetts • 221 J.A. Fuller Worcester, Massachusetts • 222 Sarah Prentice Worcester, Massachusetts • 223 Emily Prentice Worcester, Massachusetts • 224 H.N. Fairbanks Worcester, Massachusetts • 225 Mrs. A. Crowl Worcester, Massachusetts • 226 Dwight Tracy Worcester, Massachusetts • 227 J.S. Perry Worcester, Massachusetts • 228 Isaac Norcross Worcester, Massachusetts • 229 M.A.W. Johnson Salem OH • 230 Mrs. C.I.H. Nichols Brattleboro VT • 231 Charles Calistus Burleigh Plainfield CT • 232 E.A. Parrington Worcester, Massachusetts • 233 Mrs. Parrington Worcester, Massachusetts • 234 Harriet F. Hunt Boston • 235 Chas F. Hovey Boston • 236 Friend Lucretia Mott Philadelphia • 237 Susan Fuller Worcester, Massachusetts • 238 Thomas Earle Worcester, Massachusetts • 239 Alice Earle Worcester, Massachusetts • 240 Martha B. Earle Worcester, Massachusetts • 241 Anne H. Southwick Worcester, Massachusetts • 242 Joseph A. Howland Worcester, Massachusetts • 243 Adeline H. Howland Worcester, Massachusetts • 244 O.T. Harris Worcester, Massachusetts • 245 Julia T. Harris Worcester, Massachusetts • 246 John M. Spear Boston • 247 E.J. Alden • 248 E.D. Draper Hopedale • 249 D.R.P. Hewitt Salem MA • 250 L.G. Wilkins Salem MA • 251 J.H. Binney Worcester, Massachusetts • 252 Mary Adams Worcester, Massachusetts • 253 Anna T. Draper • 254 Josephine Reglar • 255 Anna Goulding Worcester, Massachusetts • 256 Adeline S. Greene • 257 Silence Bigelow • 258 A. Wyman • 259 L.H. Ober • 260 Betsey F. Lawton Chepachet RI • 261 Emma Parker Philadelphia • 262 Olive W. Hastings Lancaster MA (error?) • 263 Silas Smith IO • 264 Asenath Fuller • 265 Denney M.F. Walker • 266 Eunice D.F. Pierce • 267 Elijah Houghton HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
1851
May: Burning over the burned-over region, Sojourner Truth had since February been speaking against slavery across upstate New York. The spirits indeed move in mysterious ways, for while visiting the area she was becoming entranced by table-rappings and communications with the departed.
Carleton Mabee’s SOJOURNER TRUTH
Pages 99-100: In Truth’s time, Spiritualists played a role similar to that of “New Age” religionists in the late 1900s. The general public often ridiculed Spiritualists, and conservative churches often attacked them; Seventh Day Adventists, who were strong in Battle Creek, were among those who attacked Spiritualists, claiming they talked not to spirits of the dead but to devils. Some abolitionist-feminists such as Friend Lucretia Mott, Parker Pillsbury, and Frederick Douglass were skeptical of Spiritualists. Others tended to avoid identifying with them because they did not wish to antagonize the conventional church. But many abolitionist-feminists, including William Lloyd Garrison, Lucy Stone, and Paulina Wright Davis, despite being dubious of certain claims by particular Spiritualists, tended to believe that spiritualism not only reinforced the Christian belief in immortality, but also was a progressive development that went hand in hand with efforts to improve the status of blacks and of women. By the late 1850s most of the Progressive Friends –a movement especially of dissident Quakers in which Truth and many of her friends took part, in Battle Creek, Rochester, and elsewhere– had accepted spiritualism. By the 1860s the intermingling of Progressive Friends and Spiritualists was so pervasive that it was hard to tell them apart.
SPIRITUALISM HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
1853
August: Friend William Henry Harvey began a 3-year round-the-globe voyage on which he would visit Egypt, Aden, Ceylon, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Tonga, the Fiji Islands, and Valparaiso.
Parker Pillsbury traveled to Michigan with Abby Kelley Foster and Stephen Symonds Foster. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
1854
Parker Pillsbury served as an emissary from the American Anti-Slavery Society to Great Britain, residing there with the surgeon John Estlin and his abolitionist daughter Mary Estlin (both John and Mary would become involved in Pillsbury’s problematic correspondence with the British activist Louis-Alexis Chamerovzow).
During the Anthony Burns case, after Transcendentalist poets and preachers had attacked the Boston courthouse, the building had been converted into a sort of armored slavepen, in that it was guarded by a detachment of U.S. Marines, and 2 artillery companies with loaded cannons and with fixed bayonets on their rifles, as well as by the US Marshall’s guard consisting of “a gang of about one-hundred and twenty men, the lowest villains in the community, keepers of brothels, bullies, blacklegs, convicts....” Not even the judges, let alone the jurors, the witnesses, and the litigant attorneys, were being permitted inside the courthouse without first passing a cordon of men 5 men deep, and proving their right to be there.
Boston abolitionists had offered the slavemaster of Burns the sum of $1,200 in return for a document in HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY manumission, but had been refused.
Nothing in the whole record of the Burns affair is more striking to a modern audience or at first more off- putting than the apparent incapacity of even the most committed of the radicals to express a direct, authentic outrage on Burns’s personal behalf. Phillips’s unelaborated reference to his “suffering” is as close as they come. The evil that Parker undertakes to agitate against is the threat to the civil liberties of Northern white men. There is an oddity about this argument even on the supposition that it consciously appeals to self-interest ... if they are to be made to fight again, it must probably be for the same thing [their own personal liberty] and not ... for ... the right of another man than oneself to be free.
WENDELL PHILLIPS THEODORE PARKER At some point in the year, in regard to the enforcement of the federal Fugitive Slave Act in regard to the Burns case, the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson would deliver a sermon entitled “Massachusetts in Mourning.”
Our national birthday, Tuesday the 4th of July: This was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 50th birthday.
Rowland Hussey Macy (1822-1919) had gotten started in retail in 1851 with a dry goods store in downtown Haverhill. Macy’s policy from the very first was “His goods are bought for cash, and will be sold for the same, at a small advance.” On this date Macy’s 1st parade marched down the main drag of the little New England village. It was too hot and only about a hundred people viewed his celebration. In 1858 Macy would sell this store and, with the financial backing of Caleb Dustin Hunking of Haverhill, relocate the retail business to easier pickings in New-York. (So, have you heard of the New York Macy’s department store? –Have you shopped there?)
When the mayor of Wilmington, Delaware jailed City Council member Joshua S. Valentine for setting off firecrackers, he was mobbed by a group of indignant citizens. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY
Henry Thoreau went at “8 A.M. – To Framingham.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY At this abolitionist picnic celebrating our nation’s birthday and the Declaration of Independence and the successful completion of the 1st Great American Disunion, attended by some 600, a man the Standard described as “a sort of literary recluse,” name of Henry David Thoreau, declared for dissolution of the federal union. Thoreau was a secessionist — he believed that New Englanders should secede from the federal union of the United States of America, as the necessary step in disentangling themselves from the US national sin of race slavery. THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION
Sojourner Truth was another of the speakers, although we do not know whether she spoke before of after Thoreau (the newspaper reporter who was present failed entirely to notice that Sojourner took part), nor whether he sat on the platform beside her. Stephen Symonds Foster and Abby Kelley Foster were present
(Abby probably brought her daughter Alla to the pic nic, for it was always a family affair, with swings for the children, boating on a nearby pond, and a convenient refreshment stand since the day would be quite hot, HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY and confined her remarks to an appeal for funds), and Lucy Stone, as were Wendell Phillips, Charles Lenox
Remond, and William Lloyd Garrison.6
When the meeting in the shady amphitheater was called to order at 10:45AM by Charles Jackson Francis, the first order of business had to be election of officials for the day. Garrison became the event’s president and HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY Francis Jackson of Boston, William Whiting of Concord, Effingham L. Capron of Worcester, Dora M. Taft of Framingham, Charles Lenox Remond of Salem, John Pierpont of Medford, Charles F. Hovey of Gloucester, Jonathan Buffum of Lynn, Asa Cutler of Connecticut, and Andrew T. Foss of New Hampshire its vice presidents. The Reverend Samuel J. May, Jr., of Leicester, William H. Fish of Milford, and R.F. Wallcut of Boston became its secretaries. Abby Kelley Foster, Ebenezer D. Draper, Lewis Ford, Mrs. Olds of Ohio, Lucy Stone, and Nathaniel B. Spooner would constitute its Finance Committee. Garrison then read from Scripture, the assembly sang an Anti-Slavery hymn, and Dr. Henry O. Stone issued the Welcome.
6. There was an active agent of the Underground railroad on that platform, we may note, and it was not the gregarious Truth but the “sort of literary recluse” Thoreau. That is, please allow me to state the following in regard to the existence of eyewitness testimony, that the Thoreau home in Concord was in the period prior to the Civil War a waystation on the Underground Railway: we might reappraise Thoreau’s relationship with Sojourner Truth, of whom it has been asserted by Ebony Magazine that she was a “Leader of the Underground Railroad Movement” (February 1987), by asking whether there is any comparable eyewitness testimony, that Truth ever was involved in that risky and illegal activity? Her biographer refers to her as a “loose cannon,” not the sort of close- mouthed person who could be relied upon as a participant in a quite secret and quite illegal and quite dangerous endeavor, and considers also that no such evidence has ever been produced. The Thoreaus, in contrast, not only were never regarded as loose in this manner, but were, we know, regarded as utterly reliable — and in the case of the Thoreau family home the evidence for total involvement exists and is quite conclusive. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY I will quote a couple of paragraphs about the course of the meeting from the Foster biography, AHEAD OF HER TIME:
Heading the finance committee, Abby made her usual appeal for funds, Stephen called on the friends of liberty to resist the Fugitive Slave Law, “each one with such weapons as he thought right and proper,” and Wendell Phillips, Sojourner Truth, and Lucy Stone held the audience in thrall with their “soul-eloquence.” After an hour’s break for refreshments Henry Thoreau castigated Massachusetts for being in the service of the Slaveholders and demanded that the state leave the Union. “I have lived for the last month –and I think that every man in Massachusetts capable of the sentiment of patriotism must have had a similar experience– with the sense of having suffered a vast and indefinite loss. I did not know what ailed me. At last it occurred to me that what I had lost was a country.” Thoreau’s speech is still reprinted, but William Lloyd Garrison provided the most dramatic moment of that balmy July day. Placing a lighted candle on the lectern, he picked up a copy of the Fugitive Slave Law and touched it to the flame. As it burned, he intoned a familiar phrase: “And let all the people say Amen.” As the shouts of “Amen” echoed, he burned the U.S. commissioner’s decision in the Burns case. Then he held a copy of the United States Constitution to the candle, proclaiming, “So perish all compromises with tyranny.” As it burned to ashes, he repeated, “And let all the people say Amen.” While the audience responded with a tremendous shout of “Amen,” he stood before them with arms extended, as if in blessing. No one who was present ever forgot the scene; it was the high point of unity among the Garrisonian abolitionists.
This biography of Abby Kelley, with its suggestion that Thoreau’s speech, which it condenses to three sentences, must have been significant because it is “still reprinted,” overlooks the fact that Thoreau had not been granted an opportunity to read his entire lecture. A contemporary comment on the speech was more accurate:
Henry Thoreau, of Concord, read portions of a racy and ably written address, the whole of which will be published in The Liberator.
That is, Thoreau delivered a 4th-of-July oration at Framingham, Massachusetts on “SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS”, criticizing the governor and the chief justice of Massachusetts who were in the audience. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY –But, he was not allowed the opportunity to read his entire essay.
The whole military force of the State is at the service of a Mr. Suttle, a slaveholder from Virginia, to enable him to catch a man whom he calls his property; but not a soldier is offered to save a citizen of Massachusetts from being kidnapped! Is this what all these soldiers, all this training has been for these seventy-nine years past? Have they been trained merely to rob Mexico, and carry back fugitive slaves to their masters? These very nights, I heard the sound of a drum in our streets. There were men training still; and for what? I could with an effort pardon the cockerels of Concord for crowing still, for they, perchance, had not been beaten that morning; but I could not excuse this rub-a-dub of the “trainers.” The slave was carried back by exactly such as these, i.e., by the soldier, of whom the best you can say in this connection is that he is a fool made conspicuous by a painted coat.
Note that on paper, at least, if not verbally as well, he made a reference to martyrdom by hanging: “I would side with the light, and let the dark earth roll from under me, calling my mother and my brother to follow.” In other words, lets us New Englanders secede from the federal union of the United States of America, as the necessary step in our clearing ourselves of this US national sin of race slavery.
Here is another account of the actual speech, as opposed to what was printed later, from one who was there in the audience standing before that platform draped in mourning black:
He began with the simple words, “You have my sympathy; it is all I have to give you, but you may find it important to you.” It was impossible to associate egotism with Thoreau; we all felt that the time and trouble he had taken at that crisis to proclaim his sympathy with the “Disunionists” was indeed important. He was there a representative of Concord, of science and letters, which could not quietly pursue their tasks while slavery was trampling down the rights of mankind. Alluding to the Boston commissioner who had surrendered Anthony Burns, Edward G. Loring, Thoreau said, “The fugitive’s case was already decided by God, –not Edward G. God, but simple God.” This was said with such serene unconsciousness of anything shocking in it that we were but mildly startled. — AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMORIES, AND EXPERIENCES OF MONCURE DANIEL CONWAY (Boston MA: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.), Volume I, pages 184-5. [Moncure Daniel Conway]
DISUNION ANTHONY BURNS EDWARD GREELEY LORING HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY At the end of the morning meeting Thoreau was on the platform while Garrison, the featured speaker, burned the federal Constitution on a pewter plate as a “covenant with death” because it countenanced the return of runaway slaves to their owners — Margaret Fuller’s grandfather Timothy Fuller Sr., who had refused to consent to that document when it was originally promulgated because of its ridiculous mincing about slavery, would have been proud of him! Thoreau’s inflammatory oratory was less inflammatory than addresses made on that occasion by Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Charles Lenox Remond, for their speeches drew comments but Thoreau’s did not. On our nation’s birthday the platform had been draped in black crepe as a symbol of mourning, as at a state funeral, and carried the insignia of the State of Virginia, which stood as the destination of Anthony Burns, and this insignia of the State of Virginia was decorated with — with, in magnificent irony, ribbons of triumph! Above the platform flew the flags of Kansas and Nebraska, emblematic of the detested new Kansas/Nebraska Act. As the background of all this, the flag of the United States of America was hung, but it was upside down, the symbol of distress, and it also was bordered in black, the symbol of death.
I think no great public calamity, not the death of Daniel Webster, not the death of Charles Sumner, not the loss of great battles during the War, brought such a sense of gloom over the whole State as the surrender of Anthony Burns.
Garrison placed a lighted candle on the lectern, and touched a corner of the Fugitive Slave Law to the flame. As it burned, he orated “And let all the people say Amen” and the crowd shouted “Amen!” Then he touched a corner of the US commissioner’s decision in the Burns case to the candle flame. Then he touched a corner of a copy of the federal Constitution to the candle flame, and orated “So perish all compromises with tyranny.” As the paper was reduced to ashes, he orated “And let all the people say Amen” and stood with his arms extended as if in blessing.
William Lloyd Garrison (in 1865) HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY Moncure Daniel Conway’s comment, later, about the moment when Garrison set the match to the constitution, and the few scattered boos and hisses were drowned out by the thunderous “Amen” of the crowd, was:
That day I distinctly recognized that the antislavery cause was a religion.
In the afternoon Moncure Daniel Conway spoke, as a Virginian aristocrat, a child of position and privilege. Look at me! It was his 1st antislavery attempt at identity politics grandstanding. Leaning on the concept, he insisted that the force of public opinion in his home state was so insane and so hotheaded that every white man with a conscience, “or even the first throbbings of a conscience,” was a slave to this general proslavery public posture. He offered that to resist this Southern certitude, each Northerner would need to “abolish slavery in his heart.”7 AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II
(So, you see, the white man has been self-enslaved: the problem is not so much that slavery harms the black man as that slavery harms the white man, shudder.)
Then Wendell Phillips spoke.
7. We may note how different this was from the Reverend Theodore Parker’s “kill the Negro in us.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY We know that Sojourner Truth spoke from that mourning-draped platform after a white man from Virginia had described his being thrown in jail there on account of his antislavery convictions, because in her speech she commented on this: how helpful it was for white people to obtain some experience of oppression. She warned that “God would yet execute his judgments upon the white people for their oppression and cruelty.” She asked why it was that white people hated black people so. She said that the white people owed the colored race a debt so huge that they would never be able to pay it back — but would have to repent so as to have this debt forgiven them. Nell Painter has characterized this message as “severe and anguished,” and has commented that despite the cheers and applause, “Her audiences preferred not to grapple with all she had to say.” Her humor must have been such, Painter infers, as to allow her white listeners to exempt themselves from this very general denunciation:
They did not hear wrath against whites, but against the advocates of slavery. It is understandable, no doubt, that Truth’s audiences, who wanted so much to love this old black woman who had been a slave, found it difficult to fathom the depths of her bitterness. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
Carleton Mabee’s BLACK FREEDOM
Americans at large often held the abolitionists responsible for the war. They argued that the abolitionists’ long agitation, strident as it often was, had antagonized the South into secession, thus beginning the war, and that the abolitionists’ insistence that the war should not end until all slavery had been abolished kept the war going. In 1863 the widely read New York Herald made the charge devastatingly personal. It specified that by being responsible for the war, each abolitionist had in effect already killed one man and permanently disabled four others. … While William Lloyd Garrison preferred voluntary emancipation, during the war he came to look with tolerance on the abolition of slavery by military necessity, saying that from seeming evil good may come. Similarly, the Garrisonian-Quaker editor, Oliver Johnson, while also preferring voluntary emancipation, pointed out that no reform ever triumphed except through mixed motives. But the Garrisonian lecturer Pillsbury was contemptuous of such attitudes. Freeing the slaves by military necessity would be of no benefit to the slave, he said in 1862, and the next year when the Emancipation Proclamation was already being put into effect, he said that freeing the slaves by military necessity could not create permanent peace. Parker Pillsbury won considerable support for his view from abolitionist meetings and from abolitionist leaders as well. Veteran Liberator writer Edwin Percy Whipple insisted that “true welfare” could come to the American people “only through a willing promotion of justice and freedom.” Henry C. Wright repeatedly said that only ideas, not bullets, could permanently settle the question of slavery. The recent Garrisonian convert, the young orator Ezra Heywood, pointed out that a government that could abolish slavery as a military necessity had no antislavery principles and could therefore re-establish slavery if circumstances required it. The Virginia aristocrat-turned-abolitionist, Moncure Daniel Conway, had misgivings that if emancipation did not come before it became a fierce necessity, it would not reflect true benevolence and hence could not produce true peace. The Philadelphia wool merchant, Quaker Alfred H. Love, asked, “Can so sublime a virtue as … freedom … be the offspring of so corrupt a parentage as war?” The long-time abolitionist Abby Kelley Foster –the speak-inner and Underground Railroader– predicted flatly, if the slave is freed only out of consideration for the safety of the Union, “the hate of the colored race will still continue, and the poison of that wickedness will destroy us as a nation.” Amid the searing impact of the war –the burning fields, the mangled bodies, the blood-splattered hills and fields– a few abolitionists had not forgotten their fundamental belief that to achieve humanitarian reform, particularly if it was to be thorough and permanent reform, the methods used to achieve it must be consistent with the nature of the reform. … What abolitionists often chose to brush aside was that after the war most blacks would still be living in the South, among the same Confederates whom they were now trying to kill.
CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT
Parker Pillsbury “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
1857
December 18, Friday: Friend Daniel Ricketson in Concord, to his journal:
Took tea with Thoreau and spent the evening with him and his father’s family. Parker Pillsbury, the anti- slavery lecturer, there. Took Channing’s room for lodging, hard bed, poor sleep. Cleared this P.M.
PARKER PILLSBURY HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
Carleton Mabee’s BLACK FREEDOM
Americans at large often held the abolitionists responsible for the war. They argued that the abolitionists’ long agitation, strident as it often was, had antagonized the South into secession, thus beginning the war, and that the abolitionists’ insistence that the war should not end until all slavery had been abolished kept the war going. In 1863 the widely read New York Herald made the charge devastatingly personal. It specified that by being responsible for the war, each abolitionist had in effect already killed one man and permanently disabled four others. … While William Lloyd Garrison preferred voluntary emancipation, during the war he came to look with tolerance on the abolition of slavery by military necessity, saying that from seeming evil good may come. Similarly, the Garrisonian-Quaker editor, Oliver Johnson, while also preferring voluntary emancipation, pointed out that no reform ever triumphed except through mixed motives. But the Garrisonian lecturer Pillsbury was contemptuous of such attitudes. Freeing the slaves by military necessity would be of no benefit to the slave, he said in 1862, and the next year when the Emancipation Proclamation was already being put into effect, he said that freeing the slaves by military necessity could not create permanent peace. Parker Pillsbury won considerable support for his view from abolitionist meetings and from abolitionist leaders as well. Veteran Liberator writer Edwin Percy Whipple insisted that “true welfare” could come to the American people “only through a willing promotion of justice and freedom.” Henry C. Wright repeatedly said that only ideas, not bullets, could permanently settle the question of slavery. The recent Garrisonian convert, the young orator Ezra Heywood, pointed out that a government that could abolish slavery as a military necessity had no antislavery principles and could therefore re-establish slavery if circumstances required it. The Virginia aristocrat-turned-abolitionist, Moncure Daniel Conway, had misgivings that if emancipation did not come before it became a fierce necessity, it would not reflect true benevolence and hence could not produce true peace. The Philadelphia wool merchant, Quaker Alfred H. Love, asked, “Can so sublime a virtue as … freedom … be the offspring of so corrupt a parentage as war?” The long-time abolitionist Abby Kelley –the speak-inner and Underground Railroader– predicted flatly, if the slave is freed only out of consideration for the safety of the Union, “the hate of the colored race will still continue, and the poison of that wickedness will destroy us as a nation.” Amid the searing impact of the war –the burning fields, the mangled bodies, the blood-splattered hills and fields– a few abolitionists had not forgotten their fundamental belief that to achieve humanitarian reform, particularly if it was to be thorough and permanent reform, the methods used to achieve it must be consistent with the nature of the reform. … What abolitionists often chose to brush aside was that after the war most blacks would still be living in the South, among the same Confederates whom they were now trying to kill.
THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY
December 19, Saturday: Friend Daniel Ricketson in Concord, to his journal:
PARKER PILLSBURY Clear and colder; accompanied Thoreau on a survey of WALDO EMERSON woodland near Walden Pond this forenoon, dined with him ABBA ALCOTT at his father’s, afternoon at my lodgings with Thoreau and Parker Pillsbury. R.W. Emerson also joined us at LOUISA MAY ALCOTT the close of the P.M. Took tea with Mr. Emerson, called on Mrs. Alcott and her daughters, whom I found very ELIZABETH ALCOTT agreeable and intelligent people; one daughter I did MAY ALCOTT not see, being quite ill, probably not to recover. Mr. Sanborn called there, with whom I returned to my room, he occupied with a sister Channing’s house. ELLERY CHANNING HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
1858
January 14, Thursday: In an effort to cool the atmosphere between himself and the Wesendoncks over their little ménage a trois, Richard Wagner left Zürich for Paris.
Felice Orsini, an Italian patriot and follower of Giuseppi Mazzini, led a small band in throwing several bombs at the carriage carrying the Emperor Napoléon III and Empress Eugénie to the Paris Opéra. Two people were killed. The Empress and about 150 others were injured. Orsini would be captured and executed. As the Emperor reached his box at the Opéra, the audience, aware of the attempt on his life, nevertheless remained mute.
Giuseppe Verdi arrived in Naples with an opera about killing a king.
Francisco Javier Istúriz y Montero replaced Francisco Armero y Fernández Peñaranda, marqués de Nervión as Prime Minister of Spain.
JONATHAN BUFFUM January 14, Thursday [1858]: Mr. Buffum says that in 1817 or 1819 he saw the sea-serpent at Swampscott, and so did several hundred others. He was to be seen off and on for some time. There were many people on the beach the first time, in carriages partly in the water, and the serpent came so near that they, thinking that he might come ashore, involuntarily turned their horses to the shore as with a general consent, and this movement caused him to shear off also. The road from Boston was lined with people directly, coming to see the monster. Prince came with his spy-glass, saw, and printed his account of him. Buffum says he has seen him twenty times, once alone, from the rocks at Little Nahant, when he passed along close to the shore just beneath the surface, and within fifty or sixty feet of him, so that he could have touched him with a very long pole, if he had dared to. Buffum is about sixty, and it should be said, as affecting the value of his evidence, that he is a firm believer in Spiritualism. This forenoon I rode to Nahant with Mr. Buffum. All the country bare. A fine warm day; neither snow nor ice, unless you search narrowly for them. On the way we pass Mr. Alonzo Lewis’s cottage. On the top of each of his stone posts is fastened a very perfectly egg-shaped pebble of sienite from Kettle Cove, fifteen to eighteen inches long and of proportionate diameter. I never saw any of that size so perfect. There are some fifteen of them about his house, and on one flatter, circular one he has made a dial, by which I learned the hour (9:30 A. M.). Says he was surveying once at Kettle Cove, where they form a beach a third of a mile long and two to ten feet deep, and he brought home as many as his horse could draw. His house is clapboarded with hemlock bark; now some twenty years old. He says that he built it himself. Called at the shop where lately Samuel Jillson, now of Feltonville, set up birds,–for he is a taxidermist and very skillful; kills his own birds and with blow-guns, which he makes and sells, some seven feet long, of glass, using a clay ball. Is said to be a dead shot at six rods! Warm and fall-like as it is, saw many snow buntings at the entrance to the beach. Saw many black ducks (so Lewis said; may they not have been velvet ducks, i. e. coot?) on the sea. Heard of a flock of geese (!) (may they not have been brant, or some other species?), etc.; ice[?] divers. On the south side of Little Nahant a large mass of fine pudding-stone. Nahant is said to have been well-wooded, and furnished timber for the wharves of Boston, i. e. to build them. Now a few willows and balm-of-Gileads are the only trees, if you except two or three small cedars. They say others will not grow on account of wind. The rocks are porphyry, with dykes of dark greenstone in it, and, at the extremity of Nahant, argillaceous slate, very distinctly stratified, with fossil corallines in it (?), looking like shells. Egg Rock, it seems, has a fertile garden on the top. PARKER PILLSBURY P.M.–Rode with J. Buffum, Parker Pillsbury, and Mr. Mudge, a lawyer and geologist of Lynn, into the northwest part of Lynn, to the Danvers line. After a mile or two, we passed beyond the line of the porphyry into the sienite. The sienite is more rounded. Saw some furrows in sienite. On a ledge of sienite in the woods, the rocky woods near Danvers line, saw many boulders of sienite, part of the same flock of which Ship Rock (so called) in Danvers is one. One fifteen feet long, ten wide, and five or six deep rested on four somewhat rounded (at least water-worn) stones, eighteen inches in diameter or more, so that you could crawl under it, on the top of a cliff, and projected about eight feet over it,–just as it was dropped by an iceberg. A fine broad-backed ledge of sienite just beyond, north or northwest, from which we saw Wachusett, Watatic, Monadnock, and the Peterboro Hills. Also saw where one Boyse (if that is the spelling), a miller in old times, got out millstones in a primitive way, so said an old man who was chopping there. He pried or cracked off a piece of the crust of the ledge, lying horizontal, some sixteen or eighteen inches thick, then made a fire on it about its edges, and, pouring on water, cracked or softened it, so that he could break off the edges and make it round with his sledge. Then he picked a HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY hole through the middle and hammered it as smooth as he could, and it was done. But this old man said that he had heard old folks say that the stones were so rough in old times that they made a noise like thunder as they revolved, and much grit was mixed with the meal. Returning down a gully, I thought I would look for a new plant and found at once what I suppose to be Genista tinctoria, dyers’-green-weed,–the stem is quite green, with a few pods and leaves left. It is said to have become naturalized on the hills of Essex County. Close by was a mass of sienite some seven or eight feet high, with a cedar some two inches thick springing from a mere crack in its top. Visited Jordan’s or the Lynn Quarry (of sienite) on our return, more southerly. The stone cracks very squarely and into very large masses. In one place was a dyke of dark greenstone, of which, joined to the sienite, I brought off two specimens, q. v. The more yellowish and rotten surface stone, lying above the hard and grayer, is called the sap by the quarrymen. From these rocks and wooded hills three or four miles inland in the northwest edge of Lynn, we had an extensive view of the ocean from Cape Ann to Scituate, and realized how the aborigines, when hunting, berrying, might perchance have looked out thus on the early navigators sailing along the coast,–thousands of them,–when they little suspected it,–how patent to the inhabitants their visit must have been. A vessel could hardly have passed within half a dozen miles of the shore, even,–at one place only, in pleasant weather,–without being seen by hundreds of savages. Mudge gave me Saugus jasper, graywacke, amygdaloid (greenstone with nodules of feldspar), asbestos, hornstone (?); Buffum some porphyry, epidote, argillaceous slate from end of Nahant. JONATHAN BUFFUM Mr. Buffum tells me that they never eat the seaclams without first taking out “the worm,” as it is called, about as large as the small end of a pipe-stem. He supposes it is the penis. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
1860
December 4, Tuesday: The Reverend John Stetson Barry and Louisa Young Barry’s daughter Caroline Louisa Barry got married with Charles Willard Morton, son of Charles O. Morton and Persis Morton of Needham, Massachusetts.
Parker Pillsbury wrote from Boston to Charles Wesley Slack to let him know that he would be unable to lecture because he was heading West to take a rest from the campaign.
Henry Thoreau surveyed William Monroe, Jr.’s land on the east side of Concord’s Monument Street next to Daniel Shattuck’s property and Richard Gourgas’s property.8 Laying down his surveying tools after this job, he would not use them again.
View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm
(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.)
View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_surveys/93a.htm
Dec. 4. The first snow, four or five inches, this evening. Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone. It exists in the Northern States, and I am reminded by what I find in the newspapers that it exists in Canada. I never yet met with, or heard of, a judge who was not a slave of this kind, and so the finest and most unfailing weapon of injustice. He fetches a slightly higher price than the black man only because he is a more valuable slave. It appears that a colored man killed his would-be kidnapper in Missouri and fled to Canada. The bloodhounds have tracked him to Toronto and now demand him of her judges. From all that I can learn, they are playing their parts like judges. They are servile, while the poor fugitive in their jail is free in spirit at least. This is what a Canadian writes to the New York Tribune: “Our judges may be compelled to render a judgment adverse to the prisoner. Depend upon it, they will not do it unless compelled [his italics]. And then the poor fellow will be taken back, and probably burned to death by the brutes of the South.”9 Compelled! By whom? Does God compel them? or is it some other master whom they serve? Can’t they hold out a little longer against the tremendous pressure? If they are fairly represented, I wouldn’t trust their courage to defend a setting hen of mine against a weasel. Will this excuse avail them when the real day of judgment comes? They have not to fear the slightest bodily harm: no one stands over them with a stick or a knife even [?]. They have at the worst only to resign their places and not a mouse will squeak about it. And yet they are likely to assist in tying this victim to the stake! Would that his example might teach them to break their own fetters! They appear not to know what kind of justice that is which is to be done though the heavens fall. Better that the British Empire be destroyed than that it should help to reenslave this man! This correspondent suggests that the “good people” of New York may rescue him as he is being carried back. There, then, is the only resort of justice,–not where the judges are, but where the mob is, where human hearts are beating, and hands move in obedience to their impulses. Perhaps his fellow-fugitives in Toronto may not feel compelled to surrender him. Justice, departing from the Canadian soil, leaves her last traces among these. What is called the religious world very generally deny virtue to all who have not received the Gospel. They accept no god as genuine but the one that bears a Hebrew name. The Greenlander’s Pirksoma [?] (he that is above), or any the like, is always the name of a false god to them. 8. It would be this William Monroe, Jr. who would later give the funds to build and maintain the Concord Free Public Library. 9. This was from the issue of November 29, 1860 and appeared on page 6. It pertained to a fugitive slave in Toronto, known there as John Anderson. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY C. says that Walden was first frozen over on the 16th December.
[THOREAU WOULD MAKE NO ENTRIES IN HIS JOURNAL DECEMBER 5th TO DECEMBER 21st] HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
1861
April 9, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau was being written to by Parker Pillsbury of the Anti-Slavery Office, with a request that he provide a copy of each of his books.
{No MS—from manuscript catalog}
A friend of mine away in New York, wishes very much a copy of each of your “Memoirs”—”In the Woods” and “On the Rivers”. . . . . Can you & will you cause a copy of each to meet me at the Anti- Slavery Office.
April 9. Small reddish butterflies common; also, on snow banks, many of the small fuzzy gnats and cicindelæ and some large black dor-bug-like beetles. The two latter are easily detected from a distance on the snow. The phœbe note of chickadee. White frosts these mornings. Worm-piles in grass at Clamshell. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY April 10, Wednesday: Henry Thoreau wrote to Parker Pillsbury, sending along a copy of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS per their request but indicating that for WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS the Anti- Slavery Office will need to go to Ticknor & Fields.
A macarism from this letter: “[Ignoring evil, in general, and, specifically, ignoring the fighting that was going on at Fort Sumter, and ignoring the attitudes of President Abraham Lincoln about this fighting] is just the most fatal and indeed the only fatal, weapon you can direct against evil, ever…. I do not so much regret the present condition of things in this country (provided I regret it at all) as I do that I ever heard of it…. Blessed were the days before you read a president’s message. Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY Nature, and through her, God.”
US CIVIL WAR Concord Ap. 10th 1861 Friend Pillsbury, I am sorry to say that I have not a copy of “Walden” which I can spare, and know of none, unless, possibly, Ticknor & Fields have one. I send, nevertheless, a copy of the “Week”, the price of which is $1.25 which you can pay at your convenience. As for my prospective reader, I hope that he ignores Fort Sumpter, & Old Abe, & all that, for that is just the most fatal, and indeed the only fatal, weapon you can direct against evil ever; for as long as you know of it, you are particeps criminis. What business have you, if you are “an angel of light,” to be pondering over the deeds of darkness, — reading the New York Herald, & the like? I do not so much regret the present condition of things in this country, (provid- ed I regret it at all) as I do that I ever heard of it. I know one or 2 who have this year, for the first time, read a president’s message; but they do not see that this implies a fall in themselves, rather than a rise in the president. Blessed were the days before you read a pres- ident’s message. Blessed are the young for they do not read the pres- ident’s message. Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Na- ture, and through her, God. But alas I have heard of Sumpter, & Pickens, & even of Buchanan, (though I did not read his message). I also read the New York Tribune, but then I am reading Herodotus & Strabo, & Blodget’s Climatology, and Six Years in the Deserts of STRABO North America, as hard as I can, to counterbalance it. BLODGET By the way, Alcott is at present our most popular & successful man, HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY and has just published a volume in size, in the shape of the annual school report, which, I presume, he has sent to you. Yrs, for remembering all good things, Henry D. Thoreau
SEVEN YEARS RESIDENCE, I SEVEN YEARS RESIDENCE, II
April 10. Purple finch. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY April 13, Saturday: News of the bombardment of Fort Sumter began to reach the cities of the North:
In Boston, in order to generate an autograph, Parker Pillsbury summoned the following sentiment: “First battle against slavery with deadly weapons! Memorable in American history will the twelfth of April be, as well as the nineteenth. Yesterday began the cannonade of Fort Sumter! ‘God speed the night.’ — Parker Pillsbury — Boston 13 April 1861.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY Walt Whitman reported from New-York that: “Specimen Days”
OPENING OF THE SECESSION WAR News of the attack on fort Sumter and the flag at Charleston harbor, S.C., was receiv’d in New York city late at night (13th April, 1861,) and was immediately sent out in extras of the newspapers. I had been to the opera in Fourteenth street that night, and after the performance was walking down Broadway toward twelve o’clock, on my way to Brooklyn, when I heard in the distance the loud cries of the newsboys, who came presently tearing and yelling up the street, rushing from side to side even more furiously than usual. I bought an extra and cross’d to the Metropolitan hotel (Niblo’s) where the great lamps were still brightly blazing, and, with a crowd of others, who gather’d impromptu, read the news, which was evidently authentic. For the benefit of some who had no papers, one of us read the telegram aloud, while all listen’d silently and attentively. No remark was made by any of the crowd, which had increas’d to thirty or forty, but all stood a minute or two, I remember, before they dispers’d. I can almost see them there now, under the lamps at midnight again.
That evening Whitman would recall that “News of the attack on fort Sumter and the flag at Charleston harbor, S.C., was receiv’d in New York city late at night (13th April, 1861) and was immediately sent out in extras of the newspapers. I had been to the opera in Fourteenth street that night, and after the performance was walking down Broadway toward twelve o’clock, on my way to Brooklyn, when I heard in the distance the loud cries of the newsboys.” (He had been hearing Clara Louisa Kellogg sing the title role of Linda di Chamounix.) (Charleston) The cannonading is going on fiercely from all points, and from the vessels outside and all along our coast. It is reported that Fort Sumter is on fire! 10:30 A.M: At intervals of twenty minutes firing was kept up all night on Ft. Sumter. Maj. Anderson ceased firing from Ft. Sumter in the evening. All night he was engaged in repairing damages and protecting the barbette guns. He commenced to return the fire at 7 o’clock this morning. Ft. Sumter seems to be greatly disabled. The battery on Cumming’s Point does Fort Sumter great damage. At 9 o’clock this morning a dense smoke poured out from Ft. Sumter. The federal flag is at half mast signaling distress. The shells from Fort Moultrie and the batteries on Morris Island fall into Maj. Anderson’s stronghold thick and fast, and they can be seen in their course from the Charleston Battery. 1 1/2 o’clock- Firing ceased. Unconditional surrender made. Carolinians are surprised the fight is over. After flag staff was shot away, Wigfall was sent by Beauregard to Sumter with white flag, to offer assistance to subdue the flames. He was meet by Anderson, who had just displayed a white flag. But batteries had not stopped firing. Wigfall replied: Anderson must haul down the American flag, and surrender, or fight was the word. Anderson then hauled the flag down. Several of Beauregard’s staff came over and stipulated that the surrender must be unconditional. Anderson allowed them to take actual possession. Five of Anderson’s men wounded one thought mortally. At 2:30PM Fort Sumter did surrender, wherupon a boat and 10 men were sent from ships of war outside to Morris’ Island requesting permission for a vessel to take off Anderson’s command. Anderson’s reported surrender was because quarters and barracks had been destroyed and they had no hope of reinforcements. Fleet lay by 30 hours. Couldn’t or wouldn’t help him. His men were prostrated by over exertion. Explosions heard in Sumter. Everything in ruins but the casements. Many guns are dismounted, and the walls look like honey combs. Moultrie is badly damaged. The houses on the island are riddled. Boats sent from the fort to- HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY night officially notify the fleet of the surrender of Sumter. It is not known what will be done with Sumter or the vanquished. (New-York) The President received the war news calmly and with a confident feeling that he had done his duty in the matter. Senator Sherman arrived from Ohio and reports the Republicans there ready to stand by to the last. The opinion prevails that an attempt will be made before sunrise to run the light draft vessels of the fleet up to Sumter to reinforce and provision it. Washington Tribune dispatch says Capt. Fox commands the vessel with provisions which is to lead the expedition into Charleston. US CIVIL WAR
[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR APRIL 13th] HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
1864
When Confederate troops looted a store in Sandy Spring, Maryland; a posse of locals including local Friends set out in pursuit, engaged them near Rockville in a skirmish known as the Battle of Ricketts Run, killed their leader, and recovered the purloined goods. US CIVIL WAR THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY
James Kendall Hosmer’s THE COLOR-GUARD; BEING A CORPORAL’S NOTES OF MILITARY SERVICE IN THE NINETEENTH ARMY CORPS (Boston, Walker, Wise, and Company; 245, Washington Street). Reading this, it is hard to imagine it as the product of a mere 9-month enlistment.
The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway’s article for The Atlantic Monthly “Benjamin Banneker, the Negro Astronomer” was republished as a pamphlet in England.10
In about this timeframe, the Reverend was also having published as a pamphlet in England another of his efforts, under the title “The Spiritual Serfdom of the Laity.”11
In about this timeframe the Reverend reminisced: It is quite different from any I have ever seen. So beautiful and cheerful was this Quaker neighborhood, with its bright homes, and fields filled with happy laborers, the only happy negroes I have anywhere known,12 that I always experienced an exhilaration in riding there, and have often gone several miles out of my way to go through it to my appointments. I could tell the very line on the ground where the ordinary Maryland ended and the Quaker region began. I found on further acquaintance that I was in a place where mental culture was general, where there was a good circulating library and excellent schools, and the interior life of Sandy Spring more attractive even than the exterior.13
10. Moncure Daniel Conway. BENJAMIN BANNEKER. THE NEGRO ASTRONOMER. Reprinted from the Atlantic Monthly, by M.D. Conway. Pamphlet. London: Printed and Published for the Ladies London Emancipation Society by Emily Faithfull, Printer and Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty, Victoria Press. 1864. READ THE FULL TEXT
11. Moncure Daniel Conway. THE SPIRITUAL SERFDOM OF THE LAITY. BY M.D. CONWAY. Pamphlet. Published by Thomas Scott, Ramsgate. READ THE FULL TEXT
12. Josiah Henson would write about his experience with slavery in a memoir alleging that his life story had been a basis for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s UNCLE TOM’S CABIN in 1852, as the alleged inspiration for the character “Uncle Tom.” A slave cabin in which Henson is believed to have spent time still stands at the end of a driveway off Old Georgetown Road. 13. The Reverend Conway corresponded for decades with an elder of the Sandy Spring Monthly Meeting there, Friend William Henry Farquhar. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
In this crucial election held in the midst of war, the coining of the new term “miscegenation” (a combination of 2 Latin terms, miscere for mixing and genus for race) as the term of choice for the fertile fusion and merging of the human races, to replace or supplement the older term “amalgamation” which ambiguously also indicated the restoration of the federal union, became a central focus, largely as the result of a anonymous 72-page Fake News pamphlet Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro perpetrated by the anti-abolitionists David G. Croley and George Wakeman in New-York City. The hoax was that while said pamphlet pretended to be an argument in favor of race mixture as our salvation, actually it was being offered in argument by a couple of white journalistic gents who were supposing race mixture to be the very worst thing which might ever happen to us as a nation:14 The Anthropological Society was incensed by an anonymous pamphlet published in London and New York in that year, entitled MISCEGENATION: THE THEORY OF THE BLENDING OF THE RACES APPLIED TO THE AMERICAN WHITE MAN AND NEGRO. It was with this book that the word “miscegenation” was first introduced, and the impact of this book can be measured from the fact that it caught on immediately. The authors began with a short definition of the term, as well as a cluster of other mostly nonce-words: miscegen, miscegenate, miscegenetic, melaleukation, melaleukon, melaleuketic (the last three terms, from the Greek melas (black) and leukos (white) leading to a further term melamigleukation, “the union of the races.” The strategy involved the production of a new word that would have the more specific meaning of actual racial mixture than the customary term “amalgamation,” which doubled as the term for the restoration of the Union. MISCEGENATION consisted of an audacious, cheeky attack on the thesis of the pro-slavery anthropologists Morton, Nott and Gliddon that claimed inevitable decline to be the effect of the mixing of the races. The authors invoke instead another common argument, to be cited by Darwin in THE DESCENT OF MAN, that a cross with “civilized races” makes “an aboriginal race” more fertile. In MISCEGENATION, the authors advance the proposition that miscegenation, far from producing degeneration as Gobineau and his American sympathizers had claimed, would have altogether beneficial effects, in this case by arresting the people of the United States from their alleged current decline, and increasing their fertility and vigour so as to form them into a new super- race: Whatever of power and vitality there is in the American race is derived, not from its Anglo-Saxon progenitors, but from all the different nationalities which go to make up this people. All that is needed to make it the finest race on earth is to engraft upon our stock the negro element which Providence has placed by our side on this continent.... We must become a yellow-skinned, black- haired people –in fine we must become Miscegens– if we would attain the fullest results of civilization (MISCEGENATION, pages 18, 28). Well, isn’t that something, as provocations go! And yet these anonymous New-York anti-abolitionist agents provocateur newsies weren’t far off their mark, for in fact there were persons in that period in whom such provocative thoughts would resonate. One person in whom they had encouraged provocative thoughts was the Reverend Conway, who would argue that “the mixture of the blacks and whites is good.” Well, that might be correct, but in that era it was definitely the wrong opinion to have if one desired to be of influence in that society. The Reverend would argue “I believe that such a combination would evolve a more complete character than the unmitigated Anglo-Saxon.” He would argue that rather than attempting to rear a new nationality, here 14. Young, Robert J.C. COLONIAL DESIRE: HYBRIDITY IN THEORY, CULTURE AND RACE. London: Routledge, 1995 (page 144). HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY in America, “we have to rear a new race.”15 He would argue that “it is well to remember that Miscegenation is already the irreversible fact of Southern Society in every thing but the recognition of it,” that “the mixture of blood has been very extensive,” that “These Southerners have proved that the repulsion of the alliance of the two bloods extends only to so much of it as the parson and magistrate have anything to do with.” –But in the making of such impolitic arguments, in that period, he would be merely disenfranchising himself and his followers precisely as these anonymous New-York anti-abolitionist agents provocateur newsies desired that such persons disenfranchise themselves!
For the science of the day would not support this:
[see descriptive quotation]
15. By the sheerest coincidence the Reverend Conway had a relative down in Virginia who was doing precisely that. During the 1840s his uncle George Washington Conway had fallen in love with a neighbor’s slave, of mixed race, and gotten her pregnant. Then he had done the decent thing. Marry her? –No, that decent thing was quite impossible in Virginia, so he had done the next best, he had purchased her. They had simply matched the external pretense, the pretense of the law, that she was enslaved, with an internal pretense, the pretense of the heart, that she was enwifed. He had become de facto her loving husband. We don’t know much about this couple, for such people quickly became invisible in the Old South, but we do know that in 1852 they had been living on a small farm in the woods with an elderly black woman, and with their two mixed-race children. (Legally, the black woman, the mulatto woman, and the two mulatto children were all the slaves of G.W. Conway — but the only way we can distinguish this George Washington Conway in the records from which he is almost totally absent, as a white man, is that in these records, such as in the two censuses which were taken during his lifetime, he is listed under his full name within a context in which everyone around him has only a given name. Moncure would comment that “Even my father declares that he is the best-hearted of the family.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
The way in which [Robert Dale] Owen dwells on the physical details of the diseases of the Canadian refugees [in his 1864 treatise THE WRONG OF SLAVERY, THE RIGHT OF EMANCIPATION, AND THE FUTURE OF THE AFRICAN RACE IN THE UNITED STATES] is symptomatic of the phobia and fascination that the idea of miscegenation summons forth in the white imagination. As we have seen, 19th-Century scientists seemed particularly prone to such hostile obsessions and ambivalent fantasies. Take, for example, the reaction of the Swiss-American ethnologist, Louis Agassiz, Professor of Zoology at Harvard and contributor to TYPES OF MANKIND, when invited to comment to the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission on the prospect for emancipated slaves in the United States, with particular reference to the question of whether they would amalgamate with the whites, and whether the mulattos would be prolific in reproducing themselves or die out as Nott had claimed. Agassiz’s own theory of the geographical distribution of the races led him to argue that blacks and whites would segregate naturally, with the white going North and the Blacks south. The mulattos, weak and infertile, he claimed, would die out. Rehearsing the argument of Nott, Agassiz similarly finds himself not entirely convinced by his own scientific racial theory. He cannot bear from dwelling on the overriding nightmare of the possibility of amalgamation: The production of halfbreeds is as much a sin against purity of character.... Far from presenting to me a natural solution of our difficulties, the idea of amalgamation is most repugnant to my feelings, I hold it to be a perversion of every natural sentiment.... No efforts should be spared to check that which is abhorrent to our better nature, and to the progress of a higher civilization and a purer morality. ...Disgust always bears the imprint of desire: Agassiz goes on to suggest that the effect of such philandering with mixed-race servants is that the white Southern male increasingly acquires a taste for pure black women: “This blunts his better instincts in that direction and leads him gradually to seek more spicy partners, as I have heard the full blacks called by fast young men.” At this point Agassiz articulates the unspeakable, and opens up the basis of the necessity for why so much racial theory is based on the insistence on inalienable separation: not only the fear, and delicious fantasy, that the white woman really wants to proclaim “I love the black man,” but an avowal of the sexual desire of white men for black women. Once again, as in Gobineau, we find and ambivalent driving desire at the heart of racialism: a compulsive libidinal attraction disavowed by an equal insistence on repulsion ... an ambivalence nicely illustrated in Agassiz’s [and Mrs. Louis Agassiz’s] own A JOURNEY IN BRAZIL [London: Trübner, 1868], where [Professor] Agassiz’s revulsion against “half-breed” mixed-race populations –“a mongrel crowd as repulsive as the mongrel dogs”– is matched by his wife’s fascination for the “fine-looking athletic negroes” from West Africa whom, she writes, she never tires of watching in the street and the market. AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY As part of the propaganda that our civil war was not just a bloody mess but a noble cause –that it had moral purpose, that the North was standing on moral high ground– a number of photographs began to circulate, the intent of which was to demonstrate to all and sundry that slavery wasn’t merely something that happened only to Americans who were noticeably “of color,” but was something that might happen even to me and mine or even to you and yours:
(There’s no reason, of course, to suspect that this photograph has been in any way faked. There were in fact light-mulatto slaves in the American South, just as there were free light mulattoes in the American North, who looked just about as white as white gets — but who were still in the South being treated as “just another slave,” and were still in the North being treated as “just another nigger.” If, for instance, you ever get a chance to look at photographs of the “black” students being educated by Prudence Crandall in Connecticut –remember the fuss and feathers as local citizens threw rocks through the windows of her school and attempted to set it on HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY fire?– you will be hard put to make out that these young ladies were not perfectly white.) Carleton Mabee’s BLACK FREEDOM
Americans at large often held the abolitionists responsible for the war. They argued that the abolitionists’ long agitation, strident as it often was, had antagonized the South into secession, thus beginning the war, and that the abolitionists’ insistence that the war should not end until all slavery had been abolished kept the war going. In 1863 the widely read New York Herald made the charge devastatingly personal. It specified that by being responsible for the war, each abolitionist had in effect already killed one man and permanently disabled four others.… While William Lloyd Garrison preferred voluntary emancipation, during the war he came to look with tolerance on the abolition of slavery by military necessity, saying that from seeming evil good may come. Similarly, the Garrisonian-Quaker editor, Oliver Johnson, while also preferring voluntary emancipation, pointed out that no reform ever triumphed except through mixed motives. But the Garrisonian lecturer Pillsbury was contemptuous of such attitudes. Freeing the slaves by military necessity would be of no benefit to the slave, he said in 1862, and the next year when the Emancipation Proclamation was already being put into effect, he said that freeing the slaves by military necessity could not create permanent peace. Parker Pillsbury won considerable support for his view from abolitionist meetings and from abolitionist leaders as well. Veteran Liberator writer Edwin Percy Whipple insisted that “true welfare” could come to the American people “only through a willing promotion of justice and freedom.” Henry C. Wright repeatedly said that only ideas, not bullets, could permanently settle the question of slavery. The recent Garrisonian convert, the young orator Ezra Heywood, pointed out that a government that could abolish slavery as a military necessity had no antislavery principles and could therefore re-establish slavery if circumstances required it. The Virginia aristocrat-turned-abolitionist, Moncure Daniel Conway, had misgivings that if emancipation did not come before it became a fierce necessity, it would not reflect true benevolence and hence could not produce true peace. The Philadelphia wool merchant, Quaker Alfred H. Love, asked, “Can so sublime a virtue as … freedom … be the offspring of so corrupt a parentage as war?” The long-time abolitionist Abby Kelley Foster –the speak-inner and Underground Railroader– predicted flatly, if the slave is freed only out of consideration for the safety of the Union, “the hate of the colored race will still continue, and the poison of that wickedness will destroy us as a nation.” Amid the searing impact of the war –the burning fields, the mangled bodies, the blood-splattered hills and fields– a few abolitionists had not forgotten their fundamental belief that to achieve humanitarian reform, particularly if it was to be thorough and permanent reform, the methods used to achieve it must be consistent with the nature of the reform. … What abolitionists often chose to brush aside was that after the war most blacks would still be living in the South, among the same Confederates whom they were now trying to kill.
FAKELORE HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
1865
Parker Pillsbury broke with longtime associate William Lloyd Garrison over the need for continued activity by the American Anti-Slavery Society. ABOLITIONISM
He helped draft the constitution of the feminist American Equal Rights Association and served as vice- president of the New Hampshire Woman Suffrage Association. FEMINISM
Henry C. Wright’s THE LIVING PRESENT AND THE DEAD PAST; OR, GOD MADE MANIFEST AND USEFUL IN LIVING MEN AND WOMEN AS HE WAS IN JESUS (Boston MA: Bela Marsh).
At the end of our civil war, Wright saw very clearly the fact of the matter, that while the peculiar institution of human slavery itself might have been interrupted by military power, “its spirit and its results live.” Per Professor Carleton Mabee’s BLACK FREEDOM, pages 334-39: Americans at large often held the abolitionists responsible for the war. They argued that the abolitionists’ long agitation, strident as it often was, had antagonized the South into HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY secession, thus beginning the war, and that the abolitionists’ insistence that the war should not end until all slavery had been abolished kept the war going. In 1863 the widely read New York Herald made the charge devastatingly personal. It specified that by being responsible for the war, each abolitionist had in effect already killed one man and permanently disabled four others. ... While William Lloyd Garrison preferred voluntary emancipation, during the war he came to look with tolerance on the abolition of slavery by military necessity, saying that from seeming evil good may come. Similarly, the Garrisonian-Quaker editor, Friend Oliver Johnson, while also preferring voluntary emancipation, pointed out that no reform ever triumphed except through mixed motives. But the Garrisonian lecturer Parker Pillsbury was contemptuous of such attitudes. Freeing the slaves by military necessity would be of no benefit to the slave, he said in 1862, and the next year when the Emancipation Proclamation was already being put into effect, he said that freeing the slaves by military necessity could not create permanent peace. Pillsbury won considerable support for his view from abolitionist meetings and from abolitionist leaders as well. Veteran Liberator writer Edwin Percy Whipple insisted that “true welfare” could come to the American people “only through a willing promotion of justice and freedom.” Henry C. Wright repeatedly said that only ideas, not bullets, could permanently settle the question of slavery. The recent Garrisonian convert, the young orator Ezra Heywood, pointed out that a government that could abolish slavery as a military necessity had no antislavery principles and could therefore re-establish slavery if circumstances required it. The Virginia aristocrat-turned- abolitionist, the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway, had misgivings that if emancipation did not come before it became a fierce necessity, it would not reflect true benevolence and hence could not produce true peace. The Philadelphia wool merchant, Quaker Alfred H. Love, asked, “Can so sublime a virtue as ... freedom ... be the offspring of so corrupt a parentage as war?” The long- time abolitionist Abby Kelley Foster –the speak-inner and Underground Railroader– predicted flatly, if the slave is freed only out of consideration for the safety of the Union, “the hate of the colored race will still continue, and the poison of that wickedness will destroy us as a nation.” Amid the searing impact of the war –the burning fields, the mangled bodies, the blood- splattered hills and fields– a few abolitionists had not forgotten their fundamental belief that to achieve humanitarian reform, particularly if it was to be thorough and permanent reform, the methods used to achieve it must be consistent with the nature of the reform. ... What abolitionists often chose to brush aside was that after the war most blacks would still be living in the South, among the same Confederates whom they were now trying to kill.
February 10, Friday: Parker Pillsbury wrote to give Charles Wesley Slack permission to print an item. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
1866
Over President Johnson’s veto, the federal Congress passed a Civil Rights law to secure all the rights of citizenship for former slaves.
Parker Pillsbury edited the National Anti-Slavery Standard. ABOLITIONISM HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
1868
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan Brownell Anthony had a falling out with longtime ally Horace Greeley, editor of the New-York Tribune.
As a result they began publishing their own weekly newspaper out of New-York, The Revolution, a gazette devoted to women’s suffrage, equal pay for equal work, women’s education, the rights of working women and the opening of new occupations for women, and liberalization of divorce laws. Parker Pillsbury would serve for 2 years as co-editor with Stanton.
FEMINISM HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
1878
John Carroll Power, the custodian, and his “Lincoln Guard of Honor” at the Oak Ridge Cemetery of Springfield, Illinois managed to put the casket containing the remains of President Abraham Lincoln under a few inches of dirt in a drier corner of the basement of the marble tomb. DIGGING UP THE DEAD
Lydia Maria Child had Roberts Brothers of Boston print her own “eclectic Bible” of quotations from the world’s religions, ASPIRATIONS OF THE WORLD: A CHAIN OF OPALS, her motive being stated as: “to do all I can to enlarge and strengthen the hand of human brotherhood.” ASPIRATIONS OF THE WORLD
The Virginia supreme court, in Kinney v. Commonwealth, 71 Virginia 858, 869, considered it the state’s duty to protect the moral welfare of both races by banning any and all sorts of interracial mingling: “The purity of public morals, the moral and physical development of both races, and the highest advancement of our cherished southern civilization, under which two distinct races are to work out and accomplish the destiny to which the Almighty has assigned them on this continent — all require that they should be kept distinct and separate, and that connections and alliances so unnatural that God and nature seem to forbid them, should be prohibited by positive law, and be subject to no evasion.” Folks, let’s not go there.
NARRATIVE OF SOJOURNER TRUTH; A BONDSWOMAN OF OLDEN TIME, EMANCIPATED BY THE NEW YORK LEGISLATURE IN THE EARLY PART OF THE PRESENT CENTURY; WITH A HISTORY OF HER LABORS AND HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY 16 CORRESPONDENCE DRAWN FROM HER “BOOK OF LIFE.” SOJOURNER TRUTH NORTHAMPTON MA ASSOCIATION OF INDUSTRY AND EDUCATION
You do know that Sojourner kept an autograph collection, don’t you? Here are some of her specimens:17
16. You will notice that I do not have here an illustration of the correct edition. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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17. William Lloyd Garrison President Abraham Lincoln Parker Pillsbury Gilbert Haven Susan B. Anthony Calvin Fairbanks Wendell Phillips Harriet Beecher Stowe Charles S. White Friend Lucretia Mott Lydia Maria Child George Thompson Gerrit Smith Captain Jonathan Walker R.S. Griffing Reverend Samuel Joseph May O.O. Howard Rowland Johnson Lydia Mott Friend Amy Post HDT WHAT? INDEX
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PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
1879
February 9, Sunday: Parker Pillsbury wrote Franklin Benjamin Sanborn about Henry Thoreau: Yes, truly, “One world at a time” was the very word, almost the last word to me, of our lamented Thoreau. And in tone too sweet and tender for me to suspect that he deemed my question impertinent, or even in questionable taste; as it would have been if dictated by idle curiosity, or, still worse, by religious spleen or sectarian bigotry. He was very weak and low; he saw but very few more setting suns. He sat pillowed in an easy chair. Behind him stood his patient, dear, devoted mother, with her fan in one hand, and phial of ammonia or cologne in the other, to sustain him in the warm morning. At a table near him, piled with his papers and other articles related to them and him, sat his sister, arranging them, as I understood, for Ticknor and Fields, who had been to Concord and bought the copyright. When I entered Thoreau was looking deathly weak and pale. I saw my way but for the fewest words. I said, as I took his hand, “I suppose this is the best you can do now.” He smiled and only nodded, and gasped a faint assent. “The outworks,” I said, “seem almost ready to give way.” Then a smile shone on his pale face, and with an effort he said, “Yes,—but as long as she cracks she holds” (a common saying of boys skating). Then I spoke only once more to him, and cannot remember my exact words. But I think my question was substantially this: “You seem so near the brink of the dark river, that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.” Then he answered: “One world at a time.” All this did not occupy more than two minutes, or three at farthest; he needed all his little remaining strength for more important work. Mrs. Thoreau told me subsequently that in revising for the press he was throwing out almost everything that tended to mirthfulness, as not becoming to the deep seriousness with which he then viewed human existence. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
1881
September 24, Saturday: There was a memorial service for Stephen Symonds Foster at the Worcester Horticultural Hall, with the Reverend Samuel J. May, Jr. of Leicester, Massachusetts officiating. Comments were offered by Lucy Stone, Wendell Phillips, the Reverend Henry T. Cheever, and Parker Pillsbury. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1883
Parker Pillsbury’s memoir, ACTS OF THE ANTI-SLAVERY APOSTLES. ABOLITIONISM
Publication of the 1st edition of William J. Brown’s THE LIFE OF WILLIAM J. BROWN, OF PROVIDENCE, R.I.; WITH PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF INCIDENTS IN RHODE ISLAND, in Providence, Rhode Island by the firm of Angel & Co., Printers. =18 This 1st edition in its original cloth gilt binding as illustrated is now worth $2,000 on the rare book market, despite “corners a little bumped and worn and a few modest stains to the rear board.” (Fortunately, the autobiography has been reprinted twice, in 1971 and in 2006.)
Professor Joanne Pope Melish would comment, about this autobiography, that: In depicting his own struggles and those of his ancestors and his community, Brown offers a vivid picture of a New England 18. We have in Providence two life-story books which were published in order to create an income for a needy elderly man of color. One is an 1829 publication done for the benefit of Robert Voorhis, and the other is this 1883 publication by and for William J. Brown. Did that one at least in part inspire this one? HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY white society reluctantly disentangling itself from slavery, clinging to habits of mind formed in its context, and refashioning its basic arguments into a new form of bondage — the virulent racism that is slavery’s evil twin.... Brown’s memoir is important because it represents a determined effort by a nineteenth-century man of color to undermine the willful historical amnesia that fed, and feeds, New England racism.
(The above corresponds closely with my own personal take on the situation, since I have come to regard the antebellum Providence “quietist” Quaker context of this black American’s life as having been in effect the testing-ground for what would, subsequent to our Civil War, emerge as the disgrace of our nation’s “Jim Crow” period of racial separatism.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1886
As you are aware, there is a claim that Henry Thoreau has inspired Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., via Lev Nikolævich Tolstòy, in their use of nonviolent tactics of political confrontation. In this regard we may consider here an interesting exchange of correspondence between the retired Reverend Adin Ballou of the failed Hopedale Community of non-resistance to evil –a man who had
once lectured on nonviolence to Thoreau among others present at the Concord Lyceum– and Count Tolstòy of Russia, on the subject of nonviolent political tactics, and note that in this correspondence Thoreau’s name simply does not come up: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Upon the appearance in this country of the first of the translated writings of this Russian author and the consequent heralding of him as a new interpreter of the gospel of Christ and as a restorer of primitive Christianity as Jesus taught and exemplified it, Mr. Ballou availed himself of an early opportunity of becoming acquainted with the views and principles upon which such unusual representations were based. From what he learned incidentally through the public press, he hoped to find in this previously unknown author a man after his own heart — a consistent and radical advocate of peace, a friend of all true reform, and a wise counsellor in the work of inaugurating a new order of society from which all injurious force should be excluded and in which all things should be subordinated to and animated by the spirit of pure love to God and man. That his hopes in this direction were not realized — that he was seriously disappointed indeed in both the man and his teachings, the sequel clearly shows. The first mention of the new luminary in the religious firmament made by Mr. Ballou was in his journal of Feb. 16, 1886, as follows:
Commenced reading a lately purchased book, Count Tolstoi’s “My Religion.” Found many good things in it on ethics, with here and there an indiscriminating extremism in the application of Christ’s precepts against resisting evil with evil, and in his views of penal judgment and covetousness, or mammonism. But on theology found him wild, crude, and mystically absurd. His ideas concerning the divine nature, human nature, eternal life, Christ’s resurrection, humanity’s immortality, and the immortality of individuals, etc., are untrue, visionary, chaotic, and pitiably puerile. So it seems to me in this first perusal. But I will read further and think him out more thoroughly.
Only in private correspondence, such as in a letter to Parker Pillsbury in April 1861, where he advised “Ignore Fort Sumter, and old Abe, and all that; for that is just the most fatal, and, indeed, the only fatal weapon you can direct against evil, ever,” did Thoreau embrace nonresistance to evil. It became almost an esoteric doctrine, almost for experts only: per Job, do shun evil, do depart from it; per Yehoshua, whatever we do we mustn’t attempt to resist it; per Thoreau, indeed we must successfully ignore it. Only as an afterthought to his journal on October 22, 1859, an afterthought which he omitted on October 30 when he read his jottings in three citizens’ meetings, can we see that, had it come to killing or being killed, Thoreau would have chose to be killed (October 22, 1859): “I do not wish to kill or nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both of these things would be by me unavoidable. In extremities I could even be killed” (strikethroughs indicate changes from journal to speech). Thoreau believed that, whether the sacrifice of others’ lives was legitimate or not (even the Brown slaughter of children of slaveowners in Kansas with modern expensive weapons the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Further reading and more thorough thinking, however, did not bring him to a more favorable conclusion. “The saying of Christ, ‘Resist not evil,’ Tolstoi interpreted in its most literal sense, making it inculcate complete passivity not only toward wrong-doers but toward persons rendered insane and dangerous by bad habits, inflamed passions, or unbalanced minds, to the exclusion of non-injurious and beneficent force under any and every circumstance of life.” To Mr. Ballou’s apprehension this was carrying the doctrine of Non-resistance to an illogical and extravagant extreme, warranted neither by the teachings of Jesus nor by a true regard for the welfare of the evil-doer, the irresponsible maniac, or society at large, which often required wholesome restraint and physical force exercised without accompanying harm or injury to any one. Moreover, the distinctively religious expositions and indoctrinations of Tolstoi, as expressed in the book specified and in subsequent works, met with little favor from Mr. Ballou, whose ideas of God, man, immortality, etc., were as definite and pronounced as his ethical principles, and in his estimation as essential to a high type of personal character or a true order of social life. Some three years after Mr. Ballou began to acquaint himself with the writings of Tolstoi, Rev. Lewis G. Wilson, then pastor of the Hopedale parish and an interested reader of the latter, sent him some of the former’s published works, with his photograph and an explanatory letter. On the 5th of July, 1889, he received a responsive communication in which the Count highly commended, in their principle features, the views contained in the publications forwarded to him, though subjecting some of their applications, especially the one relating to the rightful use of uninjurious force as mentioned above, to emphatic protest and denial. This communication Mr. Wilson handed to Mr. Ballou for perusal and a reply if he chose to make one. This he did in due time, taking up the more important points of Tolstoi’s dissent — those pertaining to the practical application of Non-resistant principles, the right to hold property, and no-governmentism particularly, and answering them by extended argument and illustration. Thereto were added also some comments upon certain theological positions assumed in “My Religion.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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On the 26th of March, 1890, the mail brought a rejoinder to this missive, of which the recipient writes: “It relates to some points of difference between us as expressed in a letter sent him some months ago. He declines to argue and refers me to one of his published works, yielding nothing of his extreme Non-resistance even against madmen, but saying, ‘I exposed all I think on those subjects.’ ‘I cannot now change my views without verifying them anew.’ The dictum with which the letter opened, ‘I will not argue with your objections,’ characterized its entire contents and put an end to all discussion. It closed, however, with the statement that ‘Two of your tracts are translated into Russian and propagated among believers and richly appreciated by them.’” Tolstoi’s communication was answered about two months afterward, but no acknowledgment ever came back, by reason, no doubt, of the writer’s death a few weeks later, — an account of which was sent by Mr. Wilson to the distinguished author, whose daughter responded, “Your tidings are very sad, and my father is deeply grieved.” Of the relation between Mr. Ballou and Count Tolstoi, nothing further need be said save that Mr. Wilson embodied the correspondence between them with collateral letters of his own in a sermon read to his congregation on Sunday, April 20, 1890, of which the diary says: “We were all deeply interested, pleased, and enlightened. I never was so much gratified with Brother Wilson’s performance. His scripture-reading, prayer, hymns, etc., were all in harmony with Christian Non-resistance, and he dropped not a word or hint that implied reserved dissent from my views.” It may be added that the substance of this discourse was subsequently rearranged by the author and published in the Arena for December 1890 — a portion of the last letter of Mr. Ballou to Tolstoi being omitted. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY Thoreaus had helped purchase), nothing John Brown had ever done under the duress of his “leading” could overshadow his willingness to sacrifice his life on the gallows. And Thoreau, clearly toying with such a fate for himself, at this point was unwilling to cheapen Brown’s martyrdom by publicly re-raising a bypassed issue of “resist not evil.” He thus enabled Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi to misunderstand him, and adopt nonresistance only as a tactic for attaining political ends in India and only for so long as this was the most effective tactic for attaining these political ends.19 I am sorry that this is so, but it is so. The utterly pure nonresistance attempted by Lev Nikolævich Tolstòy has had a respectful audience, but not an accepting audience, and Thoreau’s lack of public clarity on this point has had unfortunate consequences.
The “activist pacifist” still expects to win. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is a case in point, since he frankly acknowledged that had ahimsa no chance of succeeding against the British, he would have encouraged India to choose some other, more effective, tactic. As another case in point, consider the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison who, converted to the ethics of nonresistance to evil, authored a DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS ADOPTED BY THE PEACE CONVENTION, HELD IN BOSTON IN 1838. In this declaration he stated “[W]e expect to prevail through the foolishness of preachings” and expressed a calm and meek reliance on “certain and universal triumph.” Wasn’t there some football coach who learned how to say “Winning’s not the thing, it’s the only thing”? And how does this differ from that?
19. Although Gandhi stated this many times to many people, he has been as thoroughly misunderstood by the wishfulness of American popular culture as has the liberator Lincoln, who stated many times to many people that if he could he would preserve the Union without freeing a single slave. Gandhi had more interest in the writings of Emerson than in those of Thoreau, saying that Emerson’s essays “to my mind contain the teaching of Indian wisdom in a western guru” (Louis Fischer, THE LIFE OF MAHATMA GANDHI, NY 1950, page 93). HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
1898
July 7, Tuesday: French Minister of War Godefroy Cavaignac presented to the National Assembly documents he said proved the guilt of Alfred Dreyfus. Among them was the forged letter of October 31st, 1896. For this he was denounced by socialist leader Jean Jaurès and former head of French Intelligence Lt.Col. Georges Picquart.
President William McKinley signed the resolution annexing the Hawaiian Islands to the United States of America, arguing “we must have Hawaii to help us get our share of China” (presumably nobody ever mentioned to you during your public education that what Hawaii was about was it was about China).
Parker Pillsbury died in Concord, New Hampshire at the age of 88. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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November 29, Tuesday: Clive Staples Lewis was born.
The Malolos Congress approved a constitution for the First Philippine Republic.
Thanks to the amply published derogations of such as Waldo Emerson, Ellery Channing, James Russell Lowell, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, by the end of the 19th Century it would be possible for any number of people who had never known Henry Thoreau to praise his writing while waxing wise, and simultaneously expressing considerable contempt for him as a human being. For instance, Thoreau had been the apostle of the idea that books and gaslight and conventionality and sometimes even companionship are mistakes, shutting one out from a communion with nature which is higher and better — of such thoughts he was the apostle. He never questioned that he was a god Apollo. He told the story of Nature in undress as only one who had hidden in her bedroom could have told it. Personal traits that Emerson considered had been in one way a strength, in another way could be considered a weakness: for instance, he was always self-conscious and friendship was to him only a means of developing himself. He was dry, priggish, and selfish, and imitated many things about Emerson such as his manner of speech but never imitated the sweetness of Emerson’s character. It was profit to himself that he was after in his intimacies with others, moral profit certainly but still profit to himself. He was not in fact a man of principle, as is shown by his obtaining release from prison by allowing someone else to pay his tax: note by way of radical contrast, that Emerson would have died in that Concord jail cell had it been with him a matter of principle which conscience compelled. Thoreau’s contribution to mankind is great not because of his oddity but in spite of it, and except for it would have been much greater. His friends he treated as if they were mere dictionaries, rather than human beings who needed pleasure or laughter or kisses or any quality of flesh and blood! As for taking his arm, one might as soon think of taking the arm of an elm tree. He cared little for manners, describing a person of manners as an insect in a tumbler. It cost him nothing to say no; indeed he found this much easier than to say yes. He could be as rude to friends as to strangers, and when he was polite to someone who invited him to visit, that was unusual for him. Not a particle of respect had he for the opinions of any man or body of men, and he declared at 30 that he had yet to hear the 1st syllable of valuable advice from his seniors. He found savage pleasure in defacing the traditional idols of our religion, declaring he would sooner worship the parings of his own nails. Good works meant nothing to him and he very rarely indeed, if ever, felt any itching to make himself useful to his fellow-man. Naturally he despised clergymen, who speak of God as though they enjoy a monopoly of the subject. His curse was his self-confidence: he believed in neither idols nor demons, but put his sole trust in his own strength of body and soul. He was in person small and inferior looking, so homely that he was usually assumed by strangers to be a peddler, and in result he was consistently unmindful of his personal appearance; in fact when someone robbed a local bank while he was walking on Cape Cod, he fell under suspicion. His greatest weakness was what he probably considered his greatest strength, the habit of glancing off from the fact to moralizing. He stated everything as a paradox. A certain habit of antagonism defaced his earlier writings, a trick of rhetoric not quite outgrown in his later, of substituting for the obvious word or thought its diametrical opposite. His poems were often rude and defective. Much of what he deemed sincerity was a morbid desire to be different from other people. In matters religious he showed a warped judgment. When he built up a theory of friendship and of love based on intellectual estimate and excluding the affections, he was singular but he deprived himself of the most needed help his kind can give. By supposing the rest of mankind to be fools, he was able to suppose himself by contrast to be wise. His attitude toward the HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY world was superficial, as is revealed by his abundant inconsistencies. Habitually prodigal of his own health, through under-feeding and overwork he broke down his constitution. His lungs became severely affected and so of course at his own fault for not being more careful he reaped a premature death at 45. Shame, that.
A case in point, for this sort of easy personal derogation, would be AUTHORS’ BIRTHDAYS: CONTAINING THE EXERCISES FOR THE CELEBRATION OF THE BIRTHDAYS OF BAYARD TAYLOR, LOWELL, HOWELLS, MOTLEY, EMERSON, SAXE, THOREAU, E.S. PHELPS-WARD, PARKMAN, CABLE, ALDRICH, J.C. HARRIS (2d series. Standard Teachers’ Library), which on this day Charles William Bardeen was presenting for the higher education of America’s vulnerable children, schoolchildren who might be seduced by Thoreau’s crafted sentences into betraying their own lives: I Who has not felt as he gazed upon the starlit sky, or reached the summit of a mountain, or saw the sun rise over an Adirondack lake, that books and gaslight and conventionality and sometimes even companionship were mistakes, shutting him out from a communion with nature which was higher and better? Of this thought Thoreau was the apostle. He declared that a day passed in the society of those Greek sages, as described in the banquet of Xenophon, would not be comparable with the dry wit of decayed cranberry vines, and the fresh Attic salt of the moss-beds;20 that in the sunset are all the qualities that can adorn a household, and that sometimes in a fluttering leaf one may hear all Christianity preached.21 II He was born July 12, 1817, in Concord, the only one of the group that made Concord such a noted literary centre who was a native of the village, and of all of them much the most exclusively a resident of Concord. He said he had a real genius for staying at home;22 that “cars sound like cares”23 and that it was not worth while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.24 “Better fifty fifty [sic] years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. Then fifty years of Europe better one New England ray!”25 “What a fool he must be who thinks that his El Dorado is anywhere but where he lives!”26 he exclaims; and he declares that nothing is to be hoped for you if the bit of mould under your feet is not sweeter than any other in the world.27 “Henry talks about nature,” said Margaret Fuller, “just as if she’d been born and brought up in Concord.”28
III
20. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 21. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 22. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 23. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 24. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 25. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 26. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 27. Biographical Sketch by R.W. Emerson, in MISCELLANIES, BY HENRY DAV ID THOREAU (Boston, 1894). 28. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY He was graduated from Harvard in 1837, without particular distinction; characteristically refusing the diploma because it cost five dollars and was not worth it. In his sophomore year he had kept a school of 70 pupils at Canton, where he was examined by the Rev. 0.A. Brownson, and boarded with him;29 and upon graduation he went to Maine seeking a school there. Being unsuccessful, he took the town school at Concord. Here he announced that he should not flog, but would talk morals as a punishment instead. After a fortnight a knowing deacon, one of the school committee, walked in and told Mr. Thoreau that he must flog and use the ferule, or the school would spoil. So he did, feruling six of his pupils after school, one of whom was the maid-servant in his own house. But it did not suit well with his conscience, and he reported to the committee that he should no longer keep their school.30 In 1843 he was for two months tutor in Mr. Wm. Emerson’s family; but he afterward declined the same place in Horace Greeley’s home at Chappaqua. He wrote: “I have thoroughly tried schoolkeeping, and found that my expenses were out of proportion to my income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the good of my fellowmen, but simply for a livelihood this was a failure. Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me to save the universe from annihilation.”31 IV Until 1847 he relied for support principally upon hand labor. Both he and his father were ingenious persons, the latter a pencil-maker. After his father’s death he carried on the pencil and plumbago business, and showed the punctuality and prudence which always distinguished him.32 For several years he supplied fine ground plumbago for electrotyping to publishers, among others to the Harpers.33 He also did occasional surveying. V But he worked as little as possible. He says he found he could meet the expenses of living by working six weeks a year;34 and he thought the seventh day should be man’s day of toil,-the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul, in which to range this widespread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of Nature.35 Let not to get a living be thy trade but thy sport.36 If you would live simply and wisely, life would be not a hardship but a pastime, as the pursuits of simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial.3738 He
29. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). 30. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). 31. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 32. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). 33. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 34. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 35. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 36. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 37. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). 38. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY wrote: “I am as unfit for any practical purpose,-! mean for the furtherance of the world’s ends,-as gossamer for ship timber; and I, who am going to he a pencil-maker to-morrow, can sympathise with god Apollo, who served King Ametus for awhile on earth. But I believe he found it for his advantage at last, and I am sure I shall, though I shall hold the nobler part at least out of the service.” This comparison is frequent in his writings. He never questions that he is a god Apollo. VI He was naturally deft in the handling of tools. He boasts: “A man once applied to me to go into a factory, stating conditions and wages, observing that I succeeded in shutting a window of a railroad car in which we were travelling, when the other passengers had failed.”39 In a thunder-storm he sometimes erected a transitory house by means of his pocket-knife, rapidly paring away the white-pine and oak, taking the lower limbs of a large tree and pitching on the cut brush for a roof! Wanting to measure a bank, he says: “I borrowed the plane and square, level and dividers, of a carpenter who was shingling a barn near by, and, using one of those shingles made of a mast, contrived a rude sort of quadrant, with pins for sights and pivots, and got the angle of elevation of the Bank opposite the lighthouse, and with a couple of cod lines the length of its slope, and so measured its height on the shingle.”40
VII This deftness was of great advantage to him, combined as it was with the habit of immediate and accurate record. He had gauges for the height of the river, noted the temperature of the springs and ponds, the tints of the morning and evening sky, the flowering and fruit of plants, all the habits of birds and animals, every aspect of nature from the smallest to the greatest.41 This gives his writings veracity. When he says that the blueberry on Cape Cod was but an inch or two high,42 and that an apple tree which had been set ten years, was on an average 18 inches high, and spread 9 feet, with a flat top, and had borne one bushel of apples two years before,43 we take these figures for facts and not for guesses; and when he tells of catching a pickerel which has swallowed a brother pickerel half as large as itself, with the tail still visible in its mouth, while the head was already digested in its stomach,44 we accept it not for a fish-story but for a fact. VIII His senses were unusually keen.Alcott says they seemed double, giving him access: to secrets not easily read by others; in
39. Biographical Sketch by R.W. Emerson, in MISCELLANIES, BY HENRY DAV ID THOREAU (Boston, 1894). 40. CAPE COD. 41. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 42. CAPE COD. 43. CAPE COD. 44. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY sagacity resembling that of the bee, the dog, the deer; an instinct for seeing and judging, as by some other, or seventh sense.4546 One day walking with a stranger who inquired where Indian arrow-heads could be found he replied “Everywhere,” and stooping forward, picked one on the instant from the ground.47 He was continually picking them up on Cape Cod. His hearing was very acute. He says: “At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound [of bells] acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept.”48 He delighted in echoes, and said they were almost the only kind of kindred voices that he heard.49 He thought the scent a more oracular inquisition than the sight, more oracular and trustworthy, revealing what is concealed from the other senses. By it he detected earthiness.50 He says he was frequently notified of the passage of a traveller among the highway sixty rods off by the scent of his pipe;51 and he writes: “As I climbed the cliffs, when I jarred the foliage I perceived an exquisite perfume which I could not trace to its source. Ah, those fugacious, universal fragrances of the meadows and woods! odors rightly mingled!”52 IX Holmes says Thoreau told the story of Nature in undress as only one who had hidden in her bedroom could have told it.53 Thoreau tells of his life at Walden: “There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hand. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes in a summer morning after taking my accustomed bath I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, wrapped in a reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumach, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang round, or flitted noiselessly through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or by some traveller’s wagon on a distant highway I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands could have been. They were not times subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. This was sheer idleness to my fellow- townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting.”54 X Certainly he drank in the true spirit of nature. Alcott says: “One seldom meets with thoughts like his, coming
45. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). 46. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 47. Biographical Sketch by R.W. Emerson, in MISCELLANIES, BY HENRY DAV ID THOREAU (Boston, 1894). 48. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 49. Biographical Sketch by R.W. Emerson, in MISCELLANIES, BY HENRY DAV ID THOREAU (Boston, 1894). 50. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 51. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 52. SUMMER, with a map of Concord. 53. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS. RALPH WALDO EMERSON, by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (Boston, 1885). 54. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY so scented of mountain and field breezes and rippling spring, so like a luxuriant clod from under forest leaves, moist and mossy with earth spirits. His presence was tonic, like ice-water in dog-days to the parched citizen pent in chambers and under brazen ceilings. Welcome as the gurgle of brooks and dipping of pitchers, — then drink and be cool.”55 Emerson says Thoreau would draw out his diary and read the names of all the plants which should bloom on this day, whereof he kept account as the banker of when his notes fall due. He thought if waked up from a trance in a swamp he could tell by the plants what time of year it was.56 Four books have been made from his journals by selecting the extracts for successive years on each date, showing the observations he made; and these have been appropriately named “Spring,” “Summer,” “Autumn,” “Winter.” XI His observations show how intimately he entered into the life about him. “Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy,”57 he declares; and again: “Sympathy with the fluttering alder: and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath, yet like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled.”58 He was as thoughtful of the wild forest as an old maid of her garden. “I have watered the red huckleberry,” he says, “the sand cherry and the nettle tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.”59 Here is an extract: “The sumach (rhus glabra) grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing up through the embankment which I had made, and growing five or six feet the first season. Its broad pinnate, tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to look on. The large buds suddenly pushing out late in the spring from dry sticks which had seemed to be dead, developed themselves as if by magic into graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and sometimes, as I sat at my window, so heedlessly did they grow and tax their weak joints, I heard a fresh and tender bough suddenly fall like a fan to the ground when there was not a “breath of air stirring, broken off by its own weight.”60 XII Equally keen and sympathetic was his observation of animals. The twelfth chapter, “Brute Neighbors,” is by far the most interesting in “Walden.” He speaks of the bittern carrying its precious eggs away to deposit them in a place of safety,61 and his description of a partridge, and of the battle of the ants, and his frequent pictures of squirrels are extremely felicitous. “For all the motions of the squirrels,” he says, “in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of the dancing girl.”62 55. CONCORD DAYS. by A. Bronson Alcott. Boston, 1872 56. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 57. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 58. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 59. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 60. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 61. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 62. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY Read this account of the owl: “When other birds are still the screech owls take up the strain, like mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is truly Ben Jonsonian.Wise midnight hags! It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the woodside; reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or threnodies in the scenery of their transgressions. They give me a new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I had never been bor-r-r- r-n! sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despair to some new perch on the gray oaks. Then — That I had never had been bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther side with tremulous sincerity, and bor-r-r-r-n! comes faintly from far in the Lincoln woods.”63 XIII He gained unusual familiarity with animals, and was in this respect the original of Hawthorne’s Donatello in “The Marble Faun.” He says, “You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the wood, that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns.”64 Of a mouse at Walden he tells: “It probably had never seen a man before, but it soon became quite familiar, and would soon run over my shoes and up my clothes. When at last I held still a piece of cheese between my thumb and finger it came and nibbled it, and afterwards cleaned its face and paws like a fly, and walked away.”65 Even fish showed little apprehension. “I have often attracted these small perch to the shore at evening by rippling the water with my finger, and they may sometimes be caught by attempting to pass inside your hand.”66 He tells of a pout that he drew from its ova without its making opposition.67 “The breams are so careful of their charge that you may stand close by in the, water and examine them at your leisure. I have thus stood over them half an hour at a time, and stroked them familiarly without frightening them, suffering them to nibble my fingers harmlessly, and feel them erect their dorsal fins in anger when my hand approached their ova, and have even taken them gently out of the water with my hand.”68 He was himself equally ready to accept the advances of living things. “The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October as to winter quarters, and settled on my windows and on the walls overhead, sometimes deterring visitors from entering. Each morning when they were numbed with cold I swept some of them
63. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 64. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 65. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 66. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 67. SUMMER, with a map of Concord. 68. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY out, but I did not trouble myself much to get rid of them. I felt complimented by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter. They never molested me seriously, though they bedded with me.”69 XIV He was an expert fisherman, and might have been an expert hunter, but this sympathy eventually made such sport distasteful. He said at Walden: “I have found repeatedly of late years that I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect;”70 and again: “The carcases of some poor squirrels however, the same that frisked so merrily in the morning, which were skinned and embowelled for our dinner, we abandoned in disgust, with tardy humanity, as too wretched a resource for any but starving men. It was to perpetuate the practice of a barbarous era. If they had been larger, our crime had been less. Their small red bodies, little bundles of red tissue, mere gobbets of venison, would not have ‘fattened fire.’ With a sudden impulse we threw them away, and washed our hands, and boiled some rice for our dinner. Behold the difference between him who eateth flesh and him to whom it belonged! The first hath a momentary enjoyment, whilst the latter is deprived of existence! Who would commit so great a crime against a poor animal, who is fed only by the herbs which grow wild in the woods, and whose belly is burnt up with hunger?”71 XV He prided himself on loving nature for its own sake, as an end, not a means. He says with sarcasm: “We had the mountain all to ourselves that afternoon and night. There was nobody going up that day to engrave his name on the summit, nor to gather blueberries.”72 He was an honorary member of the Boston society of natural history, and he left them his collection of plants, Indian tools, and the like.73 Early in 1847 he made collections of fishes, turtles, etc. for Agassiz, then newly arrived in America. But he would not offer the society a memoir of his observations. “Why should I? To detach the description from its connection in my mind would make it no longer true or valuable to me, and they do not wish what belongs to it.”74 None knew better than he that it is not the fact that imports, but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind.75 It was not nature he cared particularly to observe, but the effect of nature upon him.76 He records the minutest feeling or thought that comes to him for fear the world should lose it. XVI If this was as Emerson thinks in one way a strength, it was in another a weakness. He was always self-conscious. Friendship was 69. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 70. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 71. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 72. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 73. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). 74. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 75. Biographical Sketch by R.W. Emerson, in MISCELLANIES, BY HENRY DAV ID THOREAU (Boston, 1894). 76. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY to him only a means of developing himself. Stevenson says: “Thoreau is dry, priggish, and selfish. It is profit he is after in these intimacies, moral profit certainly, but still profit to himself. ‘If you will be the sort of friend I want,’ he remarks naively, ‘my education cannot dispense with your society.’77 His education! as though a friend were a dictionary! And with all this not one word about pleasure or laughter or kisses, or any quality of flesh and blood. It was not inappropriate surely that he had such close relations with the fish. We can understand the friend already quoted when he cried,78 ‘As for taking his arm, I would as soon think of taking the arm of an elm tree.’”79 He writes to Mrs. Ralph Waldo Emerson: “I like to deal with you for I believe you do not lie or steal, and these are very rare virtues”;80 but how curious a letter he could write appears in one that he wrote to her on June 20, 1843, probably as near a love-letter he ever penned. Margaret Fuller wrote to him: “The unfolding of affections, a wider and deeper human experience, the harmonizing influences of other natures will mould a man and melt his verse. He will seek thought less and find knowledge the more.” XVII Naturally a man of Thoreau’s convictions cared little for manners. In fact he said the man of manners was an insect in a tumbler. “It would indeed be a serious bore to be obliged to touch your hat several times a day. A Yankee has not leisure for it.”81 Emerson says: “It cost him nothing to say no; indeed he found it much easier than to say yes.”82 Men of note would come to talk with him. “I don’t know,” he would say; “perhaps a minute would be enough for both of us.” “But I come to walk with you when you take your exercise.” “Ah, walking — that is my holy time.”83 He could be as rude to friends as to strangers “who did not know when their visit had terminated.”84 When in Walden his poet friend Ellery Channing comes to call on him he says: “I will go with you gladly soon, but I am just concluding a serious meditation. I think that I am near the end of it. Leave me alone then for a while.”85 To David Ricketson, a wealthy merchant of New Bedford, who frequently entertained him, and who permitted him to come in his old clothes, he wrote declining an invitation: “Such are my engagements to myself that I dare not promise to come your way;”86 but this was unusually polite. On another occasion he 77. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 78. Biographical Sketch by R.W. Emerson, in MISCELLANIES, BY HENRY DAV ID THOREAU (Boston, 1894). 79. FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS, by Robert Louis Stevenson (New York, 1896). 80. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 81. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 82. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 83. TALKS WITH RALPH WALDO EMERSON, by Charles J. Woodbury. New York, 1890. 84. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 85. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY wrote: “I have a faint recollection of your invitation referred to, but I suppose that I had no new or particular reason for declining, and so made no new statement”;87 and again in a response to a reproach for not having written: “You know I never promised to correspond with you, and so when I do I do more than I promised.”88 XVIII Yet he sometimes made great sacrifices to avoid hurting the feelings of poor people. “The Irishman’s wife could not give me fresh water, so shutting my eyes, and excluding the motes by a skilfully directed under-current, I drank to genuine hospitality the heartiest draught I could. I am not squeamish in such cases when manners are concerned.”89 “When I would go a-visiting,” he says. “I find that I go off the fashionable street to where man meets man, and not polished shoe meets shoe.”90 He came to see the inside of every farmer’s house and head, his pot of beans and mug of hard cider. Never in too much hurry for a dish of gossip he could sit out the oldest frequenter of the barroom, and was alive from top to toe with curiosity.91 “I love to see the herd of men feeding heartily on coarse and succulent pleasures,” he said, “as cattle on the husks and stalks of vegetables;”92 and again: “It chanced that the Sunday morning that we were there I had joined a party of men who were smoking and lolling over a pile of boards on one of the wharves, (nihil humanum a me, etc.).”93 Channing says that when Hawthorne and Thoreau laughed, the operation was sufficient to split a pitcher.94 He was sometimes given to music and songs, and now and then in moments of great hilarity would dance gaily, and sing his unique song “Tom Bowline,” which none who heard would ever forget.95 XIX But unless he saw something genuinely original in a companion he preferred to be alone. He would not consent “to feebly fabulate and paddle in the social slush.”96 “I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own opinions,” he says, “a phenomenon so rare that I would any day walk ten miles to observe it;”97 but again: “I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don’t get enough of it this year, I shall cry all the next.”98 Even with those with whom conversation seemed worth while it is
86. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 87. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 88. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 89. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 90. SUMMER, with a map of Concord. 91. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 92. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 93. CAPE COD. 94. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). 95. CAPE COD. 96. FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS, by Robert Louis Stevenson. New York, 1896. 97. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 98. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY a favorite thought of his that the nearer they get together the less they speak. “Each moment as we nearer drew to each, A stern respect withheld us farther yet, So that we seemed beyond each other’s reach, And less acquainted than when first we met.”99 He prided himself upon being an iconoclast. Holmes called him the nullifier of civilization, who insisted on nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end.100 Emerson says, “Not a particle of respect had he to the opinions of any man or body of men;”101 and Thoreau declared at thirty that he had yet to hear the first syllable of valuable advice from his seniors.102 “If a man does not keep pace with his companion,” he says, “perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything it is very likely to be my good behavior.”103 He advises Mr. Blake not to be too moral; he may cheat himself out of much life.104 XXI Naturally his disregard of tradition was most marked with reference to religion. Holmes said of Emerson that he took down our idols from their pedestals so tenderly that it seemed an act of worship,105 but Thoreau found savage pleasure in defacing them. Thus he declares: “If I could, I would worship the paring of my nails”; and again: “Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks.”106 “The reading which I love best,” he says, “is the scriptures of the several nations, though it happens that I am better acquainted with those of the Hindoos, the Chinese and the Persians, than of the Hebrews.”107 Later he makes this distinction: “The New Testament is remarkable for its pure morality, the best Hindoo scripture for its pure intellectuality.”108 Hence as he chose the latter, it is not strange to hear him say: “No greater evil can happen to anyone than to hate reasoning. Man is evidently made for thinking: this is the whole of his dignity, and the whole of his merit. To think as he ought is the whole of his duty”;109 and again: “The most glorious fact in my experience is not anything that I have done or may hope to do, but a transient thought, or dream, or vision I have had. I would give all the wealth of all the world and all
99. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 100. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS. RALPH WALDO EMERSON, by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (Boston, 1885). 101. Biographical Sketch by R.W. Emerson, in MISCELLANIES, BY HENRY DAVI D THOREAU (Boston, 1894). 102. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 103. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 104. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 105. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS. RALPH WALDO EMERSON, by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (Boston, 1885). 106. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 107. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 108. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 109. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY the deeds of all the heroes for one true vision.” XXII In such a creed good works have no place. “I very rarely indeed, if ever,” he says, “feel any itching to be what is called useful to my fellow-men.”110 And again: “If I knew for a certainty that a man was about coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the African desert culled the simoom, which fills the mouth and ears and nose and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to me, — some of its virus mingled with my blood.”111 Naturally he despises clergymen, “who speak of God,” he says, “as though they enjoyed a monopoly of the subject.”112 At Montreal he writes: “From time to time we met a priest in the streets, for they are distinguished by their dress, like the civil police. Like clergymen generally, with or without the gown, they made on us the impression of effeminacy. We also met some Sisters of Charity, dressed in black, with Shaker-shaped black bonnets and crosses, and cadaverous faces, who looked as if they had almost cried their eyes out, their complexions parboiled with scalding tears; insulting the daylight by their presence, having taken an oath not to smile.”113 It seems strange that a man who appreciated flowers so much should get this impression of Sisters of Charity, in whom all the world, christian and pagan, has united in seeing rare attractiveness, and questioned only whether its source was the garb or the self-sacrificing soul speaking through the countenance. We are revenged to find that soon after he thinks he sees the soldiers drilling in white kid gloves. XXIII But there are glimpses here and there of other things. “Let no one think,” he says, “that I do not love the old ministers, who were probably the best men in their generation, and they deserve that their biographies should fill the pages of the town history. If I could but hear the glad tidings of which they tell, and which, perchance, they heard, I might write in a worthier strain than this.”114 “As I stand over the insect, crawling over the pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts, and hide its head from me, who might, perhaps, be its benefactor, and impart to its race some cheering information, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands over me the human insect.”115 XXIV
110. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 111. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 112. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 113. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 114. CAPE COD. 115. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY His curse here as elsewhere is his self-confidence.Alcott quotes the famous speech -of an old Northman as thoroughly characteristic of this Teuton: “I believe in neither idols nor demons; I put my sole trust in my own strength of body and soul.”116 This is an early prayer of Thoreau’s: “Great God! I ask Thee for no meaner pelf, Than that I may not disappoint myself; That in my conduct I may soar as high As I can now discern with this clear eye. That my weak hand may equal my firm faith, And my life practise more than my tongue saith; That my low conduct may not show, Nor my relenting lines, That I Thy purpose did not know, Or over-rated Thy designs.”117 From his own point of view he was consistent. “In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment, to toe that line.”118 March 31, 1862, he writes: “I suppose that I have not many months to live; but of course I know nothing about it. I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing.”119 To Parker Pillsbury, who approached him on the subject of religion the winter before his death, he replied gently, “One world at a time.”120 XXV He was consistently unmindful of personal appearance. Nature had given him little encouragement. He was small, inferior looking, usually taken for a peddler by strangers; and when the Provincetown bank was robbed soon after his first trip to Cape Cod he was suspected of being one of the thieves. Emerson says: “Henry was homely in appearance, a rugged stone hewn from the cliff. I believe it is accorded to all men to he moderately homely; hut he surpassed his sex.”121 Channing said: “In height he was about the average; in his build spare, with limbs that were longer than usual, or of which he made longer use. His features were marked; the nose aquiline or very Roman, like one of the portraits of Cæsar (more like a beak, as was said); large overhanging brows above the deepest-set blue eyes that could be seen, — blue in certain lights and in others gray; the forehead not unusually broad or high, full of concentrated energy and purpose; the mouth with prominent lips, pursed up with meaning and thought when silent, and giving out when open a stream of the most varied and unusual and instructive 116. CONCORD DAYS. by A. Bronson Alcott. Boston, 1872 117. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 118. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 119. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 120. TALKS WITH RALPH WALDO EMERSON, by Charles J. Woodbury. New York, 1890. 121. TALKS WITH RALPH WALDO EMERSON, by Charles J. Woodbury. New York, 1890. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY sayings. His whole figure had an active earnestness, as if he had no moment to waste; the clenched hand betokened purpose. In walking he made a short cut, and when sitting in the shade or by the wall-side, seemed merely the clearer to look forward into the next piece of activity. The intensity of his mind, like Dante’s, conveyed the breathing of aloofness, — his eyes bent on the ground, his long swinging gait, his hands perhaps clasped behind him, or held closely at his side, — the fingers made into a fist.”122 XXVI As for clothes, while he evidently prides himself here and there on the fact of having a new coat, and writes to Mr. Blake that he will come to see him as soon as he gets a new coat if he has money enough left,123 yet he wonders that people spend so much money on clothes. “While one thick garment is for most purposes as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars which will last many years, thick pantaloons for two dollars, cow-hide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, or better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit of his own earning, there will not be found wise men to do him reverence?”124 “Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are no better than wooden horses to hang clean clothes on.”125 XXVII On his excursion to Canada he wore a 25-cent unlined straw hat and a linen duster, and prided himself on being the worst dressed man in the party. He writes: “It is not wise for a traveller to go dressed. I should no more think of it than of putting on a clean dicky and blacking my shoes to go a-fishing; as if you were going out to dine, when, in fact, the genuine traveller is going out to work hard, and fare harder, — to eat a crust by the wayside whenever he can get it. Honest travelling is about as dirty work as you can do, and a man needs a pair of overalls for it. As for blacking my shoes in such a case, I should as soon think of blacking my face. I carry a piece of tallow to preserve the leather and keep out the water; that’s all; and many an officious shoeblack, who carried off my shoes when I was slumbering, mistaking me for a gentleman, has had occasion to repent it before he produced a gloss on them.”126 He always carried an umbrella; and as for a valise: “After considerable reflection and experience I have concluded that the best bag for the foot traveller is made with the handkerchief, or if he study appearances [!], a piece of stiff brown paper, well tied up, with a fresh piece within to put outside when the 122. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 123. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 124. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 125. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 126. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY first is torn.”127 At Walden he dug potatoes bare-footed until so late in the day that the sun would blister his feet, and on his walk to Wachusett he and his companion refreshed themselves by bathing their feet in every rill that crossed the road.128 XXVIII In food he was equally original. Emerson says that when asked at table what dish he preferred Thoreau answered, “The nearest.” That was probably at Mr. Emerson’s house where there was always pie, for he was as fond of that as Mr. Emerson, and added a special fondness for plum cake.129 In Montreal he was much troubled because he could find no pie for sale, and no good cake to put in his box; and the Quebec restaurants were disappointing, for when he inquired for pies or puddings he could get only mutton chops, roast beef, beef steak, and cutlets, etc., so he had to buy musty cake and fruit in the open market place.130 He often speaks of refraining from meat to keep down his brute nature; and believes that “every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his highest or poetical faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, or much food of any kind.”131 “Hasty pudding for the masculine eye, chicken and jellies for the girls.”132 XXIX Trying to advise a poor laborer struggling with a big family, “I told him”, he says, “I did not use tea, nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so did not have to work to get them. Again as I did not work hard I did not have to eat hard, and it cost me but a trifle for my food. But if he began with tea and coffee and butter and milk and beef, he had to work hard to pay for them, and when he had worked hard he had to eat hard again to repair the waste of his system, and so it was as broad as it was long; indeed, it was broader than it was long, for he was discontented and wasted his life into the bargain.”133 When he goes up Wachusett he makes his supper with blueberries he picks, with milk bought at a farmhouse,134 and his general advice to travellers is to go afoot, carrying a dipper, a spoon, and a fish-line, some Indian meal, some salt, and some sugar. “When you come to a brook or pond, you can catch fish and cook them; or you can boil a hasty pudding; or you can buy a loaf of bread at a farmer’s house for fourpence, moisten it in the next brook that crosses the road, and dip into it your sugar, — this alone will last you a whole day; — or, if you are accustomed to heartier living, you can buy a quart of milk for two cents, crumb your bread or cold pudding into it and eat it with your own spoon
127. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 128. THE MAINE WOODS. 129. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). 130. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 131. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 132. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). 133. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 134. THE MAINE WOODS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY out of your own dish.”135 XXX He is equally stoical as to bed clothing when travelling. On the top of Saddle mountain he says: “As it grew colder toward midnight I at length encased myself completely in boards, managing even to put a board on top of me with a large stone on it to keep it down, and so slept comfortably. I was reminded it is true of the Irish children, who inquired what their neighbors did who had no door to put over them in winter nights as they had. But I am convinced there was nothing very strange in the inquiry.”136 “Mr. Edward Hoar remembers with a shiver to this day the rigor of a night spent on the bare rocks of Mt. Washington with insufficient blankets, — Thoreau sleeping from habit, but himself lying wakeful all the night, and gazing at the coldest of full moons.”137 XXXI He was always prodigal of his health, as he constantly shows in his account of his excursions to the Maine woods. He climbed four pines after hawks’ nests, and gathered the brilliant flowers of the white pine from the very top of the tallest pines.138 He was, moreover, in the habit of abnormally early rising. On his excursions he seems always to be getting up at three o’clock and starting off in a fog long before he could distinguish the very objects he had come to see. The consequence of this under-feeding and over-working was that with all his inherited strength of constitution he was almost never well. He certainly was not a man to complain, and yet his letters and journals are full of such statements as these: “I must still reckon myself with the innumerable army of invalids, though I am tougher than formerly;”139 “I do not see how strength is to be got into my legs again;”140 “What I got by going to Canada was a cold”;141 “There is danger that the cold weather may come again before I get over my bronchitis.”142 Finally his lungs became so severely affected that he went to Minnesota with young Horace Mann in hope of recovery; hut returned little benefited, and died May 6, 1862. XXXII Up to 1847, as we have said, he supported himself mainly by labor of his hands. By that time he began to be somewhat known as a writer and lecturer. At Concord, the headquarters of the lecture movement, he gave his first lecture in 1838, and afterwards lectured there nearly every year for twenty years.143 While 135. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 136. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 137. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 138. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). 139. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 140. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 141. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 142. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY Hawthorne was surveyor at Salem he invited Thoreau to come there to lecture, telling him that the fee was $20.144 But his lectures were less in demand than those of his fellow- townsmen. In 1852 he offered to lecture in New York, but Greeley replied that the course was full for the season, and even if it were not his name would probably not pass.145 In 1856, he writes: “I have not heard from Harrisburg since offering to go there, and have not been invited to lecture anywhere else in the meantime;”146 and again: “Perhaps it always costs me more than it comes to to lecture before a promiscuous audience. It is an irreparable injury done to my modesty even, — I became so indurated. O solitude! obscurity! meanness! I never triumph so as when I have the least success in my neighbor’s eyes. The lecturer gets fifty dollars a night; but what becomes of his winter? What consolation will it be hereafter to have fifty thousand dollars for living in the world? I should not like to exchange any of my life for money.”147 XXXIII His first writing of consequence appeared in the Dial, where several of his pieces were published. Horace Greeley became interested in him, and secured the publication of several of his articles. Among them that on Carlyle in Graham’s Magazine for 1857. While Bayard Taylor was editor of the Union magazine, Greeley brought him a roll of manuscript, saying: “You must do something for this young man. His name is Thoreau. He lives in a shanty on Walden Pond, near Concord, on $37.21 a year. He must he encouraged.” The manuscript was “Ktaadn and the Maine Woods.” Taylor persuaded the publisher to give $75 for it, and it was published in 1848; but it contained so many misprints that Thoreau became indignant.148 In 1852 Sartain offered him $3 a page for what he might write for the magazine, and in April Greeley offered him $50 for an article on Emerson, in advance if he desired.149 “The Yankee in Canada,” an account of a ten-day excursion on which his total expenses were $11.62,150 began in Putnam’s magazine in September, 1853; followed in 1855 by the paper on “Cape Cod,” which became the subject of controversy, first as to price and then as to its tone toward the people of that region. The editor wanted to make some changes, which Thoreau refused, and the articles came abruptly to an end. When Lowell left out this sentence from one of his pieces about the pine tree, “It is as immortal as I am, perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still,” Thoreau having given no authority considered the bounds of right were passed, and
143. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 144. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 145. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 146. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 147. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 148. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, BAYARD TAYLOR, by Albert Smyth. Boston, 1896. 149. AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS, HENRY D. THOREAU, by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (Boston, 1882). 150. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY would write no more for the Atlantic. XXXIV His first book (1849) was “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” It was published at his own expense, and as the sale was small it brought a heavy burden of debt upon him. In 1853 Thoreau records that for a year or two past his publisher, falsely so called, has been writing from time to time to ask what disposition should be made of the copies still on hand, at last suggesting that he had use for the room they occupied in his cellar. “So I have had them all sent to me here, and they have arrived to-day by express, filling the man’s wagon, 706 copies out of an edition of 1000, which I bought of Monroe four years ago, and have been ever since paying for, and have not quite paid for yet. Of the remaining 290 and odd, 75 were given away, the rest sold. I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes, over 700 of which I wrote myself.”151 XXXV The wonder is that the book sold at all. It is an account of a week’s journey on two quiet New England rivers, in a boat that two young men had made, and in which they met with no adventure. It would seem hard to make out of this excursion, ten years afterwards, a book of 518 pages, but as a matter of fact the book is not made out of the excursion, which is only an excuse for it. Besides the poems and the local history, and the quotations from the Gazetteer, and the thoughts which the journey itself suggested, it gathers apparently everything that Thoreau had ever thought out on any subject. Here are 5 pages about gardening, 4 about mythology, 21 about religion, 25 about books and reading, 25 more about reformers and the scriptures, 15 about the Indian scriptures and history, 14 about a trip up Saddle mountain, 7 about Anacreon and 7 more about Persius with translations, 40 about friendship, 9 about Goethe, 11 about Ossian, 32 about Chaucer, with a multitude of others; so that of the 518 pages hardly half had any more relation to this particular trip than to his hoeing beans at Walden. Lowell well says: “Mr. Thoreau becomes so absorbed in these discussions that he seems as it were to catch a crab, and disappear uncomfortably from his seat at the bow-oar. We could forgive them all, * * * we could welcome them all were they put by themselves at the end of the book; but as it is they are out of proportion and out of place, and mar our Merrimacking dreadfully. We were invited to a river party, and not to be preached at.”152 XXXVI His next book, “Walden, or Life in the Woods” (1854), was more successful, and is the one by which he is best known. It is the account of an experiment he made to prove that “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”153 He occupied land owned by Mr. Emerson, on Walden pond, borrowed an axe of Mr. Alcott, bought an Irishman’s shanty for
151. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 152. MY STUDY WINDOWS, by James Russell Lowell (Boston, 1871). 153. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY $4.25 and moved the timber, spent two hours digging the cellar, got his friends to help him to raise the frame, and completed the cabin at a total cost of $28.12½, though it was 10 feet wide, 15 feet long, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap doors, a door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite. There was no other house in sight, and his nearest neighbor was a mile distant. He never fastened his door night or day, even when he spent a fortnight in Maine. XXXVII To support himself he planted seven miles of beans, “making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass.”154 He used to hoe from five o’clock in the morning until noon, then swim, dress, and go to the village, or write, his principal work being to edit his “Week.”155 The expense of his food for eight months was $8.74156 and his entire expenses $61.99¾, while he got for farm produce $23.40, and earned by day labor $13.34, leaving a balance of $25.21¾, or about what he started with. His food alone cost him in money 27 cents a week. It was for nearly two years after this rye and Indian meal without meat, potatoes, rice, a very little salt pork, molasses and salt, with water for drink. At one time, owing to lack of money, he had no bread at all for a month. He found yeast not an essential ingredient, and thought it simpler and more respectable to omit it; he even questioned the utility of salt: “If I did without it altogether I should probably drink less water. I do not learn that the Indians ever troubled themselves to go after it.”157 XXXVIII He staid from July 4, 1845 to Sept. 6, 1847. He says: “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more for that one.”158 As a protest against extravagant living this is the bold statement he makes: “I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are past wearing, or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour.”159 He continually asserts that property, especially real estate, is a needless incumbrance. When a young man inherits a farm he wonders why he should eat 60 acres of dirt, when man is condemned to eat only a peck. He says: “How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn 75 feet by 40, its Augean stables never cleansed, and 100 acres of land, mowing, tillage, pasture and woodlot.” It is not the farmer that has got the house, but the house that has got him. It makes but 154. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 155. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 156. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 157. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 158. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 159. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail. He thinks it absurd that Harvard students have to pay as much for the rent of a single room as his house costs him, not remembering that there is no land in Cambridge to be squatted upon. There was nothing remarkably abstemious about his house at Walden. The writer of this article lived for two winters in houses he built for himself simply by digging out a rectangle of dirt 6 feet by 2 and 8 inches deep, piling it on an adjoining rectangle 6 feet by 2, divided from the first by a log so as to form a raised bed, putting over all a piece of cotton cloth, covering up the ends with logs plastered with mud, and making a chimney also of logs. To privates in the Union army such a house as Thoreau lived in at Walden would have seemed a palace, yet we were not seriously uncomfortable. XXXIX His narrative and descriptive style is certainly admirable. He says: “What I was learning in college was chiefly how to express myself, and I see now as the old orator prescribed first action, second action, third action, my teacher should have prescribed to me, first sincerity, second sincerity, third sincerity.”160 He says again: “A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common-sense always takes a hasty and superficial view. Though I am not much acquainted with the works of Goethe, I should say that it was one of his chief excellencies as a writer, that he was satisfied with giving an exact description of things as they appeared to him, and their effect upon him.” 161 * * * “As for style of writing, if one has anything to say it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground. There are no two ways about it, but down it comes, and he may stick in the points and stops whenever he can get a chance. New ideas come into this world somewhat like fallen meteors, with a flash and an explosion, and perhaps somebody’s castle-roof perforated. To try to polish the stone in its descent, to give it a peculiar turn, and make it whistle a tune, perchance, would be of no use, if it were possible. Your polished stuff turns out to be not meteoric, but of this earth.”162 XL On the other hand he writes to a friend: “Let me suggest a theme for you: to state to yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you, — returning to this essay again and again, until you are satisfied that all that was important in your experience is in it. Give this good reason to yourself for having gone over the mountains, for mankind is ever going over a mountain. Don’t suppose you can tell it precisely the first dozen times you try, but at ’em again, especially when, after a sufficient pause, you suspect that you are touching the heart or summit of the matter, reiterate your blows there, and
160. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 161. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 162. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY account for the mountain to yourself. Not that the story need be long, hut it will take a long time to make it short.”163 Alcott declares of his prose, that in substance and pith it surpasses that of any naturalist of his time.164 Much of it is surpassed by few writers of his time, whatever their subject. He has himself expressed his aim: “Their sentences are not concentrated and nutty, — sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, which do not report an old, but make a new impression; sentences which suggest many things, and are as durable as a Roman aqueduct, to frame these, — that is the art of writing.”165 XLI Here are some of his sentences: “Time cannot bend the line which God has writ.”166 “What exercise is to the body employment is to the mind and morals.”167 “How can we expect a harvest of thoughts who have not had a seed- time of character?”168 “Some circumstantial evidence is strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.” “The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them.” Of a Cape Cod fisherman he said: “He looked as if he sometimes saw a doughnut, but never descended to comfort. Too grave to laugh, too tough to cry; as indifferent as a clam; like a sea- clam with hat on and legs, that was out walking the strand.”169 He speaks of the powdered snow, where not a rabbit’s track, nor even a fine print, the small type of a meadow mouse, was to be seen.170 XLII His greatest weakness was what he probably considered his greatest strength, the habit of glancing off from the fact to moralizing, already instanced in “A Week.” Of another fault Emerson says: “The habit of a realist to find things the reverse of their appearance inclined him to put every statement in a paradox. A certain habit of antagonism defaced his earlier writings, a trick of rhetoric not quite outgrown in his later, of substituting for the obvious word or thought its diametrical oposite [sic]. He praised wild mountains and winter forests for their domestic air; in snow and ice he would find 163. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 164. CONCORD DAYS. by A. Bronson Alcott. Boston, 1872 165. THOREAU THE POET NATURALIST, WITH MEMORIAL VERSES, by William Ellery Channing (Boston, 1873). 166. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 167. LETTERS TO VARIOUS PERSONS. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. With Bibliographical Introductions and full Indexes. Boston, 1884. 168. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 169. CAPE COD. 170. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY sultriness; and commended the wilderness for resembling Rome and Paris; it was so dry that you might call it wet.”171 Thoreau says: “I have heard of a dog that barked at every stranger who approached his master’s premises with clothes on, but was easily quieted by a naked thief.”172 It might be inquired in what part of the year naked thieves were common in New England. XLIII Theoretically he disapproves of humor, and cut out many of his humorous passages,173 though much genuine humor remains. He says of Chaucer’s poetry: “For picturesque description of persons it is perhaps without a parallel in English poetry; yet it is essentially humorous, as the loftiest genius never is. Humor, however broad and genial, takes a narrower view than enthusiasm.”174 But he has a marked weakness for puns, such as: “Even the elephant carries but a small trunk on his journey.”175 “Next came the fort of George’s Island. These are bungling contrivances, not our fortes, but our foibles.”176 “It was literally, or litorally, walking down to the shore.”177 “The more tired the wheels, the less tired the horses.”178 “A government lighting its mariners on a wintry coast with summer-strained oil to save expense. That were surely a summer- strained mercy.”179 This is strained if the quality of mercy is not. “As I walked on the glacis I heard the sound of a bagpipe from the soldier’s dwelling in the rock, and was further soothed and affected by the sight of a soldier’s cat walking up a cleeted plank into a high loop-hole, designed for mus-catry.”180 “Thaw, with his gentle persuasion, is more powerful than Thor with his hammer.”181 “But whether Thor-finn saw the mirage here or not, Thor-eau, one of the same family, did; and perchance it was because Lief the Lucky had, in a previous voyage, taken Thor-er and his people off the rock in the middle of the sea, that Thor-eau was born to see it.”182 XLIV There is often conscious effort for the snap he speaks of. “You might make a curious list of articles which fishes have swallowed; sailors’ open-clasped knives, bright tin snuff- boxes, not knowing what was in them, and jugs, and jewels, and
171. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 172. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 173. FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS, by Robert Louis Stevenson. New York, 1896. 174. A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. 175. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 176. CAPE COD. 177. CAPE COD. 178. CAPE COD. 179. CAPE COD. 180. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 181. WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 182. CAPE COD. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY Jonah.”183 “This hotel was kept by a tailor, his shop on one side of the door, his hotel on the other; and his day seemed to be divided between carving meat and carving broad-cloth.”184 How much broadcloth he would have to carve for Cape Cod fishermen is not stated. He shows his study of words when he says of the French: “Their very rivière meanders more than our river.”185 Not much need be said of his poetry. Emerson speaks charitably: “His own verses are often rude and defective; the gold does not yet run pure, it is drossy and crude: the thyme and marjoram are not yet honey.”186 XLV As one studies the life and writings of Thoreau the conviction grows that much of what he calls sincerity was a morbid desire to be different from other people. It was his habit when he climbed or descended a mountain to disregard the beaten paths and go straight by the compass for the point aimed at, clambering up cliffs and wading through swamps rather than follow in the footsteps of others. His persistent determination enabled him to get there, but his way was not the easiest or the wisest. When he prefers the Veda to the Bible, he is odd, but he shows a lack of literary taste. When he declares that he would rather trust himself to the Greek divinities than to Jehovah he is audacious, but he shows a warped judgment. When he builds up a theory of friendship and of love based on intellectual estimate and excluding the affections, he is singular, but he deprives himself of the most needed help his kind can give. When he does the work of a porter on the diet of a hermit, he flies in the face of tradition, but he breaks down his constitution, and reaps a premature death at forty-five. XLVI It is not necessarily a proof of wisdom to consider the rest of mankind fools. “I haven’t credulity to believe in religion,” said a flippant young man to his teacher. But his sage instructor replied, “Does it not take more credulity to believe that most of the best and wisest men who have ever lived have been wrong?” It is not necessarily true that whatever is is right, but whatever is has the presumption of being right, and should not be disturbed until one is quite sure he has something better to propose. The superficialness of Thoreau’s attitude toward the world is shown by his abundant inconsistencies. He boasted that his first book was hypaethral, like Egyptian temples, open to the heavens, and might have been written wholly out of doors; yet it contains three hundred quotations from a hundred different authors. He rails against newspapers, saying, “Blessed are they who never read them for they shall see nature;” and yet he reads even to
183. CAPE COD. 184. CAPE COD. 185. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 186. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY the advertisements the scraps in which his lunches are wrapped. XLVII He lived for a time in Emerson’s family, and unconsciously grew to imitate Emerson’s tone and manner till Lowell declared that with his eyes shut he could not tell which was talking. But he never imitated the sweetness of Emerson’s character. When he was imprisoned for refusing to pay a poll-tax to a State that sanctioned slavery, Emerson came to him and asked, “Henry, why are you here?” to which Thoreau replied, “Why are you not here?” But the reproach was unmerited. When a friend paid the tax for him, Thoreau accepted his release; Emerson would have died in that Concord jail had it been with him a matter of principle. But while Emerson never yielded where conscience forbade, he never made an issue with society unless conscience compelled. Thoreau’s contribution to mankind is great not because of his oddity but in spite of it, and except for it would have been much greater. As Emerson says, “Instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party.”187
187. EXCURSIONS IN FIELD AND FOREST. WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY
2001
January: Stacey M. Robertson’s PARKER PILLSBURY: RADICAL ABOLITIONIST, MALE FEMINIST (Ithaca NY and London: Cornell UP, 2000). Reviewed for H-SHEAR by Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven,
This gracefully written biography of abolitionist Parker Pillsbury is worthy of careful reading by those with interests in antislavery reform and race relations, feminist views on gender and family, or the art of biography. By depicting HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY Pillsbury’s wide-ranging travels, mentally and geographically, Stacey Robertson undercuts these negative caricatures, even as she explains why Pillsbury was quickly labeled “eccentric,” “fanatic,” or “zealot.” Early chapters show the maturing of a provincial young cleric, eager for encouragement and connections to a larger social and intellectual world, while the later chapters depict the mature Pillsbury as a radical and feminist reformer who spent his entire life on the northern lecture circuit, an evangelist for a radically egalitarian vision of America. Drawing on more than thirty archival collections, Robertson constructs a richly textured biography of Pillsbury from youth to his death in 1898. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Pillsbury never retired. He continued his lecturing after the Civil War, in part because he lacked the financial resources to quit. When Pillsbury did inherit a sum that would have permitted retirement, he still continued to travel and lecture on human rights. Robertson argues this was because his “perfectionist” convictions prohibited retirement in the face of only a partial victory. While the author provides many examples of Pillsbury’s intellectual and moral rigidity, this simple explanation of his persistence as an active reformer is not wholly satisfying, particularly given the contrasting behavior of fellow perfectionists. Readers who are uneasy attributing so much of Pillsbury’s career to “perfectionism” (in this biography a vaguely defined theological presupposition) can find alternative or supplementary motives in Robertson’s thorough discussion of Pillsbury’s personality, particularly his concept of masculinity, which she describes as requiring both physical and moral courage in the face of hostile or indifferent listeners. This biography provides much more than a richly textured account of Pillsbury’s life. Most chapters include details about how Pillsbury worked in countless obscure villages to engage and cooperate with less traveled reformers. Always an itinerant lecturer, Pillsbury depended on support from these local families, some of whom taught him the importance of women’s organizing skills, both for raising funds and consciousness about reform issues. While the focus remains on Pillsbury, Robertson makes clear the important work done by local residents who hosted visiting lecturers. Only Dorothy Sterling’s fine biography of Abby Kelley Foster provides readers with as rich a sense of the difficult and crucial organizing work done by antislavery lecturers.188 The difference between Abby Kelley and Pillsbury, however, is that Kelley is better known as a feminist and leader; it was the nomination of Kelley in 1840 to serve on the business committee of the American Antislavery Society that precipitated the organizational split among national leaders. Pillsbury, as one would assume from the book’s title, took the side of “feminists,” arguing strongly for inclusion of women in the formal, not just informal, organizing of antislavery work. How did Pillsbury, an ordinary farm youth from rural New Hampshire, become the champion of political and social equality, regardless of race or gender? Chapter one, “The Roots of Radicalism,” attributes his later championing of the disenfranchised to Pillsbury’s youthful experiences with personal insecurity and revival religion. The revivals which 188. Dorothy Sterling, AHEAD OF HER TIME: ABBY KELLEY AND THE POLITICS OF ANTI-SLAVERY (New York: Norton, 1991). HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY were then awakening thousands of American youth, Robertson notes, not only swept Pillsbury into the fold of the converted and devout, but propelled him off the farm and into the broader world. Counseled by Stephen Foster, then another young convert from New Hampshire, Pillsbury in 1835 began studying for the Congregational ministry, completing his training at Andover Seminary in 1839. That education reinforced in Pillsbury the perfectionist and millennial expectations aroused during his revival experiences. Another consequence of his seminary education was more insecurity and greater identification with social inferiors. Robertson argues that his experience of being the outsider, a rustic and poor young man at a school for New England’s best and brightest, as well as an earlier stint as a day laborer in Lynn, Massachusetts, always stayed with Pillsbury and helped him identify closely with African Americans. Pillsbury’s early mentors in antislavery reform included New Hampshire natives Stephen Foster and Nathaniel Rogers, firebrand editor William Lloyd Garrison, and fellow seminarian John Collins, each of whom pressed Pillsbury to view slaves as the most oppressed outsiders in American society. That close identification with slaves remained central to Pillsbury’s character and career. Appointed an antislavery lecturer in 1840, Pillsbury’s most frequent companion on the lecture circuit was Rogers, editor of the Herald of Freedom, beloved leader of antislavery activists in northern New England, and according to Robertson, a mentor and father figure for Pillsbury. His marriage in 1840 to Sarah Sargent appears just as crucial to Pillsbury’s long career: their marriage lasted fifty-eight years, through years of separation, poverty, and sickness. It was sustained, according to Robertson, by their mutual affection and commitment to reform and by Sarah’s able management of finances, household, and the rearing of their one child. Pillsbury developed what Robertson calls a feminist sense of his masculinity early in his career of lecturing. Pillsbury was a large man and his notion of proper manhood drew in part on the physical strength he developed as a youthful farm and day laborer. During his many travels, Pillsbury lodged with sympathizers, a reliance which made him aware of how often women performed hard physical tasks. A more correct notion of equality, Pillsbury concluded, would require stronger men to aid women by handling that heavier work (p. 51). While Robertson concedes that Pillsbury was not the only reformer to comment on the inequality of male and female roles in society, she does argue that he was one of a very small group of male abolitionists who subverted usual notions of manhood, primarily by arguing for female suffrage, sexual choice, and divorce, but also by suggesting that male strength should be used to defend female equality, and that men needed to master the self-control urged on them by (often female) temperance reformers. The major trauma in Pillsbury’s early career as a reformer came in 1844-45, when conflicts between Rogers and his “no organization” faction and Garrison’s old organization forced him to chose between two revered mentors. After multiple attempts to repair the broken relationship between Rogers and Garrison, Pillsbury chose Garrison and the continuing need for reform organization. Robertson suggests how personally devastating to both Sarah and Parker Pillsbury this break was, particularly since it ended the frequent visiting among an extended family HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY network on which Sarah had relied while Parker was lecturing in the west (pp. 70-72). Because of that choice, one that Robertson argues was principled and agonizing, Parker Pillsbury moved from the New Hampshire circuit of lecturing into the much larger web of communities across the northern Atlantic world--that wide world of reformers which was linked through literature and through itinerants like Pillsbury into the Garrisonian antislavery network. In chapter five Robertson vividly sketches the world of “grassroots abolition” into which Pillsbury then moves as one, in which both local and national leaders play crucial and complimentary roles (pp. 76-90). In sickness and in health, that network sustained Pillsbury, who received cash gifts from these friends when they heard that Parker was sick, unable to earn any dollars lecturing. Sickness and money were not the only problems encountered. Robertson includes and explains the many stories published about Pillsbury baptizing a dog (this often recycled legend is worth the price of the book!), a vivid example of how anti-abolitionist distortions of their message complicated the struggle of lecturers like Pillsbury to communicate their message. Pillsbury continued this tough lecture circuit until 1854, when broken health--including a warn out voice--forced him to take a rest. Resistant to the idea of a vacation, Pillsbury gladly accepted the offer of a friend to pay his way to Europe, where presumably he could both recuperate and lecture about American slavery to more varied audiences (p. 91). On that tour Pillsbury was disconcerted when some British and Irish abolitionists seemed to condescend to him, perhaps because of obvious class differences. Always sensitive to his feelings as outsider, Pillsbury found British women more kind and receptive to his rough message. This alliance with the fairer sex, Robertson argues, was strengthened by Pillsbury’s uneven reception abroad. He greatly appreciated the kindness of Mary Estlin, who nursed him through acute illness (and secretly shared his private letters with critics) and then aided him in securing similar hospitality in other locations. Pillsbury was not the most effective ambassador of abolition sent abroad, but there he did gain a broader sense of the community of reformers in which American operated. He also strengthened the network of financial supporters for American work and enlarged his own sense of the importance of female abolitionists in sustaining reform efforts. Pillsbury returned to America and to the wide-ranging lecture circuit, this time finding increasing support for his antislavery cause in the western states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Robertson compares Pillsbury to better known abolitionists on this same lecture circuit, and in doing so shows both Pillsbury and other abolitionists as more complicated than the commonly depicted “fanatics.” Pillsbury, she points out, was even more shrill than Garrison in denouncing political compromises. Generally depicted as an uncompromising radical, Garrison was more moderate than Pillsbury on the matter of political means; for example, Garrison conceded what Pillsbury never did, that some might foster reform by working through Liberty, Free Soil, or even the new Republican Party. By contrast Pillsbury always argued that change must come through moral, not political means. Pillsbury was also more radical and consistent in his denunciations of churches; in the 1850s, when HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY other leaders quieted their attacks on northern churches, Pillsbury continued to condemn the role of non-slaveholders in sustaining slavery. Because of his uncompromising stands, Pillsbury was increasingly isolated from other reformers, particularly when war and Reconstruction came. In retrospect, Robertson argues, continued racism makes his extremism look like wisdom: in 1864 he supported Wendell Phillips against Garrison on the need to continue the work of the American Antislavery Society. (Garrison believed that the Emancipation Proclamation had made further antislavery organization unnecessary.) Yet Pillsbury could not comfortably work at the center of any organization, or so it appears. Unwillingness to compromise meant that Pillsbury’s appointment as editor of the National Antislavery Standard was untenable: he could not write editorials that reflected the more moderate position of subscribers. Instead he attacked all reconstruction plans and called for a thorough restructuring of both northern and southern states, in which equal rights for all would be a legal and social reality. Robertson admires Pillsbury’s stubborn defense of egalitarianism, even as she recognizes that for him, there was no other career option: “Antislavery continued to provide Pillsbury with both a career and a spiritual center, and he was not about to declare the movement moribund” (p. 133). While Robertson argues that perfectionist theology led Pillsbury to espouse egalitarian ideals, her acknowledgement that Pillsbury could not operate except as a minority critic suggests a more complicated Pillsbury. Without disavowing Pillsbury’s perfectionism or his early experience of revival religion as pushing him toward egalitarian reform, one can see additional motives in the psychological profile provided by Robertson: Pillsbury’s assumption that masculinity required brave, sometimes physical resistance to critics, also seems to have shaped Pillsbury’s approach to human rights. After emancipation Pillsbury remained disdainful of parties and legislative change, arguing that constitutional amendments alone would fail (and he later pointed out they did) to provide equal rights for freedmen. For Pillsbury, a moral transformation was the first imperative, after which legal and social change could occur. Whether this perfectionist approach was rooted more in theological beliefs or psychological traits, we can admire with Robertson Pillsbury’s commitment to full citizenship for African Americans, something that made it impossible for him to accept either an imperfect Reconstruction or retirement from moral reform. I have just a few quibbles with Robertson’s analysis. One is rooted in admiration for the author’s clear presentation of Pillsbury’s links to his hosts on the lecture circuit, those many obscure antislavery women and men who resided in communities scattered across the north. Social geography is important, both for showing the extent of a movement’s influence and for tracing patterns of influence. Because of a paucity of evidence, Robertson’s depiction of Pillsbury as influential on the western lecture circuit is less convincing that her argument that Pillsbury was influenced by those who hosted him, both by feeding him and organizing his meetings. Perhaps Pillsbury did influence the Western Anti-slavery Society (Ohio) to adopt a more “uncompromising” stance toward the Republican Party than HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY assumed by any other antislavery organization (121). But what are we to make of this link, since Ohio’s political conversion to the Republican Party came early and more easily than in other states? Robertson senses the importance of tracing influences, including that of grassroots women on traveling agents like Pillsbury, but we will need to wait for her next book for a clear understanding of the nature of the east to west (or possibly west to east) influences in reform circles.189 Another quibble I have is with the presentation of Pillsbury as a feminist. I agree that Pillsbury made many statements advocating women’s rights, more than did most male abolitionists. But Robertson goes beyond the argument for which she has ample evidence, which is that Pillsbury was a feminist in theory and in his relationship with fellow agent Abby Kelley and with those local women abolitionists he met on the lecture circuit. She also suggests Pillsbury was a feminist in his marriage, but the examples offered of Pillsbury’s relationship with his wife Sarah and with his daughter (who interestingly never left her parents’ rural home) provide only slight evidence of feminist behavior in the family context. While traveling Pillsbury apparently did write his wife and daughter, but the surviving letters include only a few that discuss family relations or gender roles.190 Most of the letters used by the author document Pillsbury’s activities on the lecture circuit and not the rare times spent with his family. There are a couple of places where the author stumbles on details. She incorrectly describes an abolitionist co-worker as the son-in-law of Wendell Phillips (139) and states incorrectly that the 1837 gag rule on petitions dealing with slavery “destroyed the popular tactic of antislavery petitions” (77). This second error is the more serious one, since it comes at the beginning of her otherwise excellent chapter on grassroots abolitionism and is presumably why there is no discussion about canvassing for petition signatures. The error perhaps comes from the author following her subject and his disdain for political means just a little too closely. These are small matters, however, and I think that most readers will find compelling this story of how radical beliefs propelled Pillsbury both into the reform centers of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, but also out to Ohio and Illinois. This is a well- crafted and copiously documented book, one that draws together and analyzes a great variety of unpublished information. For this reason the biography is unlikely to be superceded by any later analysis of Pillsbury. Those studying social reform during the nineteenth century will find Robertson’s analysis of Pillsbury useful, both for its detailed examples of how national and grassroots leaders worked together and as a model for studying other types of political and social movements. Author Stacey Roberts stated that one of her aims was to rescue this colorful but under-appreciated abolitionist from the obscurity of his New Hampshire roots and from the caricatures of his enemies: in this fine book, she meets that goal and more. Readers will appreciate Pillsbury for his tireless and enthusiastic 189. See Robertson’s fine paper on this subject, “‘Ladies, Will You Meet With Us?’: Women Abolitionists in the Old Northwest, Gender, and Third-Party Politics,” presented at the annual meeting of SHEAR (July 2000), http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~shear/ s2000.d/pa/RobertsonStacey.htm. 190. For those interested in detailed analysis about how a feminist abolitionist viewed and practiced child-rearing, see Elizabeth Stevens, “‘From Generation to Generation’: The Mother and Daughter Activism of Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Lillie Chace Wyman,” (Ph.D diss., Brown University, 1993). HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY campaigning and will also glimpse how support from his many friends and acquaintances enabled him to embrace and sustain this life of commitment. Copyright (c) 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact [email protected].
Reply by Stacey Robertson I’d like to thank Deborah Van Broekhoven for her thoughtful review of my book and H-SHEAR for this opportunity to continue the discussion started by the review. The issue of perfectionism is certainly one of the more intriguing aspects of Parker Pillsbury’s life. Indeed, it is Pillsbury’s commitment to perfectionism that led him to compare the church to the “festering putrescence of the brothel,” (p. 82) to call Lincoln’s administration the “weakest” and “wickedest” in the nation’s history (p. 123), and to vehemently oppose the Fifteenth Amendment because it failed to include women. Van Broekhoven is troubled by my reliance on perfectionism as a central theme in the book: she would like to see a stronger definition of the term and more emphasis on psychological issues as motivation for Pillsbury’s ideas and behavior. My definition of perfectionism relies on the familiar nineteenth-century theological trend toward free will, benevolence, and the perfectibility of humankind. But my book argues that Pillsbury adapted the concept by focusing on unswerving moral agitation. This program of always reaching toward a more perfect world through uncompromising tactics and constant agitation can be found throughout Pillsbury’s public and private writings and is quite clearly the intellectual foundation to his activism. This does not mean that I discount or do not consider psychological issues. As Van Broekhoven deftly notes, the book explores Pillsbury’s painful struggle with feelings of exclusion and inferiority, and the impact of gender throughout his life (and this is unusual for biographies of men), though I tried to be scrupulous about not attributing twentieth-century psychological theories without substantial evidence. The review also suggests that the book might overplay Pillsbury’s radical influence on the West in the 1850s. Pillsbury’s influence on the West was limited to the radical Garrisonians; however, this does not lessen its impact. Many radical Garrisonians, including Garrison himself, were drifting toward the Republicans in the late 1850s. That a large group of Western radicals emphatically rejected this moderating trend is important even in the general context of antislavery history. (These Westerners adopted the very same uncompromising resolutions that Pillsbury could not get passed in the East.) Perhaps, as Van Broekhoven suggests, grassroots Westerners influenced Pillsbury as much as he influenced them; certainly there were multiple layers to this interaction. I hope to delve more deeply into relations between East and West as I continue my current work on women abolitionists in the Old Northwest. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY I am dismayed by the suggestion that the book argues that Pillsbury was a feminist in his marriage. To the contrary, the central thesis of the chapter on his family is that Pillsbury (along with many radical male Garrisonians) found it difficult, if not impossible, to maintain his feminist ideals in his marriage. His relationship with his daughter, Helen, is equally complex, but I employ abundant evidence to show that Pillsbury at least tried to raise an independent, untraditional, feminist daughter--no easy task in the mid-ninteenth-century United States! In regard to Wendell Phillips’s son-in-law, George W. Smalley, I have checked my sources and conferred with colleagues to confirm the footnote in the book which accurately states that although Anne Phillips did not give birth to any children, she and Wendell Phillips did adopt the daughter of one of Anne’s nurses and this young woman eventually married Smalley. In regard to petitioning, my larger point in the section quoted was about the importance of field lecturing at a time when other familiar abolitionist tactics declined, though I concede that the book’s language is too broad. Finally, I would like to conclude by emphasizing a few areas that Van Broekhoven’s otherwise comprehensive review does not address. At heart, this book attempts to capture an enormously interesting person: the real reason to read PARKER PILLSBURY is to spend some time with an irascible, funny, radical, and unbelievably stubborn and committed man. Moreover, this book does something unusual when it comes to biographies of abolitionists: it devotes a good deal of the text to Pillsbury’s life after the Civil War. Van Broekhoven does not find a chance to mention Pillsbury’s fascinating break with all of his old abolitionist comrades over his decision to edit the radical women’s rights newspaper, THE REVOLUTION, with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Nor does she discuss the final chapter on Pillsbury’s years in the Free Religion movement, his radical ideas about health reform, his commitment to the working class, and his constant disappointment with the retirement of his former allies who have been so thoroughly lauded for their activism. Stacey Robertson Bradley University [email protected] HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY 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 2018. 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
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Prepared: March 4, 2018 HDT WHAT? INDEX
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY 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
PARKER PILLSBURY PARKER PILLSBURY the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
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