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Nationalism and the Nature of Thoreau's Nationalism and the Nature of Thoreau’s “Walking” andrew menard IKE many American writers of the 1840sand’50s, Henry L David Thoreau often found himself at odds with the bel- licose direction of his own nation while fighting to create a culture less in thrall to the history and culture of other nations. As early as 1818 William Cullen Bryant had accused American poetry of being “a sickly and affected imitation of the pecu- liar manner of some of the late popular poets of England,” and in the decades that followed, everything from the novels of James Fenimore Cooper to the Young America movement exhibited an uneasy and contentious nationalism.1 Although Thoreau himself would be among the country’s most incen- diary critics of Manifest Destiny and the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–48), he was also patriotic enough to begin his historic stay at Walden Pond on July Fourth. Indeed, on his only trip abroad—later recounted as the rather desultory “A Yankee in Canada”—he even succumbed to a mild case of xenophobia. Coincidentally or not, it was after returning from this miserable, illness-plagued trip that Thoreau began the Journal entries that eventually led to “Walking” (1851)—perhaps his most original essay on nationhood and national culture. This was also when the Journal as a whole began to morph fairly quickly from what Robert Sattelmeyer has called “a literary workbook” devoted to “drafted passages intended for essays, lectures, and books” 1Bryant, quoted in Robert Weisbuch, “Post-Colonial Emerson and the Erasure of Europe,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed.JoelPorteand Saundra Morris (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 200. The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXV, no. 4 (December 2012). C 2012 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. 591 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00229 by guest on 29 September 2021 592 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY into a daily, sometimes hourly, record of the moonlit ponds, au- tumnal forests, and “impervious and quaking swamps” within a ten-mile radius of his home.2 The famous opening lines of “Walking” are a riveting for- mulation of the nationalism Thoreau has in mind: “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.” Not only does this stirring pream- ble introduce the sphere of “wildness” that will dominate the essay, but it deliberately constricts the parameters of nation- hood to those of nature. “If the moon looks larger here than in Europe,” Thoreau reflects a little later, “if the heavens of America appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter,” these facts must be “symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar”— “else to what end does the world go on, and why was America discovered?”3 Thoreau’s emphasis on “philosophy and poetry and religion” may be the best indication that “Walking” is an essay on nation- hood and national culture—something Max Weber defined as “a community of sentiment”—and not another of his many ful- minations against the State—a political organization that “suc- cessfully upholds a claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order.” Essays like “Civil Disobedience” (1848), “Slavery in Massachusetts” (1854), and “A Plea for Captain John Brown” (1859) are obviously among Thoreau’s most relentless and unforgiving attacks on the government’s “use of physical force.” But “Walking” represents a more promising or utopian perspective, in which a proper “community of spirit” might, in Weber’s words, “adequately 2Robert Sattelmeyer, “Historical Introduction” to Henry David Thoreau, Journal, Volume 2: 1842–1848, ed. Sattelmeyer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 447. 3Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in Collected Essays and Poems, ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2001), pp. 225–55, quotations pp. 235, 237–38. Further page references to “Walking” will be to this edition and will be cited in the text. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00229 by guest on 29 September 2021 NATIONALISM AND “WALKING” 593 manifest itself in a state of its own.”4 Sometime around 1843, Thoreau had announced that “nature is stronger than law, and the sure but slow influence of wind and water will balk the efforts of restricting legislatures. Man cannot set up bounds with safety but where the revolutions of nature will confirm and strengthen, not obliterate them.” During the same period, he had said that “a state should be a complete epitome of the earth—a natural principality and by the gradations of its sur- face and soil conduct the traveller to its principal marts.”5 By the time he produced “Walking,” it would appear that he was looking for an answer of sorts to the concluding words of “Civil Disobedience”: I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose, if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.”6 This “more perfect and glorious State” is not a body of people amalgamated by the machinery of state and federal governments. Instead, it derives from the far “higher” unity of a language and a culture rooted in the “slow influence of wind and water” and the kind of seasonal “revolutions of nature” that would allow a fruit to “drop off as fast as it ripened.” Noting in the Journal, for instance, that a neighbor has brought him the carcass of a great heron, Thoreau admits that it “belongs to a different race from myself and Mr. Frost” but is “glad to recognize him for a native of America,—why not an American 4Weber, quoted in Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Sur- vey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 14, 70. 5The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Bradford Terry and Francis H. Allen, 14 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1962), 1:455 (1837–47); unless otherwise noted, all further citations will be from this edition of the Journal. Thoreau, Journal, Volume 2: 1842–1848, p. 61. 6Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” in Collected Essays, pp. 203–24, quotation p. 224. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00229 by guest on 29 September 2021 594 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY citizen?”7 And in “Walking” he muses, “I know not how sig- nificant it is, or how far it is an evidence of singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his pettiest walk with the general movement of the race; but I know that something akin to the migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds . affects both nations and individuals, either perennially or from time to time” (p. 235). “Walking” makes it clear that Thoreau hopes to use the ex- ample of his own life—“Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable” (p. 251)—as the prototype for a “community of spirit” approximating Johann Gottfried von Herder’s notion of a “natural community.” According to Isaiah Berlin, Herder’s own opposition to the State had led him to conclude that hu- man beings “truly flourish” only “where the group to which they belong” is able to achieve “a fruitful relationship to the environ- ment by which it is shaped and which in turn it shapes. There the individual is happily integrated into a ‘natural community,’ which grows spontaneously, like a plant, and is not held to- gether by artificial clamps, or soldered together by sheer force, or regulated by laws and regulations invented, whether benev- olently or not, by the despot or his bureaucrats.”8 Although Thoreau had acknowledged in “Civil Disobedience” that the State was not despotic, per se—that Americans, anyway, ex- pected it “to execute their will”—he had also made it plain that even the government of the United States was “liable to be abused and perverted before the people” could “act through 7Thoreau, Journal, September 1850, 2:63. 8Isaiah Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), p. 424. Herder’s nationalism seems particularly attractive since, as Berlin makes clear, he emphasized both sympathy and pluralism and opposed the efforts of any nation to impose its values on any other nation, especially in the name of a greater democracy or a higher culture. But Berlin also treated Herder’s nationalism as almost exclusively cultural, not political. For a more balanced treatment of this dialectic, see Alan Patten, “‘The Most Natural State’: Herder and Nationalism,” History of Political Thought 31.4 (Winter 2010): 657–80.And for a study that often complements what follows, see Lance Newman, Our Common Dwelling: Henry Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and the Class Politics of Nature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), esp. pp. 171–83. Newman situates Thoreau within the context of “an organic community living in daily communion with the physical body of the land.” Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00229 by guest on 29 September 2021 NATIONALISM AND “WALKING” 595 it.”9 Thus his longing for a more perfect union than the one alluded to in the Preamble to the Constitution—a union in which the American Revolution was ultimately less important than the “revolutions of nature.” “Walking” is especially interesting because it was conceived during the era of Manifest Destiny.
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