THE REVEREND LEONARD WITHINGTON, D.D.’S HUCKLEBERRYING

It would seem that Henry Thoreau was not the original huckleberry hound of New England. The honor of that title belongs, apparently, to the Reverend Leonard Withington, D.D. of Newbury, Massachusetts. You will note, however, that what the venerable DD wrote about huckleberrying amounts to a report of a pleasant afternoon rural pic nic of a church social group, rather than an examination of the natural context. The difference between the Reverend’s “Huckleberrying” and Henry Thoreau’s “Huckleberries” amounts to the difference between Sunday School and grad school.

WALDEN: When formerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a living, some sad experience in conforming to the wishes of friends being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could do, and its small profits might suffice, –for my greatest skill has been to want but little,– so little capital it required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought. While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions, I contemplated this occupation as most like theirs; ranging the hills all summer to pick the berries which came in my way, and thereafter carelessly dispose of them; so, to keep the flocks of Admetus, I also dreamed that I might gather the wild herbs, or carry evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods, even to the city, by hay-cart loads. But I have since learned that trade curses every thing it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1789

August 9, Sunday: Leonard Withington was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts to Joseph Weeks Withington and Elizabeth White Withington. Leonard would graduate from Phillips Exeter Academy and become an apprentice to a printer.

1812

James Ellsworth De Kay left Yale College without a degree.

After an apprenticeship to a printer, Leonard Withington entered Yale as a sophomore.

1814

Ralph Emerson graduated from Andover Theological Seminary. He would become a tutor at Yale College.

Leonard Withington graduated from Yale. While in college he had served as one of the five editors of the fortnightly Atheneum. His play “Rustic Love: A Dialogue, in Two Acts, Written for Exhibition at the Public Commencement of Yale College in 1814” was performed at the commencement (in this play, which had to do with hypocrisy, the virtues of a country family are almost destroyed by a con artist posing as a fashionable gentleman). During his college education, he had determined that he would become a minister, and to that end he would study with President Dwight and with his own pastor, the Reverend Dr. Codman, and also study for a few months at Andover Theological Seminary.

1816

October 31, Thursday: Leonard Withington completed his divinity work at Andover Theological Seminary and became pastor of 1st Church, Congregational in Newbury, Massachusetts. There had since 1801 been a great deal of religious dissention among the various churches in Newburyport. The Reverend Daniel Dana had become greatly concerned at this. “After preaching, young men would rise in the galleries and exhort; great confusion followed. He was present, on one occasion, at a united meeting at Mr. Milton’s church, the headquarters of the excitement, when the agitation was extreme; and groans and shouts began to be heard throughout the spacious and crowded edifice. He rose, and with deep and calm solemnity said, ‘The Lord is a God of order, not of confusion.’ The effect was instantaneous; the vast auditory was hushed into solemn stillness. There must have been something strangely impressive in the scene, to have been described, as it was forty years afterward, by one who said, that, as he rose in that excited, tumultuous assemblage, ‘he looked more like an angel than a man.’” The Reverend Withington made it a condition of his acceptance of this position, that such religious practices were to cease and be forgotten. He was not going to have people getting excited about religion.

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1817

January 15, Wednesday: The Reverend Leonard Withington got married with Sophie Sherburne. The couple would produce 3 sons, William Sherburne Withington, Leonard Withington, Jr., and George Aspinwall Withington.

The American Colonization Society had been in existence for less than a month when more than 3,000 members of Philadelphia’s black community crammed the Reverend Richard Allen’s Bethel African Methodist Church at 125 South 6th Street in order to express their distress at its agenda to pack them off to another continent, such as Africa:

Our ancestors were, though not from choice, the first cultivators of the wilds of America, and we, their descendants, claim a right to share in the blessings of her luxuriant soil which their blood and sweat manured. We read with deep abhorrence the unmerited stigma, attempted to be cast on the reputation of the free people of color.... We declare that we will never be separated from the slave population of this country....

An 11-member committee including Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, James Forten, and Russell Parrott was appointed to broadcast their inalienable right to remain in the USA not only on the basis of the announced

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principles of this republic, but also on the basis of their heritage of work, suffering, and enslavement.

1826

April 1, Saturday: Captain Samuel Morey of Orford, New Hampshire received a patent for an internal combustion engine.

Sophie Sherburne Withington, wife of the Reverend Leonard Withington, mother of three young boys, died at the age of 39. The body would be placed in the Oak Hill Cemetery of Newburyport, Massachusetts.

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1827

May 29, Tuesday: The Reverend Leonard Withington remarried, with Caroline Noyes. The couple would produce 5 sons and 4 daughters (over and above the 3 young boys left behind at the death of the Reverend’s 1st wife, Sophie Sherburne Withington).

1831

May: Edgar Allan Poe’s West Point buddies funded the publication of his POEMS, dedicated to the “U.S. Corps of Cadets” and he took a job as an editor in Baltimore, where he could live with blood relatives from his father’s side of the family.

The Reverend Leonard Withington, D.D. preached the prestigious Massachusetts Election Sermon. He came onto the board of the Dummer Academy (established by bequest of acting governor William Dummer in 1761, this Newbury institution has come to prefer to be referred to as The Governor’s Academy), and would serve on this board for the following seven years, and place his sons in that institution. Frequently, he would be chosen to deliver the closing address: “Many a man now in middle life must still remember those racy, off- hand talks, so full of wisdom and good sense — so entirely free from stereotyped cant and tiresome commonplace. I will not believe that those seeds of truth and goodness all fell upon stony ground.”

Increasing deafness led F.A.P. Barnard to accept a position as a tutor at a Hartford, New York school for deaf mutes.

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1836

The Reverend Leonard Withington’s THE PURITAN: A SERIES OF ESSAYS, CRITICAL, MORAL, AND MISCELLANEOUS (Boston: Perkins & Marvin), a 2-volume collection of essays issued under the pen name “John Oldbug, Esq.,” contained in the 1st of its volumes, pages 203-208, a section on a decidedly upscale huckleberry pic nic:

With what delight, in former years, did I set out on a whortleberry expedition; or, as we had it, in colloquial language, going a huckleberrying! David, in the first place, brings up Old Dobbin from the pasture, takes off his fetters, combs down his mane, smooths his fetlocks, sees that his shoes are tight, and tackles him into the old waggon, whose capacious body, like the Trojan horse, can hold a host of people. Over this waggon, we weave branches of birch and hemlock, forming a grateful shade, to protect us from the sun of a New England summer, on the last of July or first of August. In this, is placed three or four transverse boards, planed smooth, like the seats in a whale-boat, for the party to sit on. Into this arbor on wheels, we crowd, lads and lasses, young and old, with a good supply of cakes, biscuit and cheese, with little baskets made of birch bark, into which we are to drop our whortleberries, after picking them. After much tumbling, laughing, and crowding, (one lady drops her bonnet, and another her gloves,) the old bay horse puts forth his sinews, and the waggon begins to move Over hill, over dale, Through bush, through brier, Over park, over pale, Through flood, through fire, until we reach the whortleberry pasture, which lies about four miles off. Here begin the labors of the day. But now the character of the several pickers begins to be developed. Some make it a point of conscience, not to put any thing into their baskets, until they have first filled their own maw, of which number, I must confess, I was one. Some love to

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HUCKLEBERRYING LEONARD WITHINGTON wander about, to explore new grounds, and, like other mortals, are so intent on distant prospects, as never to collect the treasures around them. Some ladies fancy that they must scream at every toad or reptile they see; and some are so engaged in talking and laughing, that they wholly overlook the business of the day. My aunt Hannah was the best picker I ever knew; and my uncle Gideon incomparably the worst: for he was so intent on taking care of the young ladies, freeing their clothes from briers, and assisting them in skipping from rock to rock, that the expedition was always to him, a day of more gallantry than thrift. I believe, in my conscience, that he never got berries enough to speckle the surface of one pudding. So roll the hours, the company scattering like a flock of white sheep, and the woods and ravines resounding with the vacant laugh, until the hour of dinner comes. This was always a busy time to my uncle Gideon. First you must select your spot by the side of a rock, or under a great tree, and at a convenient distance from some living spring, or running stream. You take out a large jack-knife and cut up the shrubbery around you, and stick it, in connected branches, around the spot where you design to spread your table, forming a little arbor, such as Adam might have dressed for Eve in Paradise. Then you take all your boards from the waggon; and piling up stones for legs, you make as good an extemporaneous table as you can; covering it over with all the towels, cravats, and white aprons you can beg or borrow, for a table-cloth; your dishes are slate-stones; and your seats are made of mounds of earth; and here with many a joke and many a laugh, you pile up your cold tongues, your slits of dried beef, your slices of ham, your cake and cheese, and down the party sits with keen appetites, to what our newspapers call a cold collation. Your water you bring from an adjacent spring, in your hat, or a wooden bowl, unless a sudden thunder- shower should come up, and then you can open your mouth and catch it directly from the sky. Here the party sit and talk, as Adam and the angel did in Eden, without fear lest dinner cool. The cheeks of the girls are painted with what I consider as the best rouge, good native fresh air, and abundance of exercise, and I have known very important connections formed for life, whose commencement was in a whortleberry pasture. After dinner they scatter again to their afternoon work; and as the sun descends and the time becomes shorter, I have observed they generally become more sober, and double their diligence, in order to fill their boxes and baskets before evening. Besides, nature becomes a little exhausted, nor can the most lively stream, dance and sparkle through the whole of its course. I remember, near a great pasture, where our parties used most frequently to go, and which my grandfather called the Take-up- time, on the opposite side of the road, on a smooth grassy plain, stood a little cottage, owned by Mr. Johnny Croft, a widower, whose wealth was by no means to be measured by his outward display. Beside this cottage, flowed a river, fringed with alders, which shall be nameless, because in New England, we do not give very poetic names to our rivers; for who can hitch into rhyme, or soften into an essay, the Amonoosuc, the Shetucket, the Quinebaug, and the Quineboag — Mother Brooks, and a hundred other fluvial mother’s names, which seem to have been given to “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 7 HDT WHAT? INDEX

LEONARD WITHINGTON HUCKLEBERRYING fright the muses from our shores, and to invite nothing but factories and paper-mills to the banks of our streams. Well — the said Mr. Johnny Croft, one day, when the sun was declining, came out, and with all the politeness with which he was master, invited a large party of us, to come into his sentry-box to take tea, previous to our returning home. It is a maxim among the schoolmen, that whatever is received, is received according to the capacity of the recipient; and accordingly, my first wonder was how so small a house was to hold so many people. But as Mr. Croft was a widower, and my aunt Hannah a single lady, we agreed, with many winks and much tittering, to accept his invitation. His little room was soon filled; there was hardly a place to set the table. The seats at the table were soon occupied by the junior visitants; and the only chair left vacant for aunt Hannah, was next to our host, the worthy Mr. John Croft, a little older than herself and a widower. In such a condition, it was impossible to restrain the looks, the winks, and smiles of the company. Mr. Johnny was all attention; and my aunt looked queer several times. Sometimes he would help her to a spoonful of honey, and sometimes to a bunch of grapes; and once he invited her to come and spend a week’s visit at his house; for which compliment she returned him her humble and hearty thanks; but left it ambiguous whether she ever intended to come. Mr. Croft was a man, who mingled very little in society; he lived in a solitary part of the town, and in his politeness he was not always able to fulfil his good intentions. The scene would have passed off very well but for accident. My aunt’s tea happened to be too strong; and Mr. Croft, who was all attention, jumped up and took the tea-kettle off from the fireplace, in the same room, and began to replenish the cup with water. But whilst in the act, the handle slipped from its socket, the tea-kettle fell, scalded Mr. Croft’s foot disastrously, and fell with its sooty sides on my aunt’s chintz gown. Many were the apologies on both sides; and deep the sorrow expressed; and I need not say, that all the wit in the waggon, as we rode home that evening, was at my aunt’s expense.

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HUCKLEBERRYING LEONARD WITHINGTON August 22, Monday: The Reverend Leonard Withington’s chapter on huckleberrying appeared, minus a few paragraphs, under the title “Huckleberrying” on the front page of the Boston Daily Evening Transcript.

August 27, Saturday: Waldo Emerson to his journal:

Today came to me the first proof-sheet of “Nature” to be corrected.

The Reverend Leonard Withington’s chapter on huckleberrying appeared, minus a few paragraphs, on the front page of the Bunker Hill Aurora and Boston Mirror.

.

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September 10, Saturday: The Reverend Leonard Withington’s account of huckleberrying appeared, in a briefer form, in the Concord, Massachusetts Yeoman’s Gazette.

1846

The Reverend Leonard Withington, having for 8 years been off the board of the Dummer Academy (established by bequest of acting governor William Dummer in 1761, this Newbury institution has come to prefer to be referred to as The Governor’s Academy), returned for another term. During most of his tenure this time, which would end in 1850, he would be serving as President.

Boston’s citizens again petitioned those in authority over them to bring to an end the racial segregation of their public schools. William Cooper Nell signed a petition, signed also by William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Francis Jackson (1789-1861), and Williams, asking the city of Boston to grant equal school rights to children of color. The School Board responded to this concern, to the effect that the racial discrimination which they saw fit to practice was a racial discrimination which was ordained of God and a racial discrimination which was “founded deep in the physical, mental, and moral nature of the two races.” What the protesting blacks needed was not indignation against their betters but cultivation of “a respect for themselves.” The committee voted 55 to 12 to continue the existing segregation of school facilities. Looking for someone more appropriate to the teaching of the black children at Boston’s Smith School than the white man Abner Forbes, who was known to have been beating them,1 Horace Mann, Sr. first offered Forbes’s position to the Reverend Samuel Joseph May and then to Ambrose Wellington.2 The inheritor of this post would need to be a white male it goes without saying, but would need to disbelieve in corporal punishment, and would need to be able to accept and honor the intellectual capabilities of black children. So, here’s an interesting question, don’t you suppose? Why did not Superintendent Mann consider offering that post to Henry Thoreau of Concord?

1. It will help us be more considerate of master Forbes, if we bear in mind that among white men he was being considered a disgrace, because he was teaching students of color. We have the following from the autobiography of William J. Brown, a Rhode Islander of color: “[I]t was considered such a disgrace for white men to teach colored schools that they would be greatly offended if the colored children bowed or spoke to them on the street. Mr. Anthony, who was at one time teaching the colored school [in Providence], became very angry because Zebedee Howland met him on the street, spoke to him, raised his hat and bowed. He took no notice of his dark complexioned scholar, but the next Monday morning took poor Zebedee and the whole school to task, saying, ‘When you meet me on the street, don’t look towards me, or speak to me; if you do, I will flog you the first chance I get.’” 10 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1850

During this year Brown University would be drastically cheapening itself –following the lead of the University of Virginia– by allowing a Ph.B. degree to be earned in three years, by drastically reducing the requirements for an A.B., by allowing the A.M. degree to be earned by the amount of work formerly required for the A.B., etc. The result would be that the university in Providence, Rhode Island would be for a period of years, until “the New System” would be abandoned as utterly debasing, “flooded by a class of young men of little solidity or earnestness of character, who resort to this college ... for the sake of cheap honors.”

As the Reverend Leonard Withington completed his 2d term on the board of the Dummer Academy, much of it as that institution’s President, Bowdoin College awarded to him the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity.

1856

Henry Thoreau would write, “I hear that some of the inhabitants of Ashby sold $2000 worth of huckleberries in ’56.” “HUCKLEBERRIES”

2. Horace Mann, Sr., a stuffed shirt advocate of citizen indoctrination who is given a lot of credit in stuffed shirt histories of education, had just, in his 10th annual report to the Massachusetts Board of Education, suggested hiring mostly females as teachers — since God had implanted in the maternal breast a “powerful, all-mastering instinct of love” that would make it possible for male superiors to induce them to work cheap and, nevertheless, do the right thing. Well, that’s not exactly what he said — it’s merely what he was understood to mean by those who knew how to read the code in use at the time. He might equally well have pointed out that women have smaller heads and smaller brains, had his audience been a different audience, and conveyed precisely the same message. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 11 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1858

October 31, Sunday: The Reverend Leonard Withington went into semi-retirement, becoming senior pastor at 1st Church Congregational in Newbury, Massachusetts.

Henry Thoreau wrote to Friend Daniel Ricketson Concord Oct 31 1858 Friend Ricketson, I have not seen anything of your English Australian yet. Edward Hoar, my companion in Maine and at the White Mts., his sister Eliz- abeth, and a Miss Prichard, another neighbor of ours, went to Eu- rope in the Niagara on the 6th. I told them to look out for you under the Yardley oaks, but it seems that they will not find you there. I had a pleasant time in Tuckerman's Ravine at the White Mts in Ju- ly, entertaining four beside myself under my little tent through some soaking rains; & more recently I have taken an interesting walk with Channing about Cape Ann. We were obliged to “dipper it” a good way, on account of the scarcity of fresh water, for we got most of our meals by the Shore. C. is understood to be here for the winter, – but I rarely see him. I should be pleased to see your face here in the course of the Indian summer, which may still be expected – if any authority can tell us when that phenomenon does occur. We would like to hear the story of your travels – for if you have not been fairly intoxicated with Eu- rope, you have been half-seas-over, & so probably can tell more about it– {One-third page missing} Your truly Henry D. Thoreau

October 31, 1858: P.M.–To Conantum. Our currants bare; how long? The Italian poplars are now a dull greenish yellow, not nearly so fair as the few leaves that had turned some time ago. Some silvery abeles are the same color. [But both turn more yellow.] I go over the Hubbard Bridge causeway. The young Salix alba osiers are just bare, or nearly so, and the yellow twigs accordingly begin to show. It is a fine day, Indian-summer-like, and there is considerable gossamer on the causeway and blowing from all trees. That warm weather of the l9th and 20th was, methinks, the same sort of weather with the most pleasant in November (which last alone some allow to be Indian summer), only more to be expected. I see many red oaks, thickly leaved, fresh and at the height of their tint. These are pretty clear yellow. It is much clearer yellow than any black oak, but some others are about bare. These and scarlet oaks, which are yet more numerous, are the only oaks not withered that I notice to-day, except one middle-sized white oak probably protected from frost under Lee’s Cliff. Between the absolutely deciduous plants and the evergreens are all degrees, not only those which retain their withered leaves all winter, but those, commonly called evergreen, which, though slow to change, yet acquire at last a ruddy color while they keep their leaves, as the lambkill and water andromeda (?). Get a good sight on Conantum of a sparrow (such as I have seen in flocks some time), which utters a sharp te- te-te quickly repeated as it flies, sitting on a wall three or four rods off. I see that it is rather long and slender, is

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perhaps dusky-ash above with some black backward; has a pretty long black bill, a white ring about eye, white chin and line under cheek, a black (or dark) spotted breast and dirty cream-color beneath; legs long and slender and perhaps reddish-brown, two faint light bars on wings; but, what distinguishes it more, it keeps gently jerking or tossing its tail as it sits, and when a flock flies over you see the tails distinctly black beneath. Though I detected no yellow, yet I think from the note that it must be the shore lark (such as I saw March 24th) in their fall plumage. They are a common bird at this season, I think. [Titlarks?] I see a middle-sized red oak side by side with a black one under Lee’s Cliff. The first is still pretty fresh, the latter completely withered. The withered leaves of the first are flat, apparently thin, and a yellowish brown; those of the black are much curled and a very different and dark brown, and look thicker. Barberry generally is thickly leaved and only somewhat yellowish or scarlet, say russet.

BARBERRY

I tasted some of the very small grapes on Blackberry Steep, such as I had a jelly made of. Though shrivelled, and therefore ripe, they are very acid and inedible. The slippery elm has a few scattered leaves on it, while the common close by is bare. So I think the former is ELM FOLIAGE later to fall. You may well call it bare. The cedar at Lee’s Cliff has apparently just fallen, – almost. As I sit on the Cliff there, the sun-is now getting low, and the woods in Lincoln south and east of me are lit up by its more level rays, and there is brought out a more brilliant redness in the scarlet oaks, scattered so equally over the forest, than you would have believed was in them. Every tree of this species which is visible in these directions. even to the horizon, now stands out distinctly red. Some great ones lift their red backs high above the woods near the Codman place, like huge roses with a myriad fine petals, and some more slender ones, in a small grove of white pines on Pine Hill in the east, in the very horizon, alternating with the pines on the edge of the grove and shouldering them with their red coats, – an intense, burning red which would lose some of its strength, methinks, with every step you might take toward them, – look like soldiers in red amid hunters in green. This time it is Lincoln green, too. Until the sun thus lit them up you would not have believed that there were so many redcoats in the forest army. Looking westward, their colors are lost in a blaze of light, but in other directions the whole forest is a flower-garden, in which these late roses burn, alternating with green, while the so-called “gardeners,” working here and there, perchance, beneath, with spade and water-pot, see only a few little asters amid withered leaves, for the shade that lurks amid their foliage does not report itself at this distance. They are unanimously red. The focus of their reflected [color] is in the atmosphere far on this side. Every such tree, especially in the horizon, becomes a nucleus of red, as it were, where, with the declining sun, the redness grows and glows like a cloud. It only has some comparatively dull-red leaves for a nucleus and to start it, and it becomes an intense scarlet or red mist, or fire which finds fuel for itself in the very atmosphere. I have no doubt that you would be disappointed in the brilliancy of those trees if you were to walk to them. You see a redder tree than exists. It is a strong red, which gathers strength from the air on its way to your eye. It is partly borrowed fire, borrowed of the sun. The scarlet oak asks the clear sky and the brightness of the Indian summer. These bring out its color. If the sun goes into a cloud they become indistinct. These are my China asters, my late garden flowers. It costs me nothing for a gardener. The falling leaves, all over the forest, are protecting the roots of my plants. Only look at what is to be seen, and you will have garden enough, without deepening the soil of your yard. We have only to elevate our view a little to see the whole forest as a garden. [Excursions, pp. 282-284; River, 346-349] To my surprise, the only yellow that I see amid the universal red and green and chocolate is one large tree-top in the forest, a mile off in the east, across the pond, which by its form and color I know to be my late acquaintance the tall aspen (tremuliformis) of the 29th. It, too, is far more yellow at this distance than it was close at hand, and so are the Lombardy poplars in our streets. The Salix alba, too, looks yellower at a distance now. Their dull-brown and green colors do not report themselves so far, while the yellow crescit eundo, and we see the sun reflected in it. After walking for a couple of hours the other day through the woods, I came to the base of a tall aspen, which I do not remember to have seen before, standing in the midst of the woods in the next

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town, still thickly leaved and turned to greenish yellow. It is perhaps the largest of its species that I know. It was by merest accident that I stumbled on it, and if I had been sent to find it, I should have thought it to be, as we say, like looking for a needle in a haymow. All summer, and it chances for so many years, it has been concealed to me; but now, walking in a different direction, to the same hilltop from which I saw the scarlet oaks, and looking off just before sunset, when all other trees visible for miles around are reddish or green, I distinguish my new acquaintance by its yellow color. Such is its fame, at last, and reward for living in that solitude and obscurity. It is the most distinct tree in all the landscape, and would be the cynosure of all eyes here. Thus it plays its part in the choir. I made a minute of its locality, glad to know where so large an aspen grew. Then it seemed peculiar in its solitude and obscurity. It seemed the obscurest of trees. Now it was seen to be equally peculiar for its distinctness and prominence. Each tree (in October) runs up its flag and we know [what] colors it sails under. The sailor sails, and the soldier marches, under a color which will report his virtue farthest, and the ship’s “private signals” must be such as can be distinguished at the greatest distance. The eye, which distinguishes and appreciates color, is itself the seat of color in the human body. It is as if it recognized me too, and gladly, coming half-way to meet me, and now the acquaintance thus propitiously formed will, I trust, be permanent. Of the three (?) mocker-nuts on Conantum top only the southernmost is bare, the rest are thickly leaved yet. The Viburnum Lentago is about bare. That hour-glass apple shrub near the old Conantum house is full of small yellow fruit. Thus it is with them. By the end of some October, when their leaves have fallen, you see them glowing with an abundance of wild fruit, which the cows cannot get at over the bushy and thorny hedge which surrounds them. [Excursions, p. 306; River, 376] Such is their pursuit of knowledge through difficulties. [Excursions, p. 307; River, 377] Though they may have taken the hour-glass form, think not that their sands are run out. So is it with the rude, neglected genius from amid the country hills; he suffers many a check at first, browsed on by fate, springing in but a rocky pasture, the nursery of other creatures there, and he grows broad and strong, and scraggy and thorny, hopelessly stunted, you would say, and not like a sleek orchard tree all whose forces are husbanded and the precious early years not lost, and when at first, within this rind and hedge, the man shoots up, you see the thorny scrub of his youth about him, and he walks like an hour-glass, aspiring above, it is true, but held down and impeded by the rubbish of old difficulties overcome, and you seem to see his sands running out. But at length, thanks to his rude culture, he attains to his full stature, and every vestige of the thorny hedge which clung to his youth disappears, and he bears golden crops of Porters or Baldwins, whose fame will spread through all orchards for generations to come, while that thrifty orchard tree which was his competitor will, perchance, have long since ceased to bear its engrafted fruit and decayed. [See Excursions, p. 307; River, 377.] The beach plum is withering green, say with the apple trees, which are half of them bare. Larches fairly begun to fall; so they are at height.

1860

The Reverend Dr. Andrew Preston Peabody, Harvard College’s Plummer Professor of Christian Morals reviewed (anonymously) the Reverend Leonard Withington’s SOLOMON’S SONG: TRANSLATED AND KING SOLOMON EXPLAINED IN THREE PARTS. The review was a favorable one.

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Summer/Fall/Winter: Henry Thoreau was working at this point on a “Huckleberries” manuscript which he would eventually need to lay aside for lack of lifetime. In this manuscript we see at one point that he is still paying attention to the “Ossian” bardic materials, in that he wrote of John Camel Heenan of Benecia, Massachusetts (a local celebrity, 6 feet 2 inches and approximately 190 pounds, who had 15 minutes of fame by sparring for OSSIAN 42 rounds with the British champion Tom Sayers on April 17, 1860, then another 15 minutes of fame in winning the hand of Adah Isaacs Menken, a well-known actress, and then 15 minutes of notoriety by accusing his bride as a bigamist) as “Mr. Blank, the Ossian Boy.”

1861

January 11, Friday: On this day the sovereign state of Alabama, unable to sustain the thought that all men had been created equal, seceded from the federal union centered in Washington DC.

Well, the above remark is a cold joke, really, a cold joke based on the reputation that Alabama has acquired as a state in which behaving decently toward one another comes in a poor second to washing crawdads down with beer. In fact none of the Southern tier of states were breaking away in order to protect their peculiar institution of human enslavement. That’s merely a modern misapprehension! The president-elect, Abraham Lincoln, had given them assurances that interfering with human enslavement was not an item to be found anywhere on his agenda. None of the Southern politicians had any reason at all to suspect that Lincoln had any affection for people of color, for in fact, as was well understood, he had no such affection. The man was a master of the nigger joke (if you hadn’t known that, it is merely that our historians have been sparing you the agony of hearing them). The primary reason for the breaking away was that the election had indicated to the states of the Southern agricultural tier very clearly that the Northern industrial sector of the nation was increasing in relative influence over the Southern. During the first century of the existence of our nation, the most important political fact was that the primary political division in the federal government was sectional, between the Northern sector and the Southern sector of the country. The Constitution had been drafted in such a manner that the powers of these two sectors were about on a par with one another — it was to achieve this rough parity between the industrial North and the agricultural South that slavemasters had been granted an extra 3/5ths of a vote for every human being they owned. Year after year, shifts in the relative power of the two regions had been being carefully monitored and struggled over. This was a sectional issue, a geographical one, an economic one, Northern sector versus Southern sector, and so, you see, any and all debates as to the morality of race enslavement pro and con amount to a mere “stalking horse.” All of American national politics had for all of the existence of the federal union been a delicate balancing act. When Florida had become available, “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 15 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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from Spain, Florida could not be brought into the union as an addition to the Southern sector until the federal politicians had come up with the idea of offering something equivalent to the Northern sector, so that the relative influences of the two sectors could be kept in balance within the corridors of power in Washington DC (so, Massachusetts was split into two states, Massachusetts and Maine, with the addition of Maine to the Northern sector balancing the addition of Florida to the Southern sector). When Texas came in, the whole chunk of territory had been brought in as one humongous state rather than breaking it apart into four reasonably sized new states, simply because the relative power of the two regions, north versus south, was being so carefully monitored and struggled for. For similar reasons, Canada is now an independent nation: Canada retained its independence because nobody could figure out how to add Canada to the Northern sector without adding Mexico to the Southern sector (and nobody wanted the Mexicans because they were thought of as half- breeds). National politics went on and on like this, and it wasn’t ever a struggle over freeing the negroes, but was instead a struggle between two groups of white men over which group of white men was going to achieve dominance over the federal establishment in Washington DC. Now hear me, the black people were just a pawn, being moved around the white man’s chessboard. So, in the 1860 election, when a northern candidate won rather than the candidate that was in the pocket of the Southern sector, they became fearful that the big bad wolf was knocking on the door, that the Northern sector had finally won out in this long-term contest for dominance over the federal establishment in Washington DC. It didn’t matter how much Lincoln protested that freeing the slaves was the furthest thing from his mind (“Who, lil’ ol’ me?”).

Thus, at our present juncture, the states of the Southern sector were seceding not because the Republican election victory posed a threat to enslavement practices –such a threat was not presented by the new Republican party platform– but because with the growing industrial power of the North, the agricultural South sensed a permanent diminution of its relative influence. It was willing to be part of a 50% versus 50% nation but feared having to suck hind tit in a 60% versus 40% nation. It had been all right when Franklin Pierce, a Northerner, had been president, because they had all understood that Pierce was a true blue Southerner at heart (besides, he was an ineffectual drunkard with the charisma of a door stop). This time, with a Northerner rather than a Southerner in control of the White House, the Northern bloc was going to start adding a bunch of free states out west, with each free state having two senators to make the Senate ever more and more lopsided — and this long stalemate would be irrevocably shattered.

Jan. 11. Horace Mann brings me the contents of a crow's stomach in alcohol. It was killed in the village within a day or two. It is quite a mass of frozen-thawed apple, — pulp and skin, — with a good many pieces of skunk-cabbage berries one fourth inch or less in diameter, and commonly showing the pale-brown or blackish outside, interspersed, looking like bits of acorns, — never a whole or even half a berry, — and two little bones as of frogs (?) or mice (?) or tadpoles; also a street pebble a quarter of an inch in diameter, hard to be distinguished in appearance from the cabbage seeds. I presume that every one of my audience knows what a huckleberry is, — has seen a huckleberry, gathered a huckleberry, and, finally, has tasted a huckleberry, — and, that being the case, I think that I need offer no apology if I make huckleberries my theme this evening. What more encouraging sight at the end of a long ramble than the endless successive patches of green bushes, — perhaps in some rocky pasture, — fairly blackened with the profusion of fresh and glossy berries? There are so many of these berries in their season that most do not perceive that birds and quadrupeds make any use of them, since they are not felt to rob us; yet they are more important to them than to us. We do not notice the robin when it plucks a berry, as when it visits our favorite cherry tree, and the fox pays his visits to the field when we are not there.

Thoreau will quote from John Claudius Loudon in the late lecture “HUCKLEBERRIES” for which he is above preparing: On the other hand I gather from Loudon and others that there are only two species growing in England, which are eaten raw,

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answering to our eight — to wit, the Bilberry (V. myrtillus) and the Blea-berry or Bog Whortleberry (V. uliginosum), both of which are found in North America, and the last is the common one on the summit of the White Mountains, but in Great Britain it is found only in the northern part of England and in Scotland. This leaves only one in England to our five which are abundant. In short, it chances that of the thirty-two species of Vaccinium which Loudon describes, all except the above two and four more are referred to North America alone, and only three or possibly four are found in Europe. Yet the few Englishmen with whom I have spoken on this subject love to think and to say that they have as many huckleberries as we. I will therefore quote the most which their own authorities say not already quoted, about the abundance and value of their only two kinds which are eaten raw. Loudon says of the bog whortleberry (V. uliginosum), ‘The berries are agreeable but inferior in flavor to those of Vaccinium myrtillus [the bilberry]; eaten in large quantities, they occasion giddiness, and a slight headache.’ And of their common whortleberry (V. myrtillus) he says, ‘It is found in every country in Britain, from Cornwall to Caithness, least frequently in the south-eastern countries, and increases in quantity as we advance northward.’ It ‘is an elegant and also a fruit-bearing plant.’ The berries ‘are eaten in tarts or with cream, or made into a jelly, in the northern and western counties of England; and, in other parts of the country they are made into pies and puddings.’ They ‘are very acceptable to children either eaten by themselves, or with milk’ or otherwise. They ‘have an astringent quality.’... Take the rubue or what you might call bramble berries, for instance, to which genus our raspberries, blackberries and thimbleberries belong. According to Loudon there are five kinds indigenous in Britain to our eight. But of these five only two appear to be at all common, while we have four kinds both very common and very good. The Englishman Coleman says of their best, the English raspberry, which species we also cultivate, that ‘the wilding is not sufficiently abundant to have much importance.’

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March 14, Thursday: The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher had a sermon on EPHESIANS 4:13 published in The Independent. The proof text in EPHESIANS reads as follows: “Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” The question the Reverend Beecher set out to answer, in the light of this Biblical text, was, what is the perfect manhood of the race. Today such a formulation would seem at least sexist, if not racist. But not so in that day, or, at least, not so to the Rev, who was fully capable of sexism and of racism, and whose reading of the Gospels was quite as fully anti-Semitic as had been intended by the author of Matthew:

It is very true that Christianity forbids physical force and physical violence where they are vengeful; where they proceed merely from the impulse of cruelty; where they seek a selfish end, and originate in a selfish motive. But where they spring from affection, or from moral sentiment, they not only are tolerated, but are commanded, by the whole spirit of Christianity. And no man is a perfect man in Christ Jesus who does not know, under appropriate circumstances, how to ward off and how to give the blow. I consider that man as a kind of eunuch who forswears, on proper occasions, physical force…. I take it that our sneak-thieves are the children of cowardly Christian ethics…. I despise this whole idea of non-resistance. It is false to manhood, and essentially false to Christianity…. A perfect man is one that has all the attributes of courage which belong to true bodily strength. It is very certain that these men who will not fight are not much respected among men…. I do not believe they are a bit more respected up there than here.

[You will remember that the Thoreau brothers debated the issue under consideration here, back in January 1841 in the Concord Lyceum, against Bronson Alcott, and that in so doing they were debating against another man like the Reverend Beecher who did not agree with the Reverend Adin Ballou’s straightforward interpretation of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount principle of non-resistance to evil, to with, that no matter how difficult it would be for us to obey his instructions, Jesus had meant precisely what he had said to us.]

[THOREAU MADE NO JOURNAL ENTRY FOR 14 MARCH]

The Reverend Leonard Withington wrote from Newbury, Massachusetts in regard to Mr. Hosea Hildrith, a teacher at Phillips Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire: My dear Sir:

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The first I heard of Mr. Hildreth was as a Teacher of Phillips Academy, in Exeter, under Dr. Abbot. I heard him represented then as a man of the Liberal school, gradually verging towards Orthodoxy; and he was somewhat celebrated for a series of articles he published, I think in an Exeter paper; but I am totally unable to recover the definite recollection of the subject and the date. After he came to Gloucester, I became rather intimate with him, and our intimacy continued for several years. He was an impressive preacher — he had a beautiful clear style, which reminded you of Dr. Paley. At Gloucester he seemed to vibrate back to the most conservative type of Unitarianism. He associated much with Dr. Lowell of Boston; but still I supposed him not to be a doxided Unitarian. He wished Dr. Perry, of Bradford, (now Goochland,) and myself to unite with him in a series of meetings. We went to see him, and told him if he would do as Dr. Parish had done, under imputed defections, — publish a Sermon on the Deity of Christ, such as we supposed he had, we would come; but we did not wish to be misunderstood. The meeting was calm and pleasant until we were about to part — then he burst into a torrent of feeling, wept like a child, and said that if all his friends forsook him, his Saviour would not. He spoke of dying a martyr to his own cause, though I did not know definitely what it was. I could not but suspect something morbid in the state of his mind at that time. But my recollections of him are exceedingly pleasant, as a man of a superior mind and highly cultivated taste, a correct and perspicuous writer and a perfect gentleman. Yours truly, LEONARD WITHINGTON.

1872

October 31, Thursday: Ruth Davol Davis died.

The Reverend Omar White Folsom, a Congregationalist licensed to preach in 1871 by the Andover Association, was ordained as colleague pastor with Dr. Leonard Withington at the First Church in Newbury, Massachusetts.

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1884

June 3, Tuesday: The Reverend Omar White Folsom, a Congregationalist who had been ordained in 1872 as colleague pastor with Dr. Leonard Withington at the First Church in Newbury, Massachusetts, was at this point dismissed to become acting pastor at the Winter Street Church in Bath Maine on July 1st and pastor on September 16th.

The Republican national convention began in Chicago, Illinois.

That night the Palisades Mountain House capable of housing 500 swells arriving by steamboat and car, 600 feet in length, would catch on fire and burn spectacularly within view of the harbor of New-York, Central Park, Long Island Sound, and Staten Island. Built as it was all of wood, standing on the brow of the Palisades 330 feet above the Hudson River, the structure had been an accident waiting to happen: there proved to be just no way to put together a bucket brigade that could bring any water at all onto these flames.

The hospitable structure would prove a total loss and would never be rebuilt.

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1885

April 22, Wednesday: Leonard Withington died at the age of 95 in Newbury, Massachusetts. He had been the last survivor of Yale College’s Class of 1814. The body would be placed in the Oak Hill Cemetery of Newburyport. He was survived by two of the sons and all four of the daughters of his 2d marriage.

This was a day of great sorrow in Kansas as surviving citizens collected the bodies of the drowned after a nighttime flash flood of the Medicine River and Elm Creek. One survivor, Nellie B. Brown Jones, would recount how she had helped retrieve the bodies of four of her classmates, and how after hunting for five days, the body of the father of these children would be discovered buried in the sand, “all except his hand.”

April 23, Thursday: The obituary of the Reverend Leonard Withington made the front page of the Boston Evening Transcript.

At Clarke’s Crossing on Fish Creek in Saskatchewan, Canada, disaffected citizens began digging camouflaged rifle pits. They understood that the North-West Mounted Police would arrive on the following day, and planned an ambush as these government forces would ford the stream. Their commander Gabriel Dumont asserted “I want to treat them like buffaloes.”

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1911

VITAL RECORDS OF NEWBURY, MASSACHUSETTS, 2 volumes (Salem: The Essex Institute).

1935

Eliza Adams Little and Lucretia Little Ilsley, eds., THE FIRST PARISH NEWBURY, MASSACHUSETTS 1635-1935 (Newburyport).

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 2012. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

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

Prepared: September 15, 2012

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GENERATION HOTLINE

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

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

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

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