Henry David Thoreau
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Henry David Thoreau was born July 12, 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts.

Huh! You call this "educating the world"? Every true fan knows that the most important of American philosophers was born David Henry Thoreau. We know that because we read it on the Fount of All Knowledge.

Soddy, old chaps. Despite what you read on the Fount, Henry David Thoreau was born as Henry David Thoreau. But six weeks after his birth, his uncle, David, died at age 21. At the time it was common to name a newborn after a recently deceased relative. So Henry's parents had their newborn christened as David Henry. But he was born - we repeat - born as Henry David Thoreau.

Everyone knows about Henry. After graduating from Harvard in 1837, he began to question the value of the rapid industrialization of the nation. So he built a cabin on Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. He survived on the natural bounty of the land, living a life close to nature and of ease and simplicity.

Sure, snort the TT's (Thoreau Trashers). Henry lived a life of simplicity - as long as his cabin was on land owned by a rich friend who didn't charge rent. And if by living "close to nature", you mean going home each week where his mother would cook his Sunday dinner and do his laundry.

And don't give us this Henry-inspired-guys-like-Gandhi stuff either. The Mahatma was only able to live his life of idealism and poverty because he also had rich friends to pick up the tab. Even his personal physician used to joke that it cost a fortune to keep Gandhi poor.

Naturally Henry's friends rise to his defense. They point out that the Trashing of Thoreau always becomes fashionable whenever society's denizens become so materialistic so that all they can do is go into spittle flinging diatribes against the one man whose very life was a rebuke to their faults. So in today's hyper-materialistic world you can expect hyper-criticism of Henry.

Of course, this back and forth brouhaha doesn't tell us much about history in general or Henry David Thoreau in particular. But what we do know as fact is that Henry was born on the family farm outside Concord, Massachusetts. His dad, John, also ran a store in town, and Henry's mom, Cynthia, took in boarders. Filling out the family was Henry's slightly older brother John, and two sisters, Helen and Sophia. It was a satisfactory arrangement since if business was slow at the store, then they had the farm to fall back on.

But in 1815 a volcano on the other side of the world erupted and spewed so much ash into the air that the following year, 1816, had freezing weather in June, July, and August. Crops failed during the "Year Without a Summer" as well as the next. So in 1818, the Thoreaus gave up farming and moved to Chelmsford, ten miles to the north of Concord where they again opened a store.

Then in 1822, Cynthia's genial but eccentric and rambling brother Charles discovered a deposit of plumbago in Bristol, New Hampshire. Charles was able to stake a claim and form a company selling this mineral we now call graphite.

Although graphite was mostly used for making items that had to stand high temperatures, it was discovered that this form of pure carbon could be used to make marks on paper. So graphite was the vital ingredient for that new fangled device called the pencil. Far more convenient than the cumbersome pen and ink, pencils were particularly suitable for writing notes, records, and journals in a country on the move and on the verge of an industrial revolution.

But American pencils were expensive. They required a high quality graphite which could only be obtained from England. But Charles found that his graphite was as good as the English stuff and was not available anywhere else in the United States.

Charles wasn't really a businessman, and he turned the pencil making operation over to John. No one's sure how John got the business started so quick but his pencils won a prize at a local business fair seven months later.

Today you probably wouldn't think much of early American pencils. Modern pencil "leads" are made by grinding the graphite with clays (like kaolin and non-swelling bentonites) and then extruding them into rods followed by firing in kilns. So they can be soft or hard to fit your needs.

But in Henry's day you mixed the powdered graphite with wax and pastes and smushed them between slabs of wood with carved notches. The early pencil leads tended to be brittle and greasy but they were better than hauling around pen and ink.

Henry was intrigued by the technology of pencil making. When he was older he fiddled with the process and improved the quality of the pencils so that they sold better than ever. But pointing out that Henry was an innovative inventor isn't as much fun as trashing him by saying he worked in a pencil factory.

John and Cynthia, like other substantial citizens, took part in civic life. John himself was the secretary of the local fire department and was a member of other business organizations.

Cynthia, on the other hand, was more politically active than her laid-back husband, and she became a founding member of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society. The Thoreaus were not just opposed to slavery but were abolitionists.

They weren't just abolitionists but they actively participated in the Underground Railroad. This was a system of safehouses and secret routes to spirit the slaves away from the South and to areas in the North where recapture was unlikely. The goal of many fugitive slaves was Canada.

But first Henry had to get through college. Although his family wasn't what we'd call rich, they were able to scrape up the funds to send Henry, who was showing a decided intellectual bent, to Harvard.

When Henry entered Harvard it only had a couple of hundred students and a dozen professors. Although offering a "rigid" curriculum, the work itself wasn't beyond the ability of an able youngster. Even the president of the college said a student could get the daily duties done quickly and spend the rest of the hours for other activities.

One thing to remember. These were college kids. The typical entrance age was fourteen. Yes, that's fourteen years old. The school was primarily intended for aspiring doctors, lawyers, teachers, and ministers. So the students spent four years studying Latin, Greek, mathematics, and religion and from time to time trashing the school in riots.

Henry did all right, actually a bit better than his rank in class indicates. The professors noted he had a quick and original mind and was a good student in mathematics and the sciences. But it was also evident he really wasn't cut out to be a doctor, lawyer, or minister.

So that left teaching, and when he graduated Henry and Brother John set up a school. By 1842, the pressure had gotten to John, and Henry found he couldn't handle the teaching responsibilities on his own. So he went back to work, yes, in his dad's pencil factory.

However, while he was at Harvard, Henry met one of the most important American philosophers. That was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who frequently gave talks at the school. Ralph's dad had been a Unitarian minister, and as Ralph expected to follow in his dad's footsteps, he entered Harvard Divinity School. Then as now HDS graduates had the pick of the best congregations, and from 1829 to 1832 Ralph was pastor of the Second Church in Boston.

Ralph's wife died in 1831 after only two years of marriage. Naturally Ralph was devastated. He had also become discontented with the Church. So with his family funds footing the bill, Ralph traveled for a couple of years in America and Europe. The question was what to do next. After all even discontented clergymen have to eat.

In the days before the Internet, television, or even radio, one of the most popular sedentary entertainments was the lecture. A speaker would stand up before an audience and talk about some topic. Unlike today where the lecture circuit is largely composed of politicians picking up $200,000 from Wall Street Bankers for delivering a 30-minute speech they didn't write, in the 19th century the lectures were open to the public who paid a modest fee. You could see even big name celebrities for a quarter.

Writing and lecturing went hand-in-hand. A popular writer could make additional money giving lectures, and a good lecturer could pick up cash writing articles. Mark Twain got his start lecturing about his trip to Hawaii (then called the Sandwich Islands) and he later returned to lecturing when his business ventures failed.

Ralph had a flair for the spoken word, and he soon became one of the most popular speakers in the country. By the early 1830's he had remarried and moved to Concord where he lived by writing, lecturing, and - we have to be honest - living off a hefty inheritance from his first wife's family.

Throughout Ralph's writings and talks there permeates a philosophy called transcendentalism. Now there is nothing more frustrating than trying to find exactly what a particular philosophy means. If you look up transcendental in the dictionary you get something like:

TRANSCENDENTAL: a transcending experience

... which leads to ...

TRANSCENDING: the state of being transcendent

... and then to ...

TRANSCENDENT: a transcendental experience

Fortunately every now and then you'll get something that's almost makes sense:

Transcendentalism is a very formal word that describes a very simple idea. People, men and women equally, have knowledge about themselves and the world around them that "transcends" or goes beyond what they can see, hear, taste, touch or feel¹.

What this means is that those who accept transcendental philosophy believe that intuition and imagination permit a knowledge beyond what is provable by logic or observed by the senses. But it's important to realize that Ralph and his friends - who formed the Transcendental Club - did not reject empirical or scientific knowledge. Au contraire (as Henry's ancestors might have said), they believed scientific knowledge and logical reasoning were essential to the full transcendental experience.

Ralph's transcendentalism is usually called Transcendentalism which is a branch of Philosophy. And according to philosophy encyclopedias, American Philosophy really doesn't have much of a definition. Instead, American Transcendentalism is often classified as less a philosophy than a (ptui) "literary" movement.

So it's no surprise that today Ralph's talks leave people scratching their heads. For instance, in one lecture he said:

The critics who complain of the sickly separation of the beauty of nature from the thing to be done must consider that our hunting of the picturesque is inseparable from our protest against false society.

Imagine listening to this for an hour and a half.

On the other hand, Ralph was impressed with the new Harvard graduate who soon returned - as people like to sneer - to working in his dad's pencil factory. Well, Ralph suggested, if Henry wanted to give writing a try, why not come to work for him, Ralph, as a tutor for his kids and an all-around handyman and factotum. He would then have plenty of time for writing.

Henry's journalistic career began at a precipitous time. Printing technology was becoming sophisticated and so books and newspapers were proliferating. Then there was that new fangled contraption the railroad that was providing rapid shipping and transportation. Furthermore that high tech device called the telegraph was making communication and transmission of news near instantaneous.

So with Ralph's advice (and we must admit it, Ralph's connections), Henry started writing articles. His first published work was "Aulus Persius Flaccus" in 1840 and which appeared in The Dial, a magazine that was largely written by Ralph and his transcendental friends. The essay was about the Roman playwright of the same name, and to be honest, it's hard to see just what the heck Henry's trying to say. So it's no surprise that the editor, Margaret Fuller, only published the article after Ralph insisted.

Then in 1842 Henry published "Natural History of Massachusetts" also in The Dial. This was his first essay that actually brought independent praise. But Henry's writing certainly didn't provide much income, and he kept working for Ralph.

Then in 1845, Henry decided to do what ultimately made him famous. He built a cabin at Walden Pond on Ralph's land and moved in.

First, of all, let's get it right. Henry did not - that's not! not! not! - say that it would be best if everyone should live like he did. Instead he said he hoped that there would be as many different types of people as possible.

As Henry put it:

One young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some acres, told me that he thought he should live as I did, if he had the means. I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible;

Still Henry could be way off on some things. He did have an if-we-don't-have-it-we-don't-need-it philosophy. For instance, he wondered why the heck they're planning to build a telegraph from Maine to Texas. But what does Maine have to say to Texas?

What Henry's doing is confusing groups of people with the individuals that make up the groups. After all, it's meaningless to say Texas didn't want to talk to Maine. Certainly there were individuals in Texas that might very well want to communicate rapidly with people in Maine.

We have to admit, then, that Henry lived what we would call a sheltered life. His limited world experience clearly shows up in Walden when he stated:

In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.

Here's where the Thoreau Trasher's jump in. Again we have Henry saying how easy it is to live a life close to nature - all the while sponging off Ralph Waldo Emerson and having his mom cook Sunday dinner and do his laundry.

Thoreau Trashing is nothing new and the Trashers showed up with the first publication of Walden. In one of Walden's first reviews, a critic pointed out that Henry's food bill outstripped his income. But at least the review concluded with a bit of a compliment, backhanded though it might be:

The object of this book seems to be to persuade men of literary attainments how happy they can be living in solitude in a hut - a sort of Robinson Crusoe life within an hour's travel of Boston and Cambridge. It is wonderful that this passion held out with Mr. Thoreau for two years, when he left his cottage and returned to Boston to write this book, which is full of proof that his talents fit him for something better than a life of idleness in the woods.

.

Henry himself never claimed he lived a life of isolation, and on July 23, 1846, he walked into town to pick up a mended shoe. There he bumped into Sam Staples, the local tax collector. Sam politely reminded Henry that he hadn't paid his poll tax for four years. It wasn't much - only $1.50 a year. But Henry replied he didn't believe in the tax. It went to finance the Mexican War which he believed was being waged simply to bring in another slave state. So he wasn't going to pay.

Well, said Sam, if that's the way it was, then Henry would have to go to jail. According to Sam, Henry went along willingly and "didn't make any fuss".

Henry later described his experience:

As I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up.

As for his actual time languishing behind bars, Henry added:

I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night.

So we can't expect much of a Johnny Cash song from Henry's ordeal.

But his time in the slammer convinced Henry that standing up to unjust laws was the duty of an honest man. According to a fictionalized account, when Ralph came to get Henry out of jail, they had their famous exchange:

"Henry!" Ralph exclaimed. "What are you doing in jail?"

"Waldo," Henry replied, "What are you doing out of jail?"

Actually Ralph didn't learn of Henry's detention until later. Later that night some lady showed up at Sam's house and left an envelope with the money needed to cover Henry's tax. Because of the lateness of the hour, Sam decided to wait until morning, and so Henry spent the night in the cell. No one knows who the benefactress was, but the best guess is it was Henry's Aunt Maria, who at the behest of his mom, Cynthia, had managed to scrape up the dough. Henry was released in the morning.

Sam altered his own telling from time to time, in some cases saying Henry was "mad as hell" to be released and at other times saying Henry "took it all right". It was probably a bit of both. Henry had no reason to give Sam any static, but he was probably annoyed that although it wasn't his money, the tax had still been paid in his name.

In the end Henry decided the problem was the state. If a government could dip into the citizen's pockets to fund unjust wars or policies, the people had ceded to the government too much power. From this episode arose the essay usually known as "Civil Disobedience". It's this essay that has led Henry to be embraced by the agin-the-government bunch who like to echo Henry's glib opening:

I heartily accept the motto, - "That government is best which governs least;" and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, - "That government is best which governs not at all";

The townspeople, on the other hand, thought the whole episode was kind of silly. And what surprises fans of both Ralph and Henry is that Ralph seems to have drifted at least temporarily into the Trashers' camp.

Ralph certainly appeared irritated with Henry. He wrote in his journal as if addressing his rash young friend, "The state tax does not pay the Mexican War. [Taxes from] Your coat, your sugar, your Latin & French & German book, your watch does [sic]. Yet these you do not stick at [i. e., avoid] buying." Publicly Ralph was less censorious and limited his comments to rather sour asides to friends how Henry had gone to jail rather than pay the tax.

There's no doubt that Henry's essay was an inspiration for those in the later non-violent resistance movements. Henry's actions were also fully d'accord with the policy of William Lloyd Garrison, the emergent abolitionist, that his followers who despite their zeal should avoid any violence.

But not all abolitionists followed William's precepts. Certainly not that most firebrand of the firebrand abolitionists, John Brown.

In fact, Henry actually met John when John came to Concord in 1857. John appeared at the behest of Concord Ladies' Antislavery Society, and he was also trying to drum up funds to continue his fight against slavery. As an example of how fragmented the nation had become, John was able to appear without fear of capture although he had been indicted for murder in Kansas at Pottawatomie Creek where he and his followers had hacked a group of pro-slavery men to death with broadswords. His last visit to Concord was in May 1859, when he again he met with Henry, Ralph, and other civic leaders. By then he had big plans.

After John Brown's attack on the Federal Arsenal at Harper's Ferry that October, many abolitionists didn't quite know what to do. Until then the fight against slavery was seen as an issue at the state level. But now John Brown equated fighting slavery with an attack on the federal government. As the US Constitution is quite explicit that "levying war" against the United States is indeed treason and must be tried in the state where the offense occurred, John was charged and tried in Virginia. He was convicted on November 2 and executed exactly one month later.

Among the abolitionists that hailed John as a hero and martyr, one was Henry. On the other hand, Southerners and pro-slavery Northerners saw him as a terrorist who was inciting the slaves to open rebellion. But despite the raid on Harper's Ferry fanning the sectional flames, it did not directly lead to the War.

People like to debate what are the real causes of the Civil War. But anyone attempting this contentious undertaking should first read the newspapers of the time and the Articles of Secession of the Confederate States. That way they can find what the Southerners themselves actually said. In particular South Carolina - who led the way - was quite specific why it was leaving the Union.

The Southerners made no bones about it. The most immediate cause of secession was the election of Abraham Lincoln, no ifs, ands, or buts. Although by the definition of modern historians, Abe may not have been an abolitionist, by the definition of the Southerners of the early to mid-19th century, he was.

Certainly the newspapers south of the Mason-Dixon Line (and many in the North) characterized him as such. Editorials pointed out that with the election of this "abolitionist" candidate, the Southern states could protect their "peculiar institution" of slavery only by forming their own country which dropped the bit in the Declaration of Independence about all men being created equal.

But an older and lingering and yet still specific issue that really irritated the Southerners was that the Northern States refused to obey the Federal Fugitive Slave Law. Yes, we said the Federal Fugitive Slave Law.

Starting from 1850 - when the old law of 1793 was beefed up - the papers continually wrote about the North's intransigence. Slaves were escaping from the South to the North but those [darn] Yankees were not fulfilling their obligation to return the slaves to their owners.

Although the new law required all states to cooperate and actively assist in recovery of Fugitive Slaves, the Northern governments not only refused to do so and some specifically passed legislation forbidding any such assistance to the point that returning fugitive slaves was kidnapping. Since the requirement to return slaves was also specifically mandated in the Constitution (Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3), the South pointed out that Northern States were not only ignoring federal law, but were spurning the Constitution itself.

In his lectures and writings, Henry attacked both the institution of slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law. Sometimes his rhetoric went further than his fellow abolitionists thought prudent. Henry in turn was irritated that many abolitionists were still reluctant to rally to the defense of John Brown.

There's an interesting episode not that well known to those who know of Henry mostly through reading Walden and "Civil Disobedience". Before dawn on December 3, 1859, Henry borrowed Ralph's horse and carriage and picked up a young man at the house of Franklin Sanborn, one of Ralph's transcendental friends. Henry's passenger was extremely edgy and at one point almost jumped out of the carriage until Henry convinced him he was just going to take him to the train station. There the nervous young man took the next train to Canada.

Although Henry didn't know it at the time, he had just actively aided and abetted the escape of Francis Jackson Meriam. Francis had been with John Brown at the attack on Harper's Ferry but managed to get away before Robert E. Lee's soldiers cornered the insurgents in the engine house² near the confluence of the Shenandoah River with the Potomac. Francis, who was always excitable, became a Union officer but was so high strung that his fellow officers thought him unreliable for any real responsibility. He died in 1865.

Despite all the editorials and speeches, the Federal government had not taken the rumblings of secession seriously. Even after South Carolina seceded in December, 1860, Northern commentators pooh-poohed the proclamation as a publicity stunt and said it was secession in name only. Certainly, they said that no "seceded" state would ever attack any federal facilities.

But by April 12, 1861, a total of seven states had pulled out of the Union. That morning the South Carolina militia artillery opened fire on the federal garrison at Fort Sumter in the Charleston harbor. By the end of June the four more states had followed suit, and the War was on.

It's strange that before the War all anyone had talked about had been slavery. Lincoln gave his views in many speeches and they sometimes seem contradictory. But as far as what Lincoln wanted he said in a speech in Chicago on March 1, 1959:

I suppose [slavery] may long exist, and perhaps the best way for it to come to an end peaceably is for it to exist for a length of time. But I say that the spread and strengthening and perpetuation of it is an entirely different proposition. There we should in every way resist it as a wrong, treating it as a wrong, with the fixed idea that it must and will come to an end.

Then in 1864 and now President, Abe wrote:

I will say now, however, I approve the declaration in favor of so amending the Constitution as to prohibit slavery throughout the nation.

As for what Jefferson Davis - the Confederate President who once approved of importing camels for the cavalry - felt about slavery, he made no bones about it, either. When expressing his opinions, he was a bit longer winded than Abe but no less vehement.

Fanatical organizations, supplied with money by voluntary subscriptions, were assiduously engaged in exciting amongst the slaves a spirit of discontent and revolt; means were furnished for their escape from their owners, and agents secretly employed to entice them to abscond; the constitutional provision for their rendition to their owners was first evaded, then openly denounced as a violation of conscientious obligation and religious duty; men were taught that it was a merit to elude, disobey, and violently oppose the execution of the laws enacted to secure the performance of the promise contained in the constitutional compact; owners of slaves were mobbed and even murdered in open day solely for applying to a magistrate for the arrest of a fugitive slave;

As you might expect, non-politicians tended to be more concise. When referring as to why he and the other had been fighting for the Confederacy, Colonel John B. Mosley said:

I've never heard of any other cause than slavery.

And yet as soon as the guns were fired at Fort Sumter, both Jeff and Abe tried to convince everyone that the war was about something else. Abe kept up his evasiveness even when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Shortly before the Proclamation was made public, Abe wrote Horace Greeley who later would tell young men to go West:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.

Of course, unless he preserved the Union, Abe couldn't eliminate slavery. The big worry in 1864 would be that former General George McClellan would win the presidential election and end the war with a negotiated settlement. If the settlement didn't grant the Confederacy complete independence (which George was against), it would certainly countermand the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.

On the surface, the Emancipation Proclamation was decidedly strange. Why, people asked (including Frederick Douglass), did Abe abolish slavery "where it did not exist, and left it intact where it did exist"? More specifically the Proclamation only freed the slaves in the states currently under rebellion - that is, states where the United States government had no active authority. And it did not free slaves in slave states that stuck with the Union: Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, Kentucky, Kansas, and Utah.

But in the Emancipation Proclamation Abe was actually playing it craftily. Even today many people don't realize it was a slick way to completely eliminate slavery - provided the North won the war.

At the beginning of the Civil War, the number of slaves in the South was huge - about 40% of the population. But with the Emancipation Proclamation and once the North won, all of those slaves were "forever free". So although legally it was still possible to own slaves in those states, there were in fact no longer any slaves to own.

In the Western States there were virtually no slaves to begin with. The total in Utah, Nebraska, and Kansas was less than fifty. Although there were many more slaves in the Border States, Abe kept twisting arms and before the War was over Missouri, Tennessee, Maryland, and West Virginia had abolished slavery.

So when the War ended, the number of slaves - originally 12% of the total US population - had dropped to less than 1 %. The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment was a slam dunk.

Henry didn't live to see it. A little over a year after the attack on Fort Sumter, Henry died in Concord of tuberculosis.

References

Henry David Thoreau A Life, Laura Dassow Walls, University of Chicago, 2017.

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"Everybody Hates Henry", Donovan Hohn, The New Republic, October 21, 2015

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Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860, Library of Conress.

The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself. His Early Life as a Slave, His Escape from Bondage, and His Complete History to the Present Time, Including His Connection with the Anti-slavery Movement; His Labors in Great Britain as Well as in His Own Country; His Experience in the Conduct of an Influential Newspaper; His Connection with the Underground Railroad; His Relations with John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid; His Recruiting the 54th and 55th Mass. Colored Regiments; His Interviews with Presidents Lincoln and Johnson; His Appointment by Gen. Grant to Accompany the Santo Domingo Commission - Also to a Seat in the Council of the District of Columbia; His Appointment as United States Marshal by President R. B. Hayes; Also His Appointment to Be Recorder of Deeds in Washington by President J. A. Garfield; with Many Other Interesting and Important Events of His Most Eventful Life; With an Introduction by Mr. George L. Ruffin, of Boston, Frederick Douglass, De Wolfe & Fiske, 1892, Documenting the South, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.