Log Cabins and Cider
For Henry and John and their neighbors, the 1840 presidential campaign was a contentious topic in Concord, as it was in the rest of the country. For the previous three years, since Henry graduated from college, the financial depression had influenced voting in both state and national elections. For this and other reasons, the campaign turned out to be the most feverish and contested the young nation had yet seen. President Martin Van Buren, a Democrat, was blamed for much of the crash, in part because he had refused to intervene with failing banks. Many preachers, however, argued that the financial crisis was God’s punishment for impiety and intemperance, favorite charges lobbed toward Democrats. Irate Protestants also denounced the Catholicism tainting the Democratic Party, as well as former president Andrew Jackson’s barbaric treatment of Indians—and Van Buren had been Jackson’s vice president.
Shortly after he began taking classes with the Thoreaus, young Horace Hosmer discovered that he was not only the youngest and smallest pupil,1 but also the only boy in the school who had not been brought up to consider himself a Whig. Like most children, he parroted the political bias of his parents. Horace suffered much chaffing, not all of it good-natured, and had to weather the occasional playground fight. He found the battle so tiring he was glad to have Saturdays away from the other students, even though it meant missing John Thoreau’s weekend excursions to Egg Rock and Sleepy Hollow, to Walden Pond and the boiling springs, during which he taught students about geology and botany.
John was vocal about his Whig politics and loudly embraced the motto “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!” as his own. The campaign’s rallying cry had been inflated from a minor military victory back in 1811. The Whig candidate William Henry Harrison, then a general and the governor of Ohio although a native Virginian, had led a thousand soldiers against a rising Indian confederation headquartered at Prophetsown, which the mystic and revivalist Tenskwatawa had built upon the ashes of the venerable village Keth-tip-pe-can-nunk (called Tippecanoe by most whites) after U.S. soldiers razed it to reduce Indian power in the region. In the battle, Harrison’s troops triumphed against a much smaller force of poorly armed Indians. John Tyler, who was brought in as Harrison’s vice presidential candidate, had grown up in the same area of Virginia as Harrison, but unlike him was still associated with it. As a steadfast supporter of states’ rights—which usually meant a supporter of slave-owners’ rights—he could court the Southern vote.
Harrison’s presidential campaign—his second—was rife with exaggeration and myth. Formerly perceived as aloof and superior, Whigs this time imitated the populist methods of Democrats and magically transmuted the sixty-seven-year-old, wealthy, and aristocratic Harrison into a vital, homespun man of the people. They placed this fiction in opposition to their version of the insider machinations of Van Buren and sent Harrison out to woo the populace. Never before had a presidential campaigner made so many stump speeches or shaken so many hands. Such shenanigans kept Henry skeptical about politics.
Democrats mocked Harrison’s age and dubbed him “Granny,” suggesting that he was fit only for retirement: “Give him a barrel of hard cider and. . . he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin. . .” Their disdain backfired. The Whigs embraced both log cabin and cider as populist emblems. A number of Henry and John’s students dutifully wore rattan Log Cabin hats and shirt pins; many boys carried the requisite cane with a hard-cider barrel as its head. One Ciderite badge was a silk lapel ribbon showing a Harrison portrait draped in flags and topped by an eagle, with below him a rustic frontier cabin. Above the eagle floated a banner inscribed the people’s choice and below the cabin poor man’s Friend. Newspaper cartoons2 contrasted two visions of the next four years—under Harrison, prosperity and families merrily picnicking; under Van Buren, royal coaches and families going a-begging.
“He leaves the plow to save the country,” declared some Log Cabin artifacts. This clever allusion invoked Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a hero of ancient Rome—a patrician who fell on hard times and worked a humble farm until called upon to serve as dictator, after which brief period he returned to private life. The educated class of Henry’s and his parents’ generation esteemed Cincinnatus as an ideal of civic virtue. His name also brought to mind George Washington, who was considered equally noble and civic-minded for returning to private life after having been granted so much power as president. How much to serve or resist the state, how imperialistic the new nation should try to be, where allegiance should lie, how to define freedom and citizenship—these topics were discussed in newspapers and around Concord pickle barrels, and as Henry grew older he found such themes more and more relevant to his own daily life.
On the fourth of July3 1840 Henry rose before sunrise, as usual, and went outdoors to crickets and a dawn breeze. Nearby he found the Light Infantry from Townsend—a small town on the northern edge of Middlesex County, along the New Hampshire border—encamped in a neighbor’s field, their linen tents drenched in dew. Henry watched admiringly as soldiers stirred. Uncertain about his own role in the world, often lecturing himself about how he ought to behave, Henry envied soldiers’ structured and committed lives. They seemed innately heroic, as if every day they woke with lofty passions, fated for valor.
Outside a tent, a handful of infantrymen gathered with bugle, fife, and drum. They launched quietly into an old Scottish air. No one, Henry thought, could be a coward after waking to the strains of this hymnlike tune, which drifted across the sleeping fields as if it had distilled from dreams that floated in the night from one sleeping man to the next. Then the morning gun sounded and more men emerged from tents. The holiday was under way.
The Fourth was always a big day in Concord, but this year regional Whigs turned it into a Harrison political rally. With cheap cider as a campaign tool, the Concord taverns did a rousing business. It was another hot, sunny day in Middlesex County; since late June, a drought had been baking eastern Massachusetts. The three roads that led into Concord were clogged with noisy travelers, including twelve hundred from Lowell alone. Members of many regional Harrison clubs flooded into town. Carriages and wagons filled the streets; canal boats clogged the river; herds of walkers marched in from every direction. One of the campaign’s giant wheeled log cabins was hauled into town by twenty-three straining, lathered horses whose hooves drummed the dry earth, with a hundred and fifty Harrison supporters on board, many of them drunk. These cabins had been featured in many such gatherings, especially back in early May, when the national Whig convention in Baltimore ratified the nomination of Harrison and Tyler, as merchants closed their stores and crowded onto balconies and rooftops alongside their customers.
The Great Ball also arrived on the Fourth, having been rolled at the front of a parade from West Cambridge by many strong-armed men pulling its ropes, and was parked in the Main Street yard of factory owner David Loring. It was twelve feet high and covered in buckskin stretched over a wooden framework—naturally painted red, white, and blue. Little Horace Hosmer walked over and read on its huge and dirty surface inscriptions from campaign songs and slogans:
O’er every ridge we’ll roll this ball,
From Concord Bridge to Faneuil Hall
Farewell poor Van,
You’re not the man4
To guide our ship.
We’ll try Old Tip.
Watching from among the jostling roadside crowd, Emerson admired the ball’s unlikely grace as it climbed hills and rolled down slopes. “The simplest things are always better than curiosities,”5 he wrote in his journal later. Henry agreed. Although he claimed to dislike hubbub, instead of escaping to the woods on this always drunken and sometimes violent holiday he strolled amid the noisy crowd to watch the ball arrive. A few days earlier he had written in his journal, out of his usual preoccupation with the idea of innate grace, “A man’s life should be a stately march6 to a sweet but unheard music, and when to his fellows it shall seem irregular and inharmonious, he will only be stepping to a livelier measure, or his nicer ear hurry him into a thousand symphonies and concordant variations.” The political Great Ball struck him as symbolic in this body-metaphor vein. Often uncomfortable inside his own body, and seldom an admirer of another person’s form, he contrasted the Ball’s graceful roll with what he saw as the ungainly tread of human beings. “The line of beauty is a curve,”7 he wrote that night. “What shame that our lives, which should be the source of planetary motion and sanction the order of the spheres, are full of abruptness and angularity, so as not to roll, nor move majestically!”
The campaign ball, like the rolling log cabin, was joined by another new development in this campaign, and one likelier to appeal to Henry—songs. Previously, satirical periodicals had often included verses fiercely lambasting candidates, but now this libelous doggerel was set to tunes that became an integral part of rallies. All day on the Fourth, Concord’s streets rang with raucous, drunken songs. “We could meet the Whigs on the field of argument and beat them without effort,” the poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant had complained in the New York Evening Post not six weeks before Independence Day. “But when they lay down the weapons of argument and attack us with musical notes, what can we do?” Often, to make them easier to remember, campaign songs were set to the tune of established classics or catchy popular songs. “Old Tippecanoe” was sung to the tune of “Rosin the Bow,” and “The Last Whig Song” to “Old King Cole.” The folk song “When This Old Hat Was New”8 simply acquired new lyrics under the same title and tune, in a Democratic ditty that represented the Whigs as disguised Federalists, which wasn’t far from the truth: “When this old hat was new, the Feds despised the poor, / And blushed if ever they were caught within a cabin door.”
The folk tune to which Robert Burns had written “Auld Lang Syne” in 1788 also found itself with new lyrics, as a Democratic rebuttal of the Harrison myth:
Oh, no, he never lost a fight—he’s9 even bullet-proof
For why? Whene’er the battle raged, he always kept aloof. . .
’T was very lucky for him too—It was, it was indeed
The more he didn’t get a wound, the more he didn’t bleed.
The tone of political discourse was changing quickly. Only a few months earlier, in December 1839, Daniel Webster, the legendary Massachusetts senator and conservative orator, had returned from a diplomatic visit to England. He had danced at balls and met Her Majesty, the twenty-year-old Queen Victoria, while wearing court dress of white satin waistcoat10 and smallclothes—the old-fashioned tight knee breeches that had been replaced by trousers in most situations—and silk stockings with diamond shoe and knee buckles. To campaign for Harrison among homespun Americans, in contrast, Webster wore a practical wide-brimmed hat and a coat of humble linsey-woolsey. Webster also had to tame his public speaking style. In keeping with the revolution in political oratory, he altered the delivery of his notoriously long speeches, which ranged from one hour to three or more, from grand and classically allusive to earnest, colloquial, and at least seemingly extempore.
Webster was still best known in the Thoreau family,11 however, for an incident that occurred around 1805, long before Cynthia’s sister Louisa Dunbar became Henry’s Aunt Louisa. Although he was never her beau, back then Webster occasionally drove the innocent young Louisa in his shay and talked so earnestly about religion that she always credited him with her own conversion.
Also in the crowd that Henry prowled on that hot busy day was John Keyes, whom John and Henry had recently bested in romance again. Mary Russell, a twenty-year-old friend of Lidian from Plymouth, was spending the summer of 1840 with the Emersons as Waldo’s tutor. Keyes was smitten with her, but, like Ellen Sewall the summer before, she preferred the company of the Thoreau brothers. Undaunted, Keyes accompanied the trio to visit a Penobscot Indian camp on the river, where he tried to get Mary to help him gather cardinal flowers, a task that would take them away from Henry and John. She quickly mustered two excuses—she had forgotten to bring a shawl and clouds were building up for rain—but Keyes was not deceived. “The Thoreaus,” he muttered to his diary, “were the real excuse.”
Like Henry, Keyes didn’t admire much about Harvard except a few of his brighter fellow students; he hated the points-counting regimen and felt that instructors behaved like enemies of the students. Not quite nineteen years old, he was so excited about Concord’s role in the campaign that he returned from school a few days ahead of the big day. Surrounded by pretty girls he had invited for the occasion, he admired the festivities from a commanding vantage point sixty feet in the air, inside the octagonal cupola atop the newly remodeled courthouse facing Monument Square.
Keyes and his entourage watched a slow, dense parade—which he estimated to include between four and five thousand revelers—pass from the battleground north of town to the square below and on to the grassy lot between central Concord and Sleepy Hollow, at the edge of which the New Burying Ground had been established in 1823, on the site of an Indian cemetery. On the lot a huge booth and speakers’ stand had been erected during days of hammering and sawing. Then Keyes squired his companions over to the rowdy crowd at the booth, where they were given free crackers and hard cider, which they nibbled and sipped while listening to rousing speeches about the virtues of Harrison and the vices of Van Buren. Keyes enjoyed seeing in person some of the great regional names of the Whig Party. Several speakers were staying at the Keyes home, on Main Street across from the Thoreau boardinghouse. The night before, one had frightened Keyes with a death-rattle wheeze during an asthma attack.
Toward the end of the day, the tipsy, sunburned crowd filed into the largest tent ever seen in Concord, measuring 175 by 200 feet, for more barbecue and hard cider. After the events were over and the drunken crowd had trickled away from the trash-filled field, Keyes went to a wedding reception at the Thoreau home. A couple of days later, the weekly Yeoman’s Gazette—which was distinctly more pro-Whig than its former incarnations,12 the Middlesex Observer, Middlesex Gazette, and Concord Gazette and Middlesex Yeoman—called the Independence Day event “The Great Harrison Barbecue.”13
A family of newcomers strolled Concord on that Fourth of July—Bronson and Abigail May Alcott and their three daughters. They had moved to Concord in early April.14 Nine-year-old Anna was enrolled in the Concord Academy. The bookish Louisa May, who was seven and a half, and Lizzie, who had just turned five, were taught by Mary Russell, the Emersons’ tutor. Abigail was eight months pregnant with a fourth child. They were destitute—with some meals consisting of bread and water—yet Abigail sang to herself as she did tasks around the cottage that they occupied for a modest annual rent of fifty-two dollars,15 while Bronson worked lackadaisically at whatever manual labor he could muster. They were glad to have a roof over their heads.
At the encouragement of Emerson, his longtime supporter, Alcott had brought his family to Concord following a principled but exhausting scandal in Boston. In late 1834, Alcott had launched, in the new four-story Masonic Temple on Tremont Street, a progressive academy called simply the Temple School. Influenced by revolutionary German ideas about early childhood development, Alcott was adamantly opposed to corporal punishment—going so far as to make his point by having a couple of boys strike him instead of his striking them. He was just as passionately in favor of a questioning dialogue and of encouragement rather than reproof. Meanwhile at home he was writing his own “Observations on the Spiritual Nurture of My Children.” There was considerable interest in such an educational endeavor. One idealized magazine illustration showed Alcott standing behind a podium opposite a floor-to-ceiling arched window speaking with a semicircle of young pupils while parents lolled on a divan.
Unfortunately, despite his admirable goals and unquestioned ability with children, Alcott’s pride went before his fall. Smug in a near-messianic sense of his own spiritual superiority and educational genius, he was a man who could tolerate almost no disagreement. He criticized the mothering skills of his devoted and affectionate wife, and gradually he alienated other close supporters, including his assistant teacher Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. A young Boston woman barely five feet tall, invariably disheveled and distracted, Peabody was full of drive and intelligence and personality. Devoted to Alcott’s ideals and goals, she had published an admiring account of his efforts, Record of a School, in 1835.
But scandal emerged in response to Alcott’s teaching methods. He encouraged open conversation among students about the Bible rather than delivering pronouncements from on high. December 1836 saw publication of his book Conversations with Children on the Gospels, which one Boston newspaper denounced as dangerously flippant; one journalist described Alcott as “either insane or half-witted.” The uproar led many parents to withdraw their children, but Alcott worked on alone, having alienated his various assistants. His final sin, in the eyes of Boston, was admitting a Negro child to his classes. Soon the Temple School closed.
Emerson had never lost faith in Alcott. His invitation and assistance had drawn the family to Concord, where Alcott immediately met Emerson’s young protege and thought highly of Henry’s intelligence and independence.
In July 1840, shortly after the campaign ruckus, the first issue of Transcendentalism’s own journal, The Dial (“A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion”), was published, swaddled in a wrapper bearing its manifesto:
The purpose of this work is to furnish a medium for the freest expression of thought on the questions which interest earnest minds in every community.
It aims at the discussion of principles, rather than the promotion of measures; and while it will not fail to examine the ideas which impel the leading movements of the present day, it will maintain an independent position with regard to them. . .
The DIAL, as its title indicates, will endeavor to occupy a station on which the light may fall; which is open to the rising sun; and from which it may correctly report the progress of the hour and the day.
Bronson Alcott had suggested the journal’s title, and in his editorial preface to the first issue Emerson unpacked its implications: “And so with diligent hands and good intent we set down our Dial on the earth. We wish it may resemble that instrument in its celebrated happiness, that of measuring no hours but those of sunshine. Let it be one cheerful rational voice amidst the din of mourners and polemics.” After claiming that there had been considerable private demand for this kind of journal, and complaining that no one else had come forth to create it, Emerson expressed his ambitious dreams for The Dial:
We do not wish to say pretty or curious things, or to reiterate a few propositions in varied forms, but, if we can, to give expression to that spirit which lifts men to a higher platform, restores to them the religious sentiment, brings them worthy aims and pure pleasures, purges the inward eye, makes life less desultory, and, through raising man to the level of nature, takes away its melancholy from the landscape, and reconciles the practical with the speculative powers.
Most contributions to the inaugural issue were signed with a single initial, such as Channing’s poem “To the Aurora Borealis,” or Henry’s poem “Sympathy,” inspired by his response to Edmund Sewall the year before. The issue also included Henry’s first published essay, “Aulus Persius Flaccus,” in which, while ostensibly critiquing the Etruscan-born Roman poet Persius at Emerson’s request, Henry worked in numerous vague observations from his journal. Margaret Fuller had not been enthusiastic about Henry’s essay on Persius, but Emerson had lobbied for its inclusion in what he called “our bold bible for The Young America.”16 Reluctantly accepting Emerson’s nudges, Henry had revised it to their satisfaction.
Alcott’s fragmentary “Orphic Sayings” were the only signed contributions in the first issue, so he alone bore the ridicule later heaped upon them. He hadn’t been in Concord long when he presented the manuscript to Emerson, in the hope that he would include the “Sayings” in the planned journal. They comprised a rambling hodgepodge of brief pronouncements, mostly vague and derivative, on a variety of topics. Hidden within was a celebratory Transcendentalist worldview, but Alcott’s turgid attempts at profundity obscured it. One observation headed “Faith” was typical: “Sense beholds life never,—death always. For nature is but the fair corpse of spirit, and sense her tomb. . .”
Even Emerson found little to admire in the “Sayings,” but he recommended to Margaret Fuller that they publish a few excerpts. Soon after Fuller came on board as editor of The Dial, she discovered that Transcendentalists were not a unified or even a well-defined group. “I believe we all feel much alike17 in regard to this Journal,” Emerson admitted to her. “We all wish it to be, but do not wish to be in any way personally responsible for it.” Knowing that the enterprise could not succeed financially and might not intellectually, Fuller cautiously accepted the thankless task of editing The Dial. Educated in the classics by her father, Fuller was, at thirty, establishing herself as a promising intellectual and writer. Following her first visit—three weeks at Bush in 1836—Emerson wrote in his journal that Fuller was “a very accomplished and very intelligent person.”18 After she taught herself to read German, 1839 saw the acclaimed publication of her translation of Johann Peter Eckermann’s weighty Conversations with Goethe. She omitted so many passages that it was later called an abridgment, but the preface alone built her an immediate reputation for critical insight and lucid prose.
Fuller had worked with Alcott at the Temple School in Boston. “One grave thing I have to say,”19 Emerson warned her, “this, namely, that you will not like Alcott’s papers; that I do not like them.” They suffered, he thought, from Alcott’s usual flaw as a writer—“cold vague generalities.” Nonetheless, thirteen pages of them appeared in the first issue. The untitled opening one built upon the notion of a sundial, and how Alcott’s “heart, a soul-flower” turned always toward the sun. The fifth, “Vocation,” was a Transcendentalist theme that Henry had long since adopted: “Engage in nothing that cripples or degrades you. Your first duty is self-culture, self-exaltation: you may not violate this high trust.”
“A train of fifteen railroad cars with one passenger,” the Boston Post called the “Sayings.” They irreparably damaged Alcott’s reputation, which already had attracted mockery. The critic James Russell Lowell soon wrote of him, “When he talks he is great20 but goes out like a taper / If you shut him up closely with pen, ink, and paper.”
Alcott pasted even the most mocking reviews into a scrapbook.