A Night in Jail
One warm evening late in July 1846,1 a couple of weeks after Henry turned twenty-nine, he closed the door of the cabin and walked away from Walden toward town. He was headed into the village to pick up a shoe that he had left for repair at the cobbler’s, so that he could wear it on Fair Haven Hill the next day while guiding a huckleberry party. He walked past his garden, in which much of the squash, tomatoes, beans, potatoes, and corn had been killed by the previous month’s unseasonable frost.
He didn’t make it to his destination. Along the way, he ran into Samuel Staples, the constable2 and recently retired tax collector. Henry liked Staples, thought him an honest and gentle and well-meaning fellow who didn’t abuse his power over lawbreakers. He was a popular man in Concord. In 1832 Staples had moved to town from Mendon, near the border of Rhode Island. He had one dollar and three cents in his pocket and immediately spent the three cents at Bigelow’s tavern—which, he insisted, gave him strength for the struggle ahead. Since then he had become known for his industry, honesty, and versatility. Before becoming local constable, a job he had begun three years earlier, Staples had been a carpenter and an auctioneer, as well as barkeep—and for a while manager—at the Middlesex Hotel. The hotel’s owner, Thomas Wesson, was his father-in-law; in 1839 Staples had married Lucinda Wesson, with Emerson officiating.
Concord hired its tax collector by taking bids. In 1842 Staples had been handed the job in response to his low bid: the city would pay him only one cent on each dollar of taxes collected. By 1845 his fee had crept up to one and a half cents per dollar. In early 1846 Staples retired and the new tax collector, Addison G. Fay, won the job with a bid of one and a quarter cents. Legally, the outgoing tax collector was required to furnish the amount of missing tax funds—which may be why Staples finally came after Henry.
He had warned Henry several times that he could not continue to ignore his poll tax without legal repercussions. Henry knew that Staples possessed a warrant for his arrest; Staples hadn’t served it yet because he knew that he could find the young man whenever he wanted to. On this day he told Henry his time was up to meet this legal obligation.
“I’ll pay your tax, Henry,”3 sighed Staples agreeably, “if you’re hard up.” In 1843 he had arrested Bronson Alcott for not paying his poll tax—without offering to pay his bill. Samuel Hoar had paid Alcott’s tax4 because he thought the educator’s arrest an affront to the town’s reputation. Protesting a war by refusing to fund it was not an uncommon pacifist action, but Alcott had been deliberately rejecting the government’s right5 to take any percentage of his property for any reason. (Less than a year later, Charles Lane, the English-born founder of the utopian community Fruitlands near Harvard, was arrested for rejecting the poll tax.) Early the previous May, Staples had threatened Alcott6 with selling his land to settle his again unpaid tax. Staples had a higher, more affectionate opinion of Cynthia and John Thoreau’s7 son, and was inclined to be generous.
Henry explained that his opposition to the poll tax’s contributions to governmental policies he opposed was a matter of principle and that he had no intention of paying. Patiently, Staples said he was willing to argue with the selectmen himself, to get them to reduce the accumulated total of back taxes, which could not have exceeded several dollars. Still Henry refused.
The constable asked what Henry expected him to do about the morality of the situation.
Resign, said Henry.
“Henry, if you don’t pay,8 I shall have to lock you up pretty soon.”
“As well now as any time, Sam.”
So Staples told Henry to come along with him to the jail. He escorted Henry through the almost treeless outskirts of the village, past the poor farm and poor house,9 past the house at the corner of Walden and Sudbury Roads where the Thoreaus had lived back in the 1820s, and finally across the Mill Dam itself to the Middlesex County Jail. It was off the Common behind the Middlesex Hotel, nicknamed the jail tavern, which had just been rebuilt after a fire the year before. Besides trying to build a life in resistance to conformity and government, for years Henry had been thinking about the moral ramifications of the dour jail.12 He had watched the gathering of prisoners every few months for court sessions—the Supreme Court in March10, with the Court of Common Pleas following in June and then again in September. Eleven years before, as a Harvard junior in September 1835, Henry had written an essay—a pro or con “forensic” on an assigned topic, required for the upperclassmen—entitled “The Comparative Moral Policy11 of Severe and Mild Punishments.” It thoughtfully considered incarceration: “The end of all punishment is the welfare of the State,—the good of the community at large,—not the suffering of an individual. . . . So far only as public interest is concerned, is punishment justifiable,—if we overstep this bound, our own conduct becomes criminal.”
Because Concord was a shire town, one of the seats of county government that hosted court sessions and had to accommodate prisoners transported for all sorts of crimes, its jail was larger than that in most towns its size—a three-story stone building, roughly sixty feet long and half as wide. It had been erected in 1791 to replace the earlier wooden jail that had famously housed Scottish Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell during the Revolution. Campbell—colonel of a Highland regiment, as well as Member of Parliament—had marshaled his troops toward a rescue of Sir Henry Clinton, who was battling General Washington’s army in Boston; but Campbell found Clinton already defeated and soon found himself residing in the Concord jail. It had also been the temporary abode of Henry’s Tory great-uncles, Simeon and Josiah, during the same period.
This later jail’s walls were built of split granite, the stones two to three feet thick, with heavy wooden doors a foot thick. Surrounding the yard behind the jail was a ten-foot-high brick wall, in which here and there were mounted iron rings to which felons or maniacs could be chained. Most of its temporary inhabitants, however, were not considered violent. When Staples brought in Henry, some of the prisoners were standing around the doorway in their shirtsleeves, enjoying the mild evening air and gossiping.
“Come, boys,” said the former barkeep, “it is time to lock up.”
As Henry was led to his own cell on one of the upper floors, he could hear the footsteps of the other men and the clang of their cell doors, the noises echoing off the hard unfurnished walls and floors. Henry noticed that the cell door had a narrow rectangular slot in it. His cellmate, according to Staples when he introduced them, was “a first-rate fellow and a clever man.” Staples closed the door and left.
As constable, Staples arrested Henry for nonpayment of previous years’ tax, including that of 1845—just as he had arrested Alcott in 1844 for failing to pay his 1842 tax. Henry had not resisted paying his highway tax; he felt it was the duty of a good citizen and certainly he used the highways. An educator himself, he had also not neglected school taxes.
Six years before, however, in 1840, the state had sent Henry a tax bill on behalf of First Parish Church in the center of town, the church to which his father and some others in his family belonged. Massachusetts commanded Henry, along with every other citizen of Concord, to pay a certain amount toward the support of Reverend Ripley. Henry was furious. Priests weren’t taxed to support schoolmasters, he thought, so why should it be the other way around? If the church could submit its tax bill to the state, why couldn’t the lyceum? Henry refused to pay. Someone else paid the church tax bill for him, but he was encouraged to deliver to the town clerk a signed official note in January 1841: “Sir, I do not wish to be considered13 a member of the First Parish Church in this town.” After this public statement, the government dropped the matter.
During the same six years, Henry had also refrained14 from paying his annual poll tax. Sometimes this was called a head or capitation tax; poll meant head, just as to poll a cow meant to cut the horns off a young cow’s head, and beheading a plant or tree was called polling. In 1780, immediately after the war15 with Britain, the Massachusetts constitution had renewed the poll tax, a well-established source of revenue assessed upon every adult rather than by income. Not that the tax was levied evenly. “Ministers of the Gospel, and Grammar School-Masters,” declared the 1784 Tax Act, “are not to be assessed for their polls and estates,” and it pronounced the faculty, administration, and students of Harvard free of the tax burden. Bowdoin, Williams, and Amherst were added later, but an 1829 revision to the code removed all these exemptions and restored colleges to the ranks of taxpayers. Tax for minors was assessed on their parents, and exemptions on account of infirmity or even poverty were left to the assessors in each region. “Each taxable person in the town,” read the law, “where he shall be an inhabitant on the first day of May in each year” must pay the poll tax. “The whole poll tax assessed in any one year upon any individual for town and county purposes, except highway taxes, shall not exceed one dollar and fifty cents.” Five-sixths of county revenues were to come from property taxes, with the remaining amount to be raised by the poll tax.
Fiscal policy in general, and the poll tax in particular, had been a stormy political issue in Massachusetts for several years, at least since the Panic of 1837. The virtues and vices of poll and other taxes were bandied about in every election campaign, with each side threatening disaster if their own agenda was resisted. Yet little change was taking place while Whigs and Democrats seesawed. Henry encountered these topics everywhere. Tax reform had been a fierce issue among abolitionists for years, in the writings and speeches of Liberator founder William Lloyd Garrison and many others. During 1844 and 1845, as abolitionist resistance to taxation had heated up even more, Henry’s family had attended more and more to such issues.
The cell was brightly whitewashed and even spacious, at least to someone who lived in a lakeside hut. The shutters of the two barred windows were inside the iron grate and open, letting in the domestic sounds of the village—the tolling of a church bell, the rattle of carts driving by, the clank of cooking pans in the kitchen of the Middlesex Hotel next door. The other man showed Henry the cell’s few amenities and pointed out a peg on which he could hang his hat. Henry thought it the neatest apartment in town, its daunting whiteness surpassing even his cabin’s simplicity.
Naturally Henry’s cellmate asked him how he happened to be in jail, and Henry recounted his story. Then he asked for the biography of the other man, who had been in jail three long months already awaiting trial—although he felt that free room and board were not exactly a burden, considering that he was treated well and left alone.
Henry asked why he was there.
“Why, they accuse me of burning a barn,” his cellmate replied, and not surprisingly added, “but I never did it.”
Henry pieced together the disjointed story and concluded that probably his new friend had been ending a drunken binge in a barn, smoking a pipe among his straw bedclothes, and had gone to sleep and caused a fire that burned the barn. He was lucky to escape alive. As a reviled accidental arsonist himself, Henry may have felt sympathy for his cellmate’s plight.
Meanwhile other people were getting involved in Henry’s arranged symbolic drama, without his awareness or consent. When Mrs. Thoreau learned of Henry’s arrest,16 she hurried to the jail to confirm it, apparently without seeing Henry in his upstairs cell. Then she walked over to the Square, to the home of her sisters-in-law, Misses Maria and Jane Thoreau. After dark, one of them, probably Maria,17 emerged from the house—with her head covered by a shawl—and strode to the jail. Sam Staples was out running an errand in the village,18 but his young daughter Ellen was there.
The veiled woman handed the girl money, explaining, “To pay Mr. Thoreau’s tax.”
When Ellen told her father at home, Staples had already taken off his boots. He decided that a night in jail was exactly what Henry seemed to want, so he might as well get it.
Legally, Henry ought to have been released immediately—or should not have been arrested in the first place. The law required that authorities unable to collect delinquent tax must “find sufficient goods19 upon which it may be levied” before they could “take the body of such person and commit him to prison, there to remain until he shall pay the tax and charges of commitment and imprisonment, or shall be discharged by order of law.” But Staples was not well versed in legal matters, and his Concord neighbor had contrived his own arrest to make a statement.
The two prisoners in the cell spent most of their hours until bedtime staring out through the bars, one man at each window. Henry found himself a witness to everything that happened at the Middlesex Hotel. He realized that if he stayed in jail for long, he would spend most of his time watching the parade of gloriously unjailed life go by. But he also fidgeted around the cell, reading every pamphlet that had been left behind. In the course of the evening, Henry was shown where one of the iron bars had once been sawed off and where former prisoners—actual felons—had escaped. His roommate also introduced him to a collection of handwritten verses by prisoners, including some by a group who had been caught trying to break out.
At last Henry’s roommate showed him which bed he was to occupy and retired to the other himself, leaving Henry to trim the lamp when he was ready.
For a while, Henry couldn’t go to sleep because the man in the cell below, apparently a drunkard, kept asking the night, “What is life?”20 Then eventually he would answer himself, “So this is life!” and the cycle would begin over again. He must have been at the window below Henry’s. To reply to him, Henry leaned against the bars of his own window and called down, “Well, what is life then?”
No reply. Finally there was blessed silence in the cell below. Henry lay back down.
They slept with the window shutters open. Henry could hear every detail of the activity in the bustling kitchen of the nearby hotel. He lay in the dark, in a reflective dreamy mood, and felt that he had never before fully heard the voice of the village at night. It seemed as if he might be traveling through time, hearing the nighttime scurry of a walled medieval town; the Concord became the Rhine, his neighbors burghers and knights. Finally he drifted off to sleep.
Henry had reached his conclusions about the poll tax over time, weaving together a variety of inspirations. He had read Charles Lane’s letter to The Liberator, explicating Alcott’s motives: “This act of non-resistance,21 you will perceive, does not rest on the plea of poverty. . . . But it is founded on the moral instinct which forbids every moral being to be a party, either actively or permissively, to the destructive principles of power and might over peace and love.” Henry had carefully considered how much he agreed and disagreed with William Paley, who documented God’s shaping nudges all over creation in his vast 1803 tract Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. He also owned Paley’s earlier book The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, which had been a Harvard textbook in his junior year. It included a long and windy chapter, “The Duty of Submission to Civil Government Explained,” which surveyed everything from dueling to polygamy to scriptural arguments on behalf of the Sabbath. At college Henry had written essays on Paley’s theology and natural history, and he considered his social ethics just as carefully. “It may be as much a duty, at one time, to resist government,” wrote Paley, “as it is, at another, to obey it; to wit, whenever more advantage may accrue to the community from resistance than mischief.”
More recently, Henry had read with great attention Emerson’s 1844 essay “Politics,” in which his mentor lobbied on behalf of the virtues of individualism and democratic government, defended individual rights over the intrusion of the state, examined the nature of property ownership, and expressed skepticism about the trustworthiness of the church and the popular press.
“The less government we have, the better,” argued Emerson, continuing,
We live in a very low state of the world, and pay unwilling tribute to governments founded on force. There is not, among the most religious and instructed men of the most religious and civil nations, a reliance on the moral sentiment, and a sufficient belief in the unity of things to persuade them that society can be maintained without artificial restraints, as well as the solar system; or that the private citizen might be reasonable, and a good neighbour, without the hint of a jail or a confiscation. What is strange too, there never was in any man with sufficient faith in the power of rectitude, to inspire him with the broad design of renovating the State on the principle of right and love.
Ever since watching Bronson Alcott perform the same tax protest three years earlier, and Charles Lane a year later, Henry had sought ways to demonstrate his lack of allegiance to the state, his right to refuse governmental demands that he found intrusive and inhumane. For the previous few years, neglecting to pay his poll tax—after paying it since reaching adulthood—had22 been a relatively low-risk way to perform this symbolic gesture. For various reasons, many other Concordians did not pay their tax during the same period. For the tax year of 1834–35, for example, seventy-three people failed to pay, forty-six of whom owed only poll tax. Yet apparently Henry was the first since Alcott and Lane to make a point of refusing out of moral objections to the state’s use of funds.
The next morning,23 the rectangular hole in the cell door proved to accommodate a tin pan a jailer pushed through it. It was laden with brown bread, a pint of chocolate, and an iron spoon. Soon the jailer returned to pick up the dishes. Henry had drunk his chocolate but eaten only half his bread, so he placed the remainder on the tray. Instantly his cellmate grabbed the bread and advised Henry that any extra provender should be hoarded to supplement the meager lunch and dinner.
Then Sam Staples came to the cell and explained to Henry that he was free to go because his overdue poll tax had been paid the previous night by someone else.
Surprised and angry, Henry refused.
Staples was dumbfounded. In all his time as constable, he had never met a prisoner who was not eager to leave jail once his cause for arrest had been attended to. But Henry stubbornly refused to accept his unexpected freedom.
“Henry,” Staples finally sighed, “if you will not go of your own accord I shall put you out, for you cannot stay here any longer.”
Staples released Henry’s cellmate to his assigned daytime task of haying in a nearby field. Each day some inmates were temporarily released to do jobs for the town or even for the jailer himself. Before he left, the man told Henry good-bye. He wouldn’t be back until noon, he explained, and he doubted that Henry would still be around then.
Henry was furious24 at this turn of events, but he realized he could not win. Finally he bade farewell to his cell and started down the street. Formerly it had been the custom in Concord to greet debtors emerging from the jail by holding up both hands, crossing the fingers over each other until they resembled barred windows, peering through them, and mockingly asking the former prisoner, “How do ye do?” The villagers did not respond thus to Henry’s reappearance on the street, but he imagined that they looked askance at him even more than usual. People had been raising their eyebrows at his antics for his whole life, however, and most of the time he took their surprise as a testament to his extraordinary virtues.
He walked to the cobbler’s, retrieved his mended shoe, and fell back into his daily routine. His arrest and brief incarceration amounted to almost nothing, but he began turning over in his mind ways to magnify the experience and make it symbolic for literary purposes. Soon he had caught and saddled the family horse and was two miles away, on the high slopes of one of his favorite places, Fair Haven Hill, leading a huckleberry party high above the village and its jail.
After a week in which Henry thought long and hard about freedom and responsibility, he demonstrated his commitment to abolition by making his cabin available for an important rally. Inviting both members and guests, the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society hosted the event on the first of August, their second commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the end of British slavery in the West Indies. Mrs. Thoreau, as well as Sophia and Helen, helped organize the event, as part of their long-standing involvement in the organization they had helped to found.
Like the first such event two years earlier, at which Emerson had officially joined the abolitionist ranks after Henry rang the bell to attract a crowd, this one drew heartening support. “All who love freedom and hate slavery” were invited, The Liberator had declared in its article about the upcoming event. The radical newspaper had lured readers to Walden Pond by promising speeches by several fiery speakers. They included the former slave Lewis Hayden, who had once been owned by the Kentucky legislator Henry Clay, who in 1840 had failed in his Whig candidacy for president against William Henry Harrison. The Transcendental Club member and Unitarian minister Caleb Stetson,25 who had been a brother in the Emerson circle, was there. Ellery Channing’s uncle, the liberal theologian William Ellery Channing—whose views on abolition had grown ever stronger since emancipation in the British West Indies—was a big draw. In his 1835 book Slavery, Channing had argued passionately, “If human affairs are controlled, as we believe, by Almighty Rectitude and Impartial Goodness, then to hope for happiness from wrong-doing is as insane as to seek health and prosperity by rebelling against the laws of nature, by sowing our seed on the ocean, or making poison our common food.”
From the door of Henry’s cabin, the speeches rang out across the bean field. There followed a picnic lunch during which attendees could meet speakers and all could further unite their spirits against what they perceived as the most despicable enemy of civilization. Henry’s desire for a more natural life was uniting with his resistance to what he and other Transcendentalists perceived as unnatural laws. A man of principle, Henry had come to believe,26 could not live his own life with pride and dignity if he turned his back on the suffering of others.