The New Schoolmaster
Following his return to Concord, Henry had less time than usual to stroll at Walden Pond. Two weeks after Harvard’s commencement, he began his first job. In mid-April, while Henry was in his last term at Harvard, the Centre Grammar School1 had run an advertisement in the Yeoman’s Gazette for a teaching position. Henry applied. The Centre was one of seven districts that comprised sixteen schools, half for girls and half for boys. With more than three hundred students, it required four teachers: two women and two men. Most of the male teachers in the region earned only about one hundred dollars per year, which was still two and a half times what women earned for the same work. Concord devoted the largest portion of its civic budget to schools—$2,132.55 during the upcoming academic year.2 The next largest expense was assistance to the poor.
Henry got the job. Fresh out of college amid a severe national recession, he found himself with a well-paid position that required not a move to Taunton or the Missouri Territory but a stroll through the village. Most Concord teachers were recent graduates—many,3 like Henry, straight from Harvard—and they regarded teaching as a temporary profession that required few skills and little commitment. Yet education was becoming a Thoreau family tradition, with John and Helen both teaching, and Cynthia’s sister, Aunt Louisa Dunbar, and father, Asa Dunbar, having taught, as had John Senior himself for a time.
Henry was hired for the Centre School by a three-person committee that included Deacon Nehemiah Ball.4 No more than forty, Ball had a hand in practically every public activity in Concord. A trial justice and the town clerk, he was also a board member of the Mill Dam Company and secretary of the School Committee. Abstemious and judgmental, broad and pompous, he seldom smiled and almost never laughed; Concord wits considered him the antidote to humor. He was never seen to walk quickly or pick up a tool. Once when Ball was serving as justice of the peace, a witness in a dispute about a sale of potatoes remarked that the potatoes had been “deaconed.” Ball demanded icily, “What was meant by that remark?” and his anger turned his face ever more red as the man explained that the good-looking potatoes had been piled on top in the barrel, with the worthless runts hidden underneath.
Frequently Ball was lampooned behind his back for quirks of speech, such as overuse of the phrase “I apprehend,” especially in his lectures for the Lyceum that, in 1828 and early 1829, replaced the village’s Debating Club.5 The series of lectures and debates were held in various venues around town until settling in the Town Hall. When he demonstrated the first magic lantern to be seen in the Concord area, Ball projected a drawing of a lion onto the bed sheet that had been hung up as a screen, stared at the figure for a moment, and said to the delight of his enemies, “This, I apprehend, is a ferocious beast.”
School was in session all year, six days a week, broken up by four one-week vacations. Fast days were holidays,6 as was Thanksgiving. Most holidays concerned celebration of or maintenance of the young nation. Students were off for the May day on which the militia performed its public training, and they were also free on the varying date when the state militia’s Day of Muster occurred in Concord. A favorite holiday for many students was called simply “Cornwallis.” It took place on October 19, the anniversary of the British General Charles Cornwallis’s surrender to American and French forces at Yorktown in 1781. Each year Cornwallis featured a reenactment of the enemy’s humiliation. Men in red British uniforms represented the invaders, while an appropriately ragtag band of volunteers, clad in antique clothes and carrying muskets, portrayed American settlers. Every Cornwallis battle ended satisfyingly with colonists parading their redcoat captives.
The trudge of school days throughout the year was made more oppressive by the close quarters. Most of the cheaply built school buildings had no windows that would open or in some cases no windows at all. During school hours the atmosphere grew increasingly foul, until both students and master nodded from the shortage of fresh air. The school committee found the stench7 in some schools disgusting and repellent when they visited to inspect, but they were slow to improve the situation.
In most American schools at the time, students worked under the threat of physical punishment. Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard alluded casually to this situation in his 1830 Treatise on Arithmetic:
1. John made 3 marks on one leaf of his book, and six on another. How many marks did he make? 3 and 6 are how many?
2. His teacher punished him, for soiling the book, by giving him 4 blows on one hand, and 5 on the other. How many blows did he strike him? 4 and 5 are how many?
When they weren’t fighting among themselves—and violence in the public schools was one reason why the Concord Academy had been founded in 1822, just in time for Henry and John to attend—students were facing violence from their teachers. Mild offenses resulted merely in incarceration in the classroom while the rest of the students cavorted outdoors during a brief recess, or perhaps in extra study after the other students left. But a long menu of rule breaking elicited a violent response.8 Even in the “infant schools”—the lower grades taught mostly by women, also known as dame schools—thrashing was an ever-present risk for the rambunctious student. A Concord schoolmistress might whip a child with the sole of her shoe or whatever else was handy, but most women walked into the schoolroom every morning armed with a more serious weapon. For centuries the corset had been uncomfortably sculpting women toward an ideal silhouette, and doing so required many stays of whalebone or pliant wood; in front, a narrow pocket in their long, high-necked dress housed a busk, a posture-minding center stay that could be unsheathed to whip students. Thrashing was more common and more harsh in the higher grades. Many teachers kept a cowhide whip in the desk.
A few years before Henry’s birth, a towering giant of a teacher named Elijah Paige, who was quite popular and respected among townsfolk despite his brutal methods, would strip off a rebellious boy’s coat, tie his hands to a high rope that dangled him with his feet unable to touch the floor, and flog him with willow rods that he had sent other students to cut. Until recent years, another regular form of punishment had been to discipline boys by forcing them to sit painfully doubled beneath the master’s desk in a posture of abject humiliation. One legendarily cruel master had tried to inflict this torture on a fourteen-year-old boy recently arrived from Canada, but not even beating could compel obedience, until finally his case had been taken before a school committee that included the allegedly kind-hearted Dr. Ripley. The committee was inclined, as usual, to enforce the viewpoint of the master, even after the student pointed out that his teacher regularly spat and blew his nose on the floor. “I will not sit down,”9 he bravely proclaimed, “in that spit and snot which is all over the floor under the desk.”
Some school board members recalled that proper conduct and high scholarly standards had been maintained in the classroom of gentle Samuel Barrett, but he taught school for only a couple of years in Henry’s childhood, and unfortunately other teachers did not adopt his pacific example. In Henry’s time feruling and flogging still were common. Many teachers kept a cane or ferule—a flat-ruler-like board—in cautionary view alongside inkwell and paper. A student would stand with hand held out and facing upward, and the teacher would strike the ferule hard across the open palm, causing blistering pain. Sometimes boys were even sent to cut and trim a supple willow rod for their own flogging.
The school’s regulations advised teachers10 to keep corporal punishment down to as little as they considered “practical,” but Henry’s students were not rowdy and he saw no need to resort to physical discipline. One day, however, only two weeks after Henry began teaching, heavy-featured Deacon Ball, solemn as Job, dropped by the class unannounced and strode in to observe the young man’s teaching methods. Soon, finding students behaving with what he considered unseemly animation, he told Henry firmly that he must not spare the rod, that the school would be ruined if he did not thrash the children now and then.
During the next day or so after Ball reprimanded him, Henry—apparently both angry at the interference in his classroom and worried about his job—thrashed several students for various reasons, or perhaps for no reason. Naturally they were outraged. Ten-year-old Daniel Potter thought he was included because he followed the rule among the female teachers he had formerly studied under at the district school: when you finish a lesson, put your book away and sit quietly with arms folded to indicate that your work is done. At the Centre School, in contrast, each student was required to keep a book visible on the desk, and here the arms-crossed posture may have seemed a taunt, a declaration of idleness. For whatever infraction, Henry called young Daniel to the front of the class and quickly whipped him. Furious at this unjust treatment, the boy stomped back to his seat, swearing to himself, “When I’m grown up, I’ll whip you for this,11 old feller!” That others were similarly treated didn’t quell his anger.
Henry’s outburst remained a mystery to the students and apparently to Henry himself. Parents probably didn’t care, because thrashing was the usual form of punishment at home. Those citizens who knew Henry outside the school were surprised, because he was considered a mild and inoffensive man, other than for his occasional sarcastic remarks and aggressive nonconformity.
Immediately afterward, in another move as sudden and irrational as his decision to punish the students, Henry resigned his job. He told his superiors that he wouldn’t keep school any longer if he was expected to whip children. Although at the last he had indulged in a paradoxical bout of violence, Henry—always a master of rationalization—managed to tell himself that he had otherwise stood by his principles, renouncing corporal punishment. Perhaps he had also peered into the future and seen a sobering image of himself as a servant of the community, trapped by a regular income, rather than his dream job of gadfly. After only a fortnight employed in a coveted position, he joined the uncountable jobless men who milled about during the national financial panic that had followed the crash in the spring. He walked east down Middle Street to the boardinghouse to tell his parents that next week he would not be leaving home every morning. In his anger at Nehemiah Ball’s interference, and his discomfort with working inside a public system, he had quickly thrown away his best chance to stay near his family and his beloved woods and ponds. The next available job might be well beyond sight of Walden.
For Henry, abandoning his teaching job meant a necessary return to the pencil business,12 which had supported the family since 1823. During his brief time living in Chelmsford, while working with the inventor Joseph Dixon, John Thoreau Sr. seems to have learned the essentials of pencil manufacturing, which was a rudimentary profession in the New World. Because of its similarity to lead, graphite was called plumbago, “that which acts like lead,” and had also at times been named after various words referring to its blackness, such as black-cowke, ochra nigra, and crayon noir. The word “graphite” had been coined in Germany as recently as the late eighteenth century, from the Greek graphein, “to write.”
Dixon mixed plumbago from Ceylon13 with clay and water and rolled the resulting paste into strips. He found plumbago readily available because his father was a ship owner whose vessels carried it from Ceylon—where the dense and heavy substance could be found cheaply—as ballast during their voyages homeward to New England. Afterward they dumped it into the bay at Marblehead, Massachusetts. Dixon learned that this waste plumbago could be used to make pencils. After baking the flattened mixture in his mother’s kitchen oven, Dixon pressed it into boards of grooved cedar, joining two boards to encase the graphite. He constructed his own hand-cranked machines to cut and groove the slats of cedar and to extrude the plumbago.
But Dixon’s American pencils were gritty and could not compete with European brands. Europe had dominated the pencil market since the middle of the sixteenth century, when a mine in Cumberland, England, began producing sticks of graphite encased in tubes of wood or wrapped in string. Gradually this humble beginning blossomed into a profitable industry. Within a century, enterprising inventors in Nuremberg were gluing sticks of graphite between two pieces of wood, and a few decades later they were filling the pencil cores with a mixture of graphite, sulfur, and a binding agent that was less sturdy than England’s natural sticks of pure graphite. In 1812 William Munroe in Boston introduced to the United States market wood-cased lead pencils that he manufactured himself, but unfortunately their core of unfired graphite paste left them brittle. When Joseph Dixon tried to peddle his pencils in Boston, he was advised to sell them under a counterfeit European label if he expected to make inroads into the market. He continued to tinker with plumbago in stove polish, lubricants, and other uses, and eventually added his own successful pencil business.
In 1821, not long before John Thoreau brought his family back to Concord, Charles Dunbar, Cynthia’s ne’er-do-well brother, discovered a plumbago deposit near Bristol, New Hampshire, and he himself briefly gambled on the pencil business. In 1823 he asked his sister’s husband to join him. John Senior had been paying attention in Chelmsford and quickly he mastered the manufacture of pencils. By the next year, Thoreau pencils were receiving special commendation at an exhibition of the Massachusetts Agricultural Society. “The Lead Pencils exhibited14 by J. Thorough & Co.,” reported the New England Farmer, “were superior to any specimens exhibited in past years.” They could compete with Munroe and other American manufacturers because all pencils then made in the New World were similarly inferior to European pencils. With British plumbago unavailable, and French processes not yet known in the United States, Americans used impure and poorly ground plumbago and mixed it with poor binding agents such as spermaceti and bayberry wax. Henry’s father improved the process enough to compete, and by the time Henry returned to Concord, the family business was well established.
John Thoreau Sr. had the early training with Dixon and years of experience, as well as a fondness for reading about chemistry. Henry—already interested in engineering, usually happy in both manual labor and solving a problem—had an impatient and eager imagination. Together they tackled the challenge of improving pencils. Henry knew that the plumbago they were using was excellent, so he determined that the problem lay in either the filler materials or the process of lead making. Apparently through research in the Harvard library, he got the idea of replacing the additive sulfur with heat-resistant clay. Experimenting with combining plumbago and clay, he immediately produced a darker pencil lead, but it was still coarse and gritty.
Deciding that the plumbago needed to be ground more finely, the Thoreaus extended the chamber15 that surrounded the millstones into a seven-foot-tall space like a churn, which opened into a broad shelflike box. An upward draft of air carried the finest plumbago dust to this height, after heavier particles had fallen to the bottom to be ground further. This refinement of the pencil lead itself vastly improved the product, and sales of Thoreau pencils steadily climbed upward.