After the Cabin
In September 1847, Henry Thoreau walked away from his cabin at Walden Pond. Emerson was departing for another European lecture tour and he invited Thoreau to return to Bush and help Lidian and the children in his absence. Thoreau accepted the offer. When he closed the door on the second of September, he had lived in his long-dreamed-of retreat for only two years, two months, and two days. “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there,” he declared in Walden. “Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.” He continued to visit the pond almost daily, but he lived in the village for the remaining fifteen years of his life, most of it in the Thoreaus’ big house on Main Street that the family bought after their rising income permitted them to rent out the Texas House.
Five years after moving out of the cabin, Thoreau revealed more to his journal:
But why I changed?1 why I left the woods? I do not think that I can tell. I have often wished myself back. . . . There was a little stagnation, it may be. About 2 o’clock in the afternoon the world’s axle creaked as if it needed greasing, as if the oxen labored with the wain and could hardly get their load over the ridge of the day. Perhaps if I lived there much longer, I might live there forever. . . . To speak sincerely, I went there because I had got ready to go; I left it for the same reason.
Although Thoreau had built upon Emerson’s land rent-free, after he moved out his generous mentor bought the cabin2 from him. He sold it to his gardener, a rough countryman and drunkard named Hugh Whelan, who moved it to a bean field near Walden Street. But soon Whelan fled his family and job and abandoned the cabin. In 1849 a man named James Clark bought it and moved it to his family farm, turning it into a storage shed for grain. In 1863, a year after Thoreau’s death, Ellery Channing visited the site and found the declining hut windowless. Five years later the Clarks took off the roof and used it to shield a pig yard. In 1876 an observer noted that the dilapidated cabin, with a new roof, served as a stable. By the mid-1880s, however, the former cabin had been torn down, and some of its wood was said to have been employed in rebuilding a barn.
Less than two years after his single night of jail in 1846, Thoreau incorporated the experience into a lecture, “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government.” In 1849 it appeared in essay form as “Resistance to Civil Government,” in Aesthetic Papers, edited by Elizabeth Peabody, alongside Emerson’s essay “War” and Hawthorne’s story/essay “Main-Street.” Four years after Thoreau’s death in 1862, the essay was re-titled “Civil Disobedience” in the first collection of his shorter writings, A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers. It has been known by this title ever since.
Mohandas Gandhi wrote of the essay’s influence on him, “Thoreau was a great writer,3 philosopher, poet, and withal a most practical man, that is, he taught nothing he was not prepared to practice in himself. He was one of the greatest and most moral men America has produced.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. insisted that “Civil Disobedience,” which he first read as a student at Morehouse College, was his “first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance.4 . . . Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I re-read the work several times. . . . The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before.” King described bus boycotts and sit-ins as “outgrowths of Thoreau’s insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.” The incendiary essay has often been banned. In the 1950s, the United States Information Service reprinted it in a textbook to be stocked in all their libraries, but Senator Joseph McCarthy succeeded in having the book removed5 from many library shelves, specifically because it contained “Civil Disobedience,” which McCarthy reviled.
After years of struggle, in 1849 Helen Thoreau succumbed to the family legacy of tuberculosis and died at the age of thirty-six. During her last months, Henry insisted upon hiring a daguerreotypist to come to the house and photograph his sisters, so at least the family had a keepsake after Helen’s death. The funeral was held in the home. During the service Henry sat expressionless, staring into space, until the pallbearers prepared to carry Helen’s coffin out the door. Then he wound his music box6 and everyone waited while a melancholy minor-key tune played until it wound down.
The same year, James Munroe & Company in Boston, who had published Emerson’s Nature in 1836, published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers—a decade after the journey Thoreau employed as a cord on which to string philosophy, poetry, and vignette. Despite Emerson’s diligent support, Thoreau had to agree to reimburse Murray for printing costs out of sales of the book. He was never able to do so. Later he bought back the unsold copies of the one-thousand-copy first edition, prompting his now famous remark that he possessed “a library of some nine hundred volumes,7 seven hundred of which I wrote myself.” He also claimed to appreciate his lack of success as an author: “It affects my privacy less, and leaves me freer.”
The family’s pencil business prospered in the late 1840s. For a time Thoreau’s former student, Horace Hosmer, worked as their agent8 in New York City. In the early 1850s, the Thoreaus began receiving large orders for their high-quality ground graphite, and soon they learned that it was because the invention of electrotyping was increasing demand for raw product. By 1853 the Thoreau family concentrated on supplying this new need and ceased manufacturing pencils entirely. At about the same time, a group of German pencil manufacturers launched in New York City and quickly dominated the U.S. market. The Thoreaus bought a big house on Main Street and rented out the Texas Street house; they were even able to afford a couple of servants.
Thoreau spent roughly four times as long thinking about and writing Walden as he spent living at the pond. The book evolved through at least seven drafts. In early 1848, in a Concord Lyceum lecture entitled “Economy—Illustrated by the Life of a Student,” Thoreau first publicly discussed his building of the cabin and his observations and goals surrounding it. Response was mixed, but soon he delivered a second lecture about his experience, “White Beans & Walden Pond.”9 Gradually more venues invited him to deliver such lectures, and over the years he steadily revised them and added to his growing manuscript. On the ninth of August 1854,10 Ticknor & Fields in Boston published Walden; or, Life in the Woods, with a lithograph of Thoreau’s survey map of the pond as frontispiece in each of the two thousand copies. On publication day, Henry gave the event less attention than he devoted to plants whose maturation he was following with his own system of notation: “To Boston. Walden published.11 Elder-berries XXX. Waxwork yellowing X.”
The book received considerable attention in newspapers and magazines. One of the earliest reviews, in the Boston Daily Evening Traveller, concluded, “It is a curious and amusing book,12 written in the Emersonian style, but containing many shrewd and sensible suggestions, with a fair share of nonsense.” Bronson Alcott’s verdict on Walden and A Week has proven apt: “books to find readers and fame as years pass by, and publish the author’s surpassing merits.” Many reviewers agreed. “Walden is a prose poem,” proclaimed the Worcester Palladium in words that have been echoed thousands of times since. “It has classical elegance,13 and New England homeliness, with a sparkle of Oriental magnificence in it. It is a book to be read and re-read, and read again, until another is written like it.”
Publication of Walden established Henry’s reputation in the United States and, to a lesser extent, abroad. He was increasingly in demand in American magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly. Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune, had become Thoreau’s unofficial agent, beginning by placing his essay “Ktaadn and the Maine Woods” in the Union Magazine in 1848, the year Thoreau began a regular career as a lecturer. From Salem, Hawthorne invited Henry to lecture; other invitations came from as far away as Bangor, Maine. Most lectures grew into essays. Besides “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau wrote other political and philosophical essays that would prove influential over the next century and more: “Slavery in Massachusetts,” “Life Without Principle,” and two essays—both of which began as lectures—about the radical abolitionist John Brown. In October 1859, Brown’s violent raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, galvanized both sides of the slavery issue and is considered to have helped ignite the Civil War. Less than two weeks after Brown’s defeat, Thoreau delivered his first lecture on Brown’s opposition to slavery and his mode of resisting governmental control. When he spoke at the Concord Town Hall, the selectmen refused to ring the town bell to notify the public, so Thoreau rang it himself. Almost no newspapers were willing to voice support for Brown’s actions, but Thoreau said of him, “The Republican party does not perceive14 how many his failure will make to vote more correctly than they would have them. . . . For once we are lifted out of the trivialness and dust of politics into the region of truth and manhood. No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature, knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any and all governments.”
In the early 1850s Thoreau committed himself more fully than ever to his journal. At the time of his death, he had written two million words in this private storehouse, filling seven thousand pages in forty-seven volumes between October 1837 and November 1861. He came to realize that his most important task was attending to the natural phenomena of everyday life, and at one point he half-jokingly complained that his observations were becoming more scientific and less poetic. Slowly, as funds permitted, he acquired the large, inadequate handbooks and technical manuals of the era to help him identify everything from grasses to small mammals. He created a huge calendar of annual natural events, recording the first blossoming of wildflowers and the return of migrating birds, the emergence of woodchucks and the duration of snowstorms. Today scientists are using his detailed journal records15 to analyze climate change during the nineteenth century.
At the age of seventy-two, after two years of illness, John Thoreau Sr. died of tuberculosis in 1859, so quietly that his watching family barely noticed the moment of his departure. Two days later Thoreau wrote in his journal, “When we have experienced many disappointments,16 such as the loss of friends, the notes of birds cease to affect us as they did.” Thoreau stepped into the role of man of the house, taking over management of the graphite business, attending to correspondence and billing. But he continued to spend as much time as possible outdoors. The next year, before the Middlesex Agricultural Society, Thoreau delivered a lecture that is now considered his most original contribution to science: “The Succession of Forest Trees.” Thoreau was one of the first people to document the means by which woodland growth proceeds upon a predictable pattern of succession.
Gradually tuberculosis wore Henry Thoreau down, as it had taken his sister and father—and likely would have taken his brother had tetanus not intervened. By early 1862, after months of decline, Henry knew his days were numbered. In March he replied to a letter from an admirer of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, “I have not been engaged in any particular work17 on Botany, or the like, though, if I were to live, I should have much to report on Natural History generally. . . . You ask particularly after my health. I suppose that I have not many months to live; but, of course, I know nothing about it. I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing.”
Friends visited Thoreau often. Bronson Alcott brought cider and apples. Elizabeth Hoar worked to help18 Thoreau arrange his manuscripts, journals, and letters. The Boston publisher William Ticknor of Ticknor & Fields came to visit, to acquire the rights to all of Thoreau’s writings in order to produce a uniform edition. Sam Staples, who had been a friend since before he put Thoreau in jail for a night sixteen years earlier, visited and told Emerson that he found Henry happy and serene,19 that he had never seen a man dying “with so much peace.”
As Thoreau faded into immobility and near silence, some friends and family worried about his soul, but he was still impatient with orthodox religion. When a family friend demanded to know the state of his relationship with Christ, Thoreau replied that a snowstorm meant more to him. Aunt Louisa asked if he had made his peace with God and he replied cheekily, “I did not know we had ever quarreled, Aunt.” A friend, Parker Pillsbury, visited and found Thoreau barely able to gasp replies to questions, as his sister sat nearby sorting papers and his mother stood guard with medicine and fan. But Pillsbury could not resist raising a provocative topic: “You seem so near the brink of the dark river, that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.”
“One world at a time,” sighed Thoreau.
He died quietly on the sixth of May 1862, at nine o’clock in the morning, with his sister and mother and aunt by his side. He was forty-four. Until the end, he had been revising his accounts of journeys to Maine, and his last discernible words were “moose” and “Indian.”