On January 22—the same day Sanborn fled to Canada for the second time—Amos Bronson Alcott walked into town, ascended the steps of the Concord Lyceum, and took a seat near the podium. He clasped his gold-headed cane before him, nodded his head to neighbors and acquaintances. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, he talked.
A contemporary once said of Alcott that he was the “most adroit soliloquizer” he had ever met. He added that his conversations were in fact “versations” without the requisite “con.” The reference was to Alcott’s monthly “Conversations,” for which subscribers paid several dollars a season to hear him discourse on subjects ranging from “The Old Testament” and “Impersonality” to “The Origin of Evil” and “The Life of Christ.” “Talking,” Alcott liked to say at the commencement of these occasions, “is the mightiest instrument which the soul can wield.”
Some felt he wielded the instrument a bit too readily. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who moved into the old farmhouse next to the Alcott home in the summer of 1860, detested his neighbor’s incessant chatter. On summer mornings, as he paced the hilltop behind his house, he turned in the other direction whenever the older man approached—“disappearing like a hare into the bush when surprised,” Alcott observed without the least bit of self-consciousness. Years later, after meeting a surprisingly garrulous Emily Dickinson in person, Thomas Wentworth Higginson informed his wife that no one had “drained my nerve power so much” with talk—with the possible exception of Bronson Alcott. Others, like Emerson, believed his talk was at least better than his writing. The Boston Post once referred to Alcott’s collected essays as “a train of fifteen railroad cars with one passenger.”
He had been born in the last month of the eighteenth century on a hardscrabble farm in Connecticut. So meager and thrifty was the household that the young boy practiced his alphabet with a stick in the snow or with scraps of chalk on the floor of the family home. At eighteen he left New England to become a Yankee peddler, a common get-rich scheme in a region where the soil was too poor to farm beyond subsistence levels. Alcott sold pins, needles, combs, scissors, buttons, thimbles, thread, clocks, bobbins of yarn, tin mugs and plates, knives, razors, paste jewelry, and other housewares produced in New England. After several years of traveling through the Tidewater region with nothing to show for it, he turned his attention to the profession for which he would become most famous: teaching.
He took his inspiration from the Swiss philosopher Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. In an era when most children sat on hard benches and learned by rote memorization, Pestalozzi believed that students should be allowed to take breaks and to sit comfortably. He thought a child’s mental apparatus was more successfully developed by Socratic conversation than by mindless repetition. Above all, he argued that kindness—not the prevailing corporal punishment—was the best incentive for learning. Alcott applied these principles to a series of schools that were revolutionary for their time and, as a result, invariably closed once parents got wind of his unconventional approaches. (One student later called him “the most eccentric man who ever took on himself to train and form the youthful mind.”)
In 1834, the same year he met Emerson, Alcott opened the famous Temple School in Boston, a small academy that drew thirty students from the city’s wealthier families. He filled his school with busts of Plato, Shakespeare, and Jesus. When his pupils asked questions, he refused to answer directly, believing he could elicit the truth from them by asking what they thought. When students disobeyed, he called them to the front of the class, handed them a ruler, and told them to administer a blow to his hands. (Alcott thought that inflicting pain on someone else was a far worse punishment than receiving pain.) All these tactics were guided by Alcott’s transcendentalist conviction that each pupil possessed a spark of divinity that needed gentle cultivation. “Every soul feels at times the possibility of becoming a God,” he wrote, “she cannot rest in the human, she aspires after the Godlike.” True education, he thought, fanned into flame the divine spark flickering within everyone.
He was the most radical transcendentalist in America. Transcendentalism had emerged in the mid-1830s as an intoxicating set of philosophical, literary, and spiritual tendencies unified by discontent with American life. The movement included people who don’t usually belong to movements: mystic visionaries, hermits, and blue-sky utopianists. But it also included radical abolitionists, advocates of free love and pacifism, educational reformers, and women’s rights activists. Most of the original members were affiliated with the Unitarian Church in some way or other, and these ministers, writers, and philosophers met in one another’s homes, attended sermons and lyceum lectures, and filled newspapers and journals with examples of the “New Thought.”
Chief among the loose coalition of intellectuals was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Tall and narrow-shouldered, charismatic and brilliantly insightful, Emerson presided over American culture like some alabaster statue clad incongruously in a black frock coat. His first book, a slim volume entitled Nature, was published in 1836, the same year Charles Darwin returned from his voyage aboard the Beagle. Revolutionary in its aspirations, Nature served as transcendentalism’s founding document, its origin myth. It began with a simple passage designed to arouse American readers from their complacency: “Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. . . . Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?”
Emerson believed, like Alcott, that God was present everywhere, especially in each human soul. But divinity could be perceived through intuition and inspiration only, not through reason, and it was best found in nature, where God resided in His most unmediated form. Transcendentalism owed a debt to German idealists such as Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who rejected John Locke’s claim that environment shaped the human mind and argued instead that the mind was resplendent with powers and insights wholly distinct from the external world. Like William Wordsworth, who claimed that infants came into the world “trailing clouds of glory,” Emerson believed that much of maturation was loss, that we spend far too much of our adult life in a mundane world filled with dry and dreary quotidian. What watered these barren seasons of the soul was the occasional mystical experience: an ecstatic, light-filled state in which one felt catapulted, in his words, to “the top of our beings,” so that “we are pervaded, yea, dissolved, by the Mind.” In one of the most memorable passages in Nature, Emerson transformed an ordinary walk in November into a visionary event, a rapturous experience in which he seemed to become a “transparent eyeball” while “the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me.” It was an odd image—one soon burlesqued by the cartoonist Christopher Cranch—but it was meant to suggest a cosmic unity, the merging of self with a larger spirit, the “wild delight” that befell a person surrounded by a natural world suffused with divinity.
Throughout the 1830s and ’40s countless young men and women were drawn to Emerson’s message of spiritual freedom and social nonconformity, and his white frame house in Concord quickly became their headquarters. But the movement also met with fierce resistance from conservative thinkers. Francis Bowen, Harvard’s professor of religion and moral philosophy, complained that Emerson and his followers rejected “the aid of observation, and will not trust to experiment. The Baconian mode of discovery is regarded as obsolete.” Bowen was defending the methods of science against a movement that claimed that true knowledge came from within. He became especially outraged when Emerson, speaking by invitation at Harvard’s Divinity School, boldly asserted that God resided within every human being and that intuition was a better guide than religious doctrine. Belief in the miracles performed by Jesus was unnecessary, Emerson argued; the moral life of the individual was miracle enough. Bowen’s colleague, the Unitarian minister Andrews Norton, declared Emerson’s address “the latest form of infidelity.” Emerson was banned from Harvard for the next thirty years.
• • •
Bronson Alcott went further even than Emerson, considering material reality at best a nuisance, at worst an illusion. Alcott believed the universe was nothing more than a symbol of divine thought. His students perceived this symbolic world because their minds had been designed to do so. Alcott accordingly instructed them to be on the lookout for “a fuller Revelation of the Divinity!” “As an acorn reminds you of an oak,” he explained, “so does the spirit within remind you of God.” As his pedagogical theories developed, he paid less attention to principles of mathematics and grammar and strove instead to instill moral perfection in his pupils. “Our thoughts are the offspring of that divine power,” he wrote in 1830, “which, when freed from the obstacles of human authority, and the influences of human circumstances, feels itself the agent of its own advancement, and the source of truth and virtue.”
One of Alcott’s assistants, Elizabeth Peabody, published an account of the school in 1835. Peabody was one of three remarkable sisters: Mary, a teacher and author who married the educator Horace Mann, and Sophia, a painter, who married the famous novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. Elizabeth’s book of Alcott’s pedagogical methods, Record of a School: Exemplifying the General Principles of Spiritual Culture, was met with interest by the transcendentalists and with outrage by practically everyone else. Visiting the Temple School on her trip through America, the British author Harriet Martineau sniffed that Alcott “presupposes his little pupils possessed of all truth; and that his business is to bring it out into expressions.” A Boston lawyer was less charitable; he bought 750 copies of the Record to use as toilet paper. Particularly scandalous was Alcott’s discussion of sexual reproduction, which prompted a wholesale exodus from the Temple School. When Alcott tried to counter this trend by enrolling an African American girl, he lost the rest of his students. Within weeks his teaching career was over.
Now he sat in the Concord Lyceum, waiting to hear a lecture by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the former minister and one of the most popular authors at the Atlantic Monthly. Higginson regularly contributed essays on physical fitness, women’s rights, slave revolts, and the flowers and birds of his native Worcester. He was an indefatigable abolitionist. Throughout the 1850s he wrote countless editorials for New England newspapers, proclaiming the evils of slavery and predicting that one day the nation would become a utopia of freedom for white and black people. He had visited Kansas, supplying antislavery settlers with knives, revolvers, and Sharps rifles in their guerrilla war with pro-slavery forces, and had led an assault against the Boston Court House in an effort to free an escaped slave who had been arrested under the Fugitive Slave Act.
On this evening the Lyceum was filled to capacity. After all, Higginson had been closely involved in the Brown affair. He was a hypnotic speaker. Tall, handsome, and indifferent to danger, of all of Brown’s conspirators he alone had refused to leave the country or retreat from the public eye. The Lyceum was packed with people who thought he would surely speak about the recent events at Harpers Ferry. Instead Higginson lectured on “Barbarism and Civilization.” He began with a reference lifted directly from Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. A “certain race of wild creatures” had been discovered in Tierra del Fuego, he informed his audience. These creatures were “dark, wrinkled, and hairy.” They slept in trees and caves, survived on snakes and vermin. They “cannot be tamed, nor forced to any labor; and they are hunted and shot among the trees, like the great gorillas, of which they are a stunted copy.” Surprisingly, they were human beings.
Higginson may have remembered Thoreau’s comment about these people in Walden (he admired Thoreau above all other writers): “Darwin, the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, ‘to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting.’” More likely, though, he had Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” in mind when he wrote “Barbarism and Civilization.” Emerson complained about excessive culture, arguing that “society never advances. . . . It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized.” Emerson believed that periodic returns to a more primitive life were invigorating, that infusions of brute vigor countered the draining effects of effete society. Contrast the “well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American,” he said, with the “naked New-Zealander.” Then compare “the health of the two men, and you shall see that his aboriginal strength the white man has lost.”
Higginson disagreed. He spoke now on behalf of refined culture, of intellectual sophistication, of developed arts and letters. He told his Concord audience that cultured societies were in fact more robust and vigorous, and he attacked the “latent distrust of civilization” so prevalent in American society, which was still rooted in the frontier experience. There were misguided people who supposed that “refinement and culture are to leave man at last in a condition like that of the little cherubs on old tombstones, all head and wings.” But this was an error. “Savage tribes,” Higginson said, were in fact physically smaller, weaker, and more likely to succumb to illness. They were “always tending to decay.”
Higginson considered it unnecessary to define labels we now consider invidious: civilization, barbarism, savagery. At the time, even the most enlightened New England abolitionists believed that black- and brown-skinned people inhabited a lower rung on the ladder of civilization. What made Higginson’s use of these categories noteworthy, however, was his insistence that race had little to do with them. Civilization and skin color were unrelated, he claimed, “for the most degraded races seem never to be the blackest, and the builders of the Pyramids were far darker than the dwellers in the Aleutian Islands.” In fact, he continued, the “black man apparently takes more readily to civilization than any other race.”
As it turned out, terms such as barbarism and civilization had long been deployed in the debate over slavery. The New York Times, commenting on Missouri’s decision to expel free blacks from the state, lamented, “Nothing has ever told so sad a tale of the relapse of the Slave States towards barbarism.” The poet William Cullen Bryant had recently observed that Kansas was “a potent auxiliary in the battle we are fighting, for Freedom against Slavery; in behalf of civilization against barbarism.” Higginson’s lecture was a thinly veiled attack on slavery, which he considered truly savage. If Americans had engaged in the most astonishing act of civilization in history, he now told his Concord audience, “there yet lingers upon this continent a forest of moral evil more formidable, a barrier denser and darker, a Dismal Swamp of inhumanity, a barbarism upon the soil, before which civilization has thus far been compelled to pause.”
The lecture was about John Brown after all.
• • •
Henry David Thoreau had also attended Higginson’s talk. As soon as it was over, he walked with Alcott along the Lexington Road to the white clapboard house that belonged to their mutual friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was gone—his annual lecture tour had taken him to western New York—but the rest of his family was present, as well as several members of the Concord Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. Earlier that day these women, including Alcott’s wife and his daughter Louisa, had hosted a tea for Higginson in appreciation of his support of John Brown. Now the small group gathered in the parlor and listened while Alcott and Thoreau argued over Higginson’s lecture.
Thoreau was nettled. He had studied Native Americans for decades, had read accounts of their customs and lore, had collected their artifacts. He had tried, in his way, to live as they did. He was convinced that native peoples filled a crucial niche in creation, bridging the gap between nature and civilized society. Like Emerson, he believed that society threatened the vigor of the individual. The tonic to this condition was wilderness: a return to those unmediated conditions from which humans had originally sprung. Thoreau not only celebrated raw nature, but also admired those peoples who still lived in close contact with it.
Alcott understood the lecture as an implicit repudiation of “Thoreau’s prejudice for Adamhood.” Too often, he thought, his friend celebrated physical reality at the expense of the spiritual. Alcott agreed with Higginson: civilization was “the ascendency of sentiment over brute force, the sway of ideas over animalism, of mind over matter.” If human history was progressive, an upward movement toward gradual perfection, then Thoreau was wrong to sympathize with native peoples. After all, they represented a step backward. Alcott challenged Thoreau’s identification “with the woods and the beasts, who retreat before and are superseded by man and the planting of orchards and gardens. The savage succumbs to the superiority of the white man.”
Alcott was not particularly interested in Higginson’s point about race. He was too busy fighting a battle against reductive materialism. Thoreau’s praise for aboriginal peoples annoyed him primarily because it valued the animalistic aspects of human nature instead of its loftier aspirations. This way of thinking was exemplified in the new book by Darwin, which kept coming up in Concord conversations that winter. On the Origin of Species had penetrated the circle of Concord transcendentalists as quickly as it had swept through Boston, with Thoreau mentioning it to Emerson sometime earlier that month. Emerson promptly included it in a list of books he wished to read, and in February, while still on the road delivering lectures to the raw western states, he wrote from Lafayette, Indiana, to his wife, Lidian, to ask that she acquire a copy. Emerson felt like “an old gentleman plodding through the prairie mud,” he wrote, adding, “I have not yet been able to obtain Darwin’s book which I had depended on for a road book. You must read it,—‘Darwin on Species.’ It has not arrived in these dark lands.”
Emerson was always interested in new books and new ideas, but this one was of special interest because it corresponded to a pattern of thought to which he was already predisposed. For decades he had relied on a quasi-evolutionary language to convey his sense that existence was an unfolding process toward perfection. In the 1830s, when his most daring and original ideas had first occurred to him, he eagerly consumed any book that confirmed those ideas, including the scientific theories of Lyell and Lamarck, whose notion that the Earth’s crust perpetually remade itself he found particularly congenial. A decade later Emerson appended a poem to Nature, inspired by a diagram he had seen in Alcott’s journal. Describing “a subtle chain of countless rings,” Emerson imagined a procession of development in which
striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.
In 1860 Emerson was revising a manuscript that married this evolutionary thinking to a bleaker materialism. The Conduct of Life, published at the end of the year, is a somber book, as pensive and stern as a Doric pediment from a Greek temple. No longer a young visionary, Emerson now directed his attention to those biological and social limitations experienced by every person. “Nature is no sentimentalist,” he wrote. “The habit of snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda,—these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs.” Emerson would remain interested in the ways human intelligence might outwit the determining parameters of biology, but he held few illusions about our ability to escape limitations entirely: “The face of the planet cools and dries, the races meliorate, and man is born. But when a race has lived its term, it comes no more again.”
• • •
Bronson Alcott was all too familiar with such misguided ideas. Fifteen years earlier, when the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation arrived in America and offered its grand hypotheses about nebular fires and the evolution of man from monkeys, he had scrupulously read it, hoping to gather insights into the inner workings of the Creator. He even discussed the book in his “Conversations,” praising its use of science to illuminate the divine plan. He agreed with the author that creation rests “on one law and that is,—DEVELOPMENT”; after all, like most of his transcendentalist friends, Alcott was convinced that life was destined toward perfection.
But that was as far as he could go with the materialist philosophy contained in Vestiges. As he had once told young Franklin Sanborn, the problem with science in general was that it threatened to reduce the world to pure phenomena—to stuff. “Naturalists . . . begin with matter,” he complained, when “they should begin with spirit,—as in the ‘Vestiges’ the author supposes man developed as a final product from inorganic matter. This is wrong,” Alcott insisted. “. . . Matter is the refuse of spirit, the residuum not taken up and made pure spirit.”
Alcott was quarreling with science’s commitment to materialism, its dedication to describing physical laws that could be objectively verified. But he was also making a claim about the spiritual nature of the universe. For Alcott, the world rendered visible by scientific analysis was ultimately a closed system, a walled fortress that rebuffed any fact or law that could not be empirically measured. Yet God was the most important fact of all. Most antebellum scientists thought they were engaged in the study of His creation, but for Alcott they had already disqualified themselves for such study by restricting their work to purely material phenomena.
It was as though Darwin were looking through a telescope from the wrong end, focusing on the solid and visible aspects of creation instead of examining the truly marvelous spirit that infused all matter and endowed it with meaning. Spirit was the key, he once told Sanborn; spirit permeated everything. “It is like a swarm of bees,” he tried to explain. “They are conical, like the arrangement of things and man. All the bees depend on the queen bee; so all matter depends on man.”
This image understandably confused Sanborn, so Alcott tried another approach: “It is better to say boldly that we are not formed from matter, but that we ourselves form it.” As the eye in essence creates what it looks upon, so too is matter created by human consciousness. Sanborn admitted that this might be “nearer the truth.” Perception, after all, shaped each individual’s world to some extent—but did not the world also shape our perception? Not according to Alcott, who believed that the divine spirit poured through each individual, enabling him or her to fashion the material universe in a creative act. “Mr. Alcott,” Sanborn noted with some exasperation, “seemed to imply [that this] was almost the exact truth.”
Alcott was making a similar point now in Emerson’s parlor. “The more animated the brain,” he announced, “the higher is the man or creature in the scale of intelligence.” On the other hand, the “barbarian has no society.” Thoreau’s quarrel with civilization made sense only if society was incapable of further development. Of course, there was “no civilized man as yet, nor refined nations, for all are brute largely still.” But Alcott was confident that things were changing, that in the future people would shed their animalistic urges, transcend the degradations of the body, and become pure spirit. “Man’s victory over nature and himself,” he told the group assembled in Emerson’s parlor, “is to overcome the brute beast in him.”
At some point Thoreau excused himself from the conversation. In Walden he admiringly called Alcott one “of the last of the philosophers,—Connecticut gave him to the world,—he peddled first her wares, afterwards, as he declares, his brains.” Thoreau respected Alcott’s habitual faith that “a better state of things than other men are acquainted with” did in fact exist. But now he remembered the library book he had checked out earlier that day. It sat on the desk in his third-floor attic room, its spine unopened, its pages uncut. It dealt with facts and observations, not abstractions, and it beckoned like a siren. After a short walk to his mother’s house on Main Street, he climbed the stairs to the attic, pulled out the large natural history notebook from his bookshelves, and began transcribing passages from the new work.