Henry David Thoreau was forty-two years old when he encountered Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Short and wiry, agile and athletic, his two most prominent features were an enormous nose and penetrating blue eyes. In the few photographs we have of him, these eyes alternate between a dreamy inward softness and a cold, crystalline intensity. The contrary expressions hint at the transcendentalism he discovered in college and the rigors of science that began to compete for his imagination a dozen or so years later. It was typical of him—and of his era—that the two impulses shared space inside the same head.
His journals from the period reveal him on a typical winter day in 1860: sliding, lurching, tramping through the snow in a pitch pine forest outside Concord, studying the tracks of a partridge, sampling a shriveled chokecherry, then stepping onto the ice of the Assabet River to watch the coppery minnows dart in all directions below his feet. Every day of every season, Thoreau descended from the third-story attic of his mother’s renovated yellow house on Main Street, put on a battered hat, and spent at least four hours sauntering (his word) through the woodlots and forests and pastures that surrounded Concord. Like a window-shopper strolling the boulevards of Paris, he examined flora and fauna, bending to inspect a robin’s egg in the spring, pausing to taste a huckleberry in the late summer. He constructed a platform inside the crown of his hat so that he might store the botanical samples he collected on these walks. (One autumn, when he was carrying home the seedpods of touch-me-nots, their explosions sounded like pistol fire above his head.) In the evenings he returned with these treasures to his attic study, where he transcribed his observations into a succession of notebooks stored in a box he had built especially for the purpose.
Born into a modest family that operated a local pencil-making business, Thoreau became recognizably himself—the cantankerous part-time hermit and philosopher-naturalist—after reading the works of his fellow villager Ralph Waldo Emerson, while still a student at Harvard. The precise circumstance of their first meeting is unknown. One account has Thoreau’s sister sending the eminent writer copies of her brother’s poetry. Another has Thoreau walking to Boston and back, a journey of some forty miles, to hear Emerson lecture. What we know for certain is that sometime in the fall of 1837 the two became inseparable. Emerson noted in his journal, “My good Henry Thoreau made this else solitary afternoon sunny with his simplicity and clear perception.” Thoreau began to keep a journal shortly after meeting Emerson. His first entry: “‘What are you doing now?’ [Emerson] asked, ‘Do you keep a journal?’—So I make my first entry to-day.”
Much has been made of the complicated, intense, and sometimes rivalrous relationship that soon developed between the two. Both Emerson and Thoreau idealized friendship, yet both were prickly, awkward, and aloof. Emerson admired Thoreau’s deep knowledge of nature and his simple practicality, so unlike his own cerebral refinement. In 1841 he invited Thoreau to live in his home. Later that decade Thoreau moved in again, this time to care for the Emerson family while the older man traveled through Europe on a speaking tour. For his part, Thoreau identified with Emerson to such a degree that he became the subject of local ridicule. One contemporary, writing in 1848, snidely remarked that he was “all overlaid by an imitation of Emerson; talks like him, puts out his arm like him, brushes his hair in the same way, and is even getting up a caricature nose like Emerson’s.”
There were tense moments. Emerson complained that “Henry does not feel himself except in opposition” and remarked, “As for taking Thoreau’s arm, I should as soon take the arm of an elm tree.” Thoreau ever felt his mentor’s forceful personality. “Talked, or tried to talk with R.W.E.,” he bitterly observed. “Lost my time—nay, almost my identity.” In 1857 he briefly felt as though the association had run its course: “And now another friendship is ended. . . . With one with whom we have walked on high ground we cannot deal on any lower ground ever after. [Emerson and I] have tried for so many years to put each other to this immortal use, and have failed.”
Still, the relationship frequently brought out the best in both writers. When Emerson announced in 1841 that “part of the education of every young man” should be to put himself “into primary relations with the soil and nature,” he was thinking of Thoreau, whose passion for nature seemed an antidote to America’s rampant materialism. Prompted by the statement, Thoreau moved to a parcel of land Emerson owned near Walden Pond. In the most celebrated act of his career, he built a rough-hewn shack seventy yards from the shore and commenced his famous experiment to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.” Rising at dawn and bathing in the pond’s glassy water each morning was “a religious exercise,” an opportunity to become awakened each day by “newly-acquired force and aspirations [to] a higher life than we fell asleep from.”
The two years at Walden made him a writer. It afforded him a writer’s most precious commodity: time. Each day he sat at the little table in his cabin and worked steadily on a book that would eventually become A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, a pastoral eulogy to his older brother John. Thoreau idealized his brother, who was thought by many in Concord to have been the more talented and certainly the more extroverted Thoreau son. The brothers went hiking together; they fell in love with the same woman. When Henry graduated from Harvard, they founded a short-lived school together. In 1841 John began to show signs of tuberculosis, an often-fatal illness that affected as many as one in four of all New Englanders. But it was something else that killed him. Stropping a rusty razor, he nicked his ring finger and contracted lockjaw. He died, delirious, in front of Henry, who did not outwardly mourn but soon began to exhibit symptoms of lockjaw, too. Thoreau was seized by convulsive spasms; he grew feverish and his jaw stiffened. The family gathered around his bed and prepared to say goodbye to their only surviving son. Gradually, however, the symptoms disappeared. The illness had been psychosomatic, a sympathetic response to his brother’s suffering. For years, Thoreau’s eyes watered whenever his brother’s name was mentioned.
Two years on Emerson’s woodlot would provide him with the material for his masterpiece, Walden, a book still cherished by countless readers who admire its nonconformist vision and evident love of nature. All of us dream of escape from our quotidian lives, and Thoreau’s decision to sequester himself in the woods can seem, especially in our rushed and hyperconnected world, an act of heroic defiance. Yet many readers forget that his escape to the woods was in service to bigger, more pressing questions. What was the best way to live? How should we spend the precious time allotted to us? In his hands, these problems became plot elements in a thrilling drama. “In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time,” he declared, expressing the profound urge many of us feel to make our lives meaningful and worthwhile. Sitting outside his cabin while a chorus of bullfrogs or Canada geese filled the air, observing the subtle, rippling changes in the color of the pond—these pastimes were part of a larger project to fully inhabit the nick of time, “the meeting of two eternities,” as he called it, “the past and future, which is precisely the present moment.”
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Transcendentalism would always appeal to Thoreau’s defiant personality. The movement was not just an effort to invoke the divinity within. It was also a cultural attack on a nation that had become too materialistic, too conformist, too smug about its place in history. Since 1800 the United States had grown rampantly, recklessly, improbably fast, its population doubling every two decades. By 1860 there were thirty-five million people in the nation, more even than in Great Britain. This unprecedented growth was in part a product of the country’s abundant land and natural resources. And it was accelerated by the most transformative technological revolution in history to that point, a series of new inventions that made America the first truly modern nation. The daguerreotype, an early form of the photograph, allowed viewers to encounter people and places they had previously only read about; the telegraph similarly demolished old conceptions of space and time. But the most startling and marvelous new technology of the era was the railroad. In 1860 some thirty thousand miles of railroad track knit the nation together, linking isolated hamlets and encouraging mobility among a people who previously had seldom traveled beyond their county seats. For many, the train stood as an emblem of progress, democracy, and material wealth.
Technology and natural resources also combined to produce the single most important global commodity in nineteenth-century America: cotton. Thanks to the Massachusetts inventor Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, the staple almost single-handedly propelled the United States onto the world economic stage. By 1850, American cotton accounted for 75 percent of the 800 million pounds consumed annually in Britain, and 90 percent of France’s nearly 200 million pounds. Much of that cotton was spun in textile mills in Waltham and Lowell, two towns just outside Boston, which quickly became the throbbing heart of the Industrial Revolution in the United States. Thousands of young women—and many children—operated spinning machines and enormous looms powered by steam, often working fourteen hours or more a day. By 1860, these two mills alone operated more than five million spindles and spun a million bales of cotton annually.
What made this industry possible, of course, was slave labor. In 1860 some 85 percent of cotton picked in the South came from large plantations, where 90 percent of all the slaves in the United States lived and worked. Millions of slaves painstakingly harvested cotton bolls by hand, rising before dawn and filling their sacks until evening. To remove seeds, slaves operated large gins based on Whitney’s patent; they used presses to shape the cotton into compact bales. The growing demand for cloth produced a corresponding demand for slaves, and by 1860 nearly four million slaves worked under coercion in what slaveholders proudly called the kingdom of cotton. Slavery was woven into the fabric of American life, the economies of the North and South, like nothing so much as the warp and weft of cotton threads in valuable gingham and calico. “You dare not make war upon cotton,” exclaimed the governor of South Carolina in 1858, referring to rising abolitionist sentiment in the North; “no power on earth dares to make war upon it.”
The transcendentalists came neither quickly nor easily to the abolitionist cause. In his most famous essay, “Self-Reliance,” published in 1841, Emerson fulminated against social activists who wore their causes like the latest fashion: “If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, ‘Go love thy infant; love thy woodchopper: be good-natured and modest: have that grace.’” Emerson was being deliberately provocative, but he also believed that individuals had to undergo moral regeneration before turning their attention to social improvements. One could not reform the world before reforming oneself.
History soon challenged that assumption. Throughout the 1850s a series of disastrous political concessions revealed all too clearly that the liberation of the soul—especially the souls of enslaved African Americans—would arrive less quickly than Emerson had hoped. Repulsed by the “filthy enactment” of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which he found hard to believe had been “made in the 19th Century, by people who could read and write,” Emerson defiantly announced, “I will not obey it, by God.” Next the infamous Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 did away with the Missouri Compromise’s northern limit on slavery, allowing new territories north of 36 degrees 30 minutes to choose whether to become slave states. This led to the eruption of violence in Kansas between pro- and antislavery settlers, followed by John Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry and his subsequent hanging.
Emerson’s journals throughout the 1850s are interspersed with expressions of outrage. As political tensions escalated, he urged dismantling the Union so as to protect the freedom valued by the North. Slavery was a communicable disease, a contagion. “We intend to set & to keep a cordon sanitaire all around the infected district,” he wrote, “& by no means suffer the pestilence to spread.” Publicly, he was just as adamant in his condemnation of slavery. “I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute one state,” he announced to lyceum audiences. “I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.” Political compromise was morally repugnant, contrary to logic: “We have attempted to hold together two states of civilization: a higher state, where labor and the tenure of land and the right of suffrage are democratical; and a lower state.” The results had been disastrous.
If anything, Thoreau was even more extreme in his response to slavery. On July 23, 1846, while still living at Walden Pond, he walked into town and was accosted by Sam Staples, the local tax collector. Thoreau was six years delinquent on his poll taxes. He refused to pay because he opposed the Mexican-American War, believing it was being waged to expand slavery throughout the Southwest. As he later wrote, “I cannot for an instance recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.” Staples had no other recourse but to put Thoreau in jail, where he spent a night before he was bailed out by someone he never identified but who was most likely his aunt.
Thoreau was powerfully affected by the John Brown affair. He kept pencil and paper under his pillow in order to write down his thoughts in the middle of the night. Three days after learning of the failed attack on Harpers Ferry, he came down to breakfast. His mother, sister, and aunt, all prominent local antislavery activists, were already seated. Thoreau asked them a question. He had been up all night, pacing in the attic, arranging his scattered notes into a lecture that would portray the captured man in a more just light. Now he wanted his family’s advice. Should he speak publicly on behalf of Brown? To do so was dangerous. In the South, abolitionist sentiment was banned from newspapers and punished by law. Antislavery advocates were routinely killed or driven out of the region. In the North abolitionists were still sometimes attacked. They were tarred and feathered, publicly tortured. Sanborn had cautioned him against going public, conceding that the threat of physical assault was real. At the minimum, Thoreau would be pilloried in the press for his opinions.
The family voted two to one in favor of his speaking out.
A week later he gave a public address at the First Church in Concord. To those who warned him against defending a traitor, he replied, “I did not send to you for advice, but to announce that I am to speak.” Thoreau’s address was entitled “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” and it became an instant sensation. Edward Emerson, the fifteen-year-old son of the transcendentalist, remembered how “deeply stirred” was Thoreau’s voice on that occasion. He read his paper, Edward recalled, as if it “burned him.” Bronson Alcott called the address “a revolutionary Lecture . . . by which the martyr’s fame will be transmitted to posterity.” Even Sanborn, who considered Thoreau a mediocre speaker, admitted that he had been “mightily stirred by the emotions” the address raised.
Thoreau repeated the address in Boston to more than two thousand people. (He filled in for Frederick Douglass, who had fled the country in the wake of the Brown affair.) Next he gave the speech in nearby Worcester, prompting local newspapers to pun on his name, calling him “a thorough fanatic,” and to wryly note that Brown’s trial “seemed to have awakened ‘the hermit of Concord’ from his usual state of philosophic indifference.” Cumulatively, these speeches were decisive in turning the tide of opinion toward Brown among Northern abolitionists. They gave others the courage to speak on behalf of the executed man. Emerson soon echoed Thoreau’s defense by comparing the gallows erected for Brown’s execution to the cross.
On December 2, 1859—the day Brown was executed—Thoreau helped arrange a memorial service with Emerson, Alcott, and Sanborn. The day was unusually warm, as if the baleful news from Virginia had been carried on a spring breeze. Two hundred people gathered in the Town Hall to listen to the solemn eulogies. Civic leaders refused to permit the bells of the First Church to mark the occasion, but Alcott believed “it was more fitting to signify our sorrow in the subdued way, and silently.” The choir sang a hymn; Alcott and Emerson read selections and poems by Schiller, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Tacitus. Then Thoreau stood up. “So universal and widely related is any transcendent moral greatness—,” he said to the assembled audience, “so nearly identical with greatness every where and in every age, as a pyramid contracts the nearer you approach its apex—that, when I now look over my commonplace book of poetry, I find that the best of it is oftenest applicable, in part or wholly, to the case of Captain Brown.”
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This is Thoreau the passionate abolitionist—almost as iconic as Thoreau the nature lover and advocate for simplified living. Not nearly so well known is Thoreau the scientist. Sometime in the early 1850s, several years before Walden was published, Thoreau began a new career and a new identity. He had always been obsessed with the workings of nature, with identifying new birds or plants. He delighted in the smell of wet stones, the rich tang of freshly spaded loam, the droning sound of the bumblebee as it stumbled drunkenly from flower to flower. Under the tutelage of Emerson and the emerging philosophy of transcendentalism, he had come to understand these delights as embodied revelation, living scripture. Nature was the expression of a benign divinity that communicated spiritual truths to the solitary individual.
While these insights helped explain the thrill and pleasure the young Thoreau felt in the woods of Middlesex County, they didn’t entirely answer the demands of his personality, which was congenitally skeptical and searching. He was drawn to the concrete and the palpable, to the heft and texture of experience. Increasingly he relied on the tools of science to make sense of the woodlots and ponds to which he daily tramped. He measured and weighed, touched and tasted. He carefully wrote down his observations.
Occasionally he worried about this new tendency. Focus on the particular instead of the abstract seemed to him a sign of age. A “young man is a demigod,” he confessed in his journal, comparing his youthful raptures with the prosaic realities of “the grown man, alas! [who] is commonly a mere mortal.” “I fear,” he wrote on August 19, 1851, that “the character of my knowledge is from year to year becoming more distinct and scientific; that, in exchange for views as wide as heaven’s scope, I am being narrowed down to the field of the microscope.” On Christmas Day 1851 he put the problem to himself more tartly: “What sort of science is that which enriches the understanding, but robs the imagination?”
One night he was awakened by a dream. Astride two fractious, ungovernable horses—literal nightmares—he galloped through the woods. “In my dream I had been riding,” he wrote, “but the horses bit each other and occasioned endless trouble and anxiety, and it was my employment to hold their heads apart.” He didn’t bother to analyze the dream, but the tugging horses suggest someone trying to coax the contending forces of his life into a shared direction. Daybreak brought no resolution to the problem: “I awoke this morning with infinite regret.”
The dream had come several months after Thoreau read Darwin’s stirring travel memoir, The Voyage of the Beagle, first published in America nearly a decade earlier. He had loved the book from the first. His natural history notebook was soon filled with extracts from the Voyage on the tiny aquatic creatures known as infusoria, on palm trees and coral atolls, on the way Argentinians hunted partridges, on the size of hail in Buenos Aires, on the invasive species of fennel introduced to the New World from Europe, on the tooth of a prehistoric horse found by Darwin on the Pampas, and on the habits and features of llamas. Less than a week after finishing the book, he opened it up and read the whole thing over again, liberally copying from it once more. He appreciated Darwin’s disparate interests, his omnivorous attitude toward knowledge, his reliance on close observation. He considered the English explorer a colleague of sorts: “His theory of the formation of the coral isles by the subsidence of the land appears probable.”
Darwin’s travelogue seems to have encouraged Thoreau to begin his own idiosyncratic voyage of discovery. Instead of circumnavigating the globe, he ventured each day into the woods and fields encircling Concord—weighing, measuring, and categorizing the local flora and fauna. He carried with him a small diary and a pencil, a spyglass for observing birds, a portable microscope, and a jackknife. He also carried two books: Asa Gray’s Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States (invaluable for its line drawings and comprehensive verbal depictions of plant genera and families) and a large and cumbersome book of flute music entitled Primo Flauto that had belonged to his deceased father. He used this volume to press plants and flowers for his burgeoning herbarium.
Like Darwin, he took notes: thousands and thousands of pages of them. In less than a decade he produced a series of notebooks filled with drawings and descriptions of mushrooms, animal tracks, snowballs, leaves, and flowers. He meticulously described the blooming seasons of plants, the subtly changing colors of leaves, the ripening of berries. He measured the heights of grasses and the size of red maple leaves in May. What he intended to do with all this data is still not entirely clear. Scholars believe he may have envisioned a vast, encyclopedic calendar of Concord’s seasons, a hybrid text of empirical scrutiny and poetic observation unlike anything else in American literature. It seems probable that he was trying to yoke the fractious horses of his dream, to straddle transcendental idealism and scientific empiricism, but he was evasive about his plans. Describing his research to a young Michigan schoolteacher in 1856, Thoreau sheepishly confessed, “I am drawing a rather long bow.”
What stands out most from this period is the pagan joy coursing through every word in his journal: a relish and delight wholly unrelated to transcendental raptures. Thoreau admires the gossamer filaments that glisten in the sun when he tears apart a milkweed pod. He samples the bitter juice of unripe berries or amuses himself by measuring his strides as he slides across frozen rivers. In 1857 he began an elaborate series of experiments to discover the best way to boil tree sap into syrup. Later he attempted to make wine from birch bark. His interests branched apart, proliferated, carved new channels of thought. He delved into cartography and the magnetic variations of compasses. He studied geology. By 1860, his third-story attic room had become a private natural history museum, stuffed with birds’ nests, arrowheads, and more than a thousand pressed plants. On shelves made from driftwood he had gathered at Cape Cod, he kept the skins of reptiles, assorted pelts, rocks and stones, lichens, moss, and the carcass of a Cooper’s hawk as well as its spotted bluish-white egg.
Early in the twentieth century, the nature writer John Burroughs, an unabashed Thoreauvian, thought he discerned a problem in all this. Thoreau’s journals were simply too capacious, too indiscriminate, guided by no principle of selection. They were “a hungry, omnivorous monster that constantly called for more.” Bedazzled by the lush plenitude of nature, Thoreau had difficulty organizing his material into a coherent project. As he put it himself in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, “Observation is so wide awake, and facts are being so rapidly added to the sum of human experience, that it appears as if the theorizer would always be in arrears.”
Put another way, he had adopted the methods of science without the benefit of a scientific theory.
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Books can change a life. The nineteenth century is filled with accounts of readers who opened a novel or a collection of poetry and instantly became someone else. Moncure Daniel Conway, a young Virginian idling on his father’s plantation, opened a copy of Emerson’s Essays one morning and stumbled across a single sentence that sparked a complete transformation of his being. He left the South and repudiated slavery. (He also refused to divulge which sentence effected the transformation.) The great orator and author Frederick Douglass experienced something even more profound. At age twelve he came into possession of a popular collection of political dialogues entitled The Columbian Orator, “choice documents to me,” he recalled. “I read them over and over again with unabated interest. They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind.” From that book Douglass came to realize the injustice of slavery—in particular the injustice of his own enslavement. The book served as a base for his future life. It prompted him to escape to freedom, and it influenced his career as an abolitionist speaker for decades to come.
Books can also change the world. In 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin crashed through American society, cracking its foundations and altering the era. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s first novel was an immediate sensation. Readers throughout the nation, both North and South, found themselves captivated by the tale of Tom and little Eva, often with an intensity they had never felt before. Some readers experienced guilt at having succumbed so completely to the work’s imaginative power. “I have indulged myself,” wrote one reader with puritanical shame. “I was bound down captive,” admitted another. Mary Pierce Poor, of Massachusetts, so feared the novel’s ability to enchant a sick relative that she wrote home “to advise” her “not to attempt [Uncle Tom’s Cabin]. I am afraid it would kill [you]. I never read anything so affecting in my life.”
Something like this happened to Thoreau when he checked out the Origin from the Concord Town Library. This copy was not the same edition Darwin had sent to Asa Gray but rather an unauthorized reprint from the New York publisher D. Appleton, bound in a grayish-brown cloth with gilt lettering on the spine. Thoreau read this edition in late January 1860, bright warm lamplight spilling onto his desk and across the book. He must have experienced that loss of self so many readers undergo when they launch into the secret world of their favorite volume. As he turned the pages, a new universe took form on the rectangular page before him. He took notes in the large natural history journal he kept opened on his desk.