Later Franklin Sanborn would recall that he had been sitting at his desk in his carpet slippers when he heard the knock at the door. It was his custom to spend the evenings writing letters, preparing for the next day’s classes, reading. Now and then he picked up a book from the stack on his desk, turned a page or two, then returned to his tasks. He might not have even heard the knock at first.
That he managed any sort of intellectual life that spring is remarkable. He lived in a state of constant anxiety. Again and again he imagined testifying before the Mason committee or being arrested for treason. He struggled to face the world with his characteristic insouciance.
Twice he had been summoned to appear before the congressional committee about his involvement in the John Brown affair. Twice he had fled to Canada. The threat of arrest weighed constantly. Yet every week he strode through town and up the long walk that led to the Old Manse, a glowering clapboard hulk built five years before the first shots of the American Revolution, an inauspicious residence made famous by Hawthorne in 1846 with his story collection Mosses from the Old Manse. Emerson had lived there in the 1830s and had written his first work, Nature, in the second-floor bedroom that overlooked the battlefield where the Revolution had begun. (Hawthorne’s desk had faced a wall; he did not care for the outside world to intrude upon his dark fantasies.) The Manse’s current resident was Sarah Alden Ripley, a brilliant autodidact related to the Emerson clan, fluent in Greek and Latin. Ripley informally tutored many of Concord’s most prominent young scholars, and Sanborn visited her weekly to read Theocritus in the original Greek.
He admired the woman’s sly wit and deep learning. Her white hair wrapped in a lace bonnet, her gray eyes variously fierce and playful, she was sometimes capable of a despairing skepticism that blazed forth at unexpected times. It seemed to her that “the dirty planet on which we creep, if [it] were blotted out from existance [sic] would not be missed.” More typically she was brisk and lively, a woman who read everything, consuming the era’s most important works—often before either Emerson and Thoreau, who respected her opinions on literary, scientific, and political matters and solicited her advice on what to read next.
Ripley may have encouraged Sanborn’s interest in the English Civil War that spring. Throughout March and April he dipped into a tottering stack of books on the religious and political conflict that had ripped England apart some two centuries earlier. As he reported to Theodore Parker, Clement Walker’s History of Independency, an account of the vicious war between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads, had utterly engrossed him, offering a striking parallel to the present divisive moment in America. Civil war seemed increasingly likely that spring, especially as the nation launched into its quadrennial orgy of campaign promises and party demonization that occurred with each presidential election. This year the contest centered more than ever upon the issue of slavery and the territorial limits of the Cotton Kingdom. William E. Seward, the New York senator widely expected to be the next Republican presidential nominee, had described the situation a year and a half earlier in a speech entitled “The Irrepressible Conflict,” which argued that “increase of population, which is filling the States out to their very borders, together with a new and extended network of railroads and . . . an internal commerce which daily becomes more intimate, is rapidly bringing the States into a higher and more perfect social unity or consolidation.” If the states were evolving into something “higher” and more complex, their development nevertheless was threatened. Divisions between two incompatible societies were growing, and “these antagonistic systems are continually coming into closer contact, and collision results.”
The press loved Seward. In a March review of his speaking style, the New York Post wrote that he addressed his topics “as coolly as Macaulay” and that his conclusions were as “thorough-going and trenchant . . . as we might suppose Agassiz . . . to make a reply to the rival theory of Darwin on the origin of species.” But Seward’s carefully laid plans to become the Republican presidential nominee had been upset by John Brown’s attack the previous December. The failed insurrection at Harpers Ferry led many opinion makers and politicians to consider Seward’s antislavery rhetoric too extreme, too alienating for the moderate Southern voters needed for presidential success. And this perception had opened the door for a long-shot candidate from Illinois.
Like many of his friends, Sanborn remained skeptical of the unlikely figure now appearing on the national political scene—a shambling rustic from Springfield, Illinois, visibly uncomfortable in his wrinkled, ill-fitting suit. Abraham Lincoln had been invited to deliver a speech in late February at New York’s Cooper Union, which stood a block away from Charles Loring Brace’s Children’s Aid Society. A Westerner from humble origins, a melancholy autodidact, Lincoln’s provincial manners concealed a shrewd strategist who grasped that the only way to win the general election was to exploit that razor-thin territory between pro-slavery apologia and radical abolitionism.
Lincoln felt with unquenchable conviction that slavery was wrong. His great adversary, Stephen Douglas, was fond of saying, “When the struggle is between the white man and the Negro, I am for the white man; when it is between the Negro and the crocodile, I am for the Negro.” In 1859 Lincoln rebutted this racist humbug. Douglas was “blowing out the moral lights around us,” he argued, “teaching that the negro is no longer a man but a brute; that the Declaration has nothing to do with him; that he ranks with the crocodile and the reptile; that man, with body and soul, is a matter of dollars and cents.” But in the early months of 1860 Lincoln was cultivating an image of tolerant moderation. Addressing an imaginary audience of Southern Democrats in his public lectures, he tried to deflate the incendiary rhetoric that portrayed Northerners and Southerners as different peoples, emphasizing commonality instead. “We mean to remember that you are as good as we are; that there is no difference between us other than the difference of circumstances. We mean to recognize and bear in mind always that you have as good hearts in your bosoms as other people, or as we claim to have, and treat you accordingly.” He also sought to defuse the hysteria prompted by John Brown’s raid. “Old John Brown has just been executed for treason against the state,” he told a crowd in Leavenworth, Kansas, in December 1859. Lincoln agreed with Brown’s antislavery beliefs, but he also considered the man’s hanging justified. No principle, however righteous, could “excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason.” And for this very reason, he took a hard line toward those politicians below the Mason-Dixon line who discussed secession. If the South undertook “to destroy the Union,” he warned, “it will be our duty to deal with you as old John Brown has been dealt with.” At Cooper Union, he again addressed an imaginary crowd of Southern Democrats, accusing, “You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves. We deny it; and what is your proof? Harper’s Ferry! John Brown!! John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper’s Ferry enterprise.”
• • •
That spring Sanborn supplemented Walker’s history of the English Civil War with a series of others from the seventeenth century, including one by the parliamentary diarist Lawrence Whitacre and another by the royalist Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon. Sanborn sided with the Puritans, of course; they reminded him of the abolitionists. In his mind, John Brown was the nineteenth century’s Cromwell, its fierce and relentless leader against a Southern aristocracy that disregarded the will of the people.
But he was interested in another book as well—the same one in which Sarah Alden Ripley was currently immersed. Possibly Asa Gray told her about On the Origin of Species; they were dear friends, and she frequently wrote him to share botanical knowledge. More likely, Thoreau encouraged her to read the new book. Later in the year, at a Thanksgiving dinner hosted by the Emerson family, she and the chemist Charles Jackson (Lidian Emerson’s brother) discussed whether Darwin’s theory was truly original or merely a restatement of older notions of metamorphosis.
Ripley also discussed Darwin’s book during Sanborn’s weekly visits to the Old Manse. Characteristically, he was interested less in Darwin’s ideas than in the cultural politics of the book. That spring he wrote to Theodore Parker, telling him that Sarah Alden Ripley “has just been reading Darwin’s book, . . . and likes it much as does Thoreau.” Ripley may have either read the same copy that Thoreau had, borrowing it from the Concord Library, or been provided with a copy of her own by Sanborn. According to her son-in-law, James B. Thayer, “Mr. Sanborn, Mr. Channing, and other friends kept her largely supplied with the new books, and she read them eagerly, especially some of the newer contributions to natural science: the writings of Darwin and his supporters she cordially welcomed.”
At any rate, Sanborn was not reading Darwin on the evening of April 3, when, as he later recalled in his autobiography, he sat at his desk in his carpet slippers, writing letters. It was not particularly late, but his sister Sarah was down the hall in her room. The Irish servant, Julia Leary, had already gone to bed. Now and then Sanborn picked up a book.
Then he heard a knock at the front door.
He put down his book and listened a moment. The knock sounded again, and he rose from his desk and went downstairs, a candle in his hand.
A man stood on the porch, his face nearly invisible in the dark. According to Sanborn’s recollections, the man entered the house and asked, “Does Mr. Sanborn live here?”
Sanborn stiffly put out his hand. “That is my name, sir.”
“Here is a paper for you.”
Sanborn took the paper and stepped backward into the dim hallway. The note was dated April 1, two days earlier, and it had come from the nearby town of Saugus: “Sir:—,” it read,
The bearer, a worthy young man, solicits
your aid in procuring employment.
Buffum
When Sanborn looked up, three more men were standing in his hallway.
“I arrest you,” one of them said.
“By what authority?” Sanborn demanded.
“I am from the U.S. Marshal’s office.”
“What is your authority—your warrant?”
One of the other men spoke up. “We have a warrant.”
Sanborn asked them to produce the document, to read it out loud, which one of the men began to do in a droning voice. The spell was broken by a noise from above. It was Sarah Sanborn, hurrying down the stairs, her eyes wide with fright. While the men stood in the hallway, she ran to the other door and began screaming as loud as she could, “Five men are arresting my brother!” (She had miscounted.)
Instantly the warrant was folded, and another man stepped forward to snap handcuffs on Sanborn’s bony wrists. Then the four men lifted him off his feet.
Sanborn kicked his long legs. He twisted and jerked, his clothes tangling around his body. Within seconds he and the group of men were breathing hard and perspiring. The four struggled to get Sanborn out the door, but he kicked even harder. He yelled and spat and wrenched his shoulders, trying to get free. Then he planted his slippered feet on either doorjamb. The men swore and grabbed his thrashing legs, working to pry him from the door. Once they got him onto the veranda, he did the same thing, bracing himself against the posts of the porch, writhing as they carried him across the gravel walk, stiffening his legs on the stone gateway.
The men paused to catch their breath.
A carriage was waiting on Sudbury Road, and the group lifted Sanborn off his feet and approached it. He smashed its door. According to Edward Emerson, who was one of the first to arrive at the scene, Sanborn, “encompassed by a throng of men,” was by this point “hoarse with passion.” He continued “struggling convulsively” as the street began to fill with people. One of the men grabbed both of Sanborn’s feet and tried to wedge him into the vehicle, but by this time the fire alarm—the bells of the First Church—was tolling, and a crowd had gathered outside Sanborn’s house. Sarah ran into the street and grabbed the beard of the man holding her brother’s feet. He let go.
At some point old Colonel Whiting, a carriage maker who lived on the corner of Main and Academy streets, ran up and tried to scare off the horses. His daughter, Ann Whiting, a prominent member of the Concord Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, climbed into the driver’s box and refused to budge. The crowd began to abuse the men who carried Sanborn. Some ventured to hit them. The lawyer J. S. Keyes ran into the street and asked if his client—he meant Sanborn—wished to petition for a writ of habeas corpus.
“By all means,” Sanborn shouted, still struggling. Keyes then hurried to the house of Judge Hoar, who was already filling out the writ. John Moore, the town’s deputy sheriff, rushed back to the scene and demanded the men surrender their prisoner. When they refused, he asked the crowd to help him free Sanborn. A group of Irish neighbors emerged from the dark and managed to extricate him from the four deputies. The neighbors stuffed them into the carriage and chased the vehicle, hooting and catcalling, as far as the nearby town of Lexington.
“We are having most exciting times here,” Emerson’s oldest daughter, Ellen, wrote to a friend the next day. “Have you ever enjoyed the interest of being awakened by alarm-bells and joining a street-fight, as most of the ladies and gentlemen of Concord did last night?” She added: “The town is in a high state of self-complacency, it flatters itself that this is the spirit of ’76.” Several houses away Louisa May Alcott wryly observed, “On Tuesday night we had a new sort of amusement called kidnapping. . . . I am so full of wrath I dont dare to unbottle myself for fear of the explosive consequences.”
The fracas had lasted nearly two hours. When it was over, Sanborn recalled, he “was committed to the custody of Captain George L. Prescott . . . and spent the night in his house not far from the Old Manse, armed, for my better defense, with a six-shooter, which Mr. Bull, the inventor of the Concord grape . . . insisted I should take.” This was the evening Thoreau didn’t go home. Instead he spent the night at Sanborn’s house, guarding it in case the four men returned.
• • •
Abolitionists across the North considered Sanborn’s attempted arrest a call to action. According to the antislavery newspaper the Independent, the arrest was an abrogation of human rights. “Where are we? Whither are we tending? Have we a Star Chamber at Washington?” the newspaper demanded. “Are we under a Charles or a James?” The incident was the latest evidence of a political system so corrupted by slavery that “an inoffensive citizen has been rudely seized in his own house by a gang of armed men professing to act in the name of the Senate, manacled and dragged without hat or boots into the night air, to be smuggled into a carriage and hurried away to Washington without the possibility of defense.” But for the prompt and courageous action of Sarah Sanborn, the paper continued, “the amiable and scholarly Mr. Sanborn would have been a prisoner.”
The next day Sanborn was taken to the Boston Court House, where Judge Lemuel Shaw, the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court (and Herman Melville’s father-in-law), listened to his case. Among those who attended the hearing were the abolitionist Wendell Phillips and the poet Walt Whitman, who had come from New York to discuss the publication of the third edition of Leaves of Grass. (It was here, perhaps, that Whitman first met Sanborn. In later years he liked to say, “I always hold Sanborn, Frank Sanborn, to be a true friend—to stand with those who wish me well.”) Meanwhile the state legislature debated the legality of Concord’s unified resistance. Some congressmen rejoiced that “the issue was met at Concord yesterday by the Democracy of that town, as a similar issue against tyranny was met in 1775.” Others insisted that the case required no “particular sympathy, such as might perhaps naturally be excited in the case of a fugitive slave.” Resisting arrest, after all, showed precious little regard for the rule of law.
At four o’clock in the afternoon, Sanborn was discharged from custody and escorted to East Cambridge, then returned by train to Concord. There Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had come down from Worcester, gathered before the Town House and vowed to protect him “against any Senate’s office.”
Thoreau was the first to speak that day. He told the assembled crowd that he had “heard the bells ringing last night, as he supposed for fire,” but “it proved to be the hottest fire he ever witnessed in Concord.” When the laughter subsided, he denounced “the mean and sneaking method the United States officials took to accomplish their purpose.” There were some in the press who congratulated the town for conducting its defense of Sanborn in a lawful, orderly fashion. But Thoreau disagreed. “No,” he said, “the Concord people didn’t ring the fire alarm bells according to law—they didn’t cheer according to law—they didn’t groan according to law.” Here he paused before a boisterous eruption of applause and said that as he didn’t talk according to law, he thought he would stop and give way to some other speaker.
Sanborn appeared next, smiling at the “storm of applause, accompanied with a few hisses” that greeted him. When the crowd quieted, he thanked them for the “prompt, generous and unexpected manner in which they had come to assistance” the previous night. Then he held up a pair of handcuffs and rattled them over his head. “What are these an emblem of?” he asked.
Someone in the crowd yelled out, “Tyranny,” but Sanborn corrected the person:
“It is the badge of slavery.”
The yard before the Town Hall filled with more cheers and applause, and Sanborn shook and rattled the manacles with greater force, his voice rising with indignation. The Southerners held the entire country as “much in bondage as their own slaves.” Slavery had implicated everyone in the nation, regardless of where they lived or what they believed. If anyone dared strike out in freedom, “the whole power of the national government is brought to bear to crush him.”
The only response, therefore, was war—not the kind of war declared by governments but a very personal sort: a struggle to extinguish one’s foes. According to a reporter for the New York Herald, “Mr. Sanborn continued, by saying that if those ruffians who attempted to carry him off last night had been killed in the act, the deed would not have been deemed unlawful. . . . They ought to have been killed. (Applause.) Such men are not killed. They die like vermin. (Renewed applause). . . . When the Senate, or the House of Representatives, or the President, act under the mandates of the slave owners, they must be resisted by every way and by every means. (More applause.) Mr. Sanborn said he was ready to meet any other offence against the South in the same manner he had done last night. Dealing with the Southerners was not dealing with men, it was dealing with demons. The system of slavery should be opposed with force. . . . There is no law to protect tigers and hyenas—and they must be met and dealt with as such.”
Sanborn had learned quite a lot in the past twenty-four hours, he told the crowd. He had learned that John Brown was right, that the slave interest could be destroyed only by violence. And he prayed that God might help him now “in pursuing the same course.”
These last words brought about the loudest cheers of all. The area before Town Hall was filled with women holding parasols, men in frock coats and top hats. They shouted and cajoled, clapped their hands. They jeered every time the South was mentioned. At that moment Franklin Sanborn must have felt as though he had lived up to the spirit of Concord. He had enacted Thoreau’s civil disobedience and assumed the role of Emerson’s self-reliant man. Most important, he had vindicated old John Brown. When the applause died down, he held up his manacles and rattled them again, inspiring fresh waves of cheering.
• • •
The Sanborn incident inflamed the nation, bringing it one step closer to dissolution. Samuel May, Bronson Alcott’s brother-in-law, reflected the opinion of many antislavery campaigners when he complained, “What we are coming to in our country seems to me evil—fearfully evil. . . . The attempt to kidnap Sanborn shows plainly enough that the pro slavery party means to stick at nothing.”
Like a ripple in a pond, the event spread well beyond New England’s borders, appearing in newspapers from Bangor to New Orleans, casting a pall over the Democratic Party’s national convention, held three weeks later in Charleston, South Carolina. The party’s front-runner, Stephen Douglas, the man who had beaten Lincoln two years earlier in the Illinois race for Senate, urged calm among his fellow party members. Sectional harmony was surely necessary for the preservation of the Union, he argued. But peace with the North had become anathema to the secessionist wing of the party. John Brown was no freedom fighter, these Southern Democrats argued, but a lawless renegade intent on plundering private property. “Ours is the property invaded,” declared William Yancey of Alabama, “ours are the institutions which are at stake; ours is the peace that is to be destroyed. . . . Bear with us, then, if we stand sternly upon what is yet that dormant volcano, and say we yield no position here until we are convinced we are wrong.” Yancey and other secessionists believed that Sanborn was merely behaving like any other abolitionist, thumbing his nose at the Constitution while ascribing his illegal behavior to a higher purpose. He and his allies demanded that the Democratic Party add a plank to its platform establishing a “slave code” to protect slavery in the territories. Douglas refused this demand, and on April 29, when it became clear that Northern and Southern Democrats could not agree, the Southerners walked out of the convention, splintering the party and opening the path for a Republican nominee to win the presidency.