Henry D. Thoreau 11

Henry D. Thoreau 11

"You know enough of my miserable catarrh. Its history,

since I left your hospitable roof, is not worth noting.

There would be nothing found in it, either of the sublime

or the beautiful; nothing fit for elegant description or a

touch of sentiment. Not that it has not been a great thing

in its way; for I think the _sneezing_ it has occasioned

has been truly transcendental. A fellow-sufferer from the

same affliction, who lived in Cohasset, was asked, the

other day, what in the world he took for it? His reply

was that he 'took eight handkerchiefs a day.' And this,

I believe, is the approved mode of treatment; though the

_doses_ here mentioned are too few for severe cases.

Suffice it to say, my dear lady, that either from a change

of air, or the progress of the season, or, what is more

probable, from the natural progress of the disease itself,

I am much better than when I left Concord, and I propose to

return to Boston to-day, feeling, or hoping, that I may now

be struck off the list of invalids."

 

Notwithstanding this affliction, Mr. Webster made himself agreeable

to the ladies of Concord, old and young, and even the little girls,

like Louisa Alcott, went to the courthouse to see and hear him. He

was present at a large tea-party given by Mrs. R. W. Emerson in

his honor, and he renewed his old acquaintance with the Dunbars and

Thoreaus. Mr. Emerson, writing to Thoreau September 8, 1843, said,

briefly, "You will have heard of our 'Wyman Trial,' and the stir it

made in the village. But the Cliff and Walden, which know something of

the railroad, knew nothing of that; not a leaf nodded; not a pebble

fell;--why should I speak of it to you?" Thoreau was indeed interested

in it, and in the striking personality of Webster. To his mother he

wrote from Staten Island (August 29, 1843):--

 

"I should have liked to see Daniel Webster walking about

Concord; I suppose the town shook, every step he took.

But I trust there were some sturdy Concordians who were

not tumbled down by the jar, but represented still the

upright town. Where was George Minott? he would not have

gone far to see him. Uncle Charles should have been

there;--he might as well have been catching cat-naps in

Concord as anywhere. And, then, what a whetter-up of his

memory this event would have been! You'd have had all the

classmates again in alphabetical order reversed,--'and

Seth Hunt and Bob Smith--and he was a student of my

father's--and where's Put now? and I wonder--you--if

Henry's been to see George Jones yet? A little account

with Stow--Balcolm--Bigelow--poor, miserable t-o-a-d

(sound asleep). I vow--you--what noise was that? saving

grace--and few there be. That's clear as preaching--Easter

Brooks--morally depraved--how charming is divine

philosophy--somewise and some otherwise--Heighho! (Sound

asleep again.) Webster's a smart fellow--bears his age

well. How old should you think he was? you--does he look as

if he were two years younger than I?'"

 

This uncle was Charles Dunbar, of course, who was in fact two years

older than Webster, and, like him, a New Hampshire man. He and his

sisters--the mother and the aunt of Henry Thoreau--had known Webster

in his youth, when he was a poor young lawyer in New Hampshire; and

the acquaintance was kept up from time to time as the years brought

them together. Whenever Webster passed a day in Concord, as he did

nearly every year from 1843 to 1850, he would either call on Miss

Dunbar, or she would meet him at tea in the house of Mr. Cheney,

a college classmate of Mr. Emerson, whom he usually visited; and

whose garden was a lovely plot, ornamented with great elm trees,

on the bank of the Musketaquid. Mrs. Thoreau was often included in

these friendly visits; and it was of this family, as well as of the

Emersons, Hoars, and Brookses, no doubt, that Webster was thinking

when he sadly wrote to Mrs. Cheney his last letter, less than a year

before his death in 1852. In this note, dated at Washington, November

1, 1851, when he was Secretary of State under Fillmore, Mr. Webster

said:--

 

"I have very much wished to see you all, and in the

early part of October seriously contemplated going to

Concord for a day. But I was hindered by circumstances,

and partly deterred also by changes which have taken

place. My valued friend, Mr. Phinney (of Lexington), is

not living; and many of those whom I so highly esteemed,

in your beautiful and quiet village, have become a good

deal estranged, to my great grief, by abolitionism,

free-soilism, transcendentalism, and other notions, which I

cannot (but) regard as so many vagaries of the imagination.

These former warm friends would have no pleasure, of

course, in intercourse with one of old-fashioned opinions.

Nevertheless, dear Mrs. Cheney, if I live to see another

summer, I will make a visit to your house, and talk about

former times and former things."

 

He never came; for in June, 1852, the Whig convention at Baltimore

rejected his name as a Presidential candidate, and he went home to

Marshfield to die. The tone of sadness in this note was due, in part,

perhaps, to the eloquent denunciation of Webster by Mr. Emerson in

a speech at Cambridge in 1851, and to the unequivocal aversion with

which Webster's contemporary, the first citizen of Concord, Samuel

Hoar, spoke of his 7th of March speech, and the whole policy with

which Webster had identified himself in those dreary last years of his

life. Mr. Hoar had been sent by his State in 1846 to protest in South

Carolina against the unconstitutional imprisonment at Charleston of

colored seamen from Massachusetts; and he had been driven by force

from the State to which he went as an envoy. But, although Webster

knew the gross indignity of the act, and introduced into his written

speech in March, 1850, a denunciation of it, he did not speak this out

in the Senate, nor did it appear in all the authorized editions of

the speech. He could hardly expect Mr. Hoar to welcome him in Concord

after he had uttered his willingness to return fugitive slaves, but

forgot to claim reparation for so shameful an affront to Massachusetts

as the Concord Cato had endured.

 

Mr. Webster was attached to Concord--as most persons are who have ever

spent pleasant days there--and used to compliment his friend on his

house and garden by the river side. Looking out upon his great trees

from the dining-room window, he once said: "I am in the terrestrial

paradise, and I will prove it to you by this. America is the finest

continent on the globe, the United States the finest country in

America, Massachusetts the best State in the Union, Concord the best

town in Massachusetts, and my friend Cheney's field the best acre in

Concord." This was an opinion so like that often expressed by Henry

Thoreau, that one is struck by it. Indeed, the devotion of Thoreau

to his native town was so marked as to provoke opposition. "Henry

talks about Nature," said Madam Hoar (the mother of Senator Hoar, and

daughter of Roger Sherman of Connecticut), "just as if she'd been born

and brought up in Concord."

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER IV.

 

THE EMBATTLED FARMERS.

 

 

It was not the famous lawyers, the godly ministers, the wealthy

citizens, nor even the learned ladies of Concord, who interested Henry

Thoreau specially,--but the sturdy farmers, each on his hereditary

acres, battling with the elements and enjoying that open-air life

which to Thoreau was the only existence worth having. As his best

biographer, Ellery Channing, says: "He came to see the inside of every

farmer's house and head, his pot of beans, and mug of hard cider.

Never in too much hurry for a dish of gossip, he could sit out the

oldest frequenter of the bar-room, and was alive from top to toe with

curiosity."

 

Concord, in our day, and still more in Thoreau's childhood, was dotted

with frequent old farm-houses, of the ample and picturesque kind that

bespeaks antiquity and hospitality. In one such he was born, though

not one of the oldest or the best. He was present at the downfall of

several of these ancient homesteads, in whose date and in the fortunes

of their owners for successive generations, he took a deep interest;

and still more in their abandoned orchards and door-yards, where the

wild apple tree and the vivacious lilac still flourished.

 

To show what sort of men these Concord farmers were in the days

when their historical shot was fired, let me give some anecdotes

and particulars concerning two of the original family stocks,--the

Hosmers, who first settled in Concord in 1635, with Bulkeley and

Willard, the founders of the town; and the Barretts, whose first

ancestor, Humphrey Barrett, came over in 1639. James Hosmer, a

clothier from Hawkhurst in Kent, with his wife Ann (related to Major

Simon Willard, that stout Kentishman, Indian trader and Indian

fighter, who bought of the Squaw Sachem the township of Concord, six

miles square), two infant daughters, and two maid-servants, came

from London to Boston in the ship "Elizabeth," and the next year

built a house on Concord Street, and a mill on the town brook. From

him descended James Hosmer, who was killed at Sudbury in 1658, in

an Indian fight, Stephen, his great-grandson, a famous surveyor,

and Joseph, his great-great-grandson, one of the promoters of the

Revolution, who had a share in its first fight at Concord Bridge.

Joseph Hosmer was the son of a Concord farmer, who, in 1743, seceded

from the parish church, because Rev. Daniel Bliss, the pastor, had

said in a sermon (as his opponents averred), "that it was as great a

sin for a man to get an estate by honest labor, if he had not a single

aim at the glory of God, as to get it by gaming at cards or dice."

What this great-grandfather of Emerson did say, a century before the

Transcendental epoch, was this, as he declared: "If husbandmen plow

and sow that they may be rich, and live in the pleasures of this

world, and appear grand before men, they are as far from true religion

in their plowing, sowing, etc., as men are that game for the same

purpose." Thomas Hosmer, being a prosperous husbandman, perhaps with

a turn for display, took offense, and became a worshipper at what was

called the "Black Horse Church,"--a seceding conventicle which met at

the tavern with the sign of the Black Horse, near where the Concord

Library now stands. Joseph Hosmer, his boy, was known at the village

school as "the little black colt,"--a lad of adventurous spirit, with

dark eyes and light hair, whose mother, Prudence Hosmer, would repeat

old English poetry until all her listeners but her son were weary.

When he was thirty-nine years old, married and settled, a farmer and

cabinet-maker, there was a convention in the parish church to consider

the Boston Port Bill, the doings of General Gage in Boston, and the

advice of Samuel Adams and John Hancock to resist oppression. Daniel

Bliss, the leading lawyer and leading Tory in Concord, eldest son of

Parson Bliss, and son-in-law of Colonel Murray, of Rutland, Vt., the

chief Tory of that region, made a speech in this convention against

the patriotic party. He was a graceful and fluent speaker, a handsome

man, witty, sarcastic, and popular, but with much scorn for the

plain people. He painted in effective colors the power of the mother

country and the feebleness of the colonies; he was elegantly dressed,

friendly in his manner, but discouraging to the popular heart, and

when he sat down, a deep gloom seemed to settle on the assembly. His

brother-in-law, Parson Emerson, an ardent patriot, if present, was

silent. From a corner of the meeting-house there rose at last a man

with sparkling eyes, plainly dressed in butternut brown, who began

to speak in reply to the handsome young Tory, at first slowly and

with hesitation, but soon taking fire at his own thoughts, he spoke

fluently, in a strain of natural eloquence, which gained him the ear

and applause of the assembly. A delegate from Worcester, who sat near

Mr. Bliss, noticed that the Tory was discomposed, biting his lip,

frowning, and pounding with the heel of his silver-buckled shoe. "Who

is the speaker?" he asked of Bliss. "Hosmer, a Concord mechanic," was

the scornful reply. "Then how does he come by his English?" "Oh, he

has an old mother at home, who sits in her chimney-corner and reads and repeats poetry all day long;" adding in a moment, "He is the most dangerous rebel in Concord, for he has all the young men at his back, and where he leads the way they will surely follow."