Henry D. Thoreau 5

Henry D. Thoreau 5

From that time, about 1823, till his death in 1859, John Thoreau led

a plodding, unambitious, and respectable life in Concord village,

educating his children, associating with his neighbors on those terms

of equality for which Concord is famous, and keeping clear, in a great

degree, of the quarrels, social and political, that agitated the

village. Mrs. Thoreau, on the other hand, with her sister Louisa and

her sisters-in-law, Sarah, Maria, and Jane Thoreau, took their share

in the village bickerings. In 1826, when Dr. Lyman Beecher, then of

Boston, Dr. John Todd, then of Groton, and other Calvinistic divines

succeeded in making a schism in Dr. Ripley's parish, and drawing

off Trinitarians enough to found a separate church, the Thoreaus

generally seceded, along with good old Deacon White, whose loss Dr.

Ripley bewailed. This contention was sharply maintained for years,

and was followed by the antimasonic and antislavery agitation. In

the latter Mrs. Thoreau and her family engaged zealously, and their

house remained for years headquarters for the early abolitionists

and a place of refuge for fugitive slaves. The atmosphere of earnest

purpose, which pervaded the great movement for the emancipation of the

slaves, gave to the Thoreau family an elevation of character which

was ever afterward perceptible, and imparted an air of dignity to the

trivial details of life. By this time, too,--I speak of the years from

1836 onward till the outbreak of the civil war,--the children of Mrs.

Thoreau had reached an age and an education which made them noteworthy

persons. Helen, the oldest child, born in 1812, was an accomplished

teacher. John, the elder son, born in 1814 was one of those lovely

and sunny natures which infuse affection in all who come within their

range; and Henry, with his peculiar strength and independence of

soul, was a marked personage among the few who would give themselves

the trouble to understand him. Sophia, the youngest child, born in

1819, had, along with her mother's lively and dramatic turn, a touch

of art; and all of them, whatever their accidental position for the

time, were superior persons. Living in a town where the ancient forms

survived in daily collision or in friendly contact with the new ideas

that began to make headway in New England about 1830, the Thoreaus had

peculiar opportunities, above their apparent fortunes, but not beyond

their easy reach of capacity, for meeting on equal terms the advancing

spirit of the period.

 

The children of the house, as they grew up, all became

school-teachers, and each displayed peculiar gifts in that profession.

But they were all something more than teachers, and becoming enlisted

early in the antislavery cause, or in that broader service of humanity

which "plain living and high thinking" imply, they gradually withdrew

from that occupation,--declining the opportunities by which other

young persons, situated as they then were, rise to worldly success,

and devoting themselves, within limits somewhat narrow, to the

pursuit of lofty ideals. The household of which they were loving and

thoughtful members (let one be permitted to say who was for a time

domesticated there) had, like the best families everywhere, a distinct

and individual existence, in which each person counted for something,

and was not a mere drop in the broad water-level that American society

tends more and more to become. To meet one of the Thoreaus was not the

same as to encounter any other person who might happen to cross your

path. Life to them was something more than a parade of pretensions, a

conflict of ambitions, or an incessant scramble for the common objects

of desire. They were fond of climbing to the hill-top, and could look

with a broader and kindlier vision than most of us on the commotions

of the plain and the mists of the valley. Without wealth, or power, or

social prominence, they still held a rank of their own, in scrupulous

independence, and with qualities that put condescension out of the

question. They could have applied to themselves, individually, and

without hauteur, the motto of the French chevalier:--

 

"Je suis ni roi, ni prince aussi,

Je suis le seigneur de Coucy."

 

"Nor king, nor duke? Your pardon, no;

I am the master of Thoreau."

 

They lived their life according to their genius, without the fear of

man or of "the world's dread laugh," saying to Fortune what Tennyson

sings:--

 

"Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel with smile or frown,--

With that wild wheel we go not up nor down;

Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great.

Smile, and we smile, the lords of many lands;

Frown, and we smile, the lords of our own hands,--

For man is man, and master of his fate."

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER II.

 

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH.

 

 

Concord, the Massachusetts town in which Thoreau was born, is to be

distinguished from the newer but larger town of the same name which

became the capital of New Hampshire about the time the first American

Thoreau made his appearance in "old Concord." The latter, the first

inland plantation of the Massachusetts Colony, was bought of the

Indians by Major Willard, a Kentish man, and Rev. Peter Bulkeley, a

Puritan clergyman from the banks of the Ouse in Bedfordshire, and was

settled under their direction in 1635. Mr. Bulkeley, from whom Mr.

Emerson and many of the other Concord citizens of Thoreau's day were

descended, was the first minister of the town, which then included the

present towns of Concord, Acton, Bedford, Carlisle, and Lincoln; and

among his parishioners were the ancestors of the principal families

that now inhabit these towns. Concord itself, the centre of this

large tract, was thought eligible for settlement because of its great

meadows on the Musketaquid or Meadow River. It had been a seat of

the Massachusetts Indians, and a powerful Sachem, Tahattawan, lived

between its two rivers, where the Assabet falls into the slow-gliding

Musketaquid. Thoreau, the best topographer of his birthplace, says:--

 

"It has been proposed that the town should adopt for its

coat of arms a field verdant, with the Concord circling

nine times round. I have read that a descent of an eighth

of an inch in a mile is sufficient to produce a flow.

Our river has probably very near the smallest allowance.

But wherever it makes a sudden bend it is shallower and

swifter, and asserts its title to be called a river. For

the most part it creeps through broad meadows, adorned with

scattered oaks, where the cranberry is found in abundance,

covering the ground like a mossbed. A row of sunken dwarf

willows borders the stream on one or both sides, while at a

greater distance the meadow is skirted with maples, alders,

and other fluviatile trees, overrun with the grape-vine,

which bears fruit in its season, purple, red, white, and

other grapes."

 

From these river-grapes, by seedling cultivation, a Concord gardener,

in Thoreau's manhood, bred and developed the Concord grape, which

is now more extensively grown throughout the United States than any

other vine, and once adorned, in vineyards large and small, the

hillsides over which Thoreau rambled. The uplands are sandy in many

places, gravelly and rocky in others, and nearly half the township

is now covered, as it has always been, with woods of oak, pine,

chestnut, and maple. It is a town of husbandmen, chiefly, with a few

mechanics, merchants, and professional men in its villages; a quiet

region, favorable to thought, to rambling, and to leisure, as well as

to that ceaseless industry by which New England lives and thrives.

Its population in 1909 approaches 5,000, but at Thoreau's birth it

did not exceed 2,000. There are few great estates in it, and little

poverty; the mode of life has generally been plain and simple, and

was so in Thoreau's time even more than now. When he was born, and

for some years afterward, there was but one church, and the limits of

the parish and the township were the same. At that time it was one of

the two shire towns of the great county of Middlesex,--Cambridge,

thirteen miles away, being the other. It was therefore a seat of

justice and a local centre of trade,--attracting lawyers and merchants

to its public square much more than of late years.

 

Trade in Concord then was very different from what it has been since

the railroad began to work its revolutions. In the old days, long

lines of teams from the upper country, New Hampshire and Vermont,

loaded with the farm products of the interior, stopped nightly at

the taverns, especially in the winter, bound for the Boston market,

whence they returned with a cargo for their own country. If a thaw

came on, or there was bad sleighing in Boston, the drivers, anxious

to lighten their loads, would sell and buy in the Concord public

square, to the great profit of the numerous traders, whose little

shops stood around or near it. Then, too, the hitching-posts in front

of the shops had full rows of wagons and chaises from the neighboring

towns fastened there all day long; while the owners looked over goods,

priced, chaffered, and beat down by the hour together the calicoes,

sheetings, shirtings, kerseymeres, and other articles of domestic

need,--bringing in, also, the product of their own farms and looms

to sell or exchange. Each "store" kept an assortment of "West India

goods," dry goods, hardware, medicines, furniture, boots and shoes,

paints, lumber, lime, and the miscellaneous articles of which the

village or the farms might have need; not to mention a special trade

in New England rum and old Jamaica, hogsheads of which were brought

up every week from Boston by teams, and sold or given away by the

glass, with an ungrudging hand. A little earlier than the period now

mentioned, when Colonel Whiting (father of the late eminent lawyer,

Abraham Lincoln's right-hand adviser in the law of emancipation,

William Whiting, of Boston) was a lad in Concord village, "there

were five stores and three taverns in the middle of the town, where

intoxicating liquors were sold by the glass to any and every body; and

it was the custom, when a person bought even so little as fifty cents'

worth of goods, to offer him a glass of liquor, and it was generally

accepted." Such was the town when John Thoreau, the Jerseyman, came

there to die in 1800, and such it remained during the mercantile days

of John Thoreau, his son, who was brought up in a house on the public

square, and learned the business of buying and selling in the store of

Deacon White, close by. Pencil-making, the art by which he earned his

modest livelihood during Henry Thoreau's youth, was introduced into

Concord about 1812 by William Munroe, whose son has in later years

richly endowed the small free library from which Thoreau drew books,

and to which he gave some of his own. In this handicraft, which was

at times quite profitable, the younger Thoreaus assisted their father

from time to time, and Henry acquired great skill in it; even to the

extent, says Mr. Emerson, of making as good a pencil as the best

English ones. "His friends congratulated him that he had now opened

his way to fortune. But he replied that he should never make another

pencil. 'Why should I? I would not do again what I have done once.'"

Thoreau may have said this, but he afterward changed his mind, for he

went on many years, at intervals, working at his father's business,

which in time grew to be mainly the preparation of fine-ground

plumbago for electrotyping. This he supplied to various publishers,

and among others to the Harpers, for several years. But what he did in

this way was incidental, and as an aid to his father, his mother, or

his sister Sophia, who herself carried on the business for some time

after the death of Henry in 1862. It was the family employment, and must be pursued by somebody.