Henry D. Thoreau 6
Perpetuity, indeed, and hereditary transmission of everything that by
nature and good sense can be inherited, are among the characteristics
of Concord. The Heywood family has been resident in Concord for two
hundred and fifty years or so, and in that time has held the office
of town clerk, in lineal succession from father to son, for one
hundred years at least. The grandson of the first John Heywood filled
the office (which is the most responsible in town, and generally
accompanied by other official trusts) for eighteen years, beginning in
1731; his son held the place with a slight interregnum for thirteen
years; his nephew, Dr. Abiel Heywood, was town clerk from 1796 to
1834 without a break, and Dr. Heywood's son, Mr. George Heywood, was
the town clerk for thirty-odd years after March, 1853.
Of the dozen ministers who, since 1635, have preached in the parish
church, five were either Bulkeleys or Emersons, descendants of the
first minister, or else connected by marriage with that clerical line;
and the young minister who, in the year 1882, accepted the pastorate
of Rev. Peter Bulkeley, is a descendant, and bears the same name. Mr.
Emerson himself, the great clerk of Concord, which was his lay parish
for almost half a century after he ceased to preach in its pulpit,
counted among his ancestors four of the Concord pastors, whose united
ministry covered a century; while his grandmother's second husband,
Dr. Ripley, added a half century more to the family ministry. For this
ancestral claim, quite as much as for his gift of wit and eloquence,
Mr. Emerson was chosen, in 1835, to commemorate by an oration the two
hundredth anniversary of the town settlement. In this discourse he
said:--
"I have had much opportunity of access to anecdotes
of families, and I believe this town to have been the
dwelling-place, in all times since its planting, of pious
and excellent persons, who walked meekly through the paths
of common life, who served God and loved man, and never
let go their hope of immortality. I find our annals marked
with a uniform good sense. I find no ridiculous laws,
no eavesdropping legislators, no hanging of witches, no
ghosts, no whipping of Quakers, no unnatural crimes. The
old town clerks did not spell very correctly, but they
contrived to make pretty intelligible the will of a free
and just community."
Into such a community Henry Thoreau, a free and just man, was born.
Dr. Heywood, above-named, was the first town clerk he remembered, and
the one who entered on the records the marriage of his father and
mother, and the birth of all the children. He cried the banns of John
Thoreau and Cynthia Dunbar in the parish meeting-house; and he was the
last clerk who made this Sunday outcry.
He thus proclaimed his own autumnal nuptials in 1822, when he
married for the first time at the age of sixty-three. The banns were
cried at the opening of the service, and this compelled the town
clerk to be a more regular attendant in the meeting-house than his
successors have found necessary. Dr. Heywood's pew was about half-way
down the broad aisle, and in full view of the whole congregation,
whether in the "floor pews" or "up in the galleries." Wearing his
old-fashioned coat and small-clothes, the doctor would rise in his
pew, deliberately adjust his spectacles, and look about for a moment,
in order to make sure that his audience was prepared; then he made
his proclamation with much emphasis of voice and dignity of manner.
There was a distinction, however, in the manner of "publishing the
banns" of the white and the black citizens; the former being "cried"
in the face of the whole congregation, and the latter simply "posted"
in the meeting-house porch, as was afterwards the custom for all.
Dr. Heywood, from a sense of justice, or some other proper motive,
determined on one occasion to "post" a white couple, instead of giving
them the full benefit of his sonorous voice; but, either because they
missed the _éclat_ of the usual proclamation, or else felt humiliated
at being "posted like niggers in the porch," they brought the town
clerk to justice forthwith, and he was forced for once to yield to
popular outcry, and join in the outcry himself. After publishing his
own banns, and just before the wedding, he for the first time procured
a pair of trousers,--having worn knee-breeches up to that time, as
Colonel May (the father-in-law of Mr. Alcott) and others had thought
it proper to wear them. When Dr. Heywood told his waggish junior,
'Squire Brooks, of the purchase, and inquired how young gentlemen
put their trousers on, his legal neighbor advised him that they were
generally put on over the head.
Dr. Heywood survived amid "this age loose and all unlaced," as Marvell
says, until 1839, having practiced medicine, more or less, in Concord
for upward of forty years, and held court there as a local justice for
almost as long. Dr. Isaac Hurd, who was his contemporary, practiced
in Concord for fifty-four years, and in all sixty-five years; and Dr.
Josiah Bartlett, who accompanied and succeeded Dr. Hurd, practiced in
Concord nearly fifty-eight years; while the united medical service of
himself and his father, Dr. Josiah Bartlett of Charlestown, was one
hundred and two years.
Dr. Bartlett himself was one of the most familiar figures in Concord
through Thoreau's life-time, and for fifteen years after. To him have
been applied, with more truth, I suspect, than to "Mr. Robert Levet, a
Practiser in Physic," those noble lines of Dr. Johnson on his humble
friend:--
"Well tried through many a varying year,
See Levet to the grave descend,
Officious, innocent, sincere,
_Of every friendless name the friend_."
He said more than once that for fifty years no severity of weather
had kept him from visiting his distant patients,--sometimes miles
away,--except once, and then the snow was piled so high that his
sleigh upset every two rods; and when he unharnessed and mounted his
horse, the beast, floundering through a drift, slipped him off over
his crupper. He was a master of the horse, and encouraged that proud
creature to do his best in speed. One of his neighbors mentioned
in his hearing a former horse of Dr. Bartlett's, which was in the
habit of running away. "By faith!" said the doctor (his familiar
oath), "I recollect that horse; he was a fine traveler, but I have no
remembrance that he ever ran away." When upwards of seventy, he was
looking for a new horse. The jockey said, "Doctor, if you were not so
old, I have a horse that would suit you." "Hm!" growled the doctor,
"don't talk to me about _old_. Let's see your horse;" and he bought
him, and drove him for eight years. He practiced among the poor with
no hope of reward, and gave them, besides, his money, his time, and
his influence. One day a friend saw him receiving loads of firewood
from a shiftless man to whom he had rendered gratuitous service in
sickness for twenty years. "Ah, doctor! you are getting some of your
back pay." "By faith! no; the fellow is poor, so I paid him for his
wood, and let him go."
Dr. Bartlett did not reach Concord quite in season to assist at the
birth of Henry Thoreau; but from the time his parents brought him
back to his native town from Boston, in 1823, to the day of Sophia
Thoreau's death, in 1876, he might have supplied the needed medical
aid to the family, and often did so. The young Henry dwelt in his
first tabernacle on the Virginia road but eight months, removing then
to a house on the Lexington road, not far from where Mr. Emerson
afterwards established his residence, on the edge of Concord village.
In the mean time he had been baptized by Dr. Ripley in the parish
church, at the age of three months; and his mother boasted that he
did not cry. His aunt, Sarah Thoreau, taught him to walk when he was
fourteen months old, and before he was sixteen months he removed to
Chelmsford, "next to the meeting-house, where they kept the powder,
in the garret," as was the custom in many village churches of New
England then. Coming back to Concord before he was six years old,
he soon began to drive his mother's cow to pasture, barefoot, like
other village boys; just as Emerson, when a boy in Boston, a dozen
years before, had driven his mother's cow where now the fine streets
and halls are. Thoreau, like Emerson, began to go to school in
Boston, where he lived for a year or more in Pinckney Street. But he
returned to Concord in 1823, and, except for short visits or long
walking excursions, he never left the town again till he died, in
1862. He there went on with his studies in the village schools, and
fitted for Harvard College at the "Academy," which 'Squire Hoar,
Colonel Whiting, 'Squire Brooks, and other magnates of the town had
established about 1820. This private school was generally very well
taught, and here Thoreau himself taught for a while in after years.
In his boyhood it had become a good place to study Greek, and in
1830, when perhaps Henry Thoreau was one of its pupils, Mr. Charles
Emerson, visiting his friends in Concord, wrote thus of what he saw
there: "Mr. George Bradford and I attended the Exhibition yesterday at
the Academy. We were extremely gratified. To hear little girls saying
their Greek grammar and young ladies read Xenophon was a new and very
agreeable entertainment." Thoreau must have been beginning his Greek
grammar about that time, for he entered college in 1833, and was then
proficient in Greek. He must also have gone, as a boy, to the "Concord
Lyceum," where he afterwards lectured every winter. Concord, as the
home of famous lawyers and active politicians, was always a place of
resort for political leaders, and Thoreau might have seen and heard
there all the celebrated congressmen and governors of Massachusetts,
at one time and another. He could remember the visit of Lafayette to
Concord in 1824, and the semi-centennial celebration of the Concord
Fight in 1825. In 1830 he doubtless looked forward with expectation
for the promised lecture of Edward Everett before the Lyceum,
concerning which Mr. Everett wrote as follows to Dr. Ripley (November
3, 1830):--
"I am positively forbidden by my physician to come to
Concord to-day. To obviate, as far as possible, the
inconvenience which this failure might cause the Lyceum, I
send you the lecture which I should have delivered. It is
one which I have delivered twice before; but my health has
prevented me from preparing another. Although _in print_,
as you see, it has _not been published_. I held it back
from publication to enable me, with propriety, to deliver
it at Concord. Should you think it worth while to have
it read to the meeting, it is at your service for that
purpose; and, should this be done, I would suggest, as it
is one hour and three quarters long, that some parts should
be omitted. For this reason I have inclosed some passages
in brackets, which can be spared without affecting the
context."
It would hardly occur to a popular lecturer now to apologize because
he had delivered his lecture twice before, or to send the copy
forward, when he could not himself be there to read it.
Mr. Emerson began to lecture in the Concord Lyceum before 1834, when
he came to reside in the town. In October of that year he wrote to
Dr. Ripley, declining to give the opening lecture, but offering to
speak in the course of the winter, as he did. During its first half
century he lectured nearly a hundred times in this Lyceum, reading
there, first and last, nearly all the essays he published in his
lifetime, and many that have since been printed. Thoreau gave his
first lecture there in April, 1838, and afterwards lectured nearly
every year for more than twenty years. On one occasion, very early in
his public career, when the expected lecturer of the Lyceum failed to
come, as Mr. Everett had failed, but had not been thoughtful enough
to send a substitute, Henry Thoreau and Mr. Alcott were pressed into
the service, and spoke before the audience in duet, and with opinions
extremely heretical,--both being ardent radicals and "come-outers."
A few years after this (in 1843), Wendell Phillips made his first
appearance before the Concord Lyceum, and spoke in a manner which
Thoreau has described in print, and which led to a sharp village
controversy, not yet quite forgotten on either side.
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