The Transcendentalists and Their World

Metadata

Author: Robert A. Gross
Full Title: The Transcendentalists and Their World
Category: #books

Highlights

By her teenage years, she was absorbed in “religious conversation and reading” but hesitated to profess her faith for want of “clear evidence of regeneration.” Hers was an agonizing uncertainty that plagued a good many conscientious souls; it was partly to eliminate such uncalled-for suffering that Ripley’s church stopped asking would-be members for “spiritual relations.” “Whether [believers] can tell you when or how they were converted,” the parson explained, “is not material, so long as they now feel and manifest their concession to God.” Rebecca was a case in point, imbued with the divine spirit before she even knew it, and so virtuous that she had no “wicked dispositions to overcome, no vicious practices to renounce.” Eventually, at eighteen she gained the confidence to unite with the Charlestown church.
The church was particularly wanting in appeal to men; by the mid-1820s, it took in just one out of every ten male taxpayers. Altogether, six out of ten households contained no member of the church for which all were obligated to pay.
Money talked in Concord, but it did not monopolize the conversation.
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- Note: Good line!
By these arrangements, Concord’s large rural families—the elder Hunts had eleven children, ten of whom reached adulthood—sought to ensure financial security for young people coming of age in communities where only one or two sons could succeed to the homestead and the rest of the siblings would have to take up trades or professions, labor for others, marry well, and more often than not, move away.
When Clarissa became pregnant sometime in 1825, she and Daniel quickly tied the knot. The premarital conception stirred no scandal; since the mid-eighteenth century, sex had frequently preceded wedlock among rural youth impatient to assume the prerogatives of adulthood. Should pregnancy occur, a wedding would soon follow, sometimes under the gun of the bride’s father. Like the union of John and Cynthia Thoreau a decade before, the marriage of Daniel and Clarissa Hunt followed this script, though by the 1820s the laxity of the past was gradually giving way to a strict standard of propriety among the village middle class.
The Hunt farm could just barely feed all its occupants, human and animal alike, on its sixty acres. Nearly all of the homestead was being cultivated with grains, vegetables, fruits, and grasses for the Hunts, their cattle, and their swine. On the typical Concord farm of the day, seven out of ten acres were being “improved” for crops to feed both people and livestock; the Hunts were approaching nine out of ten. A mere eight acres of woodland lay in reserve for future expansion—an undesirable option, since it would deprive the household of needed lumber and fuel. Daniel Hunt had no choice but to press the ancient homestead to the limit.
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The shift from homegrown to store-bought textiles was a limited gain. It reduced the burden of domestic labor, especially for women, but it added to the family’s expenses while releasing little land on which to grow more food.
Caught in a tight bind between the family’s needs and the farm’s capacity, Hunt “kept things moving,” as his son William Henry recalled life on the homestead as late as the 1840s and early 1850s, “and provided liberally for the necessities,” but “there was nothing left for luxuries, and not very much for comforts.” At times family members must have cut their brown bread thin.13
Luckily, she could call on two brothers close by for help. Just a few minutes away, in the area known as “the Plains,” George and Jonathan Hildreth plowed her garden, mowed the meadow, and carried loads of rye and corn to the mill. Their oxen were at her service. The assistance did not come for free. As much as they cared for Eunice, the brothers expected to be compensated in kind. Their contributions created debts, painstakingly recorded in her account book and conscientiously repaid with diverse goods—butter, milk, and cheese from the dairy, pork and sausages from the pigpen—and with the labor of her teenage sons. Franklin and John were regularly on call from spring plowing to fall harvest; they hoed corn, mowed grass, shoveled gravel, laid stone walls, and carted manure. And not just for their uncles: the boys redeemed their mother’s obligations to the several neighbors with whom she “changed works.” Only daughter Laura was spared. By the early 1830s, none of the Wyman children were content to remain the family dogsbody. On coming of age, all promptly departed for new lives in the booming city of Lowell. Eunice Wyman carried on by herself for another decade without the benefit or burden of “changing works.”15
Clover was the miracle crop of the eighteenth century; it helped to drive the English agricultural revolution, and its benefits were touted far and wide to farmers in the new American nation. But English hay had disadvantages. Unlike the meadow crop, which nature provided for free, timothy and clover seeds had to be bought at the village stores. Sowing uplands with English grasses was labor-intensive; the land had to be plowed, manured, and seeded, with the burden falling on individual farmers rather than on neighbors working together in the Great Meadow. River meadows were replenished by seasonal flooding, which returned nutrients to the soil; English mowing, without enough fertilizer or lime, degraded the land over time. And although an acre of upland could produce a ton or more of excellent hay, that crop was vulnerable to the ravages of grasshoppers. English hay was thus not a sure winner for a hard-pressed farmer like Daniel Hunt, strapped as he was for labor and capital.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, butter was the chief means by which New Englanders enjoyed the produce of the dairy; they consumed between thirteen and fifteen pounds per capita each year. By the mid-1820s, demand must have been strong in Concord’s two villages; nearly 60 percent of taxpayers and probably 30 percent of households lacked a cow. In 1835 eight out of ten taxpayers, including John Thoreau that year, were without their own source of milk and butter. The Hunts helped meet the need by selling 350 pounds of butter annually.
“never hire a man to do a piece of work, which you can do yourself.” Self-reliance was the best course.51 That caution against depending on others posed a sharp challenge to the social norms and cooperative customs of old-style husbandry. Since the colonial period, the practice of farming had been enmeshed in the conduct of community. When Eunice P. Wyman and Jacob B. Farmer “changed works,” they did not merely assist in the completion of necessary farm tasks; they enacted a widely held commitment to “good neighborhood.” Agricultural reformers condemned the tradition as a waste of time. How often did farmers come over to their neighbors’ fields for the chance to gossip rather than pull weeds! “There are some,” complained Thomas’s Farmer’s Almanack in 1821, “who cannot bear to work alone. If they have a yard of cabbages to hoe, they must call in a neighbour to change work. Now this is very pleasant, but it tends to lounging and idleness, and neglect of business, for we cannot always have our neighbours at work with us.” Far better to do all essential chores on one’s own.
Even worse were the periodic gatherings of rural folk for the ostensible purpose of husking corn, paring apples, and raising barns. In the eyes of critics, they commonly degenerated into drunken frolics, which could cost the poor host as much in rum, biscuits, and “apple platter pies” and in damaged crops as he gained in shucked ears of corn and skinned fruit. By the 1820s, these seasonal events were going out of fashion, and when a contributor to the Concord Gazette in 1825 recalled wistfully the “joyous huskings” of the past, he was roundly denounced for peddling immorality in the press. To the champions of the new order of agricultural capitalism, labor and leisure no longer belonged together. In the realm of work, the priorities were productivity and profit. The chain of community was giving way to the claims of cash.
Having slipped in social status from their eighteenth-century forebears, the parents undoubtedly hoped to recover standing through culture. But learning had broader uses. Through the ideas and information disseminated in books and periodicals, lectures and debates, the Thoreaus and their neighbors distanced themselves from tradition and obtained the resources to forge a new way of life.
Intellectual innovation and social reform went together. As these pioneers of change added to their stock of knowledge, they set out not only to alter the economy and the society but also to remake themselves. They aspired to live on a higher and purer plane. One youth from an impecunious farm, after boarding for a while in the Thoreau home, was astounded by what he saw. The parents encouraged the curiosity of their children and fostered their aspirations: “Mrs. T loved Nature, and Mr. T Art, and one interpreted for the other.”
Reform separated cosmopolitans from locals, the one attuned to the latest discoveries in the wider world, the other faithful to the lore of previous generations, and each committed to its version of community. Temperance rallied the abstinent to associate in self-conscious sobriety and to exclude even the moderate drinker from their midst. In a community riven by factions and sects, the very advances of the age at once opened new prospects for personal fulfillment and weakened the bonds of interdependence still more. These changes would also prepare the social and cultural ground for the individualism of Emerson and Thoreau.
“Are the habits and manners of the present age more favorable to good morals and long life,” they asked in January 1824, “than were the habits and manners of our forefathers?” Debating the question, they detached themselves from tradition, surveyed their world critically, and prepared to be agents of change.32
The plan called for the establishment of “associations for mutual instruction in the sciences, and in useful knowledge generally.” The target audience was young men in need of “an economical and practical education,” who would come together for lessons in “Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Pneumatics, Chemistry, Mineralogy, Botany,” and “any branch of the Mathematics, History, Political Economy, or any political, intellectual, or moral subject.” The benefits of such instruction were not limited to the young; “rational and useful information” would be diffused through the community at large. For one thing, as skilled craftsmen applied scientific knowledge “to the domestic and useful arts, and to all the common purposes of life,” new ideas and inventions would multiply to ease the burdens and expand the comforts of everyday existence. For another, the associations would uplift “the moral and intellectual taste” of the community; instead of haunting taverns and risking “dissipation” and “ruin” for lack of anything better to do, young people would gain a wholesome and productive outlet for their leisure time.
- Note: Makerspace! Just as ambitious, just as misguided.
Holbrook wrote up his scheme, published it in an educational journal, and then took to the road in a campaign to promote his plan.
- Note: Don’t bother seeing if it works first
The lyceum movement got its start in Worcester County, Massachusetts, a hive of industry with hundreds of skilled craftsmen concentrated in more than a dozen villages, the very people most likely to appreciate Holbrook’s plan. In November 1826 the appropriately named town of Millbury, a center of arms manufacturing, was the first to sign on as “Branch No. 1 of the American Lyceum.” Within a year Holbrook claimed to have inspired the creation of fifty to sixty more.36
The Concord Lyceum was no mechanics’ institute. By the time it got going in January 1829, five months ahead of Boston, the group had fifty-seven charter members, nearly all of whom belonged to the propertied classes.
The Concord Lyceum, like its counterparts elsewhere, was essentially a lecture bureau and a debating club.
Most important, the lyceum was founded on the principle of mutual instruction. In both lectures and debates, members would do their part to advance knowledge for the benefit of both their fellows and themselves.
Most lyceum lecturers would have ended there. Not Emerson. For him, the great reward from studying nature was the sheer delight that springs from the discovery of truth: “the knowledge itself, is the highest benefit,” for it promised to “explain man to himself.” The aims of the lyceum, Emerson implied, were too low. The truths of science mattered for their own sake and not merely for the technological advances and the economic benefits they conferred. The speaker was rehearsing the argument he would make in the Transcendentalist manifesto Nature.53
The campaign did not merely seek out individuals to endorse the cause; it put considerable pressure on them to conform. Who dared to decline an invitation to subscribe? To refuse was to court a reputation as a potential drunkard. Some men, well known for their sobriety, would not be intimidated. William Munroe drank neither brandy nor rum, shunned the company of those who did, and starting in 1835, would not hire any man expecting toddy at noon. Rather than sign a temperance pledge, he counted on the power of personal example: he would be “a law unto himself.” Ripley appreciated his objections. “Men are not willing to be driven like children, and to be accused as intemperate,” he conceded in a temperance society report, “because they see no need of signing a pledge that they will never taste a drop of spirit nor keep it in their house.”
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But many in town saw nothing wrong with moderate consumption of any sort, especially wine, and others resisted the demand to commit the temperance society to an all-inclusive ban.78 The debate roiled the meetings of reformers. One critical observer condemned the movement’s own intemperance. It was bad enough that the activists slandered innocent individuals as drunkards for declining to embrace total abstinence or condemned the honest retailer as “a thief and murderer” for continuing to sell liquor at his store. Such violent rhetoric not only turned off potential supporters; it was also destructive of community. The inevitable tendency was “to unsettle society, to break up social and friendly intercourse; make men displeased with each other when they meet.” In their demands for conformity and their intolerance of dissent, the reformers were poisoning the town with a spirit far more deadly than brandy or rum. Partisans of all stripes could invoke the ideal of interdependence to support their cause.
Community was not so much declining as shifting forms. Less bound to inherited institutions and involuntary associations, the townspeople put a fresh premium on free choice and extended their connections beyond the town—and with good reason, since so few would live there all their lives. In the books and newspapers they read, the lectures they heard, the debates they conducted, the school curricula they approved, and the organizational affiliations they formed, the men and women of Concord integrated themselves ever more deeply into the wider world.
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The terms in which people thought about themselves, their communities, and the republic were changing slowly. Concordians were behaving differently, seeming strangers even in a small town, pulling apart in everyday affairs while expecting adherence to familiar norms. When conflict erupted, as it inevitably would in a world of so much change, neighbors could suddenly turn against one another with a fury abetted by all the internal improvements they had wrought in their lives.
The premium was now on innovation in the pursuit of self-interest. In the spirit of improvement, neighbors withdrew from inherited institutions and involuntary associations and sought common cause with fellows sharing their ideas or interests. The new organizations made for a more diverse community but also a more segmented one, with townspeople divided into enclaves of family and neighborhood, occupation and class, faction and sect, custom and reform.
But local authorities, determined to shield the newspaper-reading public from Kneeland’s atheism, charged the editor with violating a 1782 state law and committing the crime of blasphemy. The case was filed in January 1834, a week after the separation of church and state went into effect. If government could no longer require citizens to attend public worship and support a Christian church, it could at least protect them from impiety. Despite the new regime of voluntary religion, the custodians of the Commonwealth continued to police the boundaries of public discourse.
Every person, he reflected, has “a determination of character to a peculiar end”—a unique native “genius.” No one can define or prescribe that intrinsic “Idea” for anyone else. Each of us must discover it “in those days or moments” when we enjoy “the sincerest satisfaction” from life. In this light, Emerson concluded, “the object of Education should be to remove all obstructions & let this natural force have free play & exhibit its peculiar product.” Rather than drill knowledge into the child, the school should draw out the genius within and cultivate it for its own sake. Society would benefit in the process, though no one could say how in advance.
Unlike the school reformers of the day, Emerson put the development of the individual, rather than service to society, at the heart of his educational vision. “His own Culture,—the unfolding of his nature, is the chief end of man. A divine impulse at the core of his being, impels him to this.” The inner capacities of every person—the unique mix of dispositions and talents, aptitudes and aversions that form each personality—should be cultivated for their own sake. “The world exists to instruct the private man.”
Previous generations had led a collective existence; theirs was the story of states and societies. No more: the individual was taking center stage and pronouncing “the awful words I am.” “The former men,” Emerson explained, “acted and spoke under the thought that a shining social prosperity was the aim of men, and compromised ever the individuals to the nation. The modern mind teaches (in extremes) that the nation exists for the individual; for the guardianship and education of every man.” The insight stuck; though Emerson tinkered with the language, he repeated the point two years later at the start of his series “the Present Age,” and made it central to his “Historic Notes on Life and Letters in New England” some four decades later. And with good reason: the statement captured the ongoing revolution in values that was dissolving the bonds of interdependence and prompting individuals to withdraw from common institutions and pursue their own self-interest. “The social sentiments are weak,” Emerson elaborated in December 1839. “The spirit of patriotism is weak. Veneration is low … There is an universal resistance to ties and ligaments once supposed essential to civil society.” Put simply, America—or at least Emerson’s New England—had entered a new era: “the age of the first person singular.” It marked the passage from Ezra Ripley’s world to Waldo Emerson’s.
The one true path to reform was self-reform, a principle that benevolent associations ignored at their peril: “Never let a man be addressed by any motive that is unworthy of a man.” To “treat men as pawns and ninepins” in a greater cause was to propagate the very errors of the society reformers wished to redeem.41
Self-improvement was not just a means to a vocation or a route to upward mobility. To seek wealth and popularity as ends in themselves, as did Moore’s father and brothers, was “too sordid” an objective. “Was I sent here, merely to gratify worldly and sensual desires…?”The teenager longed for a higher purpose and found it in the noble project of character building. This was a lifelong labor of controlling passions, refining manners, strengthening moral and intellectual faculties, and conducting a Christian life. Unitarians were assiduous promoters of such “self-culture”; the influential Boston minister William Ellery Channing treated it as tantamount to spiritual conversion: “Perfection [is] the end of our Being.”
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Having relaxed the grip of patriarchy in the Revolutionary era, they now strove to rear citizens capable of self-government, both in the public arena and in the domestic sphere. To this end, the families of the commercial and professional classes, in particular, grew more child-centered, intent on nurturing the autonomy of every girl and boy. Or so they said. But not every father or mother could abandon so easily the desire to steer the life choices of their offspring. The resulting clash between parental expectations and filial inclinations resonated in Emerson’s summons to self-reliance.
Indeed, a man could lose the respect of his peers through excessive engagement with the ladies. In his Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard, Emerson famously jibed at the liberal clergy, emasculated by identification with the female majorities in the churches. These unhappy ministers were “addressed as women,” the speaker bluntly declared. In the parlors of the pious, they never heard “the rough, spontaneous conversation of men … but only a mincing and diluted speech. They are often virtually disfranchised; and … there are advocates for their celibacy.”
But her version of that faith led outward from self to society. A devotee of the Swedish mystic Swedenborg, she envisioned every human soul as “part of a great whole,” with “its own relation to the universe.” Each discovered its purpose through engagement with others—and not apart, as her husband insisted. “This doctrine that ‘none liveth to himself’—none can nor should—is universally true.” Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, to whom Lidian confided this belief a couple months before her wedding, wholeheartedly agreed. A Transcendentalist long before Emerson—she was probably the first New Englander to employ that term, in an essay of 1826—Peabody was inspired by German idealism and the British Romantics to develop her own theory of “the unfolding of the human soul.” In her view, a “social principle” lay at the core of every being, animating our spirits in contact with others. The “more man has learned of his nature, the more he has felt there is no solitary enjoyment.” The old New England ideal of interdependence, so antithetical to Emerson, was revitalized in this female model of Transcendentalism.
Emerson’s call for self-reliance helped identify the numerous obstacles in the way of the individual. But it offered little guidance on the ties that bound, the satisfactions and support to be enjoyed with others, and the enduring power of community in human lives.
“The less government we have,” he declared, “the better; the fewer laws, the less confided power.” Like the advocates of nonresistance, Emerson inclined to a philosophical anarchism. In his ideal world, government took its character from the individual and not the other way around. Thus the purpose of the state was to “educate the wise man,” and once that was done, it could wither away. Let the individual be a law unto himself.
Adding to Trinitarian woes was the incessant squabbling among members. The disputes turned not on doctrine—the underlying reason for the excommunication of church founder Joseph Green—but on the administration of church discipline. While the Unitarians exhorted parishioners to be good Christians, the orthodox went beyond words in the determination to steer one another on the straight and narrow path. A folder in the Trinitarian archives labeled “Grievances” overflows with complaints about members’ behavior. Women were scrutinized for their sexual conduct. Committees looked into unfounded rumors of adultery by one female member and excommunicated another on more solid evidence. No man was exempt from the church’s demand for ethics in the marketplace. The wheelwright George Hunstable was called to account in 1834 for creating “a public scandal” by laboring in his shop on the Sabbath. The struggling mechanic freely acknowledged his error, but what alternative was there? “He had had hard fortune & must work to get out of debt,” he pleaded; “his employers were particular, would have their work done when they wanted it done, or would withhold their custom.” The sinner was suspended from communion until he “confessed his wrong.” No sooner was Hunstable restored to good graces than he turned around and accused Josiah Davis of “falsifying” and “dishonest dealing,” perhaps in retaliation for the merchant’s role in exposing his Sabbath breaking.
Emerson was loath to engage in a moral protest—what he called a “holy hurrah”—for its own sake, as if to put his superior sensibility on parade. Yankees were far too prone to making such displays, which hung “like dead cats around one’s neck.”
His regrets went deeper still. He had broken his long-standing resolution to give voice only to those thoughts that were truly his own. Writing an open letter to Van Buren was not the result of his own inspiration. It came from his neighbors, and he took on the assignment out of a sense of duty. “It is not my impulse to say it & therefore my genius deserts me, no muse befriends, no music of thought or of word accompanies. Bah!” He had consented to be an amanuensis of outrage, channeling the passions of others through the tip of his quill pen. The result, in his opinion, was a superficial piece, full of wrought-up emotions and calculated for effect. Emerson vowed never to repeat the experience.35
Though Emerson did seek to reach Van Buren’s better self by appealing to moral sentiment, the letter spoke chiefly to politicians and reformers and not to the universal mind. Transcendentalism was at a disadvantage when it entered the political arena.36
Maria Thoreau, one of the original band of dissenters who had deserted Ripley to launch the new church, could not abide Garrison’s heresies. “I can no longer follow such a leader,” the devout woman explained. “He has mixed up everything with it, even the doing away of the Sabbath.”
The secession “thinned” the ranks of the antislavery society, drained the enthusiasm of activists, and weakened support in the wider community. Freeman editor Gourgas, though an early member of MCASS, was disgusted by the politicking. “The Abolitionists in their scramble for personal aggrandizement, for rule and mastery, have well nigh forgotten slavery and the slave,” he grumbled. “Their efforts seem now to be principally directed to abolishing each other.”
On the other hand, the antislavery campaign fell far short of the scholar’s ideal. Emerson was disgusted when MCASS activists declined to support Nathan Brooks for Congress after the Whig candidate would not commit to their program; as a result, the election went to the unworthy Democrat, Parmenter. Far from being ennobled by agitation of a moral question, the disputants confined themselves to petty calculations of short-term advantage: “Thus you cease to be a man that you may be an Abolitionist.”
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Rejecting all those routes, he held back, championed freedom of thought, and urged self-reform as the best route to improving the condition of humankind. What he craved was a fighting faith akin to the Puritanism of his ancestors. That spirit no longer animated the church, as he acknowledged in the divinity school address. It had deserted its old haunts and obtained new quarters in the social movements of the day. “What is this abolition and Nonresistance & Temperance,” he asked his Aunt Mary after Ezra Ripley’s death, “but the continuance of Puritanism, though it operate inevitably the destruction of the Church in which it grew, as the new is always making the old superfluous.”57
Nationally, the influx of immigrants from 1845 to 1854 raised the foreign-born share of the total population to an all-time high (14.5 percent), close to its peak in 1910 (14.7 percent) and unsurpassed even today.
On the eve of the railroad age, most farms in Concord preserved as much of the old agrarian regime as they could. A bare majority (53 percent) stuck with familiar crops and eschewed the new commodities in demand by urban consumers. Even those adapting to change aimed to do as much as possible for themselves. On Daniel Hunt’s farm opposite the Nathan Barrett place, “the old style of farming” provided for a family of eleven straining at the seams. Brown bread from the rye and corn fields was on the daily board, and it was spread with butter from the six cows in the barn. Virtually everything on the table—beef and pork, chicken and eggs, beans, applesauce and “green” sauce—was homegrown. But it took the all-out effort of everyone in the household to obtain a “competency” and to earn the money needed for goods at the store, including the cotton and woolen cloth that now came from the mills instead of the farm.
The Hunt operation was not self-sufficient; nor did it resist production for market. The proprietor had, after all, bought stock in the railroad, on which he could have shipped the fifty bushels of fruit he raised in 1845: apples and peaches from the orchard, cranberries from the river bogs. The main cash crop came from the dairy: five hundred pounds of butter annually, twice the town average. To sustain this output, Daniel Hunt arduously converted his wet meadows into arable fields capable of producing immense supplies of English hay. His wife and six daughters bore the heavier burden. Day in, day out, when the cows were “fresh,” the women milked, strained, churned, preserved, and packed butter for delivery to customers in town. “My mother prided herself on the quality of her butter,” recalled her youngest son, “and spared no pains to keep up that quality.”
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Once suppliers close to Boston had the market for grains and other bulky commodities to themselves. Let the trains in, and that advantage would disappear. Farms in the interior, where land was both cheaper and more fertile, would easily outsell the produce of “old Concord” and make its agriculture unprofitable. These concerns proved exaggerated. Barretts, Bulls, and Hunts survived and often thrived by adapting to the new circumstances, laboring more intensively (thanks to Irish immigrants), and…
In the fall of 1842, on a hike into the backcountry, Emerson was startled by the contrast between the attractive landscape, “very cultivated,” and the dreary farms and houses along the way. Hardly anyone was in evidence, even in distant fields. This was a depressed countryside seldom seen by those who stayed on the main-traveled roads. Emerson attributed the decay to a relentless process by which ancient homesteads were stripped of their most talented and ambitious young men. Whenever “any large brain is born in these towns,” he departed by age sixteen or twenty to seek his fortune in the city. The farm fell to “the inferior class of the people,” from whose incompetent management resulted “all these shiftless, poverty-struck pig-farms.” Depopulation and degeneration…
Economic inequality, rising since the early 1820s, reached new heights. In the mid-eighteenth century, as Concord was beginning to cope with population pressure on land, seven out of ten taxpayers had possessed farms of their own. A century later, as newcomers from Ireland, Nova Scotia, and Quebec were pouring in, seven out of ten taxpayers had no land at all. Structurally, the community was becoming more stratified than ever, its wealth consolidated at the top, its residents divided by class, ethnicity, and religion, even as egalitarian rhetoric swirled in popular politics and, perhaps with more serious purpose, in the abolitionist movement.34
Launched by Transcendentalist minister George Ripley in the spring of 1841, the experiment in cooperative living was founded on principles of individual liberty, social equality, and shared devotion to higher ideals. It addressed social ills that had long concerned Emerson: selfishness and materialism, the overspecialization of labor, dishonest competition, widening gaps between classes, separation from nature, and the sacrifice of individual potential to the necessity of earning a living.
But much as he admired Ripley’s plan “to combine the thinker and the worker, as far as possible, in the same individual” and to foster “a more simple and wholesome life” on the land, Emerson was unwilling to give up his study and leave behind his garden for the collective endeavor in West Roxbury. Far from inspiring him with a new vision of human possibility, the scheme depressed his spirits with its detailed blueprint for working and living in common. It was all “arithmetic & comfort” for the sake of providing rooms in a Transcendentalist hotel. The philosopher of self-reliance saw no reason to exchange “my present prison” for a “little larger” one, when the change would do nothing to fire up and free his soul. Just as he had eschewed affiliation with organized abolitionism, so he now steered clear of institutionalized utopia. To join the community would violate his bedrock principle: “one man is a counterpoise to a city,” and he must find salvation on his own. Thoreau expressed this objection more bluntly: “I think I had rather keep batchelor’s hall in hell than go to board in heaven.”
The tragedy of Martha Hunt was a perfect subject for a Hawthorne story. It told of the mismatch between individual and society; it exposed the false promises of Transcendentalism; it manifested the costs of social isolation.
Yet these parochial circumstances stirred the Transcendentalists’ muse and prompted their enduring achievements. Emerson embraced his origins and carried them to wider settings in a bid to form American identity on a New England model, based on Boston and Concord. Thoreau burrowed ever more deeply into Concord itself, and the more he probed its inhabitants, natural and human alike, the more he discovered universal truths. The two men acted locally but thought globally, and they inscribed their hometown into their ideal visions of America.
No one need feel guilty about abstaining from good causes. Collective efforts would inevitably fall short. The real answer to America’s ills lay not in blueprints for social reorganization but in individual striving for “a nobler life.”
Here was a spirit truly “free and uncalculating,” in sharp contrast to the “fraternity” of do-gooders Thoreau detested. Such sickly souls “mistake their private ail for an infected atmosphere.” If they suffer a stomach ache, they think all of society has indigestion. Instead of prescribing for others, let them cure themselves first. Only healthy individuals could be trusted to address the needs of humankind.
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Once he had envisioned himself in “an observatory among the stars” viewing “this beehive of ours” from the heavens and taking its measure. Now, living on the edge of town a mile from any neighbors, he could actually secure that critical distance. “I imagine it to be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life—though in the midst of an outward civilization,” he wrote two weeks into his stay. From that vantage he could shed the everyday assumptions and practices of Concord and get back to basics, to what was truly necessary for a fulfilling existence, physical, intellectual, and spiritual. “I wish to meet the facts of life—the vital facts … face to face. And so I came down here. Life! Who knows what it is—what it does?”57
filled the pages of his notebooks with observations and reflections that steadily turned his narrative into a searching work of personal exploration and social criticism.
Like Emerson’s New England, Thoreau’s Concord stood in for a republic gone off course and in need of spiritual renewal.
Rather, the writer’s retreat attracted curiosity for its defiance of a fundamental rule of social life in Concord. Nobody lived alone—nobody, that is, with any choice in the matter. In 1837, the year Thoreau graduated from college and returned home, only a dozen individuals in a town of two thousand lived alone. Nearly all of them were widows, without children at hand to care for them, such as Sarah Hollowell, sixty-five, eking out a scanty existence on the worn-out land Thoreau was all set to buy, and Eunice P. Wyman, an intrepid woman who had farmed successfully for several decades with the aid of two sons and a daughter until they scattered to the winds—and even she had brothers down the road. Just one man was in the same situation: Tommy Wyman (no kin to Eunice), whom the literary “hermit” of Walden was glad to succeed on the land. Had Thoreau stayed on that lot long enough to be enumerated on the 1850 federal census, he would have raised the roster of solitary souls in Concord that year to four.
Thoreau thus separated himself from a community that was supposedly in need of his talents for education and reform. Approaching thirty and still without a clear social role, the Transcendentalist epitomized the selfish, antisocial outlook Barzillai Frost had decried at the lyceum two years before—or so it looked to the neighbors. The unemployed schoolmaster, whose college education had been obtained at such sacrifice by his family, was a conundrum.
have come here to spend borrowed time, robbing your creditors of an hour.”
its ruling principle was not that “mankind may be well and worthily clad, but unquestionably that the corporation may be enriched.”
People pretended that they had “deliberately chosen” a way of life that was anxious and unfulfilling. Thoreau refused to believe it. To his eyes, the neighbors accepted their miserable condition because “they really think that there is no choice left.” Never doubting that “the whole ground of human life … [has] been gone over before us by our predecessors, both the heights and the valleys,” they trudged along in the well-worn path of tradition and adapted to whatever came their way.
This blinkered perspective—surrendering to circumstances without a fight—was what Thoreau would later call “quiet desperation,” but not yet. Instead, he hastened to remind the audience that they lived in an era of rapid change and that “no way of doing or thinking, however ancient,” was fixed. The proof was all about them in the reforms of the day: “Men have left off rum safely and imprisoning for debt, and chattel slavery in some places.” Those advances, so evident in Concord life, hinted at the untold possibilities of the human spirit: “Man’s capacities have never been measured, nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedent, so little has been tried.” Why not put this to the test and explore our true nature? “All change is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.” The lecturer shared in the perfectionist spirit of the age.
The lecturer had reason to expect a positive reception. In his view, “the mass of men … are discontented and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot and of the times, when they might improve them.” This was the target audience, to whom he would dispense the lessons of his experience. His message was also directed to those who performed their duty to society, day in and day out, with no satisfaction from following the rules, and to “that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all,” the idle rich, “who have accumulated dross but know not how to spend it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.”
Thoreau’s purpose was just the opposite. He meant to show that the so-called wisdom of the past was wrong, that people did not need to reduce their lives to constant work and worry and to the endless accumulation of goods. Let them pare their needs, curb their wants, and follow nature’s way. That was the path to freedom and serenity.
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Thoreau was disgusted by the “extremely artificial and unclean methods of cultivation” recommended by reformers. Their emphasis on manures had turned local fields “into pens or hot beds” for “the fattening of swine and cattle—and the pampering of depraved tastes and appetites.” The air of New England had once been sweet with the scent of fragrant native plants, but no more: “Our offence is rank; it smells to heaven”—an unnatural act he denounced in echo of Shakespeare.
Thoreau thereby realized his Transcendentalist ideal: his labor had become an end in itself and not merely a “degraded” means of robbing nature for profit. In the very course of making a living, he cultivated his higher self. Man and nature joined together in a sacred calling.
James J. Flink posed a question that stayed with me over the years: how did Puritan communalism give way to Yankee individualism?
Rather than look for a typical community, I embraced a distinctive one and explored how Concord was like other places, how it differed, and, most important, how and why it came to be in the forefront of important episodes in our national history.