Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
Garrison. Even though he might wash his hands of society, the cries of
those who suffered injustice followed him, and when the Fugitive Slave
Law passed, it robbed him of his peace, destroying his pleasure in
wonted things. The slave hunters were in Boston streets, and justice
in the person of Commissioner Loring was sending Anthony Burns back to
slavery. As he contemplated the spectacle his wrath against a coercive
government flamed up. “My thoughts are murder to the state,” he
complained bitterly, “and involuntarily go plotting against her.”
I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, and
Americans only at a late and convenient hour.... I hear a good deal
said about trampling this law under foot. Why, one need not go out
of his way to do that. This law rises not to the level of the head
or the reason; its natural habitat is in the dirt. It was born and
bred, and has its life, only in the dust and mire, on a level with
the feet; and he who walks with freedom, and does not with Hindoo
mercy avoid treading on every venomous reptile, will inevitably
tread on it, and so trample it under foot,--and Webster, its
maker, like the dirt-bug and its ball. (“Slavery in Massachusetts,”
in _Works_, Vol. X.)
The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make
the law free. They are the lovers of law and order who observe the
law when the government breaks it.
Thoreau was a stern judge, and he held his age in low esteem. His
Concord neighbors seemed to him poor fellows with too little spirit to
be free men; they were the raw material of standing armies, militia,
jailors, constables, and the _posse comitatus_. And then one day into
the field of his vision came a plain Yankee, primitive and heroic,
John Brown of Ossawatomie. In the contemplation of his life and death
Thoreau felt a shock of new faith run like an electric current through
his veins. The age was no longer dead to him, for it had bred a man.
“I rejoice that I live in this age,” he exclaimed, “that I am his
contemporary.” He had found his hero--not in past times as Carlyle and
Emerson had done, but in the present and among his own Yankee kind. He
had talked with John Brown in Concord and recognized him as a primitive
idealist of rugged mold, a stern moralist who set justice above the
law. That this man should be so grossly misunderstood by lesser men, so
foully slandered, filled him with sorrow and with wrath also. “When a
noble deed is done, who is likely to appreciate it? They who are noble
themselves. I was not surprised that certain of my neighbors spoke of
John Brown as an ordinary felon, for who are they? They have either
much flesh, or much office, or much coarseness of some kind” (“The
Last Days of John Brown,” in _Works_, Vol. X, p. 241). His trial and
conviction Thoreau regarded as a judgment, not on John Brown, but upon
America; the lawyers and editors and politicians who judged him were
only convicting themselves.
His company was small indeed, because few could be found worthy to
pass muster. Each one who there laid down his life for the poor
and oppressed was a picked man, culled out of many thousands, if
not millions; apparently a man of principle, of rare courage, and
devoted humanity; ready to sacrifice his life at any moment for
the benefit of his fellow-man. It may be doubted if there were so
many more their equals in these respects in all the country,--I
speak of his followers only,--for their leader, no doubt, scoured
the land far and wide, seeking to swell his troop. These alone were
ready to step between the oppressor and the oppressed. Surely they
were the very best men you could select to be hung. That was the
best compliment this country could pay them. They were ripe for her
gallows. She has tried a long time, she has hung a good many, but
never found the right one before.
I do not believe in lawyers, in that mode of attacking or defending
a man, because you descend to meet the judge on his own ground,
and, in cases of the highest importance, it is of no consequence
whether a man breaks a human law or not. Let lawyers decide trivial
cases. Business men may arrange that among themselves. If they were
the interpreters of the everlasting laws which rightfully bind man,
that would be another thing. A counterfeiting law-factory, standing
half in a slave land and half in a free! What kind of laws for free
men can you expect from that? (“A Plea for Captain John Brown,” in
_Works_, Vol. X, p. 197.)
In Thoreau the eighteenth-century philosophy of individualism, the
potent liberalisms let loose on the world by Jean Jacques, came to
fullest expression in New England. He was the completest embodiment of
the _laissez-faire_ reaction against a regimented social order, the
severest critic of the lower economics that frustrate the dreams of
human freedom. He was fortunate in dying before the age of exploitation
had choked his river with its weeds; fortunate in not foreseeing how
remote is that future of free men on which his hopes were fixed:
The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this
year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched
uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out
all the muskrats ... such is the character of that morrow which
mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out
our eyes is darkness to us. There is more day to dawn. The sun is
but a morning-star. (_Walden._)
With the dawning of that day perhaps men will sit once more at the feet
of the ancient wisdom and fashion their lives upon the principle that
the soul is more than the meat and the body than raiment. Perhaps they
may even shape for themselves new heroes--“above and after all, the Man
of the Age, come to be called workingman.” He and his deeds are looked
down upon in our time--“It is obvious that none yet speaks to his
condition, for the speaker is not yet in his condition.” “Literature
speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future; how much
to the East, how little to the West” (“Thomas Carlyle and his Works,”
in _Works_, Vol. X, p. 118). One of the great names in American
literature is the name of Henry Thoreau. Yet only after sixty years is
he slowly coming into his own.
Footnotes
[458] Compare the following entry in his _Journal_ under date of March
26, 1842: “I must confess I have felt mean enough when asked how I was
to act on society, what errand I had to mankind. Undoubtedly I did
not feel mean without a reason, and yet my loitering is not without
defense. I would fain communicate the wealth of my life to men,
would really give them what is most precious in my gift.... I know
no riches I would keep back. I have no private good unless it be my
peculiar ability to serve the public.... This is the only individual
property.... It is hard to be a good citizen of the world in any great
sense, but if we do render no interest or increase to mankind out
of that talent God gave us, we can at least preserve the principal
unimpaired.”
Chapter IV • Theodore Parker • Transcendental Minister
Theodore Parker was described by one of his biographers as “the best
working-plan of an American yet produced,” and by a fellow minister as
“a conscience since Luther unsurpassed.” The two comments suggest still
another, that he was completely and adequately New England. Yankee
and Puritan contributed equally to his making. His rich and plastic
mind was two-sided: one-half was wholly English, practical, logical,
concrete, lucid; loving fact and tireless in its acquisition; master
of everyday affairs and competent in dealing with this world; the
other was emotional, mystical, idealistic, deeply and spontaneously
religious, living daily with God as a son with the Father, carrying
the sorrows of men in his heart and the wrongs of the world on his
conscience. One of the greatest of New England ministers, he was
shepherd as well as counselor, pastor as well as teacher. “I wish to
stand on the earth,” he said with true critical insight, “though I
would look beyond the stars. I would live _with men_, but think with
philosophers” (Weiss, _Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker_,
Vol. I, p. 115). The generous amplitude of his nature was too large
for the narrow walls of a church; he took all Boston for his parish,
all New England for his congregation. Amazingly active and vital, he
consumed whole libraries in his pursuit of knowledge. “His mind,”
says Weiss, “was like the republican idea itself; it could afford to
be hospitable, but could not afford to be exclusive” (_ibid._, Vol.
I, p. 178). Conversant with many fields of knowledge, with a memory
extraordinarily retentive, he was master of many languages--nineteen
or twenty, according to Thomas Wentworth Higginson--and at home in the
most abstruse subjects. He spent his vast energy with the prodigality
of Cotton Mather, and he achieved what Cotton Mather with his inbred
parochialism could not achieve, an intellectual cosmopolitanism that
judged Boston by broader standards than it could gauge.
A first-class fighting-man was this child of yeoman New England--none
braver, not even Garrison, none more effective; and yet
tender-hearted, sympathetic, with the shrewd common sense of his
homespun forebears. The son of a Lexington farmer and mechanic,
self-trained, endowed with indomitable will, he came of the soundest
stock in Massachusetts. His grandfather was captain of the Minute Men
who faced the British troops on Lexington Common in April, 1775; and
a conscious pride of ancestry broke out frequently in his speech.
The words uttered before the Ministerial Conference in May, 1851,
in justification of his repudiation of the Fugitive Slave Law, were
characteristic: “I am not afraid of men, I can offend them. I care
nothing for their hate, or their esteem. I am not very careful of my
reputation.” He then goes on:
I have had to arm myself. I have written my sermons with a pistol
in my desk,--loaded, a cap on the nipple, and ready for action.
Yea, with a drawn sword within reach of my right hand. This I
have done in Boston; in the midst of the nineteenth century; been
obliged to do it to defend the (innocent) members of my church,
women as well as men! You know that I do not like fighting....
But what could I do? I was born in the little town where the
first bloodshed of the Revolution began. The bones of men who
first fell in that war are covered by the monument at Lexington,
it is “sacred to Liberty and the Rights of Mankind”; those men
fell “in the sacred cause of God and their country.” This is the
first inscription that I ever read. These men were my kindred. My
grandfather drew the first sword in the Revolution; my fathers
fired the first shot; the blood which flowed there was kindred to
this which courses in my veins today. Besides that, when I write
in my library at home, on the one side of me is the Bible which my
fathers prayed over, their morning and evening prayer, for nearly
a hundred years. On the other side there hangs the firelock my
grandfather fought with in the old French war, which he carried
at the taking of Quebec, which he zealously used at the battle of
Lexington, and beside it is another, a trophy of that war, the
first gun taken in the Revolution, taken also by my grandfather.
With these things before me, these symbols; with these memories in
me, when a parishioner, a fugitive from slavery, a woman, pursued
by the kidnappers, came to my house, what could I do less than take
her in and defend her to the last? (_Additional Speeches_, Vol. I,
pp. 13-15.)
With his sensitive conscience visited by such memories--a child of ’76