This is part eight of a collection of excerpts from the journals of Henry David
Thoreau concerning law, government, man in society, war, economics, duty, and
conscience. This part covers Thoreau’s journals for
. For other parts, see:
These are based on the journals transcribed by Bradford Torrey and Francis
H. Allen in their The
Journal of Henry D. Thoreau
() and on the online journal transcripts at
The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau. Footnotes are mine unless otherwise noted.
Contents:
It is astonishing how far a merely well-dressed & good-looking man may go
without being challenged by any sentinel. What is called good Society will bid
high for such.
The man whom the state has raised to high office, like that of Governor for
instance, from some, it may be, honest but less respected calling, cannot
return to his former humble but profitable pursuits. His old customers will be
so shy of him. His ex-honorableness-ship stands seriously in his way, whether
he is a lawyer or a shopkeeper. He can’t get ex-honorated. So he becomes a
sort of state pauper, an object of charity on its hands which the state is
bound in honor to see through & provide still with offices of similar
respectability, that he may not come to want.
A man who has been president becomes the ex-president & can’t travel or
stay at home anywhere but men will persist in paying respect to his ex-ship.
It is cruel to remember his deeds so long. When his time is out, why can’t
they let the poor fellow go?
In my experience I have found nothing so truly impoverishing as what is called
wealth, i.e. the command of greater means than
you had before possessed, though comparatively few and slight still — for you thus inevitably acquire a more expensive habit of living, & even
the very same necessaries & comforts cost you more than they once did.
Instead of gaining, you have lost some independence, and if your income should
be suddenly lessened, you would find yourself poor, though possessed of the
same means which once made you rich. Within the last 5 years I have had the
command of a little more money than in the previous 5 years, for I have sold
some books & some lectures, yet I have not been a whit better fed or
clothed or warmed or sheltered — not a whit richer, except that I have been
less concerned about my living — but perhaps my life has been the less serious
for it, & to balance it I feel now that there is a possibility of failure.
Who knows but I may come upon the town1,
if, as is likely, the public want no more of my books, or lectures (which last
is already the case)? Before, I was much likelier to take the town upon my
shoulders. That is, I have lost some of my independence on them, when they
would say that I had gained an independence. If you wish to give a man a sense
of poverty, give him a thousand dollars. The next hundred dollars he gets will
not be worth more than ten that he used to get. Have pity on him; withhold
your gifts.
That is, become dependent upon the town’s charity for support.
I have seen many a collection of stately elms which better deserved to be
represented at the General Court1 than the
mannikins beneath — than the barroom and victualling cellar and groceries they
overshadowed.
When I see their magnificent domes miles away in the horizon, over intervening
valleys & forests, they suggest a village, a community, there. But, after
all, it is a secondary consideration whether there are human dwellings beneath
them; these may have long since passed away. I find that into my idea of the
village has entered more of the elm than of the human being. They are worth
many a political borough. They constitute a borough. The poor human
representative of his party sent out from beneath their shade will not suggest
a tithe of the dignity, the true nobleness & comprehensiveness of view,
the sturdiness & independence, & the serene beneficence that they do.
They look from town-ship to township. A fragment of their bark is worth the
backs of all the politicians in the union. They are
free-soilers2 in a peculiar
buttheir own broad sense. They send their roots north &
south & east & west into many a conservatives’ Kansas & Carolina,
who does not suspect theirsuch underground
railroads — they improve the subsoil he has never disturbed — & many times
their length, if the support of their principles requires it. They battle with
the tempests of a century. See what scars they bear, what limbs they lost
before we were born. Yet they never adjourn3; they
steadily vote for their principles, & send their roots further & wider
from the same centre. They die at their posts, & they leave a
tough butt for the choppers to exercise themselves about, & a stump which
serves for their monument.
They attend no caucus, they make no compromise, they use no policy. Their one
principle is growth. They combine a true radicalism with a true conservatism.
Their radicalism is not cutting away of roots, but an infinite multiplication
and extension of them under all surrounding institutions. They take a firmer
hold on the earth that they may rise higher into the heavens. Their
conservative heartwood, in which no sap longer flows, does not impoverish
their growth, but is a firm column to support it; & when their expanding
trunks no longer require it, it utterly decays. Their conservatism is a dead
but solid heartwood, which is the pivot & firm column of support to all
this growth, appropriating nothing to itself, but forever by its support
extendingassisting to extend the area of
their radicalism. Half a century after they are dead at the core,
they are preserved by radical reforms. They do not, like men, from radicals
turn conservative. Their conservative part dies out first; their radical &
growing part survives. They acquire new states & territories, while the
old dominions decay, and arebecome the habitation of
bears & owls & coons.
This journal entry was preceded by another, from
, in which Thoreau witnessed the
cutting down of a hundred-foot Elm that he later estimated to have been 132
years old. The following day, he wrote more on his feeling of mourning and
his exasperation that this feeling did not seem to be shared by the others in
Concord.
In Thoreau’s entry he
refined this to: “The elms, they adjourn not night nor day; they
pair not off.”
The papers are talking about the prospect of war between England &
America. Neither side sees how its country can avoid a long & fratricidal
war without sacrificing its honor. Both nations are ready to take a desperate
step, to forget the interests of civilization & christianity & their
commercial prosperity, & fly at each other’s throats. When I see an
individual thus beside himself, thus desperate, ready to shoot or be shot,
like a blackleg who has little to lose, no serene aims to accomplish, I think
he is a candidate for bedlam. What asylum is there for nations to go to?
Nations are thus ready to talk of wars & challenge one
another,1 because they are made up to such an
extent of poor, low-spirited, despairing men, in whose eyes the chance of
shooting somebody else without being shot themselves exceeds their actual good
fortune. Who in fact will be the first to enlist but the most desperate class — they who have lost all hope — & they may at last infect the rest.
The tensions between England and the United States, over such issues as
England’s colonial aspirations for Belize and the improper use of its
diplomatic presence in Washington to recruit mercenaries to help it fight the
Crimean War, were much in the press at this time.
Thoreau’s footnote: “Will it not be thought disreputable at
length, as duelling between individuals now is?”
I am sometimes affected by the consideration that a man may spend the whole of
his life after boyhood in accomplishing a particular design; as if he were put
to a special & petty use, without taking time to look around him &
appreciate the phenomenon of his existence. If so many purposes are thus
necessarily left unaccomplished, perhaps unthought of, we are reminded of the
transient interest we have in this life. Our interest in our country,
in the spread of liberty,
&c, strong
& as it were, innate as it is, cannot be as transient as our present
existence here. It cannot be that all those patriots who die in the midst of
their career have no further connection with the career of the country.
After Jules Gérard1 the Lion Killer had hunted
lions for some time, & run great risk of losing his life, though he struck
the lions in the right place with several balls (the lions steadily advancing
upon him even though they had got a death-wound) he discovered that it was not
enough to be brave & take good aim — that his balls, which were of lead,
lacked penetration & were flattened against the lions’ bones; and
accordingly he sent to France and obtained balls which were pointed with steel
& went through & through both shoulder blades. So I should say that
the weapons or balls which the Republican party2
uses lacked penetration, & their foe steadily advances nevertheless, to
tear them in pieces, with their well-aimed balls flattened on his
forehead.3
Jules Gérard ()
The party had only been around for two years at this point, and had
recently nominated its first presidential candidate, John Frémont.
Thoreau’s evocation of gunplay is more than metaphor; in
, pro-slavery
Border Ruffians
had attacked Lawrence, Kansas and
John
Brown replied with the
Pottawatomie
Massacre, which was followed by the
Sacking of
Lawrence by enraged Border Ruffians. News like this was making
abolitionists increasingly militant. On , Thoreau notes, without further comment: “Looked at a Sharp’s
rifle, a Colt’s revolver, a Maynard’s, and a Thurber’s revolver. The last
fires fastest (by a steady pull), but not so smartly, and is not much
esteemed.”
When I came forth, thinking to empty my boat & go a-meditating along the
river — for the full ditches & drenched grass forbade other routes, except
the highway (& this is one advantage of a boat) — I learned to my chagrin
that Father’s pig was gone. He had leaped out of the pen some time since his
breakfast, but his dinner was untouched. Here was an ugly duty not to be
shirked — a wild shoat that weighed but ninety to be tracked, caught, &
penned — an afternoon’s work, at least (if I were lucky enough to accomplish
it so soon), prepared for me, quite different from what I had anticipated. I
felt chagrined, it is true, but I could not ignore the fact nor shirk the duty
that lay so near to me: Do the Duty that lies nearest
you.…1
I was suggesting yesterday, as I have often before, that the town should
provide a stone monument to be placed in the river, so as to be surrounded by
water at its lowest stage, & a dozen feet high, so as to rise above it at
its highest stage; on this feet & inches to be permanently marked; &
it be made some one’s duty to record each high or low stage of the water. Now,
when we have a remarkable freshet, we cannot tell surely whether it is higher
than the one 30 or 60 years ago or not. It would be not merely interesting,
but often practically valuable, to know this.… It is important when building a
causeway, or a bridge, or a house even in some situations, to know exactly how
high the river has ever risen.…
— the tortoise
eggs are hatching a few inches beneath the surface in sandy fields. You tell
of active labors, of works of art, & wars the past summer; meanwhile the
tortoise eggs underlie this turmoil. What events have transpired on the
lit & airy surface 3 inches above them! Sumner knocked
down;1 Kansas living an age of
suspense.2 Think what is a summer to them!
How many worthy men have died and had their funeral sermons preached since I
saw the mother turtle bury her eggs here. They contained an undeveloped liquid
then, they are now turtles. June, July, & August — the livelong summer — what are they with their heats & fevers but sufficient to hatch a tortoise
in. Be not in haste; mind your private affairs. Consider the turtle. A whole
summer — June, July, & August — — are not too good nor too much to hatch a
turtle in. Perchance you have worried yourself, despaired of the world,
meditated the end of life, & all things seemed rushing to destruction; but
nature has steadily & serenely advanced with a turtle’s pace. The young
turtle spends its infancy within its shell. It gets experience & learns
the ways of the world through that wall. While it rests warily on the edge of
its hole, rash schemes are undertaken by men & fail. Has not the tortoise
also learned the true value of time? You go to India & back, & the
turtle eggs in your field are still unhatched. French empires rise or fall,
but the turtle is developed only so fast. What’s a summer? Time for a turtle’s
eggs to hatch. Not so is the turtle developed, fitted to endure, for he
outlives 20 French dynasties. One turtle knows several Napoleons. They have
seen no berries, had no cares, yet has not the great world existed for them as
much as for you?
On , two days after
Massachusetts Senator
Charles Sumner
had denounced the Kansas Border Ruffians and their supporters in Congress,
he was brutally attacked with a cane on the Senate floor by South
Carolina Senator
Preston
Brooks. It is also possible that Thoreau is referring to Colonel
Edwin Vose
Sumner who commanded the United States Army units who were ordered to
disrupt the alternate “free” Kansas legislature in July.
In Kansas, two competing legislatures — one pro-slavery and one
anti-slavery — were trying to determine whether Kansas would be admitted
to the union as a free or a slave state. The federal government
recognized the pro-slavery legislature, which had come into power after a
sham election in 1855. Meanwhile, advocates for each side were coming
into armed conflict, in what would come to be called
Bleeding Kansas.
I have come out this PM a cranberrying
chiefly to gather some of the small cranberry,
vac.
oxycoccus, which Emerson says is the common cranberry of the
N of Europe. Thus it was a small
object, yet not to be postponed, on account of imminent frosts,
i.e., if I would know this year the flavor of
the European cranberry as compared with the larger kind. I thought I should
like to have a dish of this sauce on the table at Thanksgiving of my own
gathering. I could hardly make up my mind to come this way, it seemed so poor
an object to spend the afternoon on. I kept foreseeing a lame conclusion — how
I should cross the Great Fields, look into Beck Stow’s, & then retrace my
steps no richer than before. In fact, I expected little of this walk, yet it
did pass through the side of my mind that somehow, on this very account (my
small expectation), it would turn out well, as also the advantage of having
some purpose, however small, to be accomplished — to let your deliberate
wisdom & foresight in the house to some extent direct & control your
steps. If you would really take a position outside the street & daily life
of men, you must have deliberately planned your course, you must have business
which is not your neighbors’ business, which they cannot understand. For only
absorbing employment prevails, succeeds, takes up space, occupies territory,
determines the future of individuals and states, drives Kansas out of
your head, & actually and permanently occupies the only desirable &
free Kansas against all border ruffians.1
The attitude of resistance is one of weakness, in as much as it only faces an
enemy. It has its back to all that is truly attractive. You shall have your
affairs, I will have mine. You will spend the
PM in setting up your neighbor’s stove,
& be paid for it; I will spend it in gathering the few berries of the
Vac.
oxycoccus which Nature produces here, before it is too late, and be paid
for it also after another fashion.…
…
If anybody else — any farmer at least — should spend an hour thus wading about
here in this secluded swamp, bare legged, intent on the sphagnum, filling his
pocket only, with no rake in his hand & no bag or bushel on the bank, he
would be pronounced insane & have a guardian put over him; but if he’ll
spend his time skimming & watering his milk & selling his small
potatoes for large ones, or generally in skinning flints, he will probably be
made guardian of somebody else.
My father asked John Le Grosse if he took an interest in politics & did
his duty to his country at this crisis. He said he did: He went into the
wood-shed & read the newspaper sundays. Such is the dawn of the literary
taste — the first seed of literature that is planted in the new country. His
grandson may be the author of a Bhagvat Geeta.1
Minott tells of a Gen.
Hull,1 who lived somewhere in this county, who, he
remembers, called out the whole division once or twice to a muster. He sold
the army under him to the English in the last war2 — though Gen
Miller3 of Lincoln besought to let him lead them — and never was happy after it, had no peace of mind. It was said
that his life was in danger here in consequence of his treason. Once at a
muster in front of the Hayden house, when there was a sham fight, & an
Indian party took a circuit round a piece of wood, some put green grapes into
their guns, & he, hearing one whistle by his head, thought some one wished
to shoot him & ordered them to disperse — dismissed them.
I see the old pale-faced farmer out again on his sled now for the
5000th time.
Cyrus Hubbard, a man of a certain
N.E. probity and
worth, immortal & natural, like a natural product, like the sweetness of a
nut, like the toughness of hickory. He, too, is a redeemer for me. How
superior actually to the faith he professes! He is not an office-seeker.…
Yesterday I walked under the murderous Lincoln Bridge, where at least 10 men
have been swept dead from the cars within as many years. I looked to see if
their heads had indented the bridge, if there were sturdy blows given as well
as received, and if their brains lay about. But I could see neither the one
nor the other. The bridge is quite uninjured even & straight, not even
the paint worn off or discolored. The ground is clean, the snow spotless,
& the place looks as innocent as a bank whereon the wild thyme grows. It
does its work in an artistic manner. We have another bridge of exactly the
same character on the other side of the town, which has killed one at least
to my knowledge. Surely the approaches to our town are well guarded. These are
our Modern Dragons of Wantley1 — Boucaniers of the
Fitchburg RR.2 they lie in wait at the narrow passes & decimate the
employees. The Company has signed a bond to give up one employee at this pass
annually. The Vermont mother commits her son to their charge, & when she
asks for him again the Directors say: “I am not your son’s
keeper.3 Go look beneath the ribs of the Lincoln
Bridge.” It is a monster which would not have minded Perseus with his Medusa’s
head.4 If he could be held back only 4 feet from
where he now crouches, all travellers might pass in safety & laugh him to
scorn. This would require but a little resolution in our legislature, but it
is preferred to pay tribute still. I felt a curiosity to see this famous
Bridge, naturally far greater than my curiosity to see the gallows on which
Smith5 was hung, which was burned in the old Court
House, for the exploits of this bridge are 10 times as memorable. Here too
they are killed without priest — the bridge, unlike the gallows, is a fixture.
Besides, the gallows bears an ill name, & I think deservedly. No doubt it
has hung many an innocent man, but this Lincoln bridge, long as it has been in
our midst & busy as it has been, no legislature, no body, indeed, has ever
seriously complained of, unless it was some bereaved mother, who was naturally
prejudiced against it. To my surprise, I found no difficulty in getting a
sight of it. It stands right out in broad daylight in the midst of the fields.
No sentinels, no spiked fence, no crowd about it, & you have to pay no fee
for looking at it. It is perfectly simple & easy to construct, & does
its work silently. The days of the gallows are numbered. The next time this
country has a Smith to dispose of, they have only to hire him out to the
Fitchburg RR Company.
Let the priest accompany him to the freight train, pray with him, & take
leave of him there. Another advantage I have hinted at — an advantage to the
morals of the community — that, strange as it may seem, no crowd ever
assembles at this spot; there are no morbidly curious persons, no hardened
reprobates, no masculine women, no anatomists there.
Does it not make life more serious? I feel as if these were stirring times, as
good as the days of the Crusaders, the Northmen, or the Boucaniers.6
Think what a pitiful kind of life ours is, eating our kindred animals! &
in some places one another. Some of us (the
Esquimaux)1 half whose life is spent in the dark,
wholly dependent on one or 2 animals not many degrees removed from themselves
for food, clothing, & fuel, & partly for shelter; making their
sledges “of small fragments of porous bones [of
whale]2, admirably knit together by thongs of
hide” (Kane’s last book3,
V1,
p 205), thus getting about,
sliding about, on the bones of our cousins.
Where Kane wintered in the Advance4 in
on the coast of Greenland, about 78½°
N
Lat., or further
N than any navigator
had been excepting Parry at Spitzbergen,5
he met with Esquimaux, & “the fleam-shaped tips of their lances were of
unmistakable steel” — “the metal was obtained in traffic from the more
southern tribes.” Such is trade.
What an evidence it is, after all, of civilization, or of a capacity for
improvement, that savages like our Indians, who in their protracted wars
stealthily slay men, women, & children without mercy, with delight, who
delight to burn, torture, & devour one another, proving themselves more
inhuman in these respects even than beasts — what a wonderful evidence it is,
I say, of their capacity for improvement that even they can enter into the
most formal compact or treaty of peace, burying the hatchet,
&c,
&c, &
treating with each other with as much consideration as the most enlightened
states. You would say that they had a genius for diplomacy as well as for war.
Consider that Iroquois,1 torturing his captive,
roasting him before a slow fire, biting off the fingers of him alive, &
finally eating the heart of him dead, betraying not the slightest evidence of
humanity; & now behold him in the council chamber, where me meets the
representatives of the hostile nations to treat of peace, conducting with such
perfect dignity & decorum, betraying such a sense of justness. These
savages are equal to us civilized men in their treaties, & I fear, not
essentially worse in their wars.
