PROLOGUE

A New Beginning


Early in August 1822, a Boston schoolmaster and his wife gathered up their four young children for a trip to the country. Their destination was Concord, sixteen miles west of the city and a four-hour journey by stage. The weather was perfect for the expedition, “so fine, clear and cool,” one newspaper noted, that the usual toll of deaths in the hot season was surprisingly light and the crops in the fields and orchards promised an abundant harvest. The children, ranging in age from nine to three, were undoubtedly excited by the open, rural landscape, so unlike their neighborhood atop Beacon Hill, with its continuous rows of houses and brick-lined streets. The highlight of this outing was not the farms under cultivation but rather a pond in the woods a mile from Concord center—a scene seemingly so solitary and untouched by man that it caught the imagination of the five-year-old boy in the little entourage and aroused a lifelong love of the wild. Nearly a quarter-century later he would remember that day as a turning point in his life. “That woodland vision for a long time made the drapery of my dreams,” Henry David Thoreau recalled not long after taking up residence by the shores of Walden Pond in the summer of 1845. “Some how or other it at once gave the preference to this recess among the pines where almost sunshine & shadow were the only inhabitants that varied the scene, over that tumultuous and varied city—as if it had found its proper nursery.” The encounter would prove fateful not just for the aspiring writer but for the place where he dwelled. It was a signal moment in the making of Concord, Massachusetts, into a literary landmark and of Thoreau, its native son, into an enduring force in American culture.1

In the summer of 1822, that visit to Walden was little more than an excuse for John Thoreau, age thirty-four, to get out of the city and escape his troubles. The father of four was at a low ebb in his fortunes. A native of Boston, he was the son of a self-made merchant of French Protestant origins from the Isle of Jersey, who had arrived in the colonial capital in 1773 and prospered in the Revolution. The sire’s story was the stuff of American myth. A mariner on a vessel that shipwrecked off the Massachusetts coast, Jean Thoreau showed up in Boston with little but his skills as a seaman, yet somehow, through wartime service on a privateer under the command of Paul Revere, he obtained the capital to enter trade in the new nation. His import house on Long Wharf in Boston harbor thrived in the 1790s; his home in the North End teemed with eight children. This upward course was upset by the death of his wife, and after remarrying a woman with ties to Concord, he relocated his family in 1800 to a house on the town common, only to die within a year. The orphans were left to the care of a new stepmother and the guidance of the court-appointed administrator of the paternal estate.2

John Thoreau, the eldest son and fourth child, spent his teenage years training to follow in his father’s footsteps and enter a countinghouse. His first store in Concord was ill-starred; launched in 1809, when he was just twenty-one, it soon fell victim to the pressures on American commerce in an Atlantic world at war. A second try, in the town of Chelmsford ten years later, succumbed to the Panic of 1819 and the ensuing depression. Amid these setbacks, in 1812 the unlucky merchant wed another newcomer to Concord, Cynthia Dunbar, and struggled to support their growing brood. For more than a decade he was in and out of the town, doing whatever was available to make ends meet. He peddled goods to Indians in Maine, clerked in others’ stores when he was not failing in his own, and farmed on his mother-in-law’s land. Nothing took. At thirty-five, he was reduced to instructing boys and girls in a Boston school not far from the former site of his father’s once-booming business. The summer outing to Walden in 1822 was surely a welcome distraction. In the splendor of the woods and pond, he could forget for a few hours his meager prospects in the city.3

His wife Cynthia’s family had also known better days. Mary Jones, her maternal grandmother, was born into the colonial elite of Weston, fifteen miles south of Concord. Her father, one of the largest landholders in Massachusetts Bay and among the most politically influential, resisted popular pressure and fought for king and country, as did six of his eleven adult sons. That action resulted in the loss of the family’s vast holdings and permanent exile for five sons in Canada. Grandmother Mary, who stayed behind, expressed her political sentiments by marrying men with misgivings about the Patriot cause. Her first husband, Harvard graduate Asa Dunbar, gave up a pulpit in Salem for a law office in Keene, New Hampshire, where he proved his loyalty sufficiently to be chosen selectman and town clerk. At his death in 1787, he left behind five minor children, including his one-month-old daughter Cynthia. Mary struggled to support her growing brood, keeping a tavern in Keene and then a boardinghouse in Boston, before marrying Capt. Jonas Minot, a substantial Concord farmer and once lukewarm Patriot, in June 1798 and settling into his homestead on the Virginia Road in the eastern quarter of the town. The union supported a genteel style of life for the Dunbars, but stepfather Minot was spending as much as he took in, and when he died in 1813, his estate afforded little ready money for the widow. Mary’s daughters had to rely on their manners and minds to make their way. Louisa Dunbar briefly won the affections of future senator Daniel Webster in a short-lived courtship; younger sister Cynthia found her life’s partner in the struggling John Thoreau.4

Ironically, Cynthia’s ne’er-do-well older brother gave her family a route back to Concord and the middle class. Charles J. Dunbar was legendary for barroom tricks and wrestling feats; he could toss his hat high in the air and catch it on his head without fail over and over again. But he possessed little knack for earning a living. It was to everyone’s surprise, then, that in October 1822 he finally did something useful. On a tour of the New Hampshire countryside, he stumbled upon gold—“black gold”—on a farm in the Lakes Region not far from the White Mountains. His find was a lode of “plumbago,” better known today as graphite, well suited to use in lead pencils. Dunbar readily grasped its commercial potential and with good reason. Though often on the road, he considered Concord home, and he was well aware that the town was the birthplace of American pencil making. Local cabinetmaker William Munroe had pioneered the infant industry, and after 1819 he steadily improved the technology, reduced its costs, and built the market. About the same time Dunbar was acquiring rights to the graphite in the Granite State, Munroe was advertising his ability to furnish all the pencils his countrymen could want and at a lower price than those long imported from Britain.5

That was no deterrent to Dunbar. Rather than supply the raw material to Munroe, he went into the business himself, with two Concord investors as partners. Within a few months the company was floundering for lack of a steady hand at the helm. The call went out to Dunbar’s brother-in-law to step in. In March 1823 John Thoreau returned with his family to Concord, rescued the enterprise, and made it his own. Munroe notwithstanding, there was room for more than one firm in the growing industry. Pencil making enabled Thoreau to obtain a fresh start in the town he had departed five years before and to stay there for good. Instead of importing and selling foreign commodities, he pursued a new strategy for economic success: producing high-quality items from domestic sources for the citizens of an extensive republic. What the father did with pencils, his literary son would do with books.6

John Thoreau returned to a community facing its own economic challenges. The small town of nearly eighteen hundred inhabitants in the early 1820s had been as buffeted by the ups and downs of the wider economy as had the aspiring merchant-turned-pencil-maker. In the first decades of the republic, America quickened with new motion, its trade expanding across an Atlantic world disrupted by revolution and war, its population spreading onto once-Indian lands across the Appalachians. Concord shared in the boom. From its farms flowed wagonloads of barreled beef and pork destined for West Indian plantations and oxcarts heaped with rye, hay, and wood to sustain the bustling seaports on the Massachusetts coast. The central village filled up with stores and taverns catering to rural customers with money to spend on the latest textiles and tableware, spices and lemons, rum and wine from abroad. Craft shops multiplied, and the area in the center known as the milldam, where waterpower was channeled to grind corn and rye into flour and to saw lumber into boards, took shape as a manufacturing district. It supported a little clock industry, which assembled timepieces in mahogany cases and equipped them with brass movements from the foundry across the road. The makers advertised their goods for shipment anywhere in the country.

The financial bubble burst abruptly at the close of 1807, as the Jefferson administration imposed an embargo on trade with the outside world. In the contracting economy, John Thoreau’s “yellow store” at the head of the common was doomed. An exodus of workingmen began; so many poured out that Concord registered a small loss of population in the census of 1810. The unsettlement continued into the War of 1812, though the suspension of commerce with Britain did give a boost to American manufacturers. Free from competition from cheap imports, local entrepreneurs devised substitutes. This was the moment when Munroe shifted from making clock cases to pencils; blacksmith Joshua Jones produced nails and wire. One of the earliest cotton mills in New England began operating along the Assabet River, in the western part of town. Protected by war and profiting from scarcity, these industrial start-ups faded with peace. The clockmakers departed; the cotton factory survived only by suspending production for a year and a half. Munroe looked yet again for new products to sell. In the uncertain times, people did the bookkeeping of their losses with imported pencils. By the early 1820s, the milldam was adrift and run-down. In a young nation that was doubling its population every twenty-five years, the ancient town of Concord, founded in 1635, was barely holding its own. Between 1790 and 1820 it grew by just 12 percent, well below the statewide increase of 38 percent. Concord was in need of a new direction to stave off further decline.7

Changes were stirring. The revival of pencil making in Concord was one sign of the economic expansion gathering force in the Bay State. In his address to the legislature at the start of 1823, Gov. John Brooks took pride in the advance of manufacturing; of the 149 companies chartered by the Commonwealth in recent years, with a capital exceeding $16 million, “nearly all” were in “successful operation.” The modern textile factories started at Waltham in 1814 and Lowell in 1823 put Middlesex County at the forefront of the industrial revolution. Located at the geographical center of the county, Concord felt the stimulus to enterprise and innovation. The modest mill on the Assabet became as capable of converting cotton into cloth as the more famous complex on the Merrimack. Half a mile downstream another establishment, begun in 1819, produced lead pipes for aqueducts. The town center hummed with the activity of William Whiting’s carriage works, Alvan Pratt’s gun shop, and James Adams’s “furniture warehouse.”8

Concord was well connected to wider markets. Long a hub of communications, the town was linked by highways east to Boston, west into the interior, and south to Hartford and New Haven. The most popular route to the coast, however, ran through Lexington and Medford to Charlestown, then across a toll bridge into the capital. It was far preferable to the Cambridge and Concord Turnpike, constructed with great hopes in 1803. The private toll road cut a straight path to the city, climbing up and down hills and passing through marshes. But its steep grades proved tough going for ox-teams pulling great loads of farm produce. In Concord the turnpike got off to an embarrassing start. One section of the road, crossing the wetlands along the mill brook, was built up, layer by layer, from planks of wood topped by piles of gravel. After a few days’ use, it sank out of sight, beneath seventeen feet of water. By the early 1820s the turnpike was so neglected, according to one wag, that it housed a “nest of young birds among the long grass in one of the ruts.”9

Townspeople could also take a water route to the coast via the Middlesex Canal, which joined the Concord to the Merrimack and Medford rivers in the late 1790s. It was suitable for freight such as wood, bricks, and iron ore, too heavy for overland carriage. Around 1812 Col. Amos Wood, whose farm lay along the Sudbury River, tried the experiment of floating “long flat boats of small draft,” laden with lumber, down the waters. The venture lasted only two or three years. An occasional canal boat could still be glimpsed a decade later, trailing an aura of romance in its wake. To young Henry Thoreau, the sight of a vessel “stealing mysteriously through the meadows and past the village” stirred a sense of wonder:

It came and departed as silently as a cloud, without noise or dust, and was witnessed by few. One summer day this huge traveller might be seen moored at some meadow’s wharf, and another summer day it was not there. Where precisely it came from, or who these men were who knew the rocks and soundings better than we who bathed there, we could never tell … They were a sort of fabulous rivermen to us.10

Enthusiasm for technological change spread to local farms. Starting in October 1820, the town played host to the annual fair of the Society of Middlesex Husbandmen and Manufacturers, founded to “promote improvements in agricultural knowledge” and to advance “the interests of manufacturers and mechanics.” Forget the antiquated customs of the past, its speakers urged; follow the lessons of science and the best practices of the day, as demonstrated by the winners of the yearly competitions. Local farmers vied for the cash prizes that went to the biggest crops, the largest livestock, and the best-kept fields, while manufacturers displayed the results of their mechanical ingenuity. Pencil maker Munroe led the way; he was the first person in Concord to join the new group. John Thoreau put his products to the test in the fall of 1823, just seven months after returning to town—and, remarkably, received a two-dollar premium “for a specimen of excellent Lead Pencils, manufactured from American Plumbago.” He became a member the next year.11

The agricultural society soon had allies in the cause of improvement. Knowledge was progressing in many fields, not just in husbandry, and to keep up with the advances, townsmen got together in 1821 and formed a social library, whose collections would provide access to “the useful and popular works of the day.” A private academy opened the next year with the purpose of offering a richer curriculum and better instruction than was available at the town’s grammar school. For those whose schooldays were over, a Debating Club began meeting to examine the pros and cons of various issues and initiatives. “Would the establishment of a Bank in this town be beneficial to the community?” The members considered this question at their first recorded session in November 1822, as a newly chartered Middlesex Bank was trying to raise enough capital to launch. These voluntary associations strove to foster a modern intellectual outlook: curious about the world, eager for the latest knowledge, critical of tradition, and hopeful of progress. Arguably, these were the mental habits essential to republican government and economic growth.

Not everyone agreed. A “Middlesex Rustic” objected to the arrogance of learned gentlemen presuming to lecture “worthy yeomen” on how to farm. Such “pompous agricultural declamations” constituted “a palpable indignity,” as “destitute … of the principles of farming as a Hottentot of civilization.” Others saw no reason for the households of farmers, mechanics, and laborers to alter their way of life. Why chase after the fashionable goods in growing profusion at local stores? On the Sabbath the meetinghouse was already filled with too many women bedecked in the popular taste, making “an ocean of ribbons and plumes.” Obliged to pay the bill for such unnecessary expenses, the mechanic should remember that his was “a life of care,” requiring unceasing “prudence and economy … If a mechanic would thrive, he must rise with the lark, go to bed with the whip-poor-will and eat the bread of carefulness.” Consumerism was a threat to his well-being. In competing agendas for the economy lay fundamental disagreements about how to live.12

* * *

In the early 1820s Concordians were living in the twilight of the Revolution. Most of the local heroes who had turned out on April 19, 1775, to confront the king’s troops at the North Bridge had gone to their rest in the town’s burial grounds or departed in quest of land and opportunity on New England’s frontiers and in the expanding West. But veterans of the War of Independence still guided the republic. James Monroe, the last of the Revolutionary fathers, sat in the White House; Continental Army officer John Brooks, a veteran of Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, and Saratoga, was in his eighth and final term as governor of Massachusetts in 1823. The eighteenth century was well represented in Concord’s seats of power. Reverend Doctor Ezra Ripley was celebrating his forty-fifth anniversary in the pulpit of the established Congregationalist church, his salary funded by the taxpayers. His secular counterpart, the physician Abiel Heywood, had served as selectman and town clerk since 1796. The two clerks, graduates of Harvard College, ministered to the townspeople in a distinctive style. Both continued to wear the knee breeches and high stockings of the colonial era well after every other man in town had discarded them for pantaloons. Then in 1822, when he was sixty-two, Squire Heywood astonished his neighbors by abruptly changing his life and his dress. In one burst of enthusiasm, he got married and put on pants. His new appearance was saved for the wedding day. In preparation, he nervously consulted a neighbor. How do you put these newfangled trousers on? The quick-witted advisor drolly replied that “he believed that people generally drew them on over their heads.” The elderly groom presumably learned by trial and error.13

The townspeople professed inordinate pride in their Revolutionary heritage and never lost an opportunity to assert Concord’s priority in the War of Independence. How could they forget? In their midst were thirty “surviving patriots” from the town’s famous day, rehearsing their “stories and traditions” in the taverns and stores to admiring audiences of young boys. So familiar was the presence of this aging band that the town did little to commemorate their glorious moment in the nation’s history. The Nineteenth of April came and went year after year without ceremony. Independence Day was the focus of patriotic celebration, and even that anniversary was observed intermittently. An 1822 effort to mark the “national Jubilee” never materialized, prompting Asa Biglow, editor of the Middlesex Observer, to rebuke his readers. “Shall we suffer it to pass unaccompanied by demonstrations of … joy?” Dare we “expose ourselves to the reproach of undervaluing this precious legacy of our forefathers?” The chastened townspeople got the message and honored July 4, 1823, with appropriate exercises, including a public dinner “under an awning near the field, rendered memorable by the events of the 19th of April, 1775.” But no monument stood on the sacred ground to distinguish the “scenes of British aggression and American resistance.” The North Bridge itself was gone. It had been pulled down in 1793, its planks recycled for a new crossing a few hundred yards downriver.14

While Concord took the past for granted, the town could not shed its hold. Even in 1823, local politicians were still carrying on the fights that had gripped the republic ever since Thomas Jefferson ousted John Adams from the presidency. Over the two decades of competition between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, the voters of Concord usually sided with the latter, though by narrow margins. By the early 1820s, most of the country had grown weary of the conflict, but not Massachusetts. In 1823 Federalists reignited partisan passions by nominating the aristocratic Harrison Gray Otis to succeed the retiring Brooks as governor. Despite the ongoing movement to set aside old divisions, no one in the opposite camp was willing to forgive Otis’s hard-line support for the Hartford Convention of 1815, which had sought to mobilize New England against the War of 1812. Republicans challenged him with another Continental Army veteran, William Eustis. The contest was conducted under a new constitutional provision extending suffrage in all Massachusetts elections to male taxpayers without regard to race. Any man, age twenty-one and older, qualified if he had resided in the state for at least a year and the town where he wished to vote for at least six months. So polarized were the voters that the editor of the local paper feared to take a stand. “Think you that we are so reckless of consequences as to lift our feeble voice in support of any man or measure when it cannot be done without peril to our list” of subscribers? Turnout in Concord soared by nearly half over the year before, from 170 to 250; roughly 70 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, as high as at the peak of the partisan struggle over “Mr. Madison’s War.” (John Thoreau arrived too late to qualify.) When the votes were counted, the Republican won handily, with Concord in the victor’s column by a margin of 60 to 40 percent.15

The eligible voters were not the only residents to be excited by the contest. Every spring the boys of Concord waited impatiently for the first Monday of April, when Election Day brought a school holiday. While the adult males were exercising the democratic right of suffrage, the youth organized a masculine competition of their own. Taking up their shotguns, they declared open season on birds. Anything with wings was a fair target, even if it hadn’t hatched from its shell. Points were assigned to every sort, with the fine discrimination of Peterson’s Guide: “The crow was considered the highest, afterward the hawk and down to the smallest; the eggs were counted lowest.” Dividing into two teams, the boys raced into the woods on their mission of avian doom. At an appointed time, they reassembled, displaying their “ill-gotten trophies” in numerous bloody heaps. The victors proved their prowess as future hunters and farmers. Crows damaged crops; ducks and pheasants supplied food. In pursuit of such fowl, the hunt was practical preparation for life on the farm and in the woods. But killing hawks or destroying eggs exceeded any useful purpose, except to express an adolescent urge to absolute power. On Election Day, winning candidates eliminated rivals and captured office, relying upon ballots, rather than bullets, to accomplish their will. In emulation of the adult world they would someday join, the schoolboys employed the only weapons at hand—deadly shotguns—and enacted their own exercises of power. Combining camaraderie, competition, and cruelty, the day’s events were a dress rehearsal for adulthood in the male republic of violence.16

The murderous ritual no longer went unquestioned. Following the vote for governor, a little debate erupted in the Middlesex Observer about the practice. A writer styling himself “Humanitas” condemned the wanton killing of “innocent and harmless birds.” What kind of person could look on such conduct with indifference? One reader was not ashamed to admit the pleasure he enjoyed in “taking a partridge on the wing.” The sport of hunting, he insisted, encouraged “cheerfulness, health and soundness of nerve,” in sharp contrast to the “sickly sensibility” that “Humanitas” had evidently absorbed from “some boarding school Miss.” In this war of words, the newspaper’s editor, Asa Biglow, urged an end to the annual bird hunt on both practical and moral grounds. The reckless destruction of avian life, he argued, was no good for farming. It eliminated the natural predators of the insects and vermin that damaged crops. It led to disastrous accidents, as children raced through the woods with firearms and “in very many instances filled the hearts of parents with the deepest anguish.” Worst of all, the competition blunted the “finer feelings of our nature.” If a child could exult over his bloody pile, heedless of the “last agonies” of his victims, would he not grow up “indifferent” to the needs of others and learn to set aside those “sympathies and affections” that are the “cement of society”?17

A new cultural outlook was on the rise. It took aim at a wide variety of targets, rooted in customs inherited from previous generations. Its enemies were inefficiency, ignorance, and inhumanity. Its immediate campaigns would push for better schools, broader diffusion of knowledge, more productive farms, and kinder treatment of the dependent and the poor. It would eventually inspire a crusade against slavery. But the prospects of such progress depended on who led not only the government but also society at large.


Copyright © 2021 by Robert A. Gross