Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers/Introductory Note

by Henry David Thoreau

INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

The character and opinions of Henry David Thoreau have for the most part been a stumbling-block to the judgment of his critics. As the early naturalists were puzzled to account for the peculiar structure of the bat, which did not readily adapt itself to their established system of classification, so the literary critics have been perplexed and baffled by the elusive qualities of this unique personality, who flits unclassified along the confines of civilization and wildness. One who was "bred to no profession; who never married; who lived alone; who never went to church; who never voted; who refused to pay a tax to the State; who ate no flesh, who drank no wine, who never knew the use of tobacco; and though a naturalist, used neither trap nor gun,"—it is evident that such a man must appear unreasonable and contumacious to those who have never seriously questioned the shibboleths of social order and respectability. If an individual finds himself in conflict with society, it is assumed to be the fault of the individual; he is perverse, or idle, or selfish, or cynical, and the duties of citizenship have not been rightly apprehended by him. Such is the common charge against Thoreau, who, as Professor Nichol had explained to us in his "American Literature," was "lethargic, self-complacently defiant, and too nearly a stoico-epicurean adiaphorist to discompose himself in party or even in national strifes." Thoreau was a "stoico-epicurean adiaphorist," or nearly so: such is the critical verdict on him. These are hard words (in more senses than one), and before acquiescing in them, it may be well to test their accuracy by reference to the life and writings of him to whom they are applied. On what social subjects was Thoreau an indifferentist, and on what was he not so? A study of his "Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers" will perhaps show him in a new light to those who know him only by Walden or the Diaries.

The facts of Thoreau's life can here be only summarized. He was born at Concord, Massachusetts, on July 12, 1817, being the third child of a worthy but unimaginative pencil-maker, of French extraction, whose father had emigrated from the Channel Islands to New England in 1773. Henry Thoreau was educated at Harvard University, where, though known as a sound classical scholar, he was looked upon by his class-mates as dull, phlegmatic, and unimpressionable. But after his return to Concord in 1838, there was a remarkable awakening of the energies that lay dormant and unsuspected in his mind, the immediate cause of this change being the quickening influence of Emerson and the rise of the transcendental school of thought. The presence of Emerson at Concord (he settled there in 1834) had the effect of transforming that quiet village into the centre of a social and philosophic movement which attracted many earnest thinkers; and among these "apostles of the newness," who preached an ideal simplicity both in life and art, there was none more single-hearted and resolute than Henry Thoreau.

The remainder of his life was spent in his native village or its neighborhood, varied by occasional brief visits to Boston or New York, and more lengthy excursions to Canada, the mountains of New Hampshire, the forests of Maine, and the sandy peninsula of Cape Cod. His thrifty, self-contented nature did not need the stimulus of travel, in the ordinary sense; it was at once his pleasure and his profit to find in Concord all the material of his thought. After a brief experience of school-keeping, he supported himself by pencil-making, land-surveying, and various odd pieces of handicraft, his singular aptness and dexterity enabling him to satisfy the few wants of his existence (for he deliberately minimised his wants in order to secure greater leisure and personal liberty) by a very small outlay of remunerative labour, and so to devote himself more freely to what he considered the real business of his life, the study of wild nature, which earned him the appropriate title of the "poet-naturalist." He died at Concord, in 1862, of pulmonary consumption, the result of a cold caught while botanizing in severe winter weather.

Thoreau's singular personality has thus been described by Emerson. "Henry was homely in appearance, a rugged stone hewn from the cliff. I believe it is accorded to all men to be moderately homely. But he surpassed sex. He had a beautiful smile, and an earnest look. His character reminds me of Massillon. One could jeopard anything on him. A limpid man, a realist with caustic eyes that looked through all words and shows and bearing with terrible perception!"^[1] "Thoreau was a Stoic," says G. W. Curtis,^[2] "but he was in no sense a cynic. His neighbors in the village thought him odd and whimsical, but his practical skill as a surveyor and in woodcraft was known to them. No man was his enemy, and some of the best were his fastest friends. But his life was essentially solitary and reserved. Careless of appearances in later days, when his hair and beard were long, if you had seen him in the woods, you might have fancied Orson passing by; but had you stopped to talk with him, you would have felt that you had seen the shepherd of Admetus' flock, or chatted with a wiser Jaques." The same writer has graphically described the characteristic rigour of Thoreau's personal manner—his "erect posture, which made it seem impossible that he should ever lounge or slouch, and which made Hawthorne speak of him as 'cast-iron,'" and his "staccato style of speech, every word coming separately and distinctly, as if preserving the same cool isolation in the sentence that the speaker did in society."

The most intimate of Thoreau's friends were Emerson, Ellery Channing, Alcott, Harrison Blake, Daniel Ricketson, and F. B. Sanborn, all of whom have expressed the strongest admiration for the nobility and purity of his genius. It has been his misfortune—or rather the misfortune of a later generation of readers—that his eccentricities have been magnified out of all due proportion by critics who have failed to apprehend the true key to his character. "I have myself walked, talked, and corresponded with him," says Colonel Wentworth Higginson,^[3] "and can testify that while tinged here and there, like most New England thinkers of his time, with the manner of Emerson, he was yet, as a companion, essentially original, wholesome, and enjoyable. Though more or less of a humorist, nursing his own whims, and capable of being tiresome when they came uppermost, he was easily led away from them to the vast domains of literature and nature, and then poured forth endless streams of the most interesting talk." As a lecturer—for lecturing was another occasional employment of this transcendental jack-of-all-trades—Thoreau is said to have been somewhat of an enigma to his audiences. It was not his purpose, as he himself tells in his essay on "Life without Principle," to deal merely in trivial and popular generalities, but rather to give utterance to his "privatest experiences," and, at the risk of wearying his listeners, to treat them to "a strong dose of himself."

The most vital of all Thoreau's convictions was his fixed, unalterable faith in individuality and self-reliance. Idealist though he was, he had a shrewd, practical cast of mind which made him keenly aware of the incongruities involved in many of the social schemes which were so abundantly put forward during the transcendentalist revival; it was not to co-operation that he looked for the regeneration of society, but to the efforts of one man—that is, of each man, developing and perfecting his own individual powers. His attitude on this point is well shown in the essay contributed to the Democratic Review in 1843, under the title of "Paradise (to be) Regained," a notice, ironical in tone, yet kindly withal, of a Fourierite volume which advocated a method of speedily realizing the millennium by means of co-operation and machinery. For the same reason, when a section of the transcendentalist party was occupied in organizing communities at Brook Farm and elsewhere, Thoreau stood resolutely aloof, preferring to achieve his independence by what was to him the surer and more congenial method of simplifying his own life. "As for these communities," he wrote in 1841, "I would rather keep bachelor's hall in hell than go to board in heaven. The boarder has no home. In heaven I hope to bake my own bread and clean my own linen."

It was this same individualistic tendency that led him to make his now famous retirement to the shore of Walden Pond, where, in 1845, he built himself a shanty, in which he lived for over two years, as has been inimitably related by him in the most characteristic and widely appreciated of his writings. It should be noted, however, that this sojourn in the woods, though perhaps the most striking episode of his career, was an episode only, and occupied but a tenth part of his mature life; it was simply a period of self-trial and communion with nature, in which he tested the soundness and efficacy of those intellectual weapons of which, as we shall see, he afterwards made brilliant use. It is therefore a misunderstanding, none the less complete because it is so common, to regard Thoreau as a cynical recluse, coldly indifferent to the interests and welfare of his fellow-men. He went to Walden, as he himself recorded, for a definite purpose, "to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles"; this purpose accomplished, he left the woods "for as good a reason as he went there." The further notion that the Walden experiment was designed to be "an entire independency of mankind," owes its origin not to Thoreau himself, but to the inventiveness of certain of his critics, who, being minded to prove him a fool, found it convenient to invest him gratuitously with the insignia of folly.

Thoreau's anarchist principles, which play so important a part in the "Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers," were a direct outcome of this natural individualism. When quite a young man, he had been brought into collision, as he tells us in his essay on "Civil Disobedience," with that power of which he always remained a sworn enemy—the State—his refusal to pay the church-rate, enforced by the Massachusetts Government on the members of the various religious congregations, being the cause of the disagreement.^[4] He also, like his friend Alcott, declined to pay the annual poll-tax, for which continued act of contumacy he was arrested in the autumn of 1845 (his first year at Walden), and lodged for a night in the gaol at Concord, a novel experience of which he has himself given us a characteristic description. The immediate cause of this withdrawal of allegiance on the part of one who was in reality American to the backbone in his sympathies and predilections was the iniquity, as he conceived it, of the war then being waged by the United States on Mexico, in pursuance of their policy of annexing Texas, and fostering territorial disputes–an iniquity which made him declare that under such a Government the only place for an honest man was in prison. "Henry, why are you here?" said Emerson, in astonishment, when he visited his friend in the village prison. "Why are you not here?" was the emphatic rejoinder. On this, as on other occasions, the required tax was paid on Thoreau's behalf by one of his friends, an arrangement against which he protested, but which he was presumably unable to prevent.

But though this policy of territorial aggression, and still more (as we shall see) the sanction given by Massachusetts to the institution of slavery, were the ostensible causes of Thoreau's rebellion against the State, it can hardly be doubted that a man of so individualistic a temperament must in any event have been placed in antagonism, in theory at any rate, to the existing form of government; and Thoreau has expounded his anarchist doctrines with considerable frankness in his vigorous essays on "Civil Disobedience" and "Slavery in Massachusetts." "I heartily accept," he says, "the motto 'that government is best which governs least'; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically." He unhesitatingly asserts the entire independence of the individual, in all matters where conscience is concerned, as opposed to those of mere expediency. "Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think we should be men first, and subjects afterwards. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right." Policy, he insists, is not morality. "What is wanted is men, not of policy, but of probity. . . . The fate of the country does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning." At the same time it must be noted that he admits that many reforms are needed, and while asserting anarchism as the ideal of the future, does not deny that wise legislation may be advisable in the present. What he demands is "not at once no government, but at once a better government."

Thoreau's anarchism is, in brief, the claim for the individual man of the right of free growth and natural development from within—the same claim that has been advanced in other words by Whitman, and Tolstoi, and Ibsen, and William Morris, and other prophets of democracy in the old world and the new. Such a belief does not indicate in Thoreau's case, any more than in the others named, a selfish indifference to the great questions that agitate mankind; on the contrary, there is evidence enough in this very essay on "Civil Disobedience" to convince any impartial reader of the earnest feeling by which the writer was inspired—even if he had not given further practical proof of his zeal for humanity in the course taken by him in the great party—or shall we call it national—strife of negro emancipation.

How should our "stoico-epicurean adiaphorist" care "to discompose himself" on the subject of negro-slavery, especially at a time when the mass of respectable citizens were fiercely opposed to abolition, and there was real danger in advocating so unpopular and revolutionary a cause? Yet Thoreau is seen to have been from first to last an ardent abolitionist; he was brought up in an atmosphere of abolitionism, his father's house at Concord being used as one of the meeting-places of anti-slavery agitators; and it is said that on the occasion of the great meeting addressed by Emerson at Concord, in 1844, Thoreau had rung the bell of the town hall—an act afterwards remembered by him with lively satisfaction.^[5] Furthermore, there is good reason to suppose that the hut at Walden was used as a station on that great "Underground Railroad," by which so many slaves were assisted in their flight from the southern States to Canada. Thoreau himself mentions "one real runaway slave, whom he had helped to forward toward the north star," and his friend and biographer, Ellery Channing, has recorded that "not one slave alone was expedited to Canada by Thoreau's personal assistance." It is difficult for English readers at this date to realize adequately what a storm of disapproval, and often of personal violence, had to be met and endured by the New England abolitionists of fifty years ago, when public feeling, even in the North, was strongly in favour of the maintenance of the "sacred rights of property" of the Virginian slave-bolder, and when the plea of humanity was contemptuously disregarded as irrelevant and impracticable.

In 1850, when the tide of opinion was already on the turn, the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law, which enabled the owners of escaped slaves to recover their living chattels from the free cities of the North, created intense indignation among the Massachusetts abolitionists,^[6] and led to rioting at Boston on the occasion of the rendition of Simms in 1851 and Anthony Burns in 1854. Thoreau deals with this question in his essay on "Slavery in Massachusetts," which was read as a lecture at Framingham on July 4th, 1854, and afterwards printed in the Liberator, the organ of abolition, which had been established by William Lloyd Garrison at Boston in 1831. In burning words, which retain their freshness and significance long after the details they treat of are forgotten, he denounces the selfishness and folly of those citizens of Massachusetts who could celebrate the national Independence Day a week after the rendition of an innocent man to slavery. "Now-a-days," he says, "men wear a fool's cap, and call it a liberty cap. I do not know but there are some who, if they were tied to a whipping-post and could get but one hand free, would use it to ring the bells and fire the cannons to celebrate their liberty. So some of my townsmen took the liberty to ring and fire. That was the extent of their freedom; and when the sound of the bells died away, their liberty died away also; when the powder was all expended, their liberty went off with the smoke." So, too, of the time-serving journals, which, in the heat of this contest between freedom and slavery, could deliberately subordinate the claims of justice to the claims of expediency. "When I have taken up this paper," says Thoreau, in reference to a Boston publication, "I have heard the gurgling of the sewer through every column."

Philosophical indifferentism, it will be seen, finds little place in these "Anti-Slavery Papers." Could the following passage, for example, have possibly been written by one who was selfishly indifferent to the duties of citizenship and humanity? "I have lived for the last month—and I think that every man in Massachusetts capable of the sentiment of patriotism must have had a similar experience—with the sense of having suffered a vast and indefinite loss. I did not know at first what ailed me. At last it occurred to me that what I had lost was a country. I had never respected the Government near to which I lived; but I had foolishly thought that I might manage to live here, minding my private affairs, and forget it. For my own part, my old and worthiest pursuits have lost I cannot say how much of their attraction; and I feel that my investment in life here is worth many per cent, less since Massachusetts last deliberately sent back an innocent man, Anthony Burns, to slavery."

It has been said by more than one critic that Thoreau was devoid of pity. It is instructive, in this connection, to read the words of one who happened to be present in the house of Thoreau's father on an occasion when a fugitive slave was in concealment there.^[7] "I sat and watched the singularly lowly and tender devotion of the scholar to the slave. He must be fed, his swollen feet bathed, and he must think of nothing but rest. Again and again this coolest and calmest of men drew near to the trembling negro, and bade him feel at home. He could not walk this day, but must mount guard over the fugitive, for slave-hunters were not extinct in those days."

The most brilliant of Thoreau's "Anti-Slavery Papers," and, indeed, the most impassioned of all his writings, is the "Plea for Captain John Brown." John Brown was first introduced to Thoreau by F. B. Sanborn, in the spring of 1857, when he visited Concord, and addressed a meeting of citizens in the Town Hall. "On the day appointed," says Mr. Sanborn,^[8] "Brown went up from Boston at noon, and dined with Mr. Thoreau, then a member of his father's family, and residing not far from the railroad station. The two idealists, both of them in revolt against the civil government because of its base subservience to slavery, found themselves friends from the beginning of their acquaintance. They sat after dinner discussing the events of the border warfare in Kansas, and Brown's share in them, when, as it often happened, Mr. Emerson called at Mr. Thoreau's door on some errand to his friend. Thus the three men met under the same roof, and found that they held the same opinion of what was then uppermost in the mind of Brown." Thoreau's admiration of the massive strength and earnestness of Brown's character was instant and unalterable. "He worshipped a hero in mortal disguise," says Channing, "under the shape of that homely son of justice; his pulses thrilled and his hands involuntarily clenched together at the mention of Captain Brown."

Two years and a half later, Brown was again in Concord, and started from that place on his final expedition to Harper's Ferry, where, after seizing the arsenal, he was overpowered and captured, on Oct. 18th, 1859, in an attempt to organize an insurrection among the Virginian slaves. From the first there was little doubt that his life would be the price exacted for this culminating act of boldness, which was virulently denounced by the almost unanimous voice of the American press, and was deprecated even by abolitionists as ill-considered and unseasonable. It was at this juncture that Thoreau came forward publicly with his "Plea for Captain John Brown," which was read in the Concord Town Hall on Oct. 30th, and again at Boston on Nov. 1st, and on each occasion was received with deep attention and respect by a crowded audience. It is an emphatic endorsement of Brown's action as entirely humane, rational, and right-principled—justified by the monstrous wickedness of the slave-holding system with which he was at war. "I shall not be forward," said Thoreau, "to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds in liberating the slave. I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable." The first public word spoken in defence of the hero-martyr of abolition, this essay is a worthy monument of the genius of both its subject and its author, men so unlike in many points of character and education, yet animated by the same intense hatred of cruelty and injustice.

"The Last Days of John Brown" is a written speech delivered at an anti-slavery meeting at North Elba, Brown's home and burial-place, in July, 1860. It was not read by Thoreau himself, but by the secretary of the meeting, who informed the audience that he had lately received the manuscript from the hand of its author as he was passing through Concord on his way to North Elba. This essay, which was written after Brown's execution on Dec. 2nd, 1859 (on which day a memorial service was held in the Concord Town Hall by Emerson, Alcott, Sanborn, Thoreau, and other abolitionists^[9]), is supplementary to the "Plea," and is of especial interest to students of Thoreau's character as clearly demonstrating the fallacy of regarding him as one whose affections were wholly devoted to nature to the exclusion of man. "For my part," he says, in reference to Brown's death, "I commonly attend more to nature than to man; but any affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects. I was so absorbed in him as to be surprised whenever I detected the routine of the natural world surviving still, or met persons going about their affairs indifferent." Here, at any rate, the charge of "stoico-epicurean adiaphorism" must be applied elsewhere than to Thoreau.

Thoreau's prophecy as to the momentous consequences of John Brown's martyrdom did not prove to be mistaken. "If this man's acts and words," he said, "do not create a revival, it will be the severest possible satire on the acts and words that do;" and within eighteen months from when these words were spoken, the civil war had commenced, and the northern armies were marching to the battlefield with John Brown's name as their watchword. By this time Thoreau himself had been struck down by his fatal illness; otherwise, as one who knew him has remarked, "there is no telling but what the civil war might have brought out a wholly new aspect of him, as it did for so many." Mr. Lowell, the most unsympathetic of all Thoreau's critics, has asserted that "while he studied with respectful attention the minks and woodchucks, his neighbors, he looked with utter contempt on the august drama of destiny, of which the curtain had already risen." No evidence whatever is adduced in support of this statement, and it is on the face of it inconceivable that Thoreau, most uncompromising of abolitionists, should have been indifferent to the events of the war by which the question of slavery was to be decided. "Was it Thoreau, or Lowell," asks Colonel Wentworth Higginson, "who found a voice when the curtain fell, after the first act of that drama, upon the scaffold of John Brown?"

Enough has now been said to show that the application of the name adiaphorist to Thoreau is mistaken and misleading, since he was very far from being regardless of the welfare of his fellow-countrymen or of mankind in general. It is a complete error to imagine that a man whose convictions are so opposed to those of the majority as to seem whimsical and quixotic is necessarily an indifferentist, or that a protestant, an individualist, a solitary, and a free-lance, like Thoreau, is one whit less earnest a citizen because he is not content to make the course of his life conform to the ordinary social groove; the real indifferentists are rather they who find it easier and more comfortable to swim with the tide, and to avoid placing themselves in antagonism to that "public opinion" which, in America, even more than in England, is so tremendous a power. The charge of indifferentism is therefore a perfectly vague and pointless one, unless it be shown that the indifference complained of relates to matters of real and vital import; to be unconcerned about trifles is one thing, to neglect matters of conscience is another. Now Thoreau, as we learn from the statements of those who knew him intimately, was absolutely indifferent to many things which the man of the world holds dear; he did not care for money, or personal comforts, or fine clothes, or success in business, or the innumerable cumbersome trappings, physical and intellectual, which are foolishly supposed, by those who have never tried to dispense with them, to be an essential part of modern civilization. It was his opinion that "a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone"; and his general attitude on this point may be gathered from that typical reply of his, when he was asked which dish he would prefer at table—"The nearest."

But in all cases where principle was at stake, Thoreau's will was as inflexible as the cast iron to which Hawthorne compared him; herein contrasting sharply with the mental and moral pliability of the ordinary member of society. "No man," he says, "ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience." In his fine essay on "Life without Principle," he re-enforces those salutary though unpopular lessons of integrity and hardihood which form the moral of Walden, pointing out, with all the incisiveness of speech and felicity of illustration for which his style is conspicuous, the follies and sophisms which underlie the worldly wisdom on which much of our civilized life is based—the useless toil which is dignified with the name of industry; the degradation and loss of freedom by which a so-called "independency" is too often purchased; the immorality of the various methods of trading and money-making, respectable or the contrary; the hollowness of much that passes as science or religion; and the ineptitudes and frivolities of social intercourse, which can corrupt and weaken the strength and sanctity of the mind. The conclusion of the whole matter brings us back to the lesson which Thoreau is never tired of repeating—the need of individuality and real personal development. "It is for want of a man," he tells us, in one of his epigrammatic, paradoxical utterances, "that there are so many men." Thoreau's gospel of social reform may perhaps be not unfairly summed up in one word—simplicity. He would have each individual test for himself the advantages or disadvantages of the various customs and appliances which have gradually been amassed in a complex and artificial state of society, and make sure that in continuing to employ them he does so from an actual preference, and not from mere force of habit and tradition.

It has been wittily said of Thoreau, by Dr. O. W. Holmes, that he was a would-be "nullifier of civilization, who insisted on nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end." But in reality there is no such conflict between simplicity of living and the higher civilization—indeed, a true refinement will never be realized until men have learned the wisdom and pleasure of the course which Thoreau inculcates. It is important to emphasize the fact that it is not civilization in general, but the particular vices incidental to civilization, against which his censure is directed. While recognising that the civilized state is preferable to the uncivilized, he yet maintains that the latter is free from certain evils by which the former is afflicted, and urges that "we may possibly so live as to secure all the advantage without suffering any of the disadvantage" of organized society. "To combine the hardiness of the savage with the intellectualness of the civilized man" was the problem to which Thoreau invited the attention of a self-indulgent and luxurious age, and in pursuing this course he did not scruple to avow his contempt for many of the pious fictions of conventional life. The "Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers," apart from their worth as literature, afford a valuable corrective of the erroneous notion that the man who preached this gospel of simplicity was unable to sympathize with the higher interests and aspirations of mankind. Not such was the opinion of those who had the best opportunity of judging him, as may be seen from the following memorial lines,^[10] which convey no empty panegyric, but a faithful tribute to the character of one of the justest and humanest of the real men of genius whom America has yet produced:—

"Much do they wrong our Henry, wise and kind,
   Morose who name thee, cynical to men.
 Forsaking manners civil and refined,
   To build thyself in Walden woods a den,—
 Then flout society, flatter the rude hind.
   We better knew thee, loyal citizen!
 Thou, friendship's all-adventuring pioneer,
   Civility itself wouldst civilize:
 While braggart boors, wavering 'twixt rage and fear,
   Slave-hearths lay waste and Indian huts surprise,
 And swift the Martyr's gibbet would uprear;
   Thou hail'dst him great whose valorous emprise
 Orion's blazing belt dimmed in the sky,—
 Then bowed thy unrepining head to die."

H. S. Salt.

THOREAU'S WORKS.

List of Original Editions.

(1) Published in Thoreau's lifetime:—

• "A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers." James Munroe, Boston, 1849.
• "Walden; or, Life in the Woods." Ticknor & Fields, Boston, 1854.

(2) Posthumous volumes:—

• "Excursions in Field and Forest," with Memoir by Emerson. Ticknor & Fields, Boston, 1863.
• "The Maine Woods." Ticknor & Fields, Boston, 1864.
• "Cape Cod."                  „             „           „      1865.
• "Letters to Various Persons." Ticknor & Fields, Boston, 1865.
• "A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers." Ticknor & Fields, Boston, 1866.
• "Early Spring in Massachusetts." Passages from the Journal. Edited by H. G. O. Blake. Houghton, Mifflin & Co, Boston, 1881.
• "Summer." Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, 1884.
• "Winter."           „           „          „          „      1888.

1. Recorded by C. J. Woodbury, Century Magazine, Feb., 1890.
2. Harper's Magazine, July, 1862.
3. "Short Studies of American Authors," Boston, 1888.
4. Thoreau had been brought up as a member of Dr. Ripley's Unitarian Church at Concord, but seceded in 1838, or soon afterwards. He was a pantheist in religious opinions, the only ritual which he attended being that of the "Sunday Walkers," or "Walden Pond Association," as it was jocosely styled by the villagers.
5. Samuel Hoar, a neighbour of Thoreau's at Concord, a man of senatorial rank, was sent, in 1844, by the State of Massachusetts, to South Carolina, to test the legality of the imprisonment of free negro sailors in southern ports. His inhospitable treatment by the South Carolina Government is referred to by Thoreau, pp. 34–35.
6. This was the occasion of Daniel Webster's apostasy from the anti-slavery cause. It is noticeable that Thoreau regarded Webster as a mere opportunist at an early period. See p. 47.
7. Moncure D. Conway, Fraser's Magazine, April, 1866.
8. "Memoirs of John Brown," 1878.
9. Referred to on p. 83.
10. A. Bronson Alcott's "Sonnets and Canzonets."