"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.[1] 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
- ↑ 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.
