The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches

by David Starr Jordan

THE LAST OF THE PURITANS.[1]

I have a word to say of Thoreau, and of an episode which brought his character into bold relief, and which has fairly earned for him a place in American history, as well as in our literature.

I do not wish now to give any account of the life of Thoreau. In the preface to his volume called "Excursions" you will find a biographical sketch, written by the loving hand of Mr. Emerson, his neighbor and friend. Neither shall I enter into any justification of Thoreau's peculiar mode of life, nor shall I describe the famous cabin in the pine woods by Walden Pond, already becoming the Mecca of the Order of Saunterers, whose great prophet was Thoreau. His profession of land-surveyor was one naturally adopted by him; for to him every hill and forest was a being, each with its own individuality. This profession kept him in the fields and woods, with the sky over his head and the mold under his feet. It paid him the money needed for his daily wants, and he cared for no more.

He seldom went far away from Concord, and, in a half-playful way, he used to view everything in the world from a Concord standpoint. All the grandest trees grew there and all the rarest flowers, and nearly all the phenomena of nature could be observed at Concord.

"Nothing can be hoped of you," he said, "if this bit of mold under your feet is not sweeter to you than any other in this world—in any world."

Although one of the most acute of observers, Thoreau was never reckoned among the scientific men of his time. He was never a member of any Natural History Society, nor of any Academy of Sciences, bodies which, in a general way, he held in not altogether unmerited contempt. When men band together for the study of nature, they first draft a long constitution, with its attendant by-laws, and then proceed to the election of officers, and, by and by, the study of nature becomes subordinate to the maintenance of the organization.

In technical scientific work, Thoreau took little pleasure. It is often pedantic, often bloodless, and often it is a source of inspiration only to him by whom the work is done. Animals and plants were interesting to him, not in their structure and genealogical affinities, but in their relations to his mind. He loved wild things, not alone for themselves, but for the tonic effect of their savagery upon him.

"I wish to speak a word for nature," he said, "for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, to regard man as an inhabitant, a part and parcel of nature, rather than as a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement; if so, I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization. The minister and the school committees, and every one of you, will take care of that."

To Thoreau's admirers, he is the prophet of the fields and woods, the interpreter of nature, and his every word has to them the deepest significance. He is the man who

"Lives all alone, close to the bone,
And where life is sweetest, constantly eatest."

They resent all criticism of his life or his words. They are impatient of all analysis of his methods or of his motives, and a word of praise of him is the surest passport to their good graces.

But the critics sometimes miss the inner harmony which Thoreau's admirers see, and discern only queer paradoxes and extravagances of statement where the others hear the voice of nature's oracle. With most literary men, the power or disposition of those who know or understand their writings is in some degree a matter of literary culture. It is hardly so in the case of Thoreau.

The most illiterate man I know who had ever heard of Thoreau, Mr. Barney Mullins, of Freedom Centre, Outagamie County, Wisconsin, was a most ardent admirer of Thoreau, while the most eminent critic in America, James Russell Lowell, does him scant justice. To Lowell, the finest thoughts of Thoreau are but strawberries from Emerson's garden, and other critics have followed back these same strawberries through Emerson's to still older gardens, among them to that of Sir Thomas Browne.

But, setting the critics aside, let me tell you about Barney Mullins. Twenty years ago, I lived for a year in the northern part of Wisconsin. The snow is very deep in the winter there, and once I rode into town through the snowbanks on a sled drawn by two oxen and driven by Barney Mullins. Barney was born on the banks of Killarney, and he could scarcely be said to speak the English language. He told me that before he came to Freedom Centre he had lived in a town called Concord, in Massachusetts. I asked him if he had happened to know a man there by the name of Henry Thoreau. He at once grew enthusiastic and he said, among other things: "Mr. Thoreau was a land-surveyor in Concord. I knew him well. He had a way of his own, and he didn't care naught about money, but if there was ever a gentleman alive, he was one."

Barney seemed much saddened when I told him that Mr. Thoreau had been dead a dozen years. On parting, he asked me to come out some time to Freedom Centre, and to spend a night with him. He had n't much of a room to offer me, but there was always a place in his house for a friend of Mr. Thoreau. Such is the feeling of this guild of lovers of Thoreau, and some of you may come to belong to it.

Here is a test for you. Thoreau says: "I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken to regarding them, describing their tracks, and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who have heard the hound and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind the cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves."

Now, if any of you, in your dreams, have heard the horse, or seen the sunshine on the dove's wings, you may join in the search. If not, you may close the book, for Thoreau has not written for you.

This Thoreau guild is composed, as he himself says, "of knights of a new, or, rather, an old order, not equestrians or chevaliers, not Ritters, or riders, but walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust."

"I have met," he says, "but one or two persons who understand the art of walking; who had a genius for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived from idle people who roved about the country in the Middle Ages and asked charity, under pretense of going 'à la Sainte Terre'—a Sainte-terrer, a Holy Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who go there are saunterers, in the good sense. Every walk is a kind of crusade preached by some Peter the Hermit within us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

"It is true that we are but faint-hearted crusaders, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearthside from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child, and friends; if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, you are ready for a walk."

Though a severe critic of conventional follies, Thoreau was always a hopeful man; and no finer rebuke to the philosophy of Pessimism was ever given than in these words of his: "I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of a man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. This, morally, we can do."

But it is not of Thoreau as a saunterer, or as a naturalist, or as an essayist, that I wish to speak, but as a moralist, and this in relation to American politics. Thoreau lived in a dark day of our political history. At one time he made a declaration of independence in a small way, and refused allegiance and poll-tax to a Government built on a corner-stone of human slavery. Because of this he was put into jail, where he remained one night, and where he made some curious observations on his townspeople as viewed from the inside of the bars. Emerson came along in the morning, and asked him what he was there for. "Why are you not in here, Mr. Emerson?" was his reply; for it seemed to him that no man had the right to be free in a country where some men were slaves.

"Voting for the right," Thoreau said, "is doing nothing for it; it is only expressing feebly your desire that right should prevail." He would not for an instant recognize that political organization as his government which was the slave's government also. "In fact," he said, "I will quietly, after my fashion, declare war with the State. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, or if one honest man in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to remain in this co-partnership, should be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. It matters not how small the beginning may seem to be, what is once well done is done forever."

Thoreau's friends paid his taxes for him, and he was set free, so that the whole affair seemed like a joke. Yet, as Stevenson says, "If his example had been followed by a hundred, or by thirty of his followers, it would have greatly precipitated the era of freedom and justice. We feel the misdeeds of our country with so little fervor, for we are not witnesses to the suffering they cause. But when we see them awake an active horror in our fellow-man; when we see a neighbor prefer to lie in prison than be so much as passively implicated in their perpetration, even the dullest of us will begin to realize them with a quicker pulse."

In the feeling that a wrong, no matter how great, must fall before the determined assault of a man, no matter how weak, Thoreau found the reason for his action. The operation of the laws of God is like an incontrollable torrent. Nothing can stand before them; but the work of a single man may set the torrent in motion which will sweep away the accumulations of centuries of wrong.

There is a long chapter in our national history which is not a glorious record. Most of us are too young to remember much of politics under the Fugitive Slave Law, or to understand the deference which politicians of every grade then paid to the peculiar institution. It was in those days in the Middle West that Kentucky blackguards, backed by the laws of the United States, and aided not by Northern blackguards alone, but by many of the best citizens of those States, chased runaway slaves through the streets of our Northern capitals.

And not the politicians alone, but the teachers and preachers, took their turn in paying tribute to Caesar. We were told that the Bible itself was a champion of slavery. Two of our greatest theologians in the North declared, in the name of the Higher Law, that slavery was a holy thing, which the Lord, who cursed Canaan, would ever uphold.

In those days there came a man from the West—a tall, gaunt, grizzly, shaggy-haired, God-fearing man, a son of the Puritans, whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower. A dangerous fanatic or lunatic, he was called, and, with the aid of a few poor negroes whom he had stolen from slavery, he defied the power of this whole slave-catching United States. A little square brick building, once a sort of car-shop, stands near the railway station in the town of Harper's Ferry, with the mountain wall not far behind it, and the Potomac River running below. And from this building was fired the shot which pierced the heart of slavery. And the Governor of Virginia captured this man, and took him out and hung him, and laid his body in the grave, where it still lies moldering. But there was part of him not in the jurisdiction of Virginia, a part which they could neither hang nor bury; and, to the infinite surprise of the Governor of Virginia, his soul went marching on.

[Illustration: John Brown.]

When they heard in Concord that John Brown had been captured, and was soon to be hung, Thoreau sent notice through the city that he would speak in the public hall on the condition and character of John Brown, on Sunday evening, and invited all to be present.

The Republican Committee and the Committee of the Abolitionists sent word to him that this was no time to speak; to discuss such matters then was premature and inadvisable. He replied: "I did not send to you for advice, but to tell you that I am going to speak." The selectmen of Concord dared neither grant nor refuse him the hall. At last they ventured to lose the key in a place where they thought he could find it.

This address of Thoreau, "A Plea for Captain John Brown," should be a classic in American history. We do not always realize that the time of American history is now. The dates of the settlement of Jamestown, and Plymouth, and St. Augustine do not constitute our history. Columbus did not discover us. In a high sense, the true America is barely thirty years old, and its first President was Abraham Lincoln.

We in the North are a little impatient at times, and our politicians, who are not always our best citizens, mutter terrible oaths, especially in the month of October, because the South is not yet wholly regenerate, because not all which sprang from the ashes of the slave-pen were angels of light.

But let us be patient while the world moves on. Forty years ago not only the banks of the Yazoo and the Chattahoochee, but those of the Hudson, and the Charles, and the Wabash, were under the lash. On the eve of John Brown's hanging not half a dozen men in the city of Concord, the most intellectual town in New England, the home of Emerson, and Hawthorne, and Alcott, dared say that they felt any respect for the man or sympathy for the cause for which he died.

I wish to quote a few passages from this "Plea for Captain John Brown." To fully realize its power, you should read it all for yourselves. You must put yourselves back into history, now already seeming almost ancient history to us, to the period when Buchanan was President—the terrible sultry lull just before the great storm. You must picture the audience of the best people in Massachusetts, half-sympathizing with Captain Brown, half-afraid of being guilty of treason in so doing. You must picture the speaker, with his clear-cut, earnest features and penetrating voice. No preacher, no politician, no professional reformer, no Republican, no Democrat; a man who never voted; a naturalist whose companions were the flowers and the birds, the trees and the squirrels. It was the voice of Nature in protest against slavery and in plea for Captain Brown.

"My respect for my fellow-men," said Thoreau, "is not being increased these days. I have noticed the cold-blooded way in which men speak of this event, as if an ordinary malefactor, though one of unusual pluck, 'the gamest man I ever saw,' the Governor of Virginia said, had been caught and was about to be hung. He was not thinking of his foes when the Governor of Virginia thought he looked so brave.

"It turns what sweetness I have to gall to hear the remarks of some of my neighbors. When we heard at first that he was dead, one of my townsmen observed that 'he dieth as the fool dieth,' which, for an instant, suggested a likeness in him dying to my neighbor living. Others, craven-hearted, said, disparagingly, that he threw his life away because he resisted the Government. Which way have they thrown their lives, pray?

"I hear another ask, Yankee-like, 'What will he gain by it?' as if he expected to fill his pockets by the enterprise. If it does not lead to a surprise party, if he does not get a new pair of boots or a vote of thanks, it must be a failure. But he won't get anything. Well, no; I don't suppose he could get four-and-sixpence a day for being hung, take the year around, but he stands a chance to save his soul—and such a soul!—which you do not. You can get more in your market for a quart of milk than a quart of blood, but yours is not the market heroes carry their blood to.

"Such do not know that like the seed is the fruit, and that in the moral world, when good seed is planted, good fruit is inevitable; that when you plant or bury a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up. This is a seed of such force and vitality, it does not ask our leave to germinate.

"A man does a brave and humane deed, and on all sides we hear people and parties declaring,' I didn't do it, nor countenance him to do it in any conceivable way. It can't fairly be inferred from my past career.' Ye need n't take so much pains, my friends, to wash your skirts of him. No one will ever be convinced that he was any creature of yours. He went and came, as he himself informs us, under the auspices of John Brown, and nobody else.'

"'All is quiet in Harper's Ferry,' say the journals. What is the character of that calm which follows when the law and the slaveholder prevail? I regard this event as a touchstone designed to bring out with glaring distinctness the character of this Government. We needed to be thus assisted to see it by the light of history. It needed to see itself. When a government puts forth its strength on the side of injustice, as ours, to maintain slavery and kill the liberators of the slave, it reveals itself simply as brute force. It is more manifest than ever that tyranny rules. I see this Government to be effectually allied with France and Austria in oppressing mankind.

"The only government that I recognize—and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army,—is the power that establishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice. What shall we think of a government to which all the truly brave and just men in the land are enemies, standing between it and those whom it oppresses?

"Treason! Where does such treason take its rise? I cannot help thinking of you as ye deserve, ye governments! Can you dry up the fountain of thought? High treason, when it is resistance to tyranny here below, has its origin in the power that makes and forever re-creates man. When you have caught and hung all its human rebels, you have accomplished nothing but your own guilt. You have not struck at the fountain-head. The same indignation which cleared the temple once will clear it again.

"I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in the majority? Would you have had him wait till that time came? Till you and I came over to him? The very fact that he had no rabble or troop of hirelings about him, would alone distinguish him from ordinary heroes. 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, called out of many thousands, if not millions. 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 as many more their equals in the country; for their leader, no doubt, had 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 greatest compliment their 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.

"When I think of him and his six sons and his son-in-law enlisted for this fight, proceeding coolly, reverently, humanely to work, for months, if not years, summering and wintering the thought, without expecting any reward but a good conscience, while almost all America stood ranked on the other side, I say again that it affects me as a sublime spectacle.

"If he had had any journal advocating his cause, any organ monotonously and wearisomely playing the same old tune and then passing around the hat, it would have been fatal to his efficiency. If he had acted in such a way as to be let alone by the Government, he might have been suspected. It was the fact that the tyrant must give place to him, or he to the tyrant, that distinguished him from all the reformers of the day that I know.

"This event advertises me that there is such a fact as death, the possibility of a man's dying. It seems as if no man had ever died in America before. If this man's acts and words do not create a revival, it will be the severest possible satire on words and acts that do.

"It is the best news that America has ever heard. It has already quickened the feeble pulse of the North, and infused more generous blood in her veins than any number of years of what is called political and commercial prosperity. How many a man who was lately contemplating suicide has now something to live for!

"I am here to plead his cause with you. I plead not for his life, but for his character, his immortal life, and so it becomes your cause wholly, and it is not his in the least.

"Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of the chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light. I see now that it was necessary that the bravest and humanest man in all the country should be hung. Perhaps he saw it himself. I almost fear that I may yet hear of his deliverance, doubting if a prolonged life, if any life, can do as much good as his death.

"'Misguided! Garrulous! Insane! Vindictive!' So you write in your easy chairs, and thus he, wounded, responds from the floor of the Armory—clear as a cloudless sky, true as the voice of Nature is! 'No man sent me here. It was my own promptings and that of my Maker. I acknowledge no master in human form.'

"And in what a sweet and noble strain he proceeds, addressing his captors, who stand over him.

"'I think, my friends, you are guilty of a great wrong against God and humanity, and it would be perfectly right for any one to interfere with you so far as to free those you willfully and wickedly hold in bondage. I have yet to learn that God is any respecter of persons.

"'I pity the poor in bondage, who have none to help them; that is why I am here, not to gratify personal animosity, revenge, or vindictive spirit. It is my sympathy with the oppressed and the wronged that are as good as you are, and as precious in the sight of God.

"'I wish to say, furthermore, that you had better, all of you people at the South, prepare yourselves for a settlement of that question, that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. The sooner you are prepared the better. You may dispose of me now very easily—I am nearly disposed of already,—but this question is still to be settled, this negro question, I mean; the end of that is not yet.'"

"I foresee the time," said Thoreau, "when the painter will paint that scene, no longer going to Rome for his subject. The poet will sing it; the historian record it; and, with the Landing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery, when at least the present form of slavery shall be no more here. We shall then be at liberty to weep for Captain Brown. Then, and not till then, we will take our revenge."

A few years ago, while on a tramp through the North Woods, I came out through the forests of North Elba, to the old "John Brown Farm." Here John Brown lived for many years, and here he tried to establish a colony of freed slaves in the pure air of the mountains. Here, too, his family remained through the stirring times when he took part in the bloody struggles that made and kept Kansas free.

The little old brown farmhouse stands on the edge of the great woods, a few miles to the north of the highest peaks of the Adirondacks. There is nothing unusual about the house. You will find a dozen such in a few hours' walk almost anywhere in the mountain parts of New England or New York. It stands on a little hill, "in a sightly place," as they say in that region, with no shelter of trees around it.

[Illustration: The John Brown Homestead, North Elba, N.Y.]

At the foot of the hill in a broad curve flows the River Au Sable, small and clear and cold, and full of trout. It is not far above that the stream takes its rise in the dark Indian Pass, the only place in these mountains where the ice of winter lasts all summer long. The same ice on the one side sends forth the Au Sable, and on the other feeds the fountain head of the infant Hudson River.

In the little dooryard in front of the farmhouse is the historic spot where John Brown's body still lies moldering. There is not even a grave of his own. His bones lie with those of his father, and the short record of his life and death is crowded on the foot of his father's tombstone. Near by, in the little yard, lies a huge, wandering boulder, torn off years ago by the glaciers from the granite hills that hem in Indian Pass. The boulder is ten feet or more in diameter, large enough to make the farmhouse behind it seem small in comparison. On its upper surface, in letters two feet long, which can be read plainly for a mile away, is cut the simple name—
JOHN BROWN.

This is John Brown's grave, and the place, the boulder; and the inscription are alike fitting to the man he was.

[Illustration: John Brown's Grave.]

Dust to dust; ashes to ashes; granite to granite; the last of the Puritans!

[1] Address before the California State Normal School, at San José, 1892.