The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches

by David Starr Jordan

"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.