"Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel with smile or frown,—
With that wild wheel we go not up nor down;
Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great.
Smile, and we smile, the lords of many lands;
Frown, and we smile, the lords of our own hands,—
For man is man, and master of his fate."
[CHAPTER II.]
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH.
Concord, the Massachusetts town in which Thoreau was born, is to be distinguished from the newer but larger town of the same name which became the capital of New Hampshire about the time the first American Thoreau made his appearance in "old Concord." The latter, the first inland plantation of the Massachusetts Colony, was bought of the Indians by Major Willard, a Kentish man, and Rev. Peter Bulkeley, a Puritan clergyman from the banks of the Ouse in Bedfordshire, and was settled under their direction in 1635. Mr. Bulkeley, from whom Mr. Emerson and many of the other Concord citizens of Thoreau's day were descended, was the first minister of the town, which then included the present towns of Concord, Acton, Bedford, Carlisle, and Lincoln; and among his parishioners were the ancestors of the principal families that now inhabit these towns. Concord itself, the centre of this large tract, was thought eligible for settlement because of its great meadows on the Musketaquid or Meadow River. It had been a seat of the Massachusetts Indians, and a powerful Sachem, Tahattawan, lived between its two rivers, where the Assabet falls into the slow-gliding Musketaquid. Thoreau, the best topographer of his birthplace, says:—
"It has been proposed that the town should adopt for its coat of arms a field verdant, with the Concord circling nine times round. I have read that a descent of an eighth of an inch in a mile is sufficient to produce a flow. Our river has probably very near the smallest allowance. But wherever it makes a sudden bend it is shallower and swifter, and asserts its title to be called a river. For the most part it creeps through broad meadows, adorned with scattered oaks, where the cranberry is found in abundance, covering the ground like a mossbed. A row of sunken dwarf willows borders the stream on one or both sides, while at a greater distance the meadow is skirted with maples, alders, and other fluviatile trees, overrun with the grape-vine, which bears fruit in its season, purple, red, white, and other grapes."
From these river-grapes, by seedling cultivation, a Concord gardener, in Thoreau's manhood, bred and developed the Concord grape, which is now more extensively grown throughout the United States than any other vine, and once adorned, in vineyards large and small, the hillsides over which Thoreau rambled. The uplands are sandy in many places, gravelly and rocky in others, and nearly half the township is now covered, as it has always been, with woods of oak, pine, chestnut, and maple. It is a town of husbandmen, chiefly, with a few mechanics, merchants, and professional men in its villages; a quiet region, favorable to thought, to rambling, and to leisure, as well as to that ceaseless industry by which New England lives and thrives. Its population in 1909 approaches 5,000, but at Thoreau's birth it did not exceed 2,000. There are few great estates in it, and little poverty; the mode of life has generally been plain and simple, and was so in Thoreau's time even more than now. When he was born, and for some years afterward, there was but one church, and the limits of the parish and the township were the same. At that time it was one of the two shire towns of the great county of Middlesex,—Cambridge, thirteen miles away, being the other. It was therefore a seat of justice and a local centre of trade,—attracting lawyers and merchants to its public square much more than of late years.
Trade in Concord then was very different from what it has been since the railroad began to work its revolutions. In the old days, long lines of teams from the upper country, New Hampshire and Vermont, loaded with the farm products of the interior, stopped nightly at the taverns, especially in the winter, bound for the Boston market, whence they returned with a cargo for their own country. If a thaw came on, or there was bad sleighing in Boston, the drivers, anxious to lighten their loads, would sell and buy in the Concord public square, to the great profit of the numerous traders, whose little shops stood around or near it. Then, too, the hitching-posts in front of the shops had full rows of wagons and chaises from the neighboring towns fastened there all day long; while the owners looked over goods, priced, chaffered, and beat down by the hour together the calicoes, sheetings, shirtings, kerseymeres, and other articles of domestic need,—bringing in, also, the product of their own farms and looms to sell or exchange. Each "store" kept an assortment of "West India goods," dry goods, hardware, medicines, furniture, boots and shoes, paints, lumber, lime, and the miscellaneous articles of which the village or the farms might have need; not to mention a special trade in New England rum and old Jamaica, hogsheads of which were brought up every week from Boston by teams, and sold or given away by the glass, with an ungrudging hand. A little earlier than the period now mentioned, when Colonel Whiting (father of the late eminent lawyer, Abraham Lincoln's right-hand adviser in the law of emancipation, William Whiting, of Boston) was a lad in Concord village, "there were five stores and three taverns in the middle of the town, where intoxicating liquors were sold by the glass to any and every body; and it was the custom, when a person bought even so little as fifty cents' worth of goods, to offer him a glass of liquor, and it was generally accepted." Such was the town when John Thoreau, the Jerseyman, came there to die in 1800, and such it remained during the mercantile days of John Thoreau, his son, who was brought up in a house on the public square, and learned the business of buying and selling in the store of Deacon White, close by. Pencil-making, the art by which he earned his modest livelihood during Henry Thoreau's youth, was introduced into Concord about 1812 by William Munroe, whose son has in later years richly endowed the small free library from which Thoreau drew books, and to which he gave some of his own. In this handicraft, which was at times quite profitable, the younger Thoreaus assisted their father from time to time, and Henry acquired great skill in it; even to the extent, says Mr. Emerson, of making as good a pencil as the best English ones. "His friends congratulated him that he had now opened his way to fortune. But he replied that he should never make another pencil. 'Why should I? I would not do again what I have done once.'" Thoreau may have said this, but he afterward changed his mind, for he went on many years, at intervals, working at his father's business, which in time grew to be mainly the preparation of fine-ground plumbago for electrotyping. This he supplied to various publishers, and among others to the Harpers, for several years. But what he did in this way was incidental, and as an aid to his father, his mother, or his sister Sophia, who herself carried on the business for some time after the death of Henry in 1862. It was the family employment, and must be pursued by somebody.
Perpetuity, indeed, and hereditary transmission of everything that by nature and good sense can be inherited, are among the characteristics of Concord. The Heywood family has been resident in Concord for two hundred and fifty years or so, and in that time has held the office of town clerk, in lineal succession from father to son, for one hundred years at least. The grandson of the first John Heywood filled the office (which is the most responsible in town, and generally accompanied by other official trusts) for eighteen years, beginning in 1731; his son held the place with a slight interregnum for thirteen years; his nephew, Dr. Abiel Heywood, was town clerk from 1796 to 1834 without a break, and Dr. Heywood's son, Mr. George Heywood, was the town clerk for thirty-odd years after March, 1853.
Of the dozen ministers who, since 1635, have preached in the parish church, five were either Bulkeleys or Emersons, descendants of the first minister, or else connected by marriage with that clerical line; and the young minister who, in the year 1882, accepted the pastorate of Rev. Peter Bulkeley, is a descendant, and bears the same name. Mr. Emerson himself, the great clerk of Concord, which was his lay parish for almost half a century after he ceased to preach in its pulpit, counted among his ancestors four of the Concord pastors, whose united ministry covered a century; while his grandmother's second husband, Dr. Ripley, added a half century more to the family ministry. For this ancestral claim, quite as much as for his gift of wit and eloquence, Mr. Emerson was chosen, in 1835, to commemorate by an oration the two hundredth anniversary of the town settlement. In this discourse he said:—