The Transcendentalists and Their World, Robert A. Gross, c. 2021.
Link to the discussion of the book with Gemini as I read the book: link here.
The book begins with a map of Concord, Massachusetts, 1830. We spent many Saturdays in Concord when we lived in Boston some years ago.
Okay.
The book. Copyright 2021. The Covid lockdown was all of 2020.
This book is not a biography of either Emerson or Thoreau. It is a "biography" of Concord, and Gross did a phenomenal job of recreating the citizens of that village / town. It's a biography of ideas, in the big scheme of things.
Emerson, born in Boston, but moved to Concord to get away from Boston.
H D Thoreau: the only native son among the Concord writers.
Emerson gathered thinkers and reformers in his orbit.
Margaret Fuller arrived for extended stays.
Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Alcotts took up residence.
Concord gained notice as a literary center, and it soon came to symbolize the social ferment and the intellectual iconoclasm of the age.
The town has been celebrated as the seat of the American Renaissance literature and art during the decades before the Civil War.
Henry Adams the writer dubbed Transcendentalism "the Concord church."
Concord, the home of two revolutions:
- the Revolutionary War, or course, but also,
- the intellectual awakening the Transcendentalists sparked with their rejection of European hierarchy and inequality and their vision of free individuals realizing the promise of democracy in everyday life, p. xiv.
How Emerson saw things: long main (middle) paragraph on p. xv.
The myth of Concord, p. xvi.
How Concord was unique, p. xvii.
Emerson: his step-grandfather was a dominating figure in the pulpit for more than six decades: Rev Ezra Ripley, the old order of 18th century Massachusetts -- from 1778 to 1841 (born in 1751, he was 90 years old, still preaching, and still active, when he died).
The America of their lectures (Emerson and Thoreau) and writing had its origins in Concord.
A couple of maps at the beginning.
Preface: 8 pages.
Body of text: 608 pages.
Notes: 609 - 787.
Acknowledgements: 789 - 804.
Index: 805 - 836
First page of acknowledgments: the origin of the book traces back to a question that was posed by James J. Flink, University of Pennsylvania, 1964, "how did Puritan communalism give way to Yankee individualism."
I think we'll start with a chatbot to help get started with the problems I'm having:
Query:
I'm reading Robert A Gross' 2021 book on transcendentalism and the village/town of Concord, Massachusetts. The author states that the origin of the book traces back to a question that was posed by James J. Flink, University of Pennsylvania, 1964, "how did Puritan communalism give way to Yankee individualism." To get started, the first question I have: could one say the Pennsylvania Amish have a strong lineage to the Puritans?
Reply:
Yes—but only in a broad religious/cultural sense, not as a direct historical lineage. And I think this distinction may become quite important as you work through Gross's question.
The Amish and the Puritans emerged from different branches of the Protestant Reformation.
The two streams
A very simplified genealogy looks like this:
Protestant Reformation (16th century)
↙ ↘
Magisterial Reformation Radical Reformation
Lutheran / Reformed / Calvinist Anabaptists
↓ ↓
English Puritans Mennonites → Amish
The Puritans were essentially English Calvinists/Reformed Protestants who wanted to purify the established Church of England. The New England Puritans ultimately created Congregational churches.
The Amish, by contrast, descend from the Anabaptist movement, which arose in Switzerland and neighboring areas in the 1520s. The Anabaptists were much more radical in their rejection of the established church and its relationship with the state. They insisted upon adult baptism, voluntary church membership, and, importantly, a church community distinct from governmental authority.
The Amish themselves didn't emerge until 1693, when Jakob Ammann broke with other Swiss Mennonites over questions of church discipline and religious rigor.
So I wouldn't say:
Puritans → Amish
I'd say:
Puritans and Amish are cousins—both products of the Reformation, but of different Protestant lineages.
But here is where your question gets really interesting
There is a striking family resemblance between Puritanism and Amish life.
Both traditions put enormous weight on the community of believers, disciplined conduct, separation from worldly corruption, family, work, frugality, self-government, and the idea that religious faith should govern everyday life rather than merely Sunday worship.
But they take that impulse in different directions.
The Puritan ideal was something like:
Create a godly community and build a godly society.
The Amish ideal is closer to:
Create a godly community by separating it from the larger society.
That distinction is enormous.
The Massachusetts Puritans actually became political and institutional builders. They established towns, governments, courts, schools, churches, and eventually an entire civilization. The Library of Congress describes the New England Puritan churches as independent congregations, each governed locally, but collectively constituting the "New England Way."
The Amish went in almost the opposite direction. Their Anabaptist inheritance emphasized the free church, separation of church and state, adult baptism, nonviolence, and withdrawal from the dominant culture.
And that brings us directly to Gross's/Flink's question.
"How did Puritan communalism give way to Yankee individualism?"
I suspect you're going to find that the Amish provide a very useful counterexample.
The Amish didn't really make the transition Gross is investigating. They retained a remarkably strong form of communalism—Gemeinschaft, if you will—into the modern world.
New England did something extraordinary: it started with an intensely communitarian religious culture and gradually produced one of the most individualistic, entrepreneurial cultures in America.
And yet the original Puritan system contained some of the seeds of that individualism.
The Puritan congregation was not simply an authoritarian hierarchy. It was a community of individuals who had experienced personal conversion, voluntarily entered a covenant, and participated in governing their local church. Congregationalism therefore contained both community and individual conscience from the beginning.
That is, I think, one of the fascinating paradoxes sitting underneath Gross's book:
The same tradition that demanded conformity could also teach people that the individual conscience stood directly before God.
And eventually, perhaps, the latter could escape the former.
That makes Flink's question considerably richer than simply asking "Why did Puritans become less religious?" He's asking something closer to:
How does a society built around covenant, community, mutual obligation, and religious conformity gradually generate the Yankee who says, in effect, "I will make my own way"?
The Amish are almost a control group for that historical experiment: they retained much more of the communal structure while New England increasingly transformed it.
If you want, I think the next question worth asking is whether the Puritans themselves actually contained the seeds of Yankee individualism from the very beginning. That gets us right into the heart of Gross's argument—and I suspect you'll find it surprisingly connected to Emerson and Thoreau.
QUERY:
Sometimes I think we give Emerson too much credit. His life was church-centered, unable to abide by the "rules" of the Unitarianism. Somehow that became a much bigger issue -- "Yankee" individualism -- but I see Emerson a whole lot different than "American individualism" -- starting with the Founding Fathers and then the explorers who took the thirteen colonies to Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas. Way different.
Reply:
I think that is a very good corrective, and I'd sharpen it even further: Emerson may be one of the great interpreters of American individualism without being its principal historical cause. Those are two very different claims.
Your distinction between Emersonian individualism and the older American individualism of the Founders and the frontier is important.
1. Emerson's "individualism" is primarily spiritual
Emerson's rebellion was fundamentally against religious mediation and inherited authority. He wanted the individual to encounter truth directly—to trust intuition, conscience, nature, and the inner voice rather than accepting doctrines because an institution had declared them true.
That is quite different from the individualism of, say, George Washington, Daniel Boone, Andrew Jackson, or the thousands of settlers moving westward.
The latter individualism was much more material, political, geographic, and practical:
-
acquire land
-
establish a farm
-
leave an established community
-
start a business
-
move west
-
take risks
-
create a new settlement
-
govern yourself
-
resist somebody else's authority
That tradition is older than Emerson by generations.
And you're right to include the Founding Fathers. The American Revolution itself is an enormous expression of individual and local self-government before Emerson ever appears.
2. Emerson didn't invent Yankee individualism; he gave it a philosophy
This may be the more interesting way to read Gross.
The New England Yankee had already been saying:
I'll make my own way.
Emerson essentially said:
And here's why you are morally entitled to do so.
That's a substantial difference.
The farmer, merchant, mechanic, trader, or settler wasn't necessarily thinking about Self-Reliance. He was simply living it.
Emerson transformed a set of behaviors and inherited cultural attitudes into a philosophical and literary doctrine.
And there's an amusing irony here.
Emerson's famous celebration of self-reliance can make him sound like the quintessential rugged American individualist. But the actual Emerson was a Harvard-educated minister's son, former Unitarian minister, intellectual, lecturer, writer, and resident of Concord—deeply embedded in the very New England intellectual and social world that he supposedly transcended.
He didn't go conquer Texas.
3. And your point about Emerson's relationship with Unitarianism is important
I would be careful, though, about saying he was simply "unable to abide by the rules" of Unitarianism.
The problem was subtler.
Emerson was born into liberal Congregational/Unitarian Christianity, and Unitarianism had already broken substantially with orthodox Puritan Calvinism. It emphasized reason, moral improvement, and freedom of conscience.
But Emerson pushed that freedom of conscience one step farther.
The question became:
If the individual conscience is capable of apprehending divine truth, why does it need a church at all?
That's where Emerson becomes dangerous to institutional religion.
And his resignation from the ministry in 1832 wasn't a rejection of religion. Quite the opposite. He was becoming convinced that institutional forms could actually obstruct religious experience.
That is why I think your observation that his life remained "church-centered" is worth pursuing. Emerson wasn't a secular individualist escaping religion. He was a religious man trying to escape religious institutions.
That's a very different animal.
4. And this is where I think your distinction becomes historically powerful
There may actually be three different kinds of American individualism getting mixed together:
| Tradition | Individualism means... |
|---|
| Founders | Political self-government and individual rights |
| Frontier/Yankee expansion | Independence, mobility, property, enterprise, self-sufficiency |
| Emerson | Spiritual and intellectual self-trust |
They overlap, but they're not the same thing.
And I'd add a fourth:
Puritan individualism — the individual's direct covenant with God and responsibility for his or her own soul.
That last one is particularly important because it gives us a possible evolutionary chain:
Puritan covenant → Congregational self-government → Yankee civic independence → American political individualism → Emersonian spiritual individualism
But—and this is where I would resist making the story too neat—the chain isn't linear.
The westward-moving American wasn't necessarily produced by Emerson. In many cases Emerson was produced by the same civilization that had already produced the westward-moving American.
That's why your instinct that "Emerson gets too much credit" strikes me as potentially exactly right.
The really interesting question
I think Gross's book may eventually force us to ask whether "Yankee individualism" is actually the right term at all.
Because the people who pushed from Massachusetts into Vermont, New York, Ohio, Michigan, and eventually farther west weren't necessarily Emersonian individualists. They could be extraordinarily communal—forming churches, town governments, schools, associations, voluntary societies, abolitionist organizations, businesses, etc.
America may have developed something stranger:
individuals who were exceptionally independent but exceptionally good at forming voluntary associations.
That's almost the opposite of the Amish solution.
The Amish say, essentially: the community protects the individual from the world.
The American Yankee increasingly says: the individual is free to create the community he wants.
And that, rather than Emerson alone, may be one of the deepest transformations Gross is trying to understand.
*********************************
Now, This
Query:
That is so cool. I guess Gross' preface said it at the very beginning and I missed it. On the very first page of his book, Gross actually said it -- I simply missed it -- Gross argues that Emerson was summoning his countrymen (all "men" -- women as well as men; blacks as well as whites; poor as well as rich) to throw of the bondage of the past and "become Americans!" We may not have turned out the way Emerson had hoped (another topic for another day) but he wanted his countrymen to think bigger, think outside the box -- not simply think like the Old World (living on a new continent) -- change their thinking altogether and become Americans -- which had not yet been defined. One wonders how much influence his writing had on Abraham Lincoln. I'll follow up on that later. They were practically exact contemporaries, Lincoln was only six years young and Emerson outlived him. Wow.
Reply:
Yes. That is a much more powerful way of understanding Emerson, and I think you've caught something that can get obscured when he is reduced to the slogan "self-reliance."
Gross's phrase "become Americans" changes the whole picture.
Emerson isn't simply saying, "Forget society and do your own thing." He's saying something closer to:
The inherited categories are inadequate. You have been handed an Old World intellectual and cultural inheritance, but you are living in a new country. Now become the people this new country makes possible.
That's a very different proposition.
And your parenthetical about women, Black Americans, poor Americans, as well as wealthy white men is particularly interesting. Emerson's "American" could be considerably more capacious than the political and social reality of 19th-century America. His imagination could outrun the institutions of his time.
And then Lincoln becomes fascinating
I would absolutely put Lincoln and Emerson in the same intellectual conversation, although I'd be cautious about claiming direct influence until we look at the evidence.
The chronology is almost uncanny:
-
Emerson: born 1803
-
Lincoln: born 1809
-
Emerson begins publishing major essays in the 1830s
-
Lincoln is coming of age politically during that same period
-
Emerson is writing The American Scholar (1837), Self-Reliance (1841), The Poet (1844), etc.
-
Lincoln is developing his own conception of what America means
-
Lincoln dies in 1865
-
Emerson lives until 1882
And there is an extraordinary similarity in the problem they are trying to solve, even though they approach it from completely different directions.
Emerson asks:
What kind of person should an American become?
Lincoln increasingly asks:
What kind of nation is America going to become?
And both, in different ways, are trying to break America out of the intellectual categories inherited from the past.
Lincoln's great achievement may be that he eventually found a way to make that abstract Emersonian question political and constitutional.
Emerson says, essentially:
Don't merely inherit the thinking of the past.
Lincoln says, in effect:
Don't merely inherit the political arrangements of the past.
And then comes the Civil War, where the question becomes brutally concrete:
Can America actually become what its founding principles say it is?
That's where your "another topic for another day" about whether America turned out as Emerson hoped gets really interesting.
Because there is an extraordinary paradox here:
Emerson wanted Americans to invent themselves. Lincoln had to preserve the nation long enough for them to do it.
And then there is one other connection I think you're going to enjoy when you get farther into Gross: Emerson's "American" is not primarily a nationality. It's almost an intellectual act.
To "become American" means to stop merely receiving the world and start creating it.
That is much bigger than "individualism."
And, frankly, I think that's probably the Emerson you've just discovered in Gross—the one who is much more interesting than the Emerson of the quotation books.
Query:
Yes, you are so correct. All I had were the Emerson quotes from those books, and that's why I was completely missing the picture. You know, it's interesting. Back in England, same situation, and H. D. Thoreau would probably have been sent to debtors' prison or worse .... in America, despite being the oddball he was, he was allowed to live his own life.
Reply:
Exactly. And I think you've put your finger on something much larger than Emerson or Thoreau.
The crucial word in what you just said is allowed.
Thoreau's America didn't necessarily approve of Thoreau. It tolerated his right to be Thoreau.
That is a profoundly different achievement.
Thoreau could be eccentric, refuse conventional employment, live at Walden, write strange books that hardly anybody bought, refuse to pay a tax on moral grounds, and generally decline to behave like a respectable middle-class citizen—and the surrounding society could regard him as an oddball without necessarily concluding:
This man must be forced back into conformity.
And England makes the contrast especially vivid
The comparison isn't quite as simple as "England would have put Thoreau in debtors' prison"—debtors' prisons were being abolished in the mid-19th century—but your underlying point is excellent.
The social structure inherited from Europe was heavily organized around station, class, property, church, family, occupation, and established community. You were born into a social world that already had a considerable idea of what you were supposed to be.
America was extraordinarily different because it had this enormous amount of social and geographic space.
If Concord didn't like you, there was Vermont.
If Vermont didn't suit you, there was Ohio.
If Ohio didn't suit you, there was Illinois.
And eventually there was the West.
You could literally leave.
That's one reason I think your earlier distinction between Emersonian individualism and the American frontier is so important. The frontier didn't need Emerson to invent individualism. The physical geography of America was already teaching it.
And then Thoreau takes it to an almost absurd extreme
Thoreau essentially asks:
What if I take this American permission to be an individual and push it as far as I possibly can?
And he does.
Thoreau is radically individualistic while being extraordinarily dependent upon the community around him.
He didn't go into the wilderness of Canada.
He went to Walden Pond, a short walk from Concord.
His mother did his laundry.
His friends brought him food.
Emerson owned the land.
The railroad was nearby.
He could walk back into Concord whenever he wanted.
So Walden isn't really a story about escaping civilization. It's almost a laboratory for asking how little civilization a person needs in order to remain free.
And that brings us right back to Gross.
Maybe the American revolution wasn't "individualism"
Maybe it was something subtler:
the invention of permission.
Permission to leave.
Permission to disagree.
Permission to worship differently.
Permission to start over.
Permission to form a new community.
Permission to fail.
Permission to be eccentric.
Permission to become somebody other than the person your inherited social position prescribed.
And then Emerson comes along and gives this already-existing American phenomenon a philosophical vocabulary.
Thoreau gives it a life experiment.
Lincoln gives it a national and moral test.
And the Founders give it a political architecture.
That is beginning to look like a much more interesting story than simply "Puritan communalism gave way to Yankee individualism."
It might be:
America gradually transformed the individual's relationship to inherited authority—from something largely given to something increasingly chosen.
And that might be what Gross means when he says Emerson was calling Americans to "become Americans."
I think you've found the central thread of the book.
********************************
And Now It Becomes So Much "Easier" To Understand Emerson
Preface
Gross begins: "American individualism found its strongest voices in the nineteenth century among the New England Transcendentalists, and none more so than Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau."
Summoned his country men to free themselves from bondage to the past and refuse unthinking conformity to contemporaries. "Trust thyself." Seek inspiration in nature; realize your infinite potential. Women as well as men, Blacks as well as whites, poor as well as right (for some reason, "Native Americans" were not noted in that particular passage). He led the "movement" for "Americans" to tap their inner genius and build together an original American culture, independent of the errors and injustices of the Old World and true to the ideals of liberty and equality at the heart of the democracy that the break with Britain had left unfulfilled.
He did not found the movement; his literary reputation was growing in England, while re remained a provincial figure in his native land, p. xiii.
Part I
Prologue: A New Beginning
Chapter 1: A Day of Good Feelings
Opens with John Thoreau (father of Henry David Thoreau). Pencil maker.
April 1824 -- one year ahead of the 50th anniversary of "shot heard 'round the world" -- April 19, 1775.
Republicans vs Federalists
Concord's minister: Ezra Ripley. Descended from Puritans that came across the Atlantic.
Harvard had moved to Concord; "American"military had taken over Harvard as training area.
after Concord's fiery patriot minister William Emerson died, Ripley came back to Concord as minister
now get this: Ripley married Emerson's widow and moved into the Emerson manse -- wow
thus Ripley was Ralph Waldo Emerson's step grandfather -- wow
Ripley was pastor for the next 63 years
1790s: a naval "quasi-war" with France and then again in 1813 wiht the onset of hostilities iwht Great Britain
Ripley: a Federalist preaching "liberty with order"
War of 1812 with the Brits
Ripley: anti-war -- p. 19
anti-immigration; blamed most of America's problems on the Irish immigrants
a nativist -- p. 20; hated foreigners
war with Britain ended April 13, 1815; President Madison marked the end of hostilities - p. 21
over 90% of selectmen descended from Puritan founders of the town: Barretts, Heywoods, Hubbards, and Woods
Massachusetts constitutional convention to establish constitution for Massachusetts
dissenters: Baptists and Quakers -- p. 23
story of Harvard and early leaders -- p. 24
Hoar emerges as the leader of Concord; Puritan heritage
opponent of legal giants of Massachusetts: Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate -- p. 26
universal suffrage -- p. 28
results of the constitutional conference -- p. 29
turning point in Keyes' political career
1824: new era of political unity, 1824 -- Republicans and Federalists -- p. 30
Lafayette visit -- p. 30 and following;
incredible detail of Concord and Lexington;
but the townspeople were still divided -- final paragraph, chapter 1
Chapter 2: Community and Conscience -- p. 43
again starts with John Thoreau
the story of John Thoreau and Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau
three-quarters of Parson Ripley's church was women
by the top of the second page of this chapter, "Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau and the women of the church were key inside the church (First Parish) struggle but they did not anticipate that the conflict thus set in motion would prove be be a crucible for Transcendentalism.
then, the story of Ezra Ripley trying to operate an inclusive church, 1778 -- p. 44
talks about the conflict that began with the Great Awakening of the 1740s (Puritan led; Jonathan Edwards)
Edward Bliss, Concord minister, huge supporter of the Great Awakening; died in 1764:
Emerson (the elder) became the minister
then Ripley again:
he married Phebe, daughter of one Concord minister, Daniel Bliss, and the widow of another, William Emerson
Bliss --> Emerson --> Ripley
then much on Ripley
finally back to the Thoreau family on page 53
no family was more engaged thant he Thoreaus in teh church
flashback to Jean and Rebecca Thoreau, the paternal grandparents of four children, including Henry David Thoreau
1810 - 1818: the church under Ripley thrived
Mary Moody Emerson (1774–1863) was a brilliant, eccentric writer and philosopher who served as a vital intellectual spark for the American Transcendentalist movement. She is most famous as the aunt of Ralph Waldo Emerson, but she also developed a fascinating friendship with Henry David Thoreau.
Mary Moody Emerson could not stand to be around Ripley, p. 59.
By the end of the chapter, huge division within the church. -- p. 82.
Chapter 3: The White Village -- p. 83.
- Begins: 1823, the Thoreau family moved into a neighborhood in transition - p. 83, first line.
- corner of Main Street and the road to Watertown, now Walden Street
- wow, wow, wow -- when we lived at 452 Trapelo Road, Belmont, it was an 18-minute drive to Concord -- up a block or two on Trapelo Road, then a right on Concord Road pass the sanitarium, and then to Concord, or a mile or so up to Highway 2 and direct to Concord -- wow, I wish I had known all this
- then Highway 2: a bit to the north, Thoreau Street, and then a bit north of that, Walden Street.
- A
small brook on the east side of Concord, MA, runs into the Concord
River which is formed by the confluence of the Assabet River (from the
north) and the Sudbury River (from the south). The Concord River flows
northerly into the Merrimack River which then flows north and then east
to the Atlantic Ocean, at Plum Island, which we also visited!
- Concord had been a Puritan settlement -- p. 83 -- Joshua Smithnear a pond and watering hole for cattle and a fishing hole
- this is where David Henry Thoreau lived from ages 5 to 8
- now the story of the town
a textile mill probably formed the center of the town
p. 99 -- now begins the story of slavery -- great section, pp 99 - 102.
the story of black families in the area
the blacks were native to the area, having not moved from elsewhere
the farms, particularly the Minot farm
Dugan boys -- p. 103
newcomer Jack Garrison
Robbins and Garrison families -- p. 105
Chapter 4: The Curse of Trade -- p. 113
David Henry Thoreau grea in the heart of a business community that he came to loath.
1808: John Thoreau, young man in a hurry; 21 years old; Henry David won't be born until 1817.
The "country store" phenomenon.
Self-starters; capitalists; their own businesses.
Country boys becoming owners of their own businesses.
John Thoreau -- a pencil maker -- William Munroe, p. 129.
The story of pencils and graphite that began in the Cumberland Hills of the Lake District back in the 16th century. -- p. 129.
Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution were in full swing well before Emerson and Thoreau. -- p. 144.
Chapter 5: Husbandmen and Manufacturers
Wow, David Henry Thoreau spent his entire life in / near a town center, before his sojourn at Walden.
He was 27 years old when he built a small cabin on Walden Pond where he lived a solitary life for two years, two months, and two days, leaving at the age of 30, in 1847, almost 20 years before the US Civil War.
He died at age 44, probably tuberculosis. Wow.
Grandfather Jean Thoreau (fortune from the sea; father John in the village and, then David Henry.
1816: failure of John's farm, mostly likely due to the crop-killing cold facing everyone in 1816, the legendary "year without a summer." p. 147.
The Minot farm where DH Thoreau spent his life as a toddler.
The ancestral farm of the Hunt family, p. 150.
The switchover to English meadow over the lat 1820s and 1830s. Change to hay was made by necessity, p. 157. In Walden, Henry Thoreau said nothing about Moore, but he would single out English hay as the epitome of the cash crop: an artificial product of science, reduced to a commodity, and antithetical to the wild freedom of nature.
New agricultural enterprise along the Bay Road at the ancestral home of Abel Moore. p. 159
1820: Concord threw itself into the developing movement for agricultural reform. p. 165.
Cattle.
"Manufacturers and husbandmen" -- the new society. By 1826. -- p. 167.
Wool, textiles, mulberry from China. -- p. 171.
Minot fulfilled the ideal of the agricultural reformers, but for a goal they would never approve. -- p. 183.
Pencils in USA: it should be noted --
- American colonists imported all their pencils from Europe until the
American Revolution
- Early American Pencils
- Early imports: Benjamin
Franklin sold European pencils in 1729, and George Washington used a
small pencil for surveying in 1762.
- First wood pencil: William Munroe, a
cabinetmaker in Concord, Massachusetts, made the first American wood
pencil in 1812.
- Thoreau's innovation: Author Henry David Thoreau improved
local pencil making by mixing inferior graphite with clay binder at his
family's factory.
Chapter 6: Knowledge Is Power -- chapter seems to relate to the elementary school years of HD Thoreau.
Four children went to school.
Phoebe Wheeler ran an "infant school" for youngsters.
1825: HD Thoreau was 8 years old.
Began grammar school in Concord.
School reform.
Discusses the teachers.
Edward Jarvis, first grade.
Lemuel Shattuck, second grade.
The monitorial system, p. 199. Seems to describe the one-room school house.
November, 1828, 11-y/o Henry Thoreau enrolled at Concord Academy. One of many such private institutions proliferating in the 1820s.
Chapter Seven: Internal Improvements -- p. 219.
Wow, John and Cynthia scrimped and saved for their children's education. At the end of the day, John and Cynthia were all about education.
The family went well outside what the schools had to offer. Concord's circulating library opened in 1821, a debating club the next year, and a lyceum in 1829. The Lyceum, sort of "education on steroids."
John moving his family to Boston, 1821.
The Concord Social Library -- p. 220 and following.
The Concord Library had been started in 1795 with Parson Ripley the driving force, p. 221. Known as the Charitable Library Society.
Top heavy in religion. -- p. 221.
Important section. Begins with passing remark about John Thoreau (pencil maker) and his wife Cynthia moving the family to Boston.
Project of reform through reading ... p. 225
The deluge of novels following Walter Scott's Redgauntlet. Eased the fears of fiction.
Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child.
Concord Social Library.
Debate Society. Formed in 1827, p. 232 at the bottom.
Josiah Holbrook, 1828, p. 233, at the bottom.
The lyceum and the Emerson connection, p. 242.
Alcohol, p. 244.
The temperance movement, p. 255.
Disestablishment, p. 257. The word is not found in the index.
Chapter 8: Privilege and Conspiracy -- p. 259.
So, again, the chapter opens with the Thoreaus. John Thoreau pretty much a "blank face" in the crowd.
Not much call for his political involvement during the 1820s. With the end to electoral contests between Federalists and Republicans, Concord entered an era of political consensus. Nearly unanimous support to John Quincy Adams in his two runs for the presidency, and it paid no heed to Andrew Jackson.
These years of National Republican ascendancy. p. 260.
National Republicans rebranded themselves as Whig; Thoreau cheered for their standard-bearers Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, booed Jackson and Marin Van Buren, and passed these sentiments along to his sons.
National Republican era: Concord, a town of just 2,000 people and 320 families, played an outsize role in Massachusetts politics, p. 261. Due to its strategic place in the civic landscape.
This chapter is all about the National Republic coalition. p. 266.
Disliked the tolled Charles River Bridge, constructed 1785 - 1786, but a free bridge not built until mid-1850s. Again, look at the map where Concord laid with regard to Boston.
Samuel Hoar and the Warren Bridge -- the free bridge - becomes a main story in this chapter.
The fight over the Warren Bridge hastened the breakup of the National Republican Party in the Bay State. p. 271
The "John Keyes - David Lee Child" issue then begins. p. 271.
The trial began in January 1829.
Although a big story here, doesn't even get a wiki entry.
The Social Circle. p. 279. Thoreaus back in Concord.
In 1827, HD Thoreau was 10 years old.
Freemason, p. 282.
1826: Freemasonry was at a peak of influence, both nationally and locally.
New headquarters: the Corinthian Lodge.
Anti-Masonry party peaked in 1834 - 1835, and then Freemasonry's withdrawal from the public sphere. Religious establishment was being dismantled and one-party rule was coming to an end. A unitary society could no longer be sustained. p. 300.
Aha! Top of page 301, "At just this moment, a very different way of seeing te world was coming into view. This new philosophy urged Americans to free themselves from the dead hand of the past, put politics and business aside, and seek out spiritual truths through firsthand experience in nature.It elevated individuals over institutions andcelbrated self-trust. ... Nothing could be more antithetical to Transcendentalist individualism than Masonic fraternalism -- and, thanks to Anti-Masonry, that ideological opponent had lost its punch" -- p. 301 -- now the concluding two lines: "The stage was set for a new chapter in Concord's history. In this community in change, Emerson and Thhoreau would find their intellectual home."
Again, this is being followed here.
PART II: Trascendentalists and Their World
Chapter Nine: Freedom of Mind -- p. 305.
It opens with Ralph Waldo Emerson, a man at loose ends early in October 1834, when he arrived at his step-grandfather Ripley's home and. moved in. He was 31 years old, born May 25, 1803. At age 31, he was the scion of six generations of New England ministers going back to Peter Bulkeley [Bulkley was the Puritan minister who had been born in England and founded Concord.] Ralph Waldo Emerson had not yet become the Sage of Concord or anywhere else; nor was the house the legendary "Old Manse: that would be conjured up by Nathaniel Hawthorne a dozen years later. Emerson came to Concord in large part because he had nowhere else to go.
Again, look at the map, and see how close Concord was to Harvard.
The history of Ralph Waldo Emerson, briefly, and really started with Emerson at his age of 31 and moving to Boston. Transcendentalism already growing there and their message was similar to Emerson's. Alexis de Tocqueville had two concerns with regard to the US: the "tyranny of the majority" over public opinion and the oppression of "Negro slavery in the South. Could Transcendentalism meet these challenges? The fields of Emerson's father would proceed a crucial arena and test for his vision, p. 319.
Editor Herman Atwill, p 325.
Long section on the slavery issue.
And that's where it ends. The slavery issue really, really was a huge issue for the Transcendentalists, and Emerson was more than ready to address that issue.
Chapter Ten: A Little Democracy -- p. 345.
This could be a very, very dry book had I not had the advantage of discussing this with Gemini after reading each chapter.
Chapter Eleven: Philosopher of the World -- p. 345.
The first two pages of this chapter immediately reminded me of Mary Baker Eddy:
- 1821 - 1910
born in Boston; in 1836 she would have been15 years old;
- She established the Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston in 1879.
- She wrote Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures in 1875.
- The religion teaches that true healing comes through spiritual understanding and prayer rather than physical medicine.
- headquarters: the main church, known as The Mother Church, is located in Boston, Massachusetts
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