Born in Concord, Massachusetts on July 12, 1817, Thoreau developed his attachment to words and ideas at an early age. At ten years old he composed his first known work, “The Seasons”; at eleven he attended Concord Academy with his beloved older brother John; by sixteen he had matriculated at Harvard College; and two years later he was already teaching school between college terms. It was in 1837, however, that Thoreau began his two most important literary and philosophical ventures: his journal, in which he would write consistently until November 1861 (six months before his death) and which would total over two million words; and his friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson and other members of the burgeoning Transcendentalist movement (including Margaret Fuller and Jones Very). Out of the ideas developed both in the journal and in his constant conversations with Emerson and his circle came the bulk of Thoreau's philosophy, most famously expounded in Walden (1854); it was a philosophy which emphasized a solitary understanding of nature, work, and self as a prerequisite to responsible social participation and action.
Because of that emphasis on solitude, Thoreau's most famous actions are precisely those which he undertook alone: his two and a half year sojourn in a cabin on Walden Pond, begun on July 4, 1845; and his arrest, in July 1846, for failure to pay a tax which would support the nation's ongoing involvement in the Mexican-American War. Just as the former action produced Thoreau's most famous book, the latter served as the impetus for his best-known essay, “ Resistance to Civil Government” (1849). Yet while those actions may exemplify the individualist side of Thoreau's philosophy, they do not fully encompass the socially committed and responsible side. For that one must turn to an underappreciated aspect of Thoreau's life and legacy: his work for the Abolitionist cause in the crucial decade preceding the Civil War. That work included participation in the Underground Railroad in 1851, lectures in support of John Brown in 1859, and, most importantly, a July 4, 1854 lecture entitled “Slavery in Massachusetts” which fully illustrates the depth and sincerity of Thoreau's active involvement in his era's most pressing social cause.
It is no coincidence that the “Slavery” lecture, like the move to Walden, took place on July 4: Thoreau's philosophy and actions (like those of his mentor and friend Emerson) were self-consciously concerned with the promise and problems of the ongoing American experiment. And both sides of his persona have much to offer to all Americans: his philosophical belief in the importance of solitary communion with nature, self, and work (which provided many of the founding principles of the modern environmental movement); and the actions of dissent, resistance, and social responsibility which that philosophy produced (and which inspired such twentieth-century activists as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.). Thoreau may have died far too young, of tuberculosis on May 6, 1862 (twenty years before Emerson), but the legacies of his cabin and his commitment, his journal and his jail cell, have far outlived him.
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Porte, Joel. Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1966.
Richardson, Robert D. Jr. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Thoreau, Henry David. The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau. Edited by Walter Harding et al., 12 vols to date. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971- .
Ben Railton
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