Resources for Educators
Book Review: Historical Guide to Thoreau
William E. Cain, ed., A Historical Guide to Henry David
Thoreau. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
285 pp. $35.00 hardcover; $16.95 paperbound.
Reviewed by Randall Conrad.
Reprinted by permission from Thoreau Society Bulletin
no. 236, summer 2001, p. 14.
In this volume, the
fourth in a series providing context for masterworks of the national
literature, five notable Thoreauvians draw upon evolving fields
such as material culture studies to illuminate the social environment
that generated the later Journal, "Civil Disobedience,"
Walden, and the stereotyping of Thoreau himself into a Concord
eccentric.
In the early spring of 1850,
Thoreau chanced upon an abandoned, still-functioning toy water
wheel that a child must have fashioned while playing in a Walden
meadow. This discovery inspired several rich journal pages, never
re-used in any published work (3:50-53, April 1850).
Using Thoreau's charming field
observations as a starting point for her key essay, Laura
Dassow Walls, an authority on Thoreau's science writing,
elucidates the creative dynamic by which Thoreau transcended
the limiting personae typically available to the midcentury science
writer. Thoreau instead forged what Walls calls a "technology
of inscription" enabling him to "braid together the
physical facts of the natural world and the truths of transcendental
'higher law.'"
Walls mined this field in
Seeing New Worlds (1995) and in her subsequent insightful
studies of Thoreau the scientist; now she reaches a new level
of synthesis, using a style as clear and fluid as the coursing
meltwater that powers the model engine in Thoreau's meadow. Her
essay is encyclopedic enough in its 20-plus pages to encompass
a welter of objects and ideas - the water wheel, the notions
of inscription and eduction, the Young-Ludwig kymograph, the
dawn of technology (whether industrial, literary or symbolic),
and the literary articulation of nature required to produce Thoreau's
"facts flowering into truths."
With bold dexterity, Walls
braids these seeming disparities together into a luminous vision
of transcendental science that is at once rugged and delicate,
and as "far-sounding" as the tinkling water wheel that
inspires it. Well beyond the history of science writing in the
nineteenth century, Walls believes that "seeing new worlds"
is a present-day imperative: we can, and today we must, discover
uses of Thoreau that will guide our paths through a cosmos increasingly
driven by "modern" science.
Lawrence Rosenwald's chapter on "Civil Disobedience"
is of comparable scope. A war tax resister as well as a scholar,
Rosenwald examines "the complex relation between text and
action" and clarifies the paradoxes in, and behind, Thoreau's
famous essay.
Many readers of "Civil
Disobedience" are aware that Thoreau's complex philosophy
of conscientious objection - put to the test by increasingly
violent struggles against slavery in Massachusetts and nationwide
- progressed beyond nonviolent protest in the 1850s, eventually
"siding with the light" as Frederick Douglass and masses
of abolitionists had already done in breaking away from W. L.
Garrison's pacifist movement. [More
about this subject.]
Few, however, probably realize
the extent to which "Civil Disobedience" itself was
forged amid the growing pressures of the preceding decade. Rosenwald
traces an important evolution between 1840 - Thoreau's first
tax refusal - and 1849, the first publication of his essay under
the significant title "Resistance to Civil Government."
Rosenwald establishes that
the individual act of tax refusal that won Thoreau his night
in jail is actually a blending, for dramatic purposes, of two
distinct protests by the young Thoreau -- his "signing off"
from the First Parish Church tax rolls in 1840 and his more significant
refusal of the poll tax beginning in 1842. We then learn that
Thoreau's history-making poll tax refusal is based on "a
fiction":
His account of his tax
resistance in the essay revises his tax resistance in the world,
in the community of Concord. In the essay, Thoreau cites the
Mexican War as a reason for refusing to pay the poll tax. In
the world, Thoreau's action predated the war by four years. In
the essay, Thoreau refuses the tax because, as he writes, 'I
cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as
my government which is the slave's government also.' In the world,
he apparently began refusing taxes out of an unwillingness to
recognize any political organization whatever.
Compounding the paradox is
Thoreau's disingenuous presentation of the poll tax itself. As
Rosenwald demonstrates, this was never a federal tax (the Mexican
War was financed with other monies), and even during the one
year when it was reckoned as a state tax (1845), Massachusetts
law forbade using such revenue to pay for fugitive slave-catching.
"Most of the time, then, Thoreau was refusing to pay tax
to Middlesex County and the town of Concord, neither of which
could plausibly be called the slave's government."
The ultimate paradox of "Civil
Disobedience" is that although Thoreau misrepresented many
particulars, he was "broadly and prophetically right"
in the guiding vision he articulated. Rosenwald argues that it
is Thoreau's unlikely synthesis of pacifism and support for political
revolution - rather than a global rejection of government or
violence - that inspired, famously, the particular successes
of both Gandhi's first civil-rights campaign in South Africa
and King's leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott.
It is "almost an accident,"
Rosenwald concludes, "that the essay depicts a nonviolent
action," Thoreau's tax refusal of the 1840s. "Nonviolence
is not a first principle for him; it is at most a practical preference."
Since Thoreau, unlike philosophers of nonresistance, does not
associate his action with a position on violence, he was able
without contradiction to defend violent actions "on the
same grounds as ... nonviolent action," during the escalating
struggles over the Fugitive Slave Law and the public opinion
wars over John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry.
Dana Nelson, Cecelia Tichi,
and Robert Gross
respectively contribute innovative studies of the historical
specificities of Thoreau's images of men, manhood, and race;
a reading of Walden in the light of "decades-long
feminist and material culture scholarship" in the field
of nineteenth-century domesticity; and the stereotyping of the
"hermit of Concord" during Thoreau's own lifetime,
viewed as the effect of increased local social tension and stratification.
Editor William Cain supplies a concise biographical introduction
and an illustrated, well-assembled chronology.