Thoreau, American Thinking, and Anti-Racism

“It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out to be a falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain in their fields. What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.”

-Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Painting by John Lautermilch

Today is Henry David Thoreau’s 203rd birthday. Thoreau is most famous for building a cabin on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s land at Walden Pond in Concord, MA and living in relative seclusion for over a year. Six years ago I was fortunate to spend a week in Concord—including Thoreau’s 197th birthday—staying at the Concord Colonial Inn, and participating in the annual gathering of the Thoreau Society. I walked from the town to Walden Pond three times, including one walk that followed Thoreau’s usual path from Emerson’s house along the railroad tracks to the Thoreau cabin site on HDT’s birthday. It was an exceptional week punctuated by many heightened sensory experiences. 

While in Concord, I also had the opportunity to visit important sites of the American Revolution. I had toured Revolutionary sites in Boston numerous times, but this was my first visit to the Old North Bridge—where “the shot heard round the world” was fired (Emerson coined that one)—and the sites of the battle of Lexington and Concord, the first battle of the American Revolution. 

In Concord, my experiences yielded me an overwhelming feeling of the symmetry and parallelism between the revolutionary birth of American freedom, and the philosophical birth of American letters. The important sites of both are in such close proximity in Concord that they often overlap. The Old Manse, for example, overlooks the Old North Bridge. The Emerson family owned the Old Manse, and from its windows and fields Ralph Waldo’s ancestors watched as the shot heard round the world was fired. Nathaniel Hawthorne later lived in and wrote at the Old Manse—his works written there include my two favorite Hawthorne stories, “The Birth-Mark” and “Rappacinni’s Daughter.” These places of our Revolutionary and philosophical history are so entwined that the experience of them is inseparable. 

Thoreau’s Walden was written in Concord and the book is saturated with the ideals that were fought for in Concord and further developed by later American philosophers in the town. Thoreau was a Transcendentalist, along with Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and others in Concord. And Walden is remembered as a classic of American literature and philosophy. When we remember Transcendentalism, we most often think about ecology and spirituality. We recall a distinctive brand of American consciousness that recognizes spirit imbued in the very material of nature. But another distinctive characteristic of Transcendentalism is equality. In this regard, as in others, the Transcendentalists writing and thinking in Concord developed a philosophical system of thought that was anchored in the founding ideals of America. 

In his attitude towards enslaved people,* Thoreau took the equality promised in America’s founding documents—and fought for in the town where he lived—seriously. Thoreau was an abolitionist. In private, Thoreau supported revolutionary abolitionist John Brown who led raiding parties in Bleeding Kansas and later attempted to inspire an insurgence among enslaved people at Harper’s Ferry (where he was caught and hanged). Thoreau championed the cause of abolition and often wrote publicly about equality and casting aside prejudice, including the above quote, found in his most famous book, Walden: the same book that is a cornerstone of American literature and philosophy, which we remember for its ecology and spirituality, also affirms the necessity of equality and the foolishness of maintaining inherited prejudice.  Equality is an American ideal towards which we continually strive. Thoreau knew this. It is foundational for his worldview and work, which in turn is foundational for American philosophy. 

I’m not going to suggest any “if Thoreau were here today” hypotheticals because quite frankly, I dislike those types of arguments. We can’t know what Thoreau’s thoughts on America would be today. But we do know his thoughts, and actions, and the company he kept in his own time. We know that his thinking demonstrated those Revolutionary ideals of equality that not even all the founding fathers—or even Thoreau himself—were ready to embody in their time. Thoreau was an abolitionist, and an anti-racist. Walden—that cornerstone of American philosophy—is an anti-racist book. Happy birthday, Henry. America is still continuing the good work you did in your own time. 

*Though Thoreau demonstrates an anti-racist stance in his thought and actions towards abolition and the plight of enslaved African people in America, the same cannot be said for his attitude towards “vanishing” Native Americans. While Thoreau thought he admired Native Americans, his reasons for this admiration are mired in tokenism and extend wholly from his imagined ideal of Indian-ness, and not from consideration for real Indigenous people. Thoreau romanticized Indigenous peoples’ “wildness,” and “spiritual insight” in a corollary to Edward Said’s “orientalism” known as “savagism,” here defined as a romanticization of Native peoples that is so thorough, the romanticizer only considers their own thought-formation, and mistakes it for a consideration of the people themselves. When we address Thoreau’s attitude towards Native peoples, we are addressing his attitude towards his own conception of Indigenous people and not the people as they are. This is a problem. For more, see Joy Harjo’s review of Robert Sayre’s Thoreau and the American Indian

At Walden Pond on HDT’s 197th birthday, 2014. Thoreau cabin site just to right of image