Walden Woods was marginal land. Not arable, it was good only for woodlots. The land on which Thoreau built his house was one of Emerson’s lots, and he was able to live on his friend’s land in exchange for the same type of labor and help he gave when living in the Emerson household. The woods were also home to people who, in their own way, were marginal to Concord society: the Irish building the railroad, the formerly enslaved, alcoholics, those simply called lurkers, and now Henry David Thoreau. It was no wonder people made “very particular inquiries” concerning his life there.179 When people asked what he was doing there, he presented a lecture, “A History of Myself,” before the Concord Lyceum. This became the foundation for Walden.
Thoreau woke with the sun, and his days might include a morning bath in the pond, a period for reading and writing, hoeing his bean field, a long walk through the woods botanizing and observing, a second bath or afternoon swim. He might row out on the pond or the river, playing his flute, visit friends and family in Concord, or receive visitors at his house by the Pond, take a night walk, and occasionally answer the call of Emerson.
During his first winter at the Pond, out from under Emerson’s roof, Thoreau began writing brief assessments of Emerson in his journal, such as: “Emerson does not consider things in respect to their essential utility, but an important partial and relative one, as works of art perhaps. His probes pass one side of their centre of gravity. His exaggeration is of a part, not of the whole.”180
In a year’s time Thoreau completed a draft of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which Emerson was already touting as “a seven days’ voyage in as many chapters, pastoral as Isaak Walton, spicy as flagroot, broad and deep as Menu.”181 Emerson admired what the two Thoreau brothers had done. They were not an example of those “students of words” Emerson criticized in “New England Reformers” who are
shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or our eyes, or our arms. We do not know an edible root in the woods, we cannot tell our course by the stars, nor the hour of the day by the sun. It is well if we can swim and skate. We are afraid of a horse, of a cow, of a dog, of a snake, of a spider.182
He saw in the Thoreau brothers two who would “read God directly.”183 “Experience,” Emerson wrote, “is hands and feet to every enterprise.”184 As he said in “The American Scholar,” “So much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my dominion. I do not see how any man can afford . . . to spare any action in which he can partake.”185
Thoreau believed in the benefits of old shoes. New shoes were commonly too narrow, but an old shoe that had formed to the idiosyncrasies of your foot, that was synonymous with comfort. As he noted in his journal, “King James loved his old shoes best. Who does not?”186 After visiting the cobbler in Concord in July of 1846, Thoreau was met by Sam Staples. Edward Emerson described Staples as one who “rose through the grades of bar-tender, clerk, constable and jailer, deputy-sheriff, representative to the General Court, auctioneer, real-estate agent, and gentleman-farmer, to be one of the most valued and respected fathers of the village-family.”187
Staples was finishing his term as the tax collector that year. Since he needed to either collect any outstanding taxes or, as a consequence for his failure to do so, pay them himself, he attempted to collect from Thoreau. Thoreau refused on principle. Neither a volunteerist nor a no-government man, it was a matter of personal protest in which he refused to pay a tax to a government that allowed for slavery. So Staples arrested him.
Thoreau was introduced to his cellmate. Hugh Connell was an Irishman a few years younger than Thoreau. He was accused of burning Israel Hunt’s barn in the neighboring town of Sudbury and was awaiting trial. “As near as I could discover,” Thoreau wrote in “Civil Disobedience,” “he had probably gone to bed in a barn when drunk, and smoked his pipe there; and so a barn was burnt.”188 Thoreau’s sympathy may have partly stemmed from his own accidental burning of hundreds of acres of woodland two years before, for which he escaped any fine or imprisonment, and only occasionally suffered hearing the words “burnt woods” whispered behind his back. Connell, however, poor and foreign, lacking the friends and standing that Thoreau enjoyed, did not get off as lightly.
Staples left. The door was locked. Connell showed Thoreau where to hang his hat, “and how he managed matters there” while Thoreau “pumped my fellow-prisoner as dry as I could, for fear I should never see him again.”189 Word travelled. Soon someone came and paid Thoreau’s tax to Staples’s daughter, Ellen, while her father was out.190 Although Thoreau should have been released, Staples had already removed his boots by the time Ellen told him about the paid debt. He decided to let his prisoner remain in jail for the night.
Breakfast came—a pint of chocolate with brown bread. Thoreau ate what he could, leaving some bread, which Connell seized with instructions that he should save it up for lunch or dinner. When Connell was let out to work at haying in a neighboring field, that was the last Thoreau saw of him. It is unlikely he knew that Connell soon served five years in prison for arson. Although Thoreau was angry at the intervention of his anonymous taxpayer, and Staples’s insistence that he leave the jail, he and his jailer “were always good friends,” Edward Emerson wrote.191
The next day Alcott and Emerson had a long discussion about the incarceration. Alcott wrote in his journal about his “earnest talk with Emerson dealing with civil powers and institutions, arising from Thoreau’s going to jail for refusing to pay his tax.” Alcott said that Emerson “thought it mean and skulking, and in bad taste,”192 a summation that has unfairly stuck to Emerson. He wrote page after page in his journal of arguments both for and against Alcott’s position, and what presumably was Thoreau’s.
In one passage Emerson showed a complete understanding and, ultimately, a sense of pride in his friend’s stand.
These—rabble—at Washington are really better than the sniveling opposition. They have a sort of genius of a bold and manly cast, though Satanic. They see, against the unanimous expression of the people, how much a little well-directed effrontery can achieve, how much crime the people will bear, and they proceed from step to step, and it seems they have calculated but too justly upon your Excellency, O Governor Briggs. Mr. Webster told them how much the war cost, that was his protest, but voted the war, and sends his son to it. They calculated rightly on Mr. Webster. My friend Mr. Thoreau has gone to jail rather than pay his tax. On him they could not calculate. The Abolitionists denounce the war and give much time to it, but they pay the tax.193