Ultimately Emerson took issue with those abolitionists who spoke for freeing the enslaved but were not willing to give up a lifestyle that directly supported the institutions they condemned: cotton, rum, shipping. “In the particular,” he wrote, “it is worth considering that refusing payment of the state tax does not reach the evil so nearly as many other methods within your reach.” It was “your coat, your sugar” that kept people in chains. “Yet these”—and he must have seen he was criticizing himself in this as well—“you do not stick at buying.”195 In another entry he wrote, “Your objection, then, to the State of Massachusetts is deceptive. Your true quarrel is with the state of Man.”196
On July 26 Thoreau spent two hours talking with Alcott, the one person in Concord most likely to understand. Alcott had gone through a similar arrest in January 1843. His wife wrote the following entry in Alcott’s journal: “A day of some excitement, as Mr. Alcott had refused to pay his town tax and they had gone through the form of taking him to jail. After waiting some time to be committed, he was told it was paid by a friend.” Alcott later explained it this way:
Staples, the town collector, called to assure me that he should next week advertize my land to pay for the tax, unless it was paid before that time. Land for land, man for man. I would, were it possible, know nothing of this economy called “the State,” but it will force itself upon the freedom of the free-born and the wisest bearing is to over-bear it, let it have its own way, the private person never going out of his way to meet it. It shall put its hand into a person’s pocket if it will, but I shall not put mine there on its behalf.197
Charles Lane, the British social reformer, voluntarist, and friend of Alcott, was not an easy man to like. His haughty arrogance turned many away from him, both inside the Alcott family, Abba and Louisa May, and outside, Thoreau and Emerson. Emerson wrote that Lane’s “nature and influence do not invite mine, but always freeze me.”198 His account of Alcott’s arrest for The Liberator, however, must have been stimulating to Thoreau. Lane wrote that Alcott, being
convinced that the payment of the town tax involved principles and practices most degrading and injurious to man, he had long determined not to be a voluntary party to its continuance. . . .
To the county jail, therefore, Mr. Alcott went, or rather was forced by the benignant State and its delicate instrument. . . .
This act of non-resistance, you will perceive, does not rest on the plea of poverty. For Mr. Alcott has always supplied some poor neighbor with food and clothing to a much higher amount than his tax. Neither is it wholly based on the iniquitous purposes to which the money when collected is applied. For part of it is devoted to education, and education has not a heartier friend in the world than Bronson Alcott. But it is founded on the moral instinct which forbids every moral being to be a party, either actively or permissively, to the destructive principles of power and might over peace and love.199
Thoreau gave two lectures in Concord in 1848, possibly two parts of the same lecture. “The Relation of the Individual to the State” and “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to the State” explained his actions and principles to his curious neighbors. Elizabeth Peabody, planning the first issue of her Aesthetic Papers in early 1849, asked Thoreau to contribute a manuscript after hearing about one of the lectures. He wrote Peabody on April 5 that he would send “the article in question before the end of next week.” His offering “the paper to your first volume only” was moot. The journal folded after its initial issue.
A week after Thoreau’s arrest the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society held their second celebration of West Indian Emancipation at Thoreau’s house at Walden Pond. People spoke from his doorway, including Emerson. Previously Emerson had read his address “On the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies” at the August 1844 meeting of the Society, where Frederick Douglass was also to speak. Because abolitionists had been outspoken about the clergy, they were denied use of the First Parish, and the weather prevented the use of the meadow next to the Old Manse. The Town Hall was then decided on. The town selectmen, however, would not direct the sexton to ring the meeting-house bell to alert people of the change in venue. Thoreau, “seeing the timidity of one unfortunate youth, who dared not touch the bell rope, took hold of it with a strong arm; and the bell, (though set in its own way,) pealed forth its summons right merrily.”200 Nearly twenty years later Emerson recalled the event. “I have never recorded a fact, which perhaps ought to have gone into my sketch of ‘Thoreau,’ that . . . when I read my Discourse on Emancipation [in the British West Indies], in the Town Hall, in Concord, and the selectmen would not direct the sexton to ring the meeting-house bell, Henry went himself, and rung the bell at the appointed hour.”201
In “The Method of Nature” Emerson asked, “Shall we not quit our companions, as if they were thieves and pot-companions, and betake ourselves to some desert cliff of Mount Katahdin, some unvisited recess of Moosehead Lake, to bewail our innocency and to recover it, and with it the power to communicate again with these sharers of a more sacred idea?”202 So when Thoreau was invited to accompany his cousin George Thatcher, who was in the lumber business in Maine and would be traveling to look at some property, he took the opportunity to make an excursion away from Walden, away from Concord, away from friends. While visiting a lumber camp, Thoreau found a copy of Emerson’s address “On the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies.”203 Emerson was never far away.
In the summer of 1846 Emerson imagined a retreat of his own. He showed his selected site to both Thoreau and Alcott; Thoreau drew a diagram of a small house to which Alcott added “another story, as a lookout.”204 Although these plans were not brought to fruition, Emerson did not abandon the idea of a personal sanctuary. The following summer he decided to build a small summerhouse in the field next to Bush that could be used as a study. Thoreau, Alcott, and Emerson began cutting hemlocks for posts. Built organically from Alcott’s intuition rather than any architectural design, the house was “fashioned from gnarled limbs of pine, oak with knotty excrescences and straight trunks of cedar, a fantastic but pleasing structure. . . . feeling its way up, as it were, dictated at each step by the suggestion of the crooked bough that was used and necessarily often altered. . . . Thoreau drove the nails, and drove them well, but as Mr. Alcott made the eaves curve upward for beauty, and lined the roof with velvet moss and sphagnum, Nature soon reclaimed it.”205 While working with Alcott, Thoreau felt “he was nowhere, doing nothing.”206 Emerson’s mother called it “The Ruin.” Emerson referred to it as “Tumbledown-Hall.”207 In the fall Thoreau wrote to Emerson,
Alcott has heard that I laughed and so set the people a laughing at his arbor, though I never laughed louder than when on the ridge pole. But now I have not laughed for a long time, it is so serious. He is very grave to look at. . . . As for the building I feel a little oppressed when I come near it, it has so great a disposition to be beautiful. It is certainly a wonderful structure on the whole, and the fame of the architect will endure as long—as it shall stand.