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
“Don’t run amuck against the world,” Emerson wrote, briefly considering the position that if the state “means you well”—if ninety parts of what it does is for good and “ten parts for mischief”—then you “cannot fight heartily for a fraction.” The falsity of this justification was apparent as he continued, “The Abolitionists ought to resist and go to prison in multitudes on their known and described disagreements from the state. . . . I should heartily applaud them.”194
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
