Editorial Savoir Faire: Thoreau Transforms His journal into "Slavery in Massachusetts"

The summer of 1854 was an unusually public one for the reclusive Henry Thoreau. At a Fourth of July gathering in Framingham, Massachusetts, he spoke in the company of the most militant abolitionists of the day, vigorously protested the rendition (return to his owner by federal authorities) of fugitive slave Anthony Burns, and seconded the call for an end to the Union that continued to condone slavery. His increased anger over slavery coincided with anticipation, however, as Thoreau looked forward to the publication of his eight-year work-in-progress, Walden. By the spring, he had completed many revisions to the final manuscript, and at least by early May, he had sent the printer’s copy to Ticknor & Fields (Shanley 32). Walden would be published on 9 August, and Thoreau’s name was in the papers often that summer as excerpts from the book ran in various publications. Additionally, Charles Scribner notified Thoreau in May that Walden would be included in Scribner’s Cyclopedia of American Literature, published the following year (Harding and Bode 326). It seemed that Thoreau was finally being taken seriously after years of writing and publishing, and he obviously pinned many professional hopes on Walden. Steven Fink claims that, “despite [Thoreau’s] protestations to the contrary, he was hardly indifferent to the public’s response to this work,” and he estimates that the publicity Thoreau received that year “contributed significantly to the establishment of Thoreau’s general reputation as an American author of merit” (Prophet 267).

Fink argues that Thoreau’s Fourth of July speech, soon published as “Slavery in Massachusetts,” exposed him to a potentially new audience for Walden. The public appearance clearly associated him with radical abolitionism, and those who would not normally have read his works might have viewed with interest a book written by a Transcendentalist who doubled as an antislavery spokesman (“Thoreau and His Audience” 86–87). When he decided to speak in Framingham, Thoreau began to put together a speech culled from his 1854 journal commentary about Anthony Burns and earlier journal entries in April 1851 regarding fugitive slave Thomas Sims. As any good editor would, Thoreau revised his rough prose in order to turn it into a public address: he cleaned up rambling passages, added to and deleted sentences, and clarified points. Yet he did more than this. The journal entries from late May through mid-June 1854 contain Thoreau’s strongest condemnation to that date of northern complicity with proslavery forces. However, the most vehement and sarcastic examples of this rhetoric of condemnation do not show up in “Slavery in Massachusetts.” ² A comparison of the text of “Slavery in Massachusetts” with the journal from which it derives reveals that Thoreau curtailed the journal’s stridency, revising or cutting more than twenty passages that, with few exceptions, can be categorized as blasphemous, revolutionary, or, at best, politically incautious. In the journal, Thoreau equates the suffering of slaves with Christ’s, and he unequivocally advocates violence in the fight to end slavery. Why did Thoreau trouble to make these changes? I would propose that in the summer of 1854 Thoreau wanted to be regarded as a credible and an important author, probably more than at any other time in his maturation as a writer; the Independence Day rally provided an opportunity for him to become visible both as an antislavery spokesman and as the author of Walden. Had Thoreau read from the unexpurgated journal when he spoke at Framingham, he would doubtless have offended many in the audience. So he pointedly removed from the speech the most inflammatory remarks about Christ and religious and government officials—statements that would have reflected negatively on the man who uttered them. These two concerns—slavery and the reception of Walden—should be considered equally important in evaluating why Thoreau spoke at the antislavery meeting and in determining why his remarks there “toned down” the harsh rhetoric of the journal (Richardson 315). In order to appeal to his Fourth of July audience as an impassioned abolitionist, and in order to cultivate a potential audience for...