Between John Brown and Eugenics: The Radicalism of Forest Preservation in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts

Admirers of Henry David Thoreau often marvel that the hermit of Walden Pond, lover of wilderness and solitude, was also a fiery abolitionist and champion of direct action against slavery. When John Brown launched his fateful attack on Harper's Ferry, Thoreau rushed into Concord's public square to endorse Brown's treason and declare that "the only government that I recognize . . . is that power that establishes justice in the land."¹ Thoreau's antislavery radicalism can seem all the more impressive when he is compared to the next generation of American environmentalists, many of whom couched their pleas for wilderness preservation in the language of manifest destiny, Anglo-Saxon supremacy, and eugenics. John Muir harbored such disdain for the original inhabitants of his beloved Yosemite that his own Sierra Club has compared his legacy to Confederate monuments that should be "taken down."² Perhaps the most influential American theorist of white supremacy, Madison Grant, was by profession primarily a conservationist who founded the Bronx Zoo and played the central role in early twentieth-century campaigns to save the redwoods and the bison.³ The apparent gulf between Thoreau's racial views and Grant's may seem so wide that they can only be explained as a quirk of the two men's personalities, with no larger significance for the environmental movement in which they both participated. But things are not so simple.

A closer look at the conservation movement of the late nineteenth century, especially in metropolitan Boston, reveals that neither Thoreau's abolitionism nor Grant's eugenicism were idiosyncratic. A remarkable number of early conservationists had ties not only to abolitionism in general, but also to John Brown in particular. And some of these same conservationists laid important foundations for the eugenics movement that flourished half a century after Brown's death. To be sure, the sheer chronological gap means that few individuals were personally involved in both abolitionist and eugenicist organizations. But it would be a grave mistake to imagine that there were two separate currents of early conservation, one abolitionist and antiracist, the other imperial and eugenicist. To understand early conservation, we must recognize the ways that racist and antiracist ideas could coexist in a single community of inquiry and activism.

We must also recognize how easily the "radicalism" of one era can metamorphose into the mainstream of the next, or even into a new radicalism of a seemingly contrary stamp. American conservation was decisively shaped by one such metamorphosis. The rise of the Republican Party, and the Union victory in the Civil War, gave many radical abolitionists abrupt access to sweeping political power. As they enacted policies that had once seemed fantasies, they and their successors traded radical idealism for a mindset that I will refer to as "problem solving." A radical embraces a few absolute principles and seeks to carry them through without regard for consequences: hence Thoreau's refusal to acknowledge any government save one of perfect justice. A problem solver starts not with principles but with problems, and seeks to resolve them through dispassionate scientific inquiry and coalition building. When radical abolitionists became problem solvers, they planted the seeds of future radicalisms of both left and right.

Forest Preservation in Metropolitan Boston

This story could be told in many contexts. In this article I focus on the community of activists who began the work of preserving forests in the suburban communities of metropolitan Boston. This might seem a minor story of purely local interest, and in fact most environmental historians have instead emphasized campaigns to protect Western ecosystems through federal legislation. Yet the Massachusetts campaign for forest protection was earlier and more successful than its Western counterpart. What's more, its focus was on the reforestation of disrupted landscapes rather than on the protection of supposedly "untouched" wildernesses. Since the entire globe has now been disrupted by the burning of fossil fuels and by industrial agriculture, the Massachusetts forest campaign has special relevance for environmentalists today.⁴

The story began around 1846. At the peak of deforestation in Massachusetts, the...