Thoreau in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

From Henry D. Thoreau (1882)

[129] UT From Henry D. Thoreau (1882) F. B. Sanborn At Waldo Emerson’s suggestion, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (1831–1917) opened a school in Concord with his sister, Sarah Sanborn, after he graduated from Harvard College in 1855. He lived here with her, and later with his second wife, Louisa Leavitt, for the rest of his life. On moving to Concord, Sanborn rented a home across the street from the Thoreaus, with whom he took his meals, resuming his acquaintance with Henry, whom he had met briefly earlier that year. In addition to running his school, during the antebellum years Sanborn served as Secretary of Massachusetts’s Free Kansas Committee, in which position he raised money and supplies to support abolitionists ’ military and settlement efforts in the western territories of Kansas and Nebraska. With Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Gridley Howe, Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns, Sanborn was one of the “Secret Six” conspirators who supported John Brown’s radical abolitionism , including the eventual raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. It was through Sanborn that Thoreau and Brown met in March 1857, during the first of Brown’s two visits to Concord. After the Civil War, in which despite his militant antislavery politics he did not participate, Sanborn edited the Boston Commonwealth and the Journal of Social Science; he also contributed frequently to the Springfield Republican. In 1865, he founded the American Social Science Association and also served on the boards of several charitable organizations. He lectured widely, including often at the Concord School of Philosophy, which Louisa May Alcott had organized for her father in 1879, and which, through readings and lectures, kept alive the Transcendentalist spirit in Concord. Throughout his life, Sanborn published dozens of articles and books about famous men he had known, including biographies of Samuel Gridley Howe, John Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne , Bronson Alcott, and Waldo Emerson, in addition to Thoreau. In the words of Robert Burkholder, he was “an indefatigable chronicler of the social , political, and literary currents that swirled around him” (255). Sanborn’s editorial work on these and other figures, however, is notoriously sloppy. Sanborn wrote three biographies of Thoreau. The first, excerpted here, was the third volume to appear in Houghton, Mifflin’s American Men of Letters thoreau in his own time [130] series, and was undertaken to capitalize on Thoreau’s increasing stature by the 1880s. The next two, The Personality of Thoreau (1901) and Life of Henry David Thoreau (1917), include lengthy excerpts from Thoreau’s early and college essays as well as extensive biographical details about his ancestors. Reviews of Henry D. Thoreau were mixed, with many judging that Sanborn had “exaggerate[d] the importance of his subject” (qtd. in Scharnhorst, Annotated Bibliography, 228). Regardless of its critics, however, the book renewed attention to Thoreau as a literary figure in an important new series edited by Gilded Age favorite Charles Dudley Warner. it has been a common delusion, not yet quite faded away, that the chief Transcendentalists were but echoes of each other,—that Emerson imitated Carlyle, Thoreau and Alcott imitated Emerson, and so on to the end of the chapter. No doubt that the atmosphere of each of these men affected the others, nor that they shared a common impulse communicated by what Matthew Arnold likes to call the Zeitgeist,—the ever-felt spirit of the time. . . . Thoreau brought to his intellectual tasks an originality as marked as Emerson’s, if not so brilliant and star-like—a patience far greater than his, and a proud independence that makes him the most solitary of modern thinkers. I have been struck by these qualities in reading his yet unknown first essays in authorship, the juvenile papers he wrote while in college, from the age of seventeen to that of twenty, before Emerson had published anything except his first little volume, “Nature,” and while Thoreau, like other young men, was reading Johnson and Goldsmith, Addison and the earlier English classics, from Milton backward to Chaucer. . . . My own acquaintance with Thoreau did not begin with our common hostility to slavery, which afterwards brought us most closely together, but sprang from the accident of my editing for a few weeks the “Harvard Magazine,” a college monthly, in 1854–55, in which appeared a long review of “Walden” and the “Week.” In acknowledgment of this review, which was laudatory and made many quotations from his two volumes, Thoreau, whom I had never seen, called at...