The Making of a Radical: Nathaniel Rogers and Henry David Thoreau
Crispin Sartwell
When it comes to describing the influences that shaped Henry David Thoreau’s prose and his politics as he came to maturity in the 1840s, few sources are usually mentioned beyond his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Virginia Woolf, casually manifesting herself in the drawing room at the Old Manse, 1840, reported that “If you listened to them both talking with your eyes shut you could not be certain where Emerson left off and Thoreau began." The two are obviously close stylistically and philosophically; however, their journals make it evident that despite Thoreau being the younger by fourteen years, the influence ran both ways. If Emerson dragged Thoreau through Carlyle and Coleridge, Thoreau hauled Emerson back into the terrain around Concord, Massachusetts; he brought American Transcendentalism down to earth. He had a persistently radicalizing effect on Emerson’s politics as well. In 1838 Emerson described the 20-year-old Thoreau, who soon became a constant presence in his journals, as “spiced throughout with rebellion.”
Thoreau’s own politics, in turn, were affected by some of the most deeply subversive American political writers, speakers, and thinkers of his time, or indeed of any time, such as the pioneering feminist Lucretia Mott, the radical abolitionist and pacifist William Lloyd Garrison, and - perhaps most decisively - Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, the subject of an early essay by Thoreau in The Dial, the Transcendentalist periodical edited by Margaret Fuller.
Rogers was an incomparably radical abolitionist newspaper editor from Concord, New Hampshire, about 60 miles to the north of Concord, Massachusetts and connected to it by the Merrimack River. Thoreau’s first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, describes a journey between the towns, “uniting Concord and Concord,” though the two men, it seems, never met. Rogers himself has not appeared in book form since a small collection of his newspaper writings was published in New Hampshire in 1849, three years after his death; he persists now only in his influence on Thoreau, whose style, themes, and political orientation he demonstrably affected.
All of these figures had a specific brand of “post-Protestant” politics: they were radical individualists, abolitionists, feminists, anti-racists, and anti-statists. Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” crystallizes not only his own political positions, but those of a large coalition of American reformers in the period from 1830 to 1860. And though this variety of American radicalism emerged contemporaneously with European leftism of the sort we might associate with Proudhon and Marx and is just as extreme in its criticism of contemporary society, the American developments are also quite distinct.
A variety of factors accounts for the neglect of Rogers, though writers such as John Greenleaf Whittier and Thomas Wentworth Higginson paid tribute to him later in the century. Southern New Hampshire, despite its proximity to Boston, was provincial, and Rogers and his newspaper, The Herald of Freedom, were proudly and insistently local. (Even when he emerged from the hills late in his life, it was to write a column for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune in the persona of “The Old Man of the Mountain,” a natural rock face in New Hampshire’s White Mountains that finally collapsed in 2003.) Almost all of Rogers’ writings took the form of short essays and news items written on extremely tight deadlines; he never completed or even contemplated a book, and rarely polished his newspaper writings into longer lectures or essays of the sort that made Emerson's reputation, and eventually Thoreau's. And Rogers was so very clear about his radical politics that many would have dismissed him as ridiculous or dangerous. Instead, they by and large succeeded in ignoring him.
Nathaniel Peabody Rogers was born in 1794 in Plymouth, New Hampshire, descended (according to a biographical sketch by his friend John Pierpont) from the “Protestant martyr” John Rogers, burned at the stake in 1555 at Smithfield in the reign of Bloody Mary. He was educated at Dartmouth and left a successful law practice to edit The Herald of Freedom and devote himself full time to the cause of immediate abolition. He defined the sort of country he envisioned as “an antislavery society” in which no person could coerce another and in which all people - African-Americans, Indians, women, and industrial workers, among others - were equally free.
Rogers associated close or ecstatic observation of the natural world with his political positions, one of Thoreau’s most persistent rhetorical strategies and sources of insight. As Thoreau puts it, Rogers “looks out from a serener natural life into the turbid arena of politics.” Thoreau’s own authorship returns intermittently to politics throughout (much more frequently and emphatically than Emerson’s, for example), and what he says here of Rogers is a good characterization of the stance Thoreau takes up in “Civil Disobedience,” but also in A Week, “Walking,” and elsewhere. Here, for example, is Rogers, in 1843, just as Thoreau was reading him.
Good farmers are learning that there is a better way to treat their cattle than by blows. The hostler of intelligence and kindness is ceasing to maul his noble horse. They are leaving off the practice of breaking steers and colts, for the reason that it is cruel: undeserved by the horse and unworthy of the employer, and because the whole horse or ox is better than the broken one. Political action is unfit even for brute animals. Is it fitter for man? Is humanity less susceptible of moral improvement than what we call brutality? A politician is but a man driver, a human teamster. His business is to control men by the whip and the goad. His occupation would be unlawful and inexpedient toward even the cattle.
And here is Thoreau in “Walking,” using the same metaphor as he launches into his praise of wildness: “Whatever part the whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. . . . I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society.” The anti-authoritarian spirit that led Thoreau to say “I quietly declare war on the state,” or “I was not born to be forced,” or “I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterwards,” is fully present in strikingly similar terms in Rogers.
Every aspect of Rogers’ politics, like Thoreau’s and Mott’s, for example, was driven by abolitionism. Such people regarded the ownership of people as a specific evil being perpetrated by their government and countrymen, but also as an image or essence of all evil. They concluded that since no person could own another, each person was the owner of herself. This insight drove the individualist feminism of Mott and Margaret Fuller and provided a vocabulary for demanding the liberation of all oppressed groups. Many of these figures were also absolute pacifists, and their anti-statism followed: they held that government rests on violence and that it amounts to a claim of ownership in people. “We cannot acknowledge allegiance to any human government,” declared Garrison, a hero of Rogers and Thoreau both, and he proceeded to burn copies of the US Constitution.
Rogers is one of the few writers whose prose Thoreau praised without qualification, except to say that he wished he sometimes wrote at greater length. Indeed, Thoreau roundly abused many writers, and tempered his praise even for those he admired most, such as Carlyle; he had far less tendency toward hero or genius-worship than did Emerson. In the early 1840s, Thoreau’s style - among the most distinctive and distinguished in American letters, of course - was still taking form, which is one reason his early essays are relatively little-read. As he develops, he finds a model in Rogers, and from that point his writing is at least as influenced by Rogers as by Emerson.
But to speak of his composition [Thoreau writes of Rogers]. It is a genuine yankee style, without fiction,--real guessing and calculating to some purpose, and reminds us occasionally, as does all free, brave, and original writing, of its great master in these days, Thomas Carlyle. It has a life above grammar, and a meaning which need not be parsed to be understood. . . . If perhaps [Rogers] had all the faults, he had more than the usual virtues of the radical. He loved his native soil, her hills and streams, like a Burns or a Scott. As he rode to an anti-slavery convention, he viewed the country with a poet’s eye, and some of his letters written back to his editorial substitute contain as true and pleasing pictures of New England life and scenery as are anywhere to be found.
Rogers indeed produced a series of delightful, informal New England travelogues as he described his journeys to abolitionist events, and described as well some of the great abolitionist figures he met there, including Mott and Garrison, but also Frederick Douglass, for example. But even getting stuck at home could bring out a gentle and intense poetry. This is from his little piece “It Rains” (1845):
While I am writing, it is raining most magnificently and gloriously out doors. It absolutely roars, it comes down in such multitude and big drops. There has been but little rain, and our sandy region has got to looking dry and distressed. Every thing looks encouraged now. The grass darkens as it drinks it in, with a kind of delicate satisfaction. And the trees stand and take it as a cow does a carding. You can hardly see the people for the umbrellas, and the clouds look as though they had not done with us. The prospect for the Canterbury meeting looks lowery. Let it rain. All for the best. It is extraineous, but I could not help noticing the great rain and saying this word about it. I think the more mankind regard these beautiful doings in nature, the more they will regard each other, and love each other, and the less they will be inclined to enslave each other. . . . The rain is the great anti-slavery discourse. And I like to have it pour.
“When the reader has finished one of his paragraphs,” wrote his friend Pierpont, “the last question he will ask himself will be ‘Well, now, what does all that mean?’”
Rogers himself found models for his writing in works such as Cobbett’s American Gardener, a beloved guide that went through many editions in the 19th century (and one in the 21st):
Cobbett’s Gardener is full of short, every day words which people can understand as readily as they can tell an onion stalk or a cabbage plant. You will find whole lines of them uninterrupted, every one of them as full of meaning as it can hold: the beautiful, strong, old Saxon, the talk-words, words for use and not for show. . . . A young collegian should read it twice a day, till he gets well of his pedantry. Cobbett will cure him if any body can.
By the end of his life, Rogers’ politics had become truly extreme, and he was opposed not only to government and the church, but to any form of organization that displayed any form of hierarchy whatever. Many radical abolitionists opposed participation in politics, even voting, on the grounds that government rested on violence. Rogers had gone even further by the mid 1840s, and was described in the parlance of the times not only as an ‘infidel,’ but as an ‘ultraist,’ a ‘come-outer,’ and a ‘no-organizationist.’ He wound up opposing the existence even of societies dedicated to ending slavery.
On the other hand, Rogers’ purity and ferocity are exactly what impressed Thoreau and Emerson. As is appropriate for a newspaper editor, he reserved some of his strongest words for the advocacy of free speech, his own and that of his allies being constantly under threat by pro-slavery politicians and mobs. The abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy, for example, was murdered in a pro-slavery riot in 1837, and Garrison had been grabbed from the office of his newspaper in 1835, paraded through the streets of Boston and threatened with lynching. Anti-slavery discourse was explicitly banned in many parts of the country.
The human voice is free of course [wrote Rogers]. It is naturally and inalienably free of every power but the man’s that utters it, as God is free, and language would hardly be marred more by the phrase ‘freedom of God’ than by such expressions as ‘liberty of speech.’ . . . Men better be without tongues and organs and powers, than not to use them sovereignly. If it be not safe to entrust the self-government of speech to mankind, there had better not be any mankind. Slavery is worse than non-existence. A society involving it is worse than none. The earth had better go unpeopled than inhabited by vassals.
Rogers read the initial version of Thoreau’s “Herald of Freedom” in the April 1844 issue of The Dial and republished it, while apologizing for the immodesty of doing so (Thoreau added to it, in manuscript, after Rogers’ death two years later; the longer version was published after Thoreau’s own death). He was pleasantly bewildered by the praise coming from an unknown person in a distinguished periodical, and refers to him as “Henry D. Thoreau, probably a German,” which is either an odd confusion or a lame joke. But Rogers, already struggling with the illness that ended his life two years later, praises Thoreau’s prose right back, in similar terms, calling the review “elegantly and ably written,” characterizing it as “written so beautifully and freshly,” and remarking on “the grace and beauty of the composition.”
Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College.
