The Transcendentalists and Their World

By Robert A. Gross

One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 best books of 2021
One of Air Mail's 10 best books of 2021
Winner of the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize

In the year of the nation’s bicentennial, Robert A. Gross published The Minutemen and Their World, a paradigm-shaping study of Concord, Massachusetts, during the American Revolution. It won the prestigious Bancroft Prize and became a perennial bestseller. Forty years later, in this highly anticipated work, Gross returns to Concord and explores the meaning of an equally crucial moment in the American story: the rise of Transcendentalism.

The Transcendentalists and Their World offers a fresh view of the thinkers whose outsize impact on philosophy and literature would spread from tiny Concord to all corners of the earth. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts called this New England town home, and Thoreau drew on its life extensively in his classic Walden. But Concord from the 1820s through the 1840s was no pastoral place fit for poets and philosophers.

The Transcendentalists and their neighbors lived through a transformative epoch of American life. A place of two thousand–plus souls in the antebellum era, Concord was a community in ferment, whose small, ordered society founded by Puritans and defended by Minutemen was dramatically unsettled through the expansive forces of capitalism and democracy and tightly integrated into the wider world. These changes challenged a world of inherited institutions and involuntary associations with a new premium on autonomy and choice. They exposed people to cosmopolitan currents of thought and endowed them with unparalleled opportunities. They fostered uncertainties, raised new hopes, stirred dreams of perfection, and created an audience for new ideas of individual freedom and democratic equality deeply resonant today.

The Transcendentalists and Their World is both an intimate journey into the life of a community and a searching cultural study of major American writers as they plumbed the depths of the universe for spiritual truths and surveyed the rapidly changing contours of their own neighborhoods. It shows us familiar figures in American literature alongside their neighbors at every level of the social order, and it reveals how this common life in Concord entered powerfully into their works. No American community of the nineteenth century has been recovered so richly and with so acute an awareness of its place in the larger American story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9780374711887

Robert A. Gross

Robert A. Gross is James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History at the University of Connecticut. He is author of The Minutemen and Their World.

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The Transcendentalists and their World by Robert A. Gross

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For Ann

Who shared and sustained this journey

Of books and life

JOHN G. HALES, Plan of the town of Concord, Mass. in the county of Middlesex (1830). This map of Concord in 1830 highlights the thickening of settlement in the central village, the extension of highways east into Cambridge and Boston and west and north into the countryside, and the growth of water-powered manufacturing along the Assabet River in the southwest. Note the prominence of Walden Pond in the southeast. (Courtesy Massachusetts Archives)

Map of the Town of Concord, Middlesex County, Mass. (1852), surveyed by H. F. Walling, a civil engineer. The coming of the railroad is evident on this map of Concord, showing the route of the Fitchburg line as it enters the town at the edge of Walden Pond, heads north into the central village, and then turns west to pass the Damon textile mill before crossing into neighboring Acton. The map indicates each of the school districts, and the inset image highlights the association of Concord with the monument at the Old North Bridge. (Courtesy Concord Free Public Library)

Preface

There can be no true history written until a just estimate of human nature is holden by the historian.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON,

Philosophy of Modern History, December 8, 1836

Wherever men have lived there is a story to be told, and it depends chiefly on the story-teller or historian whether that is interesting or not.

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU,

March 18, 1861

American individualism found its strongest voices in the nineteenth century among the New England Transcendentalists, and none more so than Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. From his ancestral home of Concord, Massachusetts, Emerson summoned his countrymen to free themselves from bondage to the past and refuse unthinking conformity to contemporaries. Trust thyself, he urged; seek inspiration in nature; realize your infinite potential. Through such spiritual journeys, people of all sorts—women as well as men, Blacks as well as whites, poor as well as rich—could tap their inner genius and build together an original American culture, independent of the errors and injustices of the Old World and true to the ideals of liberty and equality at the heart of the democracy that the break with Britain had left unfulfilled.¹

Starting in the mid-1830s, Emerson preached this stirring message in Boston and vicinity and at home in Concord, and over the ensuing decade he extended his reach on the lecture circuit to audiences across New England, in the leading port cities of the Northeast, and as far south as Baltimore. He was not alone nor initially in the forefront of the Transcendentalist movement; well into the 1840s, even as his literary reputation was growing in England, he remained a provincial figure in his native land.²

No one attended to his words or felt his influence more fully than his younger townsman Thoreau, the only native son among the Concord writers, who, after graduating from Harvard in 1837, became his disciple and protégé. Coming of age a generation after Emerson, Thoreau heeded the master’s call for self-reliance, cultivated his own voice and vision by the shores of Walden Pond, and fashioned a classic account of how to live simply and sincerely, in harmony with nature. Walden continues to inspire today as a model of Transcendentalist individualism and a foundation text of the environmental movement. Although he lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, Thoreau never lost sight of his townspeople, and through his strenuous critique of their way of life, he put his birthplace on the literary map. He tightened the link between Transcendentalism and town that his mentor had initiated. As Emerson gathered thinkers and reformers in his orbit, as Margaret Fuller arrived for extended stays, and as Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Alcotts took up residence, Concord gained notice as a literary center, and it soon came to symbolize the social ferment and the intellectual iconoclasm of the age. The town has been celebrated as the seat of the American Renaissance in literature and art during the decades before the Civil War. The writer Henry Adams dubbed Transcendentalism the Concord Church. It sheltered a faith he could not adopt but whose appeal he could not deny. So it was for many New Englanders then and now, within and beyond the town, and for readers all over the United States and the world.³

Why Concord? Was it simply the accidents of birth and geography—Emerson’s familial antecedents, Thoreau’s native origin, plus proximity to Boston—that made the town a literary center? Or was the community fertile ground for novel ideas? One popular account has it that Concord was the home of two revolutions—the first on April 19, 1775, when Minutemen clashed with Redcoats at the North Bridge and fired what Emerson called the shot heard round the world; the second in the intellectual awakening the Transcendentalists sparked with their rejection of European hierarchy and inequality and their vision of free individuals realizing the promise of democracy in everyday life. In this telling, the embattled farmers waged a successful war for political independence and self-government; their heirs in the 1830s and 1840s built on that achievement with an intellectual campaign to liberate American minds. The Transcendentalists thus extended what the Minutemen began, and their idealistic legacy has posed a vital challenge to our culture ever since.⁴

That story misses a profound transition in American life. The Revolutionary generation fought for collective ends. It defended the right of towns and provinces to tax and govern themselves, and it founded a republic on the duty of citizens to serve the public good. In New England the ideology of civic republicanism merged with Puritan traditions to emphasize the interdependence of individuals and families within a common way of life. This worldview was compatible with a host of inequities—slavery, white racism, class privilege, patriarchy and the subordination of women—and it was never without challenge, especially by libertarian arguments in favor of free markets and the right of individuals to pursue their own interests, whether in business or in religion. Nonetheless, a half-century after independence, the social web was still binding—as an idea, if not always in practice. In principle, everyone belonged to the community; none lived alone, independent of established institutions and without obligations to the neighbors.

The Transcendentalists rejected this intellectual heritage. Combining Romantic notions from Europe with the Protestant stress on personal salvation, and infusing these influences with a democratic faith in liberty and equality, Emerson put the individual first and foremost. As he saw it, every person comes into this world with a divine soul, infinite in possibility. It is the highest calling in life to dive into this inner ocean and give it expression. No other duty takes precedence, not the demands of elders, not the claims of church or state, not the obligation to be useful to society. An institution is merely the lengthened shadow of one man. Emerson’s purpose was to break the hold of ancient traditions and involuntary associations, so that every person could take the journey of self-discovery and be an inspiration to others along the way. Former generations acted under the belief that a shining social prosperity was the aim of men: and sacrificed uniformly individuals to the nation, he declared. The modern mind teaches that the nation exists for the Individual;—for the guardianship and education of every man. Thoreau, characteristically, carried these convictions to excess. I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society, he exclaimed. I am not the son of the engineer. I love mankind, he added during his sojourn in the woods. I hate the institutions of their forefathers.⁵

How do we explain this revolution in social thought and practice? Why did individualism come to the fore as a cultural ideal, and why in this time and place, Concord and the Boston area during the second quarter of the nineteenth century? In this book, I address these questions through a community study of Concord, with the aim of tracing the connections between Transcendentalism and the society from which it emerged and to which it spoke. This inquiry places the Concord writers in the context of the town in which they lived and wrote; it explores how the unfolding life of the community formed their understanding of the broader society and culture; it sets forth the responses of the townspeople—some favorable, others dubious, many uncomprehending—to the radical ideas of their intellectual neighbors. The Transcendentalists and Their World is at once a social history of a storied New England community and a cultural history of major American writers and the ideas they professed; it highlights the interplay between the two, the links between literature and life.

A common myth about Concord in the era of Emerson and Thoreau portrays the community as a simple country town, shaped by the seasonal routines of farmers tilling the land and supporting their families. Though the town lay along two rivers, it lacked sufficient waterpower to drive large-scale manufacturing, and so the industrial revolution passed it by. Supposedly remote from the progress of the age, Concord retained an agrarian landscape, formed by generations of mixed husbandry since the beginnings of English settlement back in 1635: an attractive blend of gardens and cornfields, meadows and pastures, woodlands and orchards. The slow-moving rivers made for pleasant boating; the pristine ponds, nestled in the forests, offered recreation and solitude in nature. In this picturesque view, Concord enjoyed a reputation as a quiet, pastoral place, fit for poets and philosophers. Safe from the conflicts and stresses of the wider world, the town nourished Emerson’s muse and energized Thoreau’s quest for a simpler mode of life.

This vision of the ideal small town, combining nature and culture in harmony, is a fiction. It was created in part by the Transcendentalists themselves, who liked to contrast the simpler ways of the town with those of the mass society taking shape in the nation’s cities. For Emerson, individuals could still thrive in the small community, could know and engage their neighbors, and could make their voices heard in public affairs. The pastoral image of Concord was popularized in the Civil War era and for long afterward to attract tourists and armchair travelers in search of an imaginative escape from the pressures of urban-industrial existence.⁶ But in the heyday of the Transcendentalists, Concord offered no haven from the times, as Emerson and Thoreau well knew and told us in their most searching works. Although its population numbered little more than two thousand souls, the town was as profoundly affected by the upheavals of the age as any booming metropolis. It was a community in ferment, whose small, ordered society, founded by Puritans and defended by Minutemen, was dramatically unsettled by the expansive forces of capitalism and democracy. During the several decades around Thoreau’s childhood, youth, and coming into maturity (1815–1847), his hometown was economically dynamic, religiously diverse, racially heterogeneous, politically divided, and receptive to social and political reforms. It stood in the mainstream of Jacksonian America with an excellent vantage on a society undergoing rapid change.⁷

If Concord was in many respects a representative town, it also had claims to uniqueness, including its origin as the first inland settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, its preeminence at the start of the Revolutionary War, its significance as a commercial and political center in the early republic, its close connections with Cambridge and Boston, and its longevity as a religious body under the watch of one dominating figure in the pulpit for more than six decades. From 1778 to 1841, Rev. Ezra Ripley embodied the old order of eighteenth-century Massachusetts for his parishioners, preaching a social ethic designed to hold the community together, even as it was increasingly undercut by change. When Emerson rejected this philosophy, he was repudiating the legacy of his own step-grandfather. Transcendentalism was a personal as well as a public fight for individual freedom.

In the Concord version, this intellectual movement differed from its Boston counterpart. There such radical thinkers as Orestes Brownson and George Ripley linked self-culture to social reform. In their perspective, a new age was possible only when free men and women cooperated to remove the barriers of inequality and oppression to individual fulfillment. Their colleagues in Concord disagreed. They stood apart from the moral crusades of the day. Emerson long resisted a public stand on behalf of abolitionism. Thoreau preferred to go his own way. For them, the route to reform ran through individual consciousness, one soul at a time. Individualism was the banner of Concord Transcendentalism, and it is to this theme that this book attends. Formulating their ideas in a community where older customs were waning, social ties fraying, and people asserting greater freedom to make their own choices and direct their own affairs, Concord writers spoke to contemporary experiences and offered fresh ways to make sense of change. In so doing, they wrestled with the same issues as their neighbors, while bringing cosmopolitan knowledge to bear on local life. The America of their lectures and writings had its origins in Concord.

Emerson, a native of Boston, opted to make Concord his home in 1835, as he sought to carve out a new path after resigning from the ministry. As he was settling in, Thoreau was in Cambridge for his sophomore year at Harvard. It would be two years before they met. By then, the ongoing transformation of Concord was provoking a profound crisis in the social and political order. In this milieu, the newcomer Emerson would compose and deliver his most influential statements of Transcendentalist individualism—Nature, American Scholar, the Divinity School address, and the various lecture series at Boston’s Masonic Temple. Thoreau, growing up amid the changes, would absorb the new ideas about individual possibility into his worldview and exhort his neighbors to resist the constraints of capitalism and conformity by living deliberately and making their every act a conscious choice.

The social transformation of Concord and New England had its roots in the Puritan foundations of the community and in the heritage of the Revolution, and the legacy of that past was epitomized by the long-serving Parson Ripley. The stirring of change was felt at the dawn of the American republic, but it was in the 1820s to the 1840s that a new order, built on greater individual freedom, voluntary association, economic innovation, social mobility, and integration into the wider world, challenged inherited ways and created new tensions and contradictions for the town and its people. These were the years when Emerson forged his role on the public platform and set forth his best-known ideas and when Thoreau laid the basis for his most influential work, Walden. This book thus concentrates on the quarter century from 1825 to 1850 to tell their stories.

It has taken many years of research to construct this picture of the town and its writers. The Transcendentalists and Their World is the sequel to my earlier account of Concord in the era of the American Revolution. The Minutemen and Their World appeared in 1976, just in time for the Bicentennial, with an approach that was then still young. It was a work of the new social history, which widened our view of the past beyond the elite white men who had typically dominated the stage and took in groups long ignored. This would be a novel history from the bottom up, recovering the thoughts and actions of common folk. Inspired by that agenda, Minutemen encompassed all levels of society and every walk of life. It placed people who were usually on the margins—notably, women and people of color, enslaved or free—in the narrative as actors in their own right. The aim was to capture the ongoing life of the town, with its issues and conflicts, as the inhabitants encountered the tumultuous forces of a revolutionary world.

The new social history, once an insurgency, has long since been tamed and absorbed into the scholar’s toolkit. It has been challenged, in turn, by other initiatives, especially, by a new cultural history attentive to the ways social roles are informed by cultural ideas (such as race and gender) and by a transnational perspective linking the local and the global. Academic readers will discern the impact of these innovations in the work that follows.

Yet this book is true to its scholarly origins. It builds on the database assembled for Minutemen to identify significant patterns in collective life. But where the documentary record for the colonial town was manageable by a single scholar, with the aid of a few research assistants, the nineteenth century burgeoned with manuscript and printed sources in tandem with an explosion of activity in economy, politics, and society. Concord abounds in materials documenting the vigorous growth and movement of the population, the expansion of economic production and exchange, the splintering of churches and the rise of new sects, the proliferation of voluntary associations, the mobilization of the grassroots in political parties and moral crusades, the increased enrollment and impact of colleges and schools, and the publication of books, newspapers, and magazines in vast profusion. Emerson professed disdain for the cheap sublime of magnitude and number, but he recognized the uses (and abuses) of statistics to illustrate his portrait of the contemporary world. So too has this historian been enticed by the opportunities such sources offer for systematic, quantitative analysis—a labor spread over several decades and made possible by a dozen or more undergraduate and graduate data gatherers and computer consultants.

The counterpoint to these records of an emerging mass society are the many personal documents left behind by individuals with heightened awareness of their public and private selves. The autobiographies, diaries, memoirs, and letters used in this study provide ample testimony to the new consciousness of self and society Emerson considered the hallmark of the age. As Concord became more deeply integrated into the wider world, its sons and daughters were constantly on the move in search of employment in the countinghouses of Boston, the mills of Waltham and Lowell, and farmlands and rising towns on the expanding Western frontier. Newcomers, in turn, flowed in and out of town, reducing the native-born to a minority. The Yankee migration deposited the personal papers of onetime Concordians across the continent, from Maine to Massachusetts and Connecticut, south to North Carolina, west to Texas, and across the Rockies to the West Coast. Chasing all these people down is a job never done, as online genealogical databases are continually updated with new details. But I have followed their trails far and wide to make unexpected discoveries about life in the wide-ranging world of Emerson and Thoreau.

Like its predecessor, this book is addressed both to students of American history and literature and to the general public. The narrative aims to present the story of Concord and its writers fluently and accessibly; the endnotes take up details of evidence and debates among scholars. The study began as an investigation into how the close world of the Minutemen, with its communal ethic and its inclusive institutions, gave way to the fragmented and individualistic society of the Transcendentalists. Over the last few years, as I wrote the bulk of these pages, Concord and Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century have seemed uncannily close to the United States in our own times.

Theirs was an era of globalization, as exhilarating and unsettling as our own. Political democracy was then new; so, in the Bay State, was religious choice. The issues with which we struggle today—fake news, electoral fraud, sloganeering, personal attacks, and conspiracy theories—drove the partisans and sectarians of small-town Concord into mutually suspicious enclaves. Yet confidence in progress remained high, far more so than it does today. Moral reformers campaigned to rid the earth of sin; school reformers strove to bring education up to date. And though the flood of information from mass media could seem overwhelming, libraries and lyceums offered guides to understanding. As a public intellectual, Emerson took up the charge of canvassing the ever-increasing world of learning and digesting it for others.

Most important, through their efforts to make sense of a rapidly changing society, the Transcendentalists and their neighbors struggled for ways to reconcile the new freedom of individuals with the older claims of interdependence for the common good. Their legacy resides not in their answers but in their attempts.

Part I

A COMMUNITY IN CHANGE

PROLOGUE

A New Beginning

Early in August 1822, a Boston schoolmaster and his wife gathered up their four young children for a trip to the country. Their destination was Concord, sixteen miles west of the city and a four-hour journey by stage. The weather was perfect for the expedition, so fine, clear and cool, one newspaper noted, that the usual toll of deaths in the hot season was surprisingly light and the crops in the fields and orchards promised an abundant harvest. The children, ranging in age from nine to three, were undoubtedly excited by the open, rural landscape, so unlike their neighborhood atop Beacon Hill, with its continuous rows of houses and brick-lined streets. The highlight of this outing was not the farms under cultivation but rather a pond in the woods a mile from Concord center—a scene seemingly so solitary and untouched by man that it caught the imagination of the five-year-old boy in the little entourage and aroused a lifelong love of the wild. Nearly a quarter-century later he would remember that day as a turning point in his life. That woodland vision for a long time made the drapery of my dreams, Henry David Thoreau recalled not long after taking up residence by the shores of Walden Pond in the summer of 1845. Some how or other it at once gave the preference to this recess among the pines where almost sunshine & shadow were the only inhabitants that varied the scene, over that tumultuous and varied city—as if it had found its proper nursery. The encounter would prove fateful not just for the aspiring writer but for the place where he dwelled. It was a signal moment in the making of Concord, Massachusetts, into a literary landmark and of Thoreau, its native son, into an enduring force in American culture.¹

In the summer of 1822, that visit to Walden was little more than an excuse for John Thoreau, age thirty-four, to get out of the city and escape his troubles. The father of four was at a low ebb in his fortunes. A native of Boston, he was the son of a self-made merchant of French Protestant origins from the Isle of Jersey, who had arrived in the colonial capital in 1773 and prospered in the Revolution. The sire’s story was the stuff of American myth. A mariner on a vessel that shipwrecked off the Massachusetts coast, Jean Thoreau showed up in Boston with little but his skills as a seaman, yet somehow, through wartime service on a privateer under the command of Paul Revere, he obtained the capital to enter trade in the new nation. His import house on Long Wharf in Boston harbor thrived in the 1790s; his home in the North End teemed with eight children. This upward course was upset by the death of his wife, and after remarrying a woman with ties to Concord, he relocated his family in 1800 to a house on the town common, only to die within a year. The orphans were left to the care of a new stepmother and the guidance of the court-appointed administrator of the paternal estate.²

John Thoreau, the eldest son and fourth child, spent his teenage years training to follow in his father’s footsteps and enter a countinghouse. His first store in Concord was ill-starred; launched in 1809, when he was just twenty-one, it soon fell victim to the pressures on American commerce in an Atlantic world at war. A second try, in the town of Chelmsford ten years later, succumbed to the Panic of 1819 and the ensuing depression. Amid these setbacks, in 1812 the unlucky merchant wed another newcomer to Concord, Cynthia Dunbar, and struggled to support their growing brood. For more than a decade he was in and out of the town, doing whatever was available to make ends meet. He peddled goods to Indians in Maine, clerked in others’ stores when he was not failing in his own, and farmed on his mother-in-law’s land. Nothing took. At thirty-five, he was reduced to instructing boys and girls in a Boston school not far from the former site of his father’s once-booming business. The summer outing to Walden in 1822 was surely a welcome distraction. In the splendor of the woods and pond, he could forget for a few hours his meager prospects in the city.³

His wife Cynthia’s family had also known better days. Mary Jones, her mother, was born into the colonial elite of Weston, fifteen miles south of Concord. Her father, one of the largest landholders in Massachusetts Bay and among the most politically influential, resisted popular pressure and fought for king and country, as did six of his eleven adult sons. That action resulted in the loss of the family’s vast holdings and permanent exile for five sons in Canada. Mary, who stayed behind, expressed her political sentiments by marrying men with misgivings about the Patriot cause. Her first husband, Harvard graduate Asa Dunbar, gave up a pulpit in Salem for a law office in Keene, New Hampshire, where he proved his loyalty sufficiently to be chosen selectman and town clerk. At his death in 1787, he left behind five minor children, including his one-month-old daughter Cynthia. Mary struggled to support her growing brood, keeping a tavern in Keene and then a boardinghouse in Boston, before marrying Capt. Jonas Minot, a substantial Concord farmer and once lukewarm Patriot, in June 1798 and settling into his homestead on the Virginia Road in the eastern quarter of the town. The union supported a genteel style of life for the Dunbars, but stepfather Minot was spending as much as he took in, and when he died in 1813, his estate afforded little ready money for the widow. Mary’s daughters had to rely on their manners and minds to make their way. Louisa Dunbar briefly won the affections of future senator Daniel Webster in a short-lived courtship; younger sister Cynthia found her life’s partner in the struggling John Thoreau.⁴

Ironically, Cynthia’s ne’er-do-well older brother gave her family a route back to Concord and the middle class. Charles J. Dunbar was legendary for barroom tricks and wrestling feats; he could toss his hat high in the air and catch it on his head without fail over and over again. But he possessed little knack for earning a living. It was to everyone’s surprise, then, that in October 1822 he finally did something useful. On a tour of the New Hampshire countryside, he stumbled upon gold—black gold—on a farm in the Lakes Region not far from the White Mountains. His find was a lode of plumbago, better known today as graphite, well suited to use in lead pencils. Dunbar readily grasped its commercial potential and with good reason. Though often on the road, he considered Concord home, and he was well aware that the town was the birthplace of American pencil making. Local cabinetmaker William Munroe had pioneered the infant industry, and after 1819 he steadily improved the technology, reduced its costs, and built the market. About the same time Dunbar was acquiring rights to the graphite in the Granite State, Munroe was advertising his ability to furnish all the pencils his countrymen could want and at a lower price than those long imported from Britain.⁵

That was no deterrent to Dunbar. Rather than supply the raw material to Munroe, he went into the business himself, with two Concord investors as partners. Within a few months the company was floundering for lack of a steady hand at the helm. The call went out to Dunbar’s brother-in-law to step in. In March 1823 John Thoreau returned with his family to Concord, rescued the enterprise, and made it his own. Munroe notwithstanding, there was room for more than one firm in the growing industry. Pencil making enabled Thoreau to obtain a fresh start in the town he had departed five years before and to stay there for good. Instead of importing and selling foreign commodities, he pursued a new strategy for economic success: producing high-quality items from domestic sources for the citizens of an extensive republic. What the father did with pencils, his literary son would do with books.⁶

John Thoreau returned to a community facing its own economic challenges. The small town of nearly eighteen hundred inhabitants in the early 1820s had been as buffeted by the ups and downs of the wider economy as had the aspiring merchant-turned-pencil-maker. In the first decades of the republic, America quickened with new motion, its trade expanding across an Atlantic world disrupted by revolution and war, its population spreading onto once-Indian lands across the Appalachians. Concord shared in the boom. From its farms flowed wagonloads of barreled beef and pork destined for West Indian plantations and oxcarts heaped with rye, hay, and wood to sustain the bustling seaports on the Massachusetts coast. The central village filled up with stores and taverns catering to rural customers with money to spend on the latest textiles and tableware, spices and lemons, rum and wine from abroad. Craft shops multiplied, and the area in the center known as the milldam, where waterpower was channeled to grind corn and rye into flour and to saw lumber into boards, took shape as a manufacturing district. It supported a little clock industry, which assembled timepieces in mahogany cases and equipped them with brass movements from the foundry across the road. The makers advertised their goods for shipment anywhere in the country.

The financial bubble burst abruptly at the close of 1807, as the Jefferson administration imposed an embargo on trade with the outside world. In the contracting economy, John Thoreau’s yellow store at the head of the common was doomed. An exodus of workingmen began; so many poured out that Concord registered a small loss of population in the census of 1810. The unsettlement continued into the War of 1812, though the suspension of commerce with Britain did give a boost to American manufacturers. Free from competition from cheap imports, local entrepreneurs devised substitutes. This was the moment when Munroe shifted from making clock cases to pencils; blacksmith Joshua Jones produced nails and wire. One of the earliest cotton mills in New England began operating along the Assabet River, in the western part of town. Protected by war and profiting from scarcity, these industrial start-ups faded with peace. The clockmakers departed; the cotton factory survived only by suspending production for a year and a half. Munroe looked yet again for new products to sell. In the uncertain times, people did the bookkeeping of their losses with imported pencils. By the early 1820s, the milldam was adrift and run-down. In a young nation that was doubling its population every twenty-five years, the ancient town of Concord, founded in 1635, was barely holding its own. Between 1790 and 1820 it grew by just 12 percent, well below the statewide increase of 38 percent. Concord was in need of a new direction to stave off further decline.⁷

Changes were stirring. The revival of pencil making in Concord was one sign of the economic expansion gathering force in the Bay State. In his address to the legislature at the start of 1823, Gov. John Brooks took pride in the advance of manufacturing; of the 149 companies chartered by the Commonwealth in recent years, with a capital exceeding $16 million, nearly all were in successful operation. The modern textile factories started at Waltham in 1814 and Lowell in 1823 put Middlesex County at the forefront of the industrial revolution. Located at the geographical center of the county, Concord felt the stimulus to enterprise and innovation. The modest mill on the Assabet became as capable of converting cotton into cloth as the more famous complex on the Merrimack. Half a mile downstream another establishment, begun in 1819, produced lead pipes for aqueducts. The town center hummed with the activity of William Whiting’s carriage works, Alvan Pratt’s gun shop, and James Adams’s furniture warehouse.⁸

Concord was well connected to wider markets. Long a hub of communications, the town was linked by highways east to Boston, west into the interior, and south to Hartford and New Haven. The most popular route to the coast, however, ran through Lexington and Medford to Charlestown, then across a toll bridge into the capital. It was far preferable to the Cambridge and Concord Turnpike, constructed with great hopes in 1803. The private toll road cut a straight path to the city, climbing up and down hills and passing through marshes. But its steep grades proved tough going for ox-teams pulling great loads of farm produce. In Concord the turnpike got off to an embarrassing start. One section of the road, crossing the wetlands along the mill brook, was built up, layer by layer, from planks of wood topped by piles of gravel. After a few days’ use, it sank out of sight, beneath seventeen feet of water. By the early 1820s the turnpike was so neglected, according to one wag, that it housed a nest of young birds among the long grass in one of the ruts.⁹

Townspeople could also take a water route to the coast via the Middlesex Canal, which joined the Concord to the Merrimack and Medford rivers in the late 1790s. It was suitable for freight such as wood, bricks, and iron ore, too heavy for overland carriage. Around 1812 Col. Amos Wood, whose farm lay along the Sudbury River, tried the experiment of floating long flat boats of small draft, laden with lumber, down the waters. The venture lasted only two or three years. An occasional canal boat could still be glimpsed a decade later, trailing an aura of romance in its wake. To young Henry Thoreau, the sight of a vessel stealing mysteriously through the meadows and past the village stirred a sense of wonder:

It came and departed as silently as a cloud, without noise or dust, and was witnessed by few. One summer day this huge traveller might be seen moored at some meadow’s wharf, and another summer day it was not there. Where precisely it came from, or who these men were who knew the rocks and soundings better than we who bathed there, we could never tell … They were a sort of fabulous rivermen to us.¹⁰

Enthusiasm for technological change spread to local farms. Starting in October 1820, the town played host to the annual fair of the Society of Middlesex Husbandmen and Manufacturers, founded to promote improvements in agricultural knowledge and to advance the interests of manufacturers and mechanics. Forget the antiquated customs of the past, its speakers urged; follow the lessons of science and the best practices of the day, as demonstrated by the winners of the yearly competitions. Local farmers vied for the cash prizes that went to the biggest crops, the largest livestock, and the best-kept fields, while manufacturers displayed the results of their mechanical ingenuity. Pencil maker Munroe led the way; he was the first person in Concord to join the new group. John Thoreau put his products to the test in the fall of 1823, just seven months after returning to town—and, remarkably, received a two-dollar premium for a specimen of excellent Lead Pencils, manufactured from American Plumbago. He became a member the next year.¹¹

The agricultural society soon had allies in the cause of improvement. Knowledge was progressing in many fields, not just in husbandry, and to keep up with the advances, townsmen got together in 1821 and formed a social library, whose collections would provide access to the useful and popular works of the day. A private academy opened the next year with the purpose of offering a richer curriculum and better instruction than was available at the town’s grammar school. For those whose schooldays were over, a Debating Club began meeting to examine the pros and cons of various issues and initiatives. Would the establishment of a Bank in this town be beneficial to the community? The members considered this question at their first recorded session in November 1822, as a newly chartered Middlesex Bank was trying to raise enough capital to launch. These voluntary associations strove to foster a modern intellectual outlook: curious about the world, eager for the latest knowledge, critical of tradition, and hopeful of progress. Arguably, these were the mental habits essential to republican government and economic growth.

Not everyone agreed. A Middlesex Rustic objected to the arrogance of learned gentlemen presuming to lecture worthy yeomen on how to farm. Such pompous agricultural declamations constituted a palpable indignity, as destitute … of the principles of farming as a Hottentot of civilization. Others saw no reason for the households of farmers, mechanics, and laborers to alter their way of life. Why chase after the fashionable goods in growing profusion at local stores? On the Sabbath the meetinghouse was already filled with too many women bedecked in the popular taste, making an ocean of ribbons and plumes. Obliged to pay the bill for such unnecessary expenses, the mechanic should remember that his was a life of care, requiring unceasing prudence and economy … If a mechanic would thrive, he must rise with the lark, go to bed with the whip-poor-will and eat the bread of carefulness. Consumerism was a threat to his well-being. In competing agendas for the economy lay fundamental disagreements about how to live.¹²

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In the early 1820s Concordians were living in the twilight of the Revolution. Most of the local heroes who had turned out on April 19, 1775, to confront the king’s troops at the North Bridge had gone to their rest in the town’s burial grounds or departed in quest of land and opportunity on New England’s frontiers and in the expanding West. But veterans of the War of Independence still guided the republic. James Monroe, the last of the Revolutionary fathers, sat in the White House; Continental Army officer John Brooks, a veteran of Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, and Saratoga, was in his eighth and final term as governor of Massachusetts in 1823. The eighteenth century was well represented in Concord’s seats of power. Reverend Doctor Ezra Ripley was celebrating his forty-fifth anniversary in the pulpit of the established Congregationalist church, his salary funded by the taxpayers. His secular counterpart, the physician Abiel Heywood, had served as selectman and town clerk since 1796. The two clerks, graduates of Harvard College, ministered to the townspeople in a distinctive style. Both continued to wear the knee breeches and high stockings of the colonial era well after every other man in town had discarded them for pantaloons. Then in 1822, when he was sixty-two, Squire Heywood astonished his neighbors by abruptly changing his life and his dress. In one burst of enthusiasm, he got married and put on pants. His new appearance was saved for the wedding day. In preparation, he nervously consulted a neighbor. How do you put these newfangled trousers on? The quick-witted advisor drolly replied that he believed that people generally drew them on over their heads. The elderly groom presumably learned by trial and error.¹³

The townspeople professed inordinate pride in their Revolutionary heritage and never lost an opportunity to assert Concord’s priority in the War of Independence. How could they forget? In their midst were thirty surviving patriots from the town’s famous day, rehearsing their stories and traditions in the taverns and stores to admiring audiences of young boys. So familiar was the presence of this aging band that the town did little to commemorate their glorious moment in the nation’s history. The Nineteenth of April came and went year after year without ceremony. Independence Day was the focus of patriotic celebration, and even that anniversary was observed intermittently. An 1822 effort to mark the national Jubilee never materialized, prompting Asa Biglow, editor of the Middlesex Observer, to rebuke his readers. Shall we suffer it to pass unaccompanied by demonstrations of … joy? Dare we expose ourselves to the reproach of undervaluing this precious legacy of our forefathers? The chastened townspeople got the message and honored July 4, 1823, with appropriate exercises, including a public dinner under an awning near the field, rendered memorable by the events of the 19th of April, 1775. But no monument stood on the sacred ground to distinguish the scenes of British aggression and American resistance. The North Bridge itself was gone. It had been pulled down in 1793, its planks recycled for a new crossing a few hundred yards downriver.¹⁴

While Concord took the past for granted, the town could not shed its hold. Even in 1823, local politicians were still carrying on the fights that had gripped the republic ever since Thomas Jefferson ousted John Adams from the presidency. Over the two decades of competition between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, the voters of Concord usually sided with the latter, though by narrow margins. By the early 1820s, most of the country had grown weary of the conflict, but not Massachusetts. In 1823 Federalists reignited partisan passions by nominating the aristocratic Harrison Gray Otis to succeed the retiring Brooks as governor. Despite the ongoing movement to set aside old divisions, no one in the opposite camp was willing to forgive Otis’s hard-line support for the Hartford Convention of 1815, which had sought to mobilize New England against the War of 1812. Republicans challenged him with another Continental Army veteran, William Eustis. The contest was conducted under a new constitutional provision extending suffrage in all Massachusetts elections to male taxpayers without regard to race. Any man, age twenty-one and older, qualified if he had resided in the state for at least a year and the town where he wished to vote for at least six months. So polarized were the voters that the editor of the local paper feared to take a stand. Think you that we are so reckless of consequences as to lift our feeble voice in support of any man or measure when it cannot be done without peril to our list of subscribers? Turnout in Concord soared by nearly half over the year before, from 170 to 250; roughly 70 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, as high as at the peak of the partisan struggle over Mr. Madison’s War. (John Thoreau arrived too late to qualify.) When the votes were counted, the Republican won handily, with Concord in the victor’s column by a margin of 60 to 40 percent.¹⁵

The eligible voters were not the only residents to be excited by the contest. Every spring the boys of Concord waited impatiently for the first Monday of April, when Election Day brought a school holiday. While the adult males were exercising the democratic right of suffrage, the youth organized a masculine competition of their own. Taking up their shotguns, they declared open season on birds. Anything with wings was a fair target, even if it hadn’t hatched from its shell. Points were assigned to every sort, with the fine discrimination of Peterson’s Guide: The crow was considered the highest, afterward the hawk and down to the smallest; the eggs were counted lowest. Dividing into two teams, the boys raced into the woods on their mission of avian doom. At an appointed time, they reassembled, displaying their ill-gotten trophies in numerous bloody heaps. The victors proved their prowess as future hunters and farmers. Crows damaged crops; ducks and pheasants supplied food. In pursuit of such fowl, the hunt was practical preparation for life on the farm and in the woods. But killing hawks or destroying eggs exceeded any useful purpose, except to express an adolescent urge to absolute power. On Election Day, winning candidates eliminated rivals and captured office, relying upon ballots, rather than bullets, to accomplish their will. In emulation of the adult world they would someday join, the schoolboys employed the only weapons at hand—deadly shotguns—and enacted their own exercises of power. Combining camaraderie, competition, and cruelty, the day’s events were a dress rehearsal for adulthood in the male republic of violence.¹⁶

The murderous ritual no longer went unquestioned. Following the vote for governor, a little debate erupted in the Middlesex Observer about the practice. A writer styling himself Humanitas condemned the wanton killing of innocent and harmless birds. What kind of person could look on such conduct with indifference? One reader was not ashamed to admit the pleasure he enjoyed in taking a partridge on the wing. The sport of hunting, he insisted, encouraged cheerfulness, health and soundness of nerve, in sharp contrast to the sickly sensibility that Humanitas had evidently absorbed from some boarding school Miss. In this war of words, the newspaper’s editor, Asa Biglow, urged an end to the annual bird hunt on both practical and moral grounds. The reckless destruction of avian life, he argued, was no good for farming. It eliminated the natural predators of the insects and vermin that damaged crops. It led to disastrous accidents, as children raced through the woods with firearms and in very many instances filled the hearts of parents with the deepest anguish. Worst of all, the competition blunted the finer feelings of our nature. If a child could exult over his bloody pile, heedless of the last agonies of his victims, would he not grow up indifferent to the needs of others and learn to set aside those sympathies and affections that are the cement of society?¹⁷

A new cultural outlook was on the rise. It took aim at a wide variety of targets, rooted in customs inherited from previous generations. Its enemies were inefficiency, ignorance, and inhumanity. Its immediate campaigns would push for better schools, broader diffusion of knowledge, more productive farms, and kinder treatment of the dependent and the poor. It would eventually inspire a crusade against slavery. But the prospects of such progress depended on who led not only the government but also society at large.

In the wake of the election of 1823, the Middlesex Observer discerned no era of good feelings in the Bay State. There now exist two parties in Massachusetts without the prospect of an amalgamation of feelings or union in sentiments. Yet just a month later, the people of Concord celebrated the Fourth of July by a union of all parties. The event promised to unite the inhabitants in common citizenship and patriotism and thereby draw more closely those cords of love and brotherly affection which bind together the whole human family. At the public dinner near the battlefield, that hope was affirmed in two of the toasts. One expressed civic pride: The plains of Lexington and Concord: Here commenced that drama, which in its bloody course, brought forth the purest and most exalted characters. The second marked the progress of the times: America in 1776, and America in 1823: No imagination of the heart could then have conceived her present glory and prosperity.¹⁸

Nor could anyone have foreseen the age of improvement that was about to unfold. But the choices to be made by such men as John Thoreau and his wife Cynthia Dunbar would give rise to a new social order and cultural climate in the years to come. In that formative milieu, their literary son would grow up, and the radical outlook of Transcendentalism, voiced by Boston transplant Ralph Waldo Emerson, would find a home.

1

A Day of Good Feelings

John Thoreau brought his family back to Concord at a propitious time. The fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution was approaching, and from their new home in the center of town, the pencil maker’s family was well situated to join in the festivities. The planning began early in 1824, when President Monroe invited the aging Marquis de Lafayette, the comrade-in-arms and adopted son of George Washington, to return to the United States as the nation’s guest and receive the thanks of a grateful people. The next year, as the French aristocrat made a triumphal progress throughout the republic, John Quincy Adams, Monroe’s successor in the White House, ushered in the celebrations. The year of jubilee since the first formation of our Union [the First Continental Congress] has just elapsed, Adams announced at his inauguration; that of the declaration of our independence is at hand.

Concord was quick to partake in the commemorative fervor. On the Nineteenth of April 1824, for the first time since 1776, the townspeople observed the illustrious day with a military parade and drill, a public dinner, and a visit to the battlefield; the following September they held an elaborate reception in honor of the visiting Lafayette. The climax of these ceremonies was the jubilee of the Concord Fight. We cherish with gratitude the recollection of those patriotic actions by which our independence was declared and achieved, the townspeople resolved, and deem it our duty specially to commemorate by a public celebration … the fiftieth anniversary of Concord Battle, in which the enemies of freedom were first met and forcibly repulsed by brave Americans. Held on a warm and pleasant day, attended by hundreds from Middlesex County and Boston, the commemoration was a gala of national patriotism and local pride.¹

Civic rituals can serve more than one purpose, and so it was with the affair in Concord. Designed to pay homage to the selfless souls who had answered the call of duty a half-century before, the remembrances were also exercises in self-promotion, asserting the town’s precedence in the annals of the American republic and showcasing the local elite. Here brave Patriots first fired upon the king’s troops; here the American Revolution had its start. The claims proved controversial, particularly in nearby Lexington, where the first American blood was shed on that fateful morning in April 1775. But the townspeople were unwilling to share credit. On the long-held conviction that Concord was the birthplace of the Revolution, they constructed a civic identity, through which the citizens could overcome differences of age, politics, religion, and class and cherish a common bond. Or so they hoped. At age seven, Henry Thoreau witnessed both Lafayette’s reception and the fiftieth-anniversary celebration. A dozen years later, on the eve of his graduation from Harvard College, he boasted of his local origin in an autobiographical essay for the yearbook. To whatever quarter of the world I may wander, I shall deem it my good fortune that I hail from Concord North Bridge.²

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It was no easy feat to assemble Concord’s citizens under one patriotic roof. For a quarter-century, the townsmen had been divided politically between rival parties. As elsewhere in the early American republic, they took sides as Federalists or Republicans in an ongoing contest for power. The dispute originated early in the administration of George Washington, as leaders of the new nation clashed over the economic program of Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton, which resembled the policies of the mother country from which the United States had only recently broken free. In the late 1790s, the divisions intensified and spread to the people at large, as a result of the French Revolution and the worldwide upheaval it unleashed. Split over sympathies with the warring powers, Britain and France, Americans debated foreign policy with an ideological fervor that led neighbors with opposing opinions to see one another as enemies in unholy alliance with foreign despots. The conflict peaked in intensity during the years of embargo and war (1807–15)—the tumultuous era that doomed John Thoreau’s initial entry into trade—with Republicans and Federalists trading charges of betraying liberty and jeopardizing national independence. No wonder, then, that the competing parties in Concord and beyond could seldom sit down together and celebrate the Fourth of July. Partisans opted for separate commemorations when they marked the day at all.³

The fierce rivalry between the parties brought Concord’s voters to the polls in unprecedented numbers. Although voting was restricted to property holders, most adult males qualified (except for laborers and paupers), and—spurred by county conventions, local rallies and speeches, and appeals in the press—they exercised the right of suffrage with growing enthusiasm. At the height of the partisan conflict, 72 percent of eligible men turned out, more than in the state as a whole.⁴ Such commitment turned virtually every election for federal, state, and county office from 1800 to 1816 into a close contest. Republicans won more often than not, typically by narrow margins, but in the wake of Jefferson’s embargo and Mr. Madison’s war, which generated Federalist tides in the Bay State, Concord floated between the parties. In 1802 the poll for governor was a dead tie until the Federalists dragged a man from his sickbed and captured the election. A dozen years later the town abandoned the effort to elect a representative to the state legislature, after no candidate, on two successive ballots, could command an absolute majority. This narrow division over two decades was unusual in Massachusetts, where most towns went reliably for one side or the other, and it set Concord apart from its neighbors in Middlesex County, a Republican bastion. In the intensity of its party division, Concord was as conflicted a community as could be found anywhere in the Bay State.⁵

But the partisanship was ambivalent. Even as the townsmen mobilized for victory at the polls, they had reservations about their conduct. To the men who won independence and created the republic, political parties were unwelcome. Ideally, government should be conducted under the helm of enlightened gentlemen cooperating for the common good. That was impossible whenever factions entered the scene to pursue their own selfish interests. Nobody envisioned such associations as useful means of informing and motivating voters, conducting elections, and carrying out the popular will. Both Federalists and Republicans yearned for harmony and consensus, and they blamed opponents for stirring up discontent and disorder for personal gain. Time and again they reminded the citizens of the biblical injunction: a house divided against itself shall not stand (Matthew 12:25). Were everyone to heed that counsel and disavow party spirit, Massachusetts would enjoy liberty and prosperity under what Concord’s minister, Ezra Ripley, upheld as a free, elective government; a government of laws, and not of men; a government guided by definite constitutions, deliberately formed, and watched by ten thousand penetrating eyes.⁶

Parson Ripley longed to speak for such a unified community. But in an age of bitter political conflict, he often fell short. Born in 1751, the descendant of English Puritans who had crossed the Atlantic in the Great Migration of the 1630s, Ripley grew up on hardscrabble farms in northeastern Connecticut and on the central Massachusetts frontier, one of nineteen children in a household noted more for faith than for wealth. (An astonishing seventeen survived to adulthood.) With a precocious piety and a strong desire for learning, the youth escaped the farm for Harvard College and the gospel ministry, thanks to a charity scholarship. His senior year was spent in Concord, where the college had found a haven in 1775–1776 while American troops used the Cambridge campus as a base for military operations against the British in Boston. Two years later, after Concord’s fiery patriot minister William Emerson died in service as an army chaplain, Ripley returned to the town and assumed his predecessor’s pulpit, married his widow, and moved into his manse overlooking the North Bridge. (He would thereby become Ralph Waldo Emerson’s step-grandfather.) There he stayed put for the next sixty-three years, preaching a clerical version of republicanism meant to unify the community and inspire Christian faith.⁷

That mission worked for Ripley’s first two decades as head of the religious establishment. The Revolution, as he saw it, was no radical break with the past. The United States had simply taken over from New England as God’s chosen people, in sacred covenant to accept the divine word and ordinances and profess godliness before the world. Freed from the British yoke, Concordians would continue their ancestors’ ways. This complacent scenario was shattered by the reverberations of the Old World uprisings in the New. Ripley feared the spread of French radicalism into his parish. The great object of the enemy, he told the congregation, is to destroy religion and morals among the people. This done, they have confidence, and with reason, that civil government must fall. With reverence for Providence gone, what would bind the community together and enforce order? Disrespect to the authorities over us and disunion among ourselves, he warned, are at the bottom of our political troubles and danger.⁸

In the late 1790s, as the United States engaged in a naval quasi-war with France, and then again in 1813, with the onset of hostilities with Great Britain, the Concord minister took to the ramparts in defense of the New England way. Suspending his regular preaching of Christ, he laid out his entire social philosophy in twenty-one sermons on the social virtues and moral duties. His central theme, indeed his only theme, was duty in every sphere of life. There were the duties that made for community: candor, charity, friendship, peaceableness, civility and condescension, public spirit. And there were the duties that ensured order: reverence for authority, obedience to law, subordination to superiors. Some duties, like charity, cut across the social ranks; others varied with one’s station. Ripley invoked the duty of parents to children in one sermon, the duty of children to parents in the next. He moved from the duty of parents to restrain their children from vice to the duty of children to honor their parents. The duty of servants was matched by the duty of masters, that of subjects by that of magistrates and rulers. Always there was the duty of gratitude to God. Through the several pairs of sermons, all integrated to advance a single, unified theme, Ripley gave rhetorical expression to his worldview. Like the linked units in his series, society constituted a great chain of interdependent parts, organized by mutual duties and privileges and sustained by common interests and affections.⁹

The ambassador for Christ did not shy away from outright political engagement. His antipartisanship was unmistakably partisan. He preached the Federalist message of liberty with order, and he readily associated himself with that party, even as his congregation was split down the middle. In the summer of 1812, several months after Congress declared war against Great Britain for violating American rights on the high seas, the Concord minister welcomed to his meetinghouse a Middlesex County convention of the Friends of Independence, Peace, and Union and petitioned the Throne of Grace to bless the antiwar gathering, which urged the defeat of the Republican administration in the upcoming November election. Ripley was on the

Reviews for The Transcendentalists and Their World

[erwinkennythomas · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Robert A. Gross’s The Transcendentalists and Their World is a comprehensive study of life in the early 1800s in Concord, Massachusetts. This book amplified on the conflict between a community mindset versus a focus on an individualistic orientation. This tension was captured in the first part of the book that described Concord before the 1830s. The second half dealt mainly with the lives of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the anti-abolition movement. Early life in Concord was dominated by its First Church, farming, politics, school, and the militia. Its pastor was Ezra Ripley and all residents were expected to attend church. Concord paid the bills for Ripley’s service. Many residents in this community were farmers, and the Whigs controlled politics. Only White males were allowed to vote. The society had a grammar school for young children, and young men served in the militia. Ripley’s church was liberal because it was open to changes in order to keep its flock. He preached sermons based on the gospels, and stressed the congregation’s interdependency to fellow citizens. The church was therefore community oriented.Just prior to 1835, Ripley’s concept of community and the church began to crumble. There was a change taking place in the social order. The Thoreau sisters who were members of the First Church decided to form their own group. They were provided with support from Calvinists in Boston, and this led to the Trinitarians. Other changes brought about the genesis of other faiths including the Unitarians and Universalists. It was during this time that there were developments in the economy, railway, establishments of more schools, growth of political parties, the rise of the Social Circle, lyceum, and the beginnings of an Anti-Masonry movement.Thoreau grew up in Concord, and received an education in its grammar schools, he later attended Harvard. His father was a pencil maker. Unlike Thoreau, Emerson settled in Concord in 1835, after having graduated from Harvard, and traveled in Europe. He received his Transcendental ideas from German idealists, Thomas Carlyle, and William Wordsworth. Concord with a population of 2,000 was ideal because of the size of the community. It wasn’t like Boston, New York, or Philadelphia where there existed masses of people and a mass culture. In Concord, Emerson could interact with individuals.Emerson’s and Thoreau’s writings emphasized the importance of the individual in a culture. Their arguments were infused with democratic beliefs. Emerson viewed religion as not a building, a doctrine, or government. In the Philosophy of Modern History, he viewed education as the guardianship of every individual, and saw his philosophy as an answer to the needs of people. He was however slow in joining the bandwagon of the anti-slavery movement, but later came out with a strong speech on the abolition of slavery on the West Indian Emancipation Act of 1833.Thoreau lived for some time in Emerson’s manse with his family. He had taught school, but is known for living in a hut surrounded by nature for a little over two years at Walden. While living there Thoreau read, wrote, went for walks, and grew his own food. In 1846, he was jailed for refusing to pay taxes. Thoreau is known for his writing about Walden, and his piece on civil disobedience.