Herald of
Freedom (1844/1846), by Henry David Thoreau
A review
of Herald of Freedom, a magazine of the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society.
We have
occasionally, for several years, met with a number of this spirited journal,
edited, as abolitionists need not to be informed, by Nathaniel P. Rogers, once
a counselor at law in Plymouth, still further up the Merrimack, but now, in his
riper years, come down the hills thus far, to be the Herald of Freedom to those
parts. We have been refreshed not a little by the cheap cordial of his
editorials, flowing like his own mountain-torrents, now clear and sparkling,now
foaming and gritty, and always spiced with the essence of the fir and the
Norway pine; but never dark nor muddy, nor threatening with smothered murmurs,
like the rivers of the plain. The effect of one of his effusions reminds us of
what the hydropathists say about the electricity in fresh spring-water,
compared with that which has stood over night, to suit weak nerves. We do not
know of another notable and public instance of such pure, youthful, and hearty
indignation at all wrong. The Church itself must love it, if it have any heart,
though he is said to have dealt rudely with its sanctity. His clean attachment
to the right, however, sanctions the severest rebuke we have read.
We have neither room, nor inclination,
to criticise this paper, or its cause, at length, but would speak of it in the
free and uncalculating spirit of its author. Mr. Rogers seems to us to occupy
an honorable and manly position in these days, and in this country, making the
press a living and breathing organ to reach the hearts of men, and not merely "fine
paper, and good type,"with its civil pilot sitting aft, and magnanimously
waiting for the news to arrive the vehicle of the earliest news, but the
latest intelligence recording the indubitable and last results, the marriages
and deaths, alone. The present editor is wide awake, and standing on the beak
of his ship; not as a scientific explorer under government, but a Yankee sealer
rather, who makes those unexplored continents his harbors in which to refit for
more adventurous cruises. He is a fund of news and freshness in himself has
the gift of speech, and the knack of writing, and if anything important takes
place in the Granite State, we may be sure that we shall hear of it in good
season. No other paper that we know keeps pace so well with one forward wave of
the restless public thought and sentiment of New England, and asserts so
faithfully and ingenuously the largest liberty in all things. There is, beside,
more unpledged poetry in his prose than in the verses of many an accepted
rhymer; and we are occasionally advertised by a mellow hunter's note from his
trumpet, that, unlike most reformers, his feet are still where they should be,
on the turf, and that he looks out from a serener natural life into the turbid
arena of politics. Nor is slavery always a sombre theme with him, but invested
with the colors of his wit and fancy, and an evil to be abolished by other means
than sorrow and bitterness of complaint. He will fight this fight with what
cheer may be. But to speak of his composition. 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. But like those same
mountain-torrents, there is rather too much slope to his channel, and the
rainbow sprays and evaporations go double-quick-time to heaven, while the body
of his water falls headlong to the plain. We would have more pause and
deliberation, occasionally, if only to bring his tide to a head more frequent
expansions of the stream, still, bottomless, mountain tarns, perchance inland
seas, and at length the deep ocean itself.
We cannot do better than enrich
our pages with a few extracts from such articles as we have at hand. Who can
help sympathizing with his righteous impatience, when invited to hold his peace
or endeavor to convince the understandings of the people by well ordered
arguments?
"Bandy
compliments and arguments with the
somnambulist, on 'table rock,' when all the waters of Lake Superior are
thundering in the great horse-shoe, and deafening the very war of the elements! Would you not shout to
him with a clap of thunder through a speaking-trumpet, if you could command it
if possible to reach his senses
in his appaling extremity! Did
Jonah argufy with the city
of Nineveh 'yet forty days,' cried the vagabond prophet, 'and Nineveh shall
be overthrown! That was his
salutation. And did the 'Property and Standing' turn up their noses at him, and
set the mob on to him? Did the clergy discountenance him, and call him
extravagant, misguided, a divider of churches, a disturber of parishes? What
would have become of that city, if they had done this? Did they 'approve his
principles' but dislike his 'measures' and his 'spirit'!
"Slavery must be cried down,
denounced down, ridiculed down, and
pro-slavery with it, or rather before it. Slavery will go when
pro-slavery starts. The sheep will
follow when the bell-wether leads. Down, then, with the bloody system, out of the land with it, and out of
the world with it into the Red Sea with it. Men shan't be enslaved in this
country any longer. Women and children shan't be flogged here any longer. If
you undertake to hinder us, the worst is your own." "But this is all
fanaticism. Wait and see.²
He thus
raises the anti-slavery 'war-whoop' in New Hampshire, when an important
convention is to be held, sending the summons
"To none but the
whole-hearted, fully-committed, cross-the-Rubicon spirits." "From rich 'old Cheshire,' from Rockingham,
with her horizon setting down away to the salt sea.² "From where the sun
sets behind Kearsarge, even to where he rises gloriously over Moses Norris's
own town of Pittsfield; and from Amoskeag to Ragged Mountains Coos Upper
Coos, home of the everlasting hills, send out your bold advocates of human
rights wherever they lay, scattered by lonely lake, or Indian stream, or 'Grant,'
or 'Location' from the trout-haunted brooks of the Amoriscoggin, and where the
adventurous streamlet takes up its mountain march for the St. Lawrence
"Scattered and insulated men,
wherever the light of philanthropy and liberty has beamed in upon your solitary
spirits, come down to us like your streams and clouds and our own Grafton,
all about among your dear hills, and your mountain-flanked valleys whether
you home along the swift Ammonoosuck, the
cold Pemigewassett, or the ox-bowed Connecticut."
"We are slow, brethren,
dishonorably slow, in a cause like ours. Our feet should be 'as hinds' feet.' 'Liberty
lies bleeding.' The leaden-colored
wing of slavery obscures the land with its baleful shadow. Let us come
together, and inquire at the hand of the Lord what is to be done."
And again;
on occasion of the New England Convention in the Second-Advent Tabernacle, in
Boston, he desires to try one more blast, as it were, 'on Fabyan's White
Mountain horn.'
"Ho, then, people of
the Bay State men, women, and children; children, women, and men, scattered
friends of the friendless, wheresoever ye inhabit if habitations ye have, as such friends
have not always along the sea-beat border of Old Essex and the Puritan
Landing, and up beyond sight of the sea-cloud, among the inland hills, where the
sun rises and sets upon the dry land, in that vale of the Connecticut, too fair
for human content, and too fertile for virtuous industry where deepens the
haughtiest of earth's streams, on its seaward way, proud with the pride of old
Massachusetts. Are there any friends of the friendless negro haunting such a
valley as this? In God's name, I fear there are none, or few, for the very
scene looks apathy and oblivion to the genius of humanity. I blow you the
summons though. Come, if any of you are there.
"And
gallant little Rhode Island; transcendent abolitionists of the tiny
Commonwealth. I need not call you. You are called the year round, and, instead
of sleeping in your tents, stand harnessed, and with trumpets in your hands
every one!
"Connecticut!
yonder, the home of the Burleighs, the Monroes, and the Hudsons, and the native
land of old George Benson! are you ready? 'All ready!'
"Maine here, off east,
looking from my mountain post, like an everglade. Where is your Sam. Fessenden,
who stood storm-proof 'gainst New Organization in'38? Has he too much name as a
jurist and orator, to be found at a New England Convention in '43? God forbid!
Come one and all of you from 'Down
East' to Boston, on the 30th and
let the sails of your coasters whiten all the sea-road. Alas! there are scarce
enough of you to man a fishing boat. Come up, mighty in your fewness.
"And green Vermont,
what has become of your anti-slavery host thick as your mountain maples mastering your very politics
not by balance of power, but by
sturdy majority. Where are you now? Will you be at the Advent Meeting on the
30th of May? Has anti-slavery
waxed too trying for your off-hand, how-are-ye, humanity? Have you heard the
voice of Freedom of late? Next week will answer.
"Poor, cold,
winter-ridden New-Hampshire winter-killed, I like to have said she will be
there, bare-foot, and bare-legged, making
tracks like her old bloody-footed volunteers at Trenton. She will be
there, if she can work her passage. I guess her minstrelsy* will for birds
can go independently of car, or tardy stage-coach."
"Let them come
as Macaulay says they did to the
siege of Rome, when they did not leave old men and women enough to begin the
harvests. Oh how few we should be, if every soul of us were there. How few, and
yet it is the entire muster-roll of Freedom for all the land. We should have to
beat up for recruits to complete the army of Gideon, or the platoon at the Spartan straits. The foe are
like the grasshoppers for multitude, as for moral power. Thick grass mows the
easier, as the Goth said of the enervated millions of falling Rome. They can't
stand too thick, nor too tall for the anti-slavery scythe. Only be there at the
mowing."
In
noticing the doings of another Convention, he thus congratulates himself on the
liberty of speech which anti-slavery concedes to all even to the Folsoms and
Lamsons:
"Denied a chance to
speak elsewhere, because they are not mad after the fashion, they all flock to
the anti-slavery boards as a kind of Asylum. And so the poor old enterprise has
to father all the oddity of the times. It is a glory to anti-slavery, that she
can allow the poor friends the right of speech. I hope she will always keep
herself able to afford it. Let the constables wait on the State House, and
Jail, and the Meeting Houses. Let the door-keeper at the Anti-Slavery Hall be
that tall, celestial-faced Woman,
that carries the flag on the National Standard, and says, 'without concealment,' as well as 'without compromise.'
Let every body in, who has sanity enough to see the beauty of brotherly
kindness, and let them say their fantasies, and magnanimously bear with them,
seeing unkind pro-slavery drives them in upon us. We shall have saner and
sensibler meetings then, than all others in the land put together."
More
recently, speaking of the use which some of the clergy have made of Webster's
plea in the Girard case, as a seasonable aid to the church, he proceeds:
"Webster is a great
man, and the clergy run under his wing. They had better employ him as counsel
against the Comeouters. He wouldn't
trust the defence on the Girard will plea though, if they did. He would not
risk his fame on it, as a religious argument. He would go and consult William
Bassett, of Lynn, on the principles of the 'Comeouters,' to learn their
strength; and he would get him a testament, and go into it as he does into the
Constitution, and after a year's study of it he would hardly come off in the
argument as he did from the conflict with Carolina Hayne. On looking into the
case, he would advise the clergy not to go to trial to settle or, if they
couldn't to 'leave it out' to a reference of 'orthodox deacons.'"
We will quote from the same sheet his
indignant and touching satire on the funeral of those public officers who were
killed by the explosion on board the Princeton, together with the President's
slave; an accident which reminds us how closely slavery is linked with the
government of this nation. The President coming to preside over a nation of
free men, and the man who stands next to him a slave! [19]
"I saw account,"says he, "of the burial of those
slaughtered politicians. The hearses passed along, of Upshur, Gilmer, Kennon,
Maxcy, and Gardner but the dead slave, who fell in company with them on the
deck of the Princeton, was not there. He was held their equal by the impartial
gun-burst, but not allowed by the bereaved nation a share in the funeral."
"Out upon their funeral, and upon the paltry procession that went in its
train. Why didn't they enquire for the body of the other man who fell on that
deck! And why hasn't the nation inquired, and its press? I saw account of the
scene in a barbarian print, called the Boston Atlas, and it was dumb on the
absence of that body, as if no such man had fallen. Why, I demand in the name
of human nature, what was that sixth man of the game brought down by that great
shot, left unburied and above ground for there is no account yet that his
body has been allowed the right of sepulture.""They didn't bury him
even as a slave. They didn't assign him a jim-crow place in that solemn
procession, that he might follow to wait upon his enslavers in the land of
spirits. They have gone there without slaves or waiters.²
"The poor black man
they enslaved and imbruted him all his life, and now he is dead, they have,
for aught appears, left him to decay and waste above ground. Let the civilized
world take note of the circumstance."
We deem
such timely, pure, and unpremeditated expressions of a public sentiment, such
publicity of genuine indignation and humanity, as abound everywhere in this
journal, the most generous gifts a man can make, and should be glad to see the
scraps from which we have quoted, and the others which we have not seen,
collected into a volume. It might, perchance, penetrate into some quarters
which the unpopular cause of freedom has not reached.
Long may
we hear the voice of this Herald.
But since
our voyage Rogers has died, and now there is no one in New England to express the indignation or contempt
which may still be felt at any cant or inhumanity.
When, on a certain occasion, one said to
him, "Why do you go about as you do, agitating the community on the
subject of abolition? Jesus Christ never preached abolitionism:"he
replied, "Sir, I have two answers to your appeal to Jesus Christ. First, I
deny your proposition, that he never preached abolition. That single precept of
his 'Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them'
reduced to practice, would abolish slavery over the whole earth in twenty-four
hours. That is my first answer. I deny your proposition. Secondly, granting
your proposition to be true and admitting what I deny that Jesus Christ did
not preach the abolition of slavery, then I say, "he didn't do his duty."
His was
not the wisdom of the head, but of the heart. If perhaps he 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 Scott. As he rode to an antislavery
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.
Whoever
heard of Swamscot before?
"Swamscot
is all fishermen. Their business is all on the deep. Their village is ranged
along the ocean margin, where their brave little fleets lay drawn up, and which
are out at day-break on the mighty blue where you may see them brooding at
anchor still and intent at their profound trade, as so many flies on the back
of a wincing horse, and for whose wincings they care as little as the Swamscot
Fishers heed the restless heavings of the sea around their barks. Every thing
about savors of fish. Nets hang out on every enclosure. Flakes, for curing the
fish are attached to almost every dwelling. Every body has a boat and you'll
see a huge pair of sea boots lying before almost every door. The air too savors
strongly of the common finny vocation. Beautiful little beaches slope out from
the dwellings into the Bay, all along the village where the fishing boats lie
keeled up, at low water, with their useless anchors hooked deep into the sand.
A stranded bark is a sad sight especially if it is above high water mark,
where the next tide can't relieve it and set it afloat again. The Swamscot
boats though, all look cheery, and as if sure of the next sea-flow. The people
are said to be the freest in the region owing perhaps to their bold and
adventurous life. The Priests can't ride them out into the deep, as they can
the shore folks."
His style
and vein though often exaggerated and affected were more native to New England
than those of any of her sons, and unfinished as his pieces were, yet their
literary merit has been overlooked.
* The
Hutchinsons.
This is a
hybrid of two versions of this essay. The first was written before Roger's
death and was published in The Dial in 1844; the second was composed after
Roger's 1846 death, and omits the dash-underlined portions, includes the
paragraphs that follow those portions, and makes some minor changes (for
instance, shifting some verbs to past-tense) to the rest of the text.
See also:
Thoreau and the "Herald of Freedom"by Wendell P. Glick The New
England Quarterly (1949).