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Title: Herald of Freedom Author: Henry David Thoreau Date: 1844 Language: en Topics: slavery, abolitionism, review Source: Retrieved on 1st November 2020 from https://sniggle.net/TPL/index5.php?entry=herald Notes: This is a hybrid of two versions of this essay. The first was written before Rogers’s death and was published in The Dial in 1844; the second was composed after Rogers’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.
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.”
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.” — “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 30^(th), 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 30^(th) 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!
“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.” … “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.