|
3 November 1859, Thursday; 7:30 p.m.
Worcester, Massachusetts; Washburn Hall, Mechanic’s Hall Building
"The Character and Actions of Capt. John Brown"
[Back to Calendar of Lectures]
NARRATIVE OF EVENT: (See also lectures 65 and
66 above, and lectures 68 and 71 below.) On 31 October 1859 Thoreau sent the following
hasty message to H. G. O. Blake:
I spoke to my townsmen last evening on
"The character of Capt. Brown, now in the clutches of the slaveholder." I should
like to speak to any company in Worcester who may wish to hear me, & will come, if
only my expenses are paid. I think that we should express ourselves at once, while Brown
is alive. The sooner the better. Perhaps [T. W.] Higginson may like to have a meeting.
Wednesday evening would be a good time.
The people here are deeply interested in
the matter.
Let me have an answer as soon as may be.
Thoreau added in a postscript, "I may be engaged toward the end of the week"
(C, p. 563).
Blake quickly rented Washburn Hall, an
eighty-by-fifty-foot meeting room on the second floor of the new gas-lighted and
steam-heated Mechanics Hall Building, opened in 1857.1
The lecture actually took place on Thursday evening instead of the Wednesday Thoreau had
requested. While the reason for the change is not known, the delay would seemingly have
benefitted Thoreau, who spoke in Boston on the preceding Tuesday evening as a last-minute
substitute for Frederick Douglass (see lecture 66 above). The 31 October telegram
requesting his stand-in lecture presumably arrived after his letter to Blake went off that
same day (C, pp. 653-54).
Bronson Alcott noted Thoreau’s
Worcester address in two journal entries. For 1 November Alcott recorded, "Thoreau
goes to read his lecture tonight at the Music Hall and again on Monday night at
Worcester."2 (Alcott’s reference to
"Monday" is an error.) Alcott’s 4 November entry praises Thoreau and likens
him to John Brown:
Thoreau calls and reports about the
reading of his lecture on Brown at Boston and Worcester. Thoreau has good right to speak
fully his mind concerning Brown, and has been the first to speak and celebrate the
hero’s courage and magnanimity. It is these which he discerns and praises. The men
have much in common: the sturdy manliness, straight-forwardness and independence. It is
well they met, and that Thoreau saw what he sets forth as no one else can. Both are sons
of Anak, and dwellers in Nature—Brown taking more to the human side and driving
straight at institutions whilst Thoreau contents himself with railing at them and letting
them otherwise alone. He is the proper panegyrist of the virtues he owns himself so
largely, and so comprehends in another.3
In a curiously hybridized journal entry
of 15 November 1859, Thoreau’s glancing comment about Worcester marks a shift from
passages of nature observations to passages about John Brown, followed by alternating
nature observation and politics to the entry’s close. Of his Worcester visit, Thoreau
wrote, "I noticed on the 3d, in Worcester, that the white pines had been as full of
seed there as here this year. Also gathered half a pocketful of shagbarks, of which many
still hung on the trees though most had fallen" (J, 12:443-447).
ADVERTISEMENTS, REVIEWS, AND
RESPONSES: The 3 November Worcester Daily Spy carried two announcements of
Thoreau’s lecture, both doubtless submitted by Blake. The briefer of the two simply
gave the particulars of the event:
John Brown.—Henry D. Thoreau of Concord, will speak on the
character of John Brown of Ossawatomie, at Washburn Hall, on Thursday Evening, Nov 3, a[t]
71/2 o’clock. Price of admission 10 cents.
On the same page of the paper was this related comment:
H.D. Thoreau on John Brown.—An advertisement in another column announces that Mr.
Thoreau of Concord will speak in Worcester, this evening, and that his topic will be John
Brown and his doings. The lecture will be delivered in Washburn Hall; and, as Mr. Thoreau
never deals in common places,—as he considers John Brown a hero,—and as he has
been so moved by the Harper’s Ferry affair, as to feel compelled to leave his
customary seclusion in order to address the public, what he has to say is likely to be
worth hearing.
On 4 November, the day after the
lecture, the Worcester Daily Spy ran this account of Thoreau’s talk:
Eulogy of John Brown.—Henry
D. Thoreau of Concord repeated his Fraternity Lecture on John Brown of Ossawatomie, at
Washburn Hall, last evening. The lecture reviewed briefly the leading events of
Brown’s personal history, and passed an unqualified eulogy upon his character and his
sacrifices. Speaking of his approaching execution he said, "No man has yet appeared
in America who loved his fellow man so well, and treated them so well. For him he took up
his life; for him he will lay it down. This event advertises us that there is such a thing
as death. There has been before no death in America, because there has been no life. Men
have only rotted and sloughed along. The best only run down as a clock. They say they will
die. I defy them; they cannot do it; they only deliquesce, and leave a hundred eulogists
mopping the spot where they left off. These men at Harper’s Ferry, in teaching us how
to die, have taught us how to live. Their deed is the best news America has ever
heard." Mr. Thoreau closed with reading portions of Brown’s conversation at the
Armory, and his speech to the court before his sentence. These scenes, he said, will stand
in history with the landing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence. It will
be the ornament of future national galleries when slavery shall be no more.
A day after this summary, the Fitchburg Semi-Weekly Reveille noted, "H. D.
Thoreau delivered a lecture in Worcester, Wednesday evening, subject: ‘John
Brown.’" The Wednesday ascription is an error.
In a 6 November 1859 letter to Daniel
Ricketson of New Bedford, Bronson Alcott attested to the success of Thoreau’s lecture
in Worcester as well as Concord:
Thoreau has just come back from reading a revolutionary Lecture on John Browne of
Ossawatomee, a hero and Martyr after his own heart and style. It was received here by our
Concord folks with great favor, and he won praise for it also at Worcester. I wish the
towns might become his auditors throughout the states and country.4
DESCRIPTION OF TOPIC: As with
his two earlier deliveries of this lecture in Concord and Boston, Thoreau’s text in
Worcester was very similar to the one later published as "A Plea for Capt. John
Brown," although for the Worcester delivery he made a few minor changes. Toward the
end of his reading draft, he altered the sentence "Some eighteen hundred years ago
Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung" to "Some
eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; on the 2nd of December Brown will be
hung."5 He also added the following sentence at
the end of the lecture’s (and the essay’s) penultimate paragraph: "And you
have read today his speech to the court that sentenced him; clear as a cloudless sky; true
as the voice of nature is."6 Our examination of
Thoreau’s extant lecture manuscripts for this and his other lectures indicates that
he very often tinkered with his texts before his deliveries in order to customize his
reading drafts for particular times and particular locations.
Notes
1. Worcester
Palladium, 18 March 1857, describes the newly built Mechanic’s Hall Building and
Washburn Hall; additional descriptions are taken from The Heart of the Commonwealth:
or, Worcester as It Is . . . . (Worcester: Henry J. Howland, 1856), pp. 64-65, which
was published as the building neared completion. [Back to Text]
2. Alcott, Journals,
p. 320. [Back to Text]
3. Alcott, Journals,
p. 321. [Back to Text]
4. Alcott, Letters,
p. 306. [Back to Text]
5. In RP, pp.
342-43, Wendell Glick mistakenly suggested, based on Thoreau’s later revision of this
sentence back to its original form (a revision reflected in the MS paged "57,"
HM 13203, CSmH), that Thoreau had added the clause "this morning, perchance, Captain
Brown was hung" before the Worcester delivery of the lecture, when in fact it was not
until after the Worcester delivery that Thoreau changed this sentence back to the original
form, which we know was the original form because the original sentence was very closely
paraphrased in the 2 November Boston Daily Advertiser summary of the lecture:
"About eighteen hundred years ago, said the speaker, Christ was crucified,—this
morning, perhaps, John Brown was hanged." Also, it was not until 2 November, the day
after Thoreau’s Boston lecture and the day before his Worcester lecture, that
newspapers in New England reported the previous day’s court proceedings in Virginia,
during which Brown was sentenced to death by hanging on 2 December 1859. [Back to Text]
6. Quoted from MS paged
"60," HM 13203, CSmH. Thoreau inserted an asterisk next to the word
"today" in this sentence and, in a footnote at the bottom of the leaf, wrote,
"This sentence was added at Worcester Nov 3d." Both the quoted sentence and the
footnote are canceled in pencil. [Back
to Text] |