{"id":14902,"date":"2020-07-09T07:45:39","date_gmt":"2020-07-09T11:45:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=14902"},"modified":"2020-09-17T12:23:32","modified_gmt":"2020-09-17T16:23:32","slug":"thoreau-and-emerson-helped-spark-the-civil-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2020\/07\/09\/thoreau-and-emerson-helped-spark-the-civil-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoreau and Emerson Helped Spark the Civil War"},"content":{"rendered":"

American Conservative, July 9, 2020<\/h3>\n

19th Century Radical Chic: How Transcendentalists\u2019 Swooned Over John Brown<\/span><\/a><\/h1>\n
\n

Thoreau and Emerson’s effort to canonize the abolitionist fanatic helped spark the Civil War.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n
\u00a0by \u00a0Jim Bovard <\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

Many Americans have been aghast at violent mobs toppling statues and the widespread looting and destructive rampages that followed the killing<\/a> of George Floyd. Media coverage often ignores the damage inflicted by righteous rioters and the businessmen, black and white, whose livelihoods have been destroyed. Instead, activists are portrayed as heroic because of their\u00a0 political rhetoric and demands for radical changes.<\/p>\n

Soaring political animosity is sparking fears of much greater conflicts in the coming months. More than 160 years ago, a similar pattern paved the way for a conflict that ravaged much of the nation. Few people are aware of how one of America\u2019s most respected philosophers helped inflame the divisions that led to the first Civil War in 1861.<\/p>\n

In his 1849 essay<\/a>, \u201cOn the Duty Of Civil Disobedience,\u201d Henry David Thoreau boldly declared: \u201cThat government is best which governs not at all.\u201d After a night spent in jail for refusing to pay taxes, Thoreau \u201csaw that the State was half-witted.\u201d He concluded, \u201cI quietly declare war with the State,\u201d withdrawing his allegiance as long as the government enforced unjust laws.<\/p>\n

But late in his life, Thoreau mutated into an apologist for bloodthirsty political fanaticism. Thoreau, following in the footsteps of his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, believed<\/a> that \u201cour whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant\u2019s truce between virtue and vice.\u201d Thoreau was a Transcendentalist with boundless faith in absolute truth and absolute goodness. And he never doubted that he perceived those absolutes far more clearly than the vast majority of people who<\/a> \u201clead lives of quiet desperation,\u201d as he wrote in Walden<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Thoreau was justifiably fiercely opposed to slavery. He had initially been wary of fire-breathing Abolitionists who wanted the nation to pay any price to end slavery until he met and swooned for John Brown in 1857. Thoreau donated<\/a> to Brown after hearing him make a rabble-rousing speech. Thoreau bragged that he \u201cnever read\u201d the political columns in newspapers because<\/a> \u201cI do not wish to blunt my sense of right.\u201d Maybe that helped explain Thoreau\u2019s obliviousness (or lack of concern) regarding Brown\u2019s notorious murders in Pottawatomie, Kansas,<\/a> when he and his sons hacked to death five men living in a pro-slavery portion of the state. That 1856 carnage embodied one of Brown\u2019s favorite sayings<\/a>: \u201cWithout the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin.\u201d<\/p>\n

In October 1859, Brown led a band of zealots attacking Harper\u2019s Ferry, Virginia to seize the federal arsenal, part of his plan to end slavery via the mass killing of slaveowners across the South. Mount Holyoke University professor Christopher Benfey aptly characterized<\/a> Brown in the New York Review of Books<\/i> in 2013 as someone who was \u201cmurderous, inept, politically marginal, probably insane.\u201d Most of the nation was horrified by Brown\u2019s attack at Harper\u2019s Ferry, which was speedily put down by federal troops led by Lt. Colonel Robert E. Lee. Even the nation\u2019s foremost abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator<\/i>, condemned Brown\u2019s attack as \u201ca misguided, wild, and apparently insane\u2013effort.\u201d Horace Greeley wrote<\/a> in\u00a0 the New York Tribune <\/i>that \u201cthe way to universal emancipation lies not through insurrection, civil war, and bloodshed, but through peace, discussion, and quiet diffusion of sentiments of humanity and justice.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Thoreau decided that Brown was literally Jesus\u2014or at least that Jesus and John Brown were \u201ctwo ends of a chain which I rejoice to know is not without its links.\u201d In \u201cA Plea for John Brown,<\/a>\u201d an oration delivered in Concord, Massachusetts two weeks after Brown\u2019s attack, Thoreau referred to Brown as an \u201cangel of light\u201d and described Brown\u2019s Harper\u2019s Ferry accomplices as his \u201ctwelve disciples.\u201d Thoreau hailed \u201cthe new saint who would make the gallows as glorious as the cross.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thoreau exalted Brown: \u201cNo man has appeared in America, as yet, who loved his fellow man so well, and treated him<\/a> so tenderly.\u201d That was balderdash on par with Stalin\u2019s apologists gushing in the 1930s about the \u201cpeace-loving Soviet Union.\u201d When Thoreau and Emerson met Brown in 1857, Brown told<\/a> them that it would be \u201cbetter for a whole generation of men, women, and children should pass away by violent death\u201d than for the Golden Rule or Declaration of Independence to ever be violated. Rather than recognizing Brown as a lunatic seeking a pretext to slaughter much of humanity, Thoreau and Emerson hailed him as a moral visionary. But they never explained how to reconcile the Golden Rule with genocide.<\/p>\n

For Thoreau, Brown\u2019s self-evident goodness made his killings irrelevant.<\/strong> Thoreau declared, \u201cThe question is not about the weapon, but the spirit in which you use it.\u201d As University of Connecticut Professor Michael Meyer noted<\/a> in 1980, \u201cThoreau\u2019s Transcendentalism allowed him to disregard any information about Brown which might have tarnished his image as\u00a0 martyr.\u201d Thoreau focused on Brown\u2019s \u201cwillingness to be killed\u2014rather than Brown\u2019s willingness to kill indiscriminately for his cause. Thoreau never mentions<\/a> that the first man killed by Brown\u2019s raiding party at Harper\u2019s Ferry was a free black man who was shot in the back.\u201d Similarly, Thoreau touted Brown\u2019s fight against slavery in Kansas but never mentioned the Pottawattomie massacre. Thoreau also entitled himself to disregard<\/a> any publications which vigorously criticized Brown: \u201cthey are not human enough to affect me at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thoreau and Emerson rallied northern opinion to view Brown as a martyr; Emerson also explicitly defined<\/a> Brown as a \u201cnew saint\u201d and labeled<\/a> him \u201cthe rarest of heroes, a pure idealist.\u201d David Reynolds, a CUNY professor and author of a book on how John Brown \u201csparked the Civil War,\u201d wrote<\/a> in 2013 that Thoreau and Emerson\u2019s \u201cbold, virtually solitary public support of John Brown rescued Brown from infamy.\u201d Thoreau and Emerson swayed northerners to see Brown as a hero; Thoreau\u2019s \u201cplea\u201d concluded with a call for vengeance against the South. As a result, \u201cmany Southerners viewed the raid as a larger Northern scheme to directly attack the South, leading to increased sectional distrust<\/a> and accelerating the approach of secession in 1861,\u201d as the American Battlefield Trust noted.<\/p>\n

For Thoreau and Emerson, \u201ctrust yourself\u201d was effectively replaced by \u201ckill them all and let God sort them out.\u201d<\/strong> Thanks in part to their efforts, \u201ca passion for the violent solution to slavery was sweeping the abolitionist citizens of the nation,\u201d as historian Thomas Fleming wrote<\/a> in A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Radical Republican Congressional leaders \u201cunanimously agreed that the integrity of the Union should be preserved, though it cost a million lives,\u201d the New York Times <\/i>reported<\/a> on Christmas Day 1860. Massachusetts governor John Albion declared<\/a>, \u201cWe must conquer the South.\u201d Pro-war Bostonians urged<\/a> the governor to \u201cdrive the ruffians into the Gulf of Mexico and give the country to the Negroes.\u201d Massachusetts\u2019 zealots were matched by fanatic South Carolina secessionists who idiotically believed that firing on Fort Sumter was a great idea. Confederate Secretary of State Robert Toombs warned<\/a> Confederate President Jefferson Davis to oppose launching an attack: \u201cThe firing on that fort will inaugurate a civil war greater than any the world has yet seen\u00a0\u2026 Mr. President, at this time it is suicide, murder, and you will lose us every friend in the North.\u201d But Davis ordered Gen. P.T. Beauregard to open fire.<\/p>\n

Thoreau\u2019s canonization of John Brown helped drive the nation to a Civil War that left more than 700,000 soldiers dead. With each passing year, the conflict became more unhinged from basic decency. Shortly before he launched his famous swath of destruction through Georgia in 1864, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman telegraphed<\/a> the Secretary of War that\u00a0 \u201cthere is a class of people\u2014men, women, and children\u2014who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though the end of slavery was a blessing, the war\u2019s aftermath unleashed new poxes. As a result of illness, poverty, and negligence by federal officials, roughly 25 percent of freed slaves died or became gravely ill<\/a> in the first years after the war, as Connecticut College Professor Jim Downs noted in his 2012 book, Sick from Freedom<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Was it worth it? It is open to dispute whether a war was necessary to end slavery in America. Abraham Lincoln said<\/a> in 1859 that he was \u201cquite sure [slavery] would not outlast the century.\u201dSlavery ended almost every place else in the western hemisphere without a civil war. In early 1862, Lincoln asked<\/a> Congress \u201cto consider a constitutional amendment that would guarantee compensated emancipation to any state, including those in rebellion, that would agree to abolish slavery gradually by 1900,\u201d Fleming noted. But abolitionists torpedoed the proposal and demanded that the war continue.<\/p>\n

John Brown was the living embodiment of the 19th century quip: \u201cA fanatic is someone who does what the Lord would do if He knew the facts of the matter.\u201d Similarly, the mobs in many cities that are currently unleashing violence are convinced they are doing God\u2019s work\u2014or at least obeying the commandments they imbibed in college sociology classes. But the idiocy of the new saviors knows no bounds, as illustrated<\/a> by their attacks on statues of Frederick Douglass in New York, the monument of the 54th Massachusetts regiment<\/a> (one of the most famous colored regiments in the Civil War), and their beheading<\/a> of the statute of Col. Hans Christian Heg, a Union officer who helped rescue escaped slaves before 1861. The Black Student Union and the Student Inclusion Coalition of the University of Wisconsin are also demanding removal<\/a> of a statute of Abraham Lincoln on their campus.<\/p>\n

Thoreau\u2019s deification of John Brown should be a reminder of the perils of glorifying political violence in the name of any ideal. John Brown\u2019s legacy vivified how hatred is far easier to unleash than to control. Reasonable people can usually reach compromises or craft accommodations with happier results than mobs driven berserk by the latest Twitter hashtag.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

American Conservative, July 9, 2020 19th Century Radical Chic: How Transcendentalists\u2019 Swooned Over John Brown Thoreau and Emerson’s effort to canonize the abolitionist fanatic helped spark the Civil War. \u00a0by \u00a0Jim Bovard Many Americans have been aghast at violent mobs toppling statues and the widespread looting and destructive rampages that followed the killing of George […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14903,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2447,144,247,2443,2446,2444,1094,101,2445,811,1093],"class_list":["post-14902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-abrham-lincoln","tag-boston","tag-civil-war","tag-emerson","tag-jim-downs","tag-john-albion","tag-john-brown","tag-lincoln","tag-robert-tooms","tag-slavery","tag-thoreau"],"yoast_head":"\nThoreau and Emerson Helped Spark the Civil War - 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14902"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15070,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14902\/revisions\/15070"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}