PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
PEOPLE MENTIONED OR ALMOST MENTIONED IN WALDEN:
BROTHER JONATHAN
WALDEN: I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this;
but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time
can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is
darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There
is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
PEOPLE OF
WALDEN
“JOHN” (BULL)
“JONATHAN”
“Mere facts & names & dates communicate more
than we suspect –”
— Henry Thoreau, January 27, 1852
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1647
The Rural Wit tradition of New England began with Nathanael Ward’s satire “The Simple Cobler of Aggawam
in America.”
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1708
The Rural Wit tradition of New England continued with Ebenezer Cook’s THE SOT-WEED FACTOR.
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1732
December 19, Tuesday (Old Style): Benjamin Franklin, AKA “Richard Saunders,” AKA “Poor Richard,” began
publication of POOR RICHARD’S ALMANACK. This continued the Rural Wit tradition of New England, with
annual publication to the year 1757. Continuing for twenty-five years to contain these supposedly anonymous
witty, worldly-wise sayings, the almanac would play a considerable part in bringing together and molding a
white American character out of what had been at that time merely a collection of diverse immigrant European
types. At about this time, presuming all of morality to consist of mere selfish prudence (a move most typical
of this man, characterizable by his marginal jotting of 1741 “Nothing so likely to make a man's fortune as
virtue”), Franklin undertook a characteristically simplistic plan for “self-improvement”:
Ben Franklin’s “Autobiography”
In this piece it was my design to explain and enforce this doctrine, that vicious actions are not hurtful because they are
forbidden, but forbidden because they are hurtful, the nature of man alone considered; that it was, therefore, every one’s interest
to be virtuous who wish’d to be happy even in this world; and I should, from this circumstance (there being always in the world
a number of rich merchants, nobility, states, and princes, who have need of honest instruments for the management of their
affairs, and such being so rare), have endeavored to convince young persons that no qualities were so likely to make a poor man’s
fortune as those of probity and integrity.
Indeed Franklin determined in this to imitate the humility not only of Jesus but also of Socrates:
Ben Franklin’s “Autobiography”
My list of virtues contain’d at first but twelve; but a Quaker friend having kindly informed me that I was generally thought
proud; that my pride show’d itself frequently in conversation; that I was not content with being in the right when discussing any
point, but was overbearing, and rather insolent, of which he convinc’d me by mentioning several instances; I determined
endeavouring to cure myself, if I could, of this vice or folly among the rest, and I added Humility to my list) giving an extensive
meaning to the word.
Of course, in Franklin’s book there was no great difference to be noted between humility and the appearance
of humility, since either could produce the desired rewards, true humility being only slightly more bothersome
to produce than its ersatz. How utterly different this mere prudence is from any real morality!
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PROTOTRACTATUS (1921) 6.422
Die Ethik ist transzendental.
Ethics is transcendental.
TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS,
6.421
Es ist klar, daß sich die Ethik
nicht aussprechen läßt.
Die Ethik ist transzendental.
(Ethik und Ästhetik sind Eins.)
It is clear that ethics
cannot be put into words.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are
one and the same.)
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
TRANSCENDENTALISM
The most pertinent of the recycled worldly-wise proverbs Franklin had put in the mouth of Saunders would be
re-collected in 1758 as “The Way to Wealth,” in which the literary persona would be a “Father Abraham”
— an elderly person who was induced, in order to kill some time for some people who were waiting for the
commencement of a public auction, to make a speech.
WALDEN: I am not sure that I ever heard the sound of cock-crowing
from my clearing, and I thought that it might be worth the while
to keep a cockerel for his music merely, as a singing bird. The
note of this once wild Indian pheasant is certainly the most
remarkable of any bird’s, and if they could be naturalized
without being domesticated, it would soon become the most famous
sound in our woods, surpassing the clangor of the goose and the
hooting of the owl; and then imagine the cackling of the hens to
fill the pauses when their lords’ clarions rested! No wonder that
man added this bird to his tame stock, –to say nothing of the eggs
and drumsticks. To walk in a winter morning in a wood where these
birds abounded, their native woods, and hear the wild cockerels
crow on the trees, clear and shrill for miles over the resounding
earth, drowning the feebler notes of other birds, –think of it!
It would put nations on the alert. Who would not be early to rise,
and rise earlier and earlier every successive day of his life,
till he became unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and wise?
This foreign bird’s note is celebrated by the poets of all
countries along with the notes of their native songsters.
All climates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more indigenous
even than the natives. His health is ever good, his lungs
are sound, his spirits never flag.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
PEOPLE OF
WALDEN
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1760
During the 1760s, John Adams would be creating the persona of Humphrey Ploughjogger, the down-country
farmer, in the Rural Wit tradition of New England which would eventually produce the American type known
on stage and in cartoons and humorous tales as Brother Jonathan.
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1787
April 16, Monday: Boston playwright Royall Tyler’s “The Contrast”1 was performed at New-York’s John Street
Theatre, the first professional performance of a comedy in America. With this staging, the “Yankee” began to
make his appearance. Under cover of naivete, startling things could be suggested. This “Brother Jonathan”
persona would become a stock part of amusements by Royall Tyler, William Biglow, and Thomas Green
Fessenden.2
Enter JONATHAN.
JESSAMY: Votre tres-humble serviteur, Monsieur. I understand Colonel Manly, the Yankee
officer, has the honour of your services.
JONATHAN: Sir! —
JESSAMY: I say, Sir, I understand that Colonel Manly has the honour of having you for a
servant.
JONATHAN: Servant! Sir, do you take me for a neger, — I am Colonel Manly’s waiter.
JESSAMY: A true Yankee distinction, egad, without a difference. Why, Sir, do you not
perform all the offices of a servant? do you not even blacken his boots?
JONATHAN: Yes; I do grease them a bit sometimes; but I am a true blue son of liberty, for
all that. Father said I should come as Colonel Manly’s waiter, to see the world, and all that; but
no man shall master me. My father has as good a farm as the colonel.
JESSAMY: Well, Sir, we will not quarrel about terms upon the eve of an acquaintance from
which I promise myself so much satisfaction; — therefore, sans ceremonie —
JONATHAN: What? —
JESSAMY: I say I am extremely happy to see Colonel Manly’s waiter.
JONATHAN: Well, and I vow, too, I am pretty considerably glad to see you; but what the dogs
need of all this outlandish lingo? Who may you be, Sir, if I may be so bold?
JESSAMY: I have the honour to be Mr. Dimple’s servant, or, if you please, waiter. We lodge
under the same roof, and should be glad of the honour of your acquaintance.
JONATHAN: You a waiter! by the living jingo, you look so topping, I took you for one of the
agents to Congress.
JESSAMY: The brute has discernment, notwithstanding his appearance. — Give me leave to say
I wonder then at your familiarity.
JONATHAN: Why, as to the matter of that, Mr. — ; pray, what’s your name?
JESSAMY: Jessamy, at your service.
JONATHAN: Why, I swear we don’t make any great matter of distinction in our state between
quality and other folks.
JESSAMY: This is, indeed, a levelling principle. — I hope, Mr. Jonathan, you have not taken
part with the insurgents.
1. Philadelphia PA: Pritchard & Hall, 1790, as reprinted in New-York by The Dunlap Society in 1887.
2. According to a report in the newspaper the day after the opening, this “Jonathan’ character had been “very well drawn.”
Actually, a similar American character named “Jonathan” had already made his appearance in a less popular play in the previous
year: Joseph Atkinson’s “Match for a Widow.” At first the attire for a stage “Jonathan” would be what was used for the Brit
northcountryman stock character known as “Hodge,” but gradually during the 1820s-1840s he would begin to be attired in the long
Yankee coat, the striped trousers and vest, the long lank hair, and the top hat with which we are now familiar in “Uncle Sam”
cartoons. But at this point he was simply a rural New Englander, a hick, a representative American bumpkin.
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1812
James Kirke Paulding’s THE DIVERTING HISTORY OF JOHN BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN, a pacifist treatise
(cf. WALDEN’s play on “bottomless”):
In a little time, Jonathan grew up to be large for his age, and
became a tall, stout, double-jointed, broad-footed cub of a
fellow, awkward in his gait, and simple in his appearance; but
showing a lively, shrewd look, and having the promise of great
strength when he should get his full growth. He was rather an
odd-looking chap, in truth, and had many queer ways; but
everyone that had seen John Bull saw a great likeness between
them, and swore he was John’s own boy, and a true chip off the
old block. like the old squire, he was apt to be blustering and
saucy, but in the main was a peaceable sort of careless fellow,
that would quarrel with nobody if you only let him alone. He
used to dress in homespun trousers with a huge bagging seat,
which seemed to have nothing in it. This caused people to say
he had no bottom; but whoever said so lied, as they found to
their cost whenever they put Jonathan in a passion. He always
wore a linsey-woolsey coat, that did not above half cover his
breech, and the sleeves of which were so short that his hand and
wrist came out beyond them, looking like a shoulder of mutton.
All which was in consequence of his growing so fast that he
outgrew his clothes.
UNCLE SAM
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[In the cartoon a nearby screen, the “John Bull” English traveller character goes: “Hi Say, Sir, Ham I on the
right road to ’Artford?” to which the American Brother Jonathan character with the umbrella helpfully
responds “Well, you be.” Then John thinks to inquire further of Jonathan “How far shall I ave to go before I get
there?” and Jonathan elaborates on this: “Well, if you turn round and go ’tother way may be you have to travel
abeout ten mile. But if you keep on the way you are going, you’ll have to go about eight thousand, I reckon.”]
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1813
Spring: John Leonard Knapp and Lydia Frances Freeman Knapp moved from Llanfoist in Monmouthshire to
Alveston in South Gloucestershire, England.
In America, a published broadsheet included the comment “If Uncle Sam needs, I’ll be glad to assist him.”
This is the first known occasion on which the figure “Uncle Sam” made an appearance in print, representing
perhaps the United States of America as a nation, or perhaps its military (Samuel Wilson, a Troy, New York
meatpacker, had been stamping barrels of pork and beef intended for consumption by the US forces with
“US”).
The lady on the following screen has prepared herself, according to this spring’s fashion, for an evening at the
opera:
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1816
During the War of 1812, American soldiers had called meatpacker Sam Wilson of Troy, New York “Uncle
Sam” because the packages of meat they received for rations were stamped “U.S.” In this year an anonymous
publication by one [Frederick Augustus Fidfaddy, Esq.], a long satirical account of the War of 1812, was
entitled THE ADVENTURES OF UNCLE SAM.
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1826
Our national birthday, Tuesday the 4th of July: Construction was initiated at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on the
Main Line Canal.
The cornerstone was laid for the first lock of the Oswego Canal.
About noon, Stephen Collins Foster was born in Lawrenceville (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, the 9th child of
William Barclay Foster, a businessman, and Eliza Clayland Tomlinson, daughter of a fairly well-off farmer.
Giacomo Meyerbeer and Eugene Scribe met in Paris to discuss Robert le diable for perhaps the 1st time.
English newspapers picked up and translated, word for word, the hoax or invention that had appeared in the
Journal du Commerce de Lyon about an Englishman, one Roger Dodsworth, who had apparently been frozen
in a Mount Saint Gothard glacier since an avalanche in 1654, and had on July 4th been recovered and
reanimated “by the usual remedies” by a Dr. Hotham of Northumberland. Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft
Shelley read this newspaper account and by October would produce her THE REANIMATED MAN.
The newspapers of 1826 abounded with descriptions of solemn odes, processions, orations, toasts, and other
such commemoratives of July 4th, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. One reflection of
the public conception of the Declaration was Royall Tyler’s “Country Song for the Fourth of July,” a poem
that describes a New England celebration of the Brother Jonathan type, where neighbors gather for food, fun,
and festivities. A clear view of just how the political ideals of the Declaration were received by the masses
shines through Tyler’s rhymed directions for the country dance. Here is how his dance appeared in an 1841
publication (although Tyler, who would die on August 26, 1826 from cancer of the face, could only have
composed this in a considerably earlier timeframe).
Squeak the fife and beat the drum,
Independence day is come!!
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Let the roasting pig be bled,
Quick twist off the cockerel’s head.
Quickly rub the pewter platter.
Heap the nutcakes, fried in butter.
Set the cups, and beaker glass,
The Pumpkin and the apple sauce.
Send the keg to shop for brandy;
Maple sugar we have handy,
Independent, staggering Dick,
A noggin mix of swingeing thick,
Sal, put on your russet skirt,
Jotham, get your boughten shirt,
To-day we dance to tiddle diddle.
—Here comes Sambo with his fiddle;
Sambo, take a dram of whiskey,
And play up Yankee doodle frisky.
Moll, come leave your witched tricks,
And let us have a reel of six;
Father and mother shall make two;
Sal, Moll, and I, stand all a-row,
Sambo, play and dance with quality;
This is the day of blest equality,
Father and mother are but men,
And Sambo — is a citizen.
Come foot it, Sal, — Moll, figure in.
And, mother, you dance up to him;
Now saw fast as e’er you can do
And father, you cross o’er to Sambo,
—Thus we dance, and thus we play,
On glorious Independence Day. —
[2 more verses in like manner]
In Salem, Massachusetts, 4th-of-July orator the Reverend Henry Root Colman delivered the necessary oration.
This would be printed by the town as AN ORATION DELIVERED IN SALEM, JULY 4, 1826, AT THE REQUEST OF
THE TOWN, ON THE COMPLETION OF A HALF CENTURY SINCE THE DECLARATION OF AMERICAN
INDEPENDENCE. Meanwhile, elsewhere, 4th-of-July orator George Bancroft was alerting an audience to the
fact that his attitudes about government were coming to tend toward the democratic.
On this 50th anniversary of our American independence, which at the time we were referring to as our “Jubilee
of Freedom” event, on the 22d birthday of Nathaniel Hawthorne, both former President Thomas Jefferson
and former President John Adams died.3 This was taken at the time to constitute a sign of national favor from
Heaven, although why death ought to be regarded as a sign of favor remains untheorized — perhaps once again
we Americans were “pushing the envelope” of what it is to be a human being. At any rate, this coincidence
would become quite the topic for conversation in our American republic.
FAMOUS LAST WORDS: Jefferson: “Is it the 4th?” —Ah.” John Adams: “Thomas Jefferson still survives”
(actually Jefferson had died at 12:50PM and then Adams died at 5:30PM.)
Even before news of Jefferson’s demise had reached Washington DC, Mayor Roger C. Weightman was having
3. At any rate, this coincidence would become quite the topic for conversation in our American republic. Refer to L. H. Butterfield,
"The Jubilee of Independence, July 4, 1826," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, LXI (1953), pages 135-38; Joseph J.
Ellis, Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (NY, 1993), pages 210-16; Robert P. Hay, "The Glorious
Departure of the American Patriarchs: Contemporary Reactions to the Deaths of Jefferson and Adams," Journal of Southern
History, XXXV (1969), pages 543-55; Merrill D.Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind, 1960, pages 3-14.
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his final letter read aloud at that city’s Independence Day national-birthday festivities. The most stirring words
in that former president’s missive –his assertion that the mass of mankind had not been born “with saddles on
their backs” nor a favored few “booted and spurred” to “ride” them– had of course originated in the speech
delivered by the leveler Colonel Richard Rumbold on the scaffold moments before his execution for treason
against the English monarchy, at the conclusion of the English Civil War, in the Year of Our Lord 1685.4
Those who noticed that the former President had intentionally or unknowingly been borrowing sentiments did
not see fit to record that fact in writing.5
Former president Jefferson’s death at Monticello (“All my wishes and where I hope my days will end — at
Monticello.”) would be followed shortly by the auction of his 90 black slaves over 12 years of age –along with
his 12 black slaves between 9-12 years of age, his 73 cows of unknown coloration, and his 27 horses also of
unknown coloration– for he had been living quite beyond his means, bringing back with him for instance from
France no fewer than 86 large crates of civilized goodies. Jefferson did, however, set free his mulatto blood
relatives. Jefferson, one might say, in allowing that after a certain number of crosses with white daddies, an
infant ought to be considered to be white, had “pushed the envelope” of what it meant to be a human being.
Yeah, right.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
JOHN ADAMS
4. Macaulay’s HISTORY OF ENGLAND, Chapter V; Adair, Douglass. “Rumbold’s Dying Speech, 1685, and Jefferson’s Last Words
on Democracy, 1826,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, IX (1952): pages 526, 530:
I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world,
ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled
to be ridden.
Rumbold was not merely being hanged but being hanged, drawn, and quartered — the penalty for an attempt upon the monarch.
This trope about horses, saddles, boots, and spurs was taken at the time to have been originated by Jefferson, in John A. Shaw’s
EULOGY, PRONOUNCED AT BRIDGEWATER, MASSACHUSETTS, AUGUST 2D, 1826 and in Henry Potter’s EULOGY, PRONOUNCED IN
FAYETTEVILLE, NORTH-CAROLINA, JULY 20TH, 1826 and in John Tyler’s EULOGY, PRONOUNCED AT RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, JULY
11, 1826 in A SELECTION OF EULOGIES, PRONOUNCED IN THE SEVERAL STATES, IN HONOR OF THOSE ILLUSTRIOUS PATRIOTS AND
STATESMEN, JOHN ADAMS AND THOMAS JEFFERSON (Hartford CT: 1826). See also THE LAST LETTER OF THE ILLUSTRIOUS
STATESMAN, THOMAS JEFFERSON, ESQ. AUTHOR OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE: BEING HIS ANSWER TO AN INVITATION
TO JOIN THE CITIZENS OF WASHINGTON IN CELEBRATING THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE: MONTICELLO,
JUNE 24, 1826 (Washington DC: 1826).
That 17th-Century incident was not the first one in our history to conform to the dictum “there must be none higher than us,
though of course there must always be some lower than us,” for in the 14th Century the Reverend John Ball had been hanged for
preaching against public toleration of privileged classes:
“When Adam dalf [digged] and Eve span,
Who was then a gentleman?”
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Mary Moody Emerson entered into her Almanack a comment that this was the day on which her Country had
thrown the gage (thrown down the gauntlet, issued a challenge to a duel of honor):
tho’ the revolution gave me to slavery of poverty
& ignorance & long orphanship, — yet it gave my
fellow men liberty
HOLOGRAPHIC IMAGES
Isabella (Sojourner Truth), who would have been approximately 29 years old, had in this year borne another
daughter, whom she had named Sophia, who would need to grow up laboring as an indentured servant, by the
husband Thomas to whom she had been assigned by her master who would not admit that he was a husband.
She had once again increasing the prosperity of the master race! The remaining slaves of New York State were
to be freed one year from this date, and John Dumont had solemnly promised Isabella in some earlier period
that he would free her and her husband “a year early” and set them up in a nearby log cabin. So it had come
time for the white race to be true to its word. However, since the master had made that commitment to this
enslaved woman, she had carelessly chopped off one of her fingers while working for him –so he figured she
couldn’t work as productively with only nine fingers as she had with ten, and so –he figured she must still owe
him some work. Fair’s fair, right? No freedom, no cabin, not yet, instead work some more for nothing.
(But don’t lose heart, as maybe later I’ll be able to keep my solemn promise.)
TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS
5. Note that we have here an American author who is establishing his claim to fame upon his being the author of the memorable
phrases of our foundational document, and who is attempting incautiously to do so by appropriating phrases originated by someone
else. Also, we have here an American public so stupid or so patriotic that it lets him get away with it. Witness John A. Shaw,
EULOGY, PRONOUNCED AT BRIDGEWATER, MASSACHUSETTS, AUGUST 2D, 1826 in A Selection of Eulogies, Pronounced in the
Several States, in Honor of Those Illustrious Patriots and Statesmen, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (Hartford, Conn., 1826),
163; Henry Potter, “Eulogy, Pronounced in Fayetteville, North-Carolina, July 20th, 1826,” A Selection of Eulogies...., 130; John
Tyler, “Eulogy, Pronounced at Richmond, Virginia, July 11, 1826,” A Selection of Eulogies...., 7-8; National Intelligencer, July 4,
1826; Independent Chronicle and Boston Patriot, July 12, 1826; Philadelphia Gazette, July 5, 1826; Commercial Chronicle and
Baltimore Advertiser, July 11, 1826; The last letter of the illustrious statesman, Thomas Jefferson, Esq. author of the Declaration of
Independence: Being his answer to an invitation to join the citizens of Washington in celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of
American independence: Monticello, June 24, 1826 (Washington, D.C., 1826).
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In New Harmony, Indiana, Robert Dale Owen gave a speech he called his “Declaration of Mental
Independence.”
In Providence, Rhode Island, four of those who had participated in the capture of the British armed schooner
Gaspe during the Revolutionary War rode in a parade.
In Newport, Rhode Island, Major John Handy read the Declaration of Independence “on the identical spot
which he did 50 years ago,” in the presence of Isaac Barker of Middletown, “who was at his side in the same
place fifty years before.” Patriotic fun and games! Friend Stephen Wanton Gould protested to his journal:
3rd day 4th of 7th M 1826 / This is what is called Independence
Day - & an exceeding troublesome one it is to all sober Minded
people - The expence of this day given to the poor or
appropriated to public school would school all the poor children
in town for some time. — Last night, we were the whole night
greatly troubled & kept Awake, by the firing of squibs &
crackers, great Bonfire in the middle of the Parade & tar
Barrells, with various noises which were kept up all night &
consequently kept us & many others awake, to our great
discomfiture - in addition to which is the bitter reflection of
the discipation & corruption of habits & morals to which our
youth are exposed. — & today we have had numerous scenes of
drunkness both among the Aged & Youth, & many act of wickedness
-besides the pomp & vain show apparant in all parts of the Town
-This evening again we are troubled with noise & tumult & what
kind of a night we are to have cannot be told. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
In New-York, 4 gold medals had been ordered to be struck by the Common Council: 3 were for surviving
signers of the Declaration of Independence, and the 4th was given to the son of Robert Fulton as a memorial
of “genius in the application of steam.”
In a celebration at Lynchburg, Virginia, among the “aged patriots of ’76” were General John Smith and
Captain George Blakenmore.
At the South Meeting House of Worcester, Massachusetts, Isaiah Thomas stood on the spot from which he had
read the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
The Frederick-Town Herald of Frederick, Maryland announced that it would no longer be publishing the usual
round of “generally dull, insipid” dinner toasts, “about which few feel any interest.”
In Salem, North Carolina, the Moravian Male Academy was dedicated.
In Quincy, Massachusetts, Miss Caroline Whitney delivered an address on the occasion of the presentation of
a flag to the Quincy Light Infantry.
In Arlington, Virginia, General Washington’s tent, the very same tent that the General had been using at the
heights of Dorchester in 1775, was re-erected near the banks of the Potomac River for purposes of celebration.
CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY
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1827
November 14, Wednesday: “Jonathan” was in use as an idiom meaning a “downeaster,” or “Yankee,”
as witness this comment in the Massachusetts Spy:
A tall, boney Jonathan, whose appetite was
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in proportion to the magnitude of his frame.
RURAL WIT
WALDEN: I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this;
but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time
can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is
darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There
is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
PEOPLE OF
WALDEN
“JOHN” (BULL)
“JONATHAN”
WALDEN: It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions
which the herd so diligently follow. The traveller who stops at
the best houses, so called, soon discovers this, for the publicans
presume him to be a Sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to
their tender mercies he would soon be completely emasculated.
I think that in the railroad car we are inclined to spend more on
luxury than on safety and convenience, and it threatens without
attaining these to become no better than a modern drawing room,
with its divans, and ottomans, and sunshades, and a hundred other
oriental things, which we are taking west with us, invented for
the ladies of the harem and the effeminate natives of the
Celestial Empire, which Jonathan should be ashamed to know the
names of. I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to
myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride
on earth in an ox cart with a free circulation, than go to heaven
in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all
the way.
PEOPLE OF
WALDEN
SARDANAPALUS
“JONATHAN”
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1830
During the 1830s, the stock “Yankee” persona began to acquire traits of shrewd social and political satire.
This began in the humor productions of Seba Smith (1792-1868) and Charles A. Davis (1795-1867)
and continued in those of Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796-1865) and Joseph C. Neal (1807-1847).
RURAL WIT
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1833
Elizabeth Oakes Smith, who had been contributing poems, sketches, and stories to The Argus both
anonymously and over the signature “E,” acted as editor when her husband Seba Smith went to Boston to
supervise the publication of THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF MAJOR JACK DOWNING, a work in the Rural Wit
tradition of New England. She wrote an unpublished autobiography at about this point which indicates that she
was studying Shakespeare, Milton, Blackstone, Mill, etc. after the others of the family had retired to bed.
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1836
Our “Uncle Sam” figure first appeared, as an old, ailing figure in a dressing gown of stars and stripes, in an
anti-Jackson cartoon by E.W. Clay.
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1837
In treating of the characters to be found in the stock “Brother Jonathan” plays of the period, such as the “hero,”
the “villain,” the “lecher,” the “impecunious Irishman,” the “wastrel lord,” the “American infected by a
Continental education,” the “true gentleman,” as well as, of course, the “Jonathan” himself, Morgan points out
in AN AMERICAN ICON: BROTHER JONATHAN AND AMERICAN IDENTITY that there is more than a superficial
relationship between national pride in scholarship and achievement and national pride as it manifests itself in
chauvinism and parochialism:
In 1837 Emerson defined the American scholar by what he was not.
Above all, he was not European. In the Jonathan plays, Americans were
already defined by what they were not. Americans were not overly refined,
corrupt men who imperiled what Americans valued: the heroine, her wealth,
and her virtue.
RURAL WIT
UNCLE SAM
[In a cartoon, the “John Bull” English traveller character goes: “Hi Say, Sir, Ham I on the right road to
’Artford?” to which the American Jonathan character with the umbrella helpfully responds “Well, you be.”
Then John thinks to inquire further of Jonathan “How far shall I ave to go before I get there?” and Jonathan
elaborates on this: “Well, if you turn round and go ’tother way may be you have to travel about ten mile.
But if you keep on the way you are going, you’ll have to go abeout eight thousand, I reckon.”]
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1840
Before 1840, “Brother Jonathan” was the media-sponsored stereotype of the American rural white male.
He was self-confident and individualistic to an outrageous degree, an “I’ll just go ahead and help myself here”
Everyman. This “new man,” the “go-aheader” American, had first appeared, so far as we now know, in a
cartoon dating to the year 1776 and in 1787 made his transition to the American stage. In the 1850s references
to him would decline, and evidently he died from shooting himself in the foot one last time, sometime during
our Civil War years. He was a transition figure, a Yankee Doodle becoming an Uncle Sam. Refer to Winifred
Morgan’s AN AMERICAN ICON: BROTHER JONATHAN AND AMERICAN IDENTITY (Newark NJ: U of Delaware
P, 1988).
“It is difficult to describe the rapacity with which the
American rushes forward to receive the immense booty
which fortune proffers to him. He is goaded onward by a
passion more intense than love of life. Before him lies
a boundless continent, and he urges onward as if time
pressed, and he was afraid of finding no room for his
exertions.”
— Alexis de Tocqueville
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1843
The cartoonist E.W. Clay’s “Uncle Sam” figure of 1836 again appeared at this point, this time in 18th-Century
garb.
“Jonathan” was in use as an idiom meaning a “downeaster,” or “Yankee,” as witness this comment in the Yale
Literary Magazine:
Occasionally you will see some honest country Jonathan, with his
waggon full of yankee notions.
RURAL WIT
According to Joseph Felt’s ANNALS OF SALEM, in this year an exhibition of a a 7-year-old girl who weighed
in at 240 pounds, and an exhibition of the 5-year-old midget Tom Thumb, Jr. (Charles S. Stratton) who at this
point was still just 25 inches in height, were touring Massachusetts:
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Table of Altitudes
Yoda
2 ' 0 ''
Lavinia Warren
2 ' 8 ''
Tom Thumb, Jr.
3 ' 4 ''
Lucy (Australopithecus Afarensis)
3 ' 8 ''
Hervé Villechaize (“Fantasy Island”)
3 ' 11''
Charles Proteus Steinmetz
4 ' 0 ''
Mary Moody Emerson per FBS (1)
4 ' 3 ''
Alexander Pope
4 ' 6 ''
Benjamin Lay
4 ' 7 ''
Dr. Ruth Westheimer
4 ' 7 ''
Gary Coleman (“Arnold Jackson”)
4 ' 8 ''
Edith Piaf
4 ' 8 ''
Queen Victoria with osteoporosis
4 ' 8 ''
Linda Hunt
4 ' 9 ''
Queen Victoria as adult
4 ' 10 ''
Mother Teresa
4 ' 10 ''
Margaret Mitchell
4 ' 10 ''
length of newer military musket
4 ' 10''
Charlotte Brontë
4 ' 10-11''
Tammy Faye Bakker
4 ' 11''
Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut
4 ' 11''
jockey Willie Shoemaker
4 ' 11''
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
4 ' 11''
Joan of Arc
4 ' 11''
Bonnie Parker of “Bonnie & Clyde”
4 ' 11''
Harriet Beecher Stowe
4 ' 11''
Laura Ingalls Wilder
4 ' 11''
a rather tall adult Pygmy male
4 ' 11''
Gloria Swanson
4 ' 11''1/2
Clara Barton
5 ' 0 ''
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
5 ' 0 ''
Andrew Carnegie
5 ' 0 ''
Thomas de Quincey
5 ' 0 ''
Stephen A. Douglas
5 ' 0 ''
Danny DeVito
5 ' 0 ''
Immanuel Kant
5 ' 0 ''
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PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
William Wilberforce
5 ' 0 ''
Dollie Parton
5 ' 0 ''
Mae West
5 ' 0 ''
Pia Zadora
5 ' 0 ''
Deng Xiaoping
5 ' 0 ''
Dred Scott
5 ' 0 '' (±)
Captain William Bligh of HMS Bounty
5 ' 0 '' (±)
Harriet Tubman
5 ' 0 '' (±)
Mary Moody Emerson per FBS (2)
5 ' 0 '' (±)
John Brown of Providence, Rhode Island
5 ' 0 '' (+)
John Keats
5 ' 3/4 ''
Debbie Reynolds (Carrie Fisher’s mother)
5 ' 1 ''
Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher)
5 ' 1 ''
Bette Midler
5 ' 1 ''
Dudley Moore
5 ' 2 ''
Paul Simon (of Simon & Garfunkel)
5 ' 2 ''
Honoré de Balzac
5 ' 2 ''
Sally Field
5 ' 2 ''
Jemmy Button
5 ' 2 ''
Margaret Mead
5 ' 2 ''
R. Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller
5 ' 2 ''
Yuri Gagarin the astronaut
5 ' 2 ''
William Walker
5 ' 2 ''
Horatio Alger, Jr.
5 ' 2 ''
length of older military musket
5 ' 2 ''
the artist formerly known as Prince
5 ' 21/2''
typical female of Thoreau's period
5 ' 21/2''
Francis of Assisi
5 ' 3 ''
Voltaire
5 ' 3 ''
Mohandas Gandhi
5 ' 3 ''
Sammy Davis, Jr.
5 ' 3 ''
Kahlil Gibran
5 ' 3 ''
Friend Daniel Ricketson
5 ' 3 ''
The Reverend Gilbert White
5 ' 3 ''
Nikita Khrushchev
5 ' 3 ''
Sammy Davis, Jr.
5 ' 3 ''
Truman Capote
5 ' 3 ''
Kim Jong Il (North Korea)
5 ' 3 ''
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Stephen A. “Little Giant” Douglas
5 ' 4 ''
Francisco Franco
5 ' 4 ''
President James Madison
5 ' 4 ''
Iosef Vissarionovich Dzugashvili “Stalin”
5 ' 4 ''
Alan Ladd
5 ' 4 ''
Pablo Picasso
5 ' 4 ''
Truman Capote
5 ' 4 ''
Queen Elizabeth
5 ' 4 ''
Ludwig van Beethoven
5 ' 4 ''
Typical Homo Erectus
5 ' 4 ''
typical Neanderthal adult male
5 ' 41/2''
Alan Ladd
5 ' 41/2''
comte de Buffon
5 ' 5 '' (-)
Captain Nathaniel Gordon
5 ' 5 ''
Charles Manson
5 ' 5 ''
Audie Murphy
5 ' 5 ''
Harry Houdini
5 ' 5 ''
Hung Hsiu-ch'üan
5 ' 5 ''
Marilyn Monroe
5 ' 51/2''
T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia”
5 ' 51/2''
average runaway male American slave
5 ' 5-6 ''
Charles Dickens
5 ' 6? ''
President Benjamin Harrison
5 ' 6 ''
President Martin Van Buren
5 ' 6 ''
James Smithson
5 ' 6 ''
Louisa May Alcott
5 ' 6 ''
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
5 ' 61/2''
Napoleon Bonaparte
5 ' 61/2''
Emily Brontë
5 ' 6-7 ''
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
5 ' ? ''
average height, seaman of 1812
5 ' 6.85 ''
Oliver Reed Smoot, Jr.
5 ' 7 ''
minimum height, British soldier
5 ' 7 ''
President John Adams
5 ' 7 ''
President John Quincy Adams
5 ' 7 ''
President William McKinley
5 ' 7 ''
“Charley” Parkhurst (a female)
5 ' 7 ''
Ulysses S. Grant
5 ' 7 ''
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Henry Thoreau
5 ' 7 ''
the average male of Thoreau's period
5 ' 71/2 ''
Edgar Allan Poe
5 ' 8 ''
President Ulysses S. Grant
5 ' 8 ''
President William H. Harrison
5 ' 8 ''
President James Polk
5 ' 8 ''
President Zachary Taylor
5 ' 8 ''
average height, soldier of 1812
5 ' 8.35 ''
President Rutherford B. Hayes
5 ' 81/2''
President Millard Fillmore
5 ' 9 ''
President Harry S Truman
5 ' 9 ''
President Jimmy Carter
5 ' 91/2''
Herman Melville
Calvin Coolidge
5 ' 93/4''
5 ' 10''
Andrew Johnson
5 ' 10''
Theodore Roosevelt
5 ' 10''
Thomas Paine
5 ' 10''
Franklin Pierce
5 ' 10''
Abby May Alcott
5 ' 10''
Reverend Henry C. Wright
5 ' 10''
Nathaniel Hawthorne
5 ' 101/2''
Louis “Deerfoot” Bennett
5 ' 101/2''
Friend John Greenleaf Whittier
5 ' 101/2''
President Dwight D. Eisenhower
5 ' 101/2''
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots
5 ' 11''
Sojourner Truth
5 ' 11''
President Grover Cleveland
5 ' 11''
President Herbert Hoover
5 ' 11''
President Woodrow Wilson
5 ' 11''
President Jefferson Davis
5 ' 11''
President Richard Milhous Nixon
5 ' 111/2''
Robert Voorhis the hermit of Rhode Island
<6'
Frederick Douglass
6 ' (-)
Anthony Burns
6 ' 0 ''
Waldo Emerson
6 ' 0 ''
Joseph Smith, Jr.
6 ' 0 ''
David Walker
6 ' 0 ''
Sarah F. Wakefield
6 ' 0 ''
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Thomas Wentworth Higginson
6 ' 0 ''
President James Buchanan
6 ' 0 ''
President Gerald R. Ford
6 ' 0 ''
President James Garfield
6 ' 0 ''
President Warren Harding
6 ' 0 ''
President John F. Kennedy
6 ' 0 ''
President James Monroe
6 ' 0 ''
President William H. Taft
6 ' 0 ''
President John Tyler
6 ' 0 ''
John Brown
6 ' 0 (+)''
President Andrew Jackson
6 ' 1''
Alfred Russel Wallace
6 ' 1''
President Ronald Reagan
6 ' 1''
Venture Smith
6 ' 11/2''
John Camel Heenan
6 ' 2 ''
Crispus Attucks
6 ' 2 ''
President Chester A. Arthur
6 ' 2 ''
President George Bush, Senior
6 ' 2 ''
President Franklin D. Roosevelt
6 ' 2 ''
President George Washington
6 ' 2 ''
Gabriel Prosser
6 ' 2 ''
Dangerfield Newby
6 ' 2 ''
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PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
Charles Augustus Lindbergh
6 ' 2 ''
President Bill Clinton
6 ' 21/2''
President Thomas Jefferson
6 ' 21/2''
President Lyndon B. Johnson
6 ' 3 ''
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
6 ' 3 ''
Richard “King Dick” Seaver
6 ' 31/4''
President Abraham Lincoln
6 ' 4 ''
Marion Morrison (AKA John Wayne)
6 ' 4 ''
Elisha Reynolds Potter, Senior
6 ' 4 ''
Thomas Cholmondeley
6 ' 4 '' (?)
William Buckley
6 ' 4-7”
Franklin Benjamin Sanborn
6 ' 5 ''
Peter the Great of Russia
6 ' 7 ''
William “Dwarf Billy” Burley
6 ' 7 ''
Giovanni Battista Belzoni
6 ' 7 ''
Thomas Jefferson (the statue)
7 ' 6''
Jefferson Davis (the statue)
7 ' 7''
Martin Van Buren Bates
7 ' 111/2''
M. Bihin, a Belgian exhibited in Boston in 1840
8'
Anna Haining Swan
8 ' 1''
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1845
By this point the Yankee oracle was a persona firmly ensconced in the imagination of America. The situation
in regard to Brother Jonathan and Uncle Sam:
Following a hiatus during the early 1840s, the character called
Brother Jonathan resurfaced in political cartoons of the middecade. By the 1850s onward however, the same visual
representation was frequently labeled Uncle Sam. [Continuing in
a pair of footnotes, first:] Given the eventual triumph of Uncle
Sam over Brother Jonathan, a curious detail was that during the
1850s the Know-Nothings called themselves “Sams.” [Then also:]
While Uncle Sam took over as an embodiment of the national
response, by the last decades of the nineteenth century, the
American cowboy had replaced Jonathan as the American original
in popular mythology.
RURAL WIT
[In the cartoon on the following screen, the “John Bull” English traveller character goes: “Hi Say, Sir, Ham I
on the right road to ’Artford?” to which the American Jonathan character with the umbrella helpfully responds
“Well, you be.” Then John thinks to inquire further of Jonathan “How far shall I ave to go before I get there?”
and Jonathan elaborates on this: “Well, if you turn round and go ’tother way may be you have to travel abeout
ten mile. But if you keep on the way you are going, you’ll have to go abeout eight thousand, I reckon.”]
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1846
James Russell Lowell returned to his family home, Elmwood, on Tory Row near the Charles River
(Quinobequin) in Cambridge.
Lowell published the first essay of the nine in THE BIGELOW PAPERS. Margaret Fuller was mean to him in her
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PAPERS ON LITERATURE AND ART, seeing him as “absolutely wanting in the true spirit and tone of poesy”:
His interest in the moral questions of the day has
supplied the want of vitality in himself; his great
facility at versification has enabled him to fill the
ear with a copious stream of pleasant sound. But his
verse is stereotyped; his thought sounds no depth, and
posterity will not remember him.
RURAL WIT
In this year an octogenarian gave a press conference and revealed that he had personal knowledge of why it
was that we Americans were referring to ourselves as “Brother Jonathan.” George Washington, he said, used
to comment to his counselor, Governor Trumbull of Connecticut, “Let us consult Brother Jonathan,” when
what the founding father meant (in our contemporary idiom) was “Let’s run this up the flagpole and see if
anybody salutes.” Of course, an alert press would have asked questions, since by counting backward they
could have noticed that this octogenarian would have been, in Revolutionary times, when he claimed to have
been rendering services as “an active participant in the scenes of the Revolution,” a mere prepubescent — and
especially since, 61 years after the death of Trumbull and 47 years after the death of Washington, it was only
this one person who had any knowledge of this derivation for the popular figure “Brother Jonathan”!6
FAKELORE
6. But maybe the idea of an interview with an octogenarian was entirely concocted by this “gullible” newsie (we may well take
notice of the fact that our newspaper correspondents had, as of 1846, not yet developed any tradition for the “news interview”).
FAKELORE
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June 17, Wednesday: James Russell Lowell published the initial of the nine essays that would be collected as THE
BIGLOW PAPERS.
rural wit
Margaret Fuller was mean to him in her PAPERS ON LITERATURE AND ART, seeing him as “absolutely wanting
in the true spirit and tone of poesy”:
His interest in the moral questions of the day has
supplied the want of vitality in himself; his great
facility at versification has enabled him to fill the
ear with a copious stream of pleasant sound. But his
verse is stereotyped; his thought sounds no depth, and
posterity will not remember him.
December 24, Thursday, Christmas Eve: “Jonathan” (AKA “Brother Jonathan” and “Uncle Sam”) was an idiom
meaning “the American people,” as witness this comment made in the US House of Representatives by Mr.
Root of Ohio, reported in the Congressional Globe:
Jonathan was hard to provoke; but when once you did get him up,
he remained at a dead white heat for a long while.
RURAL WIT
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1848
James Russell Lowell’s THE BIGLOW PAPERS, in the Brother Jonathan rural wit tradition of New England.
Also, his THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL.
June 30, Friday: Representative Horace Mann, Sr. delivered his maiden speech in the federal Congress, strongly
supporting the anti-slavery cause.
“Jonathan” (also, “Brother Jonathan,” and “Uncle Sam”) was in use as an idiom meaning “the American
people,” as witness this comment made in the US House of Representatives by Mr. Ingersoll of Pennsylvania,
reported in the Congressional Globe:
Jonathan is declared to be in his right in supporting his
diplomatic agents like private gentlemen.
RURAL WIT
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1850
March 16, Saturday: An issue of Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal:
CHAMBERS’ EDINBURGH JOURNAL
ISSUE OF MARCH 16
Waldo Emerson delivered “The Superlative in Literature, Manners, and Races.”
According to page 79 of Larry J. Reynolds’s influence study EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS AND THE AMERICAN
LITERARY RENAISSANCE (New Haven CT: Yale UP, 1988), there are distinct markings of sexist politics to be
discerned within the novel published on this day by Ticknor and Fields, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, THE
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SCARLET LETTER; OR, THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR:7
theabsorbingcontemplationofthescarletletterthestoryentitled“THESCARLET
LETTER”taleof“TheScarletLetter”thescarletletterandeventoucheditwithher
fingerthewearerofthescarletlettertakethescarletletteroffthescarletletterthre
waluridwearerofthescarletletterfingeronthescarletletterthescarletletterflam
ingonherbreastthescarletletteronherbreastornamentthescarletletterwhichitwas
herdoomtowearthescarletletterthescarletletterthescarletletteronHester’sbos
omgazemightneveroncebefixeduponthescarletlettertouchedthescarletletterthe
scarletletterthescarletletterendowedwithlifethescarletletterthewomanofthe
scarletletterthelikenessofthescarletletterthescarletletterthewearerofthesca
rletletterherchildandthescarletletterlinesofthescarletletterthatdecoratedthem
aternalbosomthescarletletteronherbosomthescarletletteronherbreastherfingero
nthescarletletterlookuponthescarletletterasthetokenthescarletletterThesca
rletletterhadnotdoneitsofficeThescarletletterburnedonHesterPrynne’sbosom“Ih
avelefttheetothescarletletter”Iwhomthescarletletterhasdisciplinedtotruthunder
thetortureofthescarletletterasforthescarletletter“Mother”saidshe“whatdoesthe
scarletlettermean?”investigationsaboutthescarletletterthescarletletterHema
deastepnigheranddiscoveredthescarletletterthescarletletterthescarletletterT
hescarletletterwasherpassportthescarletletterthescarletletteragainthescarl
etletterbrought“Lookyourlastonthescarletletteranditswearer!”thescarletletter
thescarletletterenvelopeditsfatedwearer“Thymotherisyonderwomanwiththesca
rletletter”hadoftenheardofthescarletletterthescarletletterinthemarketplaceHe
againextendedhishandtothewomanofthescarletletterLothescarletletterthesca
rletletterthemiddaysunshineonthescarletletterwearerofthescarletletterThesto
ryofthescarletlettergrewintoalegendrecluseofthescarletlettertheabsorbi
HEADCHOPPING
7. A claim of copyright has been made for THE SCARLET LETTER in 1962, for FANSHAWE and THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE
in 1964, for THE HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES in 1965, and for THE MARBLE FAUN in 1968, by Ohio State UP. (We presume that
those ostensibly appropriative and global copyright claims could actually have covered not more than whatever value was added to
the works by that press at that time, such as their reformatting and pagination and suchlike.)
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Near the end of THE SCARLET LETTER, Hawthorne in a summary tells us about
Hester’s eventual change of heart, about how she at last forsook
radicalism and recognized that the woman who would lead the reform
movements of the future and establish women’s rights must be less
“stained with sin,” less “bowed down with shame” than she. This woman
must be “lofty, pure, and beautiful, and wise, moreover, not through
dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy.” More than one reader has
correctly surmised that this ending to the novel constitutes a veiled
complement to Hawthorne’s little Dove, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, and a
veiled criticism of Margaret Fuller — radical, advocate of women’s
rights, and subject of gossip because of her child and questionable
marriage. Hawthorne’s ambivalent feelings toward Fuller indeed
informed this and other parts of the novel, and although a number of
women have been discussed as models for Hester, including Anne
Hutchinson, Ebe Hawthorne, and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Fuller seems
to have served in this capacity most provokingly. As Francis E. Kearns
has pointed out, a number of parallels exist between Fuller and Hester:
both had the problem of facing a Puritan society encumbered by a child
of questionable legitimacy; both were concerned with social reform and
the role of woman in society; both functioned as counselor
and comforter to women; and both had children entitled to use the
armorial seals of a non-English noble family. A more important
parallel, which Kearns does not mention, is that for Hawthorne both
women were linked to the figures of Liberty and Eve, that is, to the
ideas of revolution and temptation, which lie at the heart of the novel.
For certain sure the benevolent Boston presence of George Stillman Hillard and the benign influence of Waldo
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Emerson, among other notables, had been immortalized in Hawthorne’s preamble “The Custom-House”:
BROOK FARM
WALDO EMERSON
ELLERY CHANNING
LONGFELLOW
BRONSON ALCOTT
THE SCARLET LETTER: Such were some of the people with whom I now
found myself connected. I took it in good part, at the hands of
Providence, that I was thrown into a position so little akin to
my past habits; and set myself seriously to gather from it
whatever profit was to be had. After my fellowship of toil and
impracticable schemes with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm;
after living for three years within the subtle influence of an
intellect like Emerson’s; after those wild, free days on the
Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of
fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau
about pine-trees and Indian relics in his hermitage at Walden;
after growing fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement
of Hillard’s culture; after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment
at Longfellow’s hearthstone – it was time, at length, that
I should exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish
myself with food for which I had hitherto had little appetite.
Even the old Inspector was desirable, as a change of diet, to a
man who had known Alcott. I looked upon it as an evidence, in some
measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and lacking no
essential part of a thorough organization, that, with such
associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of
altogether different qualities, and never murmur at the change.
[INSERT COMMENTARY ABOUT DECAPITATION HERE]
This “psychological bondage” book offered its appreciative audience a heroine who learns, finally, after much
anguish, that as a woman her best game plan is to accept the cards society has dealt her, suffer passively, endure
numbly, and wait, wait and hope for a better day, and that anything else she might try always makes her lot less
bearable. To be silent and no bother, and maintain sexual purity, that constitutes female courage. Had slaves
formed a reading market in that era, the author could easily have authored a companion volume about a black
man who learns, finally, after much anguish, that as a slave his best game plan is to accept the cards society
has dealt him, suffer passively, endure numbly, and wait, wait and hope for a better day, and that anything else
he might try always makes his lot less bearable. To be silent and no bother, and polish shoes, that constitutes
slave courage. Then, of course, the author could have created a grand synthesis, in a tale of a female slave who
learns, finally, that her role as female and her role as slave quite reinforce one another.... To use a 19th-Century
phrase, “women and Negroes.” Do you get the idea I actively dislike this romance? No, I actively dislike the
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mentality of its author Hawthorne. The best thing I have seen on this subject was written by Jean Fagan Yellin:
Where Hiram Powers had distanced an enchained white
woman in space and called her a Greek Slave, Nathaniel
Hawthorne distanced an enchained white woman in time
and called her Hester Prynne.
Clearly, anyone who is bonded to (or in bondage to — it’s much the same, isn’t it?) such a person has a tough
row to hoe (you note I cast this suggestion in the present tense — it’s still the case). In particular Sophia
Peabody Hawthorne, who had witnessed slavery while living for an extended period in her youth on a sugar
plantation in Cuba, had a tough attitudinal row to hoe, being married to such an author-tarian. Sophia could
have hardly become an active abolitionist like her sisters Mary and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Her solution?
–Sophia went for denial, and refused to give credence to various unsettling reports such as that some slave
women had to strip to the buff on the auction block (“which I am sure is an exaggeration for I have read of
these auctions often and even the worst facts are never so bad as absolute nudity”).
Then she also capable of ignoring the BOOK OF JOB in her BIBLE long enough to suppose that a good and
benevolent God providentially “makes up to every being the measure of happiness which he loses thro’ the
instrumentality of others” — so that it really is of no consequence how we treat each other. And then she could
attempt to “lose myself in other subjects of thought,” embracing a sophisticated version of the Emersonian
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trick of resignation. She makes herself sound like a Minnesotan!8
Such were some of the people with whom I now found
myself connected. I took it in good part, at the hands
of Providence, that I was thrown into a position so
little akin to my past habits; and set myself seriously
to gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After
my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with
the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm; after living for
three years within the subtle influence of an intellect
like Waldo Emerson’s; after those wild, free days on
the Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside
our fire of fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after
talking with Henry Thoreau about pine-trees and Indian
relics in his hermitage at Walden; after growing
fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of
George Stillman Hillard’s culture; after becoming
imbued with poetic sentiment at Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow’s hearthstone – it was time, at length, that
I should exercise other faculties of my nature, and
nourish myself with food for which I had hitherto had
little appetite. Even the old Inspector was desirable,
as a change of diet, to a man who had known Bronson
Alcott. I looked upon it as an evidence, in some
measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and
lacking no essential part of a thorough organization,
that, with such associates to remember, I could mingle
at once with men of altogether different qualities, and
never murmur at the change.
As of mid-century, with the publication of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s THE SCARLET LETTER, it is clear that the
8. We may well note that although Henry Thoreau would have a copy of Hawthorne’s THE SCARLET LETTER in his personal library,
he would cross out the reference to that item — indicating that the volume was no longer present (we infer that either the volume
was lost, or given away).
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figure of Uncle Sam had become a fixture of our American imagination:
THE SCARLET LETTER: In my native town of Salem, at the head of what,
half a century ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling
wharf – but which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses,
and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except,
perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length,
discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner,
pitching out her cargo of firewood – at the head, I say, of this
dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along
which, at the base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the
track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass
– here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very
enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a
spacious edifice of brick. From the loftiest point of its roof,
during precisely three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats
or droops, in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with
the thirteen stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally,
and thus indicating that a civil, and not a military, post of
Uncle Sam’s government, is here established. Its front is
ornamented with a portico of half-a-dozen wooden pillars,
supporting a balcony, beneath which a flight of wide granite steps
descends towards the street. Over the entrance hovers an enormous
specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a shield
before her breast, and, if I recollect aright, a bunch of
intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw.
With the customary infirmity of temper that characterizes this
unhappy fowl, she appears by the fierceness of her beak and eye,
and the general truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief
to the inoffensive community; and especially to warn all citizens
careful of their safety against intruding on the premises which
she overshadows with her wings. Nevertheless, vixenly as she
looks, many people are seeking at this very moment to shelter
themselves under the wing of the federal eagle; imagining,
I presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of
an eiderdown pillow. But she has no great tenderness even in her
best of moods, and, sooner or later – oftener soon than late –
is apt to fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw,
a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows.
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1852
March 13, Saturday: Henry Thoreau made no entry in his journal.
While the name “Uncle Sam” had been being used to refer to the federal government of the United States of
America ever since the War of 1812, Frank Henry Temple Bellew was the first newspaper cartoonist to depict
this figure, in the New-York weekly Diogenes, Hys Lantern (sic).
RURAL WIT
(His cartoon depicts John Bull as actively supporting Britain’s shipping interests while Uncle Sam does
essentially nothing to assist American shipping interests.)
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1853
Our national birthday, Monday the 4th of July: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 49th birthday.
At a celebration dinner at Washington Hall in Springfield, Massachusetts, everyone stood up and cheered for
one of the aged guests: the Reverend Jonathan Smith, who in the army of the Revolution had been a chaplain.
In Abington, Massachusetts there was a “Know Nothing Anti-Slavery celebration.”
In Norwalk, Connecticut, P.T. Barnum began the celebrations by delivering an address before a crowd of
10,000.
In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the cornerstone of the West Philadelphia Institute was set into place.
Some 10,000 citizens visited Independence Hall, with each celebrant entitled to sit for a moment in the chair
of John Hancock. At the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, the comedietta “My Uncle Sam” was
performed.
In New-York, a 95-year-old, Daniel Spencer, “an old patriot of the Revolution, hailing from Canajoharie, New
York,” was an honored participant in the celebration.
In Williamsburg, Virginia, Captain Taft’s Company of Light Artillery fired off a national salute of 32 guns.
Some 500 residents of Baltimore went on an excursion to nearby Annapolis, where a fight occurred between
them and a group of local Annapolis people, resulting in two deaths and several injuries.
CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY
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1862
Some of James Russell Lowell’s essays in the Brother Jonathan rural wit tradition of New England for The
Atlantic Monthly were recycled in book form as THE BIGLOW PAPERS, SECOND SERIES.
THE BIGLOW PAPERS
During the Civil War period Lowell’s essays “E Pluribus Unum” and “Washers of the Shroud” would offer
pro-Union opinions.
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1870
The “Uncle Sam” figure of 1836 and 1843 again appeared at this point, this time drawn by cartoonist Joseph
Pepper to sport chin whiskers in the style favored by Horace Greeley.
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1872
The Uncle Sam figure pioneered by E.W. Clay and Joseph Pepper was picked up in this year by the cartoonist
Thomas Nast and transformed into a national symbol.
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1931
The phrase “the American Dream” was coined by James Truslow Adams in THE EPIC OF AMERICA (although
one can find sources for the mindframe behind it in earlier notions about the American continents as an earthly
paradise, in early utopian ideas, in Medieval dreams about the land of Cockaigne, in the desire for aristocratic
ennoblement which is so common among the conquistadores and their followers, and so on). It is a complex
idea, not easy to define, not easy to trace, but Adams definitely invented at the very least these words, this
phrase. His “American dream” is to be understood as an ethical doctrine that is symptomatic of a crisis in
national identity during the thirties. His newly invented dream called out for a supplement to the outmoded
narrative of individual uplift, which had lost its moral capacity to guide the nation during the Depression (the
editor, Ellery Sedgwick, would not allow the use of the phrase in the book’s title, allegedly commenting
“no red-blooded American would pay $3.50 for a dream”).
In this year, also, Constance Mayfield Rourke’s AMERICAN HUMOR: A STUDY OF THE NATIONAL CHARACTER
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attempted to connect Emerson and Thoreau with the rural wit tradition of American humor:
“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
HUMOR
Like Blair’s NATIVE AMERICAN HUMOR, this is a dated but significant book — an early
myth-and-symbols, American Studies approach to American humor. Rourke has much to
say about both Emerson and Thoreau. Rourke associates Emerson with the native
American humor that arose simultaneously with Jacksonian democracy. Although
Emerson at times invokes frontier mythology, he has more in common with the Yankee
comic tradition exemplified by Seba Smith. Like other popular humorists, Emerson
praises the low, the common, the familiar. He looks to the future, not to the past;
to the New World, not to the Old World; to the West, not to the East; to the country,
not to the city. The stylistic marker that links Emerson with popular humor is his
use of monologue, or soliloquy:
In Emerson the personal inner voice spoke; and this belonged
not to the realm of introspection cultivated by the Puritan,
but to that other realm of the plain Yankee, who consciously
listened to his own mind, whose deliberate speech had room for
undertones and further meanings. (165)
Thoreau
carries
these
monologic
techniques
even
further
than
Emerson.
Thoreau’s humor is wrier, drier, quirkier than Emerson’s. Rourke compares Thoreau
to the mythical Yankee peddler:
He had that air of turning the tables on listeners or observers
which had long since belonged to the Yankee of the comic
mythologies; he used a wry humor in slow prose argument; he kept
the habitual composure. (167)
Rourke’s language throughout the book reflects her epical aims. It is generalized
and rhapsodic, and neither Emerson nor Thoreau get the close readings or thorough
contextualization that her broad assertions would seem to demand.
(Lane Stiles, Winter 1992)
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1937
Walter Blair’s Native American Humor, 1800-1900 (NY: American Book Company), struggled to make a case
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for a “Brother Jonathan” tradition without consideration of the efforts of Henry Thoreau:
“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
An indispensable classic. Blair defines American humor somewhat cryptically as “humor which
is American in that it has an emphatic ‘native quality’ — a quality imparted by its subject
matter and its technique” (3). For Blair, native American humor did not really begin until
about 1830, although it was significantly foreshadowed in the journals of Sarah Kemble Knight
and William Byrd. Tracing the beginnings of native American humor in the period from 1775
to 1830, Blair cites examples of humor in the almanacs, focusing on early incarnations of
the comic Yankee figure — an archetypal American character. According to Blair, “the first
important stage Yankee from the standpoint of influence in America, however, was the creation
of a Bostonborn author, Royall Tyler, who, in The Contrast (1787), gave Brother Jonathan
[the Yankee figure] a sizeable part” (23). Yankee type characters also began to show up in
jest books, newspapers, and travel books. In the travel books, another type of native figure
began to emerge as well: the frontiersman. Westerners — a category which included what we
would now call Southerners and Midwesterners — came to be typified in the first part of the
nineteenth century by tall talk, hard drinking, and lusty fighting. Gradually, the two types
crystallized into the Down East Yankee and the Kentuckian, or frontiersman. Blair dates the
two traditions, Down East Humor and Humor of the Old Southwest, concurrently, from 18301867. Among the Down East humorists that Blair discusses are Seba Smith, Thomas Chandler
Haliburton, James Russell Lowell, Frances M. Whitcher, and Benjamin P. Shillaber. The
seminal figure in Down East Humor for Blair is Seba Smith (1792-1868) who created Jack
Downing, the semi-literate, letter-writing Maine farmer, and thereby spawned a whole series
of quaint and laughable New England rustics. Originally, this quaintness alone was
sufficient to amuse readers, but by the 1850s increasing importance was being placed on the
lifelikeness of the portraiture. Blair claims that the sophisticated uses that James Russell
Lowell makes of native American dialect and local color in The Bigelow Papers give that work
a lasting appeal. According to Blair, the early writers of Southwest Humor “were lawyers
who wrote their stories between swings around the circuit, journalists who scratched out
their yarns on desks around which eddied the life of a newspaper office, soldiers and doctors
who jotted down their tales during lulls in strenuous activity” (64). The chief difference
between these writers and those of Down East Humor, says Blair, is that from the very first
the humorists of the Old Southwest were wholly provincial, wholly local. There was no gradual
evolution of local color and regional authenticity as in the Northeast. The most influential
book in this tradition for Blair is Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s GEORGIA SCENES, CHARACTERS,
INCIDENTS, &C. IN THE FIRST HALF CENTURY OF THE REPUBLIC. Blair also discusses the writings of
Madison Tensas, MD, Johnson J. Hooper, Sol Smith, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, William T. Thompson,
Joseph M. Field, John S. Robb, Joseph G. Baldwin, and George Washington Harris and the tall
tales of the Crockett almanacs. The defining aspect of Old Southwest Humor is its
relationship with oral story-telling. (In light of current research, Blair overestimates
the influence of folk culture on this type of humor.) The form is exclusively and
emphatically masculine and reaches its apex (if we don’t include Twain) in the imaginative
conceits of Sut Lovingood by G.W. Harris. The next group of writers that Blair takes up is
labeled “Literary Comedians” (1855-1900) and includes George Horatio Derby, Charles Farrar
Browne, David Ross Locke, Robert H. Newell, Charles H. Smith, Henry Wheeler Shaw, Melville
D. Landon, James M. Bailey, Charles Heber Clark, Robert J. Burdette, Edgar W. Nye, and Finley
P. Dunne. This new crop of humorists took the techniques of their predecessors and polished
and refined them, but they readily sacrificed local interest for the clever joke or for
social satire. Another group of humorists, however, retained their regional flavor and
aligned with the local color movement (1868-1900). These writers included Bret Harte, Edward
Eggleston, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Joel Chandler Harris. The narrative that Blair sets
up in this analysis is the story of the rise of realism which resolves itself ultimately in
the writings of Mark Twain. (Lane Stiles, Winter 1992)
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1985
WALDEN was issued in the boxed hard-cover Princeton University Press edition with photographs.
Jean Fleming’s BETWEEN WALDEN AND THE WHIRLWIND (Navpress). “For author Jean Fleming, life as a
Christian seemed increasingly characterized by a whirlwind of disciplines and demands, which threatened to
sweep away the quite center of intimacy with God so long for. Struggling to reconcile the desire to draw apart
with God –to find a personal, spiritual ‘Walden’ – with the demands to spend energy n the whirlwind of
ministry to others, Jean set a major, year-long goal: ‘to simplify my life … to tame my schedule and to unclutter
my environment.’ But, instead of resolving the dilemma, Jean’s ‘search for simple’ raised deeper questions:
Did living ‘simply’ mean on a change in lifestyle? Was it an escapist attempt to avoid stress and pressure?
Or was it actually just a demand for control over circumstance? BETWEEN WALDEN AND THE WHIRLWIND sets
forth the major discover of Jean’s search: focusing life, not simplifying it –or even balance it– is the key to
truly Christ-centered living. Fleming’s thoughtful and perceptive insights are rich in practical value: learning
from Jesus’ life by making God our Director and Audience; living decisively; discerning when ‘busy’ is too
busy; the marrying of service and solitude and the importance of each; learning the secret of contentment from
Paul’s life; developing Abraham’s pilgrim perspective. This book is for Christian struggling to live a Christlike life in the midst of a whirlwind of activities, demands, and responsibilities; for those seeking to develop a
deeper, secret, inner life while remaining intensely involved in our needy world. It is for those who long to
make Christ their center, to be focused on the God who ministers to us as well as through us.”9
TIMELINE OF WALDEN
A WASHINGTON POST reporter interviewed residents of “Walden Breezes” near Walden Pond. Some resident
in one or another trailer of that trailer park was heard to characterize Henry Thoreau as “that old drunk who
used to live in a shack over on the cove.”
Sharon Cameron’s WRITING NATURE: HENRY THOREAU’S JOURNAL (NY: Oxford UP) discovered that Thoreau
had utilized a writerly persona rather noticeably distant from himself (duh, yeah):
WALDEN’s philosophic position is difficult to get hold of
precisely because it theatricalizes attitudes in which, from the
vantage of the JOURNAL’s language, it appears Thoreau did not
9.
Fleming, Jean. BETWEEN WALDEN AND THE WHIRLWIND. Navpress, 1985
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believe. In WALDEN we are conscious of postures of credence.
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Speaking of writers who create an authorial persona: Michael A. Lofaro in this year edited a study of the
Brother Jonathan tradition of American humor as it exemplified itself in DAVY CROCKETT: THE MAN, THE
LEGEND, THE LEGACY, 1786-1986 (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P).
“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
Contains eight essays on Crockett and his legacy, as well as a Crockett chronology,
filmography, and bibliography (of the “Crockett Craze” in the 1950s), a checklist
of printed twentieth-century versions of traditional “Davy Crockett” songs, and a
checklist of commercial and noncommercial recordings of “Davy Crockett/Pompey
Smash” songs.
In the first essay, entitled “The Man in the Buckskin Hunting Shirt: Fact and
Fiction in the Crockett Story,” Richard B. Hauck writes on the interrelationships
between the biographical Crockett and the fictional Crockett. Hauck notes the
virulent racism and jingoism in the Crockett almanacs and concludes: “Some scholars
give the Crockett almanacs great credit for their role in building the Crockett
legend; I have often wondered how the legend managed to survive the almanacs” (14).
Hauck also points out that the frontier woodsman was already a stock character
before Crockett came along: “The type had been solidified by the fame of Daniel
Boone and widely popularized by ballads and theatrical skits celebrating the role
of the ‘Kentuckians’ in the Battle of New Orleans” (14).
Michael Lofaro analyzes Richard Dorson’s selections of tales from the Nashville
almanacs for Dorson’s 1939 collection, Davy Crockett: American Comic Legend to show
how Dorson presents only a partial view of the Crockett legend. Lofaro argues that
“The Hidden ‘Hero’ of the Nashville Crockett Almanacs” is the shape-shifting,
trickster-transformer Crockett. In “Davy Crockett and the Wild Man, Or, the
Metaphysics of the Longue Duree,”
Catherine L. Albanese borrows the historical methods of the French Annales school
— and, in particular, Fernand Braudel’s notion of la longue duree (the study of
long duration) — to locate the legendary Crockett within the global history of Wild
Man mythology. Richard Hauck describes various manifestations of the Crockett
figure on stage and screen in “Making It All Up: Davy Crockett in the Theater.”
Hauck points out that the Crockett-like character, Nimrod Wildfire, in “The Lion
of the West” (1830) was not an original creation but part of an established
theatrical tradition of backwoods characters, the earliest variant being a DownEast character, the rude Yankee bumpkin, that can be traced back at least to 1787
and Royall Tyler’s play, “The Contrast.” (That character was named Brother
Jonathan.) The sixth essay is a reproduction of an article from Motion Picture
Magazine, dated September 1916, on a silent film about Davy Crockett. It is followed
by Margaret J. King’s look at Walt Disney’s treatment of the Crockett legend (”The
Recycled Hero: Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett”).
The final essay, “Davy Crockett Songs: Minstrels to Disney” by Charles K. Wolfe,
takes up the history of popular music in relation to the Crockett legend.
John Seelye’s essay, “A Well-Wrought Crockett, Or, How the Fakelorists Passed
Through the Credibility Gap and Discovered Kentucky” seems of particular importance
to me and is cited separately within this bibliography.
(Lane Stiles, Winter 1992)
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others,
such as extensive quotations and reproductions of
images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great
deal of special work product of Austin Meredith,
copyright 2015. Access to these interim materials will
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contact the project at <[email protected]>.
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until
tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”
– Remark by character “Garin Stevens”
in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: November 10, 2015
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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a
human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that
we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the
shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these
chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by
ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the
Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a
request for information we merely push a button.
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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious
deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in
the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we
need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology —
but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary
“writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this
originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves,
and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever
has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire
operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished
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to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic
research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge.
Place requests with <[email protected]>. Arrgh.