The Concord Quartet

Samuel A. Schreiner

Description

"We will walk on our own feet;

we will work with our own hands;

we will speak our own minds."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar," 1837

From the start of transcendentalism and America's intellectual renaissance in the 1830s, to the Civil War and beyond, the story of four extraordinary friends whose lives shaped a nation

"Beginning in the 1830s, coincidences that seem almost miraculous in retrospect brought together in Concord as friends and neighbors four men of very different temperaments and talents who shared the same conviction that the soul had 'inherent power to grasp the truth' and that the truth would make men free of old constraints on thought and behavior. In addition to Emerson, a philosopher, there was Amos Bronson Alcott, an educator; Henry David Thoreau, a naturalist and rebel; and Nathaniel Hawthorne, a novelist. This book is the story of that unique and influential friendship in action, of the lives the friends led, and their work that resulted in an enduring change in their nation's direction."
--From the Prologue
Acknowledgments.

Prologue.

1. A Homecoming.

2. A Meeting of Minds.

3. A New Voice.

4. A Man Who “Looks Answers”.

5. “A Beacon Fire of Truth”.

6. A Parting of the Ways.

7. A President’s Man.

8. A Transcendental Martyr.

9. A Time for Dying.

10. A Long Good-bye.

Bibliography.

Index.

Sujets

• Literary Figures
• Lettres et linguistique
• Años 1830
• Biography
• The American Scholar
• History of the United States
• 1830s
• American Civil War
• Amos Bronson Alcott
• Autobiography
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Guerre de Sécession
• Henry David Thoreau

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 22 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781118040096
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
 
Also by Samuel A. Schreiner Jr.
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prologue
 
Chapter 1 - A Homecoming
Chapter 2 - A Meeting of Minds
Chapter 3 - A New Voice
Chapter 4 - A Man Who “Looks Answers”
Chapter 5 - “A Beacon Fire of Truth”
Chapter 6 - A Parting of the Ways
Chapter 7 - A President’s Man
Chapter 8 - A Transcendental Martyr
Chapter 9 - A Time for Dying
Chapter 10 - A Long Good-bye
 
Bibliography
Index
Also by Samuel A. Schreiner Jr.
Nonfiction
The Passionate Beechers Henry Clay Frick Code of Conduct (with Everett Alvarez Jr.) Cycles Mayday! Mayday! The Trials of Mrs. Lincoln A Place Called Princeton The Condensed World of the Reader’s Digest
 
Fiction
The Van Alens The Possessors and the Possessed Angelica Pleasant Places Thine Is the Glory

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Copyright © 2006 by Samuel A. Schreiner Jr. All rights reserved
 
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada
 
Photo credits: Pages 8, 9 (both), 59, 107, 108 (both), 132, 133, 145 (both), 146, 208, and 209 courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library; pages 81 and 82 courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum.
 
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
 
Schreiner, Samuel Agnew.
The Concord quartet : Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and the friendship that freed the American mind / Samuel A. Schreiner, Jr.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN-13 978-0-471-64663-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10 0-471-64663-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Authors, American—19th century—Biography. 2. Authors, American—19th century—Homes and haunts—Massachusetts—Concord. 3. Transcendentalists (New England)—Biography. 4. Literary landmarks—Massachusetts—Concord. 5. Concord (Mass.)—Intellectual life—19th century. 6. Alcott, Amos Bronson, 1799-1888—Friends and associates. 7. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882—Friends and associates. 8. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864—Friends and associates. 9. Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862—Friends and associates. I. Title.
PS128.S37 2006
810.9’ 003—dc22
 
2005031915
 
For the supportive women in my life: Dorrie, my love and my wife, and my daughters, Beverly Schreiner Carroll and Carolyn Schreiner Calder
Acknowledgments
One good thing can often lead to another. In this author’s case, my last book, The Passionate Beechers , led to this one about another group of Americans living and working through the middle years of the nineteenth century and also making a difference to our lives today. On this voyage to the past, I had the same fine people in the crew: my agent, Phyllis Westberg of Harold Ober Associates; my editor, Hana Umlauf Lane of John Wiley & Sons; and Blanche Parker and her colleagues at the reference desk of the Darien Library. I am also indebted to Constance Manoli-Skocay of the special collections staff at Concord, Massachusetts, Free Library for aid in finding illustrations.
Prologue
In his book covering more than five centuries of the American people’s experiences, the historian Samuel Eliot Morison equated an early event in this book’s narrative to the start of the Revolutionary War with respect to its effect on the nation’s development. “The year 1836, when Emerson published his Essay on Nature , may be taken as opening a period in American literary culture, corresponding to 1775 in American politics,” Morison wrote. The author of that document, which Morison credits with starting a renaissance in American intellectual life, was a then little-known young ex-minister named Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, by reason of heritage, happened to live in Concord, Massachusetts, the town where that earlier political revolution erupted in war.
Emerson’s essay was a seed that flowered into a movement called transcendentalism, which Morison defined as “an intellectual overtone to democracy, a belief in the divinity of human nature . . . a belief in the soul’s inherent power to grasp the truth. Historically speaking, transcendentalism was an attempt to make Americans worthy of their independence, and elevate them to a new stature among the mortals.”
At the time it came into being, transcendentalism flew in the face of the traditional beliefs of most Americans. The nation’s few institutions of higher learning—the supposed seats of intellectual life—were generally founded and staffed by Protestant Christian clergy of largely Calvinist persuasion. They held that the Bible was divinely inspired and literally true and that, because of Adam’s fall, all human beings were born sinners and headed for damnation unless they underwent a conversion process to accept Christ as their only savior. Americans seeking enlightenment from other sources or enrichment from virtually any of the fine arts looked to Europe as the source and, when possible, went abroad for the experience. Schooling in general in the still new United States of America was a haphazard affair of mixed private and public facilities where harsh discipline and rote learning of the three R’s—reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic—took place in the few weeks of the year when children were not needed to labor on the farm or in the factory. The American writers and artists of any note got their grounding abroad and avoided realism about contemporary or local affairs in their work.
Beginning in the 1830s, coincidences that seem almost miraculous in retrospect brought together in Concord as friends and neighbors four men of very different temperaments and talents who shared the same conviction that the soul had “inherent power to grasp the truth” and that the truth would make men free of old constraints on thought and behavior. In addition to Emerson, a philosopher, there was Amos Bronson Alcott, an educator; Henry David Thoreau, a naturalist and rebel; and Nathaniel Hawthorne, a novelist. This book is the story of that unique and influential friendship in action, of the lives the friends led, and their work that resulted in an enduring change in their nation’s direction.
1
A Homecoming
ON A CRISP OCTOBER DAY in 1834, Waldo Emerson and his mother boarded a stagecoach in Boston that would take them to Concord some seventeen miles to the north and west. During the four hours that the coach rattled and rocked its way along, there was lively talk among its passengers about the beauties of a countryside ablaze with fall colors and the sorry state of public affairs. It was not surprising that one of them, a resident of Concord, a place of natural features bearing Indian names such as the Musketaquid River and still yielding arrowheads and other Indian artifacts from a precolonial settlement with every spring plowing, should harangue his captive audience about the cruel action by President Jackson—“King Andrew the First,” he called him—in uprooting the Seminoles from their native Florida. Ordinarily, Emerson might have participated in the conversation, and he certainly would have been looking forward to the rest and recreation that visits to the family homestead had provided over the years. But not on this trip. He squeezed himself into a corner of the coach and kept glumly silent while contemplating the circumstances in which he found himself. It was not sentiment or pleasure that prompted this return to Concord. It was need. He could no longer afford to rent suitable quarters for himself and his mother in Boston and might never again be able to do so. Through tragedy and an exercise of his own stubborn will, his once golden personal and professional lives had turned to dross.
Having heard, when they boarded, the names of the young man and the woman who looked to be his mother, the driver needed no prompting to pull his team to a halt before the stone gateposts of the property in Concord known to have housed Emersons for as long as anybody could remember, instead of carrying them on to his usual stopping