Concord’s second revolution

Concord, Massachusetts kindled two revolutions. On 19 April 1775, the colonial militia engaged the British Redcoats at the North Bridge, leading to the separation from Great Britain and the founding of the United States. The battle unfolded virtually in the backyard of The Old Manse, the ancestral home of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Sixty years later, in the 1830s, Concord was the hub of a revolution of consciousness and social action. In his upstairs study, Ralph Waldo Emerson drafted Nature, the foundational text for American Transcendentalism. Far more was on the way from this movement of extraordinary men and women, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley and Bronson Alcott. In their day, they were to make Concord a new version of ancient Athens.

While Transcendentalists inherited the Puritans’ ‘city upon a hill’ mission, they banished the spectre of original sin and the devilish wilderness (which led to the Salem Witch Trials of 1692). In their place, Transcendentalists established a luminous philosophy rooted in intuition, self-reliance, compassion and a belief in human goodness and societal perfectibility. Rather than formation by dogma, they sought direct, personal revelations, discovering the divine within the sanctuary of nature.

Transcendentalism combined European Romanticism, Eastern spirituality and a deep love for the American wilderness. They viewed the wilderness as a sacred space and a corrective to our mechanised, clock-driven society, inviting us into the interconnected tree of life, into the sublime and picturesque. By encouraging us to awaken our senses, these thinkers laid the groundwork for our devotion to the great outdoors, from hiking to the sublime contemplation of mountains and stars.

Guided by Romanticism and Transcendentalism, Hudson River School artists (centred in Catskill, NY) such as Thomas Cole and Frederic Church brushed this spirit onto canvas. And on both sides of the Atlantic, Romantics and Transcendentalists turned their backs on increasingly crowded cities to seek refuge in rural landscapes. Early critics of industrialisation, they raged against the mechanical annexation of human consciousness and the planet.

Through poetry, philosophical essays and utopian experiments, Transcendentalists supported universal human dignity and civil rights. Far from being ivory tower intellectuals, they worked with Frederick Douglass and actively supported the Underground Railroad. The Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society was founded by Mary Merrick Brooks, Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau, Abigail May Alcott, Lidian Emerson and Susan Garrison (who was African American). The commitment to marginalised voices is illustrated by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s scathing ‘Letter to President Van Buren’ that addressed atrocities against the Cherokee Nation during the Trail of Tears.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) had deep Puritan and colonial roots, and his father was from a lineage of ministers in Concord and Boston. Emerson grew up in a household shaped by early loss and powerful women, including his mother Ruth and his brilliant aunt, Mary Moody Emerson. His first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, died of tuberculosis just 16 months into their marriage at age 20. He found stability with his second wife, Lydia (Lidian) Jackson, though they, too, endured the overwhelming loss of their five-year-old son, Waldo. Yet Emerson maintained positivity and hope. In 1832, Emerson gave up being a Unitarian minister; such free thinking tends to be too much for most institutions to handle.

Emerson ‘was a bard, a seeker, a genius, a naturalist, a repository of ancient wisdom and the pathless woods. This led to his belief in the over-soul’, according to my article in Emerson Society Notes (Spring 2019). His essays, such as ‘Nature’, ‘The American Scholar’, ‘Self-Reliance’, the ‘Over-Soul’ and others, are among the greats. Based on his lectures, these essays ranged across the essentials of humankind and the challenges of his time. His evocative and epigrammatic prose challenged readers to find the extraordinary amid the ordinary, to forge ‘an original relation to the universe.’

Emerson’s essays range across human emotion, the humanities, art and science, to express truth and decode reality. His transcendentalist ideas directly anticipate modern theories of unity. In Nature, he wrote that in the woods we become a ‘transparent eyeball’ – mind/body unity with the cosmos. This spiritual affinity prefigured the concept of ‘biophilia’, a term coined by Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson to describe humanity’s innate bond with the living world. Wilson later championed ‘consilience’ – the unity of knowledge across disciplines – echoing the cross-disciplinary harmony once trumpeted by ancient Greek thinkers and Leonardo da Vinci. For Emerson, as for these predecessors, the arts, sciences and humanities are not rivals but an integrated toolkit for decoding the universe.

Though he had been a pupil at Boston Latin School and a bookish Harvard student, Emerson championed intuition over intellect, noting that ‘books are for nothing but to inspire.’ (A century later, Hermann Hesse would explore a similar tension between handed-down knowledge and experience in his ‘Indian tale’, Siddhartha.) Driven by the belief that ‘nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm’, Emerson influenced American culture. He was much admired by Nietzsche for following his own philosophy and avoiding herd mentality.

One of the key successes in Emerson’s life was the nurturing of talent and genius; he served as a mentor to various contemporaries. He invited Margaret Fuller to edit the Transcendentalist magazine, The Dial, launched in 1840. He assisted Bronson Alcott with writing and publishing and with settling his talented family in Concord, finding Alcott ‘to be the most refined and advanced soul.’ He even had money put aside to help Alcott. (That seems like a good lesson; some of our friends, talented or not, can use some seed money from time to time.) Emerson encouraged Henry David Thoreau to create a cabin near Walden Pond – a sanctuary, experiment in living and axis mundi from 1845–1847.

A decade later, Emerson recognised the originality of Walt Whitman, sending a fan letter to him upon the 1855 publication of Leaves of Grass. Whitman’s poetry manifested democratic values, mysticism, egalitarianism and a unitary vision that Emerson found delightful. In fact, Whitman had the flow and spontaneity much admired by the Transcendentalists. As Emerson wrote to Whitman: ‘I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.’

Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were close friends and Thoreau even lived with the Emerson family for a few years (in the 1840s), assisting with editing, tutoring, gardening and such. Thoreau (1817–1862) was an essayist, naturalist and philosopher who had a supportive family. The Thoreau home was a safe house on the Underground Railroad. His father was a pencil manufacturer, and his mother had progressive ideas; they had four children. His sisters helped finance his Harvard education, and he shared a deep spiritual and intellectual bond with his brother and co-teacher, John Jr. Despite his reputation as a recluse, Thoreau was active in the community and worked in the family business. He also played the flute, danced and sang.

Thoreau’s most famous works are Walden and his essay ‘Civil Disobedience.’ Walden is the literary fruition of his experiment living in a cabin, begun on 4 July 1845, for two years near Walden Pond, from where he advises us, ‘Simplify, simplify.’ He did scientific measurements, viewed ant armies in combat, gardened and read. In championing the individual conscience over unjust laws, Thoreau influenced Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Thoreau is the first American to refer to himself as a ‘yogi’, absorbing the Bhagavad Gita and Eastern philosophies along with his natural science studies, such as Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. (Thoreau read Darwin towards the end of his life.) Goethe’s range of knowledge, education of the senses and the holistic ‘All is one’ notion resonated deeply with Thoreau. Neither Goethe nor Thoreau separates the poet and naturalist. Thoreau and Emerson influenced environmentalist John Muir. Muir was friends with President Theodore Roosevelt, who protected 230 million acres of public lands by establishing dozens of national forests, wildlife refuges and monuments.

Thoreau’s essay, ‘Walking’, shows his great vision and his practical good sense. In Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, Robert D. Richardson writes that the three themes are: ‘walking, the wild, and myth’. A few summers ago, I perused the original in Concord’s library (during the Thoreau Gathering). If ever an essay did justice to the art and philosophy, history and aesthetic, of walking – it’s, well, ‘Walking’.

You might be thinking, yes, good idea walking – feels good and is healthy. Thoreau shows that walking is integral to happiness, spirituality and community. Walking immerses us in the cosmos. Walking allowed him to reconnect to the freedom and wildness that society suppresses. ‘I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least – and it is commonly more than that – sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements’, Thoreau writes in ‘Walking’.

In our era, when many people spend less than a half hour outside each day, akin to prisoners, when we look more at electronic screens than at trees or stars or at ourselves, when we’ve just really begun to understand the interconnections of nature and the dangers to the planet, our only home, Thoreau’s truths are worth listening to.

It is an impossible task to do justice to the vision and message of ‘Walking’. It is very learned, with references to world myth, science, Native American lore, bountiful observations and visions, and more. To read it is to experience an immersive, cosmic walking. The essay makes us want to get out there, to walk. It’s like those poets who say the only way to understand a poem is to write a poem. When we walk, we will have a better experience if we jettison our monkey mind, duality and repressive timepieces.

‘All good things are wild and free’, wrote Thoreau.

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) was friends with Thoreau and the first to publish his literary work. Born into a prominent New England family, Fuller was tutored by her father, Timothy Fuller, a congressman who gave her a classical education. When he died suddenly in 1835, she assumed financial responsibility for her mother and younger siblings. Fuller travelled out west in order to write her first book, Summer on the Lakes. In a recent article in Smithsonian Magazine, Megan Marshall writes:

Fuller sympathized with overworked pioneer wives while deploring the treatment of Native Americans – the region’s ‘rightful lords’ – and the destruction of old-growth forests. She attended a gathering of Chippewa and Ottawa tribes at Mackinac Island, conversing with the Native women in sign language and joining them in pounding their breakfast cornmeal. She wandered the prairies and rode the rapids to offer vivid natural descriptions and raise her readers’ environmental awareness. Thoreau praised her ‘rich extempore writing; talking with pen in hand’ – an approach he went on to take in his own books, which were yet to come.                                                                              

Fuller edited The Dial and authored America’s first seminal feminist book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Fuller’s salons, known as ‘Conversations’, served as an alternate university, mostly for women. They took place from 1839–1844 in Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s bookstore or home in Boston.

While Thoreau largely travelled the world from his own backyard (Walden Woods) and Emerson travelled to Europe to recover from Ellen’s death and to converse with towering authors, such as Thomas Carlyle, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fuller’s travels were life-altering and perilous. Living in Europe as a cultural reviewer and foreign correspondent added to her astonishing life and legacy – a life of historic firsts.

In London in 1846, Fuller befriended the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini, who fought for a free and independent Italy. The next year in Italy she met the revolutionary nobleman Giovanni d’Ossoli, with whom she had a son named Angelo. In 1849, during the short-lived Roman Republic, she managed a hospital for the wounded. Her life met a terrible end in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York, which claimed her, her husband and son, along with her unpublished manuscript on the revolution.

Emerson summed up the loss of Fuller: ‘I have lost my audience’. In Fuller’s famous ‘Conversations’ she shared ideas and books, working hard to educate and enlighten others. The purpose of the ‘Conversations’ was self-cultivation, social betterment and social action. She used an interactive or Socratic approach. ‘The best part of life is too spiritual to bear recording’, Fuller wrote in her Journal. Socrates could understand that – and it is a good critique of our own era where we need the dynamism of authentic, living interaction.

The participants explored a range of themes including art, history, literature, religion, mythology, politics and women’s rights. In The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography, John Matteson writes: ‘Knowledge was not to be an item for idle display; it was to become a potent tool.’ Fuller met women such as Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Lidian Jackson Emerson, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Mary Cheney (later Greeley), Sophia Ripley, Caroline Sturgis and Maria White Lowell to tackle what she called ‘the great questions.’ Emerson and Thoreau attended a few times. In those days, women could not attend universities, though Fuller was the first woman given permission to use the Harvard College library.

Margaret Fuller’s long-overdue star has arrived with an opera about her, as well as a novel, a public statue, panels at conferences and much more.

Margaret Fuller and George Ripley shared deep connections. Ripley managed the business operations of The Dial, and in 1841, the Ripleys opened their home to Fuller so she could host a conversation series on Greek myth and art. Fuller was also a frequent visitor to Brook Farm, where she worked with Sophia Ripley on women’s issues. Sophia’s seminal essay, Woman, emerged from one of Fuller’s ‘Conversations’ and was published in The Dial in January 1841.

Born in Greenfield, Massachusetts, Ripley (1802–1880) was an author, reformer and visionary. In September 1836, the first gathering of the Transcendental Club convened at Ripley’s Boston home, bringing together Frederic Henry Hedge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott and other kindred spirits. Fuller, Thoreau, Sophia Ripley and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody soon joined. The purpose? To envisage and create a better world.

Ripley moved from the religious circles of Boston into the progressive ferment of Concord, later joining the New York literary scene. Like Emerson, Ripley left the pulpit because of doctrinal differences – he was too much of a free thinker. With his wife, Sophia, he founded Brook Farm in West Roxbury, MA, the utopian community based on the belief that shared resources made it possible to allow everyone enough time for creative and intellectual pursuits. Nathaniel Hawthorne spent six months there in 1841. Poor soil, a devastating fire and money troubles ended Brook Farm in 1847, but it endured in the American imagination as an expression of idealism and community. Here’s what Ripley wrote in one of the publications from Brook Farm:

We shall suffer no attachment to literature, no taste for abstract discussion, no love of purely intellectual theories, to seduce us from our devotion to the cause of the oppressed, downtrodden, the insulted and injured masses of our fellow men.

After Brook Farm’s collapse, Ripley moved to New York, where he became a prominent literary critic for Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune. And he later co-edited The New American Cyclopaedia (1857–1863), a top-selling encyclopaedia that secured his finances and his reputation as a man of letters.

Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), a pioneering educator, speaker, author, philosopher and mystic, spent his life at the forefront of progress. Along with his wife, Abigail ‘Abba’ May, Alcott advocated women’s suffrage. The couple raised four daughters in a state of genteel poverty, sometimes assisted by friends such as Emerson. This brilliant, eccentric family was the raw material for the classic novel, Little Women, the much-adapted masterpiece by Louisa May, their second daughter, who supported the family.

Alcott is widely recognised for developing progressive educational methods that challenged the status quo. In 1834 he launched, with the brilliant Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, the famous Temple School in Boston to put these ideas into practice. Margaret Fuller also taught there. Alcott rejected the traditional learning styles of his era, which relied on memorisation, drills and physical punishment. Instead, he used a Socratic or conversational style that urged children to be creative and critical. He also designed a more friendly version of the classroom with comfortable chairs, natural light, plants and art.

The Temple School was acclaimed, but it faced public backlash after Alcott published Conversations with Children on the Gospels. The school’s finances collapsed. Alcott moved and downsized the school and invited in an African American student, Susan Robinson. Racism led the remaining families to withdraw their children, bringing an end to the Temple School in 1839.

Another experiment in education was Alcott’s School of Philosophy (founded 1879) next to Orchard House in Concord – with the financial backing of his daughter Louisa May and the usual assistance from Emerson. It was an alternative university, adult education at its best, focused on conversation about significant topics. There are still summer lectures at this wonderful location. ‘Who knows the mind has the key to all things else’, wrote Alcott.

Transcendentalist ideals compelled Alcott to embrace social reform and to co-found (with English Transcendentalist Charles Lane) Fruitlands in 1843, a utopian agrarian community in Harvard, Massachusetts that lasted just seven months. Alcott practised veganism (to use the modern term) at Fruitlands, where residents abstained from animal products, slave-derived labour and clothing made of wool or leather. Louisa May Alcott’s story Transcendental Wild Oats is a witty satire of Fruitlands with its heady philosophers who aren’t suitable for physical labour.

Utopian communities tend not to endure for long periods because of financial problems, lack of preparation, the difficulty of farming, ideological conflicts, the division between philosophical ideals and work ethic. It’s a big subject – from Plato’s Republic to today’s ideas and actual communities.

Like Brook Farm, Fruitlands failed – or did it? Some things that were once considered utopian have been or are being achieved. Eras end in the history books. Great ideals and practices become established into the future.

Rather than pursuing knowledge for knowledge’s sake or for intellectual ‘muscle’ competitions, or for a reductionist view of just about anything, the Transcendentalists stood for inward illumination, wholeness and right action. We can still cultivate who we are. ‘Insist on yourself; never imitate’, urges Emerson in his essay, ‘Self-Reliance’.

Transcendentalism remains a breath of fresh air. With the architecture of human dignity still incomplete, the call to safeguard our planet has become the most urgent revolution of our time. Transcendentalism advances our inner resources against the modern hustle, consumer traps and the impositions of the expanding world. They opened a gateway to our interior landscape, inspiring us to cultivate ourselves, care for society and uphold nature’s endless multiplicity – ‘to front only the essential facts of life’ (Thoreau). Through their interconnected, sometimes contradictory legacies, they serve as lighthouses amidst the cutting rocks of life.

And so, Emerson enjoins us to be inspired, self-reliant and original; simplifying life and sauntering is Thoreau’s answer to any age of complexity; Fuller’s eclectic conversations ignite critical brilliance and self-empowerment with the magical presence of others; Ripley champions equality, high virtues and the value of shared labour; Alcott proves that compassion is central to education and the good life.

The conundrum: how to use our inner life and knowledge to cultivate the self, society, nation and the planet – to give compassion and mindful living their place, so that we all find a place to be ourselves on our planet. Our transcendent inner life pulses within us, expressing the vibrant energy of the cosmos. Transcendentalism was the yin part of the American Revolution, with the potential to complete the circle, to fuse political with personal evolution – the Latin root of which means, to unroll, open and unfold.