Orion - May/June 2013

the Underground Railroad, and Henry David sometimes walked or drove the fugitives northward toward freedom. These Americans cared about prisoners enough to risk their own lives and liberty on their behalf.

A young abolitionist named Daniel Conway describes one such encounter, on July 27, 1853, thus: “In the morning I found the Thoreaus agitated by the arrival of a colored fugitive from Virginia, who had come to their door at daybreak. Thoreau took me to a room where his excellent sister, Sophia, was ministering to the fugitive. . . . I observed the tender and lowly devotion of Thoreau to the African. He now and then drew near to the trembling man, and with a cheerful voice bade him feel at home, and have no fear that any power should again wrong him. The whole day he mounted guard over the fugitive, for it was a slave-hunting time.

But the guard had no weapon, and probably
there was no such thing in the house. The
next day the fugitive was got o= to Canada,
and I enjoyed my first walk with Thoreau.”
In this vignette, brother and sister are
collaborators in a project of liberation, and
by this time, more than fifteen years after
the founding of the Concord Female Anti-
Slavery Society, Thoreau was wholeheartedly
recruited to the cause. A year later Thoreau
wrote, “I endeavor in vain to observe Nature — my thoughts invol-
untarily go plotting against the state — I trust that all just men will
conspire.” Many just women already had. And so in my reply to
Sims, I said, “Reading that superb piece you sent a month or so
ago deepened my sense that his abolitionist mother and sisters
were political powerhouses in whose wake he swam. My position
now is that the Thoreau women took in the filthy laundry of the
whole nation, stained with slavery, and pressured Thoreau and
Emerson to hang it out in public, as they obediently did.”
This is the washing that really mattered in Concord in the
1840s, the washing that a=ected not only the prisoners of slavery,
but the fate of a nation and the literature of the century. Thoreau’s
writing helped twentieth-century liberators—Gandhi and King
the most famous among them—chart their courses; he helps
us chart our own as well, while also helping us measure climate
change and giving us the pleasures of his incomparable prose. His
cabin at Walden was ten by fifteen feet, less than twice the size of
a solitary-confinement cell at California’s supermax Pelican Bay
State Prison, though being confined to a space and retiring to it
whenever you wish are far more di=erent than night and day. In
a sense Thoreau is still at work, and so are his sisters, or at least
the fruit of Helen and Sophia Thoreau’s work to end slavery is
still with us, along with their brother’s liberatory writings. Though
there are other kinds of slavery still waiting to be ended, including
much of what happens in our modern prison system.