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Transcendentalism and Urbanism: Concord, Boston, and the Wider World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Robert A. Gross
Robert A. Gross
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of American Studies at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts 01002. This article is based on a paper presented to the Eighth Triennial Conference of the Nordic Association for American Studies in Copenhagen on 27 June 1982.
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Extract

The town of Concord, Massachusetts, is widely celebrated in American culture as a pastoral place. It was the home of the Minutemen, the “embattled farmers” who fought the Redcoats at the Old North Bridge and launched the War for Independence. More than a half-century later, it became the bucolic center of the American Renaissance, where Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau waged their own revolutions of the spirit. In these terms, Concord readily plays its part within the longstanding American opposition between country and city, serving as the timeless small town, the symbolic guardian of that rural simplicity and love of liberty so regularly invoked in times of crisis to recall a complex urban-industrial nation to its roots. Even today, when the town numbers some 16,000 people, Concordians like to picture their community as a “climate for freedom.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , December 1984 , pp. 361 - 381
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

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18 Gross, , Minutemen, pp. 17, 173Google Scholar; Concord Yeoman's Gazette, 30 December 1826; Hendrick, George, ed., Remembrances of Concord and the Thoreaus: Letters of Horace Hosmer to Dr. S. A. Jones (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1977), p. 16Google Scholar; Torrey, Bradford and Allen, Francis H., eds., The Journal of Henry David Thoreau (14 vols. bound as 2; New York: Dover, 1962), 3, 127Google Scholar. In 1773, the middle school district accounted for 39 percent of the assessed wealth in town; by 1825, that share had risen to 51 percent. Unfortunately, no list of taxpayers, arranged by school districts, survives for 1826, so that it is impossible to check the accuracy of the newspaper's claim that the center district's share had swollen to some two-thirds of the whole. For the sources used in these calculations, see 1773 and 1825 school money lists, Concord Archives, Concord Free Public Library.

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22 Gross, , Minutemen, 188–89Google Scholar; Scudder, Townshend, Concord: American Town (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), pp. 163–64Google Scholar; Concord Freeman, 12 September 1835. The distribution of assessed weath for (1826) and 1830 is as follows: top 10% (47·1), 46·0; top 20% (67·4), 67·6; mid 40% (30·5), 31·1; bottom 40% (2·1), 1·3. I calculated the distribution for 1826 from the town assessment list, Town Clerk's Vault, Concord Town Hall. The figures for 1830 were likewise derived from the town assessment list by Weintraub, Richard N., “Wealth Distribution and Mobility in Concord, Massachusetts 1770–1830” (senior honors thesis, Brandeis University, 1973), p. 78Google Scholar.

23 Orth, et al. , JMN, 5, 422Google Scholar; Emerson, , Emerson in Concord, p. 146Google Scholar; Gross, , Minutemen, pp. 174–75Google Scholar; Jarvis, Edward, “Traditions and Reminiscences of Concord, Massachusetts, or a Contribution to the Social and Domestic History of the Town, 1779 to 1877” (unpublished manuscript, 1878, Concord Free Public Library), pp. 331–33Google Scholar; Concord Freeman, 11 February 1837. For the members of the Social Circle in 1839, when Emerson was admitted, see Memoirs of Members of the Social Circle in Concord. Second Series: From 1795 to 1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press, 1888)Google Scholar and Third Series: From 1840 to 1895 (Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press, 1907)Google Scholar.

24 Rev. Reynolds, Grindall, “Concord” in Drake, Samuel Adams, History of Middlesex County, Massachusetts (2 vols.; Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1880), 1, 398–99Google Scholar; Keyes, “Concord,” pp. 593–94; Scudder, , Concord, pp. 190–91Google Scholar.

25 Scott, Donald M., “The Popular Lecturer and the Creation of a Public in Mid-Nineteenth Century America,” Journal of American History, 66 (1980), 791–809CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Emerson, , Emerson in Concord, pp. 178, 184Google Scholar; Jarvis, “Traditions and Reminiscences,” pp. 355–56.

26 Scudder, , Concord, pp. 196–98Google Scholar; Keyes, “Concord,” pp. 593–94; Bushman, Claudia L., “A Good Poor Man's Wife”: Being a Chronicle of Harriet Hanson Robinson and Her Family in Nineteenth-Centrny New England (Hanover, N.H. and London: Univ. Press of New England, 1981), p. 93Google Scholar.

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28 Harding, Walter, The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), p. 267Google Scholar; Thoreau, Henry David, Walden, ed. Shanley, J. Lyndon (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 118–22Google Scholar; Torrey, and Allen, , eds., Journal, 4, 478–79Google Scholar.

29 Emerson, , “Culture,” in Emerson, , ed., Complete Works, 6, 134, 148, 150–53, 155Google Scholar. Emerson was already incorporating the experience of commuting into his writing by the early 1850s. In the opening to his speech on “The Fugitive Slave Law,” delivered in New York City in 1854, he characterized “the readers and thinkers of 1854” as the men on the morning train into the city. “Look into the morning trains which, from every suburb, carry the business men into the city to their shops, counting-rooms, work-yards and warehouses. With them enters the car — the newsboy, that humble priest of politics, finance, philosophy, and religion. He unfolds his magical sheets — twopence a head his bread of knowledge costs — and instantly the entire rectangular assembly, fresh from their breakfast, are bending as one man to their second breakfast. There is, no doubt, chaff enough in what he brings; but there is fact, thought, and wisdom in the crude mass, from all regions of the world.” “The Fugitive Slave Law,” in Emerson, , ed., Complete Works, 11, 217Google Scholar.

30 Emerson, , Emerson in Concord, pp. 144–45Google Scholar. For a critical view of such “urban pastorals” by one of Emerson's Concord neighbors, Nathaniel Hawthorne, see Machor, James L., “Pastoralism and the American Urban Ideal: Hawthorne, Whitman, and the Literary Pattern,” American Literature, 54 (1982), 329–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 The aspiration of suburbanites to keep their personal encounters within carefully circumscribed limits has become the dominant factor of American social geography in the late twentieth century. For a survey of the evidence supporting this critical view of suburban life see Muller, Peter O., “Everyday Life in Suburbia: a Review of Changing Social and Economic Forces that Shape Daily Rhythms within the Outer City,” Ameriean Quarterly, 34 (1982), 262–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Not all Concordians, of course, blink away the unwelcome facts about life in the community. The Concord–Carlisle Human Rights Council has since 1978 organized conferences and public education programs to foster awareness of ethnic, racial, and religious diversity in the town and to promote an atmosphere of openness and tolerance. That effort was begun after racial fights broke out in the local high school between white students, resident in town, and black students, who were being bused into Concord as part of a voluntary integration program. See “Highlights of Human Rights Progress,” a chronology of recent events in town assembled by the Concord–Carlisle Human Rights Council (mimeo, 1980) and The Concord Journal, 10 December 1981.

32 Jackson, “The Crabgrass Frontier,” pp. 196–221.