The Book That Changed America by Randall Fuller

Author:Randall Fuller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-11-14T12:56:24+00:00

PART III

Adaptations

16

Discord in Concord

Later Franklin Sanborn would recall that he had been sitting at his desk in his carpet slippers when he heard the knock at the door. It was his custom to spend the evenings writing letters, preparing for the next day’s classes, reading. Now and then he picked up a book from the stack on his desk, turned a page or two, then returned to his tasks. He might not have even heard the knock at first.

That he managed any sort of intellectual life that spring is remarkable. He lived in a state of constant anxiety. Again and again he imagined testifying before the Mason committee or being arrested for treason. He struggled to face the world with his characteristic insouciance.

Twice he had been summoned to appear before the congressional committee about his involvement in the John Brown affair. Twice he had fled to Canada. The threat of arrest weighed constantly. Yet every week he strode through town and up the long walk that led to the Old Manse, a glowering clapboard hulk built five years before the first shots of the American Revolution, an inauspicious residence made famous by Hawthorne in 1846 with his story collection Mosses from the Old Manse. Emerson had lived there in the 1830s and had written his first work, Nature, in the second-floor bedroom that overlooked the battlefield where the Revolution had begun. (Hawthorne’s desk had faced a wall; he did not care for the outside world to intrude upon his dark fantasies.) The Manse’s current resident was Sarah Alden Ripley, a brilliant autodidact related to the Emerson clan, fluent in Greek and Latin. Ripley informally tutored many of Concord’s most prominent young scholars, and Sanborn visited her weekly to read Theocritus in the original Greek.

He admired the woman’s sly wit and deep learning. Her white hair wrapped in a lace bonnet, her gray eyes variously fierce and playful, she was sometimes capable of a despairing skepticism that blazed forth at unexpected times. It seemed to her that “the dirty planet on which we creep, if [it] were blotted out from existance [sic] would not be missed.” More typically she was brisk and lively, a woman who read everything, consuming the era’s most important works—often before either Emerson and Thoreau, who respected her opinions on literary, scientific, and political matters and solicited her advice on what to read next.

Ripley may have encouraged Sanborn’s interest in the English Civil War that spring. Throughout March and April he dipped into a tottering stack of books on the religious and political conflict that had ripped England apart some two centuries earlier. As he reported to Theodore Parker, Clement Walker’s History of Independency, an account of the vicious war between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads, had utterly engrossed him, offering a striking parallel to the present divisive moment in America. Civil war seemed increasingly likely that spring, especially as the nation launched into its quadrennial orgy of campaign promises and party demonization that occurred with each presidential election.

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