A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

While working in his father’s pencil business, Thoreau diligently kept journals that would eventually form the basis of his life’s work, accumulating millions of words. He also served as headmaster of the Concord Academy for several years, teaching foreign languages and science, before closing the institution in 1841. By this time, his poems and essays were regularly appearing in The Dial.

For a period, Thoreau worked as a handyman in Emerson’s household. In 1845, he built a cabin on Emerson’s property at Walden Pond, where he lived for just over two years. He described his time there not as an exercise in frugality, but as a means to “transact some private business with the fewest obstacles.” During this period, he maintained an active social life in Concord.

In 1846, Thoreau spent a night in jail as a protest against slavery, an act that informed his influential essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849). His first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), largely written at Walden Pond, was based on an earlier boating trip with his brother. The book had little impact, selling only a few hundred copies.

Supporting himself as a surveyor, Thoreau became increasingly involved in the Abolitionist movement and contributed to the Underground Railroad by sheltering escaped slaves on their journey to Canada. He meticulously revised Walden, a work he had been developing since his stay at the pond, considering it the fullest expression of his philosophy. He stated, “Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice.” Published in 1854, Walden achieved unexpected success.

Thoreau met John Brown in 1857. Following Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Thoreau delivered “A Plea for Captain John Brown” in his defense, stating, “I know that the mass of my countrymen think that the only righteous use that can be made of Sharpe’s rifles and revolvers is to fight duels with them, when we are insulted by other nations, or to hunt Indians, or shoot fugitive slaves with them, or the like. I think that for once the Sharpe’s rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause.”

For many years, Thoreau had been undertaking a comprehensive study of American Indians, accumulating thousands of pages of notes and extracts. In 1861, he traveled to Minnesota and visited the Lower Sioux Agency at Redwood. However, by this time, he had contracted tuberculosis. Recognizing his declining health, he died on May 6, 1862. His later travel writings, The Maine Woods (1864) and Cape Cod (1865), were published posthumously.