Happy 4th of July ... Hope transmitted over 164 years.

Thinking people of New England were outraged in 1854. The family separation policy of the United States then known as the Fugitive Slave Law, and more specifically, the rendition of Anthony Burns, had about a third of the country worked up into a fever pitch of indignation. Another third backed the government's policy of supporting slavery; they called themselves the "law and order" advocates. The last third just did not seem to care. Why, this last group of the ignorant and incurious wondered, were their friends, family, and neighbors getting so worked up, so political? America seemed stuck in a quagmire, a swamp of its own slavery traditions.

Lidian Jackson Emerson (Ralph Waldo's wife) celebrated the Fourth of July holiday in 1854 as one in which her country was "wholly lost to any sense of righteousness"; and so she draped black netting over the white picket fence in her Concord yard.

From a reporter in the Boston Daily Commonwealth: “if we do not before long resist, there will be no liberty left for any man among us."

T. W. Higginson: “A revolution is begun! not a Reform, but a Revolution.”

Transcendentalist minister Theodore Parker: “the darkest periods of the American Revolution” did not compare with the “peril” that currently gripped the nation: “Then we were called to fight with swords. . . . Then our adversary was the other side of the sea, and wicked statutes were enacted against us in Westminster Hall. Now our enemy is at home; and something far costlier than swords is to be called into service.”




Henry Thoreau took a train ride over to Framingham Mass. that morning, where he joined a podium of dignitaries including Sojourner Truth and William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison, in fact,  had just burned a copy of the US Constitution, calling it a "covenant with death and an agreement with Hell." The mood was dark with little hope delivered from the podium that day.


Then Thoreau gave the speech that has come to be known as "Slavery In Massachusetts." In it, he relied on lessons from Nature to counsel hope:


"But it chanced the other day that I scented a white water-lily, and a season I had waited for had arrived. It is the emblem of purity. . . . What confirmation of our hopes is in the fragrance of this flower! I shall not so soon despair of the world for it, notwithstanding slavery [today, perhaps read "the separation of immigrant families"], and the cowardice and want of principle of . . . men. It suggests what kind of laws have prevailed longest and widest, and still prevail, and that the time may come when man’s deeds will smell as sweet. . . . If Nature can compound this fragrance still annually, I shall believe her still young and full of vigor, her integrity and genius unimpaired, and that there is virtue even in man, too, who is fitted to perceive and love it. It reminds me that Nature has been partner to no Missouri Compromise [today, perhaps read "executive orders targeting immigrants, Muslims, minority college students"]. I scent no compromise in the fragrance of the water-lily."












Henry David Thoreau Journal Entry from July 4, 1854: "A sultry night the last--bear no covering--all windows open- 8am to Framingham. Great orange yel lily some days wild yel. lily drooping, well out. Asclepias obtusifolia also day or 2- Some Chestnut trees show at a distance as if blossoming. Buckwheat how long? I probably saw Asclepias purpurascens?? over the walls. A very hot day."