The Significance of Being Frank:
The Life and Times of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn
Tom Foran Clark
Bungalow Shop Press
Boston, Massachusetts
2009
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Joan H. Peck of Winnetka, Illinois, great-granddaughter of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn; Steven Mailloux, Professor of English and Comparative Literature in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine; Don Foran, Director of the Writing Center at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington and Centralia College Professor of English and Philosophy in Centralia, Washington; Felix Meister, undergraduate in the Rechtswissenschaften / Jurisprudence program at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany; Deborah Bier, Editor of the Concord Magazine online; Leslie Perrin Wilson, Curator of the Concord Public Library’s Special Collections, Concord, Massachusetts; Catherine Swanson, Archivist, the National Heritage Museum, Lexington, Massachusetts; Jennifer Perry, Librarian, Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, Massachusetts; Vicki Denby, Curatorial Assistant, Harvard University’s Houghton Library Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Lisette Matano of Georgetown University’s Lauinger Library Special Collections, Washington, D.C.
Introduction
Franklin Benjamin Sanborn was buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery of Concord, Massachusetts near the graves of his friends and mentors Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Ellery Channing, and Henry Thoreau. Concord's flags were flown at half-mast for three days.
At the end of the month, February, 1917, just prior to America's entering World War I, the Massachusetts House of Representatives recognized Sanborn’s dedication to the unfortunate, the diseased, and the despised. The formal resolution cited Sanborn's role as a confidential adviser to John Brown, for whose sake he was arrested, mistreated, and nearly deported.
People loved and hated him. Walt Whitman described John Brown’s young defender, Sanborn, as a fighter, up in arms, a devotee, a revolutionary crusader, hot in the collar, quick on the trigger, noble, optimistic. Henry David Thoreau feared the passionate Concord schoolteacher was only too steadfast and earnest, a type, as Thoreau put it, that calmly, so calmly, ignites and then throws bomb after bomb.
Sanborn lived a long life. He was revered, finally, in the end, as a relic from a golden age gone by -- a tall and venerable figure moving picturesquely through Boston and Concord.
In 1946, writing on Thoreau, Edwin Way Teale remembered a summer evening spent in one of Concord's stateliest homes. He’d interviewed its occupant, the descendant of a man who'd absolutely despised the home’s original owner. Outside the house, a violent thunderstorm was raging, ripping branches from trees, sending sheets of water crashing against windowpanes. The storm seemed perfectly fitting, Teale reflected, regarding the uproarious drama from within the lovely brick house by the Sudbury River that had once been the home of the passionate troublemaker, Frank Sanborn.
Chapter One
In a Hampton Falls, New Hampshire farmhouse in 1834, in an upstairs back bedroom, a two-year old boy played with a ball and stick while a summer storm raged outside. When suddenly lightning hit a chimney, a brilliant blue-white flash of light filled the room. Frank’s sister Sarah rushed up the stairs to her infant brother, fearing she’d find him in ashes. His stick raised high, a jubilant Frank insisted he’d drawn the lightning bolt and the majestic attendant rumbling to himself. It was his doing.
In his old age Sanborn recalled the beautiful significance of this early event, the boy already believing himself capable, at two, of making a stir in the world.
He was born on December 15, 1831, in the largest room of the house, the dining room, where his father would oversee the boy’s early studies in Latin, Greek, French, and German. He was the fifth child of seven children, the second son -- the first having died in infancy. His brothers and sisters were named Jeremiah, Charles Henry, Lewis Thomas, Sarah Elizabeth, and Helen Maria.
Frank got his name when Aaron Sanborn, Hampton Falls' Town Clerk, entered his newborn son into the records not as Benjamin Franklin Sanborn, as precedent called for, but as Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. Aaron intended that his son should be called Frank, not Ben, and that was how it did turn out.
Frank remembered his tall, brown-haired father, dead by the time Sanborn was sixteen, as an intense, tormented man, the opposite of Aaron’s own father, a gentle, even-tempered man. Frank’s mother, Lydia Leavitt Sanborn, was amiable and beautiful, Frank recalled, with fine blue eyes and jet-black hair. He cherished the childhood memory of being warm in bed between his stoical, unsmiling father and his sweet, serene mother, who sang to them.
They were turbulent times. It had been just a few weeks before Frank was born that the Southern slave Nat Turner had been hanged for having led a band of slaves in a bloody August uprising in southeastern Virginia.
From the fierce hell-and-brimstone preachers of the Religious Revival came the cry for the immediate and unconditional emancipation of slaves. Itinerant revivalists denounced every evil, portraying Hell in vivid, even lurid terms, that sinners should feel the scorching heat and see the damned, wretched millions of them, gnawing their tongues, lifting scalded heads from a burning lake, writhing and howling.
Daniel Webster was then under investigation, his drinking habits scrutinized. It was rumored his wine cellar held enough liquor to entertain the State Department, the American Diplomatic Corps, and every foreign ambassador to the United States, with enough left over to fill the glasses of every Massachusetts member of Webster's party, the Whigs.
The most sober of American writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, had recently emerged on the national scene. After the death of his wife Ellen Louisa Tucker in 1831, Emerson would go to Europe in 1832, returning in 1833 with a series of lectures on Italy. He said he'd returned to Massachusetts with not a clue as to what would be acceptable preaching in New England. In Plymouth he lectured on natural history, mineralogy, chemistry, botany, and geology, and there fell in love with Lydia Jackson, who would become his second wife. To his home in Concord, on Lexington Road, came eager young pilgrims seeking guidance from the perplexed, softspoken sage.
The Concord poet William Ellery Channing, nephew of the estimable Dr. William Ellery Channing, said Emerson had, in his Plymouth lectures, held his audience captive, some seven hundred people sitting on white, unpainted pine benches arranged in rows so steep that had one fallen off, he or she would have rolled down to the bottom.
Miss Elizabeth Peabody had recently moved to Boston from New Bedford, where she'd been a volunteer under the charismatic Dr. Channing. Elizabeth's sister Mary, later Mrs. Horace Mann, had left the family home in Salem to join Elizabeth in Boston. Their sister Sophia, later Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne, had remained in Salem.
The amiable educator Amos Bronson Alcott had left a failed school in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and moved to Boston with his wife and daughters, to be nearer his wife's wealthy parents. Upon meeting Alcott, and learning of the school he intended to open in Boston, Elizabeth Peabody immediately transferred all the boys out of the school she'd been planning to open into the one that Alcott was starting. She agreed to be his assistant, and to teach two and a half hours a day for a year at whatever salary he could afford to pay her.
Elizabeth and Mary Peabody rented rooms at Mrs. Clarke's well-known Boston boardinghouse, where the boarders all met for dinner at a great table at the center of the house, to the delight of Mrs. Clarke's son James, destined to become one of Boston's most prominent and outspoken preachers.
At the dining room table the young lawyer, Horace Mann, regaled his fellow boarders with amusing tales and anecdotes. Born on a farm in Franklin, Massachusetts, Mann had practiced law in Dedham and had served as a State Representative. At 34, he'd married the 18-year-old daughter of the former President of Brown University who, upon converting to Unitarianism, had been charged with heresy and forced to resign. At the age of 20, ill with tuberculosis, Mann's young wife Charlotte had died in Mann's arms.
Though he himself enjoyed an occasional drink, Mann denounced alcohol as the worst of America's many social plagues. A man's conscience couldn't be properly shaped, Mann insisted, if his brain was dissolved in alcohol. If people stopped drinking, he said, there'd be nobody in the jails or almshouses. He would be a tireless social reformer, working to end imprisonment for the crime of being in debt. With his friend Samuel Gridley Howe, he would work to improve education for the blind. He would work for restrictions against working on Sundays. He would come to deplore slavery, persecution of the insane, and despicable prison conditions. A calm, diplomatic man, he would be called on to moderate many a heated meeting.
In the fall of 1834, Bronson Alcott's school opened with eight girls and ten boys. Elizabeth Peabody taught Latin, arithmetic and geography. Instead of working part-time, as agreed, she found herself arriving at nine and staying all day, captivated by Alcottt's teachings and conversations. She began to write these down in notebooks: The Record of a School Exemplifying the Principles and Methods of a Moral Culture, as recorded by Elizabeth Peabody. Alcott worried about her notes getting out to the public, warning her to keep quiet about things potentially controversial. He did not want to argue with her on that point, he insisted. It was time ill-spent, he felt. Better to argue with seven-year-olds.
When she did eventually publish her Conversations with Children on the Gospels, Elizabeth Peabody brought not only controversy, but disaster, to Alcott and to herself. While a few children in Alcott's school had inklings regarding the way babies were born, others thought angels brought them, coming as a great surprise to their mothers. Mothers suffered when they had children, Alcott had revealed. When they were going to have a child, mothers gave up their bodies to God, who worked upon them in mysterious ways, bringing forth children's spirits in little bodies of their own.
In 1835, Daniel Webster sought the Presidency as the Northeast's Whig candidate, there being no Whig candidates nominated in other regions. When Martin Van Buren was elected, Webster begged the new president to appoint him U.S. Ambassador to England -- to no avail.
Dr. William Ellery Channing's book, Slavery, was published that year, the same year the citizens of East Feliciana, Louisiana, offered a $50,000 reward for the capture, dead or alive, of the wealthy American industrialist Arthur Tappan, president of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In the fall of 1835 William Lloyd Garrison spoke before the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and was attacked by a mob, was hidden in the building, was found and tied up, was dragged through the streets, and was almost lynched before authorities took him to jail for his own safety. Bronson Alcott visited him there. On the wall of his cell Garrison had scratched a message noting he'd been brought there to be protected from a respectable and influential mob who'd sought to destroy him for preaching the abominable and dangerous doctrine that all men are created equal. His name was now known everywhere. Boston became the center of the abolitionist movement, with Garrison and his disciples the leading advocates and orators for abolitionism.
In Texas, Sam Houston's troops defeated the Mexican army at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the year Emerson's essay Nature was published. The first born son of the children of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Lydian Jackson Emerson, Waldo, was born that year; he would die just six years later.
In Boston, Bronson Alcott prepared for publication his book Psyche, or the Breath of Childhood. Emerson assured Alcott the text was original and vital in all its parts, manifestly the production of a man in earnest, written to convince. But the book remained unpublished.
In 1837 Horace Mann was appointed to be the first Superintendent of Education in Massachusetts. He believed public schooling was the key to the achievement of real Democracy. He was soon the most visible educator and reformer in the nation. Though Massachusetts had what many regarded as the best educational system in the country, still Mann found it miserably inadequate. Massachusetts’ farmers, he said, cared more for their livestock than for their children’s education. A State Board of Education was established, authorized to investigate the conditions of schools. Prestigious but powerless, the Secretary of the Board, Mann, discovered he had an important platform from which he could preach reform.
Upon Mann's marriage to Mary Peabody, the two were sought out to join the most elite and influential of Boston's social circles. Wealthy businessmen helped Mann establish teacher-training schools. He toured Europe and brought back German models for institutional reforms. He insisted reformers should be quick to help things along, schools being God's own chief tool for reforming the world.
Henry David Thoreau and his brother John, would-be schoolteachers, had vague plans of traveling West to teach. They'd agreed they'd go as far west as Kentucky. In the spring, Henry got word from Harvard College President Quincy that a position would be opening up on the 5th of May in a school in Alexandria, Virginia. He was willing to accept the post, making it understood that this would only delay the journey West with John, not end it. As it turned out, the school in Alexandria did not accept Henry Thoreau.
John did get another teaching job -- in West Roxbury, even as his sisters Helen and Sophia took teaching jobs elsewhere in Roxbury. Henry stayed home and, though appointed Secretary and Curator of the Concord Lyceum, devoted himself primarily to tending the family garden.
In 1838, the year Sarah Grimke published a stirring public defense of sexual equality, the most controversial issue in America was the proposed annexation of Texas. President Andrew Jackson, conscious of the opposition to admitting Texas as a slave state, agreed to recognize only Texas' independence, and self-determination. Texas was to be, at least for the time being, an independent Republic. John Quincy Adams, a past President and current member of the House of Representatives, staged a twenty-two day filibuster, successfully blocking annexation. Adams condemned Garrisonians, Marat Democrats, phrenology, and animal magnetism as ingredients in a bubbling cauldron stirred by radicals and rascals.
In 1780, Harvard President Samuel Langdon had left Cambridge to become the Unitarian Parson at Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, contributing the initial collection of books to the church library in which Sanborn, in the late 1830s, would immerse himself. Despite his family’s being Unitarian, Sanborn had, at nine, declared himself a Universalist. He said he enjoyed going among Baptists and Congregationalists, or any other faith or sect, so long as there was good preaching and singing.
Sanborn's grandfather, Tom Leavitt, a Jeffersonian justice of the peace, had joined the Baptists, separating from the Congregationalists, and had refused to pay his church-rates. This had led to his arrest. While the Congregationalists were generally Federalists, the Baptists, Methodists, and sects were generally Jeffersonian Republicans. Tom Leavitt became the leading Democrat in his county, until his party divided over the issue of the annexation of Texas.
Sanborn’s political opinions had begun to manifest themselves when he was just seven years old, he insisted, saying his literary life had begun even earlier. The libraries of his father, older brother, and grandfather were well-supplied. Robinson Crusoe was not accessible to him, but the family owned two copies of Pilgrim's Progress, and he had twice read Don Quixote, left on the bookshelf by one of his two uncles, who’d moved to Boston. They'd become Whigs, sending copies of Whig newspapers to their Democrat father, Tom Leavitt. Almanacs and old newspapers going back as far as 1800 were in storage in the garret of the house. On these, Sanborn feasted.
When Harrrison ran against Van Buren in 1840, Sanborn, nine, made a bet with the Parson's son, eleven-year old Henry Shaw, that Harrison would win. Sanborn lost the bet, noting New Hampshire stood loyally by Little Van, the Used-up Man, as Henry called the stately president.
A third contender for the presidency in 1840 was ex-slaveholder James Birney. The Anti-Slavery Society met in Albany, New York and nominated Birney for president. The Liberty Party was born, driven by the vigorous New York State industrialist Geritt Smith. From its inception in 1840 to its extinction in 1854, Smith gave the Liberty party its name, supplied it with funds, and chose its candidates. Its first candidate, Birney, got only a pitiful 7,000 votes in the election of 1840.
Upon the closing of Bronson Alcott’s Temple School in 1840, Elizabeth Peabody bought a storefront house in Boston's business district, at Number 13 West Street, to be a home to her family as well as a bookstore where customers would be received as guests. The front parlor, filled with shelves made to look like the bookcases of a large private library, exuded not only the odors of leather, paper, mold, and mildew, but also of exotic homeopathic drugs concocted by Elizabeth’s brother Nathaniel from aconite, belladonna, horehound, sassafras.
Elizabeth next took on the added financial burden of becoming the publisher of the Transcendentalist journal, The Dial, then edited by Margaret Fuller. The Dial, printed in editions of 700 copies, was sold to 300 subscribers. Fuller complained bitterly of the former publishers’ having spent all the income from subscriptions to the paper for their own personal expenses, leaving nothing for her salary. A compassionate Elizabeth agreed to pay Fuller's salary up front, but it wasn’t long before Elizabeth recognized the previous publishers hadn't likely misappropriated profits, as Fuller claimed. There were no profits. Fuller soon resigned the editorship, Emerson signing on. It was soon clear that Emerson also had not a clue as to how to turn a profit for the magazine. He did, however, provide a bounty of Dial contributors, all regular guests at Elizabeth's bookshop. Elizabeth would eventually pay Emerson what she could, cut her losses, and sell The Dial to yet another publisher, James Monroe.
In 1840, the year that Henry Thoreau, twenty-three, met and befriended the Concord poet William Ellery Channing, twenty-two, Emerson was thirty-seven, a year older than Elizabeth Peabody, at whose bookshop George Ripley, thirty-eight, was often present, talking like an excited teenager when he got going on social reform, Transcendentalism, and his grand notion, Brook Farm. A disciple, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, seventeen, was then a theological student under Professor Andrews Norton at Harvard, one of a growing number of students bored senseless by the bourgeois, respectable tenets of Unitarianism and the status quo. The Transcendentalists offered a romantic alternative, a revolt. Professor Norton's accusation, that the Transcendentalists were heretics, of course just fed the fire, making the new philosophy all the more alluring to Harvard’s brightest young minds.
In the West Street Bookshop’s back room, the gathered conversed and argued until the hour got late and the shop would close; the bookroom then became the Peabody Parlor where, as often as not, Ripley held court, sharing the outlines and details of his proposed utopia. James Freeman Clarke dubbed the group The Club of the Like Minded, adding that no two of them actually thought alike.
Emerson wrote to Carlyle in Scotland, commenting that just about anybody who could read carried in their pockets their own particular drafts for proposed new communities, people going a little wild with projects of social reform.
Having been urged by Emerson to join him in Concord, Bronson Alcott and his family moved into an unoccupied cottage on the Hosmer estate in April, 1840, Emerson paying the rent. Abby May Alcott was born there in July. The house would shrink further when, in 1842, two English mystics, Henry Gardiner Wright and Charles Lane, moved in.
In 1841, President William Henry Harrison succumbed to pneumonia shortly after taking office. Harrison’s cabinet, under the new president, fell apart. But the Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, stayed on past every other cabinet officer’s resigning, completing his negotiations with England to establish the Canada-Maine boundary.
Ralph Waldo and Lydian Emerson's second daughter, Edith, was born that year. Henry and John Thoreau entered into formal debate with Bronson Alcott at the Concord Lyceum, arguing the issue of forcible resistance, civil disobedience.
The school that John and Henry had opened in the former home of the Concord Academy closed that spring. Not long after, John would die of lockjaw.
In West Roxbury, the Brook Farm community was founded that same spring. Three directors were appointed: the Concord farmer Minot Pratt, the newsreporter Charles Dana, and George Ripley. In exchange for security and the basic necessities of life, Brook Farm members were asked to do their best and to contribute what they could. Labor was not compulsory.
This last principle had immediately attracted Nathaniel Hawthorne to the Farm. In winter, writing to his Sophia from a room in the bleak farm house, Hawthorne dreamed of Brook Farm's being their future home, despite the lonely, snow-covered fields filling his heart with terrible foreboding. Sophia must get herself a polar bear skin, Hawthorne wrote, to make of it a very suitable summer dress for that region. In fact, Brook Farmers were equipped with smocks like those worn by French peasants, Hawthorne noted, except except for their being sewed from flowered chintz, in which they paraded in the streets of Boston, announcing their emancipation from all things staid and stodgy.
In 1841, Margaret Fuller's sister Ellen met Henry Thoreau's Concord friend Ellery Channing in Cincinnati, where he was allegedly studying law.
The twenty-four year old Frederick Douglass was transported, with his wife, to New Bedford, Massachusetts by a New York benefactor, David Ruggles. He met William Lloyd Garrison there. Garrison was so impressed with Douglass he asked him to speak the next day at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society's convention on Nantucket island, after which he asked Douglass to become a paid lecturer, and agent, for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.
In New Hampshire, nine-year-old Frank Sanborn announced to his family that he recognized for himself, and held it to be self-evident, that slavery was wrong. If the United States Constitution allowed for slavery, then it would have to be revised -- or revoked. He said he’d reached his conclusions after diligent reading in the pro-emancipation journals, The National Era and Horace Greeley's Tribune. These, Sanborn said, had dealt trenchant blows to the monster of misgovernment.
Sanborn later said his generally quiet upbringing on a rural New England farm had fostered his independent and creative turn of mind. He’d loved to wander out, inspecting the sheds, tool-houses, barns, and garrets of local farmhouses. He’d enjoyed solitary labor in the field or woods, his mind wandering where it would, as much as working in good company, bringing good conversation. In the summer, with the mowers in the hay-field or out under an apple tree, or in the winter, beside a fire, Sanborn cherished the debates, the tall tales, the assorted random revelations of wit and wisdom. The people of New Hampshire gave him the best part of his education, he said, through their everyday labors of making shoes and clothes, shaping tools, grinding scythes, repairing roads.
In 1842, the Massachusetts Supreme Court upheld workers' rights to organize; the first born son of Ralph and Lydian Emerson, Waldo, born in 1836, died; the Reverend William Ellery Channing died in Lenox, Massachusetts; Bronson Alcott sailed for England; and Nathaniel and Sophia (Peabody) Hawthorne moved into The Old Manse in Concord.
Withdrawn from the road, with its modest gambrel roof, The Manse had been built in 1765. In 1776, it had been passed on to William Emerson's widow, who two years later married Ezra Ripley. The course of the highway was changed, the old North Bridge was removed, and the abandoned road became a field belonging to the Manse. Dr. Ripley had felt pride in his possessing the legendary ground. In 1836, however, he had given back the ancient roadway to the town for the dedication of a monument, the occasion for which his Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dr. Ripley's step-grandson, wrote the verse inscribed at the base of the Minuteman statue.
Upon the death of Dr. Ripley, the Hawthornes began renting the legendary house. Nathaniel was attracted to it not only for its elegance, but for its seclusion. The Hawthornes would stay three years.
In the autumn, in Cincinatti, the eccentric young nephew of Dr. William Ellery Channing, the poet Ellery Channing, married Margaret Fuller's sister, Ellen.
In December, the Curator and Secretary of the Concord Lyceum, Henry Thoreau, brought the reknowned Boston Abolitionist Wendell Phillips to the town, much to the chagrin of some town officials, who did not wish to have emancipation discussed in a public forum.
The Lyceum, founded as a debating society some eighty years before, still met every winter in the Town Hall. Emerson and his brother Charles spoke there more than a hundred times, Sanborn noted. Charles lectured three or four times, and Waldo the rest. The secretary of the Lyceum, Thoreau, gave some twenty lectures there through the years.
Besides Phillips, Thoreau, and the Emersons, speakers included George Bancroft, Theodore Parker, Horace Greeley, O. A. Brownson, Dr. Charles T. Jackson (the chemist and geologist, Mrs. Emerson's brother), James Freeman Clarke, Charles Lane, and E. W. Bull, the inventor of the far-famed Concord grape.
That summer, in 1843, Thoreau went to New York City to take charge of the education of the children of Emerson's brother Charles. Henry James invited him to his home at Washington Place, in a quiet and exclusive neighborhood, where James took Thoreau to task as editor of the magazine, The Dial, for allowing an article to appear that proclaimed Bronson Alcott a genius. James insisted that though Alcott could occasionally wax eloquent, still he really wasn’t much more, at bottom, than a self-absorbed, histrionic performer. Thoreau took this in his stride, reporting to Emerson that the utterly respectable Henry James had very nicely catechized him.
Back in New England, in May, 1843, Ellery Channing moved with his bride, Ellen, into Concord’s Red Lodge house, not far from Emerson's place. Bronson Alcott's English friend Charles Lane bought the Wyman Farm at Prospect Hill, in Harvard, Massachusetts. The Alcotts, Charles Lane, and Henry Wright moved to Harvard, to Fruitlands, on June the 1st.
That summer Thoreau gave Hawthorne his boat. Ellery Channing would later inherit the boat from Hawthorne. When it finally began go to pieces, Channing took it to the village blacksmith, Mr. Farrar, a quiet man fond of roaming in the woods and pastures. Farrar was said to be, with Emerson, Thoreau, and Channing, among Concord’s Fraternity of Walkers, to which neither Mr. Hawthorne nor Mr. Alcott belonged, Channing pointed out.
In 1844, two years after the death of Emerson’s son Waldo, another son, Edward, was born. Emerson's Essays, Second Series, was published. Charles Lane left Fruitlands, as did Bronson Alcott's wife and children, who went to live with the Lovejoy family in Still River, Massachusetts. They would return to Concord in November, boarding at the Hosmer Home.
In the spring, Ellery and Ellen Channing moved to a house on Lexington Road. Channing's sister Mary got engaged to her second cousin, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the same Higginson who'd studied with Andrews Norton at Harvard and had come under the spell of George Ripley at Elizabeth Peabody's bookshop, which by now had become much more a boardinghouse than a bookstore. Short on cash and almost at wits' end, Elizabeth had again become a teacher. Publication of the Dial ceased. Out in Western Massachusetts, The Springfield Republican, begun by Samuel Bowles, Jr. was now taken over by his eighteen year old son Samuel, who started up a daily edition.
Concord newcomer George William Curtis went with his brother Burrill to live on a farm, a mile north of the town. The brothers lived in a small cottage adjoining Captain Nathan Barrett's farm-house atop Punkatasset hill. The Captain put the boys to work. With whatever free time he could find, George would call on local authors, in order to write about them in his diary. He spent part of a day with Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose life, he said, was harmonious with the picture-perfect antique repose of his house, redeemed into the present by his and Mrs. Hawthorne's infant and the wife's tenderness and respect for her husband. He noted Mr. Emerson's long address -- nearly two hours -- before the Antislavery Friends on August 1st, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the emancipation of the negroes in the British West Indies.
When Concord’s Board of Selectmen refused Thoreau permission to ring the Town Hall bell in order to call attention to Emerson’s West Indies speech, he went ahead and clanged it anyway. He'd again ring the bell, years later, in the fall of 1859, to call on his townspeople to come hear an important speech of his own he had to make.
Thoreau joined Channing that summer, in 1844, for the first of many outings they would make together. They walked to Mount Greylock in northern Massachusetts, went west to the Hudson, returned by steamboat to New York, and were back in Concord by August 1st.
In the election of 1844, the two hot issues were the annexation of Texas and of the Oregon Territory. The Democrats, nominating James K. Polk for the presidency, called for the immediate annexation of both. The Whigs nominated Henry Clay,also supporting westward expansion, but with a more cautious approach. The Liberty Party again nominated James G. Birney, who'd won only 7,000 votes in 1840, would now win 62,000, enough to bring about Henry Clay's defeat. Left of The Liberty Party were the Free-Soilers, their platform resting on the circumscription of slavery along the lines laid down in the Wilmot Proviso. On their extreme left stood Gerritt Smith and the unreconstructed political abolitionists. Still further left were the Garrisonian abolitionists.
Sanborn framed these events in terms of New Hampshire politics, writing about the schism in the victorious Whig party occasioned by Henry Clay's imperious demands and President Tyler's absurd resistance. New Hampshire Democrats quarreled and, in 1844, the brilliant New Hampshire Congressman John Parker Hale of Dover refused to stand with the majority of his party for the annexation of Texas. He was forced from the Party. When, in 1845, James K. Polk assumed the presidency, Congress voted to annex Texas as a Slave Territory. In 1846, in New Hampshire, Hale was elected Senator, the first to be elected on a distinct anti-slavery platform. The resulting political reorganization foreshadowed a general reorganization nationwide.
Sanborn was then fourteen. His brother, Charles was then twenty-four, a leader among local Independent Democrats, as the new party was called. Sanborn joined too, though it would be seven years before he could vote. This activity, Sanborn noted, brought on a political schism in both branches of the family, the Sanborns and the Leavitts. The schisms never healed, Sanborn said. It was the cause of much grief and some anger to Sanborn's father, who would die within two years, that his sons, as he said, had pitted themselves against him.
Chapter Two
On May 8, 1846, at Palo Alto, the United States went to war with Mexico, after Mexico's disputation of U.S. claims regarding the Texas border. Daniel Webster nicknamed his rifle The Wilmot Proviso when Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania introduced a bill in the House of Representatives that would bar slavery or involuntary servitude from the territories annexed to the United States in the Mexican War.
In July, Henry David Thoreau was jailed for not paying his poll tax. He’d walked from his cabin in the woods to the village center to see about getting a shoe fixed, only to be arrested and imprisoned. Like Bronson Alcott, who’d once been shortly jailed on similar grounds, Thoreau found this right and just, saying a jail was the proper place for any civil person in a society that permitted war and slavery. To his chagrin, an aunt bailed him out.
In March, 1845, Thoreau’s friend Ellery Channing had told him he could see nothing for him but a field in which he ought to build himself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring himself alive. Thoreau had written a long letter to William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the The Liberator, who printed the letter on March 28th. Thoreau had railed against Concordians for not wanting Wendell Phillips to speak there, praising Phillips for opposing slavery and the annexation of Texas. Thoreau was resolved, and preparing, to beat a retreat from the affairs of men, from civilization, so-called.
Some said Thoreau had gone to the woods as much to escape from the noise and overcrowding of his mother's boardinghouse as to seek life's bare essentials. Emerson, who knew the value of his own quiet study at the edge of the village, had gladly given Thoreau permission to build the planned hut on land owned by him at Walden Pond. Thoreau had borrowed an axe, which he’d be proud to return in even better condition than he’d received it, and had set into cutting a clearing from a close stand of pine trees. Bronson Alcott, Edmund Hosmer, and George Curtis had helped him put up his cabin, built from the boards of a dismantled Irish shanty. Thoreau had moved in on the 4th of July.
Rumors circulated that Thoreau was harboring runaway slaves out in his hut, a station on the Underground Railroad. Thoreau indicated his cabin did, in fact, have a particular advantage for the purpose, but he was disinclined to talk much about it.
Visitors to the hut were forewarned about the shortage of seats, and were bid to come one at a time, or not at all. Anyone staying too long for Thoreau’s comfort would find him somehow getting further and further away from them, even within the cabin’s small confines, answering inquiries from an ever increasing distance.
Ten years after graduating from Harvard, Thoreau was asked by his Alma Mater to say something about himself. He gave them what he called some of his monster's heads: Schoolmaster, private tutor, surveyor, gardener, farmer, painter (house painter), carpenter, mason, day laborer, pencil-maker, glass-paper maker, writer, sometimes poetaster.
In February,1847, while still living at Walden Pond, Thoreau would lecture at the Concord Lyceum, two weeks in succession, on what he called The History of Myself. These lectures would provide the first public exposure to the work he was writing, which he would title, simply, Walden -- or, Life in the Woods.
Thoreau would leave Walden on September 6, 1847, eight days before General Winfield Scott’s troops captured Mexico City. Thoreau cryptically insisted he was leaving the woods for as good a reason as he’d gone there, saying nothing of Emerson’s just then departing for an extended visit to Europe, having asked Thoreau to be a houseguest during his absence. Thoreau would stay on, in fact, for two years.
Thoreau would then move back to the Main Street house he had helped his father rebuild, where he would live the rest of his life. He occasionally helped with his father's pencil-making business, improving the lead-grinding machinery. Once he’d learned the art of making a perfect pencil, he said, he gave up the work. In the attic of the house was his real work: his papers as well as his collections of pressed flowers and Indian relics.
After the failure of his Fruitlands experiment at Harvard, Massachusetts, Bronson Alcott, with the help of Emerson and Colonel May, his father-in-law, purchased the Cogswell House in Concord, on Lexington Road. At the end of the winter, in April, 1845, the family carried all their worldly possessions south to Concord on an ox-sled.
Though Fruitlands had proved fruitless, Alcott’s English friend and partner in the experiment, Charles Lane, stayed close to the Alcott family, tutoring the Alcott girls. In the fall, Alcott would learn from his brother Ambrose that their brother Junius was deranged. Alcott's friend Lane politely suggested that many of Alcott’s own troubles might likewise be due to insanity. Sanborn would later insist that though Alcott’s daughter Louisa had to contend against certain infirmities of temper, her father was free from these. He would note it was there, at the house the Alcotts had re-christened Hillside, that the 13 year old Louisa May Alcott first began scribbling her many and assorted verses on Despondency.
Sanborn was now fourteen. His New Hampshire childhood, he wrote, had included orating and acting, staging pleasant nightly revels. He’d been particularly fond of dressing up as Robin Hood. He said he’d read, beyond classic adventure books, much American history and biography. He’d spent long hours poring over Thomas Paine's Crisis and Thomas Burnet's Theory of the World Before the Flood, an account of the strictly orthodox antediluvian earth before the science of geology arrived, undermining all the tenets of the ancient faiths.
Sanborn said that by 1845, he’d studied the Bible thoroughly, Apocrypha and all. He claimed to have read the Old Testament in its entirety before he was 8. He'd then begun to read the works of Hawthorne, Carlyle, and Emerson, and had found their writings irresistible. He had read Sartor Resartus, Mosses from an Old Manse, and Emerson's poems, both in the Dial and in the Western Messenger, published by the Reverend James Freeman Clarke, the now grown son of Mrs. Clarke, who still ran Boston’s best known boardinghouse.
There, in Boston, the Reverend Theodore Parker had begun his stint of preaching at the old Melodeon Hall on Washington Street, where his friends had organized the Twenty-eighth Congregational Society. Parker lived nearby, on Exeter Place, in a downtown house, four stories high, a short walk from the Boston waterfront, and from the Athenaeum, the Old Corner Book Store, and the homes of Boston’s many and notorious other literary illuminati. The Peabody's house at 13 West Street was not far away, nor was the Town and Country Club, recently organized by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
By February, 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, Mexico ceding California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah, as well as parts of Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, and Wyoming, to the United States, Sanborn had read a tremendous profusion of political literature, he said. He’d been reading steadily through the years of the Mexican War and through the troubled times of further territorial agitation which followed. Nobody, he said, could possibly read it all.
A number of the abolitionist ideas Sanborn seized upon had been widely purveyed in the national media through the founder of the Liberty Party, Gerrit Smith of Syracuse. The handsome New York aristocrat had been left, upon the death of his father when he was 23, with hundreds of thousands of acres of land in upstate New York. Perhaps feeling guilt over his good fortune, his vast inherited wealth, he had given three thousand farms to three thousand blacks, many of whom were escaped slaves, and dreamed of sharing wealth and lands between all blacks and whites, after the emancipation of slaves, one fine day. He was known far and wide as a gentleman, a philanthropist, a hypochondriac, an eccentric humanitarian reformer zealous in providing generous financial backing to most any cause, or to anybody, that he came across. He financed not only advocates for international peace, the insane, the imprisoned, but also women, Indians, food faddists, health nuts. His greatest passion, however, was for the cause of blacks, and the abolition of slavery.
Smith was convinced the constitution and slavery were inherently at odds with each other, and that abolitionists must find and defend new interpretations of the constitution, making it not the guarantor of continued slavery, but the very instrument through which slavery would be ended. From the inception of the Liberty Party in 1840 to its demise in 1854, Gerrit Smith was open to compromise. He did set one limit, however: there would be no yielding on the principle of immediate and unconditional emancipation and civil rights for free blacks. Were the nation ruled by laws consistent with the U.S. Constitution, Smith declared, slavery could not exist in America. Anyone abdicating his or her responsibilty to abolish slavery at once, and for all time, was guilty of both treason to the slave and ingratitude to God.
That spring, 1848, Daniel Drayton, the Captain of The Pearl, a sloop, was taken into custody in the lower Chesapeake for having seventy-six slaves aboard. Drayton was charged with stealing and transporting slaves.
Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe of Boston asked his friend Horace Mann to take the Drayton case in Washington. Howe wrote to him: -- No man in the country will make more out of a bad case than you can. Howe warned him, this could be dangerous. Abolitionists were under assault everywhere, and a lawyer defending the likes of Captain Drayton might very well get shot. Horace Mann was furious with Howe for talking to his wife about it, frightening her with such talk. Mary Mann told him to go ahead; it was right. She knew he had to take the case.
In court, he would show that the slaves aboard Drayton's sloop had not been stolen, but had run away. He insisted the color of one's skin was no prooof of slave status. He argued it was not larceny to induce a slave aboard a sloop. He declared slavery unconstitutional. The lower court decided against Mann, but the circuit court reversed that decision. Drayton was set free.
In the summer of 1848 Henry Thoreau joined Ellery Channining for a four day trip, on foot, through New Hampshire.
In November, Bronson Alcott and his family left Concord and moved to Boston. The following summer they'd move in with his wife's parents there, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Joseph May, and in January, 1850, would move out of the May household into assorted other living quarters. In the summer of 1850 the Alcott family, then located on Groton Street, contracted smallpox.
Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers was published in the spring of 1849.
California was seeking admission to the Union as a free state. Led by Henry Clay and Stephen A. Douglas, the Senate put forward the Compromise of 1850, proposing California be admitted as a free state. The other areas won from Mexico would be slave or free territories, to be determined by settlers. The slave trade would be banished in Washington, D.C., but not slavery itself. President Zachary Taylor and John C. Calhoun opposed the compromise. First Calhoun died, and then the President. Millard Fillmore, who now assumed the Presidency, supported the Compromise.
On March 7, 1850, Senastor Daniel Webster stood before the Senate, calling for the preservation of the Union. The country, he noted, had become vaster, extending across the continent, coast to coast. Webster spoke favorably of the Compromise, which then passed.
Sanborn was livid, seeing that the measure allowed anyone who owned a slave, or even claimed to own a slave, the right to seize any black for enslavement. He saw that the Compromise, nicknamed the Finality Measure, was intended to end all agitation against negro slavery forever.
Sanborn aligned himself with Northerners accusing Webster of betraying them in order to obtain the South's support, him contemplating a run for the Presidency. President Fillmore appointed Webster Secretary of State, but Webster resigned due to poor health. Sanborn bitterly accused Webster of having a fatal weakness of character which contrasted forcibly with the native strength of his understanding. He was furious that Webster had fallen away from the lofty positions he'd held earlier in his life.
Sanborn would mark Webster’s death in October, 1852 with wry pleasure, noting he died before he ever was able to cast a vote for Franklin Pierce, the pro-slavery President born and raised in their common native State, New Hampshire. Sanborn would long decry the evil Webster had done, it being at the crux of the eventual, unavoidable civil war.
In upper New York State, Gerrit Smith fiercely characterized southerners going north to seize blacks as kidnappers. He proclaimed them criminals, who deserved to be struck down in instant death. For Smith, the Civil War had started already.
The enemy was now seen to be not the slave power but the Federal Government, guilty of enacting the slave power's wishes.The Fugitive Slave Act transformed and united all abolitionists, of whatever stripe, bringing them in a common cause, a common commitment to civil resistance and to action.
In Boston, Theodore Parker spoke publicly, addressing his words to President Fillmore, who'd signed the Fugitive Slave Act into law: I am not a man who loves violence; I respect the sacredness of human life, but this I will say solemnly, that I will do all in my power to rescue any fugitive slave from the hands of any federal officer who attempts to return him to bondage. If I were the fugitive, and could escape in no other way, I would kill him with as little compunction as I would drive a mosquito from my face.
Gerrit Smith was soon leading a band of free Negroes, preachers, and farmers in the rescue of Jerry McHenry, a fugitive slave who had been seized in Syracuse, and faced being transported back to Missouri in chains. Gerritt Smith was just then in the city, presiding over a convention of Libertymen. That evening Smith and his men drove a battering ram through the police station's front doors, knocked out its windows, fetched the captive fled the scene, and packed Jerry off to Canada. Smith found the advnture altogether exhilerating. Through the next dozen years or so, he and McHenry's other liberators would gather annually to commemorate Jerry Rescue Day.
Not long after the liberation of McHenry, Smith was elected to Congress. No one could have predicted that this influential gentleman, probably the wealthiest man in Congress, would years later be led away, babbling and muttering, to an insane asylum.
Just weeks after the passage of the Compromise, Samuel Gridley Howe, respectable Director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind, spread the word around that warrants were being issued for William and Ellen Craft, a black couple who were, as it happened, parishioners in Theodore Parker's church. A Vigilance Committee was formed, the Crafts were hidden, and plans were made for enabling their escape. Just prior to their being snuck out of the country, heading for England, Parker, holding a Bible in one hand and a sword on the other, pronounced them man and wife.
Sanborn was then living, he said, footloose and fancy-free, susceptible primarily to the beauty of girls, in which, he'd noticed, few New England towns were deficient. He felt confident, all six feet four inches of him, that he cut a striking figure. Beyond his looming height, he struck many also as being startlingly handsome. His serious, elegantly chiseled face held wide, deep-set eyes under waves of black hair. He knew himself to be someone to be reckoned with. He'd never been in love, but he'd been attracted, at school or elsewhere, to this girl or that, especially to those having beautiful eyes, he said, or to those with a gift for narrative.
One afternoon in the summer of 1850, Sanborn admired two sisters in a family distantly related to his, two granddaughters of Samuel Langdon, the former Hampton Falls Parson. Catharine Cram, her sister Sarah, and their cousin Louisa Leavitt, who was also Frank's cousin, came to take tea with Frank's sisters, Sarah and Helen.
As boys were not supposed to be in the company of girls at tea time, Sanborn had gone to his room, opened his strong box, and had taken out a shiny half-dollar -- the largest coin he had. He'd then ever so quietly returned to the girls, deftly transferring the coin to Cate's purse, which had been hanging on the back of a chair in the parlor chamber. This, he proclaimed gleefully in old age, he had done all in utmost secrecy, telling nobody.
In old age Sanborn admitted openly to having had, in his youth, and beyond, no particular scheme of life. The course of his education would be meandering, shaped neither from without by his family nor from within through self-discipline. He remembered his mother scheming to approach her cousin, Senator Norris, to ask him to recommend her son be appointed a Cadet at West Point. Sanborn had told his mother, nevermind: he had no inclination to become a soldier.
In 1848, a rather exacting literary society was established in the upper half of the schoolhouse where Sanborn was a pupil. Debates were held, and a journal published: The Star of Social Reform. The Star accepted anonymous contributions from subscribers, both male and female, and the articles were read aloud at monthly meetings. In the winter of 1849/50, The Star's editor was his sisters’ friend, the lovely Cate.
Cate had a friend in Peterborough named Ariana Walker who’d also attended Mrs. Winslow's Endowed School at Tyngsboro who was, like Cate, very interested in literature. Cate showed Anna a parody written by Sanborn, titled Festus, and some ballads he had written.
Anna Walker enjoyed these so much that she sent them off to Boston to share them with a friend of hers, the twenty-six-year-old Ednah Dow Littlehale: -- I send you herewith some poetry by the author of Festus, Ariana wrote to Ednah. -- The author is a Hampton Falls boy. His name is Sanborne.
When, at sixteen, Ednah Littlehale's formal education had ended, she'd begun attending Margaret Fuller's Conversations at Elizabeth Peabody's Bookshop on West Street. Asked by Margaret Fuller, -- Is life rich to you? Ednah had responded: -- It is since I have known you.
At twenty-four, Ednah had begun attending Conversations at the West Street shop given by Bronson Alcott, a man much in the company of young women. That Ednah Littlehale was well known for being a devoted and beloved companion to Mr. Alcott, this seemed of no concern to Mrs. Bronson or their daughters.
Sanborn was pleased to learn of this, that Miss Walker had shared his poems and ballads with Miss Littlehale. He was even more pleased when high praise of his ballads appeared in a commendatory notice in the Star, submitted by one A.S.W. He begged Cate to introduce him to this admirer. Who was she, this Ariana Smith Walker?
The day came. The two first saw each other in a small church at Hampton Falls.
Ariana wrote excitedly to Ednah Littlehale, saying she’d seen Franklin Sanborn, and that he had a face like young Raphael’s.
Sanborn later summed up this initial meeting with three words: Our eyes met.
Chapter Three
On August 1st, 1850 after seeing him a second time, Ariana wrote in her diary of Frank Sanborn’s visiting her in a lighthearted mood, saying he’d been advised he ought to enter the ministry. She laughed at that, she said, not because she feared he would fail in that, but because his work in life seemed so clear, at least to her. He would be a writer.
Ariana wrote Frank on August 7th, announcing she’d again be visiting her friend Cate and the other girls in her sewing circle, including Sanborn’s sister, Helen. She said she not only looked forward to seeing Cate and her friends, but also him. She said she loved sitting under the green arches of the oaks and maples, watching the play of faces, searching the souls of those around her.
Ariana declared Cate the best of her friends -- beautiful and worthy of being loved. She declared Frank’s sister Helen, on the other hand, cold and self-centered. But, Ariana, added, she was interesting. She wanted to know what Helen’s coldness concealed.
Ariana went on to enlighten Sanborn as to his own aloofness, now distant, lost in some far distant place, now suddenly talkative -- witty and charming. Eventually, Ariana went so far as to write a report, which Cate then shared with him: The Character of F.B.Sanborn.
Ariana began by observing he was, by nature, overly analytical, his intellect predominating over his heart. She had found his imagination rich and vivid, but recognized in him a practical person, not a dreamer. She saw calmness as a large element in his nature, but sensed great fire under the ice which, if triggered, would flame forth with great power and intensity. He was apt to look on the dark side of things, she warned, but was seldom sad or despondent. She recognized his great pride, and could see how highly he valued his independence, standing alone, quite apart from others. But she knew he’d require some outside authority upon which to lean. She saw him as a religious man, despite his contempt for empty forms, devoid of spirit.
Ariana noted he had great reverence for things reverenceable. Though severe in nature, he was not more so with others than with himself. He liked many, endured most, and was at war with few. He fancied himself indifferent to praise or blame. For all his frankness, still there was much he revealed to no one. He had much intellectual enthusiasm.
She noted Frank loved wit, quickly seeing the ludicrous side of things. She knew ha had many noble aspirations. He wanted a definite end for which to strive heartily. She saw he could execute better than he planned. Impatient of wrongs, he was just as impatient with inability. But he was gentle, in spite of that. His was a nature not likely to find rest. Struggle was its native element. He wanted a steady aim, and had to work. Standing still would be impossible for him. Ariana closed by saying she recognized there were many contradictions in her analysis, but not more than were in the character of the man himself.
Ariana told Frank she’d a wonderful time at his Aunt Nancy's house, at the tea party. She wanted him to know, however, that she felt badly for the old lady, whose life she supposed was mournfully lonely. She then reeled Frank in, telling him she hoped she’d be saved from so vacant and desolate a life as that of most unmarried women. She said she’d resolved she’d steer clear of romantic entanglements, but the more she resisted this entanglement, the more drawn she was to him.
She had never met anyone like him. When he left her side, she wrote, she felt full of regret for not speaking more wisely to him. She’d look out the window, desiring to throw herself down on the cool grass below. She’d lay awake nights, thinking of him. She said he made her feel strong and free. Warm tears flowed fast.
On his side, Sanborn said the arrow of love had also wounded him.
For all that, Sanborn went, in the fall, on a long-projected walking tour of the White Mountains, even as Henry Thoreau was joining Ellery Channing in a ten-day excursion to Montreal and Quebec. Sanborn followed the same route as Henry and John Thoreau had taken in the fall of 1839. He stood on the summit of Mount Washington, covered with light snow on September 15th, and returned by the Connecticut Valley as far as Lebanon. From Concord, New Hampshire he traveled west to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, then turned east again, returning home by way of Exeter at the end of September.
Then, in accordance with a suggestion Ariana Walker had made, Sanborn arranged to study with the Exeter teacher and private tutor, John Gibson Hoyt. He would focus on Greek for a year, then enter Phillips Academy. At Exeter, Sanborn wrote verses, some of which appeared in the local paper, and composed commemorative odes for the school’s assorted celebrations.
Sanborn appreciated Ariana’s having steered him in this direction. He was as amazed by her love as he was deeply grateful for her interest in his intellectual development -- and his future. He later claimed that it was Ariana’s sympathetic interest in the oppressed that stirred his resolve to commit himself to the cause of social and political freedom. This determined, he said, which course his education took. Mr. Hoyt, beyond having a reputation as a superb tutor, was also known to be a committed abolitionist.
There was certainly no greater nor more romantic nor more unselfish a love in this world than that which Ariana felt for him, Sanborn swooned. But he admitted there was one fatal flaw in this apparently picture-perfect love affair: Ariana had a rare neurological disease that had struck suddenly in 1846, interrupting her education and making her dependent on others. Ariana’s brother George, five years older than her, gave her his constant attention and care. At first he stood like a lion in the way of Frank’s courting her, Sanborn later lamented. In time, the two would become close friends.
It was just a simple matter of time, Sanborn wrote jubilantly, before he and Ariana Walker became lovers. The affair was a well-kept secret, he revealed. The world was not supposed to learn of it. The two did not want to hear the criticisms of better-knowing people who could see, so much more clearly than the young lovers could, how many outward obstacles stood in opposition to the union of their two hearts.
By January, 1851, Sanborn's correspondence was, as he put it, incessant: the Exeter post office provided the opportunity to mail and receive letters without exciting gossip.
Sanborn had a strong sense that things happened for reasons, though there were not necessarily accompanying explanations. He noticed how one important event in one's early life seemed mysteriously to lead to another like important event, then that to a third, and so on, as if by a chain of sequences arranged beforehand. He felt his life’s path was foreordained and that there was a map of his destiny, pointing the way he should go -- not compelling him to a given course, but indicating the line of least resistance. He thanked his Hampton Falls, New Hampshire forefathers for making friends with their neighbors, which led to his meeting one of their descendants, Cate Cram and, through her, his darling Ariana Walker.
In February, Ariana reported to her friend Ednah Littlehale that Sanborn had become so much mingled in her life that it became more difficult, with each passing day, to turn her thoughts away from him. believe In March she worried about visiting Hampton Falls in the summer. Frank would have to visit her in Peterborough under pretense of making a pilgrimmage to Monadnoc which, she admitted, was not very difficult to see through.
Sanborn told her only the heart should govern in such matters. He knew her heart was his. He said that being away from her only hindered the progress of his college studies. Only the friendships he had formed at Exeter meant anything to him, he said -- and his mingling with Exeter’s more cultivated families. Professor Hoyt had been showing him around, introducing him to his circle of political friends.
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