Page:Anti-slavery and reform papers by Thoreau, Henry David.djvu/27

16 war had commenced, and the northern armies were marching to the battlefield with John Brown's name as their watchword. By this time Thoreau himself had been struck down by his fatal illness; otherwise, as one who knew him has remarked, "there is no telling but what the civil war might have brought out a wholly new aspect of him, as it did for so many." Mr. Lowell, the most unsympathetic of all Thoreau's critics, has asserted that "while he studied with respectful attention the minks and woodchucks, his neighbors, he looked with utter contempt on the august drama of destiny, of which the curtain had already risen." No evidence whatever is adduced in support of this statement, and it is on the face of it inconceivable that Thoreau, most uncompromising of abolitionists, should have been indifferent to the events of the war by which the question of slavery was to be decided. "Was it Thoreau, or Lowell," asks Colonel Wentworth Higginson, "who found a voice when the curtain fell, after the first act of that drama, upon the scaffold of John Brown?"

Enough has now been said to show that the application of the name adiaphorist to Thoreau is mistaken and misleading, since he was very far from being regardless of the welfare of his fellow-countrymen or of mankind in general. It is a complete error to imagine that a man whose convictions are so opposed to those of the majority as to seem whimsical and quixotic is necessarily an indifferentist, or that a protestant, an individualist, a solitary, and a free-lance, like Thoreau, is one whit less earnest a citizen because he is not content to make the course of his life conform to the ordinary social groove; the real indifferentists are rather they who find it easier