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M D Aeschliman, THE DISSIDENCE OF DISSENT
Henry David Thoreau: A Life. By Laura Dassow Walls., Essays in Criticism, Volume 68, Issue 1, January 2018, Pages 135–143, https://doi.org/10.1093/escrit/cgx026Close - Share Icon Share
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‘Jefferson’s public career focused on securing for Americans’, the eminent historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote, ‘a right of expatriation from the past’. Morgan argues that this was a large part of ‘the meaning of independence’ for Jefferson. The more populist and charismatic democrat Andrew Jackson, coming two generations later, has been characterised by Richard Hofstadter by the phrase ‘self-assertive subjectivism’. Jefferson (1801) and Jackson (1829) both defeated and replaced as presidents Adamses of a more conservative, traditional character and cast of mind, men who were their moral superiors. However hypocritically and self-interestedly, Jefferson and Jackson offered more radical, flattering definitions of the independence of self and American national identity, a development whose literary-philosophical correlative and sequel were to be found in the life and work of Emerson and his ‘Transcendentalist’ brethren, and their various Romantic, ‘visionary capitalist’, and existentialist disciples, from Walt Whitman to the robber barons, from Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, and Norman Mailer to the current, Jacksonian, president. ‘Emersonian self-reliance identifies dissent as the quintessentially American gesture’, Sacvan Bercovitch has written, ‘and then universalizes it as the radical imperative to subjectivity’. This is a working out of Jefferson’s ‘right of expatriation from the past’, giving us what Quentin Anderson has called, in a powerful book, The Imperial Self (1971). Long after Henry David Thoreau’s death in 1862, that protean, shape-shifting barbarian Walt Whitman praised him for his ‘lawlessness – his dissent – his going his own absolute road, let hell blaze all it chooses’. Whitman ‘writ wiselier than he knew’, ominously describing and praising himself here too.
